The outstanding characteristic of the mystic’s vision is that it is satisfying

Genuine revolt goes with an all-too-definite life aim — hardly with the lack of it. Whether or not there is anything genuine about the vision, whether the visionary really sees anything, is open to dispute, but there is a wide consensus as to what the genuine experience is like, and how the genuine visionary behaves. As Baron von Hügel pointed out in one of his most penetrating observations, true illumination always results in a special sweetness of temper, a deep, lyric equanimity and magnanimity. The outstanding characteristic of the mystic’s vision is that it is satisfying. He is never frustrated, at least not in our worldly sense. It would be hard to find two less suitable words in any language to apply to Rimbaud than equanimity and magnanimity. This leaves us with Rimbaud as a sort of magician of the sensibility — of that specifically modern sensibility invented by Blake and Hoelderlin and Baudelaire — and an innovator in syntax, the first thoroughly radical revealer of the poetic metalogic which is the universal characteristic of twentieth-century verse.

Kenneth Rexroth - Rimbaud as Capitalist Adventurer

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

We went, and I won easily

LIFE

The real secret behind top athletes’ genius, then, may be as esoteric and obvious and dull and profound as silence itself. The real, many-veiled answer to the question of just what goes through a great player’s mind as he stands at the center of hostile crowd-noise and lines up the free-throw that will decide the game might well be: nothing at all.

How can great athletes shut off the Iago-like voice of the self? How can they bypass the head and simply and superbly act? How, at the critical moment, can they invoke for themselves a cliché as trite as “One ball at a time” or “Gotta concentrate here,” and mean it, and then do it? Maybe it’s because, for top athletes, clichés present themselves not as trite but simply as true, or perhaps not even as declarative expressions with qualities like depth or triteness or falsehood or truth but as simple imperatives that are either useful or not and, if useful, to be invoked and obeyed and that’s all there is to it.

What if, when Tracy Austin writes that after her 1989 car crash, “I quickly accepted that there was nothing I could do about it,” the statement is not only true but exhaustively descriptive of the entire acceptance process she went through? Is someone stupid or shallow because she can say to herself that there’s nothing she can do about something bad and so she’d better accept it, and thereupon simply accept it with no more interior struggle? Or is that person maybe somehow natively wise and profound, enlightened in the childlike way some saints and monks are enlightened?

This is, for me, the real mystery—whether such a person is an idiot or a mystic or both and/or neither. The only certainty seems to be that such a person does not produce a very good prose memoir. That plain empirical fact may be the best way to explain how Tracy Austin’s actual history can be so compelling and important and her verbal account of that history not even alive. It may also, in starting to address the differences in communicability between thinking and doing and between doing and being, yield the key to why top athletes’ autobiographies are at once so seductive and so disappointing for us readers. As is so often SOP with the truth, there’s a cruel paradox involved. It may well be that we spectators, who are not divinely gifted as athletes, are the only ones able truly to see, articulate, and animate the experience of the gift we are denied. And that those who receive and act out the gift of athletic genius must, perforce, be blind and dumb about it—and not because blindness and dumbness are the price of the gift, but because they are its essence.

David Foster Wallace, "How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart" in Consider the Lobster

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.

Shulgins / Horizons

A Boston-area housewife considers a Buddha statue in 1963 after taking LSD. NY Times

Another good talk from Ann and Sasha Shulgin, this time at the recent [Sept. 2008] Horizons Perspectives on Psychedelics set of talks. Subjects covered include: Bohemian Grove [Sasha's been a member for 50 yrs], the rapid spread of new substances, a definition of true hallucinations and how to stay healthy in such a life, but as ever with the Shulgins the take away is what a good relationship they have with each other, their selves, and the wider community.

Related sites: Horizons and all the talks from the event, and The Psychedelic Salon has a large and growing archive [158 shows to date] of MP3 discussions and talks with all the usual suspects.

Drinking quietly, doing nothing

Zen, for when all else has failed.

They say patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel, but I'd add art and blind obedience / brain death too. Possibly also TV, but definitely also Zen. You're never too far gone to come home to Zen, which welcomes the dumb and deranged, asking only that you're willing to give up your self, a bargain that even the devil is supposed to offer pretty good terms on.

When I was younger - and I was always younger - my aim was sitting quietly, doing nothing. That never really paid rent, so now I'm a riot of activity, but I still have way too many books on Zen and Taoism, it's Chinese cousin.

Neither of which, in their original form, cross the line from philosophies to religions - still no need for a man in the sky- and neither of which I mean to disparage in the second paragraph, above.

It's just I came across a Zen book today and put it in the slow-skim pile to let me feel better about failing in so many other areas. Zen isn't impressed with worldly success (except when it is), but either way it's a welcoming discipline that offers a wholesome alternative to madness / depression / suicide. None of which I'm feeling, but it's always good to build reserves ahead of time, to get ready for the return to the mean, and I'm feeling good enough today that some crash is due.

Slight digression. Success, money, sex, fame. It's what the game is supposed to about, right? Pick any two of those and you've got it made. Just ask Elvis:

The Book of Disquiet, text 58

Dr Hofmann died today

More Pessoa:

Each of us is intoxicated by different things. There's intoxication enough for me in just living. Drunk on feeling I drift but never stray. If it's time to go back to work, I go to the office just life everyone else. If not, I go down to the river to stare at the waters, again just like everyone else. I'm just the same. But behind this sameness, I secretly scatter my personal firmament with stars and therein create my own infinity.

Text 58

I think even behind the last sameness there's more of the same. Doesn't everyone secretly scatter their personal firmament with stars and therein create their own infinity? If not, why not?

Pure hypnagogic delight

History is the stories we tell about the past.

Tripping out in a cafe this morning. I was proof-reading, and running on boredom, tiredness, caffeine and hunger - a real state of neutral emptiness. I kept nodding off for a few seconds at a time, then jerking awake, and it was a good feeling I was getting into, pure hypnagogic delight. A sense of self and a sense of nothing, passing out and coming to, and in the space between them - a few seconds at most - getting into warm, gold light, supple bliss.

Anything can be accessed and created in the head - if you can think it, you can feel it, experience it. But it's hard to conjure up the right state of mind, to hang on the edge of sleep and wakefulness, to lose yourself but still remember things.

The fact of the matter is the world is a game of hide-and-seek. Peek-a-boo! Now you see it, now you do not, because very obviously if you were the supreme self, what would you do? I mean, would you just sit there and be blissfully one for ever and ever and ever? No, obviously not. You would play games. You would, because the very nature of a no energy system is that it has no energy system unless it lets go of itself. So you would let go of yourself and you would get lost. You would get involved in all sorts of adventures and you would forget who you were, just as when you play a game. And although you are only playing for dimes or chips, you get absorbed in the game.

There is nothing really important to win, nothing really important to lose, and yet it becomes fantastically interesting, who wins and who loses. And so in the same way it is said that the supreme self gets absorbed through ever so many different channels which we call the different beings in the plot, just like an artist or a writer gets completely absorbed in the artistic creation that he is doing, or an actor gets absorbed in the part in the drama. [continues]

Alan Watts

What is supposedly essential in me I neglect, run ahead of, lag behind, zig-zag and avoid. What is supposedly essential are only the stories I tell about myself to myself, when the key is to forget them all and only to be feeling.

Mishima's head on a plate

When I was in college I used to have a serious idea that the first third of your life, say until 25 or so, was what formed you, the second part saw this bloom, and the last part was you dealing with the consequences.

It's not something I think about these days, but it came back as I was working on a project to revisit the authors who meant a lot to me when I was in high school. One of these was Yukio Mishima.

Perhaps I know now that he's more insane than cool, that his longed-for 'great cause' should have been his family or a lover, not nationalism and blood. But when I open anything of his the discipline, solitude, cruelty, and masochism draw me into that world again, a super-heightened teenage sensibility. I think I like his writing even more as I get older, and his style in general. Why not cut your belly open and have someone chop your head off after making an ill-considered, ill-received, and totally pointless grand gesture? Look at the severed head, above, he's smiling.

A few weeks ago I picked up a secondhand copy of Mishima: A Biography, by John Nathan [who knew Mishima in the '60s and translated his works]. It's my reading this weekend to break the run of science and psychedelia, to bring me back to the flesh. From the preface to the original edition:

In two months, Mishima would have been forty-six. He had written forty novels, eighteen plays, [...] twenty volumes of short stories, and as many of literary essays. He was a director, an actor, an accomplished swordsman and a muscle man [...]; seven times he had been around the world, three times he had been nominated for the Nobel Prize. He was, besides, an international celebrity with a famous zest for life, a man who always seemed singularly capable of enjoying the rewards of his prodigious talent and superhuman will. A few days before his suicide he had been planning for fully a year, he confided to his mother that he had never done anything in his life he had wanted to do.

What claims to be Mishima's last interview

Body chemistry

John C. Lilly

I'm big on body chemistry. I used to get in bad moods easily, and they could mostly be traced to eating too much bread. Since I moved onto a low carb diet I've had zero mood swings, but yesterday I ate a loaf for lunch and by 4pm I was feeling bad. It was a good test of the system.

I still drink too much coffee, it's my one true addiction. I used to run it in cycles, upping my consumption until I got the shakes and then cutting it out for a week or so, moving back to tea. Lately that system's been abandoned, but I cut down by moving from a pot to twin Vietnamese drippers, a fast and slow one, and let my obsession with details run wild with new combinations of beans. Around the corner is a coffee wholesaler, and when I die I'll be riddled with caffeine.

My coffee use echoes that of John C. Lilly and ketamine, although in truth I show more moderation. He'd stay up for three weeks injecting more as the last dose wore off, and even shot up while conducting classes (albeit at Esalen).

Lilly with the Janus equipment, getting ready to communicate with dolphins

It's my birthday soon, and I got some books as gifts. One of them was The Scientist by John C. Lilly, the other was On Food and Cooking, by Harold McGee, and I'll be surprised and rather disappointed if the latter doesn't turn out to be more of a trip. I read about what I'm eating, drinking, and it's another way to become closer to things.

The many different ways of seeing an apple: culinary, nutritional, botanical, economic, chemical, aesthetic, metaphorical, and so on. The idea being to extrapolate as much meaning as possible from what's already present, to see things much more as they really are. But it'd be hard to do this without giving in to madness for a while, and then no way to talk about such things without boring the hell out of others and giving the game away.

The only [formerly] legitimate guy with comparable psychedelic experience to Lilly was probably Timothy Leary. Shuglin and others are names to conjure with in the first rank of the community, but Lilly and Leary are the two who are best known for taking too much, too often.

I read the two recent biographies of Leary, caricatured as the pro and the con versions of his story. In neither does he come out very well, more like a Hugh Hefner wannabe who hooked up with drugs rather than porn, but for much the same ends. If you look at them, they're like brothers, always the same big smile on their faces, and probably with good reason, but their aims and ends are not what it was supposed to be.

But then here I am, setting limits like a puritan. Still, a smile can be faked. It was Marshall McLuhan who told Leary to smile beatifically at cameras in order to sell his message more convincingly. But I don't like his smile, it annoys me like a commercial. It's the smile that I do when I have to.

That said, I came across Leary's 1964 Cooper Union address the other day and it holds up very well. Part of the background is that he's just come back from Mexico after an early experiment in psychedelic communal living. He's already way gone into the 60s lifestyle, but the rest of the world doesn't know a thing about what's looming. He can still be welcomed as a public speaker to a group of students. In this talk he's lucid, charming and doesn't oversell the stuff, while also kicking off the whole scene. A rewarding hour from another time and place.


Now Lilly is a very different character. While Leary went off and set out to become an international playboy, Lilly shut himself away in an isolation tank and tripped hard, and I feel quite an affinity for the guy, for his need to get further away from people and further into something else. Will be dipping in and out of the autobiography over the next week or so, and posting things as necessary. I doubt there will be as many anecdotes as with Leary. Floating alone, in lukewarm water, in the dark, doesn't really lend itself to narrative. But so what? Life isn't a work of fiction.

The Book of Disquiet, texts 183 & 204

More from Pessoa's Book of Disquiet.

I believe that the present is very ancient simply because everything, when it did exist, existed in the present.

Text 183

Freedom is the possibility of isolation. You are only free if you can withdraw from men and feel no need to seek them out for money, or society, or love, or glory, or even curiosity, for none of these things flourish in silence and solitude. If you cannot live alone, then you were born a slave.

Text 204

A methodology for studying alternate reality

A Methodology for Studying Various Interpretations of the DMT-Induced Alternate Reality

An interesting study proposal from May 2006, but haven't been able to find any follow up. Excerpt follows:

This section discusses three interpretations of the DMT-induced alternate reality. These interpretations run the gamut from DMT being a psychoactive molecule that provides a complete hallucination (i.e. a full sensory hallucination) to DMT acting as a gateway to a co-existing alien reality. First, the DMT experience can be interpreted as a hallucination where the human subject synthesizes the elaborate experience each time DMT is administered (i.e. an inconsistent subjective reality). In this sense, the DMT-induced reality is not persistent in that the alternate reality cannot exist without the momentary perception of the DMT inebriant. Furthermore, it is inconsistent in that repeated doses of DMT do not have correlated responses within the individual human subject (e.g. recurrent experiential themes). In this case, the DMT induced perception would be akin to the states perceived while on other psychoactives such as LSD and psilocybin. However, unlike LSD and psilocybin, the subject is experiencing a complete hallucination (i.e. a purely synthetic world) and not simply a distortion of their perceptual mechanisms (e.g. ‘melting walls’ and visual trails).

Second, the alternate reality could be a consistent subjective hallucination in that the DMT experience is persistent only to the individual human subject. This means that the subject may return to the DMT-induced alternate reality and perceive recurrent themes (e.g. same beings, similar conversations), but that perception is privy only to the isolated individual and does not occur across all subjects. This interpretation could imply that there exists some subconscious mechanisms facilitating the persistent personal experience. Whether that mechanism is solely biological (e.g. stimulating particular fundamental, or low-level, areas of the brain associated with the representation of humanoid beings) or psychological (e.g. stimulating high-level cortical regions associated with one’s life experiences) are two potential sub-hypothesis of the falsification of the consistent subjective reality as being a co-existing objective alien reality.

Finally, the DMT-induced alternate reality may be an objective reality that is persistent irrespective of the perceiving individual and therefore is the same reality being experienced by all DMT inebriants (i.e. a co-existing world, a true alternate reality). Though being the most extraordinary interpretation, as will be shown, this interpretation may be the easiest to validate.

The test for the second option is two give the entities a math problem, come out of the trip, and return and get the answer. The test for the third is to go in, give the problem, come out, and then send someone else back in to get the answer. Failure seems assured.

Skeptic / experienced psychonaut James L. Kent comments:

The fact remains that DMT entities do exist, but it is my belief that they represent subjective personifications of alien archetypes within our own minds. We all have the elf/alien archetype embedded within our structure; and we utilize subconscious processes which are so autonomous and foreign to our "executive" consciousness that we cannot even identify them as "self" when we see them. Imagine, for instance, if the neural network responsible for making "snap decisions" -- a little pocket in the medial pre-frontal cortex -- suddenly took visual form due to hyperactive excitation of your visual cortex. Instead of receiving feedback counseling via internal voice or "gut feeling", that voice would suddenly have a body and a face and a costume, and perhaps a fully choreographed dance routine to go along with whatever it was telling you.

Now part of me is a sucker for the sci-fi thrills of another dimension inhabited with intelligent beings existing in the same space as our own, and I certainly think that research on inner space should be undertaken with all the seriousness of research to outer space, but with regard to the search for intelligent life...we have it all around us. Working with cetaceans - in the vein of John Lilley - should be a priority, but also hacking into other life forms, ways of being.

So, being conservative, skeptical and generally in awe of the brain and what how little we know of what it does, I'm inclined to follow Kent, above. I think consciousness is an aggregate of many processes - a society of mind, and from here to DMT elves is not such a leap. Without much reflection I'll pull in Julian Jaynes and his theory about the bicameral mind. Basically this is that long ago humans were not subjectively conscious, and heard voices in their heads giving them orders which they took to be gods, but which in fact came from the subject's own head...it's late, it's complicated, you can find more online if you want to. From what I've read I'm not convinced, although I am certain - as a naive and easily swayed layman working only with the raw material of my own experience - that consciousness is environmentally constructed, and so vastly different societies would produce vastly different minds. But keeping with Jaynes, the bicameral mind, and gods inside the head - does DMT cause a mental split, and does this produce the entitiess? We're hard-wired to find faces in clouds, why not to voices in our head? No homunculi are needed, just whispers and shadows. But at some point I'll have to write some posts about salvia.

Further comment on the study, more sympathetic to the idea of autonomous entities, can be found on another new blog, one rather more devoted to this topic than mine: psychopraxis.blogspot.com

Misguided enthusiasm

I have a lot of experience with misguided emotions, but I'm getting better at channeling my energies and hope the most I can be accused of these days is misguided enthusiasm. I had 18 months, two years, when I was all about cacti and drove my wife crazy with trips to plant markets each weekend and hours spent mooning over the them. But now I've made my peace with cacti, and they're no longer an obsession.

Rode out to the country listening to a Terence McKenna talk from 1995, The State of the Stone. Some good things, but I find his attitude to science annoying, or I would if he wasn't such a good speaker. To be generous, what I take from him is a conscious interplay between fiction and nonfiction, a sci-fi thrill that extrapolates and bends to amaze. There's also no direct references to 2012, which is a plus, as I find that talk tiresome.

John Horgan's Rational Mysticism has a good chapter on McKenna, entitled The Man in the Purple Sparkly Suit, which acknowledges that he's less a philosopher, and far less a scientist, but rather a performance artist, jester and poet. Horgan falls for his charm gets what I think is the essential point of his riffs - that life is weirder and more wonderful than we suppose, that humanity is something interesting, important and good. Which may not be true, but that's no reason not to entertain such lines of thought for the feelings and internal images they inspire, the connections that they set up or uncover.

McKenna presented all of this with a michievous grin, daring us to take him seriously.

p182

Beyond me

Been listening to various Rudy Rucker podcasts and reading his blog, so picked up Infinity and the Mind online, without being able to browse. A mistake, as the math is beyond me. Anything that can't be done on a cell phone calculator leaves me baffled. So far I've been skipping all the pages full of symbols, but maybe I'll sit down and try and find out what they mean. I can probably get only 10% of the whole thing into my head.

Fortunately, 10% of infinity is still infinity.

He quotes Benjamin Blood, who [working before William James] would hold a cloth soaked with ether to his face and slip into unconsciousness, then as his hand fell away he would come to again, moving from trance to full awareness, which in this quote he refers to as sanity:

I think most persons who have tested it will accept this as the central point of the illumination: i) that sanity is not the basic quality of intelligence, but is a mere condition which is variable ... ii) and that only in sanity is formal or contrasting thought, while the naked life is realized outside of sanity altogether; iii) and it is this instant contrast of this 'tasteless water of souls' with formal thought as we 'come to' that leaves the patient an astonishment that the awful mystery of Life is at last but a homely and common thing, and that aside from mere formality the majestic and the absurd are of equal dignity. p217 [my bold]

The problem with transcendent experiences is the difficulty of integrating what's been felt with everyday life. What I like about the line above is that it says that both sides of the experience are equally valid, and that it's in the moment of crossing from one state to the other that something useful is learned. In Rucker's case this is the moving from awareness of the infinite - the one - back to the everyday - the many.

We have to live in the everyday world - get a job of somekind, turn up and perform, ideally with good health and the desired level of human contact. Jeremy Narby, author of The Cosmic Serpent, says this is what he learned from shamans:

...do what you can for those around you (including plants and animals), but don't make a big deal of it. ... I spend my time promoting land titling projects and bilingual education for indigenous people, and thinking about how to move knowledge forward and how to open up understanding between people; I also spend time with my children, and with children in my community (as a soccer coach); and I look after the plants in my garden, without using pesticides and so on. But I do this because I think it needs doing, and because it's all I can do, but not because it's "spiritual."

The challenge is in not getting blitzed on transcendence as an escape from everyday situations that it's possible to overcome or do away with, and instead to use those moments out of time to work toward the change.

The week-long vacation for Chinese New Year starts in 20 hours, and I'll be getting blitzed.