Entering the Metaphysical Blender

I had only one prior experience with mushrooms at this point in time, and had been desperately seeking them out for months after a life-changing first experience that rid me of a menacing depression that had consumed me for years. After months of fruitlessly searching a contact of mine finally had come across some, and I decided to buy a quarter ounce so that I could have more than one experience. Well, it turns out this contact didn't have a scale at the time and it ended up coming out to a whopping 14 grams of mushrooms when I weighed it later in the evening, I felt like the luckiest human being on the planet.

I had planned on taking an eighth that fateful evening but decided on taking a dosage of 5 grams because of the large amount of mushrooms I had been so suddenly granted; little did I know at the time that this sub-species of Psyilocybe Cubensis was potent enough to send me on mind-bending, cosmic experiences at dosages as low as 1.5 - 2 grams. As I have pointed out I was inexperienced at the time with psychedelics and was in no way prepared for the psychological journey that ensued, but alas, I am forever grateful that I underwent it.

At this point I had eaten that 5 grams and was anxiously waiting for the effects to make themselves noticed. Meanwhile, my sitter had accidentally fallen asleep leaving me alone with my mind and the forthcoming chaos. I will try to split this experience into three sections: Pre-peak, peak, and post-peak.

I was sitting alone in the dark face to face with the Itunes visualizer which moved fluidly to Radiohead's Kid A. It had been two hours since ingestion and little effects had been noticed thus far, perhaps I had eaten too much that day and the digestion was prolonged. All of the sudden, as opposed to the gradual come-ups that I have since become accustomed to, I was covered in the thickest blanket of pure beauty I may have ever felt. The music's energy seemed to stretch itself over the room, draping the darkness in it's subtleties and emotions. I was bewildered with the astonishing beauty of this transition, and I clicked the music off and turned the light on as a growing sense of uneasiness attached itself to the intensity of the emotions that I had just been feeling. I was shocked as I looked up to the television in my room which had apparently been playing an marathon of "Friends" and what greeted me was the detached heads of the characters floating against a morphing purple background. For a while I watched the characters become disembodied and shapeless in numerous different ways against ghostly environments that in no way resembled anything earthly. At this point, I knew that this trip would be unlike anything I had ever felt, even more-so than the harrowing experience with 4 tabs of LSD that I had earlier in the year. I looked around my room and the hues of every color were changing in fluid waves, painting the room with different color schemes repeatedly. Approaching the peak, my ego shriveled to nothing and I sat confused in a neon area that was ceasing to even be recognizable. I looked at the clock and it seemed to be foreign in this morphing realm; the numbers were completely meaningless. The peak came on fast and without mercy, there was no steady climb, I had within minutes found myself inside this consciousness and it had reached its climax no sooner.

Of course I know that even writing about this phase diminishes it, because there aren't words for the scathing intensity of this period of time. I've always referred to the peak of this experience as having my self put into a metaphysical blender and exiting as a different being, and the only way to even try to begin to put it into mere words would be to try to describe each aspect of it individually, as there were many sensations happening simultaneously. I will split up the mental and visual aspects that are actually capable of being described:

Visual aspects: Within the blink of an eye, my bedroom had went from being a colorful, morphing version of itself to an entirely different dimension. Every given object spewed vibrant colors, and each object began to morph into its surroundings until the whole room was a throbbing abstract blur; completely indecipherable. The surroundings became so foreign that I completely forgot where "I" was, I now seemed to permanently inhabited a kaleidoscopic, blob that moved around me. My eyes couldn't handle even a fraction of the sensory assault that I was seeing, but whenever I closed my eyes I fell violently into blackness; I rapidly switched between the outer dimension and my inner dimension always trying to escape the other. 

Psychological aspects: My mind had entered the eternal loop, and my thoughts and emotions looped together in an unbelievably intricate pattern that I didn't become aware of until it had repeated itself several times. I would feel an extreme explosion of bliss give way to an unimaginable onslaught of terror and that terror give way to confused sadness, and these would cycle along with the corresponding thoughts that would cause the emotions, and the emotions would each evoke strange sensations such as a vivid feeling of gazing over the top of a mountain. As this was happening, my self had literally just become an idea alongside other ideas, I had the sensation of folding up like paper and falling into my own body which was indescribably bizarre. During all of this the concept of time had ceased to exist, events throughout my entire life and childhood seemed to be happening all around me at the same moment. The dialogue of "Friends" echoed like it was light years away, and sentences would miraculously repeat themselves over and over again as if each moment was impossibly skipping. All of this barraged my psyche for what seemed like an indescribable amount of time; my reality became one with this new dimension, it became all that I knew; All that I knew was bouncing between the various extremes of my mind and falling into myself. I involuntarily urinated in my bed out of sheer, child-like terror. Looking back now, I know that the very essence of my self was being rearranged by the drug during this period.

After experiencing lifetimes in that peak state, I suddenly felt as if I was lifted from the murky depths of my inner space, I opened my eyes expecting the chaotic dimension to once again blind me but to my immense joy my room had returned to the previous neon-colored, shifting, but recognizable form. I saw that "Friends" was still on and that the chopped up impressions of the characters were still drifting between bright environments. I sat and tried to contemplate the eternity I had just emerged from but I quickly realized it would be impossible. I looked over to my sleeping "sitter" who appeared like a powdered corpse, and I decided to venture out into my house now that I had decent motor control. I should say that I was still tripping harder than I ever have at this point (and that's A LOT for me to say), but I was so relieved to exit that traumatizing state that every bit of uneasiness disappeared. I felt literally reborn; a new human being, I knew never to take existence for granted again.

 

I sat in a chair in my basement, and my perception of my house would constantly change. At one moment, I would feel as if I was in the hull of a ship, and then I would feel like my house was living and that I was in its stomach, and then I would feel that my house was actually my mind and that I was sitting inside of my subconscious. I should mention that the colors, spacing, feeling, and dimensions of everything never returned to any vaguely normal form for the entirety of the experience, everything was changing and shifting fluidly throughout. I remember gazing at the floor and seeing that it was the blatant texture of the ocean, watery ripples and crisp oceanic waves ran through it and crashed at my feet. I convulsed uncontrollably around the room with intense pleasure and joy, in a dance that moved to what I perceived as the pulse of my house. 

At this point it was 5 or 6 in the morning, and I had taken the mushrooms at 11 PM, they had kicked in around 12:30 or 1. My sitter awoke out of the need to use the restroom and I looked at him completely lost in wonder as composite versions of his face and head started to rise out of the top of his noggin. Blobs of skin emerged and extended from his face. I looked at my dog who had been kept there the whole time with the intent of "grounding" me which I had no clue would be a useless effort. Legs sprouted like tentacles from his furry back, and kicked around uselessly in the air. I lay down for a long time trying to get some rest, knowing I had work to do the next day, but even when I eventually managed to fall asleep at 8 in the morning, I was still being treated to exploding neon colors that would creep up and grow in intensity until they were blinding and then they would repeat that cycle. During this whole post-peak period, I was in a state of the most ecstatic, blissful joy I have ever felt even though I was surrounded still by overwhelming hallucinations. I drifted of to an all engulfing sleep and awoke as a new human being. Tranquility seemed to coarse throughout my body, and the colors of the world appeared astonishingly vivid (this has never completely subsided; after this experience I began experimenting frequently with mushrooms and colors have never fully returned to "baseline"; perhaps the doors of perception being cleansed?). 

This was simultaneously the most amazing, intense, frightening, and other-worldly experience of my life, and I'm sad there's not enough language to convey it even half-fully, but I suppose that's how it is with any psychedelic experience. I have never since been the same, and I even feel like the numerous trips I embarked on afterwards took on a more intense quality because of this incendiary night. I emerged from this experience perceiving reality and myself in an entirely different way; I became aware of the subjective and uncertain nature of both. This experience severed the cultural part of my mind from my personality. Now at the end of the 8 months since then, over which I have experimented with mushrooms around 21 times, I recognize this sole experience as the one that made my psychedelic transformation possible. Without it I would not be able to perceive things as openly and abstractly as I do now. I entered the metaphysical blender, and came out as an infant seeing the world for the first time; utterly pure transcendence.