Quote:You should not let yourself get too close to anyone. Love without being attached. There is no beauty in closeness.
The above is a quote by one of the most famous spiritual leaders of my country - Peter Danov, seen below.
His words of wisdom are scattered all over the forests next to where I live in the form of small wood signs hanging on random trees.
I want to share with you an experience I had with someone I hold very near and dear to my heart yesterday that I've been planning on for a long time. It's a long text, so bear with me.
In the last 6-7 months, my friend's life slowly started turning to emotional hell. He is the creative director of a very successful media and advertising company. He is also 8 years older than me. All my life I have looked up to him as an example of a stable, intelligent, disciplined, extremely creative and reliable person. He was, is and always will be my idol. He has two kids and was in a happy marriage so far. Long story short, he met another woman, fell in love with her and that started ruining his marriage, hurting pretty much everyone that he cares about (mostly his kids), which in turn is crushing him emotionally and physically.
We've talked in the past about psychedelics and how they changed me for the better. He said he wants to try LSD with me and see if it helps him to ask the questions that he needs to ask in order to get the answers he needs to get his head into the right place and state, just like what acid did to me. We both knew that being in an emotional state such as this there is a big chance we end up caught in a bad trip, but we knew we had to do it anyway. Fast forward, we are in the forest next to where we live. We split 3 tabs, taking supposedly 225μg each. The most I had taken before was 125μg, and boy did those 100 extra μg make a difference in the experience I was about to have...
As the acid kicked in, we started giggling at the stuff around us, admiring nature and its perfection. So far, so good. Then people showed up from somewhere, and we decided we had to move. We started climbing a path through the woods, but then suddenly he went:
Quote:This is not our path, we have to go that way.
So we left the path and submerged into the deep forest. No path, no nothing. Just trees, leaves and us two. That's when the trip started having a completely different vibe to it. At this point, the forest was more alive and breathing than us. Shortly after we drifted away from the safety of the path that connected us to the place I had parked my car, he said:
Quote:We must continue moving, there are too many eyes here. They are looking at us and I don't like it.
At this point, I was already tripping balls, and I knew he was fucked up even more than me. The "eyes" he was referring to were those black spots on the bark of a birch tree, of which there were many around us. Normally a forest has ants everywhere, and they are something normal. But he didn't see them that way. He went:
Quote:We must keep moving until there are no ants and eyes. When the eyes look at us, the ants see us as well, and they want to devour us. It's how nature goes. We die, they devour us and the cycle continues. If we stay in one place for too long they will devour us. We must keep moving.
So we kept moving.
I had already kept track of how our trip was developing. At first, he was having so much fun, laughing at everything, being the usual level of creative that he is, coming up with some genius quotes and ideas, then as the experience intensified, he started going deeper and deeper, talking about human relationships and the way we think and evolve. It was just a matter of time before the pain that was rotting him from the inside came out.
We kept moving through the thick forest until we saw a rotting tree trunk, about 2.5 meters tall. It was like a magnet from afar, it drew us towards it. I didn't know why I just knew I had to go to it and look at it closer. At this point, I was too fucked up to pull out my phone and take a picture, so I found one that looks pretty much like that:
Its rotten insides were glowing with an ominous bluish ambient light. The shapes of what the termites had left in its ruptured, rotten body resembled tens of human faces, all of which had unspeakable agony and suffering written on their terrified faces. They were shuffling inside, flowing like boiling water. I could almost hear their petrifying screams. But what struck me the most is the energy that this tree had. 10 meters away from it, I could already feel the immense pressure that it created, similar to being 5 meters underwater. It was like invisible waves of unstoppable energy were flowing constantly outwards, pushing everything away, but on the other side, the magnet-like attraction it had was pulling us towards it. I felt like I was in an energy clamp that had me like a trap. The air was filled with a weird humming noise, barely audible, and tingly static electricity. I had heard before of places with some mysterious energy, but this was something new for me. The energy that erupted from it was so real that it felt like the wind was blowing in our faces, but the leaves of the vegetation around us were as still as stone. I looked at my friend with the intention of asking the question "are you feeling this", but I didn't because the answer immediately became very clear in his widely-opened eyes. After 20 seconds in awe, we both knew we had to move away from this place. I was filled with fear and respect in the same way a human would be if God appeared before them. Now looking in hindsight I regret submitting to fear because I feel like this place was some sort of an energy beacon that something consumed from. Maybe it was a portal to another dimension. Or maybe it was a concrescence point where different dimensions overlapped and there was an energy leak. I had many questions, but fear completely took over and we moved along.
Some minutes later, we ended up on a 20x20 meters pool of rocks amidst the forest. We walked inside and sat in the center of this place. Suddenly he asked me to leave him alone for a while, so I turned my back on him and sat on the rocks. It was then that I finally was able to pay close attention to an object. I have a friend that claims there is a sentient, primordial, crab-like being that exists in a dimension past our capabilities. He said you can see it moving through the rocks if you look closely while tripping on acid. So I looked, and I saw it. I am not quite sure if something like that exists, but I could clearly see something that was as alive as I am moving slowly through each and every rock. It had a shell, and on that shell, there were millions of eyes that gazed directly into my very soul. At that moment I realized it knew I was seeing it, and just like a peacock during mating season, it spread its mesmerizing colors before me. A mind-blowing kaleidoscope of every possible color imaginable, breathing and flowing like a beautiful caterpillar. It was showing off how pretty it is.
While I was watching this spectacle in front of my eyes, I heard my friend sobbing behind me. His self-control finally collapsed. A lot of tears were shed in the following 30 minutes. Then laughter followed, then tears again. This cycle repeated itself countless times in the next 6 hours. At one point he saw his hands rotting like a dead man's hands. Looking at me with tears swelling up in his eyes, he asked me:
Quote:Do these hands look like a 30 years old man's hands? Not to me. I'm dying inside.
I felt an intense desire to comfort him that it's all a hallucination that he was seeing because of the pain that's inside him, but I couldn't speak. Nothing came out of me but tears. I just watched him look at his hands and sob.
Moving further, we reached a big natural stone pillar under a huge old tree. As soon as he laid eyes on that stone, terror and shock were written all over his face. He then fell down on his knees and burst into tears. Asking him what's up, he replied:
Quote:That stone over there, it's the tombstone of my wife. I can see her name and her face on it. My mistakes are killing her.
I knew that I couldn't do anything, so I just hugged him and did my best to support him through the suffering he was going through. The cycle of tears and joy continued to the very end of our journey. Shortly after we saw the rotting tree, we were basically lost in the forest with no idea how to get back to the car, or any road that leads to civilization. The day was closing in on us, and so did daylight. I knew we had to find the way back, so we just started walking in a random direction, and a bit later we found a paved way that led us to civilization.
After experiences like that you start understanding the quote that I began this story with. He's a respected man in his workplace that many people lean on for support and professional development. They all see his shell, they see stability and reliability. But when you're all alone with him in the forest, and the acid sheds his outer layers, his ego, all that is left is his very core. That vulnerable ball of energy that had been injured deeply by his very own mistakes. I had never seen him so vulnerable and helpless. He was in front of the enormous black mirror of the Universe, and he was seeing his very essence. Being so close to him was not pretty. It was saddening, scary and loving him as much as I do, it hurt me a lot, but if it helped him, I'd do it again without hesitation. It was a deeply traumatic, but a very beneficial (I hope) experience for him. He said words he had been holding up for a long time inside him. He admitted his flaws and weaknesses. Sometimes this is all you need to find the path to enlightenment.
My call to all of you is to not take a person's appearance for something absolute. Be kind, respectful and supportive to every single living thing you encounter in your life. You don't know what kind of obstacles does this person have in their life. They may seem happy and appear stable and in harmony with themselves, but what's inside is hidden, sometimes even from themselves. We all fight battles with our own flaws, insecurities, and bear the weight of the decisions we've taken in life. But that's the hero's journey - suffer, survive, evolve, repeat.
With immeasurable amounts of love and respect, I hug you all.