DOSE:

1 hit

smoked

Toad Venom

(dried)

BODY WEIGHT:

195 lb

I wanted to start off this trip report with a brief summary of who I am, and where I was at in terms of my substance use going into this experience. I’m a late-30s professional, working full time in a field I love. I wasn’t looking for any ‘escape’ from my life by seeking out Sapo. Philosophically, I’m a materialist (in the Democritus and Leucippus sense). I believe the physical world is what exists, and drugs work by interacting with certain neural receptors. Although raised religious, I do not believe in any God or Gods. I have had many, many years experience with a variety of psychedelic drugs, including LSD, Psilocybin, most of the 2C family, MDMA, DMT, and Mescaline (plus a half dozen or so more exotic research chemicals in my youth). I have also tried low-dose synthetic 5-MEO-DMT on several occasions. At this point, I only use psychedelics every few years, but I am in no way a novice to these headspaces.

The setting for this was an old Mexican archeological site, home of a native village thousands of years ago. Surrounded by giant boulders showing unmistakable signs of being used for untold millenium as grinding stones, under a massive torote tree, far from any disturbance.

I was with two other people, my friend who had arranged the session, and a respected Mexican facilitator.

Ambient music was turned on at a low volume. The facilitator knelt down next to me with the loaded pipe (dose unclear, bowl was packed by facilitator). He gave a short talk about the importance of knowing I was safe, that they would watch over me, and that I should surrender to the experience. He told me to be careful to not inhale the burning Sapo, and that we would start with a smaller dose, and I could take more in a half hour or so if I wanted to go deeper. Keeping his warning in mind, I inhaled slowly, but deeply. The smoke had a pleasant taste, not at all like the burning plastic sensation so common with NN-DMT. I handed the pipe back to him, and laid back on the sleeping bag while still holding the smoke in my lungs, and closed my eyes.

Before I even exhaled, things were beginning to change rapidly. My sense of time began to slow, a distinct vibration sense overtook me , and an infinite field of undulating eyes, reminiscent of an Alex Grey painting, was clearly visible, as clear as I’ve ever seen anything with my eyes open and sober.

I let the smoke out of my lungs.

At that moment, time and space collapsed entirely. I was unsure of how much of my ‘life’ that I remembered was real, and how much was delusion. I was overcome with the sense of the illusory nature of being. That everything I had done up to this moment had been a program designed to bring me to this exact moment, that in fact this moment was the purpose of that program. I opened my eyes. I could see my own body in my lower field of vision, my friend to the left and the facilitator to the right. The trees above me shimmered with a light far more real than real light. I had no idea which part of what was happening or what I was seeing was ‘me’. Then the realization came, that I was ALL of what was happening. I was the person lying on the blanket, the facilitator, the toad which had made these magical molecules, the boulders around me, every drop of rain that had ever fallen on the planet, every speck of dust in the distant cosmos. That it was all Maya, a dream, and that the dreamer was waking up. In that moment, I knew that ‘I’ was dying. That the body laying on the ground would never get up again, that in fact that body, and all of this consensus reality, was simply vanishing back into The Source. The movie was over, and it was time to go home. There was no fear, no worry, no angst. Because I wasn’t leaving ‘anyTHING’ behind. It had all been a lesson, to experience being, and to reach this moment. Everything had led up to this. And it was time to go. This realization looped an infinite number of times. I would be ‘me’, then I would realize there was no ‘me’, and then I would KNOW that I was dying / that the illusion of being was ending, and then I was ‘me’ having the realization again.

I closed my eyes again, and let go. I don’t have any English word to describe this feeling, but I’m sure there’s a long one in Sanskrit that might apply. It was pure bliss, pure acceptance, of all that I had previously considered both good and bad in the world. It was accepting it all, as it is.

As I started to come back in to myself some time later, and realize I was in fact a person who had distinct existence from the rest of all space-time, I sat up. The facilitator gave me some minty smelling water to wash my hands with, and said ‘cleanse yourself’. I poured it on my hands, and brought it to my face. The smell helped to bring me further in to ‘me’ as a distinct being. I brought my legs together in the Baddha Koṇāsana posture (I had no idea what this was called, I Googled it as I was writing this report), and could feel the alignment of my spine grounding me to this world. The facilitator asked if I would like to try a larger hit, and I laughed and declined.

I looked over at the boulders that surrounded me, and they were totally covered in incredibly detailed carvings. The style was mostly Aztec, with lots of skulls and serpents. I could look away and look back, and they stayed totally unchanged. They just WERE. I finally understood what would cause a person to spend a lifetime chiseling at stone to bring their vision into the world. For a drug generally considered to be not particularly visual, I was pretty damn impressed with what I was seeing.

As more time passed, I started to piece together what had been the drug experience, and what was my ‘real’ life, but it took quite a while to feel sure of that. At an hour in I was on my phone checking Facebook, just to confirm major parts of my back story that I was unsure about.

I’m still, a few days later, having flashes that maybe I’m still in that place where time collapsed, and this thing I’m experiencing now isn’t really happening (I believe this is what is being referred to in 5 circles as ‘reactivation’). Physically the session felt taxing, and the facilitator said my heartbeat was incredibly fast at one point in the experience (I suspect during the loops of realization). This has made me realize I need to work more on my physical health, particularly cardio.

Although I still believe that drugs operate by triggering receptors in the brain, I will admit that my agnosticism on this front has been shaken. This did not feel like a drug, it felt like remembering. And while I still think that the Greek materialists were right, I’m hoping more and more they were wrong.

Exp Year: 2018	ExpID: 112103
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: 37
Published: Jul 13, 2018	Views: 6,978
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