BEFORE

Sanju hasn't told me where we're going, but he's taking the preparation very seriously. I suppose I should too, but the not-knowing makes it difficult for me to have a sense of how I should prepare, or to what lengths I should take my preparation. "Write down some questions" he advised this afternoon, and as an example cited a few past ones he'd formulated around interpersonal issues at work. He explained how he'd used "the view from the mountain top" to gain new perspective on problems that he'd been obsessing over. Having no shortage of solutionless problems to obsess over myself, I suppose it couldn't hurt to get a few down in writing, if only for posterity and something to smile about when we're back.

DURING

(As soon as my motor skills returned, Sanju plunked me down in front of a computer with a simple request : "explain what you mean." What follows is the (lightly edited) transcript of the next hour.)

it's like waking up from the dream of yourself

(points at head) "I had no idea what this particular gathering of neurons was capable of".

shared in that we see something that language operates on the periphery of.

the longer you can hold on to the concept of your own brain the better.

does everyone short-circuit like this in to the universe?

atoms & science & space & english are suddenly being reintroduced to me as "frameworks".

yes, yes, ok. We.

a human brain on a little LSD with a working knowledge of english & the basics of high school astronomy will get you (hopefully) to describe ... this. Eons of imperfect work, matter collecting and failing and building in ways until planets and plants and burning man and metaphor.

we're just atoms accepting some kind shared responsibility for explaining each other.

combine perception and emotion with THIS, and language suddenly seems like the most important thing you've ever been equipped with.

the heightened consciousness thing is only important in so far as it relates (and confirms) the best of science and religion. (ie. matters of scale. modesty. shared responsibility. )

my fingers are literally quivering with the knowledge of work I know they can't complete.

maybe your role is getting unglued from time to time in this context called earth.

there's this frustrating sense that for a very brief period, your medicated brain signifies real progress in the way atoms choose to rearrange themselves.

getting kids to take LSD after watching The Matrix feels like best hope any of us has for an answer before dissolving back in to whatever made us.

choice. you have choice. always.

the moment a mind is made aware of itself, be it through depression or LSD or signals whispered beneath the surface of pop culture, there is no turning your back on this ... thing. Call it love, call it god, call it light, call it truth. Hauling it up from the trenches of yourself is the only gift you can hope to bring to this world.

it's suddenly clear that metaphor and analogy are what allow language to express as broad a range of felt experience as it does, but clearer still is how profoundly short they falll.

you contribute only in that you provide some useful synthesis. Beyond that, you are in service merely as inspiration for those who can.

Coming down = the diminishing use of "us" to eventually just describe clunky old humans.

and down. Slowly. Back through ever more familiar layers of context until the boundary between states becomes firm again. (Flexible, but firm.)

Not ready to stare at yourself in the bathroom mirror though. ... Whoa.

SEVERAL DAYS LATER

It helped. Or if it didn't help it certainly didn't hurt. For a few weightless hours there I felt plucked from the maze – given a view I'd only ever glimpsed in the clearest of dreams. That night, after hours of sitting silently in Sanju's chair, staring at the patterns of animal heads slowly rotating behind the galactic photoshow that had taken the place of my computer's desktop, I tried to take stock.

I've never felt as though I'm at the helm of a machine capable of going where this particular machine just took me. All the things that make it rough going down here on earth (emotional sensitivity, obsessive documenting) suddenly felt (feel) like extraordinary strengths. After the spins and lostness and nausea had subsided, the whole universe spread itself out in plain view, and for the first time since childhood, the whole mechanism made perfect sense. It still does.

English falls short. It was the feeling of being stripped down to just the shape your mind makes in space. The sense that your id - the whole of who you are - is just a matter of momentary throughput, just a charged field of shared space. Language has never felt so approximate, or so wanting.

Remember, this state beyond emotion is always inside.  thinking of it as such makes it so. when people go on about holding on to their power, it's this. That fugue state thing you felt upon coming down (as existing apart from and utterly connected to everything around you; the giving up of self, the rest of it) that's you. And this you-shaped dent in the universe is capable of - good at, even -  making sense through interrogation.  The meaning is in the asking. And the asking. And the asking.

The next morning, the urgency of the thing had faded, but I was happy to find that the calm remained. My questions were left unanswered - I don't think I even looked back to see what I'd written down - but I felt that the very context in which they were being asked had shifted.