LINK TO PART 1
LINK TO PART 2
THURSDAY, may 29, 2008
How mundane and filled with exquisite insignificances our lives are. It was these details that brought me back – minutiae of my life that I was amazed i could still reassemble into the thing I called me – I am the sum of all the little things, and this sum is the stitch that holds my reality together.
To call what you see visuals on salvia is diminutive – they are sensations that we arrange into forms that fill the space our eyes would ordinarily perceive. Insofar as the world we know, Salvia blinds.
The sensation I had (visuals if you will) was of the folds of my reality coming undone - a huge roller was rolling over a surface (or making contact with another roller…) and was pulling 2 identical segments apart – imagine a roller laying down ink forms rolling in reverse.
No, incorrect.
More like two carpets lying flat and connected, being rolled apart so that the form they made in their joining (reality) was shorn in two.
An equally incomplete description. There was a sense also of teeth, that there were millions of entities in the shape of teeth and that I was but one among many and that I was no more or less significant (or real) than all of them, and that a mouth (roller, carpet…) was opening pulling two 2-dimensional teeth surfaces apart – the prevailing idea in all these symbols is of a shoring apart, and then a coalescing – into something else. As if everything I had believed up until now was no more than two halves of something that had met hapharzardly and equally as randomly were now separating, two halves of myself ascending two separate rollers, to join two other independant halves and forming two (or more) new consciousnesses out of the halves (or parts) of what I had until that point understood as my own.
I fought the advancing rollers, but voices not audible but felt, said something I understood as translatable only thus : YOU WERE THIS, NOW YOU’RE THAT. YOU WERE THUS, NOW YOU’LL BE OTHER. There was that laughter. I was terrified. Everything I had come to believe was me was false and I was about to be dissolved and reabsorbed elsewhere as some (thing – one ?) else with no recollection of what I had been. I clutched at reality and pulled against the rollers and screamed NOOOOOOO !!!!!!! ( I fell certain i must have screamed for real, though I have no clear recollection)
I pulled and pulled and saw a pool of liquid. I had no idea where this pool was, but I felt somehow that it, and what it was attached to, was my only hope. Slowly things around me began to re « coalesce », and I realized the liquid was bong water and that I was on the floor clutching the half overturned table upon which the bong had toppled on one hand and the floor with the other. My knee hurt and I was soaked from the same bongwater. I have absolutely no recollection of moving, knocking the table, ending up on the floor or of drooling – the evidence of which formed a 2nd pool in direct line between the floor and my mouth, agape in awe.
It was at this point that details of my life slowly poured back into my head : my bookcase, the books I’d read, Isabelle (oh the love I felt ecstatic), my cats, the ribs I had prepared for dinner – all these things were lent significance by my profound realization that nothing has significance unless we accord it, and that the act of according such significance is what creates a reality. It seemed to me incredible that all these things WERE and that they were all somehow in my head.
I realized how fragile memory, and sanity for that matter, are. Again, words are incomplete, fragments and coloured shards that attempt clumsily to describe the vase before it shattered…. I feel as though I had almost witnessed the void. Very close, teetering on the rim of the infinite. Scary. I was utterly convinced I was about to lose myself to something large, vast, infinite, impersonal, but a force nonetheless, that rolls on and over and on and over and manipulates the REAL in ways I will never fathom.
This was the closest thing I can imagine to what death must be like. To die is to be reabsorbed – to be scattered elsewhere. The idea that I would be dispersed and manifest elsewhere is clearly tied to the buddhist idea of samsara-----, the circle of birth and life, re-incarnation if you will. Strange. I have never believed in re-incarnation, but do understand, at least for now and profoundly, how one could. Salvia is horror, if death be such. I’m not so sure it is. But inside looking out is unquestionably terrifying. Happy to be back. Happy to have somewhere to be back from. And to. Darkness illuminates. The void taunts.
LINK TO PART 4
Thanks for reading these old reports - one more to go!!
JBArk
LINK TO PART 2
THURSDAY, may 29, 2008
How mundane and filled with exquisite insignificances our lives are. It was these details that brought me back – minutiae of my life that I was amazed i could still reassemble into the thing I called me – I am the sum of all the little things, and this sum is the stitch that holds my reality together.
To call what you see visuals on salvia is diminutive – they are sensations that we arrange into forms that fill the space our eyes would ordinarily perceive. Insofar as the world we know, Salvia blinds.
The sensation I had (visuals if you will) was of the folds of my reality coming undone - a huge roller was rolling over a surface (or making contact with another roller…) and was pulling 2 identical segments apart – imagine a roller laying down ink forms rolling in reverse.
No, incorrect.
More like two carpets lying flat and connected, being rolled apart so that the form they made in their joining (reality) was shorn in two.
An equally incomplete description. There was a sense also of teeth, that there were millions of entities in the shape of teeth and that I was but one among many and that I was no more or less significant (or real) than all of them, and that a mouth (roller, carpet…) was opening pulling two 2-dimensional teeth surfaces apart – the prevailing idea in all these symbols is of a shoring apart, and then a coalescing – into something else. As if everything I had believed up until now was no more than two halves of something that had met hapharzardly and equally as randomly were now separating, two halves of myself ascending two separate rollers, to join two other independant halves and forming two (or more) new consciousnesses out of the halves (or parts) of what I had until that point understood as my own.
I fought the advancing rollers, but voices not audible but felt, said something I understood as translatable only thus : YOU WERE THIS, NOW YOU’RE THAT. YOU WERE THUS, NOW YOU’LL BE OTHER. There was that laughter. I was terrified. Everything I had come to believe was me was false and I was about to be dissolved and reabsorbed elsewhere as some (thing – one ?) else with no recollection of what I had been. I clutched at reality and pulled against the rollers and screamed NOOOOOOO !!!!!!! ( I fell certain i must have screamed for real, though I have no clear recollection)
I pulled and pulled and saw a pool of liquid. I had no idea where this pool was, but I felt somehow that it, and what it was attached to, was my only hope. Slowly things around me began to re « coalesce », and I realized the liquid was bong water and that I was on the floor clutching the half overturned table upon which the bong had toppled on one hand and the floor with the other. My knee hurt and I was soaked from the same bongwater. I have absolutely no recollection of moving, knocking the table, ending up on the floor or of drooling – the evidence of which formed a 2nd pool in direct line between the floor and my mouth, agape in awe.
It was at this point that details of my life slowly poured back into my head : my bookcase, the books I’d read, Isabelle (oh the love I felt ecstatic), my cats, the ribs I had prepared for dinner – all these things were lent significance by my profound realization that nothing has significance unless we accord it, and that the act of according such significance is what creates a reality. It seemed to me incredible that all these things WERE and that they were all somehow in my head.
I realized how fragile memory, and sanity for that matter, are. Again, words are incomplete, fragments and coloured shards that attempt clumsily to describe the vase before it shattered…. I feel as though I had almost witnessed the void. Very close, teetering on the rim of the infinite. Scary. I was utterly convinced I was about to lose myself to something large, vast, infinite, impersonal, but a force nonetheless, that rolls on and over and on and over and manipulates the REAL in ways I will never fathom.
This was the closest thing I can imagine to what death must be like. To die is to be reabsorbed – to be scattered elsewhere. The idea that I would be dispersed and manifest elsewhere is clearly tied to the buddhist idea of samsara-----, the circle of birth and life, re-incarnation if you will. Strange. I have never believed in re-incarnation, but do understand, at least for now and profoundly, how one could. Salvia is horror, if death be such. I’m not so sure it is. But inside looking out is unquestionably terrifying. Happy to be back. Happy to have somewhere to be back from. And to. Darkness illuminates. The void taunts.
LINK TO PART 4
Thanks for reading these old reports - one more to go!!
JBArk
