An acquaintance unloaded a bag of Psilocybe cyanescens mushrooms on me over the summer. Their potency freaked him out. There were six 0.25 gram microdose capsules and 3.8 grams of loose shrooms in the bag. I tend to think stronger is always better and asked why he doesn’t just take less until he figures out the right dosage for himself. He was spooked and just wasn’t having it. I was happy to take them off his hands and gave him an equal quantity of Golden Teacher Psilocybe cubensis in trade because I had a bunch.
My first experience with these mushrooms was a very low dose experience. At a party last fall, I ate two of the microdose caps (0.5 g.) and gave the rest of them away. It was pretty light and didn’t really give me much of a feel for their potency.
On Saturday, February 1, I was going to smoke DMT in the early afternoon but I chickened out at the last minute, as I do so often. I don’t know what I am so afraid of with DMT and it’s kinda getting stupid. In a recent DMT experience, an entity met me in the waiting room and said to me, “You’re not afraid of me...you’re afraid of YOU!” It’s really the truth. I’ve never had a bad experience on DMT and it usually makes me feel better about my life. Maybe that’s it. Maybe I’m afraid because I don’t really know what feeling good about my life would look like.
Instead, I figured I’d take shrooms and if I was feeling frisky I’d smoke that DMT while tripping. I’d done that a few weeks before and the effects were pretty great. I brewed a tea with the cyanascens. I figured if they are close to twice as potent as cubes, and 3.5 grams of cubes is typically a good, hard trip dose for me, then 1.82 grams would be fine. My house was pretty tidy so I didn’t really need to prep much. I took a shower, got dressed in fresh clothes, and smudged the house with sage.
I drank the tea and ate the mushroom mush at 5:56 PM. I went to my couch and started an episode of Planet Earth, which has been a go to thing I do during my come-ups for a long time. Doing that this time felt a little tired and I thought that maybe I need to come up with a more novel ritual in the future. Instead of the narration, I put on an album called “Futha” by a band called Heilung that I’d been turned onto recently. It’s dark, droney, Nordic weirdness and I like it a lot.
Over the next 30 minutes the body load seeped into all my muscles in a drowsy, heavy way. There was no impulse for fight or flight, I just wanted it to take me. I’d made a note in my phone that I just wanted to feel some healing for my lonely sadness. I wanted to find the love inside me because I’d been feeling really cut off from it. Quickly, watching the television became a stupid waste of energy.
I noted in my phone that, once again, mushrooms feel really different after having experienced DMT. Thinking about it later, I don’t know. I’ve had a lot of high dose mushroom experiences at this point and maybe the recreational doses just don’t do it for me anymore. At least not when I’m alone as I usually am.
While we’re on that subject, it really needs to be stated: I really need to trip with others sometime soon. Being a solo psychonaut has its positives but sometimes it really puts a fine point on the loneliness I feel much of the time. I miss the madcap laughs of tripping balls with a friend. Anyway....
“6:35: Tears, the displaying and the swiping, it’s different than it was, is the lesson different,” I noted and then at 7:21, my final note taken during the trip: “so frustrated and sad.” I curled up on the couch and clenched my eyes closed. Tears were running down my face as blotchy, liquid light show visuals erupted inside my head. Purple and pink and paisley splatters coming from space beyond space.
This trip quickly oriented its focus on looking at the fear and deprivation in the hearts of all of the men in my family tree and their resultant inability to know real love. Scenes from my childhood where I needed to be seen and cared for but instead was left alone or threatened with punishment. Scenes of my brother’s childhood and the triangulated separation forced upon us. Theories of the histories of my father’s and my uncles’ childhoods that have been hidden from me and suppressed all my life, and the childhood of their father. Visions of the possibilities of my young nephew’s later life. A multi-generational moving picture of motherly squandered selfishly fussing over the unreasonable needs jealous, needy, rage-filled men. Fatherly protection selfishly spent only on maintaining bogus personae and illusions of control that always evade their grasp. Images of germinating sperm gestating into adulthood and old age and death in a fractal of space and time. Repeating processes of victimization and terror. Futile pleas for change in an absence of honest awareness.
I rocked back and forth and knew in my heart that I have always lived in constant fear and that I have never truly understood how to love another human being. I felt the selfishness in my heart and the incredible need for love and protection that no one ever gave me and that I’m not sure if I will ever be able to receive even if it were offered. I wished for my mother. Not my actual biological mother but the mother she should have been. The mother that should have showed me love instead of using me as a replacement source for the love she couldn’t get from my father. I wept and wept.
It was at this point that I remembered the “Motherly Spirit” from DMT experiences I’ve had over the last year. The feminine figure that held me and fussed over me and told me “It’s ok. It’s ok. It’s ok.” I thought to myself that maybe I should go try to see her. That maybe she could show me how to love. I got it in my head that if I visited the DMT realm with this urgent need that the entities might provide. I lifted my crying, sweaty, and cold body from the couch, wrapped myself in a blanket, and moved to my bedroom
Cross-legged on my bed in my room lit only with white Christmas lights, the tears ran down my face as I brought the vaporizer to my lips. I pulsed the power button as drew the strange yet familiar fragrance of alien flowers and new sneakers into my lungs. I exhaled and pulled again, silently chanting “show me how to love…show me how to love” as I embraced myself for my entry into the realm.
It didn’t happen. Instead there was a feeling of shock and surprise as sudden and jarring as a cold glass of water thrown in my face. My previously earthy, mournful mood turned instantly into something much more blank, clinical, severe. I looked around my room and thought, “What happened?”
A small object floated into my view above my bed. I guess I’d call it a nugget. The nugget looked like a piece of the white swirl stamped with geometry and language that contains the gears of the universe that I frequently see in my DMT trips. But it wasn’t the ineffable matter of the infinite; it was like a black-and-white, three-dimensional facsimile of it. I was confused. Why was it there? Why was I not inside it? What is going on?
Then I saw something radically different from anything I’d ever seen on any psychedelic. From a space well past the far wall of my bedroom, an enormous jumble of images, objects, idea-forms started rushing up. As they got closer they all took on the appearance of mid-century space-age kitsch design elements. It was like Pee-Wee’s Playhouse threw up in outer space. It all came barreling toward me until suddenly it all went SPLAT in a space right in front of me, as if there was a two-foot-thick wall of glass between me and it. All the strange images stopped suddenly and then oozed down the invisible barrier like Wile E. Coyote after slamming into a mountainside with a tunnel painted on it by the Roadrunner.
And then there was a voice, the booming telepathic voice of wisdom from the psychedelic beyond. And it gave its answer to my request to see the Mother, to be shown how to love:
“NO.”
And then an admonition:
“GO TO THERAPY.”
I was crestfallen. The sadness of this rejection by the realm was just too much. I curled up in a ball and cried hard, defeated tears. I knew I’d really fucked up.
I’ve been on the receiving end of the stern hand of the psychedelic voice before. It’s always happened when I’ve entered into the realm with expectations of specific results. The first time I got the psychic smackdown was on 7.5 grams of mushrooms. I wanted to revisit the space I’d been in on my previous couple of trips. The voice boomed at me: “YOU DON’T GET TO CHOOSE HOW IT GOES IN MY ABODE.” But here I was again trying to demand what the lesson was to be and being soundly rebuked. I felt so foolish.
After about a half hour of sobbing and feeling stupid, the fever of my personal shame broke and I was able to sit up and open my eyes. I needed to pee and so I did that. It was 8:15, a little over 2 hours after I ate the mushrooms, and after what I’d been through I felt like it couldn’t hurt to look at my text messages (I silence my phone when I trip). A friend had sent me a text wanting to make amends to me for a wrong that I hadn’t called him on and which I’m not sure he even fully understood. After spending two hours in the depths of my fears, I was fully prepared to have the difficult conversation that was to follow.
The rest of the night was pretty weird and uncomfortable because I was out socializing with alcohol-drinking normies in bars. Being on mushrooms around drunk people really shines a big light on the stupidity and egotism of alcohol consumption. Even when they're nice, it all comes off as a bunch of stupid bullshit. I kind of regretted ever looking at my phone in the first place. At least I arrived at a solution for the problem that my friend foist upon me a few weeks prior.
