Existence and Identity – Page 2

10 Months of Acid

disclaimer: this is not typical acid use. There are many concretely ‘beneficial’ effects from lower, more infrequent doses

In 2014, I did on average 200-250ug of acid once a week(ish) for ten months, from January to October, or approximately 40 times. Doses typically ranged from 150ug-400ug, with tail ends of 50ug-600ug. Subjective experiences ranged from slightly glowing colors to complete loss of any contact with the physical world around me. I remember listening to a song, and by the time I heard a note in the song, I’d forgotten what the last one had been, and it didn’t sound like music anymore, just occasional ‘sounds’ piercing through once every few eons.

I had the ability to do this. I had savings. I lived in a house of accepting camgirls. Real life wasn’t getting in the way.

The first thing people usually want to know is why? Nobody gets addicted to acid. It’s unheard of. When people trip, they stay generally avoid it for several months. It’s usually beautiful, but intense, difficult, and often terrifying.

For whatever reason, acid was useful to me in a way that I’ve slowly grown to realize is not common in others. Every time I tripped I had the overwhelming sensation that the doors had opened and I was mainlining epiphanies from a direct source of truth. Every time I stopped tripping, it felt like those doors closed, and I forgot most of what I’d learned. But I wanted to remember.

So I kept doing it. Again and again, higher and higher doses. I needed to know. I produced art. I played music. I got very excited and tried to make everybody I knew do acid too.

When we imagine frequent drug use, we imagine it as a form of escapism – that real life is too difficult, that we want to shut down for a time. Acid is exactly the opposite. It heightened what I was aware of in my own mind, let me explore the way my own thoughts formed. It took what I was and shoved my own face in it. I couldn’t look away. There were times of deliberately induced and absolutely excruciating emotional pain, to which nothing in my regular life has ever come close. I did it on purpose. I needed to know.

It is very difficult to talk about the “things you learn” while tripping, because it occurs while in such a deeply altered state that language ceases to apply. It really is more about a way of looking – a very specific type of engaging in experience. “Thinking about the experience” defeats the point, because thinking about it is not the same thing as “having it”. Applying words to the experience is misleading by nature. Defining a thing gives it an outside and an inside, and thus you can never define the thing that is “always outside” – in giving it a term, in identifying it with boundaries, it is no longer what you are trying to say. The Tao that can be named is not the Tao. To name a thing is to give it form.

As time went on, I stopped viewing myself as a being separate from the universe. Sensations became interesting to watch, not motivating. I entered such a permanent state of utter peace and contentment that I stopped wanting anything at all. And by the end of it, I barely got out of bed, barely ate. My sleep schedule became erratic, as I woke and slept as I wished. I had vivid lucid dreams. I had stopped working almost entirely and was living off slowly depleting savings. Why would I work? Why would I do anything? I was…. not happy, not sad, I simply was. I was free of desire. I did not fear death.

And, ten months in, I realized that’s what I was looking at – death. I would compulsively whisper “I am dead” under my breath throughout the day. I was an empty vessel. And I realized, that if I kept doing acid, I probably would die, out of sheer apathy. I imagined becoming homeless, and that did not worry me. I imagined freezing on the street, and I embraced it.

I wasn’t terribly worried – but I had to make a decision. Did I want to continue down this path, knowing the end was oblivion? Or did I want to close the doors and return to the world of the living?

This choice and my decision occupies a very curious spot in my memory because I don’t really understand it, and it feels like the small center of something, like this was the thing I’d been circling around all this time. I chose life, as you can see, and I have the sense that my choice was inevitable, or that it wasn’t ever a choice at all – or as though it was a fundamental attribute of the deadlike state that I reject the state. Once I saw what the end was, the next step was to close my eyes. Or, really, the sight of the end and the rejection of it was done in one motion, like it is in the nature of seeing the end to shut your eyes. Something something quantum immortality.

The journey back was almost as strange and beautiful as the journey in. As my motivations slowly began returning, I found all I wanted was to forget. Whereas before I was trying to immerse myself in the knowing, now I was constantly attempting to shut eyes that were permanently pried open. No matter where I turned, the Knowing had been seared into my brain. It was like that feeling you get when you watch a movie and are suddenly aware that, just out of the frame, there are camera crews standing around the actors, and you stop buying into the story because all you see is the movie set.

I just wanted to pretend this was all real. I wanted to feel invested in myself. I wanted to feel upset, insecure, proud, happy, anxiety, anything. I wanted to stop knowing.

Before I chose life, I didn’t mind the deep nothingness I had sunk into – but after the choice was made, it became… not uncomfortable, but strange. I felt like I had abandoned an old lover, like this constant twinge of pain, like a splinter in my throat I couldn’t dislodge. I thought constantly about tripping again and being reunited. I did acid in my dreams.

Over time, almost without me realizing it, the eye slowly eased shut, like going to sleep. I started to find myself caught up in moments of investment. I started to feel insecure again, annoyed. And it was shitty and amazing.

It took about another ten months for me to return to roughly where I’d been when I started.

I’m mostly normal now, with only a few remnants. Sometimes certain types of conversations will trigger it, where I’m sitting there and suddenly the eye of the universe has turned on me and I am melting away. It is very intense. I don’t mind, though. That’s a fundamental part of the feeling, really – that I don’t mind when it’s happening.

I feel like I’ve pulled the wool over my own eyes. I’ve bought into this world. It is profoundly comforting in a way so subconscious it’s difficult to identify. It’s as though at all times, behind my ears, there is a powerful belief whispering it’s okay. I chose this. I am full, I am held. I am not afraid anymore, and when I am, it’s because fear is interesting, because I have the privilege of feeling it. I am so grateful to get to hurt.

My underlying motivation now is to convey this awareness to others (or feel as though I have). It seems like the most important thing, the only important thing. And so here I am.*

–Update
* The effects of taking this much have only continued to sink in and settle over time. I no longer feel some of these things. I have lost a large chunk of my desire to communicate, and I have increasingly intense episodes.

Spectrums of Identity

1. Belief

The Apatheist
This is the guy who doesn’t believe anything. Completely unconcerned with politics, religion, or even opinions about himself, he’s infuriatingly hard to pin down. Frequently contradicts himself and doesn’t seem to care. Ask him what he thinks is true and he’ll shrug his shoulders, exhale a bong rip, and say “what is truth anyway?”

Your Uncle.
This is the guy who is very right and wants you to know it. He knows exactly what is going down with the world and is hostile to any opinions contrary. This guy is present in every belief system known to mankind. He builds himself a castle of opinions and a fort of cherry picked facts to keep away the marauders with their links to objecting internet articles. His strong convictions also mean he’s a signpost for others who aren’t sure what they believe yet, and in the public sphere can help sway opinion.

2. Memory

The Now Girl
This is the girl who says “the past is just a story we tell ourselves” and frequently avoids questions about her childhood. Ask her what she did yesterday and she’ll make a joke. Has memory problems, probably from systematic lack of caring. Doesn’t tell you about herself, not because she’s mysterious, but because she doesn’t consider it relevant to your friendship with her. Why would you need to know if it doesn’t matter?

The Photographer
This is the girl who presents herself carefully and loves it, even if she thinks she doesn’t. She can give you her life story in three sentences but often chooses to do it in three hours. She wants to write an autobiography. Her life is divided into “before” and “after” some sort of important event. She can point to aspects of her personality and tell you exactly where they came from. Doesn’t consider you intimate with her unless she’s told her Story(tm). Brings all her past experiences in to justify her actions and absolve herself of blame. Probably into photography.

3. Ability

The Slacker
This is the guy who doesn’t take a lot of pride in what he does and isn’t particularly motivated either. He might enjoy activities, sure, but he doesn’t do them for you. He gives off a confident ease that comes only from not caring if people think he’s smart or not. You might know him for a year and then suddenly find out he can draw really well, or maybe has a Diamond ranking in League of Legends, but more likely you find out he deals weed with upsettingly lax security.

The guy with the Asian parents
This guy, on a deep level, views his life as worth living only if he hits the bar of ‘good enough,’ which he always sets just outside of his reach because subconsciously he can’t handle the idea of actually being good enough. He is usually terrifyingly competent, motivated by low self esteem and the need to prove something to anybody. He knows his IQ and wishes someone would ask him. He owns a really nice suit which he doesn’t get to wear as often as he’d like.

4. Society

The Manic Pixie
This girl doesn’t like being labeled, and fitting into the liberal counterculture is too much fitting in for her comfort. She doesn’t wash her hair out of sheer laziness, she’s pegged at least three guys on tindr dates, and she’s lived in four cities in the three years. Floating between groups, she’ll come in and out of your life without much predictability. She’s not doing this because she is trying to make a point, but because her parents didn’t give a shit and she operates on a strict ‘whatever feels good’ rule. Will sleep on your couch till you kick her out, and the next time you hear from her will be 6 months later asking if you saw her vibrator.

The Lemming
This girl loves playing by the rules of the social group she’s in. In conservative culture, she is the perfect housewife who shakes her head at homosexuals. In liberal cultures, she tweets “radical” messages even though she’s only followed by people who agree with her. She is the archetypical dedicated group member, flag holder, activist of whatever community she belongs to. She is more likely to join a cult. People are frequently loyal to her and a good deal of her mental attention goes towards the cohesion of her group.

——————————————————–

rate yourself, with 1 being the first one and 10 being the second

I’m 5/10 belief, 8/10 memory, 4/10 ability, 5/10 society.

You Wake Up On A Table

You wake up on a table, blinking out the haze under bright lights. Your skin is goosebumping against a sheet draped over your body. Your breathing is slow and…. clear. Deep. As you inhale greedily, you become aware of a strange lightness, and with the exhale you realize that it is an absence of pain. You’d forgotten what that felt like.

You sit up, a little faster than you meant to. The room is a strange cross between a hospital and a hotel lobby; there’s wires hanging out of the ceiling and a large machine covered in screens by your bed, but the ground is carpeted and the walls are draped in heavy salmon curtains patterned with pineapples.

This isn’t your room, the little converted closet your family had put you, waiting for you to finally die, with the blue peeling wallpaper and the drone of that old fan in the summer heat.

A man enters with a whiff of cologne. He is holding a clipboard and is wearing little round glasses.

“This is the year 2442 AD,” he says before you can think to ask any questions. His tone is abrupt, procedural. “You died four hundred and three years ago at the age of….” he glanced at his chart.

“Ninety-two,” you croak. You turned ninety-two last month, but you certainly don’t feel dead.

“Correct,” he says with the tone of someone who’s said these words many times before. “Your body was selected as part of a program by a startup company which would later become the corporate governance known as Jericho. Your brain was scanned and saved in its exact configuration – your memories, personality, subconscious, instincts, your entire brain structure. All of it was compressed and put into a file. Over time Jericho amassed hundreds of thousands of these scans, and recently has begun an initiative to boot them back up in artificial bodies.”

Artificial bodies. You look down and see what you already knew – a smooth, taut skin surface, poreless, with texture lightly imprinted for realism. There are tiny bolts in the back of your elbows. You can’t find the outline of any veins in the back of your hands.

The man continues. “We’ve constructed an artificial body that nearly perfectly resembles a human body, with a few improvements. It will not age, it will not get ill. It can eat, dance, and enjoy sexual intercourse. It cannot reproduce, but we have new methods for that now, which we can address later. It must recharge every night, but sleeping is no longer necessary.”

This is absurd and you are somehow accepting it, numbly. 2442 AD. This means everyone you knew has died. They should have brought in a counselor, or someone who at least started out with “my condolences.”

“Did you download the personalities of everyone, when they died?” you ask.

“No.” His voice remains even, but he glances at you from beneath his spectacles. “Only corpses within a certain eligibility were saved at first. Later on we expanded our reach to 85% of the world, with 100% coverage in developed nations. We have a few thousand prior to your time as well.”

“Wait,” you say. “How do you save the personalities of people before 2042?”

“We reconstruct them,” the man says. “We place bits together from memories of loved ones, of writings, of records. It is a long, painstaking process.”

These questions are something to hold onto, some sort of anchor that gives your mind grounds to think. “How do you know it is accurate?” You ask. “What if you make a mistake?”

“There is a variance in every replica,” he answers, with a bit more spark this time. Maybe he isn’t used to these sorts of questions from…. new bodies. “It’s around 0.02%, even in yourself. The variance in personalities recorded prior to 2042 can reach up to 0.09%, but it is a negligible difference. All the presidents of the United States are currently living, as well as many major historical figures. A version of Shakespeare is currently living in New Jersey.”

“A version?”

“Historical records were not comprehensive enough for high levels of accuracy.”

“So is it him?”

“More or less. We have philosophers to argue over the petty details now, but if it means anything, he’s been writing some additional great literature. You should read his newest play By the Shore if you’ve got the time.”

You run your fingers over your skin and have an eerie sense of being sixteen. Sixteen with the mind of an ancient.

“Will I ever die?”

“Your body will eventually fail,” he says. “Artificial macrocells last for approximately 240 years before they must be replaced. Don’t worry, we have a financing option.”

“And then I’ll be put into another one?”

“Yes, unless you specifically request a non-continuation of your memory.”

You stand from the table and test your walk. Your legs take a moment to respond to your will, but your new brain picks learns fast, and within a few tries you are spinning around on one leg with absurd balance. It is a good distraction.

“So if you can reconstruct memories, can you change them? If I ask, can you erase shame, or the memory of death of loved ones? What if I were a murderer? Can you erase sadistic tendencies in people?”

“Yes,” he says. “There are extensive modification forms you can submit for change upon your next body shift if you wish to improve yourself. We refuse to reawaken criminals unless they agree to positive modification.”

Your mind immediately flies to the extremes. “Do people change so much they become someone else? Wait, no – can they choose to forget who they were, entirely? Are there people who want to be someone else upon their next… wake-up? Like a reincarnation?”

“Transferral into another body is something we call a birth. This is your second birth. And yes. There are many people who choose an identity and remove memory of their prior lives. Most of those are not aware that they are on their second birth; they believe they have simply been born. Some opt to put in false memories from a life that didn’t exist, just for the fun of it.”

“Then how are they even the same person?” Your brain may be fast, but it is still yours, and it has limits. “How is this any different than booting up any arbitrary consciousness with random specifications you feel like making? How is it them?”

The man shifts, and you don’t remember at what point his enthusiasm had become discomfort. “It isn’t.”

You realize you are naked. He doesn’t seem to care. You can feel the ligaments within you moving… differently. More precisely. Cleanly. It is hard to focus on your body with your mind whirling. There are a thousand questions to ask at once.

“Are my children alive?”

He consults his clipboard, obviously relieved to have an easier question. “You have four children alive.”

“I only had three children.”

“One elected to be birthed twice.”

“What?”

The man talks calmly. He looks pleasant now. You wonder if his body is organic or artificial. “Your child Miranda lives in Texas. She also lives in New Canada.”

“What are you saying?”

“Canada had sort of an identity crisis last centur-”

“No, about Miranda. Are you saying I have two Mirandas?”

“Yes. There are two bodies that carry her consciousness.”

“But – which one is her?”

“Both are her.”

“Both? How do you have two of the same person?”

“We booted the file into two different bodies.”

“You what? You can do that? Could you do that to me?”

“Of course.”

You stand there dumbfounded, and stare at the man with his stupid little glasses. He’s shorter than you. You have an urge to push him over, but suppress it. “So if you booted me twice, would the other one be a clone?”

“Not any more than you’re a clone right now, I think. That’s actually the subject of the presidential debate’s new platform right now, outlawing of multiple copies. But I personally think it’s just the same thing, there would just be two of you.”

“And this other me – over time it would be subjected to different experiences. It would be me for a little while, but then it would change. How could it really be me, then?”

“You think because it has gone through different things, that it is not you?”

“Then how do you draw the boundary between what is and is not me? Could anyone be me?”

“Some say everyone already is you.”

“But how? I can see and touch them!”

“You can see and touch another instance of your brain booted up into another body, too. Just because you’re looking at another body you’re not in doesn’t mean it’s not you.”

You grab your head – full of thick hair – and run your hands down your face, smooth and unfamiliar.

“What am I?”

“That is a very good question.”

“Is this me? You’ve taken something that remembers some life of mine, some collection of ideas – hell, they might not even be real, maybe I elected to have them imprinted inside of me because of some some twisted idea that it would be fun – and now I’m something that can be replicated? What is this? I died! I was gone, and now I’m awake again and I remember being me. I remember my children.”

“We don’t use the term death anymore,” he says, gently now. “We call it sleeping.”

“Don’t try to soften the truth. People do die. I died.”

“And when you’ve gone to bed to sleep at night? You closed your eyes, fell unconscious, and then hours later you opened your eyes again and remembered being you. We could have replaced your body when you slept every night and you would feel no different. And just now – you’ve closed your eyes and opened them four hundred years later. Sleeping is no different from death, except with sleeping, you just remember who you were last time. With death, the memory leaves. If you remember who you were, then you haven’t died, you’ve only slept.”

You have no words. The man continues. “You will meet many people who are on maybe their tenth births who will not remember their past births.”

“What about me? Have I lived in the span before this time and chosen not to remember?”

“If you had, I would not be at liberty to tell you.”

“Why do people choose not to remember?”

“Most will say they got bored. Immortality is quite the fad, but it seems a lot of people get tired of it. They say it’s not really fun to be a kid again if you already remember being an adult. You’re just smaller and nobody really takes you seriously. So you can’t really be a kid if you don’t die first.”

“I thought you said you didn’t use the word death.”

“We do in cases of non-remembrance – if you elect to be rebirthed and not remember it. I don’t really think that’s any different from regular humans being born and dying though, but that’s just me.”

“How many times have you been born?”

“I don’t know,” he says.

“Does anyone know, for sure?”

“No,” he says. A beeping sounds from outside the door. He reaches into a drawer built into the wall and hands you a simple robe. “My shift is up, though. Take this. Are you finished with your questions?”

“No,” you say.

He smiles, his first real expression, and you catch an artificial green reflection in his pupil. “You can come back whenever you wish. There is food waiting for you. You will also find a full manual and a trained Birth Specialist just down the hall. Two of your children will meet you outside.”

You thank him, your head still spinning, and with your new legs you step through the door.