First Mushroom Trip

On July 1, 2014 I consumed very potent magic mushrooms at a Phish concert that I had gone to with my older cousin J, his girlfriend H, my female older cousin Z, and my female cousin K who is my age. I had purchased an eighth of an ounce from our tailgating neighbor for $35 and split it with K. The mushrooms tasted dry and bitter. I always say they remind me of sunflower seeds but sunflower seeds are far tastier. I washed down the caps and stems with a lukewarm beer (I do not recommend mixing psychedelics with alcohol) and continued to eat the remaining “dust” or “shake” at the bottom of my boomer bag. Neither of us had ever tried mushrooms before and this was I believe her first experience tripping. We had both just consumed approximately 1.5-7 dried grams of psilocybin mushrooms. 

I had already been smoking pot fairly regularly for over a year and had tripped a few times prior. My first time trying any kind of entheogen I had a mild psychedelic experience on LSA containing Hawaiian baby wood rose seeds. I also had a fairly intense psychedelic experience once on 1/4 of a blotter paper tab containing a research chemical called 25C-NBOME, and another time on a small dose of weak LSD that may have even been a total placebo effect for all I know. There were no visuals from this experience but I thought everything looked really bright, big, and beautiful. I had also tried MDMA once before this experience. But ultimately I didn’t have any idea what to expect from this mystical fungi. I was filled with the anxiety-laced anticipation that always accompanies the coming up part of a trip.

We entered the venue soon after I ate them. I could feel waves of excitement and anxiety wash over me. It wasn't long until we were in the grass field in front of the stadium. A fog of cannabis smoke hovered above the dense crowds of people. Every where I looked there was tie dye, bright colors, floral patterns, dread locks, faces with beards, faces with glasses, pretty faces. Everyone was either smoking pot or getting drunk or already drunk. The two degenerates in front of me were snorting Molly out of a plastic bag. Groovy funky jams played loud from the stage. Bright lasers flashed and lights danced behind the band. 

The first change in my visual perception I noticed was that my environment looked and felt like I was in a movie. Every person or object looked slightly disassociated from the rest of the background. My physical body started to feel weightless and I felt light and airy. Me and K smoked a blunt as the mushrooms started creeping up on us. After we finished the blunt my head was in such a fog I temporarily forgot that I had consumed a strong psychoactive substance earlier. Time and space seemed to dissolve all around me as I drifted away into the familiar state of being high. It dissolved in a much deeper way though. I started to feel a lucid energy flowing through my veins. My body began to feel like it was not a solid any more but more like a liquid. Every movement had such a strange kind of fluidity to it. Almost like my body didn't even exist and there just a raw me. 

I remind myself that I’m high on mushrooms and begin to pay more attention to my surroundings. I immediately notice my hands have a rippled effect going through them and appear very long and stretched. The hair on my arms is also rippling and wavy. All of a sudden everything I look at comes to life. Everything looks like its breathing heavy or rippled like the surface of a pond. I see colorful trails slithering through the grass, through everything I look at. Spiderweb patterns begin growing on everything including the sky above me which is only getting darker. Light explodes in the most confusing and abstract patterns on the stage. Purple glowing mushrooms that I don’t think were real are floating on each side of the stadium. The sun has set at this point in time painting the sky a deep purple glowing with insane violet light. 

I’m looking at reality. The only reality I have ever consciously known for the past seventeen years is literally and figuratively melting before my eyes. When I go to use the port-a-potties I completely space out and walk back and forth from port-a-potty to port-a-potty, indecisive on which one I want to use. Eventually I snap myself out of this confusion and run into a port-a-potty. Inside the little portable bathroom the walls were all warping and breathing around me and it felt like I was trapped in a Russian doll modeled plethora of port-a-potties floating around in space.

When we leave the bathrooms my cousin J starts running in front of me so I run after him. It feels like I’m shrinking, almost like I’m a rabbit or a squirrel; some kind of small animal that is going deeper into a hole. I feel myself getting smaller and everything around me suddenly seems big and intimidating. I’m still running after my cousin and I don’t want to get lost but I do anyway. There’s quite literally a sea of people and it feels like it’s impossible to find my group ever again. I sit down and space out again and when I shake myself back into reality a little bit I realize that my cousins aren’t that far away and were about a hundred feet in front of me the whole time as I was just sitting next to some random hippy girls.

I return to my party but I’ve completely lost all concept of time. I look at my iPhone, amused by the squiggly characters waving on my text screen. The colorful applications are jiggling all around like they do when you change the layout of your apps. The application bubble squares stretch and shrink, grow and wither. I look at the numbers assembled to form a time figure and realize that I can’t even understand what time is. The numbers mean nothing to me. I’m looking directly at the time on my phone but if I were to be asked what time it is I don’t think I could explain to the inquirer what time it was. I clung to this confusion and it started to bother me that I was so detached from reality. I felt like I was trapped inside my own head. I can feel myself slipping into a dark abyss of eternity. When the illusion of time is removed from your experience of reality there is only the one single moment that melts into an infinite puddle of timelessness. Once I escape the illusion of passing time I can feel everything. The beginning. The end. They are often confused as opposites when in reality they are one. I start to realize that other opposites are really the same thing and that one thing cannot exist without the other. Good cannot exist without bad. We cannot have pleasure in our life if we don’t have suffering sometimes. Up cannot exist without down just like life cannot exist without death. And then I realize that birth and death are actually the same event and we have all been reborn infinite times. Our true self is formless, egoless, and mindless. Our consciousness is just recycled energy being transferred from one organism to another as we die and are born again. Isaac Newton proved that “matter cannot be created or destroyed.” We are all immortal because it is impossible for us not to be. Reality is only individually perceived and it has no objective existence.

I’ve become convinced that time doesn’t exist and eternity is all that there is. My thoughts begin to loop in patterns that makes me feel like all my thoughts are tumbling on top of each other. As if they are awkward drunk people tripping over one another and and crashing on top of each other in a tangled knot of nonsense. Infinity consumes my mind as I see the passing of time for the illusion that it is. All of eternity is one moment. I not only witness but experience everything that has ever happened but it doesn’t happen on a timeline. I’m not experiencing or perceiving anything from beginning to end. It is all happening at once. The history of the universe, our galaxy, the earth, evolution, and every moment of every conscious and unconscious being’s life plays out before me all in the same moment and I see it all through the perspective of every conscious and unconscious organism. This one moment is infinitely shorter than a second. 

Infinity goes in every single direction imaginable and unimaginable. Inward and outward, up and down, and directions that aren’t even comprehendible. It is the eye of the needle, the one true source of creation, the balance of all forces. Good and evil. Cold and hot. Fire and water. Earth and air. Darkness and light. Masculine and feminine. This simple yet epic balance of life is as reliable as the rising and setting of the sun. 

I can’t fathom a life that exists outside of this one single moment of eternity. The beautiful balance of life becomes overwhelming as I begin to feel the connections to  everything and anything. I’m humbled as I bring to fruition the essence of my insignificance. I am just a small drop of water in an ocean that has no beginning and no end. But that drop of water is the ocean. There truly is no difference. I am nothing. I am everything. Nothing makes any sense, logic has been abandoned and in this state of timelessness it always has been and always will be.

I’m traveling through the cosmic roots of nature and eventually think myself into the most horrible panic. I feel like I’m lost and will never return. I’m certain and convinced beyond a doubt that I’m in over my head in a torrent of insanity. I’ve entered a trip of which I’ll never recover from. “Oh god I’ve finally done it.” kept repeating and echoing in my head like a tribal chant. The words don’t even make sense because words and other elements of reality are just as insignificant as time or space. I can’t seem to grasp the concept of anything. It’s like everything is backwards or inside out. It’s like I’m looking at everything through the other side of a mirror, reality is reflecting back onto itself. 

My physical form melts and my entire identity and ego shed revealing to me a light far too bright and far too powerful to ever be described with any conceivable words. Its far away, nestled in the glowing darkness. At the peak of this trip all I could see were bright green and yellow and blue fractals creating themselves, forming sacred geometries going into each other, layers on layers of throbbing colorful energy that I was a part of for all of eternity. Similar to the fractal patterns produced by a Mandelbrot set except I was the set. More colors formed out of the intricate designs, I even saw fractals and geometries with new colors which of course couldn’t be described the same way we can’t describe the colors we see without hallucinogens. During this time I not only convinced myself that I had gone so deep into the depths of insanity that I would never return but I also convinced myself that I was experiencing life and the universe in its entirety, therefore truly understanding the meaning of life. Physically it felt like I was drowning, however it was literally the most profound psychedelic state I’ve ever experienced to the day I write this.

These epiphanies changed my entire perspective on life. Before my experience with mushrooms I was an atheist leaning agnostic but after being forcefully shown the power that is all I became a much more spiritually driven person. I’m still an agnostic I don’t think anyone can know for sure what is out there but I finally knew that there was something that went so beyond myself that It couldn’t be comprehended with our simple human minds. It gave me a deeper understanding and respect for the divinity in nature and showed me that there is without a doubt higher power much greater than myself, grand intelligence, and a glowing darkness that shines in each of us. It is our True Self. It is all that there really is. It is all. It is love.