5 gram mushroom trip
At 10 AM I left town for the 25 mile drive into the desert. I traveled down gravel and dirt roads to a favorite campsite, one which doesn't see much traffic, on the edge of a beautiful canyon, dotted with scrubby juniper and big boulders, a playground for giants -- the same place I camped for my LSD trip. I spread crunchy peanut butter over a bagel and placed five grams of psilocybin mushrooms on top. I finished eating it by 11:15.
I did the usual things I do when I'm waiting for a trip to come on: organized my car camper, walked around, did some stretches and meditation. The most I'd taken before was 3.5 grams, and that was pretty intense, so I was prepared to get my world rocked. I had been preparing myself ever since I bought the mushrooms.
That purchase has an interesting story. It started by hitchhiking from Utah to Oregon and attending a music festival last summer. While I was there, at 3 in the morning I was resting in the "Snake Temple" and a young woman lay down next to me, and we held each other and talked for a while. That was pretty much our whole interaction, but we became Facebook friends, and 5 months later when I was traveling in California I visited her house which she shares with a community of ecstatic dancers. She and her partner sold me the mushrooms before I left, and I brought them back to Utah.
On a more abstract level, I arrived at this trip through the experiences of 20+ previous trips, my PCT hike, my move to Moab, and all the lessons I'd been learning in recent weeks. I probably felt a deeper level of self-acceptance and peace going into this trip than any other. I was mentally prepared, and I was in a beautiful place alone. I was confident that I would have a good experience even if things got intense.
The day was overcast, breezy, and a bit chilly, so I went into my car as the trip was starting and spent some time under my blankets. This was the period of self-calming through a maze of intense thoughts, some sad, some hilarious. I changed positions often, noticing discomforts and dwelling on them. I listened to music, halfway enjoying it. Eventually I slid onto my side and let go of what bothered me, melting into laughter and coziness. From there the trip got easier. I started addressing my needs and felt more positive, more able to venture out from my car and use my body.
Overall, I was a little surprised to find that my brain didn't melt any more than when I've taken 3 grams in the past. In fact, the most intense trip I'd had before was much crazier -- I'd thought I was living in a dream, that my body was somewhere else, and maybe that I had died and entered some kind of purgatory from which I would never escape. That was a difficult one, in a more chaotic setting. So although I was prepared to completely part with reality it never got to that point.
I opened the rear hatch and put on a really funky, dancy album by Opiuo, which sounded absolutely incredible, and I felt so happy walking around and dancing. I also listened to an ambient album by Secede which sounded magically intricate. I ventured farther from my car and entered a state of complete awe at my surroundings. In the hazy sunlight, the slickrock took on a pinkish hue, and was covered with colorful patches of lichen. I felt like I could stay there for a year and be happy. I wandered around slowly as though exploring a dream world, completely at peace, wondering at the beauty of all that my eyes took in.
The special thing about this trip was not a heightened intensity from taking a large dose, but the overwhelming sense of peace, wonder, and humility it provided. It was a highly spiritual experience, which was provided to me by another life form, a fungus, which has learned to create this chemical that has the ability to integrate my spirit with all of nature.
I began to consider the implications of this. I thought of how some fungi can infect ants and influence their actions so that they climb to a high point, where the fungus kills them and spreads its spores. I thought about how recent studies show that the microbiomes that permeate our bodies have direct links to neural inputs and play a large role in our health and happiness. I thought about how a network of mycelium permeates most of the soil on Earth, connecting plants, distributing nutrients; and how this is like a world-wide biological internet, a complex network, like a brain. In light of this I felt extremely humbled to be a mere human being.
Could it be that the greatest intelligence on Earth actually lies in the soil, in these vast networks of microbes? What if the mushrooms that create psilocybin are doing so intentionally with the knowledge that it will affect our thinking, much in the same way they can affect ants? The very fact that I was having these thoughts and developing a deep reverence for fungus after eating magic mushrooms seemed to validate the idea.
I don't necessarily believe the ideas that are about to follow, but I found them fascinating to consider. What if the development of human intelligence and spirituality has been an ongoing project of the fungus kingdom for thousands of years? What if they're intentionally raising us up from our meat-brained mammalian inferiority to be partners with them, so that one day we can build AI that is able to interface with them directly, or develop space travel that will allow all Earthly kingdoms of life to spread to other worlds? As a side effect, or perhaps as an integral part of the process, eating mushrooms helps us work through our personal anxiety, develop empathy for all living things, and live lives of greater connection, flexibility, and peace. As we come to respect and honor these creatures, it helps to ensure their survival and ours.
I also had a lot of thoughts about religion. I started to feel as though the consumption of psychedelic mushrooms might have been a contributing factor to the formation of most world religions. I thought of the story of the garden of Eden: God has created humans, and they are safe in the garden, but they don't know anything about good and evil, they only know they should obey without question. They are almost like robots or prisoners. Then here comes Satan, saying "don't you want to know for yourself? Here, eat this forbidden fruit and have your eyes opened." And maybe that fruit was mushrooms, expanding the minds of primitive creation.
And the funny thing is, I feel like Jesus has more in common with Satan than he does God. God so vehemently hated the rebellion and sinfulness of his creation, chose just one tribe to be "his" people and sent them to kill many others, destroyed the whole world in a flood, sent his people into slavery, allowed great suffering and set up rigid, barbaric rules for people to follow if they wanted to please him. The God of the Old Testament is just about the most misanthropic tyrant to exist in all of fiction. Then here comes Jesus, showing great compassion for the most sinful people, defying the traditions of the religious rulers, spreading ideas that made people question their previous beliefs, causing a major diversion from the Judaism that God had set up. Jesus seems more like an adversary of the Old Testament God rather than his son. Like Satan, he is not a "deceiver" but a revealer of truth to humankind, in protest of a vengeful and cruel God. They are both advocates of psychedelic thought.
Jesus's compassionate teachings seem to be in line with what mushrooms teach experientially. Eating this fungal "fruit of the Spirit" can help people grow in love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. As a result of the times I've taken mushrooms in my life I feel much more empathetic, gentle, peaceful, and open-minded. Jesus lived an alternative lifestyle if ever there was one, going out into the desert for 40 days at a time, wandering around at the charity of other people, teaching his own beliefs in spite of the establishment and shaking up people's conceptions of the world. As I thought about these things I wondered if his story was inspired by eating mushrooms -- whether he existed as a historical figure or not.
All of this might seem like the talk of a crazy person, some real Terence McKenna shit that most people would reject as laughable. But that's exactly my point. By simply ingesting a certain biological entity, our minds can be made to see the world differently. Fungus is a powerful thing! This scares a lot of people and prevents them from trying it. "Sure Joe, you think mushrooms are so great because you took them and they messed with your mind, how can anyone trust what you're saying to be reliable? Maybe you're just crazy." That's a fair point because maybe a meth head thinks meth is great too. I guess you can only judge by the results you see in someone's life. What results do you see in the life of a meth user, in their spirit, versus mine? The result of taking psychedelics has encouraged me to find a place of greater peace and to pursue my individual goals. Even this may not be good evidence for the average person, since the trend in my life has been to distance myself from typical pursuits of career and security; but sometimes we need to let go of what society values in order to find what's healthy for us.
Am I making myself crazy? I don't think so, but I'm not very afraid of that anymore. Drugs aren't the only things that affect our brains. Before I tried mushrooms I expressed my fear of having my mind altered permanently to a friend; he said, "everything alters your mind. Even the words I am saying now." And it was true, because I never forgot those words.
Everything we encounter has a permanent effect on us, and we all live with neuroses and believe in some kind of insanity. Even if you try to keep everything in your life sterile and predictable and sane, you might develop dementia from having your brain locked into a routine! So, choose your poison. For my life, the benefits seem to far outweigh the risks. The emotional healing, fascinating insights, and vivid experiences are exactly what I'm passionate about in life, so for my goals it absolutely makes sense to take psychedelics. I will always be careful to treat them respectfully and not go too far overboard. So far, I feel like it has actually reduced my neuroses in lasting ways, rather than increased them.
I had two items which I kept outside of my car: a camp chair, and a gallon of water. My interaction with these things taught me a lesson. It was windy, so at first I set the gallon of water on the chair to keep it from falling over. But then a big gust came and blew it over anyway, knocking the chair into a puddle, sending the gallon crashing to the ground. Later, as I was sitting on the chair with the gallon on the ground next to me, I realized that keeping the water on the chair was symbolic: sometimes in life we perceive certain things to be valuable and stable, so we use them to hold down what we're afraid might topple. Yet this top-heavy arrangement can end in disaster when the unstable thing propping up the important thing succumbs to natural laws and collapses. And it's based in fear, in some assumption about the future that isn't necessarily true: I need to keep my chair and my water out here in the wind because I'm going to want to sit in it, so I better make sure it will be stable.
If I instead make the arrangement based on the present moment, when I am actually sitting in the chair, it leads to a more stable arrangement. The chair can't be prevented from falling over once I leave it, so I might as well leave the gallon of water on the ground and allow the chair to blow over. It will fall over harmlessly and my valuable water will be safe on the ground. Maybe an analogy of this is relationships: sometimes we are afraid to be alone, we love someone and we hope that in the future they will love us back and provide what we need. So we arrange our lives around that fear and that hope for the future, keeping ourselves available for them, trying to make plans that will lead to closeness. Yet by doing this we miss out on the organic energy that flows around the present day when we are not trying to push toward a future result, and this in fact prevents that desired future result from coming to pass, as we find that we are sacrificing self-care and pursuit of personal interests and this makes us less happy and attractive.
Toward evening, the sky cleared up partially, enough to allow a beautiful sunset. Though movement was nice, I chose to sit by a pothole full of water and meditate, letting action dissolve into rest. I looked into the water and saw a .22 shell casing, reached in and picked it up. I saw several more and thought to gather them, but wondered whether my hand's contact with the fragile ecosystem had more potential to cause harm than the empty casings remaining there. So I held the single casing in my open palm as I sat restfully, acknowledging it, making it an offering. What has been done cannot be undone, and to fixate anxiously on it only makes it worse. The direction is peace and acceptance, humility and love.
