eating

[davidm]

I had an odd experience recently on a high dose of mushrooms. Not unusual, admittedly, since like most people I find psilocybin states deep and mostly unfathomable at the best of times. But this just perplexed the hell out of me. I’d be interested to know if anyone has had a similar experience.

For me, if taken correctly, mushrooms often lead to contact with an ‘entity’, a consciousness of some kind, ancient, mercurial and very weird. It usually takes the form of a bizarre octopus like creature: tentacles, pulsing, twirling, like seaweed, around my mind’s eye, with no central point. Quite monster-like in a Lovecraftian way. Sometimes it talks. Other times it just swirls around. It seems to like to dance.

On a recent tip, though, this entity did a new thing. It offered parts of itself for me to eat, presumably as a kind of symbolic sacrament. Okay – why not? I thought. Deep in a trance, my eyes closed, I found myself reaching ‘into’ my mind-eye to grab a piece of this stuff and put it in my mouth. I didn’t feel anything physically in my hand but the mental world a portion of this wafting ‘ectoplasm’ appeared to come away with my hand. It was translucent and looked very much like semen suspended in water. There was no taste and no apparent effects except, unexpectedly, automatically, as I chomped away , I found myself chanting, in a chilling guttural voice:

“So-ma. So-ma. So-ma. So-ma.”

I’m familiar with Wasson’s quest for the Vedic ‘soma’ and have always stepped in line with the idea that ‘soma’ was a physical sacrament, Amanita or some other mushroom perhaps. But could soma have been more of quasi-physical symbolic substance, closer to the alchemic material prima, a coagulation of spirit, matter and meaning - ‘mind stuff’?

I’m not massively well-read in this area. I’d be interested to know what the panel thinks.
Has anyone else had a similar eating experiences during psychedelic trances? What are the theories about soma?

Thanks
David

[Halfglass]

davidm: Hi. Thats really something. You didn't feel any different after eating the stuff? What was the mood of the Thing as it offered itself for a bite? Did you have a sense of WHY It did that? Your discription of It is what I was getting to a T. The "tentacles". I had these Crab Faced Other as I call 'em hovering around the Mind Eye and although they never gave me any Other-food they would sometimes lock onto me/brain and search. (Until the time I yanked myself out of the trance and injured It and me mentally--spiralling chaos for a few long minutes.) I'm not up on soma myself--I'm sure someone here is though.

[ July 23, 2003, 04:14 AM: Message edited by: Halfglass ]

[Nicole]

I only know the basics that I think everyone knows. Soma is the drink of the gods that's described in the Rig Vega. Wasson believed soma to be the amanita muscaria, while McKenna believed it to be psilocybin. (Apparently, amanita muscaria very rarely produces ecstatic states.)

I have an excellent book on this at home that might have more information. I'll pick it up on my lunch break. Any specific information you're looking for?

[daniel]

The whole issue of the mysterious "ectoplasm" that appears throughout shamanic and occult practices is interesting, to say the least. It seems that there is a kind of substance that is "imaginal" or astral but can become actually physical - at a certain level of intensification of ritual or trip. McKenna writes about his experience of this in True Hallucinations, on a rooftop in Kathmandu. I suspect that I had an experience of it during the occult episode described near the end of my book.

When I "reintegrated" whatever it was the DPT trip had liberated, I did so using a meditation in which I imagined a white light buddha coming down into me and forcing all impurities into my central channel where they would enter my gut and come out of me as shit. The next morning, when I woke up and felt finally cleansed or back to normal, I went to the bathroom and before flushing,k noted a strange glittering substance on top of the water in the toilet. I had this anecdote in the book but it was too much for my editor, who perhaps didn't believe it, but I stand by the story.

This substance is supposed to be very important to magical operations. I would be interested in learning more about it.

[Woodpecker]

David,

Interesting story. Among the Ecuadorian Secoyas, such transmissions as you experienced are not unheard-of. There are two parallels that I can think of. One, Cancowitoyai, who's like a god of hunting animals and a teacher of shamans, sometimes gives shamans yage to drink, in their visions. And two, Wanteanco, the jaguar goddess, sometimes lets shamans nurse at her breasts in visions. In both cases, you're getting something a little bit extra from the spirit world, some food of the gods, some nektar or ambrosia.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote in his poem "Xanadu":

Weave a circle round him twice
And close your eyes with holy dread
For he on honeydew hath fed
And drunk the milk of paradise.

[davidm]

Thanks for your replies.

Halfglass: Hi. Thats really something. You didn't feel any different after eating the stuff? What was the mood of the Thing as it offered itself for a bite? Did you have a sense of WHY It did that?As far as I recall, I didn’t feel any different after eating it, although I had expectation of being ushered into the higher levels of the psilocybin experience (even with heroic doses, access to the higher echelons seems largely a matter of grace. If you're interested, this this (http://www.erowid.org/plants/mushrooms/mushrooms_article3.shtml) lengthy article on the mushroom entity very illuminating)

The mood of the thing was…was complex…it seemed very much like I was flattering it by eating this stuff, that this was of benefit to It and not necessarily to me.

I wonder if it’s linked in some way to McKenna’s “ecology of souls” metaphor - I think Daniel mentions this in his book - the idea of humanity being some kind of spiritual ‘coral reef’ where metaphysical entities of pure information and pure consciousness feed.

Perhaps, by eating of it, I was worshipping it, feeding it somehow on a symbolic level. Much like the “body of Christ” Christian sacrament?

Nicole: I have an excellent book on this at home that might have more information. I'll pick it up on my lunch break. Any specific information you're looking for?I was wondering if there has ever been a suggestion that soma was a non-physical substance. Could the Vedics, through their spiritual practice, have discovered and conceptualized this material? Made a metaphor of it and called it ‘soma’? I haven’t read Wasson’s book but I’ve heard he argues the Amanita case quite convincingly?

Daniel: The whole issue of the mysterious "ectoplasm" that appears throughout shamanic and occult practices is interesting, to say the least. It seems that there is a kind of substance that is "imaginal" or astral but can become actually physical - at a certain level of intensification of ritual or trip. McKenna writes about his experience of this in True Hallucinations, on a rooftop in Kathmandu.Is that related to the shaman’s phlegm, yachay, that is kept at the pit of his stomach and regurgitated to heal or pass on knowledge? How is that built up? Is it given to a shaman by the spirits? Maybe I have a carton of that swilling around my gut now.

True Hallucinations is the only McKenna I’ve yet to read.

(Incidentally have you seen this (http://mckenna.psychedelic-library.org/) – an MP3 archive of all McKenna’s talks)

One disturbing thing is that I’ve noticed my two year old daughter has started pulling imaginary stuff out of the air and eating it. It may just be a toddler thing but it made me shiver when I saw her doing it.

[ July 24, 2003, 06:29 AM: Message edited by: davidm ]

[Nicole]

davidm:

A non-physical substance? I don't think I've ever come across something like that. The Vedic scriptures indicate that soma was a plant; the plant's juices were extracted and blended with milk, or sometimes another liquid. Thus, most scholars and other curious people have attempted to identify which plant it was (there are hundreds of theories). I've don't think I'm familiar with any theories that identify soma as something other than a plant, though.

Although I've never read Wasson's book, most scholars seem to be convinced by his fly agaric theory. (One notable dissenter is McKenna, who expresses his doubts in FOOD OF THE GODS. He claims that fly agaric experiences are typically characterized by discomfort and nausea, and certainly not ecstasy or divine revelation.) In the book STRANGE FRUIT: ALCHEMY AND RELIGION - THE HIDDEN TRUTH, author Clark Heinrich describes his personal experiences with fly agaric that did lead to a state like the one described in the Rig Vega, albeit after many unsuccessful attempts.