You who build the altars now
to sacrifice these children,
you must not do it anymore.
A scheme is not a vision,
and you never have been tempted
by a demon or a god.

This beautiful excerpt from Leonard Cohen’s Story of Isaac always impressed me because it talks about the origins of the phenomenon of religion. People who never had a vision start organising things through a scheme, creating evil.

What is that anyway, a vision? With that question, I think we should start. Yesterday, I talked about the glass children in Ritsos’s poem, who were all given a glass eye planted on their foreheads by the slave master. Ritsos wrote it at the time when television was beginning to emerge, a glass box that bombards you with images.

But everyone already has such a box in their own brain, at the front of the frontal cortex, and it is called ‘the visual cortex’. That is a small piece of the brain that constantly generates images: those who learn to use it get a kind of internal television, so to speak, and you can spend hours watching a bombardment of images from that visual cortex, chaotic images, fascinating images.

The Third Eye

That visual cortex was also known in other times, and then called ‘the third eye’. They had managed to pinpoint its location just fine, it is roughly between your two eyes on the forehead. By inventing television, you feed this third eye with a flood of outside images, allowing you to manipulate people, so the medium quickly became very big. Now kids with the glass eye are almost permanently fused to their mobiles, and no doubt there are forces that want to go a step further.

Many what are called ‘mental illnesses’ essentially arose precisely because that visual cortex started to grow excessively, squeezing other vital parts of the brain that were important for balance. Chinese scientists discovered that what is called ADHD is in fact a kind of brain shrinkage, but missed exactly this piece of information. A person with an overgrown visual cortex is a restless person who cannot sit still, cannot concentrate, and name the other characteristics of ADHD : all the direct result of screen use which in turn has been a kind of coup d’état on the brain.

In fact, I have news for you: the third eye, the visual cortex, is not where vision originates.

Sure, concentrate on that area and you get a flood of images. But that is precisely what a vision is not at all.

Real Vision

Then what is? Well, a real vision has an unmistakable characteristic: as soon as you become aware of the vision, it disappears like snow in the sun. This is not so with the inner images of the third eye: you can sit there endlessly consciously looking at them. But in the vision, your ‘consciousness’ no longer exists. This usually results in images so serendipitous that they can easily turn into religion. And the psyborg is not a very modern phenomenon at all: bring such serenity with conviction and they’re ready to start directing everyone with their schemata, inspired by your vision.

It is precisely in this area that the Amanita Muscaria briefly comes around the corner again. This mushroom that, as I have explained in this book, has accompanied the entire genesis history of man, until it was suddenly banished by schematists 1000 years ago with the first church-made drug laws: it is this mushroom that offers you control over an overdominant third eye and access to the visionary again.

That’s because the network this mushroom activates is much older and larger than these relatively modern ‘innere television cables’. The Gaba network is the largest and oldest network in the brain, which also allows you to switch off the brain: which is why benzodiazepines the sleeping tablets from heaven and hell work on it, cobbled together by rogue scientists to be as addictive as possible.

Remove the Noise

One of the most prominent properties of Amanita Muscaria is that it removes the noise you constantly have in your head. Because it brings back the inner silence, you become able to turn off the inner television, and you become aware that this television is not at all natural and does not have to be such an important part of the brain at all.

And so the mushroom gives you access to the land of visions, if you pay attention. Or not at all, because, as mentioned, consciousness dispels them again. So having visions actually requires the presence of what Castaneda called The Third Attention: something outside consciousness and subconsciousness still functioning.

If you want to control your own brain, you cannot avoid the Gaba network: these span the entire brain and are actually the reset button that nature built for it. Of course, unsavoury powers have used it to make super-addictive drugs, but miraculously exactly those addictive properties are absent from this mushroom.

Shrink the dictator lobe

A good question is: can use of this mushroom also permanently reduce the identified problem, an overgrown visual cortex? Can that visual cortex shrink again?

I think so, because the universal principle applies here: what you put energy into is going to grow. What you stop putting energy into will actually shrink. However, that requires, oy beware, a schedule: limit your screen use, stop consuming mass media, etc.

That way, slowly, with a little help from the mushroom every now and then, you can start winding down the dominance of that frontal dictator lobe a bit. You will find yourself wishing you had done this earlier in life.

Martijn Benders, Mierlo, 03-01-2023