Fear is a powerful force that convinces us to cling to our illusions and our deceptions because even when they make us miserable, at least they make us feel safe and secure.
To truly work with the spiritual nature of mushrooms and accept their spiritual lessons, seekers must free themselves from fear and be completely open to what they have to show, especially when looking into the darkness.
The true challenge is to face our darkness and embrace it, and thereby pass through it. This is precisely the task that most people are deathly fearful of. To engage in such an introspective process is to open ourselves up to all of our wounds, our judgments, our abuses, of both ourselves and others, our petty emotional attachments, and our convenient lies that we tell ourselves about who and what we are. But we must be willing to look at these aspects of the self if we are to come to see the deeper unity and wholeness. Fighting against something while under the influence of mushrooms is a losing effort. It is those who fight against the discomfort who tend to throw up.
If spiritual seekers get overwhelmed , they should just go with it.
A bad trip can be triggered by the urge to fight against losing control. There are few things that can produce as much anxiety as feeling one’s carefully constructed sense of self being deconstructed by mushrooms. It feels like something is taking over and the self has been launched on a journey that cannot be stopped. This is a fundamental truth that should be accepted from the beginning. As the mushroom experience progresses, the seeker regains control. In fact, quite paradoxically (as are so many things with mushrooms), when used correctly, mushroom eaters find that they have more direct control than during ordinary states of consciousness. There is nothing that cannot be changed or altered by a conscious intent of will in the mushroom experience. The difficulty is that this process is first losing control of safe reality constructions of the self and regaining a deeper sense of control from a deeper and subtler sense of self and identity. Some things are far more powerful and carry much greater resonance for this kind of investigation, but it is a fundamental truth that anything seekers encounter or experience with mushrooms has relevance for understanding the self and how they create their world and manifest their patterns. When the spiritual seeker truly experiences this revelation of meaning under the influence of mushrooms, it can be quite an overwhelming moment. Remember that we spend a great deal of time, effort, and energy creating illusions and masks for ourselves. Thus, much of who and what we are we hide or cover over in some way. We think that we can keep these things private, and hopefully even out of our daily consciousness, but when the mushrooms have opened the spiritual seeker up, there is no place for us to hide. All those things that we wanted to keep secret and all those mysteries of our self are staring back at us wherever we look, either without or within. If spiritual seekers get overwhelmed when they see and recognize these patterns, they should just go with it. They shouldn’t fight against it or try to stop it. They should accept it for what it is and then strive to work with it and explore it. Once they learn to work with the meanings of their patterns, they can begin to isolate particular aspects of them.
