home

LSD
I was depressed, running from life. Between the summer of 2019 and the spring of 2020 I took psychedelic drugs over 30 times in varying doses, settings and circumstances, with little to no prior knowledge or experience of drugs of any kind. Whereas before I'd identified as a depressed Atheist, that period of my life eliminated a larger portion of my lifelong mental health disorders and allowed for vital healing to be done. Here I will document individual acid trips in short sentences and phrases. The goal here is to compile the insights acquired into concise messages, images or sentiments. Where DMT at least seems to contain its own ideas, LSD amplified and boosted my own ideas and in many ways simplified my train of thoughts. Perhaps the speed of thought that is common during the peak allows for slower thinking at baseline consciousness. The thoughts must flow. 3/30/19 I can see that life is more than what I've thought. I've been sad a long time. I have been angry. But I can see there's more than that. I eat oranges and a spinach sandwich, watching the clouds on a rooftop in Queens. 4/19/19 There is so much more than I thought to life. A neon pink grid overlays itself on a white blanket in my bedroom. A map of the Tokyo subway system projects onto the quilting. 5/04/19 Everything expands. My mind is picked apart by something outside of myself. Another part of the psyche. Something watching. The active observer. I begin watching my thoughts, assessing the things that have hurt since childhood. There is so much more than we can see. 5/27/19 I will heal. The things that have held me back revealed as thin veils. A dissipation of the shadows masking the distant light. There is much work to be done. Egyptian holographs display on rooftop tiles. Stars are beacons of insight and the moon a metaphysical doorway to new life. 6/29/19 A carnival ride of ultraviolet city-bound psychedelia. Neon trails flurry on the Brooklyn Bridge. A whirlwind, drum and bass, nighttime revelations in the wind gusts smacking cheeks through the open car window. New levels reached. An expansion of consciousness not previously considered possible. Belief system slightly ajar. When the moon hangs high we eat more acid and romp under the stars like heady beasts. Behind closed eyes tunnels enclose. In the morning we watch the sunrise and I fall into tears over its beauty, and the overwhelming gratitude to be able to witness such perfection changes everything forever. 7/14/19 California air holds the visions of the dead. Morning drive from Los Angeles to the Malibu shores. A rented car. Enough pot to kill a seventeenth-century peasant. We arrive at a beach and get our heads full. The peak comes on fast, stronger than ever. An hour in we're loaded on the sand. Massive rocks on the beach develop fractal tunnels on each groove; a psychic motif of Gretian marble statues bathed in sunlight. Saltwater shifts from blue to deep purple. A completely new altered state is achieved. No phone, no wallet. I watch the moon turn pastel pink in the distant cosmos, resembling an approaching Death Star object descending to the Earth's surface. On that beach I abandon everything I was before. A new life begins. The possibility for rebirth becomes evident. I am new for the first time. Reborn in the ecstasy of the present moment. Barefoot outside a gas station in the California hills I smoke a joint and feel free for the first time in my life. 8/12/19 Laid on emerald hills in Prospect Park. Dogs ran over wide plains. Wife and I took LSD and fifteen minutes into laying on a blanket we felt our senses perk up and gradually expand to include visual acuity, novel associations between nature and the personal self and increased connection between one another. Love is highlighted as the primary force binding all things. A clear path forward emerges. Follow love, the insights say. Love will always lead you where you're meant to go. 8/21/19 To avoid tolerance issues I take more than usual. A friend eats an eight-gram psilocybin mushroom in the park, and I join him in exploration using blotter acid. I enter a blissful, optimistic state. Rainwater in my hair feels like an angel's touch. The world becomes an ecstatic, vibrating thing. Ideas about the importance of visceral connection between living beings, war and illumination arise. I wonder why so many opinions seem important to me. Many long-held opinions become flimsy, obviously interpretatiosn of the world filtered through the self. The personal self, having been understood to be a kind of mirror trick, appears funnier than before. Then there is music and euphoria in the dark. 9/3/19 Dropped with a friend around sundown on our rooftop in Brooklyn. A real neon-neoir-nighttime energy. A lot of qualia associated with expansion of mind through the darkness, and the vastness of the future in 'the great city of the world'. Electronic whirring sounds beam out from the back of my head when the sun rises. My understanding of LSD shifts from hallucinogenic drug to powerful psychic tool for producing high-energy cognitive experiences. The senses, seen on LSD as a mechanism for enacting beautiful moments that never truly end, are understood on a deeper level. 9/29/19 I would consider myself in the process of integrating this one, even five years later. Warm day at a Disney resort, two blotter tabs eaten at 3pm. A mad spiral into the absurd hilarity of the human project. Pirate costumes, binary sunsets and schematic pattern recognition over the boardwalk lake. In some sense taking psychedelics in public places was an experiment in seeing the world through the lense of the unreal. Doing so provided an added layer of comedy to everything that felt pure, childlike. After sunset I took more acid and ran headway into large crowds of tourists. In a pond reflected in light I watched an open-eye hallucination assemble into a map of America with several location pointers detailing words like 'destiny', 'hellfire' and 'liberation'. Voices beamed into my head. I pondered deeply about the connection between my own mind and the minds of others, the Atman (essence) at the core of being, and how I might uncover some deeper understanding related to that connection. In the late hours of the night on an empty pier underneath a blanket of stars spread across clear skies I began changing internally on a fundamental level as the LSD moved through my system. Memories, dreams and reflections flashed behind closed eyelids as I became immersed in an all-encompassing 'cosmic flight' experience, and inevitably tears flowed and all time fell into the moment which was eternal and had run through my life and lead me to that long-awaited opening of the heart in the merciful throes of a drug trip. I cried much and watched the sun rise in religious awe. A sense of adventure connected to the rapture of living, which outside of psychedelic experiences seemed fleeting and scarce, became obvious as a key aspect of higher living. I became aware of the idea of higher living in the sense of penetrating the deepest parts of life with deep observation, contemplation and love. 10/8/19 The castle in Central Park was a distant beacon huddled behind a line of trees. The bright sun and green rolling plains spoke calmly invited us further in. A high-fantasy aesthetic. I wore a red flannel shirt and a military liner jacket with a baseball cap. The high was intended to guide an old friend on his first adventure into psychedelia, and the memory I cherish closely as the wind clung to our faces and we ran across the fields with our hands in the air like wild brats. There was not much revelation on this one aside from showing my friends what I had become so interested in. I began experiencing a decline in the intensity of my LSD experiences on this trip, in part related to the rising intensity and complexity of my experiences with psilocybin mushrooms and a growing interest in DMT. 10/18/19 A week prior I had an experience with mushrooms would be considered 'mystical' in a way I had not believed possible before it occurred. That experience made me question the effectiveness of LSD beyond therapuetic use. I wondered if I simply needed to increase the dose in order to reach states which felt related to the spiritual world I entered on psilocybin. Maybe there was a lack of proper focus on the effects as a result of taking LSD in public places, or in the company of others which might distract me from them. I took two tabs of strong acid after work and took the train to Washington Square, laid in the grass and waited for it to come on. After an hour I laid on my back and watched a tree slow-turn into holographic orange liquid, like a filter edit had come over the entire tree and altered its texture. I sumrised that acid could provide some powerful visual experiences, and create immersive trances which could draw insights into parts of the personal self, whether memory, trauma, desire or any little drop of thought in the ocean of mind. I did not feel that any of it was inherently spiritual, despite the fact that I felt therapuetic relief and stabilized mental health after coming down. 10/21/19 Further pursuits in the attempt to discover the visual potential of LSD. Blown away by the realism and power of previous mushroom trips I was curious if acid had stopped being useful for me. The trips were still inspiring and insightful, but I felt that something that was there in the initial moments of revelation had stopped arising when the peak came on. I felt that the drug could take me to certain thresholds, but I would be unable to cross them. In hindsight perhaps taking higher doses to defeat the tolerance was counter-productive. Nonetheless I spent the day in Central Park contemplating the relationship between my estranged father and I, and then watching lights reflect off a shadowed lake ducked off near the edge of the park. After getting home I called him and reconnected after over a decade of not speaking. 10/31/19 Ten days later the Grateful Dead are in town and we take our share and spend the day on the trails in a wooded park in Queens. Ecstatic bouts of union with one another, with the love between us being the boundless love of all things binding all creatures together. Heady ride into the city to catch the band, and its a mad show of energetic expansion flowing through the entire nervous system up until the moment the music is moving through each sense with tactile precision and the pulse of history synchronizes with the acid filling up my head and the drums-space synth warble into another jam. I reach new heights of understanding of what powerful art is, what it means to create something that lives and breathes through human life. Love love love love love. 11/19/19 After a couple of mushroom experiences based around immersion into an unseen world, and a growing interest in the 'voice of the mushroom' Terence McKenna sometimes called the Other, or Logos, I found LSD to have run its course in terms of usefulness for solo expeditions. To ensure my suspicions were correct I took three tabs of blotter and visited the same spot in the forest where I encountered a living God-like presence on psilocybin the month before. There was strong visual acuity and a brightening of the environment, but the mental insights did not arise the same and I felt that the 'life' I sought within LSD would not show itself. The day was spent on a blanket in the park, pondering mysteries and smoking pot, accepting that I would not look further into acid as a means of transformation so long as I didn't have a purpose for taking it. There was a bittersweet, melancholy beauty, as I wondered what the main difference between these two drugs really was, and why mushrooms seemed such a greater potential avenue for close contact with the unseen. 2020 The following year I would take LSD several times. None of the experiences would compare to the high-intensity, profound capturing of the body-mind found on those early acid trips. I wouldn't trade any of them for anything; each of them vital, teaching in some sense. But there seemed to be other things in store. My interest in shamanism, mushrooms, extraterrestrials and the hidden worlds of the beyond seemed to grow exponentially.