That’s why we keep on waiting, WAITIIIIIN’, waiting on the world to change. John Mayer, you cunning linguist you. I bet you never thought that this passage would be used to describe a DMT trip or three. Because, John Mayer, I waited, and boy did the world change.
My first encounter with Aunt Anahuasca came on a purple Thursday some three months ago. I’d had a series of dreams that morning, nothing overwhelming, just the usual. One was about this creature outside my window, a frightful visage of mangled features and tangled fangs. My entire family was in the kitchen and I begged them all to come see. They dilly-dallied and came in scores of exhaustion, tired by the fact that I had distracted them from frivolity. And when in my room, their focus was drawn to the new blue paint upon my walls and the posters that gave the room its breath. I cried, urged them all to look outside, but they would not listen. They eventually acquiesced, just to silence my wailing, but it was too late- the monster was gone. They left in unison, all disappointed that they had to leave their comfort zones. I waited for them to sleep and slit my wrists in the kitchen. The second dream was about an old man whose alarm clock was ringing. And each time, he’d snooze it for 5 minutes because he just could not remember why exactly he had to wake up. Eventually, he remembered his great purpose, and arose. Unfortunately for him, this was also the exact moment the doomsday clock struck twelve and the world ended.
I also had a laxative to rid my gut of all the fast foods that would hinder my trip, that was the real shit part. There were… A lot of hindrances.
An afternoon of confounding thoughts gave way to Elvish music and a clean gut. That was even before I got to my brother’s place. He lives atop a mountain overlooking the entirety of our suburban dystopia, and then some. Breathtaking view. Pink roofs, late afternoon peach sky, bare winter trees and dry brown chutes that are but notes in the ongoing seasonal orchestra conducted by nature’s symphony. The Great Mind had chosen this wonderland for us to have our first taste of Anahuasca, The Great Mind is the best of architects. No parents at this place, commanded The Great Mind. Thanks for having our back, Great Mind. The energy at my brother’s place is of another spectrum entirely: phones charge faster, Tom Petty’s voice travels further, life feels lighter and it’s almost as if the air gets a chance to breathe again after being choked by the off-white suburban dust. Life is good at Chateau de Frere, and he assures me that there is no commandment specifying that life should be any other way. He then proceeds to take out two packets, both clear and sealed containing brown… things. He goes “my bro, how do you feel about Anahuasca crumpets?”. Well, why the fuck not, right? Today’s breakfast, hot off the menu: a teaspoon or so of Syrian Rue, and double that of Mimosa Hostilis freshly served on a bed of English crumpet smothered in a flood of golden syrup. Yum. Gulp. Jeez, that’s horrific. Ugh. Why the fuck did we even? Ohhhhhhhh, that’s the worst thing I’ve ever… I know why they call it Syrian RUE and God, the Mimosa certainly is hostile! A few minutes of complaining and wondering why we’re such druggos passed in a nauseating haze, my body started to feel like a slow and heavy couch. I had a seat, I had a cigarette. Lucky Strike, hmmm, it’s toasted you know. The most wonderful purple clouds began to form, they were not in the sky, at least not in the sky my first two eyes were observing. My brother was right, life was good, life was. Oh, Oh God no. It felt like sandpaper coming up, dry heaves and wet coughs and then warm brown landslides stained the porcelain sight and smell of the new toilet. A fitting Christening for a loo that to this day has seen more puke than a paediatric nurse. Everything was not so great. And then more puke, and then Oh Lord, it had to come out the other side and I’d just made it before my dignity decided to walk out. Bowel shaking earthquakes, and a handprint on the wall. My brother had an ice-cream container in the kitchen and heaving, I could hear he wasn’t doing too good either. A smoke break later and I had an absurd amount of phlegm, puked once more, and then promised myself I’d never smoke again. I am a filthy liar, but after that third round staring the porcelain monster in its swirling watery eye, I was too clear headed to give a shit about contemplating what a hypocrite I have the potential to be. Hell, I was too clear-headed to even think about hating myself. I was born feeling uncomfortable, and this was the first time in my life that I’d felt… Beautiful. My breath may have smelled like a Vegas whore’s, but my head and heart felt like a jackpot I’d had the honour of taking home, the winnings all mine, the money spent fixing everything wrong with everything, not a cent wasted on the superficial.
It has now occurred to me to name the toilet ‘Jackpot’.
Anything that did occur to me that night was puked away. My brother said he had the same experience- anytime he came up to a realisation, it was flushed. The spirit didn’t need us hallucinating, didn’t need us thinking. The spirit showed us that sometimes what we really need is a clean start. A clear head is a blank canvas from which the future is born. We sat there watching the sky. A star started to move in a north-easterly arc. He saw it too. Three minutes later, another followed. Disguised as stars, I think there are still spy-planes operating high above commercial altitude. Whatever it was, it is yet to be identified. It flies. It is an object. Probably a spy-plane. Things were never going to be the same.
For starters, I have since stopped masturbating and have gotten a girlfriend. While I do spend a lot of time in my room writing, I also sometimes have a yearning to go out and do more things. So, I just do more things.
DMT: Do More Things. Mind blown, man, mind blown.
A few months had passed and I’d had not the stomach to handle another taste. PTSD is real, and it smells like Syrian Rue. A day had come, filled with trauma as some heartless bastards had broken in and poisoned the bro’s dogs on at the parents’ place. Good dogs, those, loved nature and food and playing. Like children, really, only easier to maintain. The bro’s stance on the passing of the animals is firm: souls never die, energy cannot be destroyed. He told me today that he thought about them again and realised something about the healing process: though the mind can go anywhere, the body takes its time to follow. One can come to terms with something mentally, but physically they lag behind. It is only when the body has caught up to the mind is one truly healed. Our choice of healing for that night was Aunt Anahuasca, and holy shit was she an infirmary of nurses. The nurses decided to plan, for me, a surprise party and hired
A JESTER!
Motherfucker was hiding in the prisms. I was in the bathroom, getting ready to empty my wad into the ol’ jackpot, and the walls start moving. Spiralling fractals gave birth to cascading cubes made of light. Inside were signs, burning bright in neon, advertising a sure win. Pinks and yellows just above the jackpot let me know I was in the right place. Casino noises, smells and weird floating bananas made me question the nature of everything I was; was I just a subconscious garbage chute for the world’s advertisements? Had I been exposed to too many places trying to buy souls for crummy pieces of silver? Am I even hallucinating, or is this just recollection? The questions floated around the signs like giant words on a blimp, trying to sell me the idea of the reality my attention was buying into. All of a sudden, none of this was there anymore and I was in an empty space. Prisms started to fly all around me, pink and green and arcade-like. I was no longer in the neon advertisement section of hell, I was some place where the scenery was broken down into basic shapes all glowing and alive, subtly and deeply alive. Not being the only living thing in this place gave me an enormous sense of satisfaction. I no longer felt like I was being targeted to purchase things I didn’t need with money I didn’t have. Currency didn’t matter here, nothing from my world did. I was just alive and so were the prisms, and that’s all that we needed. I like that it taught me that. I also like that it taught me to refocus my vision to see the bigger picture, for the prisms were but limbs. Limbs on a dancing, skipping jester, tiny if viewed from a distance. I didn’t feel threatened, I felt like all of this was just for me. I loved it, I loved it so much my serotonin receptors commanded my gut to empty all it had. Sandpaper and sourness, gastric gasoline. The jester probably couldn’t stand the smell and ran away. The fractals, too. The party, though, was not over, because in about 30 mins the bro and I would have to join dad on neighbourhood watch patrols. What a ride, man!
Two hours of talking about acid rain (my plan to make everyone seriously not take things so seriously and start being nice to one another includes putting LSD through a condensation process and letting the clouds evaporate it. Thank me when it rains, thank yourselves, thank life and love and the clouds and the Earth and The Great Mind and one another. Acid rain will make people be nicer to plants, too), talking about the crime rate and talking about the many flora and fauna species that Trump’s wall is going to eradicate. Two hours of chatting about how Trump is an example to us all of what we shouldn’t be, about how the wall isn’t even his idea and was tossed around for years until they selected a puppet dumb enough to voice it, about how greed always has and always will tear us apart. Very trippy, man, very trippy shit. Lotsa burps and Pink Floyd references. HA- Charade you are.
The next day was spent reading analyses on MBTi-personality types and researching Jungian archetypes. I am, as they say, an ENFP. What that means is that… Yes. The bro is an INTJ, and that really means that him and I get along. Duh. The Jungian archetypes were very interesting. Carl Jung divides the mind into three parts: the ego, the self and the soul. The ego is that which you want others to know you as, the self is that which you preach as an individual and the soul is just deep man. (I am aware that I say man a lot, man, I think it is important to remind people of their humanity so that they don’t lose it and lose themselves and in doing so act inhumanely. Important work over here, man). Anyway, there is a spectrum on which these archetypes are mapped. Each one of us contains every colour, every facet, that makes up this spectrum, because the spectrum is modelled according to the ego, self and soul. Four titles are given to each section of the mind and one facet, or title usually stands out in each section. My ego is caregiver, my soul is explorer, but my self
My self is jester.
We searched for a whole buncha vids on Youtube about the jester, and tons of people had met him. We devised a hypothesis that the sense of self is the one you go exploring on DMT. I had met the jester because it was my sense of self. The bro had been feeling the magic of the universe course through his veins since the first time he had kissed Aunt Anahuasca. His self-archetype is that of the magician.
Hypotheses are shit unless tested. I needed to go back. I needed to go back and see if we were a bunch of good for nothing druggo bullshitters absorbing everything that the internet has to offer without really putting it to test. This was for science as much as it was for curiosity. I maintain that we see clearer the beautiful nature of psychology through the exploration of inner space than we do from books. We are scientists, the bro and I, and all of you who experiment inside the vast chemistry lab that is the mind. Three days later, I was ready. For science, for brotherhood, for curiosity, for myself.
^-^ I will only write the following paragraphs when I feel a sense of lightness, for it cannot be conveyed in the dark. It is currently daytime ^-^
18:30 pm, Friday night, September the 27th in the year 2019 of that nice man who lived a long time ago. I have a joke about him, but people usually get cross. Where I was going, I’d soon come to find, I didn’t need a watch, a calendar or a history lesson to find my bearings. I just needed to be. It is indeed, as I have painfully come to find out over these past few years, easier to be when there are no other humans present. Ha. I just thought of another joke. I’m a writer, my very livelihood depends on people being present.
Being present- that’s the other lesson. I could only travel by being present. So I bought the ticket, I took the ride, and regrets stayed far behind.
A slow, heavy couch. The final checks before blast-off. The body is prepared for entering hyperspace by first being submerged into a fever-like flush of meditative melting. It is at this point that you must remember not to be too many feet above the ground. Rockets work best when they do not nose-dive. The melting will continue as G-forces push you deeper and deeper into your seat until you become the slow, heavy couch. Then, lightness. Hyperspace. The show starts in 5,4,3,2
Oneness.
Oneness with the craft. I realised how small I was, how small my vessel was. Darkness all around, my craft waded through with searchlights on until I could see in front of me a gargantuan structure made of light beams. Hello, Jester my old friend. The jester’s wide smile grew as I flew closer, noticing how my flying ship was no bigger than even a tooth in his great mouth.
Motherfucker flips me the bird.
It had me laughing, but also wondering why he wanted to flip me off until I saw that he was not telling me to fuck myself, he was pointing upwards. I looked to what he wanted me to see and there was a portal just above him. Glanced back at him, he started nodding and continued to point, saying nothing. I thanked him, and I was on my way through, then I was on my back gazing up. A canopy of bare trees surrounded me. The sky was clear, the bluish bruise it tries to hide an hour before the sun wakes up. Although it was a perfect winter setting, I was not cold. I gazed at the nest of branches above me and glass blossoms began to bloom, shimmering like stars. Then I was with the stars, rising above them, looking down below as to how far away I was from anything remotely grounded. Then, ground. I could stand again. Two roads diverged in a Capricorn-head shape, and I was greeted by a little man. He was black, not humanoid, just a tiny figure so dark you couldn’t see through him. Like a 3-D shadow made of a substance I had never seen. He didn’t use any words to greet me, I could just feel it. He welcomed me to his world, and he was very excited that I was there, so excited in fact that he told all his people. I felt very special to have been chosen to visit this place. I asked if he could show me around, and I noticed that I didn’t need to use words to communicate either. In a telepathic plane of existence, I was the guest of honour.
My small friend chooses the road on the right and we go marching deep into a forest. I look around, and I know there are supposed to be trees but I can’t tell what’s happening because I can’t see any trees until I look, until I REALLY look. Out of the ground, one at a time, ice-cream cones start rising up. Cone first and towering high, the swirls of different flavours stay rooted in a creamy puddle barely poking out of the ground. OH MY GOD THERE’S A FRIKKING ICE-CREAM FOREST AND I’M INSIDE AN ICE-CREAM FOREST AND DID I MENTION THAT THE TREES WERE MADE OF ICE-CREAM?! It was the coolest thing I’ve ever seen in my entire life. My little buddy asked me if I wanted to see more and I said okay and so we went back to where the roads met and took the other one. We foraged down a dark and overgrown path, into a rainforest slithering with slimy vines and menacing banana leaves whose faces had fangs and whose jaws were always an inch away from our shoulders. I could sense how scared my little dude was getting and I told him that it’s okay to be scared because even I get scared sometimes. He thanked me and smiled and asked if I wanted a drink and I said, yeah sure man that’d be nice thank you. THEY HAVE PEPSI! BUT IT’S EVEN BETTER THAN PEPSI BECAUSE IT’S FILLED WITH ICE AND IT DOESN’T TASTE WATERED DOWN, JUST SUPER COLD AND REFRESHING ENOUGH TO MAKE YOU CRY. This Pepsi even tasted healthy. It was good for me, and I think it quenched my soul. It hit me a few days later how child-like all of this was. How the two roads were the two separate states of being a child: ice-cream trees where everything is wonderful and fun and tastes good and feels nice, and creeping monsters that are all bigger than you and make you feel small and scared. This place was by no means perfect. They still had problems and fears. I knew that this was not heaven, but a place high up on the energy spectrum of the time-tornado. I had read a story last year about a guy who had married a succubus. He mentioned how the realm of demons works, and how most humans cannot understand them. See, humans believe that demons are tricksters, that they make promises and do not deliver. This guy said that demons do deliver, and on time, but it just isn’t our time that they are governed by. Demons exist on a higher energy spectrum, and for them time is cyclical. We experience it linearly, but that is only because we are of an energy level lower down. My theory, built up from this and a few other things I’ve read/experienced these past few years is that time behaves as a tornado that tears through every dimension simultaneously. We are at the bottom, we are at the point, the dot, that the tornado has as its toe. And as we go up into different dimensions, time becomes more and more of a spiral, and the spiral itself becomes wider and wider as the energy level goes up until we reach the infinite. Would be cool if it were true, but I could be wrong. Anyway, I think that I was somewhere high up, on some wide arc spiral where all they cared about was energy (real energy, not that gas shit and nukes and coal) and how to use it in beautiful and constructive ways to further themselves as a society and indeed a world.
My tour-guide bro told me that he had something else to show me and boy, did he save the best for last.
Highways. Thin loops criss-crossing the sky that take them wherever they need to go, filled with a pink liquid that they slid around in. I asked him how they built it and he told me that they did it naturally. I asked him if they had to clear things out of the way to make room for the highways and he was surprised by that. He told me that they’d never displace anything to make room for something else. These highways, he told me, were made of the exact same thing they were made of. It struck me how intelligent these creatures were; they did not need to break things in order to create, they did not have any need for mouths to communicate. They seemed not to care about the corporeal at all, they didn’t care about how they looked, they didn’t need to waste their precious energy on that. All they did was explore, create, and live. All I did was marvel, and sip on my Pepsi. And then I knew that that was all I could see for now, and I knew that it was time to go. So I thanked my little dude, and he sent me on my way. ON A FUCKING PINK HIGHWAY LOOP, MOTHERFUCKERRRRRRRRRRRRR!
It feels like being sucked through a straw. There is no other way I can describe it. Slurp-slurp-slurp-slurp-slurp all the way past the stars and the canopy of trees and the jester and back down to Earth in bits and pieces because that’s how coming back feels: segmented. When all the bits of me had collected into one body, it was finally ready to show just how sick it was, and I puked all over Mr Jackpot. But the puke, too, seemed to be segmented and all the sandpapery pieces of mimosa just wanted to slit my throat from the inside when they came out bit by scraping bit.
By then I’d collapsed against the bathroom door, fatigued from journeying the longest ride I’ve ever been on. An hour and twenty minutes. I was gone for 80 frikking minutes. I just wanted to sleep for a year and then wake up complaining about how little sleep I had. I had never been more drained, and I have never been more thankful.
Then some second wave thing kicked in and all of a sudden I had the most amount of energy I’d ever had, felt like someone had given me some MDMA and started dancing with my girlfriend and pacing up and down and having dry mouth and dancing some more.
The next day I wrote about her, this woman whose face had been the first thing I’d seen when I’d touched down. She’s a black hole, and I mean that in the fondest of ways. Once you enter the event horizon, there is no going back. Then comes time dilation because every moment without her is an extension of time folding over itself, and when I am with her she seems to give birth to meaning in every second. Time is not governed by Earth laws, the black hole makes its own time. Next up, spaghettification, because I am no longer one whole entity. I am divided, moved around inside of her in bits and pieces, broken up and stretched to experience the density that is the black hole. Fun woman, this, she can roleplay as a space entity without needing a costume. Good on you, woman.
The next few days I spent reflecting on her, and on my trip. I saw the jester clearly, I finally understood that his role is as the pointer. As for the Jester’s middle finger; that’s what he does. He is a fuck you to all social customs and ideas, a fuck you in the face of human behaviour, a grand flipping off to normalcy. He only shows the comedy, and comedy is where expectation gets turned on its head. That is how he points the way and that is how he points to good times, to the greater purpose that is paved by adventure. His purpose is not necessarily to journey with you to the good times, he is merely there to point. That’s his point.
I felt that this really cleared up those Jungian archetype things. That the role of the self is to take you to the soul. You use the self to truly navigate the world until it points you in the direction of your greater purpose- mine is to explore. I found it really cool also, that the way there is hardwired inside of us already. All of this was already inside of me, DMT was just the tool used to extract it. We are all born with the map of where we need to be stored deep inside of us. None of us are lost, not truly at least.
The observer is not separated from the observed. That is the most important rule of quantum physics. I had the map inside of me the whole time. It is hardwired in me to know the way. The map is a part of me as I am a part of it. The same can be said about the other world/s. Just like the little men who have highways constructed of exactly the same thing that they’re made of; so too am I constructed of the path that will lead me to where I need to be.
(The following paragraph is best read in a basic California white girl accent)
Realising this is truly empowering. I feel so honoured to have been part of something in which I have a great part to play. I know now, more than ever, that I am not some good for nothing druggo loser, that maybe what I do is important to figuring out inner space so that maybe one day I can explore outer space in the same way that the tiny people get around: through the limitless energy that they’re made from. I also know that what I do leads to kick-ass stories, so that’s always fun.
The more I do psychedelics, the more I learn about them. What I’ve learned is that they teach anarchy: literally defined as a leaderless system, one where each person is their own leader. They also teach you to forget everything you were taught about anarchy. It’s the most empowering decision you’ll ever make because it’s the deepest you will ever get to exploring yourself in this life. Even if I die before I get the chance to do it again, it’ll most certainly not be my last taste of DMT. Ha, to the next life, then, and what a ride that’s going to be.