webbykevin
Bluelighter
- Joined
- Oct 29, 2010
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Finally, after weeks of rain and floods and being stuck together in the house together endlessly I got the house to myself for 2 days.
I'd been waiting for weeks now to find the right night to visit fairyland and had been itching to try out this years samples, with all this flooding the ground has been saturated and I have had a few little clumps of gold tops just popping up around the place that called out to me and demanded to be collected.
The last couple of mushroom experiences have been interesting and the dialog between myself and the "Other" has been a rambling, unfolding conversation that has been flowing across time, The last few times have also been moderate doses because I was still gently clawing my confidence back from the absolute fear and terror of the very very bad 8 gram hell dose from 2 years ago, I have been straight for weeks and have been lowering my tolerance to everything for months, cutting out pot, getting off the codeine and not tripping much at all in the last year I feel ready to plunge back in to the depths to see if I can hold myself together in there now that I have worked gently with the substance to rebuild my courage.
So, as with all the best mushroom trips things magically fell into place and the universe itself seemed to be creating the opportunity for me, The mushrooms had been a gift from nature, an old friend dropped in to break a long car journey and left me with a nice handful of herb and a chunk of hash, I had some much needed cash recently flow in so had just gotten on top of all my bills and there was suddenly enough spare for my partner to go and visit her sister for a couple of days, I have been feeling very secure and grounded for a while now so set and setting conditions were all lining up. My health was good, my heart was eager and I was alone, in my own castle with all the ingredients that one needs for a propper bit of alchemical adventuring. It seemed like it wasn't just my choice, but a conspiracy of intention coming from all dimensions.
My back has been giving me a bit of gip lately though so in order to settle that down I took an low strength 12 hour release oxycontine about 4 hours before I dosed and for some reason I did something quite unexpected until the moment I saw the packet in the drawer - I had a vallium - just a 5 but still a quite unusual thing for me to mix in a benzo with a trip, I know that it's not going to be complimentary to the tryptamines potency and it's so counter intuitive - usually, this time though my intuition said "Do It" so I went with the Tao and allowed it to be.
I didn't really have a plan re what to dose with and when, I just eased myself into the sacred space over a couple of hours, had a joint and rolled a couple more and drank a couple of glasses of water, (had not eaten all day so had about 16 hour mini fast). I opened the jar and took a few dried flat caps out and passed them between my hands for a few secs, just from experience I would say there was about 3 grams in those tops, okay that feels like a sensible start, I knew they are pretty strong cos they were really solid, well coloured perfect specimens when I picked them and they had just gone the deepest deepest blue/green when the stems got bruised, they positively oozed psilocybin lol.
So, here we go........
approx 3am - ingested 3 grams stropharia cubensis mushrooms - caps.
I lay down on the bed, lit a candle and put a Mozart symphony on the lappy, it lasts for an hour and it's the only music I'm planning on listening to, as soon as the trip comes on I'll be turning off all distractions.
After about 40 minutes I smoked a joint and as I finished it the CEVs had begun to faintly overlay the darkness behind my eyelids, I got a couple of energy rushes and there was that incredible feeling of a fast building "potential" The emotions/feelings invoked are slight appreciation, a tingling expectation that comes when you know the roller coaster is about to round the top of the first crest and there's no getting off now and for few fleeting seconds I got to retouch that moment when as a child Christmas morning was finally here and you were only seconds away from being allowed to rip into that pile of presents... hmmm... strange.
On the scale of how fast or slow a first wave psilocybin onslaught arrives this was right up there, as the vivid memory of childood faded it was replaced instantly with an exploding mandala of tryptanime colours, levels upon levels of geometric grids sliding and shuddering, the various layers coming in and out of focus, the entire hallucination is so large that it extended out beyond my width of perception and was wrapping itself around me and 3 dimensions, then that's all gone and I'm looking at a landscape, A river port at the base of a steep mountain range, there's an old tramp steamer circa 1920s pulling into the dock, that whole scene now drops downward and out of my lower vision and behind it is a new vista, a whole coherent world, Im flying through the space just above rooftop level looking at some kind of city, industrial revolution era was my first thought, 1850's maybe, there are huge rows of factory walls passing by, not modern industrial steel and glass shiney silver buildings, these are old, edwardian brick, there's smog in the air, the people behind those windows are working on hand looms and spinning jennys, the texture of the image now morphs into the style of LS Lowry painting and I can see water starting to flood every house, every room, the image changes in dimension now to something more 2d, like going from a modern first person shooter to an old side scrolling platform game.
That world falls backward like a door that's just been kicked off its hinges and spirals downward and out of sight, more vistas, more worlds, faster and faster they come into and out of my awareness, there is just too much data here, too many things to integrate, each few seconds staring at the different scenarios seems to load me with a lifetimes collected emotional experiences from a life lived in that world, after about 50 of these I just said "enough", crikey, that was intense ! I find a way to step back into the observer position and take stock for a moment, The geometric grids are now moving into Alex grey territory, you know that boy really does manage to capture the essence of some parts of hyperspace in his paintings, which is a real skill. The grids are what I believe are at the extreme end of what most casual trippers see, a normally quite overwhelming phenomena, but compared to the collapsing worlds the grids are reassuring in their familiarity.
I feel the strength of the wave lighten the tension in the atmosphere thins, if this is following the normal way a mushroom trip unfolds for me I think I should have about 10 to 20 minutes now before the next rush. time to get active.
I go and take 2 more really vibrant specimens out of the mushroom jar, maybe 2 grams but I just know because I remember picking and drying them that they are really potent and freshly dried properly.
So at about t+ 1.20 I eat 2 grams stropharia cubensis and smoke a joint.
Maybe it was the vallium or perhaps it was with the confidenced gained by navigating through the first wave so easily but I was happy to push the accelarator pedal down a little harder and decided the rue would add a little more flavour and complexity and I was up for it tonight. I tipped a gram of syrian rue seeds into a mortar and pestle and started to grind and pound quickly falling into a steady meditative rhythm. I was now sitting up crosslegged and the change in posture from lying down made me much more physically present when the second wave hit, and boy did it hit ! I closed my eyes for a second and what was happening in there was astounding lol, I snapped them open again, try and focus on the rue seeds, there is now a definite bleed through from closed eye to open eyed visuals, all around the aura of the bowl there are thousands of irridescant eyes, kind of egyptian hyroglyph eyes crossed with a peacocks plumage eye, they are alive and are looking out at me and my world, I don't want to make eye contact and leave them at the edge of my awareness and try and look at this reality as just another one of those passing scenes, I see the bowl, my hands, legs, the space around me is my familiar everyday room but the dimensions seem all wrong, it's not all savidor dali or alice in wonderland yet but things in the open eyed spectrum are getting bendy, in the bendy organic way that seems to be unique to shrooms.
The hallucinations are now so completely overlaying the world I submit to it and lay down and shut my eyes, this wave I can tell is really powerful and this really is going to be the peak of the experience if I give it my full attention, this has the potential to be one of those "please let me stand a little more" tryptamine moments.
"ok" I said "enough with the geometric patterns and the scenic slide shows of alien worlds, all very impressive but the first wave was sufficient, what else you got ?"
The patterns dissolve and there is now a blackness, darker than black, like obsidion, the background of all being, the void, true nothingness out of which all things come, there is a pattern, more a splattering of 4 dimensional green and yellow neon glowing diamonds, now they are like leaves, a tangling twining border forming around the edges of a black window, I feel my body as waves of energy start to pulsate from my feet up my legs and through my torso, in seconds I am as relaxed and squidgy as I would be after an hour of good physio, A mushroom body massage through every cell, it was delicious, I just melted into the bed and the awareness of my physical body slipped out of consciousness, just mind now, out in the billows, fascinating, time to just look and see what happens.
The next part pushes descriptive english to it's limits and in many ways will fall far short of conveying the true depth and strangeness of the content of the experience, but I am inspired by McKenna's plea to at least try, that language does play are huge part in how we perceive all reality, we constantly talk to ourselves through our thoughts, and we language and symbols to explain our thoughts and feelings to ourselves, that's the minds primary function, but that's not a law of nature, that's just a result of conditioning, it's a pattern of experiencing reality that we have allowed to become the way we move about the universe, the story we constantly tell ourselves about who we are and what we are doing in 3d.
Heading into a deep series of tryptamine hallucinations is an interesting challenge to this model, because the things you are about to see there are no words for, so the first few times you have that experience it's astonishing, overwhelming almost, it amazes you, you struggle for words, you search you internal dictionary frantically for context and meaning, you question your sanity and spend the times between trips slowly integrating and processing the experience, this is true psychedelic therapy, on many levels if you apply your reason and intellect and do some soul searching you will start to change the way the chattering voice in your head talks to you every day, because now underpinning that code is new depth to the language you have available, your consciousness has had a workout, it's like exercising a muscle, and you begin to not feel so trapped in the narrow canyons of culture and you have a twinkle in your eye because you have now glimpsed the mystery, you know the world is not what it appears to be, you can never go back to agnosticism, you can never again take seriously the rambling guilt ridden piety of the church, you have learned that the real truth does not involve you having to believe in anything, in somone elses rap, because what you have seen defies description and is beyond belief. you have joined the psychedelic community, only they will fully understand or grock you.
So facing the next 15 minutes of madness I reached into my mindfulness tool bag and shifted into a meditative space of "no labeling required" it's not hard, start with your ears and just let all sounds come without naming them, treat the general cacophony of background noise like music, just dig it. This takes a fair bit of work and practice if you just use meditation to achieve it, done with psilocybin it takes nano seconds and as I completely surrendered to the visions I was in the purest non reactive observer state that I know how to achieve.
The voice, the mysterious voice, not everyone has heard it, in fact from what I've read relatively few hear it, those who have know what I'm talking about, those who haven't struggle to conceptualize it. That's because its not a concept, it's a reality.
I've gotten over the initial challenge to my sanity when I initially encountered it and now I am pretty relaxed about it and accept and even enjoy this part of the trip, for me it raises many questions that just don't need to be answered with any urgency, whether is truly is an "other" autonomous mind communicating with me or weather it is a higher or different dimensional level of myself, or indeed the Brahman - the great self - expressing itself in another one of its many forms but essentially still a manifestation of the big me, using the Hindu version of reality as all an illusion, a big act where the great self, the all that there is, the which than which there is no whicher as Alan Watts used to say, the godhead, shiva, whatever you wanna call it, that it is playing a game with itself, the world is a great drama and the same actor is playing all the parts, but playing them so well, so convincingly that it's turned into a very far out game, with the individual points of consciousness actually managing to convince themselves that they are separate beings from the whole thing, unexplained unfathomable separate identities alone and afraid in a world they have not made.
I like that myth of reality, it free's up anxiety because it suggests that ultimately the game we are in is not serious, that there is no eternal damnation, and that once you see that you can move more easily though the drama, because you are not trying to get anywhere, you are not doing a shitty job constantly thinking about one day in the future everything will all work out and happiness will be delivered lol, no that's being stuck in the wheel of life and death, believing that you are the character, that the mask you wear IS you. If enlightenment is anything I think it's seeing that, after that you still experience everyday life, it's ups and downs, its joys and it's disappointments, but the fear has gone, the isolation has gone and one can just participate in the moment with wonder. not taking it ever too seriously, it resolves anger, grief, suffering, pain, because all these things still come and go, but now they are just allowed to flow, the great TAO again, you don't attach to emotions you don't Have to be right and you aren't seeking anything, you become a bit of a social hermit maybe but you are living a full and colourfull life and you don't get stuck.
So as soon as I said "what else you got?" I also threw in as an afterthought "not putting down the first wave, that was indeed very impressive" Even before I had finished adding that afterthought I instantly got the reply "Did you like that ?" followed by a sort of rascally chuckle, there was no feeling of unease of hesitation from me, It was as natural feeling as if a friend had just turned up for coffee, "I was just thinking about whether you are actually a form of me and not a mushroom at all" I said, "yes and No" was the reply "It's hard to explain but you can feel it can't you, the potential for it to be that great self, but there is also many levels of awareness inside of it all, and in that sense no I am definitely not you even though I am, isn't that crazy ?, so just let it be either or, don't name it".
I said "Lets do something new - something cool, something I've never seen before - Amaze me lol"
"Take more mushrooms"
Wow, that threw me a bit, "Is that necessary ? - I mean this feels like a pretty solid dose, deeper than I've been before, isn't this enough"
"No, it doesn't work like that, If you really want an adventure trust me I can amaze you and I would love to, but you have to take more mushrooms"
I paused, let the idea sit in the air for a few seconds..... "I'll think about it, I'm not adverse to the idea but lemmie give it a while"
This seemed to be a satisfactory answer and the mushroom didn't press me on it...
There followed a volley of hallucinations, schematic overlays, multi dimensional spaces, caverns, 5 dimensional objects and waves of being just filled up with juice, every cell felt like it was getting recharged, I can feel my spine fading in and out of my perception, becoming solid and then at the moment of pain pulling back and dissolving back into the void, each time moving a little further into the pain barrier until I felt a cosmic healing taking place on my biological form, it didn't need my attention and so I refocussed on the dialog and left thoughts of the physical world behind.
I was getting very distorted audio hallucinations at this point, there was the noise of rain falling on the tin roof that had been a steady drone through the whole evening, that now had changed into a more metallic buzz, there were snippets of classical music, the odd viola or cello phrase would fade in and out, some voices, not mine not the mushroom's, distant, electronic almost, distorted like the TV voices the little girl talked to in poltergeist.
"All those worlds you showed me earlier" I said, "What was all that about ?"
"It's a different form of what the elves in the DMT hive do with their sung objects - why those objects are so confounding to look at is that they contain not only a potential world but all the experiences you can experience if you chose to enter that story, because a story is what existence is, you are always telling yourself a story, everyone does, it's the engine of the game, the imagination."
"So now I've been able to resist getting sucked into those worlds but held myself together in the observer place, I think I've pretty much got that lesson - if a lesson is what it was - So that's why I'm keen to see what else I can see, how deeper out can I stand to stretch my consciousness, how much can I allow myself to stand ?, that's the motivation for me saying can you show me something amazing"
"Take more mushrooms - Look I'm not trying to tempt you into a trap or anything, I promise I wont show you more than you can stand, but if you are sincere about wanting to see then you have to have the courage to take more mushrooms!"
"Alright, I'll take more mushrooms, sorry to have held back a bit and I wasn't really holding back because I was scared, I had already decided 5 minutes ago that I was going to do it"
"No offense taken - here's blast of something a bit different just to end this wave"
Intense visual hallucinations, gigantic living murals that felt in scale like an ant standing in front of a skyscraper, then FREEZE FRAME - Silence, everything stopped the moving images all frozen in time around me, I cant move, I have no physical connection to the body at all, my consciousness is just confronted with something totally new, the silence is deafening, the frozen image fades and dissolves into a sparkling darkness.
The M Hole lol.
I love psilocybin, the moment I mentally called it the M hole I started to giggle, the mushroom chortled Im laughing all over, laughing because I am just so happy to be here, I'm enjoying hyperspace so much it's bringing tears of joy and gratitude that right here, right now, I'm happy to my core, the whole space around me is shaking and vibrating with humour and laughter - into the blackness I fall and suddenly I'm flying across a landscape, there is a huge expanse around me like open tundra stretching to infinity, below me appears a high steel meshed fence a good 3 metres high curving around like a rusting serpent eclosing a part of the land and separating it from something, I rise up and the fence passes meters below me and as I rise up a bit higher I can see something in a dip in the landscape a couple of miles away, White tents, huge ones with red ropes, a Ferris wheel, a roller coaster, a big top, It's the circus, romany world, clowns and acrobats, knife throwers and the 2 headed dog.....
"That's dmt world" said the mushroom, "you want to have a look ? - It's a much nicer way to see it"
"Maybe, even from here I can taste the archetype though, It seems to be just Like McKenna described it, the circus, and as we started to fly closer to it I seemed to download the essence of the DMT world without having to actually get fully immersed, it's just another story like those other worlds and seeing and feeling even this much of it means if i ever pass by there again I will recognize it, but lets do something else"
"Take more mushrooms then"
"Ok yes I forgot - lemmie get all that sorted and I'll catch you in half an hour on the next wave"
I could hardly stand when I went to get the jar, the full leg wobbles, rubbery land lol. I took 2 golf ball sized complete mushrooms with stems still attached out of the jar, they felt heavy and the stems were dark navy blue, even the caps had a tinge of blue through them, as I chewed them up and swallowed them sipping ice water to help them down It felt like I was squeezing pure psilocybin liquid extract out into my mouth, a major commitment.
I then made possibly a mistake, I say possibly because things did get a little weird later on and I think I needlessly of complicated it here. but I rolled a massive 3 paper joint and sprinkled a good half a gram of the crushed syrian rue seeds on top and a pinch of caapi vine shavings for good measure, and I crumbled about 1/4 of a gram of hash through the weed too so it was a loaded weapon when I'd finished making it.
Bloody hell this is turning into a long report, well if you've stayed with me this far thanks, The weirdest part is next and I'm gonna struggle to english it so i'll have to just allude to somethings that there are no words for and leave out things that there will never be words for.
The mushroom is a bit of a rascal, a good natured trickster that can move your awareness around in dimensional time and space and invoke feelings and emotions a fears that are so strange, so bizarre, It can put you into experiences so beyond the realms of your personal wildest imagination that you do reach a limit of what you are able to tolerate, what you are prepared to allow. And the fastest way to get into those spaces is to ask the mushroom to show you more of itself, for itself !
I managed to stand it for about 2 or 3 minutes this time, before I was so overwhelmed that I begged for it to change, to stop, to go back to the nice fractal grids and the elves and the circus and the 3 d hallucinations of landscapes and cities, because what begins to be revealed to you is unspeakable.
Caves, underground caverns, lots of moisture in the air, a dank rotting taste in your nostrils and on your toung, death, decomposing is happening, there are non 3d (no other words) hallucinations that are not really hallucinations any more because i am really in that place, it's not a vision it's an actual lucid experience.
Huge towering stacks and clusters of mushrooms, glowing, translucent, pale electric blues, rose pink tinted reds, row upon row of shroom towers, the walls are a pulsing glowing green, vibrant without being sharply in focus (strange description but no matter how hard I looked I could not see details int he walls/background).
That starts to change as from our vantage point (I say our because I felt accompanied) high up on the wall of the cave I start feel sucked backwards into the very rocks behind us, fragmenting out and spreading into the soil above, now that sounds cool yeh ? but the actual experience was quite unnerving and i didn't like it, without me having to say anything it seemed like the mushroom sensed my un-comfortableness and we shifted gears.
Now a couple of things happened that really started to make it take a left turn, I tried to open my eyes and when I did I had a very odd sensation that swept through me, live I was stuck between 2 dimensions and things felt very disconbobulated and just wrong, I felt waves of acidic nausea staring to rise and got stuck in a bit of a mental/physical off and on loop there for a few seconds, this is where you had to earn your psychedelic stripes and have to keep it together.
A voice - my voice - is talking to me from the 3d world, but it gets halfway through a sentence and i am unable to hold that reality and am plunged back into underground cavern of mushrooms land but the voice continues the sentence but now its a different voice in this hyperspace reality and even though it's different it's still MY voice if I really think about it.
I decide not to think about it.
That atmosphere in hyperspace is dark now, thick with darkness, there is no real visual content in any kind of understandable way, just a feeling of being down in the dirt, huge clods of rich brown soil, I feel very small, very vulnerable, like my hold on life here is fragile and there is a sense of real danger, not in a malicious way more in the sense that death, destruction, interaction, existance itself, is perceived in a way that my cultured conditioning is going to find horrific, that's the feeling I get, It's like a composite of all the moments in your life when you have had to look away, away from a horror movie, or away from a road accident, or away from a taboo, you cant allow yourself to even run those possibilities through you mind, it's a truly alien way of thinking.
Now I'm in a fix, because I asked for this, I asked the mushroom to show me it's world and it's doing it, I don't want to be rude and insult it, but it is just extremely unpleasant and uncomfortable and I'm starting to get small waves of panic, the voices from both dimensions are now asking questions and answering them instantly and I feel sick and there is a massive pressure building on top of my chest, like a great weight starting to bear down on me and i have to make my stand and let the cards fall where they may........
"I don't like this, It's too much - can we change it to something else ?, thanks for the glimpse you gave me it was an honour to see it, maybe there will be other times when I can absorb more of that, but I just feel quite wrong somehow and need to back out"
It all started to change, the space around me started to reassemble itself into the state of me, an organic being, lying in a 3d house on a planet called earth who was gazing into hyperspace through a window of geometry, not actually being there without a body and having to DEAL with that.
Phew, I let out a long sigh of relief and felt the mushroom settle back in his chair and take pause aswell.
But there is no turning it off, those last mushroom have already made it past the liver and into the bloodstream and I can feel the receptor sites just flooding with molecules, the serotonin has no chance and this ride is far from over. There are iridescent blue and white sparks exploding out of my forehead, Like mini supernova, I know that each one is a receptor site getting a tryptamine molecule bonded and locked in place, brain fireworks exploding out into reality.
There's still half of the syrian rue joint lying in the ashtray so I light it, have a sip of water and lay back on the bed, if I close me eyes I know I'm going back there in a big way so I force them to stay open as I finish the rue, as I drop stub of it into the ashtray my arm flops to the bed, my eyes droop closed and the last thing I see is walls of egyptian/arabian motifs in earthy browns, mustard yellows and dark reds. I knew that was the rue, it was so unlike anything the mushroom ever does it had to be the middle eastern influence of the rue.
"well" said the mushroom "looks like we are both in for a show"
There is now a 2 hour hole in my report, because there is just no way to explain it, I just can't, I've sat here and typed and deleted about 5 paragraphs because none of them explain or describe it, language fails, I can kind of summarize it by saying that the observer position can get very hard to hold on to and when it is challenged you get into some deep water psychologically, "Be sure your mantras you don't bungle" McKenna once said when describing being cast into the billows, that's the best advice i can give too, whatever tactics you have to employ to find sane ground again after a high dose psychedelic experience then that's your experience and will be different from mine, All I could really do this time was hang on hanna and my only reassurance was the knowledge that I had taken a drug and that I was 3/4 through the trip and I know that I will live through this and it will end.
All I can say is - syrian rue land is far weirder than the clowns over in DMT land, if you want to see it you have to go there yourself.
After the 2 hours of that peak had passed the come down happened really quickly, I wasn't at baseline by any means but I was out of the clouds and compared to where I had just been I was pretty much down. I lay there for about another hour until the last of the grids had gone and then felt ravenously hungry. So still a bit wobbly I head for the kitchen and start to get a decent breakfast together.
OK - here's the last weird bit......
While I was standing at the kitchen stove waiting for toast... I had a total blackout..... I remember feeling a bit woozy for a few seconds and feeling the strength draining from my legs but the next thing I remember is a bang, as I hit the floor in an unconscious crumpled heap, Total blackout don't remember starting to collapse, don't remember falling, just a Bang !, darkness and then realizing i was lying on the floor.
It was bloody hard to finish the toast and coffee making, ridiculously hard, obviously I wasn't down yet at all and was dehydrating or loosing lifeforce or something, I've never blacked out like that before in my life.
The toast and coffee were brilliant, energy, nourishment, a grounding in 3d, the last remnants of the trip faded fast and I got really sleep really fast, i was buggered, just plain exhausted and I collapsed back into bed and sleep saved me from all experience, and a blessing it was.
Woke up 10 hours later and wrote this report.
Thanks heaps if you made it all the way to the end.
Be safe people.
webby
I'd been waiting for weeks now to find the right night to visit fairyland and had been itching to try out this years samples, with all this flooding the ground has been saturated and I have had a few little clumps of gold tops just popping up around the place that called out to me and demanded to be collected.
The last couple of mushroom experiences have been interesting and the dialog between myself and the "Other" has been a rambling, unfolding conversation that has been flowing across time, The last few times have also been moderate doses because I was still gently clawing my confidence back from the absolute fear and terror of the very very bad 8 gram hell dose from 2 years ago, I have been straight for weeks and have been lowering my tolerance to everything for months, cutting out pot, getting off the codeine and not tripping much at all in the last year I feel ready to plunge back in to the depths to see if I can hold myself together in there now that I have worked gently with the substance to rebuild my courage.
So, as with all the best mushroom trips things magically fell into place and the universe itself seemed to be creating the opportunity for me, The mushrooms had been a gift from nature, an old friend dropped in to break a long car journey and left me with a nice handful of herb and a chunk of hash, I had some much needed cash recently flow in so had just gotten on top of all my bills and there was suddenly enough spare for my partner to go and visit her sister for a couple of days, I have been feeling very secure and grounded for a while now so set and setting conditions were all lining up. My health was good, my heart was eager and I was alone, in my own castle with all the ingredients that one needs for a propper bit of alchemical adventuring. It seemed like it wasn't just my choice, but a conspiracy of intention coming from all dimensions.
My back has been giving me a bit of gip lately though so in order to settle that down I took an low strength 12 hour release oxycontine about 4 hours before I dosed and for some reason I did something quite unexpected until the moment I saw the packet in the drawer - I had a vallium - just a 5 but still a quite unusual thing for me to mix in a benzo with a trip, I know that it's not going to be complimentary to the tryptamines potency and it's so counter intuitive - usually, this time though my intuition said "Do It" so I went with the Tao and allowed it to be.
I didn't really have a plan re what to dose with and when, I just eased myself into the sacred space over a couple of hours, had a joint and rolled a couple more and drank a couple of glasses of water, (had not eaten all day so had about 16 hour mini fast). I opened the jar and took a few dried flat caps out and passed them between my hands for a few secs, just from experience I would say there was about 3 grams in those tops, okay that feels like a sensible start, I knew they are pretty strong cos they were really solid, well coloured perfect specimens when I picked them and they had just gone the deepest deepest blue/green when the stems got bruised, they positively oozed psilocybin lol.
So, here we go........
approx 3am - ingested 3 grams stropharia cubensis mushrooms - caps.
I lay down on the bed, lit a candle and put a Mozart symphony on the lappy, it lasts for an hour and it's the only music I'm planning on listening to, as soon as the trip comes on I'll be turning off all distractions.
After about 40 minutes I smoked a joint and as I finished it the CEVs had begun to faintly overlay the darkness behind my eyelids, I got a couple of energy rushes and there was that incredible feeling of a fast building "potential" The emotions/feelings invoked are slight appreciation, a tingling expectation that comes when you know the roller coaster is about to round the top of the first crest and there's no getting off now and for few fleeting seconds I got to retouch that moment when as a child Christmas morning was finally here and you were only seconds away from being allowed to rip into that pile of presents... hmmm... strange.
On the scale of how fast or slow a first wave psilocybin onslaught arrives this was right up there, as the vivid memory of childood faded it was replaced instantly with an exploding mandala of tryptanime colours, levels upon levels of geometric grids sliding and shuddering, the various layers coming in and out of focus, the entire hallucination is so large that it extended out beyond my width of perception and was wrapping itself around me and 3 dimensions, then that's all gone and I'm looking at a landscape, A river port at the base of a steep mountain range, there's an old tramp steamer circa 1920s pulling into the dock, that whole scene now drops downward and out of my lower vision and behind it is a new vista, a whole coherent world, Im flying through the space just above rooftop level looking at some kind of city, industrial revolution era was my first thought, 1850's maybe, there are huge rows of factory walls passing by, not modern industrial steel and glass shiney silver buildings, these are old, edwardian brick, there's smog in the air, the people behind those windows are working on hand looms and spinning jennys, the texture of the image now morphs into the style of LS Lowry painting and I can see water starting to flood every house, every room, the image changes in dimension now to something more 2d, like going from a modern first person shooter to an old side scrolling platform game.
That world falls backward like a door that's just been kicked off its hinges and spirals downward and out of sight, more vistas, more worlds, faster and faster they come into and out of my awareness, there is just too much data here, too many things to integrate, each few seconds staring at the different scenarios seems to load me with a lifetimes collected emotional experiences from a life lived in that world, after about 50 of these I just said "enough", crikey, that was intense ! I find a way to step back into the observer position and take stock for a moment, The geometric grids are now moving into Alex grey territory, you know that boy really does manage to capture the essence of some parts of hyperspace in his paintings, which is a real skill. The grids are what I believe are at the extreme end of what most casual trippers see, a normally quite overwhelming phenomena, but compared to the collapsing worlds the grids are reassuring in their familiarity.
I feel the strength of the wave lighten the tension in the atmosphere thins, if this is following the normal way a mushroom trip unfolds for me I think I should have about 10 to 20 minutes now before the next rush. time to get active.
I go and take 2 more really vibrant specimens out of the mushroom jar, maybe 2 grams but I just know because I remember picking and drying them that they are really potent and freshly dried properly.
So at about t+ 1.20 I eat 2 grams stropharia cubensis and smoke a joint.
Maybe it was the vallium or perhaps it was with the confidenced gained by navigating through the first wave so easily but I was happy to push the accelarator pedal down a little harder and decided the rue would add a little more flavour and complexity and I was up for it tonight. I tipped a gram of syrian rue seeds into a mortar and pestle and started to grind and pound quickly falling into a steady meditative rhythm. I was now sitting up crosslegged and the change in posture from lying down made me much more physically present when the second wave hit, and boy did it hit ! I closed my eyes for a second and what was happening in there was astounding lol, I snapped them open again, try and focus on the rue seeds, there is now a definite bleed through from closed eye to open eyed visuals, all around the aura of the bowl there are thousands of irridescant eyes, kind of egyptian hyroglyph eyes crossed with a peacocks plumage eye, they are alive and are looking out at me and my world, I don't want to make eye contact and leave them at the edge of my awareness and try and look at this reality as just another one of those passing scenes, I see the bowl, my hands, legs, the space around me is my familiar everyday room but the dimensions seem all wrong, it's not all savidor dali or alice in wonderland yet but things in the open eyed spectrum are getting bendy, in the bendy organic way that seems to be unique to shrooms.
The hallucinations are now so completely overlaying the world I submit to it and lay down and shut my eyes, this wave I can tell is really powerful and this really is going to be the peak of the experience if I give it my full attention, this has the potential to be one of those "please let me stand a little more" tryptamine moments.
"ok" I said "enough with the geometric patterns and the scenic slide shows of alien worlds, all very impressive but the first wave was sufficient, what else you got ?"
The patterns dissolve and there is now a blackness, darker than black, like obsidion, the background of all being, the void, true nothingness out of which all things come, there is a pattern, more a splattering of 4 dimensional green and yellow neon glowing diamonds, now they are like leaves, a tangling twining border forming around the edges of a black window, I feel my body as waves of energy start to pulsate from my feet up my legs and through my torso, in seconds I am as relaxed and squidgy as I would be after an hour of good physio, A mushroom body massage through every cell, it was delicious, I just melted into the bed and the awareness of my physical body slipped out of consciousness, just mind now, out in the billows, fascinating, time to just look and see what happens.
The next part pushes descriptive english to it's limits and in many ways will fall far short of conveying the true depth and strangeness of the content of the experience, but I am inspired by McKenna's plea to at least try, that language does play are huge part in how we perceive all reality, we constantly talk to ourselves through our thoughts, and we language and symbols to explain our thoughts and feelings to ourselves, that's the minds primary function, but that's not a law of nature, that's just a result of conditioning, it's a pattern of experiencing reality that we have allowed to become the way we move about the universe, the story we constantly tell ourselves about who we are and what we are doing in 3d.
Heading into a deep series of tryptamine hallucinations is an interesting challenge to this model, because the things you are about to see there are no words for, so the first few times you have that experience it's astonishing, overwhelming almost, it amazes you, you struggle for words, you search you internal dictionary frantically for context and meaning, you question your sanity and spend the times between trips slowly integrating and processing the experience, this is true psychedelic therapy, on many levels if you apply your reason and intellect and do some soul searching you will start to change the way the chattering voice in your head talks to you every day, because now underpinning that code is new depth to the language you have available, your consciousness has had a workout, it's like exercising a muscle, and you begin to not feel so trapped in the narrow canyons of culture and you have a twinkle in your eye because you have now glimpsed the mystery, you know the world is not what it appears to be, you can never go back to agnosticism, you can never again take seriously the rambling guilt ridden piety of the church, you have learned that the real truth does not involve you having to believe in anything, in somone elses rap, because what you have seen defies description and is beyond belief. you have joined the psychedelic community, only they will fully understand or grock you.
So facing the next 15 minutes of madness I reached into my mindfulness tool bag and shifted into a meditative space of "no labeling required" it's not hard, start with your ears and just let all sounds come without naming them, treat the general cacophony of background noise like music, just dig it. This takes a fair bit of work and practice if you just use meditation to achieve it, done with psilocybin it takes nano seconds and as I completely surrendered to the visions I was in the purest non reactive observer state that I know how to achieve.
The voice, the mysterious voice, not everyone has heard it, in fact from what I've read relatively few hear it, those who have know what I'm talking about, those who haven't struggle to conceptualize it. That's because its not a concept, it's a reality.
I've gotten over the initial challenge to my sanity when I initially encountered it and now I am pretty relaxed about it and accept and even enjoy this part of the trip, for me it raises many questions that just don't need to be answered with any urgency, whether is truly is an "other" autonomous mind communicating with me or weather it is a higher or different dimensional level of myself, or indeed the Brahman - the great self - expressing itself in another one of its many forms but essentially still a manifestation of the big me, using the Hindu version of reality as all an illusion, a big act where the great self, the all that there is, the which than which there is no whicher as Alan Watts used to say, the godhead, shiva, whatever you wanna call it, that it is playing a game with itself, the world is a great drama and the same actor is playing all the parts, but playing them so well, so convincingly that it's turned into a very far out game, with the individual points of consciousness actually managing to convince themselves that they are separate beings from the whole thing, unexplained unfathomable separate identities alone and afraid in a world they have not made.
I like that myth of reality, it free's up anxiety because it suggests that ultimately the game we are in is not serious, that there is no eternal damnation, and that once you see that you can move more easily though the drama, because you are not trying to get anywhere, you are not doing a shitty job constantly thinking about one day in the future everything will all work out and happiness will be delivered lol, no that's being stuck in the wheel of life and death, believing that you are the character, that the mask you wear IS you. If enlightenment is anything I think it's seeing that, after that you still experience everyday life, it's ups and downs, its joys and it's disappointments, but the fear has gone, the isolation has gone and one can just participate in the moment with wonder. not taking it ever too seriously, it resolves anger, grief, suffering, pain, because all these things still come and go, but now they are just allowed to flow, the great TAO again, you don't attach to emotions you don't Have to be right and you aren't seeking anything, you become a bit of a social hermit maybe but you are living a full and colourfull life and you don't get stuck.
So as soon as I said "what else you got?" I also threw in as an afterthought "not putting down the first wave, that was indeed very impressive" Even before I had finished adding that afterthought I instantly got the reply "Did you like that ?" followed by a sort of rascally chuckle, there was no feeling of unease of hesitation from me, It was as natural feeling as if a friend had just turned up for coffee, "I was just thinking about whether you are actually a form of me and not a mushroom at all" I said, "yes and No" was the reply "It's hard to explain but you can feel it can't you, the potential for it to be that great self, but there is also many levels of awareness inside of it all, and in that sense no I am definitely not you even though I am, isn't that crazy ?, so just let it be either or, don't name it".
I said "Lets do something new - something cool, something I've never seen before - Amaze me lol"
"Take more mushrooms"
Wow, that threw me a bit, "Is that necessary ? - I mean this feels like a pretty solid dose, deeper than I've been before, isn't this enough"
"No, it doesn't work like that, If you really want an adventure trust me I can amaze you and I would love to, but you have to take more mushrooms"
I paused, let the idea sit in the air for a few seconds..... "I'll think about it, I'm not adverse to the idea but lemmie give it a while"
This seemed to be a satisfactory answer and the mushroom didn't press me on it...
There followed a volley of hallucinations, schematic overlays, multi dimensional spaces, caverns, 5 dimensional objects and waves of being just filled up with juice, every cell felt like it was getting recharged, I can feel my spine fading in and out of my perception, becoming solid and then at the moment of pain pulling back and dissolving back into the void, each time moving a little further into the pain barrier until I felt a cosmic healing taking place on my biological form, it didn't need my attention and so I refocussed on the dialog and left thoughts of the physical world behind.
I was getting very distorted audio hallucinations at this point, there was the noise of rain falling on the tin roof that had been a steady drone through the whole evening, that now had changed into a more metallic buzz, there were snippets of classical music, the odd viola or cello phrase would fade in and out, some voices, not mine not the mushroom's, distant, electronic almost, distorted like the TV voices the little girl talked to in poltergeist.
"All those worlds you showed me earlier" I said, "What was all that about ?"
"It's a different form of what the elves in the DMT hive do with their sung objects - why those objects are so confounding to look at is that they contain not only a potential world but all the experiences you can experience if you chose to enter that story, because a story is what existence is, you are always telling yourself a story, everyone does, it's the engine of the game, the imagination."
"So now I've been able to resist getting sucked into those worlds but held myself together in the observer place, I think I've pretty much got that lesson - if a lesson is what it was - So that's why I'm keen to see what else I can see, how deeper out can I stand to stretch my consciousness, how much can I allow myself to stand ?, that's the motivation for me saying can you show me something amazing"
"Take more mushrooms - Look I'm not trying to tempt you into a trap or anything, I promise I wont show you more than you can stand, but if you are sincere about wanting to see then you have to have the courage to take more mushrooms!"
"Alright, I'll take more mushrooms, sorry to have held back a bit and I wasn't really holding back because I was scared, I had already decided 5 minutes ago that I was going to do it"
"No offense taken - here's blast of something a bit different just to end this wave"
Intense visual hallucinations, gigantic living murals that felt in scale like an ant standing in front of a skyscraper, then FREEZE FRAME - Silence, everything stopped the moving images all frozen in time around me, I cant move, I have no physical connection to the body at all, my consciousness is just confronted with something totally new, the silence is deafening, the frozen image fades and dissolves into a sparkling darkness.
The M Hole lol.
I love psilocybin, the moment I mentally called it the M hole I started to giggle, the mushroom chortled Im laughing all over, laughing because I am just so happy to be here, I'm enjoying hyperspace so much it's bringing tears of joy and gratitude that right here, right now, I'm happy to my core, the whole space around me is shaking and vibrating with humour and laughter - into the blackness I fall and suddenly I'm flying across a landscape, there is a huge expanse around me like open tundra stretching to infinity, below me appears a high steel meshed fence a good 3 metres high curving around like a rusting serpent eclosing a part of the land and separating it from something, I rise up and the fence passes meters below me and as I rise up a bit higher I can see something in a dip in the landscape a couple of miles away, White tents, huge ones with red ropes, a Ferris wheel, a roller coaster, a big top, It's the circus, romany world, clowns and acrobats, knife throwers and the 2 headed dog.....
"That's dmt world" said the mushroom, "you want to have a look ? - It's a much nicer way to see it"
"Maybe, even from here I can taste the archetype though, It seems to be just Like McKenna described it, the circus, and as we started to fly closer to it I seemed to download the essence of the DMT world without having to actually get fully immersed, it's just another story like those other worlds and seeing and feeling even this much of it means if i ever pass by there again I will recognize it, but lets do something else"
"Take more mushrooms then"
"Ok yes I forgot - lemmie get all that sorted and I'll catch you in half an hour on the next wave"
I could hardly stand when I went to get the jar, the full leg wobbles, rubbery land lol. I took 2 golf ball sized complete mushrooms with stems still attached out of the jar, they felt heavy and the stems were dark navy blue, even the caps had a tinge of blue through them, as I chewed them up and swallowed them sipping ice water to help them down It felt like I was squeezing pure psilocybin liquid extract out into my mouth, a major commitment.
I then made possibly a mistake, I say possibly because things did get a little weird later on and I think I needlessly of complicated it here. but I rolled a massive 3 paper joint and sprinkled a good half a gram of the crushed syrian rue seeds on top and a pinch of caapi vine shavings for good measure, and I crumbled about 1/4 of a gram of hash through the weed too so it was a loaded weapon when I'd finished making it.
Bloody hell this is turning into a long report, well if you've stayed with me this far thanks, The weirdest part is next and I'm gonna struggle to english it so i'll have to just allude to somethings that there are no words for and leave out things that there will never be words for.
The mushroom is a bit of a rascal, a good natured trickster that can move your awareness around in dimensional time and space and invoke feelings and emotions a fears that are so strange, so bizarre, It can put you into experiences so beyond the realms of your personal wildest imagination that you do reach a limit of what you are able to tolerate, what you are prepared to allow. And the fastest way to get into those spaces is to ask the mushroom to show you more of itself, for itself !
I managed to stand it for about 2 or 3 minutes this time, before I was so overwhelmed that I begged for it to change, to stop, to go back to the nice fractal grids and the elves and the circus and the 3 d hallucinations of landscapes and cities, because what begins to be revealed to you is unspeakable.
Caves, underground caverns, lots of moisture in the air, a dank rotting taste in your nostrils and on your toung, death, decomposing is happening, there are non 3d (no other words) hallucinations that are not really hallucinations any more because i am really in that place, it's not a vision it's an actual lucid experience.
Huge towering stacks and clusters of mushrooms, glowing, translucent, pale electric blues, rose pink tinted reds, row upon row of shroom towers, the walls are a pulsing glowing green, vibrant without being sharply in focus (strange description but no matter how hard I looked I could not see details int he walls/background).
That starts to change as from our vantage point (I say our because I felt accompanied) high up on the wall of the cave I start feel sucked backwards into the very rocks behind us, fragmenting out and spreading into the soil above, now that sounds cool yeh ? but the actual experience was quite unnerving and i didn't like it, without me having to say anything it seemed like the mushroom sensed my un-comfortableness and we shifted gears.
Now a couple of things happened that really started to make it take a left turn, I tried to open my eyes and when I did I had a very odd sensation that swept through me, live I was stuck between 2 dimensions and things felt very disconbobulated and just wrong, I felt waves of acidic nausea staring to rise and got stuck in a bit of a mental/physical off and on loop there for a few seconds, this is where you had to earn your psychedelic stripes and have to keep it together.
A voice - my voice - is talking to me from the 3d world, but it gets halfway through a sentence and i am unable to hold that reality and am plunged back into underground cavern of mushrooms land but the voice continues the sentence but now its a different voice in this hyperspace reality and even though it's different it's still MY voice if I really think about it.
I decide not to think about it.
That atmosphere in hyperspace is dark now, thick with darkness, there is no real visual content in any kind of understandable way, just a feeling of being down in the dirt, huge clods of rich brown soil, I feel very small, very vulnerable, like my hold on life here is fragile and there is a sense of real danger, not in a malicious way more in the sense that death, destruction, interaction, existance itself, is perceived in a way that my cultured conditioning is going to find horrific, that's the feeling I get, It's like a composite of all the moments in your life when you have had to look away, away from a horror movie, or away from a road accident, or away from a taboo, you cant allow yourself to even run those possibilities through you mind, it's a truly alien way of thinking.
Now I'm in a fix, because I asked for this, I asked the mushroom to show me it's world and it's doing it, I don't want to be rude and insult it, but it is just extremely unpleasant and uncomfortable and I'm starting to get small waves of panic, the voices from both dimensions are now asking questions and answering them instantly and I feel sick and there is a massive pressure building on top of my chest, like a great weight starting to bear down on me and i have to make my stand and let the cards fall where they may........
"I don't like this, It's too much - can we change it to something else ?, thanks for the glimpse you gave me it was an honour to see it, maybe there will be other times when I can absorb more of that, but I just feel quite wrong somehow and need to back out"
It all started to change, the space around me started to reassemble itself into the state of me, an organic being, lying in a 3d house on a planet called earth who was gazing into hyperspace through a window of geometry, not actually being there without a body and having to DEAL with that.
Phew, I let out a long sigh of relief and felt the mushroom settle back in his chair and take pause aswell.
But there is no turning it off, those last mushroom have already made it past the liver and into the bloodstream and I can feel the receptor sites just flooding with molecules, the serotonin has no chance and this ride is far from over. There are iridescent blue and white sparks exploding out of my forehead, Like mini supernova, I know that each one is a receptor site getting a tryptamine molecule bonded and locked in place, brain fireworks exploding out into reality.
There's still half of the syrian rue joint lying in the ashtray so I light it, have a sip of water and lay back on the bed, if I close me eyes I know I'm going back there in a big way so I force them to stay open as I finish the rue, as I drop stub of it into the ashtray my arm flops to the bed, my eyes droop closed and the last thing I see is walls of egyptian/arabian motifs in earthy browns, mustard yellows and dark reds. I knew that was the rue, it was so unlike anything the mushroom ever does it had to be the middle eastern influence of the rue.
"well" said the mushroom "looks like we are both in for a show"
There is now a 2 hour hole in my report, because there is just no way to explain it, I just can't, I've sat here and typed and deleted about 5 paragraphs because none of them explain or describe it, language fails, I can kind of summarize it by saying that the observer position can get very hard to hold on to and when it is challenged you get into some deep water psychologically, "Be sure your mantras you don't bungle" McKenna once said when describing being cast into the billows, that's the best advice i can give too, whatever tactics you have to employ to find sane ground again after a high dose psychedelic experience then that's your experience and will be different from mine, All I could really do this time was hang on hanna and my only reassurance was the knowledge that I had taken a drug and that I was 3/4 through the trip and I know that I will live through this and it will end.
All I can say is - syrian rue land is far weirder than the clowns over in DMT land, if you want to see it you have to go there yourself.
After the 2 hours of that peak had passed the come down happened really quickly, I wasn't at baseline by any means but I was out of the clouds and compared to where I had just been I was pretty much down. I lay there for about another hour until the last of the grids had gone and then felt ravenously hungry. So still a bit wobbly I head for the kitchen and start to get a decent breakfast together.
OK - here's the last weird bit......
While I was standing at the kitchen stove waiting for toast... I had a total blackout..... I remember feeling a bit woozy for a few seconds and feeling the strength draining from my legs but the next thing I remember is a bang, as I hit the floor in an unconscious crumpled heap, Total blackout don't remember starting to collapse, don't remember falling, just a Bang !, darkness and then realizing i was lying on the floor.
It was bloody hard to finish the toast and coffee making, ridiculously hard, obviously I wasn't down yet at all and was dehydrating or loosing lifeforce or something, I've never blacked out like that before in my life.
The toast and coffee were brilliant, energy, nourishment, a grounding in 3d, the last remnants of the trip faded fast and I got really sleep really fast, i was buggered, just plain exhausted and I collapsed back into bed and sleep saved me from all experience, and a blessing it was.
Woke up 10 hours later and wrote this report.
Thanks heaps if you made it all the way to the end.
Be safe people.
webby
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