Outro

OUTRO

At the time of writing these paragraphs, my personal beliefs include the following ethical positions:
When one’s mind is free, or at least partially free from the inherited and socially acquired mental programming – that is when one can be a decent human being. Meaning – making choices based on honest, developed through extensive self-exploration, inner convictions of right and wrong.
A decent person reacts, where others sit and take it. A decent person involves himself into nasty situations of which he is a witness, but to which the other people turn a blind eye. A decent person judges someone by no pre-conceived notions, but solely by the impression from direct contact. A decent person does not constantly lie to himself and therefore does not lie to his friends.

I believe, my experience points to an assumption, that to a large extent, stopping being a compulsively lying monkey is only possible after the realization that you will die – one of the fears the size of galaxies, which tend to emerge during intense psychedelic tripping. It’s not ‘just paranoia’ - you will die. It’s not an unfounded drug induced psychosis – it’s a glimpse of what lurks beyond the walls of the mental fortress. From a broader point of view you are already dead. From a narrower point of view – you are already dying, death is inevitable, and it will come. Once a person fully and freely admits that to himself, immediately change begins, the withering away of tons of useless lies and half-lies and compromises and fears.

By this point, at the end of the book, to many readers it must have become quite apparent, that while on the level of politics, I, the author, am a liberal anarchist, on a different, metaphysical level, I am a nihilist. I have never come across anything which would convince me beyond reasonable doubt, that any human can experience the full ‘real reality’ instead of some shade of a collective dream. Certainly the walking, talking and fornicating corpses around me are no example of ‘reality perception’. Perhaps the fundamental reality is accessible for enlightened Zen teachers. Perhaps in a more mortal dimension, it is accessible for the ‘unblocked’ patients of Arthur Janov or Stanislav Groff, or to the various followers of Wilhelm Reich. Perhaps it is accessible to everyone after death. These are all theoretical possibilities, but until I myself experience something which is at least close to the ‘real reality’ I have no basis for assuming that anyone has ever experienced it.

Most of the time I am wandering around within the collective dream, and actually forget for hours, weeks and in terrible periods even months, what other alternatives exist. Getting sucked into the endless flight of second rate phenomena, with the accompanying, alarmingly rapid deterioration of the thinking processes. In certain moments, thankfully, I experience intense trips which remind me how things stand (or at least how they don’t stand), and experience crazy realities which nevertheless show what a ludicrous project the currently prevailing collective dreams are. For a short period, the fog thins out, and you can actually make sense of some of what becomes visible, and sometimes I swear I have the feeling the fog has retreated completely. But that is of course enthusiasm of the moment.

Thus I am a nihilist not in the sense of ‘not believing in anything’, but in the sense of ‘not taking reality for granted’, and ‘not taking normality for granted’. When I say ‘there is no reality’, I don’t mean ‘nothing exists’, I mean ‘everyone is a sad and scared monkey which has severe mental, emotional and physiological illnesses and deformations, and can’t see shit with it’s crude sense organs, but even if it could – wouldn’t make anything out, as the dreams would be blurring it all.’

Of course, drug abuse is in the end, suicidal. No more then ‘normal life’ in society is, but still I can not deny the drawbacks of the practice. Its very function of getting you high is ‘bad for you’, because the freedom it brings is freedom from mental mechanisms, which for a little while do not function ‘properly’. Imagine a cartoon humanoid robot hitting itself on the head with a hammer, in order to affect its built-in programming, so that it can stop following it long enough to make an escape. When a drug, or a near death experience, or intense toxic or emotional shock hit the organism of a human being, for a while some functions are impaired, and this makes a dose of freedom possible – while the program which forbids it, is not functioning at full strength. There are surely others, not so blatantly self-destructive ways of doing this, ways which actually make you healthy and have a long life span. But my point is not that drugs make me healthy, but that it should be everyone’s individual choice of what lifestyle they lead and/or change it whenever they feel like it. If I have made an informed choice to pay a certain price to achieve a certain effect – this is private. And if my choice was not informed, this is because your efforts created an environment in which taking drugs is like walking off a cliff with the hope that things will somehow work out.

Some day the hypocrisy will end. South American peasants will be free to produce legal cocaine, Central Asian peasants will be able to produce legal heroin, and one will be able to grow marijuana at one’s plot of land without fear. The third world peasant will have good money for once, the first world abusers will have cheap and clean drugs, the taxes alone will pay for many social services, the mafia will be forced to move on to more exotic businesses, or to adapt to a legalized business environment, and realize suddenly that good money can still be made, without the need of being submerged in soul crushing stress the whole time.
Will this really happen? Won’t our civilization rather:
a) destroy itself by pollution?
b) be destroyed by foreign fascism?
c) be destroyed by internal neurotic pressure?
Can we influence events?