This is a trip report for my first LSD trip, and what I learned since that trip. It's about the middle part of Be Here Now by Ram Dass. It's about a girl. It's about a 10 minute read...

So Be Here now. ... man... I've gone through the book before, but not on acid, for every one of you that may have a copy of Pihkal laying around or whatever, well fuck, this book costs like ten bucks, I HIGHLY RECOMMEND IT. If you have enough money to buy drugs, and you are a tripper, whatever ...buy this book. I guarantee you won't be let down, it's fucking ten bucks - if you can hunt down a few hits of good acid, and this book, read the middle brown section (its NOT like a regular "BOOK"), ...then get back to me and tell me it sucks .

Dr. Shugin has a scale, +1, +2, and +3 relate to how strong the effects are from a psychedelic drug. Then there's +4.

PLUS FOUR (++++)
A rare and precious transcendental state, which has been called a 'peak experience', a 'religious experience,' 'divine transformation,' a 'state of Samadhi' and many other names in other cultures. It is not connected to the +1, +2, and +3 of the measuring of a drug's intensity. It is a state of bliss, a participation mystique, a connectedness with both the interior and exterior universes, which has come about after the ingestion of a psychedelic drug, but which is not necessarily repeatable with a subsequent ingestion of that same drug. If a drug (or technique or process) were ever to be discovered which would consistently produce a plus four experience in all human beings, it is conceivable that it would signal the ultimate evolution, and perhaps the end of, the human experiment.

So about three weeks ago or so, I find i hear a whisper..."eat me.. eat me..". It gets louder, "You know you want to EAT ME!". Sooo i thought, hmm, well, i'd really like to try out some of this new blotter acid i just received, ya know, ...test out the potency 'n shit.

Now this would be the first time ever, that I FINALLY, have 30 hits worth of this potent shit in my box of mind toys. I finally, would be able to take a high enough fucking dose of acid to.. actually show me something cool that i haven't already seen with 2c-this, 4-acetoxy-upyoass, and whatever other ..inferor toys I had tried before..

Now, up until this day i'd rate only mushrooms, 5-MeO-DMT, and DMT up there at my #1 spot for my favorite psychedelic drug.

Well, apparently i was wrong.

Within two hours of putting the three tiny square little pieces of, packed full of OH YEAH, paper on my tongue, I already knew... I started ...having busts of happy motivation, telling my dad, and sending instant messages on the computer to several people saying,

"LSD IS THE BEST FUCKING PSYCHEDELIC DRUG THERE IS PERIOD!"

... well I got couple responses from people with a nice belt of LSD experience on them already, such as "yea, see told ya" and "yep, //inhales some potent cannibis//.. haha"

Basically the mighty LSD gods showed me mental images, of them, stomping on 2C-E, mushrooms, all the other tryptamines 'n phenylizzles, going "BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA, look at what I can do! Muahahhahahaha", oh they showed and demanded i give the #1 spot to them. I handed it over with a big SMILE!

* * *

Well! Where do i fucking BEGIN?!? I have a message I want to spread, to as many people as possible, if I can manage to translate to english even ONE PERCENT of what i've learned from this trip/book (and life itself), to hopefully somehow help other people live life more smoothly and flow with the universe. Although I'll be posting this "trip report" on a couple public forums I'm also going to give copies to people that might not have a clue what "tripping" really even is.

Well i'll start with this trip. I find myself coming up, and feeling euphoric, looking around at things, and I thought "wow, it's like tripping for the first time!"

A friend came over, he ate two hits, and we drove to this park with a lake on some private property. We were laughing at the thought if some "old rich fuckers" in this neighborhood would see us and say "why are those two boys, out there where nobody ever goes, on our private lake watching a sun set?!?! Call the cops!"

Well, from what i was feeling inside I didn't think it would be in the universe's best interest to have some cops come lock us up or anything - just a guess. I'll discuss that later on. Aaanyway we mainly just sat there and smoked a bowl, observing the beauty of it all.. I was just looking at trees, noticing that fractal nature of everything.

The term "fractal" was coined by Benoit Mandelbrot in 1975. It comes from the Latin fractus, meaning an irregular surface like that of a broken stone. Fractals are non-regular geometric shapes that have the same degree of non-regularity on all scales. Just as a stone at the base of a foothill can resemble in miniature the mountain from which it originally tumbled down, so are fractals self-similar whether you view them from close up or very far away.

I see this tree, and how it looks, rising up from the earth over time. It looks like its "attracted" towards something, out in the sky - it grows up with its leaves to take in sunlight and all. So we experience our lives with three dimentions of space, three directions we can move around, then there's this "strange" force called time. But i'll elaborate more on that later its a small part of what I want to say.

I felt at one with the universe, peace, harmony, I realise that everything is PERFECT! Everything up until the exact moment of experiencing life, the now, is perfect.

I started to get mental images in my head of different psychedelic molecules floating around. I've been playing around with this chemdraw program like mad on the computer lately, I see how all these serotonin 5ht2a agonists, "the psychedelic receptor", seem to want to grab onto a certain shape, the receptor shape i guess. I've seen images on the computer of LSD, psilocybin, the more potent dragonfly molecules, and new molecules we are only begining to understand....

Sometime after getting home and my friend left I read the middle section of "Be Here Now" by Ram Dass. I HIGHLY RECOMMEND YOU ALL GET THIS BOOK! I was reading it for over five hours (sober i could flip through in 30 minutes or something). If you have any gift cards, like borders or amazon.com, it's only like ten bucks.. please order it! If i had a lot of extra money I'd buy so many copies of that book and give it away to people with a proper dose of acid, only if they promise to go through the middle section while tripping.

It's not like reading a normal book, oh no, OH NO, the middle section is brown and it was written (with pictures in the background and all) in a special way to get a message across..."a message" sounds funny, because it brings you to a point of explaining everything about life itself, a million gazillion infinite messages, yet at the same time can be considered "ONE" infinitely huge message. They made it especially for people tripping on LSD, because i've read it while tripping before on other stuff, and... wow ....i'll just leave it at that, WOW.

I was feeling the 'vibe', like i'm connected to the entire acid culture of the 60's through today. I'm thinking, ...WOW, how could something this WONDERFUL, the LSD molecule where you can fit a dose on a tiny square piece of paper, non-toxic enough so where you can eat 10,000 hits and live, and it have THIS good of a general cosmic psychedelic effect, be an accident?

I mean damn, Albert Hoffman just ...accidently spilled THIS ONE on himself that day, out of the who knows how many other chemicals.

LSD wasn't an accident!

I can see things differently now. Things like karma, coincidences, I see how the whole karma thing works now, and also see how there's no such thing as a coincidence.

That Nikki girl.

I'll give an example of something in my life. I was always a shy kid, growing up, generally keeping too much distance from people, really just closed minded to life, or rather, had internal struggles causing fear towards a lot of things in life.

Well when I was about 14 y.o., I met this girl who came up to visit from Florida (I live in Michigan) for a week. Now her mom is originally from Michigan, my parents and her mom used to party together growing up.

Anyway, like usual, i was my shy inhibited self, avoiding anything too social or 'open'. Well this girl, just kept at me, talking away one night, we talked about all kinds of things, laughed, she got me to open up for once, I didn't get any of the "negative" signals from her that I'd typically get from anyone else in my school at the time (negative meaning causing me to have fear/anxiety and close back up).

I'm not saying there weren't other people my age that would be cool too bu, none have ever 'gone at me' quite like she did to get me to TALK!. I remember going to sleep that night thinking "Wow! I never knew such girls existed!" I thought well maybe it's a Florida thing, maybe all the girls in Michigan are just....I don't know. Just not like that.

In a sense, she showed me unconditional love. When I met her, before she got me talking i wasn't super physically attracted to her, but after that one night of talking.. saw her the next day and almost felt not worthy of being able to look at someone so beautiful - samadaiasmasidrrrrruff!

Well so she goes back to Florida. I remember I had this "glow", a sense of peace with me for the next couple weeks at school, i was more calm and relaxed, a feeling of "everything's ok". I felt great. I was in LOVE.

So... not sure the time, but it was summer, and I flew down to Florida with my sister, my mom was down there, just a week or so vacation type of thing. I know it was sometime near the end of the week, and my mom thought well let's go visit them (this girl, her mom/dad/brothers).

Just the thought of it made me nervous. I said yeah... maybe... whatever.

So we drive there, stay a night. There she was, looking HOT as hell to me, of course. She was just like before, nice as fuck, talking away, seemingly excited to see me and hang out. I remember she was watching Beavis & Butthead, and they were in a library, and the librarian is wearing a skirt or something and they are looking up going "uhhh yeah", she loves it, her sick and twisted mind. I still was kind of closed off to the world, well not totally I was into my own wierd shit like CB/Ham radio, not much I could relate to people my age. We went up in her room, which had a blacklight for a light and she was blasting some awesome music. She told me some crazy stories about blowing shit up with firecrackers and being a teen age rebel/delignquent. Awesome. Back to Michigan I go.

I'm back home, again feeling peaceful, and again thinking shit, it must be a Florida thing!! Well fast forward some time. I'm visiting my mom's place and she tells me, Nikki and her family are moving to Michigan. ...what?!?!

So they move on up to Michigan, I remember calling her up and having a long talk, she said she doesn't know many people here and it sucks - so we go and hang out with a friend of mine and watch a movie, then watch a couple at her house. Oh man, I wanted her, argh. Still, I thought of her like this great.. someone, that's just too good for me, no way I could date such a great girl. I let it go, didn't even try, too shy/etc.

Well for years after, we would hang out, she would pull me outta my hole, get me to go out and be social, always treating me like a great friend. She would always give me hugs - at the time I was too shy to really... do that, i never gave hugs, always felt awkward. She'd buy me christmas presents and shit.

Fast forward some more. Comes a time when we discuss moving out together, I had a job, a lot of money saved up, and really, was looking for a change of some kind. I was the only one she trusted to move in with - and really she's the only one i trusted like that also. Well ends up her mom (crazy.. person!) buys a house for us to move into.

What a ride the next year and a half was! At the beginning it was great. Never was I ever thinking "oh well maybe i'll get to fuck her!". Still I looked at her like this great person I could never date. She dated some guys, I was always kinda looking out for her, just came naturally - anyway, blah blah blah I don't want to go on about this forever here.

We had a lot of parties, big parties. We got robbed at one of the parties - involved people getting hurt, court, and 3 people sent to jail for years, another long story.

I dated this girl who kinda 'dropped into my life' as i dropped into hers at the right time for a while. lol - that uh, relationship ended kinda fast when we went down to Florida to visit my mom/vacation (my mom moved down there) and I had to um, send her on a Greyhound bus back home! biaatch! (She's awesome we're good friends now).

Fast forward a year and a half, this girl is having big problems. She's now the one kind of keeping herself from the outside world. She used to be this party girl with a million friends, always out doing something. Now it's like the opposite. I have a million friends - she doesn't answer her phone and I gotta call her up and basically say "if ya don't answer or call me back well, i'll just.. come stalk your ass anyway" - she knows I will and thats what I do. After not talking to her for I don't know how many months, I finally just came to her house and taped a bunch of notes to her door.

I'm not gonna let her go into a hole, I'll keep at her.

***

So after that first acid trip, it seems like everything in my life had fallen into place. I don't know WHERE I'd be if I never took that trip and met this girl. It's very hard to explain/put into words so people can understand what I've been shown/experienced/learned/whatever. So what is Karma? Well here's some internet definition thinigie:

(Karman, Sanskrit) This is a noun-form coming from the root kri meaning "to do," "to make." Literally karma means "doing," "making," action.

But when used in a philosophical sense, it has a technical meaning, and this technical meaning can best be translated into English by the word "consequence". The idea is this: When an entity acts, he acts from within; he acts through an expenditure in greater or less degree of his own native energy. This expenditure of energy, this outflowing of energy, as it impacts upon the surrounding milieu, the nature around us, brings forth from the latter perhaps an instantaneous or perhaps a delayed reaction or rebound. Nature, in other words, reacts against the impact; and the combination of these two -- of energy acting upon nature and nature reacting against the impact of that energy -- is what is called karma, being a combination of the two factors.

Karma is, in other words, essentially a chain of causation, stretching back into the infinity of the past and therefore necessarily destined to stretch into the infinity of the future. It is unescapable, because it is in universal nature, which is infinite and therefore everywhere and timeless; and sooner or later the reaction will inevitably be felt by the entity which aroused it.

Now a lot of people think (like i thought) karma!? what? Bullshit, because if you do something bad to someone you run into in, let's say... another state/country you are visiting, like, purposely make them trip and fall, and you get away with it totally, how can that come back to you?

While we were in that park by the lake, I can see that I was my friend at some point, maybe "was" isn't the right word, because time itself is only experienced moving like it is by me, so it could be that I was my friend, I am my friend, and I will be my friend. Its all the same. That bug on the floor I stepped on last week, I've experienced that bug's death (or will, or ..whatever!). I am "god" (using that word to mean All That Is, Everything, whatever you wanna call it) experiencing the life of Tom.

Anyway, some of what I'm trying to get at is (which is very difficult to put into words for anyone to understand other than myself), all of our lives, everything, it's all intertwined - when I was younger, maybe (I want to use the word maybe but, in actuality, I know) the universe pushed for this Nikki girl up to help me connect better to the universe. It's like she was helping me out in so many ways, yet she probably never knew it.

I guess, I see the illusion of a "wall" between myself and everything else, and it's like i'm going through 'my' inevitable process to fully reconnect to that everything else. Like the rest of the universe has already done its thing, and it's waiting for me to reconnect, but also I can look at another person and see its the same for them, err.. like an attraction from the future.

There is a process that's going on, and its always been going on and always will - universes that have evolution and self-organization like ours, "push" towards everything eventually re-connecting completely.

***

So all that happened twelve years ago. Life changes. I kept after Nikki for a while. Trying to reach her...she started to pick up the phone when I called. Sometimes. But even then, I wasn't really reaching her. Then one day she told me she was moving. She broke up with a bf, who wasn't good to her and she was leaving. Well, to be more accurate, she had moved. She was in her car driving to Nevada when I talked with her.

I wished her the best and told her I would visit. She said she would be pretty busy for a while... For awhile I really missed Nikki. But then I started to become busy to. I finished school and got a new job that took a lot of time. I then went to frickin' law school, something I never thought I would do, but honestly it was cool. Really interesting. My school was in California, and one day out of the blue I got a call from Nikki. I hadn't talked with her for a couple of years.

She said she was doing well. But she didn't sound that way. She said she wanted to visit. The truth was my life was really fucked right about then, with work. But I missed her, and I owed her. So we made plans for her to visit. When she showed up, she looked fragile. Hard to explain it. But she just looked delicate.

o, we did acid together. The first time I had done it in over ten years. It was everything I remembered, and I could see the person in Nikki I had loved so much. We stayed up all night talking, this time I was drawing her out of her shell. She told me all about her life, and it wasn't happy stuff. But there was joy in there, and I felt that love again. I started to think about a life with her in it. And the next day we slept together. And it seemed like maybe there was something in the future for us. She didn't have anything going on in Nevada that she couldn't do in the Bay Area, and I was doing ok financially....

She went home and we started talking on the phone. At first all the time, and I asked her to move out. She said ok. But she needed to get some things in order before she moved. After a few months we stopped talking as much, and we stopped talking about her moving here. Then she stopped calling entirely. She'd pick up the phone if I called. But after a while I stopped calling too.

That was two years ago.

I wish there were a happy ending to this story. There isn't. But it's not a tragic ending either. I saw Nikki last week. In San Francisco, by accident. She was in town for work. We both apologized for losing touch. We both agreed we should get together soon. But neither of us suggested having dinner or drinks or anything during her visit. I think we both knew whatever could have been wasn't going to be. We both had moved on.

So yeah, I know that's a real long frickin' oldest story in the book kinda thing. But whatever. So I'm sitting here typing this closing note. Coming down off of a nice little trip... only my third ever. And I have deep gratitude for LSD. I have deep gratitude for Nikki. Both changed my life. They brought be to the point I'm at now. Being Here Now is the best thing I've ever done.

LSD - Ram Das - Life Lessons (Many years after a trip)