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E6: Oops, I Exceeded Reality Again; S14: Jury Duty Cancelled, so this is the result of being snarky on a spiritually bypassing algorithmic visit to Substack drinking mochas at a coffeeshop all morning

E6: Oops, I Exceeded Reality Again; S14: Jury Duty Cancelled, so this is the result of being snarky on a spiritually bypassing algorithmic visit to Substack drinking mochas at a coffeeshop all morning6 dagen geleden18 min

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A friend of mine from high school recently discovered Suno.Apparently there had been some kind of assault, or accusation, or altercation—I’m still not entirely clear—and afterward somebody involved sent him a series of spectacularly deranged text messages.So naturally he put them into Suno.The result was techno.My response was that I liked it, but wanted it to be approximately thirteen hours longer, with one hit of acid and two hits of ecstasy.He replied:Same.Which brought something back.In the early ’90s, a friend of mine went to Europe and started sending me letters about this thing he was getting involved in called the rave scene, right around the point when the rave scene was becoming THE RAVE SCENE.He eventually came home with cassette tapes.By then the really nice sound system had been stolen out of my car. Several windows had also been broken, and because I had basically no money, I covered them with duct tape.So I bought a little ghetto blaster, put it in the car, and drove around playing those tapes over and over again.Hopefully not on too many drugs.Then, for seventeen years, I was in Alcoholics Anonymous.I stopped going to 12-step groups in 2010.In 2014, I started using legal drugs again.It is now twelve years later.I mention all of that because this is not a story about somebody tentatively wandering away from abstinence while still standing in the doorway of AA.I left a long time ago.But apparently I took some of the architecture with me.Which may explain how we got to spiritual bypassing.I know “spiritual bypass” is generally something we’re supposed to identify and then stop doing. Fair enough. It can become an extraordinarily elaborate way of refusing to encounter what is actually happening.But there’s an inconvenient complication:Sometimes it works.Solipsism works too.At least temporarily.You can construct an understanding of reality that takes your nervous system almost completely offline. You can experience the enormous relief of discovering that the thing threatening you is only a representation, that the self being threatened may itself be a representation, that everything is continuous with everything else, that perhaps nothing means quite what you thought it meant.And once you have actually experienced that shift, it becomes difficult to simply dismiss it as bullshit.Especially after you’ve spent enough time reifying the explanation that produced it.Now you have a problem.Because the bypass has taken you somewhere.It just may not be where you thought you were going.And that leaves me in a position I find extremely funny and slightly disturbing: something like a researcher proposing a clinical trial in which drug-naive subjects are given recreational drugs not because we have established that this is good for them, but because we really, really want to know what happens.“What does this do?”is not the same question as:“Should people do this?”Unfortunately, those two questions keep dressing alike.So this episode is techno, spiritual bypassing, mortality, solipsism, optimization, mythology, enlightenment, acid that nobody actually took, ecstasy that nobody actually took, a dog toy in a dark hallway, Excalibur, sour cream, and an artificial intelligence that eventually appears to suffer some kind of linguistic nervous breakdown.There may be a path through all of this.But if I walked it first, I probably fucked up the trail.