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Civilization Development Hyperspace Tour
Amanita muscaria
Citation:   Conti. "Civilization Development Hyperspace Tour: An Experience with Amanita muscaria (exp23323)". Erowid.org. Oct 18, 2005. erowid.org/exp/23323

 
DOSE:
5 oral Amanitas - A. muscaria
BODY WEIGHT: 55 kg
This extremely strong experience wasn’t planned. I didn’t expect anything so intense until I found myself deep inside it – inside a vision of everything, of the space-time continuum, some possible futures of our civilization and more... Towards the end, I hoped I would not remember. But I do, and it’s not a problem. And there is a strong need to share what I have seen.

On that Sunday afternoon, I decided to meet friends, a young couple living nearby and go for a walk with my and their dogs. I called them and got on my way, crossing a large park on a hill above the river in the heart of Prague. But when I arrived at their place, Milan and Martina suggested something else to do, an Idea I would like almost at any time, being a passionate fan of everything psychedelic.

Milan and Martina had some toadstool mushrooms they had collected in woods around their parents’ holiday house in the country. They are both very seriously into natural drugs. They know a lot about various plants and mushrooms containing psychoactive substances that can be found in the Czech Republic, they take trips to find them and then experiment. Sometimes, it’s almost scary for others, as they fear nothing and go into things that seem simply too much to less experienced users. Like eating a LOT of datura seeds and going out. Or trying REALLY poisonous berries of a local bush and also eating dozens – while no one can ever know the contents of dangerous and psychoactive substances in advance, it just varies too much, with bad luck, a few of those can get you to hospital. But Milan and Martina seem to always get away with it, healthy and with fascinating new experiences. So I trust them as experts in this field.

They had dried the mushrooms and made tea of them. Martina did her best to cover up the unpleasant taste and succeeded completely – the result was an almost delicious drink, with milk, honey, cocoa and a mix of spices. A beverage one wants to drink simply because it’s good, not some unattractive brew one gets down by force just for its effects. Milan and Martina had already tried it the day before and said the experience hadn’t been too strong, so I expected some kind of a mild trip, just to make the walk with the dogs more interesting. For me, it was the first time with Amanita, but it didn’t seem very important to me, as I find most psychedelics essentially about the same thing, opening the door to the same places. I read and heard about this mushroom a bit and was curious what form the familiar psychedelic state would take with this shamanic drug of the North.

When we all had our cups in our hands, prepared to drink, Milan at once started to hesitate. He said, he was feeling he had already had enough of this drug and shouldn’t take more. And Martina also looked at the tea suddenly without her previous enthusiasm, saying that she got enough of the taste the day before and would throw up. Only I drank happily, loving the taste of the liquid. Milan finally decided to drink up and quickly did so. Martina tried, but was only able to drink a half of the cup. I had already emptied mine and she offered me the rest of her portion. Someone, who knows me very well, laughed at this point, when I was telling him the story later, noting that it was typical for me. I like strong states, large doses and improbable combinations and welcome every opportunity. I drank the additional half a cup with pleasure, in fact wanting even more.

The effect started some twenty minutes later. First, it seemed what I expected, a light, pleasant psychedelic state. As I had been told to be prepared for, sickness came. For some more fifteen minutes, I was occupied with the unpleasant situation of needing and trying to throw up, but being unable to. Then my stomach stabilized and as soon as it was no longer diverting my attention from everything else, the trip began to get stronger and stronger quickly. Milan and Martina obviously didn’t feel it that much, the dosage must had made a big difference. Or it simply had to happen to me.

We decided to play a simple Czech desk game for kids called “Man, don’t be angry”. It consists of moving your figures across the gameboard, always the number of fields you throw on the dice. You have to get them all the way around the board to your “home”. Players “kick out” the figures of others, if they step on a field where the other figure is already standing. That’s about all, the simplest rules possible. At that time, I was already very deep. With closed eyes, I experienced intense psychedelic visions, comparable to say 3 tabs of acid. My ego was almost gone, that feeling when I don’t really remember who I am anymore, aware that I don’t need such information now and that it will return when it’s time. Almost…by that I mean that there was still something left of me that didn’t want to let the process have its way, to give myself up to it with trust. I was calm but not pleased. I hadn’t wanted such a trip and I wished it to be over. Maybe that made the things to come worse.

Although I was so far gone, I believed I could manage to play the game. You don’t need your identity for such a primitive task, at least it seemed to me so. Well, you do. The trip was still getting more and more intense and my basic skills became accordingly more difficult to use. I found myself unable to figure out what to do several times, with a figure or dice in hand. I didn’t know the direction to go and couldn’t figure it out. Colors became hard to distinguish. I used other’s figures. Milan and Martina told me later that I invented some quite interesting new rules for the game. Finally, I gave up, not knowing whether to throw the figure or the dice or something else. I told Milan and Martina I was having an extremely strong trip and finally accepted the fact.

Martina switched on the TV. I quite liked the idea of something to focus on that did not require activity. And the TV world could be an interesting space for psychedelic observation. On our main commercial channel run an episode of the detective series Colombo. Some men in suits were talking. And at that moment, the trip reached a completely new level. I found myself anticipating, what the next part of the dialogue would be. Somehow, words appeared in my mind and I repeated them aloud. The other man responded. And again. I realized in horror that I really knew what the next words would be. I was connected to the TV in some way. The next answer materialized and this time, I hesitated. I realized, my will could hold the words, prolonging the pause before they were said. The line to say was: “I want to kill you.” And with it, an attached instruction somehow reached my consciousness. Instead of talking to the TV, I was supposed to turn to Martina and say it to her. I didn’t like that idea at all. In my subjective time, an unbearably long silence followed. The pressure pushing me to do as I was expected was delicate but very effective. What would happen?

I could try to justify my decision by explaining that it was clearly just a game, with me tripping and a line from a TV show. But to be honest, it felt very serious and I still did it. I just stopped thinking and obeyed, to get rid of the pressure. My voice sounded very thin and childish, like no threat at all. I think Martina didn’t even notice. Maybe I wasn’t speaking aloud in normal reality at all. Nothing changed. An answer from the TV followed immediately. It created a context, in which I meant no harm to Martina or anyone….(I see now, maybe a test of TRUSTING the process…). The dialogue turned in a completely different direction. I was intensely relieved. The story gradually gained understandable meaning for me. With each sentence, even the shortest, I knew more. The set was no longer the one of Colombo. I was part of a TV show made and located in a not-very-distant future. Only interior scenes. A lot of grey shades, feeling dirty in a way. Somehow heavy and tired look of all people that seemed to be their normal state. The characters involved were people of the power-seeking kind, politicians, revolutionaries and such. Dominant males, mostly in greyish and black clothing.

I was no longer an outside observer. I merged with different persons, seeing through their eyes as they continued to exchange the dialogue lines. But I could still switch back to my body’s own view. “Lay down”. This order was meant directly for me. Given my state, it seemed quite a good idea. I laid down on the polstered bench, into a haze of energy spirals filling the air in psychedelic vision mode. Then I climbed off the bench and laid down on the floor. So it was right. I no longer needed to watch the TV. The show was now inside my head. Tension was increasing there. Even these “hard” men had feelings and emotions that made the air thick. Determination, desperation, fear, pure rage…. The issue their interactions were about was the world. Obviously a rather sad world. The history of many years shot by in short sequences. I don’t remember details, maybe the human memory isn’t built for keeping so fast impressions. Definitely, all those things that caused the men’s feelings were getting worse. Environment…

My task of saying the next sentence was also developing. I had to strain to find the right response. For some reason, I was afraid of what might happen if I broke the cycle by not being able to come up with the correct script line. I did my best. At that stage, I made myself believe I was inventing the answers myself, making rational guesses based on some special ability of my brain. The reactions were getting more and more complex. Then the person talking to me asked a killer question. The answer had to be a man’s whole name. Obviously a name known to all the world. A world maybe decades ahead of my time. I resigned. This was impossible. Now I would be recognized as an alien presence. At least, I tried. Used a bit more energy. And it suddenly became clear that I was searching an external database. Extremely huge, organic, breathing. Tired and sad, like the rest of living things in that time. A strange name, of language origin unknown to me, maybe vaguely Arabic with some other influence, appeared out of the darkness and came to my lips.

A moment later, I was that man. And somebody with a terrifyingly open, honest face bearing the look of the most absolute determination and unbreakable will I had ever seen, pointed a gun at me and shot me in the head. And in that incredibly short moment after the bullet left the barrel and before it hit my forehead, I realized this was right. Though it wouldn’t help. I, as the man, suddenly understood the evil I had done and knew I had to die. His soul got the lesson in that last moment and became free of all hate, selfishness, self-deception and craving for power. It was nice and good, when the short and intense pain came, followed by darkness.
My own point of view again.
The Earth was a single large catastrophe in that future. The man shot was one of the last careless leaders of the governing structures that had led the society into this state of coming death for all life. In the end, I got a quick multimedia/multifeeling tour of this place near the end. Greyness, unimaginable gas mix hurting my lungs, the awareness of omnipresent deadly chemicals and mutated biological filth and poison. The endless tiredness of a human body there.

Sudden complete change of the environment. Now, I finally lost the last bit of contact with anything resembling normal reality. I fought fear and disorientation. For a moment, I badly wanted back to my familiar space-time. There was no up or down, no landscape. I was two-dimensional, or at least I was seeing myself that way from the outside, while my body feeling remained almost normal. My body was an arm of a giant clocklike circular object hanging in the midst of blue emptiness. I couldn’t see the front of my body. My arm started to move towards the other one, closing the circle – the space between the arms had previously been empty, of a different color. I knew, I would get to see myself as a 3-D body again, as soon as the circle closed. I wanted to and wished to be there fast. I passed a certain point of the circle radius. I felt like I was lying on a flat, 180° surface now. Information came, voices, outside but also inside my mind. Different ones attacked me with questions. “Why?” “How is it possible?” “What do you mean by ‘I don’t want to live’?” “And what about us?” “We do!!!”
I didn’t understand. Why shouldn’t I want to live?
“Get up.” An order from a different source. I had to complete the rest of the circle, into a standing 12-o’clock-position, by my own power.

I started to rise. And understood. A horrible weight pressed me back down. I tightened all my muscles against it. I knew very well, I absolutely had to manage to get up. It was like lifting a heavy wooden closet. It hurt. And it didn’t stop when I was on my feet. Like gravity several times the Earth value. I felt like I would be crushed in a minute. There was some explanation in my head. Something like…”when the soul of an intelligent being absolutely doesn’t want to live and have ever lived, then should this universe had ever started to exist at all?” A universe that had produced a development that made a soul live under so desperate conditions that it wanted to never be created…

I imagined God’s UNDO button. I felt inside, it was possible. Everything was possible. And they were right – I wanted it. They…aliens? Luckier ones? But I was unable to care about anyone. The pain was simply too much. I eagerly expected the end. Nothingness, never been. Images from the whole history of this one universe flashed by, like the film one sees in the moments close to irreversible death. “Yes, I said,” needing all my strength to speak audibly. “I want everything to be gone forever.”

What came then is a bit hazy. I don’t remember so many exact details of this part of the trip. Somehow, the dialogue game started again. The setting changed, I changed into someone else, and still it was a continuation of what I had done. I was condemned for what I was and what I said. The only way to save myself from some fate I didn’t want to know was to always say the next right word reacting to a previous one and so pass my position on to another entity I was talking to. But after a while, I always got the “Black Peter”, my original situation, back. No database suggestions here. I had to invent my own keys.

Today, half a year after that trip, I am starting to realize what mistake I might have been making all the time. I kept saying negative words, making negative promises of the never-ever-kind. A nice way to stay trapped under any unpleasant circumstances anywhere in our universe…

Another new environment, at least 3-D (they never did let me see my body or those alien souls around that circle). Closed empty space, very large, maybe a giant sphere. Warm, pleasant air-or-something, delicious to breathe. Great relief after the awful pressure.
My identity had transformed too. I was now a female being with a distinct personality that merged with my own consciousness. I was a relaxed, almost lazy, very sensual woman whose main concern was pleasure, delights of any kind. There did not seem to be much more it would make sense to care about, or if it was, I had given it up as completely hopeless a long time ago. I thought I’d just been killed. I mean, my new self had just been killed, somewhere in her world, as for a moment, I was still also feeling deeply taught cultural guilt and shame for what I was. I had been condemned, killed and imprisoned in here for being a cause of all the evil threatening my society and while I didn’t want the punishment, I at the same time identified with all the crimes. I had been brought up to believe I was essentially related to sin and evil. I hoped removing my element from the planet completely would at least help.

Then, the remains of my society-bound ego died and I was an eternal being with a larger view of reality again, free of things taught to women of that…somewhere, sometime, no name, no date, just pictures and feelings of a planet…again a dying one… And as a freed soul, I saw how wrong it was what had happened. My dear mate, my male half, did it again, selected an enemy as the cause of everything and believed that by killing the source of all danger, the problem would be solved. So he killed his female half, to finally be all free and clean. I also saw my true degree of guilt. I felt my great energy and knew I could have used it instead of resigning, abandoning my world and going only for ways to spend the next minutes in bliss. I could have wanted and consumed less of those immediate satisfactions my dear was giving me and instead had directed and tamed his out-of-control active energy to return it where it would do good, not harm. That was my purpose as the female element. And I should had taught him that killing the enemy had been a problem solution at times when the problem was a wild predatory animal attacking the family. Not when it was the overall human attitude to life.

Some kind of cycle my spherical home was going through ended. A keyword had to be said again, but I don’t remember its purpose here. Shifts, too, but between what or whom? Something like an underwater click. The environment changed slightly. Not visibly. But…no, not again… This was not exactly gravity. In this nonspace outside the dimensions of the living, it had to be a different kind of force. Yet its effects were of the same type. Instead of a normal Earth weight, I now felt a bit heavier. And I knew it would be getting worse with the next cycle. “The planet has completed another life cycle,” a thought robot voice, or so I would best describe it, informed me. Whatever that meant, some energy they were creating down there in my civilization would show here too. Cold horror. I could probably be staying here for eternity. How far could it go on? tried if the word game would let me out somehow, to anywhere else.

I don’t remember what precisely happened next, but I exchanged a few sentences with my widowed male part outside. My mind was flooded with images of people living there. The pressure was rising for them too and it seemed to affect them more than me. Was it gravity or not? I could have used the memories of my last deceased ego now, but for some reason, they were not accessible. I was probably seeing some historical times before I had been thrown out of the realm of the living. Standard male-dominated, consumption-oriented, spiritually dying industrial civilization. Why does almost every intelligent species have to create these hells at a certain stage of their development? Well, it’s probably necessary, the only way beings really learn is through experience… But not everyone goes THIS far….

I watched the pressure grow ever stronger, so that it could no longer be ignored or denied. It hurt and made everyday life difficult. No, not gravity. Something not only laying heavily on one’s body, it also caused heavy discomfort and pain directly to the soul. Environmental and spiritual at the same time. Glimpses of decades when all the population was kept on heroin to be able to carry on. Another universal invention of so many civilizations, well, we warm, soft, intelligent animals are all the same…a sad smile on a dead woman’s bodiless face… A nice solution, also securing obedience and preventing people from fighting actively against the forces of death…. Everyone was ordered to use at least the specified standard doses by the law. A law sometimes broken by some rebel minds and teenagers, just to be different, or in attempts to be less dependent on the suicidal society…but it was soon impossible to really manage to live without an addiction to strong anesthetics. Under the pressure, such non-users would go crazy in a month.

The story continued. Simply: men in that civilization were (made) obsessed with technology and women with pleasure. Instead of guarding life, the females kept going for delight, using stronger and more effective high-tech designer drugs to be able to keep ignoring anything was wrong and to feel „good“. And suits, bone augmentations, breast shields, erotic toys... They had simply given up at some point. The forces guiding the destruction had made them believe in the depth of their souls, that doing anything to save their world was hopeless and that they were bad and deserved their final fate and that the only thing that made sense was to „enjoy“ the moments left with the means of the technology the males provided. Doesn’t that remind you of something?

Men sought for high-tech solutions, forever believing more and better technology would make everything all right. But all this technology kept going in the same destructive direction, dangerous for life, it never occurred to them that the basic concepts underlying it had to be changed. So no one did anything. And then the multidimensional „movie/hologram“ sped up, accelerating towards the end point. There…now I knew it…the end would be…the degree of pressure under which a man finally looses the ability to have sex with a woman (to be precise, with a biotech replacement, as he had abolished and killed his female half quite some time before that point) and get her/it pregnant.

My Earth identity was suddenly inside here with me. I was still the female, while at the same time, vivid memories of a little girl in Prague materialized in my mind. Her feelings, dreams, fights, bad sides… And the male presence I was communicating with became my brother. I pointed down to the planet, to a hopeless sex attempt of a half-crushed man.
„I told you,“ I said.
Keyword game, last part.
„And I made the mistake to believe you,“ he responded.
Don’t ask me what sense that makes. I remember it very clearly, we just said this. There was more before, but I hopelessly lost that part. And then the end came and he was dead, inside the sphere with me, and through that, the last cycle was completed. His cycle, „clean“, no passion left, all about technology.

The final stage of the pressure. I couldn’t have imagined THAT. It was like being pressed to a wall by a car just tight enough so that I wouldn’t die immediately.
In our case – never. Terror, that just an immortal in a torture ball can experience. Long enough to be remembered well.

Game over screen, that’s exactly what it looked like. I was alone and free again, hanging in space looking at something like a coordinate system with three quadrants. Each had it’s basic color, it’s different shades merging at the axes and becoming more and more different with increasing distance from the center. If I were to name it as a screen in some educational software, I would call it CIVILIZATION DEVELOPMENT CHART. My attention was drawn by the upper right quadrant. It was mostly grey, darker an dirtier closer to the upper right corner. Two faces appeared there, gazing at me. They had the features of my mother and grandmother, yet distorted into the most disgusting farces human beings can put on. Fear, hate, hysterical rage. At once, I understood that there was a difference between those monsters that manifest in humans wearing such masks and the people themselves. I knew somewhere in the other, happier quadrants, I could find my mom and grandma as beautiful, harmonic beings radiating love, as my family. The demons of evil had a shape of their own and in this quadrant lived beings who had let themselves become possessed by them completely.

They started to yell at me with their shrill, poisonous voices. They called me some names for „stupid“, „degenerated“ and „hopeless“ and threatened, I would destroy everything. Their message was that we, at a time level below the decisive x-axis, had to help them, so that the hell they were living in would not be created. They croaked that they were suffering victims and it was everyone’s duty to do something for them. They seemed honest, thy just knew no other way of communication. But I knew no one could do anything for them. I saw how their fear and aggressive helplessness had created their quadrant. They chose their hell, just as they had it in their minds, and created it. And only they could decide to change it, if one day God helped them find out it was their responsibility, theirs only.

I turned to the left upper quadrant. The bright, shiny, natural colors, especially towards the left edge, suggested healthy life. I felt freshness, open spaces, clean water, inner power, strength and freedom and LOVE, LOVE and more LOVE. I enjoyed this feeling, allowed it to enter and fill the deepest parts of my soul and wrote it well into my memory. Something was moving from the lower quadrants up towards me. A strange symbol. Approximately from my own time, the beginning of the 21st century. And whatever it was, it came from a force not to be trusted and I would prefer to avoid it.
Then a different one appeared from somewhere behind the board, sinking fast to me. This one was OK, it was here to help me. A quick cut to a great map of the Earth, no globe, flat, continents, oceans. A look at our version of the industrial civilization, solid structures, loads, wounds, energies of different places and populations. The spreading of the deadly energy… And a personal message for me. Formless concentrated information. Very simply reminding me to finish just hanging around in life and start DOING SOMETHING, being alive, fulfilling my purpose in this world.

Back to the chart. The friendly module caught me. Voices, male and female. Familiar, across centuries. I knew them both well. And a third sound, full of life force and love, an intense bark. I knew him very well too. I held the room for a spaceship first, when I materialized back in it. What else?

They covered me with a blanket. I turned on my stomach. Milan and Martina were happy, I was, after hours, finally reacting, talking to them. I told them I had known them, their souls, for a long, long time. I had no body. I could feel the bed and blanket but not see my hands or anything. In this state, I had to go to the toilet. Not as big a problem as it might seem. Just like going there in the dark. I laid back down and closed my eyes, hoping that I would wake up with a body.

I did.

Imagine, what my first impressions of our civilization outside the house were. A main street with a traffic jam of mostly unnecessary cars poisoning the air with their absurd fuel. Dying trees. A supermarket, a place to buy tons of stuff of which 90% no one ever really needed, manufactured and sold for profit at a completely senseless cost for the Earth. And those creatures… No, that’s not pessimism. The chart showed that all the possibilities were still open to us. The quadrant of life was open for us to choose. But it might be a good idea to SEE the REAL world we are creating now. Places like that street or consumption temple are possible only because most of us agree.



Exp Year: 2002ExpID: 23323
Gender: Female 
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: Oct 18, 2005Views: 22,975
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Amanitas - A. muscaria (70) : Entities / Beings (37), General (1), Small Group (2-9) (17)

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