Hypnagogic hallucinations are vivid, dream-like sensory experiences that occur in the transitional state between wakefulness and sleep. They can involve seeing, hearing, or feeling things that aren’t actually there, such as shapes, flashing lights, voices, or physical sensations of falling. These phenomena occur during hypnagogia, the twilight phase where the brain transitions from an active waking state to the first stages of sleep. They are a normal part of the sleep cycle for many people, though they can be linked to sleep deprivation or underlying disorders. But there is an important difference. The difference—to put it sharply—is equivalent simply to that between a diver who can swim and one who cannot. The mystic, endowed with native talents for this sort of thing and following, stage by stage, the instruction of a master, enters the waters and finds he can swim; whereas the schizophrenic, unprepared, unguided, and ungifted, has fallen or has intentionally plunged, and is drowning.” Joseph Campbell, Myths to Live By
This is how medicine men and women train in the wilderness. Prayer, meditation, and sleep deprivation; Anything else is playing.
The Inner Death is the Path of the Scout, the Ranger, the Survivalist.
Submission to nature is the ultimate in mystical adventure. Anarchist mysticism looks for the neurobiology of activity which expands the independently operating original human operating system, Human 1.0. We were born with the original operating system, and capitalism overwrites it to serve the cult of wealth. Solidarity Prepping is a mind hack. Like the open-source federated decentralised software revolution, we are hacking the mind with nature; Your brain is an antenna for nature; nature osmotically connects with different parts of the brain. People think they actually experience this, and you might be lucky enough to observe the dramatically theatrical types demonstrating how nature makes them feel. Nature’s actual connection impact occurs at the subconscious level. People who constantly need to know how things feel don’t experience deep connection with nature because the can feel it. They assume we have to be aware of everything to be able to experience nature connection.
The belief that we can actually experience nature connection is erroneous, and this is why people struggle with connection to nature. It’s a leap of faith to persevere with learning further skills which connect us to nature in deeper ways.
Bushcraft, survival skills, foraging, Advanced First Aid, Mental Health 1st Aid, Heatwave & Wet Bulb Survival, backwoods engineering, climate preparedness for a different geological age- Post-Anthropocene. This requires Solidarity Prepping: We need each other in collapse.
I’m intrigued that the prepperverse has moved to car transmissions. I’m sitting in my car van talking prepper-Wow! I’m glad I don’t have a car; I might be tempted. This is the attention economy. Podcasts, YouTube format of the desk or the car. Is this that we have run out of skills to teach, or is this that we can’t get away for the weekend but need to feel relevant? It’s not about the content its about the attention. The survival sermon, lol. endlessly. Long podcasts and then highly triggered rants; this is what the attention economy looks like. The rants are super triggered: “we need to stop reacting to our triggers” Lol. “Plucky humans” is on a par with climate denial; it’s a simple mind that jumps to the conclusion that someone who does survival skills wants to be a post-collapse hunter-gatherer. It’s like me believing a wealthy white middle-class woman sat by her living room fire gaining enlightenment with zero hardship and then tells us she hates capitalism. YAWN.
Science Denial & Intellectual Gymnastics & We Miss The Neuroscience of Nature Connection & The Structural Changes Which Happen In the Brain.
Engaging in spatial navigation and cognitive mapping activities actively changes the physical structure of the brain through a process called neuroplasticity. Whenever you learn a new environment, navigate a city, or even play virtual reality maze games, your brain strengthens, rewires, or even creates new neural pathways to store and process this spatial information.
“Our brains build maps of the environment that help us understand the world around us, allowing us to think, recall, and plan. These maps not only help us to, say, find our room on the correct floor of a hotel, but they also help us figure out if we’ve gotten off the elevator on the wrong floor.
Neuroscientists know a lot about the activity of neurons that make up these maps – like which cells fire when we’re in a particular location. But how the brain creates these maps as we learn remains a mystery”https://www.janelia.org/news/mapmaking-in-the-mind-new-research-details-how-the-brain-builds-mental-maps-of-the-world
Bushcraft relies heavily on orienting yourself in the wilderness, tracking, and understanding topography. Navigating complex natural environments stimulates brain regions like the hippocampus (responsible for spatial memory and mapping), similar to how the spatial demands of London taxi drivers increase their hippocampal volume.
“In the age of GPS, we tend to take our navigation and spatial abilities for granted, until they – or the technology – let us down. It is easy to forget that they have sustained us for tens of thousands of years. Over the course of our evolution, Homo sapiens developed an appetite for exploration and a wayfinding spirit that set us apart from previous human species. It had a huge effect on our future. One of the most intriguing recent ideas in anthropology is that our ability to navigate was essential to our success as a species, because it allowed us to cultivate extensive social networks. ..”
“The Canadian anthropologist Ariane Burke believes that our ancestors developed these attributes while trying to keep in touch with their neighbours. ‘Those far-flung networks were essential to our culture,’ she told me. ‘During the Palaeolithic, there were comparatively few people around. Maintaining a spatially extensive social network was a way of ensuring your continued survival. You would need a very dynamic cognitive map, which you would constantly have to update with information about your contacts and what they were telling you about the landscape.’ In this way, the human brain became primed for wayfinding. Navigation and spatial awareness are part of our DNA.”
“The hippocampus even drives aspects of our cognition that, on the surface, have little to do with physical space. Recent experiments have shown that the same neuronal networks that enable the brain to build cognitive maps of places are instrumental in solving many abstract problems, such as understanding power relationships in a social group, or semantic relationships in a list of words. The hippocampus is a universal map-maker, as good at helping us navigate our inner worlds as our outer ones. Keeping it active is the road to cognitive riches, and one of the best ways to do this is to pay attention to where we’re going, to navigate using our wits rather than our smartphones.”https://aeon.co/essays/why-are-we-losing-the-wayfinding-skills-of-our-ancestors
“I may hold a Ph.D. in neuroscience, but were I one of the few to survive that viral apocalypse with which this discussion began, I still would not know how to make paper and pencil to commit to writing what I have learned about how brains work and frankly, that would not matter very much. Those survivors who did have the know-how to craft pencil and paper most likely couldn’t put a bicycle together, much less a car, or even a toaster. I would also most likely fail at more down-to-earth tasks such as finding drinking water and non-poisonous plants to eat, navigating back to a safe shelter each day, predicting when to plant and when to harvest, when to slaughter and when to breed. Never mind calculating how many stones I can safely pile in a column or how many sticks I must tie together so they support a roof over my head.” https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6353107
