This won't be short. Skip past the spaced section if you want to avoid my life story.
There was a time in my life when I was really young that I remember life being perfect. Not that I necessarily understood what life was all about, but then again at that age I didn't even care what it was all about. Simply being me was enough.
Then I grew up, like we all do, and I developed this little thing called an ego. See, after I turned ten I was shipped off to a Christian school which I ended up graduating from years later. My parents were hoping that by putting me in a religious institution that I'd be less inclined to rebel and pursue things like drugs and sex. While this was true to an extent (the guilt trip they laid on me just for being a human being was pretty intense), all it did in the long haul was make me fearful and suspicious of life in general. I developed a 'voice', and I even named this voice Garet after a character from a book I read at the time. This voice, I didn't know until much later, was my developing ego, or alter ego really since our two outlooks were so different. I was convinced I was becoming a schizoid, but with how difficult life was at the time I almost enjoyed it. Sort of like it was my own little secret that I had this other side of me that no one coule ever know about.
And I had dated this girl all through high school and I was convinced she was 'the one'. I loved her exactly as my holy book told me to love her: I forced her to be subservient to me (a wife shall honor her husband and obey him), to be ashamed of herself for trying to be an independent woman (woman and man were not equal as I was taught), and putting her in a box about this big | |.
So she ended up cheating on me. Several times actually, and I could never understand why. I was so entrenched in my own deception of what love was that I was convinced that she was still the evil one and I was the one who was doing good. She ended up leaving me for another man, and after she left I had nothing at all. Nothing except my alter ego.
I spiraled into nihilism after that. We had lived together and after she left I had to move back in with my parents, and the only place I could fit was inside their garage which had no windows and was very much like a dungeon. So I locked myself in there for better part of a year, convinced that if there was no salvation in the light of god I'd cast myself into darkness and explore it until I found an answer to all of what went wrong in my life. I forced myself to bury whatever was left of the person I knew as Tek, and tried so hard to become Garet in my waking life. This essentially meant hatred and revilement for every person I encountered and an absolute disdain for life in general. I used to write long posts on forums and journal entries of how I looked at life, and when I read them now it's hard to even admit that I was the one who actually wrote them.
I had dedicated myself to finding one tiny bit of worth in this thing called life, and this was not an easy task because of the paradox of duality. I wrote a novel on this entire concept (never published it), but my ego could not get around the concept of death. My thinking went something like this: if our lives are finite and we are born only to die, what, if any, worth can my life possibly have? Why get up and do anything? Why go to college? Why fall in love? It all just ends in death anyways right? What is the point in doing ANYTHING if death awaits you no matter what?
Can you imagine facing that paradox, and have it be all you think about every day of your life? That was me, four years ago.
Call it the law of attraction or whatever, but being in that state of mind attracted only the worst sorts of friends and lovers to me. I ended up seeing this woman for better part of two years who did to me what I had done to my high school lover. She put me in a box and threatened me if I left the box or even looked outside of it. She caused me to reap my own karma that I had sown many years earlier. I hated life at that stage.
Then I was introduced to Marijuana at 23 (very late in life for most people I know). This was a silver bullet for me. After I discovered Marijuana, all the guilt and anger from my past seemed to not matter as much, and my thinking pattern began to change. See, I had not allowed myself to think much outside the box both because of my upbringing and subsequent evil girlfriend later in life. I had assumed, quite falsely, that what the church and the government had to say about drugs was correct. After experiencing a drug for the first time, I began to question my stance.
Despite what most straight people claime, Marijuana made me smarter. Not in the sense that I could smoke a joint and read about quantum physics, but I could just sit still in my own head and have it not be unbearable. And when I would do this, paradox after paradox kept creeping up in my mind. What made a man different then a woman (for me to have forced my first girlfriend into obedience like I had)? Aren't all dualities dependent upon each other? Isn't that a perfect form of symbiosis in the end? The dark needs to the light in order to exist and vice versa. How could it be any other way?
Finally, I was beginning to discover some hidden understanding in life that I had overlooked. Somehow, the paradox didn't need to be solved, just understood for what it was. And since weed had caused me to come to these revelations, I began to wonder if there were any other chemicals that could help me further in my quest...
And so I found shrooms. The first time I had ever taken shrooms, I had an experience that altered my entire perspective on life. At the time, I had walked away from anything spiritual and considered myself a hardcore rationalist (realist is what I referred to myself as). So imagine my surprise when I take this chemical, thinking it won't be too much different then a weed high, and all of a sudden I'm not even me anymore!!
Imagine for a second not knowing what a breakthrough is, then having one unexpectedly. I had no reference to what was happening to me, no understanding of where I was and how I seemingly had left my body somehow! Somehow this place I found myself in felt more real than my normal life... and why did it all feel so familiar? I was convinced while it was happening that I had died and went to heaven, and was quite comfortable with that notion. When I opened my eyes and found myself back in my living room, realizing I had not died, I moved my head to the side and I saw a very large reptile-man walk through the wall in my kitchen. As I witnessed this startling thing, it whispered at me telepathically the word "Magellan", and after that the trip was pretty much over.
This blew my freaking mind people! What I experienced I knew in my heart of hearts was real and important, and so I set out on a journey to understand what had happened to me and what that 'place' was all about. After many experiences since that time, I fully understand what went wrong with my life, how I accepted a false belief system just because others were telling me I had to believe it. I didn't ever realize I had the ability to tell them no!! I had felt trapped at that point in my life, because I had allowed this voice to develop (the ego) which told me how trapped I was and how hopeless it all was. The voice was the wrong part, it wasn't me but an imposter pretending to be me!!
So why do I use DMT? Because it saved my life, and continues to give my life purpose and meaning. I know, through psychedelics, that there is another world besides this one and I'm a necessary part of it. Death and fear have no power over me anymore, and I've never been more content.
Sorry for the long read, felt like sharing this morning
All posts are from the fictional perspective of The Legendary Tek: the formless, hyperspace exploring apprentice to the mushroom god Teo. Tek, the lord of Eureeka's Castle, is the chosen one who has surfed the rainbow wave and who resides underneath the matter dome. All posts are fictitious in nature and are meant for entertainment purposes only.