Your post actually makes me sad. You have such a wonderful life: kids, wife, privilege and wealth to travel to Europe. But the most beautiful experience in your mind wasn’t any of that, it was tripping on shrooms? If you are trying to make me not want to try psychedelics you did well.
The person you reply to sounds like someone who kknocks it without having tried it. I base this on the full comment, and more specifically on the fragment "tripping on shrooms". Drugs all enhance and alter what's inside you, for better and for worse, controllable or not. If climbing Mt Everest was your most eye opening and amazing experience, does that somehow reduce the value of your wife and kids? Such a strange premise...
LSD and heroin are pretty uncomparable. And those people were right: heroin is the greatest pleasure, that's its whole thing.
Hmm, an interesting reaction, I think I get it but I view topic from different perspective.
I am not anyhow lowering value of all other things I ever achieved in life, those are some hard won victories that didn't come without pain (and lets check in 20 years whether that stood the test of time). I gave them as a mere comparison.
Those mushrooms were that intense, it would be a lie to say otherwise. Cutting first umbilical cord was second, but then every hard peak I've climbed brought me to my knees and brought tears of joy and released emotions, those were some powerful emotions too (I guess when you struggle very hard and risk life for some specific goal and then reaching it this happens, at least to me).
But don't judge before knowing, there is nothing in this world that can prepare you for that intensity, if dose is enough (milder stuff, full stomach etc may result in different experience). Few words of description - laying in bed with eyes closed, losing gradually all the senses, dissolving what remained into mist of atoms that swirled and danced to shamanic music playing in the background. Then after a long time, very slowly starting to climb down that 'hill' by putting those atoms back together one by one, piecing together my personality, and then sense by sense, very slowly. Pure happiness afterwards, grin for an hour or two. Massive mental exhaustion from 'expanded mind', worst headache I ever had (but basic stuff like paracetamol helped a lot). Long lasting effects on life perspective.
But thats me, other folks may put the umbilical cord as #1, others those mountains or other endeavors.
The glass is half full of half empty? Did GP have reduced intensity of experiences related to his family, or they were of "normal" intensity, just intensity of shrooms experiences were above it?