On Psychedelics
I wrote -
Hello :name-retracted:!
Last night, I watched the movie Her. It was a fascinating movie on emotions and AI. It was one of its kind and made me think a bit. Humans created a consciousness in the movie, and at one point it started wondering about itself.
Maybe a lot of humans, at some point in their lives, think about the purpose of their lives (Hilariously reminds me of "You pass butter"). I found myself in the situation for the first time right after JEE, but later I forgot as programming happened to me. And then, again after reading Sapiens this December. And now, it's stuck in my head. It's not always a negative thought, a lot of times I happen to be smiling and puzzled as well.
I'm glad psychedelics exist in the world. It made me constantly aware of the mysterious and unknown, made me witness colors never seen before, geometries beyond apprehension, and gifted a broad palette of emotions.
Often at times, I self-construct arguments against psychedelics being good and then later work on the counter-arguments. I have an interesting thought to share.
Think of our ancient tradition. Children during their brahmacharya were recommended to have a Guru. It was a norm to grow up having a guru. In the case of Eklayva, his teacher was a statue, not a living person. So, Guru was a concept but mostly found in the form of life. I highly recommend a thoughtful psychedelic experience to my friends once in life. I ask them to respect what they think of intaking. I believe these chemicals and plants have the potential to be the guru in this modern age. That is the thought. Also, not all teachers and teachings are good (thus, Bad Trips), but there is always a lesson to learn, always a lesson to think about.
:name-retracted: responded
and gifted a broad palette of emotions.
I believe the emotions I have collected from the small out-of-world experience I had is the best thing I kept with myself after the trip. Now I listen to the same music with more intense emotions. Now I live the same life with more vividness. (And the most wonderful thing about reading your mail is: I hadn't given many thoughts how these emotions emerged, I will now. Surely, these trips have changed my composition as human. (Romantic ahaa!))
We all have our unique mental models about the world and there are a lot of mental models trying to dictate our ways through life. (Most people aren't even aware of them. - I wasn't aware until I went for that Himachal trip).
Example: the usage of 'we' everywhere is a small mental model about the world, watching a series of actions like a sequential programmer is another mental model, trying to optimize petty things, and watching people as a neural network model is another. We had these experiences and we have these models in our mind.
These are the consequences of being from :state-name-retracted:, being a c++/python programmer, competitive programmers, deep learning engineer in the order the examples are given.
And when I took pyshedelics, I created another mental model. It is about open-mindedness. It is compassionate and weak as a twig, at the same time it is strong as the storms. It embraces other mental models and tries to break them from bias.
Maybe if I hadn't taken it, I wouldn't have come out from the clutches of commitment. Staying in commitment for the sake of it is biased. (Commitment in itself is not).
When you are about to break a commitment, there is a lot of 'socio-cultural' norms to stop you. More than anything, it is your mind asking you not to do it for the sake of 'moral' compass you have set. Then you realize 'love' is greater than any norms/compass and that love shouldn't make you feel mediocre. I realized I feel more loved(more dopamine) when I see the white moon by the trees than her (This was the snap moment, our last LSD trip). I had written a small sentence during those time:
"Kahu kaise tujhe ki ek samandar se sukoon mila par dhoop nikalne pe wapas jana hai" (Hindi)
And it doesn't mean that you hate the ocean, that you have suddenly started hating it. It's just that if 'love' is there, you'll carry the essence of the oceans within you, wherever you go. Everyone carries something, and you shouldn't carry the things just for the sake of carrying(commitment just for the sake of commitment) but only if you want to (love).
I am always a tiny bit confused in this matter. There is yet some fingerprints on the glass, next psychedelic would help me get it cleaner.
So here is how I used some open-mindedness I gathered from my trips. It shackled some norms set in my mind.
I highly recommend a thoughtful psychedelic experience to my friends once in life.
Just to clarify, I would like to add a single point. It's for everyone but not 'every'time. I can provide almost anyone with an LSD but not DMT. Even :name-retracted:, I have never given him DMT. It's just that you have to feel (judge) whether they would embrace what they see. These are tough things we are looking at, it can make people but break them too.
I really believe you already know this but added for the sake of availability bias.