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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   1751 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 29, 2026

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?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Eh? Can you explain the acronyms please.

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:

  • Was the very vivid and literal visual metaphor real? Was it actually a "choice" to reject endless meaning and hedonium, or just my mind play-acting a decision I'd made well in advance while coming up with an entertaining visualization of it? I genuinely do not know. The opposite felt like a very real possibility. It terrified me.
  • I understood the impermanence of qualia, the meaning of the self being a series of continuous snapshots. I vividly remember (and have live notes) of a version of me that was terrified of dying and being replaced by another me. He was practically screaming and begging to stay alive, or at least to be remembered. Then, a little later, a version of me that was more pragmatic but also meta to a degree that annoys even sober me: he had the self-awareness to find this all amusing while hoping he'd be gone soon. He got his wish.
  • I understood why the brain's sober state is conserved the way it is. It's the only way to be functional, even if there's some wiggle room. Breaking something and being stuck like that? I'd call depression a broken brain too, but I'm not willing to go that far.

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'm sorry, too, sir, and thank you. It's not the funnest club to be a member of, though we sure can have some interesting and esoteric conversations amongst ourselves! Regardless, my story is also similar to yours in the sense that it took some serious depression for me to try acid for the first time. But when I did, I had clearly found my drug of choice, and for a period of about four months, I did it often enough to learn about the brain's ability to quickly build a short term tolerance to the stuff, and adjusted my consumption accordingly. Things dried up for several months after that, after which I had two deep trips maybe six week apart from each other, one weak one, and then the final time (which is the one I was specifically talking about) wherein I'd estimate the peak lasted 12-16 hours or so. All of which is to say that I've been around the block, so to speak, before I get into the fun stuff.

  • Taking your last point first, I have to completely agree with you when you say that the brain's sober state is the only way to be functional. One of my persistent impressions from my experiences is that my brain's built-in filters were significantly removed, hence the depth and intensity of sensory inputs and experiences. For instance, at some point I realized that the breathing wallpaper experience that could mesmerize me so had its roots in my own heartbeat. Likewise, on a purely causal level, I had the experience of having a realization, then having a censor kick in, saying in essence, "you are not ready to receive this truth," and then fighting to override that censor and get back to the original realization. It was amazing stuff, but it also meant that I could spend an hour looking for the car keys that were in my pocket the entire time, despite my pockets being the first place I checked!
  • I also agree with your thinking about the self being a continuous series of snapshots, and for me, the ability to perceive this as such is actually one of the true dangers of diving deeply into psychedelics. With sobriety gone and the ego much more malleable, the qualia of the psychedelic experience can create a persistent change in the perception of the Self. In your example, you could have chosen to be the more pragmatic, meta version of you that you encountered for a short time. While you didn't do that, it does sound like you not only recognize that, but experienced that to an extent for yourself. If you'll forgive the wordplay, self_made_human is no more, and you're now self_remade_human. As the lyric goes, what I used to think was me was just a fading memory, I looked him right in the eye and said goodbye.
  • The question of whether or not the vivid and literal visual metaphor you experienced was real is a haunting one. We know that as humans, the brain tends to make its decision subconsciously, then a framework of rationality is constructed around the decision that ultimately connects consciously and appears to be the process of the decision itself. Given my own belief that psychedelics get us closer to the "bare metal" of our consciousness, so to speak, this would necessarily mean that an actual awareness of the various possibilities of our choices could indeed be quite terrifying. I personally found the experience of being free of my own morality and empathy to be a hideous one.

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.

Haha, probably true in my case, am I really going to turn down an offer of knowledge? Dangle something shiny in front of me and of course I want it for my nest! Moreover, I actually did try to snap myself out of it quite a few times, all without success. At one point the (un)reality was so bloody pervasive that as I was trying to rationalize my experience, I registered amusement on the other side of the conversation just as a couple of kids I'd been tripping with exclaimed from the other room, "whoa, [Muninn's manifestation of cosmic significance] is in the TV!" That's just a coincidence! I thought. More amusement. "There he is again!" Point, made.

Anyway, It sounds like you've been shaken but are coming out the other side shaken and changed, but not broken, and I'm glad for that. I'm also glad that you took the time to share some of your experience with me--like I said, I find these sorts of conversations to be fascinating, and there aren't many of us that have gone down this particular road. And I likewise appreciate your own well wishes for me. My own experience was a long time ago, and I've thankfully been able to deal with the fallout/residual damage as it has come to me. While my own path has steadily lead me away from mind and mood altering drugs and substances, caffeine notwithstanding, I appreciate the potential in psychotropic medications and work with some folks in your profession that can artistically prescribe a medication regimen for all that ails the psyche. For all of that, however, I am still mulishly stubborn and insist on thinking my way through everything, as is my wont.

I recognize a fell traveler, albeit one with the kind of scars I really don't want to acquire. Yup, that is precisely the kind of stuff that I was and am terrified of, but hey, you're here. You're talking. You know there's a problem. You give me the impression of having a functional life. I find that reassuring!

If you'll forgive the wordplay, self_made_human is no more, and you're now self_remade_human

In an unfortunate sense, it is impossible to say for sure if I'm the same person I was before and after psychedelics. But I genuinely don't think I've broken anything I'll miss. I feel like roughly the same person, a little happier, maybe, a little less emotionally reactive in a way that doesn't amount to apathy. If I start acting really weird, or even subtly off, I suppose enough people know me well enough to mention it. That is true both online and off, I hope.

In a very real sense, we're all Ships of Theseus, and always undergoing routine and unexpected maintenance. I don't feel anxious about going to bed or getting anesthesia, because I don't seem to change very much. I don't feel too bad about aging, except for all the physical health stuff that will inevitably pop up unless we find a cure. I think the version of me that was 2 years old has only a little in common with the man I am today, but I'm glad he grew up anyway. Similarly, I'm willing to do a lot of growing up (in the transhumanist sense), and I am not afraid of it as long as I get to call the shots and, preferably, make some backups along the way. I think a much smarter and wiser version of me that preserves the same values and desires is... me. A better me.

If it interests you, I just posted a full writeup of the experience on the front page. I doubt the phenomenological aspects are new to you, but I do go into more detail about my experiences and my takeaways from them.

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