Psychedelics and then what?
To live with the poetry of the past in a mathematical world.
"The eyes have a vision of Eternity... Sounds take on colors
and colors contain music... Suppose you look at a tree gracefully
waving in the wind... you attribute to the tree your passion, your
desire or your melancholy, its murmurs and its writhing becomes yours,
and before long you are the tree. In the same way, a soaring bird
first represents the immortal desire to fly above things human, but
already you yourself are the bird..." (1860, 1967).
Charles Baudelaire in Les Paradis Artificiels.
Mind manifestation:
Let's start by looking at the psychedelic entry in wikipedia. The
psychedelic experience is defined as "the perception of aspects of one's mind previously
unknown, or by the creative exuberance of the mind liberated from its ordinary
fetters...". This definition seems vague and fuzzy to me. If I apply this
understanding of psychedelic experience to life; I would have to say that then
every moment IS a psychedelic experience. Every moment being a new one, we
can not know what the next minute brings.
What does seem to happen is that we forget to view each moment as a new one.
We get caught up in our lives, caught up in the every day doings, the routine,
and we forget to open our eyes to the magic of each new moment.
Perhaps then, the psychedelic experience is more about re-membering this constant
newness, that it is about accessing a so called "psychedelic state",
since we are in a psychedelic state by the time we "are".
The modern culture would like to believe, and would like to let
us believe that everything can be one day explained, that we can
cure everything with a little pill, that everything can be contained
in such or such theorie. From this philosophy, we have "A Theory
of Everything" for about anything, the fashionable "Singularity",
we have black holes and vortexes, uploaders and Trekkers, wormholes
and AI's. We have an endless area of propheties and various seers,
we have akashic fields, hidden Masters and their shadow/light worlds.
To replace the old gods with a new and hipper crew of them, the modern
thinkers have designed a new system just as closed as the old ones
are.
And the ancient argument goes on:
"
My god is better than yours"
"
NO, mine is"
"
Your god is old and passé!! God is dead!"
"
Your god is new and blasphemic! Long live the King!"
And some like to think this is change....
Of course there is nothing wrong with trying to organize this flow
of information which anyone pondering life receives/opens to. But
there seems to be something wrong in believing that one's own insight
is valid, or at least any valider than the next point of view. These "Everything
of theories", stepping on our toes, do not let room for the
mystery, for the unknown or for the beatific states. These theories
reduce the dreamer in each of us to a sort of mathematical equation,
a chemical formula, turning us into statistics without a name or
a face, without a personality behind those experiences.
So, where to stand in this sea of gods?
If I think of the future, I can see not one, not 2, not 3, but
an infinite amounts of them. I can imagine total destruction, destruction
always being the simplest of sights. I can see Blade Runner worlds,
space travel, and more. If I try to make an effort, and try to see
futures through positive glasses; which takes a lot more work that
the negative futures, I can see a place where people start respecting
each other as well as their environments. The worlds imagined by
artists and writers are by now infinite.
People look and dream multi-verses, when really the multiverse is
right here and right now.
Time travel already exist, and travel agencies are the ones selling
the tickets through space/time. In a few hours, you can find yourself
in a tribe like state, watching old women passing sheeps wool through
their ancient fingers,turning the piles of raw wool into the threads
that will make their mythological carpets. In a few hours you can
go to a place where the sun is still the only clock, and the days
are still designed around the harvesting of the food grown for the
village. In a few hours you can also find yourself at the center
of the most modern of cities, filled with neon signs and people running
around to buy the latest toys. Time travel is now accessible to anyone
who can afford a travel stubb through space.
One of the question now changes from "does time travel exist",
but rather "for how long will it exist?". How long will
we be able to look at nature in the wild, as species disappear every
day? For how long will our kids be able to breathe air which doesn't
also kill them?
Some, as an answer to everything dream of the space filled with
stars. And I understand this, as I used to dream of space as well.
Space was my first dreams, my first place to escape as a kid. I thought
childishly: "its ok, we're just going to go into space. F_ this
planet anyhows". Now I understand that my space dreams were
just the perfect way of dealing with my inadequacy at trying to enjoy
every day life, a way to put a conforting image onto my fears, a
way to hide from myself, a way to loose myself in the unknown. Inside
us all, there is still a kid that likes shiny stuff.
Of course, I am not saying that we should stop thinking about space,
for the simple reason that i dont think we can. We're a curious spieces,
we like to explore. All I am saying is that space will most likely
not solve any of our real and deeper issues. We will go into space
carrying the same problems that we have here on Terra. We might translate
the problems into a new set of questions, transform them onto new
shapes, but at the end of the day, we will still be faced with our
own void. For now, I am not floating around in space, I will adapt
to it when I will be there, for my mam taught me "intelligence
is the faculty of adaptation".
"The metaphysical desire...desires beyond everything that
can simly complete it. It is like goodness - the Desired does not
fulfill
it, but deepens it... [Desire] nourishes itself, one might say, with
its hunger."
Emmanuel Levinas.
Psychedelic drugs and ego loss:
I have done my fair share of experimenting, of "mind expension".
On my road to discovery, I have gone to the height spaces of the so called "ego
loss" as I have experienced the abyss of the addiction world. Both roads
have taught me many things.
Perhaps what they have taught me is a similar message, both roads being translated
through different symbols. Each road having it's own lessons, each road ending
in one and the same point: the eye, the "i" that sees, the "i" that
sees no more eye, the "eye" that becomes the "i".
I can not believe in a total "ego loss". The term to me does not
work, as even when "i" am lost, it is still a part of me that is
feeling it's own loss. It has to be something else.
Let's turn to the buddhist and see what life times of meditation
can teach.
The buddhist would say: "enlightment is jut the begining."
If it is now unquestionable that there are some "transcendent
spaces" to get access to, yet, we still seem to argue over what
exactly is that space. Each of us will have a diferent definition
of what one's own "transcendence" might be. One's transcendence
can be looked down upon as being merely swimming on the surface by
another, yet, for anyone experiencing such a state, it is indeed,
a "transcendence", whether we transe-dance during the most
mundane of acts, like looking at a leaf on a tree, or transcend with
a near death experience, it is a transcendence. We all transcend
ourself every day, every moment, and that in itself is perhaps the
ultimate transe-and-dance, every day: we are.
Many from the psychedelic drug world seem to still see the drug
experience as the ultimate and final point to acheive, as something
which people whom have not experienced an alternate mind state via
drug could not "understand". In a way they are correct,
as indeed, each experience is its own moment in space/time, relative
only to the person or persons experiencingit. But there is a tendency
of the drug takers to think: "you can not understand", "you
have not gone far enough". In that sense, the supposedly open
minded drug takers are acting exactlty as what they critique in the
non drug takers. In that sense the drug taker confuses the psychedelic
experience realm with the drug experience. In that sense, it forgets
that the drug world is only one aspect of a larger experience. As
the non drug taker might think: "those drugggies, they just
dont know". It is the same type of self induldgence on both
sides. As if both sides are still striving for a diference between
them, instead of joining forces and learning from the other. As if
both sides are still trying to define themselves by what they do,
instead of by what they have learned from what they do.
The new generation of psychedelic thinkers is born, and as any generation,
one of its job is to take what they like out of the teachers of the
old, and leave out what they dont like. The new generation has to
get rid of some of the original enthusiasm for the first drug induced
psychonauts. It has to get rid of that unique feeling that it is
bringing anything new from the oldmystics and poets of the world.
As much as the drug culture has produced some great things, such
as great parties and the field of psychedelics used for therapeutical
purposes, it has also produced a wide variety of problems, ranging
from addiction, poverty, psychosis, total corruption, and enough
fashionable kids sitting around chasing the dragon to create a market
for multicolored munchies.
Perhaps its time to put the wave of the 60's idealism to a new beat.
A psy beat. A beat that could take the lessons from the past, spice
it up with the new technologies, in an effort to preserve what left
we have of the world as we once knew it. By this I am refering to
the precious natural resources which Terra offers, the minerals,
the plants, the animals..and heck maybe even the monkey known as
homo-sapiens...
"There was never any more inception than there is now,
Nor any more youth or age than there is now;
And will never be an more perfection than there is now,
Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now."
Walt Whitman in Leaves of Grass. Song of Myself.
Links
Erowid
The
Shulgins :" Be informed then choose"
