Weeks ago, I published an article in Small Wars Journal called Naming Is Not Knowing, arguing that cognitive warfare had developed a strange addiction to naming things.
Every few months, apparently, we discover a new form of warfare.
Epistemic warfare. Memetic warfare. Semantic warfare. Alchemic warfare. Esoteric warfare!
My argument was simple: a new name is useful only if it allows us to see, predict or do something we could not see, predict or do before. Otherwise, we have just produced vocabulary.
I thought I was done with the subject.
Then "experts" in cognitive security started drifting from stillness and meditation toward hypnagogic states, shifting perception and parapsychology. Someone eventually sent me an article on "esoteric warfare" mixing hypnosis, altered states, unconventional intelligence collection and historical state experimentation.
So I decided to write this series.
I have spent enough time around esoteric traditions, religious practices, initiatory environments (and at another point in my life, desert rave parties) to be completely uninterested in performing the role of the rationalist who discovers that human beings occasionally do strange things with their consciousness.
Today, I will ask: what happens when phenomena with radically different epistemic status begin to be absorbed into the same strategic vocabulary?
When meditation becomes cognitive security. When altered states become enhanced perception. When intuition becomes anomalous cognition. When an intelligence service having investigated something becomes evidence that the thing worked. And eventually, when all of it becomes... warfare.
This is the first of three essays.
This one asks why this vocabulary is appearing now, and what exactly is being "rediscovered".
The second moves into deliberately engineered altered experience, from Silicon Valley to Burning Man to psychedelic executive retreats.
The third follows the problem into intelligence: what happens when intuition, anomaly and hypothesis begin approaching the status of verified information?
But first, we need to stop putting everything in the same "cauldron".
The battlefield has been moving inward
For years, Western security thinking has progressively moved its object of concern inward. First came information. Then perception. Then cognition. Now, the brain itself.
NATO has described the brain as both "the target and the weapon"; recent work on "brain-as-battlespace" extends the discussion into neuroscience, AI and brain-computer interfaces. DARPA's Intrinsic Cognitive Security program makes the problem less mystical: it studies how manipulated mixed-reality environments can produce confusion, anxiety, overload and reduced trust.
This is cognitive warfare at its least sexy and most useful. And it points to something the battlefield metaphor tends to ignore:
The environment through which we perceive reality is continuously reshaped by actors (governments, companies, platforms, media, communities and individuals) pursuing different objectives, often without coordination and sometimes without even understanding the aggregate effects they produce.
Cognition adapts to that environment anyway. And the environment changes the condition of the person receiving it.
Darkness, isolation, crowds, rhythm, silence, sleep deprivation or sensory overload can all change how the same information is experienced.
In other words, perception is shaped twice: by what the environment presents, and by the state of the observer encountering it.
Once you understand that, another question follows:
If changing the environment can alter the observer indirectly, what happens when human beings deliberately try to alter their own state?
This is where an enormous catalogue of very old human technologies re-enters the room: meditation, breathing, hypnosis, sleep deprivation, sensory restriction, music, ritual, psychoactive substances, symbolism, prayer, trance.
Human beings DID NOT wait for NATO to discover altered states of consciousness. What is new is that some of those practices are being translated into the vocabulary of security, performance and strategic capability.
We are rebranding "esoteric" practices
Meditation is thousands of years old. Ritual is older than language itself. And the idea that altered states, repetitive practices, symbols or divination somehow belong outside the serious business of power is itself remarkably... modern!