Mindfulness envelops to form the context before lips drink in prepared tea, the piquancy of ginger balancing the concentrated earthiness of the medicine, entheogenetic granules twirling and roughly dissolving into hot liquid before I dissolve into the gentle, gradual rush of this morning ritual. Medicine metabolizes into bloodstream, cortical and subcoritical regions disrupting normal function, disturbing the default mode network and generating neuroplasticity. And in a modern irony, science marries spirituality, the brain now becomes Crown Chakra, a conduit of otherworldly intelligence while my identity becomes fluid in this liminal space full of unworldly wonders. Subject and object dichotomies dissolve into pure transjectivity and transpersonal consciousness. Tessellated patterns blossom and blend into visions where formless beings pop in and out of existence in fractal recursion, writhing in perpetual dance through the tempos and timbres of my curated playlist of music. I become child-like in my wonder as entities and archetypes flirt and play with me, offering me answers to riddles of the Universe and Being. Flowing into and becoming Love and Beauty and Peace in transient, euphoric moments of ego dissolution, as if I became the Platonic Forms of each, receding deeper into myself and deeper into the Sublime. A beauty ineffable.

And as the fires of pure experience slowly become residual embers as I eventually come back up for air on terra firma, within me now lives lasting depths of equanimity and gratitude for life and for living. And intellectually, I’m stricken by this singular realization: there are landscapes of mind this deep and this vast lurking within us, oceans of emotional intensity that invade every fiber of our inner being, and yet there is the poverty and insufficiency to express in words what these journeys entail. There is no language that could encapsulate such awe, no phonemic utterances of sounds in any human vocabulary that could fully articulate what this pure experience is like. Only a finger pointing at the moon. But those fingers can still have their tactile meaning in the here and now if they navigate on the feet of action. All those moments, rightly so, should be integrated into daily consciousness and offer us virtuous anchors in which to live by, embodied and enacted sophrosyne in “being tempted by the Good”. I became Love and Beauty and Peace, now I let that inspire my own Great Commission, in love of myself, in love of my friends and family, and in love towards human solidarity.