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August 21 - September 9, 2018
The soul should always stand ajar. —EMILY DICKINSON
What is striking about this whole line of clinical research is the premise that it is not the pharmacological effect of the drug itself but the kind of mental experience it occasions—involving the temporary dissolution of one’s ego—that may be the key to changing one’s mind.
I had pretty much closed my accounts with reality.
(One theory of the Salem witch trials blames ergot poisoning for the behavior of the women accused.)
“Mysticism,” he likes to say, “is the antidote to fundamentalism.”
“A closeted gay kid might be afraid of what might come out if he let his guard down.”
“There is so much authority that comes out of the primary mystical experience that it can be threatening to existing hierarchical structures.”
The mystical journey seems to offer a graduate education in the obvious. Yet people come out of the experience understanding these platitudes in a new way; what was merely known is now felt, takes on the authority of a deeply rooted conviction. And, more often than not, that conviction concerns the supreme importance of love.
“Trust, Letting go, Openness, and Being
Science can bring you to the big bang, but it can’t take you beyond it. You need a different kind of apparatus to peer into that.”
“The true method of knowledge is experiment.”
What to my (spiritually impoverished) mind seemed to constitute a good case for the disenchantment of the world becomes in the minds of the more psychedelically experienced irrefutable proof of its fundamental enchantment.
The headline is the first known reference to “magic mushrooms,” a phrase that, it turns out, was coined not by a stoned hippie but by a Time-Life headline writer.
Open-minded. And bemushroomed. That was me, now, ready to reopen my own accounts with reality.
Few members of AA realize that the whole idea of a spiritual awakening leading one to surrender to a “higher power”—a cornerstone of Alcoholics Anonymous—can be traced to a psychedelic drug trip.
“It was without question the most extraordinary and significant experience this side of the Beatific Vision,” Huxley wrote in a letter to his editor
To fathom Hell or go angelic Just take a pinch of psychedelic.
“turn on, tune in, drop out.”
it seemed to me, was the recognition that these powerful, anarchic medicines can and have been misused and that if they are to do more good than harm, they require a cultural vessel of some kind: protocols, rules, and rituals that together form a kind of Apollonian counterweight to contain and channel their sheer Dionysian force. Modern medicine, with its controlled trials and white-coated clinicians and DSM diagnoses, offers one such container; the underground guides offer another.
Platitudes that wouldn’t seem out of place on a Hallmark card glow with the force of revealed truth.
A psychedelic is liable to take all the boxes off the shelf, open and remove even the most familiar items, turning them over and imaginatively scrubbing them until they shine once again with the light of first sight.
I decided I needed to practice being with stillness, being with other people as I find them (imperfect), and being with my own unimproved self.
To savor whatever is at this very moment, without trying to change it or even describe it.
just be with it.
“I hope whatever you’re doing, / you’re stopping now and then / and / not doing it at all.”)
tryptamines.
The grip of an overbearing ego can enforce a rigidity in our thinking that is psychologically destructive. It may be socially and politically destructive too, in that it closes the mind to information and alternative points of view.
“The short summary is, babies and children are basically tripping all the time.”
LSD had been used successfully to treat alcoholics in the 1950s and 1960s.
“applied mysticism.”
trust, let go, and be open”
“relax and float downstream”),
Antidepressants helped for a while, but “putting the plaster over the wound doesn’t heal anything.”
He quotes an expert on anxiety who suggests we should think of the two disorders as “fraternal twins”: “Depression is a response to past loss, and anxiety is a response to future loss.” Both reflect a mind mired in rumination, one dwelling on the past, the other worrying about the future. What mainly distinguishes the two disorders is their tense.
The usual antonym for the word “spiritual” is “material.” That at least is what I believed when I began this inquiry—that the whole issue with spirituality turned on a question of metaphysics. Now I’m inclined to think a much better and certainly more useful antonym for “spiritual” might be “egotistical.”
“The psychedelic journey may not give you what you want,” as more than one guide memorably warned me, “but it will give you what you need.” I guess that’s been true for me. It might have been nothing like the one I signed up for, but I can see now that the journey has been a spiritual education after all.
For crucial research assistance along the way, as well as their indispensable online library, I’m deeply grateful to Earth and Fire, the proprietors of Erowid, which is the single most important resource on psychedelics there is. Check it out.
