DOSE:

2.5 g

oral

Mushrooms

(dried)

BODY WEIGHT:

170 lb

The setting: Tucson, Arizona, at my good friend’s home, a pot of boiling water extracting psilocybin from 4 grams of psychedelic mushrooms, species unknown. Together we drink the tea and head to Tucson Mountain Park for a hike in the desert among our cacti friends.

Purpose: to experience nonlinear reality, to reintegrate

Experience: On the way to the park, I start to feel a slight head buzz accompanied by a bit of nausea, not unpleasant though. A red tailed hawk flies directly over our car. Is this significant? We arrive at the park and begin a jaunt through the Tucson Mountains. I am immediately (and unexpectedly) drawn to a Teddy Bear Cholla cactus. What drew me wasn’t so much the cactus per se, but the entire figure/ground relationship that the cactus was coordinating with a beautiful midafternoon sun - shimmering! I go to the cactus and feel its prickly needles, offer it thanks for its beauty and sit down on the desert floor. Colors are intense. My body feels completely relaxed as the nausea has left. I giggle and give thanks for the creation of such a beautiful moment. Time essentially stops as I lay down. There is little wind and the sun shines bright. I close my eyes and wait for what might come. I am at perfect peace yet keep expecting to have some overt hallucinogenic experience. I think “I want to leave my body,” this does not happen and is accompanied by the notion that my time of “escaping” my body is over, that the work that now needs to be done is to more fully incarnate. Giving up my desire to leave, I turn my attention to the direct physical experience of being a sensitive creature in a sensual environment. The Beauty is overwhelming and all I can do is laugh. I am laughing both at the sheer effulgence of the experience and the fact that, in “ordinary” states of consciousness, I tend to take myself and my problems “so seriously” which of course have been annihilated. A fly comes and dances on my nose. I stretch and roll around on the desert floor. This is the peak of the experience. What followed thereafter were variations of the spoken to theme: to more fully inhabit the body/physical realm.

My experience was healing and I believe the use of psilocybin presents the opportunity to experience “slices of heaven,” in the sense that perception of beauty is intensified and time goes away. The challenge is to make these temporary “states” of consciousness into more permanent 'traits of being.' And of course, this can only be accomplished by a letting go of the self, of rendering to Cesar what Cesar’s. To this end, and to finish up, I had an experience of body where for the first time I felt I didn’t own it, that it belonged or rather, was part of a benevolent expression of the Universe. I didn’t have a body, whose heart was beating…rather the heart was beating in full cooperation with the Whole: the teddy bear cholla and dancing fly to abstract a few of the parts.

It has been 3 days since my experience. The gratitude remains!

Exp Year: 2008	ExpID: 68609
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: Oct 31, 2019	Views: 1,326
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Mushrooms (39) : Nature / Outdoors (23), Therapeutic Intent or Outcome (49), Glowing Experiences (4), Alone (16)