As a forewarning, this is a post I’ve been thinking about, long and hard, for quite some time now. It will probably be a long one.
Master, I suspect partly because of what a control freak He is, has always been interested in hypnosis and the use of such in psychological BDSM. I personally, have always been interested in what I refer to vaguely and non-commitedly as altered states of consciousness.
Master hates that phrase and will probably swat me for writing a whole blog entry about it – but to that I say, niener niener, there’s value in what I’ve to say on this!
When I first met Master, as a friend, He was the first person in a good long while to actually want to know who I was – where I came from, my experiences, my feelings, my beliefs, all of it. I find that most people don’t genuinely want to know about you, these days, any more than is necessary to get what they want from you, and had long since given up the idea that I would ever have cause to explain any of this to anyone.
But, then I did. And as things continued, eventually W/we had to talk about my beliefs. This is an uncomfortable thing for me to do with people I care for; I’m a pagan, and in high school was badly beaten for expressing in a small, rural, white town the opinion that Christianity was not the One Religion. Such is life, but it has left me with a sour opinion of bothering to share with others my beliefs, as they are core to many of the aspects of me that I feel define who, and how, I am. Master, obviously, accepted and was/is even greatly interested in what I believe and what I do.
I did not come to be a pagan simply because I stumbled upon it one day and thought “hey, that’s cool!”. When I discovered “paganism” it simply put a name and a community to something that I had long since been practicing on my own.
Although not directly included in these beliefs, a part of me that greatly influences them is what I have been examining, perhaps for as long as the past eight months. Anyone who has known me for long enough (and very few people who are still in my life fit that requirement) and who has cared enough to pay attention to my life and actions will be able to tell you that there are – and have always been – times when I walk around and hardly know who I am, what I’m doing, or why. At least, that’s how others see it, from what I’ve garnered from them (though in actuality, I know very well who, what, and why I am, but the detached place I fall into seems to make it seem otherwise). The point is, I feel that I have always been subject to these bouts of “altered states of consciousness”.
I have always called these episodes that because that is the best way that I could possibly have to describe them. It is much like the accounts of various individuals “out of body experiences”; in many of these they describe the feeling of observing themselves from outside their body. While I stay in my body, it is similar in that to me it has always been somewhat like watching a sitcom or play through the eyes of an individual who is acting in it.
When you watch a show, or a play, you know that each character represented is a culmination of their thoughts, feelings, and experiences, which are influencing the words and actions of what you are seeing. It’s one of the reasons that asides to the audience are so effective – it reinforces the knowledge (of the audience) that this character has motives and experiences.
I have always seen life much like a play; everyone is an actor playing the part they feel they are wont. In my day to day life, I don’t really think about it much. During my “episodes” my body, even my mouth, continue on with the daily routine that I have been engrossed in for x amount of time, but my mind – I might go so far as to describe it as my spirit – is free to observe, to calculate, to see what I can only describe as the hidden motives, the flow of things, that have led to the moment that my body is living.
It’s a bloody terrible experience sometimes. Gorgeous always, but downright frightening others. For instance, for many years, I have walked just about everywhere. If I have somewhere to go, I walk. This usually means crossing streets, yes? Not a problem, yes? Well, usually not. But during these “episodes” I have more than once come very close to being run over – it’s very much like losing contact with the world, the “reality” that I live in. It seems so trivial, so unimportant, that as my mind/spirit wanders, my body is often left to do things that aren’t exactly the pinnacle of caution, or even observation.
And I’ve just noticed that I finally reached the word in question here – R.E.A.L.I.T.Y. Always seemed a silly concept to me, though I can’t argue that many times I’ve been able to see what’s so appealing about it. Reality seems often to be taken as the assumption that there is One True Way that existence is. I, personally, can’t say I believe that. Reality is purely subjective. Being well acquainted with the methods of anthropologists, archaeologists, and psychologists, I know all to well that humans are just no good at accepting that. For some reason, it seems almost a human condition that there is One Way, one truth only. Since I was very young, however, I’ve always thought “Well, what about all the people who think that the right way is their way?”
In history, and likely before it, there have been countless wars over this very thing. I believe that there are many rights, many Ways. With so many subjective realities, how could there not be as many subjective Ways to accomplish things? Of course, I believe that there are universal things that are “wrong” for lack of a better word, at least given the capability for thought and emotion that we as Homo sapiens have now. Murder without cause and/or very good justification, rape, some crimes have no validation except in the poisoned realities of poisoned minds.
Despite believing that reality is different, at least slightly, for every individuality, I know that our bodies, if not minds, reside in the same plane and as such, one reality that seeks to harm others has no justification. While I know there are probably countless situations you could throw at me to counter my position, I will simply say most have been attempted.
This is my core point – what makes an individuals reality, anyway?
The conscious thought of this in regards to a certain experience have been percolating in my head for a few days now, almost constantly. It is often said that the mind is the most powerful sexual organ, and with good cause. It is my opinion that the brain is, in fact, the most powerful ANYTHING organ, for simple reasons. Humans – and likely most other creatures with capacity for some level of thought – define our world in terms of our senses. Taste, touch, scent, sound, smell. There are other senses that some people engage in their defining of their world, the number really is immaterial. But it is the brain, the strange electrical and chemical reactions, that allows these things to effect us at all; without the brain as an interpreter, our senses would mean nothing. Instead, they mean our entire world.
In contemplating this, I’ve come to the conclusion that what composes our reality is not necessarily what it is normally thought to be – at least, not in my own case.
The example I’ll give is one that currently permeates my life; Master and I, have been for the entirity of O/our D/s relationship save two short visits, in a long distance situation. W/we speak on the phone at least a little almost every day. Many of O/our most important developments, understandably, have happened over the phone.
I wrote an entry about the OTK spanking I received the other night. I’ve never bothered to write, or even think of, O/our interactions as “He pretended to give me an OTK spanking” simply because it was over the phone. Occasionally, when W/we speak, I have a kind of mini “episode” of the type I described earlier. I am no longer my body, but I am – completely – my spirit and my mind. The body, the tool usually used to trigger reactions in my mind, doesn’t really matter. Though Masters hand did not strike my flesh, it matters little – it was an experience as real to me as anything my body has ever experienced. More real, in some ways, and certainly taken much more note of. I was in an altered state of consciousness, outside my body. In a place in my mind where Master and I were together, a place not of touch but of a more intangible, and in many ways more powerful, sense.
This happened often when Master and I were first together; things W/we would say and imagine took me over. More completely than could be described, or likely, believed. It had not happened in a very long time; not since the first time I convinced him that to bring me pain in a manner I liked was not a bad thing, and, indeed, a very pleasant one (and before that, had not happened since about September.) Did it matter that it was my hands that were dragging nails harshly down my body, tearing at myself, pinching, and slapping? Not in the bloody slightest. My body, perhaps, did it, to heighten that which my brain had created. Nothing more, because of the way I was “outside” of my body, what it did to me was simply a tool that added to the experience.
It was breathtaking, and to a smaller extent, the OTK incident was the same.
I have wondered if these things, the “trances” that my mind and/or my religious practices have taken me into, or this place Master has occasionally ventured with me (though I am not sure He knows of it, not in a conscious manner) is what people describe as hypnosis. With the incidents with Master, I would not be surprised were it so. I think that likely it is, at least what certain people meant when they described it, what is often called subspace.
Though I can’t describe it to the accuracy that I wish, I have come more and more to believe that the essence of “me” is not my body. If anything, I would call it my brain, but it is more those chemical and electrical impulses that do such amazing things that no one fully understands – perhaps that is what has so often been called by names such as spirit, or soul. I can’t say, but there is definitely more to the world than many people seem to think; I am glad that I have the chance to explore it and have not lived my life clinging to something which doesn’t seem to be the epitome of existence, as many seem to.
