Sometimes I worry that this is some random junk drawer of all the bits and bobs I find on the internet, but I have to say – I know Ms. Marie Kondo would approve of such. I will call your spark and raise you a sparkle.
P.S. Ms. Kondo has a new show on Netflix, btw. She’s so, so tiny!!!
[fab] Drag queens and houseplants, yes. I am the target demographic for this.
[art] If nature was an artist and I’m going to propose that she is, then the diatom must be one of her most fabulous sparkles. Now, how do I figure out how to paint one with watercolor… ?
[more fab] Bad Bunny was brand new to me as of this week, and I’m in instant love. He plays with his image with a fluidity I’ve rarely seen, especially by men, and his songs get in the hundreds of millions of listens.
[world wonder] Pathirkali Amma Temple makes a trip to Sri Lanka look even more appealing. I can’t decide if going here while on psychedelics is the worst idea ever or the best worst idea ever.
[more queens] If you haven’t seen Bridgerton I implore you to check it out. I watched the first episode while on mushrooms and realized these power players at the top of the power hierarchy actually are all on some level conscious. What I mean by that is they can’t not know that they’re in power. They chose these incarnations. I don’t know if this is true, but everything makes a lot more sense when I pivot around the anchor that we all chose our incarnations. Anyway, the stories of their inheritance intergenerational trauma are as the Brits would say “top class.”
maiden voyage : how does psilocybin work?
My friend Sara Hashkes who studied neuroscience at Radboud in the Netherlands gives an explanation of how the brain makes predictions based on our entire history as an organism. This is how we learn. If we didn’t do this, we wouldn’t be able to do anything more sophisticated than an infant could do. We make models of our world so that we can navigate it. (If you wanna go deep on this topic, check out the Predictive Coding Framework.)
This is relevant to how psychedelics work because these medicines temporarily disrupt, suspend, and recombine our existing model of the world. They make the serotonin receptors more likely to fire and change the way we make sense of raw sensory information such as the data coming in from retinas. Although serotonin receptors are found all over the body including many in the gut, there’s a concentration in the visual cortex and frontal lobes.
The effect of all that highly-activated serotonin creates an over-recognition of visual data, similar to what we see in the deep dream images. As you know, if we were always in this state we would have trouble doing many things we need to do in our daily life – drive a car, cook a meal, etc.
We can’t exist this way 24/7, but as we know, having a temporary experience of these highly-activated states allows the brain to grow new connections between areas of the brain which were not previously communicating.
My 3-month program to help you begin to microdose will launch so SOON! I’m now polishing the website, preflight checklist, and guide. Hang tight!
Besos from Oaxaca,
Cris and Team Dragon