I finally found LSD.
I've changed a lot
since getting turned on to psychedelics. Four years ago I was a rigid
atheists starting his first year of college. I watched Hitchens
debates as I fell asleep. That will give the right kind of person a
clear image of the kind of ego I insisted on cultivating. A chance
mushroom experience with some close friends sent me down a trail
where the voices of Duncan Trussell and Joe Rogan boomed through the
foliage, statues of Terrence McKenna and Robert Anton Wilson stood
among the trees winking at me, dozens of books laid along the way,
notably PIHKAL and Prometheus Rising, and the Ghost of Jung served as
my Virgil with his scepter of synchronicity.
I've spent years in
this allegorical forest. Always with my cellphone, half connected to the world I
feel myself detached from but not abandoning. I don't think we're
suppose to leave our brothers and sisters so we can go to the top of
a mountain and sit raptured by our meetings with Godhead. Its harder
to stay and try to help. I want to stay and help.
Over the course of a couple of years, I've put a total of nine or ten tabs on my tongue. Some giving a twinge of
rainbowic visions, some offering trailing images, and others only
giving a sense of mild anxiety and artificial hyperness. All of them
feeling like visual play things but nothing more.
Wednesday night at 3:03 am, I put the 11th tab on my tongue and the moment it touched it, I felt a barely perceivable electric shock. I will always have the skeptic is my head, and he is asking, “Did you imagine that or did it really happen?” My skeptic got his ass beat that night. I don't know whether or not it was “real.” And as I learned that night, it doesn't matter. What matters is what is experienced. The experiential is real.
Wednesday night at 3:03 am, I put the 11th tab on my tongue and the moment it touched it, I felt a barely perceivable electric shock. I will always have the skeptic is my head, and he is asking, “Did you imagine that or did it really happen?” My skeptic got his ass beat that night. I don't know whether or not it was “real.” And as I learned that night, it doesn't matter. What matters is what is experienced. The experiential is real.
A quick side note
for other explorers. Erowid is invaluable. Thank you Erowid. Most
“acid” is not acid. If it is bitter, it is not acid. If it does
not glow under ultraviolet light, it is not acid. Most tabs we are
putting in our mouths are nBOMEs. Do your research. Be careful. Good
luck.
As I start to try to
explain the following eight hours, know that my words are worlds from the experience, but such is the case for all writing.
Writing being one of the skills my meat suit has acquired, it will be
the spear and net I use to go hunting with in that dimension. Although, trying to capture this experience isn't so much a hunt as it is an offering only Atlas
could shoulder. What was given was a world, what I have
brought back is only a handful of sand. Some try conveying the mystical with paint, others with dance,
with love, spoken, and some remain silent out of respect. We all have an
artistic function.
The events aren't
necessarily in chronological order. They are landmarks.
Okay, so, I've taken
the tab. I'm with four friends. Two took a tab with me who also first
timers. The other two had already taken these same tabs a couple nights ago. They were our guides tonight.
I sat and talked with one of the sober ones the first thirty minutes after ingesting the tab. We talked about psychiatry. Her and I are both interested in the profession. I was talking at length about transference and how she should be careful about it in the future. Bless her and most of my friends for indulging me. I talk a lot. She she is attractive, paired with the inherent power imbalance of therapist and client, I thought it an important idea worth discussing.
I sat and talked with one of the sober ones the first thirty minutes after ingesting the tab. We talked about psychiatry. Her and I are both interested in the profession. I was talking at length about transference and how she should be careful about it in the future. Bless her and most of my friends for indulging me. I talk a lot. She she is attractive, paired with the inherent power imbalance of therapist and client, I thought it an important idea worth discussing.
At some point, I
remember looking at the carpet, and I had the audacity to think that
the tab wasn't the real deal. On cue, I began seeing a spinning
translucent kaleidoscopic image. It was like a kaleidoscope was superimposed on my visual field. There it calmly spun. I must have gazed into this vision silently for at least thirty minutes.
*Now a note needs to
be added, I've taken a lot of psychedelics at various amounts, and hallucinations are something that don't happen to me. I've taken 5
grams of mushrooms and the most I've seen, really seen, were
vague symbols on the ground and in the carpet. The rest have been
color enhancements, distortions and the like. This was my first true
hallucination.
Safe to say the tab
was the real deal. From this moment, time wasn't experienced the
same. The best I can describe it, was that during that time, I had
about six to seven mental breaths. The inhales were the chemical
effects and the exhales were these brief moments of resurfacing,
mental facilities totally intact, every time thinking, “is it
over?” Nope. It was like I was being forced to scuba dive. Whenever I'm under the water, recording Erick is offline. Whenever I'm back at the surface, Ego Erick would come back online and I'd have a moment to marvel at the beautiful chaos. Then submerged again.
So my first dive
into this experience began with the kaleidoscope. The next landmark
in the whirl of experiences was when the girl I was talking to took a
photo with a vintage Polaroid camera. I thought I could see
electrons. Yeah.
Anyways, when she took the picture, I felt like I saw the photons in the room absorbed by the camera. Like, everything had this electric cloud buzzing around it and the camera absorbed, sucked in, the excess photons into it. The event had me thinking about the native people who believed this camera sucked out their souls. The Scientist in me found this very interesting. No fear though.
Anyways, when she took the picture, I felt like I saw the photons in the room absorbed by the camera. Like, everything had this electric cloud buzzing around it and the camera absorbed, sucked in, the excess photons into it. The event had me thinking about the native people who believed this camera sucked out their souls. The Scientist in me found this very interesting. No fear though.
The most vivid and
disturbing landmark happened at the peak on the trip. I'll have to
use metaphors. Imagine that your field of vision, the entirety of
what you see right now, imagine it is a quilt. The stitching is so
fine you only see a single whole image. I could see the stitching.
It looked like buzzing, multi-colored electrons. There was an energetic
thing breathing behind the
quilt. With each breath the Unknown took, the quilt would swell and some stitches
would rip apart. In these openings, I could see the thing behind it.
I felt like I should have been fucking terrified but I wasn't. The "thing" was more an environment or dimension rather then a person or animal or monster. This
dimension behind reality seemed technological, alive in a deeply
primal way, immensely energetic, and AWE-full.
No words I know can wrangle it. It was unlike anything I've ever even
imagined. It felt alive.
There was a color I
saw inside these gaps that I think, out of everything learned that night, stays with me
most vividly. It is a kind of purple, but its not really purple. It was like an abundance of red and blue ferociously smashing together with an
energy that makes me tense and when thinking about it gives me an urge to yell. It seemed
like the hues blood looks like as it appears through veins and arteries. The
drowning skeptic in me gurgled, “is this what it looks like inside
your brain, the blood and tissue metabolizing the chemical?”
Another part of me that I don't think I've ever heard speak before said something along the lines of, “Stop. You can't. There
is no description, there are no judgments. It is.” The skeptic was silent.
There were multiple
times I felt like I should have fallen into bad thinking patterns due
to a bad initial thought, but each time, that other part of me saw
the “trap,” and walked over it. A common trigger to bad thoughts
while I am on psychedelics is when I have to use the bathroom. My
bathroom walls are a gross yellow color and shit and piss is shit and
piss. This time was different. I went to sit on the toilet and, while
the patterns on my walls danced and flashed and winked, I thought
about a book I read a little while ago. “We are shitting Gods.”
The thought sat there in my mind like a golden tablet. I got it. Our
creative minds are godly. Look at the world we've created. To create
is to reflect the image of God. But
while we are godly, we have this flesh sack that reminds us that we
are destined to feed worms and bacteria. Its heavy. I'm glad I have
the chances to glimpse the godly.
The most beautiful
part of the entire night was the bond I felt with the other four
humans around me. We've talked about it before. We feel like a tribe.
Most of them feel closer to the people within the group then they do
with there own family. Blood is not chosen. Some of my friends come
from broken homes. We have to accept the hand fate gave us. But
tribes are discovered. We found each other through the billion-armed
crowd. We've cultivated honesty, genuineness, and a sincere air of
acceptance. I trust these people in a way that heals. It takes
courageous to trust this much. I admire them.
*A quick side note,
when I had these thoughts while on LSD, I thought about corporations.
These things try to fulfill this sacred urge. Most seem to fail. I
don't know though.
Those were the major
landmarks of the trip. I began to feel functional around 8 or 9 am. I
had only taken 2/3rds a tab. I was done. It is four days later and I
still feel a slight sense of being wounded. For 24 years my vision
has been a reliable ally. These hallucinations showed me how vulnerable a foundation of my perceptual life is. Now my brain knows. Its strange. I
also feel as if a great deal of the experience was for my
subconscious, and that the parts of my mental faculties that I don't
have conscious access too, I feel that they learned many more lessons
then my consciousness did.
One last thing I'd like to get out. Synchronicity. I have three ideas about synchronicity that I got from Carl Jung, Robert Anton Wilson, and Terence McKenna. Jung gave us the actually concept, Wilson believed it happens when one is living the life their soul is meant to live, and McKenna thought synchronicities clustered around significant moments in one's life, particularly around strong psychedelic experiences. I've had about five or six notable synchronicities in my life before taking LSD. The day of and the day after the LSD, I had five.
These type of events are easy to write off with some psychological terms like false-positive blindness, cognitive dissonances, and the bulls-eye fallacy. To each their own. It enhances the joy and awe in my life so I keep it. Fundamentally, all thoughts are symbol systems that help us understand. Doing the work to find and test multiple reality tunnels is one of the fruits of existence.
One last thing I'd like to get out. Synchronicity. I have three ideas about synchronicity that I got from Carl Jung, Robert Anton Wilson, and Terence McKenna. Jung gave us the actually concept, Wilson believed it happens when one is living the life their soul is meant to live, and McKenna thought synchronicities clustered around significant moments in one's life, particularly around strong psychedelic experiences. I've had about five or six notable synchronicities in my life before taking LSD. The day of and the day after the LSD, I had five.
These type of events are easy to write off with some psychological terms like false-positive blindness, cognitive dissonances, and the bulls-eye fallacy. To each their own. It enhances the joy and awe in my life so I keep it. Fundamentally, all thoughts are symbol systems that help us understand. Doing the work to find and test multiple reality tunnels is one of the fruits of existence.
If anyone reading
this needs a place to safely explore alternate reality tunnels with
the aid of chemicals, my house is open to you. Don't ask me to be your
connect because laws, but if you need a safe
setting and a guide, I'm happy and would be honored to help.
Namaste. Good luck. Pay attention when God winks.
Namaste. Good luck. Pay attention when God winks.
You have control over doing your respective duty only, but no control or claim over the results. The fruits of work should not be your motive, and you should never be inactive.
-Bhagavad Gita