We settled down for an evening of Kahlua and hallucinations, Katriona and I... a night of booze and mushrooms and strange wanderings in Oaxaca city. We apportioned the supply we’d acquired in Huautla de Jimenez... 13 each.... honey drenched, black, slimey. We ate them down and drank a few beers, a few cocktails... waited for it all to work. Within ten minutes the effects began... intense tingling in the limbs... distortions... objects swelling and breathing and shaking... the floor tilting... head spinning... lightness and dizziness and incessent movement all around. Twenty minutes into the trip and we knew we’d been greedy... the effect was immense and impossible to tame... we were useless for anything... stranded... sprawled on the bed beneath an ocean of blinking white lights. My sense of self just crumbled away... ‘I’ crumbled away, ‘I’ dissolved and left. I kept thinking I was Katriona... somewhat egoless and struggling with identity... then I wasn’t Katriona or anything else.
I became aware of a presence... something strange and non human... several presences in fact... little elves observing quietly. They showed me all sorts of things beyond my comprehension... they knew it too... they were playful and mischievous like that... their object was not to teach my mind but to instruct my body... I could feel them swarming around it... changing it somehow. My vision dialled and revolved... the little ones danced a little parade. They all formed together into a single, crazed, technicolour spirit... some flaming god... it went trailing rainbows.... grinning madly and streaking sparks and colours and brilliance... some wild and funky interdimensional being... purely benevolent and hyper intelligent. I liked it, I liked it a lot. This god... which was a thing of sublime creativity and style... it moved through me and showed me my life. My entire existence... past, present, future... my pattern, my ‘shape’ suddenly fit into something greater... my ‘totality’ locked into the moment... I was emotional because I knew then that I was not alone... something had made itself known for a purpose and an end. All my former selves fell away like phantoms... I realised that everything hitherto had been artifice... that only now was I real, now was I in the right place and upon the right path. I felt very strong and happy and alive... like I’d been through the single most therapeutic experience of my life... the first genuine experience of my life... my first experience of life. Three hours had passed since our initial ingestion. The room was still twinkling and fractured and moving but my more intense visions had subsided. I swigged Kahlua and danced and laughed and let off fireworks... twirling!... Now truly mad once and for all... and glad to have gone mad in a good way and not a dark one. I found the most simple tasks impossible... filling a kettle was a strange and illogical act... the concept of water was alien and hard. Three hours later, sense of mundane reality returned... we crashed, thoroughly drained and exhuasted.
I’m forced to eat my words regarding the mushroom and the western mind. There are intelligences and entities beyond the limiting confines of the ego... non human things with a wisdom and style apart from our own. Mushroom induced visions are not necessarily an incoherent garble...