Trying too hard = repelling.
Trying too hard to find meaning in life is a surefire way of making sure it feels meaningless.
“People who try too hard to be liked are annoying. People who try too hard to be attractive are repulsive. People who try too hard to be enlightened are self-centered. People who try too hard to be happy are miserable.”
Excerpt from How to Live Derek Sivers
I did some work today. Yes, I delayed. Yes, I bought too much snacks. Yes, I'm here later than I wanted to be. But I did some good work.
I matched up a lot of orders with their txids. I rechecked everything and put it into categories. I am on the way to having an organised, complete report.
This is good.
I can do some thinking tomorrow about what I want to exclude. Hm?
This is now a blog about my personal development.
Back to “gringo”
I called myself rebuilding, then retreat, with the following description: > a story about coming back from the brink of madness... with the vow to go back when I'm stronger
But honestly now... I don't think any of that is helpful.
I am getting fat, weak, and irritable, from my anxiety and open-mindedness. I need to build a better life. I should just accept that I'll make mistakes along the way.
Keep an orientation toward being a better person. Don't feel ashamed for getting absorbed in games. They're fun.
Jung on mescaline!
To A. M. Hubbard 15 February 1955
Dear Sir,
Thank you for your kind invitation to contribute to your mescalin scheme. Although I have never taken the drug myself nor given it to another individual, I have at least devoted 40 years of my life to the study of that psychic sphere which is disclosed by the said drug; that is the sphere of numinous experiences. Thirty years ago I became acquainted with Dr. Prinzhom’s mescalin experiments and thus I had ample opportunity to learn about the effects of the drug as well as about the nature of the psychic material involved in the experiment.
I cannot help agreeing with you that the said experiment is of the highest psychological interest in a theoretical way, but when it comes to the practical and more or less general application of mescalin, I have certain doubts and hesitations.
The analytical method of psychotherapy (e.g., “active imagination”) yields very similar results, viz. full realization of complexes and numinous dreams and visions. These phenomena occur at their proper time and place in the course of the treatment. Mescalin, however, uncovers such psychic facts at any time and place when and where it is by no means certain that the individual is mature enough to integrate them.
Mescalin is a drug similar to hashish and opium in so far as it is a poison, paralysing the normal function of apperception and thus giving free rein to the psychic factors underlying sense perception. These aesthetic factors account for colours, sounds, forms, associations, and emotions attributed by the unconscious psyche to the mere stimulus provided by the objects. They are comparable in Hindu philosophy to the concept of the “thinker” of the thought, the “feeler” of feeling, the “sounder” of sound, etc.
It is just as if mescalin were taking away the top layer of apperception, which produces the “accurate” picture of the object as it looks to us. If this layer is removed, we immediately discover the variants of conscious perception and apperception, viz. a rich display of contingent colours, forms, associations, etc., from which under normal conditions the process of apperception selects the correct quality.
Perception and apperception result from a complicated process which transforms the physical and physiological stimulus into a psychic image. In this way, the unconscious psyche adds colours, sounds, associations, meaning, etc. out of the treasure of its subliminal possibilities. These additions, if unchecked, would dissolve into or cover up the objective image by an infinite variety, a real “fantasia” or symphony of shades and nuances both of qualities as well as of meanings. But the normal process of conscious perception and apperception aims at the production of a “correct” representation of the object excluding all subliminal perceptional variants.
Could we uncover the unconscious layer next to consciousness during the process of apperception, we would be confronted with an infinitely moving world riotous with colours, sounds, forms, emotions, meanings, etc. But out of all this emerges a relatively drab and banal picture devoid of emotion and poor in meaning.
In psychotherapy and psychopathology we have discovered the same variants (usually, however, in a less gorgeous array) through amplification of certain conscious images. Mescalin brusquely removes the veil of the selective process and reveals the underlying layer of perceptional variants, apparently a world of infinite wealth.
Thus the individual gains an insight and a full view of psychic possibilities which he otherwise (f.i. through “active imagination”) would reach only by assiduous work and a relatively long and difficult training. But if he reaches and experiences them in this way, he has not only acquired them by legitimate endeavour but he has also arrived at the same time in a mental position where he can integrate the meaning of his experience.
Mescalin is a short cut and therefore yields as a result only a perhaps awe-inspiring aesthetic impression, which remains an isolated, unintegrated experience contributing very little to the development of human personality.
I have seen some peyotees in New Mexico and they did not compare favourably with the ordinary Pueblo Indians. They gave me the impression of drug addicts. They would be an interesting object for a closer psychiatric investigation.
The idea that mescalin could produce a transcendental experience is shocking. The drug merely uncovers the normally unconscious functional layer of perceptional and emotional variants, which are only psychologically transcendent but by no means “transcendental,” i.e., metaphysical.
Such an experiment may be in practice good for people having a desire to convince themselves of the real existence of an unconscious psyche. It could give them a fair idea of its reality. But I never could accept mescalin as a means to convince people of the possibility of spiritual experience over against their materialism. It is on the contrary an excellent demonstration of Marxist materialism: mescalin is the drug by which you can manipulate the brain so that it produces even so-called “spiritual” experiences. That is the ideal case for Bolshevik philosophy and its “brave new world.” If that is all the Occident has to offer in the way of “transcendental” experience, we would but confirm the Marxist aspirations to prove that the “spiritual” experience can be just as well produced by chemical means.
There is finally a question which I am unable to answer, as I have no corresponding experience: it concerns the possibility that a drug opening the door to the unconscious could also release a latent, potential psychosis. As far as my experience goes, such latent dispositions are considerably more frequent than actual psychoses, and thus there exists a fair chance of hitting upon such a case during mescalin experiments. It would be a highly interesting though equally disagreeable experience, such cases being the bogey of psychotherapy.
Hoping you are not offended by the frankness of my critical opinion,
I remain, dear Sir,
Yours very truly,
C.G. Jung
And why choose pain over DPDR?
Because DPDR leads to anxiety, and insanity, and horror, and ultimately (I suspect) resentment of existence and the desire to snuff out everything good and worthy of love.
Only a disassociated man could shoot down a room full of people in cold blood.
Only a schizophrenic man suffering paranoid delusions could stab his wife thinking she was a demon.
Only a depersonalised pedophile could rape and kill a child, driven by the most base urges of tyranny, selfishness, fear, and sadistic curiosity.
Well, not “only” these conditions. But in all of these situations I don’t believe the person (a man, a schizo, a pedo) could do the crime without disassociating a bit.
The Japanese soldiers or German Nazis could not have performed the Nanking rapes or Jewish slaughters without sufficiently dehumanising their victims and unplugging from their empathy for pain.
If you choose pain, you ground yourself. It’s not about losing the sting of pain. You’ll probably still be blindsided by various forms of pain, no matter what voluntary pain you choose.
But, if you suffer from DPDR, you might just keep a grounded, humble perspective…
Pain as the solution to DPDR?
What if Wim Hof started going into the cold because if he didn’t, he began disassociating, – wondering if he was in a dream? He needed to get back in touch with something real, so that he could take care of his kids?
What are the healthiest forms of pain?
Working out- evenly but intensely damaging muscles, but not joints and tendons.
Cold shock as long as it’s not frostbite…
Saunas maybe, to the point of struggling to breath…
Jiu jitsu and other martial arts…
Knees over toes, mobility exercises, yoga, and other stretches…
Physiotherapy and chiropractic adjustments…
Water fasting…
Sex without ejaculation…
Eating disgusting but most likely healthy food – clean raw eggs, kimchi, sauerkraut…
Cold calling no-nonsense people, who can reject you swiftly and meanly…
Foam rolling your IT band…
(Maybe) getting a face cleaning (could fuck up your acne more though)…
Voluntary bee stinging, if not allergic, especially if there are any proven health benefits…
Sexual fasts…
Public humiliation as long as your career won’t suffer too bad…
Flirting in a foreign language (if single)…
Putting salt on an open wound…
Blood tests and donations…
Hair waxing if it won’t cause ingrown hairs or other negative effects…
BDSM sex if done consensually and carefully… with minimal tissue damage, maximal pain…
Have a child and feel them hate you and break your heart… feel their pain as they encounter difficult periods in life…
Negotiation and careful exploration/healing of trauma, with your partner…
All of these are ethical ways of inflicting pain, that can maximise a sense of reality, while either having no negative effect on your life or a positive effect.
I will rebuild. I will heal DPDR.
Existential crisis and resulting depression tends to happen more frequently to life’s deep thinkers; the inquisitive, reflective or ambitious types.
Unsurprisingly, these are often the same people who turn to entheogens and psychedelics to find answers.
Again, it is common for existential crisis to be a response to certain thoughts or experiences, which once processed and integrated can actually yield positive results.
Holy shit. Later in that article:
I’ve been experiencing a very deep existential depression and dread with a strong sense of meaningless. This was triggered from depersonalisation (caused by a cannabis experience in which I met 'the void', followed by a trauma experience).
To go through an experience for almost a year where nothing in reality was real – not even myself – was terrifying. I had a complete loss of agency and sense of self, various time distortions and other dissociative experiences.
Existential crisis was triggered by my depersonalization experience. It sparked all sorts of existential thoughts and questions, as my mind tried to grasp the new reality I was experiencing. My main existential fear, for many reasons, has been a loss of the self after death – to go back to some sort of 'all'.
The symptoms of all three disorders first arose after a very psychedelic cannabis experience that triggered the derealisation from this. Four days later, whilst in this state, a traumatic event happened that brought on depersonalisation. In attempt to find relief, two days later I was prescribed an SSRI, but it first worsened the DP and DR, and subsequently I developed HPPD symptoms. I stopped the SSRI after 9 days as it was making things worse for me.
The cannabis acted like an extreme psychedelic for me. For example, I experienced major time distortions; I experienced all of eternity in under a minute, and my reality changed. I was outside of everything, and there were multiple versions and layers of reality expanding outwards from the tip of my nose. It is hard to put into words, Hard to explain, but the effects in the music video for The White Stripes “Seven Nations Army” best depict what I experienced. However, for me it was my room and the centre point was the end of my nose.
I somehow ‘time skipped’ to my bedroom, aiming to close my eyes and fall asleep or give in. At this point reality started to dissolve, as did I, and I was transported to 'the void'. My experience of the void was the opposite of existence. It didn't feel like 'nothing' because to have nothing, you would have to know what 'something' was. It was simply non-existence, beyond the concepts of physical matter and time. It felt like I spent an eternity here, and it was truly terrifying. In this void, I did not have my physical body; I didn’t know what or who I was. I was just experiencing this void and terror.
When somehow I eventually started to come out of it, I remember seeing a reel of my life playing like a movie below as I fell from the void. I didn’t understand it, nor know what 'I' was. My sense of self and being human was still totally gone.
'I', or I guess you could say my spirit/energy/essence fell into this movie reel at the point I had left the void. I was starting to return to my body. I had to try and force my memories to understand this reality again. But now these memories didn’t feel like memories; more like thought creations. It felt like I was creating this reality through 'memories' that didn’t actually exist before I thought them all into existence. It was an intense, wild trip that left me with all sort of questions afterwards. forest-walk.jpg After this experience I remained sober and medication free, but after three months I still had symptoms of DPD, DR and HPPD, including out of body experiences. For example, I was walking through the forest with two new friends on a sunny day, and somehow we got very lost.
During this time, I left my body and somehow experienced all of time and the entirety of the entire forest in one moment, but that moment had no time definition.
As neat as this sounds, it was another terrifying experience due to my spirit/energy/essence having nothing to contain it or hold onto, as my body would usually do. Instead it was desperately grasping for something to hold onto and ground itself. When I came out of this, I had apparently been functioning somewhat normally but quietly, while with my friends trying to find our way back.
When I returned to normality, I asked my friends how long we had been there for at that point. The answer was four hours, but I honestly had no concept of time or how long we had been there. If I had had to guess, I would have said around twenty minutes.
The HPPD symptoms were another thing entirely. They made me feel constantly high, with head pressure and tinnitus. The first symptom was the walls and floors 'breathing'. I had this experience whilst on magic mushrooms 4 months prior which I enjoyed. This time it was very different; in my already overwhelmed state from DPD/DR ,the HPPD brought an immense amount of anxiety. It felt like a never ending trip. I was sober and should be feeling normal, but for a long time I was far from that. It felt horrendous.
In my house I had mostly artex ceilings, which seemed to make the visuals worse. At the initial onset, I looked at my curtains they seemed to continuously expand outwards, yet simultaneously never changing in width. It was mind bending. They kept growing and expanding outwards, yet never changed in width. It just didn’t make sense.
I would also experience trailing – when something would move across my field of vision and leave a large trail of itself behind. My hands would move and leave these trails, and I would also get a lot of ghosting vision/double vision. For some reason this was particularly bad when travelling in a car at night. I would see two road signs next to each other when there was only one, or multiple road lines when there was just one set. I also had static, like TV static, overlaid on most of my vision but it was incredibly pronounced when looking at the sky for some reason. It took all the beauty out of it and gave me feelings of regret and depression.
Today, I have largely recovered from the DPD, DR and HPPD, but the existential dread and depression hasn't left me. After these experiences I actually feel even more of a desire to try DMT in the hope of finding some insight into my existential dread, or even some peace or greater understanding. However, I am concerned that DMT might spark even more questions than answers, and I can’t risk sparking the DPDR again.
Fuck that. Fuck psychedelics man.
Let’s try to find some people who have healed.
Found one guy who suggests that he healed via meditation. Hmm.
I stumbled across one concept today – pain is real. Pain stops us thinking about whether we are ‘the creator’ and all one, single, empty, void.
The purpose of pain is to feel a sense of reality.
Kind of horrific if true but maybe it’s something I could accept as a new structure for reality?
A part of me desperately wants to go back into comfy ignorance rather than living on the edge, playing with fire, swimming in the chaotic deep end.
And I do feel like drowning in the deep end doesn’t help anyone either… I need to retreat at least a bit.
Surely I can mine the chaos for a little bit of understanding?
Meaning as the antidote to suffering…
Individuals subjected to suffering in the absence of an orientation toward meaning and responsibility become cynical, unstable, hopeless, and alienated—then resentful, vengeful and dangerous.
Conservatives can offer personal responsibility, the committed social bonds of marriage, family and job, and true civic engagement as valid and reliable antidotes to the nihilism of unearned cynicism, the temptation of narrow short-term pleasure, and the demoralizing consequences of faithless hopelessness.
Such advocates can remind us all that sacrifice—the willingness to forestall the gratifications of the immediate moment; the willingness to engage in difficult endeavours in the present to build something worthwhile for the future; the moral obligation to withstand the trials of immediate, timely disagreement and conflict, to ensure a lasting peace—is a laudable, necessary, and ultimately redeeming activity.
Such advocates can, finally, define a pathway through the pitfalls of guilt, offering atonement through responsibility as the proper response to the inevitably unequal distribution of talents and privileges.
Alcohol for escaping responsibility...
It dampens anxiety, leaves positive emotion intact – lets you do stupid things without caring for the consequences.
Alcoholics drink to escape withdrawal... anxious people to escape anxiety... but young people to escape responsibility.
Most people delay doing the future authoring program. I don't write enough, I need to do it later...
Do it haphazardly, badly, a tiny bit at a time... and get better.
Time to write a little bit...