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There Is Nothing but Beauty
MDMA
Citation:   Holotropic Thinker. "There Is Nothing but Beauty: An Experience with MDMA (exp106113)". Erowid.org. Oct 22, 2016. erowid.org/exp/106113

 
DOSE:
T+ 0:00
125 mg insufflated MDMA (powder / crystals)
  T+ 0:00   joints/cigs smoked Tobacco - Cigarettes (plant material)
  T+ 1:00   oral Alcohol - Beer/Wine (liquid)
  T+ 1:00 2 joints/cigs smoked Tobacco - Cigarettes (plant material)
  T+ 3:30 1 cig. smoked Cannabis (plant material)
BODY WEIGHT: 88 kg
OTHER FACTORS WORTH MENTIONING: Borderline personality disorder, Trigeminal neuralgia

I am a person, who doesn't take mind-altering substances lightly or 'for a fun night out'. I use them responsibly in a safe setting to observe and examine the effects meticulously with a goal of discovering what information I can extract from just about anything: the chemical itself, their effects on my mind and body, my emotions and sensory information during the altered states of consciousness and everything else in between. I am most interested in their therapeutic value.

I got a hold of crystallized MDMA few weeks ago when a friend of mine brought 500mg to split between us to two equal amounts. Having been self-educated about the dosage in relation to its effects, I decided to be cautious with the substance due to being a first-timer and ended up splitting my share down to two 125mg doses. The aforementioned friend, experienced with the substance, took his entire dose of 250mg.

The mindset was balanced throughout the day. The emotional realm had been undisturbed prior to the experience and the setting was the relatively clean and cozy comfort of the home I have shared with my girlfriend for the past five years.

It was 10:00 PM on a nice, quiet Saturday evening when we took our doses. The intake method was insufflation. The beige brown, sugar-like sticky powder tasted uncomfortable as it started dripping down the back of my throat. The taste was a bit metallic, like a bitter and more synthetic version of brown sugar with a pronounced dimension of cough syrupy bite. After the insufflation process, the both of us went straight outside to the balcony for a cigarette. I have been a regular smoker since the age of 16 (10-15 cigarettes a day, strong blend) and during smoking, the effects started building up rapidly.

Within two minutes of intake, the bodily effects had hit with full force. The mind was adapting to the alteration of consciousness in the way not unlike somatization: because the process was extremely fast, the bodily sensations of transcending were severe, causing great disturbance in tactile perception of your body weight, coordination, motor skills and eyesight. It was almost a bit too much to handle. Very little effects, however, were initially observed from the mind's point of view.

10:07 PM we came out from the balcony and I was still somewhat in the process of transcending, because entering to the kitchen felt like going to a new house for the first time. This is when I first started observing the full extent of the effects, as I remember being extremely fascinated by the 'feel' of the room, almost as if it was an entity of its own. My girlfriend was cooking food, smiling happily and asking about what's going on [in my head]. I answered that apart from physically feeling relatively nauseous, I'm feeling severely disoriented with all the sensations I was experiencing, much like going for an exploration process into an uncharted territory with no map. Only that the uncharted territory was this new notion of how my consciousness handles the full range of my emotional realm.

Very quickly, at around 10:15 PM, this friend of mine made a decision to leave the apartment to meet a friend of his, but wanted us to group hug before leaving. As soon as we touched each other's bodies in a purely platonic fashion, I felt I had been given the key to decipher what I was going through. At this point, all the bodily discomfort started to decrease as fast as it had built, so I felt inclined to report that it's okay for him to leave instead of having to be my trip advisor. All I needed was the comfort of my home and the presence of my girlfriend. Within one minute, all body load was completely gone and absolute cognitive clarity took its place.

Me and my girlfriend have had a very rough, very long and extremely consuming patch in the past with a variety of difficult and even unresolved issues, but love has always appeared to prevail and we've never been able to split up. There had been times when I had contemplated and planned suicide and I had started even organizing the rest my life towards that goal. I had never been able to pinpoint the exact feeling I've had that has hindered this plan by pushing it perpetually further in the future. I of course have known what love is and genuinely felt it a number of times with a number of people on various occasions, but as soon as I had reorganized the status of my consciousness to a self-referential coherence after the intake of MDMA, it was like an entire new level of feeling and sensing love in all its uncensored exuberance had taken a hold of me.

This new form of feeling made me completely awe-struck. I felt like I was a 5-year-old discovering a new, wonderful thing in the nature and having nothing but a sheer, uninhibited sense of wonder towards that phenomenon. The emotion was so powerful in depth and permeating all layers of what I have previously known that in contrast to this discovery, everything outside that feeling felt almost meaningless. Being bombarded with the all-encompassing nature of this discovery, all I could speak to my girlfriend was that 'there is nothing but beauty' and 'this is something else I've ever experienced' for almost half an hour. I was completely blown away by the beauty that eluded all previously known sensory perceptions and completely engaged in the experience with no ability whatsoever to escape the effects of the substance.

During those 30 minutes, the sensation transformed into a whole new version of love and affection unlike I remember to have ever experienced. I became accustomed to this new discovery, but I noticed that this happened solely because my brain had to organize this new information in a way that it made sense to me. Something 'absolute' had to be 'relative' in order for me to make sense out of it. The way that my mind apparently chose as the optimal route to handle this new information was to create a new sense that is able to observe it.

10:45 PM. At this point, I had six senses all working in overdrive but with absolutely no distortion whatsoever. The visual field was sharper with colors more pronounced than usual, all smells from the cooking were more distinctive than usual, the wine I was drinking at the table wasn't the best on the market but still astoundingly pleasant in flavor, the music coming from the living room (Helios : Einqya -album) felt like it was a universe of its own, and all tactile information was felt directly in my veins. It's a bit more difficult to explain the sixth sense, but I would address it this way: I sensed that my girlfriend has an aura - almost tangible in appearance - that draws me in its vicinity with almost maximum force. Like an electromagnetic force field that pulls objects to orbit around it. Because of the power I felt around that aura, I felt reluctant to even go to the bathroom for my business. I have experienced heightened sensory perception earlier with various strains of cannabis and to some extent with little amounts of psilocin, but this was something different. The massive sense of wonder with this new sense that I had acquired was so overwhelming and addictive that I felt, much like a child in such mindset, that I never want to leave from it. I was explaining this sensation to my girlfriend, and she started getting increasingly happier and was absolutely receptive of all my attempts to decipher this. This reception further fortified my confidence and as soon as she was done with the cooking we sat down at the table to drink wine and have a depthful conversation in the light of flickering candlelight about the ailments we have had. The atmosphere that consisted of all the aforementioned sensory perceptions was so incredibly thick and had a huge impact on me.

11:00 PM to 1:30 AM. The conversation lasted for a bit over a couple of hours. We consumed two bottles of wine and I had a couple of cigarettes during that time, but at any time I did not feel even slightly inebriated. Sometimes when I watched into my girlfriends eyes during a re-occurring ephemeral silent moment, I could feel getting more sucked in to the effects of the drug; the sensory information became increasingly vivid every time in each of the six senses. During this time I became more tangibly aware of myself, who I truly am and what I truly feel - and that every layer that I have constructed on top of another during my entire life is a filter placed to cope with all the cultural baggage that is imposed upon everybody. Upon realizing this, I didn't feel particularly sad. I just hoped every single human being would be able to distinguish this and let anything like this impact their lives as little as possible. Everybody deserves to be loved the way they truly are with no reference points from a cultural perspective. We all are pure from the heart, but cultural societies bury these qualities and pile too much rules and restrictions that directly manipulate individuals' perception of themselves. This became palpably evident to me, and ultimately I consider this piece of information as my profound lesson of this excursion.

At 1:30 AM me and my girlfriend started having sensual sex before she started sleeping. Some time after this I started shifting back to normal state of experiencing my environment and began to carefully analyze the experience, making formal notes for this report. I was enthused about the positive experience and grateful about everything that I had felt during the experience. The enthusiasm was, of course, heightened by this comfortable feeling of having resolved some of the issues that have plagued the relationship I have with my girlfriend plus me having a better understanding of myself. I still experienced great warmth due to the sensation of love, but the sensation started diminishing slowly but relatively noticeably. I wasn't exactly bothered by that at the time, since I knew that the love itself is not going away, it just is getting more and more abstract and I would still be able to summon this experience whenever I so desire to with a large array of methods that don't involve any aid from the substance itself. All in all, I felt grateful for the experience and accepted fully that it is now coming to an end. I still felt unwilling to go to sleep, so I rolled a small joint to calm me down. By 3 AM I was sleeping.

The following day the serotonin levels had completely plummeted. I woke up at 9 AM to drink water and I couldn't get a firm grip of my consciousness. Much like during hangover, but without the headache and tremors and with further cognitive impairment. Due to extreme fatigue, it felt extremely difficult to stay awake and this might've contributed to the fact that I felt disorganized in my mind. I shrugged it off partly by contemplating that the subconscious has to move things around a bit after such transformative experience but also partly because I have previously felt that powerful synthetic drugs (most notably carbamazepine) produce massive drowsiness - at least for me. I was a bit more passive than normally throughout the entire day, avoiding deep and meaningful topics for some unbeknown reason even though I wanted to share the experience with my closest friends. I gave the rest of my portion (the other 125mg dose) away. After three days of gradual recuperation in the aforementioned areas I was fully back to my normal state in terms of vigor, awareness, cognitive skills and consciousness. Afterglow started from this point on.

Shulgin rating scale: (T+2min) +, (T+15min to T+60min) a strong +++, (T+60min to T+210min) a strong ++
Overall feeling (T+15 days): more conscientious, more engaged/less passive, more positive
Afterglow magnitude (0-10): 5
Drug dependency: Physiological 0, Psychological 0

Summary: The information, based on the memories I have of this experience, has enhanced my consciousness moderately. Improvements in self-esteem are noticeable. Feelings of frustration and irritability are mildly increased but not so much that they manifest in behavior. Behavior is driven by compassion and acceptance a bit more than before. Propensity towards disappointment not increased. Tolerance of boredom increasingly better. Frequency of mood swings / peak points somewhat dropped and their tolerance strongly improved. No noticeable effect to the frequency of trigeminal neuralgia paroxysms

125mg (insufflated) is absolutely the largest dose I would try, even in a safe set and setting. I would much rather take 100mg for this type of experience, it will most likely provide the same insight and experience without going overboard or unmanageable at any time. Therapeutic value comes from the permeating state of wonder and subsequent awe, which is unmistakably profound during the first time use but will undoubtedly lose its potency and efficacy in short interval use.

Exp Year: 2015ExpID: 106113
Gender: Male 
Age at time of experience: 28
Published: Oct 22, 2016Views: 14,455
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MDMA (3) : Small Group (2-9) (17), Relationships (44), Hangover / Days After (46), Glowing Experiences (4)

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