Just had the most delightful trip. Took two slow puffs on a roughly 1:1.5 mix and drifted off to this sort of nondescript colorful place. It was pleasant but nothing spectacular. The visuals weren’t the point of this one, they were just a pleasant background to host the experience that was the real point of the trip.
I’ve had a couple of trips where it feels like I’m in this great peaceful space of awareness, where all thoughts, sounds, and sensations appear to me as being on equal footing with one another. Where none of them have any special significance as being created by me, and instead they all rest equally with one another and are simply happening, and I am merely the awareness of it all. In these trips I’ll occasionally laugh, and am then aware that the laughter is just happening. I’m not causing it to happen, there simply is laughter and I realize that the laughter is coming from me, but I’m not choosing for it to happen. It’s a lovely experience, and I’ve been contemplating it a lot as a helpful analogy for how we really don’t have ownership over any of our actions. Everything is simply happening, and we are each just a little piece of that happening.
I think this is a beautiful way to consider life because it really takes the self out of the picture. If a discrete self which is responsible for making good or bad decisions really is an illusion (as many mystics, scientists, etc. say), then any self-recrimination or guilt is not only a waste of time, but actually quite laughable. If we could experience that same lack of ownership towards all of our thoughts, actions and emotions, then maybe we’d all be a little happier.
So in this trip, I felt this laughter phenomenon again, except that this time it almost felt like I was simply a vessel or conduit for some great benevolent energy behind all being (I’ll really do anything to avoid saying the “G” word won’t I?) to laugh through me. And it was the laugh of the laughing Buddha, not at anything in particular, but laughing simply because life is joy and why not laugh? I felt that it loved all of us and just wants us to be happy, and it felt like a confirmation that everything I’ve been thinking about regarding laughter as an analogy for how life happens through us was spot on.
Also, I’ve been finding in my trips that I have my best experiences when I can get as relaxed as possible beforehand and make sure that my body is as wide open as it can be- that there are no constrictions where an elbow or a knee is bent. I’m not sure if this is universal or just for me, but as a guideline for myself it seems to be working wonders. That, along with having no specified goal for how many hits I’m going to do seems to really help to have positive trips. In many of my initial trips I would have a set number of hits I wanted to take, and this pressure on myself would create a rocky start. Whenever I relax and release any sort of pressure on myself I find that everything goes better. Maybe this is an analogy for life as well, who knows. 🙂
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