Fourth dive

In the two weeks following my third dive a huge lot happened. I sensed traces of an underlying feeling of peace and wellbeing under the surface of my mental life, as if most areas of my life such as work, passions, and the social sphere were complete. And yet something was perturbing the surface and stirring the pot, causing negative thoughts and anxiety to create ripples in this otherwise stable seabed.

I decided to organize a weekend getaway to a cabin with some dear friends. The plan was to experiment with a new dose regime, and new set and setting. The dose was 1g+1g, the set and setting was a hike with other people in a place none of us had been to before.

The morning of the day of the dive I had a psychotherapy session. The main issue that I wanted to work on is my relationship with myself. In the previous dives and during the last weeks I came to the totally unexpected realization that I might be struggling with a sense of self-worth. I came to realize that in my life I have always felt that self-care, self-compassion, self-appreciation were selfish, self-centered, and wrong things to put energy into. I always felt a push towards abandoning self-interest, towards getting rid of the ego to fully embrace selfless love for others. And this feeling always went hand in hand with the need and desire to find one special person to share this selfless love with. I always felt my goal was to learn how to put myself aside and to create space for others, and that in return I would also get my needs met, because I believed that in this selfless dynamics I would receive what I was trying to give, and by surrendering each of us to one another we would mutually provide what each single existence lacks: validation, worth, and that external justification for which something exists only if it is seen by a different pair of eyes.

The psychotherapy session focused on this sense of self-worth. We talked about something I rationally know very well, that if I am not able to be with myself, to take care of myself, to love myself to some degree, I won’t be able to create the space and resources to care and love someone else either. I have noticed this after quitting SSRIs, of course when I am not in a good place I am not able to support my friends in the way I would like to. The desire to throw myself out of the picture is romantic but unrealistic, since everyone has to learn not to detest themselves, because they are always going to be around themselves, that’s the only person one can’t run from in the entire life. My psychotherapist suggested to focus on acts of self-care, to appreciate time spent alone as time spent nurturing a connection to myself, not as time I am selfishly spending with myself instead of being there for someone else. And this hit a nerve and caused the fear of being alone of the past weeks to come to the front, that feeling of missing out, of life happening somewhere else, of another place in which I’m supposed to be but I’m not when I’m alone. That feeling that makes me stop going for walks alone, and decide to plan sports almost every night of the week so I can avoid sitting in my apartment feeling that time is getting wasted every minute I am spending alone.

This set the intention for the dive: I knew during my trip many people would come to mind, but I resolved to try and go back to myself whenever I could. To sit with this feeling of inadequacy, of insufficiency, of worthlessness. Not of hate for myself, not shame, mostly just incompleteness.

The come-up

We ate the mushrooms at 2.15pm, 1g for me, and drove to the trailhead of our designated hike for the day. It was a natural reserve area with only a few barely used trails, we started following one and pretty soon found ourselves lost in the woods, surrounded by snow, scrambling uphill to get to the ridge of the bluff. At the t+1:00 mark I wasn’t noticing any visuals, only a mild sense of warmth in my belly and a more peaceful state of mind, so I decided to take the 1g booster.

Trying to figure out what way to go was a major distraction from what was already happening to me. It was however an instructive experience, because we were able to keep our cool and do problem solving without feeling anxious or argue. Our decision to go off trail and aim to the top brought us to cross various areas of bushes full of thorns. It was annoying but also exciting to find a way to get through, the thorns were sometimes so intricate and tangled they formed a wall, and I had to give up and try another route. The struggle started being meaningful, and I had moments where I felt these thorns were a metaphor for all the tendrils in life I feel slowly but steadily wrapping around me and that will end up immobilizing and suffocating me if I don’t break free from them. I felt again like an unequipped explorer, I saw the scratches and cuts on my hands, and I had a little breakthrough moment where I decided to use my backpack as a shield. I put it in front of me and pushed it against the plants with thorns, so that I could gently rotate my body and get around without them getting to scratch me, and I felt I was as much of a pain for them as they were for me: I was made of soft fiber and I was rubbing into them, they were just there asking not to be stepped on or walked through.

We finally made it to the top of the hill, we walked along the ridge and lost ourselves looking at trees.

The (first) peak

I was resolved to going back to myself, to who am, where I am, what exists around me right here and now. To going back to the idea that I have needs that can be fulfilled only by others, but there is a constant which is me, and I need to pay attention to my feeling of value and worth. I was ready to sit with the feeling that without someone else there’s nothing of worth, that I’m not enough, that I’m not worthy of love, that being kind to myself is selfish, to pursue these thoughts without resisting them and instead letting them show what they are, where they want me to go.

I was admiring the trees, and one in particular looked so old, wrinkly, ancestral. I was having mild warping visuals so I decided to sit down and look the the tree branches up above. This is when I noticed the first strong visuals: staring at the branches for just a few seconds made them crystalize into a pattern that started expanding to the rest of the branches in my peripheral visual field (an example of the now familiar symmetrical texture repetition). The sky behind the trees was of a cloudy white blue, and the more I focused on the trees the more the background sky got brighter, looking like a white luminous surface constellated by branching lines, neural connections, root systems, or branches in a mycelial network.

I abandoned myself to the comfort and warmth I was feeling inside, lying down in the snow on the ground, and I started thinking about my younger self. I saw myself as a kid around 4 years old, a scene from an old VHS I recently found. My hair was light blonde, my face excited and alive, just clueless and honest, my expression innocent and unscarred, my eyes open wide. I was eating pasta with so much pleasure and involvement, the same attitude towards everything that I had back then, always 100% in what I was doing, always fully happy or sad or whatever I was feeling, there was no holding back. I saw this serene happy little kid oblivious of what will happen later in life. I felt compassion, affection, and I started feeling how precious and worthy of love he was.

Memories then kept coming. I then saw myself slightly older, lying on my bed thinking that I wanted the same haircut as some cartoon characters, and planning the sequence. Thinking back, that is the first memory I have of staring up at the ceiling while thinking, reasoning, planning. It was also the first time I remember I felt maybe some weird feelings for these characters, who were male. I wanted to be them but also I liked them, which has always been confusing in the process of my coming out. But I was still here, my older self, lying down in the snow looking at the sky, watching that boy lying on the bed from above. I was in that room watching him lost in thoughts.

I then remembered myself riding my bike, exploring the woods alone or with friends, climbing trees and feeling happy and excited for something present I couldn’t explain: one time it was the new path in the woods we were exploring, another it was this cool new friend I made, another yet this girl with whom I was talking while climbing a tree and who for the first time made me feel butterflies in my stomach. I was back with that kid excited about life, feeling every day something new could happen, and I felt how naive and precious he was, how oblivious of what was yet to come.

I then remembered myself later in life. I saw myself in high school, and I felt the beginning of a new feeling, a sense of longing and absence, of need, of incompleteness. I remember roaming the quiet corridors of my high school as if I were looking for something or someone, someone with the same sense of longing that would make them avoid the crowded cafeteria and walk the quiet halls looking for something they didn’t know what it was either. I remember burning CDs and leaving them on windowsills of my high school with songs I selected and text files I wrote, messages in a bottle in the hope that some fellow wandering soul would find them and knew someone else was roaming those empty halls. I saw my teenager self with dreaming eyes and a little forming hole in his chest, and I was there in the quiet halls with him, watching from above, perceiving the slow speed of his steps as if he felt someone was coming, and he didn’t want to leave just yet. I was that boy feeling the presence and at the same time I was with him, watching him, and experiencing first-hand that sense of solitude and that hole inside getting bigger.

And then something surprising happened, something clicked. For so many years I felt this presence, the feeling of another person who would just understand, who knew everything about me and felt so familiar, who was always there around me but I just couldn’t see. I wondered many times if it was an internalized version of my father, who suddenly died when I was 11. Or if it was someone I was yet to meet. Perhaps that someone I have dreamt about, someone I always felt I don’t know and I’ve aways known. But in this moment I realized something I never realized before. I realized that I was here, living as my present self, and yet I was also observing all my past selves, that if there is someone who knows them intimately, who could not only understand but actually feel what they were going through in each of those moments, that is me. I am the observer of each moment of my past life. I was there with my 4 years old self, oblivious of being remembered by me as much as he was of being recorded. I was there with my teenager self sending messages to the world through CDs, observing my goofy attempts to connect with another struggling soul in the world. I was there with my past self going on dates and feeling awful, getting drunk and being confused about my feelings for female and male friends. I was observing all of them, and almost feeling I got caught when they were staring back, feeling this presence they never realized was at least in part themselves, in part me.

But most important of all, I felt compassion for each of them, and I hugged each of them. I felt so sad and happy and silly, but I thought of a message I would have liked to send to each of them, to tell them things would be tough and unpredictable, that everything would always feel random and unexpected, but that in the end it would be ok. Because so far for me it has been ok, mostly. And I saw myself as Cooper from Interstellar, trying to send messages to a younger self who couldn’t possibly contemplate the very idea of his own future self watching him existing. This Interstellar quote came to mind: “Love is the one thing we’re capable of perceiving that transcends dimensions of time and space.” This was simultaneously cheesy and deeply insightful, because it was real, and it was the first time in my life I thought about myself that way. I was seeing my younger selves as real people, separate from me, and I felt compassion and love for my past selves in the same way I would feel it for every struggling being.

After this powerful realization I decided to push the experiment a bit further, I felt perhaps I wasn’t done quite yet. So I decided to visualize myself later in life, in my current city, in my current apartment, years ago struggling with a relocation across the world, struggling with purpose in life, loneliness and motivation. Then I fast-forwarded and visualized myself on my couch one week ago, feeling this longing and this presence, in despair fighting anxiety and depression, finding ways to avoid being alone to distract myself from this sense of loneliness, emptiness, worthlessness, remembering that the only comforting thought was imagining I could lose myself in a warm, encompassing hug, a hug from someone I so strongly hoped existed but I didn’t have the opportunity to meet yet. Or that someone I thought I finally met and I actually hugged, and it turned out nothing was real, and devastated me. But I saw myself as this translucent being, without a face and without an identity, just a bundle of feelings and strong autonomic reactions, and a big and scary black hole in their chest. And I went full out doing the most unexpected and craziest of things: I held this being in my arms, I forced myself and every fiber in me to forget that was me, and I focused on their struggle, their pain, their sadness, and I gave them the biggest, warmest, intimate, most honest hug I am capable of. And in that moment I also felt hugged. I was the hugger and the hugged. It was the strangest feeling in the world, almost forbidden, incestuous, perverted, but for a moment I felt complete. It was so odd to realize I was hugging myself. And yet, every time I abandoned myself in that feeling, I saw myself as either the hugger or the hugged, while the other me felt as separate from me as any other person would feel. It was enough to imagine him as this translucent being and to just focus on what they were feeling, and I could feel compassion, affection, love, care, and the desire to be there for them. And I could switch perspective and be my self on the couch, and I felt the comforting presence of another translucent being who was there for me, who radiated compassion, affection, love, care, and the secure feeling they were there for me.

I kept playing with these images and focused on how comforting, awkward, familiar, and silly they got at different times. But most of all I came to see myself as this provisional me, such an intimate observer of all my past selves, and completely oblivious of all the things only my future selves know. Borges’ words from The Nothingness of Personality came to mind:

“The thought came over me that never would one full and absolute moment, containing all the others, justify my life, that all of my instants would be provisional phases, annihilators of the past turned to face the future, and that beyond the episodic, the present, the circumstantial, we were nobody.”

Except I wasn’t nobody. I was each of these past selves, each of these experiences scattered across space and time. They felt as different as different people, they felt like travelers in parallel Universes who had no way to bend the laws of causation and communicate with each other, and yet were aware of each other. I imagined seeing the man I am now with the eyes of my 4 year old self. I imagined feeling the hug of this man from the future, who never could I have believed it was me. I saw the me now with the eyes of my college self, I felt the difference in life experience and how we are separate people and yet we’re the same. And finally I found my present self, with this feeling I am the first of them all, the OG, the all-knowing one who can see but is never seen. And I felt how silly I was in believing so, since I knew each of my past selves believed the same. So I now tried to visualize a future self, an old man in a hospital bed, thinking back to his past, to various moments of his life. And I felt someone, somewhere, might very well be looking back at this moment, at this first-hand experience that past, present and future are experiences that exist outside of spacetime, that space and time are contents and not containers, that all these people, these selves, these experiences, are just as real, because experience is all there is.

The gliding

After the peak we explored the woods a bit more. We started walking downhill towards the road and it felt like dancing on snow, skiing downhills between the trees in a harmonious series of left and right facing movements. There were no thorns anymore and trees were kind helpers in our descent we could gently hold to keep our balance. When we got near the road we spent quite some time observing a tree stomp covered in snow and moss. I sat down again listening to music and kept going back to my experience, I kept looking for myself in all this. I felt that the corner of the woods was all there was, that each tree separated the space in such a unique manner that walking five steps felt like walking to a different area of a city.

In this moment I reflected on the experience of diving with friends. I observed my friends lost in thoughts. One of them stood still for such a long time, staring at the trees, without even listening to music. Despite me having my own internal journey happening I felt communion with them, I felt that even though I couldn’t tell exactly what they were experiencing I was somehow aware that they were in a similar state, that we were in the same place, all experiencing the other side of things in this world. This was evident the few times we shared some thoughts on what we were respectively going through.

I consider this experiment a success, and I can only imagine that this sense of communion would have been even stronger if we were listening to the same music and had the intention to make it a communal experience from the start.

The second wind

We then went back to the cabin and I was still in a receptive state. I could still follow thoughts and explore emotions by listening to music, it was definitely the tail of the psychedelic experience. The 1gr+1gr regime made the peak stabilize at a nice intensity and it made it last longer.

At t+3:00 I spontaneously decided to smoke weed. Smoking weed always has a stimulant effect on me, even pure Indica strands give me sensations of bodily excitation, restlessness, waves of energy and vibrations, and quite often paranoid thoughts. I took a good mouthful of it, sucking the smoke from the vape into my mouth and filling it almost completely, then held it in for around 10 seconds before exhaling slowly. It was definitely a big hit, bigger than the ones I know make me jittery and anxious, but for some reason I did it that way.

And holy fucking shit, the trip began again twice as powerful as before. I went to a place as deep as the one I visited during my bad trip, but this time it wasn’t scary, it was so many things. The second peak was divided in three phases, one primarily physical, characterized by bodily sensations and an attempt to navigate through them. The second phase was the most intense and otherworldly so far, hitting the limit of ineffability for how ethereal, impersonal, and purely experiential it got. The third phase was again more familiar and yet different from the first peak, because it was characterized by a sense of dissolution and dilution of personality and the self, but there were also emotions, thoughts, and space to do intentional work.

First phase: body

After smoking the weed I decided to sit on the sofa. It was a big and comfortable sofa and I sank into it. I started feeling waves of energy on my arms, running on my skin, accompanied by increased heartbeat and a sense of mental unrest. This energy was completely different from the waves of warmth from my belly typical of mushrooms. And yet I could see the two compounds were in synergy with each other, I almost felt like there was this warm-colored dense liquid that was being reduced to a very dense paste, and it felt like I was pouring onto it another cold-colored liquid that was breaking the paste but at the same time getting mixed with it. I could feel them pulling in different directions, I could recognize the anxiogenic effect of the weed but it was mixed with this other element, and I focused my attention to pursue the swirls of warmth, the feeling of familiarity and peace, the psychedelic/emotional essence of psilocybin rather than the psychotic/rational one of THC.

I felt the waves of anxiety and I resolved to surrender to them, to embrace them, to avoid resisting them. This started feeling mildly unpleasant but I was interested and aware, I was curious, I could see myself holding back and I could bring myself to surrender. I followed sad thoughts and saw them transform in an ever-changing flow always becoming something else. I embraced the shivering and discomfort and asked what they were trying to tell me. I felt uncomfortable lying down on my back, so I decided to curl up on my right side but felt worse. I then remembered Terence McKenna’s words:

“If you get into deep water with these substances, this is true of psilocybin as well, you don’t want to clench, you don’t want to assume the fetal position and stop breathing. You want to sit up straight and breathe, and sing, and sing it back, and it will step back. You can take control of your situation … most of the time”.

And so I did, I sat up and hummed the discomfort away.

Second phase: gone

This second phase started with loss of personal identity, mild ego dissolution, feeling of being beyond good or bad, being just plain existence, and concepts of boundaries or labels or people didn’t make any sense. This part of the trip is ineffable, in the short moments of lucidity I tried to tell myself things I should try to remember but I was aware it wouldn’t last. I decided I was ok with it, and I let go.

I was more able to snap in and out of it and the drifting was more in my control. I could come back and talk to my friends who were looking for their phone and then drift off again. I remember seeing the dark facade of a giant building that somehow was inside the hall of a bigger building, the dimensions were unreal, confusing, impossible. I saw these dark halls just floating under me. There was no self, no me, no world, no people, no memories. It wasn’t pleasant nor unpleasant, it felt beyond good and bad, it just was. I drifted in this liminal state for what I think was a good half hour. Then I opened my eyes and started having a body again.

Third phase: self again

In the third phase of the second peak I felt in control again, the room was lit only by candlelight and I spent a long time focusing on the flame of a candle. I remember getting the feeling I saw the desert from my second dive and it wasn’t all there was, it was a biome in a dimension with many biomes. The sense of self was still loose and malleable, so I decided to play with it. I was lying down on the couch and I slowly wrapped my arms around myself: my right hand on my left shoulder, my left hand under my right armpit. And I focused on the feeling of the hug. If I stayed still I was able to lose track of the position of my limbs, and it felt like I was hugged by someone else’s arm. Focusing on my right arm, I could feel I was hugging someone from behind, someone who was lying on top of me. And by focusing on my left arm I felt I was touching my own belly, while someone was hugging me from behind, and I was lying on top of them. All these perspectives were loose and I felt I was always one of them at a time, but at the same time I was all of them, at times it felt like different people I know, at times it felt like it could only be one and the same “Them”. This exercise felt very different from the one I carried out during the first peak, this time I was feeling more than thinking, there was touch more than seeing.

One last interesting phenomenon I experienced had to do with object categorization in visual experience. In the last phase of the second peak I was lying down with eyes semi-open, so that I could see the light of the candle and some blurry surfaces and objects from the room. With low light and with blurred vision an interesting phenomenon happened. If I focused on the visual scene for a while, I was able to interpret the contours and shapes I was seeing as belonging to very different objects. The easiest was usually to see an urban landscape at night, with street lamps in the sky, dark-grey buildings, bridges, railings, trees, windows and other urban objects all around. The interesting thing is that it happened consistently that if I then fully opened my eyes, that scene of the urban landscape became more vivid than before, and it stayed in front of my eyes for various seconds. Then suddenly and inexorably something switched and the contours and objects that I was seeing became again the objects populating the room in front of my eyes. The dark-grey round building was just a pillow on the couch, the weird shaped tree was my foot, and the depth was completely different. This happened for multiple times and it was fun to notice top-down concepts bind to low level visual features so freely, until they were superseded by other top-down concepts matching more tightly the visual scene in front of my eyes.

Aftermath

I spent the evening relaxing in the hot tub, listening to music, and thinking about what happened. Smoking weed was definitely a game changer, a posteriori I felt the trip wasn’t as intense as I thought in the moment, but it definitely took the mild psychedelic state typical of a low dose of shrooms and projected it into a realm where features of my deeper dive were present. I guess it's the simplest way to achieve a mild state of ego dissolution, even though it likely necessarily comes with these noticeable waves of anxiety and bodily tension, which I can see could be unpleasant in a less relaxed and supportive setting.

The general take home message of this experience is that perhaps psychedelics are indeed an interesting tool if paired with psychotherapy. On a low dose plus booster to prolong the effect I was able to think straight, direct my attention, evoke memories, and purposefully work on the problems I intended to face. It is now five days after the trip, and despite the positive emotions, increased mood, and blissful state of mind are now gone, I still feel much less anxious, much less uncomfortable when I am alone, much more prone to be kind to myself. I don’t know how long this will last, I am sure external events will soon start stirring the pot again, and I expect my sense of self-worth being always heavily disturbed when my insecure attachment is triggered. But the memory of the trip remains, and even more importantly, remains the music that accompanied me during the experience and that I am still using to translate it into words.

Afterthoughts

The psychedelic stare

One important insight I had is on what for lack of a better term I’ll call the psychedelic stare. At the onset of the trip, especially on a low dose, it is often hard for me to know whether I experience anything different at all. Especially while hiking, where perception is already distorted by heavy breathing, cold head, watery eyes. One thing I find useful is to intently stare at something, usually a surface or an object. The first thing I try to notice is if there are ripples or waves, if I can see the typical warping and moving of surfaces. Good surfaces for this test are ones with uniform textures such as blankets or carpets, but also tree bark. Another revealing thing is looking at tree branches against the sky. There I find much easier to notice symmetrical texture repetition. Moreover, this is where I can check if I can engage in the psychedelic stare. When I am not in the psychedelic state, looking at tree branches in the sky feels very different: my eyes keep wandering around with little saccadic movements, staring at a fixed spot makes my eyes itchy and watery pretty quickly. But on psychedelics I can engage in this still and sustained stare, which comes the more natural the least I put effort into it. I feel like it helps to sit down and lean against something (in this case a tree trunk) in a way that my head is supported and I can relax all muscles in my body. The more I relax my shoulders, my neck, even my jaw, the better I can sustain this stare. And on top of everything, the most uncanny feeling that accompanies the psychedelic stare is that I feel I can keep my eyes open forever. Eyes don’t feel itchy or watery, there is no need for blinking or moving them, I feel I could just keep them open forever, and sometimes I get worried that’s bad for my eyes because they’ll dry out and fall off.

Thought on Roger Eno’s The Turning Year

This dive has been so deeply influenced by the music I was listening to. This was the first time I listened to this album by Roger Eno. Listening to this album in the weeks after the dive I was able to analyze the music more rationally and come to understand why it is so powerful to accompany psychedelic experiences. Most tracks in this album start with a simple and repetitive piano melody that is mostly neutral in terms of emotional tone. A Place We Once Walked is emblematic in this. The first seven bars are filled with four simple notes that have an undefined tone, neither positive nor negative, neither hopeful nor sad, maybe feeling just a little uneasy. Then these four notes get colored by additional ones that play with the same feeling of suspension, create a sense of something unresolved, and yet a sense of freedom from being suspended, from being in this uncomfortable and undefined space. You are kept in this space for the first two whole minutes, until strings are added and they start building on the repetitive piano melody adding tones that color it in slightly different ways. But the strange and uneasy feeling persists, relentless, until 4'10" when finally the full strings come in including deep bass and color the whole space with a sense of positive and comforting longing and nostalgia, only to disappear quickly and leave you again with the suspended undefined piano melody. The strings are so powerful, and yet their appearance is so quick. And the strongest experience is to listen to this song again, because now in those strange, suspended, undefined notes of the piano, you can already feel their potentiality of supporting the strings, the hopeful wistful comforting longing that is so ephemeral, but it is there all along, lurking in the silence when the strings are not playing.

I take this whole concept to be a perfect metaphor for my experience with mild psychedelic states so far. These are states where on the surface things look what the usually are, where you can function, understand social cues, see things under their everyday light. But there are moments where things get colored by an intrinsic nature, where meaning seeps through them in ways that go beyond their repetitive, mundane surface. In these moments everyday objects become deeply meaningful, they start radiating truths about you, they trigger memories and emotions, they manifest hidden meanings that only the psychedelic state is allowing you to grasp. Listening to this album feels as if the music controls the valve of the manifestation of this meaning, as if it opened the door to let it flow at intervals, keeping you on the edge of the unaltered experience of the world and letting you savor even more the subtle line between mediated and unmediated, altered and unaltered, receptive and unreceptive, meaning-manifesting and meaning-restraining states. And this is true for all songs in the album, which leaves me with the belief that this feeling of uneasiness and suspension is a precious opportunity, a special place where the mind can play with its own dials and learn to linger at the edge of the veil, experiment with the thickness of the curtain, with its resistance to touch, with what makes light barely seep through just a bit or instead shine bright and blind you. Finally, I believe this uneasy suspended mental state is important because you can still experience it when the psychedelic state is gone. It’s as if it painted a very clear picture of this door that I only see when you going through it and its wide open. And instead this songs make you linger in front of it, looking through it keyhole, feeling the presence of a world on the other side that you know is there but you can’t see.

I was happy to see this article pointed out similar features of this album, it was a good read.

Answers to self

If you focus on memories at the peak of the trip, can you retrieve arbitrary ones? Can you retrieve memories you had forgotten about?
I don’t know about arbitrary ones, but I was definitely able to follow memory threads more easily. Remembering one scene from my past brought back memories of the same period, together with a tangible feeling of being back there and then, similar to when a smell catapults you back into a time and space from the past and if you close your eyes you feel like you’re there.

You said it felt really good, it felt familiar and like going back home, you were sad it was going to end so soon. Will it leave you with more joy than the one you experienced while tripping? Will it make you enjoy life more, or make you wish to escape from intersubjective reality immersing yourself deeper in the mycelial cocoon? (again)
It will take a lot of experience to fully answer this question. My latest experience was pleasurable, I felt really good the following two days, even thought I could already start feeling sadness observing that peaceful clarity of mind slowly fading. And yet I feel something remained. Recently a dear friend told me they approach the experience of psychedelics exactly like they approach the one of a physical trip: if you go to Brazil and have a great time you might feel sad when you come back, but you wouldn’t want to stay in Brazil forever either. Most likely you will want to visit new places, and sure traveling can get addictive. And yet it is also grounding to be back home, because now you can put into practice things you have seen or realized while traveling, and see your current life under a new light. I still feel there’s more to explore, the social dimension for once could be key: tripping with others is fun and perhaps sharing the experience will also give the feeling that it fades less quickly, because there will be shared memories as well as new ones emerging all the time. To be investigated further.

For the future

• 1g+1g+weed is a good combo, definitely helps making the whole trip last double the time. Next time maybe try less weed but two or three times?