Life is a succession of open doors.

We enter some and others we pass by.

The decisions we make before these open doors are the arbiters of our destiny thenceforth.

Before you stands an Open Door.

Look within and consider well what you see there,

for this portal leads from outer darkness to

Inner Light.

May that Light be extended upon you.

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In researching occult conspiracies, one eventually faces a crossroad of mythic proportions (called Chapel Perilous in the trade). You come out the other side either stone paranoid or an agnostic; there is no third way.

Chapel Perilous, like the mysterious entity called "I," cannot be located in the space-time continuum; it is weightless, odorless, tastless and undetectable by ordinary instruments. Indeed, like the Ego, it is even possible to deny that it is there. And yet, even more like the Ego, once you are inside it, there doesn't seem to be any way to ever get out again, until you suddenly discover that it has been brought into existence by thought and does not exist outside thought. Everything you fear is waiting with slavering jaws in Chapel Perilous, but if you are armed with the wand of intuition, the cup of sympathy, the sword of reason, and the pentacle of valor, you will find there (the legends say) the Medicine of Metals, the Elixir of Life, the Philosopher's Stone, True Wisdom and Perfect Happiness.

That's what the legends always say, and the language of myth is poetically precise. For instance, if you go into that realm without the sword of reason, you will lose your mind, but at the same time, if you take only the sword of reason without the cup of sympathy, you will lose your heart. Even more remarkably, if you approach without the wand of intuition, you can stand at the door for decades never realizing you have arrived. You might think you are just waiting for a bus, or wandering from room to room looking for your cigarettes, watching a TV show, or reading a cryptic and ambiguous MySpace page. Chapel Perilous is tricky that way.

Enter At Your Own Risk!

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Still interested? Great!

Let's talk a little bit about the environment in which we have to work with before we actually get started.

"Cyberspace"

The virtual world is quite different than the in-person world. Digitizing people, relationships, and groups has stretched the boundaries of how and when humans interact. In the next few paragraphs we will explore some of the unique psychological features of cyberspace that shape how people behave in this new social realm. In different online environments we see different synergistic combinations of these features, thus resulting in a distinct psychological quality to each environment which determines how people experience themselves and others. We may think of these features as the fundamental elements of a conceptual model for a psychology of cyberspace. The effect of these elements on individuals, groups, and communities is important. However, it's also important to remember that the elements described here are only part of the story. How people behave in cyberspace will always be a complex interaction between these features of cyberspace and the characteristics of the person.Reduced SensationsCan you see a person in cyberspace - his facial expressions and body language? Can you hear the changes in her voice? Whether an environment in cyberspace involves visual and/or auditory communication will greatly affect how people behave and the relationships that develop among those people. Multimedia gaming and social environments, audio-video conferencing, podcasting, and internet-phoning surely are signs of the very sensory sophisticated environments to come. However, the sensory experience of encountering others in cyberspace - seeing, hearing, and COMBINING seeing and hearing - is still limited. For the most part people communicate through typed language. Even when audio-video technology becomes efficient and easy to use, the quality of physical and tactile interactions - for example, handshakes, pats on the back, dancing, hugs, kisses, or just walking together - will be very limited or nonexistent, at least in the near future. The limited sensory experiences of cyberspace has some significant disadvantages - as well as some unique advantages - as compared to in-person encounters.

Identity Flexibility

The lack of face-to-face cues has a curious impact on how people present their identity in cyberspace. Communicating only with typed text, you have the option of being yourself, expressing only parts of your identity, assuming imaginative identities, or remaining completely anonymous - in some cases, being almost invisible, as with the "lurker." In many environments, you can give yourself any name you wish. Anonymity has a disinhibiting effect that cuts two ways. Sometimes people use it to act out some unpleasant need or emotion, often by abusing other people. Or it allows them to be honest and open about some personal issue that they could not discuss in a face-to-face encounter.

Altered Perceptions

Sitting quietly and staring at the computer monitor can become an altered state of consciousness. While doing e-mail or instant messaging, some people experience a blending of their mind with that of the other person. In the imaginary multimedia worlds - where people might shape-shift, speak via ESP, walk through walls, spontaneously generate objects out of thin air, or possess all sorts of imaginary powers - the experience becomes surrealistic. It mimics a state of consciousness that resembles dreams. These altered and dream-like states of consciousness in cyberspace may account for why it is so attractive for some people. It might help explain some forms of computer and cyberspace addiction.

Transcended Space

Geographical distance makes little difference in who can communicate with whom. An engineer in Germany converses with a business woman from California on a server in Australia. It's a small world after all. The irrelevance of geography has important implications for people with unique interests or needs. In their outside life, they may not be able to find anyone near them who shares that unique interest or need. But in cyberspace, birds of a feather - even those with highly unusual feathers - easily can flock together. For support groups devoted to helping people with their problems, that can be a very beneficial feature of cyberspace. For people with antisocial motivations, that's a very negative feature of cyberspace.

Equalized Status

In most cases, everyone on the internet has an equal opportunity to voice him or herself. Everyone - regardless of status, wealth, race, gender, etc. - starts off on a level playing field. Some people call this the "net democracy." Although one's status in the outside world ultimately will have some impact on one's life in cyberspace, there is some truth to this net democracy ideal. What determines your influence on others is your skill in communicating (including writing skills), your persistence, the quality of your ideas, and your technical know-how.

Temporal Flexibility

"Synchronous communication" involves people sitting at their computer at the same time (i.e., in "real time") communicating with each other via the internet. Chat rooms and instant messaging are good examples. On the other hand, e-mail and newsgroups involve "asynchronous communication" that does not require people to interact with each other in the moment. In both asynchronous and synchronous communication (with the exception of video conferencing), there is a stretching of time. During chat and IM you have from several seconds to a minute or more to reply to the other person - a significantly longer delay than in face-to-face meetings. In e-mail, blogs, and newsgroups, you have hours, days, or even weeks to respond. Cyberspace creates a unique temporal space where the ongoing, interactive time together stretches out. This provides a convenient "zone for reflection." Compared to face-to-face encounters, you have significantly more time to mull things over and compose a reply.

Media Disruption

We all expect our computers and the internet to interact with us. That's the name of the game. Nevertheless, no matter how complex and sophisticated our electronic tools become, there will always be moments when they fail to live up to their end of the bargain. There will be moments when software and hardware don't work properly, when noise intrudes into the communication, and connections break. There will be moments when our telecommunication systems give us nothing, not even an error message. The frustration and anger we experience in reaction to these failures says something about our relationship to our machines and the internet - something about our dependency on them, our need to control them. That lack of response also opens the door for us to project all sorts of worries and anxieties onto the machine that gives us no reply. I call these the black hole experiences of cyberspace. Fortunately, some computer-mediated environments are more robust than others. Those differences in reliability, predictability, and dependability bear important psychological effects.

Whew!

Now that we have somewhat of an understanding of the advantages and disadvantages of working through this virtual world wide web, let's get started shall we?

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First of all, for you newcomers to this page, let me introduce myself. In this digital form I am usually referred to as:

But in other forms I am called many different things depending on what role I am fulfilling at the time. None of which is who I am in an absolute sense.

Some of these labels include but are not limited to the following:

Bro:. Christopher D. Strickland, 32°

Reverend Damien Lucas Leadbeater

Some people just call me "Chris" and that's fine...

So. Nice to meet you too. Kinda.

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I won't spend a lot of time on my own personal opinions or views because, truthfully, although you may think you're here to find out about them, you're not. You are here to find out about yourself. And I don't mean that in a conceited way, in that you are only thinking about yourself, but 9 times out of ten (now that's real scientific huh?) people are out for number one. If you don't believe me, look up statistics on how many mirrors are sold in America every single day.

Well, so who are you? Are you a man? A woman? A young person? An older person? Are you short, tall, thin, wide, heavy, light, scarred, flawless, built, bulky, mean, nice, rude, creative, odd, strange, weird, lovely, obnoxious...? And I could go on and on but you see, there is no use in continuing with these labels, these words and descriptions or symbols because they have absolutely nothing to do with the question at hand. Do they?

One more time. Who are you?

Please Do These Exercizes:

The following is written in a way that assumes you have heard of the concept that the brain is like a computer. Hardware is considered to be that which you are born with, internal, stable, impossible to change. Software is considered the "programs" and conditioning or learning that shapes the way you look at yourself and the world around you.

Sit in a room where you will not be disturbed for about 30 minutes and begin thinking, "I am sitting in this room doing this exercize because..." and list as many of the "causes" that you can think of.For instance, you are doing this exercize because, obviously, you read about it on this web page. Why are you on this web page? Did somebody recommend it? How did that person come into your life? If you found this web page on a search engine, why did you happen to use just that search engine on just that day?Why do you view web pages of this sort - alchemy, mysticism, spirituality, psychology, consciousness, truth, etc.? How did you get interested in these subjects? Who turned you on to them, and how long ago? What factors in your childhood inclined you to be interested in these subjects later?Why are you doing this exercize in THIS room and not elsewhere? Why did you buy or rent this house or apartment? Why are you in this city and not another? Why on this continent and not another?Why are you here at all - that is, how did your parents meet? Did they consciously decide to have a child? Do you happen to know, or were you an accident? What cities were they born in? If in different cities, why did they move in space-time so that their paths would intersect?Why is this planet capable of supporting life? Why did it produce the kind of life that would dream up an exercize of this sort?

Repeat the above exercize a few days from now. Try to ask and answer fifty questions you didn't think of the first time (notice that you cannot ever ask all possible questions).Avoid all metaphysical speculations (e.g., karma, reincarnation, "destiny" etc.). The point of the exercize will be mind-blowing enough without introducing "occult" theories, and it will be more startling if you carefully avoid such overtly "mystical" speculations.

Now. Pick up any household item (a spoon, a fork, a pen, a cup, etc.) and perform the same exercize as above. Why is it here? Find out who invented it, if you can. How did the invention get to that continent? Who manufactured it? Why did they manufacture that instead of, oh say, birdcages or motors? Why did they become manufacturers instead of musicians, poets, engineers, or architects? Why did you purchase it? Why did you pick that object, of all the objects surrounding you, to perform this meditation on?

Answer Quickly!

Are you your hardware or your software?

Or Both?

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While you think about that, maybe you have came to the conclusion that although you do not know exactly who you are, when you may have been perfectly convinced of it just moments earlier, you will probably most certainly agree that whoever or whatever you are it is definitely conscious. Right? I mean, you must be conscious to read this page and think about it. Or you must have been conscious to even come to a point in which you have access to a computer and an internet connection? Wait a minute... Come to a point? A what? A point in what? A point in time, as in a position in space-time? Or a point in consciousness? Is consciousness actually space-time? Damn, this is all getting a bit edgy. I want out!

OUT!

Well, first we must determine who or what "you" are and what that means precisely and then we can discover what it is that you are in and what it means to be "out" of that...

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Consciousness

From Julian Jaynes' "The Origin Of Consciousness In The Breakdown Of The Bicameral Mind":

‘We feel it [consciousness] is the defining attribute of all our waking states, our moods and affections, our memories, our thoughts, attentions, and volitions. We feel comfortably certain that consciousness is the basis of concepts, of learning and reasoning, of thought and judgment, and that it is so because it records and stores our experiences as they happen, allowing us to introspect on them and learn from them at will. We are also quite conscious that all this wonderful set of operations and contents that we call consciousness is located somewhere in the head.'

'On critical examination, all of these statements are false. They are the costume that consciousness has been masquerading in for centuries. They are the misconceptions that have prevented a solution to the problem of the origin of consciousness.'

‘Consciousness is a much smaller part of our mental life than we are conscious of, because we cannot be conscious of what we are not conscious of. How simple that is to say; how difficult to appreciate! It is like asking a flashlight in a dark room to search around for something that does not have any light shining upon it. The flashlight, since there is light in whatever direction it turns, would have to conclude that there is light everywhere. And so consciousness can seem to pervade all mentality when actually it does not.'

'It is much more probable that the seeming continuity of consciousness is really an illusion, just as most of the other metaphors about consciousness are. In our flashlight analogy, the flashlight would be conscious of being on only when it is on. Though huge gaps of time occurred, providing things were generally the same, it would seem to the flashlight itself that the light had been continuously on. We are thus conscious less of the time than we think, because we cannot be conscious of when we are not conscious…. so consciousness knits itself over its time gaps and gives the illusion of continuity.’

‘If [John] Locke had lived in our time, he would have used the metaphor of a camera rather than a slate. But the idea is the same. And most people would protest emphatically that the - chief function of consciousness is to store up experience, to copy it as a camera does, so that it can be reflected upon at some future time.'

'So it seems. But consider the following problems: Does the door of your room open from the right or the left? Which is your second longest finger? At a stoplight, is it the red or the green that is on top? How many teeth do you see when brushing your teeth? What letters are associated with what numbers on a telephone dial? If you are in a familiar room, without turning around, write down all the items on the wall just behind you, and then look.'

'I think you will be surprised how little you can retrospect in consciousness on the supposed images you have stored from so much previous attentive experience. If the familiar door suddenly opened the other way, if another finger suddenly grew longer, if the red light were differently placed, or you had an extra tooth, or the telephone were made differently, or a new window latch had been put on the window behind you, you would know it immediately, showing that you all along "knew', but not consciously so. Familiar to psychologists, this is the distinction between recognition and recall. What you can consciously recall is a thimbleful to the huge oceans of your actual knowledge.’

Where does Consciousness take place?

‘Everyone, or almost everyone, immediately replies, in my head. This is because when we introspect, we seem to look inward on an inner space somewhere behind our eyes. But what on earth do we mean by 'look'? We even close our eyes sometimes to introspect even more clearly. Upon what? Its spatial character seems unquestionable. Moreover we seem to move or at least 'look' in different directions. And if we press ourselves too strongly to further characterize this space (apart from its imagined contents), we feel a vague irritation, as if there were something that did not want to be known, some quality which to question was somehow ungrateful, like rudeness in a friendly place.'

'We not only locate this space of consciousness inside our own heads. We also assume it is there in others'. In talking with a friend, maintaining periodic eye-to-eye contact (that remnant of our primate past when eye-to-eye contact was concerned in establishing tribal hierarchies), we are always assuming a space behind our companion's eyes into which we are talking, similar to the space we imagine inside our own heads where we are talking from.'

'And this is the very heartbeat of the matter. For we know perfectly well that there is no such space in anyone's head at all! There is nothing inside my head or yours except physiological tissue of one sort or another. And the fact that it is predominantly neurological tissue is irrelevant.'

'Now this thought takes a little thinking to get used to. It means that we are continually inventing these spaces in our own and other people's heads, knowing perfectly well that they don't exist anatomically and the location of these 'spaces' is indeed quite arbitrary….'

'Let us not make a mistake. When I am conscious, I am always and definitely using certain parts of my brain inside my head. But so am I when riding a bicycle, and the bicycle riding does not go on inside my head. The cases are different of course, since bicycle riding has a definite geographical location, while consciousness does not. In reality, consciousness has no location whatever except as we imagine it has.'

‘O, what a world of unseen visions and heard silences, this insubstantial country of the mind! What ineffable essences, these touchless rememberings and unshowable reveries! And the privacy of it all! A secret theater of speechless monologue and prevenient counsel, an invisible mansion of all moods, musings, and mysteries, an infinite resort of disappointments and discoveries. A whole kingdom where each of us reigns reclusively alone, questioning what we will, commanding what we can. A hidden hermitage where we may study out the troubled book of what we have done and yet may do. An introcosm that is more myself than anything I can find in a mirror. This consciousness that is myself of selves, that is everything, and yet is nothing at all — what is it? And where did it come from? And why?’

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If you are like me when I was first exposed to this knowledge, you're a little perplexed and questioning just what the hell consciousness is. Maybe even questioning your questioning. Although a bit disturbing, it is necessary to break down the structure before rebuilding anew. Let us continue...

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How you most likely came to be who you think you are...

Let us return now to the model of the brain as being like a computer. Now remember, it's just a model. The brain is NOT a computer just as a map of Texas is NOT Texas or a cafe menu is NOT the assortment of meals available. Although we are looking for consciousness and its origins, we must fall back to the brain as it is the closest we can come to consciousness without getting too strange and weird in our exploration. Let's try to keep our feet on the ground for the time being.

In talking about the brain and referring to it as an electro-colloidal biocomputer, we all know that the hardware is considered to be inside the skull. The software, however, is practically anywhere and everywhere. For example, the software "in" the brain also exists outside the brain in such forms as, say, a book that one read twenty years ago, which may have been an English translation of various signals transmitted by Plato 2400 years ago. Other parts of the software may be made up of the Three Stooges, Beethoven, your mother and father, various pets you have "had" down through the years, and anybody and (to some extent) any-thing that has ever impacted the brain. This may sound strange but that's the way software (or information) functions.

Of course, if consciousness consisted of nothing but this undifferentiated tapioca of time-less, space-less software, we would have no individuality, no center, no SELF . We need to know, then, how does a Self emerge from out of this universal, massive software ocean?

What the Thinker thinks, the Prover proves.

Because the human brain, like other animal brains, acts as an electro-colloidal computer, not a solid-state computer, it follows the same laws as other animal brains. That is, the programs get into the brain, as electro-chemical bonds, in discrete quantum stages. Each set of programs consists of FOUR BASIC PARTS :

1. Genetic Imperatives:

These are totally hard-wired programs or what one might call "instincts."

2. Imprints:

These are more-or-less hard wired programs which the brain is genetically designed to accept only at certain points in its development. These points are known, in ethology, as times of imprint vulnerability.

3. Conditioning:

These are programs built onto the imprints. They are looser and fairly easy to change with counter-conditioning.

4. Learning:

This is even "looser" and "softer" than conditioning and very easy to change.

In general, the primordial imprint can always over-rule any subsequent conditioning or learning. An imprint is a species of software that has become built-in hardware, being impressed on the tender neurons at an early age when they were particularly open and vulnerable. Imprints (software frozen into hardware) are the non-negotiable aspects of our individuality. Out of the infinity of possible programs existing as potential software, the imprint establishes the limits, perimeters within which all subsequent conditioning and learning occurs.

Before the first imprint, the consciousness of the infant is "formless and void" - like the universe at the beginning of Genesis, or descriptions of unconditioned consciousness in the mystic traditions. As soon as the first imprint is made, structure emerges out of the creative void. The growing mind, alas, becomes TRAPPED within this structure. It identifies with the structure; in a sense, it BECOMES the structure.

Each imprint thereafter complicates the software which programs our experience, the experience we call "reality." Conditioning and further learning build networks onto this bedrock of imprinted software. The total structure of this brain-circuitry makes up our map of the world. It is what our Thinker thinks, and our Prover mechanically fits all incoming signals to the limitations of this map.

For convenience, there is a map of these circuits, not the be-all end-all of models, but something adequate to keep a grip on what we are actually dealing with here. It was first proposed by Dr. Timothy Leary and later modified by Robert Anton Wilson. It's the best map I have found so far. The image below lists other information that we will get to later, but for now, just recognize that the circuits are listed in a column with the highest circuit being what one may see metaphorically as the summit of human development or Maslow's ultimate accomplishment of self-actualization:

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