I'm glad you didn't get any worse than that - I realize that I'm very lucky I wasn't in a more dangerous environment when I was in that state. You might know about the guy (apparently on a lot of mescaline) who jumped into the bonfire at Element 11 a couple of years ago.
Yeah, that's been hard for me too. I can think about it rationally up to a point, but my mind keeps wanting to assign deeper meaning to it. I've come to realize that I must subconsciously be expecting horrible revelations because when they happen I'm more inclined to take them to be real than positive interpretations.
Let me know how the therapy works out for you. I've been looking for a therapist myself. There are few where I live, and none that seem suitable have any openings.
Yes, I've tried to hang on to that thought, too. And I know people have been thinking "what if everyone else is just part of my dream" for at least 2,000 years. Something I clung to in my first singularity was the idea of language. It didn't make much sense to me that I'd have invented all of English, let alone dreamed up the few other languages that I know bits and pieces of.
At a music festival once, when my trip didn't take off and I contented myself with trip sitting for others, a friend having a similar bad time came into the camp common area and said she needed a word. Something that didn't come from her head. I knew immediately what she meant. Someone yelled out "blueberries", but that was no good - something related had already come up and it tied in to what she was thinking. So I started giving her obscure and technical words that I knew she'd have no connection to. She needed the same assurance I had, that there was complexity out there beyond what was in her head, and things she didn't know and couldn't have created. It seemed to help. Like me looking at the back of the white board - I needed something new that hadn't been churning around in my head.
What I didn't mention in my last post is that at the start of the Ketamine experience, I got it in my head that I was going to be, or had been, everyone in the world, ever. If you buy into this idea it makes it harder to be reassured by the existence of others, since in that interpretation there *aren't* others and we're all different loops of the same thread.
But this is also far from a new thought. I know another friend had exactly this experience, years before I did. Thought she was going to have to be Hitler, and every other monster who had ever lived. No one knew what was going on when she started yelling about how she didn't want to murder babies.
If you want a more elaborate presentation of this idea, check out The Egg by Andy Weir. (Yeah, the guy who wrote The Martian.) In fact, stop now and read that story if you haven't already.
I decided that a deterministic universe would be fine with me as long as the information flow is one way. I don't think the universe is really deterministic (quantum mechanics says it's not, as I understand it, but the specifics are beyond me) but it wouldn't matter if it is as long as we can't know where it's going.
As for being stuck in a loop not mattering, it only doesn't matter if we don't know about it. The really horrible part of my loop experiences was this feeling that the nature of the loop became apparent every time at the end of the loop, and that every time I'd have, and for all eternity always had, that same rush of terror. Sometimes I would manage a tiny bit of relief that at least there were some good experiences in the loop. That was easier when I was comfortable, like when I was curled up on the papasan cushion, but acid tends to make me physically uncomfortable and that definitely tainted my feelings about going on that way for eternity.
Even when I've had some less serious loops from smoking too much, though, I've been able to recognize that my life is progressing beyond those previous points. Once it was just the fact that I had two monitors on my desk when I used to have only one that was enough for me to claw my way back to sanity.
I think that's a good way of putting it. One of the things I've valued most about psychedelics is a sense of immersion and connection. You've seen superhydrophobic coatings? You can dunk a coated object in water and it comes out dry. That's how I feel sometimes, when there are amazing things going on around me and it's like I just can't get wet. Psychedelics have let me feel connected and let experiences soak in in a way they wouldn't have otherwise.
The flip side is that that state has also let the bad stuff penetrate way further than it would have been able to otherwise. I'm working on dealing with that damage rather than fretting over theories of the universe that couldn't be proven anyway.
Some depression, but that has always been largely situational. I've always considered myself very rational around grounded. I'd never had anything approaching a panic attack before.
I'm an introvert too, and an atheist. I've always lived too much in my own head. I'm a programmer and I have a very analytical mindset and I'm certain that has played a big role in my experiences. I'm always looking for the simplest, most elegant model of any system. I'm no physicist so I may butcher this, but from what I know of electromagnetism and relativity, you've got a bunch of things that look complicated and maybe unrelated from our normal perspective, but if you look at them in the right framework (Minkowski space, with Poincare transformations governing the relations of inertial frames) suddenly it all becomes tidy and consistent and (in some sense anyway) simple. That is what I expect out of the universe. Sober, I don't expect that elegant universal truth to be easily comprehended by the average human mind or we'd have figured it out by now, but that expectation of order and simplicity at the core of things is fundamental to my mindset and might account for why I was hit harder by this than most psychonauts seem to be.
I can't say I feel a stronger pull to religion. A certain kind of spirituality, maybe. One that revolves around the shared experience of being human, whether or not there's any physical reality to our connectedness.
Recently I started thinking about what it would mean to be truly immortal. How would you keep from going insane, no matter how much you had to do? (Actually, this kind of sums it up - sorry for the awful quality, it's all I could find.) The best answer I've been able to come up with is something very much like The Egg. If I was immortal and omnipotent, I might put myself through that sort of reincarnation, knowing that mortal suffering would be temporary and would make the good parts meaningful.
I said that the loop at the party got better later on. That's kind of how it felt at some points. It was like the time between those incarnations, and the new year was a metaphor and we were all celebrating the fact that the universe was OK after all. We could have our bliss and enjoy the relief from all of our worries and when we went back down into the fray it'd be because that was the only way to keep it meaningful, and there was joy in knowing that we'd come up again every time and know that it had been worth doing.
And now it's very late and I should get to bed. I'll try to remember to check back here more than once a year. And if you happen to be going to Burning Man, let me know. I'd be happy to meet up and talk.
