As a recreational user of psilocybin mushrooms, I cannot be happier about this.

There is extraordinary value to deeply, viscerally, understanding your place in the universe, and how interconnected everything really is. Unlike LSD, which crafts things that aren't there, psilocybin pulls down our artificial/perceived barriers between things, and helps the individual feel connected, rather than disconnected.

In junior high school science classes, at some point the teacher will slap their hand on the table and explain there is more empty space in the table, than table. So why does their hand stop? And they go into atoms and attractive forces and blah de blah.

But when you assess all of the forces at play around you - from biochemical, to gravitational, to temperature, to smells, etc. - you realize there is no separation between what is YOU and what is EVERYTHING. Our brain crafts this concept of you "ending" at the surface of your skin, and nowadays we understand that our breath carries COVID to other people, but that's really an abstract and difficult to understand idea... that we are just a collection of atoms moving through a larger collection of atoms.

My experience with psilocybin was the only time that became crystal clear. And it wasn't disassociation of myself, it was association with everything that surrounded me.

There's an early TED talk with Jill Bolte-Taylor, a neuroscientist who has a stroke, and diagnoses the stroke as she is goes through the phases of it. At one point, she is leaning on the wall of the bathroom, and has that psilocybin-like experience where that "dividing the self from the outside world" part of the brain shuts down, and she loses the sense of where she "ends" and the wall "begins" and she feels integrated with the world in a deeply moving way.

I hope everyone gets to feel this some day.