Beyond The Static

[mecaib]

Throughout my psychedelic meanderings I've come across something both terrifying and hopeful. It is a place beyond that which has degraded into nothing but static (static as in TV snow). Beyond the static there is something else...

My first encounter with the static realm was through dreams. There was a window, a portal comprised of pure noise--terrifying in its chaos, devastating in its oblivious finality. In those early dreams I shied away from it, afraid of what it meant.

My next experience was resultant of an oral dose of cannabis. 3/4 joint brought me face-to-face with the duality (black-and-white, there-and-not-there) nature of existence.

My cornerstone experience was a fateful Coricidin trip, one in which I earned permanent eye damage and an eternal knowledge of a most disturbing, unshakable belief that *everything* we do, think, act upon and experience, is recorded forever in a very real layer of existence. I had never heard about the Akashic Records before this, but what I went through seems to bear witness of such a place.

My last experience with this realm, six years ago, also took place in a dream. Not all dreams are dreams: some are visions. In this dream I was meditating on my bed. I lost all contact with my body without losing contact with my consciousness. As I became numb to my physical self, I entered a place composed entirely of static. Like TV snow, but of a higher resolution. Pure existential chaos. But... I began to see something... It was a tapestry. Of the soul? I do not know. But I was able to gaze upon this visual for a long, long time. It did not change--of that, I am sure. It was the epitome of static's other definition. It did not change! Most dreams' visuals morph into other things: sights going from one thing to the next. But this was much, much different. I was looking at something eternal, something that cannot be altered no matter how hard I might try.

I can still remember it.

Throughout my journeying, I've penetrated that terrible place. I've gone beyond oblivion. I've seen something beyond memory, possibly beyond death altogether.

My question to you is this: have you traveled through the static? What have you seen?

The closest contemporary account regarding this place that I have found is this:
http://www.erowid.org/experiences/exp.php?ID=19396

I think there must be more to this issue that what I (or the aforementioned trip-reporter) has touched upon.

If you can provide some experience relating to this subject, then by all means, type away Please don't make shit up!

-Mec

P.S. To Jack The Evil Chicken, through whom my purest experience was facilitated, I tip my hat and bid you peace and good tidings.

 

[Clusterone666]

Can you explain a little better? this does sound familier, but i'm not sure i'd need you to elaborate a bit.

 

[mecaib]

Can you explain a little better? this does sound familier, but i'm not sure i'd need you to elaborate a bit.

OK. When you've lost all input from this reality your awareness degrades into pure noise. All of the signals you would normally receive are total nonsense. It's the "chaotic blindness" DXM can give you that you might have heard about, but to the extreme. Everything people say to you--anything you see/hear/fee/remember--is nothing. You are alone, without even your own memories to guide you.

There is nothing but unfiltered, universal awareness. No black, no white, yet curiously, a mixture of the two. The ego is obliterated.

What is experienced is what's left after there is nothing left of you. It's the gold that remains in the pan, the fat that cannot vaporize.

I experienced it with my friend in California's Aviary, but I might have just been tripping :D I was just wondering if anyone else had experienced anything close...

 

[Clusterone666]

OK. When you've lost all input from this reality your awareness degrades into pure noise. All of the signals you would normally receive are total nonsense. It's the "chaotic blindness" DXM can give you that you might have heard about, but to the extreme. Everything people say to you--anything you see/hear/fee/remember--is nothing. You are alone, without even your own memories to guide you.

There is nothing but unfiltered, universal awareness. No black, no white, yet curiously, a mixture of the two. The ego is obliterated.

What is experienced is what's left after there is nothing left of you. It's the gold that remains in the pan, the fat that cannot vaporize.

I experienced it with my friend in California's Aviary, but I might have just been tripping :D I was just wondering if anyone else had experienced anything close...

Oh! i've had that experience multiple times, it's ego death, and if it's not ego death, it's that FINE line between reality and death, it's where your body and mind finally snap and you are free.
I know the feeling, it is amazing, it's impossible to describe but possible to imagine. And I know that DXM feeling i've done DXM probably (not sure just guessing) 50+ times, and i've hit 3rd-sigma plateu each time (sigma once). But i know the feeling all to well.

 

[mecaib]

Oh! i've had that experience multiple times, it's ego death, and if it's not ego death, it's that FINE line between reality and death, it's where your body and mind finally snap and you are free.
I know the feeling, it is amazing, it's impossible to describe but possible to imagine. And I know that DXM feeling i've done DXM probably (not sure just guessing) 50+ times, and i've hit 3rd-sigma plateu each time (sigma once). But i know the feeling all to well.

What I'm describing isn't exactly "the void" or any of the usual ego death scenarios in which "nothing" is experienced. Otherwise, I would have made a point of distinguishing it The hallmark of this experience is a transition zone of complete and utter static. Just like TV noise, but you can't get away from it.

Is that what you experienced? A transition from being you, to experiencing pure static, and then to something else entirely?

Everything I've heard or read about people seeing static and visual noise pertains to HPPD or mild DXM CEVs... Maybe I'm not explaining it well enough, or maybe it's something unique to me

 

[psood0nym]

Everything people say to you--anything you see/hear/fee/remember--is nothing. You are alone, without even your own memories to guide you.

There is nothing but unfiltered, universal awareness. No black, no white, yet curiously, a mixture of the two. The ego is obliterated.

What is experienced is what's left after there is nothing left of you. It's the gold that remains in the pan, the fat that cannot vaporize.

Your description sounds a lot like ego death, even if what you've come to think of the term doesn't seem to fit. The term ego death is both extremely loaded and ambiguous, and so people say such and such is ego death or not because it either fulfills the semantic criteria or doesn't (things like "you" couldn't remember it if "you" died, so if you remember it it wasn't ego death, or that ego death is "nothingness," etc.). We've ended up with a lot of different experiences all labeled as ego death. There's a massive unresolved thread on it. In my experience ego death isn't awareness death. It is radical, distinct, unmistakable, and, for me, very disturbing. As you say about being "beyond" the static, it's conclusion is always essentially the same. So whatever I've experienced it sounds similar to your experience.

I'm not sure if my experience of it is the same phenomena as your "passing" through the static, but each of the four times I've experienced ego death it was proceeded by an electrical shock and a loud buzzing noise. I interpret this feature of the transition to seizure like activity resulting from my awareness disengaging from the ego pattern. I can imagine if the transition was slowed for me it would feel like I was an "untuned receiver" for a while. If I could stay inside the electrical shock sensation I imagine it would be as you describe the static -- "pure existential chaos".

Afterward, what's left is an awareness of the processes of the perceiving body disengaged from egoic interpretation or control. It seems like the experience of something unchanging because your awareness during the experience is of powerless disengagement from sensational patterns. But really the lens of perception is still very much in place weaving those sensational patterns, just no longer into an ego pattern. You're awareness moves from a recognition of the finished tapestry of the ego to the string feeds of sensation and the programmatic movements of the bioelectric loom that weaves them. It's certainly not beyond death. When we truly die I imagine those who die slowly enough do experience ego death as the resources for maintaining the ego fall away. But true death involves the shutdown of perceptual processes as well, meaning, I suppose, the end of all awareness.

Also, like you, I experienced it once in a dream/vision, or almost did. It occurred about a week after experiencing ego death from a combination of DXM and 5-MeO-DMT. I dreamed I was Aristotle. I had left a planetarium-like dwelling meant to symbolize Aristotle's philosophy, and I was searching for Nietzsche. I was told by his followers at his home that he had "ascended" and had left to live in a voracious swamp (Nietzsche's philosophy). Nietzsche's "ascended form" was a two-dimensional eye, and as I walked across a log over a pool of water in the swamp it slithered under me like a flatworm. As soon as I gazed into it I was pulled into his pupil irresistibly (the eye is perhaps analogous to the "portal" in your early dreams). I re-experienced the sensation of the DXM/5-MeO-DMT trip from a week before as I fell through the eye, and watched and felt the deeply ordered self-concept of Aristotle symbolically and personally deconstruct into a field of brilliant white static until the familiar electrical jolt of ego death was finally felt. However, I did not "cross," because the jolt awakened me.

 

[mecaib]

I guess it is the same thing some of you have experienced, only in a slightly different format

 

[Solipsis]

The static you described, yes I know that but it is generally very transient, if not then it's part of the drug effect. It is also pretty similar to the phenomenon called flanging and less similar to ego death IMO, the only commonality is dissociation as a basis for it.

When trying to meditate sober, this static never has a very high gain and seems to have a self-limiting mechanism in it. Random inner effects are picked up then and interpreted as incoming signals as a result of a lack of change in signal... but it seems to cancel itself out as you go deeper, in stages.
DXM seems to produce a lot of static for me, lots more than ketamine does.