The Viable Alternative

I’ve never been a drug user. The most I’ve ever tried are weed and alcohol, and I’ve never had any interest whatsoever of ever going beyond that to something harder.

However, around the time I had first tried weed when I was 19, I was told about something called magic mushrooms (a.k.a. “shrooms”) which is a hallucinogen. Because I learned it was natural, I was always open to try it, whereas I had always refused to try other hallucinogens like acid because it was chemical and I was paranoid I’d go the way of an uncle of mine who is schizophrenic and had tried it when he was younger. I believe that if you’re genetically predisposed to mental illness, you should stay far away from these things, and I wasn’t trying to play Russian Roulette with my genetics.

Well, this past Saturday evening, I get a random Facebook Message from a former co-worker I’m cool with, who, having cabin fever due to this COVID-19 quarantine, planned the next day to go to a park a short distance outside the city and trip on some shrooms and wanted to know if I’d join her.

Although I first heard about shrooms when I was 19, it wasn’t until relatively recently, the last four years, that I learned that it came under the category of what you call plant medicines along with Ayahuasca, Iboga, San Pedro, and Peyote, which, with the exception of Peyote, I had previously never heard of. I learned that these plant medicines take you on these amazing and cathartic “trips” where people resolve past trauma, overcome addictions, gain life changing insights and find their purpose. I’ve also heard of one person who said that one session of Ayahuasca is like going through three years of therapy, another person I met said that she changed from being an atheist to believing in God after an experience, and I have a friend who got a vision to build a wellness center in Jersey City and then went ahead and did it.

So me, not being one to shy away from “self improvement,” decided to accept her invitation because I saw it as an amazing opportunity to make good on my promise that I was going to come out of this quarantine as a much more improved version of myself. In fact, this whole opportunity seemed very timely and in alignment.

The next day, her and I arrive at the park, which was in Nyack, NY, around 10:45 am and set up “camp” on a flat bank of rock. As a sign that we were in the flow, I get a text from a cousin who almost never texts me who has the same name as my friend. I show my friend, who, after expressing shock, agrees that the stars were aligned for this very occasion.

Before we ingest the shrooms, we each decide to set an intention for what we want to get out of the whole experience. My intention, if I remember correctly, was to gain more clarity about the direction I need to go in life to achieve my purpose and the removing of any obstacles standing in my way towards realizing that.

Right after we ingest the shrooms which was more or less 1/8 oz. split between the two of us, I felt and saw nothing and thought to myself that maybe I was just going to be one of those people who shrooms had no effect on.

Yes, sometimes I can be an idiot.

Anyway, my friend warns me that I may start to feel nauseous, and sure enough, maybe after about 10 minutes, I start to feel nauseous and decide to lie down. About that time, I start to spin out into my own world where things start to slow down, and my friend’s voice, which, bless her heart, is going off incessantly, starts to take on a strange cadence. At one point, she offers me something and her face appears to me as some witch or evil character in a movie. She looks 40 years older, her face has a purplish skin tone with glowing green eyes. I almost freak out right there but was in too much of a daze, so I just decide to turn around and try to nod off.

This is when isht started to get real.

After I turn around, I go off into some sleep, trance, daydream or whatever you want to call it and I find myself in the middle of a nightmare. I’m in some room or club where this loud techno song is playing over and over again. In this room I see a CLEAR image of my father of what he looked like when he was in his late 20s. The image isn’t a person in the dream, it was really just an image of him floating around in my head following me everywhere I went. I also see different images of my insecurities in their grossest caricatures of me totally mocking me. They’re imitating me and making fun of me. They’re calling me weird names. These images transform into different type of media, from wall paintings like you’d see in the temples and pyramids in ancient Egypt, to stencil drawings, to engravings on gold, to cartoons to figures dancing in front of me so as to antagonize me. All the while, this techno song is being blasted.

As I witnessed this, I started to get tormented and imagine that I’m in hell, because these images are so powerful and all encompassing and making me feel so ugly, grotesque, self conscious and useless that I feel I’m undergoing sensory overload. I tried to tell these visions that they weren’t real but they were so intense that I wasn’t sure if I could believe myself. I pray to God to save me and make His presence known but I feel nothing. I open my eyes, sit up, and decided that taking these mushrooms was the stupidest thing I’d ever done in my life and I worried that I may never be able to escape this hell.

I felt so overwhelmed and vowed if I got through this, I would never try something this stupid again.

With the song still playing in my head, and feeling trapped in hell, I decided to leave my friend to go for a walk. As I walk the trail of the park, the figures in my dream were still dancing in front of me along the trail, making fun of me and imitating me to the same song. Each thing I would do or think to do, they would make fun of me in a mocking, demeaning way.

Then, all of a sudden, I started to realize that these images were such caricatures they were actually quite silly, so silly that they actually started to become real funny to me. I started to laugh so hysterically that at times I couldn’t stop. These images were funny to me in the same way a friend makes a joke about you and you laugh and stick your middle finger up at him because it actually is funny and you don’t take yourself too seriously.

This brought me to my first lesson:
Our insecurities grossly distort our image of who we are yet we identify
with them and let them torment us. However, the image our insecurities make out of us is so far than who we actually are it’s like a silly caricature. Once we learn about who we really are, we can see our insecurities for what they are and laugh a them when they come up instead of letting them torment us. Going from extreme torment to laughing at my insecurities showed me that I’m not obligated to identify with my insecurities because they’re not who I am.

As I continued to walk around and lightened up about the caricatures playing in my head, I started to enjoy the song that was playing, and like a remote control, instead of me dancing to the song, the song started to dance me, moving me in ways that I normally don’t move.

This brought me to my next lesson:
The music in my head represented the flow to life. The flow can ride over us like water and cause stress in our lives, or we can surrender and ride the wave and be led to where we need to go.

I started to laugh at the caricatures again, because they were still going on doing their thing to the beat of the music and looked so silly.

This was when the next lesson came to me:
The same way these caricatures looked silly to me within the whole flow of the music is the way we look silly to God with our silly little plans and our silly little interpretations of the big picture of what’s REALLY going on. I could think of all the times I thought I knew best but didn’t. It brought to mind part of a Bible verse, “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts.”

I also started to wonder why my father”s image of when he was young was figuring so prominently in my visuals. It occurred to me that I was shown his younger image and not his older image because as someone who has caused a lot of emotional wounding and trauma in my life, I needed to be shown an image I can empathize with easier to help me heal. Seeing his younger image years before I was born made me wonder about his own trauma and wounding from his own childhood that caused him to behave the way he did when I was growing up. It made me also empathize with the struggles he was dealing with at that age due to his own past and was another step towards fully being able to forgive him.

My mind went back to when I thought I was initially in that nightmare and I called out to God to come save me, and though I didn’t feel Him or hear from Him, He still brought me through to the other side where I was now having revelations. It made me see once more that even though we may be going through something very challenging that we think we may not to be able to make it through, God is still with us guiding us through even if we don’t think He’s there. Often, the teacher is silent while we’re taking the test or learning a lesson.

I also noted that my whole transition from “hell” to revelation is symbolized how life is a series of transitions where we go through an experience that initially may overwhelm us, but at the end of the day, through us persisting while getting beaten up, we gain the wisdom that will allow us to grow and advance to the next level.

Overall, we were out in the park for about 3 1/2 hours before we headed back to the city. Though the intensity of the trip had decreased, the techno song was still playing clearly and audibly in my head such that I was able to slap the beat on my thighs as we drove back. In the meantime, my friend put on a 433 Hz guided meditation. As I recalled the way the caricatures were mocking me, I started laughing again while sticking my middle finger up at them, telling them “Eff you.” The laughter started to grow until I was laughing hysterically once more. As I was laughing, something switched and I felt this deep sadness rise within me and I just started crying uncontrollably in a way I haven’t cried in a very long time. It was heavy and it was deep and I knew it was from the pain connected to the caricatures and the image of my father. At the end, I felt much lighter from the purging of deep trauma energy.

The effects of the magic mushrooms continued to decrease throughout the rest of the day, but I fully didn’t return back to normal until I woke up the next morning. In fact, as I was lying down trying to sleep, it was at first difficult because I had all this energy surging through me, and I still could hear the techno song and see the caricatures.

Okay, I admit to slightly freaking out that this was going to be permanent.

As I sit writing this a few days later, I would say that for a first time experience tripping on a medicinal plant, though it was challenging, it was an amazing experience that I definitely plan on doing again. It was very therapeutic and cleansing, and I am actually looking forward to trying the other plants like Ayahuasca one day to see what lessons I can learn and healing I can gain from that.

Now if you’re thinking that you already knew about the lessons I shared and that they’re just “common sense,” my response is that it’s one thing to read about these lessons in a book or see them on a meme on social media, but it’s a whole other thing to come to these conclusions organically out of a visceral personal experience. In the second case, the lessons have a personal context so they’re easier to integrate and more likely to stick with you.

In the meantime, as the saying goes, “First enlightenment, then the laundry.” In other words, I want to integrate the lessons I received in my life and into my being before I do anything again.

This is The Viable Alternative.

Hope this helps,

Ike Love