The Secret to Happiness
Today, I had a DMT trip. I just used a vape pen.
It felt so good that I was thinking that I was kidnapped in a heroin ring. Maybe I was a heroin addict in another life?
In the process, I think that I have found:
- The key to happiness
- Some insights on how nootropics can vastly increase productivity.
Can I even talk about all this?⌗
There is no need to be Freud to be able to talk to the conscious and unconscious mind. I even believe that Freud would be proud of me talking about this subject and describing my experiences. Everyone is gifted with a mind. And everyone has a right to introspection.
However, I’m still a normal person with little-to-none scientific background, so take what I say with a grain of salt.
That being said, I also believe that most people work the same way. We all have similar brains, so my findings might apply to you (dear reader).
So, without further ado, let’s talk about the holy grail of humanity: the key to happiness.
The key to happiness⌗
Inside my mind, there are beings. Either they are happy, or either they are sad—of course, if you are sad inside, you cannot be happy outside.
The key here is to satisfy these internal beings. The problem is that you need to be able to communicate with them, and that’s where DMT comes into play.
If we can talk to these beings, demons, angels, geometry, and discover what they want us to do, we can be truly happy.
Personally, I have met a demon in my head at a time when I was truly sad. I understood that I needed to do something a bit evil, something a bit out of bounds, that moves humanity backwards for my own personal profit. So, that’s why I started one of my projects, AIBlog (I’ll probably talk about it in another post, but the gist of it is that it publishes tons of blogs with AI content to make money)
TL;DR: The key to happiness is to satisfy the inside of the mind. Find what your inner entities want, satisfy them, and you will be happy on the outside.
Some examples of thing to make yourself happy⌗
- music
- great feelings on your body (bath, clothes, warm things, hugs…)
- day-dreaming
- accomplishing fantasies
- being in good health
- following the little voice in your head
So yeah, that’s all. This is the key to happiness; however, there is still a need for a method to use it. This will be the subject of a future post about routine tweaking and conducting self-experiments. (hello, self-quantified data-science nerds!)
How I perceve DMT as a nootropic⌗
Nootropics […] are a wide range of natural or synthetic supplements or drugs and other substances that are claimed to improve cognitive function or to promote relaxation, particularly boosting mood, executive functions, attention, memory, creativity, or motivation in healthy individuals. The most commonly used nootropic in the world is caffeine.
I believe that Nootropics affect creativity via multiple mechanisms:
1. Interconnection between areas of the brains⌗
Presently, I’m still in the coming down phase of DMT, and I can see that everything in my brain is connected. My creativity is way higher than usual because of this, and writing is fluid. I’m just writing text and rearranging it as I go. It feels effortless, and this piece might be one of the best that I’ve written.
All ideas are connected to other ideas, and I can easily access them.
In fMRI scans of people on LSD, we can see that their brains becomes more interconnected; I feel that this effect can be directly experienced as a greater interconnection of all ideas. Connections that were too weak to be accessed by the conscious mind can now be used, which leads to novel ideas quicker.
2. Greater control of brain configuration switch⌗
When coming down from DMT, my sense of reality can switch easily between tasks.
As you might know, being deeply immersed in a task (also known as flow state) works by shutting down some “personal” brain areas and heating the “work” brain sides.
I feel like DMT allows switching between brain configuration quickly.
To change your brain configuration, one needs to use their attention. If you focus on something long enough, your brain configuration will adapt itself to it; shutting down useless parts and turning on the useful ones. On DMT, you only need to look at something for a few seconds for your entire brain to reconfigure.
Of course, this is widely speculative. I am aware of studies that say that DMT (and most other psychedelics, if not all) shut down the default mode network, that is, the usual brain mode that people are using when awake. But maybe it’s not really shutting down; it’s just getting reconfigured to consume the psychedelic state (and perhaps, rapid and intense changes in reconfiguration might be what leads to a psychedelic effect).
3. Increased learning speed via BDNF augmentation⌗
Here are three excerpts from Wikipedia that will allow you to understand what are the implications of fostering BDNF.
Brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), or abrineurin, is a protein that, in humans, is encoded by the BDNF gene. BDNF is a member of the neurotrophin family of growth factors, which are related to the canonical nerve growth factor. Neurotrophic factors are found in the brain and the periphery. BDNF was first isolated from a pig brain in 1982 by Yves-Alain Barde and Hans Thoenen.
Nerve growth factor (NGF) is a neurotrophic factor and neuropeptide primarily involved in the regulation of growth, maintenance, proliferation, and survival of certain target neurons.
Neurotrophic factors (NTFs) are a family of biomolecules – nearly all of which are peptides or small proteins – that support the growth, survival, and differentiation of both developing and mature neurons.
There is also a sense of increased learning. While the trip seems very elusive, ideas that are obtained stick well in short-term as well as long-term memory.
Let’s take an example; imagine that you learn an insight in your trip (to make friends, nod, and smile - seems really dumb, but often, the best advices sound really obvious - the hard part is implementing them). Instead of having to find this insight through trial and errors before it finally sticks in your mind, this artificial life lesson gets engraved in your memory. So, you can start acting upon it as soon as you wake up, if you choose too. It will always stay right within reach until it fades out.
In this regard, I believe that the following drugs could be good candidates to create this effect:
- LSD
- Semax and cousins, since they increase the BDNF
- DMT (either taken every few hours, or micro-dosed with MAOI to prolong effects)
The key is for the drug to not disrupt normal operations too much, but still increase BDNF.
Put some respect on my name⌗
I found anecdotal reports of people trying to use DMT for external purposes instead of internal changes - meaning, they are trying to use it for sleep or to increase concentration.
One of them really stuck with me; the man was trying to take DMT to sleep better, and he encountered an entity that said to him: “Do you think that this is a joke?”
So, there might be a need to be spiritual and respect the drug.
Ending words⌗
Of course, take everything I’ve said with a big grain of salt. While I did research every topic beforehand, I am still a newborn in the field (and I did not cite my sources). Maybe I’ll find that the key to happiness I’ve found is obsolete in a few months down the line.
I wonder if this key to happiness has already been discussed. I did not read Freud, so I only have a vague idea of how he imagined the way the unconscious and the conscious mind interact. What I am sure of, though, is that there is something way deeper in our brains that we do not experience but still controls us in ways we can’t even imagine.
Back in the time, when the French Revolution begun, a large group of thinkers determined that the role of a human is to be happy on earth instead of a hypothetical external realm. You may think that you have a mission (saving animals, fostering equality, etc…) but your true mission might be found with introspection, and finding what really makes you happy.
And for some, it’s indeed saving the animals.
Anyway, whatever is making you happy: find it, and exploit it!