> “I began to suspect that I was either in a dream of my own construction or trapped in some kind of fake reality constructed by someone else,” he wrote in an essay in 2020. “Could I be in a coma or some afterlife limbo state?” ... “This isn’t real,” he thought to himself. “How do I wake up?”
Any Buddhist practitioner would tell you this is sort of what you're going for in your practice. Buddha literally means "one who has awakened". Many practices ask you to consider reality as a dream, like Lojong in some lineages of the Vajrayana tradition [1], and to look at the impermanence of all things -- especially what we call 'self' -- as part of the path towards awakening.
There's a reason why lots of the Buddhist lineages are set up to gradually introduce you to these things and wouldn't just throw you into the most esoteric parts of the practice right at the beginning. If you don't have the foundations for it I can imagine getting out of an intense psychedelic experience more confused than when you went in.
Any Buddhist practitioner would tell you this is sort of what you're going for in your practice. Buddha literally means "one who has awakened". Many practices ask you to consider reality as a dream, like Lojong in some lineages of the Vajrayana tradition [1], and to look at the impermanence of all things -- especially what we call 'self' -- as part of the path towards awakening.
There's a reason why lots of the Buddhist lineages are set up to gradually introduce you to these things and wouldn't just throw you into the most esoteric parts of the practice right at the beginning. If you don't have the foundations for it I can imagine getting out of an intense psychedelic experience more confused than when you went in.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lojong