(I have posted similar inquiries at various similar forums online, so apologies for redundancy I just cannot get any clear answers and this is supremely frustrating.)

Most of my life constituted aching for my true self, rejecting who I was in the moment, and never being able to attain it. It was there, but could never be fully accessed. After years of trial and tribulation, I finally gave up and accepted myself in all forms, and paradoxically that's when the the magical, automatic unfurling began. Everything that I intuited to be true slowly became blatantly manifest, I felt myself sinking into an ethereal, yet piercingly real, ultimate reality, becoming entrenched in who I knew I was. However, I made a calamitous error a few weeks after this realization: I took ketamine. Whatever beautiful process I had started was abruptly halted, and mere existence became excruciatingly painful, the polar opposite of what I had felt just before, in fact quite possibly the worst I had ever felt in my life. Since that point, my conscious expreience has gone up and down, with a force perpetually moving...somewhere but not always pleasant (I have tried so many meditations since, they are fundamentally useless against this force because it seems to control all.) However the one constant is that they are always segmented into cycles of experience lasting exactly 41 days.

There is a little literature from various spiritual traditions describing 40/41 day time periods as important, but none that succinctly fit it to a distinct map of progression, which is what I guess I am really trying to figure out here. From the 16 stages described on this website, does each insight cycle take that amount of time? Is there anyone here who has experience with hallucinogenics/psychadelics and can vouch for their experience in regareds to the path? I talked with someone who offered some clarification regarding the outline of the path and how it relates to mental phenomena, and that was helpful in familiarizing me with more visceral sensations and identifiying emptiness, however I am really looking for more distinct, concrete answers for this specific issue. What I experienced felt more real than anything "real" before it, and I would like to enter that again, barring substances of course.

It sounds like you had an A&P experience and somewhere around the time you took ketamine it shifted into the dark night. The dark night tends to follow the bliss of the A&P with or without ketamine I'm afraid. 

Have you stopped to think that the 41 day cycles may be entirely idiosyncratic? Might just be how your internal neurology is structured. 

The Buddha taught... 

1. There is suffering
2. There is a cause of suffering
3. There is an end to suffering
4. There is a path to the end of suffering

If you want liberation from suffering then you need to commit to doing some high quality insight practice. That's something people here can help guide you towards. 

There aren't many of us, I don't think, who can help unravel the kabbalistic mysteries of 41.

​​​​​​​Now that you mention it... I do recall 42 having some very profound spiritual significance.

It definitely set me back in some way, the level of interoception within my mental space I could experience immediately afterwards was dramatically altered, like the intricately woven complexities of life reduced to a the simplicity of a crayon drawing. It's possible that my neurology is specifically conducive to that timeframe but I don't believe the path should be non-universal, just experienced differently by different people. Within my sleuthing I found a post on this site by Joe M that documented a 40 day interval between path changes, I wish he was still active so I could ask him how it affected his practice.

I understand the need for meditation but what am I to do when this all-pervading force acts superiorly to literally any form of it I pursue? I can (and have) spent hours exploring every corner of my mind, taking a step back, watching my breath, detaching, being involved, discriminating phenomena, it's no use against these repeating cycles of experience, I feel myself solely as a vessel to these occurences. All I can do really is go with the flow, yet I have no clue if and how long it would take to get to what was right again. If I can offer any generalized descriptors of them it would generally be, during those 41 days, there is a movement of mental strata up and to the right that culminates the last day then restarts the next one, if that means anything. I can't really identify what the strata are, they are too fickle and dull, just that they move that way.

In terms of maps, also, how do the jhanas and 16 stages interrelate? Like at which jhana is which stage? In both systems are each respective level equal in measure/scope to the others (ie stage 7 is protracted while stage 12 is very short)? 

​​​​​​​Thanks

Question: What do you mean when you say, "I accepted myself in all forms?" Also, what do you think taking ketamine did to your previously contended experience of the world? What happened? Finally, what is the nature of the pain you are now feeling?

We need more detail! You are describing your experience at a very high level, as if from 50,000 feet, but not providing any useful information at ground level. We need the ground level of your experience before, during, and after what you describe. Any responses you get from anyone will almost inevitably address symptoms but not the cause.

"(I have posted similar inquiries at various similar forums online, so apologies for redundancy I just cannot get any clear answers and this is supremely frustrating.)"

If you cannot find the answer to a question, sometimes it helps to put it aside and work on a different question. Sometimes the answer to the first question becomes clear later when the second, third, or fourth question has been answered. It can be difficult to put down a question but, like anything else, it grows easier with practice. 

​​​​​​​This is a good place to ask questions.

This is exactly right; the more we resist the flow, the more we suffer (until we learn the lesson). What you might do is to go *more* with the flow than you do: so include everything *about* the practice, i.e. the aversion, frustration, wishing it to end, expectations about 41 days and all the elaborate analysis of stages in the observation (knowledge is often a trick of of the mind to persuade itself about having control, which it never really had), without falling into it — that's the insight practice. You can't see the fire when there is thick smoke; so you better look at the smoke.

As we all know, the true answer is 42. How does it make you feel to be a near miss? ;)

I'm not sure how to describe the change, I just shifted my mentality to total acceptance of everything occurring in my awareness without judgement. After ketamine my inner world vanished, and my sensitivity to everything blunted. It basically felt like a lobotomy. The pain was like a loss of familiarity with my own mind, own body, as well as extreme boredom.