Notes on bygone days: altered states of mind.

25. 02.2017.

I have always been a great sucker for altered states of consciousness. Now, when I come to think of it, altered states of consciousness have always been a welcome change of a course amidst quotidian flow of normalcy. The interruption of the everyday, down-to-earth life as I know it. Unfortunately, as with all states of consciousness, the ateltred ones are impermanent, you come into possession of them, then they possess you – and then they leave, leaving a faint trail, finally disappearing. Once you have had a taste and appreciation for them, you develop a grasping habit and long for them. Moreover, once you have found an easy way to replicate them, you do not let go.

An altered state of consciousness does not necessarily need to involve a religious or mystical state of mind, although these states are examples par excellence of an altered consciousness. For me the surest way, a gateway, to leave the everyday states of mind behind, has always been reading. An imaginary creation of the alternative worlds spurred on by books would swirl me into a current of not-this-everyday-world state and would hold me happily captive for hours or days on end.

First there were children’s stories and folk tales one devoured when lying sick in bed, then came a short period of adventure stories, which flowed naturally into sci-fi literature of Stanisław Lem and others, promising a quick lift-off from the ensnarling law of run-of-the-mill gravity and into cosmic world of other planets, star systems and galaxies. The enthusiasm for sci-fi was simultaneously accompanied with equal passion for astronomy and all things science. Coupled with a felicitous possession of a telescope and light-pollution lacking dark skies over the Soviet Riga, stargazing into the dark abyss of the celestial abode inadvertently ushered in a birth of adolescent metaphysical speculation typical of 12-year-old amateur astronomer.

Only now, within a safe distance of three decades, I do realize that peering through the telescope was not so much different from reading folk tales and sci-fi books, since all these activities possess a common quality – then unknown teleology – to induce a state of mind, which transcends the day-to-day mental going-ons. Later came religious texts, philosophical treatises and alcohol. Although those are surely qualitatively different activities, they possess the same, or let us say a familiar, resemblance of the quality of transcendence.