yes, the ego sensation is a looping or frequenting phenomenon.
maybe the speed estimation is distorted.
like what you see on a monitor.
"The first characteristic is a slowing down of time, a concentration in the present. One's normally compulsive concern for the future decreases, and one becomes aware of the enormous importance and interest of what is happening at the moment." James Fadiman
i think the visuals are always at best secondary.
maybe some people can't conceptualize the primary stuff, so they talk exclusively about visual stuff.
Yes, and as mentioned it came as a complete surprise to me. As you say it's difficult to conceptualize, at least in such a way that one can talk about it. Hence, when reading "trip reports", I mostly read about things related to what they saw, which created a misrepresentation of how the actual experience were. At least mine (and yours too).
About fear of death, I was actually surprised myself upon reflecting after the event that none of that had occurred considering how frequent an experience it is. I'm not sure, if pictured in a 2 dimensional vertical axis, whether I was "above" or "below", but I do know with fair certainty that I got a high dose and was tripping from 4pm until I managed to fell asleep at around 6 or 7am. For much of the time I couldn't have my eyes open for more than brief periods of time. For me I think it facilitated sentiments of unity. Mortality wasn't something that fell into my mind.
With regards to this topic (fear of death), perhaps two snippets from James Fadiman (even though I've already served you one) - The Psychedlic Explorer's guide would be in order?
"...all forms of life and being are simply variations on a single theme: we are all in fact one being doing the same thing in as many different ways as possible. As the French proverb goes, Plus ca change, plus
c'est la meme chose (the more it varies, the more it stays the same). I see, further, that feeling threatened by the inevitability of death is really the same experience as feeling alive and that all beings are feeling this everywhere; they are all just as much "I" as I am. Yet the "I" feeling, to be felt at all, must always be a sensation relative to the "other"—to something beyond its control and experience. To be at all, it must begin and end. But the intellectual jump that mystical and psychedelic experiences make here is in enabling you
to see that all these myriad I-centers are yourself—not, indeed, your personal and
superficially conscious ego, but what Hindus call the paramatman, the Self of all selves/ As the retina enables us to see countless pulses of energy as a single light, so the
mystical experience shows us innumerable individuals as a single Self.
The fourth characteristic is awareness of eternal energy, often in the form of intense
white light, which seems to be both the current in your nerves and that mysterious
which equals mc . This may sound like megalomania or delusion of grandeur—but one sees quite clearly that all existence is a single energy and that this energy is one's own being. Of course, there is death as well as life because energy is a pulsation, and just as waves must have both crests and troughs, the experience of existing must go on and off. Basically, therefore, there is simply nothing to worry about because you yourself are the eternal energy of the universe playing hide-and-seek (off and on) with itself."
"....A classical case of this experience, from the West, is recounted by Alfred Lord Tennyson in A Memoir by His Son.
A kind of waking trance I have frequently had, quite up from boyhood, when I have been all alone. This has generally come upon me thro' repeating my own name two or three times to myself silently, till all at once, as it were out of the intensity of the consciousness of individuality, the individuality itself seemed to dissolve and fade away into boundless being, and this not a confused state, but the clearest of the clearest, the surest of the surest, the weirdest of the weirdest, utterly beyond words,
where death was an almost laughable impossibility, the loss of personality (if so it were) seeming no extinction but the only true life."
Regarding the first snippet, it seems that taking a higher dose will increase the likelihood of reaching what is there called paramatman. In such a state, it seems obvious that any fear of death would be redundant. At lower dosages, however, flirting and grappling with death is probably a more real possibility if a sense of unity of all things is not experienced.
I know that if I happen to take a psychedelic again, I will make death one of my, if not main, areas of inquiry.
I'd also be interested to hear more thoughts on the subject of the visuals and what you conceive it to be. It seems that it's not just to be disregarded as mere hallucination. It would be great if you could elucidate and expand your first paragraph
