DOSE:

2 g

oral

Mushrooms

BODY WEIGHT:

160 lb

Preface: This was my very first experience on mushrooms. The only other drug I have used recreationally before this is marijuana. Let me begin by saying that my experience with mushrooms was just so incredibly vivid and lucid. So real. It felt like I had been living my entire life on the wrong side, that I had hit truth and reality. It was me and two friends. We each took about 2-2.5g. There were three distinct phases which I will list below. At the very bottom, I have taken everything I wrote in my journal and transcribed it. What mostly amazes me is how little of the experiences listed in my journal I have forgotten, especially compared to weed.

1) We were in my living room and shit started to get very wacky. I had just come from sparring, so my metabolism was insanely revved up, and I was probably tripping about 20 minutes after ingestion (also, they didn't taste bad at all - tasteless, mostly; texture like almonds). I was staring at two Modigliani reproductions I have hanging on my wall and I got completely sucked into them. They merged and shifted and transformed in front of my eyes. It wasn't the type of hallucination I had been expecting ie - seeing a talking rabbit, but everything was *ALIVE*. The paintings, the walls, the light, everything looked like it was breathing. I would stare at something and lose the point of demarcation. I would be connected to it; I had no concept of myself as an entity. I had just kind of merged with whatever I was watching. I had this notion of overwhelming joy and happiness, and this was basically the most consistent part of the night. Euphoria. I became super-chatty between bouts of ego death, tried to explain to my friends, but it was very different from weed. With marijuana, when I'm really high, I find that there's always a judgmental voice. I judge myself and others harshly, and when I see something I have to have them see and understand it too. But here, there was absolutely no judgment. I knew that they weren't judging me, and I wasn't them. If they couldn't see something, it didn't bother me at all. Nothing I said could be construed as stupid or embarrassing.

One of my other friends was second to feel the effects and he started noticing all these colours. When he did, he drew my attention to them and, my God, they were so vivid and perfect. The rooms, which were breathing, had halos of colour around them. My kitchen was yellow. My living room was greenish. Outside was a purple. It was all so stunningly gorgeous. We kept talking about how we had never noticed, how we take everything so for granted. I was writing a lot down in my notebook. I would talk about everything and anything and my friend would just kind of flow. Occasionally, he would converse, but most of the time, he just looked like a contented cat. It didn't bother me. I would talk to him and I knew he wasn't going to respond but it didn't bug either of us. I wasn't tripping him out or making him unhappy, and his lack of response wasn't bothering me in the slightest. We had both attained this level of intense pleasure and joyfulness and were just expressing them in our own ways. Like I said before, he just floated along happily, enjoying the sensory, while I became like a scholar-poet and tried to explain and understand and write as much of it down as I could.

We were very lucid. That's something I didn't expect. With weed, nothing is lucid. Nothing makes sense. I expected the same from shrooms, but on a more intense level. It was the opposite. I felt perfectly at peace and perfectly at understanding with the world. My second friend finally joined us, but she was freaking out a bit at first. We talked her out of it, both of us so irreversibly euphoric, and she calmed down and became incredibly happy in her own right. My first friend 'A' told me about the bathroom and how incredible it was to just close the door and be inside of it, so I went to investigate. I sat down on the toilet cover and wrote. I was still wearing pants, I didn't have to actually go, I just wanted to experience. As I was writing, everything seemed to be pulsing, pulsing, pulsing forward to some inevitable point. To some fore gone conclusion. My entire body tensed up and my breathing got incredibly shallow and quick. All of a sudden, I felt this booming voice inside my head but outside of my head. I think I had hit ego death again. And all it said was 'Be calm, be happy.' I ran out of the bathroom, super-excited and told my friends I had 'heard the voice of God, though I don't think I believe in him!' We all laughed a lot, but I was still shaken by it in a most positive way. At one point, I got really curious about how one could have a bad trip, so I tried to induce bad thoughts. I couldn't think of any and gave up.

2) I have a forest near where I live. It was dark out by now, maybe 2-3 hours after ingestion. We walked my dog to the park. Everything was beautiful. I was just walking, looking directly up at the stars. My other friend 'K' was talking a lot now, and we would oscillate between philosophical discussions about life and ego death while staring at the stars. We went into the forest and continued all this. What I remember is that there was no meanness left in any of us. On weed, we spend a good deal of time trying to trip each other out for the laughs. But none of us had any urge to do that. There was so much empathy at any given moment. It was absolutely beautiful. We were all connected to each other in a most profound, basic way. We could all feel what the others were feeling. And we weren't creating images of them while doing so. I didn't believe that I knew what they were thinking and what forces had shaped them. I wasn't internally writing their bildungsroman. I didn't know who they were. Didn't know what their identities were, per se. How I saw them when sober or high on weed. All I knew was that I could *feel* what they were feeling, because they were feeling the same overwhelming sense of goodness that I was. It was very unique.

The forest was amazing. I think I hit my biggest ego death there. From sparring, I have a very sore left quadricep, too many kicks to it, and a very sore right foot. My ankle joint swelled a bit from landing a semi-bad kick of my own to someone else's leg. I didn't feel it. I didn't feel cold or hunger or thirst. I wanted *nothing*. I just flowed with everything, stepping back every few minutes to describe it to the best of my ability. But I didn't know I was me when I wasn't describing. I only existed when I was a part of my narrative. When I was not, I merely was a part of the universe. I told my friends that we had transcended past human experience to universal experience, that everything and everyone was connected. I think I hit a low-grade version of Nirvana. We talked a lot about happiness and freedom here. We came to the conclusion that happiness was the end-goal. That feeling what we were currently feeling was exactly what all humans strive for, but our brains get in the way, because being that happy all the time would reduce our survival fitness immensely. Biological fitness versus emotional joy.

I think that was probably my most shocking revelation. Up to this point, I have always believed our defense mechanisms are there to keep us happy. I don't believe that any more. I think, at our very core, we are incredibly happy creatures. We see beauty and joy in all situations. Our defense mechanisms, though, keep happiness as that fleeting moment. A euphoria we can only capture momentarily and which we always push ourselves towards. The defense mechanisms keep us from being able to stay blissful forever. Millions of years of evolution have weeded out those who were always blissful, because they didn't strive for more, more, more and were wiped out by those who could never be happy and did.

3) We went back to my place, sat on my couch. The sensory experience was muted now. I'm not sure if it was the come-down or if we had simply become acclimated to the strangeness. We talked a lot, then. Philosophized a lot. We talked about society and how it shapes us into an ideal that doesn't exist. We talked about how no matter how close to the ideal we were, we are never any happier for it. The person with a million dollars is still envious of the person with two. How we are a race that is simply incapable of achieving anything beyond momentary pleasure, and does so through greed, always believing that the next goal one reaches will be the one that makes them eternally happy. Always setting new goals when that fails to happen. We talked and talked and talked. Probably for 2-3 hours. Even after we felt we could function normally again, we kept talking.

About two months ago, I struck an epiphany about life. The notion that we should just live our own lives to be happy, and not give a shit what everyone else thinks. It's a pretty obvious contention, but with all the academic, social, cultural, and familial pressures on me constantly, it was something I had overlooked or ignored for 22 years. I had always felt trapped, that I had to follow some predetermined course. I had always felt identity-less, or, rather, my entire identity was based around something that didn't make me happy. Something that was supposed to make me happy but never did. The notion of do x and I will get y and I will be happy. Except, when I got to y, it was always, 'well, you're still not happy, just do z and you're good to go.' And so on, so forth. I had this epiphany that I was just doing things to become *successful* because success was the road to happiness, but I wasn't happy. I was always forgetting my short-term happiness for some purported long-term happiness that was just a carrot on a stick urging me forward. One of the biggest concerns I've had was that this was just a defense mechanism I had set up to try and force myself to be happy. I no longer believe that. I know that the contention of do what pleases thou is truth, now. I know that, at my core, nothing really matters. We are all one and we are all nothing. We will leave no trace on this most glorious universe and it is fully freeing.

It was perfect. The connection, the closeness, the lucidity. I feel like I transcended the human experience. I feel like I learned more about myself and my friends in those few hours than I have with the deep introspection of the last few months. I reached a lot of the same conclusions through deep introspection - I was just never certain they were true; I'm certain now. Perfect.

Exp Year: 2009	ExpID: 78110
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: 22
Published: Mar 10, 2025	Views: 36
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Mushrooms (39) : General (1), First Times (2), Glowing Experiences (4), Mystical Experiences (9), Nature / Outdoors (23), Relationships (44), Therapeutic Intent or Outcome (49), Small Group (2-9) (17)