vitamin k

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Agent 86 and I were together apart for nearly twenty years. He ran a big logging company. He was a world class artist. He made lots and lots of money. He has bipolar disorder. He drinks more high test rum than it would take to drop a herd of elephants, and three times that much when he's having an episode, but it has only become a bad problem in recent years. It never fazed him visibly until lately. Now it makes him seriously sick but he can't seem to help himself, and has gone off to drink himself to death I know not where.

He was a heroin addict for a while many years before I met him. Kicking heroin is not hard, contrary to the hype. You get really sick, like a bad case of the flu, for about three days. Then you just wish you felt that okay about everything again for the rest of your life. 86 didn't have to deal with the ugly three days because a friend loaded him up with ketamine to blast him out of it. He stayed space traveling and spreading good will to the far reaches of the galaxy for about a week, and when he returned there were no withdrawal pains. Too bad he doesn't do it for the booze gig. The world has lost a most outstanding soul.

The first of the many times he got too crazy and had to run off on me -- he couldn't stand being nuts around me, embarrassed him too much -- he decided I needed to know what he meant about ketamine before he split. He shot me up with a nice dose of it and... oh... my... god... enlightenment lurks behind ketamine. I don't care how many birdbrained kids get off on it and don't learn a thing, for those who will know, the knowledge is there... something to take away, to never forget, to live up to in your stone cold sober walking around life. It's identical to what Jill took away from her stroke. It doesn't have to be ketamine.

It doesn't have to be any of the "hallucinogens" shamans use for their rites either. Fundamentally, one is not hallucinating. That's just what you call it. I think it's a good experience to have because it makes it more probable you will get the clue from whatever enlightenment school you choose, and it's not as dangerous as a stroke. If you are not disposed to do the work, to go down that path, recreational, or "medicinal", ketamine trips are just more of the greedy indulgences of overfed American hypocrites, no matter how hotly you protest it is for your religion or your spiritual practice. Full stop. You can't get around staring down your id. It is monsterly no fun and your ego will insist your life is at stake, when it is really only your ego doing the dying. Your ego will be waiting faithfully on the other end of your ketamine binge, the fatter for the experience. So if you have even a part of an inclination that drug trips make one more spiritually aware, that someone who does any of these shamanic drugs is any kind of a teacher, you are most lethally deluded. There is no place a drug can take you that you cannot go -- with intention and with control -- without it. Full stop.

I know the stuff comes in different forms and strengths and so you are not necessarily laid all the way out for the duration, but you ought to be, and you ought to leave it at just the once or thrice... unless you're kicking heroin... or booze... or some other medical reason for it. My major gripe with the shamanic traditions is that they are cheating, taking the easy way that does NOT involve the perfection of any perfections, the perfection of being. They are generally nearly completely devoid of ethics. High fallutin' dopers. NOT here to save all sentient beings, or whatever term your school uses, not in it for the good of life itself, but here to make a party out of their own lives, and those they choose to initiate. Not good enough. Not going to cut it. Worse than a waste of time for any sincere person who happens into their orbit.

So I've been linking sometimes to someone who seems to have some idea of the imperatives of enlightening being... pretty glad to have happened upon his stuff actually... until the other day. He'd stopped posting for a while, but he started up again to the relief of a lot of people. Turns out his hiatus was about a bad depression. Turns out he'd gotten the energy to blog again with the idea he could cast about for a supply of ketamine from one of his many readers. So the guy is a dilettante, in it to feed his ego and his id, while purporting to be on a path quite more transcendent than that. Damn.

I note today he's done a little judicious editing and deleting of telltale comments, but the cat is out of the bag. I'd already figured out that he was struggling badly with the mundane pitfalls, but hadn't realized he was so far from real understanding he'd feel entitled to ride out his depression on ketamine. No. No. You have to get here with intention. You cannot slide back to feeding your id when shit doesn't go your way, whenever your mind takes a hankering to lose all interest in everything except despair over your unhappiness. Enlightenment is about transcending one's enslavement to things like neurochemicals, and in fact gives you quite a lot to combat them or function despite them. Every resort to ketamine is evidence that you have no intention of actually manifesting positive intent; you just want to talk about it and do drugs.

There is no pill for it, no elixir for it, no injection for it. A wizard can free you for an hour or a day. A drug can do the same. Enlightening being demands the work. No getting around it. I could go postal over the number of self-indulgent geniuses posing as spiritually adept... or even intellectually or emotionally or creatively adept.

Pfeh. Black holes.

It's mostly men. I don't know why so many of them are men and so few of them women. It must have to do with how much you must give up to go this lonely route. Plus, most of the ones who are just labeled "bipolar" and snowed with neuroleptics of one stripe or another... or the booze or the ketamine or whatever fucking consciousness alterer they can get their hands on... cigarettes! oh, at least cigarettes... are men. I am a maniac magnet. I'm so good at these guys it would blow your mind. They find me. I find them. The cosmos has arranged it that we intersect over and over and over and over... for all my life this far and on up until I'm dead, I have not one part of a delusion about that.

The buddhas want me to smack one of them awake.