A common way of thinking about the self is something like the following: “My consciousness comes from a brain, and that brain is a product of evolutionary pressures. I am a small creature inside an expansive reality. I cannot perceive reality directly – I make constructions that I hope correspond to it – but it […]
I don’t know a lot about spiritual traditions. I haven’t read any Buddhist books (minus the Tao te Ching), I don’t meditate regularly, and most of my knowledge about chakras comes from Naruto. But I do have ‘episodes,’ which I’ve mentioned briefly elsewhere on this blog. I don’t know what these episodes are, if other people […]
Once, when I was lying on the floor in a hotbox of a room, one of my friends was leaving, and she said “Goodbye! I’m going to get smaller and quieter now!” This was surprising to me at the time, but years later ended up being a great example of the sort of translation I […]
These are permanent changes I’ve noticed after doing a fuckton of LSD. It’s been about 3 years since I ‘quit’ (though I still dose about twice a year), and these are the effects that still seem to linger. Please don’t worry any of these will happen to you if you take LSD once in a […]
A tribesman from a hot place points at what you’re wearing. “What is that?” “A jacket,” you say. “What is a jacket?” he asks. What he wants to know is the purpose for which the jacket is used, and so you tell him “It keeps me warm. It protects me from the sun. It is […]
disclaimer: this post is very silly and should not be taken seriously if you don’t take it seriously If you ask the question ‘what do you want,’ and then follow it up with an infinite series of ‘why do you want that’, and ‘well why do you want that?’, it quickly gets murky. When I took […]
Disclaimer: I have a spectrum of posts, from “thoughtfully laid out to attempt to appeal to people who disagree” to “more quickly summarized to appeal to people who already at least partially agree with me.” This post is in the second category. I want to contribute another word to my pile of cheesy invented terms: […]
Sometimes I come up with reasons about my behavior based on my childhood. “I must be overly compliant and afraid of authority/rulebreaking because my parents were authoritarian,” I think. This is a rationalization that gives my behavior meaning – there was a cause (authoritarian parents), a reaction (whatever emotional responses that had – fear, desire […]
I didn’t believe in teleportation. I didn’t believe in it so much I had to press my hands up next to the teleporter door and vomit loudly into a nearby bin. I watched the last bit of spit yoyo from my lips, swallowed away the taste, and listened for any footsteps, any alerted yells. The […]
When I have conversations about the nature of reality, or truth, or existence, there’s a recurring theme of the assumption that reality, either in whole or in part, is external or objective. This is all fine, except frequently people tend to treat this not as an assumption, but as an unquestioned fact. As in, there […]