"The interesting part is cartography. Each compound reveals a different room."

I think you're assuming the map is the territory here — your tarot analogies are clean, but they're still just a framework you're layering onto raw experience after the fact. From what I understand of predictive processing in neuroscience, the brain is already in the business of generating models and then mistaking them for reality, so I'm skeptical that adding more model-making (even comparative model-making) gets you closer to anything. The "recreation problem dressed up as spirituality" line is solid, but I'd push it further — maybe the cartography itself is part of that dressing.

The practical issue I keep running into is that once you start mapping, the mapping becomes the practice. You stop encountering rooms and start cataloging them. That's fine if the goal is building a reference library — some people get real utility out of that, especially in therapeutic contexts where having a named framework helps people communicate their experiences. But if the claim is that the map reveals rooms you didn't know existed, I'd want to see evidence that those rooms weren't just generated by the mapping method itself. Without that check, you're left with a system that feels productive but might just be spinning up novel descriptions of the same familiar territory.

What strikes me about your comparative approach is how closely it mirrors legitimate phenomenological methodology. Edmund Husserl called this epoché — the systematic bracketing of assumptions to examine experience on its own terms. You were essentially doing this empirically, logging set, setting, and dose the way a researcher would control variables in a double-blind study. The difference is you had N=1 and no ethics board approval.

Your observation about pattern recognition post-experience aligns with something I have been researching: the neurocognitive aftereffects of altered states. Andrew Gallimore has written compellingly about how 5-MeO-DMT in particular seems to disrupt the default mode network so thoroughly that the brain is forced into extended re-consolidation — a literal rewiring period where new patterns of meaning-making become available. The compounds did not give you answers; they gave you improved instrumentation for asking questions.

The transition to sigil work is also noteworthy. Peter Carroll specified that chaos magic deliberately exploits the same attentional mechanisms that psychedelics trigger pharmacologically. Gnosis — the altered state he identifies as necessary for sigil efficacy — can be arrived at through many doors. Your psychedelic phase calibrated your ability to enter and exit that state intentionally. That is not a step backward. It is an operationalization of what you learned.

I would push one point further: the "which room is best" question is not merely wrong. It assumes the house has a fixed architecture. My suspicion, based on both quantum models of consciousness and subjective reports, is that the rooms themselves shift depending on who is walking through them. The map is never finished. It cannot be. And that, arguably, is the whole point.

"I started noticing how specific states mapped to specific cognitive biases — confirmation bias, the narrative fallacy, all that."

This is the part that actually grabbed me. I do data validation for a living and the scariest thing about these experiences isn't the ego death — it's realizing how convincingly your brain constructs narratives afterward and labels them "insight."