The Golden Dawn

7

Regeneration, new possibility, creativity, warmth, growth, optimism

New life grows from Death and decay; the decomposing corpse fuels creation through the redistribution of matter. Through a watery blur, The Seeker blinks slowly back into the dew-dropped light of day, eyes stinging like a newborn’s, everything hazy and warm but not so clear, gasping for air through forgotten gills as sunlight’s benevolent glow filters through the dappled plant shadows, coaxing him out of his nightmare to photosynthesise into the day and forget The Haunted Winter and remember the journey, illuminating the hidden path through the tangle of trees, suggesting some kind of clearing waiting in the distance, an unseen horizon, forgotten wisdom to define the uncertain future, lost but hopeful, aware.

 My social anxiety had gotten much worse over the last few months of constant shroom tripping and social isolation, and it was difficult to shed the confrontational stance towards people I'd developed. But the people of Carrington were much more open minded and curious than those of Newmouth, and I found them much easier to get along with. Drinking alcohol helped too. Except when it didn't. I sometimes reverted back to my old, sociopathic ways when I got too drunk, stealing, breaking stuff, and messing with people's heads. Joe and Dane both had a bit of an anti-social streak to them too, and would sometimes get on my buzz. They often ripped into me about my lack of social skills, usually my inability to pick up girls; I was almost nineteen and still a virgin, and had a strong aversion to any kind of physical or mental closeness. But even this kind of jock bullshit was refreshingly normal to me after the last few months of darkness, and I made some progress in dealing with these insecurities through exposure therapy and a little bit of chemical courage - though the thought of a one-night stand or actual relationship still disturbed me.

Street drugs were cheaper, easier to find, and of higher quality in Carrington. MDMA and speed were kind of fun, but were much weaker than the legal party pills - though with less side effects - and felt kind of hollow compared to psychedelics. But I loved having easy access to LSD. It had been quite a delicacy for me and my friends back in Newmouth. In Carrington, it was there whenever I could afford it - about once a week on average.

Going from my experiences, I saw mescaline as an introspective, shamanic kind of trip; shrooms were freaky and manic, uplifting yet alienating; LSA was opaque, disorienting, and frightening. Acid, for the most part, was fun. It still had certain aspects of the other psychedelics: There were moments of meditative insight, manic energy, and passing terror; but these feelings were always transient, and much less intrusive and overwhelming than what I was used to. On the whole, it was a wild ride. I now realise that this is because of the set and setting - I was taking measured, street tab doses - probably around 100ug each - as opposed to the excessive doses recommended by crazy fuckers like William and Ty. The fact that I had to have money to take acid also prevented me from overindulging as I did on shrooms. But I also think that there's something intrinsic in the nature of acid that makes it more manageable.  LSA and shrooms - and, to a lesser extent, mescaline - seemed to build steadily to the peak, hold me there for a while, then gradually bring me back to earth. Acid was more erratic, hitting me in waves, each one almost a different trip. Though this made it a little unpredictable, there was some comfort in knowing that any bad feelings would probably pass, as opposed to simply build in intensity as they seemed to do under the influence of other psychedelics.

At the start, I usually tripped with Joe and Dane. Like my friends in Newmouth, they skated but weren't into doing tricks. We often took acid and skated in the streets all day, before seeking out parties or gigs, then going back out to bomb hills all night. We played this game called 'follow the Green Man', where we'd skate around the city without stepping off our boards. At crossings, if the green 'walk now' light was flashing we'd follow it across the road if the Red Man flashed, we'd keep skating until we came across a Green Man to guide us.

Dane wasn't always keen to trip, but I could usually talk Joe into tripping with me. These trips were like an extension of getting stoned or taking party pills together in high school. We liked to play friendly but slightly sadistic mind games with each other. One of my favourites was when one of us would try to subtly trick the other into over-analysing something simple. It was so deflating to get completely absorbed in a tripped-out rant about something, feeling like a wasted rocket scientist on the verge of figuring out the universe, only to return to reality and find one of my best friends looking at me with a smug grin and realising I'd just done an overly convoluted TED talk explaining why it feels good to eat when you're hungry. In line with the Mercurial nature of LSD, this embarrassment would always turn into hysterical laughter when the loser got over themself and admitted they'd been had.

Our acid dealer lived on the other side of town. Since I was the most hyperactive and eager to trip - and the most likely to be broke - I was always the one who would make the trek across the city to score. I usually dropped my own tab as soon as I got it, and enjoyed navigating my way back home through the town belt, a sprawling area of forest that connected most of the suburbs in Carrington. I often got lost in the bushes, and loved the mystery of emerging tripped-out in random suburbs and trying to figure out where the fuck I was. These psychedelic bushwalks also highlighted the introspective side of acid, bringing out gentle insights that would continue to unravel in between trips.

After a while, starting my trips solo became the norm. My favourite routine was to drop my tab at around sundown and head to Hudson park, a bushy public area connected to the town belt - and, as I later found out, a notorious gay cruising spot; but that's another story for another time. I'd climb up the stairs to the playground, which had some really fun flying foxes and was often populated by wasted students who I'd hang out with if I was in the mood. Sometimes, I'd venture into the pitch black bushes and try to navigate them following my visuals. In the heart of the bush, there was a massive deposit of glow worms, and I'd watch their shit twinkle like galaxies in the darkness before finding my way back to light. Then I'd climb through the bushes to the top of Hudson hill and skate down it. It was my favourite hill to bomb in Carrington. It was steep enough to be terrifying, but quiet enough at night to not be suicidal, and had just enough corners to keep you on your toes. Walking up through the darkness, I'd fully indulge in my introspective journeys, thinking about the universe and my place in it, before reaching the top and banishing the whole meditation by stepping on my board and blasting down the hill, losing myself in the amphetamine-like high of focus and adrenaline, before heading back up to play on the meditation-exhilaration seesaw once more.

My solo bushwalks turned into an internal project. When I was on acid, I’d slowly untangle the spiderweb of my psyche, identifying threads of damage and tracing them back to their forgotten origins. These tapestries eventually became more entwined with the forest tracks I walked than the acid, and the bushes almost became a physical representation of my introspections that I could revisit while sober.

I came to a greater understanding of how much of the reality I lived in - or, at least, my perception of it - was a reflection and manifestation of my internal world, shaped by my life experiences, and able to be reshaped by my thoughts and actions in the present. The events of my childhood and adolescence created and reinforced the illusion that it was unwise to show any kind of pain, fear, or weakness - that the strong and the wise dealt with emotions internally, observing life and interacting with people behind a cold, unshakable front. Showing weakness would open me up to exploitation. To show pain would be to give them ammunition for their next attack. To show fear was almost unthinkably reckless. Living behind a mask worked seductively well in the short term: A well-constructed persona would prevent people from nosing around in your brain for secrets, gain the admiration of those whose masks are shoddy in design and flimsy in structure, and, most importantly, protect the inner-monkey from the harsh geometry of reality. By hiding my pain, I felt like I could become immune to pain - or, at least, the acute pain that drove me inward in the first place. But it had created another kind of pain, less abrasive but infinitely more insidious; more patient, calculating, and thorough in its systematic destruction of my sense of self; a haunting ache deep inside that was so subtle yet all-pervasive that I didn’t even know it’s there. The fish asks: ‘What the fuck is water?’

I realised that human interaction and connections are like a feedback loop. We see others not necessarily as a mirror of ourselves, but as patterns of ourselves. For most of my life, I didn’t trust people. I believed that we all tended our lives in isolation, fending for ourselves, taking what we could and giving the minimum amount we could get away with without giving them any leverage over us by publicly acting upon humanity's ugliest secret: That we’re all out for ourselves. By believing this, I created an environment where it was true. Because I believed that the intentions of others were impure and obscene, my own became impure and obscene, tainted by the conviction that my own sincerity would be taken advantage of by opportunistic swindlers. My fear of showing any kind of vulnerability made those I interacted with similarly guarded. Most of my relationships were formed upon a foundation of paranoia and secrecy, and I found myself surrounded by people who had manifested a similar environment for themselves. The only point of connection was a shared suspicion toward others. I felt like I’d risen above the illusion, and my relationships were predicated upon communal acceptance of the fact that human nature is obscene. Whenever I thought I’d found someone I could be real with, someone who I didn’t have to wear a mask around, I’d really just found someone else whose face had been eaten by their own carnivorous mask. In this mode of thinking, the closest thing I could feel to trust was tolerance; friendships were replaced with a reptilian alliance of mutual gain and mistrust. By hiding my pain and fear, I become the very thing I was afraid of. What’s scarier than one who does not feel? These meditative bushwalks gradually led me to the realisation that we literally create our own reality - the law of attraction stripped of cosmic pretence. The forest being a map of my thoughts became a metaphor for reality itself.

Even though I took acid regularly enough for it to affect me in between trips, I didn’t do it enough for it to take over my sober life like shrooms did. I developed more interest in intellectual pursuits - though this was probably as much to do with my new social circle as my new drug of choice. I spent a lot of my downtime by myself in the library, compulsively reading books about my multiplying obsessions. These interests all branched off from my fixation with psychedelics; I read about philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, mysticism, mythology, anthropology, quantum physics, astrophysics, and more. This reignited my forgotten interest in shamanism, and I spent a lot of time trying to apply what I learnt about it to my experiences with entheogens in hopes of gaining some perspective.

The plant that interested me the most was datura. I found it interesting that - unlike the psychedelic plants, with their history as spiritual, intellectual, and healing sacraments - the tale of datura was steeped in darkness, witchcraft, and sorcery. I read about a tribe that used it as a rite of passage - sending their adolescents on a week-long datura trip into the wilderness to unlive the past and let the visions define their future, separating childhood from adulthood. My trip with William seemed to reflect this notion. Curiously, I also read somewhere that some tribes considered mescaline a cure for datura poisoning.

I read a book by Peter Carroll called Psychonaut - assuming it would be about psychedelics - and became very interested in the occult; specifically, Chaos Magick. I realised that almost every culture throughout history and across the world had some kind of spiritual belief system that was connected somehow to a plant sacrament; I saw Chaos Magick as an attempt to reconcile the secular worldview of modern western culture with this ancient yearning.

I started writing short stories that were basically partially fictionalised trip reports. The inability to render the ineffable thoughts and insights I had on psychedelics frustrated me, pushing me to expand my vocabulary and attack the limitations of language, determined to somehow transcend the bulky inelegance of words and communicate the rhythmic, formless flow of psychedelic thought. When I found myself reaching some kind of limitation of the English language, I would actively seek out different reality frames and symbolic systems to communicate my thoughts. I became somewhat fluent in the Qabala, Timothy Leary and Robert Anton Wilson's 8 Circuits of Consciousness, the Chakra system, the Dosha system, the Myer-Briggs, and more. Since I didn't know anyone else who shared these interests, most of these thoughts were sorted through privately with pen and paper - though Joe and Jakey were sometimes open to discussing them with me if I could relate whatever I was on about back to science.

Reality took on a magical quality, which, by summer, felt just as normal as breathing. Synchronicity followed me wherever I went. The realist in me knows that this is probably just the result of a combination of pronoia, confirmation bias, and spending a lot of time roaming around aimlessly. However, being a person who had been generally depressive, paranoid, and pessimistic in the past, it says a lot about my change in attitude, even if it was nothing cosmic.

With unusual regularity, I'd cross paths with someone I knew and be told that they were just thinking or talking about me. One of my friends told me that he saw me as a wasted pixie-type creature who would magically show up whenever he was bright-eyed. On one of my trips, I met a girl called Tessa and we became close friends. I was still too alien to really connect with another human, but Tessa was an open and curious person, full of wonder and always looking for little bits of magic in the grey world, and enjoyed listening to me talk in my strange language, even if she didn't always understand me; I enjoyed being able to talk about my obsessions out loud and not have to play the human role. She once told me a story about when she had described me to her friend as they drove, telling her that I just seemed to appear out of nowhere. Moments later, they almost hit me as I skated across the street.

My friendship with Tessa consisted almost entirely of serendipity, magic, and synchronicity. It even involved technology - the demon entity I had considered the enemy of the tripper. Tessa was always sunshiny and upbeat, the kind of free spirit that's just a little bit too grounded to be a hippy, open-minded but not quite to the point that her brain would fall out of her ears. What no one realised at the time was that she was privately working through a bad depressive episode that she didn't have the confidence to talk to anyone about. One time, I sent her a text asking if she was back to her pretend home - our nickname for her parents' house a few towns north, where she lived but spent very little time. Predictive text changed the word 'home' to 'good', and I unintentionally asked her if she was back to 'pretend good', which she very much was. Later, I meant to ask her if she was a 'happy cat', and predictive text changed it to 'happy act'. By complete accident, I became the first person to ask her about her depression, and I ended up becoming a kind of support person to her. It was a very unusual position for me to be in - I'd always wished I could somehow help my friends when they were hurting, but I was too chaotic and fucked up myself, and didn't have nearly enough self-confidence to take on that role. Though these were really just interesting coincidences, the way I responded is reflective of something more grounded yet even more profound - during that acid-drenched summer, strange coincidences and massive, unexpected changes didn't phase me at all; I just kind of accepted and rolled with them. Acid made me feel like I could transcend the genetic and environmental factors that once seemed to define me; flow replaced fate, anything seemed possible, and I could feel the infinite nature of the universe in every moment.

This kind of magic seemed to come from following instinct, going into the unknown; I felt like I could tap into the flow of the universe by not imposing my will on it and just taking the ride wherever it went. The universe seemed to shine upon improvisation and zen, moments and actions that existed only for the sake of existing. This, of course, was made possible by being mentally ill enough for the government to take care of me.

A good example of this cosmic trickster energy happened when me and Joe took acid with a couple of our friends from school who were visiting. After wandering through the town belt for a while, we went back to the flat to chill out while the acid peaked, before venturing out into the night. For some reason, I started making up a story about a time that I spontaneously combusted. The rest of the room got really invested in the story, leaning in further as I described in great detail the sensation of building heat, the strange aroma of cooking meat, and the temporary relief of the occasional drop of rain on my burning skin. I talked quieter and quieter, drawing everyone in, before shouting 'Bang!' with the intention of scaring the shit out of everyone. My shout echoed around the room with an explosive scatter of noise, like a firecracker going off. We all stared at each other in bewildered silence for a moment, before another clatter snapped us out of out trance, and we realised what the noise was: Rocks on the window; The main entrance to the apartment complex was always locked, and Dane was outside, throwing clumps of stones and dirt at the window to get us to let him in, having forgotten his key. Even when I realised I hadn't actually summoned the noise, the uncanny timing wasn't surprising to me. I was just like, 'Why wouldn't that happen?'

Acid seemed to reconnect me to the consensus world I'd gradually alienated myself from, through the only medium my stubborn ass would allow me to do so: More psychedelics. The datura trip and mescaline weekend that followed opened me up to a shamanic world, an alternative to the reality that had been imposed upon me that I felt so strange and out of place within. During my period of LSA and mushroom use, I got increasingly hostile toward the world I had rejected, further placing my being in the transcendent realm without really increasing my understanding of it. With LSD, I felt like I reconciled these two worlds, rejoining the muggles but bringing with me some of the magic I found at the antipodes.

Through later experiences, I've come to believe that this was more the result of external circumstances than any intrinsic properties of the drugs themselves. But I still feel like they each have their own distinct 'spirit' or personality.

When I explored datura and mescaline, I was completely footloose and lost in the world I shared with others, with nothing to keep from surrendering the entirety of my being to the shamanic. All the structures and routine I'd clung to for grounding, direction, and meaning had been shattered over little more than a year - the family dynamic that revolved around my brother's illness and compelled me to stay invisible died with him, leaving us lost and alienated to each other, and eventually led to me becoming almost completely estranged from them and depriving me of the structures of home and family I'd known; I'd finished school and was incapable finding work to give me any routine or structure; my new circle of friends contained no one I'd known for more than a year or so; I lost what little grip or connection I had to reality after my datura trip, as well as my closest friend and my home through my betrayal of Vicky. I felt I had no place in the world, nor any desire to have one, and the alternative reality was alluring and even somewhat healing. I embraced my comfort with chaos rather than trying to impose order upon it. The doses I took of mescaline and datura were also very excessive, especially considering my age and relative lack of experience with such substances, leading to mind shattering and visionary experiences that profoundly affected me

There was a more simple equation behind the effect my LSA trips had on me: The doses were way too high, I took them in all the wrong situations, and the physical effects of the drug are unpleasant and led to a more dysphoric headspace. It's not surprising that it had an alienating effect on me.

By the time shroom season came around, I was pretty set in my oppositional stance before the world. This was augmented by external factors. I now had a job and a flat, neither of which I liked or felt at home in, forcing me to participate in the world I disliked and building my resentment. My friends were all anti-social and misanthropic, influencing my own vulnerable perception in that direction. It was a gloomy winter in a city filled with bad memories and people who were mostly either afraid of me, or I of them. We also took them way too often, and in much lower doses than I had previously taken psychedelics. There was not enough time between trips to stay in touch with my normal self, and, though I did have a few strong trips, they were never enough to reach other worlds and experience new modes of thinking like I had on my datura, mescaline, and LSA trips. They really just magnified my feelings of discontent, restlessness, and, eventually, boredom. I have since had mushroom trips that have been profound, fun, illuminating, and sometimes terrifying. So this shouldn't be taken as a fair assessment of the drug. It definitely has its own shamanic and unique nature. I pretty much just did it all wrong that first season.

When I got into acid, the weather was getting warmer, I'd moved to a city I liked, and was living with friends who stimulated my curiosity and intellect. I had also made new friends who I could relate to in some way, and who kept me from getting lost in my head. Though I still took it more often than could be considered healthy, I at least had time between trips to integrate them and check my insights against the test of reality. The doses I took were low enough to keep me in touch with the manifest world, but high enough to keep me in touch with the magic. I was unemployed and existed on the outskirts of many different social groups, so had no obligation toward routine or people. It took me back to the magic of mescaline, and opened me up to a world of trust and warmth I'd never experienced before. I was creative, curious, and participating in the world. It was a magical time.

But then, of course, I fucked it up.