The Good, The Bad, and the Indifferent Pt. 2: A Dose of Good Acid

I came to a point where I saw very clearly the absurdity of my position, so I shrugged my shoulders and took a tab of acid. Such actions can radically help or harm you based on the context, though acid-taking in moderation usually yields a net positive, yes it does.

It comes in waves. It comes on slowly and builds into a crescendo that plays out in movements.

Instead of what I thought would be a super-charged form of intoxication, dragging me into some sort of dream state, there was a moment of clear-eyed revelation: of course this festival was wrought with contradictions. Anything that grows this large has to be. With the birth of a new idea in material space comes a great expenditure of energy, which itself has magnetic properties. It holds sympathetic people together tight and attracts like-elements with its vitality. However as such an entity gains more and more mass, it achieves a gravity of its own, pulling contradictory elements into its orbit, which serves to dilute the signal in noise. It diminishes the thrust of the original idea. This can tie in with efforts at increased complexity to manage such a coherent mass, which upon reaching its limits, begins to break down and fragment as global capitalism is doing now. This is true for anything from ideas to social movements, trends and fads, institutions, recurring social events and etc. 

Leopold Kohr noted bigness as a problem in itself. You could see the very problem laid out in the mechanics of the festival. In the smaller, more intimate settings I saw glimmers of what I was looking for: groups of strangers caring for each other and celebrating each other's creative expression, usually spontaneously expressed and with humanity. However the larger grounds functioned very much like a marketplace of spectacle. The performances were all carefully constructed and orchestrated, with a plethora of light effects and saturated sound. Everything on a larger scale was carefully constructed to hold attention and keep it. Otherwise the drug-addled crowds would get bored and move on to the next sensation. It was a sad sight to watch a crowd melt away from a sincere performer who wasn't cutting it. It is this impersonal relation between people as means to each other's self-pleasure that we should really be questioning at this time. 

So here was an interesting dichotomy: you had people settling down around a certain idea or aesthetic and committing to it out of love for that idea, and this was usually in the more intimate settings. Otherwise the idea was no longer important, just the brilliance of its manifestation when it came to holding the attention of depersonalized market participants, which tended to be in the larger venues. There was much talk of consciousness and spiritual awakening, but for most of the observers at the festival, the experience had to do with what was giving them the most pleasurable sensations, and they would break whatever tenuous relationship formed with a performer if they weren't satisfied. This is the very tendency that characterizes our capitalist culture, a culture we supposedly came here to escape, ironically enough.

This did not mean the entire festival was a farce. It only meant that the festival had grown to such a size that there were bound to be elements attracted in that were contradictory to the underlying ideas. One had to take away what good one could take. Such is the case with all things in life.

Whilst on acid, even the most hopelessly depressed has the chance to experience the vibrant reality of the good in things. So what good was happening at this festival?

What one witnesses at a festival like this (not all of them achieve this) is the attempt at re-absorption of the un-absorbed, which is enough to produce some good. What I mean by this is that to be happy and to feel actualized in a society, an individual must have their expressive emotional self (no idea as to precisely what this is yet) respected and loved by those around them.

Not only should people be loved and respected in a community, they should be able to make expressive art, dance, sing, make music and otherwise create and alter the physical world in accordance with their person, and have those personal expressions appreciated by a greater community.

However this is a society that grossly undervalues creative acts. It only values creative acts insofar as the acts produce attractive forces that bring in paying traffic. We end up with this sort of lottery in which only a lucky few get to actually make a living expressing themselves (e.g. mainstream record companies only care for those artists capable of reaching the greatest numbers, producing the most sales), while the rest are condemned to perpetual wage slavery, to be slowly ground down over time, under-appreciated and un-actualized, feeding off of the emotional vitality of mass produced works and harboring secret fantasies of the self-expressive life.

These people are the un-absorbed. They exist as husks in a mechanical society that cares for them only as mechanical laborers, where the only expression that is allowed is in the privacy of their homes to be enjoyed by a limited few or none at all. So part of our task is to re-absorb these people into a community that loves and admires their characters and their expression. This festival provides a venue for such an activity, though it hasn't managed to integrate such a venue into a greater society. Still, it helps.

This isn't true for everyone of course. Others like to be appreciated for their excellent mechanical abilities or their skill with data or induction. We are just talking about the people these kinds of festivals appeal to.

The other thing that is happening in festivals like these is indicated by the first embers of a new religious awakening. There is an intense interest in the Eastern religions and spiritual philosophies in particular due in part to the spectacular failure of the Abrahamic religions, at least in terms of their mainstream manifestations, though there will surely be novel religious forms emerging in certain corners as well.

Many scholars believe the word "religion" itself can be traced back to the latin "re-ligare" which means to connect or bind...again. A very curious meaning that of course has been lost today. Here we have the early indications of a social body struggling to reconstitute itself.

So again, lots of good here, along with the bad, as is the case everywhere really, even within myself. So what was my problem?

Now to begin the second phase of the acid trip. I retreated to the tent and wrapped myself up in a sleeping bag, looking up through the ceiling mesh at the tree branches above. These branches formed staggering fractal patterns that reached down into the tent, becoming neon black and white, extending infinitely into the horizon, breathing with me as I gazed up. It seemed as though this tree was communicating.

I closed my eyes and experienced vast exotic desert landscapes, floating islands with cascading waterfalls and trees extended out over voids. Shimmering geometric patterns began to pulsate: snakes of endless shifting diamonds going from reds to oranges and yellows and greens and then melting back into the black.

My attention shifted to family and friends and I felt a great compassion and tenderness for them. Musical ideas were assembling themselves in the background and melting away. Finally my attention shifted to my own self.

I appeared to myself as a massive knot of competing hopes and desires. Certain behaviors and tendencies were cross-wired...sometimes conflicting. Certain obsessions and fixations had to be attended to in order to loosen the knot and allow other aspects of my personality to be worked on. I was broken. Emotionally gridlocked. Exerted on from the outside, my emotions would pull in one direction, pulling tighter a knot that wasn't going anywhere, precluding me from action.

Seeing this objective fact, I was able to feel compassion for my own brokenness. I felt the knot loosen. Such a revelation was pacifying, but it was not enough. As the acid trip subsided I felt things tighten once again. It would take subsequent processing to get things moving again.