Showing posts with label psilocybin. Show all posts
Showing posts with label psilocybin. Show all posts
11/11/11
7/8/11
drugs and contingency
There are at least two experiences of the relation between psychedelic drugs and the idea of contingency. Let's say that one is called the coercive experience, and the other is called the dispersive.
The coercive experience is paranoiac, conspiratorial. It is ontologically suspicious. It is coercive because it is interrogatory, and more often than not, is forcefully searching for a foregone conclusion. The coercive is a great architect, building meaning upon meanings, in the way the Egyptians must have built the pyramids: with a great arsenal of violence. The coercive is religious, occult, reverent. It produces symbols by utilizing the capacity for psychedelics to temporarily erase your world. Anything that wanders into your space after your world-erasure is capable of adopting an auratic glow, because of the isolated nature of your encounter with it, and as part of the coercive's erasure of contingency, the sign before you becomes destiny.
At its most defective, the coercive is based on an irrational belief that self-authorizes the creation of a cosmos and then covers its tracks. The defective mode of the coercive is religious mania, the healthy mode, artistic creation.
The coercive works by attempting to gather the Many into the One. The dispersive works in the opposite direction, splitting unities into multiplicities. The dispersive views phenomena in the world not with suspicion, but with skepticism. The dispersive suspects that ontological inconsistencies can arise: I arrive at the office and it does not surprise me if my office were suddenly on the opposite end of the hall. This is the same lack of surprise, says Picasso, he would feel if, in the bath, his body suddenly dissolved into atoms.
The dispersive recognizes and investigates contingency by feeling the absurdity behind every particular and the potential for it to have been otherwise, to have played out a different way, belong to an alternate constitution of reality. The defective mode of the dispersive finds itself splintered off into some dead-end corner of the multiverse, unable to trace its way back to the collective stream of human experience. Dispersive experience's healthy mode finds its outlet in speculation. Its speculative regard for potentiality, which considers unrealized possibilities as real as mere actuality, makes it closely akin to science fiction.
6/28/11
6/27/11
6/16/11
the leary papers
“The first time I took psilocybin — 10 pills — was in the fireside social setting in Cambridge,” Ginsberg wrote in a blow-by-blow description of his experience taking synthesized hallucinogenic mushrooms at Leary’s stately home. At one point Ginsberg, naked and nauseated, began to feel scared, but then “Professor Leary came into my room, looked in my eyes and said I was a great man.”
* * *
“How about contributing to my next prose masterpiece by sending me (as you sent Burroughs) a bottle of SM pills,” Kerouac wrote Leary, referring to psilocybin. “Allen said I could knock off a daily chapter with 2 SMs and be done with a whole novel in a month.”
* * *
After trying Leary’s magical pink pills Arthur Koestler told his host the next day that they were not for him: “I solved the secret of the universe last night, but this morning I forgot what it was.”
["New York Public Library Buys Timothy Leary's Papers"]
3/31/11
George Condo, Internal Space 2005
"Our research has almost limitless possibilities for the expansion of the human mind," say Leary and Alpert, and they plan to pursue that expansion through their federation as long as their supplies of psilocybin hold out." Time, March 29, 1963 "Psychic Research: LSD"
6/30/10
Industry Tape
"i acquired this tape before the turn of the century at a rave in houston, texas. the recording features the two biggest 2nd gen chicago house djs playing a 2x4 tag team vinyl set on psilocybin." (DJ Harry Bennett)
Live @ Industry with Derrick Carter on 4 decks by dj sneak
3/22/10
3/21/10
2/1/10
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