Thanks to everyone who has responded on this thread! I'm really excited about this reaction to be honest, and I really want to say something about everything anyone has said thus far, but I don't want to bogart the thread with wordy responses (this is going to be one anyway, though).
First off, the Huxley recommendation is perfect. My personal choices would be
The Doors of Perception, which is an account of his first psychedelic experience, when Humphrey Osmond dosed him with mescaline. it's extremely well-written and provides a good insight into a lot of the implications of taking a psychedelic and what exactly psychedelics actually do to your head. His follow-up,
Heaven and Hell, is also very good.
However, if you want to know what Aldous Huxley is really trying to say about psychedelics, read
Island, the last book he wrote before he died (tripping, at that ... he asked his wife to give him acid as he died). In fact, read
Island anyway. It's his utopian novel (in contrast to
Brave New World), and part of the utopia that he envisions is that the use of mushrooms is a religious tradition and used as a rite of passage, as well as medicine in adult life. It gives a pretty fantastic perspective on spiritual psychedelic use, as well as spirituality in general. I count it as one of my inspirations, I guess (you know, now that I've actually had one of the experiences that he's trying to write about).
Speaking of which, I haven't actually explained what happened that made me start this thread. Without further ado I should do that. This is going to be long, but someone's already favorably compared this to literature, so I feel a good bit better about writing this much at once now.
So on Tuesday evening, my friend (who I'll refer to as A) brewed tea with some mushrooms he had grown and dried, which as I've explained were exceptionally small and potent (we used 88 individual mushrooms, which amounted to a measly 4.5 grams ... to compare, a single
Psilocybe cubensis is capable of reaching this weight). He brewed herbal tea, poured it hot (but not boiling) into a teapot with the ground mushroom matter, insulated the teapot to keep it hot, and let it steep for an hour. We then split the teapot, adding honey and lemon juice to taste (and, in the case of lemon juice, to potentiate the trip ... lemon juice speeds up the breakdown of psilocybin into psilocin, which is a faster-acting and more visual chemical). We each smoked a small joint as we drank our mugs of tea, and I remember mentioning that this was how I used to imagine that I would do drugs "when I grew up" (that is to say, with home-grown psychedelics, at a trusted friend's place, in a private rural setting that allows me the freedom to explore any topic at all in my life without worrying about causing disruption to it, etc.) We started drinking at 6:45 or so.
The tea was incredibly fast-acting and I began to feel it come on 10 minutes after I started drinking it, before I even finished. By the time I finished the mug, after 15-20 minutes of sipping, smoking, and chatting with A about our upcoming trip, I was already coming up quite strongly, and I was getting pretty significant visual effects within a half hour (this usually takes 50-80 minutes in my experience, and sometimes not even then). We decided that we wanted to see the sunset, so we climbed a tree. We ended up admiring the tree itself more than the view. After a half hour or so (our perception of time was rapidly deteriorating) we climbed down and hung out with the miniature horses who live on his land (they are about 4 feet tall and pretty amazing).
The trip was getting intense enough at this point that I was beginning to find myself getting a bit disoriented, so I decided to lie down in the grass, close my eyes, and admire the closed-eye visuals. After a very short time, the visuals reached unprecedented intensity and started to become full-fledged visions. The shifting patterns started to resolve themselves into humanoid figures and architectural landscapes that resembled M.C. Escher landscapes made out of colorful fractals. I started to lose the feeling that I was a body lying down in a grassy field, but as I started to drift away from body-awareness, the humanoid entites turned towards me as one and began to focus their attention towards me.
(Note: this is the second time I've had an experience like this, the first was my second DMT trip. The experience of encountering strange entities in particularly strong trips, specifically with DMT but to a lesser extent with mushrooms and salvia as well, is also not unique to me, and terms such as "self-transforming machine elves" have been coined to talk about them. They seem to be a recurring presence in many people's trips and a variety of strange theories have been produced to explain this phenomenon ... they all sound completely crazy, of course, but then again, they're trying to describe
strange entities that consistently appear to people who are under the influence of powerful psychedelics. People who have seen them will know what each other are talking about.)
Now, since I'd encountered weird drug aliens before, and there was no comedown in sight the way there is in a 5-minute DMT trip, I got excited and started to pay a lot of attention to these beings. However, they began to exert a great deal of pressure on my head, and it felt as if they were trying to pull it apart. It was rather unpleasant, and I opened my eyes to get my bearings. I closed my eyes again upon realizing that the outside world was of absolutely no interest to me at this point, and for the next 15 minutes I would see the entities any time that I had my eyes closed, and they would only get more insistent in their attempts to deconstruct me.
I was getting a little uncomfortable, so I sat up and started to meditate in the hopes that I could ignore them. I began to see them as demons trying to disturb my meditations, rather than curious gnomes to try to interact with, and as soon as I started to adapt a "leave me alone" approach to their existence, they began to melt back into the flowing kaleidoscope background and become less defined and eventually dissolve altogether. At this point I think it's important to explain the shift in consciousness that I'd made. While it might not seem obvious that lying down and watching visual hallucinations, and sitting up and meditating inside a visual hallucination, are especially different from each other, they're actually in a way opposite from each other. When I was lying down, trying to drift away from my body and play with the machine elves, I was holding myself as separate from the visions I was experiencing. I was still considering myself to be a subjective observer, witnessing a phenomenon that was separate from myself, "happening to me." During my sitting meditation, I was instead trying to expand/constrict my awareness in such a way as to eliminate the subject/object, observer/observed distinction. I think that when I made the shift from the former to the latter, either the elves realized that I'd gotten the message and figured they had better things to do (or their work was done), or I realized that they had never been real in the first place. At the moment I'm not sure if there's a difference.
This experience lasted overall about half an hour, I suspect (I don't know for sure). It was the peak of the trip, of course, and the description I just gave doesn't really do any kind of reasonable justice to the vibrancy of these visions. In any case, I started to get cold as I meditated, and I was getting a little antsy with the power level of my internal experiences, so I decided to go back indoors so I could figure things out in more detail. Me and A went back into his house a little after 8. At 8:30, as we were sitting in his living room, each tripping a bit too hard to have coherent conversation (and therefore abstaining), the funniest and most absurd thing that has ever happened in my life happened.
His TV, as programmed by his TiVo (I believe), spontaneously turned on, and immediately a commercial for the show "The Moment of Truth" aired. For those who aren't familiar with it, "The Moment of Truth" is a game show in which contestants answer extremely personal questions while hooked up to a lie-detector test in front of a studio audience, and also in front of the very people in their lives who are most likely to be upset at the answers (
a link about it, it's pretty bad). And lo and behold, the first thing the TV says is "Have you ever felt a sexual attraction towards your friend Joe?" and it slams "THE MOMENT OF TRUTH" onto the screen with a bunch of big sound effects. And Joe's my name. So basically me and my friend took a shitload of strong mushrooms and then the TV turned on without warning, proclaimed it to be "the moment of truth," and asked him if he had ever wanted to have sex with me. The level of absurdity was almost too much to take, and to be honest we didn't say more than 3 or 4 sentences to each other for the rest of the night. Awkward? Well, not really.
The 3 or 4 hours that we spent saying nothing to each other after we turned off the TV were actually incredibly glowing experiences for both of us. For my part, I was enjoying the full effect of the meditative state I'd reached earlier that evening. I was supremely physically relaxed. I felt very strongly as if there had been a constant level of tension throughout my entire body, and I had only just then allowed it to ease and relax. It actually felt like a high MDMA dose, in that my body, and all my senses, felt exquisitely sensitive. I was absolutely wide open to the world in every way, perceiving everything with a level of vibrancy and clarity that was unprecedented in my life. Furthermore, this physically relaxation and sensitivity corresponded perfectly to an emotional relaxation and sensitivity such that I no longer even understood what it meant to be upset, angry, or fearful. These emotional responses seemed to me to be self-evidently complete wastes of emotional energy in pursuit of flawed and illusory ideals that distort and cheapen reality. I have never felt anything even remotely as peaceful as this mind/body state of absolute relaxation and serenity. I knew that, for as long as I was in this state (which felt very much like it would persist beyond the drug's influence, which I'm happy to say it has to some extent), I couldn't possibly feel fear of death, anger, spite, malice, or jealousy. I was as emotionally secure/flexible (they come hand in hand) as I have ever been.
Just to top the whole thing off, my physical relaxation and emotional relaxation could join together if I paid attention to them the right way, resulting in waves of ecstasy the likes of which I haven't experienced in the best sex I've ever had (which is saying a LOT), nor in the most powerful trip experiences I've ever undergone. It felt like I was dissolving into an infinite field of pure good, there's no other way to put it. It was so impossibly pleasurable and fulfilling that I feel absolutely secure and safe saying that, if the entire world knew that such an experience was possible, and understood what was necessary to reach it, world peace would be instantaneous and effortless.
I had a lot of really interesting thoughts over the course of the evening after the incident with the TV, and I probably actually could write a small book about what I thought about during those few hours. But the important thing is that the trip plateau was characterized by feelings of tranquility, good will, and well-being that were so deep and clear that I believe they could only have arisen from a genuine change in the fundamental beliefs I have about the world, or perhaps they *constituted* such a change ... all I know is that the amount of respect I have just gained for reality as a whole has just increased immeasurably, and the attitude I am inclined to take towards the world right now feels more healthy and supportive than it has ever been. I feel as if I've had a direct experience of what reality is at its core, and it is infinite, unified, and perfect.
It was pretty intense! I think people might understand now why I thought this was worth a thread.
(Also, Tania and Scandinavian War Machine (whose name I forget, so sorry), thank you! I appreciate that a lot. I like you guys a lot too!)