Flickering
Bluelighter
- Joined
- Apr 11, 2011
- Messages
- 1,118
LSA (semi-experienced) + cannabis (semi-experienced): "You have already died"
Plus Four
What we think of as solid reality is actually the dream of a mind within a mind within a mind.
The experience of being human, in physical space and time, with an ego and boundaries, is a lens of that mind’s awareness focused on a tiny spectrum of sensory data, blind to a much wider reality.
Our imagination is a burgeoning gateway to that wider reality. Our bodies are what limit our imagination.
When our bodies die, we gradually realise that there are no limits. There is only mind, and it is capable of anything. It is unlimited intelligence. And you are that.
What would you do if you could do anything? However large you think the multiverse is, consider this: matter is just one means by which consciousness can organise itself. Everything your primate brain thinks of as real is the smallest pocket in the corner of existence. Free of that, how long would it take for your thoughts to evolve beyond the boundaries imposed by human reality? Eventually you have to transform, and expand, until you merge with the infinite.
You have experienced and will experience everything that could possibly be, as though it were real. You do this because you want to do it. It is how you express your absolute love of life, and your joy at the very fact that you exist at all.
You are even doing this right now. But the scale of it lies beyond the scope of your awareness because you have chosen to limit yourself, temporarily, to the experience of being a human.
You have even allowed yourself to forget that every moment is ecstasy. The worst agony, the longest torment, is in truth divine joy because every moment is that love of life. If you are not conscious of that, don’t worry. It’s all part of the game. You never need to fear anything.
And the whole of it, from the mountains to the humans to the stars, all of it loves you. I love you so much that I would birth myself onto the earth, and live through all its pains and its horrors. I would let myself be crucified just to awaken you again to the everlasting exaltation of knowing that we are one and the same.
And though you expand through every dimension imaginable, you also fold in on yourself like a lotus closing, when you see it all again as a newborn child. Your life is a pathway etched against the contrast of nothing. It is the journey that does not end.
Come On Up!
Setting: W’s house, starting at a quarter past nine in the morning. She took eight Hawaiian Baby Woodrose seeds and I took twelve. This was only my second LSA trip, but I have taken LSD over a dozen times, and the mindset is almost identical. We powdered the seeds, loaded them into pills and swallowed them with ginger tea for the nausea. We also smoked cannabis every couple of hours to augment the trip with greater vividness, creativity and relaxation.
I was in good spirits going into the trip. I felt privileged to embark on it with W, this being the second time we’ve explored the deeper layers of our minds together. She and I are part of the 8% of people who’ve ever tried hallucinogens, but we’re also in that even smaller niche of the few who use them regularly, for psychospiritual purposes. If we had a religion, this would be it.
I’m writing this twenty-four hours after it finished and I’m still processing where I ended up. I’ve never had such a beautiful experience in my life. Master chemist Alexander Shulgin, who died a fortnight ago, set the rating ‘Plus Four’ aside for these, and they are so rare that a psychonaut is lucky to ever have even one. This was my first.
Talking philosophy in her backyard, we smoked and watched the plants grow greener. Surfaces began to appear more three-dimensional. A furry chair took on a menacing air of bestial sentience. We found we agreed that there are no bad trips, only dark trips, and this is the mindset you need to both learn the most and survive the depths. And then as if to contrast this foreboding statement, she said, “Let’s watch some cartoons!” and we went to her room and chilled to the nostalgia of our old childhood favourites.
One of these, I had completely forgotten about, and it put me back in the headspace of being five years old. Childlike euphoria overtook me and I suddenly realised I felt happy. At first I had to adjust to this peculiar experience of… optimism? And… not fearing things I can’t affect? And… not having a constant background noise of guilt and regret? Weird! Even on psychedelics, I rarely feel this way. Lightness filled my thoughts and I remembered life is something you can actually enjoy sometimes. What a great way to come up.
I was just getting the hang of this novel new attitude. Then the nausea hit. We went out the front for fresh air, and the trip began to turn into full gear.
Metamorphosis
I distracted myself from my sickened gut by studying a caterpillar curled up between the bricks. I had a disturbingly clear image of what it must be like to be that tiny creature. Its inner world was alien to me. My thoughts expanded out to the wider network of life and my own human life seemed like just a backdrop to it, one tiny piece. Dissociated from my own existence, which seemed miniscule now rather than all-encompassing, I anchored myself from drifting away by talking to W. I wasn’t afraid, but the sense of expansion was uncomfortable for my ego, which yearned to stay inside the familiar comfort of human life. Yet the bolder part of me was willing to become a caterpillar. I hadn’t downed twelve seeds for a scenic drive.
A moment to describe empathy on psychedelics – it isn’t that I become the thing I’m studying, so much as I deconstruct its inner experience until I find a point where I can relate to it. This is challenging when you’re ‘sober’, but it comes naturally on acid, and sometimes it’s even involuntary. Then, with that understanding, I’m able to picture it with such clarity that I almost seem to merge with it. If I go deep enough, I can get lost in it, and tune out my human senses and thoughts for a while. Snapping out of it can be a bit of a shock. But what’s really cool is that I’ve done it enough times that I can have this melding experience and still function. Talk to a cashier while imagining I am the cashier. Talk to W while melding with a caterpillar. Such a long body, its proprioception suspended in what humans would consider a sensory void, semi-conscious of its dozens of legs, wrapping its spindly form up out of the insectile instinct that dictates its awareness. Vulnerable, and not something I would want to be for long, but it is not an unhappy creature, and it has no sense of the scale of the world, nor any way to really fathom what I am, the giant monkey transfixed on it.
The nausea cleared. W wanted to watch something light-hearted in her room, so I suggested Howl’s Moving Castle. Partway through this entrancing and surreal creative masterwork, I decided I wanted to listen to Tool, so I plugged in headphones and the album AEnima became the film’s new soundtrack. As you’d expect on a trip, the music fit remarkably well, and fused with my own introspection.
When the Witch of the Waste curses Sophie, I flashed back to a moment in my childhood where a woman a lot like her abused me. It was poignant in other ways, too. Much like the curse in the film, she both aged me by shattering my self-image, and silenced me about it by manipulating my own emotions. Song for that part was ‘H.’
’46 & 2’: scene with Howl in aerial combat…
“I / Choose to live and to lie / Care and love and to die / Learn and love and to do / What it takes to step through!”
The rhythm intertwined perfectly with the action. The tone and lyrics had me thinking about how, three years ago, I went through the unbelievably intense, unbearable experience of my first psychedelic trip. Fucking mushrooms. But I realised, I have returned from a place very few people have ever been, and I am still alive. This knowledge filled me with the most incredible sense of strength. Nothing, not death nor pain nor madness, could even come close to what I experienced that night. So I already knew what it was like to lose everything, and that meant I could be free. There was nothing left to be afraid of. Yet I have been containing this incredible gift inside the flow of habits, refusing to let go into true self-realisation. In my mind I soared past dark forces against a backdrop of black clouds, immersed in the film like I was a kid again, and it was all a dance.
The only reason any of us are not free is because we’d rather blame each other than own up to the responsibility of being autonomous. We live in a hostile world, and I saw how even the beauty of the cartoon lake on the screen was laced with life feeding on life. The same way people feed on you, and the way you feed on others. That doesn’t make it right, it doesn’t mean that they should do it or you should do it, but get over it. Anger is a powerful tool but blame is only useful if you want to destroy yourself. In my mind I screamed at my fellow man to wake up to this.
‘Jimmy’, a song about reconnecting with your wounded inner child, played while Sophie and the Witch of the Waste climbed the stairs together. I saw how strong it made Sophie that she didn’t hate her enemy, but rather pitied her. I realised that I too would have that strength the moment I became willing to let go of the hate I held for everyone who had ever hurt me. These people are miserable already. Especially in the case of the abuser I mentioned earlier – to hurt a kid like that, deliberately, you would need to be messed up inside. If I really did want revenge, I need only do nothing. I visualised meeting an old mentor who had cheated me, and for the first time, I felt nothing but pity. What a sad man.
At a higher level than we tend to think on, every person who harms you is giving you a gift. If a man mugged and shot me on the street today, I would have to die with utmost respect for my opponent; for he would have liberated me from life, and what a brilliant teacher that would make him. And every injury a person inflicts on you short of death is an opportunity to update the blind spots in your defense grid, and to better understand people. I too have hurt people, and it’s well past time to stop hating myself for it. As the song ‘Pushit’ reached its climax, I was envisioning every act of seeming cruelty as divine intent expressing through the unconscious mammals that we are, urging us to awaken us to the potential of our wisdom.
Savikalpa
We paused the film to ruminate. We spiralled around the idea of cellular and selfhood transformation over a lifetime, reflecting on how hugely different we were from the children we used to be when we first watched those cartoons from before. And yet, there we were, experiencing the moment. The transformation didn’t destroy us. I said, “You don’t need to fear death, because you have already died. So that’s it then – this thing that terrifies people so much, it’s behind you! And now you can move on.”
This statement amped the trip up to a new level. We had woken into a post-death world. While W left to make food, I sat on the floorboards to meditate on a question.
What would I dream if I could dream anything?
Vortices of closed-eye visuals wrapped me in a trans-dimensional tunnel of being. I saw life on Earth from above. I realised with unquestionable clarity that what we think of as matter is really thought, made solid and semi-stable by a fathomlessly powerful mind. This implied that I was sitting, cross-legged, in a room that was itself the interior of this psyche, and that my own body was a construct of this psyche also. If consciousness is indeed all there really is – and in my belief this is self-evident – then it must follow, this is all a kind of dream. I am a dream. And like a dreamer I am asleep to the vastest majority of my true surroundings.
For the first time, I noticed how the human senses are nothing but tools that allow us to interact with a very particular, contained mental plane. They’re the ones most likely to keep this organism alive, so we shut off from what isn’t immediately relevant to us. Then something I already knew hit me like an apex of hallucinogenic power. The world I keep implicitly taking for granted is nothing. In the wider expanses of manifest consciousness, it’s just a small corner of God’s contemplation. I could not believe in the greater reality before because I had no concept of it – but now my third eye was wide open, as it became hilariously apparent that what mystics call the astral world, or what DMT enthusiasts gaze in wonder at, is all my thoughts. And yours, and his, and hers. And once we have passed beyond every limit, we will be free to do whatever the hell we want.
In this trance, the unbound mind was saying to me, “This is my gift to you.”
Ha-HA!
Happiness surged through me. I had never known that being alive could be like this! Not since childhood have I been so grateful to exist at all. Life is a joke, death is the punchline. Life is a game, death is the goal. There is nothing to ever be afraid of, because however real it seems, deep down you are enjoying it. My mind was flowering into endless possibilities, splitting the self into vast cosmic beings, mythical realms and worlds beyond all human comprehension, every fantasy I’ve ever had coming true, every earthly desire fulfilled only for me to realise they were all infinitesimal next to what was waiting for me. It’s heaven – it’s all heaven, even hell is heaven. God itself seemed to be saying to me, “Look, this is all for you, this is how much I love you.” Beautiful tears rolled down my face. We circled around each other in the psychedelic cosmos, father and child, yin and yang, separate yet together in a state of total love for all things.
Through it all, what struck me most was that this was no revelation. I already knew this, I had just been losing myself in a lifetime. But if you accept that there is only mind – and you ought to, because your qualia right now is the only thing you can possibly know for sure, and it cannot be explained by the materialist model of dead matter – then this must follow. Something that is all mind has no inherent need to limit itself. It can do anything, including limiting itself – including being you. So, can God bake a burrito so hot even He can’t eat it? Of course the guy can.
Christian imagery unmarred by cultural dogma came to mind and I saw how each one of us is Jesus Christ, being nailed to a cross of pain and ego. I burst out laughing. All the pains we’ve gone to over history to save ourselves from Hell, and in the process we have created it! We could live in Heaven right now if we all just cut it out. Yet we think it’s easier not to open our eyes to just how much we’re tormenting ourselves. We reign through guilt and fear. Lennon was right all along: all you need is love.
Simultaneously, I was experiencing this as atheistic philosophy. Death of the body is oblivion. But you’ve experienced oblivion before, so, what was it like? Ah, it wasn’t. There is no greater state of potential than void. Else why should there be something rather than nothing? Why should you exist right now, rather than not? Have you ever thought of nothingness as a canvas for thought? At the end of time, the object and the subject are one and the same, the taijitu.
The east, the west, the void, and eternity. Those were the places I went to in five minutes.
When I came back, W’s room was as enriching to me as it would be to a newborn infant. Surveying it in mute amazement, I thought, “Am I free?” only to remind myself I have always been free. My creativity spiralled off conjuring other realities, only to fold back in like a closing lotus as I paused to exist in the simple wonder of the moment. I stared at a colourful box and grinned like a little kid. Everything was ecstasy. My body, my thoughts, my feelings, all of it divine bliss. Even the discomfort of my sitting posture.
Then W opened the door. “Want some dumplings?” she asked.
“Yes!” I said, and then we ate vegan dumplings together.
Darkspheres
We smoked some more and chatted with W’s housemates, who are very cool people. Back in W’s room, alone again, I decided to play some dark electronic music. I put on the obscure psychedelic album ‘Darkspheres’, starting with the track Amnesia.
When it got to the title track, which is characterised by an eerie, ineffably familiar droning sound… without warning, the intensity of the trip increased tenfold. It was like that first mushroom trip I described earlier. Consciousness began to collapse. Suddenly I was barely able to hold on to consensus reality. Every sensation of my body, every emotion, every thought I was having – everything a human tends to think of as ‘me’ – was becoming an utterly incomprehensible blur of information. It was dissolving into a meaningless backdrop as my awareness shifted into the death-world of pure thought. For a moment this terrified me – a terror, I should add, that like everything else w as a form of ecstasy. I knew that if I couldn’t anchor myself, I was going to go mad, and who was to say I would come back this time? Would W return to find my body sprawled on the floor while my consciousness drifted off into worlds too alien to ever reconcile again with human perception? I scrambled through the confusion of sensory data, a mess of concepts I no longer felt familiar with such as ‘ears’ and ‘noise’, to take off my headphones. I could still hear that wailing noise coming from them though, and it wasn’t until I managed to unplug the headphones that I was able to start to compose myself.
I took it as a test of my conviction from before – that after I had gone beyond death on mushrooms three years prior, nothing could ever really harm me. Taking a deep breath, grounding myself through the sensation of air through my nostrils, I reminded myself that if I did go crazy and/or die, then so be it. If this had been my first time into deep psychonautical space, I would’ve lost my shit, but by now I knew, despite a brief moment of panic, that I needed to surrender to the experience.
I mentioned none of this when W returned from the bathroom. We got back to Howl’s Moving Castle while I sat there centring myself through the panicked death throes of the ego. In retrospect, I know from experience that if I had indeed lost my mind, I would have come down from the nightmare by next morning at the latest, so there was never anything to really be afraid of. I had a gist of this at the time too, but things seemed so overwhelming, the power of the hallucinogen so suddenly and unexpectedly multiplied, that I found it hard to believe.
Eventually I excused myself and went to the bathroom. The toilet, bathtub, sink and tiles became the barest backdrop in a realm of ever-expanding consciousness. I was experiencing higher dimensions of thought from the limited scope of a human mind. All my brainpower was being used to process the much wider world of the beyond. I could barely process my normal human reality, and I sometimes wondered if it was real at all. Another thought came: perhaps it is, but it has always been so tiny. Perhaps you could see material beings as mere vessels of the higher potential for consciousness. In that case, did I even need to pay attention to this miasma of sensory data?
There is a fine line between Samadhi and insanity, and it is defined by your ability or lack thereof to hold on to consensus reality.
I looked in the mirror and there was, helpfully, a sticker on it saying “You are beautiful.” I smiled at myself and remembered that I had endured far worse than this before. At last, my fear subsided, and though the experience of being lost went on for another ten or fifteen minutes, I just stopped letting it affect me.
If the LSA was trying to tell me something, it was, “See, if you can handle your fear of this, you can handle your depression in ordinary consciousness. You have more control over your mind than you believe.”
But also: “Just because you have met God does not mean you will not need to work to maintain and understand what you learned.” In other words, I was not cured. I was perfectly capable of falling. Falling, after all, would still be ecstasy – but the ecstasy would become unconscious.
Come On Down!
The rest of the day was the beautiful unwinding of the experience. W didn’t feel like going outside, so I went to the shops alone to buy us some snacks. The street was a beautiful psychedelic caricature. It looked as bizarre and distorted as conventional imaginings of an acid trip would have you believe. Twisted trees, asphalt like a river. The music I played as I walked was ‘Altered State’ by TesseracT, and it complemented the sunset and the view of the park and the lake exquisitely. Also drowned out the highway traffic.
I was in a temporary state of zen mastery as I entered the shops. I simply noticed how my old primate habits, like getting annoyed when slow people took up the whole aisle, cropped up. Then I stopped letting it affect me, and I was happier for it. It was amusing to walk around buying things in this crowded labyrinth, appearing normal, all the while in a state most people around me would not understand. I was merging with other people’s minds as I passed them, seeing life through their eyes. All these ordinary days. I could imagine myself from their vantage points as I passed. I was completely relaxed. It felt great.
As I watched the sunset from the park, I reflected on the book I’m going to write and began piecing things I learned from this trip into it. I had been struggling to express myself through this story, but now it seemed to construct itself. I have enough experience with creative writing that it kind of forged itself out of the void of potential, which is just the way it ought to be. I felt very excited about getting to write it, more excited than I’ve been about a story in a long time.
When I got back, W and I enjoyed chocolate and soft drink and chips together. It was amazing. So simple and yet so good. We agreed that people would be much happier if they could remember to enjoy the simple things. When we made dinner later I reflected on the film Innocent Voices (highly recommended) and I felt incredibly lucky to just be able to eat rice at will.
We smoked outside and the trip turned from internal to external, as we discussed how backwards our society is and some far better alternative ways of viewing things that the species will probably never integrate.
For instance, isn’t it completely fucked how we keep teenagers in the dark about sex? Sure, we tell them how it works and why they’re getting acne, but what are they supposed to do when they encounter the stuff no one ever talks about? When they’re taught that even the word ‘penis’ is dirty, it’s no wonder they end up so repressed and confused. We never even teach them how to manage their urges, and then we wonder why some less stable individuals go off the rails and rape people. W and I felt compassion for the people going through this phase society makes so awkward.
On a similar note, government propaganda we saw about LSD: Teenager experiences terror on acid. “Good,” I said, “let her. She’ll come back. And if we make it a learning experience instead of teaching her to hide from things she doesn’t like, she’ll be a stronger person. It should be an initiation rite.” W agreed. Nonetheless the world kept on turning much the way it always has.
We could make a better world for our children, but we don’t.
Oh well.
We watched The Spirit Molecule documentary, and Mulan, and I got some writing done. And then that beautiful day was over.
Aeria gloris!
Plus Four
What we think of as solid reality is actually the dream of a mind within a mind within a mind.
The experience of being human, in physical space and time, with an ego and boundaries, is a lens of that mind’s awareness focused on a tiny spectrum of sensory data, blind to a much wider reality.
Our imagination is a burgeoning gateway to that wider reality. Our bodies are what limit our imagination.
When our bodies die, we gradually realise that there are no limits. There is only mind, and it is capable of anything. It is unlimited intelligence. And you are that.
What would you do if you could do anything? However large you think the multiverse is, consider this: matter is just one means by which consciousness can organise itself. Everything your primate brain thinks of as real is the smallest pocket in the corner of existence. Free of that, how long would it take for your thoughts to evolve beyond the boundaries imposed by human reality? Eventually you have to transform, and expand, until you merge with the infinite.
You have experienced and will experience everything that could possibly be, as though it were real. You do this because you want to do it. It is how you express your absolute love of life, and your joy at the very fact that you exist at all.
You are even doing this right now. But the scale of it lies beyond the scope of your awareness because you have chosen to limit yourself, temporarily, to the experience of being a human.
You have even allowed yourself to forget that every moment is ecstasy. The worst agony, the longest torment, is in truth divine joy because every moment is that love of life. If you are not conscious of that, don’t worry. It’s all part of the game. You never need to fear anything.
And the whole of it, from the mountains to the humans to the stars, all of it loves you. I love you so much that I would birth myself onto the earth, and live through all its pains and its horrors. I would let myself be crucified just to awaken you again to the everlasting exaltation of knowing that we are one and the same.
And though you expand through every dimension imaginable, you also fold in on yourself like a lotus closing, when you see it all again as a newborn child. Your life is a pathway etched against the contrast of nothing. It is the journey that does not end.
Come On Up!
Setting: W’s house, starting at a quarter past nine in the morning. She took eight Hawaiian Baby Woodrose seeds and I took twelve. This was only my second LSA trip, but I have taken LSD over a dozen times, and the mindset is almost identical. We powdered the seeds, loaded them into pills and swallowed them with ginger tea for the nausea. We also smoked cannabis every couple of hours to augment the trip with greater vividness, creativity and relaxation.
I was in good spirits going into the trip. I felt privileged to embark on it with W, this being the second time we’ve explored the deeper layers of our minds together. She and I are part of the 8% of people who’ve ever tried hallucinogens, but we’re also in that even smaller niche of the few who use them regularly, for psychospiritual purposes. If we had a religion, this would be it.
I’m writing this twenty-four hours after it finished and I’m still processing where I ended up. I’ve never had such a beautiful experience in my life. Master chemist Alexander Shulgin, who died a fortnight ago, set the rating ‘Plus Four’ aside for these, and they are so rare that a psychonaut is lucky to ever have even one. This was my first.
Talking philosophy in her backyard, we smoked and watched the plants grow greener. Surfaces began to appear more three-dimensional. A furry chair took on a menacing air of bestial sentience. We found we agreed that there are no bad trips, only dark trips, and this is the mindset you need to both learn the most and survive the depths. And then as if to contrast this foreboding statement, she said, “Let’s watch some cartoons!” and we went to her room and chilled to the nostalgia of our old childhood favourites.
One of these, I had completely forgotten about, and it put me back in the headspace of being five years old. Childlike euphoria overtook me and I suddenly realised I felt happy. At first I had to adjust to this peculiar experience of… optimism? And… not fearing things I can’t affect? And… not having a constant background noise of guilt and regret? Weird! Even on psychedelics, I rarely feel this way. Lightness filled my thoughts and I remembered life is something you can actually enjoy sometimes. What a great way to come up.
I was just getting the hang of this novel new attitude. Then the nausea hit. We went out the front for fresh air, and the trip began to turn into full gear.
Metamorphosis
I distracted myself from my sickened gut by studying a caterpillar curled up between the bricks. I had a disturbingly clear image of what it must be like to be that tiny creature. Its inner world was alien to me. My thoughts expanded out to the wider network of life and my own human life seemed like just a backdrop to it, one tiny piece. Dissociated from my own existence, which seemed miniscule now rather than all-encompassing, I anchored myself from drifting away by talking to W. I wasn’t afraid, but the sense of expansion was uncomfortable for my ego, which yearned to stay inside the familiar comfort of human life. Yet the bolder part of me was willing to become a caterpillar. I hadn’t downed twelve seeds for a scenic drive.
A moment to describe empathy on psychedelics – it isn’t that I become the thing I’m studying, so much as I deconstruct its inner experience until I find a point where I can relate to it. This is challenging when you’re ‘sober’, but it comes naturally on acid, and sometimes it’s even involuntary. Then, with that understanding, I’m able to picture it with such clarity that I almost seem to merge with it. If I go deep enough, I can get lost in it, and tune out my human senses and thoughts for a while. Snapping out of it can be a bit of a shock. But what’s really cool is that I’ve done it enough times that I can have this melding experience and still function. Talk to a cashier while imagining I am the cashier. Talk to W while melding with a caterpillar. Such a long body, its proprioception suspended in what humans would consider a sensory void, semi-conscious of its dozens of legs, wrapping its spindly form up out of the insectile instinct that dictates its awareness. Vulnerable, and not something I would want to be for long, but it is not an unhappy creature, and it has no sense of the scale of the world, nor any way to really fathom what I am, the giant monkey transfixed on it.
The nausea cleared. W wanted to watch something light-hearted in her room, so I suggested Howl’s Moving Castle. Partway through this entrancing and surreal creative masterwork, I decided I wanted to listen to Tool, so I plugged in headphones and the album AEnima became the film’s new soundtrack. As you’d expect on a trip, the music fit remarkably well, and fused with my own introspection.
When the Witch of the Waste curses Sophie, I flashed back to a moment in my childhood where a woman a lot like her abused me. It was poignant in other ways, too. Much like the curse in the film, she both aged me by shattering my self-image, and silenced me about it by manipulating my own emotions. Song for that part was ‘H.’
’46 & 2’: scene with Howl in aerial combat…
“I / Choose to live and to lie / Care and love and to die / Learn and love and to do / What it takes to step through!”
The rhythm intertwined perfectly with the action. The tone and lyrics had me thinking about how, three years ago, I went through the unbelievably intense, unbearable experience of my first psychedelic trip. Fucking mushrooms. But I realised, I have returned from a place very few people have ever been, and I am still alive. This knowledge filled me with the most incredible sense of strength. Nothing, not death nor pain nor madness, could even come close to what I experienced that night. So I already knew what it was like to lose everything, and that meant I could be free. There was nothing left to be afraid of. Yet I have been containing this incredible gift inside the flow of habits, refusing to let go into true self-realisation. In my mind I soared past dark forces against a backdrop of black clouds, immersed in the film like I was a kid again, and it was all a dance.
The only reason any of us are not free is because we’d rather blame each other than own up to the responsibility of being autonomous. We live in a hostile world, and I saw how even the beauty of the cartoon lake on the screen was laced with life feeding on life. The same way people feed on you, and the way you feed on others. That doesn’t make it right, it doesn’t mean that they should do it or you should do it, but get over it. Anger is a powerful tool but blame is only useful if you want to destroy yourself. In my mind I screamed at my fellow man to wake up to this.
‘Jimmy’, a song about reconnecting with your wounded inner child, played while Sophie and the Witch of the Waste climbed the stairs together. I saw how strong it made Sophie that she didn’t hate her enemy, but rather pitied her. I realised that I too would have that strength the moment I became willing to let go of the hate I held for everyone who had ever hurt me. These people are miserable already. Especially in the case of the abuser I mentioned earlier – to hurt a kid like that, deliberately, you would need to be messed up inside. If I really did want revenge, I need only do nothing. I visualised meeting an old mentor who had cheated me, and for the first time, I felt nothing but pity. What a sad man.
At a higher level than we tend to think on, every person who harms you is giving you a gift. If a man mugged and shot me on the street today, I would have to die with utmost respect for my opponent; for he would have liberated me from life, and what a brilliant teacher that would make him. And every injury a person inflicts on you short of death is an opportunity to update the blind spots in your defense grid, and to better understand people. I too have hurt people, and it’s well past time to stop hating myself for it. As the song ‘Pushit’ reached its climax, I was envisioning every act of seeming cruelty as divine intent expressing through the unconscious mammals that we are, urging us to awaken us to the potential of our wisdom.
Savikalpa
We paused the film to ruminate. We spiralled around the idea of cellular and selfhood transformation over a lifetime, reflecting on how hugely different we were from the children we used to be when we first watched those cartoons from before. And yet, there we were, experiencing the moment. The transformation didn’t destroy us. I said, “You don’t need to fear death, because you have already died. So that’s it then – this thing that terrifies people so much, it’s behind you! And now you can move on.”
This statement amped the trip up to a new level. We had woken into a post-death world. While W left to make food, I sat on the floorboards to meditate on a question.
What would I dream if I could dream anything?
Vortices of closed-eye visuals wrapped me in a trans-dimensional tunnel of being. I saw life on Earth from above. I realised with unquestionable clarity that what we think of as matter is really thought, made solid and semi-stable by a fathomlessly powerful mind. This implied that I was sitting, cross-legged, in a room that was itself the interior of this psyche, and that my own body was a construct of this psyche also. If consciousness is indeed all there really is – and in my belief this is self-evident – then it must follow, this is all a kind of dream. I am a dream. And like a dreamer I am asleep to the vastest majority of my true surroundings.
For the first time, I noticed how the human senses are nothing but tools that allow us to interact with a very particular, contained mental plane. They’re the ones most likely to keep this organism alive, so we shut off from what isn’t immediately relevant to us. Then something I already knew hit me like an apex of hallucinogenic power. The world I keep implicitly taking for granted is nothing. In the wider expanses of manifest consciousness, it’s just a small corner of God’s contemplation. I could not believe in the greater reality before because I had no concept of it – but now my third eye was wide open, as it became hilariously apparent that what mystics call the astral world, or what DMT enthusiasts gaze in wonder at, is all my thoughts. And yours, and his, and hers. And once we have passed beyond every limit, we will be free to do whatever the hell we want.
In this trance, the unbound mind was saying to me, “This is my gift to you.”
Ha-HA!
Happiness surged through me. I had never known that being alive could be like this! Not since childhood have I been so grateful to exist at all. Life is a joke, death is the punchline. Life is a game, death is the goal. There is nothing to ever be afraid of, because however real it seems, deep down you are enjoying it. My mind was flowering into endless possibilities, splitting the self into vast cosmic beings, mythical realms and worlds beyond all human comprehension, every fantasy I’ve ever had coming true, every earthly desire fulfilled only for me to realise they were all infinitesimal next to what was waiting for me. It’s heaven – it’s all heaven, even hell is heaven. God itself seemed to be saying to me, “Look, this is all for you, this is how much I love you.” Beautiful tears rolled down my face. We circled around each other in the psychedelic cosmos, father and child, yin and yang, separate yet together in a state of total love for all things.
Through it all, what struck me most was that this was no revelation. I already knew this, I had just been losing myself in a lifetime. But if you accept that there is only mind – and you ought to, because your qualia right now is the only thing you can possibly know for sure, and it cannot be explained by the materialist model of dead matter – then this must follow. Something that is all mind has no inherent need to limit itself. It can do anything, including limiting itself – including being you. So, can God bake a burrito so hot even He can’t eat it? Of course the guy can.
Christian imagery unmarred by cultural dogma came to mind and I saw how each one of us is Jesus Christ, being nailed to a cross of pain and ego. I burst out laughing. All the pains we’ve gone to over history to save ourselves from Hell, and in the process we have created it! We could live in Heaven right now if we all just cut it out. Yet we think it’s easier not to open our eyes to just how much we’re tormenting ourselves. We reign through guilt and fear. Lennon was right all along: all you need is love.
Simultaneously, I was experiencing this as atheistic philosophy. Death of the body is oblivion. But you’ve experienced oblivion before, so, what was it like? Ah, it wasn’t. There is no greater state of potential than void. Else why should there be something rather than nothing? Why should you exist right now, rather than not? Have you ever thought of nothingness as a canvas for thought? At the end of time, the object and the subject are one and the same, the taijitu.
The east, the west, the void, and eternity. Those were the places I went to in five minutes.
When I came back, W’s room was as enriching to me as it would be to a newborn infant. Surveying it in mute amazement, I thought, “Am I free?” only to remind myself I have always been free. My creativity spiralled off conjuring other realities, only to fold back in like a closing lotus as I paused to exist in the simple wonder of the moment. I stared at a colourful box and grinned like a little kid. Everything was ecstasy. My body, my thoughts, my feelings, all of it divine bliss. Even the discomfort of my sitting posture.
Then W opened the door. “Want some dumplings?” she asked.
“Yes!” I said, and then we ate vegan dumplings together.
Darkspheres
We smoked some more and chatted with W’s housemates, who are very cool people. Back in W’s room, alone again, I decided to play some dark electronic music. I put on the obscure psychedelic album ‘Darkspheres’, starting with the track Amnesia.
When it got to the title track, which is characterised by an eerie, ineffably familiar droning sound… without warning, the intensity of the trip increased tenfold. It was like that first mushroom trip I described earlier. Consciousness began to collapse. Suddenly I was barely able to hold on to consensus reality. Every sensation of my body, every emotion, every thought I was having – everything a human tends to think of as ‘me’ – was becoming an utterly incomprehensible blur of information. It was dissolving into a meaningless backdrop as my awareness shifted into the death-world of pure thought. For a moment this terrified me – a terror, I should add, that like everything else w as a form of ecstasy. I knew that if I couldn’t anchor myself, I was going to go mad, and who was to say I would come back this time? Would W return to find my body sprawled on the floor while my consciousness drifted off into worlds too alien to ever reconcile again with human perception? I scrambled through the confusion of sensory data, a mess of concepts I no longer felt familiar with such as ‘ears’ and ‘noise’, to take off my headphones. I could still hear that wailing noise coming from them though, and it wasn’t until I managed to unplug the headphones that I was able to start to compose myself.
I took it as a test of my conviction from before – that after I had gone beyond death on mushrooms three years prior, nothing could ever really harm me. Taking a deep breath, grounding myself through the sensation of air through my nostrils, I reminded myself that if I did go crazy and/or die, then so be it. If this had been my first time into deep psychonautical space, I would’ve lost my shit, but by now I knew, despite a brief moment of panic, that I needed to surrender to the experience.
I mentioned none of this when W returned from the bathroom. We got back to Howl’s Moving Castle while I sat there centring myself through the panicked death throes of the ego. In retrospect, I know from experience that if I had indeed lost my mind, I would have come down from the nightmare by next morning at the latest, so there was never anything to really be afraid of. I had a gist of this at the time too, but things seemed so overwhelming, the power of the hallucinogen so suddenly and unexpectedly multiplied, that I found it hard to believe.
Eventually I excused myself and went to the bathroom. The toilet, bathtub, sink and tiles became the barest backdrop in a realm of ever-expanding consciousness. I was experiencing higher dimensions of thought from the limited scope of a human mind. All my brainpower was being used to process the much wider world of the beyond. I could barely process my normal human reality, and I sometimes wondered if it was real at all. Another thought came: perhaps it is, but it has always been so tiny. Perhaps you could see material beings as mere vessels of the higher potential for consciousness. In that case, did I even need to pay attention to this miasma of sensory data?
There is a fine line between Samadhi and insanity, and it is defined by your ability or lack thereof to hold on to consensus reality.
I looked in the mirror and there was, helpfully, a sticker on it saying “You are beautiful.” I smiled at myself and remembered that I had endured far worse than this before. At last, my fear subsided, and though the experience of being lost went on for another ten or fifteen minutes, I just stopped letting it affect me.
If the LSA was trying to tell me something, it was, “See, if you can handle your fear of this, you can handle your depression in ordinary consciousness. You have more control over your mind than you believe.”
But also: “Just because you have met God does not mean you will not need to work to maintain and understand what you learned.” In other words, I was not cured. I was perfectly capable of falling. Falling, after all, would still be ecstasy – but the ecstasy would become unconscious.
Come On Down!
The rest of the day was the beautiful unwinding of the experience. W didn’t feel like going outside, so I went to the shops alone to buy us some snacks. The street was a beautiful psychedelic caricature. It looked as bizarre and distorted as conventional imaginings of an acid trip would have you believe. Twisted trees, asphalt like a river. The music I played as I walked was ‘Altered State’ by TesseracT, and it complemented the sunset and the view of the park and the lake exquisitely. Also drowned out the highway traffic.
I was in a temporary state of zen mastery as I entered the shops. I simply noticed how my old primate habits, like getting annoyed when slow people took up the whole aisle, cropped up. Then I stopped letting it affect me, and I was happier for it. It was amusing to walk around buying things in this crowded labyrinth, appearing normal, all the while in a state most people around me would not understand. I was merging with other people’s minds as I passed them, seeing life through their eyes. All these ordinary days. I could imagine myself from their vantage points as I passed. I was completely relaxed. It felt great.
As I watched the sunset from the park, I reflected on the book I’m going to write and began piecing things I learned from this trip into it. I had been struggling to express myself through this story, but now it seemed to construct itself. I have enough experience with creative writing that it kind of forged itself out of the void of potential, which is just the way it ought to be. I felt very excited about getting to write it, more excited than I’ve been about a story in a long time.
When I got back, W and I enjoyed chocolate and soft drink and chips together. It was amazing. So simple and yet so good. We agreed that people would be much happier if they could remember to enjoy the simple things. When we made dinner later I reflected on the film Innocent Voices (highly recommended) and I felt incredibly lucky to just be able to eat rice at will.
We smoked outside and the trip turned from internal to external, as we discussed how backwards our society is and some far better alternative ways of viewing things that the species will probably never integrate.
For instance, isn’t it completely fucked how we keep teenagers in the dark about sex? Sure, we tell them how it works and why they’re getting acne, but what are they supposed to do when they encounter the stuff no one ever talks about? When they’re taught that even the word ‘penis’ is dirty, it’s no wonder they end up so repressed and confused. We never even teach them how to manage their urges, and then we wonder why some less stable individuals go off the rails and rape people. W and I felt compassion for the people going through this phase society makes so awkward.
On a similar note, government propaganda we saw about LSD: Teenager experiences terror on acid. “Good,” I said, “let her. She’ll come back. And if we make it a learning experience instead of teaching her to hide from things she doesn’t like, she’ll be a stronger person. It should be an initiation rite.” W agreed. Nonetheless the world kept on turning much the way it always has.
We could make a better world for our children, but we don’t.
Oh well.
We watched The Spirit Molecule documentary, and Mulan, and I got some writing done. And then that beautiful day was over.
Aeria gloris!
Aspects of this remind me of my +4 trips (I have had, in retrospect, 3). But wonderfully unique to your little individual partition of consciousness. Thanks for contributing to the infinity of collective experience. 