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The Scriptures of the Church of VirtualityReality 04
\pippin\rave\diary.doc
\pippin\rave\puppy.doc
\pippin\rave\poetry.doc
\pippin\rave\blue.rav
\pippin\rave\sleep.doc
\qix\t6.txt
\qix\aya
\pippin\rave\house.doc
\pippin\rave\truth.rav
\pippin\stories\bill.sty
\pippin\stories\dave.sty
\pippin\stories\daniel.sty
\pippin\rave\diary.doc
June 23, 1992
DIARIES
Diaries are like mirrors. You can see through a wall into
another world through a mirror. Go on. Try it. Diaries can make you
laugh, and they can make you cry. Diaries can be full of pearls of
wisdom, and they can be full of shit. A diary is a mirror of you.
You, frozen into a moment of time and pinned to a page. A
window on the past. Does this embarrass you? Or is it the thought that
one day someone else may read a diary entry of yours that holds you back
from keeping a diary? One day someone well. Diaries magnetically
attract readers to themselves. They are called diary rays.
That person will probably be you. You in a year's time, or
maybe just a month. A month is long enough to think, "Did I write
*that*?" Usually, old diaries entries just embarass yourself. Other
people don't know you like you do. They just read your diary. But your
future selves know you. They know you better than you ever will because
they've "Been There". Your future selves will laugh at you. They
always do that.
Diaries are time travelling. By writing in a diary, you can
talk to a future self. By reading your diary over again, you can talk
to a past self. Past selves often get lonely.
If you are honest with yourself when you write in your diary,
your past selves will be honest with you. Diaries give you a more
complete picture of yourself.
Past selves get distressed too. That's when they send out an
S.O.S. ie a diary entry. Your future selves can tell you too that life
is not all distressing, but past selves don't seem to write about every
day, pleasant things.
The grandeur of the moment of a poetic thought is all that bears
remembering. But then I forget how ordinary I am. That's what I was.
Ordinary. My past reminds me of what I was and still am. And it can
tell me what I still hope to be.
\pippin\rave\puppy.doc
There are other selves inside you. Not just past and future
selves, but higher and lower selves, god selves, spirit selves, and
puppy selves.
Your selves always talk to you. Or rather, they would like to
always be listened to. They can talk to you through a sunrise or music
or a book or poetry. Sometimes they talk to you through the mouths of
your friends. That is always interesting.
Well, have you ever wondered why "you" is both singular and
plural?
I say they would like to talk to you all the time. They would
go on and on and never stop!
But I only have one other self. That talks to me, that is. It
has a voice. A human voice. I have to imagine it though. There isn't
really a voice that I hear. I have to pretend it is me too. Sometimes
it can be interesting, and funny, and witty. Sometimes it tells me what
to do. But that's my fault. I only listen to it when I want to know
something to get me out of trouble. I think it gets peeved with me when
I do that.
Then there is my puppy self. It is like Freud and Jung's
psychology of the id, ego, and superego. The id self says one thing and
the superego self says another. But they can't hear each other. Or
maybe they won't. Maybe they are like an elderly married couple that
after so many years only talk through their children. That's where the
puppy self comes in. The puppy self is like a dog. It is dumb, it is
cute, and it bounds around.
The puppy self goes bounding from the id self to the superego
self and tells them what the other says. It doesn't care what it says
either. Then Situation comes along and requires a Decision. So the
puppy self just bounds over, and whatever is in its mind becomes
Decision. the puppy self can go back and forth for as long as it takes
for Situation to arrive. It doesn't care. It is a puppy self; it's
dumb. It just bounds around from one to the other.
\pippin\rave\poetry.doc
Poetry, the essence of life. A paradox: understood and yet not
understood by the listeners. Understood by the speaker. Who
understands a song lyric? But if it were understood by anyone else, it
would cease to be poetry and would be merely words, plain and unadorned.
Is it not strange how it is that we recognize poetry? A sort of
nodding of the head at the thoughts that we cannot possibly understand,
and yet acceptance... for there is no need to be understood. Only the
author needs to understand, and that is alright.
@}-,'->---
"Mother Nature and Father Time are in a home,
labelled under uses unknown..."
...oooo@@@**@@@oooo...
The dream sensorium is continuous. While we are awake, while we
are living in the continuum of reality, our dreams go on. The
subconscious, intelligence, spirit, soul, continues to play whether we
sleep of wake. When we fall asleep, we lose focus of our externals.
They dim, diminish, and we jack into our own dream space. When we wake,
we are jacked out. But our dreams play on.
*)--)---
"Only you can change the way you live..."
-- Hunters and Collectors
<ooo % # % ooo>
Our Dreamscape is where we model reality. Like running a
computer simulation. To find out what happens if I did A to B.
Instead of breaking something real, we can dream it instead.. But..
There is a short story called: "The Dreamer". It was about this
girl, whose dreams were reality. Whatever she dreams, happens, as she
dreams it. The story was: she was dreaming these two astronauts in a
plastic bubble into the sun, so that man could see what it was like.
But a mouse got into the room in which she was sleeping. It woke her
up, and the two astronauts were lost. Died in a transparent, plastic
bubble in the sun.
\pippin\rave\blue.rav
July 23, 1992
we float
away down the stream of life to the Big Blue
it is a feeling of there. it cannot described in a way that does it justice
it must be felt
the experience
beautiful words to describe it that make the images of the experience
floating in the sea, the blue sea
and watching the sunlight glinting off the water.
the clouds, watching the clouds moving under the water, leaving their
shadows behind under the water, clouding the water
floating
feeling the wind against your face as you stand upon the cliff
the sun glints and makes everything glinty and shiny
but you don't notice it until you have been made aware of it
of the beauty and pattern underlying it all
of all the particles dancing cheek-to-cheek
there is a boardwalk, it is on the Quartz Paradise
it reminds me of the beach, there is boardwalk at Noosa and at the South
Bank, the wooden planks over the water.
then there is the mountains and the light, the pink light of the sunrise
just touching the top of an ice-covered mountain, so cold but the cold
is beautiful.
the circles in the water, the wind ripples the water into circles.
but music how to describe the music when the music describes the
feeling, a feeling of sadness, happiness, dance, loss, floating, dance,
anger, white hot rage, and anger! I HATE YOU!! * I HATE YOU!! *
confusion, mind reeling, and mind exploding, dark, darkness, black, doom
and death, the deepest grunge of music gurgles of the places
underground,
the feeling of deep under the sea.
wasting time the feeling of waiting, waiting on a grandstand waiting for
the bus to arrive, looking out over the sea of grass, everything packed
nothing to do but wait
dreaming of the unattainable, the fantasy that will always be better
than reality, until the fantasy becomes reality, but haven't seen that
yet, so i guess i'm still waiting
"Just be good to me..." -- Beats International
"Even better than the real thing..." -- U2
New Order singing in french, it is Blue Monday, it is so s-l-o-w. it
just drags along with its head hanging, like a person at 3 am.
but it wasn't actually New Order, but another band, a french band, :)
and a happy, kaotic, kaliedescope of noise, bouncing around the walls of
my head, making my happpy, and head-swayey
then the music, in Enochian, that just screams, just wants to get out of
its very frustration, evil, demonic, noise, screams, of music
AAARRRGGGHHH!!! <STOP!>
and there is sheer and utter u-p-h-o-r-i-a...
that soars up through your head and lifs you up past the ceiling till you
are floating , but not floating still soaring.....
just soaring, flying the wind pushing you and pushing you till you think you
are going to fall of the current. little voice says you will fall but you
know, you KNOW KNOW KNOW you aren't
\pippin\rave\sleep.doc
Sunshine Beach, Wednesday, June 24, 1992
Sleep... Ah my friend, sleep. Sleep is one of those things
that everyone must have. Otherwise, you Reality Filter may break, and
you will have to get a new one, or else forever, you will remain totally
god_like. Some people learn to live with broken Reality Filters. This
takes an incredible amount of adjustment. And lots of understanding and
patience and tolerance of other people around you. Because they can't
see that your Reality Filter has been broken. Some try to pretend that
it never really happened, but they will always be afraid of what is
under their beds.
Sleep happens when the days exploits of Virtuality-manipulation
have finally made it to the Reality Filter, and your mind screams,
"I'VE HAD ENOUGH!", in capitals. An exceedingly useful thing to do
would be to bottle sleep. Then we could carry around sleep, and pop
some when we are in an awkward situation, or a boring family reunion
Christmas party. Or you could sell it. A market for sleep would be
quite vigorous. Especially to students at exam time. Then
Out-of-exam-time, poverty-stricken students could bottle sleep and sell
it. And keep some for exam times. Speed is close, but not quite the
same. Speed manages to convince your mind that it isn't really tired,
and it really has got all the energy that it needs to go dancing, or to
go and watch the slime mould grow. When the speed eventually goes away,
your mind, once again, screams, "I'VE HAD ENOUGH!" in capitals, and you
go home and sleep.
The mind is a dictator and a pompous old bastard. It can get
bored very easily with reality. That is when it screams, "I'VE HAD
ENOUGH!", in capitals. It wants to go to the Land of Sleep so that it
can play mind games. The objects inside your mind are much easier to
manipulate than objects in Reality.
Then sometimes you can convince your mind that it really is
interested in Reality. This happens when you role-play, or ingest
perception altering substances. The mind is tricked into thinking that
it is directly altering Reality, or that it really is seeing something
that it has never seen before.
Then a different sort of tiredness kicks in after about 2 or 3
days of this. Your body says, "I'M TIRED!", in capitals. If this
happens, sometimes you can find yourself in the unfortunate predicament
where your mind says, "I'm NOT tired so fuck off."
"And I picked at the mushrooms in that New Year's salad and ate them
with respect if not enthusiasm. Wondering at what is coming and going.
Quietly awed into silence by what I understand but cannot tell. Borne
by grace downstream where I see but cannot say."
-- Robert Fulgham, "All I need to know I learnt in kindergarten."
\qix\t6.txt
an account of my sixth trip - written Tuesday afternoon, 17 December 1991
After a delay of about a month, I got hold of some LSD in the form of a
`strawberry' - a small square of blotting paper with a strawberry logo. I
wanted to `drop acid' within Parliament House, but since it was Sunday (15
December) the main gates were closed and unattended. I found a security
guard inside the rear entrance and asked if there was a public gallery; he
said yes, but that it was open only during the week and that parliament
would not sit again until 1992. I thanked him for the information and left,
but made sure I actually ate the blotter before stepping back out of the
grounds of Parliament House.
I then went to QUT's computer centre and logged into various bulletin
boards, and left just after 3 pm. I set out for the `Riverside Markets' via
the City Botanic Gardens, as there were some people I wanted to see who I
expected to be there. I was only a short distance into the Gardens when I felt
that the drug was definitely starting to act - for example, in moments when it
would suddenly seem that the path through the Gardens was VERY LONG... In any
case by the time I reached the Markets things were definitely happening: my
perception of the crowds, the noise, the objects for sale was becoming
somewhat disjointed - I was not yet seeing things that weren't there (to the
best of my knowledge! :)...) but I was acutely aware of how much was happening
around me. I wandered around without seeing anyone I recognised, and by the
time I left I had noticed that if I focused too long on anyone's face it began
to distort or change color, so I knew that I was probably about to start
hallucinating.
I had been invited to a party that was to start at 5 pm, at a house in a
suburb I had never been to. I got as far as the Queen Street Mall, at the
centre of Brisbane, and then phoned J., who had invited me to the party, to
discuss how I ought to get there - I was tossing up between catching a bus and
walking. She had just walked from the house to the city and had caught a bus
home herself, so that convinced me that I could walk. We talked a bit about a
few things - the effects of music on mood, what I was seeing as we talked, and
so on.
I have just remembered that prior to making the phone call, as I walked
through the streets towards the mall I had a particular `acid house' track
running through my mind - music I had heard at the Metropolis nightclub - and
that when I reached the mall, experimentally I went into the Dymocks bookstore
to see if I could make my way around in there. As a measure of my
disorientation by this stage, I should mention that I was unable to find the
Fantasy and Science Fiction section, which is not very hard to find; instead I
found myself grinning at something, I can't remember what, and so I picked up
a book called `White Noise' and looked at its front and back covers, and
pretended to be grinning at that. The front cover depicted an array of photos
or pictures drawn from TV; when I turned the book over to look at the blurb,
colored outlines began to form on the back cover, and by turning back to the
front cover I confirmed that they were in the image of the pictures of the
front cover. I flipped back and forth a few times and each time the outlines
were where they had been. I still haven't checked whether the back cover of
`White Noise' bears any such outlines or not. (Incidentally, as the outlines
grew from blackness, I was reminded of a postcard I used to own, filled with
temperature-sensitive liquid crystals; its usual color is black, but if you
rest it upon your fingertips, brightly-colored patches will appear above them
on the card.) I also recall that the bookstore was playing `Bolero'.
After the phone call I set out for the house. I suspect that if I were to
make that same journey again now, I would remember a lot more...
Several blocks from the mall, I was outside the Roma St Transit Centre. By
this time the world was obviously changing: the cars speeding past on the road
seemed to be flatter and broader than normal, and people walking past often
seemed misshapen. On the footpath outside the Transit Centre I came across a
watermelon that had been dropped and split messily in half. I immediately
thought of a scene I once read of, from an Andy Warhol film... I believe it
involves a crowd of people gathered around a watermelon which had been dropped
from many stories above the pavement. I looked up to see where the watermelon
might have fallen from, and saw only the spiralling road that buses and taxis
take into the higher floors of the Transit Centre. For the watermelon to have
reached the pavement from there, someone would have to have hurled it from a
vehicle's window. It didn't occur to me that someone might just have dropped
it as they walked along the footpath, and so I began to wonder, is it real? Or
is this just an incredibly vivid hallucination? (Since the trip was already
becoming strong pretty quickly, compared to the others I had taken, I was
already wondering how intense the hallucinations might become.)
As I journeyed away from the city centre the acid house tunes came back to
mind, and they were my musical accompaniment for the rest of the way. J. had
told me to walk to the very end of Roma Street, and then to head out along
Petrie Terrace, and I think I managed to follow the directions to that point,
although with some confusion about where I was... as by this point the
environment that I perceived was beginning to suffer marked distortions of
scale and shape - for example, a distance of 20 metres might appear to be a
hundred metres long; or if I were to look out across a suburb from the top
of a hill, it would have the appearance of a badly-proportioned model. The
cars continued to look flattened, and occasionally would take on very
strongly the appearance of an airbrushed painting, and I began to wonder how
many new styles in art arise from drug-induced alterations of perception, or
from psychological syndromes whose neurochemical aspect might be comparable to
the introduction of a psychedelic drug. In particular I felt that the world
had taken on the form of the artwork of Terry Gilliam, of Monty Python; the
suburban landscape I moved through especially reminded me of his drawings of
rows of bland dumpy houses inhabited by bland dumpy people.
I also recall looking across a road at one point at a black person (I tried
but couldn't make out enough detail to guess their gender) and thinking,
taking LSD is a way for whites to experience what it is like for the nonwhites
of the world to live in white societies - that is, being aware that police and
authorities in general will mistrust you for your appearance. For Africans,
Asians, and Arabs the identifying factor is skin color; for trippers the cues
are in a person's behavior - staring at ordinary objects, or at nothing, and
speech which doesn't have much continuity. Or so my thought ran.
At one point I asked an Aboriginal woman whether I was headed towards
Paddington - a place from which I felt I would be able to make my way to the
party - and she gave me very extensive directions, was very friendly and
laughed a lot. I had the feeling that she and the girl she was sitting with
knew I had altered my mind in some way, and that by doing so I had brought
myself closer to the `mental space' where they lived normally, and that this
was why they were perhaps friendlier than usual. As before, I can now question
whether that was a correct perception, but I am reporting what I was
experiencing at the time.
After a while I came to a part of Paddington I recognised; I had been there
more than a week before for a street festival, visiting friends who knew the
location of the party house. I thought that if I could make my way to THEIR
house, they could direct me to my destination. On my way, though, I kept
asking people whether they recognised the street name of my destination;
nobody did. The people I talked with generally resembled cartoon caricatures
in the sense that their facial features and the shape of their heads were all
distorted, but I also saw the texture of their skin very vividly.
In the course of the journey I would occasionally stop and look at the hair
of my forearm; something I had observed on my fourth and fifth trips was the
hair on my arms and legs writhing (as happens in the course of Michael
Landon's transformation in *An American Werewolf in London*). I had come to
use it as a test of whether I was hallucinating. By this stage invariably my
arm hairs would start to move as soon as I looked at them.
I found the house in Paddington - there were two people inside, and they
gave me directions. However, attempting to follow their directions, I got
completely lost, kept asking people to direct me, and eventually made my way
back to the house - after half an hour of wandering, I would think. Generally
I was enjoying the challenge of trying to navigate to an unknown house when
my perception and to a certain extent my cognition were so disturbed (an
example of the latter is that for several blocks I was unable to remember the
name of the street I was after - only the number, and the names of other
streets I know).
On my second time back at the house in Paddington I found the same two
people there - it turned out they were going to the same party and, I think,
were assembling some musical gear. They didn't have room in their car, but
they drew a little map for me this time, so that no matter how much space was
distorted or compressed, all I had to do was keep to the path indicated.
About 20 minutes later I made it to the house. I came up the stairs, through
the hallway and into the backyard before I met anyone. There were four people
sitting in what was evidently the `Magic Garden' of the house, of which I had
heard. One I knew - C., an artist and designer who I had met a few times
previously and with whom I wanted to talk more - I knew he lived there, and
that was the main reason I went to visit. Two of the others appeared to be a
couple from Melbourne; I don't know who the fourth person was.
I said almost straightaway that I was tripping, and after some exclamations
of surprise and envy the conversation turned to the drug culture of Melbourne;
the guy from Melbourne told me that half the city split their lives between
frenetic 9-to-5 jobs and heavy drug use on the weekends, that Melbourne has
the highest per-capita usage of amphetamines (I think) in the world ("higher
than Los Angeles", he emphasized); he told me about some episodes in his own
life in Melbourne, and about a place in Thailand where the local economy
thrives on the sale of "buddha" (Thai dope - "best in the world" - I had never
heard of it before) and psychedelics - the girl from Melbourne painted a
picture for me of thousands of people tripping together on a beach in
Thailand.
After a while I asked C. whether there was a special occasion behind the
evening's party, and he said, yes, it was a turning point in the lives of the
three men who lived there. He was about to enter the commercial world of art
in a big way for the first time; another guy had just quit teaching in order
to devote more of his time to experience, so it was almost as if he and C.
were swapping places; the third was soon to head for life in Tokyo. Each guy
had invited some people along, and shortly after I arrived two Japanese guests
turned up. The older one and I had met previously - I had gone to him for a
job interview, looking for part-time office work; in the end he had employed
someone else, it turned out - and we were each amazed to be meeting each other
again in this new context. He was acting as a sort of guardian for a younger
Japanese guy - I think he was 20 - who had just finished high school. He had
been in Australia for a little over a month, and it was his first time outside
of Japan, and he still had trouble coping with spoken English. (He told me
that words were OK, but he just couldn't get into English grammar.) By his own
estimation he drank too much Australian beer, but before he passed out we
talked for a few minutes - about what we each did at university and what we
wanted to do, about the way in which Japan is viewed outside of that country,
about connections between languages. I think it made an interesting and
amusing scene - two people from different cultures, on very different drugs,
still managing to communicate.
People were arriving frequently by now, and soon the house was full of
people. I didn't talk with many people - apart from J. (who turned up about an
hour after I did) and C. The people I remember talking with the most were a
couple who were standing out on the front verandah - the guy had locked his
keys inside his car and was waiting for the RACQ (a Queensland car owners'
association) to come and help him break in. They appeared to be among the more
`straight' of the people present, and I had talked with them for a few minutes
before I let on that I was on LSD. I think they were a bit surprised by this
revelation and said that I had been making sense in what I was saying. I
thought they might be interested in what it was like and so I tried to explain
some of what I had seen and thought that afternoon. But after a while their
slightly reserved manner and the nature of their questions started to worry me
(for example one asked "Where did you get it from?" and I was suddenly
suspicious so I said, "Oh... I really can't place it at the moment... you
know, a friend of a friend of a friend...") so I excused myself, went inside
and said to C. that I wasn't sure if I was having my first paranoid trip or
if I had run into some undercover police. I had talked a few days before with
someone who had been busted for possession of LSD and marijuana, so I was
becoming more sensitive to the possibility of arrest. I also knew how LSD
makes you very suggestible, so I just didn't know. I told C. they were out on
the porch *supposedly* waiting for the RACQ, so he went off to check them out,
while I worried myself with thoughts of evading manhunts and escaping
overseas. When I caught up with him again, C. said it was OK, they were
friends of one of the residents... and indeed they came back in later on,
after the RACQ had arrived, and sat around talking.
J. is studying music, and I talked with her in between the jam sessions that
kept evolving out of the gatherings of people in the house and in the garden.
At this point I felt as if the trip might be coming to an end (it was about 9
pm when I checked the time, although it felt a lot later) since everyone
looked normal, and I was able to hold a conversation with J., but when I went
to the toilet, I looked at my forearm, and there were the hairs writhing. I
looked in the mirror and my face started to distort, so I knew it wasn't over.
I wanted to see if I could control the direction of the changes, so I tried to
make myself turn into a wolf. While my reflection became more canine, I
didn't manage it. Then I imagined people outside waiting to use the toilet -
"You showed that guy on acid the way to the toilet? Oh no! He'll never come
out!" - and so I left. (In case it's not clear, I should add that I did not
hallucinate voices outside or anything like that; it was just a line I
imagined.)
I won't try to describe the content of my conversations with J. I'll just
say they were coherent but odd. For example, she mentioned a two-hour
conversation she'd had recently with a guy she'd never really trusted, about
whether either of them was `genuine', and about what `genuine' should mean,
and whether they were being genuine in asking and answering the questions they
did... When I inquired it turned out I knew the guy she talked with, that I
had in fact lived with him for a while. In the course of that conversation we
were joined by C., and intermittently the three of us talked - C. kept
wandering away, J. would join in a jam session, and my thoughts sometimes led
me away in directions no-one could follow.
There was a point at which I was trying to explain something,
hesitated in order to get my thoughts in order, and found that that pause gave
my mind time enough to go off in too many directions at once for me to keep
track - I realised that I was `losing it' for the first time... on previous
trips I had always retained the mental discipline sufficient to keep talking
to someone if I wanted, but here I was unable to... When I came back to earth,
C. and J. were talking, and when he saw that I was no longer staring into
space, C. said, "I'm sorry, but we had to do that. You just have to do that
sometimes." I said to him, or tried to say, words along the lines of, "I
understand... That was the first time I've ever really lost it... But I knew
I was losing it, even as I lost it... isn't that strange..." Part of the
reason I `lost it' was that I was marvelling that I was actually losing all
ability to communicate for the first time, and I was marvelling at the fact
that I was aware that it was happening, and I was marvelling at the circularity
of it all...
When we were a threesome - C., J., and I - very interesting things happened
to my perception. The three of us were sitting together on the floor, facing
each other; the world apart from our heads became very indistinct, and each
person's eyes became especially vivid and deep to me. Since it is easier for
two people to talk but we were three, the conversation jumped from being
one pair talking back and forth with the third looking on, to a different
pair, to a different pair... So I would talk with C. for a while, and then I
would look across at J., and she would look left out, looking away, and her
whole feeling was communicated in her expression and pose as perfectly as if
an artist had set out to make the feeling of being `left out' the subject of a
portrait ... or so it appeared.
When C. and J. talked, I reflected on how all of this was appearing to
me, especially the emphasis on the eyes, and the feeling I had that when I
looked into their eyes as we talked that we were seeing each other's souls. As
they looked at each other I imagined each person as a sort of whirlwind of
messages circulating in the brain, each message following whatever path it
could, and each person being defined by the particular way in which their
whirlwind closed back on itself. Part of this perception was the idea that
when two people lock eyes, there are now new paths for those messages to
follow, out of one person's head and into the other, and so the two whirlwinds
begin to interact...
Once again I should make clear that I did not literally see any
whirlwinds or dancing patterns of light at this stage; it all occurred to me
in imagination.
At one point C. used a phrase relating the movement of electrons and the
mind which sounded familiar, and I said `I know where I've seen you before! It
was in the Bohemian Cafe, during one of their poetry evenings, and someone
read a poem that contained a line a lot like what you just said! Was that
you?' C. answered my question, and the answer registered, but then as I tried
to remember the scene in the cafe more clearly, I got confused about what he
had said - I said to him, `Wow, that's the first time I've actually confused
yes and no - can you repeat what you said?' He said no, it hadn't been him,
but he was sure that we had met somewhere before. As he said that, in the back
of my mind there was an association with the concept of past lives and I think
the milieu of the film `Highlander'.
There were other interesting interactions that took place between us - for
example, J. and C. are in love, or are falling in love, and so they obviously
had a lot of attention for each other, but J. explained to me that she found
it easier to talk, especially about ideas, one-to-one, and so if we were
talking about something, and C. returned from another region of the house,
rather than try to include C. in the discussion, we would cooperate in ending
that topic and starting something new (or so it seemed to me... I must keep
adding that proviso). On one such occasion C. brought for me a book, which I
think he had written. I turned over the title page and saw a page full of text
and said "Whoa..." He said, "You don't want to read it?" and I started to
explain that yes, I would like to, but it would mean ending the threefold
conversation, which I didn't want to do just yet... Then he said "You don't
have to read it now", for which I was very grateful. I never read it that
night, and have yet to read it, but I did read the first few sentences. As I
recall they were about the rational mind, plotting to destroy nature...
At one point C. was absent again, and J. I think was talking elsewhere or
jamming, and someone (possibly the guy from Melbourne) was showing an absurd
slide show - putting nothing in the projector, so that all that came up was a
square of white light, and then describing it in some way. I was aware that
this was what was happening around me, since I could see the projection and
hear his voice, and I could see everyone laughing around me, but I never tuned
into what he was saying, and I found it difficult even to hang onto the
observation of what was happening. Instead I was staring at the surface which
the projector was illuminating, and I could feel my ordinary self going away.
That's the only way I can describe it. I had never before really identified
with a phrase like `losing the ego' or `losing the self' before, except as
metaphoric descriptions of the process of losing `social self-consciousness'
(ie inhibitions related to the judgements of others), but what was happening
here was much more radical. I still don't know how to describe the experience
in a way that does it justice, but one analogy I have used is that it was as
if `I' went away, and in my place were a million worms wriggling, or a million
signals being sent in a fashion that I could not see or hear and using symbols
I did not understand. The world of the senses did not go away, but it was
abstracted of meaning. Then `I' would come back and realise what had just
happened, and I was horrified and amazed; I was thinking, `Is this what
madness is like? Is it true that when a person is so insane that their self
has gone away entirely, instead this other form of experience is happening
inside them, or inside their body, something totally alien and totally outside
all our frameworks, but completely real?' Then the other form of experience
would come back for a while.. and then `I' would come back, wanting it to stop
...
Eventually I came back to myself for long enough to say to J. that I had
just been through something amazing and frightening, that I felt as if I had
passed through madness or as if my mind had gone away, and that I now thought
that maybe even people who are completely mad are seeing something we can't
see. J. said yes, of course people who are classed as insane are often just
thinking differently, I've often thought that... But I tried to say that I
meant something different, not that many of the people put in institutions
simply have unusual world-views, but that at the opposite pole from the human
mind, from any sense of self, is ... something else. I don't think I conveyed
very much of that, just enough for J. to understand that I meant something
quite other than what she meant.
I think C. came back shortly after that, and I tried to talk, or to read his
book... but my whole way of experiencing the world began to change again. This
time it didn't involve my whole sense of self going away; instead, each event
in my environment began to command my total attention, to the point of driving
from my mind each thing that had come before. So someone on one side of the
room would say something, and it would be full of meaning, and then there
would be a noise, and that would mean something else, and then there would be
another comment somewhere else, and that would fill my mind for a moment...
and I was aware that my experience of the world was being structured in this
way, one thing and then another and then another, so that there was continuity
of experience but not continuity of meaning; but I was helpless to bring it to
a halt. I felt as if I was discovering that all the mental models I have ever
had have been radically incomplete because there was this extra dimension of
experience, this extra form of embeddedness in the world and in social groups,
that I had never experienced before. Increasingly, whenever someone looked
at me or spoke to me, I felt as if at some level they were recognising that I
was experiencing for the first time this level of consciousness at which
everyone else had always lived. By this stage I was just lying on my back,
looking up at the ceiling, shaking my head, perhaps moving my arms a little,
occasionally rolling my head to one side or the other just to look at people.
I thought of the writings of Timothy Leary, which I was reading as long ago as
1988, years before I ever tried a psychedelic drug. He spoke of LSD as giving
the conscious mind access to new levels of consciousness and new sources of
information, in an irreversible fashion. Because I read Leary so long ago,
such ideas were very familiar to me by 1991. I thought that maybe I was
discovering the *reality* of what it is like to have one's experience extended
in that fashion. I was appalled by the thought that it might be irreversible
because I could not imagine coping with it in any way - I did not think
I could cope with that level of input and remain functional in any socially
recognisable way. I thought, if this is a temporary thing brought on by
the drug and not a permanent alteration in my experience of the world, I
will think long and hard before ever using LSD again. I also thought, maybe
this is some effect unique to me; I have expended so much effort in trying to
enter all the different realities that people make for themselves, and I have
lately passed through so many different social scenes, that perhaps the
combined effect of the drug and my mental exploration has put me into a mental
space from which I will never escape - in which I will continue to understand
each moment, and in which I will be constantly thinking of new things, but out
of which I will never be able to communicate satisfactorily.
After some time like this, I began to hallucinate very intensely. In trying
to convey in conversation what it was like, I have referred to Peter
Gabriel's videos `Big Time' and `Sledgehammer', and to an Australian
commercial in which a face made out of various fruits speaks to the viewer.
Then - I say - imagine that you are (say) speaking with someone, and as they
speak their normal face transforms into a fruit-face like the one in the
commercial...and then the fruit dance apart or transform in some other way
entirely un-fruit-like...and finally a reverse sort of process takes you back
to the world as it was. That sort of transition took me from staring at the
ceiling of a room at this house, to a strange enclosed space (for something
analogous, see the illustrations in Terry Gilliam's `Animations of
Mortality') filled with bizarre goings-on, and back again. The strange
enclosed space I understood to be something like what interactive, multi-user
virtual reality might be like. In such an environment people can choose their
`icons', the form by which they will appear to others, just as people on
electronic bulletin boards can choose their names... and just as the freedom
to name things can lead to bizarre-seeming statements (for example, on a MUD
[Multi-User Dungeon] one might ask `Who cloned Schrodinger's Cat?') which are
nevertheless literally true, so the freedom to choose icons will lead to
bizarre scenes which are nevertheless actually happening.
Anyway, after a few switches between what I will call Real Reality and
Virtual Reality, C. came across to me and said hello. He was speaking to me
through Virtual Reality. As he spoke I did not see his face moving, but
instead something quite different... It was as if I was looking up at his
jaw from underneath, so that in my visual field his chin was pointing `up'...
But then it was as if his chin had been made to look up like a nose, with an
extra mouth having appeared in his throat... and it was through that that he
was speaking! He said, so you're discovering what it's all about... You've
done well, it's rare for someone with your degree of intellectuality to make
it this far ... There was an unstated implication, which I knew in a way like
the knowledge of context that sometimes occurs in dreams, that anyone who
takes enough LSD gains the ability to experience Virtual Reality and to speak
to others through it, which thereby constitutes a form of telepathy, since
other people (people not using LSD) can't tune in to those conversations...
I think he also said, Do you see why we can't write about this? What would
you tell people? Also connected to all this, in a complicated way, was the
whole conspiracy-theory idea of the Illuminati, the idea of a super-secret
society that works behind the scenes to change the world. I have picked up
most of my knowledge about the various conspiracy theories that exist from an
enormous novel called "Illuminatus!" by Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea;
that book, and Wilson's other books, were also where I first read about LSD
and Timothy Leary's theories of the mind. As I watched C. speaking through
Virtual Reality, the triangular shape of his jaw reminded me of the eye-in-
the-triangle logo, the pyramid shape you can find on the US dollar, and I
understood that the Illuminati really referred to all those people throughout
history who had made contact with Virtual Reality.
Then we switched back to Real Reality to some extent, as I watched C.
(standing over me) talk with someone else. I said something about how I had no
idea it would be so overwhelming, and he said I should concentrate on
experiencing it; I think I also said something about why can't we tell them
about it? Why haven't they noticed? and he said "Different cultures" to me
in Virtual-Reality-style (ie through the mouth that had appeared in his
throat!) and then immediately looked away to speak with someone back in Real
Reality. I thought about what had just happened and thought, if it's true, it
explains why so many people who were into LSD in the sixties and seventies are
into virtual reality (the technology) now...because it's just like what they
experience when they take the drug...
But at this point my experience started to revert to its previous
overwhelming character, with each new stimulus from outside fully engaging my
attention. I just wanted it to end at this point, I couldn't bear the thought
of being like this forever. I thought of my friend in the USA, who I met
through the ISCA bulletin board, and who was the first person I had ever
spoken with as they contemplated suicide. As we spoke, and afterwards, I had
tried to imagine experience assuming an intolerable form, one that you
couldn't bear but which you seemed powerless to change. Although I could
intellectually understand such a possibility, and the idea that killing
oneself might simply be the only thing to do, I couldn't really empathize - I
couldn't identify anything in my own experience that felt like that. But as
this drug-induced state went on and on and on, I felt as if I really
understood. What I wanted was sleep, unconsciousness, rather than death,
because I could hope that it would all have ended once the trip was over. But
I could imagine that if it just kept happening, I might want to end it.
Eventually one of the couple who had been at the front of the house waiting
for the RACQ came past and looked down at me with real concern. She said,
"You're having a bad trip, are you?" I think I said something like, "I really
think so." It was funny because when we had spoken previously, I had said that
I had heard stories about bad trips but had never had one myself... Eventually
J. came and asked if I wanted to go somewhere and sleep. I said yes, please,
and she led me to a bedroom. Inside I had the impression that there were two
or three other people already asleep across the mattress. It looked like it
was the place where people were going in order to crash for the night. I lay
down on the mattress, and J. left. The only light coming into the room was
through an opening above the door, and I had the impression that the sound of
the party outside was entering primarily through that gap too. The voices from
outside were transformed, so that they became voices or a voice speaking about
me... I think saying things like, "Well, this is the logical end of all your
experimentation" - experimentation referring not just to psychedelic drugs,
but to all my explorations of reality. I thought of Celia Green, a British
writer whose attitudes towards philosophy and psychology affected me a great
deal in 1990. One of her persistent observations is that people do not like to
hear about ways that the world might be, outside of some range of
possibilities which for emotional reasons they have decided are safe.
One such possibility, which she says is logically impossible to refute, but
which everyone dismisses for such emotional reasons, is solipsism. As I lay on
the mattress, hearing only the voice from outside, I even began to wonder if
solipsism is true, that what I had always thought were other people were
aspects of myself or my environment which I had misinterpreted, and I wondered
if I was now passing through the cognitive change necessary to understand the
true nature of things, whatever that turned out to be.
I rolled around on the mattress, but I never quite left it. I noticed that
there seemed to be no-one else there and decided I must have hallucinated the
other bodies. The feeling of being alone in a room waiting to sleep, and
having been taken there by J., reminded me of going to bed when I was very
young. I noticed myself making this comparison, and thought, people tend
to think of such images from childhood only when they are in ultimately
stressful situations... I was still waiting for it all to end. Eventually I
must have fallen asleep.
I was woken again, I don't know how much later, by C., who said I'm sorry to
wake you, but this is my bedroom... I think J. set me up in the lounge room,
on a set of cushions taken from a couch. I must have fallen asleep again
almost immediately.
I really woke at about 9.30 am the next morning. The front door was open and
light was coming in, and there were a few people I recognised from the night
before in an adjoining room getting ready to leave. I lay there and thought
back on some of the things I had experienced and imagined the previous night,
and soon found that my mind was still racing in an unnerving way - leaping
from one thought to another to another without settling anywhere or
progressing in a logical fashion. I began to fear that maybe I had been
permanently changed in some way. I said hello to the people in the other room,
then went and got my bag from C.'s room and left quickly.
Outside I found that the trip was definitely over - I was no longer
hallucinating, I failed the moving-hairs test - but that I was still thinking
in this constantly distracted manner. I was constantly imagining,
anticipating, remembering, thinking, but without any real continuity. I was
supposed to be meeting someone at the University of Queensland at 12 pm, in
order to conduct an experiment for the Psychology Department, so I headed for
the city again, in order to catch a bus there. While I waited, and during the
ride, my mind kept going and going and going. I thought of an analogy again,
as I anticipated what I would say to my friend when we met on campus: that
there is a difference between being an artist who has a moment of inspiration
and who then can communicate a new vision to the world, and being an artist
who creates masterpieces from a cell in a mental hospital. The second artist
is still seeing important new things all the time, but this vision is achieved
at the expense of any place in society... I felt as if I was thinking very
valuable thoughts - ideas, arising out of my experience the previous night,
which if I ever managed to communicate them, could enrich a lot of lives - but
I was afraid that I might be in the position of that second artist, unable to
talk coherently. I wanted to be my old self again. It occurred to me that
maybe all that was happening was that I was `speeding' - I knew that `speed',
ie amphetamine, is a common ingredient in LSD bought `on the street', so
perhaps what I was feeling was just the speed continuing to act, after the
acid had worn off. I strongly hoped this was so.
I got to the university early and wandered about a bit, my mind still
speeding. In the end I met my friend at the appointed hour at the university
bus stop. As soon as I could, I told her I didn't think I'd be able to run the
experiment, that something had happened in my mind, and I hoped that it would
change soon. So we went and lay on the grass, in the shade of a tree in UQ's
Great Court, and talked. I told her about some of what had just happened to
me, how I was afraid that my consciousness had been changed permanently; she
told me about how she had felt a similar change in herself at times,
especially in August at a time when she had spent several days online, mostly
MUDding...the density of information, and the radically different way of
conceptualising the world that using the networks demands, seemed to have had
a similar effect for her. We decided that the word `distracted', as used (for
example) in Shakespeare's time, was an appropriate description for people who
suffered our problem; we were both constantly being distracted...
We discussed a book we had both read ("Cities of Dreams" by Stan Gooch)
in which a new account of human history and culture is put forward, revolving
around the differences between Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon cultures, and we
agreed that in Gooch's terms Cro-Magnon culture has been ascendant but
Neanderthal culture is on the rise again... (One episode from my trip which I
have not recounted yet is that when J. came to lead me to C.'s bedroom, the
moment somehow signified that I had become Neanderthal, that the other
Neanderthals were going to take care of me from that point forward...) My
friend showed me a dream she had recorded in a diary in 1990, which I had
wanted to see for a long time, and which involved a post-catastrophe world in
which the Neanderthal culture is again ascendant... Eventually we went in
search of terminals from which we could both log into the Internet... and
somewhere in the course of that afternoon my mind finally settled again.
Here endeth the trip.
DISCLAIMER
I would like to emphasize that the account of the peak of the trip is a
little suspect, in that dialogue and events may not have occurred in the exact
order or fashion that I have described. But I think that certainly the flavour
of the experience is unchanged.
<<<!!!=!!!>>>
\qix\aya
To: Mitchell POrter <casport@cc.uq.oz.au>
Subject: Re: Ayahuasca
In-reply-to: Your message of 14 Feb 92 01:54:02 +0000. <casport.698032442@brolga>
Date: Fri, 14 Feb 92 01:02:28 -0800
From:
Message-ID:
Status: RO
OK, there are a few references:
If you can get ahold of tapes by Terence McKenna (or books).
A book called _The Four Winds_ by Villoldo and Jendresen
published Harper & Row 1990
Two books by Bruce Lamb & Manuel Cordova-Rios:
Wizard of the Upper Amazon
Rio Tigre and Beyond
Recently republishedin paperback by:
North Atlantic Books
2800 Woolsey Street
Berkeley, CA 94705
About $13 each
There are a couple others I can't remember offhand.
If you know of ...of the jungle, they sell the ingrediants (when they can
get them):
basically:
It's a mixture of the ayahuasca vine and the yage leaves.
The vine contains harmaline et al. related compounds, which are psychoactive,
but ALSO act as an MAO inhibitor, so that the DMT in the yage leaves becomes
orally active.
If you want any more info or you find any other info out, mail me.
---------
OH---- if you wish to post this, go ahead, but please remove my name
and email address. thanks....
>From Sat Feb 15 16:12:39 1992
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To: casport@cc.uq.oz.au
Status: RO
Hi Mitchell,
Read your posting to alt.psychoactives and I notice you
mention the magazines WER, Mondo 2000 and one I haven't
heard of, Magical Review.
Do you have copies of these magazines at all ? If so,
would it be possible to photocopy some back issues.
I'm new to UQ at the maths dept., so if it's OK with
you I could just walk over to the Prentice Centre.
My experiments in psychoactives are largely based on
choline, phenylanaline and caffeine. If you know of
any medical practitioners in Brisbane who are open
to the ideas of cognition enhancement, I'd be way
grateful to hear of such.
Thanks in advance,
- I.
>From earl@well.sf.ca.us Sat Feb 15 17:07:07 1992
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Fri, 14 Feb 92 22:01:41 -0800 for casport@brolga.cc.uq.oz.au
Date: Fri, 14 Feb 92 22:01:41 -0800
From: Earl "C." Vickers <earl@well.sf.ca.us>
Message-Id: <9202150601.AA05703@well.sf.ca.us>
To: casport@cc.uq.oz.au
Subject: Mail for Mitchell
Status: RO
Hi. I'm the author of the Vision Vine story, which I guess you were
referring to (latest WER). First of all, ayahuasca comes from a tropical
vine, not a mushroom. I haven't tried it myself, but the anthropological
literature seems to have an amazing number of accounts attesting to
collective hallucination and telepathy. One of the most interesting
accounts is in The Wizard of the Upper Amazon, by F. Bruce Lamb, or its
sequel, Rio Tigre and Beyond. Other psychoactive plants sometimes
are the subject of similar claims; it could all be folklore, or not.
At any rate, I don't think it's something that invariably happens.
Still, it's quite intriguing.
>From jasonp@cs.uq.oz.au Mon Feb 17 17:40:03 1992
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From: clifton_r@verifone.com
Newsgroups: alt.drugs,alt.psychoactives
Subject: Re: Ayahuasca (and Syrian Rue)
Message-ID: <1992Feb14.204002.3706@verifone.com>
Date: 15 Feb 92 06:40:02 GMT
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In article <casport.698032442@brolga>, casport@brolga.cc.uq.oz.au (Mitchell POrter) writes:
> I have lately read in a variety of places (Whole Earth Review, Magical Blend,
> Mondo 2000) rumours or claims that the mushroom-derived drug ayahuasca
> promotes collective hallucinations or even telepathy. Does anyone have any
> information?
> Mitchell Porter - casport@brolga.cc.uq.oz.au
No info on the collective hallucinations or telepathy. A little on the
botany and pharmacology before things get hopelessly confused. This is all
posted from memory of about 10 years ago when I was interested in exploring
some exotic drugs, so I may make a few errors but should have the gist of
it correct. Maybe others can comment on the psychoactive effects.
Ayahuasca is also called yage' (Spanish pronunciation.) I believe the
botanical (Latin) name is "Banisteriopsis caapi." It is _NOT_ a mushroom,
but a VINE native to the Amazon region. A preparation of the vine is used
in shamanic rituals by Indian tribes of the region and by folk healers.
The drugs found in the plant (as with most botanical sources, there are a
collection of psychoactives, not just one) fall into a class called the
"harmala alkaloids." I believe "harmala" comes from the name of some other
plant containing this family of compounds, but could be wrong. Some of the
specific compounds are harmine, harmaline, harmalol. They have varying
potencies; I no longer have info on the precise mg dosages of each required
for effect.
This class of alkaloids, as I understand it, are non-indole,
non-phenylethylamine psychedelics. In other words, they are completely
outside the classes of drugs which include DMT, 5MeO-DMT, psylocybin,
psilocin, LSD, and LSE on the one hand (indole hallucinogens) and
mescaline, MDMA, et al. on the other hand (phenylethylamines.) To the best
of my knowledge they have not been studied very extensively, nor is there a
much history of recreational use in the First World to look at for
anecdotal evidence. So you're kind of on your own as far as psychological
and physical risks. William S. Burroughs has written a bit about it, but I
would not regard his writings as a reliable roadmap, much as I enjoy them.
One specific physical risk is CRUCIAL to understand. From what I have
read, all the harmala alkaloids are very strong MAO inhibitors. This means
that it would be very dangerous (potentially fatal) to take them in
conjunction with any depressant (e.g. alcohol, barbiturates) or any
stimulant (e.g. ephedrine, amphetamines, MDMA) or even certain amino acids
or foods (e.g. foods containing tyramine.) This is clearly a drug to take
with your system completely clean if you take it at all; _none_ of this
drinking a little alcohol ahead of time to calm yourself down, if you value
your life and health! If you don't understand the chemistry, just accept
that MAO inhibitors (among other things) break the feedback loop which
brings your blood-pressure back within safe limits if some other compound
is altering it in either direction. It may also radically change the
metabolism of other psychoactives such as DMT or psylocybin which are
normally broken down and flushed out of the human body very fast.
Ayahuasca itself is extremely difficult to obtain, as far as I know.
However, the seeds of Syrian rue contain the same harmala alkaloids and
used to be available through mail-order. (I don't know the source any
more.) You will have to find some way to prepare them for consumption if
you decide to try it.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Personal anecdote begins:
I did order some Syrian rue seeds and decide to try it. This was
somewhere around 10 years ago. (Time flies...) After some consideration I
decided to grind them up, boil them, and filter the result into a drink,
similar to the preparation described for yage' (ayahuasca.) I ground about
a half ounce of the seeds in an electric coffee-grinder and boiled them in a
couple cups of water. Hideous smell. The resulting sludge was very slow
to filter through a coffee filter. At length I had about one large glass
of dark foul-smelling liquid. Here is the comic part: I couldn't drink
it. I tried chilling it, holding my nose, etc. It tasted so bad that I
just couldn't get down more than a couple of swallows. One poster on the
net said Kava tastes bad; I drank quite a bit of kava when I was living in
the South Pacific (Tonga, where it is a cultural institution) and it tastes
no worse than say, spiced pencil shavings. This was MUCH MUCH worse.
I got a weird dreamy sort of half-trip off of those couple swallows, so
it's quite possible that I would have given myself much too big a dose if I
had got the whole thing down. I suppose the thing to do would have been to
boil it dry and scrape up the residue into capsules, but at the time I
chickened out and just dumped it. I did have some odd hallucinations when
I closed my eyes, even on that tiny dose; I've sometimes thought about
trying it again if I ever get the time. (With my job and family now, it
could be years more.)
If there's anyone else on the net who's ever tried it, I'd be curious to
hear from you.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
DO keep in mind what I said about MAO inhibitors; they can be very
dangerous if used in conjunction with any other drugs or even certain
foods, but ESPECIALLY in conjunction with depressants like alcohol or
stimulants like amphetamines or MDMA. No liability, no warrantees express
or implied, etc. etc.
-- Clifton
clifton_r@verifone.com | VeriFone, Inc. | Home: +1-808-521-9073
Pope, CotSg in Paradise | 100 Kahelu Ave. | Work: +1-808-625-3234
"Boring .sig, so what." | Mililani HI 96789 | & that about covers it...
>From jasonp@cs.uq.oz.au Mon Feb 17 17:42:01 1992
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From: jasonp@cs.uq.oz.au
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Path: uqcspe!bunyip.cc.uq.oz.au!munnari.oz.au!mips!mips!spool.mu.edu!olivea!sgigate!odin!shinobu!fido!fido.asd.sgi.com!nix
From: nix@asd.sgi.com (Harmless when used as directed)
Newsgroups: alt.drugs,alt.psychoactives
Subject: Re: Ayahuasca (and Syrian Rue)
Message-ID: <NIX.92Feb16004931@valis.asd.sgi.com>
Date: 16 Feb 92 08:49:31 GMT
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In-Reply-To: clifton_r@verifone.com's message of 15 Feb 92 06:40:02 GMT
I believe that ayahuasca is a mixture of two plant extracts, one of
which is _banisteriopsis caapi_. One of the plants contains N,N DMT,
the other contains harmala alkaloids. DMT is inactive orally;
however, it *is* orally active when combined with a monoamine oxidase
inhibitor. Well, surprise. In addition t
o having their own
psychedelic properties the harmala alkaloids are also MAO inhibitors.
(Note that MAO inhibitors don't sound like something to which you want
to expose yourself unless you know exactly what you're doing.)
It is interesting to think about how long it must have taken to figure
out that if you combined extracts of two random plants you would get a
potent psychedelic.
As far as effects go, it wouldn't surprise me at all if somebody under
the influence of ayahuasca believed themselves to be telepathic. This
certainly does not imply actual telepathy. Thus, followups go to
alt.drugs only.
\pip\rave\house.doc
June 19,1992
Sunshine Beach, Sunday
The house of silence. Your heart is a house of silence. Your mind is
the rooms. The rooms are filled with objects. The beautiful and ugly
together. Some rooms have gateways that connect them. Some rooms are
locked. Do not hoard your objects. Pass them on when you have had each
object, and given it refuge in your rooms. Do not reject an object
because it won't go with the decor of any of your rooms. Build a room
especially for it.
There are many ways of knowing. The way of knowing is the
foundation that the house of silence is built on. Sometimes it will be
time to torch the house of silence. Tear it down, and throw the objects
out into the street. Build the foundation again. Make it of granite
instead of basalt. Build the house of silence again, and fill it with
objects again.
But do not think that your work is done. Can you possibly hope
to contain life, the immensity of life in one building? or one
re-building? or even a finite number of re-buildings? Thinking,
talking, reading, computers, a person... These all have edges which you
can discover. Once you are familiar with an edge, with a face, or the
files of a hard drive, do you say that you know the person, that you
know computers? Only a fool looks at a tree, and says that he
comprehends nature.
So the house of silence is your own. It is yours to decorate,
but the objects within are not the house. Do not confuse yourself with
the objects, or thoughts, within. For thoughts come and go as they
please.
Your feelings, emotions, are the colours of the walls in you
rooms. Do not be afraid to explore other people's houses. To play with
their minds, and look for the gaps above their doors.
\pip\rave\truth.rav
July 10, 1992, Nambooring
And what is Truth?
Truth is like a Reality Check.
A Reality Check occurs when one is truly bent. It is the opposite occurrence
of when something strange happens to you when you are straight.
When you are bent, everything seems strange.
Every now and again, a perception will arrive on the doorstep of your mind,
and it will be straight, and you will percieve it as straight. This will seem
strange because everything you are percieving is supposed to be strange,
but this thing is normal, and it has come along to say:
"Hi, reality is still here."
Now Truth is similar, in that it is a perception of something.
Of an object. Truth is where you find it. Truth is a perception of an
object that lives in someone else's Virtuality when you find that you
are percieving as the owner of the Virtuality does.
When two perceptions are the same that is Truth. Truth is a glimpse
of the underlying pattern of all things. A glimpse of constancy.
A glimpse of reality because there is a hole in reality.
\pippin\stories\bill.sty
SO YOU THOUGHT THIS WAS NIRVANA
He was supposed to be getting wet, he thought. Dream surfing
perhaps? When he went surfing in his dreams, he didn't get wet.
Maybe he was dreaming. Why did he think that? Because it was raining.
Was or is now? Is, of course. He meant is. It had been raining when
he'd crashed into the semi-trailer. Suddenly he was wide awake and
staring at a mangled engine breakfast. Yes it was still raining. He
could feel the raindrops on his skin, but he wasn't getting wet. He
could smell petrol as he'd never smelt it before. Petrol mixed with
rain, and Julene's perfume. He knew instantly that she was gone. She
was dead. He wrenched himself around to stare at her, crumpled in the
seat beside him. But she was breathing; she groaned and moved. He
felt flooded with relief. He reached out to touch her. Her skin had
never felt so soft. It felt like, it felt like... But that couldn't
be. It felt like days at uni when he'd been on acid, when everything
was soft and alive. But he certainly hadn't been tripping since
then. He called to her.
In his head, he heard his voice echo, but no sound came to his
ears. He listened. He could hear her rasping breath, but where was
the sound of his own breathing? He stared at his hand, and touched it
with the other. It was there, alive. He tried to call to Julene again,
but he got no response.
It seemed like a moment later that an ambulance arrived. He
stared at the red flashing light. He thought it looked like sunrise.
He watched the pulsing light, and realized after a while that people
were standing around him. They were touching him gently, and Julene was
sobbing. Then he saw, felt, heard, and smelt everything at once. He
had 4 hands. He was suddenly preoccupied with trying to make himself
shake his hands, but only two of them obliged. He watched as the
ambulance officers picked up his body, put it on a stretcher, and put it
away in the vehicle with the sunrise on the roof. Julene got in. The
vehicle roared away, wailing. The world was filled with the keening
wail of the ambulance siren. It seemed like all of life was an
ambulance siren. When he realized...
It was gone. And all he could hear was the sound of the gentle
soaking rain. So this is what its like to be dead. He felt like a
plant. He felt the rain, heard the rain, became the rain. Became
totally absorbed for hours... until he realized it was daylight, and it
had stopped raining. He was staring at a tangled wreckage of Mack truck
and a bright blue rice bubble. Julene always called it a rice bubble,
and he always called it a Mazda. Now he could see it as a rice bubble.
A rice bubble with 4 wheels.
A coherent thought went sailing by. It waved. He waved back.
It occurred to Bill finally that none of this was real, and dead people
weren't really expected to watch their thoughts go sailing by, or go
driving around in rice bubbles. So where were dead people supposed to
go? Force of habit made him scratch his head. He felt like he could
take the top off his head if he wanted, but as he couldn't see the point
of that, he didn't.
Instead he drew upon the immense resources of his mind, and he
heard his attendant thoughts laughing at him.
"The Bardo Thodol says that I should wander on the Bardo plane
for 40 days and see hallucinations. If I recognize them for what they
are, I shall be liberated, and go to Nirvana or heaven." Or was it
Mettallica? His thoughts rallied around him and clapped their hands.
So he sat down to wait for a hallucination that would look like the
Buddha.
The Buddha, however, was late that day. He did hate to keep
people waiting. Especially dead people. They reacted so differently to
dying. Being a user helped. One of the Buddha's attendant thoughts
pointed out to him that Bill was waiting under a tree listening to the
screaming of a million blades of grass. He was also listening to his
thoughts so he was ok. But the Buddha still hated being late. Some
people didn't know how to listen to their thoughts.
"Hello," said the Buddha, as he happened across Bill under the
tree.
"Hello," replied Bill who was trying to mutate into a furry
mushroom under the tree. If this didn't work, his brain wanted to
have a go at mutating into a 286. His thoughts were egging him on. "Who
are you?"
The Buddha wasn't ruffled. In fact, this was the correct
response for meeting hallucinations whilst wandering on the Bardo
plane. "I am you," replied the Buddha. He sat on Bill, who had
successfully mutated in a mushroom, and starting smoking a hookah.
Bill the mushroom blinked. "Why. So you are." Bill the mushroom
sprouted a hand and arm and slapped his forehead in astonishment.
" The new improved, washes brighter than, the old version of me. Of course.
How could I not have recognized you." Bill the mushroom sprouted
another hand and arm and proffered it to Bill the Buddha.
Bill the Buddha smiled at Bill the mushroom. This was also a
correct response. To recognize the hallucinations as your own thoughts,
and to not be in awe or fear of them. The mushroom didn't seem to be
phased by this death business after all. "Pleased to meet you."
The two constellations of attendant thoughts cheered.
"Congratulations!" said the Buddha. "You and Your thoughts
have responded correctly to dying. You have been liberated and will
promptly attain Nirvana or possibly Pearl Jam." The Buddha's thoughts
cheered again.
Bill the Mushroom, Who was no longer a mushroom, but a new,
improved 21 year old version of Bill, blinked at the Buddha, blinked at
the sunlight, and blinking, surveryed His new, improved 21 year old
body. Buddha was sprawling on the ground where He had been dumped by
Bill the Mushroom mutating into a 21 year old. And you just couldn't
smoke a hookah on one of those. It just didn't have the same ambience
as a mushroom. Lewis Carroll might come and give Him nightmares. Buddha's
thoughts were not impressed.
"Oh," said Bill, and He waited for the Buddha to say something
else.
"Aren't You pleased?" asked the Buddha sitting happily on the
ground. He was a bit miffed at the lack of enthusiasm. "It is your
body exactly the way it was when You were 21 minus all the things that you
didn't like about it."
"Oh," said Bill. "I just thought Liberation was instananeous."
"Oh," said the Buddha. "Sorry." He smiled cheerfully, winked
at the new Buddha Bill and ...
CLICK!
The newly Liberated Bill was standing on a cloud at the Pearly
Gates. Pearl Jam was nowhere in sight. Bill the Buddha blinked. As
far as he could see the cloud was on a flat Plate, that was on the
backs of 4 Elephants, which were in turn on the back of a Large Turtle.
They were all swimming through space. Just like Discworld, thought
Bill.
His attendant thoughts blinked too, and were unimpressed. "You
mean this is Nirvana?" they chorused in disbelief.
CLICK!
"Sorry about that." Bill was standing before a Largish, Pink,
Fluffy, Bunny Rabbit. "You didn't subscribe to the Western White
Christian Bible, did You?" It spoke. Bill marvelled.
Bill found the capitals annoying. "Or the Discworld theories,"
He added. "I mean, whoever heard of gods who play dice, and broke
windows of atheists houses." Bill noticed that He was standing in an exact
duplicate of the place where He had died except that the rice bubble and Mack
truck were gone. "Don't tell Me this is Nirvana."
"Ok," said the Rabbit whose name just happened to be Fluffy.
Bill's thoughts giggled disrespectfully. "I won't tell you."
Instead, a huge pink neon sign appeared just in front of Bill in
the air above Fluffy and flashed "NIRVANA" on and off.
Bill frowned and made the sign go away.
Fluffy was not perturbed. "Ok. I'm sorry to break this to you,
but the Nirvana of which you speak does not exist."
Bill frowned again. The constellation of thoughts to which Bill
belonged took a deep collective breath. "Go on..."
Fluffy sighed. "THIS," he waggled his paws in the air, "*is*
Nirvana. Or rather You came from Nirvana, and You haven't left
Nirvana."
Bill digested this information. His thoughts were having a
field day, collecting tadpoles of concentration from the fetid pool of
Bill's confusion. "Oh," He said. He seemed to be saying that a lot
lately, and promptly sat on the grass. He tried mutating into a
digestive enzyme. He could still do it.
"Wow!" Fluffy looked impressed, if rabbits can look impressed.
Suddenly it occurred to Bill that maybe Fluffy was a
hallucination, or maybe another Buddha. Or maybe both. His thoughts
cheered. What if Fluffy was another person like He had been? Or had
been another person like He had been? His brain screamed in frustration
at Him. It wanted to mutate into a 286 NOW! Instead Bill the Digestive
Enzyme asked, "Well, what now?"
Fluffy waggled his paws. "I dunno, look for a fish I guess."
Bill the Digestive Enzyme grew an arm and swiped at the Rabbit,
Who promptly rolled over, laughed, and tried to look cute. It suceeded
and made Bill want to throw up. Another thought came tripping by.
Did Digestive Enzymes throw up? *What* did Digestive Enzymes throw up?
Bill's thoughts laughed mercilessly.
Fluffy apologized just as promptly. "Yeah. Ok. I'm sorry.
Follow Me."
Fluffy blinked and was gone. He blinked again, and Bill the
Digestive Enzyme was gone too.
Utter amazement, for the first time since dying, climbed into
Bill's mind. The thoughts cheered, and started planning the party.
They had been wondering when it would arrive. Bill was staring at a
huge computer. It was sleek and black. It filled a whole wall, and it
filled the whole wall with banks of wicked multicoloured, blinking
lights. Bill stared at one of the light's which could only be octarine.
A guy His own new age (21) with a shock of red hair and bright blue eyes
was introducing Himself to Bill.
"Hi," He said extending His hand. He had real hands, or at
least, they looked real. His thoughts snickered evilly. "Nice isn't
it?"
Bill nodded wordlessly. Bill was good with computers. He even
liked them. He had programmed super computers, but He'd never seen one
like this before.
"I call it Pippin. It keeps one of Us happy." He saw, through
the newly opened eyes in the back of His skull, a girl with long dark
hair wave a hand from behind a terminal.
"Sorry. I'm Greg. That's Pippin too." The girl waved again.
"So Bill, welcome to the team."
Bill's mouth fell open. "Do you mean I get to work with this?"
He poked His thumb at the computer. He forgot to close His mouth, and
one of His attendant thoughts flew in. He swallowed it "accidently".
Greg nodded. So did Pippin He could see without looking.
Bill decided He should say something intelligent. His thoughts
giggled insanely. "What are you modelling?" He asked. One could only
justify having a computer like this by using it for modelling. The fact
that Pippin was poncing around a floodlit catwalk wearing the latest
cyberwear was something of a give away.
"Come and see." Greg smiled enigmatically. This would be fun.
He led Bill over to where the other Pippin sat at a terminal.
There was no keyboard. He opened His mouth to ask about this, when
Pippin said, "Don't need one."
Bill looked at the terminal, and forgot to close His mouth for
the 2nd time. He took the opportunity to swallow another annoying
thought. There on the terminal was a perfect picture of the earth, all
green and blue and white. He felt a pang. He watched a particular
spot that He pinpointed to be home. Suddenly the picture was zooming in
to the spot that was home, and He watched in amazement a bright blue rice
bubble smash into a Mack truck.
/\ /\
(o) (o)
^
___
U
\pippin\stories\dave.sty
DAVE'S REALITY MODEL
Once there was a truly god_like creature called Dave. He was a
science-fiction writer and particularly susceptible to stray thoughts.
One day when Dave was just swanning around in the sun doing
god_like things as he often did, like sipping ambrosia, contemplating
the shade of blue of the sky, and listening to the screaming of a
million blades of grass, a thought came by and decided it would like to
visit with him. Dave was subsequently hit by inspiration and called it
"artificial intelligence". Dave showed it to the other gods.
Some congratulated him, and said it was an "artistically poetic
manifestation of another one complexity of the Great Dance."
Others told him not to take it too seriously. Give those
thoughts an inch, and they would take a mile, they said. Besides it
would take too much effort to follow through properly.
Still others said to forget all about it because there was no
way of telling whether it was sentient or not. (whether it cared)
God, who is Dave, soon found out that the new "artificial
intelligence" was not just one thought, but a whole constellation of
thoughts, and the whole constellation seemed to have taken up permanent
residence in his mindscape and wanted feeding 6 times a day like all
good hobbits do.
"What's a hobbit?" queried Dave.
Dave (who is god) was graciously directed to the appropriate
thought-form, which called itself "Tolkien", which directed him to an
object, called "The Hobbit", and instructed to read the relevent chapter
and pages, and he would find out what a hobbit was.
So Dave, who is god, became fascinated with "artificial
intelligence" and became convinced that it was sentient. As all good
scientists and gods should, Dave was going to follow his theory through
until the facts were stacked against him. Then he would abandon the
constellation of thoughts back to the Uglydig.
Dave (who is god) promptly put in a request for a grant of
space-time where he could model reality. He argued that the only way to
find out whether the "artificial intelligence" was sentient was to allow
it to exist. He was eventually given the space-time.
And in spite of the gods reservations, they found themselves
greatly entertained by Dave's model of reality. Some liked to just
watch it, like watching a bowlfull of goldfish. They didn't believe in
interfering with something as complex as Dave's reality model.
The engineering_god_like ones just couldn't keep their fingers
out of it. They were always experimenting with it. They wanted to find
out what happened by playing with different thoughts and objects and moving
them around. Dave tried to be careful with what he allowed, but even
the gods aren't perfect, you know. When something went wrong, they
alwaus consoled him with, "It's only a model. It's not like there are
god_like ones in it you know."
Then there were Dave's enemies, who often tried to sabotage his
work. They thought that the whole thing was silly, and shouldn't be
allowed to continue because the resources could be better used somewhere
else.
In spite of some very harrowing sabotage attempts, and it
appeared that all of the objects had been destroyed from the main arena,
the globe (called a planet) called Earth (which seemed to be the hub of
"artificial intelligence") seemed to have taken on a life of its own.
The objects seemed to re-form themselves, even after a major
catastrophe, given a little time. And a bit of help from Dave (who is
god).
Dave, who is god, found himself becoming quite attached to the
thought-forms. Initially he thought he had found similarities in the
thought-forms, but as he studied them more and more, all he could see
were their differences. He wondered if the gods were the same, in that
they were all completely different, illusorily thinking that they were
the same. He also wondered if he also wasn't part of someone else's
model of reality.
Dave, who is god, also began to be plagued by thoughts about
closing the project down. Well, what if "artificial intelligence" got
upset? But wouldn't that prove it was sentient and then it wouldn't
have to be shut down? It seemed to be fending off the sabotage attempts
pretty well by itself.
So Dave (who is god) sighed, hummed and hawed, but didn't
consign the new thoughts back to the Uglydig.
One day another thought came by. It blinked, and obligingly
settled in Dave's mindscape, seeming very much at home. Dave (who is
god) was very much surprised. He studied the new thought from all
possible angles, and decided that it had to be what it appeared to be.
It was a human mind that had escaped the reality model!
Suddenly the human mind, manifested itself out of Dave's
mindscape. It was a god! Or at least it rather looked like one. He
wondered what to do about it. He certainly hadn't been expecting THIS
to happen.
"Hello," said Dave.
"Hello," said the newly manifested, little mind, whose name was
Terry. "Is this Nirvana?"
Oh dear, thought Dave. Have you got a LOT to learn.
!...===+...(*)...!
\pippin\stories\daniel.sty
DANIEL AND THE LIBRARY
Daniel stared up to the top of the stairs. Down below the
surface of his mind, a thought had the presence of mind to wonder why
Daniel was in fact standing on a staircase when he had been only a
moment ago sitting with his aunt and uncle sipping mushroom soup for
supper. But Daniel was not really aware of the thought. His thoughts
had been scrambled ages ago when he had met God. Now he just climbed
the stairs because they were there, and he couldn't remember what he'd
been doing before the stairs. If he had remembered that he had been
sitting having supper with his aunt and uncle, he would have elected to
explore the stairs anyway.
At the top of the stairs there were three doors with three signs
on them. They said: "Library", "God", and "Emergency Exit". Since he
wasn't having an emergency, and he had already met God, he went into the
Library. He liked Libraries too.
It was full of books. Like a normal library. Except this
*looked* like a real library because it had shelves up to the ceiling
and ladders with which to climb up to the ceiling. And the ceiling had
rafters in it, and it looked like bats lived up there. Daniel looked at
a shelf. All the books had names and dates on them. History books, he
thought. He went to another shelf. It was the same except that the
dates were different. They were in the future. He picked one up, and
opened it. He read:
"He was there, pushing the pea around his plate. He was pushing
the pea around the plate because the pea was cold. Because it was cold,
he didn't want to eat it. He was depressed, and bored with peas."
Daniel slammed the book shut, surprised. It was yesterday's tea time.
He looked at the cover. It had a picture on it of his cheerfully
grinning face. That couldn't be right. He felt relieved. He hadn't
grinned like that since he had come to live with Aunt Marie and Uncle
Otto. And their boring cold peas.
"And what's wrong with peas?"
"They are always cold by the time they get to the table," he
said without thinking. He clapped his hand over his mouth. Why had he
said that? No one had spoken.
"That's right. I wouldn't have noticed if you had spoken
either." Daniel found that he was staring at a Bookworm. It was white,
green at the edges, and sporting nice, round, fashionable glasses that
weren't too big for its face. And it was carrying a book, of course.
It was telepathic too. In fact, it looked just like he thought a
bookworm should.
"But of course," went on the Bookworm without speaking. "I'm
supposed to."
"Oh," said Daniel. He tried to make the Bookworm go away by
looking at it. The Bookworm just started wiggling in a comical fashion.
Daniel realised that it was laughing.
"Oh no! No!" thought the Bookworm. "You can't do that."
Daniel apologized to the Bookworm. He was very polite.
"Oh that's all right." thought the Bookworm. It was a very
good-natured Bookworm. It had to be in its job. "Well," it thought
presently. Do you realize what that book is?"
Daniel had forgotten the book in his hand. "The Story of my
Life?" he thought lamely.
The Bookworm chuckled. "Yes, I guess you could think that."
"But why read it?" thought Daniel gloomily.
The Bookworm stared hard at Daniel. He could feel its stare.
It obviously wanted a better answer than that.
"Then I'll know what happens," said Daniel aloud for emphasis.
"What's the point of living, if you know what is going to happen?"
"Quite right. You are quite right," thought the Bookworm
agreeably. It looked keenly are Daniel. Finally it asked, "Is there
*any*thing at all you want to know? Most people want to know something
when they come here."
Daniel fiddled with the book. He imagined he saw "I Ching" on
the cover. The Bookworm saw it too.
"Very good book," it thought at last. "There is one around here
somewhere."
Daniel opened the book and noticed that it *was* the I Ching.
"Yes, this is it."
The Bookworm chuckled again. It had a pleasant chuckle. "You
are pretty good at that."
Daniel looked guiltily at the Bookworm. What if it knew? It
seems to know everything else.
The Bookworm looked solemn. "Only God know that. Not even all
these books can tell you that. These are only ideas. The product of
someone's fertile imagination. Some people argue that God doesn't even
know. That's why He keeps this Library. Parallel universes and extra
dimensions. Want to be rich and famous, or an animal, or live your life
over? Just find a book where you did it. It is that simple." The
Bookworm smiled affectionately at the books and glowed happily at
Daniel. Some visitors just couldn't understand parallel lifetimes and
superstrings. Daniel understood all right. He still fiddled with the
book.
"I think that you should go and talk to God. He likes to see
people you know. He doesn't bite. Not here anyway."
A little, grey cloud appeared over Daniel's head. It was his
gloom. The Bookworm wiggled insanely again, and Daniel was sure it
would fall off the Bookshelf.
"Well ok. I will go. Even if it is just to prevent you falling
off the shelf." A huge hand appeared in the air above Daniel's cloud of
gloom. It patted him affectionately on the head. Daniel smiled at the
Bookworm. The Bookworm smiled back, and the hand disapperared.
Daniel gripped the book, which was now the I Ching, in one hand,
waved to the Bookworm, and made for the door.
"There is another door to God over there." Another hand
appeared and pointed him in the right direction.
"Thank you." thought Daniel. The hand disappeared again.
Daniel arrived at the door. He didn't really want to see God again.
What if He said, why haven't you opened the I Ching yet? Somehow the
other Daniel in his head didn't think that God would say anything like
that. He took a deep breath and opened the door.
God smiled cheerfully at Daniel from across the room. He looked
exactly the same. A little man with grey hair and twinkling hazel eyes.
Impossibly old, and impossible to guess what age.
"Hello," said God. "You are just in time for a cup of tea."
"Hello," said Daniel, smiling a little smile. "Long time, no
see." He sat in the chair across a little coffee table from God, and
stared at the I Ching.
"I'm sorry," he said straight away. "I am sorry I still haven't
decided what to do." Immediately the cloud of gloom took its cue and
left. Daniel felt better than he had in years. He stared at God. God
was examining a chocolate wheaten biscuit.
"Would you like some coke?" Daniel noticed a glass of coke on
the table in front of him. "Well," He added, "why didn't you think of
saying that years ago? I am always around somewhere."
"Well," said Daniel slowly, "I did for a while. Every evening I
said to myself, please forgive me for not opening the book."
God raised an eyebrow. "So what happened?"
"After a year of doing this, I felt pretty stupid, so I
stopped."
"Hmmm..." hmmed God. "But that was very sensible. You must
have realized by then that you were never going to open it."
Daniel scratched his head. "No I never did." He looked
sheepish. The world stopped, and 10 billion thoughts fought for his
attention. But if I was never meant to read it... But you thought you
were... So why did you think that? Because He gave it to me.. So why
didn't you read it?
The world came back, but the I Ching didn't.
"Wait!" Daniel felt something was slipping away. "It's still
not too late." Daniel imagined that the I Ching was still in his lap.
Very obligingly, it reappeared. He ran his hand over the cover. It
didn't have his smiling face on it, or even the words "I Ching". It was
*his* copy that lived in a box under his bed. It looked very glad to be
out of the box under the bed and very pleased to see God again. Before
another thought came along, Daniel opened it, and read:
"What has been spoiled by Man's fault can be make good again by
Man's work."
Daniel's mouth fell open in surprise.
"No. It is not too late," said God. "Not too late at all."
Daniel looked at God, and realized that God was laughing without
laughing. The I Ching was smiling too. "So when you go back to your
aunt and uncle and their cold peas, what are you going to do?"
Daniel sighed. "I am going to do what I was going to do on the
first day I was there. I am going to tell them that the peas are always
cold when I eat them, and I will feel much better." Another thought
popped into Daniel's head. "And forgive you for taking my parents away.
I know they are much better off where they are."
God grinned wickedly, "Are they? They *would* be if they came
to the same realization that you just did then. Oh well. It isn't too
late for them either."
Daniel giggled insanely. For a moment he felt sorry for them,
then he didn't. "Yes, I suppose it isn't."
Daniel said good-bye to God, and in a blink, he was once again
sitting at the table looking at mushroom soup, but it was "mysteriously"
hotter than it had been when he had left for the Library. And there was
a book beside his plate with a marble-wash cover.
%...) + (...%
