Margarita de Loco

 

Last night at a Mexican restaurant I had a drink called a margarita de coco. It was a margarita – lime, tequila… but then it had coconut cream and coconut rum, and the combination was this delicious creamy, citrusy bright beverage, in a glass rimmed with Tajin.

This morning I decided to try following it with a mushroom recipe. I went with blended instead of serving it on the rocks; I think a rocks version would be just fine, but I’d need to remove the mushroom powder. It was DELICIOUS. I’ll try this again soon and take photos and write it up like a proper recipe.

I started with three and a half grams of powdered albino stargazers, the juice of two small limes because they were small, although one large one would probably do. I put the powdered mushroom into the bottom of the citrus juicer and squeeze the juice so that it drips down into the powder. This seems to make it soak in better; the powdered mushroom can be difficult to wet. If you pour all the citrus juice in at once, the powder floats, and is difficult to stir together. I let them sit for 10 minutes. I know that 20 is often recommended, but I feel like ten gets most of the work done. It goes into the blender with two cups of ice, a quarter cup of sugar, a quarter cup of coconut cream from a can. I had to use a little water to get the rest of the mushroom sludge out of the bottom of the container. The whole thing had a bright and creamy flavor without tasting like mushrooms at all.

The smoothie texture from using the ice was a little bit weird with the sugar. I don't know if places that do smoothies like this on the regular use granulated sugar. I like the grit of the sugar in the drink but I'm not sure that everyone would. With the ice it doesn't dissolve very quickly. I think that's more of a note to the recipe than it is a thing that needs to change. If you don't like crunchy sugar and drinks, use simple syrup and adjust flavor. I had to adjust quite a bit with sugar amount because I started with two tablespoons and it was still remarkably sour. I'm sure honey or agave syrup would also work, but I have no idea the amounts. I was literally tasting it with the long spoon and adding sugar until it tasted right which ended up being four tablespoons. Which seems ridiculous, but it's really more of a cocktail than it is a health smoothie. Of course all of these recipes are essentially drug delivery systems, but I like for them to be as delicious as possible. I realized after I tasted it and it was good that I should have taken photographs of the process, but I can do that next time. A photograph of a half empty glass didn't seem like it would tell the story as neatly.

I finished it just before 9:00. The visual drifting and the patterning symmetry that I've come to associate with the come up is already beginning.

Closing my eyes, I'm looking at patterns of what at first appears to be black and dark gray interlaced in broad stripes like the side of a zebra or like very dense calligraphy. After watching it dance behind my closed eyelids for a little bit, there are definitely areas that are red mixed with a dark gray and green mixed with a dark gray. They fill some of the areas that would otherwise just be dark gray. I don't see any meaningful nature to the pattern. It's just over sections of the design, it's not like it's a capital letter or it's picking out specific meaningful bits.

 

 

 

I love how squeezing my eyes closed, which creates a phenomenon called phosphenes (which I'm honestly surprised that the autocorrect allows to go through because it's a bit of a weird word and it always seems to want to pick on my weird words.) But it creates a new set of patterns almost like shaking one of those kaleidoscopes that has the chunks of broken glass in the end. After each squeeze of the eyes, with my eyes closed there is not only a different pattern, but a different visual style. It's like a different artist did one set of patterns and then I reset them with new phosphene material and they pick a different artist. One time it looks very much like the lettering used by a lot of graffiti artists, where everything is scrunched together like a monogram to the point that it's almost but not quite impossible to recognize lettering in it. After a reset, it's all cathedral glass. Then another reset and everything is black with very slightly jewel-toned gray lines picking everything out and I see what looks kind of like a skeleton in the middle. Not a distributed human anatomy skeleton, but patterns like bones and spines. I don't ever have hallucination content that is focused to the point that it looks like a specific kind of actual real world thing, it just has patterning that resembles those kinds of shapes. I can tell something looks like vining from something looks like bones, but at no point do I see actual traditional vines. Sometimes I will see something that looks like vines drawn by an artist, but I never have been deep enough or perhaps it's just the way my mind works, to see what I perceive as actual plants or animals except at a very fine scale and even then they almost always appear to be Illustrated like cartoons. They aren't a representation of any real animal.

Our bed upstairs has a full-length tester. This means curtains, and we made them out of a patterned figured damask fabric in khaki green and cream. The fan blows them around as it oscillates, and so there's quite a bit of visual pattern motion even when you're not in a psychedelic state. But it creates kind of a good base if I want to think of it that way. In the same sense that the ceiling, which is made popcorn-style with tiny dots of plaster blown through a gun, provides a complicated fine-grained pattern with which the psychedelic is free to play. It's very similar to looking at something like irregular rocks in concrete or vines on a fence. There's already a lot of pattern going on and so it's easy to relax my eyes on these things and allow the patterning created by the psilocybin to start to take hold. When I look at the fan blowing the draperies with the sun behind them, the patterns are very subtly colored. There is a primary shade of kind of a khaki green like an army green which is the ground fabric without any of the patterning itself. After I watch, though, there are little shapes of sort of a reddish, and pale washed-out grayed-down blue and flamingo pink. None of these are strong in the sense that they would stand out powerfully from one another. They are very similar shapes mixed with the base color of the fabric because what I'm looking at is the back. I don't see the front of the fabric anywhere because of course that's where the draperies are aimed so that the fancy fabric side goes out. [note: I looked at the fabric carefully, and it has two colors of thread. All the tints of different colors, are hallucination.] If I look at the ones that are not being blown around by the fan and allow my eyes to fixate, the light shines through them. The patterns before the hallucination begins to move them around are mostly Paisley inspired. There's not an actual plant or vine, but units of the pattern that are plant-like begin to shift and dance somewhat. It looks like little pieces inside some of the larger shapes are being moved around. If you've seen a visual representation of plants photosynthesizing, where it shows the tiny granules of energy gained by the Krebs cycle moving through the plant so that you will be able to visualize the motion, that's what it looks like. The pattern overall doesn't shift its big pieces so much as I see motion in the little pieces. The other one the fan moves, is a totally different story because I'm actually not seeing light coming through that panel so much as I am looking at the back of the pattern. I think I'm going to have to take a photograph and possibly a video of the way this pattern moves on the fabric in real life. But when I allow my gaze to fixate, the differentiation of the pattern is so slight that the little pieces just go to town it looks like looking something underneath a microscope or watching a fast motion version of microbes did Solving something. The little shapes are going everywhere and they shift and dissolve and some of them turn out not to be little creatures so much as little clouds that just dissipate and become nothing. It's very weird. It is not nearly as obedient to the real world as the one with the light.

As the one with the light coming through. This exploration of the visual field fascinates me. I've always been attracted to things like phosphenes or like the hypnagogic imagery that you get directly before awakening fully that sometimes spills over into waking, or the hypnopompic imagery which is often blended together in writings about them which leads you into sleep. When you look at things as you are about to go to sleep, especially if you are in a room or in a space that has very limited differentiation between light and shadow, a twilight space, you get play in the optic mechanism. And I don't know any word to describe it that is more apt than that one because it both has the sense of play like a steering wheel where there's some flexibility of motion before you interrupt it by moving your eyes, but also it has a sense of play in the sense of whimsy and delight. I never have these shapes behave badly. None of them are ever coming at me with scary claws or open mouths. They all want to dance in front of me as if they are showing off the beauty of patterned movement. I remember times as a child when I would lie on the bed in my parents bedroom because their room was better for this light trick than mine was and I would leave my eyes open but just sort of allow my mind to drift towards sleep and I would look at the ceiling and watch as what appeared to be an army of tiny golden and bluish sparks would come out of a corner of the room and begin to dance, creating vague fantasies of pattern on the ceiling as I watched. It didn't last with me well through adolescence. I became too fidgety and unwilling to sit until my body attained the right kind of stillness. It took me decades to get it back. It was an act that I learned to do through meditation, and actually something that I've discussed with my meditation teacher because the particular style of Buddhist meditation that we were doing relaxes the eyes on a space between 3 ft and 6 ft away from you on the floor. So it isn't looking around so much as gazing at a spot, but once you relax your gaze, and if the stillness of your relaxed gaze is sufficient, which most people don't choose to do or don't understand to do, then you got these patterns. You get an effect that begins with persistence of vision, the thing where your eyes create a pattern across empty spaces – and it eventually renders the whole visual field in dark shades.

If you've ever done the trick where you look at a candle in a dimly lit room and stare at it, or if you’ve stared into a mirror or at a friend’s face in a space that is very low lit but not dark, you begin to see the same play in your vision. You begin to see distortions and movement that are basic to the optic mechanism. I don't think this stuff has meaning a great deal of the time unless you feel like something is meaningful and then ascribe meaning to the patterning. Because these are things right at the edge of awake and asleep most of the time, you can actually get responsive patterning in the sense that if you think it's vines they will start to grow and flower. Or if you think it's dancing ants, they will resolve and become more clearly antlike. But most of it I really think is just the optical mechanisms version of snow. I'm talking about the stuff that you pick up on a television channel that is between channels. I think that it is mostly random noise. The fact that the mind is in a creative and open state allows it to ascribe cogency and behavioral coherence to what starts out as these random patterns and then they will become trees or seaweed or groups of dancing figures making a pyramid or whatever thing the mind builds into it, and then it does seem like the visual apparatus follows along seeing the light show rather than things being interpolated by the mind separately. It's tricky stuff to think about, especially because you’re usually in a state where hard thought will drive you instantly out of the state. If you think too much, if you move your body, if you focus your attention too quickly or too brightly, it's like turning on the light at the wall. It is anathema to this kind of imaginary vision. And what you don't see, or rather what I don’t often record, is that I will shut up and watch the light dance for sometimes a couple of minutes at a time between sentences. When I get intensely focused on explaining something, I won't. But typically, if I'm just noting things as they arise, I will very frequently pause but not mention the pause. There's not an easy mechanism to make this dictation software skip lines of text; I can’t seem to make it insert a carriage return. And typically, I am not watching the text move in the window as I dictate, because watching the text move in the window makes many of these things flee away like shy woodland creatures startled by a noise. A lot of these phenomena are very liminal and not something that you can point a direct light at. So, watching the screen is done only in occasional flick glances or done out of the corner of my eye so that I can see that there is still motion in the tiny window and I don't need to bump the microphone button again. I am not watching it spell things most of the time because if I do that all of this vanishes. There will be some visual distortion around the text in the window, especially the stuff that is further away from what I am dictating, the bubble that is well above will begin to dance and play.

The words, and the letters that make up the words, are patterned in just the same way that looking at Moorish tiles or a wall of vines or the dotted ceiling made with lumps of plaster or the back of the fabric. The visual storm comes in waves. It is not always entirely constant. It feels like it has movements almost more like a symphony rather than like an animal, but it comes and it goes and it fades and the behavior slowly goes away rather than vanishes. The tendency for things to iterate themselves in pattern fades slowly. It feels like I'm having a moment where trippiness is almost entirely gone, but I recognize that this trip didn't start but about 20 minutes ago, and this is just a lull. It has lulls and waves, almost like a natural storm. Like a hurricane or like a thunderstorm. You're not under the eye of it constantly. And you don't go through the walls of the storm continually unless you kind of have lost your footing. I experience them I guess more like a building or a tree experiences a hurricane. Sometimes the movement is so strong that it rolls me with it, but my roots are deep and I don't fear losing my anchor. I am flexible; I am able to bend. I think that a lot of people if they had a more rigid frame of mind some of this stuff would knock them over more than it does me. I feel like I have had to create, through practice and meditation and all of these mental works, a sense of being deeply grounded and stable in myself. I can use any of a number of cultures’ grounding mechanisms and techniques, but they're basically all the same. You recognize the wisdom of the body and you feel into the natural world and you focus the attention such that it becomes less focused on a stressful event happening or people being noisy idiots or whatever is going on around you, and you focus and center your attention within yourself and it stabilizes the mind and reduces the distraction of outside influence. I've spent many hours doing this as almost a chore, or even think of it like time at the gym.

It's not mere repetition that makes this “muscle” stronger. It is repetition with resistance. It is having to do it when your mental state is unstable. It is the need to create stability because so often in my life I have felt the ground shift under me and I could not stand, but now I don't even flinch most of the time. Shit happens and I can stay standing up. I mean that literally; I don't need to sit down for bad news or collapse in grief. When it’s OK, I do - I allow my body to have its reactions on these kinds of things, but I can master it enough to take myself to a safe space, to get out of the eyes of people who are not sympathetic, to remove myself from a situation that might be stressful or angry or upsetting or whatever, to get away to a place that I can Center and ground myself. Many of the mechanisms that I used to do this are from witchcraft and Wicca. Most of those were borrowed from various kinds of traditional wisdom. Much of what I do now comes from a Buddhist perspective, and specifically following the works of the western Buddhist authors like Pema Chodron, Alan Watts, Jack Kornfield, and a couple of others who call themselves The JewBus, the Jewish Buddhists. I understand their questioning way and I appreciate the way they explain the motions of the mind and the patterns and the habits that it tends to take up. The language is Western, but the pattern of inquiry, the way we dig into the motion of the mind and the soul, is Buddhist. It is specifically Tibetan Buddhist. It is a way of going at the elephant and the rider, a way of trying to figure out the action of the mind that is enmeshed with, but also somewhat separable from, the elephant of the body and embodiment. It's funny, listening to myself go from an excited agitated often rushing mode of speech to something that is more like what I hear those Buddhist speakers use when they speak, because each word needs to be weighed and considered before it becomes the right thing to say. It has to go through the gates. It has to be right thinking and right understanding and timely and considerate and meaningful, and I don't remember all of the gates because I don't practice regularly enough. But my speech becomes measured and thoughtful and slow and I am watching patterns that look like almost like human beings made out of lace or dots, looking at one another. There's a symmetrical aspect to the patterning which does not exist in the general dots of ceiling. The dots are randomly blown out by a little plaster gun, and so there's not the sense of pattern with meaning until the mind and pareidolia get ahold of it. But that tendency to look at a knotty wardrobe or the wood in a plank or patterns in vines or sidewalk concrete or whatever tend to resolve into figures and faces because the mind has so much real estate devoted to recognizing figures and faces that it just throws up that card on a regular basis, and you typically can't unsee it once you see that this particular tree looks like a person or that this section of fence looks like a laughing face or whatever thing it is. Your mind ascribes salience to it and it stands out as slightly more often negative and threatening. This has to do with the mind’s tendency and the brain’s tendency to create patterns that show us threats that need to be avoided. The brain is fantasy machine. And I mean that in the sense that it's job is to continue throwing up these ideas about what might be in the real world around us. The reason that we have this tendency toward believing that something Beyond a lock locked door or under a bed or behind a curtain is more likely to be dangerous than delightful is because the brain's job is not to make us happy. The brain's job is to keep us alive. It populates dark Corners with monsters because it is likely to be safer. Believing that something you can't see is full of scary dangerous stuff that you might a stub your toe on be break a leg falling off of sea get eaten by, all of these things are likely to keep us from going into some place that is dangerous or challenging to explore. Will use a light. If we don't have a light we will very carefully Edge our way. We will often do things like swing a stick or otherwise move the environment so that it can be more fully understood visually. I carry a stick with me when I forage because I would rather surprise a rattlesnake several feet away then by stepping on it. It's just a fact of life. And even when we sit quietly on a cushion, our mind creates distractions and dangers and scary things that take us away from focusing on the motion of the Mind itself. And those things are very often aimed toward an instinct of survival. We hear noises. We get spooked. We go through ritualized behaviors of checking a space and ensuring that the windows are all locked and all whole and nothing can come in. Things that come in are dangerous. But this tendency to double check things and to be afraid of what's in the closet and what's down the stairs and what's

 

Outside of our pool of lamp light is not something that we can realistically separate our understandings from. I tend to lean toward more of the schools of thought and Buddhism that recognize embodiment and dealing with the body rather than ignoring the body. That's one of the reasons that I like many of these Tibetan meditations where you focus on the literal rot that is constantly surrounding us, the nature of everything is to change and to be subject to decay. And by recognizing the impermanence of the natural world, we can start to see the impermanence of our attachment to it, and once we begin to become detached, following the vipassana strongly enough, it reduces a lot of the noise. Things become more silent. The mind can be directed to pay attention to a thought rather than being distracted trying to figure out what's under the bed and if we are safe. Granted, this requires the luxury of being safe. This does require at least some equivalent of a cushion in a quiet room at least to begin. And in a situation where you can't lock yourself in some kind of closet and be at least moderately reassured that someone's not going to come bang on it trying to beat you is necessary for the first part of the working at least. The training. Getting used to the way the Mind bucks and poles and wants to go outside and says it needs to pee and all of these things that distract us from focusing on the thought. One thing I have not done much of is actual meditation during trips. I have not spent a large amount of time trying to focus my mind, because I have so much to say most of the time. I recognize that this is not necessarily A weakness, but it is a way that I distract myself. It is a choice that I make that often keeps me from going deeper. Because I am

 

Almost always speaking. My mouth is open and I am insisting on this conduit because I generally have a great deal to say. But the thing is that I allow this to be a thing which distracts me from Pure inquiry. From actually listening in silence. Most of the time, when I do shut up while tripping, there is a lot of noise from the things themselves. It's almost as if the hallucinations are little creatures with work to do and I hear them working. Sometimes they sing together, more often it is small and focused work that makes a repetitive noise something like someone winding a clock or hitting something with a hammer, there is often humming and I can't tell whether that is an overall impression of a lot of tiny noises which my mind Blends together to be a hum in the same way the early computer speakers made a variety of tones out of pure ticks, or if there is actually a hum going on from the space around these little creatures working. I don't see this most of the time with my eyes open unless I have taken a very large amount. I typically need to close my eyes and be in a fairly dark space, meaning that light is not coming in through a window and falling on my face. A blindfold allows me the best resolution. It is remarkable how different the same space can be with the blindfold and then absent the blindfold, because often the overall archeology of a space appears to be the same, but when I keep my eyes closed and reduce the irritation of the psilocybin with fresh photons, my mind hallucinate pattern and often a kind of motivation into each space. It's almost like if suddenly you were aware of each of your organs and you could sense the pancreas making insulin or the rhythmic contractions of peristalsis moving through your intestines. Imagine that each one of those organs is a little creature with a job to do and a happy song and quite often tools which make a noise or actions which make a noise. If you can picture each molecule of insulin coming out of the pancreas with a little plank noise or a little bubble popping, it's like that. It is difficult to describe, but when you are watching it each one of the hallucinatory shapes appears to be busy on a mission of importance and Delight and it seems like they are focused on things which are not under my control or not even my awareness. If I try to interact with them they often are unaware of me as if I were a ghost in a movie. But if I open my eyes and allow the flood of fresh photons to come in a lot of this vanishes except for the bare bones of the room I was in. The reality of real space floods my Photon sensors in my eyes and I get genuine input from the outside which shakes away the fantasy version and then when I close my eyes or put the blindfold on and allow the fantasy to reassert itself it will always be different. Very frequently changes style completely as if they've hired a different artist for the job and giving him the same paints. But the entire Style will shift from Miro to Dolly. D a l i. The weird one things often look almost more like bruegel, the Dutch painter whose scenes of Village Life were always so busy and active, but then it also leans strongly towards Bosch. Hieronymus Bosch who's illustrations of the Netherworld are so clearly the hallucinations of some kind of dream or Madness or something. They have now actually translated the written music in some of his paintings and you can listen along to the noise the things make. I don't mean this metaphorically. Some of Hieronymus Bosch's paintings have sheet music illuminated into the painting itself and there are creatures singing off of it. I will have to look that up and cite it specifically for this because I don't have any sense of seeing the sheet music, but I hear the coral singing. I don't know whether Bosch hallucinated the music itself or if his visualization of these weird unearthly creatures singing from music sheets as if they were in a monastery is a way that he chose to try to capture the noises he was hearing. That sounds unnecessarily complicated when I look at it as a sentence, but what I'm trying to say is that I don't ever see the Little Critters holding up anything like sheet music, but I regularly hear them cooperating with one another and producing something that I could if I were better at the writing of music record as orchestration. Very often it will be percussion rather than wins or brass, although there are definitely moments where there is something humming and there is something like the noise that theatrical Productions make with a wheel rubbed against a bow. Does that make any sense? I'm talking about a lot of times I hear stuff while hallucinating and looking at these shapes which could be their sound track in a movie. Complete with Foley artists. But each of them

 

Appears to have a task, and most of them have a noise. This little heart-shaped thing that I can watch ticking away at something that moves next to it like a gear, and the whole thing is in shades of creamy white and Brilliant golden ocher and the pattern has something like Cathedral glass leading because every individual shape where the leading is not shines as if lit from within. And this little shape looks like it has a job to do that I have no concept of what it's doing and I don't bother them but I can sit and watch for fascinated minutes behind a blindfold as they do their important work.

 

I don't feel like my mission is visual. I don't feel like I need to try to capture them and paint or embroider them into a tapestry or something like that, although there are some of the moments where I recognize what appears to be writing and I look at the work of Alex Gray and they have created and I believe this to be drawn from hallucinated experience but they have created an alphabet of sorts. I don't know that they even have any attempt to link it to the calligraphic glyphs of any script writing at all, but there is a grid in some of his work that shows the Angelic script.

 

That's what it feels like. It feels like I am looking at writing in a foreign language that describes the basic nature of reality. I will often see what appears to be lettering moving and often marching or dancing in patterns across the shapes of real things in the world and I don't know whether that just has a label that means wood or if that has some sort of sermon written into the dark space that I perceive as the shadow of the bed rails. I don't think there's any way to know. I don't feel like at least where I am it is a useful Endeavor trying to track it down and try to force it to be meaningful just because to me it looks like it is. I don't have an irritating itch to try to dig into what it means. It does very often feel like some sort of creator has labeled the parts. It seems like there is a series of glyphs on a lot of real world articles when I am deep enough that appear to relate to their structure and function and their presence in the real world as material objects.

 

When I'm behind the blindfold, or when I close my eyes hard to compress the eyelid and stop the action of light coming in, I see these things more just moving independently. They go in lines. They are like false in a rock which are later filled with gem or quartz. Often they will look like a septarian nodule, kind of rock that is interlaced with a clear or crystalline veining. But while I am hallucinating without resort to light, the patterning is stronger. The labeling is more frequent. The Mischief that the little dancing letters get up to appears to be more so. There is more mischief the deeper I go into a psychedelic state, it doesn't translate to me in any sense to mean anything, but it definitely feels like it means something to the real world. It feels like it has the instructions or at least the notes for things like how a bird's Wing Scoops through the air or how a tree stands upright and searches for the sun. This kind of stuff is what it feels like. It feels like notes and instructions. It does not feel like revealed wisdom so much as it feels like I am getting a chance to glance at something that I will never have the option to translate but knowing that there is code, seeing the ciphered messages, makes me feel like the entire material world is more cohesive. It is almost like some fantasy movies where they can put a screen in front of things and recognize the world as a series of formula. When the world is just reduced into code and art and notes and design. I am in no way admitting or postulating a creator in this. I don't feel like that's how it works. But I do feel like there is something at a level that is not my mind that is guiding some of this stuff. And sometimes it feels like it is just a harmonic in the same way that 10,000 ants marching in rhythm will create a music, it feels like there is a spirit that embodies the real world that I have a chance to glimpse. But I don't have a sense of having special knowledge of him or getting input that other people don't have. I am not talking to the flaming bush, but I can see the writing in the flames.

Lucy has been a quiet presence breathing between my knees underneath a blanket for most of this time. Usually this means that Husband is using the Oculus because I have two dogs with me and sometimes three. The Oculus confuses them, because he is in a different world and not reacting to the things around him that they can see or sense and it freaks them out

I have tried the Oculus while stoned on weed, and it does a remarkable job of smoothing the sense of motion and engaging and appreciation of the beauty of the atmosphere within the game or within the meditative experience, because I have a meditation app on it as well. But weed doesn't give me a lot of hallucination in that experience. I haven't yet tried it on psilocybin, but I'm curious too. Not today I don't think. But the meditation app generates patterns and imagery of such astounding otherworldly beauty that it definitely reminds me of the stuff that I see when I trip. Unreal flowers rise and blossom. There is an entire meditation scheme based on fungus within it. You can pick all these things and then someone speaks or does not speak depending on which setting you've made, and most of the meditations are fairly Buddhist but phrased in such a way that none of it is exclusionary

 

I was actually surprised the first time I listened all the way through one of the Tripp meditations. It's “Tripp” in the app, because of course one of the clever things about internet searching is to make something that is memorable but not a real world word. But the actual text of the meditation was remarkably strong about the impermanence of every single thing in the world and the way that we need to focus on being calm in the midst of all this turmoil and decay. It was very Buddhist. It tied a lot to the speeches that the Buddha gave about the world being on fire. I will have to link to the specific sermons. But everything is flames. Everything is burning. Everything exists momentarily in a burst of energy and then Falls to nothing, but the flame, the experience, persists. I don't think all of this is actually in the sermon, but it's the way that I see it. All is burning I think is what he said, or everything is burning of the world is burning something like that. I have experience and urge to learn the language of the Tibetans, partly because the stuff that I see dancing around me looks so much like their writing very often, but also I read an article from a person who had undertaken Tibetan as a second language and the entire language is oriented around this kind of concept and connection and impermanence. There's a great deal in the structure of the language itself that issues from this kind of worldview. I definitely experienced learning and Italian frame of mind, a German frame of mind, when I studied those languages intensely. I feel like I've come at Tibetan the other way around, as if I have studied the way that they think and I just don't know the words.

Which, of course is how the study of modern Buddhism happens. But I like in particular the way that the Tibetans Focus, which is different from how the Chinese Buddhists or the Indian Buddhists or the Zen Buddhists of Japan Focus the attention. There's a great deal of the culture of Tibetanism if that's a word, autocorrect let me dictate it so it probably is. But there is a recognition that the things that are recorded in the scriptures coming from the Buddha are fundamental truths about the way the universe is and the way the mind works. It doesn't come out like revealed wisdom in the same sense that you see it in the Judeo-Christian myths. There is a sense that this was somebody who worked hard and figured shit out. He was enlightened, and the enlightenment came like a stroke of lightning, but the Spade work in advance was substantial. He didn't go from A to Z without a lot of study. He didn't understand the roots of suffering without having gone into a variety of religion that was happening around him. It really is more about observation and a systematic understanding of what happens because of the nature of mind. I really think of Buddhism more as a technology than as a religion. I recognize that the ideas of Reincarnation of the llamas, and of course I'm going to fix the spelling of that but I'm not going to fix it right now, but the leadership of Tibetans is based on some stuff that is outside of the actual script, but some of that I don't follow. I don't have a sense that this particular Dalai Lama is the reincarnation of the previous Dalai Lama. I recognize that that is a place where Tibetan doctrine goes a direction that I don't choose to follow.

 

But for the most part, when you look at their art with the fabulous demons, those demons will be named something like Distraction or Avoidance of Practice or Rebelliousness or something like that. There is not a sense in most of these writings that there is an actual supernatural creature walking the land, it is written allegorically from the start and the literal names of things are applied to them in a very realistic way despite the fact that they may end up being pictured as an angry monster with a thousand eyes or something with 21 Tails or whatever happens in the artwork, they will still immediately name that thing as a product of the Mind and the immediacy to which they resort to naming those things makes them not as Supernatural as a lot of Supernatural writing. When you read about an angry goddess smashing a persistent dwarf underneath her feet and eating his liver, her name will be something like Persistence of study and his name will be something like laziness and disrespect. They get given names which we can call them by, but if you go and ask the priest he will immediately explain the allegorical meaning of whichever figure this happens to be sort out how consistence of practice will Vanquish distraction of thoughts or something like that it's not it's not fairy tale. It is deliberately worked into allegorical language because that is the kind of language that works in the mind, it is almost exactly like Gregory's via anologia, I think I'm naming the right Pope. But the difference is that with revealed religions they genuinely believe that there was a person and a personage and a voice speaking to the Scribe rather than the Scribe working shit out and putting names on them that makes sense. This is the place where I break with revealed religion completely. I feel like in almost every case, the person who comes back full of zeal out of the desert has had a hallucinatory experience that they do not fully explain and they name

 

A God that goes in the center of it. I think that the Greek and Roman systems were kind of a hybrid. I do feel like they believed in some culture that there was a big man with a beard and a hammer. But for the most part I feel like the Greeks kept up their religious practice, and the Romans so much so that recognizing the Triumph of Apollo was really a way of talking about forces in the natural world and forces within ourselves that they did not expect to see walking down the streets of Athens. There was a writer and I don't remember who specifically was talking about the mysticism of the Elizabethans, all of these elaborate works of John Dee, who was the court magician basically, and the sense of the Elizabethans as a culture was that magic held the world together and created the actions of everything from chemicals to the bodies in the sky, but they didn't expect to see it demonstrated in the living room. The average Elizabethan believed in God but also in an entire complex of forces because there was more and more understanding of how things were working scientifically, but they didn't expect Alchemy to happen on the street corner. And I know that Buddhism needs like I said at least a closet and a cushion to get started but once you have space to sit down and shut up, Buddhism basically takes you by the hand and shows you how your mind creates the world. I find this absolutely fascinating and enchanting and so smart and sensible.

 

The dancing is almost completely gone. If I look at the ceiling and fix my gaze I still see a little bit of flow. The massive distortions have gone away. I think that maybe one of the reasons that Buddhism has such an appeal for me is because I can look at everything that just happened as a distortion created by my mind. I can understand and take a toolkit to the entire experience. It allows me to break it into chunks and understand what's going on in my mind and my body because I have spent time on the cushion in the closet. Not necessarily all of those words, I have a quiet room in my house, and I'm more likely to lie down than to sit, and I recognize the weakness of my body and the lack of training that causes that, but the work that I've done with my mind has given it eyes and hands and muscles that I think are not necessarily something that everybody has. I don't think that you can really get this kind of understanding without time on the cushion metaphorically. It's not something that just comes from reading the book, it's something that comes from having read the book and then looking at the way the world is when you shut your mouth and sit down. It is so hard to do. The part where you shut up is particularly hard for me because I've always been such a creature of words. But the part where you just open eyes inside your mind and observe how you feel and what happens in silence, how thoughts arise and persist and Fade to nothing so much like the weather in the sky, when you read about it and you hear about it and you listen to it then once you sit there and you see it happening you are prepared to understand what it is. I really like pamicho drawn for this. It amuses me how they fuck with her name. P e m a. C h o d r o n, although there's a weird diacritic mark that I don't understand the pronunciation value of over some of those letters. She is so wise and so humble and so deep while respecting her own flaws and failings. Makes me cry. But I've listened to a lot of her work and the understanding of the motion of the Mind and the ways that we have emotions that are built out of this basic dance that happens in the non-physical world is so insightful and piercing and cuts me right to the middle because she illuminates the explanations with stories of her own struggles to figure things out. I can identify with someone who struggles. It is much easier for me to listen to her then to listen to what is the speakers who reads the words of the ordained Buddha etc etc. She is a nun, but she is a pastor in the very strongest sense I think because she has written it down and in many cases read it aloud and delivered such clear and heartbreaking stories that it is

 

 

 

And again I don't really have a message to a mechanism to record a silence. But she's one of the things that will sometimes make me speechless. I will sit and try for sometimes a couple of minutes to figure out how I want to explain it because it is not simple or direct or immediate it is profound and sacred and deep. And at the same time she's this little chatty white woman who has sat on the cushion a very long time. She suffers. She still gets caught up. She still falls into the Trap again and again and as someone who has fallen into the Trap she can describe the tram in extraordinary detail and explain to you how she built the ladder that got her out of it and then how she learned to see it the next time it was coming and that absolutely floors me. That Devotion to an audience that is just people who are suffering. There's no you have to believe x, there's no you have to do why. There's no rule, there's an explanation of why the bad thing happens, and how we can avoid getting stuck in it.

 

I love this Clarity of mind at the end of a trip. I know that I am still tripping in the sense that my Consciousness is not entirely normal. I would not drive a car. I would walk the dogs, I can do laundry I can hold a conversation or do basic math and things like that but I won't make a lot of commitments or do dangerous things when I'm in the state of mind because I recognize that my attention is still too wide open and I can become completely fascinated in the patterns of scales on a moth's wing and I don't want to do that and run into a car.

 

But I function on these trip days quite well in most ordinary senses. But for the rest of the day very often I will be emotionally open, close to tears in the sense of being easily moved by sadness or joy and none of it shakes the middle of me. It feels deep in my heart and I cry and then it lifts and goes away I don't stay moody or upset or depressed or anxious. I don't have a sense that things are trying to be bothersome most of the time. I feel hopeful and open and thoughtful and creative in the sense of wanting to think of new things. It doesn't always translate to good Creative Energy for me in the sense of making things that are beautiful, but I think that part of that is that I have strengthened this emotional muscle this mental skill of speaking about the trip to the point that it is my first response. It is my daily driver as it were, it is the sword I reach for. It's my 9 inch chef knife. Most often I am taking this moment of seeing all of this amazing beauty stuff and I am using it to speak because I have so much stuff that feels bottled up from decades but I also have so much stuff that feels like I am seeing it brand new and I need to recognize The Shining golden strands that tie everything together. I have to write it down in a sense so that I keep it with me after the special State of Mind fades. It's like having a journal or a bunch of pictures or even sometimes a video that allows me to revisit this beautiful frame of mind later. And I can revisit the frame of mind. It's not just thinking back about things, I actually sometimes become deeply emotional about something that I had written about substantially in a trip, and I will get to a frame of mind where I see flow in close-grained patterns and I have mild effects similar to hallucination although that is a lot more fragile and a lot less deep then the actual hallucinatory experience self. The Psychedelic understanding is a place that I can visit in my mind in the course of a sober conversation and when I am back here, when I walk down the paths that make my mind open and

 

I have a sense of being skilled and powerful and creative and emotionally available and I very often cry during those talks, because for me it's almost always a conversation that brings it up rather than an art experience, although I have to say that my recent adventures with lettered weaving have been occasionally psychedelic even when I wasn't using words. The experience of working on designing those masses and seeing the shapes and opening my mind to where meaning could be literally on the cuff of your sleeve, that is better a delightful psychedelic experience that is very different for me from talking. I need to go there more. I need to spend more time working on that unless time distracting myself. I need to eat the little lazy dwarfs liver more often. Or whatever that story is it has been too easy for me to fall into sensualism and the erotic, and I recognize that the erotic and sensualism are both beautiful things and I don't ever want to cut them out of my life, but I have definitely gotten some dissipation as a 17th century writers would call it. Buddha wrote about it too, the pursuit of the princely pleasures and the court life. For me, it's not so much Court life as it is physical gratification and psychological cravings which I seem to be in a uniquely powerful place to fulfill. But I recognize that the habit of the body becomes the body. In the same sense that we are what we eat, we are what we do. Our minds and our bodies shape themselves to the work that we pursue whether that is constant television watching or daily hiking or mountain climbing or thoughtful contemplation with a charcoal and a pad. Whatever we do bends our mind and our body into the shape of that thing and that habit and my habits have been lazy and unhealthy. I don't ever want to stop being essential sexual person, but I definitely need to integrate better with other modes of creativity and not just the erotic which has been fascinating me lately.

 

It's funny, when I feel into that psychedelic space more, the drapery start dancing again. It's a way of relaxing that is similar to defocusing the eyes but it's not just visual. It is a way of diffusing the attention so that I'm not aiming at a single item or thinking deliberately.

 

But I can sort of defocus my attention and the motion in the walls comes back. The draperies appear more dancing. I have to go back and forth between that part and the part where I talk. I can't always be dictating and get that diffusion of attention to spread across my mind. It is something like savasana in yoga. I have very frequently done variations of Yoga Nidra and shavayatra during trip experiences. Focusing the subtle energies.