Home To Upper Michigan, (June, 2022)
Five days to get here from California through angry Texan desert storms. So few planes even scheduled to fly to the UP, small Cessna, bumpy turbulence ride with tall Scandinavians all gawking silently through the windows to see the endless stretches of virgin forests, sprawling across the horizon. There is nothing here, we have only barely settled it even now, one hundred and twenty years later. I love the idea of travelling by car across the Upper Peninsula in the Fall. To drive for hours and not see a single house or car, just that long stretch of deep forest. And to know that one could stop in the middle of that stretch and, if possible, travel that many hours INTO the woods and arrive at a place where no human has ever stood. Not even the Ojibwa Indian tribes had never ventured, the sparse copper mining tribes of Michigan’s prehistory. I relish the archeological history of those long-extinct peoples, cultures, and languages dead forever. How did they live in this cold? Their adaptations to the snow, hand-made tools and snowshoes, primitive forms of skis? That influence more likely introduced by the Finnish immigration wave, the first of many. I relish the immersion into that genetic phenotype and the predispositions which shaped that Arctic culture. The Sami of the North, and the Suomi of the South. I relish playfully under the watchful eye of those potent ancestors. I can feel their love course through my nervous system as a hypersensitive state of reception, the finer tunings of the Finn’s ear. To hear slightly above, they perceive the electromagnetic hum of their surroundings, the finer psychic senses, becoming aware of the fine map of our network composed by the web of our familial connections, sensing the subtle signature of one’s son, the stronger the empathic connection with a loved one, the more information it could relay. This is the apocryphal inward sense of twins, genetically identical, who sense, somehow, the tragic death of the other as a static jolt, many falling to their knees in sudden inexplicable grief for the other, knowing and feeling their trauma, themselves, the web is denser between those two, sharing so many distinct strands of connection between one another, back through their shared development, physical, emotional, and spiritual developments often in lockstep sync, even brothers may develop into distinct and novel directions and always have the other to relate to and to know and feel their signature emotional location.
The Subtle Emotional expanse and a distinct region defined by two siblings together, I am in awe of how much of behavior and emotional development is tied to the phenotype, to the one hundred percent genetic signature, shared between monozygotic twins. These phenomenal pairs are the basis of our controlled and quantitative isolation of nature from nurture. I somehow enjoy the taboo measures of psychometric traits, quantitatively measured domains of personality and cognition. Gene, in some politically liberal circles, has become a four-letter word, especially in the measure of established cognitive abilities, like intelligence studies. Gene and IQ should not be so offensive and escalated of emotionally charged debate. The students picked up the stop sign from the cement bucket that held it, swinging that heavy cement mass like a mace, smashing the professor's windshield, cutting the lights to the building he hid in. His life was threatened by the students, who formed into hostile mob-like groups to shout him off the stage for his review of the literature in his book The Bell Curve. The book, in many ways, was conservative in its interpretation of the results of these studies.
The State-Dependent Perception
Tart’s Systemic Model of Consciousness established a range of many distinct states of consciousness, a magnitude of innumerable variations, I introduce a three-dimensional model for drawing the branches of consciousness across a spectrum of many bandwidths. The branches commonly traversed are attained by the typical American given his day-to-day habits - this is their baseline.
Wringing with the assumed “he” is politically incorrect, deemed so within my lifetime. Toxic Masculinity, I was accused today in my joke about slapping cupcakes out of people's mouths to save them from the ‘beetus. I know not what I do, I am humble in my solitude, I wave affectionately from a distance, a solitary cabin going out to sea, stretching out into lesser traveled regions of consciousness, the extreme ranges of shamanic states, oceanic depths we can map along the cartographical representation of discrete states of consciousness or dSoc’s. I would like to propose that there are certain non-ordinary states of consciousness which may be traversed by the shamanic journeyer or deep state meditator which carry non-ordinary information , as if transmitted discretely within that band, I liken these non-ordinary regions traversed by the journeyer, with his or her abilities mastered within their culture, using the tools affording them reception within that spectral region. The amplitude modulation or the frequency modulation, each a distinct technology, a modulatory phenomenon we control. ke a channel or station we may receive with the aid of a radio. Each station a sudden crackle and then the whole flood of information, multitudes of cultural data, expression and influence.
Like memory, the faculty of perception can be bound to a modulatory state, a frequency we can know, measure, and learn to control. EEG is n old science, but still one we understand only in a limited way, parsing apart the many oscillatory networks of neurons, frequenting Branches of associative thoughts, the ascent or descent of the shaman’s inward journey. The unique tribes that mastered, instead, the out-of-body experience, a dissociative state of perception as valid as our waking physio-sensory state. This ability has few Western masters, but in Eastern traditions, such as the advanced mediation practiced by the Indian saints; these constitute an exceptional range of human experience less studied. But the EEG states of those expert meditators, monks and shamans, are some of the most fascinating studies I’d seen within that area of the literature. The ability of many of these masters to, not merely ascend or descent in baseline, often attaining global coherent electroencephalographic states, but also to hold those states for long periods, with such a well-developed focal ability, to hold attention as if indefinitely on long deeply calmed breaths, long stretches of attention. When thought of in this third graphical dimension as a horizon, like looking out across the ocean, the dive beneath that surface is an exploration of a network of conscious life, whole ecosystems existing and developing alongside our own, with whole rich cultures transmitted and received communally as a distinct baseline region of consciousness, thought of as potentially distant from that of our own. Here, the extreme states of consciousness of sacramental psychedelic use can be thought of in terms of distance within a network. The universal aspects of core shamanism, once established as exceptional human experiences that can be accessed in a controlled and reliable way, can inform our systematic study of consciousness as an electromagnetic phenomenon of many facets. Those we can now measure and those we have yet to measure. These universal shamanic facets can be thought of, not merely as defining a core of shamanism, but a core set of exceptional human experiences -- not belonging to any one culture - but a core set for our species.
I leave mom’s bedroom for an awkward conversation in the kitchen, her hunched back and bony frame accented by her bending over, sweeping kitchen for me. The obsessive cleaning, her scrubbing the mattress before I arrived, buying new pillows. I am without a care, ashamed of my bedridden lifestyle, albeit permitted and even encouraged by her. “Rest Up! You need it after all of that!”
The psychedelics afford a new set of eyes on your surroundings, often revealing how alien and incredible, clichéd and absurd caricatures emerge from these social selves sharing a space, developed personality forms expressing a diverse range of cultures and subcultures, as the surface-most layers of identity. The groups we adhere to and identify ourselves with are reflective of the general fitness of the culture. As a complex system, the current era of Western culture as it has come to be spread and normalized via the globalization of media, we are awash within the sheer volume of its information. I am not immune to the sickness of entertainment, its effecting, now, several post-war generations in progressively debilitating ways. With the introduction of the internet to my generation, this progressive development was one of gradual erosion of our attention span. From Saturday morning cartoons, to the console wars, headlong into social media and the barrage of “The Feed,” the notifications alerting you to highlights of “The Feed” with near-constant dings, the regular buzzing of the supercomputer in our pocket, calling you back into the screen and its engrossing environment. Programmed virtual environments designed to highjack our instinctual sensory systems, in networks of videos, flashing lights, and flashing advertisements, for maximal attention-grabbing potential. Our “Click Bait” selves, all of ourselves diverted by that strategic marketing and its technology.
My few social connections withered long ago in my solitude, from my failure to nurture a bond of regular attention. I am content without phone calls, without contact. Those parts of me that will be forever ill-at-ease in social situations, that anxiety that grips our nervous system around others was inherited and define who I am (or am not) to others.
I will never ask, “Please, sir. May I have some more?” because I will not be present for that or any other meal, my manner becoming crude as I have no one to observe or judge my behavior. I have no one to impress at my cabin on the lake, yet I would long for someone impressed by me to share my bed. I would long for a family, inhibited by that anxiety and the paralysis of self-criticism, yet I would fantasize of fatherhood and plan names for my future children. Off and on, but unbound, my bachelorhood lifestyle, once seen by others as a luxury, now increasingly seen with pity as I enter my 40s.
I should be walking in the woods today, that perfectly cool and comfortable 74 degrees in Michigan, exploring that deep woods waterfall or abandoned home. I have never been to Box Canyon, or swam in those deep woods lakes Cousin Dan swam. Oh, I hear a damned dirtbike outside. I don’t want to deal. The people constantly coming in and out of this house, junkies and desperate meth heads, looking for a hit, looking for a meal, looking for work. Sad sacks, homeless, with fetal developmental issues: those greater syndromes not limited to fetal alcohol. I don’t want to talk and am, yet, hurt to not be invited. I realize, nobody wants to be around someone who speaks as I do, who says what I do. I used to think if I could express my ideas clearly and cohesively as I possibly could, this effort would be appreciated. This can be chalked up to social ineptness, some developmental inhibition I developed, no doubt as part of being an only child. Climbing down into Box Canyon to die. “Given the chance, I’d die like a baby… On some faraway beach.”
All of the lost starts, the failures to launch, the beautiful potential mates ignored, as they can only wait for my move so long before that window closes and they lose interest. I roll the opportunities squandered over in my head, sometimes as I masturbate, imagining what I COULD have done with her. Such a gift, buxom and ready, presented to me by the most gracious kindness of fate. Yet, between her and I, all of that effort was wasted. So few instances that I concluded the exchange successfully with an "effective sexual encounter." Haha! That’s a very kind way of putting it for myself, forever putting out for myself. I am so tied up and conflicted down there with old and deep-rooted anxieties, I radiate a clenched pee-shy energy, holding it in until I can be alone again.
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Insuffolate large bumps of tobacco, feel the pulsing buzz of nicotine surge, vibrating down to the tips of my fingers and my legs and toes. Breath into the pulsing spine, laying the vertebral column flat, aligned, for the carriage of maximal flow, uninhibited or blocked with by that crinked spinal cord, characteristic of my usual posture. Calm acceptance of presence, encouraging specters hoping they may help inspire my work, as muses always have. A gracious host invites their guest to the meat.