Hi there, I wanted to introduce myself and share some of my experiences with all of you. I hope by sharing my experiences I will gain some insights about them which will help me further integrate them. I also hope they may be useful to others as they explore the world of entheogens.
Some background on me. Regarding my personality, I am a humanist and optimist. I am always amazed at the things we have been able to do as a species. Just watching technology progress over the last 20 years has blown my mind. I think humans are special and we are capable of incredible things that even now we cannot understand or believe.
On the spiritual side, I grew up in a religious culture which strongly opposes the use of any drug. I had not taken any drug until I smoked weed on my 33rd birthday. I was highly sensitive and the effect lasted a day and a half. I had never seen colors so beautiful and bright, laughed so hard with friends, and felt the crazy (and sometimes scary) effects of time dilation. I was hooked and have been smoking weed a few times a week ever since.
How did I get here? I found Terence McKenna’s work around four years ago. I listened him all of the time, and probably fell asleep listening to him every night for a couple of years. He’s just so fun to listen to. I don’t think you can listen to Terence McKenna for too long without wanting to try for yourself. I managed to go three years though, mainly due to lack of access and opportunity.
I have had six experiences with psychedelics in the last twelve months, I’ll detail each below. Would love any of your thoughts and feedback.
Psilocybin Experience #1Dose: 0.5 grams
A friend of mine had a friend who grew some Golden Teacher mushrooms. They dried them out, blended them, and encapsulated them into 0.25 gram vegetable caps. I swallowed two of them after dinner and then went to work out. I started to feel energetic and giddy and the workout was really fun. It was a completely different vibe than weed, very playful without the anxiety. I remember thinking how the effect was similar in strength to smoking a decent amount of weed and how it was from just two pills.
While I was working out I had some insights about my relationship with my wife that were very kind to me. I tend to think of myself as never being enough and always needing to improve, and the vibe I had was that I was actually enough. As I drove home from the gym, the whole world seemed to be friendly to me. The city felt like a “friendly forest.” When I got home I called one of my best friends and told him to remember the time we were young and in high school without any cares just loving life and playing video games. I went to sleep and woke up the next morning feeling super refreshed.
So far, so good.
Psilocybin Experience #2Dose: 0.5 grams
A month later I decided to take another two pills in the evening. I met up with a friend and worked out with him. Had a very fun conversation and enjoyed sitting in the sauna. Can’t recall much more detail than that.
Psilocybin Experience #3Dose: 1.0 gram
Met up with a bunch of my friends, decided to go a little deeper and doubled what I had normally taken. I had dinner so I wasn’t on an empty stomach. The effects started to hit me and made me want to get up and go out and do something. Our group of friends went to a grocery store and filled the cart with hundreds of dollars of every type of junk food. The grocery store felt like a fairy wonderland and everything was amazing. We hung out all night long eating junk food and having fun conversations. I remember being so sad because I had only had a few of the junk food things we bought but I was too full to eat any more!
At the end of the night I noticed that my ego seemed to be emboldened and I was saying things with less of a filter and being aggressive, saying things for dramatic effect that were not thoughtful. I drove home thinking about that and how I should be more thoughtful and take care in the things I say. In spite of that, this night goes down as one of the favorite nights of my life.
DMT Experience #1Dose: ~7.5-15mg
They say you don’t find DMT, DMT finds you. Well, it found me in the form of being dissolved in vaping juice oil on top of a vape pen. I was at my friend’s house, who had happened to have one of his friends give him the pen. My friend told me about his experiences with it and offered it to me. I accepted, having a little bit of fear but overall excited to try it out. I sat down on his couch and he coached me through three deep breaths. I sat back and suddenly I felt the living room being pressed into a dimension higher than this one. The fireplace appeared to be folding in on itself and projecting it’s powerful spiritual energy at me. I looked over at his Christmas tree and it was insanely beautiful. It was all right angles and kind of had a Minecraft look to it. It looked like it was the source tree from which all trees which have ever been are templated from. The lines in his ceiling seemed to be cut incredibly deep.
I sat there marveling at all of the change, as I had never seen visuals in my life. But it was more than visuals, it was an entire full body and emotional experience.
The effect was wearing off and I watched the fantastic world of the four dimensions collapse back into three. The room went darker and the once beautiful tree drooped down into a sad expression of its former self. I looked at it and thought, “that is a shadow of its true self.” And then I looked at the room and thought, “oh, maybe this entire world is a shadow world.”
DMT Experience #2Dose: ~10-15mg
I told my friend what I had experienced and he recommended that we go to a dark room and have me try it with my eyes closed. I fell back to baseline so fast after doing it the first time in the living room, so I thought why not let’s just try that again. So after talking for about 10 minutes we went to a dark room and I sat down on a chair with a blanket on me. My friend coached me through four puffs this time. I breathed out the last puff and sat back into the chair and closed my eyes.
Immediately I felt an external voice directly communicate to my mind “YOU SHOULD NOT BE HERE.” I got a little scared and opened my eyes and looked around. I was feeling the effects and thought well I’ll just ride this out it doesn’t last too long. Then the voice seemed to say to me “Well as long as you are here, might as well show you some cool shit.”
A technicolor grid on a black background appeared in my field of vision. I opened my eyes and my field of vision was the exact same. It felt like something that would normally appear in my mind’s eye was being pushed into my actual visual processing and I could inspect and look at the grid and learn about it by staring harder at it. The grid was cells about 10x10 with a border of 1. The resolution of the grid was like 80K compared to our 4K TVs. I remember be amazed at how high definition this fucking grid was. It was impressive. As I stared more closely too it, the grid started to develop small vortexes behind it. The vortexes were pulling portions of the grid behind itself, twisting all of the lines of the grid into little inverted tornadoes in the area around the vortex. The colors of the lines were merging all together in the vortexes. I watched as at the bottom of the vortex, it merged all together and dripped into a drop of technicolor which got sucked into a black hole. I thought to myself, “ah, that’s a nice touch that it drips like that.”
The grid slowly faded from my vision and I returned back to baseline and told my friend what I saw.
These two experiences on DMT didn’t seem too profound or earth shattering at the time. I thought oh maybe those are just like screensavers but there isn’t much meaning there. But as the days and weeks past after doing DMT, I started to notice things were a little different.
First of all, I caught myself randomly catching the smell of the DMT (like burnt plastic) throughout the week. The smell is not pleasant and triggered a slight feeling of disgust.
Second, I was cutting my beard in the shower and as the hair dropped into the water it was being pulled by the water at the bottom of the tub exactly how the vortexes were being formed. This effect really stood out to me.
Third, I started to obsess about my DMT experiences, researching online trying to make sense of it. The world was so different on DMT, is DMT a tool that lets us see into another dimension or are we just generating imagery? But it doesn’t feel like my brain is capable of generating that imagery because it has never done anything like that in my entire life. Is the dimension that I experienced the spirit world, where the souls of those who have died are? If not just the souls of the dead, maybe an infinite amount of intelligences are in the fourth dimension. I mean, it felt like the Christmas tree was “put” there by something, it was so out of place. It looked like it was so intently built and engineered that it was created by a higher being. It didn’t seem like my brain could make a Christmas tree look like that. It also didn’t look like nature created it, it looked manufactured.
And the feeling! The feeling feels like you are being transported somewhere different. The same place but so different.
Psilocybin Experience #4Dose: 5.5 grams
After DMT, I decided I was going to go deep on mushrooms to learn more. I had heard that DMT was stronger than mushrooms, so thought why not, let’s just go for 5 grams on Mushrooms since I’ve already done DMT.
I needed a place to do the 5 grams uninterrupted and decided to book a hotel and get it done with no distractions or concerns. I also thought it would be good to mentally prepare for this experience. So, I restricted my diet for 14 days, worked out regularly, and prepared thoughts, questions, and intents. I lined up a flight for my sitter and got hotel rooms for us.
I woke up in the morning at the hotel and prepared 22 pills of Golden Teacher each measured to a quarter gram aiming for roughly 5 to 5.5 grams, accounting for the weight of the vegetable capsules. I was fasting and had a completely empty stomach. My sitter arrived from the airport around 10:00 AM and we had a friendly chat in the hotel room while he ate breakfast.
I swallowed all of the pills triumphantly around 10:30 AM, completely unaware as to what was going to happen. I laid down in bed and put my eye mask on and ear plugs in. I felt nothing at the 20 minute mark. My sitter said he was going to go to the bathroom. I laid back and closed my eyes. Suddenly, high contrast lines of technicolor earth tones (greens and yellow and brown lines) stretched and sparkled across my black field of vision and in an instant I was ripped into the spirit world. I watched as the ever-present and insanely complex interdimensional locks unhooked and opened a passageway and I was flung through it beyond my will.
The change was so violent that it made me sit up and rip my eye mask off and ear plugs out struggling and gasping for air. The hotel room was completely changed and brought me back to the familiar place that DMT had introduced me to, but this time with much more clarity. The world was completely different, like when Frodo puts the ring on but not a realm of Sauron’s evil but a realm of beauty so complex that it easily bridges from awe-inspiring beauty into absolute terror. I exclaimed to my sitter “this is the DMT realm!” and I looked and saw that he was not in his chair - he must be in the bathroom. I fell back into the blankets crumpled into a heap and closed my eyes because the beauty was too much. When I closed my eyes I felt the presence of an incredibly powerful spirit that I naturally feared immensely.
With my spirit now detached from my body, I looked around with my spiritual eyes and found myself at the feet of a massive white stone gate. The size of the gate was immense, I was an insignificant speck in front of it. It was beautiful and simple and strong and imminent. I didn’t understand what was beyond the gate but it was obvious by its size and structure that it was protecting something incredibly valuable. It would cost hundreds of millions to build a replica in this physical world and it would still fall short. Wide steps were leading up to the gate and dark energy was swirling around the steps blocking my view beyond the steps. It was just me, the steps, the gate, and the darkness. I instantly knew the gate was not going to open for me. I didn’t know why the gate wasn’t going to open, and the message from the gate was “you don’t know how to open me, and therefore I will not open.” It was my ignorance that held the gate shut, and I didn’t and still don’t know what I don’t know to open it.
At this point I realized I was completely fucked. I had dabbled in things I didn’t understand and I knew I had put myself here and that based on the dose I took I was going to be trapped here for a very, very long time. The darkness started to swirl around me coming closer and closer, enveloping my body in what can only be described as absolute terror, fear, and suffering.
I used my physical body to call out to my sitter, and I told him “this place is so scary! I am so scared! We shouldn’t have come here!” “I took too much! We shouldn’t have done this! I didn’t know it was going to be like this!” “Help me! Please help me!”
My sitter climbed into the bed with me and I clutched his left arm with my hands and held on. I thought to myself “My sitter can save me!” And the being in the darkness laughed and mocked me, saying “you think he can save you!? He is NOTHING.” My mind raced, in a full panic. Who do you reach out to when you know it is all over? The only person that came to my mind was my Dad. Surely my Dad could save me. The being read my mind and said to me “you think your Dad can save you!? He is weaker than you! He cannot save you here!” I responded to the being through tears and said “but I love my Dad…”
At this point I was frantically thinking about what I could do and my physical body whimpered “but we can figure this out.” My sitter responded to me talking to myself and said, “strategies won’t work here.” I instantly knew this was true and I gave up (or was forced to give up) and at this point I was unable to interact and went into “read only” mode. My only input was the power of the entity ripping me apart and causing me extreme mental anguish beyond anything I knew I was capable of feeling. It is hard to capture in words how harrowing the experience was. Imagine feeling so horrible that you lose all dequorum and are crying and whimpering in agony. I am in my thirties with a family and a successful career and I consider myself very emotionally stable. I was reduced to a baby. It was by far the hardest thing I have been through in my entire life.
I was phase shifting in and out of the spirit world, being thrown violently between my bed in the physical world and the gate in the spiritual world. In my bed I was doubled over in the fetal position clutching my stomach and involuntarily shaking and making the movement to throw up but not being able to. In the spirit world I was being what felt like tortured by the dark energy being at the gate. The lines between the two worlds were blurred and at one point the entity went deeper into making me feel agony. He took all of my weaknesses and fears and sadnesses and it felt like he had placed them as multicolored putties into a mixed puddle floating in the air. He then mixed in the suffering of thousands of others into the putty and then took his “hands” and ripped and pulled the putty to the left, stretching it and ripping it and smearing it into the darkness. I felt everything, things I shouldn’t be capable of feeling and things no one deserves to feel. It was cruel. It was absolutely awful. I later recounted, “it wasn’t that I was dying, it’s that I wasn’t dying!” The entity told me “even though it feels like this, you will one day know that I am doing this for your good.”
As this was happening I looked up and found that my sitter had somehow placed himself into the spirit world with me. He was with me at the gate and I looked up at his face. His eyes were closed and he was breathing deeply in meditation. I looked up and I realized I was looking at his soul. His hair, naturally dark, was more brilliant than gold and his skin and body were emanating white energy and he had golden crescents shimmering across his face and skin. He was absolutely beautiful and impressive and marvelous. His eyes were shut but I knew he was there, not to help me by stopping the pain but at least be present with me as I suffered. I was so grateful for him. The intensity of my suffering was not reduced, in fact, it was even worse but the fact that he was there seemed to make it more tolerable.
While the being was “working” on me it seemed to leak some of its feelings. The being felt annoyed with me, annoyed that I was too weak to interact with it and kind of frustrated with the whole ordeal. The analogy is kind of like if a guy had shoved a glass lightbulb up his ass and it had shattered, and the guy had gone to the hospital and the nurse had to pick the glass out of his ass. The nurse would be glad to be helping but also annoyed that the guy had put himself in the situation where she had to pick glass out of his ass.
At around the two and a half hour mark the pain was so much and I felt the entity release me for a bit. I opened my eyes in the physical world and asked my sitter to open up the curtains and let some light in. The outside world was beautiful and blue and the ocean and beautiful city were in view. Birds were swooping around the window and for a moment I was so grateful. Then the pain started to come back and I crumpled down to the second bed in the hotel room and everything went dark for the next hour and a half. I can’t remember if I saw or experienced anything during this time. I don’t recall falling asleep but it feels like whatever happened to me during this last hour and a half was deleted or not remembered.
At the four hour mark I opened my eyes and had the distinct feeling that the being had released me and that it was done “working” on me. I exclaimed to my sitter “thank God it is over and thank God I am alive!”
I looked around the room and it felt sanctified. It felt like the holy places I have visited in my life. I went to the bathroom to go pee and as I sat on the toilet I looked at the white towels in front of me. The threads and fabric were marching in lines across the towel as it breathed. I watched this visual effect closely and thought it was so beautiful.
Afterwards, I talked to my sitter about the experience for the rest of the day. Even though we had different hotel rooms I asked him to stay in the second bed because I was so emotionally tender and felt like I needed someone else to just be around me. I didn’t want to be alone.
The next day we woke up and walked to the beach and continued talking about the experience. That evening we met up with some other friends and I realized I was too emotionally sensitive to be around other people and loud noises and needed some quiet to sort through my thoughts.
Since this experience I have had many, many reflections on it.
First of all, maybe ignorance is the true source of all suffering. I think this is the lesson of the gate. Maybe not knowing and not being aware is why we all suffer. We want things to be a way and don’t know how to make them that way. We want things to not be a way and we don’t know how to make them not that way. This is why I suffered at “The Gate of Suffering.” My ignorance of how to open the gate was why I suffered. If I knew how to open the gate, I would look at my suffering as needless. The needlessness of my suffering is why it felt cruel.
For example, a woman has a baby hundreds of years ago and the umbilical cord is wrapped around the baby’s neck. The people around her are ignorant of how to handle the situation. The mother and the baby die, causing massive suffering to the family and community. The people were ignorant - they did not have the knowledge on how perceive or handle the situation. Modern medicine has taught us. We are no longer ignorant and now know how to deal with this. So in the modern world we don’t really suffer from this nearly as much as we use to as a species.
There’s probably something more to this, but I do have the feeling that ignorance and suffering are deeply related.
Since the trip I have also had some latent and unexpected lasting side effects. For the weeks following the event I would look at people and randomly see flashes of their central nervous system. It was like I could see every strand of central nervous tissue being lit up and glowing in a white and blue light. It would flash for a second and disappear, sometimes individuals and sometimes groups of people. I had no control over this. It doesn’t happen anymore.
Another bizarre effect is feeling the essence of my Mom when I look at objects. I was making toast and as I was looking at the toast it felt like it had the essence of my Mom in it. The energy of it is loving and kind, but it is definitely a strange thing to feel. The other day I looked at my Windows 10 lock screen and text on the screen had the essence of my Mom in it. As I have been typing this document it feels like the screen has had the essence of my Mom. I can’t control this, it just happens to me. It is not unpleasant but it is so strange.
Lastly, I’ll occasionally have PTSD flashes of the pain and horror that I experienced in that hotel room. While I feel like I learned so much from the trip, there are definitely some emotional wounds from the experience which need to heal.
I don’t know when I’ll do psychedelics at that dose again, but I do know that when I do it will take actual courage. I do feel invited back and am willing but want to take some quiet time to reflect. When I do go back, I’ll probably go back at a much lower dose and ease into it.
Thanks for taking the time to read my journey so far. Would love to hear any insights or thoughts you had while reading!