From: || | | | | | | | | (blacksun@btinternet.com)
Date: Wed May 15 2002 - 15:30:07 MDT
Michelle
> Personally, I think you're not _too_ far off - but it takes some serious
> dedication and personal growth to even glimpse what's available to us -
and
> drugs are cheating. Perhaps the drugs can give you a taste of what real
> work will bring but you can't pick the lock on heaven's door...
Psychedelic chemicals open doors.
Psychedelic chemicals allow one to glimpse truth.
Psychedelic chemicals admit the seeker into the mystery.
Psychedelic chemicals do nothing of the sort.
My primary agenda, as it seems to me at the moment, is to inspire in people
the urge to interpret their experience of life in novel, dynamic, and
perhaps unique ways, in the hope that the human whose worldview is based on
an equality of subjectivities will be of great assistance in generating a
future space for interaction, comprised of multiplicities, paradoxes; a
space of spaces, a topology of diversions, unifications, temporal shifts of
agreement and non binary logics. In short, I seek to advocate a personal,
revisionist stance towards the ruling myths, mists and memes of our
acknowledged common background of culture.
Personal experience has led me to an acceptance of rather specific and
subjective elements of change, or rather, I have come to compile a list of
the most useful tools of reality interpretation, and the particular
epistemological crowbar which stands out from the rather scattered and
sparse crowd is the psychedelic, or entheogenic, or nootropic compound.
Whether the particular poison in question stems directly from the warm
earthy heart of the Amazon or the technologically advanced laboratories of
Switzerland seems to hold little relevance in my mapping of favourites. At
the molecular level, a molecule is a molecule, an atom an atom.
The new-ageism of 'mankind is bad and so are his synthetics' invokes no more
than a slight yawn in me; mankind is nature for the purpose of measuring up
the pro's and cons of substance use, and any arguments with this point would
be based more on the arbitrary demarcations of linguistic intent and scope
than the point itself.
The use of substances which alter the usual functions of the brain by
playing with its neurochemistry may perhaps, if one were to grant slight
credence to the theories of McKenna & ilk, be traced back to the birth of
religious experience, the origins of language, and the first tentative steps
towards an I/we based worldview. Evidence from various fields of research
points towards non-hierarchical shamanic/neo/pseudo-shamanic cultures
involved in maintaining group cohesion by performing the inverse operation
of loosening cohesion in the minds of the individuals of whom such cultures
consisted, using plant-allies, or whichever endearing yet utterly archaic
descriptive complex was used to designate the mushrooms, cacti and jungle
vines used.
This 'loosening of cohesion', which is no more useful a term than any other
in the quest to explain the psychedelic experience, operates by allowing the
ingester of aforementioned compounds enhanced access to the set of
associative patterns, events, memory complexes, culturally specific cues and
categories, etc, etc. of which the 'conscious mind' is said to consist. Such
enhanced access leads, in some cases, to a recontextualisation or shifting
around of the meme-modules so that the post-psychedelic / post-comedown mind
may draw new lines of association between parts, and in reality may assume,
until the next trip, a modified form and series of cross-references.
Information extraneous to the individual mind also appears to be accessed
through the use of psychedelics; one possible source is subconscious in
origin, or perhaps it is only the screen-memory or reinterpretation of such
information which relies on the archetypal idiosyncrasies of the conscious
subject; nonetheless, this data from elsewhere may be useful in helping the
tripping individual acknowledge the fact that his/her 'everyday waking
reality' may need quotation marks, may be, and indeed is, extrapolated and
distilled from a finite set of data using finite and partially valid means.
(The means are defined by the context and the previous sum of data contained
within consciousness, and are thus, by default, only partially valid, or
rather useful, 'valid' itself referring to some sort of objective meaning.)
Well, this is how it seems to me, anyway.
Most of the 'brave psychonauts' I have encountered however, seem to navigate
their experience through dogma rather than uniqueness.
Rather than 'fess up to their ontological irrelevancies, they spout all
sorts of metaphysical mumblings, re-enact tired repetitions of the same old
archetypal tales, live in the footsteps of those who passed before them who
made the mistakes of documenting their travels as travelogues, rather than
lucid explorations of their own meme-spaces. The footsteps thus lead to dull
spaces, spaces useful in the perpetuation of pattern, but void and without
much part to play in the instilment of novelty, innovation. Indeed, the
quest to reach such over travelled hillocks of the mind rests primarily in a
set of very base urges, and the playing of some boring psychological
complexes. These include the 'holier than thou, been there done that'
attitude, as though all that was needed to move up the psychedelic ladder of
self-righteousness was to read some Castanada and knock back the juice (and
the more rarefied the juice the more points you get); they also include the
peer group complex, the need for belonging, the need to feel justified in
one's actions which usually leads the not so confident into serious
trappings of dogma and empty ritual. Even in their most spoken about, most
dangerous of terrains, few are doing more than pitching their flags at base
camp.
This may seem largely irrelevant, and in some sense, it is at this point in
our story that there remains some homogeneity, some large degree of overlap
in our memetic drifts. However, it is also important to remember that
psychedelics do not magically free one of all dogma, neither does any
so-called 'authentic' religious practise. To believe that a psychedelic
experience is more valid, more real and truer than any other shadowy
concepts we gloss over in our search for meaning and relevance, is to admit
that the first lesson of psychedelics has not been learned. Nothing is Real.
Everything is Permitted. We are the sum of our sensations, in their reaction
with our reactionary apparatus, although this is meant in the widest sense
of the world, me not being particularly materialistic by nature. To parade
around with a library of second-hand experience misinterpreted as the law is
a grievous error, especially if it leads to the formation of hierarchies of
'at-oneness', and silly clique groups of snobby hippies who reject what they
don't understand in order to pretend they understand what no-one else does.
This level of homogeneity at the average psychedelic gathering i.e.: I've
done more than you attitude, shallowly apprehended concepts of trance-dance,
religious mishmashes of Buddhism, Shamanism and even 'back to basics'
Fundamentalism, as well as the nature vs. tech illusion, speaks volumes
about how psychedelic fanaticism fails to live up to its cheesy ideals.
And yet, right around the corner, one level of dilation away, there is a
totally ineffable level of experience available to all; it is only in the
explanation that it dies. Psychedelics have a potentially profound place in
our po-mo pre-fu culture. But, as is indicated by the dynamics, and the
current state of our culture, the iconography, superstition, primitive
explanations and boring spirit-of-the-plant archetypes which make up much of
the modern psychedelic (or should I say psycholytic) scene, and I here refer
not to the serious petitioners and researchers but to the trance-hippy and
new-age safely metaphysical types in particular, are no longer all too
relevant. We do not need a classical shamanically centred community, a
system of rules of experiential reproduction, an immutable set of memes with
which to blunt the mystery; rather, we need to view psychedelics, and the
experiences they provide, in our own ways. We need to develop our own
concepts with which to approach the interface between mind and information,
we need to tell these viruses how best to infect us. And, most of all, we
need to take responsibility for our infections.
This, more than any other thing, is what psychedelics taught me. Still think
its cheating?
Take care and control.
bricoleur
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