Summary:
This chapter talks about effects of drugs as drug addicts perceive them, so be warned.
Comments are greatly appreciated: please, let me know what you think!
Chapter:
…
"I want that!"
…
"Right answer, my dear!" Jenny agreed with a mellifluous grin, which remembered Skye of Raina, then continued:
"You'll see: ecstasy is beyond anything you have ever felt!
Reading about such experiences is useful, but no words can communicate the very experience; words are inadequate and irrelevant, only pitiful attempts to convey the essence of this transcendental principle.
You are going to be surprised, startled and delighted."
"I already experienced that, some years ago… and some days ago, too… until all that was ripped off me…
I know perfectly well that ecstasy and bliss, that joy and happiness, that pleasure and delight, that euphoria, that rapture… and I miss all that… bad…
This is why I wanna feel that again, even if I know the risks."
Jenny remained dumbfounded.
Evidently she thought she had to do with a novice, whereas it was not so.
"Ah, ok…
Let me say, however, that the question is not whether gaining ecstasy is risky (it is), but whether the expected gains outweigh the risks.
This is a matter that each individual must decide for himself."
"I've already decided. So, please, let's go." Skye concluded matter-of-factly.
The two stood up and started walking.
But Jenny seemed very talkative:
"There is a fathomless meaning, an intensity of delight in all our surroundings, which our eyes must be unsealed to see.
We have lost the art of playing with our life, so the joy has gone out of it: existence has become a deadly serious affair.
The use of drugs is a way of stirring deeply buried sources of the religious life and perceptions, which create feelings of awe, joy, wonder, peace and love…"
Skye interrupted her:
"I would rather prefer to leave religion out of all this…
The reason I want this is not religious.
I know I'm throwing my life to the winds.
I know I'm going down a slippery slope, made of illness and insanity…
But it is all that I deserve."
Jenny retorted:
"The psychedelic drug doesn't mean doctor disease, dope fiend crime or instant insanity, but ecstasy, sensual unfolding, revelation, illumination, contact with nature!
Ecstasy is a legitimate human need!
Ecstasy is something higher or further out than ordinary pleasure, beyond pleasure!
Ecstasy means to break out of the verbal prisons, suspend your imprints, see things anew, perceive directly. With freshened perception goes the feeling of liberation, insight, the exultant sense of having escaped the lifeless net of symbols!
We all want a passionate life lived in a state of ecstasy, a life of intensity and deep emotions; an existential life in which every moment counts; a real life!
But we're not allowed to have that, because if we did…we would be free.
Only drugs can open up those glorious and pleasurable chambers in the mind.
The ultimate pleasure organ is the brain, an enormous 30 billion-cell hedonic gland waiting to be activated!"
Skye remained pensive:
"Yes, I know it is possible to activate that 30 billion-cell hedonic gland… at the price of frying it!
But I don't care.
What I want is to feel again that bond, that sensation of unity I lost."
Skye's words were full of pain.
Jenny agreed:
"Yeah… you miss that feeling of oneness with humanity and nature, those states of cosmic unity, that loss of boundaries between yourself and the objective world…
You miss that moment when duality seems to merge into bliss; when you see the universe as supreme light, undifferentiated from yourself, and you remain unshakable in this awareness; when you feel that your self is part of a much larger pattern, and the sense of cleansing, release, and joy makes old woes seem trivial.
You know, many leading humanistic psychologists exhibited lately a growing interest in a variety of previously neglected areas and topics of psychology, such as mystical experiences, transcendence, ecstasy, cosmic consciousness, theory and practice of meditation, or inter-individual and inter-species synergy…
But it is still a marginal phenomenon."
"You seem very prepared on this matter!"
"Yeah… before meeting Raoul I was a very proficient psychology student…
Then, one day he came to our class and started to talk to some of us…
He convinced some of us to experience drugs…
At first I kept myself at a security distance, but then things started changing.
The fact that most aroused my interest was the tone and contents of what my classmates, who had taken the drugs, were saying. They talked to each other in stunned, excited voices about love, sharing, identity, unity, death, ecstasy, topics not generally discussed by psychology students except with cynical flippancy or heavy academic seriousness, but certainly never from experienced confrontation, as was happening now.
Then I tried it myself through Raoul… and I must admit that never before anybody made me experience romance, splendor, optimism, idealism, individual courage, high aspirations, aesthetic innovation, spiritual wonder, exploration, and desire to search with such intensity!
I've never been happier and more optimistic than during the high Raoul made me experience!
Previously, I had forgotten the childish joy of simply being alive.
Tripping, instead, made me feel the way an infant must feel, in the absence of discomfort, simply being: energetic, open, interested.
Tripping lent to my life the grace of fairy tales, where everything is right and appropriate and satisfying.
The effect of ecstasy is to create motivation, the longing to continue the ecstasy and fulfill it."
Jenny made a pause in her incredible flow of words, then continued:
"Critics of the drug users complain that they retreat from life's realities, become passive and inert.
The curious thing about psychiatric language is that it's almost completely negative, a pompous, gloomy lexicon of troubles, symptoms, abnormalities, eccentricities. But I think this claim to realism, facing factuality and flat earthism is, at root, resentment against quality, genius, imagination, poetry, fantasy, inventiveness and gaiety.
We cannot interpret ecstasy as mania, or calm serenity as catatonia; we cannot diagnose drug users as detached schizoids or exhibitionist masochists; or the mystic experience as a symptom; or the visionary state as a psychosis.
The entire range of pleasurable experiences has gone unstudied, unlabeled, undefined. You will not find the word 'fun' in the index of most psychology texts.
Words such as joy, ecstasy, grace, beauty, just don't exist in the psychiatric vocabulary.
The poor psychiatrist has been given the sad task of looking for pathology and is usually bewildered when he comes face to face with the more meaningful experiences of life.
As prime conditioner of his fellow man, the psychologist must be an exemplar: calm, serious, controlled, sensibly cynical, smugly pessimistic and above all, rational.
Studying the unconditioned state, producing pleasure in his subjects and acting in a natural, hedonic manner would lead to his excommunication.
…
I have been excommunicated."
"I'm sorry." Skye said.
"Oh, don't worry! Millions already know that beyond the fears of the state sanctioned psychiatry and governmental policy, psychedelics, under the right set and setting, can lead to joy, mystery, rebirth and realization beyond belief.
One traumatic event can shape a life, one therapeutic event can reshape it.
Having a good time and experiencing beauty is therapeutic."
They arrived to Raoul, and Jenny looked at him eating him with her eyes:
"And I am experiencing beauty!" she added.
He was entertaining himself with a girl.
"He has a gorgeous stamina. He cannot live without women…" Jenny said, bitterly.
"And you can't stand that, right?"
Jenny looked Skye with pain in her eyes…
"Welcome, our dear girl, seeker of a clearer, purer realm, a realm of unbounded joy, the realm of enlightenment, the pure land!" Raoul exclaimed at seeing Skye.
"Sorry to have interrupted you… in your favorite… activity…" said Skye, embarrassed.
Instead, Raoul seemed not embarrassed at all, even if he has been caught in such a compromising condition.
He, instead, seemed rather at ease and went straight to the point:
"You'll see: compared with sex under drugs, the way you've been making love, no matter how ecstatic the pleasure you think you got from it, is like making love to a department store dummy.
The grasping approach to sexuality destroys its gaiety before anything else, blocking up its deepest and most secret fountain, for there is no other reason for creation than pure joy.
The height of sexual love is one of the most total experiences of relationship to the other of which we are capable, but prejudice and insensitivity have prevented us from calling that 'mystical ecstasy'.
Before taking drugs, I never stayed in a state of sexual ecstasy for hours on end.
Instead, drugs heighten all of your senses, while awareness enhances the pleasurable aspects and allow you to live the sexual experience totally.
Each caress or kiss is timeless…
Now, that you are going to follow the line of least resistance, you will discover that all the vibrations of nature are ecstatic, blissful, or… erotic.
Existence is orgasm!"
Then he added, quietly, so only Skye could hear him:
"As the sexual activity continues and the drug takes greater hold on you, the sensations intensify.
In my case, the penis feels bigger, stiffer and strangely "rubbery" and sensations of pleasure expand to more areas of the body than usual."
At that so raw, harsh statement Skye looked away and grimaced.
"Oh, oh, our lady is playing hard to get!
You didn't seem so choosy and fussy the first night I met you!
But you will change, I assure you!
All sexual ecstasy has a quality of self-abandonment, of surrender to a force greater than the ego… and you will change, when visions of every kind of sexual encounter one can imagine will reach you and tremendous waves of lust and rapture will engulf you. Then unmotivated laughter, exuberant joy, deep feelings of peace, serenity and relaxation, orgiastic ecstasy of cosmic proportions, hedonic pleasure, feelings of voluptuousness and sensuality will exhilarate you!
You will experience the joyous unity with what exists beyond!"
With that he reached in his pocket and extracted a tiny transparent envelope with white powder inside and tossed that to her.
"This is the best on the market. Make good use of that."
Skye took that without a second thought.