Notes on enlightenment

To seek freedom from spiritual fear. "Spiritual": meaning insubstantial, meaning in this case largely a matter of paranoia. "What am I? Who am I? What will the world make of me?"

To embrace being nobody: a fate not important enough to decide. To be something kicked around at the bottom of a crashing wave, negligible friction.

A theory of enlightenment. To see too much. To surpass in experience what one can assimilate in language, which in practice means to spontaneously represent experience to oneself, such that the foundations of a linguistic capture remain isolated: a process very familiar to the poet and what he learns to exploit. Poetry is largely the translation from the relics of an isolated language, or what the poet learns to imitate of those relics. Clue as to why most poetry, even with many of the best poets, is merely bad self-imitation. Additional clue as to why most representations of "enlightenment" are frauds, even in the presence of predominant good will.

What has been called enlightenment is largely a transitory phenomenon associated with rapid growth: a disorientation, a vertigo, a greed for new ground. Most of what drives the need for enlightenment experience is an intolerance: "anywhere but here".

That enlightenment experience is largely about incommunicability: the wish that the world be not so connected, not so textured and continuous, not so traversable. Related but not to be confused with the desire for "paradeisos": an enlightened one remains behind, possessed of the signs.

To be other, to be dissolved into alienation. The wish to be no longer a mere self, to wish away the responsibility of individuality: the feverish prayer of a timid man, a morbid flagellator, a sadistic creep.

The wish to be more narcissistic than one is. So much of what passes for spiritual training is the transmission of the signs of sanctioned narcissism.

In the young and inexperienced, this most often expresses itself as a heady idealization, a willingness to be humbled, a misplaced honor - breeding grounds of the cult. One hopes to buy the right to a life of unleashed narcissistic fantasy, one hopes to outpace a conscience with exponential gains.

Why do we find psychedelia so necessary? Because everything we offer is a form of disciplined degeneracy. Because our primary value doesn't lie in stability, fidelity, and endurance, as it would traditionally - but in the spontaneous recreation of conditions of health in the midst of decay - in other words, creative convalescence. So we become skilled in the use of poisons: psychedelics are nothing but very finely crafted poison.

To be a shaman is to be a creative convalescent: to offer symbolic aids in the collective quest for sanity. The human being not only needs someone to tell him that everything's going to be okay, but to explain why and how. We need magic formulae for our magic illnesses - in our language, what is psychologically potent is psychosomatically opaque.

• 悟り : satori : awakening
• समाधि : samādhi : to place together

"Awakening" is correct, and a valuable metaphor.

In the strictest sense, samādhi as union, communion, coherence is correct. Not "pure consciousness", but psychosomatic negative entropy: that the metaphors used to explain experience to oneself, make one stronger, more confident, more prepared - and that these moods contribute to the accumulation of systemic neural coherence. To feel united in one moment, present and reflected, and yet still and unmoved: the invisible athleticism of meditative discipline, which seeks the kind of high dissipative intentional coalescence the athlete and the dancer knows, but wants to contain until it goes critical.

That enlightenment experiences are the witness of scale invariant neural activation, which facilitate such rapid and deep communicative self-sampling in a vast topology, that there are no words.

Breaking one's own information encoding through reflexive symmetry and activation: when both sides talk simultaneously, knowing what the other says, without listening. This is oracular trance.

Information theory requires gaps, noise, a certain ratio between signal length, lexicon size, and expected noise. That high degrees of meditative trance induce and recruit noise, such that the lexicon temporarily expands: there's no reason to assume that a neural system's self-reflective capacity is fixed on any but the shortest of scales. This means effectively, that we learn to relate to ourselves anew, right in the midst of something overwhelming - plasticity pushed to its absurd human limits.

There is a reason the psychotic break shares elements of the enlightenment experience: the initial stages of a psychotic moment is an unassimilated shamanic initiation. Confabulation is set free: investments in the "reality function" weaken, interpretive process takes center stage. Much of the art and science of the shamanic way was the careful utilization of the psychotic, in small and isolated doses, in order to exploit its access to unconscious formulation: to fetch uncanny knowledge from the other side. The psychotic often says things which are strangely, inexplicably true.

One can feel that I don't trust this idea called "enlightenment" - but that there's also something I consider worthy of rescue. I want to clean the priestly stink from this cairn, and give us a sense that the world is wide open. Freud was right to analyze most "religious experience" as infantile, but wrong not to affirm its adaptive value. There is a sense to everything: hallucination belongs to the deep rationality of instinct, and if there's anything uniquely human it's the ability to make good sense of nonsense.

Almost everyone underemphasizes the dissipative quality of these systems: criticality is ubiquitous because the universe is so violent yet monotonous - or put another way, because energy is superabundant while dissipation channels are limited. The character of young worlds.

Which means that our perspective of differentiable scales, in which as above is not as below, is partly bad science, the necessary prejudice of an organism. That the world is mundane, that it is a "world of facts" rather than an avalanching webwork of relationships, that there is some discernible place in which the world takes place, as though there were a universal observer whose limitations applied everywhere, rather than this sweatlodge of intertwining voices, rather than this placeless freefall of all things into all things... One can already see where I'm going, and detect the echo of the description of high neural coherence: does that mean that this vision too, of a cascading world of scale invariance, where galaxies and atoms merge, is merely the prejudice of an overexcited ape? Is every admonishing teaching, no matter how seemingly humbling, always the self-aggrandizing of neural tissue? That the world is a sacred hoop, that all speaks to all, that as above so below - so saith this articulate neurochemical mass.

Mandelbrot's vision is that if you traverse scales quickly and broadly enough, much of the structures of the universe can be approximated with some fractal dimension. Reality is infinitely textured.

If you grant that one of the preconditions of life is a certain scalebound stability, a planetary substratum which is not homogeneous and therefore provides opportunities for developing distinct shape and lifetime, that life needs a fragile nonfractal plane in which to grow, a peaceful eddy in the midst of the eternal storm, we could guess that neural activity as scale-invariant avalanche, is a reappropriation of those massive scaling effects both above and below us. Peak neural performance approaches the maelstrom.

Molecular life seems to require a zone where dissipative rates don't pressurize metabolic flow such that they gravitate to criticality. But neural tissue reintroduces this pressure, in order to gain back a nonlocalized causal model, a coherence across scales which inorganic phenomena often possess, such earthquakes, tides, and stellar distribution. That the neuromorphic way is to simulate a preorganic environment for the sake of informative efficiency, but then force the result through the lens of anatomy and a finite connectome in order to produce intelligent behaviors with finely tuned statistical likelihoods - "instinct" is generated from the play between plasticity and the limitations of neural anatomy. Put another way, the anatomy needs a kind of scale-invariant processor at its core, a "criticality drive" to facilitate communication between its many subsystems, to evoke that uncanny anticipation and accuracy which characterizes biological intelligence.

And God separated the waters, and divided the day from the night: earth as an eye of the storm.