In in my last post, I spent a lot of time crying about some chick that I never should have been that attached to in the first place. The warning signs were there from the start but I missed them. I was blinded by an intense sexual desire and my own little "feefee's." I began to love a woman who was never really available beyond our smoking sessions, phone calls, and sexual encounters. I do miss her, strangely. I can't deny that I still find myself extremely attracted to the sexual compatibility and openness we shared either but I am moving on more or less. Getting laid elsewhere the other day helped a little. At the very least, it was good for my self-esteem.
Anyway, the point is that all that sappy shit consumed my mind and I completely ignored a bunch of other recent crazy stuff in my life.
After years of abstinence, I took mushrooms again. I am in my mid thirty's and I have not had any significant psychedelic experiences since my early twenty's. I was always vague about timing in my writing but my psychedelic posts cover events from a pretty distant past. However, this recent experience is still fresh in my mind, it is my first trip as a "real" adult, and I did notice that things had changed in the psychedelic realm.
I got pretty fucked up to say the least but there was more than mushroom in the mix. I love edibles and I ate a big piece of way too strong weed fudge about three hours before took two and a half grams of some dried mushrooms. I smoked hash oil as they were coming on and, sometime after I peaked, I ate a medicated sugar cookie. Its hard to say how munch of what I had going on was from the psychedelics and how much was cannabis but I suppose it doesn't really matter.
The familiar elements of a trip were there, of course. It started with a physical heaviness in my body and a feeling of excitement. That heaviness became a "floatyness" that moved into my head. I felt like I came home again. It was a relatively light dose (for me, from what I remembered) so the visuals were mild. I noticed the different rooms in my home had different personalities and I felt like I was walking into another world when I moved between them.
As a "real adult" the trip was strangely serious, strangely focused, strangely dark at times, and strangely calm. I tripped alone. Some would say that this is a mistake. I am of two minds on the subject but I feel like I am strong willed enough to go digging around in my mind solo so I strapped in and went into that deep inner space on my own. It is possible that this contributed to the weirdness of the trip.
I did not seem to achieve the giddiness that used to accompany most of my previous experiences. I felt no compulsion laugh at everything I encountered. I did not feel that psychedelic joy that I remembered. It was, instead, replaced by a calm centeredness. I sat alone on my couch, letting YouTube autoplay some weird "world music" or something until it went off the rails, and I felt like I was the most relaxed and that I could ever remember being.
It was serious. I thought about painful subjects. Deaths and losses, uncertainty and fears, desires and limitations all filled my mind but they did not send me on a bad trip. Rather, I sat and calmly reflected.
It grew dark at times. The music changed. It was in another language that I did not recognize but it sounded like combat to me. It was something that drew images of armed worriers engaged in mortal struggles with one another to my imagination. I reflected on how some ancient peoples were said to have consumed mushrooms to enhance their abilities in battle and how some soldiers had taken acid during combat in Vietnam. In that moment, I understood how that could be. I felt as though my centeredness would be an asset in such a situation. I Imagined what it would be like if the need to strike an attacker down in that state of mind arose. Would it be harder to take a life or would the heightened focus and separation from the ego rid one of fear and allow them to approach the grim task of fighting an opponent to the death with a colder and more calculated sense of purpose? The latter seemed more correct to me.
The weed cookie eventually took over and I crawled into bed and fell asleep, still mildly tripping. I awoke to a new day and began reflecting on the trip. I still don't know what it means or if it means anything but I need some time to process it.
All the images in this post are are taken from the free image website unsplash.com.