DOSE:

5 g

oral

Mushrooms

(dried)

BODY WEIGHT:

68 kg

Setting and background:

I had done psilocybine mushshrooms before, roughly two years ago. I’d eaten 2.5 grams then. This experience was something like half of what I got this time, the amount was also half of what I ate this time.

My setting was just me in my room, with my headphones. I had contacted some friends but a little too late. I had some heroic ideas of going in completely alone. I hadn’t eaten anything, but the shrooms had been sitting in honey for a couple of weeks so there was some energy to get me through this.

During my research, I had often come across that intention is important for a psychedelic trip. I suppose what this means is that you need to have set a search area in your mind, so that the relevant thoughts in your unconscious appear to you in your trip. My intention was not very clear to me, I had written some things down that vaguely tried to approach my intention, but if I am to warrant a guess with the prior and posterior information, I was trying to gain knowledge of myself, my fears. Particularly the fear of the unknown and ultimately death, which I think it contains. To create again and to beat death is a process that I am not familiar with so I am instead lost in a state of timid detachment.

As I said, I had done mushrooms before, and that was a “glowing” experience. I felt connected with all beings around me and their struggle for survival. I remember being very fascinated with birds and how they navigated the landscape that we humans define, completely oblivious of our existence as anything more than a mysterious obstacle in their constant struggle to find food. The warmth of the earth, the sun and the grass was like a gentle reassurance that there is good in this world. I was with a friend and a friend of his. I am generally a very reserved person so awkwardness and hidden fears surfaced in me but only briefly and overall I would say this was a bonding experience with both of them, and after it I felt a certain sense of camaraderie having been through something like that with others.

This time

I have been growing more and more detached from myself and others. Prior to this, I had spent a number of months of my life being constantly around other people during my mandatory military service. This was a strange experience for many reasons. Being around others and not having a slight care filled me with a simple virility that I hadn’t been used to before. After it I came back into my old life, there was a gradual isolation and slipping into a detached state of being. I could hardly remember what being in awe felt like and started being afraid that those blissful images I had acquired in the past were beginning to fade away or that I had ever felt them to begin with. In the meantime I had been reading Jung and other Jungian inspired works (Although, reading Jung I realized that I had been already reading Jung through authors inspired by him already for a long time), and I decided explore the unconscious to try to understand what it is that is keeping me from finding something real to express.

12:00 pm
So I took 5 grams of dried shrooms in front of me and stared at them for about half an hour. I was filled with fear, the fear of the unknown. I had notes on paper and on my computer screen reassuring my future self of the temporariness of my about to be state, notes that were simply funny to me later on and meaningless. If anything, these notes were an early surfacing of my fears, fears that one tries to face and navigate through when on the trip, so let’s say an early micrography of the trip itself.

12:20 pm
I mustered the courage and beat my rationality and quickly ate most of the mushrooms. There was a single big stalk that I left and stared at for a good few seconds. I remember thinking that this could be my way back, if I didn’t eat this, I would escape the threshold. But once again I acted the fool.

12:35~ish
Soon after that I started panicking once again, there was now no way back. I messaged a couple of friends and my brother. I found no response anywhere, so I accepted my “fate”. My hands started growing numb because of the panic and I wasn’t sure how to tackle the come up. I spent some time doing a last minute study into some texts, kinda like what one would do before an exam one has gone uprepared to.

12:50
The effect started becoming noticeable, my head started “slowing” down and feeling heavier. I knew that in the next 20 mins or so I would be “launched” into the unknown. I was listening to some Vangelis music the past few days, so I hastily started a spotify playlist based on “Chariots of fire”, this all becomes very poetic if you choose to look at it that way. The chariots of fire is a concept linked with Apollo and the sun god Abraxas, so this is how the trip towards what I thought would be the sun began. I glanced through the tracks in the queue, I recognised some of them but not all.

13:10
Now it had really began, I started feeling very cold so I went and covered myself with the duvet and sat in the bed. Eyes started popping out in my duvet cover and the power sockets. I started being detached from my body, my limbs felt as if I was touching someone else. I let my head fall into the duvet which was covering my knees, and the travel distance from the duvet surface to my knees felt as if I was moving my head around in an huge soft space. I opened my eyes and looked at the power socket, it was glistening wildly and was like a sly eye peering at me. I cracked what seemed like a devilish smile in this moment and this caused me to be afraid, I immediately closed my eyes and covered my nose with “prayer hands” so as to control my breathing and still my thoughts. This is the last time I had my eyes open for the next 2 hours roughly. I lied down in my bed and covered myself. My headphones still on, I delved deeper into nothingness. It felt as if I was completely inside my brain. Surfing on geometrical shapes of beauty and trying not to lose my balance and delve into terror. There were moments when terrors appeared to me but I managed to still the thoughts. I remember having my hand on my ribcage, it felt as foreign but the heart rate was an indication, as if I was commandeering a ship. The terrors looked like formless goo, they made underworldly sounds. Sometimes the music would terrorize me, but I thought that I would endure it and not look away.

15:30 or so
I am not sure how long the past paragraph took out of the roughly two hours I spent on the bed, it could all be an instant or eternity. I cannot place the memories in a proper timeline. At some point at 15 30, I got up from the bed and dashed towards my computer. It was a synchronous event, as a friend had messaged me at that moment or slightly before. I emerged from this nothingness terrified at the absolute pain of loneliness and fluid inexistence. I had to establish a connection, words did not come easily and what I had to communicate was difficult to express, but at that moment I felt like I had succeeded and that the connection had been formed . I was once again “alive” and connected. I spend the next hour weeping on the floor and in between sending some messages to friends. I had felt this immense pain and was thankful to be once again under the light, I had feelings of equally immense gratitude. Coincidentally, the sounds playing in my headphones were in tune with the moment, and were songs inspiring unity.

16:20~
My sense of self was starting to come back, there was a homunculus again in charge that tried to actively integrate and consolidate knowledge. My fear took the form of me losing my acquired bliss once again. I felt the desperation to put the experience in focus and analyze it, but my mind was very difficult to focus. Things appeared blurry as well. At this moment I was on an information plane of existence, where I was communicating and existing in metaphors , metaphors that were created by me and a friend I was communicating with. It was as if this plane of metaphors was a collective unconscious transmitted through language. I took off my headphones because music was standing in the way of the “information processor” that was trying to focus.

17:00
Around this time I was regaining clarity, but was still confused and hazy I felt like my feet were on the ground and a metaphor came to my mind of the pentagrams. The feet on the ground and the head towards the stars. I was thankful to have come back into existence and I understood the opposite as death. The powers of death and life are constantly at work within us and in the world. It’s hard to say which of your actions are your own and come from love, and which stem from a force of fear of death.

18:00
I was mostly back, weeping at pictures and songs describing destruction, pain and isolation. I had never felt isolation to that extent and those images still 1 day later evoke a very emotional response.

17:00.
I got up and encountered my kitchen in absolute disarray, once again I felt the powers of abandonment and isolation staring at me. I visualized people who haven’t give up and projected the forces of love on them. Images of my mother came to my mind and her unwavering drive of fighting entropy and death. I also remembered an image from a Jodorowsky film, where a carpenter who is making a lot of chairs for free responds to Jodorowsky's father that all paths lead to god, when the character portraying his father looks at him confused at this drive.

I felt hungry and went to the super market, this time with no headphones on as I usually do to shut the world out.

I think this experience was a glimpse of spiritual pain and nothingness. And one cannot really see pain and struggle until one has felt it, and just what it takes out of some people to power through it.

I am writing this a day after, and the images are very vivid still in my mind. Part of me is afraid that I will once again timidly drift into isolation and nothingness, but that is I suppose what the “trip” of life, which only appears to us exacerbated so that one cannot ignore it.

Exp Year: 2018	ExpID: 112716
Gender: Not Specified
Age at time of experience: 28
Published: Jan 5, 2019	Views: 2,263
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Mushrooms - P. mexicana (193) : Alone (16), Music Discussion (22), Difficult Experiences (5), General (1)