What you’re about to read is a story. A very short tale. It’s about one of the times that I accidentally got way too high and ended up thinking of something cool and useful after freaking out. Within this tale, I’ll explain the thing that I think I gained some insight on.  

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It was morning time. I had worked out, eaten breakfast, and gratuitously frenched-kissed my wife before leaving for work. There was an air of excitement about the day, a bit of adult Christmas morning energy. I had just gotten a new vape device the previous night and was finally getting a chance to try it out. I won’t go into detail about the Storz and Bickel Mighty Plus. But, it’s from the makers of the Volcano and their stuff is utterly top-notch, hence my excitement to test it out.

Now I’m in my CRV driving to my office. I figure, why not give this thing a bit of a puff on the way? See if it lives up to the hype. But, it required me to manually enter a temperature and I chose something on the lower side, 240 F I believe, forgetting that THC doesn’t burn off until like 325 F or something—but either way.  

I start hitting this thing and I’m getting nothing. So, I turn up the temp and puff harder, and still nothing. Then this process ensues: turn up the temp a little and rip it as hard as I can a couple of times, over and over, increasing the temp by five or ten degrees each time until I finally get up to 400 F and let out a decent cloud.

But THC can be vaporized as low as 315-320 F and I had ripped my device like thirty times from there all the way up to 400 F but didn’t think I was getting anything because I wasn’t seeing a lot of plumage, hence the reason I kept hitting it like a crackhead.

Now I’m pulling into my office parking lot and the tunes are sounding really, really good. Thoughts are flying through my head at light speed and that’s when it dawned on me that I was blazed to the point of no return.

Stepping out of the CRV, I was all of a sudden overwhelmed with the idea of awareness, of pulling in sensory data from my eyes, ears, and skin, and how it just swirls around in my head and forms a picture of reality. This was the first level of the bugout that swept over me. How all of these bits are being processed by my brain and instantly forming a picture of reality that could, on some level, be a complete delusion.  

And then, as if that isn’t enough, I suddenly get overwhelmed with how chaotic and unorganized my life is. How there’s no central aim or focus. 

I was confronted with the realization that I had been living an utterly rudderless existence. No plans, no real aim. Just kinda drifting along and reacting to all of the stuff that has been thrown at me since I was a little kid, my little mind trying its best to form a coherent sense of reality from then till now.

After digesting that terrible fact about myself, my mind jumps back to the whole thing about having laid the foundational structures of my personality as a pre-verbal youth, this idea of me as a baby looking at the world, reacting to everything going on, and my entire personality just growing like fungus in the dark of my unconscious infant-mind—and then one day “coming online” as a conscious self-entity that had to face the world. An “object among other objects” (to steal a phrase from Piaget), something to be evaluated, ranked, and judged, rather than just being the center of a nonverbal awareness centered on one’s own body like when we were infants before we mentally became a self.

Basically, before you learn any words you’re just hanging out and hoping to get fed and take dumps. Someone shakes a rattle in your face and you get to just experience sound and color. Smiling faces. Nothing has been named. There are no concepts. It’s pure experience. And then…without your explicit permission…you learn language and symbols and internalize all that is being said to you and thought within yourself into this sort of center of conscious experience that goes on to become your identity, self, or whatever you call your sense of distinct “I-ness.” 

We’ll use the term “inner self” throughout to keep things simple.

I got bogged down in the details of how this sense of self, this mental software of the physical body, is built and specifically what it is built from. 

I immediately started thinking about how our physical bodies are made. There’s that whole idea of how it’s an amalgamation of stuff borrowed from the universe. Physically we are water, heat from the sun, air, minerals, nutrients, and other various foodstuffs from the earth. 

Stuff from the outside world comes into our little amoeba body, is broken down, and then gets put together by this weird self-producing natural intelligence. 

Then we’re born and the process continues, a continuous reaping and consuming of light, heat, nutrients, air, and water—all of it automatically broken down and assigned to whatever function our body requires to become/maintain our physical selves as we grow and develop into the full expression of our adult body and then start to break back down.

Now, this is all pretty basic and fundamental. We know we’re physically built out of carrots and burgers and whatnot. No surprises there. 

But the thing that had me bugging was the fact that our inner self is constructed in the same way—only instead of food, it’s built from the digestion and absorption of felt experiences, going all the way back to when we were little cells nestled in our mother’s belly.

And just like our physical body does with food and other physical inputs, our inner self (again the center of conscious awareness in this physical body) breaks down experiences through conscious reflection (digestion) and uses what is extracted to further build itself in terms of complexity and “strength” (which could be thought of in terms of sureness) into a final form or expression that is guided by the same innate intelligence that turns burgers into two legs, two arms, a torso, and a head.

Only, our inner self is nonmaterial so it’s hard to imagine what (if any) ideal final form exists, and if so, what it “looks” like. There aren’t easily discernible dimensions we can judge it by.

We know what our bodies are supposed to look like. That’s easy. It’s a physical thing with physical laws governing its properties so that it can be of use in the physical world. Just like a circle, square, boat, or airplane. 

Though it helps to think about how function relates to form. 

In the case of the body, we have two feet to stand on. Hands and arms to grab stuff. Eyes to see. Ears to hear. Teeth to eat. A digestive tract to break food down, ect. Having all of those things working functionally and effectively is the ideal form of a physical body, barring the idea of aesthetic beauty for now.

So, let’s think about the function of the inner self. Our feet are for standing and our hands are for grabbing. 

Hmm. 

So perhaps an extremely basic definition for the inner self would be the part of you that figures out where to stand and what to grab. This is the part of yourself that organizes all of the million bits of data pouring into your awareness from the outside world and fits them all into some kind of story that dictates how you feel and what you do in any given situation, all the way up to making sense of your entire existence, your place within the universe that you (unconsciously) borrowed some materials from so you could putt around.

Going a step further, we could even say that our inner self is there to regulate our feeling states through the release and reuptake of hormones, neurotransmitters, and whatever else is biologically responsible for our feelings at any given moment, based on however we’re defining the experience at hand.   

So, perhaps we can agree that the ideal form of the inner self is a pattern of ingrained thought and feeling that distributes stress hormones in a judicious and economical manner, based on a maximally accurate rendering of reality. Meaning, it doesn’t stop your physical body to admire a poisonous spider or a guy with a gun; nor does it spike your body with cortisol because the line at the grocery store is a bit longer than you would have liked. 

Within this idealized form, there’s a sort of balance in which meaning is constructed in a way that ultimately serves your physical organism well, which then allows the inner self to enjoy its task of decoding reality.  

That all sounds pretty cool and neat if you ask me, but we typically don’t get off that easy. 

As most of us know all too well, our ideal physical form constantly eludes us due to the stuff we are putting into it. The way our body should, or perhaps could be, easily gets distorted by what is being put into it.

Meaning if we are gorging on high fructose corn syrups and trans fats our whole lives, then chances are that our physical blueprint of ideal body shape will get inflamed into something that resembles the form (in that it has arms, legs, head, etc.) but gets skewed and distorted in other ways that can cause structural problems and various dysfunctionalities.

The same applies to the experiences we are taking in early in life that serve as the construction materials for our inner selves. 

And like we said the inner self, just like the body, also takes stuff in from the outside world to use in the self-creation process. So if we substitute chocolate pudding for a pretty constant stream of stress, fear, and judgment, it is safe to say that the idealized form of our inner self becomes distorted, inflamed, and dysfunctional—and not only that—but then goes on to distort our picture of reality as more stressful, fearful, and negative than it actually is (or perhaps needs to be) since the mind, or again inner self, has itself been mainly constituted from those three things. 

It would be like if your mom smoked crack when you were little and you were born with a bad heart. Trying to get into shape would be difficult since it’s tough to exercise when you have a bad or faulty heart which then makes your health even worse, ect.  

There’s nothing new or groundbreaking about what I’m saying. But, this reality itself tends to remain unconscious in most adults. Meaning, most people don’t like to think that a large part of their sense of self rests on a mysterious foundational structure that is running on autopilot outside of their conscious awareness. And, if they can bear to even swallow that idea as perhaps being just a little bit true, the thought of confronting this structure of self (sometimes called the conceptual self) can make people feel incredibly uneasy since they are essentially deconstructing their own sense of perceived reality or self-hood.

Eeek!

By the way, I didn’t think of all of this while I was freaking out. Really these ideas kinda sparked in my brain as a dissociated array of weird imagery and concepts that made me feel like I was going nuts. Actually…I think that’s what I may have been bugging out about. I think I may have felt like I was encountering my mysterious foundational structure and got scared that I was going to disappear into it or something.

And just to be clear, the bedrock reality decoding processes that are placed in the mind by evolution and preverbal childhood experience can be thought of as the unconscious. I’m sure it’s more complex than that, but that’s an easily workable definition of the idea. And the picture of who you are based on certain distortions that arise from the unconscious structure that perceives and dictates reality can be called the “conceptual self,” or “story-of-self.” Like if you say that you’re a loser, or unlovable, or whatever. 

It’s more like the color of a shirt that can change. It’s not fixed like height, eye color, or anything like that, but we tend to view our conceptual self-judgments as being just as real as our physical characteristics.

Either way, a lot of people get completely turned off by the idea of their personal unconscious. “Psychobabble!” Or “Shrink hogwash,” they say. People tend to view it as some vague academic theory, when I’d argue that it’s actually the opposite, that it’s an intensely personal and vividly experienced part of oneself, only it’s often irrational and kinda strange.

Dreams are an easy example. We all have them. Vivid and often intensely intricate experiences. We might be fighting, having sex, killing our brother, or just walking around. 

But the point is that there is a part of our mind that literally creates a fully experienced reality while our conscious awareness is offline. This natural thrust of cognitive activity underlies and evades our waking consciousness, while also tugging our perceptions (and our actions) this way and that. 

This alone points to the fact that there is more to our minds than our minds seem to think!

I guess what I am putting forth is that after we wake up from dreams, the part of our mind that produces the dream doesn’t just shut off—instead it is part of the very thing that colors our experience of waking reality. (I stole this idea from a Christian theologian from a book that I can’t remember). Say we get cut off in traffic but don’t see the driver. Do we assume that the person didn’t notice us there? Or do we assume they are being a dickhead and personally antagonizing us? Why?

The point is that a great deal of our interpretation of events stems from the same reality-creation mechanism that powers our dreams. And a great deal of that reality creation “software” within us is shaped by those early forgotten experiences I brought up earlier. It’s obviously not the end-all-be-all explanation of everything about us, but it does seem to play a role that goes unnoticed by most people.

But when we learn to remain aware of the thought process as a thing in its own right, rather than just assuming that our thoughts are Reality itself streaming inside of our heads like a news ticker, we can catch certain thought processes and assumptions that often lead to us suffering unnecessarily or perhaps acting in ways that are ultimately unhelpful.

This is, as far as I can tell, what becoming more conscious is. It’s waking ourselves up from our automatic baseline thought patterns and in-built interpretive assumptions that color our lives. And we do this by simply watching our environment with a relaxed, open perspective, paying attention to when our environment “stings” us, and then also watching that internal reaction unfold, feeling the emotions, and watching the thoughts come and go.

During this time of quiet watching, we notice the connection between stuff happening in the outer world and the accompanying rush of flash judgments within ourselves. Our body screams for us to say and do things, but we’ve chosen to prioritize the watching so we remain still and quiet, observing what the mind and body are telling us to think or do without actually being swept up into it.

This, by the way, is the basic idea behind mindfulness meditation

And though this process is tedious and oftentimes infuriating, if we do it long enough we start to make realizations about ourselves, gaining a clearer map of our own inner experience as we observe the patterns of our inner life, the one-by-one falling of dominos that lead to angry outbursts, cowardly inaction, or impulse behaviors like shopping or using drugs. This watching and noticing tend to grant individuals insights that can be used to self-correct and self-organize one’s life in highly meaningful ways. This is, like I said, the crux of meditation, of increasing consciousness which then grants you a wider array of options to all of life’s jolting experiences that is available to literally anyone who bothers to observe their minds in action in a dedicated manner over a period of time.

This is it for now. I’ll finish the story of the bugout in the next post…