Armodafinil and LSD, Question about Nothingness

[enjoythe3dplayground]

This is not so much a trip report but rather a question I have regarding the idea of “nothingness”. Also, if there are grammatical errors or anything that doesn’t make sense, English is not my native language so apologies in advance. Here’s what happened:

I took 75mg of armodafinil in combination with 300-450ug lsd depending on how accurately the tabs were advertised.

The come-up was definitely the scariest thing I have ever experienced. Especially because I didn’t expect it to be that intense. Physical objects kept dissolving in front of me, everything around me was changing its shape, at some point I convinced myself that I was surrounded by water and about to drown. Whatever horrible situation I thought about just happened, it was very hard to see a difference between reality and hallucination at that point.

I’m still in my teens so I live with my parents (who are very conservative when it comes to psychedelics) and I almost decided to wake them up and tell them that I took lsd and needed to go to the hospital because I was dying. But I had such a hard time getting up or talking that I didn’t do it. (Looking back on it, taking lsd and armodafinil was very irresponsible while my parents were in the same house and is not something I would ever do again. I also gained a lot of respect for psychedelics during this trip and I enjoy being sober like never before).

So as a quick side note, if you ever choose to take (ar)modafinil and psychedelics, maybe lower the dosage a bit because it will be much stronger than the psychedelics by themselves. At least in my experience.

Then finally I was able to let go and got calmer, I reached the peak, closed my eyes, started drifting off and experienced ego death.

Because of the armodafinil I had this intense clarity during the experience, usually with lsd I find it quite hard to focus on things for long but this time that wasn’t a problem. When I wanted my mind to go somewhere it did so extremely fast. My imagination was clear and stable if that makes sense.

During the peak I was able to verify teachings from spiritual teachers and understand things on a deeper level, not merely having a conceptual understanding of consciousness, the ego, law of attraction, non-duality, etc but actually experiencing certain insights first-hand.

I realized that wherever I was, I was always at home. Everything is me. I could never be lost. At that moment it started snowing, I just spent some time looking out the window, at the Christmas decorations, the lights in the dark, the snow flakes, experiencing it all with no boundaries between me and them because what I thought was “me”, was gone. “Me” now meant something different.

I experienced unconditional love for the first time, because to love is to see something as yourself (because it is in fact you). Even when I decided to think about what we could consider horrible scenarios like war, torture, I had compassion for it. I felt no aversion. I felt love. Obviously not in some sick, psychopathic way but from a perspective where what we consider good and evil was transcended and both was taken as part of myself.

For the first time, I didn’t feel any need to convince anybody of anything. Regardless if I agree with somebody else's choices / opinions or not, I started to fully accept them knowing why they made these choices, why they chose to think a certain way and that it’s 100% valid and ok the way it is.

Performing actions like drinking water or using the toilet were very weird (for lack of a better word) because whatever I was looking at or interacting with was me.

Further into the experience, I faced childhood trauma head-on and transcended some of it, by integrating it and accepting it as part of myself. For once I didn’t run away from negative emotions or thoughts. I just embraced them. I have never felt anything like this before.

So in summary, I had my first ego death experience and from that perspective was able to have some deep insights and start to address some emotional trauma.

However, (and this is why I am posting this in the first place) at some point during the trip I asked myself, “well, if I’m everything (“I” not being the ego of course), then I am also nothing. Because nothing is part of everything. 

And at this point I am not sure if it was my mind playing games on me but basically what happened was I was shown “nothing”. And as I started to go there / allowing the experience of nothingness, a thought came up basically saying that if I chose to experience nothingness it would mean that I could never return. Because from nothingness, there is no way back. There is no way, no ego, no universe, no awareness, not even unawareness. Just nothing.

So in that moment I convinced myself that if I decided to experience nothingness, the universe would just sort of collapse and everything would cease to exist. Obviously that sounds funny right now but that’s what it felt like in that moment.

Later during the trip, I noticed that maybe two seemingly opposing truths can exist at the same time and that there is no way to grasp that using a “three dimensional” or linear way of thinking about it.

Maybe there are certain levels of truths.

It appeared to me that yes, maybe “I am everything.” is an objective truth but that “I am.” is an even deeper truth. And therefore nothingness and “something” can happen without excluding the other.

It also made me think about quantum mechanics (and I do not know a lot about this topic), that prior to being observed, a quantum system is not in any particular state. It’s in a superposition state that contains all the possible states at once. So first, it just “is”. Then it “is something” (when being observed).

That would explain what I said before. At base, I simply “am”. And therefore I can take on the form of nothingness (or anything else really). Again, I not referring to the ego of course.

I hope this kinda made sense, obviously these thoughts and experiences can’t be translated with accuracy using language. 

Also, and this is important, I’m not saying that anything I experienced is true or false, accurate or not. I do not want to convince anybody of anything, I do not want to make a point or get people to agree with anything I wrote. 

The reason for why I made this post is because most of you had insights and experiences (induced by psychedelics or not) that I didn’t. Most of you are far beyond my level of understanding, you have connected dots that I don’t even know exist and therefore it would be very interesting to have some input about “nothingness” (basically what I wrote about before) because I simply can’t let go of it.

And thank you for taking the time to read this.

[Leo Gura]

13 minutes ago, enjoythe3dplayground said:

And at this point I am not sure if it was my mind playing games on me but basically what happened was I was shown “nothing”. And as I started to go there / allowing the experience of nothingness, a thought came up basically saying that if I chose to experience nothingness it would mean that I could never return. Because from nothingness, there is no way back. There is no way, no ego, no universe, no awareness, not even unawareness. Just nothing.

So in that moment I convinced myself that if I decided to experience nothingness, the universe would just sort of collapse and everything would cease to exist. Obviously that sounds funny right now but that’s what it felt like in that moment.

Later during the trip, I noticed that maybe two seemingly opposing truths can exist at the same time and that there is no way to grasp that using a “three dimensional” or linear way of thinking about it.

Maybe there are certain levels of truths.

It appeared to me that yes, maybe “I am everything.” is an objective truth but that “I am.” is an even deeper truth. And therefore nothingness and “something” can happen without excluding the other.

It also made me think about quantum mechanics (and I do not know a lot about this topic), that prior to being observed, a quantum system is not in any particular state. It’s in a superposition state that contains all the possible states at once. So first, it just “is”. Then it “is something” (when being observed).

Yes, this is precisely correct.

Although there is an even deeper level where you realize that something and nothing are identical and there is nowhere else to go. You can't choose to experience Nothing because you're already experiencing Nothing all the time regardless of whatever you're experiencing or not-experiencing.

That Nothing you encountered was The Void, The Godhead, Mu, or your Original Face as the Zen folks call it.

There are of course much deeper levels of nonduality and more facets you can access with practice.

Be careful taking such large doses and mixing substances. Lower your dose to 125ug of LSD and learn to contemplate.

[Forestluv]

Welcome to the forum.

You got a good look at nonduality and "high conscious" integrative awareness/thinking. . . . Integrate what you can. Be mindful of over-contextualizing and trying to make sense of it all. It is at a "higher" level than intellect. You essentially got direct experience that is worth many years of spiritual work.

22 minutes ago, enjoythe3dplayground said:

I’m still in my teens so I live with my parents (who are very conservative when it comes to psychedelics) and I almost decided to wake them up and tell them that I took lsd and needed to go to the hospital because I was dying. But I had such a hard time getting up or talking that I didn’t do it. (Looking back on it, taking lsd and armodafinil was very irresponsible while my parents were in the same house and is not something I would ever do again. 

Yes. Mixing high doses of two intensely neuro-active compounds as a teenager in this setting with little experience is risky and irresponsible. You are fortunate that things worked out ok and "you got away with it". Things aligned for you and you were given a gift. Yet be careful with psychedelics going forward. They are very powerful at high doses.  

[enjoythe3dplayground]

48 minutes ago, Leo Gura said:

Yes, this is precisely correct.

Although there is an even deeper level where you realize that something and nothing are identical and there is nowhere else to go. You can't choose to experience Nothing because you're already experiencing Nothing all the time regardless of whatever you're experiencing or not-experiencing.

That Nothing you encountered was The Void, The Godhead, Mu, or your Original Face as the Zen folks call it.

There are of course much deeper levels of nonduality and more facets you can access with practice.

Be careful taking such large doses and mixing substances. Lower your dose to 125ug of LSD and learn to contemplate.

That’s really interesting, I will do some more research on this.
And 100% agree with what you said about the dosage.

Thank you for taking the time to respond, truly appreciate it.
 

[enjoythe3dplayground]

@Serotoninluv Thank you for your input, I will make sure to do this!