Spiritual revolution

A few days ago I had a day off and I was reading a recent Hungarian book on psychedelic research and the ideas as they changed in modern history. It had an interesting effect on me, I could see those spirits above me and feel them around me - spirit guides and inspiration. I was reminded of of the basic ideas of the War in Heaven book. These spirits when asked revealed that they have been dead people at some time and the appeared as space aliens with changing forms.

This idea is that we can only enrich our energy by our own efforts while we are in the physical body, and a corollary is that taking advantage of other people (either here or after that) is a bad idea, almost like vampyrism, since it harms a basic spiritual law. Hence it is that left-wing thinking would be the one to go together with recognizing the role of the Invisible College and allied astral organizations against the Theocrats who in various guises had always sanctioned various systems where one human being exploits another one - even after death.

It seems to me that this world view is natural to me but almost everyone I know here personally is deeply irritated by it. I don't like to confront anyone with my views but for various reasons people are more and more confrontational in this part of the world.
Except when I test it with clients who come for NLP therapy or my brand of Vedic astrology. Others are divided between the nationalist front which feels that it is cornered and so it is entitled to take the most revengeful actions and the most closed-off mentality, again others are joining sects and explain everything with the sectarian brand of subjective idealism that means. Both of these kinds of people are usually opposed to science together with the ideas of the Enlightenment, which are for sure are not the end but an important milestone.

To be sure, the democracies where people experimented with psychedelics in large masses banned their use for long decades but recently scientific research is allowed again.

My own hope for for the future of the "spiritual revolution" is that Western science will soon discover techniques for "consciousness expansion" that are both safer and more efficient than psychedelic drugs. And I'm not referring to the direct electrical stimulation of various brain centers that is now going on, but to home computer software that will allow people to create their own virtual realities and use them to reprogram their minds in ways that they retain complete control over and can use for trial and error learning.

This isn't getting much publicity, because it scares just about all the professionals who now make their living in education, counseling, and psychotherapy. But I'm pretty sure it's going to have the same impact on the late Twenty-teens as psychedelics like LSD had during the late Sixties.

Does this ring the same kind of bell with you that it does with me?

It sounds very interesting... would be nice to take part in developments. It opens a whole new range of possibilities...

Much of the barriers of visionary experience and reprogramming from a therapeutic point of view can be computerized in long algorhythms. Including questions about physical circumstances which could be dealt with just like the setting of an LSD trip.
The visual part is also engaging... When you redesign abstract pictures in various rhythms, the mind or brain continues to try it. As for me, if there is some hands-on healing and my stomach isn't full, the distinctly psyclocybin or LSD-like variations continue. Just yesterday I was wondering how this could be portrayed on a computer.

One of the amazing effects is that when you look at the center of some of these self-transforming pictures as what I saw last night (no chemicals) is that when you look at the center of the picture, it changes though otherwise the picture is quite detailed and some of it is 3D.

I wonder about this feedback effect because it could be a very good entrance to a self-reprogramming thing which is set by the user. If there could be some sort of sensor whereby the computer knows that some part of a picture is being looked at, that could be a very important threshold function.

I tried sound and light driven googles in the nineties and while they were effective, they were a bit scary - I guess what I disliked was the one-way effect - with those goggles you could only set the dials if you kept the controls in your hand or took off the goggles. But it is a certainly efficient method.

One should also study the eye rhythms of people who are looking at interesting art, especially non-representative, possibly mandalic but not always...

Well the hand or finger movements of the user could be a feedback but my experience is that initially it is easier to focus on this non-drug consciousness-altering approach when you do not have to move the rest of your body.

Another thing I tried extensively which could be part of it was binaural waves. I even had a software for a while that was called I-Doser which modeled brainwave rhythm patterns of various drugs. The ones called LSD or psylocybin did have a few flashes of effect upon me but the effect lasted only a few fractions of a second.

I don't know if it would have had any effect had I not tried these in my youth and had I not consciously posted the goal to myself that I would experience the good parts of these trips by nondrug methods.

But the main single difference IMHO is the lack of interactivity which should be basic in anything tht works. It would be like a self-designing work of art (an I-art... where you could add motives like chips of color in a kaleidoscope. Let's say you turn up the insectoid themes because they trip you out. Or more 3D or less. Another person in another setting would take down the insect theme because they feel uncomfortable with it.

My brother has experimented a lot with creative sound - much of it does not stay with you, it is a generational thing, but while you are there in the dance hall it works. However, I don't always like the communal part plus the fact that there is an artist (a sensitive DJ) through whom there is a feedback loop. Everything depends upon the person and the state of mind and the mediumistic abilities of the DJ. While I have had the experience of artistic creation in several genres and there is much about art in the psychedelic experience as well as in flashbacks, that is too much of a responsibility.

It would be way enough to design several software pieces and think about the tech needed plus the taking away of malicious verbal programs.

Thanks for the idea anyway, it is really inspiring!

I just Googled up an article posted by The Guardian a couple of months ago that has some very interesting speculations about this subject by an insider:

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/oct/16/chris-milk-virtual-reality-future-questions

selected excerpts:

VR could change human consciousness – if we get there, says Chris Milk

The film-maker and co-founder of virtual-reality storytelling app Vrse predicts a big future for the medium, but admits he has more questions than answers

“It’s weird: you do a TED talk on something, and people think that you suddenly have a lot of answers around the topic. I feel like I have a lot of questions, not a lot of answers.”

Filmmaker Chris Milk is mulling over his role in plotting the potential for virtual reality (VR) technology beyond games, having delivered a TED talk in March 2015 heralding VR as “the ultimate empathy machine”.

Milk and his VR app Vrse and VR production company Vrse.works have been putting his ideas into practice with short VR documentaries including Clouds Over Sidra, which focuses on a refugee camp in Jordan, and Waves of Grace, telling the tale of an Ebola survivor in Liberia.

“Every time we build something new, more of my questions get answered, even if a few more questions come up. It feels like we’re getting better at it each time, and this is an evolving medium and an evolving process,” Milk says.

He was in the UK to deliver a speech about the creative potential of VR to the BFI London Film Festival, as well as to show the company’s films at the Power to the Pixel: The Cross-Media Forum exhibition in London.

That process includes figuring out the language of VR films which – perhaps surprisingly, given that by definition viewers control where they look in a scene rather than filmmakers – still requires composition skills.

...

“Ultimately, what we’re talking about is something really much bigger than an artistic medium. Right now, this is about a format that is interfacing with two of your human senses in such a realistic way that your consciousness interprets the medium as a virtual ‘reality’,” he says.

“But think about how the technology scales, to the point where you’re eventually incorporating other senses at further and further levels of fidelity. What you’re talking about at some point is more than a medium, but is fundamentally an alternative level of human consciousness.”

This may sound like the kind of rhetoric that characterised the ultimately unsuccessful wave of virtual-reality technology in the 1980s, as well as its rebirth in virtual worlds like Second Life in the 2000s.

Milk went on to explain that his point was more that as VR improves, if its impact on our senses is as powerful as he hopes, there’ll be important debates to have about how this new medium’s creators shoulder the responsibilities of that power.

He stressed that this is some way in the future. “In terms of an altered state of human consciousness being on the horizon, right now we’re still in the darkness of night, poking around with flashlights and trying to find our way there,” he says.

“As I said, I’ve got a lot more questions than answers about how we actually get there.”

This is an interesting development, especially the empathy part and being able to control where you look in a VR scene. But in a way they are shooting at pigeons with a cannon I suspect.
Already present computers could get you to a point where your consciousness changes to a measurable extent. A flat screen, changing images responding to your eye, as intensive as you are willing to sustain - with some written stuff and non-artistic ambient sound... as long as you could mix the elements yourself. I tried a function of Photoshop where you "dip your brush" in another part of the picture and you start painting that in another place - cloning. You can set the percentage. You can blow it up and it really feels like painting with a physical brush after some hours. All you would need is the rhythmic caleidoscope modifications and perhaps some written stuff - the verbal algorhythms of freeing your mind (but substituting nothing in its place). I found voice is not good for me at all because then you start to have a driven experience and it is seriously like films - which always take you somewhere. What grabbed my fantasy was this freeing quality of taking away bad programs slowly by means of software which is as entertaining and grabbing as games are but without any directed stuff, rather by a constant interaction with the viewer-listener-reader. You could drive it with your hand motions (as in more developed games) and voice like Cortana (but it would not chat to me instead just write. Or some smart phones. Take epileptic sensitivity to strobe light. I am not an epileptic but when I tried a pair of strobe goggles with binaural drive sound in the nineties I forgot where I was for seconds.
Or experimental software transforming pictures to sound rather rudimentary but these would be building blocks.

I will try to post one of these photoshop pictures here that I fooled around with for hours and it was a distinctly different state of mind esp. when I blew it up n the TV screen to work on it. How do you upload pictures here? I can only see a web site thingy. Photobucket?
https://2img.net/h/i1190.photobucket.com/albums/z457/regmelocco/Termeacuteszetes%20Nyelvtanulaacutes_smudge%20copy.jpg

Yeah, the href works here, thanks.

Now imagine the same thing moving from the center, with sixteen different textures added and overdrawn around and constant change in the middle... I'll try to paint you a variation but as it is not throbbing it would be a faint copy of the real thing. Let alone interactivity.
That is changing the sense of my time

Your mandala is absolutely wonderful, and I'm going to put a copy of it in my downloads file so I can look at quickly and easily.

And I post picts by clicking on the "insert image" button, then inserting a URL from either Photobucket or Servimg in the blank. And for picts I post frequently, I have text files that contain the URLs so I don't have to visit the library site.

I have researched binaural beats a lot. And had a good experience with some of them.
The following article describes how they work and the ignoble history of I-Doser company stealing the work of the British computer expert Jim Peters.
Peters interview
Peters created SBagen, which is an open source code binaural generator software (non-Gui) anyone can download, while people who use binaurals and create sequences publish their favorite sequences here. Apparently, binaural sound is formed when two sine waves are heard in each ear with a small enough difference between them - e.g. a 95 Hz one and a 105 Hz one in the other ear will "generate" a 10Hz vibrating frequency in your ear which is like an optical illusion. The appropriate binaurals can help people relax who are under continuous pain for example or insomnia cases. The pioneer of this research of consciousness changing was Robert Monroe in America, he did not publish technical secrets though.
I-Doser makes sensational news these days in some remote parts of the world because people say the result is an electronic drug. They claim they modeled the most essential brainwave sequences of people on various drugs - from peyote to MDMA to Valium and heroin. Reality is starker, as I-Doser people admit in their handbook: some people are affected positively by some "doses", some are not at all, and very few have unpleasant reactions.
I-Doser "doses" are sold apiece, and experience shows they are rather nifty with computers and the Net so you cannot freely download their software (except there is a trial free version) because all torrent sites show are files heavily infected with spyware and adware.

Years ago when I tried a version it was claiming psychedelic effects but all I had was a few flashes lasting for a few seconds at most and a general sense of excitation. Other brainwave experiments though - and artists frequently mask binaurals with soft music or nature sounds - worked very well for me, mostly for relaxation and sleep, plus sleep-like deep healing.
I-Doser files are freely converted to SBagen format though at one of the enthusiastic developer's sites. Peters says that apart from the commercial angle which is rather unpleasant (the company settled with him paying a mere thousand dollars while basing their industry on his invention - which he intended to stay open source) he does not agree with their method of use - it is more intense and the original sounds are a higher pitch. But there are you-tube binaurals too.

As for me, I-Doser files are not what they claim to be but some of them do something - not always what they call. Plus I can create the original binaural effect already on my smart phone by a tone generator and programming two or three sinus waves in stereo... however with SBagen you can program sequences and timing.

The really interesting part in audio would again come with feedback. I experimented with a primitive feedback machine emitting an alpha sound in the eighties using two electrodes on the front part of my skull and hearing a hum and when the "jump" occurred allegedly the machine was modifying its output frequency. A few times I got into such deep relaxation that I completely forgot where I was for a couple of hours and woke up completely refreshed and very sober...

They also helped me at times with severe dental pain.

Isochronic believers say their sequences do not require stereo. I heard many and IMHO it works well especially if masked by nature sounds (otherwise they sound like a couple of angry insects enjoying a fiery debate) in the Alpha range - 12-7, also on simple speakers, but binaurals work better overall.

The effect of entrainment is attributed to the olivary brainstem.

reg, #10, re: "The following article describes how they work and the ignoble history of I-Doser company stealing the work of the British computer expert Jim Peters."

There are so many similar scams in circulation right now that I assume both governments and the big plutocratic corporations are deliberately trying to sabotage the present scientific effort to invent electronic and/or virtual reality substitutes for consciousness-altering drugs of all kinds. I assume the goal of this sabotage is to get heavy legal regulation of this field even before really effective techniques are invented.

I can see how commercial interests distort research and perhaps I-Doser will meet some harsh regulations in some faraway tyranny (everything is suspect in Saudi Arabia for example). And the US right is usually chiming along with draconian approaches.
SBagen is free development though, and their DOS program works fine, users experiment on themselves writing sequences.

I once had a complete program for generating binaurals and adding some typical natural mask and also isochronous ones. If you hit a sequence that works for you you can save it even in a wav or mp3 form. A Windows GUI program, it was simple enough to handle at first sight. After all, reading science and designing whatever works for you for sleep etc. is part of the goal.

What I don't see is that this is one side of the elephant - the trunk etc. You need sounds for self-reprogramming but the winning thing would be again a feedback apparatus. The same with colored surfaces or mandalas as I wrote earlier. I downloaded an eye tracker but apparently you need some special gadget in addition to the computer's camera (which would be enough these days).

Smart phones can already recognize your face so we might get such a development on an Android app... So far you need to go into a meditative state to do whatever audio or visual programs exist so apparently it still doesn't have enough of the consistency of a psychedelic reprogramming which is like you cannot overpower it with your ego... And that is when governments will start regulating. Maybe the center of research will be an experimental country like Holland.

reg. #12, re: I can see how commercial interests distort research and perhaps I-Doser will meet some harsh regulations in some faraway tyranny (everything is suspect in Saudi Arabia for example). And the US right is usually chiming along with draconian approaches. SBagen is free development though, and their DOS program works fine, users experiment on themselves writing sequences."

Are you aware that experimentation of this type started back in the 80's when home computers still used operating systems that incorporated Basic programs the users wrote themselves?This was at a time when just about everyone in the American Counterculture and Occult communities were heavily into fantasy role playing games played by mail. So personal self-programming using virtual reality is older than most people realize. My wife at the time and I loathed all kinds of Western games, but were making heavy use of tantric yoga, which is an Eastern equivalent...

re: "I once had a complete program for generating binaurals and adding some typical natural mask and also isochronous ones. If you hit a sequence that works for you you can save it even in a wav or mp3 form. A Windows GUI program, it was simple enough to handle at first sight. After all, reading science and designing whatever works for you for sleep etc. is part of the goal. What I don't see is that this is one side of the elephant - the trunk etc. You need sounds for self-reprogramming but the winning thing would be again a feedback apparatus. The same with colored surfaces or mandalas as I wrote earlier. I downloaded an eye tracker but apparently you need some special gadget in addition to the computer's camera (which would be enough these days)."

This is why the Eastern occult approach works better than the Western one: the tantric rituals are designed specifically to work with the whole elephant: the ritual singing and chanting, the mandalas, the mudras and dances, and even the yantras that involve whole parades and pilgrimages.

re: "Smart phones can already recognize your face so we might get such a development on an Android app... So far you need to go into a meditative state to do whatever audio or visual programs exist so apparently it still doesn't have enough of the consistency of a psychedelic reprogramming which is like you cannot overpower it with your ego... And that is when governments will start regulating. Maybe the center of research will be an experimental country like Holland."

My guess is that the center of research won't be a place, but a group of people who communicate mostly on line ... like you and I are doing right now.

RR#13 : "Are you aware that experimentation of this type started back in the 80's when home computers still used operating systems that incorporated Basic programs the users wrote themselves?This was at a time when just about everyone in the American Counterculture and Occult communities were heavily into fantasy role playing games played by mail. So personal self-programming using virtual reality is older than most people realize. My wife at the time and I loathed all kinds of Western games, but were making heavy use of tantric yoga, which is an Eastern equivalent..."

En francais : RR utilise le mot "loathed" qui exprime un sens negatif

RR use the word loathed wich express a negative meaning

reality builder wrote:

RR#13 : "Are you aware that experimentation of this type started back in the 80's when home computers still used operating systems that incorporated Basic programs the users wrote themselves?This was at a time when just about everyone in the American Counterculture and Occult communities were heavily into fantasy role playing games played by mail. So personal self-programming using virtual reality is older than most people realize. My wife at the time and I loathed all kinds of Western games, but were making heavy use of tantric yoga, which is an Eastern equivalent..."

En francais : RR utilise le mot "loathed" qui exprime un sens negatif

RR use the word loathed wich express a negative meaning

Yes! It really bothered us to see people playing games like "Dungeons and Dragons" instead of doing things that contributed to their education or personal development or created writing or art worth preserving ... and often taking them so seriously that they actually got into serious arguments or neglected responsibilities in real life.