Report on a Ketamine Experience
[Many years ago] I snorted ketamine HCl powder three times, at approximately 10 p.m., midnight and 2 a.m., approximately 100 - 150 mg each time. The first two sessions, as always, were interesting, and the third definitely memorable.
In a deep ketamine experience one is not sure that one will return. This is perhaps the mark of any really interesting psychedelic experience.
I was in a state in which I thought there was a reasonable chance that this time I'd gone too far, and would not come back. I did not feel anxiety about this, just some slight concern (about ending my life with so much still to do). From time to time I would check that my heart was still beating, that I was still breathing and that I could move my hands; each time everything seemed OK, so I was reassured that I had not died.
In this and in recent ketamine states the idea of information has been prominent. Everything seems to be organized like the flow of information in a computer. It is not so much that the world is a computer as that a computer is a very limited version of the world. Everything is connected, and fractally so. The information patterns that make up Being (or what appears so) are fractal vortices, patterns within patterns.
On a previous trip I had tried listening to music, with unsatisfactory results. Apparently the parts of the brain that handle auditory sensory input do not function well under ketamine. Ketamine is an "interior" trip — contact with the outside world is dulled but interior sources are opened. During this trip I found it easy to recall music that I love and had recently listened to (Vangelis's "Private Collection" and Bernard Xolotl's "Prophecy"). It seemed to me that the complex structures of this music (especially the latter) reflected the complex, fractal, structures of consciousness/being.
This was a sort of Enlightenment experience (there are other sorts, associated with the use of LSD). I seemed to realize my identity with the totality of Being, and to understand how I normally function in a very limited way, as a single individual. It seemed to me that, with my (then) grasp of how everything was organized and connected, I could bring into being a personal world of my choosing simply by doing everything in the right way. There is no need for personal hangups, conflicts, suffering, if one simply understands the right way to bring about what is desired; there is always a right way.
As is common on my ketamine trips, there were also transpersonal aspects to this experience. Just as I, personally, can create a world of my choosing, so too can humanity create a world of peace, love, harmony, joyous adventure and exploration. We have only to Do It Right Together. Of course the idea is one thing — the reality is another.
I envisioned Consciousness, or conscious being, as a spaceship — supported by advanced technology, cruising through galactic realms. Technology can support us in our quest for the highest experiences, rather than (as so often at present) be used by greedy, unenlightened individuals and classes to enslave and diminish others.
Much of what I experience on ketamine (unlike other psychedelics) is later hard to recall. I get a strong sense of the connection between language and reality, how reality is a creation of language. By "reality" here I mean what can be talked about, what can be an object of discerning consciousness, as opposed to Being, which (if there is such) is the underlying potentiality of consciousness.
I meditated on my life and my death, wondering how long I could go on. In some ways I felt immortal, although my rational mind held to the inevitability of physical death some day. I felt that the most (and it is a lot) that I could hope for would be to be there "at the end of the world", when Being falls back into the Primordial Nothingness. (There is an Irish blessing, "May you be alive at the end of the world.") This is the Extinction of the Universe, an inevitable consequence of its Creation; it has happened many times and will happen many more. It is the Divine Beyond-Being being born and dying, and being reborn, again and again, each time with a new variation (slightly different physical laws), most times better, more satisfying, than the last.
When I, and humanity, and all conscious life, in the universe, realize our essential identity with the Great Consciousness that underlies all Manifestation, we shall be embarked on the greatest trip of all. This will end only when, in a blaze of Glory, in comparison to which a million novas are but a candle, we merge again with our essence, the Great Primordial Nothingness, from which we perpetually recreate ourselves.
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