gringo

Develop the strength to do bold things, not the strength to suffer.

This can apply to psychedelics. Taking a big dose is bold.

But it could be better than spending a whole life suffering and getting caught in illusion?

Perhaps the only way to avoid a psychotic break is accept that I will have another one someday.

I will go insane.

I will hurt those I care about, potentially physically.

I hope like fuck I don’t incestuously abuse my son(s) or daughter(s) but I probably cannot protect them from experiencing sexual assault as long as they live… or addiction, or dysfunctional relationships…

Actually if you think about life in a dual sense… the only way to raise a kid to have a happy life is to give them an extremely painful upbringing.

That’s insane but that’s the logic.

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I oscillate between thinking everyone else is woken up to reality except for me, and I have woken up to reality and everyone else hasn’t.

The truth is probably in the middle.

I also oscillate between thinking I have a responsibility to be good, put out good energy, to “choose the dream I’m dreaming” — and thinking that my choice to lead a happy life leads to more unhappiness in the world being created.

That I’m only setting myself up for future pain or shock by seeking happiness.

You know what I dislike about all these talks of enlightenment and peace? They ignore that the dream gets fucking real sometimes. Sometimes you are basically broken. You can’t see the forest for the trees.

At least I think that happens. I have felt utterly broken before. I have had a psychotic break. I have felt like my suffering will be endless.

Even right now I still feel like I’m tripping.

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I hope being back with my family will make me feel better.

Whilst on ayahuasca, I got scared.

But I was imagining everything I was scared of, right?

Perhaps the bright white light I saw was almost waking up from the dream.

(For context, I’m entertaining the concept that this entire sober/waking life is a “dream.”)

The white void I saw, the infinity: that was actually just the nature of the dream.

That it could be anything.

But I got freaked out by what I IMAGINED I could dream, not what I was really dreaming.

In that moment what was actually terrifying?

Nothing. I was in a room full of people doing ayahuasca.

None of them attacked me.

And how do I know that in a situation like the man who is stabbed by the schizophrenic wife, or the child that is raped and murdered, or the schizophrenic man who stabs his wife and then himself, that the situation will be full of fear – and not adrenaline, endorphins of some kind, liberation?

Yes this is a crazy concept, but it might be true.

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Row, row, row your boat

Gently down the stream

Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily

Life is but a dream.

Schizophrenia = waking nightmare?

Perhaps schizophrenia and mental breakdowns and other forms of intense pain are like a child having a nightmare.

The loving parent (God) is sorry to see it but can’t do anything except lovingly try to wake them up.

Perhaps ayahuasca was lovingly showing me hyperspace / true reality, and I was screaming because I was dreaming “consensus reality” full of it’s suffering, rape, war, torture, and insanity.

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I like the concept that we pre-plan our lives so that enlightenment will be reached in each life.

It sounds true, honestly – I feel like I experienced that during ayahuasca – the realisation that enlightenment will be reached in every single life.

I think I got scared when I began imagining the implications of that – enlightenment will be reached even in the lives where a paranoid schizophrenic person murders their lover, or when a kid gets kidnapped, raped, and murdered, or when a fetus dies in a miscarriage/abortion.

That’s a fucking terrifying dream and I don’t want to experience it.

I hope I’ve got a lot more dreams to go through before experiencing that again.

Interesting prayer/quote

Help me to trust the perfection that surrounds me. Help me to know that this is not real, that no child of God can ever be truly hurt, that death is an illusion. Help me to choose your voice instead of the voice of ego, to choose love over fear. Help me to choose to believe in my innocence rather than in my guilt. Help me to reclaim my true home in heaven.

• and

Ascension means the experiencing of your divinity. It is the full conscious realization that you are the creator of everything you experience, that you cannot be a victim, that you always exist, and that nothing outside of love is real. It is knowing that you are one with God and with Spirit. The possibility of realizing your ascension is the major reason for your present incarnation.

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https://channelswithoutborders.com/ascension/

Ascension is about:

Knowing the truth about who you are Realizing your unity with your higher self Experiencing on a cellular level the unity of all life Living in love rather than fear Having no judgment about anything (no concepts of right and wrong) Surrendering all attachments Trusting the perfection of each moment Listening to and following your inner guidance Finding out and doing what you came here to do

Ascension is not about:

Eating correctly (or fasting correctly) Breathing correctly Meditating correctly Communicating with extraterrestrials Pleasing God Being perfect (or even good) Following the instructions of a spiritual leader or guru Getting it right Correct spiritual beliefs

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The popular saying is, “never put off until tomorrow what you can do today”. My suggestion to people has always been the reverse, “Never do today what you can put off until tomorrow”. Today is for what is really important. If there isn’t a significant reason for action, such as inner guidance or a strong desire, why give it time in your present? Put it on the back burner until it is time for action, if ever. Is waking up really important? If it isn’t important enough to give your full focus to it today, admit that and stop playing games with yourself. Acknowledge if it is not so important to you to ascend, even though it might be a fun game to play around with. Be honest with yourself and say that you are not choosing to awaken at this time.

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If God could see your illusions, it would make them real. Think what that would mean. If your body truly exists; if this earth and universe are existent; if your pain, suffering, and fear are real; they will go on forever. When you die, and leave all of this ”reality” behind you, you will realize that none of it was actually taking place. This you realized after your last incarnation, as well as following the multitude of others you have experienced. When you no longer have a body, you still are, just a whole lot lighter without the excess baggage you carry with you now. All of the things that felt so necessary, vital, and important in your physical experience are gone. They are simply gone. If they were real, they would still be there. When you ask God to give them reality, be aware of what you are asking for. You are asking for your hell to be permanent. It is to your saving grace that God does not see your illusion, seeing only the truth of you so that you have the potential of also holding the truth.

Rather than abandoning you, God has sent the Holy Spirit. This is a difficult concept to fully understand. In Christianity, they talk about the trinity of God: Father, Son, and Holy Ghost or Holy Spirit. Usually, even though the concept is alright, the execution of it is woefully inadequate. The Father is often pictured as judgmental and punishing; the Son is limited to Jesus, excluding all of the rest of the Sonship (which includes you and me); and the Holy Spirit is often simply not understood at all. The Father is the originator God – all loving, all powerful, all creative. The Son is you: whoever is reading this; whoever isn’t reading this; and whoever has, is, or will be in a body. The Son is created in the image of the Father: divine, all loving, all knowing, all powerful. But, a part of the Sonship has chosen to believe in a separation from the Father and fears retribution for that action. That is the case for all who have chosen human form. God recognizes that you believe yourself to be lost, but does not experience the trauma you have created. You are like a sleeping child experiencing a nightmare. The loving parent recognizes that the child is having a bad dream and knows that it is terrified, but cannot penetrate into the illusion. The parent knows that what is being experienced isn’t real and that sooner or later the child will wake up. The parent tries to lovingly awaken the child and to assure it that it is safe. It is the Holy Spirit that carries out this function.

The Holy Spirit is the intermediary between the Father and the sleeping Son. Spirit is designed in such a way that you can ask for Its support, supplicating to be brought into conscious alignment with the Father. I want to remind you that you are not being helped to establish alignment. You are already aligned with the Father. You are one with God. You are one with each other. What is lacking is the awareness of that oneness. This does not take away the truth of who you are, but it does keep you from having the experience of your divinity. Rather than living in the divine love of your birthright, you live in fear. By asking Spirit for support, you can realize your alignment with the Father. The role of the Father is to hold the course, to hold it steady, to hold the truth, to never waiver, and to never give any reality to the hell that you have created. The Father always sees your perfection. It is your role, as the Son, to give up the ego, to stop choosing to listen to it, and to choose divinity. To facilitate your process, God has created the Holy Spirit to help those of you who have chosen ascension, and want to give up fear and illusion. The Holy Spirit is there to give you a helping hand. He is aware of your illusions, but does not take them seriously. Your task is to believe Spirit, rather than the ego. Spirit is there to support you in constantly choosing love over fear.

“Yesterday was my birthday, and I took 5.5g.”

Another one taken from /r/Psychonaut

I wrestled with the (non)existence of time and the nature of insanity, I saw all of humanity's suffering as a reflection of myself, and felt as though everything in existence is simply grains of flour being kneaded into bread dough by the universe.

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For the past three years, I've made it a point to take the day off work and trip on my birthday. The first time was with four tabs of acid, which essentially ripped me apart on a subatomic level and left me pooled on the floor in a gelatinous heap. I'd do it again, but definitely alone in my room instead of with friends. I took it easy last year with only one tab, and it was amazing and beautiful and pretty much what you'd want when tripping on your birthday. This year, I decided to turn the heat up once again, but with mushrooms. I've taken them many times and prefer them to LSD, but I'd never taken more than 5g before, and I've also never really left my body in any meaningful way (aside from my four-tab journey but I was blacked out for most of that and can hardly remember the trip.) So I weighed out exactly 5.05g being that the date was 10.10, it was my birthday, and math is cool sometimes, and 10.10/2=5.05.

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In a snap decision, buzzer-beater move, I grab two more mushrooms from my bag and add them to my weighed dose right before eating them, so my actual dose could've been anywhere from 5.5-6g. Was this an advisable move? No. Did it get me where I wanted to go? Absolutely. I took a hearty dab a few minutes after eating to calm my stomach, and immediately I started to feel strange. I'd planned on playing my guitar but I felt paralyzed in a way that normally doesn't happen when I'm stoned. I couldn't do anything but sit on my couch and stare at the wall. I noticed the splotchy, uneven ridges formed on my wall from 130 years of abuse and repainting. They appeared as rough continents in an ocean of smooth paint, and I was mesmerized. I made a playlist of songs and albums I thought would catapult me into Kirby's Dreamland (which I will put in the comments for those interested, psychedelic bangers only I promise,) and honestly I think I went too far. The first album I played was Ants From Up There by Black Country, New Road, which feels like a play about moving from one stage of life to another. I found it incredibly emotional as yesterday was my 25th birthday and that's kind of a milestone. I thought about my childhood, and as I closed my eyes, I was transported to an old shed in the country that seemed to be an amalgamation of my childhood home's garage and barn, my great uncle's toolshed, and my grandpa's workshop. I was just standing in this place, looking out through the gaps between the panels on the walls and through the dirty broken windows to see an endless expanse of forest around me. Ants From Up There finished like a car sliding sideways through the finish line at 90mph on fire, and I burst out laughing. The entire time I was listening, I was wondering how the band made the album sound as impactful as it does, and I figured it all has to do with how much each band member was able to put themselves into the music as they wrote it. That's why it's such a visceral experience- because everyone involved had invested themselves emotionally into the project in a way that really comes through in the final recording. It's a human experience put to tape.

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The next album in the queue was Bitches Brew by Miles Davis. I'd never heard the album before and good God what an experience that ended up being. Jazz and tripping go together like gasoline and fire. I couldn't comprehend what I was hearing, how human beings could make this music, when suddenly the entire band got quiet and Miles Davis can be heard telling his other bandmates “okay just keep it tight here.” And it hit me- none of this improvisational magic would be possible without real communication. Miles didn't care if the mic picked up his voice and blemished the recording, he wanted his bandmates to keep the same vibe going, so he told them to. And it sounded beautiful.

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Time stopped soon after this. It felt as if the same five seconds of music had been repeating in perpetuity for hours. I looked at the progress bar for the current song on Spotify to confirm that time was indeed passing, but I glanced at the queue for the playlist, and I hallucinated that every song in the queue was the current song that was playing. It really worried me, because I truly thought I was going be listening to this same insane song for all of eternity. I looked at my phone literally one a minute to confirm that time was still passing. I couldn't understand how time clearly did not exist, yet it is clearly still an ever-present construct in the human psyche. I don't know how long this loop lasted, maybe an hour. I could feel my roommate in the other room. I wanted to knock on his door and beg him to tell me that I'm not going crazy and that time hasn't stopped. I imagined him doing exactly this, and I realized how unhelpful that would actually be. Past a certain point, there's not much you can say or do to help a tripper out. I knew I just had to ride this one out. I felt as if my roommate and I were exactly the same person. Then I felt as if everyone on Earth is exactly the same person- but that means that Jeffrey Dahmer and I are really the same. How could I possibly be the same as this cannibal lunatic murderer? Was that insanity inside me, too? I don't want to be insane and cannibalize my houseguests, how could I possibly identify with this monster? I wrestled and wrestled with this feeling, but I realized that emotions are universal. Everyone feels love and hate and fear and lust and the need for power, the only differences being the intensity with which we feel these things and how we choose to act upon them. This answer satisfied me. I'm not without darkness inside of me, but I'm also not under the darkness' control.

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As the separation between myself and others began to disappear, so too did the separation between myself and everything. The universe isn't comprised of x-number of individual things, it's simply comprised of everything. The entirety of the universe (according to our current understanding) comes from one singular place and event- the Big Bang. There isn't a single thing that exists in our universe that didn't come from the Big Bang, therefore I'm a cosmic cousin to every bit of stardust and every alien across the heavens, and so are you. “Everything is everything,” I told myself hundreds of times throughout the trip.

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I saw the entirely of man's suffering as one wretched black mass of screaming tendrils. As I stared at this conglomeration of pain and sorrow, I saw myself reflected in its form. “I must be dead,” I thought as I saw this hellish, evil thing staring at me with my own eyes. “No, I'm past death. This must be Hell.” I was taken through a gallery of horrors, I felt pure insanity within myself, extreme paranoia, my mind was hurling abusive thoughts at itself about things I'm not even insecure about. I knew this would last forever. I'd broken my brain this time. So long, Icarus.

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I remembered being with my friend when he was peaking on 7g. He was even more psychotic than I was, and he ended up being fine afterwards. This brought me some comfort. I'm not crazy, and yet I felt crazy. I became obsessed with contradictions. How can I be insane and sane at the same time? How can time exist and not exist? How can I be alive and dead at the same time? I once again felt this connection between myself and everything in the universe, and I imagined the entire universe kneading itself into a ball of dough, bringing everything together into one cohesive mass worth more than the sum of its parts.

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It was then that I realized insanity and sanity are the same thing. Insanity can be conceptualized as the overexpression of characteristics any sane person expresses in moderation. We all have these insane characteristics within us, but most of us are able to control them and deal with them in healthy ways.

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I wanted to go as deep as possible this trip, and I did. I faced my own insanity, I delved deep into my own suffering, I felt myself tearing down generational trauma and finally facing the fears I'd been running from all my life. I learned of the nonexistence of fear. It's another conceptualization we invented to keep us safe in the face of uncertainty. As a concept it can be useful in keeping us safe, but sometimes it can be all to easy to let this concept materialize itself in our mind and control it. But the simple truth is that it's just another thought, and it only controls you as much as YOU let it.

Found a good explanation of what I experienced:

My deepest trip was basically that time was this infinite loop, every person was just me going through every kind of life, I didn't have anything to fear because I could just go back to a state where nothing exists, I could move forwards in time or back.

Except I absolutely feared the void.

Maybe because I wasn’t ready to die? Maybe when I’m ready I won’t be afraid of death.

It was a when I first started using mushrooms, it was just so overwhelming, i've been afraid to go that deep again. The experience was beautiful, but it was so much bigger than me.

No death and infinity is pleasant?

I had a bad trip once where i thought I was pregnant and having the baby right then and my bf did it on purpose. I am totally fixed and the next day wondered what that was about. I began to wonder if it was karmic energy from so many women who have been impregnated and used. So what Im saying is, you may have some other fears or karmic energies you were picking up on, but on another trip I learned there is no death and infinity was pleasant because theres no suffering like humans think.

Comment on the fear of infinity

I used to suffer from apeirophobia as a child. Raised Catholic, the idea that “god's always been there” freaked me the fuck out. Like, there was never any beginning? He just existed doing fuck all for an infinite length of time before deciding to do or create something? My 8 to 12 year old brain called bullshit. Even younger than that, I always just quietly wondered if grown ass adults actually believed this horse hockey. But even after I silently (not openly to my parents) decided I couldn't even entertain the ideas insisted upon in theistic, creationist religions, that still left the irreconcilable dilemma of time on a universal scale. By the age of 8, the very thought of the universe having always existed- or having come from nothing after an infinite length of time- gave me paralyzing anxiety. And as I got a little older, the question of whether universal time will ever end, or if it just goes on forever, was equally panic inducing. I didn't really like either answer there. By 13 or so, I had more friends, and a social life to distract me from such nebulous thoughts. And as of now, I have a different understanding of how time works, and I take comfort in the knowledge that the universe is finite in content. I believe the universe is cyclical in nature. Technically, going on forever, but not as an infinitely different sequence of events. That's my “comfortable compromise of certainty”, as I call it. =]

That doesn’t necessarily make me feel better as it means re-experiencing over the over the same suffering and lessons, huh?

Mistakes of boldness are better than mistakes of sloth? Perhaps.

Develop the strength to do bold things, not the strength to suffer.