What we Feel, What we Think and What we Do

Once, years ago, I was with my friend Billy Rodenberg, peaking on LSD and crossing The Calvert Street Bridge in Washington D.C. This bridge was a notorious suicide jump and you could hear the compelling voices in the air as we passed. On the other side of the bridge we had to hold hands to cross the street because of the awesome aggression of the traffic and because the air was filled with radio transmissions of all sorts. It sounded like thousands of walkie talkies were broadcasting from the astral plane.

That is something I often noticed when I was on a psychedelic journey in Washington D.C. I could hear all sorts of radio communications taking place; feel the presence of numerous enforcement agencies and the incestuous commingling of the embassies and other areas of selective representation; present there out of a desire for power, influence, money, information or what-have-you. It was all palpable in a way that really can’t be communicated to the non-psychedelicized and that includes the majority of people who have casually taken the substance. Some people find various worlds open to the psychic and intuitive senses and some people are fascinated by the colors and other sensory effects and possibilities.

I recall people asking about a particular acid and inquiring if it gave good color effects. I remember a lot of people whose connection to the awakening of the times had to do with sex and all the other same old same olds, now suddenly wrapped in candied neon and flavor enhanced.

Billy and I crossed the street and wound up in a deserted lot where half a dozen older youths were wailing away on an abandoned car; really beating the shit out of it with rocks and metal clubs. It could have been thousands of years ago and could well have been a hundred years in the future, given the de-evolution presently at work. I noted it and continued on with my juggling of six different levels of reality and all that radio traffic. Billy, on the other hand, was struck at some primal level by the scene and has never forgotten it.

We probably should have been scared but we never were. It could just as well have been us they were beating on. This was a dangerous neighborhood in uncertain times; for whatever reason we never had a problem with people of any age or color in our dozens of jaunts at all hours through the streets and the many parks of different sizes where we would always wind up in order for the magic to intensify. You always knew when you were going into nature from the urban side and... vice versa. It was like walking from one world into another.

These worlds interpenetrated each other in ways other than the physical. Sometimes you could see how one world had been formed out of the other and how that primary world had been formed out of thought. Sometimes you could see and feel the different worlds that overlaid and interpenetrated when the sheaths of your subtler bodies resonated to them; these were the suits you wore there. When those sheaths were activated you literally walked in those worlds. It’s a constant, just as possible now as it ever was.

Beings appeared, ancient voices sounded out of nothing and there was no mistaking their reality given what they had to say. You don’t hallucinate ageless wisdom when you hear it. It’s not a hallucination if it’s the same every time. Serpents coiled in and through everything. Later I came to understand that this is the radiant energy that moves in everything, no matter how dense or ethereal.

Sometimes there were darker things and darker voices too but you understood, or ‘we’ understood that something within us was infinitely more powerful than these distractions. Surely you could endanger yourself with unnecessary fear and some were more fascinated with the darkness than prudence would advise. Some people are just disposed a certain way. Why that is may be connected to the mechanics of reincarnation or it might have to do with a weakness for the world of form and its glitter.

During this period it was clear that the majority wanted particular gratifications more than they wanted a deeper knowledge or understanding. The majority of the interests I saw proliferating all had to do with improving one’s material position; even if it was what they imagined to be the world beyond. Everybody was going to sit on the right hand.

In this world it is the measure of sanity whether one is integrated into this world or longs for the one beyond... which also... interpenetrates this one. Heaven begins where your feet meet the earth; it isn’t at some stratospheric distance. Portions of it increasingly rarify by virtue of being further away. Admission to some locations is more difficult and time passes, if at all, in a different manner too.

The thing about moving through the veils is that the price of admission is the loss of the knowledge of who you thought you were before you passed through the gateway. “You can’t take it with you.” stands as the price of admission. Most people can’t accept this price, nor deal with the condition of not knowing who they are as well as the loss of all the things they thought they knew. This is what keeps people here, the lure of the familiar and, of course, the appetites and ambitions. When their tape runs out for this particular excursion they automatically pay these prices anyway. Why wait?

Because of the nature of the times and conditions, the material world increases in it’s presence on the human mind by the day. It’s more difficult all the time to achieve inner quiet and personal serenity. The competition for your time and attention is fierce and getting fiercer. Cellphones and ipods are locking us into the spiritual deprivation tanks of our bodies, while our minds have become the shopping lanes of Wal-Mart. Our emotions are now midi-instruments of limited range playing the same soap opera, elevator music over and over. Looping is the new eternity.

Our diets and the attitude with which we eat are literally feeding us into a denser, darker glitter of dead objects. We are becoming zombies who do not even know that we are repeating ourselves. We have no gratitude, just a longing that we have confused with desire and which cannot be satisfied except by turning down the flame. That goes contrary to the interests of business.

Some large portion of the world’s Christians, salivate over a looming Armageddon for the wicked as they wait upon the hallucination of a rapture that their so-called Christian lives has earned for them. They’ll escape in the final scene. Other window dressing religions are all promising exclusivity and it’s a crapshoot as to whether you picked the right one. Meanwhile, all the real responsibilities of these religious practitioners go unanswered or ignored in front of them every day; or worse, their particular answer to the desperate state of their fellows is to promise them pie in the sky as opposed to a helping hand in the here and now. Instead, the essence of the thing has been translated into the convenience of an automatic ticket to a world no one has earned.

The act of learning is a curious thing. If you aren’t changed by information into something better than you were then you have the wrong information. If you aren’t made lighter by releasing your attachments to temporary things then you are made more encumbered the further you proceed... on the loop. The insane asylum is jumping as the runaway cornucopia floods the landscape with useless things. Crazy people dance in the street holding these things up as if they were the second coming of a previous misunderstanding.

I sense that everywhere in the world there are people who understand what the condition of the times implies. Whatever there may be of rapture and salvation will not manifest itself in a transubstantiation of the most clueless among us into some kind of Easter Parade across the sky. The way out is not another production brought to you by General Electric. It’s right there where it has always been. It’s just harder to see.

What these times are about is fooling, “the very elect.” The department store at the end of the world is having a major sale. Everything must go. The band is warming up. The fighter planes are revving their engines. The victims wait or go about their business. The loop is a slow, nearly imperceptible, descending spiral. Ordinary life seems ordinary. Football season is about to begin. Everybody always thinks it will go on forever. They’re right about that. That’s the good news and the bad news and the important information that changes you or goes through you on its way to somewhere else.

Visible sings: ♫ Right Thru My Heart ♫
'Right Thru My Heart' is track no. 5 of 12 on Visible's 2007 album 'Almost A Capella'
Lyrics (pops up)