Snow had been falling outside the large bedroom windows all morning. It was about 10am and I sat in bed alone enjoying the snow and eating five grams of dried psilocybin mushrooms that I had grown myself. I chewed them slowly and thoroughly and it took a while to get the whole five grams down. Let them sit in my mouth as long as I could absorbing sublingually. Tasted earthy and a little nutty. I felt positive. (A fairly rare feeling for me) It was the perfect day for my first high dose experiment. Good set, good setting. I felt very open. These mushrooms were from a third flush of fruiting of a strain called Creepers. Early on in my experiments with plant teachers I had made a decision not to beat drums or wave feathers around. I had to except the fact that I was a suburban white man and not a South American Shaman. My ceremony consisted simply of sincerely focusing on healing and just being as open to the experience as I possibly could. I sat back and read some from Richard Evans Schulte’s, Ethnobotony: Evolution of a Discipline. Of course, I went immediately to the chapters dealing with Ayahausca. This was the point just after consuming the mushrooms when I usually felt the most fear and this morning was no exception. In fact, since this was the largest dose that I had yet tried, I sat on an underlying terror this beautiful, snowy morning. Reading has always been a panacea for me emotionally. Even though my wife was in the living room, I felt totally alone. I had evolved a little mind trick such that after ingesting the mushrooms, I tried to forget that I had just ingested them and force my mind to concentrate on something else. If I could pull this off then when I started coming on forty or more minutes later, it would come almost as a surprise. This particular morning I was definitely only partly successful and while I read could not but help thinking: “five grams, Oh man this is scary”.
It’s hard to describe this feeling after I’ve eaten them – I’ve never skydived but maybe it’s like what a skydiver feels after just leaving the plane: total commitment now, no going back. Then I felt it coming on about forty minutes in and looked out at the snow: wow, how beautiful, I thought. I would have to call it a bright and snowy day. I took off my glasses and put the big, book down and lay on my back with my eyes closed, systems check. I felt a little sick, chilled as if with fever, stomach a little upset, and I pulled up onto my left side with the covers up to my shoulder. This way I could see out the window to where the snow accumulated on a big green leaved boxwood. I tried to relax and just be open. I had felt this chill before but not so strongly as today. I suddenly felt a vibration. Perhaps this vibration was the beating of my own heart but I felt that an elephant was coming, thump, thump, thump, it’s massive and ponderous steps getting
stronger as it closed upon me. I knew then without a doubt that the elephant was here to sit on my chest. My fear sort of lunged and bucked, kicking up beyond all possible expectations. I knew that I could not move. My mind “was squirming like a toad” and it took a few moments to calm myself down enough to even think – I could not run, I did not want to run, I had tried too hard for too long to get to this point to run. I felt that I could not catch my breath so I started counting breath and deep breathing, trying to just empty my mind except for the counting. I concentrated on bringing air first deep into my diaphragm then slowly allowing it to rise up and then breathing out starting at the top of my diaphragm and pushing the air out so that the last air came again from the very bottom of my diaphragm and it seemed to help. I may have helped by giving my something neutral to think about.
I felt nauseas suddenly, balled up in the fetal position, making myself as small as possible, drawing inward, still counting breath but the elephant was upon me now. He sat on my chest and I couldn’t breath. This is it, I am going to die, I thought. I gave myself to it because I understood that at the deepest level, I had no choice in the matter.
My wife was out in the living room and she knew what I was doing. My request was to just leave me alone until I came out of the bedroom. As the elephant crushed the life out of me, some little part of me considered calling out for help. Another part of me asserted itself strongly then right through the fear and firmly dismissed that idea and I just died.
“Be here, be now”, I told myself repeatedly, continuing to breath deep and count breaths to belay the fear. This little mantra and the deep breathing turned out to be my only trick in all this. At some point the elephant left, quickly and without fanfare, the fear leaving with it. It was truly anticlimactic. The fear of death is worse than death itself, I noted.
A soothing calm seemed to slip into the emotional space the fear had left just as easily as breath: breathing in, breathing out. I considered myself an agnostic if not an atheist but I felt as if I were engaged now in prayer and the prayer was only this, “come”. Not ‘come mushrooms’ or ‘come God’ or ‘come anything’ but just, “come” and I lay there as flayed wide open as I could possibly be.
Come.
I want to say that I “saw my self” on the bed from a few feet away and that “I” was positioned up toward the ceiling looking down but it happening so fast that I cannot say that it was “real” but clearly I understood that I was inhabiting my soul now and that I was outside my body. This happened in a second’s time and left me thinking, “what the hell!?” Left me thinking, “was that real” and yet made a huge impression on me since I had not known that I possessed a soul until that very instant. Quite a revelation for a borderline atheist perhaps as you could imagine. As soon as I had a moment to reflect upon my soul, I felt myself shoot off to
the south. Somehow I was fully conscious but at the same time my body definitely lay unconscious on our bed. Really, I felt my new soul body pulled off to the south at fantastic speed and a second later I was at the office in Springfield, Virginia where I had worked now for twenty years – or, rather I was in a “soul office” rendition of the real office where I had worked for twenty years. So hard to put into the words? This place appeared to be a reality connected to our own physical reality through our soul body – a soul world. I tried to wrap my mind around it but the only way I could make sense of it was to think of the soul world as a mirror world to our own. It was almost as if when we waved our hand in this physical reality, our soul hand also waved. But that was not quite right, either. This soul world did not exist as a simple reflection of our own. It also was alive just as was our physical world. This soul world was also intimately connected to our physical world and our physical self and ego. It is as if the soul world does not exist as a separate location but exists as an aspect of our normal physical reality. Also, everything seemed to be emotionally supercharged in this soul world, the emotion the same that I had dealt with my entire life only magnified in intensity a million fold such that a little sadness was like a purgatory. Everything in this “soul world” was amplified compared to our normal, physical world.
The soul world is intense. (At this time I did not comprehend the full implications in terms of positive feelings being enhanced in the soul world but later I would “feel” beauty by connecting with this soul world and feel beauty as a real physical ecstasy, a warmth suffusing my chest)
At my actual work we were either kicked back doing nothing but shooting the shit, usually in the most unprofessional manner imaginable; or, we were thrashing around in a sort of fog-of-war trying to keep a handle on an exploding concrete dispatch department, one of the biggest on the east coast. No matter how well you might prepare; no matter how many plans you might make, a point came inevitably – and the inevitability of it all really wore on me – when it all would come tumbling down. I recall hearing a study wherein rats are given a negative stimulus of a random shock through the wire mesh of their cage. Another control group is given shocks at exactly the same intervals only the control group can jump on a switch which stops the shock. The group that could jump on the switch got really good at doing just that and the group with no control switch basically went insane. The point being that even the perception of control over our environment can be life saving. We were in this office of course the group with no switch to stop the shock – just random and constant negative reinforcements over which we had no control whatsoever. Surely, many others experience similar negative feelings about their work life. Sometimes I had to wonder if we were not all secretly involved in some cruel but fascinating sociology experiment. I always thought of it as humpty dumpy falling off the wall. Shit, here goes humpty dumpy, again.
The customers were actually less of a nuisance than my own company. I suspect that this is a fairly common theme in the workplace. It is seldom the job that is so stressful as it is the social machinations of the place. I never made my peace with the corporate bureaucracy that consistently used a vast amount of resources to make a difficult job far more difficult than it had to be. Again, this surely must be a common theme in our work places, especially with corporations getting larger and more impersonal all the time. I understood that our corporation did not exist in a vacuum and that our three stooges environment was only a microcosm of the rest of the corporate world – indeed, the rest of the world in general. Under various conditions I learned over and over the hard lessons that bad leaders teach.
I had no feelings about concrete whatsoever. I often wondered at how I had gotten myself in the concrete business. Again, I am sure that I am not alone in this sentiment. Freud is much in disfavor now I know but he said life was about two things, work and love. In that I think he had a point. If you are doing what you really love, you are fortunate indeed. In real life and in this soul world my workplace very much became a microcosm of society at large. It took a while to sink in just how profoundly true it was that this work place was the way of the world not an isolated incident. It gave me a whole new perspective on history: how the hell did we make it this far? It was so frustrating for me after two decades there seeing answers and solutions everywhere but having no power in this corporate setting to effect any meaningful change whatsoever. Every day I would watch Humpty
Dumpy fall off of the wall. Every single day we would spend so much of our time picking up Humpty Dumpy and putting him back together. Every day I would think how unnecessary this was - how whatever problem we were dealing with could have been solved twenty years ago rather easily and inexpensively. The entire system was geared for one thing: financial profit. Was it any wonder that this place was a soul killer?
Now why does that recall so much my entire society?
So work went on in this soul workplace for what seemed like thousands of years. It was no different at all than it normally was only as I said sort of supercharged emotionally. I wandered back and forth perhaps more in a daze than I might have in reality. I understood completely that I was here to learn something and I believed myself to “be having a bad trip”. I had been prepared for a bad trip. I had fully expected a bad trip. I wanted healing and knew what a mess I was and I fully expected the mushrooms to shake me like an old penny jar. In the midst of the chaos of this soul workplace I was asking myself again and again, “now what does this mean, what is all this teaching me?” It was a kind of hell and I was aware that I was in a soul world hell workplace. I believed from my readings of so many other peoples experiences with plant teachers that “bad trip” was simply a means of spiritual growth and healing. That a bad trip was the mushrooms way of resetting your clock. After a while I began to feel frustrated that I
could not “figure it out”. I could not understand no matter how hard I tried in exactly what manner this was suppose to be helping me. The dysfunctional nature of my relationship with virtually everything there, some having worked with me for twenty years, really weighed upon me. My God, I wondered painfully, this is what I’ve been giving my life force to all these years?
I then began to feel both weary and stuck in this soul work place. Weary and stuck had been a theme of mine for decades, what I had been trying to break away from. I sort of decided to “go home sick”, basically giving up on understanding and just leaving, but then I could not find the door out of this hell work place. Here again a real panic set in. I do not pretend to understand how it was possible but while my body lay unconscious miles away I was quite myself and quite conscious in this hell and it was completely and right now frighteningly real to me. The moment that I realized that I was trapped, the hell of the place became more real than ever. How to put in words? I have never had a lucid dream but perhaps it was like lucid dreaming? The thought that I may be stuck in this hell workplace forever was horrifying. My mind searched desperately like a man stumbling around in a pitch black room arms flailing out in an effect to orient himself to something else in the empty darkness.
Finally, I realized that this horrible place was teaching me nothing. It was only annoying me and distracting me from my life. There is nothing to learn here, I thought inside the experience. I have been trying to conform myself into this horrible, shallow façade of reality for twenty years and for twenty years it was as though every day I had made a decision to crush my humanity. This was simply not what I was meant to do. As if that simple insight were the key to open the door, I seemed to zip instantly back into my physical body still curled up on the bed with the snow still accumulating on the boxwood outside the window. Opening my eyes I found myself then fully conscious and feeling completely lucid. I thought that the experience over – in the vernacular, that “I was down”.
Wow, I thought, without moving a muscle except my eyes that were focusing clearly on the snowy scene out of the window, that was amazing. A soul, eh? My atheistically leaning agnosticism obviously had to be forsaken or seriously modified!
I felt also very peaceful. I felt like the snow drifting softly down upon the earth. It was not lost on me the parallel between my real life experience at work and this soul experience. It was so real – I, or my soul, had been in this soul workplace just a moment before and now I was back in my body in our bedroom. The lesson about my work was clear. I recalled some saying that mushrooms address your most serious issues first. I thought of this because I was sure that I had far more serious personal emotional issues to deal with than my work – I felt and still do that the truth dear Brutus is not in the stars but in ourselves. This all served to really make it
sink in right there just how negative my work had been for me all these years. I did not know what time it was because the clock was behind me but I assumed a couple hours had gone by, the experience had seemed to go on for so long. The diffuse light of the cloudy day didn’t give any hint as to the time. I was certain that the experience was over. For some reason, the thought of actually moving, even enough to turn and look at the nightstand clock, never occurred to me. I felt peaceful and calm and very, very happy. I had tried it seemed so many times and nothing had happened but finally this time it had worked, my God it had worked in spades! I cannot say if at this moment I was even able to move because I did not try. Just as soon as I sort of came to terms with what had just happened to me, having rolled it all around in my conscious mind a little, I felt my head spinning again and closed my eyes – the spinning continued upward even with my eyes closed and I thought, “it’s not over,” the second biggest surprise of the morning!
Then I felt a counterclockwise spinning again and still without moving a muscle my eyes glanced up into the spinning and my lucidity faded. What was really weird was that there was an UP at all. In the just ended soul experience, I had a strong sense of directionality, that this soul world was directly connected to our physical world somehow. But now I shot straight up, rising faster and faster until my new soul just sort of tore away finally and I thought, wow, so my soul is no more what "I" am than is my body - my soul is also just a vehicle and the vehicle just sloughed off into space the way a rocket might slough off it’s bottom, expended fuel tank. I had just discovered my soul - stupid like discovering your belly button - but I was kind of enamored with my soul already. I sort of lamented my souls loss. Nevertheless, I continued soulless on straight upwards at fantastic speed through the earth’s atmosphere and off into space and I felt a slight tug - what was that? That was language, I thought, which apparently had been connected to earth by means of a really long umbilical cord and before it snapped it very gently tugged as the cord reached its end before breaking. Wow, so that was language and now it is gone, I wondered. But I couldn't help but notice that I wondered this with language - and this made me laugh, sailing up through space laughing, laughing and laughing about this loss of language.
In any case, I assumed then and assume now that after leaving my soul behind what was left was “the real self” or perhaps some would call it the higher self, or highest self? The amazing thing is that I was still me.
This was the beginning of what I call my abandonment experience where the mushrooms cured my lifelong abandonment fear by abandoning me in some Nether Region of reality for a billion years. The giddy laughter was over soon enough. I continued shooting up into space at a fantastic speed and language was really finally and completely gone and I just felt – angry at the mushrooms for abandoning me. I was again totally aware of
what was happening. Clearly, the mushrooms were responsible for all of this. On the other hand, I knew why they were doing it. Another part of me found it kind of humorous and I could imagine the mushrooms saying, “hey, got your abandonment right here!” As in the first experience, I understood at the deepest level that whatever was happening was for my own good. My angry side became very annoyed at the part of me which could see the humor of it all and after some time this angry side sort of won out. By some time here I mean a billion years. My being spread out for light years and I became an anger-being spreading out so far as to be just a vague, disembodied cloud of energy drifting through vast and vacant distances of space, hardly corporeal at all. I felt as though each of my molecules were light years apart. I seemed to be a as spread out as I could possibly be and still exist at all. Anger and everything else inside me bleed out into these cold reaches of space over eons of time until finally what I was, was nothing, nothing at all.
I was a cold, disembodied nothing drifting vaguely through empty space.
I knew the mushrooms had abandoned me for my own good. I was very aware of my abandonment issues. This abandonment fear was the bane of my emotional life, maybe the root of all evils for me. How could I be at all authentic if I were so afraid of being “alone” at this heart level? Not only that, but this abandonment kept me feeling separate from everything when in fact it was clear to me that everything was one - my personal, emotional abandonment issue had taken on cosmic proportions. I knew that I was only pretending without authenticity. As I drifted trans-emotional through eons of space time, I thought of how I was stewing in my own proverbial juices. This part is very important, I think. I existed in this state for a billion years. Now to say a billion years is simply to try and put into language what defies language. It seems that this is the transformative power which the mushrooms possess, among others, that they can impart direct experience. This experience was as real, or more real, than any experience in my conscious life. Because the experience was as real as an actual life experience, it had the power to change me. By imparting direct reality the mushrooms facilitate change. In this way the mushrooms gave me a gift beyond words – no amount of advice – words – coming from another person no matter how wise or holy could equal this transformative experience. How else could one actually experience a billion years of abandonment? Not think of it or imagine it - but actually experience one billion years of abandonment?
From this I also took away a profound sense of time, especially a sense of the immensity of time involved in our DNA life and Its diversity here on the planet. So unfathomably much can happen in a billion years. A billion years is a long time – hey, I know! As alone and isolated as I have felt all of my adult life, that was nothing compared the utter and complete
abandonment I felt. As “time” stretched out into the unfathomable reaches of space, the depth of my abandonment feeling reached what I can only describe as cosmic proportions. It is so hard to find the language for this but after eons and eons of time I began to kind of lose focus on my anger and then finally on the abandonment feeling and I began to experience other feelings and then no feelings.
Wow, look at how beautiful it is out here. I can see infinity. Wow, it is so good to be alive, I thought – a thought that would seldom come to my normal self.
Then I felt as if you might feel when you are very uptight and someone massages your neck. I really began to stretch out into my disembodied form and to feel the immensity of myself, discovering that I was far larger than I had thought; in fact, as I sort of relaxed my muscles and really stretched it out, I realized that there was no end to what I was.
I am eternity.
Again, a billion years is an unimaginably long period of time. I thought about things as we all do. I thought about history, philosophy, my relationships, books that I’ve read, everything and anything. I had literally all the time in the world to think about things. Realities existed all around spread out before me like stars in the night sky. I saw and understood that the physical reality we inhabit here on earth is only one reality of an infinite number of realities. I understood also that the concept of singular and plural was only peculiar to our physical earth reality and that we our true self exist beyond singular and plural, space and time, life and death. We exist in more than one reality at a time is the clunky language to describe it that doesn’t really describe it all. I really could spend the rest of my life just writing about this “billion years” but little of it was particularly profound and much of it would be only of interest to me, and then much of it was so far beyond articulation. At some point I discovered that my abandonment feelings were gone. How can I be alone when I am a part of everything and everything is a part of me? How can I be alone when I am everything? How can I be alone when I am eternity? Much like in my first soul workplace experience, this “realization” seem to bring me back to my body still curled up on the bed in our bedroom. The journey back into the body did not seem so smooth or quick as from the soul work place and I had a sense of time and distance as well as a vague sense of returning to this planet, our earth, almost more than of returning to my own individual body.
Again I opened my eyes but did not move. Snow still falling. The diffuse, snowy light again betraying nothing of the time of day. I felt that I must have been “out” for hours and that it was probably late afternoon.
This time I knew that my “trip” was over. I managed to move for the first time and saw to my surprise that a mere hour and a half had passed approximately since I had first felt it coming on. This really surprised me. It seemed to me as though days had past, or years. I sat up on the side of the
bed testing my mobility, also surprised to find myself fully ambulatory. First of all, it sure seemed like longer than an hour and a half. Second, there was a deeper level of reality experienced within the “second”, abandonment experience that seemed more real than either my normal consciousness or the other tripping consciousness that I just left. This part only came to me as I sat up in bed and it took my breath away, a flash of vision of God raising His right hand and the glint of light off of his sword and I cringed there sitting on the bed just thinking of it as the full scope of it all washed over me, maybe because of the change of blood pressure in my head from sitting up on the side of the bed from the prone position? I actually cringed and ducked as I was sitting there on the edge of the bed, fearing God’s sword would come down on my head.
The abandonment experience was much deeper than the soul experience – beyond the soul, I guess. My God it was like a spiritual hall of mirrors. In this yet deeper level that now came to me, it was like a dream within the psilocybin experience – a mushrooms dream. But it was no dream. Not like any dream I ever had. This part was so very, very far beyond words such that I almost don’t know how to explain it? The only way is to use words straight out and they will be like hollow, paper renditions of the real experience, like watching a puppet rendition of reality as opposed to the actual flesh and blood of life itself. I was part of a spiritually connected group of entities who were storming heaven in an attempt to Kill God. Our group mantra rang out: God must die! We fought a horrendous battle and lost, my last memory was that I was not injured and that I was helping my group retreat with dead and wounded. The defeat was horrible again beyond words but we all had the sense that we had lost a battle not a war and that we would be back. We may have been beaten badly but we were still totally committed to the war, to killing God. This convinced me that we operate on multiple levels of reality at once – perhaps an infinite level of realities at once. My persona here in this reality was completely different from my conscious, “normal self”. My self in this deepest level of reality was true warrior full of a pure, unadulterated rage and completely fearless. When God Almighty’s sword came crashing down, the very wraith of God, my warrior self did not even flinch. Just the memory of this sitting there on the side of the bed made me cringe bodily with fear, almost causing me to bring up my arm in a protective manner in front of my face – like some kind of mushroom inspired Post Traumatic Stress behavior. This part of the experience would weigh on me heavily and it is almost all I thought of the rest of that Sunday – I felt as though I had abandoned “my people” and I wanted desperately to get back to this battle, to my fellow entities. It is probably a good thing that I had no more mushrooms. I would have taken any amount to return to my comrades. Of all the amazing things that had happened to me that last one and a half hours, this horrific battle with God blossomed in my consciousness into a
terrible and unnatural flower.
Storming heaven and killing God? I had no idea where that came from or what exactly it meant. But I brought back a determination to accept it all no matter how strange or unfathomable. Some months later I came to feel as if it were a significant dream, fading a little. The other aspects of the experience remained as strong and clear as any important, actual experience that I had in my life. But the mushroom dream pulled with an unusual power upon every aspect of my being from my toes to my psyche. Just the way a powerful dream will tend to do.
As I sat on the side of bed, I began to recall of yet another reality and how I had been crawling along the inside the sphere of a huge red ball. I did not think so much about all those realities that I did not make it to, but about all those realities where I did, even though only handful. I wondered if someone more spiritually advanced would have been able to operate on countless more realities than a hand full? Maybe on an infinite number? Over there on the other side, I was the only limit. Maybe enlightenment meant being able to operate on all levels at once synergistically. The thought of this really intrigued me.
I knew that crawling around inside this sphere represented dealing with some greater reality sort of surrounding our conscious reality and I was attempting to get through the veil separating the two which had taken on the form of the inside of this sphere. This part happened as I was “coming down” and I think is my higher self desperately trying to get back to the kill God reality as the levels of psilocybin deceased in my body. I crawled along the inside of this ball trying desperately trying to punch a way through the “veil”. I punched it with my fist, rammed it with my shoulder and as I continued to crawl along even head butted the hard rubbery veil that I knew separately my conscious reality from the greater reality around me. Finally I managed to punch through with my right hand up to the shoulder. Even though I could not get through completely, I managed to get the Tiger by the tail and managed to bring the Tiger’s Tail back through the veil into this reality.
“I have The Tiger by the tail, now” I thought very seriously.
I knew I would not be letting go any time soon. What is The Tiger’s tail exactly? Everything.
Everything apparently is an elusive little thing.
The Tigers tail thrashed me around but I held on tight, not about to let go. The Tiger would thrash me around pretty good over the next few months but I did not let go. In a way, that is all I “did” and really all I have to write about - holding on to the Tigers tail.
I think while most others would have let go of the Tigers tail thinking that it was all crazy, all mushroom inspired madness, I thought instead that I had a hold of something important and I wasn’t about to let go no matter how weird it was or even how weird it was to become.
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