I feel like, as with many things, beauty is in the eye of the beholder.<p>I’ve had a trip not dissimilar to what is described herein, and while the experience itself was jarring, to say the least, the upshot was that it allowed me to divest myself of an awful lot of the reified bull that we consider to be our world.<p>For me, being nothing, being everything, being utterly alone, being a barely existent mote in a vast and incomprehensible universe, resonated - for that <i>is</i> what I am - nothing, dust, a brief flickering of matter in a certain organisation against a dark background. Statistically irrelevant noise, indistinguishable from black body radiation at a distance.<p>For some, ego death is debilitating, for others, liberating - again, I suppose it’s down to the beholder, how invested you are in the false reality that we collectively agree upon, how deep down the rabbit hole you are consciously willing to go, regardless of the psychic pain it inevitably involves as you reassess yourself from “centre of your personal universe” to “statistically non-existent”.<p>I guess I was at least somewhat primed and prepared when it happened, already being well schooled in the likes of Baudrillard, Dick, and other psychedelically influenced existentialists, and having some context to give me a grasp (as much as one can have a grasp on the slippery fish of reality) on what just happened.<p>Perhaps… perhaps the bad trip actually came close to freeing him from his personal black iron prison, but upon seeing the vastness of the outside, he decided he preferred the safety and constancy of captivity.