They need to put themselves on the list.
Ok, here is my trip report from 4.67 grams of magic mushrooms, 24.9 mg of psilocybin. The dose used in modern clinical trials.
First, the experience was exhilarating. Positive in every way. I felt like a kid finding and exploring a new playground.
My sensory perception was dialed up to levels I must have felt as a kid but have been dulled with time. I experienced sense of touch with awe. Feeling my fingers rub together felt novel. Touching my skin and running my feet over the threaded quilt lit up my brain. It seemed that my mind was insatiably curious and wanted to deploy its sensors into the world and discover all things.
I felt the same sensory joy in moving my body. Rolling my joints, curving my back, curling up in a ball, flexing muscles and moving all about in a fluid fashion. My body felt nimble, supple, fit, and strong.
My sense of hearing was equally as elevated. It helped that I was also wearing my new hearing aids which restore frequencies I’d long stopped noticing. The music I listened to hit more fully than I have memory.
My facilitator gave me some water in a glass jar. The visuals of the light reflections, water dynamics and sensory experience of holding the glass were so fascinating that I forgot to drink. My brain wanted to stare, study and marvel.
One of the most satisfying things I discovered was taking huge, deep breaths. Inhaling life and fueling the body’s needs and wants. I did it over and over and over. This material of existence, all around us, was available and free to be mined. You just needed to breathe in.
(After peaking and coming down, I ate a salad. It tasted like the most delicious food I’d ever eaten. The flavor exploded in my mouth. I savored every bite.)
At one point, I felt like my entire body was still. I had a perceived sense of total body control. Like my heart had stopped. Complete stillness. This was surprising as I’m acutely tuned to my heart beat. I monitor my heart all day every day and can usually discern my heart rate by sensation. In that moment, I couldn’t feel my heart beat or any pulse pressure through my blood vessels. First time that’s ever happened. I asked Kate to check my heart rate on my wearable and it was mid 50s. I wasn’t worried. Just curious about my sensory experience.
With this heightened sense of sensory perception, it felt like my consciousness was dialed up to 10/10. I felt hyper aware and hyper alive.
It felt like mushrooms restored my perception to youthful levels, returning them to factory settings and dissolving my aged numbness.
Once my senses were reset, my attention sifted from the texture of existence to existence itself.
We spend most of our time playing games at the layers of people, dramas, companies, politics, jobs, money, ideologies, and status. Underneath these games is the knowing that physical death has been inevitable. Everyone before us has died.
When death is inevitable, people pick their game among a wide array of options including reincarnation, heaven, legacy, offspring, ancestral veneration, existentialism and many more. These frameworks make death soothing, a virtue, and something positive to be anticipated.
But what if death is no longer inevitable? I’m not suggesting immortality. I am suggesting a radical remake of human life. The speed of progress in AI, biology and medicine point to a new frontier of possibility. Are we cavemen-equivalent now compared to what we will be like in 50 years? It’s now harder to argue why we should limit our imagination.
With so much promise, why have we not shifted our societal attention to secure our own existence? To solve aging. To address existential risks. To care for our planet. Why are we still messing around with self destruction, war and ignoring preserving our own existence?
We work hard to be fit. To learn a skill. Build a relationship. To make money. When we identify an opportunity, we focus and work hard. It seems to me that we’re not yet aware or awake to the opportunity of what existence could become.
Whatever one’s life philosophy and belief of what happens after this life, the majority of us want to live to see tomorrow. We have stuff going on and things to look forward to. And when tomorrow arrives, we want to see the next day. Wanting tomorrow is functionally equivalent to wanting infinitely.
The want to exist is deeply embedded in all of us. Our actions prove this every day.
Humans have been the alpha form of intelligence for a while now, imposing our will upon all we can. Our powers have increased dramatically in the past few decades. We can edit our own DNA, design materials at the nano scale, and build thinking machines.
Our alpha status is now challenged by AI. Whether AI is friend or foe, and in what ways, and on what timelines is anyone’s guess. No one knows.
…
https://x.com/bryan_johnson/status/1988064701075648776
>and on what timelines
Last night I dreamed Q was posting but it seemed like a different timeline.