DOSE:

5 g

oral

Mushrooms

BODY WEIGHT:

175 lb

Took a heroic dose. 5 grams. For context, I’m writing this as my brain recovers from the experience. Reconnecting pathways that suggest language and other reptilian notions of conceptualizing everything. I’m a writer, and so this recounting may be decidedly less scientific than others. Still, it is my experience, as true as words can carry.

The start of it was bleak. I heaved over and over as my limbic system tried in vain to suss out an eject release, but there was none to be had. So eventually I puked up something curiously blue. Even the color white was dark to me at this point, so who knows what it looked like — ask Seattle to look up its address in our water system. After that, my wife gathered what was left of me and placed it in a neat little pile on the bed. By now my senses had completely vanished, and everything was blending together, and not in the good way; a burnt existence omelette. I had to constantly remind myself that this was just the equivalent of a firmware update, where all of my systems had to be dismantled and tossed aside like the meaningless nothings they were .

The thing is, anyone can act in accordance with humble notions of life and what it means. It is a completely separate matter from intimately familiarizing oneself with it.

After the nausea, I stopped hearing from my biology, who had peaced out after round 3 of toilet tango. I do not have accurate records of time, as I could not fathom its passage throughout the ordeal. As far as my environment was concerned, everything that stirred was my everything. Nothing was in my control, and I knew that the more that I wanted to exert it, the harder this experience would be. Boy, was it hard.

If I shut my eyes, I saw only projections from my mind in full, vivid, nightmarish view. If I opened them, I saw a picture of reality that seemed like it couldn’t stand it anymore and just needed to laugh at the culmination of the big trick the universe played on me. It’s funny now, but at the time, it was at my expense.

Where once there was toilet tango, now a new dance unfolded before my constant blinking between my own nothing and the tenuous - something. I focused on my breathing, always on my breathing — a grounding device as useful at this point as a scrappy Pomeranian in a hurricane.

After a lot of limbic hemming and hawing, all there was left to do was to sit back and get swept away. In truth, the sensation was not unlike one’s work being interrupted mid-thought by my operating system needing to shut down and install updates, as I stated before.

So I shut down.

I don’t know what happened next, but it felt as though I was in a womb, bouncing between terror and self-assurance that it would all pass. My ego was ornery; it was still holding on. Only when it tuckered itself out did I break through what felt like a prison of garbage, ever collecting for years and years, bogging me down. Eventually I felt the pieces of myself come back together, though they did not set themselves static, but seemed to intermingle with one another. There was still no “self”, but the pieces that remained who peeked back out from the subconscious like those who leave their shelters to behold the aftermath of a tumultuous storm.

I began thinking about time, distance, and the physicality of things. Trying to make sense of it was the trap I had fallen into in the first place. So I didn’t try.

I asked for light, and my wife obliged as she drew back the curtains of our back door. I saw the portrait of my wife come into view, backlit by the overcast October afternoon from outside our patio doors. The bamboo leaves that fenced in our enclosure towered ambivalently behind her, and all I could really do was smile.

I’d been smiling before — all throughout, even — but as the agent of a cosmic joke who was his own punchline. Now, bereft of those abstractions time-bred and time-worn, there was none of that.

All I felt now was gratitude. But more than that. On a much deeper and primal level, if I’m being honest. Suddenly, all of the novel Buddhist proverbs of the lion existing within every strand of the lion’s hair felt a lot closer to something that I now say I’ve experienced for myself. I had done considerable research on the heroic dose before taking the dive, reading about how people end relationships or make huge, sweeping life changes as a result of their journey. Experiencing what I have, it’s easy to see how that could happen. Fortunately, what I experienced was a cleaner, sharper version of the life I already had. Nothing needed to change save how I perceived it.

This entire journey has been something ineffable, for notions of language itself fell apart throughout its course. No writer on this planet could ever spawn an arrangement of meaning-filled symbols such that it would make for an equitable substitute. I will now end my thoughts here, for wrestling with them to illustrate the depths of my encounter with the self should seem poignant enough to leave it at that. If anything, let the descriptions of the rough beginning serve as a gentle warning — it is called a heroic dose for a reason, and my reckoning with the void will be characterized by every facet of my mind, without my consent. I’ve learned the void itself is not to be feared, but what we feel compelled to fill it with.

My senses did eventually come back, like hungover laborers shuffling in on a Monday morning. But the place just felt different than it did before. My lovely, patient wife told me that 7 hours had passed. I couldn’t believe it.

Anyway, here I am again. But now I feel like that lounging Bodhisattva from the Thailand stage in Street Fighter 2.

Exp Year: 2021	ExpID: 115841
Gender: Not Specified
Age at time of experience: 30
Published: Nov 7, 2021	Views: 1,527
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