Tag: consciousness

Tuesday November 14, 2017

Jan Hammer Group’s “Don’t You Know” serenaded me on my commute to work yesterday, a warm reminder of the previous night’s high.

Compelled by sheer force of lifelong dissatisfaction, I will jimmy the lock on the prison. I will put weed in my head and float ethereally, the walls of reality made light, airy, tenuous. The mind constructs doorways and portals. Darkness opens onto light. My world was corrupted down to the molecules, the atoms, by fuzzy memories, blurry abstractions. Worlds have been exchanged like seasons. And always, the mystery that instructs through its silent structure, the enigma of Being, with unknown end. Next thing you know, we’ve invented for ourselves an entire weed-inflected grammar. Become a “strange man,” I tell myself, who in disguise writes himself into Being. Create a sense of levels — worlds within worlds. Or, after crashing through, land on one’s feet and inquire after Thomas Pynchon and his views regarding LSD.

Awareness comes by putting things together. I recall seeing a lovely fog yesterday as I careened toward the diploma mill, the air bathed in yellow morning light. A friend and I exchanged texts throughout the day about all the many ways capitalism has fucked us since grad school. Working sixty hours or so a week translates into exhaustion, resentment of others, no time for housecleaning or physical fitness, no time for labor-power to engage in even the most basic forms of self-repair. And of course, our superiors never miss a chance to demand from us some additional act of debasement. We’re supposed to show gratitude, apparently, for these thorns they’ve planted in our temples. You’re one of the lucky ones, they warn. Give thanks or we’ll make it worse. Hence, in reaction, the turn inward: “me” time, breathwork, re-embodiment through relaxation. And I’ll never have time to collect all of the words, but that’s all the more reason to try. What would we learn, for instance, if we looked up Malta’s 1919 Sette Giugno revolts? A revolt stirred by the price of bread. What if we combine that with quantum tunneling? The last image is too immediate, as Pynchon once said, for any eye to register. Think of all of the properties of reality we’ve not yet learned to see.

Monday November 13, 2017

Look, it’s the old man from the time before Trump. Feeling good, bad, unsure, alone. The drone descends, conducts client reconnaissance. Corporate bodies know the world only in aggregate. Little do they know, the world is whatever lines of force converging in semantic space say it is. “There I was on an overcast November day,” wrote the man, “listening to Vektroid’s latest, Seed & Synthetic Earth, when out of the ground burst an octopoid creature, its fleshy tentacles covered in blisters.” Emptiness of this sort is of little use to me, I decide, the album’s knockoff-of-knockoff hijacking of emotion via synthetic optimism seriously harshing my vibe. None of this works, I tell myself. It distracts from my pursuit of higher consciousness. My desire, after all, is to one day make contact with, receive some intimation of, life after capitalism. When I walk outdoors, I at least gain a hint, an inkling, of my oneness with Being. No vaporwave track could ever match as music the visual splendor of a tree. I think that even as I walk amid crows in the rain. Drops produce hard pops upon hitting the brim of my cap. The angel of history deprived me of Coke yesterday, employing its methods in the innards of two different soda fountains in two different eateries — and in this, I see no evil. NEU!’s “ISI” comes up in my “Discover Weekly” playlist, and just like that, as if a switch has been flipped, “there is one common flow, one common breathing, all things are in sympathy.” “Everything hangs together,” writes Koestler, “no atom is an island; microcosm reflects macrocosm, and is reflected by it.” The Fall returns with equal suddenness, though, a stubborn-headed Jonathan Richman interrupting, dividing me back into self and other by asking, “Tell me, why can’t you at least take this place, and take it straight?” Attention, rapt, with time withdraws, and we find ourselves, alas, in a windblown world, trying to steal pages from books, contorted by an irresistible impulse. I’m not in Kansas anymore — thank god! — but my country is now my enemy, as it is the enemy of all who have hope of Being. Where, I wonder, might we puncture its pretense, carnivalize its wealth? How might we zap its mind, and reverse its ill intent?

Monday November 6, 2017

Can words get ahead of themselves? “Yes, they can, if one is ‘charged,'” mutters a fiction who another fiction says has no authority here. What about this universalizing thought about the universalization of consciousness? Can one migrate through portals? Is that what we’re reduced to? Is that what we lived through — a mere reality show? You show up in a place, you perform your part. They’ve turned us into mere functional selves — so it’s in our interests to resist. On a short run yesterday, I encountered white arrows painted onto street tops, symbols of unknown purpose left by aliens. Squirrels met me along my way. All, pausing to study me, found me nonthreatening enough to resume foraging for nuts amid piles of leaves. Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith provided welcome accompaniment with tracks from her new album The Kid.

Daphne’s orange body appears as an icon, trailing my every move. In “dogged” pursuit — get it? How will I maneuver myself through the remainder of my days? I feel tapped out, emptied of ideas. Capitalism nullifies. It numbs my senses and desires. I have to seek out alternative sources of intensity, like Amon Düül II’s Phallus Dei, or Aase Berg’s Hackers. I become obsessed for a time with Astra Taylor’s ideas about unschooling. I ponder ways to promote student-directed learning in my classes, despite the grade-oriented confines of today’s corporate academy. The problem, of course, is that by the time students reach me, they’ve already spoiled. It would be like offering fresh fruit to a bunch of rotting vegetables: what would be the point?

Sunday November 5, 2017

The change in mood or disposition is nearly instantaneous. I pause to investigate being, even as I continue to review sentences under my breath. I exist, take stock of myself and my surroundings, and then, following the way an exhale follows an inhale, I dictate silent sentences in response, the inner “I” reviewing words according to a learned social rubric. Once satisfied, I trance-scribe the results by hand into a marble, college-ruled Mead composition notebook. I establish these as conditions on which I work. Let all take note. Add to that the poetic cocktail of substances I ingest each day. Compared to Hunter S. Thompson, though, I remain quite the minimalist.

Rock stars, meanwhile, were Joan Didion’s ideal subjects, since they lived a disorder to which she could respond with horror, allowing the dissociative, detached bourgeois self to co-exist in a common story with its time. “The story unfolds,” Didion once said, “as you write it.” Personal phobias and superstitions intersect with the affect of one’s historical moment. One can tell and examine the story of one’s time. The emotional life of late capitalism. Illumination of peripheral detail. Corroboration of the aural through the gestural. There is, alas, a faint delay to be heard, perhaps equivalent to that which exists between an object and its shadow. We try to trust fully in life as would a singularly blessed and accepting child. We observe the embroidery, worked into the day’s pattern to lend verisimilitude. When we look into the light, we’re rearranged, our faces melt, mountains become plains, a foot slips on a banana. It helps when we imagine ourselves in a library. Light shines instead out from behind a cloud; the crowd goes wild.

Friday November 3, 2017

My break with Christianity as a teenager made me easy prey for the priests of the Culture Religion. According to this religion, the voice of authority is thought to speak through texts — even those most debased. Hence my capture by the gravity of the Cult-Studs, a tribe of Mind Flayers. Think of it as the tribe of the eternal creative appropriation of reality by reality. The creation as once it was dreamt. We must gather ourselves up, make the climb, become premonitory. Equal parts power and curse tinged with doubt. Wolf and bear icons extend outward from a common center, thus allowing my baked potato to order a baked potato at Wendy’s. Sarah and I scroll through photos of Daphne and then night-walk to a house in our neighborhood known about town for its elaborate Halloween decorations. Birds chirp as accompaniment to cricket-pulse in the moments just before total darkness. These days are numbered, we tell ourselves. Notice them. Be present. Superhuman capability and heroism allow characters to march into a foggy forest. Meanwhile I’m not even in the game, I’m on the bench. That’s not a point of view, that’s a fact, says a voice I’d just as soon discard. No need for reality principles here. Allow consciousness to go wherever it wants to go. It wants land and leisure; ’tis a lie, those who say otherwise.

Sunday October 29, 2017

What kind of allegorical reality may we ascribe to the myth of the Demogorgon and the Upside Down? A flimsy one, no doubt. A world based on a memory of a mass-media simulation. The same bodies of the past eerily reprising the moment of their youth, despite the change of age. Historical time portrayed as a collective post-traumatic episode to reawaken a numbed sensorium. Capitalism steals away from us our toys. The cathected objects of some originary moment of fully immersive imaginative play. Those objects held the imaginative universe. Why can’t we restructure economic reality around play? Students transform into patients, their automatic writing assignments revealing to me as I read them clues about their psyches. When I contemplate the many towering structures arrayed against me, however, anger flashes through my skin and I find again my hatred for my “fellows,” my “countrymen.” What can I say? It’s a mixed bag. Most of the “work” in our society is mere busy-work, as arbitrary as the mining operations that anchor the value of Bitcoin. “Everyone’s running around, trying to get up off the ground,” sings Transcendental Meditator Rick Stanley, “for that same thing.” “TM is a technique for direct experience,” states the text on the back of his album Song of Life, “And the result of that experience is a showering of pure delight.”

Where is this taking me? Can I trust fully in my journey? These are questions I ask myself while in the presence of Stanley’s LP and similar such objects rescued from historical neglect. Archaic remains of the “New Religious Consciousness” of the 1970s: so promising at decade’s start, yet somehow stalled by Prohibition by decade’s end. “Go deep into silence, take your mind into silence and transcend.” Out we come with energy and intelligence. Big takeover, here we come. We mustn’t turn self-exploration, though, into a mere chartered trip.

Friday October 20, 2017

Trust the inner healer. Support what is happening. A voice on a cassette weaves a matrix of synchronic and diachronic histories connecting archetypes and astrology. Holotropic states and planetary transits. Metaphysical reasons for the slowness of the psychedelic renaissance. The intensification of the birth problem can have healing effects. Humans show malignant violence with no parallel in nature. We have seen the realm of archetypal paranatal passage through a tunnel. An hourglass where we go through life: a tunnel experience. In birth, we lose the connection with the transcendental. Existence is a “virtual” reality that we’ve developed in response to this trauma. “Model agnosticism” holds that any grid we use to organize our experience of the world is a model of the world and should not be confused with the world itself. There is a fundamental gap. Chemicals can give rise to the way the world orchestrates experiences since “things” are constructs assembled out of energy by our nervous systems. Stanislav Grof suggests the program each of us is running right now is the equivalent of a broadcast, coming from somewhere else. Some people are high all the time because of the way they breathe. With the right instructions, one can accomplish anything. An ideal version of my psychedelic lit course would include Philip K. Dick’s Exegesis, Robert Anton Wilson’s Cosmic Trigger, and Doris Lessing’s The Sirian Experiments. But my sense is that capital doesn’t permit thought to occur anymore. It’s like the Middle Ages again. The knowledges that emerged from the failed global revolutions of 1968 are no longer accessible to current Internet-molded forms of capitalist subjectivity. In fact, I expect most of those post-68 discourses to go silent and disappear, at least temporarily, only to be rediscovered sometime in a distant, maybe post-revolutionary future. And much of this thought — post-structuralism, especially — was shaped rather directly by experiments with psychedelics. Both attempted to challenge the effects of Western imperialism through decolonization of consciousness. Foucault dropped acid in Death Valley; Deleuze and Guattari were deep into Carlos Castaneda territory. This is also why the section on mid-twentieth-century CIA-funded research into shock treatment is IMO the section of Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine with the most relevance today. Capitalist subjects have been receiving direct and indirect forms of shock treatment en masse since the early days of the Cold War. That’s what Mark Fisher meant when he argued that capitalist realism is all about consciousness-deflation. Hence the radicalism of psychedelics as self-administered counter-therapy or counter-treatment from below.

Sunday September 10, 2017

Writing requires as its precondition grounds on which to relax and listen. Words appear — enter perception — in some domain ontologically different from, but nevertheless coextensive with, embodiment amidst being. This domain is what I’ve elsewhere called “consciousness.” Raymond Williams, by the way, neglected to include that term in his book Keywords. Do I need to review debates within Marxism regarding materialism and idealism? How else would one assemble a theory of consciousness? We who wish to advocate on behalf of acid communism need such a theory, for consciousness serves as the heavily trafficked bridge connecting the otherwise radically distinct discourses of Marxism and humanistic psychology. (Along with the latter, I should add, we also need to consider its successor, the field of “positive psychology.” About this more recent field, I remain conflicted, particularly given the current, ongoing appropriation of its concepts — “eudaimonia,” “human flourishing,” etc — by paid ideologues working on behalf of capital.) “So I sing these words,” sings Kevin Ayers. “Let them fly around like birds.”

Horn part on “When Your Parents Go To Sleep,” I salute thee. Soundtrack thus established, we return again to the task at hand. Remember, too, to consult the work of Lev Vygotsky — including, for instance, his book Mind in Society. My theory of consciousness views the mind as an embodied multi-sensory medium; dreams and fantasies are its purest productions, assembled through use of historically-derived forms, images, concepts, languages, sign systems — in other words, that vast edifice that Marx called the “General Intellect,” acquired by each of us through socialization (though only ever incompletely), and modified dialectically through lived experience. What happens to consciousness, however, when its experience-stream delivers to it the event known as ego death? To be honest, I’m not sure I’ve ever myself experienced anything akin to that. Except: no, wait: I take that back. Those jumps, remember? Screen glitching, consciousness tumbling rapidly down many levels. The Subject, through parallel realities, takes flight. The unity makes itself up, just like that — and we are one with that, remember? The path keeps changing scale, until my observing self turbo-powers itself free of the gravity and haecceity or “thisness” of all things. The bodies of the non-player characters, with their oversized plastic bobbleheads, rapture away one by one. The self acknowledges itself as the occulted Alpha and Omega, the one with all the free swag. Thus the Self invents as a gameworld for itself its own adulthood.