This salvia experience began with an intention to determine the amount of plain salvia leaf that would have to be smoked in order to achieve any effect. The reason is that I have a whopping 3 ounces of this plain salvia leaf, and I am not sure whether I want to use the rest of it for making an alcohol tincture, as originally planned, or whether it would be more effective to just smoke it (because I found with a smaller test batch that the tincture method, while it does work to some extent, requires a lot of patience and isn't capable of propelling one as far, and with the more gradual nature of the tincture method, salvia is still just as maddeningly elusive as ever). I went outside by myself around 4am to do this test, and I must have smoked about 8 bowls in about 4 minutes, at which point my lungs felt about as wore out as I felt prudent or acceptable to subject them to, and at which point I was only getting the mildest flirtings with the weirdness of salvia, such that I would not have even probably noticed any changed had I not known what signs to look for as harbingers of the state into which salvia normally leads when smoked in sufficiently potent extract form. Furthermore, with the last 2 or 3 bowls, I did not feel myself getting any higher, so I concluded that even with lungs of steel that would allow one to smoke 20 bowls in a row, one would still necessarily have to do that over a 10-minute stretch, in which time the effect from the first 10 bowls would have already worn off. So I concluded that I guess I will go ahead and use the rest of the plain leaf for making a larger batch of tincture.
My curiosity, as usual, though, was seized by the flirtation with weirdness that usually comes with an insufficiently strong salvia dose. Furthermore, I felt that I was on the verge of being able to explain the phenomenology of the initial transition into the experience, which is a major, if often elusive, goal of mine. But I needed just a little bit more "raw experience" to pin it down.
So I went back inside, packed a bowl of 20x extract, and went back outside. I took two hits of the 20x extract, pretty much finishing the entire bowl. I wasn't particularly confident that it would do much because I have read that tolerance to salvia develops quickly (but also fades just as quickly--I have taken it for 3 days in a row at 24-hour intervals and have experienced virtually no attenuation of effect--if anything, a reverse tolerance or priming, in fact!), so I was not sure whether my body was already on standby alert for metabolizing incoming Salvinorin A diterpinoid molecules from when I had smoked the 8 or so bowls of plain salvia leaf just 5 minutes beforehand.
This trip started out along a similar schema that structures many of my trips (but which I feel I am only satisfactorily explaining now):
You take a mental snapshot of a present situation as you are, going into the trip (usually my mental image of my situation is something like me in my boots and trench coat, holding a pipe in some benign self-directed experiment in some harmless context), and you are led to situate that mental image within a 3-D geometrical grid as a base starting point. So that mental image of one's situation becomes a 3-D mental object that can be rotated, traced along its edges, etc. Often the salvia ends up leading me to trace this image along its edges, and often I go deeper by finding the edge to not be a line-like dimension, but rather to be like a wire or folded piece of paper that an ant can crawl around (with embedded dimensions, like in string theory)...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JkxieS-6WuA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ySBaYMESb8o
...and this transition to a higher dimensional reality I take to be the zooming back in to the real reality, the coming down from salvia (if I even remember at all having taken it a moment ago), even as in reality I'm coming up. But it's difficult to figure out while you are going along which way you are going, and in which direction lies reality and in which lies illusion. No, in fact, the sensation is not one of difficulty at all--one is immediately convinced, with the same obviousness of looking around at life normally and feeling sure that "Now I am not dreaming" or "Now I am conscious" or "Now this is reality," that your entering into this alternate reality is the real reality.
If the trip goes deeper, then this new appraisal of the situation of the universe being this wire becomes objectified in 3 dimensions, and as I trace one of the edges of this 3-D object, then once again I will find it to be a wire with nested dimensions, and I will become convinced that I have FINALLY come back to the real reality, and I'll think back and remember that I have just traversed two levels of illusory reality and think to myself, "Well, whatever just happened to me to propel me through what I've just experienced, it sure must have been strong to have this whole long dreamlike delirium of a life that existed at not one, but two levels of geometrical abstraction removed from ordinary reality! But now I'm back..." Ha!
Anyways, in this instance, I had the initial 3-D objectification of my mental image of my present situation, but instead of following one of the edges of this 3-D object and finding some nested, fractal-like layer of complexity within it, the 3-D mental image seemed to plant itself on a small globe. This globe was maybe 15 feet in diameter, and was cartoon-like, black, with a black surrounding ether, such that I could only tell that it was a globe by how the 3-D object planted on it (my mental image) slid away from my view as the globe started to rotate forward under my feet (I was sort of distinct from the globe, floating above it and just watching it roll forward below me).
First the globe rolled about 45 degrees, such that I could still see the 3-D mental image of my original situation, but the angles on it obviously looked different. But nothing else was really different, and I remember thinking, "Okay, we've gone this far, this is nothing big, I can still see my real situation, even if it is off in the distance." I had one trip with Suraj where I went precisely to this spot, and no further, and at the time I described it like a gentle zooming-in to a higher magnitude of detail, but then gently lifting back up before one got absorbed into the higher magnitude of detail, such that one simply felt the mechanics of what was going to happen.
This time, however, I proceeded past this familiar point, and the surface plane of the globe that was doing its geometrical rotations on my 3-D mental images was revealed to be a subset surface of something much larger and higher-dimensional. And as I ascended into this higher dimension, I lost sight of the 3-D image of my starting situation, and with the situation no longer in sight, I lost all memory or contact with it. It was as if memory was operating as items that one sees in 3-dimensional space, and one remembers an item (a situation, a person's name, a word, etc.) by physically seeing it sitting there. And so one's ability to remember something is contingent upon something as simple as looking around you and determining what you can see.
Anyways, as I lost sight of my starting situation, I knew that things were "getting serious" in some way, and I asked myself, "Well, exactly how serious is this?" And immediately the answer, as if pre-programmed into my psychological preparation for these trips, shot back, "Not serious at all. You just smoked some Salvia. You'll be fine in a few minutes." And I felt some momentary relief. But then I began to see that this higher-dimensional shape was a blade of grass, and what I had been mistaking for that sphere plane had been the surface of a blade of grass, and I found myself reinterpreting, as if some "Oh duh!" thought were dawning on me, the physical geometry in front of me as the ground of a soccer field as my head lay on it on its side. And suddenly I "remembered," "Oh yeah, it's "only" Salvia...except you must have just taken it at one of your soccer games, you dipshit, and now everyone is standing around you, worried about your health, and you are going to get into major trouble!" And I had the same feeling that one would have if the police were to find a pound of heroin in your car, that "Ohhhhh, fuck..." demoralization and resignation to a subsequent rest of your life in prison or something (because I guess I had the sense in this universe that this salvia experience was illegal and/or so embarrassing that my life would never recover from it, that I would never live it down. Because at that moment I was sure, as without question or seeing any need to question as much as one is normally about one's reality after waking up from a dream, that all that I had experienced before, my whole life as "Matthew," had been just a very elaborate salvia trip that I was just now coming out of. Instead I had the sense that I was, I guess, what seemed like this high school kid in some suburban community who was playing soccer in front of his (entirely different set of) school friends and parents. That's why, just as I was in fact coming up on the peak of the drug, I thought that finally then I was coming back down. And this reality seemed as vivid and real as any "reality" in our "real" world. It is amazing how quickly it comes together, fully-formed, and one realizes afterward that all of these "senses" (of having a certain life with certain parents and certain acquaintances, living in a certain time and place) are constantly operating in one's mind at a barely subconscious level and and structuring one's awareness. That is how it works in the salvia world as well. There are no moments taken to assimilate this change of reality, to pause and think, "Oh, I have this name with this life that includes this father, this mother, in this town and year, where I do these things." Instead, one has a fully-formed alternate life history that doesn't even need to be consciously remarked upon or accessed in order to have its effect.
And I find it somewhat funny and demonstrative that, despite the fact that I was able to hold onto what should have been a reassuring thought that I had only just smoked salvia, as I kept my eye on this thought, I necessarily had to take my eye off of everything else, and all the rest slipped away and was replaced. Well, the thought that "I have just smoked salvia" is of no reassurance at all if it suddenly takes place within a context that makes it illegal or otherwise problematic. In such ways I continue to find that there is no surefire way to prepare for a salvia trip because there is only so much mental reassurance (if anything) that you can take with you to the other side to put you at ease there, and what you have taken with you might have become meaningless or worse in the new context by the time you have arrived in this new context.
After that point with the feeling of the people standing around me on the soccer field and me feeling really guilty and demoralized and unsettled, my recollection of the trip becomes a little bit hazy because ever since the end of the trip I have been focusing on trying to recount the trip from beginning to end, and naturally the beginning then became a bit more solidified into my recollection, which is fortunate because it is usually the missing step, and to see exactly how ordinary reality devolves into the salvia experience is the most interesting, yet often elusive finding.
But, roughly speaking, I can say that I then determined that this supposed life as the boy playing soccer was just an illusion, and I think at one point I questioned whether the salvia explanation for my predicament itself might even be an illusion. But after a few confusing minutes I came back to reality. Once again the sense of being surrounded by presences persisted, except when I remembered who I was and that I was at Harvard, I reinterpreted the people who I thought had been standing around me on the soccer field earlier as, "Oh, these just must be Harvard people standing around me." I was ever sure at one point that I looked up over my right shoulder and saw something standing over me and seeming to inquire, with their body language, what was happening to me, and I looked down to try to find my pipe to gesture to them with it, and when I looked back a few moments later (because searching for my pipe then led me into getting distracted down other trains of thought), there was no person there. I'm still not really sure if maybe someone walked by at one point and looked down at me and then left, or what, but I suspect not. But the reason I doubt is, it seemed to some extent that I was REALLY coming back at this point, such that I even remember having the stone railing and the bushes that are really there in my field of view as I looked up at the person. But then again, salvia is rife with these "false awakening" experiences as one is coming down, much like waking up within a dream.
I would very much describe this as like where one is in a dream and suddenly remembers or realizes that there is this alternate reality out there. With salvia I usually stay aware that there are these multiple realities. But in a dream where I become lucid to the fact that I have this alternate reality, I immediately recognize that as "real life" and my present circumstance as a dream. This happens usually at a very intuitive, automatic level, although sometimes it happens pretty quickly as I do something to test reality, by trying to read a book or flip a light switch on and off or look at a clock. To imagine a salvia trip, the exercise would be to take that dream at the moment that you realize or remember that there is another reality out there, but interject, at the very least, some doubt as to which reality is the real world and which one the dream world, and often I would say salvia goes farther in giving you an intuitive gut feeling that this new reality is your waking up into or coming back to the real reality, and your previous reality was some dream/hallucinogenic/otherwise illusory state. And unlike in a lucid dream where you can tell it is not reality by things behaving oddly, in the salvia world things seem to work perfectly as "you" (as you are in your new identity in that world) would expect them to work. It all seems perfectly normal and unquestionably self-evident that you have come back to the real reality.
That is why I really no longer trust the test of saying to yourself, "Now I am conscious", or "Now I am not dreaming", as any proof that our ordinary world is not a dream world. Because if it were a dream world, the fact has been demonstrated to me firsthand now that it could or would feel just as real as a real world.
An additional note: From the moment where one's mental image of one's present situation becomes 3-dimensionally objectified in one's mind's eye, one's open-eye vision and mind's eye vision become fused together. You seem to physically see what is in your mind's eye, and what is in your mind's eye is often acted upon by what your physical eyes are looking at. It is a very curious thing, and really a testament to the amazing fact that the mind normally manages, improbably, to keep these things distinct at all. It makes one really appreciate the complexity and efficacious subtlety of the human brain.
Another additional note: More and more after this most recent trip, and after watching some of these youtube videos about imagining higher dimensions, I have started to speculate that what I originally interpreted as encountering other spirits inhabiting my same life experience might simply have been my experience of stepping outside of time and seeing the different states of myself in time simultaneously as if I were looking at time as just another spatial dimension:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDajcGcKiAM
Likewise, the situating of my 3-D mental images on a 2-D spherical plane that itself has a higher 3-D reality (which would effectively be 4-D from the standpoint of the original 3-D mental image) could be understood as stepping into a higher dimension reality and looking back on this reality from a higher dimension.
And one could possibly even look at the alternate lives or identities that I seemed to experience as alternate worldlines of myself in higher dimensions.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JkxieS-6WuA
If the 4th dimension encompasses one particular line of all of my lifetime states in a particular instant, as it were (seeing my whole life spatially laid out before me), then the 5th dimension would encompass the many possible probabilistic lines of my lifetime states (the many possible lives that I could live depending on the outcomes of innumerable quantum probabilities from this point onward) in the same plane that intersect with, and stem out from, the line that I am normally experiencing. And the 6th dimension would be like a 3-dimensional space for these world lines of myself to traverse, which would be able to include world lines of myself that never at any point intersected with the worldline that I am now living. So the 5th dimension would include the world-line in the same plane of me becoming a multi-millionaire 30 years from now, and the 6th dimension would include the worldline of me as an alien on the planet Zytran, or me as some kid with his face laying on the ground in some soccer field with people standing around him in a universe where salvia is illegal. Now, like the flatlanders who are constrained to moving in 2 dimensions and who wouldn't even see the degrees of freedom of the higher dimensions, we are constrained to moving in 3 dimensions and can't really visualize the degree of freedom of moving through a deterministic timeline of our life (4th dimension), moving through the many universes of time intersecting with, or probabilistically branching out from, our current state (5th dimension) (so every lifetime that includes this moment of me as I am know, even if the rest of my life in the past or future is different in these other universes--meaning, even if I got to this point differently or departed from this point differently with different random probabilities determining my actions and the actions of the physical universe shaping my behavior), or moving through the many universes of time not even necessarily constrained to intersecting in any way with our current state (6th dimension...which, if I could move in the 6th dimension, I could move to the point in 6th dimensional space where I was a jellyfish swimming in the sea of the planet Vortron). Assuming, for a moment, that salvia allowed one to suddenly interact with stuff from higher dimensions (such as alternate selves as other human persons or even objects), one would perceive these phenomena as, like the balloon to the flatlander, popping in and out of existence non-causally (as far as we could tell...because the causes would be operating along dimensions that we wouldn't be seeing, such as the person pushing the balloon through the flatlander's plane, which the flatlander would never see). And that is at least consistent with the way that salvia, as well as other psychedelic drugs and supernatural phenomena in general, appear to us, so we cannot rule out that, when we are perceiving phenomena that seem outside of the causal laws of our 3-D space, that these phenomena are still subject to causes, but just causes in higher dimensions that we can't perceive. One could understand "God," in this sense, as simply the collection of higher-dimensional causes that seem to produce inexplicable effects on us mere 3-D beings.
Saturday, March 20, 2010
Friday, March 19, 2010
Salvia, reincarnated dreamtimes, and the shared nature of the "Matthew" life experience
I had just had an irritatingly tantalizing, yet not thoroughly powerful salvia trip the previous night--just the sort of trip that gives you just enough of a peek at weirdness to intrigue your curiosity, and yet leave it unsatiated. So I wanted to try it again, but this time to do 2 inhalations at the very beginning. I had been wary of doing two inhalations ever since I did a two-inhalation session over a year ago and had the most overwhelming experience I ever would have imagined possible, but now I was ready to tread those waters again.
Unfortunately, my friend who usually trip-sits for me had already gone to bed (it was 2am during a spring break night in my dorm, so I was still up, but he wasn't), so I decided that I would go solo. This would be my first time ever doing it solo. Well, as it turned out, there was no cause for worry--I would have far more company during this trip than I would know what to do with.
So, I went to a spot on this stone terrace above the Cabot dining hall and sat indian-style with my back up against a low stone wall at the absolute point of symmetry of the space, facing the darkened doors and windows of Pforzheimer House. I had written a little note to put at my feet during the trip that said, "Do not disturb...tripping on Salvia...I'll be back in 5 minutes," just in case some stranger happened to walk up upon me while I was tripping, so that they wouldn't freak out if I was behaving strangely or non-responsively. I thought that this would remove any pre-occupation in my mind about being encountered by other people, but I think that there was still a part of this pre-occupation that persisted into my trip, despite my precautionary efforts.
So I composed myself for about 10 minutes and then took two drags (I had my bowl packed pretty much full of Salvia 15x standardized). I could already sense things becoming weird before I even got to counting to 30 with my first hit. So I exhaled after 30 seconds and took another hit. I remember pulling the pipe away from my face, but I don't remember putting the pipe down (although apparently I did, as I found it a few moments later carefully placed right-side up next to my lighter on the stone floor beside me).
The next thing I knew, I was amidst an unseen crowd of sentient, judgmental presences that were gathered all around me just outside of my field of vision. Although I did not see them, I had the same absence of doubt that they were there that I would have if I had just looked around me a second ago and seen them and had them fresh in my mind as something present. As is usual with salvia, I thought nothing unusual about this crowd being here. I did not notice any discontinuity between when they weren't there and when they were there. I just took them for granted at that point.
What were these presences? I think that question is less important, or even illuminating, than asking what they were doing (what message they were conveying), which I will get to in a second. But if I had to characterize them, I'd say that they were thoroughly about as "un-alien" as one could get. Not necessarily "human" in a biological sense (in fact they didn't really seem to be defined along a biological or material dimension), but they were even farther from being little green extra-terrestrials or translucent spirit beings or whatnot. If I had to characterize them, I'd say that they most reminded me of my mental image of parents and coaches that I always used to get during sporting events and band performances--of course, my mental image of these personas is much more critical and apocalyptic than these personas are in real life. That's probably one reason why I could never handle the pressure of sports or music performances--because no matter how non-chalant and positively encouraging my parents or my coaches were, my mind would transform them into these critical personalities that were much more cutthroat--"Play well, or else you will be shunned and left bereft of resources and will be doomed to an ostracized existence, laden with the conveyance of our disappointment in you," etc. Like I said, my rational mind knows that this is not how they really acted or even thought, but still that was my mental image of them. And this was my image of these presences, more or less.
And this gets us to what they were doing. The message that they were conveying was a sort of expectation of performance. They were intently expecting me to perform some task, and the intensity of their intent was so strong, it was like an electric force rushing me along from behind. I felt desperate to placate this expectation, and dread at the thought of failing to do so. I had on the one hand a sense of encouragement, but also a deathly serious sense of sober disappointment on their part, with very bad consequences to follow for me, should I not perform well at this task. Although in reality I was sitting in almost total silence, the intent focus upon me felt like the dull roar of an audience at a basketball game--totally indistinct, with no ability to discern any specific voice or message, but the overall effect and intent was unmistakable. It felt/sounded physically/acoustically cacophonous (those two senses were more or less intertwined).
Well, what was this task that I was desperately trying to keep up at, that I was being expected to do? Well, it's a curious thing because I can't quite say with certainty what it was at first. It seemed almost so omnipresent and self-evident and familiar as to make analysis or reflection upon it unthinkable. At first I was so desperately focused on doing it that I didn't even stop to analyze what I was doing. If you want to jump right ahead to the psychological explanation, you could posit that these presences were a combination of my superego and a hallucination that there were Harvard students or staff that had arrived where I was, and that the task that I was desperately trying to apply myself to was to get a hold back on reality and respond to them in a coherent manner. Or perhaps you could argue that the presences were prodding me about my schoolwork that I still have to get finished during spring break, and that this was the task that I had to do. (Of course, as it would turn out, I would discover that I had been alone and in total darkness the whole time).
I think, though, that, at least in terms of direct experience, the performance had something to do with the square stone tiles that comprised the floor of the terrace on which I was sitting, because this is what seemed to embody the nature of my performance a short moment later. These stone squares were not just squares, though. They had a varying number of edges at a varying degree of magnification within my field of view depending on how difficult the task seemed. When the task seemed most difficult, these objects were more like octagons, and my vision was zoomed in into being able to encompass or take account of one or two edges at once (such that I wouldn't be able to take account of the whole octagon, and could only infer that it was sort of like an octagon by the angles between the edges). Also, when the task seemed more difficult, the whole shape would seem to stand more right-side-up, like a wheel (very reminiscent of my previous Bach trip, I now think), such that I would be climbing over the wheeel and wouldn't be able to see the rest of it (because I was stuck in the same plane as it). And when the task seemed to be getting easier a few seconds later, the shape seemed to tilt to more of a 45-degree angle, such that I could stand outside of its plane and get more of a bird's-eye view of it, like a 3-dimensional being in the book "Flatland" being able to observe a two-dimensional shape. Also, the shape seemed to be losing sides, getting simpler and more and more like a hexagon, a pentagon, and finally a square once again. And the task seemed to be to "take account" of this shape and traverse around it and just generally "get a grip" of its nature in its entirety. And I did this one edge of a time. I would come up over an edge, zooming in, feeling the edge fly past me, and then I'd get over the edge and zoom out suddenly to see the previous edge and the next edge...but then I'd have to zoom into the next edge to overcome and round that one, and after that I'd zoom out after rounding that next edge and I'd be able to see the next edge, and so on.
This is a familiar trope of my salvia experiences, in fact--this feeling that I am compelled to "survey" or "analyze" or "get a more bird's-eye view" of a shape or an abstract entity of some sort into order to zoom back out into a more broadly aware, normal state of mind in which I know where I am situated with respect to eveyrthing else in the world.
As I started to become relieved in seeing the octagons starting to become less complex and starting to become more distinct and "surveyable" (and less a thing that I was wrapped up in and a part of and unable to analyze from the outside), I realized that I was at Harvard and that the spectators would at worst be some harmless Harvard kids or Suraj (who I concluded was there at this point, even though he wasn't, and I was like, "Oh, whew, good, it's only Suraj," and I felt far less imperiled by the notion of being watched by Harvard kids or Suraj than the previous judgmental, powerful, demanding-parent-like entities---these were truly terrifying, not in the sense of being frozen with fear, but of being motivated to engage in an unceasing effort to escape punishment and achieve momentary relief before one feels the expectations nipping at one's heels once again and so one must resume one's never-ending escape. That's the thing, too--I had the distinct sense in the beginning of the trip that this "performance" that I was doing for these spectators was not some extra-ordinary thing, but was rather a commonplace and unending thing, and that I was falling behind in performing it and would see no relief for a long while. So it was really quite a relief to realize that I was just at Harvard and that I didn't have to actively struggle to do anything at that moment, but that if people were watching me (which I was still convinced was the case, just outside of my field of vision), that I could just be calm and still and let this situation pass. Because it was also at this point that I started to remember that I had just taken some salvia, and that I had the sign resting at my feet to explain to any possible passers-by what was going on. But then I realized that, if I had made that sign, then I must have made it because I had known that I wouldn't have anyone with me during the trip, so I started to doubt whether there were really presences around me.
Now, as I was thinking all of this, it appeared to me that I was saying all of this out loud (like, I was hearing my own thoughts out loud, along with all of the babble of the "audience" around me), which was one reason why I was now sure that, if I was indeed at Harvard, that I would have surely attracted attention and at the very least drawn onlookers if there hadn't been any to begin with. But by this point I was able to get a better sense of my surroundings to visually notice that there were no onlookers around me. So then I re-examined the source of this dull roar of the "audience" that I was hearing, and to my surprise it was my own thought process being repeated out-loud at like 2-4 second intervals...sort of "echoing" (and I have glimpsed this phenomenon before with the salvia tincture session I had), except now I see that it really wasn't echoing at all, but rather a layered looping that would continue indefinitely if I paid attention to it--sort of like multiple identical copies of myself being spawned at about 2-second intervals like this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JwcE3CTp8O4
And I realized that these were the "presences" that I had been hearing and feeling all along--multiple copies of myself. No wonder these presences seemed so "un-alien!" I should say that they should be quite familiar if they are indeed just multiple versions of myself! This of course became particularly interesting when the "original" me would then reflect on this multiplication (and my thoughts still seemed to be getting emitted out loud at this point), and all of the identical copies of me would then chime in with the same self-reflection...it was like each copy of me was going through the same self-reflection and was commenting on itself and on all of the versions of me that were following it at x second intervals. I took advantage of this, though, by chanting a "Fuck yes!" mantra over and over, and soon I got a cacophony of voices chanting "Fuck yes!" in unison with a lot of positive energy pouring out of it. It was great.
Suddenly it seemed that I understood why these presences were so intent upon my "performance"--because my present performance, my existence, was their future. So, just as I contemplate with intent my own future, I am possibly at the same time contemplating the present existence of some version of me that is going through this process x seconds ahead of me.
I then got a jarringly uncanny and uncomfortable feeling that I had just touched upon something BIG. I realized that I had felt an even stronger surge of this feeling just a moment beforehand when I had been more deeply in the experience. At that point, the feeling had been borne not out of logical deduction, but from hitting some raw, intuitive nerve, but I had not known what to make of it at the time, and in any case it had seemed to be distracting me from more pressing matters.
This "something BIG" was the uncanny feeling (of which I have had glimpses before during salvia trips) that I am not really "Matthew," that it is quite palpably possible (not just theoretically possible in the detached, intellectualized way with which we are all familiar) that my "Matthew" life is a dream...or, what this latest salvia experience suggested was that this life was the "Matthew Experience"--that perhaps this life is a recorded and digitally stored set of experiences that MANY MANY bored, super-advanced beings in some far-off reality are choosing to re-live in some virtual-reality type of setup, and they are tapping into the different sectors of this "Matthew hard-drive" at several-second intervals. (This thought, by the way, gave me the uncanny feeling at the moment while I was still coming down from the trip that my life must turn out to be extraordinarily SPECIAL in some way if so many beings are tapping into it, out of all of the possible life experiences that must exist...and I wasn't so comfortable in that initial confrontation with the prospect that my life will have something very very remarkable in it before all is said and done. At that moment I felt some sort of eerily strong strange attractor or presentiment towards some future as a modern-day Hitler or Jesus or Antichrist or Bill Gates or something, and of course my critical mind immediately shot this uncanny feeling down as an irrational presumption of grandiosity or delusions of self-importance...but the uncanny feeling remained.
Perhaps my life is like a somewhat popular youtube video for some society of sentient beings in some far-off land. It doesn't seem that implausible if you suppose that the individuals of this race live for a million years. Then a 100-year continuous virtual-reality experience is just like watching a movie. Our own notion of the distinction between dreaming and waking life is no less implausible...try telling a being that lives for only 8 hours in a dream world that he/she/it is just a part of a dream world and that in reality there are beings that live for over 100 years whose dreams are generating the being's reality, and this being will scoff at you as if you were peddling some crackpot science fiction fantasy.
In fact, dreaming makes much more sense amidst this supposition of this life being virtual reality. Sometimes computer systems have errors or bugs. They need to be uploaded or maintained, or else they malfunction. If you don't dream, then you start having hallucinations and general psychological malfunctionings. I am thinking very much of the movie "Dark City," which is really a much less gimmicky and much better version of "The Matrix" that the latter probably sort of ripped off:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_City_%281998_film%29
In any case, we basically have no theory of why people (or other animals) need to dream, so this supposition seems just as plausible as any at this point.
Now, if the experience of my life is nothing more than the playback of a stored memory, then that means that at some point the original being that experienced what I am experiencing also took the salvia and had all of these same thoughts, so if salvia really does function as this gateway for stepping outside of one's virtual reality circuitry, that either means that his reality, too, was a generated reality (possibly ad infinitem), or that the original Matthew's suppositions were actually incorrect for his own circumstance, but became a self-fulfilling prophecy as the rest of society caught on to the idea that it would be cool to store experiences and re-live them--especially experiences in which one thinks that one is breaking out of a dream and attaining true self-awareness--so in my case, that would actually be true, and the virtual reality stint would have originally been advertised to me as, "Hey, have you ever wanted to make a shocking revelation of the way the world really is from inside a dream world? Well, we have this stored memory of this guy who thinks that he originally did just that, and he was wrong insofar as applying it to his own time...but we have made the world into just the thing that he supposed, so that when you re-live his experience, it will be true for you, and all the more gratifying when you wake up out of this virtual reality dream of a lifetime!" Perhaps this would make the original Matthew's life significant enough to re-live. Perhaps this "far-off" society of super-advanced beings that is re-living these memories is just a society of humans a hundred years from now whose enjoyment of existence, despite their high-technology, pales in comparison to that enjoyment that was had in this, the "golden age" of humanity, and so they have then made the original "Matthew," whose presentiment that I am re-living tonight ended up being hugely transformative, into a well-revered figure whose life many people are eager to re-live (with the society having managed to store the original Matthew's memories before he died). So, funny enough, I can't even critique these crazy thoughts for being grandiose because, if this were true, then I could not even take credit for being the original Matthew, hahaha.....
In any case, I am always one for making sure that a hypothesis is falsifiable. So here's my falsifiability of this crazy idea:
*If I die in a car wreck tomorrow and my life ends up being pretty much meaningless, then that rules out a lot of these suppositions.
*If I end up becoming a hugely important figure in world history, or if I end up having my memories downloaded and stored somewhere before I die, then that would be a necessary and highly suggestive, but perhaps not sufficient in and of itself, condition for supporting these crazy ideas.
So only time will tell, hahaha.....
But just to make clear exactly what is in dispute: I am not disputing that the life of "Matthew Opitz" is a shared experience among many different entities. This I feel fairly certain about. I also think that my experience rather strongly suggests that this life experience is a deterministic one that I am simply re-living with the illusion that I have "free will," seeing as how all of the subsequent copies of me were saying the exact same things.
Finally, I think that this experience also pretty strongly implies that this "Matthew Opitz life experience" is a vessel that holds these independent entities that, otherwise, have independent existences. Now, what the nature of these other entities and their existence is, or what the nature of my fundamental existence will be when I am no longer Matthew Opitz, is an open question. I put forward one possible explanation involving an advanced society that re-lives the memories of past lives. But it could be something else that is not contingent upon me becoming famous or having my memory uploaded before I die or whatnot. I could just be hitting on what many of the world's major religions have posited: an independent soul, using this body (or rather, this life experience) as a temporary vessel, with an independent existence otherwise. The intriguing part, though, that one does not find in the world's major religions is the idea that multiple "souls" can experience the same body or life experience. This is where the implications concerning some sort of probable self-directed "reincarnation" or choosing of different virtual reality dreamtimes come into play. Whether you want to say that "souls" "choose their own parents" before they are born, or whether you want to phrase it as advanced beings "choosing their virtual reality experience," I think it amounts to the same thing. Now, why on earth would any soul or being choose to re-live the life of a Bangladeshi child who dies at the age of 2? Well, first of all, it is quite possible that such life experiences are shared by many fewer beings--that these life experiences are far less popular. Secondly, perhaps beings/souls want to experience a sense of tragedy or something, just like how we sometimes choose to watch scary or depressing movies. I mean, yeah, the life of a Holocaust victim would be pretty hard to live through, but if you have a million years at your disposal, spending 5 of those years as a Jewish child during the Holocaust in order to gain an insight into the pinnacle of human suffering and tragedy doesn't sound all that implausible to me. The stakes are certainly different than if you suppose that this is the only life you get, in which case choosing to live the life of a Bangladeshi child or a Holocaust victim would be unthinkably masochistic.
Also note: None of this experience or reasoning implies anything like "karma" or the idea that one "deserves" whatever life one has based on some grand scale of moral judgment. My intuition is that this is not how it works at all, but that every soul chooses every life.
And do animals have souls? Probably. It is probably quite possible to, as a soul or super-advanced being, to choose to experience the life experience of caterpillar #A41563879356432w or C. Elegans #T94523410584362597754532133rws...anything with a nervous system and some minimal level of experience, I guess.
Unfortunately, my friend who usually trip-sits for me had already gone to bed (it was 2am during a spring break night in my dorm, so I was still up, but he wasn't), so I decided that I would go solo. This would be my first time ever doing it solo. Well, as it turned out, there was no cause for worry--I would have far more company during this trip than I would know what to do with.
So, I went to a spot on this stone terrace above the Cabot dining hall and sat indian-style with my back up against a low stone wall at the absolute point of symmetry of the space, facing the darkened doors and windows of Pforzheimer House. I had written a little note to put at my feet during the trip that said, "Do not disturb...tripping on Salvia...I'll be back in 5 minutes," just in case some stranger happened to walk up upon me while I was tripping, so that they wouldn't freak out if I was behaving strangely or non-responsively. I thought that this would remove any pre-occupation in my mind about being encountered by other people, but I think that there was still a part of this pre-occupation that persisted into my trip, despite my precautionary efforts.
So I composed myself for about 10 minutes and then took two drags (I had my bowl packed pretty much full of Salvia 15x standardized). I could already sense things becoming weird before I even got to counting to 30 with my first hit. So I exhaled after 30 seconds and took another hit. I remember pulling the pipe away from my face, but I don't remember putting the pipe down (although apparently I did, as I found it a few moments later carefully placed right-side up next to my lighter on the stone floor beside me).
The next thing I knew, I was amidst an unseen crowd of sentient, judgmental presences that were gathered all around me just outside of my field of vision. Although I did not see them, I had the same absence of doubt that they were there that I would have if I had just looked around me a second ago and seen them and had them fresh in my mind as something present. As is usual with salvia, I thought nothing unusual about this crowd being here. I did not notice any discontinuity between when they weren't there and when they were there. I just took them for granted at that point.
What were these presences? I think that question is less important, or even illuminating, than asking what they were doing (what message they were conveying), which I will get to in a second. But if I had to characterize them, I'd say that they were thoroughly about as "un-alien" as one could get. Not necessarily "human" in a biological sense (in fact they didn't really seem to be defined along a biological or material dimension), but they were even farther from being little green extra-terrestrials or translucent spirit beings or whatnot. If I had to characterize them, I'd say that they most reminded me of my mental image of parents and coaches that I always used to get during sporting events and band performances--of course, my mental image of these personas is much more critical and apocalyptic than these personas are in real life. That's probably one reason why I could never handle the pressure of sports or music performances--because no matter how non-chalant and positively encouraging my parents or my coaches were, my mind would transform them into these critical personalities that were much more cutthroat--"Play well, or else you will be shunned and left bereft of resources and will be doomed to an ostracized existence, laden with the conveyance of our disappointment in you," etc. Like I said, my rational mind knows that this is not how they really acted or even thought, but still that was my mental image of them. And this was my image of these presences, more or less.
And this gets us to what they were doing. The message that they were conveying was a sort of expectation of performance. They were intently expecting me to perform some task, and the intensity of their intent was so strong, it was like an electric force rushing me along from behind. I felt desperate to placate this expectation, and dread at the thought of failing to do so. I had on the one hand a sense of encouragement, but also a deathly serious sense of sober disappointment on their part, with very bad consequences to follow for me, should I not perform well at this task. Although in reality I was sitting in almost total silence, the intent focus upon me felt like the dull roar of an audience at a basketball game--totally indistinct, with no ability to discern any specific voice or message, but the overall effect and intent was unmistakable. It felt/sounded physically/acoustically cacophonous (those two senses were more or less intertwined).
Well, what was this task that I was desperately trying to keep up at, that I was being expected to do? Well, it's a curious thing because I can't quite say with certainty what it was at first. It seemed almost so omnipresent and self-evident and familiar as to make analysis or reflection upon it unthinkable. At first I was so desperately focused on doing it that I didn't even stop to analyze what I was doing. If you want to jump right ahead to the psychological explanation, you could posit that these presences were a combination of my superego and a hallucination that there were Harvard students or staff that had arrived where I was, and that the task that I was desperately trying to apply myself to was to get a hold back on reality and respond to them in a coherent manner. Or perhaps you could argue that the presences were prodding me about my schoolwork that I still have to get finished during spring break, and that this was the task that I had to do. (Of course, as it would turn out, I would discover that I had been alone and in total darkness the whole time).
I think, though, that, at least in terms of direct experience, the performance had something to do with the square stone tiles that comprised the floor of the terrace on which I was sitting, because this is what seemed to embody the nature of my performance a short moment later. These stone squares were not just squares, though. They had a varying number of edges at a varying degree of magnification within my field of view depending on how difficult the task seemed. When the task seemed most difficult, these objects were more like octagons, and my vision was zoomed in into being able to encompass or take account of one or two edges at once (such that I wouldn't be able to take account of the whole octagon, and could only infer that it was sort of like an octagon by the angles between the edges). Also, when the task seemed more difficult, the whole shape would seem to stand more right-side-up, like a wheel (very reminiscent of my previous Bach trip, I now think), such that I would be climbing over the wheeel and wouldn't be able to see the rest of it (because I was stuck in the same plane as it). And when the task seemed to be getting easier a few seconds later, the shape seemed to tilt to more of a 45-degree angle, such that I could stand outside of its plane and get more of a bird's-eye view of it, like a 3-dimensional being in the book "Flatland" being able to observe a two-dimensional shape. Also, the shape seemed to be losing sides, getting simpler and more and more like a hexagon, a pentagon, and finally a square once again. And the task seemed to be to "take account" of this shape and traverse around it and just generally "get a grip" of its nature in its entirety. And I did this one edge of a time. I would come up over an edge, zooming in, feeling the edge fly past me, and then I'd get over the edge and zoom out suddenly to see the previous edge and the next edge...but then I'd have to zoom into the next edge to overcome and round that one, and after that I'd zoom out after rounding that next edge and I'd be able to see the next edge, and so on.
This is a familiar trope of my salvia experiences, in fact--this feeling that I am compelled to "survey" or "analyze" or "get a more bird's-eye view" of a shape or an abstract entity of some sort into order to zoom back out into a more broadly aware, normal state of mind in which I know where I am situated with respect to eveyrthing else in the world.
As I started to become relieved in seeing the octagons starting to become less complex and starting to become more distinct and "surveyable" (and less a thing that I was wrapped up in and a part of and unable to analyze from the outside), I realized that I was at Harvard and that the spectators would at worst be some harmless Harvard kids or Suraj (who I concluded was there at this point, even though he wasn't, and I was like, "Oh, whew, good, it's only Suraj," and I felt far less imperiled by the notion of being watched by Harvard kids or Suraj than the previous judgmental, powerful, demanding-parent-like entities---these were truly terrifying, not in the sense of being frozen with fear, but of being motivated to engage in an unceasing effort to escape punishment and achieve momentary relief before one feels the expectations nipping at one's heels once again and so one must resume one's never-ending escape. That's the thing, too--I had the distinct sense in the beginning of the trip that this "performance" that I was doing for these spectators was not some extra-ordinary thing, but was rather a commonplace and unending thing, and that I was falling behind in performing it and would see no relief for a long while. So it was really quite a relief to realize that I was just at Harvard and that I didn't have to actively struggle to do anything at that moment, but that if people were watching me (which I was still convinced was the case, just outside of my field of vision), that I could just be calm and still and let this situation pass. Because it was also at this point that I started to remember that I had just taken some salvia, and that I had the sign resting at my feet to explain to any possible passers-by what was going on. But then I realized that, if I had made that sign, then I must have made it because I had known that I wouldn't have anyone with me during the trip, so I started to doubt whether there were really presences around me.
Now, as I was thinking all of this, it appeared to me that I was saying all of this out loud (like, I was hearing my own thoughts out loud, along with all of the babble of the "audience" around me), which was one reason why I was now sure that, if I was indeed at Harvard, that I would have surely attracted attention and at the very least drawn onlookers if there hadn't been any to begin with. But by this point I was able to get a better sense of my surroundings to visually notice that there were no onlookers around me. So then I re-examined the source of this dull roar of the "audience" that I was hearing, and to my surprise it was my own thought process being repeated out-loud at like 2-4 second intervals...sort of "echoing" (and I have glimpsed this phenomenon before with the salvia tincture session I had), except now I see that it really wasn't echoing at all, but rather a layered looping that would continue indefinitely if I paid attention to it--sort of like multiple identical copies of myself being spawned at about 2-second intervals like this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JwcE3CTp8O4
And I realized that these were the "presences" that I had been hearing and feeling all along--multiple copies of myself. No wonder these presences seemed so "un-alien!" I should say that they should be quite familiar if they are indeed just multiple versions of myself! This of course became particularly interesting when the "original" me would then reflect on this multiplication (and my thoughts still seemed to be getting emitted out loud at this point), and all of the identical copies of me would then chime in with the same self-reflection...it was like each copy of me was going through the same self-reflection and was commenting on itself and on all of the versions of me that were following it at x second intervals. I took advantage of this, though, by chanting a "Fuck yes!" mantra over and over, and soon I got a cacophony of voices chanting "Fuck yes!" in unison with a lot of positive energy pouring out of it. It was great.
Suddenly it seemed that I understood why these presences were so intent upon my "performance"--because my present performance, my existence, was their future. So, just as I contemplate with intent my own future, I am possibly at the same time contemplating the present existence of some version of me that is going through this process x seconds ahead of me.
I then got a jarringly uncanny and uncomfortable feeling that I had just touched upon something BIG. I realized that I had felt an even stronger surge of this feeling just a moment beforehand when I had been more deeply in the experience. At that point, the feeling had been borne not out of logical deduction, but from hitting some raw, intuitive nerve, but I had not known what to make of it at the time, and in any case it had seemed to be distracting me from more pressing matters.
This "something BIG" was the uncanny feeling (of which I have had glimpses before during salvia trips) that I am not really "Matthew," that it is quite palpably possible (not just theoretically possible in the detached, intellectualized way with which we are all familiar) that my "Matthew" life is a dream...or, what this latest salvia experience suggested was that this life was the "Matthew Experience"--that perhaps this life is a recorded and digitally stored set of experiences that MANY MANY bored, super-advanced beings in some far-off reality are choosing to re-live in some virtual-reality type of setup, and they are tapping into the different sectors of this "Matthew hard-drive" at several-second intervals. (This thought, by the way, gave me the uncanny feeling at the moment while I was still coming down from the trip that my life must turn out to be extraordinarily SPECIAL in some way if so many beings are tapping into it, out of all of the possible life experiences that must exist...and I wasn't so comfortable in that initial confrontation with the prospect that my life will have something very very remarkable in it before all is said and done. At that moment I felt some sort of eerily strong strange attractor or presentiment towards some future as a modern-day Hitler or Jesus or Antichrist or Bill Gates or something, and of course my critical mind immediately shot this uncanny feeling down as an irrational presumption of grandiosity or delusions of self-importance...but the uncanny feeling remained.
Perhaps my life is like a somewhat popular youtube video for some society of sentient beings in some far-off land. It doesn't seem that implausible if you suppose that the individuals of this race live for a million years. Then a 100-year continuous virtual-reality experience is just like watching a movie. Our own notion of the distinction between dreaming and waking life is no less implausible...try telling a being that lives for only 8 hours in a dream world that he/she/it is just a part of a dream world and that in reality there are beings that live for over 100 years whose dreams are generating the being's reality, and this being will scoff at you as if you were peddling some crackpot science fiction fantasy.
In fact, dreaming makes much more sense amidst this supposition of this life being virtual reality. Sometimes computer systems have errors or bugs. They need to be uploaded or maintained, or else they malfunction. If you don't dream, then you start having hallucinations and general psychological malfunctionings. I am thinking very much of the movie "Dark City," which is really a much less gimmicky and much better version of "The Matrix" that the latter probably sort of ripped off:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_City_%281998_film%29
In any case, we basically have no theory of why people (or other animals) need to dream, so this supposition seems just as plausible as any at this point.
Now, if the experience of my life is nothing more than the playback of a stored memory, then that means that at some point the original being that experienced what I am experiencing also took the salvia and had all of these same thoughts, so if salvia really does function as this gateway for stepping outside of one's virtual reality circuitry, that either means that his reality, too, was a generated reality (possibly ad infinitem), or that the original Matthew's suppositions were actually incorrect for his own circumstance, but became a self-fulfilling prophecy as the rest of society caught on to the idea that it would be cool to store experiences and re-live them--especially experiences in which one thinks that one is breaking out of a dream and attaining true self-awareness--so in my case, that would actually be true, and the virtual reality stint would have originally been advertised to me as, "Hey, have you ever wanted to make a shocking revelation of the way the world really is from inside a dream world? Well, we have this stored memory of this guy who thinks that he originally did just that, and he was wrong insofar as applying it to his own time...but we have made the world into just the thing that he supposed, so that when you re-live his experience, it will be true for you, and all the more gratifying when you wake up out of this virtual reality dream of a lifetime!" Perhaps this would make the original Matthew's life significant enough to re-live. Perhaps this "far-off" society of super-advanced beings that is re-living these memories is just a society of humans a hundred years from now whose enjoyment of existence, despite their high-technology, pales in comparison to that enjoyment that was had in this, the "golden age" of humanity, and so they have then made the original "Matthew," whose presentiment that I am re-living tonight ended up being hugely transformative, into a well-revered figure whose life many people are eager to re-live (with the society having managed to store the original Matthew's memories before he died). So, funny enough, I can't even critique these crazy thoughts for being grandiose because, if this were true, then I could not even take credit for being the original Matthew, hahaha.....
In any case, I am always one for making sure that a hypothesis is falsifiable. So here's my falsifiability of this crazy idea:
*If I die in a car wreck tomorrow and my life ends up being pretty much meaningless, then that rules out a lot of these suppositions.
*If I end up becoming a hugely important figure in world history, or if I end up having my memories downloaded and stored somewhere before I die, then that would be a necessary and highly suggestive, but perhaps not sufficient in and of itself, condition for supporting these crazy ideas.
So only time will tell, hahaha.....
But just to make clear exactly what is in dispute: I am not disputing that the life of "Matthew Opitz" is a shared experience among many different entities. This I feel fairly certain about. I also think that my experience rather strongly suggests that this life experience is a deterministic one that I am simply re-living with the illusion that I have "free will," seeing as how all of the subsequent copies of me were saying the exact same things.
Finally, I think that this experience also pretty strongly implies that this "Matthew Opitz life experience" is a vessel that holds these independent entities that, otherwise, have independent existences. Now, what the nature of these other entities and their existence is, or what the nature of my fundamental existence will be when I am no longer Matthew Opitz, is an open question. I put forward one possible explanation involving an advanced society that re-lives the memories of past lives. But it could be something else that is not contingent upon me becoming famous or having my memory uploaded before I die or whatnot. I could just be hitting on what many of the world's major religions have posited: an independent soul, using this body (or rather, this life experience) as a temporary vessel, with an independent existence otherwise. The intriguing part, though, that one does not find in the world's major religions is the idea that multiple "souls" can experience the same body or life experience. This is where the implications concerning some sort of probable self-directed "reincarnation" or choosing of different virtual reality dreamtimes come into play. Whether you want to say that "souls" "choose their own parents" before they are born, or whether you want to phrase it as advanced beings "choosing their virtual reality experience," I think it amounts to the same thing. Now, why on earth would any soul or being choose to re-live the life of a Bangladeshi child who dies at the age of 2? Well, first of all, it is quite possible that such life experiences are shared by many fewer beings--that these life experiences are far less popular. Secondly, perhaps beings/souls want to experience a sense of tragedy or something, just like how we sometimes choose to watch scary or depressing movies. I mean, yeah, the life of a Holocaust victim would be pretty hard to live through, but if you have a million years at your disposal, spending 5 of those years as a Jewish child during the Holocaust in order to gain an insight into the pinnacle of human suffering and tragedy doesn't sound all that implausible to me. The stakes are certainly different than if you suppose that this is the only life you get, in which case choosing to live the life of a Bangladeshi child or a Holocaust victim would be unthinkably masochistic.
Also note: None of this experience or reasoning implies anything like "karma" or the idea that one "deserves" whatever life one has based on some grand scale of moral judgment. My intuition is that this is not how it works at all, but that every soul chooses every life.
And do animals have souls? Probably. It is probably quite possible to, as a soul or super-advanced being, to choose to experience the life experience of caterpillar #A41563879356432w or C. Elegans #T94523410584362597754532133rws...anything with a nervous system and some minimal level of experience, I guess.
Saturday, November 21, 2009
Nationalism as a Vehicle for Universalism
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.
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.
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....
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