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symbioidljReading Carl Jung today, I had noticed an interesting correlation between my first mushroom experience and one of the fundamental tenets of all mysticism(that I know of, at least).
Oft-times I have heard the term "As above, so below." I have heard it ascribed to numerous thinkers, amongst these: Hermes Trimestigus, Paracelsus, and Heraclitus. Who originally said it, I know not. I consider this to be my view of the cosmos.
I do not remember the exact quote from Jung(and I left the book at work, so I can't look it up... *golly-shucks*), but it referred to the same concept of the above/below relation. However, not only did he refer to vertical relationships, but also horizontal relationships left/right, and had a similar comparison(as left, so right... not quite, but something along those lines)
It was then that I realized the import of my first psychedelic experience and how it pertained to my spirituality(apart from all the other affirmations of my own belief structure)... Let me explain what happened:
Having returned from the terrace on lake mendota(I believe), and having just seen intricate hindu patterns in stone, weaving their ways like serpents, like the great kundalini goddess, knowing that not only are the stones moving, but I too, was moving... after being left behind as my friends ran ecstatically down a hill, only to lose them, and myself in the process. After turning down streets in my neighborhood, not knowing exactly where i was, but somehow knowing a general location of my whereabouts, and following my instincts of "home", I made my way back, waiting for the others to arrive. Waiting. Waiting. I sat on the front porch. The street lamp light filtering through the leaves, shaded various hues of blue, whispering soft words in the wind into my eyes... the patterns of the leaves and their shadows amazed me. I felt myself sinking deeper into the chair on which i sat. The thought kept running through my head: Liquid. Liquid. Liquid. I felt truly as a liquid, melting ever so slowly. Such a fluid feeling, so free, not confined to this normally somewhat solid body. I remained still, waiting... and then they arrived. My partners in crime, my cohorts. A couple of them, at least. My friend and I went in the house. I walked up the stairs, and looked down and felt as if I understood what M.C. Escher was really saying in his works. The stairs I were climbing really felt as if they somehow looped in on themselves. It was this act that began my sense of spatial disorientation. I was so amazed at how even though I was walking up the stairs I felt as though I would eventually go to the first floor, without ever walking down. I DID walk down.
We had a pool table in our living room, and I looked at it... Not down at it, but i kneeled, and looked across it, from a cue's eye view. Seeing the various colorful balls on the bright green surface, as if it were freshly mowed, I almost felt that i was seeing wonderland. That alice could any minute pop out of a corner pocket. Or a rabbit would climb down a side pocket. I lay on my back, flat on the table... Looking up, I felt as if somehow, left were right and right were left. As if space was inverted. My sense of dimension had truly been altered. My own internal co-ordination had flip-flopped into a strange, bizarre alternate universe. Though I knew, of course, that i was still within our world and that I was merely experiencing an amazing chemical reaction. We assume that we normally experience the spatial dimension naturally. That our consciousness is only able to perceive our 3 dimensional space-time as reality. That it is ingrained as such, and that there is no other way to conceive of multi-dimensions, or various topologies within this dimension. It is not something that can be *known*, but rather it must be felt. And feel this strange contortion of space, I did. Up was suddenly down, and down was suddenly up. I lay there with my legs hanging off the table, thinking to myself....
"I feel as if I could just lift my legs up, and i would just fall towards the ceiling." Since up was down, it only made sense that gravity should thus be *up*. I knew the whole time that it wasn't really that way, but it FELT that way.
1) It should be obvious how this relates to the above/below issue. I truly felt the above/below dichotomy in the very essence of my being, and not only above/below, but left/right. Which makes me wonder about a few things. MC Escher, being one of them. It seems that he really understood these states of being. Was it pure mathematics, or something else? Lewis Carroll also was a mathematician(I believe, correct me if i'm wrong), and Alice in Wonderland seems to conjure up these alterations of space and time. And what of the Mobius Strip? That wonderful oddity where you start on one point, traverse the strip, and when you complete the circle, you find that you are on the opposite side of where you were, with your body not only being upside down, but also... your left and right sides reversed. you become a mirror image of yourself. as above so below... as left, so right...
What about space travel? Does the psychedelic experience have anything to say about perception of gravity-less space? What about cyberspace? It should be obvious that truly virtual spaces should be able to create the sense of dislocation that the psychedelic experience may impart. We are bound to mother earth with gravity. We are learning to move off the planet, and I think that psychedelics might just be essential to training our consiousness into a non-gravity mode of thinking. Terence McKenna thinks we are moving into a hyper-space. Maybe, maybe not. But I can say that the psilocybin experience(I do not think that the Lysergic experience has ever given me such a perspective) does tend towards a hyper-spatial frame of reference. By hyper I mean, of course "Above"...
Since above and below are related, the external and the internal are also related. The psychedelic experience maps our internal psyche onto the outside world, and we can thus work on understanding the relationships between the outer and the inner. Hyperspace encompasses both. The quantum world and the cosmos reflect each other, I believe. I just find it amazing that when i really analyze that moment in time, I can understand exactly what it was giving me a glimpse of. Not a sense of "dislocation", "disorientation", or any such thing, but rather a "re-orientation"... Terence McKenna(yet again), uses the term "resetting the compass of the self". This is not a bad analogy.
There are some people I know who have a very difficult time understanding why one would choose the psychedelic experience. Not that they don't think the psychedelic experience brings insight, but rather that it is 1) a so called "artificially" induced phenomenon and also that 2) there are other methods out there that can achieve the same thing... I won't go into my reasoning on this right now, but at some point I will(and I'm sure you'll have something to say about it, too... yes, you know who you are :) )
What I know is that the psychedelic experience has enhanced my perception of the world in ways that I could not undertand otherwise. It clarifies merely intuited insight into a more fully realized, illuminated understanding. It becomes not just a faint glimmer of distant knowledge to be sought after and struggled for, but instead becomes "Here". It is in front of you, and you cannot deny that experience. You can say that it is all in the mind, but that still does not remove the fact that you are experiencing such a thing. And by saying "it's all in the mind" tends to reduce the mind to a two-bit player in reality, when (at the very least) I feel quite differently. The mind is the ultimate player in reality, at least your definition of it. It certainly amplifies things that you already know(if you trust it and don't fear it. If you fear it, it will only devour your psyche, chew you up and spit you out... It is because of this power it has, you must approach the experience and the entheogen that you partake of, with the utmost respect, much in the same way a Christian partakes of the sacrament of communion with utter reverence. Communion: To communicate and become one with the divine. This, is, in essence, what the psychedelic experience essentially does. For the divine is not only that which is out there(for the world and universe itself is divine), but also that which is in here(is not the essence of "self", whether you call it soul or mind or spirit, divine?) Again, the divinity lies in both the macro-cosm and the micro-cosm. The divine spark of fire from the sun has created our planet, and it has birthed us. We truly do contain the breath of the universe. The primal components of the billions of stars are also the primal components of our fleshling bodies, and likewise with the great mother earth. OK, that's enough for now(I'm sorry this is so long, everyone but it's what my livejournal is for. my little "essays") I could go on and on about this topic, and when i get my domain up and running finally, i will post many a writing on such things. I think my next post will be about: Sound, Waves, Om, The Logos/The Word, The Trinity, Matter/Energy, Space/Time, etc... Trust me, I've got some nifty thoughts on that one.
We armchair philosophers like to wank off at the mouth, ain't that the truth?(no need to answer that!!!)
Luvz y'all...
Symbie
Oft-times I have heard the term "As above, so below." I have heard it ascribed to numerous thinkers, amongst these: Hermes Trimestigus, Paracelsus, and Heraclitus. Who originally said it, I know not. I consider this to be my view of the cosmos.
I do not remember the exact quote from Jung(and I left the book at work, so I can't look it up... *golly-shucks*), but it referred to the same concept of the above/below relation. However, not only did he refer to vertical relationships, but also horizontal relationships left/right, and had a similar comparison(as left, so right... not quite, but something along those lines)
It was then that I realized the import of my first psychedelic experience and how it pertained to my spirituality(apart from all the other affirmations of my own belief structure)... Let me explain what happened:
Having returned from the terrace on lake mendota(I believe), and having just seen intricate hindu patterns in stone, weaving their ways like serpents, like the great kundalini goddess, knowing that not only are the stones moving, but I too, was moving... after being left behind as my friends ran ecstatically down a hill, only to lose them, and myself in the process. After turning down streets in my neighborhood, not knowing exactly where i was, but somehow knowing a general location of my whereabouts, and following my instincts of "home", I made my way back, waiting for the others to arrive. Waiting. Waiting. I sat on the front porch. The street lamp light filtering through the leaves, shaded various hues of blue, whispering soft words in the wind into my eyes... the patterns of the leaves and their shadows amazed me. I felt myself sinking deeper into the chair on which i sat. The thought kept running through my head: Liquid. Liquid. Liquid. I felt truly as a liquid, melting ever so slowly. Such a fluid feeling, so free, not confined to this normally somewhat solid body. I remained still, waiting... and then they arrived. My partners in crime, my cohorts. A couple of them, at least. My friend and I went in the house. I walked up the stairs, and looked down and felt as if I understood what M.C. Escher was really saying in his works. The stairs I were climbing really felt as if they somehow looped in on themselves. It was this act that began my sense of spatial disorientation. I was so amazed at how even though I was walking up the stairs I felt as though I would eventually go to the first floor, without ever walking down. I DID walk down.
We had a pool table in our living room, and I looked at it... Not down at it, but i kneeled, and looked across it, from a cue's eye view. Seeing the various colorful balls on the bright green surface, as if it were freshly mowed, I almost felt that i was seeing wonderland. That alice could any minute pop out of a corner pocket. Or a rabbit would climb down a side pocket. I lay on my back, flat on the table... Looking up, I felt as if somehow, left were right and right were left. As if space was inverted. My sense of dimension had truly been altered. My own internal co-ordination had flip-flopped into a strange, bizarre alternate universe. Though I knew, of course, that i was still within our world and that I was merely experiencing an amazing chemical reaction. We assume that we normally experience the spatial dimension naturally. That our consciousness is only able to perceive our 3 dimensional space-time as reality. That it is ingrained as such, and that there is no other way to conceive of multi-dimensions, or various topologies within this dimension. It is not something that can be *known*, but rather it must be felt. And feel this strange contortion of space, I did. Up was suddenly down, and down was suddenly up. I lay there with my legs hanging off the table, thinking to myself....
"I feel as if I could just lift my legs up, and i would just fall towards the ceiling." Since up was down, it only made sense that gravity should thus be *up*. I knew the whole time that it wasn't really that way, but it FELT that way.
1) It should be obvious how this relates to the above/below issue. I truly felt the above/below dichotomy in the very essence of my being, and not only above/below, but left/right. Which makes me wonder about a few things. MC Escher, being one of them. It seems that he really understood these states of being. Was it pure mathematics, or something else? Lewis Carroll also was a mathematician(I believe, correct me if i'm wrong), and Alice in Wonderland seems to conjure up these alterations of space and time. And what of the Mobius Strip? That wonderful oddity where you start on one point, traverse the strip, and when you complete the circle, you find that you are on the opposite side of where you were, with your body not only being upside down, but also... your left and right sides reversed. you become a mirror image of yourself. as above so below... as left, so right...
What about space travel? Does the psychedelic experience have anything to say about perception of gravity-less space? What about cyberspace? It should be obvious that truly virtual spaces should be able to create the sense of dislocation that the psychedelic experience may impart. We are bound to mother earth with gravity. We are learning to move off the planet, and I think that psychedelics might just be essential to training our consiousness into a non-gravity mode of thinking. Terence McKenna thinks we are moving into a hyper-space. Maybe, maybe not. But I can say that the psilocybin experience(I do not think that the Lysergic experience has ever given me such a perspective) does tend towards a hyper-spatial frame of reference. By hyper I mean, of course "Above"...
Since above and below are related, the external and the internal are also related. The psychedelic experience maps our internal psyche onto the outside world, and we can thus work on understanding the relationships between the outer and the inner. Hyperspace encompasses both. The quantum world and the cosmos reflect each other, I believe. I just find it amazing that when i really analyze that moment in time, I can understand exactly what it was giving me a glimpse of. Not a sense of "dislocation", "disorientation", or any such thing, but rather a "re-orientation"... Terence McKenna(yet again), uses the term "resetting the compass of the self". This is not a bad analogy.
There are some people I know who have a very difficult time understanding why one would choose the psychedelic experience. Not that they don't think the psychedelic experience brings insight, but rather that it is 1) a so called "artificially" induced phenomenon and also that 2) there are other methods out there that can achieve the same thing... I won't go into my reasoning on this right now, but at some point I will(and I'm sure you'll have something to say about it, too... yes, you know who you are :) )
What I know is that the psychedelic experience has enhanced my perception of the world in ways that I could not undertand otherwise. It clarifies merely intuited insight into a more fully realized, illuminated understanding. It becomes not just a faint glimmer of distant knowledge to be sought after and struggled for, but instead becomes "Here". It is in front of you, and you cannot deny that experience. You can say that it is all in the mind, but that still does not remove the fact that you are experiencing such a thing. And by saying "it's all in the mind" tends to reduce the mind to a two-bit player in reality, when (at the very least) I feel quite differently. The mind is the ultimate player in reality, at least your definition of it. It certainly amplifies things that you already know(if you trust it and don't fear it. If you fear it, it will only devour your psyche, chew you up and spit you out... It is because of this power it has, you must approach the experience and the entheogen that you partake of, with the utmost respect, much in the same way a Christian partakes of the sacrament of communion with utter reverence. Communion: To communicate and become one with the divine. This, is, in essence, what the psychedelic experience essentially does. For the divine is not only that which is out there(for the world and universe itself is divine), but also that which is in here(is not the essence of "self", whether you call it soul or mind or spirit, divine?) Again, the divinity lies in both the macro-cosm and the micro-cosm. The divine spark of fire from the sun has created our planet, and it has birthed us. We truly do contain the breath of the universe. The primal components of the billions of stars are also the primal components of our fleshling bodies, and likewise with the great mother earth. OK, that's enough for now(I'm sorry this is so long, everyone but it's what my livejournal is for. my little "essays") I could go on and on about this topic, and when i get my domain up and running finally, i will post many a writing on such things. I think my next post will be about: Sound, Waves, Om, The Logos/The Word, The Trinity, Matter/Energy, Space/Time, etc... Trust me, I've got some nifty thoughts on that one.
We armchair philosophers like to wank off at the mouth, ain't that the truth?(no need to answer that!!!)
Luvz y'all...
Symbie
