DOSE:	1 gal	oral	Cacti - T. pachanoi	(tea)
	0.4 g	smoked	Cannabis

BODY WEIGHT:

140 lb

Before I get to the meat of my report I would like to give a bit of my background which I hope will add credence to my report, most of which is written after the fact through consultation of notes I took during the trip. I want to divulge a bit about myself before getting into the details of the trip because some of the thoughts that came up seem rather mundane. In divulging information about myself I hope to convince the reader I am not crazy and to also establish some manner of ethos.

As far as drugs are concerned I have consumed cannabis in almost every way imaginable: pipes, bongs, bubblers, hot-knives, hashish, apples, potatoes, joints, decarboxylated nuggets, edibles, etc., and have minimal experience with alcohol, tobacco, coca leaf (in tea and candy form from my visits to Peru)and kava-kava. I have moderate experience with hydrocodone in extracted and in pill form. My experience with psychedelics mainly stems from a trip with psilocybin mushrooms and a sub-psychedelic dose of Morning Glory.

I realize that hallucinations are not sights unseen, but rather magnified manifestations of what is actually there. Put in Lacanian Psychoanalytic terms, psychedelics help give us a true glimpse of what is actually there because our Ego represses the Real by projecting the Symbolic and Imaginary onto our experience, or, in neuro-scientific terms reduce the filters our brain places on sensory input through chemical pathways in neuron bundles. Such experiences then, are not a “mind-melt” or a “mind-fuck” but instead a mind-opener, not merely a novelty of seeing colors and patterns. (Though the colors and patterns are cool too)

I come from a relatively well-off Indian-American family of Brahmin background. My mother and father both come from a long line of Sanskrit scholars whose lineage tracing back to the Vedic Rishis of Iron Age India goes back to time immemorial. The Vedic Brahmanical society was heavily intertwined with entheogens, namely the “panja-dhatura” or “5 plants” (not to be confused with the entheogen of genus Datura) which included ganja (cannabis indica), Soma (believed to be amanita muscaria or a mixture with other mushrooms and/or cannabis or Ephedra) among others. Unfortunately, as Hinduism became more indoctrinated, the roots to the Vedic religion and my ancestors have almost entirely been lost. It is my aim in the use of entheogens to commune with my Vedic ancestral religion as well as to achieve moksha, the ultimate goal of members of Eastern Religions: permanent ego death, known to the Japanese as satori enlightenment.

My religious background due to my family is heavily influenced by Hinduism. But the Hinduism taught to me by my parents and grandparents itself was a combination of the Vedas, Upanishads, Mahabharata, Ramayana, Bhagavad Gita, Advaita and Vedanta philosophies, while my readings gave me an increased exposure to Zoroastrianism, Tibetan (Hinayana and Vajrayana) as well as Mahayana and Theravada Buddhism. My weaboo phase during middle school exposed me to Shintoism while during my youth my family gave me a mythology book which exposed me to Greco-Roman, Scandanavian, Celtic, Chinese, Polynesian, and Native American Mythologies. My curiosity led me to research Tengriism and Shamanism (due to my interest in throat singing and my love of a Mongolian Grill Restaurant). American religious indoctrination taught me about Judeo-Christianity while my curiosity once again informed me of Islam.

Before I first began using drugs I read extensively. Mythology of all kinds, the philosophies of Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Kant, Hegel, Žižek, Confucius and Ramakrishna as well as the political philosophies of Marx, Rothbard, de Molinari, Mises, Hayek, Sowell and Bastiat and Locke. I have also a fascination in the psychoanalysis of Freud, Jung and Lacan. To me, philosophy, psychoanalysis, and religion are one in the same. And all come together with a psychedelic experience.

Three books which prepared me for mescaline were Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces which aggregated the innate psychoanalytic foundations of the human experience present in our mutual mythologies. No matter how diverse the world is, there is always something which connects us. Also, Slavoj Zizek’s The Ticklish Subject is an exceptionally esoteric discourse of ontology which I think delves into many mutual ideas with the psychedelic realm. More explicitly connected with mescaline was Aldous Huxleys’ The Doors of Perception which I read before my first mushroom trip which gave me a good feel for the events to come and was also an engrossing rumination on life, art, and society. This report may seem a harkening back to Huxley’s mescaline work.

So as a disclaimer, my report should be credible, as I am not entirely crazy. Instead I am a classical liberal eastern spiritual intellectual, interested in the Shamanical pursuits for his own salvation and to spread the message to those who wish to learn. My interest in religion, philosophy, linguistics, psychoanalysis, calculus, physics, rudimentary chemistry, fractal math, the Riemann sphere, computer science, sociology, linguistics, economics, finance and international relations would all prepare me for my trip, for from taking mescaline I learned that everything is related. All intellectual disciplines use the same logic to describe the same phenomena in different terms. This is the beauty of the universe mescaline helps us understand.

Now let’s talk about mescaline. When I visited Peru they told me of the San Pedro cactus and its connection to the Mother Goddess Pachamama, the earth mother. The consumption aspect itself was maternal whereas the cactus itself was a phallic symbol connected with Viracocha, the Sun Father. At the time of my visit to Peru I was as they say in The Elder Scrolls Skyrim, ”a milk drinker”, afraid of entheogens.

I ordered the cactus and gave it to my friend S. to store in his attic, and he and my friend D. brewed the tea the day of the trip. Our original plan was to drink the tea and go swimming at my house. The water will be really cool when we “trip balls”, we thought. Little did we know the secret the Cactus Mother held: mescaline tea tastes absolutely horrendous. We had tea made out of 4 stalks which boiled down into 2 gallons of tea. The plan was to have each person drink half a gallon. Four friends were assembled at my house, S., D., B, and me. D. and B. were avid psychonauts adept in the consumption of psychedelics whereas S. was a prolific stoner who recently delved into the realm of the mind. In his own words he would exclaim “I fucking love doob, dude”.

We started drinking the tea at around 6 pm. Due to the heavily alkaline taste we decided to chase it down with a mixture of orange juice, ginger ale, and sugar coconut-flavored sparkling water. None of these helped mask the taste and the only result was I now detest orange juice. Fortunately I was conditioned with a strong stomach for bitter foods due to my grandma forcing my brother and I in our youth to eat bitter mystery-herbs which she told us would ease itching from India’s notorious mosquito infestations and due to the same grandma conditioning my brother and I to eat the pavakai or karela, the Indian Bitter Gourd. By the time I had finished my first cup of tea-juice concoction; my friends were halfway through their first cup, barely able to stomach the taste.

Around half an hour in I began to feel the pre-trip shivers, so I went for a swim to see if that would accelerate the process. It did not. Around 40 minutes in the nausea kicked in. My stomach was strong, so I did not vomit, but it felt as though I never wanted to eat or drink anything again. We kept drinking. An hour and a half in we were all very nauseous and got out of the pool to sit down. The body high was starting to come in so we ate some snacks to suppress the nausea sensation and pressed on inside. By this point I had drank around 2 cups of tea-juice mixture while my friends had drank about 1.25 cups.

When we moved inside we migrated to my study room and I showed my friends a drum&bass song I was working on FL Studio. D. showed us something he was working on and then we started listening to electronic music on my laptop. At hour 2 patterns on my desktop backgrounds began to move around. The trip had begun. At this point I was thoroughly “wonked”. Open eye hallucinations were subtle, patterns on the screen began to move around, and visions of Nasca lines and Indian Rangoli patterns began to appear 2 inches above the carpet. These patterns rippled like water. I began to roll a joint but I was nowhere near coordinated enough as I was more wonked than my friends. D. and S. finished rolling the joint and B. doled out motion sickness medication to deal with the nausea. Everything felt deeper. I felt that my vision was in high definition. While in the pool I had my glasses off and had completely forgotten. I could see as though I didn’t need glasses. When I went to the eye doctor the next day they told me that my vision had actually gotten better, and also that my optic nerve bundle was shaped differently than others. This either indicated I was at risk for glaucoma or that I had unique eyes. I presume it was due to mushrooms and mescaline. Forgive me for that aside, back to the trip: we moved to my media room.

I am fortunate enough to have been blessed with a house perfect for psychedelic trips. My parents had imported all sorts of Indian antiques from my great-great grandparents’ house, so my house looks on the outside like a Mediterranean chateau, an on the inside like some sort of Indo-Saracenic museum manor. My media room was no different. The curtains and drapes over the projector screen were imported from India, and as we listened to electronic music the curtains danced and resonated. Inside I could see a green wave as though the universe was resonating with the music. The tassels on the drapes would circulate in rhythm, belly dancing with the Indian inspired music I would play (the Buddha Bar Collection, powerful stuff). We sat for around an hour, listening to atmospheric drum&bass, some Inca Tribal music, psytrance, goa, glitchcore, and Buddha Bar music. The visualizers on my Playstation came alive. The lights seemed to extend out of the screen and reflected onto the carpet. It was like a 3D movie but in no way as gimmicky. The Nasca lines on the carpet became more profound, with wisps and faces beginning to swirl around in the ripples. The earth visualizer on the Playsation began to render faces in the clouds as the earth moved. Whoever programmed that I am grateful to, for they have created something beautiful. The particle visualizer began to liquefy, and the particles flew out of the screen. S. looked at B. and started vibrating his fingers in front of his face. He asked B. to do the same. By this point I had finished my second cup and was halfway through my third. I was wonked and thought they had activated some sort of magic. S. laughed and said that this was how he confirmed he was hallucinating. Vibrating his fingers helped materialize tracers. This motion would become our “secret handshake” for our proposed (bogus) Etheogenic Secret Society, The ΣΣΣ.

Starting at hour 3 the conversations began. The conversations I had with D. and B during my mushroom trip around a month earlier were some of the most engrossing. It was a wonder people did not discuss these matters all the time. D. was a musician interested in spirituality and B. was a scientist with similar interests. S. was fascinated by existentialist literature, and so due to our mutual interests we discussed all sorts of matters from economy, to government to spirituality to cosmogony which I will elaborate upon later. What is noteworthy in the events of the trip is that regardless of the topic brought up the conclusions were always the same. No matter what we talked about we always came to the conclusion that everything is connected by some sort of primordial energy. That without this energy the universe is sterile. The force which sets forth the cosmogenic cycle is the same force that resides in our minds, the force we call God, the Oversoul, the Paramatma, Brahman, etc. That which makes us act. That which engenders action. Volition. Everything depends on context. Before anything happens, everything is reconciled. It is the paradox of existence. Everything is nothing. Nothing is everything. Nothing is innately meaningful but this is what gives everything meaning. There is no absolute truth and this is the universe’s absolute truth. Everything is fractalized, everything is infinitely abstract. An accurate grasp of infinity is what we aspire to attain. We rationalize the data of the universe with sensory and statistical methods and derive significance from it with the operations of calculus. We then use these methods for sociological, economical, psychological, scientific purposes but the logic behind it is the same. We all aspire to ascertain a grasp of the primordial, to understand what is. Life is all one huge inside joke we wish to get in on.

At this point we went outside to smoke the joint. It was kind of dirty, but in a quaint kind of way. As I became increasingly wonked it reappeared to me how much I loved cannabis. D. and S. and B. and I all mused how much we loved cannabis, how it was a cure-all be it for glioma, glaucoma, depression, boredom, what have you. Cannabis is fantastic. It can be enjoyed in its own right or to launch with other substances. And launched we got. We went back inside and now I really started to feel the mescaline tripping in.

I lied to my friends and said I was drinking orange juice when in fact I was drinking more of the horrendous tasting brew. When I divulged this an hour later we all laughed. They were proud I could stomach the stuff. We turned the music on and I began to notice more profound effects. There seemed to be an RGB overlay over everything, like a filter of raw light permeating through my senses. The screen continued to be “3d” and the nasca lines became even more detailed. The curtains and tassels continued to dance. The open eye hallucinations were very similar to mushrooms, but the closed eye visuals were not as detailed. I saw orbs of light and fractal shapes but it was not like mushrooms where my mind conjured up scenes straight from my imagination. With mushrooms I felt like the distinction between my subconscious thoughts, my conscious thoughts and real life were blurred. With mescaline the distinction was still there, and it felt like my thought process was heightened. I brought myself off of the couch and continued to curl myself up in my blanket. My puppy pawed at the door and I let him in. He is adorable and I love him. I tried to cuddle him but he insisted I pick him up and put him on the sofa and he licked S.’s face. He was wonked and began laughing. D. had told us that mescaline is a very nurturing experience that is very forgiving to overdose. After 3.5 cups of tea-juice mixture I was thoroughly wonked and began to feel a body high akin to an immense sense of comfort. I felt so comfortable in my state I began to roll around the room for about 15 minutes in ecstasy. I exclaimed that I was rolling around because it was exactly what I wanted to do and B. concurred that if that was what I wanted to do I should do it. When a dog feels an immense sense of comfort after eating a meal, digging a bone, or finding a desirable smell, he begins to roll around on his back. Turns out my puppy and I had more in common than being fed by the same hands.

Our conversations resumed. I noticed that I hadn’t touched my phone the whole night except to play music. I didn’t care what time it was and I cared not for the social networks our zeitgeist has deemed “necessary” for a social existence. B. insisted I take notes on my phone so I would not forget the events. It is also significant that the colors on my cell phone seemed more vibrant in an interesting way. It was like the colors were polarized. Perhaps mescaline alters your neurochemistry and polarizes light entering your retina. Excuse the aside, back to writing notes: This was a very good idea, for this experience report is written primarily from my mescaline notes.

We began talking about how most people don’t care to know about how the universe works and then how intriguing calculus was. Once you understand the logic behind how limits and derivatives work you realize that this logic is fundamental to many principles. Logic is universal. Once you know how this functions with mathematics you understand that math is related to how people think. Mathematics and logic are related to psychology. Everything is connected. Everything is the same. But everything is slightly different.

Using psychology and studying how people make decisions we derive that physical and social science is all about context: In analyzing each individual moment, any action or decision depends on every possibility: social or historical context, religious or moral upbringing, expectations, government indoctrination, randomness is only random to the degree before it terminates. But it is impossible to determine when the infinite terminates. Yet it does? This mode of thinking is akin to a computer- a meta-computer that determines how everything happens, and if there is a “why”. Finance, the field I wished to pursue was in essence a formalized analysis of human thought processes concerning resource allocation. I aspire to be an attorney-at-law. The law is a means of determining fairness and setting guidelines and protocol to be followed. But how to determine these guidelines’ uniformity is difficult and requires an entirely abstract methodology. The methodology mescaline helps us understand. I call this methodology of the universe the Volition Engine. The interconnectedness between everything is infinitely significant but at the same time infinitely insignificant. Meaning is assigned. This implies that any decision, even the most menial, could have the most profound impact on the universe- if you make it so. Some call this God; my ancestors called it Purusha, the Brahman, the Godhead, the Oversoul. This is what humanity searches for, this is the meaning of life, and this is what resides in all of us, all living things. On Earth, as Ludwig von Mises wrote, human action is the driving factor behind society for economic and political decisions. Extending this to a metaphorical sense he is describing the power of volition, the Volition engine, the mechanism Mescaline helped me understand; this is the truth residing in the universe.

This shifted the conversation to life on other planets. We determined that given the vastness of the universe it was statistically guaranteed that there was life on other planets. I concluded that if everything we know about evolutionary biology was true then not only would there be life on other planets, but there was also guaranteed life that would most surely resemble us. B. concurred but also said that that was not necessarily true. On earth the conditions and phenomena promulgated a world conducive to intelligent ape life viz. humanity. But dolphins, cephalopods and pachyderms also bear incredibly complex nervous systems capable of intelligence to an unimaginable degree. Why not then, B. postulated, could life on other planets not resemble these creatures in a highly developed form? Moreover, D. chimed, how likely could it be that these creatures could have a conversation just as ours, questioning our existence and wanting to meet us here? S. at this time in the conversation was also wonked but stated how he was thoroughly enjoying the conversation.

We decided we would try and play Magic the Gathering. Ostensibly this would not happen due to the state we were in, but regardless, we tried. As I searched for my decks, S. became startled by the Nasca lines on the carpet and threw a box of my cards all over the floor. He collected them and when I found my decks we moved downstairs to my living room. We were 5 hours into the trip.

My living room is my favorite room of my house. It is filled with Indian antiques, my collection of swords ranging from Nepali kukris, Indonesian kris, Japanese katana and wakizashi, a Yemeni janbiya and also various Indian statues of deities such as Ganesha, the Buddha, Saraswati Devi et cetera. There were also several paintings of landscapes, tropical birds, a Victorian lady, and there was an antique piano to the side. The trim on the door began to be animated. The paintings began to breathe. S. noticed personalities in one of the landscapes. There were not any people in the painting. The sounds of cicadas humming coupled with the painting of tropical macaws and the Indian statuary gave the impression of a rainforest backdrop. Our conversation would now shift to the meta(meta)physical. You read that correctly, double meta. I don’t know how to describe the psychedelic thought process. I dub it cosmosophy, a combination of cosmology and philosophy.

S. and D. and B. began discussing an issue I found difficult to relate to: the time in a (White) Christian individual’s life when they find out that the Christianity they are taught is entirely different from the original philosophy of Christianity. When people figure this out they are either drawn to other philosophies or reject religion entirely. It is as though some in the West see atheism as a step to finding out the truth, as a step in their learning. I discussed a bit about Hinduism as they asked me of a statue of Saraswati. I explained the Hindu trinity and also the dubious divinity of the Devas in Hinduism. The godhead in Hinduism was unlike the conceptualization of God in Abrahamic religions. There are depicted god-like entities known as the Devas and the Asuras and then the trinity of Shiva, Vishnu and Brahma, themselves metaphorical manifestations of Brahman, the Oversoul, the Godhead, the computer-like understanding of the universe, the volition engine. Unlike the vindictive Abrahamic God, the tables are turned with Eastern religion. My ancestors wrote in the Vedas “What significance do the Devas have without the hotr(priest)’s sacrifice”? God is not an entity to allocate to you a heaven or hell based off of a binary (arbitrary) morality. Instead God is a state of being. When you shed your ego, escape from samsara, the cycle of rebirth, you attain true knowledge. You break free from your corpse body and become one with the Brahman, the eternal consciousness. You are nothing and everything. You attain moksha, nirvana, free yourself from the cycle of volition they call karma. You finally understand the inside joke that is life. I always found Shamanic and Polytheistic practices quaint. They offer praises and incantations to the sun, moon, wind, et. al perhaps because they think that there is a divinity inside it. But divinity is everywhere, and they offer prayers to appreciate that these phenomena exist.

We ended our conversation pondering about aliens again. Not only did they have to exist, but they were similar to us indubitably. And they wanted to meet us as much as we wanted to meet them. D. decided he was going to drive himself home. Not five minutes after he left D. called me. He said he had witnessed some lights flashing in the sky. He reassured me he wasn’t crazy. Immediately we ran outside. I didn’t care that I was “tripping balls” and I didn’t care that my sprinklers were on. Thankfully I went and turned them off.

With D. still on the phone we scrambled out to my back yard and noticed an object that looked like an airplane. I was still superbly wonked so I saw all sorts of RGB tubes and wormholes in the sky. The distance between the stars and me was insignificant. Looking at the object it was like it was dancing in the sky, drawing itself towards me. Perhaps it was exactly what we had wanted. Perhaps the aliens wanted to meet us just as we wanted to meet them. Perhaps it was the Cactus Mother, Pachamama guiding our spiritual journey. Or, perhaps it was Shakti Devi, the Cosmic Mother giving us a nod of approval. Long story short we were wonked, sitting on the wet grass watching something that was presumably a UFO. It flashed green and white in the southeasterly sky slowly moving up. D. remained on the phone until he felt he was too incoherent to drive. This experience was surreal. B. thought the UFO could have been a tracer whose differentially small changes in movement generated in our minds flashing lights and the appearance of a vehicle. S. moved his fingers in a vibrating motion- and assured us it wasn’t.

I decided I would go and look for my telescope. I knew I had one, I just didn’t know where it was. I scrambled around my house at 2 in the morning looking for the confounded telescope. When I couldn’t find it I felt as though my Hero’s Journey had failed. An overwhelming sense of despair overcame me. Then I ran to my garage and found the dusty contraption in a corner. I was elated. I sent my one and only text message for the night to S. and B:

“FOUND THE SCOPE”

I brought the telescope outside and we bumbled around trying to get it to work. What we were too wonked to know was that there was mud smeared all over it. After trying and failing to catch a closer glimpse of the object we sat back down on the grass and began lamenting how unfortunate it is that people jump to conclusions about other people. A consequence of the Volition Engine is that often times relationships between people are not formed because people stereotype, try to conform individuals to archetypes. But it is nearly impossible to know what another person experiences. Nietzsche and Huxley both extolled artistic expression as the ultimate expression of is-ness, to communicate experience across different individuals. But without taking the effort to understand someone else, you cannot know. It is an incredible risk to put yourself out there through any sort of expression because it is so simple for someone to refuse to understand. Personal interactions are all about individuals taking such risks out of their own volition. All you have to do is want. Gandhi once said “if you don’t ask you won’t get”. But if you don’t want, you cannot ask. Desire is primal. We migrated inside to fix ourselves some snacks. We ate bhelpuri, an Indian snack mix, and I mixed mine with some apple jacks. We took our snacks upstairs and watched some Afro samurai. Anime is very idiosyncratic. Unable to muster the patience to continue watching, S. fell asleep (he had his college orientation the following morning) and B. suggested we watch the Inbetweeners, a comical British coming-of-age show. It was a good way to end the trip.

Before the trip ended I listened to the Inca tribal music and then the Purusha Suktam, a Vedic hymn about the Oversoul and I drifted in (or perhaps out) of sleep. I started to feel a sense of wrongness. I saw glimpses of reality I was not ready for.

Mescaline is fantastic and I look forward to many more experiences with this wonderful entheogen. There were 3 quarts of tea left after this experience. I drank them before finishing this report.

Exp Year: 2012	ExpID: 97129
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: 18
Published: Nov 11, 2020	Views: 672
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Cacti - T. pachanoi (64) : First Times (2), Small Group (2-9) (17)