Or rather...I almost killed myself.

This was the strangest trip I've ever had, and I'll try to condense my thoughts because I recorded an hour of it, right when things spiraled and nearly got out of control.

I'll be uploading it to the internet at a later date, but for now I just want to take the time to process what happened and share what was most profound to me.

I learned three things last night, or perhaps I was reminded of three truths.

NUMBER ONE: It's okay to be insignificant.

NUMBER TWO: It's okay to not matter.

NUMBER THREE: I'm not afraid of death.

It's hard for me to try and give an abridged version of my experience, because I think that every little detail is important, but I'll do my best to keep it focused (I probably won't though).

Keep in mind that I had both my vision and hearing compromised, I had taken EXACTLY 3g of mushrooms (I have a scale), and I decided to chew them up into a paste and swallow. I debated on blending them with water, but decided against it for control purposes.

What normally happens during my dark and silent trips is that I experience a descent into my subconscious. I cycle through visions, episodes, snippets of things my mind creates or recalls, and then there's an out of body sensation, a period where I leave my body and become one with something greater.

That's a grossly simplified version of it, anyway.

But this time, that didn't happen, at least not in the same way.

I experienced a similar series of events, but they were...rushed? Meaningless? The things my mind created were devoid of profundity, and before I knew it I thought the trip was done. After an hour.

Every "symptom" of a trip vanished, and after a few journeys to tinkle I was ready to watch some YouTube on my phone before falling asleep.

Only after realizing that I wasn't paying attention to anything that was happening did I come to the conclusion I was still tripping, so I put it away, slipped on my headphones and eyewear, laid back, and waited.

After a lengthy conversation with myself, I reasoned that the truest definition of peace was nothingness, and became saddened after thinking that true peace was impossible if there was something awaiting us after death. If Heaven, Hell, reincarnation, or any other variant of an ethereal existence awaited us upon dying, then true peace was impossible. Therefore, the very concept of peace, that being a state of experiencing nothing, was tragic irony.

Then I realized that the oneness I'd been feeling, that out of body experience where my physical self melted and I merged with something greater, some oceanic consciousness, perhaps a cosmic sea of recycled mass, had to be what it felt like to die.

And I wanted to explore that.

I wanted to know what it felt like to die.

So I held my breath.

Now, I'd done this before during a 1-2g trip; the waves of the experience came with a slowness of time, such that one breath felt like an eternity, and at that dosage I always knew I could make the decision to resume breathing again.

But this time, I didn't want to? It's not that I'm suicidal. I consider life precious and by no means do I think it's my time yet. But as I held my breath and felt the intimate cadence of my pulse; how it beat regularly, then slowed, then grew erratic with need, I treasured it. The process of dying, and dying slowly on stretched currents of time, fading away and feeling my entire body relax in stages, as if life left in waves, was blissful.

The process of dying was so blissfully, so simplistically, peaceful.

I thought I had control of it, this game of teasing death, but I didn't, not fully, and it took a great effort to will myself to breathe again, and when I did it felt like what I'd imagine it feels like to be born.

My eyelids were fluttering and my back was arching as my lungs were fighting for air and the muscles in my arms and legs and face were spasming. It took forever for me to stabilize my breathing, and when I was able to sit up and stand my body felt like it was collapsing in on itself, as if my flexing, twitching abdomen was a black hole.

And then, for the next fifteen or so minutes, I fought against the urge to lay back down and stop breathing for good.

That's how wonderful it felt.

As I felt myself slipping away, I remember clearly saying to myself, "I'm not afraid of death."

And that lack of fear frightened me as I later recorded my thoughts.

What has this taught me?

NUMBER ONE: Dosages need to be respected. Going from 1 to 2g isn't much, but 2 to 3 is monumental, especially if you're depriving yourself of your senses. I now think that it's best for most people to take things in half gram increments, meaning from 1 to 1.5, 2, 2.5, etc.

NUMBER TWO: I need to have conversations with myself about death and my own self-worth, as well as the dangers that shrooms can present when taken irresponsibility. Also, was I thinking irrationally? It didn't feel like I was, and yet, I almost killed myself in the name of curiosity. "Curiosity killed the cat," as they say.