But it's incredibly difficult to describe a psychedelic experience in words.
It isnt particularly difficult to describe psychedelic experiencing, as you can see from any well written trip report, such as the many thousands of thoroughly detailed trip reports on erowid.
It does require a degree of intelligence and articulacy to describe a trip well, but not that much. Also people with artistic abilities can render elements of their experiences in art, as visionary artists like Alex Grey, Luke Brown and Chris Dyer etc demonstrate
Obviously what you experience on psychedelics is nothing remotely like death
This is completely false, certainly not "obvious". On the contrary, many people have experiences that are absolutely convincingly like being dead, or like going permanently insane, reaching the end of time etc etc. These kinds of experiences are commonly referred to as "ego death experiences", they are very common with psychedelic use.
but because reach for "death" and "I was dying" because it's an easy shorthand that Tim Leary used
When people try to accurately describe an experience, they typically look for the words that most closely fit with what the experience felt like. Ego death feels very much like being dead or permanently insane, so people use expressions like "i thought i had died" or "i thought i had gone permanently insane". Tim Leary is another example of a highly intelligent and articulate person who described the psychedelic death-trip in detail.
There are hundreds of reports on the internet of people seeing aliens.
Because they had experiences that felt like seeing aliens, so they describe those experiences as seeing aliens. This is the same principle that is involved with describing ego death, or any other experience, ie you use the words that most closely fit with what the experience felt like.
An orgasm is an objective experience too because you ejaculate.
There is no such thing as an "objective experience", that is a direct contradiction-in-terms. You are getting subjectivity and objectivity confused with each other.
Subjective = from a particular point of view
Objective = from no particular point of view
the subjective aspect of an orgasm is the feeling of orgasming, the way the experience feels to the person who is having the experience.
That's very different from feeling a little strange on psychedelics and then reaching for tired terms like "death" to describe it.
Feeling "a little strange" is a very different thing from feeling like one has died or gone permanently insane, people do not describe "feeling a little strange" anything like the way people describe going through ego death.
I mean - seeing as no-one has the foggiest idea what death is like anyway, what's the point in using the term? It can only be bullshit.
You don't know what death is like until you experience it tangibly for yourself, after you have experienced it, then you know what it is like. In the ego death experience, the subject feels tangibly and totally convincingly like they have died, stopped existing, gone totally insane etc, essentially ego death feels like having permanently left ordinary reality, not able to return to sobriety.
