Golden Teacher Experiences

[sapphire]

I recently harvested the first flush of some home-grown Golden Teachers. Until last night I had never tried psilocybin mushrooms in any form.

I've been drying the mushrooms to save for an appropriate moment but decided last night at least to make acquaintance with whatever psilocybin reveals.

So I took a freshly grown ~2.5gram mushroom and ate it raw with no other preparation.

After relaxing for a little while, I eventually settled into meditation not really knowing what to expect, except that I knew the dose was very small (it was 2.5 or so grams fresh, so mostly water).

I have some experience with meditation. Although I'm by no means an expert, I am familiar with concepts and direct experiences such as Jhana, purifications, etc...Although I can't formally disentangle the mushroom from whatever would have occurred in meditation last night anyway, but I am pretty confident the mushroom showed me things I needed to see.

I had asked to learn about myself in the moments prior to eating the mushroom and in meditation that's what happened.

Early on, I felt a sense of being loved spread through my body. Not "love", which I've felt before or "joy" which I've also felt arise in meditation -- this was similar but distinct and "being loved" is the only way I can put it into English, which is my only language. I'd never really felt this way before although it wasn't hard to identify the feeling. I tried to attach the feeling to my sleeping daughter and got the sense that although doubtless she felt similar feelings arise associated with daddy, this was bigger. The closest I could get to insight as to the genesis of this feeling of 'being loved' was that something enormous and profound, like the earth itself, loved me. It's a little hard to explain, honestly.

That sensation faded and was replaced with the periodic arising of anger and frustration. But they arose in a way that allowed me to see where they came from-- which is to say where in my body or subtle body unpleasant/unsettled sensations were being harbored and leading to the bubbling up of unhelpful emotions. This wasn't fun but it was definitely important; this working with the feelings in my chest and elsewhere that throw off sensations of frustration/irritation/anger, etc... I can also feel that these are getting close to surface-level issues rather than the deeply entrenched, core traumas that I've been working through for the last year. Needless to say, it's the next day I'm still working with these sensations which are now very obvious in my body. And it's not easy but I'm thankful because I was shown exactly what I need to work on & how to feel it in my body, and that I've already addressed much deeper issues. So tonight and for however long it takes, when I meditate I'll work with these pockets of leftover trauma or whatever else is in there and not yet at rest and in harmony with the universe. I'm not at this point sure if it'll be helpful to surrender to them, approach with curiosity, or invite gently and lovingly to arise, bloom, fade, and then relax to quiescence. But I'm ready to explore.

This isn't an experience report with visuals or breakthroughs or anything like that but I was definitely shown what I asked to explore. Or, if you prefer, I explored what I had set an intention to explore. But I've been on this meditative/yoga healing journey for a little while and I have no doubt the mushroom was working with me last night, even though it was subtle and a very low dose.

 

[sapphire]

Last night I harvested another flush of golden teachers and, for the first time in my life, took a substantial dose of the sacred mushroom.

I began the day with a wonderful, life-altering conversation with a new friend. So that was fantastic.

Fasted for ~6 hours then consumed ~31 grams of home grown, freshly picked Golden Teacher. I ate it as a sandwich, between two slices of toasted rye bread with butter. Accompanied that with a cup of lemon balm tea and some sliced apple. The sandwich tasted pretty good and I had no nausea or unpleasant body effects the entire time. Some ginger and antacid I had ready went unused.

Prior to the meal, I paused and sincerely asked to learn about myself, the universe, the mushroom, and my place in all of this. Then I asked for more assistance healing. I felt that wasn't a very tight intention and sent a thought that this was my first time and I wasn't being greedy, just didn't yet know best to approach intentions with the mushroom. Last, I told myself whatever happened this experience was time-bound and would end; there is no need for fear, you may be astonished but nothing will actually hurt you. Then I told myself to keep that thought close, but away from immediate awareness ( i wanted to be open to the full experience).

I'm going to omit "it seemed like X, but i'm not 100% sure what I think now" below and I'm also going to omit quotes around "I" wherever possible even though that's often how it felt.

At around 20 mins post-sacramental sandwich, I started to feel like my head was bisected by a horizontal plane a couple of centimeters above my ears. Above the plane some sort of strange energetic phenomenon was occurring. It reminded me a little of what I felt with some regularity when learning to do deep meditations w/ cannabis about a year ago. It was like .. things were moving around up there. "psychic/energetic surgery" would be a crude but not wildly inaccurate description of the feeling. But I got the sense it would be healing and although strange (it was familiar but stronger, wider, and a little closer) it didn't feel unpleasant. I consciously relaxed into and welcomed it.

I received a message that growing and eating the mushroom as medicine and spiritual guidance was an important and positive step. A threshold crossed towards understanding after all the fear and upheaval and turmoil of the last year and the endless work to remake myself. Comforted this was right and good.

I began meditating in front of my computer. Nothing formal or anything, just closing my eyes and focusing on the breath. It was easy to move into and out of thought streams, watching unhealthy patterns of thought and mental storytelling. I wasn't new to this exercise but I felt guided and the levels at which I was able to operate were deeper and more meaningful. I learned a lot here but I'm going to skip the details.

Fear started to arise. I felt it in my chest and shoulders, radiating and pulsing upwards. I watched it and interacted with the body sensations, which were trying to connect to fear-based story-telling inside my head. Thankfully I was able to navigate the arising fears by examining the sensations and thoughts, welcoming them with understanding but without being possessed by them, and allowing them to dissipate. Or something like that.

Then I picked up my guitar and soon noticed that I was somehow a much much much more adept musician than in my normal operating state. Not like "dude you're drunk and just think you're a hero" but, seriously, for real. Once I became convinced this was a real phenomenon I started concentrating a little on my hands and playing. If I kept myself out of the way of what my hands wanted to explore on the frets, it felt very much like something inhabiting me was learning how to play guitar. My fretting hand still had some physical limitations, I didn't magically turn into a virtuoso, but the player would encounter them and sort of iron them out, figure out what those limitations were, and work around it in the melodies. The whole guitar felt different to hold, feel, and play, even though the usual I wasn't doing the playing. The focus was on one or two stings and the rhythms were foreign to me. "scales" were not in play but intervals were played with and learned and used with phrasings that haven't ever come from me normally. I'm not sure if that makes sense but that's what seemed to be happening. The melodies were wonderful but don't correspond to any style of music I'm familiar with, so i'm not sure how to describe them in writing.

At some point I noticed I was holding the pick differently and concentrated a bit on my left hand. Turns out, my left hand was also simultaneously both my hand and an insectoid claw type thing. For some reason, this was not really that unsettling. My right hand was also a normal hand but, I noticed, also a bony insect-ish appendage at the same time. And when I watched my right hand in just the right way, my whole right arm was actually in something like deep space. Fear didn't enter here, although it could have. But I was so close to the direct experience of 'emptiness' and also operating mostly outside of typical human notions of time. I knew the insectoids might exist in some way but were also ultimately empty just like everything else so fear wasn't really a problem. I was definitely curious, intrigued, and somewhat astounded. And there was definitely a some apprehension around the edges-- I'm not trying to make myself out to be the storybook fearless hero here.

So I relaxed and enjoyed the deep space insectoid alien learn to play guitar and make music through me and also be me (and also I knew I didn't exist at the same time ... none of these ideas were in tension during the experience). And it was amazing.

Around this time a friend who knew what was happening sent me a short fractal-ish moving image, about a minute long. Watching this made me laugh for reasons I don't understand and wasn't really controlling and "I" didn't even find it funny although it was beautiful. This worked about 3 times. After about 30 seconds of staring at the beautiful shifting patterns but not feeling anything "funny", a laugh would arise from nowhere and my face would feel a little weird when it came out. Kind of like if you're meditating and you let go of clinging to the need to breath and then at some point your body knows it's time to breath and takes care of that for you and it's, just for a moment, a little bit of a surprise because you didn't see it coming?

Around this time I started occasionally smelling something a little strange. It smelled like a soft yellow and would come and go. I don't know how else to say it.

Then I merged with the universe and understood what it means when really adept meditators say "it's all in your head" and talk about emptiness. I felt like I could change huge swathes of "reality" with just my will because there was no reality, it was all constructed in my head, which wasn't really my head anyway although I usually feel like it is because I'm equipped with a mental storytelling unit. I understood "we're all one."

I closed my eyes and saw fractals and some sort of Buddha image and millions of eyes, like an Alex Gray thing. But I preferred moving deeper than CEVs and cosmic insectoid musical aliens, so i just kept meditating.

I understood this friend I had just met and I had been intertwined across generations? dimensions? millennia (in human time)? And that he was right now playfully and compassionately winking at me like "you finally made it home!" It was full of mischief and weirdly somehow cat-like but not in a visual way. I felt him right there playing in the cosmos with me, welcoming me. I knew this was somehow my birthright, although "birthright" is a really poor word for it. And than in a totally non-competitive but playful in mischievous way, he had beaten me at some grand game of "find your way back home" and I was playfully amused by this in a "dammit! you got me this time, buddy!" way.

The waves got a little less powerful and between them I would lament the return the baseline. Not with actual sadness, just more of a "i don't want to feel mundane again, i like it when my whole brain is functioning and I can perceive these things; I feel like I'm more whole and I understand so much more. I like being the universe." I did not, however, understand the insectoid alien musician thing but that detail didn't and still doesn't matter.

There were moments were I felt like I could easily do "magic" just by force of will. Just change my entire life circumstances by believing and doing it. I didn't want to do this in harmful ways, the ideas for uses of this "power" all focussed around giving soft comfort to my wife and daughter as they progress through this life unaware of the bigger nature of the universe and what they're cut off from by nature of our human mind/brain.

I had a lot of trouble sleeping as things wore off. I ate the mushroom at around 8:30PM and was in a thorough but very reality-bound afterglow until eventually falling asleep around 3:30AM.

A wonderful first time. Now I understand what "integration" means. With my few Salvia experiences thus far it has been different-- Salvia has helped me a lot but not (yet) so much in a way involving conscious post experience integration work, or at least not to this extent.

Already know there are lessons for me here regarding fear. I am very thankful.

Also, when I was outside of time looking in, I had the strong sense that language, specifically verb tenses, were part of the mechanism keeping us from understanding deeper truths. I have a note here from some point: during the journey: "verb tenses are why I suffer." lol.

 

[AcidShard]

Nice!
Sounds like a beautiful experience and you handled yourself well.
It is always a little freaky taking a large dose of a new substance, so kudos for keeping on top of your own mind and staying calm and accepting the experience without resisting or becoming afraid or panicked.
I'm sure your meditation techniques helped that immensely.

I think that you should dry your mushrooms fully though, so you can have a better idea of what kind of dose you are taking.
How did you come up with ~31 grams for a dose??
Do you know how many dried grams that is equal to?

Thanks for writing, I enjoyed reading it.
Mmmmm..... sacramental sandwich

 

[ducdevil]

Fabulous report, Sapphire...

the mushroom spirit is a powerful, wise and instructive one...

you treated this sacred ritual with respect and you were blessed with knowledge, insight and healing in return. there is, of course, an even more profound connection with the medicine when it is nurtured personally. nothing better, really. cosmic bond between us.

the plant spirits do, indeed, have consciousness.

peace

 

[the_Architect]

Wow, I really enjoyed your report, thank you for it. Sometimes I feel there´s nobody in my life whom I can speak to about certains topics.
That hole is filled by the nexus community and reading from people experiences such as yours, so thank you.

Peace

 

[dragonrider]

Congratulations with your first succesfull journeys. And welcome to the world of psychedelic tryptamines. I don't know what it has in store for you, but i can tell you this: you will not be disappointed.