There was this one experience on LSD where I saw that my breath was doing itself, this was super significant as in it was what got me back onto applying the method after years off. It might have been a PCE now that I think of it, it lasted about 2 seconds though and of course my mind was all over the place so it is hard to be sure.
My favourite theory of human consciousness is the psychedelic ape hypothesis.
We are the actual world regardless of the nomenclature of ‘real’ and actual.
When it comes down to it, there is only one infinite and eternal universe. ‘we’ are nothing more than a convenient filter for the purpose of making more if us regardless of personal happiness.
Yes, that’s the one.
With that being said do you see that neither these methods nor magic mushrooms are actually required to have a PCE?
Yes
Hmm is that to say, in other words, that you discovered a way to bring about apperceptive awareness, namely:
various methods employed to make yourself more intelligent , plus occasional use of magic mushrooms equals apperception ?
No, but in my case I do believe that without the magic mushrooms I would not have had the PCE. Another key ingredient was the identity-crises I was going through at the time, which provided for the motivation to change. And who knows about all the other ingredients that were there, but that I am not aware of.
First of all I need to be clear about what I experienced. PCE’s seem to come in various flavours or qualities. What I didn’t experience was an everlasting now, perfection or increased perception (beautiful colors etc). What I definately did experience was the ego taking a backseat, seeing it for what it is, an illusion, and the mind perceiving itself and operating by itself, and no emotions. It is very similar to an event that Peter described. He describes how he is designing something, and then his brain takes over, and does the designing for him. I can’t the find text right now. But I am going to call it a PCE for now, because that’s just three letters I have to type.
What I am presenting is a description of events to inspire, it is not a mathemical formula that’s going to result in a PCE.
It all started with a bunch of insights that I had written down on a whiteboard One of these insights was that I saw I was constantly thinking: what the fuck have I done, what the fuck am I doing now, and what the fuck am I going to do?
I saw that a lot of my brainpower was going into essentially useless thought patterns. I figured that I had to move my brain away from these thought patterns to what is the case, to what is true, what is sensible. One thing I did was just sit in the room, and smell, and then only smell. There was some notion there of ‘direct experience’ being valuable. Another thing did I did was look at understanding and ‘knowing’, which was another form of ‘direct experience’, by solving problems encountered during programming and doing cryptograms and the following type of puzzles:
I would carefully prod my brain, listen, and see what it came up with it. These insights that show you answers (parts of the full solution) are high quality thoughts, as opposed to the very low quality, mechanical repitition-like, thoughts, of “what the fuck have I been doing”. I noticed that occasionally I would get unexpectedly deep insights. Calculations and insights were happening by themselves, but in a fraction of second. So as I was nurturing these high quality thoughts, the quality improved. However what I didn’t realize was, that I was kickstarting an engine, and at some point, during a game of chess, the engine took over and started firing on all four cylinders and the incredible power of the brain, think genius-level, figuratively and literally blew me away.
Trip report I:
This was some months back so some details may be hazy. I could have sworn that I wrote down a report but I can’t seem to find it. So I’ll try my best to recall as this ended up being an ASC.
I ate about 0.7G of mushrooms that were ground up with some water and went for a drive to a trail by the lake that I usually go walk at. There I went walking through the trails all the while expecting for something to happen. I tried to contemplate about the universe and humanity. My thoughts veered towards humanity. I thought about society and my relation to it. The whole time I was kind of trying to prepare myself for whatever I might experience. This went on for quite a while as I was walking. I can’t recall the exact details of the thoughts, but at some point more than an hour went by and the sun was beaming a little more intensely. So I decided to head back to my car as nothing was happening. When I reached the demarcation between the trail and the concrete of the sidewalk I started reflecting on society again. The concrete was society and I didn’t want to go back as society felt painful. It was more peaceful inside the woods and the trail.
At this point I realized something was happening. I started feeling a little tired so I found a little cliffside in the woods overlooking a small pond and sat down near the edge. There I started having many thoughts and with each thought I was going “deeper”. With each thought I picked up a pebble and let it roll down the cliff. Every thought seemed to have some sort of significance as it went down the cliff side and hit another. I felt that there were two 'me’s. There was this person thinking and then I felt another one deeper inside. It felt like an unborn baby. This baby felt like who I really was at my core. It was unborn as in it never knows or will know the world. It will never know or experience the physical universe. This kind of made me sad and my reflection turned away from it. I then noticed that I was here and that the world was happening. I was looking at the pond and the woods and the trail. All of it was just there existing. Then the thoughts occurred to me, “How does this universe know itself?” and “How does this universe exist?”. This really struck me. I was holding a particular pebble that was associated with this thought and the question really invigorated me. I’ve since kept the pebble and it always makes me think of this question and this feeling whenever I hold it. Then I looked up and there was a tree limb that branched upward and created a sort of circular shape. My gaze and everything instantly looked as if it was standing still and it was as if I was looking straight into a portal. This part of the experience just stuck with me and I still remember seeing this portal very vividly. I’m not sure why but I then looked away from the portal. The moment I looked away from the portal, the trip started to wane in intensity. I saw someone else walking on the trail so I got up and walked down. It felt like I was inebriated and I was tired but I was slowly coming back down. So I made my way back the way I came. As I was walking back, the experience stayed with me and I felt like I was returning to the world and humanity. I felt genuinely sad. I started to cry because I didn’t want to go back. Then I sighed and faced the fact that I was headed back to the real world.
And that was my first ever trip. Not quite what I was expecting lol. But the dose was on the low side. The only hallucinations I experienced were really mild visuals when I closed my eyes. The fact that this and marijuana both make me sleepy and tired makes me think it might be very hard to experience a PCE for me with these substances. It makes me turn “inward” too much.
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I’ve found that making sure I eat something or drink something sugary (I like lemonade) corrects for the sleepiness.
Interesting trip, definitely very deep into ‘being.’
@cross.chrono would be interesting to see if you can more easily access PCE’s after this. Even if you didn’t have a PCE in the trip as such, I suspect the power of psychedelics to get one out of habitual being and consensual reality can shake things up so other that other alternatives for experiencing the world become more readily available.
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