Excerpts from Haight Ashbury Flashbacks
by Stephen Gaskin
Excerpts from Haight Ashbury Flashbacks
by Stephen Gaskin
DMT was one of the kind of things that I never knew anything official about. It came to me completely through the underground, and what underground folks said was, "They call this the Businessman's Lunch. This is a twenty minute, Half-hour psychedelic trip. But you really do it." I thought, That sounds like fun.Some friends of mine had some. I think it was homemade in somebody's lab. It was pretty brown and cruddy, and scabrous looking stuff, wrapped in a little piece of tinfoil. It didn't look too hot. We put it in an old corncob pipe, and it didn't look as space-age as it was.
They stuck that old corncob in my mouth, and they lit me off. I took a deep breath inhaling drag on it, and I began to accelerate. I began to rush harder and faster, almost, than I had ever rushed in my life. I was instantly transported to a telepathic, magical realm. They had to take the pipe out of my mouth. I couldn't raise my hands up from my lap.
I sat there and looked at these people who were standing around looking at me with humourous, curious and intent expressions, wondering if had I got off yet. I could read it across their faces and across their minds as clearly as if they were saying it. As that pipe went around the room , and each one of us took a hit on it as it went around, I watched them turn into the most noble looking, tribal, heavy, elder peyote gods that I had ever seen in my life up to that point, as each one turned on to the pipe.
We sat there and looked at each other as a council of strong, powerful elders. And then, suddenly, as fast as it had come on, coming down a perfectly perpendicular square-edge drop-off, everything was perfectly ordinary again.
I fell in love with Ina May on DMT. We all toked up on DMT, and I looked at her and just fell telepathically into her, and saw that we just matched up to many decimal places, and were really as telepathic as we could be. It just blew me away, She was with someone else at the time, I looked at it for a second, and I had to put my eyes down, because I couldn't keep looking at it; or I knew I would get so far in that I'd never get back out. I think I did anyway. I think it was too late.
But that kind of thing happened to people. Get stoned with somebody, look at them, fall in love with them, and the whole rest of the material plane doesn't match.
I think the last time I had DMT was with Paul H. over at 69 Harriet Street, which was a warehouse where the Pranksters hung out sometimes, and where various hippies lived at one time or another.
Paul said, "You want to experience telepathy, this is the stuff. Instant telepathy."
We sat down, and we lit off a pipe each. I looked in Paul's eyes, and every edge, every line, every detail became electric and alive with threads of color running through it, until the entire environment was neon psychedelically pulsingly crawlingly alive and lit. He looked into my eyes and smiled inscrutably, as he lit up the environment, and we played with our DMT.
Then I began to lose it - not quite as square-edged as before; I thought possibly it might not have been as pure, because I lost it slow, and struggled to try to keep it, and felt I had done something wrong as I lost it, until it drifted away and it was gone. After it was gone and I hit bottom, it took me a second or two to forgive myself for ever coming down from it.
I had talked with Patrick G. about dope. He has said he preferred DMT; and I said I thought you had heavier trips and that you were reponsible for stuff for a longer time with acid. But Patrick said to me, "On my last DMT trip, I became a weightless perception floating in space. I enlarged until I became a giant void. Buddha floated in the center of the void, and I floated around the outside of the Buddha and came out of his eye."
I thought, Well! Pretty complex and stoned for twenty minutes out there, with all this magic.
Crumbs in the bottom of the DMT pile.
See if there's enough to roll a number.
