psychedelics
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,
... See moreA 2023 genomic analysis shows that psychedelic mushrooms go back 60-65 million years, around the same time that dinosaurs went extinct. The mass-extinction event created new environmental conditions, creating all sorts of evolutionary pressure. So basically, shrooms that appeared poisonous on a first-go were more likely to survive because they dete
... See moreI’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.
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
... See moreWOW! 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
... See moreAfter looking at those futuristic covers from 2050—each of which had transhumanist or extreme back-to-nature vibes—it got me wondering: what the hell might life be like in 2100? The lead up to the 1950s had a naive futurism that exploded by the end of the century. In 1950, computers were room-sized and not even thought (by most) to have any real im
... See morePsychedelic 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.
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
... See moreTerence McKenna, Food of the Gods, p.9:
... See more"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