I highly recommend you read
PART 1 first!
In the playground of my mind I have installed a slide next to the swings.
PART 2C, whose birthday was the genesis of all this madness, invited me to the floor. I lay on my side facing her, as the rest danced around us. She talked and I listened. I understood everything she said, but whenever I tried responding, my mind filled with bubbles and my mouth with marbles. Normally the inability to communicate would thrust me into at least discomfort, if not panic – but I merely laughed at my own inarticulateness!!
All the while I was fascinated by her face – toplit, her eyes and opened mouth were deep pits, her nose a pyramid of light thrust from darkened cheeks. But where her eyes should be, buried in the black ovals, were a pair of mouths that opened as she spoke, revealing an eyeball inside of each!! When silent, the blackness seemed to return, dispelling the illusion. And in the black pit of C’s mouth itself, when opened to speak and laugh, was yet another eyeball!!
… more vivid, persistent hallucinations.
One strange side note: ordinarily our tremendous ability to concentrate is exclusive and can only be focused in one direction, but at that moment, as if my consciousness were split into two lenses, I listened intently and ruminated upon her words, making connections and associations with all my normally available attention, all the while concentrating intently and fully absorbed by the illusion of her distorted face. My mind was performing two ordinarily exclusive tasks simultaneously. Never before have I experienced such a division, such a veritable wetware systolic array, and must ask if it was somehow related to the SHIFT…
It was nice to spend some time getting to know C, but a little odd and uncharacteristic that I could contribute nothing to the discussion beyond a few awkward gulps, grunts and guffaws! Soon the music changed and we stood and went separate ways. I ended up at the table with the plate of K on it, arranged by some invisible force into small convenient lines. As I indulged I heard a distant “SWoooOoooCH”. Drawn by that alluring sound, I hobbled along the wallfloorceiling into the other room and lay down next to S and Shayku (who were hitting it off and have since become a very close couple!!).
FX was filling up the rubber party bubbles with gas from the erstwhile whipped cream dispenser. A balloon was passed along to me, and when everyone was loaded up, balloons were banged and chinchinned and inhaled.
I was thrust elsewhere. I experienced and felt, but - in typical synaesthesia mode, did not “see” - a world of shapes and colours I knew to be a playground. My playground. The shape of my mind, the outline that contained my mind now seen from the outside.
I WAS DEEP IN, BUT NOW HAVING GONE IN, I AM OUT, LOOKING IN.There were blocks and forms of red blue green yellow, and swirls and pipes and walls… all together they formed a playground and in a corner I saw what I perceived to be swings. And I decided at that moment to create a new path – to build a slide with some of the forms, next to these things that resembled nothing if not swings. As I thought it, so it was. Objects twisted and muted and serpentined from place to place, the playground morphing to my thoughts.
And thus it was that a slide was erected next to the swings. But before I could finish the installation, I was pulled back as quickly as I had been thrust there. I had slid back,
AND:
“I rolled over and uttered what I felt compelled to share with my companions next to me on the duveted floor :
«
In the playground of my mind I have installed a slide next to the swings !! »
Their dumbfounded faces confounded me, so I repeated the phrase, chuckling at the end to underline how simple it all was, and added :
« But I lost a screw, so the installation is incomplete. I need to go back to the playground !! » ”
Just then a balloon swung my way. CHoooOoooWSSWoooOoooCH, inhale hold exhale. Inhale hold exhale. S, lying next to me, said, exhaling, as my world receded: “remind me later that it smells like Fall!”
I could not get back to the playground. Instead a swirling checkerboard vortex spun in my line of sight, fluorescent floating chess pieces circling and drawn down into the infinite checkerpoint in the centre. The world was sucking chess pieces into a tiny hole. Still I searched for the screw, but there was no hardware to be found amidst the queens and pawns and bishops…
Returning in a sudden aural gulp that switched me back to my previous state (still a great leap from “normal” with an entire pharmacy still enveloping my cells), I conceded that the playground must remain unfinished. If a screw were loose in my mind, another was now missing entirely…!
I felt very good. Almost blissful. So I lay there with no expectations, just enjoying the state. The ceiling where we were was, like the walls, atrocious – a kind of faux-aged brownish plaster that swirled and protruded and generally, during the daylight hours with a sober mind, just sat there in all its ugly pretension.
BUT NOW IT WAS A MAGIC SURFACE.
It moved and jutted and re-amassed: mountains and forests then villages appeared as I stared at its irregular surface. Thatched homes and small steepled edifices arose and then were peopled by what appeared from my distant vantage to be small, brown-robed humanoid creatures navigating the “streets” and flitting between the buildings at the speed of ants. Then, surrounding the little villages and winding through their streets, I saw huge buried spines and jutting vertebrae, like creatures interred and built upon.
The bones rose. They lifted from the earth, and soil cascaded as their surfaces revealed more bone. The dead backs of ancient, unimagined beasts rose reptilian, arching cartilaginous, articulating and clacking spiked and speared endoskeletal octagons. One set I concentrated on lifted out of the village entirely, rising toward me, a square tube with vertebraed corners and ribbed surfaces, a bone cage reaching upwards/downwards, the limbs of enclosed inhabitants protruding and flailing, the entrapped beings climbing on one another to try and get to the top of the square-tubed, gallows-like edifice of spinal bone to escape through the opening above…
Then as it neared me it sunk back down and into the ceiling whose surface undulated and morphed, but had resumed its form as a ceiling.
But now below this, hanging and flowing three feet under the ceiling, was a golden luminescent and translucent river. It glowed. It flowed. It showed, revealed, informed.
IT WAS SO REAL. I asked the others if anyone could see it. Of course they could not. It rippled and waved and I realized after a moment that while like a river, it was also like a raindrop-riddled puddle of concentric waves and interferences and compounding of compounded light waves and ohhh… it was glorious. I felt in the presence of something incomprehensible, but essential and somehow both neutral and friendly. I moved my head side to side, then looked away. When I looked back it was still there. I tried to think of something else, imagine a new form, but this manifestation persisted. I moved on the floor and confirmed that it slid in exact perspective in relation to the ceiling and to my position. It exhibited all the qualities, and obeyed the physical laws, of a real visual phenomenon. It did not reflect light as an object, but instead emitted light, of which it was composed.
And then I noticed something: flowing in the ripples and the waves of this light, also composed of light, were the primary components of this river/stream/puddle: I saw ciphers, symbols, shapes. Unaware of how, I zoomed in my view and was aware with a stunning abruptness that these shapes were numbers, although unlike any digits or numerical glyphs I had ever seen. IT WAS INFORMATION. Flitting by at speeds unimaginable in luminescent quantities inconceivable, yet somehow I was witnessing it. The bands and waves of light in this flow, its atoms, its photons, were numbers, the totality of which was – Reality?
THE DaTa STREAM.The phrase had occurred to me earlier, but only now did I understand its meaning.
I felt as though I was witnessing the code of creation, of existence, consciousness – the fundamental pieces of the construct we call reality: the construction through code-light of TIME.
The DATE AWE-STREAM. The DATE AS DREAM. Time as illusion. Light as illusion. Time is the illusion of Light. And Light, as we perceive it, may be only the illusion of Time. Light created by Time. And Time created by Light… The fundamental paradox at the base of it all, at the beginning middle and end and centre and totality of the DATA STREAM. A stream of Light. And a stream of Time.
The DATE AS STREAM.This struck me as one of the most profound realizations, one of the deepest and most lucid awakenings, I had ever witnessed in myself. Tears of humbled jubilation etched my cheeks and dripped to the floor. THIS WAS AWE. I have seen perfection in a handful of dust, infinity in the flat even surface of a mottled ceiling, creation in a stream, eternity in the mind that perceives…
A voice next to me intruded: “are you OK?”. It was S. Still lying on the ground next to her I tilted my head and I think I said “yes” as I smiled, but I don’t remember speaking.
She said, with a tone of lament, “I wanted to tell you something, but now I can’t remember…”
I waited a moment, perhaps many many moments, before I was able to respond.
“You said, “remember to tell me it smells like fall.” She smiled with the glee of recognition, and I felt a connection to her. We had communicated from beyond.
Strangely, the meaning of this statement seemed twofold to me. She meant autumn – the smell of leaves and earthy fungus and cold wood - but now I see that the meaning was also a reminder of the Fall, of the loss of innocence, of the gaining of difficult and game-changing wisdom. The leaves had fallen.
WE HAD FALLEN. Never shall I return to the playground, for I must set aside childish things, and move right along falling.
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THE AFTERMATHI slept a three hour slumber that felt, upon rising, like a twelve hour night of deep Z’s. I was half awaiting the feared serotonin crash, but went about my morning, breakfasting and conversing with the thick smile of the blissfully ignorant.
Only one negative thought intruded that would stay with me through the days ahead: guilt. I have always tripped with a degree of duress, or the hanging risk of the mindfuck. The sense during the experience that no matter how positive, how ecstatic it gets, there is a mirror image that is waiting to be fallen into, an accompanying counterpoint of despair, disaster, destruction. Heaven and hell. The toll, the price that must be paid, the dues that must be rendered.
But not a glimmer of THAT with THIS. No edge, no loitering fear, no corner to go around to stare your darker side down. It may be my catholic upbringing, but I have a hard time imagining that you can get summin-fer-nuffin, edification without suffering, a glimpse of the eternal without the pain of realizing your own mortality… so I am left with this question:
If there is no price to be paid, no suffering to endure, is it a valid spiritual experience?
And in the absence of an answer, my catholic 10 year old self, always at my side, fills in the blank with: GUILT. Because I really do not know the answer. I am of the hard-knock school that you learn only from your mistakes, from hardship, that growth comes only from painful pruning and transplanting… So, while the guilt persists, I wait for the shoe to drop… (yes, I know – plants, hard-knocks, shoes – bad writing; but I also know that mixing a million metaphors is sometimes the only way you can arrive at a decent, understandable description of these states/questions – so MIX AWAY I SAY!)
Then, 2 days later, my left lip numbs. It spreads to my gums, then my cheeks and follows my jawline to my ear and up to the temple.
MY FACE IS NUMBED.
I think, “Ketamine IS an anesthetic, after all”, but realize that anesthetics do not have built-in delay mechanisms. I am alarmed and perhaps a little worried, but surprisingly not as much as I should probably be. I seek advice on the Nexus, and Corpus Collosum reassures me with a likely reason and a detailed description of what was going on with the nerves buried in my face. His explanation notwithstanding, I cannot help think that maybe my twisted catholic-stewed mind has invented its own fee, albeit psychosomatic, to levy for the experience of nights recently past: If life does not torture, we shall invent our own!!
It lasted a few days, then dissipated over another few; a little worrisome, but at the end of the day, a small price, if price it were, to pay from such a night of phantasmagoria, revelations and newly forged friendships. The sum of the experience is another perspective, new avenues to access these places within, to get to the ROOT: a knowledge that not only are things not as they seem, but that they are not as they seem from many, many alternative/altered perspectives. The SHIFT, the fifth dimensional hypotenuse, the DaTa STREAM…
The carpenter has replenished his box with new tools - one more instrument for the lucid hardware.
+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=
ADDENDUMAbout a month and a half later, and about a month and a half ago now, some of the same gang got together with a few missing and a few added. We indulged the same menu, but markedly less Ketamine. This time, S, who had previously abstained, decided to try some K. After about an hour, I saw the DaTa STREAM filling the doorway to the illuminated kitchen. I asked her if she could see it, and after a long concentrated hesitation staring at the doorway, she simply said, “WOW”. Then, with no prompting from me, she went on to describe it much as I have above, but including a detail that was novel this time around, and that I was experiencing but had not described to her: beyond the shimmering golden luminescent curtain of undulating data ripples, the kitchen was OUT OF FOCUS. This was not a question of real world optics – we were lying 15 feet from the door, so any local depth of field issues can be discounted. When I focused on the kitchen, the DaTa STREAM did not disappear, but rather softened, like I was pulling focus beyond it. And when my attention was drawn to the STREAM, the kitchen went soft…
I believe I recall she experienced all these same optical anomalies, but I cannot remember for certain. Shayku, lying next to us, could not see the STREAM at all for some reason. I wonder if it has to do with a subtle balance of the substances that S and I achieved independently and accidentally. Very strange to have a vision corroborated like that, particularly one upon which I have laid so much meaning and importance. Her seeing the DaTa STREAM and relating it to me while I was experiencing it also was at least as powerful as the mere fact of seeing it; it took on a new reality and a new meaning when I was no longer alone in its perception.
Long may it flow, the DaTa STREAM!*********************************
Thanks for reading right to the bitter end!! what a night!
Cheers,
JBArk
PS all names have been changed to protect the guilty
JBArk is a Mandelthought; a non-fiction character in a drama of his own design he calls "LIFE" who partakes in consciousness expanding activities and substances; he should in no way be confused with SWIM, who is an eminently data-mineable and prolific character who has somehow convinced himself the target he wears on his forehead is actually a shield.