The Shadow of God & Religion (Of the Woke Cult & the Assault on the Freedom of Expression).

Friedrich Nietzsche first wrote “god is dead” in his 1882 book The Gay Science, and then in his work Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None, which he published in four volumes between 1883 and 1885.

When he spoke of the death of god, he didn’t mean this literally, of course — he seemed to be an atheist and so, much like myself, never believed that such a creator deity existed in the first place. What he meant to convey is that the rise and successes of science had killed our notions of such a creator-being. Along with this, I’ve always assumed he meant religion as a whole as well, and on the surface, this shows signs of becoming increasingly accurate. After all, according to a 2022 Gallup poll, people who claim no religion — the “nones” — were at 21%, and it’s been 20% or higher since 2017. That’s the highest it’s ever been.

While some have applauded this, I think they’re overlooking the fact that this doesn’t mean the “spirit” of religion has been exorcized. Not in the fucking least. Its poisonous spirit is alive and well, dwelling in new costumes, hiding behind different masks. In The Gay Science, he articulates this fact in his typical style.

“After Buddha was dead, they still showed his shadow in a cave for centuries,” he wrote, “ — a colossal, terrible shadow. God is dead, but given the way people are, there may still be caves for millennia in which his shadow is displayed. — And we — we must still defeat his shadow as well!”

While I appreciate Nietzsche as a thinker and when I read him he always inspired my writing, this is certainly not to say I’ve always agreed with him, or for that matter always felt certain what he even meant. Even so, this quotation has risen in my mind several times as of late and I am confident that I understand, at the very least, what it means to me, at least at present. What it says to me is that, to the contrary, the spirit or shadow of god and religion persists — it has merely vacated its former, decaying vessel and gone on to possess (drum roll) politics.

Concerning the extremes on both the Left and the Right of the political spectrum, at least in the United States, the ideologies embraced have essentially turned into political cults. On the Right, you have what I often refer to as the “Trumpanzees.” This is the MAGA crowd who still rallies around the former president like he is the second coming and accepts all he says with blind faith. On the Left, you have the “Woke” crowd, who essentially constitute a sort of cultural authoritarianism — though they as of yet have no central figure that they rally around like a band of lunatics.

Nonetheless: lunatics they most certainly are.

The MAGA Cult seems to strive to dominate the populace primarily through political and moral avenues, which makes sense, as they see themselves as the forces fighting to uphold traditional and established morals, values, and ideals. The Woke Cult seems to strive to dominate the populace primarily through cultural and educational avenues, which also makes sense, as they see themselves as fighting to destroy those traditional and established morals, values, and ideals. Or, perhaps more accurately, to invert them, at least concerning how they see them from their perspective, particularly in the style detailed in Nietzsche’s The Genealogy of Morals. 

The MAGA Cult seems to clearly be a cult to those on the Left, and the Woke Cult seems just as clearly to be a cult to those on the Right — but few, it seems to me, accept the cult-like qualities of both.

Naturally, the reader may question: where do I reside on the political spectrum?

In the interest of full disclosure, while I pledge allegiance to neither party, by my very nature I lean to the left side of the political spectrum. I’ve taken the Political Compass test numerous times. Whatever your perception of the test may be, I’ve always landed in the lower, left-hand, green-colored quadrant, which is to say that the test would describe me as a member of the Libertarian Left. In any case, perhaps this is why I feel calling the MAGA Cult a cult requires little to no explanation, and why I’ll dedicate my time here to focusing on the Woke Cult.

Another reason I’d like to focus on the Woke is that I value the freedom of expression quite highly, and while the Right exercises its own forms of censorship and compelled expression, it’s been that way since as far back as I can remember. Back in the 90s, even more recently, it seemed to me that the Left was on my side on this general issue, but clearly, a terrible shift happened somewhere along the line.

One such way in which the Woke Cult exercises this is by taking already-established words with well-understood meanings, redefining them, and pushing those definitions on others. Interestingly enough, the Woke Cult did this very thing with the word “woke” itself, a fact that was first brought to my attention by comedian Bill Burr during one of his bits, and which some subsequent Googling on my behalf appears to have confirmed. In essence, the term “Stay Woke” derived from black culture, where it was intended as a term alerting the community in question to remain aware of racial prejudice, inequality, injustice, and associated issues that it continued to deal with.

While the Woke Cult condemns “cultural appropriation,” in its eyes this apparently does not extend to their appropriation of this very word, which began somewhere during the 2010s, when they started using it to refer to far, far broader issues they perceived to be similar if not synonymous.

Now, given that people (often but not always those aligned with the Right) have often thrown around the word “woke” without making any sincere effort to define it, and it has certainly endured considerable mutation since its original use in its native context, I’m going to define what I personally mean in my use of the term in as much detail as I can manage so that there is no confusion.

It should be understood that the definition I provide here is by no means universal, but merely the definition that has arisen in my mind over time and encapsulates the qualities and characteristics of a movement I have watched evolve over time since its apparent conception on college campuses.

I do not demand that anyone adopt my definition and it should be understood that I only use it here, and have come to use it elsewhere, out of convenience.

In short, what I have come to call the Woke Cult is the extreme, authoritarian, sanctimonious, and often humorless faction of the Left in the ol’ US of A that consistently displays aggressive prejudice against those who so much as question their rigid, faith-based ideology – and who are utterly blind to their hypocrisy.

They are so unquestionably devoted to their own political ideology that they feel it is not merely their right but their duty to push it on everyone through force rather than engage those who oppose or fail to see their rigid belief structures as self-evident in discourse and try to persuade them through reasoned argument or strategic means of eliciting empathy.

They embrace censorship and compelled expression, for instance – they not only feel they have the right to force everyone to not say certain things, in other words, but to force everyone to say certain things. In their minds, they are the absolute authority regarding both what cannot be said and what must be said.

And while I plan to write more on this subject soon, for now, I’d like to zoom in on their insane love of censorship in particular.

If they are students on a college campus, for instance, they may hear that a guest speaker who they disagree with – or, for whatever reason, assume they will disagree with despite knowing diddly fuckity fuck about them – is scheduled to give a lecture. Or imagine, instead of college students, they are employees of a streaming service, and this streaming service provides a wide variety of content to its many viewers – much as a campus does, or at the very least should, provide for its students – but one day, the service provides a comedy special by a comedian that speaks about topics near and dear to a certain segment of their employees and who holds views that those employees consider offensive.

Now, to my mind, there are rational, reasonable approaches that could be taken here. They could attend the lecture and listen to the guest speaker or watch the special and listen to the comedian and come up with arguments against his perspective. In a lecture, when the speaker often takes questions, they could engage with them through asking questions or providing critiques. If a comedy special, or if it’s a lecture and they are somehow unable or unwilling to engage with the speaker, they could write a rebuttal of the speaker’s views that they could publish in a newspaper or online, perhaps on a blog, or even create a video stating their case and speaking their mind that they subsequently post on YouTube or TikTok. They could even create a documentary creatively portraying their arguments.

Any of these perfectly reasonable approaches would shine a spotlight on whatever issue is at hand, give them the ability to state their position clearly and spawn conversation with those who agree, disagree, and all of those in between.

This, in my opinion, is the appropriate way to respond to those who exercise their right to freedom of expression: exercise your own freedom of expression. More specifically tailored to the above examples, the answer to what one considers “hate speech” is not less speech, but more speech.

There is still another rational, reasonable, course of action that could be taken here, however, as not all people are inspired to debate an issue they feel strongly about. Perhaps they lack the skill, or merely the will, or perhaps they recognize that the issue inspires too much emotional reactivity in them and it makes them so uncomfortable that it would swiftly become unbearable.

In today’s language, they would feel “triggered.”

I’m not disparaging such reactions or the individuals who suffer from them, understand, but the best course of action in such a case would be to simply not attend the damned lecture or not watch the comedy special.

The Woke mindset seems to inspire them to invest little time and energy into such strategies, however. Instead, when such college kids hear that a controversial guest speaker is to present his case on campus, what they do in response is organize a protest to cancel the lecture. If the lecture indeed goes forward despite their protests, they will continue to protest outside the lecture hall and even get inside the lecture hall and interrupt the speaker with dramatic demonstrations, which sometimes include rushing the stage. Or when employed at, say, Netflix, for example, they may do something similar if the company dares to keep a controversial comedian such as Dave Chappelle on their platform.

What this suggests to me is that the Woke mob considers themselves the ultimate authority on what is absolute good and absolute evil. They equate speech that contradicts their rigid viewpoints with violence. In their minds, such speech is not only spoken by agents of evil and inflicts danger and violence upon the vulnerable and innocent that they have taken it upon themselves to protect at all costs but feeds and empowers other agents of evil to do the same.

To make matters worse, it threatens to infect others with this urge to inflict such danger, evil, and violence through such vile incantations, so silencing and destroying these agents of evil is their duty. So faithful are they in their morally righteous position, as a matter of fact, that no debate is necessary, no conversation is permitted. They already know all they need to know, and so they feel justified in silencing and destroying their opponents by any means necessary.

No half-measures are acceptable, either. It must be the Inquisition 2.0, all the fucking way. After all, they are morally righteous. They have absolute authority regarding both what cannot be said and what must be said.

This manifests not only in their war against opposing viewpoints, mind you, but even in what they regard as problematic words.

As an easy example, consider the word “retarded.” As explained by the grossly underrated comedian Doug Stanhope in his 2016 release, No Place Like Home, the word “retarded” was not a term born of hatred, but rather of sensitivity. Doctors, he tells us, used to call such individuals imbeciles and morons, but people eventually co-opted those words to refer to, as he put it, “our friend when he does something incredibly stupid,” and so, over time, those words became regarded as an insult. So to distance those afflicted with the actual condition from this problematic association, doctors decided to change the medical term, and so began referring to them as mentally retarded.

Soon enough, however, can you take a wild stab at what happened?

As you could probably guess, the same damned thing as before: we appropriated the term to refer to people who did something we regard as incredibly stupid. And so now the word has changed again. This, Stanhope tells us, is what Stephen Pinker refers to as the “Euphemism Treadmill.” Regardless of what new word is attached to individuals with this condition, the same thing is always going to happen.

It seems to me that the stupidity in this particular, modern example is actually compounded now thanks to the fierce and anti-intellectual ideology of the Woke mob, for not only are we no longer permitted to refer to those actually afflicted with this condition as “retarded,” but we are also no longer to use it in the appropriated sense. In other words, the word “retarded” is to be stricken from our vocabulary entirely. It must be banished. In no context is it ever permitted to be used again, which seems absurd.

After all, if the authentically retarded can no longer be referred to as retarded, then what’s the harm in using it in its appropriated form? And if we can no longer use it in its appropriated form, what’s the harm in continuing to call those authentically retarded as retarded?

In the condemnation of this term in all conceivable contexts, would this not accelerate the euphemism treadmill to a dizzying speed, ensuring that whatever new word is acceptable when referring to those who are legitimately afflicted with the condition will be far more swiftly appropriated to use to refer to the stupidity displayed by ourselves and others?

In other words, however noble the intent here, doesn’t this only serve to exacerbate the issue they seek to squash? Doesn’t this strike you as not only censorship – bad enough in and of itself – but unenlightened censorship at that? Doesn’t it strike you as silly? Stupid?

Dare I say: retarded?

Shrooms, Lemons, and Lila.

“If Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness does not include the right to experiment with your own consciousness, then the Declaration of Independence is not worth the hemp it was written on.”
— Terence McKenna.

“Only to the extent that we expose ourselves over and over to annihilation can that which is indestructible in us be found.”
— Pema Chödrön.

4/6/18

I had an eighth. I ate about half of the bag, then felt wary about finishing the rest. After washing that down with some Arizona tea, I smoked a cigarette as I watched the first episode of Planet Earth II. By the end of that smoke my confidence recovered a bit, so I had a bit more, guzzled some more tea and had another cancer stick. Around then I achieved that point where I thought it began hitting me, but I wasn’t entirely certain whether or not I was fooling myself. As I continued watching animals interacting on my Roku, I suddenly remembered having added a YouTube video to my “watch later” folder — a segment of a speech by Terence McKenna in which he explained the Stoned Ape Theory. Halfway through watching that this feeling welled up in me, almost like a voice in my mind urging me to finish the rest of the bag and then go for one of the two lemons I’d stolen from work.

Standing up, it seemed unmistakable: I was feeling it. I went to the fridge, grabbed a lemon and sawed into it with a butter knife, then took half of it with me back to the papasan. After I sat down, it was like this mad, primitive frenzy overtook me. I tore into the lemon like a wild animal lost in the passion of its kill, sucking the blood out of some poor, defenseless prey caught in its claws. It was rather disturbing, even at the time, though at the same time kind of amusing.

In the midst of it I realized that I’d gone through this entire opening process before when doing shrooms: building up to the moment I begin eating them, stopping halfway through and considering not taking the rest of the bag, finally taking a bit more, ultimately finishing the bag and then going for the lemon and tearing into it with that wild, unrestrained fervor.

Though I had taken notes the first few times I had taken shrooms, I’ve slacked on doing so the last few times I’ve done them, which I’ve gotten down on myself about. I was also largely unsatisfied with the notes I’d provided for my first, full-blown experience on acid about two months ago, and so became determined to take notes during this experience. So after the lemon, at roughly 2:20 AM on Friday, April 6th, 2018, I lean back in the papasan, iPhone in hand, and begin typing.

Reality suddenly seemed charged with sexual energy. Being in my body felt erotic, even the simple act of moving felt sexy. This was only the beginning, but as I’d soon realize, there was so much sexual material in this shroom trip, just like LSD trip. As I had observed once before, when you deny yourself sex and try and push away the need, everything seems to become sexualized as a consequence.

As I enjoyed the experience, smoking my cigarette and typing, everything suddenly turned up another notch. Awareness intensified as my vision became incredibly bright, like someone flipped a switch and a high-watt bulb blasted on behind reality. Even that background static of silence seemed to be cranked up, heightening in frequency, the soft hiss achieving a higher pitch.

From this point on, everything came in waves: sensations and emotions would rise higher and higher, almost like the build-up during sex, but right before it seemed certain that I was about to burst through the ceiling and achieve some unfathomably intense, spiritual orgasm I’d be abruptly cut off at the climax and all would abruptly be calm again. Soon the wave rose so high that I felt like I could almost get lost in it, entirely surrender to it — and then, yet again: a sudden, peaceful calm, a plateau.

Grabbing my iPhone, I got out of Notes application, found Voice Memos and spoke into the microphone. “It’s 2:41 AM,” I said. “I’m probably going to find it difficult to keep writing, so maybe doing a voice recording would be a better idea. Things seem so erotic and comfortable right now. Very strange.”

As I looked at the ceiling, I found it waving and rippling like fluid or fabric, patterns emerging from the paint splotches. Though staring at it was astounding in and of itself, moving my line of sight across it was even more breathtaking. It was akin to what I had experienced when staring at the ceiling on LSD, but that was more rigid and mechanical, whereas this struck me as more organic and beautiful. Simultaneously I felt what I described as a mosaic of various emotions, a mishmash of moods stitched together and bleeding into one another. Some of those emotions were gross or negative ones, but they all seemed wrapped up and glazed in this overall emotion or mood that seemed to cleanse all the ones it contained.

Suddenly remembering that I wanted to listen to music, I pulled up YouTube on my Roku and found the full Tool, Lateralis album, which I had listened to while I was on acid. Shortly thereafter I paused it, grabbed my iPhone and went to the fridge for the other half of the lemon. As I did so, I commented on how I was clutching the phone and speaking to it as if it were my best friend, which instantly reminded me of carrying around my small, black, micro-cassette recorder on those sleepless nights during high school. Given the flashbacks, in light of all these puzzle pieces of the past that had surfaced, I had diminished confidence in my memory, so the recorder became sort of an external hard drive for my mind. I principally used it to document any memories that surfaced or any unusual, real-time activity, but it also served as a confessional, and in many ways served as this app on my iPhone did: as my little friend, mute and non-judgemental, to whom I spilled so many secrets.

After grabbing the lemon out of the fridge, I realized that I had to pee, so I brought along the lemon with me to the bathroom. Walking felt strange. Entering, I remarked how strongly it smelled of pot on there, did my thing, and then washed my hands, trying desperately not to look in the mirror. I tend to get transfixed like a stoned Narcissus when I chance a glance at my reflection under the influence of psilocybin. I sat on the lid of the toilet and decided to smoke a bowl, and found that sitting down felt strange as well. I found myself gazing at the shower curtains my mother had recently gotten for me, depicting trees, and thought on how Bill Hicks had said that when you do shrooms, you should go to nature. I suddenly understood it, as even the artificial greens of the trees seemed to produce profound calm in this state. I’d like to do it in nature as long as in a safe and secure location where I wouldn’t be interrupted, however, and that can’t be guaranteed, so my apartment it is.

I noted that everything I sensed seemed to have a little spice to it, by which I meant that enlivening, pin-prickling kind of sensation I like so much about hot and spicy foods like chili and Mexican foods in general. It even manifested visually in the form of tiny, multicolored points of bright light that would pop into existence at seemingly random areas of my visual field before swiftly vanishing back into the ether from whence they came.

Staring at the barren bathroom wall right in front of me, I noted the elaborate designs overlaying it like a transparent, three-dimensional film, or as if it were even carved into the wall itself. The only thing that betrayed this illusion and momentarily banished it was trying to focus on the details of the design. Given I had now seen this general effect on both my ceiling and my wall, I was curious to see if I might also perceive designs overlaying paper. If I set up some blank sheet of paper to the easel in my bedroom, would I be able to trace the designs? This curiosity was soon forgotten when my eyes shifted to the ground right outside of my bathroom door, into my dark bedroom, to see the same effect take place on the carpet. It was then that I again noted that along with these hallucinatory designs came the mosaic of emotions, which in turn made me wonder if this constituted synesthesia.

As I finally bit into and sucked the juicy life out of the lemon, I reflected on how everything seemed so fucking cool, interesting, hyperreal, but how it was all so frustratingly difficult to articulate. Everything also seemed like such a journey: the distance between the papasan to the fridge and to the bathroom, and even what a journey it was to articulate all that to my nonjudgmental confessional.

Done with the lemon, I now turned to the bowl, and the first hit felt incredibly good. Mushrooms and cannabis mingle nicely. In staring at the shower curtain, I again did what I had done during my LSD experience. Looking at the shower curtain, I was admiring how the drug in my system was able to exaggerate the movements of something already moving only to realize that it was not, in fact, moving at all. On acid, it had been the cover for Lateralis as depicted on the YouTube video, which I found, to my surprise, had not been moving at all. Now it was the waving fabric of my shower curtain. This time, however, the movement seemed to have an erotic element to it — but then again, everything did. I finally decided to take a second and much-delayed hit from my bowl, after which I entered into an exceptionally strange period of the night.

Later, while listening to the recording to transcribe it, I could hear the flick of the lighter, my inhale and exhale. Then there was a stretch of silence. I didn’t even cough, which is highly unusual for me despite the fact that I smoke pot on a daily basis. After that stretch of silence, for all I know I may have paused the recording and then picked it up later to add the additional two minutes before closing the audio file, but I honestly don’t think I did. In any case, the long stretch of silence is suddenly interrupted by a moan and this incredibly loud slap that makes me jump every time I listen to it. Perhaps I dropped the phone? After that there is a long period of muffled noises and scraping, and in the background I could just barely hear myself speaking, as if the speaker was being muffled and it made my voice sound like mumbling. I don’t think it was in the breast pocket of my flannel, because I was still in the bathroom when I recorded what happened next and the muffled voice suddenly went clear.

In what I could piece together from what I could make out of the tape and what it subsequently triggered to memory, my consciousness was suddenly “somewhere else.” I remember being on the ground in a dark place, looking up and around me to find myself surrounded by a circle of spirits, or so I called them. They encircled me in a stonehenge-like fashion and I felt as if I were part of some ritual. There was a female, taller than the rest, with whom I had a conversation, at the end of which I remembered expressing to her how I wanted to remember all of this but was afraid that I’d either freak out and doubt the experience or forget that I’d even been there when I “went back.” She told me that when I went back I’d remember the general outline, and that this would trigger the rest of it, much like in the case of remembering a dream. In the end, it did function that way, but only in part, as I don’t remember the details of our conversation up to that point.

I’m glad I recorded this, as I immediately forgot about the incident.

I needed another cigarette, so made the journey back to the papasan. Once there, I switched back to the Notes app and began thumbing my thoughts once again. I noticed that I now felt as if I were rooted in this steady, solid, confident and powerful silence behind everything. It was that calm, slow, measured, precise undercurrent behind all my thoughts, emotions, sensations and behaviors, an aspect of myself that I could only touch briefly in the rare heights I achieved within the context of my daily meditation. Though my sense was that I was always rooted there, I could feel it now and naturally identified with that aspect of myself. I felt that everything else was at a distance, that I was protected as if through some impenetrable wall of glass that buffered me from my mental contents and perceptions — both of which were getting rather wild at the time.

Reality seemed hyperreal and entirely surreal. Colors emerged out of nowhere and streamed across my field of vision, creative designs of exquisite beauty emerged out of the hairs on my forearm. In the midst of writing about how fast any movement seemed to be, how I felt like a ninja and saw trails, the bionic man sound chimed in crystal clear. Afterward, I tried to determine whether I had experienced it as an internally-generated sound or an auditory hallucination and was unable to attach a label to it: in this state, it did not feel as though there was much of a distinction to be made.

Within my mind it was just as weird. “It’s like being given a friendly, warm tour through the insane circus in your head,” I wrote, and then added a space before dedicating a line to two words I would repeat from this point on in my notes:

“Lila. Play.”

It was as if the boundary separating the conscious and unconscious, liminal and subliminal aspects of my mind had suddenly dissolved, leaving me in a truly psychedelic, truly mind-revealing experience. My thinking patterns as revealed in my writing became exceptionally strange. One or two lines would deal with one train of thought, then I’d hop to another track of thought, but ultimately return to the original track. I know I wasn’t visually referencing what I’d written before as at this point as I was thumbing away at the keypad non-stop, and I find it equally difficult to believe it was by memory. Instead, it seemed as though I was serving as a stenographer for multiple trains of thought chugging along in parallel, and since I couldn’t document all trains simultaneously, I just hopped back and forth from one mental track to another, riding multiple rails. The trains of thought were decipherable, however, and I was able to group them together in retrospect.

I repeatedly experienced déjà vu, to the point that I referred to it in my notes as “the new constant.” I felt certain that I had gone through specific, underlying thought processes before and in some cases, even the words I used to express them. Later, despite not having remembered that observation, I seemed to explain the mechanics of it all. It’s like I’m at first outside of the realm of thought and a stream of thoughts are presented to me to review as a whole from a third-person perspective. If I approve of them, I then enter the stream of thought, inhabit it and experience it from beginning to end from the first-person perspective as if for the first time, though there is that lingering sense of déjà vu. After I reach the end if the thought-stream I look back on it from a third-person perspective again, but now with the memory of having also experienced it from the first-person. I then feel embarrassed because the thoughts were so over-the-top dramatic and perfectly timed as if I was putting on a show for someone and came across as a really bad actor, as it all seems so pretentious and fake.

What seemed at one level to be deliberate and instantaneous thought I found at a deeper level to be the ultimate outcome of extensive subliminal dialogues between entities. I found myself wondering if I was truly anything more than the stenographer and translator of my thoughts. At one point I had thought to myself “I’ll try and catch that thought on the next swing around” and wondered if my thoughts were not only predetermined but cyclical. As time went on, I began describing deliberate thought as being very laborious, as if in order to think I had to think around and through a sort of obstacle course. One moment these mental gymnastics seemed exhausting; the next, I’d get another random, potent pulse of energy and found the strength to keep going. In the end, thoughts manifested in a form that reminded me a lot of poetry and it struck me that the manner in which I was taking my notes was akin to a linguistic totem pole.

I also found that my internal voice, my internal narrator, seemed to take turns embodying various stereotypical or archetypal characters. There were also swarms of lesser thoughts or voices breaking through, like there was a crowd in my mind, and I wondered: is this the way my mind is all the time on a subliminal level, and it’s simply that in this state that deep realm of thoughts have been given the psychological equivalent of a megaphone?

The aforementioned sensations of déjà vu extended to the realms I appeared to be visiting as well. Something as simple as grinding a cigarette butt into the ashtray on my red plaid lap would trigger my slippage into such a realm. It felt as though these places I kept falling into and stumbling my way back out of again were real, separate spaces that my consciousness had access to. Though I was skeptical of that intuitive certainty, I knew that the right approach was to let go, give in and enter the new space and play according to their unique rules as if it all were real, even if it all turned out to be a psychedelic ruse. Even in this act of play, however, I felt that buffer, that safe distance I felt in the “real” yet presently psychedelic world. I also felt as my identity itself was a world which I could occupy as a space or “be”.

Though I wasn’t able to ascertain whether I was traversing a complex webwork of parallel worlds or whether they were merely dreamlets, I felt as if the process of traversing these worlds as well as many of the worlds themselves were familiar territory, as if I was native to this manner of existence and had finally swung by through this sacred fungus to visit my home.

I wondered if I was experiencing the same things I ordinarily did, just handled and translated differently by my brain on account of the shrooms. It seemed as though the sensorium, which was typically predominant, was suddenly on equal footing with the realms of thought and emotion. All were just as real, just as potent. In addition, I again noted there was a cross-contamination between these equivalent sectors of experience, though I was no longer certain synesthesia was the right word for it. In any case, sounds, emotions and thoughts manifested as imagery, as scenery.

“Metaphors become real,” I wrote. “Analogies give birth to and end real lives. Our thoughts are people. There are villages of souls there. Patterns in my thinking become tangible, three-dimensional, like objects in themselves and so become more easily maneuverable.” I could also see my thought processes and patterns more easily.

Later, I also got the sense that, much as seemed to be the case with my thoughts, events in the external world were preconceived. Time only existed when you experienced the stream of events from a first-person perspective; outside, from the third-person perspective, all events already occurred and every origin and outcome could be known. I found it rather frightening and depressing — even from a young age, notions of determinism have always elicited that reaction from me — but then another thought intervened: “Kind of sucks, but buck up, sit back and relax.” I then referenced a Hunter S. Thompson quote that a friend of mine used to echo rather frequently: “Buy the ticket, take the ride.”

Twice I mentioned how things that seemed polarized from the up-close, first-person perspective seemed utterly indistinguishable, void of all distinction from the distance offered through the third person perspective, particularly the dualities of happy/sad and slave/master.

I kept yawning in pleasure, my nose full of mucus and my eyes watering profusely. “It’s like having the bliss flu,” I wrote.

Elsewhere, one part of myself seemed to be offering me self-analysis and recommendations.

“Your emotions moods have so many ups and downs,” I found myself writing. “Stabilize. Find a more suitable environment. Find a better job. Finish and publish your book.”

I wrote, “Document the downfall. Just like you said from the beginning.” This was in reference to the feeling I got shortly after the “alien” flashbacks in high school, where I became possessed by the notion that we were going to experience a global catastrophe, after which those creatures would intervene. I always had the notion that I was supposed to “document the downfall” of our civilization.

“Fuck lost civilizations,” I also wrote, which was in reference to my recent research on Graham Hancock’s ideas, then going on to proclaim that I should instead “focus on this — the intricacies of interspace, telepathic lines of communication between spatially dissociated minds, even temporally associated minds.”

This seemed tied to how I later described the boundary dissolution I was experiencing as revealing intimate, infinitely complex interconnections with everything else. This brought thoughts of what my childhood friend, Nimi, The Teacher, had told me about a web stretching across the universe, connecting all souls. “I feel it now, vibrating inside and reverberating,” I wrote, “spreading outward like the ripples caused by a stone cast in a pond.”

Sexual desire erupted in me, possessed every fiber of my being and every aspect of reality, but the yearning had greater width and depth and greater intensity than I had previously experienced. Evidently in association with this and rest of the beautiful madness I was experiencing, I was reminded of that Nietzsche line:

“I say unto you: one must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star. I say unto you: you still have chaos in yourselves.”

At least twice during this period I had the distinct sense that someone else was in the room with me, unseen but distinctly felt. At least three times in succession I had been flicking my lighter to light my cigarette and it seemed like someone else blew it out just before I could get my cigarette tip up to the flame. After I gave up, I discovered it was already lit. The second time I felt a presence, I simply wrote: “It feels like there is one other intelligence here aside from myself.” I remember asking out loud, “Who are you?” and half expected for someone to answer. Though I cannot be certain, I feel this had something to do with a disturbing line I later wrote:

“I am a tool for a higher intelligence? Fuck that. Fuck that. Is it real?”

Again and again throughout my notes, I came back to the subjects of play, of games, and of Lila, which was a word I’d vaguely recalled looking up before.

“Words are our playthings,” I wrote.

“Am I creating or describing, telling the truth or lying?” I asked, to which another part of me answered: “In play, ultimately nothing matters. You are immortal, infinite to it, yet left a derelict in the inconsequential game.”

“Struggle to think clearly,” I wrote some time later, “but this is all play. All of it. Games within games, don’t forget. Take it seriously but keep that awareness that underneath none if it matters. No matter how awake you think you are or I think I am, we are still asleep.”

Constantly throughout the experience I marveled at this — at my heightened awareness. I felt so awake, so alive, and only from the vantage point of that state of awareness did I realize how asleep I really am in life, how asleep we all are. In that state of consciousness, certain things seemed so clear, so self-evident — things seemingly inaccessible in the normal mental mode. Try as you might, however, you can’t really take it back with you, can’t effectively translate and articulate the insights.

“I’m trying to figure it all out, master this maze,” I write, “become lord of my labyrinth within.”

“Keep trying,” I write back to myself. “Keep your spirits up. Remember that it’s all play.”

“Break the code later,” I said, writing to myself again. “Get it all out first. Prima materia must first be gathered before alchemical operations can commence. It’s all play. Lila.”

“Lila,” I wrote for the final time. “Research it later.”

And so I have. There was a website I had visited many years ago that was called Lila, and I believe it dealt primarily with drug experiences. Interested in what the word meant, I had looked it up, but had since forgotten about it — at least consciously. I did remember that it had some association with Hindu philosophy. After a bit of research the last few days, I think I get the general gist.

From how I understand it, Brahman is conceived as having two basic forms, namely the unmanifest and the manifest. In it’s latent, unmanifest form, Brahman is pure and perfect awareness, the divine absolute. In manifest form, this entity becomes the ever-changing stage we call the universe, including all seemingly individual entities inhabiting it. This manifestation is accomplished through Lila, a Sanskrit term variously translated as drama, spontaneity, sport, or game, though most typically as divine play. Given its absolute perfection, it can attain nothing, so there is no driving motive, only spontaneous, aimless, creative and childlike play fashioned out of bliss. In this sense, it is both a detached observer and participant, engaged yet unrestrained, outside the universe and yet constituting the universe itself. To erroneously believe that this manifest play is the true reality we are said to be under the spell of Maya, or illusion.

I fell asleep that early Friday morning thankful for the experience but hoping it was in no way permanent, hoping I would wake up as myself, that my identity would be entirely restored, that I’d be able to think yet again in the traditional way. Aside from a strained feeling in my head that began the following morning and proceeded to follow me throughout the day, however, there seemed to be no ill side-effects.

Without doubt, it was my most mind-blowing psychedelic experience to date, and I’m still trying to wrap my mind around it.

With All That You Are.

Quid pro quo. Pardon
with a price. Invest
yourself in future

here. Bring
home

all that you are. Feet
on solid ground as you kiss
the heavens, as the earth
breaks and the sky

falls. Hold your own.
Fight, love

and fuck ‘em
with all
that you are.

Self-Contempt and Better Masques.

Nietzsche spoke about these moments of great self-contempt when you are above yourself, looking down, disgusted at yourself, shameful of this reject little ape you are.

This, I suppose, was a step towards self-overcoming — but it is not self-overcoming itself, of course. Not only do you have to hold that self-contempt but you must use it as an inspiration for action, to work towards making that self less contemptible, if nothing else.

What is it about this self-contempt that makes it such a launch pad? The self you see, the one which you are above and looking down upon, is clearly apart from you, so despite the fact that you’ve been parading around through your life playing that role, that isn’t you. The eye cannot see itself, but must rely on reflection — too often in the form of representation — or on a convincing lie to which it naively comes to identify. As you now recognize yourself as distinct from the contemptible imago, the object of your “self” contempt brings you to this self-realization. By process of elimination the self for whom you hold contempt is not you, so change things so that it becomes a masque more fitting for the face forced to bleed and receive through it.

Man is a Rope That Can Snap.

For all we know consciousness may evolve without the means to communicate, depriving it of culture. If it eventually evolves means of communication, that frees it from the lock-in syndrome and bridges the boundaries between one unit of consciousness and another. It bridges subjective worlds.

This second bridging occurs when consciousness awakens in bodies that have evolved the appropriate natural technology that allows consciousness to fashion customized artificial technology. Even if Dolphins have consciousness on par or far exceeding that of the human, for instance, they are bound by the limitations of their bodily technology. Perhaps even with consciousness in a body of suitable technology, however, such as one with opposable thumbs, there is only potential and not certainty that consciousness will make the connection and have the ambition to exploit it. Consciousness may develop concepts, even share them through grunts and body language with his peers, long before it accomplishes translating thinking into doing.

Consciousness may have grown great pressure behind a wall and so when the dam finally burst with tool-making, it appeared that we had developed suddenly when, in fact, we had only learned to express or extend our consciousness through our body’s natural technology to manipulate our environment intentionally through artificial tool-making. We see painted on cave walls and buried in the earth evidence of the birth of the artificial — which is only to say it was borne through intelligence, to what we had held, cradled, nurtured within our heads for so long rather than what was born “naturally” and directly through evolution.

In any case, the circumstances are, I think, the same. As a species and global civilization we are pushing a rock up a steep hill, and we have to make it up and onto the plateau in time or we will find our rock rolling back, crushing us, sending us down the mountain to meet our extinction or, at best, a Sisyphus fate.

Nietzsche wrote in Thus Spoke Zarathustra:

“Man is a rope, tied between beast and Overman — a rope over an abyss. A dangerous across, a dangerous on-the-way, a dangerous looking-back, a dangerous shuddering and stopping. What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end: what can be loved in man is that he is an overture
and a going under.”

Perhaps the human being and human consciousness is indeed but a bardo, a mere segue to something that perhaps our highest and most sincere ideals and aspirations can at best only vaguely foreshadow.

I cannot help but feel that if we do not cross this bridge in time and get to the ledge to which we are headed before the ropes finally snap and this failing bridge finally collapses, there is a huge, hungry, dark grave below us patiently awaiting our descent.

Technology bridged the gap and pulled the inner and outer worlds closer, ever closer to an epic collision, a transition of great wonder. We must complete the transition before we run out of the resources required to do so. We must achieve our fullest potential within the time-frame set by the external factors (finite resources, etc) in which we have evolved.

In order to cross this threshold, the human species must (a) initiate a mass migration to and colonization of space and (b) engage in targeted genetic reengineering that allows customization of the human genome.

The exploratory or migratory instinct is what led us out of Africa and ultimately brought us to dominate the earth, and mass space migration and galactic colonization is the logical extension of this tendency.

The aspect of genetic engineering seems far more complex.

Let us say, for instance, that those born with a rare and ultimately lethal mutation would die around five years of age and with them, the mutation, if not for our technology. Without this technology, this individual may not have survived to reproduce and his mutation or copy of a mutation would have died along with him. Instead they live and have children who carry on the mutation, for while it is not an advantageous mutation, neither is it any longer a lethal one with technological assistance. By treating and even saving the person, however, we as a consequence open the doorway for the mutation to propagate throughout the generations and by extension an increasing reliance on the treatment that allows the survival of those who carry it.

There is another issue here, however, aside from the cultural dependence of the lethally mutant, and that is cultural maladaptation. This maladaptation occurs because technology develops at exponentially increasing rates whereas the human body develops far more slowly, over enduring periods of time by means of accumulating mutations. Our bodies cannot meet the speed of cultural and technological evolution nor match how well it meets those demands, and as a consequence such maladaptations are treated with drugs, vitamins, surgery and other technologies provided to you by culture.

In this way it would seem that our use of technology creates an increasing dependence on technology. We make our technological culture the artificial environment to which its members must adapt or seek refuge for survival. It sounds bad and it is, for if the culture collapsed, many would die because with it would come the collapse of the environment to which they have become reliant.

If our journey as a species means anything, we must cross this bridge before it collapses. Our culture will have met the ledge on the other side and achieved its version of the Overman when we finally master the art of genetically engineering our genome, which will allow us to fashion ourselves in our own image — in accordance with our values — and adapt biologically to choice environments.

I do understand this does not exactly appear to be the Overman as Nietzsche imagined, but this is not entirely true as I see it. Instead, it merely extends the inner capacity to overcome oneself through technology and down into the winding roots of the human genome. Will to power at a height where a species can overcome its genetic limitations and epigenetic programs and consciousness can drive genetic mutation, selection, integration, reproduction. We will poke the slow poke genome and bring it up to speed, now as at the whims of trend and tradition as the rest of that which we have conquered.

We are no longer treating symptoms of maladaptation or treating/propagating maladaptive mutations themselves here; instead, we are designing mutations for choice adaptations. Consciousness evolves the capacity to create custom meat machines.