Ketaphysics Part 4

Thursday, October 4th 2018

The following chunk of text comprises the final bit of data I compiled during my adventures with ketamine this past August. It’s now been almost 2 months since the experiment began, and my first follow-up treatment is about 6 weeks away. I’m currently working on something new, which will go up next week.

I’m still working out what the overall purpose of this blog is supposed to be. I’m still nervous about being this candid. I’ve spent 40-plus years occulting this part of my life, and I’m not so naive to think that obscuring myself in a shallow layer of anonymity is going to somehow keep me safe from discovery, if anyone gives enough of a fuck about my actual identity to do some digging. The choices I make about my body, my consciousness, how I treat my mental illness should be mine to make. In a truly just and free world, they would be mine to make.

But we do not live in a just and free world. I don’t profess to understand what this reality is; all I know is what I see. And what I see over and over again is this: a system is at work in which the worst of the worst are continuously rewarded with ever expanding power and endless riches, while the rest of us are treated like slaves, if not outright chattel.

You can call my outlook either pessimistic or stoic, or maybe just the paranoid rantings of a conspiracy theorist. I simply call it evidence-based. See the above photo if you have doubts. Now, on with the show:

Original journal entries from Wednesday 8/15/18 – Wednesday 8/26/18

I can feel changes still working within my mind(s). I will continue to post updates, although maybe not so often. Definitely around the re-boosts – and whatever other methods I might employ to hit altered states of consciousness in the times between. Thank you to everyone who has reached out over the last two weeks. You literally helped me work through some of the darkest shit I’ve gone through in years, and for that I am very grateful.

A few final notes on the universal; going back to the biometry thing got me thinking about this electric current that continuously runs through our bodies, gravity and matter, love and the Mother Binah/Saturnine current. If matter is held together by gravity, and gravity could be compared to pressure (I think Dion Fortune made some observation about pressure as a divine force), this pressure could be analogous to what I identify as the MB/S current, which could be construed as “love”. This would be a divine love, as universal as it is ultimately impersonal. It could also be construed as the individual systolic force behind each and every heartbeat.

This brings us to Earth, where we exist as an electromagnetic force that is at best mostly and possibly only quite partially contained within an infinitely complex yet nevertheless constantly decaying matter body, which maintains its existence through a series of muscular contractions that remind the electromagnetic force (the real you) to basically sit still and behave long enough for it to attain whatever development you/it must, before your/its body cracks open like a husk and your /its electromagnetic body/self reports for duty in whatever realm(s) exist(s) beyond this one.

Or not.

If what I’m describing sounds crazy or upsetting or whatever, please understand that I have no interest whatsoever in proposing there is some ultimate truth in what I’m describing. It’s more like this; for a couple of weeks I had a recalibration in the parameters of my personal reality. At the far borders of this madness, it was like I was standing in some shoals. The water was only partially clear, but there was an inner glow.

What I’m trying to describe may feel like fish to me, but maybe they’re really just old blankets and washing machine parts. Or maybe they’re living sentient organisms that are made of the same material components of blankets and parts. And here we are where we always end up – the border where language begins to fail.

That does it for now.

In the next couple of days, I’m going to drop a bunch of text describing some of the more personal stuff. I’m taking an extra couple of days to go over that and omit most of it, because it’s more about dropping this single “line of code” (I don’t care for this descriptor much but it fits okay and I can’t think of anything better) and getting it over with. I don’t really know why I began including it towards the end, as I never intended to, but those last two trips left me with the definite impression that it ought to be, for whatever reason. There’s a very strong “So mote it be!” resonance about it.

Anyway, this is all to say that if you’ve been reading this from the jump and don’t give a shit about all that mess, I don’t blame you. That’s why I’ve decided to post it separately and (hopefully) in one final section. It’ll probably be the next thing I post that isn’t a reply to one of you guys.

Thanks again for reading and reaching out and stuff. Happy Wednesday.

 

8/20/18 (Monday) – 8/23/18 (Thursday)

I think I know why I’m doing this.

My youngest daughter was born 6 weeks early; 4 lbs, 4 ounces. She didn’t have any respiratory illness or immune issues.

This didn’t really surprise me. Her sister and brothers were all completely badass and pugnacious as fuck. Her body probably just chewed through illness in the womb like a caged mongoose.

Her mom developed post-partum depression.

This didn’t surprise me, either. She was a survivor herself, having been placed through a foster and group home childhood experience.

The upshot of this is that with my youngest needing a lot of body heat and overall new human care, plus her mom needing space in this almost physically palpable way (sometimes she reminded me of a cat stuck under a porch), meant that the majority of her around the clock care was my responsibility.

She still lives with me and we’re as close as can be. I wish I was closer with her siblings.

 

The boys were tough for me, although they’re great kids. I think I’ve alluded to this earlier but they’re active duty military and actually doing genuine good things, rather than living the fractured life I had (at least, that I know of). My oldest daughter is a gift, as is my granddaughter (for obvious reasons, I’m keeping their personal details to as bare a minimum as I can while still talking about this honestly).

I’ve loved them my whole life, but was never as close to them as I am to the youngest. This was literally borne out of necessity. I’m talking about this to make this one point clear to both myself and the reader (but really myself): I avoided getting close to them because I was afraid of infecting them somehow with what happened to me.

Understanding this is massive, although it might seem obvious to you if you’ve been reading this from the jump. Maybe not.

As I write this, many of my Marine Corps 8126 brothers are genuinely aging prematurely, growing overweight and lame as their old programming still spins too fast for the civilian world. We were trained to look for shadows in every corner. It’s hard not to want to join a side, even if just to know somebody has your back.

Some of them are so angry, and they’re also physically sick. This is Azathoth – a Saturnine/Martian super-current that freezes anger and turns into sugar diseases like diabetes and alcoholism.

I escaped into low-risk/low-payoff criminality, mostly pushing small weight and driving people around Phoenix who needed someone to have their back. I bounced at the topless night clubs for the same reason I go-go danced at gay bars; they paid the best.

Once again, I fractured my personality.

 

No problem.

In Seattle, I tagged the name “Ash” everywhere because it was short and I loved the Evil Dead movies. In Phoenix, I bounced under one name and danced under another, and often gave out other fake names for myriad reasons.

I escaped into chaos magic and logical positivism, still under the Discordian ethos of swapping belief systems. I explored Kenneth Grant just before going on a really bad meth tear for about 6 weeks (mirroring the other one I had when I was 20, right around the time I absolutely fucking lost it in Portland and thought I saw living entities in the trees: they looked sort of like the chameleons with prehensile eyes, only nothing like them at all). I did that tear before my youngest was born.

I think that sometimes I have this thing in me – maybe it’s a shamanic call or maybe I’m just a shitty human being – but it just forces me to break from here. It’s the same thing that allows me to write books, so I’m grateful for it.

I believe ketamine allows me to explore this compulsion in a way that is real, but also about as safe as such an experience can be. Also, not having to fly to Peru allows me to stay close to my support network. I should mention that I have a s/o that is wonderful and supportive, but also wishes to maintain her privacy to the absolute. Same goes for a few close friends – the less I say, the better. So, that’s really all I have to say about that.

Anyway, I managed the fractured life thing okay, then some bad shit happened to some tangential but influential associates and I decided to lay low. I trained people at gyms and felt good about the work.

But not enough to make me quit entirely. By the time I went back to the game, the show Will and Grace had made it somewhat okay to be a non-binary human, as long as you acted predictable enough to the people who knew you in a certain light.

I finally quit all the bullshit when my older kids got old enough to wonder about all the locked closet doors, my weird hours, women trying to dart out of the house like phantoms while they ate breakfast.

An excerpt from Peter Levenda’s Sinister Forces III: The Manson Secret –

“(Therefore,) the type of person who becomes involved in criminal enterprises has already placed himself outside the social milieu in which the rest of us live, and experiences life in a more desperate, more emotionally charged way than we do…

…Criminals have seen life the way police officers do: from the bottom, up. They see life the way it really is, behind closed doors. They know the weaknesses of their fellow humans, because they cater to them. They know the judge with a gambling problem, or the priest who prefers sex with underage boys. They see beyond the façade of society, and what they discover is no more elevated or spiritual than their own tawdry experience has taught them.”

By the time I got out of the game, I’d lost more than a dozen friends on each side. Remember all those Marines I served with? An awful lot of them went into law enforcement.

I don’t have a lot of close friends, but there are two guys I would consider as close as brothers. One is the dude I used to run nightclubs with in Phoenix. The other is a homicide detective out on the East Coast. Everywhere I look in my life I see evidence of that schism.

I can rattle of the names of so many people who died before the age of 40 from drug overdoses alone. All of them were either pain-killer or pain-killer related. I know an equal amount of dancers and veterans who committed suicide, same number on both sides. There’s the schism again.

I don’t take any prescription medicine for any of my mental illnesses. I’ve been prescribed more than a half dozen in the last 10 years; Prozac, Xanax, Ambien, Abilify, Wellbutrin, Klonopin – these are just a few off the top of my head. There were others. I’ve been off that shit for more than 5 years now and it can all go fuck itself.

I already talked about my primary treatment method, so I won’t go back into that.

I also study, practice, and teach yoga. I know a lot of people say this, but it doesn’t make it any less true: I practice this daily so as to not lose my shit. “This” in particular referring to Ashtanga yoga, Vipassana meditation, and the teachings of Gurdjieff & Ouspensky – these are the cornerstones of my daily practice, with chaos magic being “the dessert”, so to speak.

And now, I can add Ketamine therapy to the list of things I use to combat depression and PTSD.

My continued analysis of the Ketamine protocol as prescribed by Dr H causes me to believe that it is an effective form of treatment. I would recommend it to others, provided they do their own research (and some serious soul-searching) into the subject before making their own decision.

I think this is going to be my last post for a little while. I’m going to compile these notes and convert them into a blog, and I’ll let everyone know when that’s online. I’ll probably add more there between now and my next treatment (that’ll be sometime between November and January, depending on how I’m doing I guess). And when I do the next treatments, I’ll write it up here, too.

Thanks to everyone for checking this out along the way, especially to those of you who wrote to me either here or DM. I’ll check back with a lot of you this weekend (I’m back to working both jobs, so I’m not in front of a computer very much unless it’s to write).

I’ll leave you with this, because I think it might be a screen memory. I think I’ve had a few of them, but this is the most recent, and maybe the weirdest.

It happened at the last nightclub I worked at before retiring. This place was called Babydolls – it sits underneath the Grand Ave overpass that borders West Phoenix, Glendale, and Maryvale, but I think it’s changed its name since we ran it. An owner subcontracted 3 guys to be the GMs, two were my guys and then an independent third. I ran security, and tended bar during the day sometimes. I always shrank away from being the top guy, preferring to stay semi-shaded by an additional layer of responsibility. What I didn’t count on was the situation at this club was so intense – sitting as it does squarely in between what used to be PIRU and Rolling 60 territory during the W Bush years (those borders are amorphous as fuck sometimes) – that running security was a round-the-clock ass ache.

But where a lot of people might think the answer would be to go full Chuck Norris and lay down the law on some motherfuckers when things started going sideways, this was where I learned how to really grow still in hot moments, and remember to treat everyone like full-fledged human beings, with families that genuinely cared about them. I only carried a gun on occasions where if I didn’t, somebody I worked with could get hurt.

I think the lessons I learned doing that job, in that manner, in that place were what taught me that I couldn’t stay doing what I was doing.

But maybe what happened on this one night put it to me more succinctly…

It was a Saturday – technically Sunday morning at around 330am – and I had seen everyone out except for the managers. I stuck around and saw that they were going to be doing the counts for another hour or so. In a sane world, I would have sat down somewhere and read whatever book I’d brought with me for this exact purpose. I certainly wouldn’t have just walked outside, by myself, without telling anybody that’s what I was doing. Remember, this club literally sits under a fucking underpass in literal gang fucking central. Here we sit, every night, with all this money, so to walk outside by oneself in any neighborhood that knows the schedule of this sort of establishment is a stupidly dangerous proposition.

But I was in crazyland that night, and so it seemed perfectly reasonable to go outside. Maybe it was for a cigarette. Except I don’t smoke, and even if I did nobody would have complained if I lit up in the club. Once we locked the doors, most everyone lit up themselves.

Now, I unlocked one of the doors, and I remember this sort of furtive alacrity steel over me, as if I was a teenager again, sneaking out of my second floor bedroom window on Long Island in the 80s.

I slipped outside and let the door lock behind me.

April in Phoenix at about 330 am is about as nice as it ever gets in Phoenix, weather-wise. I remember seeing stars, and a goodly chunk of the moon was visible; not quite full but close. My car had another car parked in front of it, nose to nose. The parking lot lights were out – this shouldn’t have been the case, but it wasn’t entirely unheard of, especially if there was a big enough outage somewhere in the neighborhood. Anyway, 4 men stood around both cars.

I know, right?

I should have pulled out my phone and called inside. But crazyland has its own customs, and so – remember I don’t carry a gun, and on occasion much has been made of my non-gun-carrying habit – I walked on over to the party.

The four men wore baseball caps and nylon windbreakers and batting gloves. The four men wore black bandanas over their faces. They could have been anyone.

I said “How’s it going, guys?”

I remember saying that. I remember being totally calm. Other than watching their hands very intently, it was just another late night exchange in a parking lot. I’ve had hundreds of those, maybe thousands.

One of them explained to me that they had a dead battery, and needed a jump. I told them I had cables, and would be happy to help them out. And that’s exactly what I did.

To say that this whole experience had a dream-like quality isn’t quite right. It was the same sort of hyper-reality I experienced at the tail-end of the ketamine trips, which I guess is another reason I’m ending this portion of the narrative here.

I popped my trunk (I was driving a beat-up old Ford sedan at the time), pulled out my batteries, and hooked everything up. I got in my car and they got in theirs. Their car started. I unhooked everything and slammed both trunks. They stayed inside their car. I remember the driver rolling down his window just a crack as they were leaving and sticking out two fingers as they headed out the lot towards Grand Ave.

Then, I pulled out my cell phone and called inside, telling them that the lot was clear for them. The dude who answered seemed surprised but happy, as they had just finished the count and were getting ready to head outside. We did the drops and I went home.

I can’t say for sure that this is a false memory, but it certainly has that false memory flavor.

Anyway, if you’ve read all of this I hope it was worth it. Thanks again.

 

 

8/29/18 – Wednesday

 

Almost a month has gone by since I started the ketamine protocols. I feel good; I feel like a large chunk of bad processing has been converted. I’m not healthy yet – if you were to look at a prime example of someone who is mentally well I am not that person. I still take naps when I should be out hustling. I still watch reruns of Frazier and The Office as a means to blunt my senses. I lie around too much and don’t exercise as much as I should, if I expect the world to take me seriously as a yogi (this is a bad sentence; nobody should ever expect anyone to ‘take them seriously as a yogi’ but it’s the best way I can convey the sense that I need to cultivate some inner drive).

However, I have learned something interesting about my depression. I believe that the Fourth Way approach to humans as multi-centered beings is proper, and that fighting depression is more a matter of embodiment than mentation. I believe I have stated this before but also that it bears repeating. To put it succinctly, one (I) cannot think one’s (my) way out of depression half as well as one (I) can booty-shake one’s (my) way out of it.

Also, I believe that my life follows a pattern of relative normalcy followed by a need – and I mean a need; an internal drive I have that is on par with the need to pass one one’s genes – for a break in reality that will somehow change my paradigm once again. So, when other people grew up wanting to be pediatricians, detectives, pilots, and judges, I had a drive for this thing. The problem is there isn’t a word for this path in our language. “Shaman” sounds too trendy, “witchdoctor” might be more apropos for the level of weirdness I encounter.

Ketamine and cannabis are my most effective medication tools for dealing with my mental state. However, a continued dedication to the yoga-spokes; Hatha, J’Nana, Bhakti, Karma, and Raja, with a sharper focus on the Kriya and Ashtanga principals will curb tendencies to overmedicate. The Fourth Way teachings of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky help me to navigate through the continuous slightly altered reality structure of my life.

I am directly responsible for my fortune and fate. I choose to hustle and chase papers, while giving more to my community than I receive. I choose to walk the twin paths of temerity and rectitude.

If one is brave and one’s intentions are clear and honorable, nothing can stand in one’s way.

I continue to grow ever craftier, more energetic, more dangerous, more loving. My words continue to flow more eloquently as bits and pieces of what I thought I was – and what “I” thought life was – crumble away under the momentum; the momentum that invariably kicks off the moment a human being stands upright before the angular momentum of Sun-God Ra and accounts for his or her sins. There’s a lightening in the lightning strike.

In that, every catastrophe one survive brings one’s true capability and perhaps Will closer to the surface of consensus reality.