All my trips on Psilacetin recently seem to have a strong self-loathing component. I can’t figure out why unless I just truly hate myself... I try and work through it. I look at my life choices and try to make changes when I’m sober. I don’t think I’m a bad person... why is the mushroom spirit so mad at me? Why does it make me so uncomfortable in my own skin?
I identify. I think that's part of the reason I have hardly ever tripped recently on a psychedelic alone without a dissociative or a medium-large dose of benzos involved. I know for a fact personally that my sober outlook has a fair amount of self loathing built into it a lot of the time, and as we all know the set, as in
mindset is important to have in order in order to have a comfortable trip. Getting that in order of course is not always clear, and often a continuous and arduous process.
Psilacetin of course is a particularly harsh teacher. IMO, one of the harshest. I don't particularly have an answer except that it's important to remember than perception - specifically in this case, our perception of ourselves - is always somewhat uncoupled from the reality of things. We can tell ourselves that rationally we're not bad people, there's no reason to be so hard on ourselves, etc, ad nauseum, and this can help but it's often not enough to turn the tide of uncomfortable emotion - which is usually operating at a sub-rational level.
I've had low dose psilacetin trips where I've just had to focus on my breathing, in, out, in, out, for almost the duration, while just lying and thinking about the magnitude of horrific suffering and violence there is in the world, and how pathetic my own life choices have been, how much I've squandered or am squandering my relatively fortunate situation in life compared to how much worse things could be. I don't actually believe that my life choices have been pathetic objectively of course - but I do have feelings sober about how I should be doing
something different,
something more, be
something other or
someone other than who I am... and it's not surprising to me therefore that this unresolved inner conflict would come to the surface.
I don't consider that the psilacetin spirit is mad at me though, rather I like to think that it is testing me. However that perspective comes with some caveats - just as I don't particularly subscribe to the idea that all difficult experiences on psychedelics are lessons in themselves - although there may be lessons embedded within them - our minds are complicated places, and trips can be treacherous journeys into them... sometimes with catastrophic consequences. And I would not say that the latter events (trips with catastrophic endings) are incidents where someone has "failed the test"... rather these are unfortunate accidents, or misunderstandings, maybe mutual ones, where both entities misjudged how far they could push the other in their quest for an understanding of it.
To put it in more esoteric terms than I typically describe this to myself from day to day, I think that the psilacetin spirit's experience of being is so radically different to our own that we have difficulty relating to each other, and just as it is testing us, we are testing it, and sometimes one or the other will inadvertently push things too far in it's quest to understand the other's reality. Just as any larger and more powerful animal can kill or maim another not out of malice but playful lack of understanding of the other's different experience of being (I was going to say "weaknesses" but I think that is a poor choice of words in this context), psilacetin and other psychedelics can unintentionally hurt us in their efforts to understand us - just as we can unintentionally hurt ourselves in our efforts to understand them. To lean in to the esoteric a little more - I think that in these latter instances, both parties can suffer, and it's not the fault of either, really - just a misunderstanding between 2 entities communicating across the gulf between 2 radically different worlds.
It's not the same class, but I think the lessons apply - I had a recent experience on ketamine where I was coming down and I knew I was going to suffer, but was still somehow connected to the ketamine otherworld, and my "other self" within it - or perhaps, the ketamine spirit, so to speak - and it was like one self told the other, "you are going to suffer now - but this is the price for the glimpse into my world". I take this to mean that we both made this choice, with full awareness of the outcome. I talk a lot about dissociatives being "deceptive" compared to "true" psychedelics - but I think in another sense they are more transparent, and such an explicit explanation is not something that would be readily gleaned from a difficult experience with psilacetin, for example, or indeed many other drugs.
I think with a lot of substances - we think of things in terms of choices that we make, and therefore we see the results of these choices as reflections of something personal about us. But this is an innate bias in our experience of being human - we can look at it another way, that there are choices on both sides, and the Psilacetin Spirit is choosing to take an interest in us - in this sense, the fact that it makes you uncomfortable in your own skin doesn't mean it's mad at you - in fact it is a morally neutral fact, and a uniquely human perspective. The fact that you've chosen to commune with it, with full awareness of the risks, is also an indication that
it has taken an interest
in you, and if the outcome of this communion was difficult, it may well have been difficult for both of you, although we do not, and cannot really know what "difficulty" means to the experience of being a collective of psychedelic molecules.
Honestly, as I write this I'm not entirely sure what lesson I'm trying to convey here except that I think that it's important to try not to take uncomfortable experiences personally, and that our desire to anthropomorphise entities whose interface with reality is so entirely different to our own can lead us down a potentially flawed and harmful road in our efforts to extract meaning from these experiences. I'm sure you're not a bad person and I'm sure the Mushroom Spirit doesn't think this either - and any experience at all is an indication of our value and interest to this entity, which chooses
us as much as we think that we choose it.