| >> | I think I'm basically a pantheist. I started out as a Christian (because of my folks), not a super-religious family - one or two services a year - they had some strong faith, but it was mostly a quiet, personal thing, no quoting of scripture or weird rules. They weren't pushy, but always answered with honest belief if I asked that kind of question.
By the time I went to college (the first time), I'd started to understand what the world was about, didn't think much of it. I was a watered-down Christian on the surface, kind of agnostic underneath. I wasn't a cool jaded atheist like my friends, I was just looking at life through the bleak existential filter of just after high school. I didn't finish college that time, and I think a lot of the work I did went unacknowledged, by myself and everyone else. Looking back, I really did try.
It's the only time I've ever actually worked at the spiritual side of things. That college was incredibly isolating anyway, and adding existential angst to that wasn't a lot of fun. I was chipping away at it where I could, trying to arrive at a set of beliefs I could live with. I read science and philosophy, and I spent a fair amount of time just trying to puzzle things out myself, rationally. A set of beliefs ought to be based on an absolute, so I started out using death as my base. "What is death?" "What is life?" "What is conception?" - defining some very basic truths, then working through the permutations, writing it out. I don't know if I still have all of it, but some of that was pretty good. Fascinating to me at the time.
Two things I read that stand out to me (that a lot of people walking that road probably don't come across). Ken Wilber's "A Brief History of Everything" is the first. There's a lot of spiritual stuff, especially in the last half of the book, that I didn't buy at the time. It does a great job of laying out the concept of "holons" and a "holarchy," though, which made so much intuitive sense to me that it relieved a lot of existential pressure by itself. I hadn't answered the big questions, but I really felt like I understood the shape of the world. It is a concise, elegant explanation of how things fit together on every level. It speaks to the "nuts and bolts" of the existential question in a way a laymen can grasp.
I didn't have a lot of patience at the time (just out of high school), and it's not a dense text by any means, but given where I was in life - biologically - it was still tough to make myself sit down and try with it. That was true for anything that wasn't fiction, basically anything productive, which informed most of the failings I had a person then.
Daniel Dennett's "Pandemonium" theory did the same thing for my understanding of the mind. He said some basic, easily understood but profound things that helped me understand the shape of conscious thought. Things like: the mind is basically a set of associations. Every thought you have calls up other thoughts (he called those "units" daemons, giving the theory its name), which in turn call up others, and so forth. My concept of "blue ball" is going to be different from Jeff's, because - setting aside biological differences - everything I've experienced in connection with "blue" and "ball" (and the concept as a whole) since birth, every time those words/images come up, is completely different, and that's what we call into mind when someone mentions it. It might not be a difference we recognize when we talk about it, but the phrase calls up a unique constellation of "daemons" for each of us, a different "blue ball" (which gets at "qualia" in philosophical terms). And yeah, that image is deliberate. Existential blue balls is no fun :(
The last piece to this set, of course, is drugs. I tried to answer the existential question with direct knowledge. I'd messed around with low-tier stuff, weed, pills, whatever, some light psychedelics. The afterglow of DXM alleviated my crushing depression for a few days after each use, so I was no stranger to that, and it led me to MXE. I've posted a lot of long love letters to this drug, so I'll try to keep this bit short.
If you boil it down, MXE helped in two ways. It was like I'd been wearing a veil… Comment too long. Click here to view the full text. |
