Hi Everyone!
Sorry it's taken so long to updated this thread - I was snowed under with work for the last week. I have, however, managed to take mushrooms twice since my last post - the second trip being just last night!
The first trip went really well. The mushrooms seemed to be quite mild, and I had an experienced friend with me, who did a really good job of keeping me comfortable and guiding me through things. When I bought the shrooms, I specifically asked for a more visual experience, although I didn't really end up "seeing" anything except for the brief moment when I was busy throwing up into the loo, at which point I saw some nice, intricate little designs quite clearly before my eyes. Overall, though, all my senses were enhanced: the light looked like it was shining right down on my friend intentionally, and the colours and shapes in the room I was in were brighter and somehow more pleasing. My sense of taste was also enhanced - I didn't know that food could taste so good! - and I experienced liquid substances as more of a kind of static electricity than anything else. Actually, at one point I had a shower and spent quite some time marvelling at the fact that it's possible to get wet. That is, the water didn't really feel like it was touching my skin, and yet there were clear signs of wetness, which indicates some kind of interaction between the water and myself.
I also had some quite nice insights into the subjectivity of human experience, and how, although there is something that might be described as objective reality, we can only ever access it through our own subjective consciousness, which means that even physical "laws" are really just creative, subjective and more-or-less internally consistent descriptions of something that can never be experienced as what it is in itself, and that there could very well be infinite ways of correctly describing noumenal reality. So, what Kant said, basically (I wonder if he ever did mushrooms?
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The second trip was a bit more difficult. I did it alone and took some stronger mushrooms this time. I also did it at night, and ended up going for a walk through the woods that lasted for around 2 hours. I've never experienced such dramatic beauty before. There weren't any hallucinations involved, but the trees seemed to be frozen pieces of dynamic movement, and it also occurred to me that they could well be expressions of electric current, albeit unfolding very slowly from our perspective. The taut arch of the branches and ecstatic skyward stretch were a revelation, to say the least!
However, because I was alone, I was confronted more jarringly with the essential emptiness of life and the universe. Again, everything was perspective, and I realised with quite devastating force that I spend the majority of my time in my thoughts, under the impression that I'm interacting with people, where this is not actually the case. I felt a profound sense of loneliness and quite hopeless regarding the possibility of ever really connecting with another human being. However, fortunately, after allowing these thoughts to take me where they wanted to take me, it seemed that love and compassion are truly the only moral imperative in life. How can you have anything but compassion for beings who are stranded in eternity, surrounded by all the possibilities of everything that ever has or ever will be, all unfolding at once? The universe is so completely full that it is desolate it its emptiness. I understood why esoteric traditions say that man can be driven mad by coming face-to-face with God. There is terror in the realisation of the power of thought, and I was grateful for the limits of my everyday waking consciousness, because life would not be possible if we were aware at all times of the role played by our own perceptions and conscious focus on the way we experience our lives.
All this actually took me back to a profound awakening I had at university, although this time it was amplified and had a significantly stronger emotional impact. It was harder to deal with, but it showed me a lot about myself and the way I'm living my life. It made me realise just how lonely I've been, and that I've been looking in the wrong places for love. I now want to start building real relationships with flesh-and-blood people, rather than updating Facebook or YouTube and being duped into thinking that such things count as social interaction (the fact that I ever thought like that sounds crazy now that I'm writing it down!)
One more significant insight was into the nature of love: I stopped to admire one tree in particular, and I told it how I saw it. I told it it had a young soul, and that it would never truly grow old, and that it was beautiful. And then, as I was walking away, I looked at one of its branches and thought about how happy and glad I'd feel if this tree were to choose to freely give me part of itself to take with me, out of gratitude for the communication we'd shared. And I realised that this is how human love must be - if you appreciate and love someone and do your best to communicate this love, then at some point it will overflow and come back to you as a gratitude that will fill your heart up. Giving love is the only real way to connect with other people, and the fear of judgment is the reason that we - or at least I - don't give love a chance. The irony being, of course, that this fear does the job of the judgment without anyone ever actually having to judge you. It's like pre-emptively clipping your own wings just so that no-one else can do it do you, despite the fact that there's no surer way to guarantee that you'll never fly again.
I'm sorry if this is a bit incoherent - just woke up about half an hour ago, and as such am still experiencing the after-effects of my trip. I really hope to integrate a lot of the insights I gained this time around, and to make a change in the way I've been living my life. I hope you can all relate to my experience - feel free to respond!
And sproutsfriend and HippingTrippY - thanks for commenting!
- Yuchangi