Sub-Acute Effects of Psilocybin on Empathy, Creative Thinking
I tried Psilocybin on two different occasions and two very different trips. The first being pleasant, the second being my last.<p>The first time I took it, I was outside. The very first thing I notice is just how vivid the green leaves swaying in the wind were. How calm, serene, peaceful. Then I started seeing the walls, &quot;breathe&quot;. I&#x27;ve never been able to feel such inner peace before. In this moment, I realized, <i>I have so much potential</i>. We all do, yet it&#x27;s our own doubts, and the internalized opinion of others or vanity metrics hindered our progress. I&#x27;ve found &quot;spiritualism&quot;. I started playing Gran Turismo and realized how effortless I&#x27;ve been able to drive around the Nordschliefe. Normally I&#x27;d crash but I was putting no effort yet I was playing at a level that surpassed my normal everyday skill. Then I started joining meetups. Like groups that I never thought I&#x27;d join. I was suddenly interested in women&#x27;s rights, I got interested in Hinduism.<p>The next day, the inner peace continued to linger. However, after a few months, I was back to my old self.<p>So this econd time, I upped the dose (bad idea). This time I stayed in my room (another bad idea). Instead of the inner peace, I was in a state of panic. There were some scary visuals like the Eye of Providence, I could feel the presence of some extra-terrestrial intelligence, looking at me, judging me with those unchanging Eye on the US dollar bill.<p>I headed downstairs and the visuals just got stranger. I close my eyes and see complex geometrics, and reopen them to see math formulas <i>everywhere</i>. I was getting even more panicky and I head to lie down.<p>Then I experienced what is called &quot;Ego Death&quot;. I felt like I was dead. No identity, no awareness. It was awful, I longed for anything, any sort of order and structure I had in my normal reality. I was thinking &quot;yup I fucked up. I poisoned myself. good god.&quot;<p>During the ego death, the only certainty I felt was Math. Math is the language of both this universe and the fabric of our universe. We are made out of math. The gut feelings we get, the emotions, thoughts, they were ultimately mathematical manifestations. This was the intuition I was feeling, a spiritual plane where Everything is Everything while being Nothing. The ubiquity and the ephemeral nature of both our life, and the universe.<p>There is a positive story out of this. I came out of the ego death, and I was sooooo thankful that there was something in this reality instead of nothing. The trip was not over, and I started seeing this bright pulsating object that looked like a symbol of sorts....kinda like a lightning symbol appear right above between the eye brows of the people I looked at!<p>I am not a religious person and have not come into contact with any Hinduism materials but when I looked up the Hindu symbol for the Third Eye, I almost fell out of my chair-it was the same. I never even heard or seen the Third eye before, and I was just reading other people&#x27;s trips and there were people who saw the exact same thing....<p>After the trip was over, the next morning, I woke feeling light. It felt like I sat in a sauna but instead of sweating out chemical toxins, my spirit felt like it was cleansed. I did make some positive life changes....but ended up right back where I was.<p>It seems like you need to keep taking psilocybin to see the benefits but after that trip, I&#x27;d rather not open that door anymore. It was frightening more than it was awakening but perhaps because the possibility that our material reality that the Western civilization claims is be-all and end-all is not only incorrect but immature-civilizations and cultures that existed longer all have gone through such stages, and eventually gave way to spirituality at some point.