"[T]his soul does not exist ab initio as orthodox Christianity teaches; it has to be brought into existence by a process of guided self-observation. However, this is rarely achieved owing to man’s unique ability to be distracted from spiritual matters by everyday trivia."
Both definitely pulling on the same thread. It's a long shot, but I wonder if "ni" survived in esoteric traditions. The Lair of the White Worm, a horror film about snakes made in the UK in the 80s, has a bit about the snake priestess not being able to say the word "ni." Seems like Monty Python's sense of humor to parade that around in a retelling of an Arthurian tale.
I hadn't heard of Snow Crash, so thank you for the introduction to that classic. If this were a chatGPT interaction, I'd ask for some more examples as these two were so interesting.
Unlike ChatGPT I have limited cycles to answer, but like it I can give some vaguer examples when pressed: The Sinful Ones by Fritz Leiber, and Blindsight by Peter Watts, both of which question the idea that consciousness is universal or indeed necessary for human-level organization.
Like many people, I suspect, using psychedelics I have occasionally totally lost all sense of myself existing as a personality, despite at least once being otherwise completely lucid. Whenever this happened to me I felt quite powerfully that I only really existed while in this state - I remembered other times I had been in this state as being somehow contiguous with the moment in which I was feeling that way. In other words, when I was in that state I believed that I only "really" existed while in that state, and I could clearly and vividly remember the few other times at which I had been in that state, while on the other hand my normal consciousness seemed like a foggy dream by comparison.
My question is, have you ever written about the relevance (or otherwise) of such psychedelic states inasmuch as they are related to your ideas about self-referentiality, the nature of ego, snake venom initiation, etc.
Yeah, "more real than real" is a very common feeling during a trip or religious experience. I haven't written particularly about the role of psychedelics, in part because my thoughts aren't clear. My sense is that the religious death and rebirth experience is interchangeable with psychedelic ego death, hence reading Eliade's book, as well as Muraresku's The Immortality Key about Eleusis.
Pragmatically, if someone wanted to "uplift" man 50,000 years ago, it seems that getting someone high and then having them stare into a mirror would be a good way to teach "I." Perhaps especially if this was coincident with restraining the body and bringing it close to death. This is what the Titans did to Dionysus: bound him and flayed him while he transformed between animals and various gods (tripping? Theory of Mind pushed to it's limit?), staring at a mirror.
I'm also of the persuasion that this moment produced recursion, which is now coopted by language. Hence gesturing to John "In the beginning was the Word" and Terence Mckenna “I don't know why there should be an invisible syntactical intelligence giving language lessons in hyperspace. That certainly, consistently, seems to be what is happening.”
It is odd that psychedelics, which now kill the ego, may have been part of what originally called it into existence.
Sep 18, 2023·edited Sep 18, 2023Liked by Andrew Cutler
"It is odd that psychedelics, which now kill the ego, may have been part of what originally called it into existence."
I have an armchair hypothesis to explain this: as best I can interpret what the neurologists and psychonauts are finding, the various psychedelics each have their own ways of disrupting which neural pathways are preferred (or sometimes which routes are traversed faster, which in effect grants preferential treatment) in the response to various stimuli.
So when a modern individual, deeply enculturated into a predominantly "I" mode of world engagement and a hyperactive Default Mode Network, takes psilocybin then other circuits that don't route through the DMN can win for a while. Given that most people being studied nowadays fit this neural development pattern, then perhaps the observations are being "overfitted" to conclude "psilocybin causes routing around the DMN".
Could it be that individuals with say, an underactive DMN, or someone 50kya with an evolved psychology not quite the same as ours, might tend to manifest a different pattern of route re-preferencing under the influence? One where the DMN becomes more, not less, of a hub?
Sep 20, 2023·edited Sep 20, 2023Liked by Andrew Cutler
You're doing God's work here bud. I love the ideas - this is the core missing piece of our times.
Personally I'm thinking about how much we've lost by throwing out all understanding and interest in a symbological view of the world. The change is relatively recent - in Europe only about 4-500 years ago, and in the rest of the world later. But so much accumulated wisdom and history exists in the myths of our species. This Substack is an excellent exploration of that wisdom.
I'm curious if you have any thoughts on whether the scientific revolution/method represents another 'step' in human consciousness, or a sea change of some sort? I'm convinced that we've gained a lot from science, but also irrevocably lost so much from abandoning credulity of myths. This loss makes itself most evident in social breakdown, but can be seen in other areas if one looks hard enough. Such as history and anthropology.
P.S. - Great use of the Flammarion Engraving. Choice.
>I'm curious if you have any thoughts on whether the scientific revolution/method represents another 'step' in human consciousness, or a sea change of some sort?
Yeah, a sea change is probably right. Not on the order of what we experienced when we first left Eden, as it were, but one more step away from nature (and God). To take an example near my expertise, never before have people looked to personality tests to answer questions like "do men and women think exactly alike?" How disconnected from your senses do you have to be to privilege bureaucratic survey data over your own eyes? Given that epistemology, many questions (eg. What is the good life?) go unasked, filled by lowest-common-denominator consumerist values. This is a very bad situation
Perhaps my most radical belief is that Genesis already answered Anthropology's great question: what does it mean to be human? We became human with the thought "I am a moral agent who will one day die."
I'd agree that the development of recursive self awareness is a far more fundamental change. I'd say the only thing that could potentially compete would be the first development of 'culture,' or a sort of collective consciousness, but your theory seems to argue that the two happened essentially in lockstep. Which I certainly don't discount.
Interesting answer to the meaning of being human. I think that it is technically correct, but really when people are asking what it means to be human, they mean something like "What do I personally need to do in my life to feel better?"
As you point out, we used to have a lot of answers to that question, and now we have vastly more. Unfortunately relying on market forces to tell us how to find meaning in our life has been a failure of massive proportions.
Yes, there are many answers to what it means to be human. "I am a moral agent who will die" begs the question of what it means to be good, and the nature of the Good Life. Those are the practical questions, and we are on the same page that the past had good answers that are worth preserving. The first step is understanding the language in which they were conveyed.
Woah thanks for the power of myth recommendation, I'll definitely be checking that out.
And yeah, there seems to have been a systematic purge of mythic studies / Jungian psychoanalysis around the 50s and 60s. I plan to write about it if I ever get the time to figure out what the hell actually happened.
Initiation rites have continued through to recent times in many communities, even though recursiveness was already long-since evolved into the psychology of those peoples. Would we say that the rites were no longer necessary to establish self-awareness within the next generation but they were simply carried forth due to tradition?
I guess the answer has to be "Yes" because females in those places also gained self-awareness without those rituals (as do we in industrialized societies).
Or could one speculate that a worldview-shifting ritual is still required for most people, but we don't even recognize we're going through it because it occurs 1) gradually and 2) when we're too young to take note and remember the paradigm shift occurring within us -- i.e., learning the local language, all of which have the "I" concept fundamentally embedded into them?
That is true of many violent male initiation ceremonies which continued basically until the cultures disappeared (or were greatly impoverished) via colonialism. Within Judaism, I've wondered if animals took the place of young men. That is a pretty straightforward interpretation of the Binding of Isaac, where Abraham takes him to slaughter, but then god accepts a ram in his son's stead. Part of the story is that Isaac is aware that he will be sacrificed. Maybe people thought "is all this really necessary, they seem to already know about "I"?" This isn't to say that the format of death-and-rebirth is not healthy for modern people as well. Lots of traditions teach that there are levels of awareness that are not reached naturally and must be taught as an adolescent or adult. I somewhat doubt these are as phenomenologically dramatic as first (though I'm not enlightened, so who's to say).
>when we're too young to take note and remember the paradigm shift occurring within us
My dad is a speech therapist for young children, so he and I have discussed when kids understand pronouns. About 15 months, though with quite a bit of variation. Similarly, there is huge variation in when kids pass the mirror test in different cultures. About 15 months in the West, but much older elsewhere. At any rate, if these changes happen now at 15 months then we wouldn't remember the transition.
Two fictional things this reminds me of:
"[T]his soul does not exist ab initio as orthodox Christianity teaches; it has to be brought into existence by a process of guided self-observation. However, this is rarely achieved owing to man’s unique ability to be distracted from spiritual matters by everyday trivia."
https://rtt80s.com/2016/03/29/quote-of-the-day-monty-pythons-the-meaning-of-life/
The nam shub of Enki plot from Snow Crash. C2 claims it was the word "I", a detail I don't quite remember directly. https://wiki.c2.com/?NamShubOfEnki
Both definitely pulling on the same thread. It's a long shot, but I wonder if "ni" survived in esoteric traditions. The Lair of the White Worm, a horror film about snakes made in the UK in the 80s, has a bit about the snake priestess not being able to say the word "ni." Seems like Monty Python's sense of humor to parade that around in a retelling of an Arthurian tale.
I hadn't heard of Snow Crash, so thank you for the introduction to that classic. If this were a chatGPT interaction, I'd ask for some more examples as these two were so interesting.
Unlike ChatGPT I have limited cycles to answer, but like it I can give some vaguer examples when pressed: The Sinful Ones by Fritz Leiber, and Blindsight by Peter Watts, both of which question the idea that consciousness is universal or indeed necessary for human-level organization.
Like many people, I suspect, using psychedelics I have occasionally totally lost all sense of myself existing as a personality, despite at least once being otherwise completely lucid. Whenever this happened to me I felt quite powerfully that I only really existed while in this state - I remembered other times I had been in this state as being somehow contiguous with the moment in which I was feeling that way. In other words, when I was in that state I believed that I only "really" existed while in that state, and I could clearly and vividly remember the few other times at which I had been in that state, while on the other hand my normal consciousness seemed like a foggy dream by comparison.
My question is, have you ever written about the relevance (or otherwise) of such psychedelic states inasmuch as they are related to your ideas about self-referentiality, the nature of ego, snake venom initiation, etc.
Yeah, "more real than real" is a very common feeling during a trip or religious experience. I haven't written particularly about the role of psychedelics, in part because my thoughts aren't clear. My sense is that the religious death and rebirth experience is interchangeable with psychedelic ego death, hence reading Eliade's book, as well as Muraresku's The Immortality Key about Eleusis.
Pragmatically, if someone wanted to "uplift" man 50,000 years ago, it seems that getting someone high and then having them stare into a mirror would be a good way to teach "I." Perhaps especially if this was coincident with restraining the body and bringing it close to death. This is what the Titans did to Dionysus: bound him and flayed him while he transformed between animals and various gods (tripping? Theory of Mind pushed to it's limit?), staring at a mirror.
I'm also of the persuasion that this moment produced recursion, which is now coopted by language. Hence gesturing to John "In the beginning was the Word" and Terence Mckenna “I don't know why there should be an invisible syntactical intelligence giving language lessons in hyperspace. That certainly, consistently, seems to be what is happening.”
It is odd that psychedelics, which now kill the ego, may have been part of what originally called it into existence.
"It is odd that psychedelics, which now kill the ego, may have been part of what originally called it into existence."
I have an armchair hypothesis to explain this: as best I can interpret what the neurologists and psychonauts are finding, the various psychedelics each have their own ways of disrupting which neural pathways are preferred (or sometimes which routes are traversed faster, which in effect grants preferential treatment) in the response to various stimuli.
So when a modern individual, deeply enculturated into a predominantly "I" mode of world engagement and a hyperactive Default Mode Network, takes psilocybin then other circuits that don't route through the DMN can win for a while. Given that most people being studied nowadays fit this neural development pattern, then perhaps the observations are being "overfitted" to conclude "psilocybin causes routing around the DMN".
Could it be that individuals with say, an underactive DMN, or someone 50kya with an evolved psychology not quite the same as ours, might tend to manifest a different pattern of route re-preferencing under the influence? One where the DMN becomes more, not less, of a hub?
Some evidence for this in using psychedelics, which cause schizophrenia-like symptoms, to treat schizophrenia.
See: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41380-022-01832-z
And: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9147282/
Schizophrenia being the stand-in for "bicameral mind" since Jaynes termed the idea 50 years ago.
You're doing God's work here bud. I love the ideas - this is the core missing piece of our times.
Personally I'm thinking about how much we've lost by throwing out all understanding and interest in a symbological view of the world. The change is relatively recent - in Europe only about 4-500 years ago, and in the rest of the world later. But so much accumulated wisdom and history exists in the myths of our species. This Substack is an excellent exploration of that wisdom.
I'm curious if you have any thoughts on whether the scientific revolution/method represents another 'step' in human consciousness, or a sea change of some sort? I'm convinced that we've gained a lot from science, but also irrevocably lost so much from abandoning credulity of myths. This loss makes itself most evident in social breakdown, but can be seen in other areas if one looks hard enough. Such as history and anthropology.
P.S. - Great use of the Flammarion Engraving. Choice.
>I'm curious if you have any thoughts on whether the scientific revolution/method represents another 'step' in human consciousness, or a sea change of some sort?
Yeah, a sea change is probably right. Not on the order of what we experienced when we first left Eden, as it were, but one more step away from nature (and God). To take an example near my expertise, never before have people looked to personality tests to answer questions like "do men and women think exactly alike?" How disconnected from your senses do you have to be to privilege bureaucratic survey data over your own eyes? Given that epistemology, many questions (eg. What is the good life?) go unasked, filled by lowest-common-denominator consumerist values. This is a very bad situation
Perhaps my most radical belief is that Genesis already answered Anthropology's great question: what does it mean to be human? We became human with the thought "I am a moral agent who will one day die."
I'd agree that the development of recursive self awareness is a far more fundamental change. I'd say the only thing that could potentially compete would be the first development of 'culture,' or a sort of collective consciousness, but your theory seems to argue that the two happened essentially in lockstep. Which I certainly don't discount.
Interesting answer to the meaning of being human. I think that it is technically correct, but really when people are asking what it means to be human, they mean something like "What do I personally need to do in my life to feel better?"
As you point out, we used to have a lot of answers to that question, and now we have vastly more. Unfortunately relying on market forces to tell us how to find meaning in our life has been a failure of massive proportions.
Yes, there are many answers to what it means to be human. "I am a moral agent who will die" begs the question of what it means to be good, and the nature of the Good Life. Those are the practical questions, and we are on the same page that the past had good answers that are worth preserving. The first step is understanding the language in which they were conveyed.
Agreed. Any recommendations for understanding myth on a deeper level?
Already working through Hero with a Thousand Faces, and Man and His Symbols is coming in the mail.
Curious if there are any more... modern books worth reading, in your view?
Anything by Campbell is great. Very much enjoyed the Power of Myth series, which is on Youtube.
I've only read Eliade's Birth and Rebirth, but he has written many books which are also quite well reviewed.
In the space of psychedelics and mythology Jordan Peterson's interview with Muraresku is quite good.
Looking at that, it's odd that yes, the best work seems to have been in the mid to late 20th century.
Woah thanks for the power of myth recommendation, I'll definitely be checking that out.
And yeah, there seems to have been a systematic purge of mythic studies / Jungian psychoanalysis around the 50s and 60s. I plan to write about it if I ever get the time to figure out what the hell actually happened.
Initiation rites have continued through to recent times in many communities, even though recursiveness was already long-since evolved into the psychology of those peoples. Would we say that the rites were no longer necessary to establish self-awareness within the next generation but they were simply carried forth due to tradition?
I guess the answer has to be "Yes" because females in those places also gained self-awareness without those rituals (as do we in industrialized societies).
Or could one speculate that a worldview-shifting ritual is still required for most people, but we don't even recognize we're going through it because it occurs 1) gradually and 2) when we're too young to take note and remember the paradigm shift occurring within us -- i.e., learning the local language, all of which have the "I" concept fundamentally embedded into them?
I'm not sure if the hook swinging portion of the sun dance is still practiced, but it was observed as recently as the 1800s: https://traditionsofconflict.substack.com/p/devotion
That is true of many violent male initiation ceremonies which continued basically until the cultures disappeared (or were greatly impoverished) via colonialism. Within Judaism, I've wondered if animals took the place of young men. That is a pretty straightforward interpretation of the Binding of Isaac, where Abraham takes him to slaughter, but then god accepts a ram in his son's stead. Part of the story is that Isaac is aware that he will be sacrificed. Maybe people thought "is all this really necessary, they seem to already know about "I"?" This isn't to say that the format of death-and-rebirth is not healthy for modern people as well. Lots of traditions teach that there are levels of awareness that are not reached naturally and must be taught as an adolescent or adult. I somewhat doubt these are as phenomenologically dramatic as first (though I'm not enlightened, so who's to say).
>when we're too young to take note and remember the paradigm shift occurring within us
My dad is a speech therapist for young children, so he and I have discussed when kids understand pronouns. About 15 months, though with quite a bit of variation. Similarly, there is huge variation in when kids pass the mirror test in different cultures. About 15 months in the West, but much older elsewhere. At any rate, if these changes happen now at 15 months then we wouldn't remember the transition.
mboi
Radical Anthropology Group
Dec 5 Jerome Lewis and Chris Knight (UCL) When Eve laughed: The origins of language
radicalanthropologygroup.org
Interesting, if I was in London, I'd go. Do you happen to be? I wonder what Chris would think of the Snake Cult theory. He has his own version (ctr+f "dragon"): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_Relations:_Menstruation_and_the_origins_of_culture
It's also on Zoom, and i hope to attend that way.
Great analysis