Nested Realities

I was using the ‘zoom out’ function on Midjourney as a medium for actively imagining a DMT entity I once encountered, and I found some variations of an initial image evolved in a number of distinct directions, each with their own archetypal themes or ‘messages’.

This particular image seemed to be conveying some insights on the theme of ‘nested hierarchies’ I had been working on. I was interested in harmonising Jung’s notion of individuation with recent findings in psychedelic neuroscience concerning the near-criticality of the brain – in a nutshell, it seems our sense of egoic selfhood is only transiently stable (‘metastable’) because our neural networks are perpetually and delicately poised at the verge of a transition to novel re-configurations (transitions which can be catalysed by psychedelics). From an evolutionary perspective, this constant proximity to a recurring creatio ex Chao or alchemical solve et coagula allows us to respond to the vicissitudes of our environments in an adaptively optimal manner.

Anyway… there’s a great deal of evidence that the societies we inhabit, the biosphere which sustains those societies, and the cosmos itself are similarly poised at the ‘edge of chaos’. That vision of a nested hierarchy of near-critical systems was reminiscent of the words of a Kabbalist I once met at a Hungarian psytrance festival – she described the olamot and sefirot to me as fractal worlds within worlds stretching on forever. Perhaps there is something more happening in my Midjourney image, as it seems to suggest that the mirror of consciousness is an integral part of that ‘fractal cosmos’. In any case, the hypnotic minimalist iterations of the sample from Laurie Anderson’s ‘O Superman’ seemed to echo the message quite well…