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this is a tough area for me..
on the one hand, i learned alot from my passage through hallucinogens when i was a mere sprat.
on the other, i fucked up at one point and lost about year.
the material world, especially when understood through a frame of bourgeois common sense, is a diminished and uninteresting place. the world is an accumulation of things and nothing else. things can be manipulated in a superficial manner through varying levels of skill.
hallucinogens can be a device to show that these limitations obtain.
but i can't say they're necessary--but i can't say they aren't or rather weren't for me because my trajectory included them.
so i don't know.
where i think they've influenced me most is in soundwork.
but they didn't get me to whatever this place i work from is.
that just took practice, persistence and openness.
but i think they played a role in shaping what i understand working with sound to be and what it can do--how it affects me, how it can affect others. it also had something to do with the synesthetic functions that organize sound--but i don't think they come from hallucinogens, nor did my experiences do much to shape them in the longer run--at most, they helped me accept that synesthetic patterns are normal. and they are--everyone uses cross-sensory modes of organizing sense data, but their thinking ABOUT how they organize that sense data tends to erase it.
anyway. i can't say. i don't think they're a magic key. i think they can show you stuff you otherwise would block out, for better or worse. i think they can allow you to skip steps, both for better and for worse. you can get lost out there. you can fuck up. it's not all paisley and incense.
i don't think it is necessary a great idea to skip steps--but you can only determine that for yourself once you skip them.
but mostly, i don't think that putting a hallucinogen into your system will make you anything other than what you already are at that time--you'll just see more of it--and you may not like what you see. i don't think it makes you into a potentially "great" person--it can just as easily make you dysfunctional.
thinking that you can eat something and become part of some inward elite is just consumerist horseshit stood on its head.
but i wouldn't recommend or discourage anyone from taking them.
skipping steps doesn't mean that there are therefore no steps--it generally means that (a) you wont understand what you might otherwise have understood--but that doesn't mean it isn't important to encounter what you won't understand and (b) you might have trouble getting back.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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