Normalization
& Drugs
The brain is fan-fucking-tastic with its
ability to normalize things. You can imagine the brain as a blank slate, with a
few evolutionary rules plugged in: swimming movement, breathing, blood pumping,
hunger, tiredness, thirst, etc. The rest of it is all a spongy mass, just
waiting to normalize the incredibleness of the world. When a baby pops out of
the womb, they are highly apt to cry, the world is brand new, and nothing is “normal”
– and everything is important. That
is why any of the littlest disturbances in their state of awareness can make
them cry – because the feeling is important.
As they grow, and reach adolescents, they
are much less likely to cry if they are hungry, instead they may whine, or
pout, or pull on your shirt and ask for food. As the years go by, hunger is not
even that great of a discomfort. This is the power of our mind’s normalization –
but it does not only apply to our instinctual responses such as hunger, thirst
and sleep. It applies to all experience.
When we are young, we can play with an ant
hill for an hour. We can climb trees for the majority of a day. A new flower,
or plant, can hold an awesomeness for some of us. Our child selves can become
immersed in what an adult would ignore, or even find rather boring. This is not
a matter of becoming more intelligent, which often people seem to imply with
the term “Grow up”, but rather it is an increasing normalization of our world.
It is a sign of our brains filtering out more of the world as we stop to place
importance on objects and ideas in our everyday world.
The first day your rode a bike, the first
day you drove a car – those are likely to be magical times. You may even
remember the feeling of awe-someness that arose in you, that feeling of “This
is important!” As we age, however, we begin to dread car rides, and bike rides
to and from work – because we have lost the importance of them, we have
transmuted them into the mundane, the ordinary, the normal.
Do you ever go to a concert or a theme
park, or a vacation, and wonder why you’re not enthralled by the scenery, the
music, or the setting? It’s that normalization. Your brain has been working
against you for the entirety of your life, threading ideas, scenes,
architecture, personalities together, to make as much of the world as normal as
possible. After all, if everything is normal, what do you have to worry about?
That is a goal of the mind – store as little information as possible for survival,
and filter everything else out. If it isn’t helping or hurting your chance to
reproduction and survival, it’s no longer important. Yet the child in you, that
nascent level of curiosity and awe can beg to differ.
DRUGS! This is where drugs come in. This is
why LSD, Psilocybin, DMT, Ayahuasca, and others can radically change your
perspective on life. That filter that you’ve built up over the years is lifted
when partaking in these substances. That normal everyday drive now stimulates
you to the core – no longer is traffic a trivial mass of cars, but rather a
collection of human beings, in metal boxes, with wheels, attempting to perform
duties, in trade for currency – and they’re stuck on tar. The “normal-ness” of
our lives drops out from beneath us, and suddenly all things become important
once again.
The duality of this is the perspective that
nothing matters, or everything matters. The prior is called a bad trip, while
the latter is an experience of one-ness: That all things are inter-related and
genuinely important.
When in an entheogenic state on any of
these substances, the grass is no longer something to be mowed, but a large,
diverse organism, which is pleasing to the eyes. A flower is no longer an
abstract beauty, but raw magnificence of life, attempting to attract your
attention – and the bees. Your house is no longer an object to be bought and
sold, but a dwelling of your life, a place you inhabit and connect with. All
things suddenly become paramount to your existence, and reality itself.
But this normalization is only partly
subconscious. You can actively seek out new meaning and purpose to all things
in your life. Tripping every day is not an option, but realizing the vastness
of our reality is. One method I’ve discovered to remove the normalness of my
day is to imagine I am a visiting scholar on my way to work. To tap into the
mind and tell myself that this is a fleeting experience – my work – and that
the setting and people I meet are new, important, and meaningful.
Make an attempt to be a child, and see the
flower in the yard as a magnificent structure of biology, something to stare
at, and embrace. Realize traffic is not something to resist, but something to
see on a grand scale of Human’s folly, (and try to laugh at it…). See
restaurants not as logos and chains, but rather individual houses, with people’s
dreams held inside – to sustain their life by feeding people. Strip away the
normalness – and paint the world with importance.
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