While in my early twenties, I was fortunate enough to be in the right place at the right time (upper Haight, San Francisco at dusk), and among the right people (neo-hippies) to result in my first dose of psychotropic or entheogenic mushrooms. The experience was so impressive and uncanny that other experiences soon followed. The activating agents in the mushrooms may be psilocin and psilocybin, but in my experience there is something else there as well—a powerful and intelligent, communicative force.
By this time in my life I had developed a rigid ego structure that was severe and unbalanced. I was too tightly wound, had fears and prejudices, and a lack of knowledge of my deeper self. The mushrooms helped me to change these things. They prompted a deconstruction of my uptight ego, and opened me up to genuinely awesome and perplexing experiences. (I should mention that I was never so much a recreational drug user, but a semi-serious psychonaut who used substances to work through issues, learn about myself, get in touch with repressed or alternative mental conditions, and/or create states I wanted to explore through art, while occasionally just wanting to chill or trip or freak out). The mushrooms brought me in touch with some deep, natural, organic connections, while showing me certain absurdities in dominant society and mainstream culture; they offered me insights to spiritual and/or metaphysical questions I had, and let me experience a whole new domain of or way to perceive the real. I also had some very bizarre trips. These experiences imbued in me some great mysteries. I spent more than a year ingesting mushrooms on a very regular basis, and was aided tremendously in a transformative process. I shutter to think how I might have developed had I not gone through this period of my life. Even after it had ended I was far from being even semi- well-adjusted, and there were many lessons that I was not ready for, that I would have to defer until another time. After this period I only ingested mushrooms periodically, usually once every several years or so, and in some ways, my life between doses became a time to prepare myself for the next dose.
It is noteworthy to point out how at odds mushrooms and alcohol are. Even after knowing this and having these experiences with mushrooms, I continued to drink for about another ten years. Perhaps I was too weak or had too many problems, or perhaps I needed to go out of control (there was something alluring about the utter degradation and helplessness of my severe drunken episodes…), or needed to take this path for some other reasons, to learn other lessons. I stopped inhaling volatile chemicals however. I knew that this was an extremely dangerous activity, and that I’d learned my lesson from it and it was time to move on. But I would continue to drink, through car accidents and awful behavior, and having to suffer others who were painfully and disgustingly intoxicated on alcohol.
At some point, somebody gave me a big bag of marijuana, and I smoked it, and it was good. Before this I had tried it some times and it had usually been unpleasant and a cause for paranoia. But, with this bag, I became witness to its mellow, soothing, pleasant, and even mind-expanding, or at least mind-floating, effects.
It’s interesting how the substance(s) one uses contributes so much to one’s personality. This seems obvious, but maybe some people don’t realize how thoroughly a substance can permeate one’s being. I guess the saying “you are what you eat” is accurate if we take “eat” to mean “ingest,” to mean everything we put into our bodies, and our minds as well. It does not seem possible to disentangle our identities from the stuff we consume. The experiencer is a part of the experience. It might be seen as a way of forfeiture or a lazy and irresponsible way to go about our lives, handing over the task of our personality formation to a drug or a teevee show or an organizational belief of some kind. But, we have to go about it in some way, don’t we? And we must do the best we can, without any rule books, hopefully finding a way that suits us, that offers us each meaning and valuable lessons, and gets us by, basically amicably with the rest of the world. This is something that’s been a concern of mine, and my engagement with intoxicants may indicate a personal oscillation between searching for guidance and being reluctant or unable to take responsibility for myself. At the time, from my perspective, I was intensely driven by burning questions of meaning. And, I found myself often consumed with a questioning of personal ideas and moral boundaries in an effort to find something meaningful that I could hold onto.