Now that we’ve got over introductions and are finally acquainted, it might do us well to consider what makes an Accidental Psychonaut. Else you won’t know what we’re in for. Leaving you cursed to drift, a languid eye, never to truly discover.
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Criteria consists of having stumbled into the crooked embrace of The Great Unknown, for a psychonaut is a traveller, destined to step outside the constraints of their material. However, beyond this, an Accidental Psychonaut adventures into these untold realms, wholly unprepared and at risk of being enmeshed within gruelling and bizarre terms.
Enmeshed may not be the right word, throwing out some troublesome net, left to guzzle up dolphins and strangle turtles to death. Then again maybe that’s exactly what I’m saying. For an adventure involves seeking out what is different, owing to the palpable feeling that you are not consenting to the consensus you live in. A feeling palpable but not yet perceptible. It’s just we’ve got to choose what our end result will be.
This threatens to be no peaceful endeavour, involving a substantial operation with no guarantee of success. It may necessitate calling on reserve battalions that have never before seen action, commencing a blitzkrieg of the imagination. Cerebral cannons lighting up and splintering once taken for granted assumptions. Just don’t let the Accidental Psychonaut surrender, chained in perpetuity; psychotic, bipolar, schizo, whatever.
Instead, Accidental Psychonauts Anonymous can, however unbecoming, be the first step to admitting a problem. Offering a garnish to pickle in until becoming tantalisingly delicious. It can give us something to celebrate so we can torch the white flag stitched from our entrails.
I mean look at the gifts smuggled across reality’s border! A laugh, some confusion, a new sense of bemusement, who cares, let’s get romantic and show it off. We can grit and bear the mystery until it crystallises. It’s time to challenge the isolated feelings which misted our experience because we didn’t fit in with current understandings.
And so it begins…a quest; a means to digest what lessons have been gifted through interactions with what’s not yet apparent. Maybe there’s more to this world than what’s found in rational heads and the Zeitgeist of Scientific Dread.