dissolution

last day for matchmaking

Hilma af Klint, Group IX/SUW, The Swan, No. 12, “The SUW/UW Series”, 1915

I’m gonna close matchmaking tomorrow night, so last chance to enter this batch! Also, warning: I can’t edit the form for you if you enter anything wrong, so please be aware!

Also, I’m still looking for a few people age 50-60 to sign up for the matchmaking party on Feb 10th, if that’s you please come!

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These days when I do even a small amount of psilocybin, concepts dissolve. I seem externally normal but familiar concepts, like marriage or work, lose their usual meaning. I also forget my “self,” or who I am. Claude tells me that people call it ego dissolution, or derealization—I think of it as a sort of de-selving.

I was very frightened the first couple of times this happened. As you can imagine, it’s not a part of my everyday experience and not something I knew how to process. I felt extremely disoriented and not sure what was going. Luckily, I was aware that this was a temporary state, and was able to tell myself to calm down and act normal. Interestingly enough, when the person I’m tripping with talks to me (this happens on low doses so the other person is usually feeling pretty normal and wants to chat), I’m more or less able to hold a normal conversation, and so far no one has noticed anything is off, despite the intensity of my internal experience. When the shrooms wear off and I’m back to my usual self, I always feel relieved.

I was wondering yesterday whether this is how my dog, Akko, feels all the time. He probably doesn’t experience “selfhood” the way most humans do—like me on mushrooms, I imagine that he exists in a very emotional, present state. He feels things and responds to things, but he doesn’t model the world in a very complex way. In many ways, it’s freeing way to live—unburdened by your Self.

On shrooms, I become simplified, and therefore light. Off shrooms, I notice myself letting go of more rigidity with every passing year. 10 years ago, I had a very complicated model of social interaction that involved all sorts of things—dominance, status, rejection, whatever. Now I have a relatively straightforward desire to be kind to people and on good terms with them. Of course, people are allowed to have complicated feelings towards me, but more and more my personal orientation is one of simplicity.

I went to a wedding last week in Mexico. It was beautiful and there were lots of people I had known for nearly a decade, some of whom I know well, many of whom are loose acquaintances. Large group events can be socially overwhelming to me—who do I talk to? What do I say? Am I being awkward? Unlike one-on-one interactions, there are so many variables to consider at once. But uppn talking to S about the social anxiety I can sometimes experience around groups, I realized that I struggle because I’m trying too hard. I’m self-conscious not because of my surroundings, but because of my mental model of how I should act. In other words, I make myself conscious. When I let go of what I think I should be doing, I’m able to just exist.

It can be hard to admit to ourselves how much we’re always striving for control. Trying to predict the future makes us feel like we have a handle on it, lessens our existential terror. We want to know if our relationships will work out, if our health will last, how the story will end. But it’s impossible to achieve perfect safety through paranoia. Paradoxically enough, becoming fully aware of how much I want control is what’s helped me relinquish it most.

As I mentioned in the last post, lightness is my word of the year. I’ve been dwelling on this passage from Arcadia and how true it feels right now:

The unpredictable and the predetermined unfold together to make everything the way it is. It’s how nature creates itself, on every scale, the snowflake and the snowstorm. It makes me so happy. To be at the beginning again, knowing almost nothing. People were talking about the end of physics. Relativity and quantum looked as if they were going to clean out the whole problem between them. A theory of everything. But they only explained the very big and the very small. The universe, the elementary particles. The ordinary-sized stuff which is our lives, the things people write poetry about—clouds—daffodils—waterfalls—and what happens in a cup of coffee when the cream goes in—these things are full of mystery, as mysterious to us as the heavens were to the Greeks. We’re better at predicting events at the edge of the galaxy or inside the nucleus of an atom than whether it’ll rain on auntie’s garden party three Sundays from now. Because the problem turns out to be different. We can’t even predict the next drip from a dripping tap when it gets irregular. Each drip sets up the conditions for the next, the smallest variation blows prediction apart, and the weather is unpredictable the same way, will always be unpredictable. When you push the numbers through the computer you can see it on the screen. The future is disorder. A door like this has cracked open five or six times since we got up on our hind legs. It’s the best possible time to be alive, when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong.

Lately I’ve been feeling like I’m entering a portal. I don’t know what will be on the other side. I’ve been feeling scared. But past the fear, there’s only light.