The story I want to share with you today is one of my most formative psychedelic experiences. It was also my very first psychedelic experience – and while I’ve had the opportunity to partake in a handful more over the course of my 20s, this was the one that cracked open my inner mind to perceiving my ego in all of its nakedness.
The experience in the moment was psychologically torturing, very dark, raw, full of hurt, humbling – in short it was terrifying and I would never wish the experience on anybody who is unwilling. There is a big caveat, before the waves of darkness that enveloped me during this trip, I also glimpsed divinity. After this particular trip, the integration of all the insights experienced gave me one of the few concrete goals in my life that I’ve set my eyes on and continue to practice: a conscious reorganization of my mind for the betterment of myself and everyone that I interact with.
I find emotions are best expressed with imagery. I now understand that there are scales to how an emotion can be felt. Depending on the intensity of an emotion, it can be gentle in the way it takes over, like the soft cradling of a calm body of water, or it can devour your mind and rob you blind, like the pain of burning flesh. I feel like a valuable psychedelic trip is one where you download aspects of the esoteric and ineffable – the more willing you are at letting go, the more multidimensional the Great Expanse reveals itself. These are some truths that I have learned after a handful of other attempts with different mind-altering drugs. This particular mushroom trip gave me a push in the direction of peeling back the first few layers of my psyche – a rite of passage on the journey towards letting go.
Perhaps this is a good place to start. I should spend a little bit of time on the concept of letting go, so to contextualize the consequence of meeting your ego face to face. Of course, these are all my own opinions and anecdotal takes on the psychedelic ether, so please take this in with a grain of salt!
Breaking Through and Letting Go
There is this concept of having a breakthrough experience – it’s a popular term used to describe the total disillusionment of our perceived boundaries between mind, body, and the space around us. What occurs after this is an incredibly personal experience that varies for each person. Common themes that come about are visual experiences of ancient patterns, feelings of deep peace and equanimity, euphoria, intense connection with the more subtle aspects of the body, the descension into hell, and/or the ascension into heaven. Of course, these things are all happening on a psychological level, but the perceived experience is very real.
So how exactly does letting go fit into the model of breakthrough experiences? I believe it’s an intertwined relationship of push and pull. The psychedelic experience is the force of push, wherein the experience would like to reveal more of itself. The willingness of the self to let go or surrender is the force of pull. In this framework, you are asked to surrender to the psychedelic experience, and so you are faced with two choices: to agree and let the experience sweep you into its tides of mystery, or to withhold (pull away) and experience internal struggle and self inflicted anguish.
While this all sounds very esoteric, there are real life implications here which translates so well into the usage of mushrooms and other psychedelics by trained professionals to treat mental illness. The psychedelic breakthrough thrusts into your immediate existence a psychological experience that many people avoid on a daily basis: to wrestle with our ego, the creator and perpetuator of our false sense of self. The implications of this is to confront our repressed emotions, the traumas tied to these emotions, as well as the false understandings we have of ourselves in order to hide us from our true selves.
To confront our psyche at this level gives us a clear opportunity to observe ourselves and potentially come to terms with and accept our personal pitfalls. Of course, if you are not ready to approach any of this and you find yourself in a breakthrough experience, it can most definitely become a form of psychological torture. I had read a quote somewhere that some schools of Buddhism, recommend having a guru “in order for there to be light to illuminate your path, to keep you from getting lost in the darkness.”
Partaking the Golden Teacher
I’m 21, easily influenced, incredibly naive, a social chameleon, and a total mouth breather. I would say things that I would never follow up on, and the desire to please others by saying what I thought they liked hearing was the major driving force to my social interactions. I also parroted thoughts and opinions of others I believed to have some sense of moral or social authority. I rarely had any original thoughts of my own, because I didn’t have the self-confidence to substantiate my thoughts.
I cared too much about my image and what other people thought about me. I cared too little about my behaviours and how it would affect the ones that loved me. I was spineless and deep down I was disgusted with myself. I would never consciously acknowledged this. I had my bouts of depression which I would use marijauna and gaming to escape from. The only anchor that kept me going was my intense motivation to exercise and my willingness to explore my mind through seated meditation (thank goodness for my academic background and my curiosity and earnestness to follow it).
One fall evening, a friend at the time asked me to join him in partaking in some mushrooms. I grabbed a palm full and chewed – it was like eating dirt, there was nothing enjoyable about it, and it made me nauseous. Actually the nausea didn’t leave for a while – it’s kind of like a prolonged feeling of vertigo you get when you look directly down from a really high vantage point.
What transpired over the next few hours is something that I don’t think I’ll ever forget, because when the psychedelic component of the mushrooms kicked in, it was like being jolted back into a state of awe and wonder. I remember saying to myself, I haven’t felt like this since I was 11!
Psychedelic Revelations: Ascension to Heaven
Shortly after the mushrooms started taking effect, I left my friend to spend time alone. I went for a walk to settle my nausea, and returned home. By now, my visual senses had started shifting and physical borders started rippling. It was so incredibly bizarre I had to take out my journal to write about it. To my surprise, as I was writing, the words would start to float off the page! I also found it incredibly difficult to come up with words that would describe the sensations and feelings – so I decided to draw. I stared at my journal and something happened that has never happened in my life. My mind visualized an image of the head of a tiger on the blank space, and I traced it. By no means am I a talented visual artist (I’m actually awful at it) so when this occurred, it was kind of a mind blowing experience.
While all of these novelties were happening, a sense of euphoria and extreme connectedness to the world around me had started to make itself manifest in my consciousness. You know the stereotype that perpetuates hippie culture where they say “we’re all one”? I felt it. The euphoria had me standing because I didn’t know how to expend all of this overflowing positive energy – but right at the moment I had a sense that my being is connected to something far larger than myself, I was immediately brought to my knees. Just think of a National Geographic montage of Earth, where somewhere in that montage, you are included, as it pans out from micro to macro.
It’s one thing to understand a concept in theory. It is completely different to embody the experience. This oneness that I have heard about from various world religions immediately made sense to me. The intensity of this realization had me kowtowing. I wept. I wept because I glimpsed the immensity of this universe. I wept because I felt the interconnected ways of the universe that physics and religion attempts to describe. I wept because the universe had revealed itself to me, and I now had some criteria to juxtapose my partial understanding of it to the ether.
It was as if I had spent a long time looking at the stars and pondering my insignificance – only that the mushroom trip expedited my learning and pondering, packaging the experience and delivering it to me within seconds. It was as if I had downloaded a terabyte worth of information within a fraction of a second. My first breakthrough: ascension to heaven and a glimpse of divinity.
There’s a biblical story of Isaiah that I remember – one of the very few I remember in fact. It is the story of Isaiah glimpsing the glory, grandeur, power, and immensity of God. In the face of God’s presence, Isaiah fell to his knees and acknowledged is all of his sins. His reaction seems to represent that of psychological agony and a deep desire to repent, because the presence of God had made him hyper-aware of his shortcomings and iniquities. This story immediately came to mind during this portion of my trip. Isaiah’s story also acts as a fairly good framework to explain what would follow after this rapid ascension into ‘heaven’ and glimpsing the realm of the universal divine.
Psychedelic Revelations: Descending to Hell
In the presence of saints and angels, of people who seem to have something figured out that you have not, or around those who are living in a way that you desire but have not made a reality, the encounters can have the potential to dig up personal insecurities. We spend a few moments observing others in awe, and the remainder of our time in their presence can leave us in a state of comparison, indignity, jealousy, and the like.
The Great Expanse is where everything is possible. The immediate revelation about yourself the very first time you glimpse it is your insignificance - at least it was for me. You want to see more and spend more time in the Great Expanse, but the idea of your significance gets in the way. You say MOVE! But it will not – because it’s so deeply rooted in your ego. Your ego won’t move, because your mind is unwilling to let it move. At the time, I was far too attached to the idea of my personal significance. I thought I was the shit.
This was my second breakthrough: descending into the depths of hell and entering the arena to wrestle with my ego. I’ll cut to the chase with this one – I lost the wrestling match, and I lost spectacularly. It would take months to integrate what I learned during this bout, and years to eventually win the battle with my mind and change the way I thought about myself.
That night I would spend in fetal position in the dark as the mushroom’s effects climbed to its inevitable crescendo before it quietly crept away. It blew the door open on all of my repressed iniquities and lies that I had psychologically depended on to protect my ego. It made me hyper aware of my conditioned behaviours that bled toxicity. When I say that this experience was intense and not for the faint of heart, I really mean it.
Spending time with my ego without any sort of psychological lens to filter it through was a fucking tough pill to swallow. It was so bad at one point, I hallucinated a vision of myself at the bottom of a dark well, and there was a version of myself at the wellhead acting as the judge and jury. The version of me at the top was dropping down every single negative emotion I’ve never allowed myself to process, all of my thoughts of self-deceit that I used to protected my ego, and any idea of my identity that had absolutely no grounds for substantiation. I had nowhere to run to, I had to just lay there and take it. I eventually fatigued, and fell asleep.
So there it is, my very first psychedelic experience. Not a pretty one at all, but it was so valuable to me. It forced me to take a good hard look at myself - a big fat reality check. There have been a few others during my 20’s that have helped me integrate the experiences glimpsed during my first trip. Each one less torturous and more enlightening. I’ve since learned the art of letting go when partaking, and the experience is almost always enjoyable, full of levity, joy, and creativity!