Part I: Primordial Soup a.k.a Preface
Upon midnight's arrival, standing in watch of myself before my large bedroom mirror, approximately fifty milligrams of Banisteriopsis Caapi alkaloid extract were placed under the tongue, in fifteen drops of tincture. When I eventually swallowed the contents of my mouth, a slightly bitter alkaloid taste revealed a failure of complete absorption. To what degree, I'm not sure. Immediately thereafter, three small piles of DMT freebase were slid under the tongue by knife tip, and rubbed into the soft tissue by finger, in succession. A considerable, but not unbearable, burning sensation under the tongue was noted. A fourth pile of freebase would probably have increased the burn to something much less tolerable. I returned the materials to their place of storage, and began to casually pace the room in wait.
During the next five minutes, the harmala alkaloids steadily took me into their tranquil embrace. They sing a certain lullaby that gently rinses away one's fears and apprehensions. A polite beckoning to a warmer place, far from an intrusion on consciousness. Soon thereafter, the spirit of the tryptamine billowed around me, giving rise to a subtle buoyant force, and a distinct freedom from physical inertia. The boundary between the external world and my perception thereof was just, ever so slightly, beginning to blur. Ripples of distortion periodically traversed the visual field. Periphery whispered undulation, expansion, contraction, breathing...
From past experience, I knew that the synergistic effects of the alkaloids were now rapidly approaching their peak. I made haste to darken the room and retire to my bed, where I sat upright, legs crossed. On my nightstand were a glass pipeful of DMT freebase and a lighter, prepared earlier. The pipe held an unknown quantity of the crystal; more than I could feasibly smoke at once.
I took a few moments to quell any anxieties present and silence my internal monologue. I then took pipe and lighter in hand, met the pipe's mouthpiece with pursed lips, and drew a steady breath through the glass piece as the flame of the lighter grazed its bowl, filling my lungs completely. By the time I had exhaled, a force was beginning to pull me irrevocably into another space -- faster, stronger as I raise the pipe to my lips once again -- deeper yet as I spin the flint wheel of the lighter -- I desperately attempted a second hit, blindly groping through the separating veil between reality and the tryptamine's realm. At the point of about half total lung capacity's occupation, the wavering pressure of my breath pulled the lighter's flame too close to the bowl, and the freebase caught fire briefly. Instinctively, I blew back through the pipe, extinguishing the bowl and lighter. The bright yellow light's sudden pardon to darkness is the last worldly sight I'd have for some time.
Part II: Abiogenesis a.k.a. The Breakthrough
The pipe and lighter slipped from my hands, and I closed my eyes. The darkness that I met behind closed eyelids was not that of the black of midnight; rather, I found myself staring into a vast twilight sky. An expanse of cool blue shadow -- the faint, magical glow of a moonlit forest floor on a warm summer's eve. It was an organic, almost familiar space, but nothing of this Earth. Not a place in reach of plane, train, nor automobile, in any case. I was peering through the depths of a metaphysical sea, churning, threads of consciousness itself tangling and raveling with vigor rising by the second. A storm was breaking, clouds spinning, winds howling, ground quaking... No sooner did this chaos reach a deafening roar than it began to reveal something deeper -- something ordered, and far from chaotic. There was a method to the madness. An orchestration, as it were.
Yes...
Suddenly an awareness dawned. Now I heard and saw, before me was song and dance! Curse of tone-deafness lifted, and music was born of noise. The rumbling vibration of the sea's roil disclosed a perfect, mathematically intact harmonic series. A crystalline structural pattern in the fabric which wove this furiously shifting and evolving continuum became clear -- and with each passing moment this hyperspatial vista broadened, and deeper secrets of the crystal unfolded, and the passion of the music surged, and its meter quickened. The entirety of my consciousness was fast awakening to the spirit of a fervent and magnificent performance!
The utter obliteration of my notion of the upper limit of human experience only marked the beginning of a perceptual evolution that would ultimately create something entirely alien. It was like the self-assembly of the inanimate universe into some sort of radically different breed of life-energy generating mechanism -- an advanced transcendental technology, with the sole function of opening my awareness to this cosmic rhythm. I was experiencing a second-level abiogenesis and the boundless cycle of meta-reproduction that followed, catalyzed by the cooperative action between the brain and these incredible alkaloids.
The subjective result was positively confounding -- something that can only be described as looking at a blade of grass, and in an instantaneous flash of visual recognition, seeing each and every instance of tens of thousands of adjacent cell walls. Or rapidly flipping through an endless book, hundreds of words imparting their meaning in the blink of an eye's time. Whatever was happening, regardless of its origin or spiritual ramifications, it was undeniably something of an impossibly great magnitude! But it wasn't just perception and understanding. It was a brilliant, ecstatic, and electric form of art. Something of an entirely different realm than that of human self-expression, but art nonetheless.
By this point, my entire visual field was completely dominated by a frenetic display of continuously morphing intricate neon three-dimensional patterns and images. I spiraled into an intense rapture. My lips spread into a broad grin, and my entire body began to squirm and tense and flex. "I" didn't flex my muscles -- my body and mind were no longer under jurisdiction of this "I" thing -- they were vital organs of the super-macro-organism that was the universe. Each wave of bodily tension was like a slow contraction of the macro-heart. Even my thoughts were seemingly swept into existence by the current of the unstoppable passage of time itself.
I opened my eyes. Through a thick swarm of fractal serpentine insectile hallucination, I vaguely made out silhouettes of the furniture and assorted belongings in my darkened room. But the moonlight! The soft and beautiful blue glow of the moonlight sifting through my window blinds permeated the air with a vibrant presence. As I surveyed this fantastic scene, the perception of physical reality as a collection of distinguished objects of various materials began to slip away. The entire room was rapidly dissolving into a singular homogenous soup of elementary particles -- perhaps in varying concentration and arrangement, but all fundamentally identical. And, lo and behold, the soup had arms! (I held my arms and hands up before me, and slowly clenched two fists.) Clearly, the universe was reaching into itself -- groping, pulling and pushing on itself, shaping itself -- building the Machine! My limbs were a simple means of the abiogenetic self-construction of reality, and they'd been literally beside me for all my life. How could I have possibly failed to see their true nature?
I looked back on my sober life as if I were probing collective consciousness for memories of my apelike ancestors. I was another life form entirely. I'd stumbled upon a certain combination of chemicals that prompted an abrupt evolution. The potential for this transformation must have been programmed into the human genome, I thought. The probability of an experience of this nature arising incidentally in the brain by chemical stimulation seemed akin to that of a massive computer glitch creating a fully-featured word processor. I could only conclude that psychedelics and humankind must be woven by a common thread.
I felt as though I'd emerged from a plot twist in the story of my life. Nothing could have prepared me for what had occurred, and nothing would ever be the same. I cupped my hands over my face, reeling in utter disbelief. I could almost hear the punch line of a grand, cosmic joke echo through mindspace. I broke into a fit of existential laughter, which only seemed to plunge me to greater depths of euphoric awe.
And it was after I gathered myself that, almost to my astonishment, the effects began to subside, and the Machine slowly began to disintegrate as each generation of the meta-lifeform perished in succession. The trip reached its conclusion in sublime satisfaction and inspiration anew.
Part III: Canna-bonus
Upon completion of the descent to the mild lingering effect of the sublingual alkaloids, I packed a very large bowl of cannabis buds and proceeded to smoke them. I was quickly escalated to a shockingly powerful and unique psychedelic state, cognitively on par with high dose LSD, but visually and aurally far beyond anything that Hofmann's creation has ever delivered. I distinctly remember sitting up in bed and meditating, and suddenly being transported to a vast, open space. I could see a massive canopy over the space, overlaid by a repeating array of brightly colored, subtly morphing images. I suddenly shattered the silence in some way, as if I commanded a booming shout into existence in this domain of my imagination. Seconds later, the shout returned to me in a diffuse reverberation, acoustically reinforcing the colossal scope of the enclosed area. A reverence took hold of me, and a chill ran up my spine. As quickly as it had begun, the experience was over.
Shortly thereafter I fell into a peaceful sleep...
Part IV: Afterthoughts
The events relayed (or, more accurately, the events which were feebly attempted to relay) in the section of the trip report entitled "Abiogenesis" all occurred over about a five-minute duration, just to give you a concept of the depth of experience that each moment brought.
The addition of harmala alkaloids to breakthrough doses of DMT seems to make the experience much more memorable AND visual.