DOSE:	3 hits	oral	LSD	(blotter / tab)
			Vitamins / Supplements

BODY WEIGHT:

140 lb

LSD, Personality Reconstitution, and the Enduring Delusional Obsession
The trip that lasted six months

I had purchased a few tabs of LSD in February, 2010. In mid-July, 2010, I decided to try LSD for the first time. I was told by a friend that LSD decayed somewhat quickly when not kept in the freezer, so I worried that my tabs had lost much of their potency. Around noon I consumed only one tab, but when, after an hour and a half, the effects were still only barely noticeable, I concluded that their potency was highly diminished and I ingested another two. This was still a relatively light dose; at no point during the trip did I experience visuals of any kind. My trip was completely mental.

During the couple weeks prior to my acid trip, I had read and done a good deal of thinking about Christopher Langan’s CTMU, or Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe. and The introduction to his theory was fascinating, intellectually scintillating, and in its unorthodox thinking seemed at the time to be a potentially legitimate Theory of Everything. As a studying mathematician, I was also drawn to it by its almost exclusive reliance on tautology, and by the author’s clear proficiency in and application of a wide array of mathematics, from Model Theory to Topology to Quantum Theory to the theory of Manifolds, toward explaining everything from Relativity to Quantum Mechanics. Its fundamental premises are based on self-containment and autologies, which are self-referencing, self-defining tautologies such as “Reality is the set of all real things.” As I tunneled into my LSD trip, I thought more and more intensely, and soon obsessively, about the nature of reality and logic, with increasingly greater focus on the logic of Langan’s ideas and their consequences, all integrated into my dramatically changing world outlook. The details of the trip are not important; the end result is that I became obsessed with understanding reality, and came to view the entire world through that warping lens of circular causality and set- and model-theoretic self-containment. The following outlines not my state during the trip, but my state during the several months ensuing it.

The object of thought around which my 6-month enduring acid trip delusions revolved was the concept of reality, which I viewed as equivalent to the set of all sets. At the time, this was clear to me, for reality is the set of all things that are real, and all sets are real (so the set of all sets is a subset of reality), and all real things can be placed in sets or regarded as sets of objects (so reality is a subset of the set of all sets); therefore we have mutual containment, therefore equality. My thoughts on it operated in some alien sphere of twisted mathematics, wherein I integrated my understanding of mathematics, especially mathematical logic and within that discipline, model theory, at an ostensibly very high level to come to understand reality as a mutual embedding of syntactic theory and the cognitive model thereof, so that the syntax of reality were model-theoretically interpreted as providing the structural grammar of that very syntax itself. In other words, the syntax of reality provides the rules for its own interpretation and manipulation, which means that syntax is its own model. This seemed clear to me: physical reality – syntax – provides the rules for its own manipulation, so is the very thing it models. Just as our cognitive model of reality is embedded within reality’s physical syntax while all the physical syntax we can ever know or experience exists only within our own cognitive models thereof, the syntactic theory of reality is contained within the very structure it describes, which is itself that selfsame syntax.

This is just one example of the way I viewed reality. A retrospective careful analysis of my thoughts reveals that the well-defined concepts around which my thoughts orbited were in fact subtle paradoxes: one can derive a contradiction from the very concept of a syntax that defines its own grammar, hinging on its syntactic-semantic mutual self-containment (hence transitive self-containment). In a certain light, my entire enduring delusional obsession with reality can be viewed as my brain self-referentially malfunctioning over trying to process a notion that is fundamentally a paradox: reality, equivalent in my mind to the set of all sets, is a paradox. And everything about reality only confounded this, among the most confusing my own involvement in reality. After all, my entire reality exists within my mind, yet my mind exists within reality. Everywhere I looked was dual self-containment.

By embracing a theory of reality that incorporated semantic self-description, set-theoretic self-inclusion, topological-descriptive dual containment, and circular tautologies as its fundamental basis of explanation, my thought process itself became victim to the self-same circular gibberish with which it was obsessed . As I obsessively and deliriously followed one self-referent train of thought after another in circles, exultantly concluding from my inferring my premises the validity of my logic, I was fully aware that everything with which I was dealing was self-referent and circular. However, I also believed that a true theory of reality, because it must be completely self-explanatory, must intrinsically be completely circular in its reasoning. This is actually completely true, and is among the many reasons why it is a logical impossibility that there ever be a complete theory of reality: any complete theory of reality must call on no factors external to itself (otherwise it would not provide an explanation for everything) and thus everything within the theory must refer to another part of the theory, so therefore the theory must be circular. I accepted this as justification for my circular reality theory, as by this reasoning a true reality theory must be circular! After all, everything within reality refers to another object within reality, so reality is itself circular, so then because the theory of reality must be isomorphic to reality, shouldn’t the theory of reality be itself circular? So went my train of thought; I am not sure if I ever noticed that this very justification was itself just more circular reasoning, but even if I did I’m sure I would have found a way to make it circularly justify itself. Of course, circular theories are not logically valid, as all logic must be based on solid definitional foundations, so therefore the fact that any theory of everything must be circular precludes the possibility of there being any theory of everything, but I was too delusional to realize this (or, more specifically, too delusional to realize that all logic must be based on solid definitional foundations).

This lasted for months, and it manifested itself in dozens of disguised forms. Flashbacks were a part of everyday life, and I unintentionally habituated myself into inducing a flashback whenever I was not otherwise occupied (just by thinking about reality in any way, I would have a flashback). During these flashbacks, my vision would warp, and this warping corresponded to the mental fireworks of LSD flashback as I saw physical objects embedded within their descriptive language embedded within physical reality as those objects themselves, and so forth with a dozen other variants on the self-descriptive, self-containing set: reality.

My attempts at explanations at what my experience was like is no more than a partial projection of that experience to the limiting mode of language. Naturally, there was much more to my experience than just trying to linguistically process that paradox. My thoughts largely ceased to be linguistic in nature, and instead became a kind of warped internal experience and realization of the patterns, symmetry, logic, and beauty of the world around me. Upon doing acid, my previously scintillating verbal intelligence was completely demolished as I struggled for months afterward to translate my alien thoughts, strongly removed from the human experience and instead nestled in ethereally warped cosmic perspective, “to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human prose” (to quote Ginsberg’s Howl). Since I did acid, and up until recently, I spoke extremely slowly with long pauses in my sentences.

All the while, I was a completely different person than I was before. I had been bitter, nihilistic, angry, and depressed. Over the course of my LSD trip, that personality had been disintegrated and reconstituted into one of serenity and peace that saw wondrous perfection in every aspect of life, logic, and reality. I saw every object and being as a miracle of reason, and I was in a constant state of exultant awe at the ethereal logic-beauty that enveloped and was all things. This serenity has remained with me, and I still view the world as a miracle of reason. While we can never know the ultimate cause behind existence, it remains logical to believe that reality is perfectly logical. As a mathematician, logic has a special place in my heart, and I feel about logic how many others may feel about God. Six months after I did acid, when I was recovering but still somewhat delusional and transcendent, I wrote,

“Without exception, everything in existence is completely and perfectly logical (otherwise reality would be logically inconsistent, which, by some theorems of elementary predicate logic, would destroy all distinction between true and false, and hence between real and unreal). It is by perfect reason that you and I exist, and it is by perfect logic that everything happens in exactly the way it does. Logic is the mother of all things. I often look at the world, to the extent that my limited capacity allows, as the web of transcendent reason that it is. It is in these moments that I realize the wondrous perfection that permeates every aspect of life, logic, and reality. It is both soothing and awe-inspiring to be part of something immeasurably more flawless than the most crystalline mathematics, and at the same time it is breathtaking to be endowed with the privilege of awareness within that unfathomable perfection.”

That was the cosmic life-perspective in which I was suspended for months after my LSD trip. The mental mechanics of those thoughts have diminished, but the peace remains. My atheism faded as I came to adore logic-reality itself as God. In my mind, God was reality, which was divine and perfect reason. It was a kind of mysticism for the divinity of logic itself. Today, this has dimmed as I increasingly realized that we can never know or perceive perfect logic, just as the way I had thought – that ‘acid-feel’ that characterized my subjective experience for months after my acid trip – faded into its proper deductive patterns. I am no longer bitter or angry about religion. Rather, any kind of belief in an anthropomorphic god is just a bizarre and foreign concept to me, but I live and let live. I believe that people are becoming increasingly logical, and it is through compassion and respect, not bitter judgmentalism, that we advance in personal growth, interpersonally, and as a society.

During these months of obsessive delusion, I remained a straight-A math student. However, I still wanted to be smarter so that I could understand math better, so that I could see more beauty in it. Around mid-October, I began taking fish oil capsules (500mg DHA and 200mg EPA per day). I proceeded to purchase other brain-support supplements, and today I have an arsenal of over a dozen brain-supporting pills that I take every day, including (to give an incomplete list) the fish oil, Gingko Biloba, Acetyl L-Carnitine, Alpha Lipoic Acid, Lion’s Mane mushroom, Bacoba Moniera, Alpha GPC, Choline, CoQ10, Huperzine A, Phosphatidylserine, Vinpocetine, some anti-oxidants (Resveratrol, L-Carnosine), and of course a multivitamin.

I do not know how much of a role my daily regimen of brain-supporting supplements played in breaking me free of my delusions and returning me to the calm, flashback-free world of proper deductive (as opposed to circular) logic from which I can at last look back and realize the sprawling sophisticated web of interconnected delusions in which my world outlook had resided. While I will certainly never be the same again, I have at last escaped from that web of circular reasoning in which I didn’t even realize I was trapped, and can see with frightened humility the eccentric hallucination that was my everyday life. I no longer talk slowly, and in fact my rate of speech is now faster than it was before. All of the acid-feel that had permeated my life is gone, and I believe that I am now smarter than I have ever been, not to mention happier and more peaceful.

Exp Year: 2010	ExpID: 91513
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: 19
Published: Oct 20, 2025	Views: Not Supported
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LSD (2) : Post Trip Problems (8), Retrospective / Summary (11), Unknown Context (20)