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February 27 - March 3, 2017
I was taken to another world, another place, another time. My body seemed to be without sensation, lifeless, strange. Was I dying?”
Not so much chasing the dragon as reaching for the cuddly kitty of contentment.
And yet, within twelve hours, they had all completely recovered. It’s taken me longer to get right after a Pilates class.
(She said she wanted to kill her mother, but, then, what twenty-one-year-old woman doesn’t?)
personality of the researcher administering the drug had a profound effect on the experience of the patient. If the examiner was cold and distant, the subject occasionally became hostile, even paranoid. The subjects of a warm and gentle researcher almost universally experienced feelings of love and joy.
psychedelic use is correlated with lower rates of suicidal thinking and suicide.
Shit happens? When have I ever uttered those words in a tone other than ironic?
I do it because I enjoy it. The yell, the angry e-mail, the snarky tweet, the sarcastic comment, all provide a momentary release of tension that feels really good.
The pain is the point.
flow is the state of “intense emotional involvement” and
timelessness that comes from immersive and challenging activities.
Creative flow is the artist’s kibble. Having experienced it once, you want it again, and the fact that
it doesn’t always happen makes it all the more precious and tantalizing.
They are all hackers at heart,
trying to expand the computing capabilities of their own gray, lumpy wetware so that they can be the next Steve Jobs.
And yet I am so little at risk of prosecution that I am not only taking LSD but writing about it. Why? Because the sad fact is that my race and class make prosecution less likely.
racism of the drug war has been the single most important driving factor in the ever-escalating incarceration of people of color in the United States.
I didn’t believe that the approximation of a career I had cobbled together justified the expense of a renovation.
If Pride and Prejudice could be produced under such circumstances, only a pretentious fool with an overly precious sense of her own importance would demand a place of her own, free of vintage eight-track players, in which to write.
As if all our children are weak-willed moral midgets, unable to resist the drug-pushing Svengalis of the eighth grade.
Harm reduction is not incompatible with disapproving of drug use, but it is incompatible with denying that drug use exists.*3
researchers studying drugs like methamphetamine or crack cocaine tend to view any and all differences, no matter how small, as clinically significant. This, he says, is a reflection of bias, not of fact. Researchers see effects from drug use because they anticipate seeing effects from drug use.
It’s sleep deprivation, not crack or meth, that makes some people crazy.
Is equanimity a characteristic of intelligence, or does it seem so
because we associate rationality with intellect? Certainly, that isn’t true of brilliance. The genius of fantasy is often mercurial and tumultuous.
Why are you so full of self-loathing, so inept and incompetent, that all you can do is criticize yourself when you meditate? What the fuck is wrong with you?
Emotional residue from prior unsuccessful attempts no longer hindered their creative flexibility.”
“a classic paradigm of two different paths to the ultimate reality. One gets
bamboozled by the powers and tricks of the altered states, and one keeps in touch with his heart, exercising it with all his power,
Nothing in this world irritates me so much as a “free spirit.” I can’t abide when people shirk their responsibilities, when they act
without contemplation of the consequences, when they prioritize fun and freedom above all else.
They were activists on the issue of drug policy reform because
American drug policy has been a catastrophe for poor people and people of color, because they were patriotic devotees of the United States Constitution, and because they believed that the power to dictate what a person does with her consciousness should never belong to the government, even if the only thing they themselves had ever done to alter their consciousnesses was to attempt to come to grips with the rule against perpetuities.
“a glimpse of the unbearable splendour of ultimate Reality,” does that ultimate reality exist outside himself, or was he just suffering from a delusion that it did?
But I have always sworn that the thing I believe in more than anything else is my own fallibility. If
Microdosing makes me both irritable and able to tolerate irritability.
freaking out about your kids is normal, and even the most microdose-mellowed mama is still a mama.
Humans live
forever on the Hedonic Treadmill; whatever our life experiences, whatever our transient miseries or joys, we eventually revert to a mood set-point that depends not on circumstance but on individual
I’m a terrible procrastinator. Or is it that I’m a great procrastinator? Possibly the actual best procrastinator.
thing I want to feel is the floor shifting beneath my feet. They urged me to try a “real” dose. It’d change my life, they said, as though my problem is that my life has been too devoid of weirdness. Besides, my life is changing.
Turns out, when you stop fighting a war, fewer people die.
My experts all agree that there is an inherent human instinct to alter consciousness, one so powerful that there has never in human history existed a drug-free society.
They would also provide clear, honest, and thorough education about the risks and benefits of these and all drugs.
Less scare, more care.
“It is time to acknowledge that drugs are infinitely more dangerous if they are left solely in the hands of criminals who have no concerns about health and safety. Legal regulation protects health.”*13
But aching for the ideal gets in the way of the actual.
engage in more productive conflict and to be more forgiving of myself after the resolution of conflict.
Families are hostages to the moods of their members.
