Mushroom Voice Phenomenon the Start

Back in 2006 in the northern Virginia suburbs there was still Borders Book Stores complete with in store coffee house and comfy seating arrangements liberally provided as well and for years a trip to borders and a book or two was nearly a weekend ritual. Finding a book, reading some always that point where you know if you keep reading that you will buy it. 2005, 2006, a lot of books on shamanic healing practices and entheogens and just practical how to manuals from natural mescaline containing cactus available for delivery to baby Hawaiian Woodrose Seeds containing LSA au naturale relatives to the LSD created by Albert Hoffman in a laboratory and with a similar effect, I found.

I settled on the magic mushrooms originally with a lot of faith just felt right and I intended to grow them myself so knew it would take a while before I had anything of use. I did not realize how much this process of growing them myself would figure into the success, really, of my personal healing journey. My experiences were to be unique I found out only later when first posting about them on support groups for that being accused of making it up because actual psilocybin experiences were apparently not what happened to me. Each high dose experience was completely different with more elements not in common than in common. The big thread is strong dissociative effects leading to experiencing altered states of reality. Ego Death appeared to be the ticket price for admission and seemed for me to get harder to deal with not easier with each additional trip. I really only had a handful of large dose experiences but for me these were seminal events in my life, each and every one of them.

Here I want to focus on my own experiences around voice phenomenon with the psilocybin mushrooms that started for me right out of the shoot in my first three controlled and documented doses and in these three cases I will mention, each one was an auditory hallucination, a voice as if speaking aloud next to me there. I´ve seen it mentioned several times that this type of auditory hallucination is perhaps associated with lower doses say up to three dried grams and it was exactly my experience. I had succeeded in growing and drying a few ounces of a strain from Earthstongue labeled, “Creepers” and strains to note with mushrooms are not the same kind of animal as with say cannabis and may not mean much at all, really.

I felt that I was being disciplined and terribly organized in my approach to shamanic healing using entheogens deciding to start with three grams dried for a first run. My wife then was out that morning and left me home with our three dogs on a beautiful November morning in the northern Virginia suburbs of Washington DC. I feel like my set was as good as I was likely to get but pretty relaxed and physically and mentally pretty grounded. I sit in the living room of our home just in the quiet of mid morning my dogs asleep around one, two on the couch next to me. Before eating the three dried grams, I decided to go around the house and open up all the windows and get the free air flowing through the house and it felt immediately just good. I do not use any music just the quiet. I kick back in the recliner and at right about 30 minutes in, feel the mushrooms coming on, this rushing, heart rushing, feeling like being on a carnival roller coaster rising slow, very slow approaching the apex upon which it will then drop with a sudden rush only this had the feeling that it would see me catapulted into the sky not down toward the ground. I breathed deeply focusing on my breathing as this feeling began to peak out then I heard from outside myself as if someone were in the room talking to me, “you inhabit your body the way body inhabits this house”.

The voice was not the strange part. The strange part was that as I sat there eyes closed, hearing those words, in my minds eye, I am seeing a video replay of myself as if watching it from some ceiling mounted security camera going through the house opening up all the doors and windows just before sitting down to eat the three grams. It is very clear to me what they are saying and I think they most often but really whatever it is that I dealt with, it was neither singular nor plural, male nor female. I opened my eyes and it felt like the trip was over as if I had gone up only so far and not quite enough to push through so obviously then I had to raise the dosage next time. I took this as a very good sign and noted that spiritual nature of this message and decided then that next Sunday, I will increase the dosage to 3.4 grams dried of these, “Creepers”.

The next week after again taking care of things on Saturday like shopping and laundry and house chores and cooking up some things for the work week since with my wife and I both working long hours, we usually would have numerous things made to reheat during the week. So when Sunday morning rolled around, I felt at some ease and ready to give the mushrooms a 2^nd chance. My wife left for the morning and again I sat in the quiet of the living room with the windows open enjoying another unseasonably warm November day. The scenario was identical to the previous week just eating the 3.4 measured dry grams on an empty stomach about nine in the morning after morning coffee. I wash them down with coffee, my truest and first Plant Ally. It is very peaceful and quiet and the dogs sleep around me and like before I feel it start to kick in just at that 40 minute mark with the feeling of reaching the top of a roller coaster. Just as it feels as if the rush is about to kick in and take me away, I hear again a loud, clear auditory hallucination saying this time only, “Light is God”.

And then, just like the week before, the trip just ends abruptly and I feel completely sober thinking about this simple declaration, “Light is God” and somehow I know without a doubt that what was meant by it was that “the closest thing to what you humans conceive of as a God, is light”. So really, this voice that I thought of as “The mushroom entity” because it felt from bone to soul as if something outside of myself not any projection of unconscious self but something apart from me, was not even saying that God is light exactly but that with our limited minds in this corporeal world that what we experience as light is the closest thing to what we can conceive of as God. I sit for a long time with this drinking more coffee and considering the last two weeks knowing that I am on the right track and seeing the spiritual turn that these experiments are taking. My prayerful and clear intent, is to heal decades old whaleshit-at-the-bottom-of-the-ocean depression and pernicious suicidal ideation. At this point in my life, had anyone asked, I would have said that I am an atheist but I am not, really, just find it too hard to explain. The truth of it is that the only thing that had ever really mattered to me is God and my spiritual nature and connection to the divine and this seems to be coming through with these experiences.

The third weekend of mushroom healing experimentation saw me again in the living room light jacket on now but otherwise alone except for the doors asleep around me or on me just as peaceful and mellow as could be having eaten this time 3.6 dried grams of Creepers thinking this would be the one to do it. I was then determined to raise dosages slowly and scientifically, I thought, writing everything down along the way as objectively and even as succinctly as possible. Right about forty minutes again that seems the magic time of magic mushrooms I had already noticed at least when eaten dried on an empty stomach. I felt again as if sitting in a carnival ride, some roller coaster ride now inching up to the top of the ride before it kicks and we start tripping with a whoosh screaming down the tracks … But just as this is peaking out, and I am feeling like yes this is it, here we go! some thrill and a little fear, feeling the power of it this thing that is out of my personal control now …

“You haven´t crossed over yet” the same auditory hallucination said clearly snapping me up in the chair seemed like someone was right there next to me saying this and I cannot get a big, goofy smile off of my face … for an hour could not get that goofy smile off of my face as I kept thinking, “So you CAN cross over, huh? That is for certain now that I must cross over to the other side as once again I seemed to understand always more than the voice/s would say.

So you can cross over to the other side, I knew then for sure that it was so and this then became an immediate goal and I realized it was to the be 5 gram called by Terence Mckenna, the Heroic Dose this dosage at which point ego death is pretty certain to occur. I think he had the dosage about right a weaker mushroom would be a bare minimum for a strong effect but a stronger particularly wood lover shroom, 5 dried grams would constitute and exceptionally high dosage, I would think, but Terence reasoned, it is not going to kill you. That is literally true so long as it is a psilocybin mushroom, no one has ever died but some family dinners here and there usually accidentally get peppered with these mushrooms from the wild and a whole family might find themselves all at dinner under the influence of so called, Magic Mushrooms. For me at that time, it was a bit of a production problem maybe more specifically a problem with quality control but I lost crops to opportunistic fungus attacks and found myself with only 2 dried grams to work with until my next crop came in starting in December 2006. Turns out through a combination of factors due to realities of growing mushrooms and just dealing with life and work stuff, it was not to be until February 25^th 2007 that I took that next and first so called Heroic Dose of dried psilocybin cubensis tgat I grew myself, more of the strained, Creepers.

I knew that the thing I am inhabits this body the way this body inhabits a house and that light is god and most titillating to me, that you can cross over to the other side. My clear goal was healing emotionally and spiritually and crossing over to the other side. I wanted to talk to God, truth be told.