Tripping
An Anthology of True-Life Psychedelic Adventures
Edited and with an introduction and other texts
by Charles Hayes
Featuring an extensive interview with the late Terence McKenna
and illustrations by Alex Grey
EXCERPT from the NARRATIVES SECTION:
My first real breakthrough occurred on my third trip, when I dropped acid with my girlfriend Kathyrn, who abstained. We went to the beach in Santa Cruz. Although I hadn't gotten off yet, it was really extraordinary playing around in tide pools with sea anemones, observing the way they'd flow with the water moving around them. When Kathryn had to go to class, I returned home with her, still feeling no real alteration of consciousness. She kept checking with me. "Did anything happen yet?" I said, "No, I don’t notice anything." I lay down on the couch, where I could hear the water running as she showered.
Prompted by this aquatic audio cue, I remembered the water on the beach, and the next thing I knew ‑‑ and it happened so quickly I didn't immediately register the change ‑‑ I had a total identification with a sea anemone. I essentially turned into one. The walls of the apartment swished and swayed like the seaweed we'd seen in the tide pools, and everything was flowing like the ocean water there, to the sound of the shower and the music on the stereo. I was completely caught up in the flow of life that was, just a moment before, a concrete physicality.
Kathryn stuck her head out of the shower. "How ya doing? Anything happened yet?"
"No, not yet."
"What are you experiencing right now?"
"Well, I'm just a sea anemone in this tide pool, and everything is moving around like water." Suddenly I realized what was happening, and it blew me away. I’ll never forget the laughter that roiled out of me.
That evening I had one of the most beautiful experiences in my life. I was sitting on the couch and noticed a field of energy with darting splinters of multicolored light around a houseplant. Then, while looking at a candle flame, tiny fragments of light began to sputter off the top like a fountain of fireworks, filling the room with sparkles of resplendent light. It was the first time on psychedelics that I cried for joy. Beholding such beauty, I felt I was being welcomed to an ineffable mystery, as though I'd finally come into contact with a spiritual dimension that gave hope to humanity. I'd been a disciplined student of yoga and meditation for two or three years, yet this was my first real gnosis of mystic reality. The plant's energy field was also around me, a tangible bioelectrical force that seemed to be the very energy of life itself. Was this eros, orgone, or what is called in Asian philosophies, Chi, Shakti, or Kundalini?
When Kathryn came back from class, she sat next to me, I held her hand and looked into her face. A parade of visages flowed out, the faces of women from all times, young, old, beautiful, hideous. It's a hallucinatory phenomenon that I've experienced several times since. There are meditation techniques for staring into the face of a partner to trigger this effect, where the face goes through a series of fleeting masks, some recognizable, some imponderably complex in the geometry of intertwining inner cubes and outer space.
I felt a whole new dimension of love and compassion, a bioelectrical energy surrounding me, which was intensified by my interaction with Kathryn and the thought of people I loved. I felt blessed and exalted, both ecstatic and enstatic. Ecstasy connotes a separation of the soul from the body, while enstasy is an intense concentration in the present moment. Zen practice fosters a kind of enstatic liberation in which you drop all your illusions and petty desires and just be here now, whereas certain shamanic and yogic practices pursue an out of stasis, cosmic-travel sort of mysticism. I felt I was alternately undergoing both states.
This was a real dawning for me. I was twenty‑five.
Edited and with an introduction and other texts by Charles Hayes
Featuring an extensive interview with the late Terence McKenna
and illustrations by Alex Grey
EXCERPT from the NARRATIVES SECTION:
My first real breakthrough occurred on my third trip, when I dropped acid with my girlfriend Kathyrn, who abstained. We went to the beach in Santa Cruz. Although I hadn't gotten off yet, it was really extraordinary playing around in tide pools with sea anemones, observing the way they'd flow with the water moving around them. When Kathryn had to go to class, I returned home with her, still feeling no real alteration of consciousness. She kept checking with me. "Did anything happen yet?" I said, "No, I don’t notice anything." I lay down on the couch, where I could hear the water running as she showered.
Prompted by this aquatic audio cue, I remembered the water on the beach, and the next thing I knew ‑‑ and it happened so quickly I didn't immediately register the change ‑‑ I had a total identification with a sea anemone. I essentially turned into one. The walls of the apartment swished and swayed like the seaweed we'd seen in the tide pools, and everything was flowing like the ocean water there, to the sound of the shower and the music on the stereo. I was completely caught up in the flow of life that was, just a moment before, a concrete physicality.
Kathryn stuck her head out of the shower. "How ya doing? Anything happened yet?"
"No, not yet."
"What are you experiencing right now?"
"Well, I'm just a sea anemone in this tide pool, and everything is moving around like water." Suddenly I realized what was happening, and it blew me away. I’ll never forget the laughter that roiled out of me.
That evening I had one of the most beautiful experiences in my life. I was sitting on the couch and noticed a field of energy with darting splinters of multicolored light around a houseplant. Then, while looking at a candle flame, tiny fragments of light began to sputter off the top like a fountain of fireworks, filling the room with sparkles of resplendent light. It was the first time on psychedelics that I cried for joy. Beholding such beauty, I felt I was being welcomed to an ineffable mystery, as though I'd finally come into contact with a spiritual dimension that gave hope to humanity. I'd been a disciplined student of yoga and meditation for two or three years, yet this was my first real gnosis of mystic reality. The plant's energy field was also around me, a tangible bioelectrical force that seemed to be the very energy of life itself. Was this eros, orgone, or what is called in Asian philosophies, Chi, Shakti, or Kundalini?
When Kathryn came back from class, she sat next to me, I held her hand and looked into her face. A parade of visages flowed out, the faces of women from all times, young, old, beautiful, hideous. It's a hallucinatory phenomenon that I've experienced several times since. There are meditation techniques for staring into the face of a partner to trigger this effect, where the face goes through a series of fleeting masks, some recognizable, some imponderably complex in the geometry of intertwining inner cubes and outer space.
I felt a whole new dimension of love and compassion, a bioelectrical energy surrounding me, which was intensified by my interaction with Kathryn and the thought of people I loved. I felt blessed and exalted, both ecstatic and enstatic. Ecstasy connotes a separation of the soul from the body, while enstasy is an intense concentration in the present moment. Zen practice fosters a kind of enstatic liberation in which you drop all your illusions and petty desires and just be here now, whereas certain shamanic and yogic practices pursue an out of stasis, cosmic-travel sort of mysticism. I felt I was alternately undergoing both states.
This was a real dawning for me. I was twenty‑five.
2 Comments:
hi nina!... hello everyone else too!
hey there, sauceruney! long time!
Post a Comment
<< Home