Mind
Often I feel a feeling that does not flee. It makes my skin crawl, my hair stand up, and floods my chest with an empty anxious feeling. It’s deeply disturbing and extremely uncomfortable to sit on these thoughts that I cannot seem to untangle. Most would consider these thoughts ridiculous things to get hung up on, yet here I am. How do we know we’re interacting with reality at all? Why do I always feel like there is a thin veil between my conscious experience and something more? Why do I always feel like I’m constantly trying to figure myself out? Trying to define and sort through every single concept or idea that appears in my head, always frantically trying to categorize and conceptualize what it is that I’m experiencing or thinking. Am I tuned in to the minor thought processes that most people are able to tune out? Am I just hyper aware of my own existence and tiny changes in perception? This is just one single chain of thought that I go through all day long. I’m on an anti-depressant and an as needed anxiety pill, I also use Delta-8 THC and recently have been taking some live-resin cannabis vape carts. I still cannot shake this feeling. I can’t go a single day without thinking about my own existence and where it’s leading to. It all started from an interest in psychedelic drugs.
Since the age of 13 I’ve always been fascinated by drugs and altered states of consciousness. After smoking weed every now and then when I was 13-15, I was deeply interested in Eastern religions and their paradigm of the world. I fell in love with a lot of Buddhist thought and was plunged on a path in search of Enlightenment and eternal Truth. Little did I know that my journey was folly, as I now have an entirely different view of what “truth” even means. I can’t even talk about it with twisting my words through an epistemological solipsistic brain fart. I searched through altered states of consciousness, meditation, lucid dreaming, scam enlightenment con artists, a lot of random internet forums and then eventually stumbled across psychedelics. Instant captivation. I was obsessed. It wasn’t until I was 18 or 19 that I tried them for the first time and was blown away by their intensity. I dropped a tab of acid with my friend in his basement, we went on a walk, longboarded at night and then went to a party where we stayed up until 5 in the morning because we couldn’t sleep and didn’t want to be fucking high anymore. After that, the gates were open.
The insights I found on acid were astounding. I took LSD probably 4 times after that initial experience before attempting anything else. I was visiting my friends in college when someone said they didn’t want to take their mushrooms anymore because they had shit to do, so they wanted to sell them to me. Of course, I bought the 2 grams of shrooms from him and ate them on a pizza. I cashed out on their couch and listened to music for 2-3 hours with a couple other people we were with and it plunged a feeling into my heart that I will never forget. The emotional intensity I found on mushrooms was unfathomable. You feel rooted to the eternal state of being. You feel connected not only to yourself, but to the very foundational nature of reality. Intermingling with an experience like that only fueled the fire to my quest. I was determined to figure out what the true nature of reality was. I thought I was in a secret club. The feeling you get after you take psychedelics is like youre in on some sort of grand cosmic joke. For me, it was an absurdist feeling of all of us just being a bunch of clothed fucking apes looking ridiculous all of the time.
When I lived in my own apartment around 19-20 years old I was fascinated by Terence McKenna. I heeded his advice and decided to take 5 dried grams. I talked to my local guy, snagged some Gold Caps, and weighed out 5 grams when I got home. I was cautious, but nothing could stop me at that point. I started out just playing games on my computer until I could feel it encroaching on me through my stomach. I’m a person who is very in tune with their body, so I’m sensitive to slight changes in perception. I walked out to my balcony and decided to bring a chair out to sit down and just enjoy the nice weather and vape some nicotine. I sat for a while until my crazy neighbor came outside and decided she was going to smoke on her balcony right when I was outside. She was staring at me and trying to talk to me. I froze multiple times and didn't know what to say because I felt very awkward. She probably knew I was high because my eyes were definitely boomed and things were starting to sound really muffled. I went inside when I could exit the conversation at the easiest convenience. I jumped on to the couch and snagged my good headphones and there I went sailing across the vast sea of the invisible landscape.
Some notable moments throughout the night we’re things like feeling very primal and stripping my clothes off while almost pissing on my kitchen floor, sprawling out on the carpet experiencing my own birth and death, seeing the eternal drum beat to the dance of existence, wanting to go roll around in the grass outside but still being conscious enough to know I’d probably get arrested and then closing out with feeling like I was being punished by being trapped in my apartment for eternity when it turned dark, and the following insanity that would ensue from that.
This trip was such a scarring, thought provoking, emotional journey that I was never in a million lifetimes ready for. I didn’t have the necessary knowledge or brain capacity at the time to understand what I was trying to untangle in my head. I became depressed and anxious of my own existence. I amplified my hermit behaviors and chased escapism and drugs for a couple of years following that. It was full blown nihilism afterwards. Life was meaningless. There was no eternal truth. There was no blueprint to existence/reality. I had no way of understanding what I was thinking or feeling. The depression and anxiety only got worse over the next few years and it fueled other escapist behaviors because I just didn’t want to participate in society or reality anymore. I sought after serotonin boosts and time consumers.
Over the past couple of years now, I’ve been reading as much philosophy as I can. I never read books growing up, even for book reports, because my brain couldn’t follow the narrative and stay on track without getting lost. It’s gotten easier and easier over time and I think I’m finally in a place where I can conceptualize my experience enough to talk about it with other people. I think I learned valuable insights to my own perception of reality. You gain some sort of deep connection with other living things. You feel concepts of academic discussion on an emotional level and you can easily sense when someone else isn’t being genuine. You are scared into facing existence for what it is: Nothing. You exist to exist. It's an uncomfortable feeling to feel and it's hard to find motivation after that. Everything feels fake. Everything feels like a performance. I hate being on stage, why would I pretend to be someone that I’m not in order to make society feel more comfortable about their own eternal social constructs they’ve imprisoned themselves in. It feels very hard to have a genuine conversation with other people without feeling like a child. The acknowledgement of this feeling of pretentiousness is unsettling as well, because you can see exactly how other people would react to you mentioning any of it. You have to rebuild the way you interact with other people and society as a whole. When other people mention similar psychedelic experiences as some sort of tall-tale, you cringe. You can’t imagine why they would be trying to brag about accidentally doing something as emotionally breaking and real as a high dose psychedelic trip. It’s hard to relate to the average person. You feel like a societal outcast in search of concepts and ideas that you can connect with in order to better interact with the new world in front of you. It’s terrifying that you live in this new world with this new lens.
Anyways, I’m reading up on a lot of philosophy now because I do feel connected to concepts that I’ve never even heard of before. I’ve discovered that there are philosophical discoveries out there that people have known for ages when all I did was feel it. It’s completely reality bending and it feels super uncanny to discover that. I don’t really feel like writing anymore. My writing meter is drained now. I was itching to get all of this down earlier, and I think I’ve done just that.
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