HEALING ATTEMPT SELF RECORD
Got up about 7am and had two cups of coffee with half and half. Began eating 4.8 grams dried mushroom about 8:30 am - again a big pile. Blessed mushrooms and self using sage smoke and centered myself with the sage smoke and the cardinal points. Feel nauseas again as usual. Jana’ still sleeping. I am in living room but will retire to bed before mushrooms kick in. What concerns me most with this is the steroids that I am on and the blood thinner - two prescription meds. Really, this is self experimentation since I am not sure how either of these pharmaceuticals will interact with mushrooms? But I am trying to put that out of my mind - another thing to fear - and concentrate on healing. It is clear to me that I personally will have to be involved in the healing; that the mushrooms will not do it on their own - they are here to help. I have the Blue Whale screen saver up to help visualized my spirit guide later in the trip, hopefully. I am about half way done with big pile of mushrooms - O shit it is on now. No going back - what an odd feeling this “no going back“. It is like leaping off of cliff with faith that somehow you will not die when you hit the ground.
I will just go lie down in bed and see what will be. I hope to go into this experience like last May with Jana’s healing attempt and call up the Blue Whale and let him guide me to (wherever?) then wing it as usual, go with whatever experience happens: if there is door, I will go through it; if there is a window, I will climb through it; If I see a road or path, I will follow it; If there is an ocean, I will swim out into it - the first thing is to allow the blue whale spirit guide to get me to at least the correct jumping off spot.
I do this in the name of love with only the best intentions. What will be, will be with this old physical body here on this world, so will shall see.
What I am is eternity.
Where I am is here

Not the first this has happened to me - nothing, that is. I lay down for a while and relaxed in bed. I felt resigned and okay, not great. Jana’ slept next to me. I think it was a little after nine at this point. At about ten I smoked a couple bowls to see if that might help kick things off but to no effect. About 10:30 Jana’ awoke and we got up. I felt like the healing trip was an abort - nada. I could have eaten more but choose not to. I guess I think of it as respecting the mushrooms will instead of trying to force my own will. I’m not saying that this is the right way to deal with things but it is how I deal with things. I came to the healing in uncertainty, without confidence - on my knees, in other words, as I always do. I would only assume that a confident person would approach them differently? But I have never been a confident person - yet neither am I a pretender. It is simply not in me to be directional or controlling. Everything in me at the deepest level brings me to reverence before the great, unknown but benevolent power that these mushroom elders represent.
I threw myself into this rabbit hole with not only abandon but much faith.
As I lay there in bed before giving up, my mind had tried to wander off as it will, monkey mind, and I had to consciously wrench it back to my own personal healing. I felt like I did a good job at this, managing to keep my focus where I felt that it needed to be - it is in this manner that I try to bring intention into the trip experience, hoping that once “I take off” I will then carry what I have been recently thinking and visualizing into the altered reality opened by the mushrooms. This is the only “technique” that I possess to accomplish the act of taking my conscious intention into the psychedelic experience. I also visualized the blue whale over and over, looking at the screen saver I have a blue whale and closing my eyes, seeing him there, and repeating this again and again, in this manner trying to bring intention over to the other side. The blue whale spirit guide would be key in this, I felt. All of this in itself was a good mental exercise. But then as I lie still waiting, my whole being sensitive to the signs that the mushrooms were “coming on”, but there came no ego death, no crossing over, no visions, no altered reality.
The trip was a bust, I thought. I have been through this before and found it best not to dwell on why my mind seemed so hard to crack sometimes. So I had practice on letting that part go which is good because that part could drive me nuts in itself if I let it. Because I had been down this road before is probably why I did not try to boost the trip - to “force” it. Maybe our minds are different here in the rabbit hole?
It took me a long time to make myself get up out of bed. When I finally did my legs felt particularly weak and numb - kind of weird, gross feeling that is hard to put into words, definitely nothing like anything that I’ve ever felt before. I thought that the only choice I had in all of eternity was either get up out of bed - engage - or stay in bed - disengage.
I choose to engage but it felt like just barely. The metaphysical implications of this were not lost on me. Maybe that is the only choice we had, I wondered, swinging my numb, yucky feeling legs out of bed. But I didn’t take it too seriously: engage/disengage.
Who knows?
One thing that has been made clear to me in all of this is that I know nothing - it is like digging in sand.
Jana’ made breakfast but I felt nauseas even after one bite and could not eat much. When Jana’ tried to talk to me I would have to giggle. I was suffering from a form of aphasia which was common for me especially on high doses.
You are fucked up, she laughed.
I insisted that I was not, that nothing happened. I was perfectly normal and lucid. In fact, I had a good buzz on - too bad that I had not gone into this for a good buzz but for a healing. There have been times in the past even after “coming out” of an altered reality, I could still not speak at all for many hours afterward. I would form the words perfectly in my mind but I could not utter them no matter how hard I tried. In this case I could speak but it was just difficult.
I sat across from my wife in our small living room as she perused the days news on her laptop. It occurred to me that in so many ways I still did not know her even after being married 21 years. I stared at her for quite a while until she finally asked, “are you staring at me?” To which my only answer was mild giggling. I really tried to comprehend her but I ultimately found myself coming up again against that existential wall - comprehending her was impossible, like capturing life itself and putting it in a jar. Any true comprehension of her reality lived and moved with her, the life of her, the ineffable and transient herness of her. Vaguely I perceived the work of the mushrooms and perceived that I was to explore my own physical reality today, which included psychology. The mushrooms were doing something just not at all what I expected and I felt them moving deep, deep down inside of myself in some dark place vaguely equivalent to where their mycelium moved ever so slowly underground. It was almost as though they did not want to be noticed today. I felt some need to play along and pretended with them that they were not there. Their movement was so slow it was almost beyond perception and they were silent and coincidentally, I had no desire to move physically either but my mind began to slowly and precisely move across the mundane, physical world of my life.
How many times have you gone on a trip which turned out not the be the trip you expected but maybe the trip you needed?
Today, the mushroom seemed to want me to do a hard reality check. This I did and my present reality is rather harsh in a number of ways. Take a good look around the rabbit hole you have thrown yourself into, and get back to us, the mushrooms seemed to be saying.
The thought occurred to me that all our relationships and everything that happens in this life is a lesson to help us negotiate eternity. Of this I was convinced. Just learning to love on a planet where one sentient creature eats another sentient creature alive is a beautiful and immeasurably valuable lesson. Learning to discipline the mind in creativity and imagination - learning so many lessons peculiar to this world of ours. I thought that in a strange way it did not matter if I could walk or not. It did not matter even if I lived or died. I had made a very conscious decision to pursue knowledge over everything, even my own and Jana’s well being - this is the real point of grasping that Tigers Tail. This is what it means to me to follow the mushroom path.
I did not anticipate this Multiple Sclerosis thing which is adding the to reality check. Kind of like being hit in the head with a baseball bat and asked if you are awake. I thought of a carnival ride that I was on a kid and I got scared and started crying and screaming at the carnival hand to stop the ride. Well I cannot stop this ride so it would do not good to cry and yell. This ride never stops. Life comes and goes, the physical universe comes and goes, all smaller and larger speed bumps on the road of eternity. Might as well enjoy the ride when you can. The MS thing had cured my ennui expressed in the Gila Trip report. I definitely appreciate life more: the old adage that you have to (almost) lose something to appreciate it. Almost dying a couple months ago really made an impression upon me. Not only that, but shitting myself in bed like an infant, being completely paralyzed for a period of time - all served to make me more aware of what a miracle health and life really is. It is not facing death but facing incapacitation, perhaps permanent or worsening paralyses that frightens me the most. Laying in bed completely paralyzed for the rest of my life is to me the worst fate I can think of.
For hours then I sat and contemplated mostly my physical predicament. What had brought me to this place in my life? I thought a lot about the Tigers Tail - that ultimate truth of reality that I knew at one time. I had consciously traded my own and my wife’s welfare for just the chance that I could blow open this greater reality somehow - in my own mind. Of course, in retrospect, I see that the tiger had me by the tail. But really, what does it matter? I know now beyond words that I am an eternal being - is it greedy to want to know more? Perhaps a bad idea to wrestle with the tiger? Maybe just let it go altogether and return to “normal conscious” life? But I could not and I cannot do that. I have leapt headfirst into the rabbit hole and there is no going back. Either there is something for me down in here or else I will fall to my death, tumbling down into the rabbit with the tiger, wrestling because we are one, bound and yet separate. One way or another, I will find out - this is where the tiger went! If I want to know what the tiger knows then I must follow the tiger. Again, part if what it really means to follow the mushroom path.
I understood that I had chosen this place that I am at. I had vowed my life for knowledge, given my pledge to a voice in my own head, and walking or not walking and even life and death did not matter. These were mere distractions - O the tiger is famous for distraction! But I would not be distracted. My mind is fine so this does not slow me down from my main task which involves the opening of my mind (enlightenment) and the opening of my heart (love). If my purpose here in this world were to run marathons then my mission would be much impaired. My experience with the MS brought me comfort in giving me a real life test of whether or not my own consciousness has actually changed - or I am full of shit. When told that I might die in the hospital, I had no fear of death. I thought dispassionately that if I live, I live and if I die I die. In truth, there is not much that I could have done. So what lesson is this teaching me? I thought wryly. This looking at death, at dying, as a lesson is a gift from the mushrooms - they gave me this. It is not a “bad trip” but rather a lesson, a healing. It is up to me, my eternal being, to glean the meaning and benefit from it. Rather than yell at the Carney to stop the ride, better to enjoy the ride, appreciate the ride, understand the ride - after all, this ride goes on forever.
On the other hand, I spent hours thinking about our physical predicament. I thought little about my MS condition itself but about the practical aspects, mostly healthcare: only in America! Literally! No one would have me for health insurance and social security is let’s just say a misnomer. It was as though with this healing attempt I was calling in an extraction and the mushrooms response was: “break contact, continue mission” - not what you want to hear when you are calling in for an extraction. But it doesn’t matter if a soldier is asshole to eyeballs deep in shit, he does what he is told.
I think now what the mushrooms did was tell me to attend to practical matters and get back to them when that is taken care of. Today I called my neurologist, the social security, getting the ball rolling. I hate this kind of shit and there is a very real part of me that would rather just die than deal with the ungodly bureaucracy of it all!
“Give unto Caesar’s what is Caesar’s and unto God what is God’s”.