My LDS Friend's Experience with 5g of Psilocybin Mushrooms

My friend said I could share his experience that he wrote down:

"

Life Background

Psychedelics have piqued my interest for years now.  As someone who watched philosophy YouTube videos, read articles on quantum mechanics, and often zoned out about the nature of reality, the mere phrase that psychedelics make you "experience consciousness is a new way" fascinated me to no end. But as an active member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, I knew that was never going to happen.

A few things changed since then. I began to better understand that psychedelics were a very different class of drugs than anything else. They were not addictive, had no observed physical side effects, and studies were increasingly demonstrating their effectiveness at helping cure people of OCD, treatment-resistant depression, and PTSD. They could truly be a one-and-done drug. All of these differentiated it from every characteristic that both made drugs illegal in the US, and in oppositions to Church standards.

On top of this, almost two years ago, I started to develop a set of anxieties that gave me reason to consider them. What's funny is that these anxieties were directly related to drugs and alcohol. Not anxieties while doing them — I had never done either. But because of some things that happened, I began having panic attacks when I saw, heard, or even thought too long about drugs (especially weed) and alcohol. I had never been very sympathetic towards people who had anxieties. I would never have said this out loud, but I would often feel that people who experienced anxiety were just exaggerating or being dramatic. That was until I realized that no matter what I did or how I tried thinking about it, even seeing an empty beer bottle on the side of the road could make my heart race and my mind completely disturbed, spiraling downwards in a way I didn't know it was capable of. Before that, I'd had close friends smoke and drink around me without it having any effect. Now I can't remember what it felt like to think of them normally.

I thought this would just go away over time. Although it is much better than it was, it has not gone away. Over a year after these anxieties started, I began to more seriously consider trying psilocybin. What's funny is that "magic mushrooms" were part of my anxieties, albeit one of the weaker ones. As I researched about them and listened to podcasts featuring top scientists in the field, I was able to really reframe how I thought about them, and almost completely detach them from the rest of the things that caused me anxiety. I felt that it would help if I spoke to loved ones around me about it, so that it wouldn't feel like a dark, secretive thing I was doing, which could negatively affect the experience.  After speaking with a therapist, friends, and family about potentially doing this, and feeling support from all of them, I decided I'd go forward with it. I was originally going to do 3.5 grams (a full dose), but most of the studies I was seeing were using 4-5 grams (a high, or heroic dose). In most of these studies, the participants did not have prior experience with psychedelics. And the transformations these studies were capturing was exactly what I was looking for. Why not try and recreate that as best I can?  So with that, I decided to do a full 5 grams, and with a guide who I knew and trusted, and who was an experienced therapist. 

Background of the Experience

I arrived at the house Friday night. I spoke with the Guide for a few hours, filling her in on my background and reasons for doing this, most of which I had already shared on the phone before coming.  We had read a manual for psychedelic guides that was very helpful in preparing both of us. I was very nervous, but determined. 

The next morning, I had a light breakfast. We spoke for a while longer, and then I prepared to take them. I would be laying on a bed, blindfolded, with music, the Guide sitting beside me. It was 11am. I remember staring at the dried mushrooms, not knowing what was ahead of me. After taking some deep breaths, I started eating them. The taste wasn't as bad as I expected, and I just had a few sips of cranberry juice in between bites. 

I sat on a couch and talked with her, waiting for it to begin. At almost thirty minutes on the dot, I started feeling it.

The Experience

The initial feeling was one of detachment from myself. Even though I was able to control my body, I began feeling like I was an observer of it, as opposed to being the one moving it. I made my way to the bed, put on the blindfold, and played some light meditation music. 

It started out very pleasant. I tried to hold back smiling, and even laughed out loud a couple times in a kind of laughing gas-like manner. Although I never had visual hallucinations during the experience, I did see kaleidoscope patterns on the back of my eyelids. I felt like I was being carried up by something. I felt my body melt into the bed and into the music until it wasn't there anymore. When I'd move my body, I'd regain the sensation of having a body, and then it would quickly disappear again after holding still. It didn't take long before it started to take a more existential turn.

During the entire experience, I had a crippling need to remember what was happening, and to be able to describe it to others.  I felt like I wasn't able to experience anything outside the context of my trying to describe it later, like an endless internal chatter I wanted to shut off but couldn't.

There were several themes that played out through the experience.  I'll try covering each theme one by one, following a somewhat cohesive structure, but the truth is that the whole experience was nonlinear.  Time felt irrelevant, and my mind jumped back and forth between these themes. As a spoiler, I reached the end of the experience feeling very unresolved, as if I had been trying to reach the end of all these different paths, and wasn't able to finish any of them. I remember feeling that it was both too much and not enough. And I want to add that the experience was truly impossible to completely capture with words. It was ineffable in every sense of the words. But with that, here's the best I can do to describe it:

Trust 

The first theme I remember experiencing revolved almost solely around trust, which I was not expecting. It started more internal, and then grew. I had read in the manual that in the same way that your body heals itself of a bruise, your psyche wants to get to a place of healing. Sometimes it gets caught in patterns or loops, but the "medicine" will help you reach that healing. "Trust in your Inner Healing Self." I remember questioning this strongly. Why would I trust my subconscious to know how to heal itself? Why would I trust I knew what I was doing when I decided to do this? Why would I trust anyone to know this would help? 

The distrust grew.

How can I trust anyone to make sense of reality and know what is right and wrong? How can I trust institutions, individuals, or myself? Reality is so complex, and there are a seemingly infinite number of philosophies and religions and ideas — how do we know which ones are correct, or even helpful? Several times, I sat up and took the blindfold off and said things like "It's so hard to trust," or "I don't know what to trust."

I remember wanting to trust. It was painful to not have anything to trust. I remember visualizing a small blue orb that was me, and that it was trying to attach itself onto something, and being constantly rejected, not necessarily by that thing it was trying to attach onto, but perhaps by me. But it felt that it wasn't necessarily a choice to reject trusting everything, but that I was simply unable to. At the end, I was completely alone. A single blue orb in the middle of the infinite, unable to make sense of anything and therefore unable to do anything. 

I cried for maybe an hour during this entire part. My Guide held my hand several times, and it felt like a giant hand was reaching out from the Void to hold me. Despite the comfort it provided, it didn't alleviate the problem I was having as I confronted what felt like the essence of distrust.

I do remember at one point looking up and seeing two, stone-like structures that resembled parents. I remember feeling that in the very least, I had to trust them. They brought me here, after all. When I was able to write, I tried writing. Around this time I wrote "We trust out of necessity." We have to trust in some things. If we don't, we truly cannot make sense of anything around us. But I remember feeling upset that just because we had to trust something still didn't mean we would know the right things to trust. We initially trust parents unconditionally, and then we become our own beings and sometimes question things they do and say. But as a starting point, most of us deeply trust our parents, and it helps us grapple with reality and start progressing as we foray into the world. It gives us an anchor. 

But at this time, even that was gone. I didn't even have trust in myself, or more accurately, I especially didn't trust myself. I was floating in a sea of chaos. It wasn't even that my anchor wouldn't stick. It felt that there was no anchor to even throw. 

Responsibility and Expectation

Among all this distrust, I felt an immense responsibility. I felt the responsibility of making sense of everything. To know how to determine right from wrong in all things. To know whether other people were speaking truths or lies or out of ignorance. It felt like it was too great a burden for any one person, and it baffled me that we all shared the same, crushing responsibility.

I wrote: "Why did you create me just to expect things from me?" I don't know who or what exactly I was saying this to, but I felt the question deeply. Imagine signing a child up for basketball against his will, and then yelling at him when he misses a shot. This was your doing, anyway. 

Again, why create me just to expect things from me?

Chaos

At this point, my mind felt completely fragmented. If you have ever seen the movie "Everything, Everywhere, All at Once," I remember recalling that movie and thinking that there was no way the film writer hadn't had a psychedelic experience. Although I wouldn't necessarily say I was in a state of intense distress, it was also not pleasant, and I remember feeling that I would rather not exist at all than exist in this state forever. I felt like my mind was going at a million miles an hour, but in a circle that never found its beginning again, and that hours didn't exist. Or miles. 

Imagine something as simple as a chair.  There are an infinite number of facts about that chair, but our brains are masters at being able to distill it down to something very simple that we can glance at, understand, and not be overwhelmed by.

Now imagine you could see this chair down to its atoms.  And the world around it.  And it wasn't necessarily clear where the chair started or ended — it was just a different type of matter surrounded by other types of matter, and the shape seems relatively random.  And imagine being able to step back and see the life of this chair, to see when it was different pieces scattered throughout the world as fabric and wood, parts of it were a tree at some point, then before that, water and earth and sunbeams...

Now imagine being able to see this chair as all of that, and not having any ability to prioritize those infinite number of facts to form the concrete, simple concept that is a chair.

And now imagine feeling that way about the entire universe. Like understanding every molecule of a Monet painting, but not being able to see it as a painting of lilies on a pond. That was only one fact in trillions, and how do you find that exact fact amongst so many facts or even know that it's more important than any of the other ones?

The Birth of Reality

I'm speaking in somewhat grandiose terms because even those don't seem to do it justice. But this next part is... strange.

The Cosmic Form 

I remember having the sense that I was beholding a cosmic form that was all of matter and reality contained within it. Perhaps shortly after the Big Bang. I visualized it as a large cloud of... chaos.  There were two distinct characteristics about this massive form.  First, it was conscious, but in the same way that I currently was — fragmented, chaotic, unable to anchor onto anything or exist within a coherent timeline. This state was not necessarily painful, but so unmanageable that it, too, would have rather not existed at all then exist eternally in that state.

Loneliness 

Secondly, it was alone. Utterly alone. When you or I are alone, we at least have the sense of a possibility that we one day might not be alone, or maybe have a recollection of what it's like to not be alone.  But this giant mass of all of existence was alone, and always was alone, and felt that it always would be alone. There was no hope of anything else to ever exist that would understand it. Know it. For it to know. Because it was everything. 

Finding a Better State

I remember thinking how water travels the path of least resistance. In a similar way, this cosmic form was trying to travel the path of least pain, or most grounded-ness. I visualized glowing threads shooting out from it and intertwining with other threads. It had created life. These creatures existed on timelines, could touch a table, walk, imagine a future and recall a past. Reality as we feel it felt so grounded and... real. This cosmic form was relieved that it had found this new state to exist in, through us. On top of that, we could all know each other and be known by each other. We didn't have to be alone. We could connect with each other. 

To be Known

As was common during my experience, my deepest existential fears and questions quickly entered in as soon as anything good happened. I remember that all these glowing threads deeply wanted to be known. But they never would be — at least not completely. None of them would ever be truly understood by even one other thread. And that felt deeply sad. 

I remember thinking of Her, and seeing Her as another orb trying desperately to connect, and being unable to. I also remember feeling frustrated. Why would anyone want to put themselves in a state that detached themselves from this beautiful, concrete reality?

This was all overwhelming. Several times I sat up and said out loud, "I don't know what to do with this" or "this is too much" or "I'm so overwhelmed."  

Bathroom Break

Maybe four hours into this, I went to the bathroom. My Guide grabbed my arm as I walked. I felt like my mind had been shot out into the infinite, and that it was momentarily coming back to visit Bryan's body. But again, mostly as an observer. Bryan's instinctive motor functions would be able to accomplish everything just fine. 

When I came back to the bed, I realized that the strongest part of this all was over. "If I haven't figured it out by now, I probably won't by the end." There was a small dried mushroom stem still left in the ziplock bag — what if I had eaten just that one extra piece? Would that have been enough to push me just far enough over the edge to finally get to the end? At the same time, I also wanted this to end. I wrote "Why was I so curious about this? Why would anyone want to know/see this?"

Winding Down

Other themes that played out during all of this included the nature of myself and determinism vs free will. I can only recall some of those other parts like a faint dream, and don't have any words that can bring them into the realm of language. They are too nebulous and unexplainable, and yet also heavy. Looking back on parts of it really does feel like trying to recall a dream. 

By hour six, I was feeling well enough to start walking and have dinner. It still felt very dreamlike. I was processing things around me very slowly, and was aware I was slow. When my guide spoke, I would slowly look up at her and have to make sense of what she said and then formulate a response. I wanted to try and describe what had happened, but it was too difficult to do that. I almost started tearing up again. I felt exhausted, and the exhaustion came in waves. One minute I'd be fine and talking and eating, and the next I'd have to lay down and close my eyes. I spoke with my Guide for a while after, slowly gathering the words to explain everything.  

When I went to bed, I got a solid ten hours of sleep. It was hard to not feel like I had just seen reality as it really was. If I had to describe it in one sentence, I'd say that it felt like the fabrics of reality were ripped open for me, and that I didn't necessarily like what I saw. 

The Anxiety

On the drive home the next day, I tried to think about things that would have normally made me anxious. I found that I wasn't able to get myself in that state. I didn't celebrate yet, but I was hopeful that it had changed.

The next day, I found that perhaps it wasn't quite over. Someone was talking about weed, and the longer they spoke, the more uncomfortable I became. Since then it's been apparent that the experience was a step in the right direction, but not the end. But the step was noticeable. It was actually challenging to get to that state of anxiety. And when it did, it felt less potent.

After a couple weeks, the anxiety was gone. Completely. I could barley remember what it was even like to have that anxiety.

I'm going to let this stand here by itself, with no explanations or post-processing thoughts. This was my experience.

"