Hello.
Here’s my story. My interest in psychedelics began I think somewhere in the beginning of high-school, perhaps late mid-school. At this point I was only reading something about this stuff and I don’t really remember how I first heard about it and decided that someday I want to try it. Probably it was curiosity and desire for discovery, both of which have always deeply constituted my nature and were stronger forces than my socially conditioned prejudice against drugs. At least since I was a teen I always felt that there is much more to reality than I know. Hidden realms of perception and experience - though back then of course it wasn’t conceptualized, it was only a feeling. Who knows, maybe watching a lot of horror movies with Freddy Krueger and playing all sorts of strange, yet very creative, games sparkled this.
When I was fifteen I listened, quite by accident, to a music cd of my older brother’s friend, which was Biosphere – Patashnik. It literally affected me like some drug and brought to surface this feeling of mystery about life magnifying it enormously. It was a call, although I didn’t know yet for what, and it was repeating itself from time to time. I started listening to a lot of electronic, avant-garde or any other kind of music which could bring me closer to this feeling. I realized that there were so many different and awkward realms of experience and all of them were very tempting. I was reading some sci-fi books and watching strange, sometimes sick, movies. Still, at this period of my life, this interest comprised a smaller part of my life. I wasn’t aware how it was shaping me laying foundation for my future life and interests.
When I was 18 years old together with my friend we traveled to Amsterdam. I was still foolish being drunk with my youth and desire to have fun, so the trip was mostly about smoking weed, but in one shop I saw on a shelf salvia divinorum extract, about which I have already read something and was eager to try, and decided to buy it. Few months later I had my first psychedelic experience which unfortunately ( or perhaps, since it was my first time, fortunately ) was very weak. I smoked this extract at my friend’s apartment and the trip lasted maybe for half an hour, no more. In the beginning I could feel some euphoria, then I kind of perceived reality as being 2-dimensional and everything, including my friend, was awkward, but I didn’t see any visualizations or pulsations of environment that are so often mentioned in all descriptions of hallucinogenic drugs.
Three years had to past until I had another opportunity for psychedelic experience and this time the chosen tool were magic mushrooms. Finally, the experience was much more tangible and vivid. I felt that my ego at least partly dissociated, but boundaries between what I called myself and what were my surroundings still didn’t fully disappear. Everywhere I looked reality was breathing with life. Obviously that kind of perceptions were described already so many times by different people and very often much more accurately that there’s no necessity for me to go on. I just wanted to point out that at this moment I finally passed through the first threshold between consensus reality and altered states of consciousness. I could – at least to some degree – understand all those things I read about. I think it is very important to first prepare oneself theoretically, creating a kind of conceptual map and framework, before trying any hallucinogenic drugs. In my case it were the writings of Robert Anton Wilson and Alan Watts which helped me mostly with later digestion of the experience segregating certain elements and putting them in correct order. Actually this mushroom event was preceded by many nights spent on smoking weed and reading a lot about eastern religions, mysticism, quantum physics and stuff. From then on I knew I have to embark on a journey in search of unknown dimensions of reality – whatever that supposed to mean.
Unfortunately shortly after followed hard times. I went through a very painful disease, which lasted for several months and which consequences I can feel to present day. But it was at the same time very liberating and holistically healing. Although death probably wasn’t a threat, at critical moment I reached utter sorrow and near absolute lost of hope. I thought that my horrible state will never change and so I didn’t see much sense in further living - no promise of better life in the future - and this made me feel closeness of death. This state of being lasted for 8 months.
When I reached the bottom all I could do was to rebound. All my complexes and their limiting power on me suddenly became clear. Never in my life the simple truth of living in the present resonated within me so deeply. This illness started a long road of psychological self-repair and growth. Many repressed memories and emotions slowly were coming out of unconscious illuminating the real cause of my suffering. I wasn’t aware what kind of tricks mind can play on itself. All those self-deceptions and lies which I created to keep my self from painful - yet so necessary to be a whole person – truths, created a split, an internal conflict, which superficially resulted in serious psychosomatic symptoms. Sometimes I think that it was a blessing, because together with my stubbornness it lead to many important realizations. What helped me the most were auto-psychotherapy together with regular meditation. Proper diet also played its part. Since then I got a grasp of the interplay between mind and body and how deeply they could influence each other.
In the beginning of my long, but filled with hope and some positivity recovery, finally I had the opportunity to try acid or at least I though it was acid, because the trip lasted for like 30-40 hours. It was really intense, definitely stronger than my last experience with mushrooms, but at the same time I felt something was missing. Everything seemed like a game or an ever changing journey explicitly serious, but implicitly a joke. There is of course some truth in this one of many metaphors of life, but in the overall experience there was an element of superficiality which I could sense somewhere in the back of my head. In the end I started to be paranoid, cause it was taking way too long than the supposed acid would. Ideas that it activated some latent schizophrenia appeared in my mind. Fortunately I finally fell asleep and woke up normal the next day. This trip confirmed some of my philosophical assumptions and opened doors to new realms of thought.
Another year passed until I did another trip after obtaining 4-aco dmt, a compound praised by my friend as an alternative to mushrooms. I took it with two friends and we went to a near small forest. I don’t want to copy again what many people wrote before me, so I will just say it was a blissful experience and it was at this moment when I realized psychic healing potentials of psychedelic drugs and the importance of bad trips in this process. I think that concept of bad trips is still widely misunderstood and avoided even amongst psychonauts’ circles.
After reading a book by Stanislav Grof about his research on lsd’s psychotherapeutic possibilities where people with terminal cancer went through unordinary psychedelic sessions I decided to dwell deeper into the mysteries and promises of entheogens and try such a psychedelic session myself. I asked one close friend to assist me in this personal experiment. So I took a very big dose, put on headphones on my ears and eye mask on my face and played music which I deliberately chose in advance. It was probably the most intense and heavy experience in my life. At the same time joyous and terrifying, a true cosmic rollercoaster. It corresponded in many ways to the ones described in the book, but there were some slight differences. The visions although were very symbolic – for instance I could see some several pairs of hands reaching to me and trying to take something from my inside – weren’t so vivid and played rather a second role. The dominant channels of experience were mental and emotional. I was confronted with many “truths”, sometimes really painful ones and definitely unwanted by my ego, but I knew that it was inevitable for my growth, so I gathered all my courage and endured.
I tried it a second time three months later and I want to point out that choosing music is very important since it impacts your whole trip. First time I selected ambient and electronic music with space flavor and it was more of a transpersonal and cosmic experience. Second time I chose classical music with many epic symphonies and operas and this was much more on the personal level. Each of this experiences lead to the release of different, locked emotions, which probably were responsible for some of my psychosomatic problems. I plan to do many new sessions in the future hopefully learning something new about myself and about the process itself.
Everyone is being inspired by someone in his or her life and it was the same with me. There were many authors who influenced me, but probably the biggest inspirations in my life were Alan Watts and Carl Jung, though the first person who at least on a intellectual level changed the direction of my path was Robert Anton Wilson. After being acquainted with the latter I started to read extensively on topics connected with nature of reality, consciousness and the structure of our society. Presently I am deeply interested in such fields as psychology ( mostly environmental, cognitive, transpersonal ), spirituality and religion ( eastern religions/philosophies, mysticism, mythology, shamanism, rituals ), unknown realms of reality ( lucid dreaming, oobe, quantum physics ), philosophy, ecology and some aspects of sociology/politics mostly connected with the rising power of corporations and their, possibly only on unconscious level, role in the slow process of enslaving the rest of population. Keep in mind though that about some of the mentioned topics my knowledge is fragmentary, about others at most mediocre.
To conclude this already too long introduction I can say that I see big potentials in psychedelics in many areas like spiritual growth, psychotherapy or raising creativity. I look forward to try DMT in the future, although the first time I would like it to be during an ayahuasca ceremony, cause I personally think that ritual aspect of the experience plays a big part, especially when it comes to psychological transformation.
I am happy to join this beautiful forum and hope to contribute the best I can. Bless you all.