The brutal mirror

Since I have nothing in particular to share for a while, I've decided I'd share this fascinating article on ayahuasca:
www.vox.com/first-person/2018/2/19/16739386/ayahuasca-retreat-psychedelic-hallucination-meditation

Some thoughts on this:
It's interesting to see how similar this is in some ways to Huxley's experience of taking mescaline and my experience of taking ketamine. Ayahuasca, mescaline, and ketamine are all psychedelic drugs. Huxley reported feeling dissociation when in his garden while on mescaline. I concluded years ago that the self is an abstraction although that was due to conscious contemplation, not ketamine.

The Zen quality he alludes to (namely, “And I think about how I’m going to look at my wife when I get back home, and how she’ll know I’m seeing her — really seeing her — for the first time all over again [emphasis mine].”) reminds me of the Zen quality I've mentioned before about ketamine and the one Huxley mentioned about mescaline. (fourth-session.html and fifth-post.html)

His getting to relive certain moments from his life and setting them right reminds me of my post in which I mentioned thinking about the different stages in one's life and how I felt regret that I'd missed out on so much. (february-21st-2019.html)

The heart of the article, however, is the lack of ego the author Sean Illing experiences. Ayahuasca allows him to escape his ego and, thus, observe himself as a neutral third party would. No wonder he describes it as a shortcut to what years of serious, disciplined meditation can bring you. Given how hard I find meditation, it sounds like something I'd like to try, much more so than mescaline actually.