The Ketamine Clinic Above The Bank
other realties, spiritual travel, john c lilly, what is real?
Once a week, for fourteen weeks, you get shot up with a massive dose of liquid Ketamine in a clandestine and not-strictly-legal clinic for “treatment resistant depression”. These journeys are the most astonishing experiences of your life. This is in early 2019, right at the start of Ketamine becoming legalized for use by psychiatrists in therapeutic treatments in Florida. Cutting edge stuff. It’s not yet common practice, and doctors are able to order large quantities of the drug with little regulation or oversight. This is a strange and golden opportunity and in the years following, it bends your mind a bit trying to understand how you found yourself at liberty to encounter such marvelous spirit realms.
The clinic is run by 6’5”, surly male psychiatrist with a short temper, and a lot of faith in the efficacy of these treatments. He has set up his practice in an unused floor of a nondescript bank. There are only about 8 clients at a time, and a staff composed of only a receptionist (who you believe to be the doctor's elderly mother), a neurotic and wonderful nurse named May, and a tech who is a self disclosed recreational drug user and reddit aficionado in his late 20s, named Jarrod. All the staff also receive “treatments” here at the clinic.
One day a week, you are led to what once must have been a tiny office, with a small blind-covered window, and slide back into a large polyurethane recliner at its center. May inserts an IV into a vein on the back of your hand with remarkable finesse, then prepares and hangs up an IV bag of saline. She clips an oxygen and pulse monitor to your middle finger, and then brings you a pair of top-of-the-line eye covers: the luxurious padded kind that let in absolutely no light. You press the button on the side of the chair, reclining your seat to a nearly horizontal position, while she kills the lights, and covers you in thick blankets. Then the psychiatrist comes in, and shoots 220 units of pure liquid Ketamine into your IV bag, and the trip begins.
In later years, when looking to find a clinic that can provide a similar experience, you are informed that the legal maximum intravenous dose for your weight is only 40 units. When the doctor at the clinic you speak to-–several years later—sees the records with the doses you were being given, she responds by saying she’s “absolutely shocked they put that in writing, since it is six times what can be legally given to a person of your size”.
You do not mean to discredit the work done in the clinic above the bank as reckless or unwise. You actually mean quite the opposite. It is tremendously effective for nearly all of his patients, with issues ranging from Major Depressive Disorder, to chronic pain. He is hesitant at first to accept you as a Ketamine candidate, because there is not as much evidence for its efficacy for Bipolar Disorders. However, you urge him to let you try it and, thank god, he agrees.
Looking back at this time, it will be hard to say how much these treatments helped you with depression. Certainly, in the days following each treatment you feel wonderful, but in a way that is possibly closer to “manic” than “stable” (hence the unclear research about Ketamine for Bipolar). The treatments do, without a doubt, somehow enable you to stop drinking. During the time period you are a client here, you are consistently sober (okay not sober, more like “green clean” plus klonopin and occasional adderall) for the first time in about two years. This is a big deal, alcohol being the most disruptive, dangerous, and consistent addiction. But the value of these treatments, for you, goes beyond its use for your mental illness/behavioral problems. What will impact your life most greatly, are the spiritual aspects of receiving these treatments: something much more divine, profound, and precious to you. Something more important than your personal, day to day functioning. It offers you hope in a larger way, gives you greater perspective, rearranges your priorities, strengthens your spiritual ideologies.
Each week, when the drip starts, you taste the saline in your mouth as it rushes through your blood and into your tongue. A minute or two later, you feel as if you are gently tipping backwards, floating back, up, and then curving in a large arch, head falling back towards the earth, feet rising skyward, legs soaring gently past the ceiling and over your face, delivering you to a prone position as if you are floating on your stomach, gliding close to the ground on some magic carpet.
You will never do Ketamine in any other setting but with the dark shades over your eyes, lying in this office. But from what you hear others describe, the experience if you just go about your day, tripping on Ketamine, eyes open, is vastly different than the closed eye adventures. You do not imagine Ketamine is best experienced the way acid and shrooms are: as a tool to engage with the earth, with others, to experience the physical joined with the spirit. Ketamine seems more about leaving your body, and this material world, entirely.
A break in the story is necessary here, as I desperately want to paint a better picture of this dissociative anesthetic, and the powerful and genuine spiritual aspects of it. I want to talk briefly about a scientist by the name of John C. Lilly. He is to Ketamine, what Timothy Leary is to LSD, and Terence McKenna to DMT.
John C. Lilly was a slightly wild scientist who dedicated his life to the use and study of the realms found within Ketamine. Lilly is the original inventor of the “sensory deprivation tank”, a pod-like chamber which closes the user inside creating absolute darkness, filled with water the precise temperature of the human body, loaded with enough salt to allow perfect effortless floatation (think “Stranger Things”). The purpose of this chamber is to eliminate all outside sensory stimuli. Lilly invented it originally to employ in his research involving LSD, and then continued utilizing it for his study of Ketamine.
John C. Lilly created a graph that I believe to be a good hypothesis on how the experience works.
He describes these five levels of reality. The lowest level, not shown on this rendition of his graph, is dubbed “External Reality”. It is the reality we can all agree on. The reality we share with everyone on a daily basis. The things we “know to be” based on our physical senses and combined observations. One step above this is the “‘I’ or ‘Internal Reality’”. It is the inner psyche, built and molded from our own mind, our personal experiences, our subconscious. We experience it through dreams, even daydreaming at a certain level, and many hallucinations and delusions fall within this category.
Above this reality, Lilly describes the “‘They’, the ‘Extraterrestrial Reality’”. This is the spiritual realm that exists beyond anything we conjure in our individual, personal consciousnesses. It is a “place” in a way, though constructed of spirit and a larger consciousness, rather than the matter, typical energies, and the physics of our universe. “Extraterrestrial Reality” is also “the beings” as much as it is “a place”. Spirits of different types, beings I do not have the knowledge, or authority, to attempt to speak on fully. (Though I will try to describe the ones I had the opportunity of interacting with as best as I can.)
Beyond this reality is the “‘We’, ‘The Network’”. I lack any ability to describe this place, and I'm not totally sure if I’ve ever entered it. Possibly that's where the K-holes live.
Above this reality is a place John C. Lilly calls “The Unknown”, because even if you reach this plane, you cannot bring anything back with you when you return. Ketamine is a dissociative anesthetic, not even technically considered a psychedelic. The accounts given by K users of their “trips” hold many parallels to experiences described in NDEs (near death experiences), in which people describe leaving their body, looking down upon themselves in death, and then traveling to beautiful places, meeting wonderful spirits, before coming unexpectedly back to life and returning to what we consider normal existence, “external reality”.
A sad side effect of Ketamine is amnesia. This memory loss, alongside the purely indescribable spiritual nature of the experience, makes it very difficult to put into words. There is also a further and very interesting complication, which is that it is theorized Ketamine can mimic certain aspects of schizophrenia, especially “negative symptoms”. Notably, a lack of words called “alogia”. In some cases of schizophrenia, a psyche will recede into a very abstracted version of consciousness. A person can in a way “lose their words”, unable to retrieve them. This same phenomenon can appear while under the influence of Ketamine, furthering the difficulty of accurately describing the experience.
[The Scientist, by John C. Lilly]
I do not think this overlap of a person's reaction to entering realities beyond our own and what we call “psychosis” is a coincidence. I tend to believe there is some kind of fluidity or expansion of consciousness, or the realities one can access, in psychosis, that allows occasional “Extraterrestrial” occurrences to enter, alongside the “Internal Realities” experienced in mental illness.
I’ve had a history of drawing this graph when speaking with people who are experiencing psychosis, in some attempt to find a dialectic between the validity of certain perceived experiences, and the inclusion of misguided beliefs. I don’t think everything a person believes in psychosis is false. But clearly, much of it can be. I think it is composed of majority internal reality, the extension of the subconscious, while also often including certain aspects of the extraterrestrial. There are so many common delusions, beliefs, and themes repeated in cases of psychosis. Threads of some kind of truth, picked up by everyone whose realities’ are melding. Themes of god, significance of synchronicities (life lacking coincidences), of having influence over energy and electronics, obsession around paradoxes, conviction of secret knowledge and understanding, emphasis of codes, special psychic gifts, an awareness of being watched, of aliens, of persecution, of grandeur. Whether the repetition of so many major themes is attributable to the state of the human psyche, or to the existence of a greater reality we cannot make sense of, is hard to say. I would assume the source is in a combination of both these influences.
Either way, these themes are reiterated endlessly. The issue is that the disintegration of cognition within psychosis does not allow for organized thought around these revelations. They are clouded by fixation, anxiety, terror, mental deterioration and so much confusion. No one can decipher where the truths they feel are born from. And from the outside, psychosis looks dreadfully misguided. In our culture, it is not often looked at with any kind of interest beyond the chemical causes, and how to pacify these people. In other cultures, access to these planes has been revered, respected. People who may be called psychotic in current western society, have been called prophets in other times and places.
John C. Lilly himself went a bit crazy by the end of his research. Once he stopped use of Ketamine altogether, he returned to a sane state and lived a normal life. Regardless, he continued to believe in the things he discovered during his years of Ketamine exploration. He still felt it was his life's most important work and wrote a book on it years later (The Scientist by John C. Lilly). He was sane again, but did not think what he experienced was invalid, just because it fell within the umbrella of what people call insanity. There is some sort of dialectic to be found between the “real-ness” of any perceived reality. Drugs and psychosis can be conduits to seeing other truths. But these truths exist within and besides the soup of our own psyche, and we can’t be sure how to correctly sift through the contents.
As far as my own little journeys go, I will include the notes I attempted to write after many of the sessions, but they are lacking a good deal of what I felt, learned, and saw (all things now lost in the haze of amnesia), plus are fairly obscure and vague.
In that little room where you lay in the recliner with the IV, there is a camera mounted above the door so that May (the nurse) and Jarrod (the tech) can observe you and make sure you are still responsive. It is fairly uncommon for someone to become agitated while on Ketamine, as it is a strong tranquilizer, delivering deep peace and also very much limiting physical mobility. However, people are known to fall into what is commonly called a K-Hole. This is a state of such intense dissociation, that you become limp and inert, and even briefly unresponsive (though entirely safe, medically speaking). They watch the feed from the camera on ipads they carry around, and if they see someone lying too still or falling slack within their seat, head rolling to their shoulder, they come rushing in to pat at your cheeks and shake your shoulders. You imagine there might also be a clue from your vitals (blood pressure or heart rate or something).
They also will occasionally step in just to check on you, though they attempt not to interrupt your experience. Jarrod sometimes peaks into your sessions and gives you tips. He has been using Ketamine for years and is decently passionate about it. On your second session, as he readies the room and turns on your vitals monitors, he says,
“I would try opening your eyes under the mask, if I were you. Helps your mind see.”
He is dead right on this point. It's like a signal to your brain that you are looking, seeking out things in the pitch black of the mask, and the visions become more vibrant. You leave your eyes open every session from then on out.
Then he looks at you significantly and says, “You can ride, or drive.”
Cocking your head, you squint at him and nod uncertainly. You will come to understand this means you have certain input into where you will go, that you can ask for what you wish to learn. Or you can let go, let them take you where they want to.
During another session, he asks you how it's going and you slur some incoherent response. He tells you to ask “them” (the beings) to take you to specific places. Personally, he loves to travel to the amusement parks in Japan and ride rollercoasters.
“You can ride, or drive,” he says again.
Ketamine first teaches you a new kind of sight. It makes you believe in something sort of like astral projection (a concept you had never given much consideration previously.) In the absence of visual stimuli, the drug somehow enables a spiritual type of sight. As you enter the Ketmaine realm, you open your eyes to stare into the darkness of your padded eye mask. As the K continues to enter your bloodstream, you begin to somehow see the room you are in with extreme clarity. You can lift your hand in front of your face, and watch yourself wiggle your fingers, though your physical eyes are still completely covered and blinded by the eye mask. Then you float out of your body, beginning a spiritual kind of travel.
You float backwards out the window of the bank, slide face down past the bricks of the building, plummeting swifty towards the pavement, falling straight through the ground, and flying far below the streets of the city. You dive deep beneath the crusts of the earth, soaring into yawning, sprawling underground caverns.
You speed across the surface of the ocean, circling the globe itself, soaring along the curve of the waters and landforms, clinging to the planet with a speeding centripetal force. You travel through many buildings, hovering above the ground, still prone as if on that magic carpet, moving, gliding, turning through hallways, entering doors; the floor can turn to ceiling with an effortless sort of sliding-bending.
You maze your way through dark cities, radiant colorful alleyways and buildings stacked atop one another. It’s like you’re caught up in a gust of wind, pulled down streets and tossed gracefully in and out of windows. Enthralled by everything you see, exhilarated by this feeling of speeding motion. You’re streaming on the wing of this great energy.
You go to so many places. Places that are very like the ones on earth, yet composed of a kind of indefinite/spiritual material. There is a distinct sense of genuine movement, of covering vast distances, moving through spaces the way you would in the physical world.
After a few Ketamine sessions you have a very strong feeling that you are not simply having visions of travel. It is becoming clear to you that you, your spirit itself, is literally moving away from that clinic in the bank, and going places. Every session you pour out of a window, race down towards a paved surface. It isn't until your third session it occurs to you that you are leaving this very room, flying out the window of this bank, and falling towards the road beneath it.
You have notes from many sessions and will try to expand upon certain experiences as best as you remember them.
[KET 1]
ketamine hard to write
bc a thing on my left hand
dissociative
falling into nothing
10:22 am
—
it was like out of body
like different worlds
falling into blackness forever
some rooms and places had color
i would remember i was in a chair and it was so absurd
everything wasn’t real
(“Everything” here is referring to normal everyday life and the physical.)
and very dissociative
my arms were completely not mine
my legs too and body
it was like living as a mind alone and flying around but like confusing and distorted and i don’t remember enough
i would remember where i was and it was just one option of thousands to be in
it was silly to hear things on this side
i need to do more, get better at it
-
i saw the room entirely upside down
my conscious went flying out of my head and all kinds of places
at one point the doctor came in and added more and asked how i felt and i couldn’t form words at first but i landed on
“it feels like psychosis on opioids”
-
the nurses name was May
purple scrubs, purple hair, purple glasses, purple tattoos
she’s the only nurse. watches patients on her ipad
there are feeds from the cameras in each room. the video is black and white.
very depersonalized
had to feel my face to find it if i got a bit too lost
but it was like u live up above
and your operating your body like an avatar
you are in this avatar body but you are not it
~2 pm
June 14, 2019
You and May are fast friends. She vents you about the doctor's terrible moods, (“but you know men!” she exclaims disdainfully.) She tells you stories of the ways the others can be frustrating or unkind.
“This one woman, oh my god,” she moans, eyes rolling in exasperation. “She jerks everytime I try to insert the IV; tries to tell me which veins are best! Have I ever once had to poke you twice?”
You reply “No. Never,” with complete sincerity. You can’t imagine anyone in the world is better at putting an IV in than May. She used to be a neonatal nurse and is an IV inserting prodigy, very practiced at finding tiny veins, knowing exactly when she needs to switch to a new location to avoid busting an overtired vein, never having to try a second time. She makes it a point to put the IV in the back of your hand, versus the crook of the elbow, so that you can recline without having to focus on keeping your arm extended throughout the session. This ensures the drip doesn’t get slowed in the way a hose would when it has a kink from an unnatural bend, and also prevents the pinching feeling you can experience when it's in the arm. This is far more comfortable and very considerate of her.
[KET 2] ketamine again so hard to write about or put words to towards the deepest parts there were beings calling to me , pulling at me or towards me you fall away and up you are set free from your body existence can be disassociated from its own rules alien perspective alien existence everything is everything i fell deep twice maybe three times such calm, you give up your body. like you let yourself go like air from a balloon but slowly hugely falling out of yourself - realized several times deep in that it was all ok in such a fundamental way but also the opposite a couple times June 18, 2019
You only have one “bad trip” on Ketamine. It was terrifying, but the cause was very easy to establish. This trip happens right after you get out of the Peace River inpatient unit. When you were at that psych ward, a psychiatrist asked for a list of current and past medications. This is something you are asked to provide during every hospital stay. Very routine. You told him all the meds from your psychiatrist, as well as mentioning you were receiving Ketamine treatments through another psychiatrist. You provide that doctor's name when asked, as generally the doctors require you sign something allowing them to trade information and observations.
A week later you are sitting in the recliner at the clinic, IV inserted, saline flowing, when the doctor comes in to add the Ketamine to the fluids bag. He opens the door, steps into the room. You smile and say hello. He closes the door, and slowly turns to face you, jaw set in stern fury. You stare back, mildly wondering what’s pissing him off today, when he begins yelling. He’s threatening to stop providing your treatments, talking about some doctor who called him about you. That doctor was accusing him of reckless use of Ketamine for a bipolar girl. The doctor is demanding your word that you will never again end up in a psych ward. You are stunned, confused, and attempting to explain that every time you get out of a psych ward, you swear to yourself you will never let it happen again. Yet the pattern persists. How can you promise him it won’t ever happen again? You hate being sent there. You wish you could guarantee you will never end up in one again, but that would be a very feeble promise to make.
Until this diatribe occurs, you did not realize this clinic wasn’t ~totally legal~. You didn’t understand you weren’t supposed to do too much blabbing about the treatments. In telling the doctor at Peace River about these treatments, you put the Ketamine doctor in jeopardy. You feel really terrible. And he is livid, towering and glowering at his full and massive height. At one point during the angry outburst, as you are trying to keep tears out of your eyes, Jarrod bursts into the room thinking you are having a medical emergency because he got an alert on his ipad that your heart rate was above 180. He stops short as he enters the room and takes in the situation.
The doctor glances at the vitals machine, takes a deep breath, and says “Am I scaring you?” You give a tiny nod, throat tight. He sighs deeply, and then turns his back on you, shooting the Ketamine into the IV. So you enter the trip, not a minute after this encounter, in an intensely anxious and guilty mental state. And have your only bad experience.
What you remember most clearly is being strangled by a massive snake, as large as a house, with the head of the angry doctor. And falling hundreds of miles past the stacked bodies of every person who has ever died, with a booming voice yelling repeatedly “YOU DO FEAR DEATH. YOU DO FEAR DEATH.”
[KET]: fell the length of every death stacked to the sky all the way to the pit of death to show me i fear death a snake curled around me pressed in and then i couldn’t breathe it held me falling hundreds and thousands of miles down past the stacked corpses of every person to ever live, down, down to the pit of death. a strong, powerful voice: “you DO FEAR death, you DO FEAR death”. August, 26 2019
This happens on one of your later trips and begins a certain paranoia in you around the doctor. You feel convinced he caused the bad trip on purpose to get back at you. This suspicion grows and anchors in your head—-the belief that he's out to get his patients, cruel and dangerous. You do one or two more treatments following that one, and then quit because it unnerves you too much whenever you see the doctor in his office after each session. The conviction that this doctor is evil and full of deliberate schemes to scare you does not begin to fade until several months after your last appointment with him.
Before all this happens though, you have incredible trips. Your third treatment involves your first experience in a K-Hole.
[KET 3] craziest yet may said i was in a k-hole at one point i remember her helping me as i stood on my head upside down in a closet
The way you remember this you had been traveling through buildings, houses, apartments, mansions. All dark yet full of colors. You glide close to the ground, the world spinning as you slide up walls and are then deposited upside down in a closet, staring into the floor at another place that looks like outer-space. Then you see May looming above you, a giant with purple hair reaching down from a wide cast outerspace, gently patting at your cheeks, and pulling you down, and up, out of the closet, as if you are falling down into the starry sky, and emerge from the floor in the little room where you are receiving the treatment. You pull off the mask.
“There we go,” she says cheerfully, busily checking your vitals. “You were in a K-Hole!” she says with excitement. “Okay you can go back now”.
You pull the mask back over your eyes and fall away again.
i went a lot of places i tried to understand i kept searching deeper i ended up with sad answers bran came for a bit his colors a tan and a blue particular one of each ken, sam, & juli were there too i would lose and gain people become them and trade 3:30 pm June 25, 2019
At one point in this journey, you need your friends. You are calling out to them, and they come to you. Kenady, Sam, and Juli’s spirits come to you with ease, joining you in the realm. This was not a concept of your friends. You believe this was literally, somehow, actually them that came to you then. As if people are not bound to space. As if they can somehow exist in more than one place.
You need Bran too, and are reaching for him but can’t pull him to you. You yearn and stretch and tug at him. It is like you are pulling at a long elastic cord, stretching it tauter as you attempt to move the thing it's bound to closer to yourself. Like the thing at the end of the cord is too heavy, won’t budge, and then the stretchy tension of this bungee cord rebounds, yanking you towards the thing that you do not have the strength to retrieve. You begin to fly at incredible speed. You skate over a large amount of water, then over vast stretches of a brown, sandy colored surface. You slow over a city of beautiful, creamy, stone buildings. You pull at Bran again, and he swooshes up to you.
At the time of this ketamine session, Bran (in external reality) is at his home in Peru. Your other friends are in your own town, in Florida. Much closer to you in terms of physical distance. They are easier to retrieve. But with Bran, the distance eclipsed your willpower, you couldn’t pull him to you. So you believe what happened is you flew to Arequipa, the city where he lives, to get him. You flew over something you imagined could have been the Gulf of Mexico, across the mountains and desert, coming to rest above a city very much like Arequipa itself. Filled with beautiful, old, stone buildings of ivory tones, rising amidst a landscape of tans and browns.
Bran himself, also comes with colors. They are somehow his colors. A tan, like a blur of mountain desert, and a blue, saintly and pure sky, like used in ancient ceramics. A part of him as much as anything else. To this day when you think of him you picture these colors far more than his face.
Now you have the people you love most with you, and you find an answer to a question you will not remember.
i needed them and i got them and they gave me things i was missing. they actually supplied what i didn’t have. i had to go and get bran from peru. he was the hardest. then with all of them i felt understanding. it’s like we have another self that can act and impact independently of ourselves. like i fly out the window of that building every time i feel like i’m going places, physical places June 25, 2019
They, themselves, not your mental construction of them, come to you, though they simultaneously remain wherever they are physically at that moment with no knowledge of their dual presence. You truly believe this, though cannot explain it. As if everything can be many, maybe all, places at once.
During this trip you also have one moment of fear. You are flung into the body of a woman you don’t know, while searching your town for your friends. Tossed inside of her, you knock her out of her own body, and are stuck for a moment with the memories and experience of this unknown woman.
She had a son. That's all you remember now.
But in this moment you feel real fear. You wonder if you are not meant to go this far. You worry you could be stuck as her forever. Maybe people shouldn’t play with this shit. Maybe we don’t know anything about anything.
This experience makes you think of the well documented stories where a person experiences a severe head injury, and returns speaking fluently in a language they have never learned. Or with a miraculous ability to play an instrument they had never so much as touched, with prodigious skill. There are supposedly many cases of this kind of thing. People tell stories of coming back from major head injuries, organ transplants, and near death experiences with abilities they did not have previously. And somehow this seems related to your experience of falling into other people while being flung around a spiritual realm that somehow exists within and on top of the physical one. People seem fluid, and infinite within space. Individual and shared.
acid 1 was so spiritual as in like the spiritual plane within this world and seeing science as it really is like magic like really seeing what is in front of you and it’s phenomenal. and you understand the rhythms and patterns of the earth and you are so open and one with the energy throughout it. it’s an energy journey. that kind of spiritual. ketamine was i guess more the literal kind of spiritual. like a spirit realm, spirit bodies. bodies that can work and interact independently, in a way, from our own. i want to understand more. i just didn’t realize until now that every time i fly out that window when the trip starts, it’s the window of the same building i’m in. you're flying out of the actual bank you're sitting in. that’s why when you bring yourself back, you bring yourself back. June 25, 2019
[KET 8] places butterflies ketamine time 8 really colors learned a lot met a lot of beings laughed a lot yeah fall into it but call the shots so much to tell every time but i forget laughing telling them deeper further faster keep going so many places was telling beings where to take me and what i wanted everything worked to be exactly what it was bubblegum pink green ivy green it was so beautiful i can’t describe August 12, 2019
You spend this particular trip playing with beings that feel like piers. You can argue like children, battling your wills, convincing one another to participate in each other's games and ideas. You insist they take you somewhere bubblegum pink. You beg and plead, you want to see a world of pinks. They consent; they grab hold and take you there. It's play, laughter, spinning, dreaming. They pull you into a surreal carnival ground; colors of fuchsia, sweet lurid bubblegums, the bold, hot pink of flower petals, of candies, the air composed of all the shades of bougainvilleas bushes. You ride roller coasters; diving, swooping, flying, the laughter ringing like song. Melodies in the mind, buffering, pushing, pulling, loving, playing.
from ketamine 8: cocoon of crystals looking down at myself playing with beings so many of them, we were all laughing, so happy they loved to play. we would argue like kids on where to go and what to do. i begged for bubblegum pink and they finally pulled me there we rode this violet, pink roller coaster and saw a beautiful carnival of the same shade
Its just the most beautiful experience you will ever have. The colors are deeper and truer than any that exist. You cannot do this experience much justice in trying to describe it.
i saw my self rise up next to me almost like from a coffin and it was me and i felt so connected to that person August 13, 2019
You watch yourself rise up, and drift into place within a cocoon of crystals made of color and light. It was shaped like a coffin but felt like a rebirth. A cocoon, chrysalis, sparkling like the inside of a geode. You float to face her—the you in the chrysalis. You feel you know her deeply, the crystals close you in together, and you trust her.
There are other beings you meet, which feel different. Feel great. They hold wisdom, and are somehow more “ancient”. You don’t really imagine time exists the same outside of our world, but the beings you refer to as “peers” feel youthful. These others do not. You could not dare to press your will upon them, ask for anything but the wisdom they are willing to pass on. These, you know, can teach you if willing. They pull you to them. You meet them in the deepest caverns. They gather, conversing, and you sit at their feet. You ask to be shown. They are not peers, the way the ones you play with are. They are serious and knowing. It is a privilege and a gift to be in their presence. You feel their gravity, their greatness, their benevolence. They want to show you things, help you understand. You meet them several times, usually very deep in those K-holes. Only finding them once completely released from your body, once you allow yourself to fall fully into the tides of mass consciousness.
You cannot recall them well. Everytime you return from them, you are left with a divine and peaceful sadness. Deep, endless awareness of a sadness that is not related to fear or uncertainty.
Ketamine rewrites my ideas of the universe, of other dimensions. I feel as if there is a large billowing fabric, and our physical world, our planet, solar system, universe, everything that adheres to our physics, is a small fold in that fabric. The rest is made of something else, and guided by entirely different rules. I imagine our spirits are a part of that fabric, independent of our universe, of the bodies (the vehicles) we have inhabited here. It's a very abstract idea that I don’t fully know how to conceptualize.
One aspect of this that I think of often is the way features of our external reality can hold pieces of consciousness.
The train of thought goes as follows: Music, is transcendental in this ketamine state, seeming to guide the trip in a way. And the playlists I listen to during these trips are still pretty miraculous when I hear them years later. Music can do that with most experiences though, bury the essence of it within the melodies. Really anything can do this, and during the months of these treatments, I start to think of things that can store a chunk of consciousness (memory) as “tokens” or “portals”.
Everything is fleetings except that mass of consciousness. Our memories get lost to us; we can’t keep them by choice. And the material world is constantly changing at a miniscule level. Really, in every moment the entirety of the last moment is lost. You can never go back to the exact version of a moment. Is the tree you climbed as a kid the same tree you return to ten years later when you visit your childhood home? We think of it as the same tree, grown up. But in a way it isn’t the same, because it is larger, older, and has had ten years of factors contributing to its own memory. Are you the exact same person you were ten years ago? No you are not a perfect replica of your 13 year old self. All that really makes you still (insert your name here), is that you have the same reservoir of memory up to a certain point. From age 0-13 you share a past, and you know that due to your memory. And the tree, it shares a certain chunk of that memory. The years it shared with you overlap with the years you shared with it. So the tree is storing certain pieces of your consciousness within it, and encountering that tree allows you to access some of those memories.
So if in every moment that passes, the previous moment is in a way completely lost physically—because every moment contains time, which by nature engenders change (even if only at the most miniscule level) —, and a moment is completely indefinable—because there are infinite numbers between 0 and 1, and therefore time can be reduced indefinitely—-, then really the only thing that exists is the conscious construction of things in our minds: our memories.
The leading theory on memory is that memories are never actually destroyed within the brain. We just lose the way back to them, lack the ability to retrieve them. (Although in memory disorders, there can also be an inability to store the memories initially, so they are basically never created at all. In which case they are truly lost). So that consciousness, those memories, are still out there somewhere, and we construct things in reality that are used to conjure them.
Words, for example, are used for exactly this purpose. We use words to conjure up a concept. Take the word “dog”. Letters are just lines and curves and dots. Words are just combinations of those weird shapes. But the meaningless shapes of letters have been instilled with concepts in order to communicate our consciousness. So the word “dog” is attached to our concept of that specific animal. Seeing the word “dog” immediately retrieves an impression of that animal from our reservoir of consciousness.
Art is also like this. Within it are buried entire experiences, concepts, emotions, stories. Humans use these methods to communicate ideas, concepts, memories, consciousness, down throughout history: stories, music, paintings, sculpture, plays, movies, etc. And after the creator is dead it is all that remains—whatever chunk of their consciousness which has been effectively passed on in these representations.
So what I dubbed “tokens” is anything that stores a chunk of personal or shared consciousness. Anything that triggers nostalgia, returns you in some abstract way to a feeling, reminds you of any memory, elicits an emotion, communicates a concept, story, idea, sense, impression. The tokens themselves are of course just as non-existent as everything else in physical reality, but they act as portals to pieces of consciousness. And consciousness is the only thing that seems to exist in more than an in-definably miniscule slice only of time.
Further than this whole idea about consciousness as the only “real thing", I hold a personal belief that consciousness exists before and after the universe. This is just my impression, and involves my conviction in souls as something separate than minds. So to me, this mass of consciousness lingers, independent of our universe and its tokens. The tokens allow us glimpses into the pool of another dimension.
Ketamine is an incredible tool for exploration. The journeys within it are miraculous, and in me it began this indescribable change in perception of “reality”. The majority of that perspective is abstract and intangible. The concept of “tokens” is one idea born of time spent in the swirls of ketamine state of consciousness. But there remains so much I can’t seem to put my finger on. Things I want a greater understanding of, yet much of which I assume is beyond my capacity to truly grasp. I don’t think we are meant to really understand, we are meant to stay in this wrinkle of fabric. Our reality, our universe. That's where I live in this life and to become too buried in understanding all that is beyond, might be missing the point. I value the way Ketmaine reminds me of the beauty and treasure it is to be in this wrinkle for the short measure of our lives. It gives me a reverence for our world, the massive beauty beside the terrible pain. The way humans carry one another and express their stories. And also gives me a tangible belief in the existence of something greater, a peace in knowing there is more beyond this plane.
i want to return to ketamine and ask it my questions, but i’ve been many times. so what does it say? acid tells a very clear story of revelation. ketamine’s is murkier in clouds of spirit and amnesia. but when you come back each time, what did you first know about our world? it’s always been deep, profound peace, and a ringing understanding of vast sadness.
possibly it’s just an awareness of the darkness cloaking our the physical world as you leave the spirit one.
June 19, 2019