Revelations on MDMA (Newsletter No. 19)
Bad art is the most childish, purest part of people. To fully enjoy something that you cannot really brag about e.g. put on a resume. Doodling, playing piano or dancing just adequately.
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I have three friends:
-Person A has high personal EQ and low business sense but a desire to achieve business success.
-Person B has moderate personal EQ and moderately high business sense. He is generous personally and professionally but puts so much more energy into building career discipline. As a result, even though he is quite good at interacting with people professionally, he lacks practice in effectively communicating and moderating his emotions within personal relationships. In his social circle, the attention he gives often swings between all and nothing. He can be nice without boundaries at the expense of his own well-being, or pedantic. Or you get no attention from him at all if he deems you a source of negativity, or a waste of time.
-Person C has high business sense and career ambition, and is pretty successful financially because of that. But the focus on this goal can become myopic. It can come at the expense of caring about other people as people. He sees people in terms of any monetary benefit they can offer.
If they work together, they can balance each other out to become 1 super man and execute financially productive things. Person A is emotional enough to understand people’s motives from a bird’s eye view, person B is the bridge between person A and person C, caring about people but “practical” enough not to be too naive/cynical to play “the game.” person C has the most knowledge to take person A’s desire and person B’s motivation and make something out of it, business-wise.
A unique detail is that in order for person B to be the bridge (and for this collaboration trio to work) he has to see person A as a friend and person C as a colleague. If he sees person A as a colleague, he may become impatient with his passivity, if he sees person C as a friend he might be turned off by his selfishness.
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Lessons from Volunteering in Amsterdam
Homeless Center: You are in control of your destiny.
Nursing Home: Have no regrets.
Low-Income Restaurant: Something can be free and people can still complain about it.
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Empathy is Time and Space Traveling
When you empathize with someone, you become them.
Vertical time traveling: when you empathize with a baby or an old person, and everyone in between that is not the same exact age as you. You therefore become a baby in the past or older person in the future when you feel all their feelings.
Horizontal space traveling: when you try to imagine the life of someone else in the same age as you are, but think differently thank you because of their different “location.”
(Time & Space) Traveling takes a lot of energy. It’s not clean cut. The effort does not come without baggage (which includes jetlag, altitude sickness, and traveler’s diarrhea) , which often distorts the destination.
Most people’s mindsets are constrained by time, even if they are pariahs of their own timeline. For instance, I know a few old people that are perpetually friends with people In their early 20s, even as they get older year by year. Fueled by the inclination to relive their perception of their prime years, these old people approach it in 1 of 2 ways. 1) They are the ones attempting to time travel, keeping up with the zeitgeist, even if their perception of it is from the lens of a 20 year old from 1970. 2) They try to pull these 20 year olds back into their time world along with themselves, “educating” or “indoctrinating” them on what is cool as a 60 year old that was 20 in 1970s.
Many people’s mindsets are constrained by space, even if they are pariahs of their own location. Convinced that everything “here” is better than “there.” Or can’t stop seeing “there” from the lens of “here.”
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Reflections on MDMA
There is no such thing as The Matrix or moving in and out of it. Rather, there are multiple pools of matrices, pools of thought.
Drugs don’t necessarily take you out of The Matrix, they can just as well move you into another one. You can be set in your brain synapses with or without external influences. There is no pride in doing or not doing something, only if you can control your will. To be in charge of your thoughts, both holding on to them, going after them, and letting them go.
To be truly successful in the universe, you easily move in and out and through these different matrix pools. To travel in space and time. It’s another way of saying, to be truly successful, you must be empathetic. And the reverse is, to be truly empathetic, you must travel with as little baggage as possible.