"You had learnt something. That always feels at first as if you had lost something."

(George Bernard Shaw)

There is a strange convoluted story that this thought encapsulates. I will tell it later.

I lost all sorts of things, including my mind. Hope that no one ever maliciously spikes your drink with datura (deliriant hallucinogen of nightmares). You will naturally wake up several days later on some temple steps overlooking the Ganges, totally cleaned out. Maybe with luck you will still have your clothes. With luck you will not have taken a vicious blow from a steel bar across your head laying it open to the skull, and have a vague memory of cotton thread stitches at Marwari, the people's hospital, the sensation of the needle going through your flesh and feeling no pain at all. Strange flashes of huddling in the night, naked in a Kali temple, talking to faces of entities floating inside the walls. No memory at all of being treated like a street lunatic or of being taken in by a compassionate rickshaw driver and given brown sugar as a tranquiliser.

These things you will discover later, after you wake up in a filthy room that you don't recognise, overlooking the sunrise over the river. Seemingly once again smoking filthy brown powder because there is a darkness that won't lift. Once again playing main suspect and chief investigator at the same time as you try to uncover where the missing days went.

If you are going to be an idiot like that, at least hope for chloral hydrate or Rohypnol, which are pretty good to knock someone out without the psychotic effects. But why spend the money when you can just grab a handful of datura from the garden?

Oh shit, and it's one of the oldest tricks in the book, I've heard it so many times before.

Everything happens for a reason.

Not necessarily a very good one though.

the demon-possessed can spit out nails, jagged pieces of glass, father amorth tells

i walk around spitting match-sticks

i am desperate. i buy lottery tickets. i would suck cock for a break.

i don't believe the things i find myself doing, and this time around, they don't even feel entertaining or worth writing about

life isn't a competition in brinksmanship. the palette doesn't have to be these colours of endless rainswept brutalist urban decay. there's no need to be shivering in these poisonous states

i should have taken photos or you won't believe me

it's just more of the same thing over and over again, a little bit more robbed of its magic, a little less beautiful

recursively

Get my money buy my medicine.....

A meditation on pain

There's just too much of it.

Of course it is biologically necessary, but often we would get the message that there is something dreadfully wrong happening to our soft tissue/bones/organs from much less.

There is no need for quite so much of it.

I don't know what the theological implication is. "Curse God and die!" they said to Job. Hahaha! It's not that easy. I tried.

God indeed. I don't think there is a God, yet. I think that's what this is all about, this brutal struggle of life: we are building God, but he's not ready yet. The blood sacrifice of millions of generations of shocking pain, the blood shed by evolution.

One day the benevolent and incandescent one will rise.

Torture in the modern age

Picked up a New York Sun story via Google News in which Jose Padilla (alleged al-Qa'ida "dirty bomb" suspect) claims that the CIA dosed him with LSD to, presumably, help break him under interrogation - see here.

LSD was studied by the CIA as a possible "truth drug" during MK-ULTRA, without much success. But as a method of sheer chemical torture, it could be notably more successful. As a sensitiser, it could potentially make you feel really miserable, depending what sort of a set and setting you were subjected to.

Of course, there are worse things than LSD. As anyone who has read Bunker 13 will know, things like BZ: a deliriant guaranteed to give you a screaming psychotic nightmare trip, while chemically stimulating the pain receptors in your nervous system.

Oh yes: chemical torture. Too flesh-crawlingly terrifying to even contemplate.

Experts in coercive interrogation recommend (should you ever have to torture anyone for vital information) to avoid inflicting pain for as long as possible, as the fear of pain is often more potent than physical pain itself. Indeed, many people surprise themselves with how well they cope with pain, when it comes.

Imagine, instead, being placed in an immersion tank, floating in body-temperature saline and deprived of all sensory input whatsoever. You are, essentially, a "brain in a bath-tub"; consiousness floating in total darkness, total silence, total emptiness. Horror vacui. This, in itself, is enough to drive most people crazy. In a matter of a few hours or so.

But before they put you in there, you are injected with prolixin - developed as an anti-psychotic, this is something like being chemically flayed - and turbocurarine, which paralyses your body and denies you any outlet, through physical movement or flailing about, from the ghastly creeping torment and panic that is slowly drowning you. If necessary, of course, they will put a tube down your wind-pipe to keep you alive for the next few days.

The sadist genius of human beings knows no limit.

This is an unpleasant thing to think about, but almost certainly, someone somewhere is undergoing treatment like this, perhaps under the aegis of your government, busy fighting the great War on Terror.

[[realgem recommended reading]] Excellent and thoughtful article from Atlantic Monthly on the dark art of interrogation, speculating what Khalid Sheikh Muhammad may have gone through


... Or maybe they just gave him the LSD treatment...

"After 48 hours, the suspect cracked and began to reveal vital operational intelligence. It was established that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration, that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively, and that there is no such thing as death. Further, evidence was gained which seems to bear out suspicions that life is only a dream, and that we are merely the imagination of ourselves..." [remember Bill Hicks...]

Asymmetric warfare

New addition to the sidebar blogroll: Global Guerillas. Fascinating and authoritatively-written open notebook on "4th generation warfare": encompassing explorations of emergence (in the sense of spontaneously self-organising systems - all this alliteration is unintentional, by the way), open-source and networks as metaphors applied to theories of guerilla warfare, and post-modern insurgency in the age of the internet.

Also gypsy-ass bad motherfucker Robert Young Pelton's website comebackalive.com - if you haven't heard of this man and his work, please to check out the website. Found by browsing on the Black Flag Cafe forums: "Hitler's Drugged Soldiers" - RYP quotes the full text of an article discussing German military use of drugs and alcohol under the Third Reich. (Excerpts:)

Many of the Wehrmacht's soldiers were high on Pervitin when they went into battle, in a Blitzkrieg fueled by speed. The German military was supplied with millions of methamphetamine tablets during the first half of 1940. The drugs were part of a plan to help pilots, sailors and infantry troops become capable of superhuman performance. The military leadership liberally dispensed such stimulants, but also alcohol and opiates, as long as it believed drugging and intoxicating troops could help it achieve victory over the Allies. But the Nazis were less than diligent in monitoring side-effects like drug addiction and a decline in moral standards... During the short period between April and July of 1940, more than 35 million tablets of Pervitin and Isophan [methamphetamine] were shipped to the German army and air force...

Franz Wertheim, a medical officer who was sent to a small village near the Western Wall on May 10, 1940, wrote the following account: "To help pass the time, we doctors experimented on ourselves. We would begin the day by drinking a water glass of cognac and taking two injections of morphine. We found cocaine to be useful at midday, and in the evening we would occasionally take Hyoskin," an alkaloid derived from some varieties of the nightshade plant that is used as a medication. Wertheim adds: "As a result, we were not always fully in command of our senses."

[and of course Hitler's prescribed daily methamphetamine shots and Goering's morphine addiction are well documented]

... indeed, we were feeling positively... asymmetric...

scaling the north face of reality

this account may be added to and improved check back. for another account of ibogaine withdrawal, see here.

the professionals among you will know that acute heroin withdrawal, 100-0mph in 0 secs howling bloody nails-tearing screaming cold turkey, goes something like this: Day 1 is uncomfortable, the first night don't expect to sleep. Day 2 is approaching howling bloody nails-tearing dope sickness and it's only getting worse. The second and then god forbid the third night will be pure fucking hell on earth. If you are lucky and aren't too far advanced in your addiction by the fourth night you will be getting your first patches of delirious sleep, waking from nightmares to more twisting in reeking sweatsoaked sheets. And it goes on... And the craving, the god-awful cellular scream ("a yen comes on him like a great black wind through the bones..." naked lunch)...

when i did my kick, i was on over 300mg morphine sulphate (approx. equiv. to some 100 ml methadone), plus anywhere between 0.25-1 gramme of street heroin per day on top (cheap, powerful, plentiful and pure in London since the US and Brits joined the interminable war in Afghanistan and bombed the fuck out of the Taliban...)

what happened to me was this:

sometime around the time of the last post i took 1400mg ibogaine hcl and lay down on my bed, preparing for whatever was to come.

several hours later there is a vague humming in my ears. my thoughts are a little disjointed, i feel tranquilised as if by one of those horrible psychiatric tranquilisers but still able to communicate normally. i feel a little disassociated and underneath that i can feel the junk sickness kicking in. then colours are starting to blur, and objects are tinged with strange colours. it becomes more difficult to hold onto a thought for more than two seconds. the music is playing upside down.

the delirious paranoia running through my mind is that it's not working. that i've been cheated. that there's something wrong with the stuff, cause i stored it for so long. panic building up. horrible sickness. wasn't this supposed to be painless? that i toss and turn in the grip of some ketamine-like delirium while the sickness cures itself?

where is the powerful psychotropic effect i expected from the drug? instead, there is a mocking emptiness, laughing, laughing at stupid me who wanted something for free. ("pay it all, pay it all, pay it all back, every moment you have stolen...") it is only afterwards i realise how truly powerful this drug is. it's a very low-level reprogramming drug in computer programming language terms...

i am lucky to have at the other end of a telephone a man who we'll call ed i've never met with a remarkable knowledge of ibogaine. the consultant. otherwise who knows what would have happened to me.

the next 48 hours are delirious. flashes: i'm just going in. ed is on the telephone: "i have a feel for ibogaine. i can reach out and connect to you now. i can hear you are in an ibogaine space." i feel i am in acute withdrawal space and abandoned by this supposed wonder cure. "it's a remarkable drug. have trust. trust in it. now settle down in your bed and stay there. you'll be there for at least 48 hours." i laugh and drop the phone. at the time it seemed the most blood-curdlingly terrifying idea i'd ever heard.

delirium of torture. no hope no hope for one second's comfort. nerves peeled and exposed, lying twisting and twiching in a stench of toxic sweat. how much longer? someone else is talking calmly: "... in some gestapo prison... having lights shined in your eyes, getting slapped every time you tried to sleep. then when you've been sitting tied to a chair in your own piss and shit for 48 hours, when any little slap hurts, they fix your hands to a table and out come the pliers for your fingernails... if you pass out, they'll chuck some cold water on you to wake you up before carrying on..." it's the funniest thing anyone's ever told me in this infinity of pain. how petty my situation really is. i am coherent enough to answer that some sophisticated modern tortures are completely chemical in nature... inject you with this to make you feel like you're drowning in pain, inject you with that so that you're immobile and put you in an immersion tank so that you're alone in the dark with your own screaming nervous system... (like this)...

a synchronicity too delicious to miss, or how i destroyed a house with the power of my will:

sometime as i lie twisting and in delirium on day 2, just around the time i find and lock my will on what i'm doing and laugh at how easy it really is, the old house in Camden Rd collapses into the street. builders are trapped inside. the road is blocked. people in intensive care.

the old house where all this begun. where realgem began. the old house that... some people didn't like. paulette, for example. and some other sensitives. they didn't like that house, didn't come there. well. it had a fucked up old history. long-time readers will remember... see archives Jan-May 2005...


the only reason i don't leave on day two and get heroin is because there are people there to restrain me by force if necessary and i am too weak and confused for any sort of subterfuge. "give it 24 hours" ed says. "trust."

visions of evolution, nature red in tooth and claw, a million generations of teeming slashing tearing bundles of will to live and pain, a million years of bloodsoaked evolution on the primordial plains of africa. i see smoke from the witch-pyres of the middle ages rising into the skies of europe. then reeking mud and barbed wire and cutting jagged steel across the mindless battlefields of the great war. all moving towards something... moving towards something... but where did intelligence first come from? the brutal fight of evolution, the generations before us over the eons clawing forward - i owe them more than this, i owe them greater tribute than to be caught by this stupid-trap of nature and to destroy myself...

by night 2 (don't get the idea it was pleasant...) i was actually improving, just when it should have been getting worse... by the morning of day 3 i am cheerful and smiling even if i still haven't slept and feel frazzled. eating handfuls of valium and smoking dope, giving me some respite. i do not look like someone on the third day of cold turkey withdrawal. by the morning of day 3 i have a bath by my own power and dress in a suit ready to go out to eat breakfast, feeling fine in my mind, and then promptly collapse like a skeleton.

doc o had said the day before this all, the last day of my junkie life: "i don't know why you're putting yourself through this psychedelic hell when you could so easily just gently reduce on methadone." look through the realgem archives and count the number of times... gradually reduce, relapse, force the dose down again, start scoring again... count the number of times... i was in a position and with the resources to maintain my life like this indefinitely. i just couldn't quit. couldn't, couldn't couldn't.

"it all comes down to how thinly you want to spread it," he said when he dropped by on the morning of day 3. yes, in his very professional opinion, i looked nothing like someone in day 3 of acute junk sickness.


INTO THE INFERNO!

it all comes down to how thinly you want to spread it.

ibogaine lets you face the dragon or the monkey and fight it head on in one ferocious test of wills. into the inferno!

people ask me what it was like, what was the trip like: it's a shamanic psychedelic, isn't it? but no, i had no visions of african gods or strange other worlds... some people perhaps do...

as i can now limitedly comprehend it, ibogaine works on a much lower level... near the metabolic, cellular, maybe genetic level... the theory has been put forward that psychedelic chemicals played a part in the evolution of intelligence, language in some sort of proto-human apes... after ibogaine, i have a strong intuitive feeling that this may be so...

this experimental medication does merit the description miraculous. within several days i am out and about, in the street... like a window has been cleaned, and the light is painfully intense, painfully intense is the world... but it's the world... once again swimming in the world of the senses, talking to people... throwing away money at people, talking to a homeless junkie and giving him a note to score, just cause i don't need that money for my habit any more... sitting on the street in camden one of the crack-niggers comes and waves rock in my face... the pusher-man... he won't leave us alone... so i ask him if he's got brown... yeah... so i tell him to get the fuck out of my face, hoping for violence, ready for violence... but it's sunlit high street and the day it's beautiful and it's just childish bravado in the face of "powder power..."

the ibogaine's psychotropic effect, which i initially was so disappointed with, manifests itself in the next few days, and in a much more subtle way than any mere psychedelic... my mind is sharp inside my worn-out body that i push to exhaustion... and still don't sleep, no, i don't sleep... god, sometimes i want to...

and all the synchronicities... the crazy coincidences, the chance meetings, the way everything is falling into place as if the universe was in synch with me again, the new opportunities that drop into my path, the people i need to meet there just when i turn the corner... but this is some effect on a more subtle level of reality... something, something beyond words or chemistry or pharmacology...

don't think it's the painless cure. there's only one painless cure and that's death.

i hope this is of interest to anyone who struggles with this strange sickness... anyone who is finding lady heroin too demanding a mistress...