[quote]pat wrote:
[quote]Cortes wrote:
Yeah, it’s been a loooooooong time for me too, but I used to drop a lot, and loved it. But now I think I’d prefer shrooms but I really wouldn’t know where to get either. High School I guess, but that wouldn’t be creepy or anything 
I am guessing college would be a good source, maybe it’s time I revist the whole grad school thing…[/quote][/quote]
Attention: I DO NOT recommend ANY of these drugs, by the way, to ANYONE, ANYWHERE! Although it probably sounds about as believable as using SWIM as a pronoun, the novella below is not by any means intended as a romanticization of the drug culture. I don’t do ANY drugs anymore and haven’t for about 10 years. I hardly even drink alcohol anymore and I do not drink to drunkenness ever. This is intended as an account of a short portion of a life that has been devoted to self-discovery and self-realization. That’s right, I said SELF. 
Hahah! That’s nearly exactly the thought I had about needing to hang around high school kids. In high school and the first couple of years after I could get aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaanything. Usually within of my requesting it.
I used both psilocybin and LSD pretty extensively over the period of a few years (relatively speaking, of course…for the curious, I have greater than 10 and less than 100 experiences with each. Certain other drugs I can only say that I have greater than 10
I am aware of the differences between the two and, in my experience they are FAR different drugs that essentially achieve nearly the same result. My individual experience of acid was always completely different from that of mushrooms. I am not sure how reliable my memory is now, but with psilocybin, the waves of chest clenching euphoria were always far more intense almost to the degree that they would cause me some mild anxiety as that tension would appear to build and build impossibly much like when you are dizzy the room appears to spin and spin but never manages to make it all the way around. Those waves of euphoria came with acid, but they seemed always to remain at a level where I just felt Perfect, like I had actually caught ahold of that dragon you always hear about by the tail and instead of him slipping away again he came to me and gently coiled about me and melded to me.
LSD visuals were always FAR more intense than mushrooms. The tracers, the writhing pulsating colors of people’s mutable faces, like creatures of light crawling beneath their skin, the film reel in photographic negative of fireworks exploding silently in the darkness. We used to set the channel to pure snow and watch in rapt awe the shapes emerge from the plasmatic sparks. Sometimes there were animal scenes. A hundred birds falling from a hundred trees. A herd of infinite buffalo driven over a cliff like a waterfall. And pinwheels, so many pinwheels.
With mushrooms, I cannot remember anything so, heh, memorable. But the experience was no less powerful. I remember the feeling more as a melding of the physical and the emotional. Like I could feel all of this pent up power roiling inside of me that I could have directed and released like a wizard through my hands.
Okay, I know I got a little carried away just now and this probably seems more appropriate to an erowid trip report than to this thread; but I actually am going somewhere with this.
Aside from, admittedly, my just wanting to have a great time and feel awesome, my best friend, with whom I shared ALL my experiences during that period of my life, and I always used psychedelics as entheogens. As I mentioned, though we were still in high school, the movie The Doors was massively instrumental in moving us, for better or worse, to everything we could to rip down the walls of our consciousness. To strip away our protections, our excuses, our false reasoning, the lies we told ourselves. We wanted to peel away the layers of motivations and drives and fears and desires until all that was left was the pure being.
Lofty. I know.
I could go on and on (obviously!) but I’ll end with this: The psychedelically assisted forays into the subconscious came to an end when, out of no where, my best friend had a really weird, really bad trip using mushrooms. I was with him the whole time and couldn’t understand what was happening (and never would). After that he never wanted to use those kinds of drugs again and I just stopped bothering because I wasn’t interested in pursuing that kind of experience alone.
I had not achieved, perhaps, what I had hoped to, but I am absolutely sincere in my assertion that not one bad thing came of use of those drugs during that time in my life. And, because I was looking for something, I sincerely feel that I did realize certain aspects of my intention. I didn’t become some kind of enlightened spiritual master, of course. I do not think it is possible to do so from drugs and even if it were I was much too immature and ignorant at the time to attain any such thing.
I do feel, however, like I “opened” myself up. So that I was no longer able to lie to myself or that I was able to recognize certain things in myself that would have remained hidden to me for many more years but for these experiences.
