Two realities II, part 2 of 8

Two realities II, part 2 of 8

Scott Adams, Win bigly : persuasion in a world where facts don't matter, 2017

p.42
   I started to feel as if I had one reality when I was normal and an entirely different reality when I was high.  The interesting thing is that both of those realities worked fine.  When I was high, I could still navigate the world and do all the things that people do.  There were a few activities, such as studying for tests, that I didn't do as well when high.  And driving was a bad idea.  But for most daily activities there was no important difference in how I performed.  That's when I started to realize that people could be living in different realities while inhabiting the same room.  I knew from my own experience that I could experience two realities in the same room just by going from normal to high. 
p.42
   In the later years I came to understand why everyone seemed so much nicer to me when I was high.  It turns out that people were actually nicer to me.  And there is a perfectly good reason:  My cheery relaxed attitude while high was rubbing off on the people around me.  My other reality──the one in which I was not high──brought out my more intense, ambitious, and introspective personality.  People respond to that personality with less friendliness because I look like I'm all business, and it rubs off on them.  I wasn't perceiving reality to be different when I was high──I was causing it to be different. 
p.42
My reality made perfect sense when I believed I was only imagining that people were acting nicer to me when I was high.  And reality stil made sense when I realized (or believed) I was causing that niceness by my own demeanor.  
p.42
When I was high, I knew people would respond to me in a certain way, on average, and they did.  Or so it seemed.  

p.43
psychedelic mushrooms.
It was the best day of my life, at least in terms of pure joy.  And that isn't an exaggeration.  No other experience has ever come close.  But while the pleasure was temporary──literally just a spike in certain brain chemistry──the experience left me permanently changed. 
p.43
   When you are on mushrooms, you understand the world around you, and you can operate within it.  But at the same time, you become aware that your interpretation of your reality is fluid.  You see ordinary items almost as if you are an alien visiting this strange world for the first time, but for some odd reason you know what everything is and what it does.  In other words, you become aware that your perceptions are independent from the underlying reality. 
p.43
Once you understand your experience of life as an interpretation of reality, you can't go back to your old way of thinking.  ([ This is statement is not true ])

   (Names:  Adams, Scott, 1957 - author., Title:  Win bigly : persuasion in a world where facts don't matter / Scott Adams.,  Identifiers:  LCCN 2017034760 | ISBN 9780735219717 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780735219724 (e-book) | ISBN 9780525533320 (international export edition), Subjects:  LCSH: persuasion (psychology) | blog──united states. | deception──united states. | truthfulness and falsehood──united states. | social psychology──united states. | Trump, Donald, 1946─, Classification:  LCC BF637.P4 A23 2017 | DDC 303.3/42-dc23,  
classification record available at  https://lccn.loc.gov/2017034760, 2017, )
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