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sychedelics in general — acid, mushrooms, DMT — often make reality feel fractal. Any small question is a metaphor for the fundamental life struggles, my personal life a reflection of humanity’s fate, and so on. It is both disorienting and, at times, very funny.

Summer 2014; I am loaded on LSD and lost in a forest somewhere between a poor generically-named Russian village, an abandoned summer camp with Soviet frescos, a trance festival with a camping site, and cabins for rent for rich Muscovites.

The trance thing has in its belly my brother, his car, and a tent in its trunk; also, loud shitty music and fiends of different types — some are into psychedelics and yoga, others, it seems, vodka and meth. The village is a haven of simplicity: still, quiet air, chatter of old women on a bench, laughter of children playing in the dirt, soothing cadence of a low-key family fight from an open window; also, no chance of finding a place to sleep and a high chance of getting into a misunderstanding with the villagers. The summer camp is a useless, fenced ghost of the Soviet past. The rich folks’ territory is very comfortable, very expensive to rent, and is overall perceived as a bastion of sinister in its out-of-place well-being bourgeoisie.

This amounts, on the one hand, to a basic logistical challenge: where do I want to go and how do I get there? Is there a way to both find a place to sleep and avoid any annoying or dangerous interactions?

On a different level, it represents the cross-roads of my life, drifting into adulthood. I find myself in a middle of several intersecting worlds and societies: I’m both a Russian and a foreigner; neither rich nor poor; equally intrigued and appalled by the decadent / spiritually hungry drug culture; tempted by and afraid of the comfortable, tone-deaf existence of “young professionals.” Well, so — where do I go? Is there a way to both make a living and deliver myself from evil?

This also is an obvious metaphor for my country’s traumatized, scattered psyche. There’s the Soviet myth, pretty in its coffin and disastrous if resurrected; the poor, depressed reality of small towns; the hipster party politics of successful Muscovites… this kind of thinking could go on forever, applying itself to any subset of the human experience, the life of the global society or even the universe itself — and I still didn’t know which direction to go. As I said: acid turns everything into a metaphor for everything else.

At that particular junction, I solved the equation by pulling a Buddha — sat under a pine-tree and swore not to get up until answers emerge. It took some time, but produced some helpful insights for future reference and brought me home to Moscow just a few hours later.

This story is my way to justify the all-over-the-place style of my DMT notes. This being an attempt to solve a fractal puzzle, the keys I was trying had to be fractal too.

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C

ultures find different ways to address the limitations of language in light of the ineffable.

In Judaism and Christianity, the true name of God is considered a great secret, and there’s an additional ban on taking it in vein. (As Leonard Cohen sang, “You say I took the name in vein — but I don’t even know the name!”) Islam further prohibits visual depictions of God and the prophet. This is, in its way, reasonable: any image of God will be false, and then what happens if people mix up the image and what it’s supposed to stand for? They’ll end up worshiping a false god.

A different way to go about this, often utilized by Eastern traditions, is to describe what the ultimate reality isn’t instead of hopelessly trying to say what it is. This is like looking for a sculpture in a block of marble, removing what the sculpture is not piece by piece: the Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao; the name that can be named is not the eternal name.

Finally, there is the mythological approach of a story-teller: he makes up stories, each approaching the unnameable from their own side; the hope is these imperfect tales, taken together, will point the audience in the right direction while keeping them entertained.

Myself, I like that last one best.

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ne of my favorite Russian stories — Venedict Yerofeev’s “Walpurgis Night, or the Steps of the Commander” — starts with a questioning of an alcoholic upon his admission to a mental facility. The protagonist, trying to describe his condition, goes through a whole list of metaphors, including:

It’s like you’re engaged to somebody… but to whom, when and why — God knows… As if you’re occupied, and for a good reason, in full accordance with the pact of mutual assistance and close friendship, but occupied nevertheless…

And then:

You know… like in the step-mother’s womb…

This feeling is not unique to alcoholics (though I can see how it can become a reason for self-medication). Schools of thought from all over the world have been trying to name this quality of life and find a way to exorcise it for millenia.

The Abrahamic tradition considers it a kind of punishment for the original screw-up and puts the blame on the man — or rather, the woman — themselves. We had it all in God’s perfect garden, but lost it to our pride and unchecked curiosity; nostalgia for Eden, guilt for the fall, and the search for salvation are central to the Western culture, even as it grows more and more secular.

Gnostics played with the Hebrew myth, placing the disaster earlier in the story. To them, it all went wrong when Sofia, wisdom, conceived a desire to know the Unknowable Father — a pretty good rhyme to what Eve did in the original tale, except no guilt or punishment are involved. Sofia’s desire was futile and only resulted in what has been described as a miscarriage, which we later get to know as the God of the Old Testament, the flawed demiurge that wasn’t even supposed to exist. Human souls — sparks of the divine light — are now trapped in his evil world of matter, and it doesn’t feel great. In this tradition, salvation is replaced with liberation through secret knowledge, or Gnosis.

The ever-so-rational Buddhists with their goal-oritented approach skip all the mythology completely. They refer to this pain as duhkha, the ultimate unsatisfactoriness of life. It too comes from desire: craving for and clinging to what is pleasurable and aversion to what is not pleasurable. The Buddhist way to liberation is well-described in numerous manuals and is known as the Noble Eightfold Path.

The DMT flash, with its stark call to join the party, provided me with a personal interpretation of this broken feeling.

I felt its presence every time I got too scared to immerse myself in the creation, though my uncertainty did not pause the process even for a moment, just made it less intense. I don’t think stopping it is even possible: taking in the sensory input and constructing worlds on its basis is the primary function of our mind, we do it awake and asleep. The closest thing we can do when creation gets tiresome is what we do all the time: simply forgetting that we are authoring the world with every breath, thought, and feeling.

The disconnect from God that pains a Christian; the original ignorance Gnostics tried to get rid of; the suffering of Buddhists — these seem like different ways to describe an artist’s — the Creator’s — loss of inspiration. An uninspired artist is an artist no more.

When God forgets her nature, she ends up in a godless world.

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he archetype of DMT, it’s been said, is that of a circus.

It’s a delight! A space that’s filled with magic, mystery and celebration, with a whole crew of freaks and clowns and characters you haven’t seen before all working together to put on a special presentation for you. But it is not just about dancing animals and cheerful music; right under the very high dome, there’s a tight rope reaching from one side of the building to the other, and a girl in a small dress is going to cross it — or not. There’s no safety net. She’s beautiful, gracious, and in direct and deadly danger.

A psychonaut takes a similar risk of walking on the edge of her mind, and should have the same degree of courage and focus as the lady in the show.

I wander into the carnival like a child, eyes wide open and ticket in hand. I know I’ll be able to get on a ride, see the bearded woman and the pretty gymnast, maybe get a Tarot reading — all this, to an extent, is expected; but as I see the inviting, familiar faces of freaks and magicians, I am reminded of my own part in the drama.

If life is a traveling circus, then I am the kid who grew up with the carnies.

This is exciting, but there’s also a certain weight to it, a responsibility a carny should feel towards his craft. What is my craft again?

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If all of life is artistic expression of the underlying message of the universe — and the message itself is ineffable — can an artist ever get it right?

I think she can get it right-ish.

On a different acid-fueled evening, I was listening to the band Shpongle, trying to put my finger on what it is that bothers me about their music: it’s beautifully layered, engaging, enjoyable etc., and yet something scratched at my soul as I listened to their Museum of Consciousness. Maybe it’s the museum part that nagged at me — it seemed that the whole purpose of their art is to provide a way for the consciousness to look at itself and admire its own beauty. As Greeks warned with the myth of Narcissus, this type of thinking can turn a perfectly healthy human into a corpse first and a flower later.

Beauty’s not enough for me, I thought; deprived of meaning, it feels like a simplification of the fundamental message of life, made for the sake of pleasure. This rang true for a second, until my mind took another step away from the linguistic reality we ordinarily inhabit. I stared at the words beauty and meaning in my notebook. They seemed pretty empty, especially when applied to something as abstract as music. These words are just pointers to something felt, but unnamed. When I say a music track is beautiful but meaningless, I’m really saying “It has a ring of truth to it, but there’s more to the story; it is not true enough.”

What happened is I compared Shpongle’s take on what’s going on to mine. They didn’t match and they didn’t enrich each other. That’s a relationship you want to end before it gets awkward.

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cience is a great way to use language for understanding and manipulating matter. Art does the same for consciousness. Both are imperfect, because there is no perfect language: neither English, nor math, nor music would qualify.

All language is a human-made, simplified projection of logos onto our lives. Our cumbersome symbolic frameworks won’t allow us to say what lies at the center of being — but we can use symbols, like the ying-yang, the uroboros, or a triangle; words, like beauty and meaning and love; or even formulas, like E=mc^2, to point in its direction.

Writing, drawing, music, media, science, political and social organization, conversation, community building, religious structures — all of these are just genres we use to try to express the felt truth at the core of existence. This is all that culture and the universe itself ever do: all of history from long before language to now is the interplay between the creative forces that carry the message further and death erasing some of this multiplicity from the board.

Behind this all is a creative impulse, a desire to make something appear out of nothing, like a rabbit from a magician’s hat. That’s how the world appeared at the Big Bang; that’s how our thoughts emerge; and in a way, that’s all there has ever been.

Our job is to fish for ideas that are good, true and beautiful, and then provide them with a way to exist in the world we share with each other. Whether these ideas relate to our private lives, the life of the community, or the very reality we inhabit, this must be done with inspiration, skill and artistic integrity.

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wrote these notes to think through the experience, but also to provide half a dozen of friends (and any number of future acquaintances) with information and entertainment. Here is one last technical detail which has been true for all of my DMT trips so far.

I’ve noticed that the imagery of the trip is heavily influenced by the last thing the traveller sees before taking off: in my case, a friend’s giggling face found a reflection in the character of an eflic fool; a South American ritual mask hanging on my wall defined the color and emotional palette of the second trip; and on another occasion, a candle light became a burning golden ball of energy / philosopher’s stone at the center of the experience.

If this is a common pattern, we could use it to come up with all kinds of fun, scary and useful rituals — somebody has to. Right?

This article has been published in volume XVI of Psychedelic Press UK.