¼ Weed Brownie Led a Full-Blown Trip:
(This incident happened some time mid to late 2020, and the text below was written shortly after)
I hadn’t been smoking large amounts lately, as I noticed weed was making me much more high than it should have. Just a few tokes of a joint would induce a typically unpleasant and absurd psychedelic state. I wondered if my current health issues with Lyme Disease were causing this.
Nonetheless, I continued to smoke intermittently, as THC seemed to be the only thing that helped with symptoms, aside from meditation and cold showers.
One of my friends kindly gave me an edible, knowing I was suffering at that time with the pain. He warned me that the edible was fairly strong, but said he ate two the night before and came through okay.
So at about 2pm, I eat ¼ of the brownie, if even that, to be safe. I didn’t want to get high, I just wanted the medical benefits. Despite this, within 30 minutes I started feeling strange. I had an anxiety which warned something big was coming. My palms felt sweaty. Understanding I might not be very functional soon, I got water and connected by galaxy earbuds to my phone. I lay in bed in silence, just watching my state of consciousness and observing the emotional ripples going through my body. That strange feeling cannabis gives, where you are hyper away of your sense impressions, was increasing rapidly. I could feel my heart beat, I could feel my organs functioning.
This recurring state of mind I had been having at the time abruptly joined the party, a state of mind where I’m bizarrely aware of my existence. It doesn’t necessarily always come with fear or dread, but rather confusion and a feeling of overwhelming clarity regarding the absurdity of the situation I was in, being a hyper sentient awareness piloting a primates body, trying to juggle the higher meanings, desires & questions, as well as the basic needs of the animal.
About 1 hour after eating the quarter brownie, I started having DMT visuals. Not as intense and vivid as they are when on actual DMT, but still there and consistently nonetheless. It was like they were overlaid on my vision, with more transparency than on psychedelics, but always there and always moving. I felt quite a bit of fear and apprehension at this point. I have had psychological effects similar to DMT while in meditation or smoking weed, but not with visuals, and not this long-lasting. The DMT visuals stayed with me for the entire high, probably 4 to 5 hours. I could hardly stand up for these hours and only did so to get water and use the bathroom.
About 30 minutes into the DMT high I began being tormented by the thought “this is it Aaron, you’ve induced full-blown psychosis or HPPD, this will stay forever”. I decided to replace these thoughts with something on YouTube. Realizing my earbuds had been in my ears the entire time, I laughed lightly, which relieved huge amounts of tension from my body.
I saw a recommended Alan Watts video which was about 10 minutes. After it finished, the next video that played impressed and amazed me so much I was convinced that those forces which influence reality in a way that must always be disguised by coincidence played a role in choosing it. I then had the thought that perhaps these beings that have slight power to influence basic things like algorithms or code enjoy aiding and fuelling experiences like these as they hitch a ride on the novelty awareness that is of the human consciousness, part hyper intelligent awareness, part emotional primal animal – a train of thought which illustrates how full-blown this trip was – like nothing I’ve experienced on just weed.
I haven’t listened to the video since, but I plan to on my next trip. It was one hour of instrumental music mixed with nuggets of speech by people like Terence McKenna, Alan Watts, Charlie Chaplin, and Eckhart Tolle.
Every thing they said was imbued with a feeling of supreme truth. I felt so clear-headed. I could see of vividly what I was doing when in the sleep state, driven mainly by the automatic drives and patterns of the ego. I could see how I had fallen from grace due to my neurotic desire to be better. I was shooting myself in the foot and holding myself back from that desire’s actualization by obsessing over the actual desire so much, instead of just allowing it to happen. By continually placing my focus on my desire to be better, I was continually insinuating to myself, to my subconscious, that I was separate from what I wanted to be.
I was in complete awe at the experience, of how my mind and thoughts and emotions danced with the backing music and wisdom in being gifted to my ears and consciousness thanks to the tools of years of human effort and toil and love and dedication and fun and struggle. A familiar voice would come forth from the music and throw a stone into the pond that is my psyche, they would then retreat back into the music, leaving me alone to ponder and digest the information, the ripples moving outward in the pond, vibrating, rippling, in synchrony to the music, allowing me to go deeper into the thought, into the emotion, into the pond, to admire the stone and the effect it was having in me.
Some bit of speech, such as Sadgurus, were concepts I had already listened to, but only while doing the dishes or something similar. I realised to truly understand, embody and experience the truth of certain concepts one must be completely focused and open, a state we are becoming ever more separated from in this time of 10-second TikTok videos and constant multitasking.
Towards the end of this experience, with the DMT visuals still transparently in the background moving around in that DMT flow, I sighed a breath of relief. I felt cleansed. I felt healed and renewed. I felt love and inspiration. I felt silence, and I realized how much I had missed silence. Why are we always running from it? On the other side of that fear of silence, of boredom, of the podcast ending, on the other side of that resistance towards silence is where we find peace and clarity. It’s where we find our true selves, where we find how we felt when we were kids.
I don’t think anyone realizes what price we are paying for the constant entertainment and stimulation the internet gives us. We’re sacrificing the complex, profound, personal and authentic experience which we could be having, and exchanging it for mild but constant entertainment and stimulation.
I have come to believe that attention is everything. It is cousin to time and both are being farmed by the most wealthy corporations out there, who have become so powerful by harvesting our most valuable resource with our consent. We give them all we have, time, attention, in exchange for what? Tiktok? Youtube? Instagram?
Okay, sometimes we watch things that are valuable and interesting. That’s true, these tools aren’t innately bad. But how much do we actually remember when we watch so much. Maybe this argument I’m making is only relevant to people near my age (20), but from what I understand, this issue is widespread. We consume too much, leading to never truly enjoying or experiencing anything. The desire to have novelty so quick, every 10 seconds in the case of tiktok, is damaging (primarily) the youth of the world, damaging our quality of consciousness.
How are we to think or create when we are being trained to have ADHD.
A book I once read by an occultist & business lecturer from the early 1900s said that to create or actualize an idea, one must have the ability to intentional sustain focus on a desire object. If water always rushes, and cannot be stilled, ice cannot form. One must have the ability to still the water.
I’ve realized that my quality of life, my quality of thought, my complexity of experience and sense of meaning and progression is incredibly improved by the habit of reading. The less I watch YouTube, and the more I read, the more me I feel. The information I learn is actually being integrated, I’m adding to my database of knowledge and creating connections, something which only happens very mildly when watching YouTube. This is why I made the discord group. I long to read more and more and consume internet content less and less. With the discord, we have the accountability of deadlines and the inspiration of one another. Along with this, we may also create a community by exploring important ideas and sharing our thoughts on how we may best progress forward with the information we learn.
Video I mentioned: BEYOND: Terence Mckenna & Sam Harris & Alan Watts & Sadhguru