"Revelations" on MDMA Version 2 (Newsletter No. 48)

Original post here. This version has been edited for more clarity. But I still wanted to keep the original up as a record of when my thoughts where in their even more raw form.

What would happen if professionally guided sessions on MDMA was a widely accepted therapy? (My session was at De School)

I. Bad art is the most childish, purest part of people.

To fully enjoy something that one cannot really brag about e.g. put on a resume. Doodling, playing piano or dancing just adequately. 

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II. I have three friends: 

-Person A has high personal EQ and low business sense but a desire to achieve business success.

-Person B has medium personal EQ and medium-high business sense. He is generous both personally and professionally but puts so much more energy into building career discipline. As a result, he lacks practice in effectively communicating and moderating his emotions within personal relationships, even though he is quite good at interacting with people professionally.  In his social circle, the attention he gives often swings between all and nothing. He can be nice without boundaries, sometimes at the expense of his own well-being. Or he abruptly give no attention at all to someone he deems a source of negativity or a waste of time.

-Person C has low personal EQ and high business sense and career ambition, and is pretty financially successful 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 what monetary benefit they can offer. (Of course, a lack of caring for people personally can also affect professional performance, but that's a conversation for another day.)

If all three work together, they can balance each other out and become one Super Man and execute professionally 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 to not be too cynical to play “the game.” Person C has the most technical knowledge to take Person A’s desire and Person B’s motivation and make something out of it, business-wise.

In order for Person B to be the bridge (and for this collaboration trio to work) he has to see Person A foremost as a friend and Person C foremost 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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III. 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 may still complain about it.

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IV. Empathy is Time and Space Traveling

When you empathize with someone, you become them.

"Vertical time traveling": happens when you empathize with a baby or an elder, and everyone in between that is not the same age as you. You therefore become a baby in the past or elder in the future when you feel all their feelings.

"Horizontal space traveling": when you try to imagine the life of someone else the same age as you are, but who thinks differently than you because of their different “location”---i.e., they have a different perspective based on where they are standing in life, physically and emotionally.

"Time & space": Traveling takes a lot of energy. It’s not clean cut. The effort does not come without baggage (like jet lag, altitude & motion sickness), which often distorts your view of the destination.

Many people’s mindsets are constrained by time, even if they are pariahs of their own generation. For instance, I know old people that are perpetually friends with people in their early 20s, even as the older person gets older every year (oftentimes, the contemporary 20somethings inevitably mature and outgrow their elder Peter Pan friend and he/she waits for a new batch of lost boys to play with). Fueled by the inclination to relive their perception of their prime years, these old people approach it in 1 of 2 ways.  1) They attempt to keep up with the youth zeitgeist, even if their perception of it is from the lens of a 60something in present day/20something from the 1970s.  2) Or, they try to pull these 20 year olds back into their idealized past time world along with themselves, educating (or indoctrinating) them on what is cool as a 60something that was 20something in the 1970s. 

Many people’s mindsets are constrained by space, even if they are pariahs of their own location. Perhaps they are convinced that everything “here” is better than “there.” Or, they can’t stop seeing “there” from the lens of “here,” even if they have disdain for "here."

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V. There is no such thing as The Matrix. Rather, there are multiple pools of matrices, pools of thought.

Drugs (for instance) may take you out of The Matrix, but they can just as easily move you into another matrix.  You can be set in your (neural path)ways with or without external influences. There is no pride in doing or not doing something. There's only pride in if you can control your will. To be in charge of your thoughts, whether it is holding onto them, going after them, or letting them go.

To be truly successful in the universe, you have to be capable of intentionally moving in and out and through these different matrix pools. To travel in space and time. In other words, to be a truly successful traveler/human, you must be empathetic. To be truly empathetic, you must travel with as little baggage as possible.