MY PLAN HAD BEEN TO volunteer for one of the Hopkins or NYU experimental trials. If I was going to have my own guided psychedelic journey, a harrowing prospect under any circumstances, I very much liked the idea of traveling in the company of trained professionals close by a hospital emergency room. But the aboveground researchers were no longer working with “healthy normals.” This meant that if I hoped to have the journey I had heard so much about, it would have to take place underground. Could I find a guide willing to work with a writer who planned to publish an account of his journey, and would that person be someone I felt sufficiently comfortable with and confident in to entrust with my mind? The whole endeavor was fraught with uncertainty and entailed risks of several kinds—legal, ethical, psychological, and even literary. For how do you put into words an experience said to be ineffable?
“Curiosity” is an accurate but tepid word for what drove me. By now, I had interviewed at length more than a dozen people who had gone on guided psychedelic journeys, and it was impossible to listen to their stories without wondering what the journey would be like for one’s self. For many of them, these were among the two or three most profound experiences of their lives, in several cases changing them in positive and lasting ways. To become more “open”—especially at this age, when the grooves of mental habit have been etched so deep as to seem inescapable—was an appealing prospect. And then there was the possibility, however remote, of having some kind of spiritual epiphany. Many of the people I’d interviewed had started out stone-cold materialists and atheists, no more spiritually developed than I, and yet several had had “mystical experiences” that left them with the unshakable conviction that there was something more to this world than we know—a “beyond” of some kind that transcended the material universe I presume to constitute the whole shebang. I thought often about one of the cancer patients I interviewed, an avowed atheist who had nevertheless found herself “bathed in God’s love.”
Yet not everything I’d heard from these people made me eager to follow them onto the couch. Many had been borne by psilocybin deep into their pasts, a few of them traveling all the way back to scenes of unremembered childhood trauma. These journeys had been wrenching, shaking the travelers to their core, but they had been cathartic too. Clearly these medicines—as guides both above- and belowground invariably call the drugs they administer—powerfully stir the psychic pot, surfacing all sorts of repressed material, some of it terrifying and ugly. Did I really want to go there?
No!—to be perfectly honest. You should know I have never been one for deep or sustained introspection. My usual orientation is more forward than back, or down, and I generally prefer to leave my psychic depths undisturbed, assuming they exist. (There’s quite enough to deal with up here on the surface; maybe that’s why I became a journalist rather than a novelist or poet.) All that stuff down there in the psychic basement has been stowed there for a reason, and unless you’re looking for something specific to help solve a problem, why would anyone willingly go down those steps and switch on that light?
People generally think of me as a fairly even-keeled and psychologically sturdy person, and I’ve played that role for so long now—in my family as a child, in my family as an adult, with my friends, and with my colleagues—that it’s probably an accurate enough characterization. But every so often, perhaps in the wee-hour throes of insomnia or under the influence of cannabis, I have found myself tossed in a psychic storm of existential dread so dark and violent that the keel comes off the boat, capsizing this trusty identity. At such times, I begin seriously to entertain the possibility that somewhere deep beneath the equable presence I present, there exists a shadow me made up of forces roiling, anarchic, and potentially mad. Just how thin is the skin of my sanity? There are times when I wonder. Perhaps we all do. But did I really want to find out? R. D. Laing once said there are three things human beings are afraid of: death, other people, and their own minds. Put me down as two for three. But there are moments when curiosity gets the better of fear. I guess for me such a moment had arrived.
BY “PSYCHEDELIC UNDERGROUND,” I don’t mean the shadowy world of people making, selling, and using psychedelic drugs illegally. I have in mind a specific subset of that world, populated by perhaps a couple hundred “guides,” or therapists, working with a variety of psychedelic substances in a carefully prescribed manner, with the intention of healing the ill or bettering the well by helping them fulfill their spiritual, creative, or emotional potential. Many of these guides are credentialed therapists, so by doing this work they are risking not only their freedom but also their professional licenses. I met one who was a physician and heard about another. Some are religious professionals—rabbis and ministers of various denominations; a few call themselves shamans; one described himself as a druid. The rest are therapists trained in dizzying combinations of alternative schools: I met Jungians and Reichians, Gestalt therapists and “transpersonal” psychologists; energy healers; practitioners of aura work, breathwork, and bodywork; EST, past-life, and family constellation therapists, vision questers, astrologers, and meditation teachers of every stripe—a shaggy reunion of that whole 1970s class of alternative “modalities” that usually get lumped together under the rubric of the “human potential movement” and that has as its world headquarters Esalen. The New Age terminology can be a little off-putting; there were times when I felt I was listening to people whose language and vocabulary had stopped evolving sometime in the early 1970s, at the very moment when psychedelic therapy was forced underground, freezing a subculture in time.
I tracked down several of these people in the Bay Area, which probably has the largest concentration of underground guides in the country, without much difficulty. Asking around, I soon discovered that a friend had a friend who worked with a guide down in Santa Cruz, doing an annual psilocybin journey on the occasion of his birthday. I also soon discovered that the membrane between the aboveground and the belowground psychedelic worlds is permeable in certain places; a couple of the people I befriended while reporting on the university psilocybin trials were willing to introduce me to “colleagues” who worked underground. One introduction led to another as people came to trust my intentions. By now, I’ve interviewed fifteen underground guides and have worked with five.
Considering the risks involved, I found most of these people unexpectedly open, generous, and trusting. Although the authorities have so far shown no interest in going after people practicing psychedelic-assisted therapy, the work remains illegal and so is dangerous to share with a journalist without taking precautions. All the guides asked me not to disclose their names or locations and to take whatever other measures I could to protect them. With that in mind, I have changed not only their names and locations but also certain other identifying details in each of their stories. But all the people you are about to meet are real individuals, not composites or fictions.
Virtually all of the underground guides I met are descended in one way or another from the generation of psychedelic therapists working on the West Coast and around Cambridge during the 1950s and 1960s when this work was still legal. Indeed, just about everyone I interviewed could trace a professional lineage reaching back to Timothy Leary (often through one of his graduate students), Stanislav Grof, Al Hubbard, or a Bay Area psychologist named Leo Zeff. Zeff, who died in 1988, was one of the earliest underground therapists, and certainly the most well-known; he claims to have “processed” (Al Hubbard’s term) three thousand patients and trained 150 guides during his career, including several of the ones I met on the West Coast.
Zeff also left a posthumous (and anonymous) account of his work, in the form of a 1997 book called The Secret Chief, a series of interviews with a therapist called Jacob conducted by his close friend Myron Stolaroff. (In 2004, Zeff’s family gave Stolaroff permission to disclose his identity and republish the book as The Secret Chief Revealed.) On the evidence of his interviews, Zeff is in many ways typical of the underground therapists I met, in both his approach and his manner; he comes across rather as folksy, or haimish, to use a Yiddish word Zeff would have appreciated, rather than as a renegade, guru, or hippie. In a photograph included in the 2004 edition, a smiling Zeff, wearing a big pair of aviator glasses and a sweater vest over his shirtsleeves, looks more like a favorite uncle than either an outlaw or mystic. Yet he was both.
Zeff was a forty-nine-year-old Jungian therapist practicing in Oakland in 1961 when he had his first trip, on a hundred micrograms of LSD. (It might have been Stolaroff himself who first “tripped him,” to borrow one of Zeff’s locutions.) The guide had asked him to bring along an object of personal significance, so Zeff brought his Torah. After the effects of the LSD had come on, his guide “laid the Torah across my chest and I immediately went into the lap of God. He and I were One.”
Zeff soon began incorporating a range of different psychedelics in his practice and found that the medicines helped his patients break through their defenses, bringing buried layers of unconscious material to the surface, and achieve spiritual insights, often in a single session. The results were so “fantastic,” he told Stolaroff, that when the federal government put psychedelics on schedule 1 in 1970, prohibiting their use for any purpose, Zeff made the momentous decision to continue his work underground.
This was not easy. “Many times I’d be in much agony falling asleep, and wake up in the morning and have it hit me,” he told Stolaroff. “‘Jacob [his pseudonym], for Christ’s sake what are you exposing yourself to all this shit for? You don’t need it.’ Then I’d look and I’d say, ‘Look at the people. Look what’s happening to them.’ I’d say, ‘Is it worth it?’ . . . Inevitably I’d come back with ‘Yeah, it’s worth it’ . . . Whatever you have to go through. It’s worth it to produce these results!”
During his long career, Zeff helped codify many of the protocols of underground therapy, setting forth the “agreements” guides typically make with their clients—regarding confidentiality (strict), sexual contact (forbidden), obedience to the therapist’s instructions during the session (absolute), and so on—and developing many of the ceremonial touches, such as having participants take the medicine from a cup: “a very important symbol of the transformation experience.” Zeff also described the departures from conventional therapeutic practice common among psychedelic guides. He believed it was imperative that guides have personal experience of any medicine they administer. (Aboveground guides either don’t seek such experience or don’t admit to it.) He came to believe that guides should not try to direct or manipulate the psychedelic journey, allowing it instead to find its own course and destination. (“Just leave ’em alone!” he tells Stolaroff.) Guides should also be willing to drop the analyst’s mask of detachment, offering their personalities and emotions, as well as a comforting touch or hug to the client undergoing a particularly challenging trip.
In his introduction to The Secret Chief Revealed, Myron Stolaroff sketched the influence of underground guides like Leo Zeff on the field as a whole, suggesting that the legitimate psychedelic research that resumed in the late 1990s, when he was writing, had “evolved as a result of anecdotal evidence from underground therapists” like Zeff, as well as from the first wave of psychedelic research done in the 1950s and 1960s. Psychedelic researchers working in universities today are understandably reluctant to acknowledge it, but there is a certain amount of traffic between the two worlds, and a small number of figures who move, somewhat gingerly, back and forth between them. For example, some prominent underground therapists have been recruited to help train a new cohort of psychedelic guides to work in university trials of psychedelic drugs. When the Hopkins team wanted to study the role of music in the guided psilocybin session, it reached out to several underground guides, surveying their musical practices.
No one had any idea how many underground guides were working in America, or exactly what that work consisted of, until 2010. That was the year James Fadiman, the Stanford-trained psychologist who took part in psychedelic research at the International Foundation for Advanced Study in Menlo Park in the early 1960s, attended a conference on psychedelic science in the Bay Area. The conference was organized by MAPS, with sponsorship from Heffter, the Beckley Foundation, and Bob Jesse’s Council on Spiritual Practices, the three other nonprofits that funded most of the psychedelic research under way at the time. In a Holiday Inn in San Jose, the conference brought together more than a thousand people, including several dozen scientists (who presented their research, complete with PowerPoint slides), a number of guides drawn from both the university trials and the underground, and a great many more “psychonauts”—people of all ages who make regular use of psychedelics in their lives, whether for spiritual, therapeutic, or “recreational” purposes. (As Bob Jesse is always quick to remind me whenever I use that word, “recreational” doesn’t necessarily mean frivolous, careless, or lacking in intention. Point taken.)
James Fadiman came to the MAPS conference “on the science track,” to give a talk about the value of the guided entheogenic journey. He wondered if there were many underground guides in the audience, so at the end of his talk he announced that there would be a meeting of guides at 8:00 the following morning.
“I dragged myself out of bed at 7:30 expecting to see maybe five people, but a hundred showed up! It was staggering.”
It would probably be too strong to describe this far-flung and disparate group as a community, much less an organization, yet my interviews with more than a dozen of them suggest they are professionals who share an outlook, a set of practices, and even a code of conduct. Soon after the meeting in San Jose, a “wiki” appeared on the Internet—a collaborative website where individuals can share documents and together create new content. (Fadiman included the URL in his 2011 book, The Psychedelic Explorer’s Guide.) Here, I found two items of particular interest, as well as several sub-wikis—documents under development—that hadn’t had a new entry for several years; it could be that public disclosure of the site in Fadiman’s book had led the creators to abandon it or move elsewhere online.
The first item was a draft charter: “to support a category of profound, prized experiences becoming more available to more people.” These experiences are described as “unitive consciousness” and “non-dual consciousness,” among other terms, and several non-pharmacological modalities for achieving these states are mentioned, including meditation, breathwork, and fasting. “A principal tool of the Guides is the judicious use of a class of psychoactive substances” known to be “potent spiritual catalysts.”
The website offers would-be guides links to printable forms for legal releases, ethical agreements, and medical questionnaires. (“We don’t have very good insurance,” one guide told me, with a sardonic smile. “So we’re very careful.”) There’s also a link to a thoughtful “Code of Ethics for Spiritual Guides,” which acknowledges the psychological and physical risks of journeying and emphasizes the guide’s ultimate responsibility for the well-being of the client. Recognizing that during “primary religious practices” “participants may be especially open to suggestion, manipulation, and exploitation,” the code states that it is incumbent upon the guide to disclose all risks, obtain consent, guarantee confidentiality, protect the safety and health of participants at all times, “safeguard against . . . ambition” and self-promotion, and accommodate clients “without regard to their ability to pay.”
Perhaps the most useful document on the website is the “Guidelines for Voyagers and Guides.”* The guidelines represent a compendium of half a century’s accumulated knowledge and wisdom about how best to approach the psychedelic journey, whether as a participant or as a guide. It covers the basics of set and setting; mental and physical preparation for the session; potential drug interactions; the value of formulating an intention; what to expect during the experience, both good and bad; the stages of the journey; what can go wrong and how to deal with frightening material; the supreme importance of post-session “integration”; and so on.
For me, standing on the threshold of such an experience, it was reassuring to learn that the underground community of psychedelic guides, which I had assumed consisted of a bunch of individuals all doing pretty much their own thing, operated like professionals, working from a body of accumulated knowledge and experience and in a set of traditions that had been handed down from psychedelic pioneers such as Al Hubbard, Timothy Leary, Myron Stolaroff, Stan Grof, and Leo Zeff. They had rules and codes and agreements, and many elements of the work had been more or less institutionalized.
Stumbling upon the website also made me appreciate just how far the culture of psychedelics has evolved since the 1950s and 1960s. Implicit in these documents, it seemed to me, was the recognition that these powerful, anarchic medicines can and have been misused and that if they are to do more good than harm, they require a cultural vessel of some kind: protocols, rules, and rituals that together form a kind of Apollonian counterweight to contain and channel their sheer Dionysian force. Modern medicine, with its controlled trials and white-coated clinicians and DSM diagnoses, offers one such container; the underground guides offer another.
YET THE FIRST COUPLE of guides I interviewed did not fill me with confidence. Maybe it was because I was so new to the territory, and nervous about the contemplated journey, but I kept hearing things in their spiels that set off alarm bells and made me want to run in the opposite direction.
Andrei, the first guide I interviewed, was a gruff Romanian-born psychologist in his late sixties with decades of experience; he had worked with a friend of a friend of a friend. We met at his office in a modest neighborhood of small bungalows and neat lawns in a city in the Pacific Northwest. A hand-lettered sign on the door instructed visitors to remove their shoes and come upstairs to the dimly lit waiting room. A kilim rug had been pinned to the wall.
Instead of a table piled with old copies of People or Consumer Reports, I found a small shrine populated with spiritual artifacts from a bewildering variety of traditions: a Buddha, a crystal, a crow’s wing, a brass bowl for burning incense, a branch of sage. At the back of the shrine stood two framed photographs, one of a Hindu guru I didn’t recognize and the other of a Mexican curandera I did: María Sabina.
This was not the last time I would encounter such a confusing tableau. In fact every guide I met maintained some such shrine in the room where he or she worked, and clients were often asked to contribute an item of personal significance before embarking on their journeys. What I was tempted to dismiss as a smorgasbord of equal-opportunity New Age tchotchkes, I would eventually come to regard more sympathetically, as the material expression of the syncretism prevalent in the psychedelic community. Members of this community tend to be more spiritual than religious in any formal sense, focused on the common core of mysticism or “cosmic consciousness” that they believe lies behind all the different religious traditions. So what appeared to me as a bunch of conflicting symbols of divinity are in fact different means of expressing or interpreting the same underlying spiritual reality, “the perennial philosophy” that Aldous Huxley held to undergird all religions and to which psychedelics supposedly can offer direct access.
After a few minutes, Andrei bounded into the room, and when I stood to offer my hand, he surprised me with a bear hug. A big man with a full head of hastily combed gray hair, Andrei was wearing a blue-checked button-down over a yellow T-shirt that struggled to encompass the globe of his belly. Speaking with a thick accent, he managed to seem both amiable and disconcertingly blunt.
Andrei had his first experience with LSD at twenty-one, soon after he came out of the army; a friend had sent it from America, and the experience transformed him. “It made me realize we live a very limited version of what life is.” That realization propelled him on a journey through Eastern religion and Western psychology that eventually culminated in a doctorate in psychology. When military service threatened to interrupt his psycho-spiritual journey, he “decided I have to make my own choices” and deserted.
Andrei eventually left Bucharest for San Francisco, bound for what he had heard was “the first New Age graduate school”—the California Institute of Integral Studies. Founded in 1968, the institute specializes in “transpersonal psychology,” a school of therapy with a strong spiritual orientation rooted in the work of Carl Jung and Abraham Maslow as well as the “wisdom traditions” of the East and the West, including Native American healing and South American shamanism. Stanislav Grof, a pioneer of both transpersonal and psychedelic therapy, has been on the faculty for many years. In 2016, the institute began offering the nation’s first certificate program in psychedelic therapy.
As part of his degree program, Andrei had to undergo psychotherapy and found his way to a Native American “doing medicine work” in the Four Corners as well as the Bay Area. “Whoopee!” he recalled thinking. “Because of my LSD experience, I knew it was viable.” Medicine work became his vocation.
“I help people find out who they are so they can live their lives fully. I used to work with whoever came to me, but some were too fucked up. If you’re on the edge of psychosis, this work can push you over. You need a strong ego in order to let go of it and then be able to spring back to your boundaries.” He mentioned he’d once been sued by a troubled client who blamed him for a subsequent breakdown. “So I decided, I don’t work with crazies anymore. And as soon as I made this statement to the universe, they stopped coming.” These days he works with a lot of young people in the tech world. “I’m the dangerous virus of Silicon Valley. They come to me wondering, ‘What am I doing here, chasing the golden carrot in the golden cage?’ Many of them go on to do something more meaningful with their lives. [The experience] opens them up to the spiritual reality.”
It’s hard to say exactly what put me off working with Andrei, but oddly enough it was less the New Agey spiritualism than his nonchalance about a process I still found exotic and scary. “I don’t play the psychotherapy game,” he told me, as blasé as a guy behind a deli counter wrapping and slicing a sandwich. “None of that blank screen. In mainstream psychology, you don’t hug. I hug. I touch them. I give advice. I have people come stay with us in the forest.” He works with clients not here in the office but in a rural location deep in the woods of the Olympic Peninsula. “Those are all big no-no’s.” He shrugged as if to say, so what?
I shared some of my fears. He’d heard it all before. “You may not get what you want,” he told me, “but you’ll get what you need.” I gulped mentally. “The main thing is to surrender to the experience, even when it gets difficult. Surrender to your fear. The biggest fears that come up are the fear of death and the fear of madness. But the only thing to do is surrender. So surrender!” Andrei had named my two biggest fears, but his prescription seemed easier said than done.
I was hoping for a guide who exuded perhaps a little more tenderness and patience, I realized, yet I wasn’t sure I should let Andrei’s gruff manner put me off. He was smart, he had loads of experience, and he was willing to work with me. Then he told a story that decided the matter.
It was about working with a man my age who became convinced during his psilocybin journey he was having a heart attack. “‘I’m dying,’ he said, ‘call 911! I feel it, my heart!’ I told him to surrender to the dying. That Saint Francis said that in dying you gain eternal life. When you realize death is just another experience, there’s nothing more to worry about.”
Okay, but what if it had been a real heart attack? Out there in the woods in the middle of the Olympic Peninsula? Andrei mentioned that an aspiring guide he was training had “once asked me, ‘What do you do if someone dies?’” I don’t know what I expected him to say, but Andrei’s reply, delivered with one of his most matter-of-fact shrugs, was not it.
“You bury him with all the other dead people.”
I told Andrei I would be in touch.
The psychedelic underground was populated with a great many such vivid characters, I soon discovered, but not necessarily the kinds of characters to whom I felt I could entrust my mind—or for that matter any part of me. Immediately after my session with Andrei, I had a meeting with a second prospective guide, a brilliant psychologist in his eighties who had been a student of Timothy Leary’s at Harvard. His knowledge of psychedelics was deep; his credentials impressive; he had been highly recommended by people I respected. Yet when over lunch at a Tibetan restaurant near his office he removed his bolo tie and suspended it over the menu, I began to lose confidence that this was my man. He explained that he relied on the energies released by the pendulum swing of the silver clasp to choose the entrée most likely to agree with his temperamental digestion. I forget what his tie ordered for lunch, but even before he began dilating on the evidence that 9/11 was an inside job, I knew my search for a guide was not over quite yet.
ONE NOTABLE DIFFERENCE about doing psychedelics at sixty, as opposed to when you’re eighteen or twenty, is that at sixty you’re more likely to have a cardiologist you might want to consult in advance of your trip. That was me. A year before I had decided to embark on this adventure, my heart, the reliable operations of which I had taken completely for granted to that point, had suddenly made its presence felt and, for the first time in my life, demanded my attention. While sitting at my computer one afternoon, I was suddenly made aware of a pronounced and crazily syncopated new rhythm in my chest.
“Atrial fibrillation” was the name the doctor gave the abnormal squiggles that appeared on my EKG. The danger of AFib is not a heart attack, he said to my (short-lived) relief, but a heightened risk of stroke. “My cardiologist”—the unfortunate phrase had suddenly joined my vocabulary, probably for the duration—put me on a couple of meds to calm the heart rhythms and lower the blood pressure, plus a daily baby aspirin to thin my blood. And then he told me not to worry about it.
I followed all of his advice except the last bit. Now I couldn’t help but think about my heart constantly. All of its operations that had previously taken place completely outside my conscious awareness suddenly became salient: something I could hear and feel whenever I thought to check in, which now was incessantly. Months later, the AFib had not recurred, but my surveillance of my poor heart had gotten out of control. I checked my blood pressure daily and listened for signs of ventricular eccentricity every time I got into bed. It took months of not having a stroke before I could once again trust my heart to go about its business without my supervision. Gradually, thankfully, it retreated once again to the background of my attention.
I tell you all this by way of explaining why I felt I should talk to my cardiologist before embarking on a psychedelic journey. My cardiologist was my age, so not likely to be shocked by the word “psilocybin” or “LSD” or “MDMA.” I told him what I had in mind and asked if any of the drugs in question were contraindicated, given my coronary issues, or if there was any risk of an interaction with the meds he had prescribed. He was not overly concerned about the psychedelics—most of them concentrate their effects in the mind with remarkably little impact on the cardiovascular system—but one of the drugs I mentioned he advised I avoid. This was MDMA, also known as Ecstasy or Molly, which has been on schedule 1 since the mid-1980s, when it emerged as a popular rave drug.
The drug 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine is not a classical psychedelic (it works on different brain receptors and doesn’t have strong visual effects), yet several of the guides I was interviewing had told me it was part of their regimen. Sometimes called an empathogen, MDMA lowers psychological defenses and helps to swiftly build a bond between patient and therapist. (Leo Zeff was one of the first therapists to use MDMA in the 1970s, after the compound was popularized by his friend the legendary Bay Area chemist Sasha Shulgin and his wife, the therapist Ann Shulgin.) Guides told me MDMA was a good way to “break the ice” and establish trust before the psychedelic journey. (One said, “It condenses years of psychotherapy into an afternoon.”) But as its scientific name indicates, MDMA is an amphetamine, and so, chemically, it implicates the heart in a way psychedelics don’t. I was disappointed my cardiologist had taken MDMA off the table but pleased that he had more or less given me a green light on the rest of my travel plans.
At least on paper, nothing about the first guide I chose to work with sounds auspicious. The man lived and worked so far off the grid, in the mountains of the American West, that he had no phone service, generated his own electricity, pumped his own water, grew his own food, and had only the spottiest satellite Internet. I could just forget about the whole idea of being anywhere in range of a hospital emergency room. Then there was the fact that while I was a Jew from a family that had once been reluctant to buy a German car, this fellow was the son of a Nazi—a German in his midsixties whose father had served in the SS during World War II. After I had heard so much about the importance of both set and setting, none of these details augured especially well.
Yet I liked Fritz from the moment he came out to greet me, offering a broad grin and a warm hug (I was getting used to these) when I pulled my rental into his remote camp. This consisted of a tidy village of structures—a handmade house and a couple of smaller cabins, an octagonal yurt, and two gaily painted outhouses set out in a clearing on the crest of a heavily wooded mountain. Following the hand-drawn map Fritz had sent me (the area was terra incognita for GPS), I drove for miles on a dusty dirt road that passed through the blasted landscape of an abandoned mine before rising into a dark forest of cypress and ponderosa pine, with a dense understory of manzanitas, their smooth bark the color of fresh blood. I had come to the middle of nowhere.
Fritz was a tangle of contradiction and yet manifestly a warm and seemingly happy man. At sixty-five, he resembled a European movie actor gone slightly to seed, with thick gray hair parted in the middle and a blocky, muscular frame just beginning to yield. Fritz grew up in Bavaria, the son of a raging alcoholic who had served in the SS as a bodyguard for the cultural attaché responsible for producing operas and other entertainments for the troops—the Nazis’ USO. Later, his father fought on the Russian front and survived Stalingrad but came home from the war shell-shocked. Fritz grew up in the dense shade of his misery, sharing the shame and anger of so many in his postwar generation.
“When the military came for me [to serve his period of conscription],” he said, as we sat at his kitchen table sipping tea on a sunny spring afternoon, “I told them to fuck themselves and they threw me into prison.” Forced eventually to serve in the army, Fritz was court-martialed twice—once for setting his uniform on fire. He spent time in solitary confinement reading Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky and plotting revolution with the Maoist in the next cell, with whom he communicated through the prison plumbing. “My proudest moment was the time I gave all the guards Orange Sunshine that I had gotten from a friend in California.”
At university, he studied psychology and took a lot of LSD, which he obtained from the American troops stationed in Germany. “Compared to LSD, Freud was a joke. For him biography was everything. He had no use for mystical experience.” Fritz moved on to Jung and Wilhelm Reich, “my hero.” Along the way, he discovered that LSD was a powerful tool for exploring the depths of his own psyche, allowing him to reexperience and then let go of the anger and depression that hobbled him as a young man. “There was more light in my life after that. Something shifted.”
As it had for many of the guides I had met, the mystical experience Fritz had on psychedelics launched him on a decades-long spiritual quest that eventually “blew my linear, empirical mind,” opening him up to the possibility of past lives, telepathy, precognition, and “synchronicities” that defy our conceptions of space and time. He spent time on an ashram in India, where he witnessed specific scenes that had been prefigured in his psychedelic journeys. Once, making love to a woman in Germany (the two were practicing Tantrism), he and she shared an out-of-body experience that allowed them to observe themselves from the ceiling. “These medicines have shown me that something quote-unquote impossible exists. But I don’t think it’s magic or supernatural. It’s a technology of consciousness we don’t understand yet.”
Normally when people start talking about transpersonal dimensions of consciousness and “morphogenetic fields,” I have little (if any) patience, but there was something about Fritz that made such talk, if not persuasive, then at least . . . provocative. He managed to express the most far-fetched ideas in a disarmingly modest, even down-to-earth way. I had the impression he had no agenda beyond feeding his own curiosity, whether with psychedelics or books on paranormal phenomena. For some people, the privilege of having had a mystical experience tends to massively inflate the ego, convincing them they’ve been granted sole possession of a key to the universe. This is an excellent recipe for creating a guru. The certitude and condescension for mere mortals that usually come with that key can render these people insufferable. But that wasn’t Fritz. To the contrary. His otherworldly experiences had humbled him, opening him up to possibilities and mysteries without closing him to skepticism—or to the pleasures of everyday life on this earth. There was nothing ethereal about him. I surprised myself by liking Fritz as much as I did.
After five years spent living on a commune in Bavaria (“we were all trying to undo some of the damage done to the postwar generation”), in 1976 he met a woman from California while hiking in the Himalayas and followed her back to Santa Cruz. There he fell into the whole Northern California human potential scene, at various times running a meditation center for an Indian guru named Rajneesh and doing bodywork (including deep-tissue massage and Rolfing), Gestalt and Reichian therapy, and some landscaping to pay the bills. When in 1982, soon after his father’s death, he met Stan Grof at a breathwork course at Esalen, he felt he had at last found his rightful father. During the workshop, Fritz “had an experience as powerful as any psychedelic. Out of the blue, I experienced myself being born—my mother giving birth to me. While this was happening, I watched the goddess Shiva on a gigantic IMAX screen, creating worlds and destroying worlds. Everyone in the group wanted what I had!” He now added holotropic breathwork to his bodywork practice.
Eventually, Fritz did an intensive series of multiyear trainings with Grof in Northern California and British Columbia. At one of them, he met his future wife, a clinical psychologist. Grof was ostensibly teaching holotropic breathwork, the non-pharmacological modality he had developed after psychedelics were made illegal. But Fritz said that Grof also shared with this select group his deep knowledge about the practice of psychedelic therapy, discreetly passing on his methods to a new generation. Several people in the workshop, Fritz and his future wife among them, went on to become underground guides. She works with the women who find their way up the mountain, he with the men.
“You don’t make a lot of money,” Fritz told me. Indeed, he charged only nine hundred dollars for a three-day session, which included room and board. “It’s illegal and dangerous. You can have a person go psychotic. And you really don’t make a lot of money. But I’m a healer and these medicines work.” It was abundantly clear he had a calling and loved what he did—loved witnessing people undergo profound transformations before his eyes.
FRITZ TOLD ME what to expect if I were to work with him. It would mean returning here for three days, sleeping in the eight-sided yurt, where we would also do “the work.” The first afternoon would be a warm-up or get-acquainted session, using either MDMA or breathwork. (I explained why in my case it would have to be breathwork.) This would give him a chance to observe how I handled an altered state of consciousness before sending me on an LSD journey the morning of the second day; it would also help him determine a suitable dose.
I asked him how he could be sure of the purity and quality of the medicines he uses, since they come from chemists working illicitly. Whenever he receives a new shipment, he explained, “I first test it for purity, and then I take a heroic dose to see how it feels before I give it to anyone.” Not exactly FDA approval, I thought to myself, but better than nothing.
Fritz doesn’t take any medicine himself while he’s working but often gets “a contact high” from his clients. During the session he takes notes, selects the music, and checks in every twenty minutes or so. “I’ll ask you not how you are but where you are.
“I’m here just for you, to hold the space, so you don’t have to worry about anything or anyone else. Not the wife, not the child. So you can really let go—and go.” This, I realized, was another reason I was eager to work with a guide. When Judith and I had our magic mushroom day the previous summer, the simmer of worry about her welfare kept intruding on my journey, forcing me to stay close to the surface. Much as I hated the psychobabble-y locution, I loved the idea of someone “holding space” for me.
“That night I’ll ask you to make some notes before you go to sleep. On your last morning, we’ll compare notes and try to integrate and make sense of your experience. Then I’ll cook you a big breakfast to get you ready to face the interstate!”
We scheduled a time for me to come back.
THE FIRST THING I learned about myself that first afternoon, working with Fritz in the yurt, is that I am “easy to put under”—susceptible to trance, a mental space completely new to me and accessible by nothing more than a shift in the pattern of one’s breathing. It was the damnedest thing.
Fritz’s instructions were straightforward: Breathe deeply and rapidly while exhaling as strongly as you can. “At first it will feel unnatural and you’ll have to concentrate to maintain the rhythm, but after a few minutes your body will take over and do it automatically.” I stretched out on the mattress and donned a pair of eyeshades while he put on some music, something generically tribal and rhythmic, dominated by the pounding of a drum. He placed a plastic bucket at my side, explaining that occasionally people throw up.
It was hard work at first, to breathe in such an exaggerated and unnatural way, even with Fritz’s enthusiastic coaching, but then all at once my body took over, and I found that no thought was required to maintain the driving pace and rhythm. It was as if I had broken free from gravity and settled into an orbit: the big deep breaths just came, automatically. Now I felt an uncontrollable urge to move my legs and arms in sync with the pounding of the drums, which resonated in my rib cage like a powerful new heartbeat. I felt possessed, both my body and my mind. I can’t remember many thoughts except “Hey, this is working, whatever it is!”
I was flat on my back yet dancing wildly, my arms and legs moving with a will of their own. All control of my body I had surrendered to the music. It felt a little like speaking in tongues, or what I imagine that to be, with some external force taking over the mind and body for its own obscure purpose.
There wasn’t much visual imagery, just the naked sensation of exhilaration, until I began to picture myself on the back of a big black horse, galloping headlong down a path through a forest. I was perched up high on its shoulders, like a jockey, holding on tight as the beast scissored its great muscles forward and back with each long stride. As my rhythm synced with that of the horse, I could feel myself absorbing the animal’s power. It felt fantastic to so fully inhabit my body, as if for the first time. And yet because I am not a very confident rider (or dancer!), it also felt precarious, as if were I to miss a breath or beat I might tumble off.
I had no idea how long the trance lasted, time was utterly lost on me, but when Fritz gently brought me back to the present moment and the reality of the room, simply by encouraging me to slow and relax my breathing, he reported I had been “in it” for an hour and fifteen minutes. I felt flushed and sweaty and triumphant, as if I had run a marathon; Fritz said I looked “radiant”—“young like a baby.”
“You had no resistance,” he said approvingly; “that’s a good sign for tomorrow.” I had no idea what had just happened, could recall little more of the hour than riding the horse, but the episode seemed to have involved a terrific physical release of some kind. Something had let go of me or been expunged, and I felt buoyant. And humbled by the mystery of it. For here was (to quote William James) one of the “forms of consciousness entirely different” from the ordinary and yet so close by—separated from normal waking consciousness by . . . what? A handful of exhalations!
Then something frightening happened. Fritz had gone up to the house to prepare our dinner, leaving me to make some notes about the experience on my laptop, when all at once I felt my heart surge and then begin to dance madly in my chest. I immediately recognized the sensation of turbulence as AFib, and when I took my pulse, it was chaotic. A panicky bird was trapped in my rib cage, throwing itself against the bars in an attempt to get out. And here I was, a dozen miles off the grid smack in the middle of nowhere.
It went on like that for two hours, straight through a subdued and anxious dinner. Fritz seemed concerned; in all the hundreds of breathwork sessions he had led or witnessed, he had never seen such a reaction. (He had mentioned earlier a single fatality attributed to holotropic breathwork: a man who had had an aneurism.) Now I was worried about tomorrow, and I think he was too. Though he also wondered if perhaps what I was feeling in my heart might reflect some psychic shift or “heart opening.” I resisted the implied metaphor, holding firm to the plane of physiology: the heart is a pump, and this one is malfunctioning. We discussed tomorrow’s plan. Maybe we want to go with a lower dose, Fritz suggested; “you’re so susceptible you might not need very much to journey.” I told him I might bail out altogether. And then, as suddenly as it had come on, I felt my heart slip back into the sweet groove of its accustomed rhythm.
I got little sleep that night as a debate raged in my head about whether or not I was crazy to proceed in the morning with LSD at any dose. I could die up here and wouldn’t that be stupid? But was I really in any danger? Now my heart felt fine, and from everything I read, the effects of LSD were confined to the brain, more or less, leaving the cardiovascular system unaffected. In retrospect, it made perfect sense that a process as physically arduous as holotropic breathwork would discombobulate the heart.* Yes, I could take a rain check on my LSD journey, but even the thought of that option landed like a crushing disappointment. I had come this far, and I had had this intriguing glimpse into a state of consciousness that for all my trepidations I was eager to explore more deeply.
This went on all night, back and forth, pro and con, but by the time the sun came up, the earliest rays threading the needles of the eastern pines, I was resolved. At breakfast, I told Fritz I felt good and wanted to proceed. We agreed, however, to go with a modest dose—a hundred micrograms, with “a booster” after an hour or two if I wanted one.
Fritz sent me out on a walk to clear my head and think about my intention while he did the dishes and readied the yurt for my journey. I hiked for an hour on a trail through the forest, which had been refreshed overnight by a rain shower; the cleansed air held the scent of cedar, and the barkless red limbs of the manzanita were glowing. Fritz had told me to look for an object to put on the altar. While I was looking and walking, I decided I would ask Fritz to give me his pledge that if anything whatsoever went wrong, he would call 911 for help regardless of the personal risk.
I returned to the yurt around ten with a manzanita leaf and a smooth black stone in my pocket and a straightforward intention: to learn whatever the journey had to teach me about myself. Fritz had lit a fire in the woodstove, and the room was beginning to give up its chill. He had moved the mattress across the room so my head would be close to the speakers. In somber tones, he talked about what to expect and how to handle various difficulties that might arise: “paranoia, spooky places, the feeling you’re losing your mind or that you are dying.
“It’s like when you see a mountain lion,” he suggested. “If you run, it will chase you. So you must stand your ground.” I was reminded of the “flight instructions” that the guides employed at Johns Hopkins: instead of turning away from any monster that appears, move toward it, stand your ground, and demand to know, “What are you doing in my mind? What do you have to teach me?”
I added my stone and leaf to the altar, which held a bronze Buddha surrounded by the items of many previous travelers. “Something hard and something soft,” Fritz observed. I asked for the assurances I needed to proceed and received them. Now he handed me a Japanese teacup at the bottom of which lay a tiny square of blotter paper and the torn scraps of a second square—the booster. One side of the blotter paper had a Buddha printed on it, the other a cartoon character I didn’t recognize. I put the square on my tongue and, taking a sip of water, swallowed. Fritz didn’t perform much of a ceremony, but he did talk about the “sacred tradition” I was now joining, the lineage of all the tribes and peoples down through time and around the world who used such medicines in their rites of initiation. Here I was, in range of my sixtieth birthday, taking LSD for the first time. It did feel something like a rite of passage, but a passage to where, exactly?
While waiting for the LSD to come on, we sat on the wooden skirt of decking that circled the yurt, chatting quietly about this and that. Life up here on the mountain; the wildlife that shared the property with him because he didn’t keep a dog: there were mountain lions, bears, coyotes, foxes, and rattlesnakes. Jittery, I tried to change the subject; as it was, I’d been afraid during the night to visit the outhouse, choosing instead to pee off the porch. Lions and bears and snakes were the last thing I wanted to think about just now.
Around eleven, I told Fritz I was starting to feel wobbly. He suggested I lie down on the mattress and put on my eyeshades. As soon as he started the music—something Amazonian in flavor, gently rhythmic with traditional instruments but also nature sounds (rain showers and crickets) that created a vivid dimensional sense of outdoor space—I was off, traveling somewhere in my mind, in a fully realized forest landscape that the music had somehow summoned into being. It made me realize what a powerful little technology a pair of eyeshades could be, at least in this context: it was like donning a pair of virtual reality goggles, allowing me immediately to take leave of this place and time.
I guessed I was hallucinating, yet this was not at all what I expected an LSD hallucination to be, which was overpowering. But Fritz had told me that the literal meaning of the word is to wander in one’s mind, and that was exactly what I was doing, with the same desultory indifference to agency the wanderer feels. Yet I still had agency: I could change at will the contents of my thoughts, but in this dreamy state, so wide open to suggestion, I was happy to let the terrain, and the music, dictate my path.
And for the next several hours the music did just that, summoning into existence a sequence of psychic landscapes, some of them populated by the people closest to me, others explored on my own. A lot of the music was New Age drivel—the sort of stuff you might hear while getting a massage in a high-end spa—yet never had it sounded so evocative, so beautiful! Music had become something much greater and more profound than mere sound. Freely trespassing the borders of the other senses, it was palpable enough to touch, forming three-dimensional spaces I could move through.
The Amazonian-tribal song put me on a trail that ascended steeply through redwoods, following a ravine notched into a hillside by the silvery blade of a powerful stream. I know this place: it was the trail that rises from Stinson Beach to Mount Tamalpais. But as soon as I secured that recognition, it morphed into something else entirely. Now the music formed a vertical architecture of wooden timbers, horizontals and verticals and diagonals that were being magically craned into place, forming levels that rose one on top of the other, ever higher into the sky like a multistoried tree house under construction, yet a structure as open to the air and its influences as a wind chime.
I saw that each level represented another phase in my life with Judith. There we were, ascending stage by stage through our many years together, beginning as kids who met in college, falling in love, living together in the city, getting married, having our son, Isaac, becoming a family, moving to the country. Now, here at the top, I watched a new, as yet inchoate stage being constructed as indeed one now is: whatever this life together is going to be now that Isaac has grown up and left home. I looked hard, hoping for some clue about what to expect, but the only thing I could see clearly was that this new stage was being built on the wooden scaffolding of earlier ones and therefore promised to be sturdy.
So it went, song by song, for hours. Something aboriginal, with the deep spooky tones of a didgeridoo, put me underground, moving somehow through the brownish-black rootscape of a forest. I tensed momentarily: Was this about to get terrifying? Have I died and been interred? If so, I was fine with it. I got absorbed watching a white tracery of mycelium threading among the roots and linking the trees in a network intricate beyond comprehension. I knew all about this mycelial network, how it forms a kind of arboreal Internet allowing the trees in a forest to exchange information, but now what had been merely an intellectual conceit was a vivid, felt reality of which I had become a part.
When the music turned more masculine or martial, as it now did, sons and then fathers filled my mental field. I watched a swiftly unfolding biopic of Isaac’s life to this point—his struggles as an exquisitely sensitive boy, and how those sensitivities had turned into strengths, making him who he is. I thought about things I needed to tell him—about the surging pride I felt as he embarked on his adult life and made his way in a new city and career, but also my fervent hope that he not harden himself in success or disown his vulnerabilities and his sweetness.
I felt something on my eyeshades and realized I had wet them with my tears.
I was already feeling wide open and undefended when it dawned on me that I wasn’t talking to Isaac, or not only to him, but to myself as well. Something hard and something soft: the paired terms kept turning over like a coin. The night before coming to Fritz’s place, I had spoken to two thousand people in a concert hall, tracked across a stage by a spotlight as I played the role of the man with the answers, the one people could depend on to explain things. This was much the same role I played in my family growing up, not only for my younger sisters, but, in times of crisis, for my parents too. (Even now, my sisters stubbornly refuse ever to accept from me the words “I don’t know.”) “So now look at me!” I thought, a smile blooming on my face: this grown man blindfolded and laid out on the floor of a psychedelic therapist’s yurt, chasing after my mind as it wandered heedlessly through the woods of my life, warm tears—of what? I didn’t know!—sliding down my cheeks.
This was unfamiliar territory for me and not at all where I expected to find myself on LSD. I hadn’t traveled very far from home. Instead of the demons and angels and various other entities I was expecting to meet, I was having a series of encounters with the people in my family. I visited each of them in turn, the music setting the tone, and the emotions came over me in great waves, whether of admiration (for my sisters and mother, whom I pictured seated around a horseshoe-shaped table—like the UN!—each of them representing a different ideal of feminine strength); gratitude; or compassion, especially for my father, a man both driven and pursued for much of his life, and someone whom before this moment I’d never before fully imagined as a son, and a son of ferociously demanding parents.
The flood tide of compassion overflowed its banks and leaked into some unexpected places, like my fourth-grade music class. Here I inexplicably encountered poor Mr. Roper, this earnest young man in a cheap suit who in spite of heroic efforts could not get us to give a shit about the sections of an orchestra he mapped on the board or the characters of the various instruments, no matter how many times he played Peter and the Wolf for us. As he paced the classroom in his excitement, we would wait in breathless suspense for him to step on one of the upturned thumbtacks we placed in his path, a thrill for which we were willing to risk staying after school in detention. But who was this Mr. Roper, really? Why couldn’t we see that behind the cartoon figure we tortured so mercilessly was, no doubt, a decent guy who wanted nothing more than to ignite in us his passion for music? The unthinking cruelty of children sent a quick shiver of shame through me. But then: What a surfeit of compassion I must be feeling, to spare that much for Mr. Roper!
And cresting over all these encounters came a cascading dam break of love, love for Judith and Isaac and everyone in my family, love even for my impossible grandmother and her long-suffering husband. The next day, during our integration session, Fritz read from his notes two things I apparently said aloud during this part of the journey: “I don’t want to be so stingy with my feelings.” And, “All this time spent worrying about my heart. What about all the other hearts in my life?”
It embarrasses me to write these words; they sound so thin, so banal. This is a failure of my language, no doubt, but perhaps it is not only that. Psychedelic experiences are notoriously hard to render in words; to try is necessarily to do violence to what has been seen and felt, which is in some fundamental way pre- or post-linguistic or, as students of mysticism say, ineffable. Emotions arrive in all their newborn nakedness, unprotected from the harsh light of scrutiny and, especially, the pitiless glare of irony. Platitudes that wouldn’t seem out of place on a Hallmark card glow with the force of revealed truth.
Love is everything.
Okay, but what else did you learn?
No—you must not have heard me: it’s everything!
Is a platitude so deeply felt still just a platitude? No, I decided. A platitude is precisely what is left of a truth after it has been drained of all emotion. To resaturate that dried husk with feeling is to see it again for what it is: the loveliest and most deeply rooted of truths, hidden in plain sight. A spiritual insight? Maybe so. Or at least that’s how it appeared in the middle of my journey. Psychedelics can make even the most cynical of us into fervent evangelists of the obvious.
You could say the medicine makes you stupid, but after my journey through what must sound like a banal and sentimental landscape, I don’t think that’s it. For what after all is the sense of banality, or the ironic perspective, if not two of the sturdier defenses the adult ego deploys to keep from being overwhelmed—by our emotions, certainly, but perhaps also by our senses, which are liable at any time to astonish us with news of the sheer wonder of the world. If we are ever to get through the day, we need to put most of what we perceive into boxes neatly labeled “Known,” to be quickly shelved with little thought to the marvels therein, and “Novel,” to which, understandably, we pay more attention, at least until it isn’t that anymore. A psychedelic is liable to take all the boxes off the shelf, open and remove even the most familiar items, turning them over and imaginatively scrubbing them until they shine once again with the light of first sight. Is this reclassification of the familiar a waste of time? If it is, then so is a lot of art. It seems to me there is great value in such renovation, the more so as we grow older and come to think we’ve seen and felt it all before.
Yet one hundred micrograms of LSD had surely not propelled me into the lap of God, as it had Leo Zeff; even after the booster (another fifty micrograms, which I was eager to take, in hopes of going deeper and longer). I never achieved a transcendent, “non-dual” or “mystical-like” experience, and as I recapped the journey with Fritz the following morning, I registered a certain disappointment. But the novel plane of consciousness I’d spent a few hours wandering on had been interesting and pleasurable and, I think, useful to me. I would have to see if its effects endured, but it felt as though the experience had opened me up in unexpected ways.
Because the acid had not completely dissolved my ego, I never completely lost the ability to redirect the stream of my consciousness or the awareness it was in fact mine. But the stream itself felt distinctly different, less subject to will or outside interference. It reminded me of the pleasantly bizarre mental space that sometimes opens up at night in bed when we’re poised between the states of being awake and falling asleep—so-called hypnagogic consciousness. The ego seems to sign off a few moments before the rest of the mind does, leaving the field of consciousness unsupervised and vulnerable to gentle eruptions of imagery and hallucinatory snatches of narrative. Imagine that state extended indefinitely, yet with some ability to direct your attention to this or that, as if in an especially vivid and absorbing daydream. Unlike a daydream, however, you are fully present to the contents of whatever narrative is unfolding, completely inside it and beyond the reach of distraction. I had little choice but to obey the daydream’s logic, its ontological and epistemological rules, until, either by force of will or by the fresh notes of a new song, the mental channel would change and I would find myself somewhere else entirely.
This, I guess, is what happens when the ego’s grip on the mind is relaxed but not eliminated, as a larger dose would probably have done. “For the moment that interfering neurotic who, in waking hours, tries to run the show, was blessedly out of the way,” as Aldous Huxley put it in The Doors of Perception. Not entirely out of the way in my case, but the LSD had definitely muffled that controlling voice, and in that lightly regulated space all sorts of interesting things could bubble up, things that any self-respecting ego would probably have kept submerged.
I had had a psycholytic dose of LSD, one that allowed the patient to explore his psyche in an unconstrained but still deliberate manner while remaining sufficiently combobulated to talk about it. For me it felt less like a drug experience—the LSD feels completely transparent, with none of the physiological noise I associate with other psychoactive drugs—than a novel mode of cognition, falling somewhere between intellection and feeling. I had conjured several of the people closest to me, and in the presence of each of them had come stronger emotions than I had felt in some time. A dam had been breached, and the sensation of release felt wonderful. Too, a few genuine insights had emerged from these encounters, like the one about my father as a son, which turned on an act of imagination (of empathy) that even grown children seldom have sufficient distance to perform. During our integration session, Fritz mentioned that some people on LSD have an experience that in content and character is more like MDMA than a classic psychedelic trip; maybe what I had had was the MDMA session I’d had to pass up. The notion of a few years of psychotherapy condensed into several hours seemed about right, especially after Fritz and I spent that morning unpacking the scenes from my journey.
As I steered my rental car down the mountain and toward the airport for the flight home, I was relieved that the experience had been so benign (I had survived! Had roused no sleeping monsters in my unconscious!) and grateful it had been productive. All that day and well into the next, a high-pressure system of well-being dominated my psychological weather. Judith found me unusually chatty and available; my usual impatience was in abeyance, and I could outlast her at the table after dinner, being in no hurry to get up and do the dishes so I could move on to the next thing and then the thing after that. I guessed this was the afterglow I’d read about, and for a few days it cast a pleasantly theatrical light over everything, italicizing the ordinary in such a way as to make me feel uncommonly . . . appreciative.
It didn’t last, however, and in time I grew disappointed that the experience hadn’t been more transformative. I had been granted a taste of a slightly other way to be—less defended, I would say, and so more present. And now that I had acquainted myself with the territory and returned from this first foray more or less intact, I decided it was time to venture farther out.
My second journey began around an altar, in the middle of a second-story loft in a suburb of a small city on the Eastern Seaboard. The altar was being prayed over by an attractive woman with long blond hair parted in the middle and high cheekbones that I mention only because they would later figure in her transformation into a Mexican Indian. Seated across the altar from me, Mary’s eyes were closed as she recited a long and elaborate Native American prayer. She invoked in turn the power of each of the cardinal directions, the four elements, and the animal, plant, and mineral realms, the spirits of which she implored to help guide me on my journey.
My eyes were closed too, but now and again I couldn’t resist peeking out to take in the scene: the squash-colored loft with its potted plants and symbols of fertility and female power; the embroidered purple fabric from Peru that covered the altar; and the collection of items arrayed across it, including an amethyst in the shape of a heart, a purple crystal holding a candle, little cups filled with water, a bowl holding a few rectangles of dark chocolate, the two “sacred items” she had asked me to bring (a bronze Buddha a close friend had brought back from a trip to the East; the psilocybin coin Roland Griffiths had given me at our first meeting), and, squarely before me, an antique plate decorated in a grandmotherly floral pattern that held the biggest psilocybin mushroom I had ever seen. It was hard to believe I was about to eat the whole thing.
The crowded altar also held a branch of sage and a stub of Palo Santo, a fragrant South American wood that Indians burn ceremonially, and the jet-black wing of a crow. At various points in the ceremony, Mary lit the sage and the Palo Santo, using the wing to “smudge” me with the smoke—guide the spirits through the space around my head. The wing made an otherworldly whoosh as she flicked it by my ear, the spooky sound of a large bird coming too close for comfort, or a dark spirit being shooed away from a body.
The whole thing must sound ridiculously hokey, I know, but the conviction Mary brought to the ceremony, together with the aromas of the burning plants and the sounds of the wing pulsing the air—plus my own nervousness about the journey in store—cast a spell that allowed me to suspend my disbelief. I had decided to give myself up to this big mushroom, and for Mary, the guide to whom I had entrusted my psyche for this journey, ceremony counted for as much as chemistry. In this she was acting more like a shaman than a psychologist.
Mary had been recommended by a guide I’d interviewed on the West Coast, a rabbi who had taken an interest in my psychedelic education. Mary, who was my age, had trained with the eighty-something student of Timothy Leary whom I had interviewed and decided was a little too far out there for me. One might think the same of Mary, on paper, but something about her manner, her sobriety, and her evident compassion made me more comfortable in her presence.
Mary had practiced the whole grab bag of New Age therapies, from energy healing to spiritual psychology to family constellation therapy,* before being introduced to medicine work when she was fifty. (“It created the glue that brought together all this other work I’d been doing.”) At the time, Mary had used a psychedelic only once and long ago: at her twenty-first birthday party while in college. A friend had given her a jar of honey laced with psilocybin mushrooms. Mary immediately went up to her room, ate two or three spoonfuls, “and had the most profound experience of being with God. I was God and God was me.” Friends who had been partying downstairs came up to knock at her door, but Mary was gone.
As a child growing up outside Providence, Mary had been an enthusiastic Catholic, until “I realized I was a girl”—a fact that would disqualify her from ever performing the ceremonies she cherished. Mary’s religiosity lay dormant until that taste of honey, which “catapulted me into a huge change,” she told me the first time we met. “I dropped into something I hadn’t felt connected to since I was a little girl.” The reawakening of her spiritual life led her onto the path of Tibetan Buddhism and eventually to take the vow of an initiate: “‘To assist all sentient beings in their awakening and their enlightenment.’ Which is still my vocation.”
And now sitting before her in her treatment room was me, the next sentient being on deck, hoping to be wakened. I shared my intention: to learn what I could about myself and also about the nature of consciousness—my own but also its “transpersonal” dimension, if such a dimension exists.
“The mushroom teacher helps us to see who we really are,” Mary said, “brings us back to our soul’s purpose for being here in this lifetime.” I can imagine how these words might sound to an outsider. But by now I was inured to the New Age lingo, perhaps because I had glimpsed the potential for something meaningful behind the well-worn words. I’d also been impressed by Mary’s intelligence and her professionalism. In addition to having me consent to the standard “agreements” (bowing to her authority for the duration; remaining in the room until she gave me permission to leave; no sexual contact; and so on), she had me fill out a detailed medical form, a legal release, and a fifteen-page autobiographical questionnaire that took me the better part of a day to complete. All of which made me feel I was in good hands—even when those hands were flapping a crow’s wing around my head.
Yet, as I sat there before the altar, it seemed doubtful I could choke down that whole mushroom. It had to be five or six inches long, with a cap the size of a golf ball. I asked her if I could crumble it into a glass of hot water, make a tea, and drink it.
“Better to be fully conscious of what you’re doing,” she said, “which is eating a mushroom that came from the earth, one bite at a time. Examine it first, closely, then start at the cap.” She offered me a choice of honey or chocolate to help get it down; I went with the chocolate. Mary had told me that a friend of hers grows the psilocybin and had learned the craft years ago in a mushroom cultivation workshop taught by Paul Stamets. It seems there is only one or two degrees of separation between any two people in this world.
On the tongue, the mushroom was dry as the desert and tasted like earth-flavored cardboard, but alternating each bite with a nibble of the chocolate helped. Except for the gnarly bit at the very base of the stipe, I ate all of it, which amounted to two grams. Mary planned to offer me another two grams along the way, for a total of four. This would roughly approximate the dose being given to volunteers in the NYU and Hopkins trials and was equivalent to roughly three hundred micrograms of LSD—twice as much as I had taken with Fritz.
We chatted quietly for twenty minutes or so before Mary noticed my face was flushed and suggested I lie down and put on eyeshades. I chose a pair of high-tech black plastic ones, which in retrospect might have been a mistake. The perimeters were lined with soft black foam rubber, allowing the wearer to open his eyes to pitch darkness. Called the Mindfold Relaxation Mask, Mary told me, it had been expressly designed for this purpose by Alex Grey, the psychedelic artist.
As soon as Mary put on the first song—a truly insipid New Age composition by someone named Thierry David (an artist thrice nominated, I would later learn, in the category of Best Chill/Groove Album)—I was immediately propelled into a nighttime urban landscape that appeared to have been generated by a computer. Once again, sound begat space (“in the beginning was the note,” I remember thinking, with a sense of profundity), and what I took to be Thierry’s electronica conjured a depopulated futuristic city, with each note forming another soft black stalagmite or stalactite that together resembled the high-relief soundproofing material used to line recording studios. (The black foam forming this high-relief landscape, I realized later, was the same material lining my eyeshades.) I moved effortlessly through this digital nightscape as if within the confines of a video-game dystopia. Though the place wasn’t particularly frightening, and it had a certain sleek beauty, I hated being in it and wished to be somewhere else, but it went on seemingly forever and for hours, with no way out. I told Mary I didn’t like the electronic music and asked her to put on something else, but though the feeling tone changed with the new music, I was still stuck in this sunless computer world. Why, oh, why couldn’t I be outside! In nature? Because I had never much enjoyed video games, this seemed cruel, an expulsion from the garden: no plants, no people, no sunlight.
Not that the computer world wasn’t an interesting place to explore. I watched in awe as, one by one, musical notes turned into palpable forms before my eyes. Annoying music was the presiding deity of the place, the generative force. Even the most spa-appropriate New Age composition had the power to spawn fractal patterns in space that grew and branched and multiplied to infinity. Weirdly, everything in my visual field was black, but in so many different shades that it was easy to see. I was traversing a world generated by mathematical algorithms, and this gave it a certain alienated, lifeless beauty. But whose world was it? Not mine, and I began to wonder, whose brain am I in? (Please, not Thierry David’s!)
“This could easily take a terrifying turn,” it occurred to me, and with that a dim tide of anxiety began to build. Recalling the flight instructions, I told myself there was nothing to do but let go and surrender to the experience. Relax and float downstream. This was not at all like previous trips, which had left me more or less the captain of my attention, able to direct it this way or that and change the mental channel at will. No, this was more like being strapped into the front car of a cosmic roller coaster, its heedless headlong trajectory determining moment by moment what would appear in my field of consciousness.
Actually, this is not completely accurate: all I had to do was to remove my eyeshades and reality, or at least something loosely based on it, would reconstitute itself. This is what I now did, partly to satisfy myself that the world was still existing but mostly because I badly had to pee.
Sunlight and color flooded my eyes, and I drank it in greedily, surveying the room for the welcome signifiers of non-digital reality: walls, windows, plants. But all of it appeared in a new aspect: jeweled with light. I realized I should probably put on my glasses, which partly domesticated the scene, but only partly: objects continued to send their sparkles of light my way. I got up carefully from the mattress, first onto one knee, then, unsteadily, onto my feet. Mary took me by the elbow, geriatrically, and together we made the journey across the room. I avoided looking at her, uncertain what I might see in her face or betray in mine. At the bathroom door she let go of my elbow.
Inside, the bathroom was a riot of sparkling light. The arc of water I sent forth was truly the most beautiful thing I had ever seen, a waterfall of diamonds cascading into a pool, breaking its surface into a billion clattering fractals of light. This went on for a pleasant eternity. When I was out of diamonds, I went to the sink and splashed my face with water, making sure not to catch sight of myself in the mirror, which seemed like a psychologically risky thing to do. I made my unsteady way back to the mattress and lay down.
Speaking softly, Mary asked if I wanted a booster. I did and sat up to receive it. Mary was squatting next to me, and when I finally looked up into her face, I saw she had turned into María Sabina, the Mexican curandera who had given psilocybin to R. Gordon Wasson in that dirt basement in Huautla de Jiménez sixty years ago. Her hair was black, her face, stretched taut over its high cheekbones, was anciently weathered, and she was wearing a simple white peasant dress. I took the dried mushroom from the woman’s wrinkled brown hand and looked away as I chewed. I didn’t think I should tell Mary what had happened to her. (Later, when I did, she was flattered: María Sabina was her hero.)
BUT THERE WAS SOMETHING I needed to do before putting my eyeshades back on and going back under, a little experiment I had told Mary I wanted to perform on myself during my trip. I wasn’t sure if in my condition I could pull it off, but I’d found that even in the middle of the journey it was possible to summon oneself to a semblance of normality for a few moments at a time.
Loaded on my laptop was a brief video of a rotating face mask, used in a psychological test called the binocular depth inversion illusion. As the mask rotates in space, its convex side turning to reveal its concave back, something remarkable happens: the hollow mask appears to pop out to become convex again. This is a trick performed by the mind, which assumes all faces to be convex, and so automatically corrects for the seeming error—unless, as a neuroscientist had told me, one was under the influence of a psychedelic.
This auto-correct feature is a hallmark of our perception, which in the sane, adult mind is based as much on educated guesswork as the raw data of the senses. By adulthood, the mind has gotten very good at observing and testing reality and developing confident predictions about it that optimize our investments of energy (mental and otherwise) and therefore our survival. So rather than starting from scratch to build a new perception from every batch of raw data delivered by the senses, the mind jumps to the most sensible conclusion based on past experience combined with a tiny sample of that data. Our brains are prediction machines optimized by experience, and when it comes to faces, they have boatloads of experience: faces are always convex, so this hollow mask must be a prediction error to be corrected.
These so-called Bayesian inferences (named for Thomas Bayes, the eighteenth-century English philosopher who developed the mathematics of probability, on which these mental predictions are based) serve us well most of the time, speeding perception while saving effort and energy, but they can also trap us in literally preconceived images of reality that are simply false, as in the case of the rotating mask.
Yet it turns out that Bayesian inference breaks down in some people: schizophrenics and, according to some neuroscientists, people on high doses of psychedelics drugs, neither of whom “see” in this predictive or conventionalized manner. (Nor do young children, who have yet to build the sort of database necessary for confident predictions.) This raises an interesting question: Is it possible that the perceptions of schizophrenics, people tripping on psychedelics, and young children are, at least in certain instances, more accurate—less influenced by expectation and therefore more faithful to reality—than those of sane and sober adults?
Before we started, I had cued up the video on my laptop, and now I clicked to run it. The mask on the screen, gray against a black ground, was clearly the product of computer animation and was uncannily consistent with the visual style of the world I’d been in. (During my integration session with Mary the next day, she suggested that it might have been this image on my laptop that had conjured the computer world and trapped me in it. Could there be a better demonstration of the power of set and setting?) As the convex face rotated to reveal its concave back, the mask popped back out, only a bit more slowly than it did before I ate the mushroom. Evidently, Bayesian inference was still operational in my brain. I’d try again later.
WHEN I PUT MY EYESHADES back on and lay down, I was disappointed to find myself back in computer world, but something had changed, no doubt the result of the stepped-up dose. Whereas before I navigated this landscape as myself, taking in the scene from a perspective recognizable as my own, with my attitudes intact (highly critical of the music, for instance, and anxious about what demons might appear), now I watched as that familiar self began to fall apart before my eyes, gradually at first and then all at once.
“I” now turned into a sheaf of little papers, no bigger than Post-its, and they were being scattered to the wind. But the “I” taking in this seeming catastrophe had no desire to chase after the slips and pile my old self back together. No desires of any kind, in fact. Whoever I now was was fine with whatever happened. No more ego? That was okay, in fact the most natural thing in the world. And then I looked and saw myself out there again, but this time spread over the landscape like paint, or butter, thinly coating a wide expanse of the world with a substance I recognized as me.
But who was this “I” that was able to take in the scene of its own dissolution? Good question. It wasn’t me, exactly. Here, the limits of our language become a problem: in order to completely make sense of the divide that had opened up in my perspective, I would need a whole new first-person pronoun. For what was observing the scene was a vantage and mode of awareness entirely distinct from my accustomed self; in fact I hesitate to use the “I” to denote the presiding awareness, it was so different from my usual first person. Where that self had always been a subject encapsulated in this body, this one seemed unbounded by any body, even though I now had access to its perspective. That perspective was supremely indifferent, neutral on all questions of interpretation, and unperturbed even in the face of what should by all rights have been an unmitigated personal disaster. Yet the “personal” had been obliterated. Everything I once was and called me, this self six decades in the making, had been liquefied and dispersed over the scene. What had always been a thinking, feeling, perceiving subject based in here was now an object out there. I was paint!
The sovereign ego, with all its armaments and fears, its backward-looking resentments and forward-looking worries, was simply no more, and there was no one left to mourn its passing. Yet something had succeeded it: this bare disembodied awareness, which gazed upon the scene of the self’s dissolution with benign indifference. I was present to reality but as something other than my self. And although there was no self left to feel, exactly, there was a feeling tone, which was calm, unburdened, content. There was life after the death of the ego. This was big news.
When I think back on this part of the experience, I’ve occasionally wondered if this enduring awareness might have been the “Mind at Large” that Aldous Huxley described during his mescaline trip in 1953. Huxley never quite defined what he meant by the term—except to speak of “the totality of the awareness belonging to Mind at Large”—but he seems to be describing a universal, shareable form of consciousness unbounded by any single brain. Others have called it cosmic consciousness, the Oversoul, or Universal Mind. This is supposed to exist outside our brains—as a property of the universe, like light or gravity, and just as pervasive. Constitutive too. Certain individuals at certain times gain access to this awareness, allowing them to perceive reality in its perfected light, at least for a time.
Nothing in my experience led me to believe this novel form of consciousness originated outside me; it seems just as plausible, and surely more parsimonious, to assume it was a product of my brain, just like the ego it supplanted. Yet this by itself strikes me as a remarkable gift: that we can let go of so much—the desires, fears, and defenses of a lifetime!—without suffering complete annihilation. This might not come as a surprise to Buddhists, transcendentalists, or experienced meditators, but it was sure news to me, who has never felt anything but identical to my ego. Could it be there is another ground on which to plant our feet? For the first time since embarking on this project, I began to understand what the volunteers in the cancer-anxiety trials had been trying to tell me: how it was that a psychedelic journey had granted them a perspective from which the very worst life can throw at us, up to and including death, could be regarded objectively and accepted with equanimity.
ACTUALLY, this understanding arrived a little later, during the last part of my psilocybin trip, when the journey took a darker turn. After spending an unknown number of hours in computer world—for time was completely lost on me—I registered the desire to check back in on reality, and to pee again. Same deal: Mary guided me to the bathroom by the elbow, geriatrically, and left me there to produce another spectacular crop of diamonds. But this time I dared to look in the mirror. What looked back at me was a human skull, but for the thinnest, palest layer of skin stretched over it, tight as a drum. The bathroom was decorated in a Mexican folk art theme, and the head/skull immediately put me in mind of the Day of the Dead. With its deep sockets and lightning bolt of vein zigzagging down its temple on one side, I recognized this ashen head/skull as my own but at the same time as my dead grandfather’s.
This was surprising, if only because Bob, my father’s father, is not someone with whom I ever felt much in common. In fact I loved him for all the ways he seemed unlike me—or anyone else I knew. Bob was a preternaturally sunny and seemingly uncomplicated man incapable of thinking ill of anyone or seeing evil in the world. (His wife, Harriet, amply compensated for his generosity of spirit.) Bob had a long career as a liquor salesman, making the weekly rounds of the nightclubs in Times Square for a company that everyone but he knew was owned by the mob. Upon reaching the age I am now, he retired to become a painter of lovely naive landscapes and abstractions in spectacular colors; I’d brought one of them with me to Mary’s room, along with a watercolor of Judith’s. Bob was a genuinely happy, angst-free man who lived to be ninety-six, his paintings becoming ever more colorful, abstract, and free toward the end.
To see him so vividly in my reflection was chilling. A few years before, visiting Bob in the nursing home in the Colorado desert where he would soon die, I’d watched what had been a fit and vigorous man (it had been his habit to stand on his head every day well into his eighties) contract into a parenthesis of skin and bones marooned in a tiny bed. The esophageal muscles required to swallow had given out, and he was tethered to a feeding tube. By then, his situation was pitiful in so many respects, but for some reason I fixed on the fact that never again would a taste of food ever cross his lips.
I splashed cold water on our joint face and made my unsteady way back to Mary.
Risking another glance at her, this time I was rewarded by the sight of a ravishing young woman, blond once again but now in the full radiance of youth. Mary was so beautiful I had to look away.
She gave me another small mushroom—gram number four—and a piece of chocolate. Before I put on my eyeshade, I attempted to conduct the rotating mask test a second time . . . and it was a complete bust, neither confirming nor disproving the hypothesis. As the mask began to rotate, gradually bringing its back side into view, the whole thing dissolved into a gray jelly that slid down the screen of my laptop before I could determine whether the melting mask I was watching was convex or concave. So much for conducting psychological experiments while tripping.
I put on my eyeshades and sank back down into what now became a cracked and parched desert landscape dense with artifacts and images of death. Bleached skulls and bones and the faces of the familiar dead passed before me, aunts and uncles and grandparents, friends and teachers and my father-in-law—with a voice telling me I had failed to properly mourn all of them. It was true. I had never really reckoned the death of anyone in my life; something had always gotten in the way. I could do it here and now and did.
I looked hard at each of their faces, one after another, with a pity that seemed bottomless but with no fear whatsoever. Except once, when I came to my aunt Ruthellen and watched, horrified, as her face slowly transformed into Judith’s. Ruthellen and Judith were both artists, and both had been diagnosed with breast cancer around the same time. The cancer had killed Ruthellen and spared Judith. So what was Judith doing down here among the unmourned dead? Had I been defending myself against that possibility all this time? Heart wide open, defenses melting, the tears began to flow.
I’VE LEFT OUT one important part of my journey to the underworld: the soundtrack. Before going back under for this last passage, I had asked Mary to please stop playing spa music and put on something classical. We settled on the second of Bach’s unaccompanied cello suites, performed by Yo-Yo Ma. The suite in D minor is a spare and mournful piece that I’d heard many times before, often at funerals, but until this moment I had never truly listened to it.
Though “listen” doesn’t begin to describe what transpired between me and the vibrations of air set in motion by the four strings of that cello. Never before has a piece of music pierced me as deeply as this one did now. Though even to call it “music” is to diminish what now began to flow, which was nothing less than the stream of human consciousness, something in which one might glean the very meaning of life and, if you could bear it, read life’s last chapter. (A question formed: Why don’t we play music like this at births as well as funerals? And the answer came immediately: there is too much life-already-lived in this piece, and poignancy for the passing of time that no birth, no beginning, could possibly withstand it.)
Four hours and four grams of magic mushroom into the journey, this is where I lost whatever ability I still had to distinguish subject from object, tell apart what remained of me and what was Bach’s music. Instead of Emerson’s transparent eyeball, egoless and one with all it beheld, I became a transparent ear, indistinguishable from the stream of sound that flooded my consciousness until there was nothing else in it, not even a dry tiny corner in which to plant an I and observe. Opened to the music, I became first the strings, could feel on my skin the exquisite friction of the horsehair rubbing over me, and then the breeze of sound flowing past as it crossed the lips of the instrument and went out to meet the world, beginning its lonely transit of the universe. Then I passed down into the resonant black well of space inside the cello, the vibrating envelope of air formed by the curves of its spruce roof and maple walls. The instrument’s wooden interior formed a mouth capable of unparalleled eloquence—indeed, of articulating everything a human could conceive. But the cello’s interior also formed a room to write in and a skull in which to think and I was now it, with no remainder.
So I became the cello and mourned with it for the twenty or so minutes it took for that piece to, well, change everything. Or so it seemed; now, its vibrations subsiding, I’m less certain. But for the duration of those exquisite moments, Bach’s cello suite had had the unmistakable effect of reconciling me to death—to the deaths of the people now present to me, Bob’s and Ruthellen’s and Roy’s, Judith’s father’s, and so many others, but also to the deaths to come and to my own, no longer so far off. Losing myself in this music was a kind of practice for that—for losing myself, period. Having let go of the rope of self and slipped into the warm waters of this worldly beauty—Bach’s sublime music, I mean, and Yo-Yo Ma’s bow caressing those four strings suspended over that envelope of air—I felt as though I’d passed beyond the reach of suffering and regret.
THAT WAS MY PSILOCYBIN JOURNEY, as faithfully as I can recount it. As I read those words now, doubt returns in full force: “Fool, you were on drugs!” And it’s true: you can put the experience in that handy box and throw it away, never to dwell on it again. No doubt this has been the fate of countless psychedelic journeys that their travelers didn’t quite know what to do with, or failed to make sense of. Yet though it is true that a chemical launched me on this journey, it is also true that everything I experienced I experienced: these are events that took place in my mind, psychological facts that were neither weightless nor evanescent. Unlike most dreams, the traces these experiences inscribed remain indelible and accessible.
The day after my journey I was glad for the opportunity to return to Mary’s room for a couple of hours of “integration.” I hoped to make sense of what happened by telling the story of my trip and hearing her thoughts about it. What you’ve just read is the result, and the beneficiary, of that work, for immediately after the journey I was much more confused by it than I am now. What now reads like a reasonably coherent narrative highlighting certain themes began as a jumble of disjointed images and shards of sense. To put words to an experience that was in fact ineffable at the time, and then to shape them into sentences and then a story, is inevitably to do it a kind of violence. But the alternative is, literally, unthinkable.
Mary had taken apart the altar, but we sat in the same chairs, facing each other across a small table. Twenty-four hours later, what had I learned? That I had had no reason to be afraid: no sleeping monsters had awakened in my unconscious and turned on me. This was a deep fear that went back several decades, to a terrifying moment in a hotel room in Seattle when, alone and having smoked too much cannabis, I had had to marshal every last ounce of will to keep myself from doing something deeply crazy and irrevocable. But here in this room I had let down my guard completely, and nothing terrible had happened. The serpent of madness that I worried might be waiting had not surfaced or pulled me under. Did this mean it didn’t exist, that I was psychologically sturdier than I believed? Maybe that’s what the episode with Bob was all about: maybe I was more like him than I knew, and not nearly as deep or complicated as I liked to think. (Can a recognition of one’s shallowness qualify as a profound insight?) Mary wasn’t so sure: “You bring a different self to the journey every time.” The demons might rouse themselves the next time.
That I could survive the dissolution of my ego without struggle or turning into a puddle was something to be grateful for, but even better was the discovery that there might be another vantage—one less neurotic and more generous—from which to take in reality. “That alone seems worth the price of admission,” Mary offered, and I had to agree. Yet, twenty-four hours later, my old ego was back in uniform and on patrol, so what long-term good was that beguiling glimpse of a loftier perspective? Mary suggested that having had a taste of a different, less defended way to be, I might learn, through practice, to relax the ego’s trigger-happy command of my reactions to people and events. “Now you have had an experience of another way to react—or not react. That can be cultivated.” Meditation, she suggested, was one way to do that.
It is, I think, precisely this perspective that had allowed so many of the volunteers I interviewed to overcome their fears and anxieties, and in the case of the smokers, their addictions. Temporarily freed from the tyranny of the ego, with its maddeningly reflexive reactions and its pinched conception of one’s self-interest, we get to experience an extreme version of Keats’s “negative capability”—the ability to exist amid doubts and mysteries without reflexively reaching for certainty. To cultivate this mode of consciousness, with its exceptional degree of selflessness (literally!), requires us to transcend our subjectivity or—it comes to the same thing—widen its circle so far that it takes in, besides ourselves, other people and, beyond that, all of nature. Now I understood how a psychedelic could help us to make precisely that move, from the first-person singular to the plural and beyond. Under its influence, a sense of our interconnectedness—that platitude—is felt, becomes flesh. Though this perspective is not something a chemical can sustain for more than a few hours, those hours can give us an opportunity to see how it might go. And perhaps to practice being there.
I left Mary’s loft in high spirits, but also with the feeling I was holding on to something precious by the thinnest, most tenuous of threads. It seemed doubtful I could maintain my grip on this outlook for the rest of the day, much less the rest of my life, but it also seemed worth trying.
Yes, “the toad,” or to be more precise, the smoked venom of the Sonoran Desert toad (Incilius alvarius), also called the Colorado River toad, which contains a molecule called 5-MeO-DMT that is one of the most potent and fast-acting psychotropic drugs there is. No, I had never heard of it either. It is so obscure, in fact, that the federal government did not list 5-MeO-DMT as a controlled substance until 2011.
The opportunity to smoke the toad popped up suddenly, giving me very little time to decide if doing so was crazy or not. I got a call from one of my sources, a woman who was training to become a certified psychedelic guide, inviting me to meet her friend Rocío, a thirty-five-year-old Mexican therapist whom she described as “probably the world’s leading expert on the toad.” (Though how intense, really, could the competition for that title be?) Rocío is from the state of Sonora, in northern Mexico, where she collects the toads and milks their venom; she administers the medicine to people both in Mexico, where its legal status is gray, and in the United States, where it isn’t. (It doesn’t appear to be on the official radar, however.)
Rocío worked in a clinic in Mexico that treated drug addicts with a combination of iboga, a psychedelic plant from Africa, and 5-MeO-DMT—apparently with striking rates of success. In recent years, she’s become the Johnny Appleseed of toad, traveling all over North America with her capsules of crystallized venom and her vaporizer. As my circle of psychonauts expanded, most anyone I met who’d had an encounter with the toad had been introduced to it by Rocío.
The first time I met Rocío, at a small dinner organized by our mutual friend, she told me about the toad and what I might expect from it. Rocío was petite, pretty, and fashionably dressed, her shoulder-length black hair cut to frame her face with bangs. She has an easy smile that brings out a dimple on one cheek. Not at all what I expected, Rocío looked less the part of a shaman or curandera than that of an urban professional.
After going to college and working for a few years in the United States, five years ago Rocío found herself back at home in Mexico living with her parents and without direction. Online, she found a manual about the toad, which she learned was native to the local desert. (Its habitat extends the length of the Sonoran Desert north into Arizona.) Nine months of the year, the toad lives underground, protected from the desert sun and heat, but when the winter rains come, it emerges at night from its burrow for a brief orgy of eating and copulation. Following the instructions spelled out in the manual, Rocío strapped on a headlamp and went hunting for toads.
“They’re not very hard to catch,” she told me. “They freeze in the beam of light so you can just grab them.” The toads, which are warty, sand colored, and roughly the size of a man’s hand, have a large gland on each side of their necks, and smaller ones on their legs. “You gently squeeze the gland while holding a mirror in front of it to catch the spray.” The toad is apparently none the worse for being milked. Overnight, the venom dries on the glass, turning into flaky crystals the color of brown sugar.
In its natural state, the venom is toxic—a defense chemical sprayed by the toad when it feels threatened. But when the crystals are volatilized, the toxins are destroyed, leaving behind the 5-MeO-DMT. Rocío vaporizes the crystals in a glass pipe while the recipient inhales; before you’ve had a chance to exhale, you are gone. “The toad comes on quickly, and at first it can be unbelievably intense.” I noticed that Rocío personified the toad and seldom called the medicine by its molecular name. “Some people remain perfectly still. Other people scream and flail, especially when the toad brings out traumas, which it can do. A few people will vomit. And then after twenty or thirty minutes, the toad is all done and it leaves.”
My first instinct when facing such a decision is to read as much about it as I can, and later that night Rocío e-mailed me a few articles. But the pickings were slim. Unlike most other psychedelics, which by now have been extensively studied by scientists and, in many cases, in use for hundreds if not thousands of years, the toad has been known to Western science only since 1992. That’s when Andrew Weil and Wade Davis published a paper called “Identity of a New World Psychoactive Toad.” They had been inspired to look for such a fantastical creature by the images of frogs in Mayan art. But the only psychoactive toad they could find lives far to the north of Mayan civilization. It’s possible that these toads became an item of trade, but as yet there is no proof that the practice of smoking toad venom has any antiquity whatsoever. However, 5-MeO-DMT also occurs in a handful of South American plants, and there are several Amazonian tribes who pound these plants into a snuff for use in shamanic rituals. Among some of these tribes, these snuffs are known as the “semen of the sun.”
I couldn’t find much in the way of solid medical information about potential side effects or dangerous drug interactions; little research has been done. What I did find were plenty of trip reports online, and many of these were terrifying. I also learned there was someone in town, a friend of a friend I had met a few times at dinner parties, who had tried 5-MeO-DMT—not the toad but a synthetic version of the active ingredient. I took her out to lunch to see what I could learn.
“This is the Everest of psychedelics,” she began, portentously, putting a steadying hand on my forearm. Olivia is in her early fifties, a management consultant with a couple of kids; I had vaguely known she was into Eastern religion but had no idea she was a psychonaut, too.
“You need to be prepared.” Over grilled cheeses, she described a harrowing onset. “I was shot out into an infinite realm of pure being. There were no figures in this world, no entities of any kind, just pure being. And it was huge; I didn’t know what infinity was before this. But it was a two-dimensional realm, not three, and after the rush of liftoff, I found myself installed in this infinite space as a star. I remember thinking, if this is death, I’m fine with it. It was . . . bliss. I had the feeling—no, the knowledge—that every single thing there is is made of love.
“After what seemed like an eternity but was probably only minutes, you start to reassemble and come back into your body. I had the thought, ‘There are children to raise. And there is an infinite amount of time to be dead.’”
I asked her the question that gnawed at me whenever someone recounted such a mystical experience: “How can you be sure this was a genuine spiritual event and not just a drug experience?”
“It’s an irrelevant question,” she replied coolly. “This was something being revealed to me.”
There it was: the noetic sense William James had described as a mark of the mystical experience. I envied Olivia’s certainty. Which I suppose is the reason I decided I would smoke the toad.
THE NIGHT BEFORE my date with Rocío was, predictably, sleepless. Yes, I’d come through these first two trips intact, grateful, even, for having gone on them, and had come away with the idea I was stronger, physically and mentally, than I had previously thought. But now all the old fears rushed back, assailing me through the long fitful night. Everest! Could my heart take the intensity of those first harrowing moments of ascent? What were the chances I’d go mad? Slim, perhaps, but surely not zero. So was this an absolutely insane thing to do? On the plus side, I figured, whatever happened, it would all be over in half an hour. On the negative side, everything might be over in half an hour.
As the sun came up, I decided I would decide when I got there. Rocío, whom I’d made aware of my trepidations, had offered to let me watch her work with someone else before it was my turn. This proved reassuring, as she knew it would. The guy before me, a supremely low-affect college student who had done the toad once before, took a puff from Rocío’s pipe, lay back on a mattress, and embarked on what appeared to be a placid thirty-minute nap, during which he exhibited no signs of distress, let alone existential terror. After it was over, he seemed perfectly fine. A great deal had gone on in his mind, he indicated, but from the looks of it, his body had scarcely been perturbed. Okay then. Death or madness seemed much less likely. I could do this.
After positioning me on the mattress just so, Rocío had me sit up while she loaded a premeasured capsule of the crystals into a glass vial that she then screwed onto the barrel of the pipe. She asked me to give thanks to the toad and think about my intention. (Something fairly generic about learning whatever the toad had to teach me.) Rocío lit a butane flame underneath the vial and instructed me to draw on the pipe in short sips of air as the white smoke swirled and then filled the glass. “Then one big final draw that I want you to hold as long as you can.”
I have no memory of ever having exhaled, or of being lowered onto the mattress and covered with a blanket. All at once I felt a tremendous rush of energy fill my head accompanied by a punishing roar. I managed, barely, to squeeze out the words I had prepared, “trust” and “surrender.” These words became my mantra, but they seemed utterly pathetic, wishful scraps of paper in the face of this category 5 mental storm. Terror seized me—and then, like one of those flimsy wooden houses erected on Bikini Atoll to be blown up in the nuclear tests, “I” was no more, blasted to a confetti cloud by an explosive force I could no longer locate in my head, because it had exploded that too, expanding to become all that there was. Whatever this was, it was not a hallucination. A hallucination implies a reality and a point of reference and an entity to have it. None of those things remained.
Unfortunately, the terror didn’t disappear with the extinction of my “I.” Whatever allowed me to register this experience, the post-egoic awareness I’d first experienced on mushrooms, was now consumed in the flames of terror too. In fact every touchstone that tells us “I exist” was annihilated, and yet I remained conscious. “Is this what death feels like? Could this be it?” That was the thought, though there was no longer a thinker to have it.
Here words fail. In truth, there were no flames, no blast, no thermonuclear storm; I’m grasping at metaphor in the hope of forming some stable and shareable concept of what was unfolding in my mind. In the event, there was no coherent thought, just pure and terrible sensation. Only afterward did I wonder if this was what the mystics call the mysterium tremendum—the blinding unendurable mystery (whether of God or some other Ultimate or Absolute) before which humans tremble in awe. Huxley described it as the fear “of being overwhelmed, of disintegrating under a pressure of reality greater than a mind, accustomed to living most of the time in a cosy world of symbols, could possibly bear.”
Oh, to be back in the cozy world of symbols!
After the fact I kept returning to one of two metaphors, and while they inevitably deform the experience,* as any words or metaphors or symbols must, they at least allow me to grasp hold of a shadow of it and, perhaps, share it. The first is the image of being on the outside of a rocket after launch. I’m holding on with both hands, legs clenched around it, while the rapidly mounting g-forces clutch at my flesh, pulling my face down into a taut grimace, as the great cylinder rises through successive layers of clouds, exponentially gaining speed and altitude, the fuselage shuddering on the brink of self-destruction as it strains to break free from Earth’s grip, while the friction it generates as it crashes through the thinning air issues in a deafening roar.
It was a little like that.
The other metaphor was the big bang, but the big bang run in reverse, from our familiar world all the way back to a point before there was anything, no time or space or matter, only the pure unbounded energy that was all there was then, before an imperfection, a ripple in its waveform, caused the universe of energy to fall into time, space, and matter. Rushing backward through fourteen billion years, I watched the dimensions of reality collapse one by one until there was nothing left, not even being. Only the all-consuming roar.
It was just horrible.
And then suddenly the devolution of everything into the nothingness of pure force reverses course. One by one, the elements of our universe begin to reconstitute themselves: the dimensions of time and space returned first, blessing my still-scattered confetti brain with the cozy coordinates of place; this is somewhere! And then I slipped back into my familiar “I” like an old pair of slippers and soon after felt something I recognized as my body begin to reassemble. The film of reality was now running in reverse, as if all the leaves that the thermonuclear blast had blown off the great tree of being and scattered to the four winds were suddenly to find their way back, fly up into the welcoming limbs of reality, and reattach. The order of things was being restored, me notably included. I was alive!
The descent and reentry into familiar reality was swifter than I expected. Having undergone the shuddering agony of launch, I had expected to be deposited, weightless, into orbit—my installation in the firmament as a blissed-out star! Alas. Like those first Mercury astronauts, my flight remained suborbital, describing an arc that only kissed the serenity of infinite space before falling back down to Earth.
And yet as I felt myself reconstitute as a self and then a body, something for which I now sought confirmation by running my hands along my legs and squirming beneath the blanket, I felt ecstatic—as happy as I can remember ever feeling. But this ecstasy was not sui generis, not exactly. It was more like the equal and opposite reaction to the terror I had just endured, less of a divine gift than the surge of pleasure that comes from the cessation of unendurable pain. But a sense of relief so vast and deep as to be cosmic.
With the rediscovery of my body, I felt an inexplicable urge to lift my knees, and as soon as I raised them, I felt something squeeze out from between my legs, but easily and without struggle or pain. It was a boy: the infant me. That seemed exactly right: having died, I was now being reborn. Yet as soon as I looked closely at this new being, it morphed smoothly into Isaac, my son. And I thought, how fortunate—how astounding!—for a father to experience the perfect physical intimacy that heretofore only mothers have ever had with their babies. Whatever space had ever intervened between my son and me now closed, and I could feel the warm tears sliding down my cheeks.
Next came an overwhelming wave of gratitude. For what? For once again existing, yes, for the existence of Isaac and Judith too, but also for something even more fundamental: I felt for the first time gratitude for the very fact of being, that there is anything whatsoever. Rather than being necessarily the case, this now seemed quite the miracle, and something I resolved never again to take for granted. Everybody gives thanks for “being alive,” but who stops to offer thanks for the bare-bones gerund that comes before “alive”? I had just come from a place where being was no more and now vowed never to forget what a gift (and mystery) it is, that there is something rather than nothing.
I had entered a familiar and more congenial mental space, one in which I was still tripping but could put together thoughts and direct them here or there. (I make no claims as to their quality.) Before I drew the smoke into my lungs, Rocío had asked me, as she asks everyone who meets the toad, to search the experience for a “peace offering”—some idea or resolution I could bring back and put to good use in my life. Mine, I decided, had to do with this question of being and what I took to be its opposite term, “doing.” I meditated on this duality, which came to seem momentous, and concluded that I was too much occupied with the latter term in my life and not enough with the former.
True, one had to favor doing in order to get anything done, but wasn’t there also a great virtue and psychic benefit in simply being? In contemplation rather than action? I decided I needed to practice being with stillness, being with other people as I find them (imperfect), and being with my own unimproved self. To savor whatever is at this very moment, without trying to change it or even describe it. (Huxley struggled with the same aspiration during his mescaline journey: “If one always saw like this, one would never want to do anything else.”) Even now, borne along on this pleasant contemplative stream, I had to resist the urge to drag myself onto shore and tell Rocío about my big breakthrough. No! I had to remind myself: just be with it.
Judith and I had had a fight the previous night that, I realized, turned on this distinction, and on my impatience with being. She was complaining about something she doesn’t like about her life, and rather than simply commiserate, being with her and her dilemma, I immediately went to the checklist of practical things she might do to fix it. But this was not at all what she wanted or needed, and she got angry. Now I could see with perfect clarity why my attempt to be helpful had been so hurtful.
So that was my peace offering: to be more and do less. But as soon as I put it that way, I realized there was a problem—a big problem, in fact. For wasn’t the very act of resolving to favor being a form of doing? A betrayal of the whole idea? A true connoisseur of being would never dream of making resolutions! I had tied myself up in a philosophical knot, constructed a paradox or koan I was clearly not smart enough or sufficiently enlightened to untangle. And so what had begun as one of the most shattering experiences of my life ended half an hour later with a wan smile.
EVEN NOW, many months later, I still don’t know exactly what to make of this last trip. Its violent narrative arc—that awful climax followed so swiftly by such a sweet denouement—upended the form of a story or journey. It lacked the beginning, middle, and end that all my previous trips had had and that we rely on to make sense of experience. That and its mind-bending velocity made it difficult to extract much information or knowledge from the journey, except for the (classic) psychedelic platitude about the importance of being. (A few days after my encounter with the toad, I happened on an old e-mail from James Fadiman that ended, uncannily, with these words, which you should picture arranged on the screen like a poem: “I hope whatever you’re doing, / you’re stopping now and then / and / not doing it at all.”)
The integration had been cursory, leaving me to puzzle out the toad’s teachings, such as they were, on my own. Had I had any sort of a spiritual or mystical experience? Or was what took place in my mind merely the epiphenomenon of these strange molecules? (Or was it both?) Olivia’s words echoed: “It’s an irrelevant question. This was something being revealed to me.” What, if anything, had been revealed to me?
Not sure exactly where to begin, I realized it might be useful to measure my experiences against those of the volunteers in the Hopkins and NYU studies. I decided to fill out one of the Mystical Experience Questionnaires (MEQs)* that the scientists had their subjects complete, hoping to learn if mine qualified.
The MEQ asked me to rank a list of thirty mental phenomena—thoughts, images, and sensations that psychologists and philosophers regard as typical of a mystical experience. (The questionnaire draws on the work of William James, W. T. Stace, and Walter Pahnke.) “Looking back on the entirety of your session, please rate the degree to which at any time . . . you experienced the following phenomena” using a six-point scale. (From zero, for “none at all,” to five, for extreme: “more than any other time in my life.”)
Some items were easy to rate: “Loss of your usual sense of time.” Check; five. “Experience of amazement.” Uh-huh. Another five. “Sense that the experience cannot be described adequately in words.” Yup. Five again. “Gain of insightful knowledge experienced at an intuitive level.” Hmmm. I guess the platitude about being would qualify. Maybe a three? But I was unsure what to do with this one: “Feeling that you experienced eternity or infinity.” The language implies something more positive than what I felt when time vanished and terror took hold; NA, I decided. The “experience of the fusion of your personal self into a larger whole” also seemed like an overly nice way to put the sensation of becoming one with a nuclear blast. It seemed less fusion than fission, but okay. I gave it a four.
And what to do with this one? “Certainty of encounter with ultimate reality (in the sense of being able to ‘know’ and ‘see’ what is really real at some point in your experience).” I might have emerged from the experience with certain convictions (the one about being and doing, say), but these hardly seemed like encounters with “ultimate reality,” whatever that is. Similarly, a few other items made me want to throw up my hands: “Feeling that you experienced something profoundly sacred and holy” (No) or “Experience of the insight ‘all is One’” (Yes, but not in a good way; in the midst of that all-consuming mind storm, there was nothing I missed more than differentiation and multiplicity). Struggling to assign ratings to a handful of such items, I felt the survey pulling me in the direction of a conclusion that was not at all consistent with what I felt.
But when I tallied my score, I was surprised: I had scored a sixty-one, one point over the threshold for a “complete” mystical experience. I had squeaked through. So that was a mystical experience? It didn’t feel at all like what I expected a mystical experience to be. I concluded that the MEQ was a poor net for capturing my encounter with the toad. The result was psychological bycatch, I decided, and should probably be tossed out.
Yet I wonder if my dissatisfaction with the survey had something to do with the intrinsic nature—the sheer intensity and bizarre shape—of the toad experience, for which it wasn’t designed, after all. Because when I used the same survey to evaluate my psilocybin journey, the fit seemed much better and rating the phenomena much easier. Reflecting just on the cello interlude, for example, I could easily confirm the “fusion of [my] personal self into a larger whole,” as well as the “feeling that [I] experienced something profoundly sacred and holy” and “of being at a spiritual height” and even the “experience of unity with ultimate reality.” Yes, yes, yes, and yes—provided, that is, my endorsement of those loaded adjectives doesn’t imply any belief in a supernatural reality.
My psilocybin journey with Mary yielded a sixty-six on the Mystical Experience Questionnaire. For some reason, I felt stupidly proud of my score. (There I was again, doing being.) It had been my objective to have such an experience, and at least according to the scientists a mystical experience I had had. Yet it had brought me no closer to a belief in God or in a cosmic form of consciousness or in anything magical at all—all of which I might have been, unreasonably, expecting (hoping?) it might do.
Still, there was no question that something novel and profound had happened to me—something I am prepared to call spiritual, though only with an asterisk. I guess I’ve always assumed that spirituality implied a belief or faith I’ve never shared and from which it supposedly flows. But now I wondered, is this always or necessarily the case?
Only in the wake of my journeys have I been able to unravel the paradox that had so perplexed me when I interviewed Dinah Bazer, a NYU cancer patient who began and ended her psilocybin experience an avowed atheist. During the climax of a journey that extinguished her fear of death, Bazer described “being bathed in God’s love,” and yet she emerged with her atheism intact. How could someone hold those two warring ideas in the same brain? I think I get it now. Not only was the flood of love she experienced ineffably powerful, but it was unattributable to any individual or worldly cause, and so was purely gratuitous—a form of grace. So how to convey the magnitude of such a gift? “God” might be the only word in the language big enough.
Part of the problem I was having evaluating my own experience had to do with another big and loaded word—“mystical”—implying as it does an experience beyond the reach of ordinary comprehension or science. It reeks of the supernatural. Yet I think it would be wrong to discard the mystical, if only because so much work has been done by so many great minds—over literally thousands of years—to find the words for this extraordinary human experience and make sense of it. When we read the testimony of these minds, we find a striking commonality in their descriptions, even if we civilians can’t quite understand what in the world (or out of it) they’re talking about.
According to scholars of mysticism, these shared traits generally include a vision of unity in which all things, including the self, are subsumed (expressed in the phrase “All is one”); a sense of certainty about what one has perceived (“Knowledge has been revealed to me”); feelings of joy, blessedness, and satisfaction; a transcendence of the categories we rely on to organize the world, such as time and space or self and other; a sense that whatever has been apprehended is somehow sacred (Wordsworth: “Something far more deeply interfused” with meaning) and often paradoxical (so while the self may vanish, awareness abides). Last is the conviction that the experience is ineffable, even as thousands of words are expended in the attempt to communicate its power. (Guilty.)
Before my journeys, words and phrases such as these left me cold; they seemed utterly opaque, so much quasi-religious mumbo jumbo. Now they paint a recognizable reality. Likewise, certain mystical passages from literature that once seemed so overstated and abstract that I read them indulgently (if at all), now I can read as a subspecies of journalism. Here are three nineteenth-century examples, but you can find them in any century.
Ralph Waldo Emerson crossing a wintry New England commons in “Nature”:
Standing on the bare ground,—my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space,—all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball. I am nothing. I see all. The currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.
Or Walt Whitman, in the early lines of the first (much briefer and more mystical) edition of Leaves of Grass:
Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and joy and knowledge that pass all the art and argument of the earth;
And I know that the hand of God is the elderhand of my own,
And I know that the spirit of God is the eldest brother of my own,
And that all the men ever born are also my brothers . . . and the women my sisters and lovers,
And that a kelson* of the creation is love.
And here is Alfred, Lord Tennyson, describing in a letter the “waking trance” that descended upon him from time to time since his boyhood:
All at once, as it were out of the intensity of the consciousness of individuality, the individuality itself seemed to dissolve and fade into boundless being; and this was not a confused state, but the clearest of the clearest, the surest of the surest; utterly beyond words, where death was an almost laughable impossibility; the loss of personality (if so it were) seeming no extinction, but the only true life.
What had changed for me was that now I understood exactly what these writers were talking about: their own mystical experiences, however achieved, however interpreted. Formerly inert, their words now emitted a new ray of relation, or at least I was now in a position to receive it. Such emissions had always been present in our world, flowing through literature and religion, but like electromagnetic waves they couldn’t be understood without some kind of receiver. I had become such a one. A phrase like “boundless being,” which once I might have skated past as overly abstract and hyperbolic, now communicated something specific and even familiar. A door had opened for me onto a realm of human experience that for sixty years had been closed.*
But had I earned the right to go through that door, enter into that conversation? I don’t know about Emerson’s mystical experience (or Whitman’s or Tennyson’s), but mine owed to a chemical. Wasn’t that cheating? Perhaps not: it seems likely that all mental experiences are mediated by chemicals in the brain, even the most seemingly “transcendent.” How much should the genealogy of these chemicals matter? It turns out the very same molecules flow through the natural world and the human brain, linking us all together in a vast watershed of tryptamines. Are these exogenous molecules any less miraculous? (When they come from a mushroom or a plant or a toad!) It’s worth remembering that there are many cultures where the fact that the inspiration for visionary experiences comes from nature, is the gift of other creatures, renders them more meaningful, not less.
My own interpretation of what I experienced—my now officially verified mystical experience—remains a work in progress, still in search of the right words. But I have no problem using the word “spiritual” to describe elements of what I saw and felt, as long as it is not taken in a supernatural sense. For me, “spiritual” is a good name for some of the powerful mental phenomena that arise when the voice of the ego is muted or silenced. If nothing else, these journeys have shown me how that psychic construct—at once so familiar and on reflection so strange—stands between us and some striking new dimensions of experience, whether of the world outside us or of the mind within. The journeys have shown me what the Buddhists try to tell us but I have never really understood: that there is much more to consciousness than the ego, as we would see if it would just shut up. And that its dissolution (or transcendence) is nothing to fear; in fact, it is a prerequisite for making any spiritual progress.
But the ego, that inner neurotic who insists on running the mental show, is wily and doesn’t relinquish its power without a struggle. Deeming itself indispensable, it will battle against its diminishment, whether in advance or in the middle of the journey. I suspect that’s exactly what mine was up to all through the sleepless nights that preceded each of my trips, striving to convince me that I was risking everything, when really all I was putting at risk was its sovereignty.
When Huxley speaks of the mind’s “reducing valve”—the faculty that eliminates as much of the world from our conscious awareness as it lets in—he is talking about the ego. That stingy, vigilant security guard admits only the narrowest bandwidth of reality, “a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us to stay alive.” It’s really good at performing all those activities that natural selection values: getting ahead, getting liked and loved, getting fed, getting laid. Keeping us on task, it is a ferocious editor of anything that might distract us from the work at hand, whether that means regulating our access to memories and strong emotions from within or news of the world without.
What of the world it does admit it tends to objectify, for the ego wants to reserve the gifts of subjectivity to itself. That’s why it fails to see that there is a whole world of souls and spirits out there, by which I simply mean subjectivities other than our own. It was only when the voice of my ego was quieted by psilocybin that I was able to sense that the plants in my garden had a spirit too. (In the words of R. M. Bucke, a nineteenth-century Canadian psychiatrist and mystic, “I saw that the universe is not composed of dead matter, but is, on the contrary, a living Presence.”) “Ecology” and “coevolution” are scientific names for the same phenomena: every species a subject acting on other subjects. But when this concept acquires the flesh of feeling, becomes “more deeply interfused,” as it did during my first psilocybin journey, I’m happy to call it a spiritual experience. So too my various psychedelic mergings: with Bach’s cello suite, with my son, Isaac, with my grandfather Bob, all spirits directly apprehended and embraced, each time with a flood of feeling.
So perhaps spiritual experience is simply what happens in the space that opens up in the mind when “all mean egotism vanishes.” Wonders (and terrors) we’re ordinarily defended against flow into our awareness; the far ends of the sensory spectrum, which are normally invisible to us, our senses can suddenly admit. While the ego sleeps, the mind plays, proposing unexpected patterns of thought and new rays of relation. The gulf between self and world, that no-man’s-land which in ordinary hours the ego so vigilantly patrols, closes down, allowing us to feel less separate and more connected, “part and particle” of some larger entity. Whether we call that entity Nature, the Mind at Large, or God hardly matters. But it seems to be in the crucible of that merging that death loses some of its sting.