Materialism
aside, I've always lavished the weighted, sleek figure of a new
device. Whether it's the smooth black of a store-bought notebook
computer or the mousey compact of an 8 gigabyte iPod Nano, my enamor
with high-technology has been a generational staple since close to
the the day I was born. A more recent affair has been my relationship
with substance; very rarely has said relationship been without
purpose—whether vague or explicit—except during the odd cocaine
binge or my popping an extra capsule of Vyvanse when I'm already a
tweaked-out emotionless husk squat over a pile of finished homework,
craving a stimulant euphoria so-as to keep on chug-chug-chugging my
body and brain for fear of the alternative: natural fatigue, and
comedown depression. As well, it's likely I try to avoid any
potentially visceral realization that my body is beat and eternally
damaged as a result of moderate abuse. As will be discussed, it never
seems clear if I am making good or breaking bad in this world of
liberally-sized lines, livestreams, BlogSpots, Pfizer babies,
bursting housing bubbles, waning American hegemony, and the cultural
return of the psychedelic. It is my wandering assertion that both
drugs and technology—whether in their own respective rights or as a
close synergy—are conduits and extensions of ourselves; the next
logical steps in moving forward the complexity and intelligence of
natural evolution.
* * *
I used to be addicted to following links. On Wikipedia
especially, I would sit for hours upon hours upon hours absorbing
information fragments that shot through me like visible flashbacks to
memories that were not my own and lessons I could now learn
vicariously through the conduit of someone elses documented
experience.
The
light emitting diodes would fiddle with my pupils; I would wonder, at
times, if my eyes were just great black demonic puddles when the
lights were out. It was that, or they would retract into two little
black holes the size of one of these letters, surrounded—rather
romantically—by small lagoons of darkish blue. These were my nights
alone with myself, where I would recall with intellectual ecstasy and vigor one of my favorite movie lines of all time, spoken by
eccentric tour guide and philosopher Timothy “Speed” Levitch:
“On really romantic evenings of self, I go salsa dancing
with my confusion.”
* * *
Of
course, the rise in complexity is inevitably accompanied by a greater
demand for stillness and rest, lest the over-exertion of human
cognition run our collective psyche into a hall of endless mirrors,
spawning a horde of negative feedback loops that manifest in global
anxieties and dangerous (even violent?) impulses. The ultimate
end-result of this sort of feedback are such common confusions as
believing 'theory' and spoken or written vocabulary to be the basis
of ultimate and seemingly conclusive (dogmatic) understanding,
whereas it's the intangibly indefinable reality of things which
predicates all theory. Theory—as a concept in itself and in order
to illustrate how we have deified it—can be summed-up in religious
terms as “the [Almighty] Word.”1
To counter this impetus, humans have naturally wheeled backward into
the past for answers on how to balance the mind, finding a rich
tapestry of practical advice in the mystic traditions of religious
prayer and meditation—established ways of silencing the Word and
subordinating it to (what Eckhart Tolle or any other Eastern mystic
would call) the eternal Now. Yet, even here—in pursuit of mental
clarity and reprieve from omnipotent thought—drugs have been
utilized as a sort of express-lane into 'union with the Divine;' in
layman's terms, this is the felt union with the “Great Big
Mystery” we are each born into, and yet will never be able
to encapsulate via mere concept or description. A Benedictine monk of
the modern era—perhaps a little avant garde in
his approach to religious practice—once said that “[e]cstasy2
has the capacity to put one on the right path to divine union... It
should not be used unless one is really searching for God.”
“Prayer,” he continued, “is communication with God, but tends
to be blocked by the internal dialogue, distractions and losing faith
in oneself. Using [e]cstasy while trying to pray removes these
obstacles,” he claimed. Though he only uses the drug from one to
three times a year, the experience causes prayer to flow easier,
while at times it has also provided him with valuable insights such
as "a very deep comprehension of divine passion."
Where
I believe this monk is right, I also recognize he is leaning in far
too close to his ingrained dogmas when he brazenly declares how it
should and should
not be used, as if his
'spiritual plateau' has given him a mutually exclusive rise in
religious wisdom and command. What this monk fails to recognize is
that we are all—by implication of the human condition—looking for
“God” (as the wide allegorical term used to describe the giant,
ambiguously inexpressible and minutely-experienced infinity of
Reality with a capital R), and that all things may be considered
meditation if inwardly felt as such.
So,
by implication, it is my assertion—on a macrocultural level—that
drugs (including—but not limited to—MDMA) are the modern toolbox
used to 'break the fourth wall'3
of consensual reality, thus inducing religious experience: an
ecstatic recognition of ones implicit union with existence as a
whole. As complexity increases, and intelligence piles on
intelligence, this immediate portal into divine providence is exactly
what is needed to equalize the
growing hyperintelligence of our collective consciousness, as well as
be sure our theories do not overcome and rule us, but rather, that we
overcome and subordinate them with our acceptance of life as
essentially unknowable. We do this as holy humans gifted with the
creative ability to define and tentatively order almost all of what
we perceive. Drugs have a proven potential to ground us in this
divinely-felt reality, though in broad strokes, this can only be said
of the overall trends and the ultimate majority, as there are plenty
of individuals and groups that will fall off (or, perhaps, simply
'drip away') in this process. Whether it's death by overdose, or the
triggering of schizophrenic psychosis as a result of predisposition,
not all of us will make it through the ringer unscathed. Some of us
will get lost in the hall of mirrors and forget it's just a series of
reflections, convincing ourselves of strange and frightening
delusions as the feedback loop grows louder. Others—trapped in this
hall—will face the mirrors and face the fear with such reckless
sincerity that each mirror will shatter into melting shards of glass,
and we will stand in this allegorical space and realize: we are
finally free. We will tune into the meditative equalizer of the
collective psyche and find a level balance upon which to continue the
dance of life. Sobriety is a relative term.
And
by 'sobriety,' what exactly do I mean? When digging for a definition
online, one source defines it as “the condition of not having any
measurable levels [of], or effects from mood-altering drugs.” But—I
believe—it would be unfair to say 'sobriety' necessarily means a
lack of chemical intoxication, as both induced ecstatic
experience—whether via drugs, meditation, or exercise—as well as
'insanity'—such as delusional schizophrenia and clinical
depression4—are
not qualitatively sober states of mind given the intensity of
irrational behavior and thought. Typically, we would say that people
in these states are 'not in their right mind,' but this often
includes the relative imposition of 'right' and 'wrong.' People say
this of those who are intoxicated as well, and in this respect, I
think it would be wise to frame it as follows:
'Mental
illness' can only be described as such if it is a negative experience
with negative consequence, such as a clinically depressed individual
with suicidal tendencies. This is often treated through a synergy of
psychiatry and antidepressants, so in this sense, the administration
of therapeutic drugs can be seen as someone using substance to find
their 'right mind' because said 'right mind' was not a static given
at birth. This is in stark contrast to the online definition of
'sobriety' which states that “[s]obriety is ... considered to be
the natural state of a human being given at a birth.” But in the
context in which I use it, 'sobriety' means nothing more than a
rational balance, and as such, a new-born does not qualify as sober.
When there is a lack of balance, those who are willing to take the
risk can find said balance through the use of certain psychedelics in
the proper set and setting, though I do not wish to sound conceited
and pretend drugs are the only way
to find this balance because they most certainly are not.
There are many ways to plug into the meditative equalizer of the
collective psyche, and drugs—I believe—are only an express lane.
This
is, maybe, where technology falls neatly into the picture. Or, not so
much 'neatly' as logically; with a sort of implicit and inevitable
absurdity that measures itself in synonymous union with the rise of
collective hyperintelligence, having acted as both its predicator and
intensifier over the course of the 15th
to 21st
centuries (and prior, of course, but I place my starting point—rather
arbitrarily—at the invention of the printing press, as it is my
assertion—or, assumption?—that the printing press is what
ultimately accelerated our overall advance). Though we live in the
consensual (and waning) illusion of being separate egos carried about
in flesh-bodies inside of a bag of skin, we linguistically recognize
the absurdity of such a claim when we look down at our hand and say
we have a hand, as
opposed to we are a
hand; or, “this is my hand,”
as opposed to, “this is a hand.”
In reality, the hand is an inevitable and compound part of you,
though to further illustrate my point, I can utilize this same
linguistic ambiguity to assert that you are saying the same thing
when you pick up your phone and say, “this is my phone,”
as opposed to, “this is a phone.”
And, in this day and age of increasingly smarter phones with which we
each have unbridled access to the entirety of collective memory,
knowledge, and documented experience, it is easy to see the truth to
Jason Silva's5
observation: we are already cyborgs; technology is an extension of
both our intellectual capacities and our physical bodies. To further
drive this point home, we have been in a self-amplifying feedback
loop with our inventions since the advent of language, with said
inventions acting as exoskeletons with much wider function than the
basic human faculties of arms, legs, hands, and feet.
* * *
At this point, I feel it might be necessary to address—for
posterity's sake as well as to further marginalize the
Judaeo-Christian intuition of substance as taboo—the fact that I
may never have come to these conclusions were it not for the use of
drugs—which did, as stated above, break my 'fourth wall,' allowing
my intellect to dive into thought and reflection from multiple and
otherwise unseen angles. This came alongside my utilization of
high-technology such as the internet, which exposed me to the
entirety of our collective psyche—point-blank—from the day I was
born.
* * *
Only
a couple of nights prior to this writing, my girlfriend and I were on
our way home from a friends house-warming party during which we
insuffulated 2 or 3 lines of ketamine—the sedative-psychedelic and
'rising star' in the underworld drug scene—becoming deliberately
lost and enamored with the misty visage of Victoria at 3 AM on a
Monday night. The surrealism of a city of empty streets in an early
maroon fog was truly something to behold, and the colonial vibe of
old British architecture in fluid combination with the ancient totems
of the First Nations people was an unbridled magic. At one point, we
were gazing with psychedelic curiosity through the window of the
gift-shop at the Royal BC Museum, a collection of Emily Carr books
placed on a front-facing display. All I knew of Emily Carr, at this
point, was of her career as a famous author born in this same city.
My interest was immediately piqued, and I wished to know more, so I
took the smartphone from out of my right pocket, held the 'home'
button for close to a half second, and explicitly asked the device:
“who was Emily Carr?”
Within
seconds, I had a detailed dossier on close to every detail I could
have ever wanted to know.
* * *
I
was brought into a world where the self-amplifying feedback loop of
human progress has accelerated to such rapid intensity that we are
witnessing evolution manifest within the short space of our own
lives. In some cases, we also witness it within ourselves and within
those around us, constantly pushing the boundaries ad
infinitum until the glass sphere
bursts and we realize it isn't glass, but a bubble.
Sobriety is a relative term.
Did you have your cup of coffee this morning?
1 As
is stated in John 1.1: “In the beginning was the Word, and the
Word was with God, and the Word was God.”
2 Perhaps
better known as the famous ethneogen, MDMA
3 "Breaking
the fourth wall," in theatre and film, often means having a
character become aware of their fictional nature. In this context, I
use it to describe how acute transcendental experience often causes
one to become aware of their own 'fictional' (or, conceptual) nature
within the context of labelled and ordered society.
4 Clinical
depression is not so much 'insanity' as it is a state of deeply
self-conscious irrationality.
5 Jason
Silva (born February 6, 1982) is a Venezuelan-American television
personality, filmmaker, and performance philosopher. He is best
known for his YouTube series, “Shots of Awe.”
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