From: pez@manhattan.com (Gizmo) Subject: The Adventures Of Smacks Past (Part 44) Stepping Inside The Neural Network Date: 1996/12/06 newsgroups: alt.drugs.hard THE ADVENTURES OF SMACKS PAST (PART 44) Stepping Inside The Neural Network I've made a lot of noise throughout this "adventure series," to the effect that the only reason people use drugs, alcohol, __________, fill in the blank, is to change their inner state. To have some direct, immediate effect over the neural hard wiring that by the time you hit your mid-teens seems pretty well established. That is, you just can't change that sucker in any permanent or radical way except for relatively short, periodic moments in the time and space that make up our lifetime. The "Adventures Of Smacks Past," brought me through a myriad of neat, harrowing, exciting, discovery filled experiences that always had an underlying theme running throughout. "How in gods name, was it possible to enter and stay in a wider, better, more euphoric, more comprehensive state?" Surely it seemed there had to be something better than Heroin, Cocaine and the like. Wonderful as these drugs are to those of us who like them, the price was way to high the further you went down that road. Nor was the world of good old sobriety exactly what I was looking for either. This theme led me to the "meeting" at 7:00 P.M. that Thursday night in 1985. As I related in my last story, we were about to start watching the video that was being presented to the New York group. I'll try to list my earliest impressions of that "talk." As I stated in the opening paragraph of this story, the talk centered on the fact that everyone, no matter who they are or where they live, hits a kind of internal cooling off by the time they reach their mid to late teens. Of course there are some variances, but by and large, more or less, by the time you reach age 20, it's over! This idea, while not being new to me at the time, still hit me like a cosmic two by four. It rang of too fatalistic a world view of life. "If that's true, then what the hell is point in trying to do anything at all? Why bother to attempt anything that looked like self-improvement?" Plus I found a lot of voices in myself that wanted to disagree with this. Then and later I started to look around. I started to observe people that I'd known, and those that I would get to know later. Over and over again, as repugnant as this idea was, it continued to have a ring of truth. It's not to say that this is an open and shut case. It's not to say that we don't continue to add things to our lives past age 20. It's just that if you look at what's out there, in terms of people you know, from the most educated, to your average blue collar worker types, there is a certain something that's finished by a certain age. The old adage, "that people just don't change," might give you some idea of what I'm trying to convey. Another way to look at this idea, is to contrast the "world of infinite possibilities" that almost everyone feels more often than not when they are in their pre-teens. It seems that the sky is the limit, and that you could do almost anything, or you could be almost anyone you wanted to be. That energy is what makes life pulse. It's what makes life super hot and super exciting. Than although we can blame it on education, upbringing, genetics, environment etc., the bottom line is that eventually, the molten hot passion of those early years starts to cool off. The rest of the tape went into the idea that although this was a "reality," it did not have to be that way for someone who had the hunger, knew to some extent what hotter circuits felt like, and were willing to make the unnecessary efforts needed to melt down the neural hard wiring that with each passing year was entrapping us more and more. I immediately started noticing an analogy to the TC, (Therapeutic Community) I had recently graduated from. There, in the TC, the whole program was geared toward getting a substance abuser to reach a new level of functioning that would lead them out of the world of heroin and drug addiction, into the ordinary world where you dealt with things in the more so-called socially accepted manner. There, you were learning to expand your options, to stretch your envelope, to become bigger than the narrow world of staying stoned that you were previously engaged with. And now here I was listening to a talk that was not directed to ex-drug abusers. Here was a talk directed toward so-called normal adult men and woman, who sort of viewed the ordinary world of life's possibilities as being somewhat limited, but who wanted something more. Many of them had been engaged in one type of effort or another before they met up with this and many of them had "tastes" of what was possible. Here was information being presented on the nature of internal transformation without all the usual syrupy, soapy, spiritual, gloss that usually permeated stuff of this type. Here the information was straight forward and direct. "The universe of possibilities" was right inside your own damn brain. It was written into the neural wiring inside your body. Another neat thing was that this information had no name. It was not something that fell into the either "this or that" category. And yet it made use of and encompassed a lot of other streams of information that we've all heard of before. It gets very hard to write about this because I don't want to destroy to chance of conveying the impact that it had on each one of us who were tuning into it. As far as unnecessary efforts, one of the first ones that was conveyed that night was called the "don't stare" method. At first blush, this may seem like nothing to extraordinary, but upon trying to put it into practice it very soon became apparent that it was like just about everything in the universe was going to conspire to make sure that you wouldn't be able to do this. "Don't Stare." That's it, just look around, don't stare fixedly at anything. The information was that if you stop and take notice, even your eyes are geared to stare. It's not natural for us to just gaze, in a more wide open manner. Watch your vision. Notice how even if your looking out over a landscape, your attention is narrowed down to one small segment of what's possible to see. Without moving your eyes, try to bring into view the stuff that's being picked up by your peripheral vision. And this is just an example of the visual, optical reality of staring. Of course the real money in this exercise was internal, mentally if you will. Watch your internal mental/emotional landscape. What does it normally do? It fucking stares. It stares at first this, then that. It stares at "problems, worries, old dramas, future dreams, etc." Try and jar it from it's present fixation. Try and do it for say, ten minutes. It's a bitch. The ability to "not stare," took on wider and wider meaning as time went by. By "not staring," you were able to take in more and more of a much wider universe, than what you took in when you were in your normal state. In fact, the experience was not unlike a good LSD trip, in which you can actually notice that part of the reason the experience can be so damn pleasurable is because you are soaking up more and more of the total available input that's right there in front of everyone, but which normally we experience very little of. It could be likened to a radio or TV receiver that has the possibility of bringing in many different stations or channels but which only functions by bringing in one of them at a time. Well, the receiver in our head is worse than the one in your living room, because not only will it only bring in one station at a time, but in addition, if you observe the damn thing at all, YOU don't have any choice in the matter! Really. One minute you're sucked into listening to or watching a memory of yesterday, and the next minute you're sucked into watching a desire to screw your neighbors wife. A day later, your watching a thought about how you really should quit shooting Cocaine. And so it goes. Out of control as it were. Well, sort of. Actually it's under great control, it's just not YOUR control. The effort to "not stare," puts a certain kind of willful control back into your own hands. This and other type of efforts can shake up the system enough that NEW stuff can start happening. And that's what I was looking for. New stuff. As the next few weeks passed I continued to immerse myself in this NEW information. I felt like I had finally met up with some folks that shared a similar interest and at the same time were sane. This last one is a big one in this business, cause it's almost an occupational hazard for there to naturally be some very weird types of people attracted to stuff like this. But the very straight forward, in your face, stripped down nature of the information seemed to keep the terminally strange ones away, as I came to find out. Copyright Gizmo 1996