Ltd Ed 'Solve et Elucido' Art Giclee
This reverberating psychedelic giclee print is a gift for a
$500 donation to Erowid. 12" x 12", stretched on canvas, the
image wraps around the sides of the 1" thick piece. Signed
by artist Vibrata, and Erowid founders Earth & Fire.
The Meaning of Life
2C-E
Citation:   RedRabbit. "The Meaning of Life: An Experience with 2C-E (exp33278)". Erowid.org. Aug 9, 2005. erowid.org/exp/33278

 
DOSE:
30 mg oral 2C-E (powder / crystals)
BODY WEIGHT: 200 lb
This is the story of how I found the meaning of life with 2C-E on The Wings of Desire.

The is my third experience with 2C-E. My first is documented under 2C-E first experiences, A Gentler Kinder Acid. My conclusion in that report was that 2C-E was maybe a better drug for recreational use, than for self exploration. I wish to take that back now in light of my most recent excursion. I think the dosage in my original excursion was just not sufficient, along with maybe the timing and setting. This time I took roughly 30 mg, though its possible that it was anywhere between 20 and 40 mg. I had originally roughly 100 mg, taken what I measured to be about 20 mg from that prior to this. So I figure I had about 60 mg left, of which I took half of this time. The problem is my scale is only accurate to 100 mg, so measuring these doses is difficult. Anyone know where I can get a good analytical scale for less than $400 dollars? Anyway so take my stated dosage with less than the weight a grain of sand.

Ingredients:
30 mg of 2C-E (roughly)
Wings of Desire (1988) (USA)
A longing to know

    When the child was a child…
    It wondered, why am I me…
    And why not you?

    When did time begin?
    Where does space end?

    When the child was a child…
    It wondered, How is it that the ‘I’…
    That I am,
    Will someday no longer be that ‘I’


We are all of us, fallen angels. No not fallen angels in the biblical sense. We were not cast out from the heavens. Rather we have chosen to come here, to escape the eternity of endlessness. We are all of us, divine beings. We once held the infinitude of the past and the present in the palm of our hand. We at once knew all that there was to be known, yet we knew nothing of what it was to not know. To smell your first rose, to hear your first symphony, to scrape your knee on the ground for the first time, to be filled with joy, to be lost in sorrow. Yet we knew something of longing, for it was longing that brought us here, and it is the longing that remains with us; to experience the mystery of life, the wonderment of what happens next. We are strangers here, and yet it was we who created here to begin with. We are living in are own story, a script written long ago. Yet we only remember our lines moment by moment. We are as much a part of The Universe as It is a part of our selves.

The meaning of life is here, it is now, it is all around us, unfolding like the petals of a Rose. We sometimes catch a glimpse, it is the distant sensation like a dream within dream, that we have somehow known this all before. But we haven chosen to forget. We longed to experience life through the eyes of a child on Christmas morning. The mystery of what’s in the box; it is the anticipation of what may be, the astonishment of what is, and the necessity of what has been, that pulls us along an invisible path which is only here and now created instant by instant. But what we long for most, is that final dot; to place the final period in our script. It is the ending which enthrals us, yet we simultaneously wish it wouldn’t end. Though the story must have resolution, a finality that marks our completeness, Life itself will never end.

Time began when we began.

Space reaches out for as far as we can see.

We are who we are, and not someone else, because that is what life is all about!

The meaning of life is in life itself.

Ok, so don’t take my story which is a feeble metaphor for what I experienced as literal truth. The meaning of life can not be explained in mere words, it can only be hinted at. One must experience the truth to understand it. Whether ‘angels’ exist or not is not the point. The point is we are something more than what we seem to be, and yet we are nothing more than this. You see it’s hard to explain. ;-)

I put in the movie Wings of Desire about a half hour after dosing. It was roughly ninety minutes after dosing that the 2C-E really hit me, and I continued to climb for probably another thirty minutes. I dosed on a full stomach. I had also taken 100 mg of Benadryl to help me relax at the same time as my dose. How ever much more I took this time than the first two times, it was definitely much more intense. I was still able to do things, make coffee, walk around, and type (although I couldn’t figure out what to say LOL). I was peaking right around the end of Wings of Desire, which seemed perfect. Its about a two hour movie, I entered it straight, and had time to get into the movie, before the 2C-E got into me sort-of-speak. The movie seemed unbelievable long, like it would never end. But I was entranced by it none the less.

After the movie, I made some coffee. Going down stairs and just making the coffee was, hmmm, an adventure. It was scary leaving the sanctity of my room, but there was sense of accomplishment afterward. Not that I really needed any caffeine, my resting pulse measured several times through out this experience was 120, my resting pulse is somewhat high to begin with around 85-90, but still to be at 120 for many hours was intense. But anyway I wanted the coffee for the sugar and cream, which I put a lot in my coffee.

The perceptual changes were all the usual for a psychedelic drug, lots of motion, warping, tingling, time dilation, heightened sensitivity, etc. etc. After getting back to my room with my coffee, I must have sat there at my computer desk, with my matrix screen saver playing on both my monitors, for well over two hours. Just thinking about the movie I had just seen, about the meaning of life. I noticed particularly a type of echo in my thoughts. I would think a thought, think a thought, think a thought, think a thought, a thought, a thought, a thought, thought, thought, thought, t, t, t…until it faded away into nothing, and the nothingness it self would become my next thought, my next thought, my next thought, next thought, thought, thought, t, t, t, until I say that there were all the same and yet they were all different. I had the realization that this thought was no more important than the next thought, and they all come from nothing and ended in nothing, and that this was life.

Every instant of life was the whole of life in itself. The instants, the moments of life are all that are real. But the ironic thing is that every instant contains in it the whole of the Universe the whole of all that ever was and will be. And I had the sense that I had know this before, and I was just remembering the obvious. It was funny I that feeling about the movie as I watched it as well. That sense of déjà vu, though I am quite sure I have never seen this film before. Perhaps I have caught bits and pieces sometime ago in a late night drunken or stoned stupor. I don’t know it was very weird, it had all happened before it seemed, me watching this movie, and yet it was all wonderfully new.

After my two plus hours of meditating on the meaning of life, and my astonishment that it was so simple and all around me, there, here, then, now, I decided I had found what I came to find on this trip and there was no need to think about it any longer. I thought in Hallmark’s made for TV version of Alice and Wonderland, which is admittedly cheesy in some respects, and slightly misses the mark of the original work in many others, the essence of the story was there, and it is fun to watch, especially when you are in wonderland yourself.

After wonderland, I was still ‘tripping’ but I was definitely coming down. I must have been way up there, because it took me quite a number of hours to fully come back to baseline, I would say about thirteen hours over all, from time of dosing to return to baseline. After Alice and Wonderland, I wanted to watch Wings of Destiny over again, to see if all of what I saw in it the first time was really there. There was this moment in the movie, the scene in the bar between the angel and the trapeze artist, where it seemed she had said things, that well they weren’t there now. It seemed she had been speaking of the meaning of life, of love, and she said, ‘There it is, just now, did you feel it?’ or something like that, and was at that point on my first viewing that I felt the meaning of it all. Anyway, the scene does convey something like that, but she never says it exactly, and I couldn’t get that moment back. I knew that I would come away from this trip with some intellectualization of what the meaning of life was, but I would never have that exact moment again. For every moment is like us all, individuals, unique and special in its own way. It is that finality of the moment which makes it special. It is the finality of our lives, which makes them special.

Peace to all and God bless.

-RedRabbit

Exp Year: 2004ExpID: 33278
Gender: Male 
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: Aug 9, 2005Views: 14,514
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2C-E (137) : Alone (16), Mystical Experiences (9)

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