Experiences - Death / Rebirth: Experiment with Magick + P. Cubensis

[Heretic.Ape.]

This experiment was carried out several years ago. Labmonkey had been reading Crowley's Magick in Theory and Practice and had been toying with the notion of entheogenic compounds potentiating the mind tricks of magickal operations, thus bringing to fruition in a night what one would otherwise have to build up to over years by standard ceremonial practice.
Monkey had grown a nice bunch of p. cubensis which he had dried out. He made tea with a good number of shrooms. He did not record how much just that it was plenty, he tended to be of the "when in doubt, double the dose" mindset of Mckenna especially since he was planning an introspective journey rather than a "going out" type trip.

Invocation
At night he drank the tea and set out for a short hike through the woods to the top of a hill that overlooked that city he was living in and climbed up to the top of an arboretum at the top. He made up a spontaneous invokation to a made up god (to minimize influencing the trip by any particular religious paradigm), asking the god to touch his third eye that he might see the light, or something to that effect. Nothing very meaningful to monkey as he hadn't at this point read much about the third eye or such--it just sounded like good stage setting to him, with enough verbosity and mystery to create open conditions for something interesting to manifest in his mind.

Going up
As he headed down the hill the mushrooms really began to take hold and by the time he was wandering through the alley behind where he lived he was feeling pretty overwhelmed and was glad he made it home, especially after a paranoid moment while passing some police officers. Once in his small abode he took up residence in the bathroom for a while feeling nausous but didn't puke. As his stomach settled he retired to his bedroom with the lights off laying in bed with the blankets over his head to create a comfortable feeling and obtain a degree of sensory deprivation.

Dying
This is about when the fear kicked in. He was really tripping and not feeling well at all when he started thinking about the black stuff that had been on his mushrooms when he harvested them the other day. He hadn't thought much of it before as it wiped right off and he had cleaned and made tea with them. But now he was thinking "oh my god, it must have been some horrible growth! I've poisoned myself!" So now he was thinking he might be dying, laying there in bed all messed up on mushrooms--wouldn't that be lame! His poor roomates would come in and find him dead and probably be traumatized. His poor mother would hear her son had died eating "drugs".
Well, as he layed there thinking about what a drag it was that he was dying like this these shadowy creatures came to him through the wall by his bed which had dissolved into some type of portal or something. They were saying something along the lines of "don't worry, let go of your life and follow us" telepathically. So he went with them.

The other side
So he drifted out of his body and through the portal following these things. This, he says, is a little hazy. He remembers passing through what he described as the dream realm where he could see all of his dreams stretching out around him in multidimensional experiential constelations and realized this is where he had spent all of his time while dreaming while alive and sleeping.
After passing through this area he came to a bright ocean of jewels under a beautiful blue sky, with islands floating above the water all around like some surrealist painting made out of jewels.
As he drifted out into the ocean he looked up and the sky broke open like film breaking at a movie and a bright white light poured down consuming everything into itself…

Union
And everything was infinite and eternal bliss. He realized that he had never understood any of those words until that moment, thinking that eternal was a lot of time when in fact it was outside of time, that infinite was a lot while it was both outside of quantity and the completion of all. Every cell of his body and being screamed out in rapture like an orgasm that a god might have on a lucky day. It was the most intense, amazing, beautiful experience that damned monkey has ever had.
As he came slightly back into himself he found he had tears in his eyes and was saying “I am the light” over and over.

Coming down
He laid in bed for a while, he doesn’t know how long, basking in the afterglow like someone who’s just had the best lay of their life. An interesting thing did happen as he lay there. He heard that his roommates were out in the living room watching the tube and eating. The thought drifted through his mind “now so and so is going to get up, walk over to the kitchen, was his bowl and come in to see how I’m doing”. About five seconds later it happened. Minor, but trippy because a year later monkey had a much more pronounced experience with being told what would happen in the future but monkey doesn’t want to go into that because he probably sounds kooky enough already.

Conclusion
Overall it was an amazing experience for the psychonautic monkey, one he will never forget, and he hopes to carry out similar research in the future when conditions allow.
He has found many parallels to his experience since then among various mystical tradition (which he became rather obsessed with studying after this) and has seen mandalas and such that he saw during the trip. He is now an agnostic rather than an atheist because, while it can probably be explained by brain chemistry and neuropsychology, it has left an indelible mark on his suspicions about spirit, afterlife, et cetera.

Reputation Comments on this post:

	Great report
	nice trip report. I like how you divided it into short, digestible chapters, though the report was a bit short on the w...
	Very moving DMT post
	Ha, lucky monkey, incredible experience, good reporting. Thanks for sharing.
	Endlessly interesting.

[wellhelm]

Swim had a similar experience with infinity on salvia(its somewhere round here). It was a feeling of IS at its simplest. Swim can not explain it better. Past, present, and future being relative. The moment was consistent and forever and awesome. An eternal moment concious of itself? Existing, neither good or bad. Anyway, its one swim would most likely freak if reached again but thank allah, peace be upon him, he did not that time.

[Beltane]

Funny, SWIM had what he can only guess to be a somewhat similar experience of eternity when he smoked DMT. The difference as far as he can tell is that for that brief period of world time, SWIM was disconnected with what he sometimes describes as absolutely everything there is, was or would evey be. That said, he does remember some kind of visuals, but his words and language, even the concept of language itself was lost to him. How can you think if you don't know any words? Even animals must have a simple vocabulary like food, hunger, danger, etc. SWIM had nothing.

As he drifted back to this plane, the first words that came to him were delivered by some female-guardian-type entity. As his langauge began to return to him he immediately started to look for words to describe or explain to himself what was happening. That's when the guardian spoke gently and reassuringly, almost whispering the only thing she would say to me; I remember is exactly. "This is something else,' she lovingly conveyed.

The next thought was that everything would be OK so long as I was beathing. So I attempted to draw breath, but the concept of body had yet to return so SWIM had literally no access to the controls necessary to make that happen deliberately. SWIM's sitter said he breathing was deep and calm throughout.

Overall the experience was totally overwhelming. In describing it since then SWIM has referred to DMT as getting hit over the head with a velvet sledge hammer.

Funny too, SWIM was at a kind of monestary two summers ago in New Mexico. He went into Taos and saw that book 'DMT: The Spirit Molecule' signed by the author, but he didn't buy it as his spiritual plate was already pretty full at the time.

Great post.

- Beltane