This is the big lie of psychs, that they allow you to "explore your mind" as if somehow you're not fully understanding it while sober (and through meditation).
Psychs rewire how the brain handles and deals with sensory input, so that when you do them you're not exploring the mind you have while sober, but entering into a completely different "mind" based on distorted perception.
It's like thinking you're exploring new rooms in your own home when in fact you're 9 blocks away checking out a house that's entirely different in structure and form. Of course that adventure will bring in fresh new perspectives, but in no way does that help you discover more about your own home.
I don't think that's correct: one can still be mostly lucid while having the drug affect some part of their mind. You can sometimes bring things back.*
Often it's not really sensory at all; it seems to work at a higher, conceptual level. For example, I once looked in a mirror and saw myself, but recognized different people, with different personalities, my mother, my siblings, my different personalities.
I looked out into a room, and I saw all the elements, but my experience of it was flat, as if someone took a picture and laid it out on paper. Then the shading in the picture implied lighting, which quickly implied depth. Objects rotated into consciousness. I saw a tree, and then suddenly the existence of leaves and branches screamed out to me, as if to say "we are entities too! we are not simply parts of the tree! we are objects of our own." A friend of mine was standing near, but still. At a conceptual level, my perceptual experience of her was of an extremely accurate statue of her. As in "my, what a life-like Sarah." And then she moved, and she was animate again, a real person.
A friend of mine studies perception. He tells me there's a lot of evidence for these kinds of 'perceptual layers,' and that a lot of the subconscious visual classifications that I was experiencing. Self, not self. Person, not person. Animate, not animate. Object, not object. Flat, not flat. One expects it's the sort of thing that we do naturally, for many other sorts of things. Male, female, old, young, intelligent, dim, aware, tired, happy, sad, etc. And it's the sort of thing that neural networks can do, too.
So I definitely think that there are things that you can bring back. I think if you try hard, you can hold on to the experience, and see how much of it makes sense in the real world. But I'm not sure this is the experience of most people. I hear lots about people seeing pretty colors.
* Note, all this happened on half a hash brownie, alone. This experience suggest that I stay away from anything harder.
This is the big lie of psychs, that they allow you to "explore your mind" as if somehow you're not fully understanding it while sober (and through meditation).
Psychs rewire how the brain handles and deals with sensory input, so that when you do them you're not exploring the mind you have while sober, but entering into a completely different "mind" based on distorted perception.
It's like thinking you're exploring new rooms in your own home when in fact you're 9 blocks away checking out a house that's entirely different in structure and form. Of course that adventure will bring in fresh new perspectives, but in no way does that help you discover more about your own home.