Rheostatic knobs

 

20231209 Trip Report

 

I'm having a real struggle finding my joy this season.

 

Things feel like they have been a little bit extra gritty at work, people are nice but it just feels like I'm pushing the rock up the hill more than I should have to. Things that are not under my control, problems that I didn’t cause, but have to fix.

We’ve had some adjustments at home; my husband is on a new schedule where he work. I feel like if you're cuddled up with the dogs and watching TV me going upstairs and spending three or four hours doing my weird drugs feels like I'm just doing weird drugs. I usually dictate my trip reports into a text window that I send to a couple of specific like-minded friends; this time, I sent it to my husband. So any references to “you” are written to him. It also kind of shifts some of the narrative, because I’m referring to things he knows about. I’ll explain some of them.

Some of the frustration, the emptiness, feels like I'm not doing the big work. And I know that some of it I've done the big work and so that the big work doesn't need doing, but it leaves me feeling empty-handed. Because I still need to go back to the medicine to feel normal. Or at least to feel supported and okay.

My brain feels like my body does when I'm not exercising. And I recognize that I have not been exercising my body either, and that's my own damn fault, and I know that a regular schedule and all of that shit would help. I'm just feeling kind of disconnected.

(I go downstairs, and get a hug from him and talk with him just a bit, then go back to the bed.)

Thank you.

Thank you for holding me. Thank you for making a space for this because I know it has not been easy and it has not been without cost.

Sometimes when Lucy (our little dog) is just full of energy and demons and needs immediate attention that can almost be as healing as when Jackie understands that things are weird and she kind of sits a little separate from me where I can see the multiple eyes proliferate down her face.

And sometimes what I need is to stop trying to make it deep. Sometimes the vein in which we exist is superficial like the shine of an ammonite fossil. It's only the nacre. But sometimes I need to stop trying to dig into the deep nature and live my life in that level where life happens. There is so much that depends on the biological functions of water and moistness and human life is spun out of all of this stuff. And I don't usually involve you in this talking part. But I appreciate so much having you make delicious food and feed me. And all of it is stuff that I forget about. I get so focused on the weird stuff that's going on in my brain and I forgot to take care of my organism.

So thank you for loving me. Thank you for being steady and strong and letting me explore this weird shit because it really does feel like it has fixed some deeply broken stuff in me. It does feel like it has fixed some fundamentally broken things in my head that you had nothing to do with other than occasionally echoing a pattern. And some of it I know is problems between the two of us from my own weakness, laziness, bad person-ness. But I do feel like the mushroom trips have helped me unwind some serious problems in my mind. I feel like they let me travel through the world much more like the needle through water that we were watching in that show. It lets me let go of a lot of concerns about society and the ways that people engage that I never understood before.

And I feel like doing the shit that I do with the mushrooms has made me feel more like a living connected human person. And I am profoundly grateful to you, my husband, for all of the weird shit that this has put you through. Because so much of it has to come out of me even after I have figured out what's happening in my head and let go of that pain and that trauma; it still needs to work its way out of my body. And that's not easy for you to deal with. And I try not to bother you with some of that because I know that a lot of it has nothing to do with your fault or anything you did wrong and so much of it is even a version of me that you never met. But I know that you have given me space and love and support to do this weird work. And I will edit any of this that you don't want discussed, because there is some stuff that is just between us. But I want for you to understand this space, has been a profound gift for me. It is more than anything.

I think that part of my challenge and part of the thing that doesn't work right in my brain sometimes is that I forget to focus on the layer that keeps us alive and happy. It's like a skin or a mucous membrane or something that is thin but very full of life and energy. It is where all the beauty is. And sometimes I get so focused on digging into weird veins underground that it is difficult to remember that I need to put food in my mouth until the weed takes over and then I overeat. The pleasure of the food you've been making with the corn and the cranberries is absolutely delightful. Those little crunchy corn cakes are a dish you could serve at any restaurant. If you took some of them on a tray to a party tonight I'm sure they would all vanish.

Thank you for reminding me that I need to sleep. I am not good at putting down that personality that wants to stay up late and think about sex and write. It's an aspect of myself that is deep and powerful and it has awesome skills and I am having a lot of fun with it, but it is not a responsible frame of mind sometimes. It does not figure at all with things like math. It does not let me make appropriate choices in many occasions. And I don't mean that in the sense that I am giving someone else the keys. It is a way of being that is exceptionally fun for me, and I feel very empowered and very engaged, but it is very dick-centered and it is challenging to get that to let loose once it has the keys. It's a lot of work that I'm doing with my therapist and reading and then studying in my brain. I'm dealing with Richard Schwartz's Internal Family Systems therapy system, and it is exceptionally powerful and therapeutic and it helps a lot, but then at the same time I'm looking at Fadiman’s Symphony of Selves framework, and letting that be an organizing mechanism in my brain has been extremely powerful in many ways. It's like suddenly having a filing cabinet. I've never been good with filing cabinets, and so this is actually even better as an analogy because suddenly I have a different understanding that organizes my thinking about my mind. But being able to look at it and turn it on and feed it weed and let it go is remarkably freeing and very empowering and some of this is shit I wish I'd known when I was 20 but so much of this is shit that I feel like I have an empowered understanding that I would never have been able to grasp when I was 20.

This dude is smart even if he’s not careful, and it's not mathematical and it's not always good at things like my schedule and making me happy in the morning. But it's like a muse. That's a thing that my therapist and I have been talking about intensely, because that connection to creative energy is what has been broken in my head for a decade; if it means that I am fucking around and exploring sexual stuff that is hidden in my brain, it's not something that I want to stop entirely and it's not always something where the calendar and the schedule are choices that I'm making. I recognize that right now I am letting some of that have too much play. I am giving some of it not necessarily an addictive quality,  but I am letting it have more impact in my life than I ought to. So much of this trip experience is going back every time and re-leveling almost like a soundboard the way my brain works. I can tune shit up and down like I have sliders or real static knobs. R h e o s t a c i c rheostatic. I don't mean knobs that just lie there. That amuses me but that's not what they are. It feels like I have a level of adjustability in my psyche that is something that I would not have felt comfortable trusting to my 20 year old self. It's something that I have had enough therapy and enough deep reading and enough exploration before I ever got psychedelics that I understand my own weird path. 

The stuff that we're going through in therapy now is really just signposts. It feels like I am making paths that I haven't ever heard about in some cases. Some of the exploration that I'm doing I'm sure other people have done. I'm sure that the connection between autism and psychedelics is being studied in labs. But I feel like my witness, my record, of it is important. It's not just a thing that works for me. I definitely recognize that not everybody should be handed the chainsaw. Not everyone has done enough of this shit in their own mind with the lucid dreaming and the witchcraft and the meditation and all of this stuff that I was doing and some of it was ways to try to connect and fix my autism before I ever recognized that was the deficit. It was ways that I was trying to strengthen my mind and go into deep places and all of this exploration work and studying once I had the psychedelics in my hand I could make sysadmin level changes because I knew where the pressure points were and I know how the brain chemistry operates because I've read and I've studied and I've looked at the results. And it's not just a stick that I'm poking my brain with, even though there is certainly a large amount of that. The way that I trip is fundamentally different from the way that a lot of people trip, and this talking trip that I do is deeply involved in how my fix works. It is the main operating mechanism of what makes my brain better. I don't want to misrepresent that in language or make it unclear. I feel like the psychedelic experience after years of therapy and decades of study and psychodrama and weird shit that I do, I think it gives me an understanding of where to put the scalpel that I don't think that most people have. I'm not saying that there are not people that will definitely benefit from my journal. I've talked to some of them. I have helped people. And that is difficult for me to say because I look at it and think of this as such a solitary journey in a lot of ways, but I am constantly speaking. I am publishing. I am always upright and dictating, and that is why my trips have had as much psychological benefit as they have. I really feel this; I don't think that the work that is currently being done trying to separate the psychedelic experience from the medication will work. At least not in my case. I don't think that it allows for the fix. It's like trying to put a poultice on something that needs to be lanced or set like a bone or popped into place like a dislocated shoulder. I don't think that the people who are trying to do this while they're unconscious are going to get the same therapeutic results. I do feel like it will still adjust their chemistry. I do feel like it will still help a lot of people. But the way that I am fixing things in my head is not a thing that can happen while you're asleep unless you are a dream yogi. If you have done the deep dream work, the Tibetan stuff, and LaBerge and Morley and Richard Moss, maybe- but that stuff that is published under Buddhist theology gets into your brain and how it works in a fundamentally deep way and I see most Buddhism more as a technology of the mind more so than as any sort of belief system. I recognize that in many of the traditions there are deep and important cultural ties to the beliefs that various aspects of the Buddha are reincarnated in different sages and stuff like that, but the thing that makes Buddhism work is the deep understanding of the way the mind operates. And the stuff that I was doing before allowed me to have pathways preset. 

Once I have the understanding of what's going wrong or what's not operating well I go back in and poke things. I don't pretend that it is much more significant or studied than that. Now when I say that, I am talking from a perspective of having done quite a bit of Buddhist reading, a lot of lucid dream study, I've walked in my own mind. Even though I recognize I will let it get weedy and overgrown like a garden that is not healthy sometimes because of my own lack of discipline or my lack of focus, I know this shit. Because of this deep understanding of the way this stuff operates in many cases, I feel like the psychedelic gives me a torch rather than a flashlight to go back on some of these paths. It hasn't given me some of the same powers. I don't have the skill in my lucid dreams that I've had when I was practicing regularly. So much of it is the mental equivalent of being in good shape for running, or doing yoga, or something in your brain that it is tied to regular practice and consistent exploration almost like working a daily practice of crosswords or mental puzzle games. I've been there. I'm fat and lazy now. I don't have the discipline at the moment, and I recognize that discipline is like a muscle - it is a thing that requires exercise and benefits from regular application. I am being weird I apologize for sending all this in text messages to you. I know that there's a lot; I do not expect you to read all or any of it.

My devoted husband came upstairs and poured a soda for me and brought me my weird dog. I don't mean this in a problematic way at all, my dog is very weird and she seems to understand some of the needs that I have when I trip differently than most dogs. It's like she is a specially trained trip a dog, a support animal trained for psychedelics. I can watch right now as the fur on the back of her elaborate ears flows because of things that Josie Kins has subjectively scaled. She's a psychedelics explorer. She has ended up doing work with Berkeley but has no formal degree. I follow her group. She's doing the weird shit. She is leading a tribe of explorers who are, many of them, doing the same kind of stuff that I'm doing. People who have been devoted to ways of understanding the mind that this stuff allows you a very different lamp to view by. And as I'm watching geometry unfold in my ceiling. The little dots that are sprayed on with a plaster gun are moving in patterns like lace, but it's all dancing. The more I focus my still gaze, the more I see things like rainbow lines connecting things together and levels of chatoyancy. I'm talking about the effect that happens in tiger's eye crystals and labradorite. It's happening in front of my face with the stuff on the ceiling and it is exceptionally beautiful but it is shallow as a soap bubble. I have to allow my gaze to linger for it to really develop properly. This morning's trip was 2 grams of PE7 (Penis Envy 7) aborts. They are remarkably strong. Anytime that a mushroom aborts like that, it has planned on having an entire fruiting body but then something goes wrong. In my case it was I believe light and humidity related but very often it has to do with carbon dioxide balance and what you end up with is the stunted intense little mushroom bodies that never got to grow. And so very often they have the entire fruiting body worth of medication; the psychoactive principles are condensed. Measuring out grams of this stuff is almost like measuring madder root or kava or something where it's heavy in the pan; it is not the way of measuring most herbs and most light things. You don't think of it like tea in the sense that an ounce will fill a large bag. My little jar is a half pint and it could seriously damage the minds of a number of people. It is something that I undertake usually when I'm feeling like I'm not making the right connection with the lighter stuff. If I feel like I'm not going deep enough. 

Literally watching things shift and ripple in my experience of an ordinary daily life is remarkable. There's a proliferation of psychedelic geometry in things like shrubberies or wall patterns or anything that has a repetitive nature. Anything like Moorish tile or the patterns of wood grain. I am literally watching as a photograph my husband took devolves into this beautifully elaborated dance of geometry and nature and imagery; it flushes with color as if it were breathing. It reminds me of the color flushing you see in a cuttlefish. I recognize that some of it has to do with the psilocybin locking into visual receptors in my brain, that 5h2a receptor, and the way the visual aspect causes hallucination I feel is deeply tied to the therapeutic benefits that I get from it. I'm not saying that this is the path that everybody can take. I'm not saying that this is a way that a lot of people will be able to fix their minds the way that I have done. But for the serious student it is certainly something that is available. I feel like there's a lot of people that have been struggling with shit the way that I was doing that this will give an arc light to. I don't mean that in any sense of being glorified or drinking my own bath water or anything like that. But if I had had this blog in front of me when I started I would have had a very different experience. It might not have been nicer. It might have been swifter, and allowed me some of the insights that I've been able to work through. Faster. But the problem there is the problem that we always have with speed; it can be so exhilarating and so dangerous that things are not done with appropriate care and precision. And I'm not saying that I'm an expert in my behaviors. I'm still in a lot of therapy. I'm under the care of a psychiatrist and weekly therapy sessions and I see my GP and he knows all about this. A lot of the conversation that I had with my psychiatrist is really more "look what I can do, Dad" and less about his diagnosis, but his insights were exceptionally powerful and I feel like I may have shined a light into some stuff that he can use in his practice. I like being the weird dude on some of this stuff. I have no difficulty being someone that gets his case notes written up.

 I think that some of the stuff that I'm doing is meaningfully tied to the study of psychedelics and autism. I feel like some of the work that I'm doing in my own therapy is significant and important and I have no problem with people pointing to it and having a discussion. I do try as much as possible to curb my evangelism and not involve my family in ways that would be legally difficult or socially crippling. I try to keep some of my weirdness at least a little bit under wraps. But it's very difficult with the amount of weirdness that I have to cover and the amount of wrap that I have on hand. It is challenging for me to try to spread this little rainbow blanket to cover the amount of psychological ass I've got sticking out from underneath it. Publishing it in a consistent journal that dialogues with science and engages with therapy and works through some of the challenging and extraordinary stuff that's happening in psychedelics right now as well as making some delicious food, I feel like the work that I'm doing there is significant. I know that I've said that word multiple times in this trip and one of the issues that I do have with tripping is that I aggrandize myself somewhat, and I repeat myself a lot. I will go back and make notes and see how many times I have said something, but I find it very unhelpful to edit on the fly. My dictation is affected by spasms that move through my face and body on a semi irregular basis that are caused by the drug, but I feel like they are sometimes representations of my own personal autistic weirdness that I normally suppress. 

I feel like I would be a lot more like this if I hadn't been socialized. I don't mean that in any negative sense. I learned in high school how to engage and behave because of deliberate cultural lessons given to me by a student of theater. I still adore her. She reached out to someone who was clearly struggling and made a huge impact in my life. I don't know if she fully appreciates this even though I have told her, because we have such a very different understanding of reality that I don't know how much of this change for this ability to function in daily life she recognizes as a thing that she helped me to understand. Her name is KH. I will not quote her without permission, but I certainly value and appreciate the foreign language textbook she gave me. It is just like the little saying books that foreign travelers can pull open and look in their own language and be able to pronounce something like "I need a room and fresh water." Having someone look at my social engagement and teach me how to make expressions with my face was like a Helen Keller moment. I don't want to make too much of it, because I was a smart person and I can study all of this stuff, but I certainly did not have her fluency and power in emotional communication, and learning some of the stuff and ways to make my face and body communicate for me was life-changing. I don't feel like I would have the amount of impact that I can have now if I didn't have that experience. If I hadn't gone through learning how to deal with society almost as if I'm managing the limbs of a puppet, a marionette. Sometimes the stuff that I'm putting on my face is that deliberate. I am pulling a string; I am tilting a lever that makes an expression that I recognize will have an impression on another person, and it will have an effect that can be anything from touching to charismatic to disdainful but being aware of that theater going on between my eyebrows and my chin was novel for me. It was not a thing that I understood despite the amount of study I had tried to put in. There are some things that you just have to have your hands in. I really struggle with some of the modern laboratory teaching techniques for things like chemistry because they show you clicking a button to put goggles on your face or sliding a lever to boil something. They give you an understanding of the mechanism that is awesome, but you don't get your hands dirty. You don't have the visceral engagement with the actual chemicals. You can't smell them. And I feel like some of the experience that people with autism have when they haven't had to put on the real goggles and smell the chemicals is very different, and some ways not as capable of broadcasting the information. 

I can speak compellingly to a crowd, and some of it is my own evident fascination with the stuff that I am studying, but some of it is an ingrained habit of being able to make my face and body charismatic. I have had this conversation with a writer of sacred music. There is a formula. There are ways that you can make the brain work with music and expression and pattern and the stuff that he does is tied to pushing buttons in the mind that he is very conscious of. It is stuff that I see and understand very deeply now, but before it was entirely opaque to me. It was not something that I had any lens to look into with, other than just looking at a textbook explaining the the ways that the mind was manipulated in something like a church service. But being able to actually prop this stuff up on your eyebrows and make people eat it is very powerful for me, and I don't think that modern autism education gives enough credit to some of this masking. It is not necessarily just masking in the sense of covering symptoms or hiding who you are. It is masking in a sense of inhabiting a dramatic persona that allows me to feel fully engaged and powerful and important in my life in a variety of different ways. Being able to put on that mask and talk to people or go to an event with that personality stretched across my features is almost like a book that my husband and I are currently listening to about extraterrestrial life, Project Hail Mary. It is a phenomenal book, and of course like any good science fiction book it is mostly about people, but it is deeply tied to some extraordinary science work. I fully recommend it. Partly as an intellectual exercise and a way of expanding the mind to look at weird questions, but also as an example of how you can engage with someone who literally has a different atmosphere. They go back and forth communicating in very awkward scientific language to begin with because they have no human. There is no understanding of what it's like to be a mammal. 

But having gone through a certain amount of that as myself and the way that I engage with people, I really sympathize with the alien. I feel a lot of his fears and I place myself in his position sometimes more so than the hero. Our narrator is a brilliant mind and fully engaged and thinking hard and excited, but the other guy is dealing with difficulties communicating that are fundamental to his existence as a creature and I look at that and the ways that they are solving problems is very familiar to me. The thing where you prop up a clock and touch the points on the face and communicate the passage of time to build an intellectual language where you can discuss something like the passage of time is powerful to watch. It is awesome to go on that imaginary experience. But quite often I feel like the guy with the carapace. I am navigating in a bubble in the sense that I need special atmosphere sometimes and there are fundamental differences in understanding because of the way his mind was created chemically. I'm not talking about religion or anything but this way of building an understanding where language is literally encoded thought. I had a discussion with someone about hypnosis and how the ways that the hypnotic script and the voice go into the brain and literally lay down chemical pathways which become a staircase that the hypnotist can invite the person being hypnotized to travel along with them, it's remarkable to think in that way. To look at the way your brain operates and understand that some of this stuff is being engraved in cells by chemicals which then I'll be able to go back and reference later in my life is a very powerful understanding that I hadn't fully put my hands inside of as it were. I wasn't completely wearing those gloves sometimes. But looking and being able to understand some of what's going on with that gives me a perspective that allows me to go through my daily life in a much different way. I am less stressed. I recognize some of the patterns that other people are overlaying on my experience almost like a filter or an illustrators set of notes laid on with acetate sheet and annotated in red and green ink. It's not always affecting the way that I engage with people on a regular basis, but it certainly Alters my understanding of the emotional overhead and the ways that people are freighting a conversation with unspoken content. It allows me to at least look at the packets of data that are being transferred back and forth. Some of it is still untranslatable but I am delighted by the fact that my mind has kept the record clean and I can look at it in my mind and examine those packets of data going back and forth in much the same way that I hired a packet sniffer to come and check data problems with our T1 lines back in the day. I can have someone tap into the line and be able to interpret the traffic for me in a way that pinpointed and diagnosed problems we were having. It is remarkably liberating and also empowering to be able to look at those notes. To be able to understand what is being tied on to the data as it sheets back and forth. It modern society moves at a an informational level that is staggering. The information superhighway is like drinking from a fireman's hydrant. The stuff that goes back and forth in the overhead has always been opaque and being able to sniff those packets is life-changing. I think that that's a common experience for a lot of people with autism. I don't know how many of them want to put their hands in the gloves. I don't know how many people with the kinds of problems that I've had in my life and the kinds of exploration that I've done would want to be me. But I am happy to let them read my notes. I think that in many cases, and I recognize that I am repeating myself, but I think that in many cases just being aware that there is a packet is fundamentally Awakening to the mind and the way that I engage is altered by being able to grasp that. I feel like a lot of normal human beings do this stuff subconsciously. I think that a lot of this happens in nonverbal communication and social niceties and things like that where people are passing back and forth the shibboleth without even being aware. I've always had to carry my code sheet. Being able to see the handshake under the robe sleeve is phenomenal. I don't know a way to overemphasize this with language. I would dance and stamp my feet to make this point. Being able to feel like I am connecting and communicating is so remarkable for me. It is not something that I experienced for the first 50 something years of my life. It is a thing that I had only at that point read about, studied, tried to figure out. My own Journey with autism started very late and has mostly been a mechanism through which I can understand the way my brain works in the problems that I have engaging socially, but now with the psychedelics my affect is so completely engaging that the seams are not visible. People can't see the props which move my face. So much of it happens subconsciously now that I don't even think about it, but it is still like living in a foreign language. It is like speaking German to me. It is happening in a very swift process and I am not conscious of it most of the time, but my experience of having had to learn to move the props by hand gives me an understanding that I can then turn around and explain to someone else. There is an author whose books have absolutely dug into my understanding and change the way that I talk, she represents herself as a former awkward person; Vanessa Van Edwards. Her understanding of how the mind works from the perspective of someone who has looked at it as an intellectual exercise is remarkably good. I will link to her books. For me they are a guidebook of how autistic people and people who don't have those people skills can fake them, very convincingly. Very powerful. She cloaks a lot of what she writes in the language of business and engagement and dynamic speaking and things like that, but if you look at it as a handbook and give it to people who have no understanding of what's happening with their faces or with their bodies that makes people have feelings, it's a very powerful set of tools. It's a way of thinking that I had never fully understood even though I was learning to do some of it. I've read (listened to) Cues and Captivate. I first found her through Mel Robbins' podcast; this episode was mind-blowing for me. 

This is the first time that I've barfed in the hat of my husband (a euphemism I use for when I send someone a HUGE pile of text - no actual vomit was involved, just ten thousand words in his chat window) quite this much. I know that some of this is difficult reading, partly because of our relationship and his understanding of me but also because some of this goes way back before I met him.

We have discussed a lot of important and meaningful stuff that has come up for me and psychedelics and therapy but I think this is the first time that I have given him this volume of text, and certainly the first time that I have worked through in my own mind some of the shit that happens between me thinking something and what my facial features carry. A lot of this working out is happening in real time. I am figuring stuff out as I go. Like I said earlier, I will literally poke my brain in places and adjust how sensitive something is or how much forward prediction I want to allow and some of it has to do with maximizing my happiness and my productivity but a lot of it has to do with understanding the way I engage and making my path with it firm and worn-in intellectually enough that I can have this conversation while I'm not in a psychedelically open state. Being able to put myself into this state of open understanding and engagement is a new thing for me. It has made me powerful in some ways but it is also been a challenge in many ways. It has taken up a huge amount of my time and my energy to think through some of this stuff. The work that I'm doing every Saturday morning is therapy work. It is not light and it is not easy and it is not simple in the sense of mathematics being simple or physics being simple. It is sloshy and weird and Einstein's spooky movement at a distance is the right kind of thinking. The stuff works much more like quantum physics. I don't understand quantum physics. I have read some very good books. I have read explanations of how the quantum mechanics inside the brain and the eyes of a navigating dove can perceive electromagnetism as if it were laid in front of the bird like a grid. It is fascinating to me, but not to the extent that I have the time and the perseverance for serious study. I don't want to pursue a career or anything like that in this kind of understanding.

But it gives me an analogy that I can point to. When we read about I believe it was Augustine and his ways of understanding God, he had the Via negativa and the Via analogia, and this is Via analogia. I can only explain by trying to find things that the psychedelic understanding is like; I can't directly describe it to someone who hasn't been there and make much sense. I can describe some of the stuff that happens psychologically in my mind, and other parts of it is just stuff that happens in a black box. We're still working out the science. I'm not talking about things that I'm doing in that sense, although I am certainly shining a light into some corners of my own, but I'm talking about the research that's coming out of major universities about what's happening in the mind with psychedelics. The stuff that has been absolutely exploding in the past few years about psychedelics and mental health is mind-boggling. It is very upsetting to me, and I will open my mouth about it when I run into it, the way that my state (Texas) and our country have pushed against this kind of exploration from Bronze Age rule-based power structures. That's it plain and simple. I don't believe that the Christian nationalists who preach a sermon of whiteness and everything being the way they think it ought to be, have any belief in God. I don't think that they think of God. I think that they think of the Bible as a tool for power. I think that they see religion as a way of controlling people. And I have been more and more vocal about that when I run into it. It does not make me a popular person. It can make for very difficult dinner conversation. I do know a number of people who appear to be genuinely Godly. I feel like it is a thing that happens almost in spite of the church rather than because of the church, but I have seen it in a number of people in a way that has inspired me to conversation with them and a very different understanding. I had a friend, a correspondent you can say. We've met. I gave him the passion fruit jam that I make from wild fruit that I gathered; I talked with him at great length about theology and history. His understanding of Christian theology was such that it gave me a lens that I had never had before. Once again I will seek out permission before I quote or cite this person because I recognize that being referenced in this kind of blog could be problematic for his career as an academician and a scholar of the holy word. But I certainly intend those emails. 

I have had my eyes and my mind opened by a number of texts and brilliant minds with whom I can struggle across language and centuries. I recognize that a number of them have been honed by the church into great thinkers. However someone like Gregory or Augustine or these foundational prelates, they were great minds to begin with. The church helped with discipline and rules and texts that could be dissected and expounded and all of these things, the apologia and the discourses. But I still think that the stuff that Gregory did to Western Europe was putting it in chattel slavery. I think that the ways that Christian syncretism incorporated, with a very deliberate mind and a very conscious action in many cases, the traditions that belonged to people who lived in those lands by right. The ways that minds were subjugated in the service of a Bronze Age document are impressive and disturbing, and although I absolutely adore things like the Lindisfarne gospel illumination, there was no way that without the power of the church and its ability to influence politics and seize land and all of this other shit that the weird monks would have been able to illuminate page after page in elegant script that is almost completely obliterated by the artwork. So much of this was aimed at the glory of God and I feel like those monks probably really felt it, but I don't know what it could have been like for them if they hadn't. A lot of the weaving work that I study came from elaborate workshops that would never have been possible without huge disproportions of power and resources. The fact that someone has the time to hammer gold into soap-bubble thickness and glue it down to elaborately-decorated books, is entirely dependent on a feudal system that gives that person not only the gold but the time. Somebody fed them. These people did not work other than elaborating their particular artistic excellence and very frequently in the service of the church.

And some of this I won't be able to put in my blog because some of it is too personally identifying. Some of it is too tied to the stuff that has pursued me or that I have pursued as a creative expression and a way of understanding. I have worked snippets of Christian sacred texts into my own work. I have come to peace with that. But it is still something where I do fully recognizing that it's not productive in the sense of feeding or housing or protecting anyone. It is elaboration done solely for its own right. It is a creative work aimed at beauty and sophistication. And I will also put my hand up to recognizing that the language and the rhythm of the language and the candlelight and sheen of the candlelight, and the gold and the way the gold shines... is the exact same thing as a hypnotist's watch. It is a way that people are put into trances, and sometimes I feel like they did it consciously and made those choices but very often I feel like things were framed in terms of being for the glory of God or for the worship of creation. I think a lot of people were dominated intellectually without their permission. I think that a lot of basic Christian theology still works this way. I think that it is still a conscious game for a lot of the big movers, even though they have shifted to things like the gospel of prosperity or regional choices or hate or things that have allowed them to align congregations behind their speech. But the ways that they speak, the ways those lights move across the stage, the stories they tell are just as hypnotic and just as engaging. They are using an immense amount of psychological leverage. It's the reason Scientology works. The actual stuff the Scientologists are working on helps people in many cases but allows them to be pushed along and manipulated I think that about 95% or more of Baptist churches and many other large congregation groups work on the same psychological principles. They sway minds into a following that is not even necessarily belief so much as it is a tribalism where everyone is in the same room looking out and distrusting everyone else. The playbook is being revealed more and more, and it has been very insightful to be able to read some of the stuff that is going on behind the scenes. But it still pisses me off.

 Modern movements like the Quiver Full and some of its cousins are terrifying. They are literally breeding and training a force to turn us into Gilead from The Handmaid's Tale. I struggle with some of these people on a daily basis. I have people who think that the stuff that I do and talk about and teach is in the service of a religious doctrine that I do not espouse. But the way they wink at me, the way they think that we are on the right side together, makes me need to wash my hands. I feel sleazy when they do it.

 I have explored a lot of weird dynamics around race and power and dominance and submission in some of my sex play and some of my interaction with other people. I think of every one of them as an act in the sense of putting on a dramatic persona that allows me to engage in a psychodrama. And once again, much of it has become so subconscious that I don't feel artificial or deliberate as I'm doing it, but it is still a script and an act and a thing that I play at and one of the reasons that I get to do the things that I get to do is because I am playing at it. It's because the other partner recognizes that we are enacting and in many cases criticizing and being very conscious of those dynamics.

 I think that I am attractive to certain people for sexual things because it's not natural for me. It's not something that I genuinely believe is owed to me as a right. I strive to be as woke and conscious and considerate and aware as possible in my interactions. And I let people know that I'm coming at it from that perspective most of the time. But then that allows you to play a character with remarkable freedom. You can explore something that was very problematic in your own life and be able to literally tap out of it if it gets to be too much. This (being able to tap out) is not an experience that most people have had, who have experienced serious effects of racism or who have been abused or who have had family trust violated. For many gay men those things are tied to foundational sexual awakenings that haunt the rest of their lives. Being able to go into a role-play experience that recapitulates only certain parts of a child molestation can help that molested child as an adult deal with some of the difficult psychological stuff that's going on in his own head and figure out why it turns him on. A lot of guys, especially gay guys, have experiences that twist them or damage them in ways that echo throughout the rest of their sex lives much like bumping into one wall of a freeway express lane will cause you to ricochet off the opposite wall again and again in an attempt to stabilize. But all the while the car is moving forward. Guys are going forward in their own lives and engaging and trying to connect with this weird script they carry in a suitcase in their heads that frequently they're not even fully aware of. Having a frank discussion of it and then exploring why it continues to have repercussions, I feel is very therapeutic for me  - especially with some of my own history but also can be very healing to other people because I can make that theater on my face. I can present a stage and a set of props that that person can use and manipulate to work through their issue. It's remarkably heady for me as a person, and makes me feel both exceptionally powerful and remarkably responsible, and I do my very best to use it for good because I feel like there are a lot of people in that world as well who understand some of the psychology subconsciously and use it for selfish means. I feel like a lot of vulnerable guys are pressed into connections that are not emotionally healthy because they haven't had enough light shined on them and enough examination. It's part of why I write. There's an entire separate blog which I do not intend to link to from here. This reference may or may not survive the editing process. Some of it is just too personal and I don't want for it to poison the well, as it were; to discredit the other work that I've done because some Christian idiot needs to throw rocks. 

And once again, I don't think that characters like our current Speaker of the House have any deep emotional belief that they are following the dictates of a personal God who cares about humanity. I feel like they are pulling levers and telling stories and wearing the same masks that I can wear, but they are doing it with the aim of the enslavement of the human mind and domination of the modern world for a certain powerful elite. This is not a conspiracy theory. This is being laid bare more and more and I just hope that we are able to shunt this locomotive onto the right tracks before it goes into a right wing dictatorship. The Republic of Gilead is not something that Margaret Atwood intended to be a guidebook. However, her perceptions were remarkably accurate on a lot of things about the way the mind works.

I have read her short stories and her poetry. She is a remarkable author. The way that the Martha's white hood and red cape have become an opposition symbol protecting basic human rights and women's choices is amazing. I just hope it's in time. Some of this I look at almost like the way that climate scientists are almost all pessimists. Many of them drink. It's difficult to be aware of this stuff and feel powerless to make substantial change because when you have a conversation with someone whose oars are not in the water, there's just no way to find common ground. If they genuinely believe that Trump was the victim of voter fraud because of the tribal mechanisms that have been used to brainwash them, there's just no having an intellectual conversation. You can't have a meeting of the minds. There is no way for that person to see reason. I can't have a conversation with someone who isn't in the same reality that I am in. If we can't check the dictionary and a math book and some basic understandings of earth science and biology and have an agreement on very basic things, they do not exist in the same reality that I inhabit. They are not functioning as upright sober minds. They are regurgitating things that have been spooned into their brains and they will not admit of any recourse to historical record or scientific fact. I think of them almost like zombies from a modern horror movie where once they've been turned you just have to shoot them. I don't shoot them. But I do fully disregard them as human beings and think of them like non-player characters that I just have to work around. They are dangerous forces more so than people. It really bothers me to think of human beings like that, but in order to be able to navigate daily life I have to. In the same sense that I struggle at my office having to harden our building against homeless people, I don't like to think about people in any way other than as subjects. I don't want to think of them as objects. I don't wish to objectify them without permission. But if someone comes at me with a Bible that is clearly being used as a blunt instrument, they don't give me a lot of choice. I don't have sufficient charm and ability to manipulate them myself to be able to convert anyone who doesn't want to do the reading. I've had some very difficult conversations with people and I feel like I have opened some people's minds with those conversations, but they've got to be willing to start with things like climate is shifting and what we did to the Native Americans is fraught and difficult and was not morally right.

And I think we're at about the point now where I need to get off my ass and go fold laundry. We have shifted my schedule and the Saturdays when normally my husband would be downstairs in his office doing his day job he is now about the house doing house stuff and taking care of our lives. He is very tolerant and forgiving and friendly about things like bringing me food and drinks. The breakfast I was unable to eat this morning for the most part was absolutely delicious, but I was so deeply psychedelic at the moment that I could appreciate the textures and the crunch and the aromas and the colors but actually getting my mouth to swallow the food was remarkably challenging. I don't usually eat at all when I trip. I will be hungry after, and I will enjoy my food with a special savor throughout the rest of the day because my mind has been so open. But while I'm tripping my body does not enjoy the sensations of chewing and swallowing very much. I don't know how many people talk while they trip. I know that it is typically not the experience that I see in the literature, but I don't know how often it happens in the bush, as it were. But it took a while when I was first figuring this out to learn to dictate. The physical dexterity required for typing is still possible for me in a fairly deep psychedelic space but it is much more awkward and the mechanisms required to get that to work are more stilted and more held together with duct tape. Being able to speak what's on my mind into dictation software is very liberating. It lets me do the integration on the fly, so that rather than having a psychedelic insight and then having to go back and create artwork or write a journal or whatever afterward, I am working through the shit as it comes up and dealing with it as a conscious mind and an open mouth. My intellect speaks through the entire experience most of the time. There will definitely be sections where the experience is overwhelming and I just relax and enjoy what I'm being shown or the insight that is being generated visually, and sometimes it's just a light show. It is delightful in the sense that looking at beautiful nature is delightful. It is remarkably beautiful. The work of a lot of psychedelic artists like Alex Grey points to not only the immense beauty of the experience but the psychological power behind a lot of what we experience in the trip. I have certainly laid down with my eyes closed with a blindfold on and just enjoyed the show. But it's not the way I work on a regular basis. I don't think that it helps the mind as much as being able to deliberately and thoughtfully explore some of this stuff. I'm following Fadiman more so than Carhartt Harris. I know that the therapeutic use of psychedelics is aiming largely at the way they engage brain plasticity and the effects that they have on depression and things like that are mostly, I feel, to the sensation of feeling connected and engaged during the trip. While I recognize that there is some shit that happens in the brain that would definitely continue to happen even if you don't like it and you don't engage with it, I think the idea of trying to do psychedelics under anesthesia or anything like that to remove the trippiness is getting the wrong end of the stick. I think that the trippiness is the part that makes it work. At least for me. It is that sense of recognizing connections and seeing patterns and feeling on a very substantially deep basis like there is some sort of universal will toward good, to me it's all tied together. I don't think that people who skip the thinking part will get the mental health benefit as much as people who go through and do the self-examination. I recognize that pharmacology needs to progress in a measured and safety focused and conscious way, but I also recognize that big drug companies are trying to patent variations of some of the Psychedelic substances so that they can be measured and Quantified and delivered in specific milligram dosages, but they will come with a prescription and a sense that a pill is being given to you to fix you rather than giving you a toolbox to fix yourself. I feel like psychedelics have given me a toolbox to fix myself. I built my own damn toolbox. Exploring the mycology for years before I even got any mushrooms made me feel like I was committed to the process and part of the work. I think that this engagement and connection is much of why it works for me. I took the same approach to ssris and snris and benzodiazepines, but they did not give me the kind of power the psychedelics do. I had a conversation first with my general practitioner and then with the psychiatrist about the mechanism of how they interact in the brain, and I could use those chemicals to enhance or dampen reactions going on in my skull, but not having the issue fixed, it was always just painting over structural problems. It didn't fix anything substantial, it just allowed me to zoom down that counter flow lane without hitting the walls very often. Looking back at this giant pile of text, my poor husband. I normally generate these trip reports as text that I send to one or two different like-minded people and then I go through and pull them out into a text editor and make reasonable sense of them before I put them into the blog. Because I dictate including punctuation and citations, I frequently lift entire paragraphs without even having to touch anything other than spelling and capitalization, because sometimes the software will screw things up for me, and sometimes I need to do things like highlight a link or point to a study. But my field notes and what ends up in the finished blog are very nearly identical. I remove some things that are too deeply personal. I remove some things that are too identifying or would damage my family if there was a legal pursuit because we still live in a remarkably backward state. 

I have real difficulty believing that someone would be able to read my entire record and then find that I was criminally pursuing drugs for some sort of nefarious end. But I can certainly believe that the Christianist theologians in our state could twist the therapeutic benefit that I have gotten from these mushrooms into something that is not only illegal but morally dangerous. I think that a lot of the reason that the government came down so hard on psychedelics in the sixties is because of the free thinking. I think that it makes people question. I think that it fixes a lot of that automatic belief in authority. And I think that the counterculture movement was tied into that but psychedelics like LSD and mushrooms were definitely key to that movement and the ideologies of things like back to nature and recycling and peace and love. Peace and love doesn't do well on the battlefield. It is not ideologically compliant. It does not engage well with a conservative government. But one of the things that I'm definitely driven to do is make it very clear how fundamentally healing this experience has been for me, and I have to say that I have had remarkably good feedback. I have talked to so many people whose response is something along the lines of "I'm very happy for you and I'm glad it works" and "I am so glad to see you happy and healthy." The number of people who screw up their faces and want to shut me down is almost zero. I recognize that I have made choices about who I engage with in some respects, and I know that I am in a fairly left of center bubble as far as as my friends and who I read. But one of the things that I keep seeing is that if we were looking at normal political discourse, the current American left-wing is basically centrist. It is focused on a recognition of science and rationalism and general respect for humanity, and it is not even possible now to have a supportable discourse about the Green New Deal and making radical changes in that direction; it's not possible to get anything done because the right wing has gone so far into despotism and authoritarianism and this horrible cult of personality.

Okay. Once again, going to try to get off my ass and get some shit done. I keep winding myself up again. The really trippy part is mostly over. Staring at things like wood grain, they still flow and I'm still in a heightened perception of color and motion. But I can fold laundry. Laundry needs folding. Another one of the reasons that I think that this stuff works for me the way that I do it is because I do get up and go fold laundry and get on with my day. Sometimes it takes me a very long time to get up and sometimes I spend an exceptionally long time working in my brain but at least making the effort to incorporate this into my life as a thing that happens therapeutically for a few hours once a week helps me a lot.