States of Consciousness

Papa sometimes refers to his discipline as consciousness exploration—because slipping through the cracks in perception like a smeared scream of joy doesn’t have that concise, genteel phrasing. It’s certainly easier to market.

I am at the point in my development where I think it’s safe to say that my perception is altered.

I wake with a head full of the colorless crystalline fumes of meth without touching a pipe, buzzing from head to foot all day long, barely able to sit. I feel as if I am walking with a power line resting coiled on my head.

I wake with a head full of the heavy chains of pleasure, flesh wrapped warm and orgasmic around me. My torpid slither is sweet pain.

I wake with to see everything hanging like a screen, a dream, soft and nebulous, driving to work wrapped in cotton, somehow at once sharply here and absent, clean and clear and precise as ink against the watercolor world.

I wake hearing the traces of a conversation, and all day fragments of it trickle into my consciousness. Some larger part of me talks to another spirit, leaving my consciousness to work and hear what it can. I am in two places: at once in an office, industriously clicking away at a keyboard, and in a conversation so deep as to eclipse speech. Meaning tumbles out of that other place and lands, a wordless and complete piece, in my head.

I am exploring exhaustion. I am exploring a strange, soft world. I am cutting through it like a knife, like a smear of joy, colors bright and shifting and alien.

I astound myself. I am able to contain these things as I type away, because what else is there to do but be here, now, with the people who are paying me.

I am exploring that, too—this meeting, this Teams call, this status report, dry desert where I am blooming.