Aggressive Tranquility or: Y’all Motherfuckers Need Acid Part 4
I was 16 the first time I took acid. I’d taken shrooms twice, but LSD was different. I took the tabs and an hour later the paint chips on the patio were curling into bizarre, intricate patterns. I laughed and beamed in amazement. The shapes from that night burned into my memory, as vivid today as they were 16 years ago. I saw churning forms that took the likeness of everything I’d ever know, from every face to every space. My thoughts took shape. The passage of time itself took shape. Existence took shape as a singular prism reflecting radiant light in all directions endlessly.
A decade later I made a hobby out of visiting the big, friendly radiant light. I was tripping on average twice a month. It took the better part of a year to work up to routinely taking LSD at or beyond my ceiling dosage, around 1.5mg LSD. Over 1.5mg and it made no difference how much LSD I took, so I backed the dosage down to 1mg (my sweet spot) which I took regularly for two or so years.
I liked to get started on Saturday mornings or Friday mornings if I had that day off (I found it’s best to have two full days after a big trip). I would take the tabs, take out my trusty phone stopwatch (gotta have a stopwatch), and wait. At 1+mg, you need to plan the beginning to help you keep cool. Thirty minutes after my tabs would dissolve, I’d start my ritual of eating something, usually an apple or berries. As I bit into the fruit I identified a timelessness in the experience that applied to anyone who had ever had an apple — me, you, anyone. I felt a kinship with everyone eating an apple across all space. We were one mind. I sprawled across my floor and gazed at a wall or ceiling.
I sunk into the heart of a roaring engine that purred all around me, a power that seeped through the walls, the air, my chest, and my mouth. A pristine forest of gears poured out of my walls and into my being. Where my focus went, fierce vibrance followed. I lay with my head on a pillow on the floor, motionless and silent, occasionally twitching my leg or hand. I fixed my eyes and dissolved into the world, evaporated. There was no sound but the purr. It was my consciousness. I achieved perfect stillness, entranced. It could last three minutes or three hours, but the effect was the same: a burning sense of boundless unity. I stopped existing as me and became all existence in singular sameness, like I had rejoined anyone and everything across time and space in the oneness of existence itself. My fleeting time on this Earth became a grain of sand that is gripped in an ocean of a brilliant, flowing unification.
Of course at a certain point you get older and move on to other things. For me that point was turning 30. It started to be too much work and energy to endure such intensity, and I just sort of stopped. Maybe I’ll trip again, maybe I won’t. I already know what’s there waiting for me. It is always there.