DOSE:

2.5 g

oral

Mushrooms

(edible / food)

It has taken almost a week to gather my thoughts enough to write about this experience. The first thing I learned from the mushroom is that language and communication are probably the most difficult ideas among the facets of existence; how can one explain a trip? How can one ever explain anything, especially after seeing the swirling cogs and patterns and depths that form infinity? After experiencing such a new world, I have immense respect for the work of all psychedelic messengers -- most importantly, Terence McKenna, whose lectures prepared me for the journey. And hoooo boy, it was a journey.


Alright!


Thursday, May 27. Chunder ground up about 5 grams of mushrooms, melted them into about 7 ice-cube sized squares of chocolate, and stuck them in the freezer.


Friday, May 28. We woke up around noon and started taking care of business. Made sure our friends weren't going to drop by during our trip, ate some food, prepared our setting. We moved the coffee table against the fireplace so we had a big open floor to play on, with lots of soft blankets and pillows. We decided on a good playlist to listen to for the next 7 hours, and got our chocolates out of the freezer.


3:00pm: Ingestion.


We hadn't planned on eating so much chocolate -- 3 and a half cubes a piece. It was difficult to get it all down, especially with tiny chunks of gross mushrooms all throughout the chocolate. It didn't taste bad at all, but just knowing that some disgusting mushrooms were ground up into it was enough. Chunder ate his rather quickly, and I managed to get all mine down after 10 minutes or so. We laid back against the couch and waited for that feeling.


That feeling is the comeup, and it was slow to hit. It was hard to wrap my mind around the idea that for the rest of the day, we were going to trip. Nothing was happening after 10 minutes, everything was exactly the same. Or was it the same? We kept asking each other, 'do I really feel that or am I imagining it?' We were imagining most of it, in our nervous anticipation for the onset of the magic. We started up the playlist, which began with Chemical Four.


I was feeling a bit sick from all the chocolate, and I was worried that I would start tripping and vomit everywhere and be stuck in a sick hell for the whole day. But suddenly, it was easier to forget about my stomach. Things were starting to shift, the rainbow filter in front of my eyes got more intense, my insides were tingles...then my insides were gone, and I had the ultimate body high. It was around that point that my communication abilities dropped.


So many things were going on, I wanted to talk to Chunder about it. I knew he was feeling it too, and I knew that words were ultimately futile, but it felt good to try to communicate. The ridiculous psychobabble began. I kept trying to explain how insane everything was. I would look at the blinds and they would turn on their own, then the lines and shadows on the blinds would start moving and swirling across the walls while pulsating in neon green. It was intense, and I kept looking around the room to try to grasp something familiar -- the computer chair, the television, the wall -- but it was hopeless. Everything was breathing, moving, shifting, soft and beautiful and crazy, and I had no words for it. I kept looking to Chunder for answers or stability or something, but he was lost in the sea just as hopelessly...that endless soup of hallucinations and feelings and experience.


The magic was pounding us pretty hard, and our egos were slipping away. I was awestruck with absolutely everything. Chunder and I started talking about how cold we felt. I didn't really notice it too much until we mentioned it, then it felt like I started shivering uncontrollably, with my teeth chattering and insides jolting. I made it into the bedroom to put on my big black Dredg hoodie, then laid down in the middle of the living room floor. After I returned, it was like the whole mood of the universe had changed. The way I experienced my body started to change. I felt very human...very wet, fleshy, strange...like clay, like really pleasing putty. I felt like a living thing, watery and alive. My ego had disappeared somewhere along the way, and I was having some amazing fun. We had turned into little children.


The floor became our playground, and I felt very in touch with it. I laid my face against the carpet and dug my fingers into it. I threw around the blankets and pillows. I was feeling very innocent, very childlike and new. I realized that clothes didn't make any sense, so I took them off. It was a task to get out of my shirt, but my reward was nakedness, and it was absolutely crazy. I felt my legs, my arms, my stomach, rediscovering my whole body, the way things feel and how they move. I was laughing like a fool. It wasn't shallow laughter, either; it was whole body laughter, guttural laughter, orgasmic universal laughter. I was babbling to Chunder about everything, laughing and babbling and playing in true innocent childlike perspective.


The trip just got more intense as we played in the living room floor. I felt no insecurities, and everything made perfect sense to me. I kept saying to Chunder, 'Chunder, this is IT, oh my GOD, Chunder, this is IT, I underSTAND, oh my god. I understand EVERYTHING, I understand, Chunder!' It felt like I was yelling it, but I didn't care. I was losing touch with what I knew to be normal reality. I didn't feel anything but pleasure, joy, understanding, perfection, experience. While writhing there on the floor, I understood people, and life, and death, and I had absolute love for everyone and everything in existence, and I knew all the answers. The answers to hunger and war and poverty and suffering...that was IT, and I said it over and over again. 'This is IT, this is ALL IT HAS TO BE, this is IT oh my god I understand this is IT.' It felt like that was all I could say, because I was touching heaven, and I was touching the answers, and grasping them and morphing with them and becoming them and I was becoming Chunder and I was becoming the carpet and that was it.


And that wasn't even it -- there was a long trip ahead.


The intensity came in waves. While riding a wave I would lay there and close my eyes and just writhe around, feeling everything, becoming everything, enjoying the vibes and crazy hallucinations and music. While I was between intense storms of information, I would babble to Chunder about how I understood existence, and how much I wanted everyone to experience it. I told him that I loved my parents so much, and I wanted to show them, and that they would understand. I told him that we were going to show Meg, and she would understand, and she wouldn't have to be sad anymore. I said those things a million times.


Luckily, somehow, Chunder managed to be responsible and keep me from getting on the internet to talk to my mom. I remember him saying, 'Okay, let's not yell. Other people are straight and they don't understand.' And I told him that it doesn't matter that they don't understand, because this is IT. He kept trying to remind me that even though it didn't matter, I would have to come down eventually, and we didn't want to be in an uncomfortable situation because of some decision made while tripping. I could not get my mind around 'being straight.' Everything made perfect sense, and it felt like I could have died right there and felt nothing about it but bliss. I was perfectly straight then. Things made more sense than they ever had while I was 'straight.'


We had turned on the heater before things got too crazy, and Chunder managed to find the heater vent. He said he understood why ocean creatures went for the warm vents...and I understood too, after I crawled over to it. That heat felt like the most primal, deeply comforting thing ever. I was stuffed back into a little corner with Chunder, against the coffee table and a bicycle and the carpet and all these mundane things, and it was perfect. Heaven. Incredible. I felt the table, and the carpet, and I couldn't stop writhing around on Chunder and hitting him and squeezing him and laughing with him. His body felt incredible, and so did mine. To any straight person, it would have looked insane...two naked people writhing around and laughing and not making any sense. My mind felt dead sober, though...nothing was inhibiting me or changing me, and I wasn't 'fucked up'...I was just experiencing all there was to experience in the moment, really seeing things, and it made sense. At one point before leaving the living room, Chunder sat down at the computer and tried to type some thoughts. It was pointless, because there were no words in him to explain it, and I pulled him away from the computer as I laughed and beat on the keyboard, unconcerned with what it might mess up or leave for me to fix while straight. The concept of straight was gone.


The childlike playground part of the trip was over as soon as we decided that taking a shower together could be fun. Somehow, we migrated into the bathroom and managed to turn on the shower. Completing an idea like that is hard work while you're tripping...it requires intense focus. Whenever I had to get my head straight and get something done, I would say to Chunder, 'okay okay, LISTEN TO ME,' and we would look at each other, 'I am GOING to turn on the SHOWER, OKAY. This is how Sandra turns on showers,' and somehow I did what Sandra does to turn on showers and successfully worked the faucet and there was the warm water all over us.


This is the hardest part of the trip to explain. While straight, the shower isn't a glorious place at all. With some mushrooms grinding through digestion, it was the most amazing thing I'd ever experienced.


We stood there in the gentle shower of warm water, letting the tub fill up. We hugged up to each other and laughed, and excitedly talked at each other about what was going on, and sat down and stood up and kept changing our positions and feeling the water. When I felt that I needed to say something, or express something, it was like my brain reached into the box it usually keeps those things in and it was almost empty. All there was left to do was laugh and cry at the same time, and make astonished breathing noises, and speak what few words I had left. I cried and told chunder a million times that I wanted my mom there. The mother vibe in the shower was amazing, intense. I felt so close to my mother, like an equal human, like a human in this soup of experience with nothing but love to radiate, and I wanted her there to tell her all about it, to feel it with me. I wanted my mom, and Meg, and her mom, and I felt all the mothering energy in the whole universe. I felt the earth, and I felt everything. It was sex, love, life, being, consciousness, total orgiastic bliss. It was like we were in the birth canal, going backward in life, from innocent little children to this intense birthing experience, where everything was white and pink and our bodies were full of red veins that I could see, and the water was the same as us and our spit was the same as us and I became Chunder and Chunder became me and I became everything and there were no words. I was God, everything was God. I felt like everything, I felt like the mother of everything. Chunder and I were letting our spit go everywhere, feeling it, playing in it, rubbing our faces against the wall in the shower, going on and on about how we were everything, how we understood. I said 'I want EVERYONE to feel this. I want George W. Bush here right now!' And we laughed about it, because it was silly, ridiculous, and tripping is silly, life is silly. It was silly, but I meant it. George W. Bush was the only thing, the only symbol I could even remember from the real world that I relate with government and complicated things and problems that I knew the answers to. It was the only thing I knew to say that might begin to express my feelings to Chunder. He understood, and we both wished for George Bush to be there. We wished for the world to be there, all of existence. And it was. And we were it.


That was it.


I don't know how we ever pulled ourselves from that experience, but we did. We got rinsed off, and dried off with some towels I had put out before the trip. I stood there and stared at myself in the mirror. My face looked like it was covered with pimples and little red bumps. I could see the bright red blood flowing through my veins, like I had X-ray vision. I could see them in Chunder, too. I saw myself...really saw myself, with no ego to feel shame for being naked or any of the insecurities or any of that. It was all useless, and there was just me. I saw the female form of myself, and still felt like the mother of everything. It felt like I had very long hair, and I was a painting. When Chunder stood next to me, it looked perfect. Beautiful human bodies; a soft flowing one and a strong, tall one...male and female, man and woman, both God, both perfect.


Mirrors are very profound things, but I had no negative thoughts. The pimples and veins were just part of the hallucinations, and they did not worry me. I understood how everything was, and felt at perfect peace and harmony with existence.


It was unpleasantly cool out of the bathroom, so we went to the bedroom and got nested down with each other in the covers. From child to birthing and then to the womb...the bed was like a neverending nest of comfort. Absolutely perfect. I became the bed, held perfectly safe in a state of pure awareness. Sometimes I would peek out and open my eyes and see the closet looking strange, or the wood grains of the door melting down to the floor. I hugged up to Wal-Mart, my stuffed dog from childhood, and squeezed him like crazy. He felt amazing, and I felt his familiar, ancient soul inside me. I had auditory hallucinations of bells and music.


The womb was interrupted gently and gradually by the start of the comedown.


My body became restless and unsatisfied. I felt like I should have been doing something, but what? Chunder was feeling the comedown too, so we got up and spent quite a bit of time getting dressed and moving into the computer area. The mood was much different now. The playground felt like it happened ages ago. I wasn't feeling like everything anymore...I was just feeling very awkward, anxious. I just had a shirt on, and I found some underwear and talked myself through putting them on...'This is how Sandra puts on underwear.' Kind of Blue (Miles Davis) was playing on Chunder's computer then, and as soon as I stepped out of the bedroom, I became a jazz musician. It felt like I was a cool, smooth creature...not really a fleshy human anymore, but a specialized, evolved, complex thing, one who wanted to calmly, coolly dance around and snap its fingers and say 'alright' and make cool, jazzy noises. That's just what I did for a good long while. The dancing felt good to my restless body. For me jazz was a very introspective thing to listen to on mushrooms.


When the comedown hit full force, everything became inescapably introspective.


I first felt it in the kitchen. We had turned on the bright, fluorescent lights, and our egos were starting to drift slowly back in. Earlier, all our barriers and filters had been removed, and we had experienced pure sensory information, pure...experience. Now, I was witnessing the barriers and programming fall back into place bit by bit. Everything was still acting a little strange, visually, but the words were returning. The fridge was no longer a living, breathing object that was the same as me, but a Refrigerator that we keep drinks in and has magnets and papers on it and all the memories and relationships I have stored in reference to Refrigerators. Chunder and I seemed to be actors in a terribly cheap movie. Everything felt like a prop. The microwave was so much a microwave, it seemed to be unreal....everything felt that way. Everything was just a little bit too scripted, too in place. It also felt like there was intense energy in everything, cold energy, and that any object could just explode or burst into flames at any second.


Tense. The scene was very tense.


I asked Chunder over and over, 'So, what do we do now? What are we supposed to do with ourselves?' Anytime I said something to him or vice versa, it was like we were reading it directly from a script. I witnessed my ego dripping back in. I saw myself again...only this time, I saw my Ego self, with all my unpleasant habits and games and universal separatism. The mood was completely opposite of what it had been earlier -- no longer warm, fleshy, orgiastic bliss -- now cold, mathematical emptiness.


We ended up right where we started, sitting on the floor with our backs against the couch, staring at the television. At the beginning of the trip, the television was breathing and shifting and creating. Now, it was unmoving, stolid, serious, doing just what I expected it to do. We smoked some weed to take the edge off the comedown, and turned on some television show. It didn't make any sense at all. It made no sense to watch television, and it made no sense to be alive anymore. The beautiful, vibrant rainbow filter was really different now...it wasn't like a filter at all, but part of reality. Wherever I looked, I saw endless patterns of spinning cogs and gears. Within each spinning cog, there was a whole new pattern of colors and cogs, and within each one of those more patterns, straight into infinity. I looked into the carpet, and I truly grasped infinity. Forever. Emptiness.


It was Kerouac's great vision of emptiness right there in front of me. I couldn't just see objects as themselves; I saw the infinite rainbow pattern connectivity that went on forever, in everything. I even felt it in myself when I concentrated on my insides. While that was going on, my mind was also inspecting my ego. I was sitting on the floor, but I imagined myself sitting on the couch. I thought about myself talking to Chunder, and watching television, and holding up the insecurities and barriers I hold up all the time. I thought about the things I think about, and how stupid it is for me to do the things I do, and how I should just get rid of all my material things and somehow use what I had learned during the trip, during the ecstatic touching of God, to live the way I should be living.


I felt more apathetic and depressed than I have ever felt. I saw all the suffering in the world all at once, the hopeless ignorance returning to me and everything else. It wasn't easy anymore, and the answers of enlightenment weren't there. Showing everyone in the world the way was no longer an option, because I was witnessing my ego taking over and filtering all the incoming information.


Goodbye, answers to existence.


I saw no point in living, no point in anything. I didn't think I would ever return to normal. I was going to be stuck in the cold, mathematical comedown forever, and I wanted to melt into the infinite floor and die. I honestly did.


During the whole comedown, I felt like I should have been doing something with my body to make it feel better. We decided to go take a walk outside, check the mail, and go see our friend for a few minutes. It was pretty much dark outside then...around 9:30 or so. Everything felt surreal. The outside air was incredible, and the trees were so tall and magnificent to look at. It was wet outside from raining earlier in the day, so the parking lot was making beautiful oil rainbows. We could smell every single thing in the air.


We walked around, made it to our friend?s apartment, said hello, and set out to return. On the way back, we saw a beautiful landscape in the deep dusk. Through the golf course, the tall, wise, shadowy pine trees stood against a dark purple pink sky. It looked like a magical forest land with Aladdin colors. I almost expected myself to jump off the sidewalk and fly through the air into that landscape.


Back at our apartment, our bodies continued to feel restless and bad. Comedowns do not last forever, thankfully. It felt awkward speaking to each other for the rest of the night, because everything was still kind of odd. Every time we smoked more weed, the visual trip would come back a little bit. Eventually we were back down to this crazy reality we experience most of the time, and though we were exhausted mentally and physically past the point of sleep, we managed to eat some food and then slept the whole night.


The next day, we walked a mile or two down to the grocery store. The whole earth was fresh and new and ready to be received. My whole perspective had changed, and is still changing, and is constantly changing. Bodily senses felt different, mind felt clear, the slate was clear.


And so there we were, and here we are.


I have nothing to explain now, except that I know now what is truly worth doing. I had millions of loose ideas, loose concepts that needed explaining and sorting. The trip put things in order for me. It affirmed a lot of ideas I had, and really put out some new ones. It took a few days to get things straight, but now I can say, without a doubt, that I know what is to be done, with my situation here in Seattle and my relationships with other people and my whole life.


I must say, there is one thing I see especially worth being a part of now, and it's the Psychedelic Game. The mushroom is the best teacher I've ever had. I officially recommend that everyone who reads this should eat some mushrooms in a safe environment, and spiritual context -- after plenty of research, of course. The last handful of generations hasn't had tripping as a part of their culture, and the state of the world really shows it. If everyone tried these things only once, we would be a different bunch of creatures.


I don't feel like I have to bother with it anymore...being some type of activist, trying to change people and groups and their habits. I didn't bother with it before, but now I don't feel guilty about not wanting to be a part of that game. The true change, the working toward enlightenment and conscious behavior, has to come from everyone individually. That's when the good stuff happens, friends.

Exp Year: 2002	ExpID: 94871
Gender: Female
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: Nov 6, 2012	Views: 12,408
[ View PDF (to print) ] [ View LaTeX (for geeks) ] [ Swap Dark/Light ]
Mushrooms (39) : Small Group (2-9) (17), Music Discussion (22), Glowing Experiences (4), First Times (2)