Psychedelics: A Personal Take (2021)
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 &quot;field researcher&quot; of psychedelics, I&#x27;m skeptical of these magical claims like &quot;curing&quot; 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&#x27;ve yet to have that trip that will make me understand the magic, but I haven&#x27;t read many accounts of the actual psychedelic experience that have been particularly compelling.<p>Psychedelics do seem to break down lifelong mental models and thus increase your level of self-awareness but I&#x27;ve personally never been able to integrate these trip experiences to anything meaningful in my daily life. The insights I&#x27;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 &quot;ego&quot; mind that we must embrace in daily life. Sure, I&#x27;ve had interesting trips that made me question the nature of consciousness and reality. I&#x27;ve alos had trips where I broke down all my mental models and experienced pure randomness&#x2F;chaos, which I believe is just somewhat incompatible with my Earthly existence, which makes integration difficult.<p>This &quot;self-awareness&quot; is a common theme I&#x27;ve experienced in trips is just the pure randomness of reality&#x2F;existence. There is no &quot;reason&quot; why anything happens. There&#x27;s no reason you are you, and there&#x27;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 &quot;reason&quot; to be that particular configuration. You can hope to transform into a different configuration, but there&#x27;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 &quot;enlightenment&quot;. I&#x27;ve yet to experience what&#x27;s past this, but maybe someone else can shed some light on that.<p>Actually, I wonder if more self-awareness can be a bad thing for some people, and if that&#x27;s what it comes down to. Often times when I feel the most self aware, I&#x27;m the most lost in my own head and disconnected from reality and other people. This isn&#x27;t objectively a bad thing, but I don&#x27;t see how it leads to realizations about love and connectedness, which I think are the real antidotes to things like depression and emptiness.