/**
 * file: karbytes_25_november_2023.txt
 * type: plain-text
 * date: 25_NOVEMBER_2023
 * author: karbytes
 * license: PUBLIC_DOMAIN 
 */

Between 1:30AM and 2:00AM I decided to take a small amount of magic mushrooms before resting in the darkness of my motel room (and on the bed while comfortably wrapped in blankets) for a few hours before getting up to pack up my belongings, return the room key to the motel front desk, and then drive to Fremont close to sunrise. I decided to take "one more" hit of that DMT pen (which I read online uses a micro-USB to charge though it is apparently marketed as a disposable vape pen under the brand name "K."). I took two or three solid hits while standing in the dark in front of a mirror on the wall. What I saw in the mirror was a very handsome but scary-looking young man who looked like he had dreads, light-to-moderate facial hair, and light skin despite having a distinctly African American appearance which looked to me like a literal model in an impressionistic art piece (and I was seeing myself as that surrealist piece of art)! I looked straight into my own eyes and said, "Hello karbytes," though the man in the mirror did not appear to make any sounds nor have any internal subjective experiences which were apparent just by looking at that two-dimensional projection named karbytes in the mirror. 

In "normal life" and for what seems like most of my life, I have had a hard time relaxing such that I have tended to almost always look uncomfortable, restless, and excessively animated for what I felt inside at a more "core-like layer" of my being. I saw this demonstrated in the mirror when I expected to see the usual cartoonish and compulsively "comical" expressions erupt reflexively on my (non poker) face and general fidgeting or awkward-looking and awkward-feeling body tension by the way I seem to hold certain body parts too rigidly in non-flowy positions as though I am trying not to piss or shit my pants (or perhaps cry or speak uncontrollably). What I saw in the mirror while I heard the sound of a car driving by was a refreshingly still and calm and powerful looking godlike-human staring at me through the mirror in way which made him look relatively motionless while other things seemed to be in tumultuous flux. 

Like every DMT hit I have experienced so far (and including the times I did edible psilomethoxin powder (which contains a mild form of 5-MEO-DMT) which I ordered from Church of Psilomethoxin in Texas sometime around February of this year), I noticed what seemed to be noticably higher frames-per-second in terms of what my visual system is able to render. I leaned in as close to the mirror as I could to examine the unusually high-resolution details of my eyes up close; noticing the way the light from the bathroom whose door was open to my right made the irises of my eye shine with copper and olive tones. For about a minute, I noticed the way my hair seemed to morph into ghostly patterns which looks like many of the artificial intelligence generated morphing animation videos I have seen on Instagram.

What was significant to me about looking at myself in the mirror while high on DMT was the way I seemed to detach from being the person in the mirror and, instead, assume the position of some outside observer who was not the same person as the guy in the mirror nor someone I (the seemingly faceless and formless observer looking at the reflection in the mirror) immediately recognized. That improved my outlook on my life because that experience enabled me to see how normal I look compared to other people I work alongside and commute next to on the BART trains and in the streets. I looked like just another normal guy on the street (and not a mentally ill or physically dilapidated one like I thought I looked like and was told I looked like by other people). That gave me a confidence boost and also whetted my appetite for deeper explorations on DMT and other powerful psychedelics such as LSD (probably eventually). I think DMT might have been the drug I have been waiting my whole life to get into (but the setting and timing needed to be right such that I already have firmly established some kind of tangible and lasting legacy to call my own).

There was a time earlier (before I turned out the lights and when there were a lot more distractions in front of me and WayBack Machine batch save tasks I assigned myself to do while listening to dissonant music I made from my SOUND_TRACK_LOOPER application) where I did a bunch of DMT hits and felt a little panicked about feeling myself become "pressurized" into relative immobility and hence the position of some passive movie-watcher being melded into the environment as though I were a piece of furniture or some morbidly obese person held prisoner by its own body. I will continue trying this stuff in various settings and situations since I know that situational context is a very significant factor in how the DMT trip actually plays out. 

I think that smoking large amounts of the stuff makes everything in my visual field appear to be higher frame rate, slightly more color saturated, slightly more color contrasting, and almost cartoonishly surreal (and literally resembling a computer animated film). It almost feels like seeing the world as an alien inhabiting a human nervous system. I also heard what sounded like some kind of faint humming sound and, with it, a mild feeling of pressure in my head.

Also, when I was high on the DMT while working on my laptop earlier to upload that selfie I took and then the subsequent video to a GitHub repository, I noticed that, when I diverted my visual focus from the laptop screen (which was displaying a web page with a white background) to my phone, the laptop screen appeared to turn completely white. Also in that moment, my phone screen appeared to turn extra bright white and high contrast and the objects in my visual field took on a subtly crystalline (i.e. polygonal) appearance as though everything in my universe is fundamentally comprised of crystals. I think that is because, fundamentally speaking, all physical objects which my consciousness renders is comprised of geometric objects (and perhaps there are more dimensions to these objects than what normal waking human consciousness typically renders for the sake of allowing humans to function with relative ease). I noticed that, without such filtering out of those "higher dimensions", my energy felt immediately diverted and I felt pressured by some kind of underlying energy-conservation algorithmic process to follow a course of least amount of effort in terms of how I was moving. I hardly had any room to make frivolous movements like I have been prone to do while sober. It was like being forced to be hyper efficient at whatever my job as karbytes was.

Lastly, what my latest experimentation with vaping DMT has revealed to me is how non-accidental and non-frivolous my existence (as elaborate and socially awkward as it may be in some (relatively localized) contexts) as karbytes really is (as though I was and am the product of some kind of transcendent super-human intelligence which makes karbytes feel like a cherished example of divine creativity flourishing and not just mere apish conceit). I felt like more than just a machine which bumbles through existence doing little other than eating, pooping, and perhaps passing on its genes through sexual reproduction. Instead, I felt like everything about karbytes is just as valid and sensical as what I have considered to be more "appropriate" (i.e. normal, evolutionarily necessary, socially conformist) in terms of existence.

Nothing I have said in this journal entry is particularly novel compared to what I have thought and perhaps even written in the past; but having these experiences with DMT helped me verify these thoughts and see how logically sensical and transhumanist in their beauty my thoughts and experiences are. This personal knowledge (which is gleaned from empirical and conceptual data rendered and fused by my consciousness) seems to coincide with what I feel my highest goals and values are in life. In particular, I have the goal and value of becoming as impersonal and super-human in my abilities as I can and to not allow my assumptions about reality to be treated by me as absolutely insurmountable limits. 

Lastly, something I failed to mention earlier in this note is the fact that other sensory input data seems to get distorted while on DMT. I noticed my tactile senses change such that I became more acutely aware of cold temperature on my skin and a depersonalized sense of being semi in and out of my body and watching tension ripple through it like those tremors had a life of their own while I simply watched as some alien observer. I also noticed the way objects in my auditory field took on a metallic sound (which I have described as being, for lack of a better term, pixelated). I have yet to have experienced a strong enough trip to break away from time passing in my waking life. I could still see that time was moving forward but it did seem that I had gaps lasting approximately ten seconds each in my short term memory similar to what I have experienced on weed and mushrooms (i.e. the sense that my working memory is limited to flashes between intervals lasting a few seconds instead of one continuous and seamless flow of flashes). Finally, while the lights were on and I was busy working with my electronics, I got the sense that there were people (whose features I could not perceive directly) standing around in the room I was in looking at me.

Relevant Topics:

- Holography (pertains to encoding "higher-dimension" objects into "lower-dimension" formats)

- Many-minds interpretation (pertains to the how only one state of a variable in a physical system can be observed by any subjective frame of reference at a time even if objective reality (i.e. whatever exists beyond subjective observation) contains multiple states of that variable simultaneously)

* * *

Well, I made it back to Fremont at approximately 7:00AM. The roads and other public spaces seem unusually devoid of people at this time. As soon as I typed the previous sentence, I noticed the world around me suddenly become brighter as the reddish orange ball which is the sun rose above the mountainous eastern horizon (according to my vantage in the flats of the Baylands).  

I strongly felt the need to augment the note I started earlier this morning while stationed in my motel room. I want to clear up some misconceptions I may have raised in the content I published on my blogs via the past 24 hours.

Firstly, I do nor purport that taking DMT (or any other psychedelic drug) will cause its users to literally travel to alternate universes, converse with aliens, skip ahead or backward along that user's own timeline (because, logically speaking, time only moves forward from the vantage of any subjective (and non omniscient) frame of reference), or attain immortality or any other "superhuman" abilities such as telekinesis or immunity to injury.

Secondly, I do not mean to suggest that the unusual experiences which users of psychedelics experience while high on a psychedelics is merely a hallucination while not at all be the result of the user observing data about the world which is external to the user's body. After all, everything a human perceives and imagines could technically be classified as hallucinations (though there are different types of hallucinations).

The qualia which humans observe in their present moment experience is usually considered by most humans to be an accurate depiction of the world which is external to the human observer if those same qualia are allegedly observed by multiple human observers. Otherwise, humans tend to treat such experiences as being the product of only one human observer's nervous system.

To avoid being seen as a fool by other humans, I'll just default to telling them that I assume that all so-called mystical or paranormal phenomena which occur exclusively within the context of a psychedelic drug trip or of a neurologically similar altered state of brain functioning such as the feeling of time speeding up or slowing down or the appearance objects in three-dimensional space breathing which might occur as a result of oxygen deprivation is entirely confined to exactly one human's frame of reference rather than some phenomena which is occurring anywhere external to that human's brain.

(I do fancy the idea of there being phenomena which are not typically visible to most humans unless they are in a radically altered state of brain functioning. If such an idea is true, then altered states of consciousness could be accurately thought of as an amplifier of some (perhaps electromagnetic) signals and a filter which prevents some other types of signals from interfering with what the brain registers while in an altered state of functioning).