I remember having oftentimes read in trip reports the theme of respect towards the psychedelic - the substance or the spirit depending on the writer’s inclination towards spirituality or science. At first reading, and especially for someone who has not experienced these substances firsthand, this exhortation, in the absence of further clarification, might seem as a superstitious personification of what is naught but a powder or plant, obviously lacking consciousness or intelligence, or in some cases an awed ‘respect’ for a drug after someone had their ass handed to them by a difficult experience.
Through my experiences in the last period, I think I’ve seen that there is more to this respectful approach to the experience than I could have surmised based on what I had read; and it has a very specific and direct bearing on the experience.
To save most people the TLDR, what I’ll write about below is a dissection of some things that perhaps most experienced trippers (and a lot of non-trippers) know or learn intuitively; I didn’t know it though, and it would have perhaps helped me to read it before trying psychedelics. In retrospect it is somewhat obvious and also quite tedious; I’ve attempted a detailed analysis of some basic mental processes. I would have wanted to read it though before I understood it, and the process of writing it helps me further understand it, so here I go.
To provide some history, I’ve been fascinated by psychedelics since childhood; life decided though to make us meet years later, and when I was going through a rough period in my life. I was unprepared and I dove into them too deep, too quick, and one of the experiences that left me scarred was a high dose of 5-MeO-DMT. I won’t get into it now, except to say that it left me with a fear of any quick-acting psychedelic (orally administered ones were just fine though), which I foolishly transferred to DMT (which is in many ways a polar opposite to me). And as many probably know, on psychedelics, fear tends to breed more fear.
So, I set upon smoking DMT very gradually, starting with the smallest doses and repeating them many times until I became familiar and comfortable with them before increasing the dosage.
At first, I went into the experience trying to approach it like I would cautiously wading into a pool: dipping a foot first, seeing whether it’s cold or hot, then deciding whether to go in any further. This seemed to work on lower doses, but as I increased the dosage, it became clear that it was not I who decided whether to wade in or stay on the edge of the pool; I had jumped and there was no way to stop the fall.
The mindset with which I had approached it proved its failings here: I was trying to stop it and get a look at it, then decide whether to accept it or not. Needless to say, it did not stop; instead, as I was closing myself to it, it increased its pressure on me like water building behind the flimsy dam I was attempting to lay before it and quickly crushing me with its overwhelming force. And it was not gradual and subtle as an orally administered psychedelic; its force was clear and undeniable, erasing my thoughts into oblivion, singing my nerves, pumping my heart and crushing my chest under its unstoppable torrent.
I could not control my thoughts anymore; the initial ‘plan’ I had of ‘understanding’ the experience and then deciding whether to accept it was being quickly and literally forgotten; all that remained from it was a faint memory that I HAD something to do; I tried to remember what that thing was and remembered that it was looking at the experience; when I did exactly this, I forgot what I was supposed to do and returned to the faint memory that I just HAD to do something. And I repeated this cycle over and over again, each time building in intensity until it threatened to wipe me out altogether, only relieved when the thankfully short duration of the effects ended. So what do we have here? The dreaded mind loop, more exactly a simplified version of it, but with the same dynamics as the more complex and encompassing versions of it I went through on oral trips.
Then, I figured I had to approach the experience not like wading into a pool, but like jumping from a cliff. Consider the decision carefully BEFORE I smoke the spice, then when I decide it’s OK, ‘jump’ into it and abandon myself completely, only taking in my soul the assurance that I already know it’s all OK and leaving my mind free to lose itself in the flow of the DMT.
And the results are immediately, clearly obvious. I had one trip where I switched back and forth between these two modes of thinking; the oppressing flow that was crushing me, causing me nausea and whole body pinpricks, instantly turned into pleasant shivers when I opened my soul and accepted it to flow through me, then started accumulating again when I blocked it. In subsequent experiences, the storm that was unleashed when smoking DMT, leaving me unable to realize what was going on, turned into a gradual and serene come-up, where I could peacefully and soberly contemplate the world around me being transported into the otherworld by the DMT, with no confusion and no fear whatsoever, just a feeling of being a sober and wide awake passenger through a spacetime portal.
In order to do this however, I had to construct a model for approaching the experience simple enough that I could intuitively understand it and hold it in my mind as my memory is dissolved, while at the same time leaving my mind free to be blown to pieces by the experience itself.
In the ‘pool-wading’ model, I smoked the spice as an unknown, irrelevant, shapeless powder (by the way, I was totally discounting everything I had read about it too this way) and then visualized the effects as coming from myself, only catalyzed by the substance. In trying to define and capture the essence of its effects before allowing them to pass through me, I was turning my attention towards my own mind, trying to stop what was going through it in order to understand it. Needless to say, it was somewhat like trying to film a video camera with itself. And in doing this, I totally ignored the changes in the outside world, which were in fact the effect of the drug. As is obvious from this description, it was a totally sterile and useless endeavor. But unfortunately, it took me quite a few trips to realize this.
Afterwards, in order to apply the ‘jumping’ model, I came to realize there was a simple and fundamental mistake in my previous way of thinking. I was seeing me as doing DMT, and not DMT as doing something to me. I saw it as just a powder, which if I imbibe, would cause my mind to do something new and interesting. And instead of paying attention to the experience itself, the subjective effects of the drug, I was turning my attention towards myself, ignoring the experience and creating the mind loop of two mirrors placed in front of each other, my mind trying to model my mind trying to model my mind, trying to run ahead of itself until it is strained to breaking point and reboots.
In the new model, I see the DMT as an ‘entity’. Meaning this in the simplest and most literal sense, namely as a causal agent. Whereas I previously saw it as an object of what I did with it, now I saw it as subject that does something to me. Thus, unwittingly, I personified it. Inanimate objects and powders don’t do stuff to me do they? I do stuff to them. Mind you, it could be said that for example a boulder falling on your head does something to you, but a common way of thinking about it is that it happens blindly and deterministically, and you happened to put yourself in its path.
The latter way of thinking, it seems, doesn’t quite cut it with DMT (or other psychedelics for that matter). The wispy powder smelling of dreams and magic is inanimate on its own, but as you introduce it into yourself it is no longer deterministic from your point of view. For the simple reason that you can not predict yourself, as a knife can not cut itself. And in this case, I’ve found it best to think of it as an autonomous, unpredictable causal agent. Sounds familiar? It is the way we normally think of a person, not an object. And if I do it this way, I can make sense of and systematize (also sub/unconsciously) everything that happens to me and around me on the trip as effects stemming from the causal origin that is the Spice, like I normally do sober when attributing a collection of events or processes to a common cause. (By the way, I once read a thread on BL about the varying propensities of different cultures for personifying the natural world; I think the most appropriate worldview for doing psychedelics would be animism, and the impersonal one of Germanic and Anglo-Saxon cultures would be at the other end of the spectrum
Fortunately for me, my culture leans towards personification too)
In short, my initial problem was applying the wrong set of mental mechanisms, to an experience for which others were more appropriate. And these mechanisms could be summarized in the old themes of shamans and hippies: these substances have a spirit; respect it. But when I had read that without further explanation, I had no way to suspect that it was in a sense literally true, that a new spirit arises from yourself, when you introduce them into you, and that this spirit is autonomous from you and the same for all people who have ever experienced these substances, though differing in what it shows depending on the person it shows to. And my (I hope healthy
) skepticism prevented me from believing these claims wholesale; I had to analyze and check for myself whether there was truth to them. But now I would say, if you don’t want to go through this, and if you can believe them, well then believe them. They work.
The best way I’ve found of taking these substances is as the body of a spirit - taking it into my body, allowing it to pass through my soul and by this act, giving the spirit power to control my world and communicate with me through it, show me what he and she wants to show me by shifting, morphing and molding my world, while I just subject myself with eyes and soul wide open to its teachings.