The Diseased Mind

What is the state of a controlled mind? It is certainly a diseased one, as the mind cannot stand another authority over its own; its faculty is thinking, perceiving, feeling, remembering, desiring independently. We are not able to peep into others’ mind, and nobody can read our thoughts. The rule is this independence and coherence of the mind, of individual memory, of consciousness or recollection; only in times of love and death suffers it an alteration. In such moments the inclinations, opinions, sentiments of the mind are altered, and it is changed into something else. The focus of thinking, our attention becomes different, another makeup has developed, a new reality has grown on the previous one. But why don’t such basic instances for altering the mind count as mind controlling capacities?

Divinisation and self-divinisation both involve the alternating expansion of the mind by artificial means. About this the English writer Aldous Huxley[1] has a lot to say – how to reach the supernatural by artificial (in this case chemical) means. This experience of alteration is at the same time an intense participation in madness. The sovereignty of the mind is undermined, so it as if becomes diseased, its supremacy in rank over the perceptive organs is acidly violated, its outstanding excellence for comprehension is weakened, so it ceased to be the highest form of understanding, its autonomy became lost for an outside authority. Until the point of mescalin injection Huxley’s mind was a chieftain, whose authority extended over his whole body, self and soul, and the number of subordinate feelings, hearings, visual impressions functioned as feudatories to their sole overlord authority, to his mind. They played a large portion in the perceptions allotted to his mind, and numerous inferior sensual vassals served its comprehension.

The expansion of the mind can be provoked many other ways, one of them is exactly divinisation. During a séance of witchcraft, the magicians relocate their mind into the transcendental, so they are without a soul and a body, maintaining a minimal self, only their sensual, feeling impulses vibrate, and with much intensity. The integrity of the mind is similarly lost in both cases, becoming part of a bigger mind. Hölderlin saw it in the following way:

They’ve made
A mockery of their own principles
And surely the fire of heaven:
Then they’ve scorned the paths of mortals
And resolved on brazen acts,
Striving to become equal
To the gods.

Hölderlin, The Rhine – 3. Trans. James Mitchell [2]

When a diseased mind leaps into infinity by the toxicity of effervescences, it is ready to accept repatterning. Divinisation is a situation that can redesign the mind, can reinstate the whole person with a new character, for the simple reason that during divinisation the self is muted, or better to say the integrity of the self-body-soul character is offered up to the transcendental. Through this sacrifice the complexity of the self is damaged, the mind becomes diseased, the body confused, and the soul escapes; it creates the liberty of madness, whereas effervescence was the cause and reason of all. But a greater effervescence than the loss of the entity could have produced – a sad misery which Huxley did not even try to deny – which persisted in his works until his death.[3] And when could a diseased mind formulate a goal, which are the condition that makes the disease desirable?

Voegelin (1990: 341) uses Baudelaire’s example to shed light on another type of divinisation,[4] the artistic dimension, or the satanic situation that brings with itself the disease of the mind. Huxley’s quest for perception into the transcendental is just another example, as he chased the source of creativity in a transformation from healthy to the diseased mind. For the flowering effervescence of impulses, the high electricity of mortification, the delirium of a dying system, for the state of a not I,[5] when being is separated from becoming (the dying person is becoming something else than his earthly mind-spirit-self conglomerate, existing in definite time and space) and at the same he is temporally separated from finite existence, disappearing into the infinite. Huxley felt the infinity out of the agonizing sensation produced by the division of his soul, body, and self, which he experienced at the instant of that experiment. In losing the unity of self-mind-body, he must have experienced the full effect of its lack, or the void.

Pavel Florensky[6] showed through the example of icons how prayer creates an opening: not a door of perception, but a window to the transcendental. This window leads to a vacant, unobstructed void, with the window-icon serving as a passageway for the prayer to reach the transcendental. In the process of icon painting and beholding the right-minded ones reach this transcendental void. The gap is approached by each layer of paint, which represents the process of divinisation. Transformation occurs with each step, when the soul ascends from body to spirit, drawing ever closer to God. As Florensky emphasised, this process is to be a pattern for our lives so that we too become an icon image of the living God. Cautiously opening the window of the voided transcendental Florensky peered carefully alongside the opening upon the spiritual outside from the direction in which he had entered, distancing between two different worlds: that of reality, and another of sensuality, a dream-like world (as coined by Florensky), existing but not tangible. You cannot touch a wavelength, only feel its heat, hear its voice, or see its almost corporality. Wavelength has no reality, but has image extensions, which are perceivable and recognizable as they are imitations of the real and vice versa. Where has our reality got its archetypes? From the images we all have, from the images we can all relate to[7] – by debasing or bettering ourselves, whether by using low or high transcendentality, this is our choice.

This leads me into a discussion of how divinization leads to a unified opening to the infinite realm, whether by a devoted prayer, an intellectual query, or a magical techné. For thousand years religion as well as magic both taught a method as techné of making a breach of opening into the void. The techné itself is alchemical: though senseless, it appeared as conscious, and was known to those who knew the method that if an aim was followed rigorously in order to provoke an opening effect on the transcendental, its effects would have been inevitable occurring. Such techné produced a unified opening in the sense that it was available to everybody who learned the method of the aperture, though not as a unified experience. An experience is special and distinctly personnel, so its interpretation also brings in the touch of the character: the vindictive and the hateful would hardly feel Florensky’s sweet devotion:

“But the material iconostasis does not, in itself, take the place of the living witnesses, existing instead of them; rather, it points toward them, concentrating the attention of those who pray upon them – a concentration of attention that is essential to the developing of spiritual sight.” (Florensky 1996: 62-63)

Here in Florensky’s experience the relocation of the self happens in two steps. First, there is an expansion of the human cognitive capacity towards the transcendental, and only then occurs the unification with the dimensions of the transcendental. This unified opening (the opening of the infinite through sacrificing love) is an aspect of a passionate love for uniting with the transcendental, a love that keeps its devotees liberated from self-importance, an urge for denying individual separateness and consciousness, to neglect the feeling of personality, and ultimately reveals the sameness of the devotee with others. While such self-opening and emptying is a universal fact of divinization which takes place through relocating into the transcendental being, it happens, technologically speaking, as a process during magic, or as an alchemical process. Even the early modern police state, according to Axtmann (1992), was ruled by the same relocating transformation, as the rulers of police states were themselves transformed beings who performed their authority tasks through the reception of their authority from God. Police state rulers are themselves transformed by divine grace, at least that was the conviction. This was even inevitable, as divinization was a technological method, and as such it easily progressed and developed in all ways of life, until it arrived at the political sphere. What else than the spread of a methodical distribution could have followed in modernity, with its governmental machine? When an absolute universality violates both the order of space and the order of time; it turns out to have a place nowhere at all. Only the desiring being has a role in it, by destroying identity being and character in the compassion to be nothing, to be united with the void.

Mind control has significance only in this ‘trans-objective reality of being’ (as coined by Florensky), a world that is not characterized by either time or space, or by identity, but has a deep interest in their incarnation, such sensuals, impulses, the electric pulsation of energies that are coming from pain or pleasure and would like to be embodied. This is why such inconceivable, unexplorable, unfathomable transcendence is inane, complacently foolish, impersonal, and in a certain sense vampire-like, reanimated by sensuals and become a being itself, reincarnate again and again. This reincarnating effect has two consequences: one is that it causes to appear in a new form, refurbishing or revitalizing the devotees (who voided themselves); the other is a progressing pseudo-reality. The way of addressing the transcendental inside magic, alchemy or religion is complicated, but rests on the belief that one can choose, while pseudo-reality does not depend on a decision. All the stories about the existence of astral bodies in the Kabbala, the spread of voided shells (klipot), these metaphysical barriers between ourselves and the transcendental from receiving its blessing effects are the autonomous opening of that demonic virtuality, which is opening to an ever fuller extent, widening the mind to the void. When the demoniac is unfolded to its fullest width (as evil attracts evil) of pseudo-bodies and pseudo-souls, images will ruling reality, and imitation becomes the rule: the condition for mind control.

One may have reservations about some of these theses, such as the claim that divinisation opened the way for mind control and for other modes of mechanization of thinking. One is also left to wonder about other approaches to spiritual exercises, in traditions like the expansion of the mind by chemical way or by prayer that leads to the opening of the transcendental. Such exercises at the same time lead to a loss of identity and the spreading universalisation of pseudo-reality. We tried to clearly attribute to mind control, as an inevitable consequences, the loss of reality. Huxley went through the alteration experience under the influence of mescaline in May 1953, just one month later than the CIA launched its Mind Control program on 13 April 1953 in order to experiment with disabling potentialities on the mind, or on trans-objective reality. How social instability can be produced, how to funnel negative information into a large computerized database in order to engineer clandestine social intelligence activities, were among the aims, and to achieve them they experimented with drugs on volunteers and on non-volunteers. State agencies analysed the deconstructed entities and their diseased mind for the purpose of security and state defence. We know little concerning how successful the program was, but the idea of deconstruction through repatterning has definitely grown out of the satanic mills of wars, and especially the ‘satanic situation’ of World War Two. Some influential experts of the Mind Control project even witnessed the Nuremberg trial and served as its advisors, while others examined war documents, methods and actions in order to use them for their own purposes. Not accidentally, experts became the depositors of evil, further attracting the demoniac to proliferate mind control.

Bibliography

Axtmann, Roland (1992) ‘ “Police” and the formation of the modern state: Legal and ideological assumptions on state capacity in the Austrian Lands of the Habsburg Empire, 1500-1800’, German History 10, 1: 39-61.

Florensky, Pavel (1996) Iconostasis, Crestwood: SVS Press.

Huxley Aldous (2004) The Doors of Perception, London: Vintage.

Voegelin, Eric (1990) ‘Wisdom and the magic of the extreme: A meditation’, in E. Sandoz (ed.) Published Essays, 1966-1985, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.

Notes

[1] See Huxley’s 1954 Doors of Perception about the artificial introduction of stimulants into himself in order to examine whether and how the mind-body-self unity can be altered.

[2] ‘The Rhine’ was written around 1801-02, when Hölderlin started walking all along the Rhine and other beautiful places of nature. He clearly sees the limits of the mind to endure divine revelations, that not even gods want them, nor man is able to better himself by it. Instead ‘a man can experience the highest/By keeping the best things in memory/Until he dies. Everyone has/His own measure.’ (Hölderlin, ‘The Rhine’). This is a Platonic sentence, as if giving words to Socrates’ mouth.

[3] See his last novel, Island, which shows a sad loss of perceptivity, writing almost the exact opposite as in his great dystopian novels Brave New World and Ape and Essence.

[4] See Voegelin (1990: 341) on Baudelaire, ‘about the modern man as being a diseased mind engaged in the sorcery of self-divinisation, he had lived through the satanic situation’.

[5] See Dostoevsky’s Karamazov Brothers.

[6] The Russian philosopher and theologian Pavel Florensky (1882-1937) developed an ontological approach to transcendental experience. He is an eminent representative of Russian religious philosophy, among others mentor to Mikhail Bakhtin.

[7] See Plato’s theory of forms.

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