Morning, Friday is here, make those plans.
We need to get this dude in a SEG t-shirt, in this speech he perfectly sums up personal responsibility and the power of showing example. It’s a good speech, I find it interesting that now he’s had a few years to prove to the people he’s capable of making a difference to their lives, he’s now attempting to teach them how they keep the momentum going through simple action. Some - morons - will say it’s laughable that he’s gathered all those people together to give a speech about putting rubbish in the bin, but the mindset and required action he draws from that make it clear what’s acceptable and very importantly he emphasises that every Salvadorian knows already what is right, there’s no excuse, which is correct.
I said last time he did this that I’m a big fan of these optics, but how licked would you be as one of the blokes on parade having to stand there whilst your boss give a lesson of putting stuff in the bin 😂 - It’s all necessary but human nature is human nature.
This is really interesting to me because it’s very familiar to my experience with psychedelics. Now I’m not qualified in any way, nor am I seeking to try and explain what’s actually happening in your brain - I actually don’t think it matters when it comes down to it for day to day life most of the time - I’m just going to explain why I found this passage interesting.
I should probably give some history of why I’m able to say anything at all about this, apologies if I’ve done this before, maybe on Horizon Scan. About a year after I left the army the first time, 2003 I think, me and a group of friends (one of whom is now an advisor to government 😂, but at the time was battling a super rare form of Leukaemia) decided to spend a year researching and taking part in various psychedelic experiences, reading religious texts, various philosophy books and meditating. I was about to study Theology at University and that mate I mentioned was probably going to die, so we figured it’d be helpful. We treated this very seriously, even if it was carried out casually, we weren’t doing it for fun and at times it was NOT FUN 😅, we were doing it purely out of curiosity and not recreationally - and I would advise everyone against that. One of us was always sober and the environments were controlled. Generally we took LSD, mushrooms or we crushed Morning Glory seeds to get LSA(- if I remember right?). All of these have similar effects on the whole but feel different in a way it’s difficult to describe, LSD certainly feels ‘colder', more rigid and intense than mushrooms do for example, which feel ‘thicker and warmer’. - in my view anyway. I’m not even going to attempt to describe most of what it’s like because it’s virtually impossible to do so in a way that firstly doesn’t sound stupid and secondly can do any justice to it - you have to experience these things at a proper dose to really know, which is one of the reasons we were doing it. Anyway, you’ll often hear people talk about psychedelics as ‘a higher state of consciousness’ and similar stuff, in my view that’s complete bullshit. I would argue you’re in the high state of consciousness right now, the only higher one being perhaps during fight or flight. One of the things you’ll experience on psychedelics to varying degrees and dependant on dosage is stimuli overload. Your awareness of all the information your senses are trying to process goes through the roof, to the point that it can be difficult to function and you just need to sit down. If you’re trying to talk to someone it can be difficult to finish sentences before moving on to the next thing, so you sound like a stuttering idiot. My view about this has always been that your senses see, hear, smell (not that I have a sense of smell) everything within their ability, far more than you realise. Your brains’ job is to filter that overload of information down to what’s useful to firstly keep you alive and secondly be useful to you doing whatever you’re trying to do. You can train that over time, hence why soldiers for example notice things civilians don’t. Your awareness is like a torch beam and you can right now just decide to focus on one thing and virtually exclude everything else, you can also fine tune it, like when you’re listening for a specific sound you can consciously filter more and more until you’ve zoned in on it - all of that is impossible on psychedelics. This is why it reminded me of the guy in the passage, his brain has all the information to enable him to function even though ‘he’ can’t see, he just can’t access it ‘himself’, he doesn’t control the torch beam to find what’s needed in the database, but his core system can.
Overall despite some pretty sketchy moments over the year, which were very useful, but not enjoyable, my experience of that year was extremely positive and absolutely helps to inform my worldview. When I rejoined the army in 2008 and went to SFSG, I was undoubtedly a better soldier than I was for the years I was in 2 Para. My experiences were absolutely part of that. It’s also worth noting that I’ve never done any other drugs and after that year I never did any psychedelics again. I’d learnt all I needed and knew at that point that the core knowledge/experience - I don’t like using that word to describe it - I could get through meditation. Those experiences are life changing and I can understand why some people get hooked, for want of a better word. They do something Zen Buddhists describe as ‘mistaking the finger for the moon’. If you want to show someone where the moon is, you have to point to it, but the finger is just the method of doing so.
Although I know that psychedelics are useful for helping people with PSTD and the like and I can absolutely see what that’s the case. My fear has always been though that many will do the finger moon thing, treating these experiences as a crutch, something that you need to ‘top up’ when you’re having a wobble. And also that an industry will form around enabling just that. I think we see that to an extent with the ayahuasca retreats many people have been on. I’m not doubting these retreats are helpful, I just wonder if they’re incentivised to ‘fix’ people or make this treatment and the community that surrounds it part of their personality. I may possibly feel this because I’m an arrogant, elitist snob with my own view of it all - very likely - but there we go. I may upset people here, but I’ve always been of the view that whether you have ended up in a situation through your fault or the fault of others or through the sacrifice made through your employment, like having PTSD or just something that in a perfect world, you wouldn’t have, a sickness of some sort that you’d like to recover from. If you’re suffering from something like that then the last thing you should want to do is make it part of your personality and identity and even worse, connect it somehow to a career or financial well being. I can understand why people do that, I just think it’s the least helpful thing you can do. Coming to terms with something, accepting and owning it, does not require you to become it and embody it. I know many people have found that micro dosing works for them and for PTSD and the like I can see why it would, but I can’t shake that feeling that if you had an experience where ‘it clicked’ - hard to explain what I mean by that - it would put those people in a position mentally to deal with their past experiences far better than being reliant on taking a dose of something. But as I say, that’s probably just me coming from a Zen Buddhist background and the arrogant, minimal and irritatingly cold and rigid of view of what’s required, that that practice creates - you can absolutely fall into the trap of this Buddhist bullshit being your personality to.
I’ll just end by saying that you probably shouldn’t do psychedelics as you have no idea how it will effect you, some people undoubtedly lose their shit and I can see why they might. You can get to exactly the same place mentally by sitting a facing a wall regularly.
Don’t do drugs kids. Have a nice weekend.