Mini-update7/3/2019 In case you're wondering about what happens to comments for older posts, after some time has passed, they seem to disappear, but they actually haven't. If want to see them, click on the title for the post whose comments you want to read. (If you can't do that, then the post never had any comments in the first place.) Then scroll down, and you'll see a rectangle that has "(NULL) v". Click on it to reveal the comments. I mean to share this information earlier but kept forgetting to. Weebly simply hasn't fixed the problem in all these months.
The Self6/11/2019 Well, this time was a little different from previous times. Although I had some of the same thoughts about morality as I did last time, I had a few new ones.
I thought about how the universe is full of self-arranging systems. We have something called writing, which consists of symbols with no apparent intrinsic meaning but end up with meaningful sentences and how writing can be self-referential, such as “This statement is false.” Our brains are also self-referential because we’re self-aware. I’m sure I thought about this because I’m reading Gödel, Escher, Bach. I thought about the nature of memory. What we remember says a lot about us even though it’s supposed to be a record of something empirical. We choose what to focus on. Our biases can even warp our recollection of something. Even when we retrieve memory, that seems to affect the memory itself. It often alters it rather than preventing it from fading. That even seems to apply to overthinking. Overthinking has often gummed up the works of my brain, and I think ketamine used to help a lot with that. Unfortunately, I don’t believe I’ll ever achieve the tranquility to do anything to stop that problem. I simply can’t meditate. Unfortunately, I have been getting worse, mood-wise, since the treatment yesterday. This Is Getting Monotonous5/14/2019 During the prolonged period I went without ketamine due to my being fed up with going to San Francisco, I felt worse to the point of thinking about suicide. I eventually decided with much reluctance to go to S.F. again to get another ketamine infusion. (BTW, don’t get coverage from Kaiser Permanente if you want mental health treatment. The people in charge of running it are the worst.)
Since I felt my depression compromising my cognition, I was hopeful I’d benefit a lot from it this time. Unfortunately, it only cleared my mind a little and had no effect on my mood. But let me tell you about the experience this time. I ended up experiencing the same things I’ve already described in this blog. Yet again I felt worse (at first) because I associate the hospital with bad memories. Yet again I felt as though I had some bird’s eye view of the world and its history and how human society has unfolded through the millennia. The only wrinkle in the experience this time was that I also thought about game theory too. That’s probably because of this video I watched the day before. It got me thinking about whether morality is in some way connected to the Nash equilibrium point. If so, that would explain the rise of empathy, outrage, and other emotions associated with morality. Hell and Back4/28/2019 I've decided to share another fascinating article on ayahuasca, this one from the same person who recommended The Doors of Perception:
www.kirasalak.com/Peru.html Some thoughts on it: There are, of course, similarities between this and Sean Illing’s Vox article, but the one I found the most interesting was how both authors decided to take a second trip even though the first time cleared up their depression. Perhaps Sean also had “stubborn enemies” hiding out in his psyche. There’s also something Salak mentions that reminds me of something I mentioned in a post of mine (my-third-session.html): directness. It seems ketamine and ayahuasca alike are good at bypassing the need for a therapist and getting directly to “the core”. Another thing that resonated with me is the suppression of emotions. I too don’t feel it’s a sign of strength and feel resentful about the fact I’ve felt the need to suppress some of my emotions related to my depression. All that being said, I found one striking difference between Salak’s article and Illing’s: Salak’s trip seemed to be much more religious in nature. It makes me wonder if it has something to do with the fact that Salak took the drug in Peru whereas Illing took it in Costa Rica. Perhaps it’s a cultural difference between the two places? One major component of this can be seen in a metaphorical light though the shamans don’t seem to see it that way. According to them, whenever a traumatic happens to us, we lose a part of our spirit. Unless we undergo soul retrieval, those parts will be forever lost to us. Each one contains an element of who we truly are: sense of humor, trust of others, innocence, etc. There’s also the part mentioning the materialist angle. Salak talks about how she grew up among “fundamentalist atheists” (whatever that means). Her lack of happiness, though, drove her into the arms of shamanism. Furthermore, it’s difficult to catalog the drugs effect because it seems to affect people on three different levels: the physical, psychological, and spiritual. However, I nevertheless agree with Benny Shanon’s take: “Under [ayahuasca’s] intoxication, people’s imagination and creative powers are greatly enhanced. Thus, their minds are prone to create the fantastic images they see with the brew” and Ralph Metzner’s observation “[Healing with ayahuasca] presumes a completely different understanding of illness and medicine than what we are accustomed to in the West.” I don’t think the problem is materialism per se. Rather, our use of science over the centuries has sterilized the world too much for us, and we’ve lost touch with a part of what it means to be human. That’s why Joseph Campbell’s works are so popular. Like lost knowledge about sleep, we’ve lost the art of myth making. For instance, although scientists have confirmed the existence of animals like the giant squid, there seem to be no more monsters left in the world. Maybe the old will be new again. The brutal mirror4/22/2019 Since I have nothing in particular to share for a while, I've decided I'd share this fascinating article on ayahuasca:
www.vox.com/first-person/2018/2/19/16739386/ayahuasca-retreat-psychedelic-hallucination-meditation Some thoughts on this: It's interesting to see how similar this is in some ways to Huxley's experience of taking mescaline and my experience of taking ketamine. Ayahuasca, mescaline, and ketamine are all psychedelic drugs. Huxley reported feeling dissociation when in his garden while on mescaline. I concluded years ago that the self is an abstraction although that was due to conscious contemplation, not ketamine. The Zen quality he alludes to (namely, “And I think about how I’m going to look at my wife when I get back home, and how she’ll know I’m seeing her — really seeing her — for the first time all over again [emphasis mine].”) reminds me of the Zen quality I've mentioned before about ketamine and the one Huxley mentioned about mescaline. (fourth-session.html and fifth-post.html) His getting to relive certain moments from his life and setting them right reminds me of my post in which I mentioned thinking about the different stages in one's life and how I felt regret that I'd missed out on so much. (february-21st-2019.html) The heart of the article, however, is the lack of ego the author Sean Illing experiences. Ayahuasca allows him to escape his ego and, thus, observe himself as a neutral third party would. No wonder he describes it as a shortcut to what years of serious, disciplined meditation can bring you. Given how hard I find meditation, it sounds like something I'd like to try, much more so than mescaline actually. My review of The Doors of Perception4/13/2019 As I’ve said before, before I left Facebook, someone recommended The Doors of Perception to me. As I read it, I could see why she. It’s similar in some ways to my experiences with ketamine. But it was also different enough that I decided to write a review, which will hopefully help the reader to see the differences and similarities between Huxley’s experience and mine.
The Doors of Perception is an essay about Aldous Huxley’s experience taking mescaline and his musings that result thereof. On May 3rd, 1953, Humphry Fortescue Osmond (referred to as an “investigator”) arrived in West Hollywood at Huxley’s house to administer mescaline to him, and Huxley’s experience was recorded on a dictating machine so as to refresh his memory of what was said. Upon mescaline taking effect, what ensues is an odyssey centering around the way mescaline shapes the way Huxley perceives both the outscape (i.e. the physical world) and the inscape (i.e. the mind). This can be broken down into two basic qualities: an additive quality and a Zen quality. The additive quality enables Huxley to perceive more — such as “supernaturally” brilliant colors he couldn’t see earlier -- but this isn’t limited to enhancing perception that deals with “the implied questions to which [sense organs respond]”. It also enables him to see beyond the carefully selected utilitarian material our “narrow” minds can normally perceive. It opens, as it were, the doors of perception. For instance, measurements, locations, and even time cease to be important to Huxley, resulting in his small typing table, wicker chair, and desk appearing flattened and distorted, like still life in a Cubist painting. Thus, when Osmond asks him about space and time, he replies, “There seems to be plenty of it.” His mind is no longer concerned with measures and locations per se but with being and meaning. He even declares, “This is how one ought to see, how things really are,” while obsessively fixating on the minutiae around him: the “labyrinth of endlessly significant complexity” made by the folds in his trousers, the “Inner Light” of some flowers, or the “miraculous tubularity” of the chair’s legs. However, he realizes that if one always saw things this way, one would never want to do anything else, and that is perhaps why our brains limit our perception. Mescaline gives access to contemplation that is incompatible with action and even the will to action. The Zen quality is what most of Huxley’s other revelations stem from: what the Dharma-Body of the Buddha is, how one’s own mind contains mere symbols for Suchness (much as writing is symbols for objects and concepts), and what the “not-self” truly is—something made possible by the experience of dissociation, which also makes him realize what it must be like to schizophrenic. These give rise to some of the essay’s most fascinating sections. For instance, religion, poetry, and art have placed greater importance on the “inscape” than on tangible objects as the former are supposed to have greater spiritual value because familiarity breeds contempt. Taoists and Zen Buddhists, though, are an exception. Not surprisingly, it was only in the Far East that landscape painters consciously regarded their art as religious. Or take his observation that the urge to transcend the self is universal. Healthier "doors in the wall", or escapes, are needed than alcohol and tobacco. Some will be activity- or knowledge-based, but the need for chemical vacations will still remain. What is needed is a benign drug which will do that, and that drug, Huxley claims, is mescaline in modified form (its effects last too long in its natural form). After all, the fact that there is a worldwide connection between religion and drugs points to the fact that they are for satisfying the same needs, and one of those needs is self-transcendance. In fact, for the Native American Peyotists, religious experience is something more direct, illuminating, and spontaneous and not so much the product of the superficial, self-conscious mind. They’re also generally more industrious, temperate, and peaceable than non-Peyotists. However, what really gets to the heart of his essay is reflections on the limits of words. Words can refer to sensations, feelings, insights, and such, but they're only an indirect way of conveying them. We can infer how the speaker might feel based on our own experiences, but we may miss important information. As such, one can never really know what it feels like to be someone else or truly understand what someone else feels. Huxley says gestalt psychologists have devised ways to help overcome the limits of language and further claims there is no interest in their methods in academia, but this is where the essay starts falling flat. According to him, rationalists, intellectuals, educators, psychologists, philosophers, and clergy won’t give gestalt psychologists’ methods a chance because “[in] a world where education is predominantly verbal, highly educated people find it all but impossible to pay serious attention to anything but words and notions.” He also claims direct perception of the inner and outer worlds should be unsystematic. He even considers systematic reasoning to be poor at understanding the relationship of words to things! Perhaps he saw reality as a bunch of stray information and a systematic approach as something that contaminates it. However, one must have a way of sorting through that information and making sense of it in a way that doesn’t produce inconsistencies. Being systematic can help one avoid making erroneous assumption and can help one decide whether a conscious or subconscious approach is better. And it certainly isn’t at odds at understanding the limits of language. Overall, though, I highly recommend The Doors of Perception to anyone looking to enhance his or her understanding of reality. And...... nothing4/9/2019 Unfortunately, I missed the ketamine session I was supposed to get yesterday due to some balls up. I'm now waiting for the day I don't have to keep going to San Francisco to get it.
April 06th, 20194/6/2019 Coming up...Unfortunately, my two sessions in March failed to have any appreciable effect on my mood. However, I can look forward to having my next session in just two days, and you the reader can look forward to reading my review of Aldous Huxley's essay The Doors of Perception next week.
April 06th, 20194/6/2019 "Suzy, 12/11/1935"This is a belated post from a session in January.
This session was less effective than the previous one, but it definitely still had an effect. The first thing I noticed was a falling sensation like falling out of a chair tilted back except that the bed I was lying on felt tilted back. This sensation lasted quite a while. Periodically throughout most of my session, I'd hear, “Suzy, 12/11/1935” coming behind the curtain separating my bed and the one next to mine. I thought about what a long time ago 1935 was, and this got me thinking about times in our lives. I wondered what Suzy's birth looked like on that day that happened so long ago and thought about how much the world has changed since then. I thought about my own past life and how I wish I could revisit some scenes from it and make different decisions, but time is unidirectional. I even thought about time in general. We don't understand what it is. Physicists have found themselves stumped, and philosophers have helpfully pointed out to them they'd been using time to describe itself. As as a little kid, I found myself perplexed by how time could or couldn't have a beginning. My mom was puzzled when I asked her, “What's the first day?”, not realizing I meant, “What was the first day ever?” I then saw myself looking down on Earth throughout the ages and felt like the master of all I surveyed as I saw things coming together on increasingly small scale in fractal-type manner. First star dust clumped together to from Earth. Then Earth's volcanoes spewing lava and such. Eventually, things settled down enough for molecules to form the first life forms. Then self-aware animals competed with each other until some species developed empathy, leading to social species working as groups. Then humans engaged in inter-tribal warfare. Some of them would leave the Stone Age, and they would carry on fighting in the Bronze Age, forming the first civilizations, then the first city-states, and then the first nations. Then I'd see the pattern repeat with business mergers leading to large corporations having monopolies in their respective fields. Finally, throughout my session, I wished there were a way to record my thoughts directly since I knew I'd forget quite a bit before since there is always some delay between my session and my writing of it. Yes-- some interesting details from this session and all the other interesting ones will be lost forever because of that. Aldous Huxley apparently didn't have this problem, though, since he mentions in The Doors of Perception a psychiatrist there to record his thoughts. That may be due to difference between ketamine and mescaline, though. February 21st, 20192/21/2019 Coming up...I have another session soon. I have another post in the pipeline too from January.
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