
My Adventures With the Trip Doctors - burritofanatic
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/05/15/magazine/health-issue-my-adventures-with-hallucinogenic-drugs-medicine.html
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vinceguidry
Sorry in advance for the length.

The big takeaway I got from the article was that the ego actually resides in
the Default Mode Network and that psychedelic experience almost completely
deactivates it.

This allows me to construct the idea that meditation, which removes focus from
sensory experience and concentrates it in the DMN, is akin to working on your
self rather than obliterating and reconstructing it, if only for a short time.

This idea survived only as long as it took for me to search 'dmn meditation',
which reveals that concentration meditation _also_ reduces DMN activity.

So why did I feel that meditation increased activity in the DMN? Well, when I
was learning meditation all those years ago, the usual stepping off point is
through concentration practices, which obviously will quiet the DMN down
through task-focus. Eventually you reach the point where you can go exploring
in the spaces of your mind.

But the sheer magnitude time investment needed to self-induce into trance and
the cognitive effects I'd seen in people who really identified with doing lots
of it warned me off of it pretty early.

I instead settled into a pattern whereby every few years I'll sense the need
for a reboot, then self-induce for awhile, until it didn't seem to be all that
helpful anymore. The last such session had me doing inductions every few
nights and slowly pulling back on how deep I go before ending the session.

Now I understand that a person's mind builds up 'structures' over time and
they need to get swept away every now and again for good health. I was leery
of psychedelics for so many years for the same reason I didn't want to do
hardcore meditation.

Essentially, it's the 'ego-shattering' nature of turning off the DMN for so
long that makes me wary of it. Good to do every now and again, but I don't
like what happens when you do it often. I've conversed with many people who
have done this to themselves, and they present as drug addicts to me, not as
fully-functioning, let alone super-functioning, humans. Rather than grow as
human beings, they're growing as some weird alien species.

So my own personal journey has me organize my life around greater DMN
activation with occasional breaks, like to do programming work or play ping
pong, then every once in awhile trance out and break through to a new
understanding. It's very important to me to integrate trance experiences, I
spend a lot of time on it, and it's one reason trance induction is just too
heavy to do regularly.

~~~
azhu
> I've conversed with many people who have done this to themselves, and they
> present as drug addicts to me, not as fully-functioning, let alone super-
> functioning, humans. Rather than grow as human beings, they're growing as
> some weird alien species.

An alternate hypothesis to explain the weirdness of these people is that
perhaps those who have taken their place of mental residence too far closely
overlap with those who lack the social awareness to know that presenting
psychedelics as an integral part of routine life in today's society will get
you regarded as insane. This _can_ happen to people, and those who have this
happen to them are particularly noticeable while I suspect those who have
deeply moving experiences and are able to successfully incorporate them into
their daily lives to positive effect keep those pieces of their backstory
under especially stringent wraps.

Anecdotally, I was able to implement an enormous increase in my function as a
human being resulting from my reflections on my psychedelic experiences. In
all areas from mental health to human relationships to technical skill
development. The current state of my own experience of my life and the
experience of all those who are part of it confirms. The primary psychedelic
experience that spurred on these changes occurred about 3 years ago, and was
the result of a recreational trip gone very wrong. Today, I continue to
microdose 1P-LSD to subjectively beneficial effect.

~~~
mason55
Similar to how people say that transgender folks don’t ever pass. It’s not
that, it’s that you only notice the ones who don’t.

