Reduction

on another note,

I was formulating a thought out of a wide variety of thoughts and memories, and I am trying to elaborate in a proper/informative fashion.

I've been reading Tom Wolfe Electric Kool Aid Acid Test and in it, there were many places of reflection on ways of thinking I'd seldom thought about or even entertained since I was about 18. Right after highschool, I messed around Heavily with psychedelic drugs. LSD, Mushrooms, and MDMA primarily. And a full blown cocaine addiction on top of that. But I dropped acid maybe 30, 40 times. Now I'm five years clean. Woot woot.

All that to say, I never really understood the spiritual parts of it; the typical 'universe experiencing itself' part or any of the good of it.

But, now, after reading Electric Kool Aid, I've actually began to understand what exactly they mean, in ways that I didn't before.

Specifically, on language and words and openness.

Wolfe describes Kesey's words and thoughts etc about being open, and how Huxley said that the mind is a reducing valve to reduce the overwhelming amount of information we're taking in all the time for survival, etc, and then when we take LSD or some psychedelic substances, the door, the valve, is propped open for a time and we experience more data, more information, more than we can even really understand, and suddenly everything becomes clear or connected or what-have-you.

And a big part of what Kesey is doing during the book (i'm about 1/2 way, right before the chapter 'THE BUST') is using sound in a variety of ways to alter a state of sensations. For example, his lag loop or the rapping in one ear and out the other. Listening to yourself on a delay while also hearing ambient sounds or whatever.

And a thing i notice during these sessions, these sound alterations, is that a lot of the guys and gals On the Bus and even Wolfe himself, they use these long, winding, passages of words, some making sense in their place and others in some odd succession that feels and sounds good and different and only mostly makes sense but some of it is totally garbled.

Now, keeping that in mind, I was recently watching a lecture- a segment of a lecture but a lecture nonetheless- about the way our language- our Literal language- English, French, Chinese, whatever- those things impact our Real Perception of the world around us. For example, two people in identical life situations, same everything, all of it, but one speaks English and the other, German, for example, those two people may have a totally different understanding of the world- their world will be different because of the constraints of their language and the boundaries therein.

And then one step further, more personal, I really enjoy odd music and lyricism. An artist who comes to mind is Beck, who uses the most exhilarating and sometimes, often, confusing vocabulary to convey some kind of feeling. Or, on a singular song level, I am the Walrus, by the Beatles. Okay, so there's something here, right, those artists and songs make me feel some kind of way because they BREAK the regular constraints of language to create ANEW this feeling inside me or the listener, and we can't say why, and we don't totally know when we hear it, but it works, and i think because A: It pushes the boundary, and B: It is, totally, sometimes, ambiguous in meaning.

So we take, or I take, all of those three things and I see that there is a pattern here. A Pattern with a capital P which I cannot totally describe but I think I'm beginning to understand it while I formulate the thought here. Ken Kesey and other Heads, myself included, I suppose, the reason we all kind of talk, in this ornate and intricate and down-right Hieronymus Bosch vocabulary, we are doing so because of the new Feeling and Boundary pushing way, because of the openness of the mind and the willingness to push the boundary, and so, from there, from the opening of the Reducing Valve, we are able to create and speak and sing and see things that otherwise we wouldn't see. And it's not because we're doped up and all geeked on a Serotonin spiral, but because (well, partly, chemically, yes) but because when our minds are open, we are able to perceive and expose parts of ourselves and the world which we've reduced through time and age and life experiences. Life as a child had more Red in it. And Blue, and Green, and through time and age and life, we've lost the visual sparkle because of the Great Reducer, and by opening the valve up even just a little bit, we are able to UnReduce and go farther than we thought or imagined.

And still, I feel as though I'm missing some bit of overlap in this thought, this cluster of ideas, and I am trying to figure out exactly what the hell it is I'm seeing here. But I think because of the categorization of everything, and the reduction of categorization and even the language itself dissolving by the minute, the restraints being unhooked from the walls of English and Dutch and we are stripped to just Perception, Raw or OTHERWISE, we are able to break free for a minute and not live within language. Staying with an open mind- An Open Mind- they say, all the time, but never really explained- being open-minded to perception and new ways of thinking is hypercritical on the creative process and I think I'd lost touch with it for a while. 

And I hope that this makes you think about it for a while.