It's been years since I took mind-expanding substances. The impressions during such a trip can be overwhelming and frightening. Letting them pass you by as they happen and seeing them with the eye of an observer rather than a sufferer, as you describe, is probably attributable to your mental stability.
What the man who was deformed and tortured might stand for is hard to say. It can be an identification that expresses itself through him. He seems to represent death and suffering. In him is concentrated what we humans feel to be tormenting, I think to myself.
These things, like voluntarily staying in complete darkness or pushing the limits of what is physically possible, testify to the fears that are common to all of us.
I personally experience a loss of culture and community where such commonly experienced states are no longer practised. The dancing around the campfire and the drumming and singing of those in the group is not something that modern people experience.
To achieve similar states, where birth and death are involved, one is often left only with one's own intimate space.
For me, your experience is equivalent to an attempt to transcend one's own limitations and to integrate what you have experienced to the extent that the fear of death or physical and mental pain is an attempt to overcome this fear with the help of this ritual. In order to ultimately come to terms with oneself and the world.
Another aspect, however, which is not looked upon very fondly, is the confrontation with oneself and one's own dark parts, since everyone probably wants to think of themselves as a good person. Difficult to explain. ...
Anyway, I read your impressions with interest. Thank you for sharing them.