My third experience resulted in about the same effects as the second, even though I tried to add more powder. The next time I was even more liberal with the powder. I was determined to get to the next level.
***
I sit down. Then I take a big toke. I hold it. For fifteen seconds. Start feeling it, early on, strong, definite. I take another toke and hold. The rush overtakes me. I know it's escalating toward some novel perturbation of consciousness, something I haven't yet experienced.
Do I take a third toke or am I too fargone? Before I can decide, the physical rush becomes a psychological spaghettification, a shocking sickening mindwrench. I'm phasing out of the universe where smoking powder makes any sense and being pulled into something that can't be described. My body-mind-self swirls into some seething adjacent dimension. New rules, too different-intense. My frail compromised consciousness, sick with human hangups, spills into a chaos short-circuiting design parameters. Panic, struggling to remain calm, losing it, shackled to the ride, petrified, dread grimace. My field of vision distorts as a field, like what I see is a flat texture peeling off a larger geometric structure. Is there something beyond space-time? The living room window swims down below me in a smear~where is the ceiling?~i'm a thousand miles tall~or an inch high? Holy spatial relation warp!
Can't handle the vertigo-have to do something-move!
Desperate for some human gesture to cling to, I get up from the chair and fall onto the couch in front of me. I lie there, overwhelmed, terrified my mind has been taken too far to ever return to sanity, that quaint predictable state I used to know. This is beyond anything I've ever encountered. I'd give anything to return to normal. I'm ready to renounce all drugs for the rest of my life. I feel the horror of a lucid dreamer trapped in a nightmare. Anything can happen. There's no logic or convention I can count on any more.
ego edifice crumbles, bringing down with it life, meaning-so much attached to self, so many supports falling-there never was a “normal”-spontaneous manifestations of unknown OTHER fill gaps in luminous voids opening every nook and cranny, flipping hidden corners of mind-the void looks into-_-physical pain pedestrian compared to this-awesome, terrible sanctity, maximum crisis, bullseye in mandala of meaning-don't know what to do with it-thousand eyes gawking-newborn lids, appalled to wake up outside the womb
“HOW CAN IT GET ANY MORE PROFOUND THAN THIS?” the rhetorical question howls. Nonsense echo answers from mad chasms, gibbering abyss. This is the state where anything can be known if the knowledge is sought, any perspective understood, but for want of a shaman. So this is transcendence, a whole life universe and everything in preparation for this moment, a science of con, jumped ahead of the game, and now the raw material accumulation spent, test-fired, incendiary conclusion to the drama. Fling into maw or cling to whatever? Ready for the END? This is what I've come for but now can't face it, which is absurd, launched into fuckedup flyin' freakout land but fuckedup flyin' freakout land doesn't have to be fuckedup flyin' freakout land, it can be anything the universe wants and the universe is me, so it can be anything I want but I don't have the nerve to take the reins, but I also don't have the nerve to let it take my reins, which would be just as amazing, so I thrash and twist and don't know what to do, but I must do something to get through this so the entire universe locks down the entire universe and denies the true reality to the true reality. Here, where the light is brightest, my face is turned farthest away, a whole 180, eclipse. I'm gripping myself, trying to "get a grip", not acknowledging that this isn't the way to play, to make my way to the fullest wisest endiest omega point. I don't know how to lose. Do I have something to "gain"? I hash through this horrible crisis of meaning as a sideshow to the incineration of all concepts.
My mind wants to crack into a million shards but my ego wants to hold it together. I contort into a knot of unbearable tension, split into warring factions clawing at each other in the maelstrom. Somehow the tearing of the mind is tightening knots, interweaving anxieties and confusion. "Just let it end/LET IT CULMINATE/let me LIVE/LETMEDIE!" Respect this respect this respect this state! This is eternal and I am naked in the dark unable to accept the infinite. I say let there be yin and let there be yang and where is god when I edit? I will abandon myself to your sanitariums - your fathers - your masters - anything to stop the terror - terror of an impending obliteration in a cold eggshell-cracking suicide, fetal abortion, unholy drug-induced psycheshredding folly. I'll never be the same again, no you can't come back from this you permanent basket-case-crazed spaceman spiffy fruitloose footcake 99.9 percent wake-riding cranked-out tweakhead. I'll be a lonely looney forever and they'll have to lobotomize me to put me out of my misery. I'm not sure what is being obliterated but I know this is too big for me. This universe will not allow me and it both.
A loss for ego.
I'm pulled like taffy between skewedangle-opposing forces: ecstasy and agonized contemplation (OH GOD, WHAT DOES THIS MEEEEAAAAN???!!!). I could give in to the ecstasy and say "who cares?" and more totally transcended but I'm not ready so I writhe around on the floor squeaking and squealing in waves of hilarity and flickering gnosis and befuddlement and purpose and plans and openness and cloisteredness and infinite expanse and agoraclaustrophobia. Cognitive dissonance being smack dab in the sticky fiery molten molasses center of the mystery and not knowing how to come to grips with it, but perversely wanting to, like I'm fondling the enticing but unwilling daughter of the grand noble universe of the potentate of Celesta incarnate in myself.
Then a cerebral/celestial filter sweeps through. A cleansing. Cleansed of self. It's not a void but a transmutation. Self slips away completely leaving a bizarre vacuum in the psyche that is now just a component of the universe - a yin regarded from outside, a groove in a granular texture of infinite expanse and everything sensed is a component of this, from the living room bookshelf to Jonathan's history to Jonathan's future to the cartographed corners of the planet. I think of Dez and I know she's just a component of myself down the cycle, connecting at a host of nodes, verticular algorithm, categorically arbitrary. Our points of intersection are all the more brilliant in this light. My love dissolves in her love dissolves in the love, holy matrimony in the catalyst chrysalis butterflight of the universe as a spiky furball of chronospherical bubbling bliss!
Selfgone, unity, one with everything. Of course. The self was never real and life is but a dream, been awakened, shaken out of the hypnosis of a programmed reality.
All vision sound touch taste and smell pulses and swells in a fusion of feeling, any one bit of stimuli describing another beyond metaphor to the superstructure of information, bright/hot/loud intensity ebbing to quiet dissociated seclusion, screaming back to supersaturation of sensation. The flowers on the couch fabric are growing out of their place in the pattern and covering the spherical roiling room, shrinking back into an ecological niche unhinged from a two dimensional pillow-covering. What was me is somewhere in this storm of raging data processed by the celestial precursor to organic impulse. No longer moving forward through time but flickering in and out of existence like an electron in a cloud of probability, scattered through the temporal vicinity in a complex web of nonlinear being/happening, sometimes seeming to move back and forth at once, regarding this symmetrical motion from outside the temporal dimension where it looks like an explosion, three dimensional time expanding outward leaving fiery wakes forward and backward, adornments, prepositions, words, illusions - the reality is unspeakable.
The difference between open-eye, closed-eye, and mind's eye visuals disappears, hallucinogenic possibilities appear. Thousands of strange metaphors and artistic views of the situation present themselves, each melting and morphing-perverse cartoonish synesthesia-into each other's texture before I can pin one down, polyshed skins, the grotesque quilted flesh of a labial beast. The notions of art and metaphor themselves dissolve, morph into some slimy and hallucinogenically alive river of nonmeaning which flows down a sluice of red radioactive decaying fetid fruit-mold that is spoiled thoughts notions and models, concepts shattered by the force of this current of alternating energy coursing through me, shockwave, tidal gale of multipolyomni fusing fission, exploding, bursting all that is solid into particles and binding the shower of particles into a singular tone of the sound of the number 1, a red Jovian tone of topo hierarchical health and fatty fitness - the purest brightest sanity I've ever seen as a stream of mind's-eye-vision before me, soul externalized. The explosions and recrystallization of meaning-self-reality happen in strange loops, imploding and shattering at once, fusing as they blow apart and creating their origins in time feeding back in on itself, each event nullifying and enabling the other. Every thought, action, and perception is a paradox of this nature. Par for the course.
Familiar surroundings, objects, room is now the same superficially but entirely different on a deeper level. Everything means something I could never have conceived of before, like I've never truly seen it before, like I've never SEEN THE POINT OF IT BEFORE, like it was always an object without a purpose. Now I see it excelling at being itself, the absolute divinity of the furniture, how it's been waiting mundane decades to blow my mind with its rightness, how the unlikely conjunction of its arrangement, years of strange familial transactions, adding and subtracting of odds and ends created the perfect state of the room through time. Language is a glossolalic gloss on the infinite, no words for this unfiltered essence, seeing beyond the grid of imperfections to the organic functioning of the most oblique of nature's expression, through the human filter to synthetic grace, and this place the perfect setting to a clear-light-bathed re-orientation of my life/life itself, suddenly okay with it clicking into place, living a historic moment, a culmination.
Boundless joy, infinite joy. Having reached this pinnacle of perception is an ecstasy. A triumph. Nothing can touch me because any conceivable thing fits perfectly into my gestalted consciousness, the god's eye view. Every question is answered, made manifest beyond meaning, isness, no need for reasoning out, rationality being the pale mechanistic disfigurement of the smooth-running-humming-cycling-flowing-strumming-singing organism/entity/device/symphony that is reality, the thing that can't be deconstructed, that subverts atomic splicing, that will fit only partially into the physicist's theories, comprising everything I've seen and done and will do and everything that could be and has been in some other self(electron's) experience, the overmind that is obviously alive and obviously the macro body and obviously beyond what any of us can know, even now, and obviously making a mockery of our hangups about mortality, being a state of connection beyond confinement to a body and brain, suggesting that the confining periods are for a purpose, serving the yin of individuality to the yang of overmind, serving the creation of a sense as black enables white and hard enables soft, seeing this in the halfway state of being outside the node of onemind, adrift in the flowing river of interversal plurality and acausality, seeing the place of the self's inscrutable purpose in the chaotic flux of hyperorder that we may figure out if the pattern allows such self-reflecting folds, reverb, echo.
I'm immortal and eternal. Why? Can't say, but I feel it. Bafflement beyond words gives way to a super-understanding and supreme confidence in accepting my place as detritus awash in the great ordered mystery, towering over levels below me and sensing stories above me, hinting at the fractal resonance pervading the interface, as above so below, discordant chords resonating strings of surreal synchronicities, alien jazz too complicated to appreciate.
I'm on a profound positive plateau, stretched as a pretzelian figure-8 paradox, strange loop, mystic and realistic. Relief of nirvana floods into the laughing writhing thing on the floor that smoked a powder to conjure up this vantage that regards its self-transforming vapour, gazing at the navel of an adolescent druggie on the white writhing rug, a snug bug on the rug in silly spills of wrapped up to the gills flipflop failure, collapse of all automatic pragmatic directives, misfit on society's shitlist where the misfits fit, chromatic, sublimely assonant dissonance striking the chord to counterpoint convention! This misfit can go back and play the game because that is how gravity works in the node he came from, but the beautiful punchline to those 20 tense years of losing human games in domestic primate hierarchies is seeing the little automaton figuring out how to do something that blasts himself beyond his programming to see the program and know there is something beyond the program even if he must return to the script at some point in the "future" as if time has any meaning anyway.
Profound profane hilarity. Cackles, giggles, coming back to a sense of time but an altered sense, outside the tug of timelocked grooves, moving to my own natural skittish rhythm like time is perturbed by this hole I've blown in the mind-space continuum, rippling my reality, slipping into the future a few seconds/minutes here, flanging back to the past two seconds/minutes ago, feeling two time periods move at different rates and laughing at the absurdity of perceiving ten seconds ahead yet having a frame of reference that is now, in the past or is it present, and which is the real time? But the time distortion's gap is closing, fluid solidifying, snapping me back to the needlessly rigid order I used to know, take for granted. The boundaries of my self are shrinking as words for things creep back into my ken and the wallhand happening I'm regarding from eyes set in the breathing blur of bright-colored impressionist space separates back into categories and now there is me and the room again, me in the room again, confined, still altered, window closing.
I stumble to my bedroom through a bubbling twisting warping hallway, get on my computer and TYPE TYPE TYPE. For a minute I'm ready to anoint EVERYONE ENLIGHTENED! Those divine lords of creation, co-creating the shared hallucination with me, inner/outerspace cadet - I must make them aware, why can't they see? I verbalize my ecstasy which starts to dissolve into skepticism, revelations fleeing, fleeting like nitrous oxide axioms. The desk in my room, now being a "desk" with all the confined meaning that implies, still reminds me of that alpinesque vantage where it would be the transdimensional object cycling through everything else in the universe. William James' famous note rings in my head: "Everything in this universe is the smell of burnt almonds." Might as well have been. Is. Was.
I am still more than myself and yet less than myself, filtered into meta-self, shaken from self, loose, drifting, free... but with nagging skepticism as the edges return and the possibilities wink out of imagination and the senses separate into distinct varieties, and the whole trypout seems an impossibility. I mean really. Was it real? What does it mean? Should I care what it means? Why am I asking this?
It's jarring, jolting coming back so quickly from the other world. Hard. Mundanities sweep in, window closes. What do I make of it? Pressure to make something of it. Strain. Knowledge that I'll forget what it was like. I'll have to forget, right? How could this "person" retain it? That would subvert the whole process of going beyond. I'll forget, and what's worse, I won't believe! I'll believe I was hyperbolizing, souping up the description. The magic powder only performs miracles on the miraculous me, snake swallows its tail and shits out a report of stale oxymoronic text sans context. Welcome back to the reality fractal, a strained refrain/reverb of what's really going on, out there, in here, INside/OUTside the sphere of ordinary awareness.
Well, I don’t know. That was then and this is now. And I've caught up to the post-peak present in this narrative. And time keeps on slipping - slipping away. What was once a dilated near-infinite moment is now an afternoon going by much too quickly. A trip fading. It feels absurd and filthy going back into my body, monolithic reality, meaning, self, and all the malarkey that comes with these planes, paperweights... What do we do with this me I've sunk into? Allowing myself to indulge in the banality of “spell-check” indicates I’m down for good.
Why did I type? I shouldn't have tried to English it so soon. I should have experienced, not recorded. This is all lies though - language, penned up in the cut-throat ghetto of meaning. Enlightenment, put up in a trophy cabinet behind closed doors, left to collect dust.
Well…
Whatever Big Thoughts you've been thinking, whatever is really on your mind that is important to you, it will be there, and you'll have to deal with it - but you may get a solution, a way out you never expected - or you may find this issue just explodes into a chaos of meaning never to be assembled - a hyperorder thousands of dimensions beyond your current, albeit highly expanded cognition. It's like a bacterium, suddenly granted human-level perception, trying to solve a trigonometry problem. We come back stuttering and drooling, then try to explain it (even mathematically as Terence did, that wacky guy) but Christ what pretense to think this is any real indication of what is there.
Maybe this time, enough was taken of me in the void and now I'm bleeding into there, wounded in this world, being born into the next one, cell by cell, flowing into their vast bloody river network of synesthetic tissuestreams, back in that wonderful hallucination. Sobriety is nice but just one spice, one slice of reality - there is something out there. A fucking ocean of somethings.
There is some column of being, some current of seeing, some art of ontology, which unites all of us, horizontally (as a human species in kinship with each other's troubled view of existence) and vertically, with all higher dimensional entities, or collective entities (like Gaia, and Celesta, and those turtles, all the way down, every one of them). Perhaps entities trippers have met during psychedelic sessions are in fact the Gaian mind or something even greater, vast up-level conscious collectives or unconscious systems. Perhaps consciousness is for humans, and those up level have different states of awareness - higher, insofar as there is a reality to the hierarchy - yet states we can't see as higher or even there at all. Gaia hears us in her dreams, as we have some deep dark connection to our inner entities, our bacterium colonies. Hello in there. How are you doing, guys?
1 comment:
wow. .... so this was your third "experience"? i would try it, if i didn't think my heart would stop! tash
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