Nowadays we are not used to thinking of nationalism as being "on the left," but once upon a time that was the case. Not too long ago, there was a vibrant black nationalism on the left (whereas nowadays it is either non-existent or, as with the New Black Panther Party, taken over by reactionary, non-universalist Muslims). I just wrote a blog post about how the Hippie movement could have manifested itself—and in my mind much more successfully so—as a left nationalist movement. There used to be a secular Arab nationalism on the left in the Arab world. There used to be leftist national liberation movements all throughout the 3rd world. Nowadays we only have Cuba, Venezuela, and Bolivia as the only real outposts of left nationalism remaining (and maybe Uganda and some other countries that don't really show up on our political radar screen).
The mother of all left-nationalisms, though, was once upon a time the French Revolution. The proponents of the French Revolution envisioned the French nation, not as what we would call today a right-wing *ethnic* nation, but as a (what we would call left-wing) universalist *civic* nation that would act as a vehicle for the universalism of the French Revolution (and so, to defend the French nation from the emigré plots and from the alliances of reactionary monarchs was to defend the French Revolution. Think of it as "Bourgeois Liberalism in one Country." Stalin would have understood).
That is, from its very beginning, the French nation was foremost envisioned as a social contract between individuals, and second (or not at all) as a primordial collection of ethnically "French" people (à la German nationalism) that should band together not because of political interest, but because of some shared primordial ethnic destiny.
In contemporary France there is, in fact, an official debate being held over how exactly to define the French nation.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/nov/08/france-national-identity-debate-race
Many French on the left view this "debate" as an attempt to redefine French nationalism from being a "nation civique" (that would universally welcome any immigrants who shared the républicain vision) to being a "nation ethnique" (that would not be as welcoming to immigrants, and that would try to (quite ridiculously) redefine the French as the descendants of the Gaulois, as the descendants of those who built Notre Dame—in short, as the French-speaking descendants of anyone who didn't arrive in France within, oh, let's conveniently say, the last 60 years.
The reason why this debate seems so ridiculous to me is that there really didn't exist a French "nation" as recently as 1789. There was, instead, a political entity (that happened to be called "France") being ruled by a monarchical dynasty that happened to contain within it many different nations, but that happened to later come (mostly) under the control of a new political system that transformed all of these different nations into one "French" nation. In a way, a civic nationalism would have been the only nationalism that would have made sense in 1789. Ethnically, in France there were people who spoke Alsatian, Breton, Basque, Gascon, Occitan, Provençal, le Français national (basically the Parisian dialect), etc. The culture of southern France and Northern France was very different. Some regions had had totally different levels of limited self-government before 1789. Some parts of "France" had only been recently acquired (Alsace) and were widely considered to be hardly ethnically French at all as late as 1939.
Rather, the ethnic French nation that nowadays co-exists in a subordinate role to the civic French nation came about precisely thanks to that civic nationalism—the levée en masse, the national education system founded in large part in order to spread republicanism to the whole population of France, etc.
Even with the partial consolidation of the ethnic French nation, though, there still remains a vibrant love of French "provincialism." In France nowadays most people would see no contradiction between celebrating provincial specificities (cheeses, wines, quirks of manner, quirks of speech, etc.) and being a French nationalist, precisely because the French nation is foremost a civic one that does not rely on ethnic commonality in order to define itself.
This is precisely how I envision my "nation of a thousand flags" project—that is, the advent of a nationalism (and I hope eventually a new corresponding nation) that not just tolerates, but simultaneously celebrates and draws inspiration from hip-hop, salsa, mariachi bands, Norse pagan heavy metal, Buddhist chanting, and what have you. This nation would be able to do this, and still stay coherent as a nation, only if it is defined as a civic (and potentially universal) nation.
Even so, France was theoretically supposed to be a "universal nation," but that didn't stop it from using its self-proclaimed universalism to justify imperialism under the banner of a "mission civilatrice." This is where we must supplement the ethnic/civic nationalism distinction with a mutually-exclusive distinction between nationalism and imperialism.
One could make the case that there is nothing contradictory between ethnic nationalism and imperialism, and while this is not quite true, one must admit that imperialism in the service of an ethnique nation has a certain logic. The ethnic nation conquers and subjugates a foreign group of people and exploits them, enriching themselves. Simple enough. But even in such a case as this, problems may arise for the ethnic nation.
We can see this in the case of Nazi German imperialism (which, one may suppose, had these same motives of plunder at heart). For example, whereas Hitler had wanted to rid Germany of foreign populations, in fact the war ended up bringing many more foreigners into the (newly-enlarged) Germany (even if the foreigners were non-citizens or industrial slaves). To a lesser extent, this has been a "problem" that Britain has recently been facing with regards to Afghanistan. It turns out that Britain's participation in the war there has helped to drive many Afghanis out of Afghanistan, and some of them have ended up in Britain, angering British nativists.
In the case of the U.S., we can see how imperialism can actually work antithetical to nationalism by looking at the U.S. military. This military is now a thoroughly non-national institution. It icharacterized by imperial ambition, bureaucracy, professionalism, careerism, and mercenary enticements, rather than the (ethnic or civic) nation patriotically upholding its nationalism. To be sure, the U.S. military often talks about "spreading democracy," (that is, the U.S.'s civic nationalism) to other lands, and soldiers often justify their participation in the military by saying that they just wanted to "serve their country" (ethnic nationalism) or "protect the Constitution" (civic nationalism), in reality I would wager that economic/career motives are by far the strongest factors in a person's decision to join the military nowadays, perhaps in conjunction with a personal penchant for that sort of line of work. In any case, we do not find U.S. soldiers in Iraq regularly singing the American equivalent of the Marseillaise or busying themselves with spreading republican virtues and republican ideas among the Iraqi population. Instead we find mostly a bunch of fratty guys being bros with one another, havin' fun, doing their job, occasionally raping some women or massacreing some Iraqis, or perhaps being thoroughly professional, but in any case not showing any special zeal for spreading the U.S.'s civic nationalism. What we are missing is a military that approaches the task of war not in the professional, non-ideological manner in an imperial army, but in the nationalist manner of citizen's defending the country.
And what is this country that the American military defends? Is it a national territory, or an imperial one? Considering how it includes territories such as Diego Garcia, Qatar, Kuwait, and all of the rest of the U.S.'s 700+ foreign military bases, it is clearly the latter.
There is a more fundamental distinction, though, between nationalism and imperialism other than the effects that the two have on a military. There is also the question of general motivation. An empire seeks only power. It does not care about the nature of its imperial holdings. The local people can believe in this religion or that, can speak this language or that, can hold this ideology or that, the empire doesn't care. It just wants to hold the territory and recieve taxes (or, in the modern version, provide access to that territory for corporations, which in turn will uphold the empire). A nation, by contrast, is an intimate community (whether for ethnic or civic reasons). A nation cares very much about what religions members of the nation hold, or whether the members of the nation can communicate with each other, or whether the members of the nation subscribe to the nation's civic nationalism. Nationalism is, then, by its nature more totalitarian-minded than plain imperialism. I consider this a good thing. To be sure, an empire can be more invasive. It can have more secret police. It can arrest more people. But the motivation is always simply to maintain its power. It is interested in getting rid of, or intimidating, its enemies; it is not interested in winning the allegiance of its internal adversaries (for the sake of national community...that is, unless such efforts can easily profit the empire's power).
Let's look at Nazi Germany, for example. Was Nazi Germany a nation, or an empire? Well, it would depend on the timeframe. One could make the argument that, up until the spring of 1939, Nazi Germany was a nation. But after its takeover of Czechoslovakia, (after its motivation was clearly no longer the reunification, protection, and regeneration of Germans, but the acquisition of imperial power and territory) it became an empire. This was the point, in fact, when many leftists such as Simone Weil decided that Nazi Germany's territorial demands were no longer legitimate. In his "Age of Extremes," British Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm makes a comment that when he was in Germany in 1934 and saw French flags flying in the Ruhr, that even someone like him had to feel that there wasn't something quite right about that. If one reads the lyrics from the Horst-Wessel Lied, it almost sounds like Nazi Germany was a national liberation movement. "Die Knechtshaft dauert nur noch kurze Zeit," etc. Well, the point here is that, at the *very least* (i.e. perhaps much earlier), Nazi Germany ceased to be a national liberation movement, and began to be an empire, in the spring of 1939.
And likewise, the moment that France came to rule over people whom it treated as second-class citizens, rather than equal members of the French civic nation, and the moment that it ceased to be concerned with spreading its civic universalism and became focused on acquiring imperial power, that is when its rhetoric about universalism became transformed from a beacon of hope to a cynical excuse for empire. That France's imperial ambitions (under Napoleon, Louis Napoleon, under the 3rd and 4th Republics) had an adverse effect on its original civic nationalism and universalist mission is obvious.
Therefore, any civic nation with universalist pretensions would do well to stay far away from any imperial temptation. It will only corrupt or override the universalist civic nationalism.
Saturday, November 21, 2009
The Hippie Movement as a Völkisch Revival
The Hippie movement has long since been canonized in American politics as a left-wing, liberal/radical/libertarian movement, and to a certain extent that is true. But I think what made the Hippie movement so subversive, at least in its initial stages (up until 1969) was what we might call its "right-wing" element—its "völkischness." What we need more than ever in the U.S. today is an emancipatory movement that cannot be easily attacked from the right, and I think that the Hippie movement, in its initial stages, held this promise. If the Hippie movement had gone further with its völkisch element and had drawn some more concrete parallels with other historical manifestations of völkischness, then it might not have become so easy prey for the right-wing critiques along the lines of, "The Hippie movement is just a bunch of irresponsible brats who are weakening morality and society," etc.
For example, what if, instead, the initial Hippies had interpreted their movement precisely as a response to the weakening of morality and society under the capitalist consumerism of their parents' generation? What if the Hippies had said to the parent generation, "It is you who are being irresponsible, with your unhappy marriages, your unsatisfied, desperate wives escaping into painkillers, your sacrificing of real human relationships between husbands and wives for your childish, superficial status symbols that consumerist capitalism spits out at you, your abandonment of the democratic spirit of a free people in lieu of the drone-like spirit of the corporate yes-man...the Communists need not destroy your families, your sacred beliefs, or your democratic society...your cynical pursuit of the status symbols of consumerist capitalism have already accomplished this for you."
In contrast to this portrait of "Leave-it-to-Beaver-America," Hippies could have presented themselves as the responsible alternative, the alternative that would regenerate the American volk, that would regenerate human relationships and root them back into what really mattered—love, shared experiences, and satisfying work (rather than consumerism). The Hippies could have re-framed work as a satisfying communal experience to be accomplished among equals (instead of simply shunning work and "dropping out" and becoming consumers). The Hippies could have appeared as a force possessing more wisdom than the previous generation, as well as a freer, more democratic spirit befitting the United States of America.
In fact, I say, "The Hippies could have done all of this," but the fact is that some initial Hippies *were* doing all of this. What else was signified by the peasant dresses, the talk of "love," the "going back to the land" projects, in which people would theoretically make a living in order to live real human lives (sharing love and meaningful experiences and heartfelt beliefs) rather than work in order to buy pathetic status symbols.
Where it all went wrong, of course, is that the Hippie movement was hijacked by the same consumerist capitalism that it should have been more precisely targeting in the first place. Capitalist consumerism did not need productive workers, it just needed trendy consumers, so it suited capitalist consumerism just fine if the Hippie movement became a vapid, irresponsible movement of trendy consumers spending their middle-class parents' money on stupid status symbols of coolness and supposed "rebellion."
Is it crazy to think that a little bit of anti-capitalism from the right, and perhaps even a little bit more Spartan militarism, could have helped to save the Hippie movement from this awful fate? To be sure, the message would remain that of "love of friends," but it would also include "struggle with enemies," and would transform "love" from a passive emotion to a meaningful and deliberate conveyance towards other comradely human beings.
For example, what if, instead, the initial Hippies had interpreted their movement precisely as a response to the weakening of morality and society under the capitalist consumerism of their parents' generation? What if the Hippies had said to the parent generation, "It is you who are being irresponsible, with your unhappy marriages, your unsatisfied, desperate wives escaping into painkillers, your sacrificing of real human relationships between husbands and wives for your childish, superficial status symbols that consumerist capitalism spits out at you, your abandonment of the democratic spirit of a free people in lieu of the drone-like spirit of the corporate yes-man...the Communists need not destroy your families, your sacred beliefs, or your democratic society...your cynical pursuit of the status symbols of consumerist capitalism have already accomplished this for you."
In contrast to this portrait of "Leave-it-to-Beaver-America," Hippies could have presented themselves as the responsible alternative, the alternative that would regenerate the American volk, that would regenerate human relationships and root them back into what really mattered—love, shared experiences, and satisfying work (rather than consumerism). The Hippies could have re-framed work as a satisfying communal experience to be accomplished among equals (instead of simply shunning work and "dropping out" and becoming consumers). The Hippies could have appeared as a force possessing more wisdom than the previous generation, as well as a freer, more democratic spirit befitting the United States of America.
In fact, I say, "The Hippies could have done all of this," but the fact is that some initial Hippies *were* doing all of this. What else was signified by the peasant dresses, the talk of "love," the "going back to the land" projects, in which people would theoretically make a living in order to live real human lives (sharing love and meaningful experiences and heartfelt beliefs) rather than work in order to buy pathetic status symbols.
Where it all went wrong, of course, is that the Hippie movement was hijacked by the same consumerist capitalism that it should have been more precisely targeting in the first place. Capitalist consumerism did not need productive workers, it just needed trendy consumers, so it suited capitalist consumerism just fine if the Hippie movement became a vapid, irresponsible movement of trendy consumers spending their middle-class parents' money on stupid status symbols of coolness and supposed "rebellion."
Is it crazy to think that a little bit of anti-capitalism from the right, and perhaps even a little bit more Spartan militarism, could have helped to save the Hippie movement from this awful fate? To be sure, the message would remain that of "love of friends," but it would also include "struggle with enemies," and would transform "love" from a passive emotion to a meaningful and deliberate conveyance towards other comradely human beings.
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
More thoughts on a new Left-Nationalism
Someone posted this video on the cabot-open list the other day:
======
This is a must watch.
Get inspired.
That is all.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wVoaMlzvGIw&feature=response_watch
======
And this was my response:
Yep, it sure is great when they get 'em young...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FMoxZeTeRPE
I understand that we are all secretly yearning for a new universalism to bring humanity together out of its anomie and self-slaughter, but it makes my stomach convulse and my heart ache to see the oppressed minorities who have the most reason to resist opt for strands of religious universalism. Being all equal brethren under our common paternalistic authority, the Lord, does not interest me. I have not known self-proclaimed benevolent paternalism to ever be actually benevolent or fitting for adults (or children) who want to retain their dignity to follow.
Where is secular universalism in the Arab world nowadays? Secular Arab nationalism, secular Arab anti-imperialist and human rights groups? Likewise, where is secular Black nationalism in the U.S. today? Where can I find blacks, and whites, coming together on a platform of secular universalism...and, mind you, I'm talking about something much more substantial than the liberal universalism of Obama that guarantees that we all have the equal right to not have ourselves or our property to be bothered. Okay, sure, but is that all that we want politics to do?
Am I the only one in the U.S. that is yearning for the politics of the U.S. to be MORE totalitarian (in other words, to have politics invade MORE of our lives and do more to imbue our lives with more meaning)? Am I crazy in wanting that? I speak, of course, about not an authoritarian totalitarianism, but a democratic totalitarianism (sort of like the French Revolution on steroids), a democratic total-Weltanshauung (world outlook) to replace, equally, not only what I find to inherently be the hierarchical total-Weltanshauung of religion, but also the incomplete, petty, fussy, pathetic excuse for an inspiring Weltanschauung that is bourgeois liberalism. I want a politics that will imbue our lives with extremes of emotion and meaning...but I don't want a theocracy (which would, as it happens, accomplish those goals perfectly well).
It has always been accepted that religion is allowed to imbue our lives with meaning, but to turn to politics for that has always been seen as totalitarian and out of the proper scope of politics. According to classical liberalism, the proper scope of politics is confined to guaranteeing certain negative liberties (freedom from being harmed, etc.), which might make abstract sense, but applying only negative liberties, in practice, leads in practice to a skeleton of a society: fair, equal, just, but alienated, frustrated, pointless, uninspiring, depressing, etc. What about politics that don't just stand against something negatively (standing against infringement on property, liberty, etc.), but that also positively compel people to achieve certain accomplishments of meaning and greatness and excitement in their lives? This is the same lament that one hears from religious authorities about the problems of post-modern society, and I very much feel what they are saying and concur with them on this point. But I find THEIR solution intolerable. I am driven to desperately search for something else. But so far I have not found it, and I fear that I am the only one looking in this direction.
So far, the closest I have come to fleshing out these vague impulses that I feel has been to juxtapose something like this:
H. Rap Brown of the Black Panthers
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FMoxZeTeRPE
And something like this...
Laibach: Geburt einer Nation
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1YE_j0xIsJA
Laibach: Life is Life
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JbB1s7TZUQk
...and insist that they can be organically and harmoniously fused, and that they are two sides of the same coin, of a similar current of feeling running throughout all of humanity. Just as Joseph Campbell has written about the common threads of the religions of the world, and how one can come to not just a passive common appreciation of all of them, but an active fusion of their best elements, and just how he wrote similarly about mythological archetypes in "Hero of a Thousand Faces," likewise I would like to construct a "Nation of a thousand flags." Not just passive "tolerance" of national "diversity," but a forceful integration of all of the most extreme, exciting, compelling, and meaning-imbueing aspects of the world's nationalisms. There was once upon a time when nationalism was on the left, not on the right. (The French Revolution, many third-world independence movements, black nationalism, etc.) Oh how I long to forge a new left-nationalism. The result would be a stark contrast with what I see as bourgeois society:
Laibach: Wirtschaft ist tot (The Economy is dead)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJGujbkUaCs
Sterile. Obtaining better "quality of life" and better "purchasing power" (Qualität des Lebens & großen Angebote (literally, "bargains")) at the expense of putting ourselves through the process of bourgeois domestication. Substituting a set of cruelly self-regimented accountant's indulgences for the wild and free indulgencies of organic life. Substituting the bleak and cold stoicism and strength of steel and obedient factory workers for the fiery, impassioned, yet resolute organic stoicism and strength of the "Life is Life" video, or of these videos:
Die Liebe ist die größte Kraft. Die alles schaft. ("Love is the greatest force. It can accomplish anything).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y9va2Le-9ZU
Dead Prez - Way of Life
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_kEirYlSlgM
Despite the superficial difference in the "ethnic" wellsprings of these videos, I consider them to represent the same human longing for a free, indulgent, expansive, yet self-disciplined, strong, and meaningful organicism...and I could not think of a starker contrast to this organicism than the sterility and the guilty, suffocating self-loathing of the organic pleasures of worldly life that most religions maintain.
Long story short, I guess that's why my heart aches when I watch your video.
---Matthew
==========
One further thought:
Although it might seem at first like bourgeois society and religion are in an adversarial relationship, as it happens it seems to me like they are accidental (and unwilling) co-conspirators. Bourgeois society can't help but continue to have certain shortcomings that leave something to be desired from life (lack of meaning, etc.), and this constant source of problems is a boon for religion, as it gives religion a purpose and gives people a continued reason to flock to it. Then, with people going to religion as a compensation, people are contented, and bourgeois life is given no imperative to fundamentally change or revolutionize/transcend itself. So the two systems, even though they are oriented in opposite directions, end up enabling one another. This sly game has been going on for far too long for my taste. Though we may find escapism from bourgeois life's problems in religion, in the end I find it just as dissatisfying as escapism from bourgeois life via drugs or video games. Life still fundamentally feels empty. No, only an abolition/transcendence of bourgeois life towards some higher secular mission will save my heart and body from withering into dust.
======
This is a must watch.
Get inspired.
That is all.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?
======
And this was my response:
Yep, it sure is great when they get 'em young...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?
I understand that we are all secretly yearning for a new universalism to bring humanity together out of its anomie and self-slaughter, but it makes my stomach convulse and my heart ache to see the oppressed minorities who have the most reason to resist opt for strands of religious universalism. Being all equal brethren under our common paternalistic authority, the Lord, does not interest me. I have not known self-proclaimed benevolent paternalism to ever be actually benevolent or fitting for adults (or children) who want to retain their dignity to follow.
Where is secular universalism in the Arab world nowadays? Secular Arab nationalism, secular Arab anti-imperialist and human rights groups? Likewise, where is secular Black nationalism in the U.S. today? Where can I find blacks, and whites, coming together on a platform of secular universalism...and, mind you, I'm talking about something much more substantial than the liberal universalism of Obama that guarantees that we all have the equal right to not have ourselves or our property to be bothered. Okay, sure, but is that all that we want politics to do?
Am I the only one in the U.S. that is yearning for the politics of the U.S. to be MORE totalitarian (in other words, to have politics invade MORE of our lives and do more to imbue our lives with more meaning)? Am I crazy in wanting that? I speak, of course, about not an authoritarian totalitarianism, but a democratic totalitarianism (sort of like the French Revolution on steroids), a democratic total-Weltanshauung (world outlook) to replace, equally, not only what I find to inherently be the hierarchical total-Weltanshauung of religion, but also the incomplete, petty, fussy, pathetic excuse for an inspiring Weltanschauung that is bourgeois liberalism. I want a politics that will imbue our lives with extremes of emotion and meaning...but I don't want a theocracy (which would, as it happens, accomplish those goals perfectly well).
It has always been accepted that religion is allowed to imbue our lives with meaning, but to turn to politics for that has always been seen as totalitarian and out of the proper scope of politics. According to classical liberalism, the proper scope of politics is confined to guaranteeing certain negative liberties (freedom from being harmed, etc.), which might make abstract sense, but applying only negative liberties, in practice, leads in practice to a skeleton of a society: fair, equal, just, but alienated, frustrated, pointless, uninspiring, depressing, etc. What about politics that don't just stand against something negatively (standing against infringement on property, liberty, etc.), but that also positively compel people to achieve certain accomplishments of meaning and greatness and excitement in their lives? This is the same lament that one hears from religious authorities about the problems of post-modern society, and I very much feel what they are saying and concur with them on this point. But I find THEIR solution intolerable. I am driven to desperately search for something else. But so far I have not found it, and I fear that I am the only one looking in this direction.
So far, the closest I have come to fleshing out these vague impulses that I feel has been to juxtapose something like this:
H. Rap Brown of the Black Panthers
http://www.youtube.com/watch?
And something like this...
Laibach: Geburt einer Nation
http://www.youtube.com/watch?
Laibach: Life is Life
http://www.youtube.com/watch?
...and insist that they can be organically and harmoniously fused, and that they are two sides of the same coin, of a similar current of feeling running throughout all of humanity. Just as Joseph Campbell has written about the common threads of the religions of the world, and how one can come to not just a passive common appreciation of all of them, but an active fusion of their best elements, and just how he wrote similarly about mythological archetypes in "Hero of a Thousand Faces," likewise I would like to construct a "Nation of a thousand flags." Not just passive "tolerance" of national "diversity," but a forceful integration of all of the most extreme, exciting, compelling, and meaning-imbueing aspects of the world's nationalisms. There was once upon a time when nationalism was on the left, not on the right. (The French Revolution, many third-world independence movements, black nationalism, etc.) Oh how I long to forge a new left-nationalism. The result would be a stark contrast with what I see as bourgeois society:
Laibach: Wirtschaft ist tot (The Economy is dead)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?
Sterile. Obtaining better "quality of life" and better "purchasing power" (Qualität des Lebens & großen Angebote (literally, "bargains")) at the expense of putting ourselves through the process of bourgeois domestication. Substituting a set of cruelly self-regimented accountant's indulgences for the wild and free indulgencies of organic life. Substituting the bleak and cold stoicism and strength of steel and obedient factory workers for the fiery, impassioned, yet resolute organic stoicism and strength of the "Life is Life" video, or of these videos:
Die Liebe ist die größte Kraft. Die alles schaft. ("Love is the greatest force. It can accomplish anything).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?
Dead Prez - Way of Life
http://www.youtube.com/watch?
Despite the superficial difference in the "ethnic" wellsprings of these videos, I consider them to represent the same human longing for a free, indulgent, expansive, yet self-disciplined, strong, and meaningful organicism...and I could not think of a starker contrast to this organicism than the sterility and the guilty, suffocating self-loathing of the organic pleasures of worldly life that most religions maintain.
Long story short, I guess that's why my heart aches when I watch your video.
---Matthew
==========
One further thought:
Although it might seem at first like bourgeois society and religion are in an adversarial relationship, as it happens it seems to me like they are accidental (and unwilling) co-conspirators. Bourgeois society can't help but continue to have certain shortcomings that leave something to be desired from life (lack of meaning, etc.), and this constant source of problems is a boon for religion, as it gives religion a purpose and gives people a continued reason to flock to it. Then, with people going to religion as a compensation, people are contented, and bourgeois life is given no imperative to fundamentally change or revolutionize/transcend itself. So the two systems, even though they are oriented in opposite directions, end up enabling one another. This sly game has been going on for far too long for my taste. Though we may find escapism from bourgeois life's problems in religion, in the end I find it just as dissatisfying as escapism from bourgeois life via drugs or video games. Life still fundamentally feels empty. No, only an abolition/transcendence of bourgeois life towards some higher secular mission will save my heart and body from withering into dust.
Tuesday, October 6, 2009
College as a mental Stahlgewitter
Triumph of the Will
I am a coffee-drinking
paper-spewing
zombie-eyed machine.
I am a crazy-thinking
problem-hewing
Übermenschen dream.
So what if not-so-humble
will I tumble
from this haughty seat?
Awesome will be the rumble
when I crumble
and my maker meet.
What seems a failed endeavor
is forever
transformed into strength.
Unfazed & hardened lever
am I ever
infinite in length.
Caffeine & ego striving,
power-driving,
master at the helm:
U-58 Matthew Opitz,
combat diving,
foes I overwhelm.
Torpedoes primed & ready
sights are steady,
locked onto the kill—
What joy in regimental
extreme mental
Triumph of the Will!
I am a coffee-drinking
paper-spewing
zombie-eyed machine.
I am a crazy-thinking
problem-hewing
Übermenschen dream.
So what if not-so-humble
will I tumble
from this haughty seat?
Awesome will be the rumble
when I crumble
and my maker meet.
What seems a failed endeavor
is forever
transformed into strength.
Unfazed & hardened lever
am I ever
infinite in length.
Caffeine & ego striving,
power-driving,
master at the helm:
U-58 Matthew Opitz,
combat diving,
foes I overwhelm.
Torpedoes primed & ready
sights are steady,
locked onto the kill—
What joy in regimental
extreme mental
Triumph of the Will!
Wednesday, September 23, 2009
The principles of the mechanics of Salvia spacetime
Salvia Experience #3
Dose: 1 halfway lungful of Salvia 15x standardized (I didn't get it hot enough to get the full effect because the wind kept on putting the flame out on my lighter).
As I get ready to light the Salvia, I have two friends sitting on my left in comfortable wooden lawn chairs. Ahead of me and across to my right is a vista of college dorm buildings (off about a hundred feet away), with the windows of many a room sparkling light out into the night.
I am sitting "Indian-style" on the grass with my shoes and glasses off. There is a cool breeze in the pleasant September evening air.
As I light the Salvia, a gust of wind comes along, and I have a hard time keeping a flame on the Salvia. I finally get a little bit of it hot enough and suck it in and hold it for 20 seconds. It probably wasn't a full hit, though.
About 10 seconds after exhaling, I noticed that familiar effect of my vision beginning to double. Points of light seem to drift apart, or sort of, I guess, like many others describe the effect, "vibrate."
Then I feel a familiar "logarhythmic narrowing of awareness," as I've now come to think of it. I'll sketch out a general scheme of this, and then point out how far I got this time on this logarhythmic scale of awareness.
I also want to point out that, as I was experiencing the effects of this scale during this last time, there seemed to be nothing necessarily profound about it. In fact, its impression on me was so straightforward and seemingly without ambiguity, that it was almost appalling, as if I were to say to myself, "This is IT??? This is the secret to Salvia spacetime, that these tufts of grass and all other physical things are correlated with these proportional square-meter time-slice sandwiches??? This is too simple!!!" In fact, I think I did say similar things to my friend during the experience. So, the point is, even if the subsequent passages seemed profound or complicated or otherworldly or whatnot, in fact that was not at all how I experienced it. As I experienced it, it all was appallingly intuitive and almost prosaic, as if I didn't have to think about it at all, but could just look at the grass and self-evidently see that our awareness of physical dimensions scales proportionally to the size of the time-slice sandwich moments that we work with in order to process time and experience it.
The first scale, at 1 meter, would be the awareness one has of the world in one's ordinary, baseline state. That certain level of capabilities for thinking of things not immediately present, for thinking of things in the past and future, and for thinking in abstractions (like, thinking in terms of concepts like, "homogeneous," "liberalism," "nutrition," etc.) that one ordinarily has.
I say that this level of awareness coincides with "1 meter" because there really is a ridiculously simple physical correspondence, when I am on Salvia, between the scale of one's visual field of view/sense of one's self in terms of physical dimensions, and the scale of awareness and abstract capabilities (how general and broad you can think in terms of).
Time also has a very strict, almost mechanical correspondance with the aforementioned scales. At the normal 1 meter scale, 1 subjectively-experienced second = 1 second.
At the 0.1 meter level, one's sense of awareness zooms down into the individual moment. Not only does one feel about 1/10th the size as previously, but one can also only think about 1/10th as broadly as before. Concepts like "world peace," "liberalism," "the carbon cycle," etc. recede into an unreachable higher dimension). One's awareness is confined to that invdividual moment, and what is immediately present around one's self.
Sometimes this moment can become symbolized by some physical object. For me during this last time, the moment became symbolized by a sort of yellow Las Vegas neon sign, shaped only into the letter "A." It was not so much a neon sign, as it was a wire frame of the letter A, about literally 10 cm wide at the base, sitting there on the grass, and glowing yellow. When I say, "right there on the grass," I don't mean to say that I "saw" the letter sitting there. Rather, this idea of the letter made its presence known to me right there physically on the grass, through a sort of 6th sense for sensing physical objects without seeing them, but instead feeling them (but not feeling from contact with them, but *feeling* the light coming off of it with physical force on my body, rather than just seeing the light). It was glowing eagerly and in somewhat amusingly sleazy pawn-shop-type of fashion. Perhaps its sleazy self-promotion was an apt metaphor for the culture of self-promotion here at Harvard, which may have occurred to me as I sat and looked at the dorm buildings with their sparklingly lighted windows, indicating students hard at work on the inside, polishing their careers and their marketable image.
Like I said, this "letter A" arrested my attention onto it such that in no way did I have the sense that I might have been imagining it or that I could have ignored its presence. It was, as far as I can tell, an unbidden returning idea from my last Salvia trip, and it simply ordered my attention onto itself, come hell or high water).
Concomitant with this zooming in of awareness is a shrinking of the passage of time. At the 0.1 meter level, 1 subjectively-experienced second lasts only 0.1 seconds in the "real world." So one must pass through about 10 seconds to pass through 1 second in the real world. This, however, is only an approximation because how much time one gets through and how soon one is able to zoom out into the broader 1 meter level of awareness depends upon how soon one is able to grasp the totality of essential detail at the 0.1 meter level. And while one is looking at a smaller objective area, one also sees the detail of this area magnified by 10 times. So there is just as much "going on" at this level as at previous levels, and just as much subjective time at one's disposal to investigate what's going on.
You can see how neatly the time and distance scale together. At the 1 meter level, if one's investigation of reality can be symbolized by a strip of grass, then in 1 subjective-second of reality (1 second in the outside world), one might be able to investigate the essential details of 1 subjective-meter (1 objective meter) of the strip of grass.
At 0.1 meters: in 1 subjective-second of reality (0.1 seconds in the outside world), one might be able to investigate the essential details of 1 subjective-meter (0.1 objective meters) of the strip of grass. Hence, in 10 subjective seconds (1 second), one could investigate the essential details of 10 subjective-meters (1 objective meter). The same real-world time/area ratio as when one is normal. It just seems to take longer when one is on Salvia, and one gets to analyze that 1 meter strip of grass in more detail. Unfortunately, this intensified investigation of reality can only be used in conjunction with progressively narrower levels of awareness. It would be nice if one could analyze the concepts of "liberalism," or "photosynthesis" or whatnot with this intensified subjective duration and level of detail, but the more you intensify the level of detail and shrink the passage of time, the narrower the realm of awareness that one can access, by mechanical necessity, as it were. There seems to be a constant "rate" of experience that humans can access. If we could step outwards from our usual selves, where 1 subjective meter = 10 meters, where we are larger entities and looking out over the world with a broader perspective (and even greater ability for abstraction), by necessity we would only have 1/10th of the time to analyze things, and the details that we would be able to investigate would only be 1/10th as fine-grained.
At the 0.01 meter level, one's sense of awareness zooms down to the level of an ant crawling along the wire frame of the letter A. (The object could be different in each case, but the level of scale, I think, is consistent). Time effectively passes yet another 10 times more slowly, and one can notice 10 times the amount of detail on the wire frame (while losing awareness of the lawn and only being vaguely aware that this wire frame that one is investigating is part of a larger letter "A.") The sense of revelation that I often get from Salvia stems from me investigating, for example, this wire-frame level in enough of its essential details that I suddenly notice that its curves and twists form a larger letter "A." Suddenly I zoom out in quite literal physical terms, and my awareness likewise zooms out. I can then analyze the letter "A" and its immediate environs, and after a moment I'll discover that the letter "A" is just symbolizing one moment in a larger world that also includes much larger, broader things like college dorm buildings, lawns, world peace, liberalism, and other larger physical objects and abstract concepts. This is the experience I often get when coming down from the peak of Salvia. Whereas going up to the peak is like zooming in and in into a fractal, coming down from the peak is like zooming out and suddenly becoming aware of broader (but less detailed) levels of awareness. The physical substances/symbolisms can change (a letter "A," a "wheel," etc.), but the scale and traversing of this logarhythmic scale (and the resulting revelations upon zooming out to each next logarhythmic level) remain the same.
I found some fractal videos on youtube that sort of show what it's like. But it doesn't happen in the context of a made-up landscape of pretty colors, but rather with usually very ordinary and laughably prosaic objects, the idea for which one senses or appropriates from one's environment. And the effect of the zooming in and out does not apply to the visual sense alone, as in these videos, but rather to one's order of magnitude of conceptual awareness (breadth and detail being in inverse proportion):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuyRCfhCZT0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tRdLD6vh3g
Another good example would be the tidal pool stage of Spore:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGHi0RqhOno
Whenever you eat food and grow bigger, and the camera zooms out, and the really big squid that seemed vague and murky in the background suddenly comes into your level of detail and awareness, that's what coming down off of Salvia is like, I guess.
What might a 0.001 meter level be like? I don't know, maybe a flea crawling around on the ant that's crawling around on the wire frame letter "A." At this level, you'd effectively be forced to spend 1000 times the amount of time to study stuff in 1000 times as much detail as normally. You would not be aware of the larger world, the letter "A," or even the texture and curves of the wire frame that made up the letter "A." One would only be aware of the geography of the ant that one was crawling around on.
One could easily imagine further levels. Being a bacterium on the flea. Being a molecule in the bacterium. Being an electron orbiting in a molecule. Imagine having to sepnd 1 million subjective seconds (just 1 second in the outside world) figuring out that this molecule of which one is aware is part of a larger assemblage of molecules in an organism. And imagine spending 100,000 subjective seconds at this level (1 second in real life) in order to figure out that this organism is feeding off a larger organism. And so on. One can see how mentally exhausting it could become, the constant revelations, the farther in you go. The real question is, is there a limit to how deep and narrow one's awareness can plunge???
Anyways, in terms of this night's experience, I didn't even make it fully down to the level of the letter "A." I was still aware of the letter "A" within the larger context of the lawn and the college dorm buildings and such. In a way, I think it was worthwhile to have a less powerful trip this time in order to not get so wrapped up in these deeper layers, so that I could get more of an eagle-eye view of things and verbalize it all in real time as I was witnessing it and figuring it all out (this time, I did not at any point lose my language capabilities, which shows that my awareness was still at a broad enough of a level to be aware of things like "time" and "distance" so that I could discuss them.) At one point I felt myself swooping down, or sort of getting my awareness sucked down to the level of the letter "A," but before I got there I gently drifted back up, and it was then that I knew for sure that I had just past the peak and that I could feel some relief that the experience was not going to be too intense this time.
Compare to: the last time, where I really did, at one point, get down to that ant-on-a-wire-frame level (although last time the objects were a smiling sun and a big 50ft. tall wall/box (or at least it momentarily seemed 50ft. tall, for the reasons I've just explained).
Now that I have some understanding of the general mechanics of my own Salvia trips, I do not have quite as much trepidation about doing it again. I just know that I have to be prepared for spending a million mental seconds investigating essential details of the universe at a much lower level of awareness (because, like I said, I get the (somewhat alarming) feeling when I am locked into the drug that zooming out back to the broader levels of awareness is contingent not just on the passive passage of time, but on me actively using that (dilated) time in order to *discover* each level's situatedness within a larger level, so that, for example, if I didn't bother to analyze whether the wire frame might be part of something bigger like a letter, I might never regain awareness of the wider world beyond that wire frame!)
When I do it next time, I'll also need to be prepared for possibly multiple revelations, depending on how far I go in and how many times I'll undergo that logarhythmic zooming-out as I discover how each successive layer of conceptual reality is nested within the one(s) beyond it.
I wish myself and all others goodluck in probing these deeper depths of awareness. And perhaps there is a way to break through, to achieve such a deep awareness that one senses one's self as simultaneously vanishingly miniscule/nothing, and yet the totality of all there is in the universe all at the same time, and suddenly perhaps one can gain a much braoder awareness when one punches through this threshhold. Perhaps we'll see....
Dose: 1 halfway lungful of Salvia 15x standardized (I didn't get it hot enough to get the full effect because the wind kept on putting the flame out on my lighter).
As I get ready to light the Salvia, I have two friends sitting on my left in comfortable wooden lawn chairs. Ahead of me and across to my right is a vista of college dorm buildings (off about a hundred feet away), with the windows of many a room sparkling light out into the night.
I am sitting "Indian-style" on the grass with my shoes and glasses off. There is a cool breeze in the pleasant September evening air.
As I light the Salvia, a gust of wind comes along, and I have a hard time keeping a flame on the Salvia. I finally get a little bit of it hot enough and suck it in and hold it for 20 seconds. It probably wasn't a full hit, though.
About 10 seconds after exhaling, I noticed that familiar effect of my vision beginning to double. Points of light seem to drift apart, or sort of, I guess, like many others describe the effect, "vibrate."
Then I feel a familiar "logarhythmic narrowing of awareness," as I've now come to think of it. I'll sketch out a general scheme of this, and then point out how far I got this time on this logarhythmic scale of awareness.
I also want to point out that, as I was experiencing the effects of this scale during this last time, there seemed to be nothing necessarily profound about it. In fact, its impression on me was so straightforward and seemingly without ambiguity, that it was almost appalling, as if I were to say to myself, "This is IT??? This is the secret to Salvia spacetime, that these tufts of grass and all other physical things are correlated with these proportional square-meter time-slice sandwiches??? This is too simple!!!" In fact, I think I did say similar things to my friend during the experience. So, the point is, even if the subsequent passages seemed profound or complicated or otherworldly or whatnot, in fact that was not at all how I experienced it. As I experienced it, it all was appallingly intuitive and almost prosaic, as if I didn't have to think about it at all, but could just look at the grass and self-evidently see that our awareness of physical dimensions scales proportionally to the size of the time-slice sandwich moments that we work with in order to process time and experience it.
The first scale, at 1 meter, would be the awareness one has of the world in one's ordinary, baseline state. That certain level of capabilities for thinking of things not immediately present, for thinking of things in the past and future, and for thinking in abstractions (like, thinking in terms of concepts like, "homogeneous," "liberalism," "nutrition," etc.) that one ordinarily has.
I say that this level of awareness coincides with "1 meter" because there really is a ridiculously simple physical correspondence, when I am on Salvia, between the scale of one's visual field of view/sense of one's self in terms of physical dimensions, and the scale of awareness and abstract capabilities (how general and broad you can think in terms of).
Time also has a very strict, almost mechanical correspondance with the aforementioned scales. At the normal 1 meter scale, 1 subjectively-experienced second = 1 second.
At the 0.1 meter level, one's sense of awareness zooms down into the individual moment. Not only does one feel about 1/10th the size as previously, but one can also only think about 1/10th as broadly as before. Concepts like "world peace," "liberalism," "the carbon cycle," etc. recede into an unreachable higher dimension). One's awareness is confined to that invdividual moment, and what is immediately present around one's self.
Sometimes this moment can become symbolized by some physical object. For me during this last time, the moment became symbolized by a sort of yellow Las Vegas neon sign, shaped only into the letter "A." It was not so much a neon sign, as it was a wire frame of the letter A, about literally 10 cm wide at the base, sitting there on the grass, and glowing yellow. When I say, "right there on the grass," I don't mean to say that I "saw" the letter sitting there. Rather, this idea of the letter made its presence known to me right there physically on the grass, through a sort of 6th sense for sensing physical objects without seeing them, but instead feeling them (but not feeling from contact with them, but *feeling* the light coming off of it with physical force on my body, rather than just seeing the light). It was glowing eagerly and in somewhat amusingly sleazy pawn-shop-type of fashion. Perhaps its sleazy self-promotion was an apt metaphor for the culture of self-promotion here at Harvard, which may have occurred to me as I sat and looked at the dorm buildings with their sparklingly lighted windows, indicating students hard at work on the inside, polishing their careers and their marketable image.
Like I said, this "letter A" arrested my attention onto it such that in no way did I have the sense that I might have been imagining it or that I could have ignored its presence. It was, as far as I can tell, an unbidden returning idea from my last Salvia trip, and it simply ordered my attention onto itself, come hell or high water).
Concomitant with this zooming in of awareness is a shrinking of the passage of time. At the 0.1 meter level, 1 subjectively-experienced second lasts only 0.1 seconds in the "real world." So one must pass through about 10 seconds to pass through 1 second in the real world. This, however, is only an approximation because how much time one gets through and how soon one is able to zoom out into the broader 1 meter level of awareness depends upon how soon one is able to grasp the totality of essential detail at the 0.1 meter level. And while one is looking at a smaller objective area, one also sees the detail of this area magnified by 10 times. So there is just as much "going on" at this level as at previous levels, and just as much subjective time at one's disposal to investigate what's going on.
You can see how neatly the time and distance scale together. At the 1 meter level, if one's investigation of reality can be symbolized by a strip of grass, then in 1 subjective-second of reality (1 second in the outside world), one might be able to investigate the essential details of 1 subjective-meter (1 objective meter) of the strip of grass.
At 0.1 meters: in 1 subjective-second of reality (0.1 seconds in the outside world), one might be able to investigate the essential details of 1 subjective-meter (0.1 objective meters) of the strip of grass. Hence, in 10 subjective seconds (1 second), one could investigate the essential details of 10 subjective-meters (1 objective meter). The same real-world time/area ratio as when one is normal. It just seems to take longer when one is on Salvia, and one gets to analyze that 1 meter strip of grass in more detail. Unfortunately, this intensified investigation of reality can only be used in conjunction with progressively narrower levels of awareness. It would be nice if one could analyze the concepts of "liberalism," or "photosynthesis" or whatnot with this intensified subjective duration and level of detail, but the more you intensify the level of detail and shrink the passage of time, the narrower the realm of awareness that one can access, by mechanical necessity, as it were. There seems to be a constant "rate" of experience that humans can access. If we could step outwards from our usual selves, where 1 subjective meter = 10 meters, where we are larger entities and looking out over the world with a broader perspective (and even greater ability for abstraction), by necessity we would only have 1/10th of the time to analyze things, and the details that we would be able to investigate would only be 1/10th as fine-grained.
At the 0.01 meter level, one's sense of awareness zooms down to the level of an ant crawling along the wire frame of the letter A. (The object could be different in each case, but the level of scale, I think, is consistent). Time effectively passes yet another 10 times more slowly, and one can notice 10 times the amount of detail on the wire frame (while losing awareness of the lawn and only being vaguely aware that this wire frame that one is investigating is part of a larger letter "A.") The sense of revelation that I often get from Salvia stems from me investigating, for example, this wire-frame level in enough of its essential details that I suddenly notice that its curves and twists form a larger letter "A." Suddenly I zoom out in quite literal physical terms, and my awareness likewise zooms out. I can then analyze the letter "A" and its immediate environs, and after a moment I'll discover that the letter "A" is just symbolizing one moment in a larger world that also includes much larger, broader things like college dorm buildings, lawns, world peace, liberalism, and other larger physical objects and abstract concepts. This is the experience I often get when coming down from the peak of Salvia. Whereas going up to the peak is like zooming in and in into a fractal, coming down from the peak is like zooming out and suddenly becoming aware of broader (but less detailed) levels of awareness. The physical substances/symbolisms can change (a letter "A," a "wheel," etc.), but the scale and traversing of this logarhythmic scale (and the resulting revelations upon zooming out to each next logarhythmic level) remain the same.
I found some fractal videos on youtube that sort of show what it's like. But it doesn't happen in the context of a made-up landscape of pretty colors, but rather with usually very ordinary and laughably prosaic objects, the idea for which one senses or appropriates from one's environment. And the effect of the zooming in and out does not apply to the visual sense alone, as in these videos, but rather to one's order of magnitude of conceptual awareness (breadth and detail being in inverse proportion):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuyRCfhCZT0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tRdLD6vh3g
Another good example would be the tidal pool stage of Spore:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGHi0RqhOno
Whenever you eat food and grow bigger, and the camera zooms out, and the really big squid that seemed vague and murky in the background suddenly comes into your level of detail and awareness, that's what coming down off of Salvia is like, I guess.
What might a 0.001 meter level be like? I don't know, maybe a flea crawling around on the ant that's crawling around on the wire frame letter "A." At this level, you'd effectively be forced to spend 1000 times the amount of time to study stuff in 1000 times as much detail as normally. You would not be aware of the larger world, the letter "A," or even the texture and curves of the wire frame that made up the letter "A." One would only be aware of the geography of the ant that one was crawling around on.
One could easily imagine further levels. Being a bacterium on the flea. Being a molecule in the bacterium. Being an electron orbiting in a molecule. Imagine having to sepnd 1 million subjective seconds (just 1 second in the outside world) figuring out that this molecule of which one is aware is part of a larger assemblage of molecules in an organism. And imagine spending 100,000 subjective seconds at this level (1 second in real life) in order to figure out that this organism is feeding off a larger organism. And so on. One can see how mentally exhausting it could become, the constant revelations, the farther in you go. The real question is, is there a limit to how deep and narrow one's awareness can plunge???
Anyways, in terms of this night's experience, I didn't even make it fully down to the level of the letter "A." I was still aware of the letter "A" within the larger context of the lawn and the college dorm buildings and such. In a way, I think it was worthwhile to have a less powerful trip this time in order to not get so wrapped up in these deeper layers, so that I could get more of an eagle-eye view of things and verbalize it all in real time as I was witnessing it and figuring it all out (this time, I did not at any point lose my language capabilities, which shows that my awareness was still at a broad enough of a level to be aware of things like "time" and "distance" so that I could discuss them.) At one point I felt myself swooping down, or sort of getting my awareness sucked down to the level of the letter "A," but before I got there I gently drifted back up, and it was then that I knew for sure that I had just past the peak and that I could feel some relief that the experience was not going to be too intense this time.
Compare to: the last time, where I really did, at one point, get down to that ant-on-a-wire-frame level (although last time the objects were a smiling sun and a big 50ft. tall wall/box (or at least it momentarily seemed 50ft. tall, for the reasons I've just explained).
Now that I have some understanding of the general mechanics of my own Salvia trips, I do not have quite as much trepidation about doing it again. I just know that I have to be prepared for spending a million mental seconds investigating essential details of the universe at a much lower level of awareness (because, like I said, I get the (somewhat alarming) feeling when I am locked into the drug that zooming out back to the broader levels of awareness is contingent not just on the passive passage of time, but on me actively using that (dilated) time in order to *discover* each level's situatedness within a larger level, so that, for example, if I didn't bother to analyze whether the wire frame might be part of something bigger like a letter, I might never regain awareness of the wider world beyond that wire frame!)
When I do it next time, I'll also need to be prepared for possibly multiple revelations, depending on how far I go in and how many times I'll undergo that logarhythmic zooming-out as I discover how each successive layer of conceptual reality is nested within the one(s) beyond it.
I wish myself and all others goodluck in probing these deeper depths of awareness. And perhaps there is a way to break through, to achieve such a deep awareness that one senses one's self as simultaneously vanishingly miniscule/nothing, and yet the totality of all there is in the universe all at the same time, and suddenly perhaps one can gain a much braoder awareness when one punches through this threshhold. Perhaps we'll see....
Sunday, September 20, 2009
Salvia Tron-scape
I wrote this about 20 minutes after the trip.
Dose: 1 full breath of 15x standardized.
==========
So, I'm just coming off of it right now (did it about 20 minutes ago and still feel a little of that weird woosiness). But I want to get this down as quickly as possible.
So, my friends and I were down by the river. I was sitting on a park bench, looking at the moonlight. Before I even got to exhaling the smoke, I started seeing double of the moon. Then I got a slight swirling in my head/vision, like when one wakes up drunk with a really bad hangover (but I was not nauseous). As I put the pipe down, I became very very very small. Like, 2 cm vs. my friend who was sitting next to me as like 50ft tall. At first I couldn't recognize what this big square black wall thing was (and it was outlined in yellow (perhaps from being silhouetted by passing car lights)). The wall had a cartoonish sun/yellow-brown happy face in the corner smiling at me (I have since figured out that this might have stemmed from me looking at the pipe that I was setting down (the happy-face sun), next to my friend's thighs and back (which would have formed the square wall) as he was sitting there). I could feel myself returning to a familiar physical reality, similar to the last Salvia experience, and I had a whole conversation with myself about ("Oh, this is exactly the same place as last time! Now I understand what some of these accounts on the Internet that I read are talking about, with yourself returning to your own particular special place on some subsequent occasions." I also started noticing the time-distortion, and I started saying to myself, "Whoa, man, this is gonna take a long time, good thing I don't have to take anymore...I know it's gotta wear off soon..." But my friend is telling me that I need to take another hit, and I'm thinking, "Whoa, no way, man, the time-dilation would be so bad in that case, I'd go through a whole mental lifetime, grow old, and die psychologically, before I got to come back..." Then the phone rang (in reality, about 5 seconds after I had set the pipe down--notice this whole conversation with myself and then with my friend had taken place in that span of time), and I remember feeling a fear just on the edge of myself that my arm was going to reach down against my will, open the phone, and that whoever was on the phone would convince me to do another hit, thus banishing me to this realm forever (psychologically speaking)," so I said to my friends, "Don't answer it! Just let it go! Just let it go!" Then my friends suggested that I stand up and walk around a bit. That I found not difficult at all physically, and I was finding it to be a trivial, pointless exercise, a diversion of my attention from more interesting matters. Because what I was now seeing was vast 3-d solar planar surface strobing of objects in 3 dimensions, like this:
http://thumbs.dreamstime.com/thumb_218/1197672403qluBQP.jpg
But imagine the forwards/backwards dimension stretched to infinity with a continued solid surface. These 3-d solid planar strobings to infinity were not just shooting out of one forwards/backwards plane, but would shoot out of anything that I focused my attention onto, and would sometimes overlap (the strobings from the more forefront objects would strobe back onto and cover up the objects more in the background). The strobing was all headed off in the same direction---to my right, along the way the bench was sitting. My friends suggested walking in that direction, just to see if I could do it, which I found halfway annoying, and halfway bemusing because it was such a trivial thing to do (and I told them this much), because out that direction was just more of the solid-color planar strobing, whereas what I really wanted to pay attention to and contemplate was the interface of the 3 dimensions on the objects themselves. I was bemused because I realized how I was going to be able to explain none of this to my friends right then, and how they would have no idea of how trivial their recommendations and expectations were compared to the astoundingness of my reality and my inquiries at that moment. I felt a tad bit of pride at that moment from this. Nevertheless, just to prove to them that I could walk and whatnot, I hopped around and talked about how I felt ready to run a marathon or something, if need be, just to show off. Just about then the strobing was going away (the time dilation had started to wear off as I was getting up, although as I was getting up it was still with me, and it became very clear to me how the mechanics of walking were possible on Salvia. True, one had no coordination, as if one were drunk. But the time-dilation was such that if one started to lose one's balance, one had like 5 mental seconds to realize what was going on and correct one's body consciously, as if in slow motion, before one had stumbled any). I sat back down and tried to explain everything, with mainly just the weird woosiness now persisting...but also with many fake-come-downs interspersed (which sort of felt like fake-wake-ups from dreams). What I mean is, a sudden ratching "down" back into normal consciousness, except one discovers that one isn't *really* totally back until one feels the next ratcheting down, and so on, for many times, with a much smaller magnitude each, this time (whereas last time, there were 4 or so of these ratchetings, each one corresponding to some searing burst of monumental revelation and a rotation of the then-circle geometry (this time, a huge square was the center of my attention at first, and it did not rotate periodically like the wheel from last time).
This time was definitely less extreme than last time. I did not forget who I was. I only forgot where I was for a moment (when I was first looking at the 50ft. black wall, outlined in yellow (that I would later see in 3-d strobe planes at a different angle and shrunken scale)), and throughout I was able to keep thoughts together in language in my own head (but trying to say them at first seemed to take forever physically, like swimming through molasses, and just didn't seem worth it to divert my attention to that, rather than observing what was going on). In the beginning of this time, I was even able to think back to last time on Salvia and notice that things were really quite similar (and I even think now that there was that smiling sun on the first time, of which I got reminded in this time, but that may have been just a memory manufactured in the moment during my 2nd time, by extrapolating from what else was similar with last time (the time distortion). But this still felt fuckin' extreme...like a clear reminder that my goal would be to maximize the ratio of "mental replay potential"/"Salvia-state mentally-experienced time." Feeling like things are lasting an eternity is certainly not a good feeling. But it's necessary to achieve the vision, which one can visually replay in one's mind, at a safe distance from it, and then later solidify into words the experience to allow your imagination to decode it later when your mind has lost the hi-fidelity image of it...which is what I am doing now, in fact!
Dose: 1 full breath of 15x standardized.
==========
So, I'm just coming off of it right now (did it about 20 minutes ago and still feel a little of that weird woosiness). But I want to get this down as quickly as possible.
So, my friends and I were down by the river. I was sitting on a park bench, looking at the moonlight. Before I even got to exhaling the smoke, I started seeing double of the moon. Then I got a slight swirling in my head/vision, like when one wakes up drunk with a really bad hangover (but I was not nauseous). As I put the pipe down, I became very very very small. Like, 2 cm vs. my friend who was sitting next to me as like 50ft tall. At first I couldn't recognize what this big square black wall thing was (and it was outlined in yellow (perhaps from being silhouetted by passing car lights)). The wall had a cartoonish sun/yellow-brown happy face in the corner smiling at me (I have since figured out that this might have stemmed from me looking at the pipe that I was setting down (the happy-face sun), next to my friend's thighs and back (which would have formed the square wall) as he was sitting there). I could feel myself returning to a familiar physical reality, similar to the last Salvia experience, and I had a whole conversation with myself about ("Oh, this is exactly the same place as last time! Now I understand what some of these accounts on the Internet that I read are talking about, with yourself returning to your own particular special place on some subsequent occasions." I also started noticing the time-distortion, and I started saying to myself, "Whoa, man, this is gonna take a long time, good thing I don't have to take anymore...I know it's gotta wear off soon..." But my friend is telling me that I need to take another hit, and I'm thinking, "Whoa, no way, man, the time-dilation would be so bad in that case, I'd go through a whole mental lifetime, grow old, and die psychologically, before I got to come back..." Then the phone rang (in reality, about 5 seconds after I had set the pipe down--notice this whole conversation with myself and then with my friend had taken place in that span of time), and I remember feeling a fear just on the edge of myself that my arm was going to reach down against my will, open the phone, and that whoever was on the phone would convince me to do another hit, thus banishing me to this realm forever (psychologically speaking)," so I said to my friends, "Don't answer it! Just let it go! Just let it go!" Then my friends suggested that I stand up and walk around a bit. That I found not difficult at all physically, and I was finding it to be a trivial, pointless exercise, a diversion of my attention from more interesting matters. Because what I was now seeing was vast 3-d solar planar surface strobing of objects in 3 dimensions, like this:
http://thumbs.dreamstime.com/thumb_218/1197672403qluBQP.jpg
But imagine the forwards/backwards dimension stretched to infinity with a continued solid surface. These 3-d solid planar strobings to infinity were not just shooting out of one forwards/backwards plane, but would shoot out of anything that I focused my attention onto, and would sometimes overlap (the strobings from the more forefront objects would strobe back onto and cover up the objects more in the background). The strobing was all headed off in the same direction---to my right, along the way the bench was sitting. My friends suggested walking in that direction, just to see if I could do it, which I found halfway annoying, and halfway bemusing because it was such a trivial thing to do (and I told them this much), because out that direction was just more of the solid-color planar strobing, whereas what I really wanted to pay attention to and contemplate was the interface of the 3 dimensions on the objects themselves. I was bemused because I realized how I was going to be able to explain none of this to my friends right then, and how they would have no idea of how trivial their recommendations and expectations were compared to the astoundingness of my reality and my inquiries at that moment. I felt a tad bit of pride at that moment from this. Nevertheless, just to prove to them that I could walk and whatnot, I hopped around and talked about how I felt ready to run a marathon or something, if need be, just to show off. Just about then the strobing was going away (the time dilation had started to wear off as I was getting up, although as I was getting up it was still with me, and it became very clear to me how the mechanics of walking were possible on Salvia. True, one had no coordination, as if one were drunk. But the time-dilation was such that if one started to lose one's balance, one had like 5 mental seconds to realize what was going on and correct one's body consciously, as if in slow motion, before one had stumbled any). I sat back down and tried to explain everything, with mainly just the weird woosiness now persisting...but also with many fake-come-downs interspersed (which sort of felt like fake-wake-ups from dreams). What I mean is, a sudden ratching "down" back into normal consciousness, except one discovers that one isn't *really* totally back until one feels the next ratcheting down, and so on, for many times, with a much smaller magnitude each, this time (whereas last time, there were 4 or so of these ratchetings, each one corresponding to some searing burst of monumental revelation and a rotation of the then-circle geometry (this time, a huge square was the center of my attention at first, and it did not rotate periodically like the wheel from last time).
This time was definitely less extreme than last time. I did not forget who I was. I only forgot where I was for a moment (when I was first looking at the 50ft. black wall, outlined in yellow (that I would later see in 3-d strobe planes at a different angle and shrunken scale)), and throughout I was able to keep thoughts together in language in my own head (but trying to say them at first seemed to take forever physically, like swimming through molasses, and just didn't seem worth it to divert my attention to that, rather than observing what was going on). In the beginning of this time, I was even able to think back to last time on Salvia and notice that things were really quite similar (and I even think now that there was that smiling sun on the first time, of which I got reminded in this time, but that may have been just a memory manufactured in the moment during my 2nd time, by extrapolating from what else was similar with last time (the time distortion). But this still felt fuckin' extreme...like a clear reminder that my goal would be to maximize the ratio of "mental replay potential"/"Salvia-state mentally-experienced time." Feeling like things are lasting an eternity is certainly not a good feeling. But it's necessary to achieve the vision, which one can visually replay in one's mind, at a safe distance from it, and then later solidify into words the experience to allow your imagination to decode it later when your mind has lost the hi-fidelity image of it...which is what I am doing now, in fact!
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
Aspects of Salvia media coverage that make me laugh and cry
1. "Salvia, sometimes known on the street as Sally-D, Magic Mint, or Maria Pastora..."
This misdirection is quite subtle, and thus possibly one of the more pernicious of scare tactics directed against Salvia. I would not dispute that, in theory, some people refer to Salvia Divinorum by these names. Where such allusions are misleading is by implying that Salvia is some shady drug that teens are buying on the street. No, thankfully, because Salvia is still legal, pretty much all Salvia users buy it from reputable online sellers such as bouncingbearbotanicals.com, or from local head shops, and when referring to Salvia, people generally refer to it by its official species name, Salvia Divinorum. I have certainly never heard of someone buying Salvia "off the street" when such a measure would be completely unnecessary and counter-productive. Because it is still legal in most places, such measures are unnecessary. Let's keep it that way.
2. "The effects last up to 30 minutes, with some lingering effects lasting up to several days."
No, this is just flat wrong. Laughably wrong. 3-5 minutes for the peak experience, with a little funkiness up to 10-15 minutes after that. That's all. Guaranteed. (Assuming one is using the smoking method, of course!...but even when ingesting Salvia, I would expects lasting a few hours at most. In any case, this is clearly not what media sources are alluding to in their scare stories).
3. "Salvia, a drug that produces a legal high similar to LSD..."
No, sorry, Salvia trips are nothing like those from LSD. The time-scale is completely different, the emotional aspect is completely different, and even the "visual" "hallucinations" are completely different (for example, with Salvia it is rare to have simply a visual hallucination. Usually the visual aspect is fundamentally integrated with some ego-aspect or some feeling of being pushed or pulled by various geometric forces and whatnot. This is, qualitatively, very different from LSD, from what I understand. Are the two drugs even on the same level of intensity? No, I'd say, if anything, Salvia must be judged to be the stronger of the two because during the Salvia peak one cannot remotely even contemplate interacting with the outside world or even comprehending what an outside world would be. From what I understand, only DMT approaches this similar level of disconnection from the normal world. Which brings me to...
4. "Law enforcement officers worry what effect Salvia could have on teens behind the wheel..."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SnwS5sPOzb0
http://www.comedycentral.com/videos/index.jhtml?videoId=241125&title=celebrity-video-tommy-chong-vs.
'Nuff said.
Besides, people injure and kill themselves all the time from the motor discoordination wrought by alcohol. Why, then, is not alcohol illegal across the board? Likewise, water can kill you if you abuse it (drink too much of it). Too much sugar can kill you. Oxygen can kill you (if you hyperventilate). Just because there is the potential to abuse something does not mean that it makes sense to legislate around the assumption that it will always be abused. For the people who abuse a substance, we punish and/or treat with medical help. For the others who go around drinking alcohol, eating sugar, and breathing oxygen in non-abusive manners, we let them live their lives freely without the nanny-State interfering.
5. "Parents and substance abuse counselors worry that Salvia addiction could derail teens' lives..."
Addiction? Whaaat? Salvia is a kappa opiod receptor agonist, which means it has a tendency to produce dysphoria which, when combined with the startling changes in reality, means that there is practically no chance of getting addicted. The main reason why people generally choose to return to Salvia is simply because of the curiosity and/or mystical/intellectual/perceptual revelations sparked by each bizarre encounter with it.
6. "Brett Chidester, who committed suicide after taking Salvia, has served as a warning to parents and lawmakers of what potential dangers lurk within this legal plant..."
Not only is this, as far as I know, the only death to be even remotely associated with Salvia Divinorum in the history of the drug so far, but the connection between Brett Chidester's consumption of Salvia and his suicide has not been persuasively demonstrated. I would wager that Brett also watched TV at some point in his life before committing suicide. Is TV equally to blame? I imagine Brett must have faced at least one problem at school or had at least one disagreement with his parents at some point in his life before he committed suicide. There are a host of factors that could account for his decision to commit suicide. More examples of correlation between Salvia use and suicide would need to exist before we could even speculate about Salvia's tendency to induce suicidal behavior (and that would still be only correlation, which, without then identifying a causative relationship between Salvia and suicide, would be rather shaky ground for pronouncing any medical or legal judgment). There is, of course, that suicide note in which Brett claims that Salvia convinced him to take his life, but there is the obvious possibility that he is simply grasping for a dramatic rationalization for his decision. There is, of course, also the possibility that the suicide note is not authentic. And even if Brett's death could be definitely tied to Salvia, that is still just one death, compared to thousands of deaths from alcohol (legal), and hundreds of thousands of deaths from tobacco (legal), every year. If Salvia were restricted to over-18 year-olds and included a surgeon general's warning: "May cause suicide," would that satisfy frightened parents, as it seems to do for tobacco and alcohol?
7. "If you encounter someone who is under the effects of Salvia Divinorum, call 911..."
No, just chill the fuck out...jesus...all you need to do is give the person some gentle general support for about 5 minutes, and everything will be fine.
8. "Signs of Salvia exposure include dilated pupils, decreased heart rate..."
No, signs of Salvia exposure include noticing that the person is in the process of tripping the fuck out. Seriously, it is as if these news articles on Salvia have done no research or first-hand investigation on the topic, and have simply copied and pasted generic information from WebMD or something. This sort of claim is also misleading because it obscures the fact that, 15 minutes after initial inhalation, Salvia "exposure" (as news stories often put it) would be virtually undetectable.
This misdirection is quite subtle, and thus possibly one of the more pernicious of scare tactics directed against Salvia. I would not dispute that, in theory, some people refer to Salvia Divinorum by these names. Where such allusions are misleading is by implying that Salvia is some shady drug that teens are buying on the street. No, thankfully, because Salvia is still legal, pretty much all Salvia users buy it from reputable online sellers such as bouncingbearbotanicals.com, or from local head shops, and when referring to Salvia, people generally refer to it by its official species name, Salvia Divinorum. I have certainly never heard of someone buying Salvia "off the street" when such a measure would be completely unnecessary and counter-productive. Because it is still legal in most places, such measures are unnecessary. Let's keep it that way.
2. "The effects last up to 30 minutes, with some lingering effects lasting up to several days."
No, this is just flat wrong. Laughably wrong. 3-5 minutes for the peak experience, with a little funkiness up to 10-15 minutes after that. That's all. Guaranteed. (Assuming one is using the smoking method, of course!...but even when ingesting Salvia, I would expects lasting a few hours at most. In any case, this is clearly not what media sources are alluding to in their scare stories).
3. "Salvia, a drug that produces a legal high similar to LSD..."
No, sorry, Salvia trips are nothing like those from LSD. The time-scale is completely different, the emotional aspect is completely different, and even the "visual" "hallucinations" are completely different (for example, with Salvia it is rare to have simply a visual hallucination. Usually the visual aspect is fundamentally integrated with some ego-aspect or some feeling of being pushed or pulled by various geometric forces and whatnot. This is, qualitatively, very different from LSD, from what I understand. Are the two drugs even on the same level of intensity? No, I'd say, if anything, Salvia must be judged to be the stronger of the two because during the Salvia peak one cannot remotely even contemplate interacting with the outside world or even comprehending what an outside world would be. From what I understand, only DMT approaches this similar level of disconnection from the normal world. Which brings me to...
4. "Law enforcement officers worry what effect Salvia could have on teens behind the wheel..."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SnwS5sPOzb0
http://www.comedycentral.com/videos/index.jhtml?videoId=241125&title=celebrity-video-tommy-chong-vs.
'Nuff said.
Besides, people injure and kill themselves all the time from the motor discoordination wrought by alcohol. Why, then, is not alcohol illegal across the board? Likewise, water can kill you if you abuse it (drink too much of it). Too much sugar can kill you. Oxygen can kill you (if you hyperventilate). Just because there is the potential to abuse something does not mean that it makes sense to legislate around the assumption that it will always be abused. For the people who abuse a substance, we punish and/or treat with medical help. For the others who go around drinking alcohol, eating sugar, and breathing oxygen in non-abusive manners, we let them live their lives freely without the nanny-State interfering.
5. "Parents and substance abuse counselors worry that Salvia addiction could derail teens' lives..."
Addiction? Whaaat? Salvia is a kappa opiod receptor agonist, which means it has a tendency to produce dysphoria which, when combined with the startling changes in reality, means that there is practically no chance of getting addicted. The main reason why people generally choose to return to Salvia is simply because of the curiosity and/or mystical/intellectual/perceptual revelations sparked by each bizarre encounter with it.
6. "Brett Chidester, who committed suicide after taking Salvia, has served as a warning to parents and lawmakers of what potential dangers lurk within this legal plant..."
Not only is this, as far as I know, the only death to be even remotely associated with Salvia Divinorum in the history of the drug so far, but the connection between Brett Chidester's consumption of Salvia and his suicide has not been persuasively demonstrated. I would wager that Brett also watched TV at some point in his life before committing suicide. Is TV equally to blame? I imagine Brett must have faced at least one problem at school or had at least one disagreement with his parents at some point in his life before he committed suicide. There are a host of factors that could account for his decision to commit suicide. More examples of correlation between Salvia use and suicide would need to exist before we could even speculate about Salvia's tendency to induce suicidal behavior (and that would still be only correlation, which, without then identifying a causative relationship between Salvia and suicide, would be rather shaky ground for pronouncing any medical or legal judgment). There is, of course, that suicide note in which Brett claims that Salvia convinced him to take his life, but there is the obvious possibility that he is simply grasping for a dramatic rationalization for his decision. There is, of course, also the possibility that the suicide note is not authentic. And even if Brett's death could be definitely tied to Salvia, that is still just one death, compared to thousands of deaths from alcohol (legal), and hundreds of thousands of deaths from tobacco (legal), every year. If Salvia were restricted to over-18 year-olds and included a surgeon general's warning: "May cause suicide," would that satisfy frightened parents, as it seems to do for tobacco and alcohol?
7. "If you encounter someone who is under the effects of Salvia Divinorum, call 911..."
No, just chill the fuck out...jesus...all you need to do is give the person some gentle general support for about 5 minutes, and everything will be fine.
8. "Signs of Salvia exposure include dilated pupils, decreased heart rate..."
No, signs of Salvia exposure include noticing that the person is in the process of tripping the fuck out. Seriously, it is as if these news articles on Salvia have done no research or first-hand investigation on the topic, and have simply copied and pasted generic information from WebMD or something. This sort of claim is also misleading because it obscures the fact that, 15 minutes after initial inhalation, Salvia "exposure" (as news stories often put it) would be virtually undetectable.
Monday, June 22, 2009
The situation in Iran
For some leftist coverage of the situation in Iran, check out:
http://www.revleft.com/vb/iranian-uprising-f235/index.html
It appears to be a very complicated situation there. I do not think the time has yet arrived for unbridled giddiness. As I see it, the acting groups of the situation are:
*Ahmadinejad & co.
*The clerical establishment
*Moussavi & co.
*Average people who are Moussavi supporters
*Other average people who are understandably dissatisfied with the Iranian regime, but who do not support Moussavi
*The U.S. (incl. CIA interference)
*People being paid off by the CIA to contribute to the destabilization of the country.
For the first two groups, the Iranian uprising is a hindrance rather than an opportunity. Ahmadinejad & co. will want to hold onto power at all costs, though, whereas I could see the clerical establishment being willing to cut a deal with Moussavi & co. if it is deemed to be worth it. Moussavi, after all, is no direct opponent to this clerical establishment, just some of its more hardline cultural policies. I would expect very little change in Iranian foreign policy, for example, if Moussavi were to attain power with the clerical establishment intact (and perhaps even without the clerical establishment intact). Iran will still be pursuing a nuclear program. Iran will also still probably be supporting Hezbollah and Hamas. The only difference might be a little more willingness to receive direct investment from the West.
For the rest of the groups, the uprising is an opportunity. Not an unconditionally positive thing, for the uprising may yet still take a turn against their particular favor, but an opportunity. They each want different things.
Moussavi & co. want power.
Many Moussavi supporters started out just wanting a re-do of the election so that they could get a legitimate chance of getting their favorite, Moussavi, into power. But many have become rapidly disillusioned with the whole clerical establishment by the recent events, and many of this group are now calling for the outright abolition of that establishment. Moussavi & co. are not quite comfortable with this, for I'm sure they expected to be able to lean on the familiar clerical establishment for support once in power, and even worse, the abolition of the clerical establishment would give an opening to more radical groups and a radicalization of their own supporters that could threaten Moussavi & co.'s chances for power. That is something that Moussavi & co. do not want. So Moussavi & co. have in the past few days been trying to get out in front of the demands of their supporters (by belatedly calling for more radical tactics and appearing to take some initiative, whereas in reality it is Moussavi & co. who are being led), reaffirm their credentials, and corral their supporters' aspirations into tamer demands.
Other people who are dissatisfied with the Iranian regime, but who do not support Moussavi, have been some of the most radical elements in the uprising so far. This is where the chants of "Death to the Dictator" and the anti-clerical language have mostly arisen at first. However, this group is itself internally diverse. It includes communists of MANY MANY feuding sub-types (as usual), in addition to culturally-radical students and others who are just disillusioned with the entire system after perceiving the election as a complete fraud (which, by the way, I'm not even going to touch upon the issue of whether the election was really a fraud or not, but by this point, that no longer really matters. The uprising, in general, has moved beyond that issue). It is this group that has jumped on this unprecedented opening to call for systemic change that I would "support" during the ongoing uprising, and it is the existence of this group that makes me conclude that the uprising does have some worth and is, in general, worth defending against the crackdowns of the ruling regime, despite the unquestionable existence of...
U.S. interference. Although the U.S. would not have much to gain by supporting any one faction in this uprising (for example, I do not think that the U.S. is really trying to foment another "color revolution" in favor of Moussavi because that would not really help the U.S. much on the all-important foreign policy front...the U.S. would like to topple the Ahmadinejad regime, but only in favor of a much more docile puppet, rather than a homegrown nationalist reformer), I am still sure that the U.S. is using this uprising as an opportunity to foment general disorder even more, considering that it has had existing destablilization covert ops projects enabled against Iran since at least 2006, and I have seen nothing to suggest that the U.S. has since discontinued these projects. The ideal outcome for U.S. stabilization efforts is to have this uprising end in a stalemate that ends up weakening Iran internally over the long term. An outright Moussavi victory might be a slight victory for the U.S. efforts, but not much. The worst case scenario for the U.S. would be the victory of communist forces that would maintain economic and military nationalism, but would diffuse domestic tensions by abolishing the religious establishment and by reforming cultural practices and rectifying economic inequality.
So, I am sure that some component of the uprising consists of U.S. lackeys. However, unlike others who have been trying to paint this entire uprising as one big staged spectacle in the service of U.S. imperialism, I think this is a small element that does not define the overall character of the Iranian uprising. Therefore, in conversation, my position would be to support the Iranian revolution, and especially to acknowledge the existence of, and support, the most radical elements. That said, even a Moussavi victory would be a slightly progressive change (although we should have no illusions about the fact that Moussavi will crack down upon leftists in order to end the uprising and put to rest the more radical aspriations, if/when he gets into power, so in that sense, I will probably never "support," Moussavi, even though I would have to acknowledge that his victory would take Iran in a more progressive direction, which would be a comparatively good thing. Not supporting Moussavi, despite this good aspect of his, has to do with the ethical imperative of not being implicated, in even the remotest sense, in the suppression of leftist forces, I suppose).
http://www.revleft.com/vb/iranian-uprising-f235/index.html
It appears to be a very complicated situation there. I do not think the time has yet arrived for unbridled giddiness. As I see it, the acting groups of the situation are:
*Ahmadinejad & co.
*The clerical establishment
*Moussavi & co.
*Average people who are Moussavi supporters
*Other average people who are understandably dissatisfied with the Iranian regime, but who do not support Moussavi
*The U.S. (incl. CIA interference)
*People being paid off by the CIA to contribute to the destabilization of the country.
For the first two groups, the Iranian uprising is a hindrance rather than an opportunity. Ahmadinejad & co. will want to hold onto power at all costs, though, whereas I could see the clerical establishment being willing to cut a deal with Moussavi & co. if it is deemed to be worth it. Moussavi, after all, is no direct opponent to this clerical establishment, just some of its more hardline cultural policies. I would expect very little change in Iranian foreign policy, for example, if Moussavi were to attain power with the clerical establishment intact (and perhaps even without the clerical establishment intact). Iran will still be pursuing a nuclear program. Iran will also still probably be supporting Hezbollah and Hamas. The only difference might be a little more willingness to receive direct investment from the West.
For the rest of the groups, the uprising is an opportunity. Not an unconditionally positive thing, for the uprising may yet still take a turn against their particular favor, but an opportunity. They each want different things.
Moussavi & co. want power.
Many Moussavi supporters started out just wanting a re-do of the election so that they could get a legitimate chance of getting their favorite, Moussavi, into power. But many have become rapidly disillusioned with the whole clerical establishment by the recent events, and many of this group are now calling for the outright abolition of that establishment. Moussavi & co. are not quite comfortable with this, for I'm sure they expected to be able to lean on the familiar clerical establishment for support once in power, and even worse, the abolition of the clerical establishment would give an opening to more radical groups and a radicalization of their own supporters that could threaten Moussavi & co.'s chances for power. That is something that Moussavi & co. do not want. So Moussavi & co. have in the past few days been trying to get out in front of the demands of their supporters (by belatedly calling for more radical tactics and appearing to take some initiative, whereas in reality it is Moussavi & co. who are being led), reaffirm their credentials, and corral their supporters' aspirations into tamer demands.
Other people who are dissatisfied with the Iranian regime, but who do not support Moussavi, have been some of the most radical elements in the uprising so far. This is where the chants of "Death to the Dictator" and the anti-clerical language have mostly arisen at first. However, this group is itself internally diverse. It includes communists of MANY MANY feuding sub-types (as usual), in addition to culturally-radical students and others who are just disillusioned with the entire system after perceiving the election as a complete fraud (which, by the way, I'm not even going to touch upon the issue of whether the election was really a fraud or not, but by this point, that no longer really matters. The uprising, in general, has moved beyond that issue). It is this group that has jumped on this unprecedented opening to call for systemic change that I would "support" during the ongoing uprising, and it is the existence of this group that makes me conclude that the uprising does have some worth and is, in general, worth defending against the crackdowns of the ruling regime, despite the unquestionable existence of...
U.S. interference. Although the U.S. would not have much to gain by supporting any one faction in this uprising (for example, I do not think that the U.S. is really trying to foment another "color revolution" in favor of Moussavi because that would not really help the U.S. much on the all-important foreign policy front...the U.S. would like to topple the Ahmadinejad regime, but only in favor of a much more docile puppet, rather than a homegrown nationalist reformer), I am still sure that the U.S. is using this uprising as an opportunity to foment general disorder even more, considering that it has had existing destablilization covert ops projects enabled against Iran since at least 2006, and I have seen nothing to suggest that the U.S. has since discontinued these projects. The ideal outcome for U.S. stabilization efforts is to have this uprising end in a stalemate that ends up weakening Iran internally over the long term. An outright Moussavi victory might be a slight victory for the U.S. efforts, but not much. The worst case scenario for the U.S. would be the victory of communist forces that would maintain economic and military nationalism, but would diffuse domestic tensions by abolishing the religious establishment and by reforming cultural practices and rectifying economic inequality.
So, I am sure that some component of the uprising consists of U.S. lackeys. However, unlike others who have been trying to paint this entire uprising as one big staged spectacle in the service of U.S. imperialism, I think this is a small element that does not define the overall character of the Iranian uprising. Therefore, in conversation, my position would be to support the Iranian revolution, and especially to acknowledge the existence of, and support, the most radical elements. That said, even a Moussavi victory would be a slightly progressive change (although we should have no illusions about the fact that Moussavi will crack down upon leftists in order to end the uprising and put to rest the more radical aspriations, if/when he gets into power, so in that sense, I will probably never "support," Moussavi, even though I would have to acknowledge that his victory would take Iran in a more progressive direction, which would be a comparatively good thing. Not supporting Moussavi, despite this good aspect of his, has to do with the ethical imperative of not being implicated, in even the remotest sense, in the suppression of leftist forces, I suppose).
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
American nationalism is the most pathetic nationalism in the world
American nationalism has all of the excitement of a high school civics lecture. The problem is, American nationalism is always too distant from the heart. It is always reflecting on what the American *State* has accomplished, perhaps because that is one of the few things that truly unites Americans--we are all subjects (and beneficiaries) of the American State. We can all relate to that. But the result is a type of civic, bureaucratic nationalism that would be fitting for the Roman Empire in its last days of decadence.
American nationalism is always reflecting on either the greatness of the American State, or on how the contributions of miniscule, ordinary Americans have made the American State strong. One does not feel heroic when one serves the American State. One feels like a tiny, miserable mercenary, serving a huge, distant, bureaucratic, elitist multi-ethnic empire like Austria-Hungary.
Amercian nationalism entirely lacks the Blood-and-Soil folkish heroism of German nationalism.
American nationalism also cannot match up to the revolutionary, universalist, radical utopian heroism of French nationalism. Sure, we make some feeble attempts with a few "We the People" phrases scattered in our national tradition, but the minute you start singing, "Aux armes citoyens!" you are bound to get some petulant lecture about "the dangers of mob rule" and how "we are a republic and not a democracy, you know!"
The nationalist fairy tales that we are taught in elementary school might be good enough for a 3rd-grader, but they are hardly anything suitable for an adult to sink his or her teeth into.
At its very best, American nationalism is like the loyalty one feels to a company that provides dental insurance and free child care.
Napoleon summed up the problem most clearly:
"A man does not have himself killed for a half-pence a day or for a petty distinction. You must speak to the soul in order to electrify him."
But half-pences and petty distinctions are all that American society currently offers its citizens. And that's exactly why American national feeling rightfully languishes in the pathetic state that it does.
American nationalism is always reflecting on either the greatness of the American State, or on how the contributions of miniscule, ordinary Americans have made the American State strong. One does not feel heroic when one serves the American State. One feels like a tiny, miserable mercenary, serving a huge, distant, bureaucratic, elitist multi-ethnic empire like Austria-Hungary.
Amercian nationalism entirely lacks the Blood-and-Soil folkish heroism of German nationalism.
American nationalism also cannot match up to the revolutionary, universalist, radical utopian heroism of French nationalism. Sure, we make some feeble attempts with a few "We the People" phrases scattered in our national tradition, but the minute you start singing, "Aux armes citoyens!" you are bound to get some petulant lecture about "the dangers of mob rule" and how "we are a republic and not a democracy, you know!"
The nationalist fairy tales that we are taught in elementary school might be good enough for a 3rd-grader, but they are hardly anything suitable for an adult to sink his or her teeth into.
At its very best, American nationalism is like the loyalty one feels to a company that provides dental insurance and free child care.
Napoleon summed up the problem most clearly:
"A man does not have himself killed for a half-pence a day or for a petty distinction. You must speak to the soul in order to electrify him."
But half-pences and petty distinctions are all that American society currently offers its citizens. And that's exactly why American national feeling rightfully languishes in the pathetic state that it does.
Sunday, April 19, 2009
Salvia Divinorum meets Plato, Kant, Freud, and Bach
What follows is an account of the most intense, revelatory experience of my entire life, an experience that I don't think I will ever want to repeat again in my life, but which I'm glad I did have. And, besides that, I believe it might be of some philosophical and psychological import.
The sparknotes summary: Freud was completely right, Kant and Plato were completely wrong, and Bach's harpsichord solo from the Brandenburg Concerto No. 5 was waaaay too overwhelming to have playing during a Salvia experience. Or perhaps it was just right. It was not an unpleasant experience, just bat-shit-insane extreme.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VxzY3tFTz9k
That's what I chose to have playing. I had a feeling that the absolute mathematical perfection and periodicity of the piece, its chord progressions, etc., would be perfect for comfortably structuring the experience. I thought that it would be better to have something that is totally predictable and that comfortably fills up the room with a warm sound, than to risk having random noise interruptions come into play. To a certain extent, I think I was prudent in this respect, although the part about 1:54 into the piece, where he's going down the scales and doing that sort of electric guitar solo sort of thing, that was waaaay overwhelming, and literally impacted me physically as a sort of waterfall washing over me.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. First, the background:
Salvia is an entheogenic dissociative hallucinogen, traditionally used by the Mazatec Indians of Oaxaca for generations, and just recently discovered by Western science and Western drug culture. For more background on Salvia, watch this documentary:
Sacred Weeds:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4829797616419921428
Fortunately, Salvia is not regulated (Yet) under Federal law, nor (yet) under Massachusetts law. (I say "yet" because, like I said, this drug is relatively new to Western culture, and lately states have been rushing to make it illegal. It has already been made illegal in Missouri, for example. Now, in my opinion, that's completely unnecessary, and probably counter-productive. This substance is not addictive (trust me, there's no way in hell this thing could be addictive), you are as harmless as a puppy to others while you are on it (usually completely immobilized, and if mobile at all, then completely uncoordinated (if not totally unaware of your surroundings) and only a potential harm to yourself if there happen to be things like open flames or sharp objects that you could bumble into (which is a reason why it's advisable to have a sitter with you). Additionally, Salvia only lasts 5-10 minutes, it is non-toxic, it has no known side effects, aside from a potential for some minor headaches afterwards and sweating during the experience, and there are no known adverse long-term effects. Anyways, because it is currently legal in Massachusetts, that's why I feel perfectly comfortable discussing this on facebook and elsewhere. The free exchange of information and experiences is an important reason for keeping it legal, if nothing else. At least people will be able to educate themselves about it before they do it.
News reports suggesting that people "get impaired judgment" on this stuff or that people would be a "danger on the road" are laughable. If you take a reasonable dose, you will have NO judgments at all and NO ability to physically do anything, much less even attempt to drive a car. I'm sure some idiot somewhere at some point will take a mild dose and then try to drive a car and kill someone, but there are thousands of idiots who abuse alcohol and get themselves and others killed. We can't make the whole world idiot-proof, and there will always be idiots, so we just need to deal with them as they come along. Obviously, driving on Salvia should be illegal, I don't think anyone would dispute that. And maybe you would want to regulate Salvia so that there is an age requirement for buying it, because you really do need to be an informed adult to mess with this stuff. But should it be made totally illegal? No, of course not.
Now, given that it's currently legal and has no major side effects, why would I not want to take it ever again? Because one "breakthrough" is more than enough, oh boy. The experience was so goddamn intense, the thought of doing it again just seems inconceivable right now.
Last night was actually my second time doing it, but the first time I did it, I didn't do as much (only half a bowl of 10x extract) or inhale as well, and I got a much milder effect. That time, I was listening to Bach's "Air" from Suite No. 3:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CyLo9-Voy5s
Naturally, that was also bound to facilitate a gentler experience. Basically, that time, I never lost my ego or my grounding in reality. I felt a little dreamy, like an elusive "something" was happening, but I maintained a consistent train of consciousness throughout. There were no "discontinuous functions" of existence, if you will, just gentle, sloping functions. When I would open my eyes, everything continued to look as before, although there was a moment where there seemed to be a clear, viscous, rotating fluid filling the room, barely perceptible to my vision, like dissolved sugar in water. The one other notable moment in that 5-minute experience was one where I got a distinct emotional feeling of tender, innocent, and eager, quasi-erotic puppy love well up in me for a brief moment--the sort of feeling I had at first with my very first girlfriend, and that I've never quite felt since. I remember gently biting my lip at this point, sort of like when you are aroused during a sexual act. It was a rewarding, wholesome moment, a revisitation of something I now realize I've lost to a certain extent, and something that I would like to rediscover, if at all possible. After that, there was a point where another friend walked in (there were already 3 friends trip-sitting for me in the room. We were all taking turns). I remember hearing his steps in the hallway and it seeming like the steps were echoing in some reaaaaally reaaaaaally long cavern. When he walked in, I opened my eyes and mumbled to him with a grin, "Howdy thar" and I sort of gestured to him with a sort of salute, and at that moment I was overcome with giggles galore. The juxtaposition of the baroque music, all my friends sitting there in a college dorm room, and my "howdy thar" all seemed so incredibly ridiculous. So I pretty much gleefully giggled for the rest of the time, for half a minute or so, until I had more or less come out of it. I came away feeling that it was a very worthwhile experience. Not exactly "pleasurable," but it upwelled some wholesome emotions in me and gave me some reflections on that puppy-love feeling that I've been missing in life.
This second time was, I guess, "worthwhile" too, but in a totally different way. Again, none of it was "pleasant" or "unpleasant" in a sensory sort of way. It was just incredibly shocking.
I went into this second time thinking that it would be a bit like the first. I didn't really have a strong desire to do it again, but I was curious to see what would happen this time, and we had a little bit left, so we figured we might as well use up the rest of it (this time, I had 2 friends with me, trip-sitting and waiting to go for their turn).
I did about 3/4 of a bowl of the same 10x extract. It was nothing like the first. Well, I was also listening to a more energetic Bach piece, and I was a little keyed-up, but tired, after having had a busy week, so maybe that influenced it.
Here's the narrative:
I take two hits on the pipe. I could already feel some of the first effects during my second hit. My friends start the music. I lay down, close my eyes. A period of time elapses that seems vague, lacking in substance, and long, like when you go to sleep, wake up, but can't remember dreaming anything, but yet at the same time, not like those times where you just blink and wake back up again. You have a vague awareness that some time has passed, but that is all. In this case, even though it felt long, I have been able to ascertain (from reconstructing the timeline from my memory of the later parts of the song playing--and the song was only a little over 3 minute long) that this part must have been like only 10 seconds. Then...
Next thing "I" can remember, "I" am trying to climb up and upon the floor and the music, which are both physically integrated as a sort of big wheel. But not only am I hallucinating--I am hallucinating not even as "myself" who understands what a hallucination is.
I say "I" or "myself" in quotation marks because I had no concept of "I" at this point. I had heard of people talk about this sort of state before, of being separated from the ego, and I used to think, "Ah, that's bullshit, how would that even work? The ego is, like, fundamental to existence. They've got to be imagining all of this stuff." I never really believed in Freudian psychology...until now.
My consciousness was a complete blank-slate. Everything I had known and experienced from my entire life before that was gone, and I was totally lacking in any awareness of that absence in the first place. That moment felt like the beginning of my entire existence, and yet I had no concept of a beginning of an existence at the time. All of this I'm telling you know is from my re-realizations that occurred to me after I had reached the 2nd plane of consciousness and was looking back on my immediate past from the 1st plane of consciousness. What do I mean by "planes of consciousness"?
*1st plane of consciousness: I am an id without an ego or a superego. I have no self-reflection, no Vernunft (Reason), no Wille (Will), no awareness that "I" am an id, no awareness of what an "I", an "id", or an "ego" would be. I don't have a concept of culminative feelings, such as pleasure or pain. All I have is "Drive." Trieb (to use the Freudian term in the original German). All "I" had was aversion or attraction to acting on stimuli, with no awareness that this wheel that I am trying to climb constitutes a "stimuli" or that I have a "Trieb" that I am responding to in the first place. I had no idea why I was trying to climb the wheel, nor any concept of why I would need to have a reason to climb the wheel, nor any idea of what constituted a "wheel," or "climbing" or cause-and-effect, or something as "space-like" or "time-like" or anything. I try to climb the wheel, not because I anticipate renewed pleasure from doing so, nor because I am aware of a drive to do so, but just because that drive is there, driving me (of course, nor do I have any concept of "it", as a foreign force, driving "me." It's not foreign, it's just all there is, and I'm not even aware of it at this point. And besides, although I had perfectly vivid and precise sensory information coming at me (in other words, even though I had no categories of reason to structure it, the "world" as I knew it was still there as clear as ever), I would have been incapable of picking out this Trieb as something distinct from any other stimulus. All there was was the totality of stimuli, without any essential or categorical markers. Only after later reflection could I distinguish, for example, one aspect of the total stimulus as a "wheel" with essential wheel-like characteristics. I consider this to be a resounding rebuttal to Plato's idea of the "ideal forms" as fundamental to existence. Au contraire, my friend, apparently there can conceivably be existence outside of ideal forms. The material world is fundamental, and we manufacture ideal forms to summarize all of this stimulus so as to figure out a short-hand for how the world's cause-and effect-works so that we can react to it.
At this point, as far as I could tell, this was the only existence that "I" had ever experienced (but I wasn't even able to self-reflect on it, nor was I aware of a lack of ability to do so). I now imagine that this is what it feels like to be a lizard, an ant, or a lobotomized human.
The first searing burst of revelation came after getting myself over one of the nodes of the wheel (the wheel had nodes like a paddle wheel (the paddles are the nodes) or a ferris wheel (the passenger cars are the nodes). As I came up over the node, an entire new filter of existence opened up before me. Suddenly all of the shapes "slid" into their ideal forms. I recognized the wheel as a wheel. And I recognized myself as an "I". This burst of revelation was like being a devoted Catholic all your life, and suddenly learning without a doubt that God doesn't exist. It was like this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDgXQPxzY8E
Now began the most interesting portion of my experience, the 2nd level of consciousness, me as an ego and with reason, but still without my life history. I began to reflect on my experiences that I just had during my 1st level of consciousness as one would reflect on an eternity of existence (at this time, my 1st and 2nd level existences were all that I knew). I had perfect, vivid memory of this 1st level time (and even now, I fortunately still have fairly vivid memory of the whole thing, even the earliest pre-ego stage, but I am writing this down now the day after, partly in order to also get this recorded, lest details slip away from me). I also began to reflect on my current existence around me, the wheel of the floor and the music spinning, which was still the center of my attention, and which I was still trying to climb, but now I found pleasure in it, and a desire to do more of it, and it became a rewarding sort of game to be doing it. At this point, I thought nothing strange of the fact that the music was physically integrated with the floor and that I was climbing on it. Also, time would often seem to slow down or speed up depending on how fast the wheel was turning, as if those two things were mechanically connected as well. And when I would ponder my immediately preceding pre-ego existence, it was as if I could really time-travel and relive those moments again momentarily, but this time as my 2nd-level self with my 2nd-level self-reflection (I still had no concept of "levels," per se, just that the previous segment of existence was very very strange). Also, I had no idea that anything was particularly strange about this reality around me, with me climbing on the music and doing momentary time-travel and whatnot. This seemed perfectly normal, just how the world worked. I guess I had no a priori ideas or structures to suggest otherwise. This does not seem to support Kant's case for a priori structures for perceiving existence, am I right?
After a few moments of this, I rounded another node on the wheel and got my 2nd and most shocking searing burst of re-realization: an awareness of my entire life history flooded back to me, I realized that there was existence that preceded the 1st level, that I was myself, a college student, and that I had just smoked some Salvia. I saw myself climbing a wheel of floor and music in my friend's dorm room, and realized two things:
1. The world does not actually work like this. I'm tripping balls.
2. I *should* (now with more of the superego tinge of meaning) not be up out of the bed, trying to climb imaginary things, or else I'm going to freak my friends out and look like a psycho. (So, yeah, this is also, apparently, when my superego came flooding back, the most brutal re-realization of them all. Before that, I didn't have any thoughts of "should" or "should not").
So this is when I started to freak out and desperately yearn for the experience to be over. At this point, I'm hallucinating, and I know that I'm hallucinating. I guess that's worse than hallucinating, but being totally unaware, like being totally in the Matrix, vs. being re-introduced to the Matrix.
This is also the point when the Bach harpsichord solo got to the part with the fast descending scales at about 1:55 seconds in. The music now looked and felt like a pillar of water shooting out of my friend's computer, over the wheel, and splashing down from the wheel and drenching me. It was overwhelming and scary, but at the same time I felt elated, kind of like the first time I had an ejaculation. That feeling that your whole body is going into an electrical spasm, and for a split second you think it's too much and that you're not going to be able to withstand it, but also at the same time you like it and feel charged by it. So at this point, I start laughing (both in reality, and in my mental world), and in the real world I try to get up from the bed and reach towards the computer (in reality I had simply been laying there the whole time), and in my mental world I jump from the wheel and run to hug/wrestle with the pillar of music/water. That seemed to relieve some tension. I also at this time realized that it was Bach's harpsichord solo from the Brandenburg Concerto No. 5 that I was listening to, and that I had selected it, and I was thinking to myself "This is way too overwhelming, I should have picked something else...I just need to hold on a little longer, it's almost going to be over." Apparently my friends directed me back onto the bed at this point, and were laughing along with me (I was laughing, and I even kinda remember laughing, even though I felt half-terrified inside. At the time it felt like a release of tension, of the sense of everything being so overwhelming, and a recognition that "I'm not in control yet, I just have to lay back and take it easy and ride it out.) In my mind, I see my friends again, and I think that I am trying to excuse my behavior (my trying to scale the imaginary wheel) and reassure them that I'm okay. Things start to seem real again. I stop paying attention to the wheel and the water, and when I glance back, they are no longer there. The music no longer produces a physical sensation, but just sounds like music again.
Suddenly I had the 3rd burst of revelation (going to the 4th and final plane of existence, real reality), and this one felt like waking up from a dream within a dream. (Like, the previous coming back to reality had been not entirely real, like how when you wake up in a dream, and then wake up again and realize that you had just woken up into another dream). I had some minor doubts that *this* was finally the real reality, but it seemed like it was, and it was, as a matter of fact. I saw that I was in bed, rather than standing up and talking to my friends, and my first thought was a sense of relief, a thought of "Oh good, I wasn't really standing up and interacting with imaginary things and saying weird things to my friends and stuff. I had just imagined that." At this point I could move around and sort of talk again, but the feeling of weirdness was still there, and all I could say was, "Holy shit! Mindfuck! Man, aw fuck!! That was crazy!" Now, as the previous terror subsided (the shock and terror of being suddenly thrust into new planes of brutal existence and going basically from age 1 to age 21 in 3 minutes), I now had a feeling of superego-fear and paranoia that this feeling of "weirdness" would never go away, and that I'd have to write papers and go to class and live the rest of my life in this real, yet weird state with this lingering disorienting dreaminess. That fear lasted a few minutes. I was suddenly pretty thirsty, and I could still taste the Salvia in my mouth, and I had this idea that it might help get it out of my system more quickly by getting that taste out of my mouth, so I drank some water, and sat down and started to try to explain some of this experience to my friend, just as, meanwhile, the other friend was firing his experience up. I remember thinking, unsettled/distressed, "Noooo!!!! What is he doing???!! He doesn't know what's about to happen! He's not ready!"
I went on discussing my experience in a soft voice, so as to not disturb my friend's experience (although he apparently did hear some of what I was saying because his experience was structured by a wheel as well, just as I was talking about my wheel experience to my friend. Oops, sorry! (But I had to vent at least some of what I had experienced. There was no way I could keep this to myself. If my friend had wanted an undisturbed experience, it might have worked better if he had waited just a bit longer until I had told some of my experience and come totally down from it. Anyways, if you are reading this, sorry for the interference!).
So, anyways, after a few more minutes, that sense of paranoia went away, and I felt like my old self again, and I felt relieved, and now a little cleansed by the whole experience. I guess you could call this the "5th level," real reality without any lingering weirdness or paranoia. But it wasn't realized by any sudden transition, but just a gradual, but very distinct shaking off of a weird feeling.
All of what I have described took place in about 10 minutes. It felt muuuuuuch longer than that, but that's not to say that things were happening any less rapidly. They were still rapid and overwhelming. It was just so much stuff crammed into that window of subjective experience, even if that subjective experience seemed to last longer and seemed like it should have allowed for more stuff than the time duration of real reality. But maybe this longer subjective duration was an illusion created by precisely the fact that there was so much stuff going on. I don't know.
I continued to be very talkative for the rest of the night, trying to convey a fraction of what had befallen me.
I slept very well last night/this morning and woke up feeling pretty sharp.
Will I ever do Salvia again? Probably not. Do I recommend Salvia? I think this account speaks for itself. If it intrigues you, and you want to take the plunge, then go for it. But be warned that, as far as I can tell, there's no way to fully prepare for it and stay fully in control during a "breakthrough." You might set up a nice setting and whatnot, and you might remind yourself beforehand that, for example, "Satan doesn't exist, don't get freaked out if he shows up," and that might guide your brain's innermost, non-conscious processes to give you a gentler experience, but if Satan actually does show up, that reminder will be worth jack squat because you won't be the same person who went into this experience confident that Satan would not trip you up. Your real life could possibly be all out of touch from you, and you won't know that this thing in front of you doesn't really exist. Now that I realize things like this, is this one reason why I probably won't ever do Salvia ever again. If I got half-terrified at points during my thematically-neutral trip, I can only imagine what it would be like to experience the 2nd level (ego without a life history or outside knowledge) with a malevolent theme. The 1st level might not be too bad, because you wouldn't be able to make sense of fear, evil, potential for harm, etc. anyways, and the 3rd level might be a little scary, but you could always remind yourself that it's just a hallucination. But in the 2nd level, you'd never know, and you'd be to the point where you are attuned to its malevolent meaning.
That said, even if you meet Satan, it's only like 3 minutes of Satan (although it could feel longer...but it will have an end (although you won't know that in the moment, but meh...) And there's also the potential for very thematically-positive experiences, like, for the Mazatec Indians, meeting the Virgin Mary. And there are probably ways to prep your subconscious mind for that. In any case, maybe it's like one of those things that everyone should do once, just because the pontential for bad is finite, but the wonder and reflection of it all will stay with you for a long time afterwards. (It's by no means a recreational drug. It's more like making yourself into a research lab and performing a mental/psychological/philosophical experiment on yourself). I do see diminishing returns from having any more than one "breakthrough," though, which is why I probably won't be doing it again, even though I found this trip worthwhile.
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Addendum:
Here are many reflections on my experience and its philosophical/psychological implications:
Hmmm, after thinking it over a little more, it seems the issue of ideal forms might be a little more complicated than I first presumed.
Consider that I already could recognize the wheel *as* a wheel, with wheel-like characteristics (roundness, rotation), without having experienced other wheels from which to make this generalization. How could I have distinguished the outlines of wheelness or of the wheel-like object without having previously seen wheels? Where did the concept of the "game" come from? Were empiricial experiences and conceptualizations from my real life filtering back into this trip, somehow subconsciously, unbeknownst to me at the time? Even during the 1st stage, I came ready-made with the capability (but not the awareness) of climbing. How had I acquired that capability? (Perhaps now you can see how this can be such a mindfuck).
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Hmmm, I've thought about the ideal forms a bit more, and considering that they slid back into place at the same time as the ego, that suggests that one is not dependent on the other, but rather that they are co-incident, and that perhaps the ego itself is an artificially constructed ideal form, created by our minds as a shorthand for keeping track of our complex organism's actions and for providing continuity in this.
After all, Plato's ideal forms were concerned with explaining how particulars can be grouped into universals:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_universals
If you think about the Ship of Theseus paradox:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_paradox
you realize that we are not really the same material entity, moment to moment. We are physically changing, our cells are replacing themselves. Our material being at one moment is a particular than can not easily be equated with our being at another moment, at least not without resorting to the universal, the ideal form, of the ego. Without the ideal form of ego, we might not be able to bridge this change with a sensation of continuity. So perhaps the ego is a brain module that has been selected for by evolution in the higher-order animals in order to facilitate continuity of thought and perception, so that learning and planning behaviors can be undertaken and so that the animal can perform the behaviors it needs to do in order to survive. Whereas less complex animals might not have this brain module. If fish (or other less complex animals) really do only have a memory of like 7 seconds (such that they basically "begin their lives over again each 7 seconds"), or if they can only respond to immediate stimuli, then this might explain, psychologically, how this might work and what that might feel like for them.
Which makes me think, it's possible that my Trieb state was slightly longer than I remember, but perhaps the parts farther back were forgotten (perhaps that explains the vague, unsubstantial phase that I experienced immediately before that). Indeed, it has seemed a bit of a mystery to me that I was able to remember anything from this state, seeing as I had no way to keep myself continuously reminded of it or conscious of it as it was happening. Perhaps the only reason I was able to remember it was because it was immediately followed by an ego state where I was able to quickly reflect on it.
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Perhaps that also explains the feeling of time travel or actually reliving those moments of Trieb-state when remembering them from the ego state. Perhaps it was because it was the first point when I, as a conscious ego, was living those experiences.
Even more radically, perhaps what I remember as the Trieb state was not actually the Trieb state itself, but the first stirrings of my ego immediately reflecting on my Trieb state, trying to catch up, as it were (because apparently (I read this in a youtube comment, so I have no idea if this is true) Salvinorin A, the psychoactive ingredient in Salvia, works on the kappa-opioid receptors, which which causes the brain to not receive all of the essential signals and "micro-stutter," sort of like lag in a computer, giving the brain several options: either try to retransmit the data, or skip the data. So it was probably, at first, just skipping a lot of data, and perhaps the step where the brain's processor writes the data to its RAM was initially interfered with, or skipped, but then once these circuits started becoming operational again, the brain had to catch up on some of this data (thereby, in a sense, reliving it)), and then perhaps the real feeling of revelation came when the ego ran out of lagged data to re-process, and discovered that it could take in new data and reflect on it in real time.
But I think the time travel meant that I was experiencing the moments twice, both in the Trieb state, and in the ego state. Or perhaps twice in the ego state, once in an automatic reprocessing sort of way, and after the revelation of being able to consciously manipulate new data (instead of just consciously record it), I went back in my ego again and this time reflected on the Trieb data consciously, and perhaps it only felt like time travel because my attention was focused. Who knows? There are many possibilities.
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From wikipedia:
"The Id comprises the unorganized part of the personality structure that contains the basic drives. The id acts as a pleasure principle: if not compelled by reality it seeks immediate enjoyment.[3] It is focused on selfishness and instant self-gratification."
No, this is just plain wrong. Drive does not seek pleasure. Drive is its own justification, or rather, outside of the need for any instrumental justification. That's what's meant by "drive," it just drives you. It does not stop and reflect on pleasure. The Id does not seek pleasure--it's the ego that seeks pleasure. After all, why would Trieb seek pleasure? It would do it no good. What is the function of pleasure? Is it not so that you think, "Oh, this felt good, I want to do it again," or "Oh, this felt bad, I want to avoid it in the future."? But how would this function if you don't have an ego that can register concepts such as "pleasure, " "good," "bad," and that can remember things as a continuous "I" into the future? The Id just takes a summary of the body's state and the sensory stimuli at any given moment, and reflexively, and un-reflectively, responds to that stimuli in a quasi-robotic, quasi-programmed way. The Id cannot remember pleasurable experiences from the past--it cannot even register what a pleasurable experience is. At least, that is my experience.
"The Ego acts according to the reality principle; i.e. it seeks to please the id’s drive in realistic ways that will benefit in the long term rather than bringing grief."
I would put it somewhat differently. Rather, the Id does not seek things for pleasure--its is not instrumental and reflective in this respect, but direct. It directly seeks the things it is programmed by instinct to seek. The ego is then subservient to this Id and is programmed to identify itself with the Id's drives and derive pleasure from figuring out clever, longer-term ways to accomplish the Id's drives.
Which raises an interesting possibility: an ego that refuses to be subservient to the Id, but rather, finds other ways of obtaining pleasure. This would mean that we would lose pleasure from eating, sleeping, watching out instinctually from our social standing, etc. In other words, we would no longer be looking out for our biological being, unless we saw an abstract, ego-centered reason for doing so. It would mean the ruin of our "normal" lives and possibly the end of our life itself. It would manifest itself as something incredibly pathological---like someone obsessed with music or philosophy who didn't care to eat or sleep or drink. There are a million different ways that this could manifest itself---its limits being determined only by the inventiveness of the ego.
For this reason, I would have to conclude that the Id is not something to be struggled with or opposed (as is commonly assumed, especially in our post-Victorian culture), but rather, you'd do well to hope that you really did have an assertive Id that was driving your ego, and that this connection was solid.
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So, because it is the exercise of the ego in the service of the Id that produces pleasure, we can imagine situations where the Id is satisfied (we obtain food, sleep, etc), but where our ego is not necessary for obtaining these and is not exercised, and therefore we experience no pleasure from satisfying our drives in this way.
What am I saying? We do not need to "imagine" such situations--they already exist in abundance around us. Industrial capitalism, paradoxically both the wealthiest and the most miserable epoch of humanity to-date, is very good at producing goods to satisfy drives, but very poor at exercising the ego in this endeavor. This explains why working at a mindless job is unfulfilling. One might think, "Oh, but you are earning money to buy food and a place to live. You are living the good life. Why can't you enjoy that?" It's because the ego was not exercised in the attainment of these drives.
Games are a way of the ego inventing challenge for itself so that it can exercise itself in the service of the Id. For example, imagine you have a grand table of food presented in front of you. All you have to do is walk over to the table and start eating. But there's no strategy involved, no exercise of the ego. So the ego says to itself, "Hey, let's say I have to do 2 cartwheels and count to 100 in German before I can have that food." Then you do the game, you feel a sense of accomplishment, and the food actually tastes pleasurable. (Whereas, otherwise, even the tastiest food might have tasted tasteless).
Remember that, during my 2nd level, I continued climbing the wheel, but it became a game. At first I was confused by this because I assumed that games would be caused by the ego evaluating itself against a standard set by a superego, and "winning the game" meant fulfilling the expectations of the superego. And, remember, that the superego didn't make its return until the 3rd level. But no, genuine *fun* games have nothing to do with the superego, but rather the Id. Indeed, a game is apt to become most unfun the minute it is turned into a superego injuction.
In any case, even Id-directed games are not an entirely wholesome fix. They entail the ego lying to itself---they entail ego irrationality. It is possible that the habit of judging irrationally with the ego could be deeply corrosive to the ego's ability to understand and analyze reality, which is the ego's essential function. Another reason games are also probably never a total substitute for the real thing is because there's always probably a portion of the ego that knows all along that it's a game. I doubt the ego can truly trick itself totally in this respect. Nevertheless, inventing games to satisfy the ego is probably better than having no ego satisfaction at all. Games are a coping mechanism.
Games are also a symptom of the real, fundamental problem: the lack of an environment that naturally exercises the ego, where drives are challenging to achieve but obtainable.
This does not entail an opposition to progress, to increasing one's (or a society's) productivity. In doing activity that increases the productivity of society, the ego will feel very satisfied from doing productive, strategic, clever work in order to better ensure the attainment of drives in the future. It will be able to reflect on its past efforts and feel satisfaction, recognizing the connection between its past efforts and the current satisfaction of the Id. (This, by the way, suggests a solid psychological reason for why "alienation" in the labor process feels unpleasant. You need to be able to consciously recognize the connection between the ego's efforts and the Id's satisfaction.)
What this does suggest about progress, however, is that it must be tangibly connected to one's efforts (so, for example, (and actual case studies bear this out), winning the lottery will not make you happy, unless your ego invested a lot of strategy and expectation on it--which is no more of a prudent course of action because one is likely to fail at this and waste all of this investment and demoralize the ego, more often than not.)
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The type of progress that is not apt to be satisfying to the ego is the type where, either, things keep on getting better without your input, or where you quit trying to progress and just decide that you've achieved enough progress, and now you can just sit back forever and let the fruits roll in. In the latter case, you will initially still feel satisfaction, but after a while, unless the maintenance of your level of progress comes to require the exercise of your ego, you will cease to derive pleasure from your steady-state. I fear that this is the situation of the advanced capitalist countries---if we wanted to, we could mostly stop working and satisfy our desires thanks to our current, stagnant level of productivity. The only way to employ our egos, aside from inventing countless games (which we do as well), is to strive for ever-higher levels of productivity. At some point, we will reach a physical resource ceiling on that. And what then???
Note: This also explains why unemployment-as-such, and also underemployment and employment that is perceived as pointless, are felt to be pernicious and deadening and depressing. But nor is it enough to give someone a contrived job of shuffling papers from one pile to the other and back again. The job has to be visibly, tangibly, consciously connected to the satisfaction of the person's Id. (If a task cannot help but be complex and many-sequenced, then perhaps helping a person's rational mind understand the role of his/her task in the broader production process would be sufficient for making the ego feel like it is usefully serving the Id.)
So, to consider an actual example, let's look at me: I'm doing lots of productive schoolwork (I'm certainly not living in complete sloth), so my ego should feel exercised and satisfied, right?
Well, the first problem is that, except for rare papers that I write that have a personal connection (such as if they have political or philosophical significance that I care about), I don't visibly recognize how my ego's efforts on those papers satisfy my drives (and it's possible that they actually don't satisfy my drives at all, even indirectly), whereas if the paper addresses come political theme, I can understand how, indirectly, that helps bolster the political project, which might eventually help me.
Ordinarily, if I didn't recognize the tangible way in which an activity of my ego was serving my Id, then my ego would not feel compelled to do the activity. I'd procrastinate and not feel like doing it. And this is indeed what happens, until...
The superego intervenes, forcing my ego to do the activity. The ego is now working to serve the superego with this task, not the Id, so the ego derives none of the satisfaction from the activity, only the relief of having temporarily escaped the roving gaze of the superego yet again.
The model hitherto postulated has been that the ego, in its normal, healthy state, must serve both the Id and the superego at the same time. I'm starting to think that this is actually a pathological state, rooted in our particular class society.
What I imagine is a different arrangement: the superego serving the ego, and the ego serving the Id. The superego can do much productive work in this regard. The ego cannot easily comprehend what other people in society are thinking or expecting---the ego is inherently self-centered, and this is appropriate for its role. But the ego does need to know this information about other people's mental states and social expectations, one way or the other, in order to perform rationally in a social context (and human beings are the most social animals of all). That's where the superego comes in. (Likewise, other social animals, such as dogs, probably have a well-developed superego as well, which maybe partly explains their extraordinary ability to read the emotions of other dogs and even humans across the species barrier! You can see the dog's superego at work whenever they exhibit the guilty, sulking face and whatnot.)
This is now my contention: in its healthy state, the superego is no more than an empathy-generator. It gives the ego a sense of what other people are thinking and feeling and expecting. It does this indirectly by making us feel the effect of morality, or what we might call a "conscience." If our ego is not trained to be skeptical, if our ego is used to being submissive to the superego, then the ego will interpret this morality or conscience as an absolute injunction given by an absolute, omnipotent authority. But if our ego is trained in skepticism, and it is not pathologically submissive to the superego, then the ego will interpret the superego's injunction as advice based on the superego's empathetic reading of the other complex, sentient beings with which one is interacting. (Non-sentient beings are less complex, and are easy enough to understand as mechanical forces for the ego to account for them).
The alert, skeptical, insightful ego can rationally weigh the options: for example, would I more effectively serve the Id by stealing this piece of food from my friend, or is that friend likely to react in a way that harms my overall ability to serve the Id in the future? If the superego detects that the friend will be mean and angry towards you anyways, your superego might present your ego with a feeling of disdain or hatred or envy, and you might be tempted to take the food anyways. If the superego judges that the other person has a mental state/constitution that will be conducive to mutual cooperation, the superego will serve the ego with a feeling of deep affection and bonding, and you will not judge it wise to steal the food.
How does the ego become submissive to the superego, and how does the ego become infected with fear of the superego? I'm not quite sure, but perhaps it has something to do with:
1. The advent of transcendent Gods. Your superego tries to figure out this infinitely powerful member of your sociality (that could potentially inflict severe pain on you), and the superego can't figure this God out since this God is held to be transcendence and unknowable. And so the superego becomes infected with fear, and the ego looks to the superego for guidance, but receives none, except a vague feeling of fear, and the ego keeps on looking back on and on ever more urgently, but all it receives is a feeling of fear, and pretty soon the ego becomes obsessed with figuring out the source of this fear, and it becomes fixated on the superego???
(Whereas a superego might be able to cope with an anthropomorphic God with anthropomorphic finiteness and faults and personality and whatnot...and when it comes to animistic, quasi-mechanical Gods, maybe even the plain-old ego would be suited for it. At the worst, placating an animistic god with rituals would be like having the ego invent a game for itself: "Okay, this field won't produce a harvest unless I sacrifice a goat to this God...okay, now I've accomplished that, I feel satisfied, now we have the god's favor (and we think we know this with certainty because it is held to be an animistic/mechanical/quasi-naturalistic god), and it will just depend on the rain to see if we get a good harvest.")
2. Child-parent relationships. At first, the child's relationship to the parent is likely to be like the human's relationship to an incomprehensible god, so maybe a certain amount of chronic fear and suprego fixation is unavoidable at a certain age. But, assuming nothing traumatic happens, the child grows up to possess the hallmark of adulthood--a calm and collected superego that serves the ego, instead of a fearful ego that serves a fearful superego.
3. Powerful leaders/states/groups in human society. When leaders/groups become powerful enough, they can act with irrational impunity, leading to a situation that closely models the previous two examples.
These are just some ideas. I'm really not sure at all (well, I'm not sure about any of this, but especially this part).
BTW, I think #3 suggests the psychological basis for anarchism. It is possible that anarchism (along with atheism and non-patriarchical family relations) are essential for our mental well-being.
So is it possible that monotheistic, transcendental religion has been nothing more than the world's greatest method of ego-effort-redirection (redirecting our ego's efforts from serving our Id, to serving some superego or God or ruler or set of clergy, etc.)? Furthermore, a method that co-opted natural animistic/pagan impulses, as well as the superego, in order to distort these two potentially useful devices into a tool of ego-effort-redirection and exploitation?
Just think about how, in today's world,
instead of superego --> ego --> Id,
we have our egos choose to sabotage our Id with sleep depression, anorexia, monastic celibacy (less so nowadays), etc., all in order to serve the superego or some God or ruler, with very little if any benefit coming back to our Id in the end (and even if some does come back, our ego is not aware of it and so cannot take joy in it).
So the question becomes, how to get the superego serving the ego once again? I think a good start would be to interrogate the superego in terms of its instrumental usefulness to the ego every single time you feel an injuction from the superego that you "should" do something.
Superego: "You should pray to God daily."
Ego: "How does that serve me?"
Superego: "You're missing the point. You should love God just for goodness sake!"
Ego: "Sorry, I'm not going to do anything unless I can see how it at least indirectly serves my mission of serving the Id."
Superego: "Oh, fine...well, you see, God will make you burn in hell if you don't."
Ego: "Why would he do that? And how do I know he really exists?"
Superego: "The mind and substance of God is unknowable!"
Ego: "Well, sheesh, a lot of help you are...why am I even listening to you anyways if you can't do your job of translating to me, in a language and system of incentives and feelings that I can understand, what other entities are thinking and what it would be rational for me to do about it? I'm going to ignore you whenever you are not providing me with some comprehensible insight...but insofar as you explain yourself, I will take your explanations into account."
Most people currently have this idea that the superego is naturally irrational. I think a hijacked, obfuscated superego can be irrational, but an effective superego should at least make intuitive sense and also be able to be interrogated by the ego. In principle, the ego could find out everything about other people's mental states that the superego can, but it would take much longer for the ego's analytical, reductionist methods to come to any conclusions, whereas the superego can obtain reasonably accurate conclusions using shorthand rules-of-thumb (which are probably partly programmed from evolution and thus partly innate), as long as the superego is not used to address questions for which it is not suited, such as probing the mind of a transcendental God and taking account of that God's potential effects. This suggests that it is not useful or advisable to try to extend morality, which is a product of the superego, to encompass the transcendental and divine absolute. Rather, feelings of morality are to be heeded only when they apply to mundane interactions between people. And we should occasionally interrogate this morality with egoistic rationality, just to let our egos make sure that our superegos have not been supplying bat-shit-insane rules of thumb, or rules-of-thumb for social conduct that are horribly obsolete now that we have moved out of our recent evolutionary context (paleolithic clan living).
So, there are actually two distinct kinds of irrationality: Id-irrationality and superego-irrationality. (Or rather, we should speak of "Id-nonrationality," because the Id has no self-evaluation along that scale. It has its own, self-justifying, given logic that has to do with our innate drives that are, presumably unchanging from our birth--the most basic aspects of survival and reproduction).
So, declaring "I desire X (not instrumentally in order to achieve something else, but rather, directly, for its own sake)," such as food, water, sleep, etc...that is Id-nonrationality. Equally, "I do not desire X" (directly, not for instrumental reasons (if it's for instrumental reasons, then you know it's the ego that is saying that). This is the sort of irrationality or non-rationality that we might as well accept or even celebrate. So, if you are sexually aroused by men and you desire sex with them in a direct way, for its own sake, (not for instrumental, strategic, ego-driven reasons), well, that's your Id talking, so you might as well embrace that nonrational desire and set your ego to the task of figuring out how to fulfill it.
This is completely different than "I *should* desire X" or "I *should not* desire X. That's your superego talking. If we happen to interrogate this statement with our ego and find that it has no reason behind it, that it is irrational, then we would do well to discard the superego's advice in this circumstance and not allow ourselves to be troubled by its remonstrances. So we hear "I *should not* desire sex with men." Our ego asks itself, "Why? How would that harm me and my quest for gaining pleasure through serving my Id, which very much has a drive to have sex with men?" If the ego or superego can't respond with reasons, then this injuction must be discarded. A helpful superego would respond with, "Well, most other people in our society don't like homosexual sex. I mean, trust me, they reeeeeeeaaaaally don't like other people having homosexual sex, for various reasons, and they will do much harm to you (and thus prevent the Id from pursuing its other Drives) if you try it." The rational ego would then weigh these consequences, and either go ahead with the sex if it deemed the rewards greater than the risks, or if not, then possibly figure out some of the reasons why those people don't like homosexuals having sex, figure out of there's some way to change that (which would mean having another dialog with the superego and investigating its sense of morality). Or, if the ego recognized that there were other, more urgent Drives of the Id to satisfy, then the ego would set about on some new task and just drop the whole intention of having homosexual sex for the time being.
So, notice, aside from prohibiting things, the superego can equally say, "You *should* desire X." I think this is the heart of the problem that Zizek talks about, where the new psychological problem of post-modern capitalism is the superego injunction to "enjoy." No, "enjoying" will not feel enjoyable unless it is done as the ego serving the Id (rather than the ego serving the superego).
Perhaps this suggests the psychological basis of that feeling that we call "freedom." Perhaps it is the sensation of being able to cleverly and strategically exercise the full powers of one's ego (which is empowered, but not determined, by the superego's advice) in order to serve one's Id Drives.
Finally, I feel like I have resolved a philosophical issue that has been tormenting me for this whole school year. I was continually sensing an affinity for irrationality in some circumstances, but a complete opposite revulsion towards irrationality in other circumstances. I felt myself becoming rootless, not knowing how to operate---concluding to myself that ultra-rationality was the only advisable way, but at the same time practicing certain daily irrationalities out of habit and intuitive choice. Now I understand that there are some irrationalities that I can wholeheartedly pursue, that will not lead me astray from happiness, namely the Id-irrationalities, and that there are, indeed, irrationalities that will harm my happiness and that I would do well to resolve with my completely rational, egoistic ego (just as it normally should be).
So, love is irrational, right? But now I know that expressing "I love you" (as simply a gleeful expression, without any egoistic, manipulative, strategic, instrumental intent) is fine. Whereas, thinking "I know I *should* love you...but why don't I? What is wrong with me?" is problematic, unless the ego can find a very good instrumental reason for taking this attitude.
Likewise, irrational organicism that one directly feels and pursues is fine. (Example: "I feel a direct (non-instrumental) Drive or desire to immerse myself in the organic wholesomeness of the outdoor beauty of the Ozarks.") Organicism that one seeks for instrumental, egoistic reasons could also be fine, so long as this is rational organicism. (Example: "Going 'back to the Land in my Heimat, the Ozarks, will clear my mind, improve my eating habits and health, and help me finish this research paper, which in turn will help me serve my Id's Drives by getting me a future job, future employment, and money"). Whereas irrational organicism that one feels a superego injunction to possess, or irrational organicism that has irrational moral implications, will be problematic. (Example: "I should feel love for my Ozark Heimat, and so should all others, or else they are untermensch and should be killed.")
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Ah, if only we were still forced to hunt wild deer for food in order to survive, we could know the true satisfaction of satisfying our hunger thanks to the brilliant cleverness of our rational ego.
(Whereas modern deer hunting is a type of game where our ego has to trick itself into thinking that this hunting is actually necessary to obtain the meat...even when done with bow-and-arrow...actually, especially when done with bow-and-arrow, because that requires the added self-trickery of imagining that one doesn't have any better tools that one could use. At least when you use a rifle, you are being honest to yourself about that...although the sport or gamesmanship of it is lessened because of that. Really, the more you try to go back to that primitive life, the more of a game of self-trickery it is. That's another reason why I really wonder about the efficacy of "going back to the land" with some sort of commune or something. Unless we could make it productive in a practical way, I fear that we'd always have this nagging feeling in us that the only reason we were able to do this is because we live in an industrial society of abundance, and that our happiness didn't really depend on our efforts on the land, and that we could leave it any time we wanted, such that it would take self-trickery to convince ourselves that it was a meaningful endeavor. Don't get me wrong, it would indeed be pleasant. But it would also need to require the cleverness and constructiveness of our egos in order to be really satisfying. Perhaps fixing up a house would fulfill that requirement.
Even so, there's no way to really go back to that primitive, precarious, troubled, and yet acutely satisfying way of life (living off the fruits of a farm and not begrudging it with the thought that you could be doing all these other things in the city) without doing away with modern society entirely, and I do not think that would be worth it. I continue to hold out hope that we can find additional ways of satisfying our egos in modern, industrial, information society. We just need to make a few modifications to our lifestyles, our culture, and our political and social systems.)
The sparknotes summary: Freud was completely right, Kant and Plato were completely wrong, and Bach's harpsichord solo from the Brandenburg Concerto No. 5 was waaaay too overwhelming to have playing during a Salvia experience. Or perhaps it was just right. It was not an unpleasant experience, just bat-shit-insane extreme.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VxzY3tFTz9k
That's what I chose to have playing. I had a feeling that the absolute mathematical perfection and periodicity of the piece, its chord progressions, etc., would be perfect for comfortably structuring the experience. I thought that it would be better to have something that is totally predictable and that comfortably fills up the room with a warm sound, than to risk having random noise interruptions come into play. To a certain extent, I think I was prudent in this respect, although the part about 1:54 into the piece, where he's going down the scales and doing that sort of electric guitar solo sort of thing, that was waaaay overwhelming, and literally impacted me physically as a sort of waterfall washing over me.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. First, the background:
Salvia is an entheogenic dissociative hallucinogen, traditionally used by the Mazatec Indians of Oaxaca for generations, and just recently discovered by Western science and Western drug culture. For more background on Salvia, watch this documentary:
Sacred Weeds:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4829797616419921428
Fortunately, Salvia is not regulated (Yet) under Federal law, nor (yet) under Massachusetts law. (I say "yet" because, like I said, this drug is relatively new to Western culture, and lately states have been rushing to make it illegal. It has already been made illegal in Missouri, for example. Now, in my opinion, that's completely unnecessary, and probably counter-productive. This substance is not addictive (trust me, there's no way in hell this thing could be addictive), you are as harmless as a puppy to others while you are on it (usually completely immobilized, and if mobile at all, then completely uncoordinated (if not totally unaware of your surroundings) and only a potential harm to yourself if there happen to be things like open flames or sharp objects that you could bumble into (which is a reason why it's advisable to have a sitter with you). Additionally, Salvia only lasts 5-10 minutes, it is non-toxic, it has no known side effects, aside from a potential for some minor headaches afterwards and sweating during the experience, and there are no known adverse long-term effects. Anyways, because it is currently legal in Massachusetts, that's why I feel perfectly comfortable discussing this on facebook and elsewhere. The free exchange of information and experiences is an important reason for keeping it legal, if nothing else. At least people will be able to educate themselves about it before they do it.
News reports suggesting that people "get impaired judgment" on this stuff or that people would be a "danger on the road" are laughable. If you take a reasonable dose, you will have NO judgments at all and NO ability to physically do anything, much less even attempt to drive a car. I'm sure some idiot somewhere at some point will take a mild dose and then try to drive a car and kill someone, but there are thousands of idiots who abuse alcohol and get themselves and others killed. We can't make the whole world idiot-proof, and there will always be idiots, so we just need to deal with them as they come along. Obviously, driving on Salvia should be illegal, I don't think anyone would dispute that. And maybe you would want to regulate Salvia so that there is an age requirement for buying it, because you really do need to be an informed adult to mess with this stuff. But should it be made totally illegal? No, of course not.
Now, given that it's currently legal and has no major side effects, why would I not want to take it ever again? Because one "breakthrough" is more than enough, oh boy. The experience was so goddamn intense, the thought of doing it again just seems inconceivable right now.
Last night was actually my second time doing it, but the first time I did it, I didn't do as much (only half a bowl of 10x extract) or inhale as well, and I got a much milder effect. That time, I was listening to Bach's "Air" from Suite No. 3:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CyLo9-Voy5s
Naturally, that was also bound to facilitate a gentler experience. Basically, that time, I never lost my ego or my grounding in reality. I felt a little dreamy, like an elusive "something" was happening, but I maintained a consistent train of consciousness throughout. There were no "discontinuous functions" of existence, if you will, just gentle, sloping functions. When I would open my eyes, everything continued to look as before, although there was a moment where there seemed to be a clear, viscous, rotating fluid filling the room, barely perceptible to my vision, like dissolved sugar in water. The one other notable moment in that 5-minute experience was one where I got a distinct emotional feeling of tender, innocent, and eager, quasi-erotic puppy love well up in me for a brief moment--the sort of feeling I had at first with my very first girlfriend, and that I've never quite felt since. I remember gently biting my lip at this point, sort of like when you are aroused during a sexual act. It was a rewarding, wholesome moment, a revisitation of something I now realize I've lost to a certain extent, and something that I would like to rediscover, if at all possible. After that, there was a point where another friend walked in (there were already 3 friends trip-sitting for me in the room. We were all taking turns). I remember hearing his steps in the hallway and it seeming like the steps were echoing in some reaaaaally reaaaaaally long cavern. When he walked in, I opened my eyes and mumbled to him with a grin, "Howdy thar" and I sort of gestured to him with a sort of salute, and at that moment I was overcome with giggles galore. The juxtaposition of the baroque music, all my friends sitting there in a college dorm room, and my "howdy thar" all seemed so incredibly ridiculous. So I pretty much gleefully giggled for the rest of the time, for half a minute or so, until I had more or less come out of it. I came away feeling that it was a very worthwhile experience. Not exactly "pleasurable," but it upwelled some wholesome emotions in me and gave me some reflections on that puppy-love feeling that I've been missing in life.
This second time was, I guess, "worthwhile" too, but in a totally different way. Again, none of it was "pleasant" or "unpleasant" in a sensory sort of way. It was just incredibly shocking.
I went into this second time thinking that it would be a bit like the first. I didn't really have a strong desire to do it again, but I was curious to see what would happen this time, and we had a little bit left, so we figured we might as well use up the rest of it (this time, I had 2 friends with me, trip-sitting and waiting to go for their turn).
I did about 3/4 of a bowl of the same 10x extract. It was nothing like the first. Well, I was also listening to a more energetic Bach piece, and I was a little keyed-up, but tired, after having had a busy week, so maybe that influenced it.
Here's the narrative:
I take two hits on the pipe. I could already feel some of the first effects during my second hit. My friends start the music. I lay down, close my eyes. A period of time elapses that seems vague, lacking in substance, and long, like when you go to sleep, wake up, but can't remember dreaming anything, but yet at the same time, not like those times where you just blink and wake back up again. You have a vague awareness that some time has passed, but that is all. In this case, even though it felt long, I have been able to ascertain (from reconstructing the timeline from my memory of the later parts of the song playing--and the song was only a little over 3 minute long) that this part must have been like only 10 seconds. Then...
Next thing "I" can remember, "I" am trying to climb up and upon the floor and the music, which are both physically integrated as a sort of big wheel. But not only am I hallucinating--I am hallucinating not even as "myself" who understands what a hallucination is.
I say "I" or "myself" in quotation marks because I had no concept of "I" at this point. I had heard of people talk about this sort of state before, of being separated from the ego, and I used to think, "Ah, that's bullshit, how would that even work? The ego is, like, fundamental to existence. They've got to be imagining all of this stuff." I never really believed in Freudian psychology...until now.
My consciousness was a complete blank-slate. Everything I had known and experienced from my entire life before that was gone, and I was totally lacking in any awareness of that absence in the first place. That moment felt like the beginning of my entire existence, and yet I had no concept of a beginning of an existence at the time. All of this I'm telling you know is from my re-realizations that occurred to me after I had reached the 2nd plane of consciousness and was looking back on my immediate past from the 1st plane of consciousness. What do I mean by "planes of consciousness"?
*1st plane of consciousness: I am an id without an ego or a superego. I have no self-reflection, no Vernunft (Reason), no Wille (Will), no awareness that "I" am an id, no awareness of what an "I", an "id", or an "ego" would be. I don't have a concept of culminative feelings, such as pleasure or pain. All I have is "Drive." Trieb (to use the Freudian term in the original German). All "I" had was aversion or attraction to acting on stimuli, with no awareness that this wheel that I am trying to climb constitutes a "stimuli" or that I have a "Trieb" that I am responding to in the first place. I had no idea why I was trying to climb the wheel, nor any concept of why I would need to have a reason to climb the wheel, nor any idea of what constituted a "wheel," or "climbing" or cause-and-effect, or something as "space-like" or "time-like" or anything. I try to climb the wheel, not because I anticipate renewed pleasure from doing so, nor because I am aware of a drive to do so, but just because that drive is there, driving me (of course, nor do I have any concept of "it", as a foreign force, driving "me." It's not foreign, it's just all there is, and I'm not even aware of it at this point. And besides, although I had perfectly vivid and precise sensory information coming at me (in other words, even though I had no categories of reason to structure it, the "world" as I knew it was still there as clear as ever), I would have been incapable of picking out this Trieb as something distinct from any other stimulus. All there was was the totality of stimuli, without any essential or categorical markers. Only after later reflection could I distinguish, for example, one aspect of the total stimulus as a "wheel" with essential wheel-like characteristics. I consider this to be a resounding rebuttal to Plato's idea of the "ideal forms" as fundamental to existence. Au contraire, my friend, apparently there can conceivably be existence outside of ideal forms. The material world is fundamental, and we manufacture ideal forms to summarize all of this stimulus so as to figure out a short-hand for how the world's cause-and effect-works so that we can react to it.
At this point, as far as I could tell, this was the only existence that "I" had ever experienced (but I wasn't even able to self-reflect on it, nor was I aware of a lack of ability to do so). I now imagine that this is what it feels like to be a lizard, an ant, or a lobotomized human.
The first searing burst of revelation came after getting myself over one of the nodes of the wheel (the wheel had nodes like a paddle wheel (the paddles are the nodes) or a ferris wheel (the passenger cars are the nodes). As I came up over the node, an entire new filter of existence opened up before me. Suddenly all of the shapes "slid" into their ideal forms. I recognized the wheel as a wheel. And I recognized myself as an "I". This burst of revelation was like being a devoted Catholic all your life, and suddenly learning without a doubt that God doesn't exist. It was like this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDgXQPxzY8E
Now began the most interesting portion of my experience, the 2nd level of consciousness, me as an ego and with reason, but still without my life history. I began to reflect on my experiences that I just had during my 1st level of consciousness as one would reflect on an eternity of existence (at this time, my 1st and 2nd level existences were all that I knew). I had perfect, vivid memory of this 1st level time (and even now, I fortunately still have fairly vivid memory of the whole thing, even the earliest pre-ego stage, but I am writing this down now the day after, partly in order to also get this recorded, lest details slip away from me). I also began to reflect on my current existence around me, the wheel of the floor and the music spinning, which was still the center of my attention, and which I was still trying to climb, but now I found pleasure in it, and a desire to do more of it, and it became a rewarding sort of game to be doing it. At this point, I thought nothing strange of the fact that the music was physically integrated with the floor and that I was climbing on it. Also, time would often seem to slow down or speed up depending on how fast the wheel was turning, as if those two things were mechanically connected as well. And when I would ponder my immediately preceding pre-ego existence, it was as if I could really time-travel and relive those moments again momentarily, but this time as my 2nd-level self with my 2nd-level self-reflection (I still had no concept of "levels," per se, just that the previous segment of existence was very very strange). Also, I had no idea that anything was particularly strange about this reality around me, with me climbing on the music and doing momentary time-travel and whatnot. This seemed perfectly normal, just how the world worked. I guess I had no a priori ideas or structures to suggest otherwise. This does not seem to support Kant's case for a priori structures for perceiving existence, am I right?
After a few moments of this, I rounded another node on the wheel and got my 2nd and most shocking searing burst of re-realization: an awareness of my entire life history flooded back to me, I realized that there was existence that preceded the 1st level, that I was myself, a college student, and that I had just smoked some Salvia. I saw myself climbing a wheel of floor and music in my friend's dorm room, and realized two things:
1. The world does not actually work like this. I'm tripping balls.
2. I *should* (now with more of the superego tinge of meaning) not be up out of the bed, trying to climb imaginary things, or else I'm going to freak my friends out and look like a psycho. (So, yeah, this is also, apparently, when my superego came flooding back, the most brutal re-realization of them all. Before that, I didn't have any thoughts of "should" or "should not").
So this is when I started to freak out and desperately yearn for the experience to be over. At this point, I'm hallucinating, and I know that I'm hallucinating. I guess that's worse than hallucinating, but being totally unaware, like being totally in the Matrix, vs. being re-introduced to the Matrix.
This is also the point when the Bach harpsichord solo got to the part with the fast descending scales at about 1:55 seconds in. The music now looked and felt like a pillar of water shooting out of my friend's computer, over the wheel, and splashing down from the wheel and drenching me. It was overwhelming and scary, but at the same time I felt elated, kind of like the first time I had an ejaculation. That feeling that your whole body is going into an electrical spasm, and for a split second you think it's too much and that you're not going to be able to withstand it, but also at the same time you like it and feel charged by it. So at this point, I start laughing (both in reality, and in my mental world), and in the real world I try to get up from the bed and reach towards the computer (in reality I had simply been laying there the whole time), and in my mental world I jump from the wheel and run to hug/wrestle with the pillar of music/water. That seemed to relieve some tension. I also at this time realized that it was Bach's harpsichord solo from the Brandenburg Concerto No. 5 that I was listening to, and that I had selected it, and I was thinking to myself "This is way too overwhelming, I should have picked something else...I just need to hold on a little longer, it's almost going to be over." Apparently my friends directed me back onto the bed at this point, and were laughing along with me (I was laughing, and I even kinda remember laughing, even though I felt half-terrified inside. At the time it felt like a release of tension, of the sense of everything being so overwhelming, and a recognition that "I'm not in control yet, I just have to lay back and take it easy and ride it out.) In my mind, I see my friends again, and I think that I am trying to excuse my behavior (my trying to scale the imaginary wheel) and reassure them that I'm okay. Things start to seem real again. I stop paying attention to the wheel and the water, and when I glance back, they are no longer there. The music no longer produces a physical sensation, but just sounds like music again.
Suddenly I had the 3rd burst of revelation (going to the 4th and final plane of existence, real reality), and this one felt like waking up from a dream within a dream. (Like, the previous coming back to reality had been not entirely real, like how when you wake up in a dream, and then wake up again and realize that you had just woken up into another dream). I had some minor doubts that *this* was finally the real reality, but it seemed like it was, and it was, as a matter of fact. I saw that I was in bed, rather than standing up and talking to my friends, and my first thought was a sense of relief, a thought of "Oh good, I wasn't really standing up and interacting with imaginary things and saying weird things to my friends and stuff. I had just imagined that." At this point I could move around and sort of talk again, but the feeling of weirdness was still there, and all I could say was, "Holy shit! Mindfuck! Man, aw fuck!! That was crazy!" Now, as the previous terror subsided (the shock and terror of being suddenly thrust into new planes of brutal existence and going basically from age 1 to age 21 in 3 minutes), I now had a feeling of superego-fear and paranoia that this feeling of "weirdness" would never go away, and that I'd have to write papers and go to class and live the rest of my life in this real, yet weird state with this lingering disorienting dreaminess. That fear lasted a few minutes. I was suddenly pretty thirsty, and I could still taste the Salvia in my mouth, and I had this idea that it might help get it out of my system more quickly by getting that taste out of my mouth, so I drank some water, and sat down and started to try to explain some of this experience to my friend, just as, meanwhile, the other friend was firing his experience up. I remember thinking, unsettled/distressed, "Noooo!!!! What is he doing???!! He doesn't know what's about to happen! He's not ready!"
I went on discussing my experience in a soft voice, so as to not disturb my friend's experience (although he apparently did hear some of what I was saying because his experience was structured by a wheel as well, just as I was talking about my wheel experience to my friend. Oops, sorry! (But I had to vent at least some of what I had experienced. There was no way I could keep this to myself. If my friend had wanted an undisturbed experience, it might have worked better if he had waited just a bit longer until I had told some of my experience and come totally down from it. Anyways, if you are reading this, sorry for the interference!).
So, anyways, after a few more minutes, that sense of paranoia went away, and I felt like my old self again, and I felt relieved, and now a little cleansed by the whole experience. I guess you could call this the "5th level," real reality without any lingering weirdness or paranoia. But it wasn't realized by any sudden transition, but just a gradual, but very distinct shaking off of a weird feeling.
All of what I have described took place in about 10 minutes. It felt muuuuuuch longer than that, but that's not to say that things were happening any less rapidly. They were still rapid and overwhelming. It was just so much stuff crammed into that window of subjective experience, even if that subjective experience seemed to last longer and seemed like it should have allowed for more stuff than the time duration of real reality. But maybe this longer subjective duration was an illusion created by precisely the fact that there was so much stuff going on. I don't know.
I continued to be very talkative for the rest of the night, trying to convey a fraction of what had befallen me.
I slept very well last night/this morning and woke up feeling pretty sharp.
Will I ever do Salvia again? Probably not. Do I recommend Salvia? I think this account speaks for itself. If it intrigues you, and you want to take the plunge, then go for it. But be warned that, as far as I can tell, there's no way to fully prepare for it and stay fully in control during a "breakthrough." You might set up a nice setting and whatnot, and you might remind yourself beforehand that, for example, "Satan doesn't exist, don't get freaked out if he shows up," and that might guide your brain's innermost, non-conscious processes to give you a gentler experience, but if Satan actually does show up, that reminder will be worth jack squat because you won't be the same person who went into this experience confident that Satan would not trip you up. Your real life could possibly be all out of touch from you, and you won't know that this thing in front of you doesn't really exist. Now that I realize things like this, is this one reason why I probably won't ever do Salvia ever again. If I got half-terrified at points during my thematically-neutral trip, I can only imagine what it would be like to experience the 2nd level (ego without a life history or outside knowledge) with a malevolent theme. The 1st level might not be too bad, because you wouldn't be able to make sense of fear, evil, potential for harm, etc. anyways, and the 3rd level might be a little scary, but you could always remind yourself that it's just a hallucination. But in the 2nd level, you'd never know, and you'd be to the point where you are attuned to its malevolent meaning.
That said, even if you meet Satan, it's only like 3 minutes of Satan (although it could feel longer...but it will have an end (although you won't know that in the moment, but meh...) And there's also the potential for very thematically-positive experiences, like, for the Mazatec Indians, meeting the Virgin Mary. And there are probably ways to prep your subconscious mind for that. In any case, maybe it's like one of those things that everyone should do once, just because the pontential for bad is finite, but the wonder and reflection of it all will stay with you for a long time afterwards. (It's by no means a recreational drug. It's more like making yourself into a research lab and performing a mental/psychological/philosophical experiment on yourself). I do see diminishing returns from having any more than one "breakthrough," though, which is why I probably won't be doing it again, even though I found this trip worthwhile.
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Addendum:
Here are many reflections on my experience and its philosophical/psychological implications:
Hmmm, after thinking it over a little more, it seems the issue of ideal forms might be a little more complicated than I first presumed.
Consider that I already could recognize the wheel *as* a wheel, with wheel-like characteristics (roundness, rotation), without having experienced other wheels from which to make this generalization. How could I have distinguished the outlines of wheelness or of the wheel-like object without having previously seen wheels? Where did the concept of the "game" come from? Were empiricial experiences and conceptualizations from my real life filtering back into this trip, somehow subconsciously, unbeknownst to me at the time? Even during the 1st stage, I came ready-made with the capability (but not the awareness) of climbing. How had I acquired that capability? (Perhaps now you can see how this can be such a mindfuck).
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Hmmm, I've thought about the ideal forms a bit more, and considering that they slid back into place at the same time as the ego, that suggests that one is not dependent on the other, but rather that they are co-incident, and that perhaps the ego itself is an artificially constructed ideal form, created by our minds as a shorthand for keeping track of our complex organism's actions and for providing continuity in this.
After all, Plato's ideal forms were concerned with explaining how particulars can be grouped into universals:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_universals
If you think about the Ship of Theseus paradox:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_paradox
you realize that we are not really the same material entity, moment to moment. We are physically changing, our cells are replacing themselves. Our material being at one moment is a particular than can not easily be equated with our being at another moment, at least not without resorting to the universal, the ideal form, of the ego. Without the ideal form of ego, we might not be able to bridge this change with a sensation of continuity. So perhaps the ego is a brain module that has been selected for by evolution in the higher-order animals in order to facilitate continuity of thought and perception, so that learning and planning behaviors can be undertaken and so that the animal can perform the behaviors it needs to do in order to survive. Whereas less complex animals might not have this brain module. If fish (or other less complex animals) really do only have a memory of like 7 seconds (such that they basically "begin their lives over again each 7 seconds"), or if they can only respond to immediate stimuli, then this might explain, psychologically, how this might work and what that might feel like for them.
Which makes me think, it's possible that my Trieb state was slightly longer than I remember, but perhaps the parts farther back were forgotten (perhaps that explains the vague, unsubstantial phase that I experienced immediately before that). Indeed, it has seemed a bit of a mystery to me that I was able to remember anything from this state, seeing as I had no way to keep myself continuously reminded of it or conscious of it as it was happening. Perhaps the only reason I was able to remember it was because it was immediately followed by an ego state where I was able to quickly reflect on it.
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Perhaps that also explains the feeling of time travel or actually reliving those moments of Trieb-state when remembering them from the ego state. Perhaps it was because it was the first point when I, as a conscious ego, was living those experiences.
Even more radically, perhaps what I remember as the Trieb state was not actually the Trieb state itself, but the first stirrings of my ego immediately reflecting on my Trieb state, trying to catch up, as it were (because apparently (I read this in a youtube comment, so I have no idea if this is true) Salvinorin A, the psychoactive ingredient in Salvia, works on the kappa-opioid receptors, which which causes the brain to not receive all of the essential signals and "micro-stutter," sort of like lag in a computer, giving the brain several options: either try to retransmit the data, or skip the data. So it was probably, at first, just skipping a lot of data, and perhaps the step where the brain's processor writes the data to its RAM was initially interfered with, or skipped, but then once these circuits started becoming operational again, the brain had to catch up on some of this data (thereby, in a sense, reliving it)), and then perhaps the real feeling of revelation came when the ego ran out of lagged data to re-process, and discovered that it could take in new data and reflect on it in real time.
But I think the time travel meant that I was experiencing the moments twice, both in the Trieb state, and in the ego state. Or perhaps twice in the ego state, once in an automatic reprocessing sort of way, and after the revelation of being able to consciously manipulate new data (instead of just consciously record it), I went back in my ego again and this time reflected on the Trieb data consciously, and perhaps it only felt like time travel because my attention was focused. Who knows? There are many possibilities.
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From wikipedia:
"The Id comprises the unorganized part of the personality structure that contains the basic drives. The id acts as a pleasure principle: if not compelled by reality it seeks immediate enjoyment.[3] It is focused on selfishness and instant self-gratification."
No, this is just plain wrong. Drive does not seek pleasure. Drive is its own justification, or rather, outside of the need for any instrumental justification. That's what's meant by "drive," it just drives you. It does not stop and reflect on pleasure. The Id does not seek pleasure--it's the ego that seeks pleasure. After all, why would Trieb seek pleasure? It would do it no good. What is the function of pleasure? Is it not so that you think, "Oh, this felt good, I want to do it again," or "Oh, this felt bad, I want to avoid it in the future."? But how would this function if you don't have an ego that can register concepts such as "pleasure, " "good," "bad," and that can remember things as a continuous "I" into the future? The Id just takes a summary of the body's state and the sensory stimuli at any given moment, and reflexively, and un-reflectively, responds to that stimuli in a quasi-robotic, quasi-programmed way. The Id cannot remember pleasurable experiences from the past--it cannot even register what a pleasurable experience is. At least, that is my experience.
"The Ego acts according to the reality principle; i.e. it seeks to please the id’s drive in realistic ways that will benefit in the long term rather than bringing grief."
I would put it somewhat differently. Rather, the Id does not seek things for pleasure--its is not instrumental and reflective in this respect, but direct. It directly seeks the things it is programmed by instinct to seek. The ego is then subservient to this Id and is programmed to identify itself with the Id's drives and derive pleasure from figuring out clever, longer-term ways to accomplish the Id's drives.
Which raises an interesting possibility: an ego that refuses to be subservient to the Id, but rather, finds other ways of obtaining pleasure. This would mean that we would lose pleasure from eating, sleeping, watching out instinctually from our social standing, etc. In other words, we would no longer be looking out for our biological being, unless we saw an abstract, ego-centered reason for doing so. It would mean the ruin of our "normal" lives and possibly the end of our life itself. It would manifest itself as something incredibly pathological---like someone obsessed with music or philosophy who didn't care to eat or sleep or drink. There are a million different ways that this could manifest itself---its limits being determined only by the inventiveness of the ego.
For this reason, I would have to conclude that the Id is not something to be struggled with or opposed (as is commonly assumed, especially in our post-Victorian culture), but rather, you'd do well to hope that you really did have an assertive Id that was driving your ego, and that this connection was solid.
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So, because it is the exercise of the ego in the service of the Id that produces pleasure, we can imagine situations where the Id is satisfied (we obtain food, sleep, etc), but where our ego is not necessary for obtaining these and is not exercised, and therefore we experience no pleasure from satisfying our drives in this way.
What am I saying? We do not need to "imagine" such situations--they already exist in abundance around us. Industrial capitalism, paradoxically both the wealthiest and the most miserable epoch of humanity to-date, is very good at producing goods to satisfy drives, but very poor at exercising the ego in this endeavor. This explains why working at a mindless job is unfulfilling. One might think, "Oh, but you are earning money to buy food and a place to live. You are living the good life. Why can't you enjoy that?" It's because the ego was not exercised in the attainment of these drives.
Games are a way of the ego inventing challenge for itself so that it can exercise itself in the service of the Id. For example, imagine you have a grand table of food presented in front of you. All you have to do is walk over to the table and start eating. But there's no strategy involved, no exercise of the ego. So the ego says to itself, "Hey, let's say I have to do 2 cartwheels and count to 100 in German before I can have that food." Then you do the game, you feel a sense of accomplishment, and the food actually tastes pleasurable. (Whereas, otherwise, even the tastiest food might have tasted tasteless).
Remember that, during my 2nd level, I continued climbing the wheel, but it became a game. At first I was confused by this because I assumed that games would be caused by the ego evaluating itself against a standard set by a superego, and "winning the game" meant fulfilling the expectations of the superego. And, remember, that the superego didn't make its return until the 3rd level. But no, genuine *fun* games have nothing to do with the superego, but rather the Id. Indeed, a game is apt to become most unfun the minute it is turned into a superego injuction.
In any case, even Id-directed games are not an entirely wholesome fix. They entail the ego lying to itself---they entail ego irrationality. It is possible that the habit of judging irrationally with the ego could be deeply corrosive to the ego's ability to understand and analyze reality, which is the ego's essential function. Another reason games are also probably never a total substitute for the real thing is because there's always probably a portion of the ego that knows all along that it's a game. I doubt the ego can truly trick itself totally in this respect. Nevertheless, inventing games to satisfy the ego is probably better than having no ego satisfaction at all. Games are a coping mechanism.
Games are also a symptom of the real, fundamental problem: the lack of an environment that naturally exercises the ego, where drives are challenging to achieve but obtainable.
This does not entail an opposition to progress, to increasing one's (or a society's) productivity. In doing activity that increases the productivity of society, the ego will feel very satisfied from doing productive, strategic, clever work in order to better ensure the attainment of drives in the future. It will be able to reflect on its past efforts and feel satisfaction, recognizing the connection between its past efforts and the current satisfaction of the Id. (This, by the way, suggests a solid psychological reason for why "alienation" in the labor process feels unpleasant. You need to be able to consciously recognize the connection between the ego's efforts and the Id's satisfaction.)
What this does suggest about progress, however, is that it must be tangibly connected to one's efforts (so, for example, (and actual case studies bear this out), winning the lottery will not make you happy, unless your ego invested a lot of strategy and expectation on it--which is no more of a prudent course of action because one is likely to fail at this and waste all of this investment and demoralize the ego, more often than not.)
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The type of progress that is not apt to be satisfying to the ego is the type where, either, things keep on getting better without your input, or where you quit trying to progress and just decide that you've achieved enough progress, and now you can just sit back forever and let the fruits roll in. In the latter case, you will initially still feel satisfaction, but after a while, unless the maintenance of your level of progress comes to require the exercise of your ego, you will cease to derive pleasure from your steady-state. I fear that this is the situation of the advanced capitalist countries---if we wanted to, we could mostly stop working and satisfy our desires thanks to our current, stagnant level of productivity. The only way to employ our egos, aside from inventing countless games (which we do as well), is to strive for ever-higher levels of productivity. At some point, we will reach a physical resource ceiling on that. And what then???
Note: This also explains why unemployment-as-such, and also underemployment and employment that is perceived as pointless, are felt to be pernicious and deadening and depressing. But nor is it enough to give someone a contrived job of shuffling papers from one pile to the other and back again. The job has to be visibly, tangibly, consciously connected to the satisfaction of the person's Id. (If a task cannot help but be complex and many-sequenced, then perhaps helping a person's rational mind understand the role of his/her task in the broader production process would be sufficient for making the ego feel like it is usefully serving the Id.)
So, to consider an actual example, let's look at me: I'm doing lots of productive schoolwork (I'm certainly not living in complete sloth), so my ego should feel exercised and satisfied, right?
Well, the first problem is that, except for rare papers that I write that have a personal connection (such as if they have political or philosophical significance that I care about), I don't visibly recognize how my ego's efforts on those papers satisfy my drives (and it's possible that they actually don't satisfy my drives at all, even indirectly), whereas if the paper addresses come political theme, I can understand how, indirectly, that helps bolster the political project, which might eventually help me.
Ordinarily, if I didn't recognize the tangible way in which an activity of my ego was serving my Id, then my ego would not feel compelled to do the activity. I'd procrastinate and not feel like doing it. And this is indeed what happens, until...
The superego intervenes, forcing my ego to do the activity. The ego is now working to serve the superego with this task, not the Id, so the ego derives none of the satisfaction from the activity, only the relief of having temporarily escaped the roving gaze of the superego yet again.
The model hitherto postulated has been that the ego, in its normal, healthy state, must serve both the Id and the superego at the same time. I'm starting to think that this is actually a pathological state, rooted in our particular class society.
What I imagine is a different arrangement: the superego serving the ego, and the ego serving the Id. The superego can do much productive work in this regard. The ego cannot easily comprehend what other people in society are thinking or expecting---the ego is inherently self-centered, and this is appropriate for its role. But the ego does need to know this information about other people's mental states and social expectations, one way or the other, in order to perform rationally in a social context (and human beings are the most social animals of all). That's where the superego comes in. (Likewise, other social animals, such as dogs, probably have a well-developed superego as well, which maybe partly explains their extraordinary ability to read the emotions of other dogs and even humans across the species barrier! You can see the dog's superego at work whenever they exhibit the guilty, sulking face and whatnot.)
This is now my contention: in its healthy state, the superego is no more than an empathy-generator. It gives the ego a sense of what other people are thinking and feeling and expecting. It does this indirectly by making us feel the effect of morality, or what we might call a "conscience." If our ego is not trained to be skeptical, if our ego is used to being submissive to the superego, then the ego will interpret this morality or conscience as an absolute injunction given by an absolute, omnipotent authority. But if our ego is trained in skepticism, and it is not pathologically submissive to the superego, then the ego will interpret the superego's injunction as advice based on the superego's empathetic reading of the other complex, sentient beings with which one is interacting. (Non-sentient beings are less complex, and are easy enough to understand as mechanical forces for the ego to account for them).
The alert, skeptical, insightful ego can rationally weigh the options: for example, would I more effectively serve the Id by stealing this piece of food from my friend, or is that friend likely to react in a way that harms my overall ability to serve the Id in the future? If the superego detects that the friend will be mean and angry towards you anyways, your superego might present your ego with a feeling of disdain or hatred or envy, and you might be tempted to take the food anyways. If the superego judges that the other person has a mental state/constitution that will be conducive to mutual cooperation, the superego will serve the ego with a feeling of deep affection and bonding, and you will not judge it wise to steal the food.
How does the ego become submissive to the superego, and how does the ego become infected with fear of the superego? I'm not quite sure, but perhaps it has something to do with:
1. The advent of transcendent Gods. Your superego tries to figure out this infinitely powerful member of your sociality (that could potentially inflict severe pain on you), and the superego can't figure this God out since this God is held to be transcendence and unknowable. And so the superego becomes infected with fear, and the ego looks to the superego for guidance, but receives none, except a vague feeling of fear, and the ego keeps on looking back on and on ever more urgently, but all it receives is a feeling of fear, and pretty soon the ego becomes obsessed with figuring out the source of this fear, and it becomes fixated on the superego???
(Whereas a superego might be able to cope with an anthropomorphic God with anthropomorphic finiteness and faults and personality and whatnot...and when it comes to animistic, quasi-mechanical Gods, maybe even the plain-old ego would be suited for it. At the worst, placating an animistic god with rituals would be like having the ego invent a game for itself: "Okay, this field won't produce a harvest unless I sacrifice a goat to this God...okay, now I've accomplished that, I feel satisfied, now we have the god's favor (and we think we know this with certainty because it is held to be an animistic/mechanical/quasi-naturalistic god), and it will just depend on the rain to see if we get a good harvest.")
2. Child-parent relationships. At first, the child's relationship to the parent is likely to be like the human's relationship to an incomprehensible god, so maybe a certain amount of chronic fear and suprego fixation is unavoidable at a certain age. But, assuming nothing traumatic happens, the child grows up to possess the hallmark of adulthood--a calm and collected superego that serves the ego, instead of a fearful ego that serves a fearful superego.
3. Powerful leaders/states/groups in human society. When leaders/groups become powerful enough, they can act with irrational impunity, leading to a situation that closely models the previous two examples.
These are just some ideas. I'm really not sure at all (well, I'm not sure about any of this, but especially this part).
BTW, I think #3 suggests the psychological basis for anarchism. It is possible that anarchism (along with atheism and non-patriarchical family relations) are essential for our mental well-being.
So is it possible that monotheistic, transcendental religion has been nothing more than the world's greatest method of ego-effort-redirection (redirecting our ego's efforts from serving our Id, to serving some superego or God or ruler or set of clergy, etc.)? Furthermore, a method that co-opted natural animistic/pagan impulses, as well as the superego, in order to distort these two potentially useful devices into a tool of ego-effort-redirection and exploitation?
Just think about how, in today's world,
instead of superego --> ego --> Id,
we have our egos choose to sabotage our Id with sleep depression, anorexia, monastic celibacy (less so nowadays), etc., all in order to serve the superego or some God or ruler, with very little if any benefit coming back to our Id in the end (and even if some does come back, our ego is not aware of it and so cannot take joy in it).
So the question becomes, how to get the superego serving the ego once again? I think a good start would be to interrogate the superego in terms of its instrumental usefulness to the ego every single time you feel an injuction from the superego that you "should" do something.
Superego: "You should pray to God daily."
Ego: "How does that serve me?"
Superego: "You're missing the point. You should love God just for goodness sake!"
Ego: "Sorry, I'm not going to do anything unless I can see how it at least indirectly serves my mission of serving the Id."
Superego: "Oh, fine...well, you see, God will make you burn in hell if you don't."
Ego: "Why would he do that? And how do I know he really exists?"
Superego: "The mind and substance of God is unknowable!"
Ego: "Well, sheesh, a lot of help you are...why am I even listening to you anyways if you can't do your job of translating to me, in a language and system of incentives and feelings that I can understand, what other entities are thinking and what it would be rational for me to do about it? I'm going to ignore you whenever you are not providing me with some comprehensible insight...but insofar as you explain yourself, I will take your explanations into account."
Most people currently have this idea that the superego is naturally irrational. I think a hijacked, obfuscated superego can be irrational, but an effective superego should at least make intuitive sense and also be able to be interrogated by the ego. In principle, the ego could find out everything about other people's mental states that the superego can, but it would take much longer for the ego's analytical, reductionist methods to come to any conclusions, whereas the superego can obtain reasonably accurate conclusions using shorthand rules-of-thumb (which are probably partly programmed from evolution and thus partly innate), as long as the superego is not used to address questions for which it is not suited, such as probing the mind of a transcendental God and taking account of that God's potential effects. This suggests that it is not useful or advisable to try to extend morality, which is a product of the superego, to encompass the transcendental and divine absolute. Rather, feelings of morality are to be heeded only when they apply to mundane interactions between people. And we should occasionally interrogate this morality with egoistic rationality, just to let our egos make sure that our superegos have not been supplying bat-shit-insane rules of thumb, or rules-of-thumb for social conduct that are horribly obsolete now that we have moved out of our recent evolutionary context (paleolithic clan living).
So, there are actually two distinct kinds of irrationality: Id-irrationality and superego-irrationality. (Or rather, we should speak of "Id-nonrationality," because the Id has no self-evaluation along that scale. It has its own, self-justifying, given logic that has to do with our innate drives that are, presumably unchanging from our birth--the most basic aspects of survival and reproduction).
So, declaring "I desire X (not instrumentally in order to achieve something else, but rather, directly, for its own sake)," such as food, water, sleep, etc...that is Id-nonrationality. Equally, "I do not desire X" (directly, not for instrumental reasons (if it's for instrumental reasons, then you know it's the ego that is saying that). This is the sort of irrationality or non-rationality that we might as well accept or even celebrate. So, if you are sexually aroused by men and you desire sex with them in a direct way, for its own sake, (not for instrumental, strategic, ego-driven reasons), well, that's your Id talking, so you might as well embrace that nonrational desire and set your ego to the task of figuring out how to fulfill it.
This is completely different than "I *should* desire X" or "I *should not* desire X. That's your superego talking. If we happen to interrogate this statement with our ego and find that it has no reason behind it, that it is irrational, then we would do well to discard the superego's advice in this circumstance and not allow ourselves to be troubled by its remonstrances. So we hear "I *should not* desire sex with men." Our ego asks itself, "Why? How would that harm me and my quest for gaining pleasure through serving my Id, which very much has a drive to have sex with men?" If the ego or superego can't respond with reasons, then this injuction must be discarded. A helpful superego would respond with, "Well, most other people in our society don't like homosexual sex. I mean, trust me, they reeeeeeeaaaaally don't like other people having homosexual sex, for various reasons, and they will do much harm to you (and thus prevent the Id from pursuing its other Drives) if you try it." The rational ego would then weigh these consequences, and either go ahead with the sex if it deemed the rewards greater than the risks, or if not, then possibly figure out some of the reasons why those people don't like homosexuals having sex, figure out of there's some way to change that (which would mean having another dialog with the superego and investigating its sense of morality). Or, if the ego recognized that there were other, more urgent Drives of the Id to satisfy, then the ego would set about on some new task and just drop the whole intention of having homosexual sex for the time being.
So, notice, aside from prohibiting things, the superego can equally say, "You *should* desire X." I think this is the heart of the problem that Zizek talks about, where the new psychological problem of post-modern capitalism is the superego injunction to "enjoy." No, "enjoying" will not feel enjoyable unless it is done as the ego serving the Id (rather than the ego serving the superego).
Perhaps this suggests the psychological basis of that feeling that we call "freedom." Perhaps it is the sensation of being able to cleverly and strategically exercise the full powers of one's ego (which is empowered, but not determined, by the superego's advice) in order to serve one's Id Drives.
Finally, I feel like I have resolved a philosophical issue that has been tormenting me for this whole school year. I was continually sensing an affinity for irrationality in some circumstances, but a complete opposite revulsion towards irrationality in other circumstances. I felt myself becoming rootless, not knowing how to operate---concluding to myself that ultra-rationality was the only advisable way, but at the same time practicing certain daily irrationalities out of habit and intuitive choice. Now I understand that there are some irrationalities that I can wholeheartedly pursue, that will not lead me astray from happiness, namely the Id-irrationalities, and that there are, indeed, irrationalities that will harm my happiness and that I would do well to resolve with my completely rational, egoistic ego (just as it normally should be).
So, love is irrational, right? But now I know that expressing "I love you" (as simply a gleeful expression, without any egoistic, manipulative, strategic, instrumental intent) is fine. Whereas, thinking "I know I *should* love you...but why don't I? What is wrong with me?" is problematic, unless the ego can find a very good instrumental reason for taking this attitude.
Likewise, irrational organicism that one directly feels and pursues is fine. (Example: "I feel a direct (non-instrumental) Drive or desire to immerse myself in the organic wholesomeness of the outdoor beauty of the Ozarks.") Organicism that one seeks for instrumental, egoistic reasons could also be fine, so long as this is rational organicism. (Example: "Going 'back to the Land in my Heimat, the Ozarks, will clear my mind, improve my eating habits and health, and help me finish this research paper, which in turn will help me serve my Id's Drives by getting me a future job, future employment, and money"). Whereas irrational organicism that one feels a superego injunction to possess, or irrational organicism that has irrational moral implications, will be problematic. (Example: "I should feel love for my Ozark Heimat, and so should all others, or else they are untermensch and should be killed.")
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Ah, if only we were still forced to hunt wild deer for food in order to survive, we could know the true satisfaction of satisfying our hunger thanks to the brilliant cleverness of our rational ego.
(Whereas modern deer hunting is a type of game where our ego has to trick itself into thinking that this hunting is actually necessary to obtain the meat...even when done with bow-and-arrow...actually, especially when done with bow-and-arrow, because that requires the added self-trickery of imagining that one doesn't have any better tools that one could use. At least when you use a rifle, you are being honest to yourself about that...although the sport or gamesmanship of it is lessened because of that. Really, the more you try to go back to that primitive life, the more of a game of self-trickery it is. That's another reason why I really wonder about the efficacy of "going back to the land" with some sort of commune or something. Unless we could make it productive in a practical way, I fear that we'd always have this nagging feeling in us that the only reason we were able to do this is because we live in an industrial society of abundance, and that our happiness didn't really depend on our efforts on the land, and that we could leave it any time we wanted, such that it would take self-trickery to convince ourselves that it was a meaningful endeavor. Don't get me wrong, it would indeed be pleasant. But it would also need to require the cleverness and constructiveness of our egos in order to be really satisfying. Perhaps fixing up a house would fulfill that requirement.
Even so, there's no way to really go back to that primitive, precarious, troubled, and yet acutely satisfying way of life (living off the fruits of a farm and not begrudging it with the thought that you could be doing all these other things in the city) without doing away with modern society entirely, and I do not think that would be worth it. I continue to hold out hope that we can find additional ways of satisfying our egos in modern, industrial, information society. We just need to make a few modifications to our lifestyles, our culture, and our political and social systems.)
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