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Tchan909 said:
I apologize in advance for the rather bleak nature of this trip report. I have learned that MDMA truly can be used as an "entheogen," rather than a quick, peppy feel-good drug (even if that is its most common use).

I don't roll very often, and when I do, the pills I usually take very obviously contain a great deal more methamphetamine than MDMA. I've grown used to taking a pill and getting little more out of it than a speed buzz with lovey-dovey overtones. I also don't usually eat more than one.

Last night, I took two pills. These were actually really good pills - my saying this represents very low standards on my part, since they were still loaded with meth, but they were also loaded with MDMA, rather than offering little more than a taste. I was in full-on humping-the-furniture mode, a la that episode of Family Guy. Hell, I was actually seeing visuals. Every twitch of my finger was a thunderstorm of cosmic ecstasy.

I'm paying the price today. I'm a fucking wreck. But I'm going to describe what I saw.

As the peak approached, I could see a colorless rope; the rope was all of my worry, all of my stress, bound up so tightly around me. In the face of the peak, however, the rope was unraveled; the threads which composed it split apart from each other, revealing their beautiful, colorful, luminous individual nature. While I was (honestly) planning on using this roll as a masturbatory aide, I rapidly forgot that intention as I was pulled into a beautiful, introspective, cosmic trip. I instantly realized that, in the world outside our heads, there is no meaning. Realizing nothing really meant anything, I felt a colossal weight lifted from my shoulders; why bother getting burnt-up over anything when all of it is inherently meaningless? Moreover, can death even exist in a world without meaning? Our ideas of the "beginning" and the "end" are utterly fictional. They are meanings which can be applied to other meanings - e.g., I began my trip, I ended my trip. I began to carve a sculpture, and eventually that endeavor ended. But we have never witnessed a cosmic beginning or end; there is no such thing. Everything comes from something that already exists. It is a kind of human chauvinism to assume that, like an endeavor that we can perform or observe, there is a beginning and end to the universe, or to life itself; that at some point it simply didn't exist at all, and will return to that state eventually. Death as we know and fear it is an illusion. Death has no meaning, beyond the simple cessation of bodily functions. Without the core concepts of beginning and end, which are themselves fictional, tools useful for description, but disastrous for analysis, death holds no meaning, no fear. There is a growing sentiment in the world as we grow out of the ancient religions that death represents not just the cessation of the human body you have become so identified with and attached to, but a kind of eternal emptiness from which there is no return. Nothingness. I don't believe there is such a thing in the universe; even when nothingness exists, it is only in relation to something that is measurable. The emptiness between the stars, the blank spot in the memory of a dreamless sleep, cannot exist without the stars themselves, and without waking up.

For millions of years, our ancestors fit well into the little niche they had developed in response to. This was heaven on earth; the Garden of Eden. Humanity didn't have to struggle for anything; they simply had everything they needed already, in abundance. Eventually, nature got ready to move on. The climate and the very shape of the earth changed, in ways which were deleterious to early humanity. At one point, the entire population was reduced to 1000 people. It seemed we had fallen out of Mother Earth's favor, as the paradise we lived in dried up and froze over. It was our time to die, to fade into memory, roll over and make room for something new.

We were scared. Our capacity for reasoning made us scared. It also gave us the tools to fight the designs of nature as nothing else on Earth can. And we kicked the biggest, bloodiest tantrum this planet has ever seen.

We saw our home, hewn naturally from the rock and the forest, begin to crumble. Rather than silently accepting it, or adapting our own behavior, or simply bawling our sorrows out, as sane, self-respecting animals would do, we built terraces to hold it together. And as we fell ever further out of the Mother Earth's favor, we had to build more and more terraces, all over the planet. At some point, we reached a point where our terraces offered us comfortable living and opportunities for relaxation. But by this point we could no longer stop building new terraces. We had become greedy, poisoned by all the power we had already taken for ourselves. Powerful people only want more power. We wanted more - more control, more ease, less discomfort. Our brains are far too large; an organ which initially developed in order to make simple calculations for the body has gone haywire and sees fit to transpose its specifically survival-related calculations over the totality of reality it faces. Powerful tools for survival; too powerful. And so the march of technology picked up the pace, and so too did the scale of our conflicts, and our pride.

None of this makes us happy. It makes us only more afraid - of the ever-thickening boundaries our meanings we create between each other and our environment. A high dose of LSD taught me that underlying my entire experience of reality was sheer, immortal bliss. It cannot be controlled, because it is an elemental force. But it can be covered up, and it is. Once I peel away the agonizing layers of meaning and control imposed by my brain, what do I find? Joy and awe at creation, pure bliss, utterly untainted by my mortal assumptions and fears. It has always been there; I simply forgot about it when I learned how to remember at around age 3. I also learned how to hate myself, to deny myself the joy of life out of hand, as many of us have. To live in under perpetual, automatic belief that "things could still be better, one way or another," missing the forest for the trees. I am an expression of the universe, perfect like the rest, a microcosm of God. But I find whatever reasons I can to  hate myself, correct myself, doubt myself. And I'm afraid of all those other microcosmic Gods. They're all perfect too, and yet I find in myself and others such a colossal lack of acceptance - for anything beautiful or real, existing contrary to the rules of the ravenous meaning-machines we run on. How sick is that? Our ancient fear of death, refusal to die, refusal to accept, has robbed us of our humanity, our happiness, and our love.

This is hatred of God. Lucifer was a symbol for mankind; an angel of God who decided he knew better how things should be done. But as a product of God, living in God's universe, this is obvious foolishness. But it's the same foolishness we are guilty of. Order is the demon which breathes down our backs; order, the predictable lifelessness we make out of the wild perfection of the universe. This monster, which we express so well, devours everything we love, defecating a packaged version; loaded with preservatives, verified by professionals to be harmless. It is reality, defanged, declawed, castrated. The mysteries of life are obscured by the obvious intents behind everything we see.

That's what the Forbidden Fruit of Knowledge was. It wasn't a magic mushroom, it was a metaphor for the nature of knowledge itself; a gift at face value, which becomes a curse and certain death when swallowed. Such are the powers we possess, and such is the world we have made for ourselves.

The easiest analogy for mankind should be obvious. We are a cancer. We six billion are the product of a mere thousand who refused to undergo their cosmic apoptosis, and as a consequence grew vastly out of proportion, ravenous and all-consuming.

Either we will die of the very real overpopulation we already live in, or we will actually make good on our delusions of perfection, and become one with creation. I do believe that can happen, but we're currently locked in a spiritual war of cosmic proportions; and there is no guarantee that the Godly will win when we can't even be sure who they are. They fight alongside the devil's henchmen without even knowing it, such is the diversionary power of our meanings.

I should mention I'm agnostic. I use the religious language and concepts because I believe they are better descriptions of our shared history than we can possibly imagine. The foundation of shamanism, and of good religion is meaning used as a tool for description, not analysis. Shamans and the old religions understood that we are not working closer towards bliss with our meanings, but hiding from it, and developed all sorts of tools for showing this to people; from mental exercises to the use of plant poisons to override the control centers of meaning and force a sense of perspective. But now the shamans' tools are outlawed, and the communal wisdom of the old religions marginalized by an unthinking legacy of ancient imperialism and our ever-growing well of fatuous "knowledge." We can still see the ancient wisdom of the Hebrews by reading the Bible, but it is colored by the ontological assumptions of translators, working from what they've been told by the ghosts of their Roman masters.

I'm certainly open to the interpretation that we are living out a cosmic experiment. Would we really all be better off dead? It certainly seems that way sometimes, living in the hell we've made. But it would appear God is reserving his judgment for the time being. I'm sure it's some grand experiment with meaning beyond our comprehension.

Yes, I see the contradiction in that paragraph with the rest of this post. It's as self-contradictory as the rest of this post; wailing about how meaningless our obsession with meaning is. That's just another example the schizophrenia we collectively suffer under, the double-bind that defines our peculiar existence. It's why we're still alive, in spite of the earth's best efforts. Enlightenment, transcendence, spiritual ecstasy, represent a freedom from that schizophrenia, an escape from the bulldozers of order and meaning into the beautiful patterns and utter meaninglessness of creation. This is, of course, the meaning that I apply to these things. See what I mean?

This post is rambling, pseudo-intellectual, hippy-dippy tripe. I know it is. Maybe it's the depletion of my serotonin system, but thinking about what I just tried to describe was literally making me cry earlier. I seriously mean bawl. I needed to get it off my chest in text form and share it with you beautiful folks. That a child could be told that his grandparents or his pet are gone forever, when it's as obvious to him as anyone else that he can see them again but for closing his eyes and wanting to. We just have to make this life so fucking grim for ourselves.

Be gentle, this is the worst ecstasy hangover I've had in my entire life. If any of you guys have read through all this crap, scoff away, I don't care. I love you for putting out the effort of reading it, and I love you for being here.

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