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The Golden State
Maybe it was the prolonged exposure to sunlight, or to the extremely open and kind people. Or maybe it was the potency of the locally grown herbs, or else the influence of the alchemical marriage as performed by Garrett (he acted as a minister for two friends who got married in a river) but one thing is certain: I got very stoned in Arcata, California this weekend. Possibly more stoned than I’ve ever gotten.
Or maybe I’m just starting to learn what to really do with that state. Maybe that’s the difference.
In any event, I have to admit that the chakras were something which I had always had an interest in and maybe an intellectual understanding. But I guess I had always sort of half-believed that they were really just a useful metaphor for understanding the human body and not much else. That is, until I saw and felt them firsthand.
Funny how direct experience can smash your ideas to pieces like that.
The Skeptic’s Dictionary writes off chakras in a typical condescending Western tone:
The alleged energy of the chakras is not scientifically measurable, however, and is at best a metaphysical chimera and at worst an anatomical falsehood.
While my understanding of them was significantly more developed than that, I still had this reserve area in my mind that kind of half-believed it was all bullshit and that when people were talking about chakras, they were just talking out of their ass, cause they really didn’t know. Chances are a lot of people really don’t know and are doing that, but there’s also a chance that a significant number of people really have penetrated to this layer of energetic reality.
For me, it went something like this: we came home from the wedding, after spending many hours in the hot California sun alongside the Mad River. Sunburnt (which I only rarely get) and tired, we all kind of crashed out in the livingroom for a while. I’d only smoked a few hits off one bowl, which isn’t a super big amount of weed, but apparently it was enough. All the stars aligned in just the right way to spin me off into a very strange internal space.
It’s a difficult place to describe, but I will begin by saying that I became aware of disks of energy spinning inside my body. My eyes were closed, but I could easily place where they were in my body, seeing them not just in my mind’s eye, but somehow physically super-imposed inside of me as well. They were different colors and sizes and intensities. As I became aware of them, I realized what they were and was astonished, but not surprised. I focused on each individual chakra and felt the energy moving upwards through me. I could feel my legs sinking into the floor, but pushing through to the earth beneath, roots down into the soil, some kind of nutritional energy like light coming up through me. The feeling became more intense as I pushed the energy upwards.
At the location of my ajna chakra, in the middle of the forehead (the third eye, essentially), I became aware of a blockage of which I was not only unaware, but which I had always cherished: my thoughts. I realized in this state that my thoughts, which I prized so highly are partially there because I am not allowing the energy to escape upward from the column of my body and pass through the seventh crown chakra on the top of my head, connecting me to the universal energy. So I focused on this energy trapped in my head, swirling around and around in the form of endless thoughts and paranoia, and tried to send it upward. I did so initially by imagining the crown chakra as going brown in color, which I had recently been told was a method of warding off negative spirits. I don’t know firsthand if it works for that, but I focused on that color for several minutes and concentrated on sending that energy upward and my thinking began to disassemble from words into the strange structures behind words (more on that in a moment) and then all of a sudden…
BOOM!
Somebody had opened the door in front of me, which put me in a direct line of sight with the late afternoon sun. I had my eyelids closed but it burned through them, triggering what felt almost like an atomic blast in my body. I felt as though the top of my head were being scorched (without hurting) and I bolted upright in the chair to get the sun out of my eyes. At first, I wasn’t sure what had happened, but then I could feel an utterly intense energy flooding through me, accompanied by a tremendous joy and openness, unlike anything I have ever felt before.
I was absolutely positively filled with it. And it lasted something like ten hours, until I went to sleep, and allowed me access to a layer of reality I had only ever suspected, but never witnessed firsthand. It in turn was unlike anything I could have ever imagined.
Oh, before I get into all that though, I also wanted to highlight for future reference and fellow explorers that while my energy was raising through my body and head, I was witnessing closed-eye visuals of something sort of like intersecting three-dimensional semi-transparent long rectangular boxes of light rotating within and across one another. There were also lesser pronounced not so dimensional or luminous dark rectangles which danced and rotated in the periphery. Does anybody know what this could be? The only thing I can really think of that is a remotely close reference to it is the cross you see referenced in Rosicrucianism. It’s not so much that this looks like it, but that the “spirit” of it seems pretty similar.
Besides all that though, I saw the Matrix.
Or rather, I perceived directly that underlying structure which I think people are referring to when they use the metaphor that is employed in the Matrix movies to describe spiritual reality. It may also be relevant that the movie Dune was on in the background on very low volume - the only part I heard was when Paul Atreides, Muad’Dib, was about to teach the assembled army the Weirding Way. Anyway, what I mean by all that above is that I - for a while - stopped thinking in words. I began thinking in what I can only describe as meaningful structures. They at times had the after-effects of words or of images, but they were neither. They were the ground from which those things - and possibly all of reality - spring.
Consequently, describing it all in words is rather difficult. But it would go something like this. I could understand the “language” of all things. Actually, I will let Philip K. Dick describe it, because I think he experienced something quite similar:
We hypostatize information into objects. Rearrangement of objects is change in the content of the information; the message has changed. This is a language which we have lost the ability to read. We ourselves are a part of this language; changes in us are changes in the content of the information. We ourselves are information-rich; information enters us, is processed and is then projected outward once more, now in an altered form. We are not aware that we are doing this, that in fact this is all we are doing.
That’s all very well and good to understand intellectually and distantly. But to experience it first-hand is very astonishing. It is almost like you have these things, like they are almost like impulses. They swell up and cause some thing to happen. The thing could be someone saying a string of words. It could manifest as someone sitting a certain way or laughing. It could be the arrangement of objects in a room. It could be all of those things at once, and have to do with how these outward signs are clustered.
It is the ground to which numerology refers as well. Because within these “structures” or underlying impulses there are things which are equivalent. Like two words may have the same actual underlying meaning regardless of their outer appearance. That is, they have the same impulse which brings them into being. You have to understand that words as we ordinarily see them are simply an after-effect of these meaning-structures arranging and re-arranging themselves. Systems of mystical correspondence such as numerology are systematic attempts to condition the intellect to perceiving these underlying structures - the Matrix, as it were. How well they work I am not sure, as I only spent a finite amount of time being able to directly perceive these structures. But I have some sense that I will get back there at some point as well.
I also think that this is probably quite similar to what I hear the experience of schizophrenia is like - although I do not by any means feel myself to be suffering from this condition. I have seen accounts of schizophrenics who feel that:
… the whole world and every tiniest instance of anything within it is speaking to the schizophrenic of his/her singular destiny. Every utterance, whether by friends or the TV, every reported news item, every passing vehicle or fluttering leaf provides the schizophrenic with another piece in the jigsaw of the design that destiny has decreed for them.
Or one schizophrenic who explains first-hand that:
…words held too much meaning. I would listen to something as banal as a football match commentary, and to me it would be the story of the last battle of the gods. Everything was so vast, so deeply mythological. I’d see the arcane history of the world in everything, every little detail would hold another clue, and I was trying to hold all this information together, launched upon a mythic quest that terrified and excited me in ways far more real, far more vivid, than my life ever had up to that point.
Interestingly, marijuana has recently been connected by dubious scientific studies to triggering schizophrenia. But schizophrenia is only one paradigm from which we could look at a phenomenon of rich meaning such as this. I personally prefer that of the Gift of Tongues, which Jesus disciples are said to have received at Pentecost in the form of a small tongue of fire which came down and rested upon their heads.
The Book of Acts Chapter 2 reads:
3 And there appeared unto them cloven tongues like as of fire, and it sat upon each of them.
4 And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance.
5 And there were dwelling at Jerusalem Jews, devout men, out of every nation under heaven.
6 Now when this was noised abroad, the multitude came together, and were confounded, because that every man heard them speak in his own language.
At the risk of sounding like a burned out drug user and pompous ego-maniac, I believe that this is what happened to me, or at least that this is what was beginning to happen to me during this experience. I decided at the time to put this theory to a primitive test. For some godawful reason, a Tim Allen movie, the Santa Clause II, was now playing on television. I sat for a moment listening to it, to the English words with which my ear and rational mind was familiar, overlaid across this structures which I was perceiving directly. My test consisted of me concentrating on breaking apart my recognition of the English words, and tapping into the meanings themselves and modulating them into a different outward language appearance. For just a split second, te experiment was a success. The characters began speaking in French (which I am not remotely fluent in) and then reverted back as my concentration broke. I’m sure noone else heard it. But I’m also doubly sure that I didn’t imagine or hallucinate it.
As this was all happening, I needed someone to tell about what I was experiencing. A religious studies major and interested in the paranormal, Garrett was the obvious choice. I took him outside so that I could freely talk about how I was perceiving the “nature of language and reality” without having everyone else at the party think I was stark raving nuts. At some point, maybe later on, Garrett mentioned how in receiving the Koran, Muhammad was said to have heard the text as a “ringing of bells in the desert.” He suggested that perhaps this ringing of bells that he heard was somehow analogous to the underlying structures which I experienced. I didn’t experience a ringing of bells myself, per se, but I can see how when you talk about this phenomenon, you have a need to pin it down to a particular word, a metaphor or frame of reference, something concrete to allow you to communicate about it with others.
Going back to what I was saying earlier about numerology and equivalences, I think this also reveals an important truth about sacred texts in general. The Bible, for example. As I’ve written elsewhere, I believe that the Bible refers to events that happen/ed not in Linear Time but in Real or Mythic Time. What that means for the purposes of our current conversation though is that the outer appearance of the Bible, the actual language and stories with which we are all familiar is NOT the actual real substance of the Bible. It is simply an after-effect of the MUCH deeper, more meaningful and powerful structures or impulses which underly our reality. As such, when you read the language of the Bible, you are interacting with these hidden structures whether you realize it or not (and it seems difficult to become aware of it). So that the power of the Bible or a sacred text is not in what you intellectually perceive as the layers of meaning in it, but in the actual structures behind it. The larger point I am making though is that the structures hidden behind the Bible and other texts then have equivalents in other forms - just as numerology shows that individual words can be broken down into equivalent numbers. And this too is the ultimate power of language to transform individuals: it’s not that the words change people, it is the structures beneath them which form the basis of all reality…
The only other thing I could compare this idea of equivalents to is what is said to happen in the Transubstantiation of the Catholic Eucharist.
In the Church’s traditional theological language, in the act of consecration during the Eucharist the “substance” of the bread and wine is changed by the power of the Holy Spirit into the “substance” of the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ. At the same time, the “accidents” or appearances of bread and wine remain. “Substance” and “accident” are here used as philosophical terms that have been adapted by great medieval theologians such as St. Thomas Aquinas in their efforts to understand and explain the faith. Such terms are used to convey the fact that what appears to be bread and wine in every way (at the level of “accidents” or physical attributes — that is, what can be seen, touched, tasted, or measured) in fact is now the Body and Blood of Christ (at the level of “substance” or deepest reality).
To reformulate my experience in these terms, I was able to directly perceive the underlying “substance” which caused the “accidents” of words, images, and physical things to be perceived by us in ordinary reality. I was also able to see that multiple “accidents” can and do spring from the same underlying “substance”…
This is, I think, one of those esoteric points that can only be experienced to know for sure what the hell I am talking about. If others have experienced this or similar, please share!
At the end of the day, what I took away from it is this: the things you say, think and do have greater reality than you commonly think they do. Developing a mindfulness of this is very important. Also, I think it is absolutely valid and worthwhile to try and understand spiritual matters on an intellectual level - despite the fact that many people will tell you it’s not, that you can’t and that you shouldn’t try. Developing a flexible and open-ended intellectual understanding prepares you mentally for the actual experience of it, so that you do not simply become mute, unable to bring back boons from the otherworld, or to descend into schizophrenia and confusion.
The thing to be careful of is trying to mash your actual experiences so that they fit perfectly into your intellectual understanding of how things are supposed to be. For example, I have been attempting to read up on the significance of the sun within the chakra system, and various sources indicate that the sun is associated with this or that chakra. Who is right? Who do you believe? You go by what you experience and you keep yourself open enough so that there is a possibility for genuine experience, because you haven’t boarded the whole thing up with rigid rational explanations. And when an experience like this happens to you and then seems to depart, don’t despair. It isn’t gone. It just showed you what you were ready for and as much of it as you were at that time ready to receive. Go back after the fact and process it and practice as much as you need. Greater reality is there waiting for you, ready to receive you when you’re ready to receive it.
- Motorcyclin’
- Christians say the darnedest things!
- The Centennial Ring & The Golden Bowl
- For The Commonwealth!
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August 1st, 2006 at 2:18 pm
Congratulations on the breakthrough.
There’s a saying which is quoted by Lon Milo Duquette, but I forget who said it originally: “It’s all in your head, you just have no idea how big your head is.”
I’ve had this experience myself. We did a summoning of Gabriel, the archangel, and I didn’t understand the rules. I became violently ill, because although I heard the angel telling me what to do, I was attempting not to do it or say anything, because it was someone else who was the focus of the ritual.
Big mistake. Threw up all over the place. Listen to the spirits. And don’t eat before rituals. there’s a reason for fasting.
That was one of the weirder experiences I’ve had so far. It shook me, and kind of proved that this stuff I’m messing with is real, if not necessarily scientifically verifiable.
August 1st, 2006 at 2:31 pm
Hey Scott, do you think you could a bit of a write-up of that experience and submit it to Traces from Beyond? That’s be awesome!
http://www.tracesfrombeyond.com/
August 1st, 2006 at 2:51 pm
I have to admit that the chakras were something which I had always had an interest in and maybe an intellectual understanding. But I guess I had always sort of half-believed that they were really just a useful metaphor for understanding the human body and not much else.
You mean like the phrase, “human body”? We create both the common image that goes with these words and the detailed scientific model of reality in order to explain experience.
August 1st, 2006 at 2:52 pm
I’m not sure I follow…
August 1st, 2006 at 3:09 pm
Meditation on the Light in the Head
To practice this form of meditation, close your eyes, and observe your inner field of vision by focusing the attention at the point in the center of the forehead, just slightly above the point between the eyebrows. This location is called the Third Eye Center or Agna Chakra. It is related to the faculty of clairvoyant vision. The physical manifestation or anchorage point for the Agna Chakra is the pituitary gland, which is located in a bony cradle in back of the root of the nose.
When you close your eyes, look steadily into your inner field of vision until light, color and patterns begin to appear. (This is looking with your attention and not with the physical eyes which should remain relaxed.) When most people close their eyes, initially they see a black void, but by looking steadily into this void, various colors and patterns will begin to appear. When this happens, simply observe them with your full, undivided attention as if you were intently watching a movie. Then periodically focus all of your attention within the smallest point that you can see in the center of your field of vision, and pierce through that point. After you have done this, the light will again blaze forth from the point in a new burst of energy, and you will find yourself at a higher rate of vibration or plane of energy. With continued practice of this form of meditation, you will become immersed in a blazing sea of light; and you will become a center from which that spiritual power is radiated.
By concentrating the attention in the Sahasraram Chakra or Thousand-Petalled Lotus, located at the top of the head, an experienced meditator can release an even more powerful radiation of light and spiritual energy. (It may take more work to activate this chakra; the beginner can get more immediate results by looking through the Agna Chakra or Third Eye Center.) The Sahasraram Wheel is the highest chakra; called the “Doorway to the Infinite” and the Brahmarandra or Hole of Brahma, it is the most powerful and spiritual of all the centers that can be awakened in man (with the possible exception of the Heart Chakra which is considered by some yogis to be of equal importance). When the Sahasraram Chakra is fully activated in a perfected yogin or saint, the white fire of Cosmic Kundalini descends upon him and blends with his own rising kundalini force, and the white light of spirituality radiates for miles around.
http://www.erowid.org/spirit/yoga/yoga_info1.shtml
August 1st, 2006 at 3:12 pm
http://homepage3.nifty.com/MRG/eng_working_with_arrows.htm
The drug puts nothing in you that is not already there. It simply rearranges.
Your subjective experience is possible because you are a meaning-making creature.
By rights, we should be able to mentate both by thought and by form. And without extra chemical assistance.
Tim, I know you’re not a jukebox, but can you put together a post on something called “metacognition”, if that interests you?
It’s been a particular concern of mine recently as I reach the limits of what I call “my mind.”
August 1st, 2006 at 3:13 pm
Wow! I wish I could comment on lots of stuff but will only touch on a few things.
Your crown chakra opened up. It was either closed or partially closed and you experienced the big hook up with God, Higher Power, whatever you want to call it.
Kind of sounds like the image you are describing is similar to the lotus flower opening, which is a symbol of the crown chakra and was incorporated as part of the picture you posted. I would imagine there are lots of ways to feel a connection or hook up with The Source.
Putting your crown chakra at brown clears other beings from your space which is helpful to do before shifting colors. If you want easy access to God/Higher Power try imagining your crown chakra at gold, white, or violet…all of which have been associated with the crown chakra. But quite frankly I have a feeling that lots of colors would bring similar sensations depending upon what works for the individual. Gold and white seem to be the colors must discussed by people that I’ve heard. (Lately, I’ve been hearing about platinum but in a different sense…must experiment more….)
Anyhow, ror more ideas, etc, on the grid/matrix, take a look at…
Channeled Kryon who likes to talk about the grid
EMF Balancing with the Grid
August 1st, 2006 at 3:17 pm
Hm, metacognition? Not sure I know what you mean. There are lots of pieces on “meta-programming” by Robert Anton Wilson and others out there, I think.
Also, Andrew Weil points out something similar in his old books about drugs: that they don’t put anything in you, they just help you trigger naturally existing states. And he says the point of using drugs is that you learn to do these things without them…
August 1st, 2006 at 3:34 pm
I’m not sure I follow…
Oh? To put it another way, a skeptic would tell you that you didn’t experience the doctrine of chakras, you experienced sensations and used the doctrine of chakras to name or explain them. Similarly, you do not experience the human body as it appears in Gray’s Anatomy. You use an (egotistical/insecure and misleading?) image of a body to explain what you feel. Science has a set of rules for creating images and models of a specific kind. People who talk about chakras use a different set of rules. Both may limit or influence what you can experience, since the mashing you spoke of at the end of your post may happen automatically.
August 1st, 2006 at 3:44 pm
Oh…
August 1st, 2006 at 4:06 pm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metacognition
When you realize that it is your thinking itself, as in a PROCESS, that must change.
You experienced mentation-by-form.
Can that be invoked in your daily life?
Castaneda (that old showman, may he rest in peace) also maintained that drugs were a temporary shortcut to what should be rightfully ours. Gurdjieff also indicated that Eastern schools used them sometimes to prove to students of their own potential which they had to work for.
August 1st, 2006 at 4:18 pm
Tim, sounds like you had an amazing experience. Props to you. Experiences like that can skyrocket your understanding of Self and consciousness, so don’t let it go…and don’t buy into that “it was just a drug experience” bs. Thats just another way for the current Materialistic paradigm (i wish there was another way to say that) to downgrade and ignore the importance of YOUR experience. Fuck’em.
“…the outer appearance of the Bible, the actual language and stories with which we are all familiar is NOT the actual real substance of the Bible. It is simply an after-effect of the MUCH deeper, more meaningful and powerful structures or impulses which underly our reality.”
This reminded me of something Colin Wilson wrote. Forgive me for just copying it, but it explained to me the role of sacred scripture in religion very well:
“In speaking of them, it is necessary to remember that what they left recorded on paper was the least important part of their lives. It is the lesson that is expressed in the Chauang Tzu book in the story of the Duke of Ch’i and his wheelwright. It tells how the wheelwright saw the Duke reading, and called to ask him what the book was about. ‘The words of sages,’ the Duke explained. ‘The lees and scum of bygone men,’ the wheelwright said; and when the irritated Duke asked him what the devil he meant by this, the wheelwright told him: ‘There is an art in wheel-makeing that I cannot explain even to my son. It cannot be put into words. That is why I cannot let him take over my work, and I am still making wheels myself at seventy. It must have been the same with the sages: all that was worth handing on died with them. The rest they put into their books. That is why I said you are reading the lees and scum of dead men.’”
Now that doesn’t mean you can’t use “the lees and scum” as a pointer towards the Vision, just that taking the “scum” as an end-all is ultimately a dead-end.
Oh, and to add a thought to the Bible as “mythic time,” there is a good deal of evidence to suggest that St. Paul viewed the story of Christ as occuring on the Mythic plane. As one example, you can note that in none of the letters or writings attributed to Paul did he ever mention the “historical” events of Christ’s life…even though he lived closer to the time of Christ than any other writer in the Bible and would have been uniquely able to reference first-hand accounts of Christ if he chose to. Instead ALL his references to Christ come in the (exact) forms of the ressurected god myths of the Roman empire, myths he was intimately familiar with.
You’re a bastard, by the way. I gotta get some work done today and you keep distracting me…keep it up, though…
Ronin
August 1st, 2006 at 4:38 pm
I tried to read the earliest Christian writings with that in mind, and decided somehow that Paul seemed to think the Crucifixion happened on Earth in the literal sense. But I like the theory that he and the “Essenes” developed the story of Jesus from strange experiences and earlier stories (possibly including stories about Pythagoras). If we could prove that people thought the Essene Teacher of Righteousness died by the cross before Paul started saying this about Jesus, then I think Rule One would demand some such theory.
August 1st, 2006 at 6:08 pm
hf,
Yea, its certainly quite possible that Paul thought the Crucifiction “literally” occured. There are many permutations of this historical vs. mythical Jesus game we can psossibly see in Paul: The Crucifiction occurred on Earth & the Resurrection occurred in the Absolute (Mythic); the whole thing occured in the Absolute; Jesus lived and taught, but everything after that was Mythic; Paul spun the whole Jesus yarn wholesale; Jesus may have died and Resurrected just as orthodoxy states…
Like I said, “there is evidence to suggest.” I am certainly not Biblical scholar so I’m not gonna come down emphatically for one angle or another, but the evidence does lean stronger towards a mostly Mythic interp than a Literal interp for Paul.
Of course my favorite version is where Jesus punk’d Simon, hence Cruci-Fiction.
And yea, Pythogoras seems to get the short end of the stick in the occult. I mean his cult seems to be the originator of a lot of genius-god, super-man, divine-man mythology…yet he always gets left out. I’ll bet he gets pissed off about that (he was supposed to be immortal, too…wasn’t he?)
Ronin
August 1st, 2006 at 7:04 pm
Dude, you were stoned. You’ve read about chakras, and under the influence of a bunch of weed, you thought you really knew the existence of chakras. Weed makes you think stupid sh*t. End of story, man.
August 1st, 2006 at 7:41 pm
well written and awesome!
non-habitual herb usage can be as potent of a gnostic catalyst as just about anything out there.
regarding the spinning rectangles:
personally, i consider Ezekiel’s Vision to be the most authentic visionary experience recorded in the bible, a throwback to more ancient Hekhalot/Merkavah cosmologies.
the Chariot spins through itself like a higher dimensional mobius strip. each bearer Archangel of the Quarters is itself a four-part vortex through the four qabalistic worlds.
what the hell does that have to do with your damn rectangles?
well, consider the theory that John Dee’s Enochian system was an attempt to reconstruct, or build something similar to, this Chariot mysticism.
take a look at his Great Table: each quarter is an Archangel, each quarter’s quarter holds a number of rectangular angelic names. from the smallest level of division up, picture each set spinning around the next: a giant hypercubic vortex of rectangles.
not necessarily the same thing, but that’s what i saw when i read your description.
August 1st, 2006 at 9:28 pm
Congratulations, wond’rous times indeed. Try not to overthink the event,receive the blessing and illumination and work that heart chakra, so the people around you can share in your blessing and raise their vibrations as well. God is love…pass it on.
August 1st, 2006 at 9:57 pm
Dumbest comment ever! Remind me never to tell this guy any of my cool stories!
August 1st, 2006 at 10:12 pm
Wonderful Timmy. Ain’t nothing like direct personal experience. You seem to be getting closer and closer to Gnosis every time.
Don’t burn out by going too fast though… You wouldn’t be the first one.
F.
August 1st, 2006 at 10:43 pm
i immediately thought of the Antahkarana symbol. Diane Stine, in Essential Reiki, states that “it is a meditation and healing symbol from Tibet…It is also said to connect the physical brain with the Crown chakra, and to have positive affects on all the chakras and the aura. Meditation on the symbol automatically starts the Microcosmic Orbit, sending Ki through the central energy channels and the body. During meditation, the symbol seems to shift and change, evolving into other images.”
Some Reiki practitioners use this symbol, not as a Reiki symbol, but as a sacrad symbol, that enhances overall healing energies. Does it look or feel anything like what you were seeing?
August 1st, 2006 at 10:46 pm
here’s a link to see the symbol:
http://hallsofreiki.com/antahkarana.html
August 2nd, 2006 at 6:07 am
Excellent post, excellent experience! As a side-note to the weed/chakra interaction, I have a neonate theory that weed tends to block or numb the root chakra, causing the user to feel disconnected from hir body/environment. This is what freaks people out about weed (at least here in Holland, where weed is just *too* strong), while others seem to like it. It depends on what you focus on.
Also about chakras: I’m in a similar place, just beginning to see and experience them as somehow real and not just metaphorical ‘things’. I just picked up a brilliant book by Judith Anodea called ‘Eastern Body, Western Mind’. It is an excellent consolidation of chakra and Jungian psychology, highly recommended for both healing and understanding.
Finally, a comment about language and meaning. I believe the saying ‘As above, so below’ sheds a lot of light on the experiences you describe in both yourself and schizophrenics. I’ve been there too, and it feels quite different from “normal” consciousness. It feels like everything, including yourself, is *being* and *doing* by itself. The result is that everything is synchronized/resonant, meaning that thought, word, feeling, deed, and environment are operating together harmoniously as one. There is one rhythm, expressed on all levels of consciousness, including the Rational, the Mythic, the Magical, and the Archaic. As above, so below. It is dancing the dance. Playing your part. Singing your song. Synchronicity. Etc etc etc… great stuff!
Thanks for sharing.
August 2nd, 2006 at 11:53 am
Linear history correpsonds with the ‘accidental’ or ‘empty’ literal objects of day-to-day reality. Just as every word of letters and phonemes is the after-image of the primal substance, so the events of linear history (accessible only in concrete words and pictures) and quantitative science (events hypostasized into quantitative concepts, expressed with symbol manipulation) are the images “seen in a glass [mirror] darkly”.
There is no dilemma in choosing to situate events in either historical or super-historical time. One is the image of the other, through and by which the other is known. The tendency to arbitrarily pick one over the other is espescially prevalent in Christianity; Christian culture tends towards choosing one “true” explanation of any particular holy text. Meister Eckhart is a notable counter-example.
Did the founding of America take place in linear time or mythic time? The mythic overtones of the Israel-centered conflicts cannot be overlooked. What about when Cortez discovered the New World?
Borges explores this idea with The Quixote in “Parable of Cervantes and Don Quixote”.
August 2nd, 2006 at 12:58 pm
Prune,
Ya know, you’re right. That is an excellent point: the Mythic and the Historical need not be opposed to one another, or they, in fact, go hand in hand in many instances. I do tend to fall into that trap myself many times- either-or instead of either-or/both-and/neither.
But I guess I should clarify one point. In the context of Paul, it doesn’t seem that he saw the life of Jesus in Historical terms at all. What I was trying to say very poorly above was that, even though you can read many different angles in Paul, the most accurate reading seems to be Jesus in the Mythic- his actions, deeds, and trials occuring purely in the Absolute. For Paul, there may truly have been a Jesus the man, but He was completely irrelevent. Jesus the Risen, Jesus the Mythic, Jesus the God- this is what Paul was all about, and this was the Jesus that he referred to.
On the ther hand, the writer of, say, Luke would have a viewpoint of Christ’s historical life and Christ’s mythology exactly as you describe, as going hand in hand with each other: with angels dropping in, devils cast out, demons showing up, as well as a pretty linear description of the events in Christ’s life.
Your point is excellent, though. I need to go back and read “Don Quixote” again…
Ronin
August 2nd, 2006 at 1:32 pm
Amberkai:
I don’t know that it “looked” like that, but I also realized during that experience that symbols work the same way as language that I described above. The part of it that we see or reproduce through a drawing is really just the “tip of the iceberg”. And the way that a symbol we create “looks” is not necessarily indicative of how it would look were you to experience it directly. So I think you do have to go through this other channel of feeling it and I would say that there is definitely something similar in this symbol to what I experienced.
August 2nd, 2006 at 1:37 pm
Fuj: Judith Anodea is the best author on chakras that I have seen. Haven’t checked out that book you mentioned, but I have seen another awesome one by her. Highly recommended.
Yes! I totally get what you are saying. Being in that state reminds me of a few different things: (1) that everything is animated by itself (animism) and everything is equally alive; (2) which leads to this sort of automatic feeling of everything - like events are unfolding as they must, as though they only have one way they can unfold - but it’s not like your choice is restricted. It’s not like you don’t have Free Will. It’s a weird paradox; (3) something like what they describe experiencing being at one with the Tao of nature must be like…
August 2nd, 2006 at 1:38 pm
Prune:
That’s a really interesting question which I am going to think deeply about
August 2nd, 2006 at 2:00 pm
“Weed makes you think stupid sh*t.”
Well, actually…going by what others have mentioned, if we’re going to say that the drug doesn’t bring out anything that isn’t already there, then maybe it SEEMS like there’s “stupid shit” that kind of occurs in your mental process and it SEEMS like it was created by the drug…but maybe what’s really happening is that it’s just stupid shit that was aching to get out of the dark recesses of your brain and the drug just made it easier for that to happen. Sort of like taking an ex-lax. you know…for “stupid shit”.
BUT… how is what Tim described “stupid”? That’s not stupid, that’s fucking awesome! Even if he had just read a bunch of stuff about chakras and all that, why does that diminish the experience? what’s the difference between “really” experiencing the chakras and the “stupid shit” experience of the chakras? Wouldn’t that whole mess about the experience being “legit” be in the mind of the beholder?
August 2nd, 2006 at 2:01 pm
“Weed makes you think stupid sh*t.”
Well, actually…going by what others have mentioned, if we’re going to say that the drug doesn’t bring out anything that isn’t already there, then maybe it SEEMS like there’s “stupid shit” that kind of occurs in your mental process and it SEEMS like it was created by the drug…but maybe what’s really happening is that it’s just stupid shit that was aching to get out of the dark recesses of your brain and the drug just made it easier for that to happen. Sort of like taking an ex-lax. you know…for “stupid shit”.
BUT… how is what Tim described “stupid”? That’s not stupid, that’s fucking awesome! Even if he had just read a bunch of stuff about chakras and all that, why does that diminish the experience? what’s the difference between “really” experiencing the chakras and the “stupid shit” experience of the chakras? Wouldn’t that whole mess about the experience being “legit” be in the mind of the beholder?
August 2nd, 2006 at 2:01 pm
Thanks! Yeah, I am becoming very conscious of that. You can only expand so fast without exploding. At least all the groundwork that I have done for these past few years is really coming in handy now though…
August 2nd, 2006 at 2:37 pm
[…] Recent experiences have made me really re-evaluate the utility of angry and/or accusatory finger-pointing when it comes to organized religion. A reader named “prunes” posted a comment that really hits the nail on the head for me: Analogously to how words and concrete concepts are formed from the trans-formal prior substance, ‘religions’ are the outward form of the eternal impulse at their core. The error comes from mistaking the form for the substance, whence ‘bible literalists’. […]
August 2nd, 2006 at 4:15 pm
Heh heh…that’s what the angel told John Dee.
BTW, Tim- if you’re interested, Satyananda’s “Kundalini Tantra” is an excellent introduction. Aryeh Kaplan’s commentary of the SY also has some very interesting ideas in it.
August 2nd, 2006 at 6:36 pm
Found this in a book by Deepak Chopra:
“Thought cannot restore wholeness because by definition thought is also fragmented.”
August 2nd, 2006 at 8:47 pm
i haven’t kept up with the comments on this one, so maybe this has been covered, but could you have intellected something akin to platonic forms?
very fascinating stuff. i also had a weird chakra experience when i was really high, except i just got scared and paranoid and thought i was going to die.
August 2nd, 2006 at 11:07 pm
But isn’t using chemical substances to try to induce mystical states kind of, well, cheating? Buddhist monks take decades of meditation practice before they have experiences like that.
Trying to reach such a state through a quick drug trip just strikes me as trying to use a shortcut where there is no real shortcut. Decades of training and cultivating virtues are the only way, I have heard, that one can reach mystical states. Attempted shortcuts will lead you nowhere. I might even go so far as to suggest that too much of such attempted shortcuts could lead one into the kind of self-absorbed immorality that is detrimental to mystical enlightenment.
It’s like the difference between trying to lose weight by dieting and excercising, or by just eating a South Bronx Parasite bar with an intestinal worm in it (mad props to Aqua Teen Hunger Force for that comparison).
August 2nd, 2006 at 11:36 pm
What? Where in this article did I say that I smoked pot in order to induce a mystical state? That certainly was not the case. I smoked it in order to enjoy myself, to “party” with a group of people as I have done on scattered occasions in the past. I was actually plunged unwillingly into something far in excess of my expectations and outside of anything that I had consciously wanted to do.
Are you a Buddhist monk? For that matter, am I? Why should I or anyone else use them as my model? Some people would argue that they are simply going too slow or that their techniques were better suited to a specific part of the world and a specific culture and point in history.
Notice you qualify this statement with an “I have heard” rather than a “from my own experience” - which is the spirit in which I offered this story to others to learn from. People are free to see it as a positive or negative example (what to do or what not to do) or neither. It’s up to them.
Ultimately, I have gone back and forth on this subject of whether or not drugs and other “shortcuts” are an effective method, if they are dangerous, or whatever. I have come to no conclusions. If anything, I have become less certain of the things that I thought I knew.
In any event, I’m also confused by your change of heart. As someone else pointed out above, your initial response was a dismissive one. You wrote, “Weed makes you think stupid sh*t. End of story, man.” And now here you are seeming to say that drugs can and do provide such experiences, but that for moral reasons, we should not use them. Am I interpreting you wrong?
August 3rd, 2006 at 12:43 am
“But isn’t using chemical substances to try to induce mystical states kind of, well, cheating?”
Sorry, but statements like this really get on my nerves. Was it cheating for Peruvian “shamans” to use ayahuasca to commune with the jungle? Was it cheating for Hindu Saivites to use marijuana to commune with Mahavira? Was it cheating for North American Indians to use peyote to commune with their ancestors? Was it cheating for the shamans of Siberia to use fly agaric mushrooms to…well, I don’t actually know what they used it for…but cheating? What game are you playing? Do you have a rule book, cause if so, I’d love to see it.
“Buddhist monks take decades of meditation practice before they have experiences like that.”
Yea, maybe the ones with no damn concentration. I’m certainly no Buddhist monk (though i think zac is, so definitely ask him about it), but from personal experience I can tell you that it takes about 3 months of (somewhat) dedicated meditation to have some experiences that will blow your mind. And i’m fucking slow.
“Decades of training and cultivating virtues are the only way, I have heard, that one can reach mystical states.”
I got my father to join a yoga school partly to help him deal with his diabetes. After a few months of practice he attended a weekend seminar where they ended up “playing” with kundalini chakras. No real meditation experience, and in one weekend he was able to feel the chakras and have some interesting experiences. Not on par with the intensity of Tim’s experience, but nevertheless it took one…1…one weekend to get started. Certainly not decades of training.
“Weed makes you think stupid sh*t. End of story, man.”
And yea, you missed the whole point with this comment. I’m with Mickey,”Dumbest comment ever…”
Ronin
August 3rd, 2006 at 1:23 am
first off, i have to say i really admire your courage in distilling your experiences in this way and putting them out to the world for comment and collusion. you give hope to many others who have had similar experiences and have no forum in which to share them or who are in a place in their lives where they don’t feel comfortable sharing their experiences. thank you. you are doing a service to mankind & touching the lives of other people, remember that.
[quote]To reformulate my experience in these terms, I was able to directly perceive the underlying “substance” which caused the “accidents” of words, images, and physical things to be perceived by us in ordinary reality. I was also able to see that multiple “accidents” can and do spring from the same underlying “substance”…[/quote]
i use the ‘accidental’ method to discover the power in words all the time. it’s one of the ways i communicate directly with the divine, or implicit order. i have been spending a lot of time teaching myself how to gain useful information from the fractals one finds in nature; clouds, the arrangement of leaves on a tree and the way in which they move in the wind, correlating patterns that emerge in traffic and in chaotic places in cities (i was a bicycle messenger for over ten years) and learning how to put this information to use. it’s a highly idiosyncratic process but it can be immensely useful if you use it sparingly and don’t take it too seriously. it’s part of the method i use to see around things.
i don’t remember where i got this idea from, which makes me sad ‘cos i’d like to give credit where credit is definitely due, but for a long time i’ve been of the opinion that all the spacetime events in our perceivable universe happen simultaneously; the universe, it seems, turns out to be merely a big hologram which our bodies arrange into a linear timeline. linear time appears to be merely an artifact of our sensate apparatus. the big bang and the big crush and everything in between seem to occur in a linear timeframe only because our brains edit the information they recieve in a linear fashion.
thanks again for sharing, i must sleep. i’ll keep reading your blog, i really enjoy it. KEEP UP THE GOOD WORK!
-k
August 4th, 2006 at 4:30 pm
In a channeled ‘fiction’ book (said to be based on actual realities) by Jane Roberts called The Education of Oversoul Seven, one of Seven’s ’selves’ lived in an ancient culture (Sumerian? I don’t remember) where they could ‘feel’ language, and read through touch, and language had all these extra dimensions of meaning that people in later times who would come across these old texts written on stones, would not be able to decipher because they had lost those deeper perceptual capacities. They could only read the ’surface’ meanings of the language, which were like the tip of the iceberg.
This talk of actual energy structures behind the words in the bible, which are what actually change people, reminded me of that.
August 4th, 2006 at 5:26 pm
Holy shit! Yeah, that’s it. That’s a very succint way of saying what I was trying to say. Thank you!
August 5th, 2006 at 1:51 am
Oh yeah, and about the herb. Obviously we still possess these deeper perceptual capacities, they’ve just become dormant, but the THC can trigger them. That means they can be triggered.
I want.
August 5th, 2006 at 2:00 pm
First, response to Tim:
Sorry for not being more clear, Tim. I do not think drugs can lead to real mystical experiences; what I think is wrongheaded is the attempt to use drugs in this manner instead of long, dedicated practice. I don’t think it’s evil, I just think it’s a little misguided.
Response to Ronin:
Maybe you and I disagree on what spirituality means, Ronin, but I believe real spiritual growth (which I admit I have not had in the slightest) means becoming a more ethical person — not having a mind-blowing mental experience.
Allow me to quote someone who I think, unlike myself, actually has achieved some measure of mystical attainment of some sort: Zen Buddhist Brad Warner, from his book Hardcore Zen: Punk Rock, Monster Movies and the Truth about Reality. In this chapter excerpt, he mainly talks about LSD, but I think it’s relevant to any drug:
And here’s a bonus question:
2. Why does an “expanded consciousness” include the inability to operate a motor vehicle? […]
Now, just why is it that people at higher levels of consciousness can’t seem to survive without one of us low-level folks there to help them out?
Page 171 — Buddhism isn’t about anything so diminutive as any of your mental states at all. It’s much deeper than that.
There is no optimal state of consciousness. Optimal is just an idea, another manifestation of the Great Somewhere Else. Consciousness is just an idea […]
Incredibly the belief that a lifetime–hundreds of thousands lifetimes, since our consciousness includes the [172] acquired cultural and social knowledge of our entire species’ history–of bad thinking habits can be altered in a single evening high on LSD continues to be talked about seriously by people who really ought to know better.
Are the visions you can experience on LSD “real” religious visions? Sure they are. And as such they are worse than useless. Religious visions and acid experiences are both fantasies, delusions, projections of your own hidden [ 173] desires. They have nothing whatsoever to do with the truth, nothing to do with reality.
There’s also another chapter where Warner even has dismissing things to say about the mystical experiences derived from meditation instead of drugs:
I figure now I’ll be hounded for blindly quoting a master instead of “thinking for myself”, like if I got bombed I would somehow see the light.
So here’s what I’ve decided for myself: I can’t pretend to have let go of anger, greed, ignorance, or ego. The rare times I try to meditate, I do so in order to help develop my concentration and maybe someday begin to give myself a long-lasting feeling of interconnection with others. In turn, I hope that developing these qualities may help me be a better, more ethical person. I figure that meditating long enough might give one neat-feeling experiences, and that maybe, just maybe, some of these experiences gained under long practice may serve as guideposts along a neverending path of personal development. However, I believe that none of these probable experiences should be the goal of the mystical/spiritual path — nothing but ethics should be. I believe that attempted shortcuts through drugs are nothing more than smoke and mirrors before one’s mind, obscuring true clarity — like any quick fix, they don’t have any lasting effect and may even push one in the wrong direction. Whether drug experiences have any chemical similarities with experiences achieved through meditation practices is not really important to me. I know that they are dangerous for one’s mind and body — something I’d decided for years before reading Warner — and that any possible similarity between drug experiences and meditation experiences (which aren’t the point anyway) don’t make much difference in anything other than a negative way.
August 5th, 2006 at 7:23 pm
It seems you’re implying that your hidden desires are a bad thing. They are not, unless they remain hidden, from which point they will drive your life without you being the wiser. On that logic, it seems sound to me to consciously interact with your projected fantasies, so that you may overcome them, that they may no longer be hidden and thus have no power over you. A truly ethical system, I think, would demand that awareness - though drugs aren’t the only method to achieve such projection
The truth and reality is that we all have hidden desires and that they rule us. So they do in fact have quite a lot to do with truth and reality.
I don’t think anybody is here to hound anyone else. I think we’re just here to share our experiences and bounce them off one another. It only makes sense to look at maps drawn by others before and during your own expedition.
August 5th, 2006 at 11:02 pm
First, I apologize for the confusion regarding my accidental misuse of the block quote. Some of that which Tim seems to think I said was actually part of the extended quote from the book by Brad Warner. For clarification purposes, here is the quote from Warner’s book (hopefully) as I had meant it to look, with block quotes around all of Warner’s text. The page number headings, including those in brackets, are my additions.
So that should clear up what Brad Warner said versus what I said, in case there was any confusion.
You know you guys, I like y’all. Tim, I friggin’ love your website here. Earlier today, after I had posted that last comment, I realized I was getting real worked up over this discussion. How silly, to get worked up over a metaphysical argument with people I’ve never met! I thought about it, and I decided I was getting angry at least partly because I was afraid that the endorsement (however partial) of drugs as a mystical tool on this site meant that I could no longer trust this site as a valid source of metaphysical mind-fodder or mystical “nudgings”. And I would not like that to happen. So I was angry in part because I like this site and the conversations on it so much. Sorry if I was a jerk.
I believe that although I don’t think drugs are a valid source of enlightenment experiences and are definitely not for me for a number of reasons, there’s really nothing ethically wrong with their use in general. I don’t look down my nose at you, Tim, for recreational marijuana use, and therefore — I guess I may not, from that position, be able to fault anyone for drug use that is more than recreational. I still believe what Brad Warner says about not clinging too tightly to one’s mental experiences, whether drug-induced or not, and that the true goal of any good spirituality is a more ethical lifestyle, rather than any given type of spiritual orgasm. I hope that even if you all do decide that you like to pursue “mind-blowing” mental states, you may think of this.
June 26th, 2007 at 2:05 pm
[…] That is, we are working collaboratively here to create what I’ve referred to in the past as a “time-bridge” or a “noographic space” which we can all share. I am showing you how to improve your house. Or rather, it is being shown to you through the vessel of me. And I am just trying to decipher the signal into your language as best I can right now. Retransmitting substations for God is all we are. The symbols are bigger than us. They interpenetrate all our lives if we cluster around them closely. This is why so many people email me saying that the things I posted online seemed to be directly about their life. Happens to me constantly now. It’s not that I’m magic (or not any more than anyone else). It’s just that I’m jacked into the Word, which is misleading because it doesn’t actually speak in “words.” It speaks in the structural units behind words, the Flame of the Pentecost. Which is why it can be translated into any form by he with the discernment to do so. […]