Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
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Notes -
Eh? Can you explain the acronyms please.
Sigh. It's probably not worth talking about. Any insights gleaned are personal and the kind of stuff I could have told you a week in advance if I was drunk.
I mean, sample size of one and all, but I actually delurked and started posting for a conversation like this one, FWTW.
Well, if one of Odin's ravens thinks so:
The long and short of it was that it went way harder and deeper than I accounted for. I genuinely felt the edges of my mind fraying. I was fighting ego death and struggling to retain the integrity of my consciousness. I might have described myself as "tripping balls" when I enrolled for a psilocybin trial, but it had nothing on what I experienced. Back then, and in this instance, my greatest fear was succumbing to woo or catching religion. I felt the pressure, that sense of cosmic significance. I genuinely told it to fuck itself. At that point, I was envisioning it as some kind of extradimensional tendril cracking open my skull and wrapping itself around my consciousness, while "I" was quite literally shearing it away it with a set of scissors.
Another very literal visual metaphor was trying to keep the "knot" of patterns that constituted myself from being unraveled under the tension.
Words can hardly describe it. I feel like the protagonist of Scott's short story, Samsara, except I actually faced the pressure of imminent enlightenment and chose to walk away. I don't need enlightenment, I need to be less depressed. Jury's out on that one.
It’s funny to me that you went into this looking for an answer to your depression, had the answer shoved directly in your face, then still chose to “shear it away with a set of scissors” to protect your ego.
Uh.. I have multiple answers to depression. I know psilocybin worked the previous time. I could have gone for IV ketamine or ECT. I know for a fact that I do not need religion to be happy, and that becoming religious has a very real risk of making me unhappy as well as, in a very real sense, delusional and insane.
My ego exists for a reason. I am fond of being mostly myself. The parts of me I wish to keep are present when both when I'm happy and when I'm sad, and that's a fact that's clearly documented in my notes. If the only way to live is to trick myself into religious belief? You better hope to ask when I've got a literal gun to my head. I am not read to compromise my epistemics for happiness except for a very large value of the latter and a small amount of the former.
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