…AWAITING EYES AND WADING I’S.
After trading confusing and often funny euphemisms over a group chat on a social net site, Cha, Cat, D, and S showed up at my door for a few friendly rounds of Deep Massage Therapy, Drumming Mental Timpanis, Cap P Changes and Changrala. It was also to be a meeting (before, of course!) about learning to extract, which is a project we will be launching together in the coming weeks, with me stepping up in the role of mentor.
This is part of a group who I have been sharing my DMT with a few of times a year for a few years, leading up to them asking me to breakthrough. After this session, most seemed ready and eager, but I want them to extract their own, under my tutelage, so they will break through very familiar with the mid-range doses, but also with dimethyltryptamine that they have extracted themselves (I taught D, a member here for a few years, how to extract 3 years ago). So next time we gather I will bring them up to 30mg+ in the GVG, but this time around we all floated in the 15-25mg range.
There was the usual giddiness when they arrived, but the tone became more thoughtful and reserved and steeped in anticipation after we had moved the couch, set up blankets and pillows on the floor, lit candles around the room, measured out the first two GVG’s and extinguished the lights. S and Cha went first (23 and 18mg respectively – S is a tall man and Cha, a woman, a very experienced tripper but smaller).
They chose to leave the music on (I gave them the choice), and S took his larger dose all in one hit. Cha has some trouble with the GVG. I hold and adjust one lighter and D the other for S on this occasion, but Cha always has trouble breathing in quickly when I tell her to; she is afraid of coughing and not absorbing enough, which she always does because, as anyone familiar with the GVG knows, if you don’t draw it in quickly enough, there is not enough oxygen and the slower combustion, even with the flame far away, ends in burning the product creating smoke and not vapour, making it harsher on the lungs. It took her 5 hits on the 18mg, coughing out much smoke two or three of the times, but she had a good experience nevertheless.
Next up was D and Cat. D wanted to try the changa I had made a couple of years ago, but due to LIFE intervening, I had not had the opportunity to try it until a few weeks back, in a great evening session with Ay. D took just shy of 75mg of the 20:1 caapi, 2:1 leaf: dmt mix, meaning he would be inhaling around 25mg of DMT if he got it all in, on top of quite a bit of harmala magic. Cat had 20mgs of straight spice in the GVG in her hands.
They also chose to have music, though D was equivocal. About two thirds of the way through, D asked to turn the music off. Cat implored no from behind closed eyes. I hesitated and D uttered a quick “off, please”. So I turned it off, figuring music was disturbing him more than its absence would disturb her.
I was next up. Definitely no music. And silence from all. I was so focused I don’t even remember who was next to me with the other GVG!
I wanted to go a little deeper with the changa than I had last time, and a little deeper than I had gone for quite some time, without breaking through, though I knew I was getting close to that tipping point for me with 70 mgs of leafy goodness loaded, adding up to about 23-24mgs DMT. I meditated and tried to slow my heart, repeating “it’s okay, calm, you want this, it’s okay, accept it, sliiiiide into it” even while drawing in the vapour, all in one hit (I have very big lungs!). I held it for twenty to thirty seconds (who can be precise with all those molecules skipping across the blood brain barrier!)
I kept repeating those phrases over and over until a kind of split happened: I stopped speaking in my head but the words continued, flowing into me and reassuring from someplace NOT ME. And uttering soothing words not of my making. The voice almost imperceptibly transformed from my own to an electric sounding, gruff and multi-tonal, pan-harmonic version of itself.
Suddenly I was in a room, a cross between a game-show style stage and a nursery, with curved walls upon which were projected flying and mutating coloured swaths and flows and spiraling hues indescribable, and the air!
Oh, in the air before me floated something and nothing, transparent and thick, whisps and snowflake-like bubbles and entire rivers of saturated bluegreenorangepurplered, and there was a floor, yes there was a floor like the wall and standing on this floor about fifteen feet away and visible through the sparkling and multi-charged air and lit from above, making dark pools of their eyes and ray-chiseled cheeks, were four children, at least one boy and one girl, arms by their sides and palms forward, and one man – dressed in as close as I can describe, Bill Gates style attire, with blond side parted hair, his arms like the children’s only slowly raising, palms out, in a gesture of welcome, and speaking was this man, he was speaking, speaking in my voice, MY VOICE, saying the soothing things I was no longer saying in a tone of friendship and understanding and complicity. I could see his lips move, the bottom lip black from the shadow of its upper twin, and he said:
“You’re okay, it’s fine, you see, don’t you? You see..!!! Now touch your belly, run your fingers up your shirt to your chest.”
And I did. The children moved, planted firmly but slowly swaying side to side, arms gracefully floating to and fro, changing directions behind their torsos and hips.
“Now touch your face. Run your fingers along your cheeks, and now press hard with your palms.”
I pressed hard down on my cheeks.
“Move your hands up over your eyes and press hard. And please, smile.”
I complied and, smiling all the while, the scene exploded as I pressed my palms and felt my eyes receding slightly in their sockets. Wondrous spectacle of light and shape unfolding, splendourous rippling and twining pyrotechnic goo-flow, ineffable beauty effing unraveling before and through me, profane and divine and inside around and out of me all over and under and sideways pouring and puking and imploding and projecting magestic!
“Hands down, turn on your side. Awe. Awe. Awe. Touch your face. Smile.”
I had no will as I chose to do what he told me, but there was no choice involved, only the illusion of being the one following instructions, though my body moved of its own volition, no cognition interfering, the receiver received and transmitting transmissions and complying to orders and choices made from elsewhere and delivered in my own not-voice, but not heard through the squishy technology of flesh and drums and anvils and cochlear percussion and membranous timpani taut and buzzing, but through some other means electric and drifting and unthought.
“Open your eyes, look at your friends, on the couch”.
My eyelids cleaved and I saw them there, faces fluttering through shards and layers of flesh-stuff rectangularized - and I waved! I waved to my friends out there and saw the shards shift to small squared smiles, and I thought, my first thought in a while, that I had waved, I had chosen to wave, and HE had not told ME to lift my hand and flutter it before me in a signal just barely recognizable to me. I had CHOSEN.
LAUGHTER. Kind, magnanimous, paternal chuckles of the sort laid upon a child who misspells a word and beams in pride.
“Close your eyes and turn onto your back.”
I lowered my waving hand and rolled over as ordered.
“I am more than a voice, you know. Choose. Do. Do not. Forgive. Forego. Hate. Love. Birth. Kill. I AM HERE. And always AM.”
From which I understood that even my understanding happened somewhere else, all decisions and thoughts and desires all occurring far from and long before the weak semblance of the will of my own volition executed them and believed itself the originator.
I laughed. He laughed. We laughed.
The laughter laughed and echoed laughter down the ages and through the transmission of JBArk and I knew those outside me, on the couch and the floor, laughed along, having longed to laugh as I laughed but not having the choice until I was told to laugh and they were told to follow. The laughter of understanding that there is no laughter.
The birth and demise of mirth and surprise!
IT HAS ALREADY HAPPENED. AND WE GET TO LAUGH ALONG!! Long Laugh the ready all, getting to happen, as it already has!
“Look. Before you.”
Eyes closed, I perceived four swaying giants before me, wriggling to the music of pops and bleeps and hisses, and bi-harmonic multi-melodies and polyrhythmic percussing bangs and thump-thumps made aware to me through their gyrations. Somehow I could only see them from the navel to the knees, and they were all four dressed in different tight fitting shimmery purple and red and blue sparkle-tights with swirling and mutating hip belts adorned with a single buckle the size of a small plate. On the buckles was an outer perimeter of a metallic nature, inside of which was the hyper-squirmy jimjaminess of my habitual DMT visuals, but each one cast in squiggles of a differing palette and slightly different mutating form.
“Look at the first one.”
My attention zoomed toward the belt buckle furthest left until it occupied most of my vision. Snake-like primary coloured forms slithered in and out of each other, then broke the metallic periphery and, unbound, wriggled toward me dancing and swaying with the body behind the buckle and belt.
WORMS AND BOAS WRIGGLING AND WADING SERPENTINE INTO MINE EYES. AWAITING EYES AND WADING I’S.
“Number three.”
I pulled back my gaze and the snaky protrusions coalesced back into the buckle and respected the metal boundary once again, as my view sped past the second to the third buckle and approached. Geometric impossibilities there abounded, translucent, revealing the structure within, a structure of lines of light, of form unexisting and unimagined, bursting forth and burgeoning toward me once again beyond the periphery of the metal circle. Purples and blue-magentas and soft emeralds enveloped the geometries and dimensional impossibilities and not-squares and not-polyhedrons belching and blossoming forth.
UNCONCEIVED GEMS CLEAVING AND LEAVING, LEFT AND CLEFT, CLOVEN AND WOVEN AND WINGED AND WRUNG.
“Number two.”
I floated away and back to the second belt buckle, the gyrating, shiny-shimmery, violet sparkle-tights almost disappearing from my field of view. This buckle was more reserved, if reserved is a word to reserve for a buckle on a belt! Within the shiny metal circle, this one yellow and glistening alive, were an array of circles that overlapped to fill everything, while, again, impossibly, not intersecting or interfering with each other, as if they were not actually overlapping – there were many circles that fully occupied the space, leaving no gaps between, as if they were squares parading as round, but not an angle between them or within.
The space was entirely flat and two dimensional, the colour shifting subtly so that if I took in the whole thing the soft shift in hue was perceptible, but when I scanned from one circle to another all the way across and down, it all seemed to be chromatically uniform. In the circle was a black radial line, rotating, like the hand of a clock, clockwise, and though at the same speed, each circle’s rotating radius was at a different, random place in the circle. In front of some of these radii, and behind others, an array of radii was being left, as though when the original radius advanced it either erased, or created other radii ahead or behind it, like slices of pie. By the time the radii had come full circle, the radii it had laid, or erased, had disappeared, allowing the original radii to lay or erase new ones. But when I tried to pinpoint the erasing or spontaneous creating of any radius on any circle, the circle just became sort of empty, as if it was unwilling to divulge its irrational secret.
The overall effect was beautiful if I didn’t focus too hard on trying to crack this enigma, sort of like a field of un-intersecting but somehow overlapping circles were clock-spiraling into almost snail shell-like forms. All in unison, either bringing into existence or effacing radial lines.
I’S, WADING, REVOLVING RADIAL ‘ROUND THE CLOCKFACES OF UNTIME, UNWAITING, UN-EYES, UNCLOCKED.
“Back to three.”
I followed orders and brought my sight back in line with the circle array’s neighbour, the snakey buckle, but it began to fade as I moved in on it.
“Back to three. Back to three. But four is for me, and not for thee.”
(I must note at this point that the voice was actually saying things to me, but I could no longer discern whether it was coming from elsewhere or from me directly, making me uncertain I wasn’t just riffing and rhyming myself…)
THE VOICE UNMINE WAS TWINING WITH MINE, AND MINING THE MIND TO UNWIND THE I.
It faded into a luminescent emerald field that stretched out like a floor before me and curved up into walls and back over me. A sort of lattice was laid over the surface, which undulated like there were mounds or bubbles or hills underneath it, a lattice of lines not unlike a grid, but also not dissimilar to the skin of a giant viridescent and iridescent python, the green shininess fluctuating in tone, depth and hue throughout the surface stretching and bending, heaving and swelling before me. The furthest wall was receding and opening, creating the impression of a tunnel, as if I were inside a snake, a python reversed, inside out so that its skin formed a hollowed slithery tube.
“GO.”
I started up the tunnel, but it dissolved before me, leaving a grey and speckled emptiness behind my eyelids.
I opened my eyes and smiled. Everything swayed in afterglow, and my friends smiled as I rode the remaining harmala drunkenness and giggled and touched my face and tried to remember not to forget.
And a bunch of words, unsolicited and not thought, jumped into my mind and I scribbled them down:
A WAY THIN ICE, AWAITING EYES AND WADING I’S, AWAY, THE KING DIES WHILE AWE ATE WHYS AND WHY THINGS RISE WHEN THE WAY THINKS WISE.
I slumbered in post-bliss awhile on the floor then rose to measure doses like a good host. A few more GVG rounds for my guests, mostly pure spice, before the suggestion was tabled that we do small tokes of changa and hand the pipes around in a communal circle. Each GVG was loaded with 130-140mgs, and I held the Turboflame Arc for my guests as they puffed and passed. I took small hits, and I have to admit, it was a fun and novel way of sharing the experience. Laughter and giggles and occasional silences, some speaking, others crashing for a moment then rejoining with smiles.
D and I reloaded our GVGs for a second round and I took a hit, then held the Arc lighter over the GVG for Cat. She was inhaling at a good rate when…
PHARASHOOOOOOOOOMMMMMMMMM…
I handed her the lighter and apologized as I hit the deck and was swept away. Bigger hit than I thought! I hoped Cat’s hit was small enough that I didn’t interrupt her trip by bailing on lighter duty, but the compulsion to lie or fall down was irresistible.
Ecstatic washes of electrical pulsing from my toes to my crown, a phantasmagoria of colour and shape and twisty-wisty twiney trypta-goo filled my mind, but the thought of the others in the room was pervasive, and I kept waiting to be able to sit up and rejoin them, so my concentration was not fully on what was transpiring in my head. It folded and refolded, and at one point seem to fold open and fade, so I sat up from my position on the right, said hi to all in the room and continued my motion left, said “NOPE!!!” and crashed to floor between my chair and subwoofer and continued my giggly trip, echoed by the laughter in the room.
It felt good to be laughed at! The trip folded and refolded again, and their laughter peeled and repeeled and meshed and mixed with the slow beats of Pantha du Prince that boomed through the box next to my head. They were all still laughing at me, looking with waiting eyes when I sat up again, wading my I’s into the room, a cartooney fractalized vortex of spinnation and spiralizing curtainage and lampery and red black sofaness and tablery.
I was HOME. With Friends. And warm. And tryptamined and harmalaed, and gushing with ecstabliss and waves and frequencies of amour and amity.
AWAITING EYES AND WADING I’S…
JBArk is a Mandelthought; a non-fiction character in a drama of his own design he calls "LIFE" who partakes in consciousness expanding activities and substances; he should in no way be confused with SWIM, who is an eminently data-mineable and prolific character who has somehow convinced himself the target he wears on his forehead is actually a shield.