by Erik Davis
Unfortunately, the brain-wavers soon found that biofeedback was by no means a plug-and-play avenue to satori. Even at the time, Green argued that biofeedback training could only open the transpersonal gates when coupled with other techniques of consciousness expansion. “The True Self,” he wrote, “can be quickly approached if the personality is made silent through theta EEG feedback and at the same time we focus detached attention upward.”21 For some, such cyberspiritual regimes worked, but such success only begged a larger set of questions: does the True Self catalyzed by electronic gear wear the same face it does for Christian mystics who meet the midnight sun, or for Zen monks who discipline themselves with decades of subtle effort? If higher states of consciousness “de-automatize” the self from its habitual ruts, as many human potential advocates held, can they be made to do so automatically?
The experiences of Green and many others prove that cybernetic technologies can certainly be integrated into an intelligent pursuit of whatever quintessence lurks beneath our mundane masks. But the techno-idolatry that underlies a portion of the later New Age amply demonstrates how naive and vacuous this instrumentalist approach to spiritual self-improvement can become, especially when it gets mixed up with commodity culture and the old electromagnetic imaginary. Regardless of whatever psychospiritual phenomena they help trigger, consciousness gear like sound-and-light machines and brainwave-tracking devices amplify two questionable trends that already dominate the information age: an escapist desire for vivid and entertaining trances, and a utilitarian desire to reorganize the self according to the productive and efficient logic of the machine. Skimming through books like Michael Hutchison’s Mega Brain Power or New Age catalogs like Tools for Exploration, one realizes that the idea of “technologies of transformation” fits into our gadget-happy, Promethean land like a three-pronged plug with the ground ripped off.
The electronic wings of the New Age represent a quintessentially American blend of positive thinking and technological fetishism, but this tendency is hardly “New.” In the mid-nineteenth century, for example, the ex-revivalist and mesmerist John Dods started hyping “electrical psychology,” a set of practical techniques that he believed would ride the “glorious chariot of science with its ever increasing power, magnificence, and glory.”22 For Dods, “electricity” acted as God’s invisible spiritual agency, and was thus the medium that God used to directly change the material world. Drawing inspiration from one of the new media of his day, Dods argued that by cultivating the electrical powers available in the mesmeric trance, we can make ourselves and our lives a “visible daguerreotype” of God’s electrical emanations. That is, just as the daguerreotype—an early form of photography—captured the visible reality of light on the blank surface of silver-coated metallic plate, so could the mind use the electric vibrations of mesmerism to overcome external limitations and impress new visions onto the world itself.
By the end of the nineteenth century, this dream of mind over matter would mutate into the American cult of positive thinking. According to the mesmerist and healer Phineas Quimby, one of the early crafters of this new school, sickness and disease were the result of negative thoughts that blocked the nurturing flows of animal magnetism. As one of the first self-helpers, Quimby had little interest in the theoretical or mystical questions that dominated the minds of many earlier mesmerists. By putting his patients in direct contact with “a higher source,” Quimby simply wanted to improve their outlook on life, a positive attitude that he believed would directly restore their health and well-being. With his “Mind Cure Science,” Quimby helped set the stage for the rise of Christian Science and the New Thought movement, whose affirmations live on today in the New Age mantra that “you create your own reality.”
Without a doubt, positive thinking can work wonders. But for Mind Scientists and New Agers alike, this hands-on “science” of consciousness improvement became infected with America’s uncritical faith in scientific and technological progress. Detached from a deep questioning of both social and spiritual life, such instrumental approaches to the power of the mind can rapidly lead their users into a rather infantile self-obsession. Hard-core devotees of positive thinking often find themselves reproducing the mythic scenario that Marshall McLuhan argued was the archetypal scene of all technology: Narcissus gazing into the pool, mesmerized by his own reflection.
As its name indicates, the New Age rests on a social vision of utopia as well as a vision of individual psychic revolution. One’s own self-realization contributes to a creative and healing culture; by programming a better reality, one helps actualize a “paradigm shift” that collectively brings together mind and body, earth and culture, science and spirit. And yet in practice, New Agers often aim for goals barely distinguishable from the dominant logic of success that drives commercial culture—goals like efficiency, satisfaction, productivity, performance, and control, not to mention the prosperity gospel that holds that the self is actualized through money. Though these Extropian values certainly have their place, they often run directly counter to the far less quantifiable collective concerns and mystical passions traditionally associated with the taxing dance of spiritual growth, or with the loving and mysterious influx of the sacred. Without a larger ethical, aesthetic, or religious cosmology, engineered states of consciousness can easily become new power tools for the same old clutching ego.
Once its emphasis on transpersonal unity loses any genuine transcendent ground, New Age logic slides with unsettling ease into corporate management jargon and business success seminars. In the 1970s, one of the most popular and influential New Age self-improvement regimes was est, an instrumentalist and thoroughly secular mishmash of Scientology, Gestalt-style psychotherapies, and American Zen. Providing new “data” about reality, and leading people through various “processes” over long and arduous weekends, est sought to break down people’s self-limiting beliefs. Enlightenment, they would learn, is knowing that you are a machine, and thus taking control of your own programs and conditioning. But as many concerned observers noted, the est organization also did plenty of its own psychological programming along the way. Though est graduates were hardly the authoritarian robot army that some of the movement’s detractors claimed, the organization did function as what the sociologist Steven Tipton called a “boot camp for bureaucracy.”
One of the slickest New Age corporate cheerleaders to emerge after the golden age of est was the big-bucks motivational counselor Anthony Robbins, a charismatic but eerily synthetic Schwarzenegger lookalike often found hawking his wares on television infomercials. To help his customers achieve happiness and satisfaction, Robbins dug through the human potential toolkit, showing how self-affirmations, psychological discipline, spiritual workouts, and the inevitable battery of Personal Power recordings can help people “achieve their goals.” But Robbins never makes the spiritual move, which is to question the goals themselves. For it may be the case that these goals, embraced by an anxious ego with immortalist fantasies or picked up like the flu from the smiling happy people on TV, are the very source of the sense of failure, misery, and bondage that Robbins promises to banish.
Altered Solid States
The popular New Age image of “sacred technologies” suggests that Ellul was right, and that the empirical and instrumentalist logic of technique has colonized the human spirit. But though this maker’s logic erodes traditional theological foundations like faith, grace, and divine agency, it also embodies a pragmatic and demystifying bent that may go a long way toward correcting the ideological absolutism, violent shenanigans, and parochial folklore that characterize so much religious history. As Gurdjieff hinted, the dispassionate and pragmatic mind-set of the modern world, a mind-set at home with machines, science, and instrumental techniques, can be a boon to twenty-first-century seekers, steering them away from sticky old myths or contemporary delusions while engendering a discriminating, objective, and self-critical perspective that keeps them always on their toes.
No
t surprisingly, many of the human potential movement’s cybernetic gurus owe much to Gurdjieff and his spirit of dispassionate self-observation. Take the work of the psychologist Charles Tart, who taught at the University of California at Davis for many years. After decades of research and writing, Tart is still best known for Altered States of Consciousness, a landmark collection he edited in 1969. In the book, Tart and many other contributors turned their laboratory-bred eyes toward the same inner world that mesmerists began charting over a century before. They investigated hypnosis, trance, hypnogogia, and dreams, while also exploring more with-it topics like Zen meditation, psychedelic drugs, and brain-wave biofeedback. Without closing the door on the more exalted and even spiritual potentials of the self, Tart and company soberly analyzed these “states,” treating them as systems of awareness that stabilize themselves by establishing feedback loops between different mechanisms of perception and cognition. Tart and his colleagues also suggested that these cognitive states not only drastically change the world we perceive, but can be cultivated as well, as both Hindu yogis and exceptional Western psychonauts prove.
Eventually, Tart came to interrogate our “normal” state of consciousness as well. He concluded that the mundane world we ordinarily perceive, relate to, and understand with our “common sense” ’ is both physiologically and psychologically a simulation, a determined product of essentially arbitrary perceptual filters, culturally conditioned reflexes, and habitual ways of reading the world rooted in our biological past. Tart was no postmodern relativist: He believed that some simulations fit the outside world better than others. But in analyzing ordinary consciousness, Tart came to believe that our day-to-day simulations of the world were usually mucked up with unconscious assumptions, projections, delusions, and cultural myths.
In 1986, Tart published Waking Up, a “nuts-and-bolts” self-help book heavily indebted to his years studying the Gurdjieff Work with teachers at Esalen and elsewhere. In the book, Tart chalks up the bulk of our daily thoughts and behaviors to “consensus trance”—the particular social construction of reality we have been hypnotically conditioned to perceive and maintain since birth. Using a well-crafted analogy of a computer-driven robot-crane, Tart argues that most of our precious human traits are basically automatic, “programmed,” as it were, by evolutionary habits and social mechanisms. Despite this rather withering and mechanistic exposure of the myth of self-consciousness, Tart remains cautiously upbeat. In order for our human potential to take off, he argues, we first need to get in touch with our inner machine. “By studying machines, we can learn about ourselves,” he writes. “By fully recognizing and studying our machinelike qualities … it is possible to take a step no other machine can take: we can become genuinely human and transcend our machinelike qualities and destiny.”23 This transcendence occurs through the cybernetic development of the higher control center—Gurdjieff’s elusive I—which in turn allows us to extend the capacities of our bodies, emotions, and intellects.
Unlike so many psychospiritual teachers attracted to this line of thought, Tart also recognized the dangers of the spiritual cyborg. Even schools of thought as different as the Gurdjieff Work, est, Scientology, and Extropianism show a strong tendency toward a certain heartlessness, an elitist rigor that places the gnostic salvation of the individual and the in-group far beyond the problems of humanity as a whole. In sharp contrast, Tart insisted that compassion was not only a necessary complement to dispassionate wisdom, but that it serves as one of the most highly evolved and intelligent components of human consciousness—a notion Tart partly derived from Mahayana Buddhism and its image of the bodhisattva, who refuses to enter nirvana until all sentient beings are awakened.
Though his research into parapsychology has raised many an eyebrow, Tart remains a paragon of grounded and pragmatic cybernetic spirituality. Other altered states pioneers, however, got pretty bent out of shape on their climb to the higher control centers. One of the most fascinating of these characters is John Lilly, a neuroscientist, psychonaut, and Esalen workshop leader who clung to the dispassionate style of objective science even as he plumbed the iridescent fractal maw of psychedelic hyperspace. In the 1950s, Lilly had all the markings of a high priest of the hard sciences: a Cal Tech degree, an MS in neuroscience, and a gig at the National Institutes of Health studying the interface between mind and brain. Schooled as a reductionist, Lilly wanted to prove empirically that the mind was indeed contained inside the “biocomputer” of the brain. So the good doctor would while away the hours sticking electrodes into monkey brains, proving how easy it is to stimulate terror and orgasms alike with electric current. Lilly’s hardwired Pavlovian excursions into electromagnetic control soon drew the interest of Pentagon operatives, who showed up at his lab one day asking questions about certain hairless cousins of the monkey clan. The appearance of these sinister archons eventually convinced Lilly that he could not continue his research without becoming drawn into a sticky federal web of darkside behaviorism and electronic mind-control projects. So he quit the NIH and went off to study interspecies communication with dolphins, nifty work immortalized in the film The Day of the Dolphin.
In the 1950s, most members of the psychological establishment believed that external stimuli alone kept the mind humming and that the brain would promptly go to sleep if those incoming signals were squelched. To test this crudely materialist theory, Lilly built an isolation tank that muffled external sensory stimulation, and then clambered inside. After spending hours floating in his jet-black saltwater womb, Lilly discovered that mental phenomena were not simply reactive, but internally generated. Moreover, they were potentially mind-blowing as well. After an hour or so, Lilly found himself slipping into strange, relaxing, and sometimes visionary states of consciousness that lay far beyond the cartography of conventional psychiatric charts.
Once outside the orbit of the NIH, Lilly’s isolation tank experiments put him on a collision course with LSD-25, then making the rounds among North America’s more adventurous psychotherapists. After gobbling jaw-dropping doses of acid, Lilly would gaze upon the screen of his internal theater with the icy enthusiasm of a postdoc peering at a paramecium. After many such experiments, Lilly concluded that the “circuits” of the “human biocomputer” were not only wired by evolution but were constantly being programmed by the feedback loops established between the environment and that biocomputer’s assumptions about the world. LSD not only laid bare the workings of these invisible circuits but allowed one to reprogram one’s experience, “bootstrapping” new modes of consciousness and perception into experience. “As the theory [of the biocomputer] entered and reprogrammed my thinking-feeling machinery,” Lilly wrote, “my life changed rapidly and radically. New inner spaces opened up; new understanding and humor appeared.”24 Lilly’s mantra of “self-metaprogramming” became well known among spiritual cyborgs: “What one believes to be true, either is true or becomes true in one’s mind, within limits to be determined experimentally and experientially. These limits are beliefs to be transcended.”25 In essence, the mind was seen as the ultimate universal computer, capable of simulating any reality under the sun.
Though Lilly heartily rejected theology, Eastern gurus, and psychedelic mumbo jumbo, he also logged serious time with Oscar Ichazo and his student Claudio Naranjo, both Gurdjieffean-style esoteric teachers from Chile who were committed to the dispassionate work of self-observation and self-remembering. When Lilly himself gave workshops at Esalen and other human-potential centers, he would demonstrate his ideas by using high-fidelity tape loops that repeated a single word over and over. He used these loops not to hypnotize his audience, but to demonstrate that the mind inevitably began “hearing” different words, and that these variations could be preprogrammed in advance. These cut-and-paste, tape-machine mutations paled before the psychedelic protocols Lilly designed for himself, especially once he discovered ketamine, an injectable tranquilizer that produces a disembodied state of deep-space psychedelia far more alien th
an LSD’s fractal electronica. With the obsessive self-absorption of a late-night hacker, Lilly became addicted to “K,” sometimes decoupling from consensus reality for weeks at a time. Even as his mind went overboard, Lilly’s “scientific” reports back from the depths continued to express the crucial tension that lies at the heart of techgnosis: the tension between consciousness and the machine.
In one particularly knee-rattling revelation that recurred a number of times, Lilly experienced the universe as an utterly dispassionate and objective “cosmic computer,” a vast and labyrinthine hierarchy of meaningless automata alternately programming and being programmed by other senseless mechanisms. In essence, Lilly entered Edward Fredkin’s universal cellular automaton, and he experienced this intellectually compelling cosmology as an unmitigated and terrifying hell. Over time, Lilly also started channeling messages from the comet Kohoutek. He came to believe that a nonorganic, solid-state extraterrestrial civilization was controlling the spread of all technologies, communications systems, and control mechanisms on earth. This civilization was set on killing off organic life and replacing it with a Borg-like hive mind of hardwired consciousness.