I post this again because I just got out of a one month hospital stay during which I almost died and was diagnosed a year after this experience with MS - a little uncanny to me given what I had written and experienced almost exactly a year earlier. This is fourteen pages, heads up.
Healing Experience 05/26/07
DOSAGE: 6 grams dried psilocybin mixed cubensis strains. The cakes were mixed when put in fruiting chamber and I was not around at harvest to try to identify, including lots of Aborts, stems and nasty pieces: for this particular Experience I thought that the knurliest, nastiest, abortive pieces, the better.
(Mind) SET: mixture of fear, self-doubt, determination and Chutzpa. We had closed on our house and I had paid up all the bills for a month just in case I ended up in a mental institute from this experience. I was physically exhausted from both preparing to close on the house as well as my annual killer sinus infection. This particular Saturday morning was the first possible moment that I could have attempted a healing. In retrospect, I should have waited a week or two. I had spent hours during the last two days canceling and paying off credit cards, steadily chipping away at the unexpectedly enormous task of “dropping out of society” –it sounds so irresponsible and one would think therefore so easy, like growing pot (it’s just a weed, right?) but in fact is not the least bit easy. What I now think of as the mushroom entity which cohabited my body for a period of approximately four months vied for my attention which was fully committed to taking care of Jana’ and managing everything else, including an extensive “finishing” of our two year remodeling project. The pressure was unbelievable – it was not until the four months were almost over that I truly felt I was not going to go completely insane. Up until this healing experience and until the mushroom entity/entities (whatever it was it was not “individual” like us but a “collective”) left me on 6/19/07, I had been getting a lot of extraordinary information. I wrote it all down diligently but for the most part still had no idea what “it all meant” and this was frustrating at the deepest level. It is not lost on me that I dedicated the remainder of my life force to something, which I did not completely understand, and to a cause only faintly understood. This is faith in action, I believe: I had that mustard seed of faith. Something in me recognized the value in taking the mushroom path and this same aspect of myself recognized the value of the mushrooms visions and “words”, regardless of whether or not I fully understood them.
I woke nauseas and at first seriously considered putting it off to the next day. I walked over to the 7-11 next to our motel along a path strewn with panties and used, discarded condoms and got a cup of coffee, walking back to our motel along the same path. Jana’ was still sleeping just to the right of me and the large pile of dried mushrooms sat before me on top of my notebook where I had written intentions, invocations, petitions and declarations in preparation for the healing experience. My stomach settled down a little so I decided to go ahead. Other than the specific, emotionally charged, prayerful, writings, I practiced no other ceremony, having decided early on in my entheogen usage for better or worse not to “make a big deal of it”. While I self consciously avoided outward ceremony, I reread my invocations and did my best to center myself internally. The sun is not the sky, I told myself, not in my eyes – the sun is in my mind. I had also assigned a picture of a Blue Whale onto my laptop screensaver and many times just looked at it there before me, closing my eyes trying to visualize the whale. I was not yet certain that the Blue Whale was actually be my power animal. Even if the Blue Whale were my power animal, I had no confidence that I could “control” the power of six grams insofar as having the presence of mind to “consciously” call upon the Blue Whale once “inside” the trip. (If you’ve tripped on Acid or whatever, do you have the presence of mind to focus on something you thought of before tripping?) In my one breakthrough high dose experience, I had been instantly transported to what I can only call another reality. My concern was that if I were to be similarly “transported” in this experience, I would not be able to take any kind of control in the experience at all, definitely not enough to have a premeditated, “conscious” thought. This in itself would not be in any way bad, but would, I felt, preclude me from any healing of my wife. I feared getting “lost in the trip” believing that I must stay conscious for this healing to work. I cannot say why I felt this way exactly. In the instances of shamanic healing which I had read the shaman was always conscious. In my breakthrough experience it had been like being in a dream only much more realistic – cohesive, organized – but I felt no more ability to take control of the experience than I have ever felt the ability to take “conscious” control of a dream state. So I focused on the Blue Whale often during the previous evening as well as this morning, looking at the Blue Whale screen saver and then closing my eyes trying to visual this picture. I had never been able to visualize anything until recently and now my visualizing ability was not strong but vague. I felt that somehow everything depended upon this Great Blue Whale spirit guide. Only a few days before this, I had recalled a long forgotten dream from almost thirty years earlier. At that time I was on a deeply spiritual path and was in the habit of keeping a dream journal. One night I asked God to give me a symbol, which I could have for my own, as a testament of our relationship. (I have always been of the opinion that it never hurts to ask) That very night I had the most incredible dream of my life. I recalled completely the dream and wrote down in a long lost dream journal. In the dream I was an awed child on a dock when the side of the head and the enormous eye of a Great Blue Whale rose up out of the water shimmering in the sunlight more beautiful than anything I could imagine. I reached out in my child wonder and touched the Whale just above the eye, stroking it with my tiny child’s hand. I felt as though the Whale and I were both basking under the blessed auspices of God shinning down as the sun. Everything was whole. Everything was perfect. I felt total ecstasy, total love. How on 02/25/07 I could have “forgotten” that dream is beyond me. In that experience I had desperately sought spiritual help from within the experience, to no avail. I had even called upon dead relatives. The fact that I did not make this Blue Whale connection then baffled me. Perhaps losing this dream from my adolescence is the perfect symbol for losing my way in my life. I hadn’t thought of it in years but I recalled that even at the time I knew that this was an important dream, although I did not then associate it with a animal guide, being ignorant of such things then. I “thought” of it during a period when I was asking for a power animal very much with the intention of calling upon a power animal to help with this healing attempt which I had planned for Jana’. There was little doubt in my mind that this was my power animal and that in a very real sense it had been “given” to me again. When I was originally given this I was not coming from any Shamanic tradition but more of spiritual Christian tradition. I did recall that in my fatherless, lost, little white, suburban boy way, that what I had asked God was exactly a spiritual guide – just not using traditional native terminology.

SETTING: I will keep this one short: almost as bad as the mindset, one room motel in a pretty lousy part of town – already mentioned the path to the 7-11, you get the picture. Dubious set, terrible setting.

I feel there must be some context before reporting the experience itself. This experience was a straight out a healing attempt on my part. Jana’ had a rare complication to a surgery that caused almost constant nausea such that for two and a half months she could not eat or drink, even water. She was kept alive with intravenous nutrition and hydration with a stint in her arm in a home care situation with regular nurse visits to at first our house and then a series of motels as we waited (and waited …) for medical care that never came. In our opinion her surgeon had abandoned her – our Gastroenterologist said that this was common with this type of surgery when the surgeons had the admittedly rare problem such as Jana’s and the term used in the business is “cut and run”. Although pursuing both standard medical care and alternate medicine in the form of a Biofeedback/Hypnosis Clinic run by a team of doctors and clinical psychologists, we had no diagnosis, no course of treatment; precious little relief and no surgical “fix”. So it is important to note here that we were awaiting at the time an audience with the purported expert on this abomination of pure free market greed masquerading as a medical procedure which my wife had suffered - just want to be clear that we were aggressively pursuing “normal” medical care for Jana’ at the time. I had not said it out loud but at about this time I had gone from being deeply frustrated and angry about her horrendous suffering over these months to actually fearing for her life. It was just dawning upon me that she may not be so much recovering from an unfortunate surgical complication as dying. Part of this was my being so consumed with the extraordinary tasks at hand and part of it was my – misplaced – faith in our vaunted American medical care system. From one week to the next assurances came. Maybe this, maybe that, and before we knew it months had passed with nothing to show for it.
This Experience was on Saturday only a week after closing on our house – the first big commitment to what I could not help but think of as the mushroom path, just a pinch of tongue and cheek. I had gone to a chiropractor that Thursday and had a good experience that really seemed to help my back. Then I noticed later that afternoon and into the next day, Friday, the day before this Experience, that I was extremely emotional and I had several truly cathartic and healing emotional experiences, accepting and integrating long disintegrated aspects of my emotional self. I must add as relevant here that one of these powerfully integrative experiences involved my own desire to heal. I had always interpreted my “healing fantasies” as self-aggrandizing “manic” symptom of my manic depression. While I had these “manic experiences” only once or twice a year, they were always the same in kind: I would find myself fantasizing about healing “humanity”, discovering a cure for cancer, for example. These fantasies could be quite elaborate or just involve a laying-on-of-hands of someone around me who happened to be sick or even someone I saw on television. I had learned even before the mushrooms to use my fantasies as indicators of my feelings, many of which I have difficulty feeling directly: partly a man thing and partly genetics, I would guess. But I have learned to work around my own dysfunctional emotional state and pretty quickly now recognize my fantasies for the feeling status they represent. (If I “found myself” fantasying about bashing someone’s head in I was angry. Instead of interpreting this healing fantasy as a symptom of mental illness, I simply saw it now as a legitimate if latent desire to heal. There is nothing dysfunctional about such a fantasy. It beats all hell out of spontaneously fantasizing about destructive behavior. Also, these episodes lasted literally only minutes and again happened only a couple times a year. Because a psychiatrist had told me that this was pathological, I had believed it to be so: yes, a clear sign of mania. I did not consider myself a Shaman in any way whatsoever. What I had faith in was the mushrooms. I hoped in fact that somehow the mushrooms could work in spite of me personally to heal Jana’. It was on this day that I fully realized or accepted the fact that I am already completely healed insofar as I can be and that now if was up to me to take it from there: Live! Create! Grow! This chiropractor cracked me good and I am convinced released energy somehow locked up in my spine/nervous system, although I absolutely hate the New Age sound of that! This energy is not metaphysical but is somehow a physical part of our world and is no less real than were microbes before we developed the technology to apprehend them.
This attempted healing was out of desperation. In all probability, the reason that my wife could not even swallow and water, more or less food, having to be kept alive by intravenous nutrition and hydration supplied by a 24 hour feed through a TPI line into her upper arm, was a mind/body reaction by the nervous system caused by the trunks of the very sensitive Vagal nerve being cut in one of those operations with a ninety nine percent success rate. This is what I had come up with after finally getting involved more in what was happening to her after realizing that her doctors were essentially doing nothing for her. She had already found hypnosis to be helpful but not curative. This fact and a strong suspicion both from her surgeon and my own reading on the matter that there was some kind of mind/body connection problem, led me to believe that the mushrooms could be helpful. I know they can be curative of most emotional problems of non-organic nature. I do not by any means consider mushrooms a panacea but I had been thinking about this since becoming convinced that there was some mind/body connection fix out there that could help Jana’. My opinion right now – subject to change without notice – is that the mushrooms themselves cannot cure a physical injury. I have read of instances where Shaman taking the mushrooms and harnessing their power, performed feats of physical healing. A little over a month after the experience, I now consider myself a bastard Shaman: that is, I healed myself but have not had any training beyond that, no Father to teach me the ways. Fatherless and teacherless, I relied completely on the mushrooms to guide me. At the time, I not only did not consider myself a Shaman of any sort, I found this idea offensive. Just eating some mushrooms in the suburbs does not a Shaman make! I have done considerably more than that. I have healed myself using my unorthodox, bastard techniques and that is the first step for a Shaman. I deserve my title of Bastard Shaman. I would just note that I came to this conclusion after the attempted healing experience and ironically enough in spite of its apparent failure.
I admit that at this point I consider the healing Experience a failure and even though I fully expected failure there was a part of me that wanted success as much to heal Jana’ as to confirm the extraordinary reality of what has happened to me. That having been said, elements of this were definitely a success: the Blue Whale actually turning out to be my power animal; my ability – twice – to manifest the Blue Whale after having “gone in”; and the way the experience unfolded exactly as I evoked in writing– all three of these aspects really amazes me, still. On the other hand, Jana’ and I could look at it from a different perspective and call it a success since it was not long after this that she did turn the corner – no help of the medical community. In fact, not long after she got an infection in her pic-line which went untreated for three weeks – more doctor incompetence and ended up with Jana’ in the Hospital in a potentially deadly situation with this infected line running up her arm to with only inches of almost inches of her heart. It was when some days later when released from the Hospital that she began to turn the corner. While I was relieved beyond words when Jana’ did turn the corner, it sure would have been nice if it could have happened, say, within the first week after this healing Experience. I remember afterwards telling Jana’ that there was a strong theme of time throughout the experience and that I felt the mushrooms were saying that it was going to take time to heal her. The only thing the medical community was saying was that she would “probably” recover on her own but it could take up to a year.
Jana’ was suffering a very real kind of extended torture – I would do anything at that point to make it stop. She didn’t want anything to do with a psilocybin enema I had devised after a little research. It was my belief that the mushrooms could possibly help her if she herself took them. I told her that I knew it was a long shot but at worst would do nothing at all and that with the amount that I would be giving her she could be assured of at least a good trip, if not some healing or even help with healing, possibly. What can I say: I saw it as a win-win. But evidently the psilocybin enema is a hard sell. What is with this fussiness about the enema? If I thought an enema of any kind might heal me and or enlighten me and knew that it was harmless what the hell: stick it on up there and let it rip, baby. I guess after nine months before 02/25/06 having eaten such an array of vile and disgusting brews that the thought of being able to get the same trip with an enema instead of having to drink down two cups of San Pedro Cactus goop – well, let’s just say that a nice warm enema sounded doable to me. (Please try cooking down a whole cactus and chugging its thick, vile sludge for yourself before you judge!) I know how to prepare a psilocybin enema and since I have had almost no stomach distress eating large dosages of both fresh and dried psilocybin, I seriously doubted there would be any nausea involved with an enema administration. I explained to Jana’ that at the dose I would give her – the equivalent of five grams dried - she would basically be unconscious within a matter a minutes and I would be there to keep an eye on her. But such an idea was overwhelming to her at that point, spending her every waking minute either puking or trying not to puke.

So after Jana’ made it clear that there would be no psilocybin enema in her future; and given that I knew of no Shaman and that in indigenous society’s expert at the use of plant medicines the healer not the patient may be the one who takes the mushrooms; I decided to try it myself, waiting only to close on our house and get ourselves into as secure a position as possible before attempting it. My last high dose experience had been transformative but took at high toll, causing true mania with no sleep at all for five days. My thought was that if we stayed physically touching during the experience that our emotional connection and physical connection might allow me to act as a conduit for the mushrooms to do their magic. I had by this time complete faith in the mushrooms but in no way considered them a silver bullet: in other words, my apprehension in this healing experience was not so much for the mushrooms as for myself. I knew they would help Jana’ if they could. I had felt their incredible love, compassion, and power. I just really did not know if they could heal this problem. If the problem really was a body/mind, disconnect involving the nervous system (nervous systems are the mushroom’s specialty, mind you) I thought it is possible. I know for a fact that these mushrooms can heal emotional sickness and what my wife had in terms of her complications from surgery was, from everything I could gather, some kind of mind-body disconnect. Not exactly the same thing, but one has to stretch, right. I am not talking about again any new age crap. I mean a disconnect from her stomach being partially – mostly – amputated and the Vagal Nerve being cut – a physiological phenomenon creating a mind/body disconnect within the profoundly complicated and intimate neurological relationship of the stomach and the brain, a physical, not psychological condition. Because I had become convinced of this body/mind issue, I hoped the mushrooms could help. Her two brains – the one in the stomach - (the stomach with so many neural connections it has been called the second brain, I had learned) and the one in the head back in perfect sync so she could stop vomiting. This was also clearly to me some kind of nervous system problem and the mushrooms very realm is the nervous system – if they could possibly repair anything of our physical body, it would have to be something to do with our nervous system. In this realm physical and emotional merge seamlessly. Only the most rigorous scientific reductionism or most outrageous religious dogma can pull them apart, one way or the other. My main point here is that I had some reason to believe that the mushrooms would help, not just a baseless new age fantasy.
This Experience was without a doubt the weirdest ever and was very different from my breakthrough experience. The second, deeper part did fall into a familiar altered reality characterized not by psychedelics but again a completely altered state of reality– a reality seeming to existing beyond our conscious bounds of space and time. The Experience at the beginning resembled less my recent large dose mushroom experience than LSD trips from some thirty years ago almost. Honestly, this Experience disturbs me at many levels, not the least of which was the profound sense of personal failure. You have to accept at least that in my mind – crazy or sane – I believed this could help Jana’ and I definitely felt that I did not do my best and let her down here. I’m not obsessing over it or beating myself up over it but feel it necessary to get down every aspect of these Experiences no matter how personal, uncomfortable or even insane sounding or unflattering as they may be. I do not know how to say this other than that I fear that I didn’t bring enough love to the table. Maybe it will be clear when I go into it, but I guess I feel as though it came close and somehow I was the problem – as if I were a weak connecting wire which was not strong enough to convey the energy from the mushrooms into my wife, maybe allowing it to bleed out, like a spark plug wire with a microscopic hole.
I have been called upon to write this all down and I have made a blood oath to the mushrooms to do whatever I can do to serve them out of a sense of gratitude the likes of which I never knew existed: no doubt in my mind that this gratitude is EXACTLY the feeling of countless other human religious converts over the ages; and even though I still consider myself an atheist, I believe I understand their feelings now. I just believe, subject to change, that the power I am dealing with is an intelligent life force sprung from what I now conceive of as “The Plant Consciousness” and that the Plant Consciousness is vastly larger, older, smarter and far more spiritually mature than our own human consciousness. I also suspect that this Plant Consciousness may be one and the same with the Planetary Consciousness – Gaian Consciousness. They may have been so closely allied for so long that they are virtually the same now, like an old soul-mated human couple perhaps. I am just not sure, yet.
I wrote my intentions and an invocation wherein I called upon Love Itself to heal Jana’. I also called upon my Great Blue Whale spirit to guide me in this healing; believing before “going in” that if, any success was to be had the only chance in hell hinged entirely upon the Blue Whale. The mushrooms would get me “in”, the Blue Whale would guide me, and then … well, I would have to wing it at that point. I planned this out a little more like a military campaign than a psilocybin trip or even a healing. I had never done anything like this with mushrooms before, never even considered it. I put the most spiritual force that I could into it before “going in”. On the one hand, I really did see this as a long shot. On the other hand, anything worth doing is worth doing right, so I went for it. I said that I wanted no enlightenment this day; no pretty colors or visions; no spiritual wars: I wanted only to heal Jana’. Part of my invocation, which I took quite seriously on this Saturday morning …
Proceeding with love and gratitude
In my heart -
My sword in my hand …
Not a very good Haiku but sincere.
I wrote thinking clearly of Maria Sabina and her power chants, only performing this quietly while my wife slept and before I took the mushrooms, not after. I felt it necessary to bring as much personal power to bear upon this as I could – the exact opposite of my previous approach to a hallucinogenic mushroom experience which was open and supplicating. In this above Haiku, I seem to have concentrated all my ignorance, pretension and ego: this also is me trying to assert myself spiritually. In fairness to my self, it should be obvious how well I understood my own inadequacies in this attempt. On the other, the risks were minimal while the rewards, while a long shot at best, were considerable: you can not really imagine what a bummer it is to either be puking or nauseated 24 hrs a day … even a chance of helping was well worth it. I have to note that I felt it necessary be more of an Aggressor than a Supplicant, the exact opposite of previous approaches: in my notebook amongst my stoned scribbling is my demand upon Love, commanding love to heal her. At this point I could not sincerely bring myself to pray to God, but I could pray to love. In retrospect, I wonder if this was the correct stance? I was truly winging it and going with what I felt would give us the best shot: lot of faith in the mushrooms and a lot of hope in the Great Blue Whale. Really, it was not my style personally but I had a strong intuition of how to conduct the healing. Anyway, with a single reference to the aforementioned “sword haiku”, the mushrooms laid my ego to waste. Early on in this mushroom path I decided that there were some things that for better or worse I was just not willing to do because they made me feel too uncomfortable. It is for this reason that I did not and have not danced around with feathers chanting or beating drums. This is a good thing because Jana’ would not have tolerated that even from a real Shaman. She was pretty sick throughout this and mostly asleep and I pretty much was able to leave her that way throughout the whole experience, which was good. I have evolved a totally eclectic set of preparatory behaviors that I find helpful. The truth is that up until this healing Experience, such preparations were minimal. The main thing I did was pray. I would enter a prayerful state and, I believe, give myself, and open myself fully to the Experience.


05/26/07 Healing Experience

Starting eating six grams of dried psilocybin mushroom at 7:30am and finished at 8:05. I sat at a little table next to our bed in the motel, looking at my Blue Whale screen saver on the laptop screen and drinking 7-11 coffee quietly. Jana’ slept just to my right and the dogs slept on the floor. After I finished my coffee, I went to the bathroom to brush my teeth. The Little Flowers are pretty funky tasting. I looked into my eyes in the mirror. I wasn’t sure if I was feeling anything yet: my biggest fear as always was that nothing will happen. My second biggest fear was that something would happen. I rang a little turtle, brass bell close my left ear, then close to my right, nothing. I noticed in the mirror a talisman Jana’ gave me which I wear 24/7. It is a dark dinosaur tooth maybe ¾ inch long but is actually the tip of a much larger tooth, the tooth of the largest carnivore to ever walk the earth, one hundred million years old. Hair stood up on my neck and then a charge of animal fear rushed through me. The largest carnivore to ever to walk the earth! I grabbed the talisman intending to rip it off but as I touched it, immediately I thought that I could use this. I just told myself to cool it. I knew that according to indigenous Shaman while most of us guys would immediately want to go with something like a Grizzly bear or a Lion for a spiritual animal guide, these were as likely to eat you alive as to help you. They are the providence of the most power Shaman and Healers. I believe this stuff. Every fiber of my being wanted to rip that thing off and get away from it. I think the mostly indigenous Shaman of our world have the most accurate and meaningful comprehension of reality. This is why the dinosaur fetish freaked me out and I couldn’t believe that I had been wearing the thing for a year without giving this aspect a second thought. As I have said, I was convinced that this healing called for forceful, aggressive power. Anyway, it is just a fetish, nothing to fear, I told myself. I tried to focus on using it to provide power in the coming experience and to let go of my fear of it.
I closed my eyes and grasped the talisman firmly but gently with middle finger, fore finger and thumb of each hand. Immediately my mind filled with fantastic hallucinations. I had not seen anything like this since my adolescent experiences with LSD. I was awed. What seemed to me to be Mayan masks appeared. The masks were almost twice the size of a human head and resembled a human skull. Upon each mask there were blood smears as if someone had taken their palm and pressed it into fresh blood and then smeared the mask with a human hand sized smear longer than wide. Each mask had smears in the same places, one upon each cheek almost vertical and horizontal smaller smear across the chin and then the largest horizontal smear on the forehead over the eye sockets. Each skull mask appeared to contain a real human skull inside, its blank eyes staring out of the mask’s blank eyes. There were thousands of these masks and each was identical but each appeared to be smeared individually so that while the patterns were the same on all the thousands, each was individual; perhaps representing a individual human life. I could see each mask separately and all together equally well. I had some sense that these represented human individuals’ long dead – maybe all individuals? – especially when the thousands seemed to turn into hundreds of thousands and then millions and all the while I was in front of the bathroom mirror with my eyes “closed”. The skull mask were just expanding outward seemingly into infinity from a point at the center of my “vision” when they began to slowly form into vertical shapes which morphed into double helixes – two of them – each made up of countless skull masks with the skull strands of DNA slowing revolving around themselves like bands of a barbers pole. These two revolving columns of DNA like strands composed of the skulls really began to take on a cohesive form and the forms drew my “eyes” upwards as they began to spin like two columns of tornadic clouds. Whoa! My eyes snapped open no doubt a second before unconsciousness. This is why you should be lying down not standing up, I reminded myself. I had been sure that I had at least five minutes to play with. It had come on really fast. Okay, it got me. I had not even come close to this kind of visual experience on my other psilocybin trips. It was almost as if “they” were trying to draw me in. “I” noticed that the helixes were drawing me up and that the circling motion was what I had felt in my breakthrough experience just before entering an alternate reality, and unconsciousness. I would experience I whirling upward that … seemed … an awful lot like what was happening … and I said, no! No! Somehow I sensed the seduction of it all, skulls forming double helixes for god’s sake, who among us could resist that. In any case, the instant that I recognized what was happening, I had called upon the Blue Whale, never before having been able to “visualize” anything and much to my surprise, the upward spiraling helixes that drew me into unconsciousness morphed immediately into a Blue Whale much resembling the one on my computer screen. Wow, I thought. The Blue Whale then morphed further until just its one great eye filled my consciousness, as a zoom lens can fill a frame. It was then that I snapped “awake”, staring at myself in the bathroom mirror, grinning ear to ear.
Wow, the Blue Whale. The eye of the Blue Whale.
(The eye of the Blue Whale appears to be for me a portal – I have since tried to full my mind’s eye with it again without the use of mushrooms but as yet to no avail)
I knew it was about time to lie down, concerned that I could lose consciousness at any moment. I couldn’t help smiling as I shuffled over to our bed where Jana’ lie sleeping. I was sure that I would be out for a couple hours and tried to drink as much water as I could, finally laying down next to Jana’ in the fetal position facing directly the motel clock’s big, red, digital numerals on the nightstand. I pulled Jana’s hand over my side and she hugged me gently, her hand almost exactly over my heart. That will do nicely, I thought. I looked at the clock and it read 8:50am. I closed my eyes and the alien thought popped up, “you won’t need your sword today” a damning reference to my obviously presumptuous assertions of power, I thought: imagine the most humiliating thing that has ever happened to you. When “they” said, “you won’t need your sword today”, I felt my ego just crumble. It seemed to me to be the first time that the mushrooms had thrown a punch at me. I know this sounds oversensitive on my part given the seemingly innocuous statement, but that was very much how I took it. I felt some nausea but it wasn’t bad enough to worry about. The stuff with the sword bode ill to me, as well as laying low my ego. It is hard to explain but goes to the point of my trying to use personal power here – the sword – and my being aggressive rather than submissive. I had felt this was necessary but these few “words” uttered by the mushrooms inside my mind instantly laid waste to my plan. Clearly, if assertion was the way to go at all, it was not for me in this instance. I tried to relax, looking almost forward to “unconsciousness” and that other state of reality. I felt a tightening in my chest when I closed my eyes, a surprise somehow even though I had felt it before. This tightening produced a very specific kind of fear I call elephant on the chest fear, and it was as though I could both feel and hear the elephant coming to sit on my chest. O God, I thought, here it comes. I have to be honest, I find this elephant on the chest thing terrifying. I tried to concentrate on breathing deeply and counting breaths, trying to relax my body. There was no where to run since the elephant was inside me. In spite of the fact that I had lived through it before, it still frightened me. As this elephant fear subsided, I had the unmistakable thought that I was entering a realm in which I have no power whatsoever; where I in no way belonged. I glanced at the dials of the clock, 9:00am. I felt beyond frightened at this point, all confidence gone. I just kept breathing deeply concentrating on my breathe and being open.
The elephant sat on my chest, again. Abject fear now, the feeling of death. I couldn’t run and it was clearly no use to scream so I just died.
No more than a couple minutes later, I whispered to Jana’ who had just stirred, “The little psilocybin fairies are locking and unlocking the millions of neural connections up and down my spine, it almost tickles. They are like children, so light and innocent and glad to be alive. They work joyfully and have billions of neural connections to manipulate. I admire their total love of what they do and total joy in life. I only wished I could live my life like these little fairies …”
And my wife said that was really nice, taking this first morning news very well. I told her to keep her hand on me and don’t worry. She went back to sleep immediately. All fear disappeared when the psilocybin fairies began fluttering up and down my spine. I had never felt this before or heard of it but it felt very real. The elephant vanished. The fairies were so full of love and so full of life, exactly as human children are when playing happily on playground - how could I be afraid?
(In retrospect, I wonder it what was happening was not a healing of me, of my nervous system. This is definitely a believer’s point of view. I had a MS scare earlier and it was still up in the air as to whether or not I could develop MS. Also, as I have said, I did go to a chiropractor so perhaps they could have something to do with that. I noticed also in reviewing my various invocations that in one I had written, “… heal Jana’ and I …” adding myself into the mix in my exuberance. This aspect nagged at me and over a year later, I had a severe MS attack becoming at one point completely paraplegic and almost dying from it. I am dealing with the aftermath now - June of 2008. This attack hit almost exactly a year after this healing experience - the attack hitting out of the blue on May 20th 2008.)
Without really thinking about it, again I fingered the dinosaur fetish with both hands as I lie on my side, and again came the spiraling skull helixes picking up as if where we left off in the bathroom. I felt myself drawn up into the vortex again and knew all too well that meant unconsciousness.
Immediately I called upon the Blue Whale. I am not here for the pretty colors, I proclaimed in my mind. In the name of love I ask you to heal Jana’, concentrating as much as I could and again seeing the otherworldly vision of swirling double helixes formed of millions of dead human skulls slowly break up and transforming into the Blue Whale, his side and head seen through air bubbles coming up from below with his gigantic body and bubbling up to the near surface of the ocean, his one eye staring right at me. I could not believe that I had conjured Him again, and my elation at this success suddenly found me in another reality witnessing what appeared to be an electrical storm in hell itself. I looked down as if I were God upon a pathetically tiny, frail and emaciated old man standing precariously in tattered rags upon the very tip of jagged mountain in the midst of this hellish maelstrom. Lighting and thunder and wind thrashed the frail, little man. His wisps of long, thin white hair on the sides of his head, a similar few strands down his back, white strands hanging from his ancient chin, and his last few pieces of what appeared to be a white cloth robe, all whipped wildly around him like the torment itself. I was thinking, what does it mean? Clearly, this meant something but what? I looked into the wretched old man’s eyes closer then, recognizing myself instantly and alarmingly. My god, that is me! I cannot describe the mixture of alarm and amazement at discovering that this was a vision of myself. Then I saw that his eyes – my eyes - were not wretched at all but absolutely blazing with defiance – no other word for it, blazing defiance. His body – my body – frail as it was stood firm and seemed to be saying, “fuck you,” to hell itself. Bony ribs protruded from an emaciated chest. I really couldn’t believe that it was me in this vision. I can’t tell you what a heart stopping effect this “vision” had upon me – truly startling. It was as if hell itself had pulled out all stops to destroy this old man – me! – but he – “I“ - stood implacably against it. I vaguely wondered if this was another effort – like the sword comment – to destroy my ego.
Pretty much just as I realized that the defiant old man was my self, I seemed instantly transported to yet another reality. This time there was no spiraling upward, just snap and there I was. Now work with me here because this part is really, really weird. Just to describe what happened I have to take some poetic license. While the mushroom “voice” is very succinct and direct, the mushroom realities can be pretty outrageously complicated. For instance, when I say that the Blue Whale is standing at my side, I on his right side, I don’t mean that a one hundred foot long, two hundred ton whale is “standing” next to me. Only that in fact was what happened in this part of the experience. I guess that in exactly the same way that my own body was not “there” but curled up on a bed next to Jana’, neither was the Whales body there – WE were there, our eternal selves, the Whale and I.
We were in a dreamlike place – vague, grey and white. It kind of reminded me of one of the old cheesy star trek sets. We “stood” upon this vague grey/white fog below two men who stood above us upon what appeared to be a much more substantial white, stone platform. These two men were obviously the “healers” to whom the Blue Whale had brought me, amazingly performing his prime function as a power animal in guiding me in this spiritual realm. Here is where you have to again suspend disbelief for a moment - the two “healers” were what I can only describe as old CEO’s. I guess you could say that these two old, Anglo-Saxon men, both balding, both – for some reason – obviously corporate-status-quo types seemed to me to be masquerading as healers. I knew the mushrooms had a very strange sense of humor and wondered if this were not some kind of irony. I did not have the sense that they were retired doctors, but retired CEOs – the symbolic embodiment of what could be called my nemesis if there ever was one! They were the exact antithesis of what I expected. I couldn’t have been more incredulous if they had been the Olson twins.
Evidently, the old bald dudes in what I thought of as just ridiculous white robes thought considerably less of me than I thought of them. I was completely disoriented within the experience, thinking, “what the hell is this?” One of them said to the Blue Whale “standing” to my left, “is this what we are expected to work with now?” in a way of talking over me which disregarded my being most profoundly. The Blue Whale shrugged, as if to say, “what can I say, he’s with me.” There was no doubt that these two would have nothing to do with me if it were not for the Blue Whale. There was a look of disgust on their faces that I couldn’t even begin to articulate. The two were so indistinguishable that they seemed to function as one and I had little sense of their separate identities, to the point where I cannot recall the one or the other specifically. I was completely aware of the absurdity of all of this and was just dumbfounded. After a pregnant pause in which I perceived that somehow the Blue Whale had considerable pull with these two, whatever they were, and that they seemed to feel compelled to help the Blue Whale, if not me or Jana’, they both sighed disgustedly. “So be it,” the one nearest me said (on my “right”). He made three wide, dramatic circles with his right hand, reminding me of when Ed would introduce Johnny, that same kind of “flourish”, and when his arm came around for the third time, I felt a jolt of energy jump from my chest exactly where Jana’s hand still rested and into her hand.
Instantly I “woke” up, lying on my side looking at the red dials of the clock: 9:05. It seems that I was hardly out at all. That surprised me. I had really expected to be out a couple hours. It was definitely over.
Jana’ was still asleep. The dogs were asleep. I was perfectly lucid. I lay still for a while just running it back in my mind. Finally I stood up. Man that was weird. I felt fine, a little tired. It was an hour and fifteen minutes since I finished eating the six grams and I had no problem walking at all. I put my right index finger to my right temple and pressed gently as I closed my eyes– a wash of color exploded, wow! It’s working still, I whispered, smiling. I opened my eyes and again felt totally lucid. Man this was weird. I knew that I could lie back down and trip out or just stay up and trip out but I just choose not to – I had made a commitment to use these mushrooms to heal Jana’ not to trip myself. I did choose to go back to the 7-11 for another cup of coffee. I had felt that jolt of electric energy seemingly bounce from my chest into Jana’s hand after the third flourish of the “healer’s arm” and this seemed to indicate some kind of success. I had to resist the urge to wake her up and ask if she felt better. On the other hand, I was left with a very odd feeling – ominous mixed with befuddlement, maybe. I didn’t at all feel as though what had happened could be characterized as any kind of success. I felt that something was … just somehow wrong … but I couldn’t begin to articulate this feeling. I felt fine walking over and back and immediately wrote up the experience enjoying my coffee while Jana’ and the dogs still slept. It was only 9:30am after all. It was relatively easy to write but I wrote in the form of a totally loose prose poem.
At some point it came to me that at exactly two hours after finishing the six grams, which would be 10:05am, I should put a drop of my own blood in a teaspoon of yogurt and have Jana’ eat it. I felt that this would give her access to the Blue Whale as a power animal if she wanted it at some point but can’t tell you why I thought this. It would also give Jana’ an inoculation of psilocybin, even if only symbolic with no potential for intoxication of course from such a minute amount. This concept of inoculation seemed very important. It seemed crucial. From about 9:40 until 10:05 I obsessed over the two hour time frame, sensing that within this entire obsession was a message about time, somehow interpreting it as meaning that the healing would take time. Something about the skull masks seemed to refer to time also. It definitely was not what I wanted to hear. It was a long twenty five minutes. I then found that I have a natural resistance to self mutilation. I finally managed to get a drop of blood just in time and convinced my sleepy wife to wake up to a teaspoon of plain yogurt topped with a bright, red drop of my psilocybin blood at exactly 10:05am. What a lucky woman she is. At this time it was hard for her to eat anything at all but she sipped this tiny amount of yogurt with a little protest and went promptly back to sleep and the healing experience, such as it was, ended.
I suffered no ill effects, no hyper mania, from this large dose.