I Also Took A Trip Part A: The Scientist from Massachusetts

Thoughts and Notes

Last Friday night I did shrooms with Brandon and Mary. It was exactly what I needed.  It was essentially just hanging out with all walls broken down and we just talked about any and all thoughts we've had, and we told stories and joked around.  Brandon and Mary and I have really similar experiences with the world and life and other people, and it was amazing to share all these frustrations and just knowing I'm not alone on this.  Anyways, I'll try to outline the different effects and lessons I learned.

being connected to energy/experimentation/exploration: 

One of the first things that happened once we were all fully tripping was that Mary broke out this crazy sand/playdough type of stuff.  Basically it was sand that becomes playdough if you squeeze it, but if you release the pressure then it just kinda crumbles back into sand.  I put my hands in it and picked some up and squeezed it into dough, then let it crumble away.  It was crazy. It was too much.  I felt like the sand was me and it was melting my mind. I recoiled, laughing my ass off at how much I couldn't handle this sand.

Brandon, who for some reason has always read information about what is happening, explained how a lot of people who do shrooms say that what can freak you out is anything that responds to energy as if it is the energy…he described it a bit better, but the point is that I was aware of energy as I haven't been before.  I could feel the energy of myself, and all of its potential for movement, and the energy that any object has inherently from the fact that it is matter composed of atoms.

This all made me really curious of everything.  I could look at any object and observe and explore its texture and weight and shape, then see the things I could make it do with my energy.  All these attributes were interesting, whether it was a rock or cool crystal that formed naturally, or a crayon or something man-made like that.  How were they made or formed?  How did it feel to roll it around in my hand and toss it up and down?  If I let it slip onto the floor, where would it end up?  How would it roll?  I became aware of how cool all these possibilities and variety are, and how random and by chance everything is, kinda like Jeff Goldblum talking about chaos theory in Jurassic Park, and how the universe is all just random energy effecting itself in random ways.

Essentially I became a scientist.  Everything was questioned with "Why?" Through this lens, all the events that we would consider inconveniences or problems in our normal waking lives melted away and simply became observable events, events I could impact and take part in instead of thinking of it as a problem.  Two examples: I was experimenting with the sensations of hot and cold water in the bathroom and i accidentally put my arm down on the sink.  It got wet, and my first reaction was the normal "dammit, now I'm wet."  But immediately I had to question this thought.  Why was it bad to be wet? It's just a different sensation from dry, and it will go away in minutes. (This leads me to a quick tangent; everytime any of us went to the bathroom, we would have that time to get lost in our thoughts for a bit and everytime someone came back from the bathroom, they would bring with them a new thoughtful question or concept to talk about. So I came back to the living room and asked, "does anyone else have a primal urge to avoid being wet?" and we talked about it for a while.)

Anyways, I was giving examples as to how I was observing and deconstructing problems.  The second example was when we broke out some blackberries to eat.  We each grabbed one, then Mary dropped the box.  There were blackberries all over the kitchen floor, and Mary was upset that we couldnt eat them.  But I knew that by dismissing this as a problem we would miss the opportunities that these spilled blackberries had provided us.  As with the rest of the night, I wanted to observe, so I got us to try to find patterns in the blackberries, like finding constellations in the stars.  We agreed that there was some kind of bird shape going on.  In addition to observing the environment, it was really stimulating to interact with the environment and effect it with my energy, so I started moving the blackberries around.  I tried to make a picture of myself out of the blackberries and discovered it is difficult to make picture of something skinny with such a fat medium as blackberries.  Eventually I made the blackberries into a little island and pushed it off to the side.