The Weirdness Continues…

Freddy Left the White House with a Dark Cloud Over His Head

by Anton Saurian ^©1993; Edited by S. Solomon

Our story continues from the previous post. The cassette is flipped, as were all wigs in attendance…

M: Oh, and remember Freddy? Well, I'll tell ya, Squatch and Freddy had a very major connection. These guys were like room-mates in prep school or something. Right?

AS: Dah.

M: They had this incredible connection. God, the last time I saw them had'da be ten years ago, down in Washington, before that New Year's party. I stopped by to visit Squatch, and he said, ‘Hey, we're gonna go visit Freddy Blinder at his apartment.’ Freddy was workin' for the, uh, what administration...?

AS: He was vorking for Reagan, down the hall from Ollie North! He was some kind'a management assistant.

M: Yeah! Right, he's in the White House. I'm like, okay, ‘What has happened here?’ Something wrong has happened to my buddy: something deeply wrong has happened that this hard core Dead-head should be working in the White House.

I knew that he'd gone back to school, to Columbia, to get an MBA, or something like that. Alright, this is a guy who dropped out of Concordia a few years before. He was trying to get some kind of weird…

AS: ...a degree in Alchemy. He vanted to be the first Bachelor of Alchemy in five centuries. The academic powers-that-be showed him the door.

M: Yeah, but he finished first in his class, anyway. He did! Jeez. And, you know, now Freddy was workin' in the White House!

Something drastically bad has happened here. So, so… I'm like, Squatch, ‘take me to him,’ and off we go. We get to his place, and it's this little, yuppie-type apartment, y'know, relative to what I'm used to at the time. And, there's Freddy. He's dressed in his running togs or some shit, and you can see his silk tie draped over the chair. I'm like, ‘this is fuckin' real!’. The fuckin' guy has turned coat and I don't know how it happened.

So, I walk in and it's like, ‘Hi, Freddy, how'ya doin’?’. We have a beer, and the whole while I'm sayin' to myself, ‘what the fuck happened to this guy?’

All the sudden, our eyes meet. There's this little glint in his eye. All the sudden, he's kind'a lookin' at me, and it's like, I look over and he's got this very knowing expression... this ‘I know that you're weirded out by me’-look. But, there's this sparkle kind'a happenin', too. And he looks at me and he says, ‘I'm fine. Really. I'm just fine.’ I says, ‘Oh, yeah?’

He turns to Squatch, who's in the kitchen getting the steaks that Freddy made for us, and he says, ‘Hey, Squatch, let's show Marco that I'm fine.’

Squatch cuts off a little piece of steak and stabs it on the end of a knife and wings it, pweeeyoo!  It flies across the room and Freddy lunges, ‘gl-unnk’; straight down his gullet from twenty-feet! (Marco's mime of this action elicits the evening's biggest laugh. The fans are boiling in the aisles.) This was Zen! Zen and the art of being in the Here and Now... one-hundred percent. He was showing me that he had this precision. That he hadn't lost it a touch!

AS: Vun time, I saw Freddy at his most drunk, totally scattered and scary; literally on the ground in a puddle of beer and mud. I said something to him, can't remember exactly what, something about his presence making me feel straight, and ‘Velp,’ he says, ‘Ho-oe, yee-ah’ and he gets himself up and walks on over to that little tree, remember, in front of Kathy Anderson's old place.

M: Oh, yeah. Kathy!

AS: He walks on over, more like stumbles, and grabs a branch with one hand and proceeds to do a dozen one-handed chin-ups! This is a guy who, moments before, could hardly get off'a the ground.

M: As a true testimony to Freddy's precision, the last time I saw him, after that New Year's bash, he was sitting in the bath-tub, which he did quite a lot. He was wearing a funny hat, wrapped in a garden hose, with a smile from ear to ear.

AS: A few months later, two White House aids were dismissed from their jobs for alleged drug use in the Presidential Mansion. No one can be quite sure, but I'm pretty sure that Freddy left the White House with a dark cloud over his head.

Hic Finis Est  

More From the Psychedelicist…

As I continue cleaning out my digital desk drawer, I happen upon long forgotten nuggets of sublime weirdness. I submit for your intellectual and literary delictation, the following installment of Professor Saurian’s Fever Dreams; The Secret Letters…

Steven Solomon 

Fever Dreams

byAnton Saurian, PhD ©1993: Edited by S. Solomon

Introduction and Disclaimer, November 1993.

What follows are some strange stories dealing with a strange, many faceted topic that resists precise definition. Most would term this topic the psychedelic experience. Unlike so many other books and numerous articles written on the subject by esteemed and highly articulate investigators, this work will make no effort to achieve even a minimum of scholarly interpretation. This is the deliberate intention of the author, Professor Anton Saurian, PhD.

Instead, the author and editor hope to present a bodacious range of insights and anecdotes, true life stories, collected from dozens of "ordinary" individuals. In Fever Dreams, expect to find the unvarnished and entertaining recount of sometimes humorous, often harrowing, life-changing, and primarily inscrutable experiences told by those everyday people who lived them. These stories are of the kind that we who seek meaning in experience love to tell and love to hear, even as understanding seems to inevitably escape us- like the works of a mad Master Painter that disappear into the Moment just passed, mere shadows in the Moment of Now. 

Just as the subject itself resists definition, the stories told resist categorization. For some subjects, their tales presage lasting, life-affirming change. Others forebode disaster. Others herald a moment as fleeting, incendiary and impossible to fully grasp as the passing of a shooting star. Still, with some tip of the hat toward editorial organization, they have been loosely grouped under the subjects noted in the table of contents.

Finally, a word on the method of collecting the material in this book.  Some stories were gleaned in taped, personal interviews. A few resulted from anonymous response to advertisements and leaflets, and the then emerging medium of personal computer telecommunications; humanity’s most recently developed psychoactive technology. A few of the adventures, prevarications, fabrications and outright hallucinations, are those of my mentor, The Good Professor.. Whatever the source, they are experiences that have left an unforgettable mark on all of those that have  lived them. These are real-life fables that should bring some joy, some measure of awe, or at least fascination in the retelling.

S

The Rueful Saga of Mario & Squatch: October 1974, Recounted Memorial Day, 1991.

Let us first put a frame around this one. It's an unusually warm night at the end of May; it felt more like August. AS, myself, Marco, Dana, Sal and his younger brother, Gil, were sitting around at about one in the morning. Even with the air on, it's still eighty degrees in Marco’s apartment.

He’d earlier scored something very special, something from the hand of the Master Chemist, Bear, himself. We’d dropped an hour ago, Marco excepted. He no longer partook. Anyhow, wherever these little purple barrels came from, they worked.

As we journeyed into the Hour of the Tiger, the conversation turned, as it almost always does, to tales of altered exploits and comedy at the edge of chaos. I popped a cassette into the machine, and here's what was captured.

M: ...and, see, the Grateful Dead had not been on the east coast for over a year; it was 1976, as I recall. They booked three nights at the Music Hall in Boston. Now, the Dead were back and every one wanted to see them real bad, and to see them real, real right!

There was that little Chicano guy, you remember, that Mexican kid outside the hall. I walked up him and said, ‘Hey, man, you got?’. He said, ‘Yeah, I got’. We were used to getting some pretty lousy stuff right then, because... well, because... because the Bear had been locked up. That's why we weren't getting anything good. We were getting really stupid shit.

AS: It was a totally normal thing to be gobbling down five, six, ten hits of weak blotter (peels of crazed laughter in the background). Dah, and my entire lab was buried for safe keeping from the feds in a freight container in the desert near Rancho Mirage. No stash.

M: Yeah, it was totally ridiculous. So this guy goes, ‘This shit is real good.’ I said, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah.’ Mucho macho-  all my feathers were out.  So, he says, ‘Hey, man, a buck a pop.’

I said, ‘does it really work?’ He points over to this guy all sprawled out on the hood of a car, gagga, zonked. He says, ‘That guy, he took two.’ Well, I still don't get it, totally don't get it. I ask him for five hits. (more wicked laughter). Then I get five more for each of my friends. Five, ten, twenty, five more, five more. ‘Oh, better give me some more,’ you know. You get it? This kid's like, ‘Hey, man, you sure? Hey, hey, hey, this here's alright!’  I remember hookin' down the six or seventh one just as we were walking into the lobby. 

AS: We weren't even in the show yet, and we were totally schnookered! Deep in the paisely pudding; the real stuff of True Adventure. We'd started taking two or three at a time, and within an hour…

M: Within an hour, we were going into this place, baroque angels and crystal chandeliers and beautiful red carpets. The Dead had returned and there were beautiful girls carrying bouquets of red flowers and throwing the roses on the floor and we walked in there and we were way, way gone before this thing ever even started! Really gone.

AS: I think they opened with ‘Lazy Lightning’ into ‘Supplication’, that Kingfish jam. I'm already more far out than I'd ever been and still climbing toward that aethereal summit, The Bliss! At this point, I thought, I mean I knew, absolutely believed, that the Dead were singing the song backwards. Oh, St. Faust! I'm thinking, ‘My, how clever, they learned to sing backwards’, not knowing that I was the only one hearing it that way. Such a privilege!

Yes, by half-time, I am so enlightened that I had lost the ability to speak or understand human language. My consciousness was totally pre-verbal. Human voices, their sound, simply froze in mid-air, shattered and fell to the floor like shards of broken ice, tinkling away in echoes. It was a little scary, even for an experience psychedelicist as myself.

M: The whole thing was completely hallucinogenic. I spent most of the first set just staring at the hair of the guy two rows in front of me. (the laughter has now become completely evil) It's his hair man, it shimmered and stuff and…

AS: And then, dah, he disappeared.

M: Yeah, he could disappear! Like, he could dance and disappear and reappear, like…

AS: He gyrates and shakes in that boneless Grateful Dead dance and splits into two and four, eight and ten and then, poof, zen he was gone! A second later, he was back and...

M: This is scientifically verifiable. We both saw it! No joke. 

Yeah, that was pretty far out, but you know, Squatch, he went off to the men's room. Now, he'd done as much as everyone else. After having done this, half a dozen strong hits, in this state…

AS: He bumps into this guy in the men's room who had a wafer of something, Squatch recalled it as orange sunshine. Good old Squatch, offered a hit, goes up to the guy and proceeds to bend over, Squatch’s a big, big fella, totally high…

M: And he bites off half of the wafer, right?

AS: Dah! Like maybe twenty hits. That must have put him at, I don't know, some ungodly amount of micrograms... derʹmo (дерьмо), maybe four or five thousand mics.

M: Maybe more. Maybe as much LSD as any human has ever consumed!

G: And he didn't die?

AS: Nyet. It is funny, but they have never established a toxic dose for mammals. It doesn't seem to screw anything up metabolically, at least at the doses that they've tested. There is one weird story about an elephant that died on Acid.  I don't know why they were giving Acid to an elephant, but it wound up dead. It must have drunk a gallon of the stuff. Weird, and, vhat a waste.

M: Whatever! Squatch, this guy, he took over twenty hits. I don't think he's ever come down. He's still tripping. Today, he's teaching school in Hawaii, a very noble and wonderful thing, but strange to consider, givin' his experience. Yeah, I think it's safe to say, Squatch never went the prescribed route.

AS: Dah, and by the middle of the second set, we are all in the thick of it. I'd lost my ability to converse and subsequently seen my earthly vessel, my body, melt into a starry void. I was momentarily free of the shackles of flesh; flown this veil of tears. Or, so I believed. Could have been so, but what happened was that I was absolutely peaking at this point, n' I happened to look down at my left hand. Oh-oh! My finger- tips are missing! ‘Sorry, did you see my fingers?  I Seem to have misplaced them, Comrade.’  

Of course, I couldn't actually speak, so I didn't say anything to alarm anybody. But, above the top knuckle my fingers were sheared clean off! There, there was no gore, nothing inside, just black. Just black. I held up my hand closer to my eyes. I couldn't believe what I was seeing, and then it got even weirder. 

The skin started to melt back from the finger tips. I was disappearing and nothing was left in my place, but inside my skin I could see this blackness. As I stared at my arm, it had gone all the way up to my shoulder by now and was quickly moving into my chest... as I was watching this, speechless, I began to see beautiful, twinkling stars all inside of me!

My recollection is that this black, star-filled emptiness began to fill my entire field of vision. It was like I'd zoomed-in but could still look away and see the rest of the world, this wild concert with the Grateful Dead and all the people, but as I glanced back at myself I was stars.   

Somehow, I remembered that I'd taken lots of a powerful chemical and that it might eventually wear off.’ I was not forever banished from the realm of human forms.’  Then, all of the sudden, my human form reconstituted; Shazam!

And, Jezuz Christ,i looking up on stage, I saw at this big purple cloud and some guitar necks and Garcia's sun-glasses sticking out while this alien music with Martian lyrics bounced off the walls of my skull. By the end of the set, the cloud blew off, showing six flourescent skeletons playing the music. Once again, I didn't have a clue that I was the only one seeing this shit. 

I thought that it was some trick with the light show! It was only much later, when I was telling somebody, anybody, everybody about it, including our intrepid friend Geoff, that I found out the truth.

M: But two of us, Mario and Squatch were even further gone. Mario was off on this trip where he thinks he's in Hell. Then, he thinks he's in Heaven. He's running all over the place, almost getting too wierd, even for the Deadheads. We lost him for most of the first set, only to get him back a while later. I tried to stick close to him. Shit, I made him sit down next to me and wouldn't let him even get a drink of water without supervision. 

AS: Squatch, though, he's totally veird, now. He's not in any space where humans relate. Space! He's making these vocalizations: "Eeep, Orp, Time, Space, Infinity!". He's lying on the floor of the lobby, cradled in Ozone's arms after the show, completely zoned and far into the mystical space. Oh, boy, I'd just gotten straight enough, not really straight at all, but straight enough to talk and walk and I thought things were coming together in some way. No vay!

M: Now, Mario, I figure that he's alright, he's ok, cuz he can stand up! This guy, Squatch, he's not okay, cuz he's totally deep-fried in his own grease. So, I'm keyed into Squatch, now, cuz he's like...

D: Totally lost?

M: Yeah, like totally lost. Then, this whole thing happens, we need to get Squatch into the car and I just turn around and, oh shit, now I've lost Mario again. There's no time to deal with that, though, cuz Squatch, who'd been catatonic on the sidewalk, we're outside the hall now, is suddenly mobile.

AS: He'd been hanging his head in the gutter, flat on his back, eeping and orping and fondling a fire-hydrant's nozzles like a pair of breasts. All of the sudden...

M: All of the sudden, he's on his feet and running at maximum tilt and straight at a cop! Holy shit! We got a two hundred pound-plus, six foot-four, bigfoot drenched in LSD and on the stampede. There's a cop walkin' down the street. Squatch is two feet in front of him and he lands his hands on the cop's shoulders and leap-frogs over the sonuvabitch! The cop didn't know w'happened.

AS: Squatch continues to hurl himself down the street and turns the corner at full throttle... 

M: Where upon he evidently decides to lie down again and resume his, his, what ever that was...

AS: Eep, orp, time, space, infinity…

M: And the cop takes one look at this shit; he's ready to kill as he turns and runs after him, but when he finds him, well, this, this is just too weird. The cop turns around and walks away. Squatch is on the pavement, gorping and blorping and this little Dead-head gal, dressed in black, dropping roses on his chest and, and...

AS: She's saying, ‘In the name of the Father, the Sun, and the Holy Rollers’... I don't know. Somethingz like that. 

M: Well, Ozone has now pulled up in his dad's car, a big old Old’s. In the process, he managed to smash up the front, hitting a trash can, and the back, hitting a street sign, and damn near ran over poor Squatch...

AS: Stiff as a board, we pick Squatch up and dump him in the back seat. I sit on his chest, making damn sure that he doesn't go anywhere this time, and we rocket off to safe haven, trailing pieces of side-trim and busted tail-lights behind. I'm not sure how young Ozone managed to explain smashing up his Dad's car. It was a mess. The kind of thing that's only funny in retrospect- like maybe two minutes later when you make your git-away.

M: Yeah, so, now I've got to go find Mario and people are still comin' on out'ta the concert and I don't see him. I look up and down the street, holy shit, I can't find him anywhere. Jane comes around…

G: Jane was there?

M: Oh, yeah. It was her first show! It was Mario's first, no, second show. Anton's first. First show for Ozone and Squatch, too. Anyhow, we couldn't find our brother anywhere. Now, we lived in Valleyshire, up in New York state, right, and Jane lived in Boston. So we went back to her place. And, ann...nnd we had no word of Mario, no sign of him.

G: Mario lived in Valleyshire, too?

M: Yeah, he lived with me and Anton. But, he was lost, no sign of him. He vanished, he vaporized, y'know? Evaporated! Gone!

D: W'happened?

M: We lost him! Who knows. I mean, here's a guy who had been giving away his wallet, his jewelery.

AS: Scheiße, he tried to give away his clothes; angels don't need clothes. A bunch of Deadheads, thank God, had the inspiration to just take 'em, thank him, pass 'em on to the next, until they went around the circle and came back to him.  Mario, being a good angel, he thanked them for this gift and took back the clothes.

M: The thing with Squatch, though, it was done, he was in the car. Babbling incoherently, but in the car. I looked around, and, sonuvabitch, I'd lost Mario!

We got back to Jane's and I called the police. I thought maybe he'd been picked up; maybe, just possibly. I mean, I was afraid that worse could happen. Well, they tell me, after putting me on hold for a while: ‘No, sir, we have quite a few folks lost...’

G: You're tripping this whole time?

M: Oh, yeah, but compared to these two guys, I'm fuckin' straight. Anyhow, the cops tell me that ‘we've got quite a few individuals here, but none of them are Mr. Sebastiani.’ At this point, I was kind'a hopin' that they’d him in the can. At least we'd know where to find him.

So, next afternoon, no sleep, we gotta head back. The band,the Jack a’Ro’es, they had a gig that night up in Corinth. Mario's the lead singer. And, we'd lost the band's singer.

AS: I have spent the whole morning waiting to see if he’d come back to the theater. No way. I must have met met a dozen peoples looking for lost friends, folks that floated away in the course of this amazing night.

M: So we go back to Valleyshire, totally wrung out. We change our clothes and get ready to go on up to Corinth, to a joint called K.O.'s. At this point we had no idea what else to do. I mean, we just had no idea! Zero, zip; runnin' on autopilot.

S: And Mario had no money, nothing?

M: No! He'd given it all away.

AS: Then the thunder-storm came!  As we arrived back at the apartment, our sanctuary, and it really started to come down. We already felt awful, and awful tired. Then the sky, the weather started to close in. Ka-boom! Thunder and lighting and sheets of rain and the the whole thing seemed to reflect what was happening inside our heads.

It was terrible. We'd lost our friend and it seemed like there was nothing that we could do. Somehow, we just kept on marching toward that gig. What a mess! Totally shredded. Then came the knock on the door! The knock on the door!!!

M: It's Mario: he'd slept in the park, no, on some median strip underneath a statue or something. He'd literally lost his shirt. He was soaking wet. He was so broke he couldn't even panhandle a glass of water! So he'd hitchhiked, shirtless, sleepless, all the way up north.

It was unbelievable, but there he was. He'd even given away his keys, so he had to knock on the door to his own apartment. But, we hooked up with him there and bolted to KO's, where Mario somehow fronted the band...

G: So how was Squatch?

AS: Dear me... I do not know at this time. He was pretty strange to start off with. After twenty hits, he was just a bit... uh, stranger? Dah?

M: Like we said, he might've never come down. Naw, he's okay, today. I guess, if there's a lesson in this, it's that the Grateful Dead should never stay away too long. Weird shit happens when they don't come around for a while. I dunno, it seems..." (cassette runs out)

A Box of Eyeballs…

It's Just a Box of Eyeballs:  I Don't Know Who Put it There 

Edited by S. Solomon, September 1985. ^©

There are a couple of things that quickly come to mind when the name DMT is uttered. First: that bad smell. Well, it's really worse than bad; it's hellish. Naw, it's worse than that. It smells so foul that it can peel the paint from the walls and kill the dog. It's like burning the dog's corpse to tinder a pile of dioxin; like a calamity of acetylene and sulfur and everything rotten and unwholesome come to have at your nasal passages with rusty hatchet. 

Of course, when you're smoking DMT, you don't notice the smell. When Helen walked in on Me and Bernie, we were halfway through the joint. She says: "Jezuz, what the fuck is burning in my house?" Bernie looks up at her, he's smilin', says nice as can be, "Say'a, He-hellllen, how-w many l-legs do y-ou ha-have?".

This brings up that second big thing about the drug. As my respected and incinerated colleague, Dr. Hunter S. Thompson once commented: "DMT is the most powerful psychedelic ever invented!".  Yes, this is so.   

According to the intrepid traveler and poet, C. Zuck, “It’s like having everything in your brain all firing at maximum intensity, all at the same time, and all of the signals are tripping into the next like a match in a fireworks factory.  It just consumes everything and takes you away. It brought me to this, this, this... I don't know. And, it only lasts about five minutes, but, wow, jeez-Louis!". Yeah. Quite a ride. Your proverbial eternity in a moment.

It was Z., naturally, that introduced us to this most philosophical of all fumes. One day, a letter and a small  package there-in arrived. Here is what the letter said:

Dear Friend in the Mysteries,

Over the long journey through life, in the midst of myriad dangers and risk, an intrepid traveler can sometimes stumble across the  mystical. Such was my last journey through the Beyond. So, by  way of thanking  you for the great times had, and the times yet to be had, we have arranged a small loan of magic.

Inlcuded here is a bit of Di-Mystical Triptimus (actually, Dimethyl Tryptamine, really!). Method of application: grab your favorite co-pilot and arrange your affairs in preparation. Take the ingredients, and keeping in mind the sacred nature of the psychedelic, roll a joint with the substance centrally distributed. Then do your religious duty! 

Be sure to consume the entire amount between two individuals. The effect is prompt and powerful, lasting only a few minutes, kind of like being shuffled through God's back door on some  sort of shady deal. Enjoy this dip into the cosmic puddle and let me know what you think.

              

Love, from the Beyond... Z.

Well, we thought it was just wonderful. A bit scary, but really wonderful in the true and original sense of the word, as in awesome. As soon as Bernie and I had recollected our wits and reeled in our synapses, we were on the line to Z., hopeful that more DMT could be sent our way. In the background,  could be heard Helen yelling: "Not in my house! No more. You're gonna go outside with that shit!".

By the time that the next shipment had arrived,  Helen had become intrigued with our truly glowing but utterly incomprehensible reports of this drug's power. She consented to forgo what common sense, and her sense of smell, told her and was game to join us for a furthur experiment. She would not, however, personally partake of anything so powerfully evil smelling.   

We journeyed to the City in the South, to voyage Beyond in the company of our good friends, Cathy and C. For years now, they had been our most adventurous and fearless psychenautical counterparts. 

Indeed, as C. and I were cousins of the Mad Poet persuasion, so  Helen and Cathy seemed Cosmic Sisters. It was well that we were in so comfortable a setting, with such fine companions, for this night's brief expedition would swiftly carry each one of us to strange waters in the Sea of Consciousness.

 

You see, par for the course and true to form, Z. had upped the dose, perhaps conveniently forgetting to so advise his trusting researchers. Yes, one forgot at one's peril that, at heart, Z. was a true Prankster and could be relied upon to extract the maximum quanta of chaos from any given situation.

Quicksilver Messenger Service, Happy Trails, was spinning on the ol' Victorola. In the category of music to get really, psychedelically high on, few recordings can touch it. This is jammin', spaced out at warp-speed improvisation from back in the days when getting high really meant getting high: serious "if only I could remember my name" kind'a shit.

I was taking my second or third toke as the band careened into the heart of the jam. It only takes one toke to start to feel the effects. By the second, you're having a hard time finding the joint. By the third, it's a goddamn miracle that you can still find, never mind manipulate your fingers. Somehow, I still could and slowly brought the roach to my lips. I located my face only with some great concentration, heedless of an all-enveloping blizzard of neural fireworks.

I remember letting my head fall back to a pillow on the floor. The stereo speaker was right next to my ear. "Fantastic!" 

Somebody took the roach from my hand and I closed my eyes and began an experience that, to this day, confounds and fascinates me. I believe that I tripped in time. That is to say, I experienced the same moment thrice that was observed from the outside as but a single event.  Helen was straight; she saw it. Here is what happened from my point of view.

As my eyes closed, I was quite conscious of the music but began immediately to experience a profound and completely "real" type of visual hallucination. It involved my awareness with all of the conviction that normal "reality" would deserve. I had no awareness of this as being an internal event. Indeed, it was as mundane, and fully articulated as the world I now experience.

This world, you see, was the stock-room of some department store. I don't know where. But, it was totally normal: gray, metal shelves with boxes, concrete floor, cinder-block walls, fluorescent lighting. And, there was this guy in there, dressed in a navy-blue jumpsuit, like a stock-worker, carrying a big, flat box under his right arm. My view was from just behind a wood laminated fire door that, I would guess, led to the sales-floor.  

Like I said, mundane or what? Not the stuff that metaphysical revelations are normally made of. Well, there was something a bit strange. I couldn't change my point of view. My eyes wouldn't move and I couldn't see the guy's face. It remained just out of the top periphery of my vision as he walked toward me and then turned and went out of the door. Frustrating.

I remember that, at this point, the music reached a particularly pleasing peak. I breathed deep and sighed and shook my head and opened my eyes. I sat up, just a bit, and looked to Cathy. She smiled. I smiled. She nodded in her knowing, sphinx-like way. I nodded and then my head hit the pillow again, eyes closed.

I was back in my stock-room world. The guy was back where he started, but this time, as he came toward me, he began to open the box. He was holding it now in both hands as he pulled the lid open, but he turned and went through the door before it was clear what was inside.

At this point, the music reached a particularly pleasing peak. I breathed deep and sighed and shook my head and opened my eyes. I sat up, just a bit, and looked to Cathy. She smiled. I smiled. She nodded in her knowing, sphinx-like way. I nodded and then my head hit the pillow again, eyes closed.

Back in the stock-room, my guy was coming toward me again. This time, he had already begun to open the box. It was full open as he reached the turn to the door. I looked inside and then my point of view began to change as a camera would zoom in for a close-up... zzzz-ooooom... and I see... can it be.... oh, my, yes... it's a box full of eyeballs! Freeze-frame... 

Eyeballs! They're all arranged like candy easter-eggs in a protecting pile of white tissue paper, each one sitting in its own little paper cup. They're just like candies, but they're all staring back at me! Perfect, shiny, blue and white and finely veined with big black pupils: eyeballs in a box. "Oh, my God; this is weird. Why do I feel so good?"    

At this point, the music reached a particularly pleasing peak. I breathed deep and sighed and shook my head and opened my eyes. I sat up, just a bit, and looked to Cathy. She smiled. I smiled. She nodded in her knowing, sphinx-like way. I nodded and then my head hit the pillow again, eyes closed. The music ended, fading to the city sounds, filtering in through the window. The DMT seemed to be wearing off as swiftly as it began.

C. was still floating out "there", just starting to come down. He was evidently the last to take a toke. Cathy seemed quite normal, still smiling that smile.  Helen looked on in quiet amusement as I began to tell my little story. As I recounted the third part, the revelation of the eyeballs, she interrupted: "How long do you think you were out?".

"I dunno. A few minutes."

"You were on the floor maybe two-minutes, max.", she said, matter of factly. "And, you only looked up once, just after that last toke." I was bewildered. "Cathy, you saw me, didn't you? How many times did I look up at you?"

She laughed. "Jezuz! I only remember once, but who's to say. All I could see was a whole lot'a burning confetti with you in the middle of it."  Helen was resolute. "You only did it once."

I subsequently timed that piece of music. She was right about at least one thing; it only lasted one-minute and forty-nine seconds between when my head hit the pillow for the first time, and when I sat up again. Yet, at the minimum, I had experienced three separate "trips", "dreams", whatever you want to call them, that each had the subjective space of a couple of minutes.

I'm totally baffled at this triplicate reality business. No, I'm not talking Deja Deja Deja Vu. Rather, that I had experienced three different versions of the same general event in apparent sequence, while being observed to have experienced them all at once, and only once.

I've discussed this episode with members of the mental health community. My initial theory, that I had experienced multiple neural pathways for the same high level, preconscious event, does not quite hold up to logic. Nor was this some kind of simple echo. After all, the event was so different each "time". 

My professional colleagues have no answers, nor even useful conjecture. A couple have been concerned as to why I should spend much time thinking about such matters and have strongly discouraged me from using DMT ever again.

For my part, I do continue to be puzzled and fascinated. Perhaps I had caught a glimpse of something not easily seen regarding our human consciousness and the nature of time. How wonderful then, that the fabric of my mind would cloak such insight in a box of candied eyeballs.  How very nice.

I would invite any of my readers who might have similar anecdotes, or any light to shed on this type of experience, to contact me through my publisher. Please be prompt, however, as Time is of The Essence.

I Remain Yours in Happy Confabulation,

AS, PhD

God, for lack of a better word, is that Order implicit and emergent in all possible Universes, in all possible dimensions, within and without Time."

Anton Saurian

Circa 2005CE

   

 

It's About Time…

Folks,

I’ve been meandering along the Cognitive Midway at The Future Fair the past couple of days. Here’s where that stroll lead me as I encountered cosmic carnival barkers, Barnies, Clems and Bozos, and various games of chance… or no chance at all.

Is Time real, or a necessary shadow of Creation. Perhaps it is both the death shroud and essential invocation of Experience? Can it run backward, as well as forward? Start with those linked articles in this paragraph as a random points of departure and explore further, if you’ve got the time and inclination.

Well, there’s nothing in the math of physics that says that Time cannot run willy-nilly as it will. It could run sideways, by any account perpendicular to our perceived timeline. What would such an orthogonal timeline look like to a Human observer? And, what has Time to do with G-d, His preordained plan, and our humble study of comparative religions and the relationship of World religion’s to physics? They do seem to be bossing their way into each others’ territory as Time goes by. Answers aplenty in the bye and bye.

Yes, so many good questions that I cannot answer. I can offer some personal observations on the questions themselves, and perhaps a clue or two as to where the answers may lie for you or I.

First question… is Time required by Creation, or merely a support for the balustrades of and within Human intellect, a device required to experience Experience? Two of Einstein’s great quotes are apropos in these queries. 

Let us begin with: “The only reason for time is so that everything doesn't happen at once.” In this, Einstein suggests (among other things, to be mentioned soon) that our minds are perhaps too little evolved to handle Everything, Everywhere, All the Time. Still, anybody who has tried to tackle deep Physics or even taken a gander at the proceedings of modern Cosmology, anybody who has taken a true, fat trip on any certain chemical or vegetable substance knows the desire to know It All. Paging Dr. Faust! Paging Dr. Faust to the Red Emergency Phone!!!

Well, perhaps Uncle Al was simply commenting on the limited capacities of the Human mind. He might have been thinking of the possibility that Time does exist, and the Universe, Itself, requires Time to evolve. But, this notion is belied by another of his quotes. “Time is an illusion, but it is a persistent one.” It seems that our wise friend might have been inclined to believe something akin to the religious notion of G-d’s Will. Every theistic tradition has such a concept and its expression in words: God se Wil, Mapenzi ya, 天命, Dei voluntas… etc., etc.

Implied in such words is the thought that an omniscient and omnipotent Creator, by definition, knows all. All has already happened in The Creator’s Mind, in The Great Plan. There are no surprises for The One who cast Time upon Space and coddled Space within Time in an infinite moment of infinite and all encompassing Creation. In this conception, the scientist, the mystic and the psychedelicist may not be exclusive of each other’s intellectual and spiritual company.

So, just as a theory or a devotion taken as fact, Everything has already happened. Creation is complete. It (IT!) has already All been done. We Humans thus have nothing to do but discern G-d’s intentions and live in accordance with them.

I am not a religious person. Spiritual, yes, darlink, but not religious. Nonetheless, another quote from our old friend comes to mind. “There are two ways to live: you can live as if nothing is a miracle; you can live as if everything is a miracle.” Yes, Al, given what physics now tells us about time and space, the history of the Cosmos, that anything exists is a fine operational definition of a miracle.

So, back to Time. Time as we experience it is not required by the math behind current physics. Despite our never seeing it actually happen, there is no reason that the coffee that I just spilled in you lap can’t pour itself back into the cup that I dropped, the cup itself undropping, your pants unsopping… it just might take longer than the lifetime of our Universe to witness this statistical possibility or it might not be memorable, might not be glued to our minds’ presently enmeshed in our Universe… or not. We won’t be around to see it happen… if Time exists. 

Now, if this is not weird enough for you, let’s move on to the possibility of Sideways-Time. What would that look like? It’s a slippery thing to try to get one’s mind around. That’s why I find it useful to contemplate in meditation. There’s nothing better by my lights to stop my mind than trying to wrap my pia and dura maters and all their electrochemical goop, synapses and glial cells around Orthogonal time. Can’t be done. It’s a good exercise for a busy and experience besotted mind.

Still, Sideways-Time might exist. Consider the Universe that we inhabit from the point of view of an electron traveling through a true vacuum at the speed of light. At the maximum velocity permitted by nature, and according to Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity, all physical dimensions as seen by said electron, are compressed and perpendicular to the point that the electron inhabits, and time has stopped. If that pointy particle could see and report back to our world, what might be in view?

A gander to the left or right, up or down… it’s all relative when everything has become perpendicular to your location… might it be given a view into other Universes? Yes, there is some theory emerging that certain forces, Gravity and it’s weird kin, Dark Energy, chief among them, may have some of their weird properties as a result of our Universe’s “leakiness” into neighboring and otherwise unobserved Creations. 

So, on to Orthogonal Time and the proceeds of my deliberately idle meditations and a strange little science fiction story. I’ve got a perpetually unfinished short novel before an agent. If she smiles upon the first draft of the main story-line, all I’ve got to do is actually finish the damn thing. That entails weaving in a sub-plot and set-up for a prequel and a video game franchise. Ho-ho-ho! That is where the real money is. Bigger than movies!!!

Anyhow, my little confection is baked at the bleeding edge Cosmology, where the smallest twines with the greatest, where reality meets so-called hard science fiction. I quickly make a shambles of that and the story becomes a fable, a cautionary tale called “The Wisdom of the Edges^©.” There’s enough science fact and theory, and appropriate lingo in the thing to perhaps get a giggle out of the armchair cosmologists out there, and perhaps provide some entertainment to serious scientists as they see their arduous work gleefully perverted. So, I hope.

In the sub-textual rivulet that streams into the main story, there is a fellow, Professor Anton Saurian, who worked earnestly at the behest of Josef Stalin, First General Secretary of the Communist Party, USSR (Иосиф Сталин, первый генеральный секретарь Коммунистической партии СССР). Under the direct instructions of the Great Mush Brained Crazy Leader of All Happy Peoples, the good professor invents a device most sinister yet unassailably attractive… The Super Sideways Time Orthogonal Time Projector^®! Presaging developments to arrive decades later in the fields of Quantum Mechanics and String Theory, Saurian creates a machine, an inter-dimensional vessel of steel, bakelite, medical tubing, duct tape and horribly toxic radioactive materials. Upon entering the “Time Craft,” the intrepid traveler could essentially turn sideways to Time and exit this World for any of the infinite number adjacent.

Alas, as happens frequently, not only in my fiction but in Human affairs, things go horribly awry. This is in the Dare All nature of the experiment. It is eons later that a robotic ship from a very distant world encounters the decaying hulk of a dead ship circling a dead sun orbited by the cinders of rocky worlds long gone to their home star’s last rattling gasp. Aboard is found no trace of life, but the incinerated sole of a red converse sneaker, a splotch of a sock’s heel, men’s size 8-10, and within the molten capsule of polyester, a tiny tuft of DNA. This is all that remains of Professor Saurian as he is now about to be spread across the Face of Time, albeit, in an unanticipated way.

The robot craft is on a mission to collect biological samples for another brave experiment. This is the derivation of new species from old; the development of productive creatures of some mental dexterity, but not too much. They will be more than Human, but just as hapless, as the story unfolds over time. And, there is much time for this story to unfold. Time is infinite, as it is instant, in every Universe, every Dimension, every Time possible, all of the Time.

That last thought might ring true beyond my silly story. We may see. Time will tell.

S

psychedelicist

An Extemporaneous Explateration on Life, the Universe and Everything…

Folks,

Last night in northern Connecticut was quite dreary, the woods out back socked in with chilly fog and a nasty drizzle more fitting mid-November than the early Spring. Over the creek behind my Mother’s house coursed a slow moving, pulsing mist, like a zephyr in slow motion. It was occasionally pierced by gobs of sweet water falling from the evergreens and sodden, winter-dead oaks that clung to the decaying banks of the rivulet.

The stars and the Moon where hidden behind a profound haze above. I acutely missed those sign posts to the Heavens. I was reminded of Allan Watts’ wonderful title to his wonderful little book on a westerner’s take on Buddhism, “Cloud Hidden, Whereabouts Unknown”.

I’m not a religious soul, in any conventional sense, but my inclinations are acutely spiritual in equal proportion to my scientific leaning. Curiosity is a principle motivation is many of my interactions with other folks and the Universe. Science and spirituality are, to me, incomplete when not informing each other in my outlook and pursuits.

As Einstein said; “The finest emotion of which we are capable is the mystic emotion. Herein lies the germ of all art and all true science. Anyone to whom this feeling is alien, who is no longer capable of wonderment and lives in a state of fear is a dead man. To know that what is impenetrable for us really exists and manifests itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, whose gross forms alone are intelligible to our poor faculties — this knowledge, this feeling ... that is the core of the true religious sentiment. In this sense, and in this sense alone, I rank myself among profoundly religious men.”

Read that again. Maybe read it aloud to yourself. It’s that good a notion and well put.

Anyhow, in Einstein’s, my own, and no less than the current Dali Lama’s view, Lao Tzu, the man who generated from Taoism the lineage of profound Eastern philosophies that apprehended no central G-d in the Western sense, but are to westerners considered religions, was a superb scientist. Likewise, the ancient Greek practical philosophers, engineers and proto-scientists, those who trod the path of the Mystery Rites, were as divinely religious as our Uncle Al.

But, back to the stars. Peering into the vaporous ceiling occluding distant points in the Cosmos, I remembered an autumn evening lying, with no embarrassment, on the front lawn of our suburban home with my Father. We were staring at what he informed me was the constellation, Orion. I was about six years old. He asked me, “Do you ever get the feeling that somebody up there might be looking back at us, wondering if anybody is looking back at him?” That question has fascinated me ever since. I am not alone in being thus compelled back, again and again, to conjecture on the possibility, even likelihood, that we are not alone.

There was a fellow, another great physicist of Einstein’s generation, Enrico Fermi, who wondered on this same non-trivial thought. He also proposed what is known as Fermi’s Paradox in light of the possibility that we are indeed, against scientific odds, alone as intelligent life in this Universe. After all, if Life and Intelligence is something that is inherently possible across the breadth of perhaps a septillion of stars, a surfeit of planetary orbs circling those suns, many of them amenable to the creation and sustenance of life as we know it from our own limited experience… where are the dang aliens!?!

Surely we should have spied them by now. If they are now buzzing about the heavens in super-tech space craft, if they have ever have even gotten to the point of playing with crystal radios or blown themselves up with atom bombs, they should have left some clue to their presence in the starry bough.

Solutions to this enigma include that they are advanced enough to stay hid, and don’t wish to listen to the wailing of our baby civilization in its crib. They wait and watch, and hope we grow up and fly right. They may be wise enough fear our immature and violent tendencies. Perhaps don’t really give a damn about what seems to them to be barely more advanced the pond scum.

Another possibility, is that we are aliens. Perhaps our good Earth is but a petri dish, and we an experiment by an advanced species possessed of great patience born of billions of years evolution prior to the initiation of our own synthetic creation as drops of water, bits of clay, RNA and a somewhat reliably clement environment. Our theoretical creators might thus someday be back, in their own good time, to reconnoiter the cold hard data revealed in their planetary wet lab. Let us hope we do not then wind up in the cosmic bio-hazard bin.

S

Enrico Fermi