My fourth experience with unity

I’d spent the last hour talking to a male friend on discord who I’ve recently been developing romantic feelings towards. I was feeling uncomfortable, and he was keeping me company and calming me down. I spontaneously started getting the sensation that my consciousness was “ageing backwards” and that I was regressing into a younger age. I felt more childlike and felt that my vocabulary was simplifying. The world around also me seemed new and unfamiliar. It made me feel incredibly uncomfortable in a way that was difficult to define. This regression process continued to happen over a roughly half-hour period. I regressed into a preteen, a child, a toddler, a fetus, and finally into I regressed so far back that I felt as I had reached a stage before ever having even been born. When I arrived at this state which I interpreted as age “0”, I was overwhelmed with a sense of unity between my self and the entire totality of existence. I suddenly had the feeling that I had been regressed into a primordial and more basic state which precedes a humans existence. I felt that as a child grows and learns a language, they begin to separate the world around them into symbolic labels, concepts, and subconcepts. As this skill becomes increasingly ingrained into their cognitive functioning, the child can no longer step outside of it and are stuck within a system of thought that inherently separates the external environment into individual concepts which in actuality, are intrinsically unified and co-dependent upon one another. These sensations reminded me of “oceanic feeling” which is a very similar hypothesis that was posited by Freud. I had never experience personality regression before and felt very overwhelmed and frightened, I thought that the regression was somehow related to the recent death of my father as if the unexpected loss of a parental figure had triggered something inside of me during this trip and left me feeling like an incredibly vulnerable child. After this experience, I began to progress upwards back through the ages slowly. I felt like a rapidly ageing newborn baby that had been pushed into a frightening and unfamiliar world with no knowledge of survival or concepts. I felt that the universe was a system of exponential self-complexification which has the primary purpose of striving towards ever higher levels of order and interconnectedness. I felt that as a means to fulfil this goal, it seemed that the universe subtly arranged situations to occur with a predisposition of increasing the likelihood of furthering this process. As a by-product of this, I felt that concepts such as synchronicity, plot elements, and coincidences were hardcoded into the fabric of existence.

I began to regain my cognitive faculties slowly and laid there for a while before heading downstairs and rejoining my friends who were tripping in darkness in the living room. I talked with them and began to feel normal again; however, I was still very on edge, stimulated, and anxious about the overwhelming experience I had just undergone.

I decided to take 2mg of etizolam because the anxiety would not subside, I felt sad and anxious about the death of my dad, which until this trip had not exactly been on my mind recently. The etizolam calmed me down, and I spent the rest of my evening laughing and joking with my friends while discussing plans for EffectIndex and DoseBot.

I woke up and felt tired but also strangely refreshed. The trip has not affected my cognitive abilities, and there is no hangover, unlike many other psychedelics.