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This is a first-person account from a psychiatry resident (me) enrolling in a clinical trial of psilocybin. Somewhere between a trip report, an overview of the pharmacology of psilocybin, and a review of the clinical evidence suggesting pronounced benefits for depression.
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I've taken hallucinogens many, many times in my life. Mostly LSD when younger, shifting more toward mushrooms as I've gotten older, to entirely mushrooms now in my late 40s. Its the only 'hard' drug I use any more, usually 1-2 times a month on the weekend. Your report sounds like a small amount tbh, mostly based on your ability to actually record the experience. Higher doses absolutely shoot your attention span. The inconsistency of natural mushrooms is a real thing. I'm lucky to have had the same source for a long time now, but even then the same weight batch to batch has noticeable variations in strength. Taking it in a clinical setting sounds frankly horrific. I'm accustomed enough to using psilocybin that I can perform a wide range of tasks while tripping and have never had anything close to a bad trip, and I wouldn't do it in that setting ever. I live on a farm in the country. My primary activity on mushrooms is playing in the fields with my dogs. I think people refer to spiritual or mystical experiences on hallucinogens because we lack other language to describe the experience. I find trying to describe it in words very difficult, like its a category of experience that can't effectively be spoken or written about. I feel this exact same way about the effects of meditation over the long term. We just don't have vocabulary for it in English. As far as enlightenment/ego death/loss of the self experiences, most of the people I've know that have these, and I've also had many personally, are already engaged in this pursuit outside of their psilocybin use. Generally through various forms of meditation practice. Hallucinogens alone generally don't trigger these in my experience, with the massive exception of DMT, which I don't really recommend for beginners. DMT will absolutely slam into the user with ego-death/loss of the illusory self, and though temporary, you don't know that at the time. Its a class apart from other hallucinogens massively altering your thought processes and sensory perceptions.
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