Death, Responsibility, and the Void
Psilocin & 2C-B
Citation:   Xorkoth. "Death, Responsibility, and the Void: An Experience with Psilocin & 2C-B (exp66123)". Erowid.org. Oct 19, 2007. erowid.org/exp/66123

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DOSE:
T+ 0:00
25 mg   2C-B (powder / crystals)
  T+ 2:00 17 mg rectal Psilocin (powder / crystals)
BODY WEIGHT: 145 lb
This experience comes not by itself, but as the next or final step in a long sequence of seemingly separate occurrences in my life and in the lives of 'others', as is the case with everything that happens to us in this world. Looking back a few months, I had had the third +4, transcendental experience of my life, but had failed to heed its message - instead of stopping my drug use, I found solace from everyday ups and downs in AMT. This abuse of AMT went unchecked for quite some time, until my supply finally dwindled. This in turn led to some depression and feelings of self-loathing, as well as, of course, symptoms of serotonin depletion, one of which has been a propensity for vivid doomsday dreamtime.

In the short term, that is in the past 48 hours, I have had a final dose of AMT, a 20mg oral dose of 4-HO-DMT which provided a strong taste of what it has to offer, a 3mg dose of DOC to pass today by, and a 25mg dose of 2C-B, just two hours since, because I was compulsed. Which brings us rushing into the present, whereupon I find myself to have just taken ~17mg of 4-HO-DMT rectally, half-heartedly hoping for some sort of 'healing experience'. Or should I say, wholeheartedly hoping but lacking in conviction, that all-important attitude that carries us through our affairs and keeps us pointed at The Goal.

Sometimes conviction comes from elsewhere, however. In this case, it visited me in the guise of a handful of hydroxylated fourth-position dimethyltryptamine molecules, and it certainly had something important to say. The resulting experience shook me up heavily, accordingly, I will attempt to relay the night's events as well as I am able, while understanding that no words could ever hope to bridge the gap between visceral psychedelic understanding and retrospective syntactical wizardry.

2:45am - It began very quickly indeed. No sooner had I arisen from the floor where I had dosed, when I began to feel a coursing body high, a warm, glowing, moderately-frequenced buzzing which resonated through my body and mind like a wave of relaxation and agitation wrapped into one. 'Well then, I'm in for it' say I, for the benefit of the observer, to feel some measure of comfort in the illusion that it is not all alone in the vastness of existence. I had an inkling, but did not yet understand the significance that this particular arrangement of literary syntax would play in the night's experience.

3:00 - My visual field becomes strongly altered, moreso than it perhaps ever has been, or at least in a more strongly vibrant way. It begins with strong color enhancement, a dull, dirty orange shirt I had stuffed into a pile in the room became a radiating, luminescent orange cloth of beauty and grace. My kitten Magna jumps into my lap, and I see blues and purples and reds in her fur that I've never seen before. I stroke her back and neck and she snuggles against me, her fur rippling in wave-like undulations with her purring, her eyes sharp and intent on mine. The room begins to appear bright and stark, alien-like yet familiar. The yellow light from the incandescent bulb has never appeared so ochre, casting the room in its strangely comfortable glow.

3:10 - By now, the sacrament is making my body buzz almost alarmingly, yet still quite pleasurably. My peripheral vision is absolutely crawling with visual activity, when I unfocus my eyes, the world before me transforms immediately into one in which every particle is alive and independent, glowing with purpose and meaning and sentience. My mind, up until now quite devoid of significant activity aside from euphoria, henceforth begins travelling new paths of thought with reckless abandon, trailing tangents and dead ends like billowing fractal mandalas behind me temporally. The schema of the world now seems to be very much like what I imagine to be 'bio-computer-like', as useless as such a construct of the English language may prove to be in this explanation. I am listening to Glenn Gould's Beethoven Piano Sonatas Vol 2 Disc 3, and it provides endless, ever-changing fuel for my mind to digest. I gasp with surprise at the sheer beauty radiating from the speakers like the crest of a breaking wave, I am hearing the piano music as it has never been heard before, every note alive and containing a full range of emotion and intentionality.

The intensity quickly and smoothly becomes more and more. Suddenly, I begin to feel unsafe, as if I had taken too many drugs. In truth, I probably had taken too much. The music, which had just been embracing my mind in its gentle folds of cotton, became overwhelming, disjointed, and frightening. So I quickly turn off the music and am left with a ringing silence louder than a freight train's passing. My mind is working frantically fast, so fast that entire trains of thought occur from start to end all at once, the first thought leading to each other thought in the sequence before I can actually think about it. But yet at the same time, none of it escapes me. My mind has becomes a steel trap, one which has unfortunately become stranded out by itself in the middle of a dark forest full of leafless, stretching and skeletal trees.

Panic begins to creep in, slowly at first, but with increasing insistence. I enter a cold sweat, the buzzing in my body becoming so strong that I feel barely able to exist. I suddenly feel threatened, as if I am about to overdose. My thoughts begin to spin into a familiar cycle, recognizable by my second +4 experience in life, with 2C-E, a cycle of inescapable logic which all leads to the single horrifying conclusion that could possibly remain: death/nonexistence.

I begin to approach the Void, and as I realize with increasing terror, once it has grabbed me, its massive gravitational pull does not allow escape. Allow me to try to describe this mental loop for the esteemed reader. It was a process of continual awakening, of constantly unwrapping a layer from my thoughts which revealed a deeper layer beneath. Once that first panic hit, my thoughts were directed towards fear, so any unprompted thought involved some sort of fear about dying or becoming insane. Then as soon as I thought it, I would pull back my thoughts, because that thought immediately branched out into all of its consecutive steps, until it reached the conclusion that I was dying or ceasing to exist. This happened immediately, faster than the speed of thought. It also involved incredible synchronicity across time and space, with my own life, past lives, and ancient history.

I begin to understand the karmic cycle, how each of us is an incarnation of the universal mind and how each of our lives affects everything else. I realize that the downfall of humanity is pride and desire, and I realize beyond a doubt that my own desire is what led me into this situation. I begin to feel the tremendous burden that it is to be 'god', to be responsible for everything existing. I perfectly understand the process and cycle of birth and death, how each successive person carries with them the skeleton of what the previous people discovered, through genetic disposition as well as recorded history, through 'old wives' tales', through legend. In theory, as time goes on, we should become closer and closer to perfection as a race, until someone is born who is perfect. But it seems to me that the devices put into place to temper desire and pride into nothingness are being ignored and rebelled against.

I discover that the purpose of seemingly controlling religions such as Christianity is a good one, which is to provide this moral framework. As people become more intelligent, however, they are unable to accept dogma, and so they must go through the process themselves, as I am doing now. The price for not listening to what I was taught throughout my life is the undoing of everything, the restarting of the karmic cycle anew. I feel tremendous sorrow and pain at being the one to cause this, after we had made such progress. I feel as if I am becoming the Martyr, the one who must go through this terrible pain in order to plant the seed of peace for the future. When existence restarts, my tale will be in the hearts of man through eons of passing down the tale, emerging from the primordial soup into the first humans or whatever intelligent life is produced, until it becomes legend, whereupon I can only hope I will do better this time, and listen to that legend as a piece of wisdom rather than an outdated, archaic construct of social control.

During this process of branching thoughts, I feel as if time does not exist. My thoughts are moving outside of the constraints of time, so this entire period, though it was the bulk of trip, ends up lasting for not much time at all, perhaps all of five or ten minutes. My thoughts next shift to the topic of personal guilt. I feel absolutely terrible that I have lied once again to my fiance about drugs (lied by omission at least), and now I was going to doom us all, or at least myself. I am quite convinced at this point that I am overdosing and am dying. The story of Griggs, who supposedly overdosed from pure 4-HO-DMT, enters my mind, and I am pretty sure of my fate. I feel horrendous guilt at this. When this all ends, I will be all and nothing all at once and have to restart the cycle of life and death, but she will be forced to live on in this particular reality and instance of life, and will have to wake up to find my dead body, overdosed on drugs, a half-smile and half-grimace on my cold, lifeless face.

I begin to cry and panic a bit, trying to find a way to live, but my relentless thoughts do not allow this possibility. I just know beyond a shadow of a doubt that this is my death, that this is exactly what happens when you die, and that any moment my time will come. I mourn the rest of our lives together, our family that we would have had in the future, and I realize that the intensely vivid dreams I've been having lately about accepting death and/or a total elimination of my own reality were for this particular reason, so that I could go through this experience right now with a greater ability to accept it, so that I can learn as much as possible about how to prevent it from happening again. I realize that this is the root of all art and joy and pain in life, the subconscious 'remembrance' of this event. I am continually living the entire cycle of the drama of cosmic and human life. I feel that I am in hell for a while, for having given in to my human weaknesses one too many times and dooming us all.

At this point, I am standing in the doorway of the bedroom, watching my fiance sleep, tears in my eyes. I decide that, before I go, I need to also say goodbye to my dear, sweet kitties. So I go downstairs, where I find no kitties. But as I begin to despair once more, my sweet little boy kitty walks around the corner and stares straight into my eyes with a wise and ancient look. I see him and I become calm, and begin to accept that this is happening to me. I go over to him and sit down and begin communicating with him how sorry I am that things have to end, and that I could no longer see him anymore. He gives me a soulful, sad look, but also a look full of understanding and compassion. I suddenly realize how ancient of a soul he is - well, not just realized, as I have always thought this about him - but most definitely I experience it in a new, visceral way.

He then lays his head down on my foot and closes his eyes, seeming to accept what is to come and telling me to accept it as well, that there's nothing bad about it, that when it ends we will unify as one and restart the glorious cycle of birth and death. I am immensely comforted by this, and for the first time I feel a small sense of peace displace a bit of the fear and dread. He continues to lay there, completely unmoving, ever so lightly purring, and I feel reality slowing down and pixellating. I begin to have intense thoughts of merging with his soul, of becoming one during the final moment of existence, the infinitely expanding and infinitely collapsing moment that will mark the end of time. This brings to mind tantric sex, although not in an overtly sexual way. More like as an expression of deep love and as a way to find comfort in the infinity of existence through the simple act of the unity of shared love.

These thoughts bring me back to my fiance, who I want to be pressed up against during the final moment so that we can experience our shared love before it is no longer in existence. But as I stand there looking at her, I become so incredibly sad once more, that we would be separated again until god-knows-when. I feel a strong connection of soulmates, and also with my cats. It is at this moment that I decide that I have to do something, because I love this life, and I have learned my lesson. So I run downstairs and pull out my large bag of ground-up kratom leaves from the freezer. I then proceed to shovel a good 14 grams into my mouth (a very large dose for me, usual being 10) and chew it it (actually, in two separate mouthfuls). I happen to have a canker sore right now, and I chewed it with the kratom until my mouth was bleeding and swollen, but I didn't care nor could I feel any pain whatsoever.

Eventually I get the kratom down, and turn on the TV, incidentally the show 'Survivorman' (a really awesome show) on the Discovery Channel. The television brings my mind something to be distracted with, and helps tremendously to anchor me to our current physical reality. The kratom begins to work quickly, and hark! The terrible fear and desperation and immenent sense of dark doom began to lift, began to feel like they weren't real and had just been some sort of nightmare. With a tremendous sense of glee, I jumped up and hugged my kitties, hugged my fiance (who wondered why I was up), and rushed to the computer to jot down notes so I could write this trip report later on.

This trip was most certainly a peak experience. It built off every other significant trip I'd had in the past, and went so much deeper. I feel that it provided me with a much-needed jolt of reality, and it definitely served as a wake-up call to me, that I need to stop focusing on this stuff so much and devote myself to living the best life I can, and making life as good for everything around me as possible. I have not felt such a sense of joy at being simply alive and sober in a long time!

I will undoubtedly edit this report quite a bit as I come to integrate and discuss the experience. And as always (but especially this time), the words I write are nothing but the merest shadow of the incredible, terrifying, nightmarish, glorious, instructional, cleansing, purifying trip I took one night in early September, 2007.

Finally, I would like to post the notes that I took immediately upon realizing I would not be dying tonight, unedited:

Every thought played out immediately once begun. Branching into more thoughts, linking between thoughts. Death and birth make sense. We are all one, heaven and hell all at once. Karma explained - work your way up the course of evolution until humanity. I am becoming the martyr, the one who must experience this eternity of hell in order to plant the seed of peace for the future. Hating myself for taking this and lying to L one more time, my last. I will be all but in this instance she will have to live on with the agony of waking up tomorrow morning with my heart stopped, dead with a half-smile, half grimace on my cold face. I mourn for the rest of our lives together, the family in the future.

This is the root of all art. I am experiencing the entirety of the drama of cosmic and human life constantly, instantaneously. I want to curl up with L for the final moments, to experience the intense love that we share. Strong feelings of soulmate, and with Stripey as well. Idea of dying and merging with other half, simultaneous infinite collapsing and expanding. Tantric sex. Eastern philosophy is so true. Ghosts explained (?) - people in this situation (dying) who refuse to accept and let go and are perpetually stuck (or their energy anyway).

I am flawed and so I have doomed existence. Being god is a tremendously heavy burden to bear. Idea of original sin explained. The old idea that schizophrenics (or insane people) were 'touched by god', and/or prophets. The thought that my next birth in the karmic wheel, I will remember too much, and be doomed to madness.

Clues left between lives. This is what it is to die - in rebirth. I am about to give up and let go because it doesn't matter. Constant dichotomy, always leading back to hell. Horribly ironic. Synchronities. 'old wive's tales' (like 'you can't mess with ancient asian mind work and theory' as an example - a rather bad one). Stop struggling, the only peace is to clear my mind and accept that all things are illusory and inconsequential. Also, conversely, staying awake and with a cleared mind can allow this horrific cyclone of a thought loop begin to weaken.

The infinite layers of the divine plan. Thoughts of born-again Christianity. Purpose of religion is to instill automatically in people to trust in the plan entirely, to treat others and as I would like to be treated (not quite the right words).

Key - removal of desire. Desire causes the imbalance. Rock the boat, and it will be a series of overcorrections that result in toppling into the cold water. This one was linked to the previous +4 with 4-AcO-DMT. Also linked to my end of the world AMT dreams.

This took me to infinity, so much more solidly than ever before. I see no reason to continue to trip. I was THERE, and knew everything. The whole process of life and death and the reasons for the concepts of heaven and hell. My love for my fiance and my kitties kept me from letting go entirely. I may not have returned. Kitties reacting, Stripey gave me love in the final moments and seemed to understand.

Every trip in the past has built upon each other. This one picked up where the last left off, and in the future I suspect it will be very easy for me to enter this divine state. Being that it seems counterproductive to physical life, I may as well not do that.

**Remember, this will take a long time to integrate!**

Exp Year: 2007ExpID: 66123
Gender: Male 
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: Oct 19, 2007Views: 39,878
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Psilocin (388), Psilocybin (239) : Alone (16), Relationships (44), Mystical Experiences (9), Difficult Experiences (5)

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