Can you elaborate a little more on the environment you built (and are building)? You mentioned stroboscopic lights, did you use binaural beats as well? Were the frequencies of light and sound synchronized, as in typical mind machines? Would you say that you were navigating yourself around alpha/ beta/ theta/ gamma states? Or was this effect something totally separate?
Did you use headphones, or a giant sound system, or both? The music you made --
CAN we hear some? :D What was it like? Some people mentioned only certain music would work. And that it depended on individual taste. What music was on your play list?
I've heard of some people do Nitrous and say they could imagine the perfect song for augmenting the experience, but alas they weren't musicians nor could communicate their imagination.
I was thinking of making a system like this myself. Suggestions? I was going to use
video goggles with stroboscopic animation, plus headphones with binaural beats, plus some kind of music whose tempo also sync up with the sound/light frequencies (blasting from a sound system with MAD bass).. and control everything (maybe with a USB steering wheel LMAO)
AND can you tell us more about your techniques for bringing back information? Were they memory techniques? Spaced repetition-ish? As you moved back from state to state? (like recalling a dream, you retell it to yourself in hypnopompia, and again in waking state, and again later until you find a pen/keyboard/voice recorder) Or after you came down, would you "drive" the machine back to where you were, trace your steps on the trip, to perhaps spur memory?
AND can you tell us some of the knowledge you brought back to earth? The bits of epiphanies you could remember? It doesn't matter how esoteric it is, even you think would seem insignificant to us. I'm just really curious to know what kind of
psychedelic information psychonauts are capable of capturing.
I'm guessing you kept a journal? Or you will keep one? Show us! (at least a sample?) Have you thought about utilizing a
voice recorder during/after these experiences? Psychonaut journals are fascinating. (Have you heard of Carl Jung's
"Red Book"?) I'm in the process of scanning my journals right now, and publishing them on the internet (trade journals?
)
You've done a great deal of awesome sharing all of your knowledge with us -- your technique, your story. You're a true psychonaut, and your wisdom invaluable to the community of mind explorers. Can you elaborate more on your knowledge of the territory? The map. The epiphanies. (I can understand this is one of the hardest things to articulate and remember, and there's a strong state-dependent memory effect, but perhaps it's one of the most important duties one has being a psychonaut)
In other words,
did you catch any medium-sized fish?
What an amazing post!! Thank you! Both for the kudos so nicely expressed, and for the very relevant and clearly portrayed questions - many of which contained their own answers. You seem to think very much like I do, so many of the conclusions and postulations are extremely accurate, at least as I see things.
I have been asked a number of times to expand on the whole 'ship' thing. I was intending to write a self contained and separate post about this - but the time just never presented itself - so I will try to express some of it now.
But let me try and answer and comment on at least
some of your post:
The context that you need to incorporate into your thoughts is
when I did the bulk of my work on this, as many of the thoughts you have offered, are ideas that have only over the last decade and a half become actual possibilities. You have proposed ideas that I am *now* working on, but which were technologically impossible at the time.
I started doing Nitrous (then Gascid once I found it ) in 1981, and the first 15 years of my exploring Gascid space was done before the Internet and home computers. So the materials and 'technologies' that I wanted to work with did not exist, and I had to get very creative in making what seems now pathetically primitive stuff.
It is also worth noting that I came at the whole Gascid thing from two distinct perspectives - in no particular order of important. On the one hand I was/am a pure scientist, and my research and experimentation dove very deeply into the realm of the brain/mind, in the areas of psychology, hypnosis and philosophy. On the other hand I was coming at it as an artist, the end goal being entertainment. It was iin the attempt to create this psychedelic amusement park that I discovered certain things about light - and its effect on the brain/mind.
So to answer much of what you wrote, I would have to answer it in terms of what I am doing/intend to do
now - but I will first describe what led up to it. I wish that I could post photos here, as I could show you the actual stuff that I used.
It all revolved around the concept of a strobe. I was fascinated to read many, many years ago, that one in twenty
non-epileptics will have a seizure when exposed to a stroboscopic light pulsing at 20 flashes per second. This was incontrivertble proof that light has a direct relationship to consciousness, and I extrapolated that if this simple truth could be fine tuned, it might be possible to actually
control the brain/mind to a much more specific level of effect (This is of course exactly where the whole mind-machine technology went). However, this was the mid 1980's, and there were no programmable chips, or even LED's or otherwise programmatically controlled incandescent light.
I was left with a FIY situation and so I cut a circular piece of cardboard, and cut a hole about 2 inches in diameter close to one of the edges. I then mounted this on a small electric motor, and made a rheostat (using wire and a stick) to control the voltage. I then mounted this on a box, vertically, and placed a light bulb behind the wheel - aligned with the hole - and turned on the juice. The result was a very primitive strobe light - if you sat in front of it and looked at the light. By increasing the voltage, I could make the strobe go faster or slower.
I discovered that by reversing the polarity of the electrical feed (DC), the motor would spin in the reverse direction. This did not do much for the strobe itsef - but it inspired me to add to the mix. On the original Star Trek series, Spock has at his work console, this Black and white spinning disk that created an optical illusion. I decided to try this on my wheel, so I very crudely (to start with) drew a Spiral onto the wheel. This created the effect of being 'sucked in' to the wheel, and alternatively 'pushed out' of the wheel by reversing the polarity and subsequent direction of the spinning wheel. And thus was my very first component of my space/time machine/ship forged.
The discovery came the first time i used this device while on Nitrous. It changed *everything*!! It no longer mattered that I had a crude box with a light stuck in it. While under the effect of Nitrous, I had created exactly what I was trying to create. And I also realizded that I was into a new and unexpected realm - hypnosis.
The thought just occurred to me that lends validity to the work that I have done in my exploration of the psychedelic realms. When I refer to having made a 'space/time machine', I have always accepted that letting this thought out of the closet was something of a risk as I was unlikely to be taken seriously by most (although I have to admit, that I have been given a lot more leeway than I expected). My biggest argument for the validity of chemically induced mindscapes/realities/universes is the one that states simply that consciousness is a chemical reaction taking place in one's brain. We perceive reality as we do,
only because it is the product of the chemical reaction that is constantly recreating itself to produce an environment that allows us to interact with everything that is not us, without being overwhelmed with too much information. It has been postulated by many (and made famous through Huxley's "Doors of Perception") that psychedelic drugs essentially enlarge the information pipe between brain and senses, and temporarily allow us to experience
more of the reality that we inhabit than our brains can normally process. However, when you take a drug like DMT, which is
so powerful that is can temporarily competely eliminate our reality in its entirety, and replace if with another universe - one so alien to us, that it for all intents and purposes defies description. The obvious question becomes "is this new reality an hallucination, or is it a 'real' place". And if it
is an hallucination, what then is the nature of hallucination itself. I believe that the answer is that it is *not* an hallucination any more than our normal reality is an hallucination. If consciousness
is in fact simply a chemical reaction occurring in the brain, then it is possible - and
likely that there are potentially an infinite number of realities, all as valid as this one, all existing in the same space (but likely not time), and that we can travel anywhere in the universe without physically going anywhere, without the need for an 'actual' space ship, but simply by altering our brain chemistry. Our body remains where it is, but the mind is temporarily absent. And as time is redundant, we actually
can spend days, weeks, months or years in a different universe, while only minutes appear to pass in the time occupied by the body. We experience this time dilation in dreams so we
know that time is relative.
One of the goals - possibly the
primary goal of my work with light/brain is to manifest the notion that it is possible to use light to alter one's brain chemistry, and that it may be possible to induce in a subject - a bona fide, full plown psychedelic experience without the need to ingest drugs of any kind. If there is only one mountain, but many paths to its summit, with Meditation being one, psychedelic drugs being another, then it is not illogical to presume that hypnosis can be yet another, and owing to hypnosis being largely dependant on both the subjects willingness to be hypnotized as well as the subjects natural ability to be
able to be hypnotized, it makes logical sense for technology using a medium such as light to become the means whereby the subjects resistance to becoming hypnotized is broken down and eliminated - essentially potentially hypnotizing someone 'against their will'.
However that is a different story. The point being made here is that hypnosis became a realm/medium/conduit to a place of phsychedelic enlightenment, and also a mechanism of recall of the memories accumulated, but hidden from the conscious mind. And perhaps a clearer definition of my space/time ship is not so much the physical parts - the technology - but rather the state of mind itself. Combining hypnosis and psychedelics allows one to 'create' a universe to design. A 'laboritory' of sorts.
I had found the
key. I knew it with certainty. So I went to work, and over the course of the next four odd years, I created the actual parts, and assembled, and continued to assemble, my ship - always a work in progress. As I have said, my goal was entertainment - a light and sound show - designed specifically for use on Gascid. In the years to come I would work toward being able to make this 'system' something that could be simultaneously experienced by many, but in my 'laoratory', the room itself formed the scaffolding for the environment. This was the absolute opposite of 'virtual'. And only *one* person truly got to sit in the 'cockpit' at any one time. Other people could be in the room and experience a peripheral show, but front row center was the place to be in order to maximize all of the 'technology' involved. And it was from this position, that I built the ship - me in the center of the room, and the rest of it all around me.
The topic of Gascid, it's marriage to Yoga, Light and sound is monstrous, and will probably take half of the book I am writing to even scratch the surface, and as such must largely remain omitted from this post. But the bare essentials require the mention of a few facts.
It was a functional sculpture of sorts - I was in essance creating a portrayal of the manifestation of the inside of my mind - and in this headspace I am almost
obsessed with symmetry. In Gascid space - specifically in regard to the Yoga, balance and symmetry are critical. It plays into the intrinsic nature of the experience. When doing Gascid, on many occasion I was not home and did not have any of my electronic optical tools with me. I would always begin my session by positioning myself either facing the sun or moon - or alternatively having them directly behind me. I would position and reposition the objects lying around wherever I am to instill a sense or ordered symmetry. There are 'positions' that need to have an object in that place. it is all part if 'fitting in' to the space surrounding me. The arrangements of these objects are almost always as close to identical to one another - no matter where i am doing it. Putting 'placeholders' in these locations served, in the end, almost as well as the original wheels and lights. I learned to know gascid space so well, and my use of hypnosis became so easy in the end that I did not
need my ship to be able to travel.
You asked about music - the type of music - the relationship between music and visuals - you mentioned using Binaural rhythms. I am a musician and have written and recorded a lot of music - a fair amount of wehich was instrumental. Sound on Gascid - specifically music, is the most utterly amazing experience - almost always making me cry. When I am in my ship doing Gascid, I will do experiences around specific songs or music. I plan and time the Nitrous to last the length of the music, climaxing at its finale, but also increasing the Nitrous load at specific points in the music. We are talking serious choreography here. The hits of nitrous are specifically timed, and delivered in very specific amounts at various points in the music., When I was showing this to the very few friends that have seen it, felt it,
been it, I have always done the loading of the nitrous in the correct doses, and cueing the user to take the hits at specific times. It's psychedelic entertainment designed specifically not just to knock someones socks off, but to create in them a subjective experience - an experience that I designed. It's more than listening to a song - it's more than watching a visual show - it's more than the combination of *all* of the technology and artistry - it is playing not an instrument, or a tangible aspect of any kind. The persons actual spirit is the instrument, and when I put CHAOS together, it was a Gascid Show, set to a five part instrumental musical production, written specifically for the experience - to be a part of the experience. and timed so perfectly, that whoever sat in the driver's seat would have a very, very good chance of having pretty much the same experience as anyone else who did it. It was a technological tour of the inner universe. I watched their faces while experiencing it - and all of the expressions were the same in each person, at each part that I had designed to be exactly that. Owing to the lack of technology, I was part of the show - and what I could not automate - I played manually.
To get a feel for what I am about to describe, you need to see my work with Fractals. I have a presence on YouTube in which hosts all of my fractal work. These short videos were what I did while I was waiting for the technology that I needed to be invented. Each video is choreographed to an original musical piece (answering many of your other questions). You cannot imagine - but perhaps can extrapolate some of what I was attempting to do by watching CHAOS - the original Fractal video. I completed it *
fifteen* years ago - on computer technology so primitive. I had to generate *each* image in the video individually, and to accomplish this has to write a program to interface with the fractal generator. I then took these tens of thousands of images and created short video sequences from them. I then used Adobe Premiere to edit the full blown works of art. As the technology improved, so my possibilities opened up, and if you see the video that I made 3 years ago (ChaoticEnergy(Full)) with state of the art technology, the difference in possibilities is exponential. But CHAOS was built from the ground up - the music was written specifically for it. WHile CHAOS was designed as a Gascid experience, the only way to share any of it was this. CHAOS took me *two years* to make from conception to completion (it is 9 minutes in length), including writing and recording the music (I do everything - write, play, sing, produce, engineer and mix) and is my only work of art that was written to be an actual subjective experience. But without my 'ship' there was no way to show it to anyone - so I made the fractal videos. While I have got considerably better fractal footage now - I want you to see this one (first) as it specifically addresses what you asked. All of my fractal/musical work can be found at
http://www.youtube.com/fractalgod (the featured video is the *only* one that does not use my own music) - and CHAOS itself can be found here:
http://www.youtube.com/user/fractalgod#p/a/u/0/f7sei41GovI
It's worth the 9 minutes of your life.
The parts of the machine expanded. My original spinning wheel with a hole cut in it became the original template of those that followed. I made a series of wheels, all with very specific designs on them (you can see some of them in some of the fractal videos). When the wheel spins, - the designs in them create optical illusions that on Nitrous/gascid are utterly unbelievable to see and have a much deeper significance. The effect on the mind is indescribably even in metaphor and has to be experienced to in any way understood. But if one were to attach something -
anything - in an attempt to describe not the detail, but rather the awe - disbelief - incredulity -
size of it's profundity - were it actually possible. Pehaps as significant as genuine time travel. Maybe bona fide encounters with alien life forms. Stuff like that - that big. The visual aspect of the psychedelics is intrinsic. The wheels only look the way that they are suppposed to when you have taken the drugs they were designed for. I had a total of 4 wheels - all 128 - 24 inches in diameter. Each of the wheels represented an aspect of my mind. There was one wheel directly in front of me - facing me - and the strobe was created by this wheel. Then there was another wheel (all of them on motors) that lay horizonatally on the floor in front of me - lined up with the 'main' wheel. This angle created a totally different effect to the other (all of this needs to be in a separate post). Then (to keep with the symmetry) there were two more wheels, one on my left and one on my right.
Each wheel had lights shone on it I had a geat number of other lights in the room - all symmetrical and positions in those same spots. In front of me I used a candle - sometimes many candlles(in the midst of all the Order the candle flame provided the only random - totally unpredictable light source. Other times I used a crystal ball for the meditation and focus. The sound system was set up very specifically equalized and set to it's maximum undistorted volume - all unwanted light was shut down.
This may not sound like so much - but understand that once the Nitrous came into the picture *everything* changed. The wheels were no longer just spiniing disks - they were part of the
engine of my ship. They are communication tools as well - both to communicate with myself - and the 'guides and gods' that I perceived to exist in the other realm (also another story). Once the Gascid was well and truly working, the room transformed from the bunch of components that I have described, as,... welll,... a Space/time ship. I actually 'drove'/'flew' it. It was not just a show - it was an interactive show. The amount of nitrous controls how fast and how far you go, and with each new level, the wheels and lights reconfigured themselves. They went from being wheels to being portals. Slowing down and speeding up the wheels has the mind *Unbelievable* effect - like travelling at the speed of light - changing the speed of the passage of time - reversing the wheels so that they would come to a stop and then start going backwars is something that no words could encapsulate. It literally
melted your mind.
But the focus wa always that single object in the center of a world of symmetrical pairs - a candle - or a crystal - or crystal ball - or solitary LED. It is through this single point - this singularity - that the 'ship' allows you to travel. It is somewhat like being sucked into a Black Hole and experiecing the whole of creation - passing through every point in the history of time - everything is one - and all contained in the smallest pixel of light.
Chaos was completed just before Christmas, and on Christmas eve, myself and my three best friends went down to the room that housed the 'ship'. They each took a turn - I loaded the nitrous and fed it to them, as well as playing many of the lights in real time. Two years of work compressed into 9 minutes. A totally successful 9 minutes. In that space - embraced in art of my own creation - I felt more fulfilled than I have ever felt. My love of myself was blissfully cleansing. In those moments I am as pure as I can be. I am one with my eternal soul. I experience the universe. I am the universe.
It was not that long after the completion of CHAOS that I hit the wall and ended up in the Neurological ward of the hospital - the beginning of what has been a
tremendous amount of suffereing in my life. Unfortunately it derailed everything. At the time I thought that I would likely never do Nitrous again, and so I attempted, while it was still fresh in my mind, to try and capture and bring back as much as possible - to being
permanently into my life - the beliefs and foundations of understanding that I had gleaned. If I was never going back - I had to make the suffering that I was to endure have a reason - make sense - to bring back what was so important to me that I almost killed myself attempting to prove it.
I went two full years without doing Gascid, but eventually could not live without it forever, and after a time I resumed doing it - but in moderation - as it will always be. About 12 years ago I got my mind-machine. I could not believe how amazing it was, and did meny sessions of both acid and Nitrous, both separately and combined. I contacted and befriended the person who developed it, and he shared with me many programming tips and code snippits to allow me to write my own software to interface with the glasses.
During these years my vision was redefined. With the advent of tdigital technology and LED's I started to design my own prototype. The concept of the protoype was to remove the need to be the only person sitting in the center of a room to make it happen. My desire was/is to expand *massively* the optical interface, where is goes from being a stereoscopic, monotonous eyes-closed interface to a headset interface in which the eytes remain open in order to be able to position the lights, to have many *more* lights - coming from different directions, in different colours, at differen't angles - but most importantly - the fact that you would actually be looking directly into the light (naturally of a soft enough light to not injure the eyes). The goal I was seeking was/is in essence total mind control. The idea would be to use the lights (much like the mind machines do) to overpower the minds natural resistance to hypnosis, and then to take that mind to any of a vast number of programs that work something like the existing technologies, but take it much, much further.
I discovered on Nitrous (even by itself) that certain strobe pulse rates (especially ones that are changing speed, much like the effects of the wheels) would create a very specific subjective response - in this case,
pleasure. The idea was to use the Nitrous as a tool to discover and map the speed, intensity, colour, acceleration or deceleration, and then to focus in on the collection of data that I found, refining the optical program to create predictable subjective emotional responses induced by light patterns. Perfect this, and it would be like writing a song that
always brings tears to ones, eyes without ever
understandingwhat is behind the emotion (and just imagine creating a machine that can make you feel good. This was my original intent - but it occurs to me that there would be an addiction potential. If any of my beliefs in this area are right, then I can imagine a time to come when
light[/I - in certain configurarions - will become illegal.
A further step to this would be to introfduce a biofeedback device. The basic idea would be that I could play with the various aspects of the lights - which lights, what colours, positioning, intensity, pulse etc. and while doing so, the biofeedback device would be feeding back my response to the stimulus. I could have some interface - clicking a mouse button perhaps - through which I could tell the computer that it felt good. The computer would then remember the optical program segment that had been running for playback later. The computer would then play back the various segments that 'felt' good in a controlled or random manner, and again record the information as to which of these sequences worked best.
I did keep records of my experiences. I did Gascid over 300 times, and as the memories fade so rapidly when you return - keeping those memories became a mission critical task. There are points - in Nitrous - when absolutely everything in the universe makes sense - when you feel you understand the deeper connectedness of everything in the universe - you can even think actual thoughts that use words and explain it - so well do you understand it. But by the time you return - is has gone.
I used pen and paper at first - however the task of trying to write words - even hold a pen - hell, even recognize a pen. It was only possible to get a word or two down before concentrating on the task became impossible. I
I finally found the solution in my Sony Walkman! This was pre-MP3's so cassette tapes were it. Mine had the ability to record from an internal microphone. She when the thoughts came to me, I would unpause the tape and record my thoughts. In the beginning I just let the tape run - but transcribing it was way too boring. So I took to pausing and unpausing. Sometimes it led to accidentally not recording something at a 'critical' moment.
I guess I was trying to find the words to express to someone who had *not* taken Nitrous or anything else neccessarily, the nature of the psychedelic experience in a way that would have the effect of enlightenment on them that can sometimes be felt while on psychedelics. After I ended up in the hospital, I felt so bitter, and was on the receiving end of a guilt trip from my wife at the time, that I burned all my gascid diaries and tapes. Years and years of work - all gone.
But I had, by the end, gone far enough on the nitrous to bring back a considerable amount of memory of the experiences. When I resumed my exploration (very slowly), I tried keeping them again - I used video camera's - mostly to record a dance that I have been developing - a kind of Aerobic Yoga, but in the end I realize that I remember everything. It doesn;t matter how long it has been since I last did it - and even if I can remember virtually nothing of my experiences - as soon as I do it again, the memories flood back. Totall Recall. There is no longer any need forme to keep notes for myself. My need for notes and words - would be to attempt to express what I understand, to others in a way that is rational, articulate and coherent.
There are still questions that i have not answered - you asked so many of the right ones. I also had no intention of writing all of this. I still need to respond on the memory techniques that came after realizing that I needed to commit it all to memory beofore I could ever express it - and before I could remember it for the future, I had to remember it from the past - because I would need to actually understand it if I'm going to express it.
Thank you for taking a genuine interest and sharing your accurate insights. I hope you forgive my pedantry.
Peace,
TMP
