[Zanon]

Yeah, you're not kidding. I took shrooms, A (LSD), E, smoked some marijuana (not much), tried cat a few times and generally partied it up for maybe a decade. At some point I found out that my mother had suffered from schizophrenia, which would explain why I got my money's worth out of marijuana, shrooms and A. I had a pretty hard time working out what was real.

Bad trips were something else. We're talking about seeing everything bad about myself and humanity, which considering the basically selfish nature of a human is quite something. Very black-and-white, good-and-evil thinking, alternating between extremes. Synthesizing sounds, colors, physical things around me. When I read about people going nuts or harming themselves, I'm not surprised. Very black-and-white thinking can lead to some alarming thoughts.

I'd find that if I spent a few hours spiralling on that I could lose the ego totally and emerge with a very objective sense of the world. A world in balance, things as they should be, personal and friends' faults accepted, insights into myself and others. I definitely made some amazing self-discoveries, but at significant risk.