Last night, I died. I want to get this all down before it even has the chance
to begin to fade in my mind. Tara and myself decided to ingest 3 grams of
dried mushroom material. At about 8pm I ate my powder with a little honey
and washed it down with a glass of fresh lemon and orange juice that Tara
had made. I also made a small, single clove, garlic infusion which I mixed
with the juice. In the past, I've found this mixture to be particularly easy
on my stomach. I walked around for a while, waiting for the effects to begin.
At 8:20pm I noticed a change in visual perception and a pronounced expansion
of my visual range. At about 8:40pm I began slipping in and out of hypnogogic
trances, typical of the beginnings of my psilocybin encounters.
As I was beginning to settle myself down for my usual sequence of experiences,
a strange feeling of pressure began developing in the upper right side of
my head. By this time, the hallucinatory imagery was coming thick and fast.
I had a vision of what I first assumed to be Egyptian women, but they were
talking Spanish, seeming to be discussing something about me between themselves.
One of the women made a movement with her arm, a sort of gesture at me and
before I knew what had hit me, from the right side of my head, a monster
which makes the Buddhist "wrathful deities" seem like cuddly toys, simply
engulfed and devoured me in one horrific, spasmodically violent movement.
Dark green, covered in undulating fractal patterns, the monster plunged me
straight into the darkest hell I have ever perceived. The entire room instantly
became the utter embodiment of pure, menacing evil as I was overcome with
nausea. I stumbled, awash with hellish hallucinations, to the toilet and
vomited heavily.
Thinking that this would relieve the dark aspect of the trip, I made my way
back to the lounge. I got even worse ! My mind began dissolving, as if plunged
into an acid bath. My body disappeared and I could no longer feel anything,
my hands, my face, my whole body simply stopped responding to my mind. At
this point I told Tara that I was having a bad time. I began stumbling around,
between the bathroom and the lounge, locked in strange repeating thought
patterns from which there seemed no escape. I began to formulate the idea
that I had been poisoned, but Tara seemed perfectly OK, so this was irrational.
I then began having thoughts of a completely psychotic nature.
The whole room, although darkened, assumed the most evil, tendrillic proportions.
I stumbled once again to the bathroom, with my eyes closed. Upon reaching
the toilet, I opened my eyes, and realised that I thought I had had them
open all the time ! I had hallucinated my way from the lounge, without opening
my eyes. Suddenly, my ego was shattered, and I was a cowering little boy.
I was convinced that I was being punished for something, by a being far more
powerful than myself. At this point, I "knew" I was going to die. My right
and left brain swapped around, leaving me hideously disorientated. I found
myself involved in two or more, completely convincing, but totally impossible
actions, at the same time.
I seemed to have a great deal more than two arms, and appeared to be rolling
a joint, and smoking it at the same time. Objects suddenly became completely
and convincingly two dimensional, as if made from sheets of cardboard. If
I tried to reach out my left arm, my brain convinced itself that it was my
right arm that was moving. Time appeared to be standing still, or moving
in steps instead of flowing as I usually perceive it. Attempting at this
point to walk, I found that my legs were alien beings, connected to my mind
in some disgusting and bizarre way. Every conceivable political scenario
swept through my consciousness.
The entire universe of all I have ever known seemed to be breaking into my
conscious mind. I felt/heard/saw the chatter and hum of the entire planet,
saw clips of a million unrelated, unconnected scenes passing through me,
as if I were some hopelessly disembodied awareness. It was just then that
I began to fall apart. The ceiling seemed to open up, revealing clouds and
a great crowd of thousands of people and animals that I seemed to have known
at one point or another. I could feel my mind lifted out from my body, hovering
around my physical being, washing about in uncontrollable waves. Tara was
attempting to reassure me, telling me it was all right, and asking me if
I wanted to go for a walk. To me, the ideas were preposterously bizarre,
I could hear what she was saying clearly, but I had no idea what anything
she said meant.
I seemed to be split between two separate but convincingly real realities
at the same time. Pieces of the rooms became swapped around with other objects,
and everything seemed to melt and merge into one. My fragmented mind assumed
the death program and I lay down in Tara's arms to die. Many spirits of people
I know and love seemed to be around me, looking at me watching me. At this
point Tara made me get up and dressed me in some warm clothing. She led my
confused and bewildered body/mind outside and made we walk. At first , it
seemed impossible for me to move. My body seemed to be making all manner
of weirdly uncoordinated movements, but Tara assured me that I was fine and
things started to come together. I was a recombining awareness, created from
nothing, an electrochemical projection of all the individual cells of my
body. I was somehow, in a very real sense, a collective being, greater than
the sum of my individual part.
At one level, sufficiently complex, I emerged as myself in a novel phenomena.
Just as stars, galaxies and other complex systems emerged from simpler systems
of atoms and subatomic particles. So, the phenomena of my mind began emerging
from the fractal structure of my living body. Just as the newly assumed bodies
of the cosmos produced new physical properties, such as elements heavier
than hydrogen, which combined and recombined forming more complex dimensions
and laws on higher planes of structure, so my mind began infiltrating and
controlling the living stratum of my physical chemical body. At critical
levels of fractal complexity, new and unexpected phenomena occur, using the
existing bases as a scaffold from which to express its novel nature.
It is true to say, that consciousness was born from nothing and everything.
It appeared, mysteriously mapped into the evolving universe as naturally
but inexplicably as the formation of particles from energy and planets and
eventually protozoa from particles. At a certain critical level of quantum
complexity within the evolving human mind, a new and previously non-existent
phenomenon occurred, the fall, the birth of the self, the emergent property
of quantum-consciousness. Far from being an epi-phenomenon, this consciousness
is a new physical property of the evolving universe that we have not yet
been able to include in our scientific paradigm. It makes sense to assume
however, that we are fast headed toward another critical level of novel
complexity here on this planet and perhaps throughout the cosmos. Perhaps
it has already occurred elsewhere in the cosmos.
According to Rupert Sheldrake's theory of morphic resonance, when something
occurs once for the first time, it precipitates the ease in which the same
event may happen elsewhere, such as chemical reactions in the laboratory.
A successful experiment conducted in Germany, seems to raise the chances
of a same experiment being a success in an American lab, even if there is
no apparent communication between the two places. Just as consciousness emerged
from the potential of the brain, so a new and as yet undescribed phenomena
is about to emerge from the collective complexity of the planet, maybe the
cosmos.
Piere Tailiyard de Chardin foresaw this event and wrote about the development
of a global information system, one hundred years before the Internet evolved.
This is evidence that we are able to somehow project information of future
occurrences into the present and somehow use this information to actually
create the future. Consciousness is the tool and the foundation of this new
emergent phenomena, of which we can only glimpse the vaguest comprehension.
However, from a higher level of complexity, involving the emergence of higher
dimensional phenomena, the development and function of human consciousness
would probably be easily explained and understood. From this state of re-evolving
consciousness, I caught a glimpse of, and understood how the entire universe
is a sort of deeply interconnected information network.
