Forty
Dissolution
I spent the next two months assimilating all the new information that flooded into me after my psychospiritual death and rebirth. The knowledge gained in my spiral through Hell left me humbled, with a deep respect for the power of the plants and their ability to catalyze profound transformation. After my night of darkness I steered clear of visionary experiences and went through my tasks at work as if moving by remote control, feeling blessed with the simple miracle of awakening each morning filled with new found clarity and wonder. Events that I had set in motion months before loomed on my horizon, specifically my agreement with Jacques to smoke 5MEODMT together. The way things unfolded, an upcoming Memorial Day weekend provided the best opportunity for us to meet, a short two months after my crash. I felt both terrified and reluctant to embrace a new visionary experience so soon, but Jacques and I had agreed to work together ahead of time and I remained determined to honor our commitment. I met him late Sunday afternoon and we embarked on a mild journey from a Mimosa and Syrian Rue concoction we had brewed as an Ayahuasca analog. After a night’s sleep and a morning of reconnecting, we came to our moment of truth and the real reason we had come together.
We examined the white powder I had purchased by mail, smelled it, and tried to figure out the best way to calculate a dose, and smoke it. Sprinkling it over cannabis seemed like the most efficient method. Since I had purchased the 5MEO and initiated our meeting, we decided that I would try it first.
I approached my first hit with great respect and a healthy level of trepidation, evident by my sweaty palms and jittery stomach, but I tempered my fear with resolve. I had never smoked DMT, but I had experienced every imaginable LSD experience a hallucinating twentieth century man could conjure, yet none of my scares or bum trips came close to the terror of my fall into Hell, which now loomed heavy in my heart. After breathing deep and centering myself, I took what I thought to be a healthy bong hit of 5MEO sprinkled over a small bed of cannabis, but I felt nothing more than a sense of heaviness.
“I don’t know,” I said to Jacques. “Maybe getting something like this legally through the mail is too good to be true.”
“I heard sometimes it takes a second hit,” he said, gently encouraging me.
I loaded up the bong with a little more and took a second hit. I felt more of the heaviness, but nothing more.
“This is bullshit,” I said. “I think we got ripped off. I wasn’t so sure about getting this stuff through the mail.”
“Sometimes, I heard it takes a third hit,” Jacques said, still not ready to give up.
I looked at him and weighed things through in my mind, then said, “Third hit, huh? Fuck it!”
I dumped a much bigger pile of 5MEO on top of the cannabis, took a solid third hit and instantly fuzzed out and dissolved the same way I had as a kid when I hyperventilated and passed out. “Oh shit!” I thought as the terror came and annihilated me. In those first moments of being swallowed and flooded by an infinite number of things, I felt my concept of the expansion and evolution of consciousness, instantly confirmed, before I dissolved into nothingness. I have no idea of how long I was gone. In my first glimmer of returning awareness, it came as a shock to me that I not only experienced annihilation of everything I knew by becoming both everything and nothing, but I survived it. In the midst of my receding awe and terror I knew I had received a gift of power that I had earned by putting myself on the line by my explorations, which amounted to asking questions. I experienced death again in response to this inquiry
