Asante
Bluelighter
- Joined
- May 4, 2012
- Messages
- 1,108
Guys, here's an old trip report of mine, almost 15 years old, with a retrospective 420 days after the session tacked on after it. Enjoy!
EXPLORERS IN THE FURTHER REGIONS OF EXPERIENCE
Where to begin? Where to start telling the tale of the night my Old Self died, died on my living-room couch? That fateful night had been long in the coming so let me briefly flash back a few years before telling the tale of last Friday, when I died and was born again on approximately 150 micrograms of LSD.
I?ve been a Psychedelic explorer for 11 years now and my first true voyage started in 1993 with 1.2 grams of Liberty Caps. (Psilocybe semilanceata) I have tripped approximately 100 times on mostly Psilocybin and LSD, using LSD only about once in every eight full-blown trips. As my experience grew the trips got evermore intense and difficult/bad trips started happening and naturally they intensified too.
In my view the so-called ?bad trips?, Hellish as they may be, are a sign you are experiencing life itself in it?s fullness, that you do not flee suffering but rather confront it.
But a few years ago a peculiar thing started happening every once in so many trips: I felt a Presence, demon or angel I could not tell, that asked me if I wanted to follow it. And I always have known that if I were to follow, there would be no turning back, that I would experience the greatest horrors imaginable. And so I declined, time and time again, not ready to go Beyond.
Last Friday night no such luxury as Choice was offered to me. LSD took me far beyond that boundary and made me face the greatest Hells imaginable, only to discover that the Gate of Heaven sometimes is to be found at the Center of Hell.
One of my Spiritual brothers and me got together for a weekend-long Session. The plan was to take a small dose of LSD on Friday night and then take a larger dose on Saturday afternoon. We had blotters that had tested to be 50 micrograms and microdots that had tested to be around 200 micrograms of Lysergide.
But it was not to be.
Blotter sheets, shortly after they are laid, are often hung out to dry. This can have the effect that the lower rim of the sheet through gravity accumulates more Lysergide solution and ends up having been laid with far more LSD than the rest of the sheet. These blotters are called ?sheet ends? and it happened to be so that on the night that we were to try a 50 microgram blotter they turned out to be well over 150 micrograms, a dose roughly comparable to 3.5gr (1/8 ounce) of dried Liberty Caps mushrooms, or 5 grams of regular Cubies (Psilocybe cubensis) as they are usually sold.
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After having picked up our weekend groceries, dined and waited 3 hours for our stomachs to empty, we both took our Lysergic blotter, a quarter-inch square of colorfully printed paper, and placed it under our tongues to absorb the LSD through the mucous membranes of our mouth.
This provides a rapid ascent and greater dose efficiency.
And a greater dose it was, exceeding the amount we had planned to take three times over.
We were aware in a minute and were steadily climbing some twenty minutes later. We had printed the Erowid dose/response graph for LSD and put that on the living-room table with the time of ingestion written onto it, which was to be 9 PM.
About one hour into it, 10 PM, we were clearly on higher ground. We had turned the light off and there were many visuals, but they were bleak. It was hard to gauge the extent of our inebriation. It proved to be the silence before the storm. A little later we both were intellectualizing and pacing around the living-room and kitchen, discussing all kinds of matters of the real world. We discovered we were clinging on rather then letting go of consensus reality, so we turned off the light again and looked inward, by which time it was clear that we had overshot the mark three times over, and that a Great Session was to unfold.
A candle was lit and guided our way through the night.
-----
We found ourselves intellectualizing once more.
?The queen ought to visit and give us a medal for still being in the Resistance sixty years after the war.? I joked, and indeed we were fleeing into rationality and again turned to introspection. By now it was obvious it was going to be a direly intense trip.
At about two hours into it, well after we had achieved plateau, we were subjected to the great mental compressions and decompressions of intensity that are called ?waves?, a fluctuating sensory and psychological intensity characteristic for Lysergide inebriation.
I started to feel an all-too-familiar aura. The room was shifting in color and lost proportion, looking almost like it were filled with water rather then air. I knew all too well what this meant: I was in the place where the Mushroom had taken me several times, but now on LSD, the place that lay between psychedelic voyages as I knew them and the Great Beyond that lay ahead.
The Mushroom had often asked whether I would follow, not unlike a telepathic experience or rather an intense thought emanating from my Subconscious.
LSD offered me no such choice: It pulled me right in, no questions asked.
I was starting to feel suffocation, as if I got no air, and this became evermore acute and intense. Finally it overcame most of the Trip and was quite overwhelming.
Oh God Almighty.. was I going to die?
I decided I had an acute anxiety attack and that the asphyxiating feeling was due to hyperventilation, so I slowed my breath and breathed through my cupped hands as to accumulate the CO2 my lungs needed to break the cycle of overbreathing.
It passed, but now my back locked into tight muscle tension like I never had experienced before.
?I feel like a Ninja Turtle, I already got the half-shell, but it remains to be seen whether I can be the hero I need to be this night.? Trippers in peril say the oddest things.
-----
The suffocation returned with a vengeance.
Suddenly separating barriers slammed shut between me and my Spiritual brother, I was in a cocoon that separated his reality from mine. When he spoke I heard him, but his words had lost all meaning to me. I knew he was making sense but it just did not register. I was mad, psychotic, clinically insane and dying by suffocation.
I walked off to the bathroom but was smitten in my kitchen and sat down right on the floor, looking away as my brother, now quite worried went to sit in front of me and started a talkdown which must?ve been a gem? if only I could register his words because nineteen out of twenty times I just could not understand and was kept away from his tender loving care.
?Ooohh.. I want out? Yup I want out of this mayhem.. I got a goal in life and that is to make it out of this madness.. This is the grandmother of all Bad Trips?? And my grandmother had died. And I knew that I was to die that night in agony and insanity.
My friend rationalized away, deeply involved in his Trip but committed to pull me into the comfortable space where he was. He had a basic trust that I in my frantic struggling did not possess..
?It can?t BE worse. I have reached rock bottom.? I replied to my Brother?s question, or at least I believe it was a response to what he had said.
I got up and hugged my Spiritual brother with all my might.
?Life is so hard.. It is so hard to hold on.. I don?t want to die?? he lovingly held me in his Spiritual embrace and I cried lamenting about my life. I believe he must?ve cried too.
After three million years we let go.
I went to the bathroom and slammed my ass on the bowl. The bathroom door and walls breathed and closed me in, but not nearly as confined as I was by my isolation from reality. I leaned with my head against the wall and was consumed by the torment. I was beside myself, looking at my tortured self sitting there.
I put my hand on my bare leg and looked at it.
My hand lost size and shape, my leg bubbled and boiled as if it were full of reptiles fighting their way out of a leathery egg.
?Oh GOD? Help me PLEASE??
It couldn?t be more from the heart. I was at the end, Sheet?s End, in the bowels of Lysergic Hell.
And then I felt it. That is when it happened. Amidst my suffering I sensed I was not alone. A benign force was with me. I felt the Presence of God.
-----
Somehow it felt like matter became transparent. I felt the Cosmos as One. I felt the galaxies through the walls, ceiling and straight through the Earth beneath my feet as if it were somehow transparent as glass. My hand on my leg now radiated with the Life Force, the flesh of my leg breathing and embracing my fingers.
My Brother asked if I were OK.
Yes. Somehow I was.
I was an organism, a suit of flesh wrapped around an Essence that was I. And I was not alone. A Force that encompassed and permeated everything was with me. The Universe was the Body of God and all matter was his Flesh.
There is nothing but Deity, and nothing does not follow the Master Plan. And my Hellish Death was entirely symbolic and I had to go through it that night.
Off the toilet.
Dying outstretched on my living-room couch.
I felt a calm come over me. I remembered it well: It was the calm I felt when I lay on the Heart Ward of the Intensive Care Unit with my heart attack, and Death was imminent. It was the Calm of Death.
This time a peace came over me that reassured me it was truly good to let go, even if I were to die by ceasing all struggling.
My Spiritual brother was talking non-stop trying to get me out.
?No: It is my destiny that I must die tonight. I?m going through a Grofian cycle of Ego Death and I must complete it. If I don?t complete this I will come out of this trip insane. Let me die.?
?Well, DIE THEN!? my Spiritual brother blurted out and seemed to feel sorry.
?You are forgiven. All is forgiven.? This I said from my death bed.
I would die, there was no doubt that at least my mind would die and that death was imminent.
Then he asked if it were good if he left me to go to the bathroom.
I said yes. He left, and I would die.
Peace in Death. The Psychedelic states, exceedingly strange as they may be, are deeply rooted into the fabric of reality. Having had a true Near-Death Experience I can vouch for the fact that the fears and torment that accompany Ego Death, and the calm that may follow, are identical to the struggle of Biological Death, exactly the same and every bit as intense as it can be when you will die.
I closed my eyes.
?Goodbye, my Ego. I have loved you with all my heart, but now you must die, die so I can be reborn anew. Goodbye, my Old Self??
The calm gripped me. I saw veins, and the blood sinking down through them. I saw my body as if from a distance. Detached from it, totally in peace as the hectic Voyage now hushed into a tranquility unlike anything before it.
Time dissolved.
-----
My Spiritual brother returned and I snapped back into my body. He poured out words of guidance and good intentions, but sky-flying on LSD his mind was vexed by my agony and he had locked into talkdown-mode.
I got up and ended up on the kitchen floor again. He sat down in front of me and we established connection, slowly but surely he got me connected again.
Bless him.
I was amidst the stars, the Earth and bricks of my house transparent to my mind and at one with Deity, the Deity that is the Universe, the sum of the Anything & All.
I still was in pain and very much out of tune with my Spiritual brother. But I was returning to normalcy, my Brother talking me down from the agony that still was.
?Keep going: I don?t know what you?re doing but it?s working.?
Slowly my agony dissolved and gave way to what Eastern Paths and the hippies of old call Cosmic Consciousness. I was to find Heaven in the deepest abyss of Hell.
I looked at my Spiritual brother. I was still a million miles away, my mind separated from his by the cocoon of separated realities. It dawned upon me that each organism is like that: fully isolated in their own universe with but few ways to communicate between them.
He had told me it was 1:30 AM which now dawned on me and it gave great comfort. I was in the midst of a raging LSD trip, approaching the peak. I wasn?t insane, I wasn?t experiencing the aftermath with me emerging shattered and mentally unstuck: we were a mere four and a half hours into it, a good two hours before the descent would even present itself and we had traveled only but one-third of the way.
?I want to be who I am. I really want to be who I am.. I want to LIVE..?
This was far more then a yearning for sobriety: this was nothing short of a renewed commitment to life itself. I felt profoundly changed after my Ego had died on that couch.
I was no longer suffering. I was beyond conflict and out Exploring once more.
-----
I wanted to go outside to see the Cosmos, my Spiritual brother opened the door and told me the sky was overcast by clouds, no Cosmos to see.
?Oh trust me: it?s there.?
Back on the couch.
I closed my eyes and there was so much to behold, most of it symbolic and three-dimensional.
Suddenly I was gripped by imagery.
I saw Africans. Men, women and children, not just imagery but I felt them like I had been them another time around, that I had known them. I held their memories and accumulated them until I experienced what seemed like racial, ancestral memories of the suffering and greatness of our African heritage and those who remained in Africa after my later ancestors left the continent for the lush forests of Europe, paling in skin, hair and eyes as the memory of our ancestry receded to our innermost minds.
Then, when the full scope of the experience was reached, the imagery and memories shrunk into the tiniest of the tiny to merge into a minute speck of a geometric patterning I saw before my eyes. I felt like this sequence was part of the pattern, and that the pattern was the Energy Form of the Universe.
We got up off the couch again into the kitchen.
I was overcome by the organismic Experience. My Spiritual brother and I so clearly were animal beings walking the surface of a planet, I felt One with all the Beings that ever were or will be.
I sliced an orange in two and shared it with my Brother.
I leaned to the sink and sank my teeth into it, overcome by the organismic experience of eating. Suddenly I was overwhelmed by the feeling of being a young African boy, leaning against a hot loam wall in a village eating a piece of fruit. This lasted a split second but gave me great joy: I knew I had been that boy in a former lifetime and would become him again, fully convinced reincarnation is absolute and the Divine Force is perfect and infinite.
Then Divinity let itself be truly felt and filled me. My Spiritual brother talked about his love and devotion for Jesus Christ.
?Back off with the Christianity!?
I said this rather harshly because I felt the Divine Force touching me, that it was All Gods of All Religions, that it was Jesus and Mohammed and Buddha in one, and my Brother?s loving words from his Christian faith felt like they tried to fence in the Deity that revealed itself to me right then and there.
The God/Goddess/Force truly is the Anything and All.
I remained in Cosmic Consciousness for the longest time, aware of the galaxies and stars that are all around, aware of this Force that encompassed the Anything and All and acutely aware of my organismic nature and our shared but separate universes.
Beyond the six-hour point we started a peaceful descent and discussion of what we had experienced but I was too overcome by the naked intensity of what I had lived through to grasp his experience, no matter how I wanted to I grasp his Journey I was filled to the brim with my own experience.
?God is ready with me this weekend. I will not take LSD again for some months but I definitely will take it again.?
It is odd, but those five hours between 10 PM and 3 AM seemed to last an entire day, but the five hours of the descent that followed passed almost unnoticed as we told of our experiences and tried to piece together where our experiences had merged and where they had parted.
Around the tenth hour we popped open a beer to celebrate our Journey, and later on we went to sleep. We clanged together our shotglasses of ice-cold J?germeister and toasted.
?To Brotherhood.?
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Then he went to the guestroom and I went to bed myself.
In darkness there was much imagery but all too soon I drifted off into deep sleep. My final dream before awakening was that I stood in front of a closet with many compartments and was neatly arranging the matters of Life into the appropriate places.
When I woke I sat down on the couch where my former Ego had died only a few hours ago. I wept overcome by the sheer beauty of the Divine Force that had revealed it?s presence to me. I was in awe and joy. This experience of the Divine I was to take with me beyond the days of the Voyage and even though my rational mind distances itself from it my Spiritual self was uniquely enriched by it.
I grabbed the phone and called my other Spiritual brother, a Tripteam-mate who couldn?t make it to this Session and blew him away.
?Full Intensity. I lived my worst fear and got through it. I feel reborn. I know I will meet with these Hells again, and far worse then I did now, but I know that if you truly surrender to Hell, Heaven awaits.?
We talked and talked until his mobile phone battery went flat and that night he joined us. We then embarked on an MDMA-Journey which made it the best, most productive Session the three of us have ever had. Having been filled to the brim I could use this second journey to recall and integrate my LSD experience into my memory and mind. It became clear to me that the pains endured in the Entheogenic Experience are not without use and that they can be great opportunities for Personal and Spiritual Growth if you fully surrender to them and not hold back to experience them to their full extent.
In the Empathogenic state that MDMA brought about the three of us celebrated our Spiritual Brotherhood, re-affirmed our bonding and shared our love and respect for our Selves, each other and the Deep Path the three of us are walking together.
The Spiritual brotherhood, the Cult of Three...
Explorers in the Further Regions of Experience.
Explorers in the Further Regions of Experience
-- A Retrospective 420 days after the trip
Today I was running through my files when I stumbled upon my trip report called "Explorers in the Further Regions of Experience". It was quite an experience to have. You often read intense reports and find yourself thinking: "I wonder what happened afterward".
I reached for my pocket calculator and it just so happened to be that that Journey took place 420 days ago. Reading the report I decided a retrospective would be called for, after all this is rarely done.
Such an intense Journey... How would someone integrate that into their lives? What would still be left of the experience fourteen months later?
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First of all, the Brotherhood of Three is still on the Path, we've had our bumps in the road as any good friendship has, but the Spirit of what was there fourteen months ago is still very alive today. Our friendships developed further and there has been Growth for the three of us, both as a Whole and for our personal selves.
Back in the day I was a bit displeased that erowid.org chose to file this experience under "Bad Trips". To me, it didn't feel like that at the time, just a very hard experience with a wonderfully positive outcome. But looking back I can see why they chose to file it like they did. The beginning surely was quite nightmarish.
I exposed my father to the report and it upset him quite a bit. He was worried to read his son go to such realms of suffering on LSD, and the essence and benefit of the mystical experience that follows in his wake isn't clear to him, like it often isn't to those without personal experience in sailing the Lysergic seas of consciousness. We had some good talks about it and he now accepts it, even though it is now abundantly clear to him he does not want to take part in elesdious adventures.
But as for my personal experiences, let me get into those now.
That particular Journey was a watershed in my personal development. It put me on a crossroads and I feel I have definitely chosen the best of the Paths offered to me.
First of all, it resulted in a lot of fears about the safety of the Experience having been put to rest, and with it I gained a higher confidence in my ability to withstand the gales of Life itself. Ever since that experience my inner calm and confidence has been fortified, and I say this 420 days after the fact.
Before that Journey I latently harbored a fear that one day perhaps something intense would happen, which would result in me losing my grasp on reality. In the weeks after the Experience this latent lifelong fear slowly subsided and gave way to an inner confidence that this will not happen, and if it would then I'd cross that bridge when I find it, instead of consistently fearing it deep down in the back of my mind.
As for the other primal fear of Man, the fear of Death, that's still fully in place as I have not yet completed the full Ego Death cycle.
The onset of suffocation marked the point where a panic attack had set in, triggered by the realization that I was in this experience for better or for worse, which followed the shift that signaled a deepening of the experience. It eventually could have ended when I laid down and died, thus surrendering completely to the Death Experience, and with it my worst fear of total loss of control. External circumstances prevented this Ego Death cycle, and with it my surrender, to go into completion.
At first, my spiritual Brother and I both fled into rationalizations to escape the confrontation with the Self. Then, the deepening of the Experience sucked me in and I was into the Experience, for better or for worse. My spiritual Brother however could not let go and clung onto his Ego by throwing himself headfirst into giving me a talkdown and reassurances, which unfortunately both succeeded in keeping his LSD experience from reaching the Innermost Realms, and at the same time his constant preoccupation with my mindstate gave me a strong stimulus to cling onto myself, aiding my escape attempts and, once he returned from the toilet, disrupting my Ego Death sequence by immediately pouncing on my perceived peril.
Letting go is the most difficult problem for all of us, but my spiritual Brother unfortunately is very successful in holding on. We are insistently trying to get him over the edge to the point of losing control, and this is in fact a heartfelt goal of his, but he manages to stay afloat at lab-tested doses up to 250mcg of LSD. It may seem odd that his desire, and a group objective, is to plunge him into loss of control, but we firmly believe that the greatest treasures are to be found there. So unfortunately this particular experience was a turning point in my personal growth, but for him did not lead to a psychological breakthrough.
And then there was God.
Oh yes, the definite turning point where Cosmic Consciousness broke through signaling my high degree of surrender. It was so beautiful, and it proved to be so nurturing and healing in my life ever after, and again I say this at 420 days after that night of LSD.
Words cannot express the reward of experiencing Cosmic Consciousness. This is perhaps the greatest of all rewards, as it increases basic trust in the very essence of the Universe itself.
I now stronger than before adhere to the concept of the Holotropic Universe, that everything is present in all things. I've expanded my mystical universe further and now hold the belief that not just everything is present in all things but that Time is the sole divider that separates the one from the other.
At the moment of Death, will time cease to pass, will you yourself pass over or will time expand to encompass the anything and all? Will there be a void, a rebirth or will we become One with everything, in essence, become God as the boundaries of our individuality dissolves?
What really dies on your deathbed? Perhaps the symbolics of Ego Death will shed more light on it for me in the future.
And an upsurge of ancestral memories, when I went back to Africa, the cradle of humanity. The experience of not merging but actually being these people I beheld, as well as feeling to have been each of them and having known the others. It fortified my belief that perhaps we all, truly are One.
Words can not express the wonder I felt, and still feel, of these ancestral past life memories that i saw through my closed eyes and felt through my Being.
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In the sessions after this one I have had an increasing willingness to surrender completely to the experience, and experience the Heavens and Hells of it to their full intensity. In that partial Ego Death on my living room couch on that fateful night, a part of my life fears have died, and died for good. That one Voyage was the clearest proof for me to this date that the process and LSD not just have great psychological safety if it is done correctly, but also that indeed remarkable treasures are to be gained.
Above all that one voyage on LSD fortified that I really, sincerely, believe in the value of Entheogenic compounds and that I really, sincerely, want to walk this Path. Many spiritual teachers claim that the LSD experience is nothing but smoke and mirrors. I can now say from the heart and with great conviction that they are wrong, and know not of what they speak. That night affirmed to me that indeed here is more to Entheogens than exotic experience and emotional sensation. For the one who knows where to look it can be a spiritual path, which personal growth results are every bit as valuable as the formal schools of Spirituality can offer, and every bit as personal. That night of LSD changed my life for the better, I have said that then and I say this now, with full conviction, fourteen months after.
That night has affirmed to me that I am, and will remain, Explorer in the Further Regions of Experience.
Tagged by Xorkoth
substancecode_lsd
substancecode_lysergamides
explevel_experienced
exptype_positive
exptype_spiritual
exptype_lifechanging
exptype_difficult
roacode_sublingual
EXPLORERS IN THE FURTHER REGIONS OF EXPERIENCE
Where to begin? Where to start telling the tale of the night my Old Self died, died on my living-room couch? That fateful night had been long in the coming so let me briefly flash back a few years before telling the tale of last Friday, when I died and was born again on approximately 150 micrograms of LSD.
I?ve been a Psychedelic explorer for 11 years now and my first true voyage started in 1993 with 1.2 grams of Liberty Caps. (Psilocybe semilanceata) I have tripped approximately 100 times on mostly Psilocybin and LSD, using LSD only about once in every eight full-blown trips. As my experience grew the trips got evermore intense and difficult/bad trips started happening and naturally they intensified too.
In my view the so-called ?bad trips?, Hellish as they may be, are a sign you are experiencing life itself in it?s fullness, that you do not flee suffering but rather confront it.
But a few years ago a peculiar thing started happening every once in so many trips: I felt a Presence, demon or angel I could not tell, that asked me if I wanted to follow it. And I always have known that if I were to follow, there would be no turning back, that I would experience the greatest horrors imaginable. And so I declined, time and time again, not ready to go Beyond.
Last Friday night no such luxury as Choice was offered to me. LSD took me far beyond that boundary and made me face the greatest Hells imaginable, only to discover that the Gate of Heaven sometimes is to be found at the Center of Hell.
One of my Spiritual brothers and me got together for a weekend-long Session. The plan was to take a small dose of LSD on Friday night and then take a larger dose on Saturday afternoon. We had blotters that had tested to be 50 micrograms and microdots that had tested to be around 200 micrograms of Lysergide.
But it was not to be.
Blotter sheets, shortly after they are laid, are often hung out to dry. This can have the effect that the lower rim of the sheet through gravity accumulates more Lysergide solution and ends up having been laid with far more LSD than the rest of the sheet. These blotters are called ?sheet ends? and it happened to be so that on the night that we were to try a 50 microgram blotter they turned out to be well over 150 micrograms, a dose roughly comparable to 3.5gr (1/8 ounce) of dried Liberty Caps mushrooms, or 5 grams of regular Cubies (Psilocybe cubensis) as they are usually sold.
-----
After having picked up our weekend groceries, dined and waited 3 hours for our stomachs to empty, we both took our Lysergic blotter, a quarter-inch square of colorfully printed paper, and placed it under our tongues to absorb the LSD through the mucous membranes of our mouth.
This provides a rapid ascent and greater dose efficiency.
And a greater dose it was, exceeding the amount we had planned to take three times over.
We were aware in a minute and were steadily climbing some twenty minutes later. We had printed the Erowid dose/response graph for LSD and put that on the living-room table with the time of ingestion written onto it, which was to be 9 PM.
About one hour into it, 10 PM, we were clearly on higher ground. We had turned the light off and there were many visuals, but they were bleak. It was hard to gauge the extent of our inebriation. It proved to be the silence before the storm. A little later we both were intellectualizing and pacing around the living-room and kitchen, discussing all kinds of matters of the real world. We discovered we were clinging on rather then letting go of consensus reality, so we turned off the light again and looked inward, by which time it was clear that we had overshot the mark three times over, and that a Great Session was to unfold.
A candle was lit and guided our way through the night.
-----
We found ourselves intellectualizing once more.
?The queen ought to visit and give us a medal for still being in the Resistance sixty years after the war.? I joked, and indeed we were fleeing into rationality and again turned to introspection. By now it was obvious it was going to be a direly intense trip.
At about two hours into it, well after we had achieved plateau, we were subjected to the great mental compressions and decompressions of intensity that are called ?waves?, a fluctuating sensory and psychological intensity characteristic for Lysergide inebriation.
I started to feel an all-too-familiar aura. The room was shifting in color and lost proportion, looking almost like it were filled with water rather then air. I knew all too well what this meant: I was in the place where the Mushroom had taken me several times, but now on LSD, the place that lay between psychedelic voyages as I knew them and the Great Beyond that lay ahead.
The Mushroom had often asked whether I would follow, not unlike a telepathic experience or rather an intense thought emanating from my Subconscious.
LSD offered me no such choice: It pulled me right in, no questions asked.
I was starting to feel suffocation, as if I got no air, and this became evermore acute and intense. Finally it overcame most of the Trip and was quite overwhelming.
Oh God Almighty.. was I going to die?
I decided I had an acute anxiety attack and that the asphyxiating feeling was due to hyperventilation, so I slowed my breath and breathed through my cupped hands as to accumulate the CO2 my lungs needed to break the cycle of overbreathing.
It passed, but now my back locked into tight muscle tension like I never had experienced before.
?I feel like a Ninja Turtle, I already got the half-shell, but it remains to be seen whether I can be the hero I need to be this night.? Trippers in peril say the oddest things.
-----
The suffocation returned with a vengeance.
Suddenly separating barriers slammed shut between me and my Spiritual brother, I was in a cocoon that separated his reality from mine. When he spoke I heard him, but his words had lost all meaning to me. I knew he was making sense but it just did not register. I was mad, psychotic, clinically insane and dying by suffocation.
I walked off to the bathroom but was smitten in my kitchen and sat down right on the floor, looking away as my brother, now quite worried went to sit in front of me and started a talkdown which must?ve been a gem? if only I could register his words because nineteen out of twenty times I just could not understand and was kept away from his tender loving care.
?Ooohh.. I want out? Yup I want out of this mayhem.. I got a goal in life and that is to make it out of this madness.. This is the grandmother of all Bad Trips?? And my grandmother had died. And I knew that I was to die that night in agony and insanity.
My friend rationalized away, deeply involved in his Trip but committed to pull me into the comfortable space where he was. He had a basic trust that I in my frantic struggling did not possess..
?It can?t BE worse. I have reached rock bottom.? I replied to my Brother?s question, or at least I believe it was a response to what he had said.
I got up and hugged my Spiritual brother with all my might.
?Life is so hard.. It is so hard to hold on.. I don?t want to die?? he lovingly held me in his Spiritual embrace and I cried lamenting about my life. I believe he must?ve cried too.
After three million years we let go.
I went to the bathroom and slammed my ass on the bowl. The bathroom door and walls breathed and closed me in, but not nearly as confined as I was by my isolation from reality. I leaned with my head against the wall and was consumed by the torment. I was beside myself, looking at my tortured self sitting there.
I put my hand on my bare leg and looked at it.
My hand lost size and shape, my leg bubbled and boiled as if it were full of reptiles fighting their way out of a leathery egg.
?Oh GOD? Help me PLEASE??
It couldn?t be more from the heart. I was at the end, Sheet?s End, in the bowels of Lysergic Hell.
And then I felt it. That is when it happened. Amidst my suffering I sensed I was not alone. A benign force was with me. I felt the Presence of God.
-----
Somehow it felt like matter became transparent. I felt the Cosmos as One. I felt the galaxies through the walls, ceiling and straight through the Earth beneath my feet as if it were somehow transparent as glass. My hand on my leg now radiated with the Life Force, the flesh of my leg breathing and embracing my fingers.
My Brother asked if I were OK.
Yes. Somehow I was.
I was an organism, a suit of flesh wrapped around an Essence that was I. And I was not alone. A Force that encompassed and permeated everything was with me. The Universe was the Body of God and all matter was his Flesh.
There is nothing but Deity, and nothing does not follow the Master Plan. And my Hellish Death was entirely symbolic and I had to go through it that night.
Off the toilet.
Dying outstretched on my living-room couch.
I felt a calm come over me. I remembered it well: It was the calm I felt when I lay on the Heart Ward of the Intensive Care Unit with my heart attack, and Death was imminent. It was the Calm of Death.
This time a peace came over me that reassured me it was truly good to let go, even if I were to die by ceasing all struggling.
My Spiritual brother was talking non-stop trying to get me out.
?No: It is my destiny that I must die tonight. I?m going through a Grofian cycle of Ego Death and I must complete it. If I don?t complete this I will come out of this trip insane. Let me die.?
?Well, DIE THEN!? my Spiritual brother blurted out and seemed to feel sorry.
?You are forgiven. All is forgiven.? This I said from my death bed.
I would die, there was no doubt that at least my mind would die and that death was imminent.
Then he asked if it were good if he left me to go to the bathroom.
I said yes. He left, and I would die.
Peace in Death. The Psychedelic states, exceedingly strange as they may be, are deeply rooted into the fabric of reality. Having had a true Near-Death Experience I can vouch for the fact that the fears and torment that accompany Ego Death, and the calm that may follow, are identical to the struggle of Biological Death, exactly the same and every bit as intense as it can be when you will die.
I closed my eyes.
?Goodbye, my Ego. I have loved you with all my heart, but now you must die, die so I can be reborn anew. Goodbye, my Old Self??
The calm gripped me. I saw veins, and the blood sinking down through them. I saw my body as if from a distance. Detached from it, totally in peace as the hectic Voyage now hushed into a tranquility unlike anything before it.
Time dissolved.
-----
My Spiritual brother returned and I snapped back into my body. He poured out words of guidance and good intentions, but sky-flying on LSD his mind was vexed by my agony and he had locked into talkdown-mode.
I got up and ended up on the kitchen floor again. He sat down in front of me and we established connection, slowly but surely he got me connected again.
Bless him.
I was amidst the stars, the Earth and bricks of my house transparent to my mind and at one with Deity, the Deity that is the Universe, the sum of the Anything & All.
I still was in pain and very much out of tune with my Spiritual brother. But I was returning to normalcy, my Brother talking me down from the agony that still was.
?Keep going: I don?t know what you?re doing but it?s working.?
Slowly my agony dissolved and gave way to what Eastern Paths and the hippies of old call Cosmic Consciousness. I was to find Heaven in the deepest abyss of Hell.
I looked at my Spiritual brother. I was still a million miles away, my mind separated from his by the cocoon of separated realities. It dawned upon me that each organism is like that: fully isolated in their own universe with but few ways to communicate between them.
He had told me it was 1:30 AM which now dawned on me and it gave great comfort. I was in the midst of a raging LSD trip, approaching the peak. I wasn?t insane, I wasn?t experiencing the aftermath with me emerging shattered and mentally unstuck: we were a mere four and a half hours into it, a good two hours before the descent would even present itself and we had traveled only but one-third of the way.
?I want to be who I am. I really want to be who I am.. I want to LIVE..?
This was far more then a yearning for sobriety: this was nothing short of a renewed commitment to life itself. I felt profoundly changed after my Ego had died on that couch.
I was no longer suffering. I was beyond conflict and out Exploring once more.
-----
I wanted to go outside to see the Cosmos, my Spiritual brother opened the door and told me the sky was overcast by clouds, no Cosmos to see.
?Oh trust me: it?s there.?
Back on the couch.
I closed my eyes and there was so much to behold, most of it symbolic and three-dimensional.
Suddenly I was gripped by imagery.
I saw Africans. Men, women and children, not just imagery but I felt them like I had been them another time around, that I had known them. I held their memories and accumulated them until I experienced what seemed like racial, ancestral memories of the suffering and greatness of our African heritage and those who remained in Africa after my later ancestors left the continent for the lush forests of Europe, paling in skin, hair and eyes as the memory of our ancestry receded to our innermost minds.
Then, when the full scope of the experience was reached, the imagery and memories shrunk into the tiniest of the tiny to merge into a minute speck of a geometric patterning I saw before my eyes. I felt like this sequence was part of the pattern, and that the pattern was the Energy Form of the Universe.
We got up off the couch again into the kitchen.
I was overcome by the organismic Experience. My Spiritual brother and I so clearly were animal beings walking the surface of a planet, I felt One with all the Beings that ever were or will be.
I sliced an orange in two and shared it with my Brother.
I leaned to the sink and sank my teeth into it, overcome by the organismic experience of eating. Suddenly I was overwhelmed by the feeling of being a young African boy, leaning against a hot loam wall in a village eating a piece of fruit. This lasted a split second but gave me great joy: I knew I had been that boy in a former lifetime and would become him again, fully convinced reincarnation is absolute and the Divine Force is perfect and infinite.
Then Divinity let itself be truly felt and filled me. My Spiritual brother talked about his love and devotion for Jesus Christ.
?Back off with the Christianity!?
I said this rather harshly because I felt the Divine Force touching me, that it was All Gods of All Religions, that it was Jesus and Mohammed and Buddha in one, and my Brother?s loving words from his Christian faith felt like they tried to fence in the Deity that revealed itself to me right then and there.
The God/Goddess/Force truly is the Anything and All.
I remained in Cosmic Consciousness for the longest time, aware of the galaxies and stars that are all around, aware of this Force that encompassed the Anything and All and acutely aware of my organismic nature and our shared but separate universes.
Beyond the six-hour point we started a peaceful descent and discussion of what we had experienced but I was too overcome by the naked intensity of what I had lived through to grasp his experience, no matter how I wanted to I grasp his Journey I was filled to the brim with my own experience.
?God is ready with me this weekend. I will not take LSD again for some months but I definitely will take it again.?
It is odd, but those five hours between 10 PM and 3 AM seemed to last an entire day, but the five hours of the descent that followed passed almost unnoticed as we told of our experiences and tried to piece together where our experiences had merged and where they had parted.
Around the tenth hour we popped open a beer to celebrate our Journey, and later on we went to sleep. We clanged together our shotglasses of ice-cold J?germeister and toasted.
?To Brotherhood.?
-----
Then he went to the guestroom and I went to bed myself.
In darkness there was much imagery but all too soon I drifted off into deep sleep. My final dream before awakening was that I stood in front of a closet with many compartments and was neatly arranging the matters of Life into the appropriate places.
When I woke I sat down on the couch where my former Ego had died only a few hours ago. I wept overcome by the sheer beauty of the Divine Force that had revealed it?s presence to me. I was in awe and joy. This experience of the Divine I was to take with me beyond the days of the Voyage and even though my rational mind distances itself from it my Spiritual self was uniquely enriched by it.
I grabbed the phone and called my other Spiritual brother, a Tripteam-mate who couldn?t make it to this Session and blew him away.
?Full Intensity. I lived my worst fear and got through it. I feel reborn. I know I will meet with these Hells again, and far worse then I did now, but I know that if you truly surrender to Hell, Heaven awaits.?
We talked and talked until his mobile phone battery went flat and that night he joined us. We then embarked on an MDMA-Journey which made it the best, most productive Session the three of us have ever had. Having been filled to the brim I could use this second journey to recall and integrate my LSD experience into my memory and mind. It became clear to me that the pains endured in the Entheogenic Experience are not without use and that they can be great opportunities for Personal and Spiritual Growth if you fully surrender to them and not hold back to experience them to their full extent.
In the Empathogenic state that MDMA brought about the three of us celebrated our Spiritual Brotherhood, re-affirmed our bonding and shared our love and respect for our Selves, each other and the Deep Path the three of us are walking together.
The Spiritual brotherhood, the Cult of Three...
Explorers in the Further Regions of Experience.
Explorers in the Further Regions of Experience
-- A Retrospective 420 days after the trip
Today I was running through my files when I stumbled upon my trip report called "Explorers in the Further Regions of Experience". It was quite an experience to have. You often read intense reports and find yourself thinking: "I wonder what happened afterward".
I reached for my pocket calculator and it just so happened to be that that Journey took place 420 days ago. Reading the report I decided a retrospective would be called for, after all this is rarely done.
Such an intense Journey... How would someone integrate that into their lives? What would still be left of the experience fourteen months later?
-----
First of all, the Brotherhood of Three is still on the Path, we've had our bumps in the road as any good friendship has, but the Spirit of what was there fourteen months ago is still very alive today. Our friendships developed further and there has been Growth for the three of us, both as a Whole and for our personal selves.
Back in the day I was a bit displeased that erowid.org chose to file this experience under "Bad Trips". To me, it didn't feel like that at the time, just a very hard experience with a wonderfully positive outcome. But looking back I can see why they chose to file it like they did. The beginning surely was quite nightmarish.
I exposed my father to the report and it upset him quite a bit. He was worried to read his son go to such realms of suffering on LSD, and the essence and benefit of the mystical experience that follows in his wake isn't clear to him, like it often isn't to those without personal experience in sailing the Lysergic seas of consciousness. We had some good talks about it and he now accepts it, even though it is now abundantly clear to him he does not want to take part in elesdious adventures.
But as for my personal experiences, let me get into those now.
That particular Journey was a watershed in my personal development. It put me on a crossroads and I feel I have definitely chosen the best of the Paths offered to me.
First of all, it resulted in a lot of fears about the safety of the Experience having been put to rest, and with it I gained a higher confidence in my ability to withstand the gales of Life itself. Ever since that experience my inner calm and confidence has been fortified, and I say this 420 days after the fact.
Before that Journey I latently harbored a fear that one day perhaps something intense would happen, which would result in me losing my grasp on reality. In the weeks after the Experience this latent lifelong fear slowly subsided and gave way to an inner confidence that this will not happen, and if it would then I'd cross that bridge when I find it, instead of consistently fearing it deep down in the back of my mind.
As for the other primal fear of Man, the fear of Death, that's still fully in place as I have not yet completed the full Ego Death cycle.
The onset of suffocation marked the point where a panic attack had set in, triggered by the realization that I was in this experience for better or for worse, which followed the shift that signaled a deepening of the experience. It eventually could have ended when I laid down and died, thus surrendering completely to the Death Experience, and with it my worst fear of total loss of control. External circumstances prevented this Ego Death cycle, and with it my surrender, to go into completion.
At first, my spiritual Brother and I both fled into rationalizations to escape the confrontation with the Self. Then, the deepening of the Experience sucked me in and I was into the Experience, for better or for worse. My spiritual Brother however could not let go and clung onto his Ego by throwing himself headfirst into giving me a talkdown and reassurances, which unfortunately both succeeded in keeping his LSD experience from reaching the Innermost Realms, and at the same time his constant preoccupation with my mindstate gave me a strong stimulus to cling onto myself, aiding my escape attempts and, once he returned from the toilet, disrupting my Ego Death sequence by immediately pouncing on my perceived peril.
Letting go is the most difficult problem for all of us, but my spiritual Brother unfortunately is very successful in holding on. We are insistently trying to get him over the edge to the point of losing control, and this is in fact a heartfelt goal of his, but he manages to stay afloat at lab-tested doses up to 250mcg of LSD. It may seem odd that his desire, and a group objective, is to plunge him into loss of control, but we firmly believe that the greatest treasures are to be found there. So unfortunately this particular experience was a turning point in my personal growth, but for him did not lead to a psychological breakthrough.
And then there was God.
Oh yes, the definite turning point where Cosmic Consciousness broke through signaling my high degree of surrender. It was so beautiful, and it proved to be so nurturing and healing in my life ever after, and again I say this at 420 days after that night of LSD.
Words cannot express the reward of experiencing Cosmic Consciousness. This is perhaps the greatest of all rewards, as it increases basic trust in the very essence of the Universe itself.
I now stronger than before adhere to the concept of the Holotropic Universe, that everything is present in all things. I've expanded my mystical universe further and now hold the belief that not just everything is present in all things but that Time is the sole divider that separates the one from the other.
At the moment of Death, will time cease to pass, will you yourself pass over or will time expand to encompass the anything and all? Will there be a void, a rebirth or will we become One with everything, in essence, become God as the boundaries of our individuality dissolves?
What really dies on your deathbed? Perhaps the symbolics of Ego Death will shed more light on it for me in the future.
And an upsurge of ancestral memories, when I went back to Africa, the cradle of humanity. The experience of not merging but actually being these people I beheld, as well as feeling to have been each of them and having known the others. It fortified my belief that perhaps we all, truly are One.
Words can not express the wonder I felt, and still feel, of these ancestral past life memories that i saw through my closed eyes and felt through my Being.
-----
In the sessions after this one I have had an increasing willingness to surrender completely to the experience, and experience the Heavens and Hells of it to their full intensity. In that partial Ego Death on my living room couch on that fateful night, a part of my life fears have died, and died for good. That one Voyage was the clearest proof for me to this date that the process and LSD not just have great psychological safety if it is done correctly, but also that indeed remarkable treasures are to be gained.
Above all that one voyage on LSD fortified that I really, sincerely, believe in the value of Entheogenic compounds and that I really, sincerely, want to walk this Path. Many spiritual teachers claim that the LSD experience is nothing but smoke and mirrors. I can now say from the heart and with great conviction that they are wrong, and know not of what they speak. That night affirmed to me that indeed here is more to Entheogens than exotic experience and emotional sensation. For the one who knows where to look it can be a spiritual path, which personal growth results are every bit as valuable as the formal schools of Spirituality can offer, and every bit as personal. That night of LSD changed my life for the better, I have said that then and I say this now, with full conviction, fourteen months after.
That night has affirmed to me that I am, and will remain, Explorer in the Further Regions of Experience.
Tagged by Xorkoth
substancecode_lsd
substancecode_lysergamides
explevel_experienced
exptype_positive
exptype_spiritual
exptype_lifechanging
exptype_difficult
roacode_sublingual
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