Learning
Rising Star
So last Friday I ingested mushrooms for the first time in over three years. Here's a brief report of the experience.
HISTORY:
I'm pretty experienced with both mushrooms and LSD. I have had full blown psychedelic experiences with both substances in both high school and college. However, each and every one of these experiences was a social experience of some kind. In high school, I would invite friends over to my house and we'd trip all night in the basement. Then we started going to festivals and camping out in the woods. In college, I pushed the group- and nature-oriented tripping to its limits. I have extensive experience tripping in the rocky mountains of Colorado and in the canyonlands of southern Utah with small-medium groups of people.
I do believe that tripping in the middle of vast wildernesses like this is an amazing experience for sure, but for this trip I wanted to do something new and different. In the past, I had always been bombarded with stimulation, both from nature itself and from communicating with my psychedelic companions. One result was that I always felt like I was being pulled "away" from myself. I would feel language dissolving in my head and start investigating my own being introspectively, but then I would remember, "Oh, I'm backpacking in the middle of the desert," or, "damn, I should probably try to answer that funny question Y just asked me seven minutes ago." These experiences were always incredible and rewarding, but I felt like I had become an expert of the "wilderness trip." They were spiritually reinvigorating experiences, but after a while they ceased to show me new things.
SO, when I began to feel that familiar yearning about 6 months ago for a psychedelic experience, I knew that I would want to explore new terrain: an isolated trip in total darkness and silence; an experience that might parallel and yield insights into the meditation practice that has become central to my life over the past several years.
PREPARATION:
I'd been holding on to an 8th of mushrooms for several months, waiting for the time to be right. About two weeks ago I realized it was time, so I cut out alcohol and weed from my diet, tried to eat as much fresh, home-cooked food as possible, and upped my meditation and exercise regimens. I kept this cleansing regimen up for ten days, going for lots of 8 mile runs and several hour+ meditation sessions throughout the day. The particular form of meditation I practice is of the Theravada Buddhist variety, but is not strictly "samatha" or "vipassana." I primarily follow the more intuitive, zen-like teachings of the Thai Forest school (in particular, Ajahn Chah and his disciples, Ajahn Sumedho and Ajahn Amaro). This practice can basically be boiled down to paying attention to the breath and then also paying attention to the changing flux of stimuli and contents within the mind and body. This technique, as I'm sure some you know, brings the impermanence of all things into burning clarity for the observer/meditator, while simultaneously inducing states of calm and tranquility. It's simply a practice of letting reality be, which of course is an amazing skill that psychedelics (not just Buddhism) can teach us
Ok, so anyway, after ten days of preparing in this manner, I was feeling extremely positive about the experience. On Friday night at 8:30 PM, I began preparing my tea. I ground up an 8th of shrooms in a mortar/pestle, soaked them in the juice of 1 lemon, and boiled up some ginger water. After the ginger was boiling for ten minutes, I added the lemon-shroom mixture and boiled it for ten more minutes. Then I turned the heat off, added an herbal tea bag, and steeped the tea for 20 min. I strained out the shrooms with a coffee grinder and was left with less than half a cup of concentrated shroom tea. I mixed in a big spoonful of honey and downed the tea over a period of a couple minutes. The tea was surprisingly delicious!
THE EXPERIENCE:
I went into my dark tripping cave with blankets and sleeping pad on the floor. The tea came on amazingly fast. Within twenty minutes my body felt like it was burning from within, as if I had just consumed a potion that was now transforming me into a fire spirit. The sensation of heat permeated out from my belly until my entire body felt like it was made of flames. Then this sensation of heat transformed into more of a full-body orgasmic feeling. I was seated in a meditative posture but within 30 minutes this became impossible, and so I lay down on the blankets and just tried to let the experience take its course. I closed my eyes and the visuals piled up VERY quickly! Strangely, I was not in the least overwhelmed by this experience, as I had been on previous mushrooms trips. I realize now it's because I wasn't chain smoking cannabis the whole time-- this was the FIRST trip in my life in which I didn't consume cannabis (at least til the comedown) and I was amazed how much more clearheaded and less paranoid the experience was. Never once did I fear, "Oh God I'll be stuck like this forever!"
In fact I was thinking extremely clearly. The pleasant sensations were observed as pleasant, and the things that would normally be overwhelming (such as the skulls that were beginning to clutter my visuals) were simply noted. The experience lacked a "goodness" or a "badness," and I contemplated this for a long time. I had been preparing for months for a "good" experience, but now that it was actually here I realized the experience had NOTHING to do with good or bad, and that's how nature is! We create concepts of good and bad, and yes these concepts can be useful, but ultimately they trip us up, because order our lives around our expectations of good and bad (we're attracted to what we think is good, and we do our best to try and stay away from what's perceived as bad). This habit is so deeply ingrained until we can no longer just let nature be, and we can't even SEE that all things just ARE, there is no value in it. (Except, I thought, maybe love.... but then if love is ACTUALLY real, then what about poverty? Or mental illness? Or plain sadness? Are these things not equally real? On one hand life seemed like an amoral flow, but on the other hand love and suffering felt like they weren't just cultural values or projections but REAL forces in the universes)
My mind went on this track for a while. Before I knew it I was peaking and contemplating life and human beings in the most direct, basic questions. I would ask myself aloud, "what is a life?" and be treated to a chain of visuals that seemed to be a repsonse to this question (i.e. "life is just energy, Learning, it's kind of like THIS...."). I was very amused by my basic questions. I asked myself, "what is a human being?" and laughed quietly and joyfully.
This was the peak of my experience. Then my girlfriend came into my cave to check on me and ask me if I would be okay. I said, "I'll be just fine, if that's a word... yes, I'll be just fine." I realized I was having the least bumpy psychedelic ride I'd ever had, even though the intensity of the effects was pretty high.
My girlfriend and I ended up talking about life and happiness for the next hour or so. We talked about the difficulty of being really honest and sincere in everyday interactions, etc. Normal empathic type mushroom trip talk. I had several useful, practical realizations about relationships with specific family and friends, and made resolutions to act on these epiphanies (which I have fortunately been able to follow through on). Then my girlfriend went to sleep, and I had one of the most amazing psychedelic experiences of my life.
I lay down in the dark with headphones and listened to an hour-long compassion chant by the Dalai Lama. If you're interested in hearing it:
(a different recording from what I listened to, but same chant).
This experience was indescribable. I was having insanely Buddhism-specific visuals (lotuses, seated buddhas, dhamma wheels, glowing shields of metta). More amazingly though, I felt like this chant was guiding me back through my entire life, and all I had to do to have amazing breakthroughs in my memory was simply LISTEN to the track. The more closely I listened to it, the more I just paid attention to the chanting and nothing else, the more intense my memory would become. I felt like I was being guided back to my very earliest memories, and then, even further back!
My earliest memory is of waiting by the mail slot in the door for the envelopes to fall through. So I was standing at that point, I was that child again, and the mail slot started to glow and expand, and the chanting was inviting me to go into the glowing expanse of light, to see where I had been before I was a human. And as soon as I went into that light, I felt the whole chain of contingent, duality-based reality completely unraveling into a psychedelic miasma. I dwelled here for a long time and recognized it in some vague sense, as the realm of the egoless, the lifeless, the identityless. It was the first time in my life I experienced ego-death without a single ounce of panic or unease.
I dwelled here as long as I could. But of course, the effects of the trip gradually wore off, and I ended up smoking some weed and going to bed.
Now, integration-wise, I'm beginning to ask myself serious questions about karma and rebirth. These are the two major points of Buddhism toward which I've always been skeptical, but at the same time there has always been a part of me that resonates deeply with these teachings. I don't think I will ever arrive at an answer using my rational mind, so instead I'm simply trying to observe my own mental attitude toward these ideas. I "feel" like I've been here before, a million times. I'm sure some of you have had such sensations of "eternal recurrence" on psychs. Now that I've been refreshed with a heavy sense of rebirth, I'm trying to observe how this "feeling" affects my mind and my behavior.
I don't think psychedelics are good or bad. I think they simply bring up what's always in your mind in a loud and unavoidable manner. They force you to deal directly with your own mind, which is something many people go through their entire lives without doing.
HISTORY:
I'm pretty experienced with both mushrooms and LSD. I have had full blown psychedelic experiences with both substances in both high school and college. However, each and every one of these experiences was a social experience of some kind. In high school, I would invite friends over to my house and we'd trip all night in the basement. Then we started going to festivals and camping out in the woods. In college, I pushed the group- and nature-oriented tripping to its limits. I have extensive experience tripping in the rocky mountains of Colorado and in the canyonlands of southern Utah with small-medium groups of people.
I do believe that tripping in the middle of vast wildernesses like this is an amazing experience for sure, but for this trip I wanted to do something new and different. In the past, I had always been bombarded with stimulation, both from nature itself and from communicating with my psychedelic companions. One result was that I always felt like I was being pulled "away" from myself. I would feel language dissolving in my head and start investigating my own being introspectively, but then I would remember, "Oh, I'm backpacking in the middle of the desert," or, "damn, I should probably try to answer that funny question Y just asked me seven minutes ago." These experiences were always incredible and rewarding, but I felt like I had become an expert of the "wilderness trip." They were spiritually reinvigorating experiences, but after a while they ceased to show me new things.
SO, when I began to feel that familiar yearning about 6 months ago for a psychedelic experience, I knew that I would want to explore new terrain: an isolated trip in total darkness and silence; an experience that might parallel and yield insights into the meditation practice that has become central to my life over the past several years.
PREPARATION:
I'd been holding on to an 8th of mushrooms for several months, waiting for the time to be right. About two weeks ago I realized it was time, so I cut out alcohol and weed from my diet, tried to eat as much fresh, home-cooked food as possible, and upped my meditation and exercise regimens. I kept this cleansing regimen up for ten days, going for lots of 8 mile runs and several hour+ meditation sessions throughout the day. The particular form of meditation I practice is of the Theravada Buddhist variety, but is not strictly "samatha" or "vipassana." I primarily follow the more intuitive, zen-like teachings of the Thai Forest school (in particular, Ajahn Chah and his disciples, Ajahn Sumedho and Ajahn Amaro). This practice can basically be boiled down to paying attention to the breath and then also paying attention to the changing flux of stimuli and contents within the mind and body. This technique, as I'm sure some you know, brings the impermanence of all things into burning clarity for the observer/meditator, while simultaneously inducing states of calm and tranquility. It's simply a practice of letting reality be, which of course is an amazing skill that psychedelics (not just Buddhism) can teach us
Ok, so anyway, after ten days of preparing in this manner, I was feeling extremely positive about the experience. On Friday night at 8:30 PM, I began preparing my tea. I ground up an 8th of shrooms in a mortar/pestle, soaked them in the juice of 1 lemon, and boiled up some ginger water. After the ginger was boiling for ten minutes, I added the lemon-shroom mixture and boiled it for ten more minutes. Then I turned the heat off, added an herbal tea bag, and steeped the tea for 20 min. I strained out the shrooms with a coffee grinder and was left with less than half a cup of concentrated shroom tea. I mixed in a big spoonful of honey and downed the tea over a period of a couple minutes. The tea was surprisingly delicious!
THE EXPERIENCE:
I went into my dark tripping cave with blankets and sleeping pad on the floor. The tea came on amazingly fast. Within twenty minutes my body felt like it was burning from within, as if I had just consumed a potion that was now transforming me into a fire spirit. The sensation of heat permeated out from my belly until my entire body felt like it was made of flames. Then this sensation of heat transformed into more of a full-body orgasmic feeling. I was seated in a meditative posture but within 30 minutes this became impossible, and so I lay down on the blankets and just tried to let the experience take its course. I closed my eyes and the visuals piled up VERY quickly! Strangely, I was not in the least overwhelmed by this experience, as I had been on previous mushrooms trips. I realize now it's because I wasn't chain smoking cannabis the whole time-- this was the FIRST trip in my life in which I didn't consume cannabis (at least til the comedown) and I was amazed how much more clearheaded and less paranoid the experience was. Never once did I fear, "Oh God I'll be stuck like this forever!"
In fact I was thinking extremely clearly. The pleasant sensations were observed as pleasant, and the things that would normally be overwhelming (such as the skulls that were beginning to clutter my visuals) were simply noted. The experience lacked a "goodness" or a "badness," and I contemplated this for a long time. I had been preparing for months for a "good" experience, but now that it was actually here I realized the experience had NOTHING to do with good or bad, and that's how nature is! We create concepts of good and bad, and yes these concepts can be useful, but ultimately they trip us up, because order our lives around our expectations of good and bad (we're attracted to what we think is good, and we do our best to try and stay away from what's perceived as bad). This habit is so deeply ingrained until we can no longer just let nature be, and we can't even SEE that all things just ARE, there is no value in it. (Except, I thought, maybe love.... but then if love is ACTUALLY real, then what about poverty? Or mental illness? Or plain sadness? Are these things not equally real? On one hand life seemed like an amoral flow, but on the other hand love and suffering felt like they weren't just cultural values or projections but REAL forces in the universes)
My mind went on this track for a while. Before I knew it I was peaking and contemplating life and human beings in the most direct, basic questions. I would ask myself aloud, "what is a life?" and be treated to a chain of visuals that seemed to be a repsonse to this question (i.e. "life is just energy, Learning, it's kind of like THIS...."). I was very amused by my basic questions. I asked myself, "what is a human being?" and laughed quietly and joyfully.
This was the peak of my experience. Then my girlfriend came into my cave to check on me and ask me if I would be okay. I said, "I'll be just fine, if that's a word... yes, I'll be just fine." I realized I was having the least bumpy psychedelic ride I'd ever had, even though the intensity of the effects was pretty high.
My girlfriend and I ended up talking about life and happiness for the next hour or so. We talked about the difficulty of being really honest and sincere in everyday interactions, etc. Normal empathic type mushroom trip talk. I had several useful, practical realizations about relationships with specific family and friends, and made resolutions to act on these epiphanies (which I have fortunately been able to follow through on). Then my girlfriend went to sleep, and I had one of the most amazing psychedelic experiences of my life.
I lay down in the dark with headphones and listened to an hour-long compassion chant by the Dalai Lama. If you're interested in hearing it:
This experience was indescribable. I was having insanely Buddhism-specific visuals (lotuses, seated buddhas, dhamma wheels, glowing shields of metta). More amazingly though, I felt like this chant was guiding me back through my entire life, and all I had to do to have amazing breakthroughs in my memory was simply LISTEN to the track. The more closely I listened to it, the more I just paid attention to the chanting and nothing else, the more intense my memory would become. I felt like I was being guided back to my very earliest memories, and then, even further back!
My earliest memory is of waiting by the mail slot in the door for the envelopes to fall through. So I was standing at that point, I was that child again, and the mail slot started to glow and expand, and the chanting was inviting me to go into the glowing expanse of light, to see where I had been before I was a human. And as soon as I went into that light, I felt the whole chain of contingent, duality-based reality completely unraveling into a psychedelic miasma. I dwelled here for a long time and recognized it in some vague sense, as the realm of the egoless, the lifeless, the identityless. It was the first time in my life I experienced ego-death without a single ounce of panic or unease.
I dwelled here as long as I could. But of course, the effects of the trip gradually wore off, and I ended up smoking some weed and going to bed.
Now, integration-wise, I'm beginning to ask myself serious questions about karma and rebirth. These are the two major points of Buddhism toward which I've always been skeptical, but at the same time there has always been a part of me that resonates deeply with these teachings. I don't think I will ever arrive at an answer using my rational mind, so instead I'm simply trying to observe my own mental attitude toward these ideas. I "feel" like I've been here before, a million times. I'm sure some of you have had such sensations of "eternal recurrence" on psychs. Now that I've been refreshed with a heavy sense of rebirth, I'm trying to observe how this "feeling" affects my mind and my behavior.
I don't think psychedelics are good or bad. I think they simply bring up what's always in your mind in a loud and unavoidable manner. They force you to deal directly with your own mind, which is something many people go through their entire lives without doing.
