There is - something dangerous, Keltham thinks, about having a sense of perspective, if too much of it comes on too quickly - there is seeing yourself, and the shadow of everything you've done, from the perspective where it is smaller and stupider - even the parts of you that provided all of your drive and your will and your sense of enjoyment in life, maybe not as ill things in themselves, but arranged stupidly - and with no better way to arrange them being obvious, as yet, because you were only wiser for something less than eight minutes. Of which you spent half that time practicing spellcasting, and maybe you should've spent the whole time that way because you weren't ready for what this drug does to you.
Why didn't they warn him?
Because people in Golarion get Owl's Wisdom cast on them once every six months, and they've never experienced what it's like to have gone your whole life without Owl's Wisdom?
Somehow Keltham doesn't think that's it.
It's a piece of - something wrong, something he doesn't know, something he believes that's false - about this entire situation, this entire world. People not quite behaving like obvious models say they should.
...or they just have so little internal stuff that is actually powered by self-reflection that not very much happens to them when they suddenly get amplified reflection?
No, that also feels like one of those weird excuses that Keltham was coming up with inside, to dismiss puzzle pieces.
