I haven’t posted in almost 6 months. As with most of my life's pursuits, I allowed my self-confidence to be undermined by a debasing, disordered, and cruelly critical inner monologue. It persists. Maybe in the future I'll find a more elegant solution but for now the only way I see forward is by brute force of will. I hope it gets easier.
When I started this blog, my intent was to document every psychedelic experience I’ve ever had, past and present. Maybe I bit off more than I could chew. More accurately, maybe I set a goal for myself that I knew I could not reach so that I would fail. My goal right now is just to publish this post. I don’t even care if my thoughts are incomplete or imperfect. They always are and I never let myself off the hook for it. It’s time to give myself a fucking break.
I want to throw out a smattering of thoughts as a sort of “state of the union” on my personal work with DMT. This substance has been a deep source of fascination and personal insight for me over the last year. I believe this might only be the beginning.
It’s been 10 months since I started experimenting with DMT. I’ve been pretty sloppy about keeping track of the number of experiences but I figure there have been about 30-35. Initially I was very enthusiastic (maybe too much so) and was doing it multiple times a week, sometimes 3 or 4 times in a sitting. At some point I felt like I’d gone too far too fast and I backed off for almost two months. Lately I’ve been visiting hyperspace every 2 to 5 weeks.
The molecule calls to me. Not in the way an addictive drug calls out in that desperate, sickly way. It’s more strange and subtle than that. I might be out for a walk and I smell something that reminds me of DMT’s scent. Some people think it smells like moth balls. I think it smells like alien cologne. I might be meditating and something I saw on DMT floats through my consciousness. When I’m on other psychedelics, especially mushrooms, spirits from the DMT space call out to me like, “Come on, man! You know that THIS is where you really want to be!” Considering how many times I’ve asked myself “Am I dead?” while with the molecule, and considering my lifelong battle with depression and suicidal ideation, the yearning for DMT feels almost like “l’appel du vide,” the call of the void.
I’ve changed my route of administration a couple of times since starting out. My first time, I sandwiched the freebase crystals in dried mint leaves and smoked from a bong. It worked but I didn’t realize how inefficiently until an experienced friend showed me his glass “oil burner” bubbler (It’s a crack pipe). I bought myself one and found it to be much better when I could actually get the technique right. Still, it was tricky and hazardous. Employing butane torches while using a substance that takes your motor skills away became a frequent worry and resulted in some harrowing experiences. By investing 30 dollars in a highly recommended cannabis concentrate vaporizer, I found a consistent, reliable, safe, and sometimes frighteningly efficient delivery vehicle for the spice.
Early on, I got the feeling that there needed to be a ritual around these trips. I couldn’t look at them as “getting high” or anything like that. I started to see the experience as more like practicing magick, like a conjuring of alien spirits. The DMT entities (I can’t seriously call them “machine elves” and I’ve never seen a “jester”) seem as real to me as my cat. I started to feel like I needed to do something to let them know that I appreciated them visiting me. Still, I feel silly praying or making any kind of demonstration that’s too elaborate or hippieish. I’m still a punk rocker at heart and I fear going to far off the woo woo deep end. Most times, I sage smudge my apartment, strike a gong in every direction, and meditate before blasting off. It’s not much but it seems like enough for now.
DMT still scares the hell out of me. Actually, no. DMT doesn’t really scare me. Any time I’ve ever felt fear on DMT, it’s been momentary. THINKING ABOUT doing DMT scares the hell out of me. When I make up my mind to trip, I’m filled with an intense dread. The kind of dread that always accompanies the call of the void. Like when you’re looking at the ground below from the observation deck of a skyscraper.
More accurately though, thinking about DMT scares me in the same way that thinking about falling in love scares me. The DMT experience brings with it many of the potential hazards of falling in love: vulnerability, the stirring up of memories, challenges to old senses of identity, fears of discovering more meaning out of one’s existence, fears of not being able to live up to the personal expectations of a life elevated by that meaning. Maybe people with a healthier concept of love than I possess don’t experience the same kind of fear I do around the experience.
I guess it makes sense. The feeling I experience on DMT, more than any other besides awe, is that of love. A full, freely accessible, universal love that is there for the taking and for the giving. A love that transcends all fear, all bias. A love that my interpersonal relationships are far less reliable at providing. A love I rarely feel safe about giving myself over to. Part of the emotional mosaic formed of these experiences seems to crystallize around teaching me the inexhaustible resource of love and the total silliness of mortal fear.
It might be important for me to talk about that mosaic of experience. The smoked DMT experience is one of such high-speed grandiose complexity and it gives one almost nothing to anchor themselves to. One cannot take in the totality of any single experience and make sense of it. The contact with entities that greet, that nurture, that share, that joke, that disappear. The torrential download information that seems to be the code explaining time, space, and all of existence. The rushes of light and color and shape forming rooms, tunnels, the gears of the universe. For 7 to 20 minutes I am locked in an unyielding astonishment that I wish I could detach myself from so that I can take it all in. And then, like a dream, it just fades away as regular consciousness returns and language starts doing its reductive job on trying to parse that space of ineffable enormity.
Being that it’s all so intense and fleeting, it seems to me that one can only make sense of the experience by forming a sort of mental mosaic of the totality of one’s numerous experiences. I could talk about countless instances that lasted mere fractions of seconds and had zero context of their own. However, over months and months of aggregating, of integrating, of meditating on these experiences, the fragmented elements start to form a kind of pixelated philosophical picture, an incomplete spiritual mapping, a developing cosmology.
One recurring theme in my experience is that of seeing yogi-like entities at the beginning of my trips. Every time I see them they express a pleasant surprise at my arrival, like, “Oh hey! You’re here!” These entities like to talk to me. Recently, at the outset of a trip that I felt particularly fearful going in to, one of them told me, “You’re not scared of ME. You’re scared of YOU!” In another recent experience, which I undertook after spending an hour trying to find a 10-strip of LSD tabs I’d misplaced in my room, the entity told me, “You know that thing you were looking for? It’s YOU!” Early in my experiences, yogic entities came and told me I needed to “relax” and “breathe” and that “if [I] treat this like meditation, [they] have things [they] can show me.”
Recently, in a trip I went into after a particularly serene meditation session, a small, orange, glowing, sprite-like entity told me excitedly, ‘You’re starting to get it!” It then went on a hurried lecture about relaxing in to different levels of experience and what those levels might contain. Then, with a preface of “Also, while we’re at it...,” it initiated a massive, high-speed download of information which came out of its oversized, smiling mouth which seemed to contain everything I might ever need to know about everything in the observable and hidden universe.
I take much of the psychedelic experience like a little taste of meditation made perfect. My yogic DMT entities seem to reinforce that idea in a literal way. As I continue to work with this molecule, I can’t help but feel that DMT wants to teach me something. At least at this stage of the game, what it seems to want to teach me is HOW to use DMT; how to be present and fully appreciate the enormity of such a short, bewildering experience. Extrapolating those lessons out a level, it seems to me that what these experiences are trying to teach me is that the whole point of LIFE is to learn how to do it; to learn how to live every moment of this short, bewildering, enormous experience serenely, genuinely, appreciatively, consciously.
I’m going to try to stay more current with this blog in the coming months. If anyone is actually reading this, thank you.
