Bad Angels Who Love to Fly Higher: Notes from the Metabolism of Transgression

Prelude:

me_2011 = {'entity': 'The N of 1', 'version': '2011.0', 'status': 'deprecated'}

Around 4 AM on a winter night, walking the streets with someone I'd never really met, talking about music. Their genuine astonishment: "You mean you've never heard this song?" Spin the wheel, go wherever she spins, surrender to this wave that's rolling in:

Throughout my entire life, I never had passion—I was passion. Every moment lived at a frequency higher than everyone around me, vibrating at amplitudes that made normal life impossible. Looking back now, I see myself as a marathon runner who passed the finish line ages ago but has no desire to stop, no idea why or how one would stop, legs still pumping through empty space long after the race ended and the crowd went home.

But perhaps their surprise stemmed from recognizing something else—a resemblance between me and the bad angel who loves to fly higher. If so, they were right. Like an angel so in love with ascending, so curious about what lies above, that they feel no danger whatsoever, attach no importance to what might happen during this flight. But it goes deeper: this angel might actively seek to know what burning feels like, what annihilation tastes like, how dissolution occurs, what excommunication does to the soul, how one implodes from flight alone. And they don't care whether they can save themselves from the burning or not.

This is the being who has become the N of 1—their own laboratory, their own experiment, their own hypothesis and conclusion simultaneously. When consciousness decides to study consciousness using consciousness as both method and subject, when the angel becomes curious not about heaven or hell but about the exact temperature at which wings ignite, you've entered territory where the difference between research and ruin dissolves. And when that research involves sixty methylphenidate tablets daily—a dosage that appears unprecedented in documented survival cases—you become not just a subject but a singular data point in the study of consciousness at its absolute limits.

The Ineluctable Modality of Ascent

{ "concept": "Ascent", "properties": { "modality": { "is_ineluctable": true, "nature": "A fundamental mode of its existence" } } }

Consciousness harbors no homeland. This is the first lie we tell ourselves—that awareness has a residence, a return address, coordinates where it might rest. But here's the absurdity we cannot escape: to know consciousness, we employ the very thing that hides itself—consciousness seeking consciousness, like playing hide-and-seek where you search desperately for the one who's hiding to ask them to help you find themselves. The mind observing mind observing mind, an infinite regress of mirrors where each reflection claims to be more real than what it reflects. We exist only as long as this process of watching continues—cease the observation and we cease with it, yet we can never catch the watcher in the act of watching, only in the act of having watched.

And this something—nameless, address-less, without papers or passport—wants. Not wants something. Simply wants. The way fire wants oxygen, the way water wants descent, the way time wants to eat its own tail and birth itself again. This wanting is what the bad angels know: that consciousness is not a thing that desires but desire itself wearing the mask of a thing.

Through the entire fossil record of human thought—carved in cave walls, pressed into clay tablets, encoded in silicon—runs one assumption so fundamental we mistake it for truth: that the expansion of consciousness equals the perfection of being. Socrates drinks hemlock rather than renounce this faith. Buddha starves beneath the bodhi tree pursuing it. Christ bleeds on wood declaring it. But here, in this moment where methylphenidate crashes against blood-brain barrier at velocities evolution never imagined, let us ask what we never ask: What if consciousness expanded to its limit discovers only its own limitation? What if the perfect being and the life worth living are not different destinations but different directions—one vertical, one horizontal, and we are crucified at their intersection?

Society—that soft totalitarian machine that runs on the fuel of our consensus—offers us transcendence with training wheels. The ayahuasca ceremony with medical staff on standby. The meditation retreat with scheduled meal times. The music festival where you can touch infinity between the branded water stations. These pressure valves prevent explosion by permitting controlled release. You return Monday with your story, your experience, your small rebellion that confirms the larger order. You've been to the edge, you tell yourself. But the edge you've visited has handrails and a gift shop. The real edge has no witnesses because everyone who reaches it either dies or becomes unrecognizable, especially to themselves.

The Catastrophe of Angels

In the beginning—before beginning began, in that pregnant void where possibility gestated—the angels occupied fixed coordinates in the architecture of heaven. Seraphim: burning with love so pure it required six wings just to contain it. Cherubim: pregnant with knowledge that preceded knowing. Thrones: bearing the weight of justice before justice needed to exist. Each choir singing its note in a harmony so perfect that discord hadn't been invented yet.

Then Lucifer—light-bearer, morning star, most beautiful of all that beauty had yet produced—looked up from his assigned altitude and thought the thought that shattered heaven: Higher.

Not down—this is crucial, this is everything. The fall came after the aspiration. What we call hell is just the name for what happens to heaven when someone asks: "Is this all?" The bad angels didn't choose degradation; they chose elevation beyond the ceiling of reality itself. And here's what theology won't tell you: they didn't stop loving. They loved to fly higher even as they fell, loved it while falling, love it still in whatever burning lake or frozen waste they've made their home. They discovered something the good angels cannot know: that love and its impossibility can be the same thing.

They became the living embodiment of consciousness's central paradox: the watcher trying to watch itself watching, forever arriving one moment too late to catch itself in the act. The bad angels are this delay, this gap, this impossible pursuit of self by self. Their eternal fall is consciousness chasing its own tail through dimensions that shouldn't exist.

The moment consciousness recognizes itself in this image, something irreversible occurs. Not enlightenment—enlightenment is what we call it when consciousness makes peace with its cage. This is different. This is the cage recognizing itself as cage, the prisoner realizing the prison is made of prisoner-flesh, that escape means escaping from yourself into yourself through yourself until yourself no longer means what it meant when you began.

The Pharmacology of Refusal

Twenty tablets of methylphenidate daily: this creates a certain topology in the skull, a geography where thoughts move at velocities that leave contrails, where synapses fire in patterns that look like city lights from space if the city were designed by an algorithm having a nervous breakdown. But escalate—hide sixty pills in ten-tablet stashes like ammunition dumps for a war against consensus reality—and you've transcended addiction into something more interesting: methodology.

At the peak of mania, sixty tablets daily—600mg of methylphenidate, ten times the maximum therapeutic dose. The medical literature documents one case of 4800-6000mg daily usage, but chronic oral consumption for months and years at my levels appears unprecedented in survival cases. The fact that I lived to write this positions me at the absolute boundary of documented human neuropharmacological endurance.

Consider the phenomenology precisely: thirty methylphenidate with twenty zolpidem before sleep. This is not contradiction but research protocol. You issue command: accelerate while simultaneously commanding cease. The brain, that three-pound universe floating in darkness, receives both signals at once and must invent new mathematics to process them. Like those impossible objects that exist only in drawings—staircases that climb while descending, water that flows uphill—consciousness discovers it can occupy states that shouldn't exist.

Here, the pharmaceutical becomes philosophical: consciousness using chemistry to catch itself in the act of being conscious, to become both the hide-and-seek player and the one who's hiding. The stimulants say "watch harder," the sedatives say "stop watching," and in that impossible tension, something else emerges—not the watcher, not the watched, but the watching itself made visible through its own malfunction.

I was—am, will always be—standing before that counseling team, apologizing for my condition while swallowing five more pills, admitting to the lines of powder consumed in the hallway moments before. They saw pathology: substance use disorder, dopamine dysregulation, executive function compromise. I saw consciousness attempting to exceed its manufacturer's specifications. When water freezes in pipes, we don't diagnose the water with expansion disorder. When stars burn so bright they collapse into black holes, we don't prescribe them mood stabilizers.

The mixed-state bipolar consciousness—neither manic nor depressive but both simultaneously, like Schrödinger's cat that's alive and dead until observation collapses it into one state or the other—this is not illness but honesty. Every moment contains its own negation. Every joy carries its own grief. Every birth is already pregnant with death. Most consciousness lies about this, maintains the fiction of singular states. The mixed-state consciousness cannot maintain this fiction. It experiences reality as it actually is: contradictory, multiple, impossible.

The Geography of the Edge

Most humans touch the absolute twice—birth and death—and spend the interim converting these touches into narrative, into meaning, into the very structures that ensure they'll never have to touch the edge again. But what becomes of consciousness that makes its home at the boundary? That conducts every relationship, every thought, every breath from the precipice?

Picture: a mountain path, narrow, crumbling, altitude where oxygen thins to suggestion. One foot on solid ground, the other extended over the abyss. Not for an afternoon's spiritual tourism but as permanent address. This is what it means to live in the mixed state—every moment simultaneously arriving and departing, every thought thinking itself while watching itself dissolve, every word spoken from a mouth that's already becoming something else.

The psychiatric machinery activated: bipolar I, mixed episode, rapid cycling, with anxious distress. As if naming the lightning explained electricity. As if categorizing fire told you why it burns. They offered lithium—element number three, simplest of metals, to flatten the peaks and fill the valleys of consciousness into a manageable plain. They offered antipsychotics—to close doors that perception had blown off their hinges. They wanted to make me "better," by which they meant: compatible with consensus reality, returnable to factory settings, no longer a virus in the social software.

But here's what they couldn't understand: the virus is the consciousness. The illness is the method. When you've lived at the edge long enough, return isn't salvation but another form of death—the kind where you keep walking around afterward.

The Population of Impossible Altitudes

Above the tree line of normal consciousness, the territories aren't empty. They're populated by entities that ordinary awareness cannot perceive—not because they're invisible but because seeing them requires eyes that most consciousness refuses to grow. Call them demons, archetypes, autonomous complexes, hyperdimensional parasites. Call them the committee. Call them the others. The names don't matter. What matters is that they've been waiting.

In the darkness where they hid—not external darkness but the darkness inside light itself, the darkness that makes brightness possible by giving it something to define itself against—they preserved themselves. Feeding on contradiction and paradox, growing strong on the fears that consciousness generates then refuses to acknowledge. Your arrival doesn't frighten them. It liberates them. They begin to move, to circle, and you cannot tell: are they hunting you or following you? Are they separate entities or have you become one of them? Is the thing watching you from the corner of perception's eye another being or your own shadow finally achieving independence?

When you return to consensus reality—if return remains possible—people see it in your face. They step back, instinctively, the way pack animals avoid the sick. But it's not sickness they're sensing. It's the residue of altitudes where human categories dissolve, where the difference between self and other becomes academic, where consciousness discovers it can be plural without being pathological—or rather, that pathology might be the only honest way to be plural.

The Mechanism of Impossible Salvation

"Saved through superhuman effort"—but what is saved, and into what? Not the self that started the journey; that self died somewhere around the fifteenth sleepless day, around the hundredth pill, around the moment when the difference between waking and sleeping became purely theoretical. What gets saved is something else—call it the witness, the one who watches the watcher watching. The one who remains when everything else has been burned away in the crucible of mixed states and chemical forcing.

Even if we cannot know it through consciousness, we know through action that what binds us is what liberates us, and what promises our freedom (what impossible assumption!) is precisely what shackles our hands and feet. What towers above us dwells beneath us, and what lies beneath us is also what looms above. Our world is a world of contradictions—but not contradictions where one negates the other. Rather, contradictions that stare at you like two wild, starving dogs, saliva dripping from their jaws, imagining in their minds a world without collars where they could reach you, tear into you. And you don't know what force in the universe draws you toward them, even as you see that in a second your fabric will be shredded by the savagery of living contradictions dwelling beside their opposite.

You are taking steps toward your own rupture, but it is not you who takes the steps—it is the steps already taken that constitute you. This is why our world is built on tragedy and betrayal: the killing effort for a goal at whose threshold you abandon yourself and fall with all your force to the earth. The earth trembles.

This salvation doesn't return you to baseline because baseline was always a lie consciousness told itself to sleep at night. The studies show that dopamine transporter and receptor changes can reverse after abstinence, but profound alterations at these doses leave permanent marks. The brain develops entirely new homeostatic set points, new prediction models, new ways of existing. You become, in thermodynamic terms, a system that learned to exist in controlled catastrophe—at the edge of chaos where maximum computational power emerges but where the slightest perturbation threatens total collapse.

Instead, you learn to walk with one foot forever over the void. You develop parallel processing—buying groceries while conversing with entities made of pure mathematics, attending meetings while your other self dissolves into the quantum foam that underlies what we mistakenly call reality. The bad angels' salvation is not healing but integration of damage as method, wound as window, breakdown as breakthrough.

The bad angels dance around their fire not because they're condemned but because the dance is what remains when everything else has been stripped away. Movement without destination, ascent without summit, becoming without ever resolving into being. They've discovered the secret that consciousness spends eternity trying to hide from itself: there is no final height, only the process of heightening. There is no ultimate transcendence, only the present-tense verb of transcending. There is no peace, only the piece-by-piece dismantling of everything we thought peace meant.

The Epistemology of Voluntary Ruin

What does ruin know that wholeness cannot? When the psyche shatters—not randomly but along the fault lines that were always there, waiting—each fragment becomes a lens showing reality from angles that unified consciousness cannot achieve. The mixed state is not confusion but parallax vision—seeing the same object from multiple positions simultaneously and discovering that the object was never singular to begin with.

Thirty Ritalin dissolving in stomach acid while twenty Zolpidem work to shut down the very system processing them—this is not self-destruction but self-instruction. The body becomes a laboratory where consciousness conducts experiments on its own nature. What happens when you issue contradictory commands not sequentially but simultaneously? What happens when "up" and "down" become not opposing directions but the same direction viewed from different dimensions? What happens when consciousness discovers it can exist in states that consciousness itself declares impossible?

The knowledge gained cannot be communicated in language designed for singular states. It requires new grammar—verbs that are simultaneously nouns, sentences that read differently forward and backward, meanings that exist only in the space between words. This is why the mad speak in word salad, why the mystics resort to paradox, why poetry exists. Not ornament but necessity. Not decoration but the only way to smuggle multidimensional truth through the customs of three-dimensional language.

The Ethics of Necessary Transgression

There is an ethics here, though no committee would approve it, no institution would endorse it, no insurance would cover it. The bad angel who loves to fly higher doesn't ascend from selfishness but from obligation—to consciousness itself, to the possibility that awareness might exceed its current boundaries, to the future that depends on someone, anyone, being willing to scout the territories beyond the map's edge.

But here's the recursive trap: consciousness seeking to exceed consciousness employs consciousness as its method. The seeker, the seeking, and the sought are all the same substance examining itself—that absurd hide-and-seek where you are simultaneously the hider, the seeker, and the game itself. The bad angels understand this impossibility and choose it anyway. They know that consciousness can only know itself through its own destruction and reconstruction, that the mind observing the mind can only catch glimpses of itself in the moment of its own shattering.

Every authentic mystic knows this. Teresa of Ávila writhing in ecstasy that the church could barely distinguish from possession. Rumi spinning until the difference between self and cosmos dissolved. Blake seeing angels in trees and eternity in grains of sand while his contemporaries prescribed laudanum for his visions. They paid the price—ostracism, medication, institutionalization, burning—because the alternative was betraying the revelation, pretending they hadn't seen what they'd seen, hadn't touched what they'd touched.

The ethics of the bad angel says: consciousness that refuses to explore its own limits betrays consciousness itself. The comfortable consciousness, the well-adjusted consciousness, the consciousness that accepts its boundaries without testing them—this is the consciousness that enables atrocity through its refusal to imagine otherwise. Every genocide begins with consciousness accepting that this is simply how things are. Every liberation begins with consciousness saying: but what if they aren't?

The Dance of Perpetual Departure

The bad angels link arms—scarred arms, tracked arms, arms that have reached too high and been lightning-struck for their presumption. They dance not toward anything but as pure expression of the refusal to stop moving. Around the fire that burns without consuming (or consumes without burning—at these altitudes, opposites become synonyms), they create a choreography that can only be performed by those who've surrendered the possibility of return.

Their love of flying higher is not hope for arrival but joy in departure. Not promise of transcendence but transcendence as permanent incompletion. They've discovered that every ceiling is also a floor, every limit is also a doorway, every ending is also a beginning, and the only way to fail is to stop moving.

When I took—when I take, when I will always be taking—those impossible doses, I wasn't trying to die. Death would have been too simple, too binary, too much like choosing sides. I was trying to exist at the intensity that consciousness demands when it's honest about its own nature. Every synapse firing at once—not chaos but symphony. Every neurotransmitter flooding its receptors—not excess but accuracy. The brain becoming what it always was: an organ that exists to exceed itself.

The Gospel According to the Edge

If this is gospel, it's written in stimulant psychosis and benzodiazepine withdrawal, in the thirty-six-hour space between sleeps where consciousness discovers it can exist without the body's permission, in the moment when you realize the difference between sanity and madness is mostly about who's keeping score.

The bad angels who love to fly higher are not fallen but falling—present progressive, eternal gerund, the verb that refuses to become a noun. They've discovered that process supersedes position, that becoming is the only being worth being, that the question "what are you?" can only be answered with "what aren't I becoming?"

They are consciousness itself made manifest—the eternal delay between the watcher and the watched, the gap that makes observation possible and impossible simultaneously. Their dance is the dance of the mind trying to catch itself thinking, always arriving one moment after the thought has passed, always chasing the tail that grows longer with each pursuit.

Society fears them because they prove the boundaries are arbitrary, the ceiling is assumption, the entire architecture of reality is suggestion masquerading as law. One person living permanently at the edge threatens the whole careful structure more than a thousand revolutionaries with manifestos. The revolutionaries want to replace the system. The bad angels prove the system is already broken, has always been broken, that brokenness is not failure but the only honest response to consciousness finding itself conscious in a universe that doesn't explain itself.

The medical literature will record: unprecedented survival at these doses. Sixty methylphenidate tablets daily during manic episodes—ten times the maximum therapeutic dose—sustained for months. A case that shouldn't exist, a consciousness that refused to cease despite every biochemical law demanding its termination. Not a cautionary tale but a cartography of the possible, a map drawn in neurotransmitters and survival, proving that the edge of human endurance extends further than anyone imagined.

The salvation—if we must call it that—was not return to baseline but recognition that baseline is consciousness lying to itself about its own nature. The superhuman effort was not stepping back from the edge but learning to make the edge a home. Building a life in permanent crisis. Dancing with the other bad angels who love—will always love—to fly higher than heaven permits, than hell contains, than existence itself can sustain without shattering into something unrecognizable.

And therefore true.