|
Some of these posts are very old and might contain outdated information. You may wish to search for newer posts instead.
|
andriusain
Stranger
Registered: 02/08/08
Posts: 22
Last seen: 14 years, 5 months
|
Melting into the sea of immensity
#8003602 - 02/10/08 03:23 AM (15 years, 11 months ago) |
|
|
What I am going to describe is possibly the strongest experience I have ever had in my entire life. The reason why I am posting to share my views is because I was quite astonished when reading the book "The psychedelic experience" (by Timothy Leary)(which is a translation of the Bardo Thodol, Tibetan book of the dead) (http://www.lycaeum.org/languages/finnish/acid/data/psychexp.html#BM2) as the different nature of my experiences on drugs where so similar to the spiritual states described in it and now I feel the need to take it out from me. Well... there are many experiences I have had, each one very different from the other but I am only going to describe one in here. Please note and respect that even the closest people in my life do not know anything about this story, and I have not even shared a discussion about it with the person I experienced it with. The overwhelming power of this experience has made it somewhat taboo for me, and now, several years after it happened I still feel and carry with me strong emotions. I let you read this because I imagine the people in this forum to be quite open minded. However feel free to criticize, comment on anything, try to help me or to do anything you feel. I will also not say the drug i took because I believe this to be quite unimportant as it is the inner nature of the experience what really counts and, in my opinion this is quite independent of the kind of substance you take.
So the story starts: though it is not very important i will describe the setting. We arrive several friends in a car to a place where a rave party is taking place, some hills in the countryside of the mountain range of Madrid. This is the car of a very special friend who has just met mine and my older brothers friend's, and she is carrying us in the car. She is quite special for me, I had met her not long ago but our relationship was already filled with friendly love. I cannot say sexual attraction as she is ten years older than me, though this might not be a good enough reason. I basically thought it would be morally wrong. Not to bore you I will carry on. One of our friends gives us two a dose of the drug. We step out of the car and walk to the rave at around, if I remember well enough, 1 or 1:30 am. We arrive and take the drug, and take a walk around. We find the chillout area where we sat together. A few moments later the drug starts to take effect. Blissful love. Blissful and angelic music. We hug and I experience the utmost ecstasy flowing through my body. Really overwhelming, I cannot do anything but to surrender to it and then I disappeared. The next thing I know is that I open my eyes and I see the sun rising. She is still holding me. How many hours had passed I do not know but the sun does not rise at 3 am. I must have been between three and four hours elsewhere, unconscious or probably in another world i cannot remember of. I feel that hot and cold and uneasiness characteristic of the moment when drug effects take the downhill but I can still feel some of that intense euphoria. Now I quote from the mentioned book: Vision 3: The Fire-Flow of Internal Unity
(Eyes closed, external stimuli ignored, emotional aspects)
The First Bardo instructions should keep you face-to-face with the void- ecstasy. Yet there are classes of men who, having carried over karmic conflict about feeling-inhibition, prove unable to hold the pure experience beyond all feelings, and slip into emotionally toned visions. The undifferentiated energy of the First Bardo is woven into visionary games in the form of intense feelings. Exquisite, intense, pulsating sensations of unity and love will be felt; the negative counterpart is feelings of attachment, greed, isolation and bodily concerns.
It comes about this way: the pure flow of energy loses its white void quality and becomes sensed as intense feelings. An emotional game is imposed. Incredible new physical sensations pulse through the body. The glow of life is felt flooding along veins. One merges into a unitive ocean of orgastic, fluid electricity, [The Peaceful Deity of the Bardo Thodol personifying this vision is the Buddha Amitabbha, the all-discriminating wisdom and feeling, boundless light, representing life eternal. Lama Govinda writes that "The deep red light of discriminating inner vision shines forth from his heart . . . fire corresponds to him and thus, according to the ancient traditional symbolism, the eye and the function of seeing." (Govinda, op. cit., p. 120.) With the Bhagavan Amitabbha comes the Bodhisattva Chenrazee, embodiment of mercy or compassion, the great pitier ever on the lookout to discover distress and to succour the troubled. He is joined by the Bodhisattva "Glorious Gentle-voiced One," and the female incarnates "song" and "light."] the endless flow of shared-life, of love.
Visions related to the circulatory system are common. The subject tumbles down through his own arterial network. The motor of the heart reverberates as one with the pulsing of all life. The heart then breaks, and red fire bleeds out to merge with all living beings. All living organisms are throbbing together. One is joyfully aware of the two-billion-year-old electric sexual dance; one is at last divested of robot clothes and limbs and undulates in the endless chain of living forms.
Dominating this ecstatic state is the feeling of intense love. You are a joyful part of all life. The memory of former delusions of self-hood and differentiation invokes exultant laughter.
All the harsh, dry, brittle angularity of game life is melted. You drift off - soft, rounded, moist, warm. Merged with all life. You may feel yourself floating out and down into a warm sea. Your individuality and autonomy of movement are moistly disappearing. Your control is surrendered to the total organism. Blissful passivity. Ecstatic, orgiastic, undulating unity. All worries and concerns wash away. All is gained as everything is given up. There is organic revelation. Every cell in your body is singing its song of freedom - the entire biological universe is in harmony, liberated from the censorship and control of you and your restricted ambitions.
But wait! You, You, are disappearing into the unity. You are being swallowed up by the ecstatic undulation. Your ego, that one tiny remaining strand of self, screams STOP! You are terrified by the pull of the glorious, dazzling, transparent, radiant red light. You wrench yourself out of the life-flow, drawn by your intense attachment to your old desires. There is a terrible rending as your roots tear out of the life matrix - a ripping of your fibres and veins away from the greater body to which you were attached. And when you have cut yourself off from the fire-flow of life the throbbing stops, the ecstasy ceases, your limbs harden and stiffen into angular forms, your plastic doll body has regained its orientation. There you sit, isolated from the stream of life, impotent master of your desires and appetites, miserable.
While you are floating down the evolutionary river, there comes a sense of limitless self-less power. The delight of flowing cosmic belongingness. The astounding discovery that consciousness can tune in to an infinite number of organic levels. There are billions of cellular processes in your body, each with its universe of experience - an endless variety of ecstasies. The simple joys and pains and burdens of your ego represent one set of experiences - a repetitious, dusty set. As you slip into the fire-flow of biological energy, series after series of experiential sets flash by. You are no longer encapsulated in the structure of ego and tribe.
But through panic and a desire to latch on to the familiar, you shut off the flow, open your eyes; then the flowingness is lost. The potentiality to move from one level of consciousness to another is gone. Your fear and desire to control have driven you to settle for one static site of consciousness. To use the Eastern or genetic metaphor, you have frozen the dance of energy and committed yourself to one incarnation, and you have done it out of fear.
When this happens, there are several steps which can take you back to the biological flow (and from there to the First Bardo). First, close your eyes. Lie on you stomach and let you body sink through the floor, merge with the surroundings. Feel the hard, square edges of your body soften and start to move in the bloodstream. Let the rhythm of breathing become tide flow. Bodily contact is probably the most effective method of softening hardened surfaces. No movement. No body games. Close physical contact with another invariably brings about the unity of fire-flow. Your blood begins to flow into the other's body. His breathing pours into your lungs. You both drift down the capillary river.
Another form of life process images is the flow of auditory sensations. The endless series of abstract sounds (described in the preceding vision) bounce through awareness. The emotional reaction to these can be neutral or can involve intense feelings of unity, or of annoyed fear.
The positive reaction occurs when the subject merges with the sound flow. The thudding drum of the heart is sensed as the basic anthem of humanity. The whooshing sough of the breath as the rushing river of all life. Overwhelming feelings of love, gratitude and oneness funnel into the moment of sound, into each note of the biological concerto.
But, as always, the voyager may intrude his personality with its wants and opinions. He may not "like" the noise. His judgmental ego may be aesthetically offended by the sounds of life. The heart thud is, after all, monotonous; the natural music of the inner ear, with its clicks and hums and whistles, lacks the romantic symmetries of Beethoven. The terrible separation of "me" from my body occurs. Horrible. Out of my control. Turn it off.
The trained guide can usually sense when ego-attachment threatens to pull the person out of the unitive flow. At this time he can guide the voyager by reading the Instructions for Vision 3.
After I or we woke up, as I said I do not know what did she experience but when I woke up she was still holding me, and after I could move my wholly stiffed body we went to find my friends. At this point yes, I was passionately telling the story to one of my dear friends. Something weird happened next, which is not the main part of the story but yet helped in some way to corroborate it and it is in another way interesting. A 40, perhaps 50 year old man saw me and jumped through the crowd to speak to me. He was throwing out different words into my head, which had all mystical meanings or connotations. I remember well that he said I was an archangel and persuaded me to go apart from the crowd and speak to him. The innocent 17 year old that I was then led me to do so and there we went. We sat down on the grass and he started to speak about many mystical and esoteric things. Regressions he had in ancient Greece and other worlds and civilizations, contact with extraterrestrial beings living near the star of Sirio etc.. Imagine my confusion. I am very sceptical to all this kind of things, maybe now more than then, as many of the mystical, esoteric and spiritual things are very unreliable and many times hold double and obscure intentions, as I was later to realise better. However I am an open minded guy and common sense tells me that the world holds many secrets and I am quite sure that we are not alone in this universe. I like to recall Carl Sagan’s phrase that more or less says: I some times think that we are not alone in the universe, I sometimes think that we are. Both things are hugely amazing. At one point I saw running through his face what seemed a huge green blob on the side of his face. When he noticed I was looking at it he quickly covered it. Perhaps some trickery was used then. I do not really know. I further kept contact with this man who seemed to have a very interesting spiritual, esoteric, and mystical life. I went for a week to visit him to his home in Barcelona, where I had a nice time, and he kept on introducing me to his esoteric life. He seemed a nice man but then I learned about his obscure and sexual intentions. God knows well that I do not want to be no old pervert’s ephebe. So I politely went away and never knew anything else about this man. I’ll return then to that day. So I finished speaking with that man and returned to my friends. The party finished and I took the way home alone with that girl on the car. She offered me to sleep with her but I decided to return home. All too much already. Like the Beatles song “It’s all too much” for me to take. I deeply felt in love with that girl yet we never ever talked about what happened that night. There we can find the negative effects described in the previous quotation. Attachment. And this was so deep. So some time passed and guess what! I know you wouldn’t. She met my older brother and they felt in love and they now have a child. It deeply hurt me and it still does. We have a saying in Spanish that literally translates: eyes that cannot see, heart that does not feel. If at least this was the case! She was now inside my family and I could see her every day and our relationship could never be the same, even as pure friendship, which was the most important of all for me. Imagine. Morally very wrong. Think about the psychological implications it had on me. I even cried on my mother’s knees about this several years after. Nightmare and tears poured out of me after praying one day in church (I’m not even baptised) asking God to free me from those feelings (love turned into hate and rubbed in your face on a daily basis). My mind is strong and I am fine now. I must say that she seemed cool all along and that all that nightmare was only inside of me. I love them both as brother, sister, and friends. Still when I am with them a residue of this feeling arises. I now have the loveliest girlfriend I could ever imagine with whom I want to share the rest of my life. But it still hurts ten years after. If anyone knows what to do please tell me. This is life, time heals everything anyway. I am a very sceptical yet at the same time spiritual man. Drugs have triggered on me the most intense experience in my life. I would never recommend them. A different older brother than the mentioned one suffered deep schizophrenia triggered by them. I still like to experiment with them. I found the book “The psychedelic experience” quite revelatory. I am yet halfway. If you have read up to here please bother to leave a comment. I will reply.
Thank you all!!!
Edited by andriusain (02/10/08 04:59 PM)
|
imachavel
I loved and lost but I loved-ftw


Registered: 06/06/07
Posts: 31,375
Loc: You get banned for saying that
Last seen: 12 minutes, 34 seconds
|
Re: Melting into the sea of immensity [Re: andriusain]
#8005025 - 02/10/08 03:11 PM (15 years, 11 months ago) |
|
|
sorry no one replied to your post, this damn thing this is just too long.
I'll get around it in the next few days, if it's not on page 1 i'll scroll through for it, cool fukin post, i guess.... i haven't read it yet, seems like an intense experience, the name pretty much says a lot of shit.
--------------------
I did not say to edit my signature soulidarity! Now forever I will never remember what I said about understanding the secrets of the universe by paying attention to subtleties!
I'm never giving you the password again. Jerk
|
imachavel
I loved and lost but I loved-ftw


Registered: 06/06/07
Posts: 31,375
Loc: You get banned for saying that
Last seen: 12 minutes, 34 seconds
|
Re: Melting into the sea of immensity [Re: andriusain]
#8005036 - 02/10/08 03:15 PM (15 years, 11 months ago) |
|
|
there's a lot of quotes from books though... i guess, scrolling through it, seems more like an intellectual take of an ecstatic experience rather than some thralling description of how your getting lost in a sea of immensity in an insane psychedelic meltdown which is boggling your mind and ripping you away from differentiating reality, but what is reality, because your tripping, and reality is something you never experienced as the reality your experiencing now, and shit, what is reality is all this reality? or some shit. know what i mean?
--------------------
I did not say to edit my signature soulidarity! Now forever I will never remember what I said about understanding the secrets of the universe by paying attention to subtleties!
I'm never giving you the password again. Jerk
|
andriusain
Stranger
Registered: 02/08/08
Posts: 22
Last seen: 14 years, 5 months
|
Re: Melting into the sea of immensity [Re: imachavel]
#8005251 - 02/10/08 04:15 PM (15 years, 11 months ago) |
|
|
Yeah mate sorry it was a bit too long but if you read it more calmly you will surely grasp something more. Thanks a lot for replying. At least you did so which means you involve with this shit.
|
thedudenj
Man of the Woods

Registered: 08/18/04
Posts: 14,684
|
Re: Melting into the sea of immensity [Re: imachavel]
#8005254 - 02/10/08 04:16 PM (15 years, 11 months ago) |
|
|
Melting into the sea of immensity is fucking great!
i didnt read what you said cause i dont have time but will later lol
--------------------
  "You all are just puppets... You have no heart...and cannot feel any pain..."" you may think thats pain you feel but you must have a heart to feel true pain and that pain wont be yours
|
Churning
Chain Reaction



Registered: 06/02/06
Posts: 1,570
Last seen: 4 years, 7 months
|
Re: Melting into the sea of immensity [Re: andriusain]
#8005263 - 02/10/08 04:17 PM (15 years, 11 months ago) |
|
|
That sounds like quite an experince. I really liked the way you described your ego loss and everything associated with it.
As far as your troubles with past feelings all I can say is that you must let go. I understand it must be odd to be around them together. But in your post you mentioned how you thought that somehow it would be morally wrong to be with her, regarding your age difference. This reason seems to be the seed to why your relationship didnt progress. Or maybe it was just fate that her and your brother would fall in love. I dont know why really, all I do know is that the past is done and you must live on. Dont let this possibly ruin another relationship with a different special girl.
|
andriusain
Stranger
Registered: 02/08/08
Posts: 22
Last seen: 14 years, 5 months
|
Re: Melting into the sea of immensity [Re: Churning]
#8005318 - 02/10/08 04:30 PM (15 years, 11 months ago) |
|
|
Yes Churning. Great advice there, it will definitely not ruin my relationship with my lovely girlfriend. I totally accept what happened and I would not change the past or present of my life for nothing. what the problem is, is that those feelings still come out from time to time when im in her company and i am not able to control them, and it is already a long time since then. what hurt me most was not not being her boyfriend but that we could no longer be as friends as we were before. And i really loved her as a friend and did not necessarily want anything else. Thanks folks!
Edited by andriusain (02/10/08 05:01 PM)
|
Soulfire
Stranger
Registered: 10/11/18
Posts: 1
Last seen: 5 years, 3 months
|
Re: Melting into the sea of immensity [Re: andriusain]
#25531128 - 10/11/18 11:06 PM (5 years, 3 months ago) |
|
|
I have read that wonderful book twice now; and intend to read it many more times as my life journey unfolds.
I went through similar experiences, brother.
I hope you have found peace.
My advice to your past-self of ten years ago would be to delve deep within yourself, to fully express and experience any suppressed or untapped emotions; shed any crystallized, un-shed tears. Keep going deeper until you find peace in clarity and acceptance.
Use your imagination to re-create the experience of how it went, acting upon the experience from a different angle of possibility; what do you wish you had done with her? said to her? Shared with her? Do you feel she was waiting to respond to you? She was a perfect reflection of your state of being.
I believe you should talk with her about your feelings/thoughts. Find a way to express your self to her.. how you feel or felt, in the most coherent way you can. Get it off your chest! Tell her about your experiences on LSD, or whatever you took, it is indeed irrelevant. See what comes of it.
|
|