I'm watching the Netflix doc "How to Change Your Mind" about this subject. They use similar language: e.g. that psilocybin causes terminal cancer patients to view death with "curiosity". I find that really interesting, because implicit in this "curiosity" must be the idea of consciousness existing after death...otherwise what would be curious about it? You just die and there's nothing otherwise. So I wonder if, e.g. atheists or non-spiritually inclined folks have the same experiences in these drugs.

I’m basically an atheist and ketamine assisted psychotherapy did change my background fear of mortality very much in a before and after sort of way. It felt more like a different relationship to time and free will. Like a realization that the universe existed and unfolded like a cellular automata and I was integrated within that. Talking to the very experienced therapist afterwards he summed up my scattered thoughts as, “you resolved your determinacy.”

I still don’t believe in an afterlife other than in the abstract sense that that the brief existence of me as a point of consciousness was impacted by all that came before it and will have had an impact on all that comes after. I would say more calmness and more acceptance are better descriptions than curiosity.

Like a lot of psychedelic experience, there’s an underlying neurological phenomenon and common subjective experience that gets differently interpreted based on your background beliefs. It’s like the DMT experience of entities is very differently interpreted as inter-dimensional elves by those DMT smokers who have read a lot of Terrance McKenna, as plant spirits by Amazonian ayahuasca drinkers, and as channeled spirits or Christian saints by Daimistas.

After my spiritual experience 2 years ago, my latent worry / conceptual fear of death was also replaced with curiosity. But I was coincidentally faced with death recently and was disappointed to see my primal terror is still alive and well.

That sounds frightening. What do yo mean by 'experience only so many deaths' ?

At times I’ve become convinced that all of experienced reality is narrowing to a point and about to wink into nothingness, and myself along with it. It’s hard to explain, but it’s very convincing at the time. So as I experienced this sort of unraveling of the universe I have to confront the idea of my own non-being. Until I come out of it and realize it was all in my head :) Even my early, terrified experiences felt like therapy, like the pain was well spent, so to speak.

Sure, I was just curious. So essentially throughout the experience you felt as if things were sort of 'narrowing' and, inevitably, you would too. And with this repeating over and over again it forced you to confront and eventually move beyond a fear of death?

As they say, "Six million ways to die, choose one"

I am not convinced that a ketamine-induced feeling of death is at all relatable to actual death. There is plenty of neural activity remaining.

Is it possible you're just convinced it feels like death?

The point isn’t how similar (or not) the experiences in my mind are to actual death, it’s that at those times I’m convinced I am experiencing not just death, but total annihilation of my consciousness which is my personal best guess about what happens to us when we die. It’s not the moments leading up to death I’ve feared, it’s non-being and attachment to my own thoughts.

So then when I’ve experienced a series of “welp, here we go, I’m on my way to nothingness” and dealt with that terror in those moments, I’ve had the opportunity to accept that fate and even embrace the unknown.

And now that I’m not gripped by existential terror when I think of my own death, I find myself wondering if I’ll be surprised to find something else on the other side of it. And that’s way more fun :)

It's so wonderful to hear that you were able to overcome this.