[agnos]

I feel like all these articles about magical self-transformation through psychedelics are misleading and somewhat inaccurate. I would have liked to see more about the actual psychedelic experience itself rather than the aftermath. As an occasional "field researcher" of psychedelics, I'm skeptical of these magical claims like "curing" depression with mushrooms or discovering love after taking LSD without saying much about what actually changed in their thought processes or how that happened. Maybe I've yet to have that trip that will make me understand the magic, but I haven't read many accounts of the actual psychedelic experience that have been particularly compelling.

Psychedelics do seem to break down lifelong mental models and thus increase your level of self-awareness but I've personally never been able to integrate these trip experiences to anything meaningful in my daily life. The insights I've gained from psychedelics have had little to no impact on my overall mental health, emotional regulation, interpersonal relationships, etc. There seems to be a large gap between the psychedelic state of mind and the "ego" mind that we must embrace in daily life. Sure, I've had interesting trips that made me question the nature of consciousness and reality. I've alos had trips where I broke down all my mental models and experienced pure randomness/chaos, which I believe is just somewhat incompatible with my Earthly existence, which makes integration difficult.

This "self-awareness" is a common theme I've experienced in trips is just the pure randomness of reality/existence. There is no "reason" why anything happens. There's no reason you are you, and there's no reason to be anything different. I think if you truly explore self-awareness, you will reach this point. You are a configuration that has no inherent "reason" to be that particular configuration. You can hope to transform into a different configuration, but there's no compelling reason to be anything else because at the core, everything is arbitrary. The best you come out with is a sense of disillusionment or depersonalization. Maybe you can overcome this point in the journey and reach "enlightenment". I've yet to experience what's past this, but maybe someone else can shed some light on that.

Actually, I wonder if more self-awareness can be a bad thing for some people, and if that's what it comes down to. Often times when I feel the most self aware, I'm the most lost in my own head and disconnected from reality and other people. This isn't objectively a bad thing, but I don't see how it leads to realizations about love and connectedness, which I think are the real antidotes to things like depression and emptiness.

[HKH2]

> This "self-awareness" is a common theme I've experienced in trips is just the pure randomness of reality/existence. There is no "reason" why anything happens. There's no reason you are you, and there's no reason to be anything different. I think if you truly explore self-awareness, you will reach this point. You are a configuration that has no inherent "reason" to be that particular configuration.

There probably isn't a teleological reason why, but there are certainly reasons why. That's why biology etc. exist.

> You can hope to transform into a different configuration, but there's no compelling reason to be anything else because at the core, everything is arbitrary. The best you come out with is a sense of disillusionment or depersonalization. Maybe you can overcome this point in the journey and reach "enlightenment". I've yet to experience what's past this, but maybe someone else can shed some light on that.

There are limits to the utility of desire. How can life be meaningful without a body? Without contentment, how can anything have value?

[mistermann]

There ability to achieve a mental state of unknown can be useful for contemplating such questions in my experience.

These have been helpful to me:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ineffability

https://iep.utm.edu/gettier/

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Na%C3%AFve_realism_(psycholo...

[brotchie]

I'm in the same boat as you: how exactly did the psychedelic experience affect a long lasting change. Here's my story of how psilocybin cured my existential depression. I had other insights during the trip, but this is my after-the-fact reasoning about why the trip was effective at alleviating depression.

I've often struggled with existential depression: Along the lines of "The sun is going to explode in a few billion years, what's the point in doing anything today?" This didn't really affect my day-to-day life that much, but I often struggled to be motivated because of this overhanging existential "what's the point?"

Dosage: 5g dried golden teachers, ground with burr grinder, soaked in lemon juice, and then consumed in one go.

Felt like nothing was happening all that much for an hour, but then a gradual come-up of an altered state, euphoria. My senses started merging: words had taste, sounds had color, etc. then I felt I was losing touch with reality (later realized this was my ego fighting to hold on).

Things that I thought were intrinsic to the human conscious experience started to break down: I lost an understanding of the concept of time (looking at my bedside clock was nonsensical), as the trip became more aggressive, I actually started losing the concept of 4D space-time. There was no differentiation between having my eyes open or closed. I felt like I had been blasted into a high dimensional space of many possible realities.

My brain couldn't make sense of this new experience. This was actually REALLY scary, not in a bad trip sense, but in a "holy shit, I'm kind of lost in this incomprehensible set of realities and have no way of navigating back home." I distinctly had the feeling like I was a god-like being that was literally constructing reality with my thoughts.

Ultimately I remember just completely relaxing into it and finding a crazy inner peace: white light, no sense of personal identity, no sense of time.

As I was coming out of the trip, I started to "rediscover" things: Oh! Time is just the relative ordering of events. Oh, THIS particular reality I'm in has 3 spatial dimensions.

Out of all the infinite, confusing, scary possibilities of existence, I returned to my life here on earth in this body. This made me feel so so grateful for THIS existence, in THIS body, in THIS reality. Almost felt like I'd again found the oasis of our reality in the desert of all possible realities. The gratefulness I felt after being on some metaphysical trip that had felt like a lifetime and being able to return to the familiar made me appreciate how wonderful existence is and how great it is to inhabit this reality.

tl;dr; Being blasted out into a scary confusing set of all possible realities and somehow finding a path back to this familiar reality made me really appreciate what I'd previously taken for granted.