Rushes and Insights

Last Sunday, I ate 13 mushrooms.
I'm the blind woman who submitted a
trip report called "Magic Sunday"
two years ago.
I ate twice as many mushrooms this time.
After the butterflies subsided, I began to
talk more freely with my husband
and to laugh more spontaneously.
Next, I noticed a warm heaviness in my limbs.
I felt too peaceful to move.
Eventually, I did move over to the wall.
Born blind, I must substitute tactiles for visuals
when I trip.
Under my hands, the wall took on some interesting
shapes and proportions.
At times it seemed to grow taller as I touched it.
At times, it seemed to shrink and shorten.
Sometimes, it sloped forward so the upper portion
seemed like an overhang.
It would straighten for a moment,
then bulge out under my palm, then
straighten, and bulge under my wrist.
Sometimes, convex, sometimes concave.
Sometimes it would take on the shape of an
accordion door, whose partitions open in the middle.
It seemed to be on the verge of opening up,
only to assume the rounded feel of a
revolving door on the move.
When I was finished with that experience, I simply
removed my hands.
Lying on the carpet, the floor under me
listed from side to side, and bulged out
here and there.
Petting the cat produced a furry feeling on my hands
for minutes after I petted him.
My rocking chair also seemed to change shape and
feel under me, similar to the wall,
although the chair would also harden and soften.
Time for some ear candy, I turned on my computer.
My text to speech screenreader
had an interesting gated echo effect.
I surfed over to "The Trip Receptacle". On pot,
the collections of psychedelic sound
effects had sent me through the roof.
On shrooms, nothing interesting happened.
While there, I felt fear, and a sibilant voice
whispered,
as in a daydream,
"I'm going to slap you."
It was the voice of my deceased mother.
Being a student of lucid dreaming, and
understanding how to handle nightmare images,
I simply told her I understood she had not
been perfect, but had done her best.
I asked if she had been tired.
She said she had, and the
fear left.
I felt a great sense of forgiveness,
for her, and myself, since I have made
mistakes with my own kids.
By the time I turned off the computer,
I was feeling very high indeed.
I felt I could learn everything in the world.
Knowledge of all things was available to me.
Outside, in my spacious back yard,
the Hawaiian trade winds were saying
"th'th'th'eee" in the trees and long grass.
All of nature felt friendly and magical.
I felt magical too, a creature of enchantment.
I knew that if I could see, or had any visual memories
for the mushrooms to open up, I would be
seeing all sorts of colors.
The feeling that my trip was lacking
because I had no visuals produced some
sadness, and cut the magic in half.
I then had the insight: "Magic is not in
anticipation of what you can not have,
but in appreciation of what you do."
The fear and revulsion I normally felt when bugs
crawled on me
was not present, as the local insect life
explored me from time to time.
They felt friendly, and told me telepathically that
they were food for the birds,
and helped the flowers propagate themselves.
When my little girl returned from her
friend's house to find Rob and me
in the backyard, I noticed the lack
of my usual cranky uptight parent attitude.
Rather than being irritable, I enjoyed her laughter
as she and my husband tossed around a ball.
Later when she whined about something, I noticed I
didn't absorb her bad vibes as easily, and retained
a sense of detachment.
When we watched "Alice in Wonderland", I
found myself laughing at the oddest things.
She went outside again, and I tripped without any
stimulus.
I sensed a door half open in front of me,
maybe about four feet away.
I wasn't touching it, so perhaps this
sensation was very much like sight.
I don't know.
Behind this half-open door, was a
flight of stairs leading into a house.
The whole structure was in the air,
not being held up by anything, yet not floating.
Then, I was aware of a vast space, in which
I felt lost and alone. Again, I felt a frisson
of fear, to which I applied
the following logic.
"Being lost and alone is part of the
human experience."
The response was a great feeling of love,
a smile I could feel all around me,
and a soft as fur voice.
"No," it said, "not being lost and alone,
only feeling lost and alone.
I am always with you.
You are never alone."
The empty space was swallowed up in this
fur/smile/warm/everywhere thought voice.
God, of course. Who else?
What benevolence I felt from God.
The house and half-open door came back into
my awareness. I wanted to go inside,
but couldn't.
At this time, I also saw/sensed/whatever some quality
Not an object, but something which I might describe as a color
if I had had the visual memory to categorize it.
Hard to verbalize but let me try:
Both behind my eyes and out in front of me,
a feeling of warmth, brightness or electrical
impulses a sighted person would call
brightness,
kind of soft-light, pretty,
also registering at the back of my throat as
sweet and tasty, like angel cake.
I know that was synesthesia,
but the non-taste description
puzzles me. Is this what color is like?
While I was pondering this in some
frustration,
the house with the half-open door
also remained in my field of awareness.
It was only when I let go of this
frustration that the door seemed to
open wide. I did not enter
the house.
I read some Braille, and noticed how fat
some words felt, how they changed
shape and proportion,
When I stopped asking the psychedelic to give me some
sense of sight, I relaxed.
My half-open door of perception
opened wide.
But by this time, I was feeling the
tiredness which is the first
sign of coming down.
As the illusory house dissolved, and the chair stopped
breathing
I felt peace, a sense of having been enlightened.
The next time I go walking with
my psilocybe friend,
I will do so at night, in the
absence of external stimuli,
without coveting or asking for
a sense of sight.
I will fully appreciate the
rushes and insights of my Four senses.