I wrote about how psychedelics have a way of turning unsuspecting recreational users into "accidental philosophers" the other day and I wanted to follow up on that idea with a little personal story. In that post, I said that my teenage friends and I fell into that "accidental philosopher" category because we stumbled upon the real and lasting benefits of using these substances for personal growth and the expanding of consciousness while we were looking to have a good time. Getting to the point, I thought it might be fun to write about how that change started to happen in me and about the unexpectedly powerful trip that caused it to take place.
I was fifteen and I had only eaten mushrooms once before. That first experience, looking back on it, was very weak but I didn't know that then. This time, I planned to up my dose a bit (to three grams) expecting to get a slightly stronger but similar trip. As it turns out, I did not yet understand what a trip was but I was about to find out.
I got a hold of the mushrooms and a friend of mine purchased an equal amount for himself. The same mushroom man from the last story actually did his part in a timely manner and he even decided to hang out and smoke with us, while we made our mushroom tea.
The process is simple. You take about 1/3 of cup of water per gram (you can add a little more if you need to) and simmer the mushrooms on low until you have a slightly brown broth (often, with an interesting, rainbow, oil slick effect floating on top). Then, you divide everyone's small amount of tea into large glasses and fill them the rest of the way up with grape juice, not grape drink (unless you like mushroom flavored Kool-Aid, that is). Finally, you chug the stuff down and enjoy your evening.
We did all that and smoked a peach flavored blunt of terrible weed while we waited for the fun to start. The first time I had done mushrooms, it was pretty mild and I think that they might have been particularly weak. Anyway, I was expecting to get a little giddy and see some slight tracers because that is what happened the first time. I was, much to my delight and concern, very wrong.
I started noticing the effects of the mushroom tea (which comes on much faster than effects of eating the mushrooms themselves) about twenty minutes into the film "Dogma" which was playing on HBO or Cenemax, while we were waiting to start feeling our "brew." The colors on the old tube t.v. began melting into each other and then springing back into their original positions. "I am tripping so hard" I thought but I had no idea what was ahead of me.
The trip started getting more intense and these were just the first effects. I closed my eyes and saw patterns that looked like the things one sees on silk rugs but they were made of animate neon light. This is what I had hoped a trip would be, when I imagined tripping but the peak was still some distance away.
The phone rang and pulled me back into reality for a moment. I don't know how long it had been but the Kevin Smith movie was somewhere in the middle (though, I was beyond the point of being able to follow it). It happened to be my friend's mom who was on the phone. She was "cool," as they say, so him being on mushrooms wasn't a problem but she needed him to come home unexpectedly and was on her way to pick him up. He left right around the the time that things really started kicked off for me.
The movie was still going even though it felt like it had been days since we started watching it. It was at a scene featuring George Carlin arguing with the film's protagonists. The image and the entire room, for that matter, were incredibly distorted. The edges of the television were waving in and out. The walls were breathing. Everything looked cartoonish or like it had been painted and outlined. George Carlin's head had swollen to several times its normal size but his chin seemed to shrink and it wiggled when he spoke in words that I failed to understand.
This was much more than I had bargained for and I was all alone. Solo trips can be fine, of course, but they are not recommended for a "noob" and that's exactly what I was. I, luckily, was fine for the moment and the mushrooms were being kind to me, but I had no idea how deep things were going to go and how long I was going to be like this. That caused a brief moment of panic. I thought about fighting against the experience but my mind was already a little too far gone for that and my ego had begun to dissolve so it was not an option. Fear or no fear, I had to submit to the power of the drug and let whatever was going to happen play out without resistance. This really was the beginning of my accidental philosophy. In that moment, I understood that I did not control things and that I did not understand things in the way that I thought that I did. It was the genesis of a drive to think more deeply and understand reality more thoroughly and it was accidentally born out of "recreational" psychedelic use.
Things were intense and I was still a little nervous, so I decided to do what always made me feel better. That is to say, I smoked some weed. I loaded up a bowl in my trusty bong and took a few hits. It did make me feel better but it threw some gas on the fire too. When I set it down, I noticed that the walls were breathing very rapidly and deeply. The whole room seemed to shrink and expand, while the shadows danced and formed shapes. One of them, which was cast by a small ceramic statue of a coyote, kind of looked like Godzilla in silhouette and seemed to walk in place while the coyote itself stretched its bandanna wearing neck and bobbed its head.
That was a lot to take in and the walls were making me woozy, so I decided to see what was going on behind my eyelids. I got lost in another world for what seemed like quite some time. I probably only spent half an hour, in real time, with my eyes closed but it could have days or weeks from my perspective because time had stopped meaning anything to me. Reflecting on this time distortion taught me another lesson that contributed to my "accidental philosopher" status. I learned that our perception shapes our reality. In one state of mind, a minute feels like a minute but in another it can seem like a a year. I would later go on to joke that if one trips often enough, he or she can feel like he or she has lived a thousand lifetimes. I pondered this as my consciousness floated in that darkened void.
I saw patterns and scenes shift and take shape before becoming something else. All of them were beautiful and detailed. I was seeing green and red tiles flow into the center of my vision and spin around. Then, they morphed into something that looked like indigenous Central American artwork. There was a scene near the bottom, outlined in neon, that depicted little stylized people, toiling in a field. Above it was a calendar, in that same indigenous style, which, come to think of it, complimented my meditation on our understanding of time and how it relates to our perception of it.
I didn't yet understand that trips can come in waves and when I opened my eyes and saw that the room had settled down, I wrongly thought that I was coming down. I got a drink, went to the bathroom (where I spent a while gazing into the mirror, watching my own face melt), and sat back down to see that "Dogma" had ended and "Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey" had started. I was a little more in touch with what was going on and I watched the movie for a while. I found it to be hilarious (despite having seen it before and it not being as good as the first film). Its message seemed to be very profound too and I was deeply moved their adventure through the afterlife.
My stomach began to feel uneasy around the time that Bill and Ted returned to Earth with Death and their alien friends. I smoked a cigarette and that made things worse, which caused me to run off to the restroom, thinking that I was going to be sick. I heaved but nothing came out. I thought it might be a good idea to go and lie down though. I went to my room, started playing whichever CD that happened to be in the player (It turned out to be "Wish You Were Here" by Pink Floyd), turned off the light, and crawled into bed.
This is where things really got weird for me. The peak was definitely over but the trip was still going strong. I closed my eyes, focused on the music, and started losing touch with reality. I explored the void more freely than before. The nervous edge was gone and I was flowing with the experience now. At one point, I was inside a tunnel with patterns on the walls. An opening appeared which led to an organic tube and I saw what I understood to be a representation of the drug flowing in my veins. Next, I was in space and there were galaxy whizzing by at great speed. That vision faded and I saw what I think represents the thing beyond the universe or beyond reality. There was an orderly three dimensional field of cubs in straight rows and columns going back into infinity. Each cube had its own unique pattern on its walls and each pattern was shifting and changing. I stayed like that, watching the visuals come and go, for hours even after the music ended. I saw other trippy things but the cubes stuck out in my mind (they still do, in fact, and they returned in many later trips but those are other stories). I saw something there. It was some meaning that I never could put my finger on. I have tried to describe it but I only can approximate it with normal words and thoughts. To put it crudely, it let me understand that there is more to reality than what we see on its surface but I can't say what that "something more" is. At any rate, it is an idea that has helped guide me down the path of deep thought and "accidental philosophy" which gives it value, even if it means nothing.
The next day, I asked my friend how his trip had gone. He told me that he had a very mild experience with no real visuals and no profound realizations. I suspect that I, somehow, got some (or most) of his dose along with mine. Maybe the rainbow stuff is where the drug was or maybe it was mostly in the brown water. Either way, I think that I got whichever portion that had the higher concentration. Maybe, I had three grams or maybe I had five, I can't really say. The night was greater than I could have ever hoped though. I was only looking for a good time when I set out but I found something that was far more valuable, even if it was by accident.
Peace.
All the images in this post are sourced from the free image website unsplash.com.