Magus Ignoramus
I vividly recall the time when I was what I would call a novice stoner. Not that new to the landscapes as to be shocked speechless, but I was definitely not a disciplined navigator either. This stage, which every psychonaut goes through, was characterized by a specific pattern of experience: soon after first few puffs and after the initial splash and dive into the different, I would soon get lost in profundity of mundane, only to end up wound around some superficial detail, marveling at cosmology of a single pubic hair or the depth of meaning of a kitchen sink.
On campus where I lived at that time, among the peers of our visibly hidden group of self-professed urban shamans, this phenomenon was known as “deep shallowness.” Deep, simply because it run deep and it also definitely felt that way, and shallow, because the profundity of insights almost always turned out to be banal, if not outright absurd, stupid and laughable, right the other day.
There is a stage one hits fairly early on on the path to self-knowledge. One becomes accustomed to the new vistas, and the fear of moving into the forbidden and taboo subsides almost completely. Suddenly anything seems possible. It’s the time when Bible becomes an encrypted secret message from aliens; when barcodes turn to Devil’s marks; when one has more past lives than all Buddhas combined, and patterns of random numbers and symbols suddenly get deep existential meanings.
To very loosely paraphrase the classic, one becomes a “vewy knowledgeable Woman man, Magus Ignowamus.” Full of oneself and higher energies, resonating. Almost exclusively with those who affirm one’s perceptual interpretations. Unlike psychedelic flight, however, this dead end does not cease by itself. No wonder that people even spend decades in this limbo. Nonetheless, no seeker will ever see the absurdity of this stage from within it, or even at all, unless they wake up from this illusion, too.
Suffice to say, most never do.
Just look around only at Medium and you will see the swathes of conspiracy theorists, spiritual “what if” folks, all arrogant and obstinate sophists twisting absurd metaphysical pretzels, without even them knowing to what end. The allure of “mysterious” is too strong to resist for them, but it’s like playing house in the “sandlot of spirit.”
Sadly, if you are stuck in that place, there is only a very small chance that you will listen. But if this article irritates you in any way, know that I’m talking about you. And know that there is still a long path ahead of you. Not in terms of time and space — you can know right where you are and right now, there’s no other time and place for knowledge anyway — but in terms of what there is to know. Because let me assure you, not only the path has a definitive end (and I don’t mean death), but even that what you think you do know is just a speck of the whole, and even that is still tinted by a hefty dose of illusion.
Well, but if you got here without skipping parts of the text, you are on a good path to extricate yourself from the predicament.
Good luck ;)
For those of you who already can “see”, I hope you were entertained :D
