RigaCrypto
Bluelighter
- Joined
- Sep 20, 2006
- Messages
- 446
I’m standing on one side of the mirror. Across from me is a young man, and I’m staring into the black void of his pupils. I’m seeing him naked in time, frozen in a snapshot, looking at me from beneath the walls of a day in his life. He’s young and hopeful. His body yet to be worked on, trained and chiseled. His mind still to mature, know itself and cast itself unto the world. A chrysalis from which I had emerged, shattering the hard shell of the mirror with my nascent body made of dreams, spreading my wispy wings over the past and future. Seeing him today, yesterday, tomorrow and in a thousand lives through my multifaceted eyes. Seeing through the haze of the silky threads of illusions of the cocoon he’s imprisoned himself in, spun day after day, year after year from lost hopes, prejudices, clinging to the past. And I realize I have a choice. Which side of the mirror do I want to stay on? I can go back to the warmth and the quiet of the cocoon and sit there until my life runs dry and withers away. Or I can spread my wings and continue flying towards the light. If I choose this path, I know I won’t be easy. I know that from now on, I can’t forget anymore. I have to know, with every breath, I have to do, with every movement, I have to go to sleep with the light in my soul and take it with me across to the other side. And I will have to do this without pause, lest I might wake up one morning and find myself back into the mirror, my flight a distant dream, an absurd intellectual fancy, a false hope.
A long time ago, when I was a kid, I used to sit at my window sometimes, looking at the gray housing projects I came to this life among. They were the same I had known for years and grown up in; their image was but a memory, amalgamated with the days I’d lived and the life I’d felt between them; the light coming from them into my consciousness came through the same riverbeds it had flowed through thousand of times before, entraining with it all the debris accumulated along the years, the joy and the sadness of my childhood. It all came to me as a murky blur, the past suffocating my present, the world looking old and familiar, a general compressed impression, the same I used to see every day and knew every inch of, in which I knew what I could do and worse, what I could NOT do.
And one day, I caught the reflection of the same gray buildings, mirrored in my open window, the world thrown back through itself left to right. The world in the mirror was the same as my old, familiar world on the other side. I could recognize the same buildings with the sun glinting in their windows, the same trees swaying in the wind. But it wasn’t the same. The world on the other side of the mirror was free. It was new, it had been created the instant the light from the other side hit the surface of the glass. It was free of the past, and of the future I had attached to the other world. It was beautiful, alive, open, sacred, the way the outside world had been in the beginning, before I had learned to project my own conceptions unto it, before I had forgotten to see it for what it is, separate from me and as alive. The left-right inversion still left me to recognize that it was the same world, but prevented my processing and classification system from recognizing it and sending the perceptual data on the same track it had been thousands of times before and gathered a lifetime of associations, bringing them all together to my consciousness. Instead, it sent it on a wholly new path, taking it in as a new experience, free of prejudice, showing me the raw perceptual data for me to inhale every square inch of in all its beauty, and see it anew as I had seen it for the first time.
When we see, perceive, live something new, lacking previous experience to categorize it, the information is sent in its raw form for us to explore, classify and judge. When seeing something for the first time, we see it more vividly, more alive, in its full complexity. Then, as we accumulate experience with it, our new perceptions build on the old. It comes to us through the lens of our past experiences, together with the associations we’ve made, the categories we’ve placed it in, the good or bad we’ve judged it to be. Which is normally a positive and necessary learning process, as it accumulates past experience to be used in the future. But what if that past has gone in a wrong direction, and one wants to break free?
Seeing my neighborhood reflected in the mirror of my open window had fooled this association system and made me perceive the same scenery as if I was seeing it for the first time. At the time, it was an interesting and amusing discovery of a child.
Years later, I find myself before the mirror again, after years in which I have jumped back and forth across it, in feverish dreams and realities, not knowing anymore what side of it I had ended up on. This time, I have been raised above it, by the molecule that has found its way into my brain for the first time, on two thirds of an Alex Grey blotter. I‘ve been plunged through the mirror, above my world that I have so painstakingly constructed in my years of life, and shown the world again as new. Not as it was new, for it always is, dying and being born again with every moment. But as I am new, after being killed and awakened again by the substance. Seeing the world as it is, outside of me, before and after me, and myself, a flower growing from it, opening in its midst. Seeing my own world I had created in my head and which, in my foolishness, I had come to believe in more than in the world I had originally built it as a model of. The prejudices, the failures, the traumatic memories of my past I had come to believe in more than in the world that had given me life. I saw them side by side, one dead, the other alive. And I realize the stupidity and blindness that is keeping me trapped in my uncertainty, my hesitation, my lack of faith. I see my past, clinging to me like a sarcophagus in which I had died and that was dragging me back into itself. And I see the new beginning, the eternal now, the death and rebirth lying hidden in every moment, only to be seen and accepted. I see the hand always extended by God, only requiring self-acceptance and forgiveness for my dead past to disperse before my eyes like a nightmare and the present to appear, where it’s always been, and welcome me back to life.
I had been before the mirror before, staring the other me in the eyes, pledging not to fall through to the other side. Not to forget my dreams, and allow them to die beneath the slow attrition of life accumulating above them, shrouding them in oblivion. I had pledged this on everything I loved at that time, and in time, I had lost that. And in losing it, I had lost myself. I had awoken into the nightmare, finding myself on the other side of the mirror, reality a distant dream I perceived as the lost, illusory happiness of childhood. And I kept going into the nightmare, convinced that it was reality, and that reality had been an illusion all along, a naïve hope of youth. And in my stupidity, I let my life slowly crumble to pieces, drifting like a lost raft towards the end of the Earth, any semblance of hope or purpose forgotten.
And now, I am shown the two worlds side by side. I can see the old sight coming at me, with all its ennui, sadness and hopelessness, and all the emotional debris I had accumulated in fear of letting go of my past. And I can see the new sight, new and free, showing me the world as it has been in all these years when I have been slowly forgetting it, growing away from it, refusing to see it in my insane stubbornness to cling to my past. And I realize they are one and the same world, and the nightmare has all been in my head. I can switch between them at will. Which one do I want to keep?
I can enjoy this until I sober up, become tired, go to sleep and wake tomorrow morning remembering with slight amusement the trip I had the previous day, and the feeling of liberation with faint nostalgia, like a memory from the distant past.
Or I can let go now of my past, and start again in one of these new beginnings, that are offered to me with every NOW. I can put everything behind me, and learn to live again, never forgetting this time that the world is alive, that it is always new, and that I am in it, and not the world in me. That it is foolish to think that I have seen all there is to see, lived all there is to live, and that the model I’ve constructed in my mind can comprise all the world that has given birth to it and that holds it in its embrace. That the world is living and I am dead, and not the other way around. And with this renewed faith, learn to enjoy life again, breathe the world into me without fear, explore and play with it as I have forgotten how to since I was a child, and work to leave my mark on it to make it a better world.
This is a property of LSD I have long read about, and had been fascinated with, but I had of course imagined only the surface of its abyssal implications. I had read reports on Erowid about people seeing the world anew on LSD, and I was eager to experience that, but had no idea it would come into the very core of my being. It opened a window, for a few hours. A window I knew I had to reach through while I could, seize what was there, and keep it with me, never letting go, going to sleep and awaking with it, until it becomes a part of me. Otherwise, I knew I would awake in the morning slightly blank and hung over, like I had had before after trips, vaguely remembering a trip in which I had felt enlightened, but could not really remember now what the fuss was all about. I knew the experience just showed it to me during a few hours of enlightenment, but all the work was to be done by me, sober, all day, every day.
And I’m still doing it. Three years later, I’ve since forgotten the original enlightenment that was shown to me, and remembered it, lost it and reconstructed it from pieces, time and time again. And each time a bit more alive, more stable and more real. And slowly it is becoming reality, I’m gathering my life together again from pieces, and I wake up on the outside of the mirror more and more often. And I find that there is a great difference: on the outside of the mirror I can breathe, and the world comes into me with every breath.
Throughout this, LSD has helped me every time, gently but forcefully reminding me that I have to work, whenever I forget it. It is no panacea. It doesn’t do any of the work for me. It also doesn’t think for me. But when I try with all of my being, it gives me some extra help. And sometimes, that extra is the difference between success and failure. I don’t know about others’ experiences, but based on mine, I consider it a crime that these substances are willingly kept away from the world, away from scientific research and medical therapy. The amount of good they can do is unbelievable. I consider them sacred, and this comes from a generally jaded and skeptical person. Sacred, not only in the sense of providing a short-lived experience of bliss and unity with God, but through the healing and life-renewing power they have. A power that leaves its mark in my life, every day, and far beyond the direct effects of the substance itself.
A long time ago, when I was a kid, I used to sit at my window sometimes, looking at the gray housing projects I came to this life among. They were the same I had known for years and grown up in; their image was but a memory, amalgamated with the days I’d lived and the life I’d felt between them; the light coming from them into my consciousness came through the same riverbeds it had flowed through thousand of times before, entraining with it all the debris accumulated along the years, the joy and the sadness of my childhood. It all came to me as a murky blur, the past suffocating my present, the world looking old and familiar, a general compressed impression, the same I used to see every day and knew every inch of, in which I knew what I could do and worse, what I could NOT do.
And one day, I caught the reflection of the same gray buildings, mirrored in my open window, the world thrown back through itself left to right. The world in the mirror was the same as my old, familiar world on the other side. I could recognize the same buildings with the sun glinting in their windows, the same trees swaying in the wind. But it wasn’t the same. The world on the other side of the mirror was free. It was new, it had been created the instant the light from the other side hit the surface of the glass. It was free of the past, and of the future I had attached to the other world. It was beautiful, alive, open, sacred, the way the outside world had been in the beginning, before I had learned to project my own conceptions unto it, before I had forgotten to see it for what it is, separate from me and as alive. The left-right inversion still left me to recognize that it was the same world, but prevented my processing and classification system from recognizing it and sending the perceptual data on the same track it had been thousands of times before and gathered a lifetime of associations, bringing them all together to my consciousness. Instead, it sent it on a wholly new path, taking it in as a new experience, free of prejudice, showing me the raw perceptual data for me to inhale every square inch of in all its beauty, and see it anew as I had seen it for the first time.
When we see, perceive, live something new, lacking previous experience to categorize it, the information is sent in its raw form for us to explore, classify and judge. When seeing something for the first time, we see it more vividly, more alive, in its full complexity. Then, as we accumulate experience with it, our new perceptions build on the old. It comes to us through the lens of our past experiences, together with the associations we’ve made, the categories we’ve placed it in, the good or bad we’ve judged it to be. Which is normally a positive and necessary learning process, as it accumulates past experience to be used in the future. But what if that past has gone in a wrong direction, and one wants to break free?
Seeing my neighborhood reflected in the mirror of my open window had fooled this association system and made me perceive the same scenery as if I was seeing it for the first time. At the time, it was an interesting and amusing discovery of a child.
Years later, I find myself before the mirror again, after years in which I have jumped back and forth across it, in feverish dreams and realities, not knowing anymore what side of it I had ended up on. This time, I have been raised above it, by the molecule that has found its way into my brain for the first time, on two thirds of an Alex Grey blotter. I‘ve been plunged through the mirror, above my world that I have so painstakingly constructed in my years of life, and shown the world again as new. Not as it was new, for it always is, dying and being born again with every moment. But as I am new, after being killed and awakened again by the substance. Seeing the world as it is, outside of me, before and after me, and myself, a flower growing from it, opening in its midst. Seeing my own world I had created in my head and which, in my foolishness, I had come to believe in more than in the world I had originally built it as a model of. The prejudices, the failures, the traumatic memories of my past I had come to believe in more than in the world that had given me life. I saw them side by side, one dead, the other alive. And I realize the stupidity and blindness that is keeping me trapped in my uncertainty, my hesitation, my lack of faith. I see my past, clinging to me like a sarcophagus in which I had died and that was dragging me back into itself. And I see the new beginning, the eternal now, the death and rebirth lying hidden in every moment, only to be seen and accepted. I see the hand always extended by God, only requiring self-acceptance and forgiveness for my dead past to disperse before my eyes like a nightmare and the present to appear, where it’s always been, and welcome me back to life.
I had been before the mirror before, staring the other me in the eyes, pledging not to fall through to the other side. Not to forget my dreams, and allow them to die beneath the slow attrition of life accumulating above them, shrouding them in oblivion. I had pledged this on everything I loved at that time, and in time, I had lost that. And in losing it, I had lost myself. I had awoken into the nightmare, finding myself on the other side of the mirror, reality a distant dream I perceived as the lost, illusory happiness of childhood. And I kept going into the nightmare, convinced that it was reality, and that reality had been an illusion all along, a naïve hope of youth. And in my stupidity, I let my life slowly crumble to pieces, drifting like a lost raft towards the end of the Earth, any semblance of hope or purpose forgotten.
And now, I am shown the two worlds side by side. I can see the old sight coming at me, with all its ennui, sadness and hopelessness, and all the emotional debris I had accumulated in fear of letting go of my past. And I can see the new sight, new and free, showing me the world as it has been in all these years when I have been slowly forgetting it, growing away from it, refusing to see it in my insane stubbornness to cling to my past. And I realize they are one and the same world, and the nightmare has all been in my head. I can switch between them at will. Which one do I want to keep?
I can enjoy this until I sober up, become tired, go to sleep and wake tomorrow morning remembering with slight amusement the trip I had the previous day, and the feeling of liberation with faint nostalgia, like a memory from the distant past.
Or I can let go now of my past, and start again in one of these new beginnings, that are offered to me with every NOW. I can put everything behind me, and learn to live again, never forgetting this time that the world is alive, that it is always new, and that I am in it, and not the world in me. That it is foolish to think that I have seen all there is to see, lived all there is to live, and that the model I’ve constructed in my mind can comprise all the world that has given birth to it and that holds it in its embrace. That the world is living and I am dead, and not the other way around. And with this renewed faith, learn to enjoy life again, breathe the world into me without fear, explore and play with it as I have forgotten how to since I was a child, and work to leave my mark on it to make it a better world.
This is a property of LSD I have long read about, and had been fascinated with, but I had of course imagined only the surface of its abyssal implications. I had read reports on Erowid about people seeing the world anew on LSD, and I was eager to experience that, but had no idea it would come into the very core of my being. It opened a window, for a few hours. A window I knew I had to reach through while I could, seize what was there, and keep it with me, never letting go, going to sleep and awaking with it, until it becomes a part of me. Otherwise, I knew I would awake in the morning slightly blank and hung over, like I had had before after trips, vaguely remembering a trip in which I had felt enlightened, but could not really remember now what the fuss was all about. I knew the experience just showed it to me during a few hours of enlightenment, but all the work was to be done by me, sober, all day, every day.
And I’m still doing it. Three years later, I’ve since forgotten the original enlightenment that was shown to me, and remembered it, lost it and reconstructed it from pieces, time and time again. And each time a bit more alive, more stable and more real. And slowly it is becoming reality, I’m gathering my life together again from pieces, and I wake up on the outside of the mirror more and more often. And I find that there is a great difference: on the outside of the mirror I can breathe, and the world comes into me with every breath.
Throughout this, LSD has helped me every time, gently but forcefully reminding me that I have to work, whenever I forget it. It is no panacea. It doesn’t do any of the work for me. It also doesn’t think for me. But when I try with all of my being, it gives me some extra help. And sometimes, that extra is the difference between success and failure. I don’t know about others’ experiences, but based on mine, I consider it a crime that these substances are willingly kept away from the world, away from scientific research and medical therapy. The amount of good they can do is unbelievable. I consider them sacred, and this comes from a generally jaded and skeptical person. Sacred, not only in the sense of providing a short-lived experience of bliss and unity with God, but through the healing and life-renewing power they have. A power that leaves its mark in my life, every day, and far beyond the direct effects of the substance itself.
