psychedelics

WOW! Just found out that even though McKenna was the first person to publish a hypothesis on The Stoned Ape theory, someone else was casually excited about in the 1970s … FRANCIS CRICK, the guy who discovered the DNA double helix (he’s like the polar opposite of McKenna, honored for his contribution on making sense of human genomics).

Crick never pu

Terence McKenna, Food of the Gods, p.9:

"Psychedelic shamans now constitute a worldview and growing subculture of hyper-dimensional explorers, many of whom are scientifically sophisticated. A landscape is coming into focus, a region still glimpsed only dimly, but merging, claiming the attention of rational discourse—and possibly threatening to confo

The terms “set and setting” are common in psychedelic use, but the term “matrix” (by Betty Eisner) is little known. Matrix is the cultural substratum that enable all possible set and settings to unfold within. Consider the difference in matrix between the summer of love and the following blackout and Ancient Greece where entheogens were state-contr

A friend mention that he had “been to hell” on a psychedelic trip and experience cosmic horror. “Been to hell.” I found humor in the phrasing. You’ve “been to hell”… and now you’re back here on Zoom? I thought hell was a one-way ticket? It frames hell not as “the bad place at the end of the line,” but something you can experience and survive and le

On college, I ran into a high school friend on the train, and told him that my thesis was about designing facilities for psychedelic therapy. He was confused. When he took shrooms in a car with his friends, they were just laughing hysterically for 3 hours over stupid shit. The idea of this being a medicine did not computer. Shows how at low doses,

Psychedelic use in ancient and modern times … the modern brain has 20k words, so a psychoactive has a “scrambling” effect. But, in the Stoned Ape Theory, imagine a tripping hominid with only a bank of 20 words. It would be a different experience. In some ways, it’s probably more extreme for a creature trapped in their own constructs of language.

Psychedelics (and marijuana) disrupt local maxima. They break you out of an ecological rut, out of a pattern of thinking, out a rigid frame. It helps creative problems be seen in a new way. It shows wider sets of possibilities.

I like the Carlin saying of “get the message and hang up the phone.” Substances can teach your mind new pathways of thinkin

I imagine psychedelics to be a reset of your internal architecture, (at least from a high dose); a tabla rasa, rebuild based on your patterns and values. In some cases, a rebuild goes well, but there are unpredictable cases, where some freak thing can corrupt a re-compile. There are many cases of this: of people who are disoriented for like 6-18 mo

I’m nervous to try mushrooms and have a bad trip, so I thought maybe I should try them on my birthday, the happiest day of the year, but then I realize it’s also the one day every year where everyone in my life calls me to talk for 3 minutes, which is lovely on a normal day, but difficult on three dried grams when you can’t form words.