It can, instead, be an AID to the person who is actively using their knowledge and awareness in doing most of the Work themselves.
When I take creatine before hitting the gym I can push my body harder and longer than I can when I don't. Taking that supplement in and of itself does nothing useful. It doesn't replace the physical work, but it makes it easier to keep going beyond the point when I would otherwise be forced to stop by pain and exhaustion. I recover much faster afterwards as well.
My first impression of microdosing, after only 3 days, is that it acts as a performance enhancing supplement for my emotional center in very much the same way. External considering was impossible for me for a very long time, which made The Work impossible for me. My emotional center is very weak, and my default emotional state is always very morose and defensive, bordering on complete paranoia.
I made a lot of progress when I first gave up on the fourth way by turning more towards the way of the fakir. Torturing my body in the gym was the only useful thing I could do with myself for a long time, and eventually I began to notice that by strengthening my body, and exercising mental and emotional discipline over my body, I could at the very least get along better in daily life than I could before. And I could interact normally with others without using alcohol as a crutch to overcome my crippling fear of being emotionally open with others.
Still it is exhausting and terrifying and I always need long periods of recovery time after difficult interactions with others, and especially after larger social gatherings.
100mg of dried PC taken with my morning vitamins on the first day gave me a noticeable emotional boost. I noticed right away that I could stop worrying about myself long enough to really put myself into other people's shoes. I'm not sure how to describe it but in the past my attempts at external considering were more like a brute force attempt to intellectually understand where the other person was coming from, while emotionally I would remain very much focused on myself and protecting myself. The past few days my attempts feel very different, like I'm able to just let go and stop worrying about myself and just feel what the other person is feeling, instead of trying to think their feelings, if that makes sense.
So it's too soon to tell for sure if there is any real benefit here, or if it's just imagination on my part.
I just wanted to chime in with my experiences so far in case they are useful to anyone who is trying to decide whether or not to experiment in this direction, while emphasizing Joe's points that anyone doing this should temper their expectations. It can't be stressed enough: it is ONLY a supplement, not a magic solution to deeper problems in any way whatsoever.
I know a lot of recreational "psychonaughts" who believe they're somehow "enlightening" themselves. They're delusional. They have no strong discipline in any area of their lives. I've even watched some of them lose what little discipline they had as they become "more spiritually aware". Their particular spiritual awareness precludes awareness of mundane things like eating healthy and sometimes even practicing basic hygiene.
Many of them remind me of this quote from The Fire From Within:
[Don Juan] said that whenever what is taken to be the unknown turns out to be the unknowable the results are disastrous. Seers feel drained, confused. A terrible oppression takes possession of them. Their bodies lose tone, their reasoning and sobriety wander away aimlessly, for the unknowable has no energizing effects whatsoever. It is not within human reach; therefore, it should not be intruded upon foolishly or even prudently. The new seers realized that they had to be prepared to pay exorbitant prices for the faintest contact with it.
Whenever anyone asks me about my opinion on psychedelics I tell them that I wouldn't touch them without having read that book, at the very least. In fact, when waiting to decide whether or not I would go through with experimenting myself, I gave myself 2 months to reread The Fire From Within, The Active Side of Infinity, and All And Everything while making sincere efforts to work on external considering and practicing the three-phase progression with the more difficult people in my life who I would normally just avoid out of fear.
"The average man's reaction is to think that the order of that statement should be reversed," he went on. "A seer who can hold his own in the face of the unknown can certainly face petty tyrants. But that's not so. What destroyed the superb seers of ancient times was that assumption. We know better now. We know that nothing can temper the spirit of a warrior as much as the challenge of dealing with impossible people in positions of power. Only under those conditions can warriors acquire the sobriety and serenity to stand the pressure of the unknowable.
He explained that one of the greatest accomplishments of the seers of the Conquest was a construct he called the three-phase progression. By understanding the nature of man, they were able to reach the incontestable conclusion that if seers can hold their own in facing petty tyrants, they can certainly face the unknown with impunity, and then they can even stand the presence of the unknowable.
And while that doesn't really apply to microdosing, it certainly applies to people who think that taking trip doses is some kind of useful shortcut.
What does apply to microdosing, and is something that gives me red flags about continuing my own experimenting, is something that I also learned from my physical work.
Without an honest baseline measure of what you can accomplish without a supplement, you won't be able to measure what, if any, objective improvements that supplement provides. The gym equivalent of seeking a "free lunch" is the guy who starts taking steroids the moment his progress slows down, instead of just working harder to push through to the next level naturally, with nutritional supplements that don't carry the risk of interfering with your body's natural hormone production. He destroys his endocrine system and becomes chemically dependent on external hormones because he thought that working out for 1 hour 3 times a week was a lot. It's not. If you're pushing yourself to your physical limits every single day for 10 years straight while staying on top of your nutrition and recovery, and THEN you start to notice a decline in performance, then maybe you might want to consider hormone supplementation in your 40s or 50s. Until then, you're just being lazy and you will pay the price for your laziness by permanently damaging your body.
Microdosing has given me a quick glimpse of what is possible with intense emotional work. That, taken with the C's warnings about altering neural pathways and creating chemical dependence makes me wonder if maybe the benefits stop there. Maybe just getting the glimpse of what is possible was enough and I should stop now before I become dependent. I don't know. I always make fun of the guys who turn too quickly to hormone supplementation in the gym, because I did the hard work of pushing through without it. But when it comes to emotional work and I'm presented with something that actually makes it easier, the temptation to convince myself that it's safe and beneficial to continue doing it is very strong.
