I've had a significant consciousness shift over the years as a result of psychedelics. I mean, part of it happened all in one moment, because when I tripped my first time, I had the most profound experience of my life, it felt like I woke up from life and remembered that I'm everything and it's happening in this one eternal moment, and it was so silly how I had forgotten that, it was more real than anything, I saw the structure of the universe expanding out and out and becoming an atom or an electron in some infinitely larger scale. In a way it changed my life and the way I think forever, in a big-picture way... I realigned my overall way of viewing reality which colored (and colors) many aspects of my life and my daily experience. That first trip changed a lot for me, but it didn't change my behavior or give me any discipline towards actually facilitating real change in my life.
Over time, I've continued to use psychedelics, at times heavily, but for the last few years it's been a healthy rate of usage, probably on average once a month, more in the summer and less in the winter. Ever since that first trip and some that followed that were similarly paradigm-shifting, I started realizing that I was having a lot of really interesting, different, or profound ways of understanding my internal process and other people and situations. So over the years (I've been tripping for 17 years now) I've slowly accumulated what I feel is a more open and aware state... it's helped me to teach myself to think about things and be very intentional with my thoughts and actions, and how to put myself in the place of others, and how to appreciate the moment and the beauty in life in a more conscious way. There was also a time when I started using them for escapism, which was a time when they started to have a negative effect on me.
The psychedelic that has done the most to actually change my life and behaviors is ibogaine. I had worked myself over the course of my life, despite my spiritual awakening, into some circumstances that were causing me a lot of pain, including opiate addiction. I did ibogaine after 10 years of that and it seemed to work on some deeply subconscious levels to sort of snap me out of my bad patterns, again, it was like I woke up, except this time I woke up from this nightmare that my life had become and I felt like myself again, and it gave me the motivation to never touch opiates again and work on my life to improve my circumstances. Since my mind wasn't focused on negativity and stuck in trauma anymore, my internal dialogue became much more functional. Since then my life has improved very much and I just in general in life feel like I'm on an upward trajectory of becoming more intentional with and conscious of my thoughts and actions. I feel a much greater sense of personal power than I used to, in terms of what I believe it is possible for me to accomplish.
So, overall, I would say that psychedelics have changed me significantly, or rather, they've helped me to change myself, except for that first peak experience, that felt like I was given a glimpse behind the curtain while I was not expecting it whatsoever. Most of the changes are things I may well have arrived at anyway without psychedelics as I got older. But I don't think my life would be the same without having gotten that glimpse in the first place. And also ibogaine was like a personality reset sort of, I certainly could have gotten back to myself but when I took it I was at the end of my rope, I wanted to die I was suffering so much. And I came out of it feeling like anything was possible and like that life I had been living a week before was just a bad dream. That really blows my mind, that's a consciousness shift. It hasn't gone away, either, and it's been over 4 years.
