Time for me to embrace AI

One thing I know about myself is that I am hesitant to try new things and new ideas. I have messed around with AI in the past, but it was mainly for seeing what it could do with art. I never wanted to learn anything about it when it came to anything else outside of it just creating art. One of my goals for 2024 is to learn how AI can enhance my life.

One of the ways I am hoping to use AI this year is for the exploration of my mind. I am planning on doing mushrooms a lot more this year, and in doing so, I am hoping to make a lot of changes and let go of a lot of the things that have held me back over the years. Psychedelics are amazing tools for really digging deep into your mind. While a lot of people want to go explore the outer reaches of space, I am more interested in exploring the depths of my own mind.

So, I am hoping to create a lot of cool psychedelic art that conveys all sorts of different emotions, because that emotion is what can make an art peace have meaning. The image at the top of this post was created by giving the AI program an image of myself. Then I combined three other images that I created and let the program do its thing. After a bunch of different images and tweaking things, this is the final image. The AI did a pretty good job at keeping the likeness close to me. The beard is even the same length as I have it now, but there is far more gray in my actual beard.

One thing I love about psychedelics is that they allow you to go on a journey. That journey is all in your head, but it can feel like you are exploring through time and space. The mind is a massive place that you can explore and I don't think that we as humans spend enough time exploring our mind and what it really means to be conscious.

I had done mushrooms a couple times and thought they were fun, but I never really thought about using psychedelics to explore my mind until I went through ketamine therapy. While I was in my ketamine treatments, that was the first time I went deep inside my mind.

I recently saw a documentary about the human brain and they took a slice of a human brain that was the size of a grain of rice. Inside that piece of brain that was the size of a grain of rice, there are miles and miles of neural pathways. When you do psychedelics, you active normally dormant pathways and create new connections. They have even been shown to reconnect and repair damage neural pathways. So in essence, psychedelic drugs have the possibility to heal your brain.

These drugs have given me a safe place to heal from PTSD. There isn't much safer of a place than your own head where the issues all stem from. Now combined with AI, I have more tools to help combat PTSD and even give life and imagery to those feelings.

PTSD from war is something that I have dealt with for over 20 years now. I feel like I am just now learning how to deal with those feelings and I attribute a lot of that to the work I have been doing alongside the use of psychedelics and cannabis. I am now really beginning to figure out how my mind works.

One thing I have come to realize through my different trips is that we are all connected. We all have a cosmic connection. I have become a lot more empathetic to others and the struggles that everyone goes through. I used to think that the world was out to get me and bad things were happening "to me". I have learned that everything in life has a lesson and bad things don't happen to me, but for me to learn from and move forward.

Everyone and everything is connected. The world is a beautiful place. The mind is a beautiful place where we can harness the power of the universe to create the life we want. Everything starts inside our own mind and once we learn how to harness that, we can unlock the keys to the universe.

^{All images were created by me using MidJourney}

Using AI art to explore my mind

Time for me to embrace AI