Girlfriend separation is mingling with the lingering ecstasy comedown, which is mingling with the strange acid resonance. I've been thinking at least as much about the mood drugs as the acid and it seems I've learned some stuff about how brains work. Or at least I have some theories that explain a lot of what's been happening to me and others.
The regular rhythmically fluxing chemical brain is background, taken for granted, and unknown in its unperturbed state. It's the mental ether, water for a fish. But when I put my brain through instant, radical, and artificial changes in serotonin levels and such, suddenly I FEEL what's going on. I feel it in my head and body, the flood of warm, the warp of emotion. And I feel it when the artificially-stimulated influx dissipates and the consequences unfold.
I can see that my cognition is riding on waves of brain chemicals. So the awareness I associate with my ego, the sentient being inside this body, is composed of two things, the physical chemical psychodynamics which can be reduced to molecular structures, and the ethereal reality of the thoughts and feelings that penetrate chemical waves - the other side of the Cartesian dualism. So this mind jazz is perfectly real, just not traceable to the physical world in this current scientific paradigm. I don't confuse the two anymore. I think they interact but not in a way that can be reduced to simple biochemical mechanisms. I don't think the thoughts and feelings ARE the chemical waves, and I'm doubtful they're dependant on them, but certainly highly influenced by them. I think emotions can be reduced to chemical carrier waves, but the thought-patterns are the ethereal material in the waves, maybe non-local hyperdimensional data, or maybe I don't need to start writing pseudoscience to make my point.
So I'm not out to boost one at the expense of the other. I think feelings, thoughts, and chemicals are all co-dependent. A chemical dynamic alone would be hollow sensation without intellectual material to give it meaning - fun perhaps, but seeming empty and stupid shortly after.
But intellectual material on its own would FEEL hollow. I felt PRECISELY THIS during the nasty third crash - still amped up from the speed, thoughts going and going, but the MDMA was wearing off and the desired brain chemicals had drained. So all these wonderful revelations and ideas were still there but they had no support, no PHYSICAL basis. Thus the horrible, almost unbearable feeling of hollowness and fakery - I could go over my ideas and plans with perfect intellectual appreciation but not have the desire to carry them out. Hence, listlessness, depression, confusion, and above all: the dreaded feeling of fakery. Now that's a recipe for a nasty crash.
What we need is the intellectual information that arises from the chemical dynamics (this thing I keep thinking of as mysterious and ethereal) and the very substantial reducible chemical supports to make it feel real - to give it weight, an atomic mass or something. So maybe there's actually some comfort in reducing what I can of the highs and lows to neurophysiology, assuming there's a solution to the chemical equations - whether that be prozac or diet or what have you.
Now this feeling I'm talking about, it's strange and tied to so much. It's mania, for starters. It's feeling overpraised and unworthy. It happens almost as soon as things start going right - too right - something must be wrong. It's feeling over-earnest and not being able to be any other way. It's saccharine and sick, being a goody-goody, fattened up for the good witch, pathetically lacking some basic human texture.
The feeling is the total certainty that we, as sentient human beings, must be in a constant state of delusion/searching (the itch scratching itself) to be happy/fulfilled. The sages see this and laugh joyously, the divine hilarity - but for some reason this realization is intensely negative for me. I ask myself: Don't they see the darkness in this?
I see no other real state of awareness beyond this - no reincarnation, no divine overmind union, just the single role for the eternally-cursed jester. And it's so fucked up because this is precisely the nature of the classic enlightenment raptures I remember from those golden moments of gnosis but now it's somehow gotten negatively connotated!
The mystical revelations used to put a spring in my step - they spiced up life, they made the good things seem better and the bad things not so bad. But now it feels like Alan Watt's blinding all-consuming cosmic light and Sartre's sad little existential cave have collapsed into the same sick shit-brown colored void. WTF?
So when I surmount literary, psychic, and psychedelic peaks to arrive at a revelation like this - when the object of the human endeavor is to keep searching to keep happy (the more obscure and cryptically crazy the search the better it is) what I'm doing is losing the game - finally fucking up, revealing the truth, blowing it on E, burning a hole through my post-Eden garments with the ashes of the rollie marked "do not smoke". Haha - I lose. But isn't it supposed to start again? It doesn't. I'm just doing meaningless surplus laps on the Mario Kart course after the checkered finish flag that won't fade out. It's what Alan Watts described as the inverse mystical experience, the enameled tin revelation - everything sucks! You've gotten to the omega and now what? You've said everything, you've bottomed out, you've won the booby prize. This is the part I can't stand about the E comedown, and all hangovers and manias to some extent. The salvia flash is something like this but so strange and unexpected and neutrally-connotated I can only laugh in disbelief.
I imagined a video game where you're running a brilliantly confusing Escherian psychedelic labyrinth in first person and the object is to avoid the various demonic and angelic manifestations of "truth".
So coming off the speed-laced love drug perhaps only sharpened the razor I cut myself with through cognition, but I'm also understanding it better. Not being hyper happy anymore? I could deal with that fine. Speedy aftermath, that was okay. Physical artifacts, jaw clenching, no problem. Most of the nastiness of my first comedown was thinking about all the crazy things I said and did when I was high. It was mostly just me being silly ("dorky" raz would say). I guess it just bugs me cause I wanted to be happy in a productive collected cool zen way, not as a giggly dorky fool, fun though it was. On some level I know this is fairly trivial, but I still get that sick feeling when I think about it, the tainted ecstasy memories, the things I revel in saying when I know my brain won't reign me in. I hold myself to certain standards of coolness which is why I mope over my perceived failures in this area, but really, I can be quite okay about making an ass of myself as long as I'm sure I'm not making people uncomfortable or embarrassed for me. I hope my e-tarded roll created some amusement and not cringing.
Sometimes I feel the self-imposed contest, slave to the meta-me-master's game. The contest is me being aware that my brain is keeping some kind of score. I've got an upcoming clutch sentence, it's for all the marbles, better be good or at least not bad. Can I, should I say that? The maddening self-interrogation comes too late. I don't think my friends are uncool when they go on about their own psychological clusterfucks. I wish I could view myself through my own judicious filter but I don't. Even now I question whether I should write this or shrug it off and be content to think it, fleetingly. If I was so honest when I said that truth and meaning and torture were all synonymous, I'd take the shortest path to forgetting which would be to not bother writing this. But that devilish scrutiny digs on, right straight to hell.
And it sucks because those E trips needn't feel tainted. I still think a lot of what was said was wonderful and important and not all sap and pap. On the last roll I felt I was reconnecting to a rusty sense of humour I'm so rarely able to make use of. And the drug really did work miracles on minds, empathic and telepathic connections, social phobias ground to dust. None of that was fake, just realized potential - but the post-facto psychic grit does taint the memory, sad to say.
Funny I actually liked the speedy pills, the mellow ones kind of bored me. It seemed a sensible combo. But it made me crazy, put me over the edge, made my future self uncomfortable. There was a mental grit and guilt pervading the long long amphetamine downer - it's a monster, I don't like speed, I see through the self-confidence trip, I can't help it.
But no one need worry anyway, if I go back to the stuff I think I'll wait until next Shambhala. I'll be well rested and fed beforehand. I won't be on a bender of any kind and I'll only do it once during the weekend, I'll pick my day to go hedonistic. I'll try and get pure stuff (forget the speed), I'll take a decent dose but not a crazy amount (maybe 1 or 1.5 pills), and I won't make the trip about me or other people or psychological issues. I'll either just be content to be content, or I'll dance (felt fantastic for the few minutes I tried it at the Royal), or I'll love nature, or just chill in warm bliss-space. I'll resist the temptation to rope the entire world into my euphorious epic. Maybe I'll have a vitamin supplement ready, why not help the brain recharge its love batteries?
So when I come down from the ideal self-managed E trip, I will be something like: "Okay, it's wearing off now. That was a fun four hours and I wasn't a complete E-tard! Horay! Getting back to normal, time to do normal people stuff like smoking weed, shooting the shit, maybe even sleep."
I think it's good to do E either alone or in groups (not one on one), but at least one group member should NOT be rolling and the rollers should be synchronized. If one is peaking later than another, the former will be coming down and entering that hollow drained headspace while the latter is melting into love soup. The drained headspace can be traversed easily with preparation I think, but when you see your recent blissed-out self reflected back at you, the feeling of fakery is awful. If you were synchronized, you'd know it's just genuine affection communicated in ways that won't resonate with the crashing noveau-cynic (sometimes only flowery excess will suffice), but you're not, so you feel like shit and think about how dumb you've been - or maybe just happy? In the drained space, rollers can seem hideous and make the comedown worse. I think groups are good because it helps to be able to feed off someone's energy coming down, someone who is not facing the dreaded crash.
On a positive note, I did gain a real insight into how my mind works with regards to freakouts and panic attacks. I've had incidents of fainting and spontaneous delirium throughout my life stretching back to childhood. They seem to be triggered by detailed descriptions of medical disorders, brain injuries, hypothermia, bulimia, then later by the onset of powerful psychoactives or powerful placebos. The first time I got stoned it happened. A few months ago I was starting on those muscle relaxant pills. I took a double dose and stepped into the shower. I felt a little weak and wondered if it was them kicking in. Then I suddenly got into the nausea-phobia feedback loop very rapidly and recognized it as the delirium trigger. My vision whited out, then I fainted and woke up in what felt like a very malevolent 5meoDMT peak or something, just totally removed from my former life, in something I'd formerly called a "shower". I thought I'd gone insane forever, it was scary as hell. I stumbled out and realized I'd freaked out and calmed down and slept. Then there was that time I fainted in T’s bathroom after taking a large hit off a joint. Drunk combined with THC made me think I was dying or something. It's a feeling, an overwhelming, a dark deathrush, and when it happens I lose myself. But shortly after popping my second speedy E pill outside the Ewok Village, when the feeling hit me and I got REAL queasy REAL fast and I thought: OH NO! ECSTASY IS EVIL TOO! I'M GONNA FAINT AND FREAK OUT RIGHT HERE IN THE DANCE PIT AND THEY'LL DRAG ME TO A FIRST AID TENT AND HUMILIATE ME FOR BEING A PUSSY AND MY MIND WILL BREAK AND I'LL NEVER BE SANE AGAIN! - I realized, I know this feeling. It's just the freakout feedback loop, just a feeling of being physically overwhelmed. I can ride it out, I'm on E, it's supposed to be fun. So I did, and I got over it. Don't know if I can do that on a hardcore psychedelic but I hope so, it would save me a lot of anxiety.
Now a few words on the acid. That resonance is still there. It's not getting weaker or stronger, it's just there, and it's looking like it's there for good, and I've just gotta get used to it. The "it" is really fucking subtle, but it's basically that the world I'm in just doesn't seem to be the same one I was in before I dropped, particularly visually. It's not that I'm seeing more (maybe I'm noticing different things), but that the emotional and associative responses my brain makes are different. Seeing objects and scenes generate unexpected, seemingly random chains of associations from islands of memory I haven't accessed in years or even decades. It's very eerie. I've heard of stuff like this happening but I never imagined I'd experience it first hand, and have that be a possibly permanent alteration.
And the idea that I'm seeing reality unadorned with a mindfilter residue - yeah, maybe. I could appreciate this idea intellectually before, but having it HAPPEN, FEELING it in emotional response, the incredible unignorable subtlety of it I keep remarking on to myself every few minutes. It's there undoubtedly, but what it is I really can't say. I guess it's okay but there is a loss of a reliable natural high - the euphoria I could get on demand by invoking familiar associations and thoughts and feelings just by revisiting a certain place, like Gyro Park. The reason I can't ignore the reality of this phenomenon is it extents to everything. People places objects music words. I composed music today, trying to invoke recent feelings but for some damned reason, every note I laid down seemed to somehow express the feeling of being bored and tired and cold in a trailer park outside a Marina in Arrow Lakes I used to stay over summer nights when I was a kid - every harmony was a perfect component of this flavor of long-forgotten experience even though what I'd been intending had nothing to do with it and there was no programmatic or impressionistic link I could imagine. The bakery is different, it's like I applied for the job last week. Raz is different. The sky, the mountains, the grass, the feeling of sunlight. So this void is creepy. It's almost existential but maybe I'm just re-imprinting. My brain might be changed forever but in a year I won't notice because I'll have a head re-stocked with associative thoughts and feelings. I can see why some think of acid as a cleansing, maybe you get used to the wipe/re-imprint cycle, and it probably gets less intense the more often you trip.
I suspect it might have something to do with the limbic system in the brain, possibility in conjunction with rogue neuron-firing cascades. The syndrome where brain damaged people insist their family members and houses are doppelgangers is called Capgras' Delusion I think, and I certainly don't have anything that severe. I still feel the warmth I always have when seeing my mom, but there is still that subtle "difference" I just can't define. I notice how much older she looks now. I think of the acid as a rupture of plane, smoother than salvia but perhaps more complex, more psychologically integrated.
The actual trip was intense and fascinating, although I forget the bulk. I remember it was always moving on a serious and solid bedrock. I did laugh a bit around the peak but they were nervous laughs, I wasn't sure if they were appropriate. It was very much about chaos and order. Absurdity reigned, it was the deus-ex-machina godhead intervention except I could only see God as the void. Then I felt the presence of some entity, some quasi-human character with a black hat, ego distortion but not ego loss.
I think the acid could have intensified that sick-gnosis-mania, getting to the end too soon and not being able to come back. I feel slightly different as a person but at the same time I see my behavior patterns as generally falling into line with the old self, whoever that's supposed to be. I'm sure it could be VERY effective for behavior modification though. I can see why the psychologists of the '60s were so enamored with it. Why aren't they still? Do they know something we don't? Are they opposed to answers that come in blotter form? Hmmm... could Douglas Adams' supercomputer "Deep Thought" have been a metaphor for LSD? Think about it.
I drank coffee at work last night to keep me up and felt the nauseas mania consume me again, tying together all the acid and ecstasy threads. I put on music, most of which continued the parade of strange and long-forgotten associations, soaked with that eerie Capgras disconnect, like they were someone else's. The music that finally got me feeling good was Aphex Twin, something I didn't expect. There was a beautiful desolate melancholia about it that was just right. A little Nintendo nostalgia fit into a deeper soulful framework - maybe I loved that it was so inhuman, I could relate better to mechanically sculpted soundwaves and voicesynths. Then Faith No More came on and I could dig that too - I loved the mediocrity of it - never liked the band that much but they were endearingly cheesy without going right off the cliff into the chasm of bad taste. They symbolized good decent hardworking fun-loving musicians free of that terrible rancid burden of genius and art - no, it was just about having hair and fun and rocking out and it helped me forget the ridiculous imperatives to ultimate truth and the ultimate idiocy of knowing it.
So I had a dream last night that inspired most of these thoughts but it felt so pure compared to this teeth-clenching exegesis. It felt like what I'm searching for in this text, the search itself, the sutra bead. I forget the great idiosyncratic core of the dream so I'm saying it's about Shambhala or something, and deciding which person each character represents. I'm going to turn it into an epic poem. It'll be a zen bridge so people can pass back and forth between the fake and the real at leisure, mingle with hallucinations maybe. I think it'll be understandable at some point.
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