"Place of Power:" Little Black Seeds, a Mild Trip, and an Important Realization

I may have already told this story here (I honestly can't remember) but it is a good story (I think) so I will tell it again, even if it has already been told.

Sometimes the most important realizations come from the most unlikely of things. I had a psychedelic experience that was incredibly "weak" once but I also managed to gain profound insight from it and the little black seeds that caused it.

I, like many others, grew up with the image of the wayward college student who journeys to a new place to complete his or her education burned into my mind by popular culture, the media, various teachers, and other educational authorities. I aspired to this, when I was a young man, despite the fact that I had dropped out of high school because I found the authoritarian atmosphere and the approved narratives that it promoted to be unbearable. A few semesters in a city college earned me enough credits to open the doors to a real university and I was off to a new place to find new adventures in a far off world of academia.

There was a fine school in my own city but I wanted to live the image that I had believed was "ideal." I chose to travel out of my baron desert to the vast and open plains where there stood a seemingly beautiful university in a seemingly beautiful "college town."

"I'll make the best of it," I thought when I realized that my apartment was down the street from both an ambulance station and the state mental hospital. "I can adjust," I said when I noticed how alien the culture seemed from my own. "There is no good weed but I can get by for a few years," I grumbled in an attempt to reassure myself that I had made a wise decision.

After a few weeks, I was under a some stress and I decided to take a "trip" in order to "right" my mind. I knew that there were psychedelics around but I did not know who I could ask to find them. Everyone that I had met just wanted to talk about their church or some other similarly "clean" topic so I could not bring up the subject without fear of outing myself as a drug using"deviant." Instead, I decided to order one of the "legal" psychedelics and give it a go. I found a now defunct online distributor that had morning glory seeds and some other intoxicating plants for sale and I ordered myself a pouch of the little black LSA containing shells.

Instructions for preparation were easy enough to find and follow and I was assured that, even though LSA is less potent than LSD, I would trip. The seeds were crushed in a coffee grinder, the shells were removed, and I ate the remaining "meat" which was bitter but tasted a bit nutty. Finally, all that was left to do was to wait for the psychedelic experience to take hold.

The trip was disappointingly "weak," in most respects, but the realizations that it brought were profound. I t felt like I had taken too little. I had only minor visuals and I did not feel like I had stepped into a different realm of consciousness. I would compare it to a one or two gram mushroom trip but the drugs are different enough that this may not be a fair way to describe the experience. However, I found an extreme clarity of thought in the altered state that I was in and it proved to be extremely valuable in its own right.

I came to understand that I had left my "place of power" in pursuit of a false vision of the "ideal" and that doing this was a terrible mistake. I had friends, family, and networks at home. I could get my education there. I understood my culture and my land and I had left to find something that was not lost. "This place fucking sucks and I have been lying to myself about it," I realized in an IHOP booth near the end of my trip while a fellow diner stood with his denim covered ass way to close to my head. I understood that my attempts to make the best of things and to adjust were chains, binding me to a place that I did not want to make the best of and did not want to adjust to. I decided that I would return home when the semester ended and my lease was up.

Those little black seeds may not have given me the intense visions that I was looking for when I ordered them but they did show me something important. We get these ideas about what we need to do to be happy or successful from what we are told is ideal and we internalize them, often without knowing it. Sometimes, we allow them to guide us to places where may not belong because they do not account for who we are as individuals or for our unique needs. From those seeds, I learned that I need to be in my "place of power" if I am going to be content with my life and that I shouldn't let the the generalizations of society's ideals lead me away from it. To me, that seems like a profound realization and it is one that I continue to value to this day.

Peace.

All the images in this post are sourced from the free image website, unsplash.com.