The Cynic's Trip Report (a short story)

[SKL]

His vision flooded with colors and lights, the colors and lights waxed higher in intensity and lower in salience. His attention turned inward. He perceived a great structure to all things, linking birth and death, mind and matter, man and cosmos, spirit and flesh. And all things moved as one, in a great cycle – chaotic as all things seemed, they began to relate to one another in previously-unforeseen ways, but with mathematical precision. All the entropic noise ceased, entropy itself began to be given Euclidean form, complexity had been rendered simple, all was part of a supreme lattice, a superstructure uniting all the structures and interrelationships that were in the world.

And this structure shrunk again into itself, coalesced, regressed, it became embryonic, in the final throes of a gestation whose travail would bring forth the dissolution of all the old, cobwebbed structures and meta-structures into a single, eternal, shining singularity. This was Nirvana, this was New Jerusalem, this was Moksha – this was an end to dichotomy, an end to duality, an end to category and separation and dissolution and strife and discord, and above all, of narrative time and the oscillations of the innumerable points along innumerable, convoluted, elliptical continua that defined his everyday subjective being. As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end.

But as the hours wore on, the sharpness of contrast and the neon hues and the bright lights dimmed, and everything took upon a grittier appearance. And he perceived for a moment himself, perceiving this non-dualistic singularity, and in that moment, he began to perceive it as a spiritual spectacle every much as the carnival of light and colors before his eyes was a visual one. And now, he was just very, very high. And, conscious of this, what he had just seen began to feel illusory. There was no end to dichotomy – this was dichotomy, this lay in opposition to the “other” that was rapidly overtaking him – this was a state, and a state was at the very least a point in a dichotomous continuum if not a binary variable, flipped off and on like a light-switch.

The humdrum, ordinary physicality and emotionality of context returned. Euphoria gave way to mania, mania gave way to grandiosity, grandiosity to paranoia, paranoia to dysphoria, and thus the whole continuum became clear to him, and all the divisions within. As transcendent as monism felt, the practicality of dualism was once again impressed upon him. He passed a difficult, restless night, and awoke feeling tired, with but an ill conceived memory of the Himalayan heights he head reached the evening before.

 

[Dondante]

Beautifully expressed.

You described the archetypal psychedelic experience very concisely, and with clarity.

It seems that the psychedelic experience has the tendency to illuminate core elements of the Vedanta philosophy of Hinduism, perhaps better termed the Perennial philosophy since the concepts are not exclusive to a single culture.

Cynicism is something I’ve wrestled with myself. I don’t think it’s uncommon to return from such an experience with a sense of grandiosity, but this need not lead to disillusionment and dysphoria. From what I gather, the core revelation is that you are not merely a piece of this entire existence, but in a certain sense the whole. It’s a transformative conviction, even if you have to return and function in a world defined by duality. One of the major difficulties for me – I don’t know if the same is true for you – comes in realizing that the intrinsic value of the experience does not translate well into practical value. A fleeting spiritual state will not replace the need for hard work. However, the conviction continues to affect me on some level – I believe in a positive way – even if I am not consciously aware of it. I’ll have to think about this more…it’s difficult to put into words.

For now, I’ll defer to Huxley:

“I am not so foolish as to equate what happens under the influence of mescaline or of any other drug, prepared or in the future preparable, with the realization of the end and ultimate purpose of human life: Enlightenment, the Beatific Vision. All I am suggesting is that the mescaline experience is what Catholic theologians call "a gratuitous grace," not necessary to salvation but potentially helpful and to be accepted thankfully, if made available. To be shaken out of the ruts of ordinary perception, to be shown for a few timeless hours the outer and the inner world, not as they appear to an animal obsessed with survival or to a human being obsessed with words and notions, but as they are apprehended, directly and unconditionally, by Mind at Large—this is an experience of inestimable value to everyone …

… Systematic reasoning is something we could not, as a species or as individuals, possibly do without. But neither, if we are to remain sane, can we possibly do without direct perception, the more unsystematic the better, of the inner and outer worlds into which we have been born. This given reality is an infinite which passes all understanding and yet admits of being directly and in some sort totally apprehended. It is a transcendence belonging to another order than the human, and yet it may be present to us as a felt immanence, an experienced participation. To be enlightened is to be aware, always, of total reality in its immanent otherness-to be aware of it and yet to remain in a condition to survive as an animal, to think and feel as a human being, to resort whenever expedient to systematic reasoning. Our goal is to discover that we have always been where we ought to be.”

-Aldous Huxley

P.S. You might get more responses in the P&S or PD forums.

 

[nearjat]

Beautiful. This was my harvest fest 2010 acid trip right here.

Fuck man I feel like my life just took another turn..

 

[SKL]

^ I really like it.

 

[qwe]

great stuff