6. Onwards

Now, after all these cute splashings in a somewhat shallow psychedelic pond, let's look at it with more cynical eyes.

In the introduction, it was important to me to highlight the strangeness of the things I attempted to cover and to acknowledge the limitations of my verbal explanations. In conclusion, I want to highlight the apparent triviality of the insights I gathered.

A big part of what I “discovered” due to “these profound experiences” is pretty much in the ballpark of common sense. One can encounter nuggets of such wisdom in quotes from Herman Hesse, self-help literature, or sigma-male-grindset memes (and I'm ready to recognize the intellectual merit of only the last item in the list).

Really, that's your deep insight, that you gotta get out of your way to open your creative valve? Seriously, no way to learn this without a team of doctors and off-label medicine?

And that's the problem of such “simple truths”; they all sound very reasonable and very empty until you'll get some actual encounter with life that would solder the idea right in your brain with the empirical soldering iron. Yes, you actually are better off if you take some rest over the weekend. Any manager would tell you that. But you would not listen until you lose your mind after 10 months of a 7-day work week (not exactly my story though).

And it works the same here. The issue is that many of us don't have access to these empirical foundations that would ground these basic “healthy” things to us. Forget about more lofty ideas about the world.

I already thought my own death was not a scary thing, but obviously didn't have an existing network in the brain that would be the physical basis for my sense of actually knowing it. I was familiar with the idea that life can be way more pleasant if you feel safe and secure, but let's be real my developmental environment didn't promise the surplus of neither safety nor security.

At some point, it becomes impossible to simply parrot in the sense of “you're alright” into an adult. And I can't stress this enough, how sad this appears to me.

If you're underdeveloped emotionally, even embarrassingly trivial progress is impressive progress.

The reality of any therapy is that it can always roll back. Sometimes simply by the force of habit, sometimes due to new shocks. Though at the moment, I don't feel there's a risk of that. Famous last words.

My last thought is about the dreadful scary drugs. I'm not in the mood to go into a tirade about the distorted image of many substances and the ways they work. Both extremes, “drugs are bad, mkay” and “come on duuude, it's easy, only good never bad,” are primitive simplistic nonsense. And the complicated bio-psycho-social nature of addiction merits another investigation until I'm comfortable publicizing my views. Especially given that I don't have any personal experience in the matter.

Simply put, all 3 sessions were interesting, exciting, and rich in insights, but at the same time, this whole thing is pretty far from recreational use. It takes some effort, and sometimes it's plainly hard to do (please, stop looking up to me with such admiration) hard to do as a couple of hours of intellectual labor of intensity a bit above average. I'm not going to repeat the course anytime soon. And not soon, too, most likely.

And not only the whole course but a single session too.

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