Month: January 2020

Sleep

I go to bed with my mind racing (unless I drink alcohol, which I’m in the habit of doing) which helps me get to sleep, but leaves me with poorer quality of sleep.

Reading before bed is the best for sleep.

Every morning I wake up with my mind racing. Mostly bullshit. Existential stuff. Random thoughts on stuff. This morning it was thermal energy as a function of metabolism, and the various ways exercise, geography, fiber, sauna’s, clothing, lifestyle impact thermal radiation/expenditures, and how this impacts metabolism, circulation, fat deposition, etc etc

I think it’s stress.

But it may just be my default mode.

Work is always on my mind. Like a never ending puzzle, within a puzzle, within a puzzle, like a Matryoshka or nesting doll. Every day is a puzzle within a larger puzzle etc.

So many puzzles. So little time.

Thoughts on Automation

I follow some economists on twitter. Some of these academics and researchers explore the effects of automation.

One particular researcher consistently points out that automation is decreasing
I’ve pointed out that such claims are strange for several reasons:

How are you defining automation?

There are two main types of automation: 1) physical control automation and 2) data processing automation

Continue reading “Thoughts on Automation”

Psychedelic Experience

I feel like lsd and psilocybin etc allow the brain to literally re-wire itself.

There’s a de-conditioning that occurs.

Call it the “default mode network”. But it’s the habituated “mindset” that pervades conscious, phenomenal experience.

The brain subconsciously projects a “sensible” or coherent experience onto our present. It’s like a crystalline structure of thoughts.

This structure is the result of habituated actions learned from trial and error, or society, or whatever.

What supports this structure are primal emotions and instincts and values.

Psychedelics just totally melt this structure away, and reveal the primal source of being.

They provide a space to tear away the “facade” of coping mechanisms. These mechanisms aren’t good or bad, but they can obscure the “truth”, whatever that means for you.

I feel like a psychedelic trip is a process of tearing down or washing away or clearing, and rebuilding, reconstructing, readjusting.

It’s like the windows are wiped clean again, and your eyes adjusting to the scenery for the first time in a long time. The doors of perception.

Read to Become

The act of reading is often seen as an activity of acquisition, of acquiring knowledge or information or whatever meaning reveals itself through text.

This is not correct.

Reading is not an activity of “filling up”.

Reading is a process of change. Reading is the process of being transformed.

When you read, you become.

It matters less the contents you collect on this journey. Whether the exact facts stick with you matters less than the impressions they leave you with, and mold you to be.

Reading changes you. It changes your mind, the way you think, the way you process the experiential world. A book of any kind imports a narrative structure for filtering and perceiving the world. It literally molds the internal precepts which govern experience, by imposing a narrative, by infusing the psychic framework with new or updated assumptions, connected and associated with existing assumptions, acting as nodes in the artifice that regulates being, complete with constellations of unconscious beliefs, programmed into our being to allow us to adapt to present experience, and make sense of the world.

Reading is not collecting.

Reading is becoming.

Reading should change you. Change your mind, your thoughts, your feelings, your perception.

Every book should change the way you look at the world.

Collecting information is not why reading is powerful and valuable. Powerful in that you can alter the contents of your being, and leverage different perceptions and modes of thinking to alter outcomes that align with desires, goals, ideals.