Mushrooms

Saturday, 22 November 2008

Rob Chrispijn is a mycologist, but I love him anyway. For him, searching for mushrooms is one of the best things that Life has to offer. When he talks about it, I only need to exchange the word ”mushroom” for ”record” to understand what he is talking about. I have absolutely nothing with mushrooms, apart from the fact that I love to eat them in omelets. I did a magic musgroom trip once, which I enjoyed very much too.

The reason I did this trip was because what Terence Mckenna has told about it. I wanted to see if he was right. I have different ideas about many of the subjects that McKenna and I share an interest in. But the idea that certain natural substances, like in this case psylocybine, can trigger the activation of a latent function in our system is one idea that I tend to agree with him upon. In order to find this out, you have to use a critical amount of the substance, which is a quite a bit more than is consumed by people that use it for amusement. There are many accounts of such trips written and published on the Internet. My magic mushroom trip was very much like a re-visit of some of my deepest meditations. Very interesting, but not really adding anything new to what I already had experienced. Neither did it give me spectacular new insights.

The most spectacular part of the experience was when I thought that I was completely sober again. I could no longer feel any effect of the mushroom, but I did have an awareness that I only had experienced one time before. Writing about this always makes me feel a bit uncomfortable, but I want to tell like I feel it was: for an hour or two I completely understood that this Life is a Dream, and i was no longer in it. Or, better said, at the same time I was both in the dream and completely out of it. This lasted for about two hours. And just as the first time that I experienced this very wonderful mindstate, I couldn’t imagine that I would ever forget or loose it. But I did. I have never been that crystal clear again since.

McKenna’s stories about drug trips are, in my understanding, more about the extra-ordinary mind of Terence McKenna than about the drugs. The first time I had such a trip I recognised that I was experiencing the content of my own mind. It was very much like what happens to Jody Foster in the movie “Contact”. In fact, I am sure that Carl Sagan, who wrote that movie, had similar experiences. By the time I ate the magic mushrooms, I was already to familiar with the content of my mind to have it enchant me. I remember that I had all kind of visions and mental experiences that I immediately recognised as productions of my own mind. And when I saw through them, they ended.

For at least two hours, my mind kept on producing new visions and stories, before it gave up. I ended the trip with the sure knowledge that Reality is the shared trip of all of us. You don’t need any drugs to have this experience. And there is no drug that can create an experience that comes close to the trip we call Reality.
My desire to use drugs was completely gone after that magic mushroom dinner. Although I still want to use pure DMT at least once.
The trigger for this story is a booklet that Rob Chrispijn wrote recently together with Chiel Noordeloos, about the mushrooms that can be found in Holland. All the pictures in this story come from this booklet:

It can be ordered here.

And here is a guy who seems to have eating a bit too much of the wrong mushrooms: Bob Cobbing with a ”Hymn to the sacred mushroom”:

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