Hey folks, if you'll bare with me a bit, this was written more in the voice of a trip report for my ancestors or something. I'd like to just post it as is and I suppose it introduces me as well as anything else. It's just what I wrote down this afternoon after an amazing mushroom trip. I realize many here are experienced travelers, so please ignore if the tone strikes you wrong
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Journeys Outside: my latest experience with the psychedelic
I believe I was 15 or 16 the first time I took LSD. I was immediately enchanted. Laying in the back of Bill’s souped up VW Bug, I saw space for the first time.
Much later in life I embarked on a psychedelic resurgence. First through LSD, but then shortly thereafter I discovered DMT. My trials with DMT over the last few years have been strange and amazing. Like so many others, I too believe I am able to communicate with entities from another plane of existence. The DMT trip can be shocking at first. The breakthrough can quite literally feel like a massive first drop on a roller coaster. It actually took me over a year and a gram of material just to learn how to reliably navigate it. And from there the dialogue began.
Yesterday I returned to the mushroom. Mushrooms have always been in the background for me. I don’t think I took them until college. LSD was much more available prior to then. They are bulky compared to LSD. And I’ve always found them more likely to produce nausea which leads to vomiting. But they’ve been getting quite a lot of attention lately. It seems they’re easier for the new researchers to get approval around than LSD due to the unfortunate social legacy thereof. I first acquired some a couple years ago and attempted using them for microdosing. I acquired pre-powdered material, but I still found it inconvenient. I reverted to LSD for my macro and micro dosing experiments. Then recently I had opportunity to acquire some again in .5 gram capsules. I found taking one of these had variable effects, but often pleasant. Somewhat surprisingly (though maybe foolishly) I found set and setting to be relevant even on these mini doses.
Yesterday I emptied 8 of those capsules into a 2 cup graduated pitcher and poured 2 cups of hot water just off the boil into the pitcher. If you don’t like to do math, that’s 4 grams of psilocybin mushroom. Cubensis variety I am told and supposedly well bred for potency. After steeping for 10-15 minutes, I strained off 80% of the water, using a coffee filter to catch what I was unable to mechanically decant. This liquid was combined with some lemon and honey for a pleasant tea. As a young man, I would have never put the effort into such a thing and as a result, I hated consuming dried mushrooms for their pungent taste and how they felt in my stomach. This tea was very different. I truly enjoyed it. Much material still lay in a slurry at the bottom of the pitcher. I boiled water again, filled to 2 cups, steeped for 10-15 minutes, then consumed as before.
Before I continue regarding the mushroom, I should note that my first return to macro dosing LSD was between 250-300 micrograms. Maybe no heroic dose, but a strong one still. In my youth, of course we had no idea what we were getting, but current estimates are that we got ~125 microgram tabs back then. More than once I took 2, but never more than that. I had many magical journeys on LSD in those early days. I can say for certain that by 18 I had experienced what is described as ego death more than once. Just becoming nothing more than breath.
Something very pleasant about my tea making process was that I consumed the mushroom very naturally in a more ritualistic sense. The tea making process resulted in me beginning to feel the earliest tingling of the psychedelic come-on before I had finished consuming the second cup of tea. This was all very nice. As opposed to the paper blotter on tongue ritual or choking down (sorry, lovers) dried mushrooms. Also worth noting that I typically hold a light fast prior to any trip. I’ll lighten up my plate for a meal and typically skip meal time going into the trip. No doubt with mushrooms this helps get things going.
So I drank most of a 4 cup pot of tea (kind of a lot, but I enjoyed it!) and begin to feel altered while I’m still in the kitchen. Over 30 years of experience does count for something now and again. I pretty quickly grabbed my headphones, water bottle, and mobile devices and headed for the bedroom. Although in retrospect I had never taken more than 2 grams of mushrooms, I did have a pretty good idea of what was coming. I knew I had taken a high dose and that I would want to be laying down for much of what was to come. But, in truth, I had little clear sense of where I was heading.
Which, again, may have been foolish had I considered what I was learning in my DMT trips. And, in fact, the night before I consumed the mushroom I had 3 back-to-back DMT trips late at night. There was not much communication with my entity contact on those trips. S/he understood I was there for entertainment and at one point actually put me in a room full of TVs showing random cartoon-like content I found amusing. It was quite a sweet gesture.
I go to my bed, lay down, and put some music on. I’m sure it wasn’t as efficient as that sounds. As I come up I typically flutter around a while trying to get my trip resources situated. That’s everything from pillows and blankets and alternate clothing, to water and snacks. Lately I also usually fire up the TripSit IRC channel. There’s good people on there. When I got a little spooked on my first “adult” macro dose, they helped calm me down.
As my head settles into the pillows and some downtempo music flows from the headphones, I begin to fully trip. But as so often is the case, I simultaneously say to myself, “this doesn’t feel like much, I hope I took enough” and in parallel, “I took a lot, I better not second guess myself”. I do this every fucking time. Luckily these days I’m more apt to just take the correct dose in the first place. And I knew I took a good sized dose. That was the plan.
Very shortly thereafter, I started experiencing OEVs the likes of which I had never experienced on LSD or prior mushroom trips. The only other time I had seen the world around me completely overlaid with fractal-like geometries such as these, was when I would startle awake out of a DMT trip. Those walking DMT trips were some of the most visually and psychologically intense psychedelic experiences of my life. Which is wild considering the numbers of 8-10 hour adventures I’ve had in cities and forests around the world on LSD. 10-15 minutes of DMT lighting up your brain, but eyes wide open to the world around you is a level of intensity well beyond the lens through which LSD operates. The first time I managed to get a full hit of DMT and stay upright I genuinely questioned if I was still in my room. I lost all visual sense of the room and saw only amazing colors and intricate geometries surrounding me. Like a honeycomb. For those unfamiliar with DMT use, normally you become somewhat unconscious during a breakthrough journey. But there is another thing to see with your eyes open.
And I was amazed to see now, on mushrooms, the same thing starting to occur. Not with the intensity of DMT. Those open eye moments with DMT can be quite jarring and have an almost cold, techno edge to it. Sorry. That’s the best I can do on that for now. But what was unfolding around me on the mushroom, was not edgy. Its effect on my visual cortex had an aspect of warmth and welcoming to it that DMT had not always produced.
I attempted to move around, but quickly realized I wasn’t up to the task. My navigational systems were all off and it made my stomach feel queasy. I removed most clothing and laid width-wise across the foot of the bed. I had put my headphones aside and turned off the window air conditioning unit. There was ambient noise, but not much. As I lay there and relaxed into my trip, my entity friends arrived. Or maybe more correctly, I arrived in their space. I do mean space literally. I was transported to a medium resembling what I processed as ’space’.
The most amazing thing about this space was that I was there with eyes open and closed. The same space. The best I can describe is we were riding on the thermal currents of dark matter/energy. I will say this though. With eyes open I could not see the entities visiting me. With eyes closed I sensed them in a nearly visual way. Dragons and insects is the form they presented in. I had interpreted reptilian and dragon like forms on DMT. I was a bit surprised to be presented with a form akin to a praying mantis. I believe that I disappointed these ones a bit and I attempted to apologize for finding their form a bit off putting. But I adjusted. And it was the insects who attempted the most communication this day, though the dragons seemed to always be nearby. Not lurking per se, but in the background.
In the great, mystical love song by the Grateful Dead called “Althea” there is a beautiful representation of the ineffable. (I’d like to note that the reason I am well informed on this song is thanks to the former US Senator, Al Franken, and his interview in that GD doc on Amazon.) The quote is, “When the smoke has cleared, she said, that's what she said to me.” What she said, of course, cannot be repeated because it’s a transmission occurring on another plane. It represents a knowing which cannot readily be expressed in our monkey words. May it suffice to say, that what I found so consequential about this experience was that I continued a dialogue with the entities which had begun while using DMT. Only this time I was more able to interact with them and to exist within their space. If I moved I became very unsettled. For posterity and in support of others, I should note I did vomit early on in the trip. There’s no shame in it and at least this time the payoff was well worth it. But being on my feet did not work. Which sounds normal to some, but I’m usually active for long stretches on LSD. I actually had a strong desire to be the mushroom. To just lay there and absorb the experience. Or let it flow through me. And I actually had to push back on the entities at times to stop pushing thoughts at me. To let me be and just float.
Laying there on that bed, looking around my room, I saw the room, but I also saw space. The two were the same. And so I realized that was why I shouldn’t be up walking around. I didn’t know how to walk in space. But laying there on the foot of my bed, with my eyes wide open, I drifted on the energy currents of the stars while visited by dragons and insects. I’m sure to many that sounds horrifying. But for me it was an amazing culmination of a journey I’ve now been on for several years. An attempt to reconnect with knowledge I experienced in my younger years, but could only comprehend through the mind of a young man. Over 30 years on I was committed to picking up where I left off and going much, much further. Using what little wisdom and ability I had acquired over the years. I told the insects I did not fear them and I apologized for not finding them appealing. I let them whisper in my ear and I tried to understand what they said. While the dragons breathed patiently below.
This journey through the ether was to some extent the culmination of a dream. And, of course, it was also the continuation of the only journey I will know here in this place we call Earth. This is how I choose to use this life. By trying to understand how it is connected with other layers of existence. Paul Stamets teaches us about the great mycelium networks here on Earth which likely act as a communication medium in addition to sustaining, augmenting, and otherwise enabling all forms of life here. I believe there are layers upon layers of such networks. That they are the true fabric of all existence and extend around us like endless neural networks. Consciousness pervades all. The web of existence breathes with an energy we cannot see. It is like what confounds the astronomers when they gaze into space and know there is something where they see nothing.
As you reader may already understand, this writing is my performance of the integration process. Where the traveler attempts to put into context the sights s/he has seen and the knowledge gained. It’s not just ritual. It’s completion of the journey and a, possibly vain, attempt to capture in amber some essence of the ineffable. However you like to describe it, I find it incredibly useful and I thank you for providing me this opportunity.