DOSE:

4.5 g

oral

Mushrooms

BODY WEIGHT:

150 lb

The trip that I am about to discuss was the fourth time I experienced Psilocybin mushrooms in my life. I am eighteen years old and it had been about a year exactly since my 3rd, when I took my fourth trip on Oct. 3, 2009. I have had many profound realizations during and after experiencing Psilocybin mushrooms in the past 2 years. Because I did not write reports online about my first 3 trips, I will incorporate some of the knowledge I attained during those experiences, and which I remembered during this most recent trip.

I will write this report in a way, that hopefully anyone who has not tripped before can understand. I find it is highly beneficial to read trip reports, in order to learn about others experiences in different situations and places. So hopefully you will enjoy this story and understand my views. I believe the actual experience is ineffable and must actually be experienced, but I will try to articulate it. I take caution with any psychedelic/entheogen and start with a very small dose, only in a safe, natural, outdoors location, with at least 6 hours of time, where I know I will not be interrupted, and only with a positive, open-minded outlook. Also, I treat the mushrooms with respect and don’t mix them with anything. I agree with Terence Mckenna that not eating for six hours and then eating them straight is a great way to experience the true effects.

I went into this trip, wanting to get more insight into a good way to live my life, which is focused on activism to help the Earth and it’s inhabitants who are currently suffering. On my previous 3 trips, I learned so much about myself, western culture/consumerism, and my connection to the land, other people, and other species. On all three, my friends and I ventured around wooded areas during the height and then while coming down, local shops and residential areas. For this trip, I wanted to take a higher dosage, and mainly attempt to keep my eyes shut and ponder in a meditative state (still in out in a natural setting).

I planned to take about 4 or 5 dried grams (I wasn’t sure how much it actually weighed). My friend Dan and I planned to do it on a pleasant day, and then Saturday came along and we seized the opportunity. I ate a few pieces of fruit for breakfast around 9 am, and then didn’t eat anything until the mushrooms. Around 3pm, we biked out a few miles from our campus to state game lands. We biked around the cornfields and soybean fields, and found a strip of trees, with a little hangout spot inside, scattered with large rocks. We parked our bikes and got comfortable, then ingested the mushrooms at 3:35 pm. I had about 4 or 5 grams and Dan had about 1.5 to 2 grams.

I sat cross-legged against a large tree’s trunk and started meditating. I got uncomfortable, so I decided to lay down on the rocks and dirt, as Dan was doing. I put my jacket over my eyes, in hopes to see some visuals. After probably 30 minutes of not feeling anything, the feeling started to creep up on me. It starts as a warm buzz, somewhat similar to a beer-buzz, but seemingly on a much higher frequency. It felt like such a seamless transition from my normal state, to this altered state of consciousness. It wasn’t like one minute I’m not tripping, one minute I am, I just eased into the higher state of awareness. I sat up from laying down and took off the jacket and I knew the mushrooms were taking effect. I was extremely jubilant and excited to remember and re-feel what it is like to trip, since it had been exactly a year since my last experience. I wrote a few things down in my notebook, at this point during the trip:

“Oh boy oh boy oh boy!- I have picture in my head of some 8 year old kid with blonde hair in a commercial at the kitchen table smiling, waiting for his mom to serve breakfast.”

I wrote this because that’s the feeling/image that came to mind due to my excitement of tripping, paralleled to young boy’s excitement for mom’s pancakes. Next I wrote:

“It’s so weird returning to this realm. Right now I’m only a little bit in. It’s coming on fast, its awesome. It’s like returning home to a welcoming place, as if returning to the Shire in Lord of the Rings.”

Then after thinking about modern society and how we all live, I wrote: “There’s no fucking rules! All these fucking restrictions, always people telling us what to do! We are free!”

I then imagined a rastafari shaman (similar to Bob Marley) explaining the intricacies of life to a western person. I wrote him saying, “Put some color into your life ma brotha. Your living in black and white. The key is diversity. Diversity in all directions. Most think there are only 4 directions. Ma brotha, dere are many directions.”

This may be hard for people other than myself to understand. What this meant to represent for me is how multidimensional, complex, and diverse life is, but how the western perspective reduces the complexity and our own are lives are thus reduced to being boring and unfulfilling. The rastafari shaman seems to be advocating spontaneity, creativity, and diversity in all aspects of life.

When Dan returned from a short walk, I was telling him and also exclaiming in general, “Wow I love mushrooms! Thank you so much mushrooms! This is so awesome!”

As it turned out, I decided not to lay down with my jacket over my eyes and Dan and I decided to explore the intermingling woods and cornfields. As we started walking, the shroomage was fully flowing through me. My senses were awakened from their dulled state, induced by city-living. Every single thing was vibrant and happy to be alive, from the trees exploding with fall colors to the little, green clovers on the ground. Color contrasts were much more pronounced, and it was as if I was seeing colors for the first time.

We walked up a path and marveled at the surroundings which we were immersed in. The internal drive to explore this mysterious world, which I, and I believe everyone had as a young child, had returned. There were so many things we could do, every direction holding different adventures. As I reached a long path, I started sprinting as fast as my legs could possibly carry me. It felt absolutely amazing to run, I had this huge smile on my face, like a little child running in a game of tag. I felt super-alive and like Forest Gump running for the first time, but instead of breaking out of metal leg-casts, I was breaking out of my societally conditioned, rigid sense of self.

I had the sense of being a wild human, like indigenous people. I remembered back to thinking about people in our society and how they grow up and have to find jobs. Also, how we are restricted and put into some stereotyped personality, which governs how we live. I thought about us claiming to be free. I was thinking of all these stupid restrictions we have, people telling us what to do. We think we are free, but we are withheld in invisible ways, the way we eat, talk, laugh, carry ourselves, see nature as observers, not participants. We think we are free, yet for example, I was recently taken to court for writing positive messages in chalk on sidewalks around town. The worst thing about our oppression is we can barely sense how we are oppressed. We must find where the bars of our prison are, and begin to escape. These prisons are perceptual prisons, mental prisons, habitual prisons, social interaction prisons. There was never such a thing as social akwardness until we became so separated from each other and ourselves, that we forgot how to interact.

Dan and I balanced on this set of pipes on a path with trees on either side. I found this fuzzy green seed thing, and I kept it in my hand. The green fuzzy thing was moving and wriggling through my hands. It was like a DNA coil, and I actually dropped it, because I thought it wiggled out of my hand. Did it actually wiggle out of my hand, who knows? What does “actually” mean? Is there an objective reality? These are questions I still ask quite often.

We ventured around the area for probably almost two hours. I realized that life was all about every single thing expressing itself in it own way, its in own niche, and contributing to the whole system of life. I looked around and said, “Those trees are just over there, doing their wavy thing, that fuzzy is doing its fuzzy thing, just being, as it is.” I looked at trees and they would sway mysteriously in the gentle breeze.

The boarders between trees and skies, flowers and grass, were oddly sharpened and melted. Different settings had different vibes and moods, shaded areas were cooler in temperature, and eerie-ish. The whole area was radiating a blissful happiness to be in existence, which Dan and I were engulfed in. The whole day was calm and serene, leaves changing colors were amazing, sunlight radiating thru the clouds and onto the corn fields looked really cool.

I realized that naming things take the personality, and individuality to a degree away, and because I didn’t know the names of things, I could relate to them more intimately. I realized that naming and quantifying just objectifies sentient beings.

It felt amazing to laugh out loud, and to just express myself. I felt a constant impulse to be creative in living, and express myself whether through dancing, walking, beatboxing, or whatever. I just felt like grooving to the beat of life. I would beatbox and it would sort of set the mood, but it would also flow from the mood. Dan was singing and dancing and having a great time too.

I got a vibe, similar to other trips of… What are we waiting for? Lets do it now, I pictured activists who non-stop fight the system, many who are locked away now. I got sense of global awareness and all the futile things and games Western culture (now spread almost everywhere) has set up to supposedly make us happy, but inadvertently devour the planet. I deeply yearned (and still do) for everyone to experience life in this connected way, so that we could stop killing and enslaving humans, animals, plants, ecosystems, etc. Even just feeling that connection one time is enough to realize that it is real and always there.

Eventually we headed back to the little area where our bags and bikes were located. I told Dan I was still tripping pretty hard and didn’t want to go back just yet. We chilled for about a half an hour. I layed down on the leaf-covered ground and put my jacket over my eyes. I don’t really remember having any kind of visions, except I remember seeing this large gecko/lizard crawling across a dark background. It was a pretty vivid image.

Then, Dan helped me up, I got all the burrs off of me, and we hopped on our bikes. Right before leaving the cornfields, we paused and saw a low, faintly yellow full moon in the light blue sky surrounded by clouds. I know that many indigenous people regard the full moon as a time of celebration, and it felt as if the full moon was watching over us, as we celebrated how awesome it is to be alive.

Biking back we passed some horses who looked extremely beautiful and majestic, and I thought of the wild horses who roam in the Eastern U.S. When we arrived back to campus, Dan went to go eat, and I went to this park to sit, think, and write about my still-occurring psychedelic experience. I wrote this at the park, “Clouds are amazing. (It was dusk, and there are overlapping light purple and dark blue and gray ones) 1st hand experience is key, oh shrooms are amazing. We sort of have the ability to see like this inside of us, but shroos help bring it out. Haha, its 7:11. I took them at 3:35. Time is distorted. Oh, writing hardly does justice to experience. People will appreciate nature, if they are shown the way. Disclaimer: Never underestimate the pure wonder and amazingness and mystery of life!” My friend Sam asked me how it was and I called the experience, “extraordinarily and unspeakably profound and valuable.”

I am glad I wrote the disclaimer, and about my experience while tripping and directly after, because it seems that since the experience (and I found the same thing with my other trips), my egoic mind will try to convince me that the experience wasn’t really profound or that great. Not to mention our entire culture, which essentially denies the validity or reality of any transcendent experience. Also, as my friend Austin says, “It’s easy to downplay an experience that is not your own.” For any skeptics I recommend checking out a website called TASTE about scientists’ transcendent experiences, or just trying it yourself.

(I went back to my room after the park and wrote a lot of insights that I developed and gained from this experience;)

I was more conscious of clock time, but time was so irrelevant, I was deeply in the present moment. This concept of presence coincides exactly with the Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle and especially with The Ascent of Humanity by Charles Eisenstein, both of which I highly recommend.)

Psilocybin mushrooms let me see right through the culture of make believe that most civilized people live in. It as if our entire society is on stage performing a play, which I am normally playing along with. Then, shrooms allows me to go backstage and see that we are just pretending. We all believe in the same pretend things, like property and money.

While tripping I got sense of no ownership, property, borders, restrictions in the natural world. We were on farmland, which is supposedly owned, and tended to by machines. I wrote “These mental constructs are obliterated by the strong connection with the wild earth, which does not conform to human’s culture of make believe.”

Mushrooms let us grasp magnitude. I was able to fully metabolize and grasp how beautiful life is and also how we are destroying life on Earth. I believe our everyday culture essentially keeps us in a certain state of mind, where we are not only separated from seeing our damage to the planet, but we are numb to it. Our culture revolves around 3 D’s, distancing, distraction, and denial.

There are so many intricacies of life, and ways to express ourselves. It is only in our culture that we have been conditioned to think boredom is our default state. Slumdog kids in India playing in garbage dumps are clearly happier to be alive than a nine-year old in an SUV watching spongebob on a tv headset. Many indigenous cultures have no concept of “boredom.”

The mushrooms experience has an uncanny resemblance to allegory of the cave, and experiencing shrooms is essentially stepping out of the cave and realizing that in our technological society, we are not seeing the full picture of life.

Before I fell asleep on the day that I tripped, I wrote, “Although I may not always be able to see it, I know its there.”

What can we do about all this? What can we do about the fact that in America you can be imprisoned for many years for simply having certain plants? What can we do about the fact that the genocide in Darfur only got 3 minutes of air-time on CBS news in the entire year of 2006, when thousands were slaughtered daily, whereas Martha Stewart was discussed extensively?

I believe we must learn the full breadth of our situation, look this medusa of a culture square in the eyes, and not turn away. We must realize the roots of our problems and transform our way of relating to the world. I believe we must live as participants in nature, not observers. I absolutely recommend reading the Ascent of Humanity by Charles Eisenstein, which is online for free. If anything in this essay rang true with you, this book will definitely resonate with you. I believe meditation and other spiritual exercises are very beneficial. They have been helpful in order to become grounded in being, and diminish my egoic-mind domination over my life. The only thing I can do is live a life that makes sense to me, given my situation. Thank you for reading about my experience and after-thoughts. If you are planning to try psilocybin mushrooms, I recommend taking caution, having a positive mindset, natural, outdoors setting, and not abusing them. Namaste.

Exp Year: 2009	ExpID: 82749
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: 18
Published: Nov 26, 2012	Views: 9,557
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