Time and the Eternal Present

On a recent psilocybin mushroom trip, the concept of "time" was a major theme that carried on for the duration of my experience. As can happen during miserable experiences such as being ill, undergoing a difficult physical experience, or waiting for the work day to end, during my trip past and future seemed completely irrelevant and were nothing more than elusive concepts. My trip however, was not a miserable experience--far from it in fact--but was a wonderful, beautiful, profound experience.

Being only my second trip with psilocybin mushrooms, I've had to follow the advice of other people whom I respect and who are far more experienced than I with psychedelics for dosage recommendations, set and setting pointers, and various other details. One of these recommendations which I chose to follow was to record my trip using a digital voice recorder. This seemed a brilliant idea to me as I frequently wish I could record thoughts I have while driving or otherwise unable to take the time to write them out. Given the fact that the psychedelic experience is notoriously easy to "forget," the recorder seemed like it would prove invaluable.

But as I hit the peak of my trip, I found myself talking to the recorder, trying to capture the experience so my future self could appreciate it more. Not only was this at the expense of the appreciation of the trip that I was undergoing at the time, but it also proved to be a barrier preventing me from going further. At one point, I was lying under the Milky Way and some entity (whether of my own invention or external to me is irrelevant) tried to "show me" the raw experiential beauty of the Universe but my ego kept trying to capture and record all that I was experiencing. The entity, which was pulling me upward in an effort to show me, continuously told me that until I could let go and allow myself to just experience this journey in the present that I would not be able to see what it is that I needed to see. Each time it would try and show me, I would tell myself, "Okay, here we go, you've got to remember this." It was as if my ego would try and explain this situation to itself. It kept trying to capture everything, to articulate it into language to process it, to remember it, but the entity kept telling me that this experience could not be captured, could not be experienced other than in the present, yet each time it tried to show me, my ego would not let go. And so, after a while, the entity gave up. "You are not ready," it said.

After this, my trip went on with minimal interaction with anything I would classify as an entity, but I kept the recorder with me. I spent the majority of my trip lying under the Milky Way on a blanket at my family's tree farm in upstate New York watching the Perseid meteor shower. At one point, I remembered how afraid I had been in the darkness prior to starting my trip and was amazed that I felt absolutely no fear at all. I thought about it and I realized that in the present, fear does not exist. Fear REQUIRES past and future in order to exist; if you are completely in the present, you could never be afraid. What I realized was, all of fear is based off of some past memory and some future expectation. If all that exists is the present, then there can be no such thing as fear. I am not arguing that fear can not be experienced in the present, just that it requires the past and the future in order to be experienced at all.

I was completely unafraid during my trip because I was COMPLETELY in the present. I could not fear some animal jumping out of the woods and eating me because 1) that could only be an event that happened in the future and 2) the basis for this fear only existed in my mental past.

As I tried to fathom the future, I struggled to imagine anything other than the present. The notion of "Monday" seemed comically absurd to me. There is no Monday, there is only right now! Going to work at some point in the future was an absolute absurdity, a figment of my imagination. The experience that I was having at that very moment was the only experience I would ever have, it was eternal. I experienced the present so powerfully--for the first time in my life (or at least what I remember :-)--that I completely forgot who I was. I don't mean that I forgot my name, or was confused or something. I completely forgot who I was. My name, my memories, my body, my relationships, all didn't exist in the present, they had no meaning. I couldn't remember a thing about my childhood and was completely unable to come up with a single idea or memory that could satisfactorily identify me as me. I just was, that's all. Eventually, I came up with a few vague concepts that I knew that I had formally identified myself with: the street I grew up on, my own name, the image of my girlfriend, my major, but these things held no meaning, they all lived in my past and the past after all, did not exist anywhere but in my mind!

Just as the past exists only in the memories of my mind, the future also exists only in my mind, the only difference being that we call the ideas of the future dreams rather than memories. In really examining these two concepts, they are more difficult to differentiate between than initial inspection would lead one to believe. How should one think about the past? It is traditionally regarded as some point in linear time that happened prior to "now." But you cannot hold the past in your hand, it is not right in front of your eyes like the present is. It can only exist in the memories of the mind and memories can fade or change through time. The trout caught by the fisherman always grows in time. And since the past only lives in memories, it must be mutable and therefore cannot be thought of as holding any "objective truth."

As with the past, the future too only exists in the mind in the form of dreams. The traditional definition of "future" would be some point in linear time beyond "now." And like memories, these dreams are completely mutable and, though they can contain as much truth as the past, also cannot be thought of as holding any "objective truth." Really, the only difference between the past and future is the arbitrary distinction of being either prior to or beyond the present. The problem is, it is always the present. It is the never the future just as much as it is never the past. Past and future, far from being opposites are in fact, the same thing. As with all dualities they merely represent different sides of the same phenomenon.

As my trip wore on and lost its intensity, my experience of the present slowly dissolved so that I was able to incorporate more and more of my memories into my experience, but I continued to think about this notion of time. One of the biggest lessons that I took out of the whole experience was that all we have is the present. Memories can live inside us, and can be experienced in recollection, but they interfere with and limit our experience of the present (this may be a "good" thing or a "bad" thing). But just as one can live in the past, so too can one live in the future with similar consequences. Someone living in the future might put off their present situation in order to make a better future for themselves, but that person runs the risk of always putting off the present for some idealized future that never comes. After all, when has it ever been tomorrow?

Just as I experienced that fear cannot exist without the past AND the future, so it is with fear's opposite: hope. And just as fear can be dangerous, so too can hope. The notion of hope removes us from the present. It causes us to put off our present for some desirable future. But just as I mentioned above, it is never the future, it is never tomorrow. And if all that we have is today, then lets live for today.

Some think of this world as Hell, or a purgatory, a staging ground for a future eternal bliss, but if you are living your life for some paradise lying beyond this world, than you're missing the paradise right in front of your eyes. No god put us here to suffer and toil and labor for some future salvation. Salvation is yours if you open your eyes and live in the present. God's Paradise is among us here and now. We were not banished from Eden, it is not hidden in some ideal past or future, but it is hidden in the one place that modern man would never look: the present.

First Ever Trip Report

Well, after nine months of actively pursuing my first psychedelic experience, I finally got what I asked for. It took me a surprisingly long time to actually find anyone with mushrooms, but it finally happened. The following experience took place at a cabin on a tree farm owned by my grandfather in the Catskills and on an eighth of mushrooms.

In all, it was an absolutely beautiful experience, certainly one of the most beautiful experiences of my life. Originally, I had intended to have a more introspective trip a la the Secret Chief method of just chilling out in a dark room with a couple of blankets and a carefully selected playlist of some of my classical favorites. But about an hour to an hour and a half after chewing them down I decided to move around a bit. One thing led to another and I ended up getting outside for a walk along a path short path I had cleared the day before through the forest steps from the front door. Inside, I did not really visually experience anything of great interest. Certainly I was feeling different ("fucking great" is how I described it), and I think some of it had to do with me peaking as I walked outside, but the second I stepped outside it was as if a switch went off. Right away I noticed a spider web spun the night before hanging a few feet in front of the front door. I immediately was absolutely mesmerized and intrigued--I had seen spider webs before, but I had never REALLY seen a spider web before this one. Normally, I'm somewhat afraid of spiders and easily bothered by anything creepy and crawly, but not in the least when I was on my trip. To skip a few of the details (which were extraordinarily interesting to me, but naturally are difficult for someone else to appreciate) I spent about 2 hours in the 200 feet from the front door and the spider web to the spot halfway down the trail where I first noticed I was beginning to come down. Everything was just so absolutely fascinating, I was noticing normally insignificant details as if they were the only thing one could help but notice. I would glance at a branch and instantly see the seven caterpillars on it or I would notice a fly on a leaf ten feet away. I was even finding single strands of spider silk floating off of the trees in the wind. Particularly fascinating were the water droplets that had collected as morning dew (I tripped first thing in the morning) on the leaves, grass, spider webs, even on the hairs on the caterpillars. I could easily see how an experience like this would be useful to the artist and it certainly was--if nothing else at all--absolutely beautiful, though it was certainly more than that.

But as I started to come down, about halfway through the 100 yard trail, I had a quite profound experience. I was standing with my face inches away from a branch of an elm tree in the rain (it was raining by now, but that was perfectly fine) noticing all of the things that I had been noticing all morning, when I glanced a few inches up and noticed that the branch right above the one I was looking at was of a different tree, a maple actually. I followed that branch in to the trunk and noticed that this maple was much bigger, broader, and somewhat dominated the area more. Then I looked at the elm and noticed that the first few feet of its trunk, some 20 feet from the base of the maple, grew straight up but that after that, it grew at an angle moving away from the maple. Then I looked back at the branch I was looking at, I noticed that the leaves only grew where they would receive direct sunlight and that the entire branch leading back to the base of the elm was bare where the maple had blocked out the sky above. I looked around at the other trees in the area and noticed another tree, growing at a 45 degree angle away from the larger maple tree. That it could grow at such an angle and not fall over was amazing to me, even now as I think about it. It's roots would have needed to stretch far beyond the maple in order for it to hold itself up. A fourth tree grew right against the base of the maple. But it didn't grow vertically, rather after the first two or three feet it split in two, growing like a "Y" with wilting arms. But one side of the Y, the side directly under the maple, had died and was beginning to rot, the other though, was growing away from the base of the maple and was thriving. I realized that the tree itself must have cut off the right side from whatever nutrients it was absorbing from the ground and that is why it must have died. That side of the tree couldn't have been receiving much sunlight and must have been a burden on the other half of the tree so it just cut it off in order to live. These thoughts all occurred in a sort of revelation as I recognized--for the first time in my life--that trees were not just these inanimate things which, yes, were alive, but that lacked the sort of defining characteristic of what I considered to be life. But these things were alive in every sense of the word! They were active, they were animate, they even have a sort of conscious intent to their movement. The one short tree even made a DECISION in order to best adapt itself to a particular situation.

As I marveled at recognizing these trees as my brothers in life, the experience merged with the previous two hours and I FELT that all of these things, the caterpillars, spiders, flies, slugs, dew drops, birds, the bedrock under my feet, the clouds over my head, were all quite literally inseparable. When I say that I FELT that way, I don't mean it in the ordinary way ("I feel like a slice of pizza"), I mean that I EXPERIENCED it, I KNEW it but not in the way that I know that 2+2=4, but I knew it experientially, emotionally, I KNEW it in some way that I can't possibly articulate. This wasn't quite the experience of the "one" that I've often read of, but I think I was close. What was missing however, seemed to be me. As I looked around, it was still the "I" that had experienced this, it was still me that FELT this. I felt like a full blown mystical experience was just out of reach, almost as if it was on the tip of my tongue. While still in the moment of this feeling of the inseparability of everything, I looked down at my feet standing on the wet grass, on top of the roots, which were in the soil, which was above the bedrock, which at the time, meant the entire planet itself, which was ALL connected, but "I" was still there, inside my head, observing--externally--the connection in all things. I was what was missing. I say "I" not in the sense of my body, because my body was a part of everything else, but my conscious self was still somehow outside of all of this. And I knew that this particular trip, I would not be going any further.

I don't know if I needed a larger dose to break through, if the circumstances were not quite right, or perhaps I was just not ready for it, but I stopped right there, on the verge of what I knew intellectually must be true, but hadn't yet experientially KNOWN to be true. It was a beautiful experience, and the moment under the tree was profound, but I know I've only touched the tip of the iceberg.

I am sorry (mostly for myself) that it had taken so long to have this experience, but I am glad that I did and am looking forward to future explorations.