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| image by unknown artist |
Neutrality is not negativity. It only appears so when it doesn't get counted in the vote. And it only appears so when we want to weaponize neutrality. This is how we treat quantum mechanics in our daily life: as something that doesn't matter, doesn't fit with the results until decisions have been made and sides have been taken. But the ground state underlies all conditions, all states of matter and potentiates all observations, all interventions. Things themselves, when satisfied, self-consistent, enjoy being at rest. All struggles are enjoined to regain this self-consistency, homeostasis, using the laws of entropy to go contrary to itself for a shorter or longer period of time. The drama of Sisy-phusis' labor is not human in scale but cosmological. It is reduced to the simplest action merely to teach the children of ancient Greek civilization a fundamental idea about energy. It further involves, as already hinted, Chronos, time, that cut from space, the dimensional reduction in which we dwell. It demands the development of cyclical process. At the root of time is this broken, segmented periodicity. The serpent of the night. Our moons our suns our zodiac now our megagalactic clusters. Churning in our guts and minds as if one.
Written as a reply to a comment I read in the Amanita Muscaria group on FB. Multiple ideas come to mind. As always, we should stop thinking, but cannot but... Reason can choose to not exist. But it's a choice of not choosing (familiar paradox). By recognizing itself as generating illusions reason can stop creating them, stop believing one is more significant than any other, can start deconstructing the language of thought like you have already begun doing above. Mind and matter maybe coextensive and therefore infinite. As an old poem said the mind mirror of matter moves into itself backwards. What I've liked most about Amanita experiences is that it brings about a sense of connectivity. So there is no sense of being in a prison (gnostic matter) but it's rather an experience of networks like the wood wide web or the mycelial understory or the gente de yage (the spirits of the rainforest plants and animals in some of the Ayahuasca curandero/a traditions.) Amanita seems to tell me wordlessly it is not a trap and that's because there is no final border. If there is a border it can be penetrated, gotten through, worked upon or worked with.
When reason is being reasonable it opts for diversity because choosing for less than a number of things is logically impossible if one sticks to the idea of what counts. That might seem like a play on words, and it is, but with a purpose. One may contain all things but unity is a process in which all things are interactive. This is what the Gaia concept offers as a remedy to the mind matter dilemma. In other theories matter is merely energy or information seeking translation and these do not stand in opposition as they do in dualistic systems
In other thought systems (philosophies) there is often detected a harsh definition, a hard line, between what is living and so-called inanimate matter. The Gaian concept introduces us as a mixed bag of both in some kind of infinite food chain or eating chain of things metabolizing. Parallel universe theories developed to explain how quantum mechanics actually works suggest that more than two contrary states can exist simultaneously in the absolute universe if infinite probabilistic combinatorics. In the words of Wolf, matter is constantly being reborn as spirit and the spiritual matters composing the mind are eventually unable to keep the body from being reborn as matter without particular thoughts or without thoughts we particularly think.
The Amanita process is dovetailing a lot of concerns. It's truly a revelation of relatedness and brings one to see more of what is essential and necessary inside all things. In the forest, there is nothing really there by chance but it all seems like a jumble, random, senseless, when taken from the human pov. Now a lot of scientists would say that is true without needing to get so spiritually excited about it. I find the recognition however heartening because it makes me rethink my whole life configuration in a similar way. I am no longer thinking my life is nearly as fucked up as I thought it was a few years ago. Microdosing the amanita has something to do with the mood stabilization but it's the quality of that which matters the most. I was allowed to see how I got to Amanita through the forest. Reading about forest, mycology and ecological interdependence made the idea of consciousness being a result of all these processes seem much more believable since the mind and body literally find in nature that which supports them fundamentally, contrary to the industrial and classic Western idea that nature is an enemy and matter being slow, stupid, lacking intelligence.
On the use of pscyhedelic states and how to achieve them. In reply to Thibault Delfiere
I
tried to follow this in the translation and with my latin languages
background making guesses into gaps of significance. I did get the
idea that you mentioned three kinds of drugs and that the third category, the psychotopics/psyhedelic being the one
you had the least experience or knowledge about and yet they (this class of mind altering substance) seem to be the drugs you believe create the most bizarre combinations of imagery. The short answer to why strange imagery accompanies these experiences is because they expand the onieric temporality of the brain's processing and permit one to dream consciously... what's this all about? What is lucidity in dream space?
(Pupil dilation changes amount and exposure time of photonic energy, causing new visual temporal processing dynamics).
Various visual hallucinations are often the result of slowed redistribution of serotonin in the synapses accentuated by the dilation of the pupils allowing more reflective light into the apertures. This may seem trifling because the speed difference between photons relative to the curvature of space might seem negligible on the macro scale, not to mention nil on the cosmic scale, but on the subjective plane, this re-adjustment of the framing of perception is huge enough to cause wonder and reflection.
Double or trip-le or quadruple takes. It causes you to see more of what is there to be seen and because it works on phenomenological feedback loop, it's related absolutely to the actuality of becoming rather than distortion of it. It merely shows the relativity of the various distortions (reductions) we call "perception". All of our perceptions in fact are selected focus spaces, screened or filtered versions of the absolute information network that is the ultimate reality beyond our culturally manufactured limits.
The great problem with illegal substances is that one speaks of them publically these days through a veil of self-censorship (although the internet provides you with numerous forums to discuss this kind of "kink" and you can absorb details without ingesting any of them, retaining your virtual virginity, so to speak. For example, I've never ingested any ayahuasca potions but after 10 years of studying the topic I'm pretty sure I understand what can happen if I would take it and as a result I have never sought to do it outside ceremonial conditions in the natural tropical rainsforest ennvironement where the spirits of thos medicinal concotions dwell. I am pretty sure those who drink ayhuasca outside this context are not getting the ayahuasca experience. They get some kind of re-organization of mental space certainly but context is everything. Normalizing data and urbanity rushes back in. For those who don't believe in nature spirits, they are just sampling another recreational adult knock-out beverage the post-modern market place offers maybe. I mean to say they might also have profound experiences and revelations but these same revelations or experience could be obtained through sythesized pharmacueticall created intelligently. Those who believe that the trees, fungi, forest animals and waters living in symbiosis are part of the mixture will want to meet face to face with the source.
Ample information is available about the way consciousness is affected by all pyschotropics. We are in a heyday of open communications in the West where mostly we can still talk about things that are illegal if we do so in an intelligent, reasonable and scientific manner. The impact of mind altering substance on art is an old and still controversial one.
My own view is that art really is a form of symbol making that can include or ignore certain sets of phenomenological data or imagery. Deep art that delves into archetypal forms will occasionally take a more visceral or somatic than mental path and if the way to the image is through the body anthropomorphic and messy imagery of bodily process may be more understandable to the person under the influence. Both creator and viewer. When the experience is more mental or intellectual, the imagery tends to be tentacular, branching, associated with vibration, aura, multiple images, trails, wires, diagrams, sacred geometry: establishing patterns of connectivity. Perhaps this division of spheres follows bicameral, left/right brains specializations (These are neural binding geometries based on serotonin affinities of psychoactive alkaloids.).
No matter what "causes" or "results", in either case, the issue is how intelligently our mind continues, carries on, give vent to our relation of & to ourselves and the environment and the cosmos. This is what allows us to see in art even prehistorically the vehicle that carries many stages of the evolution of self consciousness from animist religions to science.
Mind altering substances have always
been ingested. The urge to merge and combine.
It's in the food or it is the food. In some cultures certain foods were taboo except as medicines. The medicinal foods had to be given in microdoses. The priest (a witch, in th west, mostly) was the first doctor. You probably know this. Yet what you don't know about psychedelics is that they provide mental pathways and create new ways of perceiving interiority. Meditation practices and isometric exercise can also bring about these mental states. Just do it. My personal question at the moment is why should we make art if we already feel good and perfect about our consciousness? The answer can be as different as every person is different. Maybe art is simply the art of being different. Of being the differand as Deleuze put it.
Recontre avec T.D. contd
Yes, you most clearly show that you don't understand psychedelics because you cling to the idea that there is dependence involved. I think you are able to understand but maybe you do not try or don't want to try. Maybe it is more convenient to have a behaviour related to dope and dopes who use dope which you can compare and contrast your own more heroic behavior as a singularity artist.
In any case, I think you are correct to say you don't need any drugs. But this also missed the point: people don't take psychedelics out of need but instead out of desire, will, or as a sacrament. It is like any decision to make a painting or sculpture or performance. It is to engage consciousness to take a challenge and engage with the material that is one's own self.
Regarding darkness it is the supreme challenge because it is without externalized media. We speak here of enlarging sensibilities not about reducing them. But we speak here also about removing obstacles and rigid binaries. We can experience light also. Light as darkness is one of the most generative discoveries of the psychonaut. Psychonauts are concerned with living experiences and perhaps little or not at all concerned with leaving traces although nothing is forbidden and everything permitted. In this sense they are also wilful and assert themselves as you might put it. I think the biggest difference we explore here is the one concerning externalization. I know you make art and do performances. I also know well and feel deeply your frustrations since I share the sense of not being able to set up performances, exhibitions. I too lack recognition for my endeavors. Yet the interesting aspect of the spiritual path is that it alone allows one finally say fuck off to society and find some peace and freedom -- of mind mainly -- but who knows -- the world and the mind may be more intricately interwoven than we can tell. Freedom is just a process of by-passing or shrinking one's self to fit through gaps in the system that enslaves. I hope you accept my statements as a friendly contrarian viewpoint and not as any attack. I respect and admire your tenacity in process. Good morning!
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