From: pez@manhattan.com (Gizmo) Subject: The Adventures Of Smacks Past (Part 40) It's Only Knock And Knowall Date: 1996/11/25 newsgroups: alt.drugs.hard THE ADVENTURES OF SMACKS PAST (PART 40) IT'S ONLY KNOCK AND KNOWALL What if all we are, is just a bunch of living chemicals? What if all we experience, is just the subtle and complex interaction of those chemicals in our bodies? Hormones, enzymes, genes, bio-chemicals, neural pulses etc. Forget the soul, god, psychology, an individual sense of "I," etc. What if the entire experience is just the unique chemistry of each and every living person on this planet. Tiny little individual chemcial/hormone production factories floating within a larger organism we call Earth, or Life. Perhaps, looked at from this point of view, a lot of stuff makes sense that won't make sense in other ways. The whole thing is one big, living, breathing organism, and each and every one of us are part of the mother fucker. Depending on our individual configuration, we can see what makes each person different and what makes each persons "experience" different. Within this large sea of living chemistry, we also have access to all the "chemicals" that we either helped to "create," or the ones that occur naturally in this life. So there we are. Little tiny individual worlds of chemistry, floating in a bigger, larger sea of chemistry. Substances, substances, substances. Take a little of this, add a little of that, and bam: you can change the nature of the chemical dance inside your own little world. Everything that we do and everything that happens to us, is an alteration of the chemistry in our individual world. Using hard drugs is a very direct and powerful attempt to alter that individual chemistry. And of course, we all know the dangers and pitfalls of doing it over and over again. Sooner or later, we upset the natural order, the individual configuration of our tiny individual world. Hard drugs like Cocaine, Heroin, etc., are very powerful substances. They can "get the job done." But what if there were a way to alter the chemistry of our own system without the use of something as potent and ultimately disruptive as hard drugs? That was my question all along. That's what led me into all this shit and that's what was going to get me out of it. In the next moment of becoming drug free again, somewhere around 1976/77, I continued the "search" to understand and master the "altered states," that drugs seemed to provide so easily. As I relayed in adventures 37 and 38, I "knew" that there was another way to live that was not only drug free, but also many times more meaningful and pleasurable than the momentary pleasures of taking smack and coke. Also, I knew from my first experiences of willful altering of my perceptions that it took discipline and work. Seemingly hard work at times, but pretty damn rewarding work as well. In this next period of becoming drug free, I set about to find out more about how to do what I suspected could be done. I "knew" it could be done. I also "knew" that there were no real specific books or available knowledge as to how it could be done. I also "knew" that almost no one was interested in this shit. Oh sure, as I mentioned in adventure 37 and 38, there were already a plethora of popular books that dealt with alternative ways to "plug into life." These were all those damn cutesy, hokey books that were flooding the American literary market, on subject like Zen, Meditation, Yoga, Sufism, Eastern Religion, Self Help, Gestalt, Casteneda, you name it. But what were all these books saying. Well, none of them really even scratched the surface of what it was really all about: Internal Chemical Alteration. Nope. They called it shit like, "finding god, waking up, turning it over to your higher power, finding out who you were, finding your soul, getting in touch with spirits/angels" etc., etc., etc. Only every now and again was there any hint of the fact that any change a person would experience, was simply just the alteration of the bio-chemical, neural, components of the individual system. This was too simple. It was too "in your face." It was much easier to say that, "you found jesus, or that you were mastering the great Zen technique of "no mind." I already suspected, but didn't totally understand that for reasons that would not become clear until a number of years later, it was just too damn simple to see the whole fucking thing as one big organic chemistry lesson. Perhaps it was too impersonal. Perhaps no one could deal with life on this basis. How much more comforting to think that there was, "a god, a jesus, or a loving compassionate plan to life." Hell, you didn't have to be a religious scholor to see that the perhaps the great questions like, "how come if there is such a companssiate god running the show, how come he/she's not helping us more? How come he isn't saving us?" Perhaps the answer was as simple as, the reason he/she isn't saving us more is because he's too busy killing everyone off!!! Reducing all of it to "chemistry," was insulting. But fuck, I'd been insulted over and over again. Life itself, or death was the ultimate insult. So what was the rub? I wanted to know more. Again, availing myself of the current information that you had to sift through in order to see it, I began another period of experimentation again. I started with the same methods that I'd tried a few years earlier. This was the Mediation, the Yoga, the Zen, the conscious mind control, the aerobics, the health foods. And of course, if you do enough of this shit, it produces an effect. It did produce an effect. I GOT HIGH. I stayed high, most of the time. Without any hard drugs. This in itself was a payoff. No external drugs, but getting stoned anyway. But I wanted something more specific this time. I wanted to see if it was possible to actually produce a specific type of HIGH. For instance, I wanted to see if it were possible to create the effect of Marijuana, LSD, Heroin, Cocaine. Am I a drug addict or what? Even without using these drugs for a while, and even while feeling pretty damn good again, I still wanted those specific effects, albeit without external input. I was getting a lot of mileage out of concentrating and meditating on certain specific things I wanted to do. For instance, if I was having a problem with shyness say, I found that by willfully focusing on it and forcing myself into situations where I had to "deal" with it, I was able to overcome it. The effects of doing this were so intense, that it felt like I had become another person, as it were. The change was so dramatic that in a sense I became a stranger to myself. It was not unlike the way heroin will temporarily fill you with confidence after you do some. WELL IT HIT ME OUT OF THE BLUE, that what was happening, was that I was willfully creating the necessary chemical basis for a lack of shyness. I was able to turn this WILLFUL focusing onto other areas that caused me problems as well, with varying degrees of success. Then I decided I would try to apply this method to "getting high." Specifically I was going to try to reproduce a cocaine high. Could it be done, I asked myself? I found that it could. It took a lot of concentration and effort, but I found that it could damn near be duplicated. Briefly, I would sit in my room and concentrate on the effects of Cocaine. I would "remember" what it was like, sniffing, or shooting the drug into my veins. I would feel myself getting all turned on. I would get sexually aroused, just like I used to just before I actually bought some coke and was about to shoot it up. I would focus on this sexual arousal and immerse myself in it, and sort of spread that sensation throughout my body. The effect was very much like sniffing cocaine. I could not reproduce the "rush" from injecting it, but I could reproduce the effects of sniffing it. Even to the point were I could feel the numbness on my face. This was exciting as all hell. It was so damn exciting that I couldn't wait to get home from work and try it again and again. Oh well, I guess once an addict always an addict, like the all those good recovery programs like to say. And still I didn't fully understand what I was doing. I still didn't realize that I was altering my own chemistry here. Well, I sort of knew it, but I didn't know it in a way that would give me a break through understanding of it. If this sounds a little fuzzy, try to understand how hard it is to try to write about this at all. It just does not translate very well into words. Even if words are the result of internal chemicals like everything else is. So what went wrong, you ask? Why go back to real hard drugs again, after having this much success? Well, I guess I still hadn't mastered the internal chemistry of laziness! Laziness was a personal internal chemical state that was very much "hard wired," in me. Perhaps I could blame, a whole mess o shit on that one. It was going to need another "run," more adventures, more lost understanding, more loss of my "self," before I got a real handle on this most addictive of chemicals: "LAZINESS." So into the chemical soup I go, one more time. Oh well, I guess looked at retrospectively, I can't really cop out and use the internal chemicals that cause (bitching & complaining) to occur. Hell, if it weren't for all of this, I might not have had anything to write about today. Perhaps there's a kind of intelligence to all that occurs in this universe after all. Only it ain't anything like, some outmoded god model that still gets a lot of air play in the worlds major, mainstream religions. Just one persons (chemcial opionion) you know. "Any rock can be made to roll, if you've enough of IT to pay the toll, IT has no home in words or goal, not even in your favorIT hole, IT is hope for the dope, who rides a horse without a hoof, IT is shaken, not stirred, Cocktails on the roof, When you can eat right fruIT, you see everything alive, IT is inside spirIT, with enough grIT to survive, IF you think that IT'S pretentious, You've been taken for a ride, Look across the mirror sonny, Before you choose, de-cide, IT is real, IT is rael. Cause IT'S only knock and knowall but I like IT." From the song "IT," Genesis album, "The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway." Copyright Peter Gabriel, 1977 Copyright Gizmo 1996