Stochastic jerks

What other people do repels me. It's an instinctive weakness, 1/3 due to curiosity [what about another way?], 1/3 due to arrogance [I'm sure I know better], and 1/3 straight stupidity [mind is blank]. Curiosity, arrogance, stupidity. A winning combination, the kind that leads to poking bee hives with a stick.

I've been to gyms, and enjoyed getting into the subset of consciously healthy people, although, once ensconced, it's plain that there are degrees. For example, the leap from exercise to diet is often unmade by gym rats, save for protein shakes and the like. I see such people eating crap, which is broadly defined as not only junk food but all carbs, the basic paleoconservative position being that you should eat nothing introduced into the human diet after the development of agriculture. So, no grains, but a hunter-gatherer diet of vegetables, meat, nuts and fruits, although not the bred-to-be-sweet varieties of the latter. It's strict, and it's a pain to observe as it involves breaking many habits and being prepared for when hungry [appropriate snacks on hand], but it works, if you do it. Note: this does not mean, if you follow the paleo-diet and also eat carbs. The foods are not supposed to be an addition to your diet, but to become the entirety, or at least the vast majority. Losing weight, gaining muscle, saving $, learning a language, cooking good food. Many things are easy if you do what you are told, but what people tell me to do repels me.

You try - observe - tweak - observe. After some time you have what works for yourself. The Heath Robinson nature of my work-arounds. Ideally I'd make use of Dr Lilly's Metaprogramming, but the fact is that I shouldn't be allowed anywhere near the controls of my biocomputer. My first creative instinct, when I got into self-hypnosis, was to cobble together MP3s that put me under and then produced sex and psychedelic dreams. When it comes to tinkering with my basic system, I'm not to be trusted, but I still trust myself better than anyone else. It's my body, my head. At best I try to undertake the task with close reference to nature, following the clues it scatters. Try - observe - tweak - observe.

Nassim Taleb on his exercise regime, via Art DeVany:

1) NO MODERATE EXERCISE SESSIONS. Either too little, or too much, way beyond what I thought I could do –and no set schedule. Never have a clear plan of how long to stay at the gym. So I would randomly push myself –with output as powerlaw distributed as possible. It is a matter of bandwidth –The range of fatigue from regular exercise does not reach all areas of the body. I now spend between 5 minutes and 4 hours at the gym –working out harder as I get more tired. I spent several times 10 days without any exercise. But my total time at the gym per month averages less than I did before. And I have no routine, do not count sets, with a preference for free weights/pull ups/dips/pushups. Sometimes I just do pushups by avoiding the moderate number 60: either 10 or 350 –then nothing for a week.

2) NO PURELY AEROBIC EXERCISE –the separation is foolish & not empirical. Avoid listening to “trainers”.

3) FOOD INTAKE Eat no carbs that do not have a Biblical Hebrew or Doric Greek name (i.e. did not exist in the ancient Mediterranean) : no oranges (only citrus), no bananas, no mangoes, etc. Apples and grapes were acidic in taste, bittersweet. Eat nothing out of the box. No sugar, bread, pasta, etc. Avoid artificial sweeteners.

4) STARVATION: Workout while starving.

The isolation facility

Altered States, very loosely based on Lilly's The Scientist

Despite his smile, John C. Lilly isn't a very funny writer, at least, not intentionally.

He [note: Lilly writes his autobiography in the third person] disguised his true motivations for using LSD-25 in a research proposal "to see its effects on dolphins".

p123

Later, as he becomes addicted to ketamine, he passes out in a swimming pool and almost drowns. His wife [Toni] and friends talk to him about quitting the chemical.

After several long negotiations [from his hospital bed] he agreed not to use it. [... However,] John felt that he had not sufficiently explored all the parameters of ketamine. He decided to do additional experiments on its long-term effects. For a period of three weeks he gave himself injections every hour of the twenty-four hours. He did most of this work in the isolation facility. He was not aware that Toni knew what he was doing.

p163

Related note: Happy 65th birthday LSD, with the first accidental trip taken on April 16,1943, by Dr Hofmann, above, still alive and kicking at 102 this year.

Monkey orgasm button

More from John C. Lilly's autobiography. It's the 1950s, and he's put electrodes into monkeys' brains to stimulate areas and watch the reactions:

It was found that in male monkeys there were separate systems for erection, for ejaculation, and for orgasm. With an electrode in the separate orgasm system, the monkey would stimulate this region and go through a total orgasm without erection and without ejaculation. Given the apparatus by which he could stimulate himself once every three minutes for twenty-fours hours a day, the monkey stimulated the site and had orgasms every three minutes for sixteen hours and then slept eight hours and started again the next day.

p90

Liquid crystal under polarised light

From John C. Lilly's The Scientist, p82:

My fear is that my mission is motivated by unrealistic, imaginary needs dictated by my childhood, my loneliness, my inability to love, my essentially inhuman or nonhuman unconscious.

Body chemistry

John C. Lilly

I'm big on body chemistry. I used to get in bad moods easily, and they could mostly be traced to eating too much bread. Since I moved onto a low carb diet I've had zero mood swings, but yesterday I ate a loaf for lunch and by 4pm I was feeling bad. It was a good test of the system.

I still drink too much coffee, it's my one true addiction. I used to run it in cycles, upping my consumption until I got the shakes and then cutting it out for a week or so, moving back to tea. Lately that system's been abandoned, but I cut down by moving from a pot to twin Vietnamese drippers, a fast and slow one, and let my obsession with details run wild with new combinations of beans. Around the corner is a coffee wholesaler, and when I die I'll be riddled with caffeine.

My coffee use echoes that of John C. Lilly and ketamine, although in truth I show more moderation. He'd stay up for three weeks injecting more as the last dose wore off, and even shot up while conducting classes (albeit at Esalen).

Lilly with the Janus equipment, getting ready to communicate with dolphins

It's my birthday soon, and I got some books as gifts. One of them was The Scientist by John C. Lilly, the other was On Food and Cooking, by Harold McGee, and I'll be surprised and rather disappointed if the latter doesn't turn out to be more of a trip. I read about what I'm eating, drinking, and it's another way to become closer to things.

The many different ways of seeing an apple: culinary, nutritional, botanical, economic, chemical, aesthetic, metaphorical, and so on. The idea being to extrapolate as much meaning as possible from what's already present, to see things much more as they really are. But it'd be hard to do this without giving in to madness for a while, and then no way to talk about such things without boring the hell out of others and giving the game away.

The only [formerly] legitimate guy with comparable psychedelic experience to Lilly was probably Timothy Leary. Shuglin and others are names to conjure with in the first rank of the community, but Lilly and Leary are the two who are best known for taking too much, too often.

I read the two recent biographies of Leary, caricatured as the pro and the con versions of his story. In neither does he come out very well, more like a Hugh Hefner wannabe who hooked up with drugs rather than porn, but for much the same ends. If you look at them, they're like brothers, always the same big smile on their faces, and probably with good reason, but their aims and ends are not what it was supposed to be.

But then here I am, setting limits like a puritan. Still, a smile can be faked. It was Marshall McLuhan who told Leary to smile beatifically at cameras in order to sell his message more convincingly. But I don't like his smile, it annoys me like a commercial. It's the smile that I do when I have to.

That said, I came across Leary's 1964 Cooper Union address the other day and it holds up very well. Part of the background is that he's just come back from Mexico after an early experiment in psychedelic communal living. He's already way gone into the 60s lifestyle, but the rest of the world doesn't know a thing about what's looming. He can still be welcomed as a public speaker to a group of students. In this talk he's lucid, charming and doesn't oversell the stuff, while also kicking off the whole scene. A rewarding hour from another time and place.


Now Lilly is a very different character. While Leary went off and set out to become an international playboy, Lilly shut himself away in an isolation tank and tripped hard, and I feel quite an affinity for the guy, for his need to get further away from people and further into something else. Will be dipping in and out of the autobiography over the next week or so, and posting things as necessary. I doubt there will be as many anecdotes as with Leary. Floating alone, in lukewarm water, in the dark, doesn't really lend itself to narrative. But so what? Life isn't a work of fiction.