I wanted to take mushrooms because of some emerging evidence, according to what I read anyway, that they could help in depression and anxiety disorders, with potentially even a single dose, for long periods of time. I felt stuck and that nothing else I had ever been prescribed or tried had ever really done anything. I had read a lot of the clinical trials that have come out and to me the evidence seemed very promising that it might work, at least for a lot of people. I also was curious about “ego death” experiences of unity, of oneness with everything, that I had read a lot about, and which seemed to have a lot of overlap with Eastern religious/spiritual ideas of enlightenment, of permanent cessation of suffering, based on my understanding of texts I had read along with many stories and articles online over a period of a decade or more off and on, firsthand and otherwise. Anyway, as for the day of, when they started to take effect, under supervision from 2 guides..
The first thing I remember was that there was a picture hanging on the wall of the room I was in of a monastery on the side of a mountain and it looked like the picture was moving, alive and breathing. That there was a tiled face (like on a computer wallpaper) with some repetitive pattern appearing in the corner of the mountain and moving around, not visible when sober.
It looked as if the light beams from the sun were diffracted into rainbows coming through blinds through windows into the room. I felt this kind of slowing down of everything, of uncannyness, of spiraling or swirling of everything. I wondered what “anxiety” really even meant, and in some apparent flash of insight noticed that this feeling of fear or anxiety I was experiencing even now seemed physically and biologically identical to the feeling of excitement, only I had all my life been processing and categorizing it differently under this category, and it had never occurred to me before. That maybe people who enjoyed fairly extreme activities like skydiving felt and loved this same sense of fear I was having right now, whether or not they called it fear or excitement.
I put on the provided eyeshade and headphones with some classical music playing, just reclining in some armchair. It all took effect so quickly, had to be within 20 minutes or so. I had these powerful colorful visions, fractals and things over a black void. Rainbow colored snakes, or fibers of some kind, twisting amongst each other and writhing and having this aliveness. I lost the sense of being or having a body, no longer felt like I was just watching some sort of show or daydreaming or anything or that I was looking at this just in mind’s eye with the eyeshades on. Rather it felt like I was really in this imagery, not centered and looking at in front of me like the way sobriety feels or normal visual imagery feels, but a part of it. Out somewhere in deep space, or outside of the universe, I was looking at some kind of a red plane suspended in nothing that seemed to contain everything, or something I had never seen. A book with writing in some language or script I had never even seen appeared super imposed over it and I couldn't understand. Other letters appeared out of nowhere in the void in this superimposed everywhere.
But then I started to get this creeping sense of dread, like I was facing actual annihilation, or going into some kind of vast self-imposed mental hell or labyrinth where I might spend however many millions of years subjectively, or several infinities, or whatever, lost and without the use of my own mind to think my way out or get through it. Of being totally untethered from everything I had ever learned or thought about the universe, about control or the sense of having a body and being able to exert my will upon it to do things, even to organize my own thoughts and work things out logically or execute a goal. Just this overwhelming sense of fear and dread and apprehension about whatever I had decided to put myself into, and not having realized what I was in for.
I felt it was too much and I took off the headphones and the eyeshade and tried to ground myself in the room. I could more or less see as normal, visual aberrations like I mentioned with the painting aside. I paced around the room intermittently between sitting or lying back down, and noticed similarities in the lacquered hardwood floor and that right angle counter design for the kitchen and the dining table and the doors and windows, all the generic luxury condo or other heavily produced types of dwellings-like things that seem the same everywhere, and so many places from my own life. This room seemed before my eyes to morph now into my own apartment, then to one of the houses I lived in as a young child, then another, every place I had ever lived or stayed in while on vacation or visiting, all sort of transforming in a way of recognition of similar patterns while simultaneously also somehow not really changing at all. Just it seemed that everything was always just some mere projection of my own mind, without really even that much variety to it. More sameness than variety.
Above all though I felt, oddly, a sense of clarity and awakeness, as if my entire life before this point had just been some sort of strange dream and this was the ultimate and true reality behind everything I was now sensing and abiding in. I had a sense of feeling I was on the verge of some kind of total ego death or annihilation even with eyes open; there was some sensation of clouds and a voice, which I took to be an inner voice of conscience or deeper understanding, telling me I still had too many attachments and wasn’t ready for the real thing, and that there would never be any coming back from it. I wondered about religion or how some people perceive or see God on psychedelics or different things, and briefly rehashed some of the conclusions I came to as a teenager. But to me, I didn’t really perceive any great force outside of myself, only things coming from within, in this moment and others.
I noticed that I felt like a young child again, as in my earliest memories, where everything feels new and big and scary and uncertain, and everything is unknown and possible. I couldn’t even remember my own name fully, with some struggling for several seconds it came back to me but it felt artificial. Profession, role in society, everything else, this physical body, nothing really seemed so important or like any of that was really who I am.
I still had some insights and introspection going. I wondered about depression, and what it really even means. I began to feel very badly and thought about what I had considered to be a mental illness called depression that I was seeking relief from, and what I expected a drug experience could really even change about it. At this moment it felt for me at least not so much as an illness at all, but more of a kind of avoiding responsibility, a desire to do nothing but the bare minimum, and never really try to make things better or make a change, but to receive recognition and all the rest anyway. I felt like I was, unknown to myself but to this moment, actually a kind of a narcissist and that it had never occurred to me before. Like this whole narrative I had constructed about my life and everything else was a form of self imposed pathetic nature and self imposed helplessness, created to manipulate others into taking up the responsibility and burdens for what I would not.
Perhaps this was actually obvious to most people, they easily saw through it. And only a few friends/family out of their own goodness and selflessness or empathy really believed in this narrative about myself that I had manufactured and put out there. Only I really believed in it as well, up to this point, and no one more strongly than I did. It wasn’t a conscious kind of putting the wool over people’s eyes, I had fooled myself as well. And I felt such a great shame about all of this.
Somewhere in the thought loops it also occurred to me that what if I actually did just have autism even though it had never been something I sought a formal diagnosis for, that there is this just this sort of fixation I have over so many things and this great mental wall between me and others that maybe I just can never get over. I wondered about entertainment, and why I am so driven toward video games and playing the same ones over and over, one in particular for the past few years. Something about mostly wanting to dive into and understand all the ins and outs of some trivial system or game, just for the thing itself. I could think lucidly, or so it seemed to be, about so many subjects, but at this time I remembered vaguely the sort of words about them but not what it was actually like to play video games, or what the purpose of “entertainment” was at all, in any form, when everything is already so demanding and gripping of our attention at all times everywhere, like just sitting in a room with our own thoughts, or engaging with others, or whatever else.
In one repetition I felt this powerful attraction to one of these guides, the woman, even though the other was her romantic partner and also there. I felt outside of time and that nothing else even existed, and that that and all other apparent obstacles, the hangups maybe everyone feels at some time or other as to a kind of attraction not meant to be fulfilled, or against many social norms, say to one’s own professor, in this moment where somewhat illusory. That if I could just explain it in the right way, somehow both of them would agree and somehow some spiritual union or consummation would take place. But even as warped as my mind was at that moment, ultimately I felt somewhere in my mind that this might cause some form of great discomfort even to say anything about or try to act on, and that the noble and right thing was to keep it to myself and focus my mind and efforts elsewhere.
I wondered if this depression or whatever else was actually just a wholly accurate and honest appraisal of the state of affairs of the universe. That others in my life had been gaslighting me into thinking I had some great potential and that this was something I needed to overcome in order to do better, and if this might not itself be the only problem I had. Not some thing, for me, known by the word of “depression”, but of taking to heart what others close to me in my life had tried to convince me, in the name of love or having my best interests in mind but that if they were not just themselves misguided and deluded, and harming me despite really trying to do the exact opposite.
I also wondered about the suicidal ideation I had sometimes, and how much it scared me and how I tried to suppress and avoid those thoughts. That the fear I might some day act on it had been the thing most of all that encouraged me to try to find treatment in the first place. Why had I avoided this subject most of all? What if that impulse was right, that continuing to live into old age or just for itself only inevitably formed an unending network of attachments, unfinished desires, goals, things undone, that I didn’t actually have the power to make the world better and that it’s become too difficult in this modern world with all the concentration of power in the elite? Mostly I always pushed those thoughts away because it would be too hard on my mom, especially with just everything that had happened in our lives. And I still somewhat felt that now, though there was a sense that eventual death could still be a calamity later/at any age. I knew my dog would miss me, but then again I’d also miss her after she is gone some day. But then it occurred to me that what if death wasn’t the end, that this universe according to me anyway had come essentially out of the unknowable, and that another Big Bang or whatever else could happen again and again forever? I had this great sinking and disconcerting feeling that all of this had already happened before, that the universe has just been repeating forever and will repeat without end, even though I didn’t think that I could remember any kind of past lives. That maybe I was just living the exact same life, doing the exact same things, and remembering at all in this moment now on mushrooms. And it was a great weight of a revelation to try to come to terms with, and scared me a lot. Or maybe I did make some changes here and there, and things happened very differently, and most times I never realized this truth at all, or maybe for the beginning of infinity up to now I had always done things this way, and that it wasn’t scripted and I could actually make a change this time for the first time, or any time, but I never seemed to quite find the courage to break out of this routine and this exact progression of life, with all its ups and downs, and failures, and everything else to it.
I had some great urge to call an ex, that despite being competent at using words in many instances, as simple as it was I had failed on so many times to express in words what I had felt toward her, including at the end. Had simply let myself be dumped without the least verbal pushback or attempt to convince her to try again, and that maybe if I called her right now despite such a long time of no contact she would agree and with a new energy toward it we would try again. But this too I felt even in this state ultimately was a bad idea, and I should not do it.
Time seemed to loop, or stand still; I asked one of the 2 facilitators, or spirit guides, or whatever you might call them (who for the most part just sat there passively apparently not paying much attention, unless in brief intervals I engaged with them), how much time had passed several times. During one of these thought spirals and chains of introspection that seemed endless, I was told less than a minute had passed since the last time I asked, which seemed impossible. I felt like I was going insane and the whole world was fake; what if I was in a padded cell somewhere? What if this was present state of apparently greater awareness and insight was now the way things would happen forever? Having realized the truth, maybe I was now subjectively trapped in this state forever. Just a looping of endless pacing around the room, lying down, things resetting somehow, going to the bathroom, drinking from a glass of water which seemed difficult because I couldn’t remember which hand was left or right and it took some effort to work out the complexities of manipulating arms and hands in order to do it. The guides told me that this is just what it’s like to be on mushrooms, that this is all how it is for everyone and everyone feels this way and goes through this same experience on a high enough dose. And that it would eventually end, and in fact pretty soon.
I felt that this might not be true; many people describe it as just the most beautiful and indescribable experience they have ever had, of unity and everything else, and I did have some brief intervals of this but there was a lot of darkness and baggage and some great insights but much fear too and despite everything from the beginning of the trip, this often seemed to dominate more than anything else. Even pacing around the room, in the brief intervals of eyes being closed with every time I blinked, I saw tiled patterns of TV-like or computer screen-like individualized squares with different events happening over a black background, next time some view of like a dollhouse viewed from the side, with different levels, then faces of certain political leaders who were the worst people I could think of on the planet, and how they laughed at everyone else and pretended not to have the power to make things better, that they manipulated people into thinking everything was someone else’s fault but their own. How divisions based on fear, of walling off certain types of people from each other, or certain experiences, literally with prisons and war and all the rest, metaphorically within myself with trying to compartmentalize and wall off or hide certain emotions or parts of myself. I felt that I was everything and everyone, everywhere, and I didn’t like it. I wanted to change everything, to reset the whole universe, but this time to make it one of kindness instead of the one of evil I perceived, that I felt some sick unconscious part of my broader self, not tied to this body or mind, had created. I was so ashamed at the evil I now felt I had created, but I felt that maybe if I could purify myself of the darkest of thoughts and impulses, those I didn’t want to admit or pushed away, and exist as a force of good, that the whole universe would follow. And that self-destruction was not the answer either, as it would not form a real escape but rather just I would incarnate in much the same or another body, or continue consciousness in some form anyway, so maybe there was a way to get by in this form, even just day by day.
Anyway, I did eventually come out of it, after 6 hours or so total, and things feel more or less normal, but it has taken a few years to process and write this all out. I have made some changes in my life for the better I think, and things have a certain new softness to them now, and it’s easier not to get stuck in some ideas or not to be so bothered about them.