DOSE:

2.3 mg/kg

MMDA

I use the word miniature in the sense that I would describe a piece by the jazz pianist Bud Powell as a miniature.

Comparing a Beethoven piano sonata with 'Autumn in New York' as played by Powell would be analogous to comparing mescaline and MMDA. MMDA domes through as a miniature high -- everything is there but in lesser quantity and duration.

MMDA stops barely short of the Olympian Universe of time-ceasing and the appearance of organic and inorganic radiance. The immediate part of the high is about two and one half hours in duration. Rather than a cessation of Time, as there is with mescaline or psilocybin, there is a kind of timelessness during the first malaise-like hour of the high. There is more a feeling of stupefaction than there is with most highs.

In a car climbing the Berkeley foothills I went into a terrible fear. It only lasted a few minutes but it did not matter in the timelessness how long the panic lasted - it was eternal. I looked out onto the grassy hillside at the dead silver-brown grass. In the expanse of field I could see each separate blade of grass gleaming and the trillions of brown-silver blades blended together into a vast wavering fur. Far below was the panorama of foggy Berkeley and Oakland and the bay. It all began to loom in timelessness and beauty. I thought I was going to enter the Olympian Universe. I WAS NOT PREPARED FOR THE OLYMPIAN UNIVERSE! I had been expecting something like a marijuana high I realized that if I entered the Olympian that I Hadn't yet recovered sufficiently from my last high to hold myself together.

Heat swelled in my genitals and rose to my stomach. I felt agonizing fear. I wanted to ask the others to go back so I could take Thorazine. I couldn't talk. The car swerved around a hairpin bend in the road giving me another view of the silver-brown grass-fur and the vast unwanted dearness of the view.

Suddenly I was fighting with 'Captain Zero' I mean the whole disordered and eternity-seeking consciousness that is no longer mammalian in nature but belongs to the order of molecules and inert matter! I decided that all I could do was to go with it, to let Zero take over, But then I was sure that I would not come back. I tried to hold back the high but realized I would do myself damage that way. Then I tried to get on top of the whole high and control it. all in all, I tried perhaps fifteen or twenty either unrecallable or almost indescribable means to control or escape the high.

During this time I believed that I was going to pieces and I would possibly never be with the human-world again. My insides were going wild and my conscious mind seemed to be the only force holding me together. At one point I managed to ask how the dosage had been figured. I was reassured by comparing the dosage to mescaline dosage. For a moment I grasped the fact that I could go through three hours of the fear. Then my insides and mind went wilder. Jesus, I could not enter Olympia again!!

When the car stopped I was in control and the aroused molecular consciousness had dissipated. The number of exits and ordinary animal powers that I tried had given me control. I account the sudden gaining of sureness to experience with hallucinogens. I don't think any of the methods that I tried worked -- but the number of possibilities gave me an assurance that I could control me even in Olympia.

I told the others what had happened and felt I could enjoy some of the day. For a moment I felt the joy of relief

As we walked up the footpath over golden brown dust I saw footprints of birds, tennis shoes, and bare feet. The frightening nature of tracks and artifacts began to overwhelm me. As I walked I tried to insulate myself from the sight. To my right was the dream panorama of hundreds of square miles of enchanted cities and dream reality fog pouring upon them from the bay. I was not interested and only cared about keeping myself together and not slipping back to meet Captain Zero.

The short, eternal, uphill walk exhausted us and we fell on the ground in a tiny stand of trees. I still wanted the experience to end and to return to the meanings of daily loves and realities. I had adjusted enough to make it through the high. My companions closed their eyes and began having brain movies. (Earlier my eyes had been forced shut many times by the euphoric hallucinogen pleasure.) Now I held my eyes open not wanting brain movies or visions. When I closed my eyes experimentally I saw only glorious and pleasing blackness.

We talked desultorily and and dozefully and I realized that I was able to see through the eyes of my companions. They were seeing stark reality exactly as I saw it. I wanted to talk to Fredo and find out who he was. I found talking too difficult. My eyes were beginning to close again with exhaustion and pleasure.

When I lit cigarettes I could not find my lips well and they were numbed. Matches kept blowing out in a wind that was not strong enough to blow them out. We wobbled when we walked.

We stayed in the little stand of trees. I sat for a while then got up and sat in another place. Then I got up again & etc.

Except for visual sensation, which was just on the verge of mescaline or psilocybin vision in clarity, I seemed to be sealed from sensation and living in a kind of hyper-lucidity of sense -- a pleasant paradox.

I lay back and closed my eyes and practiced raising the goddess Kundalini (The Serpent Power) from the base chakra and through my body. I succeeded in raising the power, for the first time, past my shoulders and into my head. I realized, as I did it, that I was not truly raising the Serpent Power but rather cleaning the nerve tubes. However, I achieved grayish-clear affective pictures of the chakra nerve centers. It was a good feeling.

The crystal clear air gave bright green sharpness to the evergreens. Looking at trees of leaves or plants was like a mild mescaline high. Fir trees became living, green, modern sculptures of strange Indian rococo beasts -- as if the sculptor Lipschitz worked at their trimming.

The malaise-like feeling began to end and the dozeful feeling left with it.

I walked to a redwood corpse where other members of the party were sitting. I was struck by the absolute and superb beauty and clarity of the people and the trees and air and the music that played over the portable radio. I felt close to the children and admired their beauty. At this point I realized that I was simply sitting and enjoying a Sunday noon in its full pleasantness. Ordinarily I would have been bored with out more to do. The next couple of hours became a pleasant and beautiful picnic. The come-down was abrupt but not unpleasant. I was ready. Time passed with swift rapidity for the rest of the day. Two hour periods would flash by. Late that night I was kept from sleep for half an hour by brain movies -- little crocodiles running across dusty roads through spotlights in the darkness, magic evergreen trees fading into and out of reality, and anecdotal sequences of brain visions.

AN OBSCURE FOOTNOTE

A week after taking MMDA I woke in the middle of the night and as I awakened I felt that there would be no reality but only nothingness. I was horrified and threw myself bolt upright in bed and opened my eyes instantaneously.

Shelley says:

Lift not the painted veil which those who live
Call Life; though unreal shapes be pictured there,
And it but mimic all we would believe
With colors idly spread, behind, lurk Fear
And hope, twin Destinies; who ever weave
Their shadows, o'er the chasm, sightless and drear...

The awakening I had was definitely a reaction to the MMDA. Yesterday I talked with a man who has taken too much LSD. I tried to avoid speaking of hallucinogens but he was insistent. As I described some post-hallucinogen states of extreme anxiety regarding the nature of reality, the man began to writhe in his chair, wring his hands, and temporarily lost the ability to speak. I have been in that state. While speaking with Ra he identified it as an anxiety state and pointed out that it is not only related to hallucinogens but is a not uncommon anxiety state for those who have not had drugs.

Ra accounts the state to an arising of unconscious material to the surface.

That seems fine and true enough -- as good a name for what is happening as any other. What it does not clear up is the intuitions that I have that strengthen and contradict each other. I am aware of two feelings: that the 'material' is of a repressed psychological nature in the Freudian-Reichian sense, and that there is also another order of 'material' confronted. The other order is that of the molecular level of consciousness. I mean a part of ourselves more related to the philosophical consciousness of sea urchins and sponges -- who are no more than the tugs of their desires and the hungers and the consciousnesses of their motions and withdrawals, who are an actual conscious part of the physical universe and the actual being of their protoplasm in the 'Surge of Life.' It would be interesting if what we so surely call the 'Unconscious' were in reality two or more vastly divided parts of our being that are both commonly inaccessible.

I am not saying this to strengthen my argument that I confronted the molecular consciousness on MMDA. I was in too much of a fear state to be definite of anything when I think of it now two weeks later.

But I am intuitively sure that we are meeting two unknown areas, both repressions and a molecular-philosophical-Universeconciousness. I have a strong feeling that the second of these should be left untouched by both psychiatry and happy-day investigations. We mess with some structure that should remain unknown because is it known by being, unless the experimenter is aware of the risk, or go slowly in an investigatory manner with caution.

Exp Year: 1962	ExpID: 92427
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: May 3, 2014	Views: 5,007
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MMDA (593) : Various (28), First Times (2), General (1)