Returning Home
Amanita muscaria
Citation:   Don Alex. "Returning Home: An Experience with Amanita muscaria (exp7332)". Erowid.org. Aug 26, 2002. erowid.org/exp/7332

 
DOSE:
25 g oral Amanitas - A. muscaria
BODY WEIGHT: 160 lb
My quest for unveiling the maya(illusion) that we live in our everyday experiences began years ago. Since then I have realized that through intense meditation or ethnogenic experiences will one be able to slip into the thousand other realms parallel to our own. The use of psychoactive plants are preferred by me given my lack of my dedication to a lifetime of meditation. Besides, the use of hallucinogens runs in my ancestry as it does to many others. I had run into amanita muscaria a few times in my personal studies of psychoactive plants and mushrooms. Its long time use in human cultures from the ancient Egyptians, Indians (thought to be the main ingredient of the famous Soma drink from the Rig Vedas) and the shamans of Siberia intrigued me. Amanita muscaria is believed by some to be the origin of the legend of Santa Clause and the world known christams holiday. With such claims and history attached to amanita, I knew this was one experience I had to undergo.

I obtained three 4'-6' caps of fly-agaric mushrooms with various size stems. Total weight 25g. The mushrooms were pre-dried and so they were sliced up in 1/2' squares. 6 cups of water was heated in a pot until the water was just barely boiling. The sliced mushrooms were then put into the barely boiling water. Amanita mushrooms contain ibotenic acid and muscimol. The latter believed to be the main ingredient for an ethnogenic experience. It is said that heat changes much of the ibotenic acid which has negative effects on the liver to the much wanted muscimol. The mushrooms were left to boil for an hour and after strained and seperated from the reddish brown liquid. 3 1/2 cups of the liquid was left and the cooked mushrooms sliced where rolled into a ball. 3/4 of the liquid and shrooms were ingested leaving the rest in case more was to taken later if they weren't potent. The taste was unruly and I found that sucking a lime afterwards help some. The full effects should be felt in two hours, if not the rest was to be downed.

The first 30 minutes were spent in holding down my bulging stomach. Alot was ingested. Nausea was bareable. I should note that I fasted for a day, which is good practice when ingesting psycoactive plants and mushrooms, I had no clue as to what I was to expect accept for other peoples' experiences. At the 45 min. interval my skin became flush and I started to sweat profusely. A feeling of a drunken state came on with the symptoms. A heaviness of the feet began soon afterwards and continued up through my legs to the hips and then to my torso. At the 55 min. interval speech was not possible and walking was dificult. Mild distortion in perception was present. The 'walls and floor are breathing' is the best way to describe it. The room and contents did not appear to be real, but more like a realistic hologram. A cautious, yet curious feeling was felt instead of a full euphoric feeling since this was my first time after all. Powerful electric surges began to eminate from my navel and spread like a ripple in water to the rest of my body mostly felt in my head. These powerful deep electrical surges began to intenify as the 1st hour passed. Powerful enough that focusing of the eyes was impossible. I could not read a single page of a book. The feeling best to describe this is to stand up and spin half around very quickly and stop abruptly and spin half around again and continue this process then increase the speed and shorten the spins to quarter turns and so on. You could then see that the disorientation was very great almost overwhelming.

That is when anxiety started to kick in. I looked at the clock and I was only in an hour not even the beginning and was experiencing convulsions and powerful surges that no drunken state, hallucinating phase, or any other state had ever produced. I knew then that I had ingested to much amanita for my body weight. I kept a cool head and just had to go along with the experience. There was no way out! At the two hour mark I had to lie down on the floor where I layed down blankets and pillows and had house-techno music playing to keep me in a tribal like trance. Then convulsions at that time where so great the only way to describe it is to imagine lying on a bed of 12'inch subwoofers and having a deep bass note play at short burts. Again starting from the navel and radiating out. As I layed down, I noticed an upside down cone (invisible, but yet discernable. Similar to the the 3D art pictures where an object appears from a background but still retains the backgrounds color.) starting from my navel and spreading to the cosmos. The cone was spinning in a clockwise direction from my perspective. It was the most amazing thing I have seen so far. I soon realized I was oberserving the life line that every living thing has connecting it to the cosmic (implicit) realm. I heard about that lifeline or tentacles in many Hindu literature and also Carlos Castaneda literature, but never thought I would see it in my day (this life at least). But the experience was short lived.

I blacked out 2 1/2 hours into the experience. I awoke in my bed to the music ending which most likely put me in trance and I felt unimagineable pulses through my body. I felt that my body and especially my head were going to explode. It was very frightening. This experience is not for the light hearted. Rarely in ones life does one experience such a powerful cosmic energy. I believe that that energy is too raw for a mind that is not very close to acheiving enlightenment. Very humbling. I got up frightened and tried to walk around. Then it happened. The powerful surges which pulsed at a constant rate started to slow down and decrease in intensity. My conciousness was not focused in my head as is usually, but above and beyond my head. It was an out of body experience. As the pulses slowed down greately but still vibrated deeply and these pulses where the only thing I could hear, my view began to become tunnel vision. If someone knows how your vision is when you black out black out, this is how it was. I lossed it. I believed I had taken to much amanita and my death was definite, yet I was going to face it in an altered state. I had mistaken the surges for my heart beat and as they slowed down to a beat per second I freaked and tried to call the ambulance and made a scene. They don't call them bezerkers for nothing.

Looking back, it was not death that approached me, but the cosmic realm that my consciousness approached through my lifeline eminating from my navel and then in a repeated cycle came back to my body where I would awaken and then sent back to the cosmos repeating itself over and over again. I thought that I was approaching death for the last time that fateful morning, but little did I realize that I was returning home for the first time.

Exp Year: 2001ExpID: 7332
Gender: Male 
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: Aug 26, 2002Views: 24,021
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Amanitas - A. muscaria (70) : Preparation / Recipes (30), Difficult Experiences (5), Overdose (29), General (1), Alone (16)

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