Unreasonable

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“

Reason is unquestionably a fine thing, but reason is no more than reason, and gives fulfillment only to man’s reasoning capacity, while desires are a manifestation of the whole of life — I mean the whole of human life, both with its reason and with all its itches and scratches. And though our life in these manifestations will often turn out a pretty sorry mess, it is still life and not a mere extraction of square roots. After all, I quite naturally want to live in order to fulfill my whole capacity for living, and not in order to fulfill my reasoning capacity alone, which is no more than some one-twentieth of my capacity for living. What does reason know? It knows only what it has managed to learn, while human nature acts as a complete entity, with all that is in it, consciously or unconsciously; and though it may be wrong, it’s nevertheless alive.”

 

– Fyodor Dostoevsky
Notes from Underground

Ambivalent attachment

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“

Her powerlessness to communicate is apparent in the dialogue she writes: the people talk along lines that never cross; each has his own language, which the other does not understand. Even in love, especially in love, any exchange is impossible, because Violette Leduc cannot accept a duality in which she sees lurking the threat of separation.”

 

– Simone de Beauvoir
La Bâtarde preface

Words to nerves

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“

Words are like that, they deceive, they pile up, it seems they do not know where to go, and, suddenly, because of two or three or four that suddenly come out, simple in themselves, a personal pronoun, an adverb, a verb, an adjective, we have the excitement of seeing them coming irresistibly to the surface through the skin and the eyes and upsetting the composure of our feelings, sometimes the nerves that cannot bear it any longer…”

– José Saramago
Blindness

The mental and metaphysical effects of microdosing LSD

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It’s 7am on the uBahn. Eyes still puffy from the night before. A woman slowly nibbles her morning brötchen while staring into the static on the broken TV above. Everyone is silent. And in this crowd of straight faces, there I am: grinning like an idiot. Why? I have a little secret. There’s acid under my tongue.

This slightly mischievous feeling is familiar to me. I’ve taken 1P-LSD (a legal LSD analog in Germany) over 50 times in the last six months. Most doses have been small. So small that they’ve merely lifted my mood, generally speaking. But somehow each and every time still feels brand new.

These ritual doses have drastically improved my life and reshaped my perception, but what’s really been going on inside my head? It seems my brain has been especially malleable these last few months. I’ve been able to untangle the knots of thought that eclipsed my reality and made everything a little darker.

Continue reading “The mental and metaphysical effects of microdosing LSD” →

Mix

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“

Ambiguity is the warp of life, not something to be eliminated. Learning to savor the vertigo of doing without answers or making shifts and making do with fragmentary ones opens up the pleasures of recognizing and playing with pattern, finding coherence within complexity, sharing within multiplicity.”

– Catherine Bateson
Peripheral Visions: Learning Along the Way