LSD: Aftermath

(Continued from LSD and the Siddhis.)

WetWaterDrop (a.k.a. James here on the blog) emailed me an update following his LSD trip. This is now the second time someone has ignored my advice to keep a stock of benzodiazepines (valium et al.) or, ideally, anti-psychotics, in order to terminate a bad trip if it happens — or even just to end an annoyingly long one. If you do not have sedatives to hand then you are really rolling the dice when you trip, as James found.

Robert Anton Wilson also recommends niacin (vitamin B3) to terminate a bad trip, which I have used to successfully end kundalini episodes but which I have not tested on LSD.

This is a longish trip report and my comments are at the end.

WetWaterDrop wrote:

I haven’t proof read this, just finished writing it, I’m kinda exhausted but wanted to put it together while I still remembered it all.

 

B. caapi + LSD

“Ayahuasca will bring you the experience she thinks you need, not necessarily the one you expect or desire.”

The only way I can describe this combination, based on my experience, is black magick.

This story begins a few months before the ingestion of this alchemy…

It starts with a Jaguar, the shaman symbol for drastic change.

A few months prior I ingested Ayahausca, the trip was mild with not much in way of noticeable effects. I’ve struggled with, at this point the idea of destiny.

I’ve been able to tune into the “source”, the source of creation of life will guide me, some might consider it a psychic phenomenon… Having this ability made me skeptical of free will. If the hand of god guides me, what’s the point of choice?

Is there choice? If there is why would you choose to do things contrary to the will of all things?

I wanted to experience my freedom, my sovereignty. I wanted the power to create my own experience and participate in a way I chose, not to be the pawn of a master plan but the king of my own.

When you take ayahausca, obedience to the plant mother is requirement. You listen and she speaks, she commands and you obey.

During this mild ayahausca experience, at one point I looked into the mirror, and my face shaped into that of an owls…

Later, I talked to the Jaguar – I wanted lessons, knowledge that I deemed appropriate for myself.

The jaguar recommended, since I desired so, make the demand of Ayahausca.

I did, and so the beginning of my journey begins.

 

Many months later I walked into my room, the light outside my window light up and I saw an owl sitting outside, I watched in fascination as the owl ate bugs, looked around and eventually flew off. During this time I remember trying to reach out and touch the owl with my consciousness. I thought it was so cool, that owl was so animated, so full of like and personality, I felt by just being allowed to watch it I had made a friend, I thanked nature for allowing me such a wonderful moment.

 

Anyway, down to the show.

I took the B caapi and LSD, I don’t know how much of either but I do know B caapi makes other things more potent.

I had a list of things written down I wanted to understand, it was as follows:

• Parana
• chakra
• Siddhi
• third eye
• Om
• Healing (I have a few phsycial injuries im still trying to work out)
• consciousness seperate from the body
• whatever the drug wants to show me
• The link between dreams, visualizations, and physical reality
• and rising above self sabatoge.

So those were the questions/experiences I had planned to get out of this trip.

I’m sitting at my computer sending out an email and everything starts to get real melty, like real real melty… I think “oh shit” I know this is just the start and it get stronger from here, I got tell my brother what I took as a just-in-case and tell him we should watch something humorous.

everything is getting melty and I am starting to feel real nausea, that can be from the b caapi and it will pass but it may have been from the lsd too, either way I’m sitting on the floor and it starts to get bad, everything is topsy turny, melty, mixed in with extreme pain and nausea.

I was on my knees bow’d down and I had a vision, mother eye came and from a brief instant wrapped her hands on my face, I felt warmth and I went “Oh, shes here” and with that she disappeared.

I’d walk outside try to vomit, didn’t work, so I’d just drink lots of Gatorade and water and try again, still won’t work. I’m feeling panic and it lots of pain while everything around me is melting when I close my eyes I get vision of a shadow realm I can’t make sense of.

It gets so bad at some point I go outside and, kneel face first in the dirt begging for mercy.

about 20 minutes and lots of Gatorade later I feel the purge, its been 4 hours so far of this shitty nightmare and this is by far the worst purge I’ve ever had, I projectile vomit while standing getting regurgitated Gatorade all over my arms and legs. Once im done I feel like a savage, a wild animal, I prance around for a bit before going and taking a shower, things seem less melty and the trip seems to be subsiding.

I feel energized, still kinda nausea’s but I want to walk outside so I do, as I’m walking thoughts and images are racing I can’t really make out. At some point the thought of suicide bombers comes up then the thought of the victims, and they’re loved ones, etc… It was too much, too overwhelming all the emotions ideas and pains all mixed in this melty world.

I go laydown in my bed, turns out the trip isn’t subsiding, its ramping up and I’m trying to figure out how to make it stop, I’ve begged every deity, guru, etc… I know to intervene and its just getting worse. Pain, my mind body and soul are just wrecked with pain.

I start getting torn from this world into a shadow realm, a dark black mixed with dark purple, than I’d end up back here but barely back here, the shadow realm seems to hold my attention better than the physical realm does and that has me worried, I feel like I’m going insane, that I’m about to be a cautionary tale. Ripped back and forth between the physical and the shadow I consider calling an ambulance, then the thoughts of medics, police, etc… and that I’d for sure end in the loony bin dosed up on anti=psychotics until I die.

That last part didn’t seem so bad, sitting nicely in a facility taking my pills to make sure I’m not taken by this nightmare.

I get up, and lay down, and pace, and lay down, and get, just a whirlwind of confusion.

One time, while walking in circles, I felt my lower 2 chakras start lighting up, they improved in speed and started to fill with energy – I knew what that meant and I used every bit of will power to shut that shit down, a burst of energy in this state for fry my whole being.

I remember being impressed with this body, this mind, and soul… If I had 00.01% less will power, less desire to hang out, it would have been over. The flexibility and persistence, the toughness of the human machine/consciousness that is this person, to me at that time, came off as very impressive.

I put on some music and laydown… and here comes the peek of my trip…

I close my eyes and, my body, my cells are just spasm in pain, on one half of my vision are LSD lights playing and pumping to the music, on the other half are creatures and minions from the  shadow realm focusing on me and trying to pull me in.

I remember what my friend Ed said about healing my body, which is breaking down the sensations with awareness, I try to do that but I’m to mind fuck’d by this carnival nightmare.

Eventually the LSD and B caapi combine wholly in my visual field. They start as small dots and grow, they balloon up until they disappear and repeat the process. It’s thousands of court jester animal demons of chaos all growing, ballooning and dissipating. I focus in and start to follow one of these balloons from birth to death and find that when it dies I automatically switch to my breathing, and follow it, the breath takes me threw my spine and into my heart up into my head, where it starts to take me to the shadow realm, I resist and go back to the visions, repeating this process. The pulsation of these creatures co-inside with nausea I’m feeling, and If I accept the sensation fully I don’t feel pain, if I resist I do.

Then I get a message, a crystal clear message, two of them actually.

One was this is chaos, this is being separate.

The other as this is Karma.

Karma, that message was deep and profound. I knew I took B caapi and LSD, and that choice let me here and It was 100% my responsibility. But there was a depth the message, that karma was all of my cells, and even deeper than the physical plane. In fact we are here in the physical so we can work out karma.

physical limitations are a gift, not a hindrance. The rules are in place for our benefit, so we learn and evolve with a rule set that allows to with safety and consistency. Without those things you could be swept up by chaos and lost to the tides of eternity.

Then I felt the shadow realm again, normally it pulls me and it feels like it pulls from the left side, but this time it sort of softly, slowly creep’d up into my vision from the right.

This time I focused in on it, I focused on the middle of my vision and started ascending upward, while all these eyes of predator birds watched me from the shadows… up and up I climbed until I was no longer in the physical, but in a vortex of shadow being circles my predator bird eyes. Their were strings of dark purple energy and I started to follow them, I followed two of them until they met in a point and the realness of what happened next shook me to my core.

There was a giant crash, the sounds of breaking glass, my journey ascending was stopped as the face of the God Owl starred at back at me, an angry predator bird dwarfing me by a thousand times in size, it only lasted about 2 seconds but the breaking glass sound was that dreams cape shattering, it call broke and shattered before me and I was back in the melty physical world.

Looking back, the owl stopped me from going too far.

Everything is still melty but I’m having a sense it might be ok.

So far this experience has been so bad I’ve redefined bad. My attitude towards life has always been very cavalry, as my mother once said I’ve never had a healthy sense of fear. I use to think I already had my worst drug experience and that was when I mixed DMT and DXM and felt the universe on the brink of extinction. What I’ve learned since is if you think its the worst thing it isn’t.

In order for it to be the worst thing you have to have the hope it will get better and the despair that It can worse from here still.

I’ve laughed off just about every single bad experience in my life, which I have lots. This time, this time my body didn’t feel like laughing… or so I thought… but I felt it, the sensation… the feeling in the bottom of my spine of a laughter… of a “I’d do it all again”… I had a moment of clarity, as tough and resilient as nature made this person that I am, hes out of his goddamn mind.

I lay down and put on some Sadhguru videos, hes my favorite Yogi and I’ve come to cherish his wisdom. I check his channel every day and there hadn’t been a video that morning but now there was a new one:

That seemed to sum my lesson, the synchronicity of the universe is very real.

By time I came down from the trip I felt violated, my mind body and soul were all exhausted, like I’d been beaten up and raped in a parking lot.

Its two days later that I’ve written this, I woke up and my bodies still has the shakes and im exhausted.

What I took away from this is hard to put into words, how I feel now. I realized that every action has a reaction, on the physical dimension and else ware. I also have a strange since of sovereignty and personal responsibility. A deeper understanding of karma, if you will… again hard to put into words.

Looking back that was a traumatizing, hellish event to go through, but me being me, it seems… I don’t seem to mind, and I feel like that should bother me.

Okay, well that sounds like a disaster.

Thoughts:

• The B. caapi sounds like a mistake. LSD is already orally active – that drug would have added a hard edge to it. It probably amped up and prolonged the nausea, too. LSD can generate nausea but usually that passes after the first hour. It is actually better to take something pleasant/sedating such as tramadol or phenibut with LSD to take the edge off.
• Sounds like you treated LSD more like an ayahuasca trip, searching for external visions and walking around etc. LSD is all about internal insight, and trips are best lying on a bed in a soothing atmosphere. LSD is also about revealing the subjective nature of reality (“you” being “the creator” – it’s all the same thing; non-duality etc.) rather than external systems such as spirit guides etc.
• One’s ability to get the most insight and benefit from LSD is directly tied to one’s ability in concentration meditation. I recommend you attain a reasonable level in concentration meditation before tripping. Most of what went on sounds more like an inability to control the trip (LSD meditated on YOU rather than vice versa).

I have had very similar experiences to what you just described – but actually from just kundalini, and no drug in my system. It really is terrifying but there are benefits from such experiences – I hope they filter into your awareness over the next few weeks so you don’t feel this was unnecessary suffering.

For the record, I’ve only ever had pleasant trips on LSD (it does hit all the pleasure receptors) and so have most people I’ve asked.

As an educated guess, I would put your bad trip down mainly to the B. caapi.

“I’ve laughed off just about every single bad experience in my life, which I have lots. This time, this time my body didn’t feel like laughing… or so I thought… but I felt it, the sensation… the feeling in the bottom of my spine of a laughter… of a “I’d do it all again”… I had a moment of clarity, as tough and resilient as nature made this person that I am, hes out of his goddamn mind.”

You need to stop laughing it off. You need to see, with no uncertainty, that it is completely brutal and hellish – so you can truly decide to have something better.

You need to get to the point where you’re saying, “Well, no matter how bad things are, at least they aren’t as bad as THAT was” – sadly, it is only from such hell that true appreciation of the present moment can be born.

It is after such hell – being lost in the chaos of the cosmos – that one can begin to appreciate things like how nice the sensate world is. For example, before typing this, I looked out the window and saw a tree swaying in the breeze against a blue sky. I felt an opioid wash coming over me as I recognized the niceness in that scene. The purpose of hell is to illustrate the heaven we have here already.

By the way, the purpose of this Universe is to experience relationships. Thenceforth comes subject–object, causality as we know it etc.

WetWaterDrop wrote:

How did you ground yourself after your experience? During mine I had a small glimpse of hope that the drugs were going to wear off, and they did so I came down, but you didn’t have anything in your system to come down from.

Only thing I can think of is take a mud bath.

Cold baths/showers. Heavy foods. Masturbation. Walks in woods or other strong indicators of material reality.

Also, keep yourself socialized. Go to work. Get dug into routine.