the timboucher experience

Table of Contents

1. On-Going Experiments
2. Stroboscopic Effect
3. Countering The Puke-Saber
4. Total Yogic Control of the Nervous System
5. Biofeedback & Galvanic Skin Response
6. Universal Self-Actualization

On-Going Experiments

I’ve been continuing my experiments with the Ganzfeld effect, and with techniques to dial-in perceptual states or states of consciousness at will. No new reports or specific experiences to report on today. The conditions of my experiment today were basically the same as the last two times I attempted it. But now I’m learning a bit more how to stabilize the perceptual field state my Ganzfeld experiment puts me into.

So far the “ideal” condition I’m able to achieve with it is a place of what I might call mutual fuzziness. The white noise coming in through the head phones becomes equivalent to the light noise patterns reaching my eyes through the eggshells (which were, not surprisingly, beginning to crack - but I just got a pingpong ball to cut in half). This is the base state from which you can begin to have really vivid synaesthetic experiences. The next stage after that seems, for me, to be the ability to begin perceiving whatever thought patterns you’re having as also noise, equivalent to the auditory and visual white noise patterns flitting across your sensorium.

Stroboscopic Effect

From there, I assume the next stage is a kind of absolute stillness, singlepointedness. I know there are terms to describe all of this in Buddhist meditation, but I’m not familiar enough with the jargon to seek them out. Plus, I’m attempting to forge a more generic cross-cultural paradigm of what might be termed as folk consciousness study.

@seanmoriva posted two links to my recent piece on designing synaesthetic experiences for next-gen tech. One is about the stroboscopic effect:

A stroboscope, also known as a strobe, is an instrument used to make a cyclically moving object appear to be slow-moving, or stationary. The principle is used for the study of rotating, reciprocating, oscillating or vibrating objects. Machine parts and vibrating strings are common examples.

In its simplest form, a rotating disc with evenly-spaced holes is placed in the line of sight between the observer and the moving object. The rotational speed of the disc is adjusted so that it becomes synchronised with the movement of the observed system, which seems to slow and stop. The illusion is caused by temporal aliasing, commonly known as the “stroboscopic effect”.

Sean’s other link is Four Arguments For The Elimination of television, a classic essay from the late 1970’s.

Countering The Puke-Saber

This whole subject has got me thinking about a recenty popular news item about the LED incapacitor, the vomit flashlight, or the puke-saber as my friend called it:

Its inventors call it the LED Incapacitator (L-E-D, as in light-emitting diode). Weapons buffs call it a nonlethal weapon. But test subjects who have buckled and reeled from its nauseating strobe call it other names—none printable.

A later version of the LED Incapacitator, featuring a trimmer head.
A flashlight designed to make you nauseatingly ill? What fiendish minds would invent such a tool? The minds of Bob Lieberman and Vladimir Rubtsov, president and senior scientist of Intelligent Optical Systems, Inc., a small R&D company in Torrance, CA. Under a multiphase contract from the S&T Directorate’s Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Office, with technical direction from S&T program manager Gerald Kirwin, the two physicists are refining an ultra-bright, multicolored, pulsing “lightsaber” that’s more disorienting, dazzling, and dizzying—though a tad less dangerous—than disco. It’s enough to make you sick. And that, Lieberman says, is not always a bad thing.

How does the LED Incapacitator incapacitate? By simultaneously overwhelming the subject both physiologically (temporarily blinding him) and psychophysically (disorienting him). A built-in rangefinder measures the distance to the nearest pair of eyeballs. Then, a “governor” sets the output and pulse train (a series of pulses and rests) to a level, frequency, and duration that are effective, but safe. The colors and pulses continuously change, leaving no time for the brain or eyes to adapt. After a few minutes, the effects wear off.

The thought occured to me though, during my own experiments in tuning the mind to specific perceptual states, that if one had access to the technology used in the puke-saber that one could train oneself to become resistant to its effects.

Total Yogic Control of the Nervous System

Of course, the puke-saber is just one of many tools in the arsenal of lethal and non-lethal technologies you are or aren’t likely to be exposed to during the course of your day-to-day life. Each one would require special training of your nervous system to overcome its biological, neurological and psychological effects. But I firmly believe that such a state of will control over the entirety of one’s biological organism is entirely possible. Just look at yogis and sadhus, not people doing Pilates at the mall, mind you, but the for-real dudes who go off and live in a cave and learn how every single inch of their minds and bodies work along with how to control them.

But I don’t even think you need to go off and live in a cave to achieve these sorts of results. I suspect there are quite simple techniques, methods, paradigms and technologies to allow one to achieve, maintain and transmit these states. And I aim to find them and share them with you here.

Biofeedback & Galvanic Skin Response

First on my list to investigate is Galvanic skin response, widely used in biofeedback applications, as well as in the E-meter in Scientology:

GSR measurement is one component of polygraph devices and is used in scientific research of emotional arousal.

E-meter which is being used by the Church of Scientology also is based on GSR measurement.

GSR measurement is also becoming commonplace in hypnotherapy and psychotherapy practice where it can be used as a method of detecting depth of hypnotic trance prior to suggestion therapy commencing. When traumatic material is experienced by the client (for example, during hypnoanalysis), immediate changes in galvanic skin response can indicate that the client is experiencing emotional arousal. It is also used in behavior therapy to measure physiological reactions such as fear. Skin conductance is also a factor in some modern electronics to measure the activation of touchscreen devices. This is notable as many of these devices that use capacitive screens cannot be used while wearing gloves as the sensors are not triggered by the low conductivity of rubber or leather.

I also know a pair who has been experimenting with GSR as an interface method for an intuitive associative information channeling software. It’s quite an interesting field, and I’d like to invite people who are experimenting with these technologies to share your findings and theories. I’m also actively interested in demoing software and hardware applications by companies who are producing liberative technologies which connect people directly to spirit, enable them to express themselves creatively, master themselves and enter into healthy sustainable relationships with all agents and entities within their environment.

Universal Self-Actualization

I’ve been thinking lately: what if we lived in a world where everyone had enough food, a safe place to sleep, friends, love for self and other and the ability to express themselves fully? What if everyone in the world were Self-Actualized?

The term was later used by Abraham Maslow in his article, A Theory of Human Motivation. Maslow explicitly defines self-actualization to be “the desire for self-fulfillment, namely the tendency for him [the individual] to become actualized in what he is potentially. This tendency might be phrased as the desire to become more and more what one is, to become everything that one is capable of becoming.”[2] Maslow used the term self-actualization to describe a desire, not a driving force, that could lead to realizing one’s capabilities. Maslow did not feel that self-actualization determined one’s life; rather, he felt that it gave the individual a desire, or motivation to achieve budding ambitions

What if everyone in the world could experience a state of self-transcendence? What would happen? What would it look like? What would it feel like? What would be the signs of that change happening?

Near the end of his life Maslow revealed that there was a level on the hierarchy that was above self-actualization: self-transcendence[6]. “[Transcenders] may be said to be much more often aware of the realm of Being (B-realm and B-cognition), to be living at the level of Being… to have unitive consciousness and “plateau experience” (Asrani [serene and contemplative B-cognitions rather than climactic ones]) … and to have or to have had peak experience (mystic, sacral, ecstatic) with illuminations or insights or cognitions which changed their view of the world and of themselves, perhaps occasionally, perhaps as a usual thing.”

Why can’t we have free and universally available tools and technologies to make these things a reality in our lifetimes? I think we can. I think anything else is a failure of imagination.

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