Consciousness Cafe - Entheogens and Psychedelic Cultural Transmissions

azure writes:

I have recently been thinking more about a peculiar experience that
arose for me some years ago under the effect of 20grams of icaro's T.
Peruvianus. Since this subject of cactus has arisen on list, perhaps
the time is right for sharing...so gather around the fire! Don't
worry, it's a short one.

The experience proceeded in typical fashion for perhaps the first two
hours, at which point a sort of prelinguistic phenomenon began to
manifest. In many of my psychedelic forays, there is a large globular
being that I will apprehend whose motion--on many levels--represents
a sort of synaesthetic whirlwind, encompassing all of the senses. On
initial inspection, this being produces a sort of 'noise,' which is
entirely incomprehensible. The trick seems to be, that underneath the
noise are a series of harmonics from whistling whispers of crisp wind
up through basso profundums of suffusing tones. These tones encompass
the capacity of 'listening' within our organism. At a deep level, I
have come to entertain the notion that these resonant phenomenon are
part of the heritage of what it is to be creative.

Categories: psychedelic, trip Report


So, this night, I am listening to these tones with the whole of my sensation, and the amorphous voice begins to resolve itself.
Suddenly, specific voices and patterns and realms of vision are
being seen. First I perceive an aryan-germanic voice, which is using
it's 'hands' to reach into the physical body and is dividing up the
various organs according to their functions and names. The words are
incomprehensible, something like babble, but the finesse of motion
and gesture and naming strikes me as a beautiful symphony of the
simple delight of consciousness: breathing in, I am aware of my
body; breathing out, I calm my body.

And the symphony continues through the language, as the language
itself transports me to a victorian ballroom, and I begin to
feel--however vaguely--the language in it's rhythms and flavors, it's
meanings and nuances, is but an extravagant attempt to conceal or
sexual organs. Perhaps...perhaps not, and the dance continues.

So, I'm sitting in the ballroom, and I open my eyes and look up at
the lamp lighting the room in which I'm now sitting. Here it gets
strange, for here there be wildthings. As I'm sitting underneath the
lamp, there is a surge of taste that comes up in my mouth: the taste
of DMT. My field of vision goes red, and in that precise instant,
sitting in the room...the lamp above me, lighting my space, BLOWS OUT
in sparks and heat, and the room is entirely dark.

'If therefore the light within thee be darkness, how great that
darkness.'

Now let me turn the page, because there is something in my heart. I
remember the day I met my fiance, when I first saw her...there was a
halo of light around her, and I saw through her being into the past of
her people, the dine. The vast planes of the desert, the smell of sage
wafting through the air as dust colors the horizon, and the sun. That
light in the space above me, reflecting off each and every earthen
surface.

Over the years, I have come to see that this tapestry in my life
called 'woman,' or the 'feminine,' who is my fiance, is what the
alchemist's called the lumen naturae...light of nature. Dogen speaks
of the 'moon in a dewdrop,' which is a reflection of a reflection of
that which comes from the stars: the light of God as reflected in a
man...lumen naturae. We are from the stars, beings of light.

Indeed when one inspects the theosophy of the christian faith in it's
current inception, the attitude of prohibition makes perfect sense.
Something like DMT represents this latent and shining divine in matter
and nature, which in fact permeates our entire being like an endless
tapestry of silk. The divinity of Christ, in it's current conception,
denies the dense corporeality of earthly necessity: it is like false
diamond. At a fundamental level, it seems nothing more than an
ellaborate denial of the light of nature.

But there is that moment of turning, when the light of God goes
out...what, in that moment, remains?

I am always struck, in reading alchemical and buddhist literature,
the numbers of synonyms that are drawn out in describing psychic
events. Both forms of literature invariably activate the unconscious
on reading. Over time, I have come to feel that these synonyms and
their teachers do something astonishing: they veil the divine. How is
that one can become many? It is like listening to the sound of
rushing water, that which 'broods over the waters' and divines their
composition...like solid earth, which receives all things into it,
like fire which consumes all that it touches, like air/aither...to
which all vapours return.

So the sun sets for me again, that light in the space above me, and a
gentle smile grows on my lips from the place of sitting...for the
earth is my mother.

Moon in a dewdrop indeed!