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Time Spirals
Cannabis
Citation:   River of Phantasia. "Time Spirals: An Experience with Cannabis (exp114402)". Erowid.org. May 4, 2020. erowid.org/exp/114402

 
DOSE:
1 cig. smoked Cannabis - High THC
Marijuana's Time Spirals

Dosage: Approximately 3 Grams of alleged "High Grade" plant material rolled into a blunt.

Method of Administration: Smoking.

Timing of Administration: Attempted to smoke all at once, but in fact smoked it in at LEAST 2 segments, possibly 3.

Upon the legalisation of certain quantities of marijuana and numbers of plants per person, I had my first experience with Marijuana.

Intent and Mindset:
100% of my intention was simply to see what it showed me, and I was quite determined to see something interesting.
100% of my intention was simply to see what it showed me, and I was quite determined to see something interesting.
In my mindset I was calm and unworried. Or rather, my biggest worry was that I wouldn’t see anything psychedelic or remotely interesting.

Setting:
My setting was my home, in a building very familiar to me, with only a trusted person present in the building as my sitter (and a relatively trusted person outside doing other things, not part of the experience.) Apart from some occasional music, and some occasional and jovial conversation, the setting was quiet. I was comfortable.

Background:
I've not been high or imbibed any drug except alcohol since birth; it was my first attempt. I wanted as strong a dosage as physically possible; this grade and amount are what I received. Because of some things my sitter had said previously, I was of the view that marijuana was at least capable of having psychedelic effects, even though that was not at all what I knew it to be famous for or GENERALLY used for.

Structure:
Firstly, a recital of the experience with some musings, second, possible explanations, thirdly, philosophical drivel.

FIRSTLY, A RECITAL WITH SOME MUSINGS:
In absolute summary, I smoked about half to 3/4 of the joint, completely lost track of time and space, and even of what the passage of time even was, then at some point smoked the last part of the blunt, threw up, and came back down to baseline. It seems to have taken from 2 to 3 hours in all.

Recital In significantly more detail:

Physically speaking:
My hands were numb the whole time, as were my feet. In reality prime, at least. They got number as it went on, until eventually having feeling restored to me. My heartbeat sped up, and seemed to remain steady at a faster BPM than usual throughout the experience. My whole body grew mildly numb (less so than the extremities) and I became unable to even THINK about moving it in real-time quickly and effectively. I was a passenger in what was being shown to me by the THC. My physical body got more and more numb, cold, dizzy, and eventually nauseous throughout the experience, and the nausea was the only real negative for me.

I felt as though my face was wet multiple times. I have not been able to verify that it actually got fully wet at any point. I felt as though I was deeply moved to tears by the knowledge that I could not bring back to my conscious sobriety every revelation that I had received, and video verifies that I cried in reality prime.

I believe I caught my sitter trying to trip me out further intentionally about 3 times; it was amusing.

Chronological log of mental experiences:
I pulled a few times, and noticed a slight disorientation. I kept going, and noticed that my reactions became slowly more and more delayed. I was still able to talk and converse easily at this time, and I was still in, and conscious of what I will call “Reality Prime”, ie the everyday reality we live in constantly, which can be recorded and verified on ordinary video.

I had had a VERY strong suspicion that nothing exciting would happen and I wondered whether taking the substance in company with my sitter would weaken the experience. I kept at it, and then, finally, (maybe halfway or 3/4 way through the blunt?) I got completely blasted out of this reality.

I went into time-loops, with a female presence by my left side, and saw infinity/eternity in an instant; an infinite number of screens showing all instances of every reality, in every moment. The ones I saw all pertained to me, but I had a complete certainty that further to the left and right were screens showing instances of everything else, before, during and after me.

I kept on going until I finished the blunt, no matter how many times it seemed I had finished it already. By focusing on what was necessary to get to the future where I had finished everything (which had already happened multiple times) I would always choose to keep smoking until the end every time a reality where I hadn't finished the blunt as yet presented itself.

I had to reach for the blunt at least once. Perhaps many times. [Video confirms that it was absent from my hand at least once, and that -as I had forgotten – I seem to have handed it over on my own accord. In reality prime I smoked half or 3/4 of the blunt and handed it off to my sitter, and THEN smoked the other half. I kept forgetting what was happening, and thought I had smoked the whole thing after smoking only half or 3/4 .]

I realised that Marijuana would probably stitch together the least coherent moments of the whole experience and present them to me as the real timeline in "Reality Prime", but I acknowledged that all of the endless realities were actually happening. Or rather, the realities that never happened in Prime were still happening endlessly in their non-realised space.

Sometimes things moved from the endless realities to Reality Prime, and sometimes when that happened they did not repeat again; even I, as the traveller through the Endless Realities, free to move forward and backwards through time, still had my own objective timeflow; I assumed at the time that I just wasn't freed enough from the moorings of "reality" to TRULY go back in time.

In one reality my Sitter remarked that there had to be at least one reality where I had put up half of the blunt for use later. I chose to eradicate any such reality every time I encountered it. I don’t know how many times I encountered such a reality… it felt like more than twice. [In reality prime, it is certainly clear that I finished the whole blunt, but it's also clear that it was first put aside half-smoked or so.]

Everything seemed like it had happened millions of times, except for certain specific instances of change-of-scenery in Reality Prime. I think I asked only once whether the administrator of reality was as incompetent as an administrator I disliked in an MMO that I enjoy. (Given the current showing, I concluded that he was indeed equally or even more incompetent.)

The revelatory aspects of the drug seem to be absolutely/strictly/profoundly limited by the perceiving powers of the consciousness, the traveller. Multiple times I noted that the revelations provided while high became the meaningless drivel of an intoxicated individual when sober. The revelations are real; all experiences are real "in that they were experienced", of course. But, ill-equipped, we forget them even while high and can hope to bring back only a slight sample, a bare smattering, when sober.

I placed my left hand over the back of my chair at least once in reality prime, talking about "The poses passed down through time." I am not at all clear what I was talking about. It was a moment of triumph, though. Marijuana, the "Spirit", was present in my estimation as a female silhouette that was first green then purple, off on the left where my sitter was not. I paid complete respects to it. The experience it provided was quite unquestionable; the subjectivity of one's perception of reality was definitely shown.

Upon realisation that the experience would be dreamlike whether in the company of a sitter or alone, I stated repeatedly that taking it alone or together was the same thing. I apologised for my arrogance in thinking that the presence of another in my dreamlike state might make the dreamlike state less obviously dreamlike. Of course, one's perceptions, when altered, are altered, quite regardless of what one is perceiving. I stated... maybe at least twice in reality prime that I didn't want to tarnish or disrespect the experience by receiving it in a raucous or party-type setting. I believe that my sitter respected this.

There WAS a musical backdrop to the experience in the beginning, and we did some silly and funny things (eg singing along to an amusing song), but I believe that largely there WAS silence and reflection. I provided permission to record but not to republish the experience multiple times. Each time was the first time for me, possibly, as I wasn't sure which statements had made it through to Reality Prime and which ones were just lost in the eternal repeating infinities. (It appears that EVERY time I stated the thing may have registered in Reality Prime, but I had no idea at that point.)

On various occasions (at least I think it happened repeatedly) my sitter asked me what my favourite song was. I didn't even know the answer... each time he asked it seemed as though it was the first time. But it also seemed as though I had remembered the future; as though I could predict that he would ask it, although he hadn’t asked it as yet for the first time. [But ... I think, really, he probably just asked me more than once. "Remembering what he would do in the future" was... in that sense, PROBABLY just remembering the ACTUAL past, but forgetting it had actually happened.]

I think my sitter asked me only once if I had already eaten lunch.

A few times we spoke about competitors in a mixed martial arts promotion that I follow; it appears that the things I was told about 2 of those competitors were in fact true, and that they were told to me in reality prime. I cannot say if they were told as a result of me making predictions, or if I made "predictions" based on the fact that they were told to me and I forgot that they had been told to me so I stated them as though they were predictions. [Sadly, the latter seems infinitely more likely.] I think at some point my sitter appeared startled to read certain realities on his phone, but again I am not sure if I predicted them first. Perhaps I did not, and if so, his startlement was from the first time he saw them on his own, and I simply forgot that.

The tone of the experience changed gradually through the wearing on of time in Reality Prime: At first it was extremely jovial, but as time wore on and I did not show signs of decisively being back, there was a little bit of worry in my sitter, and I recall hearing the situation described as a calamity. Fortunately I was entirely calm and I soothed my sitter at that juncture; I was very much aware of some of the worries that people had when high, and I was always acutely aware of the inescapable reality that the drug would pass through my system and leave at some point, on its own, inevitably.

I was also not panicked at the thought of being stuck in the infinite realities forever if it didn't actually leave; it really wasn't that different from normal reality except that the REASON you did not know the future was MORE expressly your own incompetence than usual, the flow of time was significantly more confusing, and the actual MOVING of the prime travelling/receiving vehicle, the body, was far nearer to impossible; you were FAR more a passenger than a protagonist. I acknowledged that it could be extraordinarily inconvenient if I was stuck that way, but it was FAR from the end of the world and I was unworried.

I think I falsely stated that I was "back" a few times near to when my sitter had to leave; I was still in the experience, but was only then "Back" in reality prime temporarily. Considering the difficulty of moving my own body, we can consider my interactions with reality prime to have been altered in that I was (temporarily) severely physically impaired. At some point I requested a video of the experience so I could rewatch it later. Sadly though, only two relatively short fragments of video exist. (They are approximately 5 minutes and 8 minutes long.)

At one point towards the end of the experience just before my Sitter left, while still high I saw a piece of one video of the experience; I could remember those items captured on video as happening, but I was not sure if all of them had happened in reality prime, or some had been somehow captured from the repeating eternities.

At one point I believe my Sitter observed that I was trying to fight the experience and that I should just go with it. In reality, it was not possible to fight, and I was not trying to do so. I was just fascinated by cataloguing the experience, and in every direction that I tried to take stock of or take hold of, a solid catalogue of the flow of time became impossible.

I had realised and accepted from before that I would be on this ride, and I was determined never to beg for the ride to end. I would end the ride when Lady Marijuana ended it and not at any other point. Multiple times, based on this determination, I even repeated "Light me up, would you?" when my hand appeared to be empty, just in case my senses were misleading me.

I think in one such case there was in fact something to pull on even though I did not see it. But at multiple times later on there was nothing more, and my Sitter had taken to saying, and me repeating satisfiedly: "It is done."

At some points my sitter was on his phone, sometimes recording me, sometimes talking to someone else. At the time, I didn’t know if he recorded me multiple times; I thought there were 3 recordings, but maybe I came back to see myself being recorded more than 3 times. [Actually it appears that there were only 2 recordings. And one of the times I thought he was talking to someone else on his phone, he was in fact talking to me, while holding his phone to record.]

In the comedown time continued to seem to loop, but as I got less high I could see less far into the loops, and I drifted less and less far from Reality Prime, until eventually I lost all vision of the infinite realities completely
as I got less high I could see less far into the loops, and I drifted less and less far from Reality Prime, until eventually I lost all vision of the infinite realities completely
, and the loops just seemed to be relatively short and boring sections of Reality Prime itself.

I looked to the left multiple times, just because I remembered having looked to the left before/in the future, and I was interested in keeping all of the loops in a proper line. That which had already happened in the future would happen again in the past so it could smoothly happen in the future. [In reality I probably just did it repeatedly in Reality Prime.]

Notable Setting-Changes in Reality Prime
I could keep track of the passage of time in Reality Prime by various occurrences.

Change 1) My sitter played various different pieces of music through a portion of the experience. Maybe up to an hour of it.
There were either 3 or about 10 songs, and almost every time it felt like Reality Prime was looping, and I was returning to the beginning of the experience, the song had actually changed. In other words, I was not returning to the first song, as far as I recalled it to be. So time was clearly still moving in a linear fashion in reality prime… or so it seemed.

Change 2) My sitter moved from the right of me to the left of me once or twice.

Change 3) The blunt in my hand seemed to inconsistently progress from fully unsmoked towards fully smoked and then sometimes back towards fully unsmoked… but at one point at last the thing was clearly fully smoked, and I had the un-smokable end of it in my hand.

Change 4) My sitter eventually left, along with another person who had been on the premises.

Change 5) During the loops of the comedown I threw up only once... well, twice in very quick succession, but that instance of twice only happened once.

Some of the changes in reality prime seemed more fluid than others; especially change 3 was basically impossible to keep track of until the first time I had sight of the fully smoked blunt while it was in my hand.

Re Change 3:
MANY times I had become convinced the blunt was fully smoked, but most of those I couldn’t see it … I think. I noted multiple times that the blunt was a constant. But it was an entirely unreliable constant; its length seemed to skip around.

It also wasn't ENTIRELY a constant, as at some occasions it was not present.

First it was half done, then it was all the way done, then it was 3/4 way done, then it was all the way done, and then finally, at the end, it was 3/4 way done and smoked down to all the way done.

The first time it seemed to be all the way done it was simply absent from my hand, many times my hands were empty.

But the last time it was definitely all the way done, it was present in my hand as a burned-down stub at last. It didn't disappear or re-grow after that. The stub remained near to me on the table.

The blunt was also constantly in my hand for a while, but there was a time it had to be taken from me and re-lighted. That happened once, and then towards the end it happened again. Both times did it happen the same way?

Perhaps.

Re: Change 5:
I felt it coming on multiple times during the comedown. The desire to throw up got stronger sometimes, weaker sometimes.
I was acutely conscious that in the process of vomiting I temporarily obstructed my airway and so I tried very hard to avoid it. Eventually I failed. The only time I failed to hold it back was the last pair of times; it was quite irresistible then.

RE: Change 4:
My sitter leaving only happened once. The other person on the premises leaving only happened once.

RE: Change 2: That probably just happened multiple times; it was over a 3 or 4 hour period.

[Perhaps many if not all of the repetitions in reality prime were just literally repetitions; the things happened multiple times.]

Re Change 1:
This was also somewhat unreliable. The change in songs seemed to be linear, but every measurement that you could latch onto for judging linearity was interfered with by the substance. The songs seemed like they had happened multiple times before, and I wasn't sure if they had or if they hadn't. Not millions like the rest of the experiences, but in a constant march that sometimes seemed to be looping back to its beginning after its end. So the future happened first, and then the past, in that order, but when remembering the past - in a clairvoyant way, looking forward to it as though it was the future - I was still forgetting the future AS the past, so I couldn't make any meaningful predictions.

Musings about the Experience... possibly not Chronological anymore:

At one point a future I had half-forgotten seemingly didn't happen at all. The flow of time was just a matter of perspective; how I looked at it. If you walk forward, the front is before you, the back is behind you. If I chose to walk forward in time, the future was before me, the past behind me. Normally, one may forget the past but one does not quite know the future. But you can turn around physically. Just so it felt like I could turn around time-wise. So that the past was before me and the future behind. With the future behind, I could remember it as one does the past, but with the past in front, I couldn’t quite grasp it, forgetting what "happened" in the past as though it were an uncertain future. Which of the pasts was even real, anyway? But I felt that I could remember the future, as it was behind me, and had happened already.

..... UNFORTUNATELY (but perhaps predictably), I forgot the future-behind-me far too fast to be able to make any proper rememberances of the future and bear out this theory, or to validate conclusively in Reality Prime the accuracy of this very clear experience. It's just like after Deja Vu I can never remember far enough into the future for the "Deja Vu" to be at all useful in respect of predictions. Indeed, I was in such a state of forgetfulness that the past and the future alike became blurred mysteries. The distance I could see into either past or future was reduced almost to zero either way. There was only the “now”.

And so I came to the regrettable conclusions that (one:)"Revelation under the influence of extraneous drugs", and "Delusion" seem to be distressingly closely related to each-other; and (two:) any convincing scientific or even VERIFIABLE ANECDOTAL evidence of the objective reality of "remembering the future" seems more than just a little bit too hard to come by.

As to the "present", well ... perhaps the true line of our perceived travel in time through reality is just going outwards, from the centre of a circle towards the circumference, on an infinite lollipop candy-like spiral; lines in the spiral all featuring eternities of time itself in various repetitions, and the travel in reality prime just being a movement from one candy-line of infinite possibilities to the next, along only one given instance of each realised possibility.

Out of the infinite possibilities within the eternities, a radius-like line outwards along one solid instance of the possibility occurring constitutes a “Reality Prime”. Any "present" is just one instance within a field of infinite possibilities that it could have been. And that it IS, in other areas of that candy-like lolipop-strand, that make up the area of the circle.

Well… getting my bearings was hard, though. Anything I used to try to get my bearings, whether how many loops out I was, or anything at all, Marijuana would gently nudge away sideways so I was infinitely lost in time, tumbling through every disconnected instant of the future or the past without ever being able to fully remember whatever I chose to judge to be the "objective" past in Reality Prime, or in any other timeline. I "Woke up to reality" so many times that it became a constant, almost a joke or meme, but every time I woke up I was still sleeping. While getting higher I woke up more and more to the reality that time was plural, circular, nonlinear.
While getting higher I woke up more and more to the reality that time was plural, circular, nonlinear.
While getting more sober I woke up more and more to the reality that time was singular, linear and never plural. At some point I recognised that both were true, but it was a matter of how I was looking at them. Just like the future and the past were just a matter of perspective.

A change of perspective was a change of the subjective appreciation of the truth, but perhaps whatever was truly "truth" was progressing regardless; ie the unchanged march of time forward in Reality Prime. Everything was "Now", but the blindness of the "Now" was just that I had forgotten the future as much as I had forgotten the past. It seemed that I could choose to slide through time in any direction, from past to future or future to past, or alternate present to alternate present… but every direction or angle I slid through time in, the "now" was always "now", and regardless of direction, the relative "Future" (whether as reality Prime's future or past) behind me... was always forgotten, although it had already happened.

At one point I asked how long it had been and I received the answer "5 minutes", that was after some eternities. At another point I asked how long it had been and I received the answer "2 hours", but that was before the first time I had asked, in my estimation. It was the second time I was seeing the question, but that time was before the first time in my view of the flow of time. [In reality it just appears to have been the second time I actually asked the question, considering that the answer provided was later into the future.]

Eventually I became convinced that Reality Prime kept on moving forward; every time I returned to the main timeline where I had been before, it was a little further along in time. I kept track of this by noting the change in lighting, and noting the occurrence of events that were only scheduled to happen once on that day; ie the leaving of someone else who had been on the premises.

SECONDLY; POSSIBLE EXPLANATIONS:
As to what happened, I expect that every Loop I noted in reality prime was just a separate occurrence of things that I had forgotten had already occurred.

Every experience "repeated" in reality prime was probably just a separate experience that actually happened; the “repetition” not being me living the same time repeatedly, but rather me just passing forward linearly through time and saying or doing the same things, while having forgotten that I actually said or did them in reality prime before.

During the eternities of “Time” spent in the infinite realities I was probably just spacing out in reality prime, either for seconds at a time or minutes at a time.

As to change 1:
Regarding the loop of songs partly repeating on itself, maybe it was just that some of the songs in fact were in fact just played multiple times, or even that spaced out, came back, and forgot I was listening to a particular song while it was still playing. Sometimes the future I had nearly forgotten didn't even happen.

ALL of my perceptions of The future-as-the-past was probably always just actually the past, and I was probably just constantly forgetting that it had actually just happened.


As to change 4 I am sure it only happened once, as there was never a repetition. My sitter and the other person left once.

The Same goes for Change 5; I threw up (twice in close succession) only once.

As to change 3 I am confident that the blunt was in my hand a lot, and I suspected it was occasionally hidden by my sitter so that I would imbibe THC at a more reasonable pace than I was insisting. Probably the first few times I figured I had finished it, it was really hidden behind a book or something. [The video seems to bear this out, except that I handed it over voluntarily as opposed to it being taken from me when I wasn't looking. I made smoking motions multiple times when there was nothing in my hand, too. Perhaps during some of those times I thought there was something there. Certainly on at least one occasion I thought my hand was empty but it seemed that I actually was able to smoke something despite that, so I didn’t trust my senses all that much regarding that, during the experience. The last time that I finished the blunt, when I could see the stub, must have been the first time I actually finished it.]

As to change 2 I am confident my sitter just moved about from time to time.

THIRDLY; PHILOSOPHICAL DRIVEL:
I approached the experience with maximum respect. In my own opinion there are three key components to having a pleasant experience, and they are respect for the substance, belief in one’s safety, and surroundings. I was aware that Marijuana was extremely safe. It is hard, if not impossible, to realistically overdose by smoking. Luckily, the idea that it could have been laced with something UNsafe didn’t cross my mind.

I would have wanted to do it alone but in concession to some reports provided by my friend I decided to do it with a sitter. He mentioned feeling as though he had been set on fire, in his first marijuana experience. In my opinion, voiced back then as such, it would be wiser to participate in the situation having someone on hand, on standby, to throw water on me, if I were to be at risk of feeling that I had caught on fire. [Fortunately, I never felt as though I had caught on fire. I DID feel as though my face had been completely wet though, which seems not to have happened.]

The experience was potent.

I had been VERY worried about watering down the experience by being distracted by an intrusive sitter, or suffering a misfortune in the experience based on a poor party-type set and setting. Fortunately, the journey was not made difficult by either consideration in reality.

Marijuana showed me, without the possibility of me denying or destroying the experience, that reality is plural; every timeline not only happens, but is happening in the instant; the conception of "Eternity in an instant" was possible to grasp, just by the metaphor of standing still in the instant but looking at an infinite number of replay screens, security cameras as it were, showing every instant in every instance of time... at that instant. It reminded me of the subjectivity of experience, again in undeniable terms.

When one is in search of some spiritual experience through the efforts of one's own unaided consciousness, the realisations gained seem to me always tenuous in nature, feathery and misty in a way that lets them want to slip through one's fingers.

When one receives such an experience as the unqualified gift of an external drug, however, while the experience is clear and NOT tenuous, it seems to me that it is regardless very much forgotten, and missed, even in the midst of the actual experience, because the instrument of reception, the consciousness and the mind, is simply not refined enough to encompass the whole message, let alone to bring it back to the lands of sobriety.

And so, whether by eluding or by overwhelming the seeker, the truth regardless reveals itself only to those who are ready. Unready, and without assistance, it eludes one mist-wise. Unready, and with assistance, it eludes one through bombardment and simple inability to grasp it; through one’s own consciousness' incompetence.

And perhaps, ready whenever and however that is, it cannot elude one at all. Another thing I respect is "Mensaje recibido, cuelga el Telefono". I've seen it first quoted in Spanish and so in that form I reproduce it here, whether grammatically sound or not. "When you have received the message, hang up the Telephone."

It refers to the phenomenon that if one persists in psychonautical activities under the assistance of external substances, eventually the substance is very likely to deliver a good scare, and show something terrible, whether as the Spirits' intelligent reminder that one should seek knowledge through one’s own power, or as a completely blind, blundering and coincidental probablistic result of the substance EVENTUALLY being much more likely to be impure on ONE of the occasions one takes it, if one insists on taking it on multiple occasions.

That is, to put it in a way that is unrelated to the gambler's fallacy; if one keeps on taking the substance, the probability of it being pure on every single occasion fades away steadily further into infinitessimality.

Regardless, I'd give it a very positive review.

In my view, any mind-altering substance is just a little aid to see things from a different perspective, and I think spiritual exercises are superior. I personally believe that no person, whether hobbyist or hardcore psychonaut, should rely on external drugs for ALL enlightenments. With that having been said however, I have nothing even remotely as potent as this drug-assisted experience to report from other endeavours. If one wants an experience, I guess assistance from drugs like this can be the real deal.

Exp Year: 2020ExpID: 114402
Gender: Male 
Age at time of experience: 33
Published: May 4, 2020Views: 946
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Cannabis (1) : Guides / Sitters (39), First Times (2), Small Group (2-9) (17)

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