A horror story of the mind
(This is not a psychedelic scare story. But it is a story about the horrors of the mind. )
Life becomes an endless nightmare once you’ve experienced everything you can explore – GV.
Growing up, making friends and fitting in was always difficult as I couldn’t link with people who couldn’t give me something in return, not in a materialist sense, but in a cognitive way. Being able to discuss mind-expanding topics and learning new things always sparked a flare in me. I guess it’s what fields the heart of someone interested in the scientific field, after all. Hence, I never quite understood people who don’t have passions or can’t have cognitive provocating conversations.
Don’t get me wrong. I don’t come from a book-snob family or even a family that values the Cognos over effort-based activities. On the contrary, my family mostly despised literature and didn’t grasp the concept of exploring philosophies or questioning much of what there is to explore, lacking thought-provoking conversations.
I vividly remember dinner party conversations were not as far from those in medieval times when they would purposely select a jester, present or non-present, that would be the target of their amusement for the night. They would detect flaws in the person, instigate them, observe their social media, and laugh at their life decisions as if they were part of a Victorian noble class.
Once you’ve brought up any topic that would challenge their intellect, they would either change the target to you, bash you, or say that you were insane for thinking about such things.
The way I like to present my close relatives would be the picture-perfect family, where no one has flaws, acting as if they were in an early 2000s sitcom until you start observing their patterns and behaviors until you understand that you are, in fact, in a trap room being the sacred artifact the door out. (This may or may not be an Indiana Jones pun.)
As someone in the constant look of cognitive stimulation, it’s noticeable that having the ‘so-called’ short conversations can be dreadful. Until today, I would put on earbuds/ headphones or bury my head in a book or a mobile game to avoid having such types of conversations.
To the eyes of others, this made me seem like an off-putting child or that something was wrong with me. To my parents, not so much. They thought it would be ‘normal’ to have a child who cries from hearing loud noises, avoids conversation, gets annoyed from wearing knitted shirts, spends time alone, and has to be obligated to leave the house.
After all, it’s not like having a kid who has ASD would ruin the picture-perfect family, right?
At the age of sixteen, I remember being in bed, trying to sleep, and my brain was spasming with random information that I had absorbed during the day about how social structures are faulty. The story repeated daily to the point that during summer vacations, I would stay the whole night awake, processing information and meeting various people online. For whatever reason, during night and winter, my brain still tends to be far more active than during the day. I believe it to be due to the presence of silence.
Around this time, I started showing the first signs of addiction. Allergies always have been a part of me while growing up. Nowadays, I know that they are often triggered by stress and ASD telling me that I’m dealing with too much. Additionally, I have a deviated septum that may boost the whole reaction. For around fourteen years, doctors fought over the fact that these responses were simply flu until my mother gave me one of her pseudoephedrine tablets (a precursor that can be used to synthesize methamphetamines) to see if it would fix what I had been experiencing, and soon, we all knew it helped!
As I grew, my allergies became more persistent, and I figured that instead of taking one. If I took two tablets, they would stop. But this isn’t what I would acknowledge as an addiction, at least yet.
At that time, I was fascinated by caffeine, especially after trying the sweet nectar of energy drinks. To many, this may sound like: “Oh, you had energy drinks. It’s not that bad.”
For that, I must thank my abnormal early childhood in a lineage of people suffering from various forms of addiction, being aware of the existence of psychedelics, hearing stories, and witnessing the effects of psychedelics and drug abuse. Going back to the point, even if my addiction seems something minor, I was rushing 5 to 6 cans of Monster Energy per day. We are talking approximately 900mg of caffeine per day on the body of a sixteen-year-old and the occasional pseudoephedrine tablets. Stimulants somewhat became a passion that I tend not to dip my toes in much, but this will serve as a bridge to what happens in the future.
Such a high caffeine intake would take a toll on my body in the future. That happened when I was around nineteen. Once again, I felt the switch in my brain turning. I became erratic, spent almost all of my nights woken up, and ended up falling in love with the midst of the night. To be able to be alone in my mind, to wander around in the streets without having to worry about social queues, even if restless, my mind felt at ease during the night time in comparison to the chaos that would be during the day, you see, during this time, my erratic thoughts would gather with the fact that I couldn’t get how some people wouldn’t have a passion, explore the mysteries of the world, how some people are almost soulless living their quotidian life while being moved by strains of thought, like a puppet. At that time, I would see them as not as different from stock, who live with the sole purpose of dying without following or understanding what has gone to them.
Overanalyzing people or situations is often a trait that follows each person who roams in the spectrum of anxiety or autism. But this felt much different, and these elements were gathering into what I would now describe as one of the worst experiences someone could experience.
During the day, I would lock myself in, surrounded by books, various Google tabs, headphones, and the least possible human interaction. This allowed me to start noticing gaps in my history classes during high school.
I began asking myself:
“We learn about ancient civilizations, but we always just seem to rush through them and focus more on the medieval and the regime focused on the liturgical years. What happened before the times we rushed through?”
I decided to go on a journey to delve into the daily lives, beliefs, and philosophies of ancient Egyptian and Greek civilizations. During this time, I came across the book “Kybalion” by an anonymous author known as “The Three Initiates,” which is the foundation of Hermeticism.
“All is Mind; the Universe is Mental.” -Hermes Trismegistus.
Hermeticism is an Egyptian-Greek philosophical religion that gathered knowledge of Ancient Egypt and Ancient Greece by the conjunction of two theological figures, Hermes and Thoth.
Just like any religion, there must be a head figure. In Hermeticism, this figure is Hermes Trismegistus, meaning ‘Hermes the Thrice-Greatest.’ And yet again, just like any religion, no one has concrete evidence that if the so-called Hermes Trismegistus stepped on earth.
For a short period, I thought, how can this not be BS?
‘A religion based on two polytheistic religions that we don’t often hear about, lack structure, and led by a syncretic unknown person whose name includes Thrice-Greatest? It seems like the most egotistical-based religion I’ve ever faced.’
Or at least, this was until the authors pointed out something that fascinated me.
The Gods in Egyptian and Greek theology are nothing more than mere glorification of human traits. What I thought to be unstructured polytheism is an homage to US humans!
This breadcrumb means so much once you unfold it and begin understanding it.
Many of us grew up in monotheistic families, whether in a Christian family, Hebrew, Islamic, or even LaVeyan Satanic family. Our families taught us to glorify one as the creator.
According to the most popular belief, Christianism, God created humans and everything we know thus far by giving each of us a speckle of himself within us.
But let us ask ourselves the other side of the coin. Would there be a God without the presence of humans?
The probable answer is no.
Regardless of your beliefs about how humans first appeared on Earth, the reality is that we have been creating and achieving something no other species has been capable of. We have been leaving our traces behind as a species and building what we see worldwide, all through the power of the mind.
In the eyes of Hermeticism, this should not go unnoticed, and it would only be unfair that we, as a species, creators of what we present today, downplay ourselves.
For this reason, once we enter the depths of Egyptian and Greek polytheism, we notice that some Gods are solemnly human characteristics such as Beauty, Healing, Hunting, Knowledge, and Strength, and others are elements of nature, such as Earth, Fire, Water, and Wind.
Knowing this made me wonder, what if they were not just glorifying humans as a deity but such ‘Gods’ actually existed?
You see, I must admit that I lied in the introduction of the Hermeticism chapter.
Only the physical portrayal of Hermes Trismegistus might be fictitious, or at least, to some extent. Contrary to other religions, Hermes Trismegistus is not just a mysterious syncretic figure but an acquired title by various people throughout history, represented by what is now the symbol of medicine, the caduceus.
To understand, we must first cover the origin of Trismegistus, which means ‘thrice as great’ three times grand master, the grand teacher. With this, we understand that Hermeticism has a hierarchy of wisdom. One starts as a student, becomes a master, and eventually may become Hermes Trismegistus and have their own set of students.
So it is to be said that there was not only one Hermes Trismegistus but various entities, thus allowing Hermeticism and Hermetic doctrines to spread across the world throughout the years and survive until today as an obscure religion.
Those who praised the wisdom spread by Hermes and became students of Hermes (Hermetics) raised Hermeticism as a religion based on the dualistic faith that portrays the body of men and their interactions with the material world as antagonistic to the soul.
‘The original Man had gone to Earth and united with nature. He became different from all the other creatures of the Earth.’
Finding this filled me with rage toward the human species and made me question when we ceased to view ourselves as deities in history and started seeing ourselves as ‘only’ humans. Why is this hidden from us?
Hermeticism was considered pagan in the eyes of Christian beliefs. Thus, Emperor Constantine and his successors destroyed most of the Hermetic literature. By 312AD, Christians have erased almost every trace of Hermeticism, putting to death thousands of pagans and destroying temples with sacred texts. Forcing Hermetic traditions to remain in the occult. Until today, we use the term ‘Hermetic’ in the sense of ‘Secret or Sealed so that nothing can escape.’ Hermes always observed the principle of secrecy in their teachings. They did not believe in ‘casting pearls before swine’ but held to the teaching ‘milk for babes; meat for strong men.’
Finding out that we stopped seeing ourselves and our characteristics as something divine and treating ourselves and others with such respect only a God deserves was abolished by the spread of Christianity had me raging against how the world around two millennia until now has been ruled by one major religion, Christianity. Even the fact that we use liturgical calendars almost as if everything before Christianity was meaningless, every strain of belief and evolution was now set to dust into young kids believing the earth and humans have existed for two millennia.
I had to understand more about the true origins of when we stopped seeing ourselves as a deity and which pagan religions still see ourselves as such.
Once again, I set sail into a deep rabbit hole of religious and philosophical understanding of ancient religions while under the effects of pseudoephedrine daily and sleepless nights until I found something intriguing.
I came across this information not once but twice during this research. For the first time in one of John Dee’s books, John Dee, a Hermeticist himself and also a mathematician, astronomer, teacher, astrologer, occultist, and alchemist and advisor to Elizabeth I (See more how Hermetic beliefs influenced the Scientific field and Alchemy here! https://psychedelicsasl.com/alchemy-the-primordial-of-chemistry/) and once again in The Holy Books of Thelema by the Hermetic, occultist, poet, philosopher, political theorist, novelist, and painter Aleister Crowley.
Even what we think of as Satanic symbolism isn’t as described in Christian religions. The pentagram, being a major example, has been around since the Stone Age and is one of the most misunderstood. The symbol has been interpreted in various ways throughout history. It has represented royalty, protection, the five virtues of knighthood, the perfection of man, the underground womb from which all living things are reborn, and the Star of Knowledge.
In today’s Neopagan and Wiccan beliefs, the pentagram symbolizes earth, air, fire, and water, with the element of spirit represented at the top. This signifies that the spirit rules over the four elements, reflecting the concept of ‘mind over matter.’
All of a sudden, once again, we have religious events downplaying us and hiding knowledge away from what we could have been, a more evolved form of society filled with respect for ourselves and others, and implementing all of our energy for the focus of evolution, both scientific, philosophically and in the meaning of every other form of science backed up by the Hermetic beliefs.
The rage within me started to become more of pure hatred towards humanity and what we became as I delved more into these books and the works of Thelema by Aleister Crowley and began to learn more about the so-called ‘Magick’ and alchemical herbal potion-making to allow you for deep spiritual exploration, mixed with the holotropic breathwork, an absurd amount of pseudoephedrine (600mg-900mg), and a lot of whiskey.
Almost out of nowhere, I was in a state of no return, completely abolished from human contact, almost like an urban hermit, I would say. But at the same time, it fascinated me. How could there be so much going on around me, yet I couldn’t take my eyes off what we could’ve been as a society if we followed such simple rules?
I would revoke human contact, repulsed and ashamed of ultimately being what I can’t escape being a human, and prefer to engage in less human-like activities to distance myself from that mere fact.
To do so, I would spend days of starvation in a closed, dark room, meditating, abusing pseudoephedrine, drinking whiskey, and sniffing blends of chamomile, lemon balm, and spearmint in constant horrors alone in my mind. Such events happened for approximately 3 to 4 months.
The voids of the mind would be unbearable, to the point of self-harm and various suicide attempts with medication. My mother tried to get me clinical help, which I declined as I would trust no human who revoked such status and would accept ‘just being a human.’
Deception of humanity. I could best describe it as the beginning of being a failure as a species by revoking passions, adapting to what historical oppression made us believe, making us ‘just a human’ and allowing us to fail and use this as justification, not wanting to become educated, not wanting to leave our footprint in the world, and accepting to work on a 9 to 5 and sleep without having any expertise to pass onto future generations without even knowing that we should be so much more than that, and how important it is to be ‘just a human’ and use it as our advantage instead of an excuse to our flaws, instead of mastering our flaws through the principles of mental chemistry and using it as our advantage, of respecting others and their personal decisions, beliefs, and philosophies the same way we respect other deities, master the three parts of the wisdom of the universe invented by our ancestors and passing it down to our pupils and future generations, to be a jack of all trades instead of ‘only human.’
The last straw for my family was during a week when my mother found an empty 20 pseudoephedrine pill box that I’d asked for my mother to get for me the prior day. In addition, she tracked the fact that there were groceries inside the fridge from the last week. At this time, I had been starving myself and abstaining from drinking water, leading to me losing about 88lbs, leaving me at about 108lbs while being 6’0. The only thing in my body would be the smoke of two packs of cigarettes in my lungs, 1.2 grams of pseudoephedrine, and a bottle of whiskey in my stomach. This would be my last attempt to commit suicide.
My mother decided to grab me and bring me to her home. She lived on an isolated farm with her boyfriend.
While being there, my mind was in horror, and my body was physically ill.
My brain felt numb from pseudoephedrine, almost like there was part of my brain missing, and the parts I could feel felt like mush. I could not perceive any rational strain of thought nor articulate much. Just the smell of food or drinking water was enough to make me nauseous. I spent the next two weeks with the bare minimum of food and water and would spend most of my time either shivering or throwing up while not under the influence of pseudoephedrine. At this time, I barely sleep due to the constant jolts by pseudoephedrine.
Slowly, I reintegrate small nibbles of food and eat while being grossed food, knowing that a human would have made it. Hence, it was pretty often that I gagged and forced myself to eat the least amount of food possible.
At the time, I was still in despair for the simple fact of being associated with the human species and had hatred and terrors about them.
Little did I know that after one month of following this routine at the farm, my fate was about to change.
My mother had gotten a plant, a Monstera spp, in some rough conditions. The fact that my cat decided to attack it didn’t help. But one of her friends from a nearby kettle farm told her that the land with cow manure they had at their farm was amazing to grow plants. In a day or so, my mother decided to grab the dirt from her friend, and a couple of weeks later, small pointed hat fungi grew all over the plant.
My mother urgently called me saying that some mushrooms were killing the house plant and asked me for help.
Once I got there, my jaw dropped, as I could’ve identified the mushrooms at a glance. I’ve seen my uncle taking them and putting one in my small hand when I was nine years old to teach me about the effects of these mushrooms and not to eat them if I were in the wild.
Those tiny pointed caps were P. Semilanceata or Liberty Caps. After running from these compounds and being anti-psychedelics for seeing the many ridiculous things these compounds can make you do, there they were in front of my eyes at my lowest point and constant contemplation of death.
I’ve never been spiritually oriented. On the contrary, I’ve always thought of such things to be con-arts rather than actual events, even though my mother is what is considered to be a ‘Medium’ who can communicate with spirits post-epilepsy and a clairvoyant who can ‘see’ the future while holding a picture of someone.
However, I did see the appearance of these species in my life as some fungal calling.
I waited for my mother and her boyfriend to leave the house, ran for the fungi and ate ten fresh mushrooms, ran back to my bed, lay in post-mortem position while doing holotropic breathwork, and decided to wait for something to happen.
I was waiting for an escape from the constant hell I was living in. Stuck in a world filled with hatred, as a reality of being someone (a human) that I couldn’t escape, I would have no trust or wanted help from any human (including my family and most of my friends) as I couldn’t trust or have any other emotion besides hate, disgust, and disdain for their skin, feelings, thoughts, and ignorance. Unfortunately, I also felt the same about myself eventually, leading to this whole event of suicidal attempts, self-harm, starvation, wanting to be as human as possible, love for violence, and macabre isolation.
Such love for violence and the macabre certainly played a role in my following experience with the compound.
After approximately 40 minutes of holotropic breathwork and waiting for the effects to kick in, I started witnessing some weird shapes similar to the fossilized jaws of animals chewing and distorting my face in the photography in the room I was in, leaving it in an unrecognizable mess. I began to laugh and enjoy, in pleasure, what I was witnessing. These shapes started to eat the whole room to a sense of emptiness. I could feel the sense of emptiness surrounding me and within me. I felt empty, weightless, and as if I had finally departed from the pain and hatred that followed me for the last months. For once, I could feel the true gift of permanent isolation.
This feeling kept going for what seemed like centuries. I could only feel myself as a non-human, but as a shape, a non-palpable form.
Once again, the fossilized jaws of animals appeared once again. This time, chewing the emptiness revealed the shape of a mushroom with the same voice of my grandmother, telling me: ‘Forgive them, educate them, bring awareness of the good of these substances, and be kind to yourself.’
The mushroom shape merged with the few people I trusted enough to support me through this time and have by my side and became one with me.
Slowly, I became conscious of what was happening and stopped feeling the psychedelic effects, and here is where something interesting clicked in my mind.
‘Gosh, how could I be so dumb? This experience isn’t much different from some of the experiences I’ve had while doing holotropic breathwork under the influence of pseudoephedrine and teaching me about such religions. I’ve brainwashed myself into such beliefs!’
Almost immediately, as if someone lifted a curse. It still took some time to reintegrate people into my life, and sometimes it is still troublesome. After all, I have ASD.
One thing that certainly changed was my position towards psychedelic substances. What I once thought was a vial to make foolish actions was what saved me from inescapable hell. And what I thought to be mystical experiences while meditating could be easily debunked by science.
My concept of the world changed, and I could see that every single object is made with small chains of atoms that generate what can be seen with the human eye, becoming a new world to explore. What is just ‘a plant’ became far more than a plant, and what was just ‘a white crystal or powder’ became far more than what we can see with the naked eye. For once, I felt a purpose and a calling to understand the depths of these compounds and release them to the understanding caused by the media and witnessing decisions such as taking compounds without testing, abusing compounds, and taking compounds without doing minimal research or even wanting to understand them for the simple sake of getting high and end up having negative experiences.
After experimenting with various compounds eight years later, I can firmly say that psychedelics not only saved my life but are my life. Without psychedelics, who knows what would have happened to this horror story? It could have been more than just a post on this website and a way for you to learn more about my story after sharing stories about other people in the psychedelic realm over the past year.
I want to make it clear that I don’t mean to criticize hermetic beliefs in this article. At the time I wrote it, I wasn’t feeling well, and some hermetic ideologies still influence me today. Even though I don’t identify as hermetic, I find value in the teachings of mental chemistry, respecting and caring for others, and, most importantly, in seeking the truth and constantly questioning what is thought to be true, as those are the roots of science and ultimately what makes us the only species who are leaving a history to track.
