SKL
Bluelight Crew
- Joined
- Sep 15, 2007
- Messages
- 14,647
I take drugs for granted. I've been altering my consciousness for years, and altering it profoundly, so profoundly that I am not sure that I can easily place myself in a perspective where I can imagine what it is like to go day by day, week by week, month by month, year by year, and lifetime by lifetime without some chemical entering my body which will alter my mind. My life perspective is based around altering my perspective. It is as if the drugs have grafted themselves onto my soul, or onto my DNA. There is little I feel that I can do about it, not in the sense of addiction, although in clinical terms I am certainly an addict, but rather in the sense of having started down a path and progressed too far down it not to see what lies at the end of the rabbit-hole.
I don't see this as a bad thing, or, conversely, as a good thing, but rather as a fact, like the fact that I was born at a particular time, or in a particular sociocultural context, which necessarily informs the way in which I percieve, and in turn, the way in which I interact with the world. Consciusness is our link to reality. Consciousness is based in neurochemistry. Neurochemistry creates reality, but reality is also the seat of neurochemistry. Likewise perception leads to behavior which influences events in the real world, but events in the real world are what we percieve. Consciousness, perception, reality, behavior -- intertwining to create a Gordian knot. In consciousness altering drugs, what I seek, perhaps, is the blade that will cut the knot, and allow me some time mano-a-mano with my own consciousness, that I might understand what exactly it means to exist, to exist as myself, and to exist in and interact with a universe. I wouldn't go so far as to state that I am seeking my place in the universe.
Ah, but "my place in the universe?" ... what an egotistical statement. From a really birds'-eye-view, holistic perspective, there is no "my place", or there is no "me." That is only a seperation of self and universe. You don't need to find your place in the universe. You are already there, or rather, the universe is already here, there, and everywhere, and you are just some infintesimal self-aware atom, which thinks highly enough of itself that it imagines it has a "place." It does not, not in any conventional sense, at least not any more than one single molecule of water has a "place" in a river. Finding your "place" in the universe is like pissing in a river as it flows inexhorably downstream.
So, you've never felt more "at place" than when peaking on L. Heroin would make you nod out and not feel your neck starting to ache while you're doing it. That's a pharmacological reaction. Diamorphine tickles a feel good receptor along with a pain killing receptor and, sometimes tragically, a respiratory-depression receptor. LSD tickles a mystical-experience receptor. (My pharmacologist friends are horrified. Permit me a metaphor.) Feeling as you do is the intended effect of the drug. It is not necessarily "finding your place" in anything outside of the confines of your own serotonin system.
I react with dismay whenever anyone tells me that they do drugs to find "their place" or, worse, "the answers." Psychedelics are not answers nor do they provide answers; they only ask questions, they open up doors but do not illuminate the darkness beyond; they dig a hole but do not insert a signpost, they are the yin to a yang which will be different for each person who attempts to find it.
However, like the music of the Grateful Dead, they provide one thing that I can never be cynical about, even if I've developed a lot of cynicism about the cultures that surround them ... they provide a sense of a certain timelessness, and feeling that something is all right, and that there is a superstructure to reality and to perception, and that things are flowing, a connectedness of things in an increasingly fragmented and schizophrenic social landscape. Psychedelics what keeps me sane, why I have some tiny hint of insight. Sometimes the insight is terribly depressing, emotionally crippling, disturbing ... but it makes me feel alive, like more than an automaton.
I don't see this as a bad thing, or, conversely, as a good thing, but rather as a fact, like the fact that I was born at a particular time, or in a particular sociocultural context, which necessarily informs the way in which I percieve, and in turn, the way in which I interact with the world. Consciusness is our link to reality. Consciousness is based in neurochemistry. Neurochemistry creates reality, but reality is also the seat of neurochemistry. Likewise perception leads to behavior which influences events in the real world, but events in the real world are what we percieve. Consciousness, perception, reality, behavior -- intertwining to create a Gordian knot. In consciousness altering drugs, what I seek, perhaps, is the blade that will cut the knot, and allow me some time mano-a-mano with my own consciousness, that I might understand what exactly it means to exist, to exist as myself, and to exist in and interact with a universe. I wouldn't go so far as to state that I am seeking my place in the universe.
Ah, but "my place in the universe?" ... what an egotistical statement. From a really birds'-eye-view, holistic perspective, there is no "my place", or there is no "me." That is only a seperation of self and universe. You don't need to find your place in the universe. You are already there, or rather, the universe is already here, there, and everywhere, and you are just some infintesimal self-aware atom, which thinks highly enough of itself that it imagines it has a "place." It does not, not in any conventional sense, at least not any more than one single molecule of water has a "place" in a river. Finding your "place" in the universe is like pissing in a river as it flows inexhorably downstream.
So, you've never felt more "at place" than when peaking on L. Heroin would make you nod out and not feel your neck starting to ache while you're doing it. That's a pharmacological reaction. Diamorphine tickles a feel good receptor along with a pain killing receptor and, sometimes tragically, a respiratory-depression receptor. LSD tickles a mystical-experience receptor. (My pharmacologist friends are horrified. Permit me a metaphor.) Feeling as you do is the intended effect of the drug. It is not necessarily "finding your place" in anything outside of the confines of your own serotonin system.
I react with dismay whenever anyone tells me that they do drugs to find "their place" or, worse, "the answers." Psychedelics are not answers nor do they provide answers; they only ask questions, they open up doors but do not illuminate the darkness beyond; they dig a hole but do not insert a signpost, they are the yin to a yang which will be different for each person who attempts to find it.
However, like the music of the Grateful Dead, they provide one thing that I can never be cynical about, even if I've developed a lot of cynicism about the cultures that surround them ... they provide a sense of a certain timelessness, and feeling that something is all right, and that there is a superstructure to reality and to perception, and that things are flowing, a connectedness of things in an increasingly fragmented and schizophrenic social landscape. Psychedelics what keeps me sane, why I have some tiny hint of insight. Sometimes the insight is terribly depressing, emotionally crippling, disturbing ... but it makes me feel alive, like more than an automaton.
).
