My Adventures With the Trip Doctors
Sorry in advance for the length.<p>The big takeaway I got from the article was that the ego actually resides in the Default Mode Network and that psychedelic experience almost completely deactivates it.<p>This allows me to construct the idea that meditation, which removes focus from sensory experience and concentrates it in the DMN, is akin to working on your self rather than obliterating and reconstructing it, if only for a short time.<p>This idea survived only as long as it took for me to search &#x27;dmn meditation&#x27;, which reveals that concentration meditation <i>also</i> reduces DMN activity.<p>So why did I feel that meditation increased activity in the DMN? Well, when I was learning meditation all those years ago, the usual stepping off point is through concentration practices, which obviously will quiet the DMN down through task-focus. Eventually you reach the point where you can go exploring in the spaces of your mind.<p>But the sheer magnitude time investment needed to self-induce into trance and the cognitive effects I&#x27;d seen in people who really identified with doing lots of it warned me off of it pretty early.<p>I instead settled into a pattern whereby every few years I&#x27;ll sense the need for a reboot, then self-induce for awhile, until it didn&#x27;t seem to be all that helpful anymore. The last such session had me doing inductions every few nights and slowly pulling back on how deep I go before ending the session.<p>Now I understand that a person&#x27;s mind builds up &#x27;structures&#x27; over time and they need to get swept away every now and again for good health. I was leery of psychedelics for so many years for the same reason I didn&#x27;t want to do hardcore meditation.<p>Essentially, it&#x27;s the &#x27;ego-shattering&#x27; nature of turning off the DMN for so long that makes me wary of it. Good to do every now and again, but I don&#x27;t like what happens when you do it often. I&#x27;ve conversed with many people who have done this to themselves, and they present as drug addicts to me, not as fully-functioning, let alone super-functioning, humans. Rather than grow as human beings, they&#x27;re growing as some weird alien species.<p>So my own personal journey has me organize my life around greater DMN activation with occasional breaks, like to do programming work or play ping pong, then every once in awhile trance out and break through to a new understanding. It&#x27;s very important to me to integrate trance experiences, I spend a lot of time on it, and it&#x27;s one reason trance induction is just too heavy to do regularly.