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Comment by alternativenickname on LSD, Meditation, Enlightenment, and Ego Death · 2014-04-24T11:22:25.692Z · LW · GW

I have done a few LSD trips. The first one was really weird, the rest were with smaller doses and less intense. They've given me a couple of mildly interesting ideas, but for the most part I don't feel like I've really gotten anything useful out of them. (I keep thinking that given the reputation that the thing has, there has to be some way of getting more out of the experiences, but for a large part it feels like my mind gets temporarily dulled by the thing so that I can't really think or do anything interesting, and then I just get bored and start waiting for the trip to be over.)

Comment by alternativenickname on Yet more "stupid" questions · 2013-09-25T13:00:54.688Z · LW · GW

(Created an alternative username for replying to this because I don't want to associate my LSD use with my real name.)

I'd just like to add a contrary datapoint - I had a one pretty intense trip that you might describe as "fucking weird", which was certainly mind-blowing in a sense. My sense of time transformed stopped being linear and started feeling like it was a labyrinth that I could walk in, I alternatively perceived the other people in the room as being real separate people or as parts of my own subconsciousness, and at one point it felt like my unity of consciousness shattered into a thousand different strands of thought which I could perceive as complex geometric visualizations...

But afterwards, it didn't particularly feel like I'd have learned anything. It was a weird and cool experience, but that was it. You say that one's worldview won't be the same after coming down, but I don't feel like the trip changed anything. At most it might've given me some mildly interesting hypotheses about the way the brain might work.

I'm guessing that the main reason for this might be that I already thought of my reality as being essentially constructed by my brain. Tripping did confirm that a bit, but then I never had serious doubts about it in the first place.