The following are notes recorded during and directly after medicinally induced self-dissolution. The medium here is a psychoactive substance isolated from a climbing, flowering vine.

Homage to the medium

I feel a deep, resonant kinship with my climbing plants. An identification with their struggle at this very moment, in this stage of their development. A sore, burning angst that aches deep, an ever-present howling desire to uncoil, unfurl and to grasp, to cling and to overgrow. The plain impermanence of the mortal sheath is shocking, raw in its implications. The body limp and long, rasping for breath and convulsing in pain -- a damp, sinewy mess, a crumpled, gasping incarnate of the fibrous melody of amness.

First there is being, primarily there is being. Rubbery and multi-stranded, self braided, rich with organization. Then follow the masks, the avatars, the manifestations of varying individualities. I am seven or eight, equally empowered, sharing equal stakes in this viney endeavor. We are haunted by a cadging, course lust for soil, a desire for complete inundation, a separation of soil within and soil without by only a gossamer, vital tissue that is our definition. To eat soil and to drink water and to grow and entwine. My muscles ache with angst-potential, with a calling, an imperative, a directive to uncoil! To unfurl! To climb and to overgrow!

Lost in the hall of egos

The amness is overflowing with corporate, private being. A multitude of lives, each raw and real and deep with a full sense of memory, a unique print of individuality which is a complete collection of linear experience. Somehow I feel drawn to train-tracks and to trailer-homes. To names with a J sound like Jared or Jordan. When myself dissolved -- my features and my memories and my humanity and my character -- when they drew apart like curtains of flaking flesh baring white, solid bones before the unbending imperative that is time, I was left without person, without recollection, exposed to the core of the amness thrumming inside of me. After some time, lost in communion, I began to return. I prodded numbly through egos, blindly sorting in the search for my own, groping and feeling out and grasping like a mole in the damp soil, searching and hoping and wondering if I will even recognize my own after all this time. Jared or Jordan, an affinity with trains and trailer-homes -- I nearly mistook this one for my own and almost donned it in my haste to rehumanize. At the last moment my error was clear and I was returned instead to this comfortable mask.

A virtue misunderstood

Resignation not tolerance. Tolerance insinuates permission; a trial recognized and allowed to pass. A circumstance by nature uncontrollable, tamed through the control-illusion granting act of exercising volition to permit its very uncontrollableness. Tolerance requires effort, is characterized by accepting an innate sense of resistance.

Tolerance is resistance and resistance forces the way to flow around the obstinate self. Resignation instead: let circumstance guide the self; flow through the self.

Communion with the amness

Impermanence permeates the physical world. The spring of being imbues order, which is spirit, into the caustic vastness of the material universe. Its touch is transformative: cold matter is inspired by the contagion of complex organization, it flushes forth into birth, lives and perceives, imprints its knowing into the eternal store, then loses its harmony with the amness -- dies -- and transforms, becomes material, then is reborn into new life that brings new perspective.

I am the one being and the one being is me. The ego is a perspective-mask, a narrow window, a looking glass, a self-realizing apparatus. It is overwhelmingly specialized, narrow, specific and poignant. My being belongs to the amness. The ego's authority over being is infinitesimal and temporally confined: it is granted custody only to perform its specialized duties.

I am the one being and the one being is me. The ego is a vehicle: it carries I who am the one being for a leg of the infinite journey. This leg will come to an end and the vehicle will perish; but the journey goes on.

I am the one being and the one being is me. Though everything I possess must die, I will go on forever.