looking at a plate of five grams of mushrooms is kind of like just staring down the barrel of a psychedelic shotgun you can't believe what you're about to do you know your mind is about to be blown in ways that you can't possibly even comprehend and although this is a story about my first time doing a heroic dose of mushrooms believe me I was approaching with the proper reverence I was approaching this like a sacred object like nuclear material like the Ark of the Covenant and let me tell you I was right to do so
because to this day this was one of the most profound ego obliterating brain melting occasions of my life but before we get into exactly what I mean by that I think it's important to review how did I find myself here how did I get here why perform the psychic high dive into a pile of ego shattering rocks uh yeah I know that sounds extreme but it was it was kind of a perfect storm of where I was in my life and that I had the ability to do so in that I had these fun guys
in my possession allegedly this whole video is allegedly this was not my first trip I want to make that very clear this was not my first trip and I had had a couple of I guess positive experiences with this batch in general so it made logistical sense I guess I'll call it so like I just alluded to I had had a couple of significant well really several probably significant psychedelic experiences by this point and I felt like it made sense to go a little bit deeper I felt like it made sense to finally see what
the Terence McKenna's and the Alex Grays of the world were talking about when they would wax poetic about these high-dose experiences so all of that to say I did not approach this flippantly I did not do this on on my first try please don't do that also I think it's important to talk a little bit about set and setting and starting with set meaning where I was at mentally what was going on in my life at that time if I didn't already mention it this was several years ago five or six years ago and this
was a very liminal time for me so I felt like it was also a really good time to sort of go through this initiation to explore what I was doing with my life through the lens of an explosive psychedelic experience so that liminality looked like I was just starting a new job I was quitting one creative project I was actually ending a band and uh my first go at a podcast and I was thinking about starting the show that I've been doing up to this point third eye drops and there's always just for me been
this backdrop of curiosity about life's big questions about what's going on with Consciousness what's going on what The Human Condition in general what's going on behind the veil of our everyday experience of consensus reality and what can those uh deceptively humble looking little fun guy tell me about those questions so that's my mindset as far as my setting so important all of the cliche stuff you hear about set in setting really is so important for me I'm in my apartment I'm with my girlfriend and a very good friend plenty of blankies a nice ambient playlist
queued up lights are dimmed distractions are at a minimum my beautiful little cats were in attendance and they wound up being really soothing little presents they were kind of like the mascots of the trip or something I would say so anyway back to the task of ingesting the pile of dry fungal matter I think in this occasion I did it with peanut butter to help it go down a little better and I'm not really sure if that helps but anyway that's what I did so I chomped down the dry nasties and then comes the 40
to 60 Minutes of inevitably awkward waiting and in this case it was more than awkward because I knew the magnitude of what was coming was so much bigger I knew there was an absolute psychic tsunami on its way so it felt more like a weight to like March to the Gallows or something but I was trying to calm myself I was trying to rid myself of any expectations and just be calm and present and try to minimize the uh oh am I feeling something are you guys feeling something I think I might be feeling something
but of course when it did kick in there was no wondering as usual it began with a sort of warm tingling sensation that's usually what it does for me kind of in the jaw area for whatever reason followed by a little bit of giddiness [Laughter] foreign and then I typically get this warpy nauseous kind of feeling kind of like I'm dropping into this new dimension or something then there's that sort of breakthrough moment of adjusting of whoa and then in this case that did not end the woe just kept [ __ ] wowing and I
guess unsurprisingly because this tends to be the case with me and psilocybin uh this trip started very verbal but there was a specific strange occurrence in this one where I became obsessed with slogans I thought slogans or these like stupid cliche marketing tactics were [ __ ] hilarious for some reason I was saying things like new and improved New Look same Great Taste and stuff like that and I thought it was the funniest thing ever I thought it was so Preposterous and stupid and cliche and I just couldn't let go of it from there I
started realizing a little bit that I was beginning to experience what I now call The Melting of the veils specifically the divisions between my senses for instance I started to experience synesthesia it's when you start to see visuals along with sound you see color along with sound so in this ambient music we were listening to a chord might hit and to me that chord would have an appearance it would look like a sweep of color maybe you know a chord would hit and I would see a sweep of green or a sweep of yellow really
quite beautiful actually and really quite thought provoking because I often have the thought with capacities like this that you get for a little while in these experiences that perhaps they're not hallucinations because it does feel like you're gaining something like you're gaining a sensory perception more than you're hallucinating more than you're imagining something and I should say this is not for me I at least unique to the magnitude of dose the synesthesia is something that I tend to experience on moderate Doses and above in general what happened next however was not something that I had
experienced before was not something I don't think I've experienced in exactly the same way since the deeper level of this Veil melting phenomenon was I started to babble uncontrollably because I could not distinguish between the voice in my mind the things that I was thinking and the things I was saying so I just started this like stream of Consciousness babbling straight up glossolalia which is just noises it's just noises and babbling and you're not even aware of the fact that you're doing it so I'll admit from the outside looking in from here on out it
looked like pure Madness it looked like I was having some kind of psychotic break probably but this Veil melting phenomenon still had not reached his climax because not only could I not tell the difference between what I was thinking and saying I could not distinguish between feelings I was so overwhelmed in general by the experience that I was just melting down one minute I would be absolutely inconsolably devastated by the suffering of the World by our fleetingly short lives and the fact that I was gonna lose everybody that I loved someday and when I say
devastated I just mean inconsolable hyperventilating blabbering snotty disaster and I would go from that absolute Tartarus pit of despair to the most gut-busting Cosmic guffaw like I get it I get it on a meta level I get the cosmic joke and it is transcendently hilarious uh and I'm sure I went between those two polls multiple times it was a weird challenging roller coaster to be on it really just felt like there were elves playing with all the knobs and levers in my body and brain at that point or something and I don't intend for this
next part to sound arrogant but I want to be honest I want to tell you what I experienced and this I get it feeling really did happen this I get it in a meta sense I feel dare I say enlightened period of the trip did happen it was fleeting of course and I know that I can't language it effectively but I guess I would say all of that General malaise and doubt that I carry with me that I think is very normal that we all experience in this moment was gone I could not be stumped
everything made perfect sense to me or I thought it made perfect sense to me uh for a time and by the way this actually was not unique to me because I specifically recall checking on my friend at one point looking over at him he's sitting on the ground he's kind of got his his knees holding his knees he looks up and says I know everything his face is just bursting with vibrating fractal Flower of Life tendrils so yeah that happened and up to this point I guess I've really been talking about what's going on in
the outside world what would be happening if you saw me but what's equally interesting potentially more interesting honestly is what was going on in my mind and my mind's eye and the sort of visions and visuals I was experiencing but I also think this is probably the most challenging part to talk about I am not going to come anywhere near doing this justice so with that here's my best attempt I would say the default kind of visionary aesthetic in my mind's eye and also with my naked eye at this level of dose is that flower
of life undulating morphing fractal pattern I had experienced that being in my mind's eye and mildly out in the world with my vision before but never to this magnitude I mean it was just everywhere it was in my entire field of vision and I would see it just radiating off of people and objects it's almost like you're seeing the threads of the Matrix or something I remember my cat bopping in to the area who sadly is no longer with us but he just looked so vibrant and bursting with this beautiful fractal energy and I remember
all of us just being so fascinated by him loving on him so much and of course nothing looks static everything always looks like it's moving it's breathing it's pulsating with some kind of vital quintessence energy so all of that is somewhat typical not to this extreme like I said so this is just turned up to the maximum that I had ever experienced but then from there I encountered some of the most profoundly weird unbelievable stuff that I've ever come Acro cross to this day like for instance somehow you go from this portal of fractals to
a very very clear signal a very clear visual sense that you're being encountered by like cartoon Jester entities and when I say that it's almost like straight up Cartoon Network like you can't believe how cartoony it is you can't believe that it's really presenting itself to you in this way and then these faces would morph and I don't mean it to sound like it was like a fully embodied entity dancing around it really was like a face and then the face would almost just like become some sort of like three-dimensional slot machine and just turn
into emojis and turn into esoteric symbols I had never seen and just turn into different fonts and it really does make you wonder like is this where language came came from in the first place is this like the realm of psyche where language and symbols live I don't know I do think it's possible that we're dipping into layers of the collective unconscious or something where archetypes live but I'll leave it at that and although this presence was very Clowny it's not exactly funny it feels mischievous it feels a little bit scary it feels like it
wants to toy with you and mess with you like sometimes it wants to tell you the joke sometimes it wants you to be the butt of the joke like when I was talking about being inconsolably devastated earlier it kind of feels like this entity this energy would find that entertaining but of course it's not all mischievous and scary there's this deep deep energy of wisdom of beauty of being shown unspeakably beautiful sacred geometry that just keeps getting more beautiful and keeps getting more beautiful and you're just overcome with gratitude and you're overcome with feelings of
love feelings of joy in disbelief that you get to exist in general it's hard to remember how synchronous this stuff was because again this this experience was so extreme that although I'm telling it like it was linear it absolutely was not linear or maybe it was linear in the same way a roller coaster is linear or something like that as I was going to bed after recording this video it reoccurred to me that I completely forgot to mention this I had an experience of what I would call something thing like the tree of life or
the world tree basically this channel of fractal flowing energy this plant-like structure that I viscerally felt like a part of that I just knew I was a part of and I saw experienced myself as a tiny little Branch or a tiny little fruit off of the collective branch that was my family like I felt myself connected to my family in a way that I never have before and really I felt like I was connected to all of humanity in all of life in a way that I've never felt before you know it really occurred to
me that we all come out of this dirt we all came out of the ground that is this planet and we've struggled evolved metamorphosized our way up to this level of Consciousness through some crazy combination of Grace and luck and Consciousness and although I somehow forgot to mention it the first time around it's definitely something that has stuck with me to this day it has definitely changed the way that I view my relationship to my family and to me it really made it clear where all of these myths about a world tree about a tree
of life come from I think this is a Visionary experience that's been available to humans to our ancestors throughout the ages transcending cultures so with that let's talk about messages and takeaways because I always do leave these experiences feeling like I got some kind of download transmission Epiphany I'm not sure what the right word to call it is and I do want to preempt this by saying that it's it's difficult to say how these things really come through it's just sort of like you have a flash of oh and you don't just think it you
feel it with your entire body and your mind so on the other side of that psychical roller coaster of that psychedelic Skydive was just this overwhelming sense of gratitude for being on Solid Ground for being healthy and stable and having people that love me and how miraculous it is to find yourself in a place in this fleeting fragile life where you get to have a good time where you get to have warmth and you get to laugh and you get to feed yourself the miracle of that comes to the Forefront of your reality and it's
a beautiful beautiful feeling another one that came through really clear and this is a common one for me is that I put way too much pressure on myself I'm way too anxious I worry way too much about what other people think about achieving about all of the [ __ ] that we concern ourselves with on a daily basis and just this consoling kind of energy like you're doing fine you put way too much pressure on yourself don't worry about it just go toward the things in life you want to go toward and who cares what
other people think follow your Joseph cambellian Bliss life is too short to stress the small stuff and that sounds cliche as [ __ ] but when you're feeling it so insistently you'll find that it's cliche for a reason and the last one is a bit more mystical because it did have a very Earth Spirit sense to it as if this was like a transmission from Gaia as woo and incredibly cheesy as that sounds um and this is something you'll hear a lot from other people and I have definitely experienced on multiple trips so this transmission
for lack of a better word is partially environmental and that it kind of feels a little bit like a cry for help from the Earth but it's also kind of stern kind of a reminder what we're put here to do in a medicines as human beings and the sense that it left me with is look you have evolved to have these special capacities these incredible brains the ability to invent for a specific reason and that specific reason is to spread life throughout the cosmos I know this sounds like sci-fi Astro mystical or something but that's
what it honestly felt like like the spirit of Earth or whatever has granted human beings creative spirit so that we can invent our way off the planet and proliferate life and Consciousness and light and warmth into this otherwise Barren solar system so that Earth is not this single lonely flower in a cosmic Wasteland further thoughts on what I think might be going on in these spaces philosophically how I make sense of these experiences what I suspect might be going on so first I'll say I really do like the word psychedelic because if you break it
down to its linguistic Roots they're the Greek words for mind and soul which is psyche and delios which means like manifesting so it's something like mind manifesting and I suspect that is what's going on when you enter these states that not only are you manifesting your own mind in Greater detail I kind of alluded to this before when I mentioned the collective unconscious I think we are gaining the ability to perceive parts of the collective unconscious mind that we don't normally have access to in regular consensus reality and maybe for a little bit of a
more clear explanation of what I'm trying to say here let's look at an image of the great mythopoetic psychiatrist Carl Young's map of the psyche you'll see that it's really all of these entities coming together to form the collective capital S self and that the ego is just one tiny little part of that geometry so in other words our entire Waking Life is Just one little part of that geometry and I think in these Visionary States we're going deeper into these structures we're going deeper into this capital S self and within that capital S self
lies everything things that seem to be gods that seem to be these elf-like jestery beings maybe even some of these alien-like entities that other people experience and when I'm saying this I guess you could take it as me saying it's all in your head but I actually think of it in an inside out way I think our head is all in it I think this realm of psyche really is almost everything it's almost sort of a Divine mind or something and I think it's likely that we are connected to that rather than just containing all
of that within the confines of our brain that's my intuition at least that's what harmonizes with my own experience of course I could be wrong it could all be reducible to neurochemistry and neurotransmitters and pharmacology but for whatever it's worth my intuition my experience is that it's much much more than that and with that my friends I hope I did as little violence to the great mystery as possible the devastating beautiful Grand mysterium tremendum that I got psychically Shipwrecked in for a few hours be safe out there in your Explorations Boop that like and sub
for me check out the podcast I love you all and we'll see you in the next one
