Dissociation

Everything we encounter appears to us as real, as true being.  But
we soon notice that its reality is only transitory.  It was, but now
it is no more.  Nonbeing has swallowed it, so to speak.  Or we notice
that it is different from what it seemed to be, and we distinguish between
its surface and its deeper, more real levels.  But soon these levels also prove
to be surface, and we try to penetrate into still deeper levels, toward the
ultimate reality of a thing.   No thing, however, is isolated from all other things.
And, the deeper the levels into which we can enter, the less possible it is to
to consider them in separation from each other and from the whole of reality.  Yet,
if we enter the levels of personal existence which have been rediscovered by
depth psychology, we encounter the past, the ancestors, the collective
unconscious, the living substance in which all living beings participate.  In our
search for the "really real" we are driven from one level to another to a point
where we cannot speak of level any more, where we must ask for that which
is the ground of all levels, giving them their structure and their power of being.
The search for ultimate reality beyond everything that seems to be real is the search
for being-itself, for the power of being in everything that is.  It is the ontological
question, the root question of every philosophy.

-- Paul Tillich, Biblical Religion and the Search
for Ultimate Reality

I took 1290 mg d-methorphan, aiming at what has been called a "third plateau" or "fourth plateau" trip, although I dislike terms like this, because I think it best not to pollute psychedelic experience with preconceptions.  Some retroactive reading suggests that I may have overshot my goal with this dose.  As is my custom with dissociants, when the drug showed its "alert," I took to the bathtub, lighting candles and turning out the lights  Though it was quite dark, I tried to read for a little while.  After half an hour, it became clear that efforts at reading were no longer useful, so I put my reading material aside and lay back and closed my eyes. 

In this account, I summarize the various familiar phenomena I experienced in the early stages of the trip simply as "familiar spaces," as I don't wish to devote time to things already described.  I also want to say that, of necessity, an account of this sort of thing will rapidly pass the limit of linguistic coherence, and must lapse into what, from an analytic perspective, has to be called gibberish.  Nothing can be done about that, and it would be pointless for me to apologize for it.  People who find attempts at making language slingshot past itself absurd are forewarned that reading what follows will entirely waste their time.  If you dislike words like "limitless," "boundless," and "endless," especially when they're used repeatedly and in reference to nothing at all, this is not the document for you.  The expression, "a finger points to the moon," is in brackets, and so are the brackets, if you know what I'm saying.  And it's really a lovely finger.

I had BlueDhyana.mp3  playing on infinite repeat to provide context for the trip.  This is a bit of electronic music I'd composed and recorded some time ago.  Until I made the mistake that the trip turned on, I remained in attentive meditation, intently focused on "the flow," whatever that is, with eyes closed. In my experience, deep meditation is absolutely essential to realizing the full value of psychedelics.  I ascended to some very high spaces, much higher than those I'd experienced in prior, lower dose DXM trips.  For example, early on, I felt myself becoming molten lava, hardening into stone, then being violently thrust up through earth to emerge into the clear air as a mountain range.  What can be said about the emotional tone of this sort of thing?  Well, minimally, what I just said can be said.    

So: I traveled through many familiar spaces.  Presently I came to a space where Buddha-like Fire Gods created whole realities simply by making gestures.  Their gestures, against the fabric-context-space of what seemed to be this proto-reality, caused ripples and indentations that emanated outward forever, each becoming, not a new universe, but a whole new reality. The space I was in was not reality.  It struck me as "backstage" -- the place where the props and sets and costumes out of which realities are constructed are kept.

I was seated, lotus-style, among an infinite number of these Fire Gods, arranged in stacked concentric rings that extended and radiated in all directions without end. There is no way to describe the sheer vastness of this space.  It had an ancient-beyond-ancient and noble-beyond-noble feeling to it, and I felt awed and honored to be seated there.  I decided to try my hand at creating realities.  I followed the general pattern I'd watched others execute.  Doing so was astounding. The simple movement of my hand brought forth heat like that of the core of the Sun, yet the heat did not burn me.  Each movement of my hand violently shattered the space around it, and the aftershocks from my Act swayed the other seated Fire Gods, but did not disturb their somber equanimity.  When at length I brought my hand to rest upon my knee, the Creative Act was finished, and I took up the noble and dignified silence of my fellows; a silence which was interrupted from time to time only by the Divine explosion of an occasional Act of Creation by one of us.  I continued to meditate there for countless Ages.  Eventually I rose higher than this realm, passing through a space of pure, infinite Consciousness, and then through endless Space-time itself, and finally into the limitless Nothing.

At length I became aware of a wavering Something that was persistently semi-existing.  It could not make a clear determination as to whether or not its somethinghood was implied by, or was part of, the endless Nothing. Yet the very fact that it even flickered meant that it was indeed part of the Nothingness. Soon I recognized it as me.  But who was I?.  And what was "who?"  I knew that I was "Eaton," but this didn't seem to mean much. It was only a label, or, better, an alias. But an alias for what?. I didn't know.  I knew that this "Eaton" was associated with a "body," so I checked around for a "body," but there wasn't one anywhere.  I took the "Eaton" label into some sort of "closet" and "hung it up."  Here I am starting to put quotes around everything, because this is as close as I can come in words to what I actually experienced. Of course there was no "closet," and I didn't "hang anything up," but something like that happened.

At this point I had "lost insight," as the psychonauts (and their psychiatrists) say. In other words, I didn't any longer realize that I had taken a drug, and that my experiences had been induced by a drug, and that in time they would pass.  Even if I had known, it probably wouldn't have meant much, for all I would have known was that "Eaton" had taken a drug --  but "Eaton" was nothing more than a label, an alias for I knew not what, which had been put away in the closet countless Ages ago.

I tried to determine if I was in some kind of "state" or not, and if I was, or wasn't, what it would even mean for something to be in a "state."  Eventually, I figured out that there was no "state," that this was just Reality, flimsy and ad-hoc as it might be. In time, everything came to an acute focus on the vibration of Blue Dhyana. I realized that it contained a tremendous tension.  It was forever trying to consume something, and that thing was trying to resist being consumed.  

Then I made a grave mistake. I decided that I had to figure out what was really going on .  With great difficulty, I stood up.  By this time, I was seeing the same thing with eyes open or closed; it didn't matter.  I walked out into my room and saw where the tension was: it was between my chair and the computer monitor.  There was some kind of vortex there.  Blue Dhyana was not a sound at this point, it was simply the vibration of the Whatever-It-Was-That-Was-Vibrating-That-Was-Everything. I wanted it to stop, because I wanted the tension to resolve.  But my efforts at making it stop resulted in the near-complete destruction of my room. This was caused by my simply trying to walk around, and in the process knocking over chair, desk, keyboards (both musical and computer), trash can, etc.  My enormous bed was apparently gone, replaced by a tiny, bare mattress next to an old window.    I knew that a terrible storm was coming, one which this fragile pane of glass could not withstand. I only wanted the tension to resolve. The Whatever-It-Was had to either be consumed, or it had to escape consumption.  I did not care which.  But it could not be poised forever right at the Event Horizon.  That was intolerable.  Yet nothing I tried had any effect, and finally I just collapsed on the floor, amid a heap of trash, broken bits and pieces, knocked-over furniture, and ten thousand other things I could never name. 

There was nothing to do but watch what had now become an infinite number of Consciousnesses.  I had to simply let them flow through me, to the extent that there was anything that could reasonably be called "me."  It crossed my mind that I ought to try and attach the appropriate one of these consciousnesses to "Eaton."  I decided that I had to wait for the boundless infinities to resolve themselves first.  I have learned from a thousand psychedelic experiences that this is always a good move when things seem beyond control.  In the time following, odd bits of my childhood psychology, or childhood sub-conscious, came bubbling up.  Something with an "A."  Anti-something, or Advanced-something, I couldn't tell, but it had something to do with the repelling mechanism on the sunshades of a sort of car/boat thing that a kind of prototype "Eaton in the Future" was piloting, or driving.  Huh?  On having this thought, I realized that I was really getting kind of out there.

I returned to the problem of whether or not I was in a "state" and what "states" could be, if I was.   Was I in some kind of mental state, which might change to a different state, or was this simply the way things were?  No, there were no "states," and the idea of "states" was just meaningless   Now, I understood, I was truly "backstage."  This was the place where solipsism gets a foothold, the place where each person realizes that the reality of Reality is finally, ultimately, taken on faith.  The world was metamorphosing convulsively in a total ontological collapse, and I felt that my entire life I'd been in the grip of the comforting illusion that I had a pretty good understanding of what was going on:  chemistry, physics, and consciousness; mind and matter; people, things, and relationships.   This wasn't, as it was turning out, the case.  Instead, backstage there was finally nothing at all, no world, no one observing the world, and no "individuals," or "identities," or "points of view" or "things."  This was the Core, the End, the Utter and Final Bottom Line:  the changeless, empty Nothing.  Behind everything, only nothing.

Of the expanse that followed, I can't even try to say anything.  Though I reach for the most bizarre plaster-of-Paris inchoate self-referentialities, for the loftiest, most laughably ethereal and ideo-poetic clusters of vacuous and sublime bowls of trite and somber Thousand-Lightyear word-salad dressing, they only expire ineffectually in the void. The horror of an aloneness that leaves any possible hope of encountering another human soul far, far behind -- the stark terror behind the stark terror behind the stark terror -- gives me nowhere to turn, no way to begin or end or stop or start, nothing upon nothing upon nothing upon nothing, multiplied forever.  

Billions of years later, I noticed the row of prescription bottles on the shelf.  I picked up a bottle.  It had a "Jetsons" futuristic feel to it.  Squinting at the label, I saw

Eaton T. Fores!! Take One Tablet Every Day!!

There was that "Eaton" again. I'd forgotten what I'd done with that whatever-it-was. I couldn't see anywhere on the prescription bottle that said what drug the bottle contained.  I knocked all of the bottles into the general chaos, trying to find I knew not what.  Eventually, I located some Seroquel (quetiapine, a D-2 antagonist of the "atypical" kind) and took 400 mg.  Then I was absorbed into the rubbish all around me.  I let go of everything, and watched the boundless, timeless, endless eternities whirl ever away from me, even as they didn't recede a bit.  The tension in Blue Dhyana never did resolve, but at length every trace of association with any particular "point of view" vanished, there was no meaning to "I" any more, and all ceased. There were now only the endless, timeless, ineffable, Whatevers -- cartwheeling and whirling with neither beginning nor end through the Something/Nothing that wasn't/was.  

~ 

And now this is the day you fall
Upon my waking eyes
Inviting and inciting me to rise
And through the window in the wall
Comes streaming in on sunlight wings
A million bright ambassadors of morning

     (Pink Floyd, Echoes )

After some aeons, it became light. I was me, and there was just one consciousness, although it was very fuzzy and blurry. I looked around.  It looked like a tornado had been through my room. In the bathroom, candles had melted to nothing, long streams of wax falling down the tiles beneath where they'd been placed. I walked downstairs.  The kitchen, where eternities earlier I had tried, unsuccessfully, to get a glass of Gatorade, was similarly destroyed.  With difficulty, I saw that it was a little after eleven o'clock in the morning. It was then that I realized that I wasn't going to make it to work that day.

Despite my having had plenty of experience with this sort of thing, the presence of a friend who wasn't tripping would have made things much easier.  High-dose DXM trips are long and draining.  Starting one at 8:00 pm with the intention of getting up at 8:00 am and going to work is not good planning.  It takes a full 24 hours for a trip of this magnitude to clear.

Why do this sort of thing at all?  It's difficult and exhausting, and its meaning is never clear.  In the wake of this experience, I can hardly feel as though something has been clarified.  The questions have only been multiplied and the confusion compounded.  So, what's the point?  There are many accounts of high-dose DXM experiences on the Web, and I was a bit startled and somewhat sad to find that many of them are inane, some are flat-out idiotic, and many serve to document exactly what not to do in the context of such an experience.  I'm glad that I didn't read much about DXM until after this trip.  What I have put down here, of course, is also inane, idiotic -- if not flatly psychotic -- nonsense.  As ever, what can I say?  To judge from the wordiness of this document, apparently quite a lot, although, after all is said and done, it's hard to tell exactly what was said or what happened.  It's been thousands of years, and still no one really knows what a "self" is, or what consciousness is.  We don't know what we are or what we're talking about.  No one knows the "why" of anything, and it seems like the endless accretion of "how" understanding doesn't get us any closer.  No one even knows what "meaning" means (notwithstanding the whining of formalizers, deflationists, eliminitivists, and what-have-you -- I didn't want to get into this, but I could just feel some yo-yo disciple of functionalism or whatever out there pelting me with algorithms.  You know how you can just feel stuff like that sometimes?). 

Where does one turn for some insight into the inward aspect of reality that descriptions of the world inevitably leave out?  Where?  Isn't it obvious? 

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