How Bitcoin is like a Psychedelic Drug
Psychedelic drugs ferociously alter consciousness; LSD and Mushrooms are known to do this. They cause a person to experience a gamut of internal changes and perceptions. The person becomes a psychonaut, searching the depths of their unconscious terrain. During this exploration, they experience unity with nature, and their boundaries are ultimately dissolved. This allows them to connect with fellow humans and relate to them in ways previously unconsidered.
Also read: How Bitcoin Can Alter Our Psychology
Psychedelic literally means mind-manifesting, which implies that a person can examine and fully explore their minds. The experience can then stretch for what feels like an eternity as they undergo wonderment and bliss. They may even discover something novel or profound about themselves. This aspect of the experience is referred to by Zen monks as Satori: the flash of insight.
Bitcoin, amazingly, is a psychedelic drug of sorts.
Bitcoin is a mind-manifesting experience. It deeply alters the psyche, and also causes intense insight. It is immaterial money put into focus by the human mind. It is cyberspace fashioned for practical use via code and algorithm; it is mind turned to the will. Through Bitcoin, the boundaries of finance and economics are dissolved. It is the ultimate psychedelic expression, intended to meet humanity’s needs and desires for economic self-fulfillment.
The digital currency is borderless like the psychedelic experience. It is sprawling and immersive. Bitcoin can navigate its way over any geography, across water or land, and bypass any government-controlled checkpoint. While on mind-manifesting drugs, a person undergoes the sharing of consciousness with others, transferring memories, dreams, fantasies, thoughts and emotions. People essentially open-source each others’ minds, and engage in true peer-2-peer intimacy. Bitcoin hijacked this property. It is open-source and peer-2-peer for all to experience, as people can share and alter it in a myriad of ways, for an ongoing and unending sublime creation; it is the true the democratization of money.
Bitcoin is also decentralized, which is a primary characteristic of the psychedelic experience. Once boundaries are dissolved, the individual soul becomes decentralized as well. Bitcoin takes advantage of this fact, and dissolves all boundaries regarding how money should be perceived and defined. Therefore, bitcoin represents the start of mind-manifesting finance.
These truths contain many implications.
In my previous article, I mentioned that money is like a drug. Fiat money resembles cocaine. It amps a person up, makes them feel invincible, yet they also get aggressive and mad; and when they come down, spent, they start feeling depressed and anxious. This would make fiat currency a destructive and horrible drug, something people should stay away from.
On the other side of the medallion, Bitcoin is more like the psychedelic of currency, maybe like magic mushrooms. The come up is exciting and it intensifies quickly. The peak experience blows the mind and causes a multitude of sensations and perceptions, many of them positive. And there is relatively no come down, just an afterglow of unimaginable awe. Bitcoin personifies this awe in digital form, and it is not so terribly addicting as to cause abuse and self-destructiveness. Sometimes, the psychedelic voyager may experience terror, but when something is so new and strange, it is likely to cause brief episodes of intense fear and confusion, before being acclimated by the psyche.
If we can make use of this metaphor, the implication means increasing Bitcoin adoption and acceptance. It means dispensing with this idea that money is evil; that its only use is to motivate the greedy and selfish. As Andreas Antonopoulos said,
“Bitcoin is money, but it is so much more than that.”
Antonopoulos is obviously right. Bitcoin is so more than money. It is an experience, a celebration of humanity’s determination to strive for innovation in every aspect of life, to turn the physical into mental. It is a testament to where we are going. It is psychedelic in a purely symbolic sense, because it has the power to change and expand minds. Bitcoin as a technology is an exhalation of what it means to be human. It is absolutely amazing, and will lift innovation to towering new heights, as will any blockchain based technology to come.
Do you think that the psychedelic and drug analogy can be useful for spurring more bitcoin adoption, especially from other subcultures or countercultures? Let us know in the comments below!
Image Sources: youtube.com, bloomberg.com, shutterstock.com
The opinions expressed in this article are not necessarily those of Bitcoin.com.
