Michael Balderstone, The Nimbin GoodTimes

The mushroom talks have been the most popular of all at the last few MardiGrass weekends, and so a Psilocybin Symposium in Nimbin Hall is planned for 7th December. People are invited to share their own entheogenic experiences as well.

My first mushroom trip was truly mind-blowing. I think it helped that I had no idea what I was doing! I had a ticket home after three years away, with a stopover in Bali.

At a farewell party in London I told someone that and they said, “You should try the mushrooms there, they changed my life.” That’s all I remember he said, but I knew I would after that.

Cows were grazing under the coconut palms along the beachfront at Kuta and there were only a few surfers staying there in the mid-seventies. They told me about a couple of young girls making shroom omelettes under a makeshift shelter, and I headed there early one morning.

The girls giggled and asked if I wanted a big one or a small one. The innocent country boy in me went for the big one and they mixed in a couple of handfuls of freshly picked blue meanies. I wolfed it down and naively expected to feel something.

The only drugs I knew at that time were alcohol, hash and cocaine we bought from the big black African cleaner at the HardRock cafe in London where I’d been working.

They all had a pretty instant effect, so for some unthinking reason I thought the omelette would also. After a while I felt nothing so went for a swim.

I was a fair way out swimming along when suddenly “I became the ocean”. No other way I can explain it. I looked back at the land and saw Paradise.

The girlfriend I was with met me as a suited stockbroker several years before. She was understandably pretty upset at the changes in me, dropping out and becoming a long-haired hippy who loved hash. I’d promised her no more drugs and tried to hide what was happening to me but there was no chance.

It became a huge life-changing day. At one point I was standing out in torrential rain and couldn’t stop laughing. My poor girlfriend was terrified. Balinese women understood and gently led her away.

We flew back to Australia the next day and it was like I’d been tipped upside down and everything shaken out. I had no idea who I was anymore, or what to do, but I did realise there was no turning back and I was off on a new journey to try and work out answers to those questions.

I soon discovered we had plenty of our own magic mushrooms in Oz, and so I arrived in the Northern Rivers. I ate a lot more over the following years trying to understand the non-understandable, but the same truths kept showing.

Seven years in boarding school with church and chapel every week had taught me the story of Jesus well, but that one day in Bali showed me what it was all about. I was actually in the state of mind or state of being that Jesus was talking about.

It all made sense that day, like jigsaw puzzle pieces falling into place. All his mystical words made total sense. So this was love with a capital L. And we don’t need to worry about death, or money! It all called for a major rethink on life and what it’s about.

The other story I’d like to tell on 7th December is how Buddha got enlightened, as shown to me by a monk in Colombo. As history records, he’d been fasting for a month sitting under the Bodhi tree, which is a fig tree. Birds were feasting on the fermented figs the tree was dropping all around him, getting drunk and carrying on. Buddha ate some figs and got enlightened. Simple, and made total sense to me.

The old monk I’d befriended read me the story from an ancient Sanskrit book with drawings n all. I’d been telling him about mushrooms and he led me down into the bowels of the Temple to bring out the sacred hand-written book from a locked cupboard.

How’s the sense of humour in the Creation? Find God in a brightly coloured mushroom. There’s a very interesting book in the HEMP Embassy called the ‘Psychedelic Gospels’ arguing that Jesus was on mushrooms.

It would have been quite normal back then for holy men to smoke hash and eat psychedelics. The drug wars lies and propaganda have created a lot of confusion to say the least.

Come tell your story at the Psilocybin Symposium in the Nimbin Hall on 7th December, or just listen to others.

This article appeared in The Nimbin GoodTimes, November 2024.