The Cure for Procrastination: Brain Damage

My journey of finishing what I started after taking a huge dose of psychedelics in a big, dark room

It was about 45 minutes since I had drank a glass full of what some might think is literally poison. It looked like viscous tar and was the most bitter thing I had ever tasted - like drinkable Marmite (spreadable yeast paste). After drinking, I waited patiently on my designated sleeping bag in a large dark room. I was wearing shorts, a tank top and a heart rate tracker to see if my heart rate would go haywire. After some time I started to feel warm. I heard some very strange noises around me that took me a couple seconds to identify. The black tar was having an effect on my perceptual capabilities which is why it took me a while to realize the noises were of other people vomiting. Shortly after, I had the urge to puke myself. As the retching started, along came some vivid hallucinations.

Take a moment to get a feel for how your mind is perceiving the boundaries of your experience. You might perceive a space extending from one wall of your room to another, but if you’re near a window you’ll quickly feel your boundaries of experience rapidly expand as you look outside the window. Sure you see the bigness of the outdoors, but you also feel it somewhat. Going back to the black tar: as quick as you can feel like the space around you become very big like when you look out a window… I suddenly felt like my entire universe shrunk down into the small space inside of my mouth.

[..]My world and self existed only within my mouth and now it was dissolving into the plastic bucket as I vomited. Existing in a space flooded with vomit sounds pretty disgusting but the sensations that constituted the experience of vomiting were so disjointed that I wasn’t able to perceive it as gross. The contraction in my stomach, the discomfort in my throat, warmth in my mouth and noise of all this liquid spilling into a bucket each felt like separate, completely alien sensation. Also, while the sensations unfolded very rapidly, each was as captivating as say the visceral feeling you get when you see the Grand Canyon for the first time… or maybe the jolt in the chest that you get when you see something truly dangerous: a bear, a snake, or a gun. Not that I was terrified, just that the feeling in the body was very substantial.

I can’t decide if I felt that I became the liquid spilling into the bucket or if that was the only thing that existed. I suppose there’s not much difference.

While ‘zooming into’ my mouth and vomit bucket was weird enough, it was very interesting to ‘zoom out’ and observe that somehow the rest of my body was managing quite well on its own. It was doing a good job of holding the bucket stable enough that everything went neatly into the bucket without a drop spilled on my legs as I sat upright with my legs crossed.

Now that the ayahuasca had kicked in, I was really curious to see where the remaining hours of the trip would go.

After plenty of other disorienting modifications to my perceptual apparatus, things eventually became more stable and I felt like I was back in my body and back in the room at normal size. I was sitting upright on my sleeping bag, just waiting for the next thing to happen and being ready to prepare the bucket for the next wave of vomit. I took off my heart rate tracker and tucked it under the sleeping bag because the sensor was emitting too much light.

Eventually I could both sense and hear that there was a very large presence to the left of me. The sound I heard was like the beginning of a cymbal swell. My eyes had adapted to the darkness so I could fuzzily make out some of the features of the room. I hesitatingly checked my peripheral vision to my left and could definitely see that there was a very large creature standing in the room not but two meters from me (6.5 feet). I finally directed my eyes towards the thing and as I did, the noise of swelling cymbals crescendoed. It was too dark to make out its overall form, but one thing stood out very clearly: it was covered in dozens of large, bright eyes. They were definitely staring at me. I was quite captivated by the thing at first, but it didn’t take long for me to think ‘yea fuck that’ and slowly avert my gaze. It kept staring at me.

After a couple minutes, I thought the eye beast had left me alone. Then, I could feel a hand grab my head and push it down to make me look at some kind of dark pit on the ground next to me. At first I resisted the push. Eventually, the hand won over and got me to look down into the pit. It was too dark to make out exactly what was in it, but it was definitely very deep and I could hear that there were plenty of suffering people wailing in distress down there. Again, I thought ‘yea fuck that.’ I forcefully sat back upright as I resisted against the hand.

This was just the beginning of the trip. Along the many hours of the trip there were several other instances of being confronted with some creepy thing and I attempted to not experience it. They say that the more you resist what’s presented to you in an ayahuasca trip, the longer it will last. We drank the brew around 6PM …and my trip lasted until sunrise.

They say that to get the most out of an ayahuasca trip, you’re supposed to set an intention. My intention was something along the lines of being less hesitant. That is: less fear of failure, more confident to take risks, and to stop using ‘perfectionism’ as an excuse for procrastination.

I’ve always found myself tweaking my videos up until the last minute, which always delayed the release. You could call that a form of procrastination. What does this stem from? A kind of fear that not only will a poor performing, uninteresting video end up being a waste of all that time spent researching… but my reputation will suffer as people will judge the sub-optimal piece of content harshly. You could say: a fear of being seen by many people, but also the fear of being judged by many people. I wanted to get rid of this fear and just take more action. Make more videos, do more stuff. My mind often focused on the potential negatives of taking risks, but I wanted to get it to learn how to appreciate and be excited about the potential positives.

Plenty more happened on that ayahuasca trip in Costa Rica back in 2017. I discussed one of the more intense aspects of it - it systematically turning off concepts in my brain in a predictable pattern in my post Why the Mind makes you Suffer. I went from not being able to comprehend that money existed, then that other places existed, then as I lost my ability to understand time I went into ego death. If confused terror sounds like a good time to you, I highly recommend it.

You can spot ‘complete’ people as they are often bathed in light.

I was expecting the ayahuasca trip to make me a more ‘complete’ person. With my fully integrated spiritual self who had explored his shadow and collected all the self-improvement buzzwords into my infinity gauntlet, I would be prepared to tackle the world with a superhuman fearlessness guided by my enlightenments about the nature reality. However… I went home feeling disappointed and frankly like a failure. I arranged my schedule and flew all the way to costa rica from Japan, but when was presented with the challenge, I shirked away from it. I went in with the intention to decrease fear and increase confidence, but I went back home feeling like I failed at something and left some of my confidence back in Costa Rica.

・Couldn’t face the 60-eyed monster.
・Didn’t go down the pit of death.
・Didn’t square up with the other demon that accosted me.
・Couldn’t relax when the aliens were dissecting me.
・Couldn’t relax and gain the insight that the cycling in and out of ego death was trying to teach me.

I ended up talking about this ‘ominous figure with many eyes’ aspect of the trip in a conversation with Jordan Peterson in September 2021. Jordan also thought that it might have to do with the scrutiny that comes with having a big Youtube channel. Indeed, I have to admit that when I first started the channel, I was just making the videos that I wanted to see on the platform. Then, as the channel developed, it became a source of income and also developed a reputation. I needed to preserve both. I essentially continued with the same thorough approach I took to videos that I started the channel with, but the feeling that ‘this video has to be better than the last one’ was weighing on my shoulders.

I don’t know if I normally struggled with the discomfort of (the thought of) being judged any more than others, but I figured that fear of judgement by the public was a fair enough interpretation …especially since being ‘observed’ by 1 million+ people was completely new to me. As far as whether that was exactly what the eye monster was representing, I enjoyed this comment by Jordan Peterson:

“And it’s an exploration you say - well, how do you know it’s right? Well, you don’t. what you’re striving for is something like useful. But, it’s also now and then you stumble across an interpretation that gives you that feeling of insight. I realized something I didn’t know before. I realized something new has come into reality because of it. It’s not much different than how do you know if a thought is true? You don’t.”

He offered that the multi-eyed malevolent beast attending me was animated by the spirit of the critical mob.

After that I wanted to go back and do the ayahuasca again, I wanted a rematch. I would go back, conjure up the eye demon and punch that bastard right in the nose. I’d get in his stupid pit and pass through whatever gauntlet or series of trials he had for me in record time.

I figured that if I wanted to get the high score on the dark pit of suffering souls, I should get to work on spending my time in sober reality on leveling up.