Last Sunday's post was one I've been working on for a while. I cut about 800 words off of it as I was coming up on my trip that day. When I said "posting for posterity, BRB" I meant that I needed something to read after I came back to see if I came back the same. A reference point. I expected change, but didn't know how.
For about fifteen years, I had been preparing for last week's trip. In some way or another, I knew hallucinogens would be part of my life. I didn't know when or how until the last month or so. I'd found out through talking and reading that a natural plant-based option would be best for sure. Not MDMA, LSD, or the like. Those had a reputation as being more violent on account of their synthetic processed nature. Like the way fentanyl is to opium. Or gasoline to crude oil. With that resolved, I set about taking in all the information I could on plant based entheogens.
The obvious choice is psiloscibe mushrooms, so I looked into growing some and was largely convinced against it. I remembered salvia divinorum from when I was a kid and a recreational pothead, but the 20-minute highly visual trip seemed shallow for the work I needed to do. About a month ago I harvested four or five pods of datura seeds out of convenience when I came across some plants in a public landscaping arrangement. After looking into datura, I concluded that the strong sedative and disassociative properties would not be much help for what I needed. Nature gives a lot of options.
When talking with a friend in my men's group about datura, he also recommended against the highly disassociative plant for a first trip, and had me look into Hawaiian baby woodrose. It's a similar plant to morning glories and, like morning glories, has an active entheogen in it's seeds called lysergic acid amide (LSA). LSA is a gentler natural analog to LSD (lysergic acid dimethylamide, if memory serves). We made a trade of datura seeds for HBW seeds, and I started reading. Even if I didn't use them, I still want to grow them.
Saturday night, I used some pliers and my fingers to smash and powder thirteen seeds. The compound is much more concentrated in baby woodrose than in morning glories, which would have taken over a hundred seeds. After powdering, I added lemon juice and water, about 10 mL and 200 mL respectively. It smelled a little bit like weed. I shook it vigorously every few minutes for the first hour or so while Melissa and I watched Outlander together, then put the jar in the fridge to decoct for 8-12 hours so it would be ready Sunday morning. Sunday morning, I strained out the seed matter which causes nausea and divided the infusion in half, then in quarters, and took two of the quarters with instructions to take more later based on how I felt.
I had a lot of things I wanted to address if the medicine helped. I'm not usually good at introspection, and I've been slipping in my duties as a man lately. Depression, inattentiveness, laziness, gluttony, hedonism, and addiction had all played on each other for a while in my life and affected my effectiveness as husband, father, and provider for my family.
There's a lot of things about our culture that it's easy to see have gone very wrong. The way we eat, sleep, work, travel, and speak are an easy few. I believe some others are the way we recreate, meditate, and pray. For thousands of years, people have looked to nature as a guide to God. His creation shows His handiwork, no? For a few hundred years, someone out there has decided to literally declare war on parts of creation that people have enjoyed and benefitted from for millennia. They wage war to control our consciousness.
Mantis on a mulberry tree
About two hours after taking the first half of my decoction, I was feeling good. My body was warm and tingly, almost like a heavy buzz before you are ready to officially declare yourself sufficiently drunk. But my mind wasn't fuzzy, and rather than seeing a blurry double, everything was sharp. I talked outside with Melissa about trees and water and wind and clouds. I sat in my lawn chair and walked in the garden, observing. Watching the water flow up the trees from the roots to the leaves and into the air as they danced in the wind. I drank another quarter of my decoction and went out to lay in the dappled sunshine. I don't know how long I was there, or how long I was anywhere in this process. I largely just went between laying on my bed, my bedroom floor, or the back porch. Sometimes I was there for what felt like a few minutes that turned out to be an hour, and vice versa. Total time from first dose to what I'm considering the start of the afterglow was eleven hours.
I was in contact via text with a couple of friends and my wife, Melissa, who was very apprehensive about it all. One reason I wanted to stay in contact was to have a log and a time table to look back on. My first dose was at 0845. At noon I was in the garden looking at bugs and throwing my tomahawk. I was pondering my own purpose in nature, and I was pondering language. God made language at Babel, after man rebelled and refused to spread across the land to tend it as he was made to do. God scattered their language and they understood that there were other places to go to, and man set out to go to the place that matched the words he was given.
Japan beetle
Cicada. I found a few of these guys freshly molted.
Japan beetle. In what seemed a fitting ritual at the time, I ate his head and discarded his body.
Three hours into the trip, I was peaking. I texted my friend "is this the part where I lose consciousness? I've been resisting it here and there but I feel like I need to go inward now." I went to lay in my bed. I prayed to God and allowed myself to slip inward a bit, coming out often to ensure that I was breathing and wasn't walking around in the road or doing other dangerous things. I didn't know what to expect. I found the way to come out and check was to simply open my eyes. Reality was there still, with just a sharpness to my vision and a sensation of weightlessness, I could leave the fractals, thoughts, and roaring sounds. I was praying in humility and establishing trust in what was about to happen. When I was satisfied in my safety, commitment, and resolve, I went in. There was work to do.
After another hour in, I drank the last of the decoction. While I was in the trip, I did a lot of breathwork. Filling my lungs til I thought they would pop, then slowly humming, teeth together to amplify the vibration, while I emptied them and held the empty breath til I thought my heart would stop. I was rewiring my breathing. We don't breathe right as a culture; we breathe in our chest, shallowly, instead of deeply in our bellies. I did round after round of Wim Hof breathing. In the mirror, I would look and ask what man I needed to be. What work I needed to do. What parts of me needed pruned and what parts needed tended. With my vision sharp I didn't see imperfections in my skin or body. I saw what should be and what to work towards. Between dives I would visit the mirror to determine the next topic to meditate on.
I came to a big conclusion that I've been living my life in gluttonous excess. Too much sex (never thought there was such a thing). Too much food. Too much social media. It has been making me fat, lazy, detached, and depressed. Each issue was a meditation session, and at each turn came the same solution:
your depression is because you've strayed from God's purpose for you.
In some way, at the root of every issue was that one fact. God didn't make Instagram for comparing lives and possessions with others. God didn't make porn to satisfy false desires. God didn't make food to overeat. God didn't make convenience to encourage laziness. My abuse of the excesses in my life was leading me away from a life of grateful abundance. God didn't make excess. He made abundance. And I, as men often do, was abusing the abundance.
After resolving those (and many more) issues and meditating on them as they needed, I laid down in my bed again. Melissa said I was snoring when she got home, but I wasn't asleep. After the work had been done, I relaxed to observe the visual effects of the medicine. During meditation I was focusing inward on repair and development, not on the fractals and images I saw. I knew there were visuals, but the work I set out to do took priority. I can't rightly describe what I saw, but I think it was a blanket, intricately woven with the thread of individual choices into what I concluded was the collective subconscious that I've thought about before. Where there were people living right, the fractal patterns were beautiful and orderly. Where they weren't, the image was distorted, wrinkled, and disharmonious.
It's a week later now, and I'm still processing things a bit. In the immediate afterglow, I was able to speak with Melissa more openly about some of the things I worked on and discovered. She still doesn't condone drug use, but I think I'm showing her that it can be productive if used mindfully. My mind seems to have decluttered significantly. My work has benefitted, and I've gotten multiple comments from my supervisors this week about my efficiency. My self image has improved, as has my resolve to improve myself. While I'm not a fat piece of shit like I've often joked, I'm not what I need to be, and I'm more resolved now about bettering myself. Melissa and I have started a family night with the kids every night before bed. I deleted my Facebook and Instagram apps and haven't missed them near as much as I thought I would. Porn hasn't crossed my mind except in a clinical sense to speak of it here. I've had an easy time leaving the phone in my room or wherever else (also leading me to lose it for a bit lol). I've been much less annoyed by the kids and enjoyed spending time with them more. Overall, I'd call this a very successful and insightful experience.
In all of the statements that I wrote in my post last week, one stood out in my trip above everything.
Get Right with God.
That's what I'll be focusing on moving forward because it is very broad in it's application, and everything else will lign up behind that. Immediately, I'm working with my men's group to establish a deeper community bond. I'm working in the garden as intended to fulfil my intended purpose here. I've signed up for a free permaculture class with a renewed resolve on that front.
I expected things to change, but I didn't know how. I don't think the changes could have been any better in any way.
This will be the first of a few other posts expounding on some base thoughts I've been having. Both in my trip a week ago, and before that experience. All having something to do with that post a week ago. I realize it was a bit cryptic and seems random without explanation. While I was trying to make the explanation in that same post, the situation has dictated that I make multiple posts. I like that idea better anyways.
Thanks for reading, I hope it was beneficial to you in some way. :)
Love from Texas,
Nate 💚
A stunningly beautiful post, Nate. I was lost in your garden for a while there, thinking of cicadas and the sunlight. I admire how you chose this experience very purposefully as a way to meditate on the problems you see in your life - in our lives - with the intention of recieving an answer. When you start being down on yourself for who you are, it's time to do the work, right? Though I don't subscribe to your God, the divinity in all things suggests abundance, but not the taking of it to the excessive quantities that we do. That's man's inherent problem. I'm so glad you have found a kind of balance in your life. Thanks so much for sharing this with us. I can feel your ease seeping through. Much lotus love.
It's cool to me how universal that principle of "get right with God" can be. There's no God that will be against nature. So if you don't subscribe, like you said, to the judeo-christian God, there's still room to get right by your own ethical code.
As for the right time to seek these kinds of insights, I can't say yet. I'd been down with these issues for a while. I read into a lot of things going on and ascribed some sort of divine intent:
I think this happened at exactly the perfect time, and I'm grateful that it didn't happen at any point in the last fifteen years. I don't know when it'll happen again, but I'm planting seeds because I know it will.
God is the same everywhere and with everyone. It's just the way we access that energy that is different. xx
I definitely understand what you mean. And that's why I say this principle is accessible to most folks. Most people have a way that they recognize and interact with that energy. I do like your idea, because yes, God is constant and unchanging, and our relationship with God is going to be a personal thing that can change from person to person.