Michel Serres, the great philosopher of science, likes to use the experiment of touching one’s own lips to point out how we are a subject and an object, a knower and known, simultaneously. Try it! Touch your lips like you are trying to quiet someone and feel first-hand how one moment you are in your finger, feeling your lips, and then in the next you are in your lips, feeling your finger! Feel yourself oscillate between the two positions effortlessly, naturally. In this simple activity, where are “you”? You’re in two places at once! How can this be? From a direct, first person experience, you are both the feeling of a subject knowing and you are an object known. You are inside and outside, self and no-self, emptiness and form at once with a gesture. Amazing!
A similar confusion in the story of self happens when I see another body in a room, and then notice that I am also a body being seen by them. The mysterious human condition of being a seer-seen finds expression in paranoid conspiracies and a constant sense of being stared at. People on drugs can go from bliss and flow to discomfort of the other, of “unseen” entities watching them, of themselves looking at themselves from across an abyss opened up by the drugs. The subject one moment can become the object of another subject the next moment.
We’re always on drugs because the little self is made of drugs. Neurochemically, but also “drugs” in the sense of dreams and desires. The little self is drunk on life, high on drama, taken by pain and suffering, joy and happiness. A delirium of stories and burning passions are atmosphere to the flame of our lives, a light and fire the Buddha talks about in his Fire Sermon: “All is burning.” And this is why we can so easily sympathize with the feelings of people on drugs just by looking at their faces: their glee, ecstasy, fear, sadness and confusion, and even phoniness are all our own.They are aspects of our shared humanity, probably even our shared sentience. As we see in the video, the dog and bird and distorted figures have searching eyes and ears just like we do. Juxtaposed alongside images of people absorbed in real, or fake, drug states, everything can support a meditation on what it means to be “human” in this wavy ocean of altered states.
Drugs and gurus and religions all open up the abyss, the abyss we all must “cross over,” but that depth appears as the basic mystery of human incarnation and opens up during all kinds of transitions in a person’s life. We cross over the abyss when we move from infancy to childhood, from childhood to adulthood, from adulthood to seniorhood, from seniorhood to death. When we meet a new friend, or start a new job, or fall asleep at night. We pass over into dream, into an “other,” and then “return” again to waking life. When we take drugs, we pass over into “other” states, territories, wonderlands, and then return to our sobriety. Watch these people on drugs acting all strange, and ask yourself if you, too, are dreaming. Are “you” feeling anything, or is all this life moving through you like a dream? And remember, it’s not the content of the trip or the dream that matters. “What does it mean!?” may be the wrong kind of question.
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