The Gateway Process

[viscousmemories]

Ok, so one of my nephews has been getting seriously into some deeply (imo) woo shit, but maybe I'm just being narrow minded.

He spoke to me at great length about The Law of One and I told him I didn't believe any of that. A bit later he sent me a long, rambling audio recording of Alan Watts talking about consciousness that I couldn't really follow at all. Most recently he sent me a link to this apparently real document from US Army Intelligence about.. again. Not quite sure.

The last one seems to have some legitimacy based on a quick Googling, but I'm not educated enough to know how much of it is consistent with what we know about how the universe works. Anybody else encountered any of this stuff?

[SR71]

It, uh, hmmm. Gee. I'm not the best judge either, but have to agree. At first glance it appears deeply woo.

[Ari]

“18. Time-space Dimension: Up to this point our discussion of the gateway process has been relatively simple and easy to follow.”

I literally laughed out loud at that.

But so ok, the CIA investigated literally any potential way to spy on the soviets and loved the idea of astral projecting operatives into enemy bases, or psychic links for instant communication. Either it was all a failure and never resulted in anything or there is right now an operative beaming psychic thoughts into my brain causing me to dismiss their existence... depending on who you ask.

There’s a lot of now outdated concepts, the whole right brain, left brain thing is something many would love to move away from, but it’s just outright confused about brain frequencies. At one point it was conjectured that mental states were brought on by the EM frequencies produced by the brain and thus if you got the brain to a certain beat, you would induce an experience. Like how when you want to replay a game on your computer you just capture the clock speed of your processor and induce that speed to restart the game.

“The gateway tape”
Ok, that’s what I was looking for! it had to be that or drugs! My guess is the gateway tape is a binaural beats tape. You can find and play with this concept online or in many apps. The idea is that a slightly different tone is played in each ear and the brain combines them to produce a beat equal to the phase difference, which the hypothesis being that producing a phase difference similar to sleeping states will cause the brain to follow.

Flicker lamps are a visual version of this and in part where this all comes from. You might not be able to boot up your favorite game through inducing similar frequencies but you can sure create a nice feedback loop. At just the right frequencies combined with a calm resting state a flicker lamp can prime the visual cortex to hallucinate patterns to occasionally full dream like experiences. (It’s hypothesized that ‘visions in the campfire’ experiences are accidental versions of this.)

The rest is a lot of trying to come up with ways to align his hallucinations with reality, as if they weren’t just naturally induced hallucinations.

[SR71]

I read some sci fi by John Dalmas that incorporates some similar woo. He was writing about that time, I think, late '80's into the '90's. I wonder if he could've been directly or indirectly influenced by that.

I actually found some of it useful. In The Regiment series, there was this philosophy on a particular planet in a confederation of planets where being "non polarized" was central. The idea was that the greatest satisfaction would derive from being at play and with having only a slight preference as to the outcome of ones activities. The reward is to be regarded as unimportant, the reward would be the satisfaction of practicing your chosen art with skill and enthusiasm. I never really accepted it as anything serious but it did help in some trying periods by trying to stay positive, helping to keep a little perspective and not getting all wrapped up in stressors. He also included remote viewing, empathic communication and reincarnation as story elements.

None of that really answers your questions, it's just what the OP subject made me think of.