Together: Where all things are strongest
Trip report: Psilocybin Mushrooms 2.5g (dried)
Trip Report:
Substance: Psilocybin Mushrooms
Dosage: 2.5 grams (dried)
Environment: Secluded Cabin in the Mountains
Introduction:
I tend to be an advocate of the notion that dosage does not exclusively determine the intensity or significance of an experience, so much as environment, mentality, and methodology. Many psychonauts tend to take the Tim Taylor approach to psychedelics, which suggests that for one to have a truly significant experience, one only need add more power to the equation.
My observations differ.
It is not only viable, but often practical to operate at lower doses, by placing oneself in a proper position of reception for whatever message or divination the mushroom has to offer. This is of course not to say that dosage doesn’t matter at all, for there are thresholds that higher doses breach which are otherwise unreachable via the lower ones. Nonetheless, experiences of intense visionary significance are still more than accessible at lower doses. Afterall, one does not learn to swim in a tsunami.
I usually don’t share experiences this fresh. But because of the recent transition of the new Gregorian year, and its correlating significance still lingering in the zeitgeist, I felt it necessary to put this one out there.
This trip occurred at a secluded cabin property nestled quietly at the edge of a valley within the labyrinth of the Kiamichi Mountains on December 31st. A Garden of Eden with streams trickling, a camp fire crackling, birds crooning, coyotes howling, and in between it all: a total and ineffable silence. A place I hold sacred in my heart. A place I have tripped before.
The Trip
My spouse Scub and I dosed shortly after 2pm, while the sun still warmed the air, our skin, and the spongy and mossy ground. I found a stone perfect for sitting at the crest of the mountain, looking out over a tree lined valley, cradling the whispering rushes of a cheerful creek bed. I let my bare feet rest softly atop the vibrantly soft green moss that covered the area around me. My skin and toes began to feel like they were conjoining with the moss; rooting into it, and connecting my physical body to the vast network of a life sustaining energy that permeated throughout the environment.
I conducted a series of meditative breathing techniques while a profusion of vibratory energies coursed through me. Initially from below via my feet, ascending through my body and reaching out and above my head; a funnel of light expanding from my mind, whilst my body dwelled at the epicenter of what was above, and what was below; a median between dichotomies.
My eyes closed, and there came a variety of symbols, all of which expressed the balance of opposites, to one degree or another.
Two serpents swam together in circles within the blackness behind my eyelids, spinning into a wheel and entangling with one another until the head of each nestled into the body of the other; a yin-yang.
The world-renowned symbol melted into a thin horizontal line made of a bronzed gold, from which two trees sprouted, one reaching upwards, the other stretching downward, identical to its counterpart.
A ring formed around the Yggdrasil, and the growth disappeared, leaving behind an empty golden circle. Vibrations pulsed through my body at high frequencies as I produced an unconscious hum from within my chest. The rim of the empty circle shook before blossoming like a flower into a mandalic figure of shifting color and metamorphic numinous geometry. Staring back at me from the center of the monolithic manifestation was a singular eye glowing with a bright color I can only analogously describe as an uncanny fire, perceiving both everything and nothing simultaneously.
I opened my eyes and found myself surrounded by a group of familiar and friendly faces: Twelve trees making up the rear perimeter of the cabin’s property, resting peacefully on the crest of the mountainside overlooking the valley below. Their faces were manifested by the silhouetted shapes of their branches, or unique the formations of the bark on their trunks. I sat amongst them, bantering with them about my adventures and workings of the past year while they spoke in a slow language of images and memories. I walked amongst them, placing my forehead against the trunk of each one, where I witnessed each of their respective stories.
Trees perceive the world far differently from us. Their reception for stimuli subsisting to a much greater degree than our own; feeling everything all at once; suspended in limbo between time and matter, fully self-aware, yet fully content in a cosmic balancing act of consuming whilst being consumed. Striving equally for the fiery light in the heavens above, and the earthen darkness below. A consensus I discovered amongst all of them, was that prospering in such an existence was only possible via a collective of togetherness. I gained the impression this was the reason they preferred to live in large communities. Following this thought, I mused for a moment about how similar humans are in that respect.
I found one tree particularly inspiring. Not a large robust tree, but a tireless youth with a lighter voice than all the others. He was both proud and foolish, but strong and duty-bound to stand tall where others might fall. I gave him my hat.
Scub had a fire cooking, and the scent of lingering smoke inspired my desire for a cigarette.
I smoked while sitting on another mossy rock, just at the edge of the mountain overlooking the valley. The sun was getting low, but there was still more than enough light to see everything. Through a cloud of smoke emanating from my mouth, there illuminated a wall of entities laid over the tree line across the creek from my position. Sometimes the wall would glow brightly, almost as if the images were burning themselves into my mind, only to soon fade away into a thinly transparent and barely visible veil. This cycled back and forth while I worked myself into another mantric hum until the brightness of the wall remained intact, and became more clear; primed for my studious gaze. Within it I could see distinguished patterns of character and personality, each of whom were but fragments of the greater whole; a wall of deified being. One face in particular stood out from deep within the rest: A tiny face nestled inconspicuously amongst a gathering of elvish two-dimensional giants. Its right eye stared back at me, glowing with a familiar fiery orange. I was reminded of the mandala from earlier and I could not escape the notion that I was looking back at myself from that mirrored position; its right eye plunging deep into the gaze of my left, beckoning the ever ponderous questions I find myself asking on nearly every mushroom trip,
“Who are you?” and “Who am I?”
I returned to the fire and found a stick to poke it with. I placed its tip in the maw of the inferno letting it cook to a glowing ember. I gazed at the short piece of timber as a blaze swept around it, consuming it whilst it sang a high-pitched song of dashing steam whistling forth a celestial tune amongst its brothers and sisters in flame; a harmonious orchestra of fire and earth.
I turned my gaze upward, out at the darkening wilderness, where light still crept over the tops of the tallest trees. A Gaia’en figure lay amongst the mountain range in the distance. I thought of my stick in the fire, how I plucked it from the maw of nature, and placed it into the maw of light. How similar the two were, despite their wholly opposition. How fast one consumes so little. How slow the other consumes so much. How one leaps rapidly into the sky with a devilish desire to touch the heavens. How the other stoically pulls all things into the depths of the earth.
I removed my poking stick from the flames and watched as it burned with a twinkling light. I blew out the residual flame and watched the embers illuminate a whole new world of energy, confined to a tiny space. I torched the stick again in the maw, and soon pulled it back out, letting the smaller flames whimper at its tip. Like a pen, I drew on the stones surrounding the burn pit with my flaming stick, the eyes of a hawk, a fish, a serpent, and a man, dipping my stick back into the flame like one would a quill in ink between each drawing. I coupled these symbols with runic hieroglyphs, many of which I could not see well in the shadowy darkness now looming in the night’s sky, and rather allowed the stick guide my arm. As the fire burned down to little more than a glowing mouth of light, I placed my new wooden symbol-creating pen in its entirety atop the scorching mound. New bright flames engulfed and swallowed my offering whilst I watched on with ceremonial vigilance until my pen was no longer discernible from the rest of the glowing coals.
Scub and I walked barefoot to a nearby pond atop the mountain. A blissful haven with a silence hushed by the whispers in the breeze. The sun was setting into a bright pink sky behind black pyres of silhouetted trees in the distance. The pond reflected the sky’s image in an eerie upside down version of its opposite; black roots reaching downward towards a pink luscious soil, wherein crept below a darkness filled with wispy shapes. The night’s sky behind us slowly swept over the light, just as the moon began to show her face on the glassy surface of the pond, whilst Scub and I coveted nature in all her beauty, together, where all things are strongest.
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