Sitting alone in paradise, as I meditated myself further into this dream state, I stared at the ground. This wasn’t normal. There was just no possible way this could be happening.
The realm I was in was definitely not intended for me. No, much deeper than that, this state felt as if it existed entirely independently outside of oneself yet also at the very core of the human spirit. I was a God. I was an angel. I waved my hand past my face and saw the fabric of spacetime bend at the will of my fingertips.
In the 2 weeks preceding this experience, I had been given a gift, and that gift was a sizable personal use stash of DMT enhanced leaf. I had experience with this drug, at least I thought I did, until last night fractured my ego beyond annihilation.
Psilocybin mushrooms are a common tool I use to explore the psychedelic universe as well as develop my creative spirit, sense of belonging and personal development.
The night began with me intending to take 5 grams, an amount that for me is a medium-strong dose. Do note that metabolism and other factors in my life mean that I get less out of a dose than the majority of people tend to. I measured what I had, which was supposed to be 5 grams, but actually weighed 8+. I decided to kick it a bit higher, as my last 5 gram experience was well tolerated and I wished to go deeper. I settled on 6.7 grams of cubensis and natalensis mushrooms, a mix of two species, and did my usual 20 minute soak in lemon juice before swiftly hopping in bed, turning off the lights and waiting for it to start. I felt a strong intoxication come over me and in very little time I was starting to trip.
I can only guess, but having eaten both batches of mushrooms separately prior to this without nearly the intensity leads me to believe that I likely by pure chance ended up consuming much stronger fruits than the others. After all, given how intense and strange this was, I can only conclude that a major part of it was facilitated by a massive dose of psilocybin, either my metabolism had sped up, or the fruits were stronger.
I saw complex machinery with closed eyes. It was as if mechanical scorpion like creatures made of gold and emotion were dancing, and rapidly merging with each other into even more beautiful and complex versions of themselves, consistently and following a linear evolutionary sequence. It was familiar, a simple logical next step in the evolution of visions I have had on high doses of mushrooms before, and by the time I was able to begin analysing and drawing life lessons, decisions and insights from the trip, these machines of emotional resonance had evolved into giant golden shining worms, reminiscent of the sandworms in Dune.
I felt bursting positivity inside myself, and I began to meditate without making a conscious choice to do so. My thinking abilities were a force of nature. I could make sense of so much, in ways I had never thought to look. At some point I made the transition to open eyes and sitting cross-legged I began to feel the energy around me changing. The afterglow of mushrooms for me is like being a kid on Christmas day. This time, I meditated it to another level. The dying down visuals of red and gold I see on mushrooms slowly began to be replaced with white, diamond and platinum visuals that were exactly what I was used to experiencing from smoked DMT. The difference was that instead of ripping a bong hit, I was meditating, merging with this new state.
Being, biologically and metabolically, less sensitive to psychedelics than others I speak to, I never fully “broke through” to the DMT realm, but I had enough experience to recognise the signs and feelings.
I like the description McKenna uses for hyperspatial beings, the concept of the machine elf. I always tied these to the machinery of beauty I witnessed in psychedelic states, these powerful and eternal energies of life.
Whilst undergoing this experience, I was able to point to and recognise the aspects strengthening it, and intuitively recognise ways to “break” it. Not wanting to break it, I avoided doing anything like looking at the time, holding on to my ego, and moving too much. I recognized that this was a state I was maintaining through some form of internal concentration. I felt extremely wise, like a guru, and a hypothesis of mine is that such a large dose of psilocybin produced a complex understanding of transcendental meditation to the point where I was able to reach a new entheogenic state not possible through the consumption of mushrooms alone, only in conjunction with this razor sharp clarity and dedication to peace and love in a universal way.
I love meditation, and on mushrooms I will usually meditate before and after, trying to carry the trip’s positivity into my everyday life. My meditation this time was running laps around that, and I was drifting further into the bizarre with each movement and each thought. All of a sudden something clicked, and I looked at my naked body. I have no idea at what point I took my clothes off, but I was naked from the time of lucidity to the next morning.
My naked body, with all of its imperfections ( I could do with about 5 kilos of weight loss from a health perspective, I smoke cigarettes and I am not really as healthy as I could be, but nonetheless I am satisfied with my current progress), was all of a sudden both beautiful and ugly. But the ugliness drifted, and I detached from the ugliness to embrace a new form, and as this happened I lost objective view of my body and began to merge into a new form, a body made of crystalline gears and patterns ever-changing.
At some point the similarity of this to DMT and the downright absurd nature of tripping even harder than round one so long after dosing was just so undeniable that I looked out the window and walked to my bathroom. Looking outside didn’t stop anything, I saw a whole alien universe outside. I had a strong urge to push it and go exploring, but something grounded me enough to understand that this state, being so lucid, was probably fragile and could be killed off by trying to control it too much, or greedily push it’s limits.
I used the bathroom, felt much lighter after, and before walking out of my en-suite bathroom I stared at a pile on the ground. It was a towel, but it looked like a pile of living goo. Sitting in absolute shock I was constantly just thinking, this is impossible, this is a dream, this is psychosis, this is where I lose myself. I considered that I had eaten almost 7 grams of strong mushrooms, but it still made no sense. I didn’t check the time, for the exact reason of not wanting to snap out of it, but I knew without a doubt that it was long past trip time in a normal sense.
The pile on the ground fascinated me as it boiled, rose and sank, and all of a sudden my mind clicked again with another huge rush of positive and creative energy.
Holy S, I am in DMT realm. Somehow. There was no doubt. I felt incredibly profoundly intelligent, and I quietly spoke to myself. I cursed in amazement several times, but I’ll leave out bad language.
“What do I do here? How do I feed this? How do I embrace this?” I said to myself in lightning fast whispers.
“Positivity. Love. Connection. God. The divine energy. I have to feed this.” I continued, narrating out loud.
This worked. The moving puddle rose up from the ground and danced at my fingertips in full lucidity. I returned to bed and sat down again. Feeling tired I flopped onto the covers and hugged my blankets, feeling a mix of love and understanding fueled by an objective judgement of human perspectives, that made me hate myself for being so limiting to my own perspective. It wasn’t self hatred though. In this state I felt like I was a god, an angel and a prophet rolled into one. I was a being of pure positive and creative fuel, undefined by my past, and literally holding my whole identity within my fingertips, knitting a better version of myself into existence using yarn made of divine energy.
I was now scared. I had an overwhelming feeling that this state of being was strictly off limits yet always there, and how absolutely Godlike I felt was terrifying. What was left of myself, which wasn’t much, started thinking dark thoughts like;
“Did I just trigger a mental illness or psychotic state? Is this permanent?”
But such thoughts were dismissed and I was bathed in confidence and positive energy. I knew I would return to normal, I was that powerful at the time that to do so would be my choice. A new fear dawned on me.
“What if this experience escapes me later?” I assessed my lucidity and spoke to myself. My synapses were on fire.
I began to worry that what was by now the most profound thing to ever happen to me would slip away and this glimpse of divinity would evaporate.
I wanted to scream. I wanted to wake my mother, I wanted to wake my brother. I wanted to say, “guys, I am currently having the most profoundly life changing experience ever by a wide margin, and I want to carry it all into my life.” I really thought this was a good idea, which it probably wouldn’t have been. My decision to remain where I was was based instead on a fear that doing something like that would snap me out of it. And what a waste that would be.
I had destiny at my fingertips. It felt like I would spend the rest of my life preaching these lessons I was being fed from eternity. I made the conscious choice to define this moment as the most important moment of my life, and upon doing so a vision of a crystalline angel-like feminine being appeared above me, breathing her breath into my lungs, and as I inhaled I knew for certain that I was experiencing something not of this earth.
I don’t talk much of my past drug addiction. But to contextualise this experience it is necessary to know that I spent 4 months of my life at the beginning of my 20s using pure IV methamphetamine glass 500mg at a time. This is something I am not proud of, but with therapy and time I healed and never relapsed. I mention IV meth here because of one and only one reason, and that is that I believe, and not many would argue, that the experience is both the most hedonistically pleasurable thing possible in the moment, and also that to get to be so damaged as to do this to yourself, you have to sink to the depths of shallowness and become entirely controlled by animalistic desires and material pleasures that you degrade to the level of a beast when you do this. You lose touch entirely with the divine.
As this entity of love beauty and power breathed into me, I was able to focus my mind and generate pure unrefined dopamine. I was smoking spiritual psychedelic crack just by breathing this entity’s breath.
I had long forgotten the feeling of uncontrolled hedonism, and that brought it right back. But I experienced it not as a human, but as a divine being. The feeling was hyper-intense, addictive, overwhelming, and yet I only took advantage of this free heavenly bliss for a few seconds. I let it pass, and fell into a state of having direct access to this stream of pleasure yet knowing that it was unimportant. It was a test, a dangling carrot I could choose to get fixated on or move away from.
Moving away from hedonism felt natural. Going directly against my base animal desires was second nature. I was sure in that moment that my already impressive track record of not going backwards with drug use would continue throughout life, and that if I had not cured it before, this experience would likely have catalysed into a search for recovery.
The bible, with its teachings that some argue are homophobic, fell into context for me. The destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah described was not tied to homophobia, and God did not condemn being homosexual in an expression of love, but instead condemned all shallow pursuits of earthly pleasures that move us away from the principles on which we build lasting spiritual frameworks.
I’m far from bigotted, but living in a multi-racial society as I do, and especially as a minority, I feel it is natural to fall into patterns of thinking that lead to us viewing those different from us in a different way. To actively challenge and combat such processes of the animal brain is a part of the divine human experience.
In that moment I let go of all ties to identity, race, gender and language, and felt it in my heart and soul that all of life on earth was allied, and that only a basic level of understanding and intelligence was required for a human to have all the value in the world. I felt like I could walk into a jungle village thousands of miles away and potentially meet my best friend and soulmate within anyone and everyone. I could do the same with that one neighbour I never greet, or with the board of the world’s most unethical corporations. With anyone.
My state was entirely Holy. I could stare into pure temptation and not be tempted.
I continued to meditate, but these realisations settled in and I pondered them deeply enough to decide I was happy with remaining in this state, yet also able to stoke a desire to return to visual and emotional normality. Eating savoury food is said to ground you if psychedelic states take over, and I smelled my untouched dinner across the room.
Now for some more down to earth reflections:
I was quite convinced that my state was not just induced by psilocybin, but by reaching a point of such earned wisdom that I meditated the experience into being. At the time, and now, I considered the possibility of an endogenous DMT release, leading to a hybrid meditative psychedelic state that was part mushroom trip and part dream. I am less and less convinced of that, but the experience took off only after a first peak with a mushroom feel to evolve into a trance that entirely resembled a slowed down version of a dmt trip. I have not done ayahuasca or consumed DMT with MAOIs, only smoked freebase and enhanced leaf, but I felt like the spirit of ayahuasca was there with me, facilitating this experience. (If anyone has input on ayahuasca’s effects to help me understand this, please chime in).
The experience was a connection to and experience of God unlike I’ve ever had. As I settled down in bed, I was a bit hungry, but had no desire to force a slowing down of the experience.
During mushroom journeys I usually smoke cannabis throughout, and I had it ready there. However, I had done things differently by accident this time and I didn’t smoke any cannabis until I felt the mushrooms peak, simply because before then I didn’t feel like it.
I only took that one hit and at times during “stage 2” of the experience I felt the desire to smoke both cannabis and tobacco, but there was a clear message being conveyed that this sacred state was too fragile and lucid to survive the calming, somewhat numbing effects of cannabis. As for having a ciggie, that felt like doing so would be to slap God in the face.
Bathing in the drawn out afterglow I kept changing forms and merging with geometric gear-like alien structures. I clearly recall meditating and watching myself melt away into art.
As I came back, I knew I was changed forever, and I continued to process the trip laying down comfortably, my ceiling resembling a womb, and feeling like a newborn. This rapid change from angel-god to fragile infant was humbling, and I kept with me a clear understanding of the moment I had felt my ego dissolve, and remembered that I could be a blank canvas of anything I choose to from now on. It was freeing.
I looked at the time finally and saw it was past 3 am. The experience indeed lasted far longer than I would expect psilocybin to, almost 8 hours.
I thought about my cannabis use, and how distracting it would have been, and asked myself deep and meaningfully if it was good for me or holding me back. As I re-integrated I smoked a bong and was filled with childlike exuberance and as such I concluded that maybe cannabis didn’t fit the routine of all-powerful gods free of desire, but here it was making me feel loved and helping me process this beautiful psychedelic gift/accident, and returning me to normality by encouraging eating and sleeping at an appropriate time. This rational overview made real sense, and I decided my cannabis use was truly calming, medical at times, and healthy for me as a person.
At the height of my creative super-thinking I did manage to draw out 2 rational and important desires of mine into full-fledged ideas.
The first was a desire to visit a close friend who I could share this with, and make a real effort to harness the power and importance of friendship as a universal energy. For too long, I had ditched friends for drugs, then for comfort and lastly out of fear. That evaporated.
Secondly I gained a new appreciation for my mother, the things she’s done for me, the trials she’s facing and I really appreciated her selflessness as a person, identifying the lack of a stronger connection between us as a result of self-defence mechanisms manifesting as unconscious blockages that didn’t allow us to connect on an even playing field. I was still young, and not long ago dumb, and her maternal instincts were so heavily invested in my well-being that they often turned into condescension, dismissive and panicked perspectives, and ultimately a lack of full trust in my making of my own path. The concept of mother and son and friend seemed like playdough, and I was able to imagine a new relationship evolving between us as the result of my choice of actions. I wanted to talk to her, and be a reassuring voice. I know there is pain and doubt and egotistical thinking in her that emerges from a place of doubt, but here I was with a clear view of the next step. My personal progress was a lifeforce energy for her. The more I developed the more free she could be. But the relationship lacked the balance necessary for mutual respect to truly exist. What we had was a good relationship where she helped me heal and I helped her calm down by showing progress. What she deserved was an effort on my part to show interest in her well-being from a direct action approach. I can see now that she needs just as much love and support as I ever did and do, and I have vowed to reciprocate this kindness and benevolence the best shot I can. I want to take an interest in her troubles. I want to make her okay when she is not. I want to genuinely invest myself in her well-being in a mature way that returns to her what I get from her, which ultimately is going the extra mile for someone you love in order to show your love and create more love. I saw my use of entheogens as carrying a responsibility to transmit these energies of healing and love to my mother without encouraging her to undertake these kinds of journeys herself.
Whilst the lasting impact is not yet as clear as the experience was, what happened to me last night was the most profoundly and spiritually life-changing undergoing I have ever experienced by far. It made other entheogenic journeys seem like a snapshot, a mere glimpse of that experience.
And I still have no idea how it happened really.