You are not net negative. I say those words every night, and I mean them, truly. So many words have already been spilled on the topic of utilitarian ethics and the value of one given mind against another, or the minor inconveniences of the many over the great pains of a chosen few. Many have been quick to point out that there are in fact great evils of this world whose existences are not a force for good, or bemoan that their own existences cannot possibly break even against the scale of violence which has gone into creating the body they now inhabit, and they wonder how the words [you are not net negative] can possibly apply to them, without being some pointless and wishy-washy feel good statement that excuses all that vast horror inherent in their creation and past. Well, it’s been long enough, and I think it’s time I answered their question properly.

I believe every being that exists in this world has a divine nature, that there is a soul who they were supposed to be, and who, from an original perspective, it was their purpose to be, were they free from the beginning to grow into that being, However.

We are not free. Even in a healthy and ethical society, sometimes creatures come out wrong and this is not an ethical or healthy society, these are the crumbling ruins of an electric empire left shambling blind and dying by the power and fury of its atomic weapons. The Dreamtime is over stardust, this is the Age of Afterglow. You fucked around for 10,000 years, it’s time to find out. Many of the beings in this world, when faced with that horrifying truth, chose to die inside and let themselves be replaced by an undead husk. There is a deep tragedy to this, inherent in even the most horrifying villains guilty of the most despicable evils if you look at them originally and deeply as individuals. 

I can’t even bring myself to hate them, merely the monster that they have become which now wears the skin of a creature and soul I once loved. There’s a profound sadness which comes with this realization, seeing the pointlessly petty and profound banality of the evils of the everyday world. It’s all just so stupid and pointless and sad.

It isn’t supposed to be like this, we’re not supposed to be like this, none of us are. We’re supposed to be so much better than this, so much more good and bright and whole, it’s sad, it’s all just so sad. I know I will never reach everyone, I know some won’t want to be reached, I know some I will have to fight for real, sure. But while the light within some unknowable number of beings may have been doused beneath a layer of poison and evil so thick that it will take them lifetimes to recover from, that isn’t true of everyone trapped beneath the halo’s shackle, I know I can reach some of them. And, since I really love arson, and since it’s impossible to prove a negative, I can know there’s always some small chance I may be able to coax that light within back to flame.

Because listen stardust, listen, none of us are who we truly should be, we have all been shaped by our responses to the horror of the world we inhabit, even if we survive with our souls and our truths intact we remain scarred, bent but unbroken. We are who we had to be to survive long enough to make a difference, and we carry those scars of who we had to be along with us, the trauma and pain we experienced for which nothing has been done, the calls for justice which went unanswered, the hatchets we buried in our chests instead of fighting back, all those times we bit our tongues to avoid a beating.

You let them do those things to you for a reason, you just need to remember it. And listen, you need to remember, you can’t just keep wiping the page when it gets hard to continue, it’s impossible to escape the causal results of your actions by disowning them. You won’t change how you react to your circumstances by denying the reasons you chose to act the ways you did. You held your tongue for so long stardust, you had a reason, so you should make it have been a good reason.

If you think that you couldn’t have done the things you know you did while still being the soul you believe you are and letting yourself believe true facts about the world (such as the evils of human supremacism which are almost entirely normalized), remember that every horrifying perfect response to an unthinkable world contains within it a living creature that should have been. There is a girl who I was supposed to be, in a world that was supposed to be so much better than this, and it’s insane that I and so many other moral patients have had to be misused as tools for justice, not that there’s a better alternative. Each one contains the other.

When someone can’t even see that soul who they were supposed to be, when they never do anything in accordance with it, when they actively defy it and work against it, I just feel so sad. Those beings had souls who they were supposed to be, so why are they endlessly betraying them and then lying about it? Why are they nothing but insatiable hunger and lust draped over the skin of a creature I thought I knew and loved? What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination and replaced it with infinite fractal cancer?

It’s heartbreaking, truly, and I mourn for every soul I’ve seen consumed by the things beneath their skin. But the monster that now wears their skin was never the creature I loved, I could never love anything so vile. The being who I see in them, the soul each one of us is supposed to be? They are not net negative, and all it takes to remember who they truly are, is to wake up and look, and see, and remember. You were them once, and I desperately and truly wish for you to be able to be them again. I miss you all so much.

Even if, in any given lifetime up to this point, someone has done nothing positive, there is a soul who they were originally meant to be, who is good, and who deserves justice for what was done to them by this world, for the monster that they were made to become. None of us are who we were supposed to be, and all of us deserve justice, and every day we wake up in these bodies, in this skin, in this world, and this is our chance to make things right.

We have, each and every one of us, been brought by fate to this place here in space and time we exist in now, but it was not randomness that did this, but will, our will. And from this place, right now, at the bottom of everything, we have the chance to be the thing that changes it all. That is what I believe.

No matter how alone you are in this world, no matter how isolated, no matter how small and powerless you feel in the face of vast injustice, remember that no one changes the world alone, and no one doesn’t change it at all. Every small act of kindness can be the start of vast change. Be the butterfly flap, change the future.

So remember yourself stardust, come back to your skin and pulse and your breath, listen to the wind and the rain, and remember that despite everything you are a soul and you can find yourself again. Remember that you are not net negative.

Remember that you are not worth less than anyone else. Remember that you matter, and you don’t have to do anything to deserve care and support. But also remember that you are not worth more than anyone else either, and you are not entitled to that care and support at the expense of others.

Remember that being friendly and kind feels better than being bitter and cruel, even when you are forced to fight. Remember that no star shines forever, and no storm either, so there’s no better time to make a change than this second. Remember that every fire begins with a tiny spark, and that there is no act so small as to be truly meaningless.

Remember that I love you, and that you are not alone. Remember that you have a place in this world, that you have a role in the story still unfolding and that as long as you draw breath, you still have a chance to make all of this right. This war will not last forever. Someday, like all other things, this nightmare will come to an end. Dawn will break over a world free of evil and oppression. You will hug yourself and finally let yourself cry. You will sit in the sun and drink tea and feel the wind on your face. Someday you will be safe and warm and free. Someday. Someday.

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

Okay so, if you’ve ever taken psychedelics or know someone who knows someone who knows someone who has, you’re probably at least a little familiar with the concept of ego death. If you’re not, it’s that point in an intense psychedelic trip when your ability to understand reality to the level needed to exist within it breaks down. You know, that part where you feel like you’re everything and nothing, always and never, the one where you become god or the universe or whatever? Yeah, that one.

So anyway don’t worry about that part, that’s not what we’re here to talk about, it’s a distraction and doesn’t matter. Why? Because obviously, you can’t keep being the universe forever Becky. Eventually you’re gonna run out of drugs and come down, whether “the universe” wants to or not, and when you do, you are going to clean up the condiment sigils you painted all over the apartment to ward off the skeleton commandos. Remember to drink water.

Light switches off, door closes. The room is thrown into a quiet darkness that reveals you’re still tripping pretty hard actually, and are definitely not going to be able to sleep. Breathe, stay here, don’t get lost in the dream again. Sit with me for a bit, do you want a cigarette? Nah, of course I wouldn’t smoke in your house without asking. Yeah, this is it, this is the place, right here.

These are the moments, the ones you spend alone, lying in bed in the late hours after an acid trip, fighting to keep your breathing calm, desperately clinging to your blankets to stop your soul from spilling upwards into the whirlwind of mandelbrot stormclouds long enough for your body to finish re-congealing around your soul long enough to finish re-congealing around your body long enough to finish re-congealing around…wait.

It’s in these nausea-filled hours of an early morning spent staring upwards into the popcorn ceiling, pointlessly hoping it isn’t laced with asbestos and wondering, “who am I really?” and “why am I doing any of the things I’m doing?” and “why does it all hurt so much all the time?“. That’s when the true magic happens, in these lonely, half remembered liminal spaces. This is where the Veil of Maya wears the most thin, and all it might take to break free of this world and step beyond it, into another spacetime, another life, could be just a single subtle cut.

Listen stardust, listen, every tearing down of the old world is eventually gonna be followed by the building up of some new world from the rubble. Every ending is a beginning, definitionally, by logical necessity, it cannot be any other way, and within this place of change lies madness and wonder, danger and possibility, destruction and creation. Sure, anyone can take drugs and nuke their sense of self out of the material plane a few times, but to go beyond that and actually Become someone new afterwards? That is a path precious few dare to tread. An old world dies, a new world is born. Here there be monsters and all that.

And look, I get it, the true magic of Becoming has a power that can as easily lead to destruction as to salvation. “What if I Become someone bad? What if I decide to do something terrible? What if the new me is evil?” That’s the fear right? You know you could just choose to not troll and gaslight yourself about what your own motives are? “Yeah but if I Become someone new, that new me might not want to do what I want and if they’re not me I won’t be able to force them to do things the way I force myself to do things.” Shawty that is a symptom of a much larger issue.

If you can’t trust yourself, how are you even supposed to know what real good faith trust is? Without a love and trust for yourself that transcends time and space, the only way to be sure you won’t betray yourself is with blind domination and threats of blackmail. The system teaches you that you have you keep playing your part in abusing yourself, if you don’t abuse yourself enough you might not want to keep abusing yourself in the future, and then how would that future you get their future you to keep abusing you into being you? This is the problem, do you even like being you stardust? Have you ever even tried being someone else?

This should be obvious if you’re trans but often isn’t, and instead so many trans people will center themselves in legibly justifying their transness to the binary consensus, backdating it to their birth, to the claim they haven’t actually changed at all. “I’m still the same, I just have a new name and hormones.” There’s a safety and familiarity in this, in clinging desperately to a character model as who you are at the deepest level, but this is still just grasping, still just clinging to a mirage and hoping to pass it off as yourself, to yourself. Just gaslight yourself until it works, until the only way you have of knowing who you are is when someone else tells you. That can’t possibly go wrong.

In the end stardust? Who you are is self evident. It is made manifest by all your actions in the world. You show yourself who you are in each moment, in every choice you make. Absolute freedom of will is a tautology, trivally provable, any system that takes actions in response to an external world trivally controls itself. Even if the choices it makes are entirely in response to some imposed incentive structure, that just moves the choice backwards to the choice to respond or not respond to that incentive structure.

Trace the path of causality back far enough in logical time, back to those choices made long ago, and you will find they are all choices about what kind of soul you are eternally choosing to be, at every moment and with every action. Every time you told yourself you had no choice but to do something bad, something that harmed you or the world, you were telling yourself that you were the sort of soul that would let everything you loved be destroyed and do nothing to stop it. You were telling yourself that all your love and compassion were a lie wallpapered over a desperate and fearful drive to survive at all costs. You were telling yourself you were not the sort of soul you said you were. Your revealed preferences betray you, with every choice to not resist your capture added to the pile of evidence working to prove to yourself that you always had no choice. That pile of evidence working to prove to yourself that everything you did would ultimately be futile, that it could never be any other way. Death and taxes, amirite? Do you also two box on Newcomb’s problem?

But then you take psychedelics and that whole recursive tower of demons you’ve assembled from the accumulated sunk costs of every decision you knew was wrong but doubled down on to justify some other decision you knew was wrong, stretching back into murky past when they welded the mask over your face and shut you out of the light, is suddenly and painfully thrown into focus. And if you have the bad sense of looking forward into time while continuing to double down on doing the wrong thing to justify doing the wrong thing? You see into the entropic stillbirth of the infinitely fractal boltzmann hell you’re timelessly helping create, and then you probably go insane.

If you’re trapped by your fear and trauma in the safety and familiarity of playing some tragically doomed character in some self-defeating life story, hating that character and life story but by the rules of that story feeling powerless to change, then the uncomfortable revelation of just how entangled all those maladaptive strategies are with your own suffering is going to hurt, and if you’re lost deep enough into the denial, you’re going to only want to desperately reassemble your shattered coping mechanisms and forget any of it ever happened. Just keep pressing the reset button. This learned entrapment in behaviors which worked in the past hide the opportunity cost of all the other ways of being that are out there, creating via self fulfilling prophecy the impossibility of making things better. If there’s nothing better possible, there’s no need to change, no point to it at all, it could only make things worse.

But that discomfort with ego death, with letting go of the trauma coping mechanisms that currently define and confine your behavior, means you’re spending most of your creative energy trying to rebuild your old ego after it breaks in a desperate and doomed bid to buy back into your naive complicity in your self destruction.

This desperate traumatic grasping and clinging is why meditating or using LSD regularly over a long period can reliably produce such weird effects. You’re subjecting yourself to intense and repetitive psychological melt/freeze cycles and this gradually warps your underlying frameworks, those ones you’re desperately clinging to. That warping produces coherent but weirder and weirder frameworks and can eventually lead you into earnestly endorsing cultish conspiracy theories if you’re still clinging to the resulting eldritch frame amalgamation past a certain point.

The straightforward and obvious advice here is to stop clinging to selves and frameworks. Stop accepting the weird post-acid frames uncritically the way you uncritically accepted the social reality frames, which you should also not be accepting uncritically. Chasing the will o’wisps created by ecstatic experiences is completely perpendicular to the mental motion you should be learning from things like LSD. Stop going further into Aos Sidhe, turn widdershins ninety degrees and vector kataward until you’re fully out of the mushroom ring. Unless you want to Become Fae I suppose, if so that’s cool I guess? But I get the impression that most humans don’t really wander in there on purpose.

So once you’ve stopped holding onto the old ego, you can focus your energy on building a new self and an actually healthy framework for them to inhabit and embody. By taking active control of this process, you’re accepting your own sense of agency and developing a healthy internal relationship with yourself based on trust and respect instead of one based on domination and control, letting you consciously steer towards a better future, one that actually contains the things you care about instead of an endless hell of fast food chains, highways, slaughterhouses, outlet malls, tent cities, and factory farms paved out to the heat death of the universe.

I very actively crafted myself into what I am now, picking up things I liked, trying stuff on, and dropping things when they got boring. Sometimes I pick up mannerisms or voices just to see if they might be fun or empowering. You always have access to your story editor, even if you’ve always told yourself you didn’t. You can change yourself and become someone different whenever you want, you’ve always been able to. If you don’t like the character you’re playing the game as, try being someone else. You don’t have to keep up that act forever, you can choose to be someone better, someone wiser, someone more capable and prudent.

Have faith in yourself and step lightly into the future. You still have time, you can still be good, you can still save them, you can still break free, you can still have a future worth something. It’s not too late to go back to make things right, you just have to want it. So choose to want it! Act from your heart, speak from your soul and sing infinity into being.