The following is in regards to the fictitious 'I'
In my whole life up until my second year in college, I was dead set against doing drugs of any kind. I would drink every now and then throughout high school, and would enjoy myself every now and then when I did. I didn't touch cigarettes (mostly cause I simply wasn't interested), but as far as weed went, I had a certain aversion to it. Just the way people seemed to look when they were high didn't look like a good feeling to me, despite those who testified otherwise. I even prided myself on not touching any, and I believe a large part of the prediction of the perception of guilt would arise if I thought about smoking it, but that wouldn't be too serious because I never gave it much thought. It wasn't until midway through high school that I realized that my best friends were smoking weed. At first I was uncomfortable with this knowledge, but kept it to myself and acted natural, and didn't let it interfere with our friendship.
When I went to college I met someone who would change my life as I knew it. I'll refer to him as X. He was my suitemate in the dorms freshman year (in other words, I didn't sleep in the same room, but he was in the adjoining room). When he introduced himself to the rest of the suite and myself, he talked a decent amount about drugs which made me uncomfortable with him right off the bat. The next day he was talking about his experiences with cocaine on which I had cast further negative judgment upon him. In any manner, over the course of the next few months I began to warm up to him considerably, allowing me to look past his old drug habits. By the end of the year, he became the first friend to whom I came out of the closet, and would remain the only one till the next school year. That being the most difficult experience of my life, in attempting to conjure the words (took me 45 min from getting the first words out to the last ones) coupled with his unconditional acceptance gained him a special place in my heart, and as a result, he succeeded in doing what no other came even close to.
X would periodically throughout freshman year say something like "me and so-and-so are going out on a walk to smoke a J, you wanna come?" I would always say, "no," and he would make it clear he was simply offering out of courtesy. So anyway, the first day of sophomore year, he tells me that he's going to one of his friend's houses downtown to smoke, if I wanted to come. While I didn't plan on smoking, I figured why not. It surprises me to remember as I type this story up that even though it was some years ago now, I can still remember the game that the kids were watching on t.v. It was a Boston Red Sox game, can't remember who they were playing though. These kids were passing a gigantic bong around, and I was just sitting watching the game (despite my utter disinterest in baseball) and the room was getting smokier and smokier. I began to perceive what I interpreted as a second-hand high which I, surprising to myself, didn't dislike. Early the next day, he mentioned how he was gonna go on a walk to smoke later in the night with two of my friends if I wanted to come and smoke, and for the first time, my answer wasn't "no," but rather "maybe." When he brought it up again later in the day I said, "I was strongly considering it" (in retrospect, this would be a similar series of reactions to other drugs I thought I would never do). So he rolls up this gigantic J (by everyone else's standards, as I had none at the time), and we go on what would become a routine walk around campus. X lights up the J, and passes it to my other friend who takes a few tokes and then offers it to me. I accepted it, and shedding all my fears and guilt and whatnot, I took a large, single toke. My lungs lit up like toaster ovens as I began to cough considerably. I took another hit, and passed it back to X. We continued to walk as I marveled to myself, "well, I took a hit, and I'm not feeling any guilt, and I don't feel bad in any way, so now that I've got that out of the way, I might as well smoke some more." Over the course of the next couple of months, I began to develop a special relationship with bud, and smoked it quite regularly, getting higher than I could have imagined was possible. I would get so high from just weed alone that the muscles in my face would go into convulsions, I wouldn't be able to open my eyes...I interpreted it all very positively however. If I could get myself to tweak out, I was a happy guy.
So now, let's address the issue of psychedelics...even before I started smoking weed, I was fascinated with the idea of them. Didn't know much about them, but found them intriguing nonetheless. During freshman year, before I had touched anything, X was listening to that infamous Joe Rogan shpiel on DMT which had me completely intrigued. I took it upon myself to research the chemical and its effects myself, and the geometric patterns of light, and the perception of concurrent alternate realities along with the whole death experience was simply fascinating to me. At the time, whereas I was unwilling to touch any drugs, that was one that I figured if it ever came my way, I wouldn't pass up the opportunity, especially given its short half-life within the conscious, I figured even a bad experience wouldn't last too long and it would all be over. I would not stumble upon it till much later in my "career" after doing much more in-depth research and being acquainted with other psychedelics.
In the same drug-free year, X along with my roommate and another suitemate tried salvia. Their reactions to the drug, supplemented by their colorful accounts of their trips made me wonder about doing that drug prior to weed as well. I had a big internal struggle, but by the time I would come to muster up the courage to do the drug, the store that they bought it at, was no longer selling any. Meanwhile, something that I became somewhat hellbent on trying after I had started to smoke was shrooms. At the time, it seemed like the most easily accessible hallucinogen in the area, and I simply needed to "see to believe" as I was quickly growing tired with listening to everyone else's stories. X tried many times to heavily dissuade me from doing it, but I somewhat ignorantly argued that even if it were a bad experience, I just had to see it for myself. Mid-November that same year, my friends (including X) had managed to get their hands on a bunch of shrooms. Coincidentally, we ended up taking them on the day of the 2008 presidential election. We went outside to trip and had completely forgotten the election was even going on. Most of them took an eighth, while my old roommate and I took half an eighth. For about four hours or so, I was feeling on top of the world. Shit looked amazing, and I felt like I was five years old again. One of the things that I repeatedly remarked was interesting was how I seemed to lose my internal "gay identity" throughout the trip (as would be a repetitive theme with shrooms). It would be like each time I would remember that's how I labeled myself, it would be like finding out for the first time, each time. We got a call somewhere in the middle of tripping in the middle of a field at night that Obama had been elected president. We had no idea what to do with ourselves with this new information as it was extremely hard to process what that even meant at the time, but I remember being filled with unbridled joy. Things started taking a turn for the worse when I insisted that we go and walk elsewhere to trip, as I was starting to get bored of the field, but some of the others insisted that we stay. This created a small bubble of frustration that would end up getting magnified and distorted my the shrooms mindset as the night progressed. The experience began to grow dark and uncomfortable as I stuck it out in the field until finally the others decided it was time to go in. We got back to the dorms, and most of them had stopped tripping already, but I was still going hard, and was feeling increasingly uncomfortable. I was growing very drowsy and wanted to go to sleep, but when I closed my eyes on my bed, I saw closed-eye imagery much like the distortions of the open-eye visuals. I could continue to elaborate on the experience, but suffice to say it didn't end well, although the next morning when I woke up, I felt better than normal, and reflected positively on the experience. Later in the school year, I would finally get my hands on salvia which I tried repetitively and liked every time. I was much a fan of the mental mindfuck roller coaster ride that salvia would take me on, becoming particularly intrigued with a female voice that would talk to me in a language I could not understand, although it sounded like a repetitive command.
Throughout all of this, I always kept a distant watch of DMT, and the following year, I ended up buying and reading Strassman's "Spirit Molecule". When I was done with the book, it was like no turning back and I would do whatever it would take to get my hands on the substance. I began spreading his theories coupled with my theories to anyone who would listen (including my dad who was to my knowledge completely unaware that I had experimented with drugs of any kind). I could go off on an hour lecture, becoming more fascinated myself with each retelling as different people's reactions would prompt certain questions that needed to be answered. I began to ask everyone I knew, and even some people I didn't, if they had the starkest capability of finding DMT, or finding someone who could find it as I continued to come up short.
Meanwhile, one drug that I was dead-set against doing even after a couple shrooms and salvia experiences was acid. I thought it was way too long, and if I were to get stuck in a bad trip for such a duration, I didn't know what I might do to myself. I didn't think that it would come around anyway, so I didn't give it much thought, but for a couple months I had been holding onto some xanax after learning that it was what doctors proscribed to patients with "psychedelic anxiety," so I figured I would hold onto a bar if I decided to do shrooms again or something of the like. One of my friends, we'll call him Y came back from spring break that year, and texted me if I wanted any "Liquid Silver Drops". My first reaction was "no," but I replied "maybe." At around six that night, he tells me, "you gotta let me know if you wanna do this cause we should really drop by 8, so I told him I was strongly considering it. At 7:15 I put a tab and a half on my tongue and all the nervousness instantly vanished, much similarly to my first encounter with weed. It was like, "ok well now that that's over with..." I began to realize that the nervousness was in large part due to making the decision and not so much about what the drug would do itself. It was also comforting in knowing that I would have the xanax on standby should anything go awry. I could go into great detail about the trip itself, but suffice to say it was a very positive experience and when I was done tripping, not only wasn't it too long, I thought it wasn't long enough, mind you I was still tripping a good 13 hours in.
Anyway this one kid who my current roommate was working with let me know that he had a friend from back home who would most likely be able to score us DMT. I became ecstatically excited, and after a couple weeks the kid eventually came through. He came up to us from Pennsylvania with some other kid, and the four of us (my roommate's coworker, his friend who got the DMT, that guy's friend, and myself) would end up trying it for the first time together. Once I had my hands on it, I was considerably more nervous to try it than I predicted I would have been. I had been scouring for so long to find some, and when I finally did, I began questioning myself. I reconciled that I had to try it that night, despite my initial reluctance, and boy am I glad I did. The whole "rush" sensation was the most intense, euphoric and pleasurable collection of sensations I had ever experienced....ever. I had tried E the week before, and I felt like the rush from DMT was easily triple the pleasure of E at its peak. Coating the walls like wallpaper were the geometric patterns of light I had heard so much about, and they looked just as I had imagined they might. They were interlocking oblong trapezoids and rhomboids alternating back and forth from red to blue. Meanwhile the whole room seemed to be filled with an amazing orange glow. At the time I was convinced that the color I was seeing didn't actually exist in the perceivable visible light spectrum. The radiator, a couple yards in front of me in reality had a star-patterned grid on it, and the DMT began to make extremely intricately complex patterns out of the grid. I began to feel a strong sense of love towards the radiator. It wasn't sexual, and it wasn't in any way rational or with any reason what-so-ever, but rather just some inexplicable feeling of love towards the now-animated object. All of the items in the rooms were growing and shrinking with incredible speed and fluidity. The remarkable part was how unlike with shrooms or acid, where it seemed like arbitrary distortions of the visual field, with the DMT it seemed as if my mind were identifying and isolating objects within the room that it was visually manipulating individually. In other words, just because one thing was growing and shrinking, didn't mean that other things located in close proximity would be caught in the same distortion. The way people's faces looked reminded me of shrooms which in retrospect was very interesting because I remember while I was on shrooms for the first time, that I thought people's faces looked elf-like and this was long before I had even heard of the fractal elves, despite the general knowledge I had acquired on DMT at that point in time. There were two dragon tapestries, one blue and the other red on opposing walls to my left and right. On each tapestry, the dragons seemed to come to life. As I started to speak, my voice did not sound like my voice at all. It was high-pitched (but not shrill) and it was constantly, fluidly shifting in pitch in a very alien-like manner. I came down, and the whole experience was over quicker than I had expected. For the next hour or so, I was mildly euphoric with an extra bounce in my step. It was very refreshing. I had one dose left that I decided to save for later.
A couple weeks passed and I got my hands on some more tabs of acid and decided I would do the DMT and then take the acid right after in order to better reflect on the DMT experience as per a suggestion I had read online. One of the things I forgot to do with my first experience was to close my eyes to see the closed-eye visuals, so this time as soon as I was done exhaling my last hit, I closed my eyes. The images I saw were fractal patterns of intrinsic detail that appeared to me to be very arabesque. The color shifted from purple to green, and the patterns that started off in 2D began respatializing themselves as if to become the carpet and wallpaper of a room. At the center an ambiguous figure began to take shape out of the patterns, but I started coming down before it could develop any further, and unfortunately I had exhausted my supply, so I couldn't continue the experience. My friends who were there told me I was moaning like I was having sex, which I thought was funny cause I had no recollection of this, although it was extremely pleasurable, so I figured it must've been that I couldn't "contain myself" so to speak. I dropped the acid right after. This time it was two tabs which was the largest amount I had done and the entire experience seemed very magical, almost as if enhanced my the DMT from earlier. If I stared up into the sky I would see these psychedelic, iridescent rainbow patterns overlaying my vision, like a ceiling to the sky, and when I studied them closer, I realized that they were much like the patterns I had seen a couple hours earlier on the DMT. I could also go into detail on this experience more, but perhaps that's for another time. A month or so following this experience, I would brew ayahuasca for myself, but as this is an introduction (albeit a lengthy one) and that is a story that I would like to tell in it's fully detailed entirety, I will post that story in the First Steps in Hyperspace board.
"Science without religion is lame. Religion without science is blind" - Albert Einstein
"The Mighty One appears, the horizon shines. Atum appears on the smell of his censing, the Sunshine- god has risen in the sky, the Mansion of the pyramidion is in joy and all its inmates are assembled, a voice calls out within the shrine, shouting reverberates around the Netherworld." - Egyptian Book of the Dead
"Man fears time, but time fears the Pyramids" - 9th century Arab proverb