nosce_te_ipsum
Rising Star
“existence makes something useful,
but nonexistence makes it work “ –Lao Tzu
Hello everyone and thank you for giving me the opportunity for joining the Nexus. I have been a long time lurker, but only recently have I felt the desire to become a member and seek to integrate myself into the community. A little background information on myself. I am a male in my 30’s and have been using entheogens/psychedelics for about 6 years. In these 6 years I have gained personal knowledge of mushrooms (20 journeys), LSD (30 journeys), MDMA/MDA (6 Journeys), Ayahuasca (10 journeys), and Mescaline (3 journeys). but nonexistence makes it work “ –Lao Tzu
I experienced my first psychedelic experience 6 years ago at a BurningMan inspired event. Up until that point I had spent many years around people undergoing their own psychedelic experiences (at burns, raves, house parties) but had serious personal reservations about taking my own journeys. After a long stint of being straight edge (from everything but caffeine) I was left with a curiosity of the psychedelic experience. Since I was a young boy, altered states of consciousness had fascinated me. I spent many hours of my youth meditating and reading famous/well known mystics and their experience exploring themselves and their ultimate quest for the experience of divine union. My first psychedelic experience was completely unplanned and unexpected. On the last day of the burn I was gifted a large psilocybin mushroom from an older hippie couple. I tried to refuse it at first but they insisted that I was perfectly capable of handling the experience and that this was something I had been looking for. I ate the whole mushroom and began to explore the burn, as I began to come up I found myself absolutely blown away with everything that was happening. I felt my sense of self (my ego) leave and I was filled with an incredible sense of wonder. I felt as if my mind had been transported back into time in which I was 5 and I looked upon the world with an everlasting sense of curiosity and awe. I spent most of the trip communing with nature and crying tears of joy and ecstasy. It was an incredibly moving event in my life, one which I can still recall with crystal clarity.
I experienced a number of other mushroom experiences after my initial one, each one just as wonderful as the proceeding experience. I purchased a few books on the psychedelic experience and began to read the websites Erowid and the Nexus. Around this time I met a dear friend, who has since become my best friend, and teacher of psychedelics. It was he who introduced me to my second psychedelic, Ayahuasca. My inaugural voyage with mother Aya was at a small camp out with 5 people undergoing the journey with me. The experience was absolutely life changing, I thought mushrooms were powerful, a single shot of concentrated Ayahuasca completely obliterated my entire sense of everything. As I was starting to come up, I felt the sense of weightlessness coming over me, along with the feeling that I was being pulled out of myself. I thought I had already peaked, when out of nowhere the purge hit me, as I purged, I was brought down to my knees with the incredible intensity of the Aya. When I finally stood up again, my entire world had become illuminated with beautiful fractals and intricate geometrical patterns. It is by far one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen. The sensation of dreaming awake was flowing through me and I felt a connection to every living and non loving thing around me. I was imparted with the sensation that I had read as a child, the experience of feeling the interconnected divinity/spirit of everything.
After my Ayahuasca experience, I was left with an insatiable curiosity of other psychedelics. My friends encouraged me to try other psychedelics, comforting me with the idea that since I had already been able to take and handle an Ayahuasca experience, other psychedelics such as LSD, MDMA, and Mescaline would be very manageable. This proved to be true as I began to try these new entheogens, and have since become an aspiring psychonaut/ explorer of myself and my consciousness.
In my experience each substance offers a radically different experience, in regards to head space, visuals (OEV and CEV), body load/euphoria, and the nature of the trip itself. Experiencing the multitude of subjective effects of each substance has become one of my favorite parts of the variety of the psychedelic experience. Inspired by reading other people’s trip reports I have typed a few of my experiences to share with the entheogen community. I look forward to sharing these along with my notes from various teks with the Nexus, as I seek to give back to the community that has already given me so much in just my time as a lurker. Thank you for your time and attention.
-Nosce
