I have learned a deep respect.

My friend introduced me to mushrooms. It was perfectly set up as no one else was in the house for the weekend. This was my first mushroom experience.

I made some eggs and veggies for breakfast and once it was all done I mixed the mushroom pieces all throughout my breakfast and ate it all. I'm not sure the exact dosage but it was about half an eighth. Within about 25 minutes I started to feel this strange sensation inside of myself. I couldn't describe it, it was unlike anything I've ever felt. So, I simply started laughing. My friend looked at me and said "They usually don't make people laugh so much" which in my current situation was so ironically funny to me that I began laughing harder. I started to explain to him that I feel magic inside of me. I would exclaim it over and over again. "There's magic!! In me!!! MAGIC!! I KNOW IT!" At this point these were the only effects. I just felt so unreasonably giddy. Shortly after I started to wander around the kitchen and found a place where I felt as if I was being sucked towards. I stood in that spot and reached my arms out, in that moment I started to feel as if my arms were stretching far from my body, I felt like I could touch everything, but my arms weren't any different. Nothing was different, I just felt like I could, this again excited me so much that I just stood there with my arms out yelling "Wow! Wow!!!!! WOWW!!!!!" 

We then started going back to our rooms. On the way, in the living room, I stopped because I felt a sudden change in mood when I stepped into the living room. It wasn't a nice place to be all of a sudden. I felt this strange... greyness. It was as if all emotion had been permanently sucked out of the room, and there I was, like a finely tuned antenna, highly aware of the extreme greyness of my surroundings. This dim empty feeling was overwhelming to me and so I just stood there and soaked it up, trying to analyze it and understand what could have left such a gaping hole in the happiness of the immediate area. My friend asked if me I ever wondered why everyone else in the house didn't seem to like hanging out down here. And then something very profound started to occur to me. I suddenly realized that human beings are ignorant antennas. They are constantly bombarded with signals they cannot recognize, let alone interpret consciously. As a physics student in college I know much about background radiation in the universe and the various "noise" coming from the indescribably large amount of things going on around us at the atomic scale that produce fields and frequencies at which these fields shift and change. Suddenly then I started to understand how it is that the spiritual world is truly nothing more than a physical world which operates on a sensory level beyond our primary understanding of "sense". These fields, these frequencies that are always bombarding us, they are a language spoken by things which cause the motions of the particles responsible for said fields. Standing there I understood, here and now, I am becoming open. The mushrooms, I believed, were opening me to these natural antenna abilities in a way I had never imagined and helping to see how they reside in all of us. I knew that in the next few hours I would be blessed with a gift of sight and that I must use it well while it lasts. 

                We made our way back up to our rooms and for a little while we were isolated from each other in our separate rooms. When I got back into my room I was excited that the experience was now beginning to accelerate. I was now experiencing this odd displaced feeling that I like to call the “man in the mirror” feeling. I experienced it on acid as well. The best way I can explain it is that once the feeling begins you feel as if you have stepped off of the train of time. Like, you’re wandering through time regularly, and then the trip sets in and you still are moving through time, but there’s something obviously different about this new type of time you are experiencing. I once explained it to my sister and in this explanation I said something like “Ever look in the mirror and think, what if that person in the mirror is another me? And all that around him is another world just like this one? Well, when the trip starts, all of a sudden you’re the man in the mirror. Everything is the same, but it’s all… completely different because you just know that it’s a replica of what you know.” I immediately sat down in front of my computer and put on some music, in retrospect I believe that the direction in which the trip went was mostly due to the music I picked. I started listening to Eden Synthetic Corps. I doubt any of you are familiar with them. The dark, harsh agro-tech sound was at first this plethora of rises and falls, but soon it was so much more.

I looked at my screen and saw my AIM window, my friend from down the hall just then sent me an IM that said “Reality… stops… now.” He had eaten them shortly after I had. The moment I read that I started to feel like my head was so heavy. I could barely keep it up, it hung down and I swayed it around trying to get a hold of it. It felt like it was swiveling around on my neck. I sat there in that chair, letting the auditory assault of the music take me over, watching the lines of my clothing, on the floor, on my desk, starting to pulse and jitter with the music. Opaque surfaces with no usual shine started to shimmer. I began to feel the sound of the music, it was no longer in my ears, it was in my entire body, in my mind. I started to become just like it, I started to feel like it. I felt angry, I felt unstoppable. I felt this incredible staggering feeling, like I was watching the sun as it grew closer and closer, moments away from swallowing up our planet. But I didn’t feel scared, I didn’t feel bad about it. I felt like I was watching the destruction of this miserable little place with tears running from my eyes only because I was so relieved that the pain of its existence was finally about to end. When such a thought fully hit me, I realized I was going in the wrong direction. No wait, I was going in the right direction. I knew that it was this music that was doing this to me, but I loved it. I knew that the mushrooms made me choose this because they knew that it would help them show me what they had to say. But I was coming to see, these little gems weren’t god’s flowers, they were from somewhere else. They were from somewhere dark and terrible. Nothing that could be on this planet naturally could be here to do this to us, and so I thought, they must be from a place that seeks to destroy us. And there I was, unifying with them, becoming one with the force that seeks to destroy.

                This was too much, I had to get out of this place in my head, so I looked back up at my computer screen and tried to talk to people, just to have casual conversation. I noticed that this was becoming difficult, the lines on the various windows on my screen were moving. Paragraphs of text were sliding in a weird way. One line of text would gently shift to the right as the one under it would shift left, and then back again, and again. It was making it very hard for me to read. I closed my eyes for a moment and then I had a strange visual. I saw this waving flag, it was all my vision, completely consuming all that I could see. It was dark, but behind it there was a bright spotlight shinning through it. I started to feel like it would burn if I didn’t open my eyes. I opened them and realized what I had seen. It was the flag of the unified world, from some time in the future when all the governments in the world had become one. The light that was going to burn the flag, that light was me. I quickly expressed this to a good friend of mine who later told me he was very confused. But then, I realized I had to get away from the technology. I started to see that this experience and technology didn’t mix well. So, I shut off all lines of communication.

I looked up at a large drawing on the wall in front of me, one I had done for an art class earlier that semester. It was shifting and pulsing, “breathing” as I later learned people call it. I felt like it was going to swallow me up and it was then I knew that I had to get out of this insane environment I had made for myself. So, I got up, left my room and went to visit my friend. When I entered his room I was highly aware of the difference in energy between his room and mine. His was like an old record, slowly repeating a nice story of a simpler life, a life that had figured things out. It was like I had stepped out of my fortress and into the world, his world. The soft glow of the sunlight behind his drawn shades covered the entire room in a scintillating bronze tone. I told him I just had to get out of my room for a little while, his response sent the experience in a direction that I was not ready for and till this day it remains to be the most emotionally intense period I have ever endured. He simply said “Is that because of them?” I was floored. How did he know? What’s more is, how did I know?! It was as if… all my life I had been followed by something sick, some kind of looming shade with its hand on my shoulder. There, with the smile on my face trudging through the world, the shade had a sick grin of knowing and prophecy. No one would see me coming because the bright light on my surface disguised the ultimate core of who I was; the shade.

What’s more, the legion of things behind the shade, awaiting its call to usher them into the world. It was because of this that the zone I had created had such a terrible feel to it and my extreme awareness and acceptance of it was overwhelming me. He told me not to worry and then described some things to me which sent my new found mental niche into an even deeper coil of insanity. We went into my room, where he sat and looked at a magazine as we talked. The details of our conversation are somewhat haunting and I care not to share them. The summary conclusion I reached however, all the while watching my room tilt and bend, was that I was destined to be a key part in the rise of global chaos and all around the world there were people like my friend who were destined to help.

As the trip faded the logic I had so strongly believed during it began to fade as well and it started to function more like a nightmare than something that had actually happened to me. For the most part the rest of the trip was me sitting there just shaking my head trying to come to grips with what had happened to me internally. This experience cannot be labeled in terms of “good” or “bad”. All I can say is that during the experience the notion of good and bad had fallen apart. It was simply just what was. I had no place to even begin wondering if I liked it or not. Like a good yoga session, you just move and go into a trance with it. The slight pain in the stretch of holding certain positions stops being a negative thing, it just is what it is and you accept it.