Insect Wars

First of all, i want to emphasize that this was not in any way what I would consider a ‘bad’ trip. Intense, bizarre, terrifying? Certainly. But it was also one of the most illuminating experiences of my life. It occurred soon after a mystical hitchhiking journey across Canada. My psyche was charged. Here’s what i wrote about this trip to a friend soon after it occurred:

This past weekend, me and my brother Drei and 2 crazy Chileans were in Whistler, a white fat-ass-rich ski resort a few hours from Vancouver into the Rockies; white and rich the way mounds of cellulite are when they're green with stuffed dollar bills. We were staying at a friend's house, a modernist villa with a jocose. The 2nd night we were there the boys and i decided to cook a magick mushroom omelet. I don't know exactly how many of the logos-gnomes settled into egg yolk country, based on my previous experiences i assume that it was something around 4 grams, which is not a big dose for me since I usually eat more than 5 grams. As the boys took off into town, i laid on the couch while the gnomes swung the doors wider and wider, soon unhinging them altogether. Things got weird, again.

Chronology and description, as always with such experiences, is at this point scattered and vague. Yet here is what distortedly and fractionally transpires into baseline and it's incompetent language at present:

I begin to feel 'the other'. There is at first hallucinations of insectile membranes accompanied by the distinct chirping of alien insects all around me. I feel something formless, something undefined and undefinable trying to break free from inside my flesh, something of enormous energy, ripping thru from within, thrashing.

An elastic hyperfrequency tubular trunk descends from up above straight into my head. This wormhole-like thing passes thru itself and into me some kind of other-dimensional matter, as if laying an alien egg into me. My human/monkey-mind and body increasingly feels like a larvae from which an entity begins to hatch, ripping apart this physical larval membrane. It is hatching into an altogether different space densely inhabited by alien sentience.

At first this newly-hatched being is terrified and powerless, hissing and clawing like a frightened kitten, as it is held by something vast and infinitely more powerful. Even though the hatchling is in a state of primal fear and predatory self-defense, that which is holding it seems benevolent and friendly, compassionate even.

Soon however, this other-dimensional hatchling that i've become bursts open, like a poison-thorned flower of doom, into a colossal insectile juggernautic war-machine with a vast and exponentially increasing number of insect legs that resemble a praying mantid's spiked raptorial graspers, the mantid's front legs which it uses to grab and hold prey and from which it gets its name. The end segments of these legs are razor sharp blades, many of them spinning and vibrating in various deathly manners. This enormous monstrosity, abysmally horrifying yet slick and stealthy, finds itself surrounded by a swarming army of dark demonic entities. And before i, now this creature, know anything else, i charge at them.

I don't recall, as a human ego, ever being both so terrified and enraged. In my new transcended form i am now fully engulfed in a nonhuman war trance, hacking slaying impaling ripping apart battalions of entities in this nightmarish carnage-macabre, this ghastly feast of destruction, a great battle against diabolic darkness.

Anything that dares move anywhere in my perceivable vicinity is immediately torn to pieces by my infernal forest of thousands and thousands insectile sabers. Yet at the heart of this killing machine is my 'higher self' (for lack of a less kitschy word), a humanoid warrior of clear light and pure intent, calm and focused on the path towards Absolute True Freedom of All, his war-shell violently reducing to mere shreds anything that dares to obstruct.

In my human form, i feel like an entranced samurai, both fists clenched around ethereal swords, every thought and feeling a glimmer, a blood streak on these swords which are directed completely as graceful instruments towards the art of war.

In human time, this continues for hours. There's much concern for my human form. Did i rip open the veil too wide this time? Will i be able to shut away my larval human self from this frightening world in which such a self is so vulnerable and defenseless?

Eventually i came down ofcourse, exhausted. Yet the so called 'occult hangover' persists. What was this realm, so terrifying yet so beautific and empowering, that the sacred fungi ushered my awareness into? Interestingly, even in the middle of this battle, the not fully obliterated geek in me was still able to conceptually define this experience in words that were roughly such: "This so called 'occult realm' that i am currently experiencing seems to be, to the best of my interpretation, an alternative (to the baseline human/monkey-mind) quantum holographic matrix cocreated with whatever other ungraspable forces of the universe with our archetypal psychic material.” Yes, i think with this the geek in me was satisfied.

Don't Believe Anything part 2

After much thought and research, it seems to me that every belief system that i've come across so far is a pale and primitive interpretation of reality; what Terrence McKenna called an ontological cartoon. The universe is way way whaaay weirder and more insanely complex and bizarre than we can conceive. I think that one is free to interpret reality however they choose. It matters not. What matters is what you do in this reality. How you interact with it. What tricks you can pull in it. Whether you create a happier, freer life for yourself and others. Therefore, i believe in transcending belief (paradoxical, isn’t it).

Any belief, any ideology, any set perspective on things is just that, and not the reality itself. By subjecting yourself to belief and ideology and set perspective you cut yourself off from the hyperweirdness of the universe. You put yourself into a very narrow viewpoint, a very thick filter of interpreting things, a very limited configuration of perception. You drastically reduce your mind's potential, removing other alternatives of the infinite variety of possible mental states. All systems of interpreting reality are at best incomplete if not totally ludicrous and must never be taken as truth but only be consciously used as tools when and if necessary.

I think no one knows what the fuck is truly going on. Those who claim they do, be very wary of. Thus to myself i say: imagine whatever you want, be completely free with your imagination and belief and all mental processes in general. What matters is the practical application, the consequences of these mental processes. Personally, i choose to be awed and inspired by how inconceivably weird everything is and not attach myself to any silly human cartoon of what reality is. Letting go of all these cartoons along with the ego causes one to be flooded by a stream that cannot be grasped. Immersed within that stream, centered yet dissolved, one is able to weave that which truly matters: transformation and empowerment of oneself and others. Immersed within that stream, focused yet receptive, one is able to make the most effective-efficient choices within the selection of choices available in each moment. Calm and fearless, such a person surfs the tidal wave of infinite complexity towards absolute freedom.

Unnumbered House

The rest have left long before. It was only Anthony, Chris, Ashley, Sam and I sitting back in our chairs, listening to Bridget and Aparna playing piano and violin respectively. I don’t remember what the composition was or even the composer. Not that it mattered, for this evening I listened to how somewhere in a house hidden in a corner of this enormous, ungraspable and barren world, two musicians played music for five ordinary men. Just for them, maybe for themselves or probably for the music alone. Not that it mattered, for all my sensations and, as I then realized, childish and trifling thoughts, obsessions, anxieties and the rest that our mind tortures us with, began melting away into the music, leaving me the way dirty water leaves city sewers to become sunlit clouds. I closed my eyes and only one thing still kept me with myself. It was a question “Does this house have a number?”

Tear the walls down to the earth,
Mix their rubble with the dirt,
Crush the cities into dust,
Wipe it off this planet’s crust.

This is what we do
in this unnumbered house
Breaking down in our minds
when our demons we arouse
That now kiss our tired feet
and hold tight to our palms
And sing softly to our scared souls
their wildest muted psalms.

When we’re running from our shadows,
when we’re swallowing their light
Scattered pieces of the sunshine
underneath our bare feet bite.
Strangest visions, dreams of escape
into darkened rooms divide
This abandoned still unnumbered
house where from the light we hide.

Unnumbered house,
the only building that yet stands.
All else gone; all else torn
and worn down into sand
Numbered with the footprints
of our everrunning feet.
Unnumbered house -
in this desert sole retreat.

Bridget and Aparna ended playing long before I realized it. I remember only ripping through an enormous distance Anthony’s thanking and goodnights, replied with Aparna’s “all apologies”. None of them knew that three and a half months later I stood by the just built gate of that house, staring through the midnight moonlight at a little wooden plank displaying with white paint the number 151. Not that it mattered.

Don't Believe Anything part 1

My experience with psychedelics (especially LSD) enabled me to have a degree of control over my mind, taught me that all my thought/perception/behavior patterns are mere conditioned imprints that can be altered; they showed me the deconditioned, untaught mind, the infinite mind. A mind as it truly is, my own and only my own, thus making it possible for me to choose for myself how i want to perceive and process reality. By doing something like that, you are only taking back what's rightfully yours, in fact the only thing that's rightfully yours, yourself, your freedom to shape your own thoughts and emotions and beliefs and behavior. This involves understanding societal conditioning in all it's bullshititude, ripping apart rigid thought patterns instilled by experience and other people, not being a slave to a mind that isn't even of your own making but rather being a master of a mind that is. A practice whereby ingesting a psychedelic one activates a patternless synaptic firestorm, a firestorm out of which you can willingly form new lasting thought patterns. Healthy, empowering thought patterns, if such you choose, those that uphold freedom and compassion.

Such anarchy of one’s mind is the first step to self-empowerment, that which those who control you fear most, the next step being able to do the same with your flesh. That awkward unwieldy flesh, so frail. Willing it into transformation. Hacking the code of matter. Not being its slave either. Breaking and bending the laws of the matrix. And that of course is far more difficult. Yet it is the trick to live and die for. A soul takes on a physical form to, among other things, learn how to manipulate this form. It learns this through will. That will shall persevere. That will shall overcome.

Shplazzle Dissolves

Something.

Something ENOrmous

A mass cutting through his eyelids from the outside. Pushing them open, parting them from each other. Exposing the naked eye to itself. It mustmustmust get into his eyes and it will. Into his eyes and into him. He's an empty vessel at the bottom of this mass, imploding under it. Imploding first at his eyes, letting it into himself through them, resisting at first and soon giving into the inevitability.

His eyes are open now, the mass flooding him, filling him in, it being what he sees.
Furthest away from him in his view are mountains. Far away. Dark and featureless. Masses of land. Physical shapes in their simplest form. Ancient. Unchanging. Giants.

Between the mountains and him lies a harbor. The ocean water is ink, dried up in a thick layer, black-blue and solid. Ships trapped in this goo, cringing.

Piers are slicing far into this ink-filled harbor. On these piers are structures, thousands of gigantic metallic threads twisting and spiraling around each other, forming thick layers of industrial webs. Structured chaos. Each thread a trail of an overcharged particle dashing and coiling uncontrollably, frozen in metal. This metal is polished and shiny, it's surface reflecting dimly the twilight sky, each cloud in it a piece of wool soaked in the curling arterial blood of the no more visible sun. Each cloud suspended motionlessly high up in the dissolved bluetinted nothingness of the skydome, so high up that if u were to jump up to try and grab it u'd simply freefall thru the distance forever.

Right infront of his eyes is a small patch of grass and a rocky shoreline. He is lying on his side curled up in fetal position, arms hidden inside a wool jacket that is also pulled over the knees, on moist grass under a tree, blades of grass cutting into his left cheek.

Time stopped.

Nothing moves.

Nothing.

<What is this place? Where am I?>, Shplazzle thinks. How long has he been asleep on this shoreline? Is this the end of time? The last moment before all he sees is torn apart; the final layer of a painting being looked at before it is shredded with blades and set on fire and stomped at by someone completely and totally gwabonkled, most likely the creator of the painting itself. This last moment being looked at by someone who woke up into it on it's shoreline, and this moment is trying to save itself by imprinting itself into his memory, seeking desperately asylum in his mind, seeking to preserve itself there, immortalized, trying to survive trying to flee from it's destroyer, into Shplazzle, pushing in squeezing in in in into his eyes, dialating the pupils till they're bigger than his eyes bigger than his head bigger than his body bigger than the patch of grass he is on bigger than the harbor the mountains the sky bigger than everything-everything-everything filling-filling-filling him in till he becomes this last moment, diffused into it, strange little creature, gone,

dissolved

completely

if only just for one-one-one single moment.

alien morphonogenic babies in prayer

dear psychonauts, those who would be such and simply curious ones, this is an email I wrote today to my very close friend describing my latest LSD trip that I would also like to share with all of u:

Hello sweetheart,

Thank again for your courageous input. I understand I must’ve spooked u out quite a bit with my previous email. I was at a low ebb, true. But things drastically changed soon after, I had what seemed like a short-term breakdown on the day of the equinox which was the 20th I believe and the next morning things just fell into place, I understood what the problem was and was able to resolve it. I understood the nature of human ‘games’, to use Tim Leary’s lingo, and remembered who I ‘really’ am and my relationship with these games, which until that morning was grossly misconceived. The advice in your emails was of tremendous help, concise and right to the point. I was able to use it as a sort of a guide. Thank u. As for psychedelic drugs, I’ve done none since leaving Vancouver (3 months ago) except for trying a few new things of semipsychedelic nature and smoking pot less then a dozen times. However my odyssey in the magickal and phantastik Montreal have generated a great psychic buildup revolving around many synchronicities, internal changes, great philosophical highs and new experiences and people. I was waiting to release this psychic buildup in one culminating experience, which is what happened on the morning of march 30th in the form of an LSD trip with my friend (it was his 1st LSD trip) on Mount Royal, a mountain overlooking Montreal. As expected, I obtained the ‘sacrament’ through interesting means (many thanks to my cybermystic friends) and needless to say it was of very high quality, strong and clean. We started our gradual dosing at 2:30am. I am very cautious when it comes to dosing because I’m physically hypersensitive to this chemical and because it was my friend’s 1st time and thus his reaction to it was unknown; in the past I’ve made the mistake of not being ultradiligent about gradually dosing myself in small doses (1/4 hits in this case) in timed succession which resulted several times in adverse physical reactions such as ultrarapid heart rate and severe cramps as well as negative psychological reactions such as panic attacks. What follows is a brief account, omitting many important details and nuances, of the highlights that I was able to bring back to baseline memory from this trip. It is important to keep in mind that less then 1 percent of such experiences can be expressed through words.

We met in shivering mountaintop cold an ultrapsychedelic sunrise which began at about 5:20am with a view over the entire city laughing our heads off, having a sci-fi rock star trip, but it was when the final doses kicked in that things got weird (there was a total of 1 and ¾ hits consumed by each one of us over roughly 2 – 2 ½ hours). I went into a peak sitting on a bench all hunched and curled up in my red psychonaut suit. My heart pumping hard and all my muscles trembling, I plunged into a world of death and decay, every part of my body being violently ripped apart (mind u I was hoping and intending and ready for this), a sensation well captured by Alex Grey’s painting ‘journey of the wounded healer’. It is difficult to recall an accurate chronology of these things now but eventually: I was a mythic character fighting a giant eagle; my body was exploding in razor sharp light; I experienced the ‘one mind’ as a golden conical pillar studded with faces, myself being just one such face, which would morph into this pillar as this pillar itself would morph into circular spiraling fractals only to reform itself again; I clearly heard as if it actually was consistently and unalterably outside of myself Tibetan monks chanting (I’m not Buddhist or of any religion for that matter); I found myself in a crib in a different higher frequency dimension being what I nicknamed an alien morphonogenic baby which was hooked up at it’s nerve centers (or chakra points if u prefer) and other nerve/energy points to high frequency energy wires/channels with zany alien entities hustling and bustling over and around me. They seemed to match the descriptions of what Terrance McKenna called the self-transforming machine elves, entities often encountered during DMT trips (which I have yet to experience). They seemed very preoccupied with my wellbeing, communicating with each other in an elfish language that was based on frequency modulation instead of syntactical blocks of sound; this language was rather well imitated at the beginning of a Shpongle song called ‘shiva space technology’. As I have said, these alien entities seemed very preoccupied with my wellbeing and I ‘realized’ that my ego and being in this physical world is a test for this alien morphonogenic baby to endure and complete. It is like a birthing process or strengthening and maturation process it must go through to be ready for life in this other dimension where these alien entities are waitingwaitingwaiting hopinghopinghoping that it can make it, monitoring it’s progress.

As the intensity of the peak decreased slightly, I was forced due to circumstances to leave the bench and the area it was in with my friend. Now about my friend. He is an incredibly intelligent and creative man close to twice my age (I’m 20 now) and has many therapeutic issues. He however has undergone several major ‘awakenings’ (for lack of a better word) in this past year thanks to the use of psylosybin mushrooms and nitrous oxide and the Burning Man experience as well as experiences of regional Burning Man events near Montreal, so I was hoping he would address these issues in this trip since I believed he was ready. As we roamed through the sunlit mount royal forest paths, my trip was making me increasingly more mellow and balanced and centered, while he was increasingly breaking down in the classical LSD therapy style. This included regression and surfacing of repressed material as well a spiritual urgency for transcendence. I knew however that I must stick with him through this and help him through it no matter what, this was my mission and purpose, the application of the psychedelic experience in this world instead of letting it be just another tv show. As his breakdown was increasingly intensifying, communication between us was becoming more and more difficult and since I was just as loaded as he was, forming coherent sentences and soberly reacting to the situation and thinking in linear logic was a great challenge. We eventually ended up at his grandparents’ grave in a cemetery on Mount Royal. At this point he was becoming increasingly paranoid and suspicious of me. He later told me once we were back to baseline that at that point he was perceiving me as Satan who was trying to keep him in the human ‘game’ of mundanity and suffering and prevent him from mustering all the courage and bravery in him to use this very special opportunity to “climb to the top and leap into and take off with the solar wind”, as he was then incoherently and graspingly describing it. Kneeling on his grandparents’ grave, he then proceeded to murmur a prayer “Is there any remover of difficulties save God? Say praised be God. He is God. All are His servants and all abide by His bidding,” over and over and over again, him being a very open minded adherent of the Baha’i Faith. I was lying beside him on the grass a few feet away with my eyes closed during this recitation when a face formed out of my closed-eyes fractals. I felt right away that it was a face of what some may call a spirit or angel and it was looking mostly at him, sometimes at me. When his prayer recitation stopped, we had another confrontation that finally pushed him to his edge that we both so desired. He stood up and began reiterating the prayer again. Only this time it was becoming louder and louder, until he was bellowing it at the top of his lungs, foaming at the mouth, eyes closed, head raised, arms extended, fists clenched, in deep deep trance, possessed, the prayer thundering rolling resounding across the mountain, a religious epiphany at it’s ultimate. This went on for a few minutes and when he was done, he marched off amidst the gravestones never looking back as I stood there with the most gleeful grin on my face, knowing that my purpose of being one of the links in someone’s life towards such an epiphany was complete. I lay back down on the grass, watching what I see before me form out of fractals, still hearing the elves talk and particles shrilling by, every thought plunging me into it’s own well of infinity. And finally I understood that there is no need to break down such experiences with rational skepticism, that critical and rational and skeptical thinking must be applied to what u choose to do with such experiences when u come back down in order to avoid superstition and bigotry and cultish thinking and behavior. Yet it is equally important not to use the thinking of materialistic science, or what I call archaic or immature science, to declare such experiences ‘invalid’. You just take them for what they are, an experience in itself, a gift u can apply in the mundane physical reality. And so I did, lying there in the grass under a tree amidst the graves, floating off into an ocean of suns.

melter
April 1, 2006