SCATTERED THOUGHTS ON A MUSHROOM EXPERIENCE
(In what follows, I use the first personal pronoun, but I am referring to SWIM)
I am with some childhood friends, most of whom I have not seen in years, in the forest. We have been camping. The night previous we went on a magical walk through the woods while intoxicated on cannabis, but today we will eat the mushrooms. As we begin down the trail, I eat approximately sixteen grams of psilocybe cubensis mushrooms. My friends play it much safer, ingesting about two grams each. I ate sixteen grams because I wanted to breakthrough; I wanted to see the madness. It was time. My friends would certainly tend to me if things got out of control, but I did not anticipate that they would. What follows are some scattered thoughts upon my experience, I've looked over the Nexus and it seems to be that lengthy reports on these matters aren't necessarily frowned upon, but please forgive my length anyways, there is just so much I have wanted to share with you all. Variously, I will make digressions, go here and there, I hope you will forgive this as well. After all, this is not a worked out text, but rather only a collection of scattered thoughts. I should say from the outset that some of what I arrive at might seem to foreclose viewpoints other than my own. I want to assure anyone reading this that foreclosing viewpoints is something I have no interest in at all, it is actually something I believe the world would be much better off without. I believe there are as many viewpoints as there are singular beings, and that real violence and real evil are always only in essence whatever would try and take these singular viewpoints up into something alien from themselves, something generic. Violence and evil are always about putting us to work, each of us, in the element of our essential singularity, towards some end other than each other and the always already mostly inaccessible world we share together. And so, please regard anything you might find contentious as an invitation to verify with me, as we continue to unpack with one another the concrete transformations encounters with the psychedelic might enable.
1. Time
On a trip time is without any meaning. Not on a trip time is without any absolute meaning either, but everything seems to take-place as if with recourse to some meaning of time. This is not so on a trip. While on a trip, time is without even a semblance of meaning that might be referred back to. While on a trip, time opens up without meaning as something more like a creative possibility. Now, a discrete span of time is takes-place over and over again, like a loop from which escape isn’t possible and to which the tripper is doomed eternally. Suddenly, far from the forest with my friends, I was in my bedroom miles away, but this was months ago and I had just taken my first hit of Salvia. I do not mean that I merely remembered this experience from months ago, I mean that I was actually there again, that it was really happening, and not for a second time, for the first. This was the instant I saw time go on without me. This was the instant I understood myself as nothing more than the infinitesimal of a continuum that would now continue on without me. My own life was not my own, but rather I was only an instant of that life, falling into nothingness as it continued on without me, as it continued on comprised of nothing more than other instants like myself. But why was I there again, in my bedroom miles away and months ago? Had I never left, had I never gone anywhere else, is this one infernal instant, the instant which I am and which had fallen away into nothingness, all I really am or will be? But the instant hadn’t fallen away as it had seemed to while intoxicated on Salvia. It was still going on, that very same instant was, back in the forest, with my friends. I imagine this is something familiar to anyone who has ever really tripped: maybe not the first impression of the time loop, but certainly the impression of that one instant of eternity, the simultaneity of all time perpetually in a state of becoming, changing colors and throbbing with intensities, each moment the same as the last yet somehow different. I was reminded of Deleuze's appropriation of "Eternal Return" as the "Eternal Return of the Different." Of course all this is a mere triviality, but perhaps it bears repeating anyways, that each repetition, each iteration, might be set-forth more clearly as a potentiality instead of as whatever actualization of potentiality. That even the seeming past, the long since tortured dead and gone might be approached anew through a more psychedelic understanding of time, each of them set free and bound less to appear as they a truly capable of becoming, and endlessly so, never arriving, but only ever converging.
2. Death
Now I saw that I was something else than this instant. Or at least that I supposed I was something else than this instant. People sometimes go on about the "ego" and "ego death," here I saw following them that to die isn’t to fall away into nothingness, as I thought I had so many months ago on Salvia in my bedroom. To die is to return to this madness that was opening up before me in the forest, to lose any conceit that one is something else than that madness. But I had always believed that that is what it is all about, here on this side at least, to be something more than everything else, to affirm oneself in the element of one's pre-individual singularity. That is, as always already with others, but also disjunct from them, and as somehow distinct from both them and the world shared between us. But more on all that to follow, because what I was presented with here seemed to be some idea of death as a return to the One. That is, this One, the one that is going on right now, a madness, a living creative force, a complexity beyond imagination from which everything rises and falls. Needless to say, for a man of my beliefs, all of this was very un comforting. I saw that my friends were waiting for me to jump to my death now, I saw that the whole thing, this moment from which I could not escape but too which I was to be finally reducible, wanted nothing more than my death, wanted nothing more than to swallow me up. It occurs to me now, that maybe if someone had been there to guide me, they might have encouraged me giving into this. Not, of course, that I jump, but that I allow my singularity to become swallowed up by all of this, so that I might know a joy few people ever know. When one of my friends would cautiously approach me in this state, it was as if they were inviting me to kill myself. Each word they said had a hidden meaning which suggested they were waiting for this. I would refuse to give over to that overwhelming desire on the part of everything other than myself that I should die. I knew they wanted me to jump. I knew they were waiting for me to jump. But I would never do it. I saw so clearly then that death is always decision. Of course, from my normal standpoint this does not make any sense at all. To suggest that so many countless millions who suffered senselessly unto death had somehow decided to do so, is a position that I am committed to rejecting, at least while not intoxicated on mushrooms. In other words, I had always refused any prospect of giving senseless butchery a sense, to belie its senselessness within whatever affirmative babble. But even so, on my trip, when I was there, death presented itself as always a decision. I thought of my ninety year old grandfather, who had died a few years earlier. I saw so clearly that he had really just given over, that he had really just decided to give over to this chaos now screaming at me to do the same. I thought of my ninety nine year old grandmother, who survives him. I saw so clearly that she is just stubbornly refusing to give over. That despite the absolute and utter degradation of her body, that is, her decaying site of existence, the coming-apart of her setting-forth upon this side, she refuses even still. I remember walking up to one of my buddies on the ledge. I appreciated the concern and sympathy in his face so much. He knew where I was, and I knew he had been here before himself. Although, on only two grams he was a long way from there now. He didn’t say much, as he seemed to understand that there was not much to say, but at one point he did say something like "coming up is the hardest part, you’ll feel better when that part is over.” And then I did feel good, I felt really good, if only for a moment. I was reminded of an incredible 5-MeO-DMT experience I had once had (and please forgive any seeming vulgarity) while masturbating, pure orgasmic bliss, reaching a point so far beyond the merely orgasmic that I doubted I’d ever enjoy the merely orgasmic quite the same again. With psilocybin might something like that be possible too? Either way, I had refused to believe then that the joy I was experiencing was anything other than a demonic joy. I would be the first to admit that this was refusal was probably nothing more than my own petty morals somehow managing to come through, but so what? Isn't there something about those morals worth salvaging, even if it is only the belief that sensual pleasures need be understood as a detestable agonies relative to the joys one receives in helping, and in the most concrete ways possible, those who are miserable and in need of mercy and love? The pure horror would return shortly, and one of the lessons taken from this trip is that if I ever dare to go in so deep again, it will not be without a very experienced guide to help me through.
3. Hell
Then I saw what Hell was, or I had an idea about what it might be, a common vision no doubt amongst us fellow travelers, shamans, plain old thrill seeking beasts, and so on. Hell is when the body gives way, despite one’s own refusal to do the same. Hell is being there, in the madness, without the possibility of coming back, and insisting despite all of this that you are still something else than the madness, than the vital force, than being as such, or whatever we wish to call that sublime ecstatic spectacle that opens up before us when we take the trip. I was unhappy with this, for by this logic my own great heroes, Beethoven for example, would have certainly found themselves in the greatest Hell of all upon death. That is, human beings who made it their lives to work to give something else than what was already, human beings who affirmed themselves precisely to the extent that they managed to wrest themselves from some kind of oneness or unity would certainly find it a great Hell that upon death they must give back over to a oneness not very much different with regards to unity than the one they had spent their whole lives trying to establish their distinction from. In other words, someone like Beethoven, someone who had struggled so much in order to give himself as something else than the world as it stood, would certainly not have such an easy time giving over to something like this chaotic unity, and I saw that to the precise extent that he insisted upon doing otherwise was the extent to which he would suffer there. A trivial thought of course, but I've seen other Hells than this as well. During a phenethylamine experience some months earlier, I had been staring at this very same instant which confronted me now, and it appeared to me even then as unbearably overwhelming, inevitable, senseless, and endless. These four adjectives had tormented me over and over again as the only adjectives adequate to what stood before me, and nothing could spare me from their truth, not even the funny videos and silly pop music I had tried using as a medicine to free myself from them. And again, in the ecstatic experience of heartbreak, I had almost suffocated myself once. But then as the heartbreak continued after my failed attempt, it occurred to me that I hadn’t failed suffocating myself at all, that I had succeeded unbeknownst to myself and was now in Hell. I could kill myself again in this Hell, but I would only find myself in another, more painful Hell, and here again unbeknownst to myself. I saw that I could kill myself for a third time, and so on, in infinite regress, only to eventually find myself holding a pistol or something like that, shooting myself over and over again in flames of fire, each shot to my head only making the fire hurt all the worse. That was another Hell I had seen. There are still others, for example, that I had succeeded in killing myself already ages ago, and so was now living the life I could have had only as kind of mockery, only as a kind of painful picture of what might have been, and so on. But after all, these are of course only experiences, and only as absolute as they have absolutely been had. I put whatever stock in them they deserve, and wish I had better teachers to voyage with, that they might help me understand and overcome these pictures, and move on to ever greater and more productive ones instead.
4. Madness
And it is no coincidence that the trauma of heartbreak should remind me of the psychedelic experience. Psychoanalysts tell us that the whole of the symbolic order, that is, the historically and objectively contingent network of signifiers, the fabric of cultural mores, a priori cognitive categories, archetypes, and so on, within which and from which our sense of self and world is mostly given, is anchored upon an unconscious desire. According to these analysts, this project of unconscious desire is created partly during the Oedipal drama, as we are captured by language, sexual norms, our mirror image, and so on. Through this psycho-sexual individuation, the chaos of the floating signifiers all around us are gradually distinguished and anchored upon a master signifier, our unconscious desire, so that we begin to identify with them more and more as this or that individual. Now, during the psychedelic experience, just as during heartbreak, and just as with those our situation calls "schizophrenic," and so on, the anchor is suspended. In heartbreak, it is the beloved, and the project of desire around her that is suspended. Just how isn’t so important, but for whatever reason, she now refuses to be cast as that figure upon which so much had been anchored. And so everything, to the extent that it had seemed to revolve around her, to the extent that it had been quilted upon her, is set free as a madness. That is, at least, until we’ve gotten over her, until we find new things to anchor the madness of the world upon. With so-called schizophrenics, according the analysts, it is a question of not having made it through the individuation process correctly. Unlike so-called perverts, however, the so-called schizophrenic hasn’t even a fetish which could stand in for a master signifier or an anchor to the madness, and so having no project which would make sense of the world, he appears to us as if in a world of his own. Psychosis! Now I was freaking out. Or was I freaking out? What is freaking out? I haven’t done or said anything that would give away to my friends here in the forest that I was freaking out, have I? I worried very much that my selfish desire to breakthrough would end up spoiling their merely happy two-gram trips. Would I have to go the hospital? Was I only moments away from pleading with them to take me there? No, I stayed several steps behind them all. Worrying at my madness, reminding myself constantly that it would all soon end. But would it end? Had I gone so far that I might never find my way back? Is that possible? I thought, long and hard, of course it isn’t possible, psilocybin is a remarkably non-toxic substance, cases of permanent psychosis resulting from psilocybin are unheard of. Psychosis, there is something to think on during a trip. Because it was so easy for me to imagine that this is what it must be like for those whom our situation deems psychotic. Unable to be understood, to be believed, somewhere else, and so on. Now I was somewhere else. Is it possible that I might never find my way back? Again that thought, but now came another, even if I do find my way back, I will never be the same. This trip has ruined and destroyed me. I saw it so clearly, I would come back, temporarily, but what I was seeing now on my trip would most assuredly ruin it for me once I had gotten back, slowly, bit by bit, until I was here again, tripping. This madness is surely inescapable. I mentioned death in the paragraph above, when it does come time for me to really die, what I have done here, going so far out, will somehow count against me, won't it? Not because of any divine injunction against psychedelic ecstasies of course, but rather because in those final moments of my life, when they do come, the madness I am seeing now will surely come back to me as if to insure a kind of damnation, that I had meddled with something I shouldn't have, or whatever, that I had tasted death long before my time. The Salvia, the DMT, the LSD, the mushrooms, the various and multiple array of psychedelic phenethylamines and tryptamines, surely I have ventured to places one isn't meant to see until the day of days? My mind raced to several years earlier, I was with my bandmates touring Europe, we had just left Amsterdam and we had picked up some psilocybin mushrooms. The boys began taking them and handed some to my brother, who had never tripped. "Take more than that" I told him "or you won’t really trip." I was honestly concerned, a nice threshold sparkly body buzz is one thing, and it is certainly nice as far as it goes, but it isn’t a trip, not really, and I wanted my brother to see what I’d seen, or at least something like it. "No man, he’ll freak out" said my friend in the front seat as he handed my brother but a few little caps. "Freak out," that was it, that was perhaps why my mind had returned here, "freak out," that is indeed exactly what happens when you move so far beyond the Warrior's Dose. (If four grams is the Warriors's dose, I suggest sixteen is the Wizard's). My mind then turned to an acid trip back in high school, things had gotten out of hand, and one of us had begun screaming, “What’s going on? I can’t figure out what’s going on! Take me to the hospital.” I understood back then, flying on the same amount of acid as my poor friend, and I understood now, twenty years later on sixteen grams of mushrooms, exactly why he had been asking all of this. But why did he ask it? I mean, I too could very well have asked the very same thing of my friends here in the forest with me, but I didn’t. I was somehow able, how I do not know, to keep my remarks semi-acceptable, "I took too much" or "I shouldn’t have taken that much" or "I’m tripping really, really hard," and so on. I didn’t cry out, though I really wanted to. The thought, of course, the supreme thought in such a state is "what have I done to myself?" Thinking back on my poor friend in high school, I remembered how the adult, who eventually found us all in this state, had looked at me and asked, "It is not a good feeling, is it?" It was not a good feeling. (Nor do I think much would have been gained were it nothing more than that). But the acid trip years ago had been much different, then I had felt with such certainty that I "saw what was going on:" life, words, human beings, I saw what was going on and it certainly was a kind of madness. But this was something else, this was too much, another kind of madness. "What have I done to myself?" But now, even more importantly, "Why have I done it?" There seemed no good reason that one would ever do this to themselves. The visual distortions were unbearable. The auditory disturbances were disturbingly familiar. "These again?" I remember thinking "There isn't anything to there at all but to remind you you're in the midst of it!" What is it I am seeing? The restlessness of the visible was but a constant reminder of what I’d done to myself. Why had I done this? Why does anyone do this ever? I looked at my friends standing near the cliff, happy and joyous on two grams. Hunter S. Thompson sprang to mind. We have so few public figures around psychedelics, and the one's we do have all too often strike me as cranks. But who, after all, has ever understood so succinctly as the good doctor did? That there is no hand tending the light at the end of the tunnel, that it is really only a beastly kind of madness and not, as many would have it, some kind of tool for aligning your chakras or whatever. "Buy the ticket, take the ride," that’s about it, isn’t it? I just couldn't imagine anyone who would say anything else than this has really been there, has really lost their mind in a psychedelic experience. "The only people who know where the edge is are the people who have gone over it." Right? Now my mind raced to a man I had run into several months earlier while visiting Texas. We had been talking, this stranger and I, and he explained to me that he would never touch a psychedelic drug again. He told me, as best as he possibly could, how he and a few of his friends had taken a bunch of acid. He told me that "something had happened" and that, when they returned from the trip, his friends "had refused to acknowledge it." I wanted to reach out to this man so very badly, because I thought I too now understood what had happened, and that I would never forget. He told me he had spent the several months after this experience visiting doctors, taking benzos, and so on, all his pathetic attempt to integrate something our situation really has very few avenues and tools for integrating. I saw myself like him, that I would have to spend the next few months visiting doctors, taking benzos, and so on. Following my own pathetic attempt to integrate all of this. I thought of you guys too, wondering, why is it you do this? Remember, I’m not talking about a few caps for sparkles and warmth, I’m talking about the plus-four breakthrough. It is such a beautiful thing to me, that in this situation of mechanized instrumental rationality, orientated completely around the extortion of profit, there exists a community oriented around the development of practices, here and now, of the psychedelic experience and what might be gleaned from it. Not even our sanctioned "therapies" use these tools. There is so much to be lamented here, but I will move on instead. I have gone on now about so-called schizophrenia or whatever. Before that, I mentioned heartbreak. In the psychedelic experience, using this psychoanalytic jargon, we might say the anchor or the master signifier upon which the entire fabric of the symbolic order and its floating signifiers are anchored, is also lifted, but in a different way. Here we are in a world anchored on nothing but its own pure presence, a reality or a space or whatever we can no longer make sense of, or that we can make sense of however we want. Tripping, the anchor is suspended, and so the signifiers once tied to the sense it gave them take flight and appear in the element of their schizophrenic potentiality. The Ego is still there, but there no longer makes any sense to him, he can see now only too well that there does not really make any sense at all. This is one of the most difficult things to integrate, once it has been proven to you undeniably that there is no one true perspective, that all is open to creative modification or the setting-forth implied by another perspective than your own, how do you ever really believe in anything absolutely again? But I have always believed, even before my trip, that this is the only real absolute: that there is no absolute, only the creative possibilities of reckoning with its absence. And so, I suppose, this isn't what was so confounding to me about the trip. The confounding part was all this stuff around the one, that we are all one, that we are not a multiplicity at all, or rather, we are not a multiplicity of multiplicities and so on in regress, we are instead One multiplicity. This experience horrified me. Now I thought about DMT. Strange thoughts, stupid thoughts… It occurred to me that psilocybin is something found in fungus. That right now, I had a fungus brain, I saw things as a fungus might, but maybe, if and when the day comes that I breakthrough on DMT, I’ll see things as a human does, as DMT is something found in humans. Of course that is a silly thought, but I think it is about a deeper more significant thought that psychedelics allow. This is the thought that we might see through the eyes of another being, in this case, a fungus, but whatever being, it does not matter, I just think psychedelics open the possibility of imagining we could. If the world as it appears to an animal is a world outside language and generic identities, a world of pure reactions and sensory experience, than we must approach something like that world on a plus-four trip. If only at moments, and if only fleeting ones here and there, we do see a world emancipated from any ordinary human context or instrumentality. One wonders, does the complexity of what is bared witness to finally come to nothing more than the amount of neural connections open to receive it? Might we have an inkling of what the centipede, the lobster, the dog, the ape, and so on, experiences, each with their own little network of nerves and transmitters, by shutting down all but that amount of complexity within our own brains? This is another horror of psychedelic experience to me, it would seem to affirm that we really are nothing more than the brain, that when the brain stops that really is it. What horrifies me here isn't death, but rather the idea of a positive truth, the idea of an irrefutable fact. The scientists, some of whom really do seem to think they have a monopoly upon truth, go on about neurotransmitters and all that stuff. All of this certainly is a productive metaphor, if nothing else, and a very rigorous one at that. Serotonin is supposed to be involved in locating food in the environment, locating mates, deciding whether to flee or whether to fight, determining one's social rank within the pack, and so on. But what if there were way too much serotonin? Nothing could be located in the environment, the whole world of social rank would be undone altogether. This all getting a little too obvious though, isn't it?
5. The One
I never liked the idea that we're really all just One because multiplicity, real multiplicity, and multiplicities of multiplicities and so on in regress, would seem to offer much better picture of the world. There was an interesting discovery made in foundational mathematics years ago, when Georg Cantor proved that there is not just one infinity but rather an infinity of infinities each infinitely larger than the last. This is a counter intuitive idea, is it not? I mean, isn’t infinity infinitely large, so that nothing could be larger than it? Well, Cantor demonstrated that the set of all natural numbers, itself infinite of course, is infinitely smaller than the set of all real numbers, and so we have two orders of infinity! I only bring up Cantor to make a point: there are absolutely discreet things, and there is no One-All encompassing all of them, there is no “set of all sets.” This is the idea that seemed more productive to me than monism, but while tripping, I was forced to see the lie of it all. I was made to see what all the monists and new age folks were always going on about. It really is just one thing we all return to and become indistinguishable within. And we can’t ever really cease to exist. This bothered me tremendously. I have always taken a certain pride in my mortality, and seen it as a kind of singular miracle. But now, while tripping, while there, I saw that I could never really die. It occurred to me that tripping may be thoroughly this worldly. It is a movement towards this world, whatever that means. It is a not a movement towards the outside of this world, towards something else than the world, whatever that means. The outside, in my experience, is only ever really touched in mercy, love, art, mathematical and scientific creations, and collective mobilization against an unjust State. The trip becomes something significant, an encounter with the outside, only to the extent that it transforms the world as it stands, that is, only as it guides, for example, counter-cultural collectives against an untrue State, chemical engineers and psychopharmacologists towards the creation of novel molecules, musicians and painters toward a new idea of art, and so on. In this sense, the Nexus itself is a kind of movement towards the outside, while none of the individual trips taken by each member would be. That is, the trips taken by each member only mark a movement towards the outside to the extent that the Nexus, as a collective, through helping each individual integrate what they saw, providing information on extraction, and so on, becomes a force against everything self-evident on this side. Although, this whole idea of returning to earth, of living in harmony with "nature," and so on, is a campy idea. It is an idea I think undermines the possibilities of a truly rigorous psychedelic discourse. I have absolutely no interest here in laughing at other cultures, in supposing they’re stupid or primitive or something like that. My interest here is instead is in laughing-down as violent absurdities the parodies one culture would audaciously make of another. The point then, is that it isn’t about a return to some other “earlier” more “authentic” more “holistic” culture, the point is to have done with culture altogether, to set human beings free as they might stand outside any and every culture. That is, outside the violence of hierarchies and mutually exclusive hostile collectivities towards what these orders would always already foreclose. Indeed, I would be the last one to suppose any "consciousness" as greater than any other, like those futurists who go on about the spiritual machines to come, and intelligences far beyond our own. Intelligences that would look at us as we look at ants and so on. These are hare-braned ideas, are they not? If only to the extent that there is nothing new in them. "One day there will be beings more enlightened that us." But this is a banality, is it not? I mean, as if it isn't bad enough that they are banalities, they are corrupt banalities, part and parcel with a corrupt world in that they go on supposing the very same old ideas the corrupt world they would purport to depart from does: that "consciousness" is a word that has any positive meaning, that there are "levels" of consciousness, each more sophisticated than the last, and so on. Does this mean we are more "conscious" today than "primitive man" of the past? I refuse this idea. The idea any entity could ever be somehow /more/ here than any other. This is certainly not the case, is it? I mean, whether I had an infinitely more sophisticated language for explaining this place or not, whether I had access to all the information about it or not, indeed, whether I even had senses other than the five I had now, or access to dimensions other than the three I do now, I would never be any /more/ here than I am now, would I?
6. Afterglow
I was happy to be back, and while coming down I told myself I would never need to go there again, although I am sure I will. In the days that followed there was a tremendous afterglow, but I wanted more than anything to speak with people who might understand, who might help me integrate and unpack what I had just experienced. I have no one like that in my life at present. Save for the Nexus, there are, as I have said, so very few places in our situation that would try and create practices of psychedelic activity adequate to that very situation. Of course, there is mere hedonistic enjoyment of the things, juridical condemnation of them, therapeutic puttings-to-work of them towards an adventure of self-discovery and enlightenment not so much different from what psychiatry has already done with various stimulants or "anti-depressants," that is, where the psychedelic might become a tool for the clinic, which is itself a tool of the State. For my own part, I am not sure what these things are for, although I have tried to imagine ways of approaching them here.
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