Reach for the lights

Riding at night on the bicycle listening to a DJ set and getting a thrill each time the music built to make the crowd rush on their pills, and I remembered how happy I used to be watching someone discover this world for the first time.*

Now I get a deeper feeling from watching someone get their life together and living for creativity, kindness, health and sustainable joy, which means to say I'm over the trip and want to see what happens next, how people integrate their better selves with reality, those things that [as PK Dick said] don't go away when you stop believing in them.

*I still trip once a year or so [mushrooms] but with the understanding that I'm not going to get anything out of it unless I've worked on myself in the interim using what I learned on the trip before. And at this point in the psychedelic game [just over 20 yrs in] there's very little that I'm being shown for the first time, just lessons that I should have learned long ago: it's all connected, THIS IS IT, overwhelming beauty, and the need for love and inner peace, rather than greed [in all its forms] and furious activity. All the usual suspects.

Strange fruit

Saw A Man Within, last year's Burrough's documentary. I was a big fan in my more fucked up youth, mainly of the last three novels and some essays, but even more so of the man himself. Whatever I was supposed to be [I went to a military school] I was not interested in becoming. Burroughs the man presented rebellion hiding in plain sight - short hair, three piece suit, balding and stiff. You couldn't imagine him dancing or fucking, never mind doing either of them well. For an uncool teen he represented an entirely plausible role model of sorts, as long as you ignored almost everything.

Burroughs expressed a lack of interest in psychedelics as opposed to the numbing altered states of junk and booze. This is reflected in his lack of emotion and human connection, an abstractness from himself and others. The desire to shock seemed as much aimed at himself as others. [A quote I remember runs something like: “...I think of the most horrible, disgusting things I can imagine, and then write them down...”]. What's hinted at in the work is made clear by friends / admirers in the documentary – he was incapable of confronting his own feelings for others and need to love and be loved, right up until almost the end.

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Another angle. Now I read a lot fewer fucked up writers, or if I read them, the first attraction isn't toward their fucked-upness. If I'm going to pay close attention to someone then they need to moving toward to the light in some respect, trying to make things better.

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The thing about waking up from time wasted along strange, unproductive and unfulfilling paths (again and again), is that eventually you get a sense that things need to change in quite obvious ways. And so we have our weaknesses / contradictions, and beyond a certain age are stuck with genuinely narrowing horizons, limited by decisions made long ago for reasons that at best were romantic or senseless, if not demented. There's very little that I can explain about my life, and long ago gave up trying to impose a narrative, because all the ones I came up with were just absurd creations myths.

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I had very limited expectations as a teenager, with Burroughs being the best of the worst version of myself I could have been – paranoid and repressed – and if I'd worked harder I could have achieved a shitty local optimum, being really great at something I wasn't happy with. While Burroughs seemed to push as far as possible down a blind alley, I'm glad that I turned back, broke things down, and took the simpler in the long run step of changing everything possible, an option that – narrowing horizons notwithstanding – I keep in my pocket and pat on occasion, just for kicks.

Related: You are what you read

Back into salvia space

So I posted that psychedelics post and then went off to a meeting the implications of which I hadn't really considered. I did some cleaning the other week and found a vial of salvia left over from several years ago, when I growing / smoking a lot as a way to cut stress on a brutal split shift and ease into meditation / self-hypnosis to refresh and also blank out the dull horror of permanent work crisis and creeping personal ones ahead of finding out I could untie all knots just by gently pulling the right thread, instead of all the wrong ones, harder.

I suggested to a friend that they might want to try it, so I went over to demonstrate. They saw me inhale, lie down eyes shut, do the thirty count in my head, then pass out. They were not enthused.

I used to smoke a lot of salvia over a period of several years, and I think I mapped the territory as well as I could, devising stories that satisfied me for certain problems it raised that seemed tractable, and letting other parts – the bulk of the experience – rest easy as mysteries to be lived with.

Long / short: I went back into salvia space and it was as welcoming as that first trip seven or so years ago [“Hey........you're back!” these little corn-headed flower entities waved at me and cheered back then, the first time, third hit a charm, as I descended and rematerialized into the land of extreme waking dreams. This time everyone was going about their business and I dropped back in almost incognito, the weirdness, as ever, unfailing, but no longer an obvious tourist].

Shorter: the infantile ego was silenced, and relief was felt, and I came back smiling with forgetfulness.

The relief you can feel on a good psychedelic trip

overlook

The fantasy they’re selling [on a luxury cruise] is the whole reason why all the subjects in all the brochures’ photos have facial expressions that are at once orgasmic and oddly slack: these expressions are the facial equivalent of going “Aaaahhhhh,” and the sound is not just that of somebody’s Infantile part exulting in finally getting the total pampering it’s always wanted but also that of the relief all the other parts of that person feel when the Infantile part finally shuts up.

David Foster Wallace, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again

The best of the rest of the time just being ways of surfing the needs / wants and / or distracting them with some zen / art magic or stoic practice.

Coming off a long few weeks of intense work and waking up to a reality that I haven't found my way in yet, just suspicions that the old one isn't going to serve much longer without some changes that remain obscure.

Somewhat related:
Posts that refer to the hedonic treadmill.

The 3lb Universe

The strange truth about reality is that it is both objective and subjective. In one sense we are totally at the mercy of the forces of reality, and in another sense we create our own image of reality and impose our own will on reality. One paradox revealed by psychedelics is that reality creates the mind which creates the illusion of reality so that reality can organize, observe, and modify itself from a variety of novel subjective perspectives. I think that psychedelic paradigms of god, unity, latent psychic powers, and cosmic consciousness are all attempts to grapple with the cosmic scope of this mind-bending paradox where object and subject dissolve into the same thing looking back at itself across the expanding sea of infinity. Human brains are not meant to cope with this inverted universal perspective of reality; we have no good words for encompassing the experience; the common name we use is God.

Psychedelic Information Theory: A Talk with James Kent

The virtue of continual, engaged experience

I’ve listened to the tapes from the bus trip and reread his letters and autobiography—The First Third—for years. I’ve tried to distill his teachings as best I can. The most important lesson is also the most ironic: most of what is important cannot be taught except by experience. His most powerful lesson behind the rap was not to dwell on mistakes. He used the metaphor of driving. He believed that you got into trouble by overcorrecting. A certain sloth, he thought, lets you veer into a ditch on the right side of the road. Then you overcorrect and hit a car to your left. Cassady believed you had to be correcting every instant. The longer you let things go, the longer you stayed comfortable, the more likely the case that you would have to overcorrect. Then you would have created a big error. The virtue of continual, engaged experience—an endless and relentless argument with the self—that was his lesson.

Ken Kesey on Neal Cassady, Paris Review interview

Not drowning, but waving

I got my first positive response from an unknown reader a few weeks ago, and then didn't post anymore. The events were unrelated, I just let myself slip out of time for a while. I've been away doing other things, and it was confusing, but very soon it all made sense. My life has totally changed, and I'm still in the process of hitting old beliefs and seeing if they ring true.

When I was a teenager I got given a copy of 'Notes from the Underground' and sat down and read it in one go, glowing in recognition that someone had got things down true. I'd never been much of a reader before that, but starting the next day I began to read everything, and my life was changed by that night.

A little later than that I took LSD for the first time, and all the things I'd read about it were true, but more so, and everything changed again. All the old beliefs had to be questioned, a process that's ongoing - the psychedelic life.

And the same thing happened when I met this woman about a month ago, and knew fast that my old life would have to end if I was going to live at all honestly with the truth of what had happened. My life fell apart and came together over the course of a few hours, but there were still some things I had to change if I was ever going to walk straight again.

Things are still kind of fucked up, objectively speaking, at the home of A DEEP LUST, but subjectively they're better than they've ever been, and I've got full confidence in how things will play out over time - the past few weeks the universe has been conspiring in my favor.

Normal posting will resume when my head falls in place.

He was not conscious that he had once been a man

steve blackburn

In the grip of this terror he went upstairs to his bedroom and sat down on the bed alone. There was no one honourable thought in his head; he was not conscious that he had once been a man. The sweat ran down his face unceasingly; his head swam; his whole body trembled in an agony of despair, tormented as he was by slavish fears and craven anxieties utterly unworthy of a man.

Procopius, The Secret History, p58

I haven't felt like that in a long time, but it'd be foolish to think that it'll never happen again.

The other day I was in Kanding / Kenting [see picture], beshroomed and a little drunk. I was with some friends and it was after 1am and the place was dead, which is an odd experience in Taiwan.

We walked to a beach and in the pavement someone spotted a jagged hole that went deep. One wrong step you'd be lucky if you just broke your leg, with a smashed jaw or slashed throat more likely.

On the way back we were all distracted, and nobody looked out for the hole. We noticed this soon after, and one of us could easily have fallen in. Absolute terror.

In bed I kept getting flash visions of terrible injuries, as if in all the multiverses nearby my life had taken a bloody and significant turn for the worse.

Sometimes it seems like after the bad joke of my youth the universe is conspiring on my behalf.

Procopius has a great story about an ultra-slut that I'll shoehorn into my next post, which ought to be about sex.

Eleven characteristics of transcendental states

Since I decided to get a social life after quitting my job / going freelance a year ago, I keep finding myself walking out of bars at 5 or 6am, which means this year there's been more posts tagged drink than psychedelics, but a good description of transcendental states in The Guru Papers: Masks of Authoritarian Power, by Joel Kramer & Diana Alstad, [p304].

1. One experiences being in the eternal, a place that always was and always will be.

2. There can be a great energy that breaks through boundaries to the extent of experiencing one's awareness expanding until it seems to (or could) include everything

3. The ordinary separations between what's me and not-me either momentary disappear of become really ambiguous.

4. There are often (though not always) deep feelings of identification - one might even call it love - with the cosmos.

5. One "knows" this place is always there to be tapped into.

6. The place feels foreign and yet familiar at the same time.

7. The is both awe and a feeling of personal insignificance, where the mundane concerns and emotions around self-enhancement and self-protection seem trivial and beside the point.

8. There is no fear, because death feels quite unreal. Or in a slightly different vein, when you cease identifying with yourself and merge with the cosmos, it feels like you've already died, so there's nothing left to fear. This cessation of fear is one of the most marvelously unusual feelings, bringing deep relaxation on levels one didn't even know existed.

9. One feels immune from being affected by the judgments of others, and also free from such petty responses as vengeance and competitiveness. After all, we are all one. Along this line, all so-called negative emotions - anger, jealousy, etc. - can seem not only unnecessary, but silly and based on illusions.

10. There is a recognitions that one is (or we all are) and aspect of God.

11. Everything (oneself included), and the way the cosmos is unfolding, is seen as perfect.

Good trip

air - sing sang sung [HD video won't embed, but much better, here]

Head spaces

Peripetics by ZEITGUISED from NotForPaper.

Beautiful video [worth enlarging] described like this at the source:

Zeitguised made a piece in six acts for the opening exhibition at the Zirkel Gallery. It entails six imaginations of disoriented systems that take a catastrophic turn, including the evolution of educational plant-body-machine models and liquid building materials.

The section with the grass, plane and cloud [0:30 - 1:00] looks / sounds / feels / like entering salvia space.

Mugwump jism

Fifty years since Naked Lunch was published, and whatever strange trip I've been on since my mid-teens has been in part inspired by that first rush of books, which helped me run counter to everything that had been intended or could expected for my future. So, a moment of gratitude to walking corpses everywhere, with a favorite interpretation of the work, below.

Bug Powder Dust, by Bomb The Bass featuring Justin Warfield [1994]

Ways of seeing

almost taiwan

One of the most fascinating aspects of the birth of a new science is the new language it creates, allowing us to casually converse about ideas and issues that we were struggling to describe before.

Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, Linked p222

Aside from the obvious sensory disarrangement, the main component of the psychedelic experience for me is a shift in perspective, a way seeing familiar things in a different light. One other way to do this is to read / listen as widely as possible. For example, you can go into a restaurant and trip out on:

• The taste, smell and texture of the food.
• The sense memories the meal engenders.
  
• The provenance of each ingredient.
• The chemical processes involved in their preparation.
• The physical processes of eating and digestion.
• The nutritional content of the food.
  
• The social dynamics between the people in the restaurant.
• The financial side of the business.
• How the place fits into the neighborhood.
• ...and so on.
  

All these things are floating around, different ways to talk about the same thing, and the richness of the experience seems to be in sometimes surrendering to one view and letting it take you as far as it can, and other times being easily distracted, taking a more comprehensive look at aspects that you mostly ignore.

Related posts:
Why I go out drinking more often than before
Mundane in one group
A continuous network of critical states

coop - mickey finn

Transmission of the agape

meso-american mushroom stones

Nothing sacred ever really dies out.

Richard Evans Schultes in a two part lecture on hallucinogenic plants here [audio not great, because it's old, but I don't know how old]

Schultes was one of the founding fathers of the discipline, along with R. Gordon Wasson and Dr. Hoffmann.

The planetary Other

plant technology

Reestablishing channels of direct communication with the planetary Other, the mind behind nature, through the use of hallucinogenic plants is the best hope for dissolving the steep walls of cultural inflexibility that appear to be channeling us toward true ruin.

Terence McKenna, Plan / plant / planet

What you repeatedly do

almost taiwan

Doing a big clean ahead of house guests arriving, listening to two old Mark Pesce talks on the same topic, around the same time [Fall 2002, see links at the end]. He mentions Wolfram's A New Kind of Science [whole book online here] and gives the executive summary as there are no formulas for some processes, but rather only processes that need to be followed from start to end, giving the example of a rose.

The same thing is the basis of wisdom vs. knowledge. Knowledge, as facts, can be downloaded / learned at high speed. For many things it's possible to jump over the process directly to the outcome, which enables people with almost no technological know-how, like myself, to function in a society surrounded by engineering marvels that are essentially black magic boxes. As a user, the process is unimportant and more or less invisible.

So back to Aristotle: "We are what we repeatedly do, Excellence is therefore not an act but a habit."

The first talk, Memes to an End, is slightly more scholarly, while the second, Bios and Logos, is the same material through a psychedelic lens, and several references to Terence McKenna, with my angle reminding me of this idea from somewhere in his work: most people take 40 years or so to see through the shit, if they ever do, that is culture, and now more people are living longer than ever. I don't really believe the supposed implications of this, as I think the mediated reality is so pervasive and deep that the cognitive dissonance of a mass awakening in middle age would be a break down of society, one that may well be happening, but expressed as alienation and substance / behavioral abuse rather than real recognition and communion. At 40 yrs old there's too much skin in the game to throw it all up for something authentic and better. Absurd, until you look around at what people do day after day after day.

The Pesce talks:
Memes to an End, via Future Hi
Bios and Logos from 2002 [text form here]

Slightly related post, on health:
The process not the outcome

cone shell via wikidepia

I knew what I wanted to do

I was working for Dow Chemical Company at the time as a research chemist. I had the good fortune of having seen that they were working on an interesting compound. The person in whose lab I was working at Dow had found a very easy way of making an almost unknown compound. They said, “We’d like to find some use for this,” and I said, “Gee, if you added a methyl group on this side instead of on this side, as well as on this side, and put an amine down there and make the carbamate, you’d probably have an insecticide.” “Oh?” So they put the methyl group over here, and put an amine down here—a dimethylamine— and a carbamate, and it became a commercial insecticide. And the attitude there was, “Gee, if you can predict things like that, you can just go do whatever you want to do!” That was about the time I had first tried mescaline, and I knew what I wanted to do.

Sasha Shulgin, interviewed with Anna by Earth & Fire Erowid at Mind States 2007, two parts in one pdf here

UPDATE: Sasha giving a talk in Amsterdam, 1998, with the title How I go about inventing new drugs, with thanks to Lorenzo at the Psychedelic Salon, which has a great archive of related podcasts.

The seemingly irrelevant, mediocre player

Various recent lifestyle choices have left me unable to do what I might want to inre. this blog, with far more freedom granted inre. meat life, and so the next few posts might be hurries to catch up and somewhat less thought out or polished than I'd like.

If you've read Moneyball by Michael Lewis then you need no encouragement to seek out this article he wrote on basketball. I know nothing about baseball [Moneyball] or basketball [that article], but who isn't ready to fall for the revealed truth of the seemingly irrelevant, mediocre player who makes all the difference in a game?

What we're talking about is ideas from emergence, complexity, and so on [what I think of as the psychedelic mindset] filtering down [up?] into real life, with pro sports being the bleeding edge of such things now that high finance's applications of extreme math have been shown to be little more than window dressing in a world that is far more complex than a few men on a court, playing by clear rules for an allotted time.

Unattached: the same in heat and cold

I love the man who hates not nor exults, who mourns not nor desires...and who remains unmoved who is the same to friend and foe, [the same] whether he is respected or despised, the same in heat and cold, in pleasure and in pain, who has put away attachment and remains unmoved by praise or blame...contended with whatever comes his way.

Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita, quoted on p77 The Happiness Hypothesis, by Jonathan Haidt

What would such a person be like? Ram Dass [born Richard Alpert, clip below] has a line about working with dying AIDS patients and keeping himself balanced between the extremes of hope and hopelessness, and managing to get off on the bad ends by seeing everything. I summarize it badly, but essentially he's rewired himself, or allowed the wiring to come loose. Now I can see the appeal of this, in theory and in practice, and it's obviously also an aim, but there is a wondering about how relationships run when you reach this state of non-attachment. Moreover, non-attachment in this field has never been a problem for me, and another aim is to become more attached, as a game, to try on the mask of a truly social animal, find out if it can be done this late in the day. Either way, some rewiring needs to be done, and the trick is in beating yourself, judo style, defeating bad arguments and practices with their own force, so that when they rush at you - thwump! - you end up unharmed on the other side, the strong and bad things overcome.

Here's a story about a time I failed to do this. When I was in London earlier this month I was very cold and felt genuine discomfort. Southern Taiwan has a warm climate - it's tropical -, and I like the weather here very much. I was walking with a friend in London and I would freeze up, shaking, meaning that every 15 minutes or so we had to duck into a bar or someplace and allow my body to reach an acceptable temperature. All this would've been fine, but we weren't really in the condition to be hiding out among people, and I was drawing attention, so we kept on the streets.

My friend tried to get me to change my thermoception submodality. I got down to the condition where I could understand that hot and cold are only physical sensations, that it should be possible to mess with my own responses to such stimuli. I got down to the freezing cold being an abstract notion that could be turned around in my head and viewed dispassionately, like a 3D model of a virus. For a short time I flipped my response to the input from discomfort to comfort, and the harsh cold was interpreted as pleasure, and I could see that the colder I got, the more pleasurable it would be. But very soon the cold came back as cold itself and pain, and a fear that if I kept fooling with my reactions then real damage could be done to my system. That night, probably unrelated, I was very sick in my hotel room.

It was an interesting experience, and going down into rewiring myself I understood extreme S&M practices, how an intensity of feeling could be opened up this way that the more well-used routes cannot offer. Pain leaves a more lasting impression than pleasure, because the consequences are generally so much more significant. If you can exploit the first to trigger the latter, there's whole new lands of delight to be discovered, [in theory].

But then I thought...what's the point? I enjoy living inside my conventional reality, all the more so because I know how fragile it is and how easily I could wreck the controls and cause all kinds of imbalances. I don't want to end up either freezing to death or getting off on genital mutilation.

I'm pretty sure the body is wiser than the mind, and the unconscious is smarter than the self. Anything that has been built up, hard wired over millions of years is to be trusted over something you learned in an afternoon. Still, because I'm idiot a guiding principle is still to tinker, hack the system, see what's possible, f*** up, and then reset most things to default.

Richard Alpert

Related post: The same life as Napoleon [The perils of extreme kicks]

No small amount of practice

Mishima and bodybuilding

The reviews of the Murakami book were mixed, but I enjoyed it, and am not a runner. I liked it for the same reasons that I keep going back to Mishima's Sun & Steel - the idea of coupling mental and physical discipline to reach a state of purity and blankness. This idea is with me a lot.

I have this new life wherein I get to set my own hours and do what I want, so long as the amount of work that I choose to accept gets done. I know that many people need to commute and work in offices, or - closer to home - stand up in front of classes of demanding students and perform. I need to be careful that I don't lose this life, which means I need to wake up and reflect on my luck as I make coffee in the morning, because it would be easy enough to lose this, either by performing badly and losing clients, or some greater misbehavior that would jeopardize my permanent visa, with the probability balanced fairly evenly between the two, propped up on either side by whatever discipline I can cultivate and then maintain.

My natural discipline is not so good, but I form habits very easily, and try and focus on good ones rather than bad ones. The last 10 days or so have been a refreshing proof of concept. I wake up early and start work by 07:30, and work until I lose concentration in the early afternoon.

The modafinil was both efficient and effective, with no obvious changes in perception or physical reaction, just clarity and focus. I want to use it to train myself into better habits. The interesting thing will be to see if I can use chemical scaffolding to build something new, and then have it as a free-standing structure, rather than rely on the drug. The values of psychedelics can be internalized and integrated with no small amount of practice, but is this true for other substances?

And on that note, here's two clips of Terence McKenna and Sasha Shulgin walking and talking together:

1/2

2/2

Related links:
My most popular post: Mishima's head on a plate [with picture]
All posts tagged Mishima
An interesting site that has other people's daily routines