"...

accounts tend towards religious fantasy, as the state necessarily results in

the strong impression that everything that is other than the subject; ie the
universe is not only a conscious entity, but that during the state, the subject
and everything else share joint interpersonal attention."
First, a bit about me. I was an active drug user from 17-25 or so, and now just do psychedelics 1-3
times a year, and smoke marijuana recreationally. By the time I was 21, I had literally had hundreds
of psychedelic experiences. I would trip every couple of days - shrooms, mescaline, pcp, acid... just
whatever I could get my hands on. No "Wooo", really. And, perhaps foreshadowing, I was often
puzzled by how I could do heroic quantities and work out fine, while peers would lose their bearings
with tiny quantities.
When I was 21, a friend found a sheet of LSD. It was excellent. I did it by the dozen. And then one
day, something different happened. Something in my periphery. And then, while working on my own
philosophical debate I had been having with a religious friend, I "realized" a version of pan-psychism.
By 'realized' I mean that, within my own mind, it transformed from something that I thought to
something that I fully understood and believed. I was certain of it.
This unleashed a torrent of reconfigurations - everything.... everything that I knew made way for
this new idea. And truthfully, I had some startlingly accurate insights about some pretty complex
topics.
But what was it? Was it divine? It felt like it, but I also knew fully about madness. So what I did was
try to settle the question. I took more and more and more acid, but couldn't recreate the state of
consciousness I'd experienced following this revelation. And then, one day, something happened.
What occurred is hard to describe, but if you're interested, I wrote about it extensively here. It is
espoused further in the comment section.
The state that I described in the link had two components, that at the time I thought were one. The
first is a staggeringly different perceptual state. The second was the overwhelming sensation that I
had God's attention, and God had mine. The puzzling character of this was that God is not some
distant father figure - rather God is the mind that is embodied in the flesh of the universe. This tied
in with my pan-psychic theories that suggest that certain types of patterns, such as consciousness,
repeat across spatial and temporal scales. God was always there, and once it had my attention, it
took the opportunity to show me things. When I asked questions, it would either lead me around by
my attention to show me the answer, or it would just manifest as a voice in my mind.
Problems arose quickly. I had been shown the "true" way to see the world. The "lost" way. And it was
my duty to show it to others. I never assumed I was the only one (in fact, my friend with whom I
had been debating also had access to this state), but I did believe myself to be divinely tasked. And
so I acted like it. And it was punitive.
We came to believe (my friend and I) that we would be granted ever increasing powers. Telepathy,
for instance, because we were able to enter a state that was similar to telepathy with each other. Not

because we believed our thoughts were broadcast and received, but because God was showing us the
same things at the same time.
This prompted an ever increasing array of delusional states. Everything that was even slightly out of
the ordinary became laden with meaning and intent. I was on constant lookout for guidance, and,
following my intuitions and "God's will", I was lead to heartache after heartache.
Before all this, I had never been religious. In fact, I was at best an agnostic atheist. But I realized
that, if it were true, I would have to commit to the belief. So I did. And I was disappointed.
I focused on the mechanisms. How was God communicating with me? It was always private, meaning
that God's thoughts were always presented to my own mind. As a consequence, I could not remove
my own brain from the explanation. It kept coming back to that. I didn't understand my brain, so
how could I be certain that God was, or was not, communicating with me? I couldn't. And truthfully,
the mystery of how my brain could do these things withoutGod was an equally driving mystery. So I
worked, and struggled until I was stable enough to attend university, where I began to study
cognitive science.
And so that's where I started: was it my brain, or was it something else? Over the years, I
discovered that I could access the religious state without fully accessing the perceptual state. I could
access the full perceptual state without needing to experience the religious one. I was left with a real
puzzle. I had a real discovery - a perceptual state - and a history of delusion brought on by the belief
that the universe was conscious, and had high expectations for me.
I have a wide range of theories to try explain everything, because I've needed explanations to stay
grounded.
The basic premise about the delusional component, and I think psychedelic "woooo" phenomenon in
general is that we have absolute faith in our cognitive faculties. Example: what is your name? Are
you sure? Evidence aside, your certainty is a feeling, a swarm of electrical and chemical activity. It
just so happens that every time you, or anyone else checks, this feeling of certainty is accurate. Your
name is recorded externally to you - so every time you look, you discover it unchanged. But I want
you to focus on that feeling of certainty. Now, let's focus on something a little more tenuous - the
feeling of the familiar. What's the name of the girl you used to sit next to in grade 11 english class?
Tip of the tongue, maybe?
For some reason, we're more comfortable with perceptual errors than errors in these "deep"
cognitive processes. Alien abductees? They're certain they're right. Who are we to question
that certainty?
I have firsthand experience that shows me that even this feeling of certainty - that my thoughts and
interpretation of reality are veridical - can be dramatically incorrect. This forces upon me a constant
evaluation of my beliefs, my thoughts, and my interpretation of the reality around me. However,
most people have neither the experience or the mental tools required to sort out such questions.
When faced with malfunctioning cognitive faculties that tell them their vision is an angel, or
"Mescalito" (a la Castaneda), then for them it really is that thing. Why? Because never in their life
have they ever felt certain and been wrong. Because uncertainty is always coupled to things that are
vague, and certainty is coupled to things that are epistemically verifiable.

What color are your pants. Are you certain? Is it possible that I could persuade you that
you're completely wrong? What about your location? Could I convince you that you are wrong about
that? You can see that certainty is a sense that we do not take lightly.
So when we have visions, or feelings of connection, oneness, openness... they come to us through
faculties that arevery good at being veridical about the world, and about your internal states. Just as
I cannot convince you that you are naked, you know that you cannot convince yourself. You do not
have the mental faculties to un-convince yourself - particularly not during the instance of a profound
experience. I could no more convince myself that I was not talking to God than I can convince myself
now that I am not in my livingroom.
So when these faculties tell you something that is, at best an insightful reinterpretation of the self in
relation to the world, and at worst a psychosis or delusion, we cannot un-convince ourselves. It
doesn't work that way. Instead, we need to explain these things. Our explanations can range from
the divine, to the power of aliens, to the power of technology, or ancient lost wisdom. And why these
explanations? Because very, very few of us are scientifically literate enough, particularly about the
mind and brain, to actually reason our way through these problems.
I felt this, and I have bent my life around finding out the actual explanation - the one that is
verifiable, repeatable, explorable and exportable. Like all science is, and needs to be.
I need to.
The feeling of certainty is that strong.
It compels us to explain its presence to its own level of satisfaction. I need to know: how could I be
so wrong?
I don't know how I could live. My experiences were that impactful. My entire life has been bent
around them.
I need to know.

I once believed I was among God's elect- a prophet if you will- and became a
cognitive scientist and system's theorist in order to understand why it happened.

Once, when I was a young man, I was a homeless street kid. I managed to get myself established in Ottawa in
2003, and soon (2004) began having some remarkable cognitive experiences. These experiences, on their own,
seemed of divine origin. And then I met a Seventh Day Adventist; incredibly well educated and with whom I
would have conversations spanning months.
The cognitive experiences I was having were remarkable, and very distinct. They had describable experiential
features. My friend the Christian (Mike) had been having the same experiences for years, before I met him and
recognized what was occurring within me. He had only ever known one other, highly religious, person who had
these experiences.

Mike was having them in the context of having been raised by a pastor for the Adventist church. I, however,
had long been agnostic bordering on atheist. To this day, Mike is the only other person who I know to have had
these experiences, and I have found nothing in scientific or even anecdotal literature that equates them.
He led me down the rabbit hole, and managed to convince me that God had granted us a gift that he grants to
prophets, to allow them to see truth and to see through the illusions that trap others. To see the world and our
place in it, for what it is. During that time I tried to live as a prophet, attempting to 'rescue' the trapped by
'dispelling their illusions'. I would try to turn drug addicts off of their self-destructive path, and believed God
would grant me the insights I needed to complete these tasks I had set for myself. Mike believed he would be
given authority within his church to lead his community through the coming apocalypse.
We both believed it so fully that we lived it. And we haven't spoken in four years since I changed paths, and
went to university to learn about what really happened to my brain.
Years of effort have led me to understand my experiences through a scientific framework, supplanting my
initial turn to faith to explain my experiences and Mike's.
From a poem I wrote at that time:
When it's happening, everything is golden. And when it stops, that gold just turns to black earth. I pick some of
it up again and say "This... this is our saviour. And the rest... that was just madness"
The 'explanation' is... very very long. Systems science -> systems biology -> cognitive system
Basically; the brain is an electro-chemical system. It is a set of molecular constituents that is in a configuration
(or state space) at any given time. That state-space follows lawful transitions into the next state-space.
An information signal can (for conceptual purposes) be imagined as unchanging. Giving multiple brains the
same signal will have different causal consequences for each brain.
The set of states that your brain 'tends' to be in might be similar to each other, but unique to 'you'. Ie: different
from others, but always self-similar. Consequently, information signals sent to your brain tend to be interpreted
in a 'class' of interpretations characteristic to you. The 'attractor map' of your own brain's states.
With sufficient effort, and manipulation, the electro-chemical substrate of my brain can be changed so
completely that it moves into a set of states that is far-removed from your brain's usual patterns. Meaning that,
housed within the same skull, are more than on possible brains (if brain is considered to be dependent on
configuration). Or that you can change your brain so much that it can be made to interpret relatively common
information signals in a way almost completely removed from your 'usual' patterns.
This is so fundamentally true that it can be considered to happen on the level of basic perception.
I was able to manipulate my brain into a stable state configuration that supported an entirely different (but
coherent) perceptual apparatus. It, very literally, picked a different set of patterns (particularly visuo-spatial)
than it otherwise would. Which meant that, given a normal set of information input, I would perceive that
information and pick out a completely different set of patterns than my normal brain would.
The experience was overwhelming, and the influx of novel information from a normal information stream made
it seem as though my thoughts were exactly linked to that information stream. The experience was as of having
my thoughts guided and directed by an environment that was aware that I was attending to it, and wanted to
intentionally show me things.

The experience is of recognizing not that god is a distant ethereal being, but rather that the universe is its body
and flesh, and all conscious things are its mind. Organizing and deciding our outcome at a level of organization
beyond our own comprehension. But the sense was that this 'universal-hive-mind" was explicitly aware, not
only of me, but also that I was able to hear, see and understand it.
Why did I decide to take the scientific path towards my experience? I had to. I was in violent and painful
discord with society. You can't just show up one day thinking you've been ordained by God to live a good life
and help (though I never believed single-handedly) save humanity. The pressure is intolerable. You feel as
though God needs you to bear the pain to do the work; but society doesn't want to hear or see you. They ridicule
and mock you. Rightfully so.
The visual experience is... difficult to describe. But the best analogy is of solving a magic-eye puzzle
(stereogram). At first, there's chaos and confusion, and then out of that (you can actually feel it stabilize.. like an
intense feeling of rushing upwards, like rising to the surface after a deep dive) an image begins to stabilize.
Once you have it, it's just a matter of doing what you're doing to keep it stable.
Then you can look it over, and analyze what you see. And go "ohh hey look! A pony :)"
Here's an account of my experiences (written clumsily, some years after... but well before I had a good
explanation):

Further experience with the state and a resolution of "am I insane v am I holy v is it explainable" firmly
established as "explainable" rendered it quite safe to explore. However, it is not from within that state that what
is a useful insight, versus what is simply a brain with it's ability to make conceptual-perceptual associations
cranked to 'max', can be discerned. That can only be done with a post-session debriefing.
Its difficult to emulate serotonin agonism without either the natural conditions that cause it, or the artificial
ones. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out if it was a property of my brain, augmented; or a property of the
extreme state itself. It was the former. However; within a state of 'agonism' (for instance, experimented with
non-psychoactive SSRI's which were sufficient to incite and maintain it) It is possible through effort to intensify
or diminish the effects. However, extensive training with it made it so that... when I first discovered it, it was by
accident. I spent months chasing it. Once I figured out "what to do" I could do it at will. Then I started to do it
in normal life, but with effort. Eventually, it got to the point where, under an agonist state, I no longer
experience any sensation of disorder. Everything is 'highly ordered'. As in; I no longer have to 'attempt' to do it
in an agonist state. It happens automatically. But I can focus on the effects. In normal, stress-free life it is
difficult to achieve and maintain, but is do-able, though took a lot of practice.
However, it should be noted that the effects you gain come with a trade off. You will have almost no long-term
memory of the details. Things that your brain does well, under normal circumstances, it cannot do from this
state. So it's not a one-way gain.
I haven't put a lot of effort into finding some sympathetic scientist to demonstrate this under fMRI conditions;
partly because of the confidence that I feel that it will yield measurable results when I do get around to it.
There's no rush. No need to risk martyring myself academically as "that guy" either.
There is something that it is like to be a bat
This is Nagel's famous argument for the independence of phenomenological experience from the
explanatory framework of scientific materialism. However; we can be certain that there is at least
some (more or less) predictable correlation between measurable and explainable physical states and
certain phenomenological experiences, fMRI scans bear this out. Likewise, we know that experience
is profoundly based in easily disturbed configurations of the electrochemical systems of the brain. We
can, as in other sciences, perturb that system by introducing chemicals or temperature and energy
gradients. Sometimes with bizarrely specific effects (ie some forms of agnosia, TCM stimulation
experiments), others with global and and predominantly sensory manifestations (such as illnesses
including stroke or intoxication).
As a physical system, the brain is restrained into lawful state transitions; the brain, for instance
never spontaneously reconfigures itself into a butterfly. Whatever the brain does is a thing that the
brain can do. This carries forward with the introduction of perturbances resulting in a disequilibrium
effects to that system. What is generally known, however, is that some [partially] understood
mechanisms manage to keep the brain operating within a particularly narrow range of states. These
are its attractors, and phenomenologically, we know it as our subjective experience which is nothing,
if not familiar.
The rationale is fairly straightforward. All things being equal, the brain should (and eventually does)
obey the second law of thermodynamics. It should increase in entropy and increase in disorder, and
eventually lose its apparent order. We know, however, that as long as it is connected to a functioning

body, it will continue to operate within a narrow band of possible configurations. It will occupy a
surprisingly small band of possible configurations in its state-space. It will, in general, have
predictable responses to stimulus. When you see a particular colour, particular regions of the brain
will be more active than others. When you have a particular thought, or sing the same song, then
similar regions will be active when you have that thought or sing that song at later times.
It would, of course, be incredibly difficult to derive a state space diagram for the brain; which
variables, for instance, would you monitor? Regardless of the practical difficulties, I think that it
would be a fairly safe conjecture that the map would be fairly consistent over time. Particular
abundances of certain molecules, proteins and energy consumption should correspond with the
various states we, via a shared account of phenomenological experience, have already named.
Moods, such as happy, scared, pensive, contemplative and others. States, such as those achieved
through meditation, contemplation, physical activity. We would, by reading an individuals lifetime
attractor map, be able to discern when they were 'in the zone', when they were distracted, and even
when they were aroused.
Each and every one of these states should also influence the brain's role and function as an
information processor. Information is always physically instantiated on some medium; if information
is not the system that it passes through, then it is some temporally extended configuration of that
medium. As such, the brain's role in transferring information from the environment, and across its
neural architecture should be influenced by the state that it is in. Quite literally, the information
content of the brain, at any given time, should be influenced by which of its familiar states that it is
in. We know, for instance, that states of focus tend to exclude wider portions of the sensory
information spectrum.
The argument, then, is that how the brain handles information available from the environment is
highly dependent on its particular configuration, and that configuration will necessarily be a lawful
expression of its physical instantiation. I don't really think this is a particularly contentious issue, but
I have been wrong before.
However, let's be clear. As far as most of us are concerned, our phenomenological experience of
being a brain with a body is highly ordered. We wake up every day, we read things, we see things,
we hear things. We have moods, we have desires, we have intentions, we have relationships. Our
experience is, in fact, SO reliable, that it can be a traumatizing shock when something unexpected
happens. People report a myriad of bizarre experiences that are so outside of the norm that it can
change their whole interpretation of reality. There's absolutely no shortage of these reports
on /r/neurophilosophy.
These experiences must result from some lawful state of the brain that just so happens to be
exceedingly rare. Often times, they require one of physical, electrical, or chemical alteration to the
system. We know that the regularity of subjective experience is anchored in the remarkable
regularity of the physical states of the brain, and the reliability of the mechanisms that hold it in its
attractor states. We can also know that issues related to these regulatory mechanisms can lead the
brain into more exotic states; but we know that in some sense these must be different from the
external influences by a simple limiting of the toolkit available for the change. For instance, we know

that there are extensive physical and psychological impacts to the introduction of hydrogen cyanide,
blunt force, TCM stimulation, or blood vessel rupture, but these are not states that the brain could
contrive of its own accord. Exotic states that the brain can lead itself to, by variances in its regulatory
mechanisms, are states of excessive or insufficient amounts of key neurotransmitters, proteins, or
sugars. Some of these are well established; hypoglycemic states associated with diabetes are known
to cause characteristic cognitive impairments.
What I am, however, most keenly interested in discussing, are those states that are generally
classed as religious experiences. This is generally research that is kept under the banner of
'neurotheology', but of course this also cobbles together the wide breadth of supposedly 'religious'
experiences under one explanatory banner. The result is hardly better than a pseudoscience. I am
not concerned with covering the breadth and depth of the possible exotic brain states that can leave
one to interpret their subjective experience as divine in origin. Rather I am interested in discussing a
very peculiar and very specific experience that I have had. Since I first began having the experiences
in 2004, I have encountered a handful of other people who have had the experience as well. It has
very identifiable characteristics that make it so there's a shared recognition when it's being
discussed. Almost all people have interpreted it as an encounter with God, to varying degrees of
commitment. I, however, am an atheist, and a scientist; so to me it is an experience worth
identifying and potentially researching. I feel that it is a discovery that, properly studied (it is
reproducible) has some scientific merit and could change the science of studying the mind a fair bit.
I have shared this experience with one other person, however, our interpretation of it drove us apart.
It has come to the forefront of my mind, as I have discovered two redditors in the last couple of
months who also share the experience. This, certainly, lends credence to some theories I have about
how to explain the phenomenon -and it is a phenomenon. However, in general, the others who have
this experience get extremely caught up in the subjective experience of it, believing their new ideas
to be a form of gnostic revelation. Admittedly, the experience is so overwhelming, that my early
encounters with it pulled me in the same direction. After years of searching, I have yet to find
anyone with the distance from the events, and the scientific inclination to treat it as a research
project.
So, I bring this to the /r/neurophilosophy forum with the hopes that I can have a reasonable
discussion about the experience and its implications; as well as to gain some insight into how to
share this with others in the field. It's not an easy topic to broach amongst academic peers, or with
professors, because it so deeply touches on deeply held personal convictions.
I will, in the comments, explore the characteristics of the experience, as well as my attempts at
explanation and the evidence that I have to support my hypothesis.
My assertion, then, is this:
There exists a lawful stable configuration of the brain that is very rare, but available to access under
special and consistent conditions. It profoundly alters the information processing characteristics of
the brain, and subsequently, the subjective experience of it. Phenomenological accounts tend
towards religious fantasy, as the state necessarily results in the strong impression that everything

that is other than the subject is not only a conscious entity, but that the subject and everything
else share joint interpersonal attention. It is strongly suggested that this is an illusion. While it is
inseparable from the experience, this sensation of sharing joint interpersonal attention with the
environment is accompanied by a wide range of sensory and perceptual shifts that seem to derive
from the state itself, and not from direct input from some external entity. The state can last,
unbroken, for hours to days, and is accompanied by very consistent subjective qualities from person
to person, that are not shared in common with other broad instances of religious or psychedelic
experience. It seems associated with serotonin agonism.

I have a couple of impressions about the general tone of the thread, and it leans towards quick
categorization. Really, I do not think I have supplied sufficient information to facilitate such
categorization as of yet; and it was my intention to provide a fairly thorough description of some of
the key characteristics of the state. After 8 years of research, I am quite familiar with quite a number
of the more common classes of religious experience, and sufficiently so to consider them to be
different from what I describe. There is some similarity to 'higher states' mentioned in the meditative
practices of the east, but analogy and similarity does not entail equivalence.
I have, on many occasions entertained the idea that this experience is probably a cocktail of brainstates that may play a role, quite independently of each other, in other known states. That would be
like saying "I taste curry"; it could be a part of a wide variety of dishes that may not share other
common ingredients. A profound sense of connectedness with 'the whole', as it were, is in no way
uncommon among psychedelic experiences. However, having myself had such experiences and
shared such experiences with others; the state I'm referring to is worlds apart.
Secondly, I have personally been in this state simultaneously with another person; he also identifies
it as something quite apart from the more classically accounted for drug induced religious
experiences. I have had discussions with, literally, hundreds of people claiming to have had religious
experiences, with drugs and without; and to date have identified only three others with whom a
mutual understanding of sharing this experience has been discerned. I have no presumption that I
am unique or special; in fact I believe that this is something that just about any brain can do given
the right physical substrate to support it. Some people seem 'naturally' closer to it than others. It is,
however, demonstrably a rare occurrence; and it's reliability, stability, sudden transition, and above
all reproducibility should make it a good target to study empirically.
characteristics of the state
I guess this is probably what you all came here for. First and foremost, I wish to convey that in no
way are these traits 'a sense' or 'impression'. They seem as admissible as regular senses.
The first encounter with the state, to me, had much the sensation of solving a stereogram, or a
magic eye puzzle. If you've ever done these puzzles, you know that feeling of first straining your
eyes, almost arbitrarily; then of beginning to see something change about the information coming in.
In normal vision 'images' do not appear to jump out at you 'when you do that thing with your eyes';
but in front of a stereogram an otherwise normal and benign act of visual attention results in a
pattern emerging. You have the sense of struggling as you adjust your vision; there's something

there, but it hasn't quite taken form. And then, as you work, and you tinker with your senses, a
pattern not only begins to emerge, but suddenly, rapidly and smoothly... it stabilizes. Suddenly you
can see a pattern that wasn't available before. Clearly, that pattern is really there; but if you show it
to someone who hasn't ever seen one... they'll just see an array of colorful dots. You can look it over,
contemplate it; but so long as you manipulate the information stream in such a way, the normal and
familiar patterns are unavailable to you. When you are doing this, you can make sense of the
stereogram, but not your normal stream of sensory information. When you are focused on your
normal stream, there is not sailboat in that picture.
This state requires doing something with your eyes -you must stabilize the visual input stream, by
focusing on a distant fixed point. A light, for instance. It is easiest at twilight, because keeping your
eyes steady in bright light is painful. Night is also easy, but the effect seems the most rich in low
light -cloudy days for instance. This is the first bit of evidence that the brain is actually capable of
picking up patterns from a different spatial and temporal range. This bears very direct analogy to
regular versus time-lapse photography. Different patterns nested in temporality emerge as a result of
sampling the environment 24 times a second, versus 24 times a minute, hour, day, year; however
this shift is not quite so extreme. One spectrum over.
When you manage the foveation, and relax your gaze in order to stabilize the visual input stream, it
requires an act of attention in order to 'load' the new patterns. They seem to require, quite literally,
more memory. The refresh rate needs to be lowered so that the information from the sensory input
stream doesn't erase so quickly. This act of attention is the part that feels, staggeringly, like solving
a magic eye stereogram. It is the refresh rate sustenance -keeping information active and
participating- that seems to require serotonin agonism. The more serotonin (and probably others, but
my experience with SSRI's definitely narrowed it down) the easier it seems to be to have your brain
switch to this different spatiotemporal bandwidth.
Once the information is stable, your frame of reference instantly seems to change. You feel,
suddenly, like you're in a snow globe. Instead of feeling like you're the center, and everything is a
certain distance away from you, you suddenly feel as though everything else is the frame of
reference and you're a particular distance away from its parts. That's a feeble explanation, but it's a
bit like the sensation you get in an IMAX film. This component's hard to describe, you really need to
see it to know what I'm talking about. However, once you get it, that's when the clarity hits you.
Everything seems startlingly high-contrast, crisp, clear, and well defined. Like putting on glasses,
although its not like you can read signs from farther away. And once you have it, your eyes settle;
you no longer have to make an effort to acquire or keep the stream going; the foveation on distant
points is easy, automatic and natural. Once you get it, you have it.
The next thing you notice, is that the relationship between objects seems different; as though more
information about the space between them and the rates at which moving objects pass, is preserved.
Your attention seems freed, it stops flitting about, it's calm, smooth, stable. You can listen to
conversations all around you without having to ignore what you see; you just let it happen and you
can hear what everyone is saying; and understand it. You take a deep breath. It's deep, clear, rich, it
has a flavor. It's suddenly easy to stand up straight, to feel and control every muscle. And it's not

hard to allow this rich information to move; you don't have to apply effort to listen, see, smell, taste
and feel, and breath smoothly the way that you usually do.
And then, you notice it. The whole world seems to be breathing. It's okay though... it's not as though
it's respiring, with moving lungs. You just.. notice it.. and you feel compelled to ask... Are you there?
Yes it replies.
And you tremble.
And when I say it replies, nothing happens; no words... you just... understand.
So you decide to go for a wander, because... what else would you do? And that's when the
synchronicities begin to happen. That's when the metaphor begins to pile on. So you ask.... it... a
question. In words. No answer. That's surprising. You know that it's there, you know that it's
attending to you, and you know that it knows that you know that fact. And then; something catches
your attention. So you keep the question in mind. And something else catches your attention, which
leads you to something else that catches your attention. The next thing you know; you get the
answer to your question. It's playing out before you as a metaphor -it's literally being pantomimed
before you by the world. And the way that you got to experience this scene was by following a
strange trail of breadcrumbs that led you from moment to moment, from act to act, and from place
to place until -suddenly- that burning question is answered. Right there. Right in front of you. You
just, all of a sudden, get it; and yes, you can even use that metaphor to explain the topic later. To to
others. In words.
And this happens again. And again. And again. Every time, another question, every time another trail
of bread-crumbs to lead you around your city in the most uncanny string of improbable coincidences.
The right place, at the right time, with a mind-blistering "What are the odds of that?!?!?" sense of
amazement at how improbable it was for that one event to have led you to the other. All of that, just
so that you could be in the right place at the right time for that thing to happen, and provide you
with understanding to the question that you just asked.
Your ability to communicate is searing. You are staggeringly articulate and intelligent -as bright as
you ever feel on your very best days. Every thought, clearly expressed. So startlingly so that the
people you are talking to will vocalize at just how amazing it is to talk to you. Their brows furrow
with puzzlement at just how clearly you can articulate deep and meaningful ideas that are important
to them. These are sober people; they have no idea what's going on in your head.
And then; you sleep. Not because you need to; but because you choose to. It's that time; there's
nothing else that it has to teach you tonight.

To be on the inside of this experience is quite remarkable; the experience is.. very persuasive.
But serious reflection rendered it no more mystical than any other state. Well, that may be a bit of an
oversimplification; my real impression is more nuanced.
What I could never escape, when deciding whether or not to endorse the subjective experience at
face value, was that I could not remove the brain as a physical entity from an explanation of the
account. It needed to be a part of the explanation; even if god, the divine, the

other were communicating to me; it was obvious that I had to get my brain to do something
particular in order to tune in to the conversation. How had this occurred?
I'll be honest; after some piling on of experience, I decided to indulge it. I decided to try to be a
prophet of God, because that's what I had been told in this state. Not that I was the prophet, but
rather that I was one of the people leading the way... to whatever God had in mind. And I was 'told'
all sorts of things about my duties, my responsibilities, and my future. And none of it bore out. The
more I did 'what I was told' the more it became very painfully clear that I had been talking to myself
all along. The transition back to a scientific mindset was a gradual one -it just seemed to be better at
explaining what had gone on.
However, I still think that there's something really interesting to be learned here. We need to explain
how and why the brain can do these things, and serious scientific inquiry is almost non-existent.
This state; all the immersion; the sensation; the metaphor; the breath; the pattern comprehension...
it can all be experienced without committing to the seemingly sure belief that the universe has an
opinion of you. With sufficient exploration, and the right mindset; it becomes a little bit more like
exploring a computer game. Where, even though nothing seems accidental, it also doesn't seem like
you're being played with. It's hard not to indulge, because the overwhelming impression is that
you're being attended to. I have some philosophy as to how this impression is supported, but that's
for some other time.
What I wish to try to do is separate out 'the state' from the impressions you have of the the world
the first few times that you experience it.
First, let's examine an interesting observation about human (and some animal) cognition, and that is
the faculty ofjoint attention. In most instances, this refers to shared attention to an object; but it
also refers to instances where two people engage in attending to each other.
How we most commonly experience it can be demonstrated by its initiation. Imagine that you are in
a crowded room, and you spot someone that you know. So you look at them, and smile, and keep
your gaze fixed on them. Eventually, they spot that you're looking at them, and you can almost tell
the instant when they recognize you. We know if and when we are being attended to by other
conscious entities. We know when our dogs and cats are paying attention to us, and they know when
we are paying attention to them. Both parties know when they are paying attention to each other.
This is a cognitive skill.
Here are some assumptions we can probably make about the brain during the act of joint
interpersonal attention (ie, I am aware of your awareness of me). First, is that this probably relies on
receiving input from a variety of brain areas that are themselves closer to the perceptual apparatus.
That is to say; the parts of your brain that are especially important in recognizing when someone is
attending to your attention are not so likely to be the parts that tell you basic visual information.
They receive information from other parts of the brain.
Those other parts of your brain are responsible for taking in and processing all of the other visual
stimulus; yet out of that constant stream of information, very little of it triggers the impression "I am
being attended to" or, particularly "someone is attending to my attention". Some very special
conditions, evidently, have to occur to develop the hypothesis that someone has locked onto our

attention, and the interpersonal attention feedback loop has been established. Yet how often are we
wrong? Surely we make minor mistakes, such as when someone waves at you from a distance and
you wave back... only to realize that they were waving at someone behind you. But imagine, for
instance, participating in a conversation with someone close to you, and not being certain that they
were aware of you attending them? We nearly almost know whether or not someone is paying
attention.
Knowing that other people have attention of you means knowing also that they have minds, and that
those minds have contents; thoughts, feelings, desires and knowledge. They have thoughts about
you.
Now here's where it begins to get interesting. We can also have the attention of groups; even if the
groups are individuals. There are potentially serious consequences to having the attention of groups,
because the ability of groups has recently gained the ability to be remarkably large.
Having the attention of the group is a very interesting phenomenon. Let's consider a few instances
from the last couple of years. Attention of the group usually requires some weird rare set of
occurrences. For instance, there was the bullied bus monitor. She didn't even seek the attention of
the group; but she definitely knew it when she had it. It literally elected her for salvation; for
(evidently) being a kind person who was unfairly harmed. However, criminals or undesirables are
also selected; for instance the currently viral video of the group of highschool boys who participated
in a post-rape laugh fest. What about overly attached girlfriend Lana? Sure, she made the video; but
did she think that she would become OAG? I doubt it.
The interesting thing about joint interpersonal attention and having the group's attention is that
determining when you're being attended to is pretty easy to figure out. Why? Because there is
LOADS of relatively unambiguous evidence that you've been noticed. From what I understand of
'being a celebrity' (which is admittedly very little); some begin to have a huge increase in falsepositives for thinking that people are attending to them; perhaps because of the dramatic increase in
people who really are attending to them.
What about people who believe that they are being spied on by the government, or schizophrenics
who believe they are being watched all of the time? The mechanisms that make inferences about
being the focus of attention are not only fallible; but chemically based. They can be altered. The
accuracy of this system evidently relies on proper calibration between the brain and the signals from
the environment.
My hypothesis about the 'religious state' is that excess serotonin (others, I am sure) in the brain
augments and alters the pattern identification in the sensory system. It picks out sensory patterns
that really are in the environment, but are normally outside of perceptual range; mostly due to the
rate at which the influence of information decays withing the brain. Having the information sticking
around in the brain causing changes for longer than normal should cause interference patterns in the
input stream; your brain literally won't know what to do with the information coming in, because it
hasn't finished dealing with the information that it already has.
This begins to suggest why resting foveation or settling your eyes on a distant fixed object
is essential for achieving this state; you need to stabilize the information input. My presumption,

then, is that once certain actions are taken to stabilize things, your brain will simply switch onto a
new channel; and probably does this by changing the frequency of oscillations or brain waves -to
what I have no idea. As far as I understand, this should change the temporal sampling rate relevant
to the system, and the brain will suddenly pick up information from a different information spectrum.
Don't be too harsh about this hypothesis -without access to proper research facilities and
collaborators, it is at best a diagram drawn with crayons.
The impression, then, would be of a sudden transition into a stable configuration where different
information is on display; however it would seem that it causes some sort of 'buffer overrun' into
adjacent systems for linking observations about the world into inferences of intention (as is the
accusation that scientists levy against religious animists) to create false positives - readings of
intention where there is none. It also seems to overrun into they systems responsible for figuring out
metaphor. It probably overruns the buffers for all of the post-processing systems of the brain -which
would themselves be affected by the serotonin abundance, and the novel information stream coming
from earlier in the cognitive/perceptual system.
These systems work not only to identify when we have the attention of individuals; but also when we
have the attention of a large group. We will definitely know when everyone is watching. If these
systems can be tricked into thinking an individual attends to us (mistaken wave); or that groups or
agencies are attending to us (schitzophrenia), then surely they can be tricked into thinking that "the
entirety; god; it; the other" is attending to us.
This chain of realizations, coupled with enough understanding of cognitive science and complexity
sciences to begin to formulate testable hypothesis ultimately led to the rejection of the divinity of the
experience.

One last word on the topic:

Once, I suffered a concussion while snowboarding. The next day, I had to go somewhere. It was
winter, and there were lots of boots by the door. I couldn't find mine.
"I'm pretty sure that these are yours" my girlfriend said.
They definitely weren't, I wore these boots every day.
The whole family started looking for my boots. Everyone got caught up in my absolute certainty that
they were NOT my boots.
Eventually, we all agreed that I would just borrow these boots.
I slid my toe into the boot, and immediately as my foot slid in.... they became my boots again; and I
was just as certain of it as I was before.
We are so incredibly used to the remarkable reliability of our senses and perceptions that we will
literally refuse to believe their error. Especially when we can so rarely catch the error in the act.
My certainty that "I had God's attention, and he had mine" offers no assurance that it was really
true. But was it very convincing while it lasted.

However; in the absence of its divinity; I am thoroughly convinced that the state is of interest and
importance and should be explored from within a scientific framework.

Techniques used to access:

1: Serotonin agonism seems to be implied, or gross action on the serotonergic systems. This really
just means that I've experienced it on a wide variety of substances that are serotonergic, but not on
substances that aren't. At least not on their own.
However, with that said, the state has profoundly visual characteristics. These are descriptive or
qualitative features that can be observed visually, and mostly experienced as altered representations
of space and motion. I was briefly prescribed risperidoneafter trying to tell a psychiatrist about this. I
think she heard the messianic beliefs component, but didn't acknowledge the physical systems or the
state that I was describing. Risperidone allowed me to pick up visual features of the state very easily,
as well as some attentional ones, but not to access the full "set" of features.
2: It looks like this commercial - minus, of course, the frozen-in-time characters.
3: Okay, so time for the conceptual updates!
Here's some things to know about!
First, is metastability. This is important, because the claim that I am making these days is that this is
a metastable brain state that changes the information processing regime of the brain. It's a stable
dynamical regime in a physical sense, and the result is a change in how information from the
environment is constructed into a conscious experience.
The next is the concept of the "cyclopean eye" in vision. I asked about it here. It's kind of a loosely
described thing in psychology, but it is a thing. The linked author mentions Hiroshi Ono, and he's
definitely talking about the shing that I had observed.
So, the current description that I have goes like this:
There's two input signal streams for vision - the left eye and the right. Within the view provided for
both eyes, there is a field of high definition (the fovea) and of low definition peripheral vision.
But, we seem to have a sort of "visual space" which is where the input stream for the eyes is
displayed. So, if you cross your eyes, you'll notice that there's still a left, right, up, down and center
of your field of vision. What you'll see is the left and right images splitting apart and seemingly
sliding to the left and right. So, if you hold your finger in the air at arms length, and then cross your
eyes, you'll see two fingers appear. They diverge from the center of your vision. The center of your
visual field remains the center.
Another interesting thing - when you cross your eyes deeply, the image from your left eye appears
on the left side of your body, even though you're exaggerating the orientation of your gaze to a
space that's on the right of your body. Opposite for the right. But there's one thing I want to point
out - your visual space still has an up-down, left and rightrelative to your body - relative to your
proprioception or sense of self. Either eye will paint the whole space, both eyes will paint the space
together, and the space can also be painted with the split-images from being cross eyed.

What if this space itself - the space that has an unchangeable center relative to your body - has
observable features? Think about this for a second... you - whoever you are - are watching your eyes
draw images on a space that also has spatial features. So, if I am watching a TV, and there's stereo
cameras on the screen showing left and right images - that's not weird. Tv's can do that. However,
you can "step outside" of the image and look at the TV as a tv.
So, what I'm suggesting is that our visual system is organized similarly -at least subjectively. The
eyes are like camera, and the visual space/cyclopean eye is like a television, and somewhere beyond
that is you - the observer.
How does this all come together?
Okay.. so now we've introduced the idea that there's a screen-type thing in your mind, and it has
basic spatial coordinates. Your eyes draw on it. Can other things draw on it? It seems so! I think
that's a good candidate for where visual hallucinations get drawn, and in particular where form
constantsget drawn. The latter being a hallmark of serotonergic psychoactives.
Makes sense, right? There's a brain system that represents your visual space. You aren't looking out
of your eyes, you're looking at this visual space, and your eyes are drawing on it. That means that
the system is capable of representing every image that your eyes can present to it, and it's also
where you observe things like narrative, sequence, and meaning. Makes sense, because now you
have a good reason as to why you can see dreams, and why it is that you can see visual
hallucinations and form constants.
This is because visual experience is the experience of watching this visual space.
So, when you do things like consume psychedelics, if you get it to the point where you can see from
constants, then presumably you're seeing signal noise in the visual space. What is that signal noise
anyway?
Well, imagine that an effect of serotonergic drugs is a reduction in the rate of signal decay for this
system. Think of it as doing something to make the space "echoey". When you have a lot of inputs,
as well as the presence and amplification of signal noise and static, and you slow the rate at which
the signals decay, then what do you get?
You get disorder. You get drawings in your visual space that mutate and interact with the drawings
that your eyes are sending in - you get tracers, halos, misidentification, false movement - you get
hallucinations.
Well.... what would happen if you could get all of that disorder to calm down and be coherent?
So what I've been trying to present is a rationale for why the state occurs, and why doing certain
things causes a new state to occur. Put simply, I stumbled upon a series of actions that induces
coherence in the visual space when drugs have been taken that ordinarily induce incoherence.
The transition into coherence is sudden, and once acquired is stable. Once acquired, hallucinations
stop instantly, and what remains is a startlingly brilliant clarity.
So how do you go about inducing coherence? Well, the first step is stabilizing the input stream. You
have to stabilize your eyes.

The next part is where it gets weird... because it involves observing the visual space/cyclopean eye.
This isn't something we do normally. Normally, we "look through" it - convinced in the illusion that
we are directly perceiving the world through our eyes. This is obviously a lot easier when you've
taken enough LSD to see the form constants superimposed on your ordinary vision. So, in other
words, you have to be experienced enough with drug use to be able to do that - allow the form
constants to manifest and be observed while still being out moving, walking around, or playing video
games. That's hard - it's like drumming or something, where you have to like... do it while not paying
attention.
Then, you have to stabilize your foveal image on the very center of your visual space. Center your
gaze on the center of your cyclopean eye's gaze. It has to be kept very, very stable there - which is
why looking off at a far away light seems to work well. You have to resist the urge to saccade,
because doing so scrambles the coherence and you're back at square one.
Be warned, this shit is hard on the eyes. It's best at twilight. My eyes always water, sometimes I'll go
a few minutes without blinking or averting my gaze. Do it while walking, and you'll find your
attention drawn to movement in the periphery. Static objects rock back and forth predictably and
periodically as you move. Be warned as well - it still sometimes takes me hours of effort while on
LSD before I can get it to work, and I know how to do it. But there's zero mistaking it when it
happens. Very literally, if you have to wonder "is this it?" - the answer is no. You really can't miss it.
So, the idea is that you coordinate your foveal gaze with your cyclopean gaze - so that where your
eyes rest is the exact center of your "visual space". After you do this, you go looking for the patterns,
haze, static and snow in your peripheral vision that are able to be visually observed because of the
LSD. The "magic eye" part is the act of trying to get the patterns in your vision to overlay and map
onto the objects, items and motion that's being drawn by your eyes.
There does seem to be a component of left/right channel edge detection mapping. So, edges that are
observable in your left eye's signal are somehow mapped onto those of the right eye's signal, even
though they're mechanically diplopic - or "twinned" or "duplicated" in your visual space because your
eyes are pointed in different directions.
What you get out of it, eventually, is actually attentional.
So, let's add another layer of "weird" to the visual space. Keep your eyes fixed and static
somewhere, and change where you're attending. Look straight ahead, but try to tell me about things
that are off in the periphery, without looking at them.
When you get this state going, there's a "freeing" of attention from being locked on where you're
foveating. You foveate at a relaxed point in the center of your visual space, but you can move your
attention fluidly and easily around the visual space. It's really very neat.
Okay, so let's set up a schematic: We have eyes with fovea. We have a fixed representational space
in our "minds eye". The neurological observer of that space is the "cyclopean eye" or "cyclopean
gaze". There is a center of that visual/representational space. If we cross our eyes in the extreme,
that center stays the center - the line across which the image splits. If you hold your finger up at
arm's length and straight in front of you, and look at the wall behind it, you'll see two fingers. The

left eye will draw a translucent finger on the right side of the center of the visual space, and the right
eye will draw a translucent finger on the left side of center. If you cross your eyes, this will reverse,
with the left eye drawing a finger on the left side of center, and the right drawing it on the right.
The important thing is that the center is the center.
If you focus your eyes on the finger, the dual images converge and lose their translucent quality - it
becomes solid.
So, each eye has a fovea - an area of high detail due to density of photoreceptor cells. The point in
exterior space where the gaze of each eye converges is called the foveal gaze. The foveal gaze can
move around, for instance looking to the top-left. But top-left is an area in visual space relative to
your head. In other words, your foveal gaze moves around in the visual space. You can look to the
top-left, and it doesn't change where the sense of center is for your visual space - however
what's drawn at center loses detail because it's not where the foveal gaze converges.
Let's introduce another player - your attentional gaze. My hypothesis is that visual
attention canalso move around the visual scene, but always does so in lock-step with your foveal
gaze. I think that this is another layer of "high detail representation" and is what extracts things like
form, function and narrative from your visual space.
So, it seems to me that what we're doing is learning to decouple visual attention from the location of
the foveal gaze.
We can imagine that the dead-center of the cyclopean gaze, or visual scene could map onto a
location out-in-the world. In my earlier replies, I referred to a ring on a string. So the idea is to get
your foveal gaze to rest on the ring, while trying to get your visual attention/attentional gaze to
switch to the scrolling patterns the appear in the minds-eye/visual space while on serotonergics.
So, you fix and relax your eyes on a point in empty (or near empty) space, and try to attend to the
visual space. Your eyes will continue to draw the outer world, but by resisting the urge to saccade to
where you're attending, it gives the system time to draw the scene in high-definition. Do this for a
long enough time, and the idea is that the scrolling patterns in the visual scene will suddenly take
form, map onto the images drawn by your eyes, edge-lock with them, and then
suddenly.... whoosh - you're in.
The video games are neat, because first-person perspectives in games embody what I'm describing.
Look at the game Ark. How would you describe the character's gaze? If it was stereoscopic, it just
seems to "rest" at a point off in space. It never tracks to objects, and it never saccades.
However, you are free to look around the screen, even though the character's gaze never does. Yourelative-to-the-game is like "attentional gaze" as I just described it. Free to observe around the
scene, even though the gaze doesn't shift.
So, the game is a model for this kind of spatial representation.
While on LSD, I obtained this state using video games by doing the following. Having a small dot
placed dead-center to the TV. Resting my gaze exactly on that spot, and then allowing the scrolling
visuals to begin to appear in my minds-eye. Have someone else control the character in the game,
and walk slowly and steadily forward. The slower the better.

Try to shift your attention out of the game, and onto the TV's frame - all without moving yourgaze where your eyes rest - from the dot in the center. Try to hold your gaze static, your "framing" or
resolve on the tv's frame, and then try to welcome in the visuals.
Sounds complicated, maybe it is! Lol.... anyways.

I'm glad to hear your opinion on the materialist/mystic thing! I like your description of it! I think it's
like switching between the vase/face interpretation of that optical illusion. You can't hold both at
once, you can only know that both are coherent, but incomplete descriptions of the same artifact.
They're incomplete and complementary, but cannot describe each other adequately.
I find that people who have such experiences often seem to retreat into hardcore mysticism - and
completely reject taking any responsibility for being critters with brains :p
Ohh god... the amount of times I've heard people tell me that I'm wrong because I'm insufficiently
mystic in my reasoning... it's like opposite /r/atheism. Ugh.
As for the runes and pendulum - that really encapsulates this balance I strive for. I actually think
they use procedures which exploit how the brain works. Yet they don't work unless you believe that
they can and will - but placing the burden on your brain transforms them from "spiritual knowledge"
(which has a kind of predictive epistemic authority) to a form of "intellectual insight" - which has no
predictive certainty.
By this, I mean that people who believe that they're in contact with spirits grant themselves
permission to act as though they cannot be wrong. How could they be? The knowledge was given to
them by an external source that cannot be questioned. Ohh, they're proven wrong later? Evil spirits.
Blah.
No, it's just you, and your brain. The mystical part comes in when you realize that it took all of the
sum of history to be able to have anything happen at all. Insight is valuable... but it is just insight.
Not divinely gifted knowledge. It does not stand apart from scrutiny and skepticism.
Mostly it exploits language processing. The "spreads" for runes and tarot, and maps for pendulum are
just a form of spatial syntax. Syntax tends to be spatial - in writing, the order and sequence of words
arranged from top-left to bottom right is a huge part of how we construct meaning :)
It's similar for runes and pendulums. It also give you an outlet to pursue vague sensations,
suspicions and ideas into fully formed and articulated thoughts. But... one must leave a bit of room
for the "uncanny". However, I'm cautious in how I characterize the uncanny. It feels "intentional" or
"guided" - but there's no knowing for sure. And every time I've ever acted like I knew, it's resulted in
some form of punitive outcome :p
So, once upon a time I encountered an amazing cognitive state. After many, many years of
contemplation and research, I'm convinced it's a real, amazing phenomenon and that it could be
measured and studied fruitfully. I'm also pretty certain that it's something outside of the scope of
experiences that most people know about. To this day I've found only a tiny handful of people who
know what I'm talking about, and more than a few who are sure that they are, but definitely aren't.
However, when I first encountered it, I was unprepared and more than a little messed up. It also, at

face value, manifests as a direct realization that not only is God real, but just kind of... uhh... there.
Like, in the room, immediately accessible, and primarily because God is "everything". The sum of
existence is the life, breath and blood of it.
So I went from wondering "is there a God?" to "Ohh. There it is."
The problem is that this sent me into a full-blown messianic delusion. I turned to the bible for an
explanation, and went on the usual "the end is neigh, I will bring it, now where are my super
powers?!?" thing. This was, it turned out, completely wrong.
After many years of school, study and contemplation, I eventually settled on the idea that, if
God is the universe, then it works in exactly the way we observe. Through the actions of physics and
people, and media, and war, and science, etc, etc. It is exactly how it appears to be.
In other words, for the most part, the system operates at face value. If you want the world to
change, the mechanisms for doing so are right there for doing it. Actions, words and deeds. What
this implied is that understanding how God works was to be sought by understanding
how causation works. However, there was a problem.
When I started working on causation by studying brains, cognition and complex systems, it quickly
became apparent that the world is so incredibly ordered that it's quite capable of acting intelligently
without intentionality. However, this also looks like intention. Working with synchronicity wound up
demonstrating to me that an intelligent and organized complex system was indistinguishable from
an intentional God-mind. In fact, if the universe is the body of God, then it's clearly demonstrable
that parts of it are intentional, and parts of it simply "do". Which parts?
A quick analogy from my interpretation of runes and pendulums. A lot of traditionalists would label
me a heretic, but I use them just fine to guide myself and others. I believe that they exploit
regularities in cognition and the environment, and that the ritualistic components of practice are
necessary, because of what they do in the brain, not because of what they do with spirits.
Interestingly, this allows me to read for skeptics ;)
However, there are thousands of readings to be done, and I have done thousands. They vary wildly.
Yet, many times over, I have reduced people to tears, or brought them hope, or helped them solve
real problems - something that doesn't work if the reading isn't appropriate. How, out of all the
combinations, does the appropriate one always seem to come forth? I remember one time that I was
waiting for the Eurostar Train in Paris for London. I caught the last ticket. When I got passed
customs, I found a crowd of restless travellers. A person was threatening suicide on the track, so the
train was delayed. I spotted this wistful looking blonde girl, a few years older than me. I offered her
a free reading, and she took it. The reading left her in tears - she was heartbroken and needed to
hear what I said, I guess. The train boarded, and we walked together to the platform. We began
saying our goodbyes, but kept walking and walking until the last car. By now we were all but alone.
We had tickets together - side by side on the train.
Out of a crowd of hundreds, I had picked out my seat-mate, and offered her unsolicited advice
through the runes. Advice that helped her (she was on her way to find out why her boyfriend had
broken up with her while she was away at school).

Although I know that how the runes function is by exploiting cognitive linguistic regularities, and the
construction of meaning, there's an uncanny-ness to them and their use. There's a remarkable
appropriateness that's difficult to explain. There's a component of mystery.
That mystery is where juxtapozed and jesus of narcissists diverge. Due to a quirk of how brains use
beliefs as a heuristic to assemble meaning in information, two completely distinct but complementary
explanations for the "how" and "why" of the world have developed within me. I am equally
committed to both. In one, the uncanny mystery of the world is understandable in principle. For
jesus of narcissists, the mystery is where an intentional god-mind resides.
So, for juxtapozed, claims of knowledge and truth from that place must be handled with care. We
may entertain belief, but never does something that I believe get status as privileged God-given
knowledge. Claims of knowledge are tentative, couched in fact where possible and inference where
applicable. For jesus of narcissists, the human who embodies these two personas is a divine being,
with a divine task - to spread the consciousness gift that was given for divine purpose. For
juxtapozed, it is an amazing fact of the brain that deserves scrutiny and examination - that sheds
light on the powers of ancient prophets.
So there are two complementary strains of belief: in one, the God-mind is intentional and involved,
for the other, consciousness is nested in the universe as humans and the uncanny is an emergent
phenomenon in an organized hierarchically nested system.
A while ago, I let jesus of narcissists, the persona that was once a delusional messianic aspirant out
to stretch. However, he automatically derides anyone who claims special privilege:
"The narcissist continues to love God and follow Him. He maintains this deception because his
continued proximity to God confers on him authority. Priests, preachers, evangelists, cultists,
politicians, intellectuals - all derive authority from their allegedly privileged relationship with God."
So, a mind who has a privileged relationship with God has authority, but also decries the use of that
authority. Jesus of narcissists is a man who knows he's a narcissist because he has special God-given
knowledge and a god-given purpose that exceeds day to day concerns. He decries the use of that
knowledge in a quest for dominance and authority.
When you first came to the sub, I had the impression that you were deriving authority from your
allegedly privileged relationship with God - you know, like everyone who comes to this sub - but that
you were using it for a very human game of one-upmanship. So I called you out on that, repeatedly,
by doing the same thing to you. I even explicitly told you that I was using my god-given authority to
trump your god-given authority.
However, juxtapozed has no god-given authority, so he steers clear of those debates. Instead, he
uses the authority of his intellect and effort to trump others in a game of one-upmanship whenever
he feels that people are trying to out-smart others and claim authority.
In other words, on the whole, I'm a narcissist who knows he's a narcissist, but who usually only
applies his superiority complex over people who themselves have a superiority complex. Hence, my
recent lambasting of anata phi and whipnil in yggy's thread about the ship of theseus. But you ought
to know that I do it conscientiously - I'm fully aware that I'm "acting superior", because I

intentionally apply it when I think that someone is, themselves, acting superior or claiming God-given
authority. Not when they do - when I do.
This is why, when you first came to the sub, you had conflict with jon, but not jux - they're using the
same mechanisms, but one believes he has divine insight, the other doesn't.
The rest of the time I do my damndest to be humble and cooperative.
Neither disposition is what I'm really like, because in-person me lives in a constant state of superposition. I both am and am not in a messianic role, but I am still compelled to pursue the outcome,
because both interpretations compel me to. So, I pursue my messianic role by pursuing the
intellectual and instrumental investigation of the cognitive state that anchors both beliefs. And there
is no contradiction in that to me.
Finally, one of the things I was hoping to accomplish was a discussion about the way everyone's
disposition influences how they accept information and opinion. Juxtapozed was, at the
time, extremely frustrated with the constant accusations that he had nothing valid to say on spiritual
matters because he was of a materialist bent. I switched roles, and all of a sudden
everyone listened to what I had to say - simply because I presented myself as a mystic.
When in reality, I'm a materialist mystic. An aspiring scientist who reads runes and pendulums,
courts synchronicity, uses shamanistic practices and believes that time, effort and opportunity will
decide whether or not he gets to show the world the thing he found. He's not going to try to claim
it for science or for spirituality. It is both, and to claim it as one or the other is to exclude so, so
many minds from honest inquiry.

Synchronicity as meaning
Synchronicity is worshipped as evidence of the influence of the divine. I say worshipped because it is
held aloft, revered, admired, and kept separate from the mundane. Synchronicity is meaningful, and
because it is meaningful, it implies communication. Because it implies communication, it implies an
intent behind it. Because it implies intent, it implies consciousness and therefore conscious will to
help guide our actions. It is proof.
It is also well known, colloquially, so I won't bother fetching sources, that different people are "tuned
in" to synchronicity. It is also, I think, colloquially understood that belief in the existence and value of
synchronicity is in some way related to one's beliefs about the nature of the divine.
Synchronicity is discarded by skeptics as statistically explainable. It is dismissed as apophenia, which
is the ability to map meaning onto data that has no causal process associated with the construction
of intentional meaning. When we see faces, shapes and objects that we recognize in inanimate or
natural objects or systems, this is apophenia. Nature did not intentionally create Italy in the shape of
a boot. The subreddit /r/mildlyinterestingis just shy of beingdevoted to finding instances of visual
apophenia.
Amazingly, the story of Odin's discovery of the runesappears to describe something truly fascinating.
A shamanistic ritual which elicited apophenia: the attachment of meaning to signal noise.

All of the runes can be described using a set of staves. In some versions of the poem, the staves
have been cast by Odin; in others, the staves are actually the criss-crossing roots of the tree
Yggadrasil. Importantly, one of the first things that Odin is said to have done after discovering the
runes was to go about Northern Europe teaching people how to use them.
Taken in this way, a shaman utilized methods of self-sacrifice and duress in order to provoke
apophenia. in this state, probably well worn archetypical conceptsimportant to the culture were able
to be attached to novel shapes. Shapes that could be discretized, and rendered externally. In other
words, Odin discovered a form of external concept recording. He discovered a form of writing, and
then travelled the Northern climes spreading literacy to its people.
It is important not to underestimate the importance of this technology to pre-literate peoples. With
the written form comes all sorts of amazing abilities, ranging from the extension of memory into the
environment to facilitate the development of conceptual abstraction, to simply indicating signage,
property ownership, or hazards. We are unaware of what it is like to be absent these abilities. We
have never known a world where the culture was not defined by the Word. To new people the word
allowed the silent communication of thought. It was, almost certainly, magic.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
If you do not know the runes, then you almost certainly can see no runes in the stave pattern. They
are invisible to you in the world. Once you know them, however, you can find them quite literally
everywhere. you can find them on buildings, in cracks in the sidewalk, in the twining of branches, or
in the tangles in your lover's hair.
The runes are fascinating for another reason. They gain meaning from their location. Language, in
general, does this, but for the runes it is especially important. Their meanings tend to be ephemeral
and ambiguous at the best of times. Their meaning is imprecise, and so their capacity to
communicate detailed ideas is limited. The runes are to language as some forms of abstract art are
to realism .
The runes pick up meaning from where you find them.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The runes are, quite literally, everywhere. The shapes are so basic and primitive that they can be
found in nature and in humanity's works. Finding them -or rather the ability to find them- is a skill;
but that skill is almost certainly apophenic.
But what does this tell us? It tells us that finding the runes, and finding meaning in them, and then
extra meaning by virtue of their situation in time and space is in fact a skill. It is, above that, a
cognitive skill. It is also worth noting that the runes are there whether you go looking for them or
not. If you are not looking for them, you will not find them. If you look for them, you will find them
anywhere you look. If you find them, and you are skilled in their use, then their discovery will
provoke a thought. That thought may change your actions. Your actions will change the outcome of
your day. And if anything even slightly out of the ordinary occurs as a result, then you can say that
the outcome was caused by your discovery of a particular rune, at a particular time, in a particular
place.

And you, and only you, will have any idea that anything of importance has happened at all. An
interaction will have occurred between you and your environment. What are the odds? The odds that
you would be in that place, at that time, to see that rune, with that meaning, while you had that
thought, about that thing, that led your heart to skip to your throat as you whisper to yourself
I needed to see that. Thank you.
If you are skilled in the use of the runes, this will happen constantly. It will happen especially in
moments of hardship, passion, yearning, learning, growth, pain, joy and serenity.
If you are not familiar with the runes it will never happen. Ever. At least not with the runes as the
vehicle of meaning.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Meaning is constructed1,2,3
It is well known, well studied, and empirically verifiable. Meaning is something that our brains do,
and do well.
In my view, a discussion of synchronicity cannot seriously progress without a discussion of the role of
the brain and its processes. The story of Odin, however, shows us that apophenia likely cognitively
predates written language. In fact, at cursory glance, even ancient cave paintings do not work
without the brain's ability to identify and map abstract form onto the familiar. The runes take this
process a step further by mapping concepts that are more abstract thanantelope onto shapes that
have an arbitrary relationship to the concept.
Picking the runes out of the staves involves other cognitive processes. Ones that involve discretizing
patterns in the brain. What do I mean by a discrete process? I mean temporally extended
organizations of matter, often sustained by a flow-through of energy, that can take on stable
configurations with identifiable and describable features. Things likethe eye of hell . In order to pick
out the rune staves, you need to have the ability to emphasize particular features in the information
stream, allow those features to stabilize into a discrete form, and de-emphasize information
extraneous to the pattern. The difference between R and P in the staves is the exclusion or inclusion
of the slant .
Meaning is constructed by the brain, by emphasizing and deemphasizing input signals.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Apophenia is closely linked with delusion, and schizophrenia (brief non academic summary).
In 1958, Klaus Conrad published a monograph entitled Die beginnende Schizophrenie. Versuch einer
Gestaltanalyse des Wahns, in which he described in groundbreaking detail the prodromal mood and
earliest stages of schizophrenia. He coined the word "Apophnie" to characterize the onset of
delusional thinking in psychosis .... to reflect the fact that the schizophrenic initially experiences
delusion as revelation. In contrast to epiphany, however, apophany does not provide insight into the
true nature of reality or its interconnectedness, but is a "process of repetitively and monotonously
experiencing abnormal meanings in the entire surrounding experiential field"
This was indeed my own experience with my Election as Christ on Easter of 2004. The synchronicities
piled on thick and fast, and left me staggering to understand the mechanism. Indeed, when later that

year I fully experienced the remarkable cognitive state that has defined my very existence to the
utmost, I took as evidence the amazing strings of coincidences that had led me to the discovery.
Let me give you a quick summary by highlighting some of the chancier things.
I was homeless. So I went to visit my sister. While on the way home, she spotted a friend in the
thick, heavy crowd. He told us of a rave event later that evening. I desperately wanted to go, but
neither my sister nor I had any money. Later, she was doing laundry and found $20 in her pocket, by
chance. It was her only $20, but she gave it to me.
While there, I met a girl named Jessie. We shared a hometown, and became fast friends. One minute
later, and we never would have known about the rave, and I never would have met Jessie. After
another long stint on the streets, reading the runes to people for money, I wound up moving in with
Jessie after finding an opportunity (by chance) to call her.
She introduced me to her friends, and them to their friends, and soon I was surrounded by
psychedelic loving friends. I found some LSD that had the illuminatus pyramid on it. Through
a very strange series of instances, I found myself on acid, watching my friend play a video game.
Being in exactly that place at exactly that time being exactly who I am is what showed the state to
me.
That string of coincidences -so minor, so ephemeral- completely changed my life. So it is for any life
changing event. There you were one day, and instantly, it all changes.
I followed the string of coincidences, but took them literally as God's specific instructions to me.
I could not be wrong about my insights or inferences, because they were God-given. I had God-given
knowledge and God-given authority.
I was almost completely unemployable. I could barely keep from bursting out in public and
screaming "I am Christ! I am come! Come to me to be healed!"
I tried to adopt the homeless, though I myself was only a week's income away from that state
myself. I could cure them, I believed. I tried to cure my friends of their heartaches, and their drug
problems.
Their hurts, their sorrows - theirs and mine - stubbornly refused to bend to my authority. I could not
cure. I could not heal.
I could only enter this state, change, and then talk about it. If I had God-given powers, the state
itself was it. And the world didn't care. The world couldn't care.
I lacked credibility.
But I had proof.
Synchronicities.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
One day, I showed up in a sub called /r/DigitalCartel.
It's background was the illuminatus pyramid, and across its' visage were scrawled the runes. It was a
subreddit devoted to the exaltation of a Christ claimant.

This synchronicity is aimed at getting my attention. This subreddit is for me.

Nobody, not even the Christ claimant, or his apocryphal herald had any idea that this sub was clearly
aimed at me. I'm the only one that the symbols had meaning for. Nobody knew but me.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Of course, this is apophenia in action. Of course those symbols had meaning to me. Of course this
was a startling series of coincidences.
Even a cursory glance of my life's history clearly explains why.
But this sub is not for me, because no agent or process can be identified that created the sub with
me in mind.
The subreddit, and it's accidental symbolism, was not created for me, but it is meaningful to me. And
it is that meaning that caught my attention and keeps me interested.
The question is this:
Did Odin spy the runes in the staves that he cast? Or did he spy the runes in the tangle of Yggdrasil's
roots?
It does not matter to me.
I see the runes everywhere. They are there if I look, and they are absent when I do not. They are
thematically relevant when I am seeking guidance, and I am the only one who sees them as
meaningful within my own narrative. If the universe is guiding me, then my own brain is a part of the
process. If my own brain is part of a process, then many people before me discovered and exploited
how to use the brain to construct meaning to guide themselves. It is a magical mystery why this is
the case, but it does not grant Divine Authority to my thoughts because of them.
My relationship with synchronicity can be expressed by a poem that I penned when I first started
going through these experiences.
When it's happening, everything is Golden. When it ends, that gold crumbles into black, dark earth. I
pick some of it up again and say "This... this is your saviour. The rest of it... that was just madness."
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Synchronicities bear meaning, because you build meaning. If you seek meaning, then you will find it.
If you weight its origins as instructions, then you will be led to hardship. If you discard the meaning
because its origins are Just Cold Statistics, then you are to deprive yourself of the guidance that you
provide to yourself.
I see the runes everywhere.
They bear meaning when I ask them to.
Otherwise, they are always exactly what they appear to be.
Sticks on the ground.