These may be personified as if entities, treated as if a network for information transfer, or realized as if self traveling in the Universe to strange lands or dimensions or spaces...

Once one has control over modelling the universe inside one's self, and is able to vary the parameters satisfactorily, one's self may reflect this ability by changing appropriately to match the new property....

Feelings of awe, reverence, sacredness and certainty are also adaptable metaprograms, attachable to any model, not just the best fitting one

Given a single body and a single mind physically isolated and confined in a completely physicallycontrolled environment in true solitude, by our present sciences can we satisfactorily account for all inputs and all outputs to and from this mind- biocomputer (i.e., can we truly isolate and confine it?)? Given the properties of the softwaremind of this biocomputer outlined above, is it probable that we can find, discover, or invent inputsoutputs not yet in our consensus science? Does this center of consciousness receivetransmit information by at present unknown modes of communication? Does this center of consciousness stay in the isolated confined biocomputer?XIV

The Metaprogram:

On Beyond Valis

While I was writing this work, l was a bit too fearful to express candidly in writing the direct experience, uninterpreted. I felt that a group of thirty persons' salaries, a large research budget, a whole Institute's life depended on me and what I wrote. If I wrote the data up straight, I would have rocked the boats of several lives (colleagues and family) beyond my own stabilizer effectiveness threshold, I hypothesized. John Lilly, Programing and Metaprogramming the Human Biocomputer

My research and meditation kept me focused on the peculiar mantric power of language and the remarkable role of rhetorical repetition and programming in the composition of psychedelic experience. Govinda Laura Huxley repeated the Bardo Thodol for Aldous as he lay dying, and I found myself spontaneously repeating the Prajnaparamita mantra during meditation and other psychedelic practices – such as the time George Bush visited central Pennsylvania. Here, with friends, I greeted the war criminal with sonic weapons powered by mantra. No, we didn't “believe” that we were firing actual projectiles at the president, nor would we want to do so, sharing as we do a commitment to ahimsa, a concept from the Upanishads deployed by Mahatma Ghandi against the last English speaking empire. Ours was a laughter cannon, a rhetorical practice designed not to impact but to transform. It introduced an uncanny and comic fluctuation between high seriousness – this man must be stopped – and high comedy – his power is meager in the context of the history of the planet and the enormity of our ecosystem. And of course we were aiming the fluctuation directly at our selves, such that we might be capable of sufficient involution to move beyond anger, critique, contestation and violence and begin to build a community and life other than that exemplified by Bush The Second's visit to the Future Farmers of America. Yes, we thought the mantric power of the words were powerful indeed, and not simply because of their content.

Here again we stand on the threshold of the scientific re-discovery of the relationship of sound to consciousness. Psychedelic voyagers have to develop their own mantras in a pragmatic, experimental way,using sounds, rhythms, words or music that are meaningful and that work. ( Leary, On Programming the Psychedelic Experience)

Leary calls for an experimental program actualized by the McKennas and others who would tinker with the sounds, words, images and contexts of psychedelic experience all through the criminalization of these states of mind. Hence the prohibition has regulated crucial research on the nexus between rhetoric and human communication more than it is has restricted investigation of the chemistry of these compounds. ( Shulgin, Nichols, McKenna, Holloway) Leary's rhetoric of “program”, of course, links psychedelic practice directly to the computer culture that would emerge from it, as well as the culture of information that would form the ecology of Mullis's innovations with PCR. And the rhetoric of “program”, like Huxley's “reducing-valve”, summons its own amnesias and mantras: The history of molecular biology suggests that the rhetorical softwares of “genetic code” and “program” were successful but partial representations of living systems that often occluded the complexities of ecosystems and embodiement.1 Scientist John Lilly's 1966 samistadt science text “Programming and metaprogramming the human biocomputer” sums up a framework that recognizes the role of such “programs and metaprograms” only within the dynamic wetware assemblage of developmental systems embedded in highly interconnected ecosystems over time:

Until we have thoroughly explored this genetic code, until we can specify the organism and the conditions under which it can reach maturity, and become an integral individual, we will not have the data necessary for specifying all of the characteristics of the human computer which are brought to the adult from the sperm egg combination. ( Lilly, programimng and programming the human biocomputer)

Lilly's treatment of such “programming” provides useful and very straightforward descriptions of rhetorical “softwares” with which our minded embodiements are enmeshed with DNA, one that remembers the freedoms and constraints of any given genetic sequence in its developmental and ecosystemic context:

This genic determinism of thinking can turn out to be a will o-the wisp. It may be that in the subsequent development of the computer it has become so general purpose that the original genetic factors and the genes are no longer of importance. Even as one can construct a very very large computer of solid state parts or of vacuum tube parts or of biological parts, it makes little difference as long as the total size, the excellence of the connections and the kinds of connections are such that one can obtain a general purpose net result from the particular machine. So may we possibly cancel out genic differences. So may each one of us, as it were, attain the same kinds of learning and the same kind of thinking machine little modified by genic differences.

Indeed, it was precisely Lilly's desire to understand differences other than genetic ones that he deployed the isolation tank in pursuit of what he called his “scientific problem”:

Given a single body and a single mind physically isolated and confined in a completely physically controlled environment in true solitude, by our present sciences can we satisfactorily account for all inputs and all outputs to and from this mind- biocomputer (i.e., can we truly isolate and confine it?)?

In other words, the evidence that genetic variation was causally related to human experience was less assumed by Lilly than investigated by him in total solitude: it was the occasion for an investigation of “internal” states of mind that may or may not correlate with genotype. Lilly suspects that the attribution of individuating causality to one's genotype may be nothing but a “wishful phantasy”:

24. Some kinds of material evoked from storage seem to have the property of passing back in time beyond the beginning of this brain to previous brains at their same stage of development; there seems to be a passing of specific information from past organisms through the genetic code to the present organism; but, again, this idea may be a convenient evasion, avoiding deeper analysis of self. One cannot make this assumption that storage in memory goes back beyond the spermegg combination or even to the spermegg combination until a wishful phantasy constructed to avoid analyzing one's self ruthlessly and objectively is eliminated.

So too, of course, can the sheer plasticity of embodied DNA function as a an equally egoically charged fantasy blocking actual inquiry. Lilly's “ruthless” program required a suspension or isolation of the investigator in attempt to calibrate the observer. Recognizing with quantum mechanics as well as the psychonalysis in which he was trained that the observer was an unavoidable component of any scientific system, Lilly sought an adjustment of the very observing apparatus of science that would correct, if only a bit, errors due to the fantasies the self has about itself. ***A debugging**

I had written the report in such a way that its basic messages were hidden behind a heavy long introduction designed to stop the usual reader. Apparently once word got out, this device no longer stalled the interested readers. Somehow the basic messages were important enough to enough readers so that the work acquired an unexpected viability. Thus it seems appropriate to reprint it in full. ( lillky, Foreword to second edition)

Lilly had encrypted Programming and Metaprogramming the Human Biocomputer as a summary of his National Institute of Mental Health funded studies from 1953 – 1958, seeking to avoid the incredulity of his colleagues. Despite his encryption strategies, the content of the report was enough to create doubts about Lilly's sanity. As with Albert Hofmann's experience in the discovery of LSD, Lilly's report was written for an audience who did not yet exist – one that had experienced the ontological and transpersonal bliss and dissarray of Hofmann's problem child programmed with the “sensory deprivation” tank:

I heard several negative stories regarding my brain and mind, altered by LSD. At this point I closed the Institute and went to the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center to resume LSD research under government auspices. I introduced the ideas in work to the MPRC researchers and l left for the Esalen Institute in 1969.

insert Kubie letter

It is difficult to reconstruct the exact segments of Lilly's text that may have provoked these narratives and their judgements, if only because there are so many. Lilly's glossary, for example contains an entry on mind:

3b. Mind: the computer brain detectable portion of a supraphysical entity tied to the physical biological apparatus. The remainder of this entity is in the soul spirit God region and is detectable only under special conditions.

Perhaps it was Dr. Lilly's report that

“Thus the subject found whole new universes containing great varieties of beings, some greater than himself, some equal to himself, and some lesser than himself.”

Or maybe it was Lilly's history of physical self experiments that brought him to the brink of death that led to the gossip of this interdimensional being. Yet Lilly exudes psychonautic caution: He is careful to bracket the ontological status of the states he accessed in the tank and with the use of LSD-25 as an adjunct, referring to the projection of divinities, aliens etc “external” to the mind as a “mistake”. Lilly notes that “Instead of seeing or hearing the projected data, one feels and thinks it”, and in this cognitive synesthesia, a substitution for an activity of mind for a sensory one, the human biocomputer turns itself not on but inside/out, becoming an embodied category error. ( Ryle):

This is one basis of the mistake by certain persons of assuming that the projected thoughts come from outside one's own mind, i.e., oneness with the universe, the thoughts of God in one, extraterrestrial beings sending thoughts into one, etc. Because of the lack of sensory stimuli, and lack of normal inputs into the computer (lack of energy in the reality program), the space in the computer usually used for the projection of data from the senses (and hence the external world) is available substitutively for the display of thinking and feeling.2

In this sense, the isolation tank is, for Lilly, a device for substituting the non euclidean perceptually cognitive “internal” world with the euclidean outside, a sensory/motor slow down of the “human biocomputer” asymptotic to zero that enables an unfolding of mind, releasing “the throttling embrace of the self” and allowing for perception, real or imagined, of n dimensions. For while human bodies dwell and survive in the perceptually euclidean space of insides and outsides, the human mind is capable of dwelling in n dimensional arrays ordinarily crowded out by the programmed attention orientation devices of the external world, the flowers of perception with which our ordinary mind is often understandably enthralled. The “sensory isolation tank” is hence an allosteric mechanism, an operon. In blocking one sequence of information, the operon enables the expression of another, no less actual sequence. So too does the REST tank, for Lilly block the ordinary sensory broadcast in order to enable another. Here human minding becomes less a screen for transducing sensory states than a lens through which the self appears in its expanded, non actualized and non euclidean capacities. Here is the self subject not to the vagaries and gravities of any given ecosystem, but to the entire morphogenomic field of the cosmos. IN palce of the attention attractors found in external world, the tank tunes one's attention toward an identity of self and consciousness itself.

As one opens up the depths, it is wise not to privately or publicly espouse as ultimate any truths one finds in the following areas: the universe in general, beings not human, thought transference, life after death, transmigration of souls, racial memories, species-jumpingthinking, nonphysical action at a distance, and so forth. Such ideas may merely be a reflection of one's needs in terms of one's own survival.

***Who is this One? Basic Effects of LSD25 on the Biocomputer:

Noise as the Basic Energy for

Projection Techniques

In the analysis of the effects of LSD25 on the human mind, a reasonable hypothesis states that the effect of these substances on the human computer is to introduce white noise (in the sense of randomly varying energy containing no signals of itself) in specific systems in the computer. These systems and the partition of the noise among them vary with concentration of substance and with the substance used.

One can thus "explain" the apparent speedup of subjective time; the enhancement of colors and detail in perceptions of the real world; the production of illusions; the freedom to make new programs; the appearance of visual projections onto mirror images of the real face and body; the projections and apparent depth in colored and in blackandwhite photos; the projection of emotional expression onto other real persons; the synesthesia of music to visual projections; the feeling of "oneness with the universe"; apparent ESP effects; communications from "beings other than humans"; the lowered Clozeanalysis scores by outside scorers; the clinical judgment of the outside observer of dissociation psychosis, depersonalization, hallucination, and delusion in regard to the subject; the apparent increased muscular strength, and the dissolution and rebuilding of programs and metaprograms by self and by the outside therapist, etc.

The increase in white noise energy allows quick and random access to memory and lowers the threshold to unconscious memories (expansion of consciousness). In such noise one can

76

77

project almost anything at almost any cognitive level in almost any allowable mode: one dramatic example is the conviction of some subjects of hearingseeingfeeling God, when "way out." One projects one's expectations of God onto the white noise as if the noise were signals; one bears the voice of God in the Noise. With a bit of proper programming under the right conditions, with the right dose, at the right time, one can program almost anything into the noise within one's cognitive limits; the limits are only one's own conceptual limits, including limits set by one's repressed, inhibited, and forbidden areas of thought. The latter can be analyzed and freed up using the energy of the white noise in the service of the ego, i.e., a metaprogram analyze yourself can be part of the instructions to be carried out in the LSD25 state.

The noise introduced brings a certain amount of disorder with it, even as white noise in the physical world brings randomness. However, the LSD25 noise randomizes signals only in a limited way: not enough to destroy all order, only enough to superimpose a small creative "jiggling" on program materials and metaprograms and their signals. This noisy component added to the usual signals in the circuits adds enough uncertainty to the meanings to make new interpretations more probable. If the noise becomes too intense, one might expect it to wipe out information and lead to unconsciousness (at very high levels, death).

The major operative principle seems to be that the human computer operates in such a way as to make signals out of noise and thus to create information out of random energies where there was no signal; this is the "projection principle"; noise is creatively used in nonnoise models. The information "created" from the noise can be shown by careful analysis to have been in the storage system of the computer, i.e., the operation of projection moves information out of storage into the perception apparatus so that it appears to originate in the chosen "outside" noisily excited system.

***

Lilly wanted to share the remarkable experiences with other researchers, and with the help of Stuart Brand and the Whole Earth Catalog, a mimeograph version of the report of his investigations of LSD-25 and the sensory deprivation tank Lilly had pioneered made the rounds as samistadt science. Yet it was very much as a snap shot of a moment for Lilly, written by another iteration of himself:

It seems as if this older work is a seminating source for other works and solidly resists revision. To me it is a thing separate from me, a record from a past space, a doorway into new spaces through which I passed and cannot return.

The mimeographed report from inner space

From Serial to parallel:

Here language becomes less the space of shared information than the formation of a commons – one forms a bond with

In a wellorganized biocomputer, there is at least one such critical control metaprogram labeled I for acting on other metaprograms and labeled me when acted upon by other metaprograms. I say at least one advisedly. Most of us have several controllers, selves, selfmetaprograms which divide control among them, either in time parallel or in time series in sequences of control. As I will give in detail later, one path for selfdevelopment is to centralize control of one's biocomputer in one selfmetaprogrammer, making the others into conscious executives subordinate to the single administrator, the single superconscient selfmetaprogrammer. With appropriate methods, this centralizing of control, the elementary unification operation, is a realizable state for many, if not all biocomputers.

Going parallel and post normal science:

This work is a summary of a current position in progress to try to attain objectivity and impartiality with respect to the innermost realities.

If one takes a naturally occurring, thinking mind and obtains a sufficiently large sample of its thinking, one can have a metatheoretical faith that one can then find the basic beliefs and their origins. I am not too sure that such metatheoretical faith in one's ability to adequately observe, adequately record, and adequately analyze mental events and construct them into logical explanations is warranted.

In other words, we should experiment with all of the vast parameters in which we have evolved and their variations in order to seek optimal survival values of these for the embryo, fetuses and children who do not survive under our peculiarly narrow range of values of these parameters. To change lethals to optimals seems possible and even probable with imaginative and thorough research.