michael-dean-k/

The adult mind will frequently run into psychological dead-ends, points where no more evolution is possible within an existing frame, and so growth requires you to descend into chaos, to regress down the stack, in search of new directions forward, in hope of carrying some insights from old frames with you.

I don’t know if “growth” is the right word here, and “evolution” feels off to me, but it’s something like the advancement in harmony or complexity in your sense of identity, purpose, and responsibility. The moment that freezes, it’s as if you’re cut off from the core point of the human experience.

Whether you should take psychedelics, I think, is a matter if you can reliably dissolve frames on your own. If not, maybe you don’t quite need them; I imagine there is wonder, mystery, and value in the aesthetic phantasmagoria, and all sorts of things to learn from terrible trips of demons and such, but the main point might be the new directions they point you in.

Whether you descend abruptly or gently, assisted or natural, there is a natural fear of psychological death, and so to “descend into chaos” requires a trust that you’ll figure out how and where to swim.

It would be cliche and misleading to say today's park walk was "ego death," but surely it felt like a "pause" or a "lapse." It felt like a lucid dream, in that there was a remembered peace in irreality. Irreality, in this sense, I’d describe as a disassociation from the egoic frameworks that have had a strong hold over my walking life in recent weeks; instead, I felt an immersion in nature that felt mysterious. Like an animal, today, tomorrow, yesterday were fuzzy; all social and chronological constructions were, temporarily, erased. By saying it was “mysterious,” I think I mean that I felt the emotional power of a particular moment in a way that escaped classification, and so it has this effect of being suspended in outside the normal stream of the cradle-to-grave arc.

The mind moves in planes of thought, and these 2D planes exist at every rotation, and so your mind is like this 3D object that is shaped by the planes you’ve occupied. We learn to shift to specific planes to match a context, for better or work. When we read, or talk, or hang, we get exposed to new planes that we reject or integrate. It’s not enough to see a plane once; it will escape you if it’s not reinforced, and once it’s rigid, it’s hard to dismantle. The architecture of your mind is the meta-game: get this right, and you control your lens to reality, and it affects every area of life.

I hate the word “mental models” though. Idk why, it feels too commodified, too utilitarian, for the purposes of getting ahead in business. It’s weirder than that. There are planes of good and evil, of saintliness and horniness, of man and machine. To actually surf between planes, you need to let lose all assumptions and put yourself in waters that might drive others insane, with the trust that you can pull out and shift. This is shamanism, alchemy, psychic martial arts, I think.

You want plane plasticity. There are many methods—could be drugs, or grieving, or years of meditation—but you want to be method-agnostic. Tools show you new regions and principles, but you want to be able to get there on your own, to be able to do some secret hand signal to yourself that can activate a very specific plane.

I need to think through a sensible stance on drugs for when my kids become teenagers. The simple solution is "just say no to drugs," but that isn't the safest one. They will not be in a bubble, they'll be surrounded by persuasive idiots who don't understand the drugs they're abusing. And so I think education, paired with both caution and openness, is probably the best approach. A draft:

1. LD-50: To start simply, don’t take drugs that could possibly kill you. LD-50 is the dose that kills half the population. You want to consider the multiple between the lethal dose and the recreational dose. Maybe heroin is 3:1, cocaine 5:1, alcohol 15:1. Weed and psychedelics are less lethal than water.
2. Set & setting: Even if psychoactive drugs aren't lethal, there are other risks. The first thing to know, aside from dosage, is that the experience is a reflection of your mind and surroundings. The drug is a mirror, and so don’t rip a bong around goons and watch brain rot; make a ritual where you only use it for creative projects (or some other mindful intention). There's a strong case for these drugs showing you new ways for your mind to work. Countless people, including Steve Jobs, said they couldn’t think the way they think if they weren't exposed to acid.
3. Non-dependence: the crucial thing here is to not build a psychological dependency to the substance. Even if a substance isn't chemically addictive, it's easy to hold onto an assumption that you need it to do your best work. Instead, remember a drug is not something to continuously return to, but rather an occasional realm to find a lens that helps you through your sober, waking reality. Once it shows you something important, you can retain it without the drug, but it only sticks if you focus on that idea and take it seriously. This is why psychedelic therapy involves 10-20 sessions, before and after a single trip, because preparation and integration is where the results are. Worst case, if you endlessly bend your mind without internalizing any of the insights you find, it could lead to maladaptation or mental illness. As George Carlin said “get the message, and hang up the phone.”