I Don't Feel Love the Same

Protocol: Two grams of PE7 aborts, mixed with lemon juice and rested ten minutes, then swigged whole (UGH, forgot to add any sweetener; it was harsh!) and backed up with 12.5mg of THC in a gummy. Set sail 9:15. This one was long; I kept having the psychological part well after the visual part was finished. 

I found this, while looking for images to put something in the top of this post. It was beautiful to look at, but I also am interested in the article: https://neurosciencenews.com/psychedelics-neurons-consciousness-23772/

My last two trips have been almost entirely nonverbal,  and the most recent of those was four Saturdays ago. Maybe it's two and I'm doing the math wrong. [edited: I know it's four weeks; I checked the calendar. A LOT happened.] I'm not good at math when I'm in this state. I have seriously missed the connection. I don't know if there's a certain amount of this that is how people who are not autistic experience the world on a more regular basis, this sense of quite honestly believing in God. Or having a sense that there ought to be something there to believe in, a feeling, a sensation in my mind that gives me some sense that someone's watching. A sense of connection, that the Universal Intelligence is In. 

I'm still not at all religious. I don't feel a sense of a personal God when I'm on a mushroom trip, but I feel like my body is plugged in to the universe in a way that nourishes and engages with me as a person. I wonder if this is what being religious feels like. I feel cared for, but also responsible in a way that is very different than if I am disconnected from the sense of attachment to other people and the universe and everything around me.

I don't feel necessarily that the mushrooms add powder to the pan on the scale side of believing in God; I don't feel like my likelihood of conceding the argument of a universal intelligence is significantly stronger. I am certainly no closer to agreeing to a bearded man in the sky who tells us what's best for us based on Bronze age mythology. It doesn't make me feel like I understand things psychically in a way that is different from my normal waking consciousness; I'm not "getting messages" or "hearing voices."  But the sense of being connected when my brain is psychedelically enhanced with the mushroom is profoundly different from my ground state. I feel held, connected, loved. If this is what normal religious people feel when they're being religious I can see why they do it.

(To remind anyone coming in late - I usually dictate my trip reports into a text window, typically with a trusted crowd of a couple of like-minded creative people who are also raising mushrooms. Sometimes it goes to a different person, depending on what the topic on my mind is. One of my psychedelic compadres said that I'm putting a lot of pressure on myself - on the contrary, I feel like this revelation is fundamentally liberating, and I'm both excited and delighted to figure this out. The vast majority of the text in these entries is verbatim from my dictation; I go through and clean things up, occasionally flush out an idea or tighten something up. I correct spellings, I redact names.) 

I'm not talking about it or thinking about it in a sense of putting a lot of weight on any person or being a big responsibility for me or a lot of pressure, but there's a very different sense when I've got this feeling of connection and I think about politics. Or I think about the environment. Or I watch a group of people at a family gathering. The emotional stuff sort of sets to the side, and you can see the attention flowing. It is an amazing thing to be tripping and watch something like news footage of Donald Trump working a crowd. I'm not talking about Trump trying to lie his way out of his current situation, but when he is in his charming space, he has a power that is undeniable. The fact that he's managed to make so many things simply untrue in the minds of otherwise rational people is staggering to me. To change the actual nature of a thing is wizardry; the fantasies that dominated my adolescent reading were full of True Names and understanding the nature of things and changing how the acted by using that knowledge. My phone wanted to say "with surgery" instead of "wizardry," which is hilarious on its own but has an entirely different meaning and another kind of change. I'm laughing as I say this. But to be tripping and watching it happen, I can see at least my mind's representation of the thing that comes off of him that is not his ideas. It's like a vapor. I don't know how to otherwise name that. His mana, his aura, his presence, his glamour. The thing that he uses to confuse and befuddle people. And I don't mean this in any sort of Dungeons and Dragons way, but it's very clear watching him that he has an actual power over people that is not intellectual. It is an emotional thing like watching great art. It hits you in a place that is deeply wounded and it plants a seed, and he knows ways to work and wheedle and tease it bigger and make it seem real. Granted, for this to work you have to have sympathetic ground. But I think that there's a lot of bitter resenting angry hateful people who didn't get their way in the race riots who are following his Charles Manson effect. Trump tells them something they want to hear, but he also definitely has a hypnotist voice. Some of it is him personally, as an individual, not as an ideology or a cult figure. 

So this is 2 grams deep with my penis envy aborts. They are quite strong. There's no way to tell without a huge amount of expensive laboratory work, which people may someday once realize that they need to do, but I really feel that the way the mushrooms grow and the way the chemicals balance one another in the individual mushroom is important for the way they work in your head. And I really feel like having cared for them and grown them from culture, I trust them and they know me on a level that is different than something that I could get in a bottle from a pharmacy. And honestly if I were the one doing the prescribing trying to help people figure out what is wrong with the shit in their heads I think that raising the mushrooms and understanding them has been a deep and meaningful schooling for me about the nature of connection, relationships, friendships, and even people I've bumped into on the street. They have radically changed me as a being. 

A great deal of that comes from this basic sensation of being grounded in humanity. I don't know how otherwise to explain that sense. But I normally DO NOT HAVE IT AT ALL. I wish that you could see the capital letters in my voice. That sense that everyone is like me, that the universe is curious about itself and that is why we look at it as the universe's proxy eyeballs, the sense that the universe likes us and wants for us, and me personally, to be OK. And some of this quite frankly verges on religion, and I have no problem with the kind of religion that it verges on. I am currently watching before my eyes, quite open, a dissolving sea where the actual things in the bed have become completely supplanted by other shapes and meaning. I can still see shadows of the walls and the curtains, but there is an entire play being engaged in a layer between what is real and what I imagine in my mind as the room. If I hold my eyes quite still while I'm dictating the visions rise and blossom; looking down at the dictation makes it vanish. But if I hold my eyes still the gears overlay the words. A five-letter word has a 5 tooth gear wrapped around it like the gearing of a an earth moving machine I can't remember the name of (later: a front end loader, a Caterpillar, the kind that has all-terrain geared supports like an army tank instead of wheels.) 

My voice got stuck on a concept - I have to break the logjam in order to talk again. I was stuck on a word and the whole tap of my narrative was wrapped around remembering what that earth-moving thing with multiple wheels is, and it forestalled my power of speech, like holding yourself back to avoid stepping on a baby bird suddenly appearing on the sidewalk. The level of hallucination is absolutely spectacular, and I am trying not to make this entire entry about an appreciation of the beauty of the hallucinogenic experience, but holy world, it is beautiful. I don't think that people who haven't been here with an open and curious mind we'll see anything like this. I think that it will speak to them in low resolution scary imagery because they are afraid of it. The dancing geometry is absolutely spectacular; if you can give it gentle attention and allow it to unfold, it becomes a beautiful swirling complicated pattern that somewhat reminds me of paisleys on an Indian rug... but animated. It looks like the wildlife of a fantasy movie like Avatar. There are things with shaped teeth in them that revolve in multi-sided ways. I can point to artists who quite clearly have a psychedelic understanding of the world, and you will see in a visual platform some of what is literally dancing in front of my eyes. And that doesn't often fully absorb my attention, but holy of holies this is intense. Literally to look at my screen there is knotwork similar to Celtic knots wrapped around every digit and character of my writing as it comes out of my mouth  onto the screen. I love you very much thank you for taking care of me. [My Husband walked into the room, and the dictation just carried it over.]

My husband came in. I can feel his love in a very different way when I am in a psychedelic experience than how I can feel it otherwise. It's like when the mystic voyagers talk about being able to see the cord, the silver cord that binds the Lucid dreamer to the body or the astral self in some of their traditions. I feel, and when I'm deeply tripping, I see, a current moving between the two of us. It's more like a flowing body of water or a shaped wind; it is not as organized as a wire. 

I know where I'm going, what's happening. I'm just trying to be careful with my husband working downstairs. Sometimes I need to keep the barking dog up here with me, even though I'm not very fully up to things, and I can recognize the barking that is going to not stop that will be a problem for him at work on Saturday. I know that it happens very rarely, I also know that it's a thing that frustrates him and if it's feasible for me to just hold on to her upstairs, it keeps her quiet. You see what I am dealing with. It is sometimes easier for me to hold on to the dog even though I am tripping, because I recognize that she is a noise problem sometimes that he can't fix. I don't want for her to be distracted, I want for her to learn better focus she will eventually be a good dog but there is a lot of rough edge.

I got chilled, standing at the head of the stairs yelling at that little dog. I see my grandfather in myself. But I am letting some things happen too early. I am being slack minded sometimes when I should be physical and up and doing and getting the garden fixed and climbing ladders and fixing the house. Some of what is happening is natural aging. I am getting older; I have no argument with those things. For the vast majority I look at men in their fifties and I feel like my body and my brain are in an okay place, but I've got another half century almost certainly, and I have got to get rid of some of this laziness that has grown up in my mind and my body. I recognize it for what it is; it's weeds. It is me attempting to procrasturbate myself into not giving a damn, but I need to recognize that it is sapping vital energy. The fact that your grandfather used a great deal of that vital energy to yell at his wife is not a helpful comment, but he also loved our family in a deep and abiding way that cannot be spoken.  I feel it for him, and I feel it from the pillars of the other parts of my family when I am in a psychedelic understanding. I can see those connections laid like plumbing line, or electrical feed into a city or a house. My grandfather damn near built the house in the country, and he studied the code and he knew the real estate law and he was a realtor and they sold real estate and he was a profound gardener and he corresponded with the group from A&M that was the weird lab. 

I am not at all disrespecting my gifts when I say I wish I had that man's mind. When I am in a deep enough communion with this stuff on a regular enough basis I can feel that love. I can feel that connection like rays of sunshine or like light on a plant. It nourishes and sustains me. I don't have any argument against the idea of the spirit maintaining after death, other than the obvious one; I don't see the evidence. However, when I am connected enough, often enough, I feel so much more love. It is not just the love of my family, but I can sense love almost like a nourishing broth that I swim in, and I don't know if this is how normal people think, and a way that I am different because I am autistic. It seems an exceptionally unfair way to separate someone once you understand that feeling. I am not talking about an emotional experience of feeling cared for; I understand those. I have a lot of those kind of family experiences; I had some trouble with my growing up, but the love of my family has always been strong and my childhood was full of good family. But the stuff that is happening in my mind is not superficial. I don't pretend to be the first person who's gone through any of this deep weird stuff. I am trying to understand it with some Buddha and without any Jesus and the enhanced layers of hallucination that engage when I'm still --  like if I focus my eyes because I know that the wording of the dictation is not the right word but the dictation carries forward, you can't hear me gnashing my teeth and it's very visually a lot. I'm trying to be as non-troublesome as possible to my husband who is working downstairs; this is deep shaking stuff for me. I am okay. I'm shaking and I'm weird and I'm sorry for the gaps in my language. My grandfather and I loved and understood one another on a very different level from a lot of people. Quite honestly I'm only understanding some of it now.

But if this sense of connection, this sense of family bathing me like a nourishing broth goes too long without a refresher, I forget it. My batteries run out; my stores of this sensation dwindle. I do not remember the sense of connection other than to imagine it. Once I imagine it, especially with the psychedelic, it is exceptionally real to me. The love of my family feels different. It's like I can see the calories. I can feel it moving and doing me good. It is difficult to try to explain this because it is not a visual thing; it is not something that I am seeing always visually, it is a thing that I am feeling in my mind, but the connection to the creative that came from my grandmothers and my grandfathers and my father whom I love as an adult despite our often troubling and painful past, but I am only now growing to understand some of the stuff that my Grandfather did and felt. 

For me, a lot of my experience of this is intellectual. I feel a great deal about it, but it doesn't come out in poetry, it comes out in these crystalline ideas. I think that some of what we see when the psilocybin mushroom is connecting to the visual apparatus, is a view of the visual apparatus itself. It's like a sense of having awareness of your glasses. It's spectacular. So much of my understanding of the world has always been in words; it makes complete sense for me to be sitting here talking to my phone about the stuff that I'm seeing, because it's words; it is meaning distilled. And when I hallucinate, I see the shapes of writing; the raw structure of language lying face open to the sky.

I see the grammar of ornament dancing for my personal pleasure and I honestly don't know if my weird little side road education just makes me able to see the brilliant colors in this stuff, but I feel like my witness is genuine and meaningful. I feel like my thought process is probing in a way that not necessarily everyone has approached it.

I sense love in a very different way in my mind when I trip, and for many days thereafter. It is not an intellectual understanding about the balance of the universe, it is a force, a moving dancing energy that goes between people and places and things. It is a thing that I feel when I'm engaged in the psychedelic experience; I can see it. I can see that love. The emotional sauce that for most people makes life happier, more worth living. I think this may be a very different understanding of autism for me, but I think it really does have to do with that inability to sense love. When I am tripping I feel like my nervous system is complete. I feel like my senses are engaged in a way that they can't be in normal reality. And I wonder how much of this is how regular people feel most of the time and it makes me shake. I am a careful, thoughtful, probing human being. My phone keeps trying to make weird language, distorting what I'm saying because the congestion from crying makes my speech unclear. Language is so important to me. It has been my whole life; language has been like the vine that I trip over, but it's also the thing that saves me, hanging from the tree.

When I trip sometimes, it makes me very conscious of how much I have let myself go. In terms of keeping my body up, in terms of connecting with other minds. But it motivates me. It gives me drive. I am working on myself. And being able to feel that emotional connection, even if I have to describe it to myself in language that I can go back and reread between visits to this special altered place. It is definitely a sense that I have grown; and I mean grown, like I have cultivated the ability, and it has grafted on to my sensory apparatus and gives me new input. It is an understanding that I have worked on changing. I think that a lot of the ways that I am difficult with people are very much lubricated with the understanding of the mushroom. I don't know how other to say that.

I have to be fed like an orchid. I have a weird seasonality. I am sorry for the pain that I have caused. I know that I am a difficult person. I come from a line of difficult men.

In a strange and country way, we grew deep into that soil. My Granddad loved us so much and the turning of that earth is deep in a way that I have only touched in my fifties, but he lived it his whole life long. He was a difficult ornery asshole sometimes. He was cantankerous and mean to my grandmother in some ways, but he loved her with a fire that I have never known my life. He fenced and cultivated and plowed those acres in the country and he worked on those ancient tractors and he studied real estate law and was smart and knew all of the changes with code and why, and the deaths that made them make the safety regulations. But his knowledge of the land and his love of us, the rootedness of my family in generations of farms and homes and children is a big sensation that I have only felt when I am in the mushroom, and I don't know if this is how other people feel all the time. And if so, why have people been so mean to me?  I don't understand. Do people born with the right connections feel like this all the time? I am genuinely curious. It explains some things about the ways that people tribalize that I haven't understood. It's a solid working theory, let's say. But the love that my Grandfather felt for this family was a gospel in the country. It was graven into every careful fiber of his work. And knowing it now, I can feel it in my bones. It's the same with the cooking, the gardening, the making of clothes and warm socks and all the things that my family gave to me. I feel them in a substantially different way than before.

I am so full of congestion that my words sound like one another; this makes dictation difficult. My grandfather, it's not going to let me say his name and hear it because of the amount of resonance in my voice from so much emotional snot. I have understood the love that he bore for us intellectually, but when I take mushrooms, I can feel it. I have gotten old and I am not good with my body. I am lazy with my mind and I let weeds grow in the garden that my grandfather would have been ashamed of - although he would have known their names. That is the lineage. And I love this family and it is hard, they often do not understand my love. And I don't mean that in any kind of intellectual way. I don't mean to indicate that they are insufficiently smart to get what I'm saying. I mean that when I'm in this phase, this state of existence, when I am understanding reality in this way, that connection with love and other people and the universe -- I don't know if ordinary people feel this on an ordinary day. If so, it makes what a lot of people experience as normal human connectedness feel like a gift. I recognize it as temporary. I try to absorb it in my intellect, but I can only understand it in words between visits. The understanding of this feeling, however, has been remarkably healing to my mind. I have to almost chant out the syllables to get the dictation to take the right words. But the sensations and the emotion flow through my mind and I feel loved in a physical sense that is almost like warmth.  So much of this comes with a lot of deep emotional baggage letting go. And I've read the articles about the release of trauma, and my friend ED I believe in what you're saying about the shaking. And I will come to you with this. But I think that I feel loved in a way that is very different when I am in the psychedelic state, and I don't know if this is a sense which ordinary people have in the same way that trees orient to gravity or birds sense magnetism in their heads with quantum mechanics. 

I'm not necessarily saying that my record will necessarily be any sort of guidepost for other people, but I feel like this is a conversation we should be having about the way that we sense emotional connection. I don't know if this is unique to my experience of autism, or if autism in general centers around this missing sense, or if this is just a disconnection that a lot of people feel. I recognize other people going through it a lot of times. 

But I feel like the mushroom supplements that sensation that apparently normal people have about the world loving them. About feeling the sensation of family love like a blanket. I have always been able to describe it like a blanket, I have thought about it like a blanket. I HAVE the blanket. My hands helped make it. I literally own blankets and warming things, made with love by members of my family, some of which I helped to work on, or learned lessons while fixing. I have quilts from both my grandmothers. It warms my mind. I think of love that way. But I think of it. It is like handling with careful gloves. It is like oven mitts. I think that this is a basic understanding of my autism that I have never in my life had, and I think that it makes real for me so many experiences of my family life that have never made sense intellectually. It is like viewing a room with a black light, and seeing a radiant vine tracing through everything. It is seeing and feeling loved in my veins in a way that I have never in my life felt. I think this is how many people feel at church; I think this is how many people feel with family. I have never in my life felt this until I had the mushrooms in my mouth. I have missed a great deal. I have been lonely and sad. Other people have tried to reach out and communicate their emotional support and their connection and comfort me with it, but it is a connection I have not been able to feel. And with this sense, this ability and understanding, with this sense I am able to look at my memories of my family and see the love flowing like current through wires, like light shining through glass cells painted with images. It was orderly and intellectual; the way we engaged with one another was mannerly. The way that we sat around that dinner table was kind and thoughtful and prayerful and appreciative of the work that went toward it. And I feel a very different understanding now, like the memories support and feed me. They feel like sunshine on my skin. My face cracks with tears when I think much about it. 

My Granddad's name was from Old English. I looked into the stories. Some of them, I saw the animal skins they were written on; I have looked at the parchments. I understood the calligraphy; it came to me through them. I read, and I studied, and I looked into things. Understanding this love intellectually is a very different experience to bathing in it like a nutrient. I learned to type with a typewriter. My hands are still thoughtful in those ways. I get that from my grandfather and my father. But this sense of being able to bathe in love, to have it connecting you generation over generation to the history of mankind -- I could sense it intellectually, I can see the ladder that gets people up to the higher ground. But to actually feel hands laid upon me in love is different. 

I learned from a man; I think his name is John Marshall, I need to look him up. He taught an honors class at my high school. His thesis was the history of American civilization as realized through secular Calvinism as a governing philosophy. It was a masterpiece of pedagogy. Listening to him speak, I knew in my soul that he had gone to be the beach with the marbles in his mouth like Demosthenes; he told me so himself, but I could TELL. He stood by the surf with marbles in his mouth giving his lectures in a full round voice, because he had read about it, and he wanted to be the best. I need to practice with some marbles. This dictation is making me spit every single select syllable. But I will not let imprecision color my understanding. I have always had a very clear intellectual understanding of love; I have never felt it between me and other people like I do now. My understanding is fundamentally different. I feel like my senses are altered. In some of this, I feel like actual senses have been added; I understand on a day-to-day basis in ways that I never did before my psychedelic experiences. But I have experienced love and human connection and a sense of the underlying connection with the universe that I think may be more part of the normal psychology. 

I think that this is fundamental to my understanding of my autism, and I think that some of this may genuinely be aiming at an understanding of autism in general. I'm not trying to blow my own horn with this line of thought - but I think some of this is new thinking. I have the grammar of ornament. I have the intellectual understanding. I have the vocabulary in the way that a lot of people don't. I can say "wow cool that's awesome" in 50,000 complicated words. But I genuinely feel like that sense of love or connection, or the lack of it, is at the core of many of my problems in life. And the problems of a lot of people. It is that inability to sense human connection. Even if that sense is a hallucination of the normal mind. But I feel like I have a vocabulary after years of therapy and years of art class and going down weird paths by myself and studying the bizarre stuff in libraries where they would hand it to me while I wore cotton gloves. I value. I respect. This sense feels like a novel understanding. I don't feel for certain that this is a new psychology. It is certainly a revelation for me personally and I feel like I am happy to point the way for other autistic people and people who have felt disconnected. I think that this sounds like a very different understanding of autism than anything I have read in the books so far. I don't know how many people this will apply to; my path has always been weird.

But I do feel like being able to stand here with the mushroom in my mind and at least hallucinating the sensation of universal love gives me a very different tack on life. Whether I am able to actually see it in my hallucinating vision or not, I feel love between me and the universe and between me and my family and a kind of universal affection lying around on the ground almost like effervescence. This sense that I have when I'm in the mushroom, this understanding of my autism has never been something that I've managed before despite a lot of reading and a lot of trying to figure out what's going wrong with my head. I don't know if this gives other autistic people the same feeling. I don't know if ordinary people feel connected on ordinary days. I apologize for repeating myself; it's easy to ramble when I'm tripping. So much of the stuff in my mind is pattern, the way that I love is in careful fibers laid together.

[my friend MycelialDawn interjected with a comment about the autistic people she's worked with, and how different it is for each one of them]

I totally agree, each autistic person is their own person. What I'm saying is that my version makes me feel disconnected from the sense of universal love or God's love or family love that I think warms and comforts a lot of human beings, and I don't feel it. I feel like an ant cut off from the colony, a hiveless bee who cannot smell the Queen. When I am in the mushroom, when I am in a psychedelic experience, my sensation of that support is tangible. I can lean on it like fibers that make up the universe; I understand how to weave with them. And this understanding is very different from how I feel when I'm not in a psychedelic experience. I have experienced love. I have understood love; I have thought about it. I have considered the way that the moral Universe tends toward goodness. I'm not talking here about an intellectual decline. But the actual sensation that emotionally I am okay, that being able to draw strength from my family history, being supported and loved and cared for, is a thing that I forget. It is a thing that I have to soak up like an orchid between times; I need to be watered deeply with it, and allowed to rest between waterings. It is an understanding that I do not have with the world. I am not generally a good person about keeping connected. I am excellent about thinking about. But I do wonder, for a lot of autistic people if some of this sense is what we're missing. My mental experience of love is intellectual; it has a lots of moving parts. 

I can visualize the gears in my poetry. My mind runs on careful rails. Some of it has a tolerance like glass, there's not much wiggle room. But this sense, this knowing deep in my bones that I am loved, that the universe is a warm place, that my family loves me and understands my weirdness and allows space for it, this sensation is something that I only have in a deep trip. I don't know that any of it would carry through with microdosing. But my sense that there is energy going back and forth between people and between the universe and us has become more true the more I have leaned into my understanding of my mind and the way that I function as a genuine human being even with my flaws and my inability to feel the connecting energy that I think a lot of people feel. I have never felt that in my life until I tripped. That sense that the universe is generally in favor of our existence has always been kind of an intellectual gamble. I feel like now I can look at the current going through the wires that power a lot of our lives. I feel like I see that connecting energy and that support that we lean on, community and togetherness and fellowship. I recognize intellectually the network of family and the mental and emotional support and the people that I talk to, and things like that, but the actual emotional feeling of something leaving my mind and going to another person and then coming back from that other person to me is science fiction.

I think about it. It happens in my mind. But with the psychedelic vision I can pull back and see my existence in the world as connected with a huge network of cabling almost or more like currents in a river, or aqueducts. With the mushroom I can look at it intellectually and see with a sense of feeling love, feeling supported, like the environment is focused on my well-being and supportive of my life; I have a very different understanding.

[my friend MycelialDawn says that she feels love like this most days, but especially when tripping]

I envy you, Dawn. I have wished for this my whole life. It is something that I am so in awe of when I see it, and so abashed by as a thinker that it is staggering. I am yawning and trying to come sideways off of this trip. I'm deciding if I want more or not. Because this is going in a very deep direction, but also the peak is fading. I will feel the sense of human connection for probably two weeks or more. I will feel the energy of people looking at me in the grocery store and wanting to be seen as human beings. My ability to somehow single them out special for attention is still something that I don't understand, but I have started to see it almost like a problem some times; I find myself involved in a web of conversations that I am unfamiliar with navigating. I am extremely attuned to the working world for a period after this connection; I see network in everything. I watch people and see trails of where they've gone and where they're moving, like tracing after-images. I see biological mechanism. But the thing is, I actually feel it, and normally I see it, I study it, I look at it with a camera, I design weaving patterns and white poetry and all of this intellectual stuff. And I'm going to leave white poetry even though I said WRITE poetry, because... a lot of my poetry was pretty damn white. It was English literature poetry. Structure and rhythm and classical allusions, wrapped up in language so contrived it was almost existing in its organization more than in its emotion. But my sense in it of the structure, the pattern, the understanding of the universe through its careful manipulation via small units of rhyme and rhythm was not emotional as much as intellectual. I have written intellectual poetry. It kind of hurts your brain. It is beautiful and crystalline and has more form than meaning. But as a form of strutting one's intellectual feathers it was spectacular stuff. 

I was going to literature classes and learning things about ancient Greek and Middle English and the way that their languages structure their emotions, and all of it has always been a thing that I have read about and thought about with my mind. To actually think of the emotional stuff and feel that connection is something that I have only experienced since I started raising mushrooms. Or  since I was first given mushrooms in chocolates, before I raised any myself. It was fascinating writing that kind of poetry and understanding that structure of language in terms of its assonance, consonants, rhyme, and rhythm. I wrote a whole long song cycle in iambic hexameter, with in-rhymes and consonance rolling through it like church bells. But feeling loved has always been evasive. I can think loved, I can understand myself to be cared for; it is a very different thing. It is like the difference between a bath and soup. To feel connected to the universe is so amazing, so spectacular. I recognize that I can't function in ordinary life like this, fully unfolded like I am right now. I can't work day-to-day with every door and every window in my mind wide open. When I am like this, everything is emotional. Everything pulls at the threads of my being. And that sounds so like hallucination mumbo jumbo, but there is a definite sense of connecting between myself and the friends who are reading along as I talk my way through this trip. 

I had a spectacular visit with my psychiatrist and his - I'm not sure if she was a postdoctoral student or if she was interning with him at his practice, but a new person that I had not zoomed with before. I will have to have another meeting with him in a few months. He treats adult autism as a main line of his work, and he works with a variety of psychoactive armamentum that helps various people get along in daily life. But I don't know if he knows some of this stuff. I mean, quite honestly, the sensation of feeling Universal Love sounds very hippie-dippy, it sounds like a lot of flower child nonsense, but this is a hard-won understanding after years of challenging therapy. I beat the crap out of this in terms of studying and reading and understanding on a THOUGHT level, but the actual emotional feeling is novel. I have never in my years felt this okay. I have never been able to sense a feeling like my community supporting me emotionally and my family loving me and my husband supporting me and the dogs and everything buoying me up. I feel like the universe bears me up when I am tripping like this. I feel love and I absorb it like a plant root. One of the conversations that I had with my doctor was what we are getting at with dosing, why I have been going back with regular weekly trips and why I miss it if I'm gone. It is not just that the trip is cool and awesome, although I have to admit that these experiences are spectacularly cool and I am having an amazingly awesome time, like an intellectual experience of riding a roller coaster. I feel like I am aware of that vital energy that engages human life on a day-to-day basis in a very different way. And because for me it is impossible to segregate the psychedelic experience from the sensation of being loved and connected, I don't know how much of it is normal. I don't know how much of this is my personal experience of psychedelics, how much of this is my personal experience of autism, how much of this is my own issues, and how much of this could inform the therapy of other autistic people.

I really wish that I had been diagnosed young. It's not necessarily that I would be a radically different person, but I do wish that I had had an autism diagnosis when I was a kid, because it has given me so many more ways of understanding of how my mind works and how I am different from other people and what what I'm missing. If you know the part that is missing, you can work around it. It is like being able to recognize that everyone else is moving to sounds that you are unable to hear. I feel like I am watching people in a flash mob dancing together because they all know the same song which is playing over the loudspeaker, and I don't hear the music. You will see me in my daily life walking around with an earbud in my ear almost constantly, because this is always a way for me to escape and seek solace in words. The language for me it is a way that I can go into an intellectual understanding that doesn't need the emotional content; it helps to soothe and calm my mind when feelings are confusing or the world presents too much stressful material at once. Language is a way of getting out.

And the other thing is, having an appointment with my psychiatrist was away to introduce him to my blog. I want for him to be able to engage with this intellectually as a record of my psychological experience, but also I really do feel like psychedelic therapy is going to prove transformative for a lot of people with connection problems. I feel like depression is a connection problem. I feel like anxiety is a connection problem. I feel like a lot of this has to do with the wiring in the brains of autistic people that makes us anxious with other people, and makes us good at figuring out systems, and lets us recognize patterns. I think that a lot of autistic people connect intellectually to a realm of things that non-autistic people connect to emotionally. I think that I think about a lot of things that most people feel about. I know the chemical names of the neurotransmitters that make me too anxious; I know the chemical names of the stuff that I took to try to make me less anxious and more happy, the SSRI's and SNRI's and the benzodiazepines. I know that my psychiatrist, and quite frankly most of the profession, admits that the process of trying to find the right medication for depression and anxiety is throwing pasta at a wall. He had the insight to agree that psychedelics were likely to be the right thing for my particular issues of the emotional trauma causing my depression, but I don't know if he fully comprehended how powerful they would be in my life, and how changing they would be in my mind. I don't know if he really understands. I feel fairly certain just based on the conversation that we've had in sessions, that he has some limited psychedelic experience himself, but very very circumscribed and the kind of thing that you can do and still keep a clinical position with a respected university hospital. I figure if he can read my blog, it gives him access to something that he can't officially study. 

He can read about the fairies dancing in my backyard. I am so overjoyed to see mayflies in the garden in October. With all of the brutal digging they've done and the noise and everything else in the creek it has been such a massive disruption and these little tiny guys they are maybe a quarter of an inch long and almost entirely invisible without my glasses on when I look at them up close, but I see them dancing through the yard in small groups. They are a kind of Ephemeroptera; they live for only hours or days as adults, only long enough to mate and lay eggs. They're considered ecological bellwethers; if you have mayflies you have healthy water. Our creek is laughing after the floods. Having introduced my psychiatrist to the blog, I can have a little bit of a conversation with him in this writing, about the way my mind is working with this medication, about what it feels like for me. Having gone through multiple sessions with me and trialed multiple drugs, he has some idea of how I experience psychoactive medication, and he has my case history in his files. I've always striven to have a rigorous witness of my mental state when I'm doing this kind of work, and none of those medications made me feel RIGHT, they just made different parts of my mind feel numb. The psilocybin makes me feel right with the world, for days or weeks at a time. 

I'd be willing to hazard that there is some chemical balance in the brain on feeling connected. Some place where we either believe that everything is against us or everything is for us. I don't know what chemical makes that happen; it's probably tied up in oxytocin and the mechanisms that make us fall in love and pair-bond and stay together to support our families and tribes. It's mixed with dopamine and serotonin and all that other stuff buried in the brain anatomy. But if I'm going to start showing my brain to researchers online, there's an exceptionally rigorous record of my experience. I pride myself on having to rewrite as little as possible; I am in my writing mind while I dictate, the mind that writes, the mind that teaches and tells and creates. Working my way through James Fadiman's Your Symphony of Selves, I am recognizing different aspects of my personality, and this thinking/writing/speaking self is one of my core selves. 

I started with two grams of penis envy aborts, and they are quite strong. I backed it up with 12.5 mg of live rosin THC gummy. I feel generally much more connected to other people and more genuinely in my emotions with some THC going through my system. Once again, I don't know if this has to do with my personal autism or if this is anything to do with autism as a mechanism, but I function in a much more connected way with other people, and I am better able to intuit and respond to the ways that they apparently expect me to. I have always been somewhat awkward with my body language, partly because so much of the stuff that typically generates body language is based on an emotional experience that I'm generally not having. I'm having emotional experiences. They just don't get to show up on my body because they would cause trouble. To actually have some sense of my normal experiences connecting with those of other people is mind altering. Quite honestly I feel like that has been one of the biggest changes in me since April. Getting rid of the depression was accomplished by connection. I'm not entirely certain of how much of which part chemically helps with which thing emotionally. I just know that the combination of the two seems to supply that void.  I can soak up that understanding and store it like a tuber, or like I said, like an orchid root. I need spells of dryness between. I need periodic inundations.

One of the things that my psychiatrist and I talked about was managing frequency. These Saturday mornings definitely impact my schedule; I still can't fold laundry at this point. I mean, I really could if I wanted to push all of this thinking meaning stuff away, but I feel like this is the live wire. I feel like this is the important work

I can definitely say that four weeks of no session was a lot. I also had very emotionally and intellectually complicated experiences during that time. I had reserves in store. I was well planned. But today I will probably have to have a nap and then I'm only good for a certain amount of basic housekeeping stuff. I do so much mental work but it's exhausting, but if I don't keep plowing and cultivating that field, the weeds are swift and pernicious.

So hopefully, this morning is a very deep cut, and this floats me through at least a week. Next week my Husband will be on a vacation in another state. I will be getting ready to go to teach in Houston. I am not fully mentally prepared for that, but next week I will probably spend a great deal of my trip thinking about the connection we build hand to hand, teacher to student. Weaving has been a fundamental thing in my life, but silk is even more so. I lost touch with it for a while. I have still not fired up the kettle this year, and I really need to reel some silk before I should be teaching students. I know the way, I just need to rake the leaves off the path. On the very good side, my pedagogy is excellent. The structure of my workshop across three days is rock solid, and I know fairly well within an hour or so which concepts should have been communicated and what the students should be able to get, understanding-wise, at various parts of the weekend. There is always a variety of understanding and there is always a variety of effort, but the course itself is solid. It is made of sound timber and I am proud of the work therein.

So anytime during class that I am overwhelmed or that I don't know what I'm thinking, I can lean back on years of careful refinement and getting this workshop sorted out by literally taking it to an SCA encampment where one of my students let me play guinea pigs with her friends to see how many people could work around one station and how long we could pay attention to one particular kind of thing. I remain in her debt.

But now, having set up this structure, I can know feel a very different Dynamic going on in class. I have a very different understanding of how people are struggling with the material. My teaching has changed somewhat but part of it is that I can feel them paying attention in a very visceral way. I can sense the focus in the room. Previously I've always understood it in terms of people being noisy or people being busy, because once we get enough focused work that it becomes automatic, we will tend to talk, and that's usually the time for the next lesson, but now I have a very different sense of energy in the classroom. It is not a psychedelic experience of its own, but it's a post-psychedelic experience, a post-psychedelic understanding. I feel the energy in the classroom almost like a surf, or the tides of the ocean, or a breeze. It is a thing with which I engage with my surfboard, but it has a pattern and an energy that is basic to the way that human mind works. And some of this again, I think that I have never felt in my years of teaching. I've understood the pedagogy, I've analyzed how it works with how people feel frustration or engagement with the work, I recognize the best ways to chop this material small so that it fits into the time allowed and gets the most understanding into people's hands and brains; I've had to learn a whole lot of body language that has to do with managing and manipulating groups of people in order to teach effectively. 

Body language for me in general is a foreign language. I observe it, I replicate it, I get excellent results. It does good things for my head. I have fun with it. When it is bad it is horribly isolating and I fear my human fellows a great deal because I know that they will pick on me and be mean to me and isolate me even further. I have still not had a conversation with my dad yet about why I always ended up in the tent with the profoundly retarded camper in all of our Scout camps, but I understand now that he was just as socially ostracized, he just didn't have the weapons with which to fight back intellectually. I was always fascinated, torn between being sympathetic to his plight and frustrated with him being added on to my own situation. His dad was, from what I remember, pretty much useless, and he would show up with things like a dining tarp to sleep in, and all night long he shivered like he had malaria, because he didn't shiver quietly like a normal person; it was a full body seizure looking thing. But when I asked him he would say he was just cold. I shared stuff with him as much as I could, trying to make him feel better. Sometimes it meant we were both wet. I don't know that my dad has any understanding of how much that messed me up. Smart as I was, doing excellently well in school and making good grades and all of that, I was the other handicapped kid in Scouts. 

I hope that getting out of the woods was good for him. I tried to be his friend. He was not an easy person to befriend; his intellectual handicap was such that he was friendly but then also cantankerous and exceptionally forgetful, clumsy, and generally problematic when you're trying to enforce discipline in a group of Scouts. Between the two of us we were Piggy in The Lord of the Flies.

I would wake up, wet, confused, not getting why everybody was mad at me, in the middle of some beautiful piece of woodland where I was out camping with my dad and all the other Scouts, and it was all supposed to be so fun and so awesome, and they hit me and they picked on me and they were mean to me and it was both awesome and miserable. And I think that a lot of that has to do with my autism, my inability to connect. It has to do with the way that I reacted when pushed, it has to do with the way that they fought with me and bullied me and abused me as a kid. I don't think my dad knows a lot of this, some of it is stuff that I'm telling him now. I have communicated with him during a recent trip. I always felt his love and attention with me in the woods. I recognized in the same way that someone reading bad closed captioning recognizes the meaning of a television show, that he loved me and that this was a thing that was meaningful and important for him. And I tried to enter into it in that spirit.
I think that the autism helped to create a wedge between me and a lot of those other boys. It gave them a thing to hurt me with. It gave me a thing to identify with, even though I didn't know that that was what was going on. I focused on being careful, being right, knowing the rules, learning all of the merit badges, checking the packing list, ensuring that the fire stayed going. I worked the system like an alcoholic. But I didn't feel the love. 

I can feel the love that I hold in my mind for other people. Some of it is intellectual. It is a crystalline thing in some cases, an understanding, an appreciation for another mind. With some people it is deep like trees. It goes through my life and shapes me as a person. But my understanding of that love ends at my fingertips. I don't sense except when I am in this kind of psychedelic enrichment I don't sense that affection coming back to me. I can imagine. And that is the best thing most of the time I can picture it bridging a gap like the electric chemical neuron gap for one kind of signaling turns into another, I can imagine the sensation of how I feel for other people being felt for me, and it is remarkably comforting. Especially for those people that I'm close to, and the people with whom I share a great deal of my emotional content. But there's still that gap; there's still air between you telling me how you feel and me thinking about how that would feel if I felt it.

"I think these molecules open up just a whole new way of thinking about mental illness. If you look at the underlying cause of addiction or mental illness or obsessive-compulsive disorders or eating disorders, my view is that a lot of it comes from a sense of disconnection. Psychiatrists sometimes call it a "spiritual break." Often a person has lost their sense of meaning and purpose. When a psychedelic experience can reestablish that sense of connection and relationship, then these symptoms can begin to resolve themselves in a remarkable way. It's going to change how people think about how we treat these illnesses, how psychiatrists treat them. " from this article. 

I've done the reading. I know the ways that we can understand God according to the Christian apologists. I understand the Via Negativa, I understand the Via Analogia. I've read Gregory. I've read and studied a lot of these things about how we're supposed to know and understand the universe, and I have always pictured love like warmth, like sunshine or like eating good food. But with mushrooms in my mouth, and for some weeks after, it is a live sense for me, in the same way that I feel the sun on my skin or gravity. I can sense not only that I matter in the universal scheme, but that I represent the universe examining itself and having a human experience, and it is a felt sense rather than an intellectual understanding. For all that I am putting an awful lot of words around this feeling, I am trying to express a thing that is not wordable. I am impressed that my auto dictation managed to swallow that chunk; I think I adverbed the noun or something. XKCD's Language Nerd. But I find myself going into a place that is beyond my ability to wrap words around, in spite of having a lot of words and a really good go.

The best way that I can explain it is the apologist version of the Via Analogia. I can try to explain what this feels like. I can try by similarity to approach the understanding. The weirder it gets the more I start talking like a philosophy major. But I'm not talking about philosophy so much as I am talking about brain chemistry, the ways that I engage and pull back, the things that alter my understanding of the daily world. I feel like someone who has just been in the past few months introduced to color, or to sound. This sense, this ability to recognize things going back and forth between people, feels like I can taste the current of electricity in the air or something. It is phenomenal. I certainly wish that I had had more of this understanding through more of my life, although in some senses I think that I wouldn't have been prepared to understand it in the same way that I am now if I hadn't had the struggles.

I know that I said this earlier, but I feel fairly certain reading the research now and looking at the way modern psychoanalysis and psychiatry is leaning, depression and loneliness and anxiety are all different facets of the same unfortunate gem that grows in a lot of us because we can't feel connected. Feeling connected instantly and quite radically alleviated my depression. I also felt like I needed to run screaming through the streets naked proclaiming how awesome this was because didn't everybody know it was the best thing ever, and I recognize that I have been an insufferable ass about it sometimes. But just like driving an old Volkswagen, people with this kind of mental problem become specialists in the way our weird brains work; we have to interact very intellectually with physicians and analysts, and I am fortunate that I've had the ability to read and digest a great deal of the literature in ways that I can communicate about my lack of communication. But being suddenly in the middle of it is like being in a ship at sea. It is both awesome and overwhelming. I recognize in many cases that I am very good at it, partly because I've been faking it carefully for so many decades that I understand deliberate nuances of my facial gestures that other people probably wouldn't even have considered. I recognize myself in Dangerous Liaisons when I hear the Marquise de Merteuil talking about stabbing a fork into the back of her hand underneath the table while smiling and making polite conversation. I've done it.

And so when I have all of a sudden this rich and meaty and voluminous understanding of all of the ways in which the universe supports us and wishes us well, and this genuine sense of being raised up and supported by my friends and my family, it is paradigm shifting. There's nothing other than that to explain it. It really is like I can suddenly hear. After years of being deaf, I hear voices that I've only known through been reading all along. It's not a detailed psychic sense or anything like that; it is not a sense of being able to apprehend or manipulate messages but I feel the current emotionally that I have never been able to feel outside of the psychedelic experience, and then the residual echoes that populate my daily life lately with such fantastic synchrony. When I saw three women walking down the path on the Katy Trail making the gesture of Shiva, at first I really saw Shiva. The goddess was there for me in a way that I have never felt in my life. I was not tripping then, it was just my post-psychedelic way of relating to the world, but that sense of looking at the universal and seeing the wink, the recognition that the universe is on our side, and the recognition that these patterns... things like mythology, like Joseph Campbell, like Sigmund Freud, like Karl Jung, these things echo through our lives again and again and I've always known them as if by Braille. I've always had a separation from the sensation of knowing. My understanding has always been done as an intellectual exercise. I have always argued from inside a black box.

At some point in my literature degree we studied Virginia Woolf; I think it was "To The Lighthouse." Some of that stuff has gotten blurry. But I remember very distinctly an entire class devoted to a discussion about the modernist belief that one can never know another person. One of the characters lays her head against another character, and muses that she's unable to know. That's me. I have existed in that condition my whole life. I don't think it's textual modernism. I don't think it's my critical theory. I do think that it is a way that my autism works in my brain. But when she thought about being unable to understand that other person, I felt, "Of course." Is there any other way? I felt recognition. I felt that it is the basic condition of my humanity is that I cannot truly connect with another human being. I can read his notes about how he feels; I can write detailed complicated explications of my own explaining my thought, but I can't know the other person. There is a barrier at the bone. My skull separates my understanding from everyone I know unless I type it out or say something with my mouth. I do not feel that way now. I don't necessarily feel that I understand people differently, I don't think that their ideas impact my mind differently, but I sense something going back and forth which has always been to me an imagination. I sense a current that I think that a lot of people are fully unconscious of. I think that for the majority of human beings this is a ground state. I think that this sense of tribal connectedness and the sense of belonging to a hive and a pack and a group has always been for me purely intellectual. It's not now, I feel it now. But until the past few months this was not the case.

I remember reading Terry Pratchett talking about how the witch Granny Weatherwax inhabited the mind of a falcon or an eagle and saw the world as a complicated interaction of stoop and updraft and lift, currents in the wind made visible. I have recognized those currents in human affairs my whole life. I can put on the feeling of how things ought to feel. I actually read about some autistic person who learned to make the faces of people he saw in his daily life and then try to imagine in his body what that feeling felt like that made them make the face. I'm not that deliberate, but that's me. I literally make appropriate faces on my face on a moment to moment basis in order to engage in a relatively normal way with colleagues, friends, students, and family. I am constantly adjusting my expression; I am aware after hours studying in the mirror of how my eyebrows work, what my angles look like, and how to express emotions that should be appropriate. I don't mean this to indicate by any means that I've been a cold person; I've always felt warmth with people, I've always engaged and enjoyed community. But I have always done it through this mask. And I recognize through a lot of the reading on autism that masking is as problematic as it is helpful, but for me it is my main way of engaging with other human beings. If I don't make my face say the right things when you tell me your story, you will be angry with me or you will ostracize me or you will not feed me when it's time for the pack to be fed or you will leave me alone on the playground looking at bugs when everybody else was doing something else. It's a very basic human fear, this being cut off. And so we learn to mimic and we learn to fit in and we learn to accommodate. I think that some of this is normal human psychology; I don't think all of it is my autism. I think some of this is just my experience as a human being. But I certainly feel that my autism and my weirdness before I knew the name autism have given me a sense of handling the world using implements, like trying to write while holding the pencil with tongs. I have learned to make facial expressions and pleasant conversation and socially appropriate eye contact in the same way and at the same time as I was learning to drive and to type and to build an intellectually sound argument. They are skills I rely on. I recognize in the literature of autism that masking can be very problematic, but I think that some of this throws the baby out with the bath water and ignores the fact that for some of us this has been the only way. I don't know why people kicked me, I don't know why they put signs on my back and made fun of me and all of this other hateful stuff, but those fears are basic human fears and we adapt and we train ourselves and we learn not to be the one getting the sign on our back. And school and scouting were very hard for that.

I feel like some of this comes after years of therapy and so I have an understanding of how things work. I feel like some of this is de novo from the psychedelic making a huge difference in the way that I perceive and engage with reality.

Some of this I am envisioning as a conversation between me and my therapist, me and my psychologist, me and my psychiatrist. I have every intention of getting in touch with the psychologist I saw weekly for three years after my autism diagnosis, and sharing some of this with him, because it radically affects not only my course of treatment, but his understanding of my mental illness. And, if he's honest with himself, I think that some of this will affect his understanding of autism and human connection. Partly I'm just excited to show him that I am well. I think that it says something for me both intellectually and as a patient and as a human being that I really want to have another therapy appointment where I can show my psychologist that I am happy. Where I can show him that all of our careful and not always productive work helped. I still don't think that I would have been able to make any of these breakthroughs without the psychedelics, but once I had the admin power over my subconscious in my hands, I had the understanding of three years of weekly discussions with a rigorous mind to help me figure out what I was doing. I was quite Frank with him, and I'm going to let that stand as a Rocky Horror Picture Show reference because that amuses me, but I was quite honest with my psychologist about the fact that I had a certain amount of transference where I wanted for him to be pleased with me as a father figure, and I wanted him to be proud of me. I feel like I grew beyond him, and I feel like we had good closure around that particular issue, but his therapeutic framework would not stretch or bend and insists on seeing the difficulties of the mind as constantly fixable through conversation and analysis. He's got a very Freudian style. Somewhat ironically, it is not at all what I was looking for when I found him; I had done a Psychology Today provider search, looking for cognitive behavioral therapy because it looked promising. He uses that with some of his childhood clients, but he considers that once the intellect is developed, it needs to have more of a Freudian dialectic in order to sort things out. I think this modality is wrong - or at least that it doesn't fully understand the situation. I will probably tell him that I think he is wrong in a few thousand words. I love him very dearly as a human being. He supported me in an exceptionally difficult time in my life. I genuinely hope that seeing me better will be good for him, and I genuinely also hope that seeing me radically better in a different modality than the treatment that he thinks is the only one that works, will be intellectually real for him. I feel like it was for my psychiatrist.

I'm not trying to say that everybody needs mushrooms. I am willing to go so far as to say that every human being feels the need for connection or at least the emotional feeling of connection. Mushrooms give me that. Thinking about it in a wide variety of intellectual frameworks and therapeutic modalities never did. He did work with me during some of the psychology aspect of my psychiatry; I would go to one doctor and get my meds adjusted and then spend two weeks talking to the other doctor about how it made my head feel. The difference between those sessions trying to figure out how to get through my daily life without what was becoming a crippling level of anxiety and emotional dread and a gray foggy depression that ate up all my joy and what I've experienced with psychedelics has been night and day. It is not the same kind of medicine.

I'm back out in the yard again. I find that sunshine helps to ground me. Lying in the sun and watching the life in the garden unfold makes me feel very connected with the natural world and part of all of its great mysteries. There are hundreds of the tiny mayflies. None of them is much bigger than a fruit fly, although their tiny tails catch the sunlight like gossamer and they look like tiny dancing fairies. The sheer numbers of them indicate not only good things about our watercourse but about the health of the summer. I am seriously concerned about global warming and all of those things but at the same time I've got to garden, I need to relate to the plants and the bugs and the sun and the trees.

This is the way this happens. It comes out in these phenomenally deep and intense racking sobs at the beginning, and then I go through the powerful thinking part. I am currently at the stage of grounding, reconnecting, getting some sunshine and watching the mayflies dance around, taking a breath. I'll eat here in a minute, and then get on with my day.