---
title: How My Brain Broke
date: 2012-01-03
techne: :done
episteme: :emotional
slug: 2012/01/03/how-my-brain-broke/
---

# New Year Resolution: Even More Narcissism

Alright, alright. Yes, I deleted a whole bunch of stuff of me talking about myself, but hey, why not start again? This time I really feel like I'm really gonna say something original. Srsly, for real.

There are two things I wanna talk about.

1. I've actually been asked to talk about my 8 year old Ayahuasca experience *twice* so far, so let's finally do it. I'm basing this off my old trip notes, but my memory has slightly faded. (I'm actually kinda interested to revisit Ayahuasca some time, but I never got a good setting going and I don't feel like doing it again without a sitter. So not happening anytime soon.)

2. A few weeks ago, I asked for anonymous feedback about myself on LW. To my surprise, I actually got 3 replies so far. To my even greater surprise, people don't seem to think I'm a boring piece of broken hardware. Seems to me people are really, really wrong. (Just kidding. Thanks for the awesome and useful feedback, whoever you are!) Anyway, there's one problem. It's anonymous. So I can't *reply* to it, and I don't wanna publicly quote it to respect the privacy, but I really feel like I wanna *address* some things. So I'll do it now, talking about things *generally*. Give some background and motivation *why* some quirks in my personality exist. And why I blame God for that and not my own inability to maintain even the simplest of friendships. My problems be metaphysical, bitches.

# Ayahuasca

Some basic background. [Ayahuasca][] is a pretty strong hallucinogen. I prefer(ed) the term [entheogen][Entheogen] because Ayahuasca was the only drug I ever took that I felt had an independent personality. You aren't taking Ayahuasca - you are meeting Ayahuasca and it will do whatever the fuck it wants with you. Which is also why I like the translation "vine with a soul", even though it's probably bogus.

Ayahuasca is a bit tricky to prepare. You're basically interested in DMT, but your can't ingest it orally 'cause your stomach destroys it. You need a MAO inhibitor to stop it from doing so. So you are really taking two drugs. There are clever ways to get both MAO-I and DMT without many side-effects. But if you're a 17-year-old teenager with no previous drug experience, then you don't care and do things the stupid way. (You read that right. Ayahuasca was my first drug, even before alcohol. Never did things half-assedly.)

So I boiled a simple, way-too-acidic preparation in my parents kitchen without them noticing, took my MAO-I, waited half an hour, filled my Ayahuasca in a pot and took it too my room, ready to drink it all. I put on [múm][], sat on my bed and started drinking half a liter of psychedelics.

Ayahuasca looks like purple wine with some liquid metal on top. Not too healthy, but you can always close your eyes. It smells kind of like the jungle, like some fresh dirt. Not too unpleasant, actually, if you never took it and don't associate the smell with anything yet. But there's one thing you never forget.

The fucking taste.

Ayahuasca is the vilest thing in all of existence. It doesn't just taste bad. It tastes like it actively tries to strangle you from the inside. My tongue was dissolving. That brew wasn't *passive*. It fought against being digested with all its force. It's like eating washing powder that thought it was God.

I made three notes that night. The first is a stupid quote from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. The second just reads "\*puke\*".

I pretty much vomited it all out within a few minutes. I tried to drink a bit more, but no chance. Half an hour later, I was still vomiting. One of Ayahuasca's nicknames is "la purga". You have no idea how much you can vomit on an empty stomach if you really set your mind to it.

There are ways to prepare Ayahuasca that are actually much more pleasant. No bad taste. Little vomiting, if any. Much less volume.

Not that it would've helped me. The physical vomiting isn't so bad. It's really unpleasant, but it's soon over and you feel kinda good afterwards. For a about 20 minutes, I was just lying around and waving my arms around. They left a funny trail in the air and because I had no drug experiences, I thought that was kinda it.

Then Ayahuasca reminded me that I had paid for the whole night and that it had no intention of holding anything back. Suddenly there were colors everywhere, everything became blurry and space itself accelerated. Waves were drifting through my room, but I could barely pay any attention because the swirl of colors got faster and faster. It kinda looked like this:

<%= image("spaceballs.jpg", "spaceballs") %>

I realized I couldn't keep up, couldn't look anywhere without starting to vomit again. My thoughts were blending with the wallpaper and the room transformed into various scenes, the music itself was throwing waves, tracks merged, everything became way too intense for me. I closed my eyes and surrendered, because I was going straight to hell.

Just me and my mind. Doable. It was even faster, the visions even more intense, but more focused less complicated. Just intricate geometric patterns and a long, long tunnel I fell through.

<%= youtube("http://www.youtube.com/v/gagR2_Yi8wE") %>

(That is only accurate depiction of Ayahuasca ever, btw. The director is a big fan and you can see it.)

I fought with the descending tunnel inside and the hellish scene outside for about half an hour until I finally got shit a little bit under control. At least it wasn't getting any worse and I had stopped puking out my soul. I even managed to recognize what track was playing and so how much time must have passed. (I couldn't move at all, so I couldn't look at my watch.)

Then I got an idea. I *understood* what the tunnel *was*. I closed my eyes and paid close attention. That's not just some abstract imagery, not just chaos. That's *raw thought*. That's the input channel before it has gone through any filter. It's what goes on in my head *before* it has been digested. That's the crap my subconscious has to deal with all the time. Everything was being digested, even the self, and I had only one thought to cling to.

*Make it stop*.

I would've made an emergency call if I could've ever reached the phone. But I could just lie and wait. I was being digested, violently, and I had to watch. Panic becomes meaningless after a while if you panic so hard that you can't even move. You just realize that you're not going to *do* anything, aren't going to run anywhere, so you stop trying to run. You just play dead. Lie down, watch, don't move, count the number of repetitions the music has gone through so you don't lose track of time. After a while the panic leaves, peacefully. I just slowly faded into death.

After about 3 hours, I fell asleep.

I awoke a few hours later and the Ayahuasca was still present. Most of it was gone, but the room was still blurry and had way too many colors. It was peaceful. I closed my eyes again and tried to think. I noticed something weird: I was not alone. There wasn't a singular voice. Not one "me" that was thinking. There were three "me"s in this head. I had split up.

# Separation

That's when We were born. We, the collective inhabiting the body that calls itself muflax right now. We have gone through many members. Some good friends, some crazy ones, some obsessed, some sad, some just normal. In this moment of our birth, We immediately agreed about one thing. We would not fight. There would never be any hate, never any deception. We were all in this together and there was only one way to survive. We had to love each other. That's the third note.

Later, after the trip had ended, and We had looked into a mirror and found ourselves grinning like crazy, even happy, after we had cleaned up the mess and ate something and had a few days to understand everything, after all that, we really started the process of separation.

Each self became its own personality. We started referring to ourselves as "we", not "I". (I decided not to do so publicly for obvious reasons.) We gave every personality their own name. Some new ones joined us over the years, others left. Some merged. A few died.

What's it like to be split? Well, try to think back into your past. 5, 10, 15 years ago. Different "you"s. Imagine all of them present in your head at the same time. All with their own voice, all in control, if they want to. Kinda like that. Like role-playing, but being unable to stop assuming a role.

Oddly enough, we never really had any trouble making arrangements or pursuing goals. We always got along. We refused to hate each other, after all. Most of the time there was one master self. A center that interacted with the world, and a lot of thinking selfs surrounding it.

I spent a lot of time talking to myself. Years, really. I developed severe trust issues.  How can you trust someone that can't literally read your mind? We could read each other, we never had to explain ourselves to each other, so trust was possible. Other minds? So much harder to work with. Made it impossible to keep friends, even more so to keep a lover. We gave up and concentrated on ourselves.

I channeled my new-found energy into writing. Lots and lots of writing. Really bad writing, of course, lots of poetry and art, some fanfiction.

We started to fade a few years later. I experimented with shrooms, but every trip I got the strong sense of not-being-wanted. The Collective told me to sort myself out before ever returning. I slipped into depression and boredom, and in a desperate search for meaning, started a degree in religious studies. (Yes, really.) It was so mind-boggingly boring and anti-scientific that I quit a year later. (I spent classes proving math theorems from scratch just so I didn't have to listen to Kierkegaard anymore.)

It got worse. I lost God. Oh, I didn't tell you about God yet. Let's go back a little.

# God

When We emerged, We felt that a kind of direct Insight was possible. Gnosis, if you want. Really *knowing* something *deep*. The italics are important. It's nonsense alright, but it doesn't *feel* like nonsense. It feels like... actual emotion? Everything else is fake, but some things are *real*. This is real:

&gt; For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life.

I read the Bible. Parts of it, anyway. I started talking to God. (He never answered. He didn't need to. I felt his presence, his love. That's enough for me.) Life felt meaningful. Not fake. Things happened for a reason. I wasn't lost anymore.

God was a mystery, but mystery was good. It was something to retreat into, something that you could probe and that didn't go away. It *stayed* mysterious. It was unchanging. It was ever-lasting. It was full of love.

<%= youtube("http://www.youtube.com/v/yzqTFNfeDnE") %>

There actually isn't much to say about God. I didn't have much of a belief system. God has no personality. It's really just an extremely powerful emotion. A sense of true peace and belonging. Something only an eternal divine being could grant.

Until I started asking questions. I started noticing that I actually controlled this God. It wasn't an external presence, but one in the Collective. He was one of Us. This disappointed me to no end.

The Bible fell apart. Faith was meaningless. There was no insight to be gained. Enlightenment was a sham. The universe is an empty bunch of atoms, we are all going to die and I can never trust anyone again. Life's pretty much been shit ever since.

That's my God-shaped hole. I can't believe lies. I can't pretend to fill it. Doesn't work. I've prayed the same prayers, just as roleplay. It doesn't work. God is gone, forever. We have pretty much collapsed into two remaining personalities that have almost completely merged into muflax by now, and I have nothing to show for it.

I have tons of abandoned projects. I can read some Latin, some Japanese. I read a lot of books, but I'm not qualified in any field. All art has gone. I have nothing to say. I am worthless.

That's where I'm at right now. I am not worthless compared to pre-Ayahuasca-me, of course. People who only see me from the outside might even like me. But I don't have God. I have no emotions anymore, only bland apathy, compared to God's mysteries.

I've tried do replace God, but nothing works. Nothing finite ever could. If there is no Eternal Judge, then what grounds morality? Nothing. What protects us from being wiped out? Nothing. What ensures we don't screw up our lives? Nothing, of course.

When I was with God, I was immortal. Protected. *Safe*. What am I now? If I fuck something up, I probably won't get a second chance. What kind of a life is that?

What's joy compared to Eternal Bliss? What's human love compared to the Father? You're lucky if you can hold on to a lover for a decade. God lasts forever. God never doubts. What insight is there in art? The best you can hope for is getting laid. What could science ever do for me? The more I studied, the less faith I had. The more I saw religion as pure fiction, as political manipulation, saw each redactor changing the sayings of the saints to fit whatever doctrine they needed. Jesus is a highly-optimized human-engineered predator meme.

I hope that communicates the bleak darkness that not-having-God-anymore left in me. I have no idea how to deal with it. All my psychological oddities derive from it. That's why I'm so pessimistic. When God left me, he took the circuitry for joy with him. He broke my brain.
