But also yes, psychotic people too feel like they are really being followed by CIA which an outside observer can recognize as a delusion.

But why should this even be either-or? Why couldn't it be that the brain is tripping and the supernatural is also happening? I think mushrooms probably can trigger the brain into a state that can happen other ways too (fasting, long meditations, experiences of supreme beauty, the overview effect, near-death experiences etc.) These brain states are probably what religions are on about and why they have even appeared in the first place.

My experience was that the brain state I was in was very unusual and made me more humbly appreciate more the mystery of all being and in that state disproving the existence of god through logical arguments seemed like such a silly human endeavour, as if a termite is trying to gnaw on a temple. Like, "Sure, go ahead?" (and I'm not bashing logic, I too rely on it every day)

I think the main goal of an opponent, concrete or imaginary, is to leave you in a discouraged state. When you get discouraged, you start to lose your momentum and your will to live. You become anxious, paralyzed and confused, which is to say: easy to defeat. This is exactly what an adversary would want you to do.

So, to answer the question: I do everything in my power to not get discouraged. I keep on trucking, being productive, helping out people, taking care of my loved ones and maintaining a positive, lighthearted mindset. I am hitting back by the sheer audacity of staying cheerful in these times, because that would absolutely enrage an enemy that wants to see me discouraged and defeated.

Also, I'm not sure if it was intended as advice to anyone other than himself. I was under the impression that Meditations was his private reflections towards the end of his life, not intended for publication.

(the lectures were "2017 Maps of Meaning" and "The Psychological Significance of the Biblical Stories")

I had a bad habit of checking all kinds of unimportant stuff in bed just before going to sleep but then I got rid of the smartphone and bought a dumb phone. I don't really long for that habit anymore because it's simply not possible to engage in. The withdrawal feels harsh at first but you can just soldier through it and eventually it gets easier.

As the dollar meter keeps running relentlessly you can imagine yourself being one split of a second somewhere there, and then you can imagine the sea of people working hard at compilers, optimizers, math etc. blasting you all at once with their brilliant observations. It's only natural to get overwhelmed if you expose yourself to the aggregate of the most brilliant and productive humans, because as rare as they might be, the human population is so staggeringly big that there are LOTS of them. You might not be doing so bad compared to the rest of the humanity though ;)

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8YUWDrLazCg (A Million Dollars vs A Billion Dollars, Visualized: A Road Trip)

Unfortunately, I don't have any solutions. This seems like a viciously hard problem. I saw a VICE clip[0] about some survivors of covid-19 in an ICU, and even after going through a near-death experience firsthand they were still hesitant about taking the vaccine. This suggests to me that this issue originates somewhere too deep in the lizard brain to just be reasoned with using the real facts.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AqUy8915gBg

You seem to have a felt sense of wasting your life by continuing to live it like this. That would imply that on some level you know that there's something you could and should be doing instead that you would be satisfied with, and your emotional systems are trying to signal to you that you're not doing that now. I would suggest you work on these crude signals and try to articulate the vision that's embedded in them into words to bring it into a form more comprehensible to yourself.

Here's a few questions: what would a properly lived life look like? What would you need? What could you do in your (lowly, confusing) situation to help yourself if you decided to do things properly, and humbly started to grab the opportunities that are presented to you right now, no matter how small and beneath you they might appear to you?

I'll admit that the cost upfront was not exactly cheap, but if you divide the price by the useful lifespan (my previous headphones lasted for 8 years) it becomes a no-brainer.

I don't think this has to be an sudden event? Apes are already communicating with each other and have the relevant structures for communication in place. It isn't impossible for me to imagine that mushrooms with their creativity-heightening effects might offer insights to an ape on how to improve the utilization of that which is already there, making their communication more refined, precise and expressive. It also isn't impossible to imagine that in a group of social animals better communication would likely increase the probability of survival and leaving offspring, thus influencing evolution.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T71ibcZAX3I