ONE
The Path of Temporary Immersion
The passionate longing of the human heart has always been to press beyond the boundaries of the known, to break through the limitations of our understanding, to extend the horizon of awareness. This is perhaps our most fundamental and essential freedom.
ANNE BARING, THE DREAM OF THE COSMOS
In this opening chapter, I want to candidly describe how I worked with LSD and share some core observations about the psychedelic process. Even as psychedelic research resumes, there is still a great deal of misinformation and mistrust of psychedelics in our culture. By putting my cards on the table up front, I hope to create as clear a field as possible for the story that follows. Readers who are not familiar with the psychedelic literature will get a solid understanding of how this method of inquiry works, while those who know this literature well will see how I have adapted and personalized it.
I will understand if some readers choose to skip these preliminaries and jump straight to the sessions, but if you do, I hope you will double back and read this chapter later. The experiences I’m going to share in this book go so far beyond what most people think is possible that it’s important to lay a strong foundation for them, and that’s what this chapter does. In my courses at the university, my strategy was always: start slow, build strong, and go far. So too here, for this is the farthest I have ever asked anyone to go with me.
The Therapeutic Protocol
I’ve never dropped acid and gone to a concert, never spent the night tripping with friends. When I took LSD on these seventy-three days, I entered a carefully constructed space dedicated to self-transformation. I was isolated from the outside world, in my home or my wife’s private office, and protected from all interruptions. I was lying down on a mattress on the floor, surrounded by cushions, and wearing eyeshades and headphones. The music was carefully selected to support the stages of opening and closing—gentle music as the drug comes on, powerful evocative music as it builds momentum, expansive music for the peak hours, and gentle music for the long, slow return.
Those who have done serious journey work know the set and setting well. Prepare yourself with a centering practice such as yoga or meditation, eliminate outside distractions so that you know that whatever you are confronting is coming entirely from within, give responsibility for your care and safety over to a sitter, take the medicine, and then open to whatever emerges in your experience. I followed the same procedure in all my sessions. They always began in the early morning and lasted all day, about eight hours. They were all solo journeys; I didn’t work in groups. This allowed each session to be individually tailored to follow wherever the experience would take me. My sitter was a gifted clinical psychologist who also happened to be my wife. Carol learned the therapeutic protocol by studying the psychedelic literature with me. There are pluses and minuses to having your partner be your sitter, but it worked well enough for us. We learned as we went, and I will always be grateful to Carol for the support she gave me in this work.
The core of the therapeutic protocol is to powerfully amplify your unconscious, allow its patterns to emerge in your awareness, and surrender completely to whatever presents itself in your experience.*1 Through the unrestricted engagement of your inner experience, the patterns will build in intensity until they come to a critical threshold. The same patterns will keep showing up in a variety of forms until a climax of expression is reached—some inner gestalt is consciously realized or some reservoir of pain drained—and then they will spontaneously resolve themselves. The energy trapped in these patterns is released, and the psyche is then free to flow into more expansive states of awareness for the remainder of the session. If this process is repeated many times, deeper patterns begin to emerge. However inscrutable these patterns may be at the time, eventually, they too can be dissolved by undefended engagement, and once they are, new worlds of experience will continue to open.*2
Using a protocol that combines protected isolation, interior focus, and deeply evocative music drives the psychedelic state far beyond what one is likely to experience if one takes LSD in a recreational setting. I’m not disparaging tripping, for clearly many people have had life-changing experiences using psychedelics in this manner. I’m simply pointing out that staying in contact with the outside world will change the pattern of the experiences that emerge. They will tend to be shallower, less cathartic, and less revelatory.
After the session has ended, the work shifts to critical assessment. Psychedelic experiences can be extraordinarily moving and complex. In order not to be swept away by them or simply carried along by their novelty, it’s important to step back and critically assess them. What actually happened in today’s session? What does it mean? What lessons should I take from it? Sessions have many layers to them, and these layers weave themselves into long overlapping exercises that advance one theme and then another in a sometimes choppy fashion.
In our sessions, we are in dialogue with an infinite intelligence, and this intelligence speaks to us from different depths on different days. Wisdom coming from different levels of consciousness carries different inflections reflecting different starting points, different sets of assumptions. It takes time to map the structure of these sequences, to recognize the logic of the larger whole.
Part of critical discernment also means being brutally honest with yourself. We must stay mindful of our shortcomings if we are to avoid the greatest danger of working with psychedelics—psychic inflation. Psychedelics give us temporary access to realities beyond our pay grade, allowing us to experience things beyond our ordinary capacity. It’s all too easy to think that because we have had a deep and profound experience, we have become a deep and profound person, but this is a fool’s delusion. Even when psychedelics allow us to experience the person we are in the process of becoming, we have to face the fact that we have not become this person yet, nor have we fully internalized the wonderful qualities we may have temporarily touched.
In a Philosopher’s Hands
While Grof’s therapeutic protocol was the foundation of my psychedelic practice, I want to emphasize that I did this work not as a clinician but as a philosopher. I was not primarily seeking healing but an understanding of our universe. I wanted to experience the universe as deeply as I could and to know what I was at the core of my being, underneath all the layers of social and psychological conditioning. In this I saw myself pursuing a philosophical method that in modern times can be traced to William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience. There in the context of his extensive analysis of spiritual experience, James describes his own self-experiments with nitrous oxide, which led to his famous observation:
One conclusion was forced upon my mind at that time, and my impression of its truth has ever since remained unshaken. It is that our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded. (James [1902] 2002, 300–01)
With the disciplined use of psychedelics, philosophers now have the capacity to step through the door that James opened and explore the territory that he briefly glimpsed. In this, we are witnessing the birth of not just new insights into consciousness but a new way of doing philosophy. This new philosophical method can be boiled down to three basic steps:
- To systematically push the boundaries of experience in carefully structured psychedelic sessions,
- To make a complete and accurate record of your experience immediately following each session, and
- To critically analyze your experience, bringing it into dialogue with other fields of knowledge and with the experiences of other psychedelic explorers.
By moving systematically back and forth between psychedelically amplified states of consciousness and our ordinary consciousness, where these experiences can be digested and evaluated, philosophical discourse is expanded and deepened. It is difficult to overstate the significance of this historic transition. With psychedelics we are entering a new era in philosophy.*3
LSD Sessions as a Path of Spiritual Awakening
Like many in my generation, I was initially drawn to working with psychedelics because I was interested in enlightenment. I had been meditating for a number of years and had encountered the usual blocks that show up in the early stages of sitting practice. I thought that by doing some therapeutically focused LSD sessions, I could work through these blocks faster and accelerate my spiritual awakening. I chose to work with LSD because that was the primary psychedelic Stanislav Grof had done his early research with, and I trusted what I saw there. Both the Eastern and Western spiritual traditions I had studied emphasized death of self as the gateway to liberation, and this seemed consistent with Grof’s emphasis on ego-death.
From an historical perspective, therapeutically structured LSD sessions are a modern variation of an ancient spiritual path that has been well documented by scholars.*4 From the Eleusinian mystery rites of ancient Greece to the peyote ceremonies of Native Americans and the ayahuasca churches of present-day Brazil, human beings have been ingesting consciousness-amplifying substances for thousands of years and have all come to the same conclusion: these substances are sacraments that help us reconnect with the universe. Seen in this context, therapeutically structured LSD sessions are not an end run around spiritual practice, as some early scholars thought, but a particularly intense form of spiritual practice, with its own distinctive characteristics and challenges.†5
In my university courses, I often called the sacred medicine path the path of temporary immersion and contrasted it with the path of meditation. Where meditation is a path of self-clarification that allows the layers of the mind to open gradually, the sacred medicine path cultivates intense but temporary surges of awareness. By amplifying our present awareness, the medicine path opens us more quickly to a deeper communion with the universe. This is a good thing, a healing thing, but it can also be a tricky thing because it’s easy to overestimate the staying power of these dramatic exercises. To use Abraham Maslow’s vocabulary, we can overestimate the value of our peak experiences and underestimate the challenge of achieving more stable plateau experiences. Or as Ken Wilber reminds us, states of consciousness are not stages of spiritual development.
If the ultimate goal of spiritual practice is the permanent transformation of our consciousness, then the soft underbelly of psychedelics is their temporary nature. LSD plunges us into intense spiritual exercises, holds us there for a while, and then brings us back. Clearly, we cannot stay where we have gone; it is a mistaken strategy to try to do so. We must accept these limitations and work with them. But how can we work with these temporary states in a way that will advance our permanent transformation?
In my experience, there are two keys to doing this—courage and grounding. First, we must have the courage to confront whatever negative experiences may surface in our sessions. Opening into bliss is fine if that’s what happens, but it’s when the shadow rises that the hard work is done. In a therapeutic setting, the challenges one confronts may come from many levels of our being. Beyond those that come from our personal unconsciousness are challenges that come from the womb, from previous incarnations, and from the collective unconscious. In this work, we can confront barriers that are so foreign to us that we cannot see how they are constricting our awareness until after we have broken through to what lies beyond them, and this takes commitment and resolve.
The second key is grounding. Without deep grounding, powerful experiences may come and go but amount to very little in the long run. First, there is the grounding achieved by establishing a strong set and setting on the day of a session. But deep transformation requires more than this. For enduring change to take root in our lives, we must also create a container for holding our experiences in between our sessions—for remembering them, pondering them, and putting their lessons into practice. If we don’t do this, we will be pulled to chase new experiences before we have fully digested the gifts we’ve already been given.
At a practical level, my psychedelic practice was grounded in my long-term commitments as a husband, father, and university professor. These strong bonds were the foundation of my life that kept me rooted in the earth as I absorbed the extreme swings of consciousness this journey unleashed. After every session, there were always children to take care of and dishes to wash. However deeply I was dissolved into the cosmos on Saturday, on Monday morning I was back in the classroom teaching my courses.
To extract the full transformative value of these powerful experiences, we must integrate them not only into our mind but also into our physical, emotional, and social being. This requires grounding our psychedelic practice in a larger set of transformational practices familiar to spiritual practitioners everywhere. For me, these included: (1) the ethical practice of compassionate service, (2) the psychological practice of self-inquiry, and (3) the physical practice of caring for the body. I would underscore the last here because while psychedelic experiences are usually spoken of as states of consciousness, they are profound states of body as well. Mind-opening states are body-opening states that deeply impact our physical and subtle energy system. To these I would add one more: (4) a daily spiritual practice. The longer I have worked with psychedelics, the more convinced I have become that a daily meditation practice is vital to harnessing the waves of energy and insight that sweep through us on a session day.
Though my initial motivation for doing psychedelic work was spiritual awakening, along the way a second track opened that overtook the enlightenment project. This happened because of the sheer power of the particular psychedelic protocol that I adopted, so let me first describe this protocol, and then I will describe this second track.
Low-Dose vs. High-Dose Sessions
After getting my bearings in several low-dose sessions (200 micro-grams [mcg]), I chose a regimen of working with high doses of LSD. For those unfamiliar with the difference between low-dose and highdose LSD therapy, let me briefly summarize Grof’s description of these two therapeutic modalities and then describe the protocol I adopted.
Psycholytic Therapy
Low-dose psycholytic therapy (75–300 mcg, typically around 200 mcg) activates the unconscious more gently, allowing a gradual unfolding of the psyche to take place. At this dosage level, the psyche releases its secrets and pains in layers. Emotional abreaction and other therapeutic mechanisms are intensified, calling for a flexible, dynamic engagement with the therapist. Grof’s early work at the Psychiatric Research Institute in Prague was primarily psycholytic therapy where sessions took place at one-week to two-week intervals and numbered between fifteen and one hundred sessions, averaging about forty sessions.
Psychedelic Therapy
High-dose psychedelic therapy (300–500 mcg) is a very different form of psychedelic engagement. In this therapeutic modality, consciousness is much more powerfully amplified, and the strategy is to push through the psychodynamic level of consciousness and trigger an experience of ego-death and transcendence. Rather than working through one’s personal issues layer by layer, psychedelic therapy seeks to evoke an ecstatic state in which the boundaries between the self and the universe are dissolved, allowing one to reconnect with spiritual reality and gain a new perspective on one’s life. Verbal interaction during a session is kept to a minimum. This therapeutic protocol is sometimes described as the “single overwhelming dose” approach. At Spring Grove Hospital in Baltimore, where Grof and his colleagues worked with terminally ill patients, high-dose psychedelic therapy was limited to three sessions.*6
Psychedelic Exploration
The protocol I adopted represents a third option I am calling psychedelic exploration. When I was doing this work, I did not see myself as developing a new protocol but simply doing an extended course of psychedelic therapy. When I came to the end of this journey, however, and was looking back over its length, I came to recognize that this was something different. What happened in my sessions went beyond psychedelic therapy as it was originally practiced. Rather than attempting to precipitate a single intense experience of transcendence, this protocol generated an ever-deepening spiral of initiation into the universe. This spiral of initiation opened new experiential opportunities, but it also presented new challenges that went beyond those encountered in psychedelic therapy.
As I am using the term, psychedelic exploration consists of an extended series of fully internalized high-dose LSD sessions. I worked at 500–600 mcg. While this protocol incorporates the practices and procedures of psychedelic therapy—physical isolation, minimal verbal interaction, and intensely evocative music—the high number of sessions makes it a different enterprise. One way of thinking about this third protocol is: this is what happens if you push psychedelic therapy as far as you can take it.
On the issue of dosage, I want to note that this protocol is not representative of current trends in psychedelic research, which is focused on working with much lower doses and gentler psychedelics. No federally sanctioned psychedelic study is proposing working with doses of LSD this high, and I think this is a good thing. It’s important that psychedelic research proceed slowly and cautiously in this new era. At the same time, the value of moving forward incrementally does not negate the insights and experiences that emerged using this more aggressive protocol. I trust that the public will understand the different historical circumstances in which I did this work and the different opportunities it presented.
I also want to strongly caution anyone who may be considering adopting this protocol to think long and hard before doing so. When I began this work, I assumed that if high-dose LSD sessions could be done safely one to three times, the number of sessions could be increased without increasing the risk. What I found, however, was that while my work always stayed within the margins of safety, increasing the number of sessions made this a much more demanding undertaking than I had anticipated. It took all my inner resources to manage what unfolded on this journey.
In his book Allies for Awakening, Ralph Metzner recommends against working with doses of LSD this high. When doses are raised to this level, he says, heightened awareness flips into dissociative and/or dysphoric responses for most people. A dissociative response is one in which the individual essentially blanks out and is not able to remember or describe the experience. The experience may be pleasant, even blissful, but the person can’t bring much of it back. A dysphoric response is one in which one’s innate resistance to losing control triggers an intense struggle and possibly paranoid or schizoid reactions. The trauma of being overwhelmed overpowers any positive insights or visions one may have.
Metzner is trying to walk us back from the turbulent ’60s, when 500 mcg was considered the measure of “true initiation” and Terrence McKenna was promoting “heroic dosages” for those who wanted to “really get the message.” Metzner believes that this more-is-better approach brought with it too much trauma and at the very least wasted a lot of time without yielding long-lasting therapeutic gains. Better to work more slowly and be able to integrate more of what one sees. Accordingly, he recommends a therapeutic dose range for LSD between 50 and 200 mcg, essentially staying within the limits of psycholytic therapy.*7
There is much wisdom and clinical experience in Metzner’s recommendations. In a therapeutic setting where the goal is personal transformation, it may well be advisable to stay within the range of 50–200 mcg. This level of activation leaves more of one’s psychological equipment intact, making the sessions less threatening and easier to assimilate. Or if one’s purpose for doing psychedelic work is spiritual enlightenment as this is classically conceived, this work is better done closer to where the ego lives in the world, and this means working with lower doses.†8 Clearly, working with low doses has much to recommend it.
At the same time, I think that there is a legitimate role for working judiciously with high doses of LSD in carefully managed sessions conducted in a safe and protected environment. It’s certainly true that high doses tend to overwhelm one’s psychological defenses and shatter one’s egoic identity, but whether this leads to dissociation and dysphoria depends to a great extent on how one engages one’s sessions. The dismantling of one’s psychological boundaries is a frightening, gutwrenching experience both physically and psychologically, but if you are prepared for this unraveling and meet it head-on, it can be both manageable and beneficial.
My experience has been that if high-dose sessions are managed in a responsible and conscientious manner, they do not generate experiences so deep that you cannot bring them back or so frightening that they cannot be negotiated. One can learn to work productively at these high levels with good recall and good integration, but it takes discipline and practice. I will be completely candid about the challenges I faced using this protocol and let readers draw their own conclusions.*9
Because it is extremely demanding to work at these high levels, this protocol is clearly not advisable for many people. In addition to the usual criteria used to screen subjects for psychedelic sessions, additional precautions should be taken.†10 Working at these levels becomes less a therapeutic enterprise and more an intense journey of cosmic exploration. Accordingly, it requires something of an explorer’s constitution—a capacity to withstand conditions that are highly stressful, extremely disorienting, and deeply ambiguous. In addition, one’s life circumstances and support systems must be strong enough to support such an undertaking. No one takes such a journey alone.
While I believe that I worked responsibly and productively at these high-dose levels, I want to say clearly that this is not a protocol that I recommend. If I were starting this journey over again today, I would do it differently. With hindsight, I think I pushed myself harder than was necessary and perhaps harder than was wise. Knowing what I know today, I would be gentler on myself. I would incorporate more low-dose sessions into the work. And because LSD tends to be a “high altitude” psychedelic that pushes the cosmological ceiling, I would balance it with more “body-grounded” psychedelics such as psilocybin and ayahuasca. When I was doing this work, however, I was working alone with no elders telling me how to navigate these depths or advising me when to slow down and when to press on. It was a new method and a new territory, and I had to figure these things out as I went along.
LSD Sessions as a Journey of Cosmic Exploration
I initially chose to work with high doses of LSD because it was difficult to find days for inner journeying in a dual-career marriage and I simply wanted to make the most of each session. I knew that the sessions would be more challenging, but the spiritual literature I had read described one’s karmic conditioning as being ultimately finite, and I thought that I could work through mine faster by using this intense method of transformation, in effect biting off larger pieces of karma in each session. I thought that if I confronted my shadow conscientiously and could endure the intensity of the work, it would get me to my goal of personal liberation faster. Later, after this model had imploded for reasons I will give in chapter 6, I continued working with high doses because I had developed a taste for it. It took me where I wanted to go and then further than I imagined possible.
The choice to work with high doses turned out to have enormous consequences for what unfolded on this journey. It radically expanded not only the depth of consciousness reached but also the breadth of consciousness being activated in each session. It wasn’t simply a matter of eating the same karmic meal in fewer bites, as I had naively thought. Because the web of life is an integrated whole from the very start, working with high doses of LSD activates wider portions of this web. Working at these levels changed not only how deep my experiences went but also who or what was actually having these experiences, what the “working unit” of experience was in a session. In these highly energized conditions, the size of the patient literally expands. What I mean by this will become clearer as we proceed.
Though I began this work with the goal of achieving personal liberation, over time I began to realize that there was a great deal taking place in my sessions that fell outside this project. By the third year, I was being drawn into vast purifying exercises that seemed focused on the collective psyche rather than my personal psyche, as though the target had shifted from being my personal liberation to the liberation of the entire human species. Then the sheer power of the catalytic energy unleashed by this protocol kept driving me through one experiential barrier after another, repeatedly expanding the territory of engagement. Eventually, my sessions became a periodically painful but steadfastly ecstatic journey of cosmic discovery. In this journey, I was invited to explore the universe in ways that went far beyond my original project of spiritual awakening.
It’s not that I abandoned my commitment to spiritual liberation, for this always remained part of the work, but this journey generated experiences that went far too deep to ever be converted into a stabilized “awakened state” upon my return. This was something different, a different track aimed at a different goal. One does not have to transcend time, be dissolved into archetypal reality, or return to the birth of the universe in order to realize one’s Essential Nature or rest in the condition of nonduality and emptiness. These are distinct if mutually reinforcing undertakings.
All my life I have had a passionate desire to understand how our universe works. Why are our lives the way they are? Why is there so much suffering in life? Is there a larger intelligence operating in the universe, and if so, toward what end? What is the purpose and project of existence? In our culture’s current materialist paradigm that reduces everything to physical matter, these questions are considered beyond the pale of genuine knowledge, and attempts to answer them are seen as being purely speculative enterprises. In my sessions, however, I was given the opportunity to explore these questions in exercises of profound experiential instruction choreographed by a vast intelligence. I was shown things that stunned and transfixed me, was allowed to experience things that completely reframed my understanding of existence. What philosopher could turn down such an opportunity?
As this journey deepened, I found myself entering a spiraling love affair with this intelligence, a Being so vast I can only describe it using the vocabulary of the Divine even while the sessions themselves were repeatedly demonstrating how limited and childlike our historical conceptions of the Divine have been. I agree with Jonathan Goldman who in speaking of ayahuasca said, “The rituals of the Daime are not meant to be an ‘experience,’ but rather to provide a chance to interact intimately with a Divine Being of unimaginable intelligence, compassion, clarity, and spiritual power.”*11 I do not know the limits of this Being and I hesitate to even call it a “Being” at all. As I have experienced it, it is the fabric of existence itself. I think of it as the generative intelligence of our universe, the Mind of the Cosmos—both transcendent source and manifest body of existence, beyond all categories of He or She yet infinitely more than any It.
Knowing that I could sustain the deepest intimacy with this intelligence for only a few hours on any given day and that I had no control over which session would become one of these magical days, I kept driving forward. When the communion opened, it was so intense that at the end of the day I would feel supremely fulfilled and at the same time achingly bereaved because I could not stay with my Beloved.
Everyone must choose a name for the Absolute, a title that approximates its truth, power, and beauty. Though I will use many terms to describe it in this book, in my heart of hearts I call it my Beloved. Once held in her embrace, once dissolved into her radiant splendor, I was hers forever. I will be hers until my last breath and after still. If my description tilts toward the feminine, it is because of two things—the specific story of creation that emerged on this journey and the love that reuniting with this reality awakened within me.†12
Two Phases of a Session
Using the protocol that I adopted, each of my sessions generally had two phases—a cleansing phase followed by an ecstatic phase. The first hour or two were usually spent in some form of intense cleansing and purification. This process would eventually reach a peak, and then the session would pivot to an ecstatic phase for the remainder of the day. The division between the cleansing phase and the ecstatic phase was a sliding line with many variations. Sometimes I was moved back and forth across this boundary several times in one session. Occasionally, an entire session was spent in cleansing, and the next session opened immediately into the ecstatic harvest. When this happened, the two sessions were functioning as two halves of a larger whole, even though they might be separated by several months.
As far as I could determine, the depth of the ecstatic phase of my sessions was influenced by three factors. The first is the depth of purification that had taken place during the cleansing phase of the session. Usually, the deeper the purification was in the first half of a session, the deeper the visionary experience was in the second half. The second factor is the depth of purification that had taken place in all my previous sessions. One naturally expects a deeper encounter fifty sessions into a journey than five sessions into it. The third factor is a little harder to describe. There is an energetic momentum that builds in one’s sessions if you work consistently over a long period of time. It is a tangible power that accumulates and drives you through periodic breakthroughs, similar to the way an athlete in training develops a power that periodically carries him or her to peak levels of performance. It took years of sustained work for me to build sufficient energy to enter the levels of reality I was entering in the later stages of my work. For this reason, I could not return to that territory in one session today no matter how high a dose I took. It would take years for me to generate the energy required to reenter these powerful domains.
There may be another factor that influences what emerges in our sessions. Because our solar system is constantly moving, the variable of planetary setting changes in subtle ways from day to day and month to month. In a collaboration of many years, Stan Grof and Richard Tarnas have proposed the bold hypothesis that people’s experiences in deep nonordinary states move in synchrony with the rhythms of our solar system. Using case histories, Grof has argued that natal and transit astrology can illumine and even predict the tenor of one’s psychedelic session on any given day.*13 This is too large a topic for me to take up here, but in the interest of encouraging this discussion, I will give my birth information and the dates of all my sessions in appendix II at the end of the book.
The Craft of Remembering
While the issue of set and setting has been much discussed in the psychedelic literature, I find less attention being paid to the issue of systematic recall after a session has ended. I don’t know why this is the case because I have found that making an accurate record of each session can pose a significant challenge. This may be because of the high doses I was working with, but I think it represents a larger issue as well.
LSD generates a powerful but temporary increase in the mind’s sensitivity. Our habitual conditioning is interrupted and our field of awareness is dramatically expanded, but after a number of hours our consciousness returns to its familiar patterns. If we don’t take steps to accurately record our experiences as soon as we return, our memory of them tends to fade. What was overwhelmingly powerful one day becomes slightly dimmer the next and dimmer still a month later. Preserving the memory of our experiences as carefully as possible completes the circle of learning and lays a stronger foundation for our next session.
I envy artists like Alex Grey, Pablo Amaringo, and Martina Hoffmann who have recorded their psychedelic experiences in stunning works of art. I don’t have this gift. I am a writer and I paint with words. Part of my protocol for working with LSD, therefore, has included writing a detailed account of every session within twenty-four hours. I found that if I waited even a few days, recall was more difficult and the transcript less complete, so I learned not to wait.
Recording my sessions often required writing at the very limits of my understanding as I struggled to describe experiences that were deeply mysterious to me at the time. I had to repeatedly stretch language to describe realities beyond any I had known. Psychedelic experiences are cognitively elusive. The further a session throws you into new and unfamiliar territory, the harder it is to describe it in precise detail. To help with this process, I developed a strategy.
When I write up a session, I listen to the music used in the session in exactly the same order it was played inside the session. I play each piece over and over until I feel I have captured the essence of the experience I had with this music, then I move on to the next segment. The day after a session, you are still porous around the edges. By listening to the music in this porous state, with my verbal functions restored, I found that I was able to reenter the edges of my experience and get it down on paper more effectively. I called it “standing at the edge of the well.”
On those precious days when I would break through to a new level of consciousness, recall was sometimes challenging. My write-up would have more gaps in it. Sometimes I would be able to recall only fragments of a particularly deep set of experiences, the rest disappearing into the shadows. The experiences were so unlike anything I had previously known that my mind could not hold on to all of them. I learned, however, that with repetition, recall and comprehension improved. When I returned to the same level of reality in subsequent sessions, I was able to retain the experiences more completely. My system was acclimating to the new territory, and I was able to remember things I had previously forgotten. The pieces began to fit together into more coherent patterns, and meanings became clearer. As a result, my session narratives became more complete.
This is an important epistemological point. With persistence and practice, cognition can be trained to operate in these unusual and novel conditions. Profound experiences are not simply given to you; you have to train yourself to receive them and hold on to them. I cannot emphasize this too strongly. This is especially important if you want to incorporate psychedelic work into any critical endeavor.
In this context, I want to mention that I think that ineffability is often overrated as a mark of genuine mystical experience. In The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James made ineffability one of the four marks of mystical experience, and it has become standardized in the Mystical Experience Questionnaire developed by Walter Pahnke and Bill Richards. This interpretation echoes Dante’s view in the Paradiso, where he wrote:
I was within the heaven that receives
more of His light; and I saw things that he
who from that height descends, forgets or can
not speak; for nearing its desired end,
our intellect sinks into an abyss
so deep that memory fails to follow it.
CANTO I: 4–9.
While it may be true that language falters before the transcendent, making ineffability a cardinal virtue of mystical experience almost suggests that the transcendent wants to remain opaque. My experience, however, is that the Divine wants to be known. I think forgetfulness and inarticulateness, even ecstatic inarticulateness, is primarily a symptom of hitting one’s experiential limits. If you can’t describe where you’ve been, you probably just got lost. Though you always lose pieces of experience when you break into new territory, you recover these pieces in subsequent sessions and eventually learn how they fit together. We should exhaust ourselves struggling to find the right words before surrendering to the silence. The well-known scholar of mysticism Walter Stace also had major reservations about this “alleged ineffability” because, he said, mystics do describe their experiences, sometimes quite extensively.*14
The heart of this book comes from my psychedelic journal, approximately four hundred pages of session accounts. With a sincere bow to Carl Jung, this journal is my “Red Book” without the pictures. It is the record of my deepest experience of the universe, the primary text that for me comes before all subsequent interpretation and reflection. Once I have written up a session, I do not change or edit it. I have learned that attempting to make improvements in the account may distort something contained in the original raw language, so I leave it alone. Whenever I quote from this journal in the chapters that follow, a unique font will be used. I will also number the sessions. Numbering them simply makes it easier to track the stages of the journey as it unfolds.
Defining the Conversation
Psychedelic sessions are so multidimensional and multi-thematic that isolating a narrative in them can be challenging. Themes from personal and transpersonal levels of reality braid themselves together in a complex fashion. Scenarios repeat themselves across many sessions, their plot thickening as more layers are added. In the chapters that follow, I don’t want to oversimplify this complexity by making the sessions appear simpler than they actually were. At the same time, I need to consolidate what took place in order to present them in a reasonably efficient manner. I’ve had to make decisions about what is important to share from them and what can be left out. In order to convey the most important elements of this journey, I’ve done some judicious pruning.
Working at these high-dose levels, I found that insights into my personal life tended to surface at the beginning and end of a session, when I was leaving and returning to my life in the physical world. During the middle hours when the session was at its peak, I was usually operating beyond the range of personal reality, at least after the first fifteen sessions or so. This doesn’t mean that the personal element was completely absent, for sometimes I was shown the personal relevance of this or that teaching and sometimes an entire session was spent in personal healing or instruction. But in general, there was a marked difference between the content of the peak hours of a session and the content of its beginning and ending hours. The following image may help convey this point.
Fig. 1. Session Peaks
(image by Jason Bache, Nerds Ltd.)
These bell-shaped curves represent a series of sessions. I have drawn them overlapping to emphasize their thematic continuity. The larger circles at the top of the curves mark the hours of peak visionary intensity; the smaller circles at the bottom mark the milder experiences that took place during liftoff from and reentry into ordinary consciousness.
The story I’m telling in this book is compiled from the visionary experiences that took place inside the circles at the top of these curves. I will skip over the experiences that took place inside the smaller circles where the content was more personal and addressed my immediate circumstances. Though these experiences were valuable to me personally, they are not philosophically significant enough to warrant sharing with the world, especially when there are so many larger issues to discuss.
LSD and the Mind of the Universe is primarily a cosmological narrative, not a therapeutic narrative. In a therapeutic narrative, the personal details are important; in a cosmological narrative, they are less so. Of course, this entire journey was deeply personal and I own it as such, but my personal story is not the important story here, nor is it essential to the story I want to convey. It is when one moves beyond the shoals of the personal psyche and enters the ocean of the deep psyche that the larger and more philosophically interesting story begins to emerge.
Just as dreams build on one another if you attend to them carefully, psychedelic sessions build on one another if you engage them systematically, at least they did in my case. Over the years, a systematic deepening of my visionary experience took place. I think the standardization of the procedures that I used in my sessions—same sitter, same set and setting, same medicine and dose, same location, and same recording process—contributed to the stability and continuity of my visionary conversation. Being taken into great depth one step at a time allows our cognitive faculties to stabilize at each level before we are ushered into the next, otherwise we would be swallowed whole by the enormity of the encounter, and what would be accomplished but a transient ecstasy that built little?
From this perspective, when we are attempting to understand specific psychedelic experiences, I think it is important to hold them in the context of our entire journey. In a sustained psychedelic inquiry, our sessions are always advancing our learning—sometimes breaking new ground, sometimes clarifying and commenting on what took place in previous sessions, and sometimes giving us glimpses of where we will be going next. In addition, different levels of reality operate by different rules. Words take on different meanings and significance as the process deepens. If we lift an experience out of its context, its meaning is halved.
Let me step back and say this more carefully. There is an important set of insights that emerges from gathering and analyzing the psychedelic experiences of large numbers of people, and this does require lifting experiences out of their original context. This has been one of Stan Grof’s invaluable contributions. By phenomenologically mapping the psychedelic experiences of hundreds if not thousands of people, Stan has established the ontological validity of the transpersonal territory. A different set of insights emerges when we follow one person through this territory. Without this collective database, the individual’s journey could be written off as being merely a private fantasy. Against the background of this collective database, however, tracking one person through this terrain brings out certain features of the psychedelic process more sharply: the multiple stages of initiation, the deepening spiral of death and rebirth, and the participatory dynamics of psychedelic disclosure. It is this work for which context is vital. Each of these perspectives complements and strengthens the other.
The Participatory Dynamics of Disclosure
The more I have thought about the extraordinary range of experiences that opened on my journey, the more I have come to appreciate the complex dynamics of psychedelic disclosure. In these states, we are using consciousness to explore consciousness, and a fascinating dance takes place between the mind doing the exploring and the larger mind being explored.
All psychedelic disclosure is interactive. Everything we see and learn in these visionary states is shaped in subtle ways by what we are at the moment of contact. This does not mean that the visions we experience are merely projections of our personal psyche, as though we were not experiencing something that truly exists in the cosmos. Rather, it means that all visionary encounter is participatory. Our being evokes the portion of the universe we experience in these states, and the more conditioning we have let go of when this communion takes place, the more open-ended and far-reaching are the experiences that present themselves.*15
As I have experienced it, consciousness is an infinite ocean of experiential possibilities. When we take these amplifying medicines, the mind we drop into this ocean acts as a seed crystal that catalyzes a certain set of experiences from its infinite potential. As we are gradually healed, purified, and transformed by these encounters, the seed crystal of our mind is changed. In subsequent sessions, it catalyzes still deeper experiences from this ocean. If we repeat this process many times in a sustained fashion, a sequence of initiations into successively deeper levels of consciousness takes place, and a deepening visionary communion unfolds. Each segment of this communion tends to pick up where the previous segment stopped. Sometimes there is a very tight continuity between the sessions, sometimes it is broader, but it’s always there woven into the fabric of engagement.
In this context, I will mention that this may be one advantage of the long LSD time window compared with short-acting psychedelics like 5-MeO-DMT.†16 LSD does not blast you through the many layers of the cosmos as quickly as 5-MeO-DMT does, but the eight-hour LSD interface invites/propels/forces a polishing of the consciousness doing the exploring as it is impacted/instructed/healed by the consciousness being explored. An LSD session grinds slow but it grinds fine. It gives us time to be engaged and changed by the realities we are encountering. I think this polishing influences both the eventual clarity of our perception in these states and what we are able to bring back from them, both in terms of healing and understanding.*17
Platforms of Experience
The story I am telling in this book, therefore, is a story of entering progressively deeper states of consciousness and through these states experiencing progressively deeper levels of reality. Because the universe is holographically integrated, experiences of great depth may open at any point along the way, so I don’t want to make a gospel of linear progression. Many variables influence what emerges in a person’s sessions on any given day.†18 That said, it was my experience that by standardizing as many of these variables as possible, the universe by and large revealed itself in stages. Each of these stages had its distinctive characteristics and dynamics. I think of them as different platforms of experience. On my journey, I was systematically moved from one platform of experience to another over many years.
I don’t think that the order in which these platforms emerged in my sessions necessarily reflects a universal, cross-cultural norm. In addition to the individual variability already mentioned, there are different sequences of initiation presented in different spiritual traditions around the world and a considerable variance of opinion on what is regarded as the deeper and deepest levels of reality. In this book, I am simply marking the stages in how the universe took me in without suggesting that these are normative for other people in other settings. I also know that I did not explore these platforms in their entirety. There is so much I didn’t see on my journey that others have seen. In the end, I think I drilled a deep “bore hole” in the universe, penetrating many of its levels but certainly not experiencing the complete territory associated with any of them.
I will follow Stan Grof in describing these platforms of experience as the psychic, subtle, and causal levels of consciousness. Ken Wilber first used these terms, together with non-duality, in The Atman Project (1980) to identify what he believed were the four stages of psycho-spiritual development. Drawing largely from Hindu and Buddhist sources, Wilber saw these four stages as evolutionary stepping-stones culminating in nondual spiritual realization.*19 While referencing Wilber’s model, Grof does not use these terms to classify stages of spiritual development but rather to distinguish different states of consciousness that emerge in psychedelic and Holotropic Breathwork sessions. That is, his description is phenomenological rather than hierarchical. In this context, he distinguishes low and high psychic, subtle, and causal consciousness, giving examples of each drawn from his extensive archives.†20
Like Grof, I will use these terms to identify states of consciousness without endorsing a specific model of spiritual development. While my psychedelic experiences unfolded in this general order, there were many variations along the way. I will also use these terms for the different levels of reality one becomes aware of through these states. That is, I accept the premise that subtle states of consciousness reveal subtle levels of reality, causal states reveal causal levels, and so on. This is the great value of entering these states, that through them we gain access to deeper dimensions of existence.‡21
As one would expect in a participatory cosmology, each of us will experience these platforms of experience somewhat differently. Let me, therefore, share a few observations about what these terms mean to me personally as a starting point for the story that follows.
At the psychic level of transpersonal experience, consciousness expands beyond physical reality into nonphysical or spiritual reality, but our experience of this reality still tends to be constrained by conditioning that carries over from our space-time experience. Inside space-time, for example, we experience life to be composed of separate beings, and psychic level transpersonal experience tends to mirror this assumption. At this level of consciousness, we often experience ourselves as distinct spiritual beings in the company of other distinct beings. There is an “atomistic” quality to the experience, a “soul-centric” quality, and the soul we experience at this level tends to be the spiritual self of our present life, our “discarnate self,” as it is sometimes called.
At the subtle level of consciousness, the conditioning of physical reality is more deeply eclipsed and we begin to open to the deeper architecture of life. I’ve always thought that “subtle” was a strange name for this level of consciousness because there is really nothing subtle about it at all. Quite the opposite, in fact. At this level, we begin to be drawn into the larger realities and more fundamental structures that our individual lives are part of. Subtle reality is like the steel girders of a skyscraper; it is the deeper structure that supports the individual rooms of the finished building.
At the subtle level of consciousness, we may experience the collective consciousness of our species and other species or even the archetypal forces that create space-time and all it contains. At this level, the personal soul of our present life may open to the larger Soul of our reincarnating self—which is generally how I will use the term “Soul” in this book, often capitalizing it to mark this distinction. The subtle level of consciousness covers a wide range of phenomena, but what they all have in common is that they reflect the more fundamental building blocks of existence. One is still experiencing a world divided into parts, but the parts are larger and more basic than at the psychic level.
At the causal level of consciousness, the world of separate parts begins to yield to an experience of the universe moving as a single entity. There are many ways of experiencing this vast domain, but for me the signature of causal consciousness is Oneness. Intimations of Oneness show up in lower levels of consciousness as well, for it is a primary truth with many variations, but there is something distinctive about the experience of Oneness at the causal level, where it ripens into a vivid experience of ontological transparency and all-encompassing wholeness. There is no reference point outside this Oneness from which to get a perspective on it, as it is the whole of existence. Here, as Plotinus succinctly put it, “Everything breathes together.” Or as Sri Aurobindo described it, “In this vision of things the universe will reveal itself in its unity and totality as a manifestation of a single Being, Nature as its power of manifestation, evolution as its process of gradual self-revelation in matter.”*22
The second feature of causal reality that stands out for me is Light. Light may enter at the subtle level of consciousness, but it becomes more potent at the causal level. As the experience of Oneness becomes more refined at deeper causal levels, the experience of Light also becomes more refined. If the lower causal realm is the domain of the one God, the higher causal realm is for me the domain of Diamond Luminosity. Sometimes it feels that the domain of Diamond Luminosity may even lie beyond causal reality, but I won’t press this point.
In the end, all these categories are only labels of approximation and convenience. One may divide the spectrum of spiritual reality in many ways, and I do not have a vested interest in championing one cosmological map over another. Indeed, it would be foolish to think we could do justice to the vast expanse of spiritual reality by using just three or six categories. These are simply broad divisions that I will use to frame some of the transitions in my journey.
Calling Down Heaven
The visionary story I am telling in this book is not a story of escape into transcendence but one of deepening sacred presence on Earth. This may not be apparent in the early and middle stages of the story, but it will become clear by its end. I mention this because the classical religions of the Axial Age*23 are at their core teachings of ascent, and this archetype runs deep in our culture. Both Western and Asian religions affirm stories of an “up-and-out” salvation that place the final goal of life in some off-planet spiritual paradise, be it the Christian Heaven, the Islamic Garden, or the Buddhist Pure Land. Even the Buddhist Bodhisattvas who pledge to keep returning to Earth to liberate all sentient beings are trying to liberate them into parinirvana, “final enlightenment” or enlightenment without a body.
I think that Sri Aurobindo was correct when he said that these cosmologies reflect an incomplete understanding of existence. They reflect the deepening of humanity’s contact with the spiritual universe that took place about three to four thousand years ago. Once we began to gain experiential access to the bliss of this mother universe through meditation, yoga, and psychedelic substances, how could we not but conclude that we “belonged” there more than here, that Earth was not our “true home,” and that we had “fallen” from paradise through some kind of cosmic blunder? Our enthusiasm for these theologies of return is understandable given their historical context, but in the context of the dramatically expanded understanding of the universe emerging in science combined with our deepening psychedelic experience, we are beginning to see that these theologies reflect an incomplete model of the cosmos.
The reality of a spiritual universe surrounding our physical universe is a great truth, but it is only half a truth. The other half is the long evolutionary gestation of the physical universe inside this spiritual universe and the progressive infusion of the mother universe into the daughter universe over a vast time frame. The Creative Intelligence that gave birth to space-time and to everything in space-time thinks in terms of magnitudes that dwarf our horizons. We are waking up inside a garden that has been in the making for billions of years with billions more still to come. From this perspective, the purpose of spiritual awakening appears to be not escaping from physical existence, as these early religions proposed, but awakening ever more completely inside physical existence and participating in its continuing self-emergence through our awakening. If this feels initially disappointing, it may be that we are underestimating what the fruition of the divine project on this planet might look like.
The in-taking of sacred awareness and the activation and stabilization of our innate capacities is the long and patient work of reincarnation, and I believe it is the long work of psychedelic practice as well, at least after the early excitement of discovery passes. In our later sessions, we are no longer running to explore a universe “out there,” but rather are “calling down heaven,” pulling higher states of awareness into our physical being, alchemically mixing heaven and earth in the vessel of our human body. When nirvana (enlightenment) and samsara (cyclic existence) are truly one, when full transparency lives in the sea of perpetual change, then heaven is realized on earth and there is no felt need to go elsewhere.
The Suffering of Death and Rebirth
Let me bring this chapter to a close by addressing a final important issue. The single largest concern I have about sharing my visionary journey with others is that people may be frightened by the large amount of suffering it contains. I am concerned that they will either judge the psychedelic method harshly or become fearful of the unseen universe. Both of these are the last things I want to happen. In order to avoid this, I have considered blunting the pain and diluting its role in the plot, but this would be dishonest. I may make mistakes in telling this story, but I pledge to give an honest account of what took place in my sessions. It is important, therefore, that we understand the role that suffering plays in the psychedelic process, and specifically the suffering of death and rebirth. It’s also important that I own the fact that some of this suffering came from my personal decision to push myself as hard as I did.
Let me begin by saying that I am deeply and forever grateful to have taken this journey. I would not trade these seventy-three days for any treasure on Earth. I count them as the most important days of my life. The pain I encountered in them was paid willingly, and I was more than amply compensated by the blessings that followed.
Our natural instinct is to avoid pain. We pull our hand away from the fire, instinctively withdrawing from what harms us, and this is good. But in the context of a psychedelic session, pain is something we learn to embrace. It is part of a purification process, and therefore pain becomes our ally in the work. One learns to reverse one’s instinct to avoid suffering and to open to it instead, not because we like to suffer but because of what lies on the other side of suffering. Padrinho Sebastiao, one of the founders of the Santo Daime religion, expressed it well when he said, “Look, suffering is the best thing that exists to cleanse oneself. We suffer, but when we come out on the other side we say, Thank God! . . . Like that old woman in the last works—the more she suffered, the more she gave thanks for the beauty.”*24
Confronting our personal shadow is always challenging work, but to understand the deeper suffering that emerges on this journey, we must understand the role that death and rebirth play in an extended psychedelic practice. The experience of dying and being reborn is one of the central dynamics of therapeutically focused psychedelic work. Death is simply the price one is asked to pay to gain access to the myriad worlds that lie beyond the body-mind ego, death not as a metaphor or symbolic enactment but the agonizing loss of everything we know to be real and true, the spasm of our last breath, the terrifying surrender. Death comes in many shapes and sizes. It may steal in softly, melting our resistance slowly, or break through the door violently with drums pounding. Either way, if we want to experience the deeper currents of the cosmos, sooner or later death calls to us.
But why is this so? Why must we psychologically die and surrender everything we know in order to gain access to these deeper levels of reality? It comes down to a simple principle. As we are now, we are too small to engage these vast dimensions of existence. Our capacity for cosmic experience is constrained by our conditioning inside space-time.
In deep psychedelic work, one learns by becoming. This is especially true when working with high doses of a powerful psychedelic like LSD. We cannot transport the egoic self into these depths where it can then “have an experience” of how the world works there. In order to know the universe at these levels, we must become a citizen of these levels. We must become the levels themselves. To do this, our smaller sense of self must cease to be the container of our experience. It must die. Giving up everything is simply the price of inheriting everything else.
Because the universe is infinitely deep with many layers, one faces many deaths on this journey. Ego-death is only the first. Death and rebirth is a cycle that repeats itself multiple times because the universe tends to yield its treasures in layers. The death of the egoic self is followed by other deaths at deeper levels, harder to describe because the terrain is less familiar but no less demanding to undergo.
As I mentioned earlier, there is an energetic aspect to this cycle of initiation. In my experience, each step deeper into our multidimensional universe is a step into a more intense field of energy. Deeper states of consciousness are higher states of energy. This is an unmistakable sensation and a widely recognized principle in spiritual traditions. One may have glancing contact with deep levels of reality without this becoming apparent, but to have stable experience of a given level of reality, one must acclimate to its energy. Just as when climbing a mountain we must acclimate to the atmospheric conditions of higher elevations, here we must acclimate to the energetic conditions of deeper levels of reality. In mountain climbing, we are adjusting to less oxygen; in psychedelic work, we are adjusting to more energy, and this activates intense purification processes.
It took me many years to understand this spiral of purification and initiation. The phenomena that I will describe in this book fit coherently within this model, and few make sense without it. The spiral of death and rebirth is the combustion cycle that drives the work forward.
So why, then, is there so much suffering in this story? It’s not that the universe wants us to suffer as the price of knowing her; it’s that there is a certain suffering inherent in repeatedly shedding our psychological skin in order to enter more deeply into the universe.
But there is also a second variable at work here, and that is the speed with which we tear these skins away, how impatient we are to know the universe at these depths. If we choose a form of transformational practice in which our conditioning is released slowly, the result is a series of smaller initiations spread over a longer period of time, perhaps even many lifetimes. By contrast, working with a psychedelic like LSD is an example of a transformational practice that triggers an accelerated purification process that gives us quicker access to these realities, but there is a price to be paid for this quicker access. The price is the intensification of the death-rebirth process.
If I pushed the psychedelic method harder than was sometimes wise and suffered extra for it, this was not the universe’s fault nor the method’s fault, only my own fault. Once I discovered that I could enter heaven by embracing hell, embracing hell became a core practice in the work. All the more so when I found my way to the heaven of heavens where the diamonds are kept. No hell is too terrible to endure if it opens the door to this paradise.
And yet, as I write this last sentence, something in me pulls back. This may have been my truth, but as I begin to share the story of my journey, I find that I can’t wish anyone to undergo some of the trials I went through on it. If there were no other way to reach paradise, that would be one thing, but there are other ways, slower ways, and therefore I counsel a gentler entrance into the Great Expanse. I recognize better now that the protocol I adopted represents an extreme form of the sacred medicine path. The story that follows, therefore, is not representative of what happens on this path in gentler hands. We do not need to undergo such extreme ordeals to come to our spiritual senses.
Fortunately, I have survived the enthusiasms of my youth and have come through this journey intact. If I pushed myself harder than was sometimes wise, I was also given a great deal of help along the way by a universe that seemed to take delight in being known this deeply by one of her children. Indeed, our hours together seemed as precious to it as they were to me. This is the story that I would like to share with you now.