Sacred Mushroom of Visions

by Ralph Metzner

  The first thing I noticed was the closed-eye visions of multihued geometric lattices and filigree webs, sparkling and shimmering; but this time they had a fluid quality as well, as if some divine nectar was dripping sensuously into my brain and body from these pulsing lattices. I noticed the patterns quickly turned ugly and tacky if I had the least glimmer of distrust or suspiciousness.

  I got a sense that the “little people” of the mushrooms were meeting the spirits or egos of my inner organs. Each organ, like each plant, had an indwelling spirit with a self-conscious identity; indeed, the inner organs seem to be much like plants, with their pouches, vascular stalks, and fibrous branchings. Some of them were not in a good mood, feeling out of sorts. The little mushroom folks were making them feel better by tickling them from inside and making them laugh. Happy laughter, like that of a child, gurgled up from my insides.

  There was a presence in the room that my partner and I both sensed, of a majestic elven-king, but he was elusive, not directly visible, as if playing hide and seek with us. The walls of the room were pulsating, seemingly breathing, as if we were inside a gigantic organic cell. The walls became quivering, porous membranes. Looking into the fireplace, the burning logs turned into a vision of a vast underground city, with myriad lights and glowing fires among buildings and moving shapes. As I kept looking, on the other side of the fire there was an opening into the vastness of cosmic space, studded with stars.

  From a center within myself, lines of choice radiated out in all directions. The forward radiations were lines stretching into the future, and the backward lines the memories that connect us to the past. We were in the still center of what William James called “the theatre of simultaneous possibilities.”

  I was given insights into certain behavior patterns I learned in childhood. One was my tendency to be helpful to people, so that they will love me. The mushroom spirits suggested it would be better and more forthright to just ask for the affection I want, like my dog, who rolls over with great obviousness when she wants her belly rubbed. I was also shown how my anger, unexpressed because of my fear of its violence, ties the expressive side of my nature into knots of hidden resentment and somatic distress. Several painful childhood experiences that led to that kind of entanglement flashed by in quick succession.

  We felt blessed, in full recognition of the sacredness of all life and all lives, ours included. The mushroom spirits were supremely generous in the way they showered us with insights and delights of the senses. Their quality of serene wisdom, combined with delightful giggly humor, permeated our consciousness.

  Another time, on another journey with the mushrooms in the same setting, the geometric structures became visible to me with my eyes open, filling the space around me. I was walking outside on a trail through the forest and kept lifting my feet high to step over them. We were walking through a forest of crystals.

  Later, while lying down, I felt my face changing. A mask was being removed from my head, neck, and shoulders, like a lizard shedding skin. I oscillated between a reptilian crawling posture and mammalian crouching one. I thought my conceptual human mind had been suspended, parked like a car in the garage, so that my innate body wisdom could make the changes needed for healing.

  Stimulated by music of East Indian drumming and chanting, I started to make strange explosive, trilling and rolling sounds that unzipped walls of resistance in my psyche. Echoes of aboriginal and prehistoric chants and dance movements flashed through my awareness. Barbarian consciousness, I realized, is one in which healing can take place from within, naturally, because there is no overlay of civilization, with its rules and conventions. I felt I was turned inside out, with my inner organs externalized, exposed to view, as if hung out to be washed and dried in the fresh air, and charged with sunlight.

  My partner, a psychotherapist, was asking me pointed questions. They engaged my mind and attention, but I was unable to think about them in the usual way. Instead, I was verbalizing a stream of consciousness, with words in different accents and voices and nonlinguistic sounds mixed in. The theater of possibilities had become a madcap farce, with various characters alternating speaking through me in rapid succession. I felt as if an alien power was using my vocal apparatus to talk.

  The imagery became more laced with aggression and violence, though I didn’t feel any anger or hostility. It was as if someone had pushed the “read-out” button on my computer and various patterns of aggressive behavior in the collective consciousness came pouring out of me: images of warfare, civil strife, anti-Semitism, racial violence, ethnic hatred, Spaniards against Indians, rednecks, bigots, torture, mayhem. Occasionally the stream of vicious verbiage was punctuated by maniacal laughter.

  I managed to insult my partner several times, casting slurs on her ethnicity, but she was mercifully unmoved, mindful of the nonpersonal nature of my eruptions, which continued for a couple of hours. Once, when I got too obnoxious, she reminded me that a large-bodied friend was right next-door; I backed off right away. I felt like an ape-man gone berserk, a mushroom maniac. Then, suddenly, I transformed into an aged Indian beggar woman, sitting in the dust by the side of a road, terminally weary, poor, and hungry. The mania was over.

  I believe this mushroom mania was triggered by a too-high dose, which was also accompanied by a mild stimulant. This led to the explosive expression of feelings and rampant projection of images, rather than processing them with mindfulness and conscious attention, as is possible with more moderate amounts.

  A third mushroom session occurred a few weeks later, again in the setting of the house in the forest by the river. My journey companions were again my partner and a close woman friend who is Basque. We set up our energy shields, each with different qualities and colors, in the four directions.

  In late summer afternoon sun the crown of my head felt fiery hot. Standing by the door looking outside, the sunlight was filtering through tree tops, flashing and sparkling where it touched a fern leaf, a romping dog, friends next door; even the chrome and edges of the car glowed with vibrant intensity.

  Inside, I was on my hands and knees when I noticed that my hands and forearms had turned into lizard paws. I used them to beat rhythms on the floor. Lizards had been appearing more and more in my experiences lately. I’d come to appreciate their quality of attention: how they sit motionless staring at you with one large unblinking eye, then flit like lightning and disappear, or crawl with sinuous, slow deliberation under a rock. The feeling of crawling like a lizard was very pleasurable to me. I sensed healing vibrations spreading out from my spine. I remembered, from my time of working with autistic and retarded children, that there is a process of facilitating sensory-motor integration that consists of “cross-pattern crawling.”

  Pursuing a healing intention, I initiated a conversation about my chronic constipation. Various unpleasant childhood experiences were easily seen to have created an aura of discomfort around the prosaic act of defecation. Humor and laughter emerged quickly as the obvious antidote to excretory distress. I remembered how delighted I was when I heard my six-year-old son sing while sitting on the toilet—it had never occurred to me to sing under such circumstances. The woman said she made up funny chants for shitting when she was a child. Sitting back in her chair she talked about how important full-belly laughter is for healthy elimination. I sensed a whole group of her Basque elders and family members standing behind her, as if prompting her. Then she said, “Beware the man, who when he laughs, his belly does not jiggle: he has a constipation problem.”

  I said, “What is this, a Basque proverb that you’ve just channeled?” I felt like my conceptual mind had checked out again, and I couldn’t quite understand what was being said. So I asked her to repeat the proverb.

  When she did, there was a bolt of energy from her voice that shot right to my lower abdomen, the hara center, causing me to laugh with a jiggling belly. Then her laughter and my partner’s added to mine seemed to be sending a jetlike stream of energy from my belly up my
vertical axis. I had been sitting on the couch and suddenly found myself lying face-down on the floor six or seven feet away; although I have no memory of flying through the air. When I recovered from this, I said, “So this was the sound that hurled the man across the room, caused his kundalini to rise up to his crown chakra, and maybe cured his constipation problem!”

  I couldn’t think; my mind had been parked somewhere. I started to make sounds of a computer breaking down, followed by chants, rhythmic beatings of my hands on my body, and various animal sounds. While these sounds were coming out of my mouth, my face and hands were going through expressive gestures that seemed like part of some masked demon dance, with bulging eyes, flaring nostrils, and gnashing teeth. I thought we were in the midst of some kind of ceremonial dance theater from Tibet or Bali.

  A year after the above experiences, I undertook another mushroom journey with my Basque friend. Our intention was to explore certain alchemical themes.

  While I was watching the familiar geometric lattices taking shape in front of my eyes, I felt slightly frustrated that I was not quite there yet. I got a vision of an organic furnace, dark in the center, with fire glowing around the outside edges. Then I remembered the alchemists’ secret equation: the alchemical vessel or furnace, in which the work of transformation takes place, is the practitioner’s own body. So I decided to bring the image of the partially burning furnace into my body. I identified with it, embodied it. The process worked. I felt more energy being generated within me, until I was fully charged, cooking.

  I thought about Jung’s statement that the alchemists projected their unconscious contents into matter. I realized that this is only partially right. I saw that they consciously, purposively, projected chosen archetypal images into matter, including the matter of their own physical body. The alchemical artist, through an act of imaginal perception, structures archetypal symbols, such as the alchemical furnace, or retort, into matter.

  We had a small brick of piñon incense, which we lit and placed inside a holder shaped like a kiva. At first, the little chunk was black except for two burning corners from which the fragrant smoke was curling up. We both realized it was a little elf, a furnace elf, with a dark chunky body and two enormous fiery, smoking eyes. This furnace elf was gleefully, fiercely burning itself up, releasing fragrance in doing so. It became a frog-faced fire-gnome. Then we saw an old man wearing a bear pelt. Next it became a bear-shaman fire-gnome elder.

  As we were drifting off to sleep, the Basque woman described an image of a blue spiraling line of light coalescing into a blue kernel. An inner voice told her, “Find the blue stone on the crystal glass by the large feather.” In my living room, which she was not at all familiar with, there was a large macaw feather on top of a bookcase. Near the feather was a book on sacred geometry called The Power of Limits: Proportional Harmonies in Nature, Art and Architecture. It had a figure of a spiral with the golden section on the cover. On top of the book lay a magnifying glass. Book and glass had been there for months; we had not talked about it. I got up and looked at the glass by the feather. On the circular lens, which was on top of the golden section spiral, exactly in the center of the glass, lay a single kernel of blue corn.

  Neither my friend nor I had placed the corn kernel there, nor ever seen it before, nor was there any other blue corn anywhere in my house. It was a demonstration of materialization. I looked at the clock and it was exactly 3:00 a.m. We were both in awe at the precise, elegant, nonchalant generosity of the magic mushroom spirits.

  The last mushroom journey I am going to relate here illustrates the power of intention in shaping altered state experiences. Four years after the experiences described above, I was driving down the Oregon coast with my wife and stepson, on the last leg of our honeymoon. My wife had become pregnant, as we had hoped. We had visited the spectacularly beautiful mountains and islands of British Columbia, including camping in the Queen Charlotte Islands. We found a campsite by a stream, under some trees, a short walk from the ocean. It was the last night of our trip and I decided to take some mushrooms. The boy was asleep and my wife would attend. I wanted to see if I could tune in with the spirit of the child now forming in her womb. I took three grams of dried mushrooms after nightfall. I was supremely happy and couldn’t have imagined or wished for a more positive and benign set and setting.

  Nevertheless, to my surprise and chagrin, the experience had a negative tone to it. I felt restless and anxious, with a vague sense of oppression. Amazed, I noted the contrast between the serene, lovely setting, under the stars, and the frustrated, ill-at-ease inner feelings I was having. I examined my intentions, my set, to see if there was any attitude or unexamined negativity somewhere that could account for this strange and uncomfortable turn of events. I found nothing that made sense. I began to think, “This was a mistake, I made a mistake, this is not working out, I should not have done this journey.” I ruefully resigned myself to feeling bad.

  After about two hours of restless distress, the situation changed and I began to feel warm inside, accepting and trusting in the process, even as I failed to understand the message I was apparently being given. I walked in the moonlight and felt my entire body had become one large sense organ registering sense-stimuli and energy-fields in all directions. I walked to the ocean and wanted to surrender to its immense power. However, a perception of increasing cold captured my attention, and I walked back to the tent. My instinct for self-preservation overrode any mystical or psychedelic self-sacrificial temptations.

  It was four months later, during an experience with ayahuasca, that the meaning of the strange mushroom journey finally became clear to me. My wife had a miscarriage a week or so after our return from the trip. The ayahuasca spirits showed me that my experience under the mushroom, where I had intended to tune in to the child being conceived, was exactly how one would imagine the experience of an embryo that was going to miscarry: feeling oppressed, restless, uncomfortable, ill-at-ease, and that a mistake had been made. These were apparently not how I felt personally, but they were the feelings of an endangered embryo. This exactly reflected my intention.

  I was again awed by the mysterious precision and generosity of the mushroom spirits. They had given me exactly what I asked for, an experience of the child that was coming in. I didn’t know how to interpret it because the possibility of a miscarriage never occurred to me. I realized then that many of our dreams and visions might be prophetic or precognitive, but go unrecognized as such. The more mundane and ordinary precognitions go unrecognized because we haven’t recorded them: the fateful and disastrous ones, because we don’t want to see something dangerous or terrible.

  I WAS BEING TOLD TO PAINT WITH THE BLOOD OF THE HEART

  KATE S.

  An artist now in her fifties found the mushroom showed her a vision of an ongoing struggle between human and alien beings from another dimension. The presence of a wise friend rescued her. Later, she received guidance for her artwork.

  This experience happened in a circle of fourteen people, guided by a shaman. Each participant was asked to choose an intention going into the session, such as a question or an area of concern, in hopes that the participant might gather information. I had two questions: the first had to do with understanding my restlessness, and the second had to do with whether I should take on a project of illustrating a deck of Tarot cards.

  I ate 3 to 4 grams of mushrooms around 5:00 in the evening. In a short period of time I had gone very deeply into my experience. Although the shaman was guiding us through various exercises that we had reviewed earlier that day, I was so deeply engaged that I was only partially able to hear his words.

  I was catapulted quite beyond the room into a realm where reptilian people were in a battle with human beings of our planet. They were from a different dimension of reality and through some opening or tear between our two worlds, they were able to make their way into ours. They were trying to take over our minds and bodies and were extremely focused on domination over ou
r species. I felt I was experiencing some distant time in the beginning of our human presence on this planet.

  I was being shown the history and inner workings of these reptilian beings and the long-standing war that raged between our species. Most of them were a sort of lizard-man combination. They stood as a person would stand, on legs, so that they were as tall as me or even taller. Their skin was bumpy and scaled, greenish, pinkish, bluish. They had long dark-pinkish tongues and seemed to communicate telepathically through deep intense glances of their eyes.

  I was shown that the reptilian people were aware that humans commonly lost their focus and were asleep to the influences that surrounded them. This lack of centering cause a sort of hole in the human through which the reptilian people’s influence could find its way in. Then the human being would consciously or unconsciously begin to act with the coldness of the reptilian attitude. It was a very tough situation.

  The reptilian people seemed evil, in that their emotions were heartless, with no sense of compassion. All that moved them was their need to attain their goal and an insatiable appetite for power. As the experience unfolded, I was aware that they had been at this project of trying to control human people for many thousands of years. They understood all of our modern technology and communication methods. They understood our psychology. They had found a way to disguise themselves as humans and bind humans to them through false friendships and relationships, even to win humans over to actually becoming lizard people.

  As I lay on my mat, I wondered if any of the people in the room had been taken over by the lizard people. I realized how fearful I was feeling and I did not want to get into projecting my fear onto the others. I was very aware that I was under the influence of a mind-altering substance and I reminded myself that the experience was bound to last only a few more hours.