Sacred Mushroom of Visions

by Ralph Metzner

  Time started running backwards. I had difficulty operating within such an unusual modality where I was perpetually forgetting (for it is rather difficult to remember what just un-happened). I was disoriented. Just as a child must learn how to operate in this physical reality, I had to learn how to function in a realm where time was running backwards. I could not remember with whom I had spent the previous evening, how long I had been high (an hour, a day, week, month, or year?), where I worked and even what that work was, whether my university professors existed. Had I ever learned anything? Did I know anything at all? Who was I? I? I? . . . ?

  I saw many fleeting, fast-paced images, culminating in my shifting from the inside of my head into the head of an “insane” person locked up in a padded cell. Everything I had ever (thought I had) experienced (and also all future experiences, such as writing this in my room right now) was a fiction of a psychotic, deluded imagination running wild. For all I knew, this was the case, but I could not tell for sure right then, so I continued . . .

  I decided to play with my strobe light. With the light flickering rapidly, the thought-words of my internal voice were flowing in sentences. With each flash of light, a frame was created wherein time ceased to flow. I was thus able to observe each thought, word, or concept individually and fully experience and explore it as a materially manifested object. I could climb over and around it, sensing the texture, shape, and form of the pieces of thought.

  Overall, the experience was hard work, mentally and physically grueling. Much of the experience was extracted like the bitter liquid from an orange rind. This was most apparent during a period when I was squeezing complex original musical compositions from my head.

  This was one of the most important breakthrough experiences of my life. Ever since I discovered that Santa and the Tooth Fairy were not “real,” I had rejected the existence of God, reasoning that if my parents had lied about the first two metaphysical beings, why not the third? During my late teens, I became interested in Buddhism, which, of course, lacks a “god” altogether. I had never considered my adamant denial of God to be an attachment, until this trip. When I was forced to confront this, I learned to accept things that seem impossible or unreasonable, even to love that which I hated. This has benefited me in everyday life. With this trip, my understanding of Buddhism deepened and I have developed an abiding interest in messages presented by various other schools of thought.

  I REMEMBER WHAT IT WAS LIKE BEFORE I HAD THIS FACE

  JACK SILVER

  This forty-four-year-old environmental activist and attorney is initiated through a series of purifications and enters the place where energy and matter meet.

  Less than an hour after ingesting 2.5 grams of dried mushrooms, I am in a state of total meltdown, consumed by the fire of purification. I am frightened, but willing to face the fire. The “I” does not want to die or give up control, so this purification has a deep type of pain that penetrates down to my being. Yet I know it is the resistance to the purification, not the purification itself, that is so painful.

  I find myself in a room without dimensions, which makes no sense unless you’re there. It has dimensions, but they are made of energy fields, so when I approach them, they shift and change. Here I meet my teacher/guide.

  He appears to me as an Indian. He says that I always screw up the pronunciation of his name and then he laughs. He is kind but strict. His people have a language that is absolutely precise, in which a word is its total meaning. The evocation of the word evokes the reality. The language is one that I recognize: it is used to elicit and exchange reality/experience, soul-matter.

  We visit sacred places, temples, monuments, and places of sacrament where we do ceremonies of purification. This is where one prepares to receive the sacrament of the soul. Every time I return to this place, I remember everything, even my teacher, although I still have not mastered his name.

  I open myself up and asked to be purified, to be cleansed of all resistance. My teacher instructs me in the Ghost Dance. He simply says that when we are like this, we do the Ghost Dance. He instructs me to dance.

  I ask, Why do we dance?

  He says that he does not know why, we just do. I understand that he actually knows, but my question is inappropriate. I need only to dance and to be the dance.

  I crawl through an igloo-shaped entrance about six feet wide and four feet high. Its floor is white fur. The ceiling is lined with dead rattlesnakes with their heads hanging down and their mouths open so that the fangs are prominent. If I rise up, I will certainly be pricked by their fangs.

  My teacher muses, Be careful to not touch the ceiling! Sometimes live rattlers come and crawl among the dead! He laughs, but I think he is serious.

  Next I enter my teacher’s hut to participate in a shamanic journey. I lie down on blankets and furs. My teacher holds a prayer stick, a short staff about eighteen inches long, an instrument of transformation. The power end of the staff resembles the head of a raptor, but it is invisible. As my teacher moves the staff past me, I can see in complete detail the raptor head as energy is displaced around it. As the staff passes me, I am turned into a bird flying above a great valley. I remember not knowing where I am or what is happening, then realize I am the bird. I do not see as I normally do, but as the raptor sees color and shapes, with multidepth perception and heat as shape.

  I hear my teacher’s voice and I am back in the room. He says, I have given you the gift of flight. You will always possess it.

  I experience the liberation of my spirit as a very young child, unfettered by matter, personality, or genetic legacy. It feels good and I do not want to go back to my life.

  I am in a place of energy. All of reality is in this field of energy and I am consciousness in flux. I have been here before. This is the totality of my being. In this place I am reunited with Self. No time, no space, infinite in effect and reality. I enter a world not yet made. I am looking into the universe from the back, seeing where all the energy is coming from, in waves. I see where energy and matter meet, where form moves from potential into actuality. I am privy to all creation. All is energy, yet form emerges because form is a dimension, energy perceived as function.

  Slowly I become aware of self again. I feel nausea and pain and disgust and recognize these as part of the creative force, unique qualities born of the experiential, to be realized fully. It is necessary to feel the nausea of nausea, the horror of horror, the disgust of disgust, all in their pure forms. Out of this same spirit come beauty, love, and compassion.

  We are wired for the creative energies. They flow through our bodies and souls, into the world to bring forth never-before realities to delight and enrich all beings who share in the feast of life.

  I see the universe as a fabric, with my self woven into its delicate and beautiful threads. As the fabric undulates, I experience the shifts and movements as part of a large current flowing. I understand I am being born into the fabric, forming a pattern in its weave, with its many threads all responding to the movement of the universe.

  Like the knight in pursuit of the Grail, each of us who enters the forest through these doors of perception walks a path of our own choosing. We must pay attention, as we are opening up the gates of heaven and hell. We go where our attention is directed or distracted. The universe is infinitely diverse, with many dimensions and unimaginable complexity and beauty. As consciousness-possessing beings, we are able to transcend realities and travel through these dimensions. As we become transparent to transcendence, we travel the cosmic void. Drawn into its current, lost to self, washed up on the shores of an alternate reality, we are floating through the cosmic currents of creation.

  This experience is one of many that have awakened my soul and allowed me access to an expanded realm of consciousness that I had not heretofore experienced. I feel I have reconnected with the worlds that interpenetrate this reality. I remember what it was like before I had this face.

  WE ARE ALL ACTORS AND DIRECTORS IN A GIANT CO
SMIC DRAMA

  MARK A. SCHROLL, PH.D.

  A young man skeptically eats mushrooms at a wedding party and suddenly encounters a profound realization of the playful drama that is human life.

  When I was in my twenties, I was invited to a friend’s wedding reception to be held at a home in the country several miles from the city. My friend mentioned that some close friends were going to be taking sacred mushrooms and asked if I would be interested in joining them. My friend assured me the experience would be quite safe. I replied that I had never taken psychedelic mushrooms, but that the possibility had always intrigued me. I was especially curious about the claims that psychedelics could produce profound mystical experiences.

  Each frozen mushroom cluster was approximately one ounce in weight. My friend recommended that I eat half of one, because of their potency. Picking one out, I bit into it. It tasted awful, almost like eating dirt. I chased it down with beer. In the hot July weather, the remaining mass of frozen mushroom began thawing in my hand. I thought to myself, “How potent can something like this be?” Fifteen to twenty minutes after eating the first half, I felt unchanged. Deciding that there was no harm in eating the other half, I chewed and swallowed it, too.

  During the next hour I waited for something to happen. I was really beginning to doubt the literature concerning psychedelics and mystical experiences. I also began to scorn the critics, whose negative media campaigns frighten so many people about the dangers of psychedelics. This bitterness toward the government and the ignorance of the society I had been born into continued to swell within me as the time progressed. I was experiencing a slight increase in visual, auditory, and mental awareness, but nothing that seemed significantly beyond normal awareness.

  Then, in the midst of all this doubting and critical reasoning, all at once a remarkable awareness came over me. Looking around the room at the party that was still going on, the understanding that we are all actors and directors in a giant cosmic drama became vividly real. The personality constructs and social games we create became unquestionably obvious. I felt I was able to see right into the very core of my own personality. This extended to an awareness of the personalities of everyone around me. I recognized that our social constructions of self are perceived as real because we grant each other permission to create these images and impressions. I became totally fascinated with the thought of the human ego’s ability to assume any character it chooses to express. Indeed, we not only grant each other this permission, but daily we are completely taken into believing that the social roles we create are genuine and authentic.

  Contemplating this thought, I began thinking about the shadow consequences of our ability to be both actor and director in this extraordinary drama. I contemplated advertising, which appeals to our shadow tendencies toward constant consumption by never allowing us satiation. Defining our self by the objects we own and the things we still must obtain keeps us in a constant state of deficiency motivation. We are always grasping for more objects to make us whole.

  These thoughts were interrupted when I became aware that my ability to pay attention to conversations going on around me had been expanded. I began participating in three separate conversations, remembering each of the stories that I was hearing and participating in them like we usually do when participating in one conversation. This intensified my awareness that we are both actors and directors in this cosmic drama.

  I was then compelled to begin shaking everyone’s hand in the room, congratulating them for creating such a convincing dramatic illusion that it truly seemed real, saying to them, “Great acting, you are really seeming to be authentic in this creation of your self!” When I arrived at the last person in the room, the sun had set and the sky was filled with the stars of the new moon sky. I reached out to shake his hand and looked into his face with the night sky shining in behind him through a window. My awareness of figure and ground shifted, and his body seemed to merge with the wall behind him. I then found myself looking past him into the night sky, letting go of all the social constructions of self going on around me, melding with the star-filled universe. It is still one of my most profound transpersonal experiences.

  Sometime later I roused from this vision and found myself outside the house. I had lost my glasses in the yard and people were looking for them with flashlights. Even though it was night, I could see each blade of grass with extreme clarity, like during the day. I found my glasses and picked them up. I wandered off from the crowd, crossed a road and a barbed wire fence, and found a soft place to lie down and sleep. The next day I awoke on a golf course putting green with a crowd of golfers staring down at me, wondering if I was okay. Initially I was quite startled, but I got up mumbling some nonsense and wandered back to my friend’s home.

  Over the past twenty-five years I have continued to reflect on the meaning of this experience. When I remember, my awareness of the world around me becomes expanded and my perception of the social constructions of self going on around me increases. Being human, I often forget to use this vision to guide my social interactions. In The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Really Are, Alan Watts discusses life as a drama and relates it to the Hindu myth of the universe, maya. Reading it brought the awareness of my sacred mushroom experience rushing back into my conscious memory. Abraham Maslow’s discussion of deficiency motivation and growth motivation gives me a vehicle of expression that helps keep my mushroom experience in my awareness. My interest in deepening the understanding of my mushroom experience and other transpersonal experiences has led to my continuing exploration of questions related to humanistic, transpersonal, and eco-psychology.

  I am a forty-three-year-old male writer and teacher with a Ph.D. in philosophy of science. One of my life’s guiding principles continues to be that the foundation of our discussion of transpersonal experience needs to be grounded in our direct experience of sacred plants. Indeed, cutting our selves off from this direct encounter with knowledge from the plant kingdom has contributed greatly to humankind’s increasing alienation from Gaia consciousness.

  THE LITTLE BEINGS TELL ME THAT LAUGHING IS ALSO HOLY

  KARIN RIESE

  This forty-year-old physician and sex therapist, who lives in Germany, lightheartedly joins a mushroom circle ceremony at a transpersonal conference in the Canary Islands. She has a merry time with the mushroom creatures and experiences the exquisite vulnerability of the cosmic infant.

  The guide opens the ritual by placing four candles in the four directions, representing the four elements. He follows by blowing a Tibetan conch horn, smudging with sage, and expressing gratitude to the spirits of the mushrooms for placing their powers at our disposal. All of this strikes me as a beautiful and important preparation. For the first time, I see the significance of a ritual like this, whereas before I had been rather skeptical toward rituals, especially in groups.

  Some structural guidelines are given: everyone is to preserve the cir-cle; one could dance, go outside, sing, speak, but must always return to the circle. Everyone in turn would hold the talking stick and say with what intentions they are undertaking this journey. For me, it is the first time with this kind of journey and I want to simply explore other worlds and share my experiences with the others. I have no anxiety because I feel trust in the group, the ritual, and in our guide’s confidence.

  About ten minutes later, the effects begin. I lie down and immediately totally new worlds open for me:

  Geometric forms, triangles, jagged forms, lines, bands . . . all seemingly forms without life making a kind of interconnected web. But then, the joke is that these forms are alive, after all. Furthermore, they are curious about me, very interested in everything, and incredibly amused.

  They separate themselves from the geometric web and are moving toward me. They all want to sit on my abdomen, but then I won’t be able to breathe. Strangely, although they look very light, they are actually quite heavy. It’s incredible how heavy they are. I chase them off my abdomen and lie on my si
de. Immediately I feel better. The little beings become irresistibly funny and even somewhat disrespectful, which I really like.

  Then I suddenly see a Jeep in front of me. I say to the little beings, “Well, you’ve probably never seen something quite like this!” Immediately they all gather around and want to climb into the Jeep. In no time, the Jeep is filled with triangles, bands, and lines, till they are looking out the window and we all have to laugh. Really—they’re laughing.

  At this point I open my eyes and look at our circle. Everyone looks so peaceful, earnest, and holy. This sight makes me laugh some more. I’m practically rolling around with enjoyment, but at the same time I have a bit of a guilty conscience, since one isn’t supposed to laugh in a holy situation. The little geometric beings are also laughing, and they tell me that laughing is also holy. So they give me a certain amount of cover. I proceed to crawl around in the circle—which is not really permitted—but my mood is merry and light-hearted; I find myself in front of one of the candles, having a conversation about the sense and nonsense of sitting in a circle. It is a quiet conversation; and at last the candle makes clear to me that the circle form is the right way to do it. I don’t have a clue why, but it is the correct form. So then I go and lie down at my place.

  Now I’m feeling like a newborn baby: very small and soft, with very thin skin, through which everything can pass without any possibility of defense or resistance. My whole body consists of perceptual awareness, a very clear perception, with a mixture of amazement and terror about everything that is going on around me.