A little while ago I decided to do shrooms by myself. It was an uncomfortable trip — I got higher than I intended to and kind of wanted it to be over.
But I did have some cool insights. One that stands out was that I was lying on my bed staring at the lightbulb. And suddenly had this thought that human bodies are just like lightbulbs. A lightbulb has a finite life, but once it dies, it's not that the energy behind it dies. It is plugged into this energy source for a while in a fragile and time-limited body — when the lightbulb breaks or dies, the energy source still remains. And I felt that human bodies were like that, too.
I'm not a religious person and I'm not sure I believe that now in the cold light of day. But lying there, staring at that lightbulb, it felt as certain as anything I'd ever known. The experience of certainty itself was worth something — it showed me that my relationship to fear of death is more malleable than I thought.
Even when a trip is uncomfortable, there seems to always be something worth taking home.