The Anatomy, Life Cycle and Effects of the Phenomenologically Distributed Human Parasite M0

"This paper presents a self-replicating, homeostatic phenomenon called M0. M0 runs parasitically on populations of humans. It is remarkable in that although its anatomy is distributed across all phenomenological layers from neurological to paradigmattic, its causal sequences are robust and (once exposed) readily traceable and hence vulnerable to counterattack.

The anatomy and lifecycle of the parasite are described, together with several secondary effects which are often of primary importance to the host population. An alternative interpretation of the role of dopamine in controlling mood and awareness is proposed, and how the "security breach" thus exposed is exploited by M0 is shown. A disturbing model of the variability of human consciousness is proposed.

Appropriate responses to this construction of the data are discussed."

For those who haven't had the pleasure. And there's also this:

The Ghost Not

"This paper presents a deep logical error in most people's thinking, that is introduced right at the beginning of thought, and then stays in the thinking until the conclusions are reached. The conclusions are then wrong, but when they are examined there doesn't seem to be anything wrong with them."

Have a good weekend.

Bravo. Three thumbs up.

I thought I would point out that for the naturally or developmentally immune there is another avenue for the further investigation of novel phenomena which under various conditions becomes an alchemical hothouse. I have not had time yet to determine if any of those working on this have elsewhere encountered this or considered it in depth. In the case of the dopamine challenged, (those naturally inclined to pursue any and all patterns, orders, novelties and anomalies in the external world) when confined at length in static postures and poses devoid of most all external stimuli will encounter ever increasing degrees of internal patterns, orders, novelties and anomalies. This data, given over to the aforementioned naturally inherent alchemical treatment, results in no other option but for them to become seers. Again released, at whatever intervals, into the external world they have no alternative but to rationally and objectively witness the innumerable horrors and perversions at every level that await them in the face of the relative order and wonder which they know to be potentially ever present and available to anyone and everyone who could or would but open their eyes and ears, hearts and minds.

Those like this who survive the daily ordeals of such a life within this deeply diseased and distressed world for any significant length of time speak as fully and correctly to whomever about whatever they safely may and otherwise retreat to the relative wisdom, truth, peace, bliss and safety of silences and solitudes, taking with them everything else that they long to share but cannot as they have become fully conscious that they would be tortured and destroyed for attempting to do so.

Well, that's a double thumbs up! Thanks for those reflections.

But you are taking the positive interpretation, and I'm wondering what the dyaddicts(sic) would get out of meditation other than a dopamine boosts, a ritual fixation that places well being outside of novelty, and a further dislocation of identity from experience (there's a disembedding that distances and one that... rejoins, or some better word I can't think of. Ah let me try again, does the disembedding increase or decrease ones intimacy with experience?).

And further I wonder if the noting practice, particularly one that involves 'naming', could be food for the hungry Ghost Not to simply shore up it's boundaries. I think Buddhist practice can be seen as a negative path of delusion, stripping everything down to a final delusion*, in the hope that it pops; then people have trouble describing what they find except in terms of the conceptual apparatus that took them there. An absolute view that knows little of the relative, perhaps that's why people have integration issues. But now I'm rambling, so I'll finish, in the spirit of rambling, with this: there seems to be two opposite directions that lead to the same place, but one removes everything before dumping you in it, and the other takes away the removal until you admit you're are in it. And I wonder if the mapper/packer split (of the articles) could have people choosing the wrong path for themselves, or getting one confused with the other.


(* Consider even the Buddha's investigatory model: observe something, notice your observing of it, and repeat 'this can't be "I"' as "I" am observing it. A whole practice based on the premise of being the observer, which never gets questioned by the practice...unless you get lucky.)

Fascinating, it reads just like A&P, with some nice points mixed in :-) I was tripping just from reading it!

EDIT: I thought I should add a few paragraphs, since when I read the texts the first time I just thought you had put in the links for the fun, since the texts are indeed quite funny; but then tripple think and your answer suggests that you take it more seriously than I thought at first.

I sincerely found what was written fun to read, but delusional to quite some extent. First of all, the evidence that the phenomena they describe has anything to do with dopanine is at best anecdotal, but what is really preposterous is the extent to which the authors believe that they have "understood what is wrong with the world." The "M0 virus" really explains it all, in the end, doesn't it? So they are magically "immune" to this phenomenological virus "M0", and this same virus makes everyone else an idiot? Oh please...

This would be deluded self-engrandisement if they had stopped at the first essay, but when they boldly continue to unravel what is "really wrong with modern-day physics," which of course no-one else understood because they didn't see the ghost not (an essay which I also liked, by the way), then it gets really, really, A&P-like trippy stuff :-) It reminds me those periods of A&P when "everything seems to fit," and things "stand explained," and one sees "the Truth."

The stuff people invent to fuel the belief they are special makes up for an amazing perspective during introspection, a perspective these dudes could really use for themselves

Which isn't to say, let me make that clear, that they don't have some nice points, and that the texts aren't enjoyable, which they are.

Thanks Bruno, I'm glad you enjoyed it. You have a sensible analysis I think, and funny.

The essays are indeed fun and funny, but there's tons more (which I haven't linked to, just go up a few slashes I think to find it), and it does get rather outlandish, to say the least, although still not without it's interesting points. Perhaps this is the authors own A&P stage.

Not much seems to have come from it. There is a forum for it, but when I looked it seemed to be frequented by computer programmers who like to think they have a superior angle on things, whilst displaying many of the supposed attributes of the 'virus' afflicted.

My previous post is using the material as a model for discussing some of the ways I think Buddhist practices can go wrong, but I don't think my concerns are dependant on that model.

However, I do think the mapper/packer mentality is an appropriate observation, at least behaviourally if not functionally, and it transcends all social and educational strata too. (Consider the number of scientist, historians or anthropologist who think that a thing doesn't exist or data is spurious because it doesn't fit their model*. Or cosmologists inventing reality to keep their models alive. Or beginner buddhists thinking things aren't real because their thoughts aren't....)

And the bottom line is whether our experience leads our thinking or our thinking leads our experience. (I suppose you could imagine the former as a general navigational strategy and the latter as perhaps an operational tactic, to include both.) But get this the other way around and it will lead to very different behaviour.

(* I once heard a historian on tv say that new evidence for a pre-existent culture in the americas was spurious because we simply have no evidence for a pre existent culture there )

I can't speak for the dyaddicts except that properly developed and fully engaged the full course of treatment via SamathaVipassana does seem broadly effective enough to work for most everyone who keeps at it long enough. I am far less certain that AF could be made to work for the dyaddicts straight up or dry, so to speak, and probably pretreatment with SamathaVipassana would typically be necessary.

I can speak for the naturally immune and have referred to a little of that experience in passing more in DhO 1.0 than DhO 2.0 although I think a little bit of it is still around, at least I think I noticed something on it still in the Kasina thread. I am so highly resistant to externally applied and unnatural methods of dopamine tampering that to date no known pharmacological or electromagnetic counter-agents are known to exist (yaaaaay!). So in terms of novelty I can say that, in cases like my own, fixed postures or other forms of extreme confinement be these externally or self imposed (in other words insight practice), without the inclusion of various types of a calming practice(s) or concentration practice(s), naturally leads to the presentation of a continually expansive array of ever more novelties and anomalies because any and/or all of the available naturally implicit internal patterns and orders are very quickly rendered transparent and naturally obvious. Unmodified by the employment of some kind of calming, concentrating or centering method either naturally encountered or learned one eventually encounters a series of threshold degrees of novelty which will lead to circumstances such as the processes involved in forms of Laingian Schizophrenia referenced in link one above. These periods of vulnerability between the encounter with internally revealed truths and prior to the reconciliations of those truths with the prevailing external ignorances of the corresponding external truths are typically the points at which external social structures tend to attempt to intervene, with mixed results.

In any case, left to its natural course, without recourse to the stabilizing counterbalances of sufficiently modifying calming and centering processes, the naturally hyper-investigative mind in pursuit of ever deeper insights and wisdom will have to repeatedly pass through the A/P et al in increasingly intense and dramatic forms or, in simpler terms, increasingly come to terms with ever more subjectively overwhelming truths. What I am shuffling towards pointing out here is that ultimately, the subjective pov be it internal or external has no real lasting center or home, there is no one home. Be it in the form of a series of manic depressive or bipolar episodes or psychotic breaks and periods of schizophrenia, brief or prolonged, by whatever names or in whatever terms, the individual will have to either come to both accept and enjoy their own ultimate subjective absence and simultaneously learn to cope with and operate in terms of the all of the commonly referenced conventions that do little but subscribe to the realities of these ghosts be they of one kind or another and regardless of their suitability to the more naturally occurring forms of centering and counterbalancing experience found either internally or externally.

There is a lot of new terminology to play with here, so my apologies for my natural inclination to complex run on sentences. Put simply, yes, disembedding continues until there is nothing but intimacy with experience both internally and externally along with a correspondingly complete lack of resistance, apart from appropriate and suitable forms of centering or timely reference to the given familiarity with the inherent wisdom within the natural universe. The counterbalancing engagement with forms of centering is the conversion of pattern recognitions which are all temporary and provisional into the concretization of various kinds of explicit orders of one kind or another. The plasticity of the natural order always overcomes the concretizations of the imposed orders. This is why all metaphysics ultimately fail and why the more appropriate phenomenological approaches tend to outlast all others.

In principal all maps, models and scaffolding are useful so long as it is clearly understood that these are also necessarily conditionally provisional and temporary. In other words all attachments and acquisitions, relative to the depths and degrees of suitabilities and accuracies or unsuitabilities and inaccuracies, inevitably and ultimately become impediments to further expansion and intimacy with the directly realizable, knowable and understandable universe. In principal the closer or more appropriate the methodology is to the true nature of the universe the more closely it resembles no method at all and instead freely, compassionately, appropriately and intimately connects with the known and unknown, knowable and unknowable universe and is simultaneously wisely void of any resistance to any loss of connection with the known and unknown, knowable and unknowable universe.

Here is a more inclusive link:

Reciprocality

or

http://www.datamodel.co.uk/Reciprocality/www.reciprocality.org/Reciprocality/

An astute and relevant observation. I'm glad this has come up.


Yes, and I think the insight practices are naturally occurring for many (I mean buddhism doesn't have a monopoly on this) so the lack of a well modelled calming, centering or (I think the most effective) concentration strategy results in many getting lost within their own breakthroughs. It's not like 'civilized' society has (or could ever have) an interest in supporting the dissolution of consensual reality.


"there is no one home". I wonder if this phrase has any literary history. It became my baseline expression for how I felt for many years (until I lost the home, so to speak). If only I could have chatted with you ten years ago!


I must say I'm rather taken with your intense and rather messy intelligence. I image you're the sort of person I would delightfully meet until I realized I couldn't keep up with you

I think it's worth pointing out (reiterating) the absolute difference between disembedding and disassociation; that the former effects (ultimately, or preferably) the opposite of the latter. In fact from a different perspective the latter is responsible for the embedding in the first place. I think you've written a very clarifying paragraph here.

Isn't the final bolding the cause of most spiritual suffering? Wait a minute, "The counterbalancing engagement with forms of centering is the conversion of pattern recognitions which are all temporary and provisional into the concretization of various kinds of explicit orders of one kind or another." Is this the necessary remapping exercise? ('concretization of various kinds of explicit orders' confuses me a bit.)



This paragraph comes back to the question of experience leading thought or visa-versa, as I have mentioned above. But you write very well of it. I wonder if you could say more of the final part I have put in bold. I can only think that the 'wisely' part is simply a reiteration and recognition of the intended sense of the paragraph itself.

Thanks again, clearly I've struck a chord with this.

In regards to the question of experience leading thought or visa-versa, I think of this in terms of the inherently dependent relationships between awareness and conscious mentality and materiality or in similar terms to the ways that electrons and the atomic nuclei are variously expressed in mutual interdependences throughout this universe.

So to expand in relation to what I previously said about intimate connections and acquiescence to disconnections it might help to think of this as coexisting modes of acknowledgment and conscious awareness of dependent conditionality's together with acknowledgement and conscious awareness of independent conditionality's both functioning together in harmony within potentially ever more expansive and concentrated fields of awareness. More simply put, thought both dependent and independent of experience and experience both dependent and independent of thought. One endeavors to nurture openness and expansiveness without the added growth of any undesirable vulnerabilities and/or conscious or unconscious disrespect for the boundaries and dominions of others. This is usually a very delicate subject in practice and I have discovered this many times the hard ways. It is difficult to reflect upon it and it is even more difficult to communicate about it well in writing.

Think of past, present and future modalities of awakening as occurring within series of hyperdimensionally nested sets. The dreamer awakens, proceeds with waking life for a time, thinking themselves awake for some time and then after an interval awakens again, and then again, and then again.

The first time, it is astonishing. The second time it is astonishing. The third time it is astonishing. One begins to wonder how far it is to the end of such a process. An end of one kind or another has been variously proclaimed. I have variously awoken a few times already, yet I still wonder, so at this point it merits further investigation to determine if the sets continue. While it necessitates some suffering to continue simply being conscious in the ways that earthly mortality imposes upon us, for now here I be and so more 'remains to be seen'. So I frequently revisit the modes of peace and freedom I know and I cautiously attend to the fine lines between the known and the unknown in the dangerous twilight realms that border on both.