Coming down from my last trip, I had this intense experience that has stayed with me and has been a part of my day to day experience since.... very difficult to put into words, but I will try.
I really enjoy the immediate post-trip experience, where my thoughts become like little visual narratives... I had these repeating thoughts/images (not true hallucinations, just visually inclined thought patterns) of societies throughout history, going back in time, although experiencing each historical era as the present, and 'daydreaming' these conversations that people in those times may have had about how they viewed the world, their notions of science, how everything works and their belief systems, etc. In other words, the MAPS that these people make of their realty, based upon the information available at the time. Different periods of history, like the proto-rennaissance, Greek antiquity, the industrial revolution, etc.
What struck me at the time, and was sort of the core of this thought process is that looking back on these periods today, these people's ideas seem primitive and almost foolish...yet they are based upon the best available evidence for the time. And just this sensation that, yes, these people believed that the Earth was the center of the universe every bit as certainly as you or I today may believe that particles are the building blocks of matter.
In other words, in their time, they were SURE, just as we are sure of the things that we assume to be correct today. The real crux of the experience was fast forwarding in time, and being aware that 500 years from now, if people still exist they will just as likely look at our maps, and understanding of the universe as equally primitive.
I have been learning to not be so sure of anything... everybody always seems so certain that they are right about the things they think they know. How will these things hold up over time? Is it kinda batshit to think that everything you think you know for sure may be completely wrong?
I don't know if anyone will get anything out of this post, but this idea has had me spinning. Try it. Try to genuinely doubt something that you are so so certain about. It's almost a relief.
“What goes on inside is just too fast and huge and all interconnected for words to do more than barely sketch the outlines of at most one tiny little part of it at any given instant.” - David Foster Wallace