I offer an anecdote: as a young person I struggled with many of the self-actualization how to be happy type problems that young people do. I was depressed. I was never formally diagnosed, but I would wake many days and simply have no desire to assert any form of existence. I would just not get out of bed because there was no point.

I would then later have an LSD trip where I would "trip out" and lose touch with reality. During this, while tripping out, I would get into an altercation involving five police officers in rural Georgia and be arrested and sent to jail and charged with resisting arrest, battery against a police officer, and numerous other charges. The ramifications of this in my personal life were great. While I was being arrested in reality, in my trip I would also encounter many personal emotional demons. At one point I was tased in reality, and in my trip I interpreted this to be death and I would think to myself "this is all that I have become by the time of my death?" In my trip I would feel the physical sensations of being dragged away by my arresting officers, and I would experience this as the arms of Satan dragging me to hell as payment for all of my past sins. As I would be cuffed in the back of the police car being toted off, I would hear the laughter of everyone in my life who I had ever cared about echoing through the cosmos, ridiculing me for my ultimate failure.

Once I awoke, I could not recall any of this. But, as I came to wrapped in a prison blanket with my head resting on a drain set in a cold concrete floor next to a metal toilet, I could certainly perceive the seriousness of the situation I'd landed myself in. This forced me to consider the events in my life that had led me to this. Eventually, stoked by the story of the tow truck driver who towed the car I'd driven into a ditch that initially caused the police to arrive, of the epic Jackie Chan figure who waged war with five lumbering policemen, my recollection began to form. I realized that the demons I'd encountered in my trip were "real", insofar that they were amplified mental manifestations of constructs that had already been there. This much was not new information, at least not on all levels. What was different about this encounter with those demons, in addition to their relevance to my circumstances of being charged with five serious crimes, was that I had the context of my drug induced shifted consciousness. Any previous attempts to change these behaviors had proven too feeble to be effective, my methods used were too shallow to reach towards the roots of my problems.

With the benefit of knowing that my sober reality was not the only possible or perceptible version, I began to deconstruct the thought processes, patterns, and software that ran my cognitive experience. It was this realization that enabled me to rewrite my code to better serve my greater goals. Today, I am a confident and successful engineer with only a single misdemeanor (lawyers, a good one is worth it), who is bounds happier and who feels much more in control and in touch with what he wants and how to attain it, and who believes in his ability to actualize. I will spare you further corny details of my current improved state and let you form your own judgements. In writing this post a fitting metaphor strikes me — a psychedelic trip is much like allowing someone with an entirely different set of opinions to do a radical (and temporary) rewrite of your personal software. When running it, it will confuse you. Everything will seem novel. But you will begin to see the other ways in which code can hang together. It is a rearchitecting. And if you have only ever been exposed to and developed using a single paradigm of architecture, then well I shouldn’t need to explain the benefits of this. But be wary, because in this temporary rewrite, it is possible you will forget the product spec to which your software is built and be unable to distinguish between a feature and a bug. Another metaphor that fits is that for personal growth a psychedelic trip is much like a car for a physical trip — it is not necessary to travel the distance and it will help if driven correctly.