After ingesting 1.5 grams of dried psilocybin mushroom (Alacabenzi), "I" died at 5pm Friday afternoon.
I have just experienced one of the most intense experiences of my life. And I am writing this as a cautionary tale for those who are on the journey to experimenting with psilocybin, hope this will help you.
What Dennis McKenna called ego death is extremely inaccurate but also dead on. Because language is too limited to describe what it is, ego death is the most accurate and inaccurate description available.
Basically, ego death is death. However, you can not know what is death because by definition it only happens once. You come back from death and think that you know what it is, but it is by definition, not death. True death will just be the end. And this is humbling. This ego-dissolution version of death is truly humbling.
I think psilocybin induces the brain into a state where the consciousness does not process itself anymore.
Ergo, the conventional sense of self is dead during this state, but your body, basically your sympathetic nervous system is still doing its work, heart is beating, breath is autonomous. Physiologically, no you are not dead, but only experience the absence of self.
The absence, or the process of degeneration of the self which ultimately leads to the absence of the conscious self, is the most horrifying and nightmarish experience that one can ever experience. If you have not felt this, then you have perhaps not gone deep enough.
Pain is so trivial when compared to the absence of self. I have experienced pain and near-death experiences such as a close-call situation where I nearly fall off a bridge.
However, the degeneration of the self is much scarier than pain. Is more real than pain. Once degenerated, you become dead, and you merge with the eternal background of emptiness that surrounds everything. There is no illusion, there is no feeling, there is no memory, just a state of being with everything else. And then, just there, time freezes, and you are no more.
My subjective experience tells me that there is a true risk of being lost forever, and by anecdotal account, I know that people have been hospitalized and become "Mad" after their trip. I think I know, approximately, what is going on in their head.
At the bottom of my death, there is a true possibility of eternal darkeners swallowing me forever, which makes this trip a near-death experience I guess.
The ego will try to fight, and the fighting is what keeps you sane, or in other words, keep you together as a socialized, and civilized person. However, not everyone can fight the degeneration of the self. Ego only has a few weapons in its arsenal. Options are very limited, and your subjective sense of time is not on your side.
Set and setting are crucially important.
Who you are as a human being (set) is the most important thing that will allow you to come back.
What kind of environment you are in when you are doing your trip (setting) is crucial for you to physically survive. Setting including your responsibility during the day, the time you are doing it, the dosage and etc, I highly suggest planning your trip openly and letting everyone know why you are doing this so your setting can be as safe as possible.
Few things have helped me reintegrate myself:
* Love = God, and god want me to fulfil my responsibility towards the people around me who I love. I have duties to fulfil towards my wife, my parents, and my family, I cannot just let go, and most importantly I cannot let them to be hurt. This provides me with the motivational force to seek a solution out of the empty eternal loop. * Knowledge of the objective world and pharmacology of the drug kept me hopeful that the effect of the drug will eventually die off. Although there is a significant amount of time in which I seriously doubt everything. Even though the concept of time was degenerating, I was afraid that I am in a place where time don't work the same way as in normal reality. I look at my watch, about fifty times, and the time is just not moving, it was stuck at 5PM. But just remember this, objective time is on your side, as the effect of the drug wears off (in my case, after 7PM), you will have more freedom to choose what you want to make out of this trip. That is if you choose to. * Use the loop to fight the loop. The LOOP is the concept that I learn during this trip, is nothing new that comes out of nowhere, is most probably an integration of my existing knowledge regarding philosophy. Everything will seems trivial, and empty, and the world as you know it will feel like a big fat lie. Like the truth is only empty, and empty is the truth, therefore there is no point of be alive, since everything is only an illusion. But my love of the people around me kept me motivated to come back (or maybe GOD wanted me to comeback...I shall never know for sure), so I somehow realized that if all is empty then empty itself is also empty. Is nothing. Nothing is nothing, therefore the form, as Plato calls it, is the matter. This is a loop in itself, but is in the opposite direction. Again, language is too limited to describe any of this, it might not make sense. But know this, if you are really arrogant and pretentious enough to get yourself there, you know it when you know it. * "Remember", at the end of my trip, this three syllable words (Rick Straussman theorized that it fit as your heart beat, this might have some correlations there, very interesting topics of discussion) keeps coming back in my head, I guess it means that remember what happened in the trip so I can make out the most of it and never need to come back to do it again, but also, remember to use the LOOP to fight itself, so that the idea that life is just an illusion, and the sense that emptiness as truth can be controlled.
At the end of my trip, many images and voices of people came up. They helped me tremendously. Each of them is saying something extremely profound. And all of a sudden, I feel connected to them, to all these people, who some of them I have only seen on television or social media. By slowly taking control of my body, my consciousness, my sense of self, I felt a profound sense of gratitude. Every breath I took was a gift from god, and every thought that I had was meant to be.
I had an epiphany. Things will be ok. I will die one day, and it will be ok. All the hate, anger, and disappointment will still come up from time to time, and it is ok. It is a part of this LOOP. And I remember, fight the LOOP with the LOOP, turn it on itself, remember that it is only empty and that at the end of the day, what we call LOVE is that deep connection between everything that exists so that the trickster of no-existence never erase what has happened, and LOVE, as the opposite LOOP will prevail.
Good luck, and see you on the other side.
Edited by danyboy186 (01/21/23 06:05 PM)
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