u/PixiePink87

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So the night before, I did DMT for the first time. It was a lot. Colours I had never seen before, geometric shapes constantly moving and transforming, and a sense of presence that I still cant fully explain. An entity that felt aware of me, that seemed to be showing me different states of mind, maybe almost like levels, from something that felt like heaven down to something that felt like hell. I refused to go to the lowest level and it actually respected that. I came back up to the first level and I cried. It was beautiful, felt as if I was in heaven. It was one of the strangest and most meaningful experiences of my life.

The next day, I took shrooms and for some reason decided to watch Enter the Void as it seemed cool.

That was probably one of the biggest mistakes, of my life.

The jump scares hit me like they were actually happening to me. The "wake up" scene, the car crash, the screaming, it all f* me up. I was terrified and couldn't sleep afterwards, I was that afraid.

But the ending did something else to me entirely. I cried, and I said out loud: I don't want to be reincarnated!! ( mind you, complete atheist). I was begging 'God': When I die, I just want to stop existing. I want to go into the void. And then I realised I had just referenced the title of the film without meaning to and tripped myself even more.

Ive been sitting with that since.

Im highly into philosophy, I already knew so much of this stuff, I do not understand how a movie made me so sure and scared of something I did not even believe hours ago. Im even questioning if I am experiencing psychosis ?

The film is heavily based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead which is a text traditionally read to the dying as a guide through the Bardo, the intermediate states between death and rebirth.

The core teaching is that everything you encounter in those states is a projection of your own mind. So everything from a dmt trip, the frightening things, the entities, the lights, all of it is you. And if you can recognise that, you achieve liberation rather than being pulled back into rebirth through fear or craving.

Whats crazy is how directly my DMT experience mapped onto that framework. Crazy.

But the Buddhist concept of liberation varies across schools though. Different schools disagree. Some say liberation is the cessation of craving and aversion, but a kind of pure awareness remains, not your personality, not a self, just consciousness without a centre. Like the ocean without waves.

Others come closer to saying it's full cessation. The void. Nothing remaining.

The Buddha himself, when asked directly whether the enlightened person exists after death, refused to answer and said the question is silly. Like asking where fire goes when it is blown out, east, west, north, south? He said the question wasn't useful.

I find myself drawn to the second interpretation. Wishful thinking.

And I've been trying to understand why.

I don't think it's because my life has been unbearable exactly. It's been below par in specific ways, because of loneliness mostly, feeling like existence among other humans has cost me more than it gave.

But even setting that aside, even imagining a perfect life like, I'd still feel this way. There's something about the repetition itself, the cycle of wanting and losing and wanting again, that I find exhausting at a fundamental level.

Schopenhauer argued something similar, that existence is driven by a blind, insatiable will, and that suffering isn't incidental to life but structurally built into it.

I didn't expect to arrive at that conclusion through a Gaspar Noé film on psilocybin, but here we are.

What I keep coming back to is that liberation in the Buddhist sense, if it means what I think it means, isn't really a reward or a destination. It's just the end of the wanting. That sounds like enough to me though. But isnt wanting liberation still a form of wanting? Am I going insane?

Why have I watched that movie ?

Has anyone else come out of a psychedelic experience feeling like existence itself, not just this life, but the whole project, is something you're ready to be done with?

Have I unintentionally became a efilist? Which I always thought was quite stupid...

I feel as If Im going a bit insane, and truly wish I have never watched that movie.