Nomad Codes

technologies, dangerous or not. Representatives of orthodoxy may argue that such activities represents degenerate tantra, and they may well be right. But technology is about nothing if it is not about speed, and tantra is the lightning path, appropriate for a time of waning dharma. Perhaps psychedelics are the greased lightning appropriate for an even more degenerate West, where only the philosophy of Malcolm X makes sense: by any means necessary.
    2002

DIAMOND SOLITAIRE

    In 1997, I had a bona-fide, Grade A, no-shit “mystical” experience—or at least something that felt a hell of a lot like a mystical experience. The deal went down, absurdly enough, during a month-long retreat at a Zen center in northern California; even more absurdly, it happened while I was washing a bunch of beets in the garden. I had come to the center to recover and reorient after the agony of finishing the final draft of Techgnosis . I was pretty wrung out. During work period one afternoon, I found myself alone in a shady corner field, rinsing a pile of freshly unearthed beets in a free-standing outside basin. I stood there, in the cool but sunny air, washing big clumps of moist, fragrant mud from the red roots. I hadn’t had any alcohol or drugs in weeks.
    What happened next is tough to describe, and I think I need to lay down a bit of background first. One idea you’ll find in esoteric psychology (and elsewhere) is the notion that there is a vital difference between the content of consciousness—sensations, feelings, perceptions, thoughts, etc.—and the Witness that perceives or, better, witnesses these feelings and perceptions. On the surface, the Witness might seem to be needlessly “dualistic”—a redeployment of the Cartesian split between mind and body that everybody is always bitching about. But its still kind of true, and meditation, to say nothing of rigorous selfobservation, helps clarify the Witness by loosening identification with the thoughts, feelings, and perceptions that enmesh our being without entirely defining it.
    So I’m rinsing the beets, minding my own business, vaguely enjoying the cool water washing away the moist and pungent mud, when my “I” suddenly rockets like a sci-fi space elevator into the highest, most barren and serene realms of Witness consciousness. I became the watcher of the watcher of the watcher of the watcher of the watcher of the watcher ... , a bootstrapping eensy-weensy spider of observer and observation that shed layers of identification as it flip-flopped up the water spout into ever more rarified levels of subjectivity, until there was little left. The analogy that arose most forcefully a few moments later, when I was able to reflect again, was of some seafarer’s spyglass rapidly being drawn open, an action which extends the reach of the eye even as it, in some sense, increases the distance between the eye and the surface medium where the world inscribes its traces. My eye, my I, was now peering into my experience from Olympian climes.
    It’s tough to describe what this new “I” felt like without leaning on mystic rhetoric, which I really don’t want to do because it sounds like bullshit, and my experience was anything but bullshit, at least to me. One thing is for sure: there was nothing particularly human in it. It felt like a being, but it had no attributes I can really name other than awareness and perception. It felt like diamond, like hard serenity, a clear and crystalline meta-mind that was both individual and, in some ungrokkable, transpersonal way, collective. And ever so slightly amused.
    There was a soft but implacably unemotional quality as well, a passionless intelligence I will take the risk of characterizing as “angelic.” I am thinking here of the angels in Wim Wenders’s Wings of Desire , who gaze with equanimity upon struggling humanity, like long-suffering but interested cosmic shrinks. My experience may also reflect what Thelemite and other Solomonic magicians mean—if they mean anything concrete at all—when they describe the goal of ritual magic as the “knowledge and conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel.”
    Even as I arrived at this adamantine peak, I also rolled downhill, attending to the situation at hand: washing beets in a dappled field on a cool but sunny afternoon. The spacious crystalline entity my mind had become now hovered in infinite approximation to the dude I normally am, watching hands that were no longer exactly “mine”