Universal Love Said The Eneasz-Person

In Scott Alexander’s “Universal Love, Said The Cactus Person” a protagonist experiencing a DMT trip is urged by a Cactus Person to allow the experience of Universal Love to engulf him. Or at least, that’s my interpretation, it doesn’t use many words.

For a period of about 25 days I felt this Universal Love. I felt it so profoundly that I kept think “Oh my god, this is exactly what the Cactus Person kept referring to. This actually exists?” All of existence was Love, and I was wrapped within it. Not smothered or overwhelmed, just a background knowledge that Love infuses everything, and will buoy you up no matter what.

I didn’t think this was possible without drugs. I was actually high on life. I’d been high on life before, but it never lasted more than a day without interruption, and it was a much more high-energy, bouncy type of high. Never a calm joy that underlay everything and persisted day after day. It was so strange I worried about brain damage. I started a series of blog posts to try to isolate the cause. (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6) The answer is, uh… kinda dumb tbh.

The Friggin Hippies Were Right All Along

Some time this year, without actually realizing it, I decided to stop trying to please anyone. I had responsibilities to tend to, and some personal goals, but I couldn’t do the relentless labor of pushing against my inherent toxicity anymore. People could deal with my broken, crappy self, or they could reject me, and it’s not like I would die from it.

Instead people were just… cool with me? I don’t want to repeat everything in my Burning Man and England posts, so to recap - I didn’t do the constant labor of presenting non-threatingness and value-demonstration, and the world was fine with it. A fair number of people even acted as if I was valuable just the way I was. I was able to ask for physical touch and that was totally fine and super reciprocated. Everywhere I went I was non-repulsive, and it was amazing.

How the hell is just feeling accepted and safe such a drastic life improvement? The insane quality-of-life improvements of having a high-trust environment and deep security are absolutely unbelievable. If everyone was cool to each other, and could be open and free, we would be most of the way to optimal life without needing transhuman tech. There are not many places in the world where conditions allow for such universal love. I now feel very willing to accept drastic costs to have a world like that.

Discovery Through Subtraction T_T

The way I discovered all this was by being made very aware that my true self is actually totes repulsive and I shouldn’t be honest about who I am. The Universal Love high dissipated quickly after that. The world is full of broken people that have been abused, or are looking to extract whatever they can from you when your guard is down. It’s unpleasant. I really miss the peace of universal love.

I guess this post is anti-climactic. To be honest, it’s a little anti-climactic to live through the whole thing too. I was expecting deep revelations, and all I got was “be in a loving community.” The only thing that was really startling was realizing how deeply the modern world is optimized in the opposite direction — making loving tight-knit communities so alien that most people (including myself) cannot comprehend that such a thing used to exist. It’s impossible to fix a problem when you don’t know that the world itself is the problem, and thus don’t know what a functional world would even look like, much less how to go about getting to one.

On the plus side, I now know that such a society is possible. I have some idea of how I can get it back. I know what to work for. It’s good to have goals.