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REALITY

                     June 29, 1993

Ah, now repeat after me:
"What is Reality?"

I place a high value on
Reality.

I was arguing that a drugged
experience is somehow unreal.

How about fiction? Reading
novels, watching movies?
Why is it I think those are
okay?

What about dreams?  All of us seem
to have the capacity to hallucinate
built into us.  The conventional
wisdom is that this haullucination
is needed to keep you sane.  So how
can I argue that hallucinations are
unnatural, that psychedelic
experience is necessarily
worthless?

Once I stood looking through the
screen door at our back yard on a
sunny day.  I thought it was
beautiful: sunlight on the grass
and trees, so I swung the door open
to plunge outside: and then I
realized that it was even more
beautiful, the colors were all much
more intense, the boundaries much
clearer when I wasn't peering
through a screen door.  Moral:
imposing a distortion on your
perceptions can at least make you
appreciate the way they work when
the distortion isn't present.

((there are probably some connections here
to Blake.  Try the phrase "doors of perception"?          BLAKE
And Rimbaud is worth looking up "Intentional
derrangement of the senses"  It's a bit of a
stretch but there's Poe's Usher, "hypersensitivity".))


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