February 5, 1997
ms (the mushroom shaman) and i are trying to figure out how much mushroom powder 
to give me.  We decide on one gram so that I am less likely to throw it up, and three 
capsules of perganum harmala (powdered seeds) to potentiate the dimethyltriptamine 
and psilocybin in the mushroom.  I swallow the first capsule at about 11:10 am.  it is a Wednesday.  ms plays some of a Terence McKenna CD.  I notice the first presence then.  
I swallow other two capsules at 1/2 hour intervals.  listen to music until we leave at about 
1pm.  Harmala starts coming on while we are in the flat in the form of green afterimages 
on a black and white page.
The night before I read the message from the mushroom out of "Psilocybin" by TMcK.  I am also reading "The Psychedelics Handbook" by DMTurner.  Become more certain that taking the mushroom and smoking DMT by a creek is a good idea.  Synergy comes into my head so I look it up in a dictionary.  The synergy between plants and man becomes the focus of the trip.  Synergy between the mushroom, DMT and me.
I am writing this because this trip with the mushroom was one of the most profound experiences or my life.  Maybe even more so than DMT or my first LSD trip.  It reprogrammed me.  I consider the mushroom to be an entity, intelligent, alien.  But desiring to experience *people*.  The mushroom taught me a rapport between me, plants and itself.
We ride out to Upper Cedar Creek on a motorcycle.  I experiment with opening and closing my eyes.  The strognest retinal image I get (with closed eyes) is that of a cylinder rolling slowly from left to right with a curlicue design on it.  It is fawn coloured.  There are other geometric patterns as well generated by the harmala.
We get to Upper Cedar Creek at 2pm.  My body doesn't work properly when I get off the bike.  (ms drove the bike.)  The light is very bright.  We walk up the creek for an hour and 10 minutes.  I am very uncoordinated.  ms laughs at me a lot.  I can't find the spot where I have been before.  We settle for another spot.  It has a little beach, a big tree, a pool, and rock pavement.  All we need really.
3:15 pm.  I eat the first mushroom.  I can feel it straight away.  At 3:30, I swill the gram of mushroom powder in water.  I sit still for a while pondering the universe, why I am here and talk to the mushroom.  I watch the water for a while.  I have my first visitor.  A dragonfly comes to sit on my leg.  I still have this melody line from some techno going through my mind from when I was in the flat.  It doesn't leave for the entire trip.  I talk to the dragonfly in my head, and tell it what it is like to be human.  The dragonly is an explorer.  It tells me that dragonflies explore and what they discover is contributed to the collective dragonly knowledge.  ms takes some photos of me and the dragonfly.  Nausea starts to come on.  I feel molded to the rock I am sitting on.  The cramp/nausea makes me not want to move around.  I get up and move over to where there is a blanket spread on the ground because I am cold.  I put on my flannelette shirt.  I contemplate lying down.  I lie down, and close my eyes because they are stinging.
I decide that moving around might be good after all.  I get up and walk over to the pavement.  the dragonly is sitll with me.  it wants me to go somewhere with it and I keep asking "where?"  I think I am afraid of going with the dragonfly.
	I do some Tai Chi on the pavement in an attmept to make the nausea pass.
Then I sit down and look at the water.  I sit in three different spots contemplate the water.  In one spot I swatch a berry doing a dance.  It is lying on a rock surface under the water, and the water is flowing over it and pushing it around, but the current isn't quite strong enough to push it onward.
	The nausea leaves me.  I become aware of the cause of the nausea.  it is being caused by energy being blocked from flowign through me.  I concentrate on releasing the energy.  The nausea "breaks" with a distinct physical sensation.
	With my eyes colsed, my retinal noise is bright red shapes with gold auras, the shape resemble people.  I do not concetrate on this.  I dance some more Tai Chi, to move the energy through me.  I wonder how long it has been.
	As I look up from the water again, it occurs to me that there is another person with me in this isolated spot.  I am surprised to realise that I had quite forgotten the presence of ms.  I go and talk to him.  He is being a pixie, running about, taking photos and looking at the water and the trees.  I wonder what sort of a time he is having, but he seems to be the sort that can amuse himself in this setting.  I feel that a lot of time has passed but it still quite light.  I talk to ms about:  what is going on, about what is around us, about musrooms.  I ask him whether the shining white trees across the creek are really shining.  He says yes, they seem to have a waxy lustre of the bark.  He ask me if he can borrow my brain.  I laugh at this.  He wants to know what this particular tree across the creek looks like to me.  I register for the nth time that everything that I was seeing looks completely normal.  I tell him that the tree is very tree-like, that it probably likes him, and that is why it is "doing it" for him.  We talk a lot about plants and how we are bound together, and more about the mushroom.  I am becoming more aware from the way I speak and the content that I am treating the mushroom like an intelligence.
	Consuming a hallucinogenic substance is the key to meeting the intelligence behind the substance.  Meeting the other entity in a space accessible to both to transfer ideas, to swap perceptions, to become one with the other entities and to build a common perception.  The altering of consciousness is a combination of the consciousnesses of the entities.
	Because of the focus of the trees in the conversation, my rapport with my surroundings grows.  I feel at home, with the trees and the creek and ms.  Communion.  Content, happy, and my mind is dwelling in rapt attention, rapture, extending to feeling at one with my surroundings.  I am being taught two new facial expressions.  I grin most of the time.  I spend more than the usual amount of time looking over the rims of my glasses.
	Some time about now, as it starts towards dusk, I notice that I can make geometric patterns out of my blurred vision.  The patterns are static.
	We leave as it is starting to get dark.  We walk down the creek till we get to the lodge.  I am totally amzed by coming out of the bush and coming face to face with the lodge.  It is much bigger than I expected, and so is the vast expanse of sky above it.   The size and the space overwhelm my mind.  I speculate that it is probably going to be a Buddhist meditation retreat.  As I scramble over felled trees, I am aware of a peculiar thing.  I notice the information that it not important.  I feel that this is what it is like to be a carrier consciousness.  Being deliberately unreceptive of information, but not unaware of it.  As I clamber over trees, I am being a carrier for the mushroom.
	We follow the road that runs away from the lodge.  I try to explain to ms about the carrier consciousness.  I am still in communion with the mushroom.  We come around a bend in the road and can see the lights of Brisbane.  I ask ms what the lights look like to him.  He says a city.  I say imagine that you have lived in a forest all your life, leaves overhead, then you see the lights.  He says they look like campfires.  I say it looks like Brisbane in the future, and going back to Brisbane is moving through time.
	When we get back to the house, where we left the bike, a dog comes out to bark at us.  The dog gets very close to us.  It would sort of run till it was just behind me, stop, and then run up again.  ms walks faster, but it does not occur to me to be afraid of the dog.  The dog is shutting off.  Not in communion.  Whatis it saying to me?  I don't want you near me or my space!  I am afraid of you!  Be afraid of me!  Go away!  There I stop, beyond the gate, and speak to the dog, and tell it, with a distinct and peculiar emotion, that it does not have to be afraid of me.  Then there is a pause, and the dog actually comes back down to the gate, sniffing around, doing its doggie thing, checking to see if the smells have gone (us).  It does not see us or we are far enough away for the dog not to be bothered by us.
	I realise that the conversation with the dog is actually what the mushroom wished to say to the dog.
	The I see the fire, and I am at one with the fire.  I want to watch the fire, and be with it.  It is about 100 metres away from the bike.  I walk to the fire, and ms drives the bike down.  Once again, total amazement comes over me.  When I get to the fire, there is no one else there!  The fire scares me because of its size, and that it is untended.  It is begger than a campfire and much bigger than any fire that I have seen recently.  I am afraid to leave the fire without a guardian.  I explain this to ms and tell him to go to a house and tell someone that there is this huge fire.  He leaves.  I walk around the fire, trying to discern its shape, what is burning.  There seems to be a car axle in it.  I wonder what I will do if it spreads.  I seem to be disturbed by the fire situation, but not so distressed that there is nothing that I can do for it.  The fire does not spread for the next hour that we are there for.
	ms comes back, embarrassed, and says that a guy in the house over the road has lit it, and is watching it.  ms says the guy over the road is probably burning off because we have just had a lot of rain.  Over the last two week period, it has rained nearly every day.  I say "I don't understand".  I can't understand why he is burning trees.  I start to cry.
	I am overwhelmedby my emotion for the tree.  The tears I cry flow out like my eyes are watering.  There is none of the feeling of the emotional pain that I attach to crying.  My first thought is "are my eyes watering from the smoke of the fire?"  I think that this is how the mushroom would cry at the burning of the trees.  I feel none of the "resentment" that I am being made to cry that I usual feel.  I am very resistant to crying.  I cry as a last resort, to emotional release.
	ms and I watch the fire.  Every now and again, when a new piece of wood catches, it sends a chaotic current of hot air and sparks and embers into the sky.  I imagine how the wind and the sparks could ignite the rest of the trees, but those thoughts pass.  I become absorbed in watching the spiralling embers.
	We ride back to Brisbane after about an hour.  I am still communing with the mushroom.   I just sit in the flat on the couch and do nothing, not really thinking about much.  ms puts the TV on.  "Burning Zone" is on.  I watch it, ms ignores it.  It is about a building that is contaminated by a chemical and this team of shit hot chemists or chemical engineers, or shit-hot smoething-or-others are trying to track the source of the chemical.  They have helmets and protective suits on and little black boxes with bars of orange lights on them.  The chemical is making people commit suicide, but the script writers aren't explaining that part.  But they do link it to a conspiracy to wipe out human beings.  During my experience with the mushroom, it seems very plausible to me.  Then the show finishes, I channel-surf a bit, and settle on a movie on SBS.  It is about Spanish missionaries who are lost in South America.  One of them is adopted, trained, used, abused, and finally initiated by two shaman.  He develops his magical abilities to heal.  He does this for eight years before the more Spaniards arrive.  He then is having trouble adjusting to the Spaniards wanting to use the South Americans as slaves.  The final scene shows about 50 South Americans marching across a barren mud plain with a huge metallic cross.
	I sit around for a bit longer and think about the synchronicity of seeing that particular film, and I think about smoking some DMT.  I decide that it is a matter of the right time in the evening.  I had weighed out two 50 mg doses that morning and taken them to Upper Cedar Creek.  ms has smoked one this afternoon claims to have misfired.  
	For about 20 minutes, I get the room and myself ready.  I get all the sweet smilling spiceds out of the cupboard, a large stainless steel bowl full of water goes onto the centre of the rug.  I get some alfalfa sprouts out of the fridge, and anything else that will float in the bowl of water.  I light a candle, circle the rug once, get all the glitter out, and smoke the DMT.
	I call this the Japanese tea room because it is how I would imagine a Japanese tea room to be.  It is set by the large red Oriental rug in the middle of the floor.  I am amazed that I have finally made the jump to DMT land, equal to my first trip.  I am relaxed and content just to be here.  I feel like I do when I think about being in a coffee shop when I am not in one.  There is room for my mind to expand here.  Everything that I can see is sparkling and shining.  The music sparkles too.  It is some techno thing.  I cannot quite make out the words, but I can hear the voices, and understand what they are try to say.  They are reassuring me and telling me that I can come back here whenever I can, that this is a great place to be.  It is home.
	I look "outside" briefly, that is I wonder whether it is time to go back, but I can't see ms so I go back to DMT land.  The tea room is still there, and the voices are still talking and I can understand them.  I concentrate on the bowl of water with the alfalfa floating in it.  The alfalfa comes to life and speaks as well.  It exudes a camlness and an ecstacy of being alive.  They sing the song of the voices of the techno, the assurance, "we are happy for you to be here with us."
	I sense that I can be here for a very long time, but it will never be long enough, and I just don't want to go back to "real life".  It is about 1 or 2 am.  I spend the rest of the morning exploring concepts, listening to music and talking with ms.  I go to sleep about 8 am, still communing with the mushroom.
	Since then my days have been mushroom flavoured.  Things are not boring anymore.  I still feel clean and shiny.  I am noticing how I commune with the creatures around me.  I have been talking to everyone about what I have learnt.  It feels so good to be excited again about what I have to say.
	I have of course doen some more communing with the DMT since then.  Although I realize now that with DMT, the communion is with a network of plants, all the plants that produce DMT.
	Is is amazing that a chemical produced by a plant has such a profound effect on human physiology?  On Monday morning after, I smoke DMT again and watch my arm be transformed into an anaconda.  I think that there are certain animal markings that when viewed in the right state of mind, will produce an incredibly sophisticated patterns, which are ways of encoding information.  I suspect that a lot of the South American art that remains, the style of the art is bassed on the geometric, swirling designs of how DMT sees things.
	The web of DMT bearing plants, soul plants.  Someone poses the question last night of what does DMT do for the plant.  Now that I think about it, reflect upon it, the answer is that DMT is the device in the plants that transmits information.  It carries meassages.  It collects the consciousness of the the plants.

	"if I was to design a hallucinogen, I would make it just like mushooms." -- me
	"yeah, it's got everything."  -- ms