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Comment by irishloop | Hacker News Reader

I spent quite a bit of my late adolescence consuming mind-altering substances like LSD and mushrooms. It did expand my mind and made me appreciate certain things.

But it did not fix my depression or make me feel less alone. I might feel connected to the universe -- for a time. But it eventually fades, and the old demons come back.

Sooner or later, you need to deal with the issues at hand. The reason you feel this way.

For me, going to therapy allowed me to address some of the root issues -- generational trauma, a lack of affection, perhaps chemicals in my brain -- and allowed me to start rewriting my story of myself.

I enjoyed my experiments with psychedelics, and I would not discourage anyone from using them. But they are not the cure-all many claim, either.

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The drugs certainly do not magically fix your problems. But it does allow you to see them, where you can inspect them (read: yourself) without judgement. This is what people refer to when they say "ego death". Your ego is not dying, it's just that your consciousness has been relaxed to a point that you are capable of witnessing it for what it truly is.

"Set and setting" is a frequent quip of the psychonaut that doesn't get enough respect. You must have intention. Psychedelics are like removing the bumpers from the side of a bowling lane - without intention you will just fall into the gutter (figuratively).

Therapy is vitally important, either externally or internally. One can certainly perform self-therapy, which is sometimes only enabled with the help of a mind-altering substance like Psilocybin.

I think you would be surprised to try them again. You have a lot more lived experiences under your belt, new perspectives, new/fewer biases, etc...

Great comment. This "ego death" can also be achieved through practices like Atma Vichara. Taking a shroom is catapulting yourself into that state of witnessing. It will definitely come off and the mind will take over, as it was induced artificially, the question is - what are you going to do with yourself during this state?

Defining or, rather, roughly sketching out, a mission might be one way to approach psychedelics. You don't want to follow it to the letter, to avoid self-limits, but at least define your attitude: are you looking for a master, an answer, a resolution? Do you want to feel what's inside of something, i.e. how your reactions are built, where this or that comes from? Just mildly keeping your goal in mind may set you to achieve the right result.

As a quick example of the outcome, at some point I felt my body telling me "man, what are you doing with this e-cigarette? Just stop putting this in me." In a few months I quit for good. Understand this might not be a demon as big as the one causing depression, but maybe this will help? Where did that guy came from?

What tangible insights did you get from your trips?

> This is what people refer to when they say "ego death". Your ego is not dying, it's just that your consciousness has been relaxed to a point that you are capable of witnessing it for what it truly is.

A challenge in these conversations is that there’s still no real standardized way of speaking of these experiences. What you’re describing sounds like detachment to me which can vary to different degrees of course but what I would call “ego death” is the actual death of your ego, the dissolution of yourself: you stop existing and with it also any consciousness. In my experience there was really nothing left to witness in that situation as I was no more.

> a bit of my late adolescence consuming

I liken doing psychedelics in late adolescence to reading philosophy in late adolescence. Unfortunately late adolescence is the period where the majority of both psychedelic and philosophical experimentation happen, when both of these are much more useful after gaining some life experience.

If you haven't even spent time working on or struggling with your own depression and isolation, and are in fact still quite tangled up in the formation of these issues, psychedelics don't have much to offer you other than "fun". Likewise reading Nietzsche as an adolescent, you miss many of the subtleties that make his work truly revolutionary, for example misreading "god is dead" a proclamation of some sort of victory against religion, when Nietzsche is much more concerned about our loss of meaning. You can't really get at what Nietzsche is worried about until you've had your own, serious struggle with meaning as you get older and the reality of death hits you much harder than any adolescent can imagine.

As an adolescence you're still rapidly formulating your world view, there's not a whole lot to shake up that isn't all ready rapidly changing. An adolescent will learn far more by interacting closely with a group of people they normally wouldn't, or wandering around parts of a city they normally never go to, than doing any psychedelics. It's not to say they shouldn't experiment with psychedelics and read lots of philosophy, but these won't be really impactful until later.

I highly recommend everyone in their thirties and later revisit both psychedelics and philosophy. There's a lot more there than when you where younger.

I definitely relate with this comment since my psychedelic usage was between the ages of 19 to 23. However, I don't really have any interest in trying them again. My "set" as a 33 year old is significantly more complex than when I was 19 and I'm convinced that my day-to-day worries would cause me to have a terrible trip.

What have you gained by trying them again as an adult?

I find that it's precisely when I'm mired in these "day-to-day worries" that I find shrooms most effective at breaking me out and getting a renewed sense of relative priority.

I can understand your concerns about a "terrible trip", especially since these type of worries typically make me paranoid and anxious when I'm on cannabis. However, I've found that when I do shrooms the psychedelic experience always side steps these anxieties completely and reminds me that these concerns are not the core concerns I have.

What's different about doing shrooms as an adult is that I'm not like "whoa, all this stuff isn't real!", I already know that. It's for those times when I feel daily stresses slowly crushing down, am fully intellectually aware that these things are ultimately not important, but can't quite find the emotional release. Shrooms aren't a miracle cure, but typically I'll feel a bit refreshed for quite awhile. As a teenager shrooms are about changing your perspective of big, metaphysical things "whoa man!", as an adult they're about changing perspective on those small things "oh right, performance reviews really don't matter." The insights are the things you, for the most part, already knew, but have been too distracted by daily life to really realize.

I had bad trips when I was younger, but being older and knowing both myself and psychedelics better I find I am much better at keeping myself from spiraling out of control too easily, and much more deeply feel the wisdom of "there are no bad trips". The other nice thing about tripping as an adult is you have much better control over the scene portion of it.

Same experience but while I was in college, and I was not a casual or recreational user. I fully bought into the whole psychedelic mythology, poured of Erowid trip reports, read books by Timothy Leary, kept trip journals, trip-sat for friends, tripped in nature, tripped alone, experienced ego death, etc. At one point I even backpacked a short portion of the Appalachian trail with a friend and ate mushrooms each morning before setting out.

The "insights" I gained certainly felt profound at the time, but they were kind of silly in retrospect. I'm actually cringing a bit right now remembering what I was like back then. I remember going on a first date with a girl the day after a particularly intense mushroom trip and trying to share my "wisdom" with her. She must have thought I was completely insane haha.

Sitting here now almost a decade since my last trip, I can't say it permanently changed my outlook on anything. I still dealt with a lot of depression and confusion in my 20s, just like anyone else. The things that really ended up moving the needle for my depression and anxiety were: quitting alcohol, lifting three times a week, therapy, getting married, and having a kid.

Same experience as you. I still take psychedelics once in a while but at this point it has become really clear to me that after a few initial epiphanies it can becomes purely recreational. I love taking them recreationally but I am no longer idealistic enough to think I'm really opening the doors of perception.

Talk therapy, becoming estranged from abusers in my family, and SSRIs helped me long term conquer my PTSD and depression.

Psychedelics by themselves are not a panacea. But therapy or otherwise guided experience augmented with psychedelics has huge potential.

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