A warning before going on: This is a bad trip report. It's full of fear and uncertainty. And it is also, obviously, long. Not for everyone. But it's also a call for help - I'm asking the community to use their own knowledge and their own psychedelic experience to help me put together some ideas about the nature of what I experienced.

This is something that has deeply unsettled me since it happened back in May. I've done much research online with some limited success, but essentially no answers have come. What I'm looking for are intrepid explorers and researchers and thinkers to help me put together something of a consensus or idea as to the nature of this particular state I found myself in, and which I continue, 6 months later, to struggle to integrate. This nightmare trip was my trial by fire - and I had been through a dozen or so salvia trips before this. Nothing, even the hellish bits in Salvia-land came close to comparing with the chaos I experienced on this fateful day in my life, which I will never ever forget.

It happened not on DMT, but on mushrooms. Searching for similar shroom trips turned up nothing - it's not uncommon for people to suffer seizures, but I have found none in which the tripper remained lucid - always it is a blackout. In my quest for a similar trip report, I came across a DMT report that sounded shockingly familiar.

On with my experience:

I was at a rock festival, up front at a show. It was day 4, last day. I had been getting decent sleep. Rock fests are truly a young man's game, especially by Day 4, and I'm not the type to party all night after an exhausting day and it's impossible to sleep in past 9 a.m. in a hot tent surrounded by noise, so sleep becomes somewhat crucial.

I was on a high dose of Penis Envy shrooms. I also had a joint just going into the peak - probably not a smart idea.

I witnessed an absolutely awe-inspiring truth about the world and life. Nothing out of the "ordinary" for a psychedelic experience, but it was profound and shocking in that I was SEEING it naked before me - I recognized the deep truth of it. Every person around me wasn't a person, wasn't a body, but an awareness - I describe it as being like little orbs of light floating above each person's head, but the visual wasn't really there, it was the realization as I looked around that was so potent. The bodies themselves - thousands of faces - were like paper, thin. I saw a tragedy around me - all of these lights were connected somehow, a cosmic web or lattice of light that reached up and out toward a great big something. But here were all these faces and these bodies, trapped and unable to directly connect. Each person was like a fortress, walling off the light against the others. We're all on our own, alone down here, while somehow, tragically even, being connected to this lattice the entire while.

That's when things started getting intense. The moment froze. Everyone was paper - thousands of magazine cut-outs of human beings. I was no longer contained in my body - I was up, I was on the lattice - and I perceived that everything BETWEEN the web, off of the web, was a pure void of non-existence. I could not maintain this state on the web - I was slipping - off the interconnected light of being and into the void.

The paper faces around me shredded. Reality TORE, violently, terribly. My vision was going. I felt about to faint.

My friends relayed the story to me: I slumped down to the ground. They thought I was going through my backpack, but after a few moments one of them checked on me - I was limp. My eyes were open. My face was white. no color in my lips. My eyes totally vacant. They immediately got the attention of staff, and I was carried away from the crowd in front of the stage.
My eyes searched, but focused on nobody. My friends told me they were haunted by the look in my face - "I'll never forget that look for the rest of my life." like there was absolutely nobody at home. White as a sheet like a dead man, alive and breathing but utterly gone. My legs convulsed in spasms for a brief period.

Eventually my eyes began to focus on them and I stood up and said "I'm back."

That's what my friends saw. I'll pick up my side of the story from where I left off.

I felt about to faint.
Reality rapidly shredded and was gone, and I fell directly into the absolute apex of a horrifying cosmic abyss.

My visuals here can be described as technicolor hell. A strobing multicolored nightmare. It was the least of my concerns.
I had no cognitive function. I had no means of thinking. Instant ego dissolution: I had no memories or understandings of "me" or being a human being. Nothing out of the ordinary for a transportational trip, right? Not quite: Worst of all, I could not come to a simple understanding of the very concept of "being". I was unable to fully exist, only some sort of horrifying halfway-there. I felt like a digital glitch - stuck between off and on. Physically it felt like "I" was being electrocuted. I can't stress the intensity of this pain.
But even worse was the failure to become anything - a broken awareness. On Salvia I remember being a pure empty particle - no thoughts, drifting silently in a great void. I understand ego death and have experienced it before. This was altogether different. I felt like a feedback loop was feeding my brain's outputs directly into the inputs until every possible circuit was completely overloaded and every sense screamed in agony. Like I was a single particle LODGED in the hairline between "being" and "unbeing", jaggedly vibrating in this endless abyss. It was an eternal state. The only cognition available to me was a half-thought - halfway to "be", but not quite ever there. For a billion planck moments I experienced this glitched nightmare and it felt somehow like I was there for eternity. It was a state of pure chaos - no form or beauty or meaning. A total abomination of conscious being.

So after eternity ended (for the sake of salience we'll consider it a hundred years) my mental faculties gradually returned. My senses began to work again. I was being born. This part may be quite familiar to people who have come back from being "transported" - but I witnessed sound and vision return to me - although I had no clue what it meant or what these odd shapes were. Most startling, and most welcome of all - memories returned: these are people! I'M PEOPLE! But who? More memories - that's my friend, I know him! I did mushrooms! My thought at this moment was that I was waking up in a hospital, that I had been in a coma for weeks. Then I realized I was still at the festival. My first question, after standing and touching everyone with me to affirm solidity, and assuring everyone I was "back" and okay, was "how long was I gone?"
When the answer came back - a couple minutes - I laughed, smiled bigger than I ever have, and nearly wept with joy. I was scrooge back from his spiritual nightmare. I was alive. I had a body. I had thoughts.
Waves of the experience, each diminishing in power, came back to me, and I fought it tooth-and-nail each time, digging my fingers into the grass, fleeing to little lonely sanctuaries like a dying animal, and focusing on my form, my skeleton, rebuilding every piece that came disassembled, and it got me through, thankfully because I was coming down and the waves were each quieter than the last.

What followed were the most joyous minutes of my entire life. The absolute ecstasy of being alive in this world, and what a world. That I was not in that place where chaos reigned. That I had this incredible gift of being alive in a universe of form and stability and life and a mind that could perceive love and beauty. It was so profoundly affecting that I sat on the lawn on that beautiful day listening to living, soulful music and I openly cried and thought - I will only need a drop of this overflowing joy to be utterly happy and free for the rest of my life. Merely a single drop. Remember, for god's sake, boy.

Never, ever forget this.

The pure ecstasy of Being having subsided as I fully came down, I was left shaken. I set out on my own that night, away from the group, and did a lot of solitary walking. I missed several of the highlights of the festival, but I just didn't care - the music was loud and I was in a very sensitive state. The lingering memory of the glitch land - that realm of chaos - haunted me. I had intense night terrors for days, to the extent that I was afraid to go to sleep at night. An example was to suddenly, during sleep, perceive a sense of complete terror against which my only recourse was to express: to vent my horror by screaming primally. I would "awake" paralyzed, my voice broken in a low murmuring moan as I saw my room filled with staring shadow demons and I would wait and wait until I could move. After that I left a light on for the rest of the week when I slept, until the nightmares subsided.

After a week or so they did, but I experienced intense aftershock dreams even a month or two later.

So: How to integrate? I chiefly saw two options, but my confusion has left me torn between them.

On one hand I learned a beautiful lesson. In the crevice between existence and void there is a chaos terrible to behold. I can intellectually understand how all things can emerge from chaos - how all of the universe, all of existence, essentially may be a series of structurally-sound nodes within an endless sea of chaos. Experiencing this for even a couple of minutes was enough to give me a deep and profound love of life, the world, myself, and all things that are, ever were, or ever will be. But it also gave me a new fear, deeper and more powerful and shattering than any I had ever known - that I might one day return to that realm, even for a moment. I could never count on being able to perceive this place. It's an abomination - it shouldn't be perceivable at all, and in fact it seems that it isn't. Your consciousness essentially breaks, it short-circuits. There is a new fear I have, that this is the spot on the psychedelic map where the real dragons roam. It's not malicious entities. It's not an angle on the universe in which all is arbitrary. it's merely an eternal glitch, a malfunction, of your particle of being, in that sea of chaos beyond the walls of pattern and structure.

The other option: Parts of this experience fit very well with the description of a grand mal seizure. In a grand mal, the brain is overloaded with electrical stimulus and it shuts down and then reboots. The common experience is to black out during this - I haven't found any reports of people being lucid. One of the defining characteristics in fact of a grand mal is loss of consciousness. So already it doesn't fit the definition, unless it was an "awareness fluke" of some sort. So perhaps this is merely what happened: My brain overloaded, I had a seizure during which I was lucid - My awareness, being trapped in my brain (the ultimate curse of the living) didn't shut down - but my BRAIN was on electrical fire and closed off, and so I experienced a neuro-cognitive glitch - unable to think a single thought, even the most basic of basic of thoughts: "be". How could I, with a brain effectively on standby-mode?

This experience was a major part of my life. And to give you some context, I had experienced salvia breakthroughs before this. I swam in the cosmic lifestream. I floated, empty and thoughtless, in a pure void. I became the cells of my body, and I emerged with a fragmented knowledge of the shape of all existence. But this single experience on shrooms was the most powerful, the most potent, the most awe-inspiring and nightmarish thing I've ever been through.

Here's the DMT report I mentioned early on: http://www.erowid.org/experiences/exp.php?ID=36721
Here's a report at the Shroomery of someone who experienced something similar on synthetic cannabinoids: http://www.shroomery.org...flat.php/Number/14884246

Another tidbit of information - a friend of mine relayed to me an experience he had as a young lad, holding his breath for as long as he could. He felt faint and then experienced the "flashing technicolor" and had no bodily sense of himself - when he came back to the room, he was told that during that time he was up and walking around. But this wasn't a horrifying experience to him - just a strange one.

Additionally, I have learned that in India and other places in the world, it has been common practice to perform electro-convulsive therapy on patients with no anesthetic. Electroshock uses electrical stimulus on the brain to induce seizures. I have found many stories on this practice, but absolutely zero that include an experiential report from the patients who undergo it - do they all black out? do some remain lucid? I have no answers here.

My big question is: Did I slip into a state that exists in the psychedelic country and can be accessed again? Or did I merely have a seizure and the experience was related to the shut-down of brain function, during which I somehow remained lucid?

I see our job as psychonauts as being cartographers of the great unknown. Let's map this bitch.

Hello, by the sounds of your report you managed to breakthrough into Hyperspace and you got stuck in a time loop. When you say "high dose" what would you consider that to be? Your report sounds strikingly similar to my very first experience with mushrooms where I ate 3.5 grams of Cubensis. I don't know how the hell you did not have a panic attack being on a high dose at a concert of all things. I can't even be around more than a few people at a time when I'm up on shrooms, and that's if they are people I'm comfortable with.. When I tripped like that it was my first time doing anything other than alcohol or cannabis. I had also smoked a LOT of cannabis during my trip however and ended up leaving my group of friends in the living room at a party and curled up into fetal position moaning and kind of rocking back and forth twitching a bit.. lol. My friends kept asking me if I needed to go to the hospital but I was fine. The whole time I was doing this on the floor(about an hour) I was flashing back and forth from this reality into hyperspace. It was the very first moment I ever realized there was a "bigger picture". I never "blacked out" I was conscious the whole time.. Every minute of it. I just was not conscious of my body at some points, I was in hyperspace after all. I got stuck in a time loop for what seemed like eternity before finally being released from its grip. When I came back I asked if I was out for a while, but my friends said only a few minutes.

I obviously can not tell you with certainty that you did not have a seizure. Hell, I may have had one on my trip but I don't think so. I'm not a doctor I am merely a Psychonaut.. I hope maybe that clears some things up. Again though I'm interested to hear how much a high dose is for you..

My guess would be that it was due to an overload of stimuli - a rock festival, thousands of people and what would seem like some very potent mushrooms. This is the reason why I stay away from shrooms when it comes to noisy, crowded places. I have found that acid is a much more controllable substance in these situations. Mushrooms are to be enjoyed in nature, far away from culture.

I'm going with seizure while remaining lucid. I don't think you'll ever go back to that place. I've also been stuck in a bad place before and also feared returning there, taking months to reintegrate and worrying about going back... but I was fine at the end of the day.

Once again, I don't find mushrooms to be recreational and would avoid using them in that way in future.

Awesome report in spite of the dark nature of your journey.

Haha seriously lets map that world.

You clearly had a real intense experience. You had a revelation, and that's something that certainly must be integrated. People see the way differently after taking pyschedelics. You can't unlearn. The most important thing is to take something from it.

"On one hand I learned a beautiful lesson. In the crevice between existence and void there is a chaos terrible to behold. I can intellectually understand how all things can emerge from chaos - how all of the universe, all of existence, essentially may be a series of structurally-sound nodes within an endless sea of chaos. Experiencing this for even a couple of minutes was enough to give me a deep and profound love of life, the world, myself, and all things that are, ever were, or ever will be. But it also gave me a new fear, deeper and more powerful and shattering than any I had ever known - that I might one day return to that realm, even for a moment. I could never count on being able to perceive this place. It's an abomination - it shouldn't be perceivable at all, and in fact it seems that it isn't. Your consciousness essentially breaks, it short-circuits. There is a new fear I have, that this is the spot on the psychedelic map where the real dragons roam. It's not malicious entities. It's not an angle on the universe in which all is arbitrary. it's merely an eternal glitch, a malfunction, of your particle of being, in that sea of chaos beyond the walls of pattern and structure.

The other option: Parts of this experience fit very well with the description of a grand mal seizure. In a grand mal, the brain is overloaded with electrical stimulus and it shuts down and then reboots. The common experience is to black out during this - I haven't found any reports of people being lucid. One of the defining characteristics in fact of a grand mal is loss of consciousness. So already it doesn't fit the definition, unless it was an "awareness fluke" of some sort. So perhaps this is merely what happened: My brain overloaded, I had a seizure during which I was lucid - My awareness, being trapped in my brain (the ultimate curse of the living) didn't shut down - but my BRAIN was on electrical fire and closed off, and so I experienced a neuro-cognitive glitch - unable to think a single thought, even the most basic of basic of thoughts: "be". How could I, with a brain effectively on standby-mode?"

I had an similar experience on lsd where you are talking about litteraly not being able to string together any sort of thoughts or identity. I was stuck on the couch for what felt like forever in a time loop. I had this repeating glitch in my head at an incredible speed I thought I might be this way forever, doomed to not be able to function as a rational human. That was also the worst trip of my life. I ended up locking myself out of my apartment at 3 oclock in the morning with no keys or cellphone. But that's a whole nother story..

Hi,
I just finished reading "The Psychedelic Experience" wherein it is described that if one struggles with the state of ego death, one may have an unpleasant rebirth into the normal ego-driven existence.

I suggest that you read this short but helpful guide book so that you might have a better understanding of what might have happened to you.

Hope this is of any help to you.

edit: Now that I read it again it seems like you had a '++++' experience on the shulgin scale but were in an environment where it came unwanted.

Just a bad trip. They come and can teach us some times.

Not actually sure what the exact dosage came out to. I got a bargain through a close friend. Big ziplock filled. I received a text during day 3 from my friend that warned: "Be careful, shrooms are potent." we talked about whether we were going to do a full dose or take it easy. I had done shrooms a handful of times - Was looking for awe, and took a bigger cup than the others. Dozens of shrooms went into that wicked cauldron bubbling ominously on the bbq grill by the road patrolled by ridiculously cartoonish 4x4 cops buzzing around. brewed it in a tea and split it amongst 5 people. Hard to guess exact dose, we had enough for a full trip 6 ways, one person bowed out and we split 5 ways. Wild guess, somewhere between 1/8 and 1/5? I really don't know, I just asked for "enough for 6 people for a single trip", and got a WAY bigger bag than I expected. It was one of those, "fuck it. let's do this" moments. Another lesson learned!



I have indeed read the psychedelic experience - though I don't think this particular nightmare had to do with the 'unpleasant rebirth' - I experienced something like that on Salvia once - where my new form suddenly was torn to trillions - that strangely-comfortable sense of being in the other side reduced and exploded into a wild uncontainable raging sea which slowly assembled to form my body and living self. In my shroom experience, the 'rebirth' - the gradual acclimation of self, soma, and sensory perception was a blessing and one of the greatest joys of my life. If the hellish part of this journey was in fact related to my being unable to deal with ego death, I think it was the "going in" rather than the "coming out" - but it happened almost instantaneously - In one instant I was on a tightrope, and the next I had slipped and all was gone.

The experience was so profoundly terrorizing and torturous that it made me nearly swear to put down these drugs forever for fear that I would ever set foot in that place for another moment. However, I can happily state that my last journey into Salvialand had no tinge whatsoever of that feeling or state. But Salvia really does have its own character almost totally divorced from other psyches.



Definitely the last time I'm going to take powerful psyches in such an overwhelming environment. Though I can happily say that I never came close to panic. The only moment I felt overwhelmed was during the tail end of my major revelation - the violent tearing-apart of reality. But consider that I was essentially rising up - becoming the higher self, and perceiving everyone else's, the tendrils that connect us. I went from realizing its presence to actually leaving my ego and rising up into that form - all while in the middle of a huge rock show. Perhaps these transported states leave your neurons/synapses highly sensitive and open to input? I saw a great animation once of the effects of DMT on the brain - old patterns of "burned-in" neural connections no longer matter - new ones, old ones, they all light up. Neural connections that have laid stagnant for decades will "wake up" again.

Pair that with intense amounts of immersive sensory-stimulus overload and perhaps this is the source of the psychedelic seizure - being cast into the electric fire, your brain physically unable to process anymore.

The brave psychonaut thing to do would be to try to induce the same thing again by comparing the same dose on the same shrooms in a quiet peaceful environment to a second trip in an overstimulating one. Serious "edgework" as Hunter S. Thompson would put it.

I consider myself a fairly brave explorer, but I'm throwing in the towel on this particular experiment. There's one thing I feel quite confident in, and that's that something went fundamentally WRONG - it was not a state of being conducive to housing consciousness. I'm a creative person - I have imagined twisted Hells in my day, but anything would have been preferrable to this state. If I had awoken as a fly having its wings torn off by a child, I would have thanked the Fly gods that I was out of that hell, physical torture be damned. Or even Prometheus doomed in the bowels of the earth. Anything!

Amazing that a single hellish experience can open the deepest doorways to both fear, and blissful appreciation of life.

Well that makes sense and sounds pretty much on par with 5-6 grams of potent cubes.. You would have been in for an even wilder ride had it been libs or cyans.. I would not want to be the recipient of a 5+ gram dose of cyans that's for damn sure..

Well, this is from my PERSONAL experiences but, I really think the amount of shrooms was one factor and the joint was another.

I have taken a hit and a half of LSD once and it was WEAK WEAK WEAK. Very minor visuals during the "peak" and started to comedown after mearly 4 hours, and I mean it, 4 hours, it was incredibly weak acid.

That being said I decided well now that I'm done it's time to smoke a blunt. After 6 hits I "remember" out of nowhere and happening within an INSTANT that my ego completely dissolved. I forgot where I was, who I was, what I was smoking, and barely knew that my friends with my were even my friends. Once the high fully kicked in I had visuals that came extremely close to the ones I see on DMT. One of my friends even went completely holographic before my vision and I could actually see through him. And when I mean he was transparent, I mean it. It was so vivid and real.

NEVER underestimate the effect that THC can have when tripping, it doesn't do it for everyone, but CAN send you into a overwhelming psychedelic experience even with as a said before, very weak acid. Now you were smoking a joint on possibly 1/5 oz of mushrooms? I'm not surprised you had such a revelation. I sometimes get full psychedelic experiences (level 4) on ONE gram of mushrooms where marijuana is consumed.

I'm sorry that your trip was so horrifying to you too, when going into such a state and diving into a divine experience like you had, it's best to not be at a rock concert.

Take as much time as you need and integrate, and psychedelics will always be here for you.

Safe travels<3

Thanks so much for the insight - I have heard some similar - though less intense experiential stories from people who had overwhelming experiences mixing weed and shrooms - and even a few who suffered a seizure (with blackout) when mixing them. Of course this was all learned AFTER I had done it. THC's a funny thing. I have very mellow and lovely experiences smoking even very large amounts of weed. But I have two experiences that stand out - one was this, and one was when I had an incredibly potent pot brownie. I got incredibly stoned, as high as I've ever been on pot, but it was when I attempted to go to sleep that the crazy shit happened. It was the psychedelic circus. A MANIC trip in which I felt like I was on the verge of ego loss - on just a weed brownie - This vibrating technicolor light kept threatening to consume me, and as I focused to keep myself grounded, occasionally there'd be a sudden, totally intense strobe of a distant glowing face - I'd open my eyes and the face lingered, vividly, in my vision for a minute or so.

Definitely a big lesson learned. I figure I owe it to myself to do one "heroic" trip in my days, go tumbling over the edge, and then have the wonderful experience of rising up out of it. There was an incredibly epic feel to the entire trip - It was at The Gorge Amphitheatre in Washington. Stunningly beautiful place:



The history of the landscape is interesting. Natives have a history of the area going back thousands of years, as the gorge itself changed over time. There's a land-bridge over the Columbia that was destroyed in a flood. The native mythology speaks of a great battle fought between Gods. Spirits are named who inhabit the nearby mountains.

Ultimately, I'm glad I took this trip - I will remember it for the rest of my life. It gave me new fear, but it also gave me new strength. I'm still struggling with the fear - to bluntly name the worst of it, deep at the bottom is a death anxiety - that I will die and go on to the other realm, and find myself stuck for eternity in such a time loop.
But maybe these sorts of experiences are only possible with a complex brain like ours, designed to experience linear time and with a cognition that seeks to make sense of everything? My computer glitched out, and my brain interpreted it as pure hell for cosmic consciousness.

Lately I've been using sublingual salvia tincture (low-to-moderate dose) and meditating. It's been a beautiful experience and there's been no tinge of this fear. I highly recommend this stuff to any and all explorers on these forums.

And thank you again to everyone who's chimed in here. It's been strengthening and helpful to hear your thoughts and experiences on this. I'll continue to integrate this experience in the most healthy way I can manage, and deal with the fear to the best of my ability. Hopefully this will help anyone else who goes through something similar as well.

Very true.. I forgot to mention in my first reply to the OP there were also copious amounts of bud involved. To the point where we were all sitting at a kitchen table smoking a wildberry blunt I had rolled earlier in the evening. It was big (5 or 6 grams) and after a few puffs, every puff afterwards greatly intensified the trip. I had to leave the sesh because of this and thats actually the time I started freaking out and ended up in a corner tripping my face off..

Yeah man it can definitely have insane impacts when on other psychedelics.. to the point where I go from barely tripping to insane time distortion and hallucinations in everything I lay eyes on, It's crazy!

It sounds like you may have had a complex-partial seizure (seizure resulting in loss of consciousness/awareness) not a grand mal seizure. Grand mal seizures are whole brain seizures (less common), causing convulsions, and it doesn't sound like you had any.

I'm wondering if seizures are a relatively common effect due to drug use/overdose. I've heard of people going into seizures through MDMA overdose but not through psychedelic use. In all my years of drug use, I've had one experience that I believe I may have had some kind of seizure. I've had bad trips and freakouts on psychedelics and cannabis before nothing like this before. I smoked a large amount of cannabis after taking a tolerance break, and I began to feel extremely high and overwhelmed. I went to lie down to sleep it off, but as I closed my eyes I felt sharp bursts of intense pain and feelings like an electric current was being turned on in my brain. These shocks would come and go in bursts and I felt like I was slipping in and out of consciousness during these moments. I also felt psychosomatic hallucinations that my body was shaking violently, though in reality it wasn't.

I can relate totally to the psychosomatic hallucination - I couldn't BELIEVE it when I heard that I was for the most part lying limp, the electrical violence coursing through me had to cause massive convulsions. There was a brief period in which my legs jerked spasmodically, but those were the only convulsions I experienced. I have no experience with seizures personally, so I have nothing to measure this experience against.

I have hard of seizures on mushrooms from other people, and some on acid. It's not terribly uncommon, but nobody knows the root cause, and I don't believe any "psychedelic seizures" have been scrutinized scientifically.

Perhaps the answer is a combination of both of your conclusions? Some of the experience you describe does hint at seizure like symptoms (though I'm not medically trained so take that as speculation on my part), but it could be that this seizure revealed some form of truth to you. There is a long history of people getting visions from seizures, no psychedelics involved. Here's one example.

Personally I'm drawn to your description of experiencing the chaos between reality and the void. This appeals to me philosophically as much of my own spiritual speculation deals with the nature of reality between pattern and chaos.

Thanks for sharing.

As silly as it may or may not sound, ALWAYS, treat your entheogens with respect. After having one of the most beautiful experiences of my life on about an eight, I figured it could only get better if I took more. I upped it to almost a quarter about a month later and had a freak out. I got caught in a loop and thought it would never end! At one point I thought there was only one way to make it stop, but thankfully I did not act on that idea. It was over a year before I considered even thinking about trying shrooms again. After a pleasant lsd trip and an amazing cacti trip, I sampled the mushies from a project that I had done. I approached them with respect and was rewarded with another beautiful trip. After my breakthrough on jurema though, bad trips have become a thing of the past. I have come to the belief that a bad trip is usually a reflection of ourselves and if we don't like what we are experiencing, perhaps we need to do some serious inner work. I find that bud usually helps me when I am having trouble letting go. It also makes things more intense, but today, I'm cool with that. On a side note, the second time I ate boomers, near the end of the trip my I was told that my eyes whent all whacko. Each one was twitching spasmodically in different directions. I also became very faint and every time I tried to walk, I would pass out and fall over. I smoked my noggin pretty good a couple times too. It was enough to scare me girl at the time out of ever eating them again. I had also consumed vast quantities of bud and eaten some brownies as well. It has not happened since then.

Of course however I describe "the state" I was in is largely interpreted - it was new to me, utterly, and was so thoroughly terrorizing that I couldn't exactly knock on someone's door and ask, "hey, what is this place?" What I have are deep intuitions. We tend to know on psychedelics where a state fits in relation to the void. The first thought of God in Genesis was to split dark and light. this "first day" seems available to us through drugs and meditation - we can discover the state in which nothing is - until we recognize the thought that there is existence and there is the void.

My understanding of this experience as possibly inhabiting a type of chaos is the means by which I entered it. It was when I rose up, out of my body toward the interconnected lattice of life and being. When I recognized now that I was on a web suspended in a void I could no longer hold on. This is when I essentially fell and slipped directly into this infinitely looping abyss. It was NOT the void - the void itself is empty and clear - this was the complete opposite - total stimulus of everything, overloaded to the point of unbearable torment and with no comforting pattern or structure. I wasn't bouncing from void to being to void again. I was vibrating jaggedly in between, never reaching either.

Psychedelically, it felt like I had reached a wall that I absolutely could NOT go beyond. And to this day I wonder about that. Was it the barbed wire atop the fence of ego death? Could I have just used the damned gate and spared myself this hell? Was it truly chaos? Or, was it merely a full-blown computer crash which my awareness had to patiently sit through until it completed its diagnostics?

But I do have this one perspective, when I rotate things just so, of the cosmos as being MOSTLY chaos, that there was a state that PREDATED God's "first day" which was neither empty nor void, but utterly chaos. Chaos by its nature is unpredictable and prone to birthing patterns. Evolution is one such pattern that has managed to sustain existence in a solid structural form within the foam of chaos. So all existence may essentially be a series of stable forms which have managed to maintain themselves within a realm of chaos.
All God had to do was open its Eye and a universe was born. It never created anything; it only moved its eye.

Thanks so much for the link to the seizure paper - Was an interesting read, though they seemed highly defensive and even bordering on denial at times. And then, of course, the conclusion: "In this researcher’s opinion, Ellen White was given divine guidance through her visions, which were of value in pointing out the way of salvation through Jesus Christ to those who were searching for truth." Bingo! Nonetheless, it particularly makes me wonder: If I ever experience a similar seizure again, might I be able to travel a path to Glory, as Ellen did, rather than Chaos, as I did? Might the look in my eyes in the seizure trance be "pleasant" rather than "ghastly"? I very much wonder about this...




Thanks for your insights. Seems to me that psychedelic states put us in touch with the present moment which contains nearly infinite potential. If we experience a bad trip, it very well likely has to do with how our mind is operating, how it's rotating and spinning the universe on that "other axis" - perhaps the mind is the next dimension, and by rotating the universe on this axis, it is real, we truly see, for the first time, a new "angle" on all things. Perspective is the stuff of that other dimension. It behooves us to pursue perspectives that are valuable to us, but discovering where that value lies may be a difficult journey for many. It has been for me so far, and I'm still in the middle of it.

This paragraph in particular rings very true to me. I've had very similar speculation for some time now.



I'm always curious about "the structure of reality" and your experience perks my imagination. If it was the realm of chaos, then I'm inclined to agree that it probably is a wall that we can't pass, by the very definition of what chaos is. Also, the idea of a gate that connects realms, allowing us to circumvent chaos and pass from the lattice directly to the void. Interesting notions! I think it's probably much more complicated than that, but it offers a unique visualization. Again I'm inclined to think that the answer lies in a combination of your thoughts: it probably was a computer crash wherein chaos was able to enter the system (entropy is always trying it find its way in) until stability re-emerged.



On the topic of seizures, I just watched an interesting documentary from Nova involving VS Ramachandran's neurological research. Starting at minute 39 the show talks about a patient that had seizures in which he received visions that told him he was god. Obviously not what you experienced but along the same lines of seizures and visions.

http://video.google.com/...ocid=2661634191857056612