Breakthrough Experience
02/25/07
Snow had been falling outside the large bedroom windows all morning. It was about 10am and I sat in bed alone enjoying the snow and eating five grams of dried psilocybin mushrooms that I had grown myself. I chewed them slowly and thoroughly and it took a while to get the whole five grams down. They were nutty tasting, not really too bad. I felt positive. It was the perfect day for my first high dose experiment. Good set, good setting. I felt very open. This was the from a third flush of fruiting of a strain called Creepers. Early on in my experiments with plant teachers I had made a decision not to beat drums or wave feathers around. I had to except the fact that I was a suburban white man and not a South American Shaman. My ceremony consisted simply of sincerely focusing on healing and just being as open to the experience as I possible could. I sat back and read some from Richard Evans Schulte’s, Ethnobotony: Evolution of a Discipline. Of course, I went immediately to the chapters dealing with Ayahausca. This was the point just after consuming the mushrooms when I usually felt the most fear and this morning was no exception. In fact, since this was the largest dose that I had yet tried, I sat on an underlying terror this beautiful, snowy morning and reading has always been a panacea for me emotionally. Even though my wife was in the living room, I felt totally alone. I had evolved a little mind trick such that after ingesting the mushrooms, I tried to forget that I had just ingested them and force my mind to concentrate on something else. This particular morning I was definitely only partly successful and while I read a part of my mind kept thinking: “five grams, Oh man this is scary”. It’s hard to describe this feeling after I’ve eaten them – I’ve never skydived but maybe it’s like what a skydiver feels after just leaving the plane: total commitment now, no going back.
Then I felt it coming on about forty minutes in and looked out at the snow: wow, how beautiful, I thought. I would have to call it a bright and snowy day. I put the book down and lay on my back with my eyes closed, systems check. I felt a little sick, chilled as if with fever, stomach a little upset, and I pulled up onto my left side with the covers up to my shoulder. This way I could see out the window to where the snow accumulated on a big boxwood. I tried to relax and just be open. I had felt this chill before but not so strongly as today. I suddenly felt that an elephant was coming to sit on my chest and my fear exceeded all possible expectations. I knew that I could not move and that the elephant was near. It was almost like I could feel the massive vibrations of its ponderous steps getting stronger as it got closer. I started counting my breath and deep breathing, trying to just empty my mind except for the counting. This was really my only trick but it always helps. I felt nauseas suddenly, balled up in the fetal position, making myself as small as possible, drawing inward, still counting breath but the elephant was upon me now. He sat on my chest and I couldn’t breath. This is it, I am going to die, I thought. I gave myself to it because I knew at very deep level that I had no choice.
My wife was out in the living room and she knew what I was doing. My request was to just leave me alone until I came out of the bedroom. As the elephant crushed the life out of me, some little part of me considered calling out for help. Another part of me asserted itself strongly then right through the fear and firmly dismissed that idea. I had come too far and worked too hard to bail out now before having even gotten started. Be here, be now, I told myself repeatedly, continuing to breath deep and count breaths to belay the fear. At some point the elephant left, quickly and without fanfare, the fear leaving with it. Fear of what exactly I could not even recall, pure fear of death maybe.
A soothing calm seemed to slip into the emotional space the fear had left just as easily as breath: breathing in, breathing out. I considered myself an agnostic if not an atheist but I felt as if I were engaged now in prayer and the prayer was only this, “come”.
I felt myself being drawn upward in a counterclockwise swirling and then “I” was off in the back of the room hovering about six feet off of the ground and I was looking at my body, curled up in the fetal position on the bed. Somehow I understood that I was inhabiting my soul now. This made a huge impression on me since I had not known that I possessed a soul until this very moment. Quite a revelation for a borderline atheist perhaps as you could imagine. As soon as my brief reflections about a soul ended, I felt myself shoot off to the south. Really, I felt my new soul body pulled off to the south at fantastic speed and a second later I was at my office in Springfield, VA – or, rather I was in a “soul office” rendition of the real office where I had worked for twenty years. This place appeared to be a reality connected to our own through our soul body – a soul world. I tried to wrap my mind around it but the only way I could make sense of it was to think of the soul world as a mirror world to our own. It was almost as if when we waved our hand in this physical reality, our soul hand also waved. But that was not quite right, either. This soul world did not exist as a simple reflection of our own. It also was alive just as is our physical world. Also, everything seemed to be emotionally supercharged in this soul world, the emotion the same that I had dealt with my entire life only magnified in intensity a thousand fold.
This soul world was intense.
It would be boring beyond repair to go too deeply into my actual work place and I would not want to suffer that upon anyone. Picture an office environment but with a strong touch of the old TV show MASH thrown in. We were either kicked back doing nothing but shooting the shit, usually in the most unprofessional manner imaginable; or, we were thrashing around in a sort of fog-of-war trying to keep a handle on an exploding concrete dispatch department, one of the biggest on the east coast. No matter how well you might prepare; no matter how many plans you might make, a point came inevitably – and the inevitability of it all really wore on me – when it all would come tumbling down. I recall hearing a study wherein rats are given a negative stimulus of a random shock through the wire mesh of their cage. Another control group is given shocks at exactly the same intervals only the control group can jump on a switch which stops the shock. The group with no control basically went insane while the group with some sense of control adapted to the shocks. We were in this office of course the group with no switch to stop the shock – just random and constant negative reinforcements. I always thought of it as humpty dumptdy falling off the wall. O shit, here goes humpty dumptdy, again. The customers were actually less of a nuisance than my own company. I suspect that this is a fairly common theme in the workplace. Under various conditions I learned over and over the hard lessons that bad leaders teach. I had no feelings about concrete whatsoever. I often wondered at how I had gotten myself in the concrete business. Again, I am sure that I am not alone in this sentiment. Freud is much in disfavor now I know but he said life was about two things, work and love, and in that I think he had a point. If you are doing what you really love, you are fortunate indeed. In real life and in this soul world my workplace very much became a microcosm of society at large. It took a while to sink in that this work place was the way of the world not an isolated incident. It gave me a whole new perspective on history: how the hell did we make it this far? It was so frustrating for me after two decades there seeing answers and solutions everywhere but having no power in this corporate setting to effect any meaningful change whatsoever.
So work went on in this soul workplace for what seemed like thousands of years. It was no different at all than it normally was only as I said sort of supercharged emotionally. It was a kind of hell and I was aware that I was in a soul world hell workplace such that I was constantly thinking: “so this is a bad trip, I guess. I have to get something out of it!” And I sought constantly to understand what this horrible place was suppose to be teaching me? I believed from my readings of so many other peoples experiences with plant teachers that “bad trip” was simply a means of spiritual growth and healing. After a while I began to feel frustrated that I could not get out. I could not understand no matter how hard I tried in exactly what manner this was suppose to be helping me. I felt stuck in this soul work place and this feeling of being stuck was really, really scary – I could not find the door out of this place. Finally, I realized that this horrible place was teaching me nothing. It was only annoying me and distracting me from my life. There is nothing to learn here, I thought inside the experience. As if that simple insight were the key to open the door, I left this soul workplace and found myself back in my physical body still curled up on the bed, the snow still falling outside. Wow, I thought surprisingly lucid, that was amazing.
I didn’t move at all except my eyes watching the snow still falling fat white flakes gentle and slow. I felt completely lucid and lay still thinking about what had just happened. It was not lost on me the parallel between my real life experience at work and this soul experience. It was so real – I, or my soul, had been in this soul workplace just a moment before and now I was back in my body in our bedroom. The lesson about my work was clear. I recalled some saying that mushrooms address your most serious issues first. I thought of this because I was sure that I had far more serious personal emotional issues to deal with than my work – I felt and still do that the truth dear Brutus is not in the stars but in ourselves. This all served to really make it sink in right there just how negative my work had been for me all these years. I did not know what time it was because the clock was behind me but I assumed a couple hours had gone by, the experience had seemed to go on for so long. The diffuse light of the cloudy day didn’t give any hint as to the time. I was certain that the experience was over. For some reason, the thought of actually moving, even enough to turn and look at the nightstand clock, never occurred to me. I felt peaceful and calm. I cannot say if at this time I was even able to move because I didn’t try. Just as soon as I sort of came to terms with what had just happened to me, having rolled it all around in my conscious mind, I felt my head spinning again and closed my eyes – the spinning continued upward even with my eyes closed and I thought, “ it’s not over”, perhaps more surprised than I have ever been in my life.
After so many false starts that had been the real thing, no colors or patterns or really what I would call hallucinations at all but instead a totally altered state of reality - I seemed to have lost consciousness and I guess it was little bit like a dream but that was no dream. Then I felt this counterclockwise spinning again and still without moving a muscle my eyes glanced up into the spinning and my lucidity faded. What was really weird was that there was an UP at all. There was though and up "I" went, my soul. I went faster and faster and my soul just sort of tore away finally and I thought, wow, so my soul is no more what "I" am than is my body - my soul is also just a vehicle. I had just discovered my soul - stupid like discovering your belly button - but I was kind of enamored with my soul already. Nevertheless, I continued soulless on straight upwards at fantastic speed through the earth’s atmosphere and off into space and I felt a slight tug - what was that? That was language which apparently had been connected to earth by means of a really long umbilical cord and before it snapped it very gently tugged as the cord reached its end before breaking. Wow, so that was language and now it is gone, I wondered. But I couldn't help but notice that I wondered this with language - and this made me laugh.
This was the beginning of what I call my abandonment experience where the mushrooms cured my lifelong abandonment fear by abandoning me in some Nether Region of reality for a billion years. Language was really finally and completely gone and I just felt – felt angry at the mushrooms for abandoning me. I was totally aware of what was happening and that the mushrooms were responsible for all of this. Another part of me found it kind of humorous and I could imagine the mushrooms saying, “hey, got your abandonment right here!” My angry side became very annoyed at the part of me which could see the humor of it all and after some time this angry side sort of won out. My anger spread out for light years and I became this anger spreading out so far as to be just a vague, disembodied cloud of energy drifting through vast and vacant distances of space, hardly corporeal at all. I felt as though each of my molecules were light years apart. I seemed to be a spread out as I could possibly be and still exist at all. I knew the mushrooms had abandoned me for my own good, very aware of my abandonment issues. This abandonment fear was the bane of my emotional life, maybe the root of all evils for me. How could I be at all authentic if I were so afraid of being alone? I knew that I was only pretending without authenticity. Time passed as I drifted trans-emotional through eons of space time and I thought of how I was stewing in my own proverbial juices. This part is very important, I think. I existed in this state for a billion years. Now to say a billion years is simply to try and put into language what defies language. It seems that this is the transformative power which the mushrooms possess, among others, they can impart direct experience. This experience was as real, or more real, than any experience in my life. How else could one actually experience a billion years of abandonment? Not think of it or imagine it - but actually experience it? From this I also took away a profound sense of time, especially a sense of the immensity of time involved in our DNA life and Its diversity here on the planet. So unfathomably much can happen in a billion years. As alone and isolated as I have felt all of my adult life, that was nothing compared the utter and complete abandonment I felt and as “time” stretched on the depth of my abandonment feeling reached what I can only describe as cosmic proportions. It is so hard to find the language for this but after eons and eons of time I began to kind of lose focus on this abandonment feeling and I began to experience other feelings. Wow, look at how beautiful it is out here. I can see infinity. Wow, it is so good to be alive, I thought – a thought that would seldom come to my normal self. Then I felt as if you might feel when you are very uptight and someone massages your neck. I really began to stretch out into my disembodied form and to feel the immensity of myself, discovering that I was far larger than I had thought; in fact, as I sort of relaxed my muscles and really stretched it out, I saw that there was no end to what I was: I am infinity.
Again, a billion years is an unimaginably long period of time. I thought about things as we all do. I thought about history, philosophy, my relationships, everything. I had literally all the time in the world to think about things. I really could spend the rest of my life just writing about this “billion years” but little of it was particularly profound and much of it would be only of interest to me. The point is, I went over my life, my feelings, my decisions, the books I’d read, the movies I’d watched, the dreams I’d had, the mistakes I’d made, just absolutely everything imaginable. At some point I discovered that my abandonment feelings were gone. How can I be alone when I am a part of everything and everything is a part of me? Much like in my first soul workplace experience, this “realization” seem to bring me back to my body still curled up on the bed in our bedroom.
This time I knew that my “trip” was over. I managed to move for the first time and saw that an hour and a half had passed approximately since I had first felt it coming on. I sat up on the side of the bed testing my mobility, surprised to find myself fully ambulatory. First of all, it sure seemed like longer than an hour and a half. Second, there was a deeper level of reality experienced within the “second”, abandonment experience that seemed more real than either my normal consciousness or the other tripping consciousness that I just left. This part only came to me as I sat up in bed and it took my breath away. There were multiple levels of reality, that was for sure. The abandonment experience was much deeper than the soul experience – beyond the soul, I guess. My God it was like a spiritual hall of mirrors. In this yet deeper level that now came to me, it was like a dream within the psilocybin experience – a mushrooms dream. This part was so very, very far beyond words such that I almost don’t know how to explain it? The only way is to use words and they will be like hollow, paper renditions of the real experience, like watching a puppet rendition of reality as opposed to the actual flesh and blood of life itself. I was part of a spiritual group of entities who were storming heaven in an attempt to Kill God. Our group mantra rang out: God must die! We fought a horrendous battle and lost, my last memory was that I was not injured and was helping my group retreat with dead and wounded. The defeat was horrible again beyond words but we all had the sense that we had lost a battle not a war and that we would be back. We may have been beaten badly but we were still totally committed to the war, to killing God. This part of the experience would weigh on me heavily and it is almost all I thought of the rest of this Sunday – I felt as though I had abandoned “my people” and I wanted desperately to get back to this battle, to my fellow entities. And this aspect of the experience haunted me for some time. A strange thing is that this aspect after some months came to feel as if it were a significant dream, fading a little. The other aspects of the experience remained as strong and clear as any important, actual experience that I had in my life.
The snow continued falling outside as I stood, testing – yes, I could walk. I felt as though it were over now. I found this surprising since it had only been less than two hours since ingesting 5 grams of dried mushrooms. Well, that was absolutely nothing like what I had expected! It seemed like a big deal to open the bedroom door and proceed into the living room where my wife and the dogs were. I hesitated at the bedroom threshold for a moment feeling a profound sense that I was actually opening the door to the whole, wide world not just our hallway.