Lifeline

Consider the growing anxieties surrounding the smart phone and the increasing life functions packed into the technology, or else the more general collective reliance on Internet technologies. The constant spatial expansion and movement of our social production, and the constant acceleration of the speed of those things, induces an intense need for technologies to bridge those growing gaps. And at the same time as more economic activity is migrated onto those channels, or otherwise makes critical use of them, the physical institutions, techniques, and traditions that people rely on daily diminish and atrophy, at least on a collective level. And then at the same time, the growing and concentrating monopolies accelerate this transfer, and destroy the many smaller pockets of resistance, and then of course the pandemic only further amplifies this trend. Of course there is an anxiety around the continuing availability and function of a smart phone or personal computer.  

Speak for the Trees

The downside to the subjugation of nature gets less abstract the closer you get to it spatially and materially. I mean who doesn't appreciate the plentiful availability of cheap timber goods? Wood is both beautiful and useful. But then visit a clear-cut, and you can sense that some terrible crime has happened there, at least to those sensitive and receptive to such things. 

And if the clear-cut is in the midst of a healthy forest, and one surveys the trees still living at the border between regions, there is an intense sadness and despondency in their standing. They are the closest to the site of the massacre. It is not just that they are suddenly radiated with more sunlight, wind, and heat than they are used to, and that they are drying out, but also that there seems to be a sense that they are bitterly unhappy. 

We do need tools and habitations, just as we need to eat, and these things can be carried out just fine without razing whole forests, or sending multitudes of tortured animals to their doom. And let's be clear, these activities have very real effects on the people tasked with carrying them out daily as well, and the people witnessing and managing them. 

But then you increase the growth and intensity of the human element and its multitude of needs, and you address those needs with a certain form of socioeconomic organization at a certain point of history and then these atrocities just become more frequent, until they are part of a daily rhythm of our collective reproduction.  

On Guilt

Of course we know from historical observation that the guilt is very difficult to disperse; really it just shifts into some new ideological form over time, though the old forms are still very much with us, such as the guilt surrounding sex and physical pleasure. And I suspect that some century or two into the future - assuming the constancy of our current perception - the guilt will largely take the form of a horror and loathing and envy of class-based material power and efficacy, given the profoundly economic nature of both our late civilization and its crises. 

Coming Back Around Again

With each new turn of the centrifuge, this cascade of crises is intensified: capital jacks up and then detonates its financial bubble, and then through the falling rubble moves to consolidate and grow itself further, destroying its own supply chains and demand, immiserating and fragmenting its own field of operation, allowing for rapid spread of the virus, making life that much more prickly, driving everyone underground or out above ground and raving, and so then it further consolidates and grows, immiserating and fragmenting its field of operation. 

And the muscle contracts around the broken bone, multiplying the pain and loss of mobility. But then of course the bone is broken.  

Spark

The spark metaphor comes up plenty for good reason. Just consider fire-starting: a tiny and intense pinpoint of energy which can very quickly expand the conditions of its own reproduction if surrounding conditions are right. Fuel, oxygen, heat, the movement of said things through time and space with the right intensity. 

Alteration

I used to enjoy writing after a few beers. Of course, the intensity and the quality of that state of consciousness would change as the actual metabolic process was underway. Now in tandem with drinking I've largely shifted to activities such as music, media enjoyment, wood carving, or just conversation or observing nature, oftentimes after intense work. Light tobacco use can be combined nicely with some of these activities.   

For the contemplative activities, say reading and writing or listening to or watching something intellectually stimulating, tea seems to work better.

For a lot of spiritual pursuits, stone sobriety does the trick, as these states tend to induce an alteration of their own that is all the more potent the less interference there is, though one can often combine physical and metabolic effects such as diet changes or maintenance, light fasting, cleansing, listening to tones or drones, smelling incense or burning sage, and etc. 

In the matter of using the body's own faculties of alteration, exercise can provide some powerful altering effects, especially in combination with environment. A rigorous hike in view of a mountain range can induce a profound sense of heightened awareness for example: it seems through the flowing oxygen and endorphins one is opened up further to natural beauty. I could go on. 

Part of the point here, is that there are many ways one can make use of one's own body in combination with a whole variety of activities, pursuits, and external material and non-material influences to profoundly alter perceptions and experiences, and much of this is further dictated by lifestyle, intensity of activity and ingestions, and the cultural and social forms in which those things appear. 

Curious that certain of types of these forms - such as the uptake of a given plant material - are called "intoxications" whereas others can simply be referred to as "purifications" or "medicines" or "therapies" or what have you. 

There is a further instrumental usefulness for the individual or a tradition to making these distinctions of course, but a lot of these distinctions are also passively received as a given society's "code, which itself can induce certain pressures to either encourage or dampen an activity.