The secret of life is to “die before you die” — and find that there is no death.
— Eckhart Tolle
I was 17, depressed and abusing drugs when I had my first psychedelic experience.
Back then I mostly focused on getting high. Whether through drugs, extreme sports, breath manipulation, taking risks, getting in danger, riding any edge, I consistently wanted to feel more. Life was boring. People sucked. I sucked. Everything sucked.
Except getting high. Getting high was awesome.
Seeing life as a meaningless rat race I didn’t want to participate in, I sought out experiences that could remind me there was more to life than what was presented.
The thought of living a socially prescribed life depressed me. Going to school, working a 9 to 5, raising a family, working more, old age, and finally, a welcomed death, wasn’t a life worth living. Buying a house to leave it vacant so I could get to a job to pay for the vacant house? Absurd. Nothing made sense, life had no meaning and I didn’t see any point in living my life. I often thought about killing myself.
But one day I tried psychedelics and died. Fortunately I didn’t biologically die, just psychospiritually. Yet, it felt real. I fully thought I was dying until I was reborn.
Leaving the Familiar World
As a kid and throughout my adolescence, I would experience moments of intense derealization, where I felt like an alien on a strange planet. I would be sitting in class or at the dinner table with family when suddenly, a deep and weird discomfort arose.
I soon got accustomed to occasional bouts of momentary weirdness which made me feel lost, misplaced and confused. I would feel completely out of place. I wasn’t sure how to communicate the experience, so I mostly kept it to myself.
Soon enough, at the ripe age of 9, I got slapped with the label of ADHD and was sold a daily prescription of amphetamine based pharmaceutical drugs so I could sit still and be tolerated by teachers. The teachers bored me into eventual abuse of the drugs I was prescribed. Of course, as I began taking and later abusing the “medication” I was given, my spirit quickly dulled. A year into swallowing the pills everyday with breakfast, my imagination faded and emotions flattened, my sleep suffered and appetite dwindled. Awe for life began to vanish.
I lost touch with my self. I was being squished into shape by a world I didn’t fit into.
A few years into taking the amphetamine based pharmaceuticals drugs as prescribed, I got into drugs and began crushing the pills, snorting them and feeling temporary glimpses of euphoria in the solitude of a school’s bathroom stall.
A young teenager, I couldn’t get behind a culture which I felt encouraged unnatural ways of life. The lack of relationship and connection to nature, the emptiness of infinite economic growth and consumerism. The seeming obsession with domination, achievement, competition, labour, and material possession felt wrong and diseased.
I felt like I was living in a broken world, and I was broken because of it.
As far as I could tell, society was to be avoided and Nature was to be cherished. Henry David’s Walden’s Pond became a source of inspiration. I fantasized an escape from society, a life alone in the woods. I dreamed of being a vagabond, a hermit.
Through the years, my inability to do as I was told at home or at school led to the planting and watering of a seed. The seed of resentment grew into a tree of rage which I couldn’t properly express and process. Still a nascent teenager, I'd regularly sit by my bedroom window, dreaming of the rush of falling to my death, imagining the chaos that would follow. That would show them, I thought, as I plotted my escape from a senseless, sad, painful and spiritless world.
Fortunately, I couldn’t do it. I was too scared, and a small part of me still felt love so I couldn’t leave it so early. That repressed part knew there was more to life. Memories of childhood wonder, awe and love maintained embers of hope as I worked through tedious growing pains in a world I didn’t belong in.
Soon enough, curiosity killed the cat. Experimentation and abuse of drugs led to mushrooms and LSD, which led to a spiritual awakening through a death and rebirth.
Meeting the Teacher
I was alone in the silent darkness of my bedroom for my first mushroom trip.
I wasn’t following McKenna’s popular instructions because I had never heard of him and I simply forgot to put on music. I laid in bed, alone in black silence while waiting for the mushrooms to kick in. I didn’t know what to expect as I hadn’t read anything about psychedelics other than Steve Jobs’ raving review and a vague idea of what to do because of the gentle old man who sold me LSD and mushrooms at the park. He told me to respect the mushrooms and listen to them attentively. So that’s what I did.
The experience moved quickly, almost as soon as moving geometric shapes of various colours appeared on the black canvas of mind, my ego began to dissolve without a fight. The gentle death of my ego led to a state of complete egolessness and the most profound peace. Layers upon layers of my constructed self slipping away into eternity, until there weren’t any more layers to go and I became eternity.
Much too exciting for my unprepared mind, an infinitely distant fragment of self recognized infinite cosmic consciousness. My ego came back to life almost as soon as it died, leaving me with a strong desire for more. Yet, ecstatic by what just happened, I turned on my bedside lamp to find a whole new world.
Total awe. Everything brand new, witnessed for the first time. All things shining, glimmering with ecstatic appreciation for its own existence. The pencil wasn’t just a pencil. It was energy that temporarily took the form of what we call a pencil. My reflection in the mirror wasn’t just me, but eternal spirit, one with the pencil and everything else. The world was an infinite array of sacred relationships and interconnections, and I was a part of that. I was that.
Unity, oneness, wholeness.
I laughed. I cried. I crawled around my bedroom inspecting items like a newborn until the thought of recording everything crossed my mind. I took out my notebook and wrote furiously over the remainder of the mushroom trip…
I know a lot less than I think.
These are temples, cathedrals and jungles.
You’re learning deeper feelings. Think less and feel more.
Holy shit. It’s all about love. I get it now. It all comes down to one thing, love.
Money and love, but more love.
This is the holiest shit I’ve ever experienced.
Life is your mind. It’s all your mind.
I can’t believe this is illegal, the world is fucked.
I rediscovered spirit and found radical healing in psychedelics, but I couldn’t tell a soul about it. It was 2015, I was 17 and the psychedelic renaissance wasn’t where it is now.
The divine mystery which I realized through illegal drugs was taboo. When I gathered the courage to communicate the spiritual awakening I experienced through scheduled drugs, it quickly backfired because I was taking illegal drugs to commune with God.
As the ancient intelligent fungi teachers helped me rediscover and reconnect to the spiritual being I am, I began to experience true self-love and self-acceptance for the first time since I began hating everything, including myself. I was awakening, healing, learning and growing in the most meaningful ways. I had found the alchemical gold.
Nature became the spiritual teacher I was seeking. After my first psychedelic journey, the embers of hope reignited a fire within. Life was re-imbued with true significance.
The Descent
As my young spiritual ego was fed by ecstatic experiences of mystical oneness which I had no real way of integrating or making sense of, I soon ventured too far.
Just like my favourite co-pilot, Ram Dass, LSD became my substance of choice. As I increased my dosage from one trip to the next, feeling a growing and deepening trust and confidence in the substance and my capacity to have a pleasant and safe experience, I eventually opened doors I wasn’t ready for.
Part 2 is coming soon…
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