Hi guys!
I've first heard about Daniel Ingram in the Thelema subreddit a couple weeks ago and so I've got in contact with MCTB and DhO. It's beeing a wonderful experience as my interest in medidation has flourished again. As my background is kinda unusual, I would like to share it with you so I can locate myself with more clarity in the maps we like so much. Please, don't mind my english, not a native speaker.
I have a relatively long history with misticism, but not necessarely through buddhist medidation, so I think it would be nice to give a little bit of a background. I've started studying Hermeticism and Magick when I was 12 (I'm 25 now), passing through lots of spiritual practices and experiences since. As an teenager I was involved mostly with practical magick, through chaos magick framework, specialy Austin Osman Spare, classical cerimonial ritualistic magic (with Aleister Crowley's work), witchcraft, Thelema, etc... That gave me incountable mindblowing experiences that sent me in a journey of investigation between the I and the Other at a first moment, and how changes in a subjective field of experience could impact an objective field of experience. In this process, when I was 14, I got involved with lots of divination, including mostly Hermetic Astrology and Tarot. I've past through lots of psychic scenarios, from bliss and happinness to depression and a little bit of madness.
When I got to college, I incorporated psychedelics and hallucinogens in my mystical work, in a fairly secure and controlled way. There was mostly ayahuasca and psylocibin mushrooms, but synthetics as well, like LSD or MDMA. My framework have always been the Tree of Life from Hermetic Kabbalah. The rituals would follow like this: extensive investigation of the astral weather (throug astrological charts, scrying, tarot, examination of the daily phenomena), determination and amplification through ritualistic magick (invocation of the sphere, element or gods) and then I would take the substance. As the trip begins I would be sucked up to the sphere of influence and then it's hard to describe. Each ritual lasts to something about 10 hours. Happenned at least every weekend, for 2 years. Then, once a month.
I've been in the psychedelic world, working, 1000+ hours. There were incountable experiencies, varying in quality, intensity, abstraction level. I was able to investigate really really deep stuff of my life, I've beeing presented to an absurd range of diferent kinds of emotions and feelings (incluing custom ones and others absolutely alienigenous), mental scenarios, diferent heights of cognition, speeds of perception, brutal levels of energy. I've spend lots and lots of time having long streams of insights in a non verbal way of thinking. There were countless visits to the Abyss as well and I've suffered absurd suffering. My sense of self, aesthetics, way of seeing life dilluted and were reconstructed countless times. There was a real risk of total disconection with reality (or, at least, it seemed like that). This whole process changed my personality radically and my live is outrageously better after all of this, so I'm very happy and would gladly do it all again.
I've had three (two, in fact) experiences that surpassed all the others. The first one was my first mushroom trip. I've been through 3 or 4 psychedelics experiences so far that opened my eyes for a whole new level of mysticism. That involved ridiculous synchronicity, at the point that I was questioning my sanity for real. But that also happened in a kind of dark time of my life. The day I took those first mushrooms I was planning to kill myself, and I took them in a despair act. Not safe, I know, but I had nothing to loose. As soon as the effect kicked in, I've felt bliss and happiness exploding through me, in a way I thought couldn't be possible. Suddenly, all my suffering was gone and the world was breathing with me, there was no sense of separation, just Love (with capital L). After that, the depression vanished and new colours came to life.
The second experience hapenned a few weeks after. It was with nBOME and I was with some friends. I felt a shiver up my spine, a voice calling me to my altar and, at the same time, all my friends just stood up and told me they were leaving (each one for it's own reason). As soon as I would sit to start the meditation, the mind began to accelerate uncontrollably. I sat down and a very profound insight about the true nature of reality arose. I was struck with awe. After that, a couple seconds after, another insight. I was still catching up with the first insight, and the awe just added up. Few seconds after, another. At this time, I began to cry uncontrolably. There was tons of images illustrating the mental processes and the realizations were very higher than what words could comprise. The speed of the mind was insane. It resembled life and death situations where time almost stops and everything goes in slow motion. Then, another insight, few seconds after. And another. Another. And the time between insights began to squish. The insights were happening one after the other in a way that was unbearable, each one came with a huge burst of light in the background. I was screaming, in tears, rolling the ground. The time between the insights squished so much that, suddenly, there was a continuum and full imersion and integration within the Light. There was no I and Other. It felt like being struck with a lightining containing all the information of the reality. It was a sudden "plot-twist" of reality. I laughed uncontrolably as I realised a deep truth. Then, all vanished, and I was left with a brutal afterglow that lasted for at least two months. I correlated the experience, in the thelemic language, with the Knowledge and Conversation with the Holy Guardian Angel, but as a lonely practicioner, that was only a label I gave to orient myself, not to claim any kind of title.
Before going to the last of the three experiences, it's nice to remark that the substances I took gave a mental and neurochemical background for the mystic experiences to build up. But it's always very clear the separation between the mystical and the psychedelic experience.
The third experience was the most traumatic experience of all (my life). I took 5g of dryed Psylocibe cubensis together with an extract of syrian rue (iMAO) and smoked 1g of cannabis in the bong. I spent one month meditating one hour every day and doing yoga, as well as doing magick as a preparation, but there was no way to be prepared for that.
It began with me in the altar, paying close attention to a candle's flame. Reality began to melt down and my concentration was very steady. I was confident. Sudenly, the effects started building up so much, that I payed attention to them and felt like if something really really wrong was going on. This realization came with sound and images of shattering glass. I runned to the room where my friends where and asked for them to take care of me. Then I forgot where I was. Then I forgot when it was. Then I forgot my name. I screamed: "whats going on!?!?!?" and they would tell me: "calm down, man, you tooke mushroons, you are on the trip, it will all pass soon and you will be fine". As soon as they told me that, I would forget about it, scream again and they would repeat that for me.
I looked at my hands and could not identify that as me. Or nothing. There was no me. The tingling sensations that make up reality was outrageously intense, like waves that were throwing my consciousness violently. There was horror in everything and nothing solid for me to hold. The words then suddenly where sucked down from it's meaning and became like empty shells, in a way that I could not use language to elaborate thoughts anymore. The short term memory span was shorter than one second. So I got sucked up by a "wandering". All of sudden I was in a street, taking a bycicle ride, and I had identity, name, purpose, emotional bondings to people, and a whole personality. 'I' was someone else and that felt as real as reality feels right now. Look, by this time I'm using the word "I" for the sake of the storytelling, but it is a concept that don't capture a experience where you have no psychic background for the emergence of a structure like an ego. Then I came back from that thought desperate, cause I no longer remembered which one was the real world. Then the consciousness was again sucked from the manifest world to another place and I was another person. Somebody crazy, this time, in a psychiatric hospital. Every time I was sucked into another reality, in the "real time" it took less than 10 seconds, but in the phenomenological time it could be very longer.
Then, those experiences of living other realities began to happen in parallel, lots of them each time. I had, simultaneously, multiple egos, each one of them in a different reality. And then, consciousness was removed from those experiences, as they continue to happen and to be experienced in a kind of screen, being each one of them a pixel of reality. I went further and further. Sometimes I would have a glimpse of the "real me", and I remember screaming, my friends holding me and at a time I asked a friend to verify if I had pissed myself. I could perceive the mind screaming and contorting, but there wasn't an association with the mind anymore. As I was removed from the mind and all the sensorial experience, I began to feel absolute equanimity, cause the reality had no structure anymore. And then, it's hard to tell exactly when it happenned, but there was an absolute cessation of Thought, in the strong sense. All which is manifest, included time and space, vanished. All went down and then 'I' grasped the real Real.
This part is really hard to describe. In the Hermetic Kabbalah background I associated that to an supernal experience. I've experienced in a superposed way the Boundless Space, the Infinity, the Point as well as the Veils of the unmanifest. But all of that comprised in the Nothing. Well... I think it's pointless trying to describe this... After that, reality recomposed itself and the I was reconstructed out of the nothing. "I" was destroyed, all the way to the non-existence and reconstructed. The world recompose itself like a dream. The "I" was part of the the dream as well as the walls of the room. At this moment there was very much light and the Voice of the Angel (if you permite me using thelemic terminoloy) was 'speaking' to me through reality.
After this experience I spent a week isolated and trying to handle with the fact that I could in no way prove to myself that the trip ended. There was a Revelation, with fenomena associated. And life could be just a fenomena associated to the Revelation. Also, there wasn't a 'me' like in the old sense anymore... I saw what I thought beeing 'me' being deconstructed and reconstructed together with all the rest of the world and couldn't relate to a sense of self in the old way. I dropped my spiritual activities after that and focused on my work, cause I felt that I had understood even more that I've wanted to...
Now I'm trying to rebuild those roads by the means of meditation. Where do you think I've been through in the Buddhist maps lexicon? I think the first and second experiences I described could be an A&P and the third something like equanimity, but it was outrageously intense... Also, I'm sharing for the sake of science! Thanks!
