First, let’s get this out of the way:
Substack has a new feature called Notes. It resembles Twitter in a lot of ways - where you can get the news, memes, interesting reads, and snippets of ideas from powerful minds (sans the anger and bullshit). I’m including the link here so that I don’t have to send out two emails in one week - I’ll always be respectful of your inbox.
There’s also a Notes tab in the Substack app:
Anyway . . .
It’s 7:48am, Saturday morning, and I’ve already had a rather abstract exchange. This guy replied to one of my stories and it piqued my interest because it required some serious decoding:
“I like it real and I like it with the edges still rough. I’m just flattered that they built it at all.”
Wait, what? My first thought was that this was something sexual, but I doubled down and asked him to elaborate:
He went on:
“I just really like your brand name, or whatever - The Dirty Realist - reality isn’t clean. That’s what gives it its character. I find the name intriguing. It has the right amount of energy - the energy coming off of that name feels like a code for the direction the world is going and the type of healing that is so valuable right now.”
“. . . my mind goes pretty abstract sometimes - I’m just grateful they built it at all, as in the matrix of space, a stage for all of us to be. You know, like Shakespeare, the whole world is a stage and it’s just got players with entrances and exits.
“Anyway, I gotta sleep. Been up on a mushroom trip all night. There’s some really amazing stuff coming in the world and all of us are wired and ready to heal many different parts. There’s going to be some really cool ripples meeting one another all over the globe.”
I didn’t include my responses here for brevity, but the point, besides the fact that the mushroom man’s thoughts were incredibly insightful, is that I became so deeply engaged with such “chemically” induced abstractions. Why? Because my mind lives there sober, despite being a self-professed realist - head in the clouds, feet on the ground, sort of thing. I’ve never been able to do psychedelics without losing my fucking mind (synthetics were fine. Weird). Well, you’re supposed to lose it to some degree, I mean isn’t that the point of taking a mind-bending drug - to lift the veil and expose reality for what it (potentially) is? I get there with no help at all and over-stimulation of my already-analytical mind throws me into utter chaos. Weed alone will cause my brain to twist and morph to the point of panic, self-loathing and nihilism. Some would say that the negative self-reflection is born of unresolved issues - an inauthenticity that has been pushed deep into the subconscious. Perhaps. I haven’t touched a psychedelic in 20 years and my demons have all been released since then. I think? I suppose that if the above premise were true, ‘burning one’ would be a way to find out.
Is there a reality beyond what we can see (or touch, hear or feel)? This is my favorite topic to spin on when I’m not tits-deep in work (I’m a bit of a recluse). I fell hard into this ontological rabbit hole a few years back and what I discovered was so impactful that it wound up becoming the fabric of my doctoral dissertation. Out of the many incredible minds that I stumbled across, there were a few who really stood out. Dr. Nick Bostrom and his Simulation Hyposthesis; Dr. Joscha Bach and his ideas on consciousness and coded reality (watch this if you want to hurt your brain); and cognitive scientist, Dr. Donald Hoffman - he was on a bunch of my favorite podcasts and listening to him really fucked with my head (in a good way). I bought his book, The Case Against Reality: Why evolution hid the truth from our eyes. There’s a fair summary embedded in the title but I’ll do my best to elaborate:
Reality, as we know it, has been simulated for our survival - we evolved to experience the world in such a way that is ordered and manageable, whereas ‘true reality’ exists outside of our senses. It’s chaotic and overwhelming and to fully step into it would be like taking a drink from a firehose. Hoffman explains, “just like the file icon on a screen is a symbol rather than a genuine representation of what a computer file looks like, the objects we see everyday are merely icons, allowing us to navigate the world safely and with ease.”
Hoffman’s ideas address an age-old question grappled by notable philosophers: is there such a thing as material reality or is it all in our minds? This is the classic debate of realism vs. relativism and the argument persists today. Is there a universal truth or is it ‘my truth,’ and ‘your truth?’ (this calls morality into question but that’s another post altogether). For example, we see this division in our political structures where the right tends toward realism and the left tends toward the more relative. Hoffman merges these ideas by suggesting that it’s actually both: there is a universal truth but it’s beyond perception and our socially constructed reality. He wasn’t the first to come up with an integrated ontology, but his ideas are certainly unique.
Back to the mushroom man. Do psychedelics provide a glimpse beyond this veil? I like to think so. I’m going to use dimethyltryptamine (DMT) as an example here because it’s a damn good one. Trace amounts of this chemical are found in the human body and in many plants but a concentrated dose will blast you into outer space. Different cultures have ingested this compound during ritualistic ceremonies for centuries. In the west, we typically smoke it for recreation. It’s strong as hell and you will trip absolute balls - if you do it right.
Years ago, I went to Sayulita Mexico with a bunch of hippies from San Francisco. We rented a huge villa on a cliff overlooking the ocean, equipped with pools, guest houses, staff and a chef. These hippies could party. They candy-flipped (mixed ecstasy and acid) the entire two weeks and I don’t think any of them actually slept. Anyway, we sat in a circle next to the cliff and passed around a pipe stuffed with DMT. I think I was chicken shit, looking back. I barely inhaled (for fear of my own mind, or perhaps what’s beyond it). Everyone else left to meet the aliens, or elves, or whatever, and I was left looking over the crashing waves. I suppose it was a good thing. Knowing me, I’d probably go right over the edge.
Side note: one of the hippies just messaged me in the middle of writing that. Weird, right? We rarely talk - once a year at best (probably because I’m a square now).
Anyway, people report seeing and experiencing very similar things on DMT: Elves, aliens, the sensation that they can finally connect with and understand the universe. It’s called the spirit molecule for a reason. Whole groups of people report having the exact same trip; they experience the exact same things at the exact same time (so they say. It’s anecdotal, but I believe it). What the hell does this mean? Like many psychedelics, DMT throws you into a chaotic world of magnified perception and knowing. Is this the plunge into Hoffman’s ‘true’ reality, outside the safety of our orderly minds?
Do you ever pull back and think, “what the hell is all of this?” Does it fuck you up that no one actually knows? Philosophers like Albert Camus and Jean Paul Sartre (both staunch atheists) called this the ‘absurd’ - the fact that things exist without reason or explanation. These men believed that we are thrown into a universe that is devoid of purpose and our only saving grace is to create our own. It’s now well understood in the psychological literature that having purpose - working your ass off toward an integrous goal - is inextricably linked to mental well-being, but maybe there’s something more. Maybe there’s something that would gently guide us if we only tuned in. I live my life as if this were true. Whether or not it ‘merely’ exists on a cerebral screen, I think absurdity lies in believing only in yourself.
There’s a question mark that looms over our heads and so many of us ignore it. We get stuck in the mire of the day-to-day and rarely examine things from afar. Is this not necessary to know where you’re going? To map out the quest of your life? The mushroom man referred to us as players, or characters on a larger stage. My question is - who writes the script?
Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855), one of my favorite philosophers said, “life can only be understood by looking backward; but it must be lived looking forward.” I’m not sure this is entirely true. Like any story, our paths are non-linear with off-script peaks and dips, but we’re nevertheless responsible for writing the plot. We create our own goals - intangible abstractions that exist in our minds, while somehow off in the distance. They’re fine-tuned, rewritten and reimagined as we reach for one and set off for the next. Is this not foresight?
What do we collectively do as humans? We build a better world, creating order from chaos, until we eventually travel the stars. Perhaps what drives us is a far-off ideal - a perfect goal that exists beyond the senses.
The mushroom man said he’s grateful ‘they’ built it at all, as in the matrix of space, a stage for all of us to be, and I have to ask, who is ‘they?’
Please like, share and subscribe x
With love,
