Where does the picture on your TV originate? Are there people living in the box making it shine? No, the box picks up a signal from an external source. Likewise, the brain could be a kind of antenna which reduces The Field into bite-sized human perception. If Mind were to originate separately in each individual, any kind of consensus on reality would be just astronomically coincidental: We'd more likely find ourselves living our own private dreamlets. In our isolation, it would be impossible to share our minds with each other; something clearly refuted every time you open a book, listen to a tune, have a conversation. Actually, your mind is a synthesis of those thoughts that have particularly tickled you. (My approach to tooth-brushing, for example, comes straight out of J's mind, which doubtless came out of some other mind, through another mind, ad nauseum.) Tooth-brushing, musical taste, language: All of these things are, at most, extrapolations from the human concert: Far from containing a mind, it appears I have no personal mind at all.
There are too many phenomena lurking inside this magnificent, suffering someThing surrounding us which brain-fabricated thought cannot explain. The psychedelic experience, for myself at any rate, is fairly conclusive evidence that, at least in the case of the monkey, the box is obviously too small to contain it all. J and I had a chat on the weekend and we were talking about shared mind: Everyday, my woman, Amp, finishes thoughts being beamed into my transducer; I'm sure anyone who has lived in someone else's pocket for any significant period will attest to this. How can this be explained save for the existence of some kind of Field into which we are all plugged.? Indeed, it's quite impossible to 'contain' one's mind - it's constantly spilling over into other minds: Look at mine pissing away all over the shop right now, for example, leaving dastardly images of the infinite in minds trickling throughout the Loop. I put it to you that you couldn't, for even five minutes, prevent your mind from driving the material world in some fashion.
Our culture's obsessive pecuniary interests require that we believe steadfastly in matter as the ground of being because it is engaged in chewing through every last granule on this planet in order to produce endless reams of material crassness that can then be hawked for profit. If we were to suddenly realise that we are all connected in and by the Big Mind it would be jolly tricky to keep up the pretense that, in raping the Big Mother, we are not raping ourselves.
Tuesday, June 15, 2010
Tuesday, June 8, 2010
A plant is a plant is a plant
Writing back to my sister regarding my family's position on the psychedelic experience.
Yo, thanks for the reply.
I wasn't going to bother writing back because, having read your second paragraph, it sounds like I haven't put my position across adequately, so what further use could words be, you know? However, I came across this portion of a very late Bill Hicks performance this afternoon (listen from 3:40-ish if you want - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8XPYNiJApCs&NR=1) and found the parallel too uncanny. I was compelled to respond! If you don't want to bother with the video, he talks about the healing, visionary, mystical properties of the Mushroom and his frustration at his reactionary father for the topic:
Bill - Eternity and Peace and Heaven is our inheritance and all of us are going to make it there.
Bill's father - I'm not interested!
Please have a bit of respect for my argument. I have never advocated - and will never advocate - taking 'every drug under the Sun': I would never wish this on anyone, let alone my own kin. What you wrote was quite inaccurate, and frustrated me somewhat. I am concerned only with naturally occurring plants/fungi and their alkaloids. 'Drug' is not a word that enters the issue. A 'drug' is something that leaves you side-effect-ridden, or crippled, or both. A 'drug' is something that causes unexamined, destructive patterns of behavior.
The real topics of interest are cannabis sativa and mushrooms of the genus psilocybe. (Incidentally, factoid of the week: The word sativa is taken from the Latin for 'useful', because of the wide range of properties of cannabis - medicinal, commercial, spiritual and other.) The irony is that, you're totally right, there is nothing to say. There's nothing I expect said - I don't want you to rally, thoughtless, behind me for God's sake! But acknowledgment, on the other hand, is another matter altogether: Please consider this food for thought, that for years now I've been trying to bring some information to my family's attention and in each instance, without fail, I get nothing in reply. Nothing! I mean, I think I've found something worth devoting serious thought and energy to: From our evolutionary beginnings to our timespace conquest of the future, I might have found something that overshadows it all. And the people closest to me think.. Well, I don't know what you think - in simpler hours I assume you think me something of a twit, but seeing as I never hear anything back (save your e-mail) I'll never know!
If you had come within reach of something you suspected was the conscious human soul, would you not be making a bit of a stink? I really feel that if you look at the world, if you look at this dreadful, wonderful world, you can only concede that an injection of heavy soul could do our species some good.
I'm talking about having the ability - the technology - to probe some pretty dense topics here: Death? Time? Disease? God? Mind? World? Evolution? Society? It's all on the table awaiting review - if you only wish to be seated.
That's all I'm really trying to say about this stuff. I'm glad you found the Afghan article interesting. The Afghanistan/Opium-CIA/Cocaine information is important to look at because it goes a long way to show that the legislators behind the repression of the psychedelic experience actually have no qualms whatsoever with people ingesting substances - harmful or otherwise. They don't mind your getting sick. However, they certainly do mind your making forays into the Bright World, in case you return from it safe in the knowledge that you are, and you will always be. And there's nothing you can do, nothing you would do, to change this magnificent, suffering Something surrounding us.
Now, if that news isn't a hazard to society...
!
I'll leave you to it.
Always love,
Dan
Yo, thanks for the reply.
I wasn't going to bother writing back because, having read your second paragraph, it sounds like I haven't put my position across adequately, so what further use could words be, you know? However, I came across this portion of a very late Bill Hicks performance this afternoon (listen from 3:40-ish if you want - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8XPYNiJApCs&NR=1) and found the parallel too uncanny. I was compelled to respond! If you don't want to bother with the video, he talks about the healing, visionary, mystical properties of the Mushroom and his frustration at his reactionary father for the topic:
Bill - Eternity and Peace and Heaven is our inheritance and all of us are going to make it there.
Bill's father - I'm not interested!
Please have a bit of respect for my argument. I have never advocated - and will never advocate - taking 'every drug under the Sun': I would never wish this on anyone, let alone my own kin. What you wrote was quite inaccurate, and frustrated me somewhat. I am concerned only with naturally occurring plants/fungi and their alkaloids. 'Drug' is not a word that enters the issue. A 'drug' is something that leaves you side-effect-ridden, or crippled, or both. A 'drug' is something that causes unexamined, destructive patterns of behavior.
The real topics of interest are cannabis sativa and mushrooms of the genus psilocybe. (Incidentally, factoid of the week: The word sativa is taken from the Latin for 'useful', because of the wide range of properties of cannabis - medicinal, commercial, spiritual and other.) The irony is that, you're totally right, there is nothing to say. There's nothing I expect said - I don't want you to rally, thoughtless, behind me for God's sake! But acknowledgment, on the other hand, is another matter altogether: Please consider this food for thought, that for years now I've been trying to bring some information to my family's attention and in each instance, without fail, I get nothing in reply. Nothing! I mean, I think I've found something worth devoting serious thought and energy to: From our evolutionary beginnings to our timespace conquest of the future, I might have found something that overshadows it all. And the people closest to me think.. Well, I don't know what you think - in simpler hours I assume you think me something of a twit, but seeing as I never hear anything back (save your e-mail) I'll never know!
If you had come within reach of something you suspected was the conscious human soul, would you not be making a bit of a stink? I really feel that if you look at the world, if you look at this dreadful, wonderful world, you can only concede that an injection of heavy soul could do our species some good.
I'm talking about having the ability - the technology - to probe some pretty dense topics here: Death? Time? Disease? God? Mind? World? Evolution? Society? It's all on the table awaiting review - if you only wish to be seated.
That's all I'm really trying to say about this stuff. I'm glad you found the Afghan article interesting. The Afghanistan/Opium-CIA/Cocaine information is important to look at because it goes a long way to show that the legislators behind the repression of the psychedelic experience actually have no qualms whatsoever with people ingesting substances - harmful or otherwise. They don't mind your getting sick. However, they certainly do mind your making forays into the Bright World, in case you return from it safe in the knowledge that you are, and you will always be. And there's nothing you can do, nothing you would do, to change this magnificent, suffering Something surrounding us.
Now, if that news isn't a hazard to society...
!
I'll leave you to it.
Always love,
Dan
My God! I love everything
Amp and I returned to the field, collected another basket of fruit and, on the Friday night of a 3-day-weekend, I filled my little belly. Not having any kind of scales, and the weather being too cool and humid to dry the mushrooms anyway, I settled upon eating as many as I could. I got through nearly two bowls, and had to stop for being full, which seemed to me a sensible marker. They ranged from about an inch to ten inches in size, and I probably ate upwards of 75. It was intense: Hadn't eaten all day; followed them down with a gargantuan spliff to still the stomach acids.
The (t)rip itself. I found myself in the presence of a female plant, slowly becoming aware of herself. Sweating in her opening. Flexing mechanisms inside her as she stirs. Then a scene from behind a house, a tiny inlet running behind a kitchen window, plants in bowls, hanging, and the distinct impression that some alien and mind-bogglingly broad data-gathering harddisk had summoned this for me. "We have this," it said, as if rounding up visions of our world for cosmic storage.
Being shown how indistinguishable It All Is when viewed from the perspective of an endless mushroom. And then, accompanied by massive bass tones, the camera pulls back yet further, and you're reeling, thinking, "Please don't show me anymore!" - the perspective becoming so wide that, far from the mind embracing it or no, the problem is comprehending it in its vast and terrible beauty in the first place. The first time I've fought my mind against incoming information. The first time I really felt my curiosity might disembowel me, leave my psychic viscera swaying beneath.
A being, some kind of hyper-complex poly-engine replete with faces, demons and a variety of machine tools, all of the features spinning and whirring away frantically. Close, very close, to the elves who scribble away at the frontier of mind, penning the next moment to be beheld by your perception. (I actually heard the pens scratching away.)
Inferring that 'enlightenment' is merely a choice: Open up your eyes and see that you have the means to fashion this Thing as you so wish. Or don't open up. I found myself on a chain - I felt like clothes hanging from a line, unable to do anything about it but observe: I got the impression that the only game there is is observation. I felt the engine running, felt myself pinned to it as the thing revolves on, going through its gigantic cycle. I was looking at all life from up there on the clothes line, with a mind that was not only perfectly functional, but perfectly aware of its primacy.
Primacy of mind: There is a joke that many people aren't in on. The whole of reality appears to come out of some understanding, some pact, that we don't mention the absurdity. That we ignore the initial friction that resulted in Thought. I watched Amp and I living a life together, becoming wise to this notion. I was shown that you can lend your support to the Illusion - the Illusion arising from this blinding friction - or you become part of the enriching process, that slowly awaking female plant from the beginning; examine how the energies you create feed the flanks of the Big Octopus we're all plugged into. As the mushroom showed me the absurdity I noticed how literally everything that arises in the Illusion - the friction that required mind in the first instance - becomes like an old piece of furniture: It all grows, decays. And those who truly come to enlightenment no longer complain about the frictions because, like scattered and aging fungi, all absurdity is to be expected here in timespace. Cackling about this, I noticed that the closer I came to accepting the Illusion of the world, the more the world tried to pull me back: So as soon as these thoughts came into my head the wind and rain outside suddenly started thrashing at the meshing, Amp suddenly started screeching at me to come back. All very eerie. Mind is primary.
Decay: Decaying - dying - is living. Those of us who have reconciled this rhythm of nature with our mayfly stories end up dancers, rock and rollers, and generally joyful: We have the terminal life rhythm inside us, and we flow with it. I experienced the growing and withering of a fungus, and how that withering Is you, and Is Life. Felt the withering rhythm hasten until it became a pulse, a vibe riffing. I felt that as 'the end' approaches, one's wisdom correspondingly increases. That no one dies in ignorance. That, in fact, the universe is rigged so that all beings may enjoy an endlessly increasing comprehension of the Profundity. And If you play the right cards, you can actually manipulate this into bliss, turn it into an asymptotic curve: A force that will infinitely and unceasingly rise, allowing you to create whole systems of worlds if it tickles you to do so.
Being inside a singularity. Indescribable really, memory being so fragmentary. Time spinning down; a freezing, silver, globular moment in which I came back; realised that, to an extent, a mushroom took me inside this place.
Outside, a gigantic, belching frog punctuates the jungle night. And, out of its throat, cascades of my hysterics.
"You're in the jungle yeah, kid!" the fungus reminds. The world is a jungle, there are so many lifeforms teeming for lebensraum. Try to get wise without getting infected. And there is an impression that viruses, and other kinds of software, are available, transmittable, in these spaces. I watch as an octopus-cum-leopard-come-spiderplant crawls into some kind of genetic wall. I think about symbiosis and fill out the next day being the leopard, the jungle cat. Lazing on my balcony during a thoroughly green day, gazing out of my introspection at impossibly high clouds, content to smoke only and ponder the small things.
I have tried to sum up a few of these visions; but getting information out of these places is fiendish. The business about consciousness arising from a certain friction and that most people are unaware that everything they whinge about must be a natural consequence of their being in the first place, this was so.. vivid.. so well implied by the mushroom's visions that it may as well have been presenting a lecture: The sequences of images were so meaningful.. But, I just can't grab back whatever it was that causes the friction in the first place: It's something to do with thought, subjectivity, the illusion of objects. And that once you start thinking you've got to be prepared to give everything up, because someone will have a harder time letting go of their mind than you will. Be ready to be charitable.
This is tiresome now, I'm sure. More practice is required translating these images. That's piece of news number one. Piece of news number two: The shamanic ecstasy delivered. It is both terrifying and electrifying; signs, as McKenna might say, of the enterprise's "existential validity."
Out for now.
The (t)rip itself. I found myself in the presence of a female plant, slowly becoming aware of herself. Sweating in her opening. Flexing mechanisms inside her as she stirs. Then a scene from behind a house, a tiny inlet running behind a kitchen window, plants in bowls, hanging, and the distinct impression that some alien and mind-bogglingly broad data-gathering harddisk had summoned this for me. "We have this," it said, as if rounding up visions of our world for cosmic storage.
Being shown how indistinguishable It All Is when viewed from the perspective of an endless mushroom. And then, accompanied by massive bass tones, the camera pulls back yet further, and you're reeling, thinking, "Please don't show me anymore!" - the perspective becoming so wide that, far from the mind embracing it or no, the problem is comprehending it in its vast and terrible beauty in the first place. The first time I've fought my mind against incoming information. The first time I really felt my curiosity might disembowel me, leave my psychic viscera swaying beneath.
A being, some kind of hyper-complex poly-engine replete with faces, demons and a variety of machine tools, all of the features spinning and whirring away frantically. Close, very close, to the elves who scribble away at the frontier of mind, penning the next moment to be beheld by your perception. (I actually heard the pens scratching away.)
Inferring that 'enlightenment' is merely a choice: Open up your eyes and see that you have the means to fashion this Thing as you so wish. Or don't open up. I found myself on a chain - I felt like clothes hanging from a line, unable to do anything about it but observe: I got the impression that the only game there is is observation. I felt the engine running, felt myself pinned to it as the thing revolves on, going through its gigantic cycle. I was looking at all life from up there on the clothes line, with a mind that was not only perfectly functional, but perfectly aware of its primacy.
Primacy of mind: There is a joke that many people aren't in on. The whole of reality appears to come out of some understanding, some pact, that we don't mention the absurdity. That we ignore the initial friction that resulted in Thought. I watched Amp and I living a life together, becoming wise to this notion. I was shown that you can lend your support to the Illusion - the Illusion arising from this blinding friction - or you become part of the enriching process, that slowly awaking female plant from the beginning; examine how the energies you create feed the flanks of the Big Octopus we're all plugged into. As the mushroom showed me the absurdity I noticed how literally everything that arises in the Illusion - the friction that required mind in the first instance - becomes like an old piece of furniture: It all grows, decays. And those who truly come to enlightenment no longer complain about the frictions because, like scattered and aging fungi, all absurdity is to be expected here in timespace. Cackling about this, I noticed that the closer I came to accepting the Illusion of the world, the more the world tried to pull me back: So as soon as these thoughts came into my head the wind and rain outside suddenly started thrashing at the meshing, Amp suddenly started screeching at me to come back. All very eerie. Mind is primary.
Decay: Decaying - dying - is living. Those of us who have reconciled this rhythm of nature with our mayfly stories end up dancers, rock and rollers, and generally joyful: We have the terminal life rhythm inside us, and we flow with it. I experienced the growing and withering of a fungus, and how that withering Is you, and Is Life. Felt the withering rhythm hasten until it became a pulse, a vibe riffing. I felt that as 'the end' approaches, one's wisdom correspondingly increases. That no one dies in ignorance. That, in fact, the universe is rigged so that all beings may enjoy an endlessly increasing comprehension of the Profundity. And If you play the right cards, you can actually manipulate this into bliss, turn it into an asymptotic curve: A force that will infinitely and unceasingly rise, allowing you to create whole systems of worlds if it tickles you to do so.
Being inside a singularity. Indescribable really, memory being so fragmentary. Time spinning down; a freezing, silver, globular moment in which I came back; realised that, to an extent, a mushroom took me inside this place.
Outside, a gigantic, belching frog punctuates the jungle night. And, out of its throat, cascades of my hysterics.
"You're in the jungle yeah, kid!" the fungus reminds. The world is a jungle, there are so many lifeforms teeming for lebensraum. Try to get wise without getting infected. And there is an impression that viruses, and other kinds of software, are available, transmittable, in these spaces. I watch as an octopus-cum-leopard-come-spiderplant crawls into some kind of genetic wall. I think about symbiosis and fill out the next day being the leopard, the jungle cat. Lazing on my balcony during a thoroughly green day, gazing out of my introspection at impossibly high clouds, content to smoke only and ponder the small things.
I have tried to sum up a few of these visions; but getting information out of these places is fiendish. The business about consciousness arising from a certain friction and that most people are unaware that everything they whinge about must be a natural consequence of their being in the first place, this was so.. vivid.. so well implied by the mushroom's visions that it may as well have been presenting a lecture: The sequences of images were so meaningful.. But, I just can't grab back whatever it was that causes the friction in the first place: It's something to do with thought, subjectivity, the illusion of objects. And that once you start thinking you've got to be prepared to give everything up, because someone will have a harder time letting go of their mind than you will. Be ready to be charitable.
This is tiresome now, I'm sure. More practice is required translating these images. That's piece of news number one. Piece of news number two: The shamanic ecstasy delivered. It is both terrifying and electrifying; signs, as McKenna might say, of the enterprise's "existential validity."
Out for now.
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