Well, after more than 10 years of waiting and wondering, we have FINALLY met the Machine Elves. I am certain that I did not "break through", but both my mates did. We were in my basement, and the dehumidifier was running. As I exhaled my last hit, the white noise sound of the fan began to turn up and up in pitch, until all was consumed in a high-pitch hum, which seemed to be audible well above any pitch the human ear was designed to pick up. There was a being in front of me, a tower of eyes which seemed to rotate the way the rows of squares on a rubix cube turn. Under the eyes was a constantly turning, moving "cheshire cat" grin. I felt a fear whell up in me, not that the being was scary, but I began to think I was lost. I though of things I didn't want to loose, and as each thing I clinged to poped into my mind, the being deleted it from existence, like layers of an onion, till I was no more. And that was it, it was over. I didn't feel like I was inside a "space" or a dome the way that both my mates claimed, but I went first, and didn't get as deep a hit as both of them did. One of my mates (who has never had any experiences with psychedelics other than one time smoking Saliva) broke thorough and said "WONDERFUL!!! "It's so scary, but I'm not scared." This guy grew up in Communist China, and we both heard him say "There IS a God, isn't there! We don't have to be afraid of death, do we!"
All of us felt like this MUST be how it is to die. The experience that I had seemed so reminiscent of the "my life flashed before my eyes" experiences of so many NDE survivors. And the tower of eyes/rubix cube being was so much like the description of angels in the Old Testiment, as beings of wings and fire and eyes, and the feeling of being not in your body at all, of your body no longer existing or being irrelevant... That was one thing that made it so very different from Psilocybin... And the fact that it is over so quickly... With mushrooms, I was always so exhausted at the end, always wishing it were over about 1/2 way into it because I was drained... This was hands-down the MOST energizing experience of my life thus far. Everything, for the rest of the day, and even into today, seemed more full, more joyous, more perfect, more love. I wasn't at all "intoxicated" the rest of the day, just more present, more here, more grateful for the joy in my children and having old friends visiting, in the taste of a great meal eaten out.
Such Joy, fellow Travelers, such joy.
"Christians often ask why God does not speak to them, as they believed God did in former days. When I hear such questions, it always makes me think of the Rabbi who was asked how it could be that God was manifest to people in the olden days whereas nowadays nobody ever sees God. The rabbi replied, 'Nowadays there is no longer anybody who can bow low enough.'"
--Carl Jung