Thursday, June 25, 2009

A propensity for intensity.

Having spent the better portion of today in the company of an unbelievably pretty girl, watching The Matrix and drinking mescal slings to wash down pepperoni pizza, I cam to some amusing realisations about the nature of reality.

Philip K. Dick says that "Reality is that which, when you aren't experiencing it, doesn’t go away."

This is all well and good for traditionalists, but when one delivers quantum notions and psychedelic drugs into the equation, you rapidly come to realise just how transient reality truly is.

Schroedinger tells us that until we observe an object, or to simplify matters, a choice, we cannot determine what state it is in, and for all intent and purposes, must be considered in both states, a quantum flux of living and dead, or 1 and 0, on and off, whatever the case may be. once you look at, smell, hear or touch the object, in other words, once you [i]experience[/i] reality, the waveform collapses and resolves into a steady and predictable straight.

But how do you know you can trust your perceptions? I cannot count the number of times I have eaten a powerful dose of some chemcial and seen things that weren't there. But that's the point, isn't it? how do I know they aren't there?

If you measure reality based on what is normal, of course they seem to be chemically-induced hallucinations, nonentities created purely by the action of certain seratonergic agonists on particular areas of my brain.

But - I have never been so high (and believe me I've tried) that all of what is 'normal' goes away. There are always elements of the sober world in my mind, that I can see and interact with. So no matter what i do, I am always interacting with the sober world - Always experiencing. it never goes away, and I cannot know whether or not it is real because it is always there.

However... No moment in my life has ever felt quite so real as certain experiences, particularly pertaining to the combination of LSD and DMT in high doses. They represent a complete invasion by the otherworlds, pushing through the membrane and exploding in our synapses.

Some break the shell.

I think that there are those who push their fingers through the brittle walls and make a hole. Through this cruel slit, they stare out across the cinders of the world with naked eyes and play themselves against the many-armed envy...

where am I going with this? what is the point I am trying to make?

One could easily argue that LSD and DMT are the same molecule, whenever i take them. LSD this week is the same as LSD the next week, which is why you have relatively predictable trips from the chemicals.

Anyone who has taken LSD or DMT know that this is not the case. There are, always, familiar elements in a trip, some degree of knowing-the-path even though you walk it blindly, because you've walked it before. But turning on is such a dynamic and conciousness warping experience, so dependent on so many factors totally outside our control, that it is different every time, for better or worse.

But there are still constants.

These are reality, I think. psychedelic drugs do not add layers onto the already-existing reality. They do not create things out of thin air, out of the ether, out of our imagination.

Rather, they strip away, layer by layer, until we start to see what is really out there, in other planes, in other facets of true reality. And then, we come down - We sober up, and we stop experiencing. But it's still there, evidenced by the fact that we can re-visit, any time we like, once more down the rabbit hole... And the next time we turn on, the net time we dose, the next time we trip - We remember a little bit more of the path in the dark, so we can walk a little bi farther each time. One day, we'll have walked it enough times that even blindly, sober, and without the aid of these chemicals, we'll be able to find our way to the other side.

That's why I take psychedelic drugs. So that one day, I won't have to, in order to find out what is truly real.

1 comment:

Pretty Hips. said...

My thoughts, put into a far better wording. Which, makes me damn certain you're good at this. Stop fucking off into that weird world you created, it's depressing.