DOSE: T+ 0:00	2.0 g	oral	Mushrooms	(dried)
T+ 0:20	1 cig.	smoked	Cannabis	(plant material)

BODY WEIGHT:

130 lb

At about 1:00 PM, I mixed 2.6 grams of dried mushrooms, a mix of caps and stems, with about a cup of applesauce and began to eat it. I finished just over 2 grams before I realized my stomach would not accept any more of the mix, and I gave the rest away. At 1:20, I stepped out onto the porch with my friend to smoke a joint. I noticed the first onset of mushroom effects when we returned from the porch around 1:40. The bands of color in the wooden door to my friend’s room became much more pronounced, and I recognized the tree from which it was made as biological material. Within the next twenty minutes, these bands began to pulsate up and down; the rate and extent to which they were moving increased quickly.

Soon I noticed a symbol on the ceiling that I had encountered before on mushrooms. It looked like the Greek letter sigma, but flipped backwards. In this case, it was actually the letter M, part of somebody’s name written on the ceiling, but I experienced it only as the other symbol. This symbol became much more pronounced than all the other letters. If I moved or changed my orientation to the sigma, it would stay still, and everything else in the room started to swirl around it. I began to see familiar web-like patterns pulsing out of the ceiling. I also saw thousands of faint circles of symbols that I did not recognize moving around.

At about 2:10, as I was quickly approaching my peak, another friend of mine came into the room wanting to procure a bag of marijuana. Suddenly I understood the infinite web of connectedness between all forms of life. The needs and desires of humans and animals perpetuate, the need for plants, fungi, bacteria, and so forth, just as we return to the earth to nourish these things when we die. I found this understanding to be profoundly wonderful, and it gave me a sense of amazing serenity. Both my friend and the wooden door acquired a strange glow that I recognized as the spark of a divine gift within all living things.

By 2:20, an amazing amount of energy seemed to be moving through the room. I could sense that I was in the presence of a power I did not fully understand. Somehow it seemed that the music (Amon Tobin), the potency of my dose, my mindset and my surroundings had combined to channel something indescribable. The world around me was thick with my anticipation.

At 2:24, I experienced the defined peak of the trip. I took a deep breath and closed my eyes. What happened next surely defies any human attempt to describe it meaningfully, but the most shocking part was the concreteness of the event. For only a fraction of a second, I saw a shining octopus-like creature moving through and out to the front of me. At the exact moment it disappeared, I felt its consciousness enter mine. I have read other similar experiences of others who have met such entities, and the common elements of the experience I believe unlock some deeply rooted part of the human consciousness. I was stunned by the awesome energy that suddenly became a part of me.

My eyes shot open and I gasped for breath. I did not know where I was, but I was everywhere and nowhere at once. I was everything and nothing at once. For the first time, I knew that everything in the universe was one, and that infinite meaning is found in all forms of life and the means they use to interpret the world. I had a sense of having touched the forbidden; I was Adam eating from the tree of knowledge.

These creatures do not normally come to us because they inhabit a different realm of existence, but in this one instant it and I were able to transcend the duality of our existences and merged into the singularity that is the entire universe. I sensed that it understood the experience in a similar way; it had come and touched me in a way that its kind does not ordinarily do. It was then that I realized what had just happened to me: this creature had stolen a kiss and snuck away, before I had a chance to object!

I lay still for a moment, flattered that it had chosen me and awed at the amazing power it brought with it. It was as if a thousand new dimensions suddenly opened up in the world around me. Every object I saw was a symbol, and every symbol was overflowing with meaning. I understood the universe of human experience as being organized and categorized like a symbol dictionary. Every experience is recorded in the collective memory of language, and through experience new meanings are added and represented symbolically. Language and symbols are a natural outgrowth of human experience; they arise out of the human need to describe things that are worth describing, profound experiences that stimulate the mind and demand to be communicated to others.

I was overwhelmed by the need to share this understanding. I knew that my gift as a human was to be able to comprehend the world in this way, and I craved the satisfaction of what I understood as my right as a human to choose a soul mate with whom I could share it. Even as everything in the world around me began to melt together, I looked at an Indian tapestry of animals on the wall, and I recognized the animals as symbols and as the gods and spirits that humans have worshipped through the ages. These are the things to which we ascribe great meaning. Inscribed on each of the spirit symbols was another infinite chain of unrecognizable symbols, moving through and around the spirits.

I remained in this state for perhaps five minutes, after which I slowly began to return. Nevertheless, I felt the creature’s presence in me for the next several hours, and it provided my muse as I wrote for the remainder of the trip. I understood that everything was arranged in a particular way because that was the only way things could ever possibly be arranged. I played around with words and symbols and found myself amazed at the number of concepts that can be conveyed all using the same symbols. In the English alphabet there are twenty-six symbols. There is infinite meaning in each of these symbols, as there is in the order in which they are arranged. I thought about words beginning with the letter S, inspired by the sigma I had seen and also by a strong salvia experience I had had previously. I thought about words beginning with R and T, and why those letters are before and after S, respectively.

In fact, this experience helped me to finally understand what I had seen with the help of salvia. I realized that I had traversed the symbol dictionary, for it is the map of all human experience, which is the realm that I had traveled on salvia. The breadth of experience is the reason it seemed to take so long to traverse the dictionary, and the reason I felt like I had been gone for some indefinitely long amount of time.

Mushrooms, I know now more than ever, are a powerful ally of humankind. It has been two days since the experience, and I am still working it over in my head. It is best, I believe, to approach the experience with a certain openness, knowing that things may happen beyond your control. This attitude will allow one to accept what is happening and to experience things never thought possible. Prepare a question before you embark on your journey, because you never know who or what might be able to answer it.

Exp Year: 2005	ExpID: 40798
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: Feb 9, 2007	Views: 14,636
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