I'm so very lonely right now.
ibid. said:
Felt so disconnected. No one... cares if I'm there. Or anywhere.
I feel sort of tired, so I doubt I'll trip... in theory it'd be fun, but I sort of just want to sleep. Blargh. So sad, fuck everything...
warning-exceedingly tl;dr
Divine Sister,
I don't know you, but I've become vaguely familiar with you by reading this thread (I read PD almost daily lately, but haven't had much time or inclination to post. Bluelight seems to come in waves for me like that) ... but this resonated with me and my own psychologoy of late enough that I wrote down some musings about what I'd say is a shared condition and an all-too-common affliction within the community (my primary psychological defense mechanism is intellectualization, and my closest pharmacological ally is a certain highly analytical lysergamide, can you tell?)
First and foremost, 'cause what I wrote below is long, technical, and sort of removed from any sort of personal reality here, I want to send you some LOVE and LIGHT, inasmuch as I can toss energy across ethernets and routers and space and time and national borders, please recieve peace, love, acceptance, understanding, insight, prosperity, and blessing ... world without end.
That feeling of isolation and loneliness and sheer existential terror is one that I know too well, and I think a lot of our comrades here will agree--our movement does not, as a rule, attract people who mainstream society would term "well adjusted", at least internally, that is to say, from the inside-looking-in. The Experience deeply unsettles certain equilibria within our selves our socially constructed selves, that is, our ego-bound identity, not the true self what the Hindus would call the
atman, that is to say, the experiencer which experiences ego-dissoluton/
turiya/whatever you may call it) relative to what we might percieve as normative in the context of mainstream society. The end result, in some stage of the path that we find ourselves on, is a day-to-day existence fraught with a certain sort of existential anxiety: who am I? What is my place in the world: socially, spiritually, teleologically? What is the meaning of these things that I have experienced? Is it right, and is it okay, to have seen these things and then returned to ordinary consciousness?
Maybe I read you wrong to connect all of this to the Experience, but I doubt I'm far off, one way or another, particularly as you mention tripping at the end of your post: that these concerns are common in our community raises a sort of chicken-and-the-egg, or correlation-versus-causation question: are psychedelics the source of the affliction of this existential anxiety or are those who are particularly afflicted with this affliction drawn towards psychedelics? I'm of the opinion that, at least to a degree, the movement attracts "broken people," but I put somewhat of an optimistic spin on it. At least a signfiicant portion of those within our movement are "broken people" who are in the process of fixing ourselves (some, of course, alternatively are engaged in a path of self-destruction, ironically utilizing the same tools that others are using in the path of self-improvement.)
So back to this loneliness, this isolation, this existential anxiety. I could get into a lengthy discussion of this as sociological phenomenon and as inherent part of the postmodern condition but I'll spare you all as this post is already stupidly technical and tl;dr. To bring it to a personal level, it's something I feel daily. I live in a city of millions of people, but feel completely isolated.
Psychedelics help me reconnect. However, it's sort of a Gordian knot ... tripping too much causes more of a radical disconnect between my mindset and consensus reality, which leads to more isolation. The most powerful message you can get from psychedelics is
that such seperations, dichotomies, and existential dilemmas are bullshit, and that the experience should be taken for what it is, and experience, one that can be learned from, and used as a jumping-off point to understand oneself better. Getting too far into the "message" of psychedelics can lead only to delusion
a la Leary, Pinchbeck, Lilly, Gray, and the whole rogue's gallery of tomfoolery within the movement ... the only "message" that is really there is very simplistic:
The only verb that you have to verb is "to be", i.e., to exist in the highest sense of the word. From this proceeds all else. And as all is proceeding from this fundamental fact of your existence and your experience, everything is connected. Connection is a fact; it is not a possibility or a construct or an artifact of circumstance. Only disconnection is artificial and circumstantial and constructed. The feeling of disconnection exists because we do not embrace the simplictiy of connection and of existence itself. And to embrace this is at some level synonymous with the path of enlightenment that we find ourselves on, in various stages ...
So why is it so fucking hard? Why do we find ourselves again and again alone and in doubt? Is it just the human condition? Is it an imperfection, someting "broken" within ourselves? Do others find all of this easy? Well, to the last question, I certainly think not. I think that practically any mind from the inside probably seems totally chaotic and insane ... at least until one has put a lot of work into it. That's the path we're all on, I hope ... doing that work. There are fits and starts.
Ram Dass tells a story, I think in
Be Here Now, about a man who is walking towards enlightenment. He walks up a hill, and looks about at the beautiful scenery, sits back, and says
"Gee! Look at how enlightened I am!". Immediately thereafter he continues on his journey and finds himself descending into a valley ... until he reaches another, taller hill, and repeats the process again.
Divine sister, it sounds like you're in a valley, and it sounds like it fucking hurts, but the hill beyond is taller, and the view is more beautiful than anything you have ever seen before. Trust.
Namaste
SKL
P.S. pharmacologically I think the best medicine for you would be LSD, perhaps with a touch of 5-MeO-DMT post-peak, together with some peaceful music ... this combination can be amazingly healing ... as long as you get along well with both substances ... I'm playing around with doing some serious psychedelic therapies with people, very experimental and mostly theoretical stuff at this point, but I have some ideas ... but of course, pharmacology will only go so far ... all that stuff about merely opening the door, or getting the message and hanging up, etc, etc.
![:\](https://bluelight.org/xf/BL_Images/Orig_Emoji/wrygrin.gif "wry grin :\")
