The Glass Doors
CHAPTER 1-6
CHAPTER 1
Availing
The short school bus provided a ferry service from Huntsville to the main kiosk in Algonquin Provincial Park. I loaded my gear into the back of the short bus, and I brought far too much for an already challenging hike up to Provoking Lake.
There was my tent, sleeping bag, and the kind of gear that one would expect. However, add to that, a dozen CDs and Discman, ten softcover books, a few dozen batteries, cans of food, a sixer of beer, canned heat, and enough clothing for several weeks. I didn’t intend on going back to Toronto. This was the end of the road for me.
The bus driver was a stocky woman whose furrowed brow should have alerted me to the overestimation of my hiking ability. I was wearing running shoes, yet she didn’t have to suppress laughter. She was genuinely worried. Perhaps, she had a sense that I wasn’t the typical camper. I wasn’t a camper at all. Mine was a pilgrimage to my grave.
The bus driver’s daughter sat in the front seat just behind her mother in the driver’s seat. Even this child – no older than ten – sized me up with a nervous stare. We headed off toward the park. There was a maturity to the daughter’s furtive glances, as if she was a wild animal keeping a close eye on one in her herd that was not alert to the stalking of a dangerous predator nearby.
I had been through much and it wasn’t worth explaining myself to a pair that would be unlikely to appreciate the strange choices I had been making in recent years. One of the last strange choices was to pick up a box of rat poison from the local hardware store back home in Toronto. The poison was now packed between Van Halen’s 1984 CD and a copy of George Orwell’s 1984. An unhappy coincidence, I suppose.
It was August 12th, 2005, and I was fortunate that the high-profile hiking trail cut through dense forest. The summer sun struggled to burden my journey, although the sheer amount of gear had me taking several resting breaks along the way. Ten miles into ascending and descending steep rocky paths, I finally reached the campsites. The Nike runners had my poor feet screaming, “just don’t do it again!” But I pushed past the pain and worked on setting up my campsite before nightfall.
I would stay at that campsite for the next seven weeks. On the morning of August 31st, 2005, I sat up in my tent and pulled out the box of rat poison from my backpack. I swallowed two large mouthfuls of pellets. Although the expectation was intestinal pain, passing out, and not waking up – no such thing occurred. My stomach grumbled for several hours. I distinctly remember feeling nonplussed.
There was yet another strange choice to make: continue with the original plan of suicide, or back out and try something else. I walked down to the lake not more than a dozen meters from my tent. I squatted in the rushes, the murky water coming up to my waist. It was time to consider pushing off the rocks and sinking to the bottom of the lake. The poison should have worked, no? I couldn’t shake that thought, and so I got out of the water and walked back to the tent.
Later that day, I would head back out to the highway and drop off the rest of the rat poison in the communal dumpster for the RV Park. Plans had changed, but perhaps not the essence of what was called for in my twenty-three years of life. The next two weeks I focused on my relationship with nature. There were no more campers around the lake, and few hikers during the day. September in Ontario is certainly marked as the end of summer and the nights can be brutally cold that far north.
Nature was kind to me. I was a quiet guest and the animals moved around me seldom disturbed by my presence. There was a pair of chipmunks that enjoyed playing on the long log next to my fire pit. I woke up to a chorus of birds chirping their morning recitals. One afternoon, I was talking aloud in my tent and suddenly heard a rumbling in the woods behind me.
A bear sauntered up to my tent and sniffed around. I was dead still and absolutely terrified. Although I was there to die, being eviscerated by one of nature’s most mighty beasts was not my drug of choice. The bear moseyed down to the lake, and I heard it lapping up some water. I didn’t dare sit up and cop a look – bad karma. I was the outsider and respected that meager status. The bear walked past my tent once more and then ran into the woods where I heard large branches being stomped into the ground by powerful paws.
On September 15th, 2005, I ran out of money completely and it was no longer purposeful to make supply runs to the kiosk at the highway which cut through the provincial park. I was out of food at my campsite. I lay in my tent for two weeks and ate no food. Each day, I would get up a few times to relieve myself and drink water directly from the lake.
The nights became so cold that I removed the blue tarp from under the tent and placed it over the tent for an extra layer of protection from the elements. Additionally, I took all my clothes and draped them over my sleeping bag which I lay in very still. I spoke aloud to myself or slept. Eventually, I had no energy to leave the tent and relieved myself in empty Gatorade bottles I had been putting aside when collecting water from a nearby stream. The water at the stream tasted much cleaner, crisper, and cooler than the lake water. The lake water left a taste in my mouth that felt like I was being dehydrated by some unidentified salty substance.
I had lost many pounds. It wouldn’t be long before I didn’t have energy to gather water from the lake. It was already past the point of collecting water from the stream which was several hundred meters from my campsite.
In the very early morning of September 30th, 2005, I woke up with a feral sense of need for clean water. I stood up and left my tent in a rush, but then blacked out and collapsed a few meters away. Moments later, I came to consciousness and crawled back to my tent and slept. The next morning, it was literally do or die – I did. I left my campsite and packed light, leaving behind a lot of junk to my eternal shame. Ten miles of hiking on adrenaline alone got me back to the kiosk and a nearby payphone.
My parents had been searching for me and were at the kiosk the day before based on tracking my last debit card purchases. They headed back to the city because the rangers believed that I left the park once I stopped paying the rental fee for my campsite – two weeks earlier. My mother and father returned for me that afternoon.
This was not the end of the strange choices that I made in my life back then. Neither was that trip to Algonquin Park the start of those strange choices.
Availing
The short school bus provided a ferry service from Huntsville to the main kiosk in Algonquin Provincial Park. I loaded my gear into the back of the short bus, and I brought far too much for an already challenging hike up to Provoking Lake.
There was my tent, sleeping bag, and the kind of gear that one would expect. However, add to that, a dozen CDs and Discman, ten softcover books, a few dozen batteries, cans of food, a sixer of beer, canned heat, and enough clothing for several weeks. I didn’t intend on going back to Toronto. This was the end of the road for me.
The bus driver was a stocky woman whose furrowed brow should have alerted me to the overestimation of my hiking ability. I was wearing running shoes, yet she didn’t have to suppress laughter. She was genuinely worried. Perhaps, she had a sense that I wasn’t the typical camper. I wasn’t a camper at all. Mine was a pilgrimage to my grave.
The bus driver’s daughter sat in the front seat just behind her mother in the driver’s seat. Even this child – no older than ten – sized me up with a nervous stare. We headed off toward the park. There was a maturity to the daughter’s furtive glances, as if she was a wild animal keeping a close eye on one in her herd that was not alert to the stalking of a dangerous predator nearby.
I had been through much and it wasn’t worth explaining myself to a pair that would be unlikely to appreciate the strange choices I had been making in recent years. One of the last strange choices was to pick up a box of rat poison from the local hardware store back home in Toronto. The poison was now packed between Van Halen’s 1984 CD and a copy of George Orwell’s 1984. An unhappy coincidence, I suppose.
It was August 12th, 2005, and I was fortunate that the high-profile hiking trail cut through dense forest. The summer sun struggled to burden my journey, although the sheer amount of gear had me taking several resting breaks along the way. Ten miles into ascending and descending steep rocky paths, I finally reached the campsites. The Nike runners had my poor feet screaming, “just don’t do it again!” But I pushed past the pain and worked on setting up my campsite before nightfall.
I would stay at that campsite for the next seven weeks. On the morning of August 31st, 2005, I sat up in my tent and pulled out the box of rat poison from my backpack. I swallowed two large mouthfuls of pellets. Although the expectation was intestinal pain, passing out, and not waking up – no such thing occurred. My stomach grumbled for several hours. I distinctly remember feeling nonplussed.
There was yet another strange choice to make: continue with the original plan of suicide, or back out and try something else. I walked down to the lake not more than a dozen meters from my tent. I squatted in the rushes, the murky water coming up to my waist. It was time to consider pushing off the rocks and sinking to the bottom of the lake. The poison should have worked, no? I couldn’t shake that thought, and so I got out of the water and walked back to the tent.
Later that day, I would head back out to the highway and drop off the rest of the rat poison in the communal dumpster for the RV Park. Plans had changed, but perhaps not the essence of what was called for in my twenty-three years of life. The next two weeks I focused on my relationship with nature. There were no more campers around the lake, and few hikers during the day. September in Ontario is certainly marked as the end of summer and the nights can be brutally cold that far north.
Nature was kind to me. I was a quiet guest and the animals moved around me seldom disturbed by my presence. There was a pair of chipmunks that enjoyed playing on the long log next to my fire pit. I woke up to a chorus of birds chirping their morning recitals. One afternoon, I was talking aloud in my tent and suddenly heard a rumbling in the woods behind me.
A bear sauntered up to my tent and sniffed around. I was dead still and absolutely terrified. Although I was there to die, being eviscerated by one of nature’s most mighty beasts was not my drug of choice. The bear moseyed down to the lake, and I heard it lapping up some water. I didn’t dare sit up and cop a look – bad karma. I was the outsider and respected that meager status. The bear walked past my tent once more and then ran into the woods where I heard large branches being stomped into the ground by powerful paws.
On September 15th, 2005, I ran out of money completely and it was no longer purposeful to make supply runs to the kiosk at the highway which cut through the provincial park. I was out of food at my campsite. I lay in my tent for two weeks and ate no food. Each day, I would get up a few times to relieve myself and drink water directly from the lake.
The nights became so cold that I removed the blue tarp from under the tent and placed it over the tent for an extra layer of protection from the elements. Additionally, I took all my clothes and draped them over my sleeping bag which I lay in very still. I spoke aloud to myself or slept. Eventually, I had no energy to leave the tent and relieved myself in empty Gatorade bottles I had been putting aside when collecting water from a nearby stream. The water at the stream tasted much cleaner, crisper, and cooler than the lake water. The lake water left a taste in my mouth that felt like I was being dehydrated by some unidentified salty substance.
I had lost many pounds. It wouldn’t be long before I didn’t have energy to gather water from the lake. It was already past the point of collecting water from the stream which was several hundred meters from my campsite.
In the very early morning of September 30th, 2005, I woke up with a feral sense of need for clean water. I stood up and left my tent in a rush, but then blacked out and collapsed a few meters away. Moments later, I came to consciousness and crawled back to my tent and slept. The next morning, it was literally do or die – I did. I left my campsite and packed light, leaving behind a lot of junk to my eternal shame. Ten miles of hiking on adrenaline alone got me back to the kiosk and a nearby payphone.
My parents had been searching for me and were at the kiosk the day before based on tracking my last debit card purchases. They headed back to the city because the rangers believed that I left the park once I stopped paying the rental fee for my campsite – two weeks earlier. My mother and father returned for me that afternoon.
This was not the end of the strange choices that I made in my life back then. Neither was that trip to Algonquin Park the start of those strange choices.
CHAPTER 2
Recollection
It started the night with Mike and Dan. They hadn’t been good friends of mine for all that long, but after high school most of my best friends left the city for college. I stayed, and guys like Mike and Dan stepped in to fill out my social roster.
My high school experience had been in the late 1990s, and back then, it was still possible to flunk grades in school and be held back. That hadn’t been an issue of mine, but several of my friends completed “victory laps” at alternative schools. The alternative schools in the city were lax on the formalities of institutional education, for example, you were invited to call your teachers by their first name, to arrive late for class politely, and to substitute assignment instructions for topics that had greater personal interest.
Moving from public school to alternative schools made sense if you weren’t keeping up with the work or buying into the traditional ways of teaching and learning. Plus, the alternative schools were attempting to rub out the awkward eyesore of traditional schools – the adult public high school student.
At the start of my years in public high school I had a few run-ins with those atavistic anomalies – adult high schoolers. It marked indelible humiliations in my mind because these guys were kicking around so many years that they had seen it all, and they knew better than anyone how to embarrass a kid. In that regard, they were scholarly.
Davis rushed forward and picked me up while I was standing outside the usual weekend chill spot – the glass doors – and he carried me over to a wall and pressed me against it. I was afraid of the intimate encounter because he had a distinct salacious look in his eye. Some people might have said he was just mental. What Davis was doing to me wasn’t hazing because I wasn’t being invited to hang with him and his buddies. No, it was just a show of force and an amusement for him. It turned him on like a dog pouncing on a plush toy. The best course of action for me was to avoid squeaking. Look confused. Ignore his adulation. Move on.
Sometimes, these kinds of impromptu assaults came with a warning which was always nice. It gave you a head start. One night, my friends and I entered the local McDonalds and there was Scott sitting on a table like a bad ass. Scott was the notorious neighbourhood bully – the one Hollywood comedies parody. Scott called out to me as I passed by. He called me “Joey” through the side of his mouth. That wasn’t my name. It was a heckle. I promptly exited the restaurant.
Time did catch up to those brutes. The legend of Scott became an ongoing joke for the kids in the neighbourhood who had known the terror of being misnamed or misplaced by bullies. One night, Scott had tried to rob a homeless man of his spare change, and the story goes that the hobo kicked Scott’s ass so far up his back that Scott was fitted with cushy new shoulder pads. For the rest of that school year, it felt like every month there was a new story about how Scott got his righteous comeuppance from his former victims or disillusioned proteges. It was a deluge of unholy vengeance. Bullying is an art, and you can’t lose your inspiration, it seems.
That was high school, but then it was college in the new millennium. My friends who stayed in the city were putting in their time at alternative schools, but guys like Mike and Dan were still in public high school. Mike and Dan were the younger brothers of two of my best friends who left the city for college. That meant that I had known Mike and Dan for several years prior to becoming close friends. It was awkward around the holidays when I would call their houses and my old buddies who were back from college would pick up the line. They knew that I was calling to make plans with their younger brothers.
The night that changed my life was spent with Mike and Dan. But this is not a story about the good old days, or even that fateful night of my first strange choice. This is about the waking nightmare and the living hell that I endured after that night. This story is a confession. This is an echo, or at least an attempt at a meaningful reverberation. Will I hear something back? Can anyone relate to my story? Have any of them survived their own ordeals? It has been over twenty years and I have heard nothing from the world. Perhaps, I am the only one who has experienced what I have. If so, the whole thing doesn’t add up neatly, but it might still be true.
Recollection
It started the night with Mike and Dan. They hadn’t been good friends of mine for all that long, but after high school most of my best friends left the city for college. I stayed, and guys like Mike and Dan stepped in to fill out my social roster.
My high school experience had been in the late 1990s, and back then, it was still possible to flunk grades in school and be held back. That hadn’t been an issue of mine, but several of my friends completed “victory laps” at alternative schools. The alternative schools in the city were lax on the formalities of institutional education, for example, you were invited to call your teachers by their first name, to arrive late for class politely, and to substitute assignment instructions for topics that had greater personal interest.
Moving from public school to alternative schools made sense if you weren’t keeping up with the work or buying into the traditional ways of teaching and learning. Plus, the alternative schools were attempting to rub out the awkward eyesore of traditional schools – the adult public high school student.
At the start of my years in public high school I had a few run-ins with those atavistic anomalies – adult high schoolers. It marked indelible humiliations in my mind because these guys were kicking around so many years that they had seen it all, and they knew better than anyone how to embarrass a kid. In that regard, they were scholarly.
Davis rushed forward and picked me up while I was standing outside the usual weekend chill spot – the glass doors – and he carried me over to a wall and pressed me against it. I was afraid of the intimate encounter because he had a distinct salacious look in his eye. Some people might have said he was just mental. What Davis was doing to me wasn’t hazing because I wasn’t being invited to hang with him and his buddies. No, it was just a show of force and an amusement for him. It turned him on like a dog pouncing on a plush toy. The best course of action for me was to avoid squeaking. Look confused. Ignore his adulation. Move on.
Sometimes, these kinds of impromptu assaults came with a warning which was always nice. It gave you a head start. One night, my friends and I entered the local McDonalds and there was Scott sitting on a table like a bad ass. Scott was the notorious neighbourhood bully – the one Hollywood comedies parody. Scott called out to me as I passed by. He called me “Joey” through the side of his mouth. That wasn’t my name. It was a heckle. I promptly exited the restaurant.
Time did catch up to those brutes. The legend of Scott became an ongoing joke for the kids in the neighbourhood who had known the terror of being misnamed or misplaced by bullies. One night, Scott had tried to rob a homeless man of his spare change, and the story goes that the hobo kicked Scott’s ass so far up his back that Scott was fitted with cushy new shoulder pads. For the rest of that school year, it felt like every month there was a new story about how Scott got his righteous comeuppance from his former victims or disillusioned proteges. It was a deluge of unholy vengeance. Bullying is an art, and you can’t lose your inspiration, it seems.
That was high school, but then it was college in the new millennium. My friends who stayed in the city were putting in their time at alternative schools, but guys like Mike and Dan were still in public high school. Mike and Dan were the younger brothers of two of my best friends who left the city for college. That meant that I had known Mike and Dan for several years prior to becoming close friends. It was awkward around the holidays when I would call their houses and my old buddies who were back from college would pick up the line. They knew that I was calling to make plans with their younger brothers.
The night that changed my life was spent with Mike and Dan. But this is not a story about the good old days, or even that fateful night of my first strange choice. This is about the waking nightmare and the living hell that I endured after that night. This story is a confession. This is an echo, or at least an attempt at a meaningful reverberation. Will I hear something back? Can anyone relate to my story? Have any of them survived their own ordeals? It has been over twenty years and I have heard nothing from the world. Perhaps, I am the only one who has experienced what I have. If so, the whole thing doesn’t add up neatly, but it might still be true.
CHAPTER 3
Expectation
That night with Mike and Dan started like so many others. We had a neighbourhood meeting place and then headed over to the local video rental store to pick out some titles that we could agree on. Mike was adamant that we watch Kung Pow: Enter the Fist. I had never heard of it. Mike was a confident guy and he had physical size to support that confidence. Also, I trusted his judgment in movies. I found that I had more in common with Mike than his older brother. Mike and I were big fans of the grunge band Alice in Chains, Lovecraftian 80s horror flics, and cutting humour. We loved animals, but also eating steak. We could debate politics and philosophy without straining the friendship at all.
I didn’t know Dan as well as I knew Mike. Dan was a bit of an enigma. At the surface, he seemed to be a spoiled preppy kid, but in fact, he was very down-to-earth and sincere. Dan was worldly but he didn’t force it on you. He didn’t want to make others feel small and despite his diminutive stature this quality made him a big man, and as big as Mike. Dan was relatively indifferent about our movie choices. We left the store with Kung Pow, Blade 2, and an Xbox game – an adaptation of the John Carpenter horror movie, The Thing. We never ended up playing the game.
Back at my place, Mike reached into his inside jacket pocket and unveiled a plastic bag full of magic mushrooms. I had done mushrooms before. We had all been heavy pot smokers at different times during high school, but none of us were ever considered “burnouts”. Mike was up on his 420 subcultures, and he was reliable for good, clean street drugs. Mike had related hidden talents as well: while walking down the street he could break up weed with one hand concealed behind his jacket, then get the weed into a rolling paper, and roll the joint. The raccoon-like dexterity had kids marveling at his skills as if he were a world-famous funambulist crossing Niagara Falls in the dead of winter. It was a neat trick.
We smoked a joint at the start of that fateful night, maybe two. It was all a warmup for the shroom tea. There was a sense that drug concoctions, such as, tea or brownies, would get you “more high”. It might be true, and it seemed important at the time to get the “most high” that you could, especially with an exotic drug that didn’t come around often, such as, magic mushrooms. Either way, it was fun to mix it up with concoctions, and the shroom tea tasted alright. You steeped the tea with the mushrooms, and it was thought that the effective way to preserve psychoactive mushroom spores was by putting tin foil over the coffee mug and punching some holes in it for steam to escape. Was this science, or superstition?
After drinking the tea, you scooped out the soggy mushrooms at the bottom of the mug and chewed on them to get at all those precious spores now cascading down your gullet and entering your bloodstream. Smoking a joint twenty minutes later was considered the appropriate digestif. Then, you waited for the shrooms to “kick in”.
The key was to avoid a bad trip. A bad trip meant paranoia, perhaps stomach pain, certainly jitters, and generally, feeling unsafe. You do drugs to avoid feeling unwelcome in the world, but a bad trip represents dashed expectations and the return of rejection. Bad trips are dreadful, and they can destroy some people’s minds. Is that actually what happened to me that night? But I think that I can explain what happened now. It might require waxing philosophical and doing some armchair psychology first. In fact, I know it will.
Expectation
That night with Mike and Dan started like so many others. We had a neighbourhood meeting place and then headed over to the local video rental store to pick out some titles that we could agree on. Mike was adamant that we watch Kung Pow: Enter the Fist. I had never heard of it. Mike was a confident guy and he had physical size to support that confidence. Also, I trusted his judgment in movies. I found that I had more in common with Mike than his older brother. Mike and I were big fans of the grunge band Alice in Chains, Lovecraftian 80s horror flics, and cutting humour. We loved animals, but also eating steak. We could debate politics and philosophy without straining the friendship at all.
I didn’t know Dan as well as I knew Mike. Dan was a bit of an enigma. At the surface, he seemed to be a spoiled preppy kid, but in fact, he was very down-to-earth and sincere. Dan was worldly but he didn’t force it on you. He didn’t want to make others feel small and despite his diminutive stature this quality made him a big man, and as big as Mike. Dan was relatively indifferent about our movie choices. We left the store with Kung Pow, Blade 2, and an Xbox game – an adaptation of the John Carpenter horror movie, The Thing. We never ended up playing the game.
Back at my place, Mike reached into his inside jacket pocket and unveiled a plastic bag full of magic mushrooms. I had done mushrooms before. We had all been heavy pot smokers at different times during high school, but none of us were ever considered “burnouts”. Mike was up on his 420 subcultures, and he was reliable for good, clean street drugs. Mike had related hidden talents as well: while walking down the street he could break up weed with one hand concealed behind his jacket, then get the weed into a rolling paper, and roll the joint. The raccoon-like dexterity had kids marveling at his skills as if he were a world-famous funambulist crossing Niagara Falls in the dead of winter. It was a neat trick.
We smoked a joint at the start of that fateful night, maybe two. It was all a warmup for the shroom tea. There was a sense that drug concoctions, such as, tea or brownies, would get you “more high”. It might be true, and it seemed important at the time to get the “most high” that you could, especially with an exotic drug that didn’t come around often, such as, magic mushrooms. Either way, it was fun to mix it up with concoctions, and the shroom tea tasted alright. You steeped the tea with the mushrooms, and it was thought that the effective way to preserve psychoactive mushroom spores was by putting tin foil over the coffee mug and punching some holes in it for steam to escape. Was this science, or superstition?
After drinking the tea, you scooped out the soggy mushrooms at the bottom of the mug and chewed on them to get at all those precious spores now cascading down your gullet and entering your bloodstream. Smoking a joint twenty minutes later was considered the appropriate digestif. Then, you waited for the shrooms to “kick in”.
The key was to avoid a bad trip. A bad trip meant paranoia, perhaps stomach pain, certainly jitters, and generally, feeling unsafe. You do drugs to avoid feeling unwelcome in the world, but a bad trip represents dashed expectations and the return of rejection. Bad trips are dreadful, and they can destroy some people’s minds. Is that actually what happened to me that night? But I think that I can explain what happened now. It might require waxing philosophical and doing some armchair psychology first. In fact, I know it will.
CHAPTER 4
Separation
I have had over twenty years to reflect on what happened the night of the bad shroom trip with Mike and Dan, and how it eventually led me to Algonquin Park. It is important to share my findings, even if it is mere speculation. There are others who may need my answers – if there was just one person who found this story useful then I would feel that it had been worth telling. I wouldn’t want anyone else to go through what I did for the past two decades. I will try to keep this light because I hope to hold the reader’s interest, but there are some big ideas and challenging concepts to go over first.
It is my thought that human beings begin and end life with a fundamental mental partition. The mind has a conscious and an unconscious component. The conscious part of your mind is where you develop your unique personality, while the unconscious part of your mind is a repository of all sensory data you have received. Your unconscious mind remembers every detail that was presented to your senses in life, however, almost all of it is inaccessible because your conscious mind will never find that information relevant or important.
An apt analogy might be to consider the conscious mind as your computer’s operating system, such as Windows. Whereas the unconscious mind is your Hard Disk Drive (HDD). The HDD will have a record of all operations for the computer, most of which will be mediated through the operating system. In other words, your personality develops through conscious mental operations, but all incoming data is still stored on the unconscious mental hard drive even if you aren’t actively using that data in your conscious mental Windows interface.
The unconscious mind “crunches” the sensory data from your life experience, and it can present some of that information to your conscious mind. Some “coincidences” may arise from this. For example, one day you might wake up with a sore tooth and feel that it best to go to the dentist. That same day, you feel compelled to visit a pet store on the other side of town in a neighbourhood that you rarely travel to. In that neighbourhood, you encounter your dentist on the street. It seems like serendipity or Providence. If you were religious, you might exclaim that “god works in mysterious ways”. If you were not religious, you might still claim the experience as the power of karma.
Perhaps, there is a better explanation. Let us suppose that in your previous trip to the dentist you had been leafing through magazines in the waiting room. You had casually noticed the address sticker on the magazines. That address was not for the dentist’s office but rather for the dentist’s residential home on a street that you might be familiar with. At the time, your conscious mind found the information irrelevant, and it was ignored. However, your unconscious mind picked up the data and stored it.
Your unconscious mind “summoned” you to that neighbourhood on the other side of town that you rarely frequent on the off chance that being in the dentist’s neighbourhood would lead to a prepense encounter. Likely, nine times out of ten – or 99 times out of 100 – nothing significant materializes from these mental machinations. However, your unconscious mind is playing the odds. Sometimes, these things come together, and they stand out as fantastic. They rouse a sense of spirit in us. They disrupt routine thinking.
Why is the unconscious mind putting pieces together in your life as if it were a puzzle? It is my notion that the unconscious mind is geared for keeping people alive and well – for survival, physically, but mostly, existentially. The unconscious is trying to rouse a person out of their mental slumber and get them to a higher level of self-awareness. The unconscious cannot appreciate the social constraints of being at a higher level of self-awareness among a community of people who may be triggered by that and react poorly to it. The unconscious simply wants the person’s mental life to be more significant, and perhaps, most efficient. Arguably, greater self-awareness results in more efficient thinking, which in turn should be conducive to survival. And all of this logic follows from privileging human development as an evolutionary process.
The gist of what is written above is that the unconscious mind has a mandate independent of the values and interests of a person’s personality as determined by the development of their conscious mind.
Yet, we might appreciate how a social construct such as, Religion, can stymie the path to greater self-awareness. This is to say, a religious person who is moved by unconscious mechanisms toward noticing the inner workings and “plan” of the mind, may simply discredit the self for the achievement and instead ascribe a fantastic happening (such as, the run-in with the dentist) to the work of a deified otherness. This brings me to the next point regarding the partition of the mind.
The mechanisms of the unconscious mind can be dangerous, if not, intrusive. The fundamental mandate of the unconscious might be a positive one, and if we were all abandoned on separate islands then achieving greater self-awareness would be ideal. In that situation, you would want to be guided by your unconscious mind with its vast repository of personalized data. However, within a social context, the greater self-awareness can be punished by society who feel that the individual’s mental revelations may “infect” others and force them out of a lifestyle comfort zone. Many would be satisfied to remain in a mental lull state if they also felt content in life, generally.
To maintain the mental lull state, the human mind creates a new partition within the conscious mind. The subconscious is formed. The subconscious is a pseudo-unconscious and is formed to ward off the mandate of the unconscious mind. The subconscious is driven by social ideologies, such as, family, school, civic duty, patriotism, and religion. The subconscious is geared to present the conscious mind with the kinds of “connections” that will keep the individual fitting well into society. The subconscious shuns the unconscious and seeks to replace its function. However, the subconscious cannot perform the same data crunching that the innate unconscious mind can.
The emergence of the subconscious makes sense because as small children beginning to develop rational thinking, we notice the world as ominously dangerous. Adults have total control. As children, we need to fit in to survive. Most often, we readily buy into the social ideologies and institutions. We join the herd of family, church, state, etc., and we feel safe and protected within those collectivist structures. The subconscious regulates how these social institutions are internalized through social ideologies.
It is my belief that living ruled by the subconscious is an unnatural way to exist and it is against a person’s best interests. We can construct society without it and be healthier as a people. Allowing internalized collectivist ideologies to dictate choice in fact subverts free choice. The subconscious may disrupt an individual’s mental potential in myriad ways.
In fact, I speculate that disturbing dreams and nightmares when sleeping at night originate from that internal Laocoon struggle where the individual’s mind must wrestle the competing interests of the unconscious and subconscious. Effectively, nightmares stem from the unconscious mind’s attempt to have an individual recognize the subconscious as artifice – an invader – and then reject it. This is only a theory and mostly based on personal experience because I once suffered greatly from nightmares but now, I am in control during my dreams. I sleep much better and navigate the stygian gulf of my mental oneiric existence with a greater sense of calm.
This was an important, albeit heavy, discussion regarding the mind and its partition of a conscious and unconscious, as well as the formation of a pseudo-unconscious – the subconscious. To understand my strange choices in life, you might consider my philosophies on mental life. In fact, you may have noticed some people in your life that you care about deeply that have also made strange choices that are confounding for you. Perhaps, my philosophy on mental life would illuminate some of the underlying issues which exist in those relationships.
Separation
I have had over twenty years to reflect on what happened the night of the bad shroom trip with Mike and Dan, and how it eventually led me to Algonquin Park. It is important to share my findings, even if it is mere speculation. There are others who may need my answers – if there was just one person who found this story useful then I would feel that it had been worth telling. I wouldn’t want anyone else to go through what I did for the past two decades. I will try to keep this light because I hope to hold the reader’s interest, but there are some big ideas and challenging concepts to go over first.
It is my thought that human beings begin and end life with a fundamental mental partition. The mind has a conscious and an unconscious component. The conscious part of your mind is where you develop your unique personality, while the unconscious part of your mind is a repository of all sensory data you have received. Your unconscious mind remembers every detail that was presented to your senses in life, however, almost all of it is inaccessible because your conscious mind will never find that information relevant or important.
An apt analogy might be to consider the conscious mind as your computer’s operating system, such as Windows. Whereas the unconscious mind is your Hard Disk Drive (HDD). The HDD will have a record of all operations for the computer, most of which will be mediated through the operating system. In other words, your personality develops through conscious mental operations, but all incoming data is still stored on the unconscious mental hard drive even if you aren’t actively using that data in your conscious mental Windows interface.
The unconscious mind “crunches” the sensory data from your life experience, and it can present some of that information to your conscious mind. Some “coincidences” may arise from this. For example, one day you might wake up with a sore tooth and feel that it best to go to the dentist. That same day, you feel compelled to visit a pet store on the other side of town in a neighbourhood that you rarely travel to. In that neighbourhood, you encounter your dentist on the street. It seems like serendipity or Providence. If you were religious, you might exclaim that “god works in mysterious ways”. If you were not religious, you might still claim the experience as the power of karma.
Perhaps, there is a better explanation. Let us suppose that in your previous trip to the dentist you had been leafing through magazines in the waiting room. You had casually noticed the address sticker on the magazines. That address was not for the dentist’s office but rather for the dentist’s residential home on a street that you might be familiar with. At the time, your conscious mind found the information irrelevant, and it was ignored. However, your unconscious mind picked up the data and stored it.
Your unconscious mind “summoned” you to that neighbourhood on the other side of town that you rarely frequent on the off chance that being in the dentist’s neighbourhood would lead to a prepense encounter. Likely, nine times out of ten – or 99 times out of 100 – nothing significant materializes from these mental machinations. However, your unconscious mind is playing the odds. Sometimes, these things come together, and they stand out as fantastic. They rouse a sense of spirit in us. They disrupt routine thinking.
Why is the unconscious mind putting pieces together in your life as if it were a puzzle? It is my notion that the unconscious mind is geared for keeping people alive and well – for survival, physically, but mostly, existentially. The unconscious is trying to rouse a person out of their mental slumber and get them to a higher level of self-awareness. The unconscious cannot appreciate the social constraints of being at a higher level of self-awareness among a community of people who may be triggered by that and react poorly to it. The unconscious simply wants the person’s mental life to be more significant, and perhaps, most efficient. Arguably, greater self-awareness results in more efficient thinking, which in turn should be conducive to survival. And all of this logic follows from privileging human development as an evolutionary process.
The gist of what is written above is that the unconscious mind has a mandate independent of the values and interests of a person’s personality as determined by the development of their conscious mind.
Yet, we might appreciate how a social construct such as, Religion, can stymie the path to greater self-awareness. This is to say, a religious person who is moved by unconscious mechanisms toward noticing the inner workings and “plan” of the mind, may simply discredit the self for the achievement and instead ascribe a fantastic happening (such as, the run-in with the dentist) to the work of a deified otherness. This brings me to the next point regarding the partition of the mind.
The mechanisms of the unconscious mind can be dangerous, if not, intrusive. The fundamental mandate of the unconscious might be a positive one, and if we were all abandoned on separate islands then achieving greater self-awareness would be ideal. In that situation, you would want to be guided by your unconscious mind with its vast repository of personalized data. However, within a social context, the greater self-awareness can be punished by society who feel that the individual’s mental revelations may “infect” others and force them out of a lifestyle comfort zone. Many would be satisfied to remain in a mental lull state if they also felt content in life, generally.
To maintain the mental lull state, the human mind creates a new partition within the conscious mind. The subconscious is formed. The subconscious is a pseudo-unconscious and is formed to ward off the mandate of the unconscious mind. The subconscious is driven by social ideologies, such as, family, school, civic duty, patriotism, and religion. The subconscious is geared to present the conscious mind with the kinds of “connections” that will keep the individual fitting well into society. The subconscious shuns the unconscious and seeks to replace its function. However, the subconscious cannot perform the same data crunching that the innate unconscious mind can.
The emergence of the subconscious makes sense because as small children beginning to develop rational thinking, we notice the world as ominously dangerous. Adults have total control. As children, we need to fit in to survive. Most often, we readily buy into the social ideologies and institutions. We join the herd of family, church, state, etc., and we feel safe and protected within those collectivist structures. The subconscious regulates how these social institutions are internalized through social ideologies.
It is my belief that living ruled by the subconscious is an unnatural way to exist and it is against a person’s best interests. We can construct society without it and be healthier as a people. Allowing internalized collectivist ideologies to dictate choice in fact subverts free choice. The subconscious may disrupt an individual’s mental potential in myriad ways.
In fact, I speculate that disturbing dreams and nightmares when sleeping at night originate from that internal Laocoon struggle where the individual’s mind must wrestle the competing interests of the unconscious and subconscious. Effectively, nightmares stem from the unconscious mind’s attempt to have an individual recognize the subconscious as artifice – an invader – and then reject it. This is only a theory and mostly based on personal experience because I once suffered greatly from nightmares but now, I am in control during my dreams. I sleep much better and navigate the stygian gulf of my mental oneiric existence with a greater sense of calm.
This was an important, albeit heavy, discussion regarding the mind and its partition of a conscious and unconscious, as well as the formation of a pseudo-unconscious – the subconscious. To understand my strange choices in life, you might consider my philosophies on mental life. In fact, you may have noticed some people in your life that you care about deeply that have also made strange choices that are confounding for you. Perhaps, my philosophy on mental life would illuminate some of the underlying issues which exist in those relationships.
CHAPTER 5
Continuity
Before returning to the story of the night with Mike and Dan, it is important to quickly discuss the continuity of people’s mental lives, otherwise the retelling of the events of that night will be non sequitur. If you will indulge me – a little more philosophy on mental life.
The partition of the mind (conscious and unconscious) produces powerful mechanisms for determining how we live, and most importantly, how we develop our unique personalities. Additionally, it should be noted that we present our mental lives with continuity in two distinct ways. There is the outer presentation of mental life through verbal language, body language and gesticulations, physiognomic tics, and the like. Also, there is the inner presentation of mental life through actual thoughts articulated in words or images. Emotion and aggression as the gendered primary orders of affect (lower-faculty) also stimulate mental states and drive specific outer and inner presentations of those states.
It is my contention that there is a default continuity for the outer and inner presentation of mental states and thoughts. This means that an individual lives blindly accepting that they have an outer presentation of their thoughts and that they have an inner presentation of their thoughts, and that the two are distinct. For normal people, it is taken for granted that ESP or telepathy are not truly real experiences, and that your inner presentation of thoughts is private. The continuity of mental experiences originates in the honest belief that outer presentation of mental state is observable by others, but that inner presentation of mental state is not.
The default continuity implies that an individual is not roused mentally to question their thinking. Effectively, people do their thinking in a kind of auto-pilot mode. Indeed, people are thinking, and those thoughts are complex. Those thoughts manifest from personality traits as well as, in turn, forming personality traits. However, people are not truly introspective by default.
Psychologists and philosophers (as well as laymen) bandy around the terms, “introspection” or “metacognition”, but I would contend that these enthusiasts are not truly introspective, but rather, they are highly conscientious. To be conscientious, is to gear your personality and personal values toward being ‘thoughtful’ and giving pause to make decisions. Conscientious people weigh the facts in front of them longer than unconscientious people. It is as if they are being introspective, or thinking about what they are thinking.
If we had some fantastic tool to hear people’s thoughts then the highly conscientious people would sound much like Stacy Keach’s truck driver character, Quid, from the 1981 Australian film, Road Games. In that film, Keach’s character, Quid, is in his truck cab on a long haul engaged in an internal dialogue that is acutely probative and truly dialectic. He isn’t prejudiced within his own mind when attempting to work out the problem he is faced with – in this case, tracking down a serial killer that has been stalking young women in the Aussie Outback. He is questioning his own methods of reasoning, and therefore, he is being conscientious through the filmic representation of mental introspection.
Whereas that same fantastic tool to hear people’s thoughts would reveal that low conscientious people think more like the Butcher character from Gaspar Noé’s 1998 French film, Seul Contre Tous. In that film, again the viewer is given insight to the internal mental dialogue of a character. However, the Butcher is a low conscientious mind prone to diatribes and rantings. His mental state shifts constantly, is determined by lower-faculty affect, and effectively this is the origin of his brutal violence.
I believe that there is a range of mental states for people and that sadly, some people think like the Butcher, but fortunately, others are like Quid, developing a level of conscientiousness that fosters a greater sense of moral competence. However, I contend that people have a continuity to their outer and inner presentations of mental states, and therefore, they are not truly introspective. Rather, an individual’s personality can be geared for being conscientious and this will mean that they privilege the notion of introspection and their inner thinking will emulate introspection without there actually being an “awakened” level of self-awareness, or true metacognition.
The reason that I am making this contentious claim against humanity and instead putting forward a hypothesis that people are not truly introspective, is based on that night with Mike and Dan. I became introspective that night and it was a wholly transformative experience. It was related to a sense of telepathy. There was no turning back. It wasn’t a matter of degrees in how it developed, but rather, the change was equivalent to turning a light on in an otherwise blackened space, or suddenly seeing color in a previously monochromatic world.
This sounds relatable, however, in twenty years of searching I have found no other person that can describe my experience in similar terms for themselves. I have met no one that is astounded regarding the wholesale change in consciousness and the shift to real willfulness. It isn’t a trifle, nor some mundane alteration. It isn’t the development of a third nipple. What happened to me changed everything in the most fundamental way. It isn’t something you forget to mention or brush past in conversation. This conspicuous absence of reports on the transformation to true introspection has led me to the conclusion that either no one else is truly introspective, or it is so few of us that it would be rarer than the most exotic genetic disorder.
I feel alone. That is why I am writing this book. It isn’t written to look down my nose at others or offend others through claims that I am a more accomplished person mentally than they are. How my transformation to true introspection happened was based in trauma and it resulted in years of agonizing life where I was abused by many and misunderstood by all. Eventually, I was menaced by suicidal thinking, just to affect an escape from my isolated position in the world. This shouldn’t happen. There needs to be answers for me, and for anyone else that has experienced something akin to what I have experienced.
Continuity
Before returning to the story of the night with Mike and Dan, it is important to quickly discuss the continuity of people’s mental lives, otherwise the retelling of the events of that night will be non sequitur. If you will indulge me – a little more philosophy on mental life.
The partition of the mind (conscious and unconscious) produces powerful mechanisms for determining how we live, and most importantly, how we develop our unique personalities. Additionally, it should be noted that we present our mental lives with continuity in two distinct ways. There is the outer presentation of mental life through verbal language, body language and gesticulations, physiognomic tics, and the like. Also, there is the inner presentation of mental life through actual thoughts articulated in words or images. Emotion and aggression as the gendered primary orders of affect (lower-faculty) also stimulate mental states and drive specific outer and inner presentations of those states.
It is my contention that there is a default continuity for the outer and inner presentation of mental states and thoughts. This means that an individual lives blindly accepting that they have an outer presentation of their thoughts and that they have an inner presentation of their thoughts, and that the two are distinct. For normal people, it is taken for granted that ESP or telepathy are not truly real experiences, and that your inner presentation of thoughts is private. The continuity of mental experiences originates in the honest belief that outer presentation of mental state is observable by others, but that inner presentation of mental state is not.
The default continuity implies that an individual is not roused mentally to question their thinking. Effectively, people do their thinking in a kind of auto-pilot mode. Indeed, people are thinking, and those thoughts are complex. Those thoughts manifest from personality traits as well as, in turn, forming personality traits. However, people are not truly introspective by default.
Psychologists and philosophers (as well as laymen) bandy around the terms, “introspection” or “metacognition”, but I would contend that these enthusiasts are not truly introspective, but rather, they are highly conscientious. To be conscientious, is to gear your personality and personal values toward being ‘thoughtful’ and giving pause to make decisions. Conscientious people weigh the facts in front of them longer than unconscientious people. It is as if they are being introspective, or thinking about what they are thinking.
If we had some fantastic tool to hear people’s thoughts then the highly conscientious people would sound much like Stacy Keach’s truck driver character, Quid, from the 1981 Australian film, Road Games. In that film, Keach’s character, Quid, is in his truck cab on a long haul engaged in an internal dialogue that is acutely probative and truly dialectic. He isn’t prejudiced within his own mind when attempting to work out the problem he is faced with – in this case, tracking down a serial killer that has been stalking young women in the Aussie Outback. He is questioning his own methods of reasoning, and therefore, he is being conscientious through the filmic representation of mental introspection.
Whereas that same fantastic tool to hear people’s thoughts would reveal that low conscientious people think more like the Butcher character from Gaspar Noé’s 1998 French film, Seul Contre Tous. In that film, again the viewer is given insight to the internal mental dialogue of a character. However, the Butcher is a low conscientious mind prone to diatribes and rantings. His mental state shifts constantly, is determined by lower-faculty affect, and effectively this is the origin of his brutal violence.
I believe that there is a range of mental states for people and that sadly, some people think like the Butcher, but fortunately, others are like Quid, developing a level of conscientiousness that fosters a greater sense of moral competence. However, I contend that people have a continuity to their outer and inner presentations of mental states, and therefore, they are not truly introspective. Rather, an individual’s personality can be geared for being conscientious and this will mean that they privilege the notion of introspection and their inner thinking will emulate introspection without there actually being an “awakened” level of self-awareness, or true metacognition.
The reason that I am making this contentious claim against humanity and instead putting forward a hypothesis that people are not truly introspective, is based on that night with Mike and Dan. I became introspective that night and it was a wholly transformative experience. It was related to a sense of telepathy. There was no turning back. It wasn’t a matter of degrees in how it developed, but rather, the change was equivalent to turning a light on in an otherwise blackened space, or suddenly seeing color in a previously monochromatic world.
This sounds relatable, however, in twenty years of searching I have found no other person that can describe my experience in similar terms for themselves. I have met no one that is astounded regarding the wholesale change in consciousness and the shift to real willfulness. It isn’t a trifle, nor some mundane alteration. It isn’t the development of a third nipple. What happened to me changed everything in the most fundamental way. It isn’t something you forget to mention or brush past in conversation. This conspicuous absence of reports on the transformation to true introspection has led me to the conclusion that either no one else is truly introspective, or it is so few of us that it would be rarer than the most exotic genetic disorder.
I feel alone. That is why I am writing this book. It isn’t written to look down my nose at others or offend others through claims that I am a more accomplished person mentally than they are. How my transformation to true introspection happened was based in trauma and it resulted in years of agonizing life where I was abused by many and misunderstood by all. Eventually, I was menaced by suicidal thinking, just to affect an escape from my isolated position in the world. This shouldn’t happen. There needs to be answers for me, and for anyone else that has experienced something akin to what I have experienced.
CHAPTER 6
Rupture
There I was with Mike and Dan, high as a kite on magic mushrooms. Being wasted would seem to invalidate the veracity of my claims about human consciousness. Can my word be worth all that much if the experiences I am evaluating first manifested from a state of total inebriation?
That night, we turned off the first movie – the goofy yet brilliant Kung Pow: Enter the Fist – and we ordered a pizza. The pizza arrived and we prepared to put on Blade 2. Mike was sitting two rooms over at the dining room table rolling a joint. I was in the den picking through CDs to play, while we waited on Dan who was upstairs in the washroom. I could see Mike clearly at the table from where I was standing in front of the stereo.
I knew Mike well at this point. I knew his habits and his manners. Perhaps, I could anticipate his gestures and movements. I’m not sure. Nevertheless, I had a sense that I was conversing with Mike, and he seemed to be providing feedback through body language. I was high on psychedelic drugs, and for me, his body language and gestures were actual words and phrases. It was a conjuring of sorts. I was having a conversation with Mike while Dan was upstairs. I was sure of it. Dan called down to inform us he was alright. Then, it dawned on me that I hadn’t been speaking aloud. Mike had been silent as well.
And then it happens. I had created a rupture in the continuity of my mental life. My outer presentation of thoughts had become conflated with the inner presentation. I was given pause to understand my inner mind as a space that could include otherness, for example, the thoughts of my good friend, Mike. In my mental workspace, I had to “step back” to make room for the presence of Mike. This instantly made me aware that I was thinking about thinking (metacognition). I had become truly introspective. I was looking over my own shoulder at the worktable of the inner mental workspace of my conscious mind.
Immediately, I assumed that telepathy had happened and was a real phenomenon. I confronted Mike with the knowledge. He was weirded out. He was not in on it. He vehemently denied that any ESP had occurred, and he was crystal clear about that. Dan came downstairs. I was not confrontational but rather the experience was sublime. I had been invited to the next level of being human. There was a chance at having a greater purpose in life and discovering that my previous wrongs could be shed in new light and be revealed as formative and rewarding. Some might say, I was born again. The moment certainly had evangelical implications as an existential experience.
Mike and Dan could see that I was on a “bad trip”. We tried to watch the Blade 2 DVD, but in those frenetic moments for me, the movie’s theme of insidious vampiric cabals and parasitic infection terrified me to no end. Mike and Dan went home. Later, we drifted apart as friends because frankly they were freaked out by what happened to me.
I got stuck believing in ESP and telepathy for many years. That destroyed my life. That led to diagnoses of paranoid schizophrenia. Now, I can see that there hadn’t been a telepathic moment between Mike and I, but rather, I interpreted his body language and manner, substituting language for it in my own mind, and thus, crafting a pseudo-dialogue. I had gone into a precognitive mode due to a severe uninhibited state stimulated by the magic mushrooms. I was astutely predicting Mike’s behaviours. These correct predictions provided the semblance of telepathic communication. It was enough to rouse me from my lull state, to rupture the continuity of my outer and inner mental life, and to render me to a new mode of true introspection as a form of self-awareness.
This has not been a beautiful transformation and there is no awesome chrysalis emergence to revel in. The experience is not akin to astronaut Dave in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey looking out into the majesty of cosmic existence recognizing himself as an important piece of the greater whole. My life is not like that of Robin Williams’s character in the 1998 film, What Dream May Come, arriving in the exquisite and lush billows of Heaven realizing the importance of faith. This has been Hell.
My transformation has not been understood by philosophers or psychologists, and most importantly, psychiatrists. I was left to the mercies of a society that often licenses against individuals making huge leaps forward in consciousness, self-awareness, and agency. I have been treated as a pariah and an outcast for the past twenty years. I have suicide experiences to report that you’d rarely hear of because those other people that took similar paths are no longer alive to confess.
I am not seeking sympathy or absolution. I have made the most of my experience as a grueling disability, but it is time to share that experience because in twenty years of searching I have found no one else sharing their own – certainly not one that matches mine, qualitatively. That is odd. In fact, it is at odds with possibility.
Perhaps, this text will illuminate what is missing from my experience and I might be invited to understand where the others like me have been all along. If not, then perhaps my experience is a premonition or prognostication for what is to come for humanity. The rise of AI and pursuits by computer engineers to create self-awareness in artificial intelligence may inadvertently stimulate a shift in social conditions that result in many others becoming truly introspective like myself.
For now, I will continue to reflect on how my transformation was subject to my burgeoning self-destructive tendencies as well as abuse by others. This could be valuable discourse if someone else is going through what I have gone through. There is an opportunity to stop the path of self-destruction that is paved by the desperately anxious, and then stamped by a carelessly ignorant society.
Rupture
There I was with Mike and Dan, high as a kite on magic mushrooms. Being wasted would seem to invalidate the veracity of my claims about human consciousness. Can my word be worth all that much if the experiences I am evaluating first manifested from a state of total inebriation?
That night, we turned off the first movie – the goofy yet brilliant Kung Pow: Enter the Fist – and we ordered a pizza. The pizza arrived and we prepared to put on Blade 2. Mike was sitting two rooms over at the dining room table rolling a joint. I was in the den picking through CDs to play, while we waited on Dan who was upstairs in the washroom. I could see Mike clearly at the table from where I was standing in front of the stereo.
I knew Mike well at this point. I knew his habits and his manners. Perhaps, I could anticipate his gestures and movements. I’m not sure. Nevertheless, I had a sense that I was conversing with Mike, and he seemed to be providing feedback through body language. I was high on psychedelic drugs, and for me, his body language and gestures were actual words and phrases. It was a conjuring of sorts. I was having a conversation with Mike while Dan was upstairs. I was sure of it. Dan called down to inform us he was alright. Then, it dawned on me that I hadn’t been speaking aloud. Mike had been silent as well.
And then it happens. I had created a rupture in the continuity of my mental life. My outer presentation of thoughts had become conflated with the inner presentation. I was given pause to understand my inner mind as a space that could include otherness, for example, the thoughts of my good friend, Mike. In my mental workspace, I had to “step back” to make room for the presence of Mike. This instantly made me aware that I was thinking about thinking (metacognition). I had become truly introspective. I was looking over my own shoulder at the worktable of the inner mental workspace of my conscious mind.
Immediately, I assumed that telepathy had happened and was a real phenomenon. I confronted Mike with the knowledge. He was weirded out. He was not in on it. He vehemently denied that any ESP had occurred, and he was crystal clear about that. Dan came downstairs. I was not confrontational but rather the experience was sublime. I had been invited to the next level of being human. There was a chance at having a greater purpose in life and discovering that my previous wrongs could be shed in new light and be revealed as formative and rewarding. Some might say, I was born again. The moment certainly had evangelical implications as an existential experience.
Mike and Dan could see that I was on a “bad trip”. We tried to watch the Blade 2 DVD, but in those frenetic moments for me, the movie’s theme of insidious vampiric cabals and parasitic infection terrified me to no end. Mike and Dan went home. Later, we drifted apart as friends because frankly they were freaked out by what happened to me.
I got stuck believing in ESP and telepathy for many years. That destroyed my life. That led to diagnoses of paranoid schizophrenia. Now, I can see that there hadn’t been a telepathic moment between Mike and I, but rather, I interpreted his body language and manner, substituting language for it in my own mind, and thus, crafting a pseudo-dialogue. I had gone into a precognitive mode due to a severe uninhibited state stimulated by the magic mushrooms. I was astutely predicting Mike’s behaviours. These correct predictions provided the semblance of telepathic communication. It was enough to rouse me from my lull state, to rupture the continuity of my outer and inner mental life, and to render me to a new mode of true introspection as a form of self-awareness.
This has not been a beautiful transformation and there is no awesome chrysalis emergence to revel in. The experience is not akin to astronaut Dave in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey looking out into the majesty of cosmic existence recognizing himself as an important piece of the greater whole. My life is not like that of Robin Williams’s character in the 1998 film, What Dream May Come, arriving in the exquisite and lush billows of Heaven realizing the importance of faith. This has been Hell.
My transformation has not been understood by philosophers or psychologists, and most importantly, psychiatrists. I was left to the mercies of a society that often licenses against individuals making huge leaps forward in consciousness, self-awareness, and agency. I have been treated as a pariah and an outcast for the past twenty years. I have suicide experiences to report that you’d rarely hear of because those other people that took similar paths are no longer alive to confess.
I am not seeking sympathy or absolution. I have made the most of my experience as a grueling disability, but it is time to share that experience because in twenty years of searching I have found no one else sharing their own – certainly not one that matches mine, qualitatively. That is odd. In fact, it is at odds with possibility.
Perhaps, this text will illuminate what is missing from my experience and I might be invited to understand where the others like me have been all along. If not, then perhaps my experience is a premonition or prognostication for what is to come for humanity. The rise of AI and pursuits by computer engineers to create self-awareness in artificial intelligence may inadvertently stimulate a shift in social conditions that result in many others becoming truly introspective like myself.
For now, I will continue to reflect on how my transformation was subject to my burgeoning self-destructive tendencies as well as abuse by others. This could be valuable discourse if someone else is going through what I have gone through. There is an opportunity to stop the path of self-destruction that is paved by the desperately anxious, and then stamped by a carelessly ignorant society.