HowNearOrHowFar
Greenlighter
- Joined
- Oct 4, 2012
- Messages
- 7
At the time of this experience I was experimenting a lot with Lsd. In one of the experiences, I decided to drop 6 hits.
Most of the trip went beautifully. Inside my own house, where I'd usually trip during those weeks, I experienced some profoundly transcendent moments. I felt as though I embodied a whole universe of pure consciousness, shaped into the particular experience of my own thoughts. I was thinking a lot about striving to achieve a unity between my thoughts, actions, perceptions, and language and that this unity would be equivalent to allowing the divine to express itself most fully through my being. For quite some time, this unity seemed to be achieved.
At one point, I decided to record some of my thoughts on a video with my cellphone. I pushed record and said "hello" several times into the microphone. When I played it back, my hellos sounded like a strange chanting. I noticed a wavering in my voice that took on a linguistic character all its own -- and which was in no way related to the word "hello" or to my intention in saying it. It was as though my voice expressed a vibration that reflected the presence of that core human consciousness I felt very much in-touch with. I 'chanted' for a while more, giving it a fully expression. It was quite astounding and moving. Later, however, I felt that same quality of "vibration" manifested in all of my actions -- I could see the pattern manifest in the way I thought, the things I thought about, the way I walked from room to room. Suddenly, I felt out-of-control and went to lie down on my bed in an effort to calm myself.
It seemed an increasing amount of "me" (whoever that was) was being replaced by this random stream of human consciousnes. The process - which I felt then was divine, yet cruel and terrifying now - seemed to be attempting to dissolve me. I tried to grasp to whatever ego I had left in me, but it was difficult to concentrate and every second seemed like my sense of reality was getting further away from me. There were quite a few moments when I was so absorbed in fighting the dissolution that I remained silent and still for what seemed like long periods of time.
As this 'dissolution' continued, I felt as though my body was becoming possessed by random personalities that flowed in from the stream of core human consciousness. I remember looking at random objects with the consciousness of others, touching them as though they were some remarkable alien thing. The urging toward dissolution become so intense that I was sure that "I" would not return from the trip. I was terrified - I didn't want to 'die'. Everything around me seemed utterly alien, and even trying to read something I felt like I had lost the ability to understand language.
Now, you may call me dumb or stupid, but I didn't have a sitter, neither in any of the other trips. Because of that it took a tremendous amount of will on my part to make some sense of what was happening, and, as I did so, I felt I was the whole of the universe clawing its way out of darkness and madness toward a divine radiance and sense of health and salvation. This continued for some time; it was utterly exhausting, and I didn't know how long I would be able to bear it. The feeling of dissolution had taken on a physical character - a searing iciness seemed to be taking my body over. Eventually, I began to feel better. I had made it "to the light", it seemed, and felt a peace return and saturate my being. Concentrating on the light, I was able to manifest it in greater and greater degrees. It seemed I had turned my soul - which was also the soul of the universe - away from drowning in a river of fragments of human consciousness toward something that I could only call the genuinely Divine or a superior entity present everywhere.
The ego-dissolution continued now, but peacefully. Whatever parts of me left were replaced by that Divinity. With the sun coming up, visions of joyously dissolving into the sun and the sky accomanied the experience and there was an unutterable feeling of the infinite and the sacred. I felt really happy and inspired just by the thought of having shifted the trip course so well. I encountered the stream of human consciousness again, but this time I looked on it with what I felt to be the love of God. It was beautiful, touching, precious beyond all description. I focused on reshaping my own self/ego in that divine image.
The profound and terrifying ego-loss experience induced by 6 hits of lsd had unanticipated effects. Over the next several months, I became increasingly "religious", perfectly confident that my soul had literally touched the divine. Subsequent lower-dose experiments induced religious and mystical experiences that I would have thought inaccessable at all but the highest doses. While this appeared a positive and fortunate trend at first, the experiences soon became distinctly more serious and somehow "darker." For instance, near Christmas, I experienced a haunting vision of Christ as an enflamed and swollen sun rising above a lifeless desert. I understood the sun as a symbol of Christ's passion and, far from radiating a loving and forgiving warmth, the sun appeared agonized, enraged, harsh, and cruel. Now the sun became a heart and the heart was split down the middle but continued beating, flooding the desert with the blood of Christ's passion. Inasmuch as the blood enriched the soil, making it fertile for life, the heart or Christ was in the unspeakable agony of crucificionand it was this very agony that was the life within the blood. If becoming such a martyr is my spiritual destiny, I thought, I cannot bear it. I panicked, much as I had during my ego-loss experience, losing myself in a blind and icy fear that seemed to pervade my whole being.
After a few more experiences, I decided to stop using psychedelics for a while. I had, I felt, begun to lose touch with reality to a dangerous degree.
I was growing increasingly paranoid and prone to increasingly severe panic attacks, a flood of long-buried memories, some traumatic, some trivial, occured to me on an almost daily basis. I was haunted by strange and disturbing mental imagery (often bloody and violent) that I could make little sense of and that seemed to frequently contain powerful "Jungian" overtones, and I even experienced a few genuine hallucinations - again, usually of rather disturbing content - while completely sober.
The situation worsened to the degree that ego-loss - which I interpreted as punishment from God for refusing to become a wandering homeless ascetic - almost always coincided, to some degree, with the panic attacks. As soon as I tried to find "grounding" within myself to help me ride-out the attack, all sense of personal identity would vanish, leaving nothing of me but raw panic and emotional agony. Several months had passed without me using any Lsd.
Gradually, I started getting better and the 'I' seemed to return. Also, as things started to get better I also regained the capacity to make rational judgements about myself so I could detect more easily what was going on and I tried to live with it, which made things easier.
The thing I think had the most powerful healing effect, however, was the reading of certain expanded minds like Terence McKenna and some post-Nietzchean philosophers such as Martin Heidegger. As I made inroads into understanding some of the writings of these minds and philosophers, I began to understand how the content of so many of my most powerful psychedelic experiences had been determined by certain Western philosophical presuppositions whose validity had been called into question literally centuries ago but which were nevertheless very much alive and influential among those people I'd encountered in some "alternative" subcultures. The capacity which I was developing to move my thinking away from the thinking determined by those presuppositions revealed to me that my entheogenic experiences had been not so much genuine revelations of the divine but rather intensely vivid experiences of both a collective and a personal mythology which had I discovered and developed over the past four or five years - a mythology which, because it was so pervasive among those with whom I associated, I had taken for truth unquestioningly. Realizing that the content of my entheogenic experiences - including the prescriptive "lessons" learned from those experiences -- might have been radically different had my "set and setting" been radically different allowed me to examine that content more rationally; in so doing, its grip on my psyche was loosened.
The healing process is far from over, but I no longer feel that I'm teetering on the brink of insanity at every waking moment - my psyche is gradually reconstructing itself and is thereby regaining a coherence which I had, for a time, lost. Nevertheless, I still struggle at least on occasion with panic and periods of depression; flashbacks are not infrequent, and both my physical senses and my emotions frequently seem painfully overstimulated. Most disturbing is that I now often feel unfamiliar and alien to myself - as though much of "who I am" was literally "erased". At the same time, I think that, if I manage eventually to regain a full sense of being grounded within myself again, I will have, in that process, 'lived' authentically and fully and to the depth of my being.
I never considered getting professional help until about this summer, when I went to a psychiatrist who put me on anti-depressant and anti-anxiety medication. I could only do it after some of my 'self' had returned to me.
In summary, I would urge extreme caution in approaching psychedelics for spiritual reasons. One's grasp of reality can slide away right beneath one's nose, without one ever realizing it until it's far too late to recover. Always keep as clear a head as possible -- and if anything threatens that clarity, heed it as a very serious and very dire warning.
Most of the trip went beautifully. Inside my own house, where I'd usually trip during those weeks, I experienced some profoundly transcendent moments. I felt as though I embodied a whole universe of pure consciousness, shaped into the particular experience of my own thoughts. I was thinking a lot about striving to achieve a unity between my thoughts, actions, perceptions, and language and that this unity would be equivalent to allowing the divine to express itself most fully through my being. For quite some time, this unity seemed to be achieved.
At one point, I decided to record some of my thoughts on a video with my cellphone. I pushed record and said "hello" several times into the microphone. When I played it back, my hellos sounded like a strange chanting. I noticed a wavering in my voice that took on a linguistic character all its own -- and which was in no way related to the word "hello" or to my intention in saying it. It was as though my voice expressed a vibration that reflected the presence of that core human consciousness I felt very much in-touch with. I 'chanted' for a while more, giving it a fully expression. It was quite astounding and moving. Later, however, I felt that same quality of "vibration" manifested in all of my actions -- I could see the pattern manifest in the way I thought, the things I thought about, the way I walked from room to room. Suddenly, I felt out-of-control and went to lie down on my bed in an effort to calm myself.
It seemed an increasing amount of "me" (whoever that was) was being replaced by this random stream of human consciousnes. The process - which I felt then was divine, yet cruel and terrifying now - seemed to be attempting to dissolve me. I tried to grasp to whatever ego I had left in me, but it was difficult to concentrate and every second seemed like my sense of reality was getting further away from me. There were quite a few moments when I was so absorbed in fighting the dissolution that I remained silent and still for what seemed like long periods of time.
As this 'dissolution' continued, I felt as though my body was becoming possessed by random personalities that flowed in from the stream of core human consciousness. I remember looking at random objects with the consciousness of others, touching them as though they were some remarkable alien thing. The urging toward dissolution become so intense that I was sure that "I" would not return from the trip. I was terrified - I didn't want to 'die'. Everything around me seemed utterly alien, and even trying to read something I felt like I had lost the ability to understand language.
Now, you may call me dumb or stupid, but I didn't have a sitter, neither in any of the other trips. Because of that it took a tremendous amount of will on my part to make some sense of what was happening, and, as I did so, I felt I was the whole of the universe clawing its way out of darkness and madness toward a divine radiance and sense of health and salvation. This continued for some time; it was utterly exhausting, and I didn't know how long I would be able to bear it. The feeling of dissolution had taken on a physical character - a searing iciness seemed to be taking my body over. Eventually, I began to feel better. I had made it "to the light", it seemed, and felt a peace return and saturate my being. Concentrating on the light, I was able to manifest it in greater and greater degrees. It seemed I had turned my soul - which was also the soul of the universe - away from drowning in a river of fragments of human consciousness toward something that I could only call the genuinely Divine or a superior entity present everywhere.
The ego-dissolution continued now, but peacefully. Whatever parts of me left were replaced by that Divinity. With the sun coming up, visions of joyously dissolving into the sun and the sky accomanied the experience and there was an unutterable feeling of the infinite and the sacred. I felt really happy and inspired just by the thought of having shifted the trip course so well. I encountered the stream of human consciousness again, but this time I looked on it with what I felt to be the love of God. It was beautiful, touching, precious beyond all description. I focused on reshaping my own self/ego in that divine image.
The profound and terrifying ego-loss experience induced by 6 hits of lsd had unanticipated effects. Over the next several months, I became increasingly "religious", perfectly confident that my soul had literally touched the divine. Subsequent lower-dose experiments induced religious and mystical experiences that I would have thought inaccessable at all but the highest doses. While this appeared a positive and fortunate trend at first, the experiences soon became distinctly more serious and somehow "darker." For instance, near Christmas, I experienced a haunting vision of Christ as an enflamed and swollen sun rising above a lifeless desert. I understood the sun as a symbol of Christ's passion and, far from radiating a loving and forgiving warmth, the sun appeared agonized, enraged, harsh, and cruel. Now the sun became a heart and the heart was split down the middle but continued beating, flooding the desert with the blood of Christ's passion. Inasmuch as the blood enriched the soil, making it fertile for life, the heart or Christ was in the unspeakable agony of crucificionand it was this very agony that was the life within the blood. If becoming such a martyr is my spiritual destiny, I thought, I cannot bear it. I panicked, much as I had during my ego-loss experience, losing myself in a blind and icy fear that seemed to pervade my whole being.
After a few more experiences, I decided to stop using psychedelics for a while. I had, I felt, begun to lose touch with reality to a dangerous degree.
I was growing increasingly paranoid and prone to increasingly severe panic attacks, a flood of long-buried memories, some traumatic, some trivial, occured to me on an almost daily basis. I was haunted by strange and disturbing mental imagery (often bloody and violent) that I could make little sense of and that seemed to frequently contain powerful "Jungian" overtones, and I even experienced a few genuine hallucinations - again, usually of rather disturbing content - while completely sober.
The situation worsened to the degree that ego-loss - which I interpreted as punishment from God for refusing to become a wandering homeless ascetic - almost always coincided, to some degree, with the panic attacks. As soon as I tried to find "grounding" within myself to help me ride-out the attack, all sense of personal identity would vanish, leaving nothing of me but raw panic and emotional agony. Several months had passed without me using any Lsd.
Gradually, I started getting better and the 'I' seemed to return. Also, as things started to get better I also regained the capacity to make rational judgements about myself so I could detect more easily what was going on and I tried to live with it, which made things easier.
The thing I think had the most powerful healing effect, however, was the reading of certain expanded minds like Terence McKenna and some post-Nietzchean philosophers such as Martin Heidegger. As I made inroads into understanding some of the writings of these minds and philosophers, I began to understand how the content of so many of my most powerful psychedelic experiences had been determined by certain Western philosophical presuppositions whose validity had been called into question literally centuries ago but which were nevertheless very much alive and influential among those people I'd encountered in some "alternative" subcultures. The capacity which I was developing to move my thinking away from the thinking determined by those presuppositions revealed to me that my entheogenic experiences had been not so much genuine revelations of the divine but rather intensely vivid experiences of both a collective and a personal mythology which had I discovered and developed over the past four or five years - a mythology which, because it was so pervasive among those with whom I associated, I had taken for truth unquestioningly. Realizing that the content of my entheogenic experiences - including the prescriptive "lessons" learned from those experiences -- might have been radically different had my "set and setting" been radically different allowed me to examine that content more rationally; in so doing, its grip on my psyche was loosened.
The healing process is far from over, but I no longer feel that I'm teetering on the brink of insanity at every waking moment - my psyche is gradually reconstructing itself and is thereby regaining a coherence which I had, for a time, lost. Nevertheless, I still struggle at least on occasion with panic and periods of depression; flashbacks are not infrequent, and both my physical senses and my emotions frequently seem painfully overstimulated. Most disturbing is that I now often feel unfamiliar and alien to myself - as though much of "who I am" was literally "erased". At the same time, I think that, if I manage eventually to regain a full sense of being grounded within myself again, I will have, in that process, 'lived' authentically and fully and to the depth of my being.
I never considered getting professional help until about this summer, when I went to a psychiatrist who put me on anti-depressant and anti-anxiety medication. I could only do it after some of my 'self' had returned to me.
In summary, I would urge extreme caution in approaching psychedelics for spiritual reasons. One's grasp of reality can slide away right beneath one's nose, without one ever realizing it until it's far too late to recover. Always keep as clear a head as possible -- and if anything threatens that clarity, heed it as a very serious and very dire warning.
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