“You have to throw some noise! And noise is noise – it’s distractive, it’s frame breaking – that’s horrific! That’s why the sacred always has a terrific or horrific aspect to it – awe is connected to awful for good reason. But you know the reverse! If you don’t ever throw any noise into the neural network, what happens? It over-fits to the data; it doesn’t generalise; it fixates; it gets locked into a local minima … I propose to you that we can have psychedelic experiences or meditative experiences or sensory-motor experiences that do that massive frame-breaking, but it’s not just the frame breaking! I don’t think that people should just have these experiences – I’m arguing the exact opposite – we need to have a proper, sapiential, sacred community around them so that that frame-breaking is compensated with a lot of resources for frame-making. That’s what I’m trying to propose.”
John Vervaeke
the way of the holy mushroom 