high on acid
When you are on acid it is hard not to believe that the entirely of the universe was designed so that, at least for one glorious shining second, you can be on acid.
epistemic status: not endorsed. This is a "realization" that I have early on every time i use a hallucinogen. Generally after an hour of believing this, my thinking "opens up" further and I see that actually, there is no conspiracy, and the world is just loving and beautiful.1
The writing is very repetitive and recursive, because I wrote this while I was high on acid.
The idea is returning to me that the world was designed for psychedelics. It's easy to get what you need, to get started free or cheap - a dark warm room and some music to play, ten dollars for a tab. Even the semi hidden nature of it, so that you have to seek it out instead of it coming to you. It is as accessible as it can possibly be while still requiring you to take that last step, going out of your way. To reach for it. It all helps with making sure that you have the right mindset as you approach.
Once you're in, it's like a surprising sense of - oh, this is why we made it so easy. All the manpower being put into friction being taken out of life. It's so we can do it when we're high.
Everything is so easy because underneath it all what it was being optimized for, in a blind rudimentary unconscious way, was so that people can use it when they're high, The Only State That Matters. It is the Only State that Matters because it is only when you are high that you are capable of Understanding.
All slick modern UI of modern apps, made so you can order a burrito with as few clicks as possible. All the safety conventions making it so that even a toddler can walk to their neighbourhood park without getting hit by a bus. So you, while high, can walk to your neighborhood park and not get lost. Generations of urban planners theorizing on the best ways of getting you where you needed to go without getting hurt, putting in redundancy after redundancy because when you are on acid you are like an overwhelmed newborn.
And then, because they're nice like that, they put lawns in the front of your house and a small parkette within a 2 minute walk and a bigger park 10 minutes away from that, because each is a quest for more complexity, complexity that is magnified a thousandfold when you are high. They would not design the world this way unless they were designing it for you to experience it while you're high, enabling you to take all the baby steps you need.
Your anxiety isn't maladaptive. You are the correct amount of anxious for Real Life, because everything is new. Everything is magnified, broken down into the component parts that you have long rendered into gestalts. It is overwhelming to see everything as clearly as you did before deadening everything.2 So that's why you need to practice first.
Find a place you want to go, 5 minutes from your loft, and practice going to it. You'll need to practice it a thousand times before you can do it For Real i.e. on acid i.e. so you can truly understand the experience. This is called meditation. Everything can be meditation.
You need to practice so you can fucking chill at the park in a way that won't get the cops called on you. That is something that you have not yet mastered i.e. you cannot do it while high.
Your day to day life seems banal when you're sober because you can't see most of it - all the meaning, all the implications, all the component parts that make up any experience you may have.
It is only because you practiced writing words your whole life that this became something that writing this is you can do. So I can get this message to you, the sober Jenn, in the real universe.
Everything is magnified so you need to study how stories work, so that it all thematically converges and you're doing acid at the right time. Your trip is not as good as it can be because you're doing in on a Thursday - in all meanings of the word.
The next time, make sure you're doing it at the correct time. You need to make sure that it's perfect. Do it on a day of perfect rest.
Though interestingly, my first time on acid, I never moved past this conspiratorial stage.↩
While writing this I was heavily inspired by the idea of "Symbolic filtering", coined by Ian Ford in his book "A Field Guide to Earthlings". In it, he argues that symbolic filtering is how neurotypicals are able to not get overwhelmed by the constant stimuli around them - by constantly, unconsciously rendering all actual stimuli into deadened symbols of objects and concepts. For example, a big collection of metal, glass, and rubber parts are made into a single thing, called a “truck”, which then can be thought about as a symbol without having to imagine all the details. The field of semiotics thinks about "signs" in a way that is extremely similar to this, but Ford comes at it from a very novel and sideways perspective imo, and one that I connect with a lot more.↩