Egregoros

@nyx My first foray into substance use was kinda the backwards version of yours, in that I had no symbolic language to work with but I had a very innate distaste for being high for high's sake and would intentionally put myself in situations that required me to like stress test, and it was after that did I find a way to navigate a lot of altered states, which inevitably become useful when I started exploring more occult stuff.

That said i think the west's biggest problem with entheogens is that we culturally view them as things that *do* stuff *for* us, rather than *allow* us to do stuff for *ourselves*, because it innately relinquishes agency from the experience. And while the sense of losing control is part of healthier experience we as a whole don't see them as anything but tools, when we should be seeing them as collaborators, and even more so see the experience as the beginning and the end of that change rather than a course correction.

There's this idea that we've cured whatever psychic or spiritual ailment we sought to rid ourselves of after the drug has worn off when really all that's happened is you've been shown what to do. Typical map is not the territory shit.

I could ramble on this for days because I hate substance discourse in our current social climate because it's run by fucking morons, but my main point is that that the west sees drugs as things to consume, not medicine, or teachers, or guides, and because we're so hellbent on framing everything as an exercise in extraction rather than mutation.