An () –ing

Fused to the ground with new blood running through my veins, I finally felt (at least a touch of) what had whetted my curiosity for so long: a presence manifested within and without, connecting in some unbreakable way with my mind or, indeed, from my mind.  It was as though it had answered a call; my call, which was bolder than I knew.  I had pushed and pushed, slightly further and then slightly further again and now here it was, looming in front of my eyes and all over my world in the form of elaborate patterns, streaming, slithering, serpentine shapes, colours and figures all dancing together as one, intertwined and pulsating as a visual, auditory as well as supra-sensory life-form.  But what I saw and felt were beyond passive psychedelic visual hallucinations.  They were present and active—there was something there, and it had me firmly within its grasp.  There was no longer any choice in the matter.

I had never experienced this before.

Tripping with others always creates an amazing exposure of what I like to call “Pure Dynamic”: the unadulterated interplay of personalities—personalities stripped of their conformities and cultural drapes, allowed momentarily to run and play over the limiting structures of everyday reality—all interacting as one and bouncing off one another in a profoundly unusual and excitingly novel way.  It’s often as though all superficial boundaries are left behind and what remains is a field, a net of being, coalescing and exploding into a new world.  A world devoid of a rather large aspect of regular cultural being, though the latter I cannot easily name.  It comes close to language, but words are still used (they are just used in a completely unconventional and retarded way in the context of society and culture).  So much is implied rather than said; and so much is tacit, rather than explicit or even implicit.  The field is exposed for what it always-already was, but it is stark and fresh—no one yet knows quite how to feel their way around (and this could be interpreted as pertaining to myself and my friends, or perhaps to any experimenters involving themselves in this renascence of what is truly an ancient practice; unlike, say, the ancient tribal shaman, however, we have no education or lore which can teach and direct us in these activities).  Civilised people, I venture to assume, would all experience this new, disorienting bearing.  Many layers, it seems, have been dumped over our organic streams of consciousness; but they continue to flow, nonetheless—even if unbeknownst to the beholder.  Somewhere behind the outer, more evident dynamic runs something much more fundamental, far deeper than the everyday being we can observe, assess, categorise and what not.

When enough is ingested, one can be pulled right in irrespective of who is around.  Maybe I’ve been in this situation; I’ve certainly seen it once or twice.  I think I may have been pulled in at the beginning of this trip.  I had no choice but to experience the force that confronted me.  I had wanted it, though I knew not what it was that I wanted; and of course, I still don’t know.  An inkling urged me to take enough to find this something which had always been there, which had for so many people, over so many years, become subterranean, clandestine, or completely ignored.  Many words can contribute to the description of whatever has happened to modern people; and many have, implying the complexity of the matter.  All I have found, thus far, is that there is something else to this thing we are being; we have thrown it aside and treated it as an inefficacious paradigm, or a failed approach to explaining the cosmos.  So few realise that science, philosophy, theology, or what have you—all these are mythologies, in a sense, too.  None of them are empty and neither are any of them full: these characteristics are limit-inducing and thus have no connection to mythologies, which are in essence ways of explaining the world.  They are lenses, just like the microscope or telescope, through which different people through the ages have assessed their surroundings and their situations.

And so I was briefly grabbed by a much bigger thing, pinned to the ground and forced to see.  Something.  So much movement, so many patterns and interdependencies manifested as an endless whole.  I remember an auditory drone, emitting from a mysterious life force.  It is strange, almost as though the noise was not really there, but symbolically present, the visuals and the sound not really separate.  It seemed to be, at least upon trying to recall it, the sound of the manifesting patterns, like I could hear them moving through my mind’s eye.  Perhaps I saw the profile of a gigantic human form, the size of a great mountain in the clearing, facing sideways, displayed within the entirety of the dots and lines and colours.  And when I opened my eyes I found that I could not avoid it: it pervaded not only my inner world, but the outside too; it was not a dual being, but breached both realms indiscriminately.  Imagine a giant, snatching you from its ground and holding you to a mountain, your line of vision so small that you have no choice but to look into the huge being’s massive eyes.  The gasps and groans my human body made were symbolic of some holy awe at experiencing this thing.  I felt fear, was overwhelmed and completely taken aback, stripped as I was of (presumably) a large chunk of my superficial, everyday ego.  And yet, despite a certain intrigued brand of fear, my fire is now fueled even more.  I want to see it again, to figure out how to handle this state and how to interact with its otherworldly flow.

There is no monotheistic God in these descriptions.  It was “wholly other” because it cannot fall within the bounds of this place, our tentative notions of an enduring “I”, our languages, our signs, symbols or stories: these merely hint at it, some better than others.  Experiencing it is a step up from such hints, because it is looking you in the face and reflecting your own being.  You’re a part of it because it manifests you to you from you but is a force that is constituted by all external elements also.  I am yet to become familiar with this; I sense my words as weak, even being, admittedly, conscious attempts to word what cannot yet, or perhaps ever, be adequately worded (as far as the use of words can go…).  This is stage one in the impossible naming process, though I have come to see this striving as a form of creative achievement in itself, in a sense.  The destination is the journey, the fruit cannot be without the roots; and life cannot flourish without its mysterious counterpart, death.

I managed to wrestle free from this experience, which I now doubt I was ready to have.  I could not face it at the time; and it seemed to be inherently temporary, as though it knew that the first taste would burn the tongue (like Nietzsche’s Ubermensch, it would not be what it was without being initially received as completely unpalatable; this is, of course, how great ideas originate…).  And so I got up and flew away and into a cooler breeze, a comedic flow of characters and leitmotifs, all in jest and with of course the greatest hilarity; everyone their own eccentric dynamic, as well as being part of a fascinating larger dynamic (which of course is, in turn, a part of a much larger one, and so forth ad infinitum…).  Amazing things happened, as they do, but this was of course a slightly more familiar manifestation—not to say that it wasn’t completely unique.  Mysteries were still occurring, because the power of humour is far underestimated.  Nothing is just a laugh; all is working away at something, somehow.  Nothing occurs independently.  All interacts and goes onwards—there is no exception to this.

Quieter words ensue.