Some memoirs on my PSYCHEDELIC journey to date

My psychedelic journey is only beginning, but I have descovered the intense depths of these drugs that I had not imagined before. Instead of becoming more surreal, the world around me seems so hard and dirty - such reminders of reality. instead, it is me who seems more surreal, and i look back at my life in amazement that such a coherent reality can be held for so long - for most people their whole waking lives.

my first psychedelic experiences were with marijuana. I know most people discount this, but I believe that cannabinoid receptors are a framework for the mind, and although stonedness rarely exceeds the threshold of reality-dissemblement, it is possible. Perhaps only to teenagers, I dont know. I cannot relive the experiences I had so many years ago, and they do not involve the ego-dissemblement that I experienced in recent trips, but they struck me with the greatest awe that I have to this day experienced, and that is a big statement to make following the intensity of recent experiences. Why do I put me stoned experiences in this journey? well, with marijuana I experienced beautiful (Though very reminiscent of VGA, for anyone who grew up with the graphics revolutions of the late 90's and knows what i mean) visuals. I had perceptual distortions and the world around me was scrambled into many individual perceptions that, unlike when sober, evoked thoughts and ideas that were more penetrating to my consciousness than the common, structured, consistent percept of reality that came to me almost directly from my senses. I realised that the world was in my head (when i say realise, i dont mean i came to the conclusion, i mean my actual perception of the world switched from concerning objects, to concerning perceptions - George Berkeley's doctrines if anyone is familiar with his theory of mind - without the religion)

from trying DXM, i realised (in a similar sense as above), that my conscious mind could manipulate any reality it is placed into - the reality that i manipulate and navigate generally is fed to me by my multitude of beliefs about the cityand world i live in, and my senses constantly pouring in cues to my mind. with the help of a computer however, and a drug that placed my consciousness purely in the realm of my immediate senses, I experienced the power of isolated realities. I experienced being inside an actual game for the only time in my waking life. and no, it didnt involve seeing in stereovision and manipulating my body as i would if the body from this physical universe was placed inside the computer. it was my mind that was placed into the game, and the only senses i used were the information provided by the framework of the game - each player senses the world in the game from a mono-vision perspective, and moves around in very strict motions, and must direct certain disturbances into the game-environment. needless to say, i totally p00ned the game and beat all the other fuckers in their homes with their lives surrounding them.
but dxm on the whole wasnt that enlightening, in fact, i didnt realise that being inside the game was anything special until after it happened.

when i successfully tried a sufficient amount of LSA, i had one of the most beautiful times of my life, and i was excited at the many philosophical possibilities of psychedelics. my ego was in tact, but the meaning and value of the world was not. my sensations were not distorted - but the way that signals entertained me and made sense was guided by my mind in a similar way to with marijuana - but with much more clarity. instead of perceptions hazily forming ideas of strange things, each moment flooded me with clarity, though it was a clarity guided by my own imagination and not by my educated beliefs about the world. the passing of time, the passing of space, these things became lucid and comfortable, instead of pertailing the many problems of mundanity. this experience tricked me though, it fooled me as to the real depth that powerful psychedelics push the consciousness.

so recently I tried acid and things just blew apart. My perceptions started to distort so much in such a clear way that I started to become very anxious. Normally, visual illusions and all of the visual effets i had percieved on other drugs were fleeting and glimmering. but what I experienced now was so consistent that I was afraid that anything I experienced could have been an illusion. when lines of energy were flowing through the ether, and the colours of peoples faces were morphing, and the stretchiness of vision stretched my friend's face past the bounds where it should be, what was stopping a friend's whole body from stretching past the boundries of his reality and instead into the space of my mind's whim? I needed a handle for reality, but i couldnt take anything or anyone seriously enough to hold onto them or their word. Walking through streets with my also-tripping friend, i was in constant fear that i could walk off to any place, or that I had already walked off to some random place. as i started to come down, but more importantly, as i started to dissect what handles i ever had on reality, i was confronted with the multitude of structures that we impose on our worlds and then follow as if they are part of reality. and they are, in many ways. the world functions with these structures, as random and dubious as they seem when looking out from a naked mind.



now i will talk a bit about my most recent trip.
my most recent experience was with mushrooms or a sort i do not know, but i recieved them in powder form, and they were amazing. Having confronted a regiment of inner demons in my reflections on my acid trip, I was able to deal with all the fears that I had of reality and safety and my ability to keep safe. But after peeling pff that layer I was confronted with another, one further at the root of my human-being. I took the shrooms at a pub that i have been to many times in the past, but one that i really dislike. more to the point, there was a dance party on up[stairs that my friend had invited me to. dance parties attract certain intense people that arent at other places.
my mind was swamped with questions and puzzles as to the nature of these people and what my place was amongst them. I was with a friend, and i had alot of toruble communicating anything to him, and i felt a bit bad for inviting him out and then not being able to interact properly with him. i was like a vegetable, i was so engrossed by the sensations in my mind. so i started worrying about this and then i sort of zoned out and went off on my own. i danced intensely for a little while until i got too hot for my comfort. moreso, i looked around in teh space i was dancing, and people had sorta cleared back away from me. i realised that the people dancing around me were much better and more entertaining than i - i wasnt in a rock concert or pub gig, i was amongst hardcore dancers and hardcore movers and went to sit on the side and watch them dance and swish their colourful things around. but then i started to worry about why i couldnt dance. what was going on. i was tired for one, but i also observed people's movements and became engrossed in their control and their engagement. i felt hollow, i felt like i was no longer an identity because i had lost my ability to communicate and also my ability to engage in some activity. i was simply thinking and observing. these thoughts in my head are invisible, no one can experience them but myself, so i felt like a hollow-man. but i realised that i was not always in such a state, and also that i was dealing with psychological issues that are the forefront of modern philosophy. i failed at my attempts to communicate, and i realised that i didnt even want to communicate in the way most people around me were. everything seemed very shallow, and intruding. i was confronted with so many issues as to the obligations of one person to another to say certain words and to make certain gestures. i was pretty sure i had met everyone that i talked to in a previous point in time, but i cannot say for certain if i had at all seen almost any of the people. i was mesmerised by a midget and a beautiful woman - only a single woman i saw that whole night who titilated anything in my mind, and so greatly that i was confused. i was so conscious of my desire to be held and for human contact. my inspection focussed on the way that my mind was being directed by drives, expectations, anxieties, and enjoyments. i was tired, and i wanted to hold my girlfriend, and these two thoughts constantly battered my mind. though they were only thoughts when i grasped them, otherwise they were like intrusions, gaping holes in my being, like being very thirsty. i wanted to curl up and be surrounded by flesh, but the sexual element remained as a side-lining theme. instead of thinking of sex, i had visual flashes of women moaning and shouting and of the walls turning into eloping bodies, and the looks in people's eyes involving sexual inferences. but i didnt feel like sex. i felt like comfort, like love and safety.
what i descovered from all this was that inside my mind lays a complex of social expectations and drives. a dark inner loop of expectations and self-perceptions. of guilt and shame and distrust and hate. but they werent exactly things that sit around under my mental-feet, like some gargoyle or grommit, they are more like propensities, like circuitboards that churn out responses to stimuli. if in situation X, with factors R,T, Y, elicit feeling Y with implications F, G, H, etc etc. how was i to master these feelings inside of me? in the end the solution was simply to get the hell away from that fucking hellhole! get away from all those wierd people who were so elegently buzzing and revolving to the beats of music and expectations of sex and social order. get away from people who were sucking me of my awareness, who were sucking everything of its essence.

there were the cool people, the people who were having fun, who were doing cool things, had plenty to say, and interacted as if they all knew they were going to end up in the same orgy at the end of the night.

and then there were the majority of people, the seedy leeches who probe and proclaim, trying to elevate themselves to some self-referred position that makes themn feel like they are getting closer to some thing that they want, but it merely distancing them from being themselves and from flowing as one with the world around them.

i sat in between them, in awe of those people who could control their bodies so as to make a marvel, and also feel good about themselves. and i was disgusted, saddened, angered by the naive, drunk, lonely people who were filling up space and making noise. i felt so wise around these people, and i felt so incapable, so sluggish and uncoordinated, so uninteresting around the 'cool people.'

in the end it doesnt matter that these people were talking of things i care nothing of, or talking rubbish. it mattered that they were enjoying themselves in harmony, and creating wonderful displays with their bodies and tools.

and there was i, with the whole universe at my fingertips, in an icy, cold place that made my fingers numb and dopey. figuratively of course, since it was actually quite warm.

but i rolled really good cigarettes



anyway i felt so much better when i got to my friends place and lay down in his bedroom. i felt good the rest of the night and into the morning. i felt so strong, so witty and intelligent, dispite being out of touch with the world in a manipulative way. i walked for about an hour and a half as the sun came up, and snuck into my girlfriends place, finding my way to my destination.



what i know is that next time i take a trip, it has to be in a safe environment with very few people, and more importantly, with no expectations, no requirements, none of these things that would enter my mind and cause me trouble. because when this trip happened, the universe became golden, it turned from sugar to honey. i dont want any disturbing but inescapable parts of the world - namely the structures set up by other minds in my vicinity - to stick onto me and get on my fingers and in my hair, because it can be bloody hard to clean off when the honey turns back to sugar

 

Great post.

 

Have you ever had a high from marijuana like the mushroom trip you've described here? I've never done mushrooms, but this is the type of mind-set I get into when I get high. It's as if I'm more aware of the inner workings of my mind, why I think the way I do, how to fix "problems" or things that are causing me distress.

 

way more intense, deeper mind functions occuring with the shrooms. i took what looked like an 1/8 of weed's worth, of powdered shrooms, so i dunno if thats a lot or not, but i was really trapped in my mind at points, in a way that is so much more than cannabis.

i find with cannabis, the things i pick apart concern truths or judgements. what specific thoughts am i having, or what factors are influencing my life. semantic connections, linking ideas and understanding how my beliefs fit together.

but this particular time, it seemed like, while all my sensations and logical progressions were all over the shop, i was exposed to the raw inescapable elements of my consciousness - my drives, the things that spur on any action or interaction, the baseline factors that make a person act the way they do, the ID for the psychoanalysts. and i felt these things, these cues that normally lead to normal strings of behavior, but in my state didnt lead to anything except confusion and questions. because none of my natural scripts of behavior were following through, i was simply left with these gut feelings that were surrounded by a universe of sensations and imagery and liquid-like-context that never stayed the same.

with these psychedelic journeys, it is a further level to cannabis that seemed to be inspectable. not clearly - i seemed to loop my thoughts a lot before proceeding with any conclusion, and then the conclusions i made seemed to require assumptions that i subsequently began to question in light of my previous conclusion, if that makes any sense. this strange snake eating its tail, unable to hold onto anything, yet in a constant state of holding.