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Baby Steps with Lord Death
DMT, Cannabis & Passion Flower
Citation:   Jack in the Box. "Baby Steps with Lord Death: An Experience with DMT, Cannabis & Passion Flower (exp98670)". Erowid.org. Oct 4, 2017. erowid.org/exp/98670

 
DOSE:
1 cup oral Passion Flower (tea)
  1 hit vaporized DMT (powder / crystals)
    smoked Cannabis  
BODY WEIGHT: 120 lb
Twice before I believe I tasted dmt, though almost sub-threshhold effects were noted.

'I've felt weirder than I ever felt before' on perhaps a handful of milligrams, once in nature (and I wasnt even sure that I didnt burn it) and once in the dark. In the dark, I knocked over the bowl and had to repack crystals into it.

I keep getting these feelings directing me toward and away from tripping, and that moment I was wondering why I keep receiving trouble while trying to do this. I said to myself, that if I am not meant to do it (as a Dr. Seth-Lloyd theory of mine goes), probability and possibility will physically not allow me to do it. So, using the pocketknife which I will use from now on, I measured out a couple of knife-tipfuls (more than 1, less than 2, after dumping over and reloading what was pot with more than 1 and less than 2 knife-tipfuls).

(I know I need a scale)

This also gave me the strangest feeling I had ever felt, stranger than using a one hitter with less than one knife-tipful. When I closed my eyes, I thought I almost saw an image, no, an icon, an intricately glowing icon of energy and twist and weave and shimmer... I thought I almost saw this emerge, but perhaps I was just expecting it too much. The image I almost saw had a heart or devil-face or elephant-head like symmetry. I've seen something very similar to this, but more vivid, while on a 'strong' dose of shrooms (for me) (so two whole dried mushrooms)

Than I went into feeling so so very very very strange for about 10 or 15 minutes.

Now, onto my greatest experiance yet...

I've noticed, about dmt (and 5-meo-dmt. Not so much about psilocybin), that it feels like holding a radioactive substance, something which is drawing a force upon its immediate surroundings. Something which might be dangerous if I'm around it too often. And something which, when inhaled and held in, feels like a star surrounding me, igniting the world, the space, the very time around me and doing to it what submarine thermonuclear bomb does to the water. Simply lowering my hands to my lap, cradling the massive and intense pipe, felt like being at chernobyl. Felt like dancing on the knife-tip-top of the energy-slope of vomiting, the incredible and intense RIGHT HERE RIGHT NOW DAMMIT of my very own, very last dying, flickering moment of life... Yet even before hit, it holds the intense drama of a detonator button to a bomb in my chest, loaded, armed, and ready to blow.

I set the altar in the room I am using. Its a cold room, essentially a porch. I'm late, about 50 minutes late for the eschaton at 5:12 am on 12/21/2012, finally sitting down after using the bathroom one last time, finally sitting down sometime just after 6 am.

The altar I set is on a box of my stuff, for moving out. There is a book about wisconsin state parks upon the box. There is a handkerchief, black and brightly colored, covering it, with a gift from a once close friend on the center of it (a ceramic buddha that holds incense). I placed burning sage in it, along with a small crystal, and around this are a few more quartz crystals and meaningful rocks and stones. Around this are 4 candles, lit. Before this on the floor is a star map I own, with north, south, east, and west aligned to the winter & summer solstices, and vernal & autumnal solstices. In the center is a jade buddha, and around the outside is 12 pictures of my 'somebody I used to know.' the entire time I was setting up this thing, I felt and almost heard songs in my head of the kind which make me miss my past, and regret the many bone-headed mistakes I've made.

I also was violating a taboo of mine, tripping when I've suffered any kind of head injury, which occurred within the last 24 hours, the day before around late morning. I was about to start explaining to a friend why I was considering to do it, and what things I had to do to prepare, and laid down on the bed- too close to the wall, slamming the left side of my head into the edge of a windowsill. This drove me immediately sitting up, straining to breathe and stay calm and not cry, letting out the pain with my breathing, more tremendously upset that I had fasted for so long and, close to my above test, suffering something that wound prevent me from joining in the 2012 phenomena. This I cried over.

I refused to let this get in the way of my quest to try this though, and tested it for the second time in my life, feeling stranger than I've ever felt before, and not noticing the lump on my head much.

I did notice a stomach turningness, but than as soon as the weed ignited my stomach calmed. The important thing I should have taken away from this experience was that the dmt kicks in faster than the weed does, and is vaporized first. So regardless of whatever calming effect pot has on the trip when it begins, when I'm lifting off I must still withstand the forces of TRUE REALITY erupting into my mind from my senses.

I now understand why it's done in darkness, yet I fear so much just what my mind might present before me. And also, the darkest places in this house are the sketchiest. Though a mouse skeleton *is* an interesting meditational focus, I prefer to not trip in a basement. This very basement area was the setting of the second time I tried dmt.

The first time I tried from the same bag as the second.

The 3rd time I smoked tryptamines, I am *kind* of wondering if it had 5-methoxy in it, or is mostly 5-methoxy, due to a slightly different feeling and effect.

Though whatever it was, I am now certain that endogenous tryptamines play a role in lucid dreaming and out of body experiences. The phenomena of the sound of a rushing, louder and louder and louder ringing, the intense vibrating stir of the world around me and my very body, and the rising sensation of tactile panic, are all in common with the early states of lucid dreaming and OoBEs.

I didn't expect it to hit me so *FAST*.
I didn't expect it to hit me so *FAST*.
I was focusing on what I was told on how to light the pipe, and the two things I read before the trip. I said a couple bible passages from a prayer book my mom kept thrusting upon me, and thumbed a little through an early course-in-miracles book (another cult I'm certain found a road to brief endogenous tryptamines, but more importantly synchronicity-generation through the use of those experiences... Revelations creating miracles, essentially), but the two things which I read and held in my mind were a card given to me by this girl I miss, and a poem I wrote for her. Both were from early on in that relationship, and I felt hard the intense emotions of love and adoration, of passion and joy and wonder and anticipation, young love in full flower... Also feeling the harsh and cold emptiness from its long and permanent absence. I couldnt cry then, I was too anxious about the experience to come, but now that its over, I do...

I didnt expect the drug to hit me so fast though- I was focusing on what my friend told me about how to light it, and also what terence mckenna and an internet diagram also enlightened me to, and also was focusing on the words I just read, when I heard the ringing freight train. The roaring arrival building at an immeasurable speed, over a length of time that made me wonder at the distance it must have to come from, and the size it must be to make sound over that long distance... And this is before this clear pipe even began to turn cloudy! The weed was not lit for something like 2/3rds of that inhalation, and I got *just barely* enough pot in me to keep from throwing up (from this I've learned I will need to fast for 12 hours before dmt again, and get a longer nap in between- but also that I will definitely need to be a little nausea-numbed before doing dmt again. The universe spoke to me to smoke at 4:20 am, to be ready for 5:11. I should have listened.)

I was lowering the pipe when the ringing became so complete I couldnt take reality, and had to close my eyes. If the ringing came from outside I'd have found my body, willed my hands to set the pipe DOWN and and clasp my hands over my ears, or plug my fingers in the audio canals, it was so deafening. When my eyes were open, the world possessed, though still dark and exactly as left, a burning, brilliant, blinding intensity, such an intensity that it was as if my soul had gotten sick of seeing through this dull, physical 'clear' yet almost cataract-like membrane over the pupils, dilated them, and slipped outside the eyes. It was as if my body was made of light, but everything around me was also made of light, and to see objects, more light was emitted from these objects of fiery light, which, when colliding with the light which made up my eyes, physically ripped my visual sensory apparatus apart, while being rebuilt at the same speed (-of light, of course).

This all played out against inky black voids and rich seas of color, motion being almost blurred, or echoed like a moving hand against a strobe light, but the strangest thing about dmt and 5-methoxy is that everything is REAL. Everything is enormously, incredibly, but completely believably real. I saw no hallucinations, yet I... 'played' with my mental visual stage, I would say played but there was nothing playful or non-serious about it. But that play happened minutes later, as I launch and plateau, and my eyes are open and feeling and hearing this ring, nothing I see is not 'actually there.' I see the altar, I see the star map and pictures and other important items, I see the candles, I see everything around me, but its all to me completely foreign and alien. It was like I was an infant opening my eyes for the first time, looking around at a world devoid of understandable meaning, yet sensually filled with meaning that I just know is in there.

But its so intense to see. Lowering my hands is like I'm watching it on an IMAX movie screen as big as the state, in a seat as high up as a mountain (the kind where the air begins to get thinner and the colors begin to brighten), that's poised on only a very very very tall needle. And that needle is embedded in my spiritual foundation! So as christ might have paraphrased, is it sand or is it stone, my good chum?

EVERYTHING had the intense, serious, deadly important and intricately meaningful aura of the time of one's death. The feeling that everything in my life has lead up to this moment.

I had the certain notion, that many psychonauts often get, which is said to be 'annoying' by those who either encounter it so often to get jaded about it, and those who have never truly BELIEVED it. That notion was that I was dying. I was certain that I was about to end up as some statistic in a study and a story in a newpaper, 'YOUNG HIPPIE STONED SELF TO DEATH,' and the evidence my ego presented to my higher mind was that, the ringing was getting so loud that, if its a blood pressure thing my eardrums must pop soon, and I will begin bleeding from my ears. I gently was able to sidestep the negative thought-trees associated with blood, and the image would have been something like clutching my head in pain with a broken pipe, spilled magic herbs, and my glowing life dripping from my ears.

Every thought on dmt is a film in a flash.

The other evidence, besides the 'sight-like-a-ghost', that my ego presented was this strange, unexplainable but certain sensation that time was absolutely different. The roaring gives the impression like it must have been flashing by too fast for me, but the sensation at the time was that time had stopped. Not just slowed to a crawl, but absolutely stopped dead. There was this feeling like to move was taboo. Like everything has stopped and I must stop with it, and if I move I might just be breaking the universe, or causality, or what is supposed to happen.

Looking down I saw the pipe in my hand.

One of the strangest things about pot and psychedelics, is that the stoned state feels more and more like a movie (if one is the sort of person who really gets into movies). I get lost in this dramatic, fun, intense story of my life. You know that predictableness that movies often have? My life takes on this quality, which I think is because of something like thoughts echoing in my head.

Sorry that I'm jumping around here *so* *damn* *much*

It feels (and seems from research) like being stoned is like having your thoughts echo, and echo louder and faster and deeper until your entire mind is resonating light-thought.

This echo exists in lucid dreams and nightmares.

But I believe this echo also is responsible for the sensation of deja-vu (though dreaming or actually having been in those circumstances may or may not be also responsible, be perceived or actual, or if that is the case, is causal, caused by, or non-sequiter). Smokable tryptamines produce the same, though more intensified feeling, of simply nervous-system-shattering deja-vu. So I think ordinary deja-vu, with its fleeting duration and forgettable quality, must also be caused by tryptamines, but tryptamines of an endogenous creation.

I close my eyes again, almost certain I am about to die, and finally, FINALLY exhale the vapor I inhaled. I feel like it is about to be my last breath, as I suck in incredible oxygen, and close my eyes.

I see what must be the beginning visions, this rising, symmetrical reddish-orange *thing* rising yellow & green out of blue-violet-blackness. It is intricately twisted and woven, like something so complicated to have inspired the celtic imagery, but which was too untraceable, incredible, and impossible to replicate. Something which the celts, tibetans, muslims, and hippies hoped to replicate, echoed in replication, perhaps showing some brief glimpse of the image, but never arriving close to this thing that was only barely showing itself to me. I could only barely see it, with the strain of something in the patterns on the backs of my eyelids. I realized, wait a second, maybe I'm not dying- this thought immediately was washed away however by the overwhelming intense drama of life as I opened my eyes and saw the world for the first time. It felt so real that I felt it was death I was experiencing. I closed my eyes and felt tremendous, tremendous, weighty, deep regret. I regretted deeply being still a virgin, and telling who I loved that I wanted to wait. I wanted to claw my way back into this life so that I could try again. I wanted to get alive and over the trip so that I could even get the chance to talk to that person again. I wanted to live through it to tell my family that I loved them one more time.

Than I remembered what I would say, if I was more dramatic, saved me. Saved my sanity for certain, if not my life. What I had read in this one book called mind & meditation, or meditation and the mind, something about patanjali's 8-limbed yoga. He said that in the deepest meditation, and the highest state of samadhi (that is, union with the universal consciousness), the only beings that can access it are the highest yogis, and they are dangerous because some will never come back at all- anyone who *does* ever return from that union comes back as a being of complete compassion.

At first I focused on my love for my family and my love for this girl I've been sad over, but it feels like at the time I must have been hanging on to too much. I wanted to create a sort of synchronicity or miracle that would bring me and that girl back together, but it became clear that this is not what I should do. I realized later on how luck must flee from its seekers. I also realized what I was hanging onto was love and my position in the universe, my ego. Eventually I let ego go, and decided to chant only 'love...love...love...love' in my head. Not because I was feeling it and had to express it, but because by expressing it I invoked the pure memory and deep feeling which created the kind of soul capable of surviving the trip back.

I opened my eyes and everything had the most intense light of reality about it. Seeing the pipe below in my hands, which I at last set on the ground at my side, still with something like 2 hits left in it. I take the felt-covered sunglasses off my forehead, realizing I never put them on. I blow out the candles and I begin to look around me. There are plows outside roaring by like enormous monsters of machinery. There were pictures of good times on the floor which I couldnt bear to remember at that time. There were candles burning straight up, with not a flicker or a flinch of their tongues of fire, as if my vision was an overexposed and blurred film. Everything I looked at appeared this way, as if their very visual presence painfully assualted my eyes, until the candles were blown out. The rug than took on a patterned quality which wove in and out, though when my gaze stopped at a certain point, a tibetan-celtic knot formed, central appearing, and weaving with the living quality of the form-constant hallucination. I realized, or now realize, that the form constant is either a physical artifact of the retinal & optic nerves, a psychic artifact of the way the mind assembled the visual information in its center field, or something in between- (and I think a way to test this is to look for the location of that phenomena, whether its in the center of vision always, or if it appears when the two scomata-blind-spots cross in the center).

I looked to the side, and saw something that burned too bright to look at - the white wall behind me, and to the side of me. It glowed cold and bright. Than I felt the cold of the place I was in, palpable even though I dressed warmly to be in this chilly room. I began to feel a bit of panic again and looked to see if I could call caroline, but I thought better of it and tried to stay calm, thinking it was just about to come down anyway... And I stayed with it, noting my surroundings, sort of saying a silent prayer to come back, begging that I may be given the chance to make it in life, and doing all I could to mentally get as much ground between myself and Lord Death as possible.

Before this trip I begged the blessings of Lady Mary, a deity both present in unpollinated female cannabis plants and the virgin mary iconography. Lord Death is how I always have referred to DMT and 5-MeO-DMT. (I do know these are different molecules, with different effects and greatly different potency. I'm still mentally sorting out my psychedelic mandala, but it appears to me so far that dmt will mimic 5-meo-dmt if one raises the dose- shattering the visual stage and propelling one to meeting the big bang or having an OoBE. One day these molecules will be legal. One day I will test the differences between these two more carefully. Until than, while most plants are carefully named, the two endogenous tryptamines will both be thought to be part of the dying experience, and thus are so named as one being).

I opened my eyes, realizing I was coming down. I looked in almost terror at the pipe. Perhaps not terror so much as wonder. Its just there are so few emotions that intense. It is hard to tell which it is, but perhaps wonder, because I know I want to take this ride again. Hell, I almost have to, the pipe is still full... But I wonder with trepidation when I will do so.

The next time I looked at a clock, it said 6:23 am

I had one cup of passionflower tea before this. I wonder if that caused any change in the trip. I bet it almost certainly nauseated me... If I have any maoi next time, I must have weed with it to counteract this. But I also need to experiment to see the rise in blood pressure from an maoi, from pot, and from dmt, and attempt to determine if there is any additive effect, synergetic effect, or overlapping effect.

I sit here now, having consumed a couple bowls of pot and drank a cup and a half of rich hot cocoa. Homemade, yum, a gentle caffeine buzz after nearly a week or 2 of abstaining from it entirely. Caffeine and its relatives allow me to write better (though Dark Lord Theobroma is more of a romantic wingman, than Lady Camellia and Lord Coffea, who act like a hot secretary and a neurosis-inducing boss respectively). Lady Mary is always a gentle protector, though to protect one's self too much is to prevent one's self's growth. Though the Virgin Mary did keep me from ejecting the tea from my stomach.

Lord Death is, so far, always the strangest deity I have ever met. A powerful impending and inexorably noticable presence that slaps you in the face so hard your soul crawls back into your brain, away from the eyes, into comforting memories, while you cry and hope this isnt the only time you ever meet HIM, yet feel terror that, to live through HIM would mean you will only *have* to meet HIM one more time! Lord Death stops time or vacuums the air from the room; or grabs you by the throat and tells you 'pay attention, pay attention to your breathing if you want to get back alive', and will tell you this hint calmly if *YOU* but can calm down. Lord Death comes on you with the knife or the scythe at your throat or in your heart, telling you to pay careful attention to these next couple minutes, as they could be your very last. Lord Death shows up unwelcome to many suicides, and is able to, in some rare and lucky cases, scare the unfortunate soul back into life for another chance. In these cases, as many recovering cancer patients will tell you, Lord Death reveals his kindest virtue, which is to reveal the precious jewel that is the here and now, the present moment, your life, the oxygen in the air, and light entering your eyes, and the shitty job you have to go to tomorrow. Lord Death reveals to value that is inherent in every experience, even if it is the most unpleasant thing you could think of- even if your consciousness clings to your ego with pure attention, as it shreds in the psychedelic death hurricane. Lord death teaches you that you can treasure every experience, good and bad, as experiences you can sit back from and watch, even while in tremendous physical, emotional, mental, or spiritual pain. There is nothing beyond the ability to let go of it all, and fall back into a perhaps eternal existance as light, life, energy, wisdom, understanding, peace, and most importantly LOVE.

Also, I've learned I need to keep in mind even more the two motto's on my box of medicines:

BE PREPARED.

And

DON'T PANIC.

Exp Year: 2012ExpID: 98670
Gender: Male 
Age at time of experience: 25
Published: Oct 4, 2017Views: 1,711
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DMT (18) : Alone (16), Difficult Experiences (5), Combinations (3), General (1)

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