The Menu is Not the Meal

I've been listening to a lot of podcasts lately. The usual hipster suspects, of course, like This American Life, but also some ones you might not expect. I'm a big fan of the Joe Rogan podcast, because he's into MMA, which I have discovered I really dig. Aside from his emphasis on all things punchy and kicky, he is also a perpetrator and aficionado of high weirdness. He recently had Dennis Mckenna on his show to talk about the Mayan apocalypse and all that nonsense (or "fuckery" as he likes to say). Dennis is brother to the more infamous Terrence Mckenna, who was rather instrumental in the popularization of psychedelics like psilocybin mushrooms and DMT in the 90's. If you went to a rave circa 1993, you heard his voice, booming at you over the speakers, explaining (and possibly inducing an experience of) the fractal nature of the universe.

the sun is also a star, as it turns out

Now, the brothers Mckenna are/were a delightful bunch (Terrence passed on to the Great Glowstick in the sky in 2000, alas). They had an interesting theory, which ended up popularizing the Mayan nonsense, in that they believed that the end of the Mayan calendar corresponded with a calendar they had discovered in the I Ching. This, bolstered with some prophesies they overheard/created while under the influence of catastrophic amounts of magic mushrooms... well, you get the idea. Long story short, they had some trippy experiences in a Mexican jungle back in the seventies, and spent the next several years trying to justify, corroborate, and generally make sense of what happened. Terrence, in an effort to explain to himself what happened to his brain, came up with a lot of weird math that he believed tied all these disparate elements together.

This fascinated Joe Rogan. On an earlier podcast, he'd discussed his fascination with the Fibonacci Sequence, which is set of numbers which outlines proportions that seem to govern much of what we consider healthy and beautiful in nature - the ways that leaves grow, the proportions of beautiful faces, the curve of a nautilus shell. He actually said something at this point, however, that struck me, and stuck in my craw, as it were. He said something to the effect that he was amazed that somewhere, there was a mathematical formula that ruled these things. The implication was that the math made the proportions happen, that somehow, these formulas were operating and creating these organizations of matter.

This may be a bit of science heresy, but I really don't believe that idea.

I think what we're dealing with here is a type of confusion very familiar to anyone who has worked with the more popularized forms of Buddhism expounded by Alan Watts. Watts has a way of compressing very complicated ideas into easy to remember slogans, and this has always been one of my favorites. In one of his most famous phrases he said, "The map is not the territory. The menu is not the meal." He was talking about the confusion between our ideas of the things themselves; between the words we use for things, and the things themselves. Humans have a tendency towards this kind of category confusion. It's magic thinking, believing an equivalency exists between the words we say, the maps we create, and the world around us. There is an equivalency of a kind, and, in magick, it's a very useful belief system that can produce occasionally surprising and instructive results. For the most part, however, it's a one way street.

How does this relate to the Fibonacci Sequence? Well, the numbers describe a relationship in matter, they may even predict certain behaviors. But never, in no way, can a formula be said to be real.  Matter is the primary thing, and our experience thereof, and the numbers are a descriptive tool: useful, but having no existence in and of themselves.

When we confuse these categories, we get weirdness like people wondering if the world is going to end based on calendars and math. We also get weirdness like people believing that the formulas that we use to describe the universe (great though they are) are more real than the stuff they are meant to describe.

The takeaway (also known as tl/dr): the world is real. Don't confuse formulas (or any other prophesies) for reality. I'll talk about why I think so in subsequent posts. Have a great week!

update: some other thoughts on this subject (admittedly involving morphogenic fields and other fuckery that I'm not so sure about, can be found in an interview with Rupert Sheldrake on the very fine Disinfo podcast.

Kratom and PAWS, a follow up post

Update: The original post referenced in this post can be found here. Please check it out.

So, not to get too inside baseball on things, but the post on this blog that has received the most hits in the past year is a post I wrote back in November about getting off kratom. Mostly from people looking up information on how to use kratom to get over their own issues with Post Acute Withdrawal Syndrome. This suggests a couple of issues to me:

1. People are doing a lot of drugs (duh)
2. People are looking for information on what they assume is a slightly less dangerous substance to do some of the heavy lifting of recovery from arguably more dangerous substances (I'm guessing alcohol and opiates).

Now, anybody who knows me knows that people using plants (technically called ethnobotany) is a hobby of mine. I've done a lot of research, and at the risk of sounding like an idiot, I'd like to state something very clearly - kratom is a very temporary fix for opiate addiction maintenance. Please note that just because it's "natural" (e.g. less processed, closer to the original plant) doesn't mean that it's "safer." It can be just as addictive as anything processed.

Kratom is a very mild narcotic, and most people can do it with little to no problems. People have used it for hundreds of years to enrich their lives and make living on earth a little nicer. The plants are not the problem.

The problem is you.

By you, I mean the person that is looking for relief from the pain of withdrawal, which presupposes that you have already managed to addict yourself to something or other. If you are addictive, your relationship to plants with abuse potential is, let's say, problematic. Another good word is dangerous.

What all the convoluted logic above amounts to is this - if you're trying to get off opiates, be very careful doing kratom. It may temporarily relieve your depression and the physical symptoms of withdrawal, but ultimately it can flip on you, and you will be no better off than when you started. It is easy to develop tolerance to kratom, and there are new processing methods, including extractions and reinforced strains, that up the ante in a big way. It is less expensive, and the social stigma of stirring powder into juice or brewing a relatively inexpensive legal tea is a lot lower than trying to score pills or snorting heroin. I'm not saying it doesn't work. If you are only in mild trouble, you might be able to hang. I'm just saying that, instead of turning to another substance, you might want to address behavioral and chemical issues (i.e. your internal neurochemistry, depression, anxiety) that might be better taken care of by a doctor. If you're self medicating in this way, you risk addicting yourself to a different substance. 

This might leave you saying "Well, dammit, what am I supposed to do, here? I am in pain!" You need to do what keeps you from killing yourself. All I'm saying is that at some point, like with methadone, really you are just extending the amount of time that you will be kicking. It is a risk/benefit analysis. If you're here looking for advice, I don't have a lot to offer, except please, please talk to somebody who's smarter than me. Don't get your advice for getting off drugs from some random guy off the internet. Please take care of your self, and know that with help, you can get through this. Please don't try to do it by yourself.