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by poke53281
4303 days ago
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Well, I'd always had a love of fractals, without ever truly comprehending how the underlying maths worked. Same goes for cosmology -- utterly fascinated by the outputs, but didn't really understand the actual mechanisms thereof. So during the trip, I used fractal and cosmology images and videos as an emotional "anchor" -- grounding the trip in material I already loved and was comfortable with / fascinated by. I then surrounded those materials with more mathematically technical videos, images, and texts about fractals & cosmology -- the things I traditionally would have shied away from as too mathematical for me to understand; and finally, surrounding that material, I spread out the quite trivial mathematics I was struggling with at the time -- textbooks, homework assignments, etc. The intention was to create a continuum ranging from the mundane to the transcendent, with the hope that when the boundaries dissolved between them, I would understand that they're all really one and the same, and that my enthusiasm for the transcendent could be extended into every corner of mathematics. This more or less worked as planned, although during the peak of the trip -- I had taken quite a lot of LSD -- my vision got too wobbly to actually make sense of words and numbers, so I put on a video of "Baraka" instead, which seemed comprehensible at the time and somehow in alignment with the whole "transcendent" angle of the trip. As I came down, I moved back to reading chapters of James Gleick's Chaos and finally to doing math homework which had previously irritated the piss out of me -- but now I loved it. That attitudinal switch was instant and permanent. At the same time as this was a very positive experience for me, it also gave me the a level of respect for LSD such that I don't approve of it being used as an uncontrolled "party" drug. The changes I made to my brain were intentional and beneficial, but I can easily see how somebody who wasn't controlling their environment and intentions could end up bricking their brains on a bad trip. That kind of power is something that should be used with care. |
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