Last time, I talked about a recent hippie flip (combining psilocybin and MDMA) that I had done and the positive effect it had on my negative headspace. This time I’m going to tell the tale of the candy flip (LSD and MDMA) Eirn and I did last year. Or part of it. It turns out, it’s a longer story than just one post. Who’d have guessed?
As you will recall from the last post (I’m going to assume if you’re reading this, you read that either because you’ve read our entire blog [HA!] or because you are interested in psychedelics), I said some trips have helped me come to realizations that I could, and maybe would, have come to eventually. I think most mindful, self-reflecting individuals would feel the same: the psychedelic was merely a helpful shortcut.
I also said that other trips have shown me things I never would have experienced otherwise. This candy flip was one of those trips.
Future Shane: I note this later, but I decided to travel back in time and say it here as well: shown is not the right word. What I mean is, I didn’t see this as one might watch things unfolding on a movie. I felt these things. I experienced this in a way that was very real and convincing. The same way some people can experience being other people inside a dream. Only unlike a dream, the experience was not quick to fade. I can still bring these experiences back and revisit them. OK, time travel over. For now.
Set and Setting
We were at my family’s lake house (like so many of our drug experiences!), which is in the middle of nowhere. You can barely see the neighbors on either side, and if six cars go down the street, it’s a busy day. It’s an excellent place to trip. Or roll. Or combine stuff.
It’s also a small house with cheap sofas and a poorly arranged living room, but I don’t make a fuss about this ‘cause I have a house in the middle of nowhere to go and explore the universe. But I mention this because to make our drug experiences more comfortable, Erin and I will usually bring the mattress from our bedroom into the living room so we can lie down together.
Or have sex on it, depending on the drugs and the experience.
The mattress in the middle of the living room will be important to our story.
Candy Flip Dosing Info
We had tried candy flipping a couple times without much success. Either our timing was off or we ended up using a particularly weak batch of MDMA and the MDMA-effect never kicked it.
We are both fairly experienced trippers at this point. We decided to push the envelope on this one to make sure we got the experience this time, so we went with high doses. By which I mean we started with three tabs (about 300 micro-units) of LSD. We added 160/200 mg of MDMA (Erin and I respectively; I have a much higher tolerance for it) at the two-hour mark.
How high is this for us? Welp, we normally trip with one or two tabs (at about 100 micro-units a tab). Though we’ve done more, that gets a little too far out for us for that to be our norm. Our usual starting MDMA dose would be 140 and 120 respectively for a light roll; 180 and 160 for a deeper experience. I don’t usually start at 200 unless I’m purposefully experimenting. Or we’ve decided we need a mini-vacation from an overly stressful life.
These tabs seemed particularly strong as well. I recall looking out the back window at the field beyond the house when we took the MDMA. It was getting close to 3:00 p.m. in November. The leaves were still a beautiful autumn array and the sky a pale blue. But the LSD was so strong it didn’t look like Earth. It seemed more like some strange, beautiful planet from a sci-fi movie.
Then the Molly Kicked In…
I felt it coming on, too. I recall that I was lying on the mattress and Erin was sitting on the sofa, both of us solidly into our individual trip experience, and I asked her to come lie with me if she didn’t mind, cause I felt like something important was going to happen.
And boy, did it. I dissolved into pure energy and realized I was a god. I understood that the celestial energy that is me is infinite and will continue well beyond the context that is Shane. And that the energy that is currently in the context of Erin has been traveling alongside me through many existences.
To give a visual reference, if you imagine two strings 10 feet long, one purple (celestial Erin energy) and one green (celestial Shane energy), twist them together into a tight braid, and then stick a pin somewhere in those strings. That pin is the point at which the those energies exist as Shane and Erin. Put other pins in the length, and those will mark times when we exist together under a different context.
After that revelation, time unraveled, and I very quickly unwound back to the beginning of everything.
But more on that in a moment.
Before I go on, I want to explain that I can only express things in fragments. I don’t recall the exact order, but more to the point, as much as I recall and understand my experience, I lack the ability to describe things sensibly. I still know it, but I can’t describe it. Which for someone who prides himself on his writing, that’s both frustrating and disconcerting.
Unraveling Time
I saw myself as a line of energy stretching impossibly long throughout time. I saw hundreds of these lines of energy, all twisting and turning around each other. Some, like Erin’s energy, were closely corded. These were the people in my life through which I travel through multiple existence with. Others were farther apart, those more casual acquaintances. And beyond that, the billions of other energies I never interact with across the universe.
I then followed these twisting ropes back to the Origin. Going backward, they kept merging and merging and merging until there were just two, and then the two became one. And then the rewind stopped.
I saw…hmmm. No, I didn’t see it. That implies just observation. I was it. I felt this as though it was me. At this point, I was One. I was All There Was. And for lack of a better term—it was a very childlike feeling, like an emotion not fully realized—I got lonely/curious. So I split into two.
The Adversary
Then I was confused, because up until then there had only ever been Me, and now there was something that was Not Me. I couldn’t understand the thing that was Not Me, couldn’t know what it felt or thought or why it moved the way it did. It was my antithesis. My adversary.
In some ways, we were identical. Afterall, we had both just been one being. It’s not as if I was the parent and this was my spawn or I was the original and this the clone. We were One that divided into Two. Up until the moment of separation, our experiences had been identical. But as soon as we were separated, nothing in existence was more my polar opposite than that other being simply because it was no longer me.
This wasn’t bad; it was just a new experience. A coexistence. And eventually we both continued to split. More and more and more. As this happened, I could feel that some Not Mes were more similar to me. There were now degrees of difference. It was no longer a binary, so there was no singular antithesis. I no longer had a polar opposite. But there were still Not Mes I didn’t traffic with.
Binaries
At one point, when we floated up from our experience enough to speak—or use telepathy—I said to Erin, “This must be what it’s like for God and the Devil to speak to each other.”
Not because I saw one of us as all-powerful or the other as evil, but because that’s the greatest binary I could conceive. And from a theological perspective, the first. If you believe in a Christian God and in angels, Lucifer was the first being God created. Possibly when he said, “Let there be light,” given that Lucifer is the Morning Star, the first light.
Which means there was One. And the One became Two. Then there was Conflict. And that conflict shook the heavens, and the Second was cast out from Heaven to rule in Hell.
I love angelic lore!
But my point, God and Evil didn’t really enter into it. It’s just Me and You. We will never be able to fully understand one another because we are not each other. Even if I could step into the experience of you, I would only get a snapshot of you.
There are other binaries that tend to divide us (male and female, cat and dog, pie and cake), but these are false binaries. There is really only Me and Not Me. The Me looks for similarity in others, birds of a feather and all that, which is why humans seek their tribe: those energies twisting together to form tighter braids.
But there will always be some conflict between Me and Not Me. At least until SEELE completes the Human Instrumentality Project, and we all become One again—Oh shit! I just dropped a Neon Genesis Evangelion reference!
That show makes so much more sense after psychedelics….
Braided Others
As time moved forward, I was a singular energy, breaking off other energies. And as more and more energies formed—though recall all of us were directly linked to the Source—we started to create braids. These were energies we traveled through time with. Some close braids, others more distant.
And in wacky energy physics, I could be braided with one energy that was braided to another energy I was not braided with. Through these braids, I would have a connection to everyone. Like six degrees of Kevin Bacon.
Right now, in my context as Shane, I have people in my life—like my parents, my brother, and Erin—with whom I have had multiple existence but not always in that same dynamic. The cosmic being who is incarnated as my father this time around might be my brother or cousin in some other existence. Hell, I wouldn’t be surprised if my cosmic being was one of our cats and Erin’s cosmic energy was another, given how those two interact with each other and us.
Oh yeah, time isn’t linear. That’s a human construction. Or perhaps it’s more correct to say that’s a imposition placed on matter: It decays. Energy has no such constraints. A string can be curled to overlap itself. It doesn’t need to be pulled taut.
And during the candy flip, I fully understood it all.
Bringing This Back
In his book How to Change Your Mind, Michael Pollan notes how in a psychedelic state you can know things more completely. A sober platitude becomes a significant truth when tripping. I will quote this from memory because I lent the book to my friend, but Pollan uses an example like, someone who’s tripped saying “Love is everything.” Someone who hasn’t just nods and says, “Yeah, I know.” And the psychonaut says, “No you don’t. Love is everything!”
My travel through time back to the source wasn’t just an idea or concept I imagined during this trip. It was true. I lived it. I knew with absolute certainty that this was how the universe worked. But it can be hard to keep that understanding especially in a world that degrades the psychedelic experience as imaginary.
My father and I had been doing a lot of renovation work on my house. Some weeks after this candy flip, I remember looking at him and thinking about his eventual death. I would be sad because this version of me would be without him and would miss him. But I was also uplifted by the knowledge that we would be together again sometime. Not necessarily in an afterlife but rather our energies were doing this journey through multiple existence together.
I once had the thought that my brother and I would probably have a better relationship had I been the older sibling this time around.
It also puts an interesting twist on a marriage to be able to look at your wife and know that you’ve been doing this crazy journey with each other for eons. And would continue for many more together. What’s a little nonmonogamy in the face of that?
Unplugging From the Matrix
After realizing I was a divine being (we all are, having all come from the One Source), I realized I was responsible for creating reality. And I had placed myself into this existence to experience it. Which meant I had chosen to incarnate as I did, into the context of Shane. I didn’t craft my whole existence, I didn’t carve my future, I just threw myself into a starting point. I loaded the game and began playing in this fleshy avatar using the ruleset of this world’s physics and math and chemistry.
Kind of like creating a character in a video game. You pick World of Warcraft, you play by the rules and code Blizzard created. You pick Mass Effect, you play by rules and code Bioware created. They are very different experiences, but both can be fun…as long as you aren’t playing Mass Effect: Andromeda. BURN!
I then realized that I had seen beyond the veil. Like I was out of the simulation looking in. I had the thought, “Ah, so the purpose of life is to get to the point where we realize our divinity. And we’ve got these substances, LSD and MDMA, that when combined show us our divinity.” The candy flip was the red pill. So that was it: I had unplugged from Matrix.
My first thought was this was good: I had won the game. Dying wasn’t winning because plenty of people die without realizing their true potential. I had done that instead of dying. I had shed the physical and become the divine. So I no longer needed to be Shane; I was now so much more than that.
But I Took the Blue Pill
As I thought more about this, I got a little sad. I had a trip planned the following weekend to the lake house with my dad, and I was upset I was going to miss it. Not because I would be dead and gone; I wasn’t dying after all. I was leaving the simulation. My family wasn’t going to find Erin and I dead in the house from an overdose. We were just no longer going to exist. Reality would take care of that somehow, possibly by changing it so that we never had existed? I wasn’t sure.
But I decided I wasn’t done being Shane. I had put myself into this experience for a reason, and I wanted to see it through.
But how does one go back to being a normal human from being a god?
I realized that when I decided I had spent enough time in the timeless world of god-space, I would use my godliness to make myself believe I had had a drug experience, and let that rational ease me back into the mortal realm. It was all a drug. I wasn’t truly a god. Or maybe only the drug made me a god. Or something.
Amusingly, on the drive home a couple days later, I was listening to the Joe Rogan Experience with Duncan Trussell who explained an Alan Watts idea that if there was an all-power, all-knowing infinite being, eventually that being would create life. And given time, that being would decide to experience that life without the memory of being a divine being.
That timing! My mind was blown given I had just done the same thing.
And So I Came Back
Those were the major lessons of the candy flip experience, but so much more happened, like actual physical things and conversations between Erin and myself. This seems like a good place to stop, and I’ll pick it up again some other time. Maybe next time.
I’ll try to tag Erin in for a few points as well. She didn’t have as an enjoyable experience as I did nor does she remember it as well as I do. I felt like I came back with a lot more information and have retained it.
I also never got to why the mattress in the living room was important. Cliffhanger!