All That Is Meaningful Is Imaginary

I just had to write that post some day… oddly enough it was mostly written while sober.

As were temporarily shattered memories and feelings long deemed useless, there resulted a distinctive euphoria, a state of consciousness immersed in the Now. I remembered vaguely the after-taste of the herb, still present in my mouth.

Time as humans had so thoroughly defined it lost its meaning; meaning itself was tainted of thought patterns unlike what was available to the sober mind. What did meaning mean, again? Nothing but associations of subjective mental constructs, themselves fostered by experience, filtered through cognitions built upon purportedly innate features of personality? The answer was ready-made, bearing little practical implications.

At a much more fundamental level, consciousness is an ephemeral feature of the minuscule beings that we humans are, and yet it is too vast for us to ever truly know anything about it. Each time we believe to know, we end up realising that we know nothing about knowing. Interpretations, perspectives, emotions are, practically, infinite. The psychedelic experience, from the mellow fumes of cannabis to the intense intellectual rushes of LSD, is a stunning demonstration of this multidimensionality of the mind.

My thoughts raced ahead, I slowly lost track of myself through their meanders. I caught a glimpse of a subjective reality built anew through the lenses of mind-altering chemicals. Pleasant feelings, unusual thoughts; consciousness amplified and distorted. And nothing more than my own brain and an insignificant little herb.

How can this soft inner peace be so widely frowned upon, I wondered. Ignorance and fear of the unknown were obvious candidates. And the obvious reply was that humans should accept that they will never know everything, if nothing at all. And they should concentrate on learning about themselves – opening their minds to both themselves and the world, as nobody is ever alone.

“There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that’s your own self.” ~Aldous Huxley