9:58am - British Gas fixed my boiler earlier than expected, I kind of thought I would be waiting all day for them but it was 9:58 when they left so I thought "hey, let’s get high!" I knew that I wanted to study subjective idealism and investigate fully how the objective materialist agenda I have always subscribed to is propagated by ego rather than being the way things simply are. I smoked a couple of bowls of a potent and well grown strain of skunk - UK cheese I think it is. Whilst I waited for it to wash over me I went downstairs and fetched a bowl of cheerio’s. Whilst staring into the bowl and mindlessly spooning the cereal into my mouth I felt a grin stretch across my face. But this was different to my usual smile in the sense that I had no control over it. I couldn't feel the muscles in my cheeks working to produce a smile, instead I envisioned little, red overall wearing men at work in my mouth talking in another language, gripping the corners of my lips from the inside and pulling them apart. Habitually at first, as if it was their job to do so. Clock in, pull cheek, and clock out. Then, just as I had become aware of the little smile guys, they too became aware of me. They saw the funny side of stretching my mouth into a smile at the very moment I went to put the cereal into my savouring mouth. It then became a game between me and the men. All of a sudden, I realised a similar team of internal employees were working my arms, extending my muscles and contracting them like a puppeteer to lift this enormous spoonful of matter into my mouth. The milk was a lake. The cheerio’s were islands. My mouth was a planet. My body a universe. I got an enormous sense of feeling connected, like there was something guiding my every thought and movement, from the ideas popping into my head to my mechanical fingers wrapped around the spoon. I could see beyond the immediateness of an action. I could see the cause and effect of every single event. The implications of any act, small or large - it affected me, it affected these little men. Then I understood that there weren't little men in my mouth really, what a preposterous thought. Rather, my materialist mind was presenting this particular plane of consciousness in a bite sized meme, leaving my unlearned brain to fill in the gaps from a frankly shallow database. These connections I could feel began to stretch out from me, and extended to trees outside the window. They extended into the cold wooden floor boards beneath my feet. They were electricity. They were water. They were both tangible and simultaneously out of reach. I couldn't quite put my finger on how we were all linked but the important thing was that I knew that we were. A fact I had never seen until now.

I proceeded to lap up the every word up of people that now seemed like higher, enlightened beings. The words of Terence McKenna and Graham Hancock, who a good friend introduced me to yesterday, of Farhan Qureshi and Deepak Chopra who I had just that morning discovered myself and of my beloved Richard Dawkins. A fountain of knowledge to access data from became very apparent and immediately accessible to me. It was like I'd tapped into a collective mind of sorts, where things made sense on a deeper level. I knew what to read and watch. I knew who I needed to listen to. Lyrics that seemed shrouded in ambiguity now played out like instructions to follow on a map. I became enraptured with the notion that reality is not the only landscape a person exists in, or can exist in with appropriate guidance and influence. Our explanations of the universe and all within it exist merely within the parameters and confines of a specific level of consciousness that we ourselves have created. We're here because we want to be, because we think it is right. What if reality in the traditional sense isn't the realm we exist in? What if consciousness itself is the fundamental reality? Of course it is, it makes perfect sense. We hypothesise that the universe is infinite but in fact it is the levels of consciousness that are infinite and the universe is nothing but our personal way of making sense of it all. The universe is nothing. You cannot even touch it. You just accept that it is real because otherwise how could you continue to behave in this manner? To have a job, to visit your family, to put up with an irritating elderly neighbour would seem a foolish pursuit when one has access to such an astral plane. With this in mind, our brains do not determine who we are or what is real and have no right to do so - to ask that of a brain is unfair. They are simply instruments of perception - a receiver if you will - for taking in the surroundings of something that is impossibly big and impossibly detailed and condensing it into something that can be perceived as real. It merely provides a sort of VR platform for you as an entity to exist in at that moment. To seek answers from a brain as to what existence is, is to ask of a telephone what existence is. It is ridiculous.

All of a sudden the words of people like Richard Dawkins, Neil DeGrasse Tyson and Brian Cox which I had previously taken as gospel suddenly didn't give me the answers I needed. And more to the point I noticed they didn't give them the answers either. Richard knows that there is no explanation of what consciousness is and where it actually is and it frustrates him. He has spent his lifetime searching for this answer and got so close. But he kind of looks like someone lost on a council estate. A maze of similar looking homes and cars stretching on forever. He knows that the answer is somewhere near, but he didn't give himself enough time to afford the luxury of the odd mistake and wrong turn and now he can never leave. He won't get out before it falls dark, and he no longer recognises the way he came. He'll die just outside of the gates of understanding.

Something Deepak Chopra said that knocked me for six was that perception is nothing more or less than a species and culture specific experience within consciousness itself. He used the example of a bug crawling across the floor between himself and Richard, the bug looking up at Dawkins. The bug occupies the same space as Deepak and Richard but its perception of reality is radically different. He would not see the same entity in Richard as Deepak was seeing. Then I thought back to Everest. I thought how wild and untamed it seemed in the documentaries and films I had sought out for no explicable reason the other day. I was drawn to the mountains and Everest in particular on a level that transcended mere interest. I even watched a documentary on Snowboarding, just to see footage of the mountains in the background. I craved mountains! What was this draw!? How does it fit in and connect? Could it be that these peaks are sentient beings also and we are just existing in a similar reality to that of a bug? The bug that perhaps saw Richard Dawkins as nothing more than a giant and untamed part of its landscape, or a dangerous peak to ascend? Maybe, just maybe he didn't see him at all - because he wasn't equipped with the adequate mind to even fathom that Richard Dawkins could exist on any level, let alone be sentient also.

Suddenly science, which has always been a source of almost religious comfort to me, seemed arrogant. It wasn't content in being a part of the explanation; it wanted to be the only explanation. Anything else is written off as supernatural pseudoscience. The outspoken elite who have stood and questioned these science titans once seemed like fruitcakes, crackpot thinkers and religious idiocracy to me. Suddenly, they were providing the first credible counter-argument to some of life's biggest questions, and in doing so inadvertently solving the very problem itself, because a problem is only a problem if it is inexplicable. If it can be questioned then by its very nature it can be solved and has multiple methods of solution and therefore is no real problem at all. So I guess the answer to certain things is to simply not know. That is only way to make sense of them. I found this realisation humbling.

I closed my eyes and felt my hand itching to write. I picked up my pen and delved into the other consciousness’s laid out in front of me by intelligent men and an altered mind-set. It was difficult, the world around me tried to pull me back in order to prevent me getting confused or lost, almost like a defence mechanism. I kept convincing myself that these things weren't real, I was just stoned and thinking up utter shit like stoners do. I think perhaps if I did decide to try something like Psilocybin then it would perhaps make these barriers more solid for a short while and therefore easier to penetrate and leave this particular world behind to take a look around. Weed reminds you at every moment that it is the weed that is giving you these thoughts. Trying to explore something further on weed alone is like trying to navigate a labyrinth because you yearn for the challenge of finding the middle but the walls are smoke rather than hedgerow. There is nowhere to explore that you cannot already see through the smog and you feel cheated. You can see the centre from where you stand and it underwhelms you because it took no effort to find. I tried to ignore the distractions and saw faint colours rushing past, almost like I was standing at the edge of a cosmic motorway, with multiple existences and possibilities rushing past at high speeds and blowing my hair as they pass. My hand was scrawling frantically now, trying to jot it down. “Concentrate Joe, write what you see and how it makes you feel”, I told myself this over and over but realised it was no longer me that was consciously writing - my hand had developed a consciousness of its own. "Don't use the words you know," my hand advised me. They limit you to only re-experience old emotions." At this point it seemed that the hand had willingly forgotten language and punctuation and proceeded to scribble undeterred. I finally opened my eyes after what seemed like about 45 minutes and looked at the notebook in front of me .There was a page and a half of unknown and illegible but very deliberate text laid out on the desk in front of me. There were reoccurring shapes and letters within it. It stayed within the lines of the paper, even though my eyes were closed. It appeared to me that this was communication that really transcended understanding in the traditional sense of the word; this was consciousness and communication in perfect synergy, using me as a vessel to spew information into this reality we are currently living in. I cannot decipher the text and I doubt anyone can but the main thing is that it happened and for the first time in my life I felt like there was something out there bigger than me. Bigger than science. Bigger than the universe, but small enough to fit inside my head. I imagine that the text bluntly proposes that if consciousness is infinitely big and we can fit many within our heads in one weed session then it seems like there is no other explanation than the fact that our brain is nothing but a reciever. The weed was the missing link in the chain, connecting me with the trees outside and the wet grass, just like when you finally get phone signal when you come out of the countryside and you are once again connected with a database of knowledge, with the internet and other people. I think the text then continues to explain that everything which exists, either exists because it wishes to exist or because it was willed into existence by something that already exists. Then I thought, "well how can a new sentient being come into being? Surely if there is something that wishes to exist then that very something itself already exists because it has will, a desire to exist in the first place. Then I realised that everything that exists has always existed, and will always exist, across the plains of consciousness, in varying and regenerating forms. Vast expanses of possibility, where time has no negative and no positive influence. Things simply evolve into other things whenever they feel like it. Reality then is a blank canvas where if there is an organism open to perception present then a whole world can flourish, be it in the mind of a human being, a small scuttling bug or within the space inside an atom.

I now believe this to be fact, but I confess I know relatively nothing about it. And I don't think anybody yet knows how we actively travel across these plains of consciousness and explore the ‘other.’ I believe drugs are only offering a glimpse of these things but to truly exist somewhere else that change has to first happen within you. How on Earth you do this I do not know! And therein lays my point. There is no way on Earth. We look somewhere else. We must look within.

TL;DR reality is in the eye of the beholder. What one being perceives as reality is entirely different to that of another. These "realities" are simulations of sorts that are put together by our brains to help us make sense of the mystery of consciousness on our own terms.