DOSE:	15 g	oral	Mushrooms - P. cubensis	(fresh)
	1 cig.	smoked	Cannabis	(plant material)

BODY WEIGHT:

65 kg

It’s difficult to resemble, with words, the holly teachings of these unique dwellers of earth, so close to it, that should not amaze us how much or why they know. They have their own Kingdom and are guardians of the entrance to insanity and maybe horror, yet, to wisdom and ultimate beauty. These, my friends, are keys to hidden locks in the vast of our neuronal maze. These are sacred tools.

Why to do so
Mind is a marvelous thing. It encloses our share of the collective unconsciousness. It is volatile. It is infinite. It is the will of the brain to study itself. It is a cycle. It gets to the same point and unfolds in what we call dimensions, but in none which we can understand. Why not to buy the entrance to a better understanding? The information is there. The fact that we make our mental masturbation of seeing all this (I mean, psichodelic tools) as taboo or as obscure magic and untouchable ritual is mere ignorance. If one encounters this information and feels the need to reach another non-achievable-with-usual-disciplines mind state, for the sake of your peace of being, the attempt to an answer is at one’s fingertips.

A lot has been said
This is my chance. I have a life, a girlfriend, luck and had recently recovered my self- confidence after being kind of depressed for about a year. Life is running smoothly for me, to the point of forgetting the possibility of a bad trip, though I’ve had a lot since I’m a moderately anxious person. I’ve rolled on both sides of the coin, and know how hard my mind can beat me, as well as how memorable it can be, speaking about life teachings.

My fate positions my being in distant latitudes, where the government ironically declares no prohibition. Questions arise: we have the restraint of law attached to our ankles, and then, why does this legal oasis exists? The leaders of this planet came to the conclusion of banning powerful insight resources, they don’t want us to be thinking too much about ourselves, it’s dangerous, people with ideas should be wiped out. This has been and still stands since ancient times. It is so absurd, why here and not anywhere else? The cultural shock is amazing: we have 7-11’s, as they have chills n’ thrills, whatever. A lot has been said and researched. Set and setting: check. With proper knowledge about the world I’m daring to visit, and without the 'security hazards' my native country imposes, I was now seeing myself buying my ticket to ride. That I thought.

Journey begins
Beautiful day, peaceful. The evening light glowing pastel yellows through the window of our very small, but comfortable and habitable, hotel room (very hard to get one, as a matter of fact, so we were grateful for ending up inside this modest and cozy hideout). It was a bit rainy the day before, but it seemed like someone knew we needed good weather and a nice lightmood for the trip. Maria and I have been together for a while; she’s so wise and easy-going. She’s a perfect partner. We were staring at the plastic package. Inside: the Stropharia cubensis (they sold them as Thai).

I would be lying if I say I wasn’t afraid. New situations are stressful by nature, specially ones that include the possibility of suffering or being freaked out by our own thoughts. The benefit exceeds the risk, I kept on reassuring myself. And with a rush of adrenaline flowing through our bodies, we both said: let’s do it. Both of us are doctors and know how these things are supposed to work. So, there they were, so indescribably them. Three of them. We split the dose and Maria took the first bite. She said they weren’t as bad as everyone said, maybe because these were so fresh. I took my bite to assess what she was saying. They’re OK. They tasted like plants. Really lite, as if you were eating a mouthful of air. We washed them down with zips of orange juice until food was gone.

Thoughts of uncertainty arrived, as well as excitement. We began talking about what was the best way to roll a joint, since none of us knew how to tailor a nearly smokable spliff. Maria designed a new method, she rolled the paper around a straw and started to introduce the material through it; she succeed and made two or three. I was beginning to feel funny, lightheaded but not sick, which I was thankful for; later, the bathroom door knob began to wiggle and became fuzzier, then it started to lengthen and stretch, very noticeable. Soon the whole door started to come at me.

I said: the door is... coming??!!! The door is coming!!! I was happy, it is real!!! I tossed myself to the bed staring at the white ceiling and walls which morphed then into a vision of antique bicycles, people with huge hats working on wheat fields; I saw the alphabet letter by letter passing me by, everything over a chess deck background, as if I was in a reckon flight of the mushroom landscape, all in subtle reds and pinks. Indoors were mind-blowing, unimaginably crazy and seriously meaningless. We needed to explore the new world that was waiting for us outside.

To the Museum
So, out we went, in a foreign country, with the expectable disorientation and feeling of being in wonderland. The light was awesome; I wish I had a picture of what my eyes were witnessing. Life was made of images. But not everything was so obvious. You had to pay attention concentrate a bit, and the most important of all, let go. Following these steps, suddenly all that which we were surrounded of, started to change; at first, almost unperceivable, next, surfaces were outlined, like with a felt pen, and then with no advise, everything became a cartoon, every scene of the activity of this city seemed hilarious and lacking of sense: where was everybody going, they seemed to be in a hurry, but, why? They just had to stop and see the intensity of what existence represents: everything in its right place.

We walked, amazed and realizing how blind we had been. All is all. The sense of wholeness exploded from my center, from my heart, I wanted to embrace everything as my arms expanded wide opened through every new dimension I was experiencing. Maria took off, she let go and flew way more than me, but in control. She is so unbeatable, and secure, she is the goodness. She has no envy, and all this spiritual well-being launched her into a track of absolute understanding. I was taking a walk in the clouds, with an angel. She said she was OK, but very, very overwhelmed of what was being revealed to her.

We entered the museum. They warned us about the soon closing time, but we didn’t care. And, my friends, there I knew and saw what I think the word art in its whole length stands for. Maria was my guide there; she showed me the way as she was more aware of the happenings. At first, we entered a room with paintings, but for us, they were windows, portals to Van Gogh’s mind. Different paintings called us and we stared at them in separate geographical places, but fusing our feelings, what she felt, I felt. We didn’t even care to look at the silly little card at the side of these windows. We didn’t have time, and yet, it was not important in any way to look at them.

People were staring at us as if we were the painting itself, they didn’t understand what we were looking at with such childish attention and why we were smiling from ear to ear since we were in a museum, such behavior was not museum-behavior indeed. Giggles escaped from our desperately eager-to-laugh-our-ass-off mouths as we teleported to those places, Arles, Van Gogh’s room, and we knew exactly what he meant to communicate. All the moods, all the thoughts, all his fears and joys were crashing like raindrops in the windshield of our understanding, all at a time.

We contemplated some entities which we call violets, bubbling and singing with their river flowing movement and distorting into crystal-clear ideas, they told us their names and age, and how they accepted the sacrifice of being cut to have the privilege of immortality, entering and living in peoples’ minds for a while and all just because they had been put in a canvas by one of those who has the power to narrate with colors the most unusual and difficult concepts of philosophy, the sense of beauty in ugliness, and back again to purple tones.

Maria taught me that the face in the self-portraits was a decoy. An artist knows well how to draw a face, but the real thing is in the background. I acknowledged this comments as I gazed into the brown and discolored surroundings of this face, and got it. All his feelings were captured in the back of the painting, not in his unexpressive face. He felt unlucky and just spoke his thoughts through his paint-brush, no forms, just colors. Again, she’s wise. Van Gogh, …me. Me, Van Gogh. I soon re-realized you don’t have to be alive to get people to know you, and that this is a powerful potential of our everyday work. In that moment, I was really feeling his presence. Every picture, every window was alive in ourselves, we gave them personality, and they just existed and were waiting for us to be sucked by them into their animation. Things have soul. We choose to give or not to give them life. Now I have this eye.

Closing time
The announcement of the museum doors closing in 15 minutes brought us back to usual reality. We got off the ride for a while, and it had been like 3 hours since psychedelic lunch. Every place was a planet inside our Earth. My amazement didn’t want to get tired. I had these new eyes, the eyes of the boy I used to be. I was feeling like a newborn. Again we walked with our bodies, this unbelievable machine, the house of our mind and soul. I was walking, but with my “I” unified with which composes my physical symphony.

Maria was teaching me endlessly, talking every thought that aroused her comprehension. She guided me again to seeing not just paintings, but everything as a gate to a parallel existence. She said, “look closer, look behind what your eyes see”, and what she was trying to tell me, appeared easily. Trees, grass, concrete, faces, sky and clouds. Every little piece of matter hides a story. Individuality merging in wholeness. I was so grateful for being there and then. And with her. This new understanding of existence is one of the principles I follow in my living, after the experience. As things lurk with life, because they are part of our creation, our own lives, our soul experiencing physical consciousness through the miracle of the mind must be worshiped and elevated to the maximum reachable.

The landing
Back in the hotel, I felt renewed, different, and tired. She was still tripping, and I felt a little jealous about that issue. But the mushrooms wanted this for me, I thought, they are wise and treat you according to what you are into, in that particular moment. Maybe I was not as prepared as Maria for enlightment (if there are any doubts, yes, she was enlightened). I decided to get this envy out of me, it´s worth nothing. And there it went.

She was saying I was a gnome, as I was standing in front of her, looking through the window. Then she said I looked like a demon (she perceived I was jealous) and wanted to look inside of me. So I laid beside her, on the bed, and she looked very close through my eye. She saw a demon, an ugly one, but she wasn’t scared. She said everyone has one of those inside, and as I stood up and again went to look through the window, she said “You see, now you are an angel, you have the light of the angels”. Then I lit one of the recently manufactured joints and buzzed our way down to cotidianity.

Last note
This was my first time with mushrooms. It is my very personal experience. Draw your own conclusions.

Exp Year: 2005	ExpID: 51100
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: Oct 1, 2007	Views: 16,212
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Mushrooms - P. cubensis (66) : First Times (2), Mystical Experiences (9), Guides / Sitters (39), Relationships (44), Glowing Experiences (4), Small Group (2-9) (17)