Looking at that glowing corporate pharmacy sign cutting through the freezing sleet, the reality of the system hit me. The only difference between a street junkie scoring from Om Hazem or Rana and Mohamed in Cairo and a compliant patient in North America is that the government wants to make sure its own dealers take their cut first. It was the same repackaged ritual, just institutionalised, formal, and state-approved: The right and more modern way to be dependant on drugs, you see.
For the uninitiated reading this, it is crucial to understand the uniquely deceptive neuropsychopharmacology of buprenorphine. Biochemically, it sits at a staggering 40 times the strength of morphine per unit of mass. If a person with zero opioid tolerance takes even a tiny fragment of this drug, it will smash them — knocking them out cold or sending them into certain illness. Yet, because it is a partial agonist, it possesses a rigid pharmacological ceiling. For someone like me then coming off a heavy baseline, it didn't get me high; it provided no euphoria, no rush, and no escape. It simply parked itself on the receptors with an iron grip, locking out withdrawal while quietly building a massive, state-approved chemical anchor in my system.
Scientific literature and psychological research explicitly show that cognitive traits like an overactive mind and an intense, foundational openness to experience play a monumental role in how a person interacts with psychoactive substances. For an inquiring and imaginative brain that is constantly spinning, generating a profound structural sense of alienation from the surrounding world, the internal noise can be relentless. The initial draw to downers isn’t just about getting high — it is an instinctual hunt for solace. A desperate search for some quiet. A psychological Shhhh.
Is the above an internal story some keep replaying in their mind as an excuse to keep getting high, or is it backed up by data? It could very well be both. Coincidentia Oppositorum — The Unity of Opposites.
Whatever it is, there is a parallel truth: For anyone inherently interested in psychology and philosophy, topics like
drugs and sexuality along with dreams and consciousness remain essential
material, through which one better understands the inner psyche as well
as the Human Condition in its entirety.
Coupled with a relentless native curiosity, this neuro-architecture is precisely why I delved headfirst into the chemical world for over thirty years as an addict-researcher-psychonaut. To understand the trajectory, you have to be completely honest about the utility: I took these mind-altering substances because of the genuine good I received from them initially. They provided a brief, artificial peace that silenced the static. But a highly active mind also behaves differently under the influence; it tracks the curves, studies the receptor kinetics, and builds a high functional tolerance that allows it to navigate deep waters where others immediately drown. In other words, it can still function under these altered states — just on different frequencies.
I remember walking into the pharmacy on my Toronto street, Davisville Avenue, for something unrelated when, for some strange and purely cathartic reason I ended up confessing my line-cutting methodology to the Egyptian pharmacist working behind the counter. Maybe I was looking for some encouragement or validation from someone in the field, maybe a certain reaction to a methodology that I knew well was unique and drastic — be it positive or negative. Maybe it was the Arabic… or all of them combined. And there it was:
I will never forget the look on his face — his eyes went wide and googly. It was blazingly obvious that in all his years of university and sterile clinical practice, he had never heard of a patient self-micro-managing a molecule with that level of calculated precision — certainly not with an opiate as ruthlessly potent as this one. But that is the difference between an institutional textbook and the ground-level application of neuropsychopharmacology within the reality of the trenches.
When you choose to bypass the sterile walls of programs, hospitalisations, or shrinks, your mind desperately needs an alternative arena for therapy. For me, expressing that unmasked inner self was not a mere hobby; it was the active cure — an emotional cleansing release that taught me how to work with my hands, my head, and my heart like a true artist. As Carl Jung famously noted: "Often the hands will solve a mystery that the intellect has struggled with in vain."
I parked the car right at the perimeter before going down to snap a few memorial tourist-like photographs of that quiet, frozen American border city I had not yet seen.
Clickity Click.
With the fresh script safely in hand and the
dose-du-jour already ingested right there in the pharmacy lot, the familiar, grounding chemical burn — and the throat drip — signalled to the nervous system that the immediate crisis was over. The physical panic was pacified, and I rolled back toward the Ontario border feeling safe and secure in my tactical isolation, in custody of my own focus.
The ground-level logistics of that final recovery year were pure
madness. In March 2011, a silly Canadian DUI landed me in the infamous
Toronto
Don Jail for six days — a rough medieval facility that was thankfully shut down several years later. It was inside those cold iron bars that the foundational seed was first planted:
The Pen Is Mightier Than The Sword.
Ka-Boom. Ka-Chink. Ka-Paaawww.
Almost instantaneously, the decision to become a writer and own the entire narrative layout was taken. I say “taken”, but it truly felt like I was not the
one lucky sole decider; it felt as though I was chosen to answer the call — à la Bukowski.
My passport at the time was confiscated due to the legal aftermath of those Canadian Chez Nanigans. Consequently, by the time the initial 30-pill medication supply was depleted across three months, I faced a hard wall. On the following trip to refill my script across the border in Buffalo, I couldn’t cross legally.
Hm.
For that second border run, with no passport in hand, a close Canadian friend who also possessed a tactical green card drove me down. I brought along
Caramella, my Cocker Spaniel companion, who had travelled to me all the way from Egypt. She had lived through the heavy darkness of the Cairo heroin years right beside me, and now she was experiencing the vibrant greenery, the new breeds of dogs, the rejuvenating revival, and the charming Canadian snow. Her pure, wide-eyed amazement at the falling flakes and the scampering squirrels — the whole novelty of the experience and of the New World — enticed and inspired my own mind to awaken to the beauty of life: To the
Ultimate Ground of Being. The Canon Rebel was also there for the documentation.
 |
| Caramella La Bella awaiting at a Lake Erie park, 2011 |
My friend dropped me and Caramella off at a deserted park by Lake Erie to wait in the freezing cold before driving across the
border alone to hit the same Rite Aid pharmacy from
Act I. We
sat there in the winter wind on the edge of the lake, a man and his
loyal dog, outsiders to a mammoth conglomerate of a system, yet somehow
still in total custody of our own fate, refusing to be crushed into a
million pieces like a pill of Subutex.
Click.
In between all the chemical madness of that first year, a parallel reality was blossoming; I was
actively
living my best and healthiest life in years. I was jogging through the
crisp air, deeply communing with nature, taking occasional inner
journeys while camping out on frozen Canadian lakes, and getting
passionately into the art of cooking.
Simultaneously, I joined the University of Toronto for a creative writing certificate, taking intensive copywriting and logic courses, and flat-out acing them — like Les Jésuites student that still was under my skin, the same A+ geek from Drugs and Human Behaviour at AUC. It was the very first time I had stepped back into a classroom setting since my AUC graduation in 2000, stepping back into the halls of Higher Learning to rebuild my mind from scratch. Beyond that, I ended up befriending the copywriting teacher, Leslie, who was fated to become my first actual editor.
 |
The University of Toronto campus grounds: The intellectual crucible of
Higher Learning where the surviving observer alchemised street trauma
into creative Copywriting and Logic disciplines. |
Day
after day, expressing myself in writing became an integral part of my
healing journey. Sharing what matters most to me became an exorcism of a
sort, so I am no longer alone with it. From repression and suppression
to full-on alchemical expression, it was equally a means for self-exploration. I
allowed my work to speak for itself, by showing who I really am at the
core, mostly to myself.
I was fortunate to have writing, so I didn’t need shrinks to Know Thyself — and psychedelics too.
 |
When both eyes are closed the third will guide you towards mystical heights. “Seeing” the rainbow in Niagara Falls from the Canadian side — April 2010 |
The next major intuitive visions came unto me during an exploratory vacation to Canada six months before relocation; passing by New York as well before returning to Egypt. As opposed to the precognitive dreams that followed later, in rare cases the epiphanies may psychonautically occur in waking life, often catalysed by altered states of consciousness — this time it was LSD.
While staring at this rainbow by the Falls and contemplating the bridge that crosses to the U.S, fittingly called The Rainbow Bridge, I was overcome by an intense indescribable, incommunicable, nameless sensation “telling” me that, one day, I will somehow “thrive” or “blossom” in America. For lack of better wording, the peculiar message was internally translated as “Good things will happen to you there”. Hm.
This was significantly odd because there was neither any intention nor wish to go anytime soon — other than possibly in short future visits; certainly not to stay for a long time, let alone reside. There was actually nothing for me to do in the States, for I was in Toronto to supposedly settle in one way or another. Likewise, I truthfully had no idea what “thrive/blossom” meant in such context or in which department. Down deep inside my heart of hearts, however, I knew it wasn’t going to be related to any formal employment or “work”, but more of a personal endeavour. It was even more confusing because that was right before taking writing sincerely as a vocation, so there was no frame of reference. What I saw or felt in my mind’s eye didn’t really make much sense at the time. That included my addiction, which was still just a story I hadn’t learned how to narrate yet. Still, from previous instances of “inner knowing”, I somehow also instinctively knew there was a certain truth in it.
This time, from the periphery of the trenches, there was no accompanying fear to the revelation — a little apprehension maybe, yet also some excitement towards that strange alternate reality. I was not staring at the sun from afar like some kind of mirage, I was getting close to the point of feeling its warmth. And Lordy Lord: It was mystical, beautiful, sensational, exquisitely delightful. The rainbow that just happened to be there certainly added some symbolic Magick to the apparition. Weird, man. Where was this novel perspective or realisation coming from? Must be the Acid molecule.
And the science again here is that stopping heroin for several weeks, my baseline neurotransmitters had, to a certain degree, successfully repaired themselves; I possessed even more natural dopamine velocity than during the initial Amsterdam glimpse. I was approaching the actual end of the tunnel, and therefore my brain had recovered the neuroplastic capability to see the horizon much more clearly. From what we know know, by binding directly to my 5-HT2A receptors the LSD dissolved the rigid [Burroughs] Default Mode Network that had kept my cognitive patterns locked into defensive, repetitive ruts, while initiating a profound hyper-connectivity that turned a waking reverie into a permanent blueprint for liberation.
It so happens that this Niagara hallucination-turned-reality was captured on camera by my then-girlfriend. You can see above an unusually full, blissed-out smile on my face. Though other than these couple of photos as a reminder of a fun trip, I brushed the moment off and carried on with being.
The sweatshirt, acquired from London, is still an unintended whimsical touch to the capture
By June of 2011, One Lucky Soul here was officially incepted, emerging directly from the birth canal of my imagination. It served as my own experimental avant-garde palette — a rogue creative laboratory where I acted as both the creator and the primary guinea pig. This deliberate reconstruction of my daily existence proved that true recovery is never a mere mechanical subtraction of drugs or structural doses; it is a profound process of integration, of reinvention, of forging an expanded, expansive, rich reality that is worth living without the incessant need to escape it through synthetic medication — as both the sculpture and the marble.
Months later, following the third and final run to America, my body adapted to the 0.2 mg lines — the forgotten therapeutic baseline of the original Temgesic molecule. From that plateau, the quantity was dropped even further to a microscopic 0.1 mg. Then, as learned from the various underground networks and harm-reduction sources consulted during the lengthy research phase, I deployed an alternate-day schedule — one day yes, one day no. Because the buprenorphine molecule possesses a wickedly prolonged half-life spanning anywhere from 25 to 60 hours, the alternate-day rhythm allowed the drug to slowly and smoothly drift out of my blood level without a sharp, violent drop, especially after a full year. It turned out to be a flawless self-engineered curve. Not like I did not feel any discomfort, far from it, but I think it was the most efficient way to minimise the withdrawals. Knowledge Is Power, my Friends.
With such a microscopic dosage, the final stash of 30 pills was stretched out for roughly five months of meticulously accurate step-down management. Eventually, the painstaking tapering method came to the prospected end — and along with it, the last ingested 0.1 mg fragment of Subutex.
The independent research worked. Following that last week of the taper, I took Dr. John’s few-year old Remeron (mirtazapine) to help with the sleeping. Then one night, I only had a Tylenol PM (diphenhydramine). The next
night, half a pill. And then the third, nothing. UNSHACKLED AT LAST.
For the first
time in eight years of continuous opioid saturation, I slept completely
unaided. I woke up on that mid-October morning of 2011, went on
Facebook, and posted a single cryptic status: “I’M FREEEEEEE”.
Man, going back to your natural state and to loving yourself felt splendacious. And indeed, small daily improvements and innovations can lead to astounding achievements over time. Something to remember whenever one is feeling overwhelmed by many things they have to do is simply taking the very first step. And then the next, and so on.
It was a phenomenal way to end that chapter in my life. Yet looking back, and to be perfectly honest, I do not know how easy — or not — that long detox would have been if I were getting the Subs from a pharmacy across the street, or for free, or both.
“No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.”
— Albert Einstein
─── ✵ ────── ✵ ────── ✵ ───
Act V: The Venice Beach Reminder & The Addicted MindIn those first initial, unprotected months after the final micro-dose
left my system, the world had rushed in with a vengeance — like a tube
train up my spine. Stripped of my synthetic armour, the world hit with
bloodcurdling, unfiltered velocity.
I would find myself tearing up on the Toronto subway, watching a blind
man calmly navigate the subterranean concrete labyrinth with his guide
dog — moving forward with dignity — while I would be taken back to the
near decade when I wilfully sabotaged my own functional biology.
A
similar emotional rupture hit me while standing at my window of my
studio, watching a young boy in a wheelchair smashing a tennis ball on
the courts ahead. A moment captured through my lens that eventually
became part of my sentimental photo-article,
Photos I Shot That Brought Tears to My Eyes. In that recently-awakened state, the mind constantly
wrestled with a lingering, defensive loop of self-pity, mourning the
years — the health and the money — evaporated by dependency.
Three years in cold, distant, sanitised Canada were enough;
especially regarding the gruelling legal parameter of the visa renewal
process, since I never married or formally immigrated as it was
prospected. Following the death of Caramella near the end of this period
— a loss that made me crack open and sob like a child for the first
time in my adult life, prompting me to write
Adieu Caramella just to
heal — along with the dissolution of a relationship that wasn’t going anywhere, I
coddiwompled aimlessly across the U.S. of A for seven
adventurous months.
Endings are new beginnings in disguise was my
mantra.
Having already dealt with the reawakened sensitivity of the
emotional sobriety stage of recovery — along with the inherent shadows
of shame and guilt — being On The Road was the new adventure my soul was
seeking.
In March 2014, I found myself in sunny Venice Beach, Los Angeles, where I was intuitively compelled to stay. It was there at my new enhanced
Rat Park that the decision to dedicate myself to One Lucky Soul was taken much more sincerely, channelling all my creative work — Meraki — into this singular space while stopping publication anywhere else. It was a deeply inspiring time to solidify fully owning my vocation as a writer. A time to delve into the call for creative work and for a creative existence as a whole. I was ready to use a unique, gritty set of life circumstances to forge something magnificently phenomenal that only my specific neuro-circuitry could produce. I surrendered to
What Is, becoming a humble volunteer of the Youniverse and its daemons.
I followed the sun until I got much closer. Also there, drumming followed writing as an additional artistic self-expression. Weekly
Venice Beach Drum Circle replaced online forums as actual social gatherings where,
at first, no one knew me and I knew no one — another profound layer of liberation.
My own spirited monthly baby,
Full Lunacy Drum Circle [by One Lucky Soul], followed at Dockweiler Beach.
Then, the body reminded me that it never truly forgets its past chemistry. I was run over by a car while riding my bicycle through the streets of Venice. After a drudging four-hour wait and a wacky four-hundred-dollar bill at the Emergency Room, I was discharged with a standard cocktail of prescribed pharmaceuticals: Hydrocodone (5/325), Flexeril (a muscle relaxant), and Naproxen.
My article
Dreaming of the Accident Before it Happened details the precognitive madness from April 2015. Conjured days after, Opiated The Hatin’ It details my thoughts about revising that old, familiar world.
 |
The physical aftermath of the precognitive dream taken right before
heading to the Emergency Room — Venice Beach, March 2015 |
The day after the accident, the intense deep-tissue pain set in. I looked inside my toiletry bag and, by a strange stroke of coincidence, found a long-lost 1-mg Xanax pill. My old street-smart brain instantly clicked into gear. I decided to perform a clinical version of the Egyptian
Tabteen. I swallowed the Xanax and three Flexerils first, waited 45 minutes for the nervous system to be padded and lined, and then swallowed the Hydrocodone.
The pain vanished. Opiates, Ah! Bloody Magick. I spent the day around the house writing, listening to Pink Floyd’s Animals, and visiting that distant, smoky earlier life. One must note, the analgesic properties do not actually heal the bruises; they merely make the sensation of physical trauma more tolerable to the brain. For the curious reader and the dedicated psychonaut, the exposé
The Intertwining of Pain and Pleasure (2022) delves right into the captivating nature of this peculiarly mysterious, multi-dimensional relationship ― neurobiologically, psychologically, and philosophically.
By the third night, waking up at 3:00 AM with sticky eyes and a heavy lethargic body, I decided it was enough. It was time to drop the pills and deal with the remaining physical pain naturally. Those ten minutes in bed were a microscopic withdrawal symptom from just three days of use. Here lies the profound difference between an amateur and an experienced mind: If someone who had never experienced addiction woke up sleepless after three days of pain medication, they would simply think, “I’m having a restless night”, and fall back asleep. Their symptoms would pass because they wouldn’t obsess over them.
But a mind well acquainted with addiction? It instantly recognises the ghost of withdrawal. It panics, connects the mild restlessness to memories of past agony, and actually weaponises its own thoughts to amplify the physical suffering more than necessary. The simple action of fearing or overthinking the withdrawal triggers a cascade of real stress chemicals in the brain, turning a minor sleepless night into a mental battleground spent breakdancing in bed ― literally and metaphorically. This hyper-sensitised state makes the symptoms worse by linking them to prior suffering, becoming reactionary to the slightest micro-shift in biology.
“We suffer more often in imagination than in reality.”
― Seneca
By then, I knew that all too well; so I kept observing with calm impartial eyes, made a mental note of the situation — which became the crux of Opiated Then Hatin’ it — then went back to bed, having decided that this brief visit was more than enough to remind me why that world or this mode of existence no longer fits. While I absolutely needed the painkillers for my smashed body, a part of me still fancied the chemical break. In all honesty, it was the foggy after-affects that turned me off; it repulsed me to willingly choose to feel so old and broken afterwards. Perhaps I needed that reminder — a confrontation which I did not go seek, but one that came to me exactly when required.
Those who have walked through the fire of their own hell and survived it tend to leave sparks of light wherever they go and in whatever they do.
─── ✵ ────── ✵ ────── ✵ ───
Act VI: Global Paradigms and The "Sabbooba" Mills
Living in America after that accident opened my eyes to the staggering scale of the corporate drug landscape. The U.S. consists of roughly five percent of the world’s population, yet it consumes eighty percent of the global prescription drug supply. In 2010 alone, enough opiates were prescribed to medicate every single American adult around the clock for a month. No wonder there are so many desensitised zombies around. The dealers wear lab coats, and because the addiction is funded by insurance and institutionalised by the state, millions remain tied to a shelf, untethered from the actual reality of their own bodies.
Many people I know there are actually on doctor-prescribed mood-altering chemical shackles, especially those below the age of 50.
Truth is, for the past three decades in America, the parameters were shifted to turn standard everyday human friction into a lifelong “chemical imbalance” profit model. Energy became ADHD; sadness became clinical depression; social hesitation became a lifetime generalised anxiety disorder.
As a matter of fact, national tracking data shows that antidepressant and anti-anxiety dispensing to adolescents and young adults has skyrocketed massively — surging by over 66 percent in recent multi-year windows, leaving millions from the new generations tied to a pharmacy counter before their brains could even finish developing naturally. Over prescription = Lifetime customers. Ominous to contemplate.
One cannot help but make a connection with the early work of Edward Bernays, the father of public relations
— or modern advertising. The Vienna-born man was the nephew of
Sigmund Freud, who, since the 1930s, has worked with major corporations
of manufacturing and advertising,
politicians, and the CIA.
Bernays combined the ideas of Crowd Psychology or Mob Psychology with his uncle’s school of thought. He
had a crucial and successful role in
manipulating the masses by using their inner desires and fears to
engineer public consent. The American citizen was then redefined as a
‘consumer’ and corporate greed was incepted, while Bernays became rich
and famous in the process. He was
later named one of the 100 most influential Americans of the 20th
century by Life magazine.
How things are today in America is a byproduct of such work. Out of simple citizens, consumers they have become to be capitalised upon by predatory conglomerates.
From the other side of the Atlantic, I later met a cool 60-year-old European woman who had been on continuous Suboxone maintenance for over thirty straight years, following a teenage heroin and crack addiction. In countries like the Netherlands and Switzerland, the government utilises a highly progressive harm-reduction model, handing out free Suboxone or even medical-grade heroin (diamorphine) in clean, supervised clinics to stabilise long-term users. From a societal standpoint, it is a healthy and peaceful leap forward — crime drops while fatal overdoses disappear and people can be more functional. At the same time, it introduces a quiet, invisible trap: The Forever Patient. Because the drug is free and safe, this woman had never once thought about dropping her dose beyond a certain level. Forty plus years of continuous opioid receptor saturation takes a bulky and somewhat silent toll on an ageing body. Still better than the street.
 |
The forensic analgesic chart from Opiated Then Hatin’ It (2015)
— an early field record documenting the astronomical potency scaling
of the synthetic landscape long before the over-the-counter
epidemic flooded the streets. |
When I eventually moved back to Egypt, I watched the same institutional trap operate under a different mask. I discovered certain Cairo doctors selling Subutex and Suboxone under the fraudulent guise of a specialised “medical course” for 500 EGP per pill, which later skyrocketed to 800 EGP; today, that street price has undoubtedly multiplied. One of them had his own practice in a hospital and this was a side hustle — a ridiculously lucrative one. Once again, licensed physicians act as nothing more than glorified, high-priced corner dealers, actively exploiting desperate individuals trying to stay clean from street heroin.
Every few months, these dealer-docs travel to Europe to bring back those 8 mg pills to distribute to a growing market of trapped Egyptians. In fact, the first time the Egyptian government even discovered the existence of buprenorphine was only several years prior, when someone was caught at the airport smuggling an insane quantity of pills. Suspicious, they looked into the compound only to realise it is a narcotic, partial agonist or not. Ironically — or perhaps predictably — the person once had a role within the local AA and NA crowd, who ended up serving a prison sentence following that high-stakes airport bust. Ever since that specific incident, buprenorphine was officially added to the strict state anti-narcotics schedule (El Gadwal) and criminalised. Even so, certain doctors will always find their ways to exploit the supply lines.
The strict zero-tolerance network of these programs seems completely blind to the historical fact that Alcoholics Anonymous co-founder Bill Wilson famously experimented with LSD in the 1950s and supported its use to treat alcoholism. I wonder how they manage this paradox. Is tobacco fine because cigarettes are legal?
Whether a patient buys their Bupe through a corrupt Cairo middleman or receives it entirely for free through a progressive Western insurance framework, they are bound to the establishment like peas in a pod. This is the precise reason I fiercely refused to become a registered addict inside the Canadian or American databases during my exile in
Act IV; I instinctively rejected that tracking label inside the Big Brother system.
This rejection was likely a vital catalyst that kept me in check — a certain fundamental boundary ensuring I would not return to any chemical habit. As mentioned, getting whatever it is from a pharmacy across the street, let alone for free, would be too damn convenient for anyone in my situation. But, I had had enough and was sick and tired, I wanted out of the trenches.
Another powerful catalyst that preserved my autonomy was choosing to fully embody the “On The Road” frequency during that decade in North America. Never settle or get too comfortable — a mode of existence that turned out to be essential for creativity. Truly, comfort zones are dead zones, enemies of achievement.
Unlike my reality in Egypt, I barely possessed enough money to live while travelling across the United States, an economic restriction manifested somewhat on purpose. Rent aside, I had 22 US$ per day to eat, drink, smoke, and live. Yep. And I am someone who had grown up living in
five-star hotels for 20 years. The one thing that made sense to me at the time — regarding such a simple, unorthodox, nomadic, minimalist way of living — came directly from my article
Why Hippies Are Sometimes Called Bohemians. The introduction came from the research.
“Bohemians were associated with unorthodox or anti-establishment political and social viewpoints, which were often expressed through free love, frugality, drug usage, and, in some cases, voluntary poverty.
Bohemians rejected the comfortable bourgeois lifestyle and the strict moral values it embodied. They equally rejected materialism and the pursuit of money by leaving their middle class lives behind, having no permanent residence, and by living solely for the sake of art and literature. Living carefree, indulging in drugs — mainly hashish and opium — and alcohol, and adopting sexual freedom was their way to rebel against the status quo. ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ ⠀⠀⠀
In some cases, they were associated with a more economically privileged, wealthy, or even aristocratic circle, which was sometimes referred to as Haute Bohème or conveniently, High Bohemians.”
It was comforting to find people from different walks of life who willingly choose to live on the Razor’s Edge — including the voluntary poverty — even if from centuries ago.
Residing in metropolitan Toronto or in gentrified Venice Beach, there was simply no financial freedom available to fall back into chemical dependency. In hindsight, this tactical baseline was my intuitive way to protect myself — my regained freedom — on the go and in the moment. I was operating at a time when there was no existing manual or master blueprint for the psychological terrain I was navigating. It was no longer a time to consume, it was mainly a time to experience and to follow it by creating that which has never existed before.
Looking back, another major concern which kept me in check in the wilderness of North America is fentanyl. Yeah, that motherfucker I first heard of from the above chart back in 2015 — before it turned into a street epidemic.
Also Carfentanil, the extremely potent synthetic opioid used to sedate large animals, which is roughly 100 times stronger than fentanyl and 10,000 times stronger than morphine. Say what! I would have called Carelefentanil.
Uhu. Can you even imagine the microscopic amount needed to kill a human being? Truth is, while the drug is authorised strictly for veterinary use, it has indeed appeared dangerously mixed into illicit street drugs. The stories you now read are scary, man.
All that said, I remain forever grateful to have exited that world before the arrival of this synthetic shîte. Because again and again, I did not want to die from getting high. I really, really didn’t. Life, my Friends, is too beautiful to end it in such a way.
 |
Enjoint: Healthy and whimsical at the Madhouse
— Venice Beach Drum Circle, 2018 |
The trick with “maintenance”, you see, is as follows: Who relies entirely on state-approved chemical bondage will ever rebel, shake the status quo, or spark a revolution? You cannot say “fuck the government” or travel across borders without profound anxiety when your physiological stability is dictated by an institutional database. Living on a psychotropic medication, you become an infantilised passive asset of the state, like a sleeping mole on a chemical leash. “
They got you by the balls”, as George Carlin once again used to say.
Still better than the street despite all that? Abso-fuckin’-lutely — it is the lesser of two evils.
The darkest underbelly of the Egyptian scene, however, was not the lab-coat pushers; it was the recovery industry itself, which I have been observing from the periphery through the eyes of those close to me for thirty long years. In fact, every single one in my five-people group spent some time in rehab; a couple went in and out more than 15 times. Seriously. In Egypt, many rehab and detox centres are largely the Sabooba (سبوبة) type — a predatory, money-making racket run by capitalistic doctors and ex-users looking to cash in on the sheer misery and desperation of families. Sounds familiar? The global pattern remains identical. It is still less scary than the North American model.
Again, the observing psychonaut does not judge, nor does he preach. He takes notes, studies the patterns, and sees lessons in the mistakes of others —
since this fleeting life is too short to learn all the intended lessons through
our own mistakes. It is often through those of others that we learn
best. Then again, they are only real mistakes if nothing has been
learned. Actually, without mistakes we’ll never learn; and without
learning we’ll never evolve.
One way to learn from our mistakes and failures and get past them is to talk about them. For all forms are self-expression are healing. That’s why art therapy is a successful thing. True art also has the ability to lift a human being out of time, in the words of William S. Burroughs — a state that becomes profoundly meditative in and of itself, as during Flow State. My most recent being was while finalising this lengthy piece when I spent 17 consecutive hours in The Zone, working and polishing, beautifying and obsessing.
Likewise,
mistakes and failures mean we’re trying new things. Doing something.
Without them, one could lead a ‘safe’ life yet never learn or grow or
rebuild themselves. Let alone how uneventfully dull and drab the
complacency of life would be. In truth, many great discoveries started out as mistakes. There is no good reason then to be afraid of making some. Perhaps above all, it is an opportunity to start over — for rebirth.
Perhaps if you genuinely care about someone, you may add a statistical ledger here and there or share how you survived your own chaos. But, most active users already know the maths. And the actual truth is, we are all different, and to each their own. What I silently do whenever meeting my European friend is imagine myself in her coordinates. I could have easily chosen to live out my days stabilised on Subutex, but I chose not to. I want to feel it all: the Ups and Downs and All-Arounds. The full spectrum of being human — still experienced from the observer vantage point and with a certain equanimity. This is just a ride after all. And we are here to dance.
I’ve envisioned the light at the end of the tunnel then created a reality around it; one I need not to run away from. Living on sunny beaches for the past 12 years, away from the hustle and bustle of big cities, was the healthy environment that inspired the metamorphosis. To numb my feelings about the life I’m leading is no longer an existential need. I fought hard to be wholly me, and I’m proud of my survival story.
Freedom, sovereignty, and autonomy are worth every ounce of the fire. For the average person who simply takes their liberty for granted, these natural, essential concepts remain intangible. Only when losing that foundational baseline independence and self-determination, even for a brief season, do we begin to realise how vital it truly is to existence — how elemental it is if one is to be fully, unapologetically oneself. We feel the true meaning of freedom only after it is taken away through control or oppression. That’s one hard-learned truth for you.
─── ✵ ────── ✵ ────── ✵ ───
Act VII: The Shadow of Sherif: A Decade Later
It was shortly after publishing Opiated Then Hatin’ It in 2015 Venice Beach that a 31-year-old reader from Egypt named Sherif reached out to me through a private message. He had read my words from across the world and felt a desperate lifeline.
“I’m 31 years old. Yet, I feel like 70”, he wrote.
Sherif’s downward spiral was a textbook case of systemic medical failure. At age 20, he was misdiagnosed with a bone tumour in his tibia by ignorant Egyptian doctors, who subjected him to 30 useless radiation sessions and four major surgeries. He spent his entire twenties in a cast on crutches, lonely and in agony, finding his only solace in Tramadol and benzos. When he finally fled to London, British doctors delivered the grim truth: the radiation had caused gangrene. He was forced to make the choice between death or an above-knee amputation. He chopped off his leg, swam in a sea of NHS pharmaceuticals, survived a suicide attempt, and eventually made the fatal mistake of returning home to Cairo to be near his family.
Isolated in his bedroom, refusing to use his prosthetic leg, he was trapped in a 24/7 drug loop, spending over 70,000 EGP on predatory
Sabooba, money, halfway houses that did nothing but empty his mother’s pockets. When he reached out to me, he was clean for 10 days yet losing his mind, trapped on a zombie cocktail of heavy anti-psychotics (Risperdal, Chlorpromazine) prescribed by a psychiatrist who told him his brain was permanently deranged.
For two weeks, we exchanged the
bahareez of our lives. I spoke to him not as some mechanical lecturer, but as a peer who had survived similar trenches. I told him to look at the taper maths, to look up his meds on Bluelight, and to recognise that his leg was being used as a psychological hanger for his self-pity. I told him that if he conquered his mind, he could become a fearless individual, and that his mother would look at him with a pride he hadn’t yet imagined. I tried to inject hope into his black world, advising him to look toward meditation, reading, and the ultimate paradigm shifts of psychedelics.
Our chat abruptly ended on July 9, 2015. He told me to listen to Portishead’s Roads. I told him I was busy with some stuff.
Few months later, back in Los Angeles, I checked his profile. Sherif was gone. Ten days before his death, he had posted the Islamic testament of departure — the
Shahada — followed by a final, haunting poem on his wall:
“We were born to die... loneliness and solitude all the way... suddenly and out of the blue, you take your last breath... nothing left, just a memory fading away into oblivion.” He knew.
The epilogue to his death was a definitive indictment of institutional murder. His sister later found my profile and revealed the truth: after a relapse, his desperate mother sent him to an unlicensed detox clinic called Beit el Horeya in Hada2ek El Ahram, run under the shadow of a famous doctor named Ehab El Kharrat. Once inside, Sherif — a disabled man on crutches — got into an altercation with the supervisors. They tied him to a bed, threw an unknown injection into his veins, and left him to die while noise shattered inside the room. When the police raided the place, the corporate doctors immediately weaponised bureaucratic lies, claiming he was an uncooperative diabetic, or denying their affiliation with the facility entirely to protect their medical licenses.
She denied the diabetic part.
They took his money, they took his life, and they traumatised his family. A decade later, the link to his story stands as an uncompromised monument to the sheer, murderous ignorance of the recovery system.
Addiction Talk: My Correspondence With a 31-Year-Old Reader Before He Passed Away is my piece detailing the whole human ordeal — written in memory of Sherif.
 |
The behavioural anatomy of human dependency
— unmasking how the root network of internal wounding fuels
the universal need for a chemical or psychological shield.
|
As this leafy anatomical map clearly demonstrates, almost all of us are trapped in some variation of behavioural bondage.
Split cleanly across: Substance, Activity, Thought, Feeling, or People loops — depending entirely on whatever variable we utilise to numb our internal existential friction. Legal or illegal has nothing to do with the fundamental notion, as verbalised earlier in the OLS Reflection. Whether a human being is dependent on street dope, a monthly corporate salary, or a repetitive loop of anxious overthinking, the neuro-chemical mechanics remain identically defensive. It is a universal human pressure — La Condition Humaine. What tends to differ are the taboo, the stigma, and the judgements, largely based on the legality whim at a certain point in time.
Act VIII: The Sokhna Remission and the Sinai Mountains Whisper
“New beginnings are often disguised as painful endings.”
— Lao Tzu
Two more spectacular years in Venice Beach allowed the weight of Sherif’s death to settle into my bones. At 40 years old, I found myself back in Egypt, not knowing what this newer version could — and would — do regarding the same inner demons I thought I had left behind. These are the parts of the self that one does not accept or refuse to face, therefore are pushed down into the subconscious where they run the show without the individual’s permission.
My older friends were either married with kids about to finish high school or still battling their own demons and were toothless by then. Where is the legal cannabis and the sexual freedom? Where is the weekly VBDC? Where is my monthly Full Lunacy baby
. Hmmm. I knew I had to re-escape Cairo to reconnect with Nature and to find some needed inner stillness. I entered a brutal, self-imposed hermit phase in Sokhna, detoxing from the Subutex I had accumulated from the Egyptian lab-coat dealer.
Because, you guessed it, it is still Abso-fuckin’-lutely better than going back to the street. But why having to choose between two evils?
Buprenorphine withdrawals are a special kind of
Bleugh; because of that massive half-life, the physical agony doesn’t just peak and vanish — it lingers deeply embedded in the marrow, testing every shred of your sanity. They bloody last... before they pass. Because I had survived the trenches before — with street heroin and the cold 0.1 mg Subutex taper in Canada — I didn’t panic from this rather brief stint. I knew I had it within me. My cells already held the blueprint for survival. My body’s inner intelligence remembered how to flush the poison out and rewrite its own chemistry.
When
COVID-19 hit Egypt shortly after moving back and the world was frozen over with fear and
mass anxiety, I decided not to inject an unknown
substance into my body. If I were into needles, I would have injected an
actual drug aeons ago.
Ha. What I did, however, was totally isolate
myself, remaining there all alone on a beach in Sokhna for how long? Wait for it... two
and a half years!
Uhu. I was enjoying the aloneness and the beach-front location so much that time just slipped by. Staying away from suffocating Cairo along with all human drama was how I yet again protected myself — by setting my own boundaries.
Almost everyone I know got jabbed in fear of COVID; much more than three quarters of
them still got it. I never claimed to know the full truth about that
pandemonium, but I knew I was healthy as I was and needed no jabs or
boosters or roosters. In retrospect, absolutely no one knew shit anywhere in the world.
I equally recognised that the whole novel crisis was capitalised upon, which was revolting; that is in addition to seeing first-hand how fear paralyses people, which was dreadful.
Right from the start of my relocation, I decided that for my own well-being I needed to create my own outlet, my own circle, and my own rhythm, fun, entertainment — entirely from scratch.
Once a week, usually on Mondays to ensure I was completely alone on the entire beach, I would have a “Day Out”. I drummed under the sun and took dips in the Red Sea when it wasn’t too cold. I also began filming myself to study my technique, uploading the videos to
YouTube. Eventually, I started drumming along to Chopin, Baroque, and experimental music. I worked on un-hacking my drumming by doing the exact opposite of what my hands naturally wanted to do, forcing myself to react in the moment rather than play from muscle memory.
Unshackled by the Red Sea — Free-Form Djembe Jam: The Lysergic Recordings [video] is one article about it.
Outside of Mondays, my system still needed something to chase — just not drugs anymore. So, I began chasing the sunrise as a serene and calming experience... almost every single day. Since the house sits right on the beach, I would take my camera out to shoot photos and videos, usually pairing a morning post with a deeper reflection. There are probably hundreds of them, which will one day make a great exhibition.
That same oddly enigmatic hermitage, amid the essential elements, was
when The Work took place. With zero distractions, the self-explorative inner journeys differed in substance. One major realisation from
that period of wilful isolation is the necessity to
Forgive Myself: For not knowing that which I didn’t know at a certain point in time.
Forgiveness then tends to breed empathy, compassion, and most importantly self-love — a reminder to go back to loving myself yet again. Also, to be remember that the time is always Here and Now.
Another thing to realise is that, just like writing has become part of me wherever I am in the world, drumming has now become the same. While I was drumming alone there, I felt that a drum circle in Egypt is not such a far-fetched idea. After all, I kept getting repetitive dreams of hosting drum circles by the Pyramids while I was still in the U.S. Again here, they made no sense at the time, for I had no intention of returning to the country any time soon. But where would the location be, I wondered. Cairo was out of the question.
Deep psycho-philosophical
pieces came to being in Sokhna, like A Dialectic With Myself: A Practical Yin-Yang Approach to Coincidentia Oppositorum and The Intertwining of Pain and Pleasure. It was time for trying to make sense of all
that transpired during the ten-year trip and conceptualise it, hopefully
integrate the novel perspectives into the ‘I’.
True awareness lies in the power of pure observation. It is our ability to observe through impartial eyes — without the corresponding thoughts; no analysis, judgement, evaluation, calculation, justification, expectation, condemnation, or conceptualisation. Only then do we become aware of the present Here and Now in the full sense of the word. |
Getting it out into the ether, or on the sand,
and then once it is fully, consciously realised it has no control over you.
— Sokhna, 2021
Forgive. Because you deserve to set yourself free.
It is not always about forgiving or being forgiven by others, you see.
Sometimes we need to forgive ourselves. Follow me?
With forgiveness comes love. And love breeds compassion, understanding, and empathy.
Makes you feel one with the bumblebee, the tree, the sea — the universe in its entirety.
This openness also brings upon some needed vulnerability.
’Tis destiny, my friend, quel poetry.
A B C
123
Do Re Me
Let it be, love. Now set it free.
|
─── ✵ ───Since no man is an island, and since nothing alive evolves alone including us social animals, I started missing people, even small talk and eye contacts. By the time I finally broke the isolation and reached the shores of Dahab, the physical shackles were breaking. I finally had the needed space to resume my passions. I started jogging again along the edge of the Red Sea, letting the salt air clear the remaining fog
— eventually going back to
callisthenics — in addition to sunrise stretching on the beach with the local doggo pack. I also picked up the djembe and began drumming on the beach amid the elements; that is my own meditative absorption, which the actual definition of Zen.
A month later, all alone, I launched
Full Lunacy Drum Circle — Dahab as a sister gathering to
Full Lunacy — Dockweiler I had incepted in 2016 L.A. Ah, there it is that Bohemian enclave, which I had last visited in 1999. The repetitive dreams turned out to be precognitive, like my subconscious mind was helping me envision a new endeavour
— emerging from the same birth canal of my imagination to make the invisible visible. This time in my own country of birth. How prophetic is that divinity within.
The lesson learned time and again is that: Whatever is planted in the subconscious and watered with repetition and nourished with emotion will manifest in the waking life.
We then empower our experience by insisting on our authenticity.
I once again clawed my way out of the depths by returning back to the true centre of my being. Dahab has become my new
querencia where I function at my own zen rhythm
— my most recent
Rat Park. A time to, one more time,
Journey Into Oneself. To
Bring On The Lunacy and
Phree Phlow towards some
Intention Connection & Reflective Introspection. Two full years had passed when, as it often happens, the universe threw a wild wildcard into my Yin Yang balancing act.
I was out for my morning jog at 7:00 AM, moving briskly along the Dahab boardwalk. There is something magical and poetic about having a beach all to yourself
— as I came to experience again and again. As I passed a lone stationary Bedouin standing by the
mamsha, he quietly threw a single heavy word into the morning air while I ran past:
“Afyoun”. (Opium).
I was literally running, in running gear, at seven in the morning! The sheer absurdity of it hit my brain like a lightning bolt. For a second, the defensive rational side of my mind kicked in: “
Haha, you’re completely imagining things. Of course he didn’t say that. It’s just your chronic tinnitus playing tricks on you in the wind.”
I forced myself to ignore the thought. I pushed it down into the subconscious and left it there for four or six months, focused on my usual rhythm
— the early morning jogging, writing, the djembe, and the monthly Full Lunacy.
But a psychonaut’s memory is a dangerous thing. After nearly half a year of that one-word call, the other part of my brain slowly dredged the moment back up to the surface.
“
Hmm... I wonder if that Bedouin really did say that. We actually used to score raw opium right up here in these mountains during our wild road trips to Nuweiba back in the early 2000s. The poppy plant — the absolute OG mother and father of every single opioid molecule on Earth — is actively cultivated right here in the valleys of Sinai.”
Another few days of mental wrestling passed, and the curiosity finally won. The cunning brain then began to infuse some elaborate and rather convincing half-truths to rationalise the decision:
“
An occasional opium tea is almost harmless; that is compared to whatever more potent opiates. Also, it has been over 20 years; as a psychonaut, maybe it is time to delve into such an archaic and exotic substance in order to write about it. You did cover most other major drugs in your research, but where is the Matriarch and Patriarch? With your specific past with wack-smack and bupes, it seems like you ought to. Oh, and poppy has been cultivated right here in these majestic lands for centuries, so it’s
farm-to-table. No adulteration, no cutting, no cheating. The final thought was: You never even went to seek it, it came to you, and at the most unlikely time and space. Again. It seems the plant wants its story told.”
I picked up the phone and made a casual call to a Bedouin friend, asking if raw opium was actually flowing through the area. Five minutes later, his message came back, confirming: “It’s right there if you want it.”
Haaa. The demons. Hello, old friends. Just when you think you’ve run far enough into the desert to leave them behind, they sit quietly by the boardwalk at sunrise, waiting to whisper your name.
This, by the way, was not a first: At some point in L.A, it so happened that a next-door neighbour was selling blow. But the ultimate synchronicity Ka-Pawww was when I was mid conjuring Amphetamine, Methamphetamine, and Crystal Methamphetamine — A Psychonaut’s Review when an old acquaintance from Egypt happened to pass by me in Venice just out of the “
blew”
, opening up that he had been prescribed Adderall after going through a sort of drug-induced psychosis, and shared some with me. Right the following week, the homeless guy living around the local gas station gave me a little ziplock as a thank you for the old clothes I had recently donated to him. A few days later one early afternoon I tried those two lines of meth for the first time and stayed awake till 5 am. Those two events just happened to take place while I was mid the piece. And uppers are the least attractive highs to me personally, so this street knowledge seems to be the one attracted to me. Seriously, it was like the universe is responding to my actions. And one experience was enough. I came back to Egypt to find somewhat of an epidemic of “Ice”. I’ve even learned that it is produced locally, somewhere in Sinai.
“What meth did to me in two years, heroin haven’t even come close in twenty years”,
someone I know recently confessed.
When the same happens again and again over years and across countries, you realise they are no accidental coincidences. Synchronicity, yes. Either I have been chosen to write about these things — chosen yet again, à la Bukowski — or it is my psychonaut self that attracts these intentionally unintentional bewitching happenings... or both. Such an effortless pull is something oddly mysterious which I haven’t yet fully deciphered, cementing the realisation that a distinct cosmic role is why I am still alive — surviving, and even thriving in whatever I put my mind and soul into.
I know, by now, there is another dynamic force other than myself that interacts with me within the equation. It would be foolish to assert that I am in charge of the whole thing. Free will seems to be there throughout daily existence, but in the bigger scheme of things there are many predetermined factors. For one, there is this drive, this fire, this flair that appears to do it by itself — effortlessly, too. It encourages you, even if subtly, by helping you live a more meaningful, purposeful, and wholesome life. Despite all uncertainty, be confident in your instinct and trust that organic and often visionary force.
Echoing, again, with the words of
Cark Jung:
“A creative person has little power over his own life. He is not free. He is captive and driven by his daimon.”
 |
The raw patriarch of the synthetic landscape: A living Sinai mountain
organism growing natively in the backyard, long before its lineage
was hijacked by international corporate monopolies.
— From the Private Archival Collection of One Lucky Soul |
Then came the latest opium research.
Knowing that the matriarch and patriarch of carfentanil were growing right there in the mountains of my own backyard compelled me to start digging into the raw history. This wasn’t some synthetic molecule dreamed up in a Western lab; it was a local plant deeply woven into the ancient timeline of the region and its culture.
The Ancient Egyptians revered the poppy — specifically cultivating the famous Papaver somniferum varieties in Thebes — and recorded its medical, sedative benefits in the Ebers Papyrus around 1500 BC. The ancient Greeks similarly catalogued its power, dedicating it to Nyx, the goddess of night, and Hypnos, the god of sleep.
For centuries, before it was refined into white powder or pressed into doctor-approved tablets, the raw gum of this plant was consumed whole as a tool of survival, creativity, and escape. Reading
Thomas De Quincey’s foundational 1821 text
Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, you see the timeless psychology of the substance:
“Thou hast the keys of Paradise, oh, just, subtle, and mighty opium!
”. Truth is, De Quincey also laid bare the terror of the debt the plant demands.
I devoured whatever I could find about that ancient plant: The history, early and recent studies, documentaries, personal experiences shared on threads in online forums.
In The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde writes: “There were opium-dens, where one could buy oblivion, dens of horror where the memory of old sins could be destroyed by the madness of sins that were new.”
Also, Club des Hashischins, which I had covered before.
“... After
spreading throughout Arabia and India for hundreds of years, hashish as
a mind-altering substance came to be embraced in some European literary
circles in the 1800s. Most notably, le Club des Hashischins, which was a
Parisian club dedicated to the consumption of hashish and other drugs;
its members included literary luminaries such as Victor Hugo, Alexandre
Dumas, Honoré de Balzac, Théophile Gautier, and Dr.
Moreau ’de Tours. As well as Charles Baudelaire who later wrote his 1860 book Les Paradis Artificiels, which is about the
state of being under the influence of opium and hashish. ...”
Enter The Dragon
In all the research, the most mind-boggling by far are the two Opium Wars from the mid-19th-century. The archival reality of that era is profoundly horrifying. Before Americans went fully mental on their own flesh and blood with MK-Ultra and Big Parma, it was the British led by drug-loving Queen Victoria who were messing with the world, India and China more specifically. As a widely-known historical fact, the woman regularly ingested wine-infused cocaine as well as Laudanum, the infamous opium tincture mixed with alcohol; she also took ganja for her menstrual pains. True story.
Imagine what nations can do for the sake of profit, out there in the open — how illegal, immoral, unethical, and downright absurd.
The British East India Company was simply incepted to make this global narcotic cartel formal. This is our world, Ladies and Gentlemen. And it is led by the original drug smugglers —
with the conscience of a virus —
who absolutely do not care about you or me. It is just business, you see. Dr. Smith and the Cairo plug among the others lab-coats are just products following through the legacy; mere downstream middle-managers executing the same colonial lineage.
Has the geopolitical machinery truly evolved, or has imperial drug-smuggling merely taken a hyper-sanitised, corporate form under the regulatory databases of the New World? The corporate boardroom has simply replaced the cargo hull, transforming colonial exploitation into an insurance-backed monopoly designed to harvest recurring assets from a dependent population. “The
War on Drugs”
, huh. ¡Ay, Caramba: Ay Calam!
What overcompensation. O’ the depravity and absurd hypocrisy of it all! I set out to document this re-introduction with the utmost truth — with no judgement, and no applause. I am not here to moralise or romanticise. These are just teary, sweaty, bloody documented facts from the trenches, cross-examined with historical reality. When you look at the raw opium plant in the desert, you realise that humanity has been fighting, writing, and dancing with this same organism since the dawn of civilisation.
─── ✵ ────── ✵ ────── ✵ ───
Act IX: The Naked Truth and The Cosmic Integration
One essential key to a full and fulfilling life is to never lose the
wondrous curiosity or childlike enthusiasm. To be a creative adult
requires just the same.As I reach the boundary of my 40s and prepare to step into my 50s, I look back across this sprawling, chaotic landscape with clarity. I don’t doubt it anymore: There undeniably is an underlying cosmic order to why I survived the things I did. I didn’t make it out through a random stroke of luck, nor did I survive by the clinical standards of Western addiction medicine. Standing here on the Mediterranean North Coast — or in the shadow of the Sinai mountains — looking at a visual timeline that transitions from the raw green plant to the cold white matrix of Big Pharma pills, the naked reality of my survival lays itself entirely bare.
Articulating these gritty clinical details is no simple release of old psychological static. It stands as a calculated, living act of harm reduction — a counter-strike to show that survival requires total custody over your own neurochemistry. That is why I write about these topics so openly, so nakedly, and without a single shred of defensive compromise. Mainly to comprehend myself. But also the public needs to see the real chemistry, the real psychology, and the real maths of the human brain under pressure; if only to minimise the institutional stigma and the hush-hush shame surrounding the reality of dependency. In the immortal words of
Gabor Maté, addiction is the most human thing there is — a shared frequency.
The medical complex wants you to believe that healing is a matter of compliance — moving from the illegal street dealer to the state-approved pharmacy counter, keeping your head down, and staying safely, quietly numb on a FREE lifetime prescription of Subutex, Xanax Prozac,
Adderall, Vicodin, or whatever else. But in truth, that is just a slower, institutionalised death. We tend to forget that it’s an industry explicitly designed to create customers rather than cures. “By. The. Balls.” Have you ever wondered about the “free drugs” thing?
Yes, a portion of people do require these medications, but many others are just latching onto the
modern “pill-for-every-ill”
industrial system.
 |
Red Star microdot LSD and Dali blotter art prints: The visual catalysts
of a parallel path that dissolved the rigid Default Mode Network
to reclaim the active fire of the psyche.
— From the Private Archival Collection of One Lucky Soul |
Xanax, Xalkori, Xgeva, Xtandi, Xyrem, Xylazine, Lexapro, Dexedrine, Paxil, Celexa, Nexium, Effexor, Desoxyn, Suboxone, Subutex, Benzedrex, Celebrex, Clarinex, Brintellix, Trintellix, Luvox, Vioxx; Zaltrap, Zantac, Zelboraf, Zestril, Zithromax. Zocor, Zoloft, Zosyn, Zyban, Zyprexa, Zykadia, Zyrtec, Zytiga, Prozac, Victoza, Benzedrine, Etizest, Otezla, Etizola.
Pharmaceutical companies deliberately add the letters ‘X’ and ‘Z’ to the brand names of their drugs so we find them compleX and believe they know what they’re talking about. DzzzZ.
Observation-turned-truth Ha-Ha aside, the actual fact is that pharmaceutical cartel often pay outside agencies hundreds of thousands of dollars,
even up to half a million, to develop a name for a product. The more technical and sciency sounding, the better. Everything seems to point at La Moula — the name of the game.
─── ✵ ───
My survival didn’t come from their clinics. It came from a completely different realm: A gruelling, parallel path forged through a three-digit deep psychedelic journeys, starting in 1997 then carrying on more seriously post addiction. That was the real medicine — the radical revolution in the psyche that felt like an
Anastasis. Those were the unyielding, ruthless mirrors that forced me to look directly into the eyes of my own darkness and tear down the illusions I had built to protect myself. The psychedelics didn’t numb any pain nor did they solve anything by themselves; they blew the door off the hinges and exposed why the pain I was desperate to
kill was there in the first place, rewiring my neural pathways, expanding my neuroplasticity, and opening up the Doors of Perception.
Radical and lasting change, however, manifests through the post-journey integration: To use the reshuffling to re-pattern one’s own neural circuitry. It is what you do with what you have experienced during the journeys — the novel perspectives — which begins with a transformation in consciousness. Letting go of our own conditioning while
destroying our presuppositions and conclusions and discarding all illusions and untruths. That’
s the basis of spiritual illumination: Seeing reality for what it is, not as we want it to be or as we think or wish it should be. What is referred to as awakening is not about being a better or happier person, it is about being true to yourself, remembering who you are; about meeting yourself face to face and heart to heart; about shedding whatever does not serve one’
s evolution. It is when thoughts, words, and actions peacefully [and finally] align in full harmony — which may take a lifetime: To go out of your mind, that is. Wink.
Otherwise, without The Work, psychedelic trips may be just another chemical escape. Not that there is anything wrong with that. Yet, the way of the psychonaut goes far beyond recreational or “for-fun” festival use, just as it approaches the contemporary mainstream horizon with a weary, street-tested caution.
We are living in an era where the concept of “plant medicine” is being used left and right, and as things advance in this hyper-capitalistic world, Big Pharma is already aggressively moving to capitalise on the changing legal quagmire. Whether people seek to heal from deep trauma through overpriced Ayahuasca ceremonies under a shaman in the Amazon, or via micro-dosing templates in urban centres, psychedelics are becoming widely accepted. About time. How will that massive societal shift turn out? We have to wait and see — it remains an exciting time to be alive.
I only hope this commercialised wave will not systematically ruin the sacred territory for those who choose to journey alone without an institutional manual. Knowing first-hand how the corporate drug machine operates from the inside, as you should too before we delve into the coming final Act, one cannot help but look at this new frontier with an observant and protective eye. As the clinical complex moves to extract, bottle, and standardise the experience for the mass market, a critical question remains for the modern voyager: Will this corporate acceptance deliver true psychological liberation, or is it merely design-engineering a more sophisticated, state-approved cage for your consciousness? Be careful out there in the deep water, my Friends.
Even though each journey is different from the other, after
some time psychedelics may no longer be necessary or useful. As
Alan Watts
puts it:
“If you get the message, hang up the phone. For psychedelic drugs are simply instruments, like microscopes, telescopes, and telephones. The biologist does not sit with eye permanently glued to the microscope, he goes away and works on what he has seen.” Psychedelics are no magic pill, they are mere tools — magnificent
colourful tools to enhance our consciousness and to show us that there is more than this physical reality: Matter: Spirit; they help us see life and ourselves under a different light. Following the journeys comes the time to work on the findings, in a conscious effort to apply the knowledge to one’s existence. That is how integration works in knowing oneself, shifting perspectives, and consequently in bettering the quality of our lives.
You see, there are many ways to reach a state of transcendence, as in soul elevation; it is a magical portal to alternate realities: By being that occasional visit to other realms that ends up enriching our waking life. That is, if the goal is neither to hide from the world nor to live on a secluded mountain to meditate or to mindlessly repeat century-old dogmatic rituals. To affect and influence and elevate the world it needs our contribution — away from instruments — by being
one with and from the world.
If we become too hooked on transcending the present Here and Now, we miss living life in its simplest way, and it would be a good time to pause and reflect on why we are constantly attempting to escape our daily existence. There
usually
are reasons.
When, on the other hand , there is a
direct insight into one’s own true nature, there comes along a personal expression of such insight in daily life and for the benefit of others — all sentient beings as well as nature.
Now, here lies the most critical naked truth of this entire manifesto: That cure was only mine. It cannot be bottled, it cannot be standardised, and it cannot be safely prescribed in a clinical pamphlet. What saved my life could completely shatter another person’s mind. The psychedelic realm demands a fierce, terrifying level of psychological sovereignty and an innate, street-tested understanding of your own internal chemistry. If you run into that fire without a deep and relentless respect for the molecules, it will burn you to a cinder.
With that, towards the close of this contextual piece, I am compelled to once again assert that I am not offering a safe, comforting story with a neat bow tied at the end. The demons don’t vanish just because you start jogging on the beach or drumming under a full moon; nor do they cease to exist within your very being once you relocate to the other side of the world. They change shape. They also know your permanent address. They wait for you when you least expect them, like at 7:00 AM on a quiet boardwalk, whispering ancient words like
Afyoun to see if you are still paying attention.
And honestly? I wouldn’t want it any other way. There are zero regrets because all that happened in addition to my own life choices made me who I am today.
─── ✵ ───
I have always had a deep, unyielding fascination with walking the Path of the Razor’s Edge. The dangerous, the misbehaving, the badness, and the rebellious all have a certain mystique that breaks the monotony of the bland goody-goody, the ordinary, the conventional, and the orthodox.
In Kingdom of Fear,
Hunter S. Thompson seems to have captured this state of mind: “
Never turn your back on Fear. It should always be in front of you, like a thing that might have to be killed.” That is how I choose to navigate my existence. I deliberately remind myself occasionally of my demons, not because I want to relapse, but because I look them dead in the eyes without flinching. Out of the mud, came the lotus. You keep them right out in front of you where you can track them. In a weird way, this calculated proximity keeps me humble — relating to a significant portion of the human race, including those navigating their own mental health terrain. I wonder if Thompson still thought so before taking his own life.
The most dangerous thing a recovering addict can do is fool themselves into saying:
“I slayed the dragon.
” Mayhap they did, yet this black-and-white certainty could very well emanate from the ego as an arrogant lie. The dragon, the monkeys, the demons are still there. They are all mine — they are permanent, foundational, integral parts of who I am. I cannot wage war against my own biology or my own psychology without destroying myself in the process —
which could very well mean destroying the best parts of myself. You cannot flee from your dragons and they cannot be executed; they first have to be accepted, reconciled, then integrated with their contraries; that is, if wholeness is the goal. Think about it: Would you heartlessly attempt to stab a monkey from your own flesh and blood? No, you befriend it, you talk to it, attend to it in order to understand what the fuss is all about; you thereby use compassion to include it within your own totality, naturally pacifying it. Ego dissolution —
فَنَاء.
Heck, if you’re a really good surrogate parent, you would take the little buggers out on occasions... but always, always under your watchful eyes, never handing them the keys.
Tamed dragons also tend to develop wings, so they make great transportation and are capable of taking us to undreamed of heights
. So that’s
another plus to befriending yourself in all your multitude and magnitude — as an unfragmented, indivisible whole.
As such, you see, the light and the shadow are two sides of the same coin.
These two poles are not antithetical or incongruent; they are complementary and are part of one unfragmented whole. Transcending duality through the Unity of Opposites
is the ultimate living manifestation of Coincidentia Oppositorum — where claiming absolute truth means one has stopped growing. On the other hand, to learn how to
Dance with the Demons is to take the darkness out towards the light. Both light and darkness cooperate by opposing one another. When reconciled, that’s the Alchemical Gold. This tension of opposites is the energy needed to turn the subconscious conscious, thereby keeping the Fire of the Soul alight. When you become a light unto yourself the darkness has no hold on you — it loses its grip by becoming more incorporated. But it is there. It is how the quintessence of the full potential is reached, by boldly and wholly embodying the fullest, most authentic
youest you.
The second most dangerous thing post-recovery is to remain stuck in the same loop — years, decades, an entire life — when all your energy, attention, entire existence is going towards NOT being an addict. Sure, it is a great thing to be clean and to remain clean; as the institutional models do a phenomenal job of saving lives on a basic, survival infrastructure level. But while they stop the physical haemorrhaging, they demand a tragic tax for that safety: They tend to systematically extinguish the Fire of the Soul.
The Perpetual Patient Trap: The traditional model forces a human being to spend the rest of their lives identifying exclusively with their sickness — like it is some kind of disability. Every single meeting begins with a declaration of brokenness: “Hello, I am an addict”. They lock themselves into a permanent, lifelong defensive war against a hidden enemy.
Same circles, same vocabulary, same neural circuitry. Sure, it is healthy to be open and to admit your situation, but after a while, to be truthful with yourself ought to be enough. Time to work on one
’s life in the Here and Now.
It is true that every scar, every wound, every heartbreak tells a story. The point though is not to be defined by that one story. It is a limiting mindset since there are many other stories to our multitude.
The Static Cage: Because their entire cognitive focus is poured into not doing something, their dualistic worldview becomes defensive, rigid, and safe. They become risk-averse, black-and-white automatons. The chemical dependency is traded for an institutional dependency. Like being part of a cult.
In my view, there is more to life than not being something. What we resist, persist while conflict will always exist. For resistance to What Is is the root of suffering. The secret lies not in fighting the old paradigm, but in creating a new one that will exhaust the old one and render it obsolete. Resonating with more words of wisdom by
Carl Jung:
“I’d rather be whole, than good.”Sobriety without creativity is just an empty, sterile room. It is the definition of
clinical madness. That is, not use whatever happened to me to propel me forward, like a catapulted arrow shot with a bow. I didn’t break my chains just to sit peacefully in a sanitised corner counting days on a calendar. I took the chaotic, enigmatic, dangerous velocity that almost killed me during those years of street addiction, of doctor-prescribed meds, self-explorative inner journeys, and utilised and alchemised it to fuel my art and creativity — poetry, writing, drumming and founding a community across continents. I chose the
Path of the Razor’s Edge because I know in my heart of hearts that an examined life fully lived requires the Fire of the Soul. For that is how you suck the marrow out of it. And it is by creating who we become that we discover who we are at the core — step by step.
But again, that is just nonconformist me with my own unique biology, psychology, experiences, and set of circumstances: Precisely why this writing is not really a guide for beating or even dealing with addiction. Harm reduction? Much more likely.
More details from On The Road and off it are covered in the
Early Memories Never Worded series — recently migrated to One Lucky Soul here under the first
Subconscious Chronicles and its
Sequel.  |
The Solar Crown: Communing with the Sinai sun from the home patio
— Dahab, 2023 |
“The shadow is a living part of the personality and therefore wants to live with it in some form. It cannot be argued out of existence or rationalised into harmlessness. This problem is exceedingly difficult, because it not only challenges the whole man, but reminds him at the same time of his helplessness and ineffectuality.”
― Carl Jung
Accepting myself fully — the light, the heavy addiction years, the street-smart calculations and absurd ridiculousness, the wild psychonaut impulses, and the heroic journey — has been my not-so-secret. The “good”, the “bad”, the curiosity, imperfections, enthusiasm. The whole lot. I don’t run from my past, and I don’t pretend it’s gone. I even fully expose it every once in a while just as we are doing herein. For our shadow is not evil; it is to be accepted and integrated, to be able
to live in the joyful sorrow and the sorrowful joy of the knowledge of life as it is.
Looking back across this sprawling landscape, it is blazingly apparent that my entire experience with heroin and Subutex was the most traumatic, educating, cauchemardesque, and illuminating thing that has ever happened in my life. It really got my guts out. Yet, it was the precise blessing through which I learned to coexist with the totality of who I am.
The wound from which the Light enters.
This
Terence McKenna quote famously chiselled into
Food of the Gods often comes to mind when pondering my quest so far: “
The shaman is more than merely a sick man, or a madman; he is a sick man who has healed himself, who is cured, and who must shamanise in order to remain cured.”
The beginning of the shift was the same year my family left twenty long years of living in five-star hotels to move back into a normal flat; it was a desperate, unconscious reaction to losing my childhood playground — the then-
Rat Park — right as I entered the adult corporate rat race. Self-medicating with street junk was, ironically or may not, an attempt to break away from the shackles of industrialised conformity that was creeping up on me through those unfulfilling multinational corporate jobs.
And as we said, it was also the time when all the local highs we knew ceased to exist in the country while the “smarter, non-addictive molecules” from abroad were rarely ever available, certainly not to the average population.
But through a sequence of fortunate events, relentless perseverance, and a healthy dose of self-love I was able to reverse-engineering that chemical trap, more than once. I claimed the alchemical return. If I made it out of a decade of heavy opiate addiction nakedly and alone, then anyone can navigate their own toxic habits, be it alcohol, pills, sugar, or gambling. When you fight your own biology, or psychology, you cannot ultimately win — and nature is not to be conquered; it must be embraced.
True balance, or so it is said, is learning how to be at peace with your own internal chemistry, keeping the conscious ego silent while letting the demons ride securely in the backseat with their seatbelts on; sometimes even in the trunk, but in the car nevertheless. Sometimes you laugh at them, other times with them; a constant reminder not to take life or oneself too seriously — another essential. Otherwise, if suppressed, the parts of the self that one does not acknowledge, accept, face are pushed down deep into the subconscious where they run the nervous system without conscious permission.
Life begins all over again knowing that you can pretty much survive any internal or external terrain since you have learned how to dance natively with your own hell. When you realise you are enough in your own being. The less needs and attachments, the more at peace we become. To me, it lands like a quiet incantation:
I falter, balter, and dervish over the edge of The Wall of Paradise
With a grateful heart and with open eyes — all three of them realise
 |
| Sunrise salutations with the canine allies — Dahab 2026 |
I know I made it through the darkest, most treacherous terrain of my life, and so does my body. Yet unlike the institutional model that relies on perpetual defensive hyper-vigilance, I refuse to live a diminished, fearful existence — fearing my own inner light, that is. True, full, wholesome recovery cannot be measured merely by the passive absence of a substance; it must be defined by the active reclamation of one’s fire, autonomy, and edge.
Years ago, I came to the realisation that to feel fully, madly, unapologetically alive, I enjoy having something to chase — somewhat obsessively, one might add. To have my mind taken by it, absorbed, preoccupied. A mode of being essential to inner and outer exploration as it to creativity. Some call that relentless drive a passion, while some may call it an addiction, depending on what is being chased. At the same time, I developed an aversion to routine. While routine may be convenient and anxiety reducing to some, for a creative spirit it can mean stagnation and decay. I still like my morning coffee ritual and my monthly Full Lunacy; yet too much repetitions without occasionally stepping outside the circle to take a break — by refocusing and refreshing your lenses — can turn monotonously mechanical. I now make it a habit to break a habit ever once in a while — to feel rejuvenated.
Approaching fifty years old, I look at my eventful life and realise that the fire is still burning. The spark never went out; it just evolved, only to die with me when my time in the physical world comes to an end. The impermanence of life compels me to want to live it on my own terms — بالطول و بالعرض, diagonally too; thereby create my own values. Zooming out to see us tiny specs of dust floating in space on a rotating rock in an ever-expanding universe — as passing guests — for some decades demands nothing less.
Some experiment with a vast variety of “substances” just to find that baseline spark. For me, chasing sunrises and horizons became one trusted alternative. Others are drumming as well as deep conscious breathing and simple stretching among other mindfulness practices. The best part? Natural highs don’t have lows. The chemicals in the brain don’t go through a violent, exhausting crash afterwards. They linger, subtly rewriting your perspective.
The truth is, half the mental health crises we carry around in modern society stem from a brutal, systematic disconnection between human beings and the wild. We forgot the basic biological fact that we are nature. When you disconnect from the environment, you inevitably disconnect from yourself. May you always value and cherish the simple little things in Life. For they make a significant difference, and hence are the most essential.
Inside, Outside, Offside: Keep following the sun until you become the sun.
What a ride that I would never exchange for ANYTHING.
I used to battle, wrestle, and quarrel with my demons.
Now we cuddle, nuzzle, and snuggle.
─── ✵ ────── ✵ ────── ✵ ───
ACT X: The Solitary Gnosis and the Latest Sunrise
“As we advance in life
it becomes more and more difficult, but in fighting the difficulties
the inmost strength of the heart is developed.”
— Vincent Van Gogh
For the past four weeks of intense daily work, I have been carving this heavy piece of literature while sharing the summer house with my family on the North Coast of Egypt. Delving back into this sprawling, chaotic topography and recounting the warfare word by word in this memoir, my every nerve ending remembers the physical voltage of those days. It is emotionally draining to relive it all fifteen years later using nothing but words. Under the breezy Mediterranean summer sun, the tears flow naturally down my face; for tears are how the soul cleanses itself. And the final result is a monumental, alternate level of catharsis — a peaceful emotional release observed through my older, wiser eyes.
Recounting the minute details of the struggle and of surviving the trenches to my mother, the weight of the phantoms rushed back into the present. “I saw it”, I told her in tears, recalling that pristine, illuminated, mesmerising reality of my own non-addicted light first glimpsed in that Amsterdam hotel room. She calmly held my face in her hands, looked into my eyes, and encouragingly whispered: “And you did it.”
That profound maternal validation perhaps serves as living closure to the warfare. No loving hands would have never held my face inside any sterile programs or clinical institutions. If they had listened to me or tried to help me, it is because they are paid to. Nothing like a validation from my own mother who said she respected my will and passion to dissect myself to the public, to stand naked before you — knowing fully well that you cannot be blackmailed by your past if you are the one holding the megaphone. You become a celestial force of nature.
 |
Dare to create your own rituals. Not for anyone else to follow,
but for your own zen well-being |
As for Cairo, I had to teach myself not to blame the city for whatever I went through while there. With every short trip back over the past twelve years, I would actively remind myself of all the other great memories and wonderful relationships from ever since I was a child — because there is far more to this life than just the addiction. It is always easy to point fingers at your passionless jobs, your parents, your environment, or even your phantoms as the cause. But the reality is, we only become fundamentally free when we stop blaming anyone or anything for whatever happens in our lives — and actively own it all. When we transcend all bullshit, especially our own. Living in Dahab now, away from my family and few friends, is no longer an escape; it is a conscious choice toward my own well-being.
If it took fifteen long years for that emotional release to find its final resting place, then so be it.
To those currently trapped inside the dark, heavy trenches of the machine anywhere in the world, I offer no unrealistic promises or pre-packaged institutional templates — as we have established earlier with the “no bow tie” honesty. True recovery cannot be safely prescribed in a corporate clinical pamphlet, likely not on One Lucky Soul.
Truth is, support is indeed essential to the healing process, especially at the beginning stages. But constantly looking for an entity outside oneself to tell you how to navigate your own waves of life and regulate your own emotions impairs growth as much as it threatens freedom, independence, autonomy, and critical thinking. Because it implies to your every nerve ending that you are not enough to simply know yourself, to manage your own reality; that you need someone who supposedly knows more to lead you to health, salvation, enlightenment, or whatever it is you may be seeking. It’s an infantilising mindset. Conversely, learning how to regulate the mind-body connection is learning how to regulate one’s life, or more accurately, one’s response to life. And if we want full unadulterated truth, then it is for each individual to figure out what works for them.
On the other side of the coin, the compulsive, relentless need to save people that we see across the current healing industry — The Messiah Complex — often originates from an egoic and somewhat fallacious position of vanity and assumed authority and responsibility. The trick is, we cannot really heal, save, redeem, or awaken anyone. We can help only by loving them. Perhaps also by unknowingly inspiring them to find the love and the light within them; to become their own healer and saviour, independently of a doctor, healer, guru, spiritual figure. This is not established through any associations nor formal teaching, advice, instruction, doctrine, ritual or ceremony. But instead, by sharing our bliss, grace, peace, passion, sensibility, awareness, groundedness as well as our experiences — our energy. Self knowledge is a bottomless pit, which cannot be bought or studied, why it remains a solitary and often pathless endeavour.
Truly, if one is still waiting for some leader, guru, middleman, partner, or even certain institutions, strategies, methods, rituals, books, rules to offer them spiritual significance and to make them feel whole and safe and protected, they have not yet discovered the Tao to their full potential. For those means, like the lighthouse beams, are mere tools which could only point to the entrance of the cave, yet one must summon the courage to enter by themselves; so that they own their truth — without dependence. Realise
that no one is coming to save you. Once you save yourself, the Youniverse
will somehow conspire to help you out. But the work must be ignited
from within. You’ve got to want it in your every fibre. For we are our own victim as well as our own saviour; the
rest are mere excuses.
As such, each realised man and woman ought to be a light unto themselves. The more illumination on the individual level, the more illumination on the human collective.
The only real ethos is to think for yourself — that is the ultimate act of rebellion; to remain fiercely, unapologetically true to your own internal make-up. Become your own relentless researcher. Question everything, including yourself. Take custody of your own neurochemistry and recognise that you are the sole sovereign authority over your own flesh. Only you can tame your own monkeys.
The divine spark you seek is already within you. Allow it to shine through you unobstructed and it will eternally light your way.
And just like that, our multi-decades, multi-continental truth quest together draws to its natural end. For the lawless flâneur who just casual-strolled his way through a gruelling twenty-two thousand words of raw street Gnosis, the pavement is finally clear, the sun is shining directly over, above, through, and from the forehead. The horizon is wide open. Keep on keeping on.
I leave you with the below poem. One Love. 💜
 |
| Bonding over the music, the fire, and the full moon amid the elements like our ancestors have done for thousands of years: The living manifestation of yet another community built from scratch — Full Lunacy Dahab, 2026. |
— ☙ ❊ ❧ —— ☙ ❊ ❧ —— ☙ ❊ ❧ —When The Sky Spoke BackFlirting madly with the moon
Dancing naked in the sun
Sometimes a wild loon
Others son of a gun
Forever faltering and baltering to his own tune
Terrifyingly free yet unbearably all alone
That goon مجنون has no one to call his own
Kept seeking left and right before realising he was the one
Kept searching wrong and right then one day it was all done
You are The One, murmured a soothing voice
You are the one who has the choice
The one to ride the wave of life with all its ups and downs
Madcap laughters with sleepy children but also with sad clowns
Help dry his flowing tears to flash a smile and not a frown
Merry-go-round - Merry-go-round
Mary go round - Mary go round
The sound resound follow the hound
Through Le Rabbit Hole underground
Echoing in timeless caves
Humming in endless raves:
O’ Brother, you are The One
The one you’ve been waiting for
To liberate you — just point to the door
Step now into the darkness
Fear not, there is no harness
Magickal warrior of your own rhythm
Forget big words and their ism and schism
You are your fiercest enemy and your dearest ally
You are a sage and you are a lunatic
You are also The One who rises above both
Choosing which to side with the most
— no lie
You are never alone, whispered the gentle voice
Feel IT all around you, silence the background noise
You are one with the Consciousness of Mankind
You are one with the tress and bees
You are one with the cats and dogs
The entire natural world with its sheer magnificent beauty
The earth, water, air, and fire
One with the Muses, Sirens, Nymphs, and Mermaids
You are the cosmic melody to which the faraway stars, planets, galaxies are swirling
and whirling — with no aid
Your hopes, dreams, fantasies, orgasms, and desires
Your fears, pains, doubts, sorrows, and addictions
Are all but mere manifestations of the Youniverse
Fleetingly and momentarily experiencing itself in the singular
Trust the process. Embrace it all. For Love is The Way
Or so they say
You carry the torch of your species and you always have a choice
Now own it, kiddo, giggled the Orphic voice.  |
| Salute to your Souls — all Suntimentally |
——————————————————————————————
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