[TaupeRanger]

I'm watching the Netflix doc "How to Change Your Mind" about this subject. They use similar language: e.g. that psilocybin causes terminal cancer patients to view death with "curiosity". I find that really interesting, because implicit in this "curiosity" must be the idea of consciousness existing after death...otherwise what would be curious about it? You just die and there's nothing otherwise. So I wonder if, e.g. atheists or non-spiritually inclined folks have the same experiences in these drugs.

[krrrh]

I’m basically an atheist and ketamine assisted psychotherapy did change my background fear of mortality very much in a before and after sort of way. It felt more like a different relationship to time and free will. Like a realization that the universe existed and unfolded like a cellular automata and I was integrated within that. Talking to the very experienced therapist afterwards he summed up my scattered thoughts as, “you resolved your determinacy.”

I still don’t believe in an afterlife other than in the abstract sense that that the brief existence of me as a point of consciousness was impacted by all that came before it and will have had an impact on all that comes after. I would say more calmness and more acceptance are better descriptions than curiosity.

Like a lot of psychedelic experience, there’s an underlying neurological phenomenon and common subjective experience that gets differently interpreted based on your background beliefs. It’s like the DMT experience of entities is very differently interpreted as inter-dimensional elves by those DMT smokers who have read a lot of Terrance McKenna, as plant spirits by Amazonian ayahuasca drinkers, and as channeled spirits or Christian saints by Daimistas.