\nThinking about how one of the weirder things of the last arc is that all my old plotlines regarding skills I developed in childhood became suddenly relevant to my journey again, remembering that I took flying lessons for several years
Like, when I was in tenth grade I started getting into reading about the history of psychedelics, not even “far out, man” stuff but about moves to use them to seriously grapple with consciousness \u2013 the Good Friday Experiment, early psychiatric use of LSD and “psychonauts”, Timothy Leary’s “circuit” model of consciousness all the way up to Shulgin’s circle, reading Erowid/The Lycaeum trip reports every day before I had ever smoked pot or drank alcohol.
Above all “metaprogramming”, the idea of using “entheogens” to reach a state where you could tinker with your self.
In the late ‘90s, long before anyone’d heard of Covid, one of my hyperfixations was “how you can use altered, depersonalized mental states to re-edit your personality”, and then I did some shrooms and acid in college, enough to get used to operating in such a state, and then I just set that one aside for decades
Oh, and the part where I learned American cultural history in enough detail I was able to recognize and predict a paradigm shift in progress \u2013 and that i could lean back relieved “no, this isn’t what a successful paradigm shift looks like anymore, this is what a misfire looks like” \u2013 that one too
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