Hello fellow nexus'ers.
I'm a twenty year old male that has been lurking around for quite a while and I have to say that I love this community. A bunch of "crazy" people like me to talk to! I got into psychedelics when I was around 16. I was a hardcore rationalist materialist back then, and I had heard of the profound experiences that psychedelics offer from friends and started reading erowid and others. There was nothing that could convince me that logic could not explain everything, so I resolved to take them and come up with an explanation for what they do. Boy was I in for a hell of a suprise hahaha. Experiences with LSD, LSA, mushrooms, DXM (eww) brought up many profound philosophical/social questions for me but for the most part I stayed the same, until the one fateful day that salvia arrived in my mailbox.
From what I had read I could not wait to try it. I smoked some of the extract twice and nothing happened, so I was sure that it was a bunch of bullshit. I tried one last time with quadruple the amount of extract and nothing could have prepared me for what happened next. As I was holding it in I knew that I had really done it this time. I blacked out and when I woke up I was in the twilight zone. I was told telepathically by sentient colored lines that I had broken reality forever, in fact none of it had ever even happened. Just a grand cosmic trick, and that salvia was part of the trick. Then the goddess took me for a ride and I lived out an unfathomable amount of lifetimes, each one as real as this, some even more real than this one! Then I was shown the grid where all of existence lied. Then I spent a hellish eternity as absolutely nothing. Words cannot encapsulate the terror of complete isolation for all eternity. Finally I came out of eternity to be thrown back into my body with all of my senses looping through a synesthetic infinity. Compared to what had happened before, this felt like safe sobriety!! I was not in the same room I smoked in, somehow moving in my complete unconsciousness, but luckily nothing was damaged. To top it off all of this happened in 10 minutes earth time. This experience really got me into spirituality/enlightenment and for a few years I became enamored with psychedelics and eventually meditation.
Now onto the real story..Fate seem to have it that I ran into an enlightened master (a student of Nisargadatta Maharaj) in the middle of Oklahoma around two years ago. Under him I started a intense meditation practice. Over the past 6 months my meditation ability has been accelerating exponentially. I was starting to have such progress that I stopped caring about the world, seeing it as more important to reach full enlightenment for myself and all beings. I can call up the jhanas/nirodha like moving my fingers. I can die to self on command and fade into the extreme pure bliss of True Self. Paradoxically reaching this stage has made me realize that God was here all along, that I didn't need to do anything to realize it, and now I feel like an ass for abandoning the world. It's going to be a long road for integration back into society..
Anyway I felt like sharing my story somewhere. I hope to contribute to the nexus.
"There is nothing to practice. To know yourself, be yourself. To be yourself, stop imagining yourself to be this or that. Just be. Let your true nature emerge. Don't disturb your mind with seeking."
"All you can teach is understanding. The rest comes on its own." -Nisargadatta Maharaj