Psychonautics & Mind Hacking – The Fine Line Between Evolution & Madness

The 8 Circuit Model, Substance Alchemy & How to Engineer Transformation

Mar 11, 2025

Some break through, others break down. What separates a psychonaut from a lost soul? What keeps one surfer riding the chaos while another drowns in it?

A roadmap for riding the weird, the wild, and the wyrd—without setting your nervous system on fire.

Ahoy dear Chaos Navigators,

We are still setting the stage for our adventure to unfold. Last time, I spoke of the rising storm—the waves of technocratic fascism crashing against our nervous systems. I mapped out how the 8 Circuit Brain Model helps us claim our inner terrain, fortify resilience, and resist. Going pirate makes more sense than burning out in outrage.

They want us exhausted, dysregulated, numb. But if we seize the means of perception, stay playful, adaptable, self-sovereign—we get to build arks, sanctuaries, refugiums. We craft spells, weave stories, surf the storm until it’s time to seed the civilization we know is possible. We play the long game. Even if we might not get to witness the final outcome in our lifetime.

Now we go deeper into how this map can serve this mission of playful liberation and intelligence increase, and to navigate Chaos without loosing your marbles.

For millenia, psychonauts, mystics, and cognitive explorers have sought ways to expand perception, increase intelligence, and unlock hidden potentials. The 8 Circuit Brain Model offers one of the most compelling maps for understanding how we evolve—or how we crash and burn in the process. It’s a tool, a compass, a spell for navigating consciousness itself.

But here’s the catch: transformation is not guaranteed. A system without balance spirals into distortion. A nervous system without grounding shatters. Every mystic tradition, every wisdom school, every ancient lineage of seekers knew this: the higher you climb, the stronger your roots must be.

Which brings us to our cautionary tale.

Our favorite wannabe Emperor of Mars is showing us exactly what happens when psychonautics goes unbalanced. A man with access to unimaginable resources and a mind hacking itself in real-time—but with no compass, no anchor, and no regard for the consequences. It’s not just not funny—it’s fucking dangerous.

The difference between a Magician and a Madman lies in integration.
Between true intelligence and runaway delusion lies balance.

This piece is your invitation to map the terrain, learn about the balance, and start steering your own evolution—without frying your circuits along the way.

1. Drugs, Dis-balance and Disorder – Flying High With No Feed on the Ground

Our wannabe Emperor of Mars is a case study in disbalanced psychonautics. He says Special K is treating his depression—but what we’re witnessing seems more like an ungrounded nervous system spiraling toward full-blown psychosis to me.

This is not an uncommon phenomenon in an age with high accessibility to psychedelic substances and open access to tech that has been guarded behind the veil of occultism for millennia. Plenty of psychonauts have found themselves spinning out, taking a plunge into the abyss and riding the waves of madness as a consequences of careless substance use or maverick style fucking around with magick.

A maverick fool with the reality distortion field of a cybernetic sorcerer, the emotional intelligence of an toddler, and enough wealth to terraform his own psychosis onto the rest of us? A danger to us all!

I know its bad taste do diagnose someone by afar. This is more for the sake of banter and landing the punchline, that this model can serve us as a self-diagnosis tool.

What I observe watching him:

C1-C5: A body treated like a cursed marionette, glitching, ungrounded, and disrespected with a severe lack of presence, probably a stranger to the waves of pleasure—captained by a ghost too high on Special K to hold an anchor, let alone a steady course.

C2: Emotionally stunted, hoarding like a greedy dragon with abandonment issues, obsessed with status, validation, control, and dominance—mistaking personal insecurities for divine mandate, trying to carve his name into the history books with all the grace of a drunken buccaneer swinging an oversized chainsaw.

C3: Logic circuits overclocked but running on bad code—seeking ultra efficiency and accelerated linear progress while firing misloaded cannons at the stars, yet couldn’t predict consequences of his actions if they hit him like a self-driving Tesla still in beta.

C4: No empathy. No relational intelligence. A value compass spinning like it’s magnetized to “Supervillain Peak”, rerouting straight to “Every Man for Himself” Bay.

C6: Hacked his own brain like a rogue alchemist, but tuned his reality distortion field to warp the world to his grandiosity, chasing novelty for the dopamine kick—rewiring his brain for godhood while somehow hitting control+alt+delete on his humanity.

C7: A deranged techno-messiah cosplaying as a prophet of space colonization—but hung up the phone before receiving the intergalactic memo from the Cosmic Customer Care department that we are all interconnected.
C8: Dissociated and alienated enough from our species to see Earth as a sinking ship, yet rather than plugging the leaks, he’s betting his last gold coin on a lifeboat to the Red Planet as if he was playing an escape-room-game — not giving a fuck how many of us die when he leaves the rest of us drowning in his mess.

Disbalance galore.

With this circuitry configuration we get a megalomaniac psycho with the power of reality distortion, that does not give a fuck about the rest of us or the world he wants to leave behind so badly.

Balance matters.

If you’re hacking your own mind, whether through psycho-spiritual tech or chemo-gnosis, you need anchors. Otherwise? You won’t find Liberation. You’ll get lost in Chapel Perilous.

2. Shock & Anchor – The Razor’s Edge: Dancing Between Insight & Insanity

Every great transformation cycle begins with a shock—a rupture in the expected, a crack in the walls of perception where something new floods in. It can come as a revelation, an altered state, a crisis, or a moment so surreal it forces the nervous system to reconfigure itself on the fly.

But shock alone does not lead to growth. Without an anchor, the mind spirals, drifting into dissociation, grandiosity, or confusion. This is how people lose themselves in Chapel Perilous or fall into delusion rather than expansion.

The Brain Likes Order (Until It Doesn’t)

Your nervous system works like a bureaucrat at heart. It likes order, stability, predictable loops. It runs a legacy operating system—fine-tuned for survival, not rapid transformation. When faced with too much novelty too fast, it panics. It resists change unless the stakes are undeniable. These neuronal pathways become the structure of your reality, the map through which you interpret the world. Your inner architecture. And because the brain hates wasting energy, it resists deep structural rewrites.

We all have neuroplasticity to some degree.

New info? Sure, we can learn.
New skills? Sure, with practice.
New habits? Possible, with effort.
A total rewire of your core strategies? Only if forced to adapt.

That’s where shocks come in. They disrupt our inner Order.

Shock: The Mind’s Can-Opener

A shock is an event that forces the system into rewire mode. It happens when your usual strategies fail completely—when your brain has no preloaded response and must improvise.

This could be:

A reality-breaking psychedelic trip that dissolves your ego like 5 drops too much on a sugar cube.
A moment of extreme crisis after the wacky card dealers at the Game of life threw you a weird hand, you lose something/someone that is very dear to you, and nothing makes sense anymore.
A deep mystical experience where you suddenly feel connected to everything, everywhere all at once.
An encounter with the wyrd now camping in your head because you went too far with the fuck around and find out and you forgot about the basic witchraft protection circle
A spell cast with intention, a ritual performed to deliberately challenge the structure.

In these moments, the nervous system shifts into hyper-connectivity—its filters loosen, we enter states of Chaos, it starts making wild new connections, and it tries to restructure itself around the experience, in an hail mary attempt to find a suitable navigation strategy.

These are the portals of Initation, Spiritual Emergency and Identity Crises.

Which is all great… unless you have no anchor.

Anchor: Your Lifeline To Avoid the Abyss

Without stabilization, the new intelligence has nowhere to land. The system fries itself trying to process the flood of new data. The schock cannot be absorbed.

Instead of learning, growth, and expansion you get:

Dysfunction— too scattered to get your bearings and navigate the adulting games.
Dissociaction—floating through life like a ghost, unable to reintegrate.
Delusion—deciding you’re the messiah because a tree winked at you.
Dysregulation—unable to ground, constantly oscillating between existential despair and cosmic enlightenment.
Disorder— the men with the white coats come too your padded room and offer you pills to make the voices go away.

The difference between initiation and trauma isn’t the shock itself—it’s whether you have a strong enough anchor to integrate it.

Mystery Schools and Initiatory Traditions knew this well. They prepared candidates physically (C1), emotionally (C2), mentally (C3), and socially (C4) before throwing them into the deep end (C5-C8). They fortified the anchors before delivering the shock.

But modern psychonauts? We just jump and hope for the best.

When we explore psychedelics or chaos magick without preparation—or when life throws us into the WTF-zone without warning—our anchors get stress-tested. If they hold, we grow. If they break, we fragment or worse: descend into psychosis.

3. The Chaos Compass for Those Who Dare

Balanced Psychonautics isn’t about avoiding the storm—it’s about surfing it. Some get wrecked, others ride the waves. This model isn’t just a map; it’s a navigational tool for the deep mind, designed to keep you on course when the seas of Chaos rise.

It’s a framework for balance, a spell for adaptability, and a reality-hacking toolkit to engineer transformation—keeping you on the side of growth rather than dysregulation.

The Eightfold Navigation System – Reading the Chaos Compass

C1-C4: Your Anchors (Stability, Integration, Resilience)
C5-C8: Your Sails (Exploration, Expansion, Transmutation)

Without anchors, you drift. Without sails, you stagnate. To navigate Chaos, you need both.

C1 – Bio-Unit Maintenance (The Body as Ship)

Strengthened: You trust your body to hold the line. You know how to regulate stress, keep yourself safe, and tend to the vessel that carries you.
Weakened: The ship is taking on water—sleep deprivation, overstimulation, burnout. A nervous system too fried to sail.
Substances: Opioids, nicotine, SSRIs—used to numb, stabilize, or reinforce survival instincts.

C2 – Emotional Sovereignty (The Will as Compass)

Strengthened: You can feel emotions without being ruled by them. Your boundaries are firm, your self-expression free.
Weakened: A mutinous crew of unprocessed feelings runs the ship. Emotional overwhelm, repression, or codependency steer you off course.
Substances: Alcohol—loosening emotions, dissolving boundaries, but sometimes sinking the ship.

C3 – Map & Sensemaking (The Mind as Cartographer)

Strengthened: You can track patterns, question assumptions, and think your way through the labyrinth.
Weakened: Your mind is a glitching compass—overloaded, stuck in loops, or lost in delusion.
Substances: Cocaine, amphetamines, caffeine—fuels for cognition, but also for spiraling.

C4 – Sociocultural Navigation (The Crew & The Code)

Strengthened: You read social currents, understand dynamics, and move fluidly through human terrain.
Weakened: Alienation, social dysregulation, or losing yourself in a crew that doesn’t serve you.
Substances: MDMA, Cacao, oxytocin—enhancing connection, but also dissolving identity if misused.

The Wild Waters – Shocks, Expansion, and Psychedelic Winds

The upper circuits aren’t about survival—they’re about possibility.

C5 – Somatic Hedonism (The Wind in the Sails)

Strengthened: You ride pleasure like a skilled sailor—embodied, attuned, immersed in sensation without losing control.
Weakened: Lost in indulgence, chasing ecstasy at the cost of stability.
Substances: Cannabis, MDMA (higher doses)—amplifiers of sensory immersion and flow states.

C6 – Neuro-Hacking Magick (The Trickster’s Compass)

Strengthened: Intuition sharp, reality fluid, you can shift perspectives at will.
Weakened: Delusion, paranoia, or believing every trick you pull on yourself.
Substances: LSD, psilocybin, mescaline—tools of perception hacking, but also of self-deception.

C7 – Cosmic Network Connection (The Stargazer’s Vision)

Strengthened: Synchronicities hum, archetypes whisper, downloads arrive in mythopoetic language.
Weakened: Untethered, lost in visions with no way back.
Substances: Higher-dose LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, DMT—portals to the infinite, but can leave you stranded.

C8 – Radical Transformation (The Abyss & The Rebirth)

Strengthened: You die before you die—ego dissolution, out of body experience, lucid dreaming, deep initiatory shifts, surrendering to the void and returning wiser.
Weakened: Losing all sense of self, dissociation, feeling like an alien, or falling into the abyss with no return path.
Substances: High-dose DMT, 5-MeO-DMT, ketamine—agents of dissolution and metamorphosis.

Mastering the Art of ChaoSurfing

This map isn’t here to tell you what to do—it’s here to help you see where you are.

Where are you grounded? Where are you drifting?
Which circuits are overactive? Which ones are underdeveloped?

The Chaos Compass is not about control—it’s about navigation. When the storm comes, will you sink or sail?

4. The Circuitry of Intelligence Increase

Now, let’s crack open the treasure map of the mind—because whether you’re here to level up or just figure out why your brain is doing weird shit, this one’s for you.

Leary & Wilson (the sages behind this model) didn’t just map consciousness—they reverse-engineered the alchemy of intelligence increase. Each circuit taps into a different frequency of awareness, and each has its chemical catalysts—substances that can expand your mind, unlock hidden doors, or, if misused, turn the ride into a full-blown freakout.

But intelligence increase isn’t just about tripping into new states—it’s about stabilizing, integrating, and transmitting them so you don’t just download the gnosis but actually apply it.

They outlined three essential phases in the evolution of intelligence:

Absorb – When new information shocks the system, shaking up neural pathways and rewriting the script.
Integrate – When the system processes, stabilizes, and makes sense of the madness.
Transmit – When the reorganized download gets passed on—through expression, teaching, creation, or action.

The Danger of Unbalanced Intelligence

You ever see a wizard who’s way too deep into their own magick? A psychonaut who’s stuck in the trip? A logic-brained skeptic who’s out of touch with deeper reality? Yeah, that’s what happens when the circuits go out of whack.

For smooth sailing, all circuits must function in harmony—otherwise, the mind becomes a ship lost at sea, drifting between delusion, obsession, and fragmentation.

If one circuit dominates, the system loops, obsesses, or warps reality around a singular lens—hello, conspiracy rabbit holes and guru complexes.
If circuits are neglected, perception distorts, shaping the world into a funhouse mirror of biases, blind spots, and runaway narratives.

So take a look at this compass of consciousness and ask yourself:

Where have you developed higher intelligence?
Where are you compensating instead of integrating?
And—be honest—which substances are you using as a shortcut, a crutch, or an escape from doing the real work of intelligence increase?

The Compass Doesn’t Dictate the Journey—The Map Reveals Where You Stand

Curious? Want to decode your own circuitry and plot your path toward balance?

Download the full poster below—no hoops, no email traps.
But if you’re the kind of mind that doesn’t stop at collecting maps…
If you actually want to walk the territory, fine-tune your circuits, and level up your intelligence…

Then step deeper into the rabbit hole.

Grab the Chaos Compass in high resolution now before you spiral into another round of fuck around & find out.

Navigation Tip: The goal isn’t just to hack the brain—it’s to steer it well.

5. The Practice of Balance – Building Your Own Psychonautic Strategy

We’ve laid down the basics, but a map is only useful when it’s used. To navigate chaos, you must step off the shore, set sail, and ride the waves yourself. Finding balance in the midst of transformation isn’t a one-time realization—it’s a lifelong practice of self-exploration, recalibration, and nervous system expansion.

In the next post, we’ll dive deeper into the tension between Circuit 1 (Safety & Stability) and Circuit 5 (Ecstasy & Surrender)—exploring The Red & The Blue Map.

This is where we learn to walk the edge between grounding and letting go, between structure and flow, between security and the thrill of Ecstasy.

But before we go there, the first step is knowing where you stand.

Where Are You on the Map?

A seasoned navigator doesn’t sail without a star to guide them. So let’s chart your current coordinates.

I invite you to take the self-assessment interview—a deep-dive into your own circuitry. Where are you stable? Where are you compensating? Where is your balance off? This isn’t a test—it’s a mirror to show you how your nervous system engages with reality.

Drop your results in the comments, the chat, or slide into my DMs, and I’ll map your Chaos Star balance so you can see your circuitry configuration in full clarity. When we know where we stand, we can make better choices about where to go next—and which tools will get us there.

Watch the Circuit Assessment Video & Map Your Coordinates:

Because in the end, this isn’t just about theory. It’s about training for the long game, strengthening your system, and choosing your own course through the storm.

And now to some propaganda for the upcoming journey with the Pippilotta:

ORMEC – A 3-Month Quest in Chaos Monastics Disguised as a Pirate Adventure

Twice a year, a crew of fools, magicians, and chaos monks set sail on an (imaginary) pirate ship called The Pippilotta—charting a course through the 8 Territories of the Mind and the 8 Seas of Chaos.

This is no ordinary journey. It is both a Group Coaching Quest and a Training in Chaos Magick. It is an initiation, a deep restructuring, a container for transformation. It is a living ritual.

Like any mindrevealing trip, you cannot predict what awaits you on the other side. You enter with an intention, and the waves respond. You step aboard, and synchronicity begins to weave its spell.

Each week, we gather in a Monastic Mastermind—a space where we share our insights, practice magick, and refine personal systems. We explore the maps, the spells, the rituals that sharpen our ability to navigate chaos with resilience, audacity, and playfuleness.

This is not for those who seek passive consumption. It is for those ready to train, to engage, to sharpen their edge and wield their will.

The next voyage sets sail on March 23rd. The ship is gathering its crew. If you feel the call—answer it.

Step aboard.

Claim your map.

Refine your compass.

Take the wheel.

Put on your pirates catpain hat!

Go down this deeper rabbithole and see if this is for you.

Not everyone makes it aboard. Those who do never see the world the same again. Ready to claim your map?
https://chaosurfing.rocks/ormec