How to get back from acid?

[colour074]

Hello everybody. I would really appreciate some advise on my last trip.

A few days ago I took some very strong acid. I went through a few stages... dancing, laughing, shiny lights and amazing colours and everything good. But then I started to trip hard. I was laying on the ground looking at all the moving stars and the moon started making faces at me. Then a bright light came from behind the moon and the moon moved towards me like a caterpillar but with a diamond shape alien face. It moved right into me. Then my earth world started to spin. I thought I was dying but I was ok with it, I said to myself, just trust the process and this made the transition very easy.

When I got to the other side or out of human form or whatever you would like to call it, it was quite like I had thought it would be, but still a big shock to my system. Nothing mattered, no time, no space, everything I had known in human life was spinning around me like I was the center of a vortex. I was a little bit sad/disappointed/relieved? though because I realised that nothing I had ever felt was real, even when I tried to think of strong emotions like love of hate ,, I could not attach them to anything and they seemed like a waste of energy. And when I thought of my friends and family I felt nothing also. Apart from, oh, if I die right now they will be sad and perhaps a little cranky about cleaning up my mess! but when their time comes, they will realise it never really mattered as well. I also had the thought that I would never see them again after human life because there was no need to, they are/were always a part of me? Like we are one and the same OR there is no need for emotional attachments in the spiritual form and I had made them all up to experience my human form? Bizarre I know.

I began to worry a little (or thought I should feel worried) because I realised I couldn't get back to exactly where I had just come from and I wanted to because even though the human experience is so minuscule in the big scheme of things, my life was fun...... When this thought adorned on me, a voice said laughing,,, where do you think you are going to go back to? It is all a screen, none of it is real. No thought or feeling is real, it is like a big program.... you will go back but it will not be the same place you left......

When I started to come back (I was out for 2-3hours) I remember thinking, oh the human form again..... and I could feel myself fitting back into my human body bit by bit. And I was happy to be back. I was excited.

So although I enjoyed my trip and found it very insightful, it has left me feeling a little empty. Like, what to do now? How do I live my life and put emotions into everything after feeling what I just felt out there? Like ultimately, nothing matters, what we live in now is nothing compared to where we came from and are going back to. It is hard becuase I feel so disconnected to this form we are in now but I know I have to live this life. I feel like I can't reconnect with people or connect with new people because none of it is real anyway? Hmmmmm,,, that may sound a little crazy to most of you but I hope at least 1 person understands!

So my questions are-
Did I really go to another place, or was the acid playing tricks on my mind? Was what I saw real?
And if any of you have been to this place, how do you deal with things when you come back- i.e- how do you take things seriously or even have a relationship?

Any feedback people can give me would be so great!

Thanks a lot

R

 

[hypnagogic]

When integrating an experience like this the first thing you need to keep in mind is that it will take time. During this time I'd highly recommend not tripping again and if things begin to get more depressing for whatever reason consider ceasing any other drug use for a while.

One way I initially deal with trips that deal with existential themes is to ask myself "if so, so what?" In other words, if this is really the case and nothing matters then why should that affect my life? It hasn't made any difference up until this point in my life, so why should my realization suddenly change things?

I find that by evaluating the questions that came out of my trip with that thought in mind I don't take things so seriously and don't get wrapped up in whether or not this should change my life in any way. Maybe you'll get something good out of it with this kind of attitude. Maybe nothing mattering just means you have no reason to be afraid of failure in whatever you do in life and you can open yourself up more to all the possibilities life has to offer. Or maybe things only matter as much as you need them to and you get your own meaning out of existence.

I've always found that given enough time to sort out any bizarre existential questions that come to mind while tripping I can find positive aspects to them, or at least not let it affect my daily life.

 

[colour074]

Thanks a lot Hypnagogic. I will just give it time. It is a little strange though, I don't take any other drugs or drink alcohol, I took the trip for a spiritual journey and certainly got one! Thank you for being so positive. You are very right in everything you are saying and I will try to apply what I learnt/felt in positive ways to my life. I will give it a few months before I try again, or perhaps even longer, when I feel the time is right and have got my head around everything I have just learnt.
Thanks again
R

 

[Solipsis]

Right, well the same near-death-experience sort of thing happened to me and it took me a lot of time just like hypnagogic said, I think what sometimes follows is an existential crisis. Maybe it doesn't happen to everyone but this kind of experience has a good chance of raising questions about who or what we are, and it affects each person differently but quite probably strongly.

You just might have prompted me to go digging for my trip reports in my native language (Dutch); maybe I can try to transform it into a new report using the things I already wrote but with my more mature perspective now about 10 years later.
I think in the context of psychedelics this kind of thing is bound to happen to many more people than us few in this thread, I think it is important to investigate many cases so that people can learn what they can expect beyond the unique characteristics of each person, each situation or life affected.

A way to start would be to go digging in BL/PD and look for the hallmark of spiritual emergencies whether acute or chronic. To use search words or tags that designate this type of experience. What would that be?

My suggestions:
- existential crisis
- personality / identity crisis
- spiritual breakthrough
- temporary enlightenment
- awakening

Of course most threads can be very hard to find indeed, but there have been threads of people in trouble who kept coming back to us and reported on it, we also have the rather theoretical side of it
and threads about certain processes and developments that are at the core of these phenomena or at least of significant relevance...

Meanwhile, would you like to tell us more about what you went through?

much love

 

[EarthBounded]

So my questions are-
Did I really go to another place, or was the acid playing tricks on my mind? Was what I saw real?
And if any of you have been to this place, how do you deal with things when you come back- i.e- how do you take things seriously or even have a relationship?

Any feedback people can give me would be so great!

Thanks a lot

R

Damn,

I usually skip reading these long trip report's but this one caught my eye. I have exhibited every symptom you have except for not being able to be in a relationship… Thats a tough one.

Bottom line, you were playing with acid what did you expect? Yes I have seen what you saw so have many others here and not a damn one of us can answer whether you really went to another place, if we had the answer to that question there would be no bluelight.

You need to take it day by day, if you only tripped a few days ago you could still be coming down, this is my least favorite part of hard LSD trips, it has taken me up to 2 weeks to come down.

I can't even handle a high dose LSD comedown without alprazolam anymore. I can't even handle LSD anymore.

We are all here for you but don't focus on the negative we are all blessed, like I say if you can type your gonna be fine, just chill out lay down shut the light off and think for a minute, I would say you are displaying anxiety like symptoms which is completely normal after a high dose LSD trip.

And yes you will come back, just don't sit there and act like your permatripping because you are not, sounds like shit just real in your trip. Shit I know hundreds of people who are dying to see what you saw.

Like Soli said.

Much love You will find a lot of us have been in your shoes, I hope I didn't sound rude its just better to be blunt here.

 

[!_MDMA_!]

This is why it's hard to take psychedlics serious sometimes. They have such strong effects on the chemical makeup of your brain that they can cause people to feel things that don't make sense. Things that sound cool and insightful on paper but have no meaning behind them, like "ultimately, nothing matters, what we live in now is nothing compared to where we came from and are going back to."

Where you came from was a sperm cell, and what you're going to is a wood box in the dirt. If that is more meaningful than life to you then it sounds like you need a hard dose of reality.

 

[EarthBounded]

This is why it's hard to take psychedlics serious sometimes. They have such strong effects on the chemical makeup of your brain that they can cause people to feel things that don't make sense. Things that sound cool and insightful on paper but have no meaning behind them, like "ultimately, nothing matters, what we live in now is nothing compared to where we came from and are going back to."

Where you came from was a sperm cell, and what you're going to is a wood box in the dirt. If that is more meaningful than life to you then it sounds like you need a hard dose of reality.

This should be a PD sticky two thumbs up!!

 

[colour074]

Thanks for taking the time to read and respond everybody. It is great to get others opinions and advice. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to you all.
Love R xxx

 

[pmoseman]

I appreciate and agree with others opinions, who are more open-minded then myself.
The question I'd like to ask is where else could you have gone?
The attachment we have to people and places are not real, in other words, real things are things we can't control. The ability to destroy what we are predisposed to develop comes about through LSD (even without any drug we can find this and the same is true). Those bonds with people and places, another human is going to bond to their own personal experience, so on the surface the bonds seem superficial and common place. On the other hand we all share the same basic need, a bond, and yours are unique to you. They serve only you and you cannot borrow them from someone else. So what reason could there be to give them up?
The human mind is a sponge, it absorbs life and is immersed in it, it may seem like a flimsy screen, but where do you suppose you go to get another one?
You instantly master the inner landscape, knowing and seeing all, but the real world is far more mysterious and difficult and real. You do not decide what is real. You may have found the truth or you may have been momentarily confused. We should talk about how to test for reality.
The mind is not a limitless expanse, but if you need to detach yourself from your knowledge, then that is because you are limited by your physical body. However, the price of detachment is not minor, and having gotten back in, I am currently taking the total opposite approach and have proven at least to myself, what is real.
For each person, I strongly feel, the choice over direction is an important one, so in this sense it was mission accomplished. That is only metaphor though and I believe that if you truly assess even the relatively simple variety of only the size of mammalian lifeforms, from 2 grams to 200000000, you can appreciate what I mean when I say, we, humans, are all the same.
Facing these limitations myself surely means you are equally limited, to self. Life is important and difficult and comforting and full and rich, it includes the far ins and outs. Everything is real, every dream and imaginative idea, what you and I saw is real, even what we may think about it is all llimited by reality. Keep your mind open to all of reality, and try not to pin yourself down to a single interpretation, consider as many as you can.

 

[!_MDMA_!]

^ what a bunch of mumbo jumbo
All i see are undefined and abstract generalities sentence after sentence.
And this is why i prefer an education to drugs.

 

[Foreigner]

Drugs have made me go from the scientific spectrum of thinking to new age, to something else, to back again. At this point in my life after much seeking and integration, I am no longer concerned with what is "real". All I care about is being grounded in whatever seems like reality to me, and working with that. I think it's more practical to transcend questions of whether or not it really happened. At the end of the day, it did happen, because you experienced it. It doesn't matter what anyone else has to say about the authenticity of your experience, which is why many of the more time honoured psychedelic users don't recant their experiences to broader audiences.

It sounds to me like you had a breakthrough experience involving intense ego dissolution, to the point where you came into contact with the tangible perception of Oneness. Many religions and spiritual systems around the world espouse this kind of Oneness and non-dualistic state of being (where you are both object and perceiver at the same time), but few of their followers ever truly experience it. Essentially you touched on the truth that everyone and everything is just the universe manifesting in a multitude of different ways. The drop is the ocean and the ocean is the drop.

You can take whatever you want from this experience. My experience post-many-intense-acid-trips is that it's not possible, as a human being, to live in that acute awareness of Oneness while still retaining a functional human ego for the sake of navigating the physical, material, human world. There's no point in trying to chase that state with more acid trips because you are never going to get closer, or more into it. Just come back down to earth and proceed with living, while trusting in the knowledge that you are always Oneness no matter what you choose to do in this life. The benefit of the experience is that you can learn to see that there is nothing wrong, there is no ladder to climb, no middle man's approval necessary. There is no here or there, or ritual you have to do to become part of the universe. You're already there. You can't get more into it than you are in this very moment. That was LSD's most profound gift to me.

It took me 6 months to a year to fully integrate my most intense breakthrough LSD experience. In some ways I am still coming to terms with it. But either way there is no going back... it's like letting the geni out of the bottle. Some people choose to dismiss it as unreal and a mere product of biochemistry but... for me that denies the consciousness behind the experience and its essential lessons. You're lucky as few people on this planet will ever get a glimpse of what you did.

But do what you will with it. It's your creation.

 

[mission780]

Drugs have made me go from the scientific spectrum of thinking to new age, to something else, to back again. At this point in my life after much seeking and integration, I am no longer concerned with what is "real". All I care about is being grounded in whatever seems like reality to me, and working with that. I think it's more practical to transcend questions of whether or not it really happened. At the end of the day, it did happen, because you experienced it. It doesn't matter what anyone else has to say about the authenticity of your experience, which is why many of the more time honoured psychedelic users don't recant their experiences to broader audiences.

It sounds to me like you had a breakthrough experience involving intense ego dissolution, to the point where you came into contact with the tangible perception of Oneness. Many religions and spiritual systems around the world espouse this kind of Oneness and non-dualistic state of being (where you are both object and perceiver at the same time), but few of their followers ever truly experience it. Essentially you touched on the truth that everyone and everything is just the universe manifesting in a multitude of different ways. The drop is the ocean and the ocean is the drop.

You can take whatever you want from this experience. My experience post-many-intense-acid-trips is that it's not possible, as a human being, to live in that acute awareness of Oneness while still retaining a functional human ego for the sake of navigating the physical, material, human world. There's no point in trying to chase that state with more acid trips because you are never going to get closer, or more into it. Just come back down to earth and proceed with living, while trusting in the knowledge that you are always Oneness no matter what you choose to do in this life. The benefit of the experience is that you can learn to see that there is nothing wrong, there is no ladder to climb, no middle man's approval necessary. There is no here or there, or ritual you have to do to become part of the universe. You're already there. You can't get more into it than you are in this very moment. That was LSD's most profound gift to me.

It took me 6 months to a year to fully integrate my most intense breakthrough LSD experience. In some ways I am still coming to terms with it. But either way there is no going back... it's like letting the geni out of the bottle. Some people choose to dismiss it as unreal and a mere product of biochemistry but... for me that denies the consciousness behind the experience and its essential lessons. You're lucky as few people on this planet will ever get a glimpse of what you did.

But do what you will with it. It's your creation.

Thank you for this wonderful post!

 

[hawaii]

Had similar feelings after a "psychedelic period" 2 years ago.
I had a kind of "existential crisis" where I think I was depressed too.
Now I'm out of that phase even if a lot of questions in my head are still without an answer. And they'll be for all my life maybe, but let's see.
I'm just 24 now.
It's maybe a bit trivial to say but be rational and find a balance in real life.
Good diet, do exercise, make love, and create a connection of relationships that makes you safe.
They are more real than you might think now. At least for me.
I decided to realize my self with the job too.
I always dreamed of making music and now I'm doing it.
Running two record labels, got people involved, I'm playing around Europe and get paid for that.
Use this crisis to understand what can make you happy in daily life and do it.
It takes effort but it's possible.
Hope this helps, but again, I have not truth in my hands so it's all up to everyone to find their own happiness.
I wish you'll get quiet soon from this trip.

 

[pmoseman]

One sense of reality is, those things that we cannot change. A mountain is real and death is real and this was our reality while we were nomads.
The mountains in time flowed away to the oceans and our ancient mythology came to the modern age, where death as a mountain lay beneath us. Death may never come to the next person born. The mythological table on which death was carved becomes a ritual item; where our souls were set free of the body by priests and surgeons spilt blood and meat was cut with swords of truth and knowledge. You and I may yet tap on the table, but this unborn thing has hands that will just slip through it.
The mountains move aside now for cables to give us access to the internet. Men travel to heaven, with nothing more than ideas. The inner mind has dominion and control. The mind that was dismissed as not being real is all we have left. The imagination in the modern modern world is the mountain. The archetypes of the mind, i.e. emotion and memory, are cognitive processes brought about by machines that alienate us from reality. We slip from one sense of reality to another, as we look down via satellite at our homes. The bridge between that mountain and the mind can be seen as a mountain in miniature within the mind. We see these strands of chemical reactions conducting thoughts that make the imagination and cause the shapes of those things we see. The shape of the mountain, the atomic arrangement representing that thing in our mind, this is the modern understanding of what reality really is. It dismisses the reality we never got to touch or experience in the raw. Why would we be concerned after we leave nature, other than to say we have left it preserved?
When we tap on the table now. The shape of death carved out of the stone has become sand for the modern technological age, but it taps back at us. What is real has changed from mountains to atoms, as we divide the second into trillions, our technology became its own self, and rusty keys to our locked minds still open doorways to what we know is not real. As part of the mythological story, we tell ourselves, we know these things are not at all real, we stop our imagination when the movie ends, but they have always been a danger to us. They crawl out of our dreams and awaken us.
How do you see something that is not real, other than by surrounding it on all sides? Reality has shape.
The film strip rolling back behind the eyes is a falsehood we are tempted to avoid, this is the thing we need to defend. That flicker of atoms has torn down mountains. In the future, those invisible vibrations will find access to pockets outside of reality. The non-reality becoming the reality as every kind of reality is destroyed; where no mountain can be, will a mountain ever remain.

 

[iodo]

^ what a bunch of mumbo jumbo
All i see are undefined and abstract generalities sentence after sentence.
And this is why i prefer an education to drugs.

I'm sort of with this statement. Two years ago I took 34mg of 4-aco-dmt. I felt it come on, and crawled into bed. I had complete ego loss, thinking I was dead and time was over. Then I came down, and realized that a drug had altered my perception, and that was all that happened.

Psychosis from hard stimulant use is induced by high doses, but "enlightenment" through psychedelic use is not widely considered just a medical phenomena? I dunno, I guess I've just heard a few too many trip reports with the same nature.

 

[pofacedhoe]

Drugs have made me go from the scientific spectrum of thinking to new age, to something else, to back again. At this point in my life after much seeking and integration, I am no longer concerned with what is "real". All I care about is being grounded in whatever seems like reality to me, and working with that. I think it's more practical to transcend questions of whether or not it really happened. At the end of the day, it did happen, because you experienced it. It doesn't matter what anyone else has to say about the authenticity of your experience, which is why many of the more time honoured psychedelic users don't recant their experiences to broader audiences.

It sounds to me like you had a breakthrough experience involving intense ego dissolution, to the point where you came into contact with the tangible perception of Oneness. Many religions and spiritual systems around the world espouse this kind of Oneness and non-dualistic state of being (where you are both object and perceiver at the same time), but few of their followers ever truly experience it. Essentially you touched on the truth that everyone and everything is just the universe manifesting in a multitude of different ways. The drop is the ocean and the ocean is the drop.

You can take whatever you want from this experience. My experience post-many-intense-acid-trips is that it's not possible, as a human being, to live in that acute awareness of Oneness while still retaining a functional human ego for the sake of navigating the physical, material, human world. There's no point in trying to chase that state with more acid trips because you are never going to get closer, or more into it. Just come back down to earth and proceed with living, while trusting in the knowledge that you are always Oneness no matter what you choose to do in this life. The benefit of the experience is that you can learn to see that there is nothing wrong, there is no ladder to climb, no middle man's approval necessary. There is no here or there, or ritual you have to do to become part of the universe. You're already there. You can't get more into it than you are in this very moment. That was LSD's most profound gift to me.

It took me 6 months to a year to fully integrate my most intense breakthrough LSD experience. In some ways I am still coming to terms with it. But either way there is no going back... it's like letting the geni out of the bottle. Some people choose to dismiss it as unreal and a mere product of biochemistry but... for me that denies the consciousness behind the experience and its essential lessons. You're lucky as few people on this planet will ever get a glimpse of what you did.

But do what you will with it. It's your creation.

this explains everything perfectly

 

[ziggo]

I've been to crazy hallucinatory states and trapped in different dimensions for periods and what I believe is that everything you do in this life does matter, things you do affect how your consciousness evolves and it keeps evolving after physical death. All of us humans are gaining experiences for some reason at this moment in time. Negative energy entities would like you to believe it is all meaningless because it gives them power in their dimension I think. The universe is quite deep indeed. Hope this made you feel better.

 

[Tryptamino]

Give yourself time to integrate, preoccupy yourself and the answers will come naturally.

 

[atara]

I'm on a phone right now, but this essay is good: http://www.interluderetreat.com/meditate/chop.htm

 

[pmoseman]

^ what a bunch of mumbo jumbo
All i see are undefined and abstract generalities sentence after sentence.
And this is why i prefer an education to drugs.

For your information, I am currently more educated and use less drugs than you.
Regardless of the source, the mumbo-jumbo from these experiences seems to have been influential on society. Why is that?