Englishman in New York

I just sent a pretty weird question to a friend of mine.

The question was as follows. Suppose you are at home, and you take a trip, for instance LSD or magic mushrooms. And while you are tripping, you arrive in this world, called earth and material reality. Suppose in this world, you took a trip that got you back home, where you then take an antidote to the first trip you took, which led you to enter the material reality of earth in the first place. By consequence of taking the antidote, you would no longer be on your trip that led you to this world, you would be back home again, in a sober state of consciousness.

So I was wondering if then, by consequence, you would have died in the material world of earth, and if perhaps people there, the beings of that trip-world, would find a corpse and mourn it and bury it, or rather, if that world would appear to just never have existed in the first place. No corpse, no funeral, no mourning, no people. Just you again, awake. In your bed, or on your sofa, wherever your trip to earth began.

You see, when you look at it this way, you may wonder even if after every dream you wake up from, the beings in that dream bury you somehow, and say their goodbyes.

You don’t, you just say it was a dream, and now I am awake.

This is not the first time this question has entered my thought. You may say, all very well, you are a schizophrenic, your mind is on the loose, you think in the ways of the mad man. All because of the dope, perhaps the tens of thousands of joints you smoked, or the fewer times when you took LSD or magic mushrooms.

But I would have to tell you that I was still just a child, and I had never touched a glass of alcohol or smoked even a normal cigarette, when this question first came into my existence.

I was dreaming one time, I was on a table, and some people were standing over me, torturing me and laughing a lot out of sadism. They were having fun trying to make me suffer. And I said to them, you think you are real, but I know that this is only a dream I am in. If I want to, I can wake up, and you will just have disappeared.

They seemed to differ in opinion, they laughed at me, convinced they had a truthful and real, authentic existence.

So as I did rather frequently in those days, I opened my eyes, wider and wider and stronger and stronger and higher and higher, and then my physical eyes opened and I was awake and out of the dream.

I went to the bathroom to take a pee.

As I got back to bed, I wondered. I wondered what the beings in my dream would now be thinking. If they would be panicking that I was gone, if they would come to doubt that they really existed, and if they would have seen now that I had proven the truth of my words.

So I said, you know what, I’ll go back into the dream, to see and find out.

I located the dream in space and time, closed my eyes and concentrated on that spot.

And then I was back on the table, with the same beings still making fun of me, standing and hanging over me. And I said now do you see? But they were just all too busy laughing and playing their sadistic games, fully overestimating themselves and pretending they were real and winning.

After that, I awoke again.

I thought, well, that were some stupid beings.

So that’s what I say, when I say that maybe perhaps this journey I am making on this planet earth, being Steven Vlaeyen with a body and a way of life, with all there is in this sphere, the sun rising every morning, people being born, people getting old and dying, getting a new dog to play with, all the war and sickness everywhere, maybe I’m just trippin’…

Maybe I have taken a substance back home, that led me into this dream, and maybe all of this is not real.

And you will say, but of course I am real. And you will maybe really think you are real, or be convinced that you are real, and you may call me crazy and laugh at me for thinking you are not.

But I still believe that I am trippin’.

I think all of this is just my dream.

And I do not believe it is about taking another drug, or trip, or glass of beer, champagne or wine. I do not believe it is about trippin’ on top of the trip of matter and physical existence, I think the way is to go down, not up.

I don’t think that the way out of this dream is to escape into yet another dream. And dreams in dreams and dreaming forever more and getting forever higher and finding forever thinner air. I think the way is to go down, to find your roots and wake up. To find your way home, and to realize you took this road perhaps in search of knowledge and of healing.

Perhaps, as is usual in psychedelic therapy, you have taken the trip to earth because there was something you wanted to understand or to make whole. And I am just saying, with all I have read about psychedelic therapy and the way of the shaman, that the question, especially considering the journeys of the shaman, often is whether these realities the spiritual person visits, are only in his head, or if they have an independent and actual, factual existence.

I must say, if I have to answer this myself, that it exists, but it also does not exist.

That is the only way for me to see it.

What about the dream I had as a kid, the dream of the insane beings laughing while they were making fun of me lying on the table? It was a dream I could go in and out of. It was there, but of course, from an awakened point of view, it was also not there.

So I believe this existence here, that I am encountering and living, called material existence on earth and human life, is a relative experience. It is an altered state of consciousness that I am here and now experiencing.

You know, in the movie of the Doors, by Oliver Stone, there is a scene where they are interviewing Jim Morrison, and one of the reporters asks him, are you by any chance in trance now mister Morrison?

I think I am in a trance, I think my state of mind is very altered, and I am on a trip on earth.

I don’t know what I am going to discover, and I don’t know when the dosage will fade away, but one day I will awaken again, and I will be in my bed or on my sofa, and I will say wow, that was quite a strange trip.

And I will laugh, cause the only reason you take a trip after all, is to laugh.

And when I think of it, the people here, the beings in this trip, in this relative existence, might say I am an alien. They may think of it like an alien, in his alien home planet, is taking a trip and arriving in their world, just like when I lay down after taking a pee and decided to visit the dream once again.

Perhaps the beings in that dream, missing me now for all those years already, might say that I was an alien. But I am not. I am just who I am, and I do not live on a strange planet, I live at home, and home is where I will awake again.

It is just that I do not think all of you are real, even though you may forcefully try to convince me you are. Maybe it is as crazy as you really believing you are real.

Wouldn’t that be a strange dream? When the beings there, even when you told them they were only in your dream, said no, we exist for real.

So I don’t think all of you are real, and I don’t think this is my actual home and my reality. This is just a strange experience through which I am hoping to grow wiser and more understanding.

You sometimes say that the aliens are observing you. Maybe ‘they’ are just taking trips into this world to learn. Like a shaman or someone in psychedelic therapy visits a world and a form of reality, to learn, to gather information, to grow wiser and to learn how to heal.

So maybe your world, as you would call it, is just as real as the world visited by the shaman. Only you are not the visitors, you are the beings of this world, this world that is relative and only there when tripped up into by the alien who is in fact not an alien but a kind of shaman or a kind of psychonaut.

Maybe this is not the ultimate reality.

In his book about DMT, the spirit molecule, Rick Strassman tells of how the people taking DMT would often encounter beings that lived inside computers and other electronics, and were always calculating and doing the work of the computer, in a spiritual sense. They were computer beings, entities that did that kind of work.

Maybe you too are some kind of entity that is just doing what it is you are doing. Maybe you are just a race of sadists and killers, shadows who are afraid of the light and make the world dark enough for them to keep existing.

And maybe the world is evolving into a state of enlightenment, where the shadow obscuring your heart and soul will exist no more.

And maybe aliens are just occasionally lying down on their sofa and making the trip to see how this evolution is evolving.

In this reality that does not exist, but also does not not exist.

Like to the shaman, the world he visits and the spirits that live there and help him, exist, and in the eyes of the one questioning him, they do not exist.

Perhaps it is good that you exist to me, although I still believe you really do not. But whilst I am here, it would seem that you do.

In my last post, called ‘naturally you’, I was talking about how my dog Emma and my inner spirit were one and the same phenomenon. I was talking about how I was her and she was me, and how that meant that I am you and you are me.

Perhaps, you see, all is one, and all is just a trip I am taking.

Imagine, if you will, that the beings in my childhood dream had spoken of a God, that created their reality. Would you not have laughed at that?

There is no God at all!

There is just one spirit, one reality, one creation and one vision.

And it all just comes from an alien on acid.

Aliens are the creators.

Acid is God.

And where the hell is my ufo?