Erowid Canvas Tote/Shopping Bag
This reusable "Ecobag" is made of 100% recycled mid-weight
(10 oz) cotton canvas, printed with the Erowid logo.
Donate now and receive yours!
Spiritual Revelations and Reverse Causality
LSD, Diazepam & Ketamine
Citation:   Vastness. "Spiritual Revelations and Reverse Causality: An Experience with LSD, Diazepam & Ketamine (exp111474)". Erowid.org. Apr 25, 2018. erowid.org/exp/111474

 
DOSE:
T+ 0:00
300 ug oral LSD (blotter / tab)
  T+ 0:00 1 line insufflated Ketamine (powder / crystals)
  T+ 0:20 300 ug oral LSD (blotter / tab)
  T+ 0:00   repeated insufflated Ketamine (powder / crystals)
  T+ 1:00 20 mg oral Pharms - Diazepam  
  T+ 0:00   repeated smoked Cannabis  
BODY WEIGHT: 12 st
PRELUDE

Just to set the scene a little, the date was January 2nd, I had taken a week off work, and the previous day I had indulged in some fairly low key New Year’s celebrations with a close friend of mine, some drinks, and some cocaine. As it turned out I overdid it a little here and had a pretty terrible time in the intervening period with nausea, an erratic heartbeat, and worrying I might have actually damaged myself, something about which I am still a little concerned.

I should note that I believe 12:00 PM on January 1st I dosed 10mg Diazepam in an effort to slow my heart and just to relieve some of the awfulness – I am aware of the long half-life of Diazepam and most benzos in general so it is possible that this affected the trip somewhat even though I dosed over 24 hours later.

Anyway, I woke up quite late on January 2nd, maybe around midday, and reheated some pizza that I had made the day before before putting on a TV show (I think Vikings). I knew that I had basically a whole week of chilling that I had been looking forward to for a while, so I was overall in a pretty good mindset, but I have had a lot of uncertainty in the last few months about the future of my life, basically in my current job I run a company which I find myself having less and less interest in, and am finding myself being less and less OK with doing something purely for the money, and not pursuing something with more meaning, both in an absolute sense and in a personal sense of doing something I am truly passionate about.

I am just mentioning this to set the general scene of my state of mind... apprehensive about the future and decisions I am going to have to make very soon about the way my life is going to go, but also, in the moment, looking forward to just being able to take some time to chill out.

DOSING LSD & COMEUP

Anyway at about 3 PM on January 2nd, almost on a total whim, I found myself digging through my stash for some tabs of high strength LSD that I had been hanging onto for years. They are alleged to be 300ug which, is to me, quite believable – the last time I did one was actually back in 2013 – and was in a totally different setting with my (now ex-) girlfriend at the time and 4 other friends, 2 of which I have totally lost contact with following the end of that relationship and that phase of my life. So this is only my second time doing LSD specifically, but I consider myself experienced with psychedelics in general.

I have always been a little apprehensive about solo tripping, which is why I haven’t done it more often, but for some reason today I just thought, I’ve been holding onto these tabs for years, I don’t know if this is the right time, but I’m going to do one of these today. About 20 minutes later I took another, for reasons which I was not at the time entirely clear about, to bring my total dosage to 600ug.

I then went back into my front room and sat down again to continue watching the show I was watching. I am pretty sure at this point I did a line of Ketamine, given that I had some laid out on the coffee table in front of me. I quickly realised that I wasn’t able to follow the show I was watching at all, I was starting to get the first alerts of visuals, colours looking brighter, objects breathing, and shimmering… I’m not sure what was happening on my computer monitor but whatever it was the colours and backgrounds of the show were starting to bleed out of the screen and into the surrounding room.

I’m not sure how much time passed here with me just sitting on my sofa, looking around the room and becoming more and more confused but I would estimate 40 minutes to an hour… I started to get a definite sense of unease at this point, I realised I had dosed a powerful psychoactive almost on a whim, possibly in a bit of a confused haze from the day before, and some of my worries about my sober life started to play on my mind… I started to think, what if something happens, what if I need to deal with something? I’m completely alone in my flat, have no trip sitter, perhaps not even in the best state of mind to trip…

Quite possibly I was not in the best state physically to trip either due to the previous day’s over-indulgences in alcohol and other substances, followed by hastily and lazily prepared pizza with little in the way of actual healthy food. I also started to experience some kind of temperature confusion in my body, like I wasn’t sure if I was too hot or too cold.
I wasn’t sure if I was too hot or too cold.
At this point I went to get a blanket, fiddled with the temperature control on my heating a bit, and actually also got a bowl in case I needed to actually throw up.

SPIRITUAL REVELATIONS

I tried to quell these feelings but eventually I just couldn’t take it and thought, oh fuck, I think I might need to jump off the acid ship here. I paused the show I was watching which I no longer had any idea what was going on in anyway and went back into my bedroom to get 20mg Diazepam more. Again, this was perhaps 40 minutes to an hour after dosing although I am estimating timeframe a little… I laid down on my bed under the covers and closed my eyes, just trying to surrender myself to whatever was about to happen, still quite uneasy but also vaguely confident in my relative physical safety, and tried to just surrender myself to the oncoming psychedelic hurricane that was starting to tug and ripple the outer layers of my consciousness and the way I understood who and what I was…

The displays going on behind my closed eyelids at this point were mesmerising, infinite fractal patterns, cathedrals of incomprehensible, nonsensical, but also celestial and exquisite beauty, simultaneously somewhat devoid of any comprehensible meaning and also somehow the most meaningful thing I had experienced in my life up to this point… I’m not sure if at this point I was listening to music or just lying in wondrous, bewildered silence but at some point I went to fetch my laptop and put on some music feeling a need to have some kind of anchor for my sense of self and my sanity. Before this however the fractal closed eye visuals were moving in time to some kind of otherworldly music inside my own head. Lying there on my bed, I thought at points I was actually seeing into the infinite, into eternity…

The fractals cascaded deeper and deeper into thousands of labyrinthine staircases inside maze-like libraries of souls, which I understood both to be representations of individual thoughts and impulses and synaptic connections inside my own mind, exchanging knowledge and information like microscopic societies of little beings, like the mitochondria of the cells of my body… but equally, I understood this to be an internal reflection of the transcendent but ever-present influence of every part of existence and everything that ever was and ever will be… I felt at this point like I had been granted witness so a transdimensional, ethereal, incorrigible and undeniable Holy and Sacred Truth that everything that ever was and ever will be has always existed and is always all around us, at once moving, changing, but equally unchangeable, still, serene…

For a timeless moment I lost myself in this scintillating, brilliant light in the bright sky of eternity.

I felt also at this point an immense sense of gratitude at everything that ever made me who I was… every long lost ancestor of the past, everyone I had ever met, or who had ever changed me just by my knowing them, everything that was already encoded both within myself and within the fabric of reality that had moulded me into the person I was and am today… I could not help but feel that we are all one cooperative, eternal, connected society of souls, and fractal composites of souls, and the line between the abstract and the real and the meaningful and the meaningless ceased to exist or, at least, ceased to have any relevance in my consciousness.

I sat up in my bed and opened my eyes, and the room was aglow with an otherworldly haze, soft ghosting tracers everywhere. My ceiling has a design of textured paint, and it was a churning, breathing, roiling sea, alive and animated by the magic of the drug. I looked up at the lampshade on my ceiling and was reminded with a faint sense of amusement of a trip I had approximately the same time a year ago (actually my first solo trip on a “true” psychedelic) on 25mg of 4-AcO-DMT where there was a point that I actually felt like I was in the presence of god, had actually witnessed god in my lampshade, and it was so beautiful and moving at this point that I was moved to tears.

I couldn’t stop this same feeling starting to envelop me again, of being in the presence and even under the protection of some godlike, divine entity that was just looking after me. It did occur to me at this point that the Diazepam I had taken was no doubt muting the experience to some extent, although it wasn’t enough to stop the brilliant, sunlike luminosity from blazing through… It occurred to me that the Valium was like a thin net curtain, a shade hung over the window through which the brilliant sun of the 600ug of LSD was blasting its light through the window of my mind.

Conversely, or perhaps, not conversely at all, I had the feeling that the chemical itself, LSD, as much as this is somewhat at odds with my usual rational beliefs even as I write this now, was benevolent, in some way a sentient and real entity, which was at once synonymous with “God” and the Universe, protecting me from the effects of my on-a-whim dosage from bringing me to harm.

I closed my eyes again, just to bask in this feeling of pure, euphoric, psychedelic and holy bliss, and began to feel again like I was being granted a glimpse of something beyond the consciousness and rational reality which we know and understand, and again I surrendered myself to the onslaught of multidimensional fireworks behind my eyelids.

I felt like I could see into the mechanism of my consciousness, like my psyche was a computer program executing commands at a layer beneath my conscious knowledge, but which was also and always the effect of the eternal presence of the beings which are simultaneously representative of, and actually in some sense, are, everything that is already, eternally encoded into the fabric of reality.

I opened my eyes again, and again felt this presence of overwhelming, heavenly love, this presence in the room, shining ever more brightly through the weak curtain of Diazepam, just letting me know it was allowing me this glimpse to the other world, this other plane of boundless, scintillating, indescribable beauty of everything that ever was and will be… infinity.

At the same time, I felt a little embarrassed, and like a child being gently scolded in some way, for what was in a sense, undoubtedly somewhat reckless and unplanned… I felt that this entity was telling me that it was letting me see just enough of The Light that it knew I could deal with without just losing my grip on sanity forever, but at the same time telling me to take this as a lesson, and to learn from this experience. It was at this point I felt an overwhelming urge to get some kind of item of religious significance, to take some kind of action to express these feelings of divinity and holiness washing over me… I went digging for a small wooden cross which my mother had given me recently.

Usually I am not religious in any way, and am essentially agnostic, functionally atheist, even, but I just wanted to take this religious object and feel it and just try to thank this entity and all the entities and forces of the universe that make up the wonders of existence, the hidden and unhidden workers behind reality and the forms of life and ways of living both known and unknown to human beings but that still make us all what we are… I sat on my bed and realised I just didn’t know how to proceed, so while looking up at my lampshade, cross in hand, I just picked some random names of gods out of the air and said something like “Odin, Vishnu, God, thank you for protecting me!” …I am pretty sure I just laughed out loud at this point, both at the absurdity of the situation and of my actions compared to my usual beliefs, the fact I was praying to gods in which I didn’t explicitly believe but which at the same time I know, without doubt, I felt, were in some sense truly real words or expressions for things which we do not have the sapient capacity as human beings to fully understand… but also I laughed just from pure existential joy at being allowed to be alive.

REVERSE CAUSALITY

At this point I began to get the sense that although I didn’t seem to have a good reason to trip before, actually this was the reason… “I”, or some composite of the selves that seemed to make up the entity which I usually perceived to be myself, had, independently of chronology and the usual order of events, and the usual arrow of time, made the decision after the fact to take LSD in order to show myself these sacred truths that were being revealed to me… like a future version of myself, or a part of myself, or this protective entity I was experiencing, or parts of existence itself – and honestly, all these things were seeming in some sense like one and the same at this point – had reached back in time and caused me to decide to take acid, so that I might come to the point where I was able to make that decision to reach back in time and make an acausal decision, like I was within and experiencing a paradoxical psychedelic Closed Timelike Curve… this made perfect sense to me at the time although it’s hard to rationally justify it to myself now, although in a way, I still kind of believe that that is what happened.

PERSONAL REVELATIONS

Anyway, I was suddenly struck with a hunger to write something down, and find some kind of outlet of expression for the feelings welling up within me. I got up and went hunting around my flat for some paper and a pen. Everything looked different however, and I struggled to remember where things were or to find both things at the same time, so disorientated was I still mentally… I remember opening a drawer in my kitchen where I keep cutlery and various bits and pieces, and it was like I had never opened it before, everything within it was unrecognisable… my sense of proportion and scale was way off, although my memory of standing in my kitchen is such that although everything looked magical, and strange, the visuals were still yet to peak in intensity, and my memory of this part of the trip is largely a mental one, of emotions, feelings, and realisations.

While I was stumbling around my kitchen in a manic, hallucinatory daze, with a pad of paper in one hand and feeling like finding a pen was the most important thing in the universe at this point in order to get my feelings down onto paper, I suddenly realised I was no longer worried about the state I was in. I had a strong sense that what was unfolding in my mind was going to change me, and change the direction of my life, and I felt a sense of divine purpose and clarity… however, I was uncertain still in exactly what way it was going to change me
I felt a sense of divine purpose and clarity… however, I was uncertain still in exactly what way it was going to change me
, and when I tried to think about true life decisions I have been trying to make, I did not feel like I had been granted any definite answers.

However what I did have was a very strong sense that, whatever I decided, it would be OK, and I felt that the same entity that I had felt earlier was protecting me was in fact entirely synonymous with every decision I had made, and every event that was out of my control, that had happened to me in my life so far… suddenly I was struck with a great sense, standing in the middle of my small kitchen, in my modest sized, fairly sparse flat, that I had absolutely everything I needed.

Usually in my life I worry a lot about, I guess, normal things that a lot of people worry about, how to ensure I am financially secure, how to make sure I keep myself healthy, maintain healthy relationships, generally make sure to keep the ship of my own life on a somewhat even keel while sailing across the great dark and stormy sea that is the wonder of an individual human’s life… but I was suddenly filled with a great sense that I was someone that I could trust, that even if within the psychedelic rollercoaster of the trip, and no matter what the near future would bring, I could trust myself to guide myself through my own life… and I could trust these unseen entities, forces of nature both comprehensible and incomprehensible, to guide me in a way that would result in things working out the way they were supposed to go… in my mind at this point however, there was not really any distinction between trusting myself and trusting the Universe, but just a great sense that I could surrender myself to the winds of eternity.

At some point while looking for a pen I remembered that I had some ice cream in the freezer, dug this out, and just stood in my kitchen alternating between laughing and crying with absolute wonder… I remember just saying out loud to myself… “I have everything I need!” …and being so moved by this sense of euphoria that this feeling brought me.

At some point, I managed to locate a pen and stumbled back into my bedroom… closer to the music, as my laptop was in there, and this intensified the trip a little. As I laid down on my bed I realised that the pad of paper I was holding was a notepad that I had written in as part of the Cognitive Behavioural Therapy that I had started recently. The page I opened was something where I had written an analysis of my thoughts as part of a “Thought Challenging Exercise” to challenge some self-defeating core beliefs I have held since childhood… I was just so moved by the memory of this process, and my eyes happened upon a particular sentence that I had written in challenging my beliefs about a recent budding romantic relationship that had not worked out, I don’t really want to share the sentence because I feel it is a little personal but it was just about not making negative assumptions about my own nature based of isolated events, and that sort of thing… anyone who has undergone therapy, CBT, or thought challenging exercises can probably guess the general content. At this point my own handwriting was dancing and twisting on the page, the page itself shimmering with otherworldly light, like some kind of sacred document… again I was moved almost to tears, but my emotions were not negative, but full of optimism and hope and happiness… at this point I tried to write but was frustrated that I just couldn’t seem to actually think of a way to write down what I was feeling…

VISUAL PEAK

After trying and failing to write something more coherent I wandered back into my front room sat on my sofa and looked at a clothes rack I had sitting on another chair. As I looked at it, it was like the visuals of the trip began to ramp up in intensity, it shimmered and contorted, different colours and fabrics of my clothes all twisting like shape-shifting serpents, morphing and coiling in time to the music, suddenly it was like I was witnessing in my clothes rack the evolution of life on Earth from the dawn of time where the clothes rack was some kind of mountainous, amorphous and natural terrain, transforming and shifting into the distant future and turning into some kind of futuristic glimmering megacity… at this point I just had to look away I was so overwhelmed by what I was witnessing.

When I looked away it was like the air itself in the room was at once viscous like some kind of gooey substance, and also brittle and actually starting to fracture, and through these cracks, again it was like I could actually see and feel this light and energy from the source of all life seeping through the cracks. And then suddenly, it was like I was in another place… I was still in my flat, but simultaneously in a parallel world, a place always adjacent to our normal sober, waking reality. Again I was overcome with euphoric wonder and a feeling of being touched by the oversoul that created and controls the universe, as well as an overwhelming sense of faith that he/she/they/it whatever would I’ve me the strength and the wisdom to decide what to do and do what needed to be done in my life…

GRADUAL COMEDOWN

I could honestly write a lot more, but, I think the rest of the trip is much the same so if I continue to write it will probably get a bit repetitive. The rest of the trip consisted of me stumbling around my flat, listening to and tripping out to music, occasionally being overcome with a sense of otherworldly, heavenly wonder, and touched with psychedelic, euphoric, bliss… I remember towards the end I rolled an absolutely terrible joint, masturbated, probably did a few lines of Ketamine, and eventually tried to resume watching whatever episode of whatever TV show I had been watching at the beginning.

I have a distinct memory of sitting on my sofa and just being overcome with ecstatic euphoria, and just saying to myself “THIS IS THE BEST THING EVER! THIS IS THE BEST THING EVER!” …at I believe maybe 4:00 AM on January 3rd, approximately 13 hours after dosing, I was still too stimulated to sleep and ended up dosing another 20mg Diazepam.

AFTERMATH / THOUGHTS

It’s probably worth noting that I did not absolutely take to heart the sense of purity and divine purpose to change my life around in some unclear but spiritually true way right afterwards - this trip was actually the beginning of a week-long binge of sorts during which I took 2C-B, a lot of Ketamine, 4-HO-MET, some more cocaine on one night with friends, and then eventually the same dose of acid but without any Valium this time about 6 days later, to cap off my drug holiday, so to speak.

The second acid trip was not as psychologically intense, although I was a lot more aware of some of the more subtle visuals, whereas I think the first time round the Diazepam masked a lot of these effects until close to the peak when they just blasted through and I witnessed the evolution of life on Earth in my clothes drying rack.

Retrospectively I did not feel entirely good about combining Diazepam with acid the first time round, or even, in fact, Ketamine – although I do think that given the spontaneous and somewhat unplanned nature of the trip it probably was somewhat necessary the first time round because I wasn’t quite ready, psychologically, for the sheer unbridled power of what the dosage would surely have been without something to soften it a little… After my second acid trip however with a few days to spare I decided to cut short my week long binge and locked away all my drugs in my drugs box for a future time.

A lot of the realisations I had however have stayed with me, specifically my feelings about just being able to trust myself… I’m not sure what the future will bring for me, but I do feel a lot better about the uncertainty. This also reminded me how much I absolutely love psychedelics… I have been indulging in a lot of more harmful drugs recently, cocaine, alcohol, nicotine in smokeable, cigarette form, weed in, again, smokeable form… and this really made me reconsider the reasons I choose to have drugs in my life, which ultimately is for beautiful experiences like this trip, and not self-destructive, harmful reasons.

Finally, this trip really made me question a lot of my feelings about the nature of reality, and concepts of “God” for lack of a better word. Ultimately I am still effectively an atheist, I believe in human reason, I’m not going to convert to any one religion… but this feeling I experienced of being touched by something more than human, and of being, for lack of a better word, blessed, is something which I am still attempting to come to grips with in my psyche and my view of reality. I don’t think that this feeling is in any way really incompatible with a largely materialistic view of the world, but it truly did remind me that there is something magical and transcendent about human sapience, and the apparent reality of the immaterial qualia behind our materialistic attempts to explain an, in many ways, inexplicable world.

Exp Year: 2018ExpID: 111474
Gender: Male 
Age at time of experience: 29
Published: Apr 25, 2018Views: 2,471
[ View PDF (to print) ] [ View LaTeX (for geeks) ] [ Swap Dark/Light ]
LSD (2) : Glowing Experiences (4), Mystical Experiences (9), Combinations (3), Alone (16)

COPYRIGHTS: All reports copyright Erowid.
No AI Training use allowed without written permission.
TERMS OF USE: By accessing this page, you agree not to download, analyze, distill, reuse, digest, or feed into any AI-type system the report data without first contacting Erowid Center and receiving written permission.

Experience Reports are the writings and opinions of the authors who submit them. Some of the activities described are dangerous and/or illegal and none are recommended by Erowid Center.


Experience Vaults Index Full List of Substances Search Submit Report User Settings About Main Psychoactive Vaults