Power Sojourn

You’ve never tried LSD, right?” I asked my closest friend and tripping buddy. “Na, man,” he responded, “got sold that bunk shit by that ghetto-ass dude that one time, but never had any good L.” “Well we’ll have to fix that,” I replied.

A few hours earlier we had eaten 20mg of 2C-I each, giving my roommate and his best friend around 16mg each as well. Their first psychedelic experience had been unfolding and revealing new world upon new dimension as we took in the blaring music pumping from the corner, all more than comfortable with each other, having the time of our lives; even having lived together for months, this was the first time  my roommate (or our other female companion) had decided to partake in our ritualistic insanity and eat whatever funny-ass drugs it was that made us go crazy, and the first time that any of us really opened up to each other. 

2C-I is my favorite social drug, bar none, with the brilliant and flowing conversation it usually entails, the strong push to analytically and rationally understand yourself and those around you, inducing a sort of logical and empirical empathetic drive as a sort of counterpoint to the emotional and subjective type one might feel under MDMA, along with the cascading rainbows of glittering prisms and shifts in spacial dimensions that provide sensuous and limitless conversational fodder when  overly-rational discourse grows tiresome.

The four of us and my brother, who had chosen not to imbibe, all wandered around the apartment, me drawing the utmost enjoyment and amusement with our newly psychedelic friends; the amazement on their faces glowed golden as everything they had ever held concrete became less meaningful, and everything that they had never known became more relevant. 

Ideological complacency peeled away to reveal the light of life that had been dampened since childhood by a world that had forsaken our generation. Left to struggle to find meaning in a world that had long lost hope in genuine humanity- selling its soul to materialism, conformity and industrialization at the cost of any unfortunate enough to crave anything deeper or more permanent; the children of an aimless generation saw not a glimmer of hope shining through the cracks, but the unrelenting, glaring full force of what is the feminine creative power that our world has been impregnated with, constantly exuding from everything manifest, shrouded into unappreciated and uneventful happenstance by the filters of our misdirected little human minds. 

Things they had seen every day for the past few months took on new meaning. Was it “new meaning”? or in fact the meaning(s) they had always held? simply left unacknowledged and unappreciated having been viewed through the tragically jaded and belittling minds of our generation, entrenched in heretofore inescapable dualism, division and separation from what in fact we are in whole, from what in fact Is

“Something out of fucking nowhere!!” my roommate exclaimed, at which I held my tongue at the want to detail that at every moment, that is, in fact, what our entire universe consists of: something being manifested eternally where there should be a void of nothingness, our human psyche always hard at work trying to filter out the infinite oneness that is imminent in all of it so that we might live as physical beings.

I took them into my room to see the psychedelic posters I had hanging on my walls. The black and white one, which played with one’s mind even sober, ripped us all away into a tornado of glistening onyx and pearl, pieces of consciousness flying in every direction. My brother saved us from falling into oblivion (a place I find quite hospitable, actually) by redirecting our attention to the much less intimidating poster on the adjacent wall: fractal tubes of bright colors and deep textures. “I wanna get in that one!” my roommate let out, and off he went.

Back in the living room we were back to listening to music- myself being tempted to show my inexperienced friends the wonders of the Nirvana-like trance state on the other side of veil, where only the sounds, sights, smells and sensations of the immediate and eternal moment exist. But before I could go into the explanation of how to purposefully get there, my neighbor and his girlfriend came into the apartment along with another guy I had yet to meet. 

“This guy is cool,” my neighbor mutually explained to his mysterious companion and myself, at which I invited them all in. As it turns out, neither my neighbor nor his girlfriend were “cool” with our new guest, and had left him within ten minutes, just trying to ditch him anywhere they could, but that is another story. 

My roommate and our lady friend, being inexperienced with psychedelics and our new company, grew silent and anxious as I conversed with him. I quickly learned that he had an abundance of extraordinary chemicals with him and he learned the same of me. 

“You’ve never tried LSD, right?” I asked my closest friend and tripping buddy. “Na, man,” he responded, “got sold that bunk shit by that ghetto-ass dude that one time, but never had any good L.” “Well we’ll have to fix that,” I replied.

Within twenty minutes we were making friendly exchanges, at the end of which my brother, my closest friend, and I had around 100ug of LSD apiece creeping into our capillaries via newly christened sweet-tarts. 

Our new friend stayed another half hour or so trying to persuade us all to go to the local party scene with him, himself being out of town. My roommate and our other female friend were responsibly intimidated by the proposal, being in such a novel and foreign state of mind, so we negotiated that my brother and my good tripping buddy would take him to the clubs and I would keep the other two company in their absence. 

Eager to enter the trance state myself, I put Shpongle on deck and began to explain what I knew about breaking the veil to my friends. 

“Lie down. Get as comfortable as you possibly can. Feel the comfort of the cushions beneath you and the cover above you. Become engrossed in the textures. Think of nothing else. Think of nothing. Close your eyes. Feel your body pulsate. Listen to the music- all of it. Hear the notes and rhythms intertwine within your mind. Let them paint pictures across the backs of your eye-lids. Feel the beats and how they owe their origin to the beating of your own heart. Empty your minds of everything except what is happening to you, within your own universe, within the infinite unknown bounds the moment contains. Do not deviate, do not think, do not rationalize, don’t try to make sense of any of it- just let it be as it is and let it come into you. 

Now, at some point you will feel a force welling up inside of you- it usually starts in the stomach. Acknowledge this force. Welcome it. Cultivate it. It will grow, in power and in dimension. If you think about it too much it will recede. Do not think- just feel. Cultivate this force. Let it grow stronger. Will it to grow stronger. Keep listening to the music. Keep feeling the music. Let it grow bigger. Will it to grow bigger. This force will grow to engulf all of you- your body, mind and spirit- if you will let it, if you will will it. As it becomes stronger than what you think you are, as it grows as strong as what you really are, you will most likely be intimidated- because this will take more of you than you even knew you had to give; it will take all of you, in your entirety, undivided by the dualism we live by. 

When this force reaches the bounds of what you are you will have to give way to it if you want to “see” where it will take you. Do not be intimidated. When at last you have become one with this force, you will see what in fact we all are- not simple finite beings confined for a spell to temporal bodies within finite bounds, but fractions of a universal and infinite experience, oneness of consciousness compartmentalized into physical houses filtering out the incomprehensible. Let go. Let go. Melt. Melt. Release. Melt. Release. Release. Melt.”

The complex rhythms and melodies became manifest in my mind’s eye. From my left an amethyst DNA-like double-helix worked itself in and out of intricate twists and turns through endless clouds of glowing orange as a pink double-helix did the same to my right. They collided and rained sparks of multi-colored life-force into the void, leaving behind ribbons of their own color, winding themselves into double-helixes of their own, fractalizing in the same fashion as they collided and repeated the phenomenon again and again, the colors swelling in intensity and beauty- from beauty into greater beauty, self-perfecting.

A timeless eternity later, chronologically scored by “A New Way to Say Hooray”, we shivered out of the trance state to the sound of my roommate asking, “Where did we just go?!” I answered him the best way I knew how:

“Some people thinks it’s Nirvana, but I’m not certain. It’s a state of consciousness where all the filters have been turned off and you are left naked with the entirety of your sensory input, unadulterated by the distractions we’re usually so taken with. I call it psychedelia, but that’s just a word- a symbol that merely conjures up ideas of what it stands for- what it was was an experience, and words are very clumsy.”

Not long afterwards the others got back from their night out and excitedly filled us in on what they had done- watched some drunk bimbo crash a new sports car into a ditch, freaked out in a gas station, had a ball at the clubs- and we told them about the new veils being broken. 

My brother, my close tripping buddy, and I all got another hit of that phenomenal LSD and our new friend went back out into town for God-knows-what. 

My roommate and our female friend were eager for more experience and I gave them another 15mg of 2C-I and my other buddy and I took another 20mg apiece. 

Before long I had gone into one of the deep, strange dreams that LSD usually puts me in. Immense energy began to overtake me. As it grew stronger I played with it, moving atomic orbs of dark matter surrounded by fluorescent purple lightening from finger-tip to finger-tip, containing them one at a time between my palms. As I moved the individual dime-sized spheres between my hands they swallowed each other up and grew larger. After an hour or so I had created one around the size of a soft-ball. I broke it apart and watched it fractalize back into the smaller individual parts. The tiny orbs scattered over my body, engulfing me in shadow, purple tinged white lightening electrifying me and filling me with more forceful kinetic psychedelic energy than I could have imagined. 

I felt it flowing through me more powerfully than I could contain, flowing out of me visibly as liquid lightening, my body the conduit. I let it take control. I, overtaken by this energy, conformed to the current, rolling around in the floor in languor then tensing to form whatever hieroglyphic shape I was brought to.

At one point I was left prostrate on the floor staring at the open space beneath the table. The tiny space, no more than six square feet, shone with an eerie green hue and began to sharpen in relief until I was looking out unto an endless expanse of miniature mountain scenery. Purple lightening shot up from the miniscule mountaintops below and overtook me once more, leaving me rolling and posing like an idiot for another hour or so.

When at last this unrelenting energy released its hold on me I felt absolutely drenched in what it had left behind. Literally soaked in it. I shook and flicked like a dog, doing everything I could to dry myself of this monstrous power.

All the while, my friends had watched me and said next to nothing. When they would shoot me an inquisitive glance I would try to explain myself but would no sooner be overtaken once more by this crippling psychedelic force, left unable to speak. Once I had regained command I did my best to describe what was happening to me, but I’m afraid I could never really quite put words to the experience… Words just won’t do.