Fungai, the green bird and the magic of Vattavada

This is my journal entry, hopefully things are still fresh in my mind and I remember what is what. Read along on this memoir of acid. To keep you engaged, as always, we have a song recommendation on the blog: Chroma 010. 

On June 8th at 11:30 AM, some of us friends decided to do mushrooms, the magic kind :). 

Just before this, I was falling in and out of functional depression at its finest. Everything looked okay to the people around me, but things were just not okay. There was an intense feeling of loneliness which accompanied me; it was like I was here, but I was not here at the same time. I had started to be more forgetful and would have really bad periods of emotional lows every day.  Keeping active did help me control everything to a certain extent, but it was only to an extent. I knew I needed help, or things would surely get bad. While I did have my best friend who had always been an anchor to rely on and tell him that I was not ok, I still did not know what was wrong and how I could stop this and get out of rigid negative thought patterns.

Enter psilocybin, the be-all and end-all, the magic wonder which keeps you grounded. How does it do that, you ask? I can explain, at 12:00, around half an hour after the mushrooms were ingested by me, things started to happen. And this was not my first mushroom experience. I had used this once before in Thailand during the full moon party about a year ago, purely for recreational purposes, but not in India and not in my home ground.   

From my previous experience, I knew a few things: I knew my body would feel uneasy, scared, it would want me to go home, and it would tell me to get to a safe space. And I knew what I needed to do, I knew that I should reassure myself that this is all just part of this act and would stop in approximately 5 hours. 

But here’s the thing, catch with mushrooms, time dilation is very real while on mushrooms, only a few minutes would have passed in the real world, but it could feel like hours to you. Things are just slow or really fast depending on your perspective.  

Mushroom also enhances all of your senses, imagine your eyesight, sensitivity to sound, everything multiplied by 100X, and everything is much more vivid. When the mushrooms started taking hold of me, it was like being one with nature; I was no longer secondary. I shall try to explain this the best I can, please bear with me. 

Imagine being a bottle on top of a table; the bottle is not a part of the table by its nature, as the bottle is made up of different elements, which make up the table. The table has grains, and the bottle has a complex series of carbon-carbon bonds. You can’t crush the bottle to make it a part of the table. 

In this same line of thinking, usually that’s what we are in the environment, a third variable which is external and does not get to be a part of nature. We are the bottle in our surroundings.  I might as well say that this is why we are so disconnected. We are not one with nature; rather, we are just occupying space in that world. Just like how the bottle is occupying space on that table. If none of what I just said made any sense, it’s perfectly alright because this feeling is only something who have done mushrooms will be able to relate to. 

While on Mushrooms, I started noticing everything around me. The first thing I saw was a green bird which came and sat on a tree I was staring at, and the green bird, which most of us would never notice, just came into perfect view for me. The green bird blended amazingly well with its surroundings. Nature’s camo at its finest, if I might add. 

From then on, it just kept going and going. 

Now for part two, the peak trip, the thing that scares that scares the shit out of most people. The moment when you start to lose yourself in ego, when the Disruption of Default Mode Network (DMN) happens. The Default Mode Network is responsible for your sense of self, ego, and daydreaming. On mushrooms, the DMN becomes less active, leading to Ego dissolution (“loss of self” feeling). 

The thing with mushrooms is that you should be able to express yourself and be in an environment where you know you won’t be judged; you shouldn’t have to worry about that. Be in a controlled environment, have plenty of water, space to roam around, food for your cravings, and music. Everything you might need must be accessible to you.   

And I had all of this, I visualised my insecurities. There is a clinical approach to psychotherapy that views the mind as composed of various subpersonalities, or "parts," each with its own unique thoughts, feelings, and beliefs. It’s called IFS. This is something I had read about a long time ago in a book called No Bad Parts by Richard C. Schwartz.  

I was able to interact with all of this, the mild ADD I have, the fact that I rush all the time, and the fact that I overthink. I was able to see all this. 

Now, the fact is, how do I address all of this? That is something I have to work on. Hopefully, I will. 

Now, everything I said here might have been just a work of fiction; you never know. :)