Ripping Open the Veil

On December 8th 2018, I take a high dose of psilocybin in a retreat near Amsterdam, accompanied by 14 other participants and 7 facilitators. Shortly after noon, I eat 30 grams of truffles, followed by a 15 gram booster two hours later. After consuming the truffles, which look and taste somewhat like walnuts gone sour, and the ginger tea that is served with it, I put on my eye mask and lie back.

It all starts very mildly, similar to the state right before you fall asleep, with some subtle shapes emerging in the dark. The colors are interesting but also predictable, with rainbow spotlights lighting up the darkness, the color scheme taken straight from the Dark Side of the Moon album cover. The oriental background music induces Buddhist and Hindu themes. I feel like being inside, in one of those dark boat rides in a theme park, floating from scene to scene, gliding through an Indian market place. It is all very subtle though, and I start to worry that the experience will be less profound than what I hoped for. This feeling gets worse when the person next to me starts to giggle. Clearly, she is having a better experience than me, and I get distracted by hearing her laugh, for a while I even feel like it is preventing me from going deeper into my own experience. But later in the trip I feel a much stronger connection to her and to the people who are comforting her, when she is crying for what feels like hours.

There are a few times where it briefly feels like things are finally kicking off, where I suddenly move up in the sky, move outside. But it stays very abstract, and I desperately want the experience to get more tangible and concrete. I want to meet someone, relive a memory, experience a clear, lucid hallucination rather than this atmospheric state of floating. It is around this time that the disintegration of the ego starts. The first sensation is that my hands are not really my hands anymore. I have folded them on my abdomen underneath the duvet, and suddenly they appear to belong to someone else. That feels promising. Then it becomes all about my eyes, and the duality of being inside versus outside. Whether my eyes are open or closed underneath the eye mask becomes a very important issue. Part of me wants to close my eyes, and part of me is afraid that I will fall asleep and miss out on the whole journey. This struggle then turns into a struggle of whom these eyes belong to, and it ends up feeling like two external forces are fighting for the eyes to be open or closed, and it somehow makes me think of yin and yang. At this point the ego starts to fight back. First the left side of my face becomes paralyzed. Then my face starts to melt, and the eyes, nose and mouth fall off. None of it feels scary though. I am still aware that this is all part of the trip. Then there is a moment where my mind completely disconnects from my body, like a ghost image, and pivots around the eye mask, so it is now floating right above me facing down.

The next thing I remember is waking up the gods. Suddenly something lifts the veil, and I instantly go from being the puppet to being the puppeteer behind the curtain. This feels overwhelming, like a sudden realization of living in a simulation, like being pulled outside of the Matrix, like waking up from a dream. During this first encounter with the presence, it gets annoyed, like I am disturbing its peace. I sense that this is clearly a very powerful, but not necessarily a benevolent being. Then it speaks to me. "Oh you puny little human, did you really think you could trick me with a bit of music and truffles?". It peeks through the veil as it adopts the shape of Shiva's head, and briefly the separation between our physical reality and the other side becomes a blur. There is this strong realization that we are not supposed to be eating these truffles, that we should not be cheating reality like this, and I feel the urge to share this revelation later on with the facilitators.

Then I drift back, and I start feeling concerned that I might be too far out when the opportunity is offered to take a booster, because I still cannot shake this feeling that my experience is not as profound as I expected. I have not encountered any spirit animals, have not revisited any childhood memories, have not met any lost loved ones. When they do offer the booster, I tell them I think I want to go a bit deeper, and assure them I have not experienced anything scary yet. They propose another full dose, but I cannot imagine being able to chew that many truffles again, so I ask for a little less. I eat the truffles, swallow the tea, use the restroom, and put my eye mask on again.

This is when things start to get more interesting. Right away, the hallucinations are more vivid than before. Still abstract, but clear geometric patterns, arabic motifs pulsating from the centre outwards like a kaleidoscope. It feels cliché but pleasant. I start to feel much more closely connected to the music, and whenever the facilitators pass by spraying around smells of palo santo, thyme, palo de rosa and patchouli, I breath in through my nose like my life depends on it, and start smiling uncontrollably. This phase of the journey is very enjoyable and sensory oriented, but nothing compared to what follows.

All of a sudden, my right eye focuses on a beam of light that shines right through the eye mask. I cannot believe that I have not noticed this obvious construction flaw before. And suddenly the presence is back, in the left bottom corner of my peripheral vision, bigger than before, but calm. It takes on a silhouette shape, black against a black backdrop, with a rainbow border. And we are not sitting inside the eye mask anymore. We are sitting in the absolute void, the centre of the universe, at the beginning of time. During this second encounter with the presence, it is less hostile, more all-knowing than all-powerful. It feels like I am presented with a choice, and I need to decide whether I really want to go through with this or not.

The next thing I remember is how the veil rips right open. Suddenly I am traveling at the speed of light through a stream of pure white heat. I am no longer seeing, smelling, or hearing, but perceiving the universe around me at a level far beyond those human senses. The feeling is overwhelming, but all I have to do is completely surrender to it. The booster has kicked the doors of perception right open, and all the sensory filters are now turned off, the reducing valve shattered into a million pieces. But comparing it to how a small child perceives the world does not make sense at all. This is not a blooming, buzzing confusion. This is raw, violent, powerful, dangerous, and there is no way a child would be able to deal with this. In this state of pure ecstasy, I realize that I have uncovered the secret, that this alternate state of consciousness, this level of superhuman perception is what it is all about. This feels like an epiphany, and I keep repeating to myself, "Now I know, now I know, now I know". Again I feel the need to share this with the facilitators, to let them know that they can just skip all the questions now, or take me straight to whoever is really in charge, because I am now one of them. Now I know the truth, and this truth is bigger than life itself.

Now that I have finally surrendered and reached this state of rapture, I start analyzing the experience. The idea that certain laws might prevent people from ever experiencing this radical truth suddenly feels absurd and outrageous at the same time. I also realize how silly it was to be disappointed by the lack of concrete hallucinations at the start of my journey, rather than aiming straight for the ever more abstract, for the divine. At this point the dissolution of the ego is complete. The possibility of revisiting a childhood memory seems ridiculous, because this would be the memory of one tiny human being, and we are visiting the whole universe instead. Similarly, questions like whether I still love my wife and children, or whether I can ever go back to my regular job, or whether this classifies as one of the most meaningful experiences of my life, all seem completely irrelevant, because they all pertain to this one individual, and this truth I have uncovered is bigger than all of humanity. Of course this person still loves his wife, and of course this is by far the most significant moment of his life, but it is infinitely more than that.

In analyzing the journey, I also start to shape it. I realize that I have not experienced the feeling of oneness yet, and suddenly the oneness reveals itself to me, though it is less warm and harmonic than I expected. I understand that all living creatures are connected in the sense that they are all part of this uniform membrane that shields the raw reality underneath and that I have now torn open. And while we are not aware of this membrane in everyday reality, you can almost see it in the fractal nature of the branches of a tree. I briefly wonder if I feel a stronger connection to nature itself, but then I dismiss this idea, because this universal power cannot be contained by a single planet's ecosystem. Next I wonder whether this journey would classify as a genuine mystical experience, and suddenly that is exactly what it turns into. I feel as I touch god itself, and have reached the sanctum sanctorum. I am surrounded by a white glow and all is bliss and gratefulness. The music that is playing is also purely divine, and the chanting visualizes as being sung by a rotating cluster of Brahma heads. I simply cannot believe that this music has been composed by mere mortals. It seems clear beyond a doubt that whoever has created this music also knows the truth. I remember being worried upfront about the music choice, and feel foolish for not just trusting the facilitators on this.

And just as I think I cannot possibly get any higher, the veil bursts open again and I have my third encounter with the presence. Now the angels are having a bacchanal party in a sea of white fire and invite me to join them. It is a party of love, but it is a violent love. It is The Doors rather than The Beatles. For just a few seconds, I am riding high in the sky with the angels. It is the absolute peak of the journey and the happiest moment of my life. There are two of them now, and they take on the shape of soft, smiling Buddha silhouettes, pure white against a black sky, with rainbow sparkles around the edges. Afterwards I continue floating through the galaxy at the speed of light and lose all track of time.

After a while I feel a need to urinate, but I do not want to step out of the experience, and besides, it is not me who needs this, it is this human body lying there while my mind is in a completely different space and time. But an hour or so later, it gets more urgent and I take off the eye mask to go to the restroom. The face in the mirror is still me, but the eyes are not of this world, these eyes have seen the truth. I go back and put on my eye mask, but after a while, I realize I do not need it anymore. The unfiltered reality is streaming right through my opened eyes. I understand that I have not so much opened a door to another reality, but I have become the door itself, and the door is wide open, as my eyes are wide open, and the angels are right there at the other side, and if you looked into my eyes you would be able to see them. I want to yell out, "The angels are here! Can't you see they are right here?!", but again something stops me from sharing this revelation, and I store it for later recollection instead.

An hour or two later the experience starts to fade in and out in waves, and I realize I am slowly starting to come down. The return of the ego is a struggle at first, because it seems so utterly pointless to go back to living the rest of this mere human life, knowing what I now know. This feeling of sadness is compensated by the bliss of the afterglow. At one point, I sit up and spend half an hour or more looking at a large ancient looking statue in the room, just enjoying the visual hallucinations, the shifting of shapes and colors, the interplay of matter and anti-matter, of space and negative space, with everything bathing in this warm, orange-pink glow. I also spend some time watching the candles in the center of the room, and it feels like I am steering the flames with my eyes. As I become more aware of my surroundings, I feel a particularly strong connection to two of the facilitators, a strong sense that they also know the truth, that they have been there before, that we have even been there together. I feel that they also understand how serious this all is. This is no laughing matter, no light hearted business. No matter how positive the whole journey has been, I realize that knowing the truth will also be a burden.

I write down the key revelations immediately afterwards, and spend most of the following day writing out the notes above. I feel a strong need to record what happened, as a way to hold on to the experience. In the following days, there are brief moments of a more subtle afterglow. On my way to the airport, I see the most beautiful, vivid rainbow I have ever seen, and the sky above is split with the darkest clouds on one side and the brightest sun on the other. Some colors seem brighter, certain people and trees appear to glow, and the patterns behind my closed eyes are more vivid than usual. I start hugging my wife more often, and it becomes easier to feel empathy for certain colleagues at work. The second night after the experience is long and scary. My sister made a comment about how she hoped I had not gone psychotic, and after waking up in the dark, a hint of afterglow starts to feel more like a flashback, and I start to fear for my own sanity of mind. But the next morning I go for a run in nature and it makes me feel more alive than ever.

Later that day, I am trying to find out more about the statue I had been looking at during the trip. I come across an image of a different statue, a 16th century depiction of Xōchipilli, the Aztec flower prince, god of love, music and flora. This causes a shock of recognition, because he is sitting in the same position I was sitting in at one point during the trip, and he is wearing a mask with hollow, wide open eyes, and there are psilocybin mushroom caps pictured on his knees. I feel humbled by the idea that people at the other side of the world, 500 or even thousands of years ago, have experienced something so similar to me, and it helps me understand how this sacred journey truly transcends all space and time.

I did not suffer from any bad addictions, but I end up changing quite a few habits right after the experience. There is this sense of detachment that makes it a lot easier to say no to alcohol, to meat, to sugar. I stop eating more than I need, I stop picking up my phone immediately after waking up, I stop wasting my time scrolling through my Twitter feed. It hardly requires any effort at all. It is another way to hold on to the experience. The sense of detachment that allows me to say no feels like a subtle after image of the ego death I experienced.

I keep running every morning, and I keep up the meditation practice that I started a few weeks before the experience. But it feels more intense than before. I start reading a book on Buddhism, and it all sounds so uncannily familiar. It talks about unplugging from the Matrix, about witness consciousness, about perceiving formlessness as raw sensory data, about achieving the realization of not-self through years of meditation practice. The tone is apologetic, because some of these concepts sound paradoxical, intangible and abstract, but they all sound very concrete to me. It will take another year before I realize that my journey took place on Bodhi Day, the same date Mahayana Buddhists celebrate Buddha's enlightenment. I never considered myself to be a spiritual person before, but it feels like I took a shortcut, and now I have this desire to see where this path leads to.

I travelled all the way. I went into this experience, not just believing there is nothing beyond life itself, but knowing it, deep inside me, without a shadow of doubt. And I return from this journey, not just believing in something, but knowing it is there, right underneath the veil, breathing in all its glory.