I had a very interesting experience recently.

A few days ago, I was wandering through the forest, just seeing where it would take me. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw something bright red off the path. As I got closer, I realized it was just a boundary marker. I looked around and about 10 meters further in the undergrowth, I saw a large red mushroom. It was the first time I had ever found a fly agaric, and I immediately went over to take a closer look. Suddenly, they were everywhere about 20 or 30 in various stages of maturity. One caught my eye, and I sat down to talk to it. When I finished, the clouds parted, and the mushroom was bathed in golden evening light.

I had wanted to do a ceremony with these mushrooms for a while, but I initially decided against it because I wasn’t sure and didn’t feel ready.

That night, I had a very intense dream. I was in the same forest, but everywhere there were fly agarics, only much larger, about the size of pumpkins. I saw a small, mysterious figure in an orange-red robe with white spots, bent over in a hollow. I think that was the mushroom spirit. Suddenly, I heard a voice telling me many things, but I can only remember one part: it said in Latin, "Accept the gift that has been given to you." I continued on and came across two small men, white and red, with round fly agaric heads. I think they were dwarves. They had a large cart filled with fly agarics and gave off a friendly impression.

That changed my mind. I remembered what a friend had told me about Ayahuasca: the plant calls you. And that’s what happened. The next day, I had to work, and then I had a day off. So, right after work at 10:00 PM, I packed my backpack to spend the night in the forest. I went near where I had found the mushrooms, made a fire, laid out my sleeping bag, and collected four mushrooms. I managed to eat two and could only take one bite of the third before I almost threw up. I buried one and placed the bitten one in the fire.

The comeup was very pleasant; everything felt soft, like a fairy tale world. I could feel it getting stronger and got into my sleeping bag. I had to vomit several times in between, but I felt like it was cleansing me. I’ve worked a lot with LSD before, and the mushroom directly connected to the insights I had from that, but in a much more intense and clearer way. I went into the ceremony with two open questions: Is man God? And why did we leave paradise? Both were answered by putting me in God’s role. Everything that existed was me. There was no beginning, no end, and apart from me, there was nothing. As a human, I lack the completeness of God to make such an existence anything but hell. We are not complete for a very specific reason: to have something that drives us. It is the creative force. Without it, life would not evolve but die. Without it, there would be no beauty, no complexity. Without it, life would be meaningless. And so my second question was also answered: Why did we leave this perfect world where we lived in harmony with nature? To create something that didn’t exist before. To bring life to growth, to develop ourselves further.

My goal will no longer be to become complete; I will be complete in death anyway. I will accept the gift of my life as it is. It is an opportunity to create more than what is. To discover something new, to bring life to places that have never been explored. I see the future and the greatest potential for growth in space. As humans, we have the unique ability to make this step a reality.

This experience disturbed me greatly in some ways because the lesson was harsh, and I had to suffer a lot to learn it. But the more I reflect on it, the more it makes sense why I saw these things. I was in an existential crisis, and the mushroom sensed that, which is why it called me. It will take a long time to process everything it wanted to show me, but I can already feel how it has cleansed me, washed away barriers, and ultimately given me the foundation to end this crisis.

This was my first time working with fly agaric. I was very scared of it because I had heard many horror stories. It was anything but pleasant. It was definitely risky to do this alone at night in the forest with such a quantity. But that’s what made the experience authentic. I met the mushroom personally, 1on1 , in its home. Anything else would have been filtered the experience. I think it was absolutely worth it. And I am deeply grateful for the experience. Unlike LSD, this experience was much clearer and more focused. I was able to take away much more from this ceremony than with LSD. It was an experience that grounded me more in my environment and my culture. We Germans lost the deepest part of our culture to Christianization and the witch trials, but this showed me how deep it truly goes and how closely we are connected to our nature. I never would have thought that such a powerful mushroom is native to our forests.