Bokushi
Greenlighter
- Joined
- Jan 19, 2014
- Messages
- 11
Hello everyone,
Seeing as I'm new here and all, as a way to break the ice a bit I'm going to report my experiences with a magic mushroom ritual in its homeland of Mexico. Also, do let me know what you think of my experience! I personally think I should've done more mushrooms as my experience was only mildly stronger (in some ways, in others it was WAY stronger) than a good high dose of weed, so I'm not sure what I should've experienced here. It ended up being a very long story, so if you’re the tl;dr type, don’t even attempt this.
―Begin story―
Anyways, to cut the story short, a friend of a friend lives in Oaxaca, Mexico, amongst the local artists and hippies of Mexico. One of his friends is a person whose family takes the mushrooms each year as a 'psychological treatment'. They knew (and partook in the rituals of) the famous María Sabina. They live in Huautla de Jimenez. So, another friend wanted to arrange a drug-fuelled trip in Mexico and wanted to know if I knew any contacts who know about such things. I did, and a few months later we were cruising through the Mexican highway system (which is quite good, actually, albeit expensive) to Huautla de Jimenez for my very first mushroom trip.
First, a little background on the location of my trip, as this shall become important later. It is important to note that at the time when these mushrooms were discovered, Huautla was probably some poor mountain village. The village is quite literally situated on top of a very vertical mountain, which means that when the tourism boom occurred (with both foreign and Mexican hippies all travelling to Huautla to experience the shrooms), a construction boom also occurred… with little space to grow sideways, the town (now a ‘city’ of 70,000) grew upwards. Hard. Unlike most Mexican cities, which have an interesting urban planning style that is a mix of European and American urban planning, with a bit of Asia (high-ish population density), Huautla firmly felt like a crowded, third-worldish, population dense Asian city. A bit like the slums of Hong Kong. You see many Huautla like Chinese cities in movies, anyways.
It was raining when we arrived with the shaman. Mexican houses tend to have flat roofs in the Spanish style, and therefore have little drainage systems that dump the water that collects from the roofs into the streets below, sounding like little waterfalls.
To cut the story short, we met the shaman, did an interesting ritual which involved Catholic saints, chanting in Mazatec, candles, etc, and finally ingested the little mushrooms (which were very acid and truly disgusting). While they kicked in we were free to talk in the candlelight (I remember walking out to take a piss and noticing how my car was glittering in the rain, and how beautiful and shiny it looked). Once the mushrooms were half-kicked in (I'd say), the shaman ordered us to blow out the candles and meditate. The purpose of my trip, based on the accounts of my Mexican friends, would be to improve myself as a person. No finding God or such things… I wanted to improve my mental health in this trip. So that was what I was focused on and meditating on, and what I wanted to ‘work’ on.
At this point, in the darkness, I was seeing some interesting closed eye visuals but so far nothing I hadn't experienced through weed. I got into a slight argument with my fellow co-trippers over something silly. After the argument, I began to ponder why I had argued with people and how I could make something better out of it. It was at this point when my trip started intensifying a bit.
I realised that arguing with people, regardless of ‘whose fault’ it was, was ultimately my problem. Whilst I hallucinated behind my closed eye visuals, I realised that it probably wasn’t healthy to concern yourself too much about other’s peoples actions, what they think of you, and what they say. It was better to ‘detach’ myself: learn to stop caring about such trivial little things, to live and let live. I would be ultimately be happier for it. So what if other people do this, or judge you wrongly, or whatever? I should always strive for self-improvement but also to avoid attaching myself too much to outcomes or results.
At this point is when I had my ‘hardest’ hallucinations… with many ‘revelations’ coming in the shape (at least in my mind) of bioluminescent branches of ancient, sacred, prehispanic Mexican trees which bore knowledge. These trees were not evil or good in the Western sense… they were simply incredibly ancient, neutral beings which were imparting knowledge to me. I ‘felt’ that the urban, dirty city of Huautla had faded away, and that our little concrete hut was in the middle of a forest… this feeling was only reinforced by the rain, waterfall drains in the mexican houses, and the white, electric light pouring in through a plastic ‘blind’ (the shaman’s family was clearly extremely poor), which resembled moonlight. Unless I clearly rationalised where I was, I could -and did- feel like I was in the middle of the forest, with the insects chanting, the rain falling, and the very heart of the forest, which contained my bioluminescent spirit trees, accessible for the very first time… hidden beneath a veil, revealed by the mushrooms. For them, I was but a speck in the workings of nature: irrelevant. My hallucinations at this point included many more bioluminescent trees and flowers… it was very beautiful. It felt very distinctively Prehispanically Mexican, and also somehow a bit Asian. I intend to put these experiences into some sort of artform one day… I feel it is just something I’d like to share. It also taught me to mourn for the lost and dying cultures of Indigenous Mexico… their thousands of years of tradition dying out in the name of cultural assimilation and modernity and Western culture. (Later I would learn through Wikipedia that Mesoamerica was ‘civilised’ long before Spain even left prehistory via the expanding Roman Empire… in other words, the literate Olmecs were out there building pyramids, writing epics, and recording the movement of the stars while the Spanish still lived in caves. The irony of this amuses me.)
As those hallucinations faded away, I was left to ponder and meditate. I had learnt at this point that my happiness was ultimately within my grasp and that my unhappiness, or at least my moments of it, were the result of me ‘attaching’ myself to things that were ultimately inconsequential. My job was therefore to learn to stop attaching myself to these things. I also started to realise other things: that I attached too much importance to things. For example, my lesser success with the opposite sex. I don’t consider myself unattractive, nor unsuccessful in this regard: I have had my fair share of things and I could have it worse (e.g. I could be a basement dweller). But it has always (and still is, to a point) been a big source of insecurity for me that other, less attractive guys get the better girls with less effort on their part, whereas I have to try harder and often aim lower (and this isn’t just on the attractive scale… there’s some very intelligent girls with very lucky boyfriends whom I would’ve liked to date). I realised, through the mushrooms, that this was because I ‘attach’ myself to results, in other words, while my friends were out there getting rejected a million times and not caring about it (thus maximising their chances), I attached too much importance to the results: so what if the results didn’t go as I’d like? So what if a girl would no longer want to talk to me? The importance I assigned to these things seemed laughable when I was under the influence of these mushrooms. It's still something I need to work on, although I feel I'm improving ever so slightly.
I think one of the funny thing of these mushrooms is that you arrive at all these conclusions yourself… you’re out there, thinking, and if you start heading down the wrong path, you question your previous thinking with a ‘What If?’ or ‘Have you thought of this?’. So the beautiful thing about this is how the mushrooms let you arrive at your own conclusion but they’re constantly nudging you in the right direction, guiding you down the right path.
Back to my trip… I was still sitting in my chair, feeling very ‘in’ with nature and amazed by the beauty of the world, of Mexico, and of this hidden land of Huautla. I also marvelled that even though the forest no longer reached here, you could still ‘feel’ its very essence, spiritually at least. Granted, the whole city is surrounded by mountains which are covered in forest. I realised that I had gotten what I wanted from my trip, and with a few cots and things that were provided by the shaman to lie down, I proceeded to walk down to one of them (I struggled, I was only 2-3 hours into the trip and barely had any sense of balance… it was at this point when I realised why people say you shouldn’t drive on these drugs… haha!). Lying down, I meditated a bit more on what I had learnt, and fell asleep. Closed eye visuals were still going strong and were clearly stronger than those of weed, but I wasn’t experiencing anything new, so I assigned little importance to things.
Of course, since I was still very much under the influence of drugs, my sleep wasn’t a dreamless sleep like I expected… but more of a classical psychedelic experience. I began, while I was asleep, to hallucinate again, but this time HARD. I never noticed at which point I fell asleep, since I was very clearly conscious and I was aware of my lying body, but I stopped rationalising about where I was, and felt how my body, which had stopped being material, descending down into a tunnel of colours and sound waves… a tunnel which revealed the inner workings of the universe. Infinitely complex, somewhat mechanic and yet not, and most importantly hard to comprehend is how I’d describe it. I remember as I travelled down the tube I’d enter various different rooms which all had singing pillars which sang in a certain frequency… never melodies or sounds, always frequencies. While I was travelling through the psychedelic tube I also paid attention to my body… which was merely a black, translucent shape (in the position I was sleeping)… irrelevant in the current situation but somehow important to who I am. I felt that maybe I was looking at a very important component of my consciousness or perhaps I was looking at my soul… to this day I never quite understood what I saw there, but I feel it is important. Somehow, anyways.
I should also remark that I was fully conscious during this ‘lucid dream’ and able to move my line of view (but not my body) and gaze at things, which is how I was able to ‘see’ my body… my moving my line of view to where my body was.
After I was awoken by a meditating friend who moved his foot the wrong was and hit me (he was seeking God as his tripping mission). I also realised I had been asleep, as all of a sudden I was very forcefully jolted out of my tunnel and into my awaking body. I realised I had been asleep, as my body felt like it had just emerged from sleep and different parts of my conscious began awaking and rationalising what I had felt and realising that it was all a dream (just like you awake from a real dream, except it isn’t usually lucid or so *clear*).
I couldn’t go back to sleep and therefore proceeded to lie in my little cot, gazing at the light, thinking about indigenous america, and just waiting for the effects of my shrooms to end. I had stopped hallucinating but was still under the effects of the mushrooms, as everything was brighter, and more beautiful. Gradually my two other friends awoke from their experience and we all discussed it. The shaman left (I’m guessing to bed), and we also fell asleep.
The next morning we all basked in the afterglow of what we had seen, shared our experiences (one of my friends died in his trip and came back to life, or so he says), and drove back to Oaxaca City. It’s important to note that my balance hadn’t yet fully returned (even though it was a good 10+ hours after consuming before I grabbed the wheel… we got breakfast and stuff first), and therefore I gave my car’s paint job a very slight nick attempting to navigate the narrow streets of Huautla. As my body realised that it should focus on driving my balance improved and I was able to drive safely (a 6 hour drive through some steep mountains, very dangerous for the unprepared) back to Oaxaca. We talked about our experiences on the way and filmed a little video about what we felt.
―End Story―
So, that was my first time experience with those mushrooms! What do you think? Worth it going all the way there for some shrooms, or should I just recreate the experience in your typical apartment trip back where I live?
Seeing as I'm new here and all, as a way to break the ice a bit I'm going to report my experiences with a magic mushroom ritual in its homeland of Mexico. Also, do let me know what you think of my experience! I personally think I should've done more mushrooms as my experience was only mildly stronger (in some ways, in others it was WAY stronger) than a good high dose of weed, so I'm not sure what I should've experienced here. It ended up being a very long story, so if you’re the tl;dr type, don’t even attempt this.
―Begin story―
Anyways, to cut the story short, a friend of a friend lives in Oaxaca, Mexico, amongst the local artists and hippies of Mexico. One of his friends is a person whose family takes the mushrooms each year as a 'psychological treatment'. They knew (and partook in the rituals of) the famous María Sabina. They live in Huautla de Jimenez. So, another friend wanted to arrange a drug-fuelled trip in Mexico and wanted to know if I knew any contacts who know about such things. I did, and a few months later we were cruising through the Mexican highway system (which is quite good, actually, albeit expensive) to Huautla de Jimenez for my very first mushroom trip.
First, a little background on the location of my trip, as this shall become important later. It is important to note that at the time when these mushrooms were discovered, Huautla was probably some poor mountain village. The village is quite literally situated on top of a very vertical mountain, which means that when the tourism boom occurred (with both foreign and Mexican hippies all travelling to Huautla to experience the shrooms), a construction boom also occurred… with little space to grow sideways, the town (now a ‘city’ of 70,000) grew upwards. Hard. Unlike most Mexican cities, which have an interesting urban planning style that is a mix of European and American urban planning, with a bit of Asia (high-ish population density), Huautla firmly felt like a crowded, third-worldish, population dense Asian city. A bit like the slums of Hong Kong. You see many Huautla like Chinese cities in movies, anyways.
It was raining when we arrived with the shaman. Mexican houses tend to have flat roofs in the Spanish style, and therefore have little drainage systems that dump the water that collects from the roofs into the streets below, sounding like little waterfalls.
To cut the story short, we met the shaman, did an interesting ritual which involved Catholic saints, chanting in Mazatec, candles, etc, and finally ingested the little mushrooms (which were very acid and truly disgusting). While they kicked in we were free to talk in the candlelight (I remember walking out to take a piss and noticing how my car was glittering in the rain, and how beautiful and shiny it looked). Once the mushrooms were half-kicked in (I'd say), the shaman ordered us to blow out the candles and meditate. The purpose of my trip, based on the accounts of my Mexican friends, would be to improve myself as a person. No finding God or such things… I wanted to improve my mental health in this trip. So that was what I was focused on and meditating on, and what I wanted to ‘work’ on.
At this point, in the darkness, I was seeing some interesting closed eye visuals but so far nothing I hadn't experienced through weed. I got into a slight argument with my fellow co-trippers over something silly. After the argument, I began to ponder why I had argued with people and how I could make something better out of it. It was at this point when my trip started intensifying a bit.
I realised that arguing with people, regardless of ‘whose fault’ it was, was ultimately my problem. Whilst I hallucinated behind my closed eye visuals, I realised that it probably wasn’t healthy to concern yourself too much about other’s peoples actions, what they think of you, and what they say. It was better to ‘detach’ myself: learn to stop caring about such trivial little things, to live and let live. I would be ultimately be happier for it. So what if other people do this, or judge you wrongly, or whatever? I should always strive for self-improvement but also to avoid attaching myself too much to outcomes or results.
At this point is when I had my ‘hardest’ hallucinations… with many ‘revelations’ coming in the shape (at least in my mind) of bioluminescent branches of ancient, sacred, prehispanic Mexican trees which bore knowledge. These trees were not evil or good in the Western sense… they were simply incredibly ancient, neutral beings which were imparting knowledge to me. I ‘felt’ that the urban, dirty city of Huautla had faded away, and that our little concrete hut was in the middle of a forest… this feeling was only reinforced by the rain, waterfall drains in the mexican houses, and the white, electric light pouring in through a plastic ‘blind’ (the shaman’s family was clearly extremely poor), which resembled moonlight. Unless I clearly rationalised where I was, I could -and did- feel like I was in the middle of the forest, with the insects chanting, the rain falling, and the very heart of the forest, which contained my bioluminescent spirit trees, accessible for the very first time… hidden beneath a veil, revealed by the mushrooms. For them, I was but a speck in the workings of nature: irrelevant. My hallucinations at this point included many more bioluminescent trees and flowers… it was very beautiful. It felt very distinctively Prehispanically Mexican, and also somehow a bit Asian. I intend to put these experiences into some sort of artform one day… I feel it is just something I’d like to share. It also taught me to mourn for the lost and dying cultures of Indigenous Mexico… their thousands of years of tradition dying out in the name of cultural assimilation and modernity and Western culture. (Later I would learn through Wikipedia that Mesoamerica was ‘civilised’ long before Spain even left prehistory via the expanding Roman Empire… in other words, the literate Olmecs were out there building pyramids, writing epics, and recording the movement of the stars while the Spanish still lived in caves. The irony of this amuses me.)
As those hallucinations faded away, I was left to ponder and meditate. I had learnt at this point that my happiness was ultimately within my grasp and that my unhappiness, or at least my moments of it, were the result of me ‘attaching’ myself to things that were ultimately inconsequential. My job was therefore to learn to stop attaching myself to these things. I also started to realise other things: that I attached too much importance to things. For example, my lesser success with the opposite sex. I don’t consider myself unattractive, nor unsuccessful in this regard: I have had my fair share of things and I could have it worse (e.g. I could be a basement dweller). But it has always (and still is, to a point) been a big source of insecurity for me that other, less attractive guys get the better girls with less effort on their part, whereas I have to try harder and often aim lower (and this isn’t just on the attractive scale… there’s some very intelligent girls with very lucky boyfriends whom I would’ve liked to date). I realised, through the mushrooms, that this was because I ‘attach’ myself to results, in other words, while my friends were out there getting rejected a million times and not caring about it (thus maximising their chances), I attached too much importance to the results: so what if the results didn’t go as I’d like? So what if a girl would no longer want to talk to me? The importance I assigned to these things seemed laughable when I was under the influence of these mushrooms. It's still something I need to work on, although I feel I'm improving ever so slightly.
I think one of the funny thing of these mushrooms is that you arrive at all these conclusions yourself… you’re out there, thinking, and if you start heading down the wrong path, you question your previous thinking with a ‘What If?’ or ‘Have you thought of this?’. So the beautiful thing about this is how the mushrooms let you arrive at your own conclusion but they’re constantly nudging you in the right direction, guiding you down the right path.
Back to my trip… I was still sitting in my chair, feeling very ‘in’ with nature and amazed by the beauty of the world, of Mexico, and of this hidden land of Huautla. I also marvelled that even though the forest no longer reached here, you could still ‘feel’ its very essence, spiritually at least. Granted, the whole city is surrounded by mountains which are covered in forest. I realised that I had gotten what I wanted from my trip, and with a few cots and things that were provided by the shaman to lie down, I proceeded to walk down to one of them (I struggled, I was only 2-3 hours into the trip and barely had any sense of balance… it was at this point when I realised why people say you shouldn’t drive on these drugs… haha!). Lying down, I meditated a bit more on what I had learnt, and fell asleep. Closed eye visuals were still going strong and were clearly stronger than those of weed, but I wasn’t experiencing anything new, so I assigned little importance to things.
Of course, since I was still very much under the influence of drugs, my sleep wasn’t a dreamless sleep like I expected… but more of a classical psychedelic experience. I began, while I was asleep, to hallucinate again, but this time HARD. I never noticed at which point I fell asleep, since I was very clearly conscious and I was aware of my lying body, but I stopped rationalising about where I was, and felt how my body, which had stopped being material, descending down into a tunnel of colours and sound waves… a tunnel which revealed the inner workings of the universe. Infinitely complex, somewhat mechanic and yet not, and most importantly hard to comprehend is how I’d describe it. I remember as I travelled down the tube I’d enter various different rooms which all had singing pillars which sang in a certain frequency… never melodies or sounds, always frequencies. While I was travelling through the psychedelic tube I also paid attention to my body… which was merely a black, translucent shape (in the position I was sleeping)… irrelevant in the current situation but somehow important to who I am. I felt that maybe I was looking at a very important component of my consciousness or perhaps I was looking at my soul… to this day I never quite understood what I saw there, but I feel it is important. Somehow, anyways.
I should also remark that I was fully conscious during this ‘lucid dream’ and able to move my line of view (but not my body) and gaze at things, which is how I was able to ‘see’ my body… my moving my line of view to where my body was.
After I was awoken by a meditating friend who moved his foot the wrong was and hit me (he was seeking God as his tripping mission). I also realised I had been asleep, as all of a sudden I was very forcefully jolted out of my tunnel and into my awaking body. I realised I had been asleep, as my body felt like it had just emerged from sleep and different parts of my conscious began awaking and rationalising what I had felt and realising that it was all a dream (just like you awake from a real dream, except it isn’t usually lucid or so *clear*).
I couldn’t go back to sleep and therefore proceeded to lie in my little cot, gazing at the light, thinking about indigenous america, and just waiting for the effects of my shrooms to end. I had stopped hallucinating but was still under the effects of the mushrooms, as everything was brighter, and more beautiful. Gradually my two other friends awoke from their experience and we all discussed it. The shaman left (I’m guessing to bed), and we also fell asleep.
The next morning we all basked in the afterglow of what we had seen, shared our experiences (one of my friends died in his trip and came back to life, or so he says), and drove back to Oaxaca City. It’s important to note that my balance hadn’t yet fully returned (even though it was a good 10+ hours after consuming before I grabbed the wheel… we got breakfast and stuff first), and therefore I gave my car’s paint job a very slight nick attempting to navigate the narrow streets of Huautla. As my body realised that it should focus on driving my balance improved and I was able to drive safely (a 6 hour drive through some steep mountains, very dangerous for the unprepared) back to Oaxaca. We talked about our experiences on the way and filmed a little video about what we felt.
―End Story―
So, that was my first time experience with those mushrooms! What do you think? Worth it going all the way there for some shrooms, or should I just recreate the experience in your typical apartment trip back where I live?
