DOSE:

400 ug

LSD

(liquid)

BODY WEIGHT:

140 lb

The return to the garden. We had spent the previous day wondering if we were even going to take the L, since the clear liquid had turned a sinister black. Bacterially poisoned? Or benign oxidation? It seemed like a bad omen. But that morning we received word from the chemist - oxidation. All systems go.

I had tried setting intentions prior, but I barely remember what they were. I think I asked to see something new, and that didn’t really happen. I asked about how to break the bonds of addiction to phone usage but that didn’t really happen either. Interestingly, the experience doesn’t really seem to make too much room for conscious work on the psyche. It’s too much bigger than that. One can only hope an inner healing intelligence hears the message, and downstream vices are swept away by the flash flood of energy that pours out of the experience.

As we walked through the Joshua Tree wilderness under cool grey skies, K immediately received a phone call from a distraught friend dealing with a relationship on the brink of divorce. I let her work her magic, knowing that was the right thing to do, but also felt like the trip was starting off on the wrong foot. I wasn’t sure what to expect.

We pilgrimaged to a wild, lonesome area where I returned the skull of a desert tortoise that I had taken a year earlier. I left it in a small hollow in the boulders alongside a chunk of rose quartz and the tail feather of a red-shouldered hawk I had found in the canyon at home. An offering, an apology for removing the skeleton one year prior.

The come up was incredibly fast and destabilizing. K had a bad reaction to it, dry heaving, filled with fear and anxiety, calling out for our son and totally intimidated by the landscape. Communication was awkward and I wasn’t sure how to help other than continual reassurance. It wasn’t getting any better so we made the decision to head back to the house, where hopefully she would feel safer.

The journey back was hard. As the experience began to really rev its engines, desert navigation became difficult. We walked and felt like we got nowhere. K wanted to get on a road, which we eventually did. We then had an exhausting 20 minute walk to the house, and I worried more about the trajectory of the trip. I knew there was a lot that lie ahead of us, and there might be a chance of it being all bad or all difficult. But it was also hard to think, or do anything really.

We got back to the house and immediately put our stuff down and succumbed to the gravity of the experience. Literally floored, sprawled out in the sand. The visions were so thick that I wasn’t sure what I was looking at - wasn’t sure if my eyes were open or closed.

At one point I saw it, and immediately recognized it - a vision of god. It was a prismatic ribbon of rainbow energy that appeared as four loops. It felt like the atom had been cracked and the god-energy inside was made visible. There was fear to this vision, since it had the trademark signature of intimidating beauty and self-evident holiness. I knew I was back.

The peak was incomprehensible. I hardly remember it. I do remember K having a difficult time with it. At some point I heard her say “it’s beautiful, but it’s very scary.” This re-anchored me in the realization that we were in fact encountering god again. The human mind is unequipped to remember what it was looking at. A blistering fractal sun. A category 5 storm of god-winds. The veil peeled back to reveal a howling void of holy fire, the energetic mesh latticework of pure fabric - the ground of being.

I looked out to the horizon and realized I was crying. “I forgot!” I said outloud, shaking my head, “I forgot.”

Closing my eyes again, I had another vision, perhaps my most cherished vision of the trip - a felt sense of the seamless connection between myself and the earth. It only lasted a single breath, but I felt and saw that I was connected to the living earth by a red lattice of energy. When the earth breathed, I breathed. My being was the natural world's being. We are One. Beyond the spiritual concept of oneness, this was direct experiential confirmation of connection as shared identity. Damage to the earth is damage to myself. This vision had a clear implication that it was a gift given in exchange for the responsibility of stewarding and protecting the health of the planet.

The closed-eye visuals were breathtakingly beautiful. Moving in perfect synchrony with the music, there were endless gyrations, tentacles, and fractals of energy in gorgeous technicolor and seamless high-definition. Despite a moody and cloudy sky, the visions were backlit as if by an invisible sun. The imagery felt holy. The beauty, intricacy, and astounding creativity was beyond anything I felt my imagination to be capable of. Ribbons of light being split through prisms and fanned out in roping geometries. Pulsing tentacles of light with edges finely inlaid with burning Mandelbrot blossoms. The ebb and flow of god's creative movements. Beauty beyond all comprehension.

K seemed to understand the implications of what she was seeing right away. Connection. Oneness. No border between oneself and god. The breathtaking and terrifying beauty of looking directly at god, of wanting to hold the gaze but being blinded by the intensity of it.

There is so much I don’t remember. Hours of it. Knowing that there wasn’t much to be done except let god flush the toilet. Looking out into the immense beauty of the clouds and mountain desertscape, of feeling the whole field irradiated by god. Trusting that bearing witness to the radiance before me was all that was needed to simplify, clean, and heal.

As the peak passed, pure bliss, love, happiness. Feeling good about our impending move to a new state, but also the simple recognition that happiness is where you’re at now. You don’t have to go anywhere in space or time to find it. It’s all the same trip. It’s always all god.

Rainbows coming off of the creosote plants in shimmering vapors. The plants and animals, everything standing up alive and happy for us. The insane, heart-shattering beauty of it all. The recognition of beauty as a god's signature in the world, as a guiding principle - follow beauty, create beauty.

The fractal octopus, arms gyrating and connecting insides and outsides, interiors and exteriors, seamlessly, effortlessly encompassing and tying together all things, from the inside of my own mind to the towering rock walls of the San Jacinto mountains. No gaps, nowhere to stand outside of or untouched by god. We crouched to our knees and dug through the sand to find a single grain that could escape the net, and could not (“and think about what that means for your life”).

K continued to experience points of difficulty, and I was already warning her to cherish the fading glory - it would be gone too soon, and it was. I was already navigating the strange discomfort of the comedown, the back-and-forth between two worlds, the ego recrystallizing in the void.

No special lessons around phone usage or personal vices, these things felt idiotic and small and not worth thinking about. Just do. Swift and decisive action without creating complicated frameworks of incremental becoming.

We sat talking and laughing, embracing one another, filled with awe and gratitude as half-lives kicked in and the intensity subsided, the experience decaying like a dream. Lingering, fading, and finally lost.

All that’s left is to live a small and simple life. Value beauty, connection, love, nature, spaciousness, the small and simple things. Integrate by keeping the channels clear (put down the phone), journaling, creating art/beauty, loving, spending time in nature, and participating in ritual reminder of sacred truths.

Exp Year: 2023	ExpID: 117010
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: Apr 30, 2025	Views: Not Supported
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LSD (2) : Public Space (Museum, Park, etc) (53), Therapeutic Intent or Outcome (49), Personal Preparation (45), Relationships (44), Entities / Beings (37), What Was in That? (26), Mystical Experiences (9), Glowing Experiences (4)