DOSE:		oral	Cacti - T. pachanoi	(extract)
		oral	Cacti - Mescaline-containing

With both parents on holidays in Bali and the house left for my sister and I to look after, I began preparation for what was to be my first psychedelic experience produced by the chemical Mescaline.

I had purchased the psychotropic plants from a cactus stall at the St Andrews markets in Melbourne. Approximately twenty to thirty centimeters of the San Pedro cactus was sliced thinly and combined with one Peyote button. This I then boiled in a large pot of water on the stove for at least ten hours while I was at school. After this time the solid material was removed and the remaining liquid continued boiling until the broth was reduced to a fairly small amount.

Several days later when ‘set’ and ‘setting’ was right and I felt I was ready to take the substance, I sat before the altar in my bedroom and proceded to drink the dark greeny-brown liquid. As I took the first mouthful of the substance from the chalice, I had trouble keeping myself from vomiting. This was the most revolting thing I had ever tasted. I was reminded of what Jim DeKorne said when he described its taste as something a “curious preadolescent deity might dream up if he wanted to test to what extremes poor, benighted humanity would go to, to transcend its natural condition.”

While waiting for the substance to take effect, I noticed a change in the way I perceived things. No longer did I see objects as a whole, but realised that they were made up of millions and millions of smaller particles (cells or atoms perhaps), these particles were interwoven to create the whole. The clothes I was wearing and the curtains in front of me no longer appeared as the every day objects I am used to, but were now totally alien to me.

Approximately two hours after taking the substance I decided to go bed. I thought that if no visions or images had come to me by now, my chances of experiencing something enlightening were very slim. I was so tired that I should have fallen asleep immediately, but once in bed I noticed a restlessness I had never felt before. I likened it to what Albert Hofmann experienced early in his first LSD trip. I was “affected by a remarkable restlessness, combined with a slight dizziness. At home I lay down and sank into a not unpleasant intoxicated dreamlike condition, characterised by an extremely stimulated imagination.”

This restlessness prevented me from sleeping and I quietly ‘freaked out’ as more bizarre thoughts and feelings came to me.

At one point during the night the shape of my bedroom window went out of whack and began to bend and warp. It was at this point that I decide it was time to move myself to another room. For a while everything appeared to be back to normal, I believed that the effects had subsided and I was reentering my ordinary state of consciousness, little did I know that the most bizarre was yet to come. It was once I began to nod off that I experienced the queerest sensation. It was what I experienced at this point that had the most affect on me.

All of a sudden I woke up with the distinct feeling that I was in at least five different bodies all at the same time. I am unsure if these bodies were all mine or whether I had taken possession of them, but each one was doing something totally different. One was digging in a garden, one was flying a plane, and one was sitting up in bed wondering what the hell was going on, the thing was that all of them were fully awake. Somehow the Mescaline had caused me to become ‘one’ with various people and objects, this gave me a feeling that everything in existence is connected. This is a universal belief found in many shamanic cultures, especially those that use the Peyote and San Pedro cacti as a means of altering their state of mind. It is also a very popular belief amongst the old Celtic and Druidic cultures, which I have an intense interest in.

For the remainder of the night I slept quite restlessly as I continuously slipped in and out of an altered state of consciousness. When I awoke the following morning I was filled with the greatest sense of awe I had ever felt. I felt as though something inside me had been transformed forever.

Although I regret not being able to take these cacti in the same way that the Native Americans did in their sacred rituals, I still think that it’s possible for the modern man to experience the same illuminating visions that they were exposed to some two thousand years ago. Although this is not a substance I would like to take too often I think it possible that Mescaline could be a catalyst for mans evolvement and that we should take this possibility into consideration when we decide that it should be an illegal substance.

Notes
1. Jim DeKorne (1994). Psychedelic Shamanism pg 85, Loompanics Unlimited, Port Townsend.
2. Albert Hofmann (1983). LSD My problem child pg 15, Tarcher, Los Angeles.

Exp Year:	ExpID: 1782
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: Jun 14, 2000	Views: 53,581
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Peyote (42), Cacti - T. pachanoi (64) : Alone (16), First Times (2), General (1)