Phase Three

Five grams of mushrooms, an eclipse, a control room, and the strange feeling that my trips have entered a completely new phase.

My astrologer friend had given me one very specific piece of advice:

Never do a psychedelic journey during an eclipse.

Unfortunately, by the afternoon of August 12th, I had developed an equally specific intuition:

Take the mushrooms.

Five grams of albino penis envy were sitting in front of me.

I stared at them for a while.

Then I meditated.

Then I ate them.

To be fair, this wasn’t an act of rebellion.

I wasn’t thinking, Let’s poke the cosmic bear!

Quite the opposite.

I took the warning seriously.

My friend is an advanced astrologer and white magician, and his basic point was that an eclipse is already a potent energetic event. Psychedelics make you unusually open and permeable. Combining the two could mean opening yourself very wide on a day when the energetic weather is already doing something unusual.

Message received.

And yet I felt calm.

That was the strange part.

No ominous feeling.

No internal warning.

No sense that I was chasing intensity because “mushrooms during an eclipse” sounded like a good story to tell afterward.

I genuinely felt:

Today. Now. This is the moment.

So I sat with it.

Meditated.

Checked again.

Still calm.

Okay.

Let’s go.

I know mushrooms very well at this point.

I’ve tripped well over a hundred times at this point. Possibly two hundred. Possibly enough that I really should have kept records.

There should be a psychedelic version of Duolingo that sends you little notifications:

22 PORTALS OPENED THIS YEAR

THE VOID HAS NOTICED YOUR CONSISTENCY

This particular strain was familiar to me too.

Albino penis envy.

(I do not make up these names.)

Potent, obviously.

But for whatever reason, this batch has always felt remarkably smooth in my system.

I prepared the five grams as tea and strained out the mushroom material. Much smoother on my stomach.

Then I prepared the room.

Sage.

Palo santo.

Candle.

Eye mask.

AirPods.

A brand-new playlist.

I have a particular way of doing music for mushroom journeys.

I’ll choose the opening song or two myself. Enough to establish the frequency.

Then I let Spotify take over.

I don’t want to know what’s coming next.

The surprise is part of it.

And once the trip starts, I generally don’t want to touch my phone for the first few hours. Choosing every song in real time feels like going to a movie and repeatedly asking the projectionist to pause because you’d like to make some edits to the screenplay.

Normally, I trip with a speaker.

This time I had a very clear instinct:

AirPods.

Eye mask.

Inner darkness.

Noise cancellation.

Go fully inward.

So I took the mushrooms, meditated through the beginning of the come-up, climbed underneath the covers, put on the eye mask, put in the AirPods...

...and let the outside world fall away.

The handpan problem

One strange side effect of having done mushrooms this many times is that occasionally the opening hour feels familiar.

The visuals begin.

Reality starts stretching.

Geometry appears.

Some ethereal voice floats into the music.

A handpan inevitably enters the chat.

And there is a small, slightly ungrateful part of me thinking:

Yes, yes. Very nice.

Can we get to hour two and beyond?

I know.

This is obnoxious.

God opens the doors to another dimension and I’m complaining about the lobby furniture.

But there are certain psychedelic motifs I’ve encountered so many times that sometimes I can feel myself waiting for the trip to deepen.

Yesterday, one particular song started playing.

Handpan.

Very spiritual.

Very ceremonial.

Very “someone is selling cacao nearby.”

And something in me immediately went:

No.

This wasn’t ordinary resistance.

I know what it feels like when a piece of music annoys me and the move is simply to surrender and let it carry me somewhere.

This wasn’t that.

We were still in liftoff, and I could feel the trip settling into a frequency I did not want to spend the next five hours inside.

Not dangerous, per se.

Just off.

Like getting on a plane, hearing the engines spool up, and realizing we’re taxiing toward the wrong runway.

There was no getting out of the trip.

Five grams were already in the building.

But there was still time to recalibrate.

The music felt elementary.

Something needed to shift.

We’re not doing it this way.

So I pulled out my AirPods.

The music stopped.

And apparently this caused an emergency.

There was a control room

By this point the visuals were already strong.

The eye mask created total darkness, which meant opening or closing my physical eyes made almost no difference.

There was only the inner visual field.

And inside it, I could make out something directly in front of me.

A room.

Or at least the impression of one.

A control room.

There were little figures inside it.

I couldn’t see them perfectly.

This is something I’ve come to understand about what I can only call psychic vision.

You do not automatically get 20/20 eyesight in the astral, mushroom, interdimensional realm, just because you ate mushrooms.

It’s more subtle.

There are shapes underneath shapes.

Faces hidden inside geometry.

Eyes.

Figures.

Presences that become more obvious when one stop trying so hard to look at them. Sometimes they appear in the peripheral vision. Sometimes directly in front.

Years ago, I would have called this imagination.

The brain loves finding faces.

Cool visual effect.

Moving on.

I don’t experience it that way anymore.

Lately, these presences feel increasingly autonomous.

Less like patterns.

More like inhabitants.

And whatever these little creatures were, I had the unmistakable impression that they were working.

They had a job.

They were involved in what was happening to me.

Whether they were operating my mushroom trip, operating some part of consciousness, operating the simulation itself, I have absolutely no idea.

But they were on shift.

And then I removed the AirPods.

Apparently this was not in the schedule

The music paused.

And the control room reacted immediately.

Commotion.

Movement.

The little figures started scrambling around.

Something had gone wrong.

Apparently nobody had prepared for the contingency where the human gets picky about the handpan.

Which was strange, because on my side of the experience, absolutely nothing had gone wrong.

I was calm.

Relieved, if anything.

The annoying music had stopped.

I was perfectly happy to lie there in silence for a minute and figure out what I actually wanted.

Different music?

No music?

A complete reset?

Meanwhile, across whatever dimensional partition separated us, these little creatures appeared to be having an operational emergency.

That contrast is part of what made it feel so strange.

If I had been freaking out, it would have been easy to think:

Of course the control room is freaking out. It’s just my own panic rendered visually.

But I wasn’t panicking.

I was lying peacefully in bed.

They were the ones losing their shit.

And then I sensed something even more specific.

They were calling for backup.

Larger figures started rushing in from the edges of my peripheral vision toward the control room.

Senior management had been summoned.

The customer had gone off-script.

I could almost hear the conversation.

“What happened?”

“He removed the AirPods.”

“Why?”

“He doesn’t like the handpan.”

This is the part that still cracks me up.

I had somehow interrupted an interdimensional production because I didn’t like the soundtrack.

Somewhere, an astral run-of-show was now in jeopardy.

And everybody was looking at me.

The message felt very clear:

Put them back in.

Come on.

We’re doing something here.

And my answer was equally clear:

No.

We reached a standoff.

They couldn’t force me.

And, I must confess, I felt a small burst of executive authority.

I’m the boss here.

Whatever you guys are trying to do, the vibe is off.

I’m not spending the next four hours inside this frequency because the astral production team has a schedule to keep.

Then another piece of information came through.

Urgency.

Time matters.

That was fascinating.

It felt like the trip had sequencing.

Like certain things were supposed to happen at certain points, and every minute I spent lying there refusing to continue was knocking the whole thing off schedule.

This was apparently a tightly produced event.

They wanted me back in the experience.

I wanted the experience recalibrated.

Neither side was moving.

So eventually I proposed terms.

Fine.

I’ll put the AirPods back in.

I’ll skip to the next track.

But the next track better be good.

Apparently I become a difficult client across multiple dimensions.

I put the AirPods back in.

Double-clicked.

Next song.

Perfect.

Immediately.

The entire frequency changed.

The music became exquisite. Everything suddenly clicked into place.

The tension in the control room vanished.

The figures relaxed.

Senior management apparently returned to whatever floor they had rushed down from.

Crisis averted.

Production resumed.

And the trip opened beautifully.

Five-star customer service.

Then everybody started looking at me

As the journey deepened, the control room faded away.

The visual field opened up.

And suddenly, it was crowded.

Eyes started appearing.

Lots of them.

Faces.

Presences.

Things moving in and out of the geometry.

Some were beautiful.

Some felt curious.

Some seemed to be simply watching.

And some were slightly dark.

A friend of mine once gave me an image that has stayed with me.

He said that when you enter psychedelic space, it may be something like switching on a light bulb in another realm.

Suddenly, things over there can see you.

That description has been making more and more sense to me.

Because lately, when I go deep enough, I get this distinct feeling:

Oh.

They noticed me.

And not everything that notices you feels the same.

Some of the faces that night looked almost demonic.

But even as I use that word, I want to make a distinction.

Demonic-looking and genuinely dark are not necessarily the same thing.

There are presences in these spaces that feel almost jester-like.

Mischievous.

They’ll flash a grotesque face at you.

Stretch themselves into something horrifying for half a second.

Try to startle you.

Basically:

Boo.

And underneath it, you can sometimes feel the joke.

They’re not necessarily trying to hurt you.

It can feel more like they’re playing with the human who has accidentally wandered into their neighborhood.

Look what I can do.

Did I scare you?

Very funny.

There were also moments where I had the strange sense that I wasn’t alone in managing the darker presences.

I can’t prove this.

It was simply something I felt.

Almost like there was a protective layer around me.

Other beings.

Guides.

Something.

And when certain presences seemed to get too close, I had the impression that something else would rush in and blast them back out of my field.

No battle.

No drama.

Just:

Absolutely not.

The psychic equivalent of nightclub security seeing someone jump the velvet rope.

I liked having my security team there.

Because every once in a while, something would come through that didn’t feel playful.

You feel the difference immediately.

Heavier.

Denser.

Less boo.

More:

What exactly are you?

And somewhere around this point, the entire experience started feeling more serious.

Then something much larger appeared.

The black visitor

I still don’t know what it was.

Alien.

Creature.

Spaceship.

Energy.

Intelligence.

Some impossible combination of those words.

It appeared above me in the visual field.

Dark.

Large.

Hovering.

There was something about its actual appearance that vaguely reminded me of the beings in Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival.

Not exactly the same.

But there was that same black, difficult-to-resolve, distinctly nonhuman quality.

And this one felt different from the jesters.

No funny face.

No little:

Boo.

No sense that it was trying to entertain itself at my expense.

It just watched me.

And I watched it.

I couldn’t tell whether it was hostile.

That was part of what made it unsettling.

There was intelligence there.

There was weight.

And there was an uncanny sense that simply by being close to me, it was affecting my energy.

I could feel its presence in the field.

A pressure.

A density.

A kind of energetic proximity.

Like it had entered close enough into my space that my system could register it.

And suddenly I remembered, very clearly, that I had chosen to do this on an eclipse.

Earlier, my astrologer’s warning had felt theoretical.

Now it felt immediate.

Five grams.

Eye mask.

Noise cancellation.

Eclipse.

Large unidentified intelligence hovering overhead.

Great.

This was also the moment where I stopped feeling like the executive producer.

With the control-room entities, I had been perfectly comfortable saying:

The music sucks. Fix it.

This was not that.

There was no:

I’m the boss here.

I had no idea what I was dealing with.

If this intelligence had capabilities beyond what I understood, I certainly wasn’t interested in finding out through trial and error.

So I did the thing that felt most natural to me.

I called on God.

And I called on Jesus.

Yeshua.

Not as a religious exercise.

As an energy.

A presence.

The frequency I associate with Christ.

Someone else might call on Buddha.

Paramahansa Yogananda.

A saint.

A guru.

A protector.

Whatever represents absolute light and spiritual authority in their inner world.

For me, in that moment, it was Jesus.

And I became very clear internally:

Only God-like energies are welcome in this space.

Again.

Only God-like energies are welcome in this space.

I asked for my energy to be sealed.

Protected.

And underneath that prayer was a boundary:

You can observe me.

You can come close.

But you are not allowed to fuck with my energy.

I believe deeply in free will in these spaces.

Consent matters.

An entity can appear.

It can look.

It can make itself known.

But I do not believe it has unlimited permission to enter my energetic field simply because I became capable of perceiving it.

There is a line.

And I was making mine very clear.

The strange thing is that the boundary seemed to do something.

The black presence stayed for a while.

Still watching.

Then, slowly, it began to move upward.

Away from me.

Higher.

Farther.

Until eventually it disappeared into the ether.

Or another dimension.

Or the psychic loading dock.

Wherever large black mushroom intelligences go when they’ve finished observing you.

And I remember thinking:

Okay.

That was a close call.

There was no escape hatch this time

For years, one of the things that has made mushrooms feel relatively safe to me is that I’ve always retained a certain amount of control over how immersed I am in the inner visual world.

Obviously, opening your eyes does not end a mushroom trip.

You’re still very much on mushrooms.

But there’s a meaningful difference between lying in darkness completely absorbed in the inner imagery and opening your eyes to see:

The wall.

The candle.

My hands.

My bedroom.

Okay.

Still tripping.

Still here.

I’ve used that many times as a kind of orientation point.

Not an escape hatch out of the trip.

More like an escape hatch out of one particular layer of it.

But during this part of the journey, that psychological option felt strangely unavailable.

The eye mask was on.

The AirPods were in.

My entire sensory environment was sealed.

And I had this feeling that we had already left the runway.

The spaceship was in the air.

The doors were closed.

We were doing this.

I could have physically removed the eye mask, obviously.

But psychically, that didn’t feel like the assignment.

I had chosen five grams.

I had chosen the eclipse.

I had chosen complete darkness.

I had chosen to go all the way inward.

And now there was a sense that the experience expected me to stay in the seat.

That was new.

There was no panic in it.

More like a recognition:

Oh.

I signed up for the advanced ride.

Okay.

Strap in.

And looking back, the encounter with that black presence almost had the feeling of an initiation.

Into what, exactly, I have no idea.

Hopefully not the dark arts.

But there was something about the sequence of it.

It appeared.

It came close.

I could feel its energy interacting with mine.

I stayed calm.

I called on God.

I held the boundary.

It stayed for a while.

Then it left.

And afterward, the entire journey changed.

I don’t know whether I had passed some kind of test, crossed a threshold, completed some strange energetic checkpoint, or whether my mind simply experienced the sequence that way.

All I know is that once that presence disappeared, the trip began flowing with beautiful ease.

The darkness softened.

The whole inner world took on this warm, beautiful glow.

The music was exquisitely on point.

My body relaxed completely.

Whatever tension had been present earlier was gone.

And then I sank into the experience.

Three hours inside

For the next three hours, I barely moved.

Eye mask on.

AirPods in.

Noise cancellation.

Complete darkness.

No outside world.

By that point I had fully surrendered to the experience.

And because the sensory world had been sealed off so completely, I started losing my usual coordinates.

Where exactly was my body?

How long had I been there?

Was it twenty minutes?

Two hours?

The questions themselves stopped mattering.

Dr. Joe Dispenza talks about reaching states in meditation where you lose awareness of the body, the environment, and time.

That is very close to what happened.

Except I was also on five grams of mushrooms.

So it became this incredible hybrid:

Part meditation.

Part psychedelic journey.

Part whatever dimension I had apparently just negotiated entry into.

I sank deeper and deeper into it.

There were insights.

Downloads.

Ideas I needed.

Things about my life became suddenly obvious.

There were long stretches of complete peace.

And beneath all of it was this warm feeling that I was exactly where I was supposed to be.

The trip had found its rhythm.

The music, the darkness, the body, the visuals, everything had fallen into place.

The earlier friction was gone.

The whole experience seemed to be carrying itself now.

I could simply let go.

No more course correction.

No more negotiation with management.

Just surrender.

And from there, I went deeper.

Something about staying physically still seemed to deepen the experience further.

The body would occasionally issue a request.

Move.

Adjust.

Go to the bathroom.

And I kept staying.

Then the request would pass.

And there would be another layer underneath it.

Stay with it.

Go deeper.

At some point I had the realization:

This is preparation.

In about a week, I’m going to San Diego for Dr. Joe Dispenza’s week-long retreat.

And suddenly this felt like some strange psychedelic training session beforehand.

Three uninterrupted hours of remaining in the experience.

Three hours of letting the body become less important.

Three hours of losing track of time and space and sinking further inward than I normally allow myself to go.

When I finally looked at the time, I genuinely couldn’t believe it.

Only three hours had passed.

I was surprised.

It felt closer to four.

The rest of the journey continued beautifully after that.

But that first unbroken stretch felt like its own world.

And afterward, I kept thinking about how normal some of this had started to feel to me.

A control room.

Entities.

An alien intelligence hovering over me.

At some point in the last few journeys, my psychedelic experiences had become markedly different.

The mushrooms and I had crossed some sort of threshold.

I think I’m in a different phase now

When I started exploring mushrooms in 2018, I usually did them with close friends.

There was music.

There were conversations.

Open-eye visuals.

We laughed.

We reflected on life.

Sometimes somebody said something profound.

Sometimes somebody stared at a plant for forty minutes.

It was beautiful.

And the mushrooms were already doing deep work.

But the experiences still felt recognizably human.

I didn’t have a sense that I was visiting places.

I wasn’t seeing control rooms.

There weren’t entities gathering around to watch me.

Then, over time, I started tripping almost entirely alone.

And the character of the journeys changed.

They became much more meditative.

Three hours.

Four hours.

Six hours.

Long stretches where I would barely move.

The insights became deeper.

God.

Relationships.

Life.

Patterns in my own psyche.

Consciousness.

Reality.

And there was extraordinary geometry.

For years, I mostly understood that geometry as part of me.

My subconscious.

My mind.

Something inside my own consciousness unfolding visually.

And now something else seems to be happening.

The geometry has inhabitants.

There are eyes.

Faces.

Entities.

Rooms.

Spaces.

Things that appear to respond to me.

Things that seem to have their own agendas, personalities, curiosity, humour.

Looking back across eight years of journeys, they almost seem to have unfolded in chapters.

The first chapter was:

The mushroom as experience.

Then:

The mushroom as teacher.

And now I’m increasingly getting:

The mushroom as portal.

That is new territory for me.

And I’m fascinated by where it seems to be leading.

Something about the trips has changed.

Or my ability to perceive what is happening inside them has changed.

Probably the latter.

The signal is different now

What fascinates me is that strong mushroom journeys are hardly new territory for me.

I’ve taken large doses before.

I’ve seen extraordinary visuals.

I’ve had ego dissolutions, mystical experiences, states of Oneness, trips that completely rearranged the way I understood something about my life.

And yet the last few journeys have had a different texture.

More populated.

More interactive.

More like there is something on the other end.

The dose is part of the equation, obviously.

But five grams alone doesn’t explain what feels different to me.

Eight years have passed since I first started exploring mushrooms.

And somewhere during those eight years, the person entering the experience changed.

I started tripping alone.

I became much more comfortable with silence.

The journeys became longer and more meditative.

I learned how to stay still inside strange states without immediately reaching for something to ground myself.

I had other mystical experiences.

I became more sensitive to subtle shifts in energy.

And perhaps most importantly, I became much more open to the possibility that some of the things I was perceiving weren’t simply decorative effects produced by my own mind.

That changes the trip too.

The same way learning music changes what you hear in a song.

The song may have been playing the whole time.

You simply start hearing more of it.

That’s increasingly how this feels.

The mushroom enters a different receiver now.

And the signal comes through differently.

Whatever the explanation, one thing feels clear to me:

My access has changed.

I’m entering the same basic doorway I’ve been walking through for eight years, but lately I seem to be ending up somewhere else inside the building.

Deeper rooms.

Stranger occupants.

Parts of the place I didn’t know were there.

And I’m beginning to wonder whether that’s simply how this works.

Maybe access comes in stages.

Another keycard

The best metaphor I have right now is a building.

When you walk into a huge building for the first time, you don’t get every key.

You get access to one floor.

You learn the place.

You spend time there.

Then, at some point, another door opens.

Then another.

Access expands as your relationship with the building deepens.

That’s increasingly what mushrooms feel like to me.

In 2018, I walked into the lobby.

It was incredible.

Then I found classrooms.

Meditation rooms.

Places where the mushroom taught me about myself.

And lately I seem to be wandering into stranger parts of the building.

There are other occupants.

There is architecture.

There are things moving behind the walls.

Apparently there is a control room.

I have no idea how many floors there are.

That’s the exciting part.

And there’s something else I’m beginning to understand:

More access seems to require more responsibility.

Seeing something is one thing.

Understanding what you saw is another.

An encounter can be real to me without giving me a complete map of the territory.

So the deeper these experiences go, the more I find myself valuing discernment.

Humility.

Integration.

Respect.

Curiosity without immediately turning every strange thing into a cosmic conclusion.

At the same time, I’ve lost interest in flattening these experiences simply because the metaphysical interpretation sounds weird.

Something happened.

It was extraordinary.

I want to meet it at the level it arrived.

And if the next floor has aliens, entities, psychic architecture, simulation employees, whatever...

Excellent.

Give me all the woo.

Why I’m glad I went in

I knew going in that I was taking a risk.

A calculated one.

Five grams.

An eclipse.

Total immersion.

A very deliberate opening of the psyche on a day I had specifically been warned carried unusual energy.

For me, it paid off.

The whole journey had the feeling of a threshold.

Old things closing.

New things beginning.

Timelines shifting.

A chapter of my life energetically completing.

Another one opening.

That is exactly what eclipse energy means to me.

And the trip seemed to meet it perfectly.

Would I recommend anyone else do mushrooms on an eclipse?

No.

If you have a choice between doing mushrooms during an eclipse and having a beautiful, quiet Saturday afternoon with absolutely nothing cosmically dramatic happening in the sky...

take the Saturday.

Especially if you’re new to psychedelics.

There is no prize for adding difficulty.

I knew this particular medicine.

I knew this particular strain.

I knew myself well enough to check the intuition carefully before going in.

And even then, there were moments where the experience seemed to say:

Okay.

You wanted the eclipse version.

Here it is.

That deserves respect.

But I’m deeply glad I went in.

Something shifted.

I can feel it.

The exact meaning of that shift is still unfolding.

That’s often how it works.

The mushroom gives you the download.

Life explains the file format later.

So that’s where I am now.

Integrating.

Watching.

Seeing what changes over the next few weeks.

And wondering what floor comes next.

Because after all these years, I have the strange feeling that somebody just handed me another keycard.

I don’t know what it opens.

I just know the building suddenly feels much bigger.

And somewhere inside it, several small entities apparently had a very stressful eclipse because one human refused to listen to the handpan.

I hope management gave them the rest of the night off.

See you upstairs. 😉

James

P.S. Have you ever felt like something on the other side noticed you?

An entity. An alien. An intelligence you couldn’t quite explain.

If yes, comment below and tell me what happened.

---

P.P.S. Next week I’m heading to San Diego for Dr. Joe Dispenza’s week-long retreat, August 22–28. Some amazing people I know personally are going as well, along with a few people from the Unlock God Mode community.

I’m not affiliated with Dr. Joe and I’m not getting paid to say this. I just have a very strong intuition about this particular week and the convergence of people who are going to be there.

The retreat is currently waitlisted, but if you’ve already been feeling the nudge, put your name down and see what happens.

There are certain moments in life where the timing, the people, and the place seem to gather around the same point.

This feels like one of those moments.

I have a feeling it’s going to be quite a week.