Revelation

so here i am my friends, writing for the first time in a little while, and moreso, this will not just be another entry about the pimping things ive been doing (only a little). there will be some constructive thoughts i hope.

so first of all, my sister has come to visit again, she arrived the 12 and she leaves in a few days. it has been great as always to have her around. her visit has coincided with a vacation in my arabic classes so we have been able to hang out alot while she was here. she came to visit with a few friends and my friend owen was supposed to come visit, but my man didnt check his passport till the checked his bags, only to find out it had expired. i can tell you dont travel much OG, common. so yea, my sister was here with her friends and weve been doing tha do. tomorrow we are going to go to the beach, although its going to be COLD, but it should be madd fun. were going to do some hammock camping.

on the ithaca front, it seems that me nate and shane have found a house, i wont elaborate too much, since we have not signed a lease yet, although we do have a verbal agreement. it is a nice, WELL MAINTAINED house overlooking the lake, on a nice piece of property, yet still close enough to get to and from school.

so the now that the chit chat is out of the way, i will get to the heart of my story. this last weekend there was a festival, it is called El Festival del Dragon. originally it was started in the 70's by a few english families as a celebration of the coming of spring. it has evolved alot from its early beginings, now it consists of a 3 week festival in the mountains outside granada. the beauty of this festival is that it is completely guerrilla, there is not charge to get it, very little central organization, and no one really making any money off it. people bring their tents and set up little food stands, music tents, a few concerts, etc. you just walk around and there are tents everywhere, and people just chilling out without any method to the mayhem. it is quite remarkable when i compare this to the Grassroots Festival in Ithaca this summer, where it costs like $75 to go in for the weekend and you had an assigned plot and food was madd expensive. compare that to the dragon where everyone was just throwing up their tents where ever they could (for some reason people were pitching them strait up on rocks). the food was remarkably cheap considering where we were. there were people selling jewlery in stands, beer out of buckets of ice, people just waving around huge nuggets of marijuana, it was the ill spring festival. on the other hand, the festival does have its negative aspects, i feel bad for the people who live in the area who have to listen to hardcore drum and bass from like 9pm to 9am for at least 2 weeks, it can be heard a good distance away. there is also the matter of garbage and feces littering the area. part of the lack of organization is the lack of appropriate waste facilities, there were very few trash cans, and they were FULL in no time, and there were a few latrines, but in general it was just a free for all. from what i understand, the organizers pay the govt to clean up afterwards, presumably from their profits from concessions, but the river definetly looked a little mangy afterwords.

so anyway, this has all been a bit of a long wind up for me to tell you about my own experience with my sister and her two friends (although we met up with some other cats while we were there). the main night of the whole festival when everyone comes and it is just crazy was friday night. this is the night that we planned on attending. we arrived on saturday afternoon at around 6 and walked around the grounds, saw the sights and got our bearings, as it is quite unlikely that we would be able to see anything at night. so from the moment we arrived people just started piling into it. by like 9 it was a complete grid lock as the whole festival grounds only had one enterance, and at a certain point the max capacity was reached but cars kept piling in, it was quite satisfying to be there and parked and chilling.

so let me cut to the chase. the thing that makes this festival most remarkable is that you will never be in a place with so many people doing so many drugs at the same time. it is insane, i think that 100% were doing drugs of some sort including alchohol and marijuana, but furthermore, at least 95% were doing 'harder' drugs. you could literally see a food stand that said: WINE 1 euro, BEER 1 euro, SHOTS 2 euros, ACID 10 euros, SPEED 20 euros, etc. me and cas and one of her friends decided that we were going to do some MDMA, the active ingredient in exstacy, although i felt it was safer as it didnt have all the other things they throw in it, and we got it from a friend.

so i realize at this point im going out there, i am well aware of all the people i send this blog to, and i am even more aware of the impressions that they may be making of me as they read this. i would beg you all to read with an open mind and not judge too hastily as there is much more to this than the recreational use of drugs (which i think has some merit in its own right, when not abused, as with all things).

so basically we started taking it around 9 pm and started feeling it at like 10, we spent the next 7-8 hours dancing like maniacs to the heartbeat of drum and bass. this is both the first time that i have done MDMA and the first time that i have consumed 'hard' drugs in a rave setting. how can i describe the feeling that you get when you are packed into a room just being swayed back and forth by the DJ. you can feel the energy in the room swaying back and forth, like an entity of its own. acording to Aldous Huxley, the primary function of the mind is to reduce the amount of sensory input we recieve down to what is necessary to our survival as an animal. a reducing valve, he calls it, functioning as a survival mechanism. so essentially the brain is capable of recieving a great deal more input, which is mostly useless for our survival as a species. so when we take drugs, the brain is no longer functioning as a reducing valve and is opened to new sensorum. in other words, i think that the sensations/halucinations/connections we feel while we are on drugs, are not made up in our mind, we simply cannot percieve them in our normal state of conciousness. its not so much that we are imagining things is that we are percieving other sensory mediums. like in the crowd, you could feel yourself connected to everyone else. this is similar to the experience of sitting in a drum circle (without drugs) when you start to feel the rhythm and everyone is syncing and you just stop thinking and feel the connection. i think that religious ceremonies (if the people are true beleivers) are able to generate this collective thing that everyone plugs their mind into. in a book i read about witches it refered to this as everyones aura vibrating at the same frequency, and what better to do this than music. in fact i think that it is the most effective unifier of minds. i used to think that when all the druggies would get together and just listen to crazy techno music on madd drugs that it was no good, but now i can see the reason that they do it. and while, there were many people there who i think were over doing it on the drug consumption because they were REALLY out of it, it was amazing to feel that connection with such a large number of souls. you could almost feel it breathe in and out. you could feel the crowd waiting as if on the edge of a precipice for the climax in the music. quite remarkable and enlightening really.
so i spent the whole night mostly with my sister and her friends and we were having a jolly good time. for those of you who know me well, you know that my sister is my best friend and that we are extremely close. i cannot tell you the joy of taking drugs with her. i always felt so remarkably close to her. when we would come in contact it was crazy, it was like i could feel madd quantities of electricity passing through us. i am quite certain that this was a manifestation of love that we cannot percieve in our everyday state. i felt so safe. oh how limited these silly words are in all of this. if there were more degrees of love i would say i was definetly feeling level 10 love (out of 10). this is not the only time i have been on level 10 (and the others have not been on drugs). the difference that feeling these other manifestations of love, it was just so much more gratifying to feel love.

at some point, maybe like 4, the one of my sisters friends who did not trip with us went back to the car to get a few hours of shut eye.

the rest of us kept dancing and dancing and dancing (and eating clementines) until the sun began to rise around 7.

at this point i went to the assigne meeting place to see if my sisters friend had come for any reason. on the walk there i started reflecting on the night and how good it was to be here with my sister and all the other people sharing this remarkable experience. i was out in the middle of the woods having the craziest tribal experience of my life. i could feel the love gushing out of my veins and i was oh so happy to be alive. ::u may think: isnt it bad to need drugs to have all of this, it surely will lead to addiction.:: well i suppose that that is a good point, but i think that i am well aware of the fact that drugs only offer you a glimpse of what is available through hard work and dedication. i think that all of the extatic sensations i was having can be had in a longer and more permanent way through meditation and spiritual practice, but here lies the power and benefit of drugs. thy can offer you a glimpse at what is available. they can give you the temporary insight you need to move foward with ur life. let us take my opinion as an assumption for the sake of argument: that through drugs you can take a small look at God, the infinite, enlightenment, whatever you want to call it, etc. i think that it is definetly worth looking than not looking, while keeping the perspective clear. i know, believe me i know there are dangers in taking drugs, the most imminent being addiction. BUT, but if they are done carfully, in the proper state of mind, with the right people, than they can offer a momentary glimpse of what the universe is really like. and honestly, i think that for most people, those few glimpses throughout their lives would be enough. i think that most people spend alot of their lives lacking the humility and perspective that is gained by an awe inspiring encounter with the infinite, but i will continue this latter, let me get back to my story.

so im walking to the meeting spot, overwhelmed by love and a feeling of understanding, and i got the notion to go all the way to the car, which was a little ways away, to wake her up if she wasnt at the meeting spot. the sun was about to come out and we were going to go down to the river and enjoy the day after the night, and i didnt think she would want to miss that. so i was feeling lots of love for my sister, and lots of love for her friend, and i was happily strolling towards her. AND THEN

like a flash it hit me, a moment of inspiration, a revelation of sorts. i attribute it to being in an enlightened/loving (they are one and the same as far as i can tell) state of mind, where the mind is at its most powerful, and the future and the past become apparant. and so i got a flash into the future and i saw my life play out in front of me. for some time i have been unclear as to the direction that my life will take. i have been in debate about wheter i want to be a scholar or a wanderer or god knows what. i love school, but i also love freedom. i dont know, it was a hot mess in my brain. and then the flash hit and it was clear as to what i am going to do. i have decided to go to graduate school in egypt when i finish up ithaca. i will study islamic studies or somehting of that nature, and i will be able to master my arabic, which is the one thing that i was sure of. i want to lead the life of a scholar and family man. my head has always been happy when buried in a book, and i am now clear that it would be foolish to abandon this path. espially when i seem so well suited for it. i know this may not seem like a surprise to some of you, but it certainly was to me: i saw myself at the center of a large family of my own, completee with wife children nieces nephews godsons and god daughers. i saw myself not unlike my father, happily sitting at the head of a long table with all my beloved people. there is certainly a relativly long span of time between now and then, but it is good to know where you are goin.

so anyway i continued towards the car and woke up the poor girl from her unconfortable nap. despite her grogginess i started chattering away at her the thing i had discovered. we talked and talked and talked and talked until we finally ran into the rest of the gang, at which point we found a quiet spot in the woods by the river where we spent the whole day just talking and chilling and smoking joints.



so i would like to continue the discusion on the power and use of drugs. i was just saying that i think that getting a few glimpses of the divine throughout ones life is enough to generate the humility and submission that i find to be essential to a happy life. (let me just say here on a side note, that in my limited experience i find that not all drugs serve this purpose. in cigarets for example i have found no trancendant value. it seems that psychadelics/halucinogens are the best for the purpose of opening the reducing valve). i think that we all have the desire to transecend our ordinary existance, which is why religion has been the center our lives up until the very recent past. we all want some sort of indication that this isnt it, that there is something more to the ordinary ups and downs of life. this is the reason taht we use drugs, and im not talking about 'hard' drugs, im talking about alcohol, and ganga, and hashish, and mushrooms, and peyotes and everything else. we just want, even for just one night to be in a different state of mind, to be rid of the triffles that hold us down. one of the problems, id say, is taht we are usually unaware of our own desire to transcend so that we do not do it properly. we smoke every day, or we drink ourselves into oblivion, or we do so many drugs that we dont know what hit us. it is impossible to reach the ultimate enlightenment through drugs, only to to open small windowns temporarily, and if we abuse them, the windows get smaller and smaller until eventually they dont even open up and we are left with only frustration. another problem with drugs, is that they have a negative effect on our mind as a survival mechanism, the mechanism basically doesnt work for a while. it is hard to imagine looking for food and shelter in the state of mind i was in, in fact it seemed the only thing possible was blissful contemplation of the beauty of life. this is great once in a while, but if done regularly, it is easy to see why drug addicts have such a low life expectancy.

there is really so much more that i could say about this matter, but that is the subject of books, not blogs, i think, although i am expecting some responses. this is certainly a subject that everyone must have some sort of opinion on, one way or the other. so i look foward to hearing from you. and i just want to reassure you that i have a sound head on my shoulders and that i dont forsee myself slipping into any of the pitfalls of drugs anytime soon.

many of you might be asking why i would write something like this, as it can only make people think less of me. first of all you may not be thiknking that at all, but if you are i would like to tell you my reasons. first of all i wanted to lay it all on the line so to speak, to share my thoughts and experiences with the people i love. i am neither ashamed of myself, nor do i think i have done anything wrong. secondly i would like to present another image of drugs. i wish that we could get over the whole D.A.R.E. attitude about drugs and have some real discussions. for example, i cannot remember the last (or first) time that an authority type figure had a conversation with me explaining the positive aspects of drugs. i cant remember the last time that sombody talked to me about the fact that people have been using drugs for religious and ceremonial purposes since the begining of time. nobody ever told me that drugs arnt bad, but abusing them is. i can find an analagous situation with the consumption of alcohol in the USA as compared to europe. in the US drinking is super taboo and its really not ok to drink if ur under 21, and as a concequence everyone drinks themselves retarded, from a very young age. being so taboo, drinking itself becomes an event. in europe on the contrary, drinking is very acceptable even from a young age. the drinking age is technically 18, but in reality there is very little regulation, i can send my 13 year old brother to buy beer for me (not that i would EVER do that ;), or would i?) children learn to drink in their homes and as a concequence when they drink socially it is much more under control and less extreme. drinking is just something you do while socializing, its not the whole point of a night. so perhaps if we educated our youngsters about the real nature of drugs, instead of painting a comically simplified and highly distorted picture of it, we would not have people using drugs in such reckless manners. perhaps we could ever learn to use them in a more profitable way, generating love, happiness and community. i know that i will certainly be one to try in that envisioned time when i got some childrens of my own.

finally i would like to recomend two essays by Aldous Huxley on the relationships between drugs, spirituality, and other such things. they usually come together, they are called The Doors of Perception & Heavan and Hell.

peace and love
emi