Stoned musings. Point/counterpoint kind of thing, sobering up towards the end:
You can actually watch your thoughts after a fashion when this happens, or rather feel them, running down the back of your mind; an insubstantial, seemingly lucid flow of casual insight. It can be felt, or watched, like a movie, as long as you have the sound turned down. It breaks apart on contact, either because it's nothing to begin with, or because it's truth on a level that the conscious, 'lower' brain can't comprehend, at least not intrinsically. The rational conclusion would obviously be that it's nothing to begin with - but, when you're in the moment, it feels true. What else is truth to us, except that which we feel is true?
It's waves of drug induced realisations, the mind running free and fast, expanding and branching from one topic to another and another and another, again and again and again and again and again; the scattered, viscous tributaries of everyday thought fused and energised into a roaring, romping torrent of perception, intangible and unfocused, darting over the thread and pattern of reality with casual, questing exhuberence.
Impossibly, the magic seems to be independant of the self; insight and perception gliding with unhurried burning clarity somewhere outside the warm, roiling stew of the personality - a personality which has become a detached observer - the ME, hanging with embryonic torpor in a silent, infinite void, cut adrift by chemicals from the moors of reason to float with serene apathy on the winds and whims of intuition, watching in an unblinking, muzzily-astonished stupor as the mind burns and dances before it like quicksilver, one understanding flowing with seamless liquidity into the next. A fluid, rapid welling of insight. The question is: what (or who) is the self actually observing?
But as soon as the conscious mind stops to pick one of these jewelled fruits, the harmony collapses - the moment the rebelling psyche demands to examine this so-called insight, the solid thrum of truth lurches away from us in a jarring muddle; a perfect, beaded snowflake instantly collapsing into a mental singularity of impenetrable density. The thought selected is reduced to (or exposed as) a confused and muddy concept; the meat of it slips away as a dream, leaving only the maddening, fading memory of infinite perspective and truth. Any attempt to explain the ideas in question inevitably break down in the same way: dismissed by thinker and audience alike as nothing more than a random peak in the ebb and flow of the high. Maybe they are.. but then again, maybe they aren't - maybe we really are tapping in to some higher truth that the rational, conscious mind is usually unable to percieve - and maybe the mental collapse of the fuzzy, insightful harmony that occurs simultaneously with conscious examination of the rapidfire, sequential understanding is like a safety valve in the mind, which shuts off the fount of knowledge when we open our eyes in wonder at what we drink of, leaving only a depressingly pallid aftertaste, a remnant of a remnant - perhaps nothing more tangible than that - but still, even in these murky dregs there is a subdued exhilaration, like the fading panic felt upon waking from a nightmare. A memory of a memory of a feeling.
Sometimes you can dip into the stream, catch lightning in a bottle, and isolate the bedraggled afterimage of this liquid insight. This was one of them... one of many flashes in a sequence. It struck me as a truth about drugs, but rationally it seems likely that it's merely yet another of the seemingly self-apparent but ultimately false 'insights' which flash through the drug-addled brain at a pace which belies their flaws: slowing them down, bringing them to the light and examining them may be like putting the Mona Lisa under a microscope - the whole gives an impression of truth, synergy, and cohesive, intrinsic beauty, but ultimately, if we look closely enough, it is made of flawed constiutent parts - seemingly random placements of tiny pieces of paint, each lacking truth or beauty in itself. Are these thoughts the same? Random splashes of paint? Or is it that we truly can't see the forest for the trees - that truth and intrinsic beauty really is everywhere we look, and understanding is all around? Does our rational brain destroy an intuitive harmony that we all share with each other and the universe? Does altering our consciousness with drugs or meditation begin to break down an invisible wall whose boundaries we unkowingly live within? It's obviously a circular argument, but intuition and intrinsic belief really is the only truth, ultimately, for individuals. All I know is that I exist. Everything else is subject to doubt, but also to consideration.
Back to the perception trip. Is it real? I will never know. The rational argument is that of course it's all drug induced; that it's a chemical reaction in the brain (both claims self-apparent and undeniable). But many would say that this is irrelevant - that regardless of how messed up they are, people in altered states of consciousness really can begin to access a different level of reality, call it what you will. This would also include mediation, peyote in America, cava in the Pacific, etc. It seems that many indigenous cultures have taken the perception trip at face value - for example a Native American not eating and taking peyote in order to find their spirit animal. But even meditation in a Buddhist monk is essentially the same. Altering your state in order to passively receive insight. Any transcendent experience used to deliberately attempt to access this kind of knowledge, even meditation, is essentially identical to me smoking 15 cones and then spewing this out. It comes down to faith, I suppose.
It feels real at the time, but then the feeling is drug-induced. Finding out whether the drugs are opening our eyes or closing them seems to be impossible. Ultimately it comes down to the individual, just like every other fucking thing.
Stalemate.
PostScript: Just found this on a scrap piece of paper, offers (extremely) alternate view, think I mustve been pretty messed up at the time: The universe is soulless. A grinding, meaningless mechanism, driven madly onward by the sightless thrashing of seething, spastic forces. We are it's children and it's victims; forever condemned to perceive order and meaning in the shifting foam of infinite chaos. Our senses, and ourselves, belie the horrific, self-evident truth: We are nothing. There is nothing.
I think I started tripping out about this when I was trying to imagine the quantum foam, and I had this really vivid image of the universe as I imagined it 'really' is - It was like the snowstorm static on a television with no aerial, except it was red and blue instead of black and white. I remember there was no distinction at all between empty space, matter, and energy: just this silent, endless foam. And I was made out of the same stuff. Distinction was an illusion. Freaked me right out!
05-12-2006, 06:51
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