I am currently writing my last mushroom trip, both from memory and from a video journal I made back in 2018. This was my very last trip, and I took 1.5 grams of some dense "nug like" mushrooms that were wrinkly with blue streaks-supposedly penis envy strain.

I considered this my most "aware" and "mature" trip, given I had the most experiences under my belt and was the oldest I'd ever been (given, I was still only 19).

One of the aspects of the psychedelic experience that I only truly began to realize after this trip was the role of the mind in that first hour of waiting. I remembered the line between sobriety and "high on mushrooms" being extremely grey; I couldn't decide whether my thoughts were because psilocin was actively working on my brain, or if I was just having placebo. With that said, there is a sort of "trip" before the trip, in the way that the mind either anticipates whats to come, or tries to make sense of reality as it slowly disintegrates.

I noticed this effect starkly present because I took a walk to the park during the come up, and back home a few hours in. My mind was entirely different on the way there-unfocused on the environment and anxious to see what things were going to be like. On the way home, however, I was looking at everything. The houses where people LIVED, the yards people try to maintain, the never ending sidewalk, and the blue sky.

It was all there, BEING, yet I had paid no mind to it in the way to the park because I was so preoccupied with tripping. I could not believe how different things seemed, even though I had walked right past them.

Admittedly, the 2 hour trip in the woods had been emotional, so I was in an appreciate mindset, but this duality emphasized the disengaging potential of the mind. In a way, thoughts have the ability to completely change your perception of the world, yet they seem non-physical and temporary. Of course, thoughts can lead to action, but the power of changing thought seems to be a lot of what religion gets after.

I'm not so bold as to disregard any specific religious doctrine, but I think it's very interesting to look at the psychological implications of accepting certain views of the world, and how they change people for better or worse (and how it varies from person to person.)

One of my personal battles with this is the notion of deserved suffering. I get into this more in my book, but the implications of such a "theory" are so disturbing and expansive in scope that I refuse to accept anything within that realm.