DOSE:

5 g

oral

Mushrooms - P. cubensis

(dried)

BODY WEIGHT:

90 kg

Advaitic abyss of creation
An heroic dose ego death experience.

Age at the time: 19.

Previous experiences: Alcohol; Tobacco; Cannabis; Psilocybe cubensis; psilohuasca; Ayahuasca; LSA, Brugmansia; Syrian rue; Nicotiana rustica; Amanita muscaria; Nymphaea caerulea.

Setting: in my bedroom, a couple of days before my 20th birthday.

My exploration of the psychedelic experience started around my 18th birthday, and it developed in parallel with my abandonment of my materialistic worldview, my researches into esoterism and Hinduism and my growing interest for religion in general. The works of Terence McKenna always were like a sort of guide for me, showing me a side of reality that I never knew existed, but I never saw myself as ready to really experience the depths of the psychedelic abyss. This changed after an intense experience given me by an Ayahuasca+Brugmansia mix I brewed, and after my first psilohuasca: with time I felt like something terrifying and beautiful was calling me into the abyss. I wanted to see what cannot be seen and hear what cannot be told. So, ready to leave myself and my fears behind, with the start of the second decade of my life approaching, I decided to dive into the chasm.

After I weighted the five grams of dried mushrooms, I felt a great sense of doom and danger wash over me, as before every trip. After the deed was done and I could not look back, even if fear still loomed around, I tried to calm myself listening to music. After all, I already jumped in now.

I felt them hit me around the 40-minute mark. I felt like a metaphysical truck hit my consciousness at full speed. I couldn’t stand up properly and felt nauseous, which is unusual for me with psychedelics. At this point the first of three parts in which the trip can be broken down starts:

I. The splitting apart (I-Ching 23), dualism;
II. The ego death; Six at the fourth line.
III. The Cauldron (I-Ching 50), the abyss, advaita, the union of the opposites.

The two I-Ching hexagrams are given as symbolic explanations of what happened and were given to me by a reading of the I-Ching when asked about the trip. I think they perfectly summarize everything.

The splitting apart

The first part of the trip was something that could as well be described as a bad trip. I felt bad, nauseous, regretting my decision. I tried in every way to reconnect myself with my normal reality, by thinking about things I have attachment to, like my friends. My mind was split apart between the desire go deeper, to unveil what can’t be seen, and the desire to go back to a more comfortable reality. My bodily sensations were split, I felt either extremely hot, to the point of burning, or extremely cold, to the point of shivering. Often, I felt both at once. With my right eye I saw a world, with my left one another. One was warm, Dionysian, sexual, immoral, uncontrolled, red. The other was blue, controlled, moral, disgusted, lawful. These two gods were fighting into my head, with me being torn apart by their violent dance. Masculine and feminine, heat and cold, one and two, every opposite was fighting inside me. This went on until I finally decided to let go. I laid down, turned off the light and closed my eyes. There, a third One appeared.

Six at the fourth line: The bed is split up to the skin.

From here, things become increasingly less material and logical, so please forgive my overuse of religious metaphors, but that’s the only language I can use to describe That.

As I closed my eyes, beautiful designs of sapphire and silver danced over me. Immediately, pain and fear were washed away from me, this time to never return. The show didn’t last long tough, as the immediate silence of the two gods was nothing more than a prelude to Her. A deep darkness swept away the dancing jewels. The temperature dropped, thin lines of silver, like spider threads, started descending down on me, intersecting in front of my eyes. Like an atomic bomb exploding without light, I sensed an infinite, unmistakably feminine, terrifying, uncontrollable dark force emanating from all around me. I immediately recognized Her as the same thing that I felt during the height of the ecstasy of ayahuasca, that violent force that I felt slithering around me when I felt the Brugmansia that day, that thing that observed me silently all night when I had my psilohuasca, watching me as I moved over the edge of the same abyss I was now falling into. I’m sure many names could be given to Her, or even no one. If you were a more materialistic and classical psychology oriented kind of man you would probably describe that as nothing more that drug induced psychosis. I always sense that thing as nothing else but what the ancient Indian tantric schools described with the name Kālī, The black one, consort of lord Shiva, mother of the universe, absolute pinnacle of tantra.

At first I only saw Her as darkness dancing in darkness, a blacker black moving around a normal, less hollow black. Then, between the silver threads, I saw Her terrifying face, screaming, Her long black tongue out of Her contorted face, the eyes open, holes into the deepest of wells, Her matted hair moving around like the ropes of Indra’s net, binding the whole cosmos and every god to Her, and a slit on Her forehead, a third eye looking directly into my soul.

Never I saw something so terrifyingly beautiful. A surge of ecstasy swept over me, as I started to chant the mantra of Kālī Mā. Trying with every fibre of my being to sustain that all-consuming gaze, it felt as my psyche was being torn apart just by that.
After a while, ù retreated into nothingness again, and the second step of the dance took place. I saw hues of yellow and red coming from my left side, images of wild animals fighting between themselves, sand, a horned man, dressed in pelt, running around in an ecstatic trance: Rudra, Dionysus, Pasupathi, the lord of animals. There, the most instinctual part of myself emerged, taking place of my usual ego. I felt like a savage, an animal, a being without moral and desire, just running without direction in a field, full with the glory of creation. Visions of hunt, violence, blood, animals cleaning bones of other animals.
After that, from my right side, the darkness came again, the treads of silver again slithering around my body like snakes, the wild god left as soon as that darkness arrived.

At that point, I couldn’t believe what was happening. I left behind me the worries I had at the start of the trip, I was in a state of complete ecstatic trance. Every emotion a man could fathom was running through me at the same time: happiness, sadness, rage, compassion, lust, love, hate, laughter. But all of that was just in it’s pure form, without any object. There again Kālī was dancing around me, moving Her threads around me, preparing me for my death, a human sacrifice to myself.

A blue light came from the Sky, a series of spheres containing themselves in themselves, perfectly round, inorganic, calm, crystalline. A blue skinned man looked at me from inside it, Vishnu, the god of Order and morality. Now, the red and the blue god, the Yin and the Yang, the beast and the human, were not fighting anymore, the opposites were now waiting for the final union in the absolute: Kālī.

The darkness came again, She was at my right side, Her dark skin glimmering in the darkness, the silver threads as the only source of light, like moonlight poking through a crack in the wall. This time I couldn’t see Her face, but I could see Her silver billhook, shining over my head. I was ready, I called Her to destroy me, to deconstruct my being, so set me free from what remained of my limitations.

In three cuts, She removed my head. The first cut off the skin, the fear of death, the first obstacle. The second cut at my arteries and veins, the blood flowing out from my body, my life essence removed from me, no more possible action or karma. The third cut the bone, the first of all foundations. As my head floated into nothingness, She cut all of my body with ritualistic precision. It’s wasn’t painful, it was beautifully euphoric. After that, I felt what remained of my flesh being eaten away by insects, of me remaining just bones. There, every sense was shutting down, the curtain was finally closing, my last thought to the people I love, and to Kālī, everything ceased to exist.

For a brief moment, there was just emptiness. As told in the heart sutra, there was no form, no feeling, thought, or choice, no consciousness. No eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, mind; no colour, sound, smell, taste, touch, or what the mind takes hold of, nor even act of sensing. no ignorance or end of it, nor all that comes of ignorance; no withering, no death, no end of them. Nor there was pain, or cause of pain, or cease of pain, or noble path to lead away from pain; not even wisdom to attain.

The Cauldron

I don’t know for how long I remained there. There was no time. Saying a spit second or an eternity wouldn’t change anything. I only know that after that I started to slowly come back to reality. This time though, I wasn’t what I was before. Like a resurrection, I could now see with clear eyes. I finally turned on the light. The world for what it is was revealed to me in all of its glory. Everything was empty, everything had no inherent meaning, everything was nothing less and nothing more that God itself. I stared laughing and crying. Finally, the truth I always searched was there. The object of every philosophy, the model that every artist followed, the muse of every poet, the One that can’t be known, I now knew it. The Truth was so simple and clear, it’s beauty bringing me tears.

I took up the phone and started writing in a group chat of my closest friends. My messages were disconnected, written all in caps lock, and seemed like the rambling of a mad but happy man. Now that the search for truth ended, I finally saw what the real meaning of our existence is. To love, to love and experience the glory of God and God’s creation without any limit. I now had no personality of my own, realizing my own emptiness, I played by wearing the masks that previously formed my ego, wearing lies for nothing more than experience itself. One of the masks was that of a serious man, a sort of Swiss psychologist, rational, cold, somewhat moral, but very good at analysing things. Despite his flaws, I loved him as a part of me. The other was a sort of oriental old wise man, for some reason it strongly reminded me of Iroh from Avatar. Despite his strange goofiness, I loved him as a part of me. The other was a young boy, that loved everything, researching everything, the mask of childlike wonder. I didn’t wear that from such a long time, and I loved him as a part of me. I could even wear the mask of my friends and people I knew, and I flawlessly became them. I even wore the mask of a woman at some point, there was no difference for that empty face that lied behind it, the face of the infinite eternal consciousness. Many name we have for that emptiness: God, Brahman, Allah, Odin, Chaos, Tao. It really doesn’t change anything.

I took up my copy of the Tao Te Ching, and started reading it. Everything made sense, it was the most simple and understandable of books. “Dao ke dao fei chang Dao”, The Dao that can be Dao-ed (followed, spoken, done) it’s not the eternal Dao. It felt so natural, so obvious. It wasn’t anymore the cryptic book I always thought. Everything just made sense. From that day my already high esteem of Taoism just became greater.

During this phase, which lasted from around two hours, I felt like a cauldron, and infinite grail from which all of existence poured out. I could feel myself into that infinite emptiness, inside the grail. And I could see the empty darkness pouring out of the cup, manifesting the material world, for I was that too. Every idea a man could have, I had it. I felt like if I was able to write down even a droplet of what I was seeing and experiencing now, I would have been considered the greatest writer, musician or philosopher of all time. But there was no need to do it, for every treasure of the world was already there, in my empty hands. This trip report is nothing but a filtered out, dim, feeble impression of a memory of what I lived that night. But I hope that something of that unnameable glory made its way trough my words.

Kālī didn’t come back that night, as with Rudra and Vishnu. They now were without form, in the perfect void within me. After I came down completely, six hours after ingesting the mushrooms, I felt like a new man. Obliviously, ignorance and limited understanding came back to me the moment the masks fused themselves into one and rebuilt my ego, but the memory of what lies underneath them, that beautiful, dark, infinite an eternal emptiness, it will never leave me until the day of my death.

Exp Year: 2022	ExpID: 116806
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: 19
Published: Dec 10, 2022	Views: 373
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