This isn’t going to be a space for any grand proclamations about the nature or value of psychedelic substances and experiences. There is too much to say, and greater minds are saying it. Note though that even in this video the only thing any of these thinkers and scientists are saying is that there is a something to all this. Our understanding of our own brains is in its infancy. Our connection to more, whatever more is, was shut down generations ago and every attempt to open it has been blocked either by our inexperience, our fear or our governments.

My last psychedelic experience, or rather my last experience with psychotropic substances, was over 15 years ago and that was a one off of sorts. The bulk of my experience is over 30 years old and I’m still unpacking it in its relationship to what I see in the world around me today. It’s still informing my sense of self and my sense of the world. The concept of self itself is largely informed by my experiences with the repeated dissolution of ego — relieve me of the burden of self, as the prayer goes — and having had the filters of self drop away my “self” and the world look very different. I don’t know everything I am but I know for certain many of the self-lies that I am not. It’s impossible now also to wake up, leave the house, and believe that anything I’m seeing is a construct of truth. It’s not. It’s a construct of consensus and while you have to be clued into what the consensus is to navigate it, it’s simply not possible to see it as anything but what it is. It’s a collective falsehood. Not that it’s a malevolent lie. It’s just not real in the truest sense of real. It’s only ‘real’ because we’ve (we as in most of us) agreed that this is the way things are.

The downside of knowing it’s mostly bullshit is that it’s difficult to place any value on being part of the bullshit, but that’s a topic to be expounded upon a bit at a time. Perhaps this feeds into the thoughts of Baudrillard’s Simulacrae and Simulation but all that too, is for further exploration.

The upside of not being able to value a lot of what’s going on around me is that it’s somewhat liberating. Attachment doesn’t form to anything that has no real value, monetary or economical, moral or ethical. Fitting into it isn’t as necessary for a sense of well-being. There is no sense of rejection or insecurity about not fitting in.

Anyway, to the title of this post, what has been seen cannot be unseen. You can’t go back. You just can’t go back.