Greetings everyone! So very happy to be making this introduction essay, as I have been waiting a very long time to connect with more elevated and experienced souls on this beautiful topic. I have spent roughly every day for the last 5 years researching consciousness and everything relating to it, as I find it to be the most incredible and amazing phenomena we are currently aware of.
I'm 28 and live in California. Work in IT at a venture capitol firm. I grew up in a Christian family with Christian influences, but it was never crammed down my throat. I always felt like I had room to breathe and make my own decisions about religion (in this way I was very fortunate to have a relatively unbiased view of the world). I was taught to keep my mouth shut, use common sense and speak only when spoken to. I was raised by my grandma the old fashioned way. This made me quite the observer and listener, which really helped open my mind in many ways.
My first introduction to psychedelics was at Burning Man 2011. A friend of mine brought up a vial of liquid LSD (white fluff, I believe), which he transferred to a eye contact dropper (so it doesn't look like a vial of LSD). The drops from the eye contract dropper were about 3-4x the size of the dropper from the vial. I remember him putting in 7 drops from the contact dropper, which we guessed was about 20-30 drops in the flask of whisky. I took a small sip from the flask (just enough to let it run halfway down my throat before it dissolves) and then set off to wander the Playa.
Lets fast forward ahead to peak point: I looked up at the night sky and was immediate catapulted 'up'. As I was getting shot into space, it looked exactly like I was going into warp drive. After a moment of this, everything went black, and then I opened my eyes. When I opened them, I was greeted with a beautiful image of a sea of white/yellow light. I was here long enough to perceive "This is love. This is source. This is energy. This is where we come from." and then was blasted black down to Earth (warp drive, of course). When I realized who I was, where I was, when I was... I knew an incredible shift/change in my perception and consciousness had forever been changed. This is where my passion into studying this experience started.
I'm not sure if was every day since that experience, but at least 95% of my waking time has been spent reading books, articles, journals, talking to people, researching, learning, experimenting, journeying and learning about consciousness, psychedelics, LSD and the sort (my main aim was to research the experience I had, to give me SOME sort of placement). I'm fortunate to have those who approach this subject with more of a spiritual point of view, and those who approach it with a more technical point of view. I choose not to subscribe to a certain way of believing things, but over the years of research and experience, I'm finding it more difficult to NOT believe things that are more metaphysical in its nature.
5 years of researching psychedelics, primarily using liquid LSD. 100ug, 150ug, and 200ug are typically my go-to's, and it's incredible how some 100ug trips can be more life changing than 200ug+ trips. LSD showed me a perception of reality and energy in such a synchronous fashion that left be believing that everything happens exactly/perfectly as it should in every moment. There are no accidents, and we are a small piece to a bigger whole. It taught me that there is no other time than Now (actually it was Eckharte Tolle's The Power of Now that taught me this, LSD just put me there to experience it), that we are all One, and all that matters is Love. Coming to this perception made my life a thousand times more vibrant and enjoyable. Everything that happened felt like it was pure divine synchronicity and that nothing happened out of place. The interactions, relationships and experiences with those around me have amplified, and I can feel a deeper sense of connecting with people and animals.
Every time I would find something that blew my mind in my research, I would always find something to one up the last thing I found. 5 years of having my mind blown as I study more and more about psychedelics and consciousness. I remember for a few years how I was really getting into LSD, down to where I did it 3 weekends in a row, and realized by the 2nd weekend that the magic quickly fades if you do it like this. This taught me to reflect on my experiences and not just trip to see pretty lights. This has to be held with a sense of reverence and respect. So my trips would all have some intention or purpose behind them, aiming to learn something or release/let go of something else.
It wasn't until about a year ago that I started to research more on DMT and Ayahuasca. Started to become incredibly fascinated with the stories of people encountering alien entities and such. Even Terrence MacKenna's accounts of these gnomish/elfish creatures made me want to jump right into DMT.
Well as it seems with all things psychedelic, you don't find them, they find you. A buddy of mine went to Burning Man with me this year and told me he does Ayahuasca ceremonies. Told him I was interested and we would catch up after the burn. Skip ahead to a week ago and we are in his martial arts dojo, sitting around a small wooden table with a bunch of shaman items and crystals. The dab rig I brought was setup in the middle of the table. We drank the MAIO tea, waited about an hour, and then ate the Ayahuasca chocolate edibles that were prepared for us. Skip ahead an hour, we find out that the batch that was made for us wasn't very potent (we all felt like we had a tingling feeling in our heads, nothing more), so we decide to just smoke some of the DMT crystal and changa. I step up to the plate, scoop up what ends up being 50mg, throw it on the domeless ceramic e-nail and cap it with the glass cover/oven. (Just to note, this is the 710 whip, a ceramic e-nail designed for low temp dabbing. It is designed to not burn but slowly vape). Within 3 seconds I'm immediately transported, or rather the 'human experience filter' was immediately removed, to DMT land. Nothing that I could really point out in this first breakthrough, other than realizing through the experience "oh yeah, it does come on super fast. Oh yeah, the visuals do get super crazy. Oh yeah, you do hear a little ripping/tearing sound when breaking through. Oh yeah, that did leave my system super fast."
The second breakthrough happened an hour later, same dab method, using 200mg. Yes, 200mg. I don't recall hearing the ripping/tearing sound when breaking through, as I remember I felt like I broke through much faster on the 2nd trip than I did on the 1st. The first 8 minutes felt like a toroidal force of using only the purest of synchronicity energy, as everything I saw/heard/felt would roll in and out on itself, with everything making sense of everything it created upon itself.
Near the end of this 2nd trip, it started to 'set' or become less like I was getting shot with psychedelic images and I found myself in what felt like some sort of control room. It was greenish in the back ground and had a transparent screen in front of me. I could see other transparent screens behind, next to, in front, all around from the main control window, each with these little blocks or buttons in them. I perceived the transparent slides as realities I could jump to, and the little buttons/blocks were the probabilities within each reality I look at. In front of this control window was a spherical rubicks cube, and as I would turn it (with my mind), the slides of the realities I was looking at would dance all over the place, until I found the one that I wanted. At this point I opened my eyes and saw my gf sitting over me. As I slowly start to wake up to the space around me, she says "When you stop saying you're not going to feel anything, then you do." This snapped me back to an hour or two earlier when we all realized the Ayahuasca wasn't hitting and kept saying we weren't feeling anything. Having her say this made me feel like I had just woken up from having this incredible experience that I started myself (not from smoking DMT), as in I took the Ayahuasca, nothing happened, and then I thought that 'thing' that allowed me to leave my body/trip/journey/go on the experience. Many times I would wake up within the DMT trip, completely forgetting I smoked DMT and thought "I did it! I thought of the 'thing' I needed to think of to bring me back to this place. I'm dead, and thats ok. This is my life now."
So now it is a week or so later and I feel amazing. I can feel my desire for LSD just fade away (I have been at the point for some time now that I know LSD has helped me how it needed to, and now I feel like I'm just beating a dead horse when I take it), and even my desire for smoking/dabbing has diminished quite a bit. I feel as if all these LSD experiences were just childs play, in comparison to the DMT experience.
Sorry for the super long intro essay, but I am just ecstatic to discuss and learn from all of you who are willing to share and listen.
Much love!
Yeti