Alloklais
Rising Star
Journey back to Self
Forgive me, essays and writing, it can be bullying to subject a reader to a stream of thoughts. This place seems to keep an undertow of seriousness - and so deserves a serious essay. Already it poses the first question on balance between the sacred and the irreverent. I guess it takes a certain panache to stay light-hearted in the wake of an Atlas rocket.
I am feeling ambivalent like the last unspoken word of a Beckett play.
Being here, it’s an exploration. I don’t want to fool myself - that DMT should be all puppies and rainbows. I am looking for the color though between the black and white, as I spend a lot of time in the liminal spaces.
I’ve returned and re-returned to this introduction essay many times. Each time its a different voice, and speaks to the complex of a constant changing self.
This Original Post: I am a Clipper caught in Irons. The OP, it’s a blind date with people you already know. Where to start - the internal argument never ends. A close friend, a good twenty years older, with the ZZ Top beard and Gandalf’s brows, he told me, “Dude. Your brain is like a pogo-stick but you’re so not unstable like a Mars rover.” I resemble that.
The reason I am here feels like it keeps shifting, in drifts and in dunes of sand and psyche.
I’ve been the intrepid mind explorer since 1982, when I wrote my first tenth grade term paper on Albert Hoffman and LSD. And then waited. I was a good kid, conforming mostly but curious, though never really fit in, often felt like an outsider; but kept straight A’s, honors and AP, was destined for Cal Berkeley. But that never happened: I took my first dose in 1983.
Now I’m half way through life. I have a beautiful family, enjoy my work and colleagues, though culture’s a bit corporate, button down, button up; but lots of love in the life, and lots of alone time too. While the crew sleeps I’m cutting the fog through waves of undulating grays and synapses. I’ve pretty much have always sailed solo. But I think it’s time to start re-learning the lessons of a supportive community.
It’s not a struggle but in some ways a lonely road. I have no peers really to discuss this with. I think this too is a driver behind the essay. The idea of admittance to a community.
Regardless, had I discovered DMT-Nexus or not, I was going to get here: I have all the source material and lab equipment now, have read and re-read many texts, endless times. I’ve listened to countless talks of Terrence McKenna, love to digest books, especially Robert Anton Wilson, Mae Wan Ho, Miller, Mishima, Hofstadter, Borges. As terse as Borges is, every re-reading of his short stories, it’s like visiting with an old friend. Cigar on the stoop and a lazy command of the world. A life time of prep, getting all psyched up, but in slow motion - a stop frame animation of clouds rolling and flora opening - through my mostly steady manner. Scaling K2 or spelunking Son Doong takes planning, patience, stamina. Fearlessness? DMT does not strike me as an impulsive picnic.
So I am returning to where I was scared witless from my first break through:
In 1986 Oakland CA , my first and only Grateful Dead / Dylan concert, already enjoying a wondrous tab of LSD, when a friend asks if I'd like to smoke some marijuana; and so produces the tiniest dime bag I had ever seen, a postage stamp with one distal sized bud. I have one toke and am suddenly propelled into a swirling vortex of kaleidoscopic shards and colored light, waves of crashing geometries and into the most beautiful and terrifying Bliss. The firmament on Fire. And I am introduced...to myself....and the Universe.
I exclaim the wonder! And my friend’s every response is a question, “Or is it?” And he says, “I am you. And you are me.” The thousands around us go into a blur. And I see myself in him, a doppelganger, talking back, serious, funny, macabre, a fun-house mirror right out of Duck Soup. And to the side a third appears, an old man, stooped and craggy faced, long unkempt beard, wild and sullen eyes: we look at one another, both ashamed, lost. At that moment I realize I have to get out of the concert. Dylan is taking the stage while streams of concert goers are leaving, an endless river to the BART, and if I don’t get out of there, I am that old man, stuck, forever lost at the Dead.
In the next week during an Indian Philosophy class in the University I am introduced to the Upanishads, where we discuss Sat, Chit and Anand: pure being, consciousness and joy. Brahma and Atma, self and Self and All, Oneness. I almost couldn’t contain my excitement, that that was part of my ineffable experience at the concert. I’ve reached back millennia and across to an alien culture. More than ever now I am convinced that that little dime bag was in fact bud with DMT.
I have been seeking ever since, walking the labyrinth slowly back to center. A beautiful, strange and Inspiring journey. Dovened with Chasids, studied with Witnesses, immersed myself in Suzuki, Zen, some meditation, yoga, Buddhist studies, transpersonal psychology, even Crowley, Kabbalah, Greene, Hawking, and Lao Tsu. I agree with the skeptics and still call myself a Pantheist. It’s all good - until someone loses an eye. As much I like the edge I still wear safety glasses and a helmut.
There's always been a balance between drive and restraint - circling, spiraling and navigating, charting the stars, back to the DMT experience.
I am at the beach, often, always. Standing in the water at the shore. When is it that I am in the ocean, and when is it that I am on the beach? It is this liminal place of the in-between, neither one nor the other, but both. Where the waves crash, it’s dynamic, energy in motion. I imagine that this is what it is like beyond the horizon. If I use DMT (or is it the DMT calling me?) and get back to the questions, do I get back there again? Do I want to?
As a child I thought I could see molecules. If I relax my gaze even today I feel like I can still see them. A snowy veneer over everything I see. The pointillism of Seurat. It's a color-noise that forms and surfaces and essences arise from. I also thought I could fly. Maybe I was three, definitely not four. I have memories of jumping up high in front of the house, right off from the lawn. My father was reaching up to try to catch me. I was floating away, and I would flap my arms furiously downward, palms up, trying to push the air so I would descend. I felt that if I got too high and too far away, I would float off. I had to return to earth, back to my father's hands.
I feel like I have a lot to say, too much at times. A hundred me's with arms outstretched could not embrace all the thoughts. Is that Avalokiteshvara with her thousand arms? "Should He ever become disheartened in saving sentient beings, may His body shatter into a thousand pieces." The thousand pieces, like the break through on DMT.
Might we pass through these shards on the way in?
A recursive life.
Why am I here on the Nexus? Deconstructing the personal myth? Pirsig did.
The stories we tell ourselves and others about who we are, our pattern, our stasis. The static quality that gives rise to form. And then we reach, to novelty, to a disruption, the dynamic quality. I believe this is DMT’s calling to me.
One moment, The Bug-Angels&Devils, the next moment, Bach - Fugue in G minor. BWV 578. The internal argument never ending. They are deconstructing the Art of Fugue. Isn't that what we do? What happens when we break through?
A few years ago I got this yen, this itch, to smoke cannabis again. It had been years. More than a decade. But not to party. It was contemplative now. I started painting. Madly painting. It was returning. Even the cannabis is feeling like a sacrament.
So I allow the falling inward into a thousand lighted strands like clouded cob webs shimmering. Deep into the fugue. And my skin gets warm.
Since I’ve felt a rising sense of compassion. This has been new for me. Guy shows up in the pipe shop in such bad shape. You could see him struggling. He was on the verge of tears at every wince, standing there, trying to hold on. Young man. Tall. He should have been a CEO. Whatever hand he was dealt and played, now he is here. Unbathed. Hair long and matted. Filthy. Urchin, even Rascal like. Everything he owned was on his person: backpack, bed roll, long wooly hat. So strange for the hot weather beachside.
I would have in the past recoiled. But now I feel this rising call to help somehow. This kid needed help. I don't think this was his choice. I think there must be a kindness dividend somehow. Like change. In your pocket.
I blink and the days slip by.
I soften my gaze and let the three dimensional world flatten like an illuminated, medieval painting. I’ve always felt that I could swing a hammer into the field of sight and shatter it like a mirror.
Funny how much digging goes into writing an essay. I am darkening my own shadow, and starting to feel more trepidatious about the DMT journey. I am starting to scare myself, some. Is this something I want? Could I be ascribing far more importance to this than is real or warranted? Do I need more questions in my life?
Freedom of Thought to me seems to be worth fighting for.
Perhaps some day I will proudly say Smoalk Moar. And if not, that is okay too.
Cheers, thank you if you made it this far (brevity isn’t my finest point), and looking forward to contributing beyond lurking and voracious reading.
- Alloklais
Forgive me, essays and writing, it can be bullying to subject a reader to a stream of thoughts. This place seems to keep an undertow of seriousness - and so deserves a serious essay. Already it poses the first question on balance between the sacred and the irreverent. I guess it takes a certain panache to stay light-hearted in the wake of an Atlas rocket.
I am feeling ambivalent like the last unspoken word of a Beckett play.
Being here, it’s an exploration. I don’t want to fool myself - that DMT should be all puppies and rainbows. I am looking for the color though between the black and white, as I spend a lot of time in the liminal spaces.
I’ve returned and re-returned to this introduction essay many times. Each time its a different voice, and speaks to the complex of a constant changing self.
This Original Post: I am a Clipper caught in Irons. The OP, it’s a blind date with people you already know. Where to start - the internal argument never ends. A close friend, a good twenty years older, with the ZZ Top beard and Gandalf’s brows, he told me, “Dude. Your brain is like a pogo-stick but you’re so not unstable like a Mars rover.” I resemble that.
The reason I am here feels like it keeps shifting, in drifts and in dunes of sand and psyche.
I’ve been the intrepid mind explorer since 1982, when I wrote my first tenth grade term paper on Albert Hoffman and LSD. And then waited. I was a good kid, conforming mostly but curious, though never really fit in, often felt like an outsider; but kept straight A’s, honors and AP, was destined for Cal Berkeley. But that never happened: I took my first dose in 1983.
Now I’m half way through life. I have a beautiful family, enjoy my work and colleagues, though culture’s a bit corporate, button down, button up; but lots of love in the life, and lots of alone time too. While the crew sleeps I’m cutting the fog through waves of undulating grays and synapses. I’ve pretty much have always sailed solo. But I think it’s time to start re-learning the lessons of a supportive community.
It’s not a struggle but in some ways a lonely road. I have no peers really to discuss this with. I think this too is a driver behind the essay. The idea of admittance to a community.
Regardless, had I discovered DMT-Nexus or not, I was going to get here: I have all the source material and lab equipment now, have read and re-read many texts, endless times. I’ve listened to countless talks of Terrence McKenna, love to digest books, especially Robert Anton Wilson, Mae Wan Ho, Miller, Mishima, Hofstadter, Borges. As terse as Borges is, every re-reading of his short stories, it’s like visiting with an old friend. Cigar on the stoop and a lazy command of the world. A life time of prep, getting all psyched up, but in slow motion - a stop frame animation of clouds rolling and flora opening - through my mostly steady manner. Scaling K2 or spelunking Son Doong takes planning, patience, stamina. Fearlessness? DMT does not strike me as an impulsive picnic.
So I am returning to where I was scared witless from my first break through:
In 1986 Oakland CA , my first and only Grateful Dead / Dylan concert, already enjoying a wondrous tab of LSD, when a friend asks if I'd like to smoke some marijuana; and so produces the tiniest dime bag I had ever seen, a postage stamp with one distal sized bud. I have one toke and am suddenly propelled into a swirling vortex of kaleidoscopic shards and colored light, waves of crashing geometries and into the most beautiful and terrifying Bliss. The firmament on Fire. And I am introduced...to myself....and the Universe.
I exclaim the wonder! And my friend’s every response is a question, “Or is it?” And he says, “I am you. And you are me.” The thousands around us go into a blur. And I see myself in him, a doppelganger, talking back, serious, funny, macabre, a fun-house mirror right out of Duck Soup. And to the side a third appears, an old man, stooped and craggy faced, long unkempt beard, wild and sullen eyes: we look at one another, both ashamed, lost. At that moment I realize I have to get out of the concert. Dylan is taking the stage while streams of concert goers are leaving, an endless river to the BART, and if I don’t get out of there, I am that old man, stuck, forever lost at the Dead.
In the next week during an Indian Philosophy class in the University I am introduced to the Upanishads, where we discuss Sat, Chit and Anand: pure being, consciousness and joy. Brahma and Atma, self and Self and All, Oneness. I almost couldn’t contain my excitement, that that was part of my ineffable experience at the concert. I’ve reached back millennia and across to an alien culture. More than ever now I am convinced that that little dime bag was in fact bud with DMT.
I have been seeking ever since, walking the labyrinth slowly back to center. A beautiful, strange and Inspiring journey. Dovened with Chasids, studied with Witnesses, immersed myself in Suzuki, Zen, some meditation, yoga, Buddhist studies, transpersonal psychology, even Crowley, Kabbalah, Greene, Hawking, and Lao Tsu. I agree with the skeptics and still call myself a Pantheist. It’s all good - until someone loses an eye. As much I like the edge I still wear safety glasses and a helmut.
There's always been a balance between drive and restraint - circling, spiraling and navigating, charting the stars, back to the DMT experience.
I am at the beach, often, always. Standing in the water at the shore. When is it that I am in the ocean, and when is it that I am on the beach? It is this liminal place of the in-between, neither one nor the other, but both. Where the waves crash, it’s dynamic, energy in motion. I imagine that this is what it is like beyond the horizon. If I use DMT (or is it the DMT calling me?) and get back to the questions, do I get back there again? Do I want to?
As a child I thought I could see molecules. If I relax my gaze even today I feel like I can still see them. A snowy veneer over everything I see. The pointillism of Seurat. It's a color-noise that forms and surfaces and essences arise from. I also thought I could fly. Maybe I was three, definitely not four. I have memories of jumping up high in front of the house, right off from the lawn. My father was reaching up to try to catch me. I was floating away, and I would flap my arms furiously downward, palms up, trying to push the air so I would descend. I felt that if I got too high and too far away, I would float off. I had to return to earth, back to my father's hands.
I feel like I have a lot to say, too much at times. A hundred me's with arms outstretched could not embrace all the thoughts. Is that Avalokiteshvara with her thousand arms? "Should He ever become disheartened in saving sentient beings, may His body shatter into a thousand pieces." The thousand pieces, like the break through on DMT.
Might we pass through these shards on the way in?
A recursive life.
Why am I here on the Nexus? Deconstructing the personal myth? Pirsig did.
The stories we tell ourselves and others about who we are, our pattern, our stasis. The static quality that gives rise to form. And then we reach, to novelty, to a disruption, the dynamic quality. I believe this is DMT’s calling to me.
One moment, The Bug-Angels&Devils, the next moment, Bach - Fugue in G minor. BWV 578. The internal argument never ending. They are deconstructing the Art of Fugue. Isn't that what we do? What happens when we break through?
A few years ago I got this yen, this itch, to smoke cannabis again. It had been years. More than a decade. But not to party. It was contemplative now. I started painting. Madly painting. It was returning. Even the cannabis is feeling like a sacrament.
So I allow the falling inward into a thousand lighted strands like clouded cob webs shimmering. Deep into the fugue. And my skin gets warm.
Since I’ve felt a rising sense of compassion. This has been new for me. Guy shows up in the pipe shop in such bad shape. You could see him struggling. He was on the verge of tears at every wince, standing there, trying to hold on. Young man. Tall. He should have been a CEO. Whatever hand he was dealt and played, now he is here. Unbathed. Hair long and matted. Filthy. Urchin, even Rascal like. Everything he owned was on his person: backpack, bed roll, long wooly hat. So strange for the hot weather beachside.
I would have in the past recoiled. But now I feel this rising call to help somehow. This kid needed help. I don't think this was his choice. I think there must be a kindness dividend somehow. Like change. In your pocket.
I blink and the days slip by.
I soften my gaze and let the three dimensional world flatten like an illuminated, medieval painting. I’ve always felt that I could swing a hammer into the field of sight and shatter it like a mirror.
Funny how much digging goes into writing an essay. I am darkening my own shadow, and starting to feel more trepidatious about the DMT journey. I am starting to scare myself, some. Is this something I want? Could I be ascribing far more importance to this than is real or warranted? Do I need more questions in my life?
Freedom of Thought to me seems to be worth fighting for.
Perhaps some day I will proudly say Smoalk Moar. And if not, that is okay too.
Cheers, thank you if you made it this far (brevity isn’t my finest point), and looking forward to contributing beyond lurking and voracious reading.
- Alloklais
