The Cloud of Unknowing

The author presents a case of self-organizing daimonic mythopoiesis. The spiritual tourist, entheogenic experimenter, and the painter enfold a matrix of inter-developed "sorties" into the allotropic differentials of the autopoietic process. Fieldwork in Mandi, Himashal Pradesh, India provides an introduction to the virtualities of the peripersonal as it manifests in a "darshan" or self-showing of the goddess where the velocity of the psychopomp's body approaches pure phase-space. The immersive space of the peripersonal is further revealed in the author's absorption within the wire-frame virtualities of currently available three-dimensional modeling programs. Parallel work is conducted through experimentation with Animita muscaria , a traditional entheogen revered in various cultures. Possibly the ancient Soma of the Vedic scriptures, the mushroom provides occasion for somatic dissociation within which phenomenological data is gathered. Use is made of the phenomenological method of introspection, which more literally becomes a driving inward of the homuncular eye along a trajectory of the cine-somatic gaze through an introjected, intra-corporeal immersive scene. In the conclusion, this ancient "gaze of the clinic" is deemed useful to current research, as corporeality and the politics of peripersonal space enter new technological and juridical frames of reference in relation to agency, identity, and the state

Aesthetics · Art · Cognitive science · Epistemology · Gaze · Introspection · Psychoanalysis · Sketch · Sociology · Visual arts · Computer Science · Geographies of human-animal interactions · History · Philosophy · Posthumanist Ethics and Activism · Psychology · Religious Studies and Spiritual Practices

• The Soma of the Rig Veda

  R Gordon Wasson•Journal of the American Oriental…•1971

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