The survival of the stable is a meta-principle. From it you can derive the three principles of evolution; it is a deeper truth. Yes, sure, there’s biological organisms and all that. You know, if a rock is really stable, it will be here, it will be around if it has mechanisms to continue to exist. That’s what exists – what exists is what is good at being stable.
– Andrés Gómez-Emilsson, Psychedelics and the Free Energy Principle: From REBUS to Indra’s Net – YouTube
Guitar players play the guitar, piano players play the piano, violin players play the violin, but music players… they play the muse!
– D. P. Lovefool
“I must console myself with the reflection that the nature of the subject is evidently responsible for this, rather than any preference of my own.”
1/5 Introduction: The Muse
There is a lens that can make things feel golden.
Before we jump into Dante’s allegory and Neural Annealing, let me begin with a memory.
It was early autumn, September. I waited in the street sitting next to a tree. I was holding a CD with Christmas Carols. A creature I’ll refer to as the Seagoat appeared from behind a tree as suddenly as if she had been teleported. We met in front of a mysteriously looking dark goth restaurant filled with religious and occult symbols. It had something creepy to it but in a positive, authentic, artsy way. The place was called The Forgiveness and it was quite popular in Leipzig’s Connewitz.
Seagoat broke the silence by asking me twice in a row:
– Hi, how are you?
I said I was good, and then she asked the same question again. It seemed we were both somewhat confused with the situation, but the reason to be confused wasn’t particularly clear, except maybe that it was obvious I really wanted to meet the Seagoat.
Upon seeing or hearing that same question today, instead of Daniel Johnston, I think of an apocalypse. We can all agree that nothing about this memory seems particularly odd, but what I want to tell you here is that an apocalypse can be a very real and very private experience. More so, I would claim that an apocalypse manifests both physically and physiologically – because it has high valence, it affects hormones and shatters one’s model of the world. As a phenomenal object, an experience of apocalypse should have a mathematical description – a geometric shape (Qualia Formalism), resonance, and a powerful “wild” (high entropy) energy, wildfire. (More about this later.)
After this event, or somehow even already before it (see Reachback), I’ve entered a state of intense and unprecedented romantic infatuation. My whole being was overwhelmed with one thought, and it was Seagoat’s name echoing throughout me whenever I wouldn’t deeply focus on something else equally pleasurable. Eventually, that equally pleasurable thing became studying consciousness and explaining to myself how the heck this happened, building on top of old passions which were creating music and art movies. I’ve lost my sense of awareness, and with Jigglypuff eyes, I’ve confessed to her how I think she was a true muse. My romantic attempt didn’t go very well. After saying she enjoys spending time with me, my hopes got high, only to suddenly realize I was being ghosted. Ouch!
Cupid’s arrow not only killed the illusion of maintaining a Self that has a choice, but it also completely shattered my understanding of causality. Everything would have been less unusual if there was time for those feelings to develop. Suddenly, I had a muse I adored with each and every cell in my body and there was no way back. My intense feelings were based on nothing else but a simple truth: they were there before I could even intellectually catch up with them, almost as a place to be found. At the time I suspected I might have some mental illness just because I thought such a causeless feeling of love shouldn’t be possible. But to say it felt beautiful is an understatement. The story resembled a movie that rational person would rate as a fairytale. I couldn’t find a reason for this change in the way that I function. (Well, until I found out about Neural Annealing!)
Sadly, or as we will see, luckily, The Seagoat was apprehensive of a stranger with such glittery eyes and mad love ready to be lived. We had a phone call where I apologized for my feelings and my attitude. I thanked her for giving me this gift, which I reckon was merely the fact I could perceive this person being alive. She said she gave me nothing and that it would be for the best if we cut contact, so I promised myself I will pull back and try to forget about it.
Months were passing by but the feeling was not diminishing. I was glowing. I’ve been asking and calling friends to evaluate if they think I am insane because I couldn’t stop it – every day was filled with enthusiasm, ecstasy, hope, lovely misery, and joy that at some point I would see her again. I reckon what I was going through was mania.
“Socrates states that mania is not always evil, but can be a blessing, when it is sent as a gift from the gods. This divine gift of mania is inspiration, of which Socrates distinguishes four different kinds: prophecy, telestic madness, poetic madness and madness of love.”
Divine Mania: Alteration of Consciousness in Ancient Greece
Later on that same year, on the New Year, I decided to use the opportunity and send the last message which I composed and evaluated for three days. It was morning on the January 1st, 2021, I’m sending my last words:
Lovely Seagoat, I think of you, and for the last month I think to myself if I might have fallen in love with you. I am not sure, but I think about that question every day, so there might be an answer in that. I published a song for your birthday, so happy birthday, and I wish you a scientifically successful 2021. My motto: Yves Tumor – Honesty.
PS. I am really not a creep.
PPS. I have an extra ticket for Arlo Parks in April.
PPPS. Don’t feel bad for me sending this, I am happy and grateful, although severely incomplete.
Stay beautiful.
I’ll shut up now.
So I did shut up. I saw the Seagoat again only after 9 months of purest despair, happy misery and internal, hidden, high-valence madness driven by surprise, fascination and beauty of disbelief how something can simply possess you just like that, out of the blue. It was lockdown and I’ve spent days and nights recording music, reading, writing and thinking. Also it was the first time I shed a tear after accidentally hurting a flying bug. I’ve connected with the environment in a profound way.
Those months without the (in QRI Glossary) intentional object, or (in Jacques Lacan’s vocabulary) objet petit a that stands for the unattainable object of desire, were the onset of my personal Inferno, but also strengthening of the important realization that it wasn’t the Seagoat that was objectively precious, it was everyone else walking and breathing on this planet, because everyone held the power of triggering that same feeling in someone else. It just somehow had to be a match. Obviously, I actually couldn’t prove this to be true, maybe not everyone could actually perceive something as I did, but probably there was potential. This reasoning was coming only from understanding how it was not her that was objectively different than the others, but it was specifically to me that she seemed like a magical alien from another world.
Apropos learning to feel, when I was around 21-22, I read Henry Miller’s Rosy Crucifixion trilogy. I suspect that the thoughts and feelings presented in those books created an opportunity for me to perceive something fairly similar; I’ve built an internal model and learned how it feels. Sexus was one of the few books that really made me cry a lot, and although many people think of Miller as a deeply arrogant pervert, for me it was the most honest thing I have read. The title for the trilogy comes from a sentence near the end of Miller’s Tropic of Capricorn:
All my Calvaries were rosy crucifixions, pseudo-tragedies to keep the fires of hell burning brightly for the real sinners who are in danger of being forgotten.
I love Henry. RIP! (December 26, 1891 – June 7, 1980)
A few facts
The three books (1949, 1953, 1959) in the trilogy were initially banned in the United States, published only in France and Japan.
Their American publication followed the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1964 decision that the also-banned Tropic of Cancer was a work of literature and therefore should not be banned.
Miller was concerned about the publication of Sexus in the US. He felt that it was possible that his ex-wife Beatrice, the model for Maude, would bring a lawsuit for her portrayal in the novel.
2/5 The Four Steps of Neural Annealing
For a reader not yet familiar with Neural Annealing, I will extract something about it from the author’s (Mike’s) website:
Neural annealing is QRI’s unified theory of music, emotional updating, meditation, psychedelics, depression, trauma, a theory that may give us the tools to build a future that’s substantially better than the present.
The basics: how does annealing work?
Carhart-Harris’s and Friston’s model does many very clever things and is a substantial addition to the literature; I start from a similar frame but describe the process slightly differently. The following is QRI’s model (based on my talk on the Neuroscience of Meditation in Thailand).
In relation to his piece “Neural Annealing: Toward a Neural Theory of Everything”, Mike writes:
- First, energy (neural excitation, e.g. Free Energy from prediction errors) builds up in the brain, either gradually or suddenly, collecting disproportionately in the brain’s natural eigenmodes;
- This build-up of energy (rate of neural firing) crosses a metastability threshold and the brain enters a high-energy state, causing entropic disintegration (weakening previously ‘sticky’ attractors);
- The brain’s neurons self-organise into new multi-scale equilibria (attractors), aka implicit assumptions about reality’s structure and value weightings, which given present information should generate lower levels of prediction error than previous models (this is implicitly both a resynchronization of internal predictive models with the environment, and a minimization of dissonance in connectome-specific harmonic waves);
- The brain ‘cools’ (neural activity levels slowly return to normal), and parts of the new self-organised patterns remain and become part of the brain’s normal activity landscape;
- The cycle repeats, as the brain’s models become outdated and prediction errors start to build up again.
Any ‘emotionally intense’ experience that you need time to process most likely involves this entropic disintegration → search → neural annealing — this is what emotional processing is.
Now that you’re somewhat familiar with the basics of the framework, we can start to think how the four stages of Neural Annealing could be seen as analogous to the phenomenology commonly described as a soul’s journey to god in The Divine Comedy. In a certain way, the feeling of burning out which I will describe could relate to previously described phenomena of Jungian Psychic Death or Platonic Abstractio.
If you look at definitions of an apocalypse, the four stages of Neural Annealing might indeed hold a key for making sense of the evolution of consciousness:
1. Energy Application (Inferno)
2. Entropic Disintegration &
3. Search (Purgatorio)
4. Neural Annealing (Paradiso)
Let’s see how these steps match the phenomenology reported by Dante and Lovefool’s essay on limerence and Twin Flame phenomenology.
3/5 The Divine Comedy
Source: Dante’s Divine Comedy and the Vertical Worldview — On Verticality
Before an apocalypse as an altered state of consciousness earns its well-deserved description, someone, of course, has to see it – psychologists would say perceive it, physicists would observe, but finally, it requires someone to recognize the symptoms and report them. In an online Merriem-Webster dictionary when looking up apocalypse, what we usually associate with it (destruction and disaster) comes up only as the third definition:
Dante Alighieri was a literary genius whose 14-century epic poem The Divine Comedy is read across high schools and interpreted at literary studies across the globe. From the perspective of Neural Annealing we can now start understanding why had this pre-Renaissance cultural hero wasted so much of his energy onto writing Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso, and dedicating all of it to Beatrice, or rather, the idea of Beatrice, a woman he allegedly only ever saw twice in the course of 9 years. (9!)
The poem known as one the most influential works on love in the history of modern human civilization, besides Shakespeare, literary experts say, is an allegory of a soul’s journey towards god, but also a social critique.
The way that Dante has been spending time and energy on writing his masterpiece for 10 years certainly wasn’t contributing to the biological imperative of spreading genes. Just like stable genes and stable rocks have been around for millions of years, so have stable memes – powerfully configured and shaped ideas embedded onto the fabric of reality that have their own evolutionary drive by demanding attention from our nervous system.
- Energy Application (Inferno). Organism is given energy in order to fulfill its biological needs and reach homeostasis. This mechanism was contemplated by Freud while thinking of an explanatory model for conversion of bodily and emotional needs into mental energy (Mark Solms, The Hidden Spring, page 150). Mental energy appears to be isomorphic with changes in thermodynamic free energy. In other words, living things must resist entropy. When we’re hungry, we use energy to find food, and when we’re in love, we use energy to settle with a mate.
- Entropic Disintegration, followed by…
- Search (transition from Inferno to Purgatorio). In case that for some reason food is out of reach, organism will die. That’s a biological need. But what happens when an emotional need is not settled? In the case of love, we keep using energy to try out different ways which will help us reach our goal. Lack of love won’t kill you biologically, but at some point, the energetic threshold (recrystallization temperature) is crossed and consciousness (which is as a dynamic system) reboots.
- Neural Annealing (Paradiso). A transient increase in TEMP (Temperature or Entropy Mediated Plasticity) within a system should help rebalance its global state-space. Analogies of “wiping the state clean”, “starting afresh” or “rebirth”. (Carhart-Harris et al., 2023)
“You must be ready to burn yourself in your own flame; how could you rise anew if you have not first become ashes?”
Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
4/5 The New Science of Consciousness
As experts in the field say, we’re currently in a moment of history where the alchemy of consciousness is making its transition to the chemistry of consciousness. Besides www.qri.org, Principia Qualia by Michael Johnson offers a technical overview of necessary preconditions.
Within the philosophy of Dual Aspect Monism, I’d say that consciousness evolution runs parallel to the biological one, and they are both equally rooted in the laws of physics. In my case, the reason for that insight was that the causality for intense love was not found in the material world causality (brains, the Screen of Consciousness/Spacetime) but rather in the other aspect – consciousness domain as harmonic vibrations and geometric shapes. Of course, this is just a philosophy, but I think it will turn out to be a crucial one.
As previously explained in Phenomenology of Psychic and Ego Death as Geometric and Molecular Docking, there might be a clear reason for experimental failures of Supersymmetry, how all that relates to Euler’s Formula, and how gravitons are actually internal analogues of photons and that’s why they can’t be discovered in the LHC. This essay might be intended for audience of a more philosophical and technical understanding of current problems in science. There is, of course, a lot more to say about this, but that’s for another time, since it’s not the topic of this post.
Sir Arthur Eddington figured something out a long time ago. He translated Dual Aspect Monism into external world and its fibres back in 1928 after the discovery of quantum mechanics:
We are acquainted with an external world because its fibres run into our own consciousness, it is only our fibres that we actually know; from these ends we more or less successfully reconstruct the rest, as a paleontologist reconstructs an extinct monster from its footprint.
Sir Arthur Eddington, The Nature of Physical World (1928)
Another curiosity for me was a question quoted in Ray Kurzweil’s famous book The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (2005). While contemplating the future of humanity and the nature of reality, Ray Kurzweil quotes Lily Tomlin:
If love is the answer, can you please rephrase the question?
What is there to say?
5/5 The Dream
I am laying on the floor in my bedroom, belly down. The Seagoat is in the room. I feel her presence from the boundaries of my visual field, and as I direct my gaze in her direction, there she is, embodied, looking as I know her from waking life. Like a shot person dying on the ground, I utter to her:
– Every time you leave, I get a fever.
She kneels down next to me, kisses me on the cheek, which quite literally feels as a drop of water in a burning desert. She vanishes.
Little did I know that this love fever would end up being an important sign and symptom of a thermodynamic reaction, an apocalyptic wildfire that was a result of energy gone crazy. Because something was missing, a part of myself that I thought I need to find and get in the outside world, I was energized until I burned.
The union of opposites on a higher level of consciousness is not a rational thing, not it is a matter of will. It is a process of psychic development that expresses itself in symbols.
Carl G. Jung
Both Dante and I experienced a massive amount of energy in order to get that thing, love, the key for our locks. Once I have been incomplete, but I was lucky enough to 1) realize I am incomplete, 2) complete myself.
Seagoat doesn’t understand, and maybe she never even will. This is not easy to comprehend, so I forgave her with the hope that she will learn how to forgive herself. But maybe, just maybe, in order to close the circle, what she would have to do is to find is true forgiveness for both of us, for creating this extremely complicated and emotionally heavy situation, and to fall in love with the possibilities of life by understanding, with what we, humans, have found and created merely by having the ability to perceive one another and to feel. If The Forgiveness was the beginning, maybe it’s also the end.
Hereby I would end this essay and say:
Burning from “true” love is a natural precondition for a crystalline consciousness configuration, a perfect drug that can be found within the mind. The only other options for that, as far as our understanding goes, are annealing with 5-MeO-DMT, becoming a meditation master, going through a Near-Death Experience, or a certain type of seizure/concussion. Due to events described, I’ve felt almost all of the NDE symptoms apart from separation from the body, bright light, encountering deceased spirits, and life review. However, some of these experiences followed afterward while experimenting with psychedelics (after checking that I am actually not psychotic).
So no, Lily, maybe we cannot rephrase the question. What survives and stays around is that what is stable, and universal love is simply very stable, if not the most stable and blissful configuration of consciousness. Because once you find it, somehow you just understand:
Game over.
***
Additional read: What is Love? Neural Annealing in the Presence of an Intentional Object | Qualia Computing
Opportunity to support me:
Since I am essentially unemployed in order to have time for writing and studying, you can consider supporting me by making donations on PayPal. The working title of a book based on this blog is Music Theory of Consciousness, Symmetry, and Geometric Docking as Answers to the Question of Origin of Love: Technical and Phenomenological Guidebook for Organic Altered States of Consciousness (Lovefool, 202x). I am available under the email address: olfaktorne.halucinacije@gmail.com.
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