Hahaha, yeah... maybe not the most intuitive path. I guess I am just that stubborn. After the first bad one which was the worst (when i was a teenager), I didn't touch psyches for a long time.  Started to dabble again in my mid 20's but still just had way too much emotional baggage and wasn't putting enough thought into setting and environment.  Only in the past few years, in my late 20's and now early 30's does it feel like I've gotten it right.  Mostly just doing small doses of Psilocybin, which I've found to be more manageable. 

It feels like I have finally had that profound spiritual psychedelic experience that I knew was possible, because I had heard of it happening to people, but never had myself.  Probably a big part of what I was searching for all these years in my experimenting with psyches. 

Regardless of how it plays out in the grand scheme of things, I think it's due in large part to meditation and Buddhist philosophy (and just more generally getting my shit together) that I was better equipped to make sense of and properly handle the psychedelic experience.

As of right now, I don't feel much of a need to dip further into psyches, though most likely I'll do it again at some point.  As always, I remain curious.

Hey Tommy,
Thank you for your response… these are some very thought-provoking questions, it gives me a lot to chew on, in a way that feels productive though.

I want to spend some more time on this, I think it would be worth it for me. I feel there is opportunity for great insight here for me, and your questions are pointing me in the right direction. For now I just want to say thank you for the interest and for taking the time - it is truly heartwarming, and I am grateful.

J W

Hey Tommy,
My apologies for the delay in response here. I have spent the past few days in what has felt very much like a Review phase, which I think is in part due to the natural progress of insight, but also spurred to some degree by your questions, so for that I thank you.

I felt it best to just proceed with a new post, actually more of a novella, as there has been a lot more of thought, and then answer your questions directly from there. 

I would list out all of the usual disclaimers here, but you don't seem like a judgemental person at all so, I'll just say this is probably way oververbose, grandiose or just sloppy, which is just the result of my karma and my narcissistic tendencies, probably compounded by the lack of sleep I've had over the last few nights, which seems to happen to me once a month or so as part of these natural cycles.  Please don't feel the need to spend too much time on this, just because I did. I feel that great benefit has already come from this.
Lastly, I don't know if any of these answers are "right"... I am mostly going off the cuff here!  And I also want to add that I do not find myself to be in any unique position here in terms of my realizations.  Ok!



Firstly, a few more thoughts on psychonaut / Buddhism / not-Buddhism, because looking back I'm not sure I really said exactly what I wanted to, and it is important to my realization. Honestly I think I just did not put the right amount of thought into it: 

I consider myself to be a Buddhist.  Not for any reason other than that I have found the Buddhist teachings to be completely true.  It has been somewhat of a gradual process; I was not raised Buddhist.  When I first met the Dharma 2-3 years ago, there was very much a sense that these teachings were putting into words things that I had long thought about, things about the nature of perception and the mind, things that I had questioned since at least my teenage years, and had come up with some partial answers to, but the Buddhist answers were far more complete and lucid than anything I had come up with.

As my meditation practice gained traction, and I began to gain some experiential knowledge, the Buddhist phenomonology and philosophy became less and less of a theory, and more of a reality, and not just "a" reality, but reality itself.  By the time I started this log, probably well before, I had very little doubt at all in the veracity of the teachings.  With this LSD experience, I feel like any remaining doubt has been completely eliminated. The laws of dependent arising, the nature of suffering and samsara, the path to eliminating suffering, these things are as real to me as my own body, the laws of physics, math, or anything else. Though, due to the nature of samsara and clinging, I don't always remember these as the truths that they are, because I still get wrapped up in my delusions. 

On another level, it doesn't matter what I consider myself to be.  I have found on quite a few occasions that my very identifying as this or that or either/both can contribute to hard feelings.  And I have found myself attempting to change that interpersonal or societal dynamic as a result.  Honestly, I am just getting to the point where I don't care if someone thinks of me as a Buddhist or not, or a Christian or not. It really just doesn't really matter unless I am somehow causing someone harm from the self-identification that I project, in which case I want to be aware of that.

So to clarify a bit more what I mean by the statement, "I'm not really attached to staying in the Buddhist space".
I have much more to say on this but I am going to try to keep it brief.

When I say 'Buddhist space', I don't mean Dharma Overground specifically, though this is a 'Buddhist space' (a rather unconventional once, I should say).  I am talking about Buddhism in general as an external means of communication. 
To give a little context: I am a believer in the concept of enlightened beings being 'hidden in plain sight' everywhere among us, and I believe that they come in all shapes and sizes, and they may have various sets or levels of attainments.  Whether or not this is true is beside the point, but I believe it to be true and I believe it is to my benefit to believe it to be true.  And if it is true, it means the vast majority of them have probably never heard anything about Buddhism.
So much has been said on this already, but it's like Chris M says a lot: This is human stuff.

All of this is to say that, somehow, this LSD experience was so indescribable and so real and present, it somehow reified the above statement for me.  Like, there's no way that "this" can be described even through Buddhism, because it's completely outside of any dualistic language, outside of language itself.  After all, 'There is no path, there is no attainment, there is no wisdom to attain'.  These words now ring true for me in a way they didn't before.  "This" is just the present moment and I don't see how Buddhism is even that relevant outside of pointing you to what already exists.  It's relevant for me because it's the method I've used and it's worked, but I don't know that means anything beyond just that. It certainly seems like there's other methods out there that work for other people because my life is a result of their kindness.

Just one brief example: my wife is in academia and she specifically studies systems of knowledge.  We frequently talk about her research and writers (Virginia Woolf, Tom Hardy, James Joyce, etc), and when we talk about this stuff it feels to me like we're talking about Dharma.  Not like, "these two schools of thought are vaguely touching on similar concepts in interesting ways", no.  These guys are all talking about the same. damn. thing.  Yes, the language is different, yes, there are differences in how enlightenment is talked about, but it's the same. At least anywhere that perception or the mind is explored.  I am probably not doing this justice but to give a little more context of what I'm talking about, the concepts of 'Flaneur' or 'the sublime' come to mind. I just had to paste this quote from Baudelaire (re: the Flaneur), it is too on point not to:

"The crowd is his element, as the air is that of birds and water of fishes. His passion and his profession are to become one flesh with the crowd. For the perfect flâneur, for the passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite. To be away from home and yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the centre of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world—impartial natures which the tongue can but clumsily define. The spectator is a prince who everywhere rejoices in his incognito. The lover of life makes the whole world his family, just like the lover of the fair sex who builds up his family from all the beautiful women that he has ever found, or that are or are not—to be found; or the lover of pictures who lives in a magical society of dreams painted on canvas. Thus the lover of universal life enters into the crowd as though it were an immense reservoir of electrical energy. Or we might liken him to a mirror as vast as the crowd itself; or to a kaleidoscope gifted with consciousness, responding to each one of its movements and reproducing the multiplicity of life and the flickering grace of all the elements of life."

... a kaleidoscope gifted with consciousness...



Dharma is truth, and everything can be Dharma, therefore, everything is Dharma.  I don't need to find new relationships that are more Buddhist oriented, (though I rejoice in any Buddhist relationship, new or old).  The relationships I have are perfectly alright - my family, my friends, and yeah, my Sangha. All I have to "do" is to continue to cultivate and bring lovingkindness to those already existing relationships.  Family is Sangha.  Friends are Sangha.  Collaboration is Sangha.  I don't need to change or craft new spaces that speak in a language perfectly suited to my own constructions, I just need to find the right ones for me that already exist, and for me it doesn't have to be a Buddhist space.  It just has to be a space where people are doing what they love to some degree.  Eventually I want that space to extend to all perceived phenomena, where that can be any space at all, because those spaces do exist everywhere.


Moving on... I have struggled to find the right way to put my experience into words over the past week.  I feel like there are a few different aspects to it. But as I still have your questions to answer, there will be a sequel to this novel, so I am going to let my subconscious mind do the talking here (be warned, this is the mushy part ):


As I finally drifted off in the early hours of the morning, I slipped into a vivid dream. This was a gathering place of some sort, a celebration, on a beautiful, wide river, full of fanciful, human-like characters of all shapes and sizes, travelling together in little bands or tribes.  These were magical creatures, this was perhaps a Dakini realm.  I found myself thrown into this realm, lost.  I was observing the different guilds, and the whole shabang, from a close distance but from the outside. Sometimes approaching the creatures, who from what I remember were all nice to me, since they were clearly highly enlightened beings. But, I felt kind of like a lunatic, like a lost wanderer.  I could not communicate verbally with them.

Then, I spotted someone that stuck out to me, who was standing inside some sort of medieval looking booth. A warrior of some sort, with gold plated armour, with a little bit of a viking look to him.  (Maybe that's from the video game I had been playing earlier ).  When I approached this strange warrior, he sang me his song.  Though it was music unlike anything I have ever heard (it was kinda like black/death metal), I could understand the words. "Break through... the part of you... that's holding to... long forgotten faces".  As I heard these words I began to cry, as I begin to cry writing this now.  These are the words to one of my songs (in real life).  Though I could not communicate anything beyond reciting those same words back to him, it was enough for him to understand that we were singing the same song, and we wept together in communiion for a brief moment, before he was pulled away by the rest of his guild, though I did get his business card (LOL).

In that moment, I felt like I belonged. And what I have come to realize over the past few weeks/months is that all I have ever wanted, is to belong.  What is this 'belonging'?  I think it is simply resting in the 'knowing' of this present moment.  Resting in that place of knowing is going for refuge.  It is the same mind that I experienced on the acid. It is the same mind I experience when going for refuge or practicing Metta or any other heart practice. A mind of compassion is a mind of going for refuge.  Wherever there is consciousness and awareness, there can be/there is compassion, which could be anywhere.







TBC....

To put these responses in proper context, I wrote most of it just a day or 2 after the trip when I was still in the afterglow of it (in phase 1 from below), and these visuals were still quite vivid. I marked my more recent thoughts with a ***

And FYI this is what I noticed about my changing experience of the last week:

1a, there was definitely an afterglow type effect which lasted a few days, which very much felt like what I would imagine spontaneous bodhicitta to feel like. Just an abundance of lovingkindness, coming naturally, without effort. (1-3 days after)
1b, there was a sort of knowledge of emptiness, the kind that is hard to describe, but I can tell you the this knowledge made me feel like everything was going to be okay, even in death. And it also brought a sense of satisfaction that 'everything is exactly as it is', that I was already doing exactly what I needed to be doing in life, and that I was exactly who I needed to be. (1-3 days after)
2, there was a sort of disillusionment period where these realizations became less accessible, my mind once again became a bit cluttered, and my meditations were a little bit frustrating (3-5 days after)
3, finally, I was able to get back to this place of knowing compassion, I was able to remember the feelings from #1 again, I think this was partially due to me coming back to my devotional tantra practice (described in the first journal entry) which seemed to help keep my concentration focused, partially due to investigaitoin and review of the experience. (5-8 days after)
4, current state is quite content considering the lack of sleep. I have cried happy tears several times today and I very rarely cry (maybe this is due to lack of sleep). Right now it seems generally easier to develop a mind of compassion.



"To your mind, what did the lifting of the veil reveal and what, in your words, would describe what reality "truly is"? I understand that it's difficult to express this stuff verbally, so use whichever analogies/metaphors you find most useful."


***Now the perhaps more important aspect to this is that what reality ‘truly is’ is just exactly what appears to our ordinary consciousness, though I feel that I’ve covered that in my last post

This will probably sound ridiculous but here goes:
There is certainly an infinite or fractal-like quality to things, and there is also no true separation of objects, so there’s this kind of dependent-arising feel to everything. And yet, these sort of ‘consciousness wells’ which form living entities, which are sort of arising independently out of the environment but ultimately not really separated from the environment. That’s not to say what we consider ‘non-living’ does not also have consciousness. But, there seems to be something unique about a living creature, like a human, or a cat, and especially places like eyes and ears, places where the eye sense and ear sense come into contact with the external. These appear sort of like black holes, or portals. This is where the magic happens, so to speak, where the internal consciousness comes into contact with the external. So entities, and objects in general, in one sense form sort of like planets, they just sort of materialize out of the necessity for an object to perform a given function within samsara, and they are created out of whatever junk/trash is sort of in the immediate vicinity.

It sometimes feels like we’re just kind of wading around in this beautiful soup of trash, this space jungle filled to the brim with fellow travelers running about, bumping into each other, etc etc, and it doesn’t seem like it should work in any way, but somehow it does. Kind of like New York City I guess


*** kind of looks like this:
(https://thenewstack.io/deep-learning-neural-networks-google-deep-dream/)

"Do you have any ideas as to what "this primordial soup" consists of or how it's being 'mixed in the pot', so to speak?"


I honestly don’t know if I have a good answer for ‘what it consists of’, that’s a really interesting question though. What I can say is that everything is exactly as it appears while simultaneously infinitely complex and interdependent. So, it, and how it’s being mixed, is the result of karma, and the various parts, molecules, pieces, of the various objects. And the result of karma is nothing other than exactly what appears to us, although because of our self-grasping delusions, we usually cannot see completely what is appearing to us, we can only see like the nominal appearance of things. Perhaps what I saw was simply a less deluded visual representation of causes and conditions? I’m not sure… it is interesting to think about what actually holds this stuff together. Like, from a physics standpoint… what do gravitational force consist of?

***I think one factor of ‘what it consists of’ is consciousness and awareness. And that consciousness element is maybe no different than a mind of compassion.






"When you say "all this emptiness stuff", could you describe what that means to you right now?"



Like what you are saying later on, really the only way to talk about it is by using sort of generic placeholders for the the ‘this-ness’ that is our constant, direct experience of the present moment, which we generally do not realize moment to moment, but is still there. So in once sense it is simply the current experience, whatever that experience may be, exactly as it is.
On the other hand it is so much more than that. That there can be the possibility of ‘something existing’, for reasons we will probably never fully understand, because that means there is the possibility of boundless, infinite joy arising out of something completely mundane, like the washing of a dish, is just truly a beautiful thing, is itself a cause for that joy to arise, which is also both fascinating and humbling.
A lot of my understanding of emptiness comes from didactic teachings, like meditating on the emptiness of the body or the mind, (think like Rob Burbea’s meditations on emptiness). From a theoretical perspective, I think of it as the way that things exists, so it’s sort of a way of looking at things, like by investigating or noting using the 3C’s.
We have these different sorts of ways that we’ve come up with that point us towards this thing that sort of exists outside of existence, outside of time and space, and yet, is itself time and space.

*** So i feel like practice at this point should be aiming towards more consistent realization of that 'thisness'




"Beautiful. Did everything 'have' consciousness, or would it make more sense to say that "everything is exactly as it appears" arising as consciousness? In other words, was there any distinction present or would a phrase like "world of appearances, simultaneously perfected" more accurately convey what was perceived?"


I think that is a more accurate description. It was like I was imputing consciousness onto various objects, not like a separate consciousness of “this is what it’s like to be a book” or anything like that, but more just like a shared consciousness. Like ‘this book’ is a living object that I feel this sense of connection to. It’s similar to states that I have found myself in during meditation before (I think of it as 6th jhana kind of stuff) or when listening to or playing music. So I think fundamentally, it’s kind of like empathy or compassion. It’s a knowledge or understanding of what it’s truly like to be someone/something else but weirdly, not in a way that’s really any different from your own experience. Empathy in a way is just this shared sense of compassion based around some mutual experience.

*** expanded on this in my first post




"In most cases, the habitual patterning of personal karma will encroach again and reinstate the subject/object polarity. This is natural so don't worry too much about this realization remaining stable yet."


*** At this point there is definitely a lot that has faded. But, there does seem to be some sort of lasting effect. Still kind of sorting it out.


"Avoid clinging to the placeholder, or trying to recapture it. The harsh truth is that it's nothing special, even though it may feel that way. Instead, incline mind towards that 'space' and rest in it for increasingly longer periods."


Thank you for this. Like any profound meditation experience, there can be attachment, it is always good to be reminded of this.
.
.
(Cutting out the Buddhist - space stuff since I already covered that in my last post).
.
.
“I write this for no other reason than to present and project this experience to the shared sense of consciousness. The truth of reality is that there is no separation between the self and the other. There is a sticky web of love that binds us all together, though we are all free, we do not exist independently.
The universe for both of us, the universe inside of us.”

"Love it, love everything about it! What would you say that "sticky web of love that binds us all together" looks like? Is there more to than "love", and if so then what else was apparent?"


I don’t know if I can get much more detailed from a visual perspective than my above descriptions since the memories were more vivid at that time. There is more to it than just love, though I think lovingkindness is kind of like this driving force behind it, perhaps the thing that actually binds things together - perhaps gravity itself? There is karma, but karma is the result of action and intention as well as the cause of action and intention, so lovingkindness and karma are kind of inseparable. Or more simply, wisdom and compassion.
“Let it wash like a wave of experience telling you that you know who you are”.

"How would you, in your own words, define what this wave of experience is telling you about "who you are"?"


I would say it is a knowing. It is a resting into this knowing that everything is exactly as it should be, of "thisness". But, there is a element of ‘doing’ associated with this know-’ing’, that doing is in essence nothing other than your own consciousness, your own awareness.



"I appreciate your caveats re. LSD. More people could do with understanding why the same dangers we can encounter on psychedelics can also occur with more advanced practices, e.g. Six Yogas of Naropa. Unless we have the capacity to handle and integrate what these experiences reveal about the nature of the thing, then we risk problems that can have long-lasting and life-changing effects. Seeing what samsara really 'is' could easily send most people into psychosis, and I don't say that lightly."

To be clear I am ultimately thankful for all of those experiences, I just feel like it would be irresponsible to not be honest about those experiences. I don’t mean to scare anyone away from it or anything like that.


"In closing, take refuge in the Three Jewels. Incline the mind via remembering what was experienced. Contemplate, integrate and actualize these insights however you see fit, and I wish you all the very best in your practice. "


Thanks very much for the time you’ve put into this. It has been very helpful to me, I hope it has been beneficial to you as well in some way. Thank you also for the reminders and encouragement to practice.


John