Male

49

(a few chapters from the book i'm working on about my own experiences with psilocybin mushrooms)
CHAPTER ONE

02/25/07 –Breakthrough Experience

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. Let them sit in my mouth as long as I could absorbing sublingually. Tasted earthy and a little nutty. I felt positive. (A fairly rare feeling for me) It was the perfect day for my first high dose experiment. Good set, good setting. I felt very open. These mushrooms were 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 possibly 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. 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. If I could pull this off then when I started coming on forty or more minutes later, it would come almost as a surprise. This particular morning I was definitely only partly successful and while I read could not but help 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 took off my glasses and put the big, 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 green leaved boxwood. I tried to relax and just be open. I had felt this chill before but not so strongly as today. I suddenly felt a vibration. Perhaps this vibration was the beating of my own heart but I felt that an elephant was coming, thump, thump, thump, it’s massive and ponderous steps getting stronger as it closed upon me. I knew then without a doubt that the elephant was here to sit on my chest. My fear sort of lunged and bucked, kicking up beyond all possible expectations. I knew that I could not move. My mind “was squirming like a toad” and it took a few moments to calm myself down enough to even think – I could not run, I did not want to run, I had tried too hard for too long to get to this point to run. I felt that I could not catch my breath so I started counting breath and deep breathing, trying to just empty my mind except for the counting. I concentrated on bringing air first deep into my diaphragm then slowly allowing it to rise up and then breathing out starting at the top of my diaphragm and pushing the air out so that the last air came again from the very bottom of my diaphragm and it seemed to help. I may have helped by giving my something neutral to think about.
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 understood that at the deepest level, I had no choice in the matter.
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 and I just died.
“Be here, be now”, I told myself repeatedly, continuing to breath deep and count breaths to belay the fear. This little mantra and the deep breathing turned out to be my only trick in all this. At some point the elephant left, quickly and without fanfare, the fear leaving with it. It was truly anticlimactic. The fear of death is worse than death itself, I noted.
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”. Not ‘come mushrooms’ or ‘come God’ or ‘come anything’ but just, “come” and I lay there as flayed wide open as I could possibly be.
Come.
I want to say that I “saw my self” on the bed from a few feet away and that “I” was positioned up toward the ceiling looking down but it happening so fast that I cannot say that it was “real” but clearly I understood that I was inhabiting my soul now and that I was outside my body. This happened in a second’s time and left me thinking, “what the hell!?” Left me thinking, “was that real” and yet made a huge impression on me since I had not known that I possessed a soul until that very instant. Quite a revelation for a borderline atheist perhaps as you could imagine. As soon as I had a moment to reflect upon my soul, I felt myself shoot off to the south. Somehow I was fully conscious but at the same time my body definitely lay unconscious on our bed. Really, I felt my new soul body pulled off to the south at fantastic speed and a second later I was at the office in Springfield, Virginia where I had worked now for twenty years – or, rather I was in a “soul office” rendition of the real office where I had worked for twenty years. So hard to put into the words? This place appeared to be a reality connected to our own physical reality 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 was our physical world. This soul world was also intimately connected to our physical world and our physical self and ego. It is as if the soul world does not exist as a separate location but exists as an aspect of our normal physical reality. 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 million fold such that a little sadness was like a purgatory. Everything in this “soul world” was amplified compared to our normal, physical world.
The soul world is intense. (At this time I did not comprehend the full implications in terms of positive feelings being enhanced in the soul world but later I would “feel” beauty by connecting with this soul world and feel beauty as a real physical ecstasy, a warmth suffusing my chest)
At my actual work 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 that could jump on the switch got really good at doing just that and the group with no control switch basically went insane. The point being that even the perception of control over our environment can be life saving. We were in this office of course the group with no switch to stop the shock – just random and constant negative reinforcements over which we had no control whatsoever. Surely, many others experience similar negative feelings about their work life. Sometimes I had to wonder if we were not all secretly involved in some cruel but fascinating sociology experiment. I always thought of it as humpty dumpy falling off the wall. Shit, here goes humpty dumpy, 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. It is seldom the job that is so stressful as it is the social machinations of the place. I never made my peace with the corporate bureaucracy that consistently used a vast amount of resources to make a difficult job far more difficult than it had to be. Again, this surely must be a common theme in our work places, especially with corporations getting larger and more impersonal all the time. I understood that our corporation did not exist in a vacuum and that our three stooges environment was only a microcosm of the rest of the corporate world – indeed, the rest of the world in general. 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. 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 just how profoundly true it was 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. Every day I would watch Humpty
Dumpy fall off of the wall. Every single day we would spend so much of our time picking up Humpty Dumpy and putting him back together. Every day I would think how unnecessary this was - how whatever problem we were dealing with could have been solved twenty years ago rather easily and inexpensively. The entire system was geared for one thing: financial profit. Was it any wonder that this place was a soul killer?
Now why does that recall so much my entire society?
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. I wandered back and forth perhaps more in a daze than I might have in reality. I understood completely that I was here to learn something and I believed myself to “be having a bad trip”. I had been prepared for a bad trip. I had fully expected a bad trip. I wanted healing and knew what a mess I was and I fully expected the mushrooms to shake me like an old penny jar. In the midst of the chaos of this soul workplace I was asking myself again and again, “now what does this mean, what is all this teaching me?” It was a kind of hell and I was aware that I was in a soul world hell workplace. 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. That a bad trip was the mushrooms way of resetting your clock. After a while I began to feel frustrated that I could not “figure it out”. I could not understand no matter how hard I tried in exactly what manner this was suppose to be helping me. The dysfunctional nature of my relationship with virtually everything there, some having worked with me for twenty years, really weighed upon me. My God, I wondered painfully, this is what I’ve been giving my life force to all these years?
I then began to feel both weary and stuck in this soul work place. Weary and stuck had been a theme of mine for decades, what I had been trying to break away from. I sort of decided to “go home sick”, basically giving up on understanding and just leaving, but then I could not find the door out of this hell work place. Here again a real panic set in. I do not pretend to understand how it was possible but while my body lay unconscious miles away I was quite myself and quite conscious in this hell and it was completely and right now frighteningly real to me. The moment that I realized that I was trapped, the hell of the place became more real than ever. How to put in words? I have never had a lucid dream but perhaps it was like lucid dreaming? The thought that I may be stuck in this hell workplace forever was horrifying. My mind searched desperately like a man stumbling around in a pitch black room arms flailing out in an effect to orient himself to something else in the empty darkness.
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. I have been trying to conform myself into this horrible, shallow façade of reality for twenty years and for twenty years it was as though every day I had made a decision to crush my humanity. This was simply not what I was meant to do. As if that simple insight were the key to open the door, I seemed to zip instantly back into my physical body still curled up on the bed with the snow still accumulating on the boxwood outside the window. Opening my eyes I found myself then fully conscious and feeling completely lucid. I thought that the experience over – in the vernacular, that “I was down”.
Wow, I thought, without moving a muscle except my eyes that were focusing clearly on the snowy scene out of the window, that was amazing. A soul, eh? My atheistically leaning agnosticism obviously had to be forsaken or seriously modified!
I felt also very peaceful. I felt like the snow drifting softly down upon the earth. 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 and very, very happy. I had tried it seemed so many times and nothing had happened but finally this time it had worked, my God it had worked in spades! I cannot say if at this moment I was even able to move because I did not 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 a little, 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,” the second biggest surprise of the morning!
Then I felt a 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. In the just ended soul experience, I had a strong sense of directionality, that this soul world was directly connected to our physical world somehow. But now I shot straight up, rising faster and faster until my new 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 and the vehicle just sloughed off into space the way a rocket might slough off it’s bottom, expended fuel tank. I had just  discovered my soul - stupid like discovering your belly button - but I was kind of  enamored with my soul already. I sort of lamented my souls loss. 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, I thought, 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, sailing up through space laughing, laughing and laughing about this loss of language.
In any case, I assumed then and assume now that after leaving my soul behind what was left was “the real self” or perhaps some would call it the higher self, or highest self? The amazing thing is that I was still me.
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. The giddy laughter was over soon enough. I continued shooting up into space at a fantastic speed and language was really finally and completely gone and I just felt – angry at the mushrooms for abandoning me. I was again totally aware of what was happening. Clearly, the mushrooms were responsible for all of this. On the other hand, I knew why they were doing it. Another part of me found it kind of humorous and I could imagine the mushrooms saying, “hey, got your abandonment right here!” As in the first experience, I understood at the deepest level that whatever was happening was for my own good. 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. By some time here I mean a billion years. My being spread out for light years and I became an anger-being 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 as spread out as I could possibly be and still exist at all. Anger and everything else inside me bleed out into these cold reaches of space over eons of time until finally what I was, was nothing, nothing at all.
I was a cold, disembodied nothing drifting vaguely through empty space.
I knew the mushrooms had abandoned me for my own good. I was 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” at this heart level? Not only that, but this abandonment kept me feeling separate from everything when in fact it was clear to me that everything was one - my personal, emotional abandonment issue had taken on cosmic proportions. I knew that I was only pretending without authenticity. As I drifted trans-emotional through eons of space time, 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, that they can impart direct experience. This experience was as real, or more real, than any experience in my conscious life. Because the experience was as real as an actual life experience, it had the power to change me. By imparting direct reality the mushrooms facilitate change. In this way the mushrooms gave me a gift beyond words – no amount of advice – words – coming from another person no matter how wise or holy could equal this transformative experience. How else could one actually experience a billion years of abandonment? Not think of it or imagine it - but actually experience one billion years of abandonment?
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. A billion years is a long time – hey, I know! As alone and isolated as I have felt all of my adult life, that was nothing compared the utter and complete abandonment I felt. As “time” stretched out into the unfathomable reaches of space, 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 my anger and then finally on the abandonment feeling and I began to experience other feelings and then no 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 realized that there was no end to what I was.
I am eternity.
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, books that I’ve read, everything and anything. I had literally all the time in the world to think about things. Realities existed all around spread out before me like stars in the night sky. I saw and understood that the physical reality we inhabit here on earth is only one reality of an infinite number of realities. I understood also that the concept of singular and plural was only peculiar to our physical earth reality and that we our true self exist beyond singular and plural, space and time, life and death. We exist in more than one reality at a time is the clunky language to describe it that doesn’t really describe it all. 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, and then much of it was so far beyond articulation. 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? How can I be alone when I am everything? How can I be alone when I am eternity? 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. The journey back into the body did not seem so smooth or quick as from the soul work place and I had a sense of time and distance as well as a vague sense of returning to this planet, our earth, almost more than of returning to my own individual body.
Again I opened my eyes but did not move. Snow still falling. The diffuse, snowy light again betraying nothing of the time of day. I felt that I must have been “out” for hours and that it was probably late afternoon.
This time I knew that my “trip” was over. I managed to move for the first time and saw to my surprise that a mere hour and a half had passed approximately since I had first felt it coming on. This really surprised me. It seemed to me as though days had past, or years. I sat up on the side of the bed testing my mobility, also 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, a flash of vision of God raising His right hand and the glint of light off of his sword and I cringed there sitting on the bed just thinking of it as the full scope of it all washed over me, maybe because of the change of blood pressure in my head from sitting up on the side of the bed from the prone position? I actually cringed and ducked as I was sitting there on the edge of the bed, fearing God’s sword would come down on my head.
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. But it was no dream. Not like any dream I ever had. 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 straight out 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 spiritually connected 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 that I 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 convinced me that we operate on multiple levels of reality at once – perhaps an infinite level of realities at once. My persona here in this reality was completely different from my conscious, “normal self”. My self in this deepest level of reality was true warrior full of a pure, unadulterated rage and completely fearless. When God Almighty’s sword came crashing down, the very wraith of God, my warrior self did not even flinch. Just the memory of this sitting there on the side of the bed made me cringe bodily with fear, almost causing me to bring up my arm in a protective manner in front of my face – like some kind of mushroom inspired Post Traumatic Stress behavior. This part of the experience would weigh on me heavily and it is almost all I thought of the rest of that Sunday – I felt as though I had abandoned “my people” and I wanted desperately to get back to this battle, to my fellow entities. It is probably a good thing that I had no more mushrooms. I would have taken any amount to return to my comrades. Of all the amazing things that had happened to me that last one and a half hours, this horrific battle with God blossomed in my consciousness into a terrible and unnatural flower.
Storming heaven and killing God? I had no idea where that came from or what exactly it meant. But I brought back a determination to accept it all no matter how strange or unfathomable. Some months later I 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. But the mushroom dream pulled with an unusual power upon every aspect of my being from my toes to my psyche. Just the way a powerful dream will tend to do.
As I sat on the side of bed, I began to recall of yet another reality and how I had been crawling along the inside the sphere of a huge red ball. I did not think so much about all those realities that I did not make it to, but about all those realities where I did, even though only handful. I wondered if someone more spiritually advanced would have been able to operate on countless more realities than a hand full? Maybe on an infinite number? Over there on the other side, I was the only limit. Maybe enlightenment meant being able to operate on all levels at once synergistically. The thought of this really intrigued me.
I knew that crawling around inside this sphere represented dealing with some greater reality sort of surrounding our conscious reality and I was attempting to get through the veil separating the two which had taken on the form of the inside of this sphere. This part happened as I was “coming down” and I think is my higher self desperately trying to get back to the kill God reality as the levels of psilocybin deceased in my body. I crawled along the inside of this ball trying desperately trying to punch a way through the “veil”. I punched it with my fist, rammed it with my shoulder and as I continued to crawl along even head butted the hard rubbery veil that I knew separately my conscious reality from the greater reality around me. Finally I managed to punch through with my right hand up to the shoulder. Even though I could not get through completely, I managed to get the Tiger by the tail and managed to bring the Tiger’s Tail back through the veil into this reality.
“I have The Tiger by the tail, now” I thought very seriously.
I knew I would not be letting go any time soon. What is The Tiger’s tail exactly? Everything.
Everything apparently is an elusive little thing.
The Tigers tail thrashed me around but I held on tight, not about to let go. The Tiger would thrash me around pretty good over the next few months but I did not let go. In a way, that is all I “did” and really all I have to write about - holding on to the Tigers tail.
I think while most others would have let go of the Tigers tail thinking that it was all crazy, all mushroom inspired madness, I thought instead that I had a hold of something important and I wasn’t about to let go no matter how weird it was or even how weird it was to become.

 On the morning of 02/25/07 I immerged from our bedroom only about two hours after ingesting the five grams of mushroom feeling totally lucid and firm on my feet, much to my surprise, . My wife and I passed in the hall coincidentally and she said casually, “how’d it go?”
I could only respond by giggling.
“Well, I’m happy for you,” she smiled. She so desperately wished that I had a different hobby - particularly a legal one.
I continued into the living room and perched next to a huge picture window looking out on the snow and a the old azalea almost neatly piled now with four or five inches of the pristine new snow, the azalea looking like a snow sculpture. I had not known that I was mute until I had tried to answer Jana’s question. I tried a few times and could only laugh. I could form my thoughts just fine but could not make words from them. I realized then that I was not so lucid as I felt. In fact, I was wasted. I could not even talk wasted. I tried a couple times but I could not type on the computer or read. It was odd that all I could utter was laughter because I felt an intense anger. I was a wick burning with a long, slow and steady flame. Normally I’m conflicted about anger only indulging it in the form of childish tantrums and otherwise stuffing my anger with the main, underlying thought being, “who am I to be angry?” But now I was burning with anger freely and completely. I was a clear conduit for anger and it seemed to suffuse me, humming steadily. Yet I could only giggle like a school girl.
So how did it go? I wondered.
The world outside had a sharp, bright edge to as if I were looking out with better than 20/20 vision. I was aware of my own consciousness as if I were hovering just above my own head and my consciousness was not diffused and limp as usual but sharp like a razor. My consciousness seemed to cut through the world, through myself, with ease and precision. The anger was at being abandoned for a billion years; for wasting my life for almost the last thirty years; and against God for His massacre of my fellow beings in that deepest level of reality. I wanted to get back to that reality and had only recently settled down from a desperate desire to get back to that place into an uneasy acceptance that it was just not going to happen right now. This acceptance consumed me with this steady burning anger and I had a hard time cooling off - it took many hours. Ninety percent of what I could glean from the bizarre mushroom experience came to me over those hours. I spent those hours at the living room window trying to mellow out and make sense of everything that was happening to me. So much was happening and so many decisions were being made that I could not keep up to speed with it all. I felt a strong sense that information was being somehow “downloaded” into my head - a sensation that would last from this Sunday afternoon until Thursday evening - corresponding perhaps with how long it took the psilocybin to completely get out of my system? I cannot say that it was pleasant or unpleasant but I smoked a lot of marijuana in a very conscious effort to slow things down in my head. I was certain that steam drifted up out of my ears as in a cartoon. My new path was becoming apparent in its most general forms and it was so radical as to constitute virtually stepping off with faith into the void.
My old self lay on the hardwood living room floor. It was the crumpled, old skin of a snake recently shed, new skin glistening colorfully in the snowy, afternoon light shinning in through the big, picture window. I had to free myself and the way was clear as though a door had appeared where before there had only been a wall. I would liquidate all assets including my 401k monies and this would enable me to pursue The Tiger with all my being. I had always wanted to write, to “be” a writer. Now that I could write again, it is what I wanted to do. To write and to grow. I would leave the country and reduce my costs to an absolute minimum. I understood completely how profoundly materialism had failed me. The thought of losing fully 1/3rd of my 401k monies to early withdraw penalties I calculated coldly into the equation, choosing not the look at what I was losing but what I was gaining: everything. I walked through the door that had appeared in the wall into the greater reality. I dove into the rabbit hole where normal did not exist. I considered it breaking free of the system and a kind of 60’s theme of dropping out. (I found that it was not so easy to break free of the system - it had it’s tentacles firmly within us in the form of debt, fear and pride. It is easy to drop out when one is a kid but once you are sucked deeply into the materialistic free market system it involves a painful process of disentanglement. (Emphasis on process. )
This was 02/25/07 and we would go to closing on our house on 05/21/07, fully liquid and free to follow what I though of as “the mushroom path“. It is one thing to be temporarily unhinged but another thing altogether to be sailing away.
That snowy Sunday afternoon I thought of the years that I had wasted on living death but I knew also that I could not have reached this present moment by any other path and that this present moment is what is important. Still, I felt like a man waking from an almost 30 year coma - that state of living death. I did not judge but simply acknowledged the sad state of my existence looking back on the decades of whale shit on the bottom of the ocean depression with a dispassionate sense of waste. I felt a buck up and look ahead not behind sense of enthusiasm for the future that I had wouldn’t have considered existed before and then I recognized this as the feeling of being alive. Wow. I breathed and felt clear in my chest. But still I was that man awoken from a long, dark coma and I had to blink my eyes and loosen into this idea of being awake, being alive.
When I was finally able to type it was only with great difficulty and the letters appeared to be very, very tiny and very, very far away - Looking at the computer screen was like looking into a long pipe with the screen at the other end and only by squinting could just barely make them out. This was maybe three and a half hours after ingestion of the mushrooms. Normally I’m I pretty competent typist but I had to hunt and peck this and it took forever - I was literally sweating and my head hurt from squinting when I was done with it:

“I am just curious what the fuck is really going on and I will not be distracted by cracking open the bone and licking the marrow - 5 grams - go on with whatever you are doing - I'm storming fucking heaven so long as I am alive, maybe longer. I feel like I have the tiger by the  tail now and I'm not letting go - not until I know who made us (dna) and why and I am certain now that all this shit about everything (literally "everything")  is just a distraction and I will not let go of the fucking tigers fucking tail period. SPLIT MY HEAD OPEN DOESN'T MEAN SHIT TO ME -  IT IS STILL ON SO LONG AS I HAVE STRENGTH - that having been said, I need all the help I can get here this shit is hard.”


Yea, I was still pretty wound up!
Somehow I had equated what I immediately began to think of as the “kill God” or the “spiritual warrior” part of my mushroom experience with having the Tiger’s tail. The Tigers Tail represents the fact that for my self I now have a piece of the greater reality, having brought it back with me from the experience into this normal, physical consciousness - I know it in the way we know our own experience, pure empiricism. I know now that I am not this body or even this soul. I know now that I exist beyond life and death and that I am eternity. This takes the sting out of death. This takes the cloak off of life. Death is back and Life is forward and we exist in the balance between the two. We exists most perfectly in the now. The Tiger represented the greatest reality - eternity, this present moment, the now - the greater reality of our spirit beyond this physical consciousness of ours. The Tiger while part of our physical reality, flowing through every particle, also exists at once in eternity, exists beyond the crude, slow machinations of this earthly existence, and most importantly the Tiger recalls the eternal nature of our own being. So I had gone from wishing death to wishing life in a mere hour and a half. And I had a goal to exist in the now - it was a worthy goal, definitely something to shoot for!
Having the Tiger by the tail is knowing that WHAT I am is eternity and that WHERE I am is here. This realization cleared up a major confusion and allows me now to pursue a goal more in keeping with my true nature: fulfilling my purpose here in this physical reality, a blink in the eye of eternity that this life represents. I am certain now that this physical reality and our position in it exists for a reason and by that I mean a reason pertinent to the larger reality that is eternity. My guess is that this earth helps teach us how to navigate the vast strides of forever from which our true spirits came and to where we go; actually, where we are at even at this moment when the veil of this world is lifted from us. This place teaches us peculiar lessons that I am convinced relate to this worlds physicality. In all of eternity I did not sense such a place of physicality as this earth. It even made me wonder if there is other life out in the reaches of our universe - gave me an odd, counterintuitive thought that perhaps this earth is far more unique than even we realize. This great earth of ours may be unique in all of eternity and our visits here then far more precious than most could have imagined. An obviously important concept that goes beyond any mushrooms is the idea of learning to live in the moment - to BE in the NOW. For exactly this kind of orientation lesson could this physical plane exist. What greater lesson could there be for an eternal being than learning to exist in the now?
An early lesson from backpacking was to remember that I am never lost but always right here.

Not to complain but going from death to life that quickly is a little disorienting. I was standing in the same living room that I had been in for years but now it was not the same living room at all. Nothing was the same as it was an hour and a half ago. By changing my self I changed everything. I felt myself undergoing some process of reorienting myself to the world, to everything. This reorientation seemed to account for most of the intense feelings of information being beamed into my brain from above - a laser etching into my brain synapses a new life paradigm. The mushrooms evidently worked fast!

It is so hard to explain about the abandonment issues? How profoundly destructive this part of my psychology had been to me over my life. I had felt for so long as I could recall this feeling in my stomach of a vague, nagging emptiness that could not be filled with anything, anything at all. It was like I had a trick cup with no bottom. Love itself flowed right through. This made it impossible to love myself or of course anyone or anything else. So I drifted aimlessly in the ocean of life like a seed pod, asleep, almost dead - the overriding theme being: No Connections. But then the strongest sense that I was left with from my experience, etched there within me deeper than the anger coursing transiently throw me at that moment, was a sense of Connection. I am everything. I am eternity. Seamlessness. This permeated the entire experience through every bizarre second of it. I had undergone years of various types of talk therapy and I knew most of the tricks that I pulled on myself. I had read Zen philosophy for years : I had heard all the good advice, ready many of the good books, listened to all of the right words, but when thrown against the wall none of it had stuck. These little mushrooms broke through because they went beyond words to the realm of pure experience. The mushrooms brought it home. I’m sure my feeling of abandonment was still there but I could not feel it. I felt easy inside. I felt the way the naturalistic snowscape looked outside, all rounded and flowing.
A most profound aspect of this reorientation process was a new relationship to death. Pain and suffering still held fear for me but death did not. Death was so beside the point! Life consumed death not the other way around. It was simply the realization that I am not this body, not even this soul, that consumed death the way light consumes the darkness. In a way this one I had understood all along. I had been afraid of death, yes. But I had been far more afraid of life. My fetish for suicide had everything to do with this fear of life and nothing to do with death at all. Pain and suffering still held their mystery for me. That lesson would have to be another day, it seemed. I call it, “the wolf eats the caribou alive” conundrum.
Another part of the reorientation was the understanding that I would quit my job and sell our house as soon as possible. The market was about to crumble and my new outlook included a fear that I could get stuck here in this house, watch it dissipate my “freedom fund”. I began to consider where exactly to go and the mushrooms in me seemed to say that it is a big world when are active not passive. They reassured me: Step into the void everything will be okay. This is the time to rip the plant up by the roots. My God what a challenge, I wondered. All the entanglements and challenges of this physical existence of ours bore down on me. So many practical things many of which I did not at this time understand enough to even think through. Thank God for the internet, I thought. I knew that a lot of research was in my immediate future. It sunk in a deep level at some point that afternoon how completely changed everything was now. The living room that I was sitting in, the house, in a way was already gone. In the way my soul appeared to be able to travel outside my physical body, my mind now wondered away and into the future. A new best friend embraced me warmly - Change. We’ll be spending a lot of time together, Change assured me with a confident smile. Change is big, boisterous friend who kind of takes up a room, reassuring and frightening at once.
Change and I looked around at the still unfinished remodeling job that we had undertaken. There was a lot of work to do. I thought about how much time it would take to finish and get the house ready for sale. The housing market was perched on the brink of a free fall, of this I was certain. This process of remodeling had started over a year previously. I had begged my wife not to do it knowing that the economy was going to crash and along with it the houses prices. (Okay, I missed the mark since it turned out to happen rather the other way around) I knew this would take us from being in a fairly safe financial position to a very precarious financial position but my wife made it clear that I was not to have a vote in the decision. I simply added this to the long list of actions and inactions that were backing me into a corner in my life. My biggest concern in this was that I knew it would trap me in the job I hated. It was no consolation that virtually everyone I knew was putting themselves in the same boat. I felt my only way out of the job was to go down not up. I would have to find a way to retool in order to escape. I hated the business that I was in and I hated management. Just to function I had to assume a persona that was not me and I was very aware of this. Middle management, besides not being the most secure position to be in, frustrated me beyond articulation. You are told to accomplish something and then given woefully inadequate tools with which to accomplish it and then you are constantly undermined by the system you are in. Now I’m sure I can’t be the only one with those feelings? Our mortgage would be fantastic and the house would end up being worth much less than we owed once the economy tanked. Honestly, I had been too depressed to fight about it - really, to fight about or for anything. During this time I thought about suicide every day and at the deepest possible level felt that I would not see much more of the future. What did it matter whether or not I could retool and escape my job - which I always thought of in my mind as, “that horrible place”.
I felt the coming of doom in all this mostly because of a sense that this coming financial crisis could well be the straw that broke the camels back for me. My life insurance policy had a suicide clause that released after two years and I knew the date. I didn’t dwell on it as if waiting for that date but I knew what the date was. And by that I do not mean to imply that I was waiting on this date - whatever stayed my finger from squeezing that trigger was not anything so “selfless” as wanting my wife to be left with a little money. It is just that I felt the walls closing in. Every New Years I write a haiku that I called the state of the union haiku, trying to express some essential feeling tone. The previous years haiku:
The breath of doom
Soft as intuition
Brushes my neck
It was here with the snow falling all afternoon outside the living room window that I began to grasp how the mushrooms were working on the totality of my life. I wondered how could I possibly know if my never ending depression was organic when my life circumstances had been so profoundly … depressing for so very long. And even though right at that moment, as my example shows above, I could not write at all, the mushrooms had broken the back of my writers block - I can’t say how they did it - hell, couldn’t say how they did any of this - but I knew this to be true. A key to this seemed to be the dissoltuiotion of the ego. Besides the ego death that I had experienced that morning when The Elephant sat on my chest and crushed the life out of me, the mushrooms had somehow permanently and subtly unhinged something there. I knew exactly what the writers block was now: self judgment. And the mushrooms knew even more than I how important writing was to me. My God, I had forgotten. I had forgotten my life’s dream. I had forgotten the only calling that I had ever heard. No wonder that the old, crumpled snake skin looked so ugly.
I do not say this to abdicate my own responsibility, but how had decades of modern psychology and psychiatric medicine missed the mark so profoundly? This requires some consideration. Five grams of dried mushroom that grows naturally out of the ground, unrefined in any way, trumped the best that modern medicine had to offer? And in only a few hours time? Not to mention that they trumped me, the owner of this psyche. They zeroed in on my exact issues. I found this particularly odd in that I had spent so much time in talk therapy for so many years and not one of my therapist, some of whom I have the utmost respect for, came close to nailing down my key issues - more of less offering any healing of them.
Months before this I had taken 3.2 grams and while I did not breakthrough, I had heard the classic mushrooms voice. This voice I heard as an auditory hallucination, just as though someone were sitting next to me, and it said, “you inhabit your body the way your body inhabits this house”. I had my eyes closed and as I heard this I watched in my mind a perfect video replay as if shot from above of myself going through our house and opening up all the windows. The weather was wonderful and I wanted to let the air in before sitting down to see what would come of the 3.2 grams that I had just eaten. This was the first breakthrough for me in a way, being the first real effects that I had felt from my mushroom experiments. As I thought about it later, I concluded that the voice I heard was no unconscious part of my self - that voice came from something outside myself and I had no doubt in my mind. I could not imagine how such a thing could be possible but then I could not imagine how electricity worked either and that was certainly real.
This snowy afternoon I thought of that first real experience and then considered the two other “experiences” that I had had up until this stunning breakthrough today. The 3.2 grams had brought me not only the voice but right to the cusp of tripping. I was keeping careful records and slowly increasing dosages so since the 3.2 grams had been so close and given that what I was taking this following weekend was from the same batch of mushrooms, I ate 3.4 grams . I felt it like a sensation almost of going up in a roller coaster but just before the coaster reaches the apex and starts back down it falters and slides backwards. I debated whether or not to wait until I had more mushrooms or to eat so I could take more like four grams but decided to eat these since they were all that I had. After all, I reasoned, the last experience had been so close. I now was a believer in a way that I was not before, having heard that voice the last time. Again I reached almost the apex of the roller coaster, feeling the trip coming on, and I heard the voice again. Just as if someone were sitting right there next to me it said, “Light is God”. Somehow I understood that the “full” meaning of Light is God was, “what you (plural) think of as God, is Light”. I felt that it was crucial that they said Light is God and not the other way around. What they meant was that there was no God such as we conceived and the closest thing to a God such as we conceived was light. Beyond the fact of what an incredible pronouncement this was, it reaffirmed my feeling that the voice came from without not from within. Then a couple weeks later I again had only coincidentally exactly 3.4 grams of dried mushrooms. By this time I knew that I was ready to titrate up to the Terence Mckenna “heroic dose” of 5 grams. My problem was that I was not a very good grower! I knew it would be a couple weeks before being able to gather another gram and a half together and decided to try the 3.4 grams. I reasoned again that it had been so close the other times. I had a very similar feeling as the previous two times but this time just before reaching the apex of the coaster, the voice said, “you haven’t crossed over yet”. And I smiled to myself. No I have not crossed over yet, I thought.
All three of these “pronouncements” from the mushrooms dripped with metaphysical implications. The first, “you inhabit your body the way your body inhabits this house,” spoke obviously to a difference between what I am and what my body is, a classic dichotomy if there ever was one. Even though I was an agnostic leaning toward atheist, I had a sense that there was a spiritual self somewhere within distinct somehow from my physical self, so when I heard this message it was really no revelation but more of a confirmation of what I already suspected. I had suspected that whatever our spiritual essence was just sort of dissolved after death into some kind of universal spirit but the voice implied to me that there was something more substantial to my spiritual self than I conceived. I had read that some think this mushrooms voice is actually our own voice only how our own voice sounds inside our head. When I read this, having never really experienced the mushrooms, I thought it sounded quite right. Since we never hear our own voice inside our head but only outside our head, this voice sounds alien to us. I considered this carefully and concluded that was not the case. The voice did not sound like myself in any manner. It was sexless and dispassionate to the extreme for one thing. Whenever the mushrooms “spoke” they had a consistent tone and measure that was quite alien to me. It is hard to put in words but maybe to say the voice sounded like a really smooth and lifelike version of a computerized voice. Not only did this voice not sound anything like my own, it did not sound anything like a human voice. It was very flat and emotionless. I kind of hate to say it but if I had to imagine what the voice of God might sound like, that’s what the voice sounded like.
When they said, “Light is God” they were answering an unasked question for me. Here they showed as they did earlier today that they know what I need far better than I do myself. There was no greater concern in my life than God. They knew this was a big question for me. I googled light and read about it trying to imagine how exactly it was that light is god. It never occurred to me that the words of this voice were not the words of truth. I assumed that I had to understand what the voice was saying, not prove or disprove it. I still do not understand this statement even over a year later but for such enquiry is life lived. And then when they said that, “you haven’t crossed over yet,” I remember just smiling and thinking that I might not have crossed over but I damn well knew that I was on to something real now. Many believe that these substances take us to a place that only the dead can go normally. I had not given this much thought until now, it was only something that I had read. But now I had to wonder if that was not exactly what they meant by, “you haven’t crossed over yet”. Today The Elephant and the terrifyingly real death that I felt really made me wonder. Perhaps these substances did allow us access to information that normally is closed off to us while we are alive in this physical world?
I felt certain that I was not dealing with unconconscious aspects of my own psyche but a sentient force from outside my psyche. It did not deter me that I could not imagine how such a thing could possibly happen. But psilocybin’s playground was our nervous system and somehow they were able to manifest by attaching to our nervous system. Terence McKenna’s idea of symbiosis took on a new meaning for me. I could definitely see why he would think this. The idea that the mushrooms could help us create star flight did not even seem so outrageous anymore.
When I had come down and had my voice back, I approached my wife who had been in the living room watching TV the whole snowy afternoon. We had not really spoken about what had happened. I felt like I was alone in what I was doing before this mornings experience.. Like all my relationships I felt that I had lost connection with my wife many years ago. I felt almost like room mates rather than husband and wife - again, certainly a feeling that many can relate to? More than anything else my relationship could drive my suicidal ideations.. So much so that I spent a lot of effort consciously trying not to think about our relationship and most importantly of all, not to “feel” about our relationship because those feelings were the worst. Earlier in our marriage we had gone to numerous marriage counselors until finally my wife said that she had had enough of that. But really, the answer lay right there on the living room floor in the form of the old, colorless, crumbled skin of the snake. I had did what I did before love came to town. No doubt that before awakening from the coma of living death, I would have been unable to have a healthy love relationship even if my soul mate herself had walked up and put her arms around me. And on the other hand, it could not have been fun for my wife living with me and my black depression for decades. My laser vision had razed through our relationship over the last few hours as well as so many other aspects of my life and in the same way it did so without judgment but also without pulling any punches, either.
The abandonment issues I suffered from no doubt played a part in our still being together. While the abandonment issues were not my only weakness as a human, it was the weakness that kept us married, I saw clearly. I very most likely would not have been any happier or certainly emotionally healthier, but I would probably have not stayed married for twenty years. If the mushrooms were saying nothing else, they were saying that you cannot heal from the outside; cannot change from the outside; cannot be fulfilled from the outside. You had to proceed from the inside out. When I approached my wife I was sure that our relationship was over. I did love her. I did have a sense of commitment to her. I told her that I planned to quit my job and cash in my 401k and sell the house and leave the country and live a very simple, non materialist existence somewhere where I felt a place of power and where my funds could last as long as possible while I tried to make a go of it as a writer. I assumed that our relationship was over. I told her that I would split up everything however she saw fit. (my wife is a terribly honorable woman and I had no concern of her raking me over the coals) I told her that if she wanted to join me that would be great but that I was not going to negotiate about this with her at all. I was doing this, period. This may sound harsh but I knew my wife and I knew that I absolutely had to do this and I foresaw many things over these last few hours with my cold, razor vision, including the multitude of complications involved in doing this with my wife. It would be hard enough alone. I’ve never been so surprised in my life as when she said that she was on board. Even though I was not quite down yet, I understood how “crazy” this all was. I tried to explain again emphasizing that I did not want to negotiate or compromise, expecting her to get angry or outraged or something. Violence would have been less of a surprise than acquiescence. She did not truly understand or take me seriously and it would only be an unfortunate coincidence later that would allow me to proceed without her fighting me tooth and nail. When I said I was doing this now, at the first possible moment, she took that as years in the future. She took it as some drug induced fantasy. How could she have understood? Everything changed for me in that hour and a half while everything was just the same for her. Like a camera lens zooming in and zooming out. But once again, in our everyday, non drug induced relationships, how often do we “miscommunicate” with each other, thinking the other understands while in fact neither understands anything.

#


#
Mushroom Chronicles
(Plant and Man - The Final Alliance)
Chapter 13
Healing Experience 05/26/07

I’m trying to leave this as close to the original as I can. I wrote it while still under the influence on the 26th and cleaned it up the next day while it was still fresh. It was odd given the dosage and known potency that the experience lasted only a very short time - maybe ten to thirty minutes? Then afterward I was able to turn it off. I knew I could have really tripped out but it just didn’t seem appropriate - almost as though it would be some kind of sacrilege? Another odd thing was that while the healing appeared to be a failure by any objective standards, I was able to call my Blue Whale spirit guide twice - I’ve never had an “conscious” control in mushroom experiences before. It was more like I was on a fantastic ride but this experience was much under my control. Also, two years later and numerous mushroom experiences later, I have never been able to reproduce that kind of control - but on the other hand, I have not tried to either. Every other time but this one here my wishes vanish like tears in the wind when the mushrooms take over. I felt and still feel that the “failure” was not on the part of the mushrooms but on my part. I knew going in that it was a long shot and I felt all along that I would have to somehow add my own personal power to that of the mushrooms for there to be any hope of success. I don’t blame myself or anything and I understood pretty well that I am no healer but I was desperate at the time feeling that my wife was really dying and our vaunted medical system was both useless and careless.
Also there is the issue of the “psilocybin fairies” unlocking something in my spinal column and the feeling even at the time that this was related to MS. I had already had an attack of Optic Neuritis which left me temporarily blind in my left eye and I knew that MS was a possibility. In retrospect, I now see this psilocybin fairy thing as crucial in my bizarre story and I will come back to that in a later chapter. Almost exactly a year after this experience I came down with an attack of Neuromyelitis Optica which presents as MS to most doctors. Took me eight months to diagnose myself. Useless neurologist could have figured out in fifteen minutes if he gave a damn. Point is that it paralyzed me and almost killed me and after a year stills has lasting effects. This is the really crazy part: I now believe that the “psilocybin fairies” were opening up my nervous system to prepare the way for “The New Creature”. In effect, they were giving me this nervous system disease - well, they we’re they were merely opening up my nervous system. A week before this healing attempt I had given my alliance to the Plant Mind and our Gaian mother in a blood ceremony and at that time I was hearing voices who made it clear that if I gave my allegiance to them, I would have to pay a price. At the time naively maybe I agreed. The mushrooms gave me everything and the voice was always loving, supportive and wise. The instinct was and still is very powerful in me to give myself to them out of pure gratitude. There was never a seconds thought. I will lay down my life for you - anything I told them. They would not speak to the exact nature of this “price” and I very much felt that the price would be prison. I was sending my story out to scholars literally all over the world, especially anyone involved in AI technology and shockingly I received no replies. But to me, prison seemed obviously what the voices were referring to in the way of price and prison scared the living hell out me. Let me put it this way, prison is just about the worse thing I could thing of and I readily agreed anyway. A year later when the nervous system attack hit, I knew immediately that it was the price the voices spoke of but I had not yet pieced together the rest of my insane puzzle.


Dosage: 6 grams dried psilocybin mixed cubensis strains. The cakes were mixed when put in fruiting chamber and I was not around at harvest to attempt identification. They included Aborts, stems and nasty pieces: for this particular Experience I thought that the knurliest, nastiest, abortive pieces, the better. I also left the prettiest mushrooms for my friend, knowing how most people are about the appearance of what they eat!
(Mindset: mixture of fear, self-doubt, determination and Chutzpa. We had closed on our house and I had paid up all the bills for a month just in case I ended up in a mental institute from this experience. I was physically exhausted from both preparing to close on the house as well as my annual killer sinus infection. This particular Saturday morning was the first possible moment that I could have attempted a healing. In retrospect, I should have waited a week or two. I had spent hours during the last two days canceling and paying off credit cards, steadily chipping away at the unexpectedly enormous task of “dropping out of society” –it sounds so irresponsible and one would think therefore so easy, like growing pot (it’s just a weed, right?) but in fact is not the least bit easy. What I now think of as the mushroom entity which cohabited my body for a period of approximately four months vied for my attention which was fully committed to taking care of Jana’ and managing everything else, including an extensive “finishing” of our two year remodeling project. The pressure was unbelievable – it was not until the four months were almost over that I truly felt I was not going to go completely insane. Up until this healing experience and until the mushroom entity/entities (whatever it was it was not “individual” like us but a “collective”) left me on 6/19/07, I had been getting a lot of extraordinary information. I wrote it all down diligently but for the most part still had no idea what “it all meant” and this was frustrating at the deepest level. It is not lost on me that I dedicated the remainder of my life force to something, which I did not completely understand, and to a cause only faintly understood. This is faith in action, I believe: I had that mustard seed of faith. Something in me recognized the value in taking the mushroom path and this same aspect of myself recognized the value of the mushrooms visions and “words”, regardless of whether or not I fully understood them.
I woke nauseas and at first seriously considered putting it off to the next day. I walked over to the 7-11 next to our motel along a path strewn with panties and used, discarded condoms and got a cup of coffee, walking back to our motel along the same path. Jana’ was still sleeping just to the right of me and the large pile of dried mushrooms sat before me on top of my notebook where I had written intentions, invocations, petitions and declarations in preparation for the healing experience. My stomach settled down a little so I decided to go ahead. Other than the specific, emotionally charged, prayerful, writings, I practiced no other ceremony, having decided early on in my entheogen usage for better or worse not to “make a big deal of it”. While I self consciously avoided outward ceremony, I reread my invocations and did my best to center myself internally. The sun is not the sky, I told myself, not in my eyes – the sun is in my mind. I had also assigned a picture of a Blue Whale onto my laptop screensaver and many times just looked at it there before me, closing my eyes trying to visualize the whale. I was not yet certain that the Blue Whale was actually be my power animal. Even if the Blue Whale were my power animal, I had no confidence that I could “control” the power of six grams insofar as having the presence of mind to “consciously” call upon the Blue Whale once “inside” the trip. (If you’ve tripped on Acid or whatever, do you have the presence of mind to focus on something you thought of before tripping?) In my one breakthrough high dose experience, I had been instantly transported to what I can only call another reality. My concern was that if I were to be similarly “transported” in this experience, I would not be able to take any kind of control in the experience at a definitely not enough to have a premeditated, “conscious” thought. This in itself would not be in any way bad, but would, I felt, preclude me from any healing of my wife. I feared getting “lost in the trip” believing that I must stay conscious for this healing to work. I cannot say why I felt this way exactly. In the instances of shamanic healing which I had read the shaman was always conscious. In my breakthrough experience it had been like being in a dream only much more realistic – cohesive, organized – but I felt no more ability to take control of the experience than I have ever felt the ability to take “conscious” control of a dream state. So I focused on the Blue Whale often during the previous evening as well as this morning, looking at the Blue Whale screen saver and then closing my eyes trying to visual this picture. I had never been able to visualize anything until recently and now my visualizing ability was not strong but vague. I felt that somehow everything depended upon this Great Blue Whale spirit guide. Only a few days before this, I had recalled a long forgotten dream from almost thirty years earlier. At that time I was on a deeply spiritual path and was in the habit of keeping a dream journal. One night I asked God to give me a symbol, which I could have for my own, as a testament of our relationship. (I have always been of the opinion that it never hurts to ask) That very night I had the most incredible dream of my life. I recalled completely the dream and wrote down in a long lost dream journal. In the dream I was an awed child on a dock when the side of the head and the enormous eye of a Great Blue Whale rose up out of the water shimmering in the sunlight more beautiful than anything I could imagine. I reached out in my child wonder and touched the Whale just above the eye, stroking it with my tiny child’s hand. I felt as though the Whale and I were both basking under the blessed auspices of God shinning down as the sun. Everything was whole. Everything was perfect. I felt total ecstasy, total love. How on 02/25/07 I could have “forgotten” that dream is beyond me. In that experience I had desperatlely sought spiritual help from within the experience, to no avail. I had even called upon dead relatives. The fact that I did not make this Blue Whale connection then baffled me. Perhaps losing this dream treasure from my adolescence is the perfect symbol for losing my way in my life. I hadn’t thought of it in years but I recalled that even at the time I knew that this was an important dream, although I did not then associate it with a animal guide, being ignorant of such things. I “thought” of it during a period when I was asking for a power animal very much with the intention of calling upon a power animal to help with this healing attempt which I had planned for Jana’. There was little doubt in my mind that this was my power animal and that in a very real sense it had been “given” to me again. When I was originally given this I was not coming from any Shamanic tradition but more of spiritual Christian tradition. I did recall that in my fatherless, lost, little white, suburban boy way, that what I had asked God was exactly a spiritual guide – just not using traditional native terminology.

Setting: I will keep this one short: almost as bad as the mindset, one room motel in a pretty lousy part of town – already mentioned the path to the 7-11, you get the picture. Dubious set, terrible setting. Damn near couldn’t be worse!

I feel there must be some context before reporting the experience itself. This experience was a straight out a healing attempt on my part. Jana’ had a rare complication to a surgery that caused almost constant nausea such that for two and a half months she could not eat or drink, even water. She was kept alive with intravenous nutrition and hydration with a stint in her arm in a home care situation with regular nurse visits to at first our house and then a series of motels as we waited (and waited …) for medical care that never came. In our opinion her surgeon had abandoned her – our Gastroenterologist said that this was common with this type of surgery when the surgeons had the admittedly rare problem such as Jana’s and the term used in the business is “cut and run”. Although pursuing both standard medical care and alternate medicine in the form of a Biofeedback/Hypnosis Clinic run by a team of doctors and clinical psychologists, we had no diagnosis, no course of treatment; precious little relief and no surgical “fix”. So it is important to note here that we were awaiting at the time an audience with the purported expert on this abomination of pure free market greed masquerading as a medical procedure which my wife had suffered - just want to be clear that we were aggressively pursuing “normal” medical care for Jana’ at the time. The doctors at first kept saying O don’t worry it’ll go away and so we lost time and week after week and then month after month it went on. I had not said it out loud but at about this time I had gone from being deeply frustrated and angry about her horrendous suffering over these months to actually fearing for her life. (Later my wife admitted that she was close to suicide from months of almost constantly throwing up - and she ain’t the suicide type)
It was just dawning upon me that she may not be so much recovering from an unfortunate surgical complication as dying. Part of this was my being so consumed with the extraordinary tasks at hand and part of it was my – misplaced – faith in our vaunted American medical care system. From one week to the next assurances came. Maybe this, maybe that, and before we knew it months had passed with nothing to show for it.
This Experience was on Saturday only a week after closing on our house – the first big commitment to what I could not help but think of as the mushroom path, just a pinch of tongue and cheek. I had gone to a chiropractor that Thursday and had a good experience that really seemed to help my back. Then I
noticed later that afternoon and into the next day, Friday, the day before this Experience, that I was extremely emotional and I had several truly cathartic and healing emotional experiences, accepting and integrating long disintegrated aspects of my emotional self. I must add as relevant here that one of these powerfully integrative experiences involved my own desire to heal. I had always interpreted my “healing fantasies” as self-aggrandizing “manic” symptom of my manic depression. While I had these “manic experiences” only once or twice a year, they were always the same in kind: I would find myself fantasizing about healing “humanity”, discovering a cure for cancer, for example. These fantasies could be quite elaborate or just involve a laying-on-of-hands of someone around me who happened to be sick or even someone I saw on television. I had learned even before the mushrooms to use my fantasies as indicators of my feelings, many of which I have difficulty feeling directly: partly a man thing and partly genetics, I would guess. But I have learned to work around my own dysfunctional emotional state and pretty quickly now recognize my fantasies for the feeling status they represent. (If I “found myself” fantasying about bashing someone’s head in I was angry. Instead of interpreting this healing fantasy as a symptom of mental illness, I simply saw it now as a legitimate if latent desire to heal. There is nothing dysfunctional about such a fantasy. It beats all hell out of spontaneously fantasizing about destructive behavior. Also, these episodes lasted literally only minutes and again happened only a couple times a year. Because a psychiatrist had told me that this was pathological, I had believed it to be so: yes, a clear sign of mania. I did not consider myself a Shaman in any way whatsoever. What I had faith in was the mushrooms. I hoped in fact that somehow the mushrooms could work in spite of me personally to heal Jana’. It was on this day that I fully realized or accepted the fact that I am already completely healed insofar as I can be and that now if was up to me to take it from there: Live! Create! Grow! This chiropractor cracked me good and I am convinced released energy somehow locked up in my spine/nervous system, although I absolutely hate the New Age sound of that! This energy is not metaphysical but is somehow a physical part of our world and is no less real than were microbes before we developed the technology to apprehend them.
This attempted healing was out of desperation. In all probability, the reason that my wife could not even swallow and water, more or less food, having to be kept alive by intravenous nutrition and hydration supplied by a 24 hour feed through a TPI line into her upper arm, was a mind/body reaction by the nervous system caused by the trunks of the very sensitive Vagal nerve being cut in one of those operations with a ninety nine percent success rate. This is what I had come up with after finally getting involved more in what was happening to her after realizing that her doctors were essentially doing nothing for her. She had already found hypnosis to be helpful but not curative. This fact and a strong suspicion both from her surgeon and my own reading on the matter that there was some kind of mind/body connection problem, led me to believe that the mushrooms could be helpful. I know they can be curative of most emotional problems of non-organic nature. I do not by any means consider mushrooms a panacea but I had been thinking about this since becoming convinced that there was some mind/body connection fix out there that could help Jana’. My opinion right now – subject to change without notice – is that the mushrooms themselves cannot cure a physical injury. I have read of instances where Shaman taking the mushrooms and harnessing their power, performed feats of physical healing. I not only did not consider myself a Shaman of any sort, I found this idea offensive. Just eating some mushrooms in the suburbs does not a Shaman make! I have done considerably more than that. I have healed myself using my unorthodox, bastard techniques and that is the first step for a Shaman. I deserve my title of Bastard Shaman. I would just note that I came to this conclusion after the attempted healing experience and ironically enough in spite of its apparent failure.
I admit that at this point I consider the healing Experience a failure and even though I fully expected failure there was a part of me that wanted success as much to heal Jana’ as to confirm the extraordinary reality of what has happened to me. That having been said, elements of this were definitely a success: the Blue Whale actually turning out to be my power animal; my ability – twice – to manifest the Blue Whale after having “gone in”; and the way the experience unfolded exactly as I evoked in writing– all three of these aspects really amazes me, still. On the other hand, Jana’ and I could look at it from a different perspective and call it a success since it was not long after this that she did turn the corner – no help of the medical community. In fact, not long after she got an infection in her pic-line which went untreated for three weeks – more doctor incompetence and ended up with Jana’ in the Hospital in a potentially deadly situation with this infected line running up her arm to with only inches of almost inches of her heart. It was when some days later when released from the Hospital that she began to turn the corner. While I was relieved beyond words when Jana’ did turn the corner, it sure would have been nice if it could have happened, say, within the first week after this healing Experience. I remember afterwards telling Jana’ that there was a strong theme of time throughout the experience and that I felt the mushrooms were saying that it was going to take time to heal her. The only thing the medical community was saying was that she would “probably” recover on her own but it could take up to a year.
Jana’ was suffering a very real kind of extended torture – I would do anything at that point to make it stop. She didn’t want anything to do with a psilocybin enema I had devised after a little research. It was my belief that the mushrooms could possibly help her if she herself took them. I told her that I knew it was a long shot but at worst would do nothing at all and that with the amount that I would be giving her she could be assured of at least a good trip, if not some healing or even help with healing, possibly. What can I say: I saw it as a win-win. But evidently the psilocybin enema is a hard sell. What is with this fussiness about the enema? If I thought an enema of any kind might heal me and or enlighten me and knew that it was harmless what the hell: stick it on up there
5
and let it rip, baby. I guess after nine months before 02/25/06 having eaten such an array of vile and disgusting brews that the thought of being able to get the same trip with an enema instead of having to drink down two cups of San Pedro Cactus goop – well, let’s just say that a nice warm enema sounded doable to me. (Please try cooking down a whole cactus and chugging its thick, vile sludge for yourself before you judge!) I know how to prepare a psilocybin enema and since I have had almost no stomach distress eating large dosages of both fresh and dried psilocybin, I seriously doubted there would be any nausea involved with an enema administration. I explained to Jana’ that at the dose I would give her – the equivalent of five grams dried - she would basically be unconscious within a matter a minutes and I would be there to keep an eye on her. But such an idea was overwhelming to her at that point, spending her every waking minute either puking or trying not to puke.

So after Jana’ made it clear that there would be no psilocybin enema in her future; and given that I knew of no Shaman and that in indigenous society’s expert at the use of plant medicines the healer not the patient may be the one who takes the mushrooms; I decided to try it myself, waiting only to close on our house and get ourselves into as secure a position as possible before attempting it. My last high dose experience had been transformative but took at high toll, causing true mania with no sleep at all for five days. My thought was that if we stayed physically touching during the experience that our emotional connection and physical connection might allow me to act as a conduit for the mushrooms to do their magic. I had by this time complete faith in the mushrooms but in no way considered them a silver bullet: in other words, my apprehension in this healing experience was not so much for the mushrooms as for myself. I knew they would help Jana’ if they could. I had felt their incredible love, compassion, and power. I just really did not know if they could heal this problem. If the problem really was a body/mind, disconnect involving the nervous system (nervous systems are the mushroom’s specialty, mind you) I thought it is possible. I know for a fact that these mushrooms can heal emotional sickness and what my wife had in terms of her complications from surgery was, from everything I could gather, some kind of mind-body disconnect. Not exactly the same thing, but one has to stretch, right. I am not talking about again any new age crap. I mean a disconnect from her stomach being partially – mostly – amputated and the Vagal Nerve being cut – a physiological phenomenon creating a mind/body disconnect within the profoundly complicated and intimate neurological relationship of the stomach and the brain, a physical, not psychological condition. Because I had become convinced of this body/mind issue, I hoped the mushrooms could help. Her two brains – the one in the stomach - (the stomach with so many neural connections it has been called the second brain, I had learned) and the one in the head back in perfect sync so she could stop vomiting. This was also clearly to me some kind of nervous system problem and the mushrooms very realm is the nervous system – if they could possibly repair anything of our physical body, it would have to be something to do with our nervous system. In this realm physical and
7
emotional merge seamlessly. Only the most rigorous scientific reductionism or most outrageous religious dogma can pull them apart, one way or the other. My main point here is that I had some reason to believe that the mushrooms would help, not just a baseless new age fantasy.
This Experience was without a doubt the weirdest ever and was very different from my breakthrough experience. The second, deeper part did fall into a familiar altered reality characterized not by psychedelics but again a completely altered state of reality– a reality seeming to existing beyond our conscious bounds of space and time. The Experience at the beginning resembled less my recent large dose mushroom experience than LSD trips from some thirty years ago almost. Honestly, this Experience disturbs me at many levels, not the least of which was the profound sense of personal failure. You have to accept at least that in my mind – crazy or sane – I believed this could help Jana’ and I definitely felt that I did not do my best and let her down here. I’m not obsessing over it or beating myself up over it but feel it necessary to get down every aspect of these Experiences no matter how personal, uncomfortable or even insane sounding or unflattering as they may be. I do not know how to say this other than that I fear that I didn’t bring enough love to the table. Maybe it will be clear when I go into it, but I guess I feel as though it came close and somehow I was the problem – as if I were a weak connecting wire which was not strong enough to convey the energy from the mushrooms into my wife, maybe allowing it to bleed out, like a spark plug wire with a microscopic hole.
I have been called upon to write this all down and I have made a blood oath to the mushrooms to do whatever I can do to serve them out of a sense of gratitude the likes of which I never knew existed: no doubt in my mind that this gratitude is EXACTLY the feeling of countless other human religious converts over the ages; and even though I still consider myself an atheist, I believe I understand their feelings now. I just believe, subject to change, that the power I am dealing with is an intelligent life force sprung from what I now conceive of as “The Plant Consciousness” and that the Plant Consciousness is vastly larger, older, smarter and far more spiritually mature than our own human consciousness. I also suspect that this Plant Consciousness may be one and the same with the Planetary Consciousness – Gaian Consciousness. They may have been so closely allied for so long that they are virtually the same now, like an old soul-mated human couple perhaps. I am just not sure, yet.
I wrote my intentions and an invocation wherein I called upon Love Itself to heal Jana’. I also called upon my Great Blue Whale spirit to guide me in this healing; believing before “going in” that if, any success was to be had the only chance in hell hinged entirely upon the Blue Whale. The mushrooms would get me “in”, the Blue Whale would guide me, and then … well, I would have to wing it at that point. I planned this out a little more like a military campaign than a psilocybin trip or even a healing. I had never done anything like this with mushrooms before, never even considered it. I put the most spiritual force that I could into it before “going in”. On the one hand, I really did see this as a long shot. On the other hand, anything worth doing is worth doing right, so I went for
8
it. I said that I wanted no enlightenment this day; no pretty colors or visions; no spiritual wars: I wanted only to heal Jana’. Part of my invocation, which I took quite seriously on this Saturday morning …
Proceeding with love and gratitude
In my heart -
My sword in my hand …
Not a very good Haiku but sincere.
I wrote thinking clearly of Maria Sabina and her power chants, only performing this quietly while my wife slept and before I took the mushrooms, not after. I felt it necessary to bring as much personal power to bear upon this as I could – the exact opposite of my previous approach to a hallucinogenic mushroom experience which was open and supplicating. In this above Haiku, I seem to have concentrated all my ignorance, pretension and ego: this also is me trying to assert myself spiritually. In fairness to my self, it should be obvious how well I understood my own inadequacies in this attempt. On the other, the risks were minimal while the rewards, while a long shot at best, were considerable: you can not really imagine what a bummer it is to either be puking or nauseated 24 hrs a day … even a chance of helping was well worth it. I have to note that I felt it necessary be more of an Aggressor than a Supplicant, the exact opposite of previous approaches: in my notebook amongst my stoned scribbling is my demand upon Love, commanding love to heal her. At this point I could not sincerely bring myself to pray to God, but I could pray to love. In retrospect, I wonder if this was the correct stance? I was truly winging it and going with what I felt would give us the best shot: lot of faith in the mushrooms and a lot of hope in the Great Blue Whale. Really, it was not my style personally but I had a strong intuition of how to conduct the healing. Anyway, with a single reference to the aforementioned “sword haiku”, the mushrooms laid my ego to waste. Early on in this mushroom path I decided that there were some things that for better or worse I was just not willing to do because they made me feel too uncomfortable. It is for this reason that I did not and have not danced around with feathers chanting or beating drums. This is a good thing because Jana’ would not have tolerated that even from a real Shaman. She was pretty sick throughout this and mostly asleep and I pretty much was able to leave her that way throughout the whole experience, which was good. I have evolved a totally eclectic set of preparatory behaviors that I find helpful. The truth is that up until this healing Experience, such preparations were minimal. The main thing I did was pray. I would enter a prayerful state and, I believe, give myself, and open myself fully to the Experience.


05/26/07 Healing Experience

Starting eating six grams of dried psilocybin mushroom at 7:30am and finished at 8:05. I sat at a little table next to our bed in the motel, looking at my Blue Whale screen saver on the laptop screen and drinking 7-11 coffee quietly. Jana’ slept
9
just to my right and the dogs slept on the floor. After I finished my coffee, I went to the bathroom to brush my teeth. The Little Flowers are pretty funky tasting. I looked into my eyes in the mirror. I wasn’t sure if I was feeling anything yet: my biggest fear as always was that nothing will happen. My second biggest fear was that something would happen. I rang a little turtle, brass bell close my left ear, then close to my right, nothing. I noticed in the mirror a talisman Jana’ gave me which I wear 24/7. It is a dark dinosaur tooth maybe ¾ inch long but is actually the tip of a much larger tooth, the tooth of the largest carnivore to ever walk the earth, one hundred million years old. Hair stood up on my neck and then a charge of animal fear rushed through me. The largest carnivore to ever to walk the earth! I grabbed the talisman intending to rip it off but as I touched it, immediately I thought that I could use this. I just told myself to cool it. I knew that according to indigenous Shaman while most of us guys would immediately want to go with something like a Grizzly bear or a Lion for a spiritual animal guide, these were as likely to eat you alive as to help you. They are the providence of the most power Shaman and Healers. I believe this stuff. Every fiber of my being wanted to rip that thing off and get away from it. I think the mostly indigenous Shaman of our world have the most accurate and meaningful comprehension of reality. This is why the dinosaur fetish freaked me out and I couldn’t believe that I had been wearing the thing for a year without giving this aspect a second thought. As I have said, I was convinced that this healing called for forceful, aggressive power. Anyway, it is just a fetish, nothing to fear, I told myself. I tried to focus on using it to provide power in the coming experience and to let go of my fear of it.
I closed my eyes and grasped the talisman firmly but gently with middle finger, fore finger and thumb of each hand. Immediately my mind filled with fantastic hallucinations. I had not seen anything like this since my adolescent experiences with LSD. I was awed. What seemed to me to be Mayan masks appeared. The masks were almost twice the size of a human head and resembled a human skull. Upon each mask there were blood smears as if someone had taken their palm and pressed it into fresh blood and then smeared the mask with a human hand sized smear longer than wide. Each mask had smears in the same places, one upon each cheek almost vertical and horizontal smaller smear across the chin and then the largest horizontal smear on the forehead over the eye sockets. Each skull mask appeared to contain a real human skull inside, its blank eyes staring out of the mask’s blank eyes. There were thousands of these masks and each was identical but each appeared to be smeared individually so that while the patterns were the same on all the thousands, each was individual; perhaps representing a individual human life. I could see each mask separately and all together equally well. I had some sense that these represented human individuals’ long dead – maybe all individuals? – especially when the thousands seemed to turn into hundreds of thousands and then millions and all the while I was in front of the bathroom mirror with my eyes “closed”. The skull mask were just expanding outward seemingly into infinity from a point at the center of my “vision” when they began to slowly form into vertical
10
shapes which morphed into double helixes – two of them – each made up of countless skull masks with the skull strands of DNA slowing revolving around themselves like bands of a barbers pole. These two revolving columns of DNA like strands composed of the skulls really began to take on a cohesive form and the forms drew my “eyes” upwards as they began to spin like two columns of tornadic clouds. Whoa! My eyes snapped open no doubt a second before unconsciousness. This is why you should be lying down not standing up, I reminded myself. I had been sure that I had at least five minutes to play with. It had come on really fast. Okay, it got me. I had not even come close to this kind of visual experience on my other psilocybin trips. It was almost as if “they” were trying to draw me in. “I” noticed that the helixes were drawing me up and that the circling motion was what I had felt in my breakthrough experience just before entering an alternate reality, and unconsciousness. I would experience I whirling upward that … seemed … an awful lot like what was happening … and I said, no! No! Somehow I sensed the seduction of it all, skulls forming double helixes for god’s sake, who among us could resist that. In any case, the instant that I recognized what was happening, I had called upon the Blue Whale, never before having been able to “visualize” anything and much to my surprise, the upward spiraling helixes that drew me into unconsciousness morphed immediately into a Blue Whale much resembling the one on my computer screen. Wow, I thought. The Blue Whale then morphed further until just its one great eye filled my consciousness, as a zoom lens can fill a frame. It was then that I snapped “awake”, staring at myself in the bathroom mirror, grinning ear to ear.
Wow, the Blue Whale. The eye of the Blue Whale.
(The eye of the Blue Whale appears to be for me a portal – I have since tried to full my mind’s eye with it again without the use of mushrooms but as yet to no avail)
I knew it was about time to lie down, concerned that I could lose consciousness at any moment. I couldn’t help smiling as I shuffled over to our bed where Jana’ lie sleeping. I was sure that I would be out for a couple hours and tried to drink as much water as I could, finally laying down next to Jana’ in the fetal position facing directly the motel clock’s big, red, digital numerals on the nightstand. I pulled Jana’s hand over my side and she hugged me gently, her hand almost exactly over my heart. That will do nicely, I thought. I looked at the clock and it read 8:50am. I closed my eyes and the alien thought popped up, “you won’t need your sword today” a damning reference to my obviously presumptuous assertions of power, I thought: imagine the most humiliating thing that has ever happened to you. When “they” said, “you won’t need your sword today”, I felt my ego just crumble. It seemed to me to be the first time that the mushrooms had thrown a punch at me. I know this sounds oversensitive on my part given the seemingly innocuous statement, but that was very much how I took it. I felt some nausea but it wasn’t bad enough to worry about. The stuff with the sword bode ill to me, as well as laying low my ego. It is hard to explain but goes to the point of my trying to use personal power here – the sword – and my being aggressive rather than submissive. I had felt this was necessary but these
11
few “words” uttered by the mushrooms inside my mind instantly laid waste to my plan. Clearly, if assertion was the way to go at all, it was not for me in this instance. I tried to relax, looking almost forward to “unconsciousness” and that other state of reality. I felt a tightening in my chest when I closed my eyes, a surprise somehow even though I had felt it before. This tightening produced a very specific kind of fear I call elephant on the chest fear, and it was as though I could both feel and hear the elephant coming to sit on my chest. O God, I thought, here it comes. I have to be honest, I find this elephant on the chest thing terrifying. I tried to concentrate on breathing deeply and counting breaths, trying to relax my body. There was no where to run since the elephant was inside me. In spite of the fact that I had lived through it before, it still frightened me. As this elephant fear subsided, I had the unmistakable thought that I was entering a realm in which I have no power whatsoever; where I in no way belonged. I glanced at the dials of the clock, 9:00am. I felt beyond frightened at this point, all confidence gone. I just kept breathing deeply concentrating on my breathe and being open.
The elephant sat on my chest, again. Abject fear now, the feeling of death. I couldn’t run and it was clearly no use to scream so I just died.
No more than a couple minutes later, I whispered to Jana’ who had just stirred, “The little psilocybin fairies are locking and unlocking the millions of neural connections up and down my spine, it almost tickles. They are like children, so light and innocent and glad to be alive. They work joyfully and have billions of neural connections to manipulate. I admire their total love of what they do and total joy in life. I only wished I could live my life like these little fairies …”
And my wife said that was really nice, taking this first morning news very well. I told her to keep her hand on me and don’t worry. She went back to sleep immediately. All fear disappeared when the psilocybin fairies began fluttering up and down my spine. I had never felt this before or heard of it but it felt very real. The elephant vanished. The fairies were so full of love and so full of life, exactly as human children are when playing happily on playground - how could I be afraid?
(In retrospect, I wonder it what was happening was not a healing of me, of my nervous system. This is definitely a believer’s point of view. I had a MS scare earlier and it was still up in the air as to whether or not I could develop MS. Also, as I have said, I did go to a chiropractor so perhaps they could have something to do with that. I noticed also in reviewing my various invocations that in one I had written, “… heal Jana’ and I …” adding myself into the mix in my exuberance. This aspect nagged at me and over a year later, I had a severe MS attack becoming at one point completely paraplegic and almost dying from it. I am dealing with the aftermath now - June of 2008. This attack hit almost exactly a year after this healing experience - the attack hitting out of the blue on May 20th 2008.)
Without really thinking about it, again I fingered the dinosaur fetish with both hands as I lie on my side, and again came the spiraling skull helixes picking up as if where we left off in the bathroom. I felt myself drawn up into the vortex
12
again and knew all too well that meant unconsciousness.
Immediately I called upon the Blue Whale. I am not here for the pretty colors, I proclaimed in my mind. In the name of love I ask you to heal Jana’, concentrating as much as I could and again seeing the otherworldly vision of swirling double helixes formed of millions of dead human skulls slowly break up and transforming into the Blue Whale, his side and head seen through air bubbles coming up from below with his gigantic body and bubbling up to the near surface of the ocean, his one eye staring right at me. I could not believe that I had conjured Him again, and my elation at this success suddenly found me in another reality witnessing what appeared to be an electrical storm in hell itself. I looked down as if I were God upon a pathetically tiny, frail and emaciated old man standing precariously in tattered rags upon the very tip of jagged mountain in the midst of this hellish maelstrom. Lighting and thunder and wind thrashed the frail, little man. His wisps of long, thin white hair on the sides of his head, a similar few strands down his back, white strands hanging from his ancient chin, and his last few pieces of what appeared to be a white cloth robe, all whipped wildly around him like the torment itself. I was thinking, what does it mean? Clearly, this meant something but what? I looked into the wretched old man’s eyes closer then, recognizing myself instantly and alarmingly. My god, that is me! I cannot describe the mixture of alarm and amazement at discovering that this was a vision of myself. Then I saw that his eyes – my eyes - were not wretched at all but absolutely blazing with defiance – no other word for it, blazing defiance. His body – my body – frail as it was stood firm and seemed to be saying, “fuck you,” to hell itself. Bony ribs protruded from an emaciated chest. I really couldn’t believe that it was me in this vision. I can’t tell you what a heart stopping effect this “vision” had upon me – truly startling. It was as if hell itself had pulled out all stops to destroy this old man – me! – but he – “I“ - stood implacably against it. I vaguely wondered if this was another effort – like the sword comment – to destroy my ego.
Pretty much just as I realized that the defiant old man was my self, I seemed instantly transported to yet another reality. This time there was no spiraling upward, just snap and there I was. Now work with me here because this part is really, really weird. Just to describe what happened I have to take some poetic license. While the mushroom “voice” is very succinct and direct, the mushroom realities can be pretty outrageously complicated. For instance, when I say that the Blue Whale is standing at my side, I on his right side, I don’t mean that a one hundred foot long, two hundred ton whale is “standing” next to me. Only that in fact was what happened in this part of the experience. I guess that in exactly the same way that my own body was not “there” but curled up on a bed next to Jana’, neither was the Whales body there – WE were there, our eternal selves, the Whale and I.
We were in a dreamlike place – vague, grey and white. It kind of reminded me of one of the old cheesy star trek sets. We “stood” upon this vague grey/white fog below two men who stood above us upon what appeared to be a much more substantial white, stone platform. These two men were obviously the
13
“healers” to whom the Blue Whale had brought me, amazingly performing his prime function as a power animal in guiding me in this spiritual realm. Here is where you have to again suspend disbelief for a moment - the two “healers” were what I can only describe as old CEO’s. I guess you could say that these two old, Anglo-Saxon men, both balding, both – for some reason – obviously corporate-status-quo types seemed to me to be masquerading as healers. I knew the mushrooms had a very strange sense of humor and wondered if this were not some kind of irony. I did not have the sense that they were retired doctors, but retired CEOs – the symbolic embodiment of what could be called my nemesis if there ever was one! They were the exact antithesis of what I expected. I couldn’t have been more incredulous if they had been the Olson twins.
Evidently, the old bald dudes in what I thought of as just ridiculous white robes thought considerably less of me than I thought of them. I was completely disoriented within the experience, thinking, “what the hell is this?” One of them said to the Blue Whale “standing” to my left, “is this what we are expected to work with now?” in a way of talking over me which disregarded my being most profoundly. The Blue Whale shrugged, as if to say, “what can I say, he’s with me.” There was no doubt that these two would have nothing to do with me if it were not for the Blue Whale. There was a look of disgust on their faces that I couldn’t even begin to articulate. The two were so indistinguishable that they seemed to function as one and I had little sense of their separate identities, to the point where I cannot recall the one or the other specifically. I was completely aware of the absurdity of all of this and was just dumbfounded. After a pregnant pause in which I perceived that somehow the Blue Whale had considerable pull with these two, whatever they were, and that they seemed to feel compelled to help the Blue Whale, if not me or Jana’, they both sighed disgustedly. “So be it,” the one nearest me said (on my “right”). He made three wide, dramatic circles with his right hand, reminding me of when Ed would introduce Johnny, that same kind of “flourish”, and when his arm came around for the third time, I felt a jolt of energy jump from my chest exactly where Jana’s hand still rested and into her hand.
Instantly I “woke” up, lying on my side looking at the red dials of the clock: 9:05. It seems that I was hardly out at all. That surprised me. I had really expected to be out a couple hours. It was definitely over.
Jana’ was still asleep. The dogs were asleep. I was perfectly lucid. I lay still for a while just running it back in my mind. Finally I stood up. Man that was weird. I felt fine, a little tired. It was an hour and fifteen minutes since I finished eating the six grams and I had no problem walking at all. I put my right index finger to my right temple and pressed gently as I closed my eyes– a wash of color exploded, wow! It’s working still, I whispered, smiling. I opened my eyes and again felt totally lucid. Man this was weird. I knew that I could lie back down and trip out or just stay up and trip out but I just choose not to – I had made a commitment to use these mushrooms to heal Jana’ not to trip myself. I did choose to go back to the 7-11 for another cup of coffee. I had felt that jolt of electric energy seemingly bounce from my chest into Jana’s hand after the third
14
flourish of the “healer’s arm” and this seemed to indicate some kind of success. I had to resist the urge to wake her up and ask if she felt better. On the other hand, I was left with a very odd feeling – ominous mixed with befuddlement, maybe. I didn’t at all feel as though what had happened could be characterized as any kind of success. I felt that something was … just somehow wrong … but I couldn’t begin to articulate this feeling. I felt fine walking over and back and immediately wrote up the experience enjoying my coffee while Jana’ and the dogs still slept. It was only 9:30am after all. It was relatively easy to write but I wrote in the form of a totally loose prose poem.
At some point it came to me that at exactly two hours after finishing the six grams, which would be 10:05am, I should put a drop of my own blood in a teaspoon of yogurt and have Jana’ eat it. I felt that this would give her access to the Blue Whale as a power animal if she wanted it at some point but can’t tell you why I thought this. It would also give Jana’ an inoculation of psilocybin, even if only symbolic with no potential for intoxication of course from such a minute amount. This concept of inoculation seemed very important. It seemed crucial. From about 9:40 until 10:05 I obsessed over the two hour time frame, sensing that within this entire obsession was a message about time, somehow interpreting it as meaning that the healing would take time. Something about the skull masks seemed to refer to time also. It definitely was not what I wanted to hear. It was a long twenty five minutes. I then found that I have a natural resistance to self mutilation. I finally managed to get a drop of blood just in time and convinced my sleepy wife to wake up to a teaspoon of plain yogurt topped with a bright, red drop of my psilocybin blood at exactly 10:05am. What a lucky woman she is. At this time it was hard for her to eat anything at all but she sipped this tiny amount of yogurt with a little protest and went promptly back to sleep and the healing experience, such as it was, ended.
I suffered no ill effects, no hyper mania, from this large dose.