Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
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Notes -
Sigh. It's probably not worth talking about. Any insights gleaned are personal and the kind of stuff I could have told you a week in advance if I was drunk.
I mean, sample size of one and all, but I actually delurked and started posting for a conversation like this one, FWTW.
Well, if one of Odin's ravens thinks so:
The long and short of it was that it went way harder and deeper than I accounted for. I genuinely felt the edges of my mind fraying. I was fighting ego death and struggling to retain the integrity of my consciousness. I might have described myself as "tripping balls" when I enrolled for a psilocybin trial, but it had nothing on what I experienced. Back then, and in this instance, my greatest fear was succumbing to woo or catching religion. I felt the pressure, that sense of cosmic significance. I genuinely told it to fuck itself. At that point, I was envisioning it as some kind of extradimensional tendril cracking open my skull and wrapping itself around my consciousness, while "I" was quite literally shearing it away it with a set of scissors.
Another very literal visual metaphor was trying to keep the "knot" of patterns that constituted myself from being unraveled under the tension.
Words can hardly describe it. I feel like the protagonist of Scott's short story, Samsara, except I actually faced the pressure of imminent enlightenment and chose to walk away. I don't need enlightenment, I need to be less depressed. Jury's out on that one.
Been there myself, though I chose... differently. I hope you understand when I say from the bottom of my heart that I believe you made the right choice.
It was mumblety decades ago, and I was several orders of magnitude deeper than I'd ever been before. When my own personal variety of cosmic significance came knocking on the door of my consciousness, I was all out of fucks to give. I was extremely cognizant that I was crossing a line by opening up my brain for an interior conversation with a hallucination, but I did it anyway, and as a result I had the classic experience of going mad from the revelation. Although I ultimately made it out the other side with some semblance of my Self still intact, it was a damn close run thing and it definitely Changed me. Were I my brother, I'm sure I would have had the good sense to pull a Brave Sir Robin and Nope right up outta there, but I wasn't, and I'm not, and here we all are.
I'm sorry man. I genuinely am. Even during the experience (or very very shortly after the peak), I was grappling with multiple existential crises:
I don't know if you ever had a choice in the matter. I don't know if I did either. But I am so lucky to have made the choice of going the route I would have committed myself to going well in advance. Screwing with my brain's chemistry is pragmatically useful for therapeutic purposes and also... fun. But it's not a solution to metaphysics. If I claimed to have come up with one after the trip, my notes tell myself that I should consider the original me gone, maybe for good.
I hope you're doing okay. I wanted to be changed too, but I'm clearly the annoying kind of person who is just as analytical and self-scrutinizing when sober as they are zooted. I'm happy/sad about that. Uh, now that I think about it, I do understand the limits of language as a communication tool/expression of qualia better. That perhaps does constitute a change. Words genuinely cannot express the conflict within at the time. Good luck to you, if there is some residual damage, we will likely be able to cure you, speaking from a medical perspective. That is a promise I am mostly confident science can cash.
I've never done it myself (and would be terrified to) but it's quite interesting to read these anecdotes about psychedelics and then connect it to some of the research that's been coming out. Psilocybin AFAIK disrupts functional connectivity in the brain quite aggressively and basically causes different brain networks to become less segregated and bleed together, and it does so most severely in the default mode network, which is the piece of mental circuitry responsible for your sense of time, space and self. So you get ego death.
It also helps to suspend depressive symptoms by disrupting the connections between networks, specifically the hippocampus and default mode system, which are associated with that. Your thought patterns are quite literally spilling into each other on the fly in a way that can temporarily disassemble your entire perceptual and affective world, and it offers the possibility of your mental circuitry settling into a subtly changed baseline for better or for worse. It's basically very imprecise, very ghetto biohacking.
I honestly don't think it's all bad and has some possible transhumanisty applications, but as it currently stands the drug is like a sledgehammer where the effects aren't fully understood or controllable. If not I would be all in to be honest.
I agree with you. That's my understanding of my the mechanics, though note that there's also a general increase in neuroplasticity as well as evidence of some neurogenesis.
In predictive processing terms: psychedelics relax your priors, which helps unstick the stuck ones (like depression).
For what it's worth, I was always fascinated by psychedelics even as a teen, and wanted to try them recreationally. But I avoided them for a decade, because I was too afraid of the risk. Then my depression got really bad, and I felt the clinical trial was a good shout before I resorted to IV ketamine and ECT (very annoying to get in my parts of Scotland). It worked wonders, and gave me more confidence that I could push things.
Uh.. Turns out there's a limit to how far I wanted to push things. I might try LSD again, but never at this dose. I've had my fun. I like my sanity. If you do specifically want a treatment for depression, the evidence for psilocybin is much more robust. You've probably read my blog post, but if you haven't, it's in my posts.
The interesting thing about psychedelics is that you can titrate this somewhat, in ways that change it qualitatively as well as quantitatively. LSD/Psilocybin is a sledgehammer. Ketamine (in recreational doses, administered nasally, I have no idea about IV and no interest in trying) is more like pushing the clutch out on a manual car. "You" are still there, and can still contemplate things rationally, but you're separated from the world in a way that lets you be, for want of a better phrase, creatively objective.
The unfortunate side effect, for me, is that I spend a good deal of time on most ketamine trips thinking about how Nick Land was right about everything.
I am interested in trying ketamine, preferably I since it's more effective for depression.
Perhaps it's unfortunate that I often think Nick Land is right when sober. To be precise, more directionally correct than any other contemporary philosopher or writer. I hate the man and his ideology, I don't want the future he imagines and dreams of to come to fruition. I want something human to survive into the far future.
Alas, I must still concede that it's a very real possibility that the techno-capital singularity consumes us whole. It won't surprise you to learn that I spent a good while on the trip worrying about the Singularity. I do that while sober too.
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