Trip Report Review: "A Story in the Void"

"A Story in the Void: Deep thoughts eloquently expressed" comes to us out of the void from a post by an anonymous author on Lycaeum. A well organized (and indeed "eloquently expressed") report from a person seeking guidance, it is both respectful and informative with regards to the experience.

SET: Supplicative. I feel I needed this kind of communion in preparation for the upcoming visit with my family. I am encouraged by my previous experience, but wanted to clarify certain issues.
SETTING: Saturday afternoon in my apartment.
DOSAGE: About 4 grams dried psilocybin mushrooms, a few hits of cannabis, orange juice.
The effects begin 25 minutes after ingesting the sacrament. I am seated, breathing regularly, listening...

Excellent beginning to a trip report! I know exactly what I need to know going into it. The author clearly states their intent and state of mind going into the experience, where they are, and how much they ingest. While mentioning a few hits of smoke and the OJ may seem unnecessary (we would have assumed as much right?), I think it is a nice touch. Overall the description of the experience is, as claimed by the subtitle, eloquently expressed.

This was the sole clear visual I can recall. However, the whole mushroom experience always has an element of being "shown" things -- but this showing is not a visual presentation of images so much as a visceral apprehension of fundamental truths. It is showing in the sense of "understanding", as opposed to seeing in the usual sense. I seems to be confronted with the essence of a particular metaphor or archetype. All that follows is "seen" in this way.

This, I think, is a description of the Logos with respect to the mushroom experience. The language it is most adept to is not linear and would seem to be atomic in a sense. It is a sensation I'm familiar with as I've experienced similar, subjective experiences. I would suppose it is a form of telepathy where the transmission of the thing and the thing itself are singular-- as if it were the thing itself being transmitted, and that this happens instantaneously! The thing being expressed is simply and suddenly there, in your consciousness, before your subjective reality filters have a change to distort it. It is something beheld.

It is like a guided tour at the brink of the Abyss. The mushroom leads you to the cliff, and points, and commands you to look. To be sure, there is a guard-rail, and a concession stand, and the guide cracks jokes somewhat lamely. It can be banal, even silly, and the brochure guarantees that there is no danger of falling off the edge.

I've been mocked before by mushrooms! I can remember at least one experience rather vividly where I was being shown something I didn't quite grasp, over and over. Each time I remember the sensations of fear and amazement at what I was being show (perhaps the details will come in a future posting of a trip report of my own) and the mushrooms would almost seem to be laughing at me and talking with itself, "Should we show it again?" "Yea! Again! hahaha"

You see all life pouring past you over that trembling, aching lip, pouring back into the Mystery, receding into Truth, never slowing, constantly renewed. And you understand that someday you will stand at this precipice again. On that day, the concession stand will have been boarded up, the railing will be rusted to the ground, and the brochures will have long ago blown away. Then the only guide will be a familiar, quiet voice which beckons to you gently from the depths of the Mystery.

I believe this is also a familiar experience. To me these seems to me to be a place somewhere on the edge of timeless, hyper-dimensional space. And it is because of this timeless nature and entire lives can be compressed into an instant. I've had the sensation where what seems like an eternity flies by in what would normally be the blink of an eye, yet it is there in its entirety. Billions of years in this conventional reality is compressed to what is perhaps a single point in hyper-dimensional space. (Actually, this is what I was being shown when the mushrooms were mocking me, mentioned above. They would repeatedly "recreate" this universe- create it, show me the entire thing, collapse it back into nothing, and do it again. As I stood there aw-struck and fearful that they might actually be destroying entire universes, they would laugh and say, "Again?" "Show it again!")

By far, mortality is the overwhelming theme of the mushroom trance. All else is commentary, metaphor, detail. Issues of life and death arise like idols before me, demanding sacrifice. It is a kind of reckoning. My mind is led directly to the instant of life's fleeting, without the crutches of distraction and numbness to which it is accustomed. There I am confronted with the things that make one take life very seriously, issues of conscience, sacrifice, and responsibility. I behold with a shudder that I am living on borrowed time, and that the things I love most in life are all busied in their own passing. We are living on borrowed time. This is a source of acute urgency. Time is a call to responsibility: to live, to love, lest it all end in tragedy.

I've seen my own deaths many times. I say deaths because I'm probably not the only one of me, so then I'm also not the only one of me that will have to die. I've been shown all the different ways I could die and I've been given a taste of what it would feel like. This has always been an intense, but ultimately rewarding experience, though I know it troubles a lot of people. At some point, after witnessing then pondering your own death over and over, you stop caring. You say to yourself, "Alright, well let's see which one this reality picks for me, onward!" and at that point a tremendous weight is lifted off your shoulders. But if you don't surrender to this, if you fight it, it will only be more painful. The simple truth being expressed is that your body will die, and the more you deny it, the stronger its expression. Definitely one source of bad trips for the uninitiated.

But understand also that we do not exist in isolation from the universe. That is an illusion, a trick of our sophisticated mind. Our life, our perspective, is unique. It is the mechanism of creativity. But we are all one substance, changeable. I look in the mirror and see the universe presenting itself in a particular way, as with all the things I see around me. Where is the distinction between my body and the world? Truly, the only distinction is in language. It seems to me that differences in shape and color and chemistry are superfluous creations of the linguistic mind. We are animate bits of a great cohesive Whole, rising and falling like waves. The Buddha has said this all already, only better.

Indeed, this is a healthy dose of Buddhism right here, something that seems quite at home and natural in the mushroom experience. I have gained some deep insight into various Buddhist concepts while on mushrooms. Anyone also interested in Buddhism and mushrooms, I would recommend this, for your next trip, find some Alan Watts recordings, and listen to those while you're tripping.

It is daring me to BE. The mushroom is not impressed with idle speculation: it is truly the voice of conscience. It is my own inner voice, so rarely acknowledged, challenging me to go beyond myself. I hear it almost taunting me, laughing at my pretensions, waiting to see if I have the courage to act, waiting to see what I will Do. I sense the expectation of the world, waiting for me to make sense of it -- but not waiting for long! There will come a reckoning, even within my own heart. When that time comes, will I be ready? And if it were to come today?

This is always a mind fuck with me. Time and time again, I've had mushrooms show me what I could be. Beautiful visions of myself doing all the things I wish I could do, and sometimes I do interpret it as a sort of taunting. I'm being shown what is possible for myself and my life, and then being dared it give it a shot, to see if I can pull it off.

Time is flying: I hear the wailing of the grave, "Make a difference!"
...
The voice within me says clearly, "Be thankful," and surely I am.
...
The mushroom tells me, "You will find words in the living of your life."

More examples of communication with the mushrooms. They can be rather direct and commanding in the way they speak to you. And they really don't seem to care if what they say hurts your feelings. But at the same time, they'll say what they have to say. I find its best to acknowledge them lest they become more insistent in their attitude. I don't know if you can "piss off" mushrooms, but I'm not trying to find out.

I approached this journey hoping to clarify where I must go with my life. At first it seemed my question had been ignored. After all, the mushroom shows you what you truly need to know, not necessarily what you want. But at the end it seemed that I had received ample clues to guide me...The mushroom has shown me what I must do -- though it remains up to me to find the way. As it fades back into the glow of mundane reality it speaks clearly, one last time: "Be a teacher. Be a storyteller. Or be gone!"

The key point here, "it remains up to me", akin to, "I can only show you the door, you must walk through it." When the trip is over, the choice presented is, "Do I give any more thought to what I learned or do I dismiss it as lunacy?" And I think this is the big question when it comes to the psychedelic experience in general: "Is it serious?" I am here to contend, "Yes its fucking serious!"

Overall this was an excellent trip report. A bit verbose, but still an excellent depiction of the experience. While I won't argue that words really can't capture it all, for the time being at least, its almost the best we have for this purpose of comparing our experiences. This report captures some key concepts of the experience that I was able to directly relate to some of my own experiences and experiences others have had.

This is why trip reports are important, because what we need to figure out is whether or not the experience is ubiquitous. We're trying to defeat the contention that it isn't, the contention that in fact all this is, is the random firings of neurons having a traumatic experience with a foreign substance. That the psychedelic state is really just the brain going crazy with no substantive value. I know this isn't true, but most people don't, and it are perceptions like this that make mushrooms illegal and pervert and retard our understanding of them. If we're ever going to develop a mature relationship with these substances, we need a mature understanding of what they do and why.