michael-dean-k/

Frigid in the machine-cooled nursery I look out over the low-rise sprawl of roofs and canopies and see what I remember as and now call the pom pom tree, a sole trunk towering above treelines and wires, with wooden skeleton hands reaching up and into the blue, yet skewering only through shaggy green balls, the poms, again sighted all from this nursery, a mysterious one, for I walk down that main boulevard every afternoon but never notice poms for they glide above the sight lines of the side-walk, and so here, and so now, observing this dying thing suspended 30 feet above the town, the village of floating spheres, home to ticks and ants and loraxes I'm sure, it reminds me of what I saw yesterday, those Lesser Poms east of home at ground level, where that Japanese landscaper with her hedgeclippers existed in that only moment I'll ever know her, whom I said hello awkwardly, who did not see the unattended child of an aloof mother when he snuck an empty wrapper into her bush, or so I thought I saw and double-taked and daydreamed of moralizing him, and this is what I think as I type into my Oracle, who incorrectly diagnoses the disease of this pom tree as witches broom. Witches Broom? No Claude, no, this is not a clot of bird twigs, and so I sent it a pictures and then it tells me, ah, of course, Verticillium Wilt, and that seems still wrong but slightly closer to the truth, for it does look like this tree is losing its vascular system unevenly, and yet even more true because it resembles my own numb arm, an uneven vascular, where my daughter's heavy head—her 86th-percentile head—pinches my ulnar nerve for hours of unclocked time each day as I read pre-Socratic philosophers from ebooks and remember the times I had to be investigated in expensive offices where fast-talking doctors lathered my arms in jelly and shot electricity through them but could diagnose me no better than my pseudo-Oracle despite their graduate degrees, and now I look down and imagine my arm itself as the naked pom tree, with only scant patches of flesh and tissue over fully exposed forearm bone, and there it is that ulnar nerve in plain sight, and I see it black and dying and in need of a clip, if only to release that black astral voodoo I acquired from weak composure in an equitorial skirmish, and if only I could find and cop a clip from that landscaper who I will surely never notice again despite she herself is a walking distance mystery who will yet never step foot into this refrigerated machine-cooled nursery.

10:12 AM: Wow. Through a visual meditation in the park, I experienced a full erasure of perspective, and my perception was only this massive flat 2D panel of color, patterns, and light (abstracted from the 3D perspective of the park). Will write more on this later.

11:18 AM: After I drop my wife off at the train, I take a half-mile walk in the nearby park. This was day 3, and also, my third attempt to try to naturally hallucinate (see older logs). Day 1 was something like a mystical experience; Day 2 was a dud—possibly because I tried a different spot; and so Day 3 I’ve returned to the original location. An open question: can you do some [ perceptual-hacks / visual-meditations / (not sure what to call this) ] in any location, or is it that certain vantage points have a perception that can mess with your consciousness if you look at it right?

To summarize in one sentence, two days ago I found myself in “flat land,” meaning that while staring into a park, for about five minutes, my entire perspective collapse into a flat, complex, oscillating 2D texture. 

Today, from the same spot, I only got halfway there, but far enough to form a better thesis: the location matters, and there’s a particular way of looking. First, I need to step off the path and into the grass, because otherwise the path will be in my peripherals and it will be harder to unlatch from my default frame (I really need to work on my vocabulary around this). Anyways, I’d describe what I was doing with my eyes as a kind of “parallel processing”: I’d fixate my gaze at a point in the background, while simultaneously trying to expand my peripherals, horizontally and vertically. 

It takes several attempts, with subtle approaches on how to focus, refocus, and break focus. In the process there are some neat effects, such as changes in color and brightness, as well as wave-like oscillations (that I imagine are normal on a mushroom trip). But the particular effect of interest has something to do with contrast.

Maybe my working theory is this: by adjusting the contrast to extreme degrees, it actually alters your depth perception. For example, from this vantage point, with a normal gaze, you’d see a bunch of trees cascading from foreground to background. But when I tap into some focusing drill that seems to adjust contrast, if I follow it down, it’s almost like the leaves and their patterns (with shadow & light), come into such focus, that the trees (the main “object” creating depth perception) seem to disappear.

And this is I think the “secret” of this location. The foreground, the field, is full of leaves, but also, the background has trees still in the canopy. So basically, by adjusting the contrast, and creating a new gestalt that’s optimizing for leaf patterns, it can become so strong and overpowering, that the trees diminish in their hierarchy, until they practically evaporate, overpowered by pattern. The fact that this pattern was both in my foreground and background, paired with the trees losing all hierarchy, might explain why it felt like I was suspended in a 2D plane.

The adult mind will frequently run into psychological dead-ends, points where no more evolution is possible within an existing frame, and so growth requires you to descend into chaos, to regress down the stack, in search of new directions forward, in hope of carrying some insights from old frames with you.

I don’t know if “growth” is the right word here, and “evolution” feels off to me, but it’s something like the advancement in harmony or complexity in your sense of identity, purpose, and responsibility. The moment that freezes, it’s as if you’re cut off from the core point of the human experience.

Whether you should take psychedelics, I think, is a matter if you can reliably dissolve frames on your own. If not, maybe you don’t quite need them; I imagine there is wonder, mystery, and value in the aesthetic phantasmagoria, and all sorts of things to learn from terrible trips of demons and such, but the main point might be the new directions they point you in.

Whether you descend abruptly or gently, assisted or natural, there is a natural fear of psychological death, and so to “descend into chaos” requires a trust that you’ll figure out how and where to swim.

It would be cliche and misleading to say today's park walk was "ego death," but surely it felt like a "pause" or a "lapse." It felt like a lucid dream, in that there was a remembered peace in irreality. Irreality, in this sense, I’d describe as a disassociation from the egoic frameworks that have had a strong hold over my walking life in recent weeks; instead, I felt an immersion in nature that felt mysterious. Like an animal, today, tomorrow, yesterday were fuzzy; all social and chronological constructions were, temporarily, erased. By saying it was “mysterious,” I think I mean that I felt the emotional power of a particular moment in a way that escaped classification, and so it has this effect of being suspended in outside the normal stream of the cradle-to-grave arc.

I’m watching a squirrel on a tree; specifically, it’s instinct to structurally brace itself against a wind gust. It is frozen alert, flat, legs wide, arms narrow, neck up at 30 degrees. It looks stuffed. Fake. Is it in fear or wonder or maybe just loving the breeze? Is it scared of the pongs from the pickleball courts, or curious about the strange spherical nuts curving through air, a sport played by millennials and elders on a Friday? I see it swallow, it’s tail fuzz blowing, attached to a white belly with orange at the ears and the edges of the eyes. I step closer and closer, until I can see the glass in its eyes. I look away for one second, look back, and it’s gone. A brown sock hops away through the leaves again, rummaging across the concrete to find another tree.

Last night I hallucinated trees and nature scenes as I was going to bed, which makes sense because we did a short two-hour hike in the PNW yesterday. This happened last time I was here (at Mt. Shasta), and probably happens after every hike (I think, but the two most lucid times happened to be in the pacific northwest). The visions were bright, lucid, and shifting every 5 seconds to a completely formed photo-realistic scene. I guess this is hypnogogic imagery. Or hyperphantasia? My guess is that, when the brain is immersed in a complex environment, it creates a strong impression on the visual/auditory cortex, and then when you switch to a dark environment, it’s still firing. (Fatigue/endorphins might contribute too?). Sometimes after parties or museum, I will hallucinate ambient chatter as I fall asleep.

Thought from an anarchist book store in Seattle: to be against hierarchy is to misunderstood nature. Is most of nature not a vast nothingness pierced with monuments of beauty? What about the food chain? Even our very perceptual systems have hierarchies.

Your life is composed of thousands of overlapping hierarchies, and in each you exist at different points in it. Consider where you stand as a parent, vs. where you stand in geopolitical conflict. I think “progress” is when the average person has mobility to shift between hierarchies and then, gain skills or do whatever they need to exist within or climb up the hierarchy they want. What we need is cognitive liberty: the awakening of mind to the degrees of freedom around you, and the opportunities possible within your single life.

Instead, social justice seems fixed on this myth of a monohierarchy that dominates everything. Of course bad hierarchies exist, but those are most likely out of your scope. Even if you protested Gaza, and got 50k people to join you, and even persuaded some high-level politicians, you still likely won't change anything. Consider the opportunity cost of those 50k people not focusing on what they’re uniquely capable of doing because they are distracted by mob politics.

Futurists fear that robots and AIs will terraform and harvest the world, but it already feels eerie and unnatural to see midwestern fields carved out into perfect grids. It is as alien as crop circles, but more terrifying and less creative. Perfect 90 degree angles. It is brute order and dull patterns; a metallic fishnet over the midriff of America. I’d be surprised if there weren’t good reasons for this, but it is spooky in its orthagonality. FWIW, I am pro-grid; a grid-head FFS. But the grid to me is an invisible structure to guide the creation of complex, organic, natural forms, not the form itself, disappearing into the edges of sight.