| I'm in the same boat as you: how exactly did the psychedelic experience affect a long lasting change. Here's my story of how psilocybin cured my existential depression. I had other insights during the trip, but this is my after-the-fact reasoning about why the trip was effective at alleviating depression. I've often struggled with existential depression: Along the lines of "The sun is going to explode in a few billion years, what's the point in doing anything today?" This didn't really affect my day-to-day life that much, but I often struggled to be motivated because of this overhanging existential "what's the point?" Dosage: 5g dried golden teachers, ground with burr grinder, soaked in lemon juice, and then consumed in one go. Felt like nothing was happening all that much for an hour, but then a gradual come-up of an altered state, euphoria. My senses started merging: words had taste, sounds had color, etc. then I felt I was losing touch with reality (later realized this was my ego fighting to hold on). Things that I thought were intrinsic to the human conscious experience started to break down: I lost an understanding of the concept of time (looking at my bedside clock was nonsensical), as the trip became more aggressive, I actually started losing the concept of 4D space-time. There was no differentiation between having my eyes open or closed. I felt like I had been blasted into a high dimensional space of many possible realities. My brain couldn't make sense of this new experience. This was actually REALLY scary, not in a bad trip sense, but in a "holy shit, I'm kind of lost in this incomprehensible set of realities and have no way of navigating back home." I distinctly had the feeling like I was a god-like being that was literally constructing reality with my thoughts. Ultimately I remember just completely relaxing into it and finding a crazy inner peace: white light, no sense of personal identity, no sense of time. As I was coming out of the trip, I started to "rediscover" things: Oh! Time is just the relative ordering of events. Oh, THIS particular reality I'm in has 3 spatial dimensions. Out of all the infinite, confusing, scary possibilities of existence, I returned to my life here on earth in this body. This made me feel so so grateful for THIS existence, in THIS body, in THIS reality. Almost felt like I'd again found the oasis of our reality in the desert of all possible realities. The gratefulness I felt after being on some metaphysical trip that had felt like a lifetime and being able to return to the familiar made me appreciate how wonderful existence is and how great it is to inhabit this reality. tl;dr; Being blasted out into a scary confusing set of all possible realities and somehow finding a path back to this familiar reality made me really appreciate what I'd previously taken for granted. |