Monday, February 15, 2010.

Monday, February 15, 2010 was the most intense and inexplicably incredible day of my life.

How can I truly begin to describe it? Time is not of the essence because it bears no essence at all, its carcass frail and apocryphal, a languid and inadequate expression of reality, of how experience is suffered. There was no time that day. And though I am weary of pointing out one sordid moment, of accusing that which left me before I had even realized it, I feel that I must for the sake of discernment. The beginning, so understood, came with the weight of the world gently bearing down on me. On instinct, when under such insurmountable saccharin pressure, one's muscles simple give way, the insides follow. It is not guttural, it is not violent, I felt it to be an affectionate reaction; I surfed on gravity's loving throes. Her weightless hands wrapped around what was slowly becoming her own body, like a lover decaying, and I responded all too eagerly until I was facing the very dust that formed me.

What happened next can only be understood, and ineffectually at that, by addressing the fundamental question of why. We were under the influence of psilocybin, a chemical compound with the peculiar ability to propel us into dissociation; and dissociate we did. What is usually described as an unexpected disruption was in this case a reshaping of the fabric of the cosmos, so severed was our connection with the world and all of its certainties that I believe I can truly say we neared what reality truly is, it is distance. In order to understand the world one must turn from it on occasion, only then can we glimpse into the hidden world, the coiled pathways seldom traveled, we were commuters of existence, children of a lesser world plunged into the infinite barely walking out first steps and then completely forgetting how it feels to have ever laid a foot on any foundation, sidereal or terrestrial.

I dug a hole.

A hole which I had verbally referred to as a temple, a place or absolute comfort and reverence, but my mind was already racing, thoughts scattered constantly and they may have well been the sand itself. All but one thing remained clear: this was no mere temple, it was a womb. In the deepest recess of my memory I recalled the need for comfort, thinking back on it I believe that same need for comfort was exploited by the chemical intensity. I dug and I dug and perfected the second womb several times until I had a hole that was deep and large enough for me to sit in comfortably. It was a primal comfort, preternatural in nature almost, it was far beyond any understanding of the feeling of comfort that I had ever known. The word became meaningless, it was trite, unusable under the current circumstance because it was too limited, to say or think comfort is by definition to constrict it, to wrap a word around it, an expression, an intent, it completely destroys the freedom of the feeling itself. It so happened that the feeling surged within me, at least I wish I could say with certainty that it did, in truth I felt it washing over me from a myriad of directions, I felt that entire darkened giant cloth its arms and fingers in blue and yellow and wrap me within its hands for what felt like endlessness. My hands responded, I could not stop touching the sand because I could not stop being the sand, the colors were indistinguishable and my mind soon released me from the association that I was I or skin was skin, I soon felt my fingers coming apart atom by atom, then my hand, then my arm, I realized that my body was slipping into eternity, the world around me was infinite and so was I, I was infinite, and so was the world around me. This went on until there was no me and there was no world, there was no constriction, all that is was and I was.
I began to laugh at this point. I laughed by myself, to myself, but I could hear and see and feel the others laugh too. I laughed because I was so comfortable, I wondered if the others felt that way too, if they could possibly be laughing at the same notion, I was asked if it was possible that we were all laughing even if we were all so far away from each other. I laughed and I also cried. I cried between bursts of the happiest laughter I had ever let loose, I cried because I felt this nameless freedom guised as comfort, because I had never felt anything so strongly before in my life, nothing quite like this. It was torture because it was so beautiful, there was so much comfort around me that I could not escape it, I could not bear how wonderful it felt, so I cried. Sometimes I cried because of that, sometimes I cried because I felt so alone, I was the space between particles, I was the only creature in the universe, aimless, timeless, forever displaced in an ocean of emptiness. Looking back on it, I realize that all of my insecurities and anxieties were present there, the amplified feeling of dissipation was most likely a result of my own constant fear of being alone forever. The medley of tears and mirth accompanied the ocean's own harmonic resonance. It engulfed everything and it was everywhere, it was both dissonant and euphonious, it was the roar of existence and I felt like I was the most fortunate man to ever be, the only man to ever be, to exist and to listen to the music of reality. The soaring airplanes and helicopters uttered a gloomy cackle, a deep electric hum, and it all came together so perfectly.

Eventually I was called over to where the surf met the sand, we sat there huddled together like children. Everything was more vivid then, the sky's intoxicated blue, the sand was purple and gold, the ocean was a watercolor canvas constantly reshaping and reforming itself, and I felt like the ocean, without my body, I felt like I was embracing even what laid beyond the visible horizon. We sat there being buffeted by the waves, looking at the sand and cupping multiple universes in our hands. The sand itself was breathing. It expanded fanatically, and not just away from each grain of sand, but new grains were also coming into existence, rapidly spilling all over, everything felt infinite. We tried to talk, and as much as we felt that we were making sense of it all, I'm sure we weren't, but it didn't matter, we understood each other so much that words felt unnecessary. Language was too limited, to crass, even if I had known every word ever uttered it still would no have been enough, I spoke and I felt the words falling from my mouth, it was a feeling that left me thirsty for everything. So we stopped using words; I thought instead. Thought seemed to be the only thing keeping me from falling apart and mending my consciousness with matter, every thought I had echoed across great distances, to and fro, I looked at my friends, but they weren't my friends at this point, they were extensions of me, and somehow I could hear what they were thinking and they could hear me, I sat there speaking to myself and the lump of me sitting away understood me perfectly, I need not even utter a single word. I felt at this point my ego began to suffer. I started thinking about death, about how insignificant, how lonely and pathetically abandoned I was. I felt my body shrinking, my hands still digging ceaselessly for comfort, all I found was sorrow upon sorrows, I felt like the only living creature in the universe again, so far away from everything I found familiar. I felt as if I would be stuck there forever, hands dug in the sand, but death didn't bother me, it was all quite the contrary, I realized how fruitless everything was, no longer being tethered to those ancient worries I understood once again how meaningless every action man could ever take truly was. There was no decision made, it was simply the natural transition after accepting the inevitability of oblivion, I wanted to die, I felt it deep in my consciousness, I felt myself letting go and drifting out with each coming wave, I wanted to be the ocean again. I wanted to be matter, to be fundamental again, my very being cried out for return to the void, the material ancestry of all living things. I realized at this point that I could not feel a thing, my being was purely conscientious, and for all it mattered I had long since surrendered my body to entropy and unentanglement, I could not feel heat though I had been sitting under the blistering sun for who knows how long and I could not feel cold though I was washed in frigid waters. The thought scared me a little bit and I remembered the womb, I thought about going back in it but I could not bid my body to move, though my mind was bearing down on me I still felt a high degree of comfort, I simply did not want to move, I let the waves throw me around, I was ready to let them take me. The cold set in shortly after that. The sensation rippled through me fading in and out, but I knew that I felt cold again. It was enough incentive to stand, sand slid off me and I felt it was my flesh falling to pieces, but that did not matter either, I slowly realized I was once again corporeal, but nothing indicated that I had missed my body. I sat in the second womb once more.

Considering what I had just experienced I should have been more shaken, at the very least noticeably colder, but I wasn't. The womb seemed to have radiated an effulgent sensation of comfort, it was still there, just as if I had stood up and left it there before joining the ocean. I wrapped myself in it rapidly, my thoughts began to flow, each sentence a grain trickling from my lips. I wanted to speak again, and I spoke for so long and so much that I wished I had a recorder to remember everything. I talked about the universe, existence, being, the shape of atoms worried me dreadfully, how they were all so different and yet all the same, how indistinguishable they were and yet how I could feel them all over, how I could see them in my youth and how I missed those hallucinations, I missed it as truth. I talked for so long that I can't bring myself to remember everything that was said, that would be the one thing I deeply regret from this experience, the not remembering. I felt that I was speaking to myself, my consciousness was there, my being was present, it was still spinning all around me but it was almost tangible now, it had a direction, I knew where I was and I know that I could speak to myself there, our conversation was eternal. I was more in control then. I had been in control to some extent because I was always conscious of what was happening, but I felt myself regain control of my thoughts, that made me happy, euphoric even. Realizing what was going on transformed the experience even further, it was the last wave before it all came to a soft halt, my thoughts began to slow down, I stopped conversing with the universe, I could now move what I had forgotten I even had. I was able to stand, and so I did, looking over at my friends I noticed they were crying, in my mind I figured they were probably having an argument, something silly like that, so I left them for a little while. I walked away and pieced myself together, collected my thoughts from the innominate corners and reaches of the ocean, the sand and the sky, I was becoming whole again. After washing my face I felt like I had been born anew, the weight of experience no longer burdened me, it was simply mine. I felt like Prometheus had handed me the fires of Olympus, I was the first man, a neonate born unto the chaos of the universe able to make primeval sense of it all, I was prepared for it, dissociation is an exercise of the mind that I had been familiarized with and that day I felt it intensified times a million.
When I returned to my companions I realized they were still not all there, it came as a surprise to me since I had spent this whole time believing we were all of one solitary consciousness, I realized then that the trip was, for the most part, over. I was still under the influence, very much so, I could not feel my arms or my innards, but I was in control of myself. It was an exercise of will to regain complete control, I managed to find ways to return feeling to the rest of me, chewing was an alien activity, I chewed and chewed and I did not understand why, I knew I was inevitably going to swallow the food, but the meaning was lost on me. Drinking water was what I believe truly snapped me back to this reality, it ran cool down my throat and as it touched my internal organs I felt them reanimate, I was whole again, I was back in my own skin.

To tell the story is to betray the events that transpired. As I said before when words were failing me, language is woefully inadequate and I believe that is because this experience isn't verbal in nature, in fact, it doesn't even tether you to the you that you are accustomed to or even to the manner of experiencing reality that you are accustomed to. I have written about this before, it's a separation of it and function, though we were no closer to an objective reality, which I believe to be pure matter, we really skirted quite close to it simply because of the fact that we were so away from the fabricated concept of reality we experience per diem. We will always have our limitations and all that we see and experience is always an approximation of what might or might not be there. Albert Camus wrote that in order to understand the world, one must turn away from it on occasion. I wholeheartedly believe that we all walked away with a better understanding of the world that day, we turned from it all and stared into the emptiness of all things, we stared and we dared not even blink because we too were enraptured with all that we saw and, eventually, understood, even if we can't quite put it all into words. No, we will never be able to put all of it into words, only those who have skirted the edges of reason and reality will understand, and only those people I shared this incredible experience with will understand truly what it meant to turn away from everything but at the same time to face ourselves. We had all felt that we died that day, but more importantly, we all felt as if we were born again.