8/11/18 – Saturday
The following is a fair and true account of events leading up to the 6 ketamine sessions I conducted with Dr H in the period from Wednesday, 8/1/18 – Saturday, August 11, 2018 (Today). Some readers might find the following subject matter upsetting. To them, I apologize in advance.
From sometime around my 2nd semester of kindergarten (1980) until the end of the 5th grade, I was sexually assaulted a number of times. I won’t go into much further detail other than to list a couple of things, in order to bring some clarity to this moment in my life.
I did not like it.
I developed a major fucking attitude about it.
I thought the situation resolved itself to my satisfaction.
I thought that if the people who did this to me were out of reach, that I was out of danger.
The physical world repeated this data back to me over and over again, but it did not sync with what my interior world was telling me.
My interior world is what literally kept me alive during the worst moments of my childhood.
This created a fractal pattern of schisms between me and consensus reality. I knew that my inner self was more often right than the data presented to me from the outer world. Breaks in reality are what attracted me to Horror, and the occult. I remember when my older brothers –
Break: I should mention that my family is fucking awesome. What happened to me had nothing to do with them and this isn’t their fault.
Anyway, my older brothers showed me The Texas Chainsaw Massacre when I was probably way too young to watch it (my brothers really are the best and I’m genuinely sorry I’m so difficult to live with). I remember when Marilyn Burns thought she got away the 1st time and just shaking my head. This world hides poison in its pockets.
When I was a kid I thought if I became literally the toughest motherfucker on earth it would get the world (Ouspensky’s Devil) to maybe tone down the danger signals some. I joined the wrestling team but sucked at wrestling. So in high school, after walking up to a couple literally the biggest kids I could find and ragging them until I got my ass kicked, I took up boxing. I didn’t suck so badly at that.
I joined the Marine Corps.
I went Infantry.
I scored high enough to join a counter-terrorism unit.
I became literally the baddest motherfucker in that unit – meritorious this, ironman that, made Corporal at the age of 20.
I lost my mind again.
I began slinging MDMA and LSD. I rode a ferry over to Seattle every night and tagged freeway underpasses with teenage runaways.
I did not fuck the runaways.
I hung out at nightclubs all weekend selling drugs and beating the shit out of people who fucked with my friends. I eventually got caught and went to prison.
Nobody ever did so much as a day in jail for whatever transgressions they may have committed in my presence.
I know how to keep secrets.
I can still do that. But I don’t have to about everything anymore. Releasing this constant tension is a key to unlocking depression/PTSD/Mother Saturn.
Here’s a secret I’ve just been randomly hanging on to, for no real reason. You guys that are into magic, the occult, and conspiracy theories ought to get a kick out of it.
Check it –
A lot of people have been talking about Enochian this and John Dee that lately, and it’s all impressive old school magic. So, Dee studied under this other cat named Johannes Trithemius, and he’s going to be the subject of a bunch of books in the next couple of years. Him, and especially his books on steganography.
Now, you guys that are already hip to that should do a google search on something called the Olaus Wormius Necronomicon. I’ve heard that the Trithemius steganography is used for a lot of modern day encryption.
And the Olaus Wormius Necronomicon appears to be some sort of encryption code for the collected works of Johannes Trithemius. Go play around with it a bit and you’ll see for yourself.
It’s bloody fucking interesting, isn’t it?
Anyway that’s about all I can do. At this point my brain is good for frying up some eggs and potatoes and then going to sleep. G'nite
8/12/18 - Sunday
Apologies for the sort of self-indulgent turn I took yesterday. So, I’ll start today on a more universal tac, but will end up veering back into that other country before the end of the post. To differentiate between the two lines of thought, when I start wandering into stuff that happened 20 years ago and forward (I was in the Marine Corps from 1992-1996) it’ll have more of that bullet-point style. If you want, you can skip all that junk.
The reason I’m typing it up has to do with my new understanding of operant belief mechanisms, and the 4th Way model of self-remembering. Belief can be, for lack of a better metaphor, a sort of muscular contraction (perhaps it’s the pineal gland squirting out a microdose of DMT, I don’t know enough about cerebral anatomy to argue for the possibility of such a thing) that occurs within the mind, and then creates changes within the individual’s operant version of consensus reality. This is the underlying power behind things like religion, logical positivism, and chaos magic as I understand these practices. The idea that belief has anything to do with some ontological root reality, and that by developing a better understanding of reality we can, and should, adjust our belief models is the exoteric doctrine pushed by the State (or Yaldaboath & the archons or the BDP or whatever you want to call it), sometimes at the expense of the individual.
It’s also flawed; not incorrect, just merely flawed. There is no root reality but there is a consensus reality that makes for a fairly approximate map. And there’s probably nothing wrong with remembering as much of the map as you have to in order to keep up with the conversation at dinner parties.
But you owe nothing to consensus reality. Not a goddamned thing. So, with practice, you can alter your belief system in a way that it moves alongside reality, but without you having an attachment to that reality.
This is where my approach to self-remembering comes in. I believe that, while under normal circumstances I don’t have a proper understanding of self-remembering yet as an exercise in mentation, being placed into an altered state of consciousness that many times in that short of a timespan has given me an embodied sense of the state, enough so that when I finished coming out of my final dose yesterday that I intuited this line of data needed to come out; that if I want to not suffer from PTSD and depression, that I need to do this expurgation of sins, so to speak. Anyway, here’s some more personal bullshit.
I was only in prison for a few months – at the Sands Point Federal Penitentiary outside of Seattle Washington while the higher-ups decided what to do with my ass.
NCIS had a fucking hard-on for me, and wanted to push a “narco-terrorism” beef. This was on account that they believed I was pushing serious weight (I wasn’t really, I always preferred staying on what I thought of as street-level), and that I had publicly clowned one of their undercovers (no comment).
In my corner were a fucking badass Major and an equally badass CWO3 who had recently managed to depose an actual rogue Colonel from command and have him forcibly retire.
I don’t know the story behind how or why they did it, but they were fucking awesome and fought for me to be tried on my base on 1 count of failing a piss-test and 1 count of conduct unbecoming.
In exchange for this, I served out my full term and stood 2 more meritorious boards before getting out.
Per the UCMJ “zero-tolerance” policy I was given an OTH (other than honorable) discharge at the end of my 4 years, with a 4.8/4.8 pro-con score (the highest possible you could get was 4.9/4.9
An officer who shall remain nameless quietly drove out with me that morning to a mediation session. My OTH was reversed before the ink dried on my DD-214
Part of the deal was that Seattle WA was not a place for me to hang my hat anymore.
I had already distanced myself from a lot of my night-self pals by then.
If I hadn’t, I might have started bringing heat on them from whoever might be friendly with my NCIS people.
Besides, I was well-behaved enough but there was always this thing in me that could flip out at any moment.
So in 1996, off to Phoenix AZ I went.
A year later I was married.
2 years later I was divorced, with 2 sons. I now have 2 sons and 2 daughters. All but one are grown up.
The boys are both military now.
One of them struggles with depression.
This is enough for now. Fuck, it’s like yanking a never-ending stream of snot out of your sinus cavity.
8/14/18 – Tuesday
The 2 week trial ends. I took my final dose a couple of days ago, and went out pretty much the way I came into this; barely able to handle the trip aspect. I don’t have a hard time letting go. It’s coming back, not knowing who or where I am that fucks me up. Whatever spark that serves as the proto-Will feels danger lurking everywhere when he comes back. I wander around, asking the same nurse practitioner who I am, and why I’m here. I cried a couple of times. Once I actually pissed myself. Only a little, but still…
The protocols dictate I can come back whenever things start to go grey again, but usually it’s about 3 months between visits. I probably won’t take the every-other day injections again anytime in the near future. At least I hope not.
So, enough bitching – the big question is, was this an effective form of treatment for PTSD and depression?
My answer is a cautious yes so far. I mean, I feel pretty great. Feeling is the operant word in this case. I think that in least my case, one of the big takeaways is that I fight my mental illness more effectively through a conscious approach to embodiment rather than mentation.
You can’t destroy the castle with the king’s tools –or something like that.
We appear to be multi-minded organisms; carrying these minds throughout our physical bodies in the form of nerve and endocrine clusters in and around our brain, heart, gut, sex organs, and the base of the spine, to name a few. Additionally, during certain peak experiences these clusters appear to correspond to energy systems that may exist both outside our material bodies and within the deep mind.
I do not understand the deep mind enough to really talk about it, other than to say this:
Proprioception is our sixth sense, and the door to an inner world that is larger than the external material world. Biometry proves the existence of electrical impulses that originate from within our physical bodies, but extend beyond the outermost layers of the epidermis. This indicates a fundamental misjudgment of both how we interact with the physical world and our own anatomy, possibly. Essentially, we may possess energetic tentacles that extend far beyond our own ability to measure them. This makes both Ouspensky’s idea of shape-shifting superhuman imagos and PKD’s mycelial alien intelligences worth reconsidering.
Most interestingly (at least to me), my vision has color shifted. Since my fourth session last Tuesday, I see yellows, oranges and browns differently. Flecks of gold appear everywhere, and sunlight has a different quality, especially in the morning. It’s pretty freaking delightful, actually. Also, my night vision appears to have improved. If this starts to fade, I’ll post an update.
8/15/18 – Wednesday
I can feel changes still working within my mind(s). I will continue to post updates, although maybe not so often. Definitely around the re-boosts – and whatever other methods I might employ to hit altered states of consciousness in the times between. Thank you to everyone who has reached out over the last two weeks. You literally helped me work through some of the darkest shit I’ve gone through in years, and for that I am very grateful.
A few final notes on the universal; going back to the biometry thing got me thinking about this electric current that continuously runs through our bodies, gravity and matter, love and the Mother Binah/Saturnine current. If matter is held together by gravity, and gravity could be compared to pressure (I think Dion Fortune made some observation about pressure as a divine force), this pressure could be analogous to what I identify as the MB/S current, which could be construed as “love”. This would be a divine love, as universal as it is ultimately impersonal. It could also be construed as the individual systolic force behind each and every heartbeat.
This brings us to Earth, where we exist as an electromagnetic force that is at best mostly and possibly only quite partially contained within an infinitely complex yet nevertheless constantly decaying matter body, which maintains its existence through a series of muscular contractions that remind the electromagnetic force (the real you) to basically sit still and behave long enough for it to attain whatever development you/it must, before your/its body cracks open like a husk and your /its electromagnetic body/self reports for duty in whatever realm(s) exist(s) beyond this one.
Or not.
If what I’m describing sounds crazy or upsetting or whatever, please understand that I have no interest whatsoever in proposing there is some ultimate truth in what I’m describing. It’s more like this; for a couple of weeks I had a recalibration in the parameters of my personal reality. At the far borders of this madness, it was like I was standing in some shoals. The water was only partially clear, but had an inner glow.
What I’m trying to describe might have looked like fish to me, but maybe they’re really just old blankets and washing machine parts. Or maybe they’re living sentient organisms that are made of the same material components of blankets and parts. And here we are where we always end up – the border where language begins to fail.
That does it for now.
In the next couple of days, I’m going to drop a bunch of text describing some of the more personal stuff. I’m taking an extra couple of days to go over that and omit most of it, because it’s more about dropping this single “line of code” (I don’t care for this descriptor much but it fits okay and I can’t think of anything better) and getting it over with. I don’t really know why I began including it towards the end, as I never intended to, but those last two trips left me with the definite impression that it ought to be, for whatever reason. There’s a very strong “So mote it be!” resonance about it.
Anyway, this is all to say that if you’ve been reading this from the jump and don’t give a shit about all that mess, I don’t blame you. That’s why I’ve decided to post it separately and (hopefully) in one final section. It’ll probably be the next thing I post that isn’t a reply to one of you guys.
Thanks again for reading and reaching out and stuff. Happy Wednesday.
willm308 wrote: 8/14/18 – Tuesday
The 2 week trial ends. I took my final dose a couple of days ago, and went out pretty much the way I came into this; barely able to handle the trip aspect. I don’t have a hard time letting go. It’s coming back, not knowing who or where I am that fucks me up. Whatever spark that serves as the proto-Will feels danger lurking everywhere when he comes back. I wander around, asking the same nurse practitioner who I am, and why I’m here. I cried a couple of times. Once I actually pissed myself. Only a little, but still…
The protocols dictate I can come back whenever things start to go grey again, but usually it’s about 3 months between visits. I probably won’t take the every-other day injections again anytime in the near future. At least I hope not.
So, enough bitching – the big question is, was this an effective form of treatment for PTSD and depression?
My answer is a cautious yes so far. I mean, I feel pretty great. Feeling is the operant word in this case. I think that in least my case, one of the big takeaways is that I fight my mental illness more effectively through a conscious approach to embodiment rather than mentation.
You can’t destroy the castle with the king’s tools –or something like that.
We appear to be multi-minded organisms; carrying these minds throughout our physical bodies in the form of nerve and endocrine clusters in and around our brain, heart, gut, sex organs, and the base of the spine, to name a few. Additionally, during certain peak experiences these clusters appear to correspond to energy systems that may exist both outside our material bodies and within the deep mind.
I do not understand the deep mind enough to really talk about it, other than to say this:
Proprioception is our sixth sense, and the door to an inner world that is larger than the external material world. Biometry proves the existence of electrical impulses that originate from within our physical bodies, but extend beyond the outermost layers of the epidermis. This indicates a fundamental misjudgment of both how we interact with the physical world and our own anatomy, possibly. Essentially, we may possess energetic tentacles that extend far beyond our own ability to measure them. This makes both Ouspensky’s idea of shape-shifting superhuman imagos and PKD’s mycelial alien intelligences worth reconsidering.
Most interestingly (at least to me), my vision has color shifted. Since my fourth session last Tuesday, I see yellows, oranges and browns differently. Flecks of gold appear everywhere, and sunlight has a different quality, especially in the morning. It’s pretty freaking delightful, actually. Also, my night vision appears to have improved. If this starts to fade, I’ll post an update.
8/15/18 – Wednesday
I can feel changes still working within my mind(s). I will continue to post updates, although maybe not so often. Definitely around the re-boosts – and whatever other methods I might employ to hit altered states of consciousness in the times between. Thank you to everyone who has reached out over the last two weeks. You literally helped me work through some of the darkest shit I’ve gone through in years, and for that I am very grateful.
A few final notes on the universal; going back to the biometry thing got me thinking about this electric current that continuously runs through our bodies, gravity and matter, love and the Mother Binah/Saturnine current. If matter is held together by gravity, and gravity could be compared to pressure (I think Dion Fortune made some observation about pressure as a divine force), this pressure could be analogous to what I identify as the MB/S current, which could be construed as “love”. This would be a divine love, as universal as it is ultimately impersonal. It could also be construed as the individual systolic force behind each and every heartbeat.
This brings us to Earth, where we exist as an electromagnetic force that is at best mostly and possibly only quite partially contained within an infinitely complex yet nevertheless constantly decaying matter body, which maintains its existence through a series of muscular contractions that remind the electromagnetic force (the real you) to basically sit still and behave long enough for it to attain whatever development you/it must, before your/its body cracks open like a husk and your /its electromagnetic body/self reports for duty in whatever realm(s) exist(s) beyond this one.
Or not.
If what I’m describing sounds crazy or upsetting or whatever, please understand that I have no interest whatsoever in proposing there is some ultimate truth in what I’m describing. It’s more like this; for a couple of weeks I had a recalibration in the parameters of my personal reality. At the far borders of this madness, it was like I was standing in some shoals. The water was only partially clear, but had an inner glow.
What I’m trying to describe might have looked like fish to me, but maybe they’re really just old blankets and washing machine parts. Or maybe they’re living sentient organisms that are made of the same material components of blankets and parts. And here we are where we always end up – the border where language begins to fail.
That does it for now.
In the next couple of days, I’m going to drop a bunch of text describing some of the more personal stuff. I’m taking an extra couple of days to go over that and omit most of it, because it’s more about dropping this single “line of code” (I don’t care for this descriptor much but it fits okay and I can’t think of anything better) and getting it over with. I don’t really know why I began including it towards the end, as I never intended to, but those last two trips left me with the definite impression that it ought to be, for whatever reason. There’s a very strong “So mote it be!” resonance about it.
Anyway, this is all to say that if you’ve been reading this from the jump and don’t give a shit about all that mess, I don’t blame you. That’s why I’ve decided to post it separately and (hopefully) in one final section. It’ll probably be the next thing I post that isn’t a reply to one of you guys.
Thanks again for reading and reaching out and stuff. Happy Wednesday.
Its been nice journeying with you on this one.
Your comments about Biometry proves the existence of electrical impulses that originate from within our physical bodies, but extend beyond the outermost layers of the epidermis.
You also mentioned something similar a couple of days ago along with something about muscle constriction (i can't find it now) - it grabbed my attention as it synced up with this video and it comments on Wilhelm Reich Bio-energy. and how if it is blocked can lead to constricted muscles.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cAMzkYhEn4A
Here's my summary of the relevant bits
- The bio-energy of life and its flow in and through the body at both a conscious and unconscious level, can be over ridden, supplanted, by the super-ego’s projected self image.
- The super-ego filters the energy of thoughts, feelings, emotions and actions, suppressing, redirecting and bottling up all that does not fit it’s self-image.
- The method used by the super-ego is musculature. Muscles affected will be chronically contracted and hidden from conscious awareness. Preventing impulses from flowing from core to body surface, removing the muscles from conscious control and perception.
- This “armouring” which can be in place from birth, is when a muscular system across the whole body is tense in a fight or flight type mode, similar to a when a boxer prepares to take a punch.
- The armouring can effect basic bodily functions such as digestion, breathing, libidinal, eye focus. As well as distorting the levels of cortisol, serotonin and inflammatory chemicals which can lead to chronic debilitating diseases such as Multiple sclerosis, hypothyroidisms, diabetes etc.
- The False-self submits to and is controlled by the subtle disapproval messages given by dysfunctional parents and a society of conformity to an idealised self image. This creates an internal conflict feedback loop where obeying the false causes more stress and further contraction of the unconscious musculature system binding them into a continual struggle.
- All Narcissistic behaviours stem from dysfunctional parenting, often with an unhealthy special relationship with one parent. - Mother uses the child's love-affect to replace the missing love-affect from a distant husband, for example (in your case the Army could be viewed as this authority figure)
- The narcissistic false-self image is more important than the true-Self. Appearance is more important than honouring the True-Self feelings. Like Narcissus they identify with and love the False-self image of the super-ego over their suppressed true self, true feelings, true emotions and dreams.
My intention is to finish off the blog post with more details and I'll link it her once done - but I'm a lazy ass so...
Absolutely Nick!!!
It's really funny/synchronous/whatever that you brought this up - I wanted to talk about the bion, but my knowledge of Reich pretty much begins and ends with the one time I read "Ether,God, Devil, & Cosmic Superimposition" about a year ago (while understanding very little of it). So, I wanted to say "Yeah, this has something to do with the bion," or something to that effect, but didn't think I could back up the assertion with enough knowledge.
I listened to this, and also checked out Tsarion on an old Skeptico podcast, too. The guy sounds pretty on the ball, I look forward to checking out more of him.
Please let me know when you get around to the post. Your blog is fantastic.
8/20/18 (Monday) – 8/23/18 (Thursday)
I think I know why I’m doing this.
My youngest daughter was born 6 weeks early; 4 lbs, 4 ounces. She didn’t have any respiratory illness or immune issues.
This didn’t really surprise me. Her sister and brothers were all completely badass and pugnacious as fuck. Her body probably just chewed through illness in the womb like a caged mongoose.
Her mom developed post-partum depression.
This didn’t surprise me, either. She was a survivor herself, having been placed through a foster and group home childhood experience.
The upshot of this is that with my youngest needing a lot of body heat and overall new human care, plus her mom needing space in this almost physically palpable way (sometimes she reminded me of a cat stuck under a porch), meant that the majority of her around the clock care was my responsibility.
She still lives with me and we’re as close as can be. I wish I was closer with her siblings.
The boys were tough for me, although they’re great kids. I think I’ve alluded to this earlier but they’re active duty military and actually doing genuine good things, rather than living the fractured life I had (at least, that I know of). My oldest daughter is a gift, as is my granddaughter (for obvious reasons, I’m keeping their personal details to as bare a minimum as I can while still talking about this honestly).
I’ve loved them my whole life, but was never as close to them as I am to the youngest. This was literally borne out of necessity. I’m talking about this to make this one point clear to both myself and the reader (but really myself): I avoided getting close to them because I was afraid of infecting them somehow with what happened to me.
Understanding this is massive, although it might seem obvious to you if you’ve been reading this from the jump. Maybe not.
As I write this, many of my Marine Corps 8126 brothers are genuinely aging prematurely, growing overweight and lame as their old programming still spins too fast for the civilian world. We were trained to look for shadows in every corner. It’s hard not to want to join a side, even if just to know somebody has your back.
Some of them are so angry, and they’re also physically sick. This is Azathoth – a Saturnine/Martian super-current that freezes anger and turns into sugar diseases like diabetes and alcoholism.
I escaped into low-risk/low-payoff criminality, mostly pushing small weight and driving people around Phoenix who needed someone to have their back. I bounced at the topless night clubs for the same reason I go-go danced at gay bars; they paid the best.
Once again, I fractured my personality.
No problem.
In Seattle, I tagged the name “Ash” everywhere because it was short and I loved the Evil Dead movies. In Phoenix, I bounced under one name and danced under another, and often gave out other fake names for myriad reasons.
I escaped into chaos magic and logical positivism, still under the Discordian ethos of swapping belief systems. I explored Kenneth Grant just before going on a really bad meth tear for about 6 weeks (mirroring the other one I had when I was 20, right around the time I absolutely fucking lost it in Portland and thought I saw living entities in the trees: they looked sort of like the chameleons with prehensile eyes, only nothing like them at all). I did that tear before my youngest was born.
I think that sometimes I have this thing in me – maybe it’s a shamanic call or maybe I’m just a shitty human being – but it just forces me to break from here. It’s the same thing that allows me to write books, so I’m grateful for it.
I believe ketamine allows me to explore this compulsion in a way that is real, but also about as safe as such an experience can be. Also, not having to fly to Peru allows me to stay close to my support network. I should mention that I have a s/o that is wonderful and supportive, but also wishes to maintain her privacy to the absolute. Same goes for a few close friends – the less I say, the better. So, that’s really all I have to say about that.
Anyway, I managed the fractured life thing okay, then some bad shit happened to some tangential but influential associates and I decided to lay low. I trained people at gyms and felt good about the work.
But not enough to make me quit entirely. By the time I went back to the game, the show Will and Grace had made it somewhat okay to be a non-binary human, as long as you acted predictable enough to the people who knew you in a certain light.
I finally quit all the bullshit when my older kids got old enough to wonder about all the locked closet doors, my weird hours, women trying to dart out of the house like phantoms while they ate breakfast.
An excerpt from Peter Levenda’s Sinister Forces III: The Manson Secret –
“(Therefore,) the type of person who becomes involved in criminal enterprises has already placed himself outside the social milieu in which the rest of us live, and experiences life in a more desperate, more emotionally charged way than we do…
…Criminals have seen life the way police officers do: from the bottom, up. They see life the way it really is, behind closed doors. They know the weaknesses of their fellow humans, because they cater to them. They know the judge with a gambling problem, or the priest who prefers sex with underage boys. They see beyond the façade of society, and what they discover is no more elevated or spiritual than their own tawdry experience has taught them.”
By the time I got out of the game, I’d lost more than a dozen friends on each side. Remember all those Marines I served with? An awful lot of them went into law enforcement.
I don’t have a lot of close friends, but there are two guys I would consider as close as brothers. One is the dude I used to run nightclubs with in Phoenix. The other is a homicide detective out on the East Coast. Everywhere I look in my life I see evidence of that schism.
I can rattle of the names of so many people who died before the age of 40 from drug overdoses alone. All of them were either pain-killer or pain-killer related. I know an equal amount of dancers and veterans who committed suicide, same number on both sides. There’s the schism again.
I don’t take any prescription medicine for any of my mental illnesses. I’ve been prescribed more than a half dozen in the last 10 years; Prozac, Xanax, Ambien, Abilify, Wellbutrin, Klonopin – these are just a few off the top of my head. There were others. I’ve been off that shit for more than 5 years now and it can all go fuck itself.
I already talked about my primary treatment method, so I won’t go back into that.
I also study, practice, and teach yoga. I know a lot of people say this, but it doesn’t make it any less true: I practice this daily so as to not lose my shit. “This” in particular referring to Ashtanga yoga, Vipassana meditation, and the teachings of Gurdjieff & Ouspensky – these are the cornerstones of my daily practice, with chaos magic being “the dessert”, so to speak.
And now, I can add Ketamine therapy to the list of things I use to combat depression and PTSD.
My continued analysis of the Ketamine protocol as prescribed by Dr H causes me to believe that it is an effective form of treatment. I would recommend it to others, provided they do their own research (and some serious soul-searching) into the subject before making their own decision.
I think this is going to be my last post for a little while. I’m going to compile these notes and convert them into a blog, and I’ll let everyone know when that’s online. I’ll probably add more there between now and my next treatment (that’ll be sometime between November and January, depending on how I’m doing I guess). And when I do the next treatments, I’ll write it up here, too.
(1 of 2)
(2 of 2)
Thanks to everyone for checking this out along the way, especially to those of you who wrote to me either here or DM. I’ll check back with a lot of you this weekend (I’m back to working both jobs, so I’m not in front of a computer very much unless it’s to write).
I’ll leave you with this, because I think it might be a screen memory. I think I’ve had a few of them, but this is the most recent, and maybe the weirdest.
It happened at the last nightclub I worked at before retiring. This place was called Babydolls – it sits underneath the Grand Ave overpass that borders West Phoenix, Glendale, and Maryvale, but I think it’s changed its name since we ran it. An owner subcontracted 3 guys to be the GMs, two were my guys and then an independent third. I ran security, and tended bar during the day sometimes. I always shrank away from being the top guy, preferring to stay semi-shaded by an additional layer of responsibility. What I didn’t count on was the situation at this club was so intense – sitting as it does squarely in between what used to be PIRU and Rolling 60 territory during the W Bush years (those borders are amorphous as fuck sometimes) – that running security was a round-the-clock ass ache.
But where a lot of people might think the answer would be to go full Chuck Norris and lay down the law on some motherfuckers when things started going sideways, this was where I learned how to really grow still in hot moments, and remember to treat everyone like full-fledged human beings, with families that genuinely cared about them. I only carried a gun on occasions where if I didn’t, somebody I worked with could get hurt.
I think the lessons I learned doing that job, in that manner, in that place were what taught me that I couldn’t stay doing what I was doing.
But maybe what happened on this one night put it to me more succinctly…
It was a Saturday – technically Sunday morning at around 330am – and I had seen everyone out except for the managers. I stuck around and saw that they were going to be doing the counts for another hour or so. In a sane world, I would have sat down somewhere and read whatever book I’d brought with me for this exact purpose. I certainly wouldn’t have just walked outside, by myself, without telling anybody that’s what I was doing. Remember, this club literally sits under a fucking underpass in literal gang fucking central. Here we sit, every night, with all this money, so to walk outside by oneself in any neighborhood that knows the schedule of this sort of establishment is a stupidly dangerous proposition.
But I was in crazyland that night, and so it seemed perfectly reasonable to go outside. Maybe it was for a cigarette. Except I don’t smoke, and even if I did nobody would have complained if I lit up in the club. Once we locked the doors, most everyone lit up themselves.
Now, I unlocked one of the doors, and I remember this sort of furtive alacrity steel over me, as if I was a teenager again, sneaking out of my second floor bedroom window on Long Island in the 80s.
I slipped outside and let the door lock behind me.
April in Phoenix at about 330 am is about as nice as it ever gets in Phoenix, weather-wise. I remember seeing stars, and a goodly chunk of the moon was visible; not quite full but close. My car had another car parked in front of it, nose to nose. The parking lot lights were out – this shouldn’t have been the case, but it wasn’t entirely unheard of, especially if there was a big enough outage somewhere in the neighborhood. Anyway, 4 men stood around both cars.
I know, right?
I should have pulled out my phone and called inside. But crazyland has its own customs, and so – remember I don’t carry a gun, and on occasion much has been made of my non-gun-carrying habit – I walked on over to the party.
The four men wore baseball caps and nylon windbreakers and batting gloves. The four men wore black bandanas over their faces. They could have been anyone.
I said “How’s it going, guys?”
I remember saying that. I remember being totally calm. Other than watching their hands very intently, it was just another late night exchange in a parking lot. I’ve had hundreds of those, maybe thousands.
One of them explained to me that they had a dead battery, and needed a jump. I told them I had cables, and would be happy to help them out. And that’s exactly what I did.
To say that this whole experience had a dream-like quality isn’t quite right. It was the same sort of hyper-reality I experienced at the tail-end of the ketamine trips, which I guess is another reason I’m ending this portion of the narrative here.
I popped my trunk (I was driving a beat-up old Ford sedan at the time), pulled out my cables, and hooked everything up. I got in my car and they got in theirs. Their car started. I unhooked everything and slammed both trunks. They stayed inside their car. I remember the driver rolling down his window just a crack as they were leaving and sticking out two fingers as they headed out the lot towards Grand Ave.
Then, I pulled out my cell phone and called inside, telling them that the lot was clear for them. The dude who answered seemed surprised but happy, as they had just finished the count and were getting ready to head outside. We did the drops and I went home.
I can’t say for sure that this is a false memory, but it certainly has that false memory flavor.
Anyway, if you’ve read all of this I hope it was worth it. Thanks again.
willm308 wrote: 8/20/18 (Monday) – 8/23/18 (Thursday)
I think I know why I’m doing this.
My youngest daughter was born 6 weeks early; 4 lbs, 4 ounces. She didn’t have any respiratory illness or immune issues.
This didn’t really surprise me. Her sister and brothers were all completely badass and pugnacious as fuck. Her body probably just chewed through illness in the womb like a caged mongoose.
Her mom developed post-partum depression.
This didn’t surprise me, either. She was a survivor herself, having been placed through a foster and group home childhood experience.
The upshot of this is that with my youngest needing a lot of body heat and overall new human care, plus her mom needing space in this almost physically palpable way (sometimes she reminded me of a cat stuck under a porch), meant that the majority of her around the clock care was my responsibility.
She still lives with me and we’re as close as can be. I wish I was closer with her siblings.
The boys were tough for me, although they’re great kids. I think I’ve alluded to this earlier but they’re active duty military and actually doing genuine good things, rather than living the fractured life I had (at least, that I know of). My oldest daughter is a gift, as is my granddaughter (for obvious reasons, I’m keeping their personal details to as bare a minimum as I can while still talking about this honestly).
I’ve loved them my whole life, but was never as close to them as I am to the youngest. This was literally borne out of necessity. I’m talking about this to make this one point clear to both myself and the reader (but really myself): I avoided getting close to them because I was afraid of infecting them somehow with what happened to me.
Understanding this is massive, although it might seem obvious to you if you’ve been reading this from the jump. Maybe not.
As I write this, many of my Marine Corps 8126 brothers are genuinely aging prematurely, growing overweight and lame as their old programming still spins too fast for the civilian world. We were trained to look for shadows in every corner. It’s hard not to want to join a side, even if just to know somebody has your back.
Some of them are so angry, and they’re also physically sick. This is Azathoth – a Saturnine/Martian super-current that freezes anger and turns into sugar diseases like diabetes and alcoholism.
I escaped into low-risk/low-payoff criminality, mostly pushing small weight and driving people around Phoenix who needed someone to have their back. I bounced at the topless night clubs for the same reason I go-go danced at gay bars; they paid the best.
Once again, I fractured my personality.
No problem.
In Seattle, I tagged the name “Ash” everywhere because it was short and I loved the Evil Dead movies. In Phoenix, I bounced under one name and danced under another, and often gave out other fake names for myriad reasons.
I escaped into chaos magic and logical positivism, still under the Discordian ethos of swapping belief systems. I explored Kenneth Grant just before going on a really bad meth tear for about 6 weeks (mirroring the other one I had when I was 20, right around the time I absolutely fucking lost it in Portland and thought I saw living entities in the trees: they looked sort of like the chameleons with prehensile eyes, only nothing like them at all). I did that tear before my youngest was born.
I think this is going to be my last post for a little while. I’m going to compile these notes and convert them into a blog, and I’ll let everyone know when that’s online. I’ll probably add more there between now and my next treatment (that’ll be sometime between November and January, depending on how I’m doing I guess). And when I do the next treatments, I’ll write it up here, too.
(1 of 2)
I'm no psychologist but I'm delving deep into it, as like you I had/have a gnawing self doubt in the back of my head about being good enough and not wanting to pass on whatever is defective in me to my nephews + friends - partner - (they're better off without me, I'm a burden - was my reasoning)
Sounds like you made a primary caregiver-baby bond with your youngest (such a PC phrase) - not sure how this might affect your sense of self, your inner world and your sense of not being enough for you other kids.
And reading the rest, it sounds like you are walking in two worlds - or two worlds are interacting with you, the exterior world and your interior world, both interacting with you.
As I write I'm intuiting that your ability to walk the line of the 2 worlds and not plunging head first off the cliff like so many others in your life might have all been to ensure you were there to make the bond and ensure a healthy balanced survival of your daughter.
It's a rare an unique bond, and so your daughter I'm sure will have a rare and unique insight, inner world and is more likely to have psychic/empath/clair-sentience type skills, your broad knowledge and experience will help guide her through the archontic world systems of suppression and control, and point her to the right type of books, knowledge and inner work that can help her thrive in this world of in-authenticity. I don't doubt her reflection of you via the bond will erase the oh so debilitating non-sence that you feel would have been passed onto your other kids.
I just did a blog on that feeling of not being enough that the external world tells you you are and your inner world that doesn't, yes its a shameless plug but hey, it's relevant and might help other readers
https://healingthehero.wordpress.com/2018/08/28/guy-ritchie-nails-it-be-the-master-of-your-own-kingdom/
I am curious as to the 2 finger gesture, I'm presuming it's a gun gesture and not the V found in the UK.
Your blog could be the starting point for a book and a "Call to Adventure" of your latest hero's journey towards being the master of your own inner world.
write your own gospel and live your own myth!
Thanks Nick, I love your blog and much of the subject matter is so germane to a lot of the stuff I've been writing about here that it would be crazy not to link it. And no, it wasn't a gun gesture, more like a miniature two finger salute. He just stuck the index and middle finger out, together, as if he was holding a cigarette. But I didn't see a cigarette. Maybe it was a peace sign, with the baseball gloves on. If that was the case it was still weird because of only cracking the window a couple of inches.
The whole thing was fucking weird.
great writing & all around great stuff, OP. thanks for sharing. i wish we had this treatment in memphis 😉
trintdaddy wrote: great writing & all around great stuff, OP. thanks for sharing. i wish we had this treatment in memphis 😉
Hey, thanks and sorry for the late reply. Also sorry to hear this isn't an option out there. I'm seeing and hearing about a lot of different options in different parts of the country. Apparently you can do ayahuasca ceremonies in a number of states now (just an example). If psychedelic self-work is something you're even curious about though, after a couple of months since the treatments I would still 100% recommend exploring whatever you have available in your area that speaks to you.
wow... I've been here a month though only actually logged in a handful times. How did I just now find this thread? It has it all.... psychedelic dissociatives, tarot, Enochian references, occult visionary work... pretty much right up my alley. It's been about 3 years since I've done any entheogenic substances but my life used to revolve around it for most of my adult life. Of them ketamine was my favorite by far, primarily because a) I didn't use them "recreationally" but have been on the magical path about as long (now longer) as the psychedelic. Generally, set and setting play a big role and I can't imagine doing things in a clinical setting but with a dissociative like ketamine I guess it doesn't matter as much since once you get into it it doesn't matter where you are. The thing about ketamine for me was that while it might only last an hour in physical time, experientially it would be a separate eternity experientially. Time seemed to have no meaning. Having already been well researched and experienced with the occult and psychedelics before doing ketamine my trips were always steeped in the occult and I was probably better equipped than most to actually understand them. One thing I found that actually blows ketamine out of the water is a (I think it's still) legal compound that is actually an analog of ketamine called methoxetamine (MXE). It's more orally active and more potent than ketamine and lasts about 6 hours. To me it was always like an "ultra high definition" version of ketamine... we used to use the term "k-tarded" to describe being high on ketamine while the MXE version would be "genius level". This is already a long thread post so I'll cut it off here but would love to continue this conversation if people are interested.
Wow, thanks for the heads-up Walrus. I've never heard of MXE before but will look into it.
November would be the earliest point at which I could do a follow-up treatment (3 shots administered over a single 2 hour session, unless we decided to do more), but as of right now I might push it out until after the holidays. I still feel pretty good, although I've been playing around with a micro-dosing protocol, and that could be why the depression/PTSD isn't rearing back as bad.
I thought about journaling about that here, but I'm not really doing high-level psilo doses enough to cause the sort of breaks with reality that ketamine created. It would probably be boring and repetitive, and not add much to this thread. However, overall life is good and I'm really glad that people are still reading and getting something from this. Hope everyone had a happy Halloween.
3/20/19 – 3/21/19
Hey gang.
Yesterday I went in for a follow-up treatment, taking 3 injections over the course of 2 hours, with dosages of 50 mg, 60 mg, and then 50 mg again. Dr H originally was going to administer 70 mg for the 3rd dose, but backed off on account of I wasn’t doing too great after 60. These aren’t very large doses, but it doesn’t take a lot for me to go over, perhaps due to some quirk of my metabolism.
It’s been a little over 6 months since the original protocols. A lot of patients go back after 90 days for their first follow-up, but that was the middle of November and I had a lot of family and holiday obligations. Also, I was actually doing pretty well at the time.
I still have depression and will probably struggle with PTSD for the rest of my life. I’ve learned how to be okay with this. I think some people don’t function well unless they have something to struggle with.
Drugs have different flavors and flavors, but at least you can describe the phenomena that accompany, say, an LSD trip or blackout drinking. The experience of being injected with a large dose of ketamine and being left to writhe around on an oversized bean bag, in the back room of a doctor’s office in some random office complex in the suburbs beggars description. The phrase “K-hole” is as useful as it is inadequate. If ketamine has a flavor, it’s the same flavor that a deep dark hole has; a narrow hole in the middle of the woods at midnight, a hole you cannot see the bottom of.
You find yourself inside this hole after a time, and you know there’s no coming out of it. Something will take this thing you call yourself back, but the price of the return trip includes a piece of that said “you”. Hopefully, whatever you end up sacrificing is that which you came down here to jettison in the first place.
Medical professionals can talk about mechanisms in the lateral habenula and improved left/right brain dynamics all they want, but it feels an awful lot more like standing blindfolded naked in front of those old Egyptian gods. They cut you open, weigh and measure every piece of you. In the land of the dead you are beyond pain.
Some process occurs; a promised exchange of goods and services between principals that only tangentially involves “you”, and then you are stitched back up (minus whatever you surrendered, remember) and sent back into the world of the living.
I think that in spite of any evidence to the contrary, despite all of our combined angst, essentially we volunteered to be here. We certainly opt into staying here for as long as we can, renewing this option every time we crawl out of bed without jumping out the window.
Jennifer Dore, MD is a member of the adjunct clinical faculty at Stanford and is a board certified psychiatrist specializing in psychodynamic psychotherapy and medication management for conditions such as depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, ADHD and addiction. Dr. Dore earned her MD from New York Medical College in 2007, with the highest academic distinction, Alpha Omega Alpha and holds a B.A. from Amherst College where she majored in English Literature. Upon graduating, Dr. Dore trained for three years as a surgical resident at Weill Cornell/NY Presbyterian Hospital. It was while training as a surgeon, specifically time covering the Intensive Care Unit, that Dr. Dore discovered a deep concern and interest in the complexity of human suffering and how difficult it is for patients and their families to make life critical medical decisions. Dr. Dore’s training subsequently took her to Northern California where she joined the Stanford Department of Psychiatry as a resident physician. While at Stanford, Dr. Dore’s focus included the treatment of bipolar disorder, intensive individual psychotherapy, family and couples therapy, the treatment of addiction and medical decision making. Dr. Dore’s research in the area of bipolar disorder earned her recognition from the American Psychiatric Association during their 2013 Annual Meeting in San Francisco. Dr. Dore was also elected Chief Resident for her contributions as a leader and innovator. With the founding of Helios Psychiatry, Dr. Dore is excited to connect with the community and deliver exceptional care grounded in an integrative approach to wellness and the whole person.
