5 grams alone with music — what ego dissolution actually felt like

I had done psilocybin three times before — 2g, 2.5g, and 3.5g. Each was meaningful. I felt I understood the territory well enough to go further. I was wrong about understanding the territory, but the decision was still probably right.

I took 5g of dried Golden Teacher on an empty stomach, ground fine and eaten with honey. Set an eye mask on the couch, pressed play on a playlist I'd spent two weeks curating, and lay down.

What happened at the 90-minute mark: There was no longer a "me" having an experience. There was experience happening. The boundary between what was inside and what was outside simply was not present. I can't say "I felt at one with everything" because there was no "I" doing the feeling — there was just oneness. The sentence is grammatically incoherent in a way that I mean literally.

I knew, at some level, that my name was something, that I had a body, that I had taken a substance. This knowledge was present the way the existence of Japan is present to me right now — true, not doubted, but not experienced. What I experienced was... boundlessness. That word is also wrong.

Coming back: The return was gradual over 2-3 hours. First came the awareness that "something had happened." Then came "I." Then came the realization that I was crying without knowing why and without being distressed about it. Somewhere around hour 4 I was coherent enough to write in my journal and I wrote a single sentence: "It was real and it was fine."

The next morning I felt simultaneously humbled and calm. Something had been shown to me about the nature of identity that I hadn't asked for and couldn't fully articulate. A year later I still haven't fully articulated it. But something in how I relate to fear — particularly existential fear — has been permanently different.