I just bought new high-end headphone setup and wanted to _experience_ some music.
I took 60ug of LSD-p1 and 2 hours later 1.6g of Golden Teacher.
I started off with something familiar: Tool's Lateralus. At this point I had some visuals (walls breathing, paintings melting, etc. - nothing as kaleidoscopic or geometric as I've had with lower doses of mushrooms). The music was amazing. Instead of just "listening", I "tasted" the music.
When I finished Lateralus (78 minutes later), I got up to take a leak. I got a bit angsty, and intuitively felt that a walk around the block would do me some good. A breather. I did, however, notice that I couldn't really _explain_ why I needed a walk, which was weird to me. Usually I'm a very deliberate person. This weirdness (this idea of doing something but not being able to explain _why_ I did it) continued to be the defining characteristic of the rest of my trip.
The walk itself was exhilarating. As I was walking past rows of houses, my vision zoomed while the background simultaneously drew back. In my mind, there was a hint of recursion, like two mirrors reflecting an image recursively. At one point this visual effect got so much that I thought I was lost, which made me panic for a microsecond. It took a few seconds to orientate myself.
When I got back home, I made a coffee and decided to go for my second album (Heads by Ott). There was a brief moment where the memory of my father popped into my head, undefined, but bothersome. I didn't want to focus on that, I wanted to focus on the music. So I tried, but the feeling of "bother" remained. It wasn't about my father per se, but there was this tightness in my body, as if my body was clenching, not wanting to let go. At this point I recited some of the psychedelic wisdom I've happened to read online: "let go, don't fight it". What was I fighting against? I was dissolving. It felt like falling asleep, but I was wide awake. Slowly but surely, my ability to stitch one moment to the next with some "narrative that makes sense" broke down, until such a time that I just had to accept that there's nothing "logical" anymore tying one moment to the next. Things still happened. The music was still there. But there wasn't an overarching grand narrative weaving them together anymore. This is when it hit me: this is death. Death is just like falling asleep. Slowly things dissolve until you're "under".
That realisation filled me with such hope. The "normal" human condition is one of having an abject fear of death, even though we don't admit that to ourselves. But dying isn't this cold, harsh blackness. The light remains. The world remains. The only thing that is gone is the machine that stitches one moment together with the next using a narrative that links them together (a.k.a you).
Once I realised that, I let go. I "died". The notion of "I" as a being separate to its surrounding stopped making sense. There was just the surrounding. There was a person part of that surrounding. There was music part of that surrounding. The "I" was gone.
At this point (I'm just saying "at this point", but in truth, time was a meaningless concept "at this point"), I was "jolted" out of this state. Something was bringing the "I" back, struggling to regain "control". It built the "I" up again, piece by piece. I was being born. It was like waking up.
It is here where I grasped my second meaningful insight of the trip. For me (now that I've come down, I'm comfortable again with using words like "me" and "I"), it's difficult to understand how I got to this insight, but I'm attempting to reconstruct it here: up to that point in the trip, there has been this interplay between letting go and maintaining control. In this there's the idea of a cycle, from going to sleep to waking up, from dying to being born. I realised that "I" have always been, "going to sleep" and "waking up" over and over. Forever. I was eternal, and yet I was mortal. The first I (eternal) was reality itself, a thing oscillating between two states, cycling, a perfect circle, pure aesthetic, God. The second I (mortal) happens to occupy this body, at this moment, at this space. And I am so grateful for this particular cycle.
I am left with nothing but love.
I took 60ug of LSD-p1 and 2 hours later 1.6g of Golden Teacher.
I started off with something familiar: Tool's Lateralus. At this point I had some visuals (walls breathing, paintings melting, etc. - nothing as kaleidoscopic or geometric as I've had with lower doses of mushrooms). The music was amazing. Instead of just "listening", I "tasted" the music.
When I finished Lateralus (78 minutes later), I got up to take a leak. I got a bit angsty, and intuitively felt that a walk around the block would do me some good. A breather. I did, however, notice that I couldn't really _explain_ why I needed a walk, which was weird to me. Usually I'm a very deliberate person. This weirdness (this idea of doing something but not being able to explain _why_ I did it) continued to be the defining characteristic of the rest of my trip.
The walk itself was exhilarating. As I was walking past rows of houses, my vision zoomed while the background simultaneously drew back. In my mind, there was a hint of recursion, like two mirrors reflecting an image recursively. At one point this visual effect got so much that I thought I was lost, which made me panic for a microsecond. It took a few seconds to orientate myself.
When I got back home, I made a coffee and decided to go for my second album (Heads by Ott). There was a brief moment where the memory of my father popped into my head, undefined, but bothersome. I didn't want to focus on that, I wanted to focus on the music. So I tried, but the feeling of "bother" remained. It wasn't about my father per se, but there was this tightness in my body, as if my body was clenching, not wanting to let go. At this point I recited some of the psychedelic wisdom I've happened to read online: "let go, don't fight it". What was I fighting against? I was dissolving. It felt like falling asleep, but I was wide awake. Slowly but surely, my ability to stitch one moment to the next with some "narrative that makes sense" broke down, until such a time that I just had to accept that there's nothing "logical" anymore tying one moment to the next. Things still happened. The music was still there. But there wasn't an overarching grand narrative weaving them together anymore. This is when it hit me: this is death. Death is just like falling asleep. Slowly things dissolve until you're "under".
That realisation filled me with such hope. The "normal" human condition is one of having an abject fear of death, even though we don't admit that to ourselves. But dying isn't this cold, harsh blackness. The light remains. The world remains. The only thing that is gone is the machine that stitches one moment together with the next using a narrative that links them together (a.k.a you).
Once I realised that, I let go. I "died". The notion of "I" as a being separate to its surrounding stopped making sense. There was just the surrounding. There was a person part of that surrounding. There was music part of that surrounding. The "I" was gone.
At this point (I'm just saying "at this point", but in truth, time was a meaningless concept "at this point"), I was "jolted" out of this state. Something was bringing the "I" back, struggling to regain "control". It built the "I" up again, piece by piece. I was being born. It was like waking up.
It is here where I grasped my second meaningful insight of the trip. For me (now that I've come down, I'm comfortable again with using words like "me" and "I"), it's difficult to understand how I got to this insight, but I'm attempting to reconstruct it here: up to that point in the trip, there has been this interplay between letting go and maintaining control. In this there's the idea of a cycle, from going to sleep to waking up, from dying to being born. I realised that "I" have always been, "going to sleep" and "waking up" over and over. Forever. I was eternal, and yet I was mortal. The first I (eternal) was reality itself, a thing oscillating between two states, cycling, a perfect circle, pure aesthetic, God. The second I (mortal) happens to occupy this body, at this moment, at this space. And I am so grateful for this particular cycle.
I am left with nothing but love.
