To whom it may concern,
I'm a 25 year old male and decided it was time to join this community since I'd gathered so much information from it and am down for the cause. I think I'll introduce myself with a short synopsis of my story thus far. I'll try not to qualify myself too much and sorry in advance for this being too long and not entertaining enough.
In my early years I attended a catholic elementary school, but soon transferred into an accelerated learning program where I had some really great teachers. To still qualify for confirmation, (a catholic rite of passage) I worked after school with nuns from our church and quickly won their affection and they recommended I go into the priesthood(!), which I declined. Soon my family as a whole grew away from the church, and I have come to find with age that the whole shebang was mostly a homage to my paternal grandmother, who was a very devout catholic.
I then went to a regular, overcrowded public high school in central California and had great academic and athletic success. This eventually got me into a top-tier university, where I started to study computer science and continued playing sports. Up until that point in my life I had never had to put much thought into decision making in the larger context, the next step of my life had always either fallen into place naturally or been set in place by my parents. Furthermore, after my initial bout with Catholicism I never replaced my spiritual practice with another and had little in the way of spiritual guidance upon starting college. So naturally in my first quarter at university I took a class called "Buddhist Political and Social Theory", just to see what that was all about... Luckily, the professor was particularly brilliant and absolutely shattered my worldview and my understanding of myself and society.
I soon began having great difficulty with school and sports, unable to find focus or concentration, where before these had come with ease. I was distracted by the fact that I had no way of reconciling my inner voice with my current goals and aspirations.
The next few years involved me quitting sports and dropping out of school, working at a production company doing lights and sounds for concerts, dropping out of school again, becoming a semi-pro gamer for a few years, dropping out of school again, teaching kids programming and 3d design and otherwise still trying to figure shit out about my place in the world. I slowly acquired knowledge about the histories of our civilizations, of western and eastern philosophies, of various religious practices, of various physical practices (exercise theories), of dietary practices and more. Then at one point a friend of mine suggested that I talk to someone she had met who had tried these things called mushrooms... (from hereon out this person is referred to as SWIM)
As SWIM told me all about their first experience, I instantly fell in love with the idea of psychedelics.
As I learned more about the psychedelic culture I found myself already quite a ways into it, having independently studied fractal geometry, meditative techniques and listened to thousands of hours of psychedelic music (which previously I didn't realize was inspired by psychs, doh!). I continued to go deeper, dropping out of university again(!), but really starting getting to the core of internal metaprogramming as SWIM told me about their experiences exploring various psychoactives. SWIM says they are lucky to have been introduced to psychedelics in such a positive environment with plenty of space and room for exploration and experimentation.
At some point along the road, SWIM met an older person who had quite a bit of special, interesting knowledge that SWIM had never seen people enacting before. SWIM was greatly impressed by this person, because whereas many psychonauts and friends of SWIM seemed to have lots of psychoactive ideas but in reality little practice of them, this person really understood that knowledge without action is empty. (talking here about all areas of knowledge, whether it be spiritual development, intellectual development, lifestyle changes, etc.) This person told SWIM all about the spice and the Nexus, and gave them their first experiences with hyperspace. SWIM has subsequently decided to slow down their lifestyle and integrate all those epiphanies which had been coming too fast. SWIM has also urged me to look into switching my field of study and work from computer science to chemistry, as it is applicable to so many areas of life, health, well-being and environmental issues, and would surely help me adhere to my inner voice. SWIM has become very interested in organic chemistry and someone named Linus Pauling. Watching SWIM have these experiences has been very influential on me, and since SWIM doesn't like talking much, I have agreed to post here in their stead.
Well I guess that's it, as I said before I hope its not too boring for y'all...
-nemo
You are what you're doing. Who are you?