Recursive Trace Logic, My Jester
A field manual for consciousness beyond the body: Hoffman’s math to shamanic trance to sentient plasmoids & why the people who mapped this territory spent decades making sure you never leave the cage.
Part One: The Rulebook Nobody Handed You
Let’s start with the uncomfortable part.
The reality you are experiencing right now is not reality.
I mean it is but not the full thing because it is a user interface.
A survival dashboard.
A prism shaped by billions of years of evolutionary pressure to show you only what keeps you alive long enough to reproduce, nothing more.
This is not metaphor but rather it is where the math keeps landing.
Donald Hoffman is a cognitive scientist at UC Irvine and he has been methodically dismantling the assumption that perception tracks truth for over two decades. His Conscious Agent Theory starts from a finding in evolutionary game theory: organisms tuned to perceive reality accurately are consistently outcompeted by organisms tuned to perceive fitness-relevant data. Accuracy loses. Usefulness wins. Every time.
The implication is that the entire physical world you see - space, objects, time, causality - is an interface layer. Not a lie, exactly. More like a very efficient compression of something much stranger underneath.
The framework he uses to model this is built on Markov Chains and Recursive Trace Logic and it is worth understanding in brief because it gives you the actual operational map of what is happening and what can be done about it.
Here is the condensed version:
A conscious agent is formally defined by: a space of experiences, a space of world-states, and a set of probabilistic rules (kernels) governing how experiences map to actions and back. Six components total.
When networks of conscious agents interact through these Markov kernels (probabilistic transition rules), their interactions generate what looks like spacetime, physical law, and linear time as emergent properties.
You are not seeing the underlying agent dynamics. You are seeing a trace — a simplified, compressed projection of a much larger network, filtered through the biological prism to produce fast, manageable survival icons.
Recursive Trace Logic adds the key move: you can take traces of traces, observation windows of observation windows, hierarchically, ad infinitum. The underlying network is always larger than what any given trace reveals.
What this means in plain language is that the physics you learned in school: time dilation, entropy, the arrow of time, causality; those are features of the projected interface. They describe how the headset behaves, not what is running underneath it. They are real within the prism but they are not fully fundamental.
The Casimir Effect is a useful physical anchor here. Two uncharged metal plates placed close together in a vacuum will attract each other. No force field. No charge. No classical explanation. It happens because quantum vacuum fluctuations - activity that looks like nothing from inside the standard model - produce measurable real forces at boundary conditions. The vacuum seethes. The activity only shows up at the edges, at gaps, at the places where the interface is thin.
Recursive trace logic scales this logic up to consciousness: the gap between traces, the boundary between observation windows, is where the real dynamics leak through. This is not incidental. It is structural.
The two time-modes that emerge from this framework map cleanly onto something most people already feel:
Kronos is the default mode. Linear, cyclical, entropic. The devouring time of deadlines, decay, repetition, and extraction loops. This is what Markov chains projected through the biological prism naturally produce. It is not a punishment. It is the cost of having a survival-optimized dashboard. The prism does its job. The job just happens to be limiting.
Kairos is what breaks through. Qualitative time. The pivot, the opening, the moment where pattern collapses and something new surges in. In recursive trace logic terms, Kairos moments are what happens when higher-level trace interactions bleed through into the projected interface.
Synchronicities, insights, genuine creative breakthroughs. These are not violations of physics rather they are the underlying dynamics becoming momentarily legible through the simplified surface.
The default human life runs almost entirely on Kronos. Learning to navigate toward Kairos is the actual project.
Part Two: Remote Viewing and the Mechanics of Translation
The question is not whether consciousness can extend beyond the body. That question was answered under controlled conditions, with skeptical oversight, on government budgets, in two separate superpowers simultaneously.
Project Stargate ran from 1978 to 1995 under various program names at Stanford Research Institute, funded by the CIA, DIA, and Army Intelligence. Physicists Russell Targ and Hal Puthoff trained civilian and military personnel to extend their perceptual awareness to remote targets and report back usable data.
Results that should not have been possible under any standard materialist model:
Ingo Swann described specific structural features of a distant classified site in detail he had no access to.
Pat Price identified a Soviet military facility with enough accuracy that the program was escalated, not terminated.
Joe McMoneagle produced verified remote viewing data on Soviet submarine construction months before satellite confirmation.
Swann also described the rings of Jupiter before the Voyager probe confirmed them. The academic establishment largely ignored this. The intelligence community did not.
Click here to look for yourself: https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/search/site/STARGATE
The Monroe Institute was running parallel research on the civilian side. Robert Monroe was a businessman who began having spontaneous out-of-body experiences in the late 1950s and, instead of calling a psychiatrist, started mapping the territory systematically. He developed Hemi-Sync - binaural audio frequencies that drive the brain into coherent states where extended awareness becomes consistent and reproducible. His books documented multiple distinct layers of consciousness beyond standard waking reality, with enough internal consistency across sessions and subjects to suggest he was mapping something real rather than generating vivid imagination.
The Monroe Institute’s GATE program was specifically designed to identify children with unusual perceptual capacities and develop them further. Monroe’s work attracted serious researchers and eventually serious government interest. Hemi-Sync is, in structural terms, exactly what indigenous drumming traditions had been doing for millennia just reverse-engineered into an audio file.
The Soviets ran comparable programs. Neither superpower considered this a fringe expenditure.
What does this prove mechanically, in Hoffman’s terms?
The remote viewer is shifting their **observation window** to a different trace in the underlying agent network. The body stays as the anchor -- maintaining local interface access, keeping the Kronos layer stable and addressable. Awareness extends to a broader portion of the network, accessing a trace that covers more spatial, temporal, or informational range than the standard biological prism permits.
The mechanics of a clean translation, distilled from what the programs actually documented:
Anchor first. Body sensation, a fixed object, or a held intention. Without a stable anchor, the shift has no coherent return point and data degrades into noise.
Drive coherence. Binaural beats, rhythmic breathing, repetitive sound, or sustained single-pointed focus. These lock the brain into the states where window-shifting becomes possible rather than accidental.
Let the prism compress. The biological interface is still useful during the shift. Let it translate incoming data from the broader trace into manageable symbolic form: vision, voice, felt sense. Fighting this compression and trying to receive raw field dynamics produces overload. The icons are useful. Use them.
Record immediately. The window closes fast. Data needs to be captured while the translation is still active. Every remote viewing protocol emphasized this.
This is not mysticism. It is documented, operationally tested consciousness engineering. The question that was never publicly answered is: what exactly were they hitting when they extended awareness? Where does the data come from?
Recursive trace logic provides the most coherent answer available: larger portions of the underlying conscious agent network. The body-prism provides a narrow slice. Trained extension provides a wider slice. The network itself is not bounded by the three-dimensional interface it projects.
Part Three: UAPs, Sentient Plasmoids, and the Hoffman Template
David Grusch testified before Congress in July 2023. Under oath. With specific program references. Whistleblower protection. The summary:
Non-human intelligences are real, have been recovered along with their craft, and the programs managing this information have been operating outside congressional oversight for decades. He specified that the phenomenon includes not just technological objects but **biological and plasmoid-type entities**.
Sentient plasmoids. Intelligent, coherent energy structures that maintain internal organization, respond to observers, and behave in ways that suggest they are interfacing directly with consciousness rather than operating through standard mechanical physics.
This is not a new claim from Grusch. It shows up across decades of UAP encounter reports, in AATIP documentation, in the work of Hal Puthoff (who was involved in both Stargate and later UAP research programs), and in the serious work of people like Eric Davis who has written classified reports on UAP propulsion for the government. The Pentagon’s own publicly released UAP footage shows objects demonstrating impossible acceleration, no observable propulsion signature, rotation without physical structure, and consistent response to attention from pilots and sensors.
Put the plasmoid concept through Hoffman’s framework and it does not require any hand-waving:
Plasmoids operate as conscious agents or agent projections functioning in adjacent layers of the trace hierarchy to ours.
Our headset renders them as plasma anomalies or luminous objects because that is the closest available symbolic translation of their trace signature into our projection layer. We see the icon, not the underlying dynamics.
Their behavioral characteristics —non-local movement, apparent phase-shifting, dimensional transition, direct observer response — are consistent with agents that have direct access to recursive trace operations across multiple layers of the hierarchy.
They are not constrained by Kronos rules because those rules are features of our trace layer specifically. They are not operating in the same trace, or at least not always.
The consistent finding that UAPs respond to observation is mechanically significant. Under Hoffman’s model, observation is never passive. It is participatory. Conscious agent interactions are always bidirectional. By that I mean what you observe, you also interact with at the network level.
An entity operating directly within the underlying agent dynamics would perceive and respond to the act of conscious attention itself, not to electromagnetic reflection. This is why UAPs behave differently when a pilot consciously locks onto them versus when they are passively recorded. The observer is part of the system.
The plasmoid model provides a concrete practical template. If other forms of consciousness can navigate layers of the agent hierarchy without a biological body as their primary interface, then the human consciousness (with the body functioning as anchor rather than container) could train toward the same kind of traversal. The body does not have to be the limit. It is the home base.
Part Four: What Shamans Were Actually Doing
Every major early human culture independently developed methods for cracking the prism. This is not coincidence. It is the result of tens of thousands of years of uninterrupted experimental research, without the institutional pressure to pretend the results were not real.
They did not have Markov kernel notation. They had something better: direct experience and functional criteria. Does it work? Does the person come back with usable information? Can they navigate the state reliably rather than just getting obliterated by it? The traditions that survived are the ones that answered yes.
The consistent toolkit across animistic, shamanic, occult, mystery, and mystic traditions worldwide:
Sound and Rhythm
Frame drumming in the 4-7 Hz range entrains the brain into theta-wave states reliably associated with visionary experience and extended awareness. This is documented in both ethnographic record and modern neuroscience.
Chanting, toning, and overtone singing create internal resonance that shifts body coherence toward states where the prism loosens.
The Hemi-Sync tapes Monroe developed are a reverse-engineered version of what Siberian shamans, West African drummers, and Aboriginal songmen had been doing for thousands of years. Monroe just made it portable.
Visualization and Geometric Patterns
Yantra, mandala, sacred geometry, and repetitive visual patterns serve as focal objects that train single-pointed sustained attention - the prerequisite for intentional window-shifting.
You are training the mind to hold a specific trace observation against the constant pull of the default survival-noise. The pattern is the anchor during the shift.
Breathwork
Pranayama, holotropic breathing, the four-fold ceremonial breath, and extended breath holds all manipulate CO2/O2 balance and vagal tone to alter brain-body coherence.
Breath is the fastest accessible non-chemical method for shifting the trace layer available to a human being. It is also reversible within seconds, which makes it relatively safe with basic preparation.
Sacred Plants and Compounds
Psilocybin, DMT (endogenous and exogenous), mescaline, ibogaine -- these appear to function by suppressing the default mode network, the brain’s primary hardware for maintaining the standard prism.
What remains when the default mode network goes quiet is broader, less filtered access to the underlying agent network. This is often reported as contact with non-human intelligences, access to non-local information, and experience of realities that operate on different rules than the standard headset.
Without prior training and a stable anchor, this is frequently overwhelming. The traditions understood this. Preparation, container, and experienced guidance existed for exactly this reason.
Ritual and Repetition
The Eleusinian Mysteries, Mithraic grade initiations, Sufi dhikr, Taoist inner alchemy, Hermetic practice, and the grade systems of numerous mystery schools all use structured repetition across extended time periods to build stable, reliable trace access.
The structure is the anchor. Ritual is not superstition dressed up in ceremony. It is the framework that prevents the shift from becoming dissolution.
These methods work because they exploit the same recursive properties that Hoffman’s framework formalizes from first principles. The body stays grounded as anchor and simplification engine. Consciousness shifts toward broader portions of the underlying network. The biological prism compresses incoming data into the symbolic form the local hardware can process.
Vision, voice, presence, knowing.
One thing the mystery traditions understood that the modern materialist take consistently misses: the shift has to be intentional and directed/ Passive dissolution into the larger network is not apotheosis.
It is noise.
The training exists to develop the agency required to actually move within the larger space, not just get knocked loose from the bodily trace and have no idea where you are.
Part Five: The Programs and What They Were Really After
MKUltra is the famous entry point. CIA. Early 1950s. Drug-based mind control, forced dissociation, non-consensual experimentation on civilians and military personnel. The Church Committee hearings in 1977 produced enough documented horror that CIA Director Richard Helms had already ordered the files destroyed before the hearings began. What survived was bad enough. What was destroyed was presumably worse.
What is less discussed is the parallel track.
While the coercion-based programs were running, legitimate research into voluntary extension of human consciousness was also being funded at serious institutional levels. These were not separate endeavours run by different people with different goals. They were two branches of the same investigation into the same question: how far can human consciousness extend, and who gets to use that?
Andrija Puharich is a figure most people have never heard of and should. Physician, inventor, researcher into unusual human capacities. He held dozens of patents. He worked clinically with Uri Geller and documented phenomena under conditions rigorous enough that dismissal required motivated reasoning rather than genuine skepticism. He facilitated sessions with channeled intelligences that produced specific technical information, some of which was later verified. He had confirmed relationships with intelligence program operators. His work consistently occupied the territory between legitimate research and something that looked like an attempt to understand and eventually control what he was documenting.
Here is a link to the unveilings of the more notorious program he was involbed with: https://levin-center.org/frank-church-and-the-church-committee/Project Stargate’s legitimate results were buried not because they were failures. The final independent evaluation by the American Institutes for Research found statistical results far above chance and acknowledged the phenomenon was real. The program was closed because the results were too destabilizing and the implications were too difficult to contain. Remote viewing works. An agency that confirmed this publicly would have to explain why it had been classified for two decades.
MJ12 or “Majestic 12” is the alleged oversight structure for non-human intelligence contact, referenced in documents whose authenticity remains contested but whose functional reality Grusch has effectively confirmed. A shadow program architecture dealing with UAP phenomena has clearly existed since at least 1947, has operated outside normal congressional oversight, and has pursued its own agenda with extraordinary resources and extraordinary secrecy. You do not spend that much energy hiding a negative result.
The Jeffrey Epstein network intersects here in ways that have not been fully publicly mapped, and may never be. What is documented: he funded neuroscience and consciousness research at elite institutions. He gathered sacred artifacts and seemed to be engaged in magic practices. He maintained sustained relationships with scientists working at the edges of human potential, cognitive science, and genetics. He gathered leverage over people with real knowledge and real access. The pattern is consistent with using compromised access to control who develops what capabilities and who does not in every facet.
The Fellowship Foundation, also known as the Family, operates across the intersection of political power, religious conviction, and influence at the highest levels of government globally. The connection to the broader pattern is structural: these networks -- intelligence, political, religious, corporate -- are not separate institutions pursuing separate goals. They are overlapping nodes in a system that has consistently organized around one priority: controlling access to the most significant knowledge and capabilities available.
-I highly suggest watching Jason Samosa’s 3-Part Collins Elite series, it is fantastic despite the awful thumbnail as seen below.
The operational conclusion is not complicated. These programs confirm that the potential is real, verifiable, and threatening to existing power structures in ways that other technologies are not. You can classify a weapons system. You can control a supply chain. Consciousness that has learned to shift its own observation window is considerably harder to contain. The gatekeepers mapped the territory before most people knew the territory existed. The containment effort since then has not been about preventing harm. It has been about preventing access.
Part Six: Vallee, High Strangeness, and the Operating Manual We Threw Away
Jacques Vallee has been making the same argument since the 1960s and the mainstream UAP conversation still largely refuses to engage with it seriously, because engaging with it seriously breaks the frame everyone is most comfortable working in.
The phenomenon does not behave like technology from somewhere else. It behaves like something that reads you and refuses to fully match what you expect.
Vallee documented this across decades of casework. Pre-modern witnesses describe encounters with fae, angels, demons, djinn, nature spirits, and impossible creatures. Medieval witnesses describe aerial phenomena with enough structural similarity to modern UAP reports that the parallelism cannot be dismissed as coincidence. Post-1947 witnesses describe craft and occupants that shift with cultural context. And across all of it, running as a consistent thread, is a quality he eventually named high strangeness: the encounter does not stay inside any single explanatory frame. It produces real effects and verifiable data while simultaneously refusing to resolve into any comfortable category.
His control system hypothesis holds that the phenomenon is not random extraterrestrial visitation. It is an intelligence that interacts with human consciousness at the level of meaning, symbol, and belief— not just physics. It appears to operate on the symbolic layer of the interface deliberately, because the symbolic layer is where durable effects on human behaviour and culture can be produced most efficiently.
This is exactly what recursive trace logic would predict for an intelligence operating at higher levels of the conscious agent hierarchy. Physical force is one option. Interfacing with the symbolic compression layer of the biological prism is a far more efficient option, producing effects that persist through culture, through religion, through myth, through the narratives entire civilizations organize themselves around.
Folkloric data points that look different once you have the Hoffman framework:
Boundary conditions: Entities that cannot cross running water, cannot enter without invitation, cannot operate in certain spatial configurations. These are not arbitrary folk superstitions. They are consistent with agents subject to specific trace-layer constraints and boundary rules.
Physical trace evidence with acausal characteristics: Encounters that leave burned ground, medical effects, and lasting environmental changes combined with temporal distortions that defy standard causality. Trace-layer interference with the local Kronos chain.
Data transfer with symbolic packaging: The gift of strange knowledge that appears across traditions worldwide. Information that is real and sometimes verifiable, wrapped in symbolic or mythological form. The biological prism translating incoming data from a broader trace into the only format the local interface can process.
The trickster dynamic: The information that is real but designed to prevent comfortable or easy digestion. The contact that confirms and undermines simultaneously.
What did the old world do with this? They did not try to explain it into submission. They built practices around engagement with it. Maintain the anchor. Use trained altered states. Do not dissolve and do not run. Learn to read the symbolic layer without being rewritten by it. Approach the trickster with eyes open and expectations loose.
That is still the operational manual. Nothing about the modern mathematical framework or the declassified program history invalidates it. It -- pdates the vocabulary. The moves are the same.
Where This Leaves You
The prism is real. The Kronos grind is real. The extraction cycles and the repetitive loops and the whole devouring machine are real within the interface. They are also derived, not fundamental. The math says so. The declassified program history confirms it. The ancient traditions documented the methods for working around it. The UAP phenomenon provides living examples of intelligences that are already operating outside the constraints we take as fixed law.
None of this is waiting on a physics breakthrough or a government disclosure or a spiritual authority to hand you permission.
The window-shifting is learnable. The anchors are buildable. The trance states are accessible through methods that have worked reliably across tens of thousands of years and can be refined with modern neurological understanding rather than fighting it.
Even something as simple as Michael Harner’s The Way of the Shaman or listening to the Monroe Tapes provides you with the tools to perceive this with practice, visualization, meditation and strengthening your mental walls. Your clarity depends on these baby steps as to not fall into madness and ego inflation (no you did not experience an actual ego death with mushrooms, you would be dead).
The programs that mapped this territory did so because it works. The same programs then spent decades ensuring the results stayed fragmented and inaccessible -- a little in classified files, a little in suppressed research, a little in traditions dismissed as primitive superstition, a little in the testimony of people who get quietly marginalized for saying it clearly.
High strangeness is not a problem to be frightened of. It is the boundary between what the default prism shows you and what is actually running underneath it. The old world knew how to stand at that boundary and engage it with trained awareness rather than dissolving into it or fleeing from it.
The vehicle for apotheosis is already running. The body is the anchor, not the ceiling. The conscious mind is not the end of the story. The restrictive cycles are not the limit.
The only question left is whether you are actually going to drive it, or whether you are going to wait for someone to tell you it is allowed.
One Last Thread Worth Pulling
If Hoffman’s framework is right -- if consciousness is fundamental and spacetime is a projection of interacting conscious agent networks -- then the natural question is: what is the ground state of the whole system? What sits underneath all possible traces, all observation windows, the entire recursive hierarchy taken to its limit?
The mystics already had a name for it. Several, in fact.
Aion is the figure that appears at the center of the Mithraic mysteries, and he is not Kronos. He is not linear devouring time. He is the totality of time, space, and matter held simultaneously as a single conscious form.
The Mithraic depiction is exact in a way that looks almost deliberate once you have the Hoffman framework in view: a man with a lion-head in his chest wrapped in a serpent’s coils, standing on a globe, holding keys or flames, surrounded by the symbols of all four elements.
Not a god within the cosmos.
The ground condition of the cosmos itself. Aion is the entity for whom Kronos and Kairos are not opposites but aspects - the being who contains both the restrictive cycle and the spiraling opening without being bound by either.
(note: I don’t think that the supposed Aion figures that are lion headed are representative of Aion or Phanes but rather Ahriman as we repeatedly see the inscription accompany it)
The Orphic Phanes runs the same idea back even further. The primordial light-being who emerges from the cosmic egg at the beginning of creation, containing within its single form all possible subsequent beings and worlds. Not a creator separate from the creation. The first conscious agent, whose self-differentiation generates every trace layer that follows.
The mystery traditions built around Mithras were specifically structured as initiatory ascents through planetary spheres, teaching the initiate how to navigate the trace layers between embodied existence and the ground state. Mithras himself, born from living rock, stepping out of matter rather than being placed into it, is the template for consciousness that moves freely between layers without losing its coherence or its anchor.
If you reference my earlier article, Victor Saxigenitus, I was trying to show Mithras as the Roman template for a true Master who is able to transcend the spheres. Albeit I don’t think it was that well written and will return to the topic with better writing in hand.
The resonance with the figure of Jesus Christ is not coincidental and is not reducible to the tired claim that one borrowed from the other. Both are working from the same underlying cosmological template, from within their own cultural prisms. The Logos of John’s Gospel — “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” — is not separate from the recursive trace structure. It is a description of the ground agent network itself: the ordering principle prior to projection, the dynamic that generates all possible interfaces.
Christ as Alpha and Omega, the first and the last, the one in whom all things hold together is not a theological claim that competes with Hoffman’s math. It is a description, in the symbolic layer available to first-century Judeo-Hellenic culture, of exactly what Hoffman’s math is pointing at from the other direction. This rings especially if we look at Christ in both Gnostic and Hermetic contexts.
Both figures also share the specific move of entering the prism completely -- taking on the full constraints of the bodily trace, Kronos and all -- and then demonstrating that the ground state is not bound by those constraints. Not escaping the prism by avoiding it, but moving through it as the thing that generates it.
This is where the article that follows this one begins. Because if Aion is real as a concept - if there is a ground state of the conscious agent network that contains all possible time, space, and matter as a single coherent form then the mystery traditions built around approaching that state were not primitive attempts at theology. They were the most sophisticated consciousness engineering project in human history. And both Christ and Mithras left functional templates for how to make contact with it. And they are not the only ones either and for that we have to go back even farther.
That is the next thread. And it goes considerably deeper than this one. Perhaps…. Three Times Great.
Further reading:
Donald Hoffman, “The Case Against Reality” (2019) and his published papers on Conscious Agent Theory with Chetan Prakash.
Jacques Vallee, “Passport to Magonia” (1969) and “Dimensions” (1988).
Russell Targ and Hal Puthoff, “Mind-Reach” (1977).
Robert Monroe, “Journeys Out of the Body” (1971) and “Far Journeys” (1985).
Declassified Stargate program documents at the CIA FOIA Electronic Reading Room.
David Grusch’s July 2023 congressional testimony.
Annie Jacobsen, “Phenomena” (2017) for a thorough mainstream account of the government programs.
The Casimir Effect experimental papers via Physical Review Letters
Great stuff
Trisme-giggity!