Charles U Farley
Well-Known Member
Just noticed this section, so I will do one other post. This comes from a journal entry in absolutely non-commercial, ad free website I created, southeastlights organization. I hope this cut and paste isn't too long for this system:
I will attempt to communicate something that happened over 30 years ago when I did LSD and it is, for the most part, indescribable. I did not actually see sound (synesthesia) but I could visualize it and _understood_ how it was created. I'm sure I cannot adequately describe this experience, because I've never really discussed it with anyone in detail, even with my wife. I will attempt to describe this experience and it may not make any sense at all, to you. It occurred in complete visual darkness but the experience could not have been brighter.
I was recently separated and temporarily living in a small trailer that was isolated and remote, here in the mountains. I'm in that brief stage where sorrow and self-pity have ebbed and before anger and frustration have really had a chance to swell. I have a day off from the hospital, I'm broke, with no cannabis, nowhere to go and nothing to do. I start looking for any shake that might've been left in album covers from days gone by. Out of a Blind Faith album falls a strip of perforated paper from long ago. Thinking it would not still be potent and since I hadn't done any in over a decade, I decide to do it that night, all by myself.
It was a half a ten-strip of blotter and it was old, so I took two. After an hour or two, nothing really special, just some trails and a bit of shimmering, melting reality, with the familiar brilliance and sheen I remembered so fondly.
I decided to take the other three.
After a slice of time, I don't know how long, I was the one in the fishbowl. The one being observed, by the entire outside world, even though I was not within a mile of a human; looking directly in on me, by myself, in this tiny little trailer. I remember it was around 3 AM and I had been up since 6:00 AM the previous day, so I could drop the kids off at school. In the usual time/space warp of LSD, seconds seemed forever and an hour flashed by in a nanosecond of my perceived reality. Music and lyrics have always seemed to penetrate my soul when I have taken psychedelics and I was about to be pierced. I was embarking on a journey to a very special place that would change how I perceived my life, once again.
I won't get into the feelings and emotions of a recently divorced father who feels all alone, without his children, but it was quite obviously a difficult period. At this point in my life, I needed a psychic recharge and my consciousness was about to be defibrillated. I was going to rock the mountains with a Marantz 2252. As the music I selected for the journey flowed throughout the 12' X 60' space I inhabited and out through the mountains, I began to experience an expansion of my soul, as I felt the music emanating from the Dynaco A25's. I had read of synesthesia before and always thought of it as seeing musical notes float out the source of sound, F sharp to B flat, transitioning into A minor, that sort of thing.
That was not my experience.
Sound is not composed of notes or sound waves as humans perceive them, it's consists of atoms vibrating and flowing together to form elements and compounds, which interact and combine with each other. These combinations create exponentially larger vibrations, as they combine and interact with both each other and nothing, the absence of what is being created. This interaction creates something out of nothing, as it's being created. What has been newly created interacts with the infinite amount of matter that has already been made and together, they combine to formulate the sensation we perceive as sound.
The molecular interaction of a plastic pick on the compounds that comprise a metallic guitar string; the physicality of the elements that compose a drumstick combining and transforming with the stretched membrane of the drum skin; human fingers creating friction on coiled steel bass strings that pulsate atoms to combine; all of which leads to oscillating protons, electrons and neutrons interacting on a seemingly infinite scale; then coalescing to transform and move nitrogen and oxygen atoms into a form of energy that interacts with a biologic membrane that transforms the physical energy it receives into an electrical entity the brain interprets as sound, that humans can experience and perceive. I _understood_ the composition of sound.
That's when Ghost in the Machine drops on the Dual 1225.
Now, the human interpretation of what it perceives is translated from electrical impulses that power sound into information the brain processes to establish the emotions we feel. We express those emotions in physical, vocal sounds that form words, like these:
"We are spirits in the material world.
Where does the answer lie?
Living from day to day
If it's something we can't buy
There must be another way”
I am transitioning into another way.
"Do I have to tell the story
Of a thousand rainy days since we first met
It's a big enough umbrella
But it's always me that ends up getting wet”
I would no longer compromise life away, as I had in my marriage.
Then, in the black fucking pitch of night, I hear this:
"There has to be an invisible sun
It gives its heat to everyone
There has to be an invisible sun
That gives us hope when the whole day's done”
I begin to feel hope and the day that is night is just beginning, instead of ending.
"Tout le monde est à moi”
I do not understand French, but I felt this.
"…I'm a walking nightmare, an arsenal of doom…”
Will I become that? Right now, I _am_ the Demolition Man.
"Too much information running through my brain
Too much information driving me insane”
Fucking A, do I have to Re-Humanize Myself?
"It's a subject we rarely mention
But when we do, we have this little invention
By pretending they're a different world from me
I show my responsibility”
LSD reveals the unconscious world that we ordinarily cannot perceive and I'm about to intertwine down into it. I dissolve into the consciousness of the sound. As I write this, it is almost as real as I experienced it, with the aid of music:
"The night came down, jungle sounds were in my ears
City screams are all I've heard in twenty years
The razor's edge of night, it cuts into my sleep
I sit upon the edge now
Shall I make that leap?”
Good God almighty, I was hearing the sounds of mountains, I've heard agonizing screams in the ER, I was now on the razors edge of night and I used to be on The Edge. I had already made the leap, with five hits of blotter.
"The echo makes me turn to see that last frontier.
The edge of time closes down as I disappear”
I vanish as I spiral down _into_ the sound. At this point, time ceased to exist, it had parsed down until it was closed.
"The time that's best is when surroundings fade away
The presence of another world comes close to me”
I understood, became one with the sound and interacted in it. I cannot explain it any other way; it's all vibrating and pulsating atoms, interacting and combining to create something completely new, out of nothing. Now expand that interaction and combination out from your mind, past our planet, to the solar system, expanding out past the galaxy, all the way to the edge of the universe, into the Universal Mind. All life is interactions of one thing with another. This wasn't a hallucination, it is reality.
When time finally regained its momentum, the sun was rising. I wasn't the Omegaman but I was so very fucking tired. Until I realized my Secret Journey.
"You will see light in the darkness
You will make some sense of this
You will see joy in this sadness
You will find this love you miss”
I would indeed find the love I missed, two years later.
"But darkness makes me fumble
For a key
To a door
That's wide open”
As my oneness with sound diminished its vibrations, I can't interpret it any other way but a voice/entity/being/force communicated with me:
"Go back and tell them you've been down to where the music is _made_.”
Finally, I just did.
I will attempt to communicate something that happened over 30 years ago when I did LSD and it is, for the most part, indescribable. I did not actually see sound (synesthesia) but I could visualize it and _understood_ how it was created. I'm sure I cannot adequately describe this experience, because I've never really discussed it with anyone in detail, even with my wife. I will attempt to describe this experience and it may not make any sense at all, to you. It occurred in complete visual darkness but the experience could not have been brighter.
I was recently separated and temporarily living in a small trailer that was isolated and remote, here in the mountains. I'm in that brief stage where sorrow and self-pity have ebbed and before anger and frustration have really had a chance to swell. I have a day off from the hospital, I'm broke, with no cannabis, nowhere to go and nothing to do. I start looking for any shake that might've been left in album covers from days gone by. Out of a Blind Faith album falls a strip of perforated paper from long ago. Thinking it would not still be potent and since I hadn't done any in over a decade, I decide to do it that night, all by myself.
It was a half a ten-strip of blotter and it was old, so I took two. After an hour or two, nothing really special, just some trails and a bit of shimmering, melting reality, with the familiar brilliance and sheen I remembered so fondly.
I decided to take the other three.
After a slice of time, I don't know how long, I was the one in the fishbowl. The one being observed, by the entire outside world, even though I was not within a mile of a human; looking directly in on me, by myself, in this tiny little trailer. I remember it was around 3 AM and I had been up since 6:00 AM the previous day, so I could drop the kids off at school. In the usual time/space warp of LSD, seconds seemed forever and an hour flashed by in a nanosecond of my perceived reality. Music and lyrics have always seemed to penetrate my soul when I have taken psychedelics and I was about to be pierced. I was embarking on a journey to a very special place that would change how I perceived my life, once again.
I won't get into the feelings and emotions of a recently divorced father who feels all alone, without his children, but it was quite obviously a difficult period. At this point in my life, I needed a psychic recharge and my consciousness was about to be defibrillated. I was going to rock the mountains with a Marantz 2252. As the music I selected for the journey flowed throughout the 12' X 60' space I inhabited and out through the mountains, I began to experience an expansion of my soul, as I felt the music emanating from the Dynaco A25's. I had read of synesthesia before and always thought of it as seeing musical notes float out the source of sound, F sharp to B flat, transitioning into A minor, that sort of thing.
That was not my experience.
Sound is not composed of notes or sound waves as humans perceive them, it's consists of atoms vibrating and flowing together to form elements and compounds, which interact and combine with each other. These combinations create exponentially larger vibrations, as they combine and interact with both each other and nothing, the absence of what is being created. This interaction creates something out of nothing, as it's being created. What has been newly created interacts with the infinite amount of matter that has already been made and together, they combine to formulate the sensation we perceive as sound.
The molecular interaction of a plastic pick on the compounds that comprise a metallic guitar string; the physicality of the elements that compose a drumstick combining and transforming with the stretched membrane of the drum skin; human fingers creating friction on coiled steel bass strings that pulsate atoms to combine; all of which leads to oscillating protons, electrons and neutrons interacting on a seemingly infinite scale; then coalescing to transform and move nitrogen and oxygen atoms into a form of energy that interacts with a biologic membrane that transforms the physical energy it receives into an electrical entity the brain interprets as sound, that humans can experience and perceive. I _understood_ the composition of sound.
That's when Ghost in the Machine drops on the Dual 1225.
Now, the human interpretation of what it perceives is translated from electrical impulses that power sound into information the brain processes to establish the emotions we feel. We express those emotions in physical, vocal sounds that form words, like these:
"We are spirits in the material world.
Where does the answer lie?
Living from day to day
If it's something we can't buy
There must be another way”
I am transitioning into another way.
"Do I have to tell the story
Of a thousand rainy days since we first met
It's a big enough umbrella
But it's always me that ends up getting wet”
I would no longer compromise life away, as I had in my marriage.
Then, in the black fucking pitch of night, I hear this:
"There has to be an invisible sun
It gives its heat to everyone
There has to be an invisible sun
That gives us hope when the whole day's done”
I begin to feel hope and the day that is night is just beginning, instead of ending.
"Tout le monde est à moi”
I do not understand French, but I felt this.
"…I'm a walking nightmare, an arsenal of doom…”
Will I become that? Right now, I _am_ the Demolition Man.
"Too much information running through my brain
Too much information driving me insane”
Fucking A, do I have to Re-Humanize Myself?
"It's a subject we rarely mention
But when we do, we have this little invention
By pretending they're a different world from me
I show my responsibility”
LSD reveals the unconscious world that we ordinarily cannot perceive and I'm about to intertwine down into it. I dissolve into the consciousness of the sound. As I write this, it is almost as real as I experienced it, with the aid of music:
"The night came down, jungle sounds were in my ears
City screams are all I've heard in twenty years
The razor's edge of night, it cuts into my sleep
I sit upon the edge now
Shall I make that leap?”
Good God almighty, I was hearing the sounds of mountains, I've heard agonizing screams in the ER, I was now on the razors edge of night and I used to be on The Edge. I had already made the leap, with five hits of blotter.
"The echo makes me turn to see that last frontier.
The edge of time closes down as I disappear”
I vanish as I spiral down _into_ the sound. At this point, time ceased to exist, it had parsed down until it was closed.
"The time that's best is when surroundings fade away
The presence of another world comes close to me”
I understood, became one with the sound and interacted in it. I cannot explain it any other way; it's all vibrating and pulsating atoms, interacting and combining to create something completely new, out of nothing. Now expand that interaction and combination out from your mind, past our planet, to the solar system, expanding out past the galaxy, all the way to the edge of the universe, into the Universal Mind. All life is interactions of one thing with another. This wasn't a hallucination, it is reality.
When time finally regained its momentum, the sun was rising. I wasn't the Omegaman but I was so very fucking tired. Until I realized my Secret Journey.
"You will see light in the darkness
You will make some sense of this
You will see joy in this sadness
You will find this love you miss”
I would indeed find the love I missed, two years later.
"But darkness makes me fumble
For a key
To a door
That's wide open”
As my oneness with sound diminished its vibrations, I can't interpret it any other way but a voice/entity/being/force communicated with me:
"Go back and tell them you've been down to where the music is _made_.”
Finally, I just did.