Breaking Through to the Other Side: How a Journey Inward Changed My Life

Writing contributed by Daniel Berdichevsky

One of the greatest experiences anyone can have is that of psilocybin mushrooms. It really is like opening an entirely new doorway to perception. After such experiences you are simply incapable of ever looking at the world the same way again. It is almost as though we as a collective are living our lives on a surface level unconscious assembly line. Rather than taking in all in the present moment we are always in a hurry to the next step, the next task, the next chore the next goal, but it never seems to be in the now.

On magic mushrooms your perception of time simply becomes irrelevant, and the fast paced moment you inhabited just prior has now been stretched and twisted into an iridescent vortex of choppy fragments of moments that no longer have any cohesion. If a person near you were to speak to you, you cannot discern at what moment they just spoke to you, they may have said something “right now” but to you it may immediately feel like this occurred hours ago. And you’re not simply hearing what the person said, you are experiencing their entire being, it is almost as though the culmination of all of their past lives and experiences are now exposed to you and presented at face value, nothing about the individual you are interacting with is hidden any longer.

You can feel every fiber of their being, the emotional intensity that resonates from those around you is like being hit with a sledgehammer in the gut, and it is often difficult to discern positive and negative emotions, it all just gets blended into one experience. In fact, everything on mushrooms feels unified, you are no longer separated from the couch you’re sitting on, the room you’re in, or the cockroach under that couch, and everything is now your friend. Pictures become alive, they speak to you, they let you know what’s on their mind, and how they can help you. Be careful when looking at art when on magic mushrooms because you may well become the art, the Mona Lisa will hang out with you for the entire night in your brain.

Try looking at your hands while on magic mushrooms they almost become luminescent and transparent and seem to take on a life of their own. In fact, if you look at any object long enough on mushrooms, it seems to take on a life of its own, it can become whatever you imagine it to be, and a stick on the ground may present itself to you as the secret to the universe itself. You might be able to see the atoms that stick is made of, at least that’s what you will be thinking in that moment. Your imagination is so expansive you will try to go back to the origins of the stick, if you look at a rock the rock shows you where it was a billion years ago, evolution just seems to slam you in your face and reveal itself all at once. You realize you are not separate from anything else that has ever evolved, you and the extinct animals played in the cosmic dance together in a single moment and that moment has become what you always knew you were.

Everything on mushrooms becomes interesting, every benign, boring object that you would normally pay no attention to, is now the most fascinating thing ever created, and you may just dwell on that thing for hours and hours and hours……YOUR MIND EXPLODES INTO A BRILLIANCE YOU NEVER THOUGHT POSSIBLE, OUR BORING PLANET BECOMES WHAT YOU ALWAYS WANTED IT TO BE, THE GLORIOUS HEAVENLY PALACE WHERE THE MAGIC NEVER CEASES.

Warning: This blog in no way advocates the recreational use of psychedelic substances, which can be dangerous without the assistance of a medical professional. Please, do not use on your own.