By Thad McKraken - October 2015
Back in June, when the 20th anniversary of my high school graduation hit, I found myself thinking, “wow, what an insignificant milestone that I barely think about at all anymore.” After spending exactly no time contemplating that period of my life in zero detail, it hit me. Oh wait, I took mushrooms for the first time not too long after. Now THAT was something worthy of extensive and existential contemplation. Yep, it was at some point in the fall of 2015, and I’m not sure when precisely (wish I’d written it down), that I first blasted my headspace into the exotic realms of the trans-dimensional art gods, forever changing my relationship with, well, everything. And the funny thing is I knew it too, pretty much immediately. Strangely enough, the first thing that occurred to me when I realized I’d been experimenting with psychedelics continually for the past 20 years was, god, isn’t it a bit screwy that Timothy Leary didn’t get hip to this stuff until he was like 40? No wonder he got so out of control. I’m just starting to kick 40 in the ass and I’ve been at it for 20 freaking years. Leary thought you could take acid weekly. I’d be more of the mind to point out that these are powerful shamanic chemicals. You should probably treat them with the proper respect or they just might turn on you.
In fact, it’s my take that the failure of western psychedelic culture is now and has always been a failure to take shamanism seriously. While I most certainly agree with the idea that set and setting are ultimately large factors in the exeperiential nature of any given trip, I don’t think enough people truly contemplate the radical difference in set and setting between say a Phish show, and a shamanic trance ritual. The setting by which most kids embark upon their first forays into enthneogen consciousness is usually, at some sort of party or party-esque environment. Maybe a concert as mentioned. The set then is that these are just drugs fucking with your head and you’re doing this for primarily recreational purposes. In my case I was lucky enough to not be at a party, but rather on an empty beach in San Francisco with a few friends in the middle of the night. But the set was still the same. I just thought I was going to get fucked up something proper with zero clue what sort of unfathomably otherworldly shit was about to go down. Which is why 20 years later I’m still putting it all together.
From the shamanic perspective, the set is completely inverted. You’re intentionally trying to make contact with the spirit world. It’s not supposed to be about fun necessarily. It’s about healing and learning. So, rather than taking drugs to kill time on the weekend, you’re ingesting sacred chemicals to convene with the conscious core of the multiverse. Which is why when that’s what happened to me, I had exactly zero clue how to deal with it as a teenager. I had been programmed to think that this sort of thing was impossible.
Of course, now 20 years later I’ve been so far deep in the shit for so long, when spectral entities grabbed hold of my consciousness and started telling me about the space between space a while back, I was like, oh yeah, sure. You know, the layer behind reality where the hidden code that is our linguistic programming actually emanates. Yeah, got it. I’ll just project myself out there with inner visualization exercises when I have a free sec and start re-writing the code. Sure. Just another day in my world (which I write about on FB continually, like my new page).
Then out of nowhere it hit me. Waaaaaait a minute. That’s something “they” were trying to beat into my head on my first trip. The holy spirit. I attempted to do this dream programming exercise for reconnaissance on the topic last week. That night my dream went lucid. As I was phasing through what appeared to be a solid wall in my exotic dreamscape mind temple, I looked down and there was a recognition. This is the info that the other waking half of myself wanted. The space between space. From a lower more limited perspective this would be a solid wall, from this point of view I exist betwixt its molecules and it feels like nothing. The spirit world. They/me were trying to tell me/them this all those years back, but I didn’t understand because it was so out of context. As a matter of fact, “they” laid out a lot of shit that ended up being fairly coherent and substantial, it just took me 20 years to conceptualize it properly. Remember when I was talking about why you shouldn’t fry your head on this stuff all the time? Anyway, I’d even forgotten that I’d written about this experience years ago in my first book (which is out of print but my current one costs 3 bucks to download and is a billion times better), so let’s review.
First lesson:
I can’t speak for my fellow travelers, but I can say that at one point I stared at the waves breaking on the sand and experienced a revelation of sorts. The waves appeared to me as stairs to another world. I had a spontaneous vision in which I saw myself climbing into the freezing water and sinking to the bottom; the last breath of air coyly escaping from my saturated lungs as my consciousness burst into eternity.
In that second I knew. It was a disembodied communication brought forth from deep inside of me. Everything I had known about life was a sham. Death was not the end of reality at all. It was in fact an insignificant transition. The life that I had come to know in my short eighteen years as a human being was a minor blip on my long journey towards enlightenment. Much of that Journey was to take place in this other world that I was now catching a glimpse of for the first time.
So yeah, death is an illusion. It’s sort of amazing that the purpose of religion is supposed to be to alleviate the fear of death from our culture…and it obviously doesn’t work, but I start wigging out on ‘shrooms for an hour and there it is. Right off the freaking bat. Gnostic wisdom roughly a gajillion times more advanced than anything I’d gotten from church in the preceding decade. Death isn’t the end of the freakshow, onto the next lesson fine daemon lords:
The rest of the night rocketed on in a similar fashion. At one point I became so enamored with the sidewalk wall border of the beach that my friends had to pull me away from it forcibly. I was staring into the vortex of another world, transfixed by its dark and menacing beauty. I still remember it as black swirling hole inhabited by a multitude of transcendent life forms. I became lost in a chaotic visceral oblivion that probed its way into the tightly sealed corners of my lush inner sanctum. I think my compatriots began to worry that if I stared any longer I might completely lose my self. Something about the way I was staring worried them to the point that they felt they needed to take action.
After being pulled away I kept ranting; “its not about here, its about being out there” I was making a parallel to Star Wars when Obi Wan Kenobi voluntarily let Darth Vader murder him, knowing full well that he would become more powerful and eventually exist in the unexplored nether regions dwelling within everything and everyone. I tried to explain it to them (my friends) and they stared back at me confusedly. I’m quite sure that I wasn’t presenting myself in a way that anyone, even under the peak influence of super hallucinogens, could fully comprehend. “Don’t you get it? It’s not about here! It’s about being out there. Just like in Star Wars.” In retrospect I should have know my fragmented rambling would fall on deaf ears.
See it yet? “It’s not about being here, it’s about being out there.” I can still hear myself uttering those words over and over again like a crazed animal. I personally love how this is all being communicated to me by means of pop cultural metaphor (Star Wars at that), the gods ARE made of art after all. I’ve been saying this for years as that’s what was metaphorically transmitted to me through the projected visual imagery. I guess I sort of understood instantaneously all the way back when. The space between space. Layered on top of our world and yet simultaneously entangled with it. Later I’d refer to this as the 4th dimensional time space perception to appeal to the science fiction geeks, but let’s continue:
The following day, I remember taking a shower possessed with the disorienting feeling that I wasn’t quite the same as before. I was standing in the filthy dormitory stall with warm water cascading down my body and yet I wasn’t. I was in two places at once–bilocated. For the first time, it occurred to me that a conventional existence would never suite me. I had blown it in one night of glorious curiosity. What would I do with myself now?
In my little microverse, I find this maybe the most profound insight. Right there, at age 18, I realized a “normal life” was going to be impossible for me. After one trip. And here I am writing about weird shit like astral projection and the Occult on the internets. Funny how that works out. Now of course, there’s still an aspect to this encounter that is to this day still surreal as all get out to me, mainly because it’s never happened again:
For the next couple weeks I continued falling subject to the same sensation. It’s something I’d never experienced before and haven’t since; the feeling of living parallel existences in conjunction. I was going about the daily business of being a college student as if on autopilot while simultaneously looking down upon myself from above, astounded by my own autonomy.
I can still see this in my mind’s eye, but while it’s locked into this state of existence, I can’t wrap my head around it properly. There I am going to get lunch at the dining hall, and yet I’m also above myself in the corner looking down on me from another invisible perspective. Yet, none of this seems strange at all and I keep going in and out of it unwilling. On an intellectual level I get it, yet it’s so distant and alien that it just doesn’t compute in my waking mind…still. Maybe in another 20 years.
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