The Trip

So I spent a long time writing and trying to capture at least some small fragment of a particular experience I had that altered my entire life. The amount of time it took to write even the tiny amount I am able to articulate and share, was immense. I am sharing it here. If you feel like reading a small novel of Personal Spiritual Experience, here it is. It is in a very rough stage, and at some point if I can stay disciplined, I plan to keep writing some memoirs of my Journeys Thru Time (This is based on recollections 15 years after the experience)

The Trip

I ate 13 strong LSD gel tabs, my brother had more, and my cousin had about the same as I. We were in a tiny cabin in the woods, oddly reminiscent of my childhood home. The sun had just risen and we had started the morning off watching a documentary on Albert Hoffman. That’s what prompted the notion of the trip. All I could say was ‘why not?’

We dosed and then put on Alice in Wonderland….the version with Martin Short as the mad hatter and whoopie Goldberg as the Cheshire cat. I remember thinking to myself…’buckle up, theres no going back now’. I knew that my life was irrevocably altered, even before the acid hit me. I knew that I had just dug a grave, metaphorically, and I was going to lie in it and hopefully rise again from it. I knew it wasn’t ‘for fun’ either. That was not the purpose of the trip. We were ‘going in’. Consciously. I was not playing around. It was not recreational. I was heeding the Madwomans Whisper, and I was daring to face the dweller at the threshold. And I knew, with every fiber of my being, that I just might not make it back out. At least not as the same person who went in.

IT didn’t take very long to kick in, and it is at this point that I have no idea where my memories converge with theirs, but I can only speak from what my experience was. I remember looking at my hands, they were my measuring stick to how much the acid had taken hold. As it started to come on, it was like the Nothing in the movie The NEverending Story. It was coming. You couldn’t really see it. You didn’t quite know what it was, or how it would show, but you could feel it. Coming closer. It was so overwhelming, the feeling of implosion, that it was almost impossible to even be afraid of it. Somewhere in the beginning, I started to get so uncomfortably hot and felt like my body was on fire. An electrical fire. Like my nerves were burning up from inside, because they were Inside Everything and could not handle the charge. Like there was so much of Everything of Inside Me, or so much of Me inside Everything, that I couldnt be still. And then I had to get onto the floor, my body was contorting into these strange postures and positions. My spine was flexing and elongating and I was a slave to what my body was doing. I had no control over it, I simply knew that If I did not concede the power over to it, or what was Inside It, that I would Die for sure. I would explode into a million universes and never ever find my way back to the one I Was. At the time, I had never come across yoga. This was 1999 long before the trend of yoga here in the US . I had never even recalled seeing a book about yoga. But in retrospect, I realized my body was going into spontaneous yoga poses. At the time, I just thought every nerve and cell in my body was expanding at such an incredible rate and speed that if I did not flow with it, it was the End of Me. I am not sure how long this went on. I remember around the same time wandering outside into the forest and I think my brother retrieved me. I felt confused and disoriented and yet astounded at the beauty of everything around me. I had barely even scratched the surface of this trip and it was already so far beyond anything I had felt or experienced up to that point. As the trip built toward a crescendo, I was further and further astonished into Nothingness .What started as amazing insights into the nature of reality and the mind and Energy, faded out into nothingness. I had no concept of it because there was no me to experience it. At some point I started to feel like a tiny spark of light in an immense dark heavy fertile void that was teeming with potential Isness. And I experienced myself take on the form of billions of years of evolution, all the way thru single celled organisms and growing in complexity, all the way through the strata of the planet. I WAS these things. I knew what it was to BE these versions of Self, and I had no concept of human. Until a long long way into the trip, when I started to feel as if there was ‘something on the tip of my tongue’ that I just ‘ couldn’t put my finger on’. That feeling. That feeling that theres something to Know, to figure out. That I am a Something. Like a puzzle or something. And when I first caught a tiny trail of epiphany and was able to follow it without losing myself to the myriad distractions, I managed to pull myself through a ‘cloud’ of vagueness into a seemingly solid facet…….a familiar feeling of something that I was. And I traced it and traced it for what seemed like Aeons, noting the spaces in which I had been before. It was like being lost in the labrynth of my psych, or the Psyche of the World, and knowing that Im trying to get out, but not knowing to where, or even knowing What a Where Is. Wandering. And learning that Focus is key. Focus and Will and Intent. I could not be ‘pulled hither and thither’ and ever find a coalescent sense of Self to latch onto , I had to maintain some kind of direction, and it didn’t seem to matter What that Was, as long as It remained steady and I could withstand the assault of infinite stimuli and sensory overload. I was not a human being while traveling this labrynth. I still had no concept of that. It was all very abstract. All very mathematical and geometric. It was as If I was Language, and I was interacting with Language; I was Self. All Is Self. There was nothing else. Nothing At All. And yet the gradations of that knowing slowly leaked and I held on like a thread that was woven round and round in patterns of infinite beauty and terror at the same time. When I finally managed to weave this Selfness into a concept of Human, I have no idea how much time had elapsed. In fact the whole trip except for the very beginning and ending, is a mash of intermixed feelings and images and experiences that have no real coherent order, and much of my attempt at articulating is using logic in order to place events. Suffice it to say, for probably 4-5 hours I had no idea I was a person, there was no cabin, there was no forest, the external environment was moot. I carefully and concisely started to reconfigure my personal story as the Self that was me in that moment in that cabin. I then relived my entire childhood. At some point, some other people had come into the cabin and I can remember being vaguely aware of them. One of them was a friend of my brothers who I knew only slightly. I watched as before me there was a massive block of makeshift apartments, like a large nyc building, except all there was no wall on the front….and I could see into each cubicle/room/apt……I would be drawn to a particular cubicle and in it was my brother, and the friend, and they would be acting out a scene of some archetypal relevance. Everything was Archetype at this point. It was like speeding ever faster and the closer to SourceSelf I got, the simpler things got. I was riding waves of Cosmic Inspiration and Expiration….the Great Breath, and the further out on the wave of the outbreath, the more complex and detailed, whereas the further in on the inhale I sped thru to Vast Love Spaces that seemed to need no minutia. In these play acts between my brother and the friend, who in appearance to me at that time resembled my mother and father in a primal way, As soon as I would Understand or Innerstand the Concept or archetypal interaction etc they were acting out for me, they would immediately stop, turn toward me, bow and a curtain would close over the cubicle/apt. Then my awareness would be drawn to some other cubicle and the whole things would start again, only it would be a totally different situation/archetype/Vast Insight into Self. And I would get quicker and quicker at figuring it all out, and the bows and curtains came quicker and quicker til the whole building collapsed in a heap. And then I was on a throne, a huge, massive throne it seemed, overlooking some kind of kingdom. But the kindgdowm was made up of shapes and geometries and frequencies and spectrums of light….thats the only way I know to articulate it. My head was drooped. Almost as if I was unconscious, or that I could feel my fleshly body in a stooped daze….but my third eye/spiritual sight could see without my fleshly body….so I was aware of both worlds in some strange way. As I watched out over my kingdom It felt like watching a pinball game or something. And then right in the center of this kingdom there was an immeasurable Mass that seemed almost like a ball of energy of different pixels of color and light and density. It was not perfectly round. There would appear to be a ‘pixel’ that would be absorbed into the mass, and at exactly the right spot on the reflected part of the mass, that same pixel or a variation of it would pop out. Every Action the Reaction. There was nothing in this swarming Mass of Beingness that did not create some equal Measure in return. I watched and watched, and it was like bees in a hive, only it was fractally infinite scope of color and feeling and concept. I understood everything when I saw it, when I felt it, but I still to this day cannot really articulate it or put it into a concept. I knew that any thought or word or feeing or action was infinitely tied to the Whole Scope and there Was No Escape. That was very humbling.

At one point I am following a Concept thru a tunnel of Energy, speeding faster and faster and faster, feeling like I am really getting somewhere, starting to feel comfortable in this realm, this is toward the end of the trip, when I was coming down but still tripping harder than I had ever tripped on any other dose. I am speeding thru the tunnel, which was very much like when I am in my ‘astral’ body and traveling thru a vortex, and I feel like I am getting closer and closer to IT, when SNAP! It felt as if a million ton brick slapped me in the face except I didn’t really have a face at the time. And then this GIANT LID opened, I was in the lid and I was the lid, and I was staring into this Infinitely vast Eye. The terror and palpable feeling of ‘ The Inner Eye Staring Into Mine’ as I remember writing it afterward. There was nothing that could hide from this Sight, and I knew it was my own Sight, I knew that I was the Eye, The Sight, The Seen and the Act of Seeing. All at Once. Not as an intellectual concept. Not like reading it in a book. But like walking through the corridor of it, and feeling my cells dissolve in the light of that awareness.

Another interesting part of the trip was even later on, when I was back to my HumanSelf enough that I not only knew I was human but I knew I was charleen and that the entity next to me on the couch was my brother)…..or it could have been earlier on, before my sense of human self dissolved….I am not entirely sure. We are staring at each other, with huge nervous smiles. We are in a web and nexus of energy pulsating all around us. We are in a Matrix, we are In Code. I am watching the equations or our thoughts. And then I hear a booming voice crash through the Programming and say ‘You’ve done it this time. You’ve gone too far. You’ve done it this time. You’ve gone too far’. It is my fathers voice! I feel shamed, I feel like I didn’t Heed some primal warning and that I was so deeply and existentially aware that I was conscious of my own Lostness. Our own lostness. It then became very clear to me that I may never get out of ‘this Place’. And I knew the place was Within ME, as well as Without Me. And I wondered how long we had been there at that point. Had it been weeks? Months? Years? Millennia? I had no way to know. I had no reference point.

As I began to coalesce more and more back into my Everyday Self, I was relieved, exhausted, terrified, excited, humbled. Humility. I felt as if I was shown in a a billion different feeling-sense ways, that approaching the Vastness without Humility is a dire dire thing. And I also knew that at the End of It All, there Was Just Self, and so it was Funny to Me. The Paradox. The Hilarity of It, as I later wrote in my journal. ‘The Hilarity of It, preceded me’. The now indisputable Fact, that there was no way to Die, that there was no Death, that there was no way to ever NOT BE, that Consciousness ItSelf was All There IS, and was Playing Games with ItSelf, OurSelves……was so excruciatingly obvious and funny and yet created apprehension. The Exhaustion of Being. The Terror of Immortality. The NeverEnding Story and The Nothing. It IS coming . It has been, always. You cant get away from Being. And what I learned, in that trip, was that when you Aware that you ARE, it is WAY MORE FUN than when you are UNAWARE that you ARE, because you still ARE. And I learned that my only real desire in ‘Life’ was to be capable of containing ever greater immensities of the Self that is All in y individual ConsciousnessUnitSElfHoweverYou Want To Define It. If I could expand my boundaries over and over and over again, without losing cohesion. COHESION. The golden word. I could be SHATTERED by the vastness, and have to ‘start all over again’ at least in a manner of speaking. But If I could penetrate and be penetrated deeper and further and RETAIN it, without being shattered, and while ReMEMEMBERING Which WHO I AM at THIS point IN THE spectrum, and build on that, I am actually GIFTING THE MULTIVERSE. We are being BREATHED. By our Very Own Self. And each outbreath sends sparks of Intent ‘outward’ toward the periphery of Self in magnificent patterns of Incarnation and experience and Play and Love and Light and further out toward the periphery, the Denser experiences of Pain and Longing and SEperation and Sorrow. Like a cosmic wind or wave, becoming particles or more PARTICULAR on the journey outward until like a slingshot the containment capacity is reached and the INbreath is drawn, and the PARTICULARS or particles start to journey back ‘inward’ to coalesce and take all that Awareness, and consciousness, back to the AllSelf and when all those Individual Selves are reunited in the self of all selves, the entire ‘Organism’ is a vast ‘Orgasm’ of Awareness and Potential………and then again, the Exhale and the process starts again.

So I ask, what if one can make it all the outward, and then all the way back in, without losing COHESION? Taking all the experiences, memories, reMemberences with itSelf back and forth. What happens then? Is ‘God’ Godding ItSelf? Implosion Explosion InGoesYou OutGoesYou

By the tine this trip ended I decided I was disgusted with much of the previous human I had been, at least in the year or so preceding the experience, and I felt that my hair was reflective of my Thoughts and Patterns and History and I knew I had to shave my head to get it off me, to release those attachments and purify myself. And so it was. Out came the clippers.

5-1-15