Default Mode Network
It comes in waves. That's the reoccurring observation I make when I've taken a “heroic” dose of psilocybin bearing mushrooms. Outside of the fact that I'm irrationally frightened literally every time I decide to trip, up to the point that it starts happening. Then there is the short period that I'm concerned, irrationally and deeply, that I've somehow poisoned myself. Then finally, the psilocin starts replacing the serotonin in my brain and I stop worrying so much about dumb bullshit. It takes effort to overcome the fears, but not a whole lot. I've noticed that the best way to conquer fear is to not take it seriously and to ignore it. Not taking your fears seriously is pretty stupid, and I'm stupid; that my fellow gentle-persons, is the key to “heroism”. Nah, I'm just kidding, the true key to heroism is putting your shit on the line for other people. I mean overcoming your fear is part of that, but merely doing that is not a sufficient condition for being a hero.
It is going to be a pretty round about explanation I have to give to explain what I see going on. I may drop a Tantric (non-)secret or two. You may even get bored. There is definitely going to be a dash of Buddhism in this, so if you are super adamant about only reading articles about “Gods and Radicals” instead of maybe a few moments of “Bodhisattvas and Radicals”, you may want to skip the whole damn thing. I'm also going to talk about neurology, and probably fuck it up. Then to finish, we're going to look a bit at the society of the spectacle, and what 2020 can teach us.
So if you are wondering when the hell I'm going to get to explaining the title, wonder no further. The default mode network videlicet wikipedia is thus: “[...] the default mode network (DMN), also default network, or default state network, is a large scale brain network best known to be active when a person is not focused on the outside world and the brain is at wakeful rest, such as during daydreaming and mind-wandering.” However, it is also active when we “think” about ourselves and others or talk about ourselves and others, to yourself or others. The DMN is your ego, or at least “ego” is the best Sigmund Freud could do without a scanning MRI and a fucking clue.
So there are a few things you should understand about the DMN, or “ego”. The first is that the “ego” is not you, but it thinks of itself as you but actually isn't, it's just a part of you. You, that is your ego, don't make decisions. Neurology has shown this, what is presented to you as a “decision” that you made consciously actually occurs before you are aware of there being a decision to make. If that is true, you might ask, then why bother with the whole Platonic cave BS then, why the deception from my own brain? Well, there is no deception, the “ego” isn't tasked with lying to itself. That isn't its job. The “ego”s job is to make your actions and person explicable to others on a social level. In order to do that, it has to have a reasonably good narrative as to why you did or said a thing. Those narratives become more believable if the “ego” pretends it is the master and commander, instead of what it actually is, the public relations department of you. So that's its job, to produce narratives. It is very good at this and indeed, it never stops. Ever. You are doing it as you read this, I am doing it as I write this. Most people's DMN is settled into what it is going to be by age 12.
The Buddha call the DMN monkey mind. But not one monkey, he felt that it was more like a whole troop, and all of them drunk. This is the incessant mental chatter of your “ego” that zen meditation is supposed to help calm down, and if you are willing to give it a go, it might. Takes a while though. And you have to resist those narrative distractions when they come back, in waves. Also you have to have the luxury of sitting down and not doing much for several hours a day. Not all of us have such a luxury, in fact few have such luxuries. There is a better way though, a so called “lightning” path, that got its start at a time in which things had fallen apart on the sub-continent of India. It was right after the collapse of the Gupta empire, and everything was all Mad Max, but without cars or chrome. Plenty of Witnessing though.
Looking at Medieval Indian art, and reading monographs and secondary sources concerning the period, I can only come to the conclusion that much of what could be called “siddha culture”, Tantric culture, etc., has its genesis in the rediscovery of the effects of the psilocybin mushroom. Mushrooms are very taboo in Vedic culture, so no surprise they hid their pharmacological knowledge in legend and image. Very possibly, the taboo nature of mushrooms themselves has to do with the identity of Soma, called amrita by the Buddhists. The iconography of Shiva, the Adiyogin, or, first yogin... anyway, the iconography is specifically translated when it comes to Shiva's white skin and blue throat. Avalokitesvara, Shiva's Buddhist face, also has a blue throat and white skin. Mind you, not Caucasoid skin, actual white, white skin. White like the ashes left over in a funeral pyre. Both Shiva and Avalokitesvara carry jars of amrita or sakti.
But if that isn't enough to convince you, how about an entire Tantric family of deities and Bodhisattvas centered around the “Ushnisha”, or umbrella, which is, yes you guessed it, a white parasol with a blue handle. Krshna was a “cowherd” that had a very unique color of blue skin. He had all kinds of super powers n' shit. The Buddhists call him Mahasthamaprapta. Green Tara is a Bodhisattva associated with the Acacia. They used to call it Khandira. They called Syrian Rue Khandira too. Syrian Rue has all those good MAOI inhibitors. Acacia bark is full of DMT. Another chemical that takes you off the DMN. Maybe stop it with the ayahuasca vacations now?
There is a preponderance of evidence like this, for the sake of space and flow I'm leaving a lot out. So, in the wreckage of the Gupta empire, the people of that age discovered that the psilocybin mushroom, along with other tryptamine bearing plants, takes you off the default mode network; they then equated this with the Buddha's accomplishment. That would mean that they thought the Buddha's accomplishment was getting off the DMN without switching out neurotransmitters, straight off the DMN on serotonin. That would be quite the accomplishment if that were the case. Well, I'd be impressed, your mileage may vary. This could also be happening during the Kundalini experience, or the samadhi experience. If your some sort of brain scientist, you might want to check that out. But what do I know, I'm just a historian.
Ok, so time to change gears. First of all, if you thought this article would be a nice break from reading about the troubles, SURPRISE! It isn't. Second of all, what changed in America? George Floyd, as far as I can tell, wasn't different enough from all the other black people murdered by cops to account for the very different reaction to his murder than to all the other black people murdered by cops. Personally, for my money, I thought the video of Walter Scott being shot in the back by a coward wearing a police uniform would be the one. Nope. The coward got 20 in prison for his murder, but nothing changed systemically, and no one was out in the streets pulling down statues over it. Amber Guyger broke into a black dude's home and shot him fucking dead, she only got 10 for that! That was last year! And so many other murders. Nothing. Then George Floyd, casually murdered on camera. Everyone loses their shit. What changed? Was it a critical mass that was reached? Maybe, I won't discount it. But I think I have a better explanation. The Society of the Spectacle was disrupted.
Corona VIrus Disease 2019 made everyone stay at home. Millions of people out of work, permanently or not, got to sit at home and watch a cop casually murder a black man with a big shit eating grin on his face as the black man pleaded for his life. A lot of people will tell you the entertainment industry is the opiate of the modern masses, that it is the Spectacle generation machine par excellence. Nah, it ain't. Everyone wasn't done with Netflix yet, and Netflix isn't the only game in town, people had plenty to entertain themselves with, disgusting amounts of entertainment. But it didn't turn them away from the sight of a cop casually murdering a black man. If the collective gestalt of America has the society of the spectacle as its DMN, and Corona VIrus Disease 2019 disrupted the spectacle, then what was the spectacle? Oh man, this is like the riddle of steel! Come on Conan the Reader, you can do it, you can think of the answer, it is so obvious! Shall I tell you? It's the least I can do...
Americans work harder than a lot of people in the Western world, if not a lot of people in general. We bust our asses. We get paid shit. We work a lot of hours. The spectacle is your fucking job bitch! Guy Debord almost got it right. Having did not replace being, working replaced being, which was then replaced by work that isn't needed, what the economists call a, “useless fucking bullshit job”. And Corona VIrus Disease 2019 disrupted the spectacle. And that, my beautiful readers, is why the richy rich folk are desperate to get you back to work, so you will shut the fuck up and get with the program. Worried about you getting sick? Nah they ain't. It should be obvious by now that they are leveraging Corona VIrus Disease 2019 as a method of voter suppression. I mean, this is obvious to all of you, right?
So, what has 2020 taught us? It taught me that this whole time, what I thought was the spectacle that enchains our society here in America was just the bullshit that distracts you from the Distraction. Turns out the actual spectacle is your job. In the sixties the government experimented with basic income. See, back in the day, they all thought we'd be crushing elbows to get our foot in the door, so that we could maybe have the chance of working 15 hours a week! And everyone else gets to recreate. There is one reason, and one reason only that this was never to be as long as the richy rich have anything to do with it. That would disrupt the actual spectacle. Then everyone would have free time to recreate how they prefer, and if you are familiar with Americans, then you know that when we have a lot of time on our hands we start getting bored and we start going to church and we start paying attention to politics (along with the drunken partying and all that too). This frightens the rich extremely, because they don't actually hide what they are doing, if they ever even knew how. They don't have to, the spectacle keeps us all busy and tired.
I very much want to say that this will be the thing that finally roots out racism in America. But that fight, as well as the fight against authoritarianism in general, isn't a pitched battle and never was. I know, I hate that too. I was trained in my youth to fight pitched battles, and win. Even at the cost of my flesh. But this isn't that kind of battle, so I can get frustrated easily. I'm old now too, and lets face it, 24 years of anarchism (from age 16 on) and nothing got better, authoritarianism and racism only spread. To tell the truth, it feels like a personal failure. But there isn't time these days to wallow in self pity, nor is it healthy or good to try and make this about me. This isn't a pitched battle! It is many pitched battles, of many different kinds, that we all will have to fight over and over again through the ages. That being the case, an awareness of timing might be helpful. You just have to remember that your opportunities come in waves.
Patacelsus
A Discordian for 20 years, Patacelsus finally got comfortable when the 21st century “started getting weird.” When not casting sigils, taking part in Tibetan Buddhist rituals, or studying the unfortunate but sometimes amusing stories of the dead, he’s been known to wander the hidden ways of the city, communing with all of the hidden spirits one can find in a city. As Patacelsus sees it, we’re all already free; after completing the arduous task of waking up to that we can then proceed, like a doctor treating a patient, to try to rouse others from the bitter and frightening nightmares of Archism. He laughs at Samsara’s shadow-play in lovely California, in the company of his wife, two cats, and two birds.