Platform for Dialogue:
Stanislav Grof’s proposal of the Cartography of the Human Psyche: Biographical, Perinatal, Transpersonal Domains.
Perinatal and transpersonal phenomena have been described throughout the ages in religious, mystical, and occult literature of various countries of the world. – Stanislav Grof from his book, “Psychology of the Future: Lessons From Post Modern Consciousness Research”
Clinical and academic psychiatry use a current model of the human psyche that limits the psyche to only postnatal biography and onwards. Freud postulated that a new-born child’s psyche is a Tabula Rasa. That there is nothing that precedes birth, including birth itself. Incredulous as it might be, psychiatry doesn’t believe that biological birth is a psychodrama. Surely there would be quite a number of Mothers who would disagree. The central nervous system of a new-born baby’s neurons in the cerebral cortex hasn’t developed the protective sheath, made from a lipid rich fatty substance called Myelin. This acts like the plastic insulation on electrical wires. Psychiatry doesn’t take into account that the auto-biographical map starts prenatally, only postnatally. That is why you have this distressing state of affairs in modern psychology, where you have ten different schools of depth psychology, with ten different models with ten different therapies. According to Stanislav Grof, there are four ‘hypothetical dynamic matrices governing the processes related to the perinatal level of the unconscious’, called the four ‘Basic Perinatal Matrices’ (BPM). These BPM’s correspond to the stages of birth, during the process of childbirth.
Cartography of the Human Psyche: Table 2 Basic Perinatal Matrices:
The passing of information.
After completing my essay, which involved the cut-up technique, the collaboration of Brion Gysin and William S. Burroughs. Together with some insights on abstract and representational painting, then I did some extensive research on Gerhard Richter’s photo-paintings. This led to me watching a documentary on the most recent work of Gerhard Richter. Where in, he starts to apply heavy amounts of paint on to the left-hand side of a canvas, then, with a long plank of wood, scrapes the paint across the canvas. (I had kept in mind his blur photograph paintings.) These abstracts he produced were interesting, I was thinking about the blur, speed and the passing of information. This seemed to be backed up by obtaining and watching Decoder (1984) directed by Muscha and featured Genesis P’Orridge and William S. Burroughs. (Thanks to the help of Luke Nash.)
Then finally, Towers Open Fire by Anthony Balch and William S. Burroughs. From that footage I made some screen shots of cathode ray monitors containing visual noise.
The second and third image was like a monochrome version of some of Gerhard Richter’s recent work. Plus, early Arabic calligraphy and Kufic squares came to mind as well.
The static or visual noise from a cathode ray monitor is a common and familiar sight to a person of my age. But the generation that were born at the beginning of the 21st century would only perceive those images as something abstract or mysterious, even in the realms of mysticism itself. E.V.P. or Electric Voice Phenomena works in the same way as watching static. You will see whatever you want or told, (Programmed.) within the noise. Because the brain likes to make sense of its perception of things. Therefore, it can spook itself out. It is very psychedelic and abstract in nature. The mind is insecure, it seeks order out of chaos.
Out of these ideas, I painted two coats on a canvas board (35.6 x 45.7cm) Mars Black. Then I squeezed a fair quantity of Titanium white paint onto a long beer mat. Then twice only, from the left-hand side, scraped the paint that was on the beer mat, horizontally along the width of the canvas board. Then it was left to dry. Next day I had bought some 120-grit wet and dry sandpaper from Wilkos, and rubbed down the surface of the white paint, while wearing a facemask.
What came to my mind was V.H.S. tracking and that’s it’s title.
It can be viewed either way round, and it is abstract and representational at the same time.
Some time later, I applied the divide and multiply process to this piece of work. The outcome was interesting to say the least…
First step, isolate a selected component from the image:
Unfortunately the image can not be displayed. Because WordPress sucks!
(Step 1.)
Then copy/multiply the selected component into a 3 x 3 grid.
If you look closely at the final image, it is surprising how they are similar in nature to Tibetan Buddhist script juxtaposed to these patterned lines.
The next part got more interesting…
I inverted and broke down the white colour range in the digital image, until this was the result.
Then I selected another component which was the middle band, even though each band is the same.
Turned it upside down and scaled it up to fit the width of the screen.
Now it resembles more like Arabic script than Tibetan Buddhist script.
Observe the juxtaposition…
In a more profound sense, it evokes a sound-wave form or even data from an electronic pulse. What is the nature of the nervous system but an array of electro-chemical pulses? Maybe you’re looking at your soul?
Might it be all the same thing? The passing of information. Sic transit gloria mundi.
‘The passing of information.’
Parascience and Permutation: The Photo-based work of Brion Gysin:
Notes taken from Bruce Grenuile
In the spring of 1958, when Gysin took residence in the highly charged atmosphere of the Beat Hotel in Paris, he embarked on a short, intense period of initiating and collaborating in the production of an extraordinary range of projects. The photo-based works in particular-involving slide projection, film, photo-collage and conventional photography-are remarkable for their prescient character and rich diversity. An examination of Gysin’s use of photography during this period is another piece in the puzzle of coming to understand his distinctly visionary role as an artist. Gysin’s Parisian Renaissance began with the return to painting that he had predicted when leaving Tangiers. His photo-based work emerged in part from his interest in the grid that he had developed with a paint roller. The camera in its various forms was treated like a roller or a tape recorder, serving as another machine with which to explore permutations. (See page 184.) Apparently triggered by the cabbalistic writing that has been part of an amulet concealed in his Tangiers restaurant the 1001 Nights, Gysin first developed in Paris an original compositional conceit that involved the use of a combination of Arabic-style calligraphy running from right to left with Japanese style calligraphy running from top to bottom. The resulting grid was a powerful formal tool that deftly unified the surface of the painting, activating it in a manner similar to his Morocco market scene paintings, while providing multi-faceted references to the cabbalistic grid, Eastern mysticism, and the all-over surface style of contemporary abstract art. This new calligraphic grid set up, an obsessive, repetitive structure that would echo across all of Gysin’s projects from this period. Through his photo-based works he produced elaborate performances using repeated images and permutated texts, complex collages unified by an underlying roller grid and deceptively simple photographs that skilfully adapted to the ready-made grid of the contact sheet.
In 1960, Gysin found a simple formal extension of his cabbalistic grid that had, in his paintings and drawings, been formed in the horizontal/vertical conjunction of the Arabic and Japanese calligraphy. This new grid was formed by recutting the surface design of a rubber roller to enhance its patterns by making it slightly irregular and asymmetrical. (See page 164.) Gysin’s interest in the repetitive character of the new roller grid lay not in its predictability but its possibilities. It opens up doors for the permutations he explored in his poetry, sound recordings, films and multimedia performances throughout the 1960’s. Obsessive repetition, produced through mathematical permutation or the use of an underlying grid, provided Gysin with new ways to reveal the ‘reflexes of our conscience.’
An artist who is interested in all the structural problems of sensation and who examines with great objectivity and curiosity the possibility of sensorial enrichment innate, in the perspective capacity of humankind. His research is in short Para-scientific; he ventures into very particular areas, not limiting himself to theoretic discussion, as the Dadaists did, but going into an actual examination of semantic links to which we entrust ourselves daily with our senses. Obsessive repetition, the upsetting of relationships, unconventional stimuli etc, constitute the instruments that permit to examine the novelty of the reflexes of our conscience, and therefore also the novelty of the ways that they reveal themselves.
The para-scientific, unconventional stimuli that assumed a growing significance in Gysin’s work of the early 1960’s was facilitated in part with his collaborations with Ian Sommerville. Together they made the first dream machine, cut-up tape recordings, permutation poems and sound poetry and light shows. It was this partnership that set the stage for the introduction of photography in Gysin’s work. Sommerville had a strong mechanically inclined mind enhanced and informed by his study of mathematics at Cambridge. His genius for electronics opened the doors to a variety of new media and fed Gysin’s desire for ‘unconventional stimuli.’ Gysin’s permutation poems, for example were produced by Sommerville, who wrote a computer program to build this permutation (see pp 144-5). Sommerville also designed and refined the mechanical component for the original dream machine using a 78rpm turntable as the driving principle. In the case of Gysin’s photo-based work Sommerville provided the technical means to link Gysin’s sound poetry with projected slides to create what was variously described as ‘expanded cinema’ or ‘machine poetry’. Gysin’s first public light and sound performance took place at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London 1960. The slide images presented full-length and half-length portraits of Gysin in various states of undress. Each slide had been manipulated by hand: some were scratched ‘with an etching point, while others had been repainted directly onto film or have undergone some interruption in the ‘emulsifying liquid.’ Many images were scratched with the phrase ‘I AM THAT I AM’ in various permutations, others were covered in calligraphic marks closely related to those used in his paintings and drawings in this period. Still others were clearly intended, in combination, to produce specific theatrical effects such as a receding or advancing figure. Gysin’s use of slides for performance, which started in the 1960’s and was periodically revived throughout the 1970’s and early 1980’s, capitalised on the powerful, theatrical presence of the slide image and its potential to disrupt and enhance the poetic word. It played perfectly into Gysin’s desire for novelty and the production of powerful stimulation. In a 1982 interview describing the slide performance of the early 1960’s Gysin explained the link of theatre, his use of the machine as a creative tool and interest in multimedia performance:
…a French group picked up on what was happening in the old hotel [The Beat Hotel] and invited me to join a group they were forming, to be called ‘Le Domaine Poétique’. They were floundering around a bit between French careerism and a vague Fluxus influence from Berlin. As I had worked on Broadway in the early 1940’s, I jumped in with a theatrical approach aided by Ian Sommerville with the projected visuals. We were so successful that George Macinas tabled the lightshow aspects of our efforts as ‘Expanded Cinema’ on his chart of what happened in the ‘60s. What we had going were tapes of my permutated poems like: ‘I AM THAT I AM’ the Divine tautology. ‘Junk Is No Good Baby’, ‘Kick That Habit Man’, ‘Calling All Re-Active Agents’, etc. In a white jumpsuit, I played live into the colour projections of my slides on me, or I could be invisible dressed in black and pull up sheet with a slide of me naked showing on the sheet. . .
There was a whole muggy area of doubt as to what to call this monstrosity I helped bring about. Because of the machines involved, the electronics, I would have called it ‘Machine Poetry’, but everyone shied away from that. I felt good about creating through the machines and they did not. I wanted to make language work in a new way, to surprise its secrets by using it as the material one past through the available electronics to amplify the voices of poetry ‘Poets, are made to make words sing’. I wrote. I wanted to get as far away as possible from ‘inspiration’. I wanted expiration instead, to breathe out rather than in.
If during the late 1950’s, Gysin provided William Burroughs with the tool of the cut-up method, then Burroughs reciprocated by suggesting a new and powerful subject for Gysin’s own work – the subject of his own self represented primarily through the photographic medium. In his books Naked Lunch, Junky, The Soft Machine, and The Ticket That Exploded, Burroughs had revealed the rich potential for a hybridized, autobiographical mode of writing that drew heavily on personal experience. In his slide performance works, Gysin offered his own image and, later that of his immediate companions – Burroughs and Sommerville – as the principal image/subject of the work. Here for the first time Gysin saw the possibilities inherent in presenting his own image in his works (see pp.18ff.) were intended to tap the artist’s subconscious, drawing on repressed and/or irrational thoughts, and his later calligraphic works drew on personal experiences filtered through abstraction and/or a ‘foreign’ language, his experimental photo-based works of the early 1960’s mark the first instance in which the artist himself is presented as the nominal subject of the work.
It is difficult to assess the photographs used in Gysin’s performances as individual or singular images when divorced from their performative context, but it is clear that his use of self-portraiture marks a significant shift in his thinking around subjectivity and autobiography. It is also interesting to note that this shift to self-referentiality emerged through an intense process of collaboration between Gysin, Burroughs, Sommerville and Antony Balch that dramatically expanded and extended Gysin’s notions of art and art making.
In all of the collaboration projects from this period it appears that one on of the participants took the lead while the others offered varying degrees of technical support, critical feedback and subject matter. In Antony Balch’s films from the early 1960’s Burroughs and Gysin appear as actors and Gysin’s Dream machine plays a supporting role. They all figure prominently in Balch’s ‘Towers Open Fire’ and ‘The Cut-ups.’ Both films reveal Gysin’s aggressive, experimental presence, pushing the process toward the abstract rhythms of the permutation and disharmonies created by the editing and recording machines.
Gysin’s roller figured prominently in Balch’s ‘Towers Open Fire’ and ‘The Cut-ups’ as a device that magically spread a network of lines across an open space, providing a unified ground for disparate image/objects. The image of the laying of a grid and the act of rolling and unrolling are repeated throughout ‘The Cut-ups’, with the grid taking its final form as the windowed surfaces of the skyscrapers. During the production of the work ‘Antony was applying. . .the cut-up technique where he simply took all the footage he had and handed it over to an editor, just telling her to set up four reels and put so many feet on each one in order – one, two, three, four, and start again, the same number… Even the sequences are cut, and parts of them appear on one or another reel.’ While Gysin’s influence figures prominently in the visuals of ‘The Cut-ups’, he also played an important role in the film’s soundtrack: ‘Some of it was Moroccan music which had been recorded by me… Some of it [the soundtrack] is the application of cut-up to material heard over the radio, you recognise lots of pieces which would have been recorded sound… It is he [Burroughs] and I in ‘Cut-ups’ who read a text which I proposed, taken directly from the Scientology classes that he was doing at the time. That is the “stop-change-start”. All of that, and that’s just Burroughs and I, our two voices back and forth.’
Conventional and mathematically ordered permutational cut up sequences.
(Numbered sequence starts: 12345678/81234567.)
(Numbered 8×8 sequence: 12345678/81234567/78123456/67812345/56781234/45678123/34567812/23456781/12345678/ (Discount the top row as that is the primer/codex.) Cantor’s Diagonalisation Proof is a pattern also seen in multiplication tables for example.)
(Numbered 4×4 sequence: 1234/4123/3412/2341/)
The Third Mind: Journal/Blog entry:
“More Tea and Space Vixen’s Vicar?”
“Oh!rather!”
Upsetting relationships: Polar extremes? Or absurd juxtapositions like Godzilla vs Flipper or King Kong vs an angry salmon?
Disruption of continuity or contexts including conventions like eating a bowl of soup with a fork for example, which can illustrate the absurdity and futility of a conventional endeavour. Another one that comes to mind is tying one’s shoes while wearing boxing gloves. Thus, making an apparent glitch in the flow or sequence of context. Comedians use this in comic narratives by hijacking or derailing the narrative’s intended meaning by leading the audience’s assumptions with populist conventional tropes. Such as this joke written in the 1980’s by Comedian, Alexi Sayle, “If your surname was Cooper, you were a Barrel maker. Fletcher, you were an arrow maker. Thatcher, you were BASTARDS! A more contemporary examples from Comedian, Jimmy Carr, “In a Palestinian passport, under occupation: does it say Israel?” or “I should leave Gary Glitter alone now, he just wants to settle down and have kids.” This is a common form of psychological cut up technique that derails the flow of contextual thought.
Ok so, this is the tail end of a caper that relates to the entry that one wrote about reading The Third Mind:
I am reading “The Third Mind” by William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin. It was downloaded from the internet, purchasing the book itself can go into hundreds of pounds! Anyhow, while reading it, one’s thoughts had been vindicated by the content relating to one’s work from last year. Which had felt unresolved because of the chaos caused by quarantine lockdown which had begun last year. This bother has catalysed by developing and researching further with authentic analogue cut up permutations and organising them into something orderly and comprehensive to an audience. Adobe Photoshop was only used for printing the sequences to be edited into ordered permutations by hand.
While that was underway, this tract from “The Third Mind” by William S Burroughs and Brion Gysin was meditated upon and copied into the journal:
21. In any case, the first deliberate and systematic attempt at permutation was undertaken not by Anglo-Saxon’s but a Dada-ist group in Paris. In answer to a peevish literary critic of L’Intransigeant, who said of them:
” Yes, rules must be violated, but in order to violate them you must first know them.”
The Dada-ist replied as follows:
” Yes, you have to know rules, but in order to know them, you must first violate them.”
” Yes, you have to rule knowledge, but in order to rule it you must first violate it.”
” Yes, you have to rule violations, but in order to rule them you must first know them.”
” Yes, you have to know violations, but in order to know them you must first rule them.”
” Yes, you have to violate knowledge, but in order to violate it, you must first rule it.”
This is the only known experiment of this kind in French.
Obviously, it would be necessary to go far back into English oral tradition to find its historical foundations, and such is not our purpose here. The Limericks and nonsense poems that we know from the works of Edward Lear in particular but were over the centuries also created both by well-known writers (Eliot happily devoted himself to this pursuit under a pseudonym) and by anonymous authors who never otherwise set hand to pen, were in the form puns and spoonerisms, which to all intents and purposes carried within them the principle of permutations. Gertrude Stein, uncontested master of the corrosion of syntax, was the first to make a specific use of permutations, without, however, carrying her idea to a logical conclusion:
Money Is What Words Are
Words Are What Money Is
Is Money What Words Are
Are Words What Money Is
Then on the 160th page of The Third Mind on Adobe Acrobat Reader there is a profound fictional dialogue that has two characters from Burrough’s novel, Naked Lunch. The two characters are, the protagonist William Lee, who was a fictional literary avatar for Burroughs’ conscious self and Doctor Benway, who is a subconscious patriarchal character:
Dr Benway: Nobody ever recovers from life, young man. Life is always terminal.
Lee: But that’s terrible!
Dr Benway: Life is a one-way street, Bill, you know that. No U-turns.
Lee: My cure could be a U-turn for me, couldn’t it? Seeing what I’m suffering from…
Dr Benway: You do not know what you are suffering from yet, do you?
“Not knowing what is and is not knowing I knew not.”
-Hassan I Sabbah’s Razor.
Logic and rationality can only go so far…
The Fatal Flaw of Mathematics:
Mathematics is incomplete, inconsistent, and undecidable. There is no algorithm that can always determine whether a statement is derivable from its axioms. The argument of whether mathematics is a complete, consistent, and decidable system or not, was debated by mathematicians since the 1870’s with set theory which is used in algorithms and was settled in 1936 by Alan Turing in which the World War II code breaking enigma machine led to the invention of the modern computer. Turing designed his machines to be the most powerful computers that are possible to make. To this very day the very best and most powerful computational systems are those that use Turing Complete Systems or Turing Machine Programs that deal with a halting problem caused by an undecidable property of the system. One expression is the question of the Twin Prime Conjecture-are twin prime number sequences infinite?’ Which has no closure and is undecidable. One can only be certain of uncertainty because there will always be true statements that cannot be proven. This also is expressed in quantum physics with the question of the spectral gap-the energy difference between the ground state and the first excited state of a system. In other words, “Even in a perfect, complete description of the microscopic interactions between a material’s particles is not always enough to deduce its macroscopic properties.” Nearly every programming language in existence is Turing Complete, all modern computers stem from the weird paradoxes that arise from self-reference. A mathematical problem that starts to echo a philosophical problem. A temporal question of the self, the ego, the I am, and the attempt to go beyond the self.
The importance of non-representational art has to this very day the appeal of those who have a sense of adventure for the unknown. Because it has the psychological as well as the spiritual involved. What cannot be denied is that representational art is too safe. Which can only deaden the nerve endings of the experienced practitioner.
The point in hand is for the case of originality. Ever wondered what that is? or what that really means? Like conceiving what truly describes nothing. If we have abstract concepts in literature, conversation, and human language in general. Then surely it is permissible in imagery? Regardless of it, even if it offends people. By mere thinking, you run the risk of offense. The right to be offended does not override the right to have the freedom of thought. Without that however, freedom of speech becomes redundant. One’s freedom does not end where other people’s fears begin.
(#1 Establish a motive.)
The Para scientific narrative applied to automatic drawing and white noise sensory deprivation.
There is a phenomenon that occurs which has been preoccupying one’s sphere of consciousness. It is difficult to find a starting point to explain something that is a bit hard to explain. So, after reading Robert Anton Wilson’s Cosmic Trigger: Volume 1: Final secret of the Illuminati. page 24-28. One starts by these assertions by Arthur C. Clarke called Clarke’ law. #1. ” Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magick.” (Magick with a K is regard to Chaos magic and Hermetic Alchemy that Aliester Crowley from the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn practiced and previously by John Dee and Edward Kelly in the Renaissance period.) Both had used techniques in scrying using magic squares, (Gysin started with a grid that in digital art software known as a raster.) Mathematical permutations, numerical and literal, Dee, Kelley and Crowley all claim to have had contact with entities. Crowley called it Aiwass or his Holy Guardian Angel and Dee and Kelley had contacted Angelic entities and created the Enochian language. Paranormal investigator and occultist, Allen H. Greenfield who wrote about using occult techniques to contact extra-terrestrials, such as The Complete Secret Cipher of the UFOnauts, journalists and writers like, John Keel who wrote the Mothman prophecies had contact with an entity that called itself Indred Cold in Point Pleasant in West Virginia.
(Illustration of ‘Malakh.’A caste of old testament angel.)
(One had drawn a comparison with the Mothman and an image of an angel called Malakh from the Old Testament Bible (Which is not as old as the Geneva Bible.) Which one believes is the same thing. There are different castes of angels that are described in the old testament.)
Author Whitley Strieber claimed contact with Extra-terrestrial entities and now, para normal investigators Greg and Dana Newkirk, in their documentary, ‘Hellier’ used white noise sensory deprivation techniques, had bizarre synchronicities, investigating the Goblin type Extra-terrestrials that left footprints and were reported near caves and abandon mine entrances from Hellier, Kentucky had been led by an E-mail from an entity called David Christie who the tight knit locals claimed to have never heard of. Bigfoot sightings thought to have been said is a hallucination induced by Temporal Lobe Epilepsy that is said is a genetic memory within human D.N.A. that we exterminated and made extinct other hominins from our distant past also come under these phenomena. Goblins, Elves from Nordic legends, Leprechauns, all can be wrapped up as the same thing. It is an ‘Archetype’ as described by Carl Jung, always reportedly having pointy ears like Mr Spock from Star Trek which is also recognised in many myth systems and dozens of shamanic traditions called Mescalito.
Well… we shall soon see the results of the developments and experiments with the practical process in a few days-time…
Perception and White Noise-Sensory Deprivation Experiments.
Above all the practical and theoretical work, there is a salient and profound quote about perception from a movie based on a book by John Keel called, ‘The Mothman Prophecies’ that starred Richard Gere as the protagonist John Kline, who had a conversation with a retired paranormal investigator named Alexander Leeks, who was played by the late English actor, Alan Bates. This quote has provided one with motive and a level-headed approach to the practical experiments. The quote is as follows: “If there was a car crash ten blocks away and that window washer up there could probably see it. Now that does not mean he’s God, or even smarter than we are… But from where he is sitting, he can see a little further down the road than we can.”
Another consideration to approach the experiments was Clarke’s law. Clarke’ Law (by science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke): #1. ” Any sufficiently advanced technology would be indistinguishable from magick.” With the following position by author, Robert Anton Wilson as a second law called Wilson-Clarke’s Law #2 “Any sufficiently advanced parapsychology would be even more indistinguishable from magick.”
Other supporting quotes that were taken from the article, Our believing brains by Lawrence R. Samuel, page 54-55 of the Fortean Times, March 2012.
“Mystical experience is biologically observably, and scientifically real,” the three hold; this is the reason why such experience is seemingly as old as the human species itself and common to all civilisations.”
“Thinking that something which looked or sounded like a ghost, a ghost is just your mind doing its job, even though it doesn’t mean that a ghost was actually there.”
“Creating such ‘illusions’ provides self-worth, meaningfulness, and power, functioning as a kind of counter-intelligence.”
“Anxiety or economic distress create even more of a need for people to feel in control, it’s argued, thus explaining the consistent spike in para-normalism experienced during times of socio-political turmoil.”
“The difference between a believer in the supernatural and a non-believer could thus be down to their relative levels of dopamine.”
“The brain’s sensory regions, including vision, are at the mercy of higher-order systems, such as those that run attention and emotions, and people are prone to effectively blinding themselves in situations where they do not really want to see something.”
“Hardwired into our biology, the super-natural will continue to be an essential dimension of the human experience.”
Anyhow, one has been busy starting cut ups that Brion Gysin and William Burroughs had done. Cutting newspaper columns and rearranging them. This frees up the words from fixed meaning and when spoken there is a sound or lyrical musicality to these sentences that do not quite make sense. There is a permutation that one has in my sketch/notebook. As my tutor had said that one should do more deep developmental experimentation in one’s practical work. This has been happening but there have been developments in the investigation. Brion Gysin’s work has a ‘Para scientific’ area in cut ups. This has developed into planning some sensory deprivation experiments by listening and recording white noise one can hack one’s everyday consciousness. As Gysin said that it is not so much as inspiration, taking something in, but more expiration, breathing out. The calligraffiti stencil has been copied on to some lino and one is planning to make some printing experiments after writing this tract. The exploration of the sensory deprivation EVP experiments will begin tomorrow. Having these on the go will cough up some results…
(First white noise sensory deprivation experiment.)
“This exploration in short, is Para-scientific in nature, which venture into particular areas, without restricting theoretic discussions like the Dadaists employed to examine the actual semantic links that we trust with our senses daily, the Dream Machine was this first step towards unconventional stimuli and therefore it is a Para-scientific device that produced positive results. This has led to examining white noise sensory deprivation experiments as the unconventional stimuli, to be utilised as a supporting creative tool for art.”
– Brion Gysin
(A basic automatic drawing.)
Additional.
After four different experiments, concentrating on meditative breathing, while listening to a tuned-out radio station. The white noise was broken up with intermittent distorted broadcasted sounds. The key is the liminal state. A threshold. Between neither here nor there. The white noise imitates, imaginatively rushing water, which profoundly establishes natures flowing forces of time and motion. (Water is a universal conduit.) Another key is the para scientific narrative. One must believe that one is simply communicating to non-corporeal entities. The other key is to just let it happen. No matter how scary it feels. Feeling one with it.
(Second experiment.)
(Third experiment. Left hand only.)
(Fourth experiment. Right hand.)
The first three attempts were mainly abstract, the result was an image that was quickly taking form as a representational drawing, personally from one’s own mind.
In a controlled and familiar environment and after understanding my research on the subconscious, the understanding of synchronicities, paranormal events and UFO phenomena are all the same things.
Why is the subconscious important? What is it and do we really need it?
One’s consciousness is presently seated in the waking state, but when you are asleep, the subconsciousness takes over. The subconscious regulates the bodies autonomic systems like respiration, food digestion and the filtration of bodily fluids. The brain’s activity depends on whether one is in a deep state which would be between .5 to 3 Hertz, this is a Delta bandwidth which is a low frequency which stimulates healing and regeneration.
However, if Theta brainwaves occur, which is a kind of liminal state that does not last for long when observed, but the subject’s temporal awareness potential could seem to be a substantial amount of time. It can be described as the state that is about to drift into deep sleep. Theta-waves are between 3 to 8 Hertz which is a vivid dream state which has information beyond our normal consciousness which is also where we harbour fears, trauma, and nightmares…
The subconsciousness serves as the split or difference in primal consciousness as memory of being attacked by a predator and the waking consciousness of an actual encounter with a predator.
One can tell of things that are related or originate from the subconscious in nature by being hokey, Gothic imagery is a perfect example, castles on mountains, skeletons, vampires, werewolves, monsters, and medieval torture chambers are stuff of hokum. Another term for spoof in content, as the word Hokum was originally a particular style of American blues music that has humorous exaggerations, extended analogies, and sexual innuendos popular from the nineteenth century to the nineteen thirties.
Doctor Carl Gustav Jung described the subconscious as a storehouse of repressed memories specific to the individual and our ancestral past. Jung regarded three separate acting systems to the unconsciousness, the Ego, the personal unconscious, and the collective consciousness. He underlined a feature of the personal unconscious called complexes. A complex is a collection of thoughts and feelings, attitudes and memories that focus on a single concept. Freud often clashed with Jung on the nature of the libido and in particular, Jung’s collective (transpersonal) unconsciousness, it was his most original contribution to personality theory.
The collective unconscious also known as Jung’s universal field theory, is a universal version of the personal unconscious, holding mental patterns or memory traces with the D.N.A. of other members of the human species. These ancestral memories, which Jung called ‘archetypes’ are represented by universal themes in various cultures as expressed through art, literature and dreams.
For Jung, our primitive past becomes the basis of the human psyche, directing and influencing present behaviour. Jung claimed to identify many archetypes. But he paid special attention to these main four archetypes. These archetypes are defined and labelled by Jung as; The Self, The Persona, The Shadow, and The Anima/Animus.
The Persona is our social mask.
The Anima/Animus is the mirror image of our biological sex.
The Shadow is the animal side (or the Id in Freud’s terms) which was our creative and destructive energies that once had survival value.
The Self that is the unified self or the entire selfhood.
These archetypes have been used in storytelling, mythology, and fairy tales. They are present in the ancient Parthenon of Gods, from the Greeks, the Norse, and the Egyptians for an example. (But there are many more.)
Until recently, it has transpired that the earliest archaeological evidence that humans have had mythology in their psychological make up, dates to the ninth millennium and probably even further, like it or not, we are stuck with the subconscious.
The Shadow is the area that is the missing piece of human psychology that can be induced, summoned, and understood. This is a Jungian archetype that is represented as Venus. Venus has dual mythical meanings and representations like, Aphrodite and feminine power. Venus is by its very definition is unconventional and it represents all things liminal in nature as its elliptical orbit is in the opposite direction to the rest of the planets in the solar system. Venus is the also known as the morning star, associated with Lucifer the Lightbringer, Pan, Prometheus, and represents the shamanistic entity known as Mescalito. It is an ithyphallic deity/architype that holds hidden knowledge that dwells in the Theta brainwave liminal state, between awareness and sleep.
“Obsessive repetition, produced through logical mathematical permutation or even using a grid can reveal reflexes of our conscience. This can be combined with employing unconventional stimuli, such as the upsetting of relationships, which are used as instruments to examine the novelty of the reflexes of our conscience and the novel ways in which they can reveal themselves.”
The next step in the sensory deprivation EVP automatic drawing experiments required a collaboration with an exceptional photographic student who can document this process…
The rationale that was applied was to pinpoint a profoundly liminal location. A rat-run tunnel is a good example that was used. It can be seen as a simple digestive tract as we humans process food. A mouth of a tunnel, you travel like a food stuff through it and then get expelled out of the other end. It’s acoustical value was taken into account considering that Louise Rummel and I, both recorded the session on our devices. There is only one foreign sound on these recordings that needs to be thouroughly analyised at a later date.
(The rat-run tunnel. Image used by kind permission of Louise Rummel.)
(The visual documentation of the sensory deprivation-automatic drawing session. Image used by kind permission of Louise Rummel.)
(A surprising result had occurred.)
(Immediately, the top left-hand side drew my attention. It resembled a three dimensional pyramid shape with a female closed eye, nose and lips.)
(The same image observed upside down.)
Then the image was turned upside down, and a strange aquiline face with one eye can be clearly seen. This connotes the Shamanistic Mescalito entity that has been generally described through folklore as elf like or aquiline, like Mr Spock from Star Trek or Peter Pan. The one eye connotes Odin from Norse mythology, “in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.”
This image will be made into a painting, by sizing a grid onto it and then reconstructing it on to a canvas board. Hopefully, this will be done while studying for a master’s degree later in the year.
Remarkable.
Invoke the Shadow.
Introduction.
Is representational painting obsolete in Art?
‘Paint has to become something else. The visible world has been flooded, inundated with reproduced images. How many hundred thousand images have you seen today? How many hundred images did our great-grand parents see in a lifetime?
Who is a painter to add merely one more image to your incalculable store?
Painting is about light.
Gradations of refracted light in space are represented by pigments on a surface. Close your eyes and take away the light and there are no paintings but the ones in your image bank. A painter who deals in single images is a fumbling counterfeiter of the currency of space. But where is the light in my interior space? Light has no image. Space has no image. Art records the Word that light writes in space. Painters want to write a new world. Art is the tail of the comet. Painting is the signal, the message that light writes in space to draw up images beyond the reach of number.
What is the story?
What draws one to do expression of any kind, over and over again, in a way that is in the word one would immediately use which would be ritual? One would think back to prehistoric times, how did art begin? What was the real origin of art? It was magical, one would know the wise person or the oldest person of a clan, they would remember all the stories to pass on. So, they were a librarian in a sense, also, they were doing things visually and with sound and in costume, sand paintings and shrines, literally to make the Sun comeback again. Because for tens of thousands of years proto humans did not know the Sun would come back. How could they? So, they would develop rituals to bring the Sun back, therefore the shaman must be greatly empowered for that, so it was functional. Why did one even need to do that? Because one did not know the seasons would come back, one had no concept of human linear time. So, every morning when you awoke was about trying to maintain continuity to survive. It was also a spectacle that unified a clan, it could be in part initiations after puberty. All these different aspects of biological and geographical life and the linearity of time, all played into the origins of art.
Invoke the shadow project.
“This exploration in short, is Para-scientific in nature, which venture into particular areas, without restricting theoretic discussions like the Dadaists employed to examine the actual semantic links that we trust with our senses daily, the Dream Machine was this first step towards unconventional stimuli and therefore it is a Para-scientific device that produced positive results. This has led to examining white noise sensory deprivation experiments as the unconventional stimuli, to be utilised as a supporting creative tool for art.”
– Jim Bidwell.
The Shadow.
For Jung, our primitive past becomes the basis of the human psyche, directing and influencing present behaviour. Jung claimed to identify many archetypes. But he paid special attention to these main four archetypes. These archetypes are defined and labelled by Jung as; The Self, The Persona, The Shadow, and The Anima/Animus.
The Persona is our social mask.
The Anima/Animus is the mirror image of our biological sex.
The Shadow is the animal side (or the Id in Freud’s terms) which was our creative and destructive energies that once had survival value.
The Self that is the unified self or the entire selfhood.
These archetypes have been used in storytelling, mythology, and fairy tales. They are present in the ancient Parthenon of Gods, from the Greeks, the Norse, and the Egyptians as examples. (But there are many more.)
Until recently, it has transpired that the earliest archaeological evidence that humans have had mythology in their psychological make up, dates to the ninth millennium and probably even further, like it or not, we are stuck with the subconscious.
The Shadow is the area that is the missing piece of human psychology that can be induced, summoned, and understood. This is a Jungian archetype that is represented as Venus. Venus has dual mythical meanings and representations like, Aphrodite and feminine power. Venus is by its very definition is unconventional and it represents all things liminal in nature as its elliptical orbit is in the opposite direction to the rest of the planets in the solar system. Venus is the also known as the morning star, associated with Lucifer the Lightbringer, Pan, Prometheus, and represents the shamanistic entity known as Mescalito. It is an ithyphallic deity/architype that holds hidden knowledge that dwells in the Theta brainwave liminal state, between awareness and sleep.
Surrealism and the subconscious.
Both automatic drawing/writing and sensory deprivation were employed as creative and therapeutic sources (including P.T.S.D.) against the backdrop of stifling rationalism during socio-political upheaval of the early 20th century by Dadaists and Surrealists. These practices required a paranormal narrative, automatic drawing was described like a medium channelling a spirit. Andre Masson was drawn upon for inspiration for this process.
Required key conditions of location:
A rat-run tunnel under the A135 next to the river Colne.
Bridges are considered as a threshold from one state to another which defines a liminal state. A rat-run tunnel operates in a opposite Cartesian manner. (Same thing, but the other way round.)
Acoustical bombardment in a liminal location dampens and disorientates the outer psychic areas creating psychological inertia within the practitioner. The Norse myth of Trolls and the popularisation of them dwelling under bridges from the Grimm fairy tales added a sprinkle of mythic value.
The ritual practice.
- Preparation:
Within a week of experimenting and practicing automatism with sensory deprivation on a A3 sketchpad at home, the location was established by describing the surroundings one was experiencing in the sensory deprived state. This started as an illustration after the first experiment:
By the last experiment this had clarified amongst a lot of other useful information.
- At the established location, the simple invocation involved a counter clockwise circle of salt, together with a ring cast also counter clockwise with a fanned sage smudge. Within the circle, one’s collaborator and witness was presented and blessed with a sage smudge for protection.
- The invocation involved verbally calling forth Pan, “I O PAN!” As mantra while requesting Pan to communicate with us.” One’s collaborator continued this invocation while one began the sensory deprivation and automatic drawing session.
- In total, by mechanically measured means, the practice took a little under twenty minutes. This seemed much longer in terms of human wibbly wobbly time perception.
Photographic images used by kind permission by Louise Rummel.
“Fear is a disabling condition to an artist who has drawn for money. After a while one can seize up from fear of making a mistake. One just must let it go and happen without self-critical prejudice.” – Jim Bidwell.
The rationale that was applied was to pinpoint a profoundly liminal location. A rat-run tunnel is a good example that was used. It can be seen as a simple digestive tract as we humans process food. A mouth of a tunnel, one travels like a food stuff through it and then get expelled out of the other end. It’s acoustical value was taken into account considering that Louise Rummel and oneself, both recorded the session on our devices. There is only one foreign sound on these recordings that needs to be thouroughly analyised at a later date.
A rat-run tunnel by the river Colne on the A134 road called Station Way, just off Colne Bank Roundabout…
The Norse myths of Trolls who live under bridges came to mind during this practice. As we spent some time in the middle of the tunnel, we were overwhelmed by sound and felt the air was compressed.
These images show the setting up process with a sage smudge being cast in a circle counter clockwise direction.
Frankencense was burnt and a small invocation to Pan was spoken. The automatic drawing with white noise sensory deprivation began. The theory was that one was channelling any entities that dwell there. The paranormal narrative was used with an emotional desire to make contact.
The drawing pad was rotated four times in the session. Scribbling and drawing furiously with a black Biro pen that was running out of ink. Drawing with only faith and random chance…
(Order is predictable, only with chaos can the unlikely occur…)
This was part of the whole experiment that was also sound recorded. The sound was played back in Audacity which is a simple sound mixer for analysis. The result is a single foreign sound that will be analysed by Luke Nash who has a lot more expertise in this field.
After the practice itself we packed up all our equipment and left. One saw the result of the session on the drawing pad for just an instant then put the pad in one’s backpack and did not think too much of it until later. We both had an overwhelming sense of peace when we had left the tunnel. In our defence, we were exhausted, so, we got a takeaway and went home to sleep.
The results were remarkable, one had no expectations of Louise’s work, but her photographs are just more than mere documents of time and instance, she has used her skill to clearly convey her understanding of one’s practice and her role played within it.
The automatic drawings, while blind folded were surprising, it is remarkable that anything recognisable had transpired. Let alone an optical illusion. One had felt that this had followed in the footsteps of Dadaists and Surrealists like Andre Masson, Andre Breton, Salvador Dali, Jean and Hans Arp, Jean Miro with this work. Which is quite gratifying to say the least.
(A surprising result had occurred.)
Same image upside down.
This image was made by random chance and was quickly produced. Louise Rummel can testify that one was blind folded and drew all over the paper at speed, the whole time. One was being plunged into a void with multiple flashes of glowing silhouettes. It was very energy intensive, physically, and one’s mind was overloaded, my body could hardly keep up. The outcome was unexpected, surprising, and a bit spooky.
Then the image was turned upside down, and a strange aquiline face with one eye can be clearly seen. This connotes the Shamanistic Mescalito entity that has been generally described through folklore as elf like or aquiline, like Mr Spock from Star Trek or Peter Pan. The one eye connotes Odin from Norse mythology, “in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.”
This image will be made into a painting, by sizing a grid onto it and then reconstructing it on to a canvas board. Hopefully, this will be done while studying for a master’s degree later in the year.
The Cardinal Rite is a study in orientation and perception, which was customised from the Lakota ritual mixed with the Yggdrasil. Leonardo Da Vinci in the Renaissance, had simplified it to a cube and a Polyhedron according to the rule of ‘PHI’ This had been updated centuries later by the Rosicrucian movement, and followed on afterwards by the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn by Aliester Crowley.
via New Title released on Youtube.
giftgas1 
