Thank you.

The short version is yes, some of the perception persisted. The big one I mentioned in my first post – I have personally verified that my brain is capable, in at least one scenario, of feeling self acceptance. I won't soon forget that.

But I can't actually latch onto those feelings and hold them, or lean into them, or conjure them out of thin air. For example, I'm in a pretty mellow mood right now, but if I really wanted to go back and relive lots of mean things that happened to me, I think I could get probably 75% of the way to proper anger, at least. This "conjuring from thin air" is not yet possible for the mentality I sought and found through MDMA.

The other thing that persists somewhat, though weakly and requiring focus, is a certain moral/behavioral template associated with the feeling. For example, I'd guess you can do an okay job of simulating the way you'd think if you were hangry, drunk, stoned, or overly excited. I now have this for MDMA, which is really fascinating mostly as a comparison to other things.

For example, I never really understood why people called alcohol a depressant – it makes me feel pretty great – until taking MDMA. I came down with the realization that alcohol was more of a devil on the shoulder than the neutral-but-well-meaning thing that I thought it was. It took the angelic counterparty of MDMA to illustrate this contrast.

There's something I'm not sure what to call, but I think the best way I could phrase it is "trajectory/valence of intent". The version of me that was on MDMA wanted the best for myself, and the best for the world, and was shockingly lucid in its ability to determine what these things might be, and recognize what things might need to be added or subtracted from my life. Let's call this maximally positive intentional valence.

Alcohol is basically the total opposite. It's hedonic, lustful, impulsive, etc. Importantly, it's not (for me at least, though surely for others) angry/violent, which in the past led me to see it as having a sort of neutral/harmless valence of intent. Sophomoric, sure, but not murderous. I have a new respect for its negativity. Playing the game of life with a focus on short timelines and impulsiveness isn't neutral – it's downward facing. That's is somewhat obvious intuitively, but my appreciation for it has a newly profound depth.

I'll end with a swing at the new mental model I loosely hold – it's a little off kilter and hard to articulate:

Instead of having one core personality with modifiers ("you are you", and then your feelings sit on top of this core), each of your moods are distinct perceptual frameworks that just happen to have ~65% overlap. There is no "default" state of mind/perception that gets modified by drugs, and there is no such thing as "sobriety" where there is a home state that is "normal". I have been "sober" in the medical and vernacular sense while elated and also while depressed – can these two versions of me fairly be called the same consciousness? I am no longer confident they can. Each state of mind is a distinct lens, and you wear them like outfits, roughly only one at once. The same party through the lens of excitement and depression will be totally different, and you're unlikely to experience both simultaneously.

Our minds are capable of wearing many, many more perceptual lenses than we realize, and there's no guarantee we're going to wear all of them in one life. We're not intrinsically very good at knowing which ones are possible, which ones are desirable, and have almost no framework for knowing which ones are "correct" or "normal". We've just got some loose, mostly functional social constructs that encourage some forms and discourage others, similar to the Overton window.[1]

I was unable to find the quote, but Sam Harris does a better job than I do of explaining parts of that idea, and to the extent that I believe it now, much of that is due to his explanation.

I have a new understanding for the desire of psychonauts[2] to collect, compare, and understand as many lenses of consciousness as possible. Though I remain a fairly fearful person, and it will be a long time I think before I've got the stones to grapple with LSD, psilocybin, or DMT. MDMA doesn't have the "bad trip" risk in the same way, which makes it a lot less intimidating IMO.

To answer your last question, I'm definitely not "over it", and I haven't taken a formal reassessment of my mental state in the aftermath (as they do in MAPS to measure progress), mostly because I don't see the need. I know the answer, as far as I'm concerned. There simply wasn't that kind of movement.

This neither surprises nor discourages me. I read the MAPS docs, and, naturally, these people know what they're doing. They have trained professionals guiding patients through multiple focused sessions deliberately pointed at taking the maximally theraputic path with minimal distractions. I had a lounge chair in a basement in SF's chinatown, and hold no illusions about the delta in efficacy.

Still, progress is progress. I can't get into a program like MAPS right now, so one does what one can. I consider the forays of 2018 to be practicing, in the only way you really can these days – recreationally. In 2019, with some more experience under my belt, I hope to continue more deliberately in the style of the MAPS program. We'll see how it goes. I know it's a risky to experiment on yourself in this way, but it's a risk I'm happy to take.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window

[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychonautics