Category: Psychedelics

It’s pretentious hippies all the way down

The most bored or perhaps most pretentious of a post-scarcity society will want their art to reach new heights. Their art will involve multi-sensory engagement to excite the senses. Why listen to music when you can listen to music that simultaneously washes a warm breeze through you or stabs you with icy daggers?

The trend will be to dare to experience art in more and more raw ways. Be immersed for longer or with more pain. Eventually they will remove some safety measures – the capacity to tap out of the virtual environments where art is being experienced. People will have no choice but to dive in and live through the entire experience, no matter how intense or painful. 

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Cabal

My horrifying psychedelic experiences make me feel like I’m part of some secretive cabal in possession of the core truth of reality, the utter pointlessness and cruelty of existence.

But this cabal is compelled to keep this bitter truth a secret because it does no benefit to share it, other than causing horror and despair – and they do not have so much hubris that they can’t accept there is a small chance they are wrong and some bold brave saviour will appear some day to present us with a new truth, a happy truth.

As much as they scoff at this possibility they must accept it as just that, a possibility – and in that eventuality, no matter how unlikely, it is also possible that spreading the (unbeknownst to them) false truth of the utter hopelessness of sentient existence actually precludes the appearance of this merciful saviour and may act as a self-fulfilling prophecy.

So this cabal begrudgingly maintains its secrecy despite its desperate wish for all sentient beings to know its truth. Thus stumbling upon this truth and the aforementioned extensions of its logic introduces the piteous sentient being who beholds it to the secret and at once the cabal who holds it. You have become a member of a sect who can know each other only in allusions and hints.

Reflections on the horror of existence

I wrote this in my journal about four years ago. I wanted to put it here because it’s worth remembering these things, and being aware that my current sense of peace and fortunate privilege is all ultimately a part of the universal awareness trying to hide from the horror of itself.

It’s been a while since my LSD trip. About three months. And I feel like I’m gradually coming back to some kind of sanity and reality. But I feel like things have changed forever, like I’ve woken up to a reality that is more intense and terrifying, but also more vivid and beautiful, than I could have ever imagined.

I think the biggest change has been that I’ve realised that things are the way they are, because they’re the way they are. That sounds pretty stupid… but what I’m getting at is that the meaning of existence is inherent… things exist because they don’t not exist. It’s like why creatures evolve to suit their environments; filling a niche because that’s just what happens. I’m filling a Patrick niche, my own little bit of consciousness, because there is an infinite realm of possible consciousness that I inhabit a tiny part of.

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Army of Absolutes

This is a tongue-in-cheek story roughly based on some choice ayahuasca trip reports.

Please do not take it too seriously.

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Content notice: Racism, misogyny.

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The bile pours out of his mouth into the plastic bucket

“No more!” is this boy’s mantra

But it keeps coming…

And the icaros continue…

Plaguing him with their terrifying Spanish-ness.

The headdress makes the shaman look like the devil.

Their savage superstitions are killing him!

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There is no LSD

This is a long story. It has two perspectives.

(1) I woke up one morning, took a moderate dose of LSD, had a psychotic break that lasted three days, and have continuing psychological issues as a result of the experience.

(2) We are all being constantly expelled from Divine Source, like loose clay from a spinning potter’s wheel, and enter deeper into illusion the further from Source we are flung. There was no LSD, there is no me, I am alone and lost, forever.

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The Noumenon-Numinon Nominum

The terms “Noumenous” and “Numinous” have both been used to describe the psychedelic experience, despite having etymologically distinct origins.
 
Noumenon is a term popularised by Kant to be contrasted with the term “phenomenon” – interpreted either as meaning “that which is thought” (as opposed to “that which is perceived”), or as the “unknowable nature of things.” It is derived from the Greek “noûs” meaning “mind.”
 
Numinous means “spiritual, mystical or religious in nature,” but can also be interpreted to mean a form of knowledge that can only be evoked through direct experience (rather than rationalisation or objective learning). It is derived from the Latin “numen” meaning “a deity or spirit residing over a place.”
 
These two words could arguably be sorted into the same Nominal (derived from the Latin “nomen” or “name”) category, since they both describe common facets of the psychedelic experience.
 
The “Noumenon-Numinon Nominum”