Travelers,
<Editor Note>
Hello! Sorry if you read my initial post on this topic and were nonplussed - I often write here at the Nexus either extremely late at night or directly following a spice trip. Ergo, my writing is raw. I felt that this post deserved re-working.
TLDR: I'm developing an allegorical system of understanding brain function as exposed by my DMT trips. This effort is not to declare the absolute truth, but create a vocabulary that is useful in describing the effects of memory and desperate parts of our personalities as well.
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These ideas are not new. Anyone who has left their body or met their subconscious can attest to the truth that ourselves are made up of constituent parts; there may be in fact three brains operating simultaneously like entwined lovers who have lost themselves to a greater union.
The words below are motivated by a particular DMT experience where I was so deep and blown apart that I thought I would never return - *I* had died. In death, I met the several beings who's union made up the totality of FiniteFox. Discovering each entity's job functions helped me figure out the hows and whys of memory and experience of altered states, including waking consciousness.
And thus it happened, as I was blown apart, I walked onto the stage of reality to meet the cadre. A handful of men and women greeted me with polite but distant handshakes. They spoke on and off again about what they did for the production. Today was downtime for the show, and the cast and stage hands were just in the in-between.
The Sensors
When you meet them, it is no surprise. Brothers and sisters of the same ilk; they are in charge of taking stimulus and reporting it to the archivist. The auditory man is the receptor of sound, internally, externally, imaginatively. The same for smell, sight, taste. Touch has two cousins that he brings to the stage - vestibular and proprioception. Each can be weak or strong in their ability to specify their sensations of stimulus. A tongue can be trained to taste deeper flavor, a ear to delineate grades.
Always on duty, the feel and report to the Cadre on the stage unless biologically [chemically] sent AWOL.
The Governess hears most of what they say, as does the administrator. When attention is focused on their report, the scribe will increase the fidelity of the record. The archivist may leave around these reports in the "easy reading" section of the library for speedy access to recent stimulus.
The Governess
Think of whom you are referring when you say, "myself". Past the facade of personality, there resides a sovereign being at control room helm. (S)he resides deep inside, silently driving the mechanism of you. She is the will, the impulse, the gut feeling. She sends the energy of action throughout your body - she is the prime mover. Your lusts, your drive, your subconscious desires - all of these are signs of her communication.
Many people are completely unaware of her or choose not to acknowledge her. And yet she is a truer definition of who they are than any other part of themselves. The governess's weakness, if it can be thought of as such, is that she generally lacks reflexive observation. She lives her existence face forward.
On a similar note, she is a creature of habit. These habits can be built from environment or from constant pressures of the administrator - but habit hold sway over her for good or ill. I believe it to be a feature rather than a bug that the governess is the essential operating system of the whole troupe, constantly whirring away in the background.
She is responsible for all choices that are made, no matter what mental chatter says on top of them.
Eckhart Tolle greets her by saying, "What a liberation to realize that the 'voice in my head' is not who I am. 'Who am I, then?' The one who sees that ... To know yourself as the Being underneath the thinker, the stillness underneath the mental noise, the love and joy underneath the pain, is freedom, salvation, enlightenment."
The Administrator
I admire the administrator for his almost tireless presumption that he is me, as if this status can be won by default. And who can blame him? For most, there is but one voice inside your head, talking with no response.
The primary duty of the administrator is to move thoughts and impulses around inside the canvas of the mind. He makes comment on them frequently, internally and externally. Your perception of your physical voice is likely his persona.
Depending on your relationship with him, he is generally the project manager of the brain, who can chop up thoughts and help explain input. He is also a primary participant in "book learning", or that is to say, non-experimental learning. On the spectrum of knowledge versus wisdom, the administrator leans heavily towards informational intelligence. This is no slight, as he is generally the factor behind someone's wittiness.
He generally goes off-line when you sleep and is sometimes known as the manager, the mouth piece of the governess, or the narrator.
The Scribe
He is of the old breed of monastic transcriptionists, copying texts or recording dictations without inserting his opinion (as best he can). The written language in which he records is vastly symbolic rather than photographic or holographic (for most of us, anyway).
Symbolic writing is terse; it allows for fragments to be saved and a full memory record reconstituted in nearly perfect fidelity. Depending on what quality of parchment he has to work with, as well as his level of potential intoxication. I know of some experiences that were lived but not recorded, external facts allowed me to play detective such that I know no record was made.
Once codified and meta tags are written about what the record contains, the finished product is given to the archivist.
The Archivist
The curious task of the archivist is to file away and retrieve memories in the wet library. Using the meta tags written by the scribe, the archivist uses a four dimensional biopsychological dewey decimal system.
There are better parts of the library for easy access, some for long term storage (where the wind and dust doth not corrupt). Sometimes a book can be put in a dark corner of the library for odd reasons; such records are not easily found.
All records get piled up in sorting baskets in the main lobby before being put into proper storage. When performing well, the archivist reviews the baskets and puts memories in sections where it is logical to store them, given reasonable expectations of check out frequency and preservation of the record. When performing under duress or chemicals, results can vary widely.
While the sprawl of its campus is breathtaking, like all physical buildings, the structure and documents therein degrade with time and damage. If the archivist is left idle, he gets plump and slow. Frequency builds familiarity in the halls of the library.
When engaged in conversation, I learned that the archivist cannot access certain DMT recorded memories without being currently bathed in DMT, as if to keep the mystical books of memory unavailable during regular library hours.
IME, I have had dozens of DMT experienced that could only be remembered while on DMT.
The Cadre
Together, these actors make up oneself. They work together seamlessly. Only fine introspection or chemical augmentation can show them as individuals. Their union is truly a miracle we only appreciate when there is malfunction.
Epilogue
Thanks for reading, if you did. As I mentioned earlier, this is whole post is an attempt to both document a super deep trip I had, as well as build out some conceptual framework to allow further description. I know this is all a bit heady - I'll clean it up when my feet are back on the ground. Feel free to ask any questions or to move this post where it belongs in the forum.
- FF