It felt like i was slowly receding into reality. Like somehow I was infinite or perhaps I was larger than my self, more specifically my spiritual entity was larger than my physical container and as the effect wore off, as I descended toward the sober self, and the metaphoric runway came closer and closer, my spirit got compressed.

Said in a different way imagine you need to pack a sleeping bag into its sleeve. You fightand wrestle with it to return it to its sleeve. Logicaly you know it came from the bag, but somehow it will not fit back in. You are forced to bully it into the carry bag by punching hand fulls of material and pressing your knee down and crushing the inflated spaces out of it until eventually the sleeping bag is back in the pouch. Well that is how it felt.

In the first person the experience began with a sudden expansion, a feeling of being set free to exist in a tethered duality. One part of me was the body, and another separate part was the essence of me, or rather the experience of exaggerated senses impacting on my mind. I also experienced myself as an intention, miliseconds before it was expressed as an action in physical reality. Let us name this as the impulse of me.

Some how my soul had escaped its container, and expanded to its nartual size, inflated by the hyperactivity of my senses and their reaction to the stimulations of the world around me. The sounds where clearer, the light was cleaner, and the benevolent essence of the people around me was amplified, or exposed to me.

The guest leaves residue. The shrinking feeling, mentioned earlier, occurred in a tiny moment, perhaps half a second in real time, and this happed half way into the experience. Of all of the other amazing experiences of the day that insight persisted. It got me to thinking. And has lingered in my sober thoughts for days now. Firstly I wondered if this thing that is so commonly named consciousness is perhaps a device whose purpose is to distract us, since almost all other animals including most other mammals operate perfectly fine without one. We are left asking what is it's function and why is it bestowed upon us alone, and how come is it so obviously destructive?

I had the intuition that the sensation of me was irrelevant to the vechile. It was a spectator, of some other physical phenomenon, a passenger or tourist.

The other question that emerges from the journey pertains to the role of rhythm. For a while now I have wondered if rhythm and conscientiousness are not entwined. In addition to this why does music or the pursuit of dance diminish as i get older. I seems a marker of the youth, it seems an expression of play, and undoubtedly it rendered me and my peers and defined my generation. What is its function? And I think it is to re-enforce memory. We musify events and organizations of value (eg: wedding march, or a state anthem) to weld ourselves to provinces of value.

Where most will insist that language is the gift that separates us, i would add that I believe that language is an extension of rhythm. The ability to recognise rhythm is that which separates us from our primate cousins, it is the essential gift of our species. Are there other animals that naturally dance? or make melody? And by extension language can be argued to be a high resolution expression of music. We sign to each other, and the language emerges from the rhythm. English is one such song. I am not a linguist, but perhaps that is how language came to be. By shortening primal wave lengths (from a whoop or screech i.e. low resolution vowels) and interrupting the out-bound air with shaped mouths (constants) we refined and repeated notes (ie phonemes) and evolved to make the sounds more identifiable (ie chords of words) and efficient and then in concert with other chords language emerged. Is that such a preposterous proposal?

There is an emotional difference between sentimental ingestion of music and embodied recreational response to rythmn. In other words the way an older person listens to a tune that is long out dated and relives associated memories which the music reactivates (sentimental), is wildly different to that moment in time when that same person was introduced to that tune, and was swept away by the emotion and movement of the music. There is no way to know which tunes will linger when you first hear them, and the emotional quality will linger regardless of weather you like or dislike that music. That in itself is interesting but what is more fascinating still is that lyrics associated with music are easier to recall more than almost anything else.

Take for example a nursery rhyme. These odd little songs seem welded into me. Incy wincey spider, or Humpty Dumpty, or ring-a-ring-a-rosie. I have no recollection of any stories I was read at that age in nursery school. The same stands true for primary school, high school and university. In my memory I can locate books that affected me at certain juncture in my life, but i can not quote passages verbatim from any of them, isolated fragments come to mind but not as orderly rolling verse. In the same way hearing a pop song from the 80s (weather i liked the song or not) the lyrics arrive in my mind just at the time when i need to sing along, and when the music is over I generally have a much harder time to recreate the lyrics without generating the rhythm in my mind, to the benefit of the sound.

Under the influence of pscilociben I have been consciously displacing my experience with music and movement. And I have also been noticing the mood that certain music manifests in me. You could say I am surrendering my mood to the author of the tune, and ingesting the emotion that is baked into their melodies. What I have noticed on a personal aside, is that I do prefer non-vocal music. Or music with a very small word count.