Mushrooms and Mantras

I’ve written about why I chose trips over therapy. This is about how the practice itself took shape — because it took shape strangely, and the strange parts turned out to be the important ones.

I got it set up right from the start, on the advice of a friend. Then it settled into its own form by itself, which, I’ve noticed, is how things tend to go with mushrooms. The funny part: the friend who explained the method to me never used it himself — and was genuinely surprised by the effects I was getting.

The other big push came from a documentary, In Waves and War — Navy SEALs treating combat PTSD with ibogaine. At one point I was seriously planning to go. There are clinics in jurisdictions where this is legal — one in Mexico, one in Malta. The complexity of the procedure put me off, and so did the price. But before letting it go I asked myself one honest question: judging purely by how those men described what happened to them — was I getting the same thing in my own trips? The answer was yes. So I shelved the idea. Maybe someday.

And to be honest, I don’t have PTSD. For me this isn’t treatment. It’s a tool, and it does two things: spiritual development, and something I can only call flexibility of mind — a widening of horizons.

One thing prepared me for this work more than anything else: decades of meditation. Long before the mushrooms I could enter inner silence, the meta-observer state. At some point the practice produced an effect I’ve never found described anywhere — waves of tingling that start in the head and spread through the whole body. Deeply pleasant; I can stay in it a long time. The closest thing I’ve found is a passing mention in yoga texts of tension release, and it did first appear in deep shavasana. Later I learned to enter it in ordinary meditation. Now I can summon it almost instantly, in almost any situation, and it levels my state like nothing else. I mention it because I suspect the trips landed on soil those decades had already turned.

Now the technology itself. It’s a combination: mushrooms and music. I have a playlist of mantras that assembled itself over the course of the trips — I didn’t curate it; it accumulated. And here’s the thing. The mantras without the mushrooms are just music. Pleasant music. The mushrooms without the mantras are what I call kids goofing around — which is how most people take them. But the combination is a different instrument entirely. Forty minutes to an hour after eating, the effect arrives. Blindfold on. Headphones on, noise cancellation on, mantras on. And that’s it — I’m gone, carried into places I didn’t suspect existed.

In the beginning I would set an intention: this trip I want to look at such and such. After a few sessions I stopped. It’s pointless — and I mean that precisely. The mushrooms and the mantras take me somewhere I didn’t plan, and from inside the trip I can see for myself that this place matters more than anything I’d have chosen. Sometimes it’s my own past: I live through old experiences from the outside and see the inner logic in them — what they were for. And sometimes I visit places I don’t understand at all. I’ve come to call that territory the underside of the world. It’s where the seeds live — the ones I’ve written about — and I watch how they surface later, here, in physical reality, as people, events, things.

Trips like this aren’t needed often. Often they can’t be done; often you don’t want to. Once a month is more than enough, and I’ve had breaks of a year and longer. But when this crisis came, I went into a regular rhythm — two or three a week — and it was profoundly healing. It let me live through the loss faster and deeper, absorb it, and come out of the series a different person. Out the other side.

And now? The stage is complete. I don’t even want to trip anymore — there’s a full sense of a finished chapter: the crisis closed, the new state accepted. When the desire will return, I don’t know. Which is exactly the point: this was never the goal and never an escape. It’s a tool. The cornerstone tool — the one everything else in the plan was built on top of.