OFF: Re: me, myself and I

[Christian Mumford]

> Dr. John Lilly's early data on experiments with isolation and LSD-25
>
> Basic Belief No. 1
>
> Basic Belief No. 1 was made possible by the early isolation results:
> Assume that the subject's body and brain can operate comfortably
> isolated without him paying any attention to it. This belief expresses
> the faith that one has in one's experience in the isolation situation,
> that one can consciously ignore the necessities of breathing and other
> bodily functions, and that they will take care of themselves automatically
> without detailed attention on the part of one's self. This result allowed
> existence metaprograms to be made in relative safety.
>
> Succesful leaving of body and parking it in isolation for periods of twenty
> minutes to two hours were succesful in sixteen different experiments.
> This success, in turn, allowed other basic beliefs to be experimented upon.
> The basic belief that one could leave the body and explore new universes
> was succesfully programmed in the first eight different experiments lasting
> from five minutes to forty minutes; the later eight experiments were on the
> cognitional multidimensional space without the leaving the body metaprogram
> (see previous section on Projection for the cognition space phenomenon).
>
> Basic Belief No. 2
>
> The subject sought beings other than himself, not human, in whom he
> existed and who control him and other human beings. Thus the subject
> found whole new universes containing great varieties of beings, some
> greater than himself, some equal to himself, and some lesser than himself.
>
> Those greater than himself were a set which was so huge in space-time as
> to make the subject feel as a mere mote in their sunbeam, a single microflash
> of energy in their time scale, my forty-five years are but an instant in their
> lifetime, a single thought in their vast computer, a mere particle in their
> assemblages of living cognitive units. He felt he was in the absolute
> unconscious of these beings.
> He experienced many more sets all so much greater than himself that they were
> almost inconceivable in their complexity, size and time scales.
>
> Those beings which were close to the subject in complexity-size-time were
> dichotomized into the evil ones and good ones. The evil ones (subject said)
> were busy with purposes so foreign to his own that he had many near-misses
> and almost fatal accidents in encounters with them; they were almost totally
> unaware of his existence and hence almost wiped him out, apparently without
> knowing it. The subject says that the good ones thought good thoughts to him,
> through him, and to one another. They were at least conceivably human and
> humane. He interpreted them as alien yet friendly. They were not so alien as
> to be completely removed from human beings in regard to their purposes
> and activities.
>
> Some of these beings (the subject reported) are programming us in the long term.
> They nurture us. They experiment on us. They control the probability of our
> discovering and exploiting new science. He reports that discoveries such as
> nuclear energy, LSD-25, RNA-DNA, etc., are under probability control by these
> beings. Further, humans are tested by some of these beings and cared for by
> others. Some of them have programs which include our survival and progress.
> Others have programs which include oppositions to these good programs and include
> our ultimate demise as a species.
> Thus the subject interpreted the evil ones as willing to sacrifice us in their
> experiments; hence they are alien and removed from us. The subject reported with
> this set of beliefs that only limited choices are still available to us as a
> species. We are an ant colony in their laboratory.
>
> Basic Belief No. 3
>
> The subject assumed the existence of beings in whom humans exist and
> who directly control humans. This is a tighter control program than the
> previous one and assumes continuous day and night, second to second,
> control, as if each human being were a cell in a larger organism. Such beings
> insist upon activities in each human being totally under the control of the
> organism of which each human being is a part. In this state there is no free will
> and no freedom for an individual. This supra-self-metaprogram was entered
> twice by the subject; each time he had to leave it; for him it was too anxiety-
> provoking. In the first case he became a part of a vast computer in which he was
> one element. In the second case he was a thought in a much larger mind: being
> modified rapidly, flexibly and plastically.
>
> All of the above experiments were done looking upward in Fig. 1 from the
> self-programmer to the supra-self-metaprograms. A converse set of experiments
> was done in which the self-metaprogrammer looked downward towards the
> metaprograms, the programs and the lower levels of Fig. 1.
>
> Basic Belief No. 4
>
> One set of basic beliefs can be subsumed under the directions seek those
> beings whom we control and who exist in us. With this program the subject
> found old models in himself (old programs, old metaprograms, implanted by
> others, implanted by self, injected by parents, by teachers, etc.) He found that
> these were disparate and separate autonomous beings in himself. He described
> them as noisy group. His incorporated parents, his siblings, his own offspring,
> his teachers, his wife seemed to be a disorganized crowd within him, each
> running and arguing a program with him and in him.
> While he watched, battles took place between these models during the
> experiment. He settled many disparate and nonintegrated points between these
> beings and gradually incorporated more of them into the self-metaprogram.
>
> After many weeks of self-analysis outside the experimental milieu (and some
> help with his former analyst), it was seen that these beings within the self
> were also those other beings outside self of the other experiments. The subject
> described the projected as-if-outside beings to be cognitional carnivores
> attempting to eat up his self-metaprogram and wrest control from him. As the
> various levels of metaprograms became straightened out in the subject, he was
> able to categorize and begin to control the various levels as they were presented
> during these experiments. As his apparently unconscious needs for credence in
> these beliefs were attenuated with analytic work, his freedom to move from one
> set of basic beliefs to another was increased and the anxiety associated with this
> kind of movement gradually disappeared.
>
> A basic overall metaprogram was finally generated: For his own
> intellectual satisfaction the subject found that he best assume that
> all of the phenomena that took place existed only in his own brain and
> in his own mind. Other assumptions about the existence of these beings
> had become subjects suitable for research rather than subjects for blind
> (unconscious, conscious) belief for this person.
>
> Basic Belief No. 5
>
> Experiments also were done upon movements of self forward and back
> in space-time. The results showed that when attempting to go forward into
> the future the subject began to realize his own goals for that future, and
> imagine wishful thinking solutions to current problems. When he put in the
> metaprogram for going back into his own childhood, real and phantasy
> memories were evoked and integrated. When he pushed back through to
> the in utero situation, he found an early nightmare which was reinvoked and
> solved. Relying on his scientific knowledge, he pushed the program back
> through previous generations, prehuman primates, carnivores, fish and
> protozoa. He experienced a sperm-egg explosion on the way through this
> past reinvocation of imaginary experience.
>
> The last set of experiments (see Use of Projection section) was made
> possible by the results of the previous set. Progress in controlling the
> projection metaprogram resulted from the other universes experiments.
> Finally the subject understood and had become familiar with his need for
> phantasied other universes. Analytic work allowed him to bypass this need
> and penetrate into the cognitional multidimensional projection spaces.
> Experiments in programming in this innermost space showed results quite
> satisfying to a high degree of credence in the belief that all experiments in
> the series showed inner happenings without needing the participation of outer
> causes. The need for the constant use of outer causes was found to be a
> projected outward metaprogram to avoid taking personal responsibility for
> portions of the contents of his own mind. His dislike for certain kinds of
> his own nonsensical programs caused him to project them and thus avoid
> admitting they were his.
>
> In summation, the subjectively apparent results of the experiments were
> to straighten out a good deal of the "nonsense" in this subject's computer.
> Through these experiments he was able to examine some warded-off beliefs
> and defensive structures accumulated throughout his life. The net result was
> a feeling of greater integration of self and a feeling of positive affect for the
> current structure of himself, combined with an improved skepticism of the
> validity of subjective judging of events in self.
>
> Some objective testing of these essentially subjective judgments have been
> initiated through cooperation with other persons. Such objective testing is very
> difficult; this area needs a great deal of future research work. We need better
> investigative techniques, combining subjective and behavioral (verbal) techniques.
> The major feeling that one has after such experiences and experiments is that the
> fluidity and plasticity of one's computer has certain limits to it, and that those
> limits
> have been enlarged somewhat by the experiments. How long such enlargement
> lasts and to what extent are still not known of course. A certain amount of
> continued critical skepticism about and in the self-metaprogram (and it its felt
> changes) is very necessary for a scientist exploring these areas.



One of these could possibly explain mr. Swann's grand delusion? (or
perhaps he just read the god-part of the Hawkwind Log...)

Christian