Well I have spent the last year listening to endless hours of Terrence McKenna, Sasha Shulgin, Alan Watts, etc. lectures just to hear their varied, well-educated opinions of the psychedelic experience, the natures of the compounds, and the integration of it all into daily living.
One can only hear so much before becoming convinced to follow through in self-experience with certain descriptions from others, especially for my own self when it's coming from people who put to shame many of the 'adults' that I looked up to and sought life advice from whom would be terrified and not even bother to hear out, let alone dispute anything discussed.
SWIM had been aware of MDMA usage among many, many of his peers as it is probably the most popular drug, aside from cannabis, in his location of the world. having been sheltered at a young age though, spending almost the entirety of his first experience with cannabis feeling hopelessly guilty and paranoid for having consumed the drug and wondering what his parents would think of him, and what if; WHAT IF that cannabis never wore off? he would now be known as a person (the FIRST person, as his friends tried to explain to him) who had become mentally handicapped from ONE INTRODUCTORY smoking session. was there already a mental handicap preventing him from doing other things with his life that would one day be chipped away at with MDMA? maybe. did he get way too stoned for his first experience with cannabis? more than likely.
anyhow. SWIM's MDMA experience turned from a nice "this is cool! kind of feels like a clean crossfade of thc and alcohol" to a "holy shit this sand has been here FOREVER". then the ocean waves seemed to call him out. he would walk so that he was shin-deep in the water, looking out, inevitably hopping around like an adult baby who had never been to the beach before, or even shin-deep in a bed of water period before! after that recess had ended, he would continue to stare out at the massive energy protruding ocean for another half hour to an hour longer; the sun in the sky obviously the more important energy-holding figure but looking at the ocean being much, much more emotional. SWIM's mother has not died yet, nor has he had any children, but SWIM would say that he felt what he predicts to be the amount sadness he will feel at the time of his mother's inevitable death, along with the feeling of love and amazement he will feel when he sees his first child born, all at one. the sadness though, seemed to be slipping through the invisible grips of the ego. going off of all of this, in addition to applying a lot of the various physics and astronomical factoids that he had been learning about in the previous few years, many fucked up circuits seems to have been realigned to update this older-bodied SWIM. he went back to his towel on the sand and listened to a playlist picked by an experienced user, which was pretty much light trip-hop/house beats. not only were the next few hours in the sand humbling as the roll was now peaking hard in the body, but the knowledge that SWIM is not the only one who has experienced this drug and in fact many of his peers had (and he had toxically compared himself to them for so long before) the forgiveness of so many wrongs which had been done to SWIM seemed to almost automatically occur. not even too much mental focus necessary.
in short, he believes that this mental humbling helped him forgive many of the people who had done wrong to him; he, now better than ever, saw how insignificant many of these acts were. while obviously insignificant to the wrongdoers, he now understood that these wrongs really did nothing to him as far as hindering any future endeavors he would so choose to take on, and that focusing energy on past situations like this was his own choice from the very beginning of his conscious life.
a few months later he would work up the courage to see a clinical psychologist, who would perform multiple EMDR (google it) sessions with him. he now feels more mentally clear than he has ever felt in his life. he is even on week four of a break from cannabis, which in the past 3 years he has used via medical marijuana certification heavily, albeit taking good long breaks here and there.
oh and for the record, SWIM was never that big of a fan of modern day edm. he has new allowed room for a completely new genre of music to become a fan of however, and thinks this in itself was humbling.
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