Joe Rogan

wall of text i know, but i found it funny:
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"People on fear factor ate rotten animal dicks for a chance at $50,000 dollars and you’re telling me you have a problem eating bland fungus for a chance at contacting god?

Wait… Contacting who?

Now, if my young self had ever heard my current self saying something this crazy, I would have thought that I was a ****ing crackpot, and I would have probably immediately dismissed me. I was far more convinced that I had the answers that I needed from life back then than I am now, and anything that challenged that perception was just labeled “bull****” for my own protection.

I’ve had many intense psychedelic experiences, and one of the most profound effects of these trips isn’t just that the world feels strange when you’re on them, but that the world is forever changed once you’re back. Once the genie is out of the bottle it’s impossible to forget.

Mushrooms were the first real psychedelics that I tried, so I really had no idea what to expect. I heard that you “hallucinate” on them, so I expected to see a bunch of **** that wasn’t there. What actually happened was far stranger than that.

I didn’t see anything that wasn’t there, but I did see the things that have always been there in a totally different way. The first thing I noticed after I started to feel “funny” was that there seemed to be an underlying geometric pattern to everything that I could never see before. It was almost like I had put on some goggles that allowed me to see secret connections that everything shared.

Everything seemed to be made of these patterns, and despite the solid nature of the world I was looking at, it almost felt like what I was seeing was that everything that seemed separate was actually just one huge, all encompassing thing expressing itself in different frequencies.

As the trip got deeper the natural world around me seemed to be made out of thoughts, and as the effects of the mushrooms made these thoughts stranger and stranger, the world itself seemed to merge with these thoughts and become indistinguishable.

The hills were breathing. I watched them pulsate in and out in fascination, until I realized that it was my own breath that was making this happen. It was like I was now looking at the world as it was being projected onto a very thin screen, and every time I breathed it was teasing me with what was behind the screen like a hot chick wearing see-through lingerie.

By this time I was psychically naked for the first time in my life. I realized how much of what I thought of as “me” was just psychic armor that I had applied long ago and forgotten about. Social status, accumulated material possessions, accomplishments, friendships and feuds alike – all stripped away to reveal a core; a core with no language, no culture, and no fear.
Then this core was shown the true nature of this world, and I watched things that I always thought of as “normal” as if I was a visiting alien from another galaxy.

All the predetermined patterns of behavior that we follow were all revealed like tracks on a grid, and the more we follow these tracks the less we have to think. The tracks can be completely bizarre, but as long as they’re there even the most unlikely of patterns will be followed.
African women will cut their lips and stretch them out to fit plates. American men will wrap a traditional cloth around their neck and hang it in front of their chest in order to be taken seriously in a business meeting. It was all the same thing manifesting itself in different actions.

I saw the whole world like I would see it if I was an alien. Eventually I came back, and the world stopped breathing, and the mushrooms stopped talking to me – but I don’t think I’ve ever looked at anything the same way since.

I’ve always said that if we were seeing our world not even as an alien, but just from the perspective of people living a few hundred years ago it would seem almost impossibly bizarre. I have this routine that I follow where I hire a car to take me to the airport, and while he’s driving I sit in the back seat and get on the internet on my laptop.
Seems pretty normal and straight forward to most folks.

Now if you really think about it, just 400 years ago this “normal” routine that I have would have been the stuff of the strangest fiction.
I’m moving faster than a sprinting horse inside a big metal box that’s powered by tiny controlled explosions and we’re rolling over a hard, man made surface that’s interconnected throughout the entire continent. I’m typing away on a machine that is interfaced with the entire world through some invisible signal that almost instantly connects me to the entire current sum of accumulated human knowledge, and while all this crazy **** is happening, I’ll occasionally pull out something smaller than my hand, and I’ll use it to talk to people that are on the other side of the ****ing world.

I will eventually get to a giant group of buildings where I will be scanned for explosives. I’ll then be strapped into a metal tube that’s also powered by explosions, and along with hundreds of other people I’ll be hurled through the sky so high that you can see the curve of the earth, and so fast that you literally go forward in time for the slightest fraction of a second.

What…
The…
****.

To pay for all of this I don’t give them gold coins, or a goat, or even let them **** me. All I have to do is let them hold on to a small card that I have, and then I’ll scribble something that’s supposed to represent “me” on a piece of paper. This stands as an agreement that I am willing to pay in the future for this experience, and I will use this strange method to aquire everything in my life.

At the end of each 30 days I will pay for the total that I owe by, wait for it… writing on a piece of paper. Most of my bills are paid online now, so in that case I’m not even writing anything. I’m just pressing on little buttons, and those little button presses support me and fortify my life.

That’s our everyday life, and if you lived 500 years ago and explained that this is what the future would be like there would be a very good chance that a group of people would burn you at the stake.

I’m sitting in a hotel room in Nashville right now finishing this up. I will copy and paste it into a location that my web browser is pointed to, and it will be read by thousands of people almost immediately. I’ll then head out to a club in town where people have agreed to come and listen to me make noises with my mouth that represent the focused thoughts bouncing around in my mind.
These thoughts will make people think, and by laughing at them, they will actually make people feel better.

I will never say that I truly understand this world, because the more I learn about it the more I feel that’s actually impossible.
What I can say though, is that as strange as it is, I appreciate every bizarre moment of it. I appreciate the freedom to think this way, and I appreciate the patience and attention of all you people reading and considering all this crazy ****.

It would be a lot easier to understand what the **** I’m talking about if you did some mushrooms. Or had a baby. Either one, really."