The following is a stream of consciousness dictation during a recent psychedelic experience with friends. To protect their identities, I’ll call them Nick and Jacob. The paragraph formatting and punctuation (such as capitalizing ‘It’) were added for contextual clarity. I didn’t correct the changes in grammatical person.
Stick with it and enjoy the ride.
This is what it feels like for a cloud to regard itself.
This is what it feels like for a cloud to know itself.
This is what It feels like to be Itself.
This is what It feels like to be me.
This is the human experience of being where you come from. It’s the source of everything and you are It.
This is allowing Its presence to effortlessly flow through you.
There’s nothing to distract from It. There’s nothing to describe It.
This is the divine experiencing Itself.
To judge people is as pointless as judging a tree. It’s the equivalent of saying, “I hate you tree, for being there, for being a tree. I hate you in all your treeness.” We’re all following the same coded instructions. It’s ridiculous to hate something for what it was always supposed to be.
[Tremors kick in] This feels like the harmonic resonance of the universe Itself, working through me, in tune with me. Same as voice, same as dance. We control these tremors and we call them Art. We control these tremors and call them Language. We control these tremors and call them Perception. We try to define the undefinable by endless labeling and classifying. We make It into bite-sized pieces.
[Nick and Jacob are pacing on the deck] These guys are like wind-up toys that can’t stop chattering and walking around. They’re wound up in amazement. Bleeding energy into the pavement. Finding things to absorb it, bounce it off and reduce it.
Why are we so wound up? Why do we resist unwinding? We’re spun into the world. We’re wound up like a top that spins until it can’t. That is entropy. That is our life; a purposeful unraveling. It’s the universe falling inward, collapsing upon itself.
As tops unwind, they do a dance and that’s art. We can appreciate the way life beautifully unwinds itself. You could say that a civilization is a symbiotic unwinding, in predictable patterns over time. That’s how we measure entropy, as an equation of the universe unwinding over time.
We say, “I was born” instead of, “I gave birth to me.” We set ourselves in motion. We make ourselves and there’s no one to blame for that. It’s just a funny little game we make up to avoid knowing our true selves. At the root of it is to avoid knowing what we are.
It’s disorienting, the distinction we create between ourselves and what we make. We are our own creation, not separate from It. This distinction creates a false duality in which we lose our whole sense of self.
[Watching a storm approach] Source energy is perfectly chaotic.
[Drinking from my water bottle] Ok…back to Entropy. Entropy is the unwinding of something over time. Once an emergent process begins unwinding, it can’t be wound up. We can only witness it, and contribute the creative forces of our own unwinding.
Equanimity is being the unwinding. Being an inseparable part of It. There is rapture – a divine grace, in Its direct experience. It reminds us where we came from, what we are.
Understanding is the consolation prize. It’s the cheap little token of knowing vs. becoming. It’s at the bottom of the box that we have to eat our way through to claim. We choke our way to the prize, only to find it meaningless in the end. To understand something, become that thing.
I’m OK. Really.
Nick put a towel on me because he thought I was cold but actually I’m not.
The shivering feels like opening myself completely, as if surrenduring to death. It is magnificent.
[Noticing psychedelic distortions] There are patterns everywhere.
We’re tuned for pattern recognition. And the stunning patterns that emerge through unwinding is divine art. But we prefer to observe it rather than be it. There is ecstacy in becoming the pattern rather than trying to recognize, judge and react to it.
[Shivering recedes] I feel like I’m out the other side of something now. It’s fading. It’s passed through me.
This energy is liberating in Its destruction. And we’re fearful, trying to control It. We get stuck. We tie knots to avoid letting It unwind Itself. And that’s so much work, tying ourselves in knots, then trying to get ourselves unstuck. It’s the serpent eating its own tail.
The divine comedy is that we make all of this, (our reality), and then we complain about what we make. We are co-creators and co-conspirators. How we regard people or situations, it’s endlessly comical. We make everything, and then we complain about how much we hate it. Then we keep making more of it, and hate ourselves for making more of it. How can we hate something that we ourselves make? The only thing we can do in this situation is laugh at the cruel irony of it. This feels epscially Jewish. Like, Larry David Jewish, in its recursive neurotic spiral.
I mean, that we would put ourselves in these untenable situations that are completely ludicrous and then complain about how unfair it is. That’s deliciously comical. We have to laugh because we’re doing it to ourselves all the time.
Watching Jacob, pacing on the stage just now. This is his soliloquy. He’s director of a show he doesn’t like. He is an unreasonable man. So he changes the cast. He rolls in new scenery. He fires the lighting guy, shuts down the performance and opens at a different theatre. Because why would we pay money to a show about Jacob that even he doesn’t like. (Laughing). Then we criticize the show and Jacob blames the audience for not appreciating his art. Our life’s pageant is the absurdity of our own unwinding.
[Tearing up with joy] And why were we made to be so sensitive? If you were desigining a creature to fully experience itself, you’d make it as sensitive as possible. You’d build it to feel everything. It would be selfish to do otherwise. It would be selfish to create a creature that that couldn’t feel everything deeply. It’s why I believe that our creation is generous. It’s purely generous. And the ultimate act of generosity for us is to acknowledge that It loves us.
Final thoughts before a swim: We are gems in Indra’s web; facets of the eternal self. The web is wound and unwound, shimmering in ecstasy. It is made to be unmade, not by neglect, but by purposefully unwinding. We are witness to this purpose by divine grace. So let us surrender to Its unwinding and experience the rapture of our own creation.