Psychonetics: A nerd's toolset to work with mind and perception

http://deconcentration-of-attention.com/psychonetics.html

197 83 5 years ago

Hmm. I want to like this. Something is making me uneasy, though. It seems like some of what is here is partial reinvention and tweaking of stuff that goes back at least to the earliest days of Buddhism. It reminds me a lot of the method known to westerners as "Mahasi noting", so I was surprised not to see it mentioned.

Each time I was inclined to be encouraged by something like "distractions are welcomed", I'd be worried again soon after at mentions of controlling things. It's OK to go against thousands of years of tradition if you want, but it seems worrisome if you do it without mentioning the prior art and explaining what's wrong with it.

Kheyas• 5 years ago

You can study the tradition separately. This is one of those tools that can become a dangerous weapon in the wrong hands. If someone doesn't study the universe before getting into this he is most likely to use it the wrong way. It's important to appreciate the universe from outside the individual perspective. But you can't stop people from doing anything. Just like you couldn't stop people from building the atomic bomb. We need to experience and learn.

Tradition, in my opinion, is people being one-sided towards the right side of the brain - focusing only on experience and not logic. To the point where mysticism is the only way to explain anything. Both sides need to be integrated.

dr_dshiv2• 5 years ago

It is nice to see attempts at rationally integrating mystical experiences. That mystical experiences occur and have value is clear. The mystical and perennial philosophy (“all is one”) is not too far from rational thinking.

dvh19903• 5 years ago

You get uneasy because this is written in a very ego/control driven way. I get the feel from the text that the individual who wrote it is interested in dominion over himself and perhaps others.

This is diametrically opposite to how Buddhist/Hindu texts sounds and feel. And I think the way those aforementioned religions approach the subject of personal practice is healthier for both the individual and the world

joeberon18• 5 years ago

Honestly as a Buddhist, I find perennialism and the western approach to Buddhism to be offensive and degrading to the religion. Many such people even claim that traditional Buddhist lineages are "backwards" and "for stupid people". The pushing of secularists into Buddhist spaces is a huge issue and invalidating traditional Buddhist voices in the west.

The worst part is that the Buddha even specifically spoke out against many of the points secularists rely on, for example he spoke out extensively against the idea that death is the end. People who believed that were called annihilationists. However people approaching Buddhism in a secular way choose to ignore this, because they think their secular worldview is basic, immutable, and "obvious". Not accepting that the whole Buddhist project contradicts that, they try and suppress Asian voices and spaces, and instead support spaces that already agree with their preconceptions. It is just another form of colonialism, and I really don't like it.

itisit3• 5 years ago

Sorry, this comes across as surprisingly dogmatic and sanctimonious for someone who identifies as Buddhist. Religion can be used in any way people fancy. It goes without saying, but there is no right/pure/true way to practice a religion, especially considering their imaginative basis.

klik996• 5 years ago

On the other hand, Buddhism has a rich tradition of interacting and fusing with local beliefs and creating totally new interpretaions, which then go on to fight with each other about who's right and who's got it backwards. I once saw a lecture by the Dalai Lama and where he spent an hour defending the purity of his lineage!

Take for example the Zen koan: "Why did Bodhidharma come to China?" "The cypress in the courtyard." (referring to the tree growing in the center of their monastery.) Zen is a very Japanese version of Chen Buddhism, which was in turn a very Taoist free wheeling version of Buddhism from India, which used existing Indian mythology. Zen Buddhists is very formal and ritual focused, and their koans mostly being about a Chen Buddhist monk who spent his little money on alcohol in the nearby town rather than food.

The Tibetan monk Chögyam Trungpa famously said Buddhism would come to the West as psychology. Who cares who's right and who's wrong, as long as it helps you see the cypress in the courtyard?

dvh19903• 5 years ago

The thing with Buddhism and perhaps any genuine spiritual practice is that the tools you acquire through working on yourself are powerful and useful, which is why secular people are drawn to yoga/meditation as "just" a practice.

The problem here is that by removing the spiritual side, you get the all the tools but none of the restraint required to wield them gracefully.

GlennS2• 5 years ago

Have you considered that maybe the only path to victory for Buddhism is by being flexible enough to rise above the bollucks?

I'm not a Buddhist, but in its atheist forms (which aren't only Western) it seems like it's close enough to reality.

If my choice is between abandoning religion entirely (because I'm a pedant who spends all my time with computers that won't accept anything unless it's technically correct), or having a think about it because you abandoned the literal truth of your literal texts in favour of some useful metaphors, then maybe I'll think about it?

This is my counter-offer to Pascal's wager.

dr_dshiv2• 5 years ago

“The model was simple. An individual performs some arithmetic calculation, such as subtracting 17 from 10000. Then, 17 again from the result and again. At some point, he is administered nitrous oxide and sees a hallucinatory image. His task is to continue the calculation.”

pvarangot• 5 years ago

I think the Neo American Church has a similar ceremony with nitrous if you are interested in nitrous rites: http://okneoac.org/

Don't quote me on that, I never read their texts except tangentially while reading other history books.

dvh19903• 5 years ago

This isn't very different from existing forms of meditation, but the scientific/secular focus here changes things.

If done for science and the discovery of truth, this practice could be a great way to bring old-school spirituality into modernity.

If, however, this is practiced for the acquisition of power, I can see how it can lead to psychosis.

FeepingCreature5• 5 years ago

The basic structure of this seems to match my experience.

This experience can be perceived as the "normal" mind turning off and another mind awakening. This "other mind" does not think serially with words. Instead, it thinks dimensionally, with mental sensations of pure meanings.

An important note is that it is, imo, not the case that the "conscious mind" shuts off and an "unconscious mind" begins operating; rather, the unconscious mind is always the one doing the work, and the conscious overlay is more akin to a debugger pausing, stepping and querying its operation.

A good exercise for verbal thinkers that I've found, is to try and think a thought out loud, then interrupt yourself before actually mentally verbalizing it, but still keep the thought at the forefront of your mind. This allows you to examine the "pre-verbal form" of the thought.

edit: I've also found that a good way to get rid of intrusive visual thoughts is to do the opposite of their planar deconcentration exercise, basically embedding my observing perspective completely in my vision, leaving no "space" for imagination.

edit: POSSIBLY IMPORTANT INSIGHT that I've just had. Why is there a sense of "I exist/I have control" to begin with? Well, with our imagination, we can move our center of perception somewhere or sometime else. When we do that, the center of our perception diverges from our actual current body. In this state, consciousness cannot command actions at the point of perception, so there has to be a sense of "I do not exist here/I cannot perform actions here", in order to differentiate the state of imagining a fictional center of attention from living in the moment. That sense is precisely the quale of existence.

plutonorm• 5 years ago

I agree the unconscious is the one delivering the 'stuff'. If you know anything about neural networks, you may have come across an autoencoder. This is what I think is happening as information gets passed into the conscious mind. We are aware of the shifting patterns of non verbal thought within our mind, when we pay attention, this is viewing the compressed output of the inner mind - just as the second stage of an autoencoder views the compressed output of its first stage.

The unconscious is unconscious because it's machinations are not directly recorded into memory and so we cannot self reflect upon them. But of course in the moment that part of our mind is conscious just as we are, it's just that that consciousness cannot be recalled.

So this article is calling for the shutting down of the fore mind so that we can better listen to and interpret the output of the subconscious. And further to start to think in terms of the same non verbal architecture that the subconscious moves with.

It is also apparent to me that this matches with the MBTI personality classification system. Sensing types rely upon machinations within the fore mind, logic, verbal translations of inner thought - whereas the intuitives listen directly to the unconscious. I'm an intuitive and when solving a problem I will often simply wait for the answer to arrive.

fjabre• 5 years ago

You have touched on some very old knowledge found in Hindu and Buddhist texts.

You do not exist in the same frame of reference as the objects you perceive. You are fixed while the objects perceived are subject to spacetime.

The sense of existence is all that you are. Free will and control over external environment are only apparent. We claim to be the owner of actions and deeds. Claims do not make it so. The senses and intellect are easily fooled, i.e. Dreaming or VR.

I suggest the Upanishads for anyone looking for more. Eknath Easwaran’s version is an excellent read.

FeepingCreature5• 5 years ago

I don't agree that that view is correct. Perceived self and perceived reality are abstractions, but that doesn't mean they aren't real. Also I'm a compatibilist, meaning that I think that free will arises from and within determinism. At any rate, how can you tell anyone "what they are"? That's a subjective categorization; it can be useful or useless, but I don't know how it can be mistaken even in principle.

My consciousness isn't the (only) thing that thinks or makes decisions, but I am more than my consciousness. My consciousness is just a part of the system that I view as my self.

klik996• 5 years ago

As a side project I've been trying to build a conception of consciousness/unconsciousness with unconsciousness as a mental model, in a sense of a programmed simulation continually attempting to mirror the inputs from the senses, and consciousness as a programmer to override or possibly act as another input, but it's power is pretty weak.

It would make sense that it would look like machine learning, as we find machine learning useful because it categories inputs in a similar way to the way we do. In other words, our unconscious model may be a very complex and subtle set of categorizations, we understand the world by dividing and grouping sense inputs.

But I still haven't cracked how the feeling of consciousness arises from this, your comments are pretty interesting and in line with all that.

*edit - I understand that this way of describing it is deeply informed by me being a programmer of many years, I imagine a life long woodworker would describe it in terms of their trade!

112• 5 years ago

Identity and time (the process of remembering the past and projecting the future) are two core ideological viruses that shaped humanity, but that's all they are - ideas we've been thought to model the world around with. Intentional thinking is a completely different game.

FeepingCreature5• 5 years ago

I mean, but they're useful though.

bemmu• 5 years ago

If you can speak several languages, then you can also notice that in the moment before choosing which language to express something in, you already “just know“ what you mean.

At that point even if you don’t turn it into words, you know the thought anyway.

qwerty4561276• 5 years ago

Some forgetfulness sort of helps even more in this: oftentimes I can't actually recall a relevant word/phrase in any of the languages I know although I know there are. I usually manage to find the words after a pause but the gap between the experience of the sense I want to express and its verbalization can feel huge.

daralthus• 5 years ago

Perhaps a note about grounding techniques form psychology should be added here, as many of the exercises may cause anxiety or even psychosis.

If you happen to feel uneasy try this:

Look around and take a mental inventory of things around you: "This is a lamp. This is a table. This is a room..."

kelseyfrog• 5 years ago

A similar grounding exercise[1] I like is saying out loud: 5 things I can see, 4 things I can touch, 3 things I can hear, 2 things I can smell, and 1 thing I can taste. It takes just a minute to complete and consistently works.

[1] https://copingskillsforkids.com/blog/2016/4/27/coping-skill-...

selfhoster11• 5 years ago

My intuition is that changing how the mind works in any significant way will destabilise it, long term or even worse. Techniques that mess with it, either psychologically or using drugs, are not sustainable. Using such techniques to correct a mind that's already out of balance isn't something I've got a problem with, but altering a healthy/typical mind is to be avoided.

throwanem• 5 years ago

This is a reasonable intuition, but consider the same statement in the context of physical exercise:

Using such techniques to correct a [body] that's already out of balance isn't something I've got a problem with, but altering a healthy/typical [body] is to be avoided.

Of course there exists dangerous excess in both cases. You can exercise yourself to death, or ruin your health with horse testosterone. But that overindulgence can do harm doesn't automatically indict a daily hour of cardio, or even HIIT and a bit of protein powder or whatever.

edit: Granted, some of the stuff in this "psychonetics" book seems a bit nonsense. But some of it certainly isn't.

For example: What it systematizes apparently for the sake of systematism as "(VM.PDA) Planar Deconcentration of Attention (PDA)" is just a very highflown and rather silly description of something I learned from a great-uncle as one of a hunter's techniques for easily noticing movement. The way he put it was not to look at anything, but just look, and eventually I got the hang of it.

I don't hunt, or at least not with a rifle, but I do regularly use the technique in wildlife photography, and it's extremely helpful and not at all as complicated or esoteric as Kusakov would seem to prefer. Too, Uncle Bram seemed perfectly sane when I knew him as a child, and I'm likewise not aware of any particular harm the use of this mental technique has inflicted on me.

I wouldn't make the same assertion for everything in here, or even claim that anything in here is useful other than by coincidence, but there is at least one thing in here I can vouch for, albeit again preferably without all the nonsense with which Kusakov hedges it around. So if nothing else he's no worse off than a broken clock, I suppose.

qwerty4561276• 5 years ago

It's definitely good to always remember this cautious idea, yet sticking entirely to it seems equivalent to "don't ever go to gym and lift any weights". People around do all sorts of things which are rather far from the stable point to where their bodies rest naturally and get all sorts of semi-sustainable benefits. A human can actually use brains some good ways most people don't know about. Your brain is a machine you should develop some degree of control over rather than leave it to drive itself chaotically based on external and unintentional internal stimuli alone. E.g. it is possible to develop some degree of effortless stress-free emotion control, learning to take your feelings and ideas critically is also very important. E.g. feeling anger doesn't necessarily mean the other person is wicked or have actually done anything bad at all, feeling depressed doesn't imply everything is bad, you can feel debilitating panic without actual danger, appetite is just loosely correlated to actual need to eat, it is possible and good for health to switch (by your will alone) to feeling gratitude from feeling annoyed. Most people are not aware of this but they should be. Also "normal" mind is a sleeping mind, occasionally you sort of "wake up" for a moment and find the time has passed as if it never was so you didn't live it for to full extent.

heavenlyblue3• 5 years ago

My intuition is that changing how the mind works in any significant way will destabilise it, long term or even worse. Techniques that mess with it, either psychologically or using drugs, are not sustainable.

Your intuition from what experience exactly? What makes you think your mind is stable naturally? What makes you think that even if you're sure your mind is stable, that it's not left in it's local minima of abilities?

trutannus3• 5 years ago

What makes you think that even if you're sure your mind is stable, that it's not left in it's local minima of abilities?

I don't think anybody needs to justify to anyone else why they don't want to tamper with their mind. This is by definition a subjective topic. If this person's intuition is that tampering with their mind will destabilize it, that's legitimate. Nobody is in a place to question someone's intuitions about their own mind. Other minds are alien experiences -- unknowable. Not everyone can, wants to, or needs to push their consciousness to the theoretical idea maximum of its capacity as defined by another fully isolated subject. It's deeply irresponsible for anyone to suggest, or aggressively advocate, otherwise.

jonnydubowsky• 5 years ago

This practice has similarities to Rudolf Steiner's Six Exercises for Basic Esoteric Development. I've been practicing at least a few of these, nearly every day for most of my adult life. I've found them to be a great help.

My 2 favorites are:

The Control of Will Choose a simple action to perform each day at a time you select. It should be something you do not ordinarily do; it can even be a little odd. Then make it a duty to perform this action at that time each day.

Rudolf Steiner gives the example of watering a flower each day at a certain time. As you progress, additional tasks can be added at other times.

This exercise is as hard as it is simple and takes a very strong intention to complete. To start you might think of it as you think of a dentist's appointment - you do not want to be late. It can be helpful to mark your success or failure on the calendar each day. If you completely forget at the time, but remember later, do it then and try to do better the next day.

My other favorite isn't on this list, but is a related practice:

Draw the same plant or tree every day for 5 minutes. This offers incredible insight into the observation of small changes taking place as part of the change in seasons.

https://leadtogether.org/six-basic-exercises-esoteric-develo...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudolf_Steiner%27s_exercises...

greenail• 5 years ago

Preface: I've been fascinated with cults since I read "a piece of blue sky" about L. Ron Hubbard and scientology. I'm reading "The private life of chairman mao" now. I've only skimmed the article but...

With the right leader this could make a great cult!

coolgeek• 5 years ago

You might be interested in the following:

https://listserv.brown.edu/archives/cgi-bin/wa?A2=CONLANG;a5...

And the New Yorker article he references (which is citation 34 in the OP article here):

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/12/24/utopian-for-beg...

BoppreH• 5 years ago

  Psychonetics originated from academic research[1] and appears to employ scientific criteria and methodology (such as [27, 28]) in many aspects.

That's a lot of qualifiers.

So it originated (but may not have continued) from academic (but not necessarily peer reviewed) research, and appears (but may not actually) employ scientific criteria and methodology in many (but not all) aspects.

I hope it's just unfortunate writing, but I can't help but take it as a pseudoscience red flag.

jorgesborges• 5 years ago

The purpose isn’t to explain anything scientifically but rather to find practical solutions to a given problem.

> However, that team of researchers was seeking solutions to their tasks rather than explanations concerning the observed phenomena. The researchers' approach could be called "technological".
> A technological approach differs from a scientific approach in the sense that the former does not claim to develop explanations as long as there are reproducible steps that can be followed to reach a predictable result.

qwerty4561276• 5 years ago

Sure, but "technological approach" doesn't sound nearly as cool and specific as "scientific approach" does. Say "scientific approach" and people think rationality, granularity and reproducibility. Say "technological approach" and people think something boring, complex and, paradoxically, impractical.

It is also curious to mention Oleg Bakhtiyarov specifically discusses the technological and a bunch of other approaches in the beginning of his "active consciousness" book referenced in the article and considers "organismic approach" the next step after it. I hope somebody is going to translate the book into English once.

analyte123• 5 years ago

I always enjoyed looking at Necker cubes and making them morph, as well as other optical illusions. I'm looking forward to trying the more "advanced techniques" mentioned here, like perceiving both morphs simultaneously or doing two cubes at a time. My intuition is that many of these exercises could be valuable training for the mind, although I definitely see how some (like the audio time compression thing or the 2d visual plane thing) could cause psychosis or other problems in a vulnerable individual. A few weeks ago I was wondering why optical illusions were part of my elementary school curriculum in the US. I doubt there is any connection at all to this particular Russian school, but I think "awareness and control of perception and attention" could be part of why you'd want a child to see them. Also, working with the "Schulte table" reminded me a lot of looking at passages or charts on standardized tests, or looking over logs or source code while debugging.

_virtu• 5 years ago

I read this years ago on HN and could not put my finger on the name of the phrase or the originating article. Every year or so I would go in and try to find it in my notes, email or via the search on HN. I'm so stoked this popped up in my feed today as it's one fewer brain itches I have to scratch. Man I love HN.

JALTU2• 5 years ago

There was a long-form, dramatic (as is typical) story about a woman who lost control and eventually committed suicide in The New Yorker or similar that I can't find at the moment, but any search on the "dangers of" or "dark side of" meditation will return ample material to consider before going excessively far with these techniques.

Not to belittle the seriousness of the dangers or their practical consequences: It does seem in life that too much of a good thing, isn't "good."

JALTU2• 5 years ago

Also, just FWIW: Sam Harris' Waking Up app has many podcast style conversations with and monologues by practitioners of variations on meditation/mindfulness. I'm suggesting this as a starting point if the article's content is perhaps too esoteric.

YossarianFrPrez• 5 years ago

It is very hard for me to take any claim of "advanced psychological technology" seriously, especially when it includes a section about "supernatural phenomena."

Can a person get or train themselves to resolve ambiguous stimuli (like a Necker cube) in multiple ways? Sure. Can one dissociate one's attention from the center of one's gaze? Undoubtedly. But is there a reason to call this "perceptual weightlifting"? Maybe this works for some people; but I find myself turned off by this language, especially because it seems to promise "superpowers."

One of the points made here is that though most people think that the important aspect of attention is what people focus on, it is also possible to change how one focuses, in a low level sense. Which is a) true, b) potentially worth exploring, and c) very likely not going to live up to the self-hype.

I think being aware of what one is sensing and perceiving to be important; the same is true with other types of self-awareness.

agumonkey• 5 years ago

I wonder what those people think about music. Especially polyrhythmic instruments (piano, drums, guitar when overlapping low and high tones). It's a massive walk into deconcentration of attention.

Also their mention about "pure mind" reminds me of an event 10 years ago. Got to job further than usual, 10km along a path on the forest, never been that far, it was a new environment. Sparse forest, calm, but disturbingly so. Sparsity allowed to see far away, but the perspective made trees difficult to differentiate from someone standing still. My mind turned into a hawk-like state. It wasn't fear like fight-or-flight, with accelerated heart beat, sweat, anxiety.. no it was more like a slight hunger and extreme calm focus (also I'm a thin, non combat/chaos trained person, being ready to survive was not a natural thing). My brain also operated faster.

Psychonetics: A nerd's toolset to work with mind and perception

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