"So-called "bad trips" can be tremendously beneficial afterwards. They're "bad" because you get into the kind of deep, uncomfortable introspection that most people would want to avoid naturally."
While such uncomfortable introspection could certainly occur in a bad trip, it's far from the only kind of experience that could make a trip bad. You could also find yourself imagining you're in something like a horror movie or in hell, dead, or dying.
Terrence McKenna and Rupert Sheldrake coined the term "necrotogen" (a play on the much more common term "entheogen") for the common effect that psychedelics have of being confronted with death. Such an experience often feels very real, sometimes even "more real than real".
That kind of experience is much more than simply uncomfortable introspection, especially when it's combined with temporal distortions and confusion that is also common in psychedelic experiences -- where one feels like what one experiences takes years, decades, centuries, or millennia, or that one is stuck in a temporal loop of doing the same thing over and over again, or that one can't escape from the distressing situation that one is in, or that one doesn't know who one is or where one is or what is happening or what is real and what isn't.
Are you really dying? Did you just murder someone? Or are you being murdered or threatened in some way? Did someone call the police or ambulance? Are you in jail or being tortured or abducted by aliens or dead and experiencing decomposition, etc.
Despite all that, I fully agree that one could learn a lot from such very negative experiences -- for example, how to cope with them -- and the "bad" trip could wind up being one of the best trips one ever had because of what it revealed to you about yourself and the world.
Also, it's quite common for such a "dark night of the soul" experience and/or ego-death to be followed by an experience of rebirth and of very positive, life-enhancing and life-embracing revelation (incidentally, such psychedelic experiences bear strong similarities to shamanic initiation experiences, where sickness, bodily dissolution, and death prefigure and even legitimize the abilities and status of the shaman). But even without the latter, it could still be very constructive, and one could learn a lot.
While such uncomfortable introspection could certainly occur in a bad trip, it's far from the only kind of experience that could make a trip bad. You could also find yourself imagining you're in something like a horror movie or in hell, dead, or dying.
Terrence McKenna and Rupert Sheldrake coined the term "necrotogen" (a play on the much more common term "entheogen") for the common effect that psychedelics have of being confronted with death. Such an experience often feels very real, sometimes even "more real than real".
That kind of experience is much more than simply uncomfortable introspection, especially when it's combined with temporal distortions and confusion that is also common in psychedelic experiences -- where one feels like what one experiences takes years, decades, centuries, or millennia, or that one is stuck in a temporal loop of doing the same thing over and over again, or that one can't escape from the distressing situation that one is in, or that one doesn't know who one is or where one is or what is happening or what is real and what isn't.
Are you really dying? Did you just murder someone? Or are you being murdered or threatened in some way? Did someone call the police or ambulance? Are you in jail or being tortured or abducted by aliens or dead and experiencing decomposition, etc.
Despite all that, I fully agree that one could learn a lot from such very negative experiences -- for example, how to cope with them -- and the "bad" trip could wind up being one of the best trips one ever had because of what it revealed to you about yourself and the world.
Also, it's quite common for such a "dark night of the soul" experience and/or ego-death to be followed by an experience of rebirth and of very positive, life-enhancing and life-embracing revelation (incidentally, such psychedelic experiences bear strong similarities to shamanic initiation experiences, where sickness, bodily dissolution, and death prefigure and even legitimize the abilities and status of the shaman). But even without the latter, it could still be very constructive, and one could learn a lot.