N.B.: I’m experimenting with writing for output, not originality. Nothing below is original to me, it’s cobbled together as I wander the internet and connect dots.
I didn’t set any sort of intention to write again in 2020, but I’ve been going through a bunch of my old notes and decided to surface some of it on this newsletter for fun.
I am going to cure some of your anxiety related problems. Some of you may not believe that's true. Some of you may probably think it's possible. All of you are going to have a different experience. And some will have a profound experience. Some of you may cry, some of you may scoff. A lot of you will just change the channel or unsubscribe. But let me go through the presentation. And you can leave whenever you feel you would like to. I'll give you this following warning: I am going to be rewiring the brains of the people who keep reading.
Now, none of it is dangerous. There's no there's no risk of anything bad happening to you. I promise you that. I am going to have you go through a guided visualization, which I think you will find in some cases, profound. And other cases, you won't feel anything. So everybody will have a different experience.
All right, let me give you some background. This is also a part of the technique. So I'm going to make you feel comfortable with what I'm going to do next. Now, anxiety disorders take many forms, and I may be using the language a little differently than maybe an expert in mental health would. So sort of this general anxiety, fear. Many, many of you probably are experiencing anxiety in the last several years that you had never felt before and there's something about modern life, maybe it's about the news business that gets people worked up. Maybe it's our technology, but whatever it is, there's a gigantic, whole ball of different anxiety related problems that people have.
You've maybe seen in the news about how hallucinogens, specifically psilocybin, which comes from hallucinogenic mushrooms, LSD, and some other hallucinogens are being used by medical professionals to cure various anxieties. From PTSD to all kinds of stuff, and almost instantly. In other words, one dose, in some cases, is curing people of a lifetime of mental problems. And there's so much of that and there's so many stories of it, that it's considered one of the most exciting fields in mental health. Now, if you read up or if you've had the experiences of having any kind of hallucinogenic experience — the most common thing that people say is that they describe it as the Ego death. Ego death.
Now, if you've never experienced ego death, and you’ve never experienced any kind of hallucinogenic experience at all, that phrase doesn't mean anything to you. If I said, Hey, ego death — what does that even mean? So everybody probably has sort of a personal experience that they they tend to describe that way. It's exactly how I described it before I'd ever heard anybody else use those terms. It was exactly the words I used.
Now, for our purposes, I'm going to define your ego as that part of you that makes you feel special. The thing that makes you feel like you're special and important, that's your ego. And I'm giving you a very friendly definition. You know, so, no deep psychology here. But the thing that makes you really feel special is your ego. And let me tell you why. I’ll explain this by an analogy.
Suppose I said to you: I would like you to take this potato — just a regular, uncooked potato — and could you walk it half a mile that way and give it to somebody? Now, forget about why you need to deliver this potato. That's not important. But if I say, could you take this potato and deliver it over there? And you've got the time and the inclination to do that. Would that give you any anxiety? Probably not. Because what's the worst that could happen? You drop the potato. Well, it's just a potato. You lose the potato. It's just a potato. You get busy and you don't make it with your potato. What's the difference? It's just a potato. That person can get a new potato. A potato has no value.
Now let's say I said instead of a potato: Could you take this priceless painting by Picasso and just just walk it down the street to where it needs to go to the museum? Could you do that for me? Now, let's imagine it's a world where there's no crime. So you're not worried about crime. You're only worried about the safety of the painting. And all you're doing is just carrying it half a mile that way and giving it to the museum. How much anxiety would you have? If you were holding a priceless, irreplaceable painting, and you're just walking down the sidewalk with it, you'd be plenty of worried because of the value of the painting, you'd worry that a bird would do something, that the wind would come up and put some dirt on it. You'd worry that you trip, you'd worry that somebody would come along and worry that a car would splash water on it. It would be your fault, you'd have to pay for it. You'd have all kinds of things to worry about. And it's only because the painting is so valuable. The potato was not.
So what you need to learn is to be the potato. Don't be the painting — be the potato. Now, why is it that a psychedelic experience would give you ego death? And why would ego death turn you from somebody who's trying to deliver a priceless painting into somebody who says “no care in the world, it's just a potato.” And here's my hypothesis. The hypothesis is that when you have the ego death, you have nothing to worry about. Because there's nothing to protect. And I think that the way that you come about that idea is indirectly.
The way that you get to that point is by being in the hallucinogenic experience. You see your environment completely differently for the first time. And yet — and here's the important part: you understand it. You see your world as if it's brand new. But you still understand it. Now, once you've experienced that you could have a completely different set of subjective interpretations of your environment. What does that tell you about your old view of the world? It was subjective. It wasn't right. More importantly, it wasn't important.
The way you always saw the world before that first time you saw it differently, was never real. And it was never important. And if the way you see the entire reality is unimportant, and you just feel that you're part of that larger reality, and that it is subjective — you suddenly start to feel that you are not that important. But here's the clincher. You never lose the sense that you need to, you know, take care of your life and your health. And all that. There's no danger. You simply take away your unreasonable fear of protecting yourself. And it comes down to a normal: well, I have to eat today, gotta sleep. If I cross the road still got to look both ways. There's no downside, you still will be fully protective of yourself, but you will just learn that you're more like a potato than like a priceless painting.
Once you get that feeling that your ego is not important. What would you ever be afraid of? Would you be afraid of the future? No, there's nothing to be afraid of, because there's nothing at risk but a potato.
Now, think of your body as a robot. In this case, it's a moist robot or a biological robot. But imagine yourself as a person in the control room inside your head, you're looking out your eyes, and you're controlling this big robot. That is your body. Just think about that. And then think about the fact that there are different filters on your perceptions. And so sometimes your big robot body is hungry and you know that you see the world differently. When you're hungry, things bother you that wouldn't bother you. You're angry about things you didn't need to be angry about. But you're not really seeing those things. You're seeing it through a filter of your own hunger, and it makes you angry sometimes.
Likewise, if you're tired, that's a different filter. Likewise, if you're an optimist, you're seeing the world through a different filter. If you believe you live in a simulation, you're seeing the world through a different filter. If you have a different religion, it's a different filter. Once you start to understand that your filters are interchangeable, and it has no nothing to do with you, whoever is you, whatever is this thing called you, your preferences, your experiences, your memories, whatever it is, it can be all kinds of different things in terms of how it sees the world, but you don't really change. Not that much.
What changes is your filter. Take a filter down, hey, this President is a big old monster! Change the filter. Oh, he's just operates differently. Now I see it through a different filter.
This mental exercise of being able to see the world as a filter will depersonalize things and get you very close to your escape route. Let’s try to take you all the way there. It goes like this: I want you to relax. I'm going to take you through some guided imagery. You don't have to close your eyes. In fact, keep them open. Keep your eyes open. Take a deep breath. Loosen your shoulders. And now, I want you to imagine — not as if it's true — but just imagine that everything you see in your environment, your room, the device, the table, the objects, the whatever you were using to drink.
Imagine them as if they're a virtual reality.
Imagine you're not in a real reality, but rather you're in a virtual one. Now it's a special one, because if you touch something, you can feel it. But imagine that's just an illusion. And imagine without touching anything, you just look around and you look at an object, pick an object in the room, and just look at it and imagine instead of it being real, that it's a perfectly rendered virtual reality simulation. Now, watch how that makes you feel. Just feel yourself in the moment, just looking at your environment. Don't think of anything else. Don't think of anything outside of your direct, immediate experience. Look at them, and imagine them as a virtual reality construct and see what happens.
Stay in the moment, the future doesn't matter. Just look at your objects. Look around you. And imagine that they're not real. They're subjective. They're just like a virtual reality. Now, do that, and then repeat. Think about life as filter. Think about your ego as unimportant. Worth protecting, but it's not the be all end all. Just see yourself in a simulated subjective reality and know that you can change the subjective reality if you need to. You have control.
Some of you were just released from a lifetime of pain, a lifetime of anxiety. Some of you just got released. Some of you will be released later. You'll think about this and you won't be able to get it out of your mind. And you'll repeat the exercise on your own. You'll look around wherever you are. You'll imagine it as a virtual reality and it will give you the same sensation that people have when they experience ego death and it will free you.
And that's all you need.