MAY I HUMBLY REQUEST YOU READ PART 1 FIRST?
THEN PART II?
I have difficulty explaining two aspects of this trip : why it was so powerful on a moderate dose of mushrooms (perhaps the fresh ginger potentiated the psilocybin, although I have never heard of this…), and why it sent me to the same place to which DMT and salvia and LSD have taken me – a different side of the place, longer in duration (with the exception of the LSD) and hence more lucid, but similar nevertheless. Has DMT, or perhaps salvia, opened a portal for these other substances? Forged new neural pathways to access this part of my consciousness?
Why can I not have low dose, visual euphoric trips like the ones I was accustomed to? Have I skipped up to a plateau? Is there no going back? Has all my prior use been training for this new plateau, habituating my mind to the sweeter altered states so I may accept the bitter, the astringent, the salty and the sour? In an unresolvable conundrum, I long for that innocence – but appreciate, nevertheless, the experience that fills the gap it left.
How is it, once again, that I can be so unquestioningly convinced, so startlingly CERTAIN, that I am God? A defense mechanism, perhaps, against the mycological onslaught? Or a truth, THE TRUTH?
My godmind laughed as it told me I would conceive of rationalizations, false paths through the labyrinth, invented loopholes in the ultimate paradox. And I have lived up to what it has foretold. : I cannot accept that THAT is all there is. But neither can I deny the utter certainty of the experience. So I theorize. What a strange word. THEO-rise : the ascension… of god…
SOLARIS
As I often do to mitigate the comedown, I chose a film to watch from my library. SOLARIS. The Soderbergh version : brilliant movie, and VERY appropriate. It seemed custom made for my post GOD experience. It deals with memory, desire and to a degree the manufacturing, the self-fabrication of our reality. Check out these quotes :
Until it’s happening to you, there’s really no point in discussing it.
I could tell you what’s happening, but, uh – i don’t know if that would really TELL you WHAT’S HAPPENING.
There are no answers, only choices.
When you think about it, our enthusiasm’s a sham…we don’t want other worlds. We want mirrors.
And death shall have no Dominion…
AND DEATH SHALL HAVE NO DOMINION!! The Dylan Thomas quote that bubbled up unwittingly in the swamp of my trip! WTF…
I kid you not. A line, a recurring motif, in the film Solaris that I began watching at the tail end of the trip! This line, quoted in the movie, like a piece of the future in the present now past…
I don’t know…
Maybe…
::: Maybe time, like light, like photons, is a collapsible wave function : both a point and a scale, a duration… The duration paradigm is the default, until it is observed in its rawest form and collapses to a point where all things happen simultaneously, in a universe where simultaneity no longer carries currency as a concept…
Time is light. Light is all. LIGHT ALL TIME.
TIME IS A POINT AND A DURATION AND ME.
ME. IT. I EMIT TIME…
(as I emit light)
Now I have stated elsewhere that I am not a real believer in synchronicity, but after the 5 hours I just endured, it certainly seemed like something of the sort was going on. The movie seemed tailor made for that moment. Very auspicious. There seems no way around the paradox : time travels in a straight line, but I intuited a point on that line, far away. Then I arrived :::
::: the next day my 17 month old son was back. Ohhh, how I had missed him. Hugs and kisses and hugs and a spattering of high pitched guttural noises he expected to be words – my son, spouting the cutest gibberish to ever grace a man’s ears. The nonsense that in its uttering was the only sense.
SUDDENLY A FLASH. A revelation :
The 2 dimensional primary coloured cartoon visions of DMT and now mushrooms, the word as signifiers, « Friday, Marshmallow, Spaghetti, Lego, Ketchup, Saturday » and even letters themselves - children’s visions, childish words. Even the struggling with the phonetics of these words (as in this report) is consistent with a child making aural connections between words in an endeavour to understand their pronunciation. Perhaps the substances were stripping us down, bringing us the route to the root and the root of the route…
Rooty Route Root, Routey tout TOUTE! (in french, the path (route) to all (toute))!
Perhaps we are reliving the terror and ecstasy of infancy, tapping into the prelingual, prerational mind mass, back at the moment where we learned our first words, and made visual sense of our surroundings and started understanding the divine geometry that surrounds : up, down, forward back – colour, shape, texture - the construction of reality, through words, of all our sensory input – the moment where our minds slide from the memory of the primordial soup through Reptilia and Hominoidea to supersede instinct with words and symbols that compartmentalize our environment, and become us. WE ARE WORDS. I believe Mckenna said that, copping it from the new testament :
« In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made. In him was life; and the life was the light of men And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.». JOHN 1 :1
« Au commencement était le Verbe et le Verbe était tourné vers Dieu,
et le Verbe était Dieu. » JEAN 1 :1
(some french translations use « Parole » (word), while others use « verbe » : verb or action. God is the word, but the word in action – in TIME.
(here there should be Hebrew text that I am unable to paste...see attached image) GENESIS 1 :1
(a word-for-word translation might be "in-beginning created God.")
We are language, the building blocks of consciousness, of the Id, of the ego, of the superego, of I – OF EVERYTHING. Except darkness. Darkness, or non-being, « comprehended it not ».
Here’s a hypothesis :
When we consume these substances in quantity, it divides our brains bicamerally, disabling most of the higher functions of the cerebral cortex and separating them from the functioning glands of the the endocrine system : the pituitary (regulating homeostasis), the hypothalamus (synthesizing and secreting neurohormones, it controls body temperature, hunger, thirst, fatigue, and circadian cycles) and the thalamus (its function includes relaying sensation, spatial sense and motor signals to the cerebral cortex, along with the regulation of consciousness, sleep and alertness) – and yes, the pineal gland (that creates melatonin, a hormone that affects the modulation of wake/sleep patterns). While retaining some higher cognitive faculties, we are working largely from the reptilian consciousness AND the prelingual, presymbol infant mind.
AND IT FEELS DIVINE.
From the perspective of the remnants of the adult mind, we see the construction, the artifice, the « building blocks» as I refer to them, and we ask the question WHO BUILT THIS and by process of elimination, in the absence of anything or anyone else, we assume that WE must have built it ourselves. Built our Self : the machine of self that self transforms. From the perspective of the beginning, the root of consciousness, it appears, by default, that we are the maker, the creator, the one and only god. This sense of divinity is derived, perhaps, from the bicameral division of the mind into a consciousness that processes and one that communicates.
A window to the childmind or a doorway to god?
Christopher Dewdney is a Canadian poet who wrote an essay called « the house of the living language » that I read in university but have been unable to subsequently locate. I will recount how I recollect it, however flawed that recollection be :
In his early twenties Christopher Dewdney was a left wing hippy type who got into a rather serious VW bus accident with his soulmate, a woman who was quite seriously injured as a result. It was discovered that while she had suffered relatively minimal brain damage for the head trauma she endured, her language center was nevertheless somehow wiped completely clean. All memories and knowledge and emotions entirely intact, just no linguistic way to express them or to understand anyone else – she was an adult who no longer understood language! (variations of this phenomena sometimes occur after severe strokes).
During her convalescence, Christopher Dewdney, little injured in the accident, stayed at her bedside and began reteaching her the english language; progress was slow and often frustrating, but they eventually made some headway and she began slowly to regain her capacity for understanding language and using it to communicate. But a strange change had taken hold of her that first manifested in small things : before the accident, she had loved chocolate ice cream, but now, vanilla was her favourite flavour. Christopher began noticing dozens of these little changes, that slowly added up to larger ones : as time went on, she fell out of love with her soul-mate, returned to school to study law, and if I remember correctly, went on to lead the defense counsel of a prominent right wing politician. A total about face : from lovestruck hippy to hardnose conservative lawyer!
Christopher Dewdney, quite shell-shocked I imagine, had a theory to explain this radical change in her. When her language center was wiped clean he believed that, essentially, so was she! She became a blank slate and the order in which she relearnt words and associated different symbols with objects and phrases not only changed minor characteristics about her, but rather changed who she was fundamentally, reconstructing her character from the bottom up! SHE WAS LANGUAGE. The building blocks of HER were WORDS.
She had been unmade and then made anew. The flesh remained, but the spirit altered.
So : We are language. God is language. Language is a group of symbols. We are symbols employing symbols to create and understand reality, to comprehend God, to behold ourselves.
BUT :
The how, the who - the WHY? God needed to feel imperfection, so he created. He created language, with all its failings, which in turn created him. He created duality, a binary system, a code of opposing forces through which we understand our world : hotcold, blackwhite, lovehate, lostfound, youme. In a world of infinite notches between extremes, we grasp at words to condense reality into comprehensible packets, symbols taking the place of the infinite (a symbol itself) in order to understand our environment : 1 & 0, binary, duality, mind/body. Absence, presence. The body is 1, the mind 0. The code is inescapable, for it is US.
« Information is difference that makes a difference », Gregory Bateson. WE ARE INFORMATION.
Paraphrasing and building on R.A. Wilson : Negative entropy is information – given that entropy is the measure of the inertness, lack of coherence or « deadness » of a system, negative entropy is the measure of the « liveliness », coherence or informational content of a system. (Prometheus Rising, p.112)
SO THEN :
The sum total of an infinite negative entropic system is god, is reality, is the universe; and the primary binary (oxymoron intended!) nature of that universe is the struggle, the conflict between entropy and negative entropy – life/death, being/not being, time/stasis.
Given the binary nature of the universe, is it surprising that at the root of it all is paradox? For is paradox not the irreconcilable co-existence of opposites? 1,0, off, on, live, die.
I am codified. I am a number. I am pairs. And much more - I am pair ‘o docks : one dock to land and another to take flight.
I AM : 100100011101010000100010010100010010010…
The body is 1, the mind 0. A PAIR of DOCKS.
In the beginning there was 0. Then 1 was born into the world : 1n the end, there was the w0rd. And we saw that
1t was g00d.
:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
I humbly thank you all for being a part of my FAVOURITE REALITY, and I leave you with a PPM (partial palendromic poem!!) written the morning after the trip:
STRAWCABS REVENUE
The strawcaB sevirD Backwards, & Backwards Drives The strawcaB Where Dreams are smearD By The sutarappA Of The seyE. The Mind Is Mined By The deniM mullebereC anD Thoughts Are smeareD Where Dreams Are Thought. Try And rebmemeR The gnitt-egroF, For It Is She That slaeveR The h-truT to the nairB.
Eat ill ear & (DROW, it is so, O city, WORD, & reality…)
The universe is revenue. Denruter returned.
DENRUTER RETURNED & STRAWCABS REVENUE*, backwards, the universe is.
Hints : the beginning is Capital, my friends!
*Revenue implies a flowing toward, and is french for return.
JBArk
THEN PART II?
I have difficulty explaining two aspects of this trip : why it was so powerful on a moderate dose of mushrooms (perhaps the fresh ginger potentiated the psilocybin, although I have never heard of this…), and why it sent me to the same place to which DMT and salvia and LSD have taken me – a different side of the place, longer in duration (with the exception of the LSD) and hence more lucid, but similar nevertheless. Has DMT, or perhaps salvia, opened a portal for these other substances? Forged new neural pathways to access this part of my consciousness?
Why can I not have low dose, visual euphoric trips like the ones I was accustomed to? Have I skipped up to a plateau? Is there no going back? Has all my prior use been training for this new plateau, habituating my mind to the sweeter altered states so I may accept the bitter, the astringent, the salty and the sour? In an unresolvable conundrum, I long for that innocence – but appreciate, nevertheless, the experience that fills the gap it left.
How is it, once again, that I can be so unquestioningly convinced, so startlingly CERTAIN, that I am God? A defense mechanism, perhaps, against the mycological onslaught? Or a truth, THE TRUTH?
My godmind laughed as it told me I would conceive of rationalizations, false paths through the labyrinth, invented loopholes in the ultimate paradox. And I have lived up to what it has foretold. : I cannot accept that THAT is all there is. But neither can I deny the utter certainty of the experience. So I theorize. What a strange word. THEO-rise : the ascension… of god…
SOLARIS
As I often do to mitigate the comedown, I chose a film to watch from my library. SOLARIS. The Soderbergh version : brilliant movie, and VERY appropriate. It seemed custom made for my post GOD experience. It deals with memory, desire and to a degree the manufacturing, the self-fabrication of our reality. Check out these quotes :
Until it’s happening to you, there’s really no point in discussing it.
I could tell you what’s happening, but, uh – i don’t know if that would really TELL you WHAT’S HAPPENING.
There are no answers, only choices.
When you think about it, our enthusiasm’s a sham…we don’t want other worlds. We want mirrors.
And death shall have no Dominion…
AND DEATH SHALL HAVE NO DOMINION!! The Dylan Thomas quote that bubbled up unwittingly in the swamp of my trip! WTF…
I kid you not. A line, a recurring motif, in the film Solaris that I began watching at the tail end of the trip! This line, quoted in the movie, like a piece of the future in the present now past…
I don’t know…
Maybe…
::: Maybe time, like light, like photons, is a collapsible wave function : both a point and a scale, a duration… The duration paradigm is the default, until it is observed in its rawest form and collapses to a point where all things happen simultaneously, in a universe where simultaneity no longer carries currency as a concept…
Time is light. Light is all. LIGHT ALL TIME.
TIME IS A POINT AND A DURATION AND ME.
ME. IT. I EMIT TIME…
(as I emit light)
Now I have stated elsewhere that I am not a real believer in synchronicity, but after the 5 hours I just endured, it certainly seemed like something of the sort was going on. The movie seemed tailor made for that moment. Very auspicious. There seems no way around the paradox : time travels in a straight line, but I intuited a point on that line, far away. Then I arrived :::
::: the next day my 17 month old son was back. Ohhh, how I had missed him. Hugs and kisses and hugs and a spattering of high pitched guttural noises he expected to be words – my son, spouting the cutest gibberish to ever grace a man’s ears. The nonsense that in its uttering was the only sense.
SUDDENLY A FLASH. A revelation :
The 2 dimensional primary coloured cartoon visions of DMT and now mushrooms, the word as signifiers, « Friday, Marshmallow, Spaghetti, Lego, Ketchup, Saturday » and even letters themselves - children’s visions, childish words. Even the struggling with the phonetics of these words (as in this report) is consistent with a child making aural connections between words in an endeavour to understand their pronunciation. Perhaps the substances were stripping us down, bringing us the route to the root and the root of the route…
Rooty Route Root, Routey tout TOUTE! (in french, the path (route) to all (toute))!
Perhaps we are reliving the terror and ecstasy of infancy, tapping into the prelingual, prerational mind mass, back at the moment where we learned our first words, and made visual sense of our surroundings and started understanding the divine geometry that surrounds : up, down, forward back – colour, shape, texture - the construction of reality, through words, of all our sensory input – the moment where our minds slide from the memory of the primordial soup through Reptilia and Hominoidea to supersede instinct with words and symbols that compartmentalize our environment, and become us. WE ARE WORDS. I believe Mckenna said that, copping it from the new testament :
« In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made. In him was life; and the life was the light of men And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.». JOHN 1 :1
« Au commencement était le Verbe et le Verbe était tourné vers Dieu,
et le Verbe était Dieu. » JEAN 1 :1
(some french translations use « Parole » (word), while others use « verbe » : verb or action. God is the word, but the word in action – in TIME.
(here there should be Hebrew text that I am unable to paste...see attached image) GENESIS 1 :1
(a word-for-word translation might be "in-beginning created God.")
We are language, the building blocks of consciousness, of the Id, of the ego, of the superego, of I – OF EVERYTHING. Except darkness. Darkness, or non-being, « comprehended it not ».
Here’s a hypothesis :
When we consume these substances in quantity, it divides our brains bicamerally, disabling most of the higher functions of the cerebral cortex and separating them from the functioning glands of the the endocrine system : the pituitary (regulating homeostasis), the hypothalamus (synthesizing and secreting neurohormones, it controls body temperature, hunger, thirst, fatigue, and circadian cycles) and the thalamus (its function includes relaying sensation, spatial sense and motor signals to the cerebral cortex, along with the regulation of consciousness, sleep and alertness) – and yes, the pineal gland (that creates melatonin, a hormone that affects the modulation of wake/sleep patterns). While retaining some higher cognitive faculties, we are working largely from the reptilian consciousness AND the prelingual, presymbol infant mind.
AND IT FEELS DIVINE.
From the perspective of the remnants of the adult mind, we see the construction, the artifice, the « building blocks» as I refer to them, and we ask the question WHO BUILT THIS and by process of elimination, in the absence of anything or anyone else, we assume that WE must have built it ourselves. Built our Self : the machine of self that self transforms. From the perspective of the beginning, the root of consciousness, it appears, by default, that we are the maker, the creator, the one and only god. This sense of divinity is derived, perhaps, from the bicameral division of the mind into a consciousness that processes and one that communicates.
A window to the childmind or a doorway to god?
Christopher Dewdney is a Canadian poet who wrote an essay called « the house of the living language » that I read in university but have been unable to subsequently locate. I will recount how I recollect it, however flawed that recollection be :
In his early twenties Christopher Dewdney was a left wing hippy type who got into a rather serious VW bus accident with his soulmate, a woman who was quite seriously injured as a result. It was discovered that while she had suffered relatively minimal brain damage for the head trauma she endured, her language center was nevertheless somehow wiped completely clean. All memories and knowledge and emotions entirely intact, just no linguistic way to express them or to understand anyone else – she was an adult who no longer understood language! (variations of this phenomena sometimes occur after severe strokes).
During her convalescence, Christopher Dewdney, little injured in the accident, stayed at her bedside and began reteaching her the english language; progress was slow and often frustrating, but they eventually made some headway and she began slowly to regain her capacity for understanding language and using it to communicate. But a strange change had taken hold of her that first manifested in small things : before the accident, she had loved chocolate ice cream, but now, vanilla was her favourite flavour. Christopher began noticing dozens of these little changes, that slowly added up to larger ones : as time went on, she fell out of love with her soul-mate, returned to school to study law, and if I remember correctly, went on to lead the defense counsel of a prominent right wing politician. A total about face : from lovestruck hippy to hardnose conservative lawyer!
Christopher Dewdney, quite shell-shocked I imagine, had a theory to explain this radical change in her. When her language center was wiped clean he believed that, essentially, so was she! She became a blank slate and the order in which she relearnt words and associated different symbols with objects and phrases not only changed minor characteristics about her, but rather changed who she was fundamentally, reconstructing her character from the bottom up! SHE WAS LANGUAGE. The building blocks of HER were WORDS.
She had been unmade and then made anew. The flesh remained, but the spirit altered.
So : We are language. God is language. Language is a group of symbols. We are symbols employing symbols to create and understand reality, to comprehend God, to behold ourselves.
BUT :
The how, the who - the WHY? God needed to feel imperfection, so he created. He created language, with all its failings, which in turn created him. He created duality, a binary system, a code of opposing forces through which we understand our world : hotcold, blackwhite, lovehate, lostfound, youme. In a world of infinite notches between extremes, we grasp at words to condense reality into comprehensible packets, symbols taking the place of the infinite (a symbol itself) in order to understand our environment : 1 & 0, binary, duality, mind/body. Absence, presence. The body is 1, the mind 0. The code is inescapable, for it is US.
« Information is difference that makes a difference », Gregory Bateson. WE ARE INFORMATION.
Paraphrasing and building on R.A. Wilson : Negative entropy is information – given that entropy is the measure of the inertness, lack of coherence or « deadness » of a system, negative entropy is the measure of the « liveliness », coherence or informational content of a system. (Prometheus Rising, p.112)
SO THEN :
The sum total of an infinite negative entropic system is god, is reality, is the universe; and the primary binary (oxymoron intended!) nature of that universe is the struggle, the conflict between entropy and negative entropy – life/death, being/not being, time/stasis.
Given the binary nature of the universe, is it surprising that at the root of it all is paradox? For is paradox not the irreconcilable co-existence of opposites? 1,0, off, on, live, die.
I am codified. I am a number. I am pairs. And much more - I am pair ‘o docks : one dock to land and another to take flight.
I AM : 100100011101010000100010010100010010010…
The body is 1, the mind 0. A PAIR of DOCKS.
In the beginning there was 0. Then 1 was born into the world : 1n the end, there was the w0rd. And we saw that
1t was g00d.
:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
I humbly thank you all for being a part of my FAVOURITE REALITY, and I leave you with a PPM (partial palendromic poem!!) written the morning after the trip:
STRAWCABS REVENUE
The strawcaB sevirD Backwards, & Backwards Drives The strawcaB Where Dreams are smearD By The sutarappA Of The seyE. The Mind Is Mined By The deniM mullebereC anD Thoughts Are smeareD Where Dreams Are Thought. Try And rebmemeR The gnitt-egroF, For It Is She That slaeveR The h-truT to the nairB.
Eat ill ear & (DROW, it is so, O city, WORD, & reality…)
The universe is revenue. Denruter returned.
DENRUTER RETURNED & STRAWCABS REVENUE*, backwards, the universe is.
Hints : the beginning is Capital, my friends!
*Revenue implies a flowing toward, and is french for return.
JBArk
