Extract from “Many Voices, One Mission” by Michael G. Reccia, R. Jane Kneen

25th February, 2007

[Jane recalls: This clairvoyant address from Silver Star was given to Michael and myself one Sunday morning on our return home after he had accompanied us on a walk around the local reservoir.]

Silver Star: I want to talk about resonance and vibration, particularly in the spirit world. What I am going to talk about also applies to this level but cannot be picked up with earthly senses.

Everything in the spirit world has a sound, a colour, a tonality of Light and a degree of sentience. If I place a box in front of you on an earthly level it is simply a box …a utilitarian, functional, square structure built to hold something. If I gave you a box from the spirit worlds, that box has been created by thought. So, if I have a box in my house in the spirit world and turn my attention to it, that box will have a colour value. It is not just a box but is also a vibration of Light, and it is that vibration of Light that gives it its ‘solidity’. It will have a particular colour according to the purpose I assign to it. And, because the spiritual atoms in the box are vibrating at a certain rate, that box also has a sound value if I choose to tune in to it, which will be pleasing to the ear because the box has been created in one of the worlds of Light. That box is made from energy so as well as its colour – which will change dependent on what I want the box to do – it also has a luminance.

So, every object in the spirit realm has a colour (even a seemingly transparent box has a colour value) …it has a vibration of sound …and it has a perfume. The box stimulates all the senses we had on Earth so we can see, hear, touch and smell it.

Michael: Why would it have a perfume, Silver Star?

Silver Star: All the senses can be used as a spirit. Even though there is no dense atmosphere like on Earth, the sense of smell is stimulated by any object. There are exquisite perfumes here and each object has a unique scent dependent upon its complexity and intention of purpose. There is also a background aroma from the landscape and a subtle fragrance with people as well.

All your senses work at once, spiritually speaking, which is why, when Michael tries to describe spirit communication, he says it is like a beam of energy that carries within it a huge amount of information. Each object here conveys a lot of information …it has Light …it has a colour value …it has a sound value …and it has a perfume.

You can tune out these things, dependent on which of them you want to sense, or you can experience all of them at once. You can (as in your drug ‘culture’ on Earth) smell colours. You can experience emotion through colours and so feel warm or cold or happy or sad through colours. You can hear the symphony of Creation that runs through everything, and yet it can be individualised so that you only hear it coming out of the ‘box’ or just from the atmosphere around you …or you can hear it coming from the whole of the sphere you are in at the time.

Discord also exists in the Lower Astral because people there are still God-like in potential and what they imagine takes form. They think up discordant images and those images have vibrations that clash …that have a disagreeable odour …that exhibit violent colours …that carry sounds that are an assault on the senses. The spirits in the Lower Astral can feel and sense their havoc that, whilst on Earth, they thought they were creating in secret.

As an example of what I am trying to put across, let us take the simple act of one person visiting a friend with the express intent of spreading discord by voicing disharmonious views about a mutual acquaintance. On an earthly level all the person can be seen to have done is travel from point A to point B, indulge in malicious gossip, and then return home with no apparent retribution or consequence for having done that.

On a spiritual level, however, as soon as that person decides to undertake that malevolent course of action, they create jagged thoughts around themselves and attract towards themselves similar spirits from the Lower Astral. So, accompanying them unseen on that journey are spirits who think that this is a fun thing to do, because their vibrations are similar to the intentions of the soul on Earth wishing to cause trouble.

In contrast, the person who is sitting in meditation creates thoughts of Light and balance, and creates spheres (like the ones photographed over your door [reference to the coloured orbs that I had unexpectedly captured on my camera]), which have lovely, balanced colours and beautiful harmonies and sounds. Whereas the person who is acting negatively towards someone else creates a ‘thunderstorm’ around themselves with roiling clouds of darkness and disharmony within that bubble. Those disharmonies are then recorded in the karmic pattern of the person’s life, inhibiting their vibration so that, when they pass to spirit, they have to rid themselves of that thought and intention (even though they might not have thought about it for years) before they can raise their vibrations enough to fully appreciate the worlds of Light.

So, just as there are harmonious colours in Creation, there are also disharmonious colours; and just as there are harmonious sounds there are sounds – like clashing cymbals – of discord and disharmony.

Many illnesses on Earth are caused by the body having to react on a subconscious level to the constant battering of disharmony that the spirit has created around itself, year in, year out. The cells within a person’s body also vibrate, have a sound- and Light-quality and are designed to be harmonious but can be overcome by the bombardment of dominant negative thoughts from the person. That dulls or extinguishes the Light within the cells, resulting in the cells becoming unhealthy because they are not receiving the harmony from God that should reach them …so thick are the thoughts around the person and their subconscious.

In spiritual work you will often detect a smell …such as cigarettes, earth or perfume. The part of the wavelength that affects smell is easier to manipulate from one of the spirit worlds than sight or hearing, so very often a discarnate soul will convey a smell to the person on the Earth plane they wish to contact because it is the easiest way (relatively speaking) to do so from the spirit worlds.

So, if we come back to my box – a simple object like that is really a riot of colour, sound and intention but so is everything on Earth …as above, so below. The chair you are sitting on has its own harmony, its own energy-signature and a colour that is quite apart from the colour vibration you can see on the Earth plane. That vibration or low level of sound is harmonising with the other sounds in your room – such as the sounds that the chairs and the television are giving out; and electricity gives out a very specific sound-signature spiritually. There are colours that are emanating in your room on a spiritual level and perfume vibrations given out by various objects. Flowers, for example, give off perfume on a low level on the Earth but their perfume as a glorification of God on a spiritual level is wonderful to experience.

All this is going on in everyone’s house and this is why a medium can enter someone’s room and instantly feel threatened because of the chaos picked up there, or in somebody else’s room – like this one – feel at peace because peace is in the atmosphere. On a subconscious level you, as souls, pick up the Light-signature, the colour-signature, the sound and the perfume from the objects within a room… and, indeed, from people themselves.

It is not a cacophony in our world because everything is harmonious and we can tune in or tune out those particular vibrations, just as you would on a television. If we do not wish to hear the background noise of the universe we tune it out – knowing that it is always there if we wish to tune back in to it. If we don’t wish to see beyond the physical objects that we have (like the box) and don’t want to see its colour or Light, we tune out of that particular wavelength so we are just looking at the object.

The reason I am telling you this is to make you aware of the fact that the universe is vibrant and alive. There is no such thing as a ‘dead object’ because the last quality my box exhibits is a degree of sentience. It is built out of God-ether …the substance of the universe… and, therefore, is alive. I can influence the box with my moods and so it is on Earth. You influence your immediate surroundings with your moods and, because those surroundings are, in effect, alive, they react to the way that you are feeling.

Objects on Earth should be blessed periodically and dedicated back to God so that their vibration is raised and they will then serve you rather than drag you down by exhibiting depressive tendencies that they have picked up from yourselves! This is why you should bless your houses. Anything new that is brought into your house should be blessed because you don’t know the history of that object. You don’t know who has touched it before and what their thoughts or intentions have been. Everything should be blessed and dedicated to God …so should the food you eat …and the thoughts you think. You should say: ‘Father, this morning I pray that my thoughts be of the highest quality and worthy of You‘ and then you are not thinking things that will damage you.

I would like to leave you the box to think about. It is just a box that I have created from nothing by thinking, ‘I want a box!’ …What colour is it? …What is its intention? …What are you going to use it for? …How much Light does it exhibit?

It is up to you!

It depends what you put into that box.

That box is symbolic of every thought you think, everything that is in your house and everything you use – from your car to your telephone – and, just as I can influence that box, you can influence the things around you. That is why the Persian Gentleman said some weeks ago [reference to a private communication] that you should bless and thank the objects in your house because they react at a God-level to your approach to them. If you love them they become filled with Love; if you hate them they become filled with hate.

So, I have tried to bring through something of the abstractions of our world and pin them down through physical speech. Our world is a world of Light, of colour, of perfume, of sound …and so is yours.

Bless your days …bless each other …bless the objects, then you are putting Light into them as co-creators of those objects, which is what you will eventually be. You might not have physically made a chair today but one day with the power of your mind you will. You might not have physically built a house but you are building the house you will go to in the spirit realms by your thoughts whilst on Earth. So, be aware that you are creating, even though this is a pool of vibration where other people create physical objects for you. What you put into those objects you create yourself and get heaven or hell from them dependent on your motives and thoughts.

Would Jane would like to ask a question about anything I have just said?

Jane: Do objects emit music as well?

Silver Star: To create heat you stir up molecules – that is heat. Heat is molecules hitting each other because they have become agitated. To create any object, you formulate the molecules so that they become that object temporarily. Once formulated, however, they are not in stasis but in motion. If something is in stasis it decays; therefore, there must be movement. So, dashing about within the box that I have created are molecules that give the illusion of the box being ‘solid’. They are reacting to each other and – as when you rub your finger around the rim of a wine glass – it creates a sound. You cannot hear it on this level but you can on ours. Every object has a tone because of the way in which the molecules within it are moving. Does that make sense?

Jane: Yes, thank you.

Silver Star: Was there anything else?

Jane: No.

Silver Star: Then I will leave you, although I never leave you on a Sunday and, in particular, I never leave Jane [reference to Silver Star’s role as my principal guide]. I leave Michael to my colleague, the Persian Gentleman [reference to P.G. being Michael’s guide], and God bless you for the work you have done this week on behalf of us all – and for the work you will continue to do.

Analysis

Is there any value in considering the experiences described in the text above? With a physicalist ontology paired with inferential realism about perception, we are compelled to conclude that when people report traveling to heaven worlds and seeing objects that make signature multi-sensory music, they are really reporting on the quality of hallucinations. Alas, this is not enough to dismiss these reports as useless. Why? Because they may have some key information about how phenomenology works, and specifically, about valence structuralism. Let me explain.

The experience of going to a phenomenal world where the objects resonate and produce notes in all sensory channels has been reported by a number of people from various traditions (e.g. how Buddhas are said to emit blissful vibrations in the pure abodes, flowers making music in heaven as described by a gnostic “medium” (The process of dying), the sound-sight complementary nature of Mandalas and Mantras*, etc.). As I’ve said elsewhere, “desiring that the universe be turned into Hedonium is the straightforward implication of realizing that everything wants to become music”. So when people say things like this, listen. They may be reporting back on glimpses they’ve had of radically enhanced modes of being, whether or not they are really gaining privileged access to an external transcendent world of consciousness.

Gaining Root Access to Your World Simulation

Let’s examine the phenomenology described under the theoretical paradigms developed at the Qualia Research Institute. Some core paradigms are Qualia Formalism (“every conscious experience corresponds to a mathematical object such that the mathematical features of that object are isomorphic to the phenomenology of the experience”), Valence Structuralism (“pain and pleasure are structural features of the mathematical object that corresponds to an experience such that they can be read off from this object with the appropriate mathematical analysis”), and the Symmetry Theory of Valence (“the mathematical feature that corresponds to pain and pleasure are the object’s symmetry and anti-symmetry, namely, its invariance upon the transformations the object is undergoing”). Whereas Qualia Formalism is a necessary assumption to make in order to make any progress on the science of consciousness (cf. Qualia Formalism in the Water Supply), Valence Structuralism and the Symmetry Theory of Valence are currently still mere hypotheses whose truth will be determined empirically by testing the predictions they generate. For now, we rely on strong, but admittedly circumstantial, pieces of evidence. The phenomenology reported of the connection between harmony and bliss in heaven worlds is one of these pieces of evidence. But can we do better? Not everyone can access these so-called heaven worlds of experience. So what can we do instead? Thankfully, there is a way…

Indeed, as carefully catalogued by Steven Lehar in his book about altered states “The Grand Illusion“, combining dissociatives and psychedelics produces an altogether new kind of experience different than the experience of either alone. His discovery first came by combining DXM and THC, which he says has a decent chance of giving rise to a free-wheeling hallucination, meaning that one can control the contents of hallucinatory experiences. For example, rather than being at the mercy of one’s hallucinatory world, under such a state, you could choose to fly on an airplane, travel the cosmos, or even go to Burning Man, and your mind will render a world-simulation in which you are doing such things.

Lehar, famously, is a proponent of indirect realism about perception. Hence he does not confuse those experiences with a transcendent access to an etheric plane or literal other dimensions. Rather, he points out, what underlies the phenomenal character of one’s experience is made by patterns of harmonic resonance interfering with each other within the confines of one’s own brain. The illusion of “seeing things outside of oneself” is due to the fact that the experience we have seems to be of a 3D space. But in reality, what is happening is that you are a 2.5D diorama-like projective space that represents a homunculus looking at a 3D space:

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In the book, Lehar discusses how one can study some of the key parameters of one’s world-simulation in such a state. By imagining/requesting/generating lenses, diffraction gratings, and mirrors in your world-simulation during a free-wheeling hallucination you can explore the ray-tracing algorithms used by your brain to render your experience in normal circumstances. Just as the best way to figure out how a videogame engine works is to break it with corner cases, to find how your brain builds your world-simulation, overloading the simulation with difficult-to-render elements is highly useful.

What algorithms does your mind use for ray-tracing? According to an anonymous reader (whom we shall call “R”), the DXM + THC state allows you to explore precisely this question. From the conversations with R, it seems that ray-tracing follows a repeating two-step top-down and bottom-up recursive process in order to draw your experience. Amodal percepts are first constructed and set in place in order to build a projective frame (e.g. isometric projection, fish eye lens projection, etc.), which is followed by the “lighting” of that amodal space with modal qualia (color, scent, touch, etc.) in order to increase the definition of the rendered scene. Then an algorithm kicks in that figures out which is the most under-constrained region of the world-simulation, and rendering begins there, again with an amodal frame followed by modal filling-in, and so on, and the process repeats until you reach reflective-equilibrium.

The amodal step allows you to explore the range of possible projective transformations of your world-simulation. It is at this step that you can explore the rendering of cinematographic camera effects, such as lens flares and the Hitchcock Zoom. Unlike pure psychedelic states (e.g. LSD, psilocybin, etc.) on dissociatives, projective transformations seem to have a certain gravity to them. It’s as if the entire scene was built as a model on a platform suspended with ropes and springs. To turn the space around (i.e. change the projection) you can “add weight” to some of its parts, and then let the ropes readjust the orientation of the model to balance it out again. This is why dissociative projective hallucinations have a characteristic initial acceleration ramp-up, similar to what it is like to give a push to a ceramic turn table with a heavy vase. It moves very slowly at first, but once it gets going it keeps spinning until you stop it, which also has a characteristic deceleration dynamic. On the free-wheeling hallucination state one is like that; the world-simulation model can be pushed around to change the projection, and when you do so it travels at constant speed until it decelerates before its reposition. During the modal step, effects can be added such as wind, dust, rain, hail, liquid, gelatin, etc. These are all applied one at a time in a relatively legible way, with physicalized rendering of e.g. the filling up of a tank, parts of wood combusting with a low-grade fire propagating at constant speed, an ocean filled with water increasing its viscosity until it becomes lava, etc. A very valuable follow-up research that could be done at e.g. a Super-Shulgin Academy of rational psychonauts would be to get people to study SIGGRAPH algorithms and then try to replicate them during free-wheeling hallucinations. Perhaps not so surprisingly, graphics researchers are notorious for using psychedelics**.

Some people may want to say that there is nothing special about these states… we already have lucid dreaming after all, right? Alas, that is a very misguided analogy. Yes, lucid dreams can be used to explore unusual phenomenal configurations, but the scenes experienced are very hard to stabilize and examine in detail over the course of minutes (rather than seconds). The features of free-wheeling hallucinations along with their generic emotional intensity make them not comparable to most moments of life, or even lucid dreams. The texture of dissociative+psychedelic states is drastically different from lucid dreaming, and so is the degree of controllability of their content in precise and measured ways (not to say that dream music cannot be very emotional, but we are talking of something that is on another level altogether). That said, the state has clear limitations, too. Lehar points out, for instance, that looking at the control panel of an airplane during a free-wheeling hallucination reveals that you cannot have as many buttons as you would have in real life. Likewise, the projective transformations are restricted in some ways. A specific example would be trying to simulate going to Las Vegas. There you will find that jumping off a building is not possible because that would require a projective transformation where the distance covered grows quadratically as a function of time. Instead, jumping off a building will be approximated by what it feels like to go down an elevator at constant speed. In contrast, getting into the High Roller wheel is an excellent choice because your world-simulation can render the circular constant-speed projective trajectory of the camera movement in a very accurate and precise fashion.

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Happiness and Harmony: A Marriage Made in Heaven

With regards to the connection between symmetry and pleasure, the free-wheeling hallucination state is a prime place to conduct high-quality phenomenological research. In particular, R tells us that you can study how different objects generate (are resonant with) particular moods, sounds, and tactile feelings. Thus, DXM + THC can be a tool of grand scientific significance for the study of emotional valence.

[If what follows is hard to make sense of, please bear with us, it will get easier:] R points out that one can climb the symmetry gradient within a scene by normalizing the space vertically, horizontally, depth-wise, temporally, weight-wise, and so on. During each amodal step you can try to re-align the projective lines so that the points at infinity are either precisely at the center of your vision, or at least have symmetrical counter-parts (e.g. left-right, top-down, etc.). This way you can take the energy of the phenomenal objects and generate what we call a “projective energy entrapment”. This is a strange thing to report on that goes outside of people’s conceptual schemes, but it is definitely real, and very important. With a symmetrified amodal projective frame, the phenomenal object can “lock in place”, and a process of annealing takes place. The pre-existing invariant degrees of freedom present in the amodal projections before the symmetrification are still there, but on top of them, one gets additional invariant degrees of freedom. R compares this to taking a space with affine geometry and projecting it into a space with Euclidean geometry, such that the space now has two layers of invariance that add up and, together, prevent energy in the phenomenal objects from escaping to their surroundings. In light of QRI’s meditation paradigms, this would be akin to removing energy sinks from the system. In turn, the projective energy entrapment allows the build-up of extraordinarily intense resonance amplitudes, and this, according to R, feels really good.

Thus, at least according to these observations, the emotional valence of our world-simulation is both related to the number of active invariant degrees of freedom along which transformations are taking place and the amount of energy entrapped in such spaces. Here is a good example. The gif on the left is what the space may look like at first, with the pseudo-time arrow creating a video feedback effect that gives rise to chaotic behavior. If you meditate on normalizing the projective points, you can turn that space into something akin to the image on the right. Now rather than having the modal energy leak to the surroundings, it all gets trapped inside the cube, giving rise to a powerful feeling of emotionally-loaded resonance, which empirically feels really good.

Chaotic pseudo-time arrow

Stable pseudo-time arrow

To reiterate, the image to the left is what it feels like when the space is asymmetrical. The affine symmetries may be preserved, but Euclidean energy entrapment is not possible there. The one on the right has both affine invariants and Euclidean invariants, which allow for more energy entrapment (and also temporal stability). If you can stabilize an infinite hall of mirrors projected from a highly symmetrical point of view, you will be able to entrap a lot of energy, which feels like a resonating space and empirically this seems to be very pleasant. We would love to hear from more rational psychonauts whether they are able to replicate this experience, and whether the correlation with valence is also uncovered in their world-simulations.

In the more general case, one can do this with other amodal projections, and generate peaceful but wide awake energy-filler mandalas of experience:

Indeed, during dissociative free-wheeling hallucinatory states one can “tune in to the phenomenal objects” one constructs and translate their vibration into sounds, tactile sensations, emotions, and even scents. Again, empirically, one will notice that the projective symmetry of an object will be associated with the symmetry of the multi-modal translation, and in turn, with the valence of the object. Ugly phenomenal objects will have discordant sound signatures, whereas smooth, easily compressible and symmetrical phenomenal objects will have harmonic sound signatures. You can indeed try to listen in to your entire experience, which in the general case will give rise to rather experimental-sounding music. If you have annealed your hallucinations into a highly symmetrical state (e.g. hall of mirrors above) the sound translation will be *very* pleasant, akin to Buddhist chants in a reverb chamber or mystical violins in a resonant cave (again, this is an empirical finding as reported from R, rather than just arm-chair speculation, but it does support QRI’s hypothesized Symmetry Theory of Valence). Two very symmetrical objects with different but nearby frequencies will clash at first, but one can try to resolve this clash by paying close attention to both at once. If so, sooner or later one of the objects will dominate the other, they will undergo affine transformations until they merge, or there will be some kind of compromise where you stop paying attention to some of the features of one or both of the objects such that the remaining ones are in harmony. Here are some more examples of what a more complex DXM + THC state may render that could produce extremely beautiful sounds:

Thus, even within our modern scientific paradigms (updated with QRI’s frameworks) we can explain and indeed utilize the phenomenological reports of heaven worlds. We believe that understanding the underlying mathematical basis of valence will be ground-breaking, and analyzing these reports is a really important step in this direction. It will allow us to make sense of the syntax of bliss, and thus aid us in the task of paradise engineering.

But What if Our Scientific World Picture is Wrong?

Indeed, maybe the picture of the world painted above is fundamentally mistaken. Within it, we would gather that heaven and spirituality are in a sense illusions caused by high valence states. The experience is so beautiful, sublime, and delightful that people try to make sense of it invoking God, the divine, and transcendent love. Alas, if the universe has an in-built utility function based on valence we could expect people to become confused that way when experiencing some of the really good states. But could we be mistaken here? This points to an important question: whether bliss is a spiritual phenomenon or whether spirituality is a bliss phenomenon.

Leibniz might retort by saying that although each person is a separate monad, God keeps their experiences synchronized so that our actions in Maya do have effects on other sentient beings, rather than being just a movie of one’s own making. Thus, a world-simulation model may be correct, but what makes an experience blissful or not is not its physical state, but rather its degree of spiritual wisdom. Or consider, for instance, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, along with its psychedelic interpretation (by Leary, Metzner, and Alpert), which suggests that both good and bad feelings are projections of the unconditioned mind.

Alas, even if a spiritual account turns out to be true, in the sense that interpreting these experiences through their lens is more accurate, and inferential realism about perception is misguided, we would still be able to gather from these reports that the structure of thought-forms encodes emotions – perhaps even in a spiritual multiverse with souls, God-energies, Realms, etc. we would still be able to derive a master equation for valence. Rather than valence structuralism referring to the fire in the equations of physics, it might refer to God-energy, emptiness, etheric fields, or whatnot. But why would that matter? We could still formalize and mathematize the nature of bliss under those conditions. This is what we call Spiritual Structuralism: even in the spirit world math still encodes the experiential quality of phenomena. Saying “we either live in a mathematically-describable physical world or in a mysteriously inscrutable spiritual world” may turn out to be a false dichotomy. We could still look forward to having spiritual analogues of Galileo, Newton, and Einstein, albeit their equations would apply to how the God-force self-interferes to generate the multifaceted spiritual world of sentient beings.

Alas, I suspect that many spiritual people would recoil at the prospect of mathematizing Mystical Love. So let us ask ourselves: Would this be good? Tongue-in-cheek, I remember asking God at Burning Man 2017 whether deriving the equation for valence would be good from a spiritual point of view. God’s response? A resounding “Yes!” Importantly, God emphasized that individual bliss is limited, whereas collective bliss is boundless.  But maybe this, too, could someday be formalized. Here I reproduce the relevant part of our conversation:

Me: I’ve been working on a theory concerning the nature of happiness. It’s an equation that takes brain states as measured with advanced brain imaging technology and delivers as an output a description of the overall valence (i.e. the pleasure-pain axis) of the mind associated to that brain. A lot of people seem very excited with this research, but there is also a minority of people for whom this is very unsettling. Namely, they tell me that reducing happiness to a mathematical equation would seem to destroy their sense of meaning. Do you have any thoughts on that?
God: I think that what you are doing is absolutely fantastic. I’ve been following your work and you are on the right track. That said, I would caution you not to get too caught up on individual bliss. I programmed the pleasure and pain centers in the animal brain in order to facilitate survival. I know that dying and suffering are extremely unpleasant, and until now that has been necessary to keep the whole system working. But humanity will soon enter a new stage of their evolution. Just remember that the highest levels of bliss are not hedonistic or selfish. They arise by creating a collective reality with other minds that fosters a deep existential understanding, that enables love, enhances harmony, and permits experimenting with radical self expression.
Me: Ah, that’s fascinating! Very reassuring. The equation I’m working on indeed has harmony at its core. I was worried that I would be accidentally doing something really wrong, you know? Reducing love to math.
God: Don’t worry, there is indeed a mathematical law beneath our feelings of love. It’s all encoded in the software of your reality, which we co-created over the last couple billion years. It’s great that you are trying to uncover such math, for it will unlock the next step in your evolution. Do continue making experiments and exploring various metaphysics, and don’t get caught up thinking you’ve found the answer. Trust me, the end is going to make all of the pain and suffering completely worth it. Have faith in love.
Me: Thank you!

– Conversation with God, Burning Man 2017

John C. Lilly’s Simulations of God posits that as people evolve and mature, their concept of the highest good also evolves and matures. Thus, learning about the math behind pleasure might very well transform your conception of divinity. I would therefore offer a new perspective on what is God that unifies bliss and spirituality: God is a happiness engineer who knows all the theories, tricks, and techniques to optimize qualia for bliss. Indeed, Romeo (from QRI) has reported experiencing multi-sensory harmonious mandalas when closing his eyes after coming back from long meditation retreats. One could very well posit that this world is the training ground of souls to learn how to avoid creating evil thought-forms while practicing how to increase the harmony between all sentient beings.

Additionally, Wireheading Done Right could have a spiritual analogue – namely, moving between realms in such a way that you go from good one to good one, reaping their functional benefits, while avoiding getting stuck in any one of them. Just because a spiritual universe underlies our reality would not mean that suffering forever is either good or necessary. And if there is math associated with love and liberation, we are all better for it, for then we are not shooting in the dark. Carefully selected dynamic systems equations that give rise to beautiful (i.e. high valence from many different points of view) patterns could very well be what is behind the bliss of heaven worlds, and you should neglect this discovery at your own peril.

Alas, this is unlikely. Even so, promoting a given ontology is less important, intrinsically, than promoting subjective wellbeing. For if someone’s delusions are comforting and do not interfere with their ability to help others, there is no reason to remove them. Do not go and try to convince your dying granny of the non-existence of God, for that is pointless cruelty. And certainly don’t go around talking about tenseless suffering in the Everettian multiverse outside of circles to whom this can either help them intrinsically or extrinsically (I assume being candid with QC readers is a net positive, though I often doubt that a bit myself).

Either way, from what I gather, practicing creating beautiful harmonic thought-forms is probably good for your health and happiness. It is likely to make you not only feel good, but also be sweet-natured. So by all means practice doing it as often as you can.

Infinite Bliss!

*”Mantras, the Sanskrit syllables inscribed on yantras, are essentially ‘thought forms’ representing divinities or cosmic powers, which exert their influence by means of sound-vibrations.” [source]

**”In 1991, Denise Caruso, writing a computer column for The San Francisco Examiner went to SIGGRAPH, the largest gathering of computer graphic professionals in the world. She conducted a survey; by the time she got back to San Francisco, she had talked to 180 professionals in the computer graphic field who had admitted taking psychedelics, and that psychedelics are important to their work; according to mathematician Ralph Abraham.” [source]