So you want to hear about a bad trip?

I posted the following defense, and testimony on behalf of and in response to, the following blog post, with an INCREDIBLY enlightening piece of brand new information about Terence McKenna, which JUST came out..... 

You MUST read this blog for that reason alone: 

http://members.tripod.com/lysergia_2/psychedelia/index.blog/2308075/mckenna-reconsidered

Once you've read that post, then you can read my response: 

UPDATE: I may get around to editing this some time but until I do, I'd like to mention briefly that I posted this at about 4 AM, and was quite inebriated. Hence the poor quality to the writing. I reread it, noticing I didn't just miss a few words, but rather, it seems I missed entire phrases in some places, so when you're reading it, just fill in whatever words you THINK belong there based on the context any time you are confused because what I wrote doesn't make a lot of sense. My deepest apologies. This experience which I shared is actually very, very personal to me, and I don't often share it or anything having to do with them, with other people in real life. It was nice and cathartic to sort of focus on trying to delve into my psyche to explain in terms- ones that people might understand- what has happened to me when I've gone through this and similar bad trips. However, having so much to say and being in less than perfect condition to say it, I apparently, many times, got ahead of myself and thought I'd already typed what I'd apparently only intended to type but hadn't actually done so yet. Without further ado, the following is my comment on the blog post above.

I actually sort of understand, i think, a little bit where he was coming from. I've done some pretty stupid things in my life, and several of them involved ingesting an ungodly quantity of intensely psychoactive and psychedelic chemicals or plants all at once. This has resulted, occasionally, in some of the worst trips I've ever heard of from anyone, and I frequently compare notes, as I long to find someone else who understands precisely the situation i have happen to me from time to time...... We are talking, BTW, some really, seriously intense bad trips. I've become convinced that there are some people who have simply blown too deep a tunnel open to ever have it totally close up....And when I say tunnel, I mean a path in my synapses, much the same as when a person gets into a rut or the way an addictive behavior is reinforced, making it harder to stop the more they do it. Essentially, I feel like I opened up a such a gouge in my synapses that led to this path, that it didn't need to recur a hundred times to develop a sort of rut that I can't avoid falling back into once in a while. I don't really understand how else the experience I am about to relate was just the first in a string of several somewhat similar experiences. I know now that, unfortunately, any time I ingest a dose above "miled/moderate" of any psychedelic, the potential exists to relive a similar experience to the nightmare I'm about to share. It matters not how experienced a user I am. When this happened I'd been ingesting large quantities of psychedelics for a decade or more, and had already gotten my "peek behind the curtain." I'd already become a better and improved, and I'd dare say, an enlightened person because of my experiences, and so to have one devolve this badly, into such a nightmare of the worst kind was an eye opener and frightening to say the least. I am reasonably sure that the amount and combination i ingested had a LOT to do with why this happened the first time. Subsequent experiences I can only say must have been made possible by this first one, becaise I haven't ingested even close to what I did this first time, the few other times something similar has occurred.

..........I first discovered I wasn't invincible when I ingested $500 worth of peyote from Amsterdam, which I think was either 23 buttons, or 17 buttons each...(Me and a friend who managed to smuggle the buttons back in potpourri bags.) We waited 2 to 2.5 hours from them to kick in, and thought that, despite knowing we're supposed to wait, that maybe they were bad or defective buttons, since he'd bought them commercially, and who knows how they acquired them.... So, since we'd been on a real mission that night and were disappointed, having prematurely decided that the peyote was junk, we ate 12 grams of mushrooms each. Good mushrooms.
3 hours later,  I literally thought I was in charge of bringing the world  to an end, and that I HAD to get arrested to prove my worthiness and committment to the process. I attempted to shave my eyebrows and all body hair off, and was struggling to get out of the house naked while 4 people held me back. I eventually blacked out, thank god, and I awoke about 6 hours after eating the mushrooms from my blackout, to find I'd been hogtied up with duct tape, and was naked in the middle of my friend's living room floor, lying in a spot soaked with my own piss, where apparently I'd expelled the urine as part of a purification ritual that needed to be completed as well, all the while completely scaring my wife and friends, and totally delusional in a way where I felt like my ego had died, and a new totally psychotic one had temporarily moved in. I looked around, coherent for the first time in hours, with my wife sobbing quietly next to me, and 3 other people sitting on top of me, still not trusting that I would not attempt and nearly succeed to drag every last person out of the house and into the final moments of the universe as we know it, with me. They breathed a sigh of relief when I, legitimately having no memory of the previous several hours at the time, asked what the hell hapened. Over the next two months, scary flashing recollections and moments of clarity lit up on my head like a photograph. Eventually more and more..... I hadn't been totally psycho the whole time! I now remembered minutes, or probably really more like split seconds of time from the duration of my fugue state which were like terrifying little glimpses into the mind of a madman. When I was completely schiziform, I'd have a second of total lucidity---and I remember the horror at the realization that I wasn't even able to grasp that sanity for long enough to co climb up onto it, and before I could even form a complete sentence, I'dterrifyingly know my sanity was being replaced by this OTHER lunatic mind and I'd helplessly be forced to watch myself act in a way that terrified the love of my life andmy closest friends.....
 I won't go into them here, but I have had a few highly delusional psychotic breaks since then, and while there are moments from each which are all very, very similar, and are the tie-in I'm talking about with regard to creating an unavoidable loop that  brings me to the same place, time and time again. This all, despite being certain Ive worked through the issue that I suspect caused the first time to happen.... (I suspect, with the nature of being raised on a religion as I was, that there are often unresolved vestiges of the religion, that I knew in a very fundamentalist form thanks to my narrow minded parents.....but have rejected out of handsince LSD saved me from being a loony conservative bible thumper at age 16...).
Its impossible to describe exactly what the feeling and the deja vu nightmare aspect of each super intense bad trip has shared in common with the others, because its, entirely, a very vivid and real couple moments of pure hallucination, where I believe Im lost inside my own head, and surrounded suddenly by family and police who don't realize what I do about psychedelics being good for the human race, and I'm trying to rematerialize a stable enough version of myself to have a conversation that won't get me thrown in prison (I spent a year in prison for selling acid when I was 18 to 19, and so I've worked very hard to never go back.... And suddenly my parents reveal to me, that even though they got to their situation a different route then me, every human being has to have this exact moment I am having, and there is this feeling of tim-synesthesia that occurs that makes THIS EXACT MOMENT the same exact moment as I've already been through over the times past, and the times future where this hallucination sequence engulfs me. The emotion and the terror and the desperation to get out of this and back to a position where I  am able to have a bit more say in the thoughts and visions that run through my head is palpable. Its often this point IN my experiences where I've started behaving bizzare and irrationally. Calling my parents and scaring them with a rambling deluded voicemail, or kicked all my friends out of the house, usually tripping themselves, so I can be alone, or as I mentioned, shaving my hair off and mistakenly thinking i'm the end of the world messiah-like catalyst figure, or one time diving out and tumbling head over heels naked onto my front lawn in the middle of winter, before becoming aware enough what the fuck this must look like and getting back in the house....

.I am now over twice the age I was when LSD first made me a much better person, and expanded the scope of my world view too allow for everyone and everything.....I still take psychedelics to this day. But I won't take mushrooms, as I perceive those trips to be sort of not-for-me, and full of an almost darkly comic sinister moo. I'd much prefer LSD or just about anything now a days. And to this day, I must watch my intake, and never go to heavily with anything, for fear that I end up back in that singularly existent delusion, that exists across nights in my past and nights yet to come.... 
And yet, the final point to be made is that I am also a huge and active proponent working to raise awareneness and public acceptance of the benefits of psychedelics, because I DO know, first and foremost, who I'd be were it NOT for them. And thats proof enough that they can make the planet a better place.  So in many aspects, I don't let my personal struggles interfere with sharing the underlying message: That while it IS possible to have a terrifying experience, even THOSE usually end up being pure gold, for introspection and personal issues repair, and that we shouldn't fear something so clearly good....The government wants to stop us all from ever trying them, and that alone is proof enough of the risk/reward ratio being tipped towards reward... But this does not make me a hypocrite, nor do I do any double book keeping. I keep chipping away at whatever this issue I keep revisiting is, and hoping to resolve it someday. And in the mean time, I mostly keep that story to myself, because sharing it with people I'm already trying to paddle upstream against Government Propaganda Creek, why cloud newcomers vision by playing devils advocate agaianst yourself by telling personal anecdotes that would seem to misrepresent things, when really, they do not: I believe wholeheartedly in the good propagated though, and the consciousness healing power within psychedelics. All my own personal baggage does not change that belief and knowledge for me. 
I'd like to think Terence had the same  approach.