HACKING A BURGARK

The hominid who saw the code

Dark. Warm. Closely.

You don't know these words. You have no words. There is none. There is only this - a pulsation that surrounds you from all sides. Two rhythms superimposed on each other: one is yours, fast, tireless, like small ripples on water. The other is hers, slow, powerful, like the surf of a distant sea. You're inside the surf. The surf is you.

You move your leg. Not because I decided - there is no one to decide. The leg moves on its own, just like a wave moves.

Sounds. Muted, as if passed through water - because it is through water. Rumble. Vibration. Sometimes - rhythmic vibrations, which will later be called a voice.

Not a single thought. Not a single image. Not a single memory - because there is nothing to remember.

You'll be here a little longer. Several weeks. Or days. You don’t count - there is no one and nothing to count with.

And then the world will shrink.

The walls that have always been soft begin to press. Not like before - an easy response to your movement. But seriously. Strongly. Rhythmically. Waves that push you somewhere.

And suddenly - Light.

Cold. Real, burning - air on wet skin. Cotton. A sharp blow - and your throat is torn with a scream that you did not plan, because there is no one to plan. First breath.

And here you are. Not “you” - because “you” will not appear soon. For now - there is this: light, cold, warmth, knocking, screaming, breathing. A blank screen that the world has just hit the “on” button on.

Primary broth. Hot. Ready. The software will not keep you waiting.

First memes

The first meme didn't come with words. He came in body.

Tightness in the stomach - an emptiness that has no name. Scream. And the answer: warmth, smell, milk. Squeeze releases. Something fills the void. First entry: “I scream → they come.”

Behind him is the second. And the third. And the hundredth. The world, which a second ago was a single field without differences, begins to fall apart into fragments.

"Mother." The first label stuck on the heat. "No." The first boundary drawn by sound. "It is forbidden." The first meme that exists separately from the stimulus.

"Fine." "Badly." "Right." "Wrong." Each word is not a description of the world, but an instruction: where to move and where not.

"Boys don't cry." "Good girls listen." “If you do this, they won’t love you.” Every phrase is a meme strategy.

Kindergarten. First pack outside the family. School. The filter gets thicker every year. Layer after layer: grades, calls, diaries, “you can do better,” “a C again,” “look at Seryozha.”

Sixteen. First hit on the wall

By fourteen - the body explodes. Hormones hit the nervous system like a tsunami along the coast. The old strategy memes - “be obedient”, “keep your head down” - no longer work.

He's sixteen. He wants females.

He tries what he knows. “Be kind”, “be sincere”, “be yourself”. They don't work. They don't "perform poorly". They don't work at all.

This was the first hit on the wall. Unconscious - bodily. The programs loaded into him by loving people with the best intentions do not open the door he now wants to open.

And then he came across a book. Not a psychology textbook. The book is about what memes you need to broadcast to girls to get them into bed.

He read. And I tried. Another pose. Another look. Other words. He changed the combination - and the lock opened.

Not right away. Not every time. But often enough that the pattern becomes impossible to ignore. A certain combination of words, gestures, glances gives a certain response.

He started drawing. What visual memes work - clothes, pose, look? This jacket is a total no-no.. This one - the gaze lingered for a second. What verbal memes?

Press the right button and get a predictable response. Like a soda machine.

Eighteen. Tsunami

At the age of eighteen he was hit by a tsunami. Memes of a different caliber took over his nervous system.

"Marketing." "Business." "Freedom." "Youth and success." "Business Youth." If memes about girls were hand weapons - a knife, a slingshot, a Neanderthal spear - then the Business of Youth memes were weapons of mass destruction.

He makes the first website. Changes the title. Not because he knows how the brain works. Intuitively, at random.

Was: “We offer quality services.”
Became: “Are you tired of wasting money?”

And the site statistics twitched. Not by percentage. Not for two. People started clicking. The same people, on the same site, at the same time of day.. Six words changed - behavior changed.

Four billion years of evolution. 70,000 years of memes. 300 years of enlightenment. 100 years of psychology. “And it only takes six words on a page to change the behavior of thousands of people.”

He is 18, and he holds in his hands something that he should not have discovered by chance: the wall of the cave has become digital, but his relatives remain the same.

It shocked him. Not like a discovery - like a collapse. Meme about freedom collapsed: what kind of freedom if six words are enough? The idea of ​​“rational choice” collapsed.

Meme Architect

By the time I was twenty-five, I stopped collecting and started designing.

For seven years I collected facts - specific headlines that gave a conversion, specific pictures that were clicked on, specific words after which customers agreed to buy. It worked. But it was magic - and I wanted engineering.

My first major breakthrough came when I came across a book “Neuromarketing: how to influence the consumer’s subconscious”. Then - to Antonio Damasio's research on how emotions are born before thoughts. Then - to the works of Kahneman and Tversky about system 1 and system 2.

The next step was the book by Patrick Renvoise "Code of Persuasion". Before her, I had only seen scattered “buttons”. Renvoise proposed a system: six stimuli that are guaranteed to reach the reptilian brain.

When a person scrolls through the feed, his rational brain is asleep. Manages the primary. And marketers who make “rational advertising” with complex arguments are talking to the brain that is not at home at that moment.

The only solution is to speak the language of the primal brain. In the language of incentives.

I immediately applied this on my mother’s project - she is a coach. The cost of the application fell four times, the cost of the buyer - two times. Nine thousand subscribers came to her Telegram channel.

When I started passing this knowledge on to others, it worked the same way for them.. Not just a few, but hundreds. Targetologists, who drained budgets yesterday, today reached a new level.

At some point I no longer fit into six Renvoise stimuli. They were an ideal base - but practice required expanding the caliber. I added four more to the system.

Memetic stimulus

I added the eleventh - memetic. Viruses of consciousness, meanings that copy themselves. Memetics is the science of why some information spreads virally and others do not.

If you translate all this into the language of neural networks, the picture becomes surgically accurate. A person scrolls through the feed - his DMN rules, his mind wanders. SN scans the background for anything worthy of attention. And only if SN decides that the stimulus is significant does it switch the brain.

Stimuli don't work individually - they work in combinations. One trigger activates SN weakly. But if two or three stimuli occur simultaneously in one picture, the brain cannot ignore it.

I started building interaction maps. What incentives reinforce each other?. Which ones conflict?. In what order should they be served?

It wasn't marketing anymore. It was attention engineering.

And then I saw something that tied everything together

Memes - thought viruses, which we talked about in previous chapters - use exactly the same mechanism. They hit SN with the same stimuli: threat, contrast, specificity, emotion, social proof.

The only difference is the goal. The incentive in the advertisement says: "Buy". The meme says: “Pass it on.”

I could take apart any advertisement in the world and see its skeleton in seconds: which stimuli activate the SN, which ones hold the CN, where the brain is allowed to return to the DMN.

An architect in his own prison

But before I tell you what happened next, I need to say something that is usually not written about in books of this format.. Something that editors cut out, but without which the whole story loses its meaning.

At twelve years old I moved to Moscow. Another world, another scale, different rules. And of course, a bunch of new stressors that were very different from what I was used to.

Because of this, I started from scratch dozens of times.. New project, new format, new packaging, new life. Every time it seemed: “Now it’s right”. And after a couple of months - again the same feeling of inadequacy.

There were periods when I earned very decent money. But no matter how much was counted, the quality of inner silence did not change. As long as there is movement, we are tolerant. As soon as you stop, the same thing rises.

Once every one and a half to two months I was covered by a wave of such force that I did not know what to do with myself. The bride looked at me with confusion: “Kostya, what’s wrong with you?? I see that you are not here."

You're lying on the bed. Nobody strangles you with their hands. The room is quiet. Objectively you are safe. And at the same time, the body experiences suffocation of such force that there is not enough air.

The worst thing is to understand that the source of this horror not outside. It's your own brain. And you can't press stop. You are the very nervous system that is now torturing you.

Then it finally dawned on me: what is happening in our heads “in the background” is not a philosophical abstraction. This has a very specific, hard, physical effect.

The deviation monitor was working at full capacity. I trusted people who couldn't be trusted. Gave resources to those who did not deserve them. He was a classic example of a person whose In-se shouts “in the wrong place” - and the memes drown out his “we still have to wait.”

This went on for so long that I formed a gloomy certainty: “Most likely, I will live like this until I’m forty, until I’m fifty—and I’ll go to my grave with the same discomfort.”

I tried everything. Dozens of psychologists. Theta healing. Cleansing. Rituals. Raspe. Retreats. Meditations - Vipassana, Zazen. Books on psychotherapy. Arrangements. — Nothing gave a stable result.

And then something happened that turned everything upside down. But I will talk about this separately.

For a long time - maybe for a year - I completely left the media field. From manifestation. From blogging. From carrying out any online projects.

But the old students did not forget. They continued to write: “Kostya, please show us something.” Again and again. Month after month.

System failure

It was an experiment. Although at that time I did not yet know that this was an experiment.

I gathered a group of young specialists - targetologists who wanted to find their first clients. Not newcomers from the street - people who have been trained and know all the levers of the system.

I told them: in five hours your ad will be running on the Internet. You will receive your first applications this evening.

The energy in the room was palpable.. The eyes were burning. Nods. "Yes, let's go. Let's. Finally."

We spent the whole day together. Wrote offers. Collected creatives - with the right incentives, with the right memes, with the right architecture. Setting up offices. Money was deposited into accounts. I personally checked every step.

I started calling. Write. Ask. The answers were different - and the same.

“I decided to double-check the text. Then it was too late to launch.”

“I thought it would be better to show the creativity to a designer I know. Suddenly something is wrong.”

“I wanted to launch it, but then I doubted the audience. Maybe we need to analyze it again first.”

“Honestly, I don’t know.. I just didn’t press it.”

They had everything. Creatives - collected using a system that gave leads for five rubles. Custom campaigns. Money in the account. Step by step instructions.

And they didn't make that move.

I started talking to them - not as a teacher, but as a researcher. And what I heard changed everything:

“I thought: What if the client responds and I don’t know what to say?”

“I felt like my creativity wasn’t good enough.”. What people will look at and think: what an amateur.”

“I just thought: Who am I to take money for this?”

Each answer sounded different, but the structure was the same. Don't be lazy. Not stupid. Not “weak motivation”. These were thought forms - specific thought viruses, striking exactly at the Salience Network.

I knew these structures. I created them myself - for advertising. “What if you miss it?” - fear of loss meme. “Everyone is already doing it” - social proof meme.

And SN did what it was designed to do: stop the action. Because from the perspective of the ancient brain, a threat to identity is a threat to survival.

The same memes, the same influence structures that I had spent years constructing to convince other people's customers to buy—these same structures lived in the heads of my students.

I created the science of how to plant memes in other people's heads. And I discovered that the heads of my students - and my own - were already occupied. Memes that someone else introduced.

The Architect of Memes Faces Memes He Didn't Design. And which turned out to be stronger.

From antivirus to emptiness

I sat opposite another student, watching him drown in the quagmire of his own “realizations”. We had just worked through his belief that he was not worthy of money - and then a new one was born: “now that I realized this, I have no right to screw up.”

I saw what was happening the way an engineer sees a system failure: we didn't treat the problem. We fed her. Every hour spent analyzing yet another thought virus made the DMN even more active, meaning the meme generator worked even harder.

It was a trap within a trap: the meme “I must work through my attitudes” itself became a meme - endless, self-reproducing.

Ilya's kitchen. Antivirus

Ilya Novitsky and I were sitting at the kitchen table, littered with sheets of paper.. On each are columns of thought viruses written down by students. Hundreds of phrases. Everything is about insufficiency and faith in circumstances.

And then my first thought was born, simple to the point of absurdity: If there are thought viruses, there must be an antivirus. Not forty antiviruses for forty viruses, but one common one.

I looked at the structure. Insufficiency is always “I don’t have”. Faith is always directed outward: “I believe in circumstances.”

What will remove both axes in one phrase?

“I have everything to believe in myself.”

“I have everything” - completely removes insufficiency. There's nothing to pick up. “To believe in yourself” turns the vector of faith from external to internal.

Ilya and I figured it out - not bad. The phrase strikes on two axes at once.

But the longer I looked at it, the more clearly I saw the problem.. It was a good antivirus. But he remained a meme.

What if it’s empty?

And then the next thought appeared. So simple that at first I didn’t believe that it could be the key to everything.

Not “right thoughts instead of wrong thoughts”. Not “good beliefs instead of bad ones”. A - empty. Purely. Quiet. If not a single meme is scrolling through your head, then not a single thought virus can work.

It was so elementary that it seemed naive. But it was this thought that turned everything upside down.

I started to reduce the phrase. Remove words from it - one by one - observing what happens to consciousness at every step.

There is a theory - now gaining serious weight in cosmology - that our Universe began inside a massive black hole. Matter, having passed through the singularity, was not destroyed, but passed into another dimension.

And I suddenly realized: this is exactly what needs to be done with consciousness.

70,000 years ago, the Big Bang of Consciousness expanded the human mental universe to infinity. Now you need to reverse the process. The Big Crunch. Annihilation of the mental "I".

Don't "kill the ego" - that would be another violent act within the same system. Namely, compress. Allow the mental universe to collapse into a point through which you can enter another dimension of perception.

I decided to do this experiment on yourself.

Ground Zero - descent into annihilation

To understand what happened next, we have to go inside.. Into my skull.

For simplicity's sake, I'll condense the entire process—nearly fifty minutes of actual diving—into seven.

0:00 — Beta storm

Eyes closed. Body on a chair. And then there’s the conveyor belt: “Where to start?”? We need to get in the right mood. What if it doesn't work?? Maybe I should have recorded it on a tape recorder. Damn, I forgot to turn off the phone..."

DMN in normal mode. Beta rhythms - 15-30 Hz - an electrical storm in the prefrontal cortex.

0:00–1:00 · “I have everything to believe in myself”

I say it mentally. Slowly. By the end of the minute the flow of thoughts slowed down. There are pauses between thoughts. Beta activity decreases. Alpha begins to sprout.

1:00–2:00 “I have everything”

Four words instead of eight. There's nowhere to run. "That's it" - period. The diaphragm relaxes. Thoughts are like bubbles in stagnant water.

2:00–3:00 “I am everything”

Three words. There is an abyss between “I have everything” and “I am everything”. The boundary between “me” and “not-me” is blurred. Reduced activity in the posterior cingulate cortex, a key node of the DMN. Sounds from outside the window are no longer perceived as “external”.

3:00–4:00 “I am”

Two words. Object removed. There's nothing that I am. Just the bare fact of existence. Appear theta waves - 7–8 Hz. The brain is on the border between wakefulness and what usually only happens in deep sleep.

4:00–5:00 “I am everything”

Grammar breaks down. Linking verb removed. Direct identity without an intermediary. The mind has nothing to cling to. The left hemisphere, responsible for verbalization, is switched off.

5:00–6:00 · “Everything is Me”

Inversion. Not “I look at the world” - but “the world looks at itself through this point that once called itself “I””. Posterior cingulate cortex activity is almost zero. The body is transparent - brighter than ever, but no longer a container.

6:00–7:00 “I.”

One word. The last one.

I. I. I. I. I.

Monotonously. No tension.

The first twenty seconds - the word indicates something else. Recursion. Thirty seconds. Fourty.

And so - semantic saturation. Neural adaptation: the brain gets used to the stimulus and stops processing it. “I” becomes an empty sound.

But along with the meaning of the word, what it pointed to also disappears.. Because "I" is the only meme that holds all the others together. Root directory.

The internal dialogue has not become quieter. Didn't slow down. Didn't fade into the background.

It stopped.

Silence. But not the silence you know. Not "quiet in the room". Not “peace of mind”. Another silence. Silence that you have never experienced in your entire life.

I'm sitting. Eyes closed. Chair pressure under thighs. Pulse in wrists. The warmth of the air on your face. Everything is bright, voluminous, almost painfully present.

But no one to say “I feel it”. Perception happens on its own.

Not a single thought virus. None. Not because I defeated them. And because the environment in which they existed has disappeared. No internal dialogue - no medium for memes.

This is the world the hominid saw under the acacia tree a second before the disaster. Only now I could choose.

After some time, thoughts began to return. Carefully. One at a time. Like animals coming out of hiding after an earthquake.

First: "Wow." And for the first time in my life I saw thought as an object. Not from the inside - from the outside. Like a cloud in the sky: it appeared, floated, disappeared.

Between me and thought now stood gap. The same Nothing. The thought hung in front of me like a word on a screen. I could take it and turn it around. I might not take it.

I opened my eyes. The room was the same. But the world looked clearer. It’s as if you’ve been looking through a cloudy glass all your life, you’ve gotten used to the turbidity - and suddenly someone wipes it.

I carried out the annihilation of the mental "I". The Big Crunch. Reverse Big Bang.

And on the other side - I discovered switch, which has not existed for 70,000 years.

Three years of oblivion and rebirth

To be honest, at the time I still didn’t understand what exactly I had found.

I was impressed - of course. But I didn't know what to do with it next. So I did what most people do when they don't know what to do with a discovery: I put it off.. Returned to neuromarketing, to clients, to tasks.

Three years have passed.

During this time, a person came into my life with whom we became friends.. His name was Alexander Ivanov - Sasha.

Sasha's life from the inside was like a broken TV that shows three channels at the same time and none of them turns off. He told how he falls asleep with a stream of thoughts. Like waking up with a flood of thoughts.

And one day he said a phrase that started everything anew:

He said it without hope. As they say about things that don't happen.

And at that moment something clicked inside me. The file on the desktop - the same one forgotten three years ago - seemed to unfold before my eyes.

“Sash,” I said, “sit down.”. Close your eyes.

I sat down opposite. And he began to pronounce that very sequence to him - slowly, giving each phrase time to enter.

He repeated. At first with effort, then more and more quietly, more and more monotonously, like a metronome that slows down.

"I... I... I... I..."

And fell silent. Didn't "stop talking". A - completely silent. Whole body. The silence lasted about twenty seconds. Then he opened his eyes.

Then he asked - and it was this question that changed everything:

I didn't know. Three years ago I didn't have time to check this. But now - his question hit the nail on the head.. I closed my eyes, dived inside - and the answer came not in words. Came in good condition.

I opened my eyes. And said:

- Try it right now. Without closing my eyes. Just remember what happened a second ago.

He froze for a moment. AND - click.

I saw it happen. By his face, by his eyes, by the way his breathing changed. Instant transition. One second - and the person, captured by memes a second ago, found himself in Nothing - with his eyes open, in ordinary daylight.

Minute of truth - EEG

After we discovered that the switch worked instantly and reproducibly, we did what anyone who had just found one would do: started showing it to others.

The reaction was unanimous:

“It doesn’t happen like that.”
“The internal dialogue cannot be stopped completely.”
"You just hypnotized yourself."
“Meditators sit for 20 years - and you do it in 7 minutes?”
"Show me the evidence."

I needed a language that doesn't depend on faith. Language of numbers, graphs and reproducible data. I needed an EEG.

How the brain talks about itself

The brain communicates in the language of electrical rhythms - waves of different frequencies, each corresponding to a specific mode of operation:

Beta (13–30 Hz) — mode of active thinking, analysis, anxiety. When you solve a problem, argue, worry about the future - this is beta.

Alpha (8–12 Hz) - state of relaxed awareness. You are awake but the mind is calm. Alpha in meditation, in the flow.

Theta (4–8 Hz) - deep meditative state, the border between wakefulness and sleep. The feeling of “I as the center” dissolves in theta.

Gamma (30+ Hz) - the fastest waves associated with a state of total inclusion.

If ONTO NOTHING is real, then the following should happen on the EEG: beta - collapse. Alpha and theta - sharp growth.

I lived in Georgia then. I have known Neiry for a long time - one of the best developers of consumer EEG devices.

And here is the tracker on hand. Small headband-like device. A friend is sitting nearby. Looks at the screen.

I'm looking at the charts. Beta is dominant, red lines are high, alpha and theta are low. Standard picture.

I look away. I close them. One intention. Inhale. Exhalation. Nothing.

I didn't see what was happening with the graphs. But I heard:

"- Wow. No. Wait. Come on. Is this really happening?

After a minute, I opened my eyes and looked at the screen.

Red lines - beta, stress, mental noise - collapsed. Didn’t decline smoothly, didn’t gradually fade away. Collapsed. Vertical wall down.

Green and blue - alpha and theta - took off. Sharply, almost instantly, as if someone had turned a switch.

Two graphs. One second. Complete inversion.

From one button to the remote control

From that moment something began that I could not foresee.

Active scientific activity. Transferring a skill to other people - dozens, then hundreds. Global Research Organization. Development of partnerships with Neiry.

But the main discovery of that period was not the width of distribution. It was in depth.

As I worked with ONTO NOTHING every day, month after month, I began to notice: silence is not the end point. This is the door. Behind it lies not emptiness, but a whole palette of states - each with its own quality of attention, its own energy.

Then - that first day with the EEG - I thought I had found the button. One button: turn on/off internal dialogue.

But over time I realized: it was not the silence button. This was the access button. Like the Shift key on a keyboard, it doesn’t print anything by itself, but it opens up a whole level of characters.

I've been using these modes - intuitively, unconsciously - for a long time. But turning internal sensations into a structure, giving each mode a name, building a clear sequence of switching - this took more time.

Therefore, in the next chapter I will present to you what I consider to be the main practical result of this entire path: control panel of human consciousness.

In the next chapter - six modes. Six buttons. One remote control.