Industrial Vitriol - The Neurotoxic ++++

[A 1943 Carbon Tetrachloride Trip Report by René Daumal, author of The Mount Analogue (The Holy Mountain by Jodorowsky is an adaptation of this unfinished book)

I lived the exact same thing when I was 16, it melted my brain's memory-library for 10 years.

When the machine thinking the world isn't working anymore]

Original french version

http://litteratura.free.fr/spip/article.php?id_article=15

"One day, I decided to tackle the problem of death itself; I would put my body in a state as close as possible to physiological death, but using all my attention to stay awake and record everything that came my way. I had some carbon tetrachloride on hand, which I used to kill the beetles I collected.

The result was always exactly the same: it exceeded and upset my expectations, shattering the limits of what was possible and throwing me brutally into another world.

So everything that, in my ordinary state, was for me "the world" was still there, but as if suddenly emptied of its substance; it was no more than a phantasmagoria at once empty, absurd, precise and necessary. And this "world" thus appeared in its unreality because I had suddenly entered another, intensely more real world, an instantaneous, eternal world, a blazing inferno of reality and evidence into which I was thrown, swirling like a moth in a flame. At that moment, it's certainty, and it's here that the spoken word must content itself with circling the fact.

Certainty of what? - Words are heavy, words are slow, words are too soft or too rigid. With these poor words, I can only make imprecise propositions, whereas my certainty is for me the archetype of precision. All that remains of this experience, thinkable and formulable in my ordinary state, is this - but I'd give my head to cut it off: I have the certainty of the existence of something else, a beyond, another world or another kind of knowledge; and, at that moment, I knew directly, I experienced this beyond in its very reality. It's important to reiterate that, in this new state, I perceived and understood the ordinary state very well, the latter being contained within the former, just as wakefulness includes dreams, and not vice versa...

I shall now try to define the unspeakable certainty by means of images and concepts. The first thing to understand is that, compared to our ordinary thinking, this certainty is at a higher level of meaning. We are accustomed to using images to signify concepts; thus, the image of a circle to signify the concept of a circle. Here, the concept itself is no longer the final term, the thing to be signified; the concept - the idea in the ordinary sense of the word - is itself a sign of something higher. I recall that, at the moment when certainty was revealed, my ordinary intellectual mechanisms continued to function: images were formed, concepts and judgments thought out, but without having to be encumbered by words, which gave this process the speed and simultaneity they often have in moments of great danger, such as during a fall from a mountain, for example.

The images and concepts I'm about to describe were therefore present at the moment of experience, at a level of reality intermediate between the appearance of the everyday "outside world" and certainty itself. However, some of these images and concepts are the result of a later affabulation, due to the fact that, as soon as I wanted to recount the experience, and first of all to myself, I was obliged to use words, and thus to develop certain implicit aspects of the images and concepts.

I'll start with the images, although images and concepts were simultaneous. They are visual and aural. The former presented itself as a veil of phosphenes more real than the "world" of the ordinary state, which I could always perceive through it. A half-red and half-black circle inscribed in a half-black triangle, the red half-circle being in the black half-triangle and vice versa; and the whole space was divided indefinitely in this way into circles and triangles inscribed in each other, arranging and moving, and becoming each other in a geometrically impossible way, i.e. unrepresentable in the ordinary state. A sound accompanied this luminous movement, and I suddenly realized that it was I who was producing this sound; I was almost this sound itself, I was sustaining my existence by emitting this sound. This sound was expressed by a formula that I had to repeat faster and faster, in order to "follow the movement"; this formula (I'm recounting the facts without trying to disguise their absurdity) was roughly pronounced: "Tem gwef tem gwef dr rr rr" with a tonic accent on the second "gwef"; and the last syllable merging with the first gave a perpetual impulse to the rhythm, which was, I repeat, that of my own existence. I knew that, as soon as it got too fast for me to keep up, the unspeakable and appalling thing would happen. In fact, it was always infinitely close to happening, and in the end... I can say no more.

As for concepts, they revolved around a central idea of identity: everything was the same at all times; and they were expressed in spatial, temporal and numerical patterns - patterns present at the very moment, but whose discrimination into these various categories and verbal expression were, of course, posterior.

The space in which the representations took place was not Euclidean, for it is a space such that any indefinite extension from a starting point returns to that starting point; I believe this is what mathematicians call a "curved space". Projected onto a Euclidean plane, movement can be described as follows: either an immense circle whose circumference is rejected to infinity, perfect, pure and homogeneous - except for one point: but as a result, this point widens into a circle that grows indefinitely, rejects its circumference to infinity and merges with the original circle, perfect, pure and homogeneous - except for one point, which widens into a circle... and so on, perpetually, and indeed instantaneously, for it is at each instant that the circumference rejected at infinity simultaneously reappears as a point; not a central point, that would be too beautiful: but an eccentric point, representing both the nothingness of my existence and the imbalance that this existence, by its particularity, introduces into the immense circle of the Whole, which at each instant cancels me out by regaining its integrity (which it has never lost: it is I who am always lost).

In terms of time, it's a perfectly analogous scheme, and this movement of return to its origin of an indefinite expansion is understood as duration (a "curved" duration) as well as space: the last moment is perpetually identical to the first, it all vibrates simultaneously in the instant, and it's only out of the need to represent things in our ordinary "time" that I have to speak of an indefinite repetition: what I see, I've always seen, I'll always see, again and again, everything begins again identically at every instant - as if my particular and rigorously null existence were, in the homogeneous substance of the immobile, the cause of a cancerous proliferation of moments.

From the point of view of number, similarly, the indefinite multiplication of points, circles and triangles leads instantaneously to regenerated Unity, perfect except for me, and this except for me unbalancing the unity of the Whole engenders an indefinite and instantaneous multiplication which will immediately merge, at the limit, with regenerated Unity, perfect except for me,... and everything starts again - always on the spot and in an instant, without the Whole really being altered.

Under the category of causality, for example, cause and effect are enveloped and developed at every moment, passing into each other because of the imbalance produced in their substantial identity by the void, the infinitesimal hole that I am.

I've said enough for you to understand that the certainty I'm talking about is at once mathematical, experiential and emotional; mathematical - or rather mathematical-logical - it can be grasped indirectly, through the conceptual description I've just attempted, which can be summed up abstractly as follows: identity of the existence and non-existence of the finite in the infinite; experiential, not only because it is based on direct vision (which would be observation and not necessarily experience), not only because the experience can be redone at any moment, but because it was experienced at every moment by my struggle to "follow the movement" that was annulling me, repeating the formula by which I was pronouncing myself ; emotional, because in all this - and this is the crux of the experience - it's all about me: I saw my nothingness face to face, or rather my perpetual annihilation in every moment, an annihilation that was total but not absolute: mathematicians will understand me if I say "asymptotic".

I insist on this triple character of certainty in order to prevent the reader from misunderstanding it in three ways. Firstly, I don't want vague minds to have the illusion of understanding me, when all they would have to respond to my mathematical certainty are vague feelings of mystery, beyond, etc. Secondly, I don't want psychologists to have the illusion of understanding me. Secondly, I want to prevent psychologists, and especially psychiatrists, from taking my testimony not as a testimony but as a psychic manifestation interesting to study and explainable by what they believe to be their "psychological science", and it is to render their attempts futile that I have insisted on the experimental (and not merely introspective) character of my certainty...

I repeated the experiment several times, always with exactly the same result; or rather, it was always the same moment, the same instant that I found again, eternally coexisting with the illusory unfolding of my duration. Having seen the danger, however, I stopped repeating the test.

My certainty certainly didn't need external confirmation, but rather it was this certainty that suddenly illuminated for me the meaning of all sorts of accounts that other men had tried to make of the same revelation. Indeed, I soon knew that I was not alone, that I was not an isolated and pathological case in the cosmos. First, several of my comrades tried the same experiment. For most of them, nothing happened except the ordinary phenomena that precede narcosis. Two of them went a little further, but brought back from their escapade only the rather vague images of profound bewilderment; one said it was like the advertising posters for a certain aperitif, where two waiters carry bottles on whose labels two waiters carry bottles on whose labels...., and the other, painfully digging into his memory, tried to explain to me: "Ixian, ixian, i..., Ixian, ixian, i...", which obviously translated into his language my "Tem gwef tem gwef dr rr rr...". This was Roger Gilbert-Lecomte, with whom I was to edit the magazine "Le Grand Jeu", and whose tone of deep conviction reflected our shared certainty. I'm convinced that this experience determined his life as it did mine, albeit in a different direction.

And little by little, in my readings, I discovered testimonies of the same experience...

The famous circle spoken of by a medieval monk, and seen by Pascal (but who saw it and who first spoke of it?) ceased to be a cold allegory for me, but I knew that it was an all-consuming vision of what I had also seen. And beyond all these human testimonies, more or less complete (there's hardly a true poet in whom I didn't find at least a fragment), the confessions of the great mystics, and beyond that, certain sacred texts of various religions, brought me the affirmation of the same reality, sometimes in its terrifying form, when perceived by a limited individual, who, like me, has tried to look at infinity through the keyhole and found himself in front of Bluebeard's wardrobe, sometimes in the peaceful, fully happy and intensely luminous form that is the vision of beings who have truly transformed themselves and can see this Reality, face to face, without being destroyed by it. I'm thinking, for example, of the revelation of the Divine Being in the Bhagavad-Gîtâ, of the visions of Ezekiel and Saint John in Pathmos, of certain descriptions in the Tibetan Book of the Dead "Bardo Th'ô Dol", of a passage in the Lankâvatâra-Sutra..."

This is my "inner melody"

First music I ever recorded on a toy keyboard around 16, I still don't know how to play keyboard

https://on.soundcloud.com/5wLBgsxHhZeZpEXp6

I've learned and forgot so much

https://youtu.be/qbKijNvH3Cs?si=VkmHJR6-_VGqbfiT

I also need to tell you how my exposure to industrial trichlo vitriol transformed me, the internal structures of my human meta-programs (In the John C Lily way (Btw I took some yopo in a isolation tank one time)), even though I was already so allergic to the industrialization of living things (I became a vegetarian when I was 7, with my first awareness of death).

This ravaged memory-library-list pushed me to cram my functional memory, me who only wanted to be able to love, in no hard-drive mode (or else it's become noo-spherical, in any case it was my only hope that something like this would be possible, no longer access calculated in advance but that I'd have access to the information I needed in the moment, I'd learned and forgotten so much, at first I came across this documentary The Man Whose Mind Exploded, a guy who had kept all his memory from before x age but then I don't know what pathology made him unable to record anything, so he transformed his living space into a Mental Palace, I did a bit the same, I live in an Autel, then I integrated it little by little) so let's extend the RAM

Vitriol on legs, perhaps that's made my body a vehicle of choice for the imaginal, in I am the Substance mode.

After my first dose of LSD, this pattern of a kind of cross, always rotating but never turning, was imprinted on my retina with my eyes closed.

With iboga, it was a TV that never showed the same image, a continuous stream of crazy creativity.

The 3-meo-pcp, this thing of the relationship to the other and its gaping wound with that all-important little comma, I saw it everywhere, the slightest meme on twitter was nothing more than the dynamic of a relationship to the other.

And now what I'm most interested in is this, the poisoned path that starts from the explosive hinge zone of friction between fire and structure, Fire Walk With Me