Sophie’s goal was to recruit me for a ‘volunteer research associate’ position in Trilobite. The work was directly related to my areas of specialization and, apparently, I had been recommended by people who knew me well in my professional capacity. My conclusion then, and still today, was that some of my colleagues or supervisors at work had some degree of involvement with the Club.
As the name implied, my work was to be officially carried out on a ‘volunteer’ basis, in my own free time and, to the extent possible, out of my own home through a virtual private network (the latter was pretty high-tech at the time). All necessary equipment—including a professional, high-end workstation and communication equipment—would be ‘donated’ to me by the Club. There would be no contracts of any kind and the Club would have complete deniability regarding my participation. The advantage for me was that I would not need to leave my day job. Indeed, as I would later learn, most of Trilobite’s workforce was made up of part-time ‘volunteers’ like myself. Only a few staff positions—top scientists and managers—were occupied by people with a formal link to one or another of the Club’s foundations and funds. Together, staff and volunteer associates were responsible for all the research and development behind Trilobite. The commodity work of implementation—of both hardware and software—was almost entirely contracted out to external firms. Each of these firms only ever saw small modules of the project, never getting a chance to understand how they came together or what ultimate purpose they served.
As for how the Club managed to attract volunteers, I can only speak for myself: my key motivation for having eventually accepted the job was the nature of Trilobite itself, as I am about to describe. The project was simply irresistible to me. I considered—and still consider—my participation in it the privilege of a lifetime. Yet, I also won’t deny that volunteers were treated well by the Club in terms of in-kind contributions and intangibles. Being an associate made life easier and safer, especially when one was a young engineer just getting married.
Trilobite
Originally inspired by the psychedelic revolution of the 1960’s, the Club had set up Trilobite to find more effective and controllable methods for accessing what was described to me as ‘transcendent realms.’ I once asked the project’s Chief Scientist whether these were actual realities or just otherwise unconscious mental spaces. He replied by asking me, rather rhetorically, what the difference between the two was. I didn’t quite get his drift at the time.
Anyway, the problem was that psychedelics, although providing unambiguously powerful effects, were unpredictable and impossible to control. The experience was also awkward to describe or make sense of afterwards. It was as if the subject’s rational capacities for analysis and recall were switched off during the trance, rendering it impossible to articulate or bring back anything meaningful. Club founders had experimented with psychedelics but were highly frustrated by these shortcomings. Their ‘trips’ had given them the certainty that there was something huge to be explored—potentially holding all the answers they yearned for—but tantalizingly out of reach. They wanted to find ways to enter the psychedelic realm for long periods of time, with their analytical and recall capacities somewhat preserved, and with some level of control over the themes and directions of the trip. Specifically, they wanted the trance to be conducive to intention: a goal or a question posed before the beginning of the trip.
The working hypothesis behind the inception of Trilobite was that everyday brain activity somehow restricted or blocked lucid access to these ‘transcendent realms.’ Club founders were galvanized by Aldous Huxley’s psychedelic-inspired description of the brain as a ‘reduction valve’ of otherwise unlimited consciousness—discussed in Huxley’s famous 1954 book The Doors of Perception—and believed it to be rather accurate. Huxley’s book, in fact, had been the basis for the foundation of Trilobite. The project’s scientists were tasked, from the beginning, with finding ways to temporarily and selectively switch off specific parts of the brain in a coordinated manner, in hopes that this could eventually induce a controlled psychedelic trance. This seminal hypothesis was the guiding principle of Trilobite throughout its life and, as it turns out, a good-enough approximation of the facts. Indeed, time after time the hypothesis was confirmed in trials, at least at an operational level: things did behave as though a normal working brain were a reduction valve of consciousness, focusing our attention on what was important for the survival of the physical body but restricting our access to transcendent insight.
The scientists’ initial attempts had focused purely on drug design. However, for many years little progress was made. To be sure, new and effective psychoactive agents were developed—some even found their way to the streets—but none that could deliver on the Club’s key requirement: that of a controllable trip preserving one’s analytical wits and memory formation capacities. Early methods for synthesizing drugs were crude, severely restricting what could be achieved. And even as methods improved over the years, project scientists realized that drugs alone, no matter how well designed they were, could never give them sufficient granularity of control over the activity of different brain regions. Finally, they also realized that the subject’s responses during the trance were dynamic, requiring the effect of the psychoactive agent to quickly adapt on-the-fly. That was impractical with drugs. The scientists’ ultimate dream was to be able to selectively deactivate any individual neuron anywhere in the brain, at any time. Drugs alone simply couldn’t do it.
It was only in the mid 1980’s that project scientists began exploring another tool: exposing the subject’s brain to electromagnetic (E.M.) fields. Some guy in England had managed to control a subject’s motor functions by applying these fields through the skull, so project scientists figured that they could push the technique further. The E.M. fields could disrupt activity in specific regions of the brain in a way that could be programmed and adapted on-the-fly. The theory was that one could manipulate the subject’s state of consciousness with these fields, opening the ‘gates of transcendence,’ so to speak. The scientists also theorized that they could control the trance by, for instance, disrupting cyclical, self-reinforcing neural processes responsible for the notorious ‘loops’ of ‘bad trips.’ The whole thing was rudimentary back then, but it offered enough degrees of freedom for progressive refinement.
Through exhaustive and unbelievably expensive trial and error over many years, project scientists had converged on a mix-and-match technique that they called ‘the Recipe.’ It entailed three different elements: a carefully coordinated series of intravenous infusions that delivered different psychoactive drugs at specific moments (colloquially called the ‘Juice Mix’ among research associates); a programmed series of E.M. pulses at specific locations of the subject’s brain (which we inaccurately called the ‘Light Show’); and brain function measurement technology to monitor the subject’s neural activity during the trance (the ‘Telemetry,’ also a rather inaccurate term that stuck). A custom-made computer coordinated all three elements. The Recipe had shown tremendous promise in trials carried out during the few years preceding my joining the project. This had motivated the Club to free up a seemingly unlimited financial line to, once and for all, have Trilobite deliver on its goals. Their efforts to get me onboard were a small part of this renewed push.
One of the key remaining technical challenges had to do with pattern recognition and control. This is where I came in. With their brain function measurement technology, project scientists could see and record the neural activity in a subject’s brain with exquisite detail, but they hadn’t yet developed a way to reliably interpret the patterns they saw. They didn’t quite know what the Telemetry meant from the subject’s direct subjective perspective; that is, what the subject was experiencing in association with the measured pattern of brain activity. To develop a tool to help figure this out was the first part of my team’s task. The second part was to develop a way to translate this interpretation of the Telemetry into commands
for adjusting the Juice Mix and the Light Show. The idea was to have a computerized system continuously observe the subject’s brain activity and adapt both the cocktail of psychoactive drugs and the position and intensity of the E.M. pulses on-the-fly, so to steer the trance along paths predetermined by the subject’s original intention.
Our general approach was to use offline data to train an A.I. system to interpret Telemetry. Trilobite had amassed a huge library of Telemetry recordings and corresponding trip reports, the latter written by the subjects shortly after their respective trips. With enough trip reports and Telemetry recordings we should, theoretically, be able to develop an A.I. system that could mine for correlations between the two and learn what patterns of neural activity corresponded to what types of subjective experience. Once the A.I. had learned enough, it could then be deployed ‘live,’ during a trip, so to help adjust the Light Show and the Juice Mix on-the-fly. There were huge problems, though: despite the thousands of trip reports and Telemetry recordings available to us, the data were, statistically speaking, extremely limited for our purposes. The complexity of neural activity and the variety of subjective experiences reported were such that orders of magnitude more data would be necessary for an ordinary A.I. to learn the correspondences. To compound the problem, the trip reports were not time-stamped: we didn’t precisely know what segment of the Telemetry corresponded to what part of the subject’s later narrative of his or her experiences. Fundamentally new technical insights were necessary to tackle these issues.
Even with these problems addressed, project scientists were aware that deliberate control of the trance could only be done coarsely, at the level of broad themes and directions. But that was enough. The Club’s intent was to learn about the underlying nature of life and reality, so the system was meant to continually monitor the Telemetry to see if the trip was going in this general metaphysical direction. If not, it should calculate changes in the Juice Mix and the Light Show to put the trip back on the intended course.
Notice that the idea here wasn’t to create an artificial virtual reality by manipulating brain function; in fact, that would have defeated the whole purpose of the project. As mentioned earlier, the hypothesis was that the trance gave subjects access to transcendent but real landscapes, where real answers to the biggest questions of life could be found. The goal of fine-tuning the Juice Mix and Light Show during the journey was merely to help an explorer navigate an unfamiliar terrain with some level of control, not to artificially simulate the terrain itself. Selectively de-activating certain parts of the brain was just a means to send people off to specific locations of a transcendent space, rather like Jody Foster in the movie Contact (there actually were some interesting rumors about the relationship between that movie and Trilobite, but that’s not relevant here). There, they would hopefully find the answers and insights the Club sought.
Trilobite had an amazing team of carefully selected volunteer subjects to undergo the trips. We called them ‘Explorers’ and I was surprised to find the names of some well-known personalities among them: authors, scientists, filmmakers, spiritual teachers, artists, the lot. I wondered whether their celebrated creative power, insights and eloquence didn’t arise, at least in part, from their secret Trilobite journeys. Be it as it may, the Explorers were handpicked for their uniquely varied background in mathematics and hard sciences, the arts, humanities, literature and poetry. The idea behind this careful selection was to send in people equipped to interpret and make some sense of the transcendent landscapes encountered. They should also be able to describe what they experienced with some clarity and consistency, which turned out to be quite difficult. The average person on the streets, as project scientists soon discovered, simply couldn’t accomplish this.
The unfortunate implication was that there was no overlap between the team of research associates developing the Recipe—of which I was part—and the team of Explorers. The respective selection processes posed radically different requirements. As a member of the research team, I wasn’t supposed to trip myself. However, a few years into my tenure at Trilobite, we had managed to turn the Recipe into computer-controlled fine art. The system was playing like an orchestra. The increasingly coherent and tantalizing reports of Explorers emerging from their trips began to instill in me an irresistible urge to trip myself. I just had to know first-hand what the Explorers were talking about. And, as it turns out, I’d get my chance; in fact, many more than one.
Off to another realm
I did my work well at Trilobite. Even though my physical visits to Club premises were few and far between, because of constraints related to my day job and personal life, I was highly motivated and engaged in the project. This had given me visibility and earned appreciation from Trilobite staff. Indeed, after only a couple of years, I was already seen as a true member of the family. Being aware of this, there came a time when I decided to leverage my solid position in the project to—how should I put it?—enrich the modes of my participation in it.
Yes, I just wanted to trip. I needed to trip. My curiosity was becoming unbearable and Sophie was the person I chose to share my feelings with. Over the years, she and I had become friends—in case this word is applicable to people who see each other in person once or twice a year—so I felt comfortable opening up to her. As it turns out, she sympathized with my cause and brought it up for discussion with her management. The usual arguments against mixing roles were brought up, but I had one important thing going for me: I was trusted. I guess they figured that, in the worst-case scenario, my trip reports would be useless but at least I would be happy. For them, I guess this was simply a new way to compensate my efforts in the absence of a salary; another type of in-kind bonus, so to speak.
I had to undergo training and preparation before my first journey. This consisted in: multiple psychological and physical evaluations; a form of psychotherapy aimed at ‘clearing the skeletons in the closet’ (deeply-ingrained, unnoticed fears and traumas that could get amplified during a trip to the point of ruining it); tools for controlling the journey from within, like breathing techniques, self-hypnosis, visualization and the use of mantras; a mildly restrictive diet; and—most time-consuming of all—academic-level courses on philosophy, history, religious studies and mythology. Because of my background, no courses were required on math or sciences. Fortunately, the vast majority of this training could be done remotely, via self-study and guided live sessions on the Internet.
For the actual trips, however, Explorers needed to be physically present at the Club’s main laboratory, where the rather large rigs required by the Light Show and Telemetry were located. Qualified nursing staff was also required for the application of the Juice Mix. Traveling to the lab’s site, despite being demanding on my schedule and complicated to disguise as a regular business trip or vacation, was always very pleasant. It suffices to say that most Club leaders reside in a particularly beautiful, quiet and safe part of the world; and it was there that they set up their laboratory. Like several retired Explorers, I, too, dream of retiring there one day.
And so it was that, in the first years of the twenty-first century, I embarked on a series of journeys that would forever change not only my life, but my very sense of identity. At first, I had been scheduled to undergo only five journeys. However, the surprising results of my initial experiences triggered a process that would see me trip into transcendence more than two dozen times.
What nobody had anticipated was that, precisely for having intimate knowledge of the A.I. that automatically adjusted the Juice Mix and the Light Show during the journey, I was uniquely positioned to correlate the inside view of the trip with what the system was measuring and doing from the outside. This allowed me to optimize both the Recipe and my own mental states—the latter during the trip—so the A.I. would pick up my intentions and react accordingly. In essence, I could teach the A.I. new skills and then tell it, from within the trip, exactly what to do to help me steer the journey. Through subjective tri
al-and-error during each trip and extensive tweaking of the A.I. in between trips—the latter based on my own Telemetry recordings—I refined and personalized this mechanism to a point where I was soon achieving results nobody had achieved in the prior thirty-five years of project Trilobite. And that is the next part of my story…
Chapter 9
Meeting the Other
I found that the easiest way for me to rationally make sense of, and later remember, the transcendent insights attained during each trip was to frame the journey in the form of a dialogue. Naturally, this raises the question of whom I was dialoguing with. The most honest answer is: a deeply obfuscated but knowledgeable complex of my own mind that, at the same time, was also entirely alien to my ego. It became a habit for me and other Explorers—who later used similar Recipe setups—to refer to this psychic complex as ‘the Other,’ a designation inspired by our Continental Philosophy courses. Indeed, I spent substantial effort trying not only to tune my mental attitude to this dialogue format, but also to get the A.I. to optimize the Recipe for it. One’s limited ego would play the part of the questioner, while the Other would answer the questions with deeper, broader knowledge of what’s going on. The dialogue format—the dissociation it enabled between ego and Other—allowed one to retain one’s analytical wits and memory formation capacities in the ego complex, while bringing the deeper, broader aspects of consciousness out of obfuscation in the form of the Other. This simple dissociative trick allowed us to nail down the Club’s original, apparently contradictory goals in a rather elegant manner. There was no complete ego dissolution, as in traditional psychedelic trances, but neither was the ego able to obfuscate the deeper aspects of mind any longer.
More Than Allegory Page 15
