This is a guide to stopping your long-term use of LSD (or other teaching molecules); and returning to 'The Matrix' safely.
Without this guide, you may soon find yourself shopping in Walmart ‘just this one time’; reading billboard advertising, or wearing an Apple Watch.
So, here's how you can leave the psychedelic space-capsule. And return home.
We’ve all been there: You’ve been taking psychedelic trips into your inner landscape every other week for 3 years. You’ve unveiled the truth of your childhood; you’ve deconstructed language and bathed in the glittering lights of pure-consciousness; you’ve had deep insights into the parabola of human evolution.
You’ve probably taken a ride through the synaptical structures of your own nervous system, or held council with your lineage via, as yet, undocumented features in the DNA blockchain. You’ve experienced ego death and unpicked the lock of social conditioning. In short, you are aware of the unconscious programming most humans have been subjected to.
You are free of this programming.
But now, amidst your personal revelations on psychedelics — of the type that led scientist Kary Mullis to discover the Polymerase Chain Reaction, or Steve Jobs to proclaim that LSD was “one of the most important things in my life.” — a thought occurs to you:
Now I am ready to stop.
This post, then, is a guide to taking a long break from regular psychedelic use. I want to describe how you can now return, safely and peacefully, to the world of normal waking consciousness (NWC), otherwise known colloquially as “The Matrix”.
In other words, how do you stay awake and aware in the face of this?
1. Stay away from socially-normalised mind-control systems
The difficult thing about mind-control systems which operate in our society is that they work precisely because people do not perceive their influence.
Many inhabitants of ‘The Matrix’ will laugh at the idea that mind-control systems inhibit and manipulate their reality. But this is precisely the point at which a person is lost: when they no longer recognise the social-shaping that they are subjected to by the wounded power-seekers who generate mainstream media.
Without psychedelic use allowing you to perceive the water you swim in, it is very easy to slip back into the invisible fabric of consensus mass-consciousness. In the worst-case, you will not know the slip is taking place.
Without the exit tool of psychedelics, you will now need to be very cautious about what media, and mediums, you expose yourself to. Our encounters with modern communication tools are not passive or benign. These tools, used without awareness, can quickly, quietly, and radically, drag you back into 'The Matrix'.
The first step is to completely switch-off and disregard all mainstream media. If you have a television and want to maintain the conscious awareness that psychedelics have provided you, you will have to get rid of your television.
There is almost no way to safely use a television set in our modern world. The reasons are obvious to anyone who has used psychedelics regularly, or read Orwell, so I won’t go into a treatise on this topic here. Suffice to say, in Marshall McLuhan's terms, the message of the medium of television is: Fall asleep.
Next: Newspapers and magazines (online and offline).
As Mark Twain said, “If you don’t read the newspaper, you’re uninformed. If you read the newspaper, you’re misinformed”.
Without LSD to give you a regular perspective on the perverse hilarity of mainstream news media, you may find yourself looking at a newspaper headline and thinking, ‘yes, this seems like a plausible representation of the world’.
Avoid this.
Your post-psychedelic starting-point when reading any mainstream media publication should be: ‘What is this trying to sell me?’. Behind almost every headline is a product. Typically that product is a broad impulsion to consume, generated by inducing a state of fear in the reader:
Terrorism is the leading marketing campaign of the 21st Century.
In avoiding ‘news’ you may like to substitute with books. Many great books are still available in 'The Matrix', and have been written by thoughtful, conscientious people, many of whom have used psychedelics themselves. You might enjoy the work of Timothy Leary, Buckminster Fuller, or Alice Miller. Such books can smooth your return to the planet's surface.
2. Avoid social media
In true Orwellian double-speak, Social Media is actually asocial, or anti-social, media. It distances us from human connection via the simulation of human connection.
When you stop using psychedelics to maintain awareness of this construct, 'The Matrix' will encourage you to use tools like Facebook to construct a fantasy version of yourself in simulation, rather than create that version of yourself in reality.
This simulacra will then pass as you, while the real you experiences a psychic death. In the movie, The Matrix, this was expressed metaphorically in the image of machines feeding off unconscious human bodies.
Facebook feeds off unconscious human bodies. This is not hyperbolic.
Of course, you are aware of this from your psychedelic use, but it is useful to restate here because social media is such a pervasive and seductive component of the social-shaping mechanisms.
In leaving Facebook, it will be easier to see yourself as you are: connected and real. Tangible and solid. Bones and flesh, a voice and a laugh. Not photographed and self-curated.
In her book, 'On Photography', Susan Sontag describes this problem in reference to photography. But, it applies to Facebook as a whole.
Sontag writes:
"A way of certifying experience, taking photographs is also a way of refuting it — by limiting experience to search for the photogenic, by converting experience into an image, a souvenir. Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs"
This is what happens to a body on Facebook. The participants in this reality-tunnel are induced to create images to confirm a reality that is actually being lost precisely because it is being documented, rather than experienced.
In other words: Facebook can never really reflect who you are, and leads you away from yourself. Many humans keep looking for their reflections in the mirror of social media. But really: Our reflections are all around us in physical reality.
Facebook facilitates dissociation from reality. Although it seemed to be connecting you to people, Facebook prevents connection because it provides the illusion of connection and depletes the need to satisfy the deeper need. In other words: Facebook makes you feel connected when you are alone.
Post-LSD, you will want to know when you are alone, and when you are with people.
Avoid the simulation of connection.
As Jean Baudrilliard wrote in 'Simulacra and Simulation' (a philosophical treatise that inspired The Matrix movie):
"Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or substance. It is a generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal."
What Baudrillard is getting at here, is that our symbol systems have detached themselves from the physical reality they once represented. In other words, the maps started referring to each other and the territory got lost.
Post-psychedelics, you will want to know if your map of reality is real. This means burning the old maps and checking the territory again. One of the old maps is Facebook.
Facebook is a surveillance network on the brink of full-blown information-totalitarianism. This may sound extreme, but these things creep quietly in through the night. Facebook is already a morally dubious replacement for television: It is a place where we become not only the subjects of advertising, but also the producers of the content that intersperses the advertising.
In other words: Humans now make the shows (photos and written posts) that encourage them to watch the adverts between the shows they produce. Karl Marx would be horrified.
As if this was not enough, now Facebook decides what is 'fake news' and what is 'real news'. Since real news is mostly fake, the entire proposition is absurd.
In using Facebook, not only are ‘users’ creating content to power an engine that sells them to advertisers, but they are agreeing to participate in a 'reality tunnel' where Facebook decides what is 'real' or not.
In other words: A simulation of reality proposes to tell you what is real. A perfect Baudrilliardian dystopia. A place where everyone thinks they are watching reality, but in reality see nothing.
The 'real' media is completely unable to identify 'fake news' — witness the deciet of the Iraq war as just one example. This is not to mention the election fraud that will be enabled by profiling humans on Facebook and creating 'dream' politicians that appear to represent our values, but are just vacuous figureheads for multinational corporations.
So, what Facebook is now doing, in summary, is:
• Distancing humans from reality though simulation.
• Encouraging humans to provide content for free.
• Using this content to sell humans to advertisers.
• Setting itself up as an authority on what is 'real' news.
• Contributing to a political culture of mass-fraud.
3. Meditate
With cessation of weekly or bi-monthly psychedelic use, you will need a replacement practice to maintain your escape trajectory from 'The Matrix'.
The difficult thing about 'The Matrix' is that it is pervasive and seductive. It is very easy to unconsciously fall back into the prescribed behavioural patterning of an unconscious populace.
A beginner’s mistake is to assume that the revelations and perspectives gained through psychedelic use will persist without support. Sadly, this is not the case. As a minimum, you should seek to meditate at least half-an-hour each day. Those who were more regular users of psychedelics will require meditation more often to maintain their state of awareness.
If, for example, you micro-dosed LSD every other day for six months, you may now need as much as one hour or more meditation each day to retain your vibrational pitch of post-Matrix consciousness. If you undertook LSD psychotherapy every week for a year, you may — as a replacement — need two hours or more meditation a day to retain your state of being.
4. Stay physical
The psychedelic state will, in the past, have naturally alerted you to physical blockages and enabled the release of tensions in your muscle tissue. You have probably experienced many LSD sessions in which deep trauma material was released through shaking and stretching.
But this ease-of-expression is over now.
When you stop psychedelic use, you will need to find a replacement for this process of releasing stored tensions from the body.
As you return to 'The Matrix', especially if you live in an urban setting, you will inevitably find that tensions creep back into the musculature. Post-LSD (or other teaching molecule), you will need a new way to release these contractions.
Organised yoga is often cited as an option, and for many people it can be very effective. However, as you will have discovered through your psychedelic use: The body is a self-facilitating healing mechanism (if you get out of its way). So, prescriptive yoga routines in a ‘class’ are not always the best choice.
An alternative is to integrate your own, personalised, improvised quasi-yoga routine into your meditation practice. This also saves time because an hour of meditation can be integrated with a significant amount of movement and stretching.
To summarise this section: Find time and space to let your body express itself. It knows the moves, stretches and poses to make to release its unique and individual set of tensions. This will help you avoid slipping back into ‘The Matrix’ and its associated Reichian ‘body armouring’.
5. Return to nature and eat naturally
‘Nature’ is somewhat arbitrary concept, since 'The Matrix' itself is arguably a product of ‘nature’, but in this sense it is meant specifically: Trees, rivers, oceans, lakes, forests, mountains, woods.
These spaces are naturally psychedelic — meaning ‘soul revealing’ or ‘mind manifesting’. Taking time to explore a wooded enclave or run your fingers across the mossy bark of a willow tree is the perfect way to ground yourself in a non-human-engineered reality-tunnel.
I don’t want to say too much about nature, in this sense, because it transcends words and is a deeply personal experience. But, without psychedelics, you will need to get out there and and touch and explore the physical reality of your post-Matrix landscape.
Regarding food, this is again a deeply personal choice: But it is wise to take a look at your diet and include only natural products, avoiding the industries of low-consciousness: meat and dairy, for example. Much has been written on this elsewhere, and any long-term psychedelic user has likely already adopted these practices.
Conclusion
Welcome back home.
Stay connected.
Stay free.