Lucid LSD Trip Report from an Anonymous Reader

Writer: Anonymous (here substituted as “Bill”)

Dose: 2 blotters

I remember at one point feeling and saying that I was on the “sandy beaches of time.” Normally there are story arcs to events. There’s peak arousal and closure. But the hoffman [“LSD blotter”] was sustained arousal. In an expected upbeat I found a downbeat. All downbeats. So I found myself with extra moments unexpectedly. Moments that normally would have been blank or dim transitions were just as full as the moments they connected. The idea of the “sandy beaches of time” came from the feeling of rolling around in the sand on the inclines. Imagine you’re floating in water and then you wash on shore. Then you’re on the sand. That’s a feeling of unexpected support. You’re lying passively and find yourself on solid ground somehow. That’s how I felt that I found myself (without trying or initiating a thought) supported unexpectedly in additional moments. This reminds me of the experience I had on a stronger dose in 2016 (same number of blotters but higher potency due to freshness) where I always felt “in the middle of my thought.” It’s like there’s a moment of height and openness at the peak of the thought where you expand open to figure out how you’re going to fit together the structural pieces of the highest level of organization of the thought. But I was continually in the middle of the thought and never finishing a thought, I felt. I tried a lot harder to have complete well formed thoughts back then too, so the experience would have been more notable. In general this time I was least excited or interested at all. Quite passive and peaceful, but not exploring with great energy or amusement. It was a lower dose. I thought it was going to be difficult and possibly be my first bad trip, but when I did them I saw as always that psychedelics are nice to me and weed is the only one who occasionally gets medieval. When I figure out my van and living situation I will definitely seek out more hoffmans and things like it, because they have a certain potential to make my mind work better and they don’t seem to make me insane at all. On weed I can picture some bad day it getting me into a fetal position, but on psychedelics I have a relaxed “power pose.”

I also slightly expanded my sense of unifying with the perceptual (and otherwise conceived/imagined) environment. I’m putting on equal footing (there’s that equal footing theme again… In an article (link) the author used the phrase on “equal footing” once.  I had an idea to explain the equal footing phenomenon but I forget what it was). I feel like my implicit understanding of “merge your awareness with the world around you” increased and so I didn’t have to try so hard to figure it out. At this point I started to reflect on the kind of spiritual poverty of the spiritual ideas and theories I had and would often think about. The ideas I have often come from a dim dull state of mind. Anyway the merging came at the same time as understanding objects on their own terms. So rather than forcing a single texture onto two objects to see them both, I would see both objects with their own unique shapes and the only thing bridging them together was my awareness. That felt like the cubism people talk about in psychedelics (by the way Brahms is notoriously full of time distortions and musical cubism and disintegrations. The very long lines and irregular rhythms (implying a much lengthier process to “resolve,” i.e., achieve a full round of symmetry) are like the decreased decay of stuff in the mindstream. You can use sentences, words, sounds, symbols in a way that sustain moments of that openness, the middle-of-the-thought, and use sleight of hand to keep it from compensating or closing back down.). So I’d put on equal footing perceptions and all the notions I had which would be replaced by syntheses. Like I’d see a plane out the window and have a notion of the distance I was from it and then the notion of the angle of the distance line on my body and the plane, maybe picturing the underside of the plane and then the point of view from the plane looking back down, and I thought these images were all valid, and with the cubism going on it seemed to put the plane and the skyspace relationship to me on equal footing as myself, so I would see and not identify with my physical body and it’s vantage point and I would begin to get a sense of omniscience. Normally I’d reject this and say, “Well, look, we can take the pieces of the collage and infer that there’s only one body with eyes who can see and a brain that can think… it’s not like the plane actually sees or thinks” and yet I was going beyond that somehow. The panpsychism I’ve long subscribed to is like particulate panpsychism. It’s just like molecules and atoms have basic building blocks of complicated mechanical chemical processes, likewise simple consciousness properties of the oxygen atom and the carbon atom are modified by complex activities. However, the way I always thought of it wasn’t very smart. It wasn’t distributed consciousness at all. Nor did the consciousnesses of particles grow or interact or form “consciousness molecules” out of consciousness atoms. It was only the ability of surrounding forces to dance upon a carbon atom’s surface that I could imagine some experience arising. As for the human state—there are billions of consciousnesses and you just happen to be the one seeing this or hearing that or having the feeling of talking. In fact, all these examples of phenomenal experience would be vastly too complicated. But it’s no problem when you don’t believe in binding to suppose that I’m not a single person who talks and hears single sounds, but I’m an army of tiny mind particles that contribute their own tiny dust threads to experience… an experience that remains unbound and separate from all the other threads. So something like mind dust.

The cubism, by the way, was like dissociation, except that, like with the sandy beaches of time rushing in to provide an unexpected moment of support, there was always some unexpected maximally abstract unity support rushing in to bridge the disperate cubist pieces. That bridge was found in ongoing openness to find out. It was like an exercise in faith, and, in turn trust and compassion.

Anyway, that’s one kind of panpsychism. Another kind is nihilistic. Something about my coefficients was altered. Something normally was disproportional in my approach to panpsychism. Something similarly was out of place in the approach to open individualism. Well, the hoffman seemed to tune me a bit and adjust the amount of belief and nihilism and so on I was going into it with to give me a fuller experience. It turns out that what I see as “taking at face value” is actually an important state of openness. One doesn’t truly take it at face value because one isn’t ever pretending to have complete knowledge, but one does take something without devoting so much resource to reconceiving it in order to conform to one’s beliefs. The hoffman experience was generally very in favor of bottom up mindfulness. Let go of socially motivated reasoning and imaginary conversations trying to prove yourself to ignorant people with no imaginations who want to ruin everything good… just put your energy into understanding something with openness and then you’ll see it. I got higher understandings or understandings I realized I otherwise wouldn’t get.

The experience really gave me a strong sense of the doom of my life while at the same time making me light hearted about it and trying to show me around. Normally I’m scared that a psychedelic is going to be like weed and be scary, but it never is. In fact the hoffman took me around my room to see that in some areas where there was some mess or something that I projected an ugly identity onto (like I see my shoes and the first thing I think is, “That’s asperger’s shoes. Those are the shoes someone with asperger’s wears.” So I have my social “identity disturbance” imbued into virtually all the objects around me. Any object that signifies someone else in my life is imbued with boogeymen and gremlins of the relationship I have with that person). I’m oppressed by my room and the needless flavoring of everything with stigma and shame… it’s so comprehensive that I’ve lost the sensitivity to it. It’s like a fish in water, I’m drowning in stigma to the point that I take it for granted and no longer realize there’s any other way of being. So the hoffman tried to show me around my room and show me there aren’t any boogey man and reconnect me to the personality I do have which isn’t aspergery and is fine and contradicts the stigmas. Every time I look in the mirror I see someone more attractive than I expected to see. I think this started in middle school. I always always always underestimate my appearance by quite a bit. And I load my self image with all those bad stigmas. Going to the mirror is like a reality check, but it’s worn out because I’m largely desensitized to it. But the hoffman helped me see that being aspergery or any other stigma was an unnecessary self-fulfilling trap I didn’t have to go down because I did have… I was in good standing and nothing meant I had to be aspergers. My posture my voice my skin etc.., all was fine.

But the hoffman did go over my life. I expected it would attack me about my relationship with my family (which I stigmatize myself for… “I must be some kind of deranged monster” is a load I begin every thought on the matter with) and turn me vegan, but it’s never what you expect. It wasn’t a fear based assault but it was really sane and reasonable. It gave me a sense of the trap I’m in. I ordinarily only feel one part of the trap at once, like I’m in a maze going from one dead end to another. But the hoffman gave me a sense of all the traps of my life I’m in at once. Yet I was lighthearted and amused and smiling about it. I was ego dead but I didn’t even know it. It’s like my ego left without making a sound. Another thing is that it isn’t necessarily key to have no ego, but it is key to be in the moment which is often conflated with having no ego. Like if you’re alone walking and having an inner monologue conversation, that’s probably being lost in thought having some imaginary future conversation and that exemplifies the problems and life-of-it’s-own of the ego. But it actually could be that one is checking into the present moment continuously and one is having that conversation for the nobody, for the consciousness. After all, the consciousness divided and packaged into different points of view and bodies in an audience is the same as the consciousness you have, so why not have the conversation before it? I used to regiment being in the moment, a certain grid of checkpoints of checking in. But that top-down systematic way of being mindful doesn’t work because I find shortcuts and seem to be beyond the age where I can keep going back to the beginner’s mind in a subject and question everything I know to the point where I am not allowed those shortcuts. Further those shortcuts are easy to take without knowing it. They masquerade as true mindfulness. So an informal bottom up spontaneous not regimented continuous mindfulness is important. I like the short ego stories mentioned… (to be continued… must use bathroom now)

I like the idea of short duration egos/stories Mike Johnson mentioned in his recent meditation article. I used to have long systematic stories with regimented moderately high frequency check ins with the present moment proportional to what I used to call “salience essentialism” (a silly name, but the idea of making some element of information that’s only found in a state of lots of reflection and skepticism and metacognitions essential). But, as I said, I can’t do that regimentation anymore, so I’m going with Mike Johnson’s idea of short egos linked together. To have short ego stories that remain close to the present it’s key not only to bring a story to a natural end soon but also to not linger on that ending. If you linger on that ending rather than immediately continuing the moment, keep it rolling in a new moment, then you end up just getting lost in a nothingness epilogue to the story. Useless. You can’t end and then stop with nothing to continue with. So key to keeping short ego stories is also continually making them. Always be shedding light on the situation (keep no secrets. The ego performer has no secrets to keep as the actor. Continually to unravel it in any situation it finds itself. Don’t worry about nullifying a previous performance…because the previous performance was never meant to fool you as complete reality. Hold onto no pretense, but continue to act while shedding light always. A dance without deceit.)

Rather than being mindful to grasp the moment, to pas a yes/no test, I be mindful anew each time. Every time I be mindful is a new way of being mindful, and it’s about quickly jumping to the moment. When you’re really mindful like this listening to Beethoven’s cello sonata, you can’t tell if it’s you that’s singing or the cello. It feels like your own mind almost. I used to be a yes/no tester. I would have a preconceived idea of reality I strove for. But now I’m not doing that. I’m letting go of all my notions and quickly coming to the moment with openness.

One more word on the cubism thing. It’s related very much, I think, to the feeling of open individualism as well as the sandy beaches of time thing because each item has with it it’s own competing structure. Normally we resolve things into one system, but this cubism takes different elements on-their-own-terms, which means there are terms and structures and systems and orientations attached to them. In these systems are simulated the ego and its orientation to things. It’s like when you have some words and are deciding what sentence to make of them you ordinarily subordinate certain words to other words (the main verb being at the highest level of organization), but instead this cubism would have competing sentences for different words. It wouldn’t force the collapse of one structure or system for the other. Likewise the feeling of always being in the middle of one’s thought (or the sandy beaches of time) is like the noncollapse of the thought structure. There are many overlapping thoughts, all of them in the middle, rather than one thought with a start and a finish spanning several moments. You see? I think a similar thing can explain the proliferation of selfhood in objects in one’s perceptual/imagined environment. You go beyond your ordinary selfhood sense structure and see no problem attaching it to multiple things, like anthropomorphizing things with your sense of orientation and first person perspective. This gives rise to a sense of perspective that is beyond seeing and hearing and all the ordinary things. Yet what is it? Alas, perspective as a concept is only as advanced as the abstraction of perceptions and imaginations and so on, so we don’t actually have a more advanced concept of perception/perspective-having. What we have is the abstraction that’s forced upon us by the cubism and multiplication of competing perspective-having structures attached to different objects. All we know is that whatever it is must go beyond any individual object and is seen only when you’re continually opening up to the idea by watching the cubism unfold. So it’s easy to understand how this is all just a conceptual trick of the mind, but it has a very good way of taking everything you know and all your beliefs and spinning those into the picture to convince you of something beyond all that still. And I really do like to believe the idea of a perspective that transcends my human situated perspective of sense organs and a center of imaginations. I’d like the floating above everything and seeing the symphony. I see how MC Escher pictures are very evocative here, because you have competing “structures” or competing whatevers…  competing resolutions. MC Escher is a form of cubism in this way.

Another thing I notice is a decrease in bad compulsions. Generally psychedelics relieve anxiety and obsessions and stuff like that. I have this nasty habit of looking at attractive people and getting a pang of pain and loneliness and stuff. My work involves me being on social media all day long, so I often see a lot of attractive people and it’s just a pang of badness. But fighting with the compulsion is no good either. Flee it. I’ve got to stop correcting past mistakes. Short ego story. Don’t go down one road and then smack your forehead and then reverse and go back down another road. Nobody wants to see you back up. It’s not valuable. You’re not submitting or apologizing to anyone. Once you go down one road simply poof out of existence and then poof back into existence on the right road. No ego story of grinding corrections and punishments and obstacles. Just skip ahead to the right spot the moment you notice a better spot. Ordinarily seeing or hearing attractive people makes me tense up and go ouch and feel a dose of desperation and so on. This time I’m not doing that. I find that I’m lucky that I haven’t had that and a state of not clinging and so on is naturally here (I’m not anxiously monitoring my clinging level). I think it’s good to just zip to the right moment, the right thought and not spend time wrestling with the thing trying to undo it explicitly. Learn the habit of bypassing it, not reversing it. Don’t even expedite reversal. There should be no struggle to correct anything. Rather just jump freely to a better state of mind. But that’s easier said than done. I think it’s very hard to see the possibility of freedom in the present when faced with very strong recurrent thoughts or states of mind that one doesn’t want. It feels like the only hope of getting out of there is by contending with it, reversing it. But I’m suggesting that actually one can unlearn ever going down the wrong path in the first place (as opposed to learning to make the mistake and then the correction) and that is found in the present, the elusive present we overlook (or underlook). In fact, the present moment isn’t known to you yet while you’re still trying to struggle to escape the undesirable thought pattern. Trust that it will show you the way and open up to you as you open up to it. It will progressively open up, and you’ll say, “Oh, I see now.” 

So short stories are good, being in the moment is good. The intentional object is particularly tyrannical (ref) when it lives in a long story. Short stories can still have intentional objects. Things can have purposes, there can be a point, but the point should be found in the present (or the very very near future). When you find yourself having imaginary conversations for the future, then quickly start speaking that to the present. Whom are you talking to? Nobody. The nobody of the now (or yourself, or the non-people of the now) is a perfectly interesting audience.  You have within your consciousness basically what any audience can actually supply anyway. Consciousness differentiated through filters of points of view and personality and so on is only just the same as what you have in your “solitary” conversation.

Well anyway, I found myself having a bit of a love for the present. I like knowing that fulfillment is found in the present. It is beautiful and wholesome. I like not being chained to anxieties and compulsions. I like the spontaneousness of the higher rate of mindfulness. I don’t normally have so much mindfulness and trying with much effort to be mindful backfires. As explained above about reversing mistakes, today I was quickly and without making a fuss finding myself snapping back into the present. Rather than trying to make an ordeal of an error report trying to diagnose the lapse in mindfulness and see to it that it doesn’t happen again, I let go of that controlling and just join the present moment “ready to rock” as [person] from [previous job] would put it.

Here’s part of the trip report. I wrote the other half of it in a paper notebook:

5:10PM I recorded everything earlier in a notebook.

Wow so much easier to type fast. Anyway I see how the ego and the self, I created a dark scary world of doubt and fear and shame for this Bill character. It’s just a character. Bring as many emotional resolutions as possible to make the story have as happy an ending as can be, but ultimately just don’t forget it’s all fiction.

And I guess that’s key. The fears of the hellishness of being a “bad human” and so on…all fictions of the Bill story in the world, in consensus reality. Make the story look nice, but see through it. It’s just a story for some TV viewer. I’m so predictable, what I’m paranoid about, what my hang ups are, etc… How the grass is greener on the other side of being social.

But this trip, rather than dipping me in guilt and attacking me with my own problems is actually more like a refresher on how these places aren’t full of boogeymen like I think they are, and if I just realized this I’d have a better day. But ultimately the desperateness and the loneliness and so on…gosh what a drag. On and on and on being upset about my life. I cultivate a sense of loss before fulfilling it. I should instead not have any needs and just pursue excitement… It’s interesting to think about whether you can get anywhere in life or have a very interesting time without those needs and voids held open by fear.

5:19PM I think I watch Minecraft playthroughs as a surrogate for socializing. Now without getting emotional or caught up in the Bill story, let’s just assess whether this is necessary.

5:25PM I’m listening to music. I’m admiring the majesty of some things in it. CPE bach. Just like Huxley said about my nonself being the non self of that chair leg, I identify as a non self with the non self of the grand music at points. Anyway, I notice how a lot of my enjoyment of music is really grinding and unpleasant. Forceful and full of pain like fighting through wounds, forcing your way through barbed wire. It’s senseless, isn’t it? If I can control it and enjoy music without this forceful stuff, this suffering forcefulness and longing and neediness and narrowness.

5:30PM Those headphones cause such misery. I get lost in those things. I’m getting a bit morbid, aren’t I? I’m not coming down but I’m tired and maybe my blood sugar is lower or something.

9:51PM Watched the Terence McKenna in Prague with Ram Das and Shulgin and others (link 1, link 2). Fascinating. Then I listened to this I noticed how this time I did acid my mind didn’t expand very much at all. I feel old and like my brain is stuck in certain ways of seeing things. I do have a gentle calling to feel myself situated in terms of nature and evolution and the mystery of the universe…I just want to see the open night sky like our ancestors did, but not clouded by all these paved roads and jobs and clocks and so on. Missing the moment for some future goal, measured by time and streets and so on. I liked what Watts said about playing a musical instrument for the enjoyment of music and not to do secondary things like make money or impress an audience. Now one could say that their goal is to impress audiences and so one isn’t “playing music” but one is “impressing audiences” and happening to play music. But I like the idea of only playing music in an innocent way because of the pleasure the noise gives. Unlocking the song by learning the music is rewarded by the music as it comes along. Not the prospect of performing or this becoming a dance of your ego or something. That’s kind of the problem. At least not living acts for the present well enough. That’s what I meant a couple weeks ago about having present moment self goals. Have goals for the moment. Don’t do stuff for later. The goal shouldn’t be set on some fulfillment of something later on. Why? Because people who say things like that have broken heads and my head is broken so I say stuff like that. Anyway, when I play music it should be to produce sound. When I try to get a self image, a social ego, a sense of my social personality, it shouldn’t be aimed at a future date. I should be genuine where I am, even if I’m alone. That is the moment. When it happens, it isn’t practice for some future performance. I’m not scripting. Rather, that is it. That was the moment to make the joke or be clever or do something. If I’m alone, that’s who I do it for. I do it for myself and nobody. I don’t do it for anybody, at least nobody to be abstracted and conceived in a later date. What happens happens then…what happens in the moment stays in the moment. Right now, who am I journaling with? Whom am I talking to? Wow, I can’t even believe I’ve got the depth to question that. Above I mentioned how not expanded my mind felt. Well I’m not very reflective, and the fact I just brought up the question who I am journaling for shows that thing. A lot of life has been lived in these journals. Some good, a lot bad. I can imagine myself throwing my journals away. I can imagine my laptop getting stolen or destroyed or lost. I no longer am hoarding up notes on philosophy projects. So what is this all for? Well, it’s all for itself. And right now it feels better. This feels like a good use of my time and a legitimate experience of living. Nothing lacks. I don’t need to add on some need to escape here and strive for a better place. Apples and oranges. This is adequate in itself. What I do, I must enjoy doing for the sake of itself. I don’t read books to build a vocabulary and a wit so I can talk to people. I have to enjoy reading the books and having that vocabulary and wit as the reader. Not for some future moment. The journey of a book isn’t an overture to something else. It is the journey. I need really to start becoming intrinsically motivated by everything I do, see things as ends in themselves. Really end. Not mindfulness to some other place. I make this mistake all the time. I think of the future now, of the future present moment mindfulness state. I’ve got to enjoy the mindfulness I already have before I can progress further…or rather before it can progress to unfold and intensify. I have to appreciate the experience of education I’m getting by reading a book, raw education however unglamorous and rudimentary, before my education can grow and intensify.

Sunk cost is big when trying to improve yourself (referring back to Alan Watts talk there). If I haven’t already implemented these notes about living in the present moment, then why do I think I can? Seems like the game has run stale. I’ve been narrowly focused and in sunk cost and escapism and I need to just let go of the outcome and step back and observe. Just like what I said about the stand-up comedian’s ego filtering out the amount of feedback based on how massively they’d have to renovate their act—they’re unwilling to open themselves up to just assess what’s wrong and fix it because they’re trying to open up to a small amount, one repair guy and see what he says and see if he recommends a follow up repair guy when he can’t figure it out, and then two slightly more in-depth expert repair guys come by and so on….why is this progression of repairmen economical? It is if you have no idea what’s wrong with your electricity in your house, but if you are a standup comedian and your ability to correct your act depends on your ability to recognize what’s wrong with it and you have access to that consultation, why limit yourself by peeking through a half closed eye? Why not just open up and see the whole situation? You won’t waste time…oh so much time you’ll spend fighting your way back up from the later stage repair men to earlier repair men…correcting later stage specific advanced diagnoses but still something’s wrong but it’s simpler than before. Just always wrestling with the errors in your performance trying to keep them in the simple no biggie zone rather than in the serious fail zone. But if only you were willing to open your eyes fully to see the true extent of the problems, then you could fix them all.

10:30PM Down with an edible. Wow, surprised how powerful the acid still is. Let’s see I took one at 12:33PM and the other at 1:49PM. Well, and I just took an edible. A tinge of regret because it’ll dull and otherwise contaminate the acid, but I’m getting tired so it wasn’t like I was going to get much out of it anyway. Alas, I’m still looking for gold to fill my notebooks for for later reading. I still take notes for the future. I should see notes as what they really are, which is just prosthetics for the experience of narratives in the present moment. Nothing more. (And I’m often blind to that possibility! I’m blind to the potential of the present! I only think in terms of future stuff. I just overlook the present.)

10:36 Wow that Alan Watts talk though. I know I always can’t help but put in my disclaimers. I don’t even feel like going through the various examples of why I have critical reasoning bla bla bla (don’t think of me as a stupid sheep). Just how helpless I seem to be in my current mode of doing things to get myself to live in the present and for the present. I don’t make decisions. I don’t decide what meanings my words have. I rather sit there passively waiting for the right words to come and fill in. I could do with some asserting myself more. But when the moment is right, when it gives energy rather than drains.

And rather than striving for an answer for a theory about consciousness or something or reality or whatever crazy… that is so rewarding that it can be done for itself in the moment. Think about consciousness. The mystery of the ever elusive background. The unknown is stimulating. It is exciting. Seeing the implications of the unknown and questioning old frameworks is enjoyable. It just is. 🙂

11:30PM Just took my second edible. (Saw: Alan Watts – Nature of God)

12:31AM Only do things for the now. Don’t solve problems for the future. Propose solutions for the future in the now. It’s a present act. You’re just exercising talking and proposing and speculating recreationally for the present. You ‘re not putting your will into the future. And the idea I have is that the bleakness of my life is in my head. Living in a van can be positive. I can have a happier social life. But doubts just feed. They’re demonic. They love sadness like heroin. They love to feed on the anxieties about not being able to make friends, of how poor my track record has been, how my life used to be in my control and going in a direction has now fallen so dramatically in a different way….The doubt tempts you. The decisions stop being made in the present moment. IT says “Hold on now. Think about this…” as it proceeds, foot in the door, to tempt you to sadness and doubt, as if there’s some social reward for having a sufficiently pessimistic view.



David Pearce responds [emphasis mine]:








Sadly, I can guess.












Links: Annealing (metallurgy)The entropic brain




Image credit: Fabián Jiménez

The Purple Pill

It finally arrived. I had to appeal it’s denial a couple times, but it finally came through. It arrived in the mail today. It’s laminated with rounded corners, a holographic mark, and a pinch of glitter. I finally got my Poetic License. They said if I wanted permission to use metaphors I would need to apply for an allegorical diploma, but what is a poetic license without metaphor? In practice most licensed professionals in the field ignore this rule. It’s not like the reader ever asks you for your credentials whenever symbolism is used. They said my trope copyright agreement is on the way. They gave me a tracking number. But I’m not going to be waiting around any longer…

The most insidious thing about taking the blue pill is that it is usually followed by an immediate amnesia of having done so. Soon after one is presented with the same decision, but now with an incredible -unbelievable- literary feeling of empowerment and bravery that makes you decide to take the red pill in an heroic act of self-effacement. Alas, this is of course all a fantasy induced by the original blue pill.

There are various grades of pseudo-red pills. You have the standard sedatives that put you to sleep; a dreamless coma – “Life is an unprofitable episode disturbing the blessed calm of non-existence” (Schopenhauer). You have the one that makes you forget -in fact achieve a state of convenient social neglect- of the intensely bad experiences that exist out there in Hell branches of the multiverse. There is the one that makes you believe that nonhuman animals lack souls and are unable to suffer (despite their, it turns out, much greater capacity for suffering than humans). There are those that by virtue of making you believe that you took the red pill give your life a tremendous sense of mission and moral superiority. There is the pill of sentimentalism, the pill of fanaticism, the pill of scientism, the pill of mainstream sports, the pill of social media rage, the pill of analytic philosophy fandom, and the pill of pop psychopharmachology (SSRIs increase your serotonin levels, and serotonin is the happy molecule, or so the scientists are saying *wink*). Alas, naming the most common ones, those that zombify the people who claim to be the most awake would feel like a personal attack (even if far from it). So the most common blue pills shall remain unmentioned lest I’m lynched.

The true red pill is not just DXM with red 2. It isn’t just eugenics, international conspiracies, evolutionary psychopathology, or Hansonian signaling theory. The real red pill is made of 4000°C bright red luminous magma that destroys not only your esophagus, but cuts through your body and falls directly on the ground below passing right through, only barely cooled down by your body due to its incredibly high specific heat capacity.

No. That’s still another blue pill fantasy designed to make you feel brave and morally superior for taking it. The real red pill is agape. The communion with the Godhead in its infinite compassion for all Beings large and small.

But you guessed it right, that’s also another type of coating for the blue fellow (iridescent, yes, but still synthetic and bad for your liver).

What did you think, that there is any real closure? It is not like nature is going to be kind to us humans who suffer from high levels of neuroticism and psychological need for closure.

There is no red pill. But there are decent approximations. There is the unprejudiced pursuit of truth – the high AQ high IQ depressive realism that is an evolutionary spandrel. The state of metta and LSD ego death are close seconds, though they lack the critical clarity of mind needed to be willing to stare at the raw truth of suffering and its causes for too long before craving social validation for doing so.

Is there an alternative? Yes.

The purple pill is the pill that gives you both high hedonic tone and an unprejudiced open ended approach to the pursuit of truth. For losing truth is to lose it all, but to lose it all is only bad because it makes you and others suffer in the wider universe. Yes, here is where I am abusing my poetic license. I am a licensed wordsmith, don’t you know? I carry with me the approval of RA, I have the blessing of poetic authority so don’t you dare question my use of vagueness to drive a point home. The purple pill is what will redeem us all. The recognition that though truth is painful in our current, evolutionarily adaptive mind-frame, it is not in and of itself a cause of seething pain. Recognizing that true evil is not a person or a mythical archetype but the mere existence of states of consciousness as pornographically unethical as kidney stones or cluster headaches does not need to induce (at least not logically, not physically) a nihilistic depression. It does not need to make you speak in tongues, to scream at strangers in the street “AHH don’t you see how bad it is that we live in an eternalist empty individualist universe that does not care about the welfare of moments of experience!?!?” – It is still possible to do something productive instead. You can still, it turns out, choose to take eros and agape and reforge them into a laser sword that produces hyperdopaminergic loving-kindness in those who are hit by it, and mindfulness in those who wield it.

The purple pill is the true red pill; at least the best approximation there is. For if the truth is that the world is tenselessly (timelessly) littered with hellish states of consciousness implicated by the universal wavefunction satisfying the principles of zero ontology, this still does not imply that accurately representing the causal structure of such facts *has* to come along with a hellish hedonic tone of itself. This is the truth we all long for.

Take the purple pill and join us in the battle to destroy hell. You will, much to everyone’s incredulous amazement, be happy while doing so.

Photo credit: The HyperSpace

Personality Traits Are Continuous With Mental Illnesses


The Constitution of the World Health Organization

Whether pain takes the form of the eternal Treblinka of our Fordist factory farms and conveyor-belt killing factories, or whether it’s manifested as the cruelties of a living world still governed by natural selection, the sheer viciousness of the Darwinian Era is likely to horrify our morally saner near-descendants.

David Pearce in Brave New World? A Defense of Paradise-Engineering

Personality traits are continuous with mental illnesses

by Geoffrey Miller (originally posted on Edge in 2011)

We like to draw clear lines between normal and abnormal behavior. It’s reassuring, for those who think they’re normal. But it’s not accurate. Psychology, psychiatry, and behavior genetics are converging to show that there’s no clear line between “normal variation” in human personality traits and “abnormal” mental illnesses. Our instinctive way of thinking about insanity — our intuitive psychiatry — is dead wrong.



One implication is that the “insane” are often just a bit more extreme in their personalities than whatever promotes success or contentment in modern societies — or more extreme than we’re comfortable with. A less palatable implication is that we’re all insane to some degree. All living humans have many mental disorders, mostly minor but some major, and these include not just classic psychiatric disorders like depression and schizophrenia, but diverse forms of stupidity, irrationality, immorality, impulsiveness, and alienation. As the new field of positive psychology acknowledges, we are all very far from optimal mental health, and we are all more or less crazy in many ways. Yet traditional psychiatry, like human intuition, resists calling anything a disorder if its prevalence is higher than about 10%.

The personality/insanity continuum is important in mental health policy and care. There are angry and unresolved debates over how to revise the 5th edition of psychiatry’s core reference work, the Diagnostic and Statistic Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), to be published in 2013. One problem is that American psychiatrists dominate the DSM-5 debates, and the American health insurance system demands discrete diagnoses of mental illnesses before patients are covered for psychiatric medications and therapies. Also, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approves psychiatric medications only for discrete mental illnesses. These insurance and drug-approval issues push for definitions of mental illnesses to be artificially extreme, mutually exclusive, and based on simplistic checklists of symptoms. Insurers also want to save money, so they push for common personality variants — shyness, laziness, irritability, conservatism — not to be classed as illnesses worthy of care. But the science doesn’t fit the insurance system’s imperatives. It remains to be seen whether DSM-5 is written for the convenience of American insurers and FDA officials, or for international scientific accuracy.

Psychologists have shown that in many domains, our instinctive intuitions are fallible (though often adaptive). Our intuitive physics — ordinary concepts of time, space, gravity, and impetus — can’t be reconciled with relativity, quantum mechanics, or cosmology. Our intuitive biology — ideas of species essences and teleological functions — can’t be reconciled with evolution, population genetics, or adaptationism. Our intuitive morality — self-deceptive, nepotistic, clannish, anthropocentric, and punitive — can’t be reconciled with any consistent set of moral values, whether Aristotelean, Kantian, or utilitarian. Apparently, our intuitive psychiatry has similar limits. The sooner we learn those limits, the better we’ll be able to help people with serious mental illnesses, and the more humble we’ll be about our own mental health.


Excerpt from: The Grand Illusion: A Psychonautical Odyssey Into the Depths of Human Experience (pages 60-62) by Steve Lehar (emphasis and links are mine)


About this time I had the good fortune of locating a supply of ecstasy. True to its name, ecstasy promotes a kind of euphoric jitteryness, in which it is just a thrill to be alive! Every fiber of your being is just quivering with energy. But ecstasy also has some interesting perceptual manifestations. In the first place there is a kind of jitteryness across the whole visual field. And this jitteryness is so pronounced that it can manifest itself in your eyeballs, that jitter back and forth at a blinding speed. If you relax, and just let the jitters take over, the oscillations of your eyes will blur the whole scene into a peculiar double image. But if you concentrate, and focus, the ocular jitter can be made to subside, and thus become less noticeable or bothersome. One of my friends got the ocular jitters so bad that he could not control them, and that prevented him from having a good time. That was the last time he took ecstasy. I however found it enchanting. And I analyzed that subtle jitteryness more carefully. It was not caused exclusively by jittering of the eyeball, but different objects in the perceived world also seemed to jitter endlessly between alternate states. In fact, all perceived objects jittered in this manner, creating a fuzzy blur between alternate states. This was interesting for a psychonaut! It seemed to me that I could see the mechanism of my visual brain sweeping out the image of my experience right before my eyes, like the flying spot of light that paints the television picture on the glowing phosphor screen. The refresh rate of my visual mechanism had slowed to such a point as to make this sweep visible to me. Very interesting indeed!


Having access simultaneously to ecstasy and LSD, I tried my hand at the practice known in the drug literature as “candy flipping”, that is, taking ecstasy and LSD in combination. The combination is so unique and different from the experience of either drug in isolation, that it has earned its own unique name. Under LSD and ecstasy I could see the flickering blur of visual generation most clearly. And I saw peculiar ornamental artifacts on all perceived objects, like a Fourier representation with the higher harmonics chopped off. LSD by itself creates sharply detailed ornamental artifacts, like a transparent overlay of an ornamental lattice or filigree pattern superimposed on the visual scene, especially in darkness. Ecstasy smooths out those sharp edges and blurs them into a creamy smooth rolling experience. I would sometimes feel some part of my world suddenly bulging out to greater magnification, like a fish-eye lens distortion appearing randomly in space, stretching everything in that portion of space like a reflection in a funhouse mirror. But it was not an actual bulging that changed the shape of the visual world, but more of a seeming bulging, that was perceived in an invisible sense without actual distortion of the world. For example one time I was putting on my boots to go outside, and as I reached down to pull on a boot, I suddenly got the impression that my leg grew to ten times its normal length, but I could still reach my boot because my arms had also grown by the same proportion, as had the whole space in that part of the room. Nothing actually looked any different after this expansion, it was just my sense of the scale of the world that had undergone this transformation, and even as I contemplated this, and finished securing my boot, the world shrank down gradually back to its normal scale again and the distortion vanished.

I have theorized that the way that ecstasy achieved its creamy smoothness is by dithering or alternating so fast between perceptual alternatives as to blur them together, like a spinning propellor that appears as a semi-transparent disc. At this level of observation I was unable to get my co-trippers to see the features that I was seeing. I would ask them when they saw that line of trees, did they not see illusory projections, like a transparent overlay of vectors projecting up from the trees into the blue sky that I could see? They did not see these things. So don’t expect to see what I see when I take LSD and ecstasy. I report my observations as I experience them, but observation of the psychedelic experience is every bit as subjective and variable as any phenomenological observation of our own experience. What stands out for one observer might remain completely obscure to another.

But the features I observed in my psychedelic experience all pointed toward a single self-consistent explanation of the mechanism of experience. It appears that the spatial structure of visual experience is swept out by some kind of volumetric imaging mechanism with a periodic refresh scan, not unlike the principle of television imagery, but extended into three dimensions. This was interesting indeed!

Related Articles:

  • Quantifying Bliss – which proposes a model from first principles to explain the structural properties of an experience that makes it feel good, bad, mixed, or neutral (i.e. valence). It then derives from this model precise, empirically testable predictions for what really good experiences should look like. Specifically, MDMA euphoria is postulated to be the result of a high level of consonance between connectome-specific harmonic waves.
  • A Future for Neuroscience – which discusses the broad implications of a harmonic resonance theory of brain function for neuroscience, including new ways to conceptualize personality, and exotic states of consciousness.
  • The Pseudo-Time Arrow – which discusses a particular physicalist model to explain the experience of time by examining the patterns of *implicit causality* in networks of local binding (these terms are defined there). The bottom line being: each moment of experience contains time implicitly embedded in its geometric structure. Psychedelics, MDMA, and their combination would each have unique signature structural effects along the arrow of pseudo-time.

Taken together, these articles would provide an explanation for why MDMA has a uniquely euphoric effect. In particular, Lehar’s point that MDMA’s generalized jitteryness/dithering smooths out the sharp edges of an LSD experience would show up as the harmonization/regularization of the relationship between time-slices along the pseudo-time arrow of experience. The Symmetry Theory of Valence can then be applied in the resulting network of local binding after MDMA’s smoothing effect, leading to the peculiar insight that MDMA’s euphoric effects come from the symmetrification of experience along the axis of experiential time. The creaminess of experience produced by MDMDA that Lehar talks about feels very good precisely because it is the phenomenal character of a dissonance-free state of consciousness. Hence, the fundamental nature of pleasure is not behavioral reinforcement, the maximization of utility according to one’s utility function, or expected surprise minimization; pleasure is more fundamental and low-level than any of those properties. Pleasure, we predict, shall correspond to the degree and intensity of energized symmetries present in a bound moment of experience, and MDMA phenomenology is a clear example of what it looks like to optimize for this property.

The Universal Plot: Interlude ‽ – The Slytherin Wavelength

Below you will find key quotes from two very interesting interviews. The first one is an interview of a mafia hitman, and the second one deals with a legal executioner. Of note is the fact that a key motivation for choosing their lines of work (killing people illegally, and killing people legally, respectively) was to be someone. That is, they wanted to be recognized by other people’s mental models as someone who is good at their job and whose line of work can command respect. I bolded the sections that show this in the most prominent way.

In other words, even people who would squarely belong to Slytherin are motivated by otherwise very normal, very human kinds of emotions and signaling behaviors. Perhaps what’s different is that for whatever reason the degree of moral disgust they experience concerning their choice of career is vastly out-weighted by the positive emotion they experience from their secure place in a robust competence hierarchy. Parallels to military, police, and political social roles are obvious. There are many people in the world whose internal affective triggers are configured in such a way that they will do anything to be someone. In turn, the world’s militaries, mafias, and slaughterhouses can always find people willing to cause immense suffering to sentient beings in exchange for crumbs of social recognition.

How do we steer people like this away from unethical lines of work? In light of the actual motivations behind their actions, here are four general approaches I think can work:

  1. Increase their moral disgust in response to causing suffering (cf. Clockwork Orange)
  2. Reduce the positive emotion associated with having a secure place in a competence hierarchy (cf. Rank Theory of Depression)
  3. Increase the positive emotion they associate with other’s happiness (cf. MDMA), and
  4. Make them believe/realize that we are all one consciousness (cf. Open Individualism, Peaceful Qualia, LSD for Criminals).

Which approach should be pursued? We shall come back to this in future articles.

Related: The Universal Plot: Part I – Consciousness vs. Pure ReplicatorsThe Banality of Evil (David Pearce), Virtue Signaling (Geoffrey Miller), Book Review: Evolutionary Psychopathology and Radicalizing the Romanceless (Scott Alexander).

Susskind: My guest is a man named Joey. He by his own admission has murdered 38 people. He was a paid killer. A “hit man” for the mafia. Joey is the author of the recently published book “Killer” in which he describes his career and the world of organized crime. You’ve killed 38 people.

Joey: Yes, sir.

Susskind: When did you first kill somebody. How old were you?

Joey: I was 16 the first time I hit somebody in the head.

Susskind: How did that come to pass?

Joey: I was working numbers as a kid. I was a big, tough, kid. I became a controller very shortly. And one day a guy came to me and said “I got a job for you”. So what is it? “I want you to hit somebody in the head.” I looked at him. And said when do you want to know? “By tonight.” I said “ok, see you tonight”. So I thought it over. If I turned this guy down. All my life I will be scuffler. I’ll be looking to hustle, make a dollar somehow. If I take the job, I’m somebody, if I do it right. So I decided to take it. And then I was paid what I considered a fortune. And after I did the job guys who used to see me and just fluff me off, like “that’s just another kid walking around”, suddenly were “hi kid, how are you?”. All of a sudden I had new friends I didn’t know I had. 

Susskind: How much were you paid?

Joey: Five thousand dollars. 

Susskind: At 16?

Joey: That’s correct.

Susskind: How did you killed them?

Joey: I walked up behind them and shot them in the back of their head.

Susskind: Why did you kill them?

Joey: Because I was paid.

Susskind: Did you know what he did?

Joey: I didn’t ask. It was none of my business.

Susskind: Who hired you? Not the name of the man. I mean, was it an organization?

Joey: It was part of an organization, yes.

Susskind: Did they tell why he was going to be killed?

Joey: No.

Susskind: You didn’t ask?

Joey: No. It was none of my business. You weren’t supposed to ask. They offer you a job. You take the job, you do it. You don’t take the job, you don’t do it. It is not my business to know, unless it happens to be somebody, where as you go by you get a reputation, and they are going to knock somebody down, and it is somebody you happen to know, well they tell you “you know them” and they give you the option. By the description of what they tell you, and you think you know the person, then you can say “I am not interested”.

Susskind: How did you feel when you killed somebody? The very first time.

Joey: I don’t know. I guess I was a little shook. But after that it didn’t bother me.

Susskind: Did your conscience hurt?

Joey: No.

Susskind: Could you sleep?

Joey: Yeah.


Susskind: Did you ever wonder about the person, like they had a wife, or children…

Joey: I don’t worry about any of them. The same as if somebody comes after me. He ain’t gonna worry about me.


Susskind: Are there don’ts in killing people?

Joey: Yeah. You do not kill them in houses of worship. You do not kill them in their home, in front of their families. And you do not torture a man.

Susskind: Do you rob them?

Joey: No, you do not rob them.

Susskind: Do you torture, at all?

Joey: No.

Susskind: You just do it discretely…

Joey: You just do your job and get out of there. You are not there to play games. You are not there to decide why he should die. Somebody already decided he is going to die. He ain’t have a chance to cross himself before you pull the trigger.

Susskind: What about their begging? 

Joey: I don’t give them enough time to give the word “please” out. If they see me, it’s all over by the time they see me. If they don’t see me because I came up behind them, they never had a chance anyway.


Susskind: Do you think you have any ethics at all?

Joey: I have a lot of ethics. My word is my bond. That’s number one. I’m more honorable than anybody in the course of your life. That’s my ethics. If I say something will be done it will be done. If I make a promise I will keep it. If I tell you I will be at a certain place, I will be there. I will not break my word to you.


Susskind: You say in your book that women find you irresistible.

Joey: No, I didn’t say they find me irresistible. 

Susskind: They find you sexually very attractive.

Joey: They find the fact of what I do very attractive.

Susskind: You tell them what you do?

Joey: No. I’ll give you an example. At a party one time after I had been acquitted, I was introduced to this girl, who incidentally comes from one of your better families. She couldn’t wait to jump into bed with me.

Susskind: Because you were a killer.

Joey: That’s correct.

Susskind: And that’s somehow alluring.

Joey: Yes, to her.

Susskind: Was she just a stunning exception?

Joey: No! When girls find that you deal in violence… in controlled violence, as I call it… the fact that you know you have taken a life. Or that you do this. That you have no compunctions about it… it has a strange fascination for them. Don’t ask me what it is. I don’t know!

Susskind: How long does this fascination last?

Joey: I don’t know… they do it two or three times and all of a sudden they look up and ask “where the hell am I?”

Intro: “Ashmawy” is the name given to an executioner in Egypt. We met with a retired “Ashmawy” who carried around 1,070 executions across his career.

Q: How did you become an executioner?

A: After I joined the army, I became part of the security forces. But two or three months after I joined the army, there was an execution. I watched as the executioner walked in with his two assistants and his subordinate officer, and he just commanded the whole room. It’s a job that earns people’s respect because it’s so unique. From that moment on, I knew it was something I wanted to do.

Q: What are the requirements needed to become an executioner?

A: The most important thing is maintaining your fitness and being a physically strong person. You also need to be observant, pray regularly and be close to God. You need to be over 30 or 40 years old because the job is tough and cruel. People’s minds begin to mature in their 30s and 40s, as they have many more life experiences compared to a young person. Sometimes, young men attend the executions, and they end up vomiting or fainting. And some of them are police officers!

Q: Did you love your job?

A: Of course, I did. I loved my job. I mean, some newspapers and magazines even wrote about how I was “in love with the noose”, or something like that. What they really meant was that I was so good at what I did, I became an innovator. And indeed I was innovative. The first time was difficult… I can’t deny that it was difficult. I couldn’t sleep for two days. There is usually a committee of 30 or 40 people watching. People with so much copper on their shoulders – lieutenants, security managers. And they are all watching you. I was scared, but not because someone was dying. I was scared of not doing my job properly.

Q: How did you feel executing someone?

A: It became a very normal thing for me… to the extent that during quiet times, I’d get upset because there were no executions to carry out. In the end it was just like meeting up with you now, or like going to see some friends and taking one to hang. That’s really it. No emotions involved.


Q: How do people treat you when they find out what your job was?

A: The job makes you famous. You can get someone out of trouble with the police. You can end a problem. A wise person in this position should be humble, and not take advantage of the position. Be humble about it and respect others. You will then find that people will respect you even more.

Hell Must Be Destroyed

Hell must be destroyed.

An angel appears on Earth. This genderless being connected to God shows up on every screen on Earth at once and asks us if we are interested in drastically improving life on Earth. A large enough portion of those who hear the message (which gets a coverage of 80%+ of people worldwide) see into their souls and find the willingness to make life better, and then they see into their hearts and see the warmth of hope, and so they resolve to agree to do whatever is necessary to help the angel improve life on Earth. And thus the angel says “thanks to the collective desire to make it so, I shall change some things about how the planet is programed, and you will see a 99% reduction in suffering and a 20% increase in overall happiness.”
And so the angel gets to work.
A year passes, and nobody can really tell the difference from before. Most people’s day to day experience is perhaps even slightly more tedious and slightly more boring. What happened? After a few years it is clear that no major change has happened, and indeed affective psychologists report a mild but very generalized decrease in people’s engagement with their day to day activities and increases in feelings of being a bit disoriented. Did the angel scam us? Or did people fail to do their part? Or why are there no improvements? A large enough mass of people asked this question that the angel felt the need to provide an update. He comes back down and appears in all of the planet’s screens and says:
“Everything went according to plan. It is just that your society hasn’t reached the point of scientific development where you are able to measure the quality of experience of sentient beings. You aren’t quantifying pain very well.”
“Here is what I did. Above of all, I focused my energies on trying to prevent some of the worst experiences, which in aggregate happened to be an ethical catastrophe. I managed to reduce how bad these experiences were by about 99.99%.”
“I started by reducing how bad cluster headaches feel. They are now only about 44,000 dolors per second (d/s). They used to be around 450,000,000 d/s. You see, when most people get a fleeting headache, we are talking about headaches that range from 0.5 to 1d/s. You know, the type of headache that people are willing to wait out, and perhaps some people will ask for a little aspirin or some placebo of some sort and then get on with it. Most headaches are of this kind. But even if you bundle all of them together we are talking about a rounding error relative to the suffering caused by other types of headaches, the bad ones. Migraine, for example, tends to get to about 1,000 dolors per second, and sufferers have a hard time communicating the fact that it is not just a lot worse, it is a thousand times more painful than the “normal” ones. But even then that does not register relative to one of the really really bad ones, like cluster headaches, which as I said can spiral up to values close to a billion d/s. As it happens, on your planet there are simple chemical tricks to reduce that particular type of pain (e.g. LSD), so I just went ahead and got rid of the bulk of it very easily. It’s still super painful by human standards, but not by my standards, like it was before. To have a cluster headache now is just as “indescribably bad” as before, meaning it goes beyond people’s ability to imagine and make sense of. But that doesn’t challenge the fact that the 99.99% improvement I did is an ethical victory of civilizational magnitude.”
“Next I went on to reducing how bad it feels to have kidney stones, bone pain, and various kinds of particularly bad neuropathies in people with schizophrenia. By the time I had taken care of about the dozen or so worst kinds of pain, I had already overdelivered by an order of magnitude and was starting to run into diminishing returns. So I decided to go on to helping other planets in my quest to prevent as much suffering as possible.”
“I apologize I used about 0.13 hedons per second (h/s) from mundane experiences to implement one of those cosmic pain diminishing plans. In order to increase the amount of happiness in the world as I promised I made the experience of showering about 50% more enjoyable and the experience of listening to music about twice as good. As you can see, the bathing industry did take off, but not many thought much of it. And the musicians were able to tell that music was awesome again and wondered why, but most people seem to have attributed their increased musical enjoyment to what they imagined had been their own hidden musical talents all along.”
“Thank you, and keep enjoying your drastically improved planet.”


Thus, people realized that the world was indeed a lot better. Well, some did. And others complained, but it was ok.

Thanks to Michael Aaron Coleman and Jonathan Leighton for inspiring this piece. Michael suffers from cluster headaches and has described their phenomenology in gruesome detail. He says that in a 0 to 10 scale, cluster headaches are solid 10/10. But he also says you really need a different scale to make sense of this monster. He once used the phrase “minus one million hedonic tone”. He says that morphine makes the pain go from 10/10 to 9/10, if at all, maybe more like 9.5/10. Thankfully, LSD in small doses (~25 micrograms) makes it go to 1/10. DMT also works, but 5-MeO-DMT does not (and yet it still expands time, so not a good idea). Jonathan is the Executive Director of the Organization for the Prevention of Intense Suffering (OPIS). He works on identifying cases where intense suffering can be prevented on a massive scale and doing what has to be done. I recommend getting in touch with him if this is a particular interest of yours.