There are parts of your brain whose activation you can scarcely imagine. territories lie within the human mind which few have touched, and whose beauty and terror are unfathomable to those who have never experienced them. Strange lands, more foreign to your culture than the furthest countries on the globe, species of characters more alien than anything springing from the imaginations of George Lucas or Gene Roddenberry. Directions in space and time which are imperceptible to our normal mode of apprehension. Spaces between the spaces, spaces behind the spaces, spaces beyond the spaces which we move through in our ordinary day. And moments between the moments.
Is it so odd to suppose that a chemical change in the brain might cause a human to be able to perceive dimensions other than the familiar four, three-space and one-time? After all, the very perception of space-time lies in the peculiar configuration of our brains. It is well accepted that just about any drug can alter the sense of the passing of time--make minutes into hours and hours into minutes. After all, what is the brain, and its role in consciousness and the perception of space-time?
That in itself is a major question, I know. Some say the brain produces consciousness--that conscious awareness lies in the electrochemical reactions which cross our neural structures. Then there are those who suppose that the brain transmits consciousness--that it is an instrument for focusing the Universal Consciousness into a particular direction in space-time. If the former is true, then everything we know, believe, and experience has a molecular basis. If the latter is true, then our neurochemistry is a substrate for the interaction between consciousness and matter, and many in this camp would suppose that still a large portion of our knowledge and belief have their existence purely in neurochemical encoding of human information, and perhaps only our experience is what is channeled through the structure of the brain. Despite which view might be true, is it such an absurd proposition to consider that altering the functioning of the brain might alter the direction and manner of conscious perception? And might it be possible, under certain chemical circumstances, to even focus the brain's perceptions into hyperspace? Into a direction which lies at a right angle to the three dimensions of space, a direction which we cannot easily visualize?
I'm not a scientist. I can't answer these questions with anything more than speculation. I'm more of an artist-philosopher who can understand scientific concepts, who enjoys working with them and weaving them into these scientifiction tales and realities. I hardly have the stamina for anything more than kitchen chemistry, certainly no serious occupation in the fields of pharmacology or chemistry. I'm a writer, and that's all I am, and all I ever have been.
I was a Religious Studies Major when this all began for me. In the middle of my second year--it was early January, the second semester had just begun. I was also thoroughly disappointed.
A number of realizations were beginning to dawn on me. I was an intellectual, my studies unmarred by the field of experience. My principle interest was in Eastern religion and philosophy--I devoured the transcendent realities of Hinduism, and the vibrant Void of Buddhism. But the question kept occurring to me, why had I never touched these realms? How could I get there?
I understood that these could often not be taken literally. But the texts and practices all over the world held a common thread in mystic traditions--and even if these transcendent experiences lacked solid bases in ordinary reality, they still had reality for the experient. And they fascinated me in their commonality. Whether or not God or Whatever existed and gave these gratuitous graces (as the Catholics called them) was moot for me. I was convinced that the secret lied in the elements held in common by all humans that could be observed--body and brain. Regional differences aside, some basic changes in the way the brain worked caused by some basic exercises seemed to be an observable, reproducible pheonema. Indeed, that was the original basis of Buddhism, of all Yoga. Accordingly, I was beginning to turn my attention to psychology and neurology. I was in a neuroscience class that semester, as well, but a lot of the material I could already see flying above my head. Such is the fate of an overzealous student who ignores suggested prerequisites, I suppose.
Back to Yoga, though. This in particular held me captivated. Yoga, whether Buddhist or Hindu or Taoist or even Christian, was a systematic, pragmatic, and scientific investigation into altered states of consciousness. Through experimentation, millenia ago the holy men of India discovered body positions, breathing exercises, thought exercises and other techniques that would explore vistas of the human mind, and even categorizing and classifying the varieties of experience.
And through my studies of Yoga, I began to run against another disillusioning realization. Most of the professors in my department, and almost all of the students, had no interest in directly experiencing what they studied. It was alright to write papers about the transcenent experience, but to seek it for yourself was--and likely still is--not a scholarly pursuit. All of the knowledge in the field was second-hand, and while perhaps not as dogmatic as the pale imitations which pass for Christianity nowadays, certainly just as bad in that they don't seek the first-hand knowledge held by those who wrote the original texts.
I had been taking Yoga for a few weeks at a local Yoga studio. Twice a week in the evenings, Tuesday and Thursday, when I was free from class. It felt good. Relaxing. But that's about it. Progress, I knew, was slow. It would be years before I would have my ego dissolved and see through the Illusion and all that. Which was frustrating for one brought up in a culture of instant gratification.
Around Novemeber, I had a growing interest in Zen. This seemed like a slightly more expedient method for achieving altered states, if less sophisticated and detailed than traditional Yogas. Arising from the fusion of Taoism and Buddhism in Chinese monasteries and reaching its full culmination in Japanese culture, Zen was based on the simple division of the human organism into the organic component and the mental component. Or rather, that this division is false and is to be dissolved. Mind, the conceptual, rational, thinking word-driven mind, believs itself to be controlling and operating body, piloting it around like some automaton. Body awareness is practically nil. Zen develops tricks--like the familiar word-puzzle koans--for confusing and suspending mind in order to experience body wisdom, to heal the imagined split. Zen ended up having wide applications in martial arts, when in fighting one could not think with the rational mind but had to simply act. Spontaneity, living in the moment without intellectual mediation, fusing mind and body harmoniously, is the essence of Zen. At least, the essence expressed in words. (Because you see, the real essence of Zen is five tons of flax.)
In pursuing modern American developments in Zen, I came across Alan Watts, an excellent scholar and gentlement, and, one reads, quite the practicioner of his preaching. I started reading what our University's library held by him--came to This is It. And the last essay, "New Alchemy," held me transfixed.
The essay defends and describes the capacity for certain drugs--mostly, the essay discussed LSD--to produce mystical experiences, the Zen satori experience, the Illumination of the Buddhas, under certain circumstances. This concept was one I had never before considered.
So I considered. What did I know about LSD? I knew of acidheads in school. I knew everyone--at least, everyone in Power--said it could ruin your life. I knew of its noteriety, of the horror stories of spaced-out kids jumping out of windows, walking through flames impervious to pain. But I had never really talked to someone about it. My information was, until reading this book, at best third-hand. I decided to keep an open mind. (Perhaps this could be taken as a sign of the desparation I felt, the emptiness which our culture provides for those who seek to be come more fully human through spiritual experience? The emptiness which is not noticed by most, or perhaps is attempted to be filled by consumption? By television and advertising and obsession with politics and current events, or parties and mind-numbing drugs like alcohol?)
I searched the library for another book in my spare time. It was still just a curiosity, not yet as transfixing as it would become. Aldous Huxley was a name I recognized--he had helped introduce Eastern ideas into Western thought with his book the Perennial Philosophy. So I read his Doors of Perception. And Alan Watts had written another book on psychedelic drugs, called The Joyous Cosmology: Adventures in the Chemistry of Consciousness. The first told of a day under the influence of half a gram of mescaline sulfate, the second was a composite of a number of experience of LSD, psilocybin (the active ingredient in magic mushrooms), and mescaline (the active ingredient in peyote cactus). And both described the unfolding of mystical consciousness as aided by these drugs.
Let me say, that at this point in my life, I hadn't really ever experienced any drugs other than caffeine. No alcohol. No nicotine. No marijuana. No interest. Caffeine, however, was a fun drug for me. I no longer used it as much as I did in high school, but the feeling of being stimulated, of rushing along, of having one's mind race at a breakneck speed, always thrilled me. I did probably ninety percent of my papers in high school buzzed on caffeine, and almost all of my creative writing, as well. So I suppose I don't fit your typical druggie profile that is fed through DARE and other anti-drug propoganda. A further (or should I say furthur in honor of Kesey's Bus? ah, but I'm looking too far ahead for that, not yet) blow to that image for the typical (brainwashed?) reader should be the measure of my intelligence, which I hope has shown forth to some degree already. And this is after extensive exploration in the chemically induced visionary realms.
At any rate, I searched through the library for a few more volumes. The next two for me to pick up were Psychedelic Drugs Reconsidered and The Psychedelic Experience. The first was an attempt at objectively examining the evidence for and against the use and research on psychedelic drugs. Written by James Bakalar and Lester Grinspoon. What I discovered was that most of the horrors were rather unrealistic. Unless one used the drugs heavily, organic damage was nil. Bad trips could be smoothed out through attention to set and setting. The only real dangers were if one was prepsychotic or otherwise unstable. Which I believed myself not to be, at least not to the degree which would prevent some self-exploration.
The Psychedelic Experience was a user's manual for psychedelics. It claimed to be based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead, and being a student of Tantric Yogas as well as other Yogas, I was quite familiar with that text. And, not to demean the value of the book, but I would like to add that it is very loosely based on the Book of the Dead. At any rate, it was divided into three parts. The first outlined the types of experiences the authors--Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert, and Ralph Metzner--had observed in their sessions. Apparently they had been doing experiments at Harvard University with psychedelic drugs, when the political climate was still tolerant, in a sort of Golden Age which allowed artists, philosophers, theologians, scientists, and many others to experience that which is now illegal--their own brains. The second part of the book consisted of technical comments on how to run a psychedelic session. Drugs, dosages, preparations to be taken for the voyager before the experience, qualities for the guide, and so on. And one paragraph mentioned a drug I hadn't seen mentioned anywhere else--DMT. It said that 50-60 mg of DMT injected intramuscularly (i.m.) would produce the same effects as 500 micrograms of LSD (which is the maximum dosage recommended) but that it would only last half an hour, rather than the twelve hours of LSD. It also mentioned that DMT could be given to an experient who had become trapped in a "repetitive game-routine," a loop, and who couldn't get out any other way. This was the first time I'd seen mention of DMT, and certainly wouldn't be the last. Indeed, do many things come to pass.
The final part was a set of poetic instructions to be read aloud to the voyager.
.oOo.
In my Gnostic Literature class was a hippie. Okay, there were lots of hippies in a number of my classes, but this is the only one I'd struck up a friendship with. We'd shared a number of classes in the past, and we were both on the same track with similar interests--altered states of consciousness in religion. We'd had a few conversations, in the course of which I'd learned that he used psychedelics. He remained pretty close-lipped about it after discovering I'd never taken any of those drugs, and I didn't press, as I had never been interested. But the next Monday, I approached him after class in the noisy hallway.
"Hey Joe!" I said. He stopped and turned around and smiled a big smile and scratched his scraggly beard. A thick, dark beard, giving him a sort of giggling sage glow, with his curling unkempt hair and the giggling sage glint in his gray eyes.
"Um. how are you?"
"I'm fine. How are you?" His voice carried an accent acquired from summers of following the Grateful Dead, a relaxed, laid-back tone of openness originated perhaps in California but being dragged through the heart of America, across the midwest and up and down the East coast, trading stories with curious strangers along the road, and springing from the land of the free and home of the brave.
"Um, fine. I have a question." I dropped my eyes, a habit when I'm about to say something I'm afraid of saying. He motioned for me to continue. "Um, could you get me some um acid?"
I looked up, head still lowered. He shot a glance through the hallway, making sure no one was listening. "Come walk with me." Into the snow.
"Acid, eh? You've never done it before, have you?"
"No, I haven't."
"Why do you want to do it?"
"Well, I've been reading accounts of trips--I don't know if you've read them, Alan Watts, Aldous Huxley--"
"Right on. A couple of guys that really had their heads together. Believe their words, my friend."
"--Timothy Leary--"
He laughed. "Now there was a freak and a half."
"Anyway, I want to experience that. I want to have this mystical consciousness they are writing about."
He stopped me and looked into my eyes. Smiling. "Do you know where I live?" I shook my head. He reached through his pockets and fished out a scrap of paper and a pen. Scribbled an address. Handed it to me. "I'm having a few friends over. Don't worry, just a few, and they're all cool. We're having a potluck lunch around one or two, come over as soon as you get out of class. Cool?"
I looked at the address. "Cool."
"Okay, I gotta get to class. Get ready. Pack your head over the next few days with stuff you'd like to think about. And think about what a great time you'll have."
He walked off to class, leaving me wondering about the upcoming night.
.oOo.
Lois is a friend of mine. She's a Journalism Major, and lives in my apartment complex. We like to go over to each others' apartments for dinner. Both of us live in single-bedroom apartments, but our apartments are adjacent and we have keys to each others' homes. And I was at her place, as she boiled spaghetti. Her turn to cook.
"Hey Lois, you know anything about acid?"
She absentmindedly responded with a Hmm and continued doing dinner preparations. "Just a sec, Kent." Said a few tidbits of gossip from her department--who was fucking whom, that asshole Rush Limbaugh wannabe wrote another editorial about how God said women should be in chains or something. Then she sat down across from me and asked, "Now what did you say?"
"What do you know about acid?"
"Hmm. Not much, really. But I'm kinda curious. I have a friend back home--she started tripping a few months ago and was telling me about it over winter break. Says it's the most wonderful thing that ever happened to her--she took two hits and watched grass grow or something. Why?"
"Well, I've been reading about it and other psychedelics. I think I might try it this weekend."
"What? Really? Where?"
"This guy I know--I told you about him, Joe?--I asked him about it and he invited me over Friday for a potluck lunch and trip, I guess."
"Wow...that sounds...interesting." She thought for a second.
"I'm a little nervous," I said after a pause. She nodded, but hadn't heard what I said. Then she offered, "Hey, you want someone to go with you? Like, a friend to keep you company and stuff around those strangers?"
I brightened up. "Sure. Do you want to try it too?"
Shook her head. "No, at least not this time. I'd like to watch how you react, you know? See what it looks like, from the outside."
She got out of class at 12:30 on Friday. We agreed to go after that.
"It's a date," she said.