This was my very first ultra high-dosage mushroom trip taken just before
Xmas a few days after reaping my very first home-grown mushrooms. It was
undoubtedly one of the most pivotal events of my life. It was also the first and
last time I ever took such an epic dose. This was written in the hours
immediately following the trip. The following is an abbreviated, polished-up
version of the original:Took 15 gms of my Psilocybe cubensis powder at
7pm last night on an empty stomach. The effects were evident after only 15
minutes. No sense of time after 7.30pm and generally oblivious to what was
happening elsewhere in the house.
Initially, the dominant imagery was that
of clowns, a carnival atmosphere, gaiety, everything very light-hearted. (Echoes
of that wonderful essay called `The Mushrooms of Language' by Henry Munn). Then
suddenly there was a transition and the whole trip become totally awash with
mythic Egyptian imagery; especially that of birds - the falcon and vultures -
and the presence of artefactual images of the gods Isis and Horus. All
overwhelmingly intense and baroque.
Mythic Egypt became totally real, as if
it exists eternally in another dimension of being. Strong images of the Nile and
papyrus growing from its waters. V (my wife) came in at one stage and starting
making love to me. All very exotic, erotic and far-out. She played the part of
the High Priestess of Isis superbly, eventually leaving me and telling me that I
should now be alone. Her reassuring presence in the house was vitally important
during the whole trip. When we were making love she had a bird's face, with
pointed ears, soft, dewy bird-like eyes with whispy, upturned eyebrows and eye
lashes. She was like some beautiful, avian, extra-terrestrial visitor to Planet
Earth. (Perhaps there was a visitor and it temporarily incarnated itself in her
body.)
Nine years ago the pivotal LSD trip that I took one night in a
snow-blown graveyard in Zurich, Switzerland, featured the mythic presence of
Wotan/Attis, sacrificed on a tree. It was a darker, gloomier, more Gothic sort
of trip than this one. (I suppose hardly surprising considering where I was
tripping.) This mushroom trip was sunnier, more care-free, and lacked the
overwhelming emphasis on death and putrefaction that was a feature of the Zurich
one. This time birth was the central issue. Major insights on the trip were that
Xmas was terribly important, the 25th of December sitting solid as a rock,
unshakeable. The great mystery glimpsed was that of the birth of a wondrous
child. (Jesus/Horus?).
I felt on the trip that it was very important that we
should go and see L and her child in hospital. (A sort of parallel with the
visitors to Mary and Jesus two millenia ago.) I realised what a great sadness it
was for B not to be able to have children. In the early hours of the morning I
started verbalising this to V - using the metaphor that barren women had a
bottomless well of tears within them.
Images of the mushrooms I am busy
growing, and the small green leaves of my sinsemilla bush, were intertwined
throughout all the Egyptian imagery. Things got pretty far out at times, at one
stage I believed that I could mentally draw V back into the room whenever I
chose to do so. I tried, and low and behold it happened! Heaviest of all was the
experience of time compressing and accelerating, and that I was rocketing
forward towards the Ultimate Truth, but uncertain as to whether I was ready to
witness it. Time was at times like a roll of film being wound up, until there
was no longer any time as such, just a solid circular object floating in a sea
of infinite, eternal space.
At times I felt like calling to V for a
tranquilliser to bring me down, but fortuntely I resisted the impulse. At times
I was so far, far out that there did not seem to be any possibility of my ever
coming back down again. Some heavy fears during the trip about the possibility
of not being able to return to normal after this overwhelming experience.
A
welter of Egyptian hieroglyphics permeated the trip - baroque, multitudinous,
detailed - a total orgy of Egypt. And always, always, everywhere the falcon head
of Horus. An image that came to mind quite a few times was that of the eagle
picking up the shaman in his talons (the one appearing in the Joan Halifax book
on shamanism).
The whole trip was far longer than I had anticipated, the
main part lasting all of seven hours (7.30pm - 1.30am) and another five hours of
being pretty high, making it a 12 hour trip in all. In fact it is now 9.30 am
and I'm still pretty buzzy. No doubt the epic dose was responsible for the long
duration of the experience.
Had some acute diarrhoea during the later part
of night but this didn't phase me as I felt that this was all a very necessary
part of the trip - images of the rich, brown fertile soil washed down by the
Nile!
Quite a poignant moment when the cock next door started crowing before
sunrise. It was no longer just a banal, irritating domestic fowl, but something
extremely exotic and other-worldly. Interesting how so much of my imagery on my
LSD death-trip nine years ago was of writhing, fanged snakes, now this time it
was the bird image that dominated. Certainly preferable!
My experience was
not the UFO one that McKenna raps about on his tapes, but it was in its own way
even more bizarre than anything I could have imagined. The big question now is
what do I DO with this event? Meditate on it I suppose, try to bring my life in
line with the truths that it offered. I really have had a powerful shamanic
initiation for which I am very glad and grateful. Thank goodness that my long
and frustrating efforts at mushroom growing have finally been justified. How
appropriate too that my first successful flush of mushrooms should have come at
Xmas time. Los Ninos - Children of the Gods.
I think it will be some time
before I make another venture out into these spaces. It's really wonderful to
have survived back to reality. Sometimes the trip was just altogether too much,
everything literally dripping in the essential spirit of mythic Egypt. Mostly
all too luxuriant and overwhelming.
I feel as if I have reprogrammed myself
in some way, as if my mind is the soft clay into which all these Egyptian images
have been imbedded. So what do I do with this new programming? Idea of all these
images being a sort of circuitry that actually transcends the individual
meanings that hieroglyphic experts give to them. The idea that there is a Living
Mystery lying at the heart of Egyptian mythology that is the most important
thing on earth. Perhaps the key lies in the notion of hieroglyphics representing
a sort of solid state circuitry - ie the images must be intuitively grasped in
their entirety, not broken down and analysed as a form of language.
These
last few hours of writing are perhaps the most important part of the whole trip
- integrating everything that happened before I finally go to sleep. (Though
there's little chance of that at the moment!) It's now close on 16 hours since I
took the mushrooms and I'm still very sensitised. Thank God I don't have to do
anything demanding today. I feel it would be very difficult to cope with any
serious stress at the moment.
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