I'm a bibliomaniac, or more euphemistically, a bibliophile. If Amazon sells it, I've read it. Okay, okay, now I'm just being immodest.
What brought me here? The same
eros that has inflamed your souls: a relentless desire to know, intimately, the very nature of reality.
Since I hit my mid-teens, I relinquished the unquestioned doctrines I was taught and began reading--
anything!--that might explain the nature of reality.
Could Richard Dawkins have exposed the blood-stained underbelly of our universe? Perhaps.
Could Socrates have learned a trick or two from Diotima that leads us to the Good? Maybe.
Could Buddha have truly soared higher than angels toward
sunyata? Could be. Of course, then there's the thorny issue of whether we're supposed to secularize those "angels" and other supernatural beings.
Could Kabbalah be a nuts-and-bolts application of Neoplatonism, exploding Ein Sof into all of creation? Possibly.
Could W.V.O. Quine be right, reducing all of ontology to a desert landscape? Conceivably.
Many questions, few definitive answers. But I think Aldous Huxley was right:
no matter what, just add more kindness! That seems to be true enough, more so than most doctrines.
I am here partly out of the aforementioned curiosity, but also from genuine admiration: here we have countless kitchen chemists, boldly experimenting and sharing. It's like Alexander Shulgin, only Internetized: a decentralized network of peers who openly communicate and advance psychedelic knowledge.
Beyond the perennial questions about reality, I'm also much more conservative than most people involved in these sorts of communities. Nowadays, I have a
Burkean sense of culture: to reverse McKenna, culture
is your friend. It's the meshwork from which springs families, friendships, temples, artwork,
etc. There's little we can individually know for sure, but much wisdom that informs our lives subtly, from centuries of inherited practice.
P.S. I wrote an introductory essay to bring me one step closer to membership. I'm sorry for the pretentious show-boating of knowledge. I purposefully refrained from posting an "introductory essay" beforehand; I usually detest talking about myself specifically. But once I get started....
"The infinite vibratory levels, the dimensions of interconnectedness are without end." -- Alex Grey