Epiphany on a couch

To start this trip I must preface this by saying that Magic Mushrooms are much different from Acid. The sensations you feel, the noises you hear, and the visuals you imagine are completely different from LSD. It is beyond all mortal description the feelings I felt and the things I had come to realize by simply laying down on a couch in a friend's house.

    The day began a little later in the afternoon, around 12 or so if I can recall. A few weeks prior Clancy and I had planned to smoke weed and take mushrooms on the full moon and view it on the levee. By the time I realized it was the day of the full moon, I felt some sort of regret/anger at myself that I had taken the acid only but a week prior, and that I was overdoing psychedelics. I still believe that I am overdoing them, and will definitely wait a good while before tripping again, but that is besides the point.

I had ingested the Blue Meanie mushrooms straight up, and washed them down with lemon juice at my friends house. They were quite tasty, with a uniquely bitter flavor that I had thought would be more intense then it was. The aftertaste was not as good as I had liked, but, it was bearable. When I got some lemonade involved the aftertaste was easier to deal with. It was all quite easy to do, all in all. And once I had gotten the shrooms in my stomach, I talked a bit with my friend and his mom and we ended up smoking on the porch.

Oddly, the shrooms kicked in much faster then I had anticipated. In the span of ten or so minutes, by the time we were smoking, the shrooms began to set in. I felt it in my head at first, as if I had smoked a little bit, but it seemed lighter in some way that is hard to describe. But is quite similar to how weed feels when you’re only lightly buzzed. Once that was happening, I decided to smoke the last of the weed I had with my friend, running through two bowls until the both of them had fallen into the water of my bong. We smoked in the front yard as well, and the experience was quite calming. Watching the many trees and other stuff of South Streets calmer and cooler side streets, which were surprisingly full of gardens and nature.

    Once we were done smoking, the shrooms had most definitely kicked in properly. And I used the time I had before the trip reached its peak to start a precursory cleaning of my bong, which I had done to stoneflower as I had done before. No alcohol was available, so I simply resorted to water to rinse out the bowl and the bong itself. It was a quick process, and was easy to do.

At some point, we walked around South Street and down Willow Street while my peak began. At that point, the effects of the shrooms were vastly different from the acid. The stretching effect acid had on the world was flipped on its head, and was replaced by some sort of condensation that had made the world seem smaller. Usually acid had made me feel as if feet had turned into yards, yet now the inverse was true. On the streets I had crossed blocks within the blink of an eye, walked through rooms as if I had taken a single step to do so, and everything had seemed to become much more saturated as I went and walked around. Though, all the while, the truly oddest sensation came across my body. And that was a hyper awareness of my head.

In my head, I could feel my mouth in a way i had never felt before. Every nook and cranny in my throat was visible to my minds eye, and whenever i breathed in or opened my mouth, I could feel a rippling sensation that crawled its way across my entire body. Whenever my mouth was closed, a sensation built up before it was released again when I had opened it. For a while I had felt like the only part of my body that I could perpetually, consciously feel was my mouth and throat, and could visualize it with great detail. The mental effects were similar to acid, with me rambling instead of talking and other such things.

Once we had finished walking it was approximately 6:00, and after some wandering around the house I had finally decided to crash on the couch and let the shrooms run their course. And upon that couch I had one of the most biblically awesome experiences of my human life, even if it was minuscule in comparison to what it could have been.

To start, the mouth sensations I was feeling was oddly accentuated by the water. As whenever I drank something, I could feel the water course and caress every nook and cranny of my throat, coating it in a cool wetness for microseconds before it was replaced by the dry feeling I had constantly experienced before. While laying down, and thinking of music ti listen to with earbuds in my heads, the ringing in my ears had intensified to an odd sort of hum, mingling with the buzz and humdrum of some sort of machinery (methinks an AC unit) and filling my head with this oddly hypnotic sound that rocked my head back and forth. Sometime during this event, I began to feel like I was falling once my eyes closed, and my perception was becoming condensed. Looking around at the living room, the corners felt like they were mere inches apart, and that everything before me was small and that I had become large enough to see such things. The world was becoming some sort of compilation of colored swirls, conjoined with each other to make my perception a possibility. And it seemed that whenever my eyes closed, I could perceive nothing but corners upon corners, all made up of perpetually shifting colors and designs that are hard to describe in mortal tongues. But that wsan’t the true peak, the true peak hit as I closed my eyes for a while longer.

Suddenly, life was realized for me in microscopic timeframes incomparable to human timekeeping, only able to be measured by the instants of synapses firing within ones brain, or the speed of light between the space of an atoms neutrons and its core. But for me it felt like I was larger then whatever I was before, and that it was hours within that couch I laid, falling for an eternity as I entered an unnamed, primal, place that can only be felt as a mixture of Ego and Superego. I had entered once I realized the main existential truths of life. That we will die someday, that we are unfathomably tiny in the face of the universe, that the time we experience is so small that it’s not even a heartbeat for the universe. Yet, I was fine with that, and the realization didn’t phase me. The revelation did, yes, but the idea itself did not. That was the beginning of my awakening, and the invitation into whatever acid had finally made me aware of.

LSD had awakened me to the fact something primal, yet cosmic, existed across the world. Something that breathed beneath the concrete, inside of buildings, through the bark of trees, and inside myself even. But Acid had only awakened me to its existence, making me aware enough to see it, yet not understand or touch it. But the mushrooms themselves made me get close enough to it that I was able to run my hands through it, like putting my hands into the rings of Saturn or the river rapids. The force itself touched me back, extending some sort of series of tendrils towards me and caressing me with whatever forces composed the space behind the great wall I was falling through. And while it coated, caressed, and cuddled me with its incomprehensible forces, it told me things that I had been told, yet in such a manner as to make me realize that they are indeed true. Many of these things I had been told throughout my life and had merely thought them empty platitudes from parental and platonic figures alike to merely attempt to wipe away my deep seated feelings of inadequacy and depression at my impotence at life. For the most part, I still believe the words told to me by the mortal type were indeed empty, though there are a fair few exceptions to this feeling. The Cosmic Force, on the other hand, had told me exactly what they told me in the exact same way that I was told by everyone else, in the same wording as well. Yet somehow The Cosmic Force had convinced me that it was true, affirming the things everyone else told me and making me realize that they were all right all along, even if they weren’t always genuine.

    I do hold great potential, and I never believed myself until now that I had such great power stored within my being. That I had the ability to do things, to make people happy, to make people feel good, and to lead others to do things to better their lives and others around them. Potential to do many great things for people, even if it’s not for the earth as a whole, then at the very least the tiny amount of people I will meet in my life that I will hopefully guide down a path of self exploration and enlightenment. Another revelation I was told was how passive I was throughout my life, and that I needed to be more abrasive, to grow a spine, and to talk back to those who deem me worthless enough to disrespect for little reason. All I needed to do to truly stand up for myself was to talk and take action, not passively accept the abuse and hatred on the chin and walk along as if I had never been talked to as if I had no worth. Psychology was also one of the things I was affirmed in exploring as a career path for the future of my life, and was assured by The Cosmic Force that I would feel greatly satisfied by doing so.

All the while the visuals in my head were fitting for the situation. As I could imagine myself, dressed in my rolled up cargo pants and plain white cotton shirt, hurtling through this unknown field of Cosmic Energy. Kicking up waves as I fell through its everlasting expanses, feeling it move across my body as I plummeted down deeper into infinity. The beings behind the field are imperceptible to my minds eye, yet able to be felt. Their presence is now known to me, and I am certain they were teasing me, somehow. Perhaps they are merely figments of my imagination, some sort of creation of my mind to better internalize and accept what I have been told through this trip. But with how it felt, the monumentality of it all, I am certain they are in some way sentient, powerful, beings hiding within my mind, or some sort of collective consciousness that one can only perceive on such chemicals. Beings with enough power to shape the lives of all who cross the great barrier of this Cosmic Field, and willing to do so only to those who are brave enough to make themselves vulnerable to their changing touch, and to make their forms visible to those willing to be changed. Lovecraftian is one of a few ways to describe it, or Biblically Awesome. But either mortal description only captures a microcosm of the feeling of being there, on the cusp of a breakthrough. To be so close to the gates of Nirvana that your hands caress its golden bars, and that the mystical energies behind the gate touch and molest your bare body. But to be far away enough that you cannot cross the gate, and the powerful, godlike beings behind the great bars chuckle and tease you with the potential they hold for you behind it, poking you, chuckling, and being so playful about it. It is a shame I hadn’t taken more, for I think they were telling me that I am ready for their touch, or if not that, at least to be invited back to face them at the gate and have them tease me yet again. I should consider this idea more, as I am unsure of what their intentions are to do to me if I am to cross the gates into Nirvana, and into their waiting, changing, touch.

At the same time, or before, or after, I had thoughts about my life in general that had helped me come to the realization that I was too passive for my life, and that I must take more initiative for my own actions to truly make use of the potential I hold. Other memories flashed before my minds eye, and then I awoke from my nap, full of knowledge, teased by what laid beneath The Cosmic Force, and quite thirsty. Taking note from earlier, and how his mother recommended fruit juices to recover, I immediately stood up from the couch and walked to the kitchen to retrieve some more lemon juice as a form of recovery alongside some water to wash the acidic taste from my mouth. But after such a revelation was had upon the small couch, I looked over to my tripsitter and inquired if I had slept, and he said I did. I told him that I didn’t feel like I slept, however he told me he heard some snoring, and assumed I was doing so.

We talked for a couple more minutes as I recuperated and began to fall back into the mortal plane, the time dilation still in effect while we did stuff. I talked to his mother for a few minutes about the trip itself and the nuances between LSD and Psilocybin, and the essential difference of the trips being the exemplification of ID in the case of LSD and Ego and Superego (Hyperego, one could say) being accentuated in the case of Psilocybin. After more talking I got up and walked out the door with him by my side, and we walked to the levee to hopefully see the moon.

While we did not see the moon on the levee, we did end up seeing the Mississippi river in the sunset, which was quite a good sight to behold. For the while we roamed and chattered about before we began the trek back home. But, while we did so, I had come to the realization that we had taken the wrong path, and panic had started to set in. However, with the lesson I had been taught earlier, I decided to take initiative, ensure where his home was multiple times, and walked us both home in a fit of determined walking. Once home, I spent the time lounging about, waiting for the effects to wear off while talking to his mother before I headed home.