What’s It Like To Ingest 16 Grams Of Psilocybin Magic Mushrooms?

So there I am, sitting in a South Philadelphia living room at the height of the COVID-19 lockdown in April 2020, on the weekend right before 420, feeling the ego that is me slowly come apart and drift into oblivion. I must preface this by saying that you should not try this. I came out of a blunder with a tale, but someone else may have ended up in a straitjacket, or even worse…

The Backstory

Let’s back up some so I can properly set you up for this tale of a heroic dose. During the COVID-19 lockdown of April 2020, there was a ton of uncertainty about everything. People were scared, anxious, and just trying their best to stay safe. Staying confined to your home and not interacting with the outside world was psychologically crippling for some. Not me; it was like a vacation, to be honest.

I’ve always been a really active person. In the gym, in life, in the things I’m passionate about doing. By default, I’ve accumulated a world of friends and acquaintances living that kind of life. As the years have gone on, it’s been harder to have time to myself because of this variable. So being forced to stay home and not see anyone was, in a way, a nice break. I got to be by myself and catch up on some things, and what better thing to catch up with than your soul?

The Scenario

I had acquired some psilocybin around that time. The strain was penis envy. I had never been, but oh boy was I about to be. The plan was to hang out with my cousin at his place in South Philadelphia and just spend the night. It was Friday, April 17th of 2020. The person from whom I acquired the mushrooms told me that they were about a year old, and that his significant other at the time had taken about 7 grams and only had some effects for about 4 hours. She was tiny compared to me, weighing in at 115 pounds and 5’3. I’m 6.2 and a half and about 190 at the time. I thought, well, if she took 7 grams, I should probably do about 9 or 9 and a half grams.

My cousin had a digital scale for me to measure out what I planned to ingest. I came prepared with 00 capsules and a capsule filler that I got from Amazon. I have to point out that the scale my cousin had was a “gift” with some other purchase that he got in the past, which I wasn’t aware of at the time. Needless to say, it was not very accurate because at a later date I compared it to my jeweler’s scale, which was fairly pricey, and there was a difference of a little more than a gram between the two.

So there I am, dumping out little piles of ground psilocybin onto this “gift with purchase” of a scale, about 2 grams at a time, until I finished at 9.5 grams. That’s quite a bit of dust if you’re not aware. As I weigh the dust on the scale, I put the dust into another plate where I would take lesser amounts of that pile and transport it into the capsule filler contraption. By the end of the process, I had 37 double-zero capsules packed to the brim with the pile. I still had some dust left over as well, which I just shoveled back into the dark-tinted supplements bottle that it was given to me in.

My cousin points out that each capsule holds 455 milligrams of material as he references Google on his phone. But I assert, he saw me weigh out 9.6 grams on his scale. I’ll never forget his words that followed, “Do what you want, Cuz”. And with that, I swallowed handful after handful of the capsules that would end up being another heroic dose that would be known as the mushroom mother trip in years to follow.

I got down 34 of 37 capsules. Now, if you do some math here, 34 multiplied by .455 is 15.47, but when I say those capsules were packed solid, I mean there was absolutely no more to fit in them. I packed them, really packed them. So I’m just assuming it was around 16 grams. I could get down those last three capsules because I could just feel my stomach was full of capsules and water, and nothing else was going to fit. 

The Point of No Return

After the point of no return, or 9:30 PM for a time stamp, it was time to turn on a movie and just wait. My cousin has every streaming service available and YouTube, so I was already on overload with choices. We settled on Avengers: Endgame because he hadn’t seen it, and I thought he would like it, not to mention the visual eye candy throughout the film. After about an hour into the film, I had a check-in with myself. Nothing was really taking place for me. I felt no change from an hour and a half before. My thought was “oh well, they’re a year old, so maybe they’ve just lost all their potency at this point”. A half hour after that, though, would prove my previous statement wrong.

Shrooms have this funny way of sneaking up on you, especially if you eat them or take them in capsule form. At this point in my life, I exclusively lemon tek my psilocybin. Anyway, I could tell the effects were starting to creep in because I was more relaxed, and the shades of light on the corners of the room began to have movement. The characters on the screen started to have a hue around them, and then full-on trails started to happen. I’m really happy at that moment because it’s like an old friend coming back into my consciousness. 

It’s getting to the end of the movie, and even though I know that it’s a movie, I’m so invested in the emotions of the actors. Usually, when I watch a movie, I’m watching it from a production standpoint versus being swept up by the characters and the story. This was fun, though, because I could kinda straddle both perspectives. I was wondering about how much production went into each moment, how much computer-generated CGI was used, and what it was like to be the actor/actress in the scene with a huge green screen and green suit, most likely. At the same time, I was completely immersed in the character arc and the story.

The First Wave

As the movie came to a close, I decided it was probably a good time to urinate. When I rose from the recliner that I was stretched out in, it was like I rose out of a still pond. The room rippled outwards as I stood up. I walked from the recliner through the small South Philly dining room and kitchen into a back room, which had been converted into probably the tiniest bathroom you could ever be in. As I got to the toilet and started to relieve the pressure that had built up from sitting for the past two hours, my field of vision started to go to an absolute void of white. It was complete and total ecstasy; the piss of divinity. 

As I zipped up and made my way out of the tiniest bathroom ever, I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror. I looked completely insane. Rosy cheeks, eyes like a cartoon character, tears of joy and bliss just glistening on my face. Returning from the bathroom into the living room, I remembered that I hadn’t spoken the entire time the movie was on. So I exclaimed to my cousin, “It’s like my consciousness is being tickled! I’ve never tripped this intense from shrooms, Cuz. This is wild.” Cuz laughed. He was enjoying my antics. I was walking around the room like Hunter S Thompson in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas because the floor felt like a marshmallow. My energy level was through the roof. I didn’t know if I wanted to lie down, sit, stand, or run, but I needed to be doing something.

After walking around the couch and recliner in the middle of the tiny South Philly living room a few times, laughing hysterically, I decided to just plant myself back in the recliner and watch Cuz flip through all of his subscriptions, trying to decide on something to watch. It’s at this point that I start to go inward. The trip itself is just still ramping up with intensity. I close my eyes and see a world of visuals. I open them back up, and the visuals are overplayed on everything. It’s reminiscent of my first Ayahuasca experience, which was my first and most profound mother trip. Just hang in there, though; this trip is right next to it…

I start to have some anxiety creep in as the experience continues to ramp up, and up. I start to think back to when my Cuz had said that the double zero caps held 455 milligrams per capsule. Even though I weighed out 9.5 grams on the scale, I was starting to question my decision to ingest those 34 capsules. What if this is the trip that I don’t come back from? The trip where “He took too much and just got lost in there”. Was I gonna be that guy now, or one of those stories? It seemed like it. 

The Dissolution of Self

I was starting to forget my personality, my little isms, and basically how to be “human”. I thought to myself, everyone is gonna be so disappointed with me; how I just squandered all of my talent with this decision to take this ridiculous amount of shrooms. I was never gonna be able to work again. I’d be one of those people in an institution who’s nonverbal and locked inside of my own world, dissociated from reality. At this point, I have no idea of time. I’m in a timeless place. No past or future; just now, forever. Sitting silently in the recliner while my Cuz is still flipping through channels, staying on something for a few seconds, then the next thing, and on. 

I think about everyone I know, and how they would react to seeing me be a nonverbal vegetable in a psych ward somewhere. The life review begins. I start to relive moments of my life like I’m watching a movie in my imagination. This goes on for what seems like infinity. With each memory I observe, a piece of me falls away. While parts of me fall away, my emotions tied to the memory also fall away. Characters from my life experience pass by like the way the shade of sunlight does as a cloud passes by in the sky. It’s soothing but also melancholy. As this goes on, and I’m at a point where I can’t remember who I am, my personality has all but flaked away like the scene in Avengers: Endgame where the characters just fall away into ash. I come to one last person in my life. Her. The girl with whom I had just started a secret romance. 

She was someone who came to my fitness class. Without going into great detail, synchronicity brought us together. The issue was that I didn’t want to break the rule of having a relationship with someone who attended my classes. I bought into the belief of the stigmatized story of the teacher/student taboo. At the end of the day, I didn’t want it to complicate things for her or me. We had a bond, though. A very strong and intense bond that was protective, compassionate, empathetic, fun-loving, and easy-going. All the ingredients that make up a healthy relationship. 

And there I am, the last bits of the identity that is me, thinking about her. I thought, at the very least, if she comes to see me in a psych ward and I’m non-verbal, she’ll still be able to see the love for her behind my eyes. It’s just a shame I would never get to say it to her, but it’s there. The last part of me that remained. No identity anymore, but the ability to love, and not just love, but love with no condition, because that’s all that’s left. No what-ifs, no past traumas to hold it up; just a pure, unfiltered observation of the purest feeling of genuine care, to see the best possible outcome for someone, regardless of what takes place for them.

That part of me remained. It didn’t flake away. It just “is”. I’m that unconditional love, no matter what. It was home, even dare I say, rest. I’d been here before, in that first Ayahuasca trip. How could I forget? You can read every spiritual text that exists to hear people describe it, but you can only remember and know by being here. That’s how convincing the human experience is that it’s real. It is so convincing that it makes you forget the truth. The one truth. The easiest truth to remember.

As I remember this one truth, each little piece of me starts to return, but it’s like each part went through the wash. Cleaned, lubed, and shone to perfection. I start to remember who I was, but not forgetting who I am at the same time.  With each piece comes only what I could describe as a note. Almost like correction notes from a teacher grading a test. It played out visually in my imagination like watching an onboarding or training module for work. I didn’t know it at that time, but what I was observing was how Magick works. How Magick is woven into the wiring of existence. The circuit board of divinity and how the expression of something can be modulated or directed for a change or outcome.

The parts coming back to me arrived in the form of a memory and something that was taking place in my current situation in life at that time. The memory and the current weren’t separate. I think it unfolded this way to see how the past, current, and future aren’t separate. If I changed something in the present, it changed the past and the future. Very much like jumping into a different film role altogether. When Terrance McKenna talks about astonishment, this falls under that umbrella.

Coming Down The Mountain

Around 3:30 AM, my cousin had wrapped me up in a blanket on the recliner and tucked in the edges of the blanket so I was essentially a burrito. He went up to bed while I let the trip continue. The dawn began to peak its rays of light through the tops of the curtains in the three front windows and the three small panes of glass above the front door.  As the full ego that is me returned with an upgrade from the one great mind of all, I lay there just grateful that I made it through. I had yet another new lease on life; to live to my potential, and more importantly, to love with my full potential. I knew that it would not be without its challenges, but I had a direct line of memory back to the ultimate one truth. I would never forget it, and never have.

My cousin came down from his bedroom around 11 AM, and we had some coffee. Over coffee and some Middle Eastern snacks, I shared with him the entire experience. I was mostly quiet, as everything was taking place during the night, because it was so internal. He was intrigued and had no idea because I seemed totally fine and content. Apparently, my poker face is amazing during the dissolution of my ego and sense of self.

Around 1 pm, I was finally done with the trip; no lingering effects of visuals or anything. I should have been completely exhausted from being awake all night, but I wasn’t. I texted “Her” to see what she was up to that afternoon. She was free, so I asked her if she wanted to meet up and hear about my “mother trip” from the past night. She agreed.  I picked her up and brought her to a place on Kelly Drive past the Philadelphia Art Museum. We sat by the bank of the Schuylkill River, and I told her about my experience the previous night. I let her know my feelings, and how our relationship was our business and no one else’s. We’ve been together for 5 years, and we’ll be married this fall. There’s our happy ending to this tale.

Do you have a mother trip of a story with psilocybin or another psychedelic? Have you experienced an ego death or dissolution of yourself? Perhaps some aspects of this story resonate with your own experiences. Let me know in the comments. I love to read other people’s trip reports!