"being high", goal pursuit, dopamine, internal conflict

there's something about being "high" that's really hard to let go of. let's say you're feeling euphoric from mdma or meth or opiates. when the first waves of "not-high" state start to hit you, it can be pretty awful. deep sadness in the pit of your stomach, isolation, hopelessness. it would be understandable to want to take more drugs at this point to avoid those feelings.

parts of our deep suffering are often probably coming from very old things, fragile childlike stuff. this is kind of a discordance, often pretty unconscious but still there. for example if some childlike part was hurt before it knew how to deal with it, it still has this wretched image of itself, which is constantly grating against our adult self-image. dunno, that's pretty freudian and rough, but something like that. and so, if drugs let us kind of muzzle the discordance to just believe completely in some positive perspective, then when the drugs wear off and the muzzle disappears, those things ache particularly. partly because you've kind of betrayed yourself in a way.

(incidentally, this might explain why mdma with psychotherapy could be positive without a hangover.)

i think on a smaller scale this is what's happening without drugs, with every little perspective we take. we don't like to let go of our current movement/direction/goal. and the more that connects to any really long-term deep things we haven't been connected to, the harder it is probably. it hurts when you believe in something and that rug is swept out.

i wonder if dopamine contributes to energizing these goal-states - maybe partly related to the idea that dopamine can stabilize representations. some drugs really blast the dopamine. and you can feel great, fully believing in what you're doing or whatever perspective you have at that point. you feel like you're making progress toward this overall goal that you believe in.

this seems like randy o'reilly's "tantrums" that come from frustrated goal-pursuit. it's the worst feeling. it might even be the same thing as hopelessness, because if you have some idea and motivation for how to turn things around and start feeling better, then your goals really haven't been completely frustrated; you still have a goal-state at that higher level that you feel like you can make progress toward.

with or without drugs, this also brings up something similar to the last post i made here about what's special about human suffering. one thing humans can do is entertain perspectives that frustrate the goals of our other perspectives. like when you're an adult, it's hard to get too excited about christmas, because you've had better things than presents, and you know santa claus isn't real.... thus your mental hipster is constantly short-circuiting lots of potentially engrossing goal states. (this reminds me of "zen mind beginner's mind".)