A Failed Nap Metaphysics

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Instructions for joining are at the end of the post.

— Nikita

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Three weeks ago I was laying still on my couch, failing to take a nap before an early morning flight to Berlin. I was in one of my favorite states of consciousness, between dreaming and waking, paying relaxed attention to thoughts and ideas emerging out of the darkness of mind and dissipating back into it.

Sometimes in this hypnagogic domain, I hear voices — usually, disparate phrases, as if pieces of conversations by strangers I’m passing by (walking through a literal bazaar of ideas could feel this way).

I was thinking about the piece on Steve Bannon and the noosphere warfare I was preparing for publication; and also of the scene in the Bible where the entity presented as “the LORD God” says, after Adam and Eve eat what appears to be a psychedelic plant of some sort, “Behold, the man has become like one of Us, to know good and evil.”

This passage is often cited as evidence that the Abrahamic religion didn’t start out as monotheistic: at first, Yahweh was one of many spiritual beings recognized by the Hebrew tribe, then he managed to monopolize the Israelite market — “thou shalt have no other gods before me” — and only later did this exclusive deal escalate to the status of an ontological claim that other gods simply do not exist.

I thought of the noosphere, which I used to take to mean a planetary domain of information that only started to emerge with the advance of information technology, as a reality that might predate humans, the one where the voices I sometimes hear while falling asleep come from.

I thought that ancient people might have had an easier access to this domain; that somebody, maybe multiple people, could really have overheard Yahweh say “behold, the man has become like one of us” to other entities of his kind, which were later erased from history like those early Bolsheviks were erased from photos with Stalin.

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Bannon is the first person I’ve heard to equate McLuhan’s view of electric media with de Chardin’s noosphere:

McLuhan called it, right? He says this mass thing called media, or what Pierre Teilhard de Chardin said of the noosphere, is going to so overwhelm evolutionary biology that it will be everything.

I suppose it makes sense: McLuhan viewed all media (that is, technology) as extensions of human faculties: the wheel of the foot, the book of the eye, and radio and TV of the central nervous system. Perhaps what we see on the many screens that surround us now is the externalization of the same noosphere, the domain of mind, that used to be teeming with gods and other magical beings; and maybe the fact that it’s now populated by Putins and Trumps instead of Horus and Seth is only a sign of the times: on the one hand, we’re just coming out of the death of God era, and on the other, the technology is only now starting to be really compelling at full-blown hallucinations.

Perhaps we can see the foreshadowing of the future in the U.S. Congressional hearings about UAPs, in which the words “interdimensional beings” were uttered, and in TikTok videos exposing Hollywood celebrities as shapeshifters.

Give AI a few years, and demons and gods may become exactly as real as Putin — they’ll have perceived causal power, you’ll see them a lot on the screen, and you’ll know a person who knows a person who knows a person who saw them in person.

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This motif of seeing political agents as mythological beings is an old interest of mine. I’ve written about the mythologeme of Putin not being real; about Navalny’s journey into the hyperspace; one of my drafts is labeled “Evgeny Prigozhin as a Lesser Deity of War, Propaganda, and Commerce”; and then, of course, there is Trump.

Back in 2018, Gary Lachman told me that he saw Trump as the spilling out of the TV world into the real one:

It’s a cliché by now, but the most popular thing on television is “reality TV.” There are even reality television shows about people watching reality television shows. The simulation of reality is becoming increasingly more vivid and more “real”: HD, 3D, all this sort of thing.

So it strikes me that we’re putting all this reality into the represented world, and, to put it in a funny way, it’s going to get so crowded in there that something’s going to pop out.

And that’s what I think Trump is.

He was a reality television celebrity for many-many years in precisely the kind of position that he is in now as the leader of the country. He was the boss in The Apprentice and did exactly the same thing: hired and fired, wore the suit and looked like a very strong leader figure. He sort of popped out of that status in the represented world into the actual world.

In light of this view of Trump as the Television Man, I now interpret this originally incoherent dream journal entry from March of 2016 — 8 months before Trump’s first electoral victory — as a fun little prophecy: there is TV, a Russia-Russia-Russia connection, the qualifier “entrepreneurial,” a recognizable style of speech, a focus on things that are big, a tower, and a reference to a widely distributed grass-roots movement of patriots.

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Of course, it’s not only politicians that inhabit TV and the Internet. There are actors and singers and socialites and ourselves — ordinary people dancing and sharing their outrage, amusement, anxiety, laughter in videos on TikTok and Instagram.

Maybe our selves — what we call “I,” “me” — are entities of exactly the same nature as Yahweh, except that we’re strongly attached to the individual animals which Yahweh didn’t want to become “like them”; perhaps, if we ate of the second magical tree (“and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever”), the change would be that we could travel freely from one animal mind to another instead of being trapped in individuals.

(I also like to imagine the reason he warned us about the first tree wasn’t limited to his drive for control or fear of competition but included something close to the concern traumatized psychonauts feel for psychedelically curious — “don’t you touch those drugs, kids, it’ll fuck you up like it did me”; Yahweh’s existence might be a really bad trip.)

Ancient gods, media personalities, our own selves are nothing more than ideas — ideas that are alive — which inhabit the minds of the human animal, or the noosphere, which has been undergoing a process of amplification and externalization via the rapidly advancing technology of transmitting information with ever-increasing resolution.

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One of the interpretations I have for the “Putin doesn’t exist” mythologeme is that it expresses an intuition that not only he doesn’t believe anything that he says — that it’s all informational warfare, per Bannon — but that there’s nothing that he does believe, even privately. He might have let go of his self, with its beliefs, desires, attachments, and allowed other people’s ideas about what a powerful person is like, fill that void; he ceased being a person and became a function of the power dynamics around him¹. He’ll want and believe whatever he needs to want and believe to stay in his role of perceived authority.

The same goes for Trump — in this narrative, they’re both nothing but mirrors of the societies they represent; that’s what authority looks like to Russians, and this is what power is like for Americans.

Both can be seen as characters in a live-action role-playing game — and, at the same time, as actors that so fully lost themselves in their roles that they are not really there anymore.

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The Livestream

You may be wondering if I’m going somewhere with this.

Not really.

The purpose of this post is to let you know that Boria, the author of the original Bannon & the Noosphere article, will be joining us at the Second Psychopolitica Live Stream (should we call them Assemblies?) at 7pm CET / 1pm ET, 10am PT on December 5, 2024².

Here is the Youtube link (for watching).

Here is the Zoom link (for calling in).

I hope to see you there.

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Classifieds

Jeremy N. Smith is a very accomplished coach, creative consultant, and writer acclaimed by CNN, the New York Times, Bill Gates, and Jane Goodall, among others.

He offers a complimentary coaching session to any PsyPol subscriber.

1. “And I would also really like not to lose, you know, my human qualities. Because here, forgive me, sometimes it feels like you turn from a person into a function. But I think I’m managing to preserve those human qualities after all” — Putin in a 2020 interview to TASS.

2. Which, I am just realizing, is the 13th anniversary of my first political rally and the night spent at the police station, so I might have a glass of something to commemorate this important initiation.