Dark night of the soul on shrooms

[astrokeen]

I tried magic mushrooms for the first time - grown at home using a grow kit from an Amsterdam shop. My only previous experience with psychedelics was a one time session with Ayahuasca at a Sainto Daime church. That did not go well - rather it did not go beyond the purging stage - I felt really unwell, exhausted and miserable while the effect lasted. Having read that shroom experiences were gentler and more positive, I had hoped to make some kind of spiritual breakthrough. I took approximately 30gm of fresh shrooms, alone in a darkened room. This was after setting intention and meditating. 

Firstly, nothing much happened for the first hour except was some sense of heavy sleepiness. No visuals occurred at all. I felt queasy and uncomfortable. At some point in the night, the experience became horrendously painful, lasting several hours. It was a psychological brutality as I would have never imagined. This is what I felt or realised - there is no god, no heaven or wonderful place to go to. I am of no value, depressed, miserable, uncared for and unloved. No one, god or angels were watching over me - these were illusions that I had latched on to. The love of my family was superficial - I was essentially alone and my life was meaningless. I was overtaken by utter despair - with no way out - death was not a solution, in fact nothing could resolve this. I felt truly sorry for the people I loved - my children who were alive in this meaningless world. I could sense their despair. All the structures that I had built around me were an illusion, things to get by and provide an illusion of meaning. I sobbed and asked for it to end. At some point in the night I also vomited.

All the accounts I have read speak of experiences ending in feeling positive and loved. This was not the case for me. I just felt washed out and exhausted and fearful of whether I would now become  permanently depressed.

Can someone please cast some light on this. Has this ever happened to anyone? I am now trying to understand this and find something positive in it. I don't know what to believe anymore. 

 

 

 

[tsuki]

11 minutes ago, astrokeen said:

This is what I felt or realised - there is no god, no heaven or wonderful place to go to. I am of no value, depressed, miserable, uncared for and unloved. No one, god or angels were watching over me - these were illusions that I had latched on to. The love of my family was superficial - I was essentially alone and my life was meaningless. I was overtaken by utter despair - with no way out - death was not a solution, in fact nothing could resolve this. I felt truly sorry for the people I loved - my children who were alive in this meaningless world. I could sense their despair. All the structures that I had built around me were an illusion, things to get by and provide an illusion of meaning. I sobbed and asked for it to end. At some point in the night I also vomited.

Your description of reality seems pretty accurate to me, even though I haven't done any psychedelics (yet).
It is a positive experience to me. There is solace to be found in meaninglessness. True meaninglessness is total freedom.

I've been through two experiences similar to dark night of the soul.
The first confrontation with meaninglessness sprang me right back into building meaning for myself.
The second came into being when the self-built meaning showed itself to be meaningless after all.
I came to stillness when meaninglessness itself became meaningless.

You are a boat that floats on the river of meaning.
Dark night of the soul is when you enter the ocean.
There is nowhere to go, but you don't have to.
Everywhere is the same. Even storms are still.

There is no meaning in having meaning.

[astrokeen]

Thank you both.

Tsuki, the thought that did come to me was that since the life I have built around me is meaningless, I needn't worry which bit is worthier or more successful. I can construct whatever I want to suit me. I needn't impress anyone - that would be completely pointless. Perhaps, there is a hint of freedom in this realisation. 

I would like to find the stillness you speak of.

now is forever, I went for a walk at 4 am to seek a change and breathe in fresh air. I noticed the loveliness and silence around me. I felt that is all one can do - live in the moment and appreciate whatever comes our way. This would allow one to momentarily forget the meaningless of existence. 

I do know my (now adult) children love me, but I knew I couldn't reach out to them in my moment of darkness. They would have found it repelling and pitiful. I was essentially alone.

Edited May 22, 2018 by astrokeen

[tsuki]

16 minutes ago, astrokeen said:

Tsuki, the thought that did come to me was that since all that since the life I have built around me is meaningless, I needn't worry which bit is worthier or more successful. I can construct whatever I want to suit me. I needn't impress anyone - that would be completely pointless. Perhaps, there is a hint of freedom in this realisation. 

Noticed how your life was probably constructed around trying to impress people? Funny, huh?

Think of it like this: you have died. You have no life. Whatever you had is gone and you laugh at yourself for being silly.
If a doctor told you a month ago that you have one month to live - you would give everything for another day of whatever this is.
Now you have that one more day to live. Nobody promises you tomorrow.
Everything you do is meaningless.
Wanting to do anything is meaningless.
Your desires are meaningless.
Your fears are meaningless.
Your ambitions are meaningless.

What do you do? Nothing. You never did anything.
You were being ignorant of whatever you thought you were doing.
Now you know and there is nothing to be done with this knowledge.
This is total, complete, stillness.
Resisting day-to-day life is meaningless. So is living it.
Just sit and observe this miracle while it lasts.
It is perfect.

Other people are not in despair. You are mourning over your lost life, that's all.
You do not mourn to re-live what had been lost. You do it to realize that what's left is also open for being lost.
Mourning is the shadow of appreciation. Mourn! Appreciate!
When you were being ignorant of your meaninglessness, you did not despair. Their ignorance is bliss.
They chase their meaning. We sit in meaninglessness.
We're not that different in our ignorance.

Edited May 22, 2018 by tsuki

[astrokeen]

7 minutes ago, tsuki said:

Your desires are meaningless.
Your fears are meaningless.
Your ambitions are meaningless.

I get this.

I am some way yet in finding the perfection in it. You have given me much to think about. Thanks.

Edited May 22, 2018 by astrokeen

[tsuki]

You're welcome, friend.

[Viking]

you are identified with your thoughts and meanings, these are not you. 

thats what happens when you dont do enough spiritual work before psychedelics. 

besides, meaning does exist, when you create it, you latched on to a meaning which says nothing is meaningful. its true that meaning does not exist outside yourself but that doesnt mean meaning doesnt exist. you didnt go far enough with the meaninglessness and didnt realize meaninglessness is meaninglessness.

in addition, you dont need meaning to be fulfilled, meaning is an illusion and when you attach to it you get into trouble. when you will drop the identification with the self you will see that being is much much more profound that meaning.

[Faceless]

20 minutes ago, tsuki said:

Now you have that one more day to live. Nobody promises you tomorrow.
Everything you do is meaningless.
Wanting to do anything is meaningless.
Your desires are meaningless.
Your fears are meaningless.
Your ambitions are meaningless.

 

Conciousness void of these is FREEDOM. 

20 minutes ago, tsuki said:

Now you know and there is nothing to be done with this knowledge.
This is total, complete, stillness.
Resisting day-to-day life is meaningless. So is living it.
Just sit and observe this miracle while it lasts.
It is perfect.

This is the art of living. Art being to things “thinks” in there right place. 

??

[Arman]

As difficult as it is to accept, these things do serve us if we allow them to. And it is difficult to fight against the strong currents that are taking you to happiness and well-being. The more you struggle against where the water obviously wants you to go, the more unnecessary suffering. 

Bad trips can be really rough, but it's important not to hold on to them, take them too seriously or try to 'figure them out'. Sometimes the psyche just goes through these dramatic polarizations and you get an intense and obtuse experience of density and awfulness that have been lying dormant within. You may have gotten a sense that none of what you were experiencing was new, that it was something hiding inside you all along. 

You're trying to find someone to 'cast light on the experience' but only you can do that for yourself, and it isn't going to be done through intellectualizing about it. It would be useful to simply decide that this too will serve you, even you don't yet know how. 

If you're feeling depressed, empty and exhausted, don't try too hard to figure that out either. Homeostasis is your friend here. Your mind, body and mood will stabilize itself over some time and you'll feel good again. Sooner than you probably think, you'll feel great. I wouldn't worry. 

Edited May 22, 2018 by Arman

[astrokeen]

24 minutes ago, Viking said:

you didnt go far enough with the meaninglessness and didnt realize meaninglessness is meaninglessness.

Do you mean that to state that all is meaningless is a contradiction in terms? One cannot escape from meaning.

21 minutes ago, Arman said:

Bad trips can be really rough, but it's important not to hold on to them, take them too seriously or try to 'figure them out'. Sometimes the psyche just goes through these dramatic polarizations and you get an intense and obtuse experience of density and awfulness that have been lying dormant within. You may have gotten a sense that none of what you were experiencing was new, that it was something hiding inside you all along. 

Yes, this resonates. There were elements of it which uncovered deeply harboured fears. The bit about there being no god, no consciousness watching over us was something I had never entertained. The hopelessness of it all was a shock. 

Very sensible advice about not mulling over it too long.

Edited May 22, 2018 by astrokeen

[Viking]

11 minutes ago, astrokeen said:

Do you mean that to state that all is meaningless is a contradiction in terms? One cannot escape from meaning

there are 2 perspectives: absolute and personal.

meaning can survive only in the personal. in absolute terms there is no meaning.

in your trip you tapped into the absolute, you realized there is no meaning, but you didnt go far enough into the absolute. you remained halfway in the personal, because you applied meaning to meaninglessness. that was your fault. if you wouldnt apply meaning to meaninglessness you would be fine.

[astrokeen]

33 minutes ago, Viking said:

in your trip you tapped into the absolute, you realized there is no meaning, but you didnt go far enough into the absolute. you remained halfway in the personal, because you applied meaning to meaninglessness. that was your fault. if you wouldnt apply meaning to meaninglessness you would be fine.

I was not in a state to control what I was sensing or experiencing. A strong shroom trip, after all. So, talk of it being my fault is somewhat misplaced. Perhaps I needed to go further into the experience, which I hope never to do as it was the most hideous, brutal punishment ever. 

I hope I can some day understand it by other means. Thanks for taking the time to explain the distinctions.

Edited May 22, 2018 by astrokeen

[Faceless]

If there is a cessation of meaning after an experience and yet meaning finds its way back into the mind, this is because one has not carried out that experience all the way to the end. We have certain experiencings and we never end them, or finish them, and leave them behind. We carry them with us and those experiences act as a veil to mask new experiencings. Which implies that each experience is not actually new, but a continuation of memory “that which is static” and that memory is where meaning is attatched to “new experiences”...But that meaning itself implies that is a conceptualization accumulated from the old, and acts as a blindfold to what is, THE ESSENCE OF CREATIVITY. 

THE KEY TO THE ART OF LIVING IS NOT TO CARRY  “THAT WHICH IS STATIC” ,,being PAST KNOWLEDGE, EXPERIENCE, THROUGH THE MOVEMENT OF MEMORY OVER ONTO EACH NEW, ACTIVE, AND ALIVE MOMENT OF THE NOW, “THAT WHICH IS DYNAMIC”...AN EXPERIENCING FREE OF THE EXPERIENCER. 

If this is done, no meaning becomes attached to the beauty of what is, TRUTH. 

This is CENTERLESNESS. AND SIMULTANEOUSLY ALL IS CENTER. 

Edited May 22, 2018 by Faceless

[cetus]

@astrokeen I was talking to a friend the other day about shrooms. He said he tried them once many years ago and didn't like it at all. He walked into his house and everything around him look depressing. The things he owned that surrounded him and the way he lived all seemed like meaningless shit to him. So he said he never did shrooms again because of the way it made him feel. I didn't say anything but was thinking to myself, "maybe you seen truth for the first time".

[Faceless]

There shouldn't be any fear the moment when truth is. Truth is only when there is a cessation of the entity. If there is fear then that implies there was some form of resistance at play. A deep rooted unconscious piece of the entity still in tact. 

 

This is the result of identity still attaching meaning “experience” on top of an experiencing. 

 

The biggest barrier to TRUTH is the veil of experience. Learn and understand the complexity of experience and the experiencer.  This is the key to conciousness emptying its content/movement. This is the end of the center. Truth. Once this is seen and maintained by carful and scrupulous religiosity, these types of experiencings will happen more and more, free of fear, meaning, the experiencer. 

Edited May 22, 2018 by Faceless

[astrokeen]

I think I need to reiterate what is it that I felt. If that is the truth, then it is scary:

Life is a kind of meaningless hell for everyone - from which there is no escape. There is no loving consciousness keeping watch over us. All we can do is find another human being to form attachments with - human contact can, to a little extent, provide succour. Our work, interests, life styles are distractions from facing the awful truth of the hopelessness and meaninglessness of our existences. We can grasp at all these things only to mask the emptiness that is within us. It is all that humans can do. Death itself is not an answer - there is no escape. It is all darkness and nothingness.

Edited May 22, 2018 by astrokeen

[Faceless]

16 minutes ago, astrokeen said:

I think I need to reiterate what is it that I felt. If that is the truth, then it is scary:

Life is a kind of meaningless hell for everyone - from which there is no escape. There is no loving consciousness keeping watch over us. All we can do is find another human being to form attachments with - human contact can, to a little extent, provide succour. Our work, interests, life styles are distractions from facing the awful truth of the hopelessness and meaninglessness of our existences. We can grasp at all these things only to mask the emptiness that is within us. It is all that humans can do. Death itself is not an answer - there is no escape. It is all darkness and nothingness.

This is all from the perspective of self/thought. I assure you when the self ”time” ends there will be no entity that identifies anything in any way or another. 

Explore into the nature of experience. In this lies consciousness with NO-THING in it. 

??

Edited May 22, 2018 by Faceless

[tsuki]

The awfulness and despair of the experience you have is your interpretation of it.
It is a shadow that will hunt you unless you face it.

The despair is a call for mourning. Mourn, so it will turn to appreciation.
You will eventually reinterpret it in a different way.
This is the miracle of the inherent meaninglessness.

Edited May 22, 2018 by tsuki

[cetus]

Here's a picture I shot titled "Dark night of the soul"

[WindInTheLeaf]

Discovering there is no meaning to be found can be excruciating. The truth doesnt set you free, it tears you apart, as you have held on to illusions of meaning without seeing them as illusions. Accepting there is no meaning to be found opens up for the side of this discovery you havnt noticed at first glance. If everything is meaningless, and any particular thing has no meaning at all, then you are essentially free to do whatever you want, as anything can be meaningful, as it has no higher meaningfulness to be discredited against. If everything is meaningless, then anything holds meaning if you chose to make it so.