That SSC post also had some really interesting comments, especially this beautiful one by anodognosic:
Here is at least two lasting powers of psychedelic and mystical experiences: they reveal unconscious assumptions in our understanding of the world, and they facilitate the emotional resignification of facts about the world.
1. Unconscious assumptions: let’s take being at one with the universe. Is it true that a guy on mushrooms *is* the universe? No. But it’s not false either. The boundaries of the self are arbitrarily drawn. Usually, we think of the body as the self. But sometimes, we see the self as our executive capacity (“ego”, if you prefer), in opposition to other mental phenomena like feelings and impulses. In certain mystical practices, we dissolve our identification with the ego and identify only with consciousness itself. In the other direction, when we drive, we think of the car as an extension of ourselves. We identify with our accomplishments, with our family or friends, with our community. If you are a patriot, an offense to your country feels like a personal offense to you.
Edit to connect explicitly to the main point: the unconscious assumption that your self is definitely only one thing is not true and leads to suffering.
“Being at one with the universe” means nothing more than the feeling of extending that boundary of the self to encompass everything. Is it wrong? No, because it’s not exactly a proposition. It can’t pay rent in experience anticipation. But feels right, and it can make you feel a lot better about things that make people miserable like death and impotence and feeling small. This brings us to
2. Resignification. Let’s run through an example. You’re going to die someday. Chances are, you think of death as something frightening, associated with frightening feelings or impressions like darkness, isolation and helplessness, and this may cause you a lot of grief and anxiety.
Mystical experiences allow you to resignify death – to change your emotional relationship to it. Instead of associating it with darkness and horrible things, you can think of death as “an old friend”, like the third Peverell brother. *Is* death an old friend? No. But neither is it darkness, isolation and helplessness. This understanding is no more accurate than the old-friend understanding, and the old-friend understanding causes a lot less heartache.
(If you don’t like this particular resignification, just think of another that doesn’t offend your rational understanding of the world. But it takes a little more work of resignification to be at peace with the idea that death is nothingness, because “nothingness” also has some tenebrous associations to be unwound.)












