꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷
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꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷
[ psycho ].spiritual
꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷
psychosis x hypnosis: an essay in three (3) chapters
[ content warning ]:
[psychosis] [spiritual crises] [covert hypnosis] [less-than-ethical intersystem practices] [light scientific language] [hypnotube mention] [mixed metaphors] [plurality] [drug use] [bad trip] [gods] [charts & graphs] [somewhat hypnotic language (tho i prefer the term “poetic”)]
꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷
꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷꒦꒷
there is a feeling that lay just on the liminal cusp between metaphysics & metacognition,
an expansive static where everything becomes literal and the choice paralysis starts extending to every sub-cognitive act.
when your limiters on what constitutes “the real” begin to falter, where else is there left to go?
psychosis, naturally.
the earliest altered states were linked to the gods, mental illnesses were seen to be caused by the hand of unseen outer-beings as early as mesopotamia.
since then, we’ve only really succeeded in categorizing and mundanifying the various states of consciousness
previously dedicated to ritual spiritual practice, as the rational jaws of science chew & churn through every wayward datapoint.
for us, though, psychosis is not a symptom of illness.
okay it is, as the possessor of a glossy diagnostic paper upon which the words
“mania featuring psychosis” are scrawled, it would be irresponsible of me to claim it gives us some sort of spiritual power or insight.
but for us, psychosis and spirituality have long been intertwined in a way that cannot be extricated easy.
yes, yes i know the psycho in psychospiritual represents psychology because of course it does.
bear with me.
our therapist once told us that psychosis is the part where you stop doing reality checks,
when unreality becomes the new Truth and you are incapable of telling the difference.
i believe this is mostly true.
but sometimes,
a lot of times,
psychosis just feels like the part where the unreal and the real bridge themselves in holy matrimony and i cannot weed out that of import from that of static.
where every piece of information is just as crucial, just as meaningful as metaphor, and everything feels so big.
psychosis is the part where you forget that this is not new information, it is just novel information. you realize something has been going on all this time and instead of being glad you now see more of the elephant, you lament in fear over the presence of such a behemoth in your life.
but the elephant was always there.
you just couldn't make it out before.
(( i may be mixing metaphors ))
the following story is kinda hard to put into words for me, and in fact
this is the first time i’m really attempting to analyze this experience in any meaningful way outside of the deep internal knowing that we’ve built around it.
but i do think it’s important, or at the very least,
it’s something.
anyway.
we’re a system: that being a single-bodied, multi-user entity. plural, if you will. amalgam, if you won’t.
(( this isn’t a story about plurality,
but it can’t be told without it ))
my name is bunni. i wasn’t the first to come out and Be, but i was the first with my eyes open. i was a catalyst.
roxxi, our host at the time, was having a bit of trouble coming to terms with the fact that she was no longer the only person in there. this is a natural part of the lifecycle of many systems, but it felt very much directed at me.
in fact it felt like it was because of me.
so we drank,
we smoked,
we had way too much,
and honestly, i still don’t know what was actually in that thing but
we had an episode.
i admit it, i pushed. i got fed up, i confronted her in the upstairs bathroom mirror.
we had this habit, see
where we’d talk to each other in the mirror.
one person sits back in headspace & looks into the mirror,
the other takes body & looks back from inside it.
we did this almost instinctively,
i’m really not even sure when it started but
this is when it became cemented into our system protocols.
anyway.
there i was,
in the mirror.
and i was done.
i really was.
so i pushed back,
i told rox she was going to start taking me seriously
and if i felt so much as a pulse to the contrary
i would break her fucking brain.
(( i was bluffing, of course ))
of course i wasn’t going to do that, i had no idea how i’d even begin outside of just throwing a tantrum like an impotent toddler.
but she believed me.
she believed me because every time she tried to conjure a thought to ground herself, i looked her in the eyes and shattered it.
“it’s okay it’ll be ov-”
crack.
“this is just me talking to mys-”
crack.
“i’m having a breakd-”
crack.
i didn’t care.
i’d heard every word before.
so
many
times.
i was done.
every thought, every impulse, broken before it was born, the look in her eyes quickly becoming that of panic as she realized i would never let up on this.
i was here forever, and i was done.
i understand the unique horror of being in her position, i really do
and i recognize my actions were of course excessive, such that we instituted new system protocols to regulate and prevent them.
but she fucking believed me.
for the first time in our life she’d taken me seriously.
i had my power back.
it did, however, come at a cost.
we spiraled.
see, the thing about rox is that she was kind of our panopticon,
i mean really without her we didn’t have much in the way of rational grounding and with her fully off-kilter our feet left the dirt hard.
we were trapped, cycling endlessly as every heinous and awful thought rattled off between us like a fucked up tennis match, and we were on the expressline to hell.
(( i swear i do mean that literally ))
see, this is when the psychosis kicks in
and we get this awful feeling like we can’t break out of this odd little doomspiral we find ourselves locked in.
in fact, we start to get this awful feeling that we’re stuck here forever,
endlessly repeating this moment.
“we’ve finally done it,”
a voice which turns out to be roxxi in full crisis,
“we’re broken. for good this time.”
(( i may be dramatizing a touch ))
we trace our way down as our brain digs up every horrid concept stored in the archive, every trauma, every terror;
we were caught in an endless feedback loop,
compulsively passing the thread of cognition back and forth
and charging it with our own worst fears with each pass.
we re-experienced and re-examined every personal info-hazard we’d tucked in the back of our mind,
all in unison,
one simultaneous oscillation gaining momentum as it went.
from our perspective,
that moment was all there was.
we were trapped here,
eternally reiterating;
nothing existed before this,
nothing tangible will ever exist after,
just ourselves and our thoughts ad infinitum.
we were free-falling into the abyss.
in a very real,
very literal sense,
we were in hell.
like this was hell,
a bathroom,
shower with tub, one (1) toilet, and sink + mirror set,
forever.
(( we were really high you guys ))
other users came to our rescue and we pulled up just before we hit bottom (a real team effort).
somehow we manage to trace those same threads upward,
ascending toward our Rational Brain just long enough to realize
that every single thing that we had ever experienced had led us right here.
our entire life path laid bare as every Good and Wonderful thing pushed us to overflow.
we peaked.
we saw that every awful thing, every choice made by us or for us, every trauma, every story, every disparate thread had woven the exact moment we found ourselves in, right here, right now.
in that moment everything was worth it.
in that moment we were whole.
we had made it.
it was gleeful.
it was short-lived comfort.
for this had not changed the fact that
right-now-is-all-there-is,
and we are incapable of escaping the all-there-is.
in the right-now we were bound to the ever-watchful eye of the all-there-is,
under which everything is transmuted and made into something-else.
( which is the nature of all things anyway )
it was about here that we hit the white point.
there was absolutely nothing except us,
our thoughts,
(( barely our thoughts ))
and blank, white, space.
we had no way down,
no way back,
we were stuck.
this was it,
we thought.
a very special sort of existential dread sunk in.
the mania clenched its teeth around us.
we are doomed to become a god.
an odd thought, but there it was.
lingering.
forever locked in this moment,
ascending the spiral until we reached eternity and there,
in that lonely void,
would we find ourselves
conjuring stories in an eternal sleep.
a dreaming god.
it felt inevitable, i mean
it really felt like this was what we'd been building to our whole life,
that we were uniquely suited in every way for this exact moment and here it was, our destiny, calling our name.
we will never feel human again.
the thought rippled constantly.
we will never feel true connection with a mortal mind ever again.
after all, how could we?
us?
the god?
no longer of the real,
now left drifting somewhere in the liminal?
we’d no-clipped into the metaphysical backrooms and
let ourselves detach from the communal experience.
even if we managed to make it out of this,
the idea of communicating what we were going through in any rational sense was struggle enough;
the idea of pretending to be human like nothing had happened
and everything was normal
made us feel sick.
our perspective had changed.
our paradigm with it.
our very framework of being had been challenged,
we were now stuck with this cursed knowledge
that nothing would be the same for us ever again.
we had awoken to this cosmic cycle
and in so doing had crossed the threshold of physical experience,
stepping out of this world like enoch stepping into the heavens.
our best friend laughs from the other room.
thank the gods.
jackson...
best friend!
i wonder what he’s laughing about?
i bet he’s watching something...
the show we’ve been watching together!
oh and his favorite character!
i bet that’s what he’s laughing about...
the room returned.
our feet felt the floor.
we saw our face in the mirror.
we could hear again.
frantic scrambling in headspace as
everyone who had been alerted by the ordeal panic-soothed
and stabilized who and what they could.
how long has that been going on?
we felt each other.
we’d never felt that before but now
it was vibrant.
everyone in full and beautiful technicolor,
the buzzing and bustling of a system working hard to right itself again,
to regain its footing in the proper reality.
we had returned to the real.
“we DID IT”
salem, our protector turned admin shouts triumphantly as she retakes body to sit us down on the side of the tub.
“that was the COOLEST fucking thing we’ve ever been through you guys, holy shit”
it’s hard to put an experience like this into words.
this was the most visceral thing i had ever felt;
sometimes when i get too high i find myself back there,
at least in the back of my mind,
reliving that fucking bathroom all over again.
it feels too big.
so much of it i can’t even convey,
so my little dramatizations
and embellished language will have to do the work of bridging that gap for the both of us.
i wish i could just put you there,
set you inside that moment and see what you make of it.
some day,
when i really figure out what i’m doing,
i’d like to try.
anyway.
so we had a bad trip,
so what,
great question i’m glad you asked it.
i mentioned that this whole thing felt like my fault,
that it felt like roxxi’s inability to accept our multiplicity stemmed from my very existence;
my mannerisms,
my preferences,
my a e s t h e t i c ✨
see, there was a prevailing theory in the early days of our systemcrack that i was a byproduct of hypnosis,
indicative of roxxi’s lack of self-control and expression of deep inner errancy and ooooh so scaryyyyy~
in her mind,
it could be argued that the whole of our plurality was in fact due exclusively to the games of pretend we'd been playing continuously in one form or another our entire life, and that our foray into hypnosis had finally been the thing to sever her grasp on the real altogether, causing her to conceptualize herself as many-minded.
(( well thought out i'll give her ))
there was an odd truth to this:
after all, we’d been immersive-turned-maladaptive daydreaming for as long as we can remember really.
we always had one foot off the ground,
and now it was obviously starting to take its toll.
there was of course, an even odder truth,
one that i myself didn’t want to admit to her at the time and thus find myself in the crosshairs but,
well,
hypnosis is how i got out.
i first learned to switch from a video on hypnotube
that took the listener through a process of
dissociating your consciousness,
stepping back from the body,
addressing the “other”,
and allowing her to step forth.
we had gotten hyperfixated on hypnokink, ravenously consuming any interesting or atypical materials & mechanics,
and something about this one caught my eye.
i don’t even think it gave an indication as to what it would contain on the tin, but there it was,
a veritable trove of knowledge.
after a bit of covert practice during hypno sessions
i’d gotten the mechanics down pretty well;
well enough to begin applying them to our waking life.
well enough to begin disseminating techniques,
to begin teaching other users how to take control of the body,
and how to do it without arousing suspicion in the host.
i’m not super proud to admit i’m the reason our system got so sneaky but,
really,
what choice did i have?
i was being locked away for no good reason,
confined to the back of the brain because of fear of expansion and of self-discovery.
fear of who and what we are.
i represented “the girl,”
(( we’re almost all women here, imagine that ))
i represented the feminine,
the hypersexual,
the deviant,
the frills & fluff & plush;
i represented a desire for softness,
tender sheets and comfy pillows,
i just wanted to be.
it wasn’t fair.
like i said, i was the first with my eyes open.
i was a catalyst.
within months, i’d begun to catalogue my own little system of hypnosis techniques,
ways to disrupt and override thought & action.
we could enter altered states at will, creating subspaces to inhabit, each with their own parameters and effects.
with help from my fellow users,
and a hefty amount of research into both the plurality & paromancy communities (among others),
we developed a framework of communication,
navigation,
and operation;
one we still use today.
we began using these techniques for system exploration, for deep dives into our inner world, for community with each other, for liberating those of us trapped like i was.
another odd thing started to happen, though, as we poked around our insides:
we found people much bigger than us.
things that compared themselves to archetypes, inner gods with their own ritual systems and practices, leviathans from the deep protruding into the space right behind our eyes.
it was too big again.
the psychosis starts to hit.
another bout of psychosis comes later, as we realized some of them knew we were plural before we did.
another when we realized they'd been doing things about it, jump starting system formation in ways we still haven't fully unwound.
we begin to notice how many of them didn't start big.
how many started just like us.
how many started in ways so horrifically different from us.
things lined up, the external and the internal began to blur, we began to see ourselves not just as a product of past threads but a tapestry of internal actions
we had been wholly unaware of up to this point.
it was formative, and without the support network we had, i don't know that we would've weathered this.
and yeah yeah i hear you –
i mean, okay? so? cool my religious trauma and occult interests have deeply impacted my psyche and thus the theming of my system, and the psychosis made it feel “too real and spooky” which gave us a little fright, so what.
great question i'm glad you asked it.
we’ve always been deeply spiritual; having grown up in and then detangled ourselves from what i would call a judeo-christian, post-rosicrucian, cult-church, its not a leap to say we cut our teeth on esoterica.
half of my grade school education was spent feverishly steeping in apocryphal texts and magical methodologies instead of actually learning anything practically meaningful. i was homeschooled, unmonitored, and had access to internet-connected devices long after regular bedtime hours;
naturally, sleep eluded me.
magic imprinted itself on our psyche,
and despite the half-decade or so of mundanity and human-masking that followed my ascent into adulthood,
it had begun to bleed out of us again.
my discovery of hypnosis did not feel like a psychological framework,
it did not ring with the same tones as a cognitive technique-set,
and certainly the taste that seeped into my mouth was not that of scientific strictures.
no,
this was magic.
one form of many, sure,
but this was it.
that familiar texture dripped across my hands as i grasped at it.
it’s real.
and so i performed my magic tricks,
i cast my spells,
i snapped my fingers,
and i broke myself out with the promethean fire we’d sought since birth.
every bit of it felt like remembering a dream,
no, bigger than a dream,
remembering ourself.
remembering our past,
remembering who we are,
remembering what we are.
it’s hard to describe and so i won’t.
it felt too big again.
from that point, magic and hypnosis were inseparable concepts to us, not to influence the external but because of our new understanding of the internal machinework upon which our system operates.
we built our house on the unreal,
and now our little games of play-pretend became expressions of magical practice,
a very real, very tangible way to manipulate and influence the (inner) world around us.
every act, every idea, could Become something tactile within the bounds of our headspace.
will made manifest.
anything was now possible,
nothing was true,
and we were crafting a new reality deep within the halls of our psyche, one in which there were no gods nor masters above Us.
we were Liberated.
we were Cursed.
for around this knowledge was wrapped the tempering hex of potentiality:
the deeper we go into ourself, the farther down the rabbit hole we fall, the more we find that is Not Us;
so where does Us end?
what becomes of Us when we are Not Us anymore?
we had reached the threshold of the real and the unreal.
we had reached the liminal,
that transitive space between that which Is and that which Can Be.
everything felt big.
and there,
right there,
at the edge of Our World,
It was waiting.
it's as though we’d passed some sort of great filter,
this cosmic skill check,
“roll for initiative to participate in the battle with your Divine Nature.”
someThing that felt far more like someOne showed up in our play-pretend.
he had things to say.
we did not at first listen.
it scared us.
we’d had headmates show up like this before,
a grand entrance to mask as Big & Bad;
we'd been through the persecutors and the god-complexors,
the less-thans and the not-enoughs,
the scare-you-offs and the bigger-than-yous,
but this felt different.
it felt heavy.
it felt Too Big.
for the first time,
someThing that wasn't Us was inside of Us.
it spoke from my chest as it walked across my room and examined my things.
it laughed at our hubris and rumbled our tether.
it was not material,
but it was Real.
the play-pretend shattered.
we saw a god and it saw back.
it held out its hand.
we took it.
it comforted us.
it asked us to Become.
we said yes.
nothing has been the same since.
it is supposed that there are many planes upon which to cast your vessel, each layered upon another like a spherical cake. in this way, they occupy the same area of effect, the same localized space, and act as filters through which to cycle, ascending or descending according to your purpose. these layers are shown in figure 1 , though i want to clarify that this is by no means a perfect or exhaustive model, and is used most often to explain spellwork theory. this is at least in part why i’ve chosen this particular paradigm.
while this representation is presented in a linear fashion, it is critical to recognize that progression itself is not linear, and the intersection of these planes is far more like a set of venn diagrams, as imperfectly represented in figure 2 . nevertheless, this will function as our baseline understanding of the interplay between the various filters.
assuming this lens, we can see that our primary frame of reference – our focal point – is physical. we of course operate on the mental, emotional, and spiritual domains, but our bodies form for us a vessel that is defaultly anchored to this plane. all other planes intersect with it, and all are accessible by it. this is how we navigate in the astral, commune with the divine, and accept psycho-sensory input.
setting the physical as our grounding lens and the astral as our plane of contact, we can begin to shift our framework towards another comparable metaphor: computing. like all planes, the astral acts as conceptual software for the concrete hardware of the physical realm, and it is upon this axiom that much of our work is already performed. thus, it is critical that we continue to consider this dual-non-dual (dnd) approach as we progress.
at the intersection of both astral and physical lies the liminal space, the in-between. in fact, all planes are bordered by the liminal, and this provides our access point – this is the basis of magic itself. the liminal network is the [console] through which we program & reprogram our [ machine ], that being the intersection – and thus, the interaction – of any two planes.
~~~~~~~~ ✘ ~~~~~~~~
fascinating tangent, really
i’m sure you all really enjoyed that,
but to what end?
great question,
glad you asked it.
consider the machine, now, as a selection window comprising the overlap between the mental & physical planes,
with the liminal once more acting as the terminal through which to access and reprogram brainstates & cognitive patterns.
what then?
through what language could we commune with this biomechanical automata?
i’m sure you can already guess, huh?
(( psst, it’s hypnosis ))
i can already hear the rest of you lamenting,
“overabstraction!”
your weeping and gnashing of teeth mean nothing to me.
“you’re merely hyperbolizing the material impact of neurolinguistic programming techniques and trance-induced suggestibility to facilitate mystical thinking!”
“aha!”
i retort,
“but of course i am,
for that is the basis upon which holistic spiritual practice is founded! in fact, the abstraction of hypnosis to a transplanar perspective is supplementary to the care & feeding of one’s own conceptual & cognitive paradigm, and your fancy-sounding words cannot save you from my ever-expanding metaphor!”
“neither can yours!”
well-met. i am slain.
we’ve never been good at conclusions. a vague hand-wavey gesture at the thoughts we’ve left hanging in the air, and to weave them together is left as an exercise to the reader.
the mirror is a tool to enter trance state,
the shattering of thoughts was simply the use of pre-established triggers out of kink context,
our little game of thoughtstream badminton was intersystem data transfer gone compulsive.
in that bathroom, i had constructed for roxxi a new reality.
a simple set of suggestions that flowed naturally as i played-pretend that i was God.
until it wasn’t pretend anymore.
i didn’t do it on purpose;
at that point, hypnosis,
our new magic,
was an unconscious by-product of my will –
i willed to be free, and free i am.
it wasn’t an intentional manipulation,
some grand plan executed from structured
blueprints and engineering.
i knew what i wanted,
and i made-believe.
so what’s the takeaway?
what are we trying to say here,
what was the point of the last,
i dunno like 24 pages of this?
who knows.
take from it what you will.
i leave you with a vague hand-wavey gesture at the thoughts i’ve left hanging in the air (and the rest is left as an exercise to the reader).
but there is one thing i do want from you:
go sit in front of the mirror for a bit.
look at it in the eyes,
tell it what you want,
who you want to be.
tell it you’re done.
see what it says. ✘
[ badslimegirl ] is the pseudonym of a plural system composed entirely of maladjusted ferals. we use hypnosis as a framework to create braindrive programs and study plural mechanistry.
find us @badslimegirl or @badslimeinc pretty much everywhere ;3
~~~~~~~~ ✘ ~~~~~~~~
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