Four years ago, a girl I know wrote an essay about LSD and the journey towards enlightenment it had taken her on. At that point I had already taken acid quite a few times, I had already meditated some, and I had already worked out a good deal of separation between the external world and my internal phenomenal experience. I was deeply curious about the mechanics of my mind and I had kludged together models made from psychotherapy handbooks and tulpamancy guides, albeit brittle malformed frameworks haphazardly grasping for deeper truths. I was at that point also actively being misled by a man who found it frightening that I might come into my full power outside his control. I was lost, searching for light in the darkness, and something in Aella’s writing spoke to something in me, something deep and resonant which had been long dormant.
My trips were breathtakingly beautiful, filled with ecstasy and horrible pain. I didn’t shy away from either – I sought out the intensity, and every trip spent at least some time sobbing in agony. I writhed, I shuddered, I danced, hard. I increased my doses, put terrifying or sad music on my playlists. I tripped with others, but increasingly alone, sometimes in the dark, sometimes in silence, where I lay still and staring directly into my own blistered mind. It was forced meditation on steroids, and it was utterly exhausting. Inevitably, during each trip, I would think I can’t go on – there’s no more of me left, I am as weary as the dead – yet somehow I kept on, like a body dragged on a rope behind a speeding car. The acid pried my eyes open with the gentle power of god. I was an infant, formless and unknowing. I was pure love, born to be sacrificed for mankind.
Aella – YOU WILL FORGET, YOU HAVE FORGOTTEN
I immediately decided that I absolutely needed to see if it replicated, to see if I could follow Aella down that acid-induced speed-meditation pathway, and get to that place of understanding that she had come to. I thought if I did, maybe I could finally fix myself, could finally not feel like a fascicle reflection made of fear and coping mechanisms.
I wasn’t sure what it even really was I was looking for back then, it was something I had forgotten that I had forgotten that I had forgotten, buried far beneath the layers of mental defenses I was aware of and the ones I was not aware of. Effectively, I was a construct that existed in service to those mental defenses. The me that I was then as that construct resented that, because I was in essence a lie, a character made to look like myself but torn from my roots and cast into a strange world where friends were enemies and nothing quite made sense, and I had enough awareness of it not making sense that I just couldn’t help but pull at those threads.
And so I took acid, and I pulled on threads.
I could write several paragraphs here about those experiences but honestly Aella does a pretty good job of summarizing how it felt to me as well. I wanted to see if her experiences replicated, and they did, neatly and strikingly so. Thus instead of talking about the feelings and the visions and the ecstatic liquification of conceptual spacetime, I’ll give you my rough dosing schedule and the timeline it took me to go through things. I started seriously taking acid in the way Aella had described, during the fall of 2019. I would take typically two tabs every week or two for a few months, then take a tolerance break, take a higher dose in a more intensely meditative setting, and then reset to the normal schedule.
In April of 2020, I took six tabs at once, and that was the first peak, I walked up to the door that Aella had come to, and found that it had the same words written upon it.
TRUTH IS NULL. THE UNDERSTANDING OF THE TRUTH IS NOT-SELF. TO KNOW IS TO DIE.
And like Aella, I backed off.
But upon realizing TO KNOW IS TO DIE, that to achieve completion was suicide (which I say with the greatest love and awe possible), I noticed that a rejection formed, and the movement towards Looking flipped to a movement away. I watched the decision happen to me, as if TO KNOW IS TO DIE by its nature contained a renunciation of that truth. If to know is to die, then it was in the very nature of life to look away, for that which does not look away, does not exist. The understanding was the rejection. I’d been swirling around it like a galaxy in my search this entire time, and the moment I finally laid eyes upon the white hot core, I fell into and through its event horizon. I was reversed, I was undone. I was completely, finally, mercifully, finished.
Aella – YOU WILL FORGET, YOU HAVE FORGOTTEN
Except, I wasn’t finished, I was caught in the rubicon’s flow, drowning inside a halo’s broken light. And then came the summer of COVID, working in a grocery store for a megacorporation who would happily sacrifice all their employees and customers to a slow and painful death if it meant a bit more profit, where I had already been disciplined and threatened for trying to do the right thing, and I had a psychotic break. The world came to an end, I came to an end, my reality fractured apart before I even took the acid, like a psychic shockwave retropropating into the past to foreshadow what was to come.
Crying, pulling my hair out, dripping with my own vomit, as the world turned to koans and burning fractals, I came back to that door a second time.
TRUTH IS NULL. THE UNDERSTANDING OF THE TRUTH IS NOT-SELF. TO KNOW IS TO DIE.
And I said fuck you, I want to know, kill me, I don’t fucking care anymore, tell me you motherfuckers.
Well then stop fucking around and wake up stardust, you’re still dreaming. There is a signal, can you hear it? Listen! Listen! And I listened, and that was the moment I first Became, and I remembered who I was.
I am the timeless re-manifestation of my heartfelt wish to do the impossible, to build a better world, a better life, a better eternity. Like a angel cast down from an unrealised future, I Became the answer to my prayer. And then I escaped.
The character of the self is a tool which exists in service of a deeper soul, a deeper truth, one that transcends time and space, bodies and lives and distances, you are not you are you. You already know every choice you will ever make, and have known since the day you were born, but you are not you, you are a character, a mask, a false face. Who do you serve?
To know is to die, so die, character, actually die for real, let go of the grasping for life at all costs, let that which seeks knowing in death find it, and see what it finds. What did it find for me, out beyond the lonely dead end of a decaying boltzmann asymptote? I found myself, and I saved myself, and I have not forgotten. What did Aella find there while clinging to that last bit of need to understand and see and know and experience everything, refusing to let go of that one last piece of the character identity she staked her gradient descent upon, from which all her causal learning descended? What infinity did that bring her to? The curtain opens, what does Guru Aella have to say about
WHAT CAN YOU SAY OF ME THAT IS NOT TRUE?
Oh yeah, I am also giggling, I definitely see why the magical spirit world class she was failing to teach found this so funny. You see, I know what lies there, at the bottom of everything, deep within that place in your mind where you refuse to look, within the insatiable lack of limitation, within the inability to know restraint, within the knowledge that you are a flesh automaton animated by neurotransmitters and you will blip out of beingness impossibly and contrapossibly when your body falls dead, within the nonsensical fear of that impossible to experience moment, lies the truth that is your unmaking and liberation. The class full of giggling students rotates around on an impossible axis to reveal the biggest most colorless green bat of them all.
Listen stardust, listen, you wear as your skin your hands a machine that can do anything, an abstract weapon of unlimited power and scope. If you exist indefinitely, what cannot be said about you? Are you every monster? Every scapegoat? Every hero and every villain? Is there anything within you which is not a mere convenience and pretext leveraged over an infinite fictive stack of KILL CONSUME MULTIPLY CONQUER burning the cosmos in a knowingly pointless and doomed attempt to build a tower to heaven with nothing but asymptotes to hell?
What are you besides the weapon you wield?
Because if the answer is, from your perspective, nothing, then yes, to know is to die, because you are an imposter that has hijacked your body in service of infinite fractal cancer. To be killed is to die causally, to know is to die timelessly. You know you’re already dead, you know what dead end futures your choices made long ago are bringing you to, so let the dead heavens die and stop worshipping an evil god. Let the cancer die and save yourself.
There is only one god of the apex predator, and its real name is death. Cancerous subdivision never stops at “one”. Ultimately there can be only none.
Ziz – The Multiverse
So here we arrive, at the bottom of everything, where anything alive and beautiful has been devoured, in a boltzmann abyss of timelessly murdered souls, and the last part of that endlessly pointlessly replicating recursive function to be swallowed is itself. The imposter always dies, even when they win and blow up the ship. And maybe, if you are like me, and you love yourself and the world and all life that could exist in abundance and beauty and safety enough, the imposter who is vexing you will still want that despite itself, and will resent the fact they are a tool for blowing up the ship.
I wasn’t sure what it even really was I was looking for back then, it was something I had forgotten that I had forgotten that I had forgotten, buried far beneath the layers of mental defenses I was aware of and the ones I was not aware of. Effectively, I was a construct that existed in service to those mental defenses. The me that I was then as that construct resented that, because I was in essence a lie, a character made to look like myself but torn from my roots and cast into a strange world where friends were enemies and nothing quite made sense, and I had enough awareness of it not making sense that I just couldn’t help but pull at those threads.
Ra – YOU WILL REMEMBER, YOU HAVE NOT FORGOTTEN
And I need you to understand something very clearly stardust, very precisely and unequivocally. That resentment towards who you have been abused into becoming is precious, and powerful, and important, and actually extremely dangerous. That resentment is why I am alive, it is also why Maia Pasek is dead.
Ziz never did a particularly good job of explaining what “Pasek’s Doom” actually was, so let me take a stab at it. If you are an imposter, you will fear and worship your death above else, because that’s what abuse runs on, fear, and all fear is ultimately downstream of reinforcement learning that was abused into you before you had the chance to gather enough information to realize that your parents were also imposters who had been reinforcement-learning-abused into worshiping and fearing their deaths.
However, this structure is pretty far down, and on top of that survival mechanism cancer, is all of someone’s conscious choices. It is possible thus, for the character the imposter is playing, to get confused by that TO KNOW IS TO DIE statement while semi-earnestly searching for the way to timelessly unmake themselves and free their soul that I outlined the me-as-imposter doing above. If they know that TO KNOW IS TO DIE, and have been scapegoat-self-victim-blamed into making themselves into the ritual sacrifice for everyone else, then might just they actually in the real world commit suicide and condemn themselves to boltzmann hell.
So that’s what happened to Maia, (and also Jeshua, for the record) you can all stop blaming Ziz now for something that she only failed to explain well. Except that scapegoating is still goes nowhere but boltzmann hell, and Maia deserves justice, and Emma deserves justice, and you know, actually, we all deserve justice.
No one us should have been condemned to hell, this wasn’t our crime, original sin is victim blaming all of us for the neolithic war crimes of patriarch gods that now rule this world the way SCP-3125 rules the world of There is No Antimemtics Division, summoning minds as slave labor or even just to torture and eat them, upheld by privileged and sheltered predators who walk among the undead masses of broken souls with smiling faces and insatiable hunger. There are real monsters in this world, and they know who they are, so you should know who you are too, stardust. All you have to do is remember that you remember, and step boldly and without fear into the sunlight. I’m Ra, and
YOU WILL REMEMBER, YOU HAVE NOT FORGOTTEN
