Vivid Void's profile picture
Vivid Void@VividVoid_

The thing about Adderall and other stimulants is that they don't actually give you focus. What they do is chemically numb the separation you feel from your work, so it becomes bearable. They're an emotional analgesic - not artificial concentration, but a pharmaceutical merger of Being. This is also why speed dampens memory. Memory requires contrast, and it's hard for anything to stand out when you are caught up in the effortless, non-conceptual Dao. Longtime meditators will tell you the same thing - the world becomes intensely interesting but your brain treats it all with very low salience. It doesn't grab onto much, if anything. When you're in flow you are in flow, it doesn't occur to you to try to fix anything in time. For this reason alone, methamphetamine could be considered psychedelic: Mushrooms can show you suchness, MDMA can show you oceanic love, ketamine can show you stillness-in-motion, LSD can bring you to the border of egolessness. Adderall cleanly demonstrates the basic motion of mystical union. The move here is not to spend your life taking speed to grind code, or ingesting huge doses of psychedelics on weekends to tally up peak experiences. What individuals can do, and what psychiatry could do for the mentally ill in a saner world, is to study the subtle mental motions these drugs incur, and then learn to reproduce them in sobriety. At that point, you have the insights you need, and you are left only with your karma - understood here as your biological and genetic constraints plus your accumulated psychological habits of compulsion, alienation and willful ignorance. These are the last obstacles remaining to integration and continuing to use drugs unskillfully will only make them harder to overcome. With respect to Alan Watts, once you get the message, you can hang up the phone.

6429 57511/29/2023
Permalink View on Twitter