Psychedelics and then what?

[fuzz]

Hey there.
This is a note written as a response to a post on futurehi.net.
http://www.futurehi.net/archives/000779.html

For a little background about futurehi. It is a site very much into all the latest technologies, AI's, uploaders, nanotech, singularities and all those new science terms derived from computer tech.
The site is also concerned with psychedelic experience and its futures, consciousness, and what is stuff in general.

Enjoy:)

Psychedelics and then what?

To live with the poetry of the past in a mathematical world.



"The eyes have a vision of Eternity... Sounds take on colors and colors contain music... Suppose you look at a tree gracefully waving in the wind... you attribute to the tree your passion, your desire or your melancholy, its murmurs and its writhing becomes yours, and before long you are the tree. In the same way, a soaring bird first represents the immortal desire to fly above things human, but already you yourself are the bird..." (1860, 1967).
Charles Baudelaire in Les Paradis Artificiels. (1)

Mind manifestation:
Let's start by looking at the psychedelic entry in wikipedia. The psychedelic experience is defined as "the perception of aspects of one's mind previously unknown, or by the creative exuberance of the mind liberated from its ordinary fetters...". This definition seems vague and fuzzy to me. If I apply this understanding of psychedelic experience to life; I would have to say that then every moment IS a psychedelic experience. Every moment being a new one, we can not know what the next minute brings.
What does seem to happen is that we forget to view each moment as a new one. We get caught up in our lives, caught up in the every day doings, the routine, and we forget to open our eyes to the magic of each new moment.
Perhaps then, the psychedelic experience is more about re-membering this constant newness, that it is about accessing a so called "psychedelic state", since we are in a psychedelic state by the time we "are".

The modern culture would like to believe, and would like to let us believe that everything can be one day explained, that we can cure everything with a little pill, that everything can be contained in such or such theorie. From this philosophy, we have "A Theory of Everything" for about anything, the fashionable "Singularity", we have black holes and vortexes, uploaders and Trekkers, wormholes and AI's. We have an endless area of propheties and various seers, we have akashic fields, hidden Masters and their shadow/light worlds. To replace the old gods with a new and hipper crew of them, the modern thinkers have designed a new system just as closed as the old ones are.
And the ancient argument goes on:
"My god is better than yours"
"NO, mine is"
"Your god is old and passé!! God is dead!"
"Your god is new and blasphemic! Long live the King!"
And some like to think this is change....

Of course there is nothing wrong with trying to organize this flow of information which anyone pondering life receives/opens to. But there seems to be something wrong in believing that one's own insight is valid, or at least any valider than the next point of view. These "Everything of theories", stepping on our toes, do not let room for the mystery, for the unknown or for the beatific states. These theories reduce the dreamer in each of us to a sort of mathematical equation, a chemical formula, turning us into statistics without a name or a face, without a personality behind those experiences.
So, where to stand in this sea of gods?

If I think of the future, I can see not one, not 2, not 3, but an infinite amounts of them. I can imagine total destruction, destruction always being the simplest of sights. I can see Blade Runner worlds, space travel, and more. If I try to make an effort, and try to see futures through positive glasses; which takes a lot more work that the negative futures, I can see a place where people start respecting each other as well as their environments. The worlds imagined by artists and writers are by now infinite.
People look and dream multi-verses, when really the multiverse is right here and right now.
Time travel already exist, and travel agencies are the ones selling the tickets through space/time. In a few hours, you can find yourself in a tribe like state, watching old women passing sheeps wool through their ancient fingers,turning the piles of raw wool into the threads that will make their mythological carpets. In a few hours you can go to a place where the sun is still the only clock, and the days are still designed around the harvesting of the food grown for the village. In a few hours you can also find yourself at the center of the most modern of cities, filled with neon signs and people running around to buy the latest toys. Time travel is now accessible to anyone who can afford a travel stubb through space.
One of the question now changes from "does time travel exist", but rather "for how long will it exist?". How long will we be able to look at nature in the wild, as species disappear every day? For how long will our kids be able to breathe air which doesn't also kill them?

Some, as an answer to everything dream of the space filled with stars. And I understand this, as I used to dream of space as well. Space was my first dreams, my first place to escape as a kid. I thought childishly: "its ok, we're just going to go into space. F_ this planet anyhows". Now I understand that my space dreams were just the perfect way of dealing with my inadequacy at trying to enjoy every day life, a way to put a conforting image onto my fears, a way to hide from myself, a way to loose myself in the unknown. Inside us all, there is still a kid that likes shiny stuff.
Of course, I am not saying that we should stop thinking about space, for the simple reason that i dont think we can. We're a curious spieces, we like to explore. All I am saying is that space will most likely not solve any of our real and deeper issues. We will go into space carrying the same problems that we have here on Terra. We might translate the problems into a new set of questions, transform them onto new shapes, but at the end of the day, we will still be faced with our own void. For now, I am not floating around in space, I will adapt to it when I will be there, for my mam taught me "intelligence is the faculty of adaptation".

"The metaphysical desire...desires beyond everything that can simly complete it. It is like goodness - the Desired does not fulfill it, but deepens it... [Desire] nourishes itself, one might say, with its hunger."
Emmanuel Levinas.(2)



Psychedelic drugs and ego loss:
As many of you on this site, or reading this, I have done my fair share of psychedelics, of "mind expending" drugs. On my road to discovery, I have gone to the height spaces of the so called "ego loss" as I have experienced the abyss of the addiction world. Both roads have taught me many things.
Perhaps what they have taught me is a similar message, both roads being translated through different symbols. Each road having it's own lessons, each road ending in one and the same point: the eye, the "i" that sees, the "i" that sees no more eye, the "eye" that becomes the "i".
I can not believe in a total "ego loss". The term to me does not work, as even when "i" am lost, it is still a part of me that is feeling it's own loss. It has to be something else.

Let's turn to the buddhist and see what life times of meditation can teach.
The buddhist would say: "enlightment is jut the begining."
If it is now unquestionable that there are some "transcendent spaces" to get access to, yet, we still seem to argue over what exactly is that space. Each of us will have a diferent definition of what one's own "transcendence" might be. One's transcendence can be looked down upon as being merely swimming on the surface by another, yet, for anyone experiencing such a state, it is indeed, a "transcendence", whether we transe-dance during the most mundane of acts, like looking at a leaf on a tree, or transcend with a near death experience, it is a transcendence. We all transcend ourself every day, every moment, and that in itself is perhaps the ultimate transe-and-dance, every day: we are.

Many from the psychedelic drug world seem to still see the drug experience as the ultimate and final point to acheive, as something which people whom have not experienced an alternate mind state via drug could not "understand". In a way they are correct, as indeed, each experience is its own moment in space/time, relative only to the person or persons experiencing it. But there is a tendency of the drug takers to think: "you can not understand", "you have not gone far enough". In that sense, the supposedly open minded drug takers are acting exactlty as what they critique in the non drug takers. In that sense the drug taker confuses the psychedelic experience realm with the drug experience. In that sense, it forgets that the drug world is only one aspect of a larger experience. As the non drug taker might think: "those drugggies, they just dont know". It is the same type of self induldgence on both sides. As if both sides are still striving for a diference between them, instead of joining forces and learning from the other. As if both sides are still trying to define themselves by what they do, instead of by what they have learned from what they do.

The new generation of psychedelic thinkers is born, and as any generation, one of its job is to take what they like out of the teachers of the old, and leave out what they dont like. The new generation has to get rid of some of the original enthusiasm for the first drug induced psychonauts. It has to get rid of that unique feeling that it is bringing anything new from the old mystics and poets of the world. As much as the drug culture has produced some great things, it has also produced a wide variety of problems, ranging from addiction, poverty, psychosis, total corruption, and enough fashionable kids sitting around chasing the dragon to create a market for multicolored munchies.

Perhaps its time to put the wave of the 60's idealism to a new beat. A psy beat. A beat that could take the lessons from the past, spice it up with the new technologies, in an effort to preserve what left we have of the world as we once knew it. By this I am refering to the precious natural resources which Terra offers, the minerals, the plants, the animals..and heck maybe even the monkey known as homo-sapiens...



"There was never any more inception than there is now,
Nor any more youth or age than there is now;
And will never be an more perfection than there is now,
Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now."
Walt Whitman in Leaves of Grass. Song of Myself.

Links:
Quotes taken from Zig Zag Zen. (1&2)
http://www.zigzagzen.com/

Text and images by Fuzz.

[fuzz]

Ketamine report.
Or what about ketamine elves?



"Looking-glass Insects.

Of course the first thing to do was to make a grand survey of the country she was going to travel through.`It's something very like learning geography,' thought Alice, as she stood on tiptoe in hopes of being able to see a little further. `Principal rivers - There are none. Principal mountains - I'm on the only one, but I don't think it's got any name. Principal towns - why, what are those creatures, making honey down there? They can't be bees- nobody ever saw bees a mile off, you know -' and for some time she stood silent, watching one of them that was bustling about among the flowers, poking it's proboscis into them,` just as if it was a regular bee,' thought Alice.

However, this was anything but a regular bee: in fact..."

Set and setting:
It's a nice mellow friday evening, nothing going on besides the usual friday parties. A perfect time to take a trip with some Special K, aka Ketamine.

Let's make sure we have the basic 2 trip rules covered:
Set and Setting.
"Set" is the expectations a person brings with them. "Setting" is the environment that a person is in. Set includes expectations about the drug's actions and how the person will react. Setting includes the social and physical conditions.
Mission for the evening trip:

Set = travel and experience.
Setting = Nice and mellow, confortable and safe.


We are 3 people. First of, we select a play list for a couple hours of play. Some mellow ambient, Alpha Wave movement and a couple other albums. http://www.silentrecords.net/html/greg_ ... _move.html

We get 100 mgs each on a CD cover, cut in 2 lines, ie, about 50mgs each line.
We pick our respective positions, 2 on the matress and I on a big and extremely confortable chair.
First snort.
A minute or so after the snort, we all feel the liquid K going down the throat. The body starts being felt in a diferent way than usual. We are still communicating, still quite "there". 15 mns laters, We decide to go for the second line.
Second snort.
I lay back and experience. For me, the experience isnt very visual. It seems as if it is mostly a nice and relaxed feeling, of sitting back with extremely soothing and mellow music playing. The usual things i associate with psychedelics came in the mind, the thoughts and panders. I sit and make an effort not to attach any form of meaning or actual attention to the passing thoughts. I know I cant make sense out of those thoughts, or rather that they are just thoughts, not any more or less important than the usual thoughts, just the mind going through its mechanisms of thought fabrication. I see the passing thoughts as a hindrance being a barrier between a full experience of the moment and the ego trying to analyze the moment. Of course, I am also aware that this making a choice over what to do with those passing thoughts is also a part of my ego, yet, I go for it. I choose not to let myself be bothered by my own irelevant thoughts. I let the thoughts be as the dead mechanism they are, I watch them pass as if there was some other place to get past the words and the spaces the words create. Letting go of the words, I get to that place, and the place is experience itself.

I know that the "after" trip thoughts will be enough words put onto the experience itself.
The music feels nice, the body feels nice and relaxed, at least as far as i feel connected to that body.
The 2 others in the room are also tripping. My partner on the matress goes through a moment of anxiety. I see that he is in good company, next to his caring friend, so i decide not to move from my chair. I feel as if focusing on the moment of anxiety would only deepen that passing anxious moment. Also,to get close to him, i would have had to make wide movements, which seemed at the time as unescessary. I knew my partner was in good loving hands, so i watched from my chair, and waited for the anxious moment to pass, not focusing on it, yet paying attention to the safety of the one going through a not so smooth moment.
The moment passed, and the trip went on normally. My partner and I decided to stop after second line, and our friend decided to go for 1 more, then one last. As my partner and i slowly landed back to ground zero, our friend went to lay in the back room, and went through his trip, occasionaly moaning, laughing, calling us and laughing some more. This reminded me of the Cosmic giggle, the giggle overcoming everything, as if facing the absurdities we sometimes call truth, the giggle looking at the self and just
laughing.. because we can and its beautifull.
Our friend landed, we all hughed, thanked each other for a great time, waited a bit and went on with evening food, a great rice chicken in coconut milk plate.




K, psychedelic or not?

A couple days after the trip I wander if i consider K to be a psychedelic or not. I think that the effects during the trip  are of a psychedelic type, ie, that the self experiences reality in a way not similar to the commonly agreed upon every day reality.
But the after effect feeling was not what i would call a classical psychedelic experience after effect. The feeling i get after a psychedelic trip is one of purification, as if i had swept some cobwebs from the corners of my mind, as if i had cleaned myself up and from this reorganizing my new self, i had rebooted my spiritual side. K did not do this to me. After the trip, i felt as if i took a trip in my mind, as if i had watched an intense movie, but nothing more.
This trip reinforced an idea i have been formulating in my mind about psychedelics. That is, that a trip isnt as much about the chemical being ingested, than it is about spaces we go to in our mind. The spaces are there to go into, and i am starting to believe that it is not the chemicals which sends us there, but rather a combination of how we choose to use the chemicals and where each person is at along it's own personal development. After this k trip, as well as a bit during the trip, i wandered if i'd feel any diferent if i was on another psychedelic. The answer was that no. I would not feel any diferent if i was on a diferent psychedelic drug. Perhaps the body feeling might be slighlty diferent, yet it seems to me that during a full trip, no matter of the chemical aid being used, the body is "psychedelized", the body is transcended and only becomes the carrier for this other thing which takes over.

What is this other thing taking over? I do not know. Most likely the body is not being "taken over", most likely it is just shifting from one perception to another one. Like changing glasses, like just moving one inch over, in order to see a scene from a diferent angle. The scene remains the same, only the perspective changes, from altering the point of view from which we stand. Perhaps it is the body becoming one with the mind, with the heart and all the things which create this thing called the "i", a type of diferent unification from the one usually experienced. I do not think that it is a "higher" me, or  a "better" me, or a "more centered" me.

It is just a different me, from a different angle. Diferent does not mean more, better, less or worth, it just means diferent. The "truth" experienced on psychedelics is not any more or less valid than the one experienced while not on psychedelics, they are just different glasses, different reality tunnels as RAW would call those sets of "reality". "i", becomes a different version of the "i", a new configuration which does not anymore differentiate the material flesh body from the other functions contained in it, such as the mind, and what the mind creates.



Psychedelic maps or reality tunnels?

During the trip, i mentionned this as best i could for the moment to the 2 other people in the room. They both asked if i had been to the K-hole. I asked what exacty was the k-hole. "if you had been there, youd know". The answer still didnt point out to anything specific, just a name, the k-hole. I have to wander wheter this k-hole actually does exist as a space, or if it more along the lines of familiar words people put onto their experiences, a word more pointing to an abstraction than an actual space. Being on ketamine, we are supposed to reach this k mythological space. As for DMT, many mention meeting what they describe as being elves like
creatures. I have not yet tried DMT for myself, yet, if I read the book by Strassman, DMT, the Spirit Molecule, one obvious thing is that there are as many ways to experience dmt than there are people to describe the experience itself. In the book, some go to the so called elf space, some go to completely different spaces which has absolutely nothing to do with elves or an other wild creatures for that matter. A similar thing happens while reading the Ayahuasca book, Human Consciousness and the Spirits of Nature. Some people during the trip will meet animals and plants spirits and some will not. As if we have populated psychedelic spaces with specific creatures for each drug in order to put our experiences in easy to understand boxes, as if we have created those images in order to have a reference point to share with others. In one way,this organizing of abstrat and more "real" imaes can be usefull. In another sense, to me, that is also doing the exact opposite of what the potential of psychedelics can be. I do understand that having some reference points can be quite helpfull, as a sort of map before to enter such and such territory. Yet, as the old man says : we can never confuse the map for the teritory. Once we feel confortable enough with the territory, the map becomes absolete and we can start writing our own map, with the help of the old maps studies.

The elves might be only one way to describe the experience, as the plants and animal spirits, the k-hole and so goes with the other drug mythologies. I suspect that the elves are one image people feel safe with, therefore they go and see elves. As for reading a movie critique. How many times have you read a critique, then seen a movie and felt something completely diferent from what you read in the critique? Perhaps the critique sucked, and you loved the movie, or vice versa. It seems that the psychedelic experience is a bit like this. People report certain things, so a few people will actually think they experience those things. In a sense, if they think they experience this, it is of course actually what is being experienced. But does everyone have to experience the very same thing? Why should everyone have to express their experience using similar images?
Could it be a lack of imagination? A fear of not tripping as everyone else does? A fear of not "belonging", of not tripping right?
Another question is: why should i trust any entity i might meet during a trip? What if the elves are elves because we make them elves and are really soemthign else alltogether? Why should i stop at what i see in a trip and believe it blindly anymore than i should trust what i see in non trip reality?
The answer is: i cant. I cant take any reality blindly and believe of it whatever i am told by othes it is. I will question both realities just as much, the every day one, as the more unusual realities.

Here is what James kent has to say, in reference to his The Case Against DMT Elves where he attempts to tie a knot in the meme of autonomous elves and other DMT entities.
http://www.tripzine.com/listing.php?id=dmt_pickover

"Now I may be wrong about some of the little details, only more research will prove me right or wrong one way or the other, but the psychedelic state can be deconstructed rationally without having to go off into airy-fairy land of spirits and whatnot. Also, I never denied the possibility of DMT elves or OBEs or whatever, I'm just saying there is no need to cling to these things as *explanations* for what is going on in the psychedelic trip. The evidence for these "supernatural" things is weak and totally based on the reporting of people who have had their heads full of hallucinogens, so it is wise to not take them too seriously, and foolish to believe them outright. It makes me angry that McKenna's fantastical memes have spread so far that some people take them as dogma.

It is obvious that McKenna told fanciful stories to sell books. I mean, if he sat at the podium talking about receptor sites and activation of layer-V pyramid cells in the temporal lobe, etc., he would be preaching to empty seats and would not be a star. But when he talked about elves and aliens and eschatons (like a religious prophet) he packed the house. It is insanity I say, it must stop. I think these "mystical" memes are misleading and dangerous and more often lead to delusion than enlightenment. If there is truth to them, then what is the harm in deconstructing the biophysical means by which these "paranormal" visits from autonomous
entities occur? The only harm is discovering oops, it was all a hallucination."
http://tripzine.net/pit/viewtopic.php?t ... 92aca2a77b
by James Kent, former Editor of Psychedelic Illuminations and Publisher of Trip Magazine, Psychedelic Information Theory.
http://www.tripzine.com/pit/

What about them ketamine elves then?

As for any travels, wheter it is in our mind, inner travel, or outside our mind, on roads and cities, we all experiene things in a diferent way. The experience itself and the way the individual expresses it later is a combination of so many factors that i seriously doubt we could ever put words onto it. A combination of where the individual is at at the moment of its life, of personal history, of cultural images, of intentions and desires, which all differ from one person to the next.
As if the experience itself had a life of its own, it changes as we try to recall it. It is not set in stones, it is still alive and morphing as we try to point to it. As for the electron elf in the world of physics, we can not see a point and tell its speed at the same time. It seems to be a similar type of paradox with experiences, wheter they be psychedelic or not. As we try to describe them.
I did not go to the k hole. Niether on this last trip, or on previous k trips. I do not even know what is meant by the k-hole. if the words k-hole does point to something concrete in some people's mind, fine with me. I do not question their feeling they experience such a thing, i am only sharing the way i myself experience things, using a language which i feel familiar with. If i accept the k-hole metaphor of some, should those others also not accept the way i describe my own non k-hole experience?

For now, i still stand by the idea that psychedelics arent as much about the chemical being used as much as it is about the way the chemical is being used as a tool to interact with the moment. Of course each chemical carries its own properties. Some are seperate entities all together, for exemple the Salvia experience which i do not think fits into any of the usual psychedelics categories.
But it is as if psychedelics throw us deeper into the moment. The moment, which is where the person stands in its own personal evolution, mixed with the yearly/monthly/weekly events, the day's mood, creating the moment where the past and future meet. The mysterious moment which no elves, no k-holes, no dragons, no angels nor gods will explained. The moment, psychedelic in nature, the moment which we will keep on pandering as long as we can ponder our many selves..... The moment being created with every breath we take...



Reality as the Grand Illusion has been written about since man could create realities. We can keep on writing them up, yet i doubt anybody knows whats really going on, and the more someone tells me they know, the more i disbelieve them...

Francois Rodin:
"The realities of nature surpass our most ambitious dreams."

Photos manipulation images by Psych. Go check more of his work:
http://psych.jail.se/

more on K:
http://peyote.com/jonstef/ketamine.htm
more reality tunnels from the fusionanomaly:
http://fusionanomaly.net/realitytunnels.html
Ayahuasa - Human Consciousness and the Spirits of Nature
Ralph Metzner, Ph.D.
http://www.lycaeum.org/books/plantscomp ... ametz.html
http://www.rickstrassman.com/