"Honestly, I'm fine with the uncertainty."

That's the win right there—I think the real work isn't chasing the state, it's just training yourself to tolerate the unknown without needing a label to make sense of it.

(There's a deeper dive on this in our wiki: Using the I Ching for Meditation and Decision-Making | Mystic Wiki.)

The boundary between contemplative practice and actual psychedelics feels genuinely permeable, at least in my experience.

I get why it feels that way, but I’d push back on the "permeable boundary" idea. In my comparative religion coursework, we tracked how Tibetan tummo, Hindu pranayama, and Sufi dhikr all induce altered states through breath, rhythm, and sustained attention. These weren’t described as "natural psychedelics" in their original texts. They were mapped as deliberate physiological and psychological processes with entirely different phenomenological structures than alkaloid trips. One is built on surrender, repetition, and the gradual unraveling of habitual thought patterns. The other is often a sudden, chemically-driven override of default mode network activity. They might look similar on the surface—flash of light, sense of timelessness, archetypal imagery—but the mechanics and the aftermath are wildly different. When I see people conflate them, it usually comes from a Western desire to medicalize or quantify the ineffable. I’ve spent years watching laboring people go through what you’re calling Tower moments. Birth doesn’t feel like a chemical trip; it feels like being systematically dismantled and rebuilt by forces you can’t control. It’s not about crossing a threshold into some shared inner territory. It’s about meeting resistance, learning to move through it, and coming out with a completely different relationship to your own nervous system.

You mentioned Carl Jung and the collective unconscious, which is a fair anchor, but Jung himself warned against treating archetypes as literal neurochemical events. They’re patterns of meaning-making, not brain states. When the Moon keeps showing up alongside those altered states, it might not be your brain synthesizing tryptamines. It might just be that you’re finally quiet enough to notice what’s been running your emotional baseline all along. I’m not dismissing your experience. I’m just asking: what do we lose when we assume the boundary is permeable? Sometimes labeling it as a "natural high" or a "DMT mimic" flattens the actual work of sitting with uncertainty, boredom, and the slow, unglamorous process of actually changing your wiring. Keep pulling the cards. Keep breathing. But maybe stop trying to fit the door into a vial.