DOSE:

200 ug

oral

LSD

BODY WEIGHT:

194 lb

Started ceremonially with a prayer and benediction, 11:16a.

Earliest sensation was of things appearing vaguely masked, with an almost plasticine or clay-like quality. According to K (my sitter)'s notes, this happens at about 11:44a. From this point on my memories become less linear. I moved from reading chair to meditation pillow noting clammy feeling of my hands.

From K's notes: 'Nothing in my life has ever happened before, it could be the real deal.'

12:08p - Odd physical sensations are beginning to capture my attention, not quite an altered state, but definite onset. I'm aware of carrying - something, an appendage or a growth - working its way up my back from my ankles. It advances with each step I take around the apartment.

In this time frame perceptual shifts are happening with increasing rapidity. The world is recognizable, but it's altered - as though another, almost identical world is sliding in alongside it. Of course, spacial references like 'alongside' are not quite apropos, but that's as close as I can get to describing it.

At about 12:25p I said 'This is a beautiful molecule. It's fire (through). It's burning the edges of the forest.' I also report 'This is familiar. I've been here before.'

This world behind the world has an at-once evolving, complete and decaying quality. The worlds envelope my world, displaying the present moment, of which I am conscious, against a numinous shuffling of all possible permutations and histories.

Each alternate history touches my reality at the precise moment in its own timeline that I am experiencing in mine. Each of the alternate moments is faintly different, slightly off, not so much that I could ever qualify what it is or was, nor was the distinction's passing ever more than evanescent, such that its contribution to my perception was in the form of an overlay, a suggestion, a constant flux of different nows where all that I could anticipate, or that comported with what I thought was or would be true, was constantly shuffling through other probabilities.

The edges of particular quanta were as kaleidoscopic event horizons, shimmering with the moment of change and transformation. This is a key characteristic; the stack of phenomena related in time were perceptually shifted to one side and another, above and below, such that I could see them lined up, like cards or dominoes ordered over the horizons of eternity, touching my present in the moment of my perception and then shuffling away.

Sometime before 1p - From this point forward I lost my sense of linear time, other than as I would check in with K and anchor (in some loose sense) in her present for whatever vague sense of comfort this afforded me.

'Every breath is the 10,000 fatherings.' As my own present became increasingly unmoored and dilute, perceptions yielded to impressions of the parallel reality or timeline. Things assembled, lived, died and decayed, all in the span of a single breath. I think I was now beginning to get a feeling for what this was going to be about, what was in store on this trip. I could already see that it would not be pleasant, but in touching in with K I could take a measure of faith that the egoic 'I' would not become completely adrift.

K, for her part was serenely untroubled by however it was that I was showing up , which was, to me, momently reassuring, but also troubling in that I was not quite willing to loosen my ego into what lay beyond normal perception. I needed the life line, and K assured me that I was OK, meaning my integrated, a priori sense of my self was intact. In this I know the dissolution of ego was started, but incomplete.

For its part, the multiverse did not care one way of the other. It was just revealed and was neither welcoming nor barriered. I was free to dip in to the extent I willed.

What K recorded in this span:

'Now that I've endowed it with the power, it's asking me if I want to join it.'

'I've given it the power to ask that question.'

'It's very... sweet.'

I must have been seeing K returning already many times, because I said 'You are its emissary in my life.' I now think this may be referring to love.

'It's very careful with me.' As terrifying and uncertain as the early premonitions were, somewhere I realized that this would all turn out for the best, or at least in some 'evolved' way. I did not feel safe, exactly, but I did feel recognized and understood.

Also in this vein, 'We would do well to remember that we are held.'

At my request, K played some Beethoven, the Emperor Concerto. This proved completely overwhelming. I was not hearing the music so much as living inside the crushing sense Beethoven himself must have had when he first received it, as it rained down on him like an assault, demanding that he assemble the notes and chords and relations coming to him into sounds. Each passage pulled at me, dragged me from pleasure into acute pain. Individual notes were forces of condensation, wherein vaporous, unformed and notional plumes crashed together to change state, forming liquid and discharging massive energies as in a thunderhead. It was the sound of the cycles of life, at least on this world and in this reality, where water, strongly bonded hydrogen and oxygen, courses in all directions effecting and marking everything in time.

At my bidding (possibly while I was on my knees in supplication to the forces revealed in the Emperor, and before the Pathétique could get started), K switched to Brian Eno's Music for Airports. This was no less moving, but less revelatory somehow, and so allowed me more movement in other aspects of the larger experience. Beethoven had been the storm, requiring all my powers of determination to merely stay aboard the vessel. Eno was the becalmed lake, deep and dark, but quietly buoyant.

During Beethoven, at about 1:15p, I noted to K that the music 'just opens the doors again and again. Always the same motif.' again, suggesting the cycle, the eternal return.

I also flashed on a father speaking to his little girl about how to listen to the world, about what sounds signal safety that what signal danger. And that she is safe. I think this had to do with K and her father, but I was speaking to K.

I also passed my own deceased father in this stretch as he shuffled through, alighting in the sense that he could feel music this way as well, that his worldview was 'in this music' and that it had him in its sway.

I think in this stretch, K and I also settled down around the boy child we never brought into this world. He was with me strongly, and expressive of how when he opted into our world he believed it would be an easy entry, and that he was very surprised when we sent him back. 'Didn't see that coming!' he said. In the shuffling of parallels he emerged less visible to my awareness than he was a felt articulation. What I could sense was that he was fine, and that he did instantiate in many another reality, and that the Great Soul had prospered by his being.

To the extent I was able I spoke this to K and I know she wept. Although she says she shed but a few tears, I felt a great stampede of sadness and regret for our not meeting our boy in this time, and I could see her in distinct parallel realities inconsolable, completely destroyed by the loss of her child. Even now, I can sense that swelling of remorse in myself. I found and held the card shuffling in underneath the present, the one where I have a 17 year old son today, and he's robust and intelligent and beautiful. I also held the card that lead down the path of really wanting him to come through and losing him, where he opted to instantiate in another reality, rather than the one in which we made the choice.

This is a regret, a heavy one. I could cry now thinking about it.

I have reached 55 years and now know that the path to this time, being what it has been, was made for my reading and forming ideas that I may impart somehow - a legacy (a word in my intentions for this trip). That I did not choose to endow the collected wisdom of my nexus in time/space to a soul of my own devising is a sadness perhaps rooted in the fear that I will not endow anything at all, and therefore not seize upon my knowledge of the built-in flaw in all creation.

The Great Soul blinked into being and in an instant became aware of all infinite possible realities. All befores, durings and afters having in this instant occurred, the Great Soul disinstantiated and reinstantiated an infinitude of non-discrete 'times' before once, for no reason other than a sense of play, introducing a faint flaw in the solid block of timeless reality, precipitating the slight shaving of difference in the primary reality and propagating the multiverse. Each possible reality is distinguished by the inflection off the primordial flaw, which begets (creates) a new and different reality - another whole universe.

The flaw is not a mistake, it is the genius of the great, one soul to introduce friction and difference and all the colors and moods, much as the flaw in a diamond refracts light and endows character to what is otherwise simple, undifferentiated carbon. The flaw is the gift of the Great Soul of intelligence to itself, and from the multitude of inflections and refractions among the primary energies emerged difference and all the worlds in unbounded proliferation, with new universes calving from each inspiration. This could be the meaning 'Every breath is the 10,000 fatherings.'

There is much to think about with regard to quantum superposition here, but that's for another time. Trip space seems like an overcoming of quantum decoherence, allowing a quantum system to be observed directly without the collapse of the wave (superposition) function in to a classical state.

Approximately as I was drowning in Beethoven I must have entered what Hofmann referred to in his bicycle trip report as the 'crisis' phase. Nothing in the middle reaches of my trip has clear position relative to anything else. There is no anchor. I was at once terrorized by the cascading of all realities into one, with its great hordes of monstrous apparitions and loss, while being compelled in equal measure by the poignancy of my awareness of the same. A profound feeling of disembodiment was constant here, such that any sensation that erupted in my actual body occurred to me almost as an obliterating force. All ideas hung suspended in a vast, amorphous protoplasmic medium, never forming as more than kitsch or ugly half-made ephemera. Nothing could move. I was not me, but was an idea of me bogged in a wasteland of disconnection and dissipation. I now see that my struggle here was my attachment to individuated ego and a belief that I should be able to get ahold of myself - a self, any self. There was none. Just an artless, friction-free zone of ooze and corrupted ideation. I felt the press of non-existence, of oblivion, collapsing in from all sides, but not with rancor or hostility. The feeling was 'This is how it is. This is the start and the end. I have to lose existence to have existence.' Maybe I let go, maybe not, but the moment itself was profoundly confrontational and I think as I'm writing this that, much as with existence itself, the ego has to have its useful frictions. If that's the case, maybe in being let go it is made again anew - new in the sense that it is recognizably itself, but evolved for having emerged through the flaw.

In this state of despair I felt all the losses I have to look forward to, because I know them already. I've experienced them all before, as I will again.

Most poignant was my constant return to K as the touchstone. I watched and mourned as she came to me a young woman, growing, changing, withering and dying eternally. Even as she would decay in death, she would speak to me as her flesh and bones faded to dust. She would disappear and then in the next instant return as she was. I noted to her that I could see each wrinkle forming, know where all of them would be and always were, where each cell of her being would pass into another state. My soul wept each time, with every return. I spoke to her of the great sadness, that all awareness included loss, but that all returns as the next card shuffling in and out, the next reality in which all life and death is played out, down through eternity, but all at the same time, in parallel, all cards touching the same instant out of time and in connection.

The connection through K, the connection of love, is the portal to all realities. It is in the specter of loss that we bend toward the devised and ingenious flaw and thereby make the new reality. It is through love that we create and assume the mantle of the Great Soul of which we are the insight and the reward. It is my great soul's perception that always sensed the flaw and knows I had the playfulness to make myself intelligent so that I could parse the multitude and evolve.

The flaw also entails oblivion. Each subtle change among parallel realities and their endless propagation means every return and every moment evolves. As I saw it, creation develops a list and eventually capsizes. This is no more or less than the oscillation of time and space from Big Bang to collapse. The universe came and went an infinitude of instances out of time before the Great Soul playfully tossed in the flaw by which to disport in time and space. Bang, the extensional universe I know and all of the others in their parallel multitude were born and born again.

In the moment of our parting, in death, we realize the access to any and all of the parallels in which we will be reinstantiated. The life in that new time and space we have will be substantially similar to the one from which we last parted, but for the flaw. The flaw is a universal flaw, it is manifest in all perception and awareness of it occurs to us as beauty. Beauty, because we are transfixed by it, and the ground of our unreasoning seduction is a latent knowledge of having passed this way innumerable times. We sense that the moment of beauty's perceiving is the gateway to all other realities, or at least the intimation of them. The quality of the conscious experience of beauty is similar if not identical, no matter its quanta, so it's fair to suppose that what underlies our perception is something common to each discrete experience of beauty. Love and beauty are the signifiers of eternity and our movement through it.

Love and beauty also signify loss. That we will loose this world and all others eventually. Sadness and mourning attend us all our days, yet without them we would not have any bearing on the shuffling of all possible realities that are in play or ever will be in play.

I noted to K that 'We are death. Death is us with our eyes on each other.' That we are love is also to be loss. Love and beauty are the portals through to the multitude that death ultimately facilitates whether we've realized in life the enfolded and holographic nature of all reality or not.

The last bit that K noted I'd noted while I was coming back from my journey is: 'At any point in time you can reach for another deck and pull other cards. You can play another hand because all the possibilities are available to us all the time.' Love, beauty and death are the portals through which we pick inflections into new realities.

Postscript: my provider's gear is much more potent than my reading led me to expect, and 200µg may have been a bit intense for a first experience. Micro-dosing in no way prepared me for what was in store, no more than feeling pond ripples would prepare me to surf Escondido. Even so, it was what the medicine negotiated with me, and the experience was not merely survived, but fully embraced. For the sake of comparison, if nothing else, next time I'll work at 150µg.

Exp Year: 2017	ExpID: 111915
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: 55
Published: Jul 29, 2018	Views: 2,009
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LSD (2) : Music Discussion (22), Guides / Sitters (39), First Times (2), Small Group (2-9) (17)