Hello Nexus.

It's been awhile since I've posted on here, so forgive my time away. That said, some of you may remember that prior to my departure I alluded to an adventure that I was conceptualizing in somewhat vague terms.

Well, now I can be a little bit more open about it, as I have completed my journey and now return with stories to tell.

To those who didn't follow my posts prior to my departure in the spring, here was my plan as I outlined it prior to leaving: Go out into nature with a lot of plant entheogens (DMT and psilocibin) and stay out there for a long time in hopes of completely resetting my life.

Obviously, some of this plan involved breaking the law in the United States (the laws forbidding that citizens of our country experiment with our own consciousness), so I had to remain vague so that no one would be able to track me down and put a stop to my adventure.

Now that it's done however, I can explain a bit more fully what I did.

In April of this year I started walking the Pacific Crest Trail from the United States border with Mexico in Campo, California to the US border with Canada. I walked 2,650 miles. And with me at the start of my hike was 1/2lb of medicinal cannabis, 60 grams of psilocibin mushrooms measured into 1/2g capsules, 2 grams of DMT, and 1 gram of 1:1 changa.

The plan was to walk all 2,650 miles (initially I planned to hike with my little brother, but things changed and I had to do the hike alone) and regularly partake in spiritual journeys with the help of the plant medicines that I had along with me.

Like I said, it's happened, and I am now finished with the journey. I am now in the process of starting to write a book about the adventure that I hope to finish within a year.

I was not able to journey into the spirit world as much as I would have liked for a number of reasons, but I did successfully have upwards of about 15 entheogen experiences during the 124 days that I spent in the wilderness.

Throughout the entire time I wore a necklace with a small mushroom on it, and that always served as a reminder of this community that led me to take such a huge undertaking. Without the support of the people in this forum, I never would have had the bravery to quit my job and try such a massive hike.

I learned so much on the hike and through the plant experiences, and I'm excited to write about them and hopefully start posting retrospective "trip reports" on this forum as I work through documenting it all.

I do appologize that I have to be so brief right now, but I only have limited access to a computer at the time. As things settle a bit more and I get back into the "real world" however, I will be posting on here a bit more often and I'll share my experiences in far more detail with you all.

Thank you to everyone in this community who encouraged me in the conceptualization of my adventure. It was a truly life-altering undertaking.

Love,

"TheScientificMethod"

Impressive. Congratulations!

Welcome back. I am happy that you safely completed your journey, and I look forward to reading more about your experience!

Right on, you just turned into one of my heroes!

Can't wait to read your adventure! Welcome back!

Interesting, very tempted to know more.

So wish I could do something like that, look forward very much to your stories about your journey.

And welcome back

Sounds like you have a good time, ScientificMethod. Welcome back!

tseuq

Welcome back!

Hey All.

I've been in the process of writing up my experience and my story. It's more like a short book as it turns out. Where's the most appropriate place for me to post? It's going to largely consist of trip reports, but it's not a conventional trip report because I talk a lot about what led me to undertake this journey and the implications of the adventure itself in addition to talking about the psychedelic experiences.

So where should I post it?

Thanks!

My suggestion would be to write it all up and publish it in a .pdf file. You can upload that almost anywhere on the internet and you could even try to self-publish it on Amazon.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/seller-account/mm-summary-page.html?topic=200260520

By the sounds of this incredible adventure you took, I would be willing to dole out a few bucks to read it I know I'm not alone in that sentiment either.

A good idea for posting a multi-segmented series of interesting adventures would be to make a blog and post each and every chapter/section/experience/interval in separate posts and post a link to the site on the nexus-I started doing this once my stories began to eclipse the word limit per nexus post.

Thank you for the suggestions guys.

I'm a bit skeptical about self-publishing, as I think that this *could* (don't get your hopes up ScientificMethod) be worthy of being picked up by a publisher. I kind of think of it as "Wild" meets "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" meets "Electric Cool-aid Acid Test."

I REALLY appreciate your willingness to say that you'd dole out a couple bucks to read it. That was my thought in conceiving of this adventure. I said to myself, "well shoot, if someone else were to do this and write a book like that I would certainly buy a copy." But since no one else was doing it well I had to do it--and oh how I'm grateful that I did. It was beyond words. I hate when people say stuff like "dude, this weekend was EPIC" but in seriousness, I can't think of a word that better describes being out in the woods for 124 days under the influence of psychedelics.

I do like the idea of converting it into a PDF after I finish the write-ups and possibly posting that document somewhere on here. The writing that I'm doing right now is really with the Nexus and Shroomery in mind (Yes, I know that those are two TOTALLY different sites, but those are the two forums that have had the most influence on the journey itself and those are the audiences that I'm specifically writing towards right now). The final product of what I want to write (the book, if you will) won't be just for these online communities, but I have found that writing with this audience in mind has helped me to organize what I want the book to focus on.

Again, thanks for your feedback, and anyone else who has any suggestions, I'd be happy to hear where I can post specifically for the Nexus.

Okay guys... here's a preview of what I'm working with so you've got an idea of where I'm going with it.

I would appreciate any feedback that you can provide. Keep in mind that this is a draft of prewriting; this IS NOT what I plan to use as "my book" in the end. It's just prewriting for you all to see a bit about my journey and the ideas that I'm working with. Also, it's not near complete. This is only the very beginning of the 15 or so psychedelic experiences that I had on trail.

WARNING: LONG POST

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[Introduction]

I want to begin by thanking everyone on this site for your help in getting me started down a path that eventually led me to where I am today. Were it not for the knowledge that I gained from Shroomery and the Nexus (Yes, I know, very different sites, but they both contributed to my journey in their own ways) I would not have had the skill set, the knowledge, or the testicular-fortitude to actually attempt this life changing journey.

I still have to write in somewhat ambiguous terms for a couple of reasons. Firstly, what I did was illegal. That one’s pretty straight forward. It is for that reason that I must emphasize that everything that I’m about to tell you should be read as fiction. If you want to believe that it is all true, then go ahead and do so, but I make no claim that this is actual truth. It’s really much closer to a dream that I had or a story that I developed in a creative writing workshop. Secondly, I want to be sure that those other people who were involved in this journey are not implicated unwillingly. Although I’m somewhat okay with “putting myself out there” by sharing my story, those who were with me through the story did not sign up to have their story told to audiences of strangers. So for that sake, I will go to great length in creating composite characters or completely making up characters. While my story is fictional, their involvement in my story is *extremely* fictional.

And finally, before I get going, I’d like to say that I’m still working on how I can best tell my story. I am in the process of trying to write a book about all of these things, but it’s a big story and it’s basically a story about my entire life leading up to a 4-month adventure that very heavily relied on the influence of psychedelic substances—namely psilocybin and DMT. So I am starting by sharing my trip-specific experiences with the communities of the Nexus and the Shroomery who started me down this path in the first place. I don’t really know how this will turn out, but I conceive of the following “trip reports” as a prewriting process that I hope to use to gain perspective on how to tell the greater story at large.

—

[The Backstory]

I have to give a bit of back story to explain how this all came about and hopefully contextualize the 4-month psychedelic experience that I want to share with you all.

I moved from my home state in 2006 to finish my undergraduate degree. Immediately after finishing my bachelor’s I enrolled in a master’s program and also completed that at the same school. Following completion of grad school I went straight into working what basically amounted to a dream job, but before starting that job I took 2 months and went out on a backpacking trip that was 800 miles long. That’s where I first smoked marijuana. I’d been open to smoking weed before then, although I was adamantly opposed to drugs before I was in college, but I was never exposed to people who had access, so I just never tried it. During the 800 mile backpacking trip however I was with a dude who smoked a lot, so he introduced me to it and I became a heavy user of pot after that. Then through the use of pot I was introduced to mushrooms, then LSD, then DMT. Well shoot… I guess pot really is a gateway drug after all.

I found that the psychedelic experience was absolutely amazing. I had been an atheist for years before my second LSD trip, and during that trip I went from atheist to pantheist in about 4 hours. It completely changed my life. I started using LSD about once a every week or two while I was also starting work in this “dream job” that I mention above. It was weird though because my job required that I be pretty straight-laced. I wore a tie to work, sat behind a desk, and was supposed to be an upstanding citizen. This sucked though because that’s not who I had really become. Although I did my job well and didn’t mix drugs with work, I was in a small enough community where people would see me outside of work and expect me to be a representation of the guy who wore a tie Monday-Friday when in fact I was the guy who was tripping balls and getting in touch with the universe on Saturday and Sunday.

This conflict between my two lives gave me a great deal of anxiety… or maybe “anxiety” isn’t the right word, but it made me feel like I was living a double life and the life that really felt more important to me was one that I had to keep hidden from the people in my community.

Now, long story short here, the dream job started to fall apart during the latter half of my third year working in it. I can’t give too many details about this, but basically I started to see the job for what it really was as opposed to the idealized image of what I had thought that it was for so long. A new supervisor came in and started working above me and that person really began manipulating and harassing me for no reason. I was horrified because although I had thought that I’d really “made it” even before turning 30, all the sudden that dream was being taken away from me. I was a hard worker and I genuinely kicked ass at what I did, but now for no reason this other person wanted me out largely because of the good work that I did. She wanted to do things her own way and a subordinate who had his own vision for the company/business wasn’t in line with her ability to do what she wanted. So she really started screwing with me and there was nothing that I could do about it because she was sort of like my supervisor.

When this started happening it caused me to deal with a lot of sever depression. Now I should back up here a bit and explain that I have dealt with depression pretty much my whole life, but I started seeking help for it in college when some really terrible things happened to me (lost my girlfriend of 4 years, lost pretty much all of my friends that same year, and my roommate killed himself in our dorm—all of this happened during my freshman year). It was at this time that I started taking antidepressants (I’ve been on all of them and took them for almost a decade before stopping them after grad school). After grad school however my life started getting a lot better. I had a better understanding of myself and what I wanted from life, I had a solid relationship with a woman who I loved, and I had a killer career set up for me right out of college. So I stopped taking antidepressants and right after that is when I started exploring consciousness with psychedelics. After I started taking psychedelics I had about 2 years where I was in absolute heaven. Life was amazing—the girl, the job, the worldview, everything was just perfect.

But then things started going bad with work for the reasons that I mention above, and I stopped taking the psychedelics because I was worried that the work related depression would bleed over into my trips and I didn’t want to enter the “spirit world” when my life was already in a bad state.

Then sh*t really hit the fan and the supervisor basically took over my work and I learned that my career was done. I wasn’t being fired or anything like that, but she basically rewrote my job and turned my dream-job into a slave-labor position working for her. It was awful. I was so depressed and upset and really pissed off at the world. So I went to visit a therapist.

I should explain here that I have seen a therapist for years and it’s been really helpful, especially after I stopped taking antidepressants. The therapist was very supportive of my choice to use psychedelics and even encouraged me to do so in a safe way. We had a great relationship. But this one day in 2013, things went bad. I was extremely depressed and disappointed in the world and I hadn’t had a psychedelic trip in months. I went into her office in a terrible state and shortly into our meeting I started crying. I just let go and purged my feelings to her… and I said the wrong words.

Basically I said “Sometimes I don’t feel like living.”

She asked me, “Do you feel that way right now?”

And I told her that yeah, I did feel that way right then. I didn’t think that I was going to kill myself or anything like that, but I was severely depressed, I was emotional, and I had said the magic words. From that point forward things got really ugly. (This next part is a book in itself, so I’ll try to keep it short for the time being. Forgive my brevity, but I want to get to the “adventure” part as quickly as I can).

She told me that I had to check myself into an institution or that she was going to force me to be institutionalized. So I went in, hoping that I would get to talk to some really good therapists and that I’d be able to work through my depression. That is not what happened though. What happened is that I was literally locked into a cage, my clothes were taken away along with my dignity and I wasn’t allowed to see a doctor for more than a day. I was completely humiliated and not helped in any way. My time in that institution only lasted for about 36 hours, but during that time I “hit rock bottom.” It was the worst experience of my life BY FAR. It was so, so, so terrible.

And so I told myself that whatever it was in my life that had brought me to that place, I had to see that I never ended up there again. So I had to completely let those things out of my life.

I spent a lot of time thinking while I was in there and I realized that it was my job, my relationship with my fiancé (we had been great for one another at first, but we were honestly growing apart with each passing month), and it was my life of consumerism. Or, to put it more simply, it was my everything that was causing me to feel this way.

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[Birth of The Idea]

I didn’t know immediately what to do to change those things, but one day about a month later, I was out at a lake and I ate some acid with a very close friend of mine. We hadn’t tripped together in awhile, but he was actually the guy who introduced me to psychedelics in the years prior. That night I ate two hits of the LSD and he ate nine… that dude was sort of a professional tripper, if you will. We had an absolutely transformational evening out by the lake and next to the fire. We cried together, we laughter together, we danced around the fire together, and we watched the sun go down and the moon come up. We talked about life and how the world is so rough but also looked for the good parts of reality and what makes life worth living even through the pain. He’d been in the service and he’d seen some really terrible things during his two tours, and he knew of my issues with work.

I still remember it so clearly, sitting there beside the campfire that we had built. It was in this moment that I had an idea that would come to completely change my life. I told him about the Pacific Crest Trail. It’s a trail that stretches all the way from the US border with Mexico to the US border with Canada. It’s 2,650 miles long and it had sort of haunted me ever since I had completed that 800 mile trail a few years before. It seemed to me like the ultimate adventure, and ever since I’d hiked the long trail before then, I’d wondered if I had what it would take to hike all the way from Mexico to Canada.

“The problem that we have,” I said, “is that we come out here on the weekend and we have these transcendent experiences, but then on Monday we have to go back to work. We reset ourselves back to culture and civilization instead of ‘coming down’ in nature. But what if we changed that? What if you were to go out into nature, trip you head off, then be out in the woods for two weeks. Then do it again. And again. And again.” I paused and we looked from the fire, then to the moon, and then back to one another. “Imagine if you were to do that along the PCT (Pacific Crest Trail). You walk for 100 miles, then trip, and then just ‘reset’ in nature over the next 100 miles. Every week or two you trip balls and just spend time in nature afterwards. There’d be no society or culture to be your influence; it’d just be nature.”

Well, like so many of the ideas that you get under the influence of LSD, it seemed good at the time, but after we came down the next morning it all just seemed like an acid-fueled fantasy. Sure the idea was romantic, but ultimately it could never really happen. It was just a fantasy.
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[Deciding to Follow Through—The Final Push]
Now fast forward two months and that same friend and I are out in the desert for the weekend for another “psychedelic camping trip.” This time it was mushrooms and it was the first time that I ever ate 5 grams at once. It was one of the top five most intense psychedelic experiences (not counting DMT trips) of my life. In that trip I literally lived every human life that has ever been lived. I saw what it was like to be Hitler AND what it was like to be the people he killed. I saw through the eyes of school shooters AND their victims. I saw the world from the perspective of world-famous authors and philosophers and murderers and philanthropists. I *literally* saw every perspective that ever has existed in human history. I know that this is hard to believe, and it’s even hard for me to believe as I write this, over a year later, but I know that it’s true because I was there. It was an intense evening.

But what really changed me in that experience was that I saw my own life. I saw that even though I had had the experience in the ward some four months before, I still hadn’t removed the destructive forces from my life and I was still on the path that had led me there in the first place. What was so eye opening in this trip however was that I got to see what was actually going to happen to me if I didn’t make a change—I was going to kill myself. I wasn’t going to do it that night, but I saw in absolute clarity that if I didn’t actually do something dramatic to change my life and stop what it was that was causing me to feel depressed and angry towards the world that I would die by my own hand in the next year. I literally witnessed my own suicide that night. I not only witnessed my own suicide, but I witnessed the aftershock of my death. I was able to see what it would do to the people in my life. I saw how it would affect my mother, my brother, my father, and all of my friends. It was like that cliché story by Charles Dickins called “A Christmas Carol” where the character of Ebenezer Scrooge travels through his future and his past and sees the lives of those who he’s impacted. That new perspective changes Scrooge and he realizes the implications of his actions. That’s what happened to me that night too. It was like I was literally flying over my family in the wake of my suicide.

It was such a traumatic experience! I cried so heavily that night, and I was so lucky to have my friend there to support me through the trip. It was definitely the first time that I had a “life changing” experience of such magnitude under the influence of a psychedelic. I’d had my life changed by psychedelics, yes, but never so profoundly.

The next morning we woke up, still in the desert, but no longer tripping like we had been under the stars and the moon the night before. I made a decision right then and there that I wasn’t going to be a passive victim to my circumstances. I was going to do something dramatic. I was going to follow through with that acid-fueled fantasy that I’d dreamed up beside a lake in the months before. I was literally going to quit my job and hike the Pacific Crest Trail and I was going to do it with the help of the entheogenic plant medicines that had given me that insight in the first place.

I couldn’t just do it overnight though. I knew that it would take a lot of preparation, so I made the choice to keep up with that same job that I had started to hate so much for one more full year and get another job on the side. This would allow me to build up enough savings to take 5 months and undertake a hike of 2,650 miles. I also started making preparations to move out of the town house that I was renting with my fiancé and ultimately I prepared to end that relationship altogether.

The following year was challenging. I worked like an animal to build up my savings. I did end my relationship with the woman who I did still love, but towards whom I no longer felt the same as I used to. As much as I wished that she and I could be together forever, it just wasn’t going to be possible, and if I wanted to keep that promise to myself, I needed to let it end, so I bit the bullet and did.

I also learned to extract DMT and made my collection of the molecule in preparation for my journey. I grew enough mushrooms to provide me access throughout the trail and enough to give to all of my friends as well—spread the love kind of thing. Then I also used some of my savings and collected a half a pound of the best marijuana that I could possibly find (which was absolute fire!).

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[And the Story Begins]

And so in the spring of this year (2015), after ending my job, finishing my relationship, and selling almost everything I owned, I had a friend drive me to the start of the Pacific Crest Trail at the US border with Mexico in Campo California.

In my backpack was 1/2 pound of top-shelf marijuana, 2 ounces of mushrooms that I’d measured into .5g capsule (I was very careful with this, and each gel cap was *exactly* .5g since I didn’t have a scale to measure the dose on trail), 2 grams of crystal white DMT (way more than I’d end up needing for my journey), and 2 grams of 1:1 changa that I’d made personally.

In the following four months I walked all the way to Canada over the course of 124 days and I tripped quite regularly. I write to you today to share those experiences.

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[Going it Alone]

I spent a lot of time mentally and spiritually preparing to spend 4-5 months out in the woods and tripping on psychedelics regularly. That means that I tripped a lot in the months leading up to my separation from civilization in April. Those of you who have followed me on the Nexus or Shroomery may have read my trip reports from that time. I would meticulously document the dose of mushrooms or DMT and how that dose affected me. I’d also try to repeat each dose experiment. So for example, I’d eat 2.5 grams in silent darkness on an empty stomach, then a week later I’d try to replicate those circumstances as closely as possible and try to compare the two experiences as a means by which to know exactly what I could get out of each dose. This was so that when I got on trail I could titrate each individual trip to the conditions that were at hand.

During much of this time I was with my little brother. My little brother and I grew very close during the four or five months leading up to departing for the PCT and we shared a lot of psychedelic experiences during this time. Unfortunately, (and I will remain brief here like I have earlier in this document) we had a severe falling out just before leaving for the trail (about 3 weeks before the trail). In short, he got involved with a girl and he completely turned into a new person. He went out and bought a gun and threatened me with it. I was completely shocked and hurt in a way that few people have ever hurt me before. To make a long story short however, it was decided that I did not feel safe hiking with him anymore and I *certainly* didn’t feel safe having psychedelic experiences with him out in the woods when I now knew that he was capable of such a terrible thing. So I decided that if I was still going to undertake this journey that I’d been preparing for over a year, then I had to do it alone.

This was a challenge of its own because all of the preparation that I’d done in terms of tripping, or at least the majority of it in the preceding 4-5 months had been with the support of my little brother. We were going to do this together. That made a huge difference. Now however I’d be out in nature alone (something that I was comfortable with) but for me to try and go into entheo-space alone while out in the woods was a completely different ballgame. It was going to be a lot more challenging. So this turned out to be a very major variable for why I was not able to trip out on the trail nearly as much as I had wanted to. I had a lot of anxiety whenever I did try tripping because I no longer had his support. I also had a lot of animosity for the betrayal that he showed me and that led me to have anxiety.

During the entire journey however I wore a necklace with a little mushroom on it, and that reminded me of the two online communities that I’ve shared my experiences with (the Nexus and Shroomery). I knew that even though I didn’t have my little brother to go through this with me, at least I had those of you online who I’d be reporting back to once it was done.

And so I must confess that there was never a single time on trail where I tripped without considerable apprehension, anxiety, and… well… fear. It was hard to surrender to the great unknown, but I KNEW that I would be coming back to these online forums with stories to tell and if all that I did was hike the Pacific Crest Trail and carry these entheogenic agents with me the entire time that I’d be letting all of you down and that I’d be letting myself down. So what I found myself doing was going as long as I could excusably go and then I’d plan and execute a trip. I wish that I could have had more heavy trips and I wish I could have had more trips all together, but I am grateful for every single one that I did follow through with even if they weren’t as plentiful or as deep as I’d hoped when I sat beside a fire with my friend a year before and planned it out.

I envisioned that I might be able to undertake a psychedelic experience once every 7-14 days when I planned everything out. In the end I was on trail for 124 days and I undertook 15 psychedelic experiences. So I was able to stick with that goal, but most of the time I was not able to go as deep as I had hoped. I did however have some really profound experiences while I was out there though and I came away with some incredible insights that apply to my life. And that’s what I want to document in the trip reports that will follow.

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[My First Trip: DMT]

I had been on trail for a week when I undertook my first psychedelic experience on trail. From the very first day I knew that it would be more challenging to take psychedelics than I wanted for it to be, but during those first 150 miles the thought of what my backpack contained never left my mind. It sort of became a burden to have been out there for a full 7 days and still I had not entered the spirit world.

An ideal opportunity presented itself at this point on the trail though. Although the PCT starts mostly in the desert, there was a mountain at this point. Also, there was a closure on the trail that required hikers to take one of two options: 1) skip this section by hitchhiking around, which most of the hikers did or 2) hike all the way up this mountain to the closure, then take a detour back down the mountain, road-walk for about 16 miles, then hike back up the other side of the mountain. Obviously option 2 took a lot more work, but I had dedicated myself to walking a 100% continuous path from border to border, so skipping wasn’t an option.

The reason that this became an ideal place for my first psychedelic experience was because firstly it was the first time that the trail really rose up from the desert floor to a point of almost 8,000 feet where it was not only extremely beautiful, but it was also much cooler. The desert heat had become a bother to me in that first week and I could see how it would be possible for me to sit in the southern California sun and shmoalk a bowl of changa. Secondly this was an ideal place to trip because most of the other trail hikers weren’t on this part of the trail; they just hitched around to the end of the trail closure, so I mostly had the trail to myself.

On the way up the mountain I decided that the top of this mountain would be my first psychedelic experience on trail and that it would be DMT.

When I arrived at the top there was actually someone there. It was a girl who was laying in the shade of a tree and writing. I found it odd that someone would have been up there, but at the same time, it was quite a scenic place, so I couldn’t blame her much. She told me that she kind of liked hiking until mid day and then taking a nap or a writing for a couple of hours. She didn’t seem like any threat to me, and I told her that I was just going to wander off a little ways and meditate.

For those of you who don’t already use the “Oh, I’m just going to go meditate” excuse when you’re actually going to go trip, it’s a MUST! People will leave you alone and they won’t question why you’re just sitting by yourself off in the woods. And if they do see you shmoalk, unless you’re using a crack-pipe, they’ll think that it’s just bud.

So that’s what I did. I went off the trail a little ways to a place where I was completely isolated. No one would have wandered over there to disturb me unless they were looking for a secluded place to take a dump, but since I knew that most hikers weren’t on this section of trail, I knew that I’d be safe.

I was nervous though. It would be the first time on trail that I had just let go, but I knew that it was also the reason that I’d come out there in the first place, and so I had to follow through.

I sat down in a patch of bushes looking out to the east and I tried to calm myself. I did sort of meditate there for awhile. I closed my eyes and really focused on my breathing. After a few minutes I took out my “equipment” and looked at it for a moment—crystal or changa—I thought. I decided that I’d try to use the crystal. Unfortunately, since I didn’t have a torch lighter, I wasn’t able to get the pipe to melt the product down well enough and so I resorted to packing a small bowl of changa.

I meditated again for a few minutes with the changa pipe in one hand and my lighter in the other. I was extremely nervous… I get anxious/excited just thinking back on it.

After a few minutes I opened my eyes and tried to do a separation-of-body-from-mind sort of thing that I learned works best when I’m about to take a DMT dose. I just broke it down into actions and tried to forget the potential that was in my hands. Pipe to mouth. Lighter to bowl. Flame to product. And just inhale.

I took one hit first and held it in for about seven seconds before letting it out. I closed my eyes and felt that feeling that I had become so used to. I describe it like having a blanket thrown over me from behind. It’s a blanket of anesthetic and sort of numbs away all my anxiety. Colors brightened a bit and I instantly remembered why I had decided to embark on this mission in the first place. I sat with that feeling for a minute or two, and then I took a second hit—this time it was larger and I held it for longer.

When I let out the hit I opened my eyes and watched the smoke as I pushed it out of my lungs and it dissipated in the air in front of me. The world began to change. The colors brightened, and then I could suddenly recognize the alive-ness of the plant life around me. It was like the trees and bushes were no longer plants but watchful animals. I could FEEL their eyes on me, and they changed in their form. They looked and felt different. They didn’t really speak to me as I have had trees sort of do when I have been in deeper DMT states, but I could absolutely feel their awareness of my presence.

It was such a warm and pleasant experience. There was no element of fear whatsoever after I had taken the hit. It was a welcoming to this place and, like I said before, a reminder of why I came out here on this mission in the first place.

I sat there with the trip for about ten minutes. I considered taking more, but in the end decided that this was all that I needed. I had miles to cover still that day before the sun went down, and really the purpose of this first trip was to test the waters. I didn’t need to breakthrough today. I just needed to remind myself what the DMT realm was and that it would be okay.

I accomplished that goal fully.

After coming down over the course of about ten minutes I packed my pipe and equipment away, threw my backpack back on, and made my way back to the trail. I could still feel the spirit molecule flowing through my system, but by the time that I made it back to the trail where that girl had been relaxing and writing I was fully “back” to this reality. I could feel a heavy afterglow though and an immense feeling of gratitude. It was going to be okay; I was going to be okay; the world was a beautiful place.

I talked with the girl a bit more and then headed back down the mountain on the detour trail. Throughout the remainder of that day I could feel a tangible after-glow that I always seem to get from psychedelics—especially from changa.

I camped that night under the stars and slept like a baby.

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[My Second Trip: Low Dose Mushrooms]

Although I really like to think of myself as a general “psychadelacist” my drug of choice really is mushrooms. I love DMT and LSD is really what got me going down this path, but I feel like mushrooms are “where it’s at” for me at least. The LSD trip I find to be too synthetic and electric. I prefer something natural and organic. Also, I don’t think that it’s as easy to reach true transcendence with LSD. You can trip your head off on enough acid, but it really has more to do with visual hallucination than transcendence of the human condition and understanding of the interworking of the universe. Then with DMT it obviously will blast you straight to “level 5” but as many users point out, it’s hard to process so much in such a short time period. Mushrooms give you just the right amount of time through. I compare high dose DMT and high dose mushrooms like this: I say that in both cases you’re going to go to the moon and back; with DMT you’re going to make the trip in 5-10 minutes, but with mushrooms it’ll take 5 hours. Both are pretty fast to be traveling that far, but at least with mushrooms you have a lot more time compared to the spirit molecule.

It was hard for me to take the time out of my trail days however to sit down and have a mushroom trip. But the fact remained that mushrooms were really my purpose for being out there. I mean I literally had a glass mushroom hanging from my neck; I had to take a mushroom trip early in the hike if I was going to succeed in this mission. I couldn’t let it wait and keep putting it off. It needed to happen.

So I decided around mile 275 that I’d take my first low-dose mushroom trip. It had to be low enough dose that I could keep hike during the experience and it needed to be low enough so that it didn’t invoke any anxiety since I’d be in a place where I’d never been before (I mean physically—I’d never seen that part of the trail that I’d be walking through. I certainly would be familiar with the mental space that the mushroom would bring me to). So I decided to start as low as I possibly could—I would take a single gel cap: 1/5 gram.

I had never eaten such a low dose of mushrooms before, and I really thought that it would be sub-threshold—a “micro-dose” if you will. I was on top of a mountain when I took the dose and I’d been on trail for about 10 days. Although I had been in the desert for much of that time period, this spot was up high on a mountain near Big Bear, California. In fact, I planned to hike far enough that I’d actually end up in Big Bear (my next resupply point) by the end of the day. So that meant that if anything “went wrong” (whatever that may have meant) I wouldn’t be far from a city and I could get to a motel if I really needed to. This wasn’t such a logistical help as it was mentally calming.

So being up on that mountain, it was actually quite chilly that evening. What I could not have anticipated however was what I woke up to: snow....

Continued: Sorry for the cut off mid-paragraph.

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So being up on that mountain, it was actually quite chilly that evening. What I could not have anticipated however was what I woke up to: snow. During the night it had dusted the mountain with a white frosting and the whole landscape looked like nothing that I’d seen on trail so far. I hesitated for a minute that morning wondering if it was such a good idea to take my first mushroom trip (micro-dose or otherwise) in such truly foreign conditions. But what pushed me over the edge to know that I had to do it was the fact that I had promised myself the night before that I would do it. So that morning I woke at 5am, drank some coffee, made a small batch of oatmeal from my backpack, and with the oatmeal I ate a tab of my mushrooms.

Surprisingly, I could actually feel the effects of the mushrooms within about twenty minutes, and I rushed to break down my tent and all the rest of my camp before any real “trip” effects could kick in. I wanted to be on trail for the trip itself.

As soon as I started hiking my expectation that this would be a sub-threshold dose dissolved away. I immediately started seeing visuals of twisting and bending. I smiled a huge grin as my anxiety dissolved and I settled into the trip. I was a bit worried when I had trouble finding the trail on account of everything being covered in snow, but really it was just a magical morning. I felt like I was in a magical fairy land where everything sparkled, and wherever I looked I was absolutely in the “mushroom space.” It wasn’t an overwhelming trip by any means—way too small of a dose for that—but I will say that the effects were closer to what I would expect from 1.5-2.0grams of the substance than what I was expecting from a half a gram. It was very pleasing and I was so happy with myself.

I felt very at one with nature. I felt like I belonged. I could feel the entire trajectory of the trip from the beginning, the come-up, the peak, and the gradual come down.

My favorite moment of the entire trip was this:

I was hiking alone still and then I saw something that is very rare for that point on the PCT; I saw someone hiking in the opposite direction as me. This person was hiking south. Now everyone up to this point had been hiking north towards Canada, so this was very peculiar. On top of it, I was still in the mushroom-space so it seemed even more odd, but I tried to remind myself that maybe it’s just the mushrooms that were making the guy walking south seem odd. He was dressed strangely too though. He was sort of wearing something that resembled a tunic and he had a big stick that he used as a walking staff. For all intents and purposes he was an elven druid or wizard of sorts—I knew this as soon as I saw him. I know that this sounds ridiculous, but the mushrooms told me instantly that he was a wizard-man.

I was a bit nervous at first because he seemed so out of place—as did everything since I was tripping on mushrooms for the first time and it was snowing whereas I’d only hiked sober (except for the daily pot use) up to this point through the desert for the most part. The man’s dress and direction and walking stick would have been enough to make things strange, but then what happened next was even weirder. We walked by one another and he didn’t even acknowledge me. We didn’t even make eye contact. It was all good though and I just carried on my way, but then after about ten steps I heard him say from behind me, “Hey!”

I turned around and looked at him, half stunned that he’d said something, and half curious what he wanted. The man/wizard paused for a moment and then continued in a ominous tone. He said, “Be sure to open the magic box.”

Now *this* really confused me. Magic box? What in god’s name was this dude talking about. I must have misheard him, I thought, and so I asked him to repeat. He said again, “the magic box…” and then paused again with a little grin on his face. “Oh, you’ll see.” Then he turned back south and continued on his way.

I started to think to myself, okay, I must be completely tripping balls right now, but that doesn’t even make sense; I only had a half a gram and some bud this morning. What on earth is this dude’s thing? I was so confused. All the same though, I continued on my way. There was no use chasing him down and asking him to explain himself.

About ten minutes later however, I learned exactly what he was talking about. Right alongside the trail there was a giant dumpster. I mean literally a dumpster like the kind you’d throw garbage into. That wasn’t all though. This dumpster had been painted with eyes and a mouth so that it looked like a giant head and across the bottom of the dumpster was painted “MAGIC.” This truly was turning out to have been the perfect day to have eaten mushrooms. Inside the “magic box” was food, soda, candy, and a few other things like hand sanitizer, toilet paper, and water. There was a sign posted on the inside too that said that this was all donations from a hostel in Big Bear city. There was also a sofa next to the dumpster. Seriously—right out in the middle of the woods there was this “magic box” of food and goodies with a sofa to lounge out on. You can google search “PCT magic box big bear” and you’ll see what I’m talking about; unfortunately there’s no photos with the face painted on it. I guess the face was a recent addition.

When I arrived at the magic box I stayed for a little while and ate a few chocolates. This had turned out to be one of the greatest days. I was so pleased with everything. I was grateful for the snow, for the mushrooms, for the weird wizard man, the sofa to rest on, and the chocolate to munch on. Come to think of it I also remember that I drank one of the sodas from the “magic box” too. Oh, if I could only put into words how wonderful it all was.

A few miles later I was definitely starting to come down from my trip—I think that the food brought the rest of the mushrooms to an end. It only lasted for a couple of hours, but I was absolutely floored by how effective such a small dose had been. It wasn’t at all even close to sub-threshold. It was definitely the smallest dose of mushrooms I’d ever eaten, but it was NOT the lightest trip that I’d ever had. It honestly made me a bit apprehensive to take a “normal dose” later on during the PCT because I was so worried that maybe this batch of mushrooms had been super-potent. But that didn’t make sense because this was the same batch from which I’d had so many trips leading up to hiking the Pacific Crest Trail. So I don’t know what it was. Maybe my body was just primed for a good trip or something. To this day I couldn’t tell you because my next mushroom trip would be this same dose and the effects were much less profound. In fact, I’ll probably refrain from writing about that second mushroom trip on account of the fact that nothing nearly this cool or worth-telling happened (although I did definitely get a trip out of the ½ gram the second time that I did it as well—it just wasn’t as heavy as this first one).

When I came down I met some other hikers whom I’d camped near the night before. They were discussing their plan to hike into town and resupply later that day and they were complaining about the snow. “Really?” I asked. “I totally disagree. It was like hiking through a magical fairy land!” They looked at me kind of strangely, kind of like I’d just farted in an elevator or something. I could just hear them thinking “Man, this dude is weird or fruity or something.” Needless to say, they didn’t hike with me for the rest of that day.

Several hours later I made it to Big Bear city by catching a hitch from where the trail crosses the highway into town (I hitched back to the same exact location the next day to restart the hike). I do want to note here especially since I’m sharing this with the Nexus and Shroomery forums that I had very notable (I might even call it severe) anxiety when I got into town. I dosed at 6 or 7 am and I got into town at around noon or one, but I think that there was clearly an effect of the mushroom on my nervousness. This was odd because I’d never had this happen after a mushroom trip. Usually after a mushroom trip I’m all happy-go-lucky and have a good after-glow. I certainly was not tripping when I got into town, but I could absolutely attribute the anxiety that I felt to the mushroom experience from that day. Maybe it was the fact that I had tripped so much harder than I could have possibly expected from such a light dose, or maybe it had to do with the mushroom *combined* with the fact that this was the first time in 10 days that I’d been away from the trail (the town is about 6 miles off from the trail itself) or maybe it was that this was the first town that I’d been to since starting the trail and so there was a social anxiety type thing going on, but it definitely bothered me. It made me wonder if I’d be able to continue taking mushrooms like this if I had such a terrible after-trip. Thankfully however this turned out to be the only time on trail that I had this problem with one other very, very minor exception some three months later.

But all in all I found that the trip had been extremely successful. The snow, the wizard, the magic box, and just the intensity of the trip in all really made me happy to have dosed that day. I decided that it was a bit exhausting though and that my next trip would have to be another DMT experience, and as a means by which to overcome the bit of fear/anxiety that I had at the end of the mushroom trip that day, I wanted to do it soon. I decided to trip DMT next on the morning of day 15 having completed my first two weeks on trail.

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[My Second DMT Trip]

One thing that really prevented me from tripping as much as I wanted was the fact that the PCT is long. I mean really long. Like longer than anything that I’d even come close to hiking before. It stretches all the way across the United States from Mexico to Canada. That’s 2,650 miles! If you’re going to cover that many miles in a single season (the “season” is roughly April-October, give or take) then you need to cover a lot of miles every day. So as much as I would have liked to just sit down and spend a day eating mushrooms from sun up to sun down, if I wanted to make it to Canada, then miles needed to be my focus, even if I had come out here to eat psychedelics in conjunction with covering the trail. There was also peer pressure associated with that. Many people hike this trail every year, so although I hiked alone, I would see other hikers every day who were doing everything that they could to cover big miles. Most people aimed for around 20-25 miles a day, and with the weight of a backpack and the vertical changes that the trail is made up of, that means waking up before sunrise and basically hiking all day long until after sundown in most cases. There just isn’t time to sit down and trip. And when I would sit down, I was absolutely exhausted and really just needed to catch my breath, eat some food, drink some water, and then get back on the trail. It was hard to prioritize “tripping balls” over water, food, and air when it came to taking a break. Also the desert heat was intense, so I couldn’t really get comfortable enough to surrender to the psychedelic world.

That however is sort of what made DMT an ideal candidate for the desert; a trip didn’t need to be 12 hours like you get from LSD or 5 hours like you find with mushrooms. With DMT/changa I could sit down for a half hour or so and be completely done over the course of that time. So that is largely why I mostly stuck with DMT/changa during the desert portion of the trail. I’d break into the mushroom supply later on, but for the desert it needed to be a shorter trip.

So my second trip on DMT I planned out the day before. This was around mile 350 (give or take). I’d been on trail at this point for exactly two weeks, and it was really beginning to feel like my home.

I set up camp the night before out on a ridge overlooking a large desert stretch. There was a lot of brush all around but I was able to find an opening about 150 yards off trail where I had space to set up my tent, and I decided that first thing the next morning I would smoke changa. I set my alarm to wake up early so that the desert heat wouldn’t be intolerable yet. I also figured that I would have time to break down my camp, get everything ready for the trail, smoke the dose, then just throw my backpack on and start my miles. And that’s exactly what I did.

For this second trip I didn’t bother with the crystal. I knew that my lighter would just go out trying to use the crack-pipe (I’ll call it an “oil burner” from here on out), so I just went straight to the changa.

The desert had become lit by the time I sat down for the dose, but the sun had not yet broken the horizon. It was close though, and so I decided that I’d meditate to calm the butterflies in my stomach until the sun hit the horizon, which I did, although I must admit that it didn’t do much to ease my nervousness. I knew what DMT was capable of and so mostly I just wanted for the sun to hurry up so I could get it over with.

As soon as the bright desert sun peaked at the horizon I took five deep breaths and went to the pipe that was already prepared in my hand. I thought to the trip that I’d taken a week before and promised myself that it would be alright. If only I could have had someone there with me it could have been so much easier. The desert is a scary and unforgiving place. It was hard to completely surrender when I was so deep in it for so long.

I took the dose two hits, breathing it in, holding it for ten or fifteen seconds, and then slowly letting it out of my lungs. This time I had that same “blanket thrown over me” feeling that I get from DMT, but I knew that this would be stronger. I breathed deeply and tried to relax as the trip came on. I closed my eyes and tried futilely to relax.

After the “come up” I arrived in a “place” behind my eyelids. I thought of that Shpongle song “Behind Closed Eyelids” as I witnessed an entity before me. This is a “place” that I’ve been before on DMT. One that isn’t fully broken through, but is absolutely in the spirit realm. Before me was what might be called a “gate keeper.” It was in the form of a snake. Not like a realistic snake that you’d see in nature necessarily, but a giant, coiled snake made up of psychedelic coloring and surrounded by blackness… like the blackness of the night sky when it’s filled with stars—not absolute and complete black, but mostly black with little specs of light—glimmering stars.

The entity/snake did not scare or threaten or startle me. Instead, like DMT also does to me, it welcomed me and comforted me. It was like looking into the eyes of an animal with protective glass between us. We both pondered one another and wondered what it all could mean. Who knows even still? What does anything that you experience on DMT mean?

The trip lasted for the predictable 7-10 minutes and just like the “snake/entity” had appeared before me it dissolved. I opened my eyes and remembered the morning sun which was still not completely revealed over the horizon, but was nearly there. I could already feel the heat of the coming day and the breeze was beginning to pick up.

When the trip was over I smiled and took deep breaths. I silently thanked the molecule and the entity that I had confronted. It had reminded me much of my first DMT experience that had happened about a year before. It was warm, welcoming, real, and protective. This day I also felt tremendous after-glow as I got back on trail. Throughout the remainder of this day I was so grateful for having made the commitment to smoke DMT after my completion of two full weeks on trail.

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[Days on the Trail: Shmoalk *ALL* the Weed]

The desert was probably the hardest part of the four months that I was out there hiking—in other words the beginning. Although there are mountains in southern California, like I’ve discussed above, it’s mostly desert stretches and some of the monotonous miles of the PCT. It has the least water too so hikers have to carry a lot of water from point to point which adds to the weight and foot pressure. There are crowds of other hikers in the first 200 miles to deal with as well. For so many reasons the start of the PCT is the hardest to deal with.

I’d wake up at 5am most mornings and try to have my tent broken down, my gear packed, and be hiking by 6:00. Every morning I’d brew coffee right away, make a small breakfast (usually just oatmeal or something like that), brush my teeth, and as soon everything was packed I’d sit down for just a minute or two to take care of my last piece of business before getting on trail. I’d take the little black bag out of the top of my backpack, look at the glowing horizon, and burn down a bowl of high-quality cannabis. The weed that I brought was the best of the best. I’d specifically saved up my stock for about eight months an I had a collection that amounted to about 90% sativa and then I had a smaller collection that was about 10% of my stock that was indica used exclusively for getting to sleep at night.

I wouldn’t admit this to the world at large, but to the Nexus and Shroomery I don’t mind confessing that I was basically stoned for four months. I’d smoke before hitting the trail every morning, and it’d be the last thing that I’d do almost every night before going to bed. Between the start and end of the day I’d smoke roughly 4-6 times. I smoked a lot… but I can’t say that I regret that at all.

I studied Ekhert Tolie a bit in the years before the trail, but the only real piece of his philosophy that I ever held onto was the idea of “now.” You need to live a life that is “in the now” but that is such a difficult thing to do. With weed however I was able to be in the now much more easily. I’d burn down, put in some headphones blasting entheo-tribal-earthy-electronica sorts of music and for the first two hours of my day I’d just float down the trail.

There is a certain simplicity to the life on the trail. It’s not that it’s at all *easier* than “the real world” but it absolutely is simpler. Everything you own fits into your backpack and your only real concerns can be counted on one hand: Food, water, miles, maps, and resupply. That’s basically all that there is to it. Sure there was the pressure of making sure you cover enough miles every day, but I was in good shape even at the start of the trail (trained a lot before starting the PCT), so as long as I didn’t sleep in and I stayed on my feet all day I was able to get the miles I needed.

As long as I woke on the trail, spent the whole day on the trail, and went to sleep on the trail I found that there was no excuse to cover fewer than 30 miles. If I were to resupply that day or if I’d slept in a trail-town the night before, then I usually got later starts or earlier finishes to the day and in those cases I’d only cover around 20 miles. But still, it goes to show that life was simple out there. Just smoke weed (I’d always hear Dr.Dre play in my head at the beginning of each day saying “Hey, hey, hey, hey—smoke weed every day.”

There was that documentary called “Super High Me” that was produced around 2010 where a dude smokes weed every day for a month straight. Well I wasn’t ever all that impressed because I knew plenty of people who did that as a part of their every day life. But on the trail it was different. Like I already said, I basically smoked 6-8 bowls of high-potency weed from sun up to sun down. I was literally high every day for 124 days.

Here’s what I found on trail as it specifically applies to weed: Sativa made the hiking very enjoyable, and if I put on the right music with it (Shpongle, Kaminanda, or Plantrae) I could almost produce a psychedelic experience of its own. Hard to explain, but it was definitely kin to tripping. The weed also helped to block the pain in my feet and lower back. When you’re covering that many miles each day the plain and honest truth is that it hurts—a lot. A lot a lot. But the weed helped with that. It also helped keep me “in the moment” like I mentioned earlier rather than worrying about the fact that I’d been on trail for let’s say 20 days and I still had over 2,000 miles of trail ahead of me. That was just too daunting, but when I’d smoke it up I was able to just think about how beautiful everything was around me and not worry about the future.

I also found old Terrence McKenna lectures to be an important part of almost every day that I hiked on trail. I know that many of you are probably familiar with “The Psychedelic Saloon” podcast, but if you’re not, I MUST recommend it! It has hundreds of McKenna lectures for your listening pleasure. I first discovered those podcasts/lectures when I first started taking mushrooms and I loved that Terrence was able to go right past the “hey, let’s get weird and eat some shrooms dude” and go directly to the “Okay, what does this all mean and how can we use these plant teachers to better understand ourselves and the universe?” It was an intellectual approach to psychedelics, and that really connected to me. In a lot of ways, that’s what led me down this path of undertaking the “Psychedelic Pacific Crest Trail” in the first place.

So I had literally listened to every one of the Terrence McKenna lectures that have been posted into “The Psychedelic Saloon” even before hiking the PCT. That’s literally hundreds of lectures! But I really wanted to listen to them again while I was on the trail. And so that’s what I did. Like I said, I would usually wake up in the morning, eat a light breakfast with coffee, break down my camp, and right before hitting the trail I’d burn some down while and turn on some trippy earth-music. I’d hike to that for a few hours usually (two or three) and then stop for a real breakfast to get some calories in my body. THEN I’d usually smoke another bowl and turn on a Terrence McKenna lecture and listen to those until noon or so.

Those McKenna lectures really kept me motivated down the psychedelic path. A lot of times I’d get afraid to stop and have a deep trip or want to put it off or think to myself, “ah, what does the psychedelic thing even matter? Maybe I should just put that aside and cover miles like everyone else who’s out here.” But then I’d listen to McKenna and he really reminded me that this was about self discovery and understanding of the meaning of the universe through the use of plant entheogens. So I found that to be a very useful tool. I guess you could even say that, to put my four-month adventure in a brief synopsis, it was: Hiking 2,650 miles under the influence of psychedelics, cannabis, and Terrence McKenna. That’s how I envisioned it before starting the journey, and that’s really what it turned out to be as well.

The downside of the smoking so much really only came at the end of the trail, and it wasn’t anything long-term. What I found after about 3 months of this smoking all day every day routine was that my memory became absolutely fried. Maybe it had to do with the nature of the trail as well but I would literally forget where I’d started every day. I wrote literally every night on the trail (my trail journal became my most prized possession within about a month), so that helped me to track things from day to day, but I would often find myself at around 2:00 in the afternoon just hiking along and I’d say to myself, “hey, where did you wake up this morning?” I would think about it for a moment, then realize that I couldn’t remember. Sometimes it would take up to five minutes for me to really put everything together and remember my campsite and last resupply location. I sort of found that kind of funny in its own way, but I do want it documented here that smoking that much weed for that long of a period of time absolutely had a tangible effect on my memory.

After the trail I stopped smoking weed completely. I had thought about abstaining from time to time on trail, but I had become in such a routine and my backpack was literally filled with weed (always within reach), so I couldn’t bring myself to stopping during the hike. Once I got done with the hike though, I stopped cold turkey. And I had absolutely NO withdrawal effects. If anything I found stopping the weed smoking to be incredibly easy. It was like I hadn’t been on the “binge” in the first place. Nothing could have been easier.

So my advice to anyone who might be thinking of taking such an adventure for themselves: “Hey, hey, hey, hey—Shmoalk weed er’y day!”

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[The Reset Button: Why I was Doing This]

I had a lot of time on trail to ask myself what the purpose of all this tripping was supposed to be. I knew when I decided to do this, but now that I was out there, I had to really think long and hard about it. Was I just out there to have fun? I think the answer to that was pretty clearly “no,” because I never found tripping to be a “pleasurable” thing. In fact, as I’ve briefly discussed already, I would go a week without tripping and only at that point would I say to myself, “Okay, ScientificMethod, you came out here to explore entheo-space, so if you’re going to do it, then you have to actually follow through with it.” And when I did trip, I was never really excited to do it. It felt more like a chore, although “chore” isn’t really the right word either. Instead, it was a mission that I was on, and I didn’t find it to be easy. I sometimes thought about DMT as a sort of Pandora’s Box. Each time I opened it I would learn something about myself and the universe, but consequently, the lid became heavier after each trip. Yeah, the first time I ever tripped on DMT was hard because I knew that it would be the most intense trip of my life, but every time AFTER that it just became more difficult.

I’ve though long and hard about why that is, and this is my best explanation: There are no words that we can put onto the DMT experience to fully describe it—even to ourselves. Even after we’ve been through many DMT trips, we can’t put words to it accurately enough to know what we’re getting into. I mean, yeah, we can say, “there’s the come-up when things start to get trippy, and there’s a body high, then the energy around us starts to focus, then we reach the ‘chrysanthemum’ then we break through that to this strange chamber of ‘machine elves’” but does that really encompass it? I think not. I think that those are just metaphors. No words can really describe what the psychedelic experience actually is, and so that unknown can be scary. And maybe that’s why the lid of the metaphorical Pandora’s Box that I describe becomes heavier with each time. Because the more times you’ve had a DMT experience, the more capable you are of recognizing just how intense they can be. But somehow you still can’t know what to expect.

“So what’s the point?” I’d ask myself while I was out there. Why trip again and again and again? Aren’t you just getting the same thing out of it each time? Of course, to those of you familiar with DMT and with mushrooms, you know that it’s not just the same experience every time. Like the saying goes, “you can never swim in the same river twice.” Every time you go into those “places” you see and experience something different. And sometimes it’s VASTLY different.

What I finally settled on as a good explanation for why I was doing all this tripping out in the wilderness was this: DMT allows us to see a reality that we cannot see in the sober state (yes, I know that I’m looking past the argument that you can experience a DMT trip “on the natch,” but I want t try and keep it simple here). Since there are no ways to fully encapsulate the psychedelic experience into words, the memory of the experience fades with time. I’ve had many people in my life who I turned onto DMT who had completely mind blowing experiences, but then a week later they’re able to just sort of shrug it off. They can say, “man, that was just too weird, and I don’t know what to do with it, so I’m just going to pretend that it didn’t happen, or that it wasn’t real, or that it was *just a hallucination*.” I didn’t want that though; I wanted to really solidify the psychedelic experience in my mind.

So by “cleansing the doors of perception” regularly, it kept the realness of the psychedelic experience in my mind.

Consider this: Imagine that you were born blind and lived your whole life up to the age of 30 without ever experiencing sight. Sure, people would tell you that sight is a thing, but what does the blind man really know of sight? I propose that he knows nothing of it at all. But then imagine that you get to “open your eyes” and experience sight for the first time in your entire life. You experience that for 15 minutes, and then you go blind again.

Well, if this were to happen, surely it would be a world-rocking experience. You would understand reality in a completely new way. But if that was it and you never got to *see* again, then you’d probably file that “open eye” experience under the category of “something that happened a long time ago that was completely unbelievable, but ultimately not worth anything to me because it was so long ago and I can’t quite even remember what it was like.”

I feel like this acts as a pretty solid metaphor for the psychedelic experience. And by going out into nature and having these experiences again, and again, and again, and again, it forced me to confront the realness of it. It was like having regular reminders of why I was out on this journey in the first place. I wanted to “hit that button” over and over again to keep it fresh in my mind, and when I wasn’t in the psychedelic state, I wanted to be in nature so that I could try to integrate the experiences into my life while surrounded by what was natural. Remember what Terrence said: He told us that “culture is not your friend.” Well I don’t think that we can 100% eliminate culture from our lives, but by going out into nature on this four-month hike by myself, I was able to get as far away from culture as reasonably possible. And while away from culture, I wanted the psychedelic experience to be my influence.

So I hope that this explains just a bit more of why I wanted to undertake this four-month psychedelic journey. It wasn’t just about “woo, lets have some fun and trip balls!” Rather, it was, “let’s use these entheogenic tools as a means by which to remind myself what brought me out here in the first place.”