A Dissertation on enlightenment as found in a Chocolate Factory

[Bebek Sincap Ratatosk]

(This was originally posted at 23AE in 2005 and updated for this post, I've been asked to repost some of my other works and thus I am doing so... if this is not appropriate, please feel free to delete)
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"Hold your breath, make a wish, count to three...
Come with me and you'll be in a world of Pure Imagination.
Take a look and you'll see into your Imagination.
We'll begin with a spin, traveling in the world of my creation.
What we'll see will defy explanation.
If you want to view Paradise, simply look around and view it.
Anything you want to do is, want to change the world, there's nothing to it..."
- Willy Wonka

At some point in the quite distant past of my early childhood, I saw Willy Wonka. I don't remember watching the movie the first time, but I do remember that there was a defining moment in my consciousness that day. It was the scene right before Agustus Gloop fell into the Chocolate River and became a giant chocolaty spit wad. Willy Wonka had opened the door to the Chocolate Room. Everyone walked into a world that couldn't exist. The colors were too vibrant to be simple reflections of light frequencies, everything was edible and the power of a single man's imagination had changed reality. I don't know when it happened, but I will never forget the elation I felt as Gene Wilder sang the above words. Every one of them hit me like an arrow. I wanted to live in a world of Pure Imagination. I didn't want to live in the serious world around me. The world of school and the factory where my dad worked was far too much like Charley's hometown, all the color and cheer had washed away. People were serious and concerned about serious things....

Of course, being whatever age I was, my analytical skills weren't sophisticated enough to appreciate this. All I can remember is wishing that I was in the Chocolate Room. Some number of years passed between that memory and the first time I can recall actually watching "Willy Wonka and The Chocolate Factory". The feeling I got when I heard the opening bars to "Marriage of Figaro" played on Wonka's locked door was a complete shift into that world of fantasy again.

I think that it was probably the first time I recall touching what Dr. Timothy Leary calls the 5th Circuit of Consciousness. That point where you can simply comprehend more of what is going on... at least maybe more of what you perceive to be going on. Colors do indeed appear brighter and the line between your reality and everyone else's becomes a shade less defined. Wilson and Leary both wrote that this level of consciousness was the 'next' evolution of the human experience. Circuits that are ready to use, just waiting to be plugged in. I'm not sure that they were right, but it makes a useful metaphor if nothing else.

I have only in the past few years been able to identify the place my imagination gets me to with the 5th level of Consciousness. I did this with specific neurotransmitters as well as other ways that have been in use for 4000 years to activate the fifth-brain. The ways that have been developed have been almost exclusively the domain of the shaman, the occultist and the alchemist. I have come to believe that the 'magic' associated with most occult figures may not a supernatural magic, but simply the engaging of higher circuits of consciousness. Perhaps that's all that Willy Wonka was, someone who had figured out how to engage all eight circuits of consciousness permanently. His hallucinations manifested in other people's reality model.

Marijuana has been proven to be a powerful neurotransmitter for the fifth-circuit. So has Tantra Magick, Sensory Deprivation and Free Fall. All of these are known to cause hallucinations on some level as well. Are hallucinations simply the beginning of reality-shaping? Is it simply your imagination beginning to affect the world around you? Wilson and Leary both connected fifth-circuit engagement with the separation of the nervous system from terrestrial ties. Astronauts describe feelings very similar to 'being high' when in the freefall of space (perhaps that is why the earth looks different to an individual experiencing it from space than any picture or virtual display can ever convey... they experience earth on a slightly different level of consciousness.

So maybe that's what Willy Wonka is actually trying to do, evolve consciousness to the next level (metaphorically). Look at the extreme warping he does to the reality of the contestant winners (and their greyfaced hunchbrained parents). Every one of them is placed in a situation that forces them to accept that they know less of reality than they think (or at least they know less of Wonka's reality). The book takes this idea a step further. At the end of the book we learn that all the children made it through their ordeal and were now much better for it. They all had improved in a number of ways. Wonka's mindfucks had proven beneficial for each of them.

Even Grandpa Joe and Charley need to get high (on fizzy lifting drink) before they can go to the next level of consciousness where they get everything they always wanted. Charlie and Grandpa Joe finally become fully aware of consciousness at a Wonka-level in the great glass elevator. Not only flying high (stoned off their sweet-tooth), but in a vehicle that allows them, with the touch of a button to go anywhere and anyway they desire. They simply push a button and wooosh! The GGE appears as the representation of Ultimate Freedom from Rules and Restrictions, to fully explore their Three Dimensional Universe.

They found a reality with no more rules to hold them back.

After all, that's what Wonka promised when he sang, "There is no Life I know to compare to Pure Imagination, living there you'll be free, if you truly wish to be."

I hereby declare Willy Wonka a Non-Prophet of Eris.

[Cramulus]

 

more mittens for you, squirrelly. That happens to be my favorite scene in the chocolate factory too.

I really wish that more people who take hallucinogens had this view of them. I know a lot of people that trip out for the lulz - and though that's a great reason, they're not using its full potential. I have one friend who insists that drugs are for recreation only, and that any "enlightenment" you get from an altered headspace is cheap and unreal - he calls them 'dime store prophets'. (surprising considering how smart he is and the amount of drugs he's done)

aside from that - the real trick seems to be that one should get high like Charlie and Grampa Joe. High in a way that changes your perspective. It lets you see where you were standing and where the exits are. I do fondly recall a trip in which I became kind of feral for a while - then coming out of it I was so much more aware of my limbic system, and how seemingly half of all human interaction takes place on the level of territory and body language. Something I had missed in my man-mind.

nice moustache in your avatar by the way.

[Bebek Sincap Ratatosk]

The illumination comes not from the outside, but from the inside; the experiences of the entity itself. Drugs come from the outside and therefore cannot provide illumination. However, the experience of drugs can provide the entity with a different perspective and this perspective, along with the other experiences of the entity can bring about enlightenment.

In the smoke alone, there is no enlightenment.

[Doktor Loki]

EXACTLY.  The Psychadelics do not provide enlightenment, or illumination, or whatever, but they allow shifts in your psyche that are sometimes hard to make otherwise. 
They allow you to fuck your own mind, to achieve desired results.
And they're fun as hell to boot.

[LMNO]

If that's true, why are so many Pinealists down on alcohol and coffee?

[Bebek Sincap Ratatosk]

Huh?

[LMNO]

If pot and LSD merely allow a shift in perspective for the user to contemplate different modes of thought, why then was RAW (and by idolatry, the Pinealists) so negative about other drugs such as coffee and alcohol?

[Bebek Sincap Ratatosk]

If pot and LSD merely allow a shift in perspective for the user to contemplate different modes of thought, why then was RAW (and by idolatry, the Pinealists) so negative about other drugs such as coffee and alcohol?

I'm not sure why you think RAW was negative about Coffee or Alcohol. Indeed, according to the Old Man, Coffee, Irish Whiskey and Marijuana were the Discordian Trinity and a Cure-All for all sorts of ailments. Indeed, I myself partake of the wholly mix each day. The last piece of artwork that I was doing when Bob died was a pastel of a bottle of Jameson, a coffee mug and a small bong. I haven't had the heart to finish it, but it may make a good avatar... I think I'll try to finish it up now.

As for Pinealists ( I'm guessing thats a label for people that interpret RAW's stuff literally?), well RAW said that a disciple was just an asshole looking for a human to attach itself to... once dogma enters the brain, all rational thought leaves.

The only drug I ever heard Bob speak of in a negative sense were the ones that were known to occasionally kill people, or ones that may quickly become addictive. Even with those it was caution, not abstinence that he usually advocated, at least in my experiences with him.

[Cain]

Coffee can make you paranoid, and alcohol is a depressant, but so long as you are aware of the effects they have on, thats all OK.

[Cramulus]

As for Pinealists ( I'm guessing thats a label for people that interpret RAW's stuff literally?), well RAW said that a disciple was just an asshole looking for a human to attach itself to... once dogma enters the brain, all rational thought leaves.

that's the first time I've heard that term too. But I think LMNO is referring to the type of people who post things like "23 PINEAL GLAND LMAO". As you know, many of us consider the repetition of those old memes a form of idolatry.

[LMNO]

I just made the term up.



I think I was riffing off of some stuff in Cosmic Trigger I and in Sex and Drugs, and maybe even TSOG.  I don't have the texts in front of me, I'm working off memory.

[Bebek Sincap Ratatosk]

Coffee can make you paranoid, and alcohol is a depressant, but so long as you are aware of the effects they have on, thats all OK.

Sure, any drug can cause side effects (even the drugs we produce in our own bodies)... the trick is being aware of yourself, your chemicals, your side effects and your actions.

that's the first time I've heard that term too. But I think LMNO is referring to the type of people who post things like "23 PINEAL GLAND LMAO". As you know, many of us consider the repetition of those old memes a form of idolatry.

That view seems a bit dogmatic to me, but I do understand the aggravation of the new Chidle that hasn't figured out the difference between a meme and a metameme (or between the map and the territory). The old memes, for me at least, have a lot of value. I use 23 (and the associated hand sign) in our cabal as a reminder that all the other patterns we see are just as real (or not real) as the $2.30 bag of Golden Delicious apples I just bought, or the 23 days that Paris Hilton is spending in jail.

Once Bob said that if you didn't see the fnords, they couldn't eat you. But, sometimes people forget that the opposite is also true... If you do see the fnords, they can utterly consume you. Fnord, 23, Pineal, Flax etc etc etc are all fnords. They are fnords designed to be found. They are fnords that we can use to find other fnords (they are memes we can use as a pattern to find and root out other, insidious and negative memes). Yet, many who read the PD do seem to get eaten by the Fnords and fail to understand the metameme nature of the PD.

[Bebek Sincap Ratatosk]

I just made the term up.



I think I was riffing off of some stuff in Cosmic Trigger I and in Sex and Drugs, and maybe even TSOG.  I don't have the texts in front of me, I'm working off memory.

I'd be interested in the quote if you find it

[The Good Reverend Roger]

Coffee can make you paranoid,

LIES!  THAT'S JUST A LIE PUT FORTH BY THE ANTI-CAFFIENE BUND!

[LMNO]

I just made the term up.



I think I was riffing off of some stuff in Cosmic Trigger I and in Sex and Drugs, and maybe even TSOG.  I don't have the texts in front of me, I'm working off memory.

I'd be interested in the quote if you find it

Seriously?  You've never heard his anti-caffeine riffs?