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There is a door within the self. When this door is opened, a unity is revealed that encompasses all beings and transcends all boundaries. Mystics in every religious system in every culture and in every age have reported this to be the highest truth.
This is how a human being can change: there’s a worm addicted to eating grape leaves. Suddenly. He wakes up, call it grace, whatever, something wakes him, and he’s no longer a worm. He’s the entire vineyard, and the orchard too, the fruit, the trunks, a growing wisdom and joy that doesn’t need to devour. RUMI, “THE WORM’S WAKING”
There is an almost sensual longing for communion with others who have a larger vision. The immense fulfillment of the friendships between those engaged in furthering the evolution of consciousness has a quality almost impossible to describe. PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN
Seemingly universal, this opening is often experienced as reuniting one’s self with an eternal flow of energies and understandings.
Ideally, on the first day, stay quiet and unhurried. Reserve time for self-reflection, spending a portion of the preparation day in nature. Set aside the second day, all day, for the session. Try to take as much as possible of the day after the session to begin to integrate the experience and to record your discoveries and insights.
To maximize the usefulness of realizations that may occur during your psychedelic voyage, it is invaluable to write out beforehand what you hope to learn, experience, understand, or resolve.
couldn’t believe how much I learned about my psyche in those few hours. I experienced a fantastic display of colorful visions, some abstract and geometrical, others figurative and filled with symbolic import. The sheer intensity of the array of emotions I felt simply amazed me. I was hit by a radiance that seemed comparable to the epicenter of a nuclear explosion or perhaps the light of supernatural brilliance said in oriental scriptures to appear to us at the moment of death.
I have said nothing about the visual. Where it was important, it was abstract. Lights such as never were on land or sea. And space—not three or four dimensions but more like twelve.
The perennial philosophy and the esoteric teachings of all time suddenly made sense. I understood why spiritual seekers were instructed to look within, and the unconscious was revealed to be not just a useful concept but an infinite reservoir of creative potential.
What I learned from my own research is that psychedelics take your life experience and compost it, so that something new can grow. If you don’t have much to compost, you may not get much out of it.
Even in the middle of a psychedelic experience, I would begin to think, “I wonder what I’m going to do with this?” In a sense, I wanted it to be over so I could start to get to the digestion and assimilation phase, because the psychedelic experience itself wasn’t my major interest.
The question posed by the poet Mary Oliver, “What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”20 is one that psychedelics impel you to take seriously.
The real world is not like that at all. Nothing ever ends; it just blends into the next thing. Every nonfiction book is only a snapshot of what is currently known and what remains unknown. Some of what we know now as being ever so true will turn out to be wrong, and whole areas will be revealed as the new unknown.
The main teaching is we are all part of the same thing. Our bodies do not end at our skin; they extend throughout the cosmos. We do not live on the Earth; we are the Earth. We are not separate and we will suffer until we realize this, at which time our true healing begins.
Under this husk of temporarily arising selfish thoughts, preferences, conditions, images, attachments, and desires, I am a vibration of pure compassion, which is being itself, already liberated, never born, never died, traversing the great void that holds each of us, whether as gods or humans, as my teacher Maniko says, more perfectly than any living element.
