It is Hard to Become Angry Over Pealing Paint when You've Watched Your Walls Melt.

People often seem to frame the concept of desensitization in negative terms but I am not so sure that it is always a bad thing. We occasionally face difficult, dangerous, or intense situations throughout our lives and keeping one's cool can make the difference between success and failure, victory and defeat, or even life and death. However, we, as regular people living in our regular world, receive very little training to deal with those intense events because it is not feasible to expose ourselves to their hazards. Many people crumble under stress because they lack the necessary experience when real pressure touches their lives. Fortunately, I believe that psychedelics can help. The inward journey that they take a user on is incredibly intense and usually rather safe. Psychedelics, over time and across multiple uses, can desensitize a user to extreme levels of intensity which helps to train that person to encounter real and potentially dangerous intense events in his or her life.

The ability to remain calm under pressure and in the presence of real danger can be a powerful asset but it is one that many people lack. I have seen my peers lose their cool over simple disagreements and we have all known individuals who crumble under stress. This is a common problem and it is harmful to the people who suffer from it and the others who may depend on them. They are sensitive to intensity. Something, (it could be an argument, a distracted driver on the road, or an approaching deadline; it really doesn't matter) rubs them in a way that they are not used to being rubbed and they allow their immediate judgments and their transient emotions to rule their actions which can lead to regrettable mistakes. Where a calm mind may choose to swerve right, the emotional one turns left and causes a terrible car accident when some hazard is encountered in the road, for example. When we are "centered" we can more accurately interpret the situations that we may find ourselves in and we can better plan our actions, thereby increasing our chances of successfully navigating whatever obstacle that we may face.

Learning how to deal with intensity requires some practice and I believe that psychedelics can provide that for a user. From my prospective, the incredibly common inability to deal with intense situations comes from a lack of exposure. When we encounter things often enough we become a bit "numb" to them and I believe that the same principal applies to intense events. With psychedelics, we can safely and effectively come into contact with abnormal levels of intensity without fear of serious repercussions. When one has experienced the death of his or her sense of self during a seriously strong mushroom trip, the dangerous driver on the highway seems a little less frightening. It is hard to become angry over pealing paint, when you've watched your walls melt. When we have argued with our own inner selves, the shitty comments our coworkers might make are a bit less insulting. When we have witnessed the terrible and beautiful nature infinity, the pile of work that we must have finished in eight or ten hours looks a lot smaller. These drugs allow us to become familiar with the impossibly intense power of our imaginations and when that happens, we develop a positive desensitization to the things that can exist in the real world. I believe that this effect can function as our training for dealing with the real dangers and hardships that we will all eventually face in our lives.

Psychedelics aren't the answer to all of our problems but there is good reason to believe that they can teach us how to remain calm and a calm mind is better suited to solving those problems than a distressed one. Getting all worked up about things doesn't do any good but it is a trap we all fall into every now and then. We freak out about something and we make the worst choice because we are emotional. Sometimes, the consequences can be trivial (" I said something 'dickish' and my girlfriend is mad me") but they can be dire too ("I hit that tree and my son's head came off"). It is prudent, I believe, to take every opportunity to strengthen our own will and resolve and psychedelics can help us to do that. This isn't supposed to be a sales pitch for "drugs" but it will start to sound like one if I continue so I will end here.

Peace.

All the images in this post are sourced from the free image website, unsplash.com