The 'Vision' that Began My Quest

My second mystical experience began with a fall. In Spring 2024, I fell into a waking dream by softly repeating my own name on 150mg of ketamine—my chemical submersible, my pharmakon.

That night, I was alone in my apartment, alone in my bed. I'd resolved to face the pervading existential loneliness that had plagued me since childhood. Eyes open, I imagined I could allow myself to feel the inner space that contained the foreboding geometries of this lead-weighted feeling tone. I invited my hands to shape that object of fear there before me, within. If you'd have seen me there in my bed, you'd have seen a man laid with hands churning in a supine tai-chi caress of the air just above my solar plexus. As I sensed the density, the immovability of the fear of being alone, I realized I could not shift it, could not push or pull it. So instead I breathed down into myself, intending the oxygen to reach me back in time, to the far away back when I was most afraid and most alone. I was ushered to a memory I didn't have, but was told second-hand; back to when my mother shared that I would not sleep unless she hung her head over my crib and allowed me to play with her hair for tens of minutes until I'd finally rest. I noticed the urge to speak to myself. I allowed it. I began a soft murmur that became a chanting,

"...drew.... Drew... Drew," for minutes until I felt myself, louder now, say, "Drew...id." And the whole thing began.

It was a feeling at first, the same you'd notice in your body as a passenger in a car in fast reverse. My vision dimmed, and my bedroom darkened until I was fully plunged into the night of my mind. I don't recall closing my eyes. I was pulled backward through a corridor of digital-looking fir trees. The space was a shimmering void and the trees looked more like holograms than realistic organic matter. I was pulled back and back, nearly careening, certainly not feeling like I was "the one doing this" until slowly the trees began to fade their green color. As each set passed from behind to beside me, they shrank down in sub-sequence, turning into stout black mounds that then resolved into cloaked figures.

For the first time in my life, I heard an auditory hallucination. It was this deep, broad, resonant droning: "Aauuuuuhhhhhhh..." Like an Om without the M being sung by many baritone and tenor voices.

My backward rushing pace slowed and I realized I was now in the center of these figures, reminiscent of the scene from Dune in the underground sietch with thousands of devotees surrounding Paul. My interior response to this part was immediate:

"I'm not special. Thank you, but I'm not special."

They continued to chant without acknowledging my protests. Then they bowed... all at once in a unison that felt utterly sacred. I urged them, "No, haha, no thank you, please."

And then I began to be lowered.

I had a faint impression of these hundreds of cloaked, hologram-looking beings as something like "ancestors". They seemed to have emerged because I spoke my name along the length of my fundamental fear of self-ness, the rails of emotion and DNA that led from trees to me with an undercurrent charge of the obliterating fear of every survivor throughout my lineage.

But I was lowering now. My sense of direction in psychedelic spaces is usually that Up=Good and Down=Bad—or, even less precariously binary, that "Up" is a generally higher 'frequency' of being and "Down" is a lower frequency. I watched as I breached the threshold of the ground beneath me to reveal a grey-black, Egyptian-esque tomb. It was a large, but not massive, chamber with glyphs on the walls, pillared architecture, and a sense of smoke in the air.

One of the features that stood out here was the lighting. There were black crystals and obelisks placed around the room—large, but wreathed in gentle white flames that I sensed would be cool to the touch.

I was at the center looking upward, lowering downward, and several of the cloaked beings seemed to be preparing to seal me in a coffin or a pod of some kind. It didn't feel malicious, but seemed achingly protective, as though this rite was some ancient, solemn thing that was reserved for the dire need of an at-risk initiate. As the space turned to darkness, I found that I was speaking. I was speaking partially because I was feeling fear and wanted to hold myself up through language, but what I was saying came out incantation-like. I cannot remember most of it, but I know it had a self-soothing undertone with a kind of sorceric, existentially declarative overture.

It ended with a deep proclamation, stated to convince myself and the universe at once, perhaps knowing at last they are the same, as a seal within the seal:

"...AND I AM GOOD."

The next thing wasn't my eyes opening. In fact, important to the phenomenology here, my eyes were already open.

It was as though I was on the inside of an ink bubble. When I said the final word, the bubble "popped," and then my vision saw my room. I know my eyes were open already because I noticed the dry feeling of them—and for a split second worried—that I couldn't see at all.

But when I said that final word, the fear also popped.

I was trembling a bit when I emerged. I could barely hold the pen, but I managed to scratch out the transmission before the mundane logic of the waking world could dismantle it:

I met my ancestors

they first were trees

and then

they boughed

to me

The significance of this, even through a reductionist-materialist lens, is that something about the psychological magnitude, the meaning density of this intentional encounter with deep fear, generated a kind of automated, comprehensive vignette drenched in archetypal imagery and self-reference just beyond the bounds of ego. Although, importantly, not so far beyond those bounds as to be non-sense. There remained enough self-reference here for me to integrate my experience into a higher sense of who I am.

I'd not studied Druidry before then. I'd hardly known for sure the etymology of my name, per se. I found later several translations of the sound "Dru" like in my name. At least one was "Tree" and one was "Wood", another "Wisdom". My skeptic part came online to dismiss this in the most asinine way: "You weren't chosen, you input information you didn't know had extrapolations in your unconscious and it fed you back a rudimentary vision."

In the days after, though, it felt like I had received a kind of software upgrade. Like I had stumbled upon an easter egg locked away beneath the fear in my mind. I understood what my mentors in ketamine-assisted psychotherapy had meant when they said,

"The deeper you dig, the higher you rise."

I now see the psychological self as a circle with a dot in the middle, like Jung. But the bottom half of the circle fades into blackness and the top fades into white. If your attention, as that center dot, pushes down into the limits and bounds of your fear and into the darkness, it stretches the whole of the circle, similar to a "growth edge" chart you'd see in a therapist's office, and then the potential energy of that confronted experience slingshots you into the upper range. I've done enough reading on this alongside concomitant first-hand experience as a psychotherapist to sense a deep truth here. Something fit to be written about in the Kybalion, or maybe something already established by perennial esoteric principles. Perhaps I'm just discovering them firsthand. This, as I understand it, is the only way they truly stick. And they've stuck. And I've listened. And I've stepped toward the story within. And become a Druid.