This is such an important point that's easy to lose sight of. It's so easy to imagine ourselves as better than others; all the more so when those others live li

This is such an important point that's easy to lose sight of. It's so easy to imagine ourselves as better than others; all the more so when those others live lives unfathomably different from our own. On that note, I want to share a favorite quote of mine, about the burgeoning of empathy via psychedelics: "My most recent mushroom trip (also the largest dose I've ever taken) I became fixated on a news story I had heard that week. About an 8 year old girl from a tribe in the Amazon, who was tied to a tree and burned alive in order to scare her people off their land so it could be logged. I realized that at the moment he did it, whoever lit that gasoline actually felt/thought more or less okay about what he was doing. And my mind was illuminated with dozens of the parallels between that man's malformed, horrific perceptual/behavioral state, and mine. I saw the same mistakes in value attribution, the same willful ignorance of the consequences of my acts and words. And there was nothing I could do to deny the similarity."