My Brain On Lsd Essay, Research Paper
My intentions was to return to that rather frightening but nonetheless undeniably intriguing place where I had been on my last trip. A bizarre, brain wrapped around the universe, mode. This time I was equipped with a greater degree of understanding of the place, due in part to conversations I had had, and in part to my own realizations in integrating the details of the last trip.
Only a double dose of LSD this time, but it was quite enough. Again, the start time was late at night. I lie in bed. My brain and body beginning to prepare for a night’s sound sleep little did they know of what was to come. Shortly, I began to stretch out in my bed, much as a dragon would awaken at the scent of battle. I felt the wind. Not the physical wind in the atmosphere, but the psychic wind that permeates all things it swept through me, awakening with a tingle the dormant energy within me. I began to writhe in its glorious unearthly currents. The visuals emerged, separating out from their usual role as scaffolding in the structure of reality, and exposing themselves for my manipulation. They were part of me. It wasn’t long before I was again the conductor of an alien orchestra, the orchestra of my brain.
My first reaction was a sense of horror, because I had forgotten the hellish feeling of physical emptiness I had associated with this before, the feeling that all is an empty illusion, and the only truly existing thing was just a brain thought process that happened to be in a particular configuration in a pre-determined cycle. Instead of seeing the world, I saw the underlying reality behind the world, namely, the tissue behind the retina a total deconstruction of reality into the ugly, raw input. I was a mere detail, a mere surface expression of this inevitable program. But this time it made some sense that it hadn’t really made before. I knew I didn’t have to get locked into a one dimensional thought process where in which you can only do two things, go toward the light or away from it.
Instead of me being trapped inside heavy folds of brain tissue, my brain was laid out before me like the keys of a huge piano. My room was my brain. And my body was also my brain. Through the cells in my body I could feel the thoughts in my head and orchestrate the vision in my room, because the room was also in my head. I could also see my thoughts in the room, as if they were located in various places in my brain.
For the next few hours I explored my brain as if it were physical territory. I thought to myself, It is so dirty in here. How could I even see correctly with all this gunk here? It occurred to me that cleaning it out would clear up my perception of reality.
There are places in the brain that correspond to the various emotions. Love and hope and joy are up above. I reached upward with my mind and instantly, I was a fountain of light, bursting with joy in all colors, existing as pure, light consciousness. It was Heaven. But it was very brief.
Pleasure, enthussiasm, aggression, all were various places along the forward equator. To the side, humor, disgust. I did see some pretty disgusting things, in fact I had my first real taste of hallucinations it tasted bitter. It was in a corner of the mind along with hair, sticky matted stuff like you find in drains and sinks, bubbly purplish snot, and some octopus tentacles. But I laughed, because it was so bad it was funny. I quickly got out of that one by swallowing and thus suppressing them downward.
There were more places in the brain behind is fear, below is despair. I was overcome with fear when I went to that spot, for a moment I was crouched in the corner in terror. But realizing that it was a place that I had gone, just like the love and joy place, made me realize that getting out of fear is simple, just move.
When we refer to thoughts and feelings, we like to use physical terms for them. Sinking feeling, really reaching, deep thoughts, preying on the mind, a flash of insight, feeling tense. I know why now, the unconscious mind knows full well what muscular tensions and motions correspond to various kinds of thoughts and emotions, and so figurative language developed in a way that represents an accurate portrayal of these muscle motions. One particularly moment was the occurrence of dawn. Not the dawn with the sun and sky, but the Archetypal Dawning Moment, the dawn of a new age, I had finally awakened, something had dawned on me. I felt that each awakening was a reconstruction of self-aware consciousness, a miniature echo of creation.
In the brain, there are various closets and broom cupboards and unswept corners and attics. One can get into quite a cleaning frenzy, opening up old trunks and so on. Typically what I found was cliches and habits and instinctual behavior. All the ingredients of personality. I found that reaching physically and reaching in the mind are the same. All the time while under the influence of the mind altering hallucinogenic I found myself reaching with my right arm for things, especially my glasses, whenever I want to reassert my intellectual hold on the situation. Now I see why. That’s my left brain reaching into the right brain and rummaging around, that’s my way of visualizing the process of connecting unconscious symbols with conscious intellectual ideas. I started to realize what dreaming is. Literally, housekeeping. All of that stuff there in the corners exists in symbolic form.
While under the spell of the chemical I found a doorway into places I am certain I dreamt about in my childhood, crystal dimensions, where I could taste colors and touch sounds and smells with my hands, I felt great amounts inhibitions and unresolved issues from my past leaving me, literally enlightening me. I was like a snake shedding skin and slithering into a newer safer place. I stopped being afraid of who I had become.
Please note that the mind is literally obsessed with reality and truth. Obsessed with a need to know. So obsessed that it is willing to risk insanity or death to discover its true nature. The use of foreign chemicals can be path to self-discovery but it can also be a path to self-loathing, resentment and even death. I do not condone the use of illicit drugs; this is merely a description of enlightenment I received with my own experimentation.