🍄 MUSHROOMS AND MUSES 🍄
Two nights ago I ate a decent amount of psilocybin with a friend at her house. It wasn’t planned or expected, which is almost always the best way to ingest psychedelic mushrooms. We laid on the worn carpeted floor next to the burning fireplace, our heads comfortably sinking into faux fur pillows. The snoring of the dog under the chair behind us provided a rhythmic, soft soundtrack to our conversation. If you want to have a genuine, honest, deep discussion with someone, or yourself, magic mushrooms perfectly hold that space for those interactions to take place. There is no room for the ego, for the stories we carry that we’ve created about ourselves. There’s just raw connection and pure truth.
One of my favorite effects while under the influence, and there are many, are the epiphanies or drops of knowledge that graciously float into my consciousness like willows in the spring. I experienced this same intuitive knowing while drinking ayahuasca. While many of my fellow partakers in the room experienced vivid and clear hallucinations, more often than not, I was thrown into deep, geometric ayahuasca worlds where nothing made sense. Instead, truth bombs, as I like to call them, would wave over me, from deep within me, giving me insights on myself and the universe at large (a future blog for sure).
So, while on these mushrooms, the notion of the elusive muse floated into my perception. I have no idea why. Artists, writers and musicians for centuries have all paid homage to their creative muses, often citing they don’t know where the inspiration comes from, but it is certainly from outside of themselves. If you believe the soul lives on after death, which I do, especially after ayahuasca, then it is said that the part of us that continues to live is our consciousness. Which could mean, the consciousnesses of all the great artists who have walked the earth are somewhere in a cosmic library, waiting to be borrowed and checked out.
Do our muses somehow merge into our own consciousness to provide assistance in blossoming our creativity? I cannot answer that question. But what the mushrooms were saying to me is that maybe, something like that is happening. Personally, I love this idea. It takes the pressure off of trying to be this creative genius and allows room for ethereal collaboration. There is so much about our own consciousness we have yet to uncover so I keep an open mind to the possibilities that stretch our current way of understanding how the world works.
During these uncertain and precarious times, I find comfort in expanding my mind and opening my heart through psychedelics. We’re all processing the anxiety and existential dread caused by this pandemic in our own ways. There’s no right or wrong way to understand or go deeper into yourself.
The next morning, while walking home, the sun had barely risen over Smuggler Mountain, casting a muted glow over the concrete landscape around me. The air was slightly dewy and I was still happily feeling the residual effects of the psilocybin. It felt good to feel something within this abyss of lately feeling nothing.
