waitwhatwhere
Rising Star
I prepared my space all day--all week, if you count the work and life obligations I dutifully discharged, writing overdue emails, speaking with loved ones. It had been a touch more than three months since my last experience with DMT. It was a full moon, which often seems like an auspicious time for a DMT ceremony, yet I would only learn it was actually the full moon after the fact when I stepped outside to gaze at its brightness on my patio. During the day I ate a light brunch, cleaned the kitchen, and did my laundry by hand, hanging it to dry in the sun. Since I recently moved houses and this was to be my inaugural journey in this home-space, I took care in arranging things. Because I sometimes host ceremony for the benefit of others, this was also a test for them. Aside from brunch, I took no other food that day.
Space is important to me, as is ceremony. I feel that the work to manipulate my surroundings beforehand is part offering, part meditation. In any case, I rearranged the furniture so that the Persian rug would fit in my chosen, checker-tiled room, yielding a much more open temple. I constructed an altar of pretty stones, candles, icons of my ishta-devantas, and other symbols that have personal meaning. Around sundown, I began my yoga practice, right on top of the newly situated rug. I usually banish cellphones, but I forgot and a friend called with whom I need to have a serious conversation--but then was not the time. Ignoring the call, and with the cellphone appropriately banished, I did my best to put my friend and his troubles out of my mind and continue my practice. After focusing on my breath and the willful surrender to fully engage with each pose, I laid myself to rest in the very place where I would soon be taking a journey. While in corpse pose, I thought about my process, start to finish, of extracting a sacrament from a once living plant and crystalizing it into a purified, accessible form. Having reflected upon my deliberate actions, I was now about as prepared as one gets to dissolve the ego and/or consensus reality.
My lovely partner agreed to sit for me. I’m not typically a solo DMT user. I smudged the room and sat down where my yoga mat had been on the carpet. Before me was a sub-altar, a smoking altar: a platter to roll dried herbs, a candle, a place to ash, and some more pretty things. Beneath me was a meditation cushion, as I prefer to remain in some form of lotus while in the trance state. I had tucked a weighed dose of bitter harmala freebase under my tongue about 20 minutes prior to rolling a joint of parsley, mint, and DMT. I eyeball the dose. I prefer joints because I find that the last few inhalations are much more natural gestures, allowing me to focus on letting go rather than manipulating a lighter and apparatus. With a bit of carefully curated music playing in the background, I ignited my rocket ship.
The flash came on with little prelude. My closed-eye vision was flooded with multi-neon-colored entoptic hallucinations with sensual women emerging from the patterned hyperspace, bathing me with urgent sexual energy. This or some other impulse shocked my eyes open. Usually, I like to keep them closed as I don’t experience the same degree of open-eye visions as I do when they are closed. Eyes open, I gazed catatonic into the eyes of my girlfriend, watching her flow from young to old, to young again. Motionless, I felt the brunt of the injustice of the place of women in the world, not seen as persons, reduced the world over to sexual spigots, domestic slaves, and punching bags. My girlfriend noticed that my eyes were open when they usually are not, and got a bit worried. She touched my elbow to get a response from me and I put my hands together, bowing ever-so-slightly in homage to her, my wonderful, patient, amazing lover, who enables much joy in my life. Reassured, she held my gaze until I could speak, and then we talked over what I had experienced. Always a surprise, with DMT.
Eventually, I felt steady enough to return to the cushion for another round. The barely diminished joint glared at me. I fiddled with the music, and then settled in to relight my spaceship without much to-do. As the inhalations stacked, the room subsided and I was surrounded by beautifully clothed human-appearing attendants. Their purple-quilted vestments swished by as they were attending to me and making sure I was okay while placing rainbow technology in my field of vision: seemingly a kind of deprogramming or mathemARTical antidote to reality. I don’t think I could see their faces. Vistas of living knot-work impregnated with forests and microorganisms in macroscale sailed by as I saw more clearly than ever, more clearly than always.
Impossible, outrageous visions followed. Of course words fail, but I will flatten and compress what was already stripped of power and memory. It doesn’t fit. It can’t belong here. Simply, the illusion evaporated and I remembered that I was a part of a universe vast and dense, aware of its (our) inertness from a position invalidating and illuminating both the conscious and the blind. And yet order. A complexity beyond a dozen lifetimes’ study unfolded in such a manner that as an observer, I grew less to encompass it. A sense of hierarchical dimensionality permeated, and I was suddenly a metaphoric circle from Flatland peeking into the world of 3D life, boggled and electrified. It was full of beings: vast, distinct beings of no identifiable category, yet many fused. While robbed of sequential and complete memory, I am left with the echo of the face of one such being. It was looking at me with eyes of stars and planets, a visible mind of magma and a crown of algorithmic fire. It seemed happy to see what was left of the observer, as if recognizing a cousin who’d missed the last few family barbeques.
Forgetting the irrelevance of time, I descended back into self. As the observer sank back into “me,” the colors dulled and dimmed into burnt umbers, soggy blues, and rusty shadows as they do. A demiurge shoved me back into the material plane, looking like an evil genie singing the silent opera of a pre-Talkie film, gesticulating as the lights went down in the house. I emerged in comfortable prayer pose, aware that more time than usual had likely passed. My girlfriend lay on her side and I shifted my eyes to show I was wording again. Gratitude filled me. My teeth chattered and I remained with palms pressed towards each other, swaying and savoring.
Much later, sleep took me.
Space is important to me, as is ceremony. I feel that the work to manipulate my surroundings beforehand is part offering, part meditation. In any case, I rearranged the furniture so that the Persian rug would fit in my chosen, checker-tiled room, yielding a much more open temple. I constructed an altar of pretty stones, candles, icons of my ishta-devantas, and other symbols that have personal meaning. Around sundown, I began my yoga practice, right on top of the newly situated rug. I usually banish cellphones, but I forgot and a friend called with whom I need to have a serious conversation--but then was not the time. Ignoring the call, and with the cellphone appropriately banished, I did my best to put my friend and his troubles out of my mind and continue my practice. After focusing on my breath and the willful surrender to fully engage with each pose, I laid myself to rest in the very place where I would soon be taking a journey. While in corpse pose, I thought about my process, start to finish, of extracting a sacrament from a once living plant and crystalizing it into a purified, accessible form. Having reflected upon my deliberate actions, I was now about as prepared as one gets to dissolve the ego and/or consensus reality.
My lovely partner agreed to sit for me. I’m not typically a solo DMT user. I smudged the room and sat down where my yoga mat had been on the carpet. Before me was a sub-altar, a smoking altar: a platter to roll dried herbs, a candle, a place to ash, and some more pretty things. Beneath me was a meditation cushion, as I prefer to remain in some form of lotus while in the trance state. I had tucked a weighed dose of bitter harmala freebase under my tongue about 20 minutes prior to rolling a joint of parsley, mint, and DMT. I eyeball the dose. I prefer joints because I find that the last few inhalations are much more natural gestures, allowing me to focus on letting go rather than manipulating a lighter and apparatus. With a bit of carefully curated music playing in the background, I ignited my rocket ship.
The flash came on with little prelude. My closed-eye vision was flooded with multi-neon-colored entoptic hallucinations with sensual women emerging from the patterned hyperspace, bathing me with urgent sexual energy. This or some other impulse shocked my eyes open. Usually, I like to keep them closed as I don’t experience the same degree of open-eye visions as I do when they are closed. Eyes open, I gazed catatonic into the eyes of my girlfriend, watching her flow from young to old, to young again. Motionless, I felt the brunt of the injustice of the place of women in the world, not seen as persons, reduced the world over to sexual spigots, domestic slaves, and punching bags. My girlfriend noticed that my eyes were open when they usually are not, and got a bit worried. She touched my elbow to get a response from me and I put my hands together, bowing ever-so-slightly in homage to her, my wonderful, patient, amazing lover, who enables much joy in my life. Reassured, she held my gaze until I could speak, and then we talked over what I had experienced. Always a surprise, with DMT.
Eventually, I felt steady enough to return to the cushion for another round. The barely diminished joint glared at me. I fiddled with the music, and then settled in to relight my spaceship without much to-do. As the inhalations stacked, the room subsided and I was surrounded by beautifully clothed human-appearing attendants. Their purple-quilted vestments swished by as they were attending to me and making sure I was okay while placing rainbow technology in my field of vision: seemingly a kind of deprogramming or mathemARTical antidote to reality. I don’t think I could see their faces. Vistas of living knot-work impregnated with forests and microorganisms in macroscale sailed by as I saw more clearly than ever, more clearly than always.
Impossible, outrageous visions followed. Of course words fail, but I will flatten and compress what was already stripped of power and memory. It doesn’t fit. It can’t belong here. Simply, the illusion evaporated and I remembered that I was a part of a universe vast and dense, aware of its (our) inertness from a position invalidating and illuminating both the conscious and the blind. And yet order. A complexity beyond a dozen lifetimes’ study unfolded in such a manner that as an observer, I grew less to encompass it. A sense of hierarchical dimensionality permeated, and I was suddenly a metaphoric circle from Flatland peeking into the world of 3D life, boggled and electrified. It was full of beings: vast, distinct beings of no identifiable category, yet many fused. While robbed of sequential and complete memory, I am left with the echo of the face of one such being. It was looking at me with eyes of stars and planets, a visible mind of magma and a crown of algorithmic fire. It seemed happy to see what was left of the observer, as if recognizing a cousin who’d missed the last few family barbeques.
Forgetting the irrelevance of time, I descended back into self. As the observer sank back into “me,” the colors dulled and dimmed into burnt umbers, soggy blues, and rusty shadows as they do. A demiurge shoved me back into the material plane, looking like an evil genie singing the silent opera of a pre-Talkie film, gesticulating as the lights went down in the house. I emerged in comfortable prayer pose, aware that more time than usual had likely passed. My girlfriend lay on her side and I shifted my eyes to show I was wording again. Gratitude filled me. My teeth chattered and I remained with palms pressed towards each other, swaying and savoring.
Much later, sleep took me.
