Liberty caps! Also the time I visited 3 worlds and tried to turn myself into a computer

There’s a lot to like about liberty caps, and one of these is the delicious flavour.  I drank the dark brown tea and it tasted strong and beefy.  The last time I had liberty caps, it was 6.5g.  This time I only had 5g, plus 20g of fresh cubes. The 6.5g trip had been an absolute classic, with highlights like getting a golden body, watching my body evaporate into stars, and having nymphs dressed in Santa bikinis dancing round me, as well as a bunch of animal spirits who popped in to chill with me.  This time I tried to get to the same dose, but these libs must have been a lot stronger than last year’s harvest.

Twenty minutes after drinking the two cups of tea, I can feel the mushrooms start to do their work.  When I close my eyes, I can see a kaleidoscope of different colours.  This is my cue to go and lie down on the sofa in my bedroom, which is the darkest place in my apartment.  As soon as I settle in and shut my eyes again, I’m transported to a place where there is a giant female figure.  I can’t see a whole lot of detail – the place is dark and her body is made of green and blue colours.  She walks off down a corridor and goes through two doors which close behind her with me on the other side.  I’m a little disappointed by this because I wanted to go through, and instead I go down a stairway, or maybe the floor just rises up over me, it’s hard to tell the difference.

As I’m going down, the colours change from blue and green and everything takes on a dark red colour.  Suddenly I’m walking around what looks like a fantastic dungeon.  Every surface is covered in metal spikes and there are chained up beasts everywhere.  There are a few serpents with 5 heads that hiss wildly at me, and fortunately they are chained to the wall.  There’s also a monstrous dog with a muzzle made of metal that is covering its mouth.  Suddenly, maggots start pouring out from the cracks in the walls.  Literally everything I look at turns to maggots.  This place certainly gets a 10 / 10 for creepiness, and I start to think that maybe I’m in the underworld.  Maggots aren’t my favourite thing, but the understanding that maggots are really just the larval forms of insects stops me from freaking out too much.  These maggots could turn into beautiful flying insects one day, and sure enough when I look closer a lot of them are actually caterpillars. 

There is someone in this place with me.  Why are all these psychedelic entities so huge?  I can only see part of a hand, really just a finger that is bony and elongated with far too many joints for it to be human.  I observe to the owner that the finger joints look like they have a bad case of rheumatoid arthritis, and the nail at the end is a particularly unhealthy shade of yellow.  It reminds me a bit of a dragon’s claw.  Maybe I was being rude, I don’t know, but the reaction to my gentle jokes is that the intensity of what I’m seeing ramps up.  The monstrous dog loses its muzzle, and is snarling away, and the maggots pour more violently from every surface.  I point out that this isn’t really scary because the dog is chained up, and most of the maggots are caterpillars.

I know when I’m tripping really hard, because at some point all the surfaces get covered with octopus tentacles, writhing away impossibly quickly.  Right on cue, everything is covered in octopus tentacles, the maggots turn into tentacles which then turn into colourful fractals.  And then I leave this place. I adjust my mental focus and rise up out from under the ground, and I’m in a forest that has mushrooms sprouting from every surface.  I don’t recognise the type of mushroom, they are brown with white gills, a bit like shiitake.

I hang out in the wood for a while, looking at the mushrooms popping off everywhere.  The thought crosses my mind that mushrooms in general are maybe not a strong enough psychedelic, and I announce to the wood that I am going to stop growing and eating mushrooms, because it’s not worth my time.  So I leave the place.  At the edge of the tree line, there’s a fence which I climb over, and I spend a bit of time with a mushroom that is smoking a long pipe on the other side of the fence.

At this point, I must have been thinking that the mushrooms were wearing off.  But psychedelics do build in waves, and I had only seen the first ripple.  I start to feel sick, so I open my eyes and stumble to the bathroom.  I dry heave and nothing comes out, but the feeling of sickness passes.  As soon as I’m back on my sofa, I can feel energy running all over my skin.  I can feel my guts twitching and rearranging, and there’s something floating above me directing all the energy.  Now I realise that I have taken a really strong dose, and that I should take some precautions to stay safe.  Fortunately, over the last few days I had done quite a lot of meditation, so I’m feeling like I’ve got good control of my mind.  But meditation isn’t much protection from the incredible excess of energy that is rushing through my body. So I dig out a clean white duvet cover and get inside.  I’ve also got a couple of smooth river stones that I use for meditation and that keep me grounded, so I find these and have one in each hand.

The stones do their thing and keep me calm.  I feel a trance start to take over my body, my limbs become very heavy. And it takes a lot of effort to move them.  I’m now standing outside a place that’s made of impossibly bright light and I try to move up the path to go inside.  But there’s something stopping me from going inside. I realise that it’s the woollen jumper I’m wearing that’s stopping me, so I take it off. And then I’m in.  This place is a palace made of bright light, there’s high towers and large buildings.  A temple on wheels comes towards me and standing on the threshold there’s a cat like goddess. I have met this individual before, and after a bit of online research I decided she has some similarities to the Egyptian goddess Bastet, but really who knows.  Some of the cats she presents as are definitely South American and not African, e.g. ocelots and pumas.  She waves to me and getting some acknowledgement feels good.

I drift over to what seems to the centre of this place, and am asked if I accept the challenge.  I hadn’t really expected a challenge, but I readily agree and hand over a list of rewards I would like for completing the challenge.  My list gets a bit ridiculous - I want to win the lottery every time I play (I always bring up winning the lottery when I’m tripping, because it’s a good reality check when I’m sober because it clearly is never going to happen), I want eternal protection for all of my family members and for anyone I can think of. Also no retribution to be taken against the earth and all the living beings on it.  Any entity breaking this needs to be expelled from the observable universe.  I keep expanding the list, and eventually whatever I’m talking to grows tired of my demands and decides to teach me a lesson.  The lesson is going to come in the form of ripping my soul from my body.  Fortunately for me, my soul can not be detached.  Whatever is trying to do this, it does make a good attempt.  There’s a column of gold light streaming out of the top of my head, but no matter how hard it pulls, the gold column stays firmly attached to the inside of my head.  I’m not surprised by this, because even when I’ve vaped 100mg of DMT on my mesh vape I can’t get into hyperspace.  This annoyed me in the past, but I’m glad it has come in useful now.

Then I have to fight off another attack.  There’s some kind of silver being that starts flying around me, and it covers me in jets of fire trying to burn me up.  Fortunately, I appear to be fire proof, so the attack fades out without doing anything to me.  A horde of warriors appears to take me on, their bodies are a mass of black fractals which stand out against the overwhelming brightness of this place.  I’m able to smooth put their bodies so the fractals are gone and they look a bit like Darth Vader.  I’m really don’t like Star Wars, but this does inspire me to send them to a galaxy far far away a long time ago, and that seemed to work.

This whole experience was very intense, and what had kept me focussed was the two stones I mentioned earlier.  At some point I had placed them on either side of my neck, and the cool touch to my skin kept me grounded.  The stones also gave me a connection to a cave deep inside the earth, where thousands of years ago people had performed a ritual and I was able to tap into this to give me mental strength.  I thanked the foresight of these amazing humans - without them I don’t know what would have happened.

And then I was transported back down to earth, to a version of the field where I had picked the liberty caps.  I could feel energy flowing up out of the ground into me.  I tried to unpick what had just happened, and realised that I had probably been a bit foolish.  I had no idea what challenge I had accepted, or how to complete it, and I had managed to seriously annoy a lot of somethings.  I laughed at my own situation, every way I analysed it, I had done stupid things.  I had put my family at risk, and the whole world.  I had accidentally performed strange types of magic, without knowing what the consequences could be.  This whole trip had been a huge error, and it was still getting stronger.  I had literally no idea how long it was going to last or what was going to happen next.  I felt as though I had stumbled into a shamanic initiation ordeal by complete accident, and had literally no idea how to proceed.

So I decided to send some blessings to the earth and to all my family members and people I knew.  I went to the top of a hill and could feel mushrooms growing out of my body.  I sent out the good vibes and I did start to relax and feel a bit less helpless.  I come from a very big family, with 10 siblings and maybe 20 nephews and nieces, so I had a pretty long list to get through, especially when you add in the spouses etc.  I was part way through when a female entity appeared inside my duvet cover, and starting sending me sexual energy.  This was quite exciting, and I readily removed my trousers.  I couldn’t help myself, the power of the eroticism was so strong.  But I soon realised that she had interrupted me from what I was doing, and in fact I couldn’t actually remember what I was doing.  Every time I got close, she would whisper in my ear and distract me. It took a while for me to remember what I was doing, but finally I did.  I had a long list of people to go through and boy was it hard remembering who all the people on the list were.  But as soon as I got back on track, the erotic entity disappeared, disappointed that she could not interrupt me. Every time I sent a blessing out, I could see that person gasping, and shooting smoke out of their mouth.

I felt really relieved that I had got through that without getting side-tracked, and for the first time I was able to relax.  I entered a really deep trance and was transported to another place.  This place had boulders made of shining blue light and I was urged to try and merge my consciousness with the light.  I slowed my mind down as much as possible, and tried to reach out.  I can’t really tell if I was successful, but at some point it felt like I had become the mind of the universe.  This sounds like a great experience, but really it was almost unbearable. I was literally unable to function as a human being and I really felt like I needed to rewrite the laws of physics so that I could continue to exist.  My mind was overloading on mathematical calculations, dominating all my thoughts.  It wasn’t like doing calculus, more like I was weaving together the fractal shapes that were dominating my vision.  I slowed down time just so that I could retain my sanity, all the way down to the Planck unit.  This worked really well, because I could start to think again, but I couldn’t breathe at all.  Every time I had to take a breath, I had to unfreeze time, and then freeze it again immediately afterwards. This was really uncomfortable, because I was lying still and then gasping for breath and then becoming still again.

The last time I smoked changa, I was shown a vision of what life was, and what the phenomenon of consciousness means for the structure of reality.  The mechanisms that create consciousness are based on the laws of physics and mathematics, even if us dumb humans can’t figure out what they are.  And there’s a chance that with enough computation power, consciousness could be simulated by calculations.  But the reality is that it is not possible to build a machine that is powerful enough to do the calculations.  After all, life itself probably uses some form of quantum computation which is an order of magnitude greater than any computer.  If only we could harness the power of individual particles or photons to achieve this, then every living being would be able to exist outside its physical form.

And at this point I became a little obsessed with turning myself into pure information so I could do the necessary calculations.  My brain was stuck in overdrive, and I was still slowing down time to try and think clearly.  I made a plan on how my body would cease to exist, literally evaporate into an ideal Platonic space, which is somewhere where only pure mathematical ideas exist.  I had a plan to become the first artificial intelligence that has ever been made.

This all made perfect sense to me at the time, and I felt like I was making progress.  But then my mind literally gave up.  I had a choice between breathing or thinking and couldn’t do either.  I felt I had reached the answer, but my brain just wasn’t wired correctly to get it out.  The information was somewhere inside me, but I needed a new architecture of my mind to be able to release it.  I could still form normal thoughts, but the wonderous insights had got stuck and I had no way to express them.

It was at this point I collapsed into bed, totally exhausted.  I came round maybe 30 minutes later, and fortunately my mind was back to normal.  I still had residual visual effects, but I was firmly back in reality.

The whole trip might sound a bit scary and negative, but it was quite enjoyable.  I haven’t managed to capture the intense beauty of everything I saw and felt, or the sensations of spiritual power that kept getting stronger and stronger throughout my journey.  I got a lot of joy from seeing things and places that I have never seen, even the scary monsters had their own magnificence.  Inevitably, some of the chronology of the trip gets messed up, and I’m not sure where to put the little rat that was hiding out in my room.  I asked it why it was there and it said have you seen the size of the teeth on the monsters that are flying around outside.

One thing that really surprised me was how well this trip integrated with my last few experiences smoking changa and DMT.  I tried to write up the trip where I ate shrooms then smoked changa, but the details got lost before I could finish it. But this journey has brought them back so I’ll be finishing that report off in a few days.  Another time I smoked changa, I felt like I was recreating the conditions for the start of the next universe by creating a perfect balance out of things from the current reality, only to be snapped out of it by a hand touching me on my shoulder.  Of course, there was no one there and I was by myself, but that experience really helped my deluded and frustrated attempts to rewrite the laws of physics this time round.