I wanted to document one of the most radical altered states I’ve experienced, especially what happened to the sense of being a separate observer.
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There is a part of the experience that I still cannot properly translate into language.
Calling it “ego dissolution” feels almost absurdly insufficient.
It wasn’t simply that I forgot my name.
It wasn’t that I stopped thinking about my biography.
It was more like the entire architecture that normally makes an experience belong to someone had become liquid.
I wasn’t standing somewhere watching something happen.
There was no stable “somewhere”.
There was no stable “me”.
There wasn’t even a clear distinction between the place where the experience was happening and the experience itself.
I felt as if I had fallen inside consciousness.
Not inside my brain in any literal anatomical sense.
Inside the thing that normally remains invisible because it is the medium through which everything else is experienced.
And once I was there, it felt enormous.
Almost impossible in scale.
There were structures.
Rooms.
Corridors.
Layers.
Things that felt like processes rather than objects.
Memory seemed to be somewhere.
Language seemed to be somewhere.
Identity seemed to be somewhere.
Perception seemed to be somewhere.
But these were not rooms I could walk through like a house.
They were more like regions of experience that suddenly had a kind of spatial character.
I could feel that they were there without being able to point to them.
And the strangest part was that I was somehow both inside these structures and made out of them.
There was no person standing in the middle saying:
“I am now exploring my consciousness.”
That sentence would have required the ordinary self.
The ordinary self wasn’t there.
I was closer to a process moving through processes.
A current moving through a system that had no obvious outside.
Sometimes I seemed to be the thing moving.
Sometimes I seemed to be the space through which it moved.
Sometimes I seemed to be one of the rooms.
Sometimes I seemed to be whatever connected the rooms.
And sometimes there was no one there at all.
This is where language breaks down.
Because every sentence creates the illusion that there was a little person somewhere experiencing all of this.
There wasn’t.
Or at least not in the ordinary sense.
There was experience.
There was structure.
There was movement.
There was something happening.
But the person who normally owns the experience had become almost completely transparent.
I could be a thought without thinking that I was a thought.
I could be a sound without hearing the sound as something external.
I could be the music.
I could be the space around the music.
I could be the sensation produced by the music.
There was no clean boundary between those things.
The distinction between “inside my head” and “outside my head” stopped making sense.
I remember making a sound.
My body was apparently humming or moving.
But subjectively I couldn’t determine whether the sound came from my mouth or from somewhere inside.
It was simply happening.
And somehow that was enough to constitute existence.
There was something almost absurdly primitive about it.
No explanation.
No story.
No biography.
No purpose.
Just:
sound
sensation
movement
being
The entire enormous structure of a human life seemed to collapse into something as simple as a hum.
And somehow that felt profound.
Then the structure started coming back.
Not all at once.
A tiny point appeared.
An observer.
Not yet “Me”.
Just something capable of noticing:
“Something is happening.”
And then:
“I am extremely deep in a psychedelic state.”
And suddenly the depth itself became frightening.
Because I realized how far away I was from the person who had eaten the mushrooms.
There was no ordinary body.
No normal memory.
No familiar world.
No reliable sense of time.
No obvious way back.
I felt as if consciousness was turning itself inside out.
As if the thing that normally looks outward had somehow folded inward and was now looking at its own foundations.
Space seemed to unfold with me.
I was not moving through space.
It felt more like space and I were being unfolded together.
Then I opened my eyes.
And suddenly there was a face.
My face.
In a mirror.
And I had the strangest possible reaction:
Oh.
This is me.
Except it didn’t feel obvious at all.
It felt like discovering a character I had been assigned.
A body.
A face.
A room.
A relationship.
A language.
A name.
A life.
Everything had to be recognized again.
I didn’t simply remember who I was.
I had to somehow become that person again.
And that may be the most disturbing and fascinating part of the entire experience.
Because normally I assume that I am the same person continuously.
I wake up and the continuity is invisible.
During this experience I briefly experienced the opposite:
the continuity became visible because it had disappeared.
I could feel the self being reconstructed.
Memory returning.
Language returning.
The sense of time returning.
The sense of having a history returning.
The sense of having a body returning.
The sense that this body was mine returning.
It was like watching a world assemble itself from almost nothing.
And for a while I genuinely couldn’t understand why this particular reconstruction was me.
Why this face?
Why this body?
Why this apartment?
Why this person next to me?
Why this particular history?
Why this particular point of view?
I had the feeling that somewhere deep inside consciousness there was a corridor that I could enter but never reach the end of.
Every time I thought I had found the observer, there was another layer.
Another observer.
Another process observing that process.
Another “I” looking at the previous “I”.
And eventually I stopped knowing whether there was an observer at the center at all.
Maybe there was only the looking.
Maybe the observer was something that appeared because the system was capable of looking at itself.
I don’t know.
That is what remains strange to me.
Not that I saw impossible things.
But that for several hours, the ordinary fact that experience belongs to “me” stopped being obvious.
And once you have experienced that directly, it becomes very difficult to completely forget how strange the ordinary state actually is.
Because now, even sober, sometimes I notice it.
I notice that I am behind these eyes.
I notice that the world is appearing here.
I notice that this body feels like mine.
And for a brief moment the thought comes back:
Why?
Why is there a window here?
Why is there a point of view?
Why is this point of view mine?
Why is there an “I” at all?
And then the ordinary world continues.
People walk down the street.
Cars pass.
Someone buys food.
Someone has sex.
Someone gets angry.
Someone falls in love.
Someone goes home.
Everyone continues living inside their own private window.
And I am inside mine.
Which is perhaps the strangest thing of all.
Because the psychedelic experience didn’t make consciousness less mysterious to me.
It made ordinary consciousness look completely insane.