And suddenly... I could read

I sometimes think about where psychedelic experiences started happening in my life and the more I look back the more often I find instances of mind-expanding experiences in my past - long before I ever discovered psychedelics or trips.

I'm not quite sure when it actually happened, it must have been around the time in my early school years and reading was the issue of the day. Reading. Always wanted to but had some issues to get through it, maybe because my parents had separated recently and I was swapping schools for the third time - a lot for a kid to process and keep up with.

Anyways, reading - despite my wish to make it work - didn't come easy to me. I felt it was hard and it didn't quite click.

Then came the fateful day - my mom wanted to go to town to do some shopping for certain things. And I went with her, sitting in the passenger seat. And it started coming to me, like an avalanche:

I caught myself reading letters. Suddenly there were letters everywhere. I distinctly remember that I had never seen the city like this - I marveled at how there was this inexplicable newly accessibly sublayer of information anywhere I looked: words, designations, numbers. They were literally jumping out at me now.

It was quite the rush at first. We would drive by some building and I could just make out the word on its front side before we would pass it. I told mom that I could read and she was so proud of me, with me uttering letters I read out loud.

The trippy part however was not the new layer of information I could never decipher before. The trippy part was that after an hour or so I could not stop reading things. I clearly remember how different it felt compared to all my previous visits to the city - suddenly there were attention grabbers EVERYWHERE (letters and words) and I could not stop reading them. So much so that I eventually got a little scared and TIRED. My eyes would tire and I even got a headache from reading anything I could read against my own wishes.

It soon subsided as reading became more and more normal to me and as my skill level improved. But when I think of it now I see how drastic of a basic indoctrination tool reading is. Not only reading specific things on particulars. But moreso the general modus operandi of the mind that has been trained to decode anything into words and readily accepts them as truth. A mind that thinks in words and that ultimately lives in and through words.

I feel that this trippy experience of a flood of words coming into my awareness once I let the genie out of the bottle is a great symbol for how deeply our linguistics and our training in methodology have altered our view on the world we are living in. I knew then that I could probably never get back to the intellectual innocence I had before the dam of being able to read was broken for good.

But then that was before I had my first actual psychedelic experience that showed me that words are a clumsy but arguably necessary tool for the era of waking up to our own being and greatness. The eras we are living through RIGHT NOW.

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