“Euphoria and insight,” as Roger Sterling said in Mad Men, but while the ‘visuals’ are what’s publicized, they really only make up a very small portion of the experience.
The #1 thing psychedelics do is make you unable to rationalize how important events and emotions are supposed to be, similar to the way a child thinks. In other words, it makes EVERYTHING seem incredibly significant, in a way it’s almost impossible to experience otherwise. You are INCREDIBLY attuned to small emotional / mood / vibe changes, and are in a heightened, much more “raw” state of being. This can be incredibly enlightening (or terrifying, depending on how your trip goes).
On psychedelics, you very quickly realize that scrolling on your phone, for example, makes you very uncomfortable, feels shallow and vapid, and drains your energy, like a room full of too-bright fluorescent lights. Horror movies are totally out, even if you normally love them, because the brutality will be far too much to bear. But something as simple as going outside, having a campfire, and listening to good music suddenly becomes absolutely incredible, and extremely poignant. Nature is the #1 thing to pair with psychedelics. It truly makes you see the beauty of the earth in a much more profound way.
It’s also a serotonin kick, and it makes your emotional relationship senses heightened as well. You often experience a profound sense of camaraderie and an outpouring of love — you will realize, for example, all the ways that your partner is beautiful, kind, and wonderful, and you’ll question how you could ever take anything for granted, especially the people that you’re surrounded by.
It can also grant you deep introspection, where your mask of ego and projection is thrown off, allowing you to see the truth at the core of your life (although sometimes this “truth” is not more accurate than the way you see yourself, just simply different.) This can be wonderful, or it can be extremely difficult, it just depends on your surroundings, dose, and mental state.
Long story short, while psychedelics don’t make you hallucinate, it’s like they strip away the callouses of your soul and heart, callouses that have been layered on by pain, age, boredom, and the grinding repetition of life. Once those callouses are broken down by the psychedelic experience, it allows you to see the world with a sense of childlike wonder again, and grasp the extraordinary nature of life and this earth for the miracle that it is.
– Nice-Violinist-6395