"Psilocybin shows you everything you know is wrong. The world is not a single, one-dimensional thing, but some kind of interdimensional nexus… What the voice in the psychedelic experience wants to reveal is the syntactical nature of reality. That the real secret of magic, is that the world is made of words, and that if you know the words that the world is made of, you make of it whatever you wish!”
-Terence McKenna
This article is part three of my heroic dose experience with psilocybin mushrooms. A few years back I ingested around 7 grams of the mushroom. My experience was profound and spiritual in nature and I believe it was the most important experience of my life to date.
For part one and two of the article please see the links below.
Inside the Belly of the Worm: A Heroic Dose Part I
Saying Goodbye: A Heroic Dose Part II
Part III: Where is My Mind?
It was a few hours into my trip – I think. Time is extremely hard to track when on psilocybin so I can only guess at how long it had been since I first ate the mushrooms.
I was in a state of singularity. My mind couldn’t categorize or differentiate between objects. Everything was one. The feeling created a sense of peace within me but it also created a lot of confusion. Everything was connected and nothing existed outside of me. I couldn’t distinguish myself from others and at one point I even asked a friend if we were the same person.
He assured me that we weren’t. Nothing made sense in my mind anymore.
I could feel my ego slipping away and along with it, my internal dialogue. What many people do not realize is that it is our internal dialogue which allows us to think, rationalize and understand our reality. Without our internal dialogue, words and concepts have no meaning.
If you would like to see this for yourself, try explaining the concept of a mother, or money, or ownership without words. It’s just not possible. There is only blankness.
In this moment I was being given a profound gift. A glimpse at an untainted and unfiltered reality. Without the mind to categorize and separate each individual object the individual perceives their reality as a non-separated oneness.
In this moment I was at one with the universe.
However, my mind fought the experience and tried to hold onto what it knew and what made it feel safe. It wanted the world to make sense and fought desperately to hold on to its precious words - its language.
Though I was completely lucid and coherent I became very confused. I tried to think, but my mind was completely blank. Though I could talk out loud to others, I couldn’t talk to myself in my head and because of that, I couldn’t explain simple concepts to myself. The words inside my head just didn’t exist.
I couldn’t tell the difference between life and death. I didn’t know what a sister or a mother was. I couldn’t even reason to myself why different drinks in the glasses on the table were different colors. I asked my friends to explain these simple terms to me until they eventually became frustrated. I was like a child continuously and incessantly asking why or what?
Why are the drinks different colors?
What does it mean to die?
What is a sister?
Why do we have to eat food?
Images popped into my head and I immediately wanted to know their meaning.
Overwhelmed by the questions raining down on them, my friends began to distance themselves from me. I could see it coming. I could sense a change in their energy. I was too much for them, which I can understand. They were afraid for me and annoyed.
But I became frustrated as well. I felt lost and confused. I knew that it was the mushrooms that weren’t allowing me to think but I felt scared that the confusion would never wear off.
Agitated, I began banging my hand on the counter saying
”I don’t understand”
I asked if I would ever understand things again and was nervous and scared that I had done irreparable damage to myself. I was torn between wanting to isolate myself and hide from others and wanting to be accepted by the group.
I ultimately became afraid to speak.
It’s a strange thing to be fully lucid and aware of your surroundings, to see the world in a vivid clarity with your full memory intact, yet not be able to think or explain simple concepts. It was almost paradoxical. My friends were convinced that I was “Gone,” lost in an abyss of unconscious incoherence. Even to this day I haven’t been able to convince them that in that moment I was completely aware of everything that was going on.
Slowly, the mushrooms wore off and things returned to normal. I could feel it happening. Slowly things began to make sense again until finally I was completely “sober.”
Conclusion
The experience has certainly changed my outlook on life and reality. I now realize how much we rely on words in order to understand ourselves and the world around us. Words, ultimately shape our reality and without them a lot of what we know to be true, crumbles away.
Words categorize the world around us and separate us from a unified oneness. However, without words there is no separation and the individual realizes that they exist as a part of the mysterious whole. This calls into question the very nature of reality and suggests that much of our understanding of the world is based on the words we use to describe it.
