Tripping to the end [View All]

(Disclaimer: I don't advocate drug use nor do I advocate breaking the law. I certainly don't advocate the use of psychedelics by kids and teens, whose still-forming personalities can be severely damaged by such use. I wrote this mostly to finally come to terms with this particular trip 35 years after. It's a long post.)

Hunter Thompson once wrote that LSD, like a motorcycle, was a means to an end. In my case, LSD became a journey to the very end of the world, a journey that I still haven't made sense of.

It was 1969, I think. My friend, Jim, scored some acid, but it was powdered LSD, a form we'd never seen before. We didn't know exactly what to do with it or how much to take. Jim and I finally and foolishly decided to snort the drug, taking in much more than we should have. I was sixteen, which is much too young to be taking acid, let alone experience extreme tripping. Ego loss is horrifying when one has a not-yet-fully-formed ego. Our friends Brad and Toni declined to trip that night and so they served as guides, or, according to their accounts, our restraints.

I only remember bits and pieces of the trip, which was episodic and dreamlike, but it was the first time my trip took place separate from my actual physical surroundings. Sure, I'd seen trails and colors before, but I always pretty much knew where I was and who I was while tripping. But this trip was completely elsewhere from the house in which it occurred, in a separate time and space.

There was an intense rush immediately after snorting (oral acid takes twenty or thirty minutes before its effects are felt), which was rather like a psychic and physical rocket launching.

I was Adam in what I assumed was the Garden of Eden. Bunny rabbits hopped around a very English garden and I made love with Eve on a dark-green carpet of moss and fern. God was there and he was straight out of central casting, I remember, with a white robe and long, flowing beard. He looked like Mr. Natural, an underground cartoon character of the time. God dug the action for a while, but He was more like a detached observer. After my tryst with Eve (who looked suspiciously like Toni), I asked God if He knew where I was. He got angry and told me to leave.

I was floating to Earth inside a blue, glowing, translucent prism. I was an infant, wrapped in a blue blanked, and I could see our planet from inside the prism.

After that I believe my entire life flashed in front of me, especially the bad parts - the abuse and all. I was crying when I got to the present, which was me at age sixteen, but the review of my life went on. I remember seeing my adult life and death, but have no recollection of the details and no sense if what I saw was accurate or at what age I died. When the review ended, I died. I wasn't afraid and I wasn't holding on to my past life. It was simply time to go.

After I died I found myself on a plane made of something like grey, swirled marble, stretching out in all directions to a dark horizon. There was a night sky with stars. I couldn't walk, but I could crawl. I became very afraid because I didn't know who or where I was. I think I was crying again. Finally a huge monolithic set of stone letters began rising on one of the horizons, kind of like a cold, dead sun. When the letters had risen completely, I could see that they spelled out "L S D." I remembered briefly that I was tripping and I felt a bit better.

I was given a riddle to solve. I have no idea how the riddle was given to me, but it was there and I had to solve it. The best way to describe the riddle is that it was non-verbal and not linear and had to do with discovering who or what God was. It was some sort of paradox and eventually I figured out how to solve it. To solve it, I had to envision the paradox as a physical shape -- a figure eight -- and then travel (flying?) along that shape so fast that I was physically on all points of it at once. Then there was a flash of white light.

A voice let me know that I had solved the riddle. I can't really describe the answer, but it has to do with a feeling of oneness with everything and an understanding about how life and consciousness fit in. It felt really good, but it didn't last long. Then I saw scientists working in a lab and the voice said that once those scientists solved the riddle and figured out who or what God was, the Universe would come to an end.

In a flash, I was shown the end of the Universe. It wasn't pretty and it was the Earth covered in a kind of liquid suspension of garbage and sewage, blood and pus, brown and smelly. I was floating in it. And then I saw the Garden of Eden forming again, forming from the awful mess that had covered Earth.

____________________

That's all I remember. I came to, or re-gained reality, on the floor of the house, with Brad and Toni asking if I was OK. The intense part of the trip had lasted about four hours, they said, and all I did was lie curled up on the floor, occasionally rolling around whimpering. They kept me from rolling into stuff, but were not able to get me to acknowledge them. They were worried about me.

Jim, who had taken the acid with me, was never able to tell us what he experienced. He had spent his trip on the couch but was able to talk to Brad and Toni occasionally.