Empathy is a tool for building people into groups, for allowing us to function as more than self-obsessed individuals.
—Neil Gaiman
Two board-certified relationship counselors are trying to get a handle on whether or not my wife and I can be trusted. They look skeptical: There’s a cocked eyebrow on the man, and the woman has her arms crossed across her belly in what might be a defensive posture. We’ve shown up at this office to ask them to break the law and guide us through a chemically assisted couples therapy session. We believe that a drug best known for fueling night-long raves in the electronic dance scene might have a more legitimate use in a clinical setting. MDMA—or methylenedioxymethamphetamine, for people who prefer chemical tongue twisters—also has a street name: ecstasy.
Laura and I don’t fight often; we are both generally game for working through the issues in our relationship. Like all couples, we have some hangups and tension points that are easier to avoid than talk about directly. We are so close that we can finish each other’s sentences, and sometimes we just know what the other one is thinking. In other words, at times we work like a single unit. So the reason we’re here is to see if we can treat the space between us as a point to work on the Wedge and take a little control over the unconscious bonds between us.
It has taken us a long while to get to this meeting. For the last month, we’ve exchanged messages on encrypted applications as we delicately went over risks and rewards. On the one hand, these counselors could lose their license to practice or even face jail time. On the other hand, they have a chance to examine a revolutionary new type of therapy that will probably be legal—or even standard—in America pretty soon. In order to protect their careers, the two clinicians use pseudonyms: Dr. Clark Kent and Dr. Lois Lane.
Dr. Kent’s bookshelf brims with dense-looking psychological manuals and pop-culture-inspired self-help bestsellers. One shelf nods to his expertise in helping couples get over infidelity, with one title asking what happens When People Cheat, while a second shelf caters to open relationships, sex and bondage: The Ethical Slut, The Multi-Orgasmic Woman, and She Comes First. It’s quite a reading list. There’s also a wall for diplomas, and another dedicated to non-threatening floral paintings.
We’re not here today to actually take the drug; this is a preliminary meeting for Kent and Lane to go over ground rules and figure out if we’re good candidates for MDMA-assisted therapy. They also want us to sign a multi-page agreement that acknowledges the risks we know we’re taking, and asks us to commit to further psychiatric treatment if we have trouble integrating the session when it’s over. The goal is to make our relationship stronger, with the assumption that the chemical will facilitate our ability to empathize with each other’s problems during the session.
“One session with MDMA has the potential to replicate months, if not years, of in-person therapy. It confers the miraculous ability to completely deflate a person’s fight-or-flight response, so that while you can still feel sadness or anger, all sense of defensiveness evaporates. It lets a person empathize with their partner without any boundaries,” says Dr. Kent. This is a sort of therapy Holy Grail.
MDMA floods your senses with chemically induced euphoria. Taken recreationally, it might just be a good time, but under the guidance of a therapist where the goal is healing, MDMA can change lives. There’s no need to dance around stressful topics. When two people take it at the same time, the shared bliss becomes a wedge that operates at the level of their interpersonal relationship.The therapist only needs to guide their conversation to what would ordinarily be pain points and watch the patients work through their issues.
“It’s like the therapy version of autopilot,” he says.
The words “mind-altering drug” don’t sit well on the American palate. When a person seeks out an altered state, we reflexively think of it as a moral failing. But what happens when feelings and sensations are the goal? In cases where altering the external stress is impossible, our mindsets can get reflexively fixed, and sometimes the only place to insert a wedge is in the sensory pathways themselves. This is the promise of MDMA: The side effects are the point. We can feel those side effects as a wedge into the unspoken patterns that reinforce relationships. MDMA is an empathogen, meaning that it’s a chemical that creates feelings of empathy and connection.
This is somewhat similar to what we just saw with the curative potential of the placebo effect. When an attentive person carefully calibrates external stress, they can influence the internal environment of their body and guide their immune system to healing. MDMA turns that communication outward when it eliminates emotional reactivity at the personal level. Since they’re feeling the same set of sensations, a couple can work together on the level of the issues brewing between them. They gain perspective. It’s almost like they’re in flow.
Doctors Kent and Lane both tried MDMA recreationally years ago, though neither therapist has ever seen it used in a clinical setting before. Part of the reason they entertained my offer was so they could see for themselves if the clinical promise lives up to the reality.
Like the doctors, this is not my first rodeo with the love drug. I experimented with a few mind-altering substances in my 20s. Once at a flat in Boston, I poured a white powder of crushed ecstasy into tea with three friends and then we danced. We howled barbaric yawps into the alley behind the flat, bore our souls to one another and felt expansive. But I never sought it out again until the year that my wife and I started dating. We holed up in a cabin deep in the California wilderness, took a healthy dose of MDMA, and for five or six hours spoke to each other about our deepest, darkest fears and hopes for what the future could look like. Eventually we found ourselves hugging each other and swaying to the soft sound of snow falling outside. I look at that time as a moment that cemented us as a couple, where the barriers broke down and our words always rang true in each other’s hearts. And though it was chemically induced, the sentiments weren’t any less real. Ecstasy keeps you lucid. However, as with any drug, the high didn’t last. The comedown was hard, especially for Laura, whose hangover was probably intensified because she had been taking an antidepressant, a Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor, or SSRI—a class of drugs that includes Prozac, Lexapro and Zoloft.
Dr. Lane leans forward and asks us pointedly if either one of us is on an antidepressant now. Since both MDMA and antidepressants modulate serotonin levels, mixing the two can lead to serious drug interactions. This often means it makes hangovers worse, but in some cases it can lead to a dangerous condition called “serotonin syndrome,” which, in rare cases, can chemically lock a person’s brain chemistry into permanent depression. We tell her that neither of us have taken them for years, and the doctor smiles.
The rule for most drug experiences is that whatever high notes you feel come with an equal and opposite down. The experience follows the delicate balance of a sine wave as the body tries to return to homeostasis. We’re all familiar with the hangover that comes after a night of alcoholic bingeing, or perhaps the mental fog aftermath from smoking marijuana. Most people pay for MDMA’s heightened state with a few days of mild depression as their bodies restock the depleted neurotransmitters. And though she has been off antidepressants for several years, the memory of the prolonged hangover makes Laura hesitant to try ecstasy again.
In the 1970s, a Jungian psychiatrist named Leo Zeff trained 4,000 therapists to use MDMA in their practices. It was a revolutionary new treatment that saw many early successes, but things fell apart once the drug found its way into the discotheques of New York, L.A. and San Francisco. In 1984, banning MDMA became a cornerstone of Ronald Reagan’s War on Drugs, and the chemical was off limits for even clinical research. The ban has only recently begun to thaw. In the last few years, the efforts of do-it-yourself biohackers and podcasters like Joe Rogan, Russell Brand and Tim Ferriss have brought the chemical into the spotlight again. New clinical trials under the rubric of the Multidisciplinary Association of Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) out of UCLA, CU Boulder and Johns Hopkins show that MDMA is useful for treating people with post-traumatic stress disorder. Even more promising, at the time of writing, the Food and Drug Administration has indicated that it might consider taking MDMA off of the restricted-drug list. A change at the government level would open up the floodgates for new research into the drug and clear the way for new uses in clinical settings. Perhaps it’s all a sign of a cultural shift that gained traction when the clubbing teens from the ’80s and ’90s made it to adulthood. Now they’re looking for salvation from maladies of middle age using something they discovered in their youth.
By day, Dr. Kent’s practice focuses on the imponderable problems that arise between two people in whatever sort of marriage structure they have. Dr. Lane’s practice centers mostly on individuals struggling with addiction and anxiety; Dr. Kent wanted her here because she ran a psychedelic integration program in Brooklyn for several years in which patients used mind-altering drugs to explore their inner lives. These mental explorers are chemically interested soul-searchers. Raised on science and psychedelics, many psychonauts look for ways to objectively assess their transformations. After all, simply thinking your life is better because of a mind-altering drug doesn’t mean that it actually is better. And not all drug-induced realizations are worthwhile. Dr. Lane sees herself as a critical stable foundation in her patients’ lives, helping steer them away from more dangerous paths.
She offers that, in her experience, MDMA widens the gap between stimulus and response. Rather than simply reacting to an emotionally charged statement in a therapeutic setting, instead you have a chance to receive the words in the most positive light possible. As long as we’re both in the chemical’s sway, neither of us will be able to judge each other negatively.
The thought of that much openness is a little unsettling. I wonder what it will be like to suddenly feel so open about my deepest secrets and fears—not just to my wife, but also in front of two counselors whom I’ve never met before. They’ve assured me of the sanctity of the doctor-patient covenant, but in an ordinary therapeutic setting, we always have a mental governor that lets us restrict information as we build up trust. MDMA strips away that governor. What will happen when all my secrets come out at once? What judgments secretly lurk in the hearts of therapists? I can’t say for sure, but the project means I will just have to trust them.
And finally, our introductory meeting settles on the tricky question of procurement.
Acquiring the drug crosses certain lines that they’re just not comfortable with. Dr. Lane says she doesn’t have any way to get us any. But she adds that once I do locate a source, I can order chemical tests online that will identify common drug adulterants—from amphetamines to rat poison—that dealers sometimes put into pills to make them stronger or make their supplies stretch a little further.
This is a problem when the wedge between stimulus and response is a chemical and not a technique. With a kettlebell, sauna, ice bath or breathing program, I always have the option to stop the ride and find my bearings. I can jump ship at any time. But once I’ve taken the drug, there’s no way out of the experience except through it. So testing what we’re going to put into our bodies makes a lot of sense.
I started making inquiries a few months ago with a friend of mine who “knew a guy” who “gets it straight from the lab.” Without any better recommendations than that, I decided to buy 400 milligrams, which eventually arrived in a one-inch-by-one-inch plastic bag with red hearts stenciled across its face. It was as sketchy as it sounds.
The following Sunday morning, I need Laura’s steady hand to run an experiment on the unknown powder. The testing kit arrives in a black cloth bag that contains several small eye droppers full of chemical reagents. Back in the 1990s, a company called DanceSafe emerged as a harm-reduction nonprofit that would test the purity of drugs at raves, concerts and parties in the hopes that fewer people would die on the dance floor. The kit is fairly straightforward to operate for anyone who has ever had to test the levels of chlorine and pH of a hot tub or swimming pool. I pour out the contents of the plastic bag onto a dinner plate and place six individual grains in separate piles. When Laura drops a dot of reagent on a grain, the liquid instantly changes color on contact. We match the color to a key that comes with the kit to see if the change indicates something chemically fishy. The contents of the mystery bag passes with flying colors. The bag is 100% pure and unadulterated MDMA. All we have to do now is wait for our appointment.
…
In the next two weeks, Laura and I talk a lot about the plan to hack our minds with an illicit drug. I’ve never had a bad experience on MDMA and am excited to be able to use it under guidance. I’ve felt how two people can throw kettlebells to build trust, how a sauna removes depression and how sensory deprivation can help me look inward to my own body. But MDMA promises something even more fascinating: the ability to feel no emotional stress at all. Any neural symbol we form will have to bond with a positive emotion. We will be free of inhibitions, which I assume will only make us closer. Laura chews on that idea and is less sure. Yes, MDMA feels great in the moment, but what about the hangover? And will it really make lasting change, or will the lessons vanish with the euphoria? I’m grateful that she trusts me enough to try so much with me.
And then, before we know it, the day is here, and Kent and Lane arrive at our door. They offer us warm smiles and, after a few pleasantries, ask us once again what we want out of the experience.
“Your intentions matter a great deal in any therapeutic session, but they’re even more critical when there’s a chemical involved,” says Dr. Kent. They remind us that Laura and I are the ones in control and that we’re free to leave the room at any time if we want. I mention that it’s a little weird to have witnesses to what is likely going to be an intimate moment between Laura and me. Dr. Kent responds with what sounds like stereotypical therapist speak: “Thank you for naming that,” he smiles respectfully. He says that if they make us uncomfortable, they’re comfortable with waiting outside. “This is supposed to be for you two,” confirms Dr. Lane.
Laura and I are nervous. But the therapists exude different energy: They’re excited. While they’ve both sat in on hundreds, if not thousands, of couples therapy sessions over their careers, and both have independently tried MDMA and other psychedelics for personal use, they’ve never brought those two experiences together. This is going to be their first time using MDMA as a tool for therapy, and I can tell that they’re more than simply curious about how it will play out. Could this be the tool they need to save marriages?
We sign the waiver that they gave us earlier and then divvy up the bag of white-ish powder into two unequal clumps. Since I’m larger and have more experience with psychoactive substances, I take what we calculate to be 150 milligrams of MDMA. Laura takes 100. We pour the powder into two mugs of mint tea and drink the brew down while making small talk with our guests.
In some ways, the worst part is the anticipation of what we’re going to feel between the time we take the dose and when the feelings actually kick in. We’ve crossed the Rubicon—the point of no return. We know that MDMA usually takes between 30 and 45 minutes to start working and are trying to pay attention to the first signs of it coming on. Do shadows look any different? Are Laura’s eyes more dilated than usual? Was that joke unusually funny?
Just as I’m beginning to get concerned nothing is going to happen, Laura stiffens up with a rigid back and puts her hand down on the couch. “Oh. It’s coming on now,” she says, like she’s being pummeled by a wave. A look of sudden seasickness overcomes her face and she gets up and heads to the bathroom. There’s a rush of nausea as she begins to lose control. It’s hard to say if this is a symptom of the drug or her own anxiety unwinding. After a minute sitting with the doctors, I get up to find her sitting next to the bathtub with her legs out in front of her. She doesn’t look like she’s going to vomit, but her eyes flit back and forth, slightly unfocused. I ask her if she’d like to lie down, and she answers yes.
By now I’m starting to feel something, too. It’s not anxiety; it feels amazing, like a silky wave of comfort and peace. I lead Laura to the bedroom, and she lies down on the bed with her arms bolted down next to her. It’s as if she’s lying down on the sort of backboard that medics use to secure a patient with a neck injury. Her blue eyes dart around the room, and I worry that this might not have been a good idea. What have we gotten ourselves into? I’m at a loss for what to do next until I get the urge to make some sort of physical contact. I reach down to grab her sock-covered right foot and ask if it’s okay if I give her a massage. It’s warm to the touch. In a matter of seconds I watch her wave of high tension melt away. Her body relaxes as she turns her attention to the rub and lets out a long, audible breath. We look into each other’s eyes—both sets of which are dilated into black saucers—and I tell her I love her.
That’s when the floodgates open and words start to spill out.
“It’s so strange that there are therapists watching us do drugs,” she says to me.
“I know.” I say. But It’s an opening into what would ordinarily be a difficult discussion of the state of our relationship. Every couple, no matter how strong their bond, has habits, routines and verbal shorthands that constrain communication. There are always subjects that we avoid—not necessarily because they might spark an argument, but because we know how that argument might play out. Most people live in a sort of detente, inside carefully mapped-out boundaries that no one wants to cross. But now, here on a bed in the back room of our house, the borders break down and we just start to talk like we haven’t since the first days of our relationship—when everything was new and transgressions were overlooked in the excitement of the moment.
On a neurological level, the part of our brains that produces and retains serotonin—the chemical responsible for anxiety, happiness and mood modulation—floods all the synapses in our brain. We’ve begun to release oxytocin, the chemical that helps two people bond—the very neurotransmitter that floods a mother and child’s brain when they first meet, and among lovers just making their feelings known to one another. In these moments on the bed, every chemical in our heads is making us closer, and there is no sense of defensiveness.
It’s strange to say this, but the state we’re in now is a little related to what it feels like to learn trust while throwing kettlebells. In those exercises, the threat of the bell forces both partners to focus on the threat of injury, and the shared focus puts them both into flow. MDMA tricks our nervous systems into emotional openness that might otherwise feel dangerous. Since the chemical works on our bodies in the same way, it creates a shared emotional environment: chemically induced flow.
The details of what we say are deeply personal and private, but suffice it to say we both bathe in feelings of absolute openness. Eventually I crawl into bed next to her, and the warmth of her body sweeps over me like liquid pleasure. Or perhaps this is the physical sensation of love itself. We stay there like two spoons, me talking into her hair, and her into the air in front of her. We’re there long enough that we realize it’s a little rude to leave our therapists alone with only a cheese plate for company.
At times the drug makes it too intense to talk. My eyes flit around the room without a lot of control to focus on any one thing. But those peaks only last a few minutes before the intensity settles into a valley of a calmness. We use those interludes as time to speak deeply about our feelings. Our journey out of the room has lasted maybe fifteen or twenty minutes. But when we return to the couch, we are in a stronger place than when we left it.
Dr. Kent and Dr. Lane ask if we’re feeling more stable; we say we are and then turn toward one another and lock eyes. Both psychologists scribble in their notepads the same phrase: The eye contact is amazing. There is something intense about the eyes of a person on ecstasy. It’s not only that the pupils dilate so that the blue of Laura’s irises almost vanish into space. It’s also that there doesn’t seem to be anywhere else to look but at each other. Why would we want to look anywhere else? There’s something almost alien to it, and it forces me to remember that for the past few months, even though the relationship feels stable, we’ve fallen out of the habit of actually looking at one another. When we talk, our minds connect through the sentences and paragraphs we speak, but we’ve abandoned the visual tether that speaks an entirely other language.
At one point, Dr. Kent asks a question. It’s a typical therapist line about how patterns in the past might play out in the future, and as he speaks, we both turn to listen. When we break that focus, my eyes start to search the room again like they’re unhinged. It feels like there is a low, annoying flow of electricity in my field of vision. Laura looks anxious. It’s not because of the question, but from being pulled out of our concentration on each other.
“Look at me, not them,” I say to Laura. The two therapists nod accession, and we lock our eyes back into the comfort of mutual connection. Windows to the soul or not, the way we look at each other is just as powerful as the drug’s chemical rush. Our conversation meanders through hard topics: health, the hostile political environment, our relationships with our parents, and whether our previous marriages predict the ultimate demise of what we are building together. We talk about sex. We examine our careers, and how both of us working from home might make us too close sometimes. How, we wonder, do we branch out with friends and family so as not to overload our relationship with too much pressure? The session lasts for about three hours, reaching peaks and crescendos of palpable intimacy, then drifting back to what feels like a normal state. Each peak gets progressively smaller until we are close to where we started.
The conversation flows so naturally that part of me feels that the therapists didn’t have enough space to help guide it. When it feels okay to drift my attention away from Laura, I ask them how what they just watched differs from an ordinary couples therapy session.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” starts Dr. Kent. “It was like the two of you just went through eight months of weekly therapy in just the course of two or three hours,” he says.
Dr. Lane nods in agreement, adding, “There are things that you said to one another that I was sure would start an argument. When you started talking about your relationship with your families, I actually cringed inside. I expected a fight. In any other context, someone would snap—anyone would—but you just accepted it and then delved into the roots of the problem. Frankly, this has been amazing,” she says.
Most discussions between two people operate on predictably safe scripts. In the same way that we initially form neural symbols with strong stimuli—like cold, heat or exercise—we also encode reactions in relationships based on our emotional state during the first time we experience a conflict or pleasurable moment. We forge reactions to difficult topics at a neurological level and re-access emotions from the past when they come up again. For example, when we see a contrary political view on social media, we generally react according to scripts we’ve already arranged in our mind. And when those reactions are already ingrained, we miss the opportunity to form new emotional bonds. MDMA breaks that tether and allows for new associations based on the emotional state we’re experiencing while on the drug. Done in a safe and responsible context, it allows a person or couple to attach positive emotional values to difficult subjects.
This doesn’t mean that you mindlessly accept any new idea as inherently positive on MDMA, but rather that you’re able to evaluate new information from the most optimistic perspective possible. Not only that, but the notes that the therapists scribbled on their respective yellow legal pads record that, more than simply listening with empathy, Laura and I automatically started looking for solutions.
Take, for instance, the issue of shared space. Since we work together from home, the way we share space can lead to conflict. As someone who has been diagnosed with attention deficit disorder and dyslexia since childhood, I’m easily distracted. If someone breaks one of those rare moments of focused flow on my work, I can snap without thinking. I can be mean. And rather than continue that pattern, we suggest closing my office door to lessen any tension. This is the sort of realization that might easily come up in a therapy session, of course, but this, and about a dozen other small fixes, appear almost automatically when we process our relationship on the drug. The conversations naturally flow from empathy with the problems we see arising in our relationship to solutions for how to deal with them down the road.
Dr. Kent and Dr. Lane eventually leave, but we make a follow-up appointment with them for the following week, to see how much of the experience turned into practice. For the next few hours, Laura and I ride the wake of the diminishing chemical wave. The high goes away, and in the hours afterward, our feelings balance out into a post-buzz sort of numbness. Rather than succumb to the depression, we decide to go outside on a walk around a lake near our house, with the idea that sensations from the world will help build back whatever neurotransmitter reserves we’ve burned through. By the next morning, we feel pretty much normal.
…
Over the next few months, we learn how effective a wedge MDMA really was. Things feel smoother between Laura and me. It turns out that the flow afterglow (afterflow?) is real. I’m less inclined to myopically snap if she interrupts my work. We have more open communication about our feelings on family matters, and even manage our time with each other with a little more élan. Our sex life improves. We might be 10% happier overall. It’s not a complete paradigm shift, but certainly worth the experience.
MDMA is a promising drug for a wide range of therapeutic uses. Currently, clinical trials at the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies won accelerated FDA approval for post-traumatic stress disorder. Depending on how those trials go over the next few years, therapist-assisted MDMA sessions have the potential to become a new standard of care across the country. The chemical’s ability to drive a wedge between stimulation and reaction could alter the way that we approach any sort of anxiety disorder or foster bonds between parents and children and husbands and wives. Hell, we might even find a use for it in business negotiations (though one wonders what that might end up looking like).
Of course, there are potential dangers. Most obviously right now is that MDMA-assisted therapy is illegal. Drs. Kent and Lane cloak their identities for good reason. A well-placed tip to the police or regulatory board could ruin their careers, and patients could end up in jail just for seeking treatment. The fact that it’s illegal also means that quality control is a major problem. It can be difficult to know if any chemical you purchase off the street is legitimate. While some countries like the Netherlands test drugs for free at harm-reduction programs, similar services in the United States are rare. Outside the legal ramifications, MDMA is probably not for everyone. Underlying mental disorders, including excessive paranoia or schizophrenia, could make the condition worse. And since MDMA releases serotonin into the neural pathways, people on some antidepressants could find themselves in actual physical danger.
Some people might not be great candidates for this sort of therapy for other reasons. In some ways, traditional therapy sessions offer a predictable slow pace where the relationship between therapist and patient follows a predictable rhythm. MDMA’s speed is also its liability. Imagine a case of a person who was sexually assaulted as a child and who had never told anyone about the experience before because of the deep shame that it brings up. While an MDMA session could provide an environment where they feel safe talking about those circumstances for the first time, what happens after the session is over? They might think back to the session as painful instead of as a path to recovery. In those cases, aftercare is critical. Alternately, if two people use MDMA together and one of them has a manipulative personality in general, information that comes up during the session could be used against the partner in the future. In other words, it’s a good idea to assess how it all could play out with a therapist before you actually try the drug itself.
On a more profound level, people thinking of trying MDMA need to realize that it’s not a one-stop shop or magic pill that makes all of a person’s problems go away. While the chemical provides an environment for productive conversations, patients need to provide the presence of mind to make the best of their time. Intentions matter, as does taking the session seriously, with a clear desire for a positive outcome.
As an intervention into the sensory pathways, MDMA is a more radical iteration of the Wedge than I’ve explored before. Chemicals can change the way that our minds experience the world and help us sink deeper into the unconscious psychology that forms our behavior. MDMA creates very specific chemical changes in the brain, but it only works as a medicine when the environment reinforces a positive experience. So when thinking about the Wedge while using a chemical, it’s important to control all sides of the experience; the stable and supportive environment impacts your chemically altered sensory pathways in order to create an orientation that is more positive. Together this sort of treatment forms new neurological connections that will influence your life down the road.
But there are other chemical interventions that don’t just alter sensory experiences; they actually create entirely new perceptions of the environment whole cloth. Where MDMA is an empathogen—meaning it creates feelings of empathy—other classes of psychedelics create neural environments that radically alter your perception of the outside world. Used recklessly, they are no doubt dangerous, but in the hands of experienced practitioners and guides, the new chemical environments and the experiences that come with them can get to the source of ingrained psychological and physical problems in ways that no other class of medication can.
For the past year, I’ve built up a skill set with the Wedge that has allowed me to re-evaluate my relationship with my environment and stress in general. I’ve seen how pushing myself to a physical threshold defines who I am. I’ve also learned to look inward. I’ve played with fear, focus and flow. Now I feel ready to take on a new challenge that pushes me into entirely new terrain. Instead of using one stress at a time, I want to dance with an entire world of stimulus and reaction all at once. I want to use chemicals, sound, sensory deprivation, indigenous medicine, fear and breathing in a grand ritual where the barriers of consciousness will begin to break down.
An indigenous shamanic medicine tradition from the Amazon jungle uses a psychedelic ritual brew that facilitates feelings of connection to nature and even god itself. The potion is part of a class of drugs called entheogens, meaning they create transcendent experiences. But the ritual of taking the medicine also incorporates all frames of the Wedge at once—with a novel environment, challenging emotional terrain, music, and a shamanic guide through the entire experience—to rebuild the human psyche from the ground up.