Can psychedelic therapy allow people to return to physical/structural origin without shame and denial? (This includes the biological, sexual, and thanatological.)
Could this therapy, if done well, and over time, decondition cultural norms (gender, too) and help people become more ambiguous and self-actualized, and lead to more tolerant, progressive societies?
Neither the spider has planned for the leaf nor the leaf for the spider—and yet there they are, an accidental pendulum propelled by the same forces that cradle the moons of Jupiter in orbit, animated into this ephemeral early-morning splendor by eternal cosmic laws impervious to beauty and indifferent to meaning, yet replete with both to the bewildered human consciousness beholding it.”
-Maria Popova
Figuring
Moving from psychedelic routine to spot-treatment, originally published on Medium
Fifteen micrograms of acid, on a sliver of paper, washed down with a glass of water. This is my medicine of choice.
*
I microdosed 1P-LSD from April to December 2017 following a regimen: one day on, threeish days off. It’s been over a year since I stopped that routine and tapered my dosing to as-needed for mood support.
Eight months is a bit longer than most ~microdosing experts~ recommend. Online sources typically suggest six weeks or three months, but that’s mostly speculative. Any recommendations for continued psychedelic use (and all psychiatric medicine?) are relatively inexpert given our still premature understanding of the brain. When it comes to intimate psychological issues, there is no single cure for what has complex—and largely unknown—causes. No one knows which precise treatment or prescription will work for anyone. Especially in people with discreet or hard-to-diagnose issues, who experience difficulty communicating, or who are especially young or old. It’s all an experiment. That’s what the medical community has been doing, as well as a few rogue individuals.
Testing, and reflecting. Continue reading “Dosing after microdosing”
Notes from the Mind Medicine Australia launch, originally published on Medium
Psychedelic researchers, advocates, and skeptics alike met on February 13th, 2019 in Melbourne for the Mind Medicine Australia launch. Fresh from San Francisco and eager to meet people in this city also interested in psychedelic medicine, I bought an early-bird ticket.
***
February 13th, 2019, 5:30 PM. At this point in life getting ready to go out involves more time bopping around with acid under my tongue than looking in the mirror. Microdosing quells my zapping nerves and oftentimes overactive mind, especially before larger gatherings.
So I took a small dose before biking to the University of Melbourne for the Mind Medicine launch. The bats weren’t out yet, but they would be soon, and the air was a perfect 23°C. I locked my bike, tried to tame my helmet hair, and entered the Sidney Myer Asia Centre. Immediately greeted, thick lashes ushered me to the left. More smiling eyes appeared around the corner, showing the way upstairs. I entered the full, bustling theater.
There were only a few seats left. Everyone was finding their space, finding their friends. I sat down in the back and observed the crowd. No matter if it’s in Melbourne, London, Berlin, or San Francisco, the general attitude and sense of psychedelic conferences remains the same: compassionate, curious, positive, and present. There’s this shared understanding, communicated with kind and sometimes cheeky glances that say: “We’ve seen a glimpse of the possible. That’s why we’re all here.” It’s usually a clash of characters, buttoned-up scientists, artists. The kind of people you might bond with at a music festival and never see again are there, anticipating a lineup of lectures.
Sound cultish? It really shouldn’t. People from all edges of the earth have been interested in psychedelic medicine and its potential for millennia. Many aboriginal people wonder what took us so long to make the connection. This goes beyond a Reddit thread.
“Hi neighbor,” the man next to me introduced himself. He was wearing a sheen suit and said he wanted a job.
Continue reading “Is Australia ready for psychedelic progress?”
Life exceeds itself, its past, its context, in making itself more and other than its history: life is that which registers and harnesses the impact of contingency, converting contingency into history, and history into self-overcoming, supersession, becoming-other… Life is not different in substance from matter but is a kind of opening up of matter to indeterminacy, a qualitative transformation of matter into the unexpected, the surprising, the never-seen-before and the never-able-to-be-repeated. It adds to the contained and structured material universe the openness of the virtual, the potential to be otherwise, as it transforms matter, and itself, in its self-overcoming.”
-Elizabeth Grosz
Time Travels
We never see reality, but only an internal representation of it that our brain constructs for us continuously.”
-Jeremy Narby
The Cosmic Serpent
Which is more ethical or “fair-trade” ~ taking drugs from the Earth or from a lab?
You struggled to park an invisible car on Fillmore because your piercing was stuck to a fire hydrant. Stuck like the rest of us. Under another spell of moral authority. Believing real emotions drawn from deceptive acts. A medium slips voodoo bags in all the right places. A spiritual advisor advises a touch. A guru reaches too far. The priest hides it all. Power seeks vulnerability, speaking in silence. Those who can’t afford buy lotto tickets. Talking to God, never hearing back. Hoping and hopeless for another chance. Anything to divert attention and responsibility from this current mess. Enters the magician. Playing with projection to manipulate. To create a feeling of awe, allure, amazement. Shock value. And we love to feel, even fear. The heightened pulses and rising temperatures. Cranking up fields. Just the way the man behind the curtain likes it: wrapped in a mist of confusion. Divine delirium quiets. Shh, don’t question it. No reason to reason with fog. But what really happened? Pure deception and perception. Hinging until it breaks and you see the truth underneath the pain, the shame, the neglect, the harm. A universal craving for psychological attention. Falling into traps and release.