In the beginning was the world, and the world was made of atoms, and the world was atoms. Truth Existed, as something objective and elusive, to which I could be closer or farther.
With my first (good) acid trip, I was blown apart by beauty and purpose, and saw how much of a participant I was in my experience. Colors were brighter. The atoms of the world became sacred art. The seal had been broken – where before I had been a scientist puzzling things on paper, now I was part of the puzzle, and it felt like waking up.
I became an evangelist, feeding irresponsibly high doses to newcomers and feeling confused when they didn’t all have the same reaction I did. My framework was excited; something radical had happened to me, and the integration into my sense of purpose was raw and inconsistent. I had a sense of collective consciousness, like I was tapping into a great unified awareness or something. I wanted other individuals to feel like they were part of a collective consciousness too, ironically feeling somewhat uncollective with the individuals who didn’t grok the psychedelic realm, man.
With each successive acid trip, I felt profound insights emerging at subconscious levels, though they remained as just faint impressions to my sober self. So, in an attempt to bring more faint impressions with me, I kept going back – I was learning, something really important, and it was changing me. I really did feel better – I was at greater ease with myself and my life, I felt intense love for everyone around me, and I was hemorrhaging art onto every blank page in sight. I accidentally did therapy on myself, permanently healing trauma around my abusive father. This stuff was good for me, and so the nonverbalness of my insights didn’t bother me, really.
In hindsight, I view most of this period as marked by a strong belief that I understood something important – I’d begun a process of self deconstruction, and most of the people around me were still stuck on the world is atoms. I had started out this process as analytical and curious, and now my analytical habits were giving me a new framework – one for profound changes in my relationship to reality that nobody could understand; in this solitude, I viewed myself as enlightened.
My trips were breathtakingly beautiful, filled with ecstasy and horrible pain. I didn’t shy away from either – I sought out the intensity, and every trip spent at least some time sobbing in agony. I writhed, I shuddered, I danced, hard. I increased my doses, put terrifying or sad music on my playlists. I tripped with others, but increasingly alone, sometimes in the dark, sometimes in silence, where I lay still and staring directly into my own blistered mind. It was forced meditation on steroids, and it was utterly exhausting. Inevitably, during each trip, I would think I can’t go on – there’s no more of me left, I am as weary as the dead – yet somehow I kept on, like a body dragged on a rope behind a speeding car. The acid pried my eyes open with the gentle power of god. I was an infant, formless and unknowing. I was pure love, born to be sacrificed for mankind.
The process of this annihilation followed a cycle of holding on and letting go in a particular way – the slow dissolution and defense of my lattice of beliefs.
We’re each a gigantic, complex lattice of beliefs, intertwined and functional; the large scale, top-level lattice features things like “conservative social norms are bad” or “if I save enough money, I can retire”, while the bottom, low-level stuff consists of the granular, unconscious ones, like “pain is bad” or “I move through time”.
And with each trip, a chunk of my beliefs would disappear from the lattice. I don’t mean they disappeared from my experience, but more that they would become object, where my experience of the beliefs transitioned from “reality indicator” to “a playful frame” – I lost the sense that the belief corresponded to anything measurable outside myself, and thus lost the sense of control I’d had from feeling like I knew what was going on.
It’s a bit like visual illusions – have you ever felt your brain ‘snap’ from viewing an illusion one way, to viewing it another? Nothing about the concrete sensory data changed – you’re still seeing the same shapes and angles – but the frame you used to make sense of it shifted, quite suddenly, and maybe you became aware that your experience of the illusion was your frame, and that the frame was not inherent, that it could move, and maybe then you held what you saw lightly, playfully, without the idea your frame actually corresponded to reality.
In the void of departing beliefs, the remaining belief structure (to which I was still subject) would attempt to reconcile with that void, like the seared ends of a burned paper curling in on itself. This is where my belief in enlightenment came from – I detected that I had a great void in me where many beliefs had been, and when the lattice of remaining beliefs attempted to make sense of it, it came into a “I must be enlightened” framework, a framework I did not take as playful, but rather sensed as some indicator of reality. This process repeated subtly for everything – my belief that I was separate from others became playful (e.g., “I now see that my separateness from others is just a construction”), and so in its void my lattice latched onto the belief of collective consciousness (e.g. “I now realize we must all be part of the same mind”). My belief in timespace as a traditional, measurable thing that I existed inside of became object, and so in its void I got something like “all internally consistent realities must necessarily exist.”
Keep in mind I was not aware that I was subject to the beliefs I was subject to; internally, this felt like I was deconstructing myself, and the sense of deconstruction did not include giving me knowledge of the things I hadn’t yet deconstructed. My lattice of beliefs was undetectable to myself, and only became alive at the edges of what had been destroyed.
The Journey In was a slow process of whittling away the beliefs I was subject to, and watching the remaining beliefs contort themselves in attempt to maintain the idea that they corresponded to something outside myself. As my island of self got smaller and smaller, my experience of reality – and my ability to function – got weirder and quieter.
I entered profound silence, both internal and external. I lost the urge to evangelize, my inner monologue left me, and my mind was quiet and slow-moving, like water. I inhabited weird states; sometimes I would experience a rapid v
