The Ishmael Gradsdovic Papers, part sixteen


Ishmael Gradsdovic takes too much drugs, then writes about it in part sixteen of the papers...


17 April 1994

Trips have been getting stranger lately, and I've been getting more hardcore as I get more enthusiastic knowing that the psychedelic realm is really the place to search for the meaning of life, the universe and everything. On the other hand, I'm getting more cautious as I begin to see just what I'm up against.

Took four hits a couple of weeks back and had a wonderful day - a day full of wonder. Very under control, in that I knew the lay of the land pretty much and was prepared for what was around the corner, but weird in some other ways. Very productive though.

Our subjective impression of the passage of time is of a fairly steady procession: one, two, three, four, five, six... and on from the day of our birth until now, and as far as we can tell, into the future until the day we die.

At one point during my trip, my subjective impression of time went something like this: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 2, 3, 4, 9, 10, 11.

It was like reality was a CD that skipped. There was no wrenching, no flashing lights, no blackout, no "beam me up, Scotty," I just was now, and then I was then, and then I was now again. I didn't just have a vivid memory of the past, I was fully living it, and I had as much (or as little) control over my actions as I do any other time.

It seemed (and still seems) to me that it was completely arbitrary that my consciousness should be aware of events in the particular linear arrangement of time that it does. I wonder now: maybe it's a flocking thing. Many animals tend to run in herds, schools, or flocks in the three-dimensional spacial arena for various reasons (safety, community, availability of mates, etc.) Maybe humans run in a cultural flock in the temporal dimension, based on our evolutionary guidance - but this is not a necessary mode of temporal travel.

(And the Zen master saying "Be Here Now" means "Why travel? Enjoy the view!")

I've been pumped up by Terence McKenna's talk of using five grams (dried) Psilocybe cubensis mushrooms for what he considers the important work of psychedelia. I don't think I understood what that might mean. What's five grams, anyway?

At the Pink Floyd show last Thursday I thought it would be nice to have a nice, mellow trip, so I figured I'd eat a mushroom. Surely, after four tabs of acid, that'd be small potatoes. Just one shroom...

Wow!

Five grams of this!?!? Holy shit!

Oddly, I acted fairly normally; I could carry on conversations, I knew where I was and what my surroundings were but it took all of my effort to keep my ego from disintegrating completely. If I'd been at home, this would have been great, but I had a show to go to, so I had to keep my mind in my skull. I felt myself sliding into a serious mind-fuck.

I was able to hold on, but it was a heavy trip. Had some more of that time-twisting stuff happen, but more along the line of 1, 2, 3, 4, 7, 8, 9, where time flowed evenly from 4 to 7 without hitting five and six. Since in this case I had no memory of points 5 & 6 when I got to point 7, I tend to think that this was less time-travel type manipulation, and more of a blackout caused by having my ego temporarily leave my body and this world.

I have become more convinced that there is not a "flow of time" but that time is just a dimension in a completely existing universe and that we tend to travel in the direction we do as stupidly as a ball rolls down a hill. In three dimensions, we are here now and there then, but when we are here we don't assume that there doesn't exist, and when we move there, we don't think here stopped existing. It is the same with time. Now and then always exist -- we just visit each place in turn.

The order in which our consciousness visits these time-places and the speed in which it travels are not laws of nature but are the particular momenta of our egos. We all seem to be going continuously in the same direction temporally (except perhaps the mentally ill) and at roughly the same speed (perhaps bright people are traveling more "slowly" in the temporal dimension, while idiots are moving "faster.")

What my last acid experience seemed to show me is that our movement in time need not be continuous - there can be jumps, quantum leaps, from one 4D location to another. What's even more baffling is that when I'm then, whenever then is, I'm completely then. For all I know I may always be jumping around from time to time. How would I know? My memories of the past are not caused by my travel through it, but are contained in each individual moment.

Mortality is an illusion caused by mistakenly ascribing momentum to the ego in the opposite direction of memory.

We are just as mortal by virtue of our births as by virtue of our deaths. Any 3D time-slice which does not contain us is as dead as any other. But turning this into a complaint about mortality is like saying a basketball has to fear for its existance because it is only so large and its radius doesn't encompass everything.




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