Essays on freedom and personal fulfilment by Chris Barclay
In Dr. Oliver Sack’s book, The Mind’s Eye, the famous neurologist explores clinical cases of individuals afflicted with fascinating perceptual aberrations, including the inability to recognize faces. Sacks, who himself suffered from this disorder all of his life, recounts a case of apologizing to a bearded man he had bumped into when in fact it […]
Continue ReadingHalfway down the rabbit hole of a recent psychedelic experience, I encountered the fable of the Scorpion and the Frog. What I always thought was a simple morality tale suddenly took on new meaning as a powerful metaphor for my own contradictions and possibility of self-integration. Through this mystical experience, I have come to see […]
Continue ReadingOn daily walks, I often put on a Lex Fridman podcast or Sam Harris’s Making Sense. Both of these are long-form interviews, taking deep dives into the nature of human experience. But my guilty pleasure is a YouTube channel called Coming Home. These are stories from a wide range of people who recount their near-death […]
Continue ReadingThe following is a stream of consciousness dictation during a recent psychedelic experience with friends. To protect their identities, I’ll call them Nick and Jacob. The paragraph formatting and punctuation (such as capitalizing ‘It’) were added for contextual clarity. I didn’t correct the changes in grammatical person.Stick with it and enjoy the ride. This is […]
Continue ReadingIn 1960, counter-culture icon Timothy Leary went to Mexico and took psychedelic mushrooms, inspiring him to launch the Harvard Psilocybin Project. He and other psychologists believed these mind-altering substances offered access to higher states of consciousness, and a personal connection to the divine. Leary was profoundly changed by his psychedelic experiences and famously exhorted disaffected […]
Continue ReadingThe jungle is so loud at night. Through a series of increasingly poor decisions, I found myself stranded on a ledge in the darkness, high up in the wilds of Mt. Intanon, the highest mountain in Thailand. Alone and ill-prepared, I had lost my way back to the trailhead and run out of daylight. It […]
Continue ReadingFacebook friends. Instagram followers. Discord groups. We are building systems that help us optimize for separation. While claiming to further connectivity, these algorithms and their frameworks teach us to quantify our personal value by audience engagement versus through actual human affinity. They keep us hooked by gamifying social interaction, rewarding performative likability in place of […]
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