The Black Hole

For the Psychadelic Festival I am very stoked to build this structure my group conceived, it's going to be a trance inducing room made to exhaust your attention span until you give up in thinking of nothing. It's going to be 10x20ft and all black with black lights, glow paint, glow sticks, speakers, a projection, and a window to the stars. I hope people are really able to engage with it and enjoy it.

I want it to invoke this vibe, skip to 11:30

Sweat Lodge

The Sweat Lodge experience, was definitely an experience. Before I talk about the Sweat Lodge I just want to say I was sooo inspired but the set up of the Ojai Foundation. It was so beautiful surrounded by greener and perched on a hill the view was serene. The communal areas and little structures just made me think about how I want to live, that is, simply in a sustainable environment where I can kick it with friends amongst the beauty of nature.

Okay back to the Sweat Lodge, so that morning I awoke after a nightmare in which I dreamt that I had done the sweat lodge but didn't remember a thing about it. I approached a table of fresh fruits and veggies where Cameron was munching away and he asked "How did you like it?" I was dumfounded because I could not recollect any memory of the experience. Crazy right, but I actually do remember my waking experience in the sweat lodge and I'll tell you all about it.

It was very ritual oriented with some pseudo-Native American ceremonies, which were cool but actually felt kind of like attending church except, it actually made sense. Giving thanks to nature and reflecting on what you want for yourself and others. Be selected our rocks and made a wish for ourselves and then selected some wood to burn away something. My wish for my self, to envision my passion in life more clearly. The burn, the close mindedness of our world leaders.

Inside the womb as Paul referred to it the sweating commenced. We went through 4 levels of rocks all with different degrees of sweat and activity. Level 1 I wanted the heat ore intense, by Level 3 I was sweating like no other, this was my favorite level because of the intensity and everyone through concepts, ideologies, and bad habits into the void. You think you know how you feel and think about things but verbally expressing them really drives your stance on things home and into your memory.

Overall it was an awesome experience and a definite bonding experience. I did feel a sort of lightness coming out of the lodge perhaps it was because I stopped living in the past and future and was just taking in the present. We ate delicious food we cooked the night prior and all slept like babies that night.

Allosphere

The concept of the allosphere is really awesome. Reading the pamphlet before I got in totally hyped me up for it. However, it was somewhat of a let down. Don't get me wrong, I love visualizers especially with music and sounds, but the Allosphere felt kind of like an amusement park exhibition that people go to when the lines are too long for the rides. Conceptually though pretty cool. As a researcher I would totally use this to revisualize the way in which I understood the nature of things. Rather than chemicals being a hexagon surrounded by letters. the Allosphere allow for a new representation of the sciences.

Isolation Tank's Space-Time Continuum

After experiencing the isolation tank, I must say that the experience was not what I expected. With the majority of the senses deprived I thought I would experience a rush of ideas, image and revelations from my construction of the outside world. I envisioned having the type of projections that John C. Lily spoke of in, “Use of Projection –Display Techniques in Deep Self-analysis with Lysergic Acid Diethylamide.” I thought my mind would make up for the absence of the tangible world through elaborate depictions of reality. It made sense, that as my senses were dulled by the nothingness that my mind would try to make up for the world that was not present. However, maybe I needed some LSD and some dolphins to get the level of craziness that Lilly wrote about because instead of falling into some vivid hallucinatory state, I felt extremely relaxed and mindless.

My experience was more like the sensory deprivation described in Scott Daly’s, “The Ganzfeld as a Canvas for Neurophysiology.” Daly describes sensory deprivation as putting the body’s receptors in a “resting state and send no information up the pathways to the high centers of the brain” (172). I quickly was able to adjust to the odd environment of the isolation tank despite my desire for the water to be warmer and the air to feel fresher. Once I was comfortable in the tank I found my self intentionally grasping for visions or thought, but I would them hard to complete as a wave of tranquility swept my mind away from the world beyond the tank. I easily slipped between conscious and unconscious stated unable to complete a thought or form a memory. According to Daly, during sensory deprivation, “There is no perceptual event, other than the awareness of darkness” (172). This easily sums up my experience in the isolation tank as my mind was only aware of the darkness and I easily forgot about the outside world, unsuccessful of even try to fathom it. It felt like a deep meditation with great success. The objective of meditation is to clear the mind. This is often difficult even when sitting cross-legged in a silent room, however it seems like the complete lack of acoustic distance and lack of light (which would normally activate the rods of even closed eyes) inside the isolation tank contributed to its immediate effect of relaxation on me.

Inside the tank I eventually fell under a very deep state of unconsciousness, perhaps even sleep and when I awoke I panicked. I’m not quite sure why I panicked upon my awake, perhaps it was the thought that I had been in there for a lifetime, or maybe the fear that there was no more oxygen in the tank. Whatever the case I was taken by an overwhelming feeling that I had to get out. It felt like I couldn’t have been in the tank for longer than an hour, but to my surprise I had actually been in there for two hours. The mind-altering state experienced in the isolation tank was very similar to that experienced during the sound bath in the Integratron. These two similar experiences must be a result of the activated alpha waves in the brain, caused by such environments of sensory deprivation or particular sensory activation. During the sound bath it felt as through there was only one thing to focus on, the sound. During the isolation tank, the only thing my mind began to focus on was the darkness.

My experience in the isolation tank was far different from my experience during the Ganzfeld Field. During the Ganzfeld, my brain was extremely activated as I saw a series of images among the red fog. The white noise helped to focus on my projections and actually enhanced my visions. In the isolation take the silence did the opposite as well as the darkness that disabled any projections my mind attempted to create.

Nevertheless, the isolation tank was a trippy experience in which I lost complete sense of time and even space. Part of my panic was the fact that I had forgotten where I was and when the opening of my eyes brought no light, I became desperately hungry for stimuli. The isolation tank left me more appreciative of my surroundings and my ability to make sense of them and after I got out the world around me seemed a lot more fruitful for observation.

Ganzfeld

This was a cool narrative short I found about the Ganzfeld Field. I really enjoyed it. The representation of Ganzfeld projections is beautiful. My personal experience was not as vivid, but I definitle saw a lot my brain was going crazy with the projections. I saw almost too much, but I did get some pretty strong recurring images such as birds, flowers, and triangles. Some of my visualizations were full on scenes in which I travelled through space. For instance I went into a triangular crack and found a flower and another time I flew into a mouth and headed straight for the little punching bag thing. It was a trip.

After reading Scott Daly's article "The Ganzfeld as a Canvas for Neurophysically Based Artworks" I am super inspired to try something up this ally, imagine your using ping pong balls and your imagination to create an art piece with the aid of a performer, sounds a bit shamanic. Anyways I plan wearing ping pong balls on my eyes and just hanging out under a tree, pronto!

Cybernetics & Psychedelic

In contemplating the relationship between cybernetics and the psychedelic experience, there seems to be little interrelatedness. The psychedelic experience as subjective and random as it may be does not fit well with the cybernetics philosophy of redundancy and stability. However, when looking through the Marshall McLuhan perspective of electromagnetic technology as having the power to retribalize and unify mankind, the subjective psychedelic experience and the resulting revelations gain the ability to become ubiquitous among a society where technology is the extension of mankind’s senses.

According to Gerald Heard in “Can This Drug Enlarge Man’s Mind?,” he explains to the psychedelic experience of LSD through the Greek mythology metaphor of the “The Gate of Ivory” in which the incomprehensible concepts that belong to “higher registers” of the human mind subside (14). Heard believes, when channeled through the proper means, the psychedelic experience can produce new original discoveries. Although these discoveries may seem initially farfetched, they can become the added variable that can produce optimal performance in a cybernetic cycle. In “Cybernetics and the Sacred,” Ryan Paul defines cybernetics as systems that process “differences in such a manner as to be self-corrective either toward maximizing particular variables or finding homeostatic optima” (133). Therefore, cybernetics provides a framework in which “different” elements can be added or subtracted in a cycle to produce regenerative rhythms for an optimal life. Consequently, if new ideas have the ability to affect our lives for the better, than the “different” ideas resulting from a psychedelic experience can potentially be added to our construction of life for the greater good.

This integration of new ideas into our consciousness and cybernetic cycle becomes inherent in modern society that relies on electromagnetic technology. According to Marshall McLuhan, electromagnetic technology is “total and inclusive…an external consensus or conscience is now as necessary as private consciousness” (57). As a result, McLuhan believes the totality of electromagnetic technology is unifying mankind as he/she seeks to express and take in ideas through a unified system of communication.

Therefore, if unity is being established through communication systems that are cybernetic, than there is a potential for the psychedelic experience to be shared among a vast audience. Whereas the psychedelic experience was once suppressed by subjectivity, mankind’s unity in electronic information system may allow ideas conceived from the “Gate of Ivory” to become integrated into our lives as “differences” introduced into a cybernetic cycle.

Sacrificial Cyborg and Communal Soul

The Electric Daisy Carnival draws around 130,000 people to it making it the largest electronic dance music festival outside of Europe.

Interestingly I have examined some of the characteristics of "Post-Intustrial Cyborgs" described by Hillegonda C. Rietveld in participants at raves, including myself.