Neuronaut
Rising Star
Finally, at long last, I broke through.
Before this week I had resigned myself to the ride aspect of Spice with none of the insight or clarity of my fellow travelers.
As it turns out, the consciousness on the other side was just slowly building me up, providing a sort of thought scaffolding so I could experience my breakthrough in the correct frame of mind.
My work schedule forces me to work with the plant, and then go into work my shift. I think the pressure of work and time colored my thoughts going into it, but this time we did things a little differently. I worked first and had my whole day ahead of me, so that pressure was off, and usually Antrocles, Impossible Machine, and I get into some heavy discussions. Since I had yet to break through and lacked the experience of Ant and IM, I had little to offer. The weight of these discussions put a lot of pressure on me (or, you know, I did it to myself).
I think that colored my mindset going in, but on that day, we joked around, and watched funny videos online, and then boom, I went in. No navel gazing, no meditation, it was the opposite path but with the same destination, a relaxed mind.
A happy accident, we watched videos because Ant gave all of us THH to place under our tongues, so we had to give it time to soak in and clear out neural pathways.
As I write this I'm realizing that the entire day was new things. Instead of trying to match Ant and IM's giant pulls of smoke (while I work out, the other two are superior athletes with the lung capacity to match), I instead took a series of smaller pulls which allowed me to get more, and kept me from coughing it all up. As Ant re-lit it for the next series of tokes, the colors in the room turned up, and the music I so often hear was beginning to fill me up. I closed my eyes and opened my mind.
The first part of the trip was a lot of colors and designs, and a common motif I always see, flowers and machines, impossibly precise, that 'turn' and reveal beings behind them who observe me as I observe them.
Later, I found myself in a comfortable room with five or six personalities, and we talked about my experiences, life, and what lay beyond. They told me the trip was done and I could go.
I strapped on a jet pack and left to go about my day. As I buzzed a skyscraper made of captured sounds (I know, I know) I realized I don't have a jet pack, and that humanity has yet to build things out of sound, the personalities appeared around me to let me know that I was on drugs, and they were just kidding. We talked about what it meant, and then they told me I could go.
So I stepped outside into a world of orange trees with purple leaves to get to my spaceship. Once again they appeared and gleefully yelled "you're on drugs" and we had a good laugh. We talked about it and they told me I definitely had to go now.
This continued to happen a seemingly infinite number of times, like a Russian doll of alternate worlds, and I laughed every time.
Towards the end, I started to come out of the trip and opened my eyes. The effects of the spice still upon me with the room filled with light, I thought to myself:
"It's gorgeous. I wish everyone could see the world like this, even once. We are all light."
The personalities took issue with my statement, and pulled me back under into an even more intense trip, the most intense experience I ever had and explained to me that we are not light.
When I come back and see my fellow travelers as made of light, it's because it's simultaneously the simplest and grandest way to get across to us that we are not flesh. The light I see is in effect the lesson's they're trying to show me dumbed down for our stunted senses.
This next part I apparently said aloud and I remember all of it.
"Grow. Grow new ears. Grow new eyes. Our senses are stunted and our minds to rigid to grasp it now; we are not light; we are not energy; we are information, data that is plugged into the machinery of the universe to make it work. Information like energy is. It is not good. It is not bad. It is intent that controls energy and shapes information. Intent is everything.
I am information. I am all of my experiences; I am all the stories I have told and all the stories I've heard. We are code. We are part of what makes existence run."
Glad that I finally got it, they let me go.
I slowly came back from over there, wading into my body slowly, like one would move into a lake that's too cold. I heard my voice talking to Ant and IM about what I was told, and my voice was so shrill, like a copy of a copy of a copy, not clean and precise and beautiful like the one I had spoken with on the other side.
"Does my voice always sound like that? How do you put up with it?"
During my trip report to them I drifted back and forth seeing things while still talking to them. At one point I was in the city I visited so many times with my eyes open and talking to them while also being there.
It was a hell of a thing.
One of my favorite writers, Grant Morrison has worked with DMT in the past, and he wrote a story about Superman, that basically made him the guardian of all fiction, for the last son of a dead world giving all of himself to his new home is the story of ultimate hope and the greatest giving. It is a story as a protection spell or code.
I always liked that story, and after being told that we are all information, we are all, in effect, stories, that narrative resonates with me even more. At one point in the book, someone asks Superman what he would have on his gravestone. He bends down, and carves it in, and at the end we see what he wrote, "To Be Continued."
He's absolutely right, information, like energy can't be destroyed, just changed, refined or ruined, but never really gone. This story, our stories, never really end; they continue on forever.
Before this week I had resigned myself to the ride aspect of Spice with none of the insight or clarity of my fellow travelers.
As it turns out, the consciousness on the other side was just slowly building me up, providing a sort of thought scaffolding so I could experience my breakthrough in the correct frame of mind.
My work schedule forces me to work with the plant, and then go into work my shift. I think the pressure of work and time colored my thoughts going into it, but this time we did things a little differently. I worked first and had my whole day ahead of me, so that pressure was off, and usually Antrocles, Impossible Machine, and I get into some heavy discussions. Since I had yet to break through and lacked the experience of Ant and IM, I had little to offer. The weight of these discussions put a lot of pressure on me (or, you know, I did it to myself).
I think that colored my mindset going in, but on that day, we joked around, and watched funny videos online, and then boom, I went in. No navel gazing, no meditation, it was the opposite path but with the same destination, a relaxed mind.
A happy accident, we watched videos because Ant gave all of us THH to place under our tongues, so we had to give it time to soak in and clear out neural pathways.
As I write this I'm realizing that the entire day was new things. Instead of trying to match Ant and IM's giant pulls of smoke (while I work out, the other two are superior athletes with the lung capacity to match), I instead took a series of smaller pulls which allowed me to get more, and kept me from coughing it all up. As Ant re-lit it for the next series of tokes, the colors in the room turned up, and the music I so often hear was beginning to fill me up. I closed my eyes and opened my mind.
The first part of the trip was a lot of colors and designs, and a common motif I always see, flowers and machines, impossibly precise, that 'turn' and reveal beings behind them who observe me as I observe them.
Later, I found myself in a comfortable room with five or six personalities, and we talked about my experiences, life, and what lay beyond. They told me the trip was done and I could go.
I strapped on a jet pack and left to go about my day. As I buzzed a skyscraper made of captured sounds (I know, I know) I realized I don't have a jet pack, and that humanity has yet to build things out of sound, the personalities appeared around me to let me know that I was on drugs, and they were just kidding. We talked about what it meant, and then they told me I could go.
So I stepped outside into a world of orange trees with purple leaves to get to my spaceship. Once again they appeared and gleefully yelled "you're on drugs" and we had a good laugh. We talked about it and they told me I definitely had to go now.
This continued to happen a seemingly infinite number of times, like a Russian doll of alternate worlds, and I laughed every time.
Towards the end, I started to come out of the trip and opened my eyes. The effects of the spice still upon me with the room filled with light, I thought to myself:
"It's gorgeous. I wish everyone could see the world like this, even once. We are all light."
The personalities took issue with my statement, and pulled me back under into an even more intense trip, the most intense experience I ever had and explained to me that we are not light.
When I come back and see my fellow travelers as made of light, it's because it's simultaneously the simplest and grandest way to get across to us that we are not flesh. The light I see is in effect the lesson's they're trying to show me dumbed down for our stunted senses.
This next part I apparently said aloud and I remember all of it.
"Grow. Grow new ears. Grow new eyes. Our senses are stunted and our minds to rigid to grasp it now; we are not light; we are not energy; we are information, data that is plugged into the machinery of the universe to make it work. Information like energy is. It is not good. It is not bad. It is intent that controls energy and shapes information. Intent is everything.
I am information. I am all of my experiences; I am all the stories I have told and all the stories I've heard. We are code. We are part of what makes existence run."
Glad that I finally got it, they let me go.
I slowly came back from over there, wading into my body slowly, like one would move into a lake that's too cold. I heard my voice talking to Ant and IM about what I was told, and my voice was so shrill, like a copy of a copy of a copy, not clean and precise and beautiful like the one I had spoken with on the other side.
"Does my voice always sound like that? How do you put up with it?"
During my trip report to them I drifted back and forth seeing things while still talking to them. At one point I was in the city I visited so many times with my eyes open and talking to them while also being there.
It was a hell of a thing.
One of my favorite writers, Grant Morrison has worked with DMT in the past, and he wrote a story about Superman, that basically made him the guardian of all fiction, for the last son of a dead world giving all of himself to his new home is the story of ultimate hope and the greatest giving. It is a story as a protection spell or code.
I always liked that story, and after being told that we are all information, we are all, in effect, stories, that narrative resonates with me even more. At one point in the book, someone asks Superman what he would have on his gravestone. He bends down, and carves it in, and at the end we see what he wrote, "To Be Continued."
He's absolutely right, information, like energy can't be destroyed, just changed, refined or ruined, but never really gone. This story, our stories, never really end; they continue on forever.
