Chanelling the collective unconscious

probably the one first and most groundbreaking examples of this was the acid tests back in the 60's with ken kesey and the merry pranksters. i'm not totally sure how to explain this fully but i'll give it a shot.

from phil lesh's book searching for the sound:

"Let's walk, (or should i say dance? crawl?) through a "typical" Acid Test layout. Entering, we find ourselves in darkness, relieved only by the blinding flashes of strobe lights (carefully timed to be out of sync with one another and the music). What seems like several hundred people are variously milling about, dancing strenuously, or puddled in the corners, against the walls, and on the floor, all clad in colorful and exotic clothing. Several projection screens are showing vastly different sequences of images, film clips, or full-color quasi-protoplasmic blobs moving in time (or not) to the music. The music itself is manifesting not from silence, but from a bed of ambient sound created by Mobius loops of microphones and speakers, and is enhanced by interjections of what we called "Prankster music" -- loud, incomprehensible, jagged, and not exactly lyrical -- and punctuated by shrieks, moans, expostulations, cries, murmurs, and laughter emitted spontaneously by the assembled freaks."

"kesey's avowed goal was to "diffuse the pyramid of attention" so that people weren't focused solely on the stage; we were after a more rounded experience, where many types of stimuli were occuring simultanously.

on the first acid test:

"It ended up being just like every other acid party -- people getting high and doing pretty much what they wanted. There were a few sporadic attempts at getting a collective experience going, but the energy was too spread out. It seemed as though some kind of focus was needed to transform diffuse individual energies into coherent collectives."

for phil lesh, music was the answer.

"When a large crowd is present, as at the Fillmore, or the Trips Festivals, the experience of the group mind becomes much more intense, as much larger-scale; see how the entire wildly dancing audience behaves like waves in the ocean: whole groups of dancers rising and falling, lifting their arms or spinning rapidly in synchronized movement, darting swiftly through the crowd or languidly undulating in place -- manifesting the same sort of spontaneous consensus seen in flocks of birds, schools of fish, of clusters of galaxies.

To make music for dancers like these is the rarest honor -- to be coresponsible for what really is the dance of the cosmos. If, as some savants of consciousness suggest, we are actually agreeing to create, from moment to moment, everything we percieve as real, then it stands to reason that we're also responsible for keeping it going in some harmonious manner. That fervent belief we shared then, and that preserves today, is that the energy liberated by this combination of music and ecstatic dancing is somehow making the world better, or at least holding the line against the depredations of entropy and ignorance."

so. my question is, how can we recreate this? how could the underlying idea of the acid test be manipulated? what forms of focus could be used to unify the experience? how should the experience be focused? how can we push the envelope?

 

i dunno about your questions, but this part was awesome! it completely reminded me of a small festival i went to last summer. first time that i dosed acid in a couple years. standing/dancing around the music that night was exactly like this. it wasn't even a large crowd. but it was perfect.

i LOVE watching flocks of birds fly as "one"

cool post, man

 

i like watching groups of gnats in a falling evening light.. they look like spirits, or ghosts...

 

i dislike rollerblading through a group of gnats and inhaling some, getting them in your eyes, etc.

 

ugh yeah the bane of cycling

i dig this thread and will give it some thought but have mucho homework atm

 

It seems like it's as simple as changing perception. The connection is already there, but it's fear in many shapes and forms that is thwarting it. I'm sure LSD and music don't hinder the process, as they are pretty sincere in changing perception to different degrees.

Sorry for being cliche, but I really don't see any other answer to this.

As far as pushing the envelope, I'm not really sure what you are getting at. Life has, and will improve with evolution. If you want to peel behind the layers and implement a better perception of unity just smoke some DMT, meditate, get a group of open-minded people together, or something to that matter.

 

It certainly does not reach this at every event and for whatever reason less and less of it seems to occur these days but...

The rave scene at its pinnacle acheives this group mind phenomenon. The music is repetitive which allows a tribal synchronisty. You can see/feel the energy in people rise to buildups in the music as well as drop when the music shifts down and its dark so you are not really seeing faces and people but fluctuating energy.

 

If you really want to push the envelope, start treating everybody you meet with on a day-to-day basis with absolute love and respect regardless of stipulations. It grows onto other people and begins to multiply quick, believe me; I've seen it first hand.

 

loving the enthusiasm of the OP. If you need a band to harness and focus the energy, count me in! I think my position is one more of energy conductor as opposed to psychedelic tripper. My sober and focused attention will provide a sense of direction, and with a past of psychedelic tripping, i won't be out of wavelength. I'll just direct the wavelength. And take people surfing deep into vast cosmic oceans with my electric guitar.

 

i guess the point being is that when you get enough people together with a common focus it really starts to cause ripples through the collective unconscious. even in small frequencies it can work like this. it really opens up a whole new level of interconnectedness. is the interconnectedness fate? or is it simply a matter of free will.

the perception coming in brings about as a result a series of reactions in the individual which is then manifest in the collective, which causes more ripples all based around the integral charachter of each individual melded into a group experience. the common focus is the source of all the input, thus with the common focus stands the most influence over the collective.

but what if the common focus was based on something that wasn't as biased as to be created by someone? like, for example, say the focus was blankness, or nature. then the individual output would surface as a more pure expression leading to a higher manifestation of the collective unconscious. kinda like a direct line to the cosmos.

just thought it was an interesting idea and thought that it would be worth sharing here to see if the subject could be built on.

 

i'm just soaking it all in. i'm enjoying your thoughts very much Desos. I find it to be the way of the future for a certain collection of people. This is adding fuel to the fire of a 2012 ejaculation.

 

Predisposed traits? I could see that, especially considering DNA is code. That would mean that there is a larger intelligence behind things, or a higher concentration of energy that our perception blocks out. It does seem like this kind of complexity would have to be planned out, kind of like a higher energy playing a game. We are that energy playing this game with our mammal computers. When I think of the possibilities that could be happening behind our game, It's truly endless; different dimensions of experience and shit. I've had "out-of-body" experiences, and it is exactly as described by many: floating around between different areas of experience with different seemingly programmed parameters.

Yeah I dig, basically evolution. More concentrated areas of energy. Give it some time, we are still very early.

 

Hahaha, yeah, it certainly does seem that way. Wishful thinking never hurt anyone, as long as you are feeling good right now.

 

You can very easily experience and study this interconnectedness at a show. Go to a shpongle show and you will realize the thing works all in one big flow. You can watch how there are certain archetypal situations that play out and how everything kind of adapts to fit the situation. Especially tripping at shows, all the tons of people can be overwhelming at times, but you can learn a great deal of how humans interact with eachother. People are all ready consciously coming together spreading peace love and unity, just grab a hand and let it fly.

Maybe you become a psychedelic conductor, and conduct a visionary, musical, orchestrated mind blowing sensory overload trip through the mind that could bring people to a certain deep level of awareness.