Hey everyone! I'm a 21 year old guy that grew up in the Southeastern USA. I'm going to try and introduce myself a bit and give you a bit of my drug history and what led me here.. (Long post, sorry. It's as much for my sake as yours, just to write this stuff out. Here I go!)
I'm the son of an old hippie, raised on tales of ego-death and the power of psychedelics. I went to a Catholic elementary school until middle school, and was heavily influenced by Christianity at a young age. My Dad put me in that school because the public schools in the area were basically in the ghetto. He told me to learn the math, the science, the English in school, and to learn the values of the Church, but to try to avoid the religious indoctrination.
Still I had this duality as I went to church twice a week hearing about Jesus and Sin, Heaven and Hell. Then I would go home and talk to my Dad, and he would attempt to explain the limitless nature of reality, that all of the the classifications and rules of the Church were limitations, and therefore couldn't be the ultimate. He told me that drugs, specifically LSD, was like the forbidden fruit that Adam and Eve had eaten.
My Dad made me promise not to take psychedelics until after I graduated college. He said that my priorities would change. He believed that he couldn't hold back his experiences, and answered all my questions, but urged me to focus on school, reality. I told him I would.
From a very young age I was obsessed with the nature of reality, God, whatever, in science, in occult type stuff, including using meditation and binaural beats. I got into lucid dreaming, and dabbled with astral projection, energy work, etc.
But early in freshman year of high school I decided to try weed. My Dad smoked and although he told me not to do it, he also passed it off as "just a little weed." So I figured it couldn't be that big of a deal. I decided to try it once... I had what was unquestionably a psychedelic experience. I was paranoid that my friend had put acid in weed.
Once I was convinced that it was just weed... I was hooked. Weed has produced one of the most incredible experiences I had ever had. I smoked a lot of weed for 2 years, and realized that it was my life, and I felt I was ready to do psychedelics. I tried mushrooms. That was my initiation, and it was one of the most incredible experiences of my life.
I ate mushrooms many times over the next few years pushing myself to what I felt was limits of reality. I had been obsessed with the nature of reality since before I had ever done drugs, but mushrooms made me feel like I understood it all. I remember time stopping and realizing that I was "enlightened."
Then I started getting into acid. All I can say is that life is crazy. I traveled around a lot, living in the forest for months at a time, hitchhiking, whatever. I got a car and lived in that for months. I felt like I had killed my ego, smashed it to dust. I was a robot, so in the moment, so high all the time. Nothing against it for other people, but for me, I realized that I wanted that mental construct, that illusion called the ego.
So I stopped the acid, or at least gigantic ego-shattering doses. I lived in a couple of places, drifting, writing, thinking, making art. I had a few jobs. I still hadn't "solved" issues that I'd always had. They are related to my family, issues with my Father, my Mother. Deap-seated emotions of guilt compounded by my subconscious archetypes of sin pounded into me by Christianity. I was becoming apathetic on Acid, thinking too much about death, about killing myself to see what was next. I took a break from acid, and decided to try and "get my head on straight."
Enter cactus! A light dose of cactus, one that hardly produced any visuals whatsoever, resulted in one of the most profound and life changing trips ever. The knots in my soul seemed to unravel effortlessly of their own accord. Things that acid and shrooms had helped me to live and deal with to an extent, mescaline helped me to utterly eliminate. I felt healed in a way that I never had.
I did a few larger doses of cactus subsequently and had immensely rewarding experiences. I thought I had found the perfect psychedelic for me. Mescaline seemed like it would help me to build up the right kind of life, while acid just seemed to tear down my old false life.
And so things were going good. I was living happily, finally starting to make some real progress in my life. Sure I was still living in a tent in someone's back yard with no worldly possessions except for my laptop. I knew that it was all simple, everything would be straightforward from now on. I just had to live right.
And that's the state of mind I was in when my a few of my friends and I got together to try some DMT. I had tried DMT about a year before and gotten significantly freaked out, although I now realize that I hadn't even begun to taste its power.
Anyway, about a year later we got some more. We gathered around, passed around a joint made of some smoking herb infused with DMT. We all took a couple of puffs, and achieved mushroom-like visuals on the ceiling and patterns, a major body high, but nothing crazy.
I took another big puff off of the joint, and found myself face to face with this faceted, billowing green sheet superimposed with triangles and gears. I had a strong impression that immediately beyond the green fabric was a vast empty space. I stared at the intriguing visuals before settling back down to reality. I had apparently gone farther than the others. I was the only one actually attempting to take a full hit.
We took a break, visited some friends, and came back later that night to smoke some more. This time we loaded a bowl. My friends passed the pipe around with me last. Each one of them took a couple more "careful" puffs, and exhaled a good amount of white smoke. All of them felt effects and presumably tripped fairly hard, but apparently no more than the previous time.
I decided to demonstrate the zen of smoking. They were talking amongst themselves as I accepted the pipe. I breathed slowly and deeply a few times, exhaled fully, and torched the whole bowl as I veerrry slowly inhaled. I kept the bowl cherried for 30 seconds, and leaned back in my chair, holding my breath. I felt it coming on fast and I wasn't even close to exhaling! Wooooshhhh... I realized that I was about to see what this stuff was really about.
All I can say is that nothing could have prepared me for what I experienced. I wrote a report which I will post here soon. It was hell. This was not a hallucination. This was God showing me what he was capable of. I kept saying, "I didn't expect this." as if it was some sort of excuse. Guilt bubbled up, and God created a little bubble of hell to contain my soul. The entire experience was underscored with this sinister sense of humor and irony. I knew it was my fault and that I would be like that forever. This wasn't a trip. Only God was capable of doing something like this. I wasn't meant to be here, but I was getting what I was deserved.
It almost brings tears to my eyes as I write this. I felt like I had been in that state for eternity and simultaneously like I hadn't existed the moment before, all the while being enveloped by this hellish fractal soup of geometry. My life flashed before my eyes, right up to the present, and then to the future, to me sitting in a padded room, still in the same state, while my family came to visit.
I was rolling on the ground, and managed to tell my friends, "DON'T DO DMT." I have never been more serious in my life. I was still in hell. I wondered if I would have enough control over my motor functions to kill myself. I intended to do so as quickly as possible, and saw visions of me slitting my wrists and bleeding out on the floor.
I saw a photo of myself from my First Communion. (The first time you eat the Body of Christ, the disk of bread, during mass.) I was 6 or 7, smiling, wearing a white tuxedo. I believed in God. I loved Jesus. I saw how proud my family was. Then I saw myself now, a druggy who had burnt out his brain and killed himself, leaving behind only a few possessions in a goddamn tent. I felt the sadness of my family who had witnessed my bright beginning fizzle out into such a terrible ending. Hell. God.
Anyway... It wore off. I came down.
That was 5 days ago. I will never be the same. I knew that I wouldn't be ready for DMT, but I didn't know it - or anything - could be like that. How could that exist? I thought I knew so much, that I was so enlightened and aware. I thought I was so smart. Now I'm questioning everything. Nothing can ever be the same again. This stuff is not just a drug.
I don't know if I'll ever do it again. What scares me is that DMT is related to the experience of death, right? Well when I experienced DMT, I experienced a hell that was beyond anything I had ever imagined possible. That scares me very much. What if I were to die tomorrow? Would I go right back to Hell? And if so, would that be my last experience before my brain function ceased?
But I don't even know if death is a way out. DMT shoved it in my face that there is no such thing as death. I will never die. I am immortal, and heavens and hells both exist... I exist... I exist... Oh God!
Needless to say, I am forever changed. I want to learn more from those of you who are actually capable of not only traversing these realms, but doing so repeatably and apparently to more positive places. I felt like I was cheating the universe, getting a glimpse of what I was never meant to see. I keep thinking, "I didn't know that was possible... Not that, not that." Maybe I'll go back some day, when and if I ever think I'm a ready again.
And that's a bit about me, from my innocent past to my evolving present. Nice to meet you all! For the record, I'm not scarred for life. That experience was the most terrible, awesome, awful, terrifying, traumatic experience of my life... for 5 minutes... and I'm still assimilating it and expect to be doing so for weeks or months. However I believe I'm better off from the experience, and do not regret having it at all, even if I'm not eager to repeat it.
I'm the son of an old hippie, raised on tales of ego-death and the power of psychedelics. I went to a Catholic elementary school until middle school, and was heavily influenced by Christianity at a young age. My Dad put me in that school because the public schools in the area were basically in the ghetto. He told me to learn the math, the science, the English in school, and to learn the values of the Church, but to try to avoid the religious indoctrination.
Still I had this duality as I went to church twice a week hearing about Jesus and Sin, Heaven and Hell. Then I would go home and talk to my Dad, and he would attempt to explain the limitless nature of reality, that all of the the classifications and rules of the Church were limitations, and therefore couldn't be the ultimate. He told me that drugs, specifically LSD, was like the forbidden fruit that Adam and Eve had eaten.
My Dad made me promise not to take psychedelics until after I graduated college. He said that my priorities would change. He believed that he couldn't hold back his experiences, and answered all my questions, but urged me to focus on school, reality. I told him I would.
From a very young age I was obsessed with the nature of reality, God, whatever, in science, in occult type stuff, including using meditation and binaural beats. I got into lucid dreaming, and dabbled with astral projection, energy work, etc.
But early in freshman year of high school I decided to try weed. My Dad smoked and although he told me not to do it, he also passed it off as "just a little weed." So I figured it couldn't be that big of a deal. I decided to try it once... I had what was unquestionably a psychedelic experience. I was paranoid that my friend had put acid in weed.
Once I was convinced that it was just weed... I was hooked. Weed has produced one of the most incredible experiences I had ever had. I smoked a lot of weed for 2 years, and realized that it was my life, and I felt I was ready to do psychedelics. I tried mushrooms. That was my initiation, and it was one of the most incredible experiences of my life.
I ate mushrooms many times over the next few years pushing myself to what I felt was limits of reality. I had been obsessed with the nature of reality since before I had ever done drugs, but mushrooms made me feel like I understood it all. I remember time stopping and realizing that I was "enlightened."
Then I started getting into acid. All I can say is that life is crazy. I traveled around a lot, living in the forest for months at a time, hitchhiking, whatever. I got a car and lived in that for months. I felt like I had killed my ego, smashed it to dust. I was a robot, so in the moment, so high all the time. Nothing against it for other people, but for me, I realized that I wanted that mental construct, that illusion called the ego.
So I stopped the acid, or at least gigantic ego-shattering doses. I lived in a couple of places, drifting, writing, thinking, making art. I had a few jobs. I still hadn't "solved" issues that I'd always had. They are related to my family, issues with my Father, my Mother. Deap-seated emotions of guilt compounded by my subconscious archetypes of sin pounded into me by Christianity. I was becoming apathetic on Acid, thinking too much about death, about killing myself to see what was next. I took a break from acid, and decided to try and "get my head on straight."
Enter cactus! A light dose of cactus, one that hardly produced any visuals whatsoever, resulted in one of the most profound and life changing trips ever. The knots in my soul seemed to unravel effortlessly of their own accord. Things that acid and shrooms had helped me to live and deal with to an extent, mescaline helped me to utterly eliminate. I felt healed in a way that I never had.
I did a few larger doses of cactus subsequently and had immensely rewarding experiences. I thought I had found the perfect psychedelic for me. Mescaline seemed like it would help me to build up the right kind of life, while acid just seemed to tear down my old false life.
And so things were going good. I was living happily, finally starting to make some real progress in my life. Sure I was still living in a tent in someone's back yard with no worldly possessions except for my laptop. I knew that it was all simple, everything would be straightforward from now on. I just had to live right.
And that's the state of mind I was in when my a few of my friends and I got together to try some DMT. I had tried DMT about a year before and gotten significantly freaked out, although I now realize that I hadn't even begun to taste its power.
Anyway, about a year later we got some more. We gathered around, passed around a joint made of some smoking herb infused with DMT. We all took a couple of puffs, and achieved mushroom-like visuals on the ceiling and patterns, a major body high, but nothing crazy.
I took another big puff off of the joint, and found myself face to face with this faceted, billowing green sheet superimposed with triangles and gears. I had a strong impression that immediately beyond the green fabric was a vast empty space. I stared at the intriguing visuals before settling back down to reality. I had apparently gone farther than the others. I was the only one actually attempting to take a full hit.
We took a break, visited some friends, and came back later that night to smoke some more. This time we loaded a bowl. My friends passed the pipe around with me last. Each one of them took a couple more "careful" puffs, and exhaled a good amount of white smoke. All of them felt effects and presumably tripped fairly hard, but apparently no more than the previous time.
I decided to demonstrate the zen of smoking. They were talking amongst themselves as I accepted the pipe. I breathed slowly and deeply a few times, exhaled fully, and torched the whole bowl as I veerrry slowly inhaled. I kept the bowl cherried for 30 seconds, and leaned back in my chair, holding my breath. I felt it coming on fast and I wasn't even close to exhaling! Wooooshhhh... I realized that I was about to see what this stuff was really about.
All I can say is that nothing could have prepared me for what I experienced. I wrote a report which I will post here soon. It was hell. This was not a hallucination. This was God showing me what he was capable of. I kept saying, "I didn't expect this." as if it was some sort of excuse. Guilt bubbled up, and God created a little bubble of hell to contain my soul. The entire experience was underscored with this sinister sense of humor and irony. I knew it was my fault and that I would be like that forever. This wasn't a trip. Only God was capable of doing something like this. I wasn't meant to be here, but I was getting what I was deserved.
It almost brings tears to my eyes as I write this. I felt like I had been in that state for eternity and simultaneously like I hadn't existed the moment before, all the while being enveloped by this hellish fractal soup of geometry. My life flashed before my eyes, right up to the present, and then to the future, to me sitting in a padded room, still in the same state, while my family came to visit.
I was rolling on the ground, and managed to tell my friends, "DON'T DO DMT." I have never been more serious in my life. I was still in hell. I wondered if I would have enough control over my motor functions to kill myself. I intended to do so as quickly as possible, and saw visions of me slitting my wrists and bleeding out on the floor.
I saw a photo of myself from my First Communion. (The first time you eat the Body of Christ, the disk of bread, during mass.) I was 6 or 7, smiling, wearing a white tuxedo. I believed in God. I loved Jesus. I saw how proud my family was. Then I saw myself now, a druggy who had burnt out his brain and killed himself, leaving behind only a few possessions in a goddamn tent. I felt the sadness of my family who had witnessed my bright beginning fizzle out into such a terrible ending. Hell. God.
Anyway... It wore off. I came down.
That was 5 days ago. I will never be the same. I knew that I wouldn't be ready for DMT, but I didn't know it - or anything - could be like that. How could that exist? I thought I knew so much, that I was so enlightened and aware. I thought I was so smart. Now I'm questioning everything. Nothing can ever be the same again. This stuff is not just a drug.
I don't know if I'll ever do it again. What scares me is that DMT is related to the experience of death, right? Well when I experienced DMT, I experienced a hell that was beyond anything I had ever imagined possible. That scares me very much. What if I were to die tomorrow? Would I go right back to Hell? And if so, would that be my last experience before my brain function ceased?
But I don't even know if death is a way out. DMT shoved it in my face that there is no such thing as death. I will never die. I am immortal, and heavens and hells both exist... I exist... I exist... Oh God!
Needless to say, I am forever changed. I want to learn more from those of you who are actually capable of not only traversing these realms, but doing so repeatably and apparently to more positive places. I felt like I was cheating the universe, getting a glimpse of what I was never meant to see. I keep thinking, "I didn't know that was possible... Not that, not that." Maybe I'll go back some day, when and if I ever think I'm a ready again.
And that's a bit about me, from my innocent past to my evolving present. Nice to meet you all! For the record, I'm not scarred for life. That experience was the most terrible, awesome, awful, terrifying, traumatic experience of my life... for 5 minutes... and I'm still assimilating it and expect to be doing so for weeks or months. However I believe I'm better off from the experience, and do not regret having it at all, even if I'm not eager to repeat it.
