What a marvelous way to express oneself, writing on the computer! Not looking at what is being written, and certainly not correcting trivial mistakes at the moment; simply letting things run on without either barriers or editing.
I have been spending some time trying to deduce where in the brain this is operating. What is it that has disconnected me from the known behavior patterns that would allow me to go out into the world and drive and talk to someone and protect myself from somebody else? At the moment, none of these interactions would seem possible. Perhaps I could screw something-or-other together and interact with an attorney about a court case (assuming he was reasonably un-perceptive) and maybe carry it off. I am glad that I need not do so.
But what has opened up with 2C-T-4? I feel in a simultaneous connection with everything outside of myself, in one moment of time that keeps going on and on, and this is a form of universal knowing.
The music playing in the next room is sadly artificial. It has been played and played a million times to the same tired ears, and has assumed the criminal status of background. Something to fill the cavities for the moment, to perhaps stop the incessant internal dialog. I wish to stop the music. Much better. I want the dialog, the monolog, to go on, and to tell me things about myself that only I can know, and that only I should hear.
It is said that with psychedelics one can gain communication from the unconscious. That's only partly right. We have continuous access to these deep, primitive things within us, the survival and instinctual things, with psychedelics or without. It is only a self-inflicted pattern of thought and behavior that keeps us from living all parts of ourselves continuously.
We are taught, really driven, to believe that whatever is in our depths must be kept bound and in its place, in our interactions with ourselves and others, else we are naught but animals.
But we are animals in our exterior, and in every way in our interior. We are continuously in communication with our unconscious; this is the heritage of every cell in the body. So 2C-T-4
does not do anything unexpected or new; it simply reminds us of this continuing interaction.
I want this monolog to continue, as I feel that it can bring up to my conscious mind treasures that are buried within me - knowledge that cannot be articulated - genetic histories that are only read, otherwise, as the silly DNA that means proteins to scientists, separated by miles of what they so charmingly call "nonsense." That our heritage is 5% protein and enzyme, and 95% nonsense, is an incredibly foolish idea. We have evolved for millennia to become what we are today, and we cannot decipher 95% of our heritage just because we have only this scientific certainty that DNA stands for protein and nothing else.
I may be playing with a plus four. There is a simultaneous union with everything around me, and thus with everything within me too. A complete identification with my environment. And a sense of being at total peace with it, as well. If this is me, then I thank the dear Lord for a wonderful awareness, at least for a short time, of the fact that we can be so rich and beautiful.
The mind flows and with it the soul, and no matter what words I put down in an effort to catch the wondrous monolog, I can do it little justice.
But then, as once before (and I was fooled then), I wonder what if this were not the moment, and me, and an extraordinary experience of an extraordinary day, but a property of 2C-T-4?
I have been fooled, again and again, into thinking that the magic of the unified reality was iri the drug, and not in the person. Of course it is in the person - and only in the person - but if a drug could be found that would consistently catalyze this, then it would be one of the most powerful and awesome drugs that could be conceived of by man. If it were this material, 2C-T-4, it would have to be held apart with a reverence that would be impossible to describe or explain in a patent application!! I am going to tour the farm for a minute to check on things.
All is serene. Not so serene - the telephone just rang, with a shrillness completely unexpected. I allowed it to ring itself out, eleven rings, each dutifully counted. Now, silence again.
(4:30) It is now 1:30 p.m.and this is an amazing experience. I'm excited at the thought of having Alice share this with me, and we will allow ourselves a full day, with the freedom not to answer the phone.
The full plus-four is still upon me, a tinge of omnipotence blended with a modest amount of omniscience. I forget what the third omni is, but it's present also.
How can one describe a bliss state, except to say that it is a state that we are all in, whether in pleasure or in pain, awake or asleep, alone or in crowds, and that we are simply too hurried to be aware of it. Or, as said earlier, we've been taught to believe that it is not part of a productive reality, or a "proper" reality, and must not be allowed to intervene in our day-today commerce. More than having been taught to disavow, we have come to actually believe as fact, as gospel, that this bliss-interaction-union state is at best drug-induced, at worst a result of chemical imbalance, and should be left to hippies and other ne'er-do-wells who are naught but cancers on the body social.
But this state is with us at all times. We have sadly learned to tune it out. If this drug can bring this state of unity again in me - and through some miracle in another person - and if this is indeed a property contained in its makeup, then this is truly the most powerful and saintly piece of scripture that could ever be written.
A tour of the body this time. There seems to be no threat from any corner; a good, benign at-peaceness. Pulse 88 and blood pressure 145/95 with good-health sounds. Weight a perennial 200 Ibs. and blood alcohol averaging a perennial 0.05 gram percent. I can't afford either one any more.
On the piano I played a Bach two-part quite well without looking once at my hands! Couldn't do that straight! And I have just helped a wasp escape from the kitchen.
A brisk walk to the road entrance, for the mail. Mind still going a mile a minute, thoughts such as: I hope I don't run into anyone on the walk. Not paranoid so much as not wanting to have my internal flow interrupted. A very significant cattapiuller - how do you spell that monster? -
was moving across the road at the last turn. When I came back, I saw that there were dozens of caterpillars [I looked it up] all over the road, and I felt a gladness that we had not gone after the tent moth nests in the moribund almond tree. In the balance and flow of things, the tree supported the moth-nests (the tent-caterpillar), who in turn mature to moths, who then do something else somewhere else, which in turn helps another almond tree to replace this one. Don't muck with nature. It had eons to establish a working balance before man and his intelligence appeared on the scene to improve things.
Hearing is more acute. I heard children's voices, and checked the perimeter of the Farm again.
Turned out they were way down below the hill.
(5:30) I feel that there has been an astounding amount of integration, and - as with my previous plus-four - a sadness to see things coming together in a way that is socially acceptable again, but there is a sense of indescribable personal wealth that has resulted from the integration of all that internal talk. It is time to start re-shielding myself for eventual public interactions. Tonight is the get-together in Marin County at Walter's house, with Alice's children and our friends, which takes place every two weeks.
In the mail there was a strange and beautiful letter from a young alive chemist in Germany who has found that an antitussive, a cough suppressant called "Isoaminile," at 300 mg has hallucinogenic properties. And since this can be warped into an indole ring that looks like DMT, he wants to make the alpha-methyl analogue, and the psilocybin analog, and thus discover a "new" class of psychotomimetic substances. Of course. This is also a caterpillar. Leave it alone.
I will encourage him, but never direct his way of looking. Somewhere in the balance of things his role, although not yet defined, will be played out.
Coffee tastes terrible to drink, but what else can you do with it?
Back to the letter from Germany. What a s
trange sort of omen, that out of the occupied country of our victory in World War II, appear what seem to be the seeds of a renaissance in awareness, and a naive openness in studying altered states, something quite disallowed in our own FDA-dictated society. Professor S.'s work is continuing, and now this young one.
It is now 3:00 p.m., exactly six hours into the experiment. I am obliged to leave the house in three hours, so I will institute an unwanted but necessary program for reintegration. No, wrong word -1 am integrated as never before. My program is for re-installing the social interfacing skills needed for dealing with others.
(7:00) Back to an honest plus three. (8:00) Still pretty much plus three.
(9:00) Ah, repair occurring for the re-exposure to the outside world; now simply a plus two. (9:20) Have showered, changed clothes and am heading, with great care and love for myself as well as Alice, to pick up David at the hospital for the Marin dinner.
(10:00) At the hospital, still quite aware, though hard to tell the plus-ness. There was no difficulty driving, but maybe still a 1-1 /2 plus.
(15:00) Still residual awareness. Have consumed no alcohol whatsoever, and am quite alert and substantially baseline.
(17:00) Went to sleep without much difficulty.
Next evening, at (36:00) tried a challenge with 30 milligrams of 2C-B, and had only a modest response. Definitely some loss of sensitivity.
An extraordinary and never to be forgotten day.
Final note. Alice took 2C-T-4 with me, at the same dosage level, a few weeks later. We both had a very satisfying plus-3 experience. The plus-4 was not repeated.
CHAPTER 42. LECTURE AT THE UNIVERSITY
(Shura's voice)
For a goodly number of years I have been teaching a class in the Fall, at the University of California, in Berkeley. It is, officially, a toxicology course with both lecture and laboratory, dealing with the analysis of drugs in body fluids with an eye to the preparation of evidence for the courts of law. But some years ago I made a point of writing out all of my lectures, so that they could be read by my students before class, and the actual lecture time could be used in offering additional explanations, or answering questions.
If there were no questions, then the two-hour slot became a rich opportunity to explore any topic I wished to. The consistent underlying theme of these lectures was the excitement of science and of learning. I had been shocked, year after year, by the total distaste that my students had for organic chemistry, which was one of the prerequisites for my class. It apparently had been taught along the lines of, "For next Monday read from pages 134 to 198
in the text and we will have a quiz on the material." They memorized reactions and mechanisms, struggled through the exams, promptly forgot everything that had been memorized, and never took the second year course. They hated it.
So I would try to present chemistry as an art form, rather than as a science. Why are sugars usually white? Why don't food additives ever have smells? Make a guess as to how some interesting drug might change in the body? How would you explain chromatography to a jury with no scientific background?
And sometimes I would be on a particular kick, and the whole time would be devoted to a single subject that I felt deserved emphasis. Recently just such an occasion arose, and I presented the following lecture to my fifteen or so undergraduate students. I know that I have been scheduled to use this time to build up a picture of the how's and where's of drug action in the brain. It has been listed as a lecture on the pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics of centrally active compounds. But I am going to exercise one of the precious freedoms allowed me as a professor -1 am going to change the topic, and make it a lecture on politics and government.
In fact, I am going to talk to you about our freedoms in general, and about the loss of certain of these freedoms under the shameful excuse of waging a war on drugs.
Our form of government is known as a constitutional republic. The federal structure was established by the signing of the Constitution, some ten years following our Declaration of Independence from England, and many of our present inalienable freedoms were explicitly guaranteed by the passage of the first ten amendments to our Constitution, the Bill of Rights, some four years later. These freedoms - of speech, of the press, and of the practice of religion, our protection against unreasonable searches and seizures, the rights of anyone accused of a crime to know the nature of the accusation and to be judged by an impartial jury - these are the bedrock of our nation and are integral to our national way of life.
This Bill of Rights is continuously being challenged, largely through the enactment of laws by Congress which have been written without sufficient thought as to whether they might endanger or restrict basic freedoms. The function of the Supreme Court has always been to serve as a safeguard against the enforcement of laws which do not respect the Constitution, but it has become increasingly clear that we can no longer rely on this protection.
There are other freedoms that we retained from England, even when declaring our independence from her. England has never had a written constitution; rather, there has been a structure based largely on a few remarkable acts of reform such as the Magna Carta. From these collective acts came our concepts of habeas corpus (of what am I accused) and of trial by jury (by whom shall I be judged), both now embodied in the sixth amendment to the Constitution.
There are three most important freedoms that are part of this heritage which were never included in our Constitution, but which have nevertheless been a foundation of our national self-image. These are the presumption of innocence, the right to privacy, and freedom of inquiry. These are being rapidly eroded. Also, one hears more and more voices declaring that the relinquishing of these traditional rights is of little importance, as long as the national purpose is thereby achieved. The stated national purpose, at the moment, is the winning of the so-called War on Drugs. In the future, it may take the form of a war against some other threat to our national security - that phrase has worked before, and it can be counted on to work again - and the restoration of the lost rights and freedoms will simply not take place; at least, not in our time, nor in the time of our children or grandchildren.
We must act by ourselves - those of us who are aware of what is happening - either as individuals or collectively, to demand restoration of what has been taken away, and to prevent further losses.
Laws are born as concepts, but must be recorded as the written word when finally put into effect. And the exact interpretation of some of those words depends to a considerable extent upon current popular usage and understanding of their meanings. Since there cannot be complete consensus as to some definitions, there will remain a certain degree of ambiguity. I will examine a few examples of recent shifts in the manner in which such ambiguities are being handled, if not exactly resolved.
Consider the basis for the determination of innocence or guilt of a person who, as a potential defendant, has fallen under official scrutiny because of some accusation. In the past, the accusation had to be stated as a formal complaint, an arrest had to be made, and the task of providing evidence to support the charge was the province of the plaintiff, usually the people.
In a case where the crime is a felony (one which can be punished by a stay in a Federal prison), guilt must be proven beyond a reasonable doubt. Doubts are obviously challenges to presented evidence, but for heaven's sake, what is meant by "reasonable?" It has evolved in legal practice that what this means is that a jury unanimously agrees that no doubt remains in their minds as to an accused person's guilt. This is the criterion that must be met to convict someone of such a crime.
However, in the current madness involving drugs and violation of drug laws, it is no longer necessary to convene a jury or - for that matter - to even bring a charge, in order to hurt and punish someone suspected of having been involved in drug-related activity. Only the thinnest of evidence, far short in quantity or quality of what would be necessary to obtain a verdict of "guilty, beyond a reasonable doub
t" in a courtroom is now regularly used to "get" the suspected wrongdoer.
If you are a person in authority, you now don't have to confront the suspected wrongdoer; you confront his possessions, instead. Accuse his bank account of being the result of illegal activity, and seize it. Accuse his truck of having transported illegal drugs, and confiscate it. Accuse his house of having been bought with cocaine dollars, and take it from him. This is a move from criminal procedures to civil procedures. Such a person, invested with the power of the law, can decide that your car, your boat, your lower twenty acres of pasture land, have been associated with the commission of a drug-related crime. He can and will seize this car (boat, land), invoking the mechanisms of civil forfeiture, and you can't do a thing about it. By association with a crime, it is meant that the seized item was used in the commission of a criminal act, or that it was obtained as the result of a criminal act.
All of the above acts on the part of the authorities are possible without any jury findings whatsoever; in fact, without a trial of any kind having been held.
Our protection against civil forfeiture was also part of our British heritage of common law, and it had been steadfastly respected here in the United States since the time of the founding fathers. But it was dissolved in 1978 by Congress, with the passage of the Psychotropic Substances Act. That law must be withdrawn.
These acts of confiscation follow the criterion of "a preponderance of evidence."
Consider that phrase, "preponderance of evidence." The first thought that comes to mind is that the word, "preponderance," suggests an excess or a superiority of evidence. That is what the dictionary says, but that is not its common usage in the courts. In legal usage, a relationship (say, between your car and illegal drugs) is established as being valid by a preponderance of evidence if it is deemed more likely, on the basis of the available evidence, to be valid than not valid. In other words, the connection is at least 51% valid. The decision that no additional evidence need be sought, can be made by one person, by one judge, even by one single policeman. Thus, the quality of proof can be miniscule.
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