'All things happen suddenly,' says Henry Miller, 'but there's a long process to be gone through first.' He could have just as easily said: 'there's a long process to go through afterwards.'
            But everything happens suddenly. The only real moment of time is now. Whether what we experience is cumulative or intuitive, its ultimate import is instantaneous. If we are a novelist, it's a long story. But it's all in an instantaneous symbol. Miller looked down on the dance floor and saw June, and his life as anything other than a novelist was all over. But there was still a horrendously long process to go through. And if we deal with time the way he deals with 'truth' - since, as he said, 'Everything I say is true. And if it's not true, it's still more true than what actually happened.' - we can say that 'before or after' is irrelevant to what he had to go through.

            The only real moment is the present. This is our essential problem. History is not an illusion, but its efficacy or detriment is only immediate. So this is our problem. Eastern teachers or their students say, 'Be here now'. But Kathopanishad says, 'What is here is elsewhere. What is not here is nowhere.' How can we be anywhere except here and now? Why is it that we think we are not here and now? The west not only acknowledges history, it gets lost in it. Our artificial extrapolation of 'objectivity' creates a cultural worship of inertia, the 'positivist' religion of atheism. We may not live entirely in the past, but we wind up living in an arbitrary and artificial death-land. For the logician, it is the addictive power of concept. And the addictive power of concept has followed the death religion of 'positivist' atheism across the spheres of the intellect, all in the name of 'democratic secularism'. By inversion, the history of Islam teaches the necessary separation of 'church' and state as powerfully as the legitimate empiricist tradition in western philosophy. But neither justifies compulsory atheism, anti-religion or anti-spiritualism. But this death religion is so profound, for the western mind, that it has destroyed creativity, whether aesthetic or intellectual.
            History has real force. Objectivity has a valid and legitimate base. Causality and sequence are 'real'. The reason we think we are not here and now is because the past has a gripping hand in the present. But whether the grip is death-dealing or life-giving is a matter of choice. Ignoring the hand of the past is a sure way to guarantee its strangling force. Confronting the past as combat is a sure path to defeat. We can only embrace the past. But embracing the past is not an idea, but a creative act. How will we know when we have creatively embraced the past? The answer is simple: we will find ourselves totally embracing the present. Moreover, we will find, in that moment, that we have embraced our vocation. We have embraced our own essential uniqueness.

            But this, then, is equally our problem. If we accidentally strike upon the moment that embraces our history, we suddenly find ourselves engulfed, momentarily, in the absoluteness of the present. But, commonly, what we experience is the absorptive elation of immediacy, not the causal or historical key. And, according to Miller's dictum, this is the inevitable situation. Our first awakening is always instantaneous and complete - complete, that is, in terms of the moment in which it transpires. Now, as a general rule, we walk around with this fading sense of an immediacy that occurred once in the past, wondering how we can once again grasp this sudden exhilaration of the present. So, of course, we become susceptible to the blandishments of 'be here now' in its most simplistic apparitions - that is, unless we can recall the impetus that brought us into this elevated state in the first place; in which case, we begin the slow journey of self-education, a journey that reestablishes and extends the harmonic resonance between past and present, setting the stage for a series 'openings' that restore us to a present, which, while perhaps not as instantly jubilant as our first awakening, is possibly more satisfying, becoming, as it does, more and more the creature of our conscious intention.

            The particular problem of the psychedelics was that they created what I suppose we could call a simulacrum for this initial experience, but apparently altogether outside the frame of our personal history, since the experience came out of a substantive 'thing' - a pill, a sugar cube, etc. etc. - and not out of the actuality of our past and the history of our desires and needs.

            As I have become more cognizant of my own vocation and its relation to the psychedelic experience, I have consistently tried to point out to other 'heads' I encounter that the 'white light' always occurred in a context and with an import specific to who we are as individuals. It was always vocational. But I suppose that the reason I could say this was because I had grown up in an atavistic household, culturally. Like the American immigrants, who preserve the 'old ways' long after they have been abandoned in the home country, my father perpetuated the New England of two generations earlier, since his father died in his adolescence and his mother withdrew into a living retrograde that, in 1960, looked more like 1910; and not like her 1910, but the 1910 of her mother. My mother, on the other hand, was an emigrant into New England. Her parents had fled the Midwest to become New York Artists, stripping themselves as effectively as they could of any Midwestern residue and immersing themselves in the New York formlessness. My mother adopted my father's New England by inclination and default, gravitating there physically for her education and culturally by marriage. And the New England of 1910 still honored Emerson and Concord and the latter day Congregational code of individualism and vocation.
            But my own vocation was clearly demarked long before I took psychedelics. In fact, being a little too old to be a hippie, I backed into psychedelics slowly, using them primarily to address an addictive condition for which they were a known antidote. As a consequence, I set myself up for a massive 'flashback', taking them at slightly sub-hallucinogenic doses repeatedly over a relatively short period of time. And in that 'flashback', I tasted the white light while simultaneously, empirically, unraveling the issues of Spirit and the One, and their basis as the organic nature of aesthetics and as the legitimate ground of analysis, all of which I have touched on more or less cryptically throughout this blog.

            So much for qualifying.

            If one's vocation is the visual arts, the white light is naturally and quite literally a direct introduction to the language of color, since it is the essential luminosity at the core of perception. All perception is volitional. And if we can get meditative absorption in the self at the point at which we view 'pure' volition, it will appear as the same white light, the light of consciousness itself as the instrument that 'assembles' our perceptions. It is, of course, also the pure 'empirical' light of value itself. So, at this point, for the vocational artist, it is the direct connection between the substance of perception as 'light' or color and the nature of value.
            Yes, yes, so the experience of the white light is a wonderful ground or starting point for any vocation. The only problem, once again, is the fact that as a psychedelic experience, the white light came in a 'material form'. It has no tail, no obvious causal link that ties it to history, whether objective or personal. One day I acquired this pill and took it. But, as such, the means are entirely extraneous to the end.

            For myself, the psychedelic moment was a centerpiece, but not necessarily the preeminent experience, in a sequential development. If I were to consider myself as a philosopher rather than a poet, I would have to say that the hunger for the fulfilling knowledge was the dominating theme. Had the psychedelic moment occurred in isolation, I doubt I would have recognized its significance. In fact, I doubt it would have occurred to me in the way it did. The implications were dependent, in part, on the work I had already done and, in part, on the work I still needed to do. Because I could place it in a framework from the first, it became a directive as well as a substantive experience.

            But now, as the work moves toward the completion of its cycle, what I keep feeling is a process of entering into immediacy: that, for the first time, a burden of history is falling away, and I am entering into a state of 'just now'. Not the 'just now' of the psychedelics with its often frightening intensity of focus on an immediacy absolutely without history, and therefore dangerous and potentially disorienting; but a gentle 'just now' in which there is only the work of the moment and the satisfactions that go with it.