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back Selected experiences: On the way down. by Paul Garner, Peter Wilson Number of episodes: 10 Words of previous episode revealed to each author: all of story Written between 6 Aug 2002 and 14 Aug 2002 Drugs and pride, the two co-exist and interact in a strange kind of parasitic relationship. The more drugs you do the lower your sense of self-attachment, self-interest and self-obsession becomes. Whether you spend more time and attention chilling out in your new world or hanging out for your next fix or binge this is all energy that is not being used by the ever hungry ego. The very soil where the tree pride grows becomes less and less fertile, less supportive to the notions of self-worth that can eventually grow into giant Oaks of conceit. The converse is also true, the more time and energy spent away from a steady drug habit the more opportunity the ego has to use and divert time-energy to pride and notions of identity and self-worth. It's important here to define the term: drugs. Either Paul or I, or both of us came up with the idea once that everything can be classified as a drug. I recently was talking about it: "How do you define drugs? What are the qualities of drugs? You can define a drug as a mind and/or mood altering substance, well pretty much everything can fall into that catergory. Food, air, exercise, words... In fact all somatic (and therefore psychic or mental) stimuli can be shown to have some drug effect. It is a clever and pervasive propaganda indeed that has people believing they are superior (cleaner) to Johnny the junky while they guzzle soda-pop, chips, soap-operas or sports-casts. "Addicts of a different kind." Everything is abstraction. Perception is abstraction of reality. Perceptions are abstracted in order to be understood. Comprehension of abstracted perception is abstracted into action/reaction. Action is real. Perception of action/reality is an abstraction. The molecules in tap water in an average large city have been drunk, swallowed, absorbed, filtered by kidneys and pissed out, drained away, evaporated, condensed, rained, collected, piped into a home, poured and drank by maybe six other people by the time they reach you. Television is a sixth-hand recycled, pissed out abstraction of other people's abstractions of reality. Drugs are a first-hand abstraction of abstracted perception. There is no moral judgment to be made, all things co-exist. I'm tired and I don't care. Life is for [the] living. Most people don't notice the abstractions they consume like so many powdery orange 'nacho cheese' flavour corn chips, or so it seems. I'm tired. People are killed for possession of plants or plant material. The stars of 'Friends' go on strike because they aren't being paid enough. Who is the pusher and what are they pushing? Biochemical induced introspection - "take a look inside your mind, you'll be surprised by what you might find." Or mind numbing entrapment scenarios, bland Americana, spoon fed regurgitations, designed to distract. Giving nothing, inspiring nothing, just killing time. Whereas knowledge of your mind/ self actually empowers, creates time, the distractions of media, mass entertainment/ entrainment diverts, subverts and perverts creativity and vitality. Until you have a generation of kids (and thirty-something's) that would rather play Pavlov's dog to a pixilated screen than to go outside, play music, or share themselves with other sentient, vital, and social beings. Penance can be made in the form of a shot or a pill. Ego-less states easily brought by using safer drugs (there are many currently available and being developed) can enable individuals to shake free from illusory, unreal and meaningless life. In such states (and as a result of them) conceit and pride can be chipped away like tartar from the soul. Well, for my part, I've done my bit, examining and desiccating my fledgling ego. I have never really had that much sense of identity or possession, never been very materialistic in the philosophical sense. So, it didn't take long for me to chip away delusions after taking drugs. Unfortunately some drugs do not promote balance within the organism, sometimes when you are particularly weakened mentally or physically, or when you overdo it and take things to extremes, well, it can leave you kind of fucked. tender mind / against fear / alcohol terror everyone something / fear recurrent / lowself / pot underground trouble / all racing images / without gain weight sky / prednisone shutters of the heart / I steel thoughts pot up my trouble / hang on to that speeding say racing tender self / alcohol the fear out / get new fear fenders for myself / low up disintegrated fear / steel saviours on the shutters of prednisone / an underground sky hangs against, breaking on the rocks of the racing racing waterfall alcohol pot / terror recurrent / speeding deja vu / threatening is mind / the end / say trouble, prozac? I without head gain of everyone thoughts tender and ominous / tend to fear and fear itself needs an alcohol pot / all sorts / fear I that will waterfall but Mozart / trouble spreading, or so the tenders in the sky say / did they gain out of my head and get disintegrated by the ominous saviour of racing terror? / racing myself is everyone / my heart alcohol imagines prozac / deja vu thoughts recurrent on trouble / no pot, without all hang ups the mind forms an end and undergrounds out / up low / weight / breaking my shutters / steel my underground with alcohol and pot / sky trouble heart head / and the steel of of fear is yellow without all / fear sorts up - out the mind into all disintegrated tenders fears particulate images speed ominously and waterfall gain terror racing for prozac / myself hangs low from the weight itself. / alcohol trouble. / something breaking is on the pot / something is breaking the pot / out on Mozart tenders / sick on the shutters, waiting for the prednisone end I say I saviour that. / fear alcohol and it gets you into alcohol trouble / fear so get pot / but threatening fear tenders itself and all I get is disintegrated thoughts of form from something out of heart / saviour end this speeding vu the everyone is myself I say no longer low out of breaking pot, I particulate my head all the yellow on all the sick itself. that terror can hang in the sky blown down away by a Mozart waterfall steel racing deja racing underground is prozac ominous and recurrent / tenders trouble the images of shutters and of mind prednisone weight gain / it's an open road again, it took some years, but i don't regret a thing. descending / ascending some valleys you climb. The laugh track is laughing at you. Talking about drugs I somewhere got onto a rant against Television. Pushers and pullers. In the lingo of the internet boom, broadcast TV is a 'push' medium - you don't request any of the information you get from TV, you just tune into one of the channels being 'pushed' at you. TV, drugs, it all comes down to a matter of health, do what you like but stay healthy, that is its own reward and self-evident purpose of circular logic. They all pale in comparison to the unadulterated creative magic of true life. I come to work to look out the window. Outside [and inside] the window is reality. Elsewhere: fast-forwarding the commercials is theft and Heroin is trademarked as a cough medicine. I create transient moments of beauty. Savour and consume wonders of reality. Tiny details and the experience of the experience. The man-made world is a strange creation. I look around and suddenly realise everything in the room except the water in my plastic cup is man-made. Outside through the window I see trees. What has all this got to do with anything? One can face anything when there's hope. I remember this manifesting when I was six or seven, maybe earlier. I had the shocking realisation (later I found this follows Descartes, so much so that some have labelled my theories and exporations as Cartesian) that perhaps nobody else was self-aware. The germ of doubt had awakened in me and I knew that it was impossible to prove that all that I experienced wasn't just a dream or a construct of another mind. I remember wondering with considerable anxiety: 'Do my parents, my friends think? Do they know?' For a time I felt afraid and alone, but with love there was no thinking, no worrying or self-analytical theorizing on the nature of reality. 'Surely my Mum is real.' I thought. 'She loves me.' So I learnt early on what fear was, real fear, the most basic and strongest of all fears: that of being alone. The isolation post-natal love drug baby control for a longing learn just what you need to get what you need the lessening light from the firstness of bright bright birth canal sensations racing in a big bang! cell parade assembling lines and basic bubbles but wheres the light fading fading so busy making breathing i didn't notice 'till now i mean whats that i touch the knife and blood comes out my friends head my friends head is empty? not as the stone rolled his way now we're making penance we are mean? breathing assembling making as we fall into our school lines and the headmaster on his toes again making a speech on the stupid and brave don't talk! don't talk! WHAT IS THIS! last week i didn't know i even existed now im being punished can't be sure this is real but you sure seem to think so taking things very seriously and it was a very dangerous thing we did i love you i love you excuse me are you real? reality is meaningless / experience is real / plough a stubborn bull-headed path through the icebergs and create your own / others may catch on wrapped in cellophane realities. we're here in the office together, maybe we live in the same world. look I share your stapler. you speak Persian on the phone. I look out the window and dream of flying, though not strictly-speaking at the same time. half a picture is better than none at all. where is my motivation? what is the story? I came to a conclusion once, and I'd hardly be the first person, that there was no point to anything. It was some kind of reducto ad infinitum logic that concluded so because, well, nothing lasts forever or is remembered forever and as the Universe itself will eventually die, where is the purpose to what we do? The usual. I felt pretty bad about this, but really, that line of philosophical reasoning was more a symptom than a cause of any melancholy I experienced. It seems to me a bit like the reasoning that leads people to clutch at the straws of an afterlife.... where everything lasts forever, and the everafter you get depends on what you do 'in this life'. What a bore. It's upsidedown thinking, a superimposition of negative on positive. Is the room getting colder, or the Universe outside getting a little warmer? But of course it wouldn't neccessarily be experience, just existence, or a blissful nothing, or a magical collision of love-something... yet why does the idea exist at all? All belief is superstition on some level. Purpose comes from within, it's the game(s) we play to amuse ourselves while we're here, strange pieces of unusual dirt. It's a blue sky today. Know yourself and you'll know the reason why. No purpose to anything? The purpose is in the purpose. Nothing matters? That's freedom. Freedom to play whatever games you want to in the meantime. Some games are serious. Some games are hard to escape from once you start playing them. Some games you don't even realise you're playing. There are games within games. It's a blue sky today. Question everything, including questioning. Burn break build and make. Then relax. -every army is made up of individuals. individuals that are prepared to kill other sentient human beings- I realised a while ago that nobody knows or has the answers. I had said this for quite a time but I didn't inside really believe it, or live it. I guess for a lot of my childhood I suspected that I didn't or couldn't perceive absolute reality, or on a smaller level that somebody, a government or a scientist, or perhaps a group of lofty academics knew the nature of things, maybe even so much so that they were in control. It was these left over child notions (quite natural when you consider the child - adult relationship) that started me searching, examining through various theologies, philosophies and ideologies. They were and are interesting, but don't provide answers or rulebooks. I have found that people are far more useful in life's education. I do not mean formal schooling, as schooling which dictates and encourages specialization is detrimental to the development of a healthy open mind. -not to kill them for the weaknesses we all possess- Of course thinking is thinking. As far as it goes, reason can be quite convincing. I wrote once that (during one of my many word experiments) that the meaning of life is the meaning. Or something like that. It kind of fitted neatly with what I thought for a long while: that questions have and contain answers, and not just in a semantic way or as with a syllogism. Many tenants of religion have and are fairly superstitious and have a simplistic (one based on a paternal human model) view of the after-life. Of course anyone that tells you they know exactly what existence or non-existence post-mortem is like is quite possibly delusional and at best not to be trusted. It is also a mistake to take a theory and think it is fact. Most things, most of the so-called big questions only find answers or semi-answers in theories. Reality, life, mind, universe. It's all wide open. Recent theorizing has cast doubt on the big bang concept and that of expansion, indeed astrophysics has more to do with faith and imagination (and faith in your imagination) than traditional hypothesize, test, experiment, reduce and deduce scientific method. The big questions haven't been answered, not so much or as well as they lead us to believe in school. When the ground, the basis for much of what we believe to be (how things occur and interact) is cast into doubt then we question other things, subsequent and related ideas. Those notions that are labeled as physics are not cut and dried truths. Question everything, including questioning. Then relax. -"it's human nature" - the insidious slide to barbarism - - all the exploitation, yet we still maintain and pursue the model, the holy-money-pie of rainbow-commerce-success-upmarket draftees - It's wide open. - I got a lot of hope when I realised this. A bit like what Emerson said about not worrying: "All of life is an experiment." There are many other realisations from others or myself that I have found revealing. I read this quote from Herman Melville in an essay recently: "We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men; and among those fibers, as sympathetic threads, our actions run as causes, and they come back to us as effects." (This to me is a good non-superstitious definition of karma) We all have to believe in something. I guess along with love, it is those fibers that I believe in, and the complex ways in how our actions become causes and in turn effect life, our life, after all, that is all there is. All we are is in us. All we have is each other. So much pain can be brought and yet so much love. We all believe in something. Some beliefs cause harm and some create. I think that for a belief or action to be considered good then it must create and nurture both understanding and love. This is not simply utilitarian, more than that it makes sense. If a person believes that the pink and blue Pixies at the bottom of the garden on a flat earth determine what is right and wrong, then no matter. As long as they endeavour to love and to grow. By remaining open to other beliefs and other people. As long as they accept change. Doubt is healthy. - we (humans) continually make the mistake of abstracting people. to be controlled. to be bought and sold. to and of. killed and maimed. one blind empire is replaced by another. - So much of the delusion and psychosis created and lived in by human-kind stems from close-mindedness and obsessional illusory notions of the unchanging, or that there is something to be preserved and protected. There is only love. (That is worth preserving and sustaining) - the spiritual are in grace, not bound by rules, recognising the unrecognisable, the reality, the grace of existence, all energy, becoming, unbecoming, to the giver is the given, existence where, now - We children at play in the fields. There is no permanence to protect. Living, flashing, falling, momentarily. With no idols - ghosts of past mind to kill and die for. Appreciating. Thankful. Unattached. Loving. Unattaching. Caring. Living hope and proof, That atoms can create anything. back © All work herein copyright the stated authors.

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