I didn't expect to write this.

I'm still not sure I can.

When you have decades of past experience with mind-changing substances, you sometimes grow into a comfortable zone of expectation, where you have plenty of miles laid behind you with stories, highs, lows... but you know. You've been to many places, dark and light. You've felt the connected tendrils of bliss undulating through your soul reach out and connect to the stars. To Jupiter in the sky, and Saturn. The celestial light making the trees come alive with a new light from within. You feel it in you, and it is an answer to questions that we always search for, but never usually know how to ask.

But what I went through last night, I must share too... because it was a lesson that cost me. It cost me my past, and my future. It cost me my expanded consciousness, and replaced it with the most nightmarish crucible that I've ever known.

As I write this, it's late afternoon the day after, and the sun is shining through the window on my guitar. A thing that makes music with vibration and electricity, as do we all. It is beautiful outside. Calm. Last night it was gone from me. Music was gone. Light was gone. Breath was gone. Future was gone. It was folded up, inverted, and twisted into The Now. It was the most powerfully awful experience I've ever known.

I will struggle to make sense of this in writing, and I pray you'll be lenient on me for the disjointed way I may tell my story, because I want to share it but I am not gifted with prose or narrative eloquence. I will just tell you what I know now, and hope that it provides a kind of road sign that fellow travelers can look upon to help them navigate their own path inward somehow.

I have been in a transition period in my last year or so, having moved to a different state for a job that went from promising to failed experiment. I seek to begin a family with my wife soon, and to build our future together. I am happy, but incomplete without the certainty of what I will do now, between jobs, uncertain if we will move for the fourth time in three years when this lease expires. So many questions. I have felt the call for outside thinking these past few months, and after several (many) years of separation from our plant teachers, made the decision to ask them back into my life for renewed perspective.

For many weeks I have incrementally journeyed deeper into the medicine. Cautiously, toe-first so as to both respect and receive gently. Mild vine-only nights with music and introspection were rewarding and subtle. Time would pass and I sought to integrate the plant spirit with my waking one. Another session, and the light was strong. Electric. The vine sedating my body but charging it with vibration. My visions have never been of the kind often described by others, and in my reflection I've come to learn that my receiver and transmitter--my third eye-- is tuned and grounded to feeling more than fantastic visual manifestations.

Another session... another intimate exchange with music, the stars, and the full moon talking about the immensity of human life-- the billions of lifetimes collected in the light reflecting its silver story.

These sessions were conventional I suppose-- just what many people hope to find from these plants.

Last night was so similar in the beginning. It was not the first time with this red vine. I had found a prior experience with 70g to be mild in general, so this time I used 100g. This time I joined it with chaliponga. Many of you will clearly understand now how this story came to be. You see, I have used this chali twice before, to practically no effect. As do all that make this mistake (I knew better...I knew) I brewed this time 30g, with the intention to drink only a third, which would have roughly doubled my prior two experiences. That's exactly what I did, too-- following the vine by about a half hour I took the drink, and went to my sky and music.

But nearly two hours came and went, and as the electricity of the vine made by steps unsure and my hands shaky, I still perceived no light... and this was my disaster. Believing still that the leaf was very weak, I impulsively decided to take another third. I remember the moment. I went inside, and was in doubt. Nervous. I knew. Somehow I knew that there was a magnet from within pulling me into an abyss. I was afraid. But I took the drink, rationalizing that it was surely weak.

It went down hard, and I felt by body try to protect me. The moment I came out to sit under the sky I began to purge...but to my awful arrogance--to my belief that I somehow knew better than God and our plant teachers...I swallowed the vomit back down... two times. I kept it in me. I said no to my lifeline. I did not heed the warning. I missed my chance at salvation. For maybe another hour I still did not feel much change-- I was tired, and at this point it was maybe 1:30 AM. I am not sure how to explain the initiation into chaos, aside from it declaring itself arrived.

I have experience with chakruna-- both strong and mild. It has overwhelmed me once before, I went far too deep with it once...but the difference between that very difficult experience and this one was... it was like... the difference between being stuck in a burning building with no way out...and setting yourself on fire yourself, wide awake. I struggle to communicate this point, but it's so important to somehow make the distinction---I did this to myself. I stepped off the cliff into an ocean of Fiery Now. I couldn't get out of the water because I left the ladder in another lifetime... a lifetime that I had rejected. I couldn't cry, because I was too overwhelmed. I couldn't think because I was too overwhelmed.

I was so powerfully, titanically PRESENT that my universe was locked into a suffering and loss...so immediate and whole...that the past and future ceased to be. There was only the terrible NOW.

I wanted music to save me--as it had so many times before-- but as the panicked reality dawned on me that it was too late--too late-- I was not able to function outwardly-- I couldn't operate the controls. I could not comprehend the language or symbols. It was too late.

As I began to worry, I felt sick-- and I stumbled to the bathroom, barely diving to the toilet in time to release the vulgar acid within me, the sound of retching...ugly, agonized retching... echoing with digital precision off the dark, sterile bathroom walls. So sorry... so much remorse... It was only just beginning.

I grasped that I was in thrall to something I could not control, or even define-- the vestiges of my intellect instantly clicked off the reality of what I had done with the repetition and speed of a locust--each instant reminding me that I had taken an extreme amount of leaf, and it was not weak. It was so strong that I could only submit to it. I was so tired. I longed for some respite from the horror, the rolling awareness that would not stop being so...crushing. But I knew I was adrift and would not get away-- and I did not get away.

I agonized for hours this way-- I despaired within the prison of my mind. There were no benevolent spirits to guide me-- I had insulted their love for some kind of willful gratification, and I was left utterly alone to live with the eternal consequence.

I was ravaged. I was raped from within. I was alone. I did it to myself.

Then, after a century of torment and endlessness, I began to perceive a contrast between the eternal hell and outside. Outside of me. The hurricane winds were lesser. Awful still, but not what they were. I ached for hope. I ached for release from this. And it came, slowly. I found music somewhere, and it was a tiny beacon, but even the faintest beacon can be followed to safety. Time passed, and it became 4:30AM. I was broken--exhausted, and still not free--but I could understand that the nightmare was receding--morphing into education--to gratitude.

I came back outside to my sky and stars, and this time they welcomed me home again. The light was real again, not imagined-- it was touching me and I could feel love. The music was so important to me here... it lifted my emptiness to breathe in life. To be thankful. I knew as I felt the storm pass what the lesson was, and remains.

All the questions I've been asking of this medicine have been on what to do with my life. But I have been too hung up in what to do NOW. The gift of this abject nightmare was to reveal just how horrifying it is to fixate on the NOW alone-- to be trapped in it... and I feel like I see that for the first time. I've been afraid of changing and adapting to new things for fear of making mistakes. But I have to, because the alternative was shown to me last night.

Life is a long story with a dawn and a horizon-- where we stand is important, but it is so much more important to remember that you have places to go-- that you must also decide what to do NEXT. You can not survive by allowing yourself to be locked into the quicksand of this moment, and it is the gift of our life that we can travel to any place we choose, with those we love, as the billions that looked upon our moon before us did before they took their journey to some place we have yet to see

I am grateful, and confused-- but I thank you for listening to this story with me.