June 1, 2008

I spent last night with a pharmacologist who moonlights as a small-time southern French clairvoyant. He brought me over some high grade, home grown doob and spent the evening smoking a great deal of it through an ancient bone chillum that he claimed some old man from god knows where gave him. He wanted to share his thoughts on expanding consciousness.

Drugs will only do it momentarily before snapping you back to a place even smaller than where you were when you began. A one step forward two steps back sort of thing. A brief glimpse via the elevator. But climb up yourself and you can hang around all day.

He took me to a bar off the Canal du Midi and ordered us two pints of shit beer. His attempts to tip the waitress with refinery were a catastrophe. But then he was holding a bone chillum in his hand that really just looked like a big dick. When he turned to me again his thoughts were in a muddle but I understood what he was attempting to explain. He seemed very interested in the latent, dormant abilities of the individual.

This, he waved the dick in my face, opens us up to a mass of information that we only normally receive unconsciously. In this state we are far more aware of our energetic effect on others. A single movement, even in a place like this, will create counter movements and micro-counter movements in everyone else. Like schools of fish in the sea. But sober and we hardly notice them. We have in fact been conditioned to shut down our awareness of the greater truth of any moment because it can be so difficult for us to bear. Precisely why mystics say we don’t remember our previous incarnations. I mean could you live with your father today if you knew that three hundred years ago he’d been your wife? Paranoia is merely the emotional reaction to the recognition that what you are hearing and seeing from a person is in contradiction to what you are feeling from them. We’re all constantly saying one thing just to hide the fact that we feel another. And it’s not easy watching the lies of your friends and lovers day after day after day. It’s a heavy burden to bear consciously, regardless of whether it’s only being done reflexively. This is the reason why we have trouble understanding conversations in this state. Not because we’ve become slower but because we’ve opened up to the full information available. And because this portion is so vast, so much greater, so much more real than the charade, the theatre, the sheer falsity of our words, that a portion of the mind simply finds itself ignoring them. As if you were suddenly shown the motor of a performance car you were buying, when all along you’d just been checking out its paint work. Only a telepath, my boy, knows the full extent of the worlds pretense.

From out of the corner of my eye I had noticed a couple of local girls checking us out. But every time I glanced over they pretended not to care, or suddenly began having what appeared to be the most interesting conversation in Europe. He went on. Of course the real truth is that we’re not really saying much at all. We’re not talking to communicate. We’re talking to expend nervous energy. To feel less anxious. We’re talking to relax. But it’s about as effective as draining a lake with a tea spoon. And we all know it. Because when we talk we’re actually slowing down the potential communication process by a massive degree. We’re reducing it to a linear grain by grain production line. But we’re capable of exchanging so much more, so much more quickly. There is in fact no limit. But speaking with these blunt staccato lumps, this completely stilted machinery, these individual fragments of such stark, inexpressive sound, we are simply slowing everything down. Every word we use is in fact simply reducing, through beat after battered beat, how much we are able to express, into smaller and smaller bits. The more you talk the less you say. The less you talk the more your mind will find another way. He now stared at me hard now, and slowly but meaningfully tapped his dick on his head. I ordered more beer.