I'd been itching for some time to try a larger lsd dose (8 hits, each most likely of a pretty typical strength for the U.S.) than I had in the past and a four-day weekend provided the opportunity.
Most of the trip went beautifully. On a walk in the woods, I experienced some profoundly transcendent moments. I felt as though I embodied a whole universe of pure consciousness, shaped into the particular experience of the trees, snow, rocks, and sky about me. I was thinking a lot about striving to achieve a unity between my thoughts, actions, perceptions, and language and that this unity would be equivalent to allowing the divine to express itself most fully through my being. For quite some time, this unity seemed to be achieved.
At one point, I decided to record some of my thoughts on a tape (I was too far-gone to write). I pushed record and said "hello" several times into the microphone. When I played it back, my hellos sounded like a strange chanting. I noticed a wavering in my voice that took on a linguistic character all its own -- and which was in no way related to the word "hello" or to my intention in saying it. It was as though my voice expressed a vibration that reflected the presence of that core human consciousness I felt very much in-touch with. I hummed/chanted for a while more, giving it a fully expression. It was quite astounding and moving. Later, however, talking to a friend, I felt that same quality of "vibration" manifested in all of my actions -- I could see the pattern manifest in the way I spoke, the things I spoke about, the way I walked from room to room. Suddenly, I felt out-of-control and went to lie down on my bed in an effort to calm myself.
It seemed an increasing amount of "J" was being replaced by this random stream of human consciousnes. The process - which I felt then was divine, yet cruel and terrifying now - seemed to be attempting to dissolve me. I called to my friend, I tried to explain, but it was difficult to speak and to concentrate. There were quite a few moments when I was so absorbed in fighting the dissolution that I remained silent and still for what seemed like long periods of time.
As the dissolution continued, I felt as though my body was becoming posessed by random personalities that flowed in from the stream of core human consciousness. I remember looking at my friend with the consciousness of others, touching him as though he was some remarkable alien thing. The urging toward dissolution become so intense that I was sure that "I" would not return from the trip. I was terrified - I didn't want to die. I thought I was literally losing my mind, and losing it permanently. I managed to express some of this to my friend; he held me while I moaned and cried in the grips of what I was sure was death and madness. Everything around me seemed utterly alien; once, when my friend tried to talk to me, I felt I had lost the ability to understand language.
My friend was eventually able to get through to me, to talk me back to a state of semi-sanity. It took a tremendous amount of will on my part to cling to his words and make sense of the and, as I did so, I felt I was the whole of the universe clawing its way out of darkness and madness toward a divine radiance and sense of health and salvation. This continued for some time; it was utterly exhausting, and I didn't know how long I would be able to bear it. The feeling of dissolution had taken on a physical character - a searing iciness seemed to be taking my body over. My friend continued to reassure me that I'd be okay. Eventually, I began to feel like it. I had made it "to the light", it seemed, and felt a peace return and saturate my being. Concentrating on the light, I was able to manifest it in greater and greater degrees. It seemed I had turned my soul - which was also the soul of the universe - away from drowning in a river of fragments of human consciousness toward something that I could only call the genuinely Divine.
The ego-dissolution continued now, but peacefully. Whatever parts of me left were replaced by that Divinity. Visions of joyously dissolving into the sun and the sky accomanied the experience and there was an unutterable feeling of the infinite and the sacred. I encountered the stream of human consciousness again, but this time I looked on it with what I felt to be the love of God. It was beautiful, touching, precious beyond all description. It had been nearly twelve hours since I'd dosed, and the effects were subsiding. I focused on reshaping my own self/ego in that divine image.
The profound and terrifying ego-loss experience induced by 8 hits of lsd had unanticipated effects. Over the next several months, I became increasingly "religious", perfectly confident that my soul had literally touched the divine. Subsequent lower-dose experiments induced religious and mystical experiences that I would have thought inaccessable at all but the highest doses. While this appeared a positive and fortunate trend at first, the experiences soon became distinctly more serious and somehow "darker." For instance, near Christmas, I experienced a haunting vision of Christ as an enflamed and swollen sun rising above a lifeless desert. I understood the sun as a symbol of Christ's passion and, far from radiating a loving and forgiving warmth, the sun appeared agonized, enraged, harsh, and cruel. Now the sun became a heart and the heart was split down the middle but continued beating, flooding the desert with the blood of Christ's passion. Inasmuch as the blood enriched the soil, making it fertile for life, the heart or Christ was in the unspeakable agony of crucificionand it was this very agony that was the life within the blood. If becoming such a martyr is my spiritual destiny, I thought, I cannot bear it. I panicked, much as I had during my ego-loss experience, losing myself in a blind and icy fear that seemed to pervade my whole being.
After a few more such experiences, I decided to stop using psychedelics for a while. I had, I felt, begun to lose touch with reality to a dangerous degree: I was growing increasingly paranoid and prone to increasingly severe panic attacks, a flood of long-buried memories, some traumatic, some trivial, occured to me on an almost daily basis. I was haunted by strange and disturbing mental imagery (often bloody and violent) that I could make little sense of and that seemed to frequently contain powerful "Jungian" overtones, and I even experienced a few genuine hallucinations - again, usually of rather disturbing content - while completely sober. The situation worsened to the degree that ego-loss - which I interpreted as punishment from God for refusing to become a wandering homeless ascetic - almost always coincided, to some degree, with the panic attacks. As soon as I tried to find "grounding" within myself to help me ride-out the attack, all sense of personal identity would vanish, leaving nothing of me but raw panic and emotional agony. I was convinced I was becoming insane. This whole period culminated in a brief stay in a local mental hospital, I was put on anti-depressant and anti-anxiety medication. Gradually, I started getting better.
That which had the most powerful healing effect, however, was the reading of certain post-Nietzchean philosophers (ie, Martin Heidegger, M. Merleau-Ponty, and Jacques Derrida) to whom I was introduced by a favorite teacher. As I made inroads into understanding some of the writings of these philosophers, I began to understand how the content of so many of my most powerful psychedelic experiences had been determined by certain Western philosophical presuppositions whose validity had been called into question literally centuries ago but which were nevertheless very much alive and influential among those people I'd encountered in various"hippie" or "alternative" subcultures. The capacity which I was developing to move my thinking away from the thinking determined by those presuppositions revealed to me that my entheogenic experiences had been not so much genuine revelations of the divine but rather intensely vivid experiences of both a collective and a personal mythology which had I discovered and developed over the past four or five years - a mythology which, because it was so pervasive among those with whom I associated, I had taken for truth unquestioningly. Realizing that the content of my entheogenic experiences - including the prescriptive "lessons" learned from those experiences -- might have been radically different had my "set and setting" been radically different allowed me to examine that content more rationally; in so doing, its grip on my psyche was loosened.
The healing process is far from over, but I no longer feel that I'm teetering on the brink of insanity at every waking moment - my psyche is gradually reconstructing itself and is thereby regaining a coherence which I had, for a time, lost. Nevertheless, I still struggle at least on occasion with panic and periods of severe depression; flashbacks are not infrequent, and both my physical senses and my emotions frequently seem painfully overstimulated. Most disturbing is that I now often feel unfamiliar and alien to myself - as though much of "who I am" was literally and permanently "erased". At the same time, I think that, if I manage eventually to regain a sense of being grounded within myself, I will have, in that process, 'lived' authentically and fully and to the depth of my being.
In summary, I would urge extreme caution in approaching entheogens for spiritual reasons. One's grasp of reality can slide away right beneath one's nose, without one ever realizing it until it's far too late to recover. Always keep as clear a head as possible -- and if anything threatens that clarity, heed it as a very serious and very dire warning.
JT, American man.
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