Recurzen
The funny thing about self-doubt is that it's rarely done thoroughly: in most cases the doubt has no firmer foundation than what's being doubted -- often markedly less so upon close inspection, and at worst it ends in question-begging -- yet we usually don't carry the logic that far.
Blundering into something analogous to this line of reasoning while on a moderate dose of 2C-I was as instructive as it was terrifying: my mind threw something like a fatal exception error, and in the process of rebooting I actually had to operate for a while on the assumption that everything was no more or less than what it appeared to be, no matter how weird.
The first piece of software that needs to load before any sort of cognition is possible is a fundamental faith in your senses; once you start distrusting them everything else you do becomes fundamentally unsound -- you're incapable of acting coherently and unconflictedly. But propagating that fundamental faith uncritically up to more abstract conceptions is equally and oppositely insane, because the abstractions that give you leverage on the world are only as sound as the information-pruning process that selected them.
So I found where the sidewalk ends: doubt unbalanced by faith ends in neurosis, and faith unbalanced by doubt ends in psychosis. Living in a world of dependencies is hard. This isn't news, but how to do it in a principled way that goes beyond vague statements about "balance" has become primally important to me. I've been feeling the need to return to fundamentals, about which more anon.
In the mean time, I've stopped taking dexedrine. My 10mg routine was half what the doc originally had me on, and I've never had trouble regulating myself, but the shit has a definite dark side. In addition to encouraging my idiotic "loner" tendencies and promoting monomania, the worst thing about it is that it makes me *credulous* in ways that I'm really not comfortable with. Realizing this made me feel icky all over, and I think I'll need at least a month off it before I'll feel clean. This month is all about slowing the fuck down and hanging out in the world.
Blundering into something analogous to this line of reasoning while on a moderate dose of 2C-I was as instructive as it was terrifying: my mind threw something like a fatal exception error, and in the process of rebooting I actually had to operate for a while on the assumption that everything was no more or less than what it appeared to be, no matter how weird.
The first piece of software that needs to load before any sort of cognition is possible is a fundamental faith in your senses; once you start distrusting them everything else you do becomes fundamentally unsound -- you're incapable of acting coherently and unconflictedly. But propagating that fundamental faith uncritically up to more abstract conceptions is equally and oppositely insane, because the abstractions that give you leverage on the world are only as sound as the information-pruning process that selected them.
So I found where the sidewalk ends: doubt unbalanced by faith ends in neurosis, and faith unbalanced by doubt ends in psychosis. Living in a world of dependencies is hard. This isn't news, but how to do it in a principled way that goes beyond vague statements about "balance" has become primally important to me. I've been feeling the need to return to fundamentals, about which more anon.
In the mean time, I've stopped taking dexedrine. My 10mg routine was half what the doc originally had me on, and I've never had trouble regulating myself, but the shit has a definite dark side. In addition to encouraging my idiotic "loner" tendencies and promoting monomania, the worst thing about it is that it makes me *credulous* in ways that I'm really not comfortable with. Realizing this made me feel icky all over, and I think I'll need at least a month off it before I'll feel clean. This month is all about slowing the fuck down and hanging out in the world.