DOSE: T+ 0:00	8 in	oral	Cacti - T. pachanoi	(plant material)
T+ 3:00	2 hits	smoked	Cannabis
T+ 9:00	2 hits	smoked	Cannabis

BODY WEIGHT:

145 lb

I had a phenomenal experience with San Pedro a few days ago. It had been a long time since I had explored anything other than mushrooms and herb, and I was extremely excited to try San Pedro, as were my friends. We did it in my house, where there was no danger of distractions. I had prepared pillows and soft pads all over the floor of one room, putting in red lights, which, in addition to the living room, gave us two comfortable areas to be in.

We all removed the spines, peeled the skin, and started to eat the green area directly under the skin. My friend M and I shared a 16 inch cactus, and everyone else had much smaller doses. The taste was initially quite bitter, but palatable. However, after eating about half of our desired doses, it seemed that our taste buds became saturated with bitterness, and each bite became a chore. We ended up running the remaining portions through a juicer, mixed with watermelon and ginger, and M drank his slowly. I though it might be interesting to add the white, central portion to my juice, and regretted it immensely, as it was far more bitter than M's. I managed to drink some of it, but it eventually proved too much for me, and I gave up.

I felt a slight alteration in my perception after about 30 minutes, but after even 3 hours it hadn't grown to anywhere near the level of experience I had been hoping for. I decided to bring out the mescaline by smoking a hit or two of green. Within a few minutes after smoking, it was clear that I had arrived.

I had some wonderful experiences that night, but it would take pages to describe them in detail. I will summarize them as concisely as I can.

The most pervading effect of the cactus was that I simply had fun. I was like a child again, in that I knew very deeply that it was ridiculous to live without fun. Walking to the park, I enjoyed myself greatly by reciting spontaneous poetry, playing 'follow the leader', and feeling the cool night air on my skin. In my house, my friends and I laughed, played music, and wrote several group poems (each person writes one line) that varied from wonderful to eccentric to bizarre to horrible, but we had a wonderful time doing it. Unlike a child, however, I had some deeper levels of consciousness directing me to ask the important questions, and to search for truth, even as I was enjoying myself so much at another level.

The visual effects were also sometimes experiential. In other words, there were hallucinations that I saw, and there were others that I experienced more directly. At one point, for example, I looked at a white wall and saw thousands of tiny, shimmering diamonds, all of them radiant, equally spaced. They were the stuff that comprises the universe, I half-believed. Immediately after seeing them, I began to experience them as filling all space, including the space around and inside my body. In fact, it was clear that the border between the inside of my body and the outside meant nothing to these diamonds. They extended infinitely in all directions, intricate, impartial, and the difference between matter and open space was irrelevant to them.

For most of the trip, I felt the flow of time through my body. It reminded me of my LSD trips long ago, except that with acid, the flow of time was choppy and harsh, angular and clean, whereas with San Pedro it was exceedingly gentle and smooth, and flowed lovingly. It seemed to me to be the difference between watching a movie and seeing someone flip the pages of one of those books of drawings that looks like it moves. This was the real thing, and acid was just a caricature of this truth.

At one point, my friends and I were talking, and I said 'it all comes down to this. This moment - every moment - has what you need.' (Quoting Rumi). My friends and I decided that that was the point of all that we were doing ... not just this trip, but all psychedelic experience.

Later in the trip, roughly 9 hours after finishing the cactus, I was getting tired, and so smoked another hit or two of green (marijuana acts as a stimulant for me, believe it or not). It again brought out the mescaline, and I began to trip harder than I had the entire night, although my friends were falling asleep one by one. I listened to a CD I had recorded of some spiritual poetry, including Rumi and others, and felt very much at peace. I finally fell asleep around 12 hours after eating the cactus.

The interaction of marijuana and mescaline was fascinating to me. When I am on mushrooms, the marijuana doesn't affect me at all while the 'shrooms are strongly active. On LSD, the pot takes the acid world and multiplies it, but it's still the acid world that I'm in. With San Pedro, however, the effects of both drugs embraced one another, and combined into a single, inseparable, whole effect - and a fantastically pleasant and enlightening one at that.

I learned several things on this trip, but the most important was that I had been too serious for too long. I think that I have already changed my thinking about life, and am enjoying every minute. This is related to the idea that each moment is complete in and of itself, and has what we all need, which is another of the lessons I was granted (or at least reminded of powerfully) by San Pedro.

I look forward to some more experiences with San Pedro, and to learning more about how to respect, even more deeply, this great gift-giver.

Exp Year: 2003	ExpID: 25939
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: Aug 20, 2004	Views: 12,412
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Cacti - T. pachanoi (64) : Small Group (2-9) (17), Mystical Experiences (9), Glowing Experiences (4), Combinations (3)