“The soul is not the witness of an external event but the medium in which the event takes place.”

—Henri Corbin

*

There is a feeling blacker than black, an emptiness into which anything, everything, can disappear. Those who know it know that it can be so powerful that it becomes more than a feeling. It becomes a lens. A manner of moving through time in which the future no longer makes any difference: there is simply no event novel enough, no perspective wide enough, no feeling bright enough to ever overcome it. Just as galaxies swirl around the dark hungry worms at their center, experience itself orbits this hole.

*

Deep space. I travel on an interstellar cruiser with the last remnant of humanity, searching for a new home. Thousands of years have passed since some nameless disaster destroyed earth, and now, having sailed through galaxies upon galaxies, having reached the last outermost stars, we push past the edge of the universe and into the boundless black.

But something is there.

Far below our ship, lit by an inner, pale-blue light, there hovers a nebula-sized wolf’s head.

We are so startled that for a decisive moment, no one knows what to do. Then we come to our senses. The wolf’s head is malicious, and it has noticed us. I have a horrible feeling that already it may be too late. As it turns its snout to our ship, we drop a bomb—a powerful nuclear weapon, released like a depth charge. It strikes the wolf’s face and explodes, and we slip away.

Now the dream skips forward. We have arrived at the paradise we’ve been seeking, a glorious planet of green fields and pink skies. It has been a long time since our voyage through the void, so many years that I hardly think of it anymore. I’m standing in a river. Tall alien trees line the banks, shading the wooden hut where I now live. All around I see endless varieties of plants, red fruit hanging from branches, and strange airborne jellyfish whose translucent bodies refract the clear dusk light. It is extraordinary to be here, and a profound gratitude stirs in me, but it’s not new, it’s familiar gratitude, something I’ve felt since we found, against all odds, this new home.

In the middle of this reverie, I notice a figure far off on the horizon and an uneasy feeling comes over me. It hobbles in my direction, moving slowly at first, then swiftly. A moment later it has arrived at the river. It isn’t human, and though it is hunched, it still towers over me, intense and full of import.

It points a finger at me and stares.

And suddenly we are back. Our interstellar ship is hovering over the blue wolf’s head like a worm on a hook.

I understand, then, that the wolf has been toying with us. It let us go, let us find our paradise, only so it could reel us back through time, fattened now on hope and happiness, to once again dangle us over its vast maw.

The realization catches like a gob of frozen horror in my throat.

It can do this.

Once you’ve seen it, even once, it’s over. There is no victory. Whatever you thought was yours, whatever bliss you know, whatever peace, the fruits of long-suffering and patience, yes, all love, all joy, even heaven itself—

horror, horror—

it can all just be undone.

*

I had this dream in my late teens, a time when I was just beginning to navigate what would become a lifelong chronic illness. Gasterintestinal chaos, essentially. Sudden and inexplicable stomach pain, gas, diarrhea. At an age when you most want to be free to cruise streets in your pal’s car, sneak into the movie theatres and smoke joints and race shopping carts behind the mall, I was spending a couple evenings a week locked in a loop between my bedroom and the bathroom.

Months, years this went on, while a potent brew of dread and loneliness fermented inside me. I hid it from my friends. I hid it even from my parents.

Then, one summer, at a house party, I drank half a glass of rum and coke. Just half a glass. That night I was up at two in the morning, vomiting until I had nothing left. After that, the diarrhea began. Three days it lasted. My summer job at the time involved supervising kids at a playground, and that next day in particular was a day of big responsibility, as kids from all the parks around the city were gathering to play wide games. I can still recall the feeling of shame as every ten minutes I crept away to use the outhouse. The temperature had climbed above 30°C (over 90°F) and the kids were energized on Freezies and Bradburian end-of-summer angst. I listened to their shrieks and laughter while I sat on the toilet, rapidly dehydrating in the heat.

Later, in the emergency room, the doctor told me to think of my gut as “a policeman telling me to respect the law.” He gave some bad dietary advice and sent me away.

Thus began a journey into wellness which lasted years. I did parasite cleanses, adhered to the Low Fodmap Diet, got a colonoscopy, sent in endless stool samples. Once, I nearly dropped out of university. I could go on. But this isn’t the story of that time, or my illness. Something else was happening.

I was becoming acquainted with a new dimension of reality.

“Narrative wreckage” is the term sociologist Arthur Frank uses to describe how chronic illness destroys a person’s expected life trajectory. I think it is a very good term. It’s not just your health that’s ruined; it’s your sense of yourself. It’s your whole future. While my body seemed to fall apart, taking with it my identity, my dreams, even the moment-to-moment stability of my moods, I was also confronting the fact that such a thing even happens in this world. It’s not something everyone at that age knows, not in their bones. Teenagers are invincible, right? But I knew now that reality is a place where things can just break down. Where what is good can, inexplicably, become bad.

I knew that doom exists.

It’s just there, outside everything and ready to strike at any moment, like a wolf.

*

The dream of the Blue Wolf was the first time I experienced the feeling with such crystalline purity, but it was not the last time. It has returned throughout my life. No matter that for many years now I have been mostly “well” after years of detox and finding a diet that works for me: there have been afternoons when suddenly it’s as though I am again hovering in the void. It’s there when I listen to Thom Yorke’s “Dawn Chorus.” Sometimes it’s there when my bladder wakes me up at 4:00 AM. I sit on the toilet and feel the acuteness of my solitude, a solitude that during the day is a cheerfully operational bubble of separation, but now, upon the night’s empty stage, has become ugly and inert, situated like a bog corpse in the thick vapid jelly of reality’s basic substrate. I know with frightful clarity I’m going to die one day, and I slip back into bed covered in the residue of doom.

That’s the thing about this despair: it doesn’t actually have to do with illness. Not really.

It may be triggered by circumstances, but it isn’t explained by them.

When my illness was at its worst, I thought that if I could just get well, that if my body could only just digest the proper nutrients and shuttle them to my brain, the despair would disappear. To some extent this was true—detoxifying and re-nourishing my body resulted in greater mental clarity, more energy, and a generally improved mood. But that is not the same thing as being outside despair.

Conversely, some people suffer far worse illness and yet are not visited by the Blue Wolf. They shine with an inner light. Rowan Williams, for example, writes of a priest in Paris who might be called a minor saint: he was “in many ways a very complex character, a very depressive person who had a series of breakdowns, who had suffered physically a great deal, and spent a lot of his time lying on a couch in a darkened room with a cloth over his eyes because of migraines. But when you spend ten minutes with him, you went away feeling wonderful.”1

No, the feeling that is blacker than black is not explained, or even “caused,” by bad things.

It is the bad thing.

It isn’t a mood, though it may manifest as a mood. It isn’t illness, though it may be triggered by illness. It is, rather, a self-existent, self-reinforcing phenomenon. It is a reality-structuring principle.

*

What is a reality-structuring principle? Let me explain by telling the brief story of my mind.

My intellect came online in late high school. I began reading in order to understand the world, starting with Betrand Russel’s History of Western Philosophy. From that time on, I was a seeker in quest of a functioning model of reality. Topics like the “structure of the self” and books like Kierkegaard’s Repetition: A Venture in Experimental Psychology and Paul Tillich’s The Courage to Be interested me above everything. I didn’t just want facts, I didn’t just want to “know things.” I wanted to know the thing that would change everything. I wanted the paradigm within which facts would also make sense. I wanted orientation. I wanted to know where the hell I was.

Not where on the map, obviously. There were more important axes of orientation than the four cardinal directions.

Eventually, in all my reading and thinking, I began to understand that my search was itself impacting the object of my search; that is, my model of reality influenced the kind of reality I lived in. “Be careful how you interpret the world,” says literary theorist Erich Heller. “It really is like that.” This quote became the koan of my mid-twenties. It was the first “model” of reality that accounted for the way that models of reality act upon reality itself.

Versions of this insight are all over the place, now that I have eyes to see them. In a dharma talk at the Brooklyn Zen Center, Kosen Gregory Snyder once declared that “the world has no shape.” Reality is formless until we give it form. “Everybody sees the world through the idea he has of himself,” says Sri Nisargadatta. “We don’t see the world as it is,” writes Anaïs Nin famously, “we see the world as we are.” Or as William Blake put it most succinctly: “As a man is, so he sees.”

It’s all the same insight: we don’t live inside reality; we live inside our ideas of reality.

The fantasies, myths, and interpretations that we bring to bear on reality are, then, of utmost importance. For they become real.

They are reality-structuring principles.

*

Back to my despair. It took me years to see through it as a fantasy. Then, in March, 2025, I ate ten grams of psilocybin mushrooms.

This was more than I’d ever taken, but I was working with someone very skilled who I trusted deeply. Before the journey, I asked my guide what I might expect with this amount, which he had called a potentially “life-changing” dose. “Well,” he said, “time can feel… long. People can get stuck in loops, circling round and round the same idea, the same moment. In such cases, there’s nothing to do but wait it out.”

The idea of being trapped in a loop sent a ping of fear down my spine.

And then… it happened.

After eating the “Bluey Vuittons,” I lay back on the mat and welcomed the spirit of the Niños Santos into me. Already I was feeling them. I can describe no precise sequence of events after this, nor any particular visuals, and yet I do remember the impression, exciting and dreadful, that something immense and irrevocable had been set into motion.

Something that wasn’t “me,” something more like experience itself, began to move through a kind of pressurized, kairotic, hyperreal yet symbolic temporality.

For lack of a better word, I’ll call it eternity.

Eternity consisted of an unending oscillation between joy and despair. It had a kind of internal emotional logic, this oscillation: it was like a computer program, a simple line of code that, once executed, unfolded itself into a rich, auto-propelled phenomenology within a virtual space. It started with a dim awareness that something was wrong. This awareness grew into a distinct sense that I (whatever “I” meant in this state) was on the dark underside of reality, excluded from all things bright and beautiful. I was locked out of the whole community of Being that I dimly intuited existed somewhere outside me. Then, through that intuition, something began to shift. The loneliness and despair awakened into longing. This longing, in turn, acted as an attractor that brought the longed-for goodness nearer, until it was near enough that I could, at last, enter it. And then—joy! The white heat of ecstasy! A heartbreakingly magnificent, open space that allowed everything. It allowed even despair.

And so the dark flower bloomed again, right at the center of being.

That was the basic cycle, at least. The two moods moved in and out of each other in ever new and surprising ways, but the gist was that no matter how much joy and light existed, it was always going to be possible to despair, and no matter how black the blackness got, light could always enter. Both modes had a kind of internal consistency. Both “argued” for themselves with perfect coherence. On and on it went, the back and forth never resolving, until an hour later eternity was over, and I sat up from the mat.

*

The days that followed were an anguished inquiry. By this point in my explorations, I knew, at least intellectually, that the visions psychedelics afford are often best described as an outward projection of my inner being. They hold a funhouse mirror to my psyche. Yet it’s one thing to know with the mind, another to know with the heart.

Was this vision of eternity really only a projection of some maladapted belief? It felt true.

Sitting by Blue Heron Lake in Golden Gate Park, I wrote:

A deep part of me believes it has figured how eternity is going to play out. There’s a back and forth between acceptance and rejection, forever: a universal seesaw between despair and joy. Existence must grow tired of itself, then the light must win it back around... It’s a vision as deep, raw, and metaphysical as those I had on iboga. I seem to come up with these horrible cosmic visions on psychedelics, like a child who can’t fathom how eternity could be good.

“There’s a part of me that doesn’t want to exist,” I said to [my guide] towards the end of the journey.

“That makes sense,” he replied. “If it’s found existence hard, it wouldn’t want to exist.”

Is this wounded part responsible, then, for the dark cosmology playing out in my soul? Is there no actual, no objective, truth about eternity? Is everything just a mirror? Is it really all inside me? Is that really how it works?

I have been drawn throughout my life to dark metaphysical visions. The image of “the rind” described by Professor Weston in C. S. Lewis’ Perelandra. Castaneda’s awareness-devouring Eagle. John Gardner’s novel Grendel, Cărtărescu’s Solenoid. Kafka, Thomas Ligotti. What does it mean, then, that I am facing my own despair now? Did I not learn from these books? Did they sink too deep into my soul? Or was I drawn to them because I already unconsciously carried this despair? Have I been infatuated by such visions because they are actually familiar? Do I not actually want to change, to give up the infatuation?

I am confronting a core fantasy of mine. A dark fantasy: “It can all just be undone.”

And this right here is the breakthrough.

Ken Wilbur defines maturation as the process whereby a worldview becomes an object.2 Now you are able to look at a “truth,” in which you were once blindly operating, as but one perspective. By the same token, Sri Nisargadatta says, “Externalisation is the first step to liberation.”

By confronting the fantasy as such, by meeting the despair as a projection, I was getting outside of it. It was becoming an object of my psyche.

*

Fantasy, reality-structuring principle, object of the psyche—these words are fine. But I like best the term philosopher Gaston Bachelor and psychotherapist James Hillman both use: “image.”

Images, in this context, are not static mental pictures. They are autonomous and alive. They are generative of visuals, concepts, and feelings, but they are not themselves visuals, concepts, or feelings. It would not even be accurate to say they are “inside” or “outside” you, for they are what structure our experience of the inside and the outside. They structure the psyche.

Indeed, Hillman says, “image is psyche.”

What I have been writing about—the feeling that is blacker than black, the Blue Wolf, despair—is an image. This image may be related to or triggered by extrinsic factors like brain chemistry or “the state of the world,” but it does not come from these things. It does not originate from news cycles or serotonin crashes. It does not even originate from “trauma.” An image “is not an echo of the past,” writes Bachelard. “On the contrary: through the brilliance of an image, the distant past resounds with echoes.”3

For James Hillman, then, the healing that work with images affords is not accessed by decoding them. It is had not through treating images as a message from some deeper or more elementary reality. The site of meaning is not elsewhere; it is the image itself: “Fantasy-images are both the raw materials and finished products of psyche, and they are the privileged mode of access to knowledge of soul. Nothing is more primary.”4

The psychotherapeutic method, then, is just this: “stick to the image.”5

By staying with the image as image, we both de-literalize it (it is not real) and engage it on its own terms (it is real). And in so doing, we learn to “see through” it.6

Psychological learning or psychologizing seems to represent the soul’s desire for light, like the moth for the flame. The psyche wants to find itself by seeing through; even more, it loves to be enlightened by seeing through itself, as if the very act of seeing-through clarified and made the soul transparent.7

And what is the result of this process of “seeing through”? Of this whole saga with the Blue Wolf, the mushroom journey, these thoughts on images?

It’s there in that word, “transparent.”

Once, some time after I experienced the harrowing mushroom eternity, I tried to describe it to a friend. He asked me what I possibly gained by taking such a high dose and confronting such darkness. Trust, I said. A greater trust in myself, and in reality. And this trust, I think, comes from transparency: a transparency of the psyche to itself, a transparency of reality to itself.

*

Another image came to me, back when I was first toying with the idea of writing about despair. At the time I wasn’t sure I had anything to say, really, beyond describing a few intense encounters with the phenomenon throughout my life. The despair was not conquered. I knew this, but the fact had been brought home to me anyway the night before, when I took an edible and became extremely nauseous. Edibles usually make me feel giddy and creative, but not this time. I just wanted it to end. I had the sense of flapping like a ragged tissue at the edge of some abyss, an abyss that was both deeply alien and intimately familiar, as though I had been here before, and would be here again, and all my yearning to escape was not only nothing new to it but had been accounted for in advance, indeed it was the very thing the abyss wanted most, its sweetest nourishment.

But the next day, as I said, an image came to me. I was reading at my desk when suddenly, in my mind’s eye, I saw an old woman. I knew intuitively that this was not really an old woman but a power whose maternal presence made me see it as an old woman. It reminded me, when I thought about it later, of blind Aunt Beast in A Wrinkle in Time.

The woman, or the maternal power, has her back to me. She wears a simple cloak of a rough, dark cloth. She is tending something like a hearth fire, but it is not a fire, not really. And nestled in the ashes of the fire is a kind of globe. This globe is my despair. The feeling-state, or fantasy-image, that came to me in the dream of the Blue Wolf, and in my mushroom journey—she has it, she is caring for it.

She is caring for my despair.

The image seems, in an instant, to solve everything.

This happened one afternoon months ago. At that time, I had the impulse to write it down, for the feeling it gave me was one of serene completeness, a resting in something bigger than consolation. But I resisted making too much of it. Some part of me, I think, wanted to see if the image would stick, if it would keep feeling important. I suppose I had a prejudice, too, that “special images” could come only in “special” states of consciousness. I had received the image in status-quo consciousness, so could it really be worth noting?

But it did stick. I thought of it again and again throughout the week, and the sense of consolation endured. So I wrote it down in my journal. And now I’m writing about it here.

*

In my early thirties, I smoked DMT for the first time. I had been hunting this drug for years, not proactively but in that passive, synchronicity-inviting way appropriate to a proper drug search. When at last I acquired the crumbly yellow freebase, I felt like a kid who couldn’t wait to open a Christmas present: in my room that evening—who cared that my roommates were all home, chatting in the kitchen—I scooped a tiny heap of the molecule atop my glass vaporizing pipe and positioned myself cross-legged on my bed.

I knew I was being hasty. Psychedelics are always better with preparation and intention. But it was just a teeny little hit. Teeny weeny.

Tao Lin observes how people describe the DMT breakthrough as “‘zooming through a tunnel’ or ‘being shot out of a cannon.’” They’re missing, he says, what’s truly strange about it. “What feels so incredible is that the ‘tunnel’ has no physical direction.”1

Yes.

As I held the vapor in my lungs, something novel happened. I found myself traveling, not spatially, but through another plane entirely, one that manifested as an intensification of being. I was moving in another direction.

*

In the three dimensions of space, we can move laterally, vertically, and longitudinally.

In the fourth dimension of time, we move forward.

In the fifth dimension, we move… into.

The depth dimension might also be called the dimension of presence, or beingness. It is nonspatial and nontemporal; this “into” is a metaphor the same way that moving “forward” in time is a metaphor. But we cannot talk about depth, we cannot imagine it, apart from borrowed images.

In itself, what is it?

*

In the year 1415, the artist Filippo Brunelleschi re-discovered “linear perspective”: a method by which two-dimensional images could be made to have three-dimensionality. The painting is still flat, but by an arrangement of converging lines this flatness opens, in a very real way, onto a direction that isn’t physically there.

*

The first time I tried to describe the depth dimension, I was writing to a depressed friend. This was many years ago. After offering some comforting words, no doubt gauche, I came to this:

There seem to be two axes along which our lives develop, the vertical and the horizontal. The horizontal axis of growth is the visible, public axis: the career, the relationships, the education, the linear accumulation of wealth, power, status.

The axis I find myself more interested in, and the one that seems to pay the most long-term dividends, is not the horizontal.

The vertical axis is private: it’s your inner life, the richness of your experiences, your pain, your longings. It’s the intensity with which you live these things within yourself. You could call it the depth dimension. It’s what inherently has no outward face.

*

The second time I tried to talk about the depth dimension was on ketamine.

It was a Friday night, and my friend and I were listening to an ambient playlist and shooting the shit. I was quite high. At one point, as I considered how similar my friend and I were—both writers, both tall white men, both laid-back but intellectual—I realized I’d lost the difference between us. Which one was I, J or Patrick? I startled giggling. Did it matter?

When were were coming down, my friend remarked on how he was obsessed with a certain bright star he could see out the window. It seemed to mean something, without quite revealing what it meant.

I told him my notion then—what I’d begun to think of as the depth dimension of life. I experienced it most acutely in psychedelic states, which often carry the symbolic density of a dream: a single word can become a hinge-point in your life, a star in the sky can shine like the eye of God. We see with a mode of perception open to the true semantic potency of reality, to the infinite resonances of beingness itself.

*

But that wasn’t quite it. Neither what I wrote to my depressed friend, nor what I said to this other one, feels like it.

It’s a private thing, this depth dimension. Resistant to words. Sometimes I feel that all I want to do is point to it, again and again—but how? How do you point to the end of your finger with the end of your finger?

Austin Osman Spare said that you could shout the Secret from the rooftops and it would still remain secret.

*

Haruki Murakimi, a Japanese author whose fiction has become a global phenomenon, once resembled one of his novel’s protagonists: a simple, unassuming bar tender and jazz enthusiast without any particular ambitions. Then one day in 1978, while attending a baseball game, he saw the batter slam a pitch into left field and the notion simply came to him.

The satisfying crack when the bat met the ball resounded throughout Jingu Stadium. Scattered applause rose around me. In that instant, for no reason and on no grounds whatsoever, the thought suddenly struck me: I think I can write a novel.

I can still recall the exact sensation. It felt as if something had come fluttering down from the sky, and I had caught it cleanly in my hands. I had no idea why it had chanced to fall into my grasp. I didn’t know then, and I don’t know now... All I can say is that my life was drastically and permanently altered in that instant—when Dave Hilton belted that beautiful, ringing double at Jingu Stadium.2

Murakami started writing that same night.

*

The depth dimension can suddenly flash out at you with an intensity that no chain of events can predict or explain. It comes entirely from its own direction, offering, in place of explanation, its own measure of meaning, a sui generis causality outside of material cause and effect. On the outside, it can look incomprehensible. Conversely, events may have great significance on the public, horizontal axis, but this simply isn’t correlated with their significance of the axis of depth.

What happened in that moment the bat connected with the ball? Why do some moments mean more than others? The answer can only be legible at the level of the depth dimension. Depth cannot be accounted for; it accounts for itself.

*

Sometimes I read a poem and the infinite opens up.

Look at that! and that!

Is all I can say of the blossoms

At Yoshino Mountain

—Teishitsu

Sometimes I read a poem, even that same poem, and it’s just words.

*

The loss of contact with the depth dimension is a silent and invisible catastrophe.

In Technic and Magic, the author Federico Campagna chronicles the systematic obfuscation of depth in the last two-thousand years. He calls it a “crisis of reality.” We live inside the cosmology of Technic—a reality-structuring principle, a kind of archetype of archetypes. Under its rule, existence flattens into a system of operations. All phenomena are defined and categorized according to metrics of value and nothing is allowed to simply be. Not even individual subjectivity.

“We used to colonize land,” says Bo Burnham, paraphrasing Douglas Rushkoff. “Then they realized: human attention. They are now trying to colonize every minute of your life.”3

*

In undergrad, I had a philosophy professor I admired who once said, “I don’t want a happy life. I want a meaningful life.” This became my motto for years. Give me a meaningful life. Give me striving, give me purpose. But I think now that meaning isn’t it, either. Meaning is horribly cheap. It’s everywhere, hypertrophying like cancer, disposable like paper towel. And it’s weaponizable. It can be colonized.

What I want isn’t meaning. It’s intimacy. It’s intensity. It’s reality in its fullness.

I want to be in things. Truly in them.

Deep, deep inside.

*

Digging into the apple

with my thumbs.

Scraping out the clogged nails

and digging deeper.

Refusing the moon color.

Refusing the smell and memories.

Digging in with the sweet juice

running along my hands unpleasantly.

Refusing the sweetness.

Turning my hands to gouge out chunks.

Feeling the juice sticky

on my wrists. The skin itching.

Getting to the wooden part.

Getting to the seeds.

Going on.

Not taking anyone’s word for it.

Getting beyond the seeds.

—Jack Gilbert

*

If depth offers a “direction,” then how do we move into it? Is there really an “into?”

The first time I ever used psilocybin mushrooms ceremonially was with a white-bearded chain-smoking man I’d met a few weeks before in Brooklyn. We took the mushrooms in a motel on Long Island, at night, with flickering candles and yoga mats and eye masks.

Some ways into the journey, I became distracted by the sounds of the neighbors smoking and chatting outside our room. My companion came over and put a gentle hand on my chest. “Patrick,” he said, “close your eyes and go inside.” I tried. I closed my eyes and searched for my inside. But my attention kept moving to the people I loved, my parents and brothers, my friends. I was composed of a web of relationships that had no beginning or end. “Go inside,” he encouraged, “go inside.” But all I could do was laugh and cry out: “I have no inside!”

*

In Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard expounds on the power of “images”, which are both “outside” and “inside” us.

“Imaginative contact with the outer world,” he says, “renews our inner being. To imagine going down into the water or wandering in the desert is to change space; and to change space is to change being. To dream otherwise—even if it is for the moment of a reverie or poem—is to exist otherwise.”

Depth is not located “inside” you. Inward is not an escape from the outward. The farther you go, the more the private opens into the common—the archetypes, the aches.

Depth is convergence.

Depth is Brunelleschi’s lines.

*

Appropriate verbs for journeying into depth: slowing down, listening, growing intimate.

*

And how deep can we journey? “Infundibular” is the word John Crowley uses in Little, Big to describe a space that enlarges the further in you get. “Each perimeter of this series of concentricities encloses a larger world within, until, at the center point, it is infinite.”4

*

When I was eighteen, I worked at a care institution for adults with what we called “intellectual disabilities.” Sometimes we took the residents on tractor rides along the road that wrapped around the institution. In the heat of summer, amid the whir of insects and the hiss of the tall prairie grasses, it was always a dozy half-hour.

I still remember one ride in particular. I was driving, looking lazily around at the usual sights: the cracked concrete road, the wide field and stubby polar trees and colossal blue sky. And suddenly it hit me: all this, all of it, came from nothing. I had had this thought before, but the thought seemed to me in that moment incapable of ever growing old—and that was what astonished me. Wonder was inexhaustible. It had infinite depth.

A bird flew in front of me; the trees rattled their leaves. These things might grow old, but wonder itself did not.

*

When our anemic modern souls feel restless, depth is the direction they yearn to stretch into. When we sense there must be more than mere atoms bouncing against each other within an infinite Newtonian grid, this is the direction we direct our longings toward. It is the direction hidden everywhere and nowhere. Invisible and untouchable, it cannot be blocked or covered over. It is the secret way through the back tunnels of matter. If the divine is ever to approach us, this is the direction it will use.

When someone you love changes so radically that you no longer recognize them, that they are in some fundamental way no longer the same person—is this not a loss worse than death?

Such a thing happened to a friend of mine, Niles Doran. We were twenty years old then. Afterwards, I didn’t see Niles—no one did—for sixteen years. Then, by chance, we met in Chicago.

I was presenting at the thirtieth anniversary celebration of a certain occult press. I’m no LOOPH (Literalist Oglers of Occult Phenomena), but I accepted the invitation out of a sense of duty. The periodical, easily the most rigorous within the ecosystem of metaphysical magazines, had meant a great deal to me when I was young. Still, I began to regret my decision as soon as I stepped into the lobby. Guests stood in clusters discussing cryptozoology and the possible extraterrestrial origin of sasquatches. Oracle card readers abounded, without one true Rider-Waite deck in sight.

I found my reserved seat at the front of the auditorium. Beside me, a woman perused an article entitled, “Is Your Beloved Pet Trying to Reach You from the Other Side?”

Was I at the wrong event? The thought flashed with sudden plausibility, and my awareness ballooned outwards to take in a wobbly gestalt of the room.

That’s when my eyes met Greta Möller’s. I’d noticed her in the programme, of course. Two months ago, when I’d met her at the New York Public Library, I sensed a kindred soul, a person drawn to the supernatural even while repelled by the crust of kitsch that so often barnacled its surface.

Her purple lipstick widened in a slight, private smile.

Here we sit, the two of us, her eyes seemed to say, in this sea of hapless New Agers. Those eyes! So large that her slow blinks seemed to shutter half her face.

I felt my heart quicken, and I took out my cue cards for review.

*

My subject was the Angel of Unseeing, a little-known folk entity I’d chanced upon a few years ago in a German periodical. The author cited a work titled Urkunden zur Sage des Engel des Ausblendens (1898) that described a creature drawn to human longing and appearing, as a wild animal does at the edges of campfires in the night, to so-called cravers of infinity. Later I found another reference in a history of the Mandaeans, a Gnostic sect in the Middle East. From there I attempted a kind of phylogenetic history of the tradition, but I soon found this impossible; the sources were mostly unaware of each other, as though stories of the Angel came in and out of existence independently. This was not how proper folk entities behaved.

Still, each story fit the pattern. The Angel appeared to her visitants and showed them a vision. The “Glimpse,” as one account called it.

As to what was Glimpsed, the stories differed. A Gnostic source referred to the pleroma, the yearned-for totality of being. Another speculated about a fertile “proto-matter” which, existing chaotically before the distinction between material and immaterial, gave rise both to physical and spiritual substances. Another connected it to the Al-Malakut—the imaginal realm of Sufi metaphysicians, a place that lies outside both the senses and the intellect and requires its own sui generis mode of perception, implying that the Glimpse was delivered across another medium than the senses.

After offering the Glimpse, however, the Angel of Unseeing did something even more remarkable.

She presented a goblet. Like that of the river Lethe, or the Soup of Oblivion offered by Mother Meng in Chinese mythology, the drink ushered a total forgetting of the Glimpse. It was a chance to un-see. A chance to return to the way things had been.

That detail puzzled me. Who, on seeing the pleroma, the Al-Malakut, would choose to forget?

And yet, it was implied, some did. Many, even. Naturally the accounts of the Angel of Unseeing could not arise from these, for they had lost the memory of the encounter. But one report has the Angel saying, “Will you not drink, then, like all the others?” All the others. Is it possible, speculates a source from old Prussia, that everyone is given the Glimpse at some point in their life, and that, afterwards, nearly everyone takes the cup? The world filled with those who have forgotten?

*

The talk caused a satisfying stir. It’s always a gift, isn’t it, when an academic curiosity meets a crowd of credulous hearts. Towards the end, the hush of the auditorium gave my voice power, and in the alarming orange of the stage lights I seemed to have guided the room to the lip of a perilous mystery. One audience member even began to weep: a lugubrious and ungovernable sobbing. There were a few unhinged types among them, I’d noticed. Thankfully he was guided to the exit, where he turned and threw me a look from beneath thunderhead eyebrows that was full of terrible sorrow.

Afterward, Greta approached me in the lobby.

“A man was just telling me, Aldo, that he is so sensitive, he can actually feel the earth spin. Blindfold him and he’ll tell you if he’s moving along or obliquely to its axis. Do you think the APA would grant a fellowship to study him?”

I liked her cheeky familiarity—as though picking up a conversation we’d just left off. We ordered gin and tonics at the lobby bar. Without overdoing it, I congratulated her on her talk on the Global Consciousness Project. The group analyzed the output of Random Number Generators that produced sequences of zeroes and ones using quantum tunnelling. They’d found that, during national emotional crises like September Eleventh, these sequences took on unique distributions. The odds were one in a trillion that the effect was due to chance, but what did the mainstream research community do? Ignored it.

I expressed my exasperation. She put a hand on mine.

“Why do we do this, Aldo?” She cast a world-weary glance at the vendors selling wares—rose quartz crystals, Ouija boards, Tibetan chimes, teeth and bones of various cryptids.

I arched my brows.

“Oh, you know what I mean.”

I did. “It’s always possible someone has something right, even if for the wrong reasons. The broken clock and all that.”

Greta had moved closer to me, and I felt a flash of something conspiratorial between us.

Since my marriage had ended half a decade ago, I’d made an ascetic choice to set aside romance. A lucky investment in my late twenties—which funded my researches, and out of which my wife had taken a large shark bite in the settlement—had made me insular, self-contained, able to step aside from that whole weary game. In Greta’s presence, I suddenly sensed the brittleness of this choice.

I drew a line with my eyes down her Greek nose and across the dark lips. Her proximity made me daring.

“For me,” I said, “it comes down to this. Everyone is a fool, but the sceptics are the fools’ fool. It’s true that I haven’t seen irrefutable evidence for ghosts, fairies, extraterrestrials. No séance has convinced me I am speaking to the dead. But I remain open. When we enter the world as infants, when we are new to things, openness, total wide openness, is the only adequate response. It is the natural state of being. And when, Greta, do we ever really cease being new to the world?”

She raised her glass again, this time with a real smile.

“That I’ll drink to.”

Tipsy and exultant, I wondered then if I might venture something even more intimate. I kept a piece of paper in my breast pocket, cheesily, à la Pascal, on which I had a passage I’d found in the private letters of a mid-twentieth century occultist. His words had buoyed my researches through periods of discouragement.

Everything depends upon a quality of inner vigilance, the existence of which no one else will discern and no one will reward. You will be unable to speak of it, unable to describe its benefits or trace its consequences, and it will produce nothing of value outside yourself. Indeed, it may increase your capacity for suffering, even to the point where you crave to give up on the vigil. And you could. Ah, it would be the easiest thing in the world, and no one would know. Given enough time not even you would know. This is precisely the danger you must face. Stay awake.

I dipped a pair of fingers into my pocket and withdrew the paper. Before I could open it, however, I froze.

A man with a swampy beard and violent eyebrows stood before me. He wore a dark tie-waist topcoat, stained and whiskered with loose threads; his skin was tanned beyond health and his long inky hair tied back. He looked like he’d spent the last year outdoors.

This was the man who had wept during my talk. He was grinning now.

“Can I help you?” I said.

“Not in the least,” he said happily. His breath had a sour odor. I felt obliged to offer my hand, but he did not glance at it. Rather than take offense, I felt myself grow magnanimous.

I asked if he’d like to get a drink; it seemed obvious he could not afford one himself. He ignored my offer.

“So, you don’t remember me.” He adopted a facetious tone. “‘When our intellect is drawing close to its desire, its paths are so profound that memory cannot follow where it goes.’”

This was the first canto of Dante’s Paradiso, which I had quoted in my talk. I shot a look at Greta. Her face was a composed blank.

“Aldo, it’s me,” he said. “Niles Doran.”

Even then recognition was not instant. First the name took on familiarity, then the low, ox-like cheekbones that dragged the face downward. I felt as you sometimes feel in dreams, radically displaced and yet held by the hand. My gaze was guided past the beard and suntan, past sixteen years of aging, and into the eyes.

“My God, Niles,” I said. “You’re still—”

“Alive. And look at you, an academic. Is that what you are? You know, your hair is exactly the same.”

I spluttered something and reached out as though to touch his face, but realizing the strangeness of the gesture, I withdrew my hand immediately, and Greta shot me a curious glance. Through my stupefaction I remained aware that it was up to me to alleviate the strangeness of the situation.

“Greta,” I said, “this is a friend from long ago, Niles.”

Niles merely gave Greta a yellow-toothed grin before turning back to me. My grip on the situation loosened further. It was just as though he’d successfully pulled some ingenious prank, won some game of hide and seek sixteen years long.

“What are you doing here, of all places?” I said. Then, quickly, “Do your parents know? How long have you been back?”

“Three years. They’re gone. Car accident, long time ago.”

A silence passed. It seemed to me, on the alert as I was for signs of mental instability, that Niles’s answers were flippant. The enjoyment he clearly derived from the situation suggested a comic detachment.

Then I remembered his weeping in the auditorium.

When Niles suggested we find a dive bar and catch up, I looked to Greta for help. To my dismay, she touched my wrist and gave a weak smile.

“It’s alright, Aldo. Go ahead.”

I hesitated, glancing at Niles’s shoes, which were held together with duct tape. He noticed.

“You think I want something from you,” he said. “But maybe it’s the other way round. Maybe I want to give you something.”

“Give me something?”

Niles gave me a frank gaze then, different than before, and just like that I knew that I would leave with him.

The paper I had taken from my breast pocket, hoping to read to Greta, was still in my hand. She plucked it and wrote her number on the back. I understood then that the touch on the wrist she’d given me before, and the permission to go, had been politeness, something she’d hoped I would contradict.

Greta’s silver earrings shone through her dark hair as she spun away. I watched her a moment, then I spun too, and followed Niles. It was only then that I realized the apprehension I felt was, in fact, dread.

*

At age nineteen, with cool and total deliberateness, Niles had walked away from his life.

We were roommates that year, in Los Angeles. We’d become friends in the fourth grade and remained close through high school. I was the serious one, he was the goof. These were roles, of course: when it came down to it, Niles was as smart and studious as the next guy (like me, he got into UCLA on scholarship). But the roles came naturally. I encouraged him to keep a class schedule and get sleep, and he produced fat joints and announced spontaneous midweek desert hikes in the state parks north of the city.

Sometimes, Nile’s spontaneity organized into something more mischievous. Once, finding a box of old books on the curb, it occurred to him to plant these books around the library. Then, returning an hour later, he pretended to browse, and to take these books from the shelves—and then began to rip pages from them, startling the students nearby.

I didn’t always find this side of Niles amusing. On a visit to New York City, our subway train had gotten stuck on the Brooklyn Bridge. After half an hour trapped in a subway car full of restless bodies, he leaned over to me and said, “Do you think if I claimed that I was a diabetic in a sugar low, I could score that woman’s apple?”

I knew he could do it, he was a natural actor, and the idea scared me.

“That’d be an asshole move,” I said.

“You’re right.” But he got up anyway. He returned with the apple, merry as could be, and offered me a bite.

The next semester, Niles bought a plane ticket to Chittagong, Bangladesh. After stopping briefly in his hometown to say a strange and oblique farewell to his bewildered parents, he took a bus to the airport. That was the last we ever heard from him.

It took me a long while to become convinced that this was not some new stunt. His family, however, never entertained the notion. He had said nothing to them by way of explanation, and they had not even known his farewell was a farewell. They were distraught. It was clear to them that something terrible must have happened to Niles, and naturally they turned to me with questions. Had he been acting funny? Depressed? Manic? This was more than exam pressure, wasn’t it? Had something “happened?”

He’ll come back, I’d insisted at the time.

Of course he’ll come back.

*

As Niles led the way to the bar, I recalled vividly the ugly, sawn-off feeling of those empty end-of-semester days. Something in me, still soft after all these years, was hardening. I heard again the voice of his mother, who had phoned me daily those first weeks, and who had wept without inhibition. Was there anything Niles could say that would make this better? Were there words which, like a magic formula, could render his actions understandable? I did not believe they existed.

Low-hanging incandescents lit a mahogany bar top and a row of stalls against a brick wall. At the far end was an empty platform for performances and readings. The sun had set hours ago and the windows were a shining black.

“The last we heard from you,” I said after the waitress took our order, “you were in Bangladesh. What were you doing there?”

“Fishing.”

“Fishing?”

In Bangladesh, he said, he’d slept in a mud hut and lived off lentils, rice, and fish. He named people: a friend, Nurul Ahmad, who died in a storm; the family he lived with, the Waddedars; a woman, Pritilata; a boy, Binoy. He described things at random, making no effort to organize it into a story, and I had the impression that this was the first time he had spoken about it to anyone. At one point he grew excited as he described a system of fishing with long pipes made out of banana trunks: the villagers placed one end in the water with a one-way aperture of spiralled date thorns, and the other end they sprinkled with fish food and hung over a basket. “Then they just sat back as the fish swam up and trapped themselves!”

As he spoke, he played with his beard. His hands were calloused and scarred. A part of me could not accept I was sitting with my old friend Niles Doran at a bar in Chicago on a windy October night. Inspecting the chain of cause and effect, I could see no breakage: and yet, face to face with this bearded, sulphurous-smelling man, I had the strange impression of a fundamental disconnect, as though I had wandered outside my own story.

“Around that time,” he said, “the government imposed a temporary fishing ban in order to recover stocks, lasting all Ramadan. It was a disaster, there was no food. People starved. I was just one more mouth to feed; I couldn’t stay.”

The waitress brought the order. At this hour it was only appetizers from the kitchen, so Niles had ordered two plates of yam fries. He looked at them now as though stunned. Then, after squirting almost half the bottle of hot sauce onto the steaming plate, he began to seize large clusters of fries and plunge them into his mouth.

I sipped my Heineken. Noticing that familiar mole above his right eye, I felt the old urge to reach out and wipe it from his skin, like a fleck of food.

“That sounds like a real adventure,” I said. “What did you do then? I mean, after the fishing ban, where did you go?”

“I came here.”

“After Bangladesh?”

He swallowed and wiped his lips with the back of his hand, ignoring the napkin. “I spent thirteen years outside Chittagong. I’ve been in the States three years.”

“I don’t understand. You spent thirteen years in a fishing village. In Bangladesh.”

“Yes.”

“All that time, you were just... fishing?”

He frowned, and I detected a note of disappointment. “I taught English, and I translated when it was needed. I wrote things down, in English at first, and then, as I learned the language, in Chittagonian.”

“Things?”

“Things that came to me. I had to leave the papers behind, but by the end there was quite the stack.”

I was growing frustrated. I didn’t think he was lying, yet it seemed to me he was avoiding what was most interesting and crucial about his story, namely, why he left in the first place. Did he get a kick out of leaving me in the dark? My eyes hardened on him, and I let my impatience resolve on my face.

“I guess it seems strange to you, my life,” he said, meeting my gaze.

“Of course it does. You gave up everything. You were a hell of a musician. You had a girlfriend. You just left. No one does that, Niles. No one.”

He considered me.

“Do you know that your life seems strange to me, too?”

“I don’t know if it’s the same thing.”

Niles gave me a serious look, and as he exhaled I wondered how I might offer one of the breath mints in my pocket.

“It was, for starters, odd,” he said, “to see you at a gathering of ‘occult science,’ of ‘esoteric wisdom,’ being all academic about it.”

I couldn’t tell if he was mocking me. “Well, you came to the talks too.”

“I saw your name in the programme.” He shrugged. “I pay attention to events like these, in case there are others.”

“Others?”

He nodded. The waitress took away the empty plates. When he did not clarify, I said, “Niles, I hope you know that I’m not like most of the attendees. I don’t take all that literally. You can’t prove any of it.”

He just looked at me, and I was suddenly annoyed. “What I mean is, I’m not interested in that sort of certainty. Truth is something more than facts. You know what St. Albert the Great said of the philosopher’s stone? ‘If it exists, I want to know what it is like. If it does not exist, I would like to understand the meaning of such an illusion.’ That’s what I care about: not what’s real or not real, but that realm of meaningful illusions.”

Niles laughed.

“Am I amusing?”

“You’re eloquent. You always were. You know what I used to say to myself? ‘Aldo doesn’t talk. Aldo reads aloud from his inner book.’ But you’re lying to me, and to yourself. You believe. You’re just embarrassed by it. I mean, god, why do you think you’re drawn to that myth, that Angel of Unseeing, in the first place?”

Until this point, I had almost forgotten Niles’ weeping in the auditorium, perhaps because it had been difficult to square with the unserious character before me. I recalled it now with a twinge of unease.

He sensed my discomfort, and his eyes locked on mine. “Most people think there is something wrong in my head,” he said. “You’re thinking it now, and you’re trying to figure it out. No need to deny it; it doesn’t bother me in the least. But I need you to get past it. Enter that realm of ‘meaningful illusions’ or whatever. Because I want to tell you something.”

A moment passed. The waitress gauged our drinks from across the room and turned away.

“Do you remember junior year art class,” Niles said, “with Miss Gebbe?”

“Yes,” I said slowly. “I remember.”

“Do you remember that one class, when we were supposed to bring pieces of fruit with us for a still life? I’d forgotten mine, so you gave me one of your apricots. I was having a hard time of it, and beside me you were painting this masterpiece. At one point Miss Gebbe took pity and came over to correct my technique, mix colors, but it did no good. I knew what was wrong. The apricot was so ripe, so juicy-looking, and when the period ended, when class was all over and the painting complete and the colors washed off the mixing palette, I knew I was just going to eat it.”

There was a distant smile on his face.

“How can you paint what you’re about to eat? To really see the apricot, I understood, I had to renounce it. Things only give themselves to you one way. You have to choose.”

I might have quibbled with that; instead, I played his game. “Then, let me guess—you renounced it and painted a perfect apricot?”

“No, no. I chose to eat it.”

He broke into peals of laughter. The waitress looked over with a start, and I handed Niles a napkin so he could dab his eyes. A grape-sized sadness was lodged in my throat. I remembered those somnolent afternoons, how we’d sit at the back corner by the window looking onto the parking lot, dabbing paint on canvasses, so long ago.

“I want to tell you,” he said, “why I left, and what happened that day.”

I nodded. I felt a sudden stiffness in my neck.

“We were together, you know, when it happened. The day before I left, we were out hiking in Topanga Canyon, and we were trying to get back to the car before sunset. There was an old shack halfway down one of the hills, almost blocked entirely by the chaparral. You wanted to continue, but I wanted to check it out.”

I remembered this hike, and the shack; it was, after all, the last time I had seen Niles. We’d ended up arguing, and by the time we got back to the dorm we were hardly speaking to each other.

“And we fought about it, didn’t we?” I said.

Niles shook his head. “No. I started walking and you followed. It took us a few minutes to pick our way down the slope. It was leaning against one of those low, gnarly oaks. The door was shut. We stood there a moment, you know, weighing things. It was a little frightening, with the light failing and that crow croaking somewhere over the hill. Then we opened the door, and it happened.”

I felt in myself a maddening absence, like a missing tooth discovered by a tongue. I could remember everything up to this moment, and then nothing. I had only an impression of the two of us standing before the closed door.

“It,” I said. “What do you mean?”

“The Angel of Unseeing is the name you used.”

I blinked.

“It was in the shack,” Niles went on. “It was... huge. Not a person—you got that wrong. More like a light. But, still, somehow personal. And it showed us.”

“You’re making fun.”

“I’m not.”

“What is this, Niles? After sixteen years you just show up, I give you my evening, and what you do is mock me?”

“I know what this seems like. But I am telling you the truth, Aldo. We saw the Glimpse, as you called it, and I chose to remember it and you chose to forget.”

“And why would I do that?”

“Aldo,” he said flatly, as though I was being difficult, “how would I know that? Maybe you just didn’t want it.”

I shook my head, forcing a grin. “I didn’t want it.”

“No.”

“Okay,” I said. “Okay. So we saw the Glimpse. What was it, then?” I was impatient, but I kept a leisurely tone. “What did we see?”

“I could tell you. But it wouldn’t make a difference. It’s not the same.”

“Tell me.”

He bit his lip. With a gesture he called the waitress over and ordered two more Heinekens and, as she turned away, added, “And one Guinness.” We waited in silence until they were brought. He took a long drink of his Heineken and looked at me.

“It’s like this,” he said. He took the coaster out from the under the Guinness and placed it on top. “Imagine the glass is a tall pillar, and the coaster is a platform. On the platform, children are playing. But the pillar is unstable. So there’s a man down below”—he leaned a knuckle against the Guinness—“supporting the pillar, straining and grunting so that the pillar stays upright. If it doesn’t, the children will tumble off and die. The man knows it’s all up to him, and he’s just sweating and panting with the effort. Understand, he doesn’t have to hold it up; if it falls, he’ll survive, it won’t hurt him in the least. But it’s the children. He won’t let them die.”

Niles’ hands, one holding the coaster, the other leaning against the Guinness, were trembling.

“And now imagine something stranger,” he said. “Imagine a dark thing, a nasty imp, coming out of nowhere. It’s holding a long needle. When it sees the man, it gets this wicked grin. The man starts to yell at the imp, but the imp ignores him, because it knows that the man has no free hands, he’s totally occupied with the pillar. So the imp starts to poke the man. The man roars in pain. The imp keeps poking. It pokes and pokes. There’s nothing the man can do; if he were to fight back at all, if his feet were to shift position even an inch, it would all be over for the children. He’s this close from losing his grip, but he doesn’t. He just holds on and takes it. The imp is laughing away, poking and drawing blood, but he refuses to let go.”

He paused. His large eyebrows shadowed his face.

“If you look into his eyes, you’ll see it. He won’t ever let the pillar drop.”

With that, Niles’ voice tapered into silence. His hands remained motionless in their demonstration.

The image was so peculiar, I couldn’t tell if I was supposed to take it seriously. I thought of the mystic visions described in my research, so unlike this.

From behind the bar came the clinking of glass, like a heavy wind chime. The low light of the incandescents hanging from the ceiling made sparks in my eye.

“You’re unwell, Niles.”

He put the coaster back beneath the Guinness and blew his nose into a napkin.

“I don’t know what happened to you,” I said. “But it’s not true that you don’t want something from me. I think you want something I can’t give you. Something no one can give you. I’m going back to the hotel now.” As I spoke my hand drifted to the note in my breast pocket—and Greta’s number.

Niles made no reply, and I did not get up.

“Did you hear me?”

After a moment, he stood. He seemed immense in the low light of the speakeasy, the shadows riding up him and gathering upon his face and beard. “Do you want another chance?” he said.

I blinked.

“Do you want another chance?” he said again, looking at me flatly. “I can show it to you.”

A feather drew itself along my back.

“Show me?”

“Stop acting stupid, Aldo.”

I sat back. “That’s rich, coming from a guy who hung out for thirteen years in Chitta-whatever.”

“What you are hoping for,” he said, calmly, “you won’t get it this way. You can’t just sit there and wait; you can’t just keep living your life. Making the same choices over and over. Saying the same words. It doesn’t happen by accumulation. No matter how many days you live, you will never get to anything outside days. No matter how many places you travel, thoughts you think, it all happens to you. You could endure a million years and there will still be that one Thing you will never touch, never understand.”

He said all this with such ease and deliberation, I found I could not reply. I gripped my Heineken, now as warm as my hand.

“Aldo, you ask me why you chose to forget? This is your why. You don’t want to be a fool. You want to guard yourself, your idea of yourself. God. Everyone in this world is just saying one thing, over and over: ‘Look at the precious little self I have here!’”

Now I stood.

“Let’s go, then.” I was angry; I wanted to reverse things, I wanted to show him who was the fool. He had no right to turn up after sixteen years, after abandoning his family, me, all his friends, without one word of explanation, and throw smug insults around. I held his gaze, and he nodded.

He led us down the thin hall at the back of the bar to an alcove with three doors: two washrooms and a back-alley exit.

“Tonight,” he said, “this door doesn’t open onto the back alley.”

“Sure.”

“When I open this door, it will open onto the Glimpse.”

“Good, okay.”

He looked at me and sighed. “I know what you’re doing, Aldo. But it doesn’t matter if you believe or not.”

“Oh?”

“No. What matters is whether you really want it or not.” He put a hand on my shoulder in a way that was not paternal, and not pleading, just neutral. “You know as well as I that it takes something other than intelligence to think certain thoughts. I’m going to open this now, and you’ll see for yourself—if you want to.”

He had brought the Guinness with him. He handed it to me. It was still full; he hadn’t taken a sip.

“I’m not thirsty.”

“It’s Lethe,” he said. “It’s yours if you want it. After.”

Now, holding the glass, I felt absurd again. The forced jocularity with which I had played along curdled into a profound self-disgust. Why was I letting him do this to me? Despite everything, I was curious; a dumb, persistent hope kept me locked into the situation. Perspiration burned at my hairline.

Niles put a hand on the knob. “Are you ready?”

“In my research,” I said, “it’s always the Angel of Unseeing who shows the Glimpse. Not people.”

He gave me a level look. “The Angel of Unseeing is just a name.”

I remembered what he’d said about “the others.” I glanced behind us. The bartender was busy cleaning mugs and chatting with a woman.

“Are you ready or not, Aldo?”

My hands were slick. I could hardly swallow. “I’m ready.”

Niles eyed me.

“I’m ready,” I said again.

He turned the knob and opened the door.

*

As a child I knew something, something beyond strange: I was alive. I existed when I might not have, and the world, though it might not have been, was. So, I reasoned: strangeness was at work. Something else could happen, strangeness could strike again. Perhaps this time, though, I was to have an active part in it.

Such a feeling can lead a child to odd behaviors. You double-check the mailbox in case a letter appears in the moment between. You stroke the cat and encourage her to speak. You watch the clouds carefully for messages. I remember one long afternoon of staring at my math homework, tapping my pencil to my lips, feeling sure that if I persisted the answer would come to me from outside algebra. If you only gave things a chance to happen, they just might. I remained alert for the Revelation which had not yet come.

When I was nine, I played a trick on my mother. It was Niles’ idea. My mother led, we determined, a boring, stagnant life: a medical secretary for our family doctor, she had no friends and no hobbies, she worked, ate and slept. We wanted to shake her up.

It was my mother’s habit to take evening walks at the edge of the city—a route that went along farm fields and a graveyard. One evening in late November, when the days darkened early, Niles dressed me up as a ghost. He tore up an old, white bed sheet and streaked my face with lipstick. We went to the graveyard.

I had the patience of a cat in those days; I planted myself behind a marble headstone, at what I deemed just the right distance from the path, and waited. Niles was in the bushes, closer to the path.

She came. She was alone and walking quickly, as though she had somewhere to be. When I heard her footsteps, I rose slowly and let out a long, ragged breath to draw her attention. She turned, started, and with a small gasp snapped her head back to the path. A few meters on, as though against her own will, she looked again—but by this time I had ducked behind the headstone.

Niles and I raced back home by a different route in order to be ready for her shrieking entry—“Ghost, ghost, I saw a ghost!” But it did not go that way. She entered through the back door, shutting it quickly on the cold, and hung up her toque and scarf. She looked at us, sprawled on the living room sofa pretending to do math homework, and smiled thinly—then went into the kitchen and put the kettle on. As the water gurgled to a boil, she asked about our homework. I watched her closely. There was no sign of her covering anything up, no sign of a mind preoccupied.

Later, I asked Niles: “She saw, didn’t she?”

“Definitely.” He described the expression of genuine alarm he had seen, having had a better view.

“Maybe,” he said, “she’s hiding it. To protect us.”

But I was already convinced of something else: she had buried the event. This had been, without having known it until now, my great fear: the possibility that, when the Revelation came, a person could miss it entirely.

Imagine! Receiving the Revelation and finding no use for it, no way to accommodate it in your life. Such a rejection would not even have the climax of a rejection. A person would simply go on living, ordering their thoughts and actions the usual way—that would be the form it took. A non-form. And yet it would be no less decisive, indeed it would change all the rest of one’s life, make of it a criminal thing, a fugitive of that failure.

And that, to me, seemed far worse than any catastrophe.

What could be done? How could a person prevent it from happening? Niles did not seem concerned, convinced my mother had her reasons for not speaking of the ghost; but I remained alert. I checked my own experiences again and again, searching for evidence of the Revelation’s activities. A kid at school had braces; I watched the way they glinted in the sunlight. I paid attention to the swirl of images that, as I lay in bed, bore down at me just before sleep. I knew, of course, that to expect anything at this level was childish. The Revelation would be more creative, more alien and strange, indeed it would operate by entirely different means. It might not even take the shape of words or images. It might not happen in a moment; it might be as long as days.

So pay attention.

Stay awake.

I never considered that it would demand anything of me less than that.

*

Niles opened the door.

My expectation, like a pitched ball, hurtled out from me to meet the scene and was knocked back. From out of the luminous darkness a wind entered and whip-snapped my burning cheeks. A brick wall across the gravel lane seemed to bulge out; above, the night sky was blotchy with clouds and a half-moon tilted crazily in a gap. A car horn whined. I caught the scent of grease from the food waste. It was the world I knew—an alley. It took me a moment to realize it, and then suddenly it was as though everything out there was rushing menacingly in to fill a void I could not quite see, and I felt dizzy and put a hand out to the wall. A framed painting fell and I dropped slowly after it, and suddenly Niles was squatting beside me and the door was shut again.

“Aldo? Aldo?”

I pushed his hand away. I continued to look at the closed door and a moment later I realized I was laughing.

“Aldo.”

I felt pale. My chest was tight.

“That was good,” I said. “That was well done.”

He put his hand back on my shoulder. “I’m sorry, Aldo.”

I stopped laughing. “Don’t touch me.”

He hesitated and then removed his hand. Now I looked at him. The lids were low on his eyes, and a great deal of energy seemed to have left him; his body language, once kinetic and explosive, was muted. He avoided my gaze.

“Look at me,” I said.

He regarded me silently, with sad eyes.

“What happened to you, Niles?”

“You know what happened,” he said quietly.

“No.”

I stood with effort and remounted the painting. After three rounds of drinks I badly needed the washroom, but I did not want to spend another minute there. I felt like a struck-down animal, overcome by the need to flee. More than this, I could not shake a mounting sense of shame.

“I’ll get the bill, then I’m leaving.”

I paused. He was looking at the Guinness in my hand. I held it up. He’d given it to me full and now it was half empty.

It took me a moment. I glanced around the floor, at my chest, but there was no spill. The room seemed to swim and lose stability. Niles reached out as though to steady me, or perhaps comfort me again, but I pulled back with a spark of rage and realized I was afraid.

“How did you—?”

Niles just shook his head.

“No,” I said. I meant nothing but that: No, that meager syllable of contradiction appointed to stand up, somehow, to gargantuan reality and its ecstatic ongoing Yes.

“Aldo…”

The painting I had remounted was a cheap watercolor of tall reeds by a pond. I stared at it for a fixed point in a dizzy room. It seemed to me their tall slim stocks protruded not from the mud, not really, not finally, but from some deeper and more fertile place. The soil’s soil. You should be able to follow those stalks with the eye down past the mud, down beyond the edge, beyond matter… But you can’t; the eye is made of matter, and matter is that edge.

I was trembling. What had I been hoping for? I felt once again like a child waiting in the November dusk for something to happen, something more than the world.

Why can’t it be enough, the world?

It is so much.

As the waitress processed my payment at the bar, I withdrew the paper from my breast pocket. On the one side were words written in my own hand, on the other was Greta’s number. I twisted it to one side then the other, back and forth, like flipping and unflipping a switch.

Then I left.

I didn’t look back at Niles. I leaned against the exit and, feeling the wind from the street blow against me, shouldered open the door.

1. Part One: Hermeneutics and psychedelic literalism

2. Part Two: McKenna, perennialism, Eleusis

3. Part Three: Messages and entities, DMT space, psychedelic ideas

4. Part Four: Participatory hermeneutics

5. Conclusion: Mystical community and the Mystery

Communities of the Void

“…and here again are these clumsy words, these words that separate a person from God, and at the same time in some incomprehensible way connect a person to God…”

—Jon Fosse, A New Name

I hate to do it, I really do. But for our conclusion, we’re returning to our unwilling psychedelic straw man: McKenna.

In a talk about a hypothetical “psychedelic society,” McKenna fleshes out the final consequence of his devaluation of context and culture:

A psychedelic society would abandon belief systems for direct experience. This is I think much of the problem of the modern dilemma: direct experience has been discounted, and in its place all kinds of belief systems have been erected. I would prefer a kind of intellectual anarchy where whatever was pragmatically applicable was brought to bear on any situation—where belief was understood as a self-limiting function. Because, you see, if you believe something, you are automatically precluded from believing its opposite, which means that a degree of your human freedom has been forfeited in the act of committing yourself to this belief.

Insofar as McKenna is talking about cultivating genuine unknowingness, a “negative capability,” I don’t disagree. We must continually call ourselves out for confusing our belief systems with irreducible reality. We must stay open to the dialectical encounter with Otherness.

Still... Isn’t this another instance of McKenna leaning too heavily on the idea of unmediated experience over-against “tradition” and “culture”—and in the process burying his presuppositions?

As we’ve seen, this is not a solution to the problems and limitations of culture. Nor is it a solution to preserving the “immediacy” of psychedelic experience. We are social, communicative, creatures—not just with others, but with ourselves. We move and breathe in representations, in mediation, in stories. Unmediated reality, direct experience, Gnosis—this, too, gets embedded in mediation as a mere representation of itself, and as such risks giving rise to new ideologies.

And isn’t this what’s happening here? McKenna’s “direct experience” comes fully equipped with goals and values. It acts as the center-point for a culture of psychonauts. It smuggles in its own ethics and metaphysics. It refuses belief, refuses staking a claim, refuses to enter the hermeneutical process.

Can I level with you?

This “psychedelic society” sounds like a road to fundamentalism, and it freaks me out.

*

After writing about that continental philosophy course in Part One, I felt inspired to look up my old prof, Jeffrey Dudiak, and to read a recent publication of his. Dudiak is a Quaker. Quakers, or the Religious Society of Friends, are a unique branch of Christian Protestantism for whom direct mystical experience (of “the light within”) is a constitutive aspect of their life together. Their meetings are famous for their long silences, punctuated now and then by congregants moved by the Spirit to speak.

A community organized around mysticism? Folks in the psychedelic field should be leaning in.

But all is not well, according to Dudiak. In the article, “The Wordless Mystical and the Spirituality of Belief,” he inveighs against an innocuous-seeming belief: that “we are all saying the same thing, despite a plethora of incommensurable assertions.” (Anyone else getting whiffs of Perennial Philosophy?)

The problem is that this renders all theological discussion, all exploration of experience through language, otiose in advance. “How one says things, if one need say anything at all, does not matter.” You can see how this undermines communication, indeed the very impulse to articulate your experience at all. And so, Dudiak argues, instead of a true fellowship we get a dogmatic assertion of sameness coupled with the ebbing motivation to grapple with the very experiences that are supposed to be unifying the community.

We are left speaking as vaguely and elusively with each other as possible—which usually means speaking about something else. This is the new basis of our (religious?) society, then, that struggles not to give collective articulation to our religious experience, but unites around our principled refusal to do so.

Ah...

This sounds a little like McKenna’s psychedelic society, no?

But Dudiak has a proposal for the Quakers. Rather than uniting around hermeneutical naiveté—a belief in the oneness of mystical experience—what if they united instead by consciously entering the living process of a mystical tradition in articulation of itself?

In contrast to this heretical orthodoxy, I would like to entertain the possibility that beliefs do matter, and this because, hermeneutically considered, we not only give formation to our traditions, but are formed by them… This circularity between our traditions and our experience of “the divine” or “God” or “the Spirit” or “the Life Force” or what have you (as there is no neutral, non-tradition-bound articulation of “that which calls”), each conditioning the other, is I think a better description of a living spirituality than is the static (and I suspect illusory) phenomenon that we have an immediate connection to the divine, if that is taken to mean one that is neither nourished by, nor demands, articulation.

Man, this really takes me back to college days. I can just hear Dudiak, lanky as ever, quoting Gadamer and scratching out his incomprehensible doodles on the chalk board…

Anyway. What we have here is an invitation to conscious participation in a tradition. An invitation that can, I think, be heard by McKenna’s starry-eyed psychedelic mystics. It is an invitation not to take for granted the contexts which mediate the Unmediated; an invitation to explore the frameworks, presuppositions and background values that shape our psychedelic explorations and the ways we talk about them—so that these frameworks do not determine the entirety of what is possible for us. (Or worse, turn us all into cringy neoshamanic love-and-light bros who insist without seeming to on their way of seeing reality.)

It is an invitation to own your hermeneutic.

While McKenna wants to get outside belief altogether, Dudiak sees belief as one way of entering the stream of living reality co-creation. Those who refuse to enter the process of meditation, refuse to enter dialogue, refuse to enter a tradition, a community—also never let themselves grow.

“The poet ventures to speak not because speech is adequate but because it is a necessary moment in the continuing struggle for meaning,” theologian Ben Myers writes. “You stake a position not because it is right, but because staking a position is the only way to enter into the process of learning and growth. And this process… is ‘obscurely redemptive,’ since our failure and defeat drive us into a stance of deeper commitment to the world.”

I find something poignant in this acceptance of finitude. Our language is always open-ended and incomplete. So too are our hermeneutical forecastings, the images we allow to shape our experiences. But rather than bury our head in the metaphysical sand and hope to bypass the whole hermeneutic process, let’s own it. Let’s participate.

The Mystery

“He remained the hidden God, even after this epiphany.”

—Maximus the Confessor, Ambigua

So what is psychedelic literalism? A failure to see the deeply mediated nature of all psychedelic experience.

What are its consequences? By ignoring the role of context, language, and culture in not just shaping but providing the necessary ontological foundation for our participation in Being, we a) limit our awareness of our own presuppositions; b) hamstring our ability to consciously and ongoingly co-create with the Mystery.

Literalism may not be a particular stance or principle so much as an inclination, a drift towards reification and universalism. It is Anthony Bossis’s impulse to call NYU’s psilocybin trials the new Eleusis. It is McKenna’s insistence on a naive idea of “direct experience.” It is my longing toward some kind of “Master Tradition” that started off this essay. It’s the New Age way of saying “We are all One” that can’t also celebrate “We are Many.” It’s calling psychedelics “medicine” without being willing to also just call them “drugs.” It is any way of looking that wants to close itself off from other ways of looking. It is any insight that wants to be the insight. It is the finalizing impulse.

Andy Mitchell, reflecting on the way that meditation has helped him grow conscious of invisible backgrounded frameworks, writes:

Metaphorically speaking, meditation invites us to widen our field of vision so that the frame through which we see everything comes into view. In that sense, meditation is always doomed to fail. However wide we go, there will always be a frame. There can be no such thing as an unmediated experience of consciousness, because consciousness is the medium of all experience.1

What we have been doing here is, in a sense, widening the frame. We’ve been trying to pull back and observe the presuppositions of our experience with greater awareness. And we could keep pulling back. We could engage in a meta-critique of the culturally-situated perspectives of this essay. Are not these articulations of participatory hermeneutics, of a pluralistic and enactive ontology, themselves culture-bound? A product of an obsession with Heidegger plus repeated psychedelic experiments within a hyper-intellectual techno-western milieu? Lo! Another frame!

Indeed, my younger brother, who did much to temper the excesses of my first draft, came at me with just this point:

One could argue that the tendency to generalize this “cultural construction of experience” is a very particular product of twentieth and twenty-first century western culture. I wonder if [this perspective] is really a symptom of uprootedness.

And so, through dialogue, the hermeneutical process begins anew. It is endless. Each moment presents another opportunity for interpretive engagement, for improvisation. We’re caught in an infinite game, hurtling us deeper into self-awareness, deeper into the unknown.

No one escapes these conditions. No one.

*

A few years ago, on a strain of mushrooms called “Enigma,” I encountered a being that seemed somehow both singular and plural, a collective individual. It, or “they,” were a complex of colorful, fractalled growths, vaguely fungal but far more involved. Emergent from the depths of my mind’s eye, this being was a real presence within yet separate from me. With sudden clarity, in the way it happens on psychedelics or in dreams, I understood that these were the “Teachers,” the ones behind the mushrooms. After well over a dozen mushroom journeys, I’d met them.

And to my astonishment, they were—existentially, epistemologically—in just the same boat as me.

I had my laptop open at my desk. When the encounter was over, I popped up and wrote it down, eager to capture the insight—a psychedelic message if there ever was one.

I’ve met the Teachers…

just two presences

they didn’t know everything

but together we could just be

I still remember how it felt to face that powerful Otherness, so alien, so near. I wanted the Teachers to be infallible, all-knowing, an oracle of guaranteed truth. Instead, I was brought into an even deeper unknowing—an unknowing that reminded me, later, of those chilling final lines from the oldest of the Vedas: “Whence this creation has arisen… the one who looks down on it, in the highest heaven, only he knows—or perhaps he does not know.”2

Psychedelics are our companions on the path. They are our wise elders, our playful siblings, our dialogue partners, our comforters. They wake us, provoke us, scare the shit out of us and laugh at us. And they rain upon us ecstasies beyond imagining. But at the end of the day, they are not themselves outside the hermeneutical situation.

If I may reify them for just one more moment: they are in this too, wondering alongside us...

Is there anyone out there who really knows?

the full strangeness

I felt it just increase and increase and increase

1. Part One: Hermeneutics and psychedelic literalism

2. Part Two: McKenna, perennialism, Eleusis

3. Part Three: Messages and entities, DMT space, psychedelic ideas

4. Part Four: Participatory hermeneutics

5. Conclusion: Mystical community and the Mystery

Mediating the Marvelous

“Whenever there is the world of appearances, there is self... There are always selves. And those selves are always presented, they’re always imagined in a certain way. We are imagining self and other and world, always…  What’s important is not trying to get rid of that fantasy, as we might usually believe, but actually seeing image as image, knowing image as image. This is image. And engaging with it rather than disengaging.”

—Rob Burbea, “The Theatre of Selves”

The first time I smoked Bufo (5-MeO-DMT)—in a secret loft in Chelsea, Manhattan—my guide allowed me an introductory hit before the full dose. A “kiss,” she called it. As I came up, I sensed a terrible threat on the horizon. It was as though an important non-physical membrane—the very membrane creating the favorable conditions in which I, this self, this precious me-ness, could exist—was about to burst. If it broke, what would happen to Patrick?

I clenched up.

At last the fizzle of energy subsided and I could reflect soberly on my reaction. Right away, I saw what was behind it.

The night before my session, a friend of mine had called to wish me well. He was experienced in Bufo, and indeed was the one who’d connected me with the guide. Before hanging up, he imparted these words of… encouragement: “This is a very powerful medicine. Your ego may snap.”

Oh, I didn’t like it that word, snap. I fixated on it all night and into the next morning. Naturally, after that “kiss” of the Toad, the image had cast itself onto my experience like a stencil, characterizing my encounter with the contentless explosion that is 5-MeO.

My guide was waiting. Did I want the full dose?

I did, I did. But was I ready to actually… snap?

Suddenly I knew what I had to do. I told her exactly what I was afraid of, I named the metaphor structuring my encounter—and I asked for a new one.

She was happy to oblige.

“Not snap. No, no! You’ll be embraced.”

Holding that image, I took the full dose and found the whole experience fantastically altered. By the Big Holy Nothing, by the Mysterium Tremendum, by that placeless place outside time and space—I was embraced.

*

I’m telling this story, obviously, to illustrate our hermeneutical freedom to shape psychedelic experience.

Now, we want to be careful here. We shouldn’t confuse the metaphor, the interpretive structure, with the experience itself, which is always irreducible. Our interpretive forecasting shapes and informs it, gives it a container—but experience, including psychedelic experience, is not perfectly “programmable.” For all our contextualism in the preceding sections, it’s important to remember this: if psychedelics are water, they are a weird water that doesn’t always conform 100% to the shape of their container. Sometimes they even burst the container. (If you read the full account of my Bufo experience, you’ll find it riddled with the verbiage of immediacy. “I was outside my mind, my body, my history.” “I felt utterly decontextualized.”)

But to return to our maxim from Part Two: “All Immediacy is embedded in Mediation.” The Unmediated Absolute as we experience it cannot ultimately be separated from its intentional, linguistic, imagistic and conceptual context. No matter what contentless, contextless place I’d witnessed on Bufo, no matter if there was no longer an “I” to witness it—it was still Patrick who came back down, Patrick who wrote up his experience and chose the words he chose. It was a Patrick encounter, through and through.

Erik Davis theorizes eloquently on this point. Where McKenna naïvely wants to locate the transcendent zero-culture-point in the psychedelic peaks, Davis understands that all experience is embedded in a hermeneutical process, even the most mystical journey. He calls this tempered view of transcendence “weird naturalism”:

I want to understand these extraordinary experiences not as signs of a “separate reality” but as manifestations or mutations of this one… Our experiences of the weird —as aesthetic encounter, as deviation from the social norm, as inexplicable factum—may point beyond, but they are perhaps better seen as an unnerving and enigmatic warp or wiggle in the web of reality itself… [Psychedelic] experiences open up a space of encounter and evolution that does not transcend so much as loop together culture and consciousness, sacred and profane, romance and realism, gnosis and nature.1

In this view, it’s not that psychedelics reveal a Gnostic truth, lifting the veil and giving you a glimpse of “the way things really are.” Nor do they plunge you into delusions. Both images participate in a naïve realism.

Davis is suggesting something different. Something… participatory.

The Loopy Psychedelic Discourse

“Perhaps how we see psychedelics can also shape them?! Oh, the rabbit hole!”

—Behike Sensei Kevon Simpson, “A New Standard: The Urban Heroic Dose of 10g”

Thus far, we’ve described the multifarious forms of psychedelic literalism. We’ve seen how a blindness to the interpretive dimension and the impulse to reify metaphorical realities locks us into limiting (and lame) perspectives. Now we will explore the alternative: a participatory hermeneutic.

*

You’ve heard it before: “I took the medicine.” “The medicine told me…” “How much medicine were you on?” This isn’t code language in case there’s narc in the room. “Medicine” is in fact many people’s preferred term for psychedelics. 

I spoke with someone recently who dislikes this nomenclature. To call psychedelics “medicine,” he said, imbues them with a healing power they don’t intrinsically posses, while simultaneously obscuring the truly healing power: intention, relationship, and context.

I agree… sort of. When it comes to the starry-eyed and uncritically literal use of the term “medicine,” of course he’s right. Psychedelics aren’t medicine. It’s the whole dynamic of set and setting and intention that, catalyzed by the molecule, comes together in an event we might, during or after the fact, interpret as healing. But I’ve also seen a usage that is more self-aware, more attuned to the language game at play. The linguistic act of calling psychedelics “medicines” puts us in a particular relationship with them. We need not have any illusions about what we’re doing: we are invoking the power of placebo, of self-fulfilling prophecy. So what? Calling them “medicines” is a practice. Calling them medicines helps make them medicine.2

This is a participatory hermeneutic. Our practices, even our language practices, around psychedelics shape psychedelics themselves.

The way someone engages in the name game is actually a decent litmus test for the literalizing ego. “Psychotomimetics” are out of favor, “hallucinogens” too for the most part, and who these days says “telepathines”? But alternatives to “psychedelics” (mind-manifesting) are in use, including “entheogens” (engendering god) and “ecodelics”3 (interconnectivity-manifesting). At the Synchronicity Unconference I helped organize in NYC in 2023, Glauber Loures de Assis even suggested “kin-delic” (relationship-manifesting). In a sense, all these names are prayers. They draw the attention toward particular potentialities of a multi-dimensional phenomenon. Should anyone become dogmatic, should anyone conceive of the properties suggested by their preferred name as the “intrinsic essence” of this class of psychoactive compounds, they have wandered into the land of literalism.

I’ve seen it happen in even the best places. I’m thinking of this substack I encountered recently: “Are Psychedelics Inherently Feminist?” I’m thinking, too, of Kate Kincaid’s statement in the anthology, Queering Psychedelics: “The psychedelic worldview is inherently queer.”4

I might agree… if they just didn’t use that term, “inherently.” Can’t I be an ally and still be insufferable about philosophic distinctions?

Here’s another fun one. Most plant medicine people I know refer to peyote as masculine and ayahuasca as feminine: “Grandfather” and “Grandmother.” But in her book Swimming in the Sacred, Rachel Harris encounters a Native American guide who refers to “Sacred Mother Peyote,” and in his book Plant Teachers, Jeremy Narby points out that many indigenous tribes consider ayahuasca to be male. “Ayahuasca,” he says, “has no fixed persona.” It seems that for plants as well as for humans, gender is a culturally-mediated reality.

Or take the “bad trip” vs. “challenging experience” debate. I’ve heard scornful rejections of the latter: “Sometimes a bad trip really is just a bad trip!” Fair enough. Indeed, the term “challenging experience” can be mildly gas-lighting—as though it’s your fault if you can’t redeem the trip somehow, your fault if what didn’t kill you is still trying to. Rachael Peterson, a Johns Hopkins trial participant who had a terrible time in her second session, writes eloquently about this dynamic in her article, “A Theological Reckoning with ‘Bad Trips.’”5

And yet. Sometimes I get whiffs of an inflexible literalism: “it is a bad trip, end of story!” Given that what’s at stake is our ability to make meaning from suffering, from darkness, do we really want to lock it down this way?

Let’s keep going. You’ve heard the phrase “higher consciousness.” It might seem a natural and even obvious description of what’s going on when you eat five grams of Psilocybe cubensis. But in his book Psychonauts, Mike Jay points out that if you time-travel back before Gordon Wasson and Robert Graves—the first Westerners to really name the experiences these mushrooms occasioned as sacred—you can find plenty of accounts from doctors, mycologists and toxicologists of accidental ingestion of various psychoactive mushrooms, and they come nowhere near the sacred. 

Their subjects, on noticing the early onset of psilocybin’s effects – dizziness, gastric disturbance, odd and intrusive thoughts – had typically leapt to the conclusion that they had inadvertently eaten poisonous fungi and were undergoing a toxic crisis, perhaps a fatal one. Hallucinatory effects and visual distortions were experienced as delirium or fever, and often rendered more disturbing by attendant physicians applying emergency medicine such as emetics or stomach pumps.6

The point is, it took interpretive effort to arrive at a different paradigm than poisoning. It wasn’t even yet a “trip.”

In an interview with Erik Davis, Manuel De Landa has this to say about the metaphor of “higher consciousness”:

When I’m tripping, I’m thinking concepts I’m sure no one’s ever thought before, and in a way it’s like a higher state of consciousness, but it’s not a plane that was waiting there for me to access it. It’s something I’m building that moment by destratifying my brain. If you’re destratifying thinking there’s some benevolent god out there, or a world of harmony with nature right through the door, you’re fucked. ‘Cause you’re not gonna find the world of eternal harmony. Everything there is something we will build.

De Landa is making an ontological claim: he is not discovering a pregiven mystical plane, he is co-creating it. Where some psychonauts talk about leaving or literally transcending the immanent frame, De Landa talks about immanentizing transcendence.

This is Davis’s weird naturalism again. The transcendent and the immanent are two sides of a continuous mobius strip: we don’t leave—we loop.

The “As If”: Entities and Messages

“Some people, when they meet a monster, flinch away. Some think: This is interesting. Others say to the monster: I created you. Our interpretation of events is what gives them meaning. This is the power of the medicine: to show us our own power.”

—Little Owl, before my first ayahuasca ceremony

In his book Daimonic Reality, Patrick Harpur writes about what he calls “non-literal” phenomena. Things like apparitions, demon possession, alien abduction. A naïve hermeneutic reacts to the felt reality of such experiences as though they were “literal,” i.e. happening in the same way that consensus reality events happen. In contrast to this, Harpur offers Carl Jung’s approach:

When Jung spoke of images, he referred especially of course to those archetypal images we encounter as daimons and gods. We must not be misled by the word “images” into thinking of them as somehow unreal. We should, on the contrary, approach them as Jung approached daimons like his Philemon—“as if they were real people” to whom he “listened attentively.” He did not, we notice, treat them as literally real, as we (mistakenly) treat hallucinations or (correctly) treat people in the street. He did not treat them as “extraterrestrials.” Nor did he treat them as parts of himself, illusions or mere projections. He treated them as metaphorical beings.

Philemon was a guru-like being who first appeared to Jung in a dream. Throughout his later life, Jung had dialogues with this being and acted just as though they had a real master-pupil relationship. Because… well, they did. The metaphorical reality of Philemon’s appearances was of no less consequence than, and indeed was just as “real” to Jung as, literal reality.

But Jung didn’t mistake one for the other. He took Philemon seriously but not literally.7

This is a pragmatic approach to non-literal experience. “Skepticism during the experiment prevents any interesting results,” Robert Anton Wilson notes.8 By bracketing your ontological judgments, the phenomenon is allowed to unfold with its own agency, even as you, too, keep your hermeneutical agency. As a result, an intentional, dialogical relationship opens up.

In the same way, we can work with psychedelic entities without risking an unself-aware literalism—or, for that matter, undergoing harrowing, psychosis-inducing quests like, uh, this guy:

(Honestly, give it a read; it’s quite entertaining.)

*

In the midst of writing this essay, I set aside a Saturday for a 30 mg dose of 4-AcO-DMT (equivalent to about 5 g of mushrooms). I wanted to test out these ideas from “the inside,” so to speak. How did all this talk about interpretive freedom sound when I was really high?

At one point in my journey, an entity appeared. I was lying on my back, eye mask on, listening to my playlist, when suddenly space itself bulged toward me, coalesced across a complex convex surface, and with a neutral affect extended a proboscis-like appendage into my chest above my right nipple. It was implanting something! Curiosity threatened to tip into fear: I tried to relax. There is so much emphasis in psychedelic/therapeutic discourse on “letting go” and “surrendering” that this has become my default response. And yet… wasn’t I in the middle of writing an essay on psychedelic hermeneutics? Oughtn’t I to engage more actively in meaning-making?

I put up a hand and said aloud: “I’m not going to let you put anything in my body until I know who you are. Can you respect that?”

The entity had eyes in all kinds of strange places, and every one of them bulged. But it withdrew its appendage, and left.

Who knows what would have happened had I received the implant submissively. Maybe something marvelous, maybe something sinister. But I chose to defend my bodily sovereignty, and the choice left me with more confidence and self-respect. I can, apparently, stand up to weird-ass 4-AcO space probes.

Life skillz…

This minor enactment of the “as-if” was shaped, in turn, by Rachel Harris’s more compelling exploration of hermeneutical freedom in Swimming in the Sacred. In one chapter, she juxtaposes two experiences of “trespassing” on discarnate entities. The first is from parapsychology researcher, David Luke.

After about fifty journeys smoking DMT, [Luke] began to get “the feeling I was intruding upon a cosmic gathering I wasn’t invited to.” He felt he was trespassing and that he surprised an entity he described as an “ominous luminous voluminous numinous … [who] proceeded to let me know that I should not be there and that I should certainly not be peering into the hallowed space beyond it, which it clearly guarded.” Luke was sufficiently frightened to stop smoking DMT for fourteen years.

I sympathize. I’ve startled a DMT entity before, a Cthulhu-like being guarding the edge of space-time who, after asking me “What the fuck are you doing here?” cast me back into my body. It wasn’t pleasant.

But look at this next trespassing experience. Ariella, a psychedelic elder who has been journeying and holding space for decades, describes being

in a maze with doors, hallways, stairs, different rooms. I went through a door and encountered and surprised an entity, a very old, ancestral being. The entity admonished me, ‘You’re not supposed to be here.’ The entity put on a cloak of skin with lots of wrinkles to look like an old being.

Arielle asked the entity, “Why are you putting this on?”

“To make it okay to talk,” the entity replied. “So that you will be able to understand me and not be frightened.”

“You don’t need to do that for me,” Arielle told the entity.

Where Luke was scared off for fourteen years, Arielle ends up reassuring the entity about its appearance. The comparison shows the degree of creative engagement available to us. Even if you are taking the non-literal reality seriously, you don’t have to take it at its word. It is possible to go off-script. The secret is, there is no script.

Of course, exercising this power doesn’t mean it will go well. Once, having smoked a mix of DMT and Salvia, I encountered a force of darkness beyond malice, a thing not to be fucked with. For some time I held myself perfectly still, energetically-speaking, as though to prevent it noticing me.

When I felt it leaving, a sliver of courage wormed up inside me. I called (mentally) after it: “You’re only in my head!”

WHAM—it was back, closer this time. Imagine being an inch from a snarling tiger. Feel the spittle on your cheeks. Hear your heart jumping like panicked jackrabbit. Oh yeah? it seemed to say. Only in your head?

Such are the costs of our hermeneutic freedom.

*

The practice of the “as if” can go much deeper, of course. In a dharma talk titled “Releasing the Self, Freeing its Demons,” meditation teacher Rob Burbea proposes an exercise with the inner critic. After describing what it might look like to deconstruct this phenomenon into its elements, he describes the opposite: a reification. That is, relating to the inner critic as if it were a person.

Is it possible to have a dialogue? Is it possible to speak and listen, turn towards, and have relationship with this figure? There’s two styles of doing that. You could turn towards this inner critic and challenge everything that he/she/it said, ask it to prove something, question what it means. You actually will find that you have more intelligence than this inner critic that tends not to be the smartest in the world. Or you could adopt a much more loving approach, much more softness, seeking to understand, much more kindness in relating to this person. What might unfold if we do that slightly different approach?

Both deconstructing it, or letting it be a person and then relating to that person, can be helpful. It’s not like one is right and one’s wrong. None of them, neither of them, is ultimately true.9

Burbea then describes a woman on a meditation retreat who, inquiring into the pressure she felt to perform well, discovered that this inner critic was actually related to her deceased mother, a woman who set high standards in life. In another instance, a meditator decided to stop cowering and confront their overactive inner critic with a direct question:

She asked it what it wanted. Why it criticized. And to her enormous surprise, a gentle and extremely kind voice replied, “I want you to use your full potential.” Tears came.

The ultimate point of this practice is empowerment. It is seeing clearly. This dialectical engagement opens up the phenomenon into more liberating possibilities. Furthermore, by consciously reifying the phenomenon, you avoid the less self-aware reification that happens outside your control. Uncritical literalism, in other words—the kind that might, in this instance, lead me to obey my inner critic and leave this hot mess of an essay unfinished.

Stay back, you bastard. We’re almost there.

The Hermeneutic Burden (Or: It’s Okay to Co-Create!)

“Be careful how you interpret the world; it is like that.”

—Erich Heller, The Disinherited Mind

Remember that college course on Continental Philosophy I mentioned in Part One, the one that changed my life? After that class, I got depressed. There were many causal factors, including a mysterious physical illness, but the despair in my soul was in no small part catalyzed by the hermeneutical insight. If everything was decided by our interpretation, if everything was “constructed,” then what was “real”? I went full Holden Caulfield: Phony! It’s all phony!

The universality of hermeneutics may be a hard pill to swallow for us moderns, who still live with the legacy of the European Enlightenment (or Endarkenment, as C. S. Lewis called it). We’ve inherited a suspicion of authority and tradition and find ourselves mid-way on a wild goose chase for objectivity: that “view from nowhere,” that “knowledge without presuppositions.” We are haunted, as Gadamer put it, by a prejudice against prejudice.

By prejudice, Gadamer means the preconceptions that we bring to any interpretive situation—even (especially) the situation of Being. Prejudice in this sense is inescapable. There is no neutral ground from which to begin our relationship to otherness, to reality. There is no possibility of achieving a completely objective or universally valid interpretation.

And here’s the thing.

This isn’t bad.

Prejudice—or, to return to our more familiar vocabulary, interpretation—is in fact what reveals being.

This is Gadamer’s point about language being “the all-embracing form of the constitution of the world.” Experience and interpretation are consubstantial. The world can only be accessed through a tradition: the interpretive comportments implicit in languages, in cultures, in ways of being. It is through this pre-conscious and conscious hermeneutical engagement that the world emerges.

In this sense, prejudices are ontological. Our interpretation of the world, you might say, is the world for us.

“All culture is a flight from reality,” McKenna said. But from our perspective, without culture—in the deep phenomenological sense—we wouldn’t have reality.

Now, the hermeneutical process isn’t whimsical or arbitrary. It’s not like just any interpretation will fly; contra certain New Age platitudes, you can’t just believe whatever you want to believe. “We create our own reality.” “Everything is in your head.” No, no. If we were indeed self-powered reality generators, we’d have bootstrapped our way into a land of unicorns and rainbows by now. But it’s so much more interesting than that. Hermeneutics is dialectical, involving an “other,” and the best interpretations are those that include more, explain more, respond more.

It’s not reality creation, but reality co-creation.

In his book, Revisioning Transpersonal Theory, Jorge N. Ferrer, teases out the nuances of this perspective.

In nature mysticism, as well as during certain ritual uses of entheogens, the natural world can be drastically transformed and unfold with an exalted quality of depth, pregnant meaning, profound numinosity, luscious Life, and sacred Mystery. In the context of the participatory vision, this transfiguration of the world is not seen as a mere change in our individual experience of a pregiven world, but as the emergence of an ontological event in reality in which our consciousness creatively participates. In other words, it is not so much our experience of the world that changes, but rather our experience-and-the-world that undergo a mutually codetermined transformation.

Catch that? This is not objectivism. Nor is it pure constructivism. “Spiritual knowing,” as Ferrer puts it elsewhere, “is not a mental representation of pregiven, independent spiritual objects, but an enaction, the ‘bringing forth’ of a world or domain of distinctions co-created by the different elements involved in the participatory event.”

My Holden Caulfield despair, then, was based on a misunderstanding about what made something “real.” I was grieving the death of my naïve metaphysics. I wanted unmediated access to reality, I wanted it to be simple, and I thought that universal mediation meant never getting to the real thing.

It took me a while to consider the possibility that mediation might be the real thing. That, paradoxically, mediation may be the unmediated thing itself...

*

We’ve gone abstruse, so let’s bring it back to the concrete. There are all kinds of realities that we take for literally real which are in fact co-created hermeneutical phenomena. Yet this does not diminish the power of their presence in our Lebenswelt. “Wahr ist, was wirkt,” Carl Jung said: “Real is what has an effect.”

The months of the year, for example. “Time is an illusion,” sure. The days of the week, the hours of the day, the minutes of the hour—arbitrary as fuck, arising in part from the conditions of our particular solar system. But I’m still going to celebrate my birthday in August.

Or: nation states. Are the lines on the world map “literally” real? Are currencies? Take an American twenty dollar bill. (Use a Canadian twenty if that’s easier. ) The literalist says: this “is” money. But we know that’s bullshit. This isn’t money, this is a physical object representationally embedded in a culturally-agreed-on value arrangement. But again: that doesn’t mean I’m going to burn it.

Let’s keep going. As a white boy from the Canadian plains, I used to not think much of chakras. Now, having had an unusual experience with kundalini breathwork in Costa Rica (groans from the audience), I think about chakras as an imaginal body, a particular spiritual tradition’s meaning-making around certain psycho-physical phenomena which is now, for whatever reason, enjoying a cultural moment.

The songlines of the Australian aborigines are another, geological example of an imaginal relationship with physicality. So too is logging tape. The resource-extraction relationship of Teal Jones to the last of BC’s old growth forest (viewing those majestic beings as resources, “standing reserve”) is also an imaginal relationship. Reductive materialism, too, is based in metaphor.

This goes even for our own bodies, as Thomas Metzinger examines in unnerving exactitude in his book, Ego Tunnel.

The sense that our bodies are literally real is a construct of the rational ego which, while it does not identify itself with the body (it sees the body as its vehicle), nevertheless allies itself so closely with the body as to impose its perspective on the body. It makes our physical reality the only reality—makes of our physical reality a literal reality.

On and on. If we wanted to go down that rabbit hole, we could deconstruct the universe, revealing the non-literal reality of everything.10 But the point is: it is still a kind of reality.

And it is our relationship to this reality, this co-creation, that is decisive. How self-aware are we about our own interpretations, our constructions? How do we value them? Do we, like McKenna, think of culture as a placenta from which to escape? Do we, like Enlightenment philosophers, think of our traditions as a cage? Or can we also see these preconceptions, these pre-ontological understandings, as the very thing that opens up the world, allowing our creative participation?

In the history of world religions, Ken Wilber argues, you track a pendulum swing of spiritual desire from one side of dualism to the other: from Gnostic craving for the Unconditioned, to reconciliation with the world of form:

The Nondual revolution… had one basic tenet: the manifest world of samsara is not an impediment to Spirit but is rather the perfect expression of Spirit: samsara and nirvana are not-two. Emptiness is Form, Form is Emptiness.

The revolution brought by Plotinus and Nagarjuna is of the same form: Plotinus lashes into the merely Ascending gnostics (who taught that the manifest realm was evil incarnate) with a devastating critique that said, in effect, since this manifest world is actually the creation and expression of Spirit, then how can you despise this world and say you love Spirit?... Full spiritual realization is rather to be found in the perfect nondual embrace of this world, not in fleeing this world for the unmanifest.

I’m setting this vision of participatory hermeneutics alongside this pendulum swing toward the nondual embrace. Contra the “tease of immediacy,” we can’t locate final liberation in any so-called unmediated blip of non-culture—because we can’t live there. We live here, in the world. Every effort to metabolize the mystical Unconditioned, every stage in our process of meaning making, is conditioned by this world and informed by a web of relationships within and without us: our past, our hopes for the future, the material of our cultural and personal history, the concepts we’ve been exposed to or introspected our way toward, etc., etc.

And that is beautiful.

“Any object whatever may paradoxically become a hierophany,” as Mircea Eliade says, “a receptacle of the sacred, while still participating in its own cosmic environment (a sacred stone, e.g., remains nevertheless a stone).”

Language, culture, stories—all of it, the whole contextual shebang, can be the set and setting of our experience of the divine.

*

And if anyone is still reeling from the loss of an objectivist metaphysic and the real-fake dichotomy, I suggest reading C. S. Lewis’s greatest children’s book, The Silver Chair. Does anyone out there remember it? Does anyone recall that heartbreaking scene at the end when the children and Puddleglum are trapped in the dreary Underworld?

The Queen has bewitched them into thinking that the above-ground world of Narnia, with its flowers and sunlight, with the majestic godlike lion Aslan, are just made up and never really existed. All seems lost, so lost.

Then Puddleglum speaks.

Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things—trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones… I’m going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn’t any Aslan to lead it.

How can you argue with that? So what if it’s all co-created reality! So what if higher consciousness is “constructed,” if even love is somehow imagined. If such a thing as love can be imagined, the only rational, the only truly sane response is: let’s fucking imagine it!

*

…Part Five

1. Part One: Hermeneutics and psychedelic literalism

2. Part Two: McKenna, perennialism, Eleusis

3. Part Three: Messages and entities, DMT space, psychedelic ideas

4. Part Four: Participatory hermeneutics

5. Conclusion: Mystical community and the Mystery

Bro, I’m Getting All These Downloads…

“Mystical states seem to those who experience them to be also states of knowledge. They are states of insight into depths of truth unplumbed by the discursive intellect.”

—William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience

So far, I’ve outlined how some psychedelic thinkers and researchers have tried to exit the hermeneutic process by abstracting “experience” from “context,” and the path of error they set themselves on as a consequence. I want to talk now about psychedelic experience itself. How do we lose track of the hermeneutic dimension in our own subjectivity?

*

Let’s start with the idea that psychedelics give you messages, most famously suggested in that grating phrase: “If you get the message, hang up the ph—”

*Slams receiver down*

Yup. Got it.

I’ve been so involved in the psychedelic world these last few years that it’s remarkable to recall, now, that I’d been adventuring with psilocybin both privately and with friends for years before I heard anyone talk about receiving “messages” or “learning lessons” from psychedelics. In fact, I remember distinctly the first time I came across that language. Here’s a journal entry from early 2020, after the second or third psychedelic Meetup group I attended in Brooklyn:

Some people talk about using mushrooms and LSD to learn some kind of lesson, like they’re going to an Oracle who has a personal message for them. One guy described learning that he needed to be more of a “leader” in his life. This is great, but it feels reductive. The lessons may be fine, even life-changing, but the “lesson” model is not itself an inbuilt aspect of tripping. And, more to the point, where is the transcendence? Don’t people only receive the lessons they are capable of giving themselves?

I’ve relaxed quite a bit since this journal entry. In fact, I’ve full absorbed this paradigm of lesson-learning as one way of experiencing psychedelics, and have used those same locutions you hear around psychedelic Meetups and integration circles: “LSD taught me such and such.” “The shrooms told me yada yada.” Etc. They are a useful short-hand for a more complex phenomenon that is impractical to detail in every instance. And anyway, I like how those phrases introduce a relational element, framing it as a conversation between me and the fungi, the vine, the toad.

That said, what I sensed in my journal entry holds. Such phrases can also be expressions of literalism.

*

Let’s take for example this common message: “Grandmother Aya told me to spread the word.” I can’t count the number of time’s I’ve encountered this. Richard Doyle, to pull a name out of a hat, describes meeting “a wand wielding bird deity” during a ceremony in the upper Amazon who, after clearing his asthma attack, said: “Look, you know can you write and speak about the fact that you were healed of your lifelong asthma using an ancient Indian technology?”

But just dip into psychedelic reddit and you’ll find this sort of thing everywhere:

Jules Evans had something similar happen to him. He describes a snake with a microphone telling him he could become an ayahuasca influencer. “I was naturally flattered,” he writes, “but now I wonder… are the plants / plant-spirits supporting our spiritual growth, or using us as marketing bots?”

There are, then, hermeneutically-hip ways of encountering such “messages,” and hermeneutically-unhip ways.1 Evans shows an awareness of an interpretive dimension that the Reddit poster seems to lack.

Need more examples? What about this random guy, Stuart Mason, who wrote a book called Salvia Divinorum: Reality of Life and Death? Here’s his description of a 10x salvia extract bong rip that sends him through a hole in the fabric of reality.

A young female, human in appearance… communicated to me that I was about to be let-in on the biggest secret ever. She turned my awareness around to reveal a black curtain, not in my everyday view, but somehow always there, just behind my mind… It was made known to me at this point, that humanity’s history on earth as we had come to believe, was not real. The passing of time was not real.

Stuart goes on to glimpse our universe inside something like a photo booth. He talks with “Light-Beings.” “A lot of knowledge was revealed to me,” he writes.

I don’t doubt it. The trouble is, all this is written with a very straight face. And such a straight face produces straight readings, a literalistic engagement all around—as this Amazon reviewer demonstrates.

Okay, final example. Have you heard of Baba Kilindi Iyi, proponent of the superheroic dose (30-50 dry grams)? “In my travels,” he says, “it was told to me that the mushroom is an organic technology for access to the multiverse memory bank, created to enable one to go into that library.”

I can’t know for sure, but when I hear Iyi talk, I sense little self-awareness of the interpretive choices he is making. He presents himself as a prophet of the mushroom, merely delivering messages the mushrooms gave him.

Now, I’m no super-heroic doser. But I’ve had my share of heroic doses, and whenever I examine the textures of those experiences, whenever I pay very close attention to the dynamics of the visuals and the intuitions and so-called messages in my internal perceptual field, I notice that there is always—always—an active interpretive process and hence an inherent ambiguity. The visuals, the emotions that come up, the bodily sensations: everything is in a feedback loop with my attention. I don’t, for example, see a demon and then feel fear. I see a demon and feel fear at the same time. If I were to try repressing the demon, it might get scarier. If I were to turn toward it, it might get less scary. The demon is not independent of my relationship with it.

In short, psychedelic states are interactive in a way that you can’t “get behind”—the same way you can’t open Schrödinger’s box without influencing the very thing you want to witness (the cat in its non-dual state).

Here’s a journal entry from January 2023, following an ayahuasca ceremony:

I saw a being of unutterable strangeness, a strangeness that wasn’t represented visually so much as the way it utilized representation itself. Picture an immense mushroom cloud which, as it unfurls upwards, arcs toward you, building itself with a pinkish and perfectly polished material. This moving image managed to be two things at once. At no point was it not possible to reduced it to just an interesting visual in my head; at the same time, it had a felt presence, as though another intelligence occupied it, or rather, in a less Docetic metaphor, lived through the image as a finite expression of an infinite reality. The entity, in order to enter my mind, composed itself of the stuff of my mind, but in such a way that it enacted a translucency, a double-vision, allowing me to see at the same time how it was both only a visual and something more.

This is the DMT paradox: something is trying to talk to me, as me.

Psychedelics may indeed lead to encounters with genuine Otherness. But structuring the “messages” that come through, structuring those encounters with Otherness, is always a complicating hermeneutical back-and-forth. This shouldn’t surprise us. It is this way with all experience. Even basic physical sensations are influenced by your way of relating to them, indeed to such an extent that you can’t abstract the sensation from your relationship to the sensation.

Of course I understand the wish that psychedelic messages were “special.” Wouldn’t it be wonderful to access a supreme sage who could somehow bypass the whole hermeneutical process and communicate to us infallible and self-transparent truths? Certainly some trips feel that way. But not even ecstatic feelings are enough to evade the necessity of interpretation.

“NOTHING gets past hermeneutics! Mwahaha!”

—Hans-Georg Gadamer2

This holds true no matter how high a dose of psilocybin you take.

*

One last thing. Literalist interpreters are a dime a dozen on the reddit forums, but there are plenty more nuanced literalisms. We are returning, once again, to McKenna.

In True Hallucinations, Terrence McKenna describes a trip he and his brother took in 1971 to La Chorrera in the Amazon to investigate the “secret” of DMT. It is truly one of the wildest psychedelic tales ever told. Here’s one of McKenna’s run-on speculations that populate the book:

My own reaction to the mushroom’s claims concerning the extraterrestrial origin of tryptamine hallucinogens and the visions that they bear has taken many forms. I think that it is possible that certain of these compounds could be “seeded genes” injected into the planetary ecology eons ago by an automated space-probe arriving here from a civilization somewhere else in the galaxy. Such genes could have been carried along in the genome of a mushroom or some other plant, awaiting only the advent of another intelligence and its discovery of them to begin reading out a message that opens with the bizarre dimension familiar to shamans everywhere... I speculate that the final content of the message will be instructions—it will be called a “discovery”—of how to build a matter-transmitter or some other device that will allow us direct contact with the civilization that sent the message-bearing hallucinogen genes to earth so many aeons ago...

He goes on. But despite the energy of his language, one begins to wonder if it lacks… imagination. Blasphemy, I know. McKenna’s ideas one-up the wildest Philip K. Dyck novels. I mean, to suggest that someone has “seeded intragalactic space with automatic biomechanical probes” which “tailor-make message-bearing hallucinogens for the special ecological conditions…” That’s some Deep SF right there.

And yet.

What does it amount to but simply: we are receiving messages from aliens?3

I’m not saying this isn’t a possibility. I don’t even mean to imply that it’s silly or unsophisticated to discern a “message” in a psychedelic experience or to engage with visionary entities as though they possessed their own sui generis ontological autonomy. I’m merely pointing out that this is one way of engaging with the phenomenon. And if you don’t see this, if you ignore the interpretive choice you are making, then you (a) render other interpretations inaccessible, and more importantly, (b) limit yourself to explanations that never allow the Other to truly disrupt your categories.

Which, it needs to be said, is the whole point. Hermeneutics isn’t a head game. The idea is to empower your encounter with otherness. By becoming aware of the hermeneutic dimension, by knowing your context, your interpretive choices, your projections, you are better able to discern when something is trying to puncture through.

McKenna holds his interpretations lightly, yes. But that’s not enough. He is still, at bottom, interested in a hermeneutical conclusion. He’s asking, What is “actually” going on? His interpretations are after a final explanation based on evidence, something that is “correct,” and as such still playing the game at the level of correspondence metaphysics. He uses aliens, gods, fairies, and other higher entities to explain the communicative power of mushrooms. Accordingly, our idea of reality as we know it isn’t challenged. We arrive at no new ontology.

And against the high strangeness of such psychedelic experiences as his—is that satisfying?

Psychedelic messages and entities exist in a profoundly unique and unfamiliar mode. McKenna senses that. It’s the reason, I think, his language is so rich and ecstatic. But it doesn’t matter how inventive you get with your adjectives. It doesn’t matter what fantastical hypertrophy of speculations you conjure. You’re still just hopping from one literalism to the next.

In True Hallucinations, the hermeneutic through which the McKenna brothers engaged with the whole experiment at La Chorrera rarely becomes an object of attention in itself. As a consequence, they never learn to leverage what is perhaps the most interesting, empowering, and mysterious dynamic of the whole story—the participatory dimension of all psychedelic exploration.

And just as with messages, so with maps…

Mapping Hyperspace

“Dennis and I, through a staggered description of our visions, noticed a similarity of content that seemed to suggest a telepathic phenomenon or some sort of simultaneous perception of the same invisible landscape.”

—Terrence McKenna, True Hallucinations

In his book LSD and the Mind of the Universe, Christopher Bache describes a harrowing experiment involving seventy-three sessions of 300-700 µg of LSD over two decades. He develops a nomenclature to help himself navigate the many extraordinary states he encounters through the years, and toward the end he begings to enter the most extraordinary of them all: “Diamond Luminosity.”

I was so taken by his story that, in early 2022, I organized an event in Brooklyn and invited Bache to join us via Zoom. At that gathering, a woman who had sat with ayahuasca a few times claimed in earnest that she, too, had experienced Diamond Luminosity.

I couldn’t believe the gall.

Like, you realize this dude took twenty years to get there, right? Twenty years of arduous narrativizing that, through exquisite attention and careful interpretation, gradually gave rise to what is surely but one out of a near-infinite set of possibilities inherent in consciousness—and which Bache named, in itself a hermeneutical act, Diamond Luminosity?

Right?

I get it. We’re social beings. We burn with the need to have our experiences witnessed and validated. Psychedelics in particular seem to trigger this need, partly because the wider culture is so illiterate when it comes to non-ordinary consciousness.4 But the temptation to legitimize psychedelic experiences by locating them on an objective map, a new “consensus reality,” isn’t the answer. It’s a new trap. Because what happens very quickly is the ol’ merging of map and territory: we collapse our representations with reality and, in a pyrrhic victory, trap ourselves in representations.

In other words, we lose touch with the inherent multiplicity and interpretive pluripotency of psychedelic experiences and get… literalism.

It’s not hard to find examples of this. On a podcast, I heard some dude who’d written a book on DMT describe the thought he had after his first trip: Holy shit, Alex Gray was painting a real place! I’ve heard similar things at the local psychedelic society’s Trip Tales. But most blatant of all is the Hyperspace Lexicon, a kind of OED for DMT states where you can find entries on The Waiting Room, Soul Surgery and the Hyperslap, as well as various common entities like the Jesters and the Mother Goddess.

Don’t get me wrong. When I discovered this lexicon a few years ago, I was thrilled; it was genuinely cool to see people taking seriously the challenge of mapping this crazy phenomenon.

At the same time, it makes me cringe to imagine the next generation of DMT-nauts coming down from breakthrough hits and, all starry eyed with metaphysical awe, gasping, “I saw them. I saw the Jesters!”

Rick Strassman himself, hero of psychedelic research in the dark ages of the 90s, edges toward literalism. At the end of his well-known book The Spirit Molecule, he earnestly suggests researching “the being-contact phenomenon and its relationship to parallel universes and dark matter.” Then, detailing protocols for a hypothetical future research center, he says: “it’s helpful to know something about current theories regarding ‘invisible realms,’ like dark matter and parallel universes. Equipped with these types of training and experience, research scientists and staff will be ready to understand, accept, and react to nearly everything that might come up during deep psychedelic sessions.” Unfortunately, by “accept,” I think he may be saying just what he means.5

Patrick Harpur, in his book The Philosopher’s Secret Fire: A History of the Imagination, has this to say to anyone describing psychic material as though it were “located” somewhere in the multiverse.

The whole debate about whether the unconscious is inside us or outside is a distraction… The unconscious, soul, imagination—whatever model we use—are in themselves non-spatial, just as they are timeless… But in order to discuss them at all we find ourselves falling back on spatial metaphors, calling the unconscious for instance an ‘inner realm’ or ‘an alien country outside the ego.’ But the unconscious is not a literal place. Images are not contained in it; images are the unconscious—‘image is “psyche,”’ said Jung... The unconscious is itself an image.

It’s tempting to act as if psychedelics bring us into some kind of shared navigable space. I mean, wouldn’t it be cool if, by smoking DMT, we could in fact adventure into a hidden parallel world? I think most DMT-nauts aware that this is a metaphor for what’s happening, at least at some level. But narratives ossify. It’s easier to describe your breakthrough journey this way. It’s easier (returning to the topic of messages) just to say, Ayahuasca gave me this idea, Shrooms told me that. It might even feel more socially meaningful.

So we cast aside the whole complex phenomenology that orchestrated the Aha moment, and just keep the Aha.

Fine. But isn’t it better to be self-aware about it?

Stop Reducing Me, Valve: On “Psychedelic Ideas”

“A psychedelic trip should not mean but be.”

—Andy Mitchell, Ten Trips

Such simplification also happens at a broad cultural level. Psychedelia is full of founding myths, origin stories, and ideas that people claim were inspired by psychedelics.

Example 1. Take Aldous Huxley’s notion of the “Reducing Valve.” Anyone who’s read The Doors of Perception probably recalls the book’s big epiphany: the brain, rather than producing consciousness, in fact constricts it from the unbounded “Mind at Large” down to a biologically useful trickle of data.

I used to think that this was one of those “psychedelic ideas.” But as Mike Jay points out in Mescaline, Huxley “conceived it as an explanation for the effects of mescaline some time before he took it: he had outlined it in his first letter to Osmond a month previously.”

(In fact, C. D. Broad, who Huxley credits with suggesting that the brain is “eliminative and not productive,” took inspiration from Henri Bergson. And if you want to dive deeper still, Bergson himself likely took inspiration from Nietzsche, who was onto this whole thing back in 1885: “…we have senses for only a selection of perceptions — those with which we have to concern ourselves in order to preserve ourselves. Consciousness is present only to the extent that consciousness is useful.”6)

In short, to credit psychedelics themselves with ideas is psychedelic literalism.

Example 2. Reading an essay titled “The Return of the Philosophy of Psychedelics (And Why It Matters)” I came across the idea that Plato owed his philosophy to a psychedelic experience:

It doesn’t seem so far-fetched to imagine a psychedelic origin of Plato’s ‘Allegory of the Cave’: transcending the illusory sensory impressions of the material world (portrayed as shadows cast on a cave wall by a fire) and gaining knowledge of ultimate reality... “Whitehead famously said, ‘Western philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato.’ If Plato was inspired by psychedelics, then the whole of the Western canon is unwittingly inspired by these experiences,” Sjöstedt-Hughes adds.

Plato did claim to be inspired by the Eleusinian Mysteries. And as we’ve seen, the Mysteries may have involved a psychedelic. But to present this as a linear story of cause-and-effect is sophistical. As we’ve also seen, the so-called messages don’t emerge ex nihilo. They arise from a rich froth of preexistent emotional and conceptual material. In this sense, the psychedelic experience in fact owes everything to us—to the cultural and personal context into which we plug Grof’s ol’ nonspecific amplifier. We could just as well say that philosophy (i.e. the myths and values instantiated by the Mysteries) inspired Plato’s trip.

Sixty years ago, Timothy Leary called this the “programmability” of psychedelic experience. Today, anthropologist David Dupuis puts it in less sexy terms:

Rather than opting for a seductive but angelic approach seeing psychedelics as substances capable of healing the world… psychedelics should be thought less as tools for social transformation than as vectors of cultural transmission. (Emphasis mine)

Example 3. Not because we need it, just because it annoys me. In that same essay on philosophy and psychedelics, I came across the sentence: “Huxley adopted a belief in the ‘perennial philosophy’ (philosophia perennis), inspired by psychedelics.”

Again! That cause-and-effect framing! But this time, I can prove it’s garbage. Sit down, hold onto your butts, and look at the publication dates:

1. The Perennial Philosophy: 1945

2. The Doors of Perception: 1954

Huxley took mescaline nearly a decade after formulating his ideas on perennialism.

What is going on here?

The overzealous impulse to locate psychedelic inspiration at the heart of Western thought and history drives no small number of books, blogs, and podcasts. Foucault in California, a charming but insubstantial memoir, has no raison d’etre other than the idea that Foucault, one of the Greats of 21^st century philosophy, owed something to a psychedelic. Peter Sjöstedt-Hughes’ essay, “The Psychedelic Influence on Philosophy,” tracks the (very thin) engagement of philosophers with psychoactive compounds. And so on. Part of this, to be sure, is motivated by the desire to give credit where credit is due. It represents a search of truth in the scientific sense. But motivating that search is also a revisionist impulse, a need for academic and cultural legitimacy in the wake of drug prohibition and stigmatization. To put it crassly: we want to be able to say to those who judge us for our drug use: See? Plato did it!7

It’s a trauma response.

Haha… But seriously?

For my part, I’m not convinced that we need to enlist the authority of the ancients to justify our present-day investigations into consciousness. It’s nice that philosophy isn’t totally ridden with psychedelic virgins, and that, for example, William James huffed nitrous and understood Hegel better. But let’s not make too much of it. These simplified narratives will backfire, burying a hermeneutical dynamic that, were we instead to become conscious of it, would become for us a source of power and agency.

How so? It’s to this that we now turn…

*

…Part Four

1. Part One: Hermeneutics and psychedelic literalism

2. Part Two: McKenna, perennialism, Eleusis

3. Part Three: Messages and entities, DMT space, psychedelic ideas

4. Part Four: Participatory hermeneutics

5. Conclusion: Mystical community and the Mystery

McKenna and the Tease of Immediacy

“Language is not an indirect method of communication, to be contrasted with ‘direct’ thought reading. Thought-reading could only take place through the interpretation of symbols and so would be on the same level as language. It would not get rid of the symbolic process.”

—Ludwig Wittgenstein

Two things before we begin our exploration of Terrence Mckenna’s philosophical assumptions. First, I want to say that I find his soliloquies thrillingly inventive. Even if his views fail to cohere into the kind of durable spiritual perspective I’m always on the lookout for, he kept things going during the psychedelic dark ages of the 80s and 90s, exhibiting a curiosity and cognitive agility that defined for so many what it meant to be a psychedelic explorer.

Second, given how frequently McKenna quoted Heidegger, he should have known better.

Several months ago, I was preparing to facilitate a book group on McKenna’s True Hallucinations. To get into the spirit of McKenna’s wild Sci-Fi-adjacent journey into the Amazon, I listened to a number of talks, including this one, recorded at Esalen in March, 1996, in which McKenna posits a polarity between “nature” and “culture.”

Here are his remarks:

The only time you recover the natural state of human beings is in orgasm and in psychedelic apotheosis. And then, you know, for fleeting moments you recover it. Then you’re dropped back down through levels and levels of culture, programming, obligation, matrix stuff, matrix, matrix. Anyway, what I wanted to get to is how to do this, how to get out of culture, how to get out of three-dimensional space, how to get into this superspace. Well there are two main methods on the table, and one is through—no matter how you cut it—some manipulation of the body… And strangely enough often unaccompanied by substance, plants or drugs, but almost always accompanied by enormous doses of fuzzy thought and ideology, usually known as religion. So there is that path. And the claim that you can achieve somehow the paradox of being outside, without ever leaving culture, by using the cultural instrument of religion to religion to make your way to the heart of the mystery, I reject this. I just think it is bunk. It is an effort to close the loophole. It is an effort to channel spiritual thirst that is still culturally affirming. But spiritual thirst can’t be culturally affirming, because it is a rejection of culture. Culture generates spiritual thirst. Okay, so the other method on the table are psychedelics.

Isn’t this interesting? The goal, McKenna states explicitly, is to get outside of culture. “Radical human freedom is what you were born for,” he says in the same talk, “and culture is a kind of placenta, which if you develop normally by around age twenty you have no need of it.”

To be clear, by “culture,” McKenna is not talking about stinky cheeses and erudite conversations during intercession at the Met. Nor is he talking about culture in the broad sense of mainstream Western culture. By culture, he seems to mean any collective social context in which meaning-making happens.

Not “a” culture, but culture as such.

All these remarks are met without challenge from his audience. In fact, people begin asking him how to do it. And McKenna has an answer. Again and again in his talks, his psychedelic theology becomes praxis in the exhortation to take “five dry grams in silent darkness.” It’s a clear line from a philosophy of culture-escape to this minimalism. Isolate yourself. Withdraw the mind from the senses. Clear away the clutter of language, imagery, environment, and get closer to the “real thing.” “Avoid gurus, follow plants,” goes another famous McKenna quote. Direct, unmediated Gnosis: this is the proper psychedelic initiation.1

A nice sentiment. But doesn’t it overlook something vital and, well, inevitable? Doesn’t it, by ignoring the decisive role of socio-cultural contexts, enter into a delusion that communication—whether it be from humans or plants—could ever take place through some kind of direct, cultureless vector?

What we’re dealing with here, if you haven’t already caught on, is a sneaky version of psychedelic literalism.

*

Let’s pause and remind ourselves what our school of Continental Philosophy observes about experience.

1. You are always inside a “tradition.”

2. A tradition is a set of pre-ontological understandings that constitute our relationship and comportment to being.

3. This relationship influences what “shows up” in your Lebenswelt and is the precondition for personal experience.

In sum, our being in the world is situated within and forestructured by a tradition. There is no place “outside” tradition from which to think or represent experience. We do not live in the Unconditioned Formlessness; where we live, all there is is one big interpretive space.

The Tease of Immediacy: this is how Continental philosophers might describe the wriggly hope of making lasting contact with “reality as such” outside of mediating factors. Sucking off layers of interpretation is indeed possible; tricky, but possible. But to actually arrive at full-on Immediacy? To grasp it in a way that can be formalized and represented—in short, made constitutive of a philosophy?

Nah.

All Immediacy is embedded in Mediation. Moments of so-called direct experience take place within and are shaped by our contexts and traditions and stories. It is not possible to fully and permanently separate culture and nature, self and world, interpretation and reality. You can pull the poles apart, but they will always snap back.

(Yes, all Mediation is also embedded in Immediacy—neither is master, neither has the upper hand. But our purposes are are to correct overzealous literalisms.)

What, then, do we do with McKenna? Immediacy seems to be his prize hen. It become a whole spiel in another talk: “What life… is supposed to be about is the reclamation of the primacy of direct experience.” But there is a big ol’ blind spot in this view. By positing a kind of a-cultural gnosis, a perspective “outside culture,” and then by claiming this perspective, he renders himself—in the same way as that non-denominational pastor who “needed no hermeneutic”—immune to critique.

One example is all we need. So here is Graham St. John, in his cultural history of DMT, describing McKenna’s take of shamanism:

Expressing the view that the hyperdimensional experience is “too numinous and energy-laden to be accessible through a tradition,” McKenna held that the gnosis should not be governed by administrators of the divine, but “must be personally discovered in the depths of the psychedelically intoxicated soul.” … The possibility of direct, unmediated gnosis was declared to be a human right, an idea striking appeal among his audience.2

Catch that? McKenna is making it out as though it’s only the shamans who have traditions. Not him. He’s the one free of cultural and theological baggage.3

He isn’t alone in this, either. The feeling of possessing unmediated knowledge, a knowing that needs no external validation, is not uncommon in psychedelic states. It can even alter entire worldviews, as this study suggests.

Now, personally, I believe there are indeed ways of using these compounds that make us more self-aware about our cultural assumptions. Psychedelics may indeed alleviate what neuroscientists call “canalisation” (i.e. “over-learning”) and as a result temporarily free us from ingrained patterns of relating to ourselves and the world. Psychedelics may even help us realize the deep dependence of our experience on presuppositions and reality frameworks.

However. It’s different when you think you’ve “arrived” at something.

The danger of McKenna’s language is the danger present in all traditions that claim privileged access to unmediated truth. We know how this goes. History is full of confident middle-aged men who think they’ve arrived at the metaphysical pinnacle. Here’s Caputo again, getting snarky:

What we always get—it never fails—in the name of the Unmediated is someone’s highly mediated Absolute: their Jealous Jahweh, their righteous Allah, their infallible church, their absolute Geist that inevitably speaks German... Somehow this absolutely absolute always ends up with a particular attachment to some historical, natural language, a particular nation, a particular religion.4

*

In case you’re getting worried, I promise I’m not leading you towards nihilistic relativism. This isn’t some cynical post-modern take-down of earnest quests for truth. Such a quest is what we’re on right now. (Do you have your vorpal blade?)

What we are examining is the dichotomy between “culture” and “experience” and the attempt to abstract the former form the latter. To pursue this naively is to be a sucker for the “Tease of Immediacy”: the always-beyond-ness of direct experience which resists formalization and representation. Psychedelics, it seems, can give energy to this wild goose chase. They can engender a yearning for a naïve realism that abdicates its interpretive responsibility in co-creating the reality it lives into.

There is a far more popular and innocuous-seeming version of this. You know it as…

Perennial Philosophy

“There is no mysticism as such, there is only the mysticism of a particular religious system, Christian, Islamic, Jewish mysticism, and so on.”

—Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism

Perennial philosophy refers to the notion that all religions share a common mystical core and as such are expressions of the same Divine Truth. In other words: when you undress each tradition of its language, its stories and texts, its mediating factors, you find the same naked body.

You can see where this is going.

But let’s give some hermeneutical charity to the perennialists. Philosophia perennis has a longstanding history, dating back to its first coinage in 1540 by Agostino Steuco, and arguably further still, into the Neoplatonism of the 3^rd century. It is, in part, an effort to respond to an urgent existential problem resulting from the various truth claims across the world’s spiritual traditions. How do we account for such a rich and conflicting visions? Who is “right”? The perennialist answer is to cut right through so-called superficial differences and posit a nameless, wordless, unmediated knowingness behind it all in which everyone can participate. Advaita Vedantists call it Brahman, Taoists call it the Tao, Christians call it union with God, a practitioner of Patañjali’s yoga call it asamprajñata samadhi, Sufis call it Allah, Kabbalists call it Kether, Zen Buddhists call it sunyata. But “it’s all the same thing.”

Perennial philosophy enjoyed a surge in popularity in the 20^th century, in part thanks to Aldous Huxley. Many psychedelic thinkers and researchers now hold this perspective.

Dr. William Richards, for example—one of the leads in the Johns Hopkins clinical trials. He uses this very perennialist language to conclude his book:

God awaits and embraces us both as Ground of Being (Celestial Buddha Fields, Pure Land, The Void that contains all Reality, The Ground Luminosity of Pure Awareness) and as Personal Deity (Lord Jehovah, Lord Jesus, Lord Krishna, Lord Buddha).5

You can also see Dr. Anthony Bossis, the director for a clinical trial at NYU on the effects of psilocybin on religious professionals, quoting perennialist Abraham Maslow during his presentation at the MAPS conference Psychedelic Science 2023: “All religions are the same in their essence and have always been the same.”

And Stan Grof himself, a friend of Maslow’s and a figure whose influence is hard to underemphasize in the field of psychedelic research and transpersonal psychology, states of his research: “It became clear that I had rediscovered what Aldous Huxley called ‘perennial philosophy.’”6 He even wrote a whole book on the theme: The Cosmic Game.7

The claim made by these psychedelic researchers is, in short, that the psychedelic experience participates in the same mystical core that perennial philosophy posits across religions.

But here’s the problem. And you know what I’m going to say next—so I’m going to have Jules Evans say it: “The idea that psychedelics predictably lead to a unitive experience beyond time, space and culture is itself culture-bound—it’s the product of US culture, and the perennialism of Huxley, Dass, Ralph Waldo Emerson and others.”8

I want to be careful here. This is subtle territory. It’s worthwhile to draw comparisons and see patterns where they exist across cultures, across traditions, and across individual experience.9 These psychedelic researchers, and perennialists in general, are responding to and interpreting a very real “data set”: mystical texts and experiences. They are, you might say, looking for a “unified theory of consciousness.”

But recall Gadamar’s insistence on the universality of hermeneutics. Recall our critique of McKenna’s Gnosticism. What we want to avoid is the creation of a wholly new tradition that, blind to the hermeneutical process, becomes hubristically invisible to itself as an interpretive tradition.

And that seems to be what’s happening here.

There’s no getting around it: perennialism is an a priori philosophical stance. A likeable stance, certainly. But full of bias. It favors a nondual monistic metaphysic, values commonality above difference, and tends towards objectivism by claiming a universal underlying structure of consciousness and reality. As a consequence, it becomes quietly dogmatic. It insists, in one way or another, on a single ultimate spiritual realization.

In his book, Rational Mysticism, John Horgan interviews a delightfully scornful anti-perennialist named Steven Katz, who has this to say about that:

There is no universal mystical truth apprehended by Christians, Jews, Buddhists, and Hindus alike; mystical experiences are enormously diverse, and they invariably reflect each mystic’s particular culture and personality.

Or, as Katz puts it more bluntly elsewhere, “There are NO pure (i.e., unmediated) experiences.”

Katz goes too far, in my opinion. Yes, the conceptual/metaphorical/mythological containers of each religion are more powerful and ontologically decisive than perennialists acknowledge. But zealous postmodernists have a way of overemphasizing the power of context and thereby, in my estimation, undermining the possibility of transcending our particular cultures and traditions. It’s a self-fulfilling (self-damning) prophecy.

All the same, let’s receive Katz’ corrective. Putting it our own words: all experience, even mystical knowingness, is embedded in a larger context of mediation.

This is the reason that religious traditions shape different spiritual characters. It’s the reason mystical states themselves differ. As Jorge Ferrer points out, “The more precisely mystical states are described, the more disparate they appear to be.” See, for example, Jess Hollenback’s research on the contextuality of mysticism.10 When you look at how it gets expressed, the values it suggests, its personal and social ramifications, etc., the nondual experience of a Vaishnavite in the 12th century just flat-out unfolds differently than the ecstatic devotional experience of a 16th Century Benedictine monk.

The container is not absolutely determinative, of course, but it is inescapably influential. Just as with psychedelic trips.

Which brings us to…

The Myth of a Primordial Psychedelic Experience

“The whole point of these psilocybin interventions, [Dr. Anthony Bossis] concedes, is to trigger the same beatific vision that was reported at Eleusis for millennia.”

—Brian C. Muraresku, The Immortality Key

So, we have (a) the idea that all religions, when you look past their particulars, share a common originary mystical experience; and (b) the idea that psychedelics can occasion that same experience. What happens when you bring them together, and add a pinch of conspiratorial thinking?

You get… Brian C. Muraresku.

Muraresku’s recent book, The Immortality Key, is responsible for re-hypping an old hypothesis first posed by John M. Allegro in 1970’s The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross. Allegro’s idea was admittedly a little more farfetched. He argued that Christianity had its origins in mushroom cults that survived into the current era. Muraresku’s version relies on ergot fungus in the kykeon wine mixture from the Greek mystery cults. It comes to the same thing in the end, though: psychedelics are responsible.11

What was the original sacrament of Western civilization? And did it somehow sneak its way into the primitive rites of Christianity? If the experts ever turn up new information on the real reason why the universe of Greek-speaking pagans became the founding generations of Christianity, turning a Jewish healer from Galilee into the most famous human being who ever lived, it promises the Reformation to end all Reformations. Because the mystical core, the ecstatic source and true lifeblood of the biggest religion the world has ever known, will have finally been exposed.12

For all the pizzaz and salesmanship, there is actually a solid scholarly argument here. I don’t quite buy it, others do—I’m not going to get into that. I’m more interested in the assumptions that motivate Muraresku’s research and frame its importance. The assumption, namely, that inserting psychedelics as “causal factors” in religious and philosophical systems changes something fundamental about our understanding of those systems, and human history itself.

It’s a Gnostic claim, basically. There is a secret, a “final” revelation, hidden behind the revelation.

And it’s drugs!

(I’m imagining the conniption fits all this would induce in Karl Barth, a theologian who scorned the demythologization projects so fashionable among the European intelligentsia of his time. The revelation, the spiritual catalyst—oh, it couldn’t possibly have anything to do with the claim that God became flesh and dwelt among us! Simply unpalatable!)

I do understand why this is an important hypothesis. If it’s truly a buried history, it matters. Especially in our current context of the war on drugs, religious prejudice, injustice and ongoing stigma.

But, looked at hermeneutically, it misses the point. From Anthony Wallace’s 1959 paper, “Cultural Determinants of Response to Hallucinatory Experience,” through to today’s millionth psychedelic newsletter, “set and setting” have been long acknowledged as factors equally important as the psychedelic catalyst. But Muraresku (a psychedelic virgin by his own admission) writes as though he’s never cracked Double Blind Magazine.

What made Eleusis special wasn’t the sacrament. As Joshua Schrei of the inimitable podcast, The Emerald, says:

Imagine years of waiting to be initiated. Friends who have gone through the initiation and come back changed but can’t speak about it. What little they say comes with the welling of tears, tears that arrive with the memory of something sharp and bright. Whispers of the story of the goddess to be told in full only at the festival. One’s entire socio-cultural experience of the world oriented around this mythic narrative of death and renewal.

In other words, the secret of Eleusis isn’t a secret, it’s right there on the surface. It’s not the ergot fungus in the kykeon;13 it is every element of the rite.

It’s the fasting.

The dancing.

The all-night vigil inside the Telesterion.

The presence of the holy Anaktoron, which only the hierphants could enter.

It is the whole ritual complex which, moving the initiates through mythologized action inside a container so sacred that to divulge its contents meant death, culminates in a peak experience of participatory awe.

No part of that isn’t sacred: that is the secret.

*

So Muraresku downplays the importance of the container. Why is that so concerning? Because behind it all broods that same Gnostic craving we saw in McKenna. Get outside the symbols. Escape culture, see the Truth. That’s what it’s all about, man.

Here’s Muraresku once more, and it’s only page thirty-six: “Back in the Garden of Eden, maybe the forbidden fruit was forbidden for a reason. Who needs the fancy building, the priest and all the rest of it—even the Bible—if all you really need is the fruit?”

Can you hear it now?

We don’t need no hermeneutic. All we need is the fruit.

By ignoring the power of symbols and myth, by ignoring the role of interpretation and the contextual web of meaning, we lose sight of what makes these experiences meaningful in the first place.

Erik Davis, a historian of the weird, cleverly observes the latent irony:

The desire within the psychedelic community to reduce the rich and highly variegated phenomena of religious experience to secret psychoactive cults is, I think, misguided and historically problematic, at least given the associational and fantastic way that most people try to pursue it… Such literalism actually goes against one of the main features of psychedelic experience and psychedelic cognition, which is that the world, whatever else it is, is profoundly metaphoric. Our experience is not literal; the world is not literal. And yet people want to discover a literal drug at the heart of religious experience to reduce the latter to the former, just like good skeptics.

In short, those who lean on psychedelics to explain religion in fact lose the mystery for a newfound materialism. If you think you understand Eleusis because a scholar tells you there was probably a lysergamide somewhere in all that fasting and kerfuffle, and if as a result you think that you can reproduce Eleusis in some session room at Johns Hopkins with a dose of psilocybin…

Well, I don’t know what to tell you.

But this assumption can reach even deeper levels of ridiculousness. Jules Evans, writing about New Age and neo-shamanic churches making up their own religions, relates this anecdote from MAPS’ Psychedelic Science 2023 conference:

At the panel to present the initial findings of the Johns Hopkins / NYU ‘psychedelics for priests’ study, one man stood up in the Q&A and said: ‘I run a psychedelic church with a congregation of over a 1000, we’re also training around 80 ministers. Any advice on what sort of cosmology we should have?’

There was a long pause. ‘That’s totally out of my wheel house’, replied Roland Griffiths.

I got chills reading this. Chills. The mythology, the story, the values—they’re an after-thought! Not even a particularly important after-thought if they can be asked about during a panel Q+A. What does this church leader think myth is? A generic plug and play item? Pick a myth, any myth will do! I mean, are you serious right now!? *Throws laptop across room*

This is a rejection of our own hermeneutical freedom. You could even say it is a rejection of meaning itself. It is life denying. As though the particular nature of the story the church tells, the values it embodies, the mysteries it points to, could be dealt with the way we settle a bill…

But we’ll return to this point later. We’ve got more literalist territory to cover.

*

…Part Three

his mirror broken a thousand times

frightened

listening

not wanting to be lost

drawing plans

of the plans drawing themselves in him

—Henri Michaux

Two summers ago, I smoked a bowl of cannabis and found myself coming up on DMT.

Surprise!

I’d known there might be DMT residue in the pipe from past sessions, but it took me three deep drags to realize I’d drastically underestimated the amount. Part of me was thrilled. How many chances do you get to trip without expecting to? The other part neared panic. At the time, I was cat sitting in Connecticut. Holding that last hit in my lungs, I lay on the lawn and stared up at the backyard’s massive elm as a sentient-seeming warpzone opened in and around me. The leaves transmuted into hieroglyphs, my body into an expanding plane of energy. Each second I held it took me higher.

I could go as high as I like, I realized, just by keeping it in my lungs. When to stop? How to make such an increasingly important decision with such a decreasingly functional mind?  

I exhaled—but the transdimensional membrane kept peeling back. Feeling radically undefended, I stumbled into the house, stretched out on the sofa, and there, frantically choosing a comforting song on my phone, glided into a full-on DMT-inflected cannabis journey.

*

Why do I tell this story? First, to make clear that as the self-serious concepts stack up in what follows, I’m really just a goof who accidentally doses himself with superpotent psychoactive molecules.

Second, because of what happened next.

In those first ten minutes, the challenge of self-stabilization presented itself as cosmically important, even—oh, psychedelics—somehow fractally or synecdochely related to a more significant and longer-term spiritual process. Was I “spiritually prepared” for this, I wondered? Abraham Heschel, a Jewish theologian, describes the goal of the religious path as a readiness to face holy moments.1 Holiness, being holiness, is beholden to nothing. How, then, did one become the kind of person who could meet the unannounced in-breaking of the sacred with the gravity and poise it required?

…Such as when you accidently smoke DMT? (Forgive me, Heschel.)

There was no getting around it: I had to be my own guide. Despite having set no intentions and prepared no container, I had to make meaning of the trip in real time, sorting myself out from within the mess of my own thoughts while simultaneously coming to grips with the very related and discomfiting intuition that this imperfect coping-through-the-mess, this authority-less space through which I tumbled, is actually the way things are for everyone, across all spiritual traditions, at all times, period.

Oh, psychedelics.

It was a moment that seemed to bring together the whole history of my eclectic spirituality. Since high school, my world has been rocked by countless great hearts—Thomas Merton, St. Augustine, Theresa of Avila, Angelus Silesius, Shantideva, Ram Dass, Simone Weil, Hafez, Ibn Arabi. The hunt for ever more exotic, ever more cosmologically and mythically novel teachings and practices has driven me into some strange and magical corners of the library. But behind this search, it seemed to me—suddenly, on that Connecticut couch—I had, all along, been looking for something that doesn’t exist: a ruler, a perfect “straight edge,” an absolute and authoritative reference point against which to grow.

Sometimes I turn on a tape recorder while tripping. It helps with recall later. Plus, those slurred utterances, in all their dorky and over-earnest energy, often become silly little koans to unpack.

I did so now. A surprising heartache erupted in me as I spoke, so deep and heavy that it felt like missing a loved one.

I have this yearning for a complete teaching. Something that is really truly complete. But because of who we are, there can’t be a master text. There can’t be.

Everything is just improvised.

An idol was crumbling away, a vestige of a spiritual naiveté that, though I knew better, I had unconsciously taken comfort in. Indulged, as Castaneda’s Don Juan might say. I know that all wisdom teachings have a situated history. But I hadn’t let myself feel the depth of what that meant. Tantra, Vipassana meditation, Sufi whirling, Hesychasm, Cantillation—every spiritual practice was ultimately born out of and remains characterized by the same messy reality in which I found myself now.

There I was, yearning for an Ultimate Tradition. A Master Text. A sure and guaranteed path to walk down. Yearning, in other words, to escape context, situatedness, and the whole hermeneutic process. 

Ha!

*

In this piece, I will explore how similar yearnings play out in the world of psychedelics through what I’m calling—bundling together a diverse but unified set of subcultural phenomena—psychedelic literalism.

This will be more of a ramble than a treatise: I can’t hope to make definitive arguments on a topic so nuanced and quantum-unstable, nor do I want to. I’d rather presume your first-hand knowledge of psychedelics, as well as a baseline level of readerly patience and interpretive charity. We’ll get into the juicier stuff that way.

I will touch on:

1. Part One: Hermeneutics and psychedelic literalism

2. Part Two: McKenna, perennialism, Eleusis

3. Part Three: Messages and entities, DMT space, psychedelic ideas

4. Part Four: Participatory hermeneutics

5. Conclusion: Mystical community and the Mystery

Forgive me if this occasionally feels polemical. My true hope is that readers will receive these reflections as an invitation into a deeper participation with the psychedelic phenomenon and the freedom it can open up.

What is Literalism?

“Revelation does not reach us in a neutral state.”

—Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics

Imagine a world in which no one ever dreamt. There, that sui generis oneiric reality we all know, in which anything can happen and every emotion is available to be felt, simply doesn’t exist. People just go to sleep and wake up.

Now imagine that for the first time in this world, someone… dreams. They wake up and recall a bewildering, utterly improbable sequences of events that, furthermore, seemed to have happened differently than things usually happen.

What is this person to think? How are they to talk about it? How assign value, significance, or indeed reality to the occurrence?

Without any cultural context to guide them, things could go nearly any direction.

Imagine, now, others beginning to dream. Soon thousands and tens of thousands have their own stories. People are waking up confused, excited, heartbroken. It’s making the news. Someone has a wet dream, someone has a blood-curdling nightmare. Someone insists they’ve seen the future. Dream coaches enter the market. Peer support circles form. The first book on dreams is published, and now dream virgins want an experience too. Theories abound on Tik Tok: it’s a parallel dimension, it’s a message from your higher self, it’s random neurons firing. Someone claims to have found the key to dream symbols and offers readings for $333. Rolling Stone Magazine publishes an article about Amazonian tribes who have been dreaming for thousands of years…

Sound familiar? We’re living this story now.

*

The use of psychedelic substances is exploding in North America. According to this Monitoring the Future study, it quadrupled among 35-50-year-olds over the last decade, and tripled among 19-30-year-olds last year. Judging by the number of drug dealers now spamming my zero-posts Instagram account, I’d say this checks out.

Simultaneously, psychedelic subcultures are crystallizing. As someone involved in the psychedelic “field” since 2021 (what has the “field” come to that I can’t type it without quotes?) I’ve had a front row seat to it all. We’ve got the trauma-heads over here, the hard-core DMTx psychonauts clamoring to be the next hyperspace Columbus over there. We’ve got the feel-good neoshamans, the microdose moms, the earnest therapists, the VC bros on the scent for the next burgeoning market. It’s a subculture in itself to mock the subcultures: thank you Adam Aronovich and Dennis Walker.

But while engagement with psychedelics increases, ecstatic literacy lags behind.

A term coined by Jules Evan, ecstatic literacy refers to the way we make sense of ecstatic experiences, including psychedelic states. Currently, there is no lack of intellectual engagement with psychedelics per se. But when we speak about our trips, how aware are we of the presuppositions, values and models that inform our meaning-making? Are we holding these experiences with critical and historical awareness? There are, of course, plenty of thinkers who model this to an advanced degree.2 But on the whole, the tone out there in psychedelia is still mostly hype-filled and pseudo-intellectual. People are under-resourced to process their experiences through robust critical frameworks.

And it shows. In this qualitative study on ayahuasca drinkers, Alex Gearin found that a “resistance towards ascribing metaphorical status to psychedelic experiences” was “shared by many ayahuasca drinkers in the United States, Europe, Australia, and elsewhere… For some, marking a psychedelic vision a metaphor is an ontological offense akin to treating a sober memory like it was a fairy tale or fiction.”

I get it. To call such powerful experiences “metaphorical” might feel like a diminishment.

But isn’t this backwards?

Isn’t this, rather, a drastic underestimation of the power, and indeed of the reality, of metaphor?

Don’t get me wrong: it’s wonderful that more people are learning to clear trauma from their nervous systems, grow fluent in the somatics of emotion, re-access bodily pleasure, unleash primal energy at consciousness festivals, etc. But if the mission is to “mainstream” psychedelics, to spiritualize humanity and democratize mystical experience, and if hundreds of thousands, even millions, of people are going to be pursing the drug-induced ecstasies that movers and shakers like Bob Jesse tell us are our “birthright,” then, unless we want to lock ourselves into new broken stories, we need more sophisticated and self-critical frameworks than literalism.

*

Time for a definition? “Literalism,” in philosophy and theology, generally refers to any way of conceptualizing or speaking about texts that does not recognize the foundational role of interpretation and context in shaping the message of the text itself.

Take Christian fundamentalism, for example. I’m not just talking about Westboro Baptists yelling in the streets. My Dad, an Anglican priest, has this telling story from his seminary years involving a non-denominational pastor. They were chatting about sermon writing. For background, it is standard for pastors and priests, when preparing a homily, to use a study Bible to supplement their knowledge of Hebrew and Koine Greek, plus dozens of commentaries which provide book-by-book exegetical support.

“Oh, I don’t use any of that,” the pastor said.

“Then how do you do exegesis?”

“We just read the text. We don’t need a hermeneutic.”

My Dad was appalled. At the time, I didn’t fully understand my Dad’s reaction; now those words make me shiver.

We don’t need a hermeneutic.

The ancient Greek word hermeneuein means “to utter, to explain, to translate.” A hermeneutic, then, is a way of interpreting. You can’t not have a hermeneutic. Would you read Breitbart News with distrust or credulity? That’s a hermeneutic. Would you read First Corinthians as addressing a particular minority community in an oppressive empire two thousand years in the past, or as a message intended for you, now, as you scroll BibleGateway your phone? That’s a hermeneutic. You can study history through a hermeneutic of suspicion (Nietszsche, Marx, Freud), a hermeneutic of charity (Augustine, Kierkegaard), or even a hermeneutic that treats everything as a kind of endless aesthetic play (Derrida, Borges, yay!). 

And if you think you don’t have a hermeneutic, then, buddy, your hermeneutic is unconscious. And remember what Jung said about that:

Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.3

Just look at the disturbing spectacle of the mega church: hundreds of thousands of people engaging with an ancient collection of texts as though nothing were required to understand their messages but a sincere heart—nay, the feeling of a sincere heart. In reality, it’s confirmation bias in overdrive: cherry-picking questionably translated New Testament passages to support homophobia, fear of female leadership, revenge-fantasies, and the almost literal worship of Moloch (capital). And you can’t even argue with them, because they won’t acknowledge their fucking hermeneutic.

So that’s literalism as it plays out in American Christianity. Most major religions have their own version. But what is psychedelic literalism?

This is where things get tricky. Because we’re no longer just talking about interpreting texts, but experience. And what we find when we examine the matter is that experience, and reality itself, has a hermeneutical dimension.

Conception Affects Perception

“The map precedes the territory.”

—Jean Baudrillard

Let’s take a step back and clarify a few key concepts. 

When I was a bushy-tailed undergrad, I took a class on Continental Philosophy, a school of thought devoted to examining the non-obvious presuppositions that shape our experience of the world. It is no joke to say it changed my life. Forget illegal drugs: if parents are going to freak out about what their kids get up to at college, let it be over a flirtation with Edmund Husserl.

The basic idea is, well, very basic. So basic it can be hard to grasp. Generally, we position ourselves as observers over against a singular, objective “reality,” and assume that this reality is universally true for everyone at all times. This perspective, it is fair to say, is the default; it’s how most of us operate in the unexamined moments of our lives. It is also the operative scientific stance. Quantum physics notwithstanding, the scientific method presumes to investigate one reality by means of objective measures. Reality as it is “internal to itself,” reality as an object of study, has been the obsession of western philosophers for centuries.

Against this, the Continental tradition operates from the insight that there is no pure, raw, objective experience of the world.

Early in the course, we examined something called the “as-structure” of experience. This is the observation that everything—every object or person or thought or action or Whip-It! charger eyed from across the room—in order to appear to us at all, must appear as something. In other words, sensory experience isn’t an arrival of “raw data” which then gets formulated into this or that. Rather, sensory experience is shaped from the get-go by a set of forestructured understandings, pre-existent categories, values, and expectations: what Husserl calls the life-world (Lebenswelt). For us to experience anything at all, it must manifest according to the shape of this life-world.

As John Caputo writes in our class textbook, Radical Hermeneutics4: “an object is an object for consciousness only inasmuch as consciousness has been motivated to constitute it as such.”

Got it?

Take that Whip-It! charger. When I pay attention to how it shows up in my experience, I realize that I see it right from the beginning as a Whip-It! It doesn’t through a phase transition from an abstract set of lines and curves and colors that I then decide would make a good Whip-It! It is whole—interpreted—from the start. I know pre-cognitively, for example, that it is a thing I could pick up, because I’d be surprised if I found it glued to the counter. I’d be surprised, too, if I went around and found that it had no backside. Or that it smelled tangy. These surprises reveal implicit structural expectations. This is what Caputo means when he says, “The object which is able to appear has been prepared for in advance.” Such predelineation makes my experience of the Whip-It! possible.

Of course, those who don’t know that a Whip-It! contains 8 grams of NO2 and a short-cut to bliss may cycle through various possibilities suggested by that oblong bullet; nonetheless, in so far as they notice it, they will see an “it,” a thing, a meaningful object gestalt. Those who have experienced nitrous addiction, on the other hand, may find the Whip-It! charger has an extraordinary presence in their perceptual continuum. It’s nonvisible “aliveness” draws the gaze… This is interpretation in action. How the Whip-It! shows up for you is influenced by your context, your intentions and expectations, your relationship with it.

So important are these contexts of meaning, these interpretive structures, that it’s fair to say a Whip-It! at a Phish show is a different object than a Whip-It! in a suburban home in which pumpkin pie steams on the kitchen counter.

The point is, interpretation is not just a second-order phenomenon. It doesn’t just happen “after” experience; it is constitutive of experience. It begins before we are conscious of it. To ask for an un-interpreted experience is almost like asking to see matter without form. As Marilyn Robinson observes in Absence of Mind: sensory experience has “the character the mind has given it,” and in this sense, perception functions “as language does, both enabling thought and conforming it in large part to its own context, its own limitations.”

To be clear, this doesn’t mean that it’s “interpretation all the way down,” nor that we can alter reality simply by “interpreting differently.” There is indeed an exterior world, an Otherness. Interpretation does involve a dialectic. But we’ll get to that later. Right now, we are drawing our attention to the deep interpretive structures pre-given by culture and history, by nature, by organisms themselves. These are so pervasive and inescapable that Hans-Georg Gadamer’s titled one of his essays: “The Universality of the Hermeneutical Problem.”

“Language is the fundamental mode of operation of our being-in-the-world,” he claims, “and the all-embracing form of the constitution of the world.”

By “language,” Gadamer doesn’t mean specifically German or English or whatever, but a deeper semantic structure. And by “world,” he means “our” world, our experienced reality, the world that has meaning for us and gives us our basic operational “coordinates.” We could put it this way: language and world, interpretation and experience, are consubstantial. They constitute each other.

In short: all being, insofar as we represent it to others and to ourselves, is mediated by interpretation.

*

I’m asking you to take a lot on trust here, I know. If you’re new to hermeneutics, this is not going to be enough. All I can say is, I promise to do my best to explain as we go. But first, let’s return to our definition in light of the above. What is “psychedelic literalism”?

It is any way of conceptualizing or speaking about psychedelic experience that does not recognize the foundational role of interpretation and context in constituting the experience itself.

You know spiritual bypassing? The use of spiritual ideas or practices to avoid dealing with difficult realities? You might say that psychedelic literalism is a kind of interpretive bypassing.

With that hasty foundation laid, let’s turn at last to the world of psychedelics, and the Bard Terrence McKenna himself.

*

…Part Two

One night in late June, I awoke in the darkness with the sure sense that at some point, maybe soon, I would be sucked outside this plane of reality forever. I lay still, not fighting back. After all, what could be done? If the void approaches your shitty Bed-Stuy apartment and pulls you down through all dimensions of being and into the Outer Dark, what can you possibly grab hold of to stop it?

I’d been sleeping without sheets since the heat-wave hit, and a bedside fan fondled my pubic hair. In the back lot below my window the dog began to bark, as it did every night, at nothing.

I waited for the feeling to pass.

*

At the beginning of summer, I’d initiated an experiment. Now that international borders were opening back up, my roommate Archer had decided to undergo his Covid-postponed backpacker’s year and on moving out had left me all his drugs: half a gram of ketamine, frayed tabs of acid, a baggie of disintegrating mushrooms, one unlabeled tic-tac-sized pill—and a vape pen with a vial of sunset-orange DMT.

“Young Grasshopper.” With grave ceremony he offered me a blue tin box labeled The Cosmic Secret. “It’s time.”

“Master,” I replied, “I won’t disappoint you.”

And bowed.

I was at my own crossroads that summer. I’d just graduated from a writing program, one minor planet among New York’s solar system of MFAs, and I had no plan at all. Less than no plan. Two years of workshops and craft talks had drained some fount of enthusiasm in me, some reservoir of simple faith I had once thought inexhaustible. I couldn’t write.

I couldn’t do it.

The whole enterprise of literary fiction had become an abhorrent indulgence.

It was clear to me that this was more than the usual post-MFA burnout. Even reading had become impossible. I browsed online lists, library displays, used book stores; it was like touring a zoo of dying animals. Everything I did, and everything my fellow grads did, seemed insipid, predictable, and somehow needy. Who the hell were we kidding? We were brats. Despite our freedoms and accomplishments, despite our education, our so-called passions, the lives we lived were fruitless and incapable of producing anything of lasting value. We were so far gone that, I sensed, even our attempts to think our way out were already on the wrong track.

Oh! I couldn’t bear it any longer. To want to write, to have nurtured this most intimate yearning for so long, to know no other—at a time like this! The planet was boiling, democracy was crumbling, social media had won the battle for our souls, and to top it all off, at some very real point in the future the maggots would claim my body and I wouldn’t get to be here ever again.

Help me.

No really, help.

I sat in the newly empty apartment, my ex-roommate’s pharmacopeia open on my lap, going over all my failure and inertia and trying to gauge just how desperate I really felt. The vial of liquid freebase N,N-Dimethyltryptamine shone wanly in the kitchen light. I’d used mushrooms and LSD before, but never DMT. What, I wondered, would this little guy do to me? There wasn’t much left: four, five trips maybe.

I flicked it.

Well, little guy?

Are you powerful enough to change my view on the whole of existence?

I had no job. My lease ended on the first of July and a wasteland of summer hours stretched between now and then. In those intervening weeks, I decided, I would consume it all.

*

The day of my first session, I tidied the apartment. I felt like someone about to depart on a long journey: I watered Archer’s whimpering Salvia plant, did the dishes, pulled a Chewbacca-looking clump of hair goop from the tub’s drain. In the interest of thoroughness I even checked my dating app, though I hated the thing. I really just wanted to meet a woman in the course of a regular day—while shopping for groceries, while reading in the park—who without my having to utter a word understood me perfectly, loved me unconditionally, and who was hot.

At 1pm, I put my phone on airplane mode. Well then. What had I been about to do?

Oh yes.

Just a little afternoon DMT.

Already my armpits were damp. I knew what people said: this was the psychedelic summit, the knock-out trip. You lost contact with your body, astral-frolicked with extraterrestials, met Shiva, penetrated secret hypercosmic membranes. And when you returned to this terrestrial plane, you possessed a new transcendent meter stick of Gnosis with which to feel superior to all uninitiated pleebs.

But what if I choked on my own saliva? Permanently fucked my neurochemistry?

Ended up woo woo?

I’d set up a nest of pillows on my bed, with the “God telescope,” as Archer called the vape pen, on the nightstand. Ten minutes I sat there, not knowing if I’d actually go through with it. Not even knowing how to go about deciding. Just sitting. Then, without my doing anything, some switch flipped.

You know what?

Fuck fear.

Archer had told me once about a DMT entity he’d met, a being of wisdom and benevolence. This Being had given him profound insights into his own nature and had even helped him make a difficult life decision.

A Guide.

Ah.

I aimed my thoughts in that direction and took the first hit. The smoke tasted like something different than, but just as immense and sinister as, death. The second hit hollowed out my body. Every object in the room crystallized into a higher-definition version of itself. Naked existence, a sensation in its own right, seemed to have emerged as a nonspecific object of perception and over the course of mere seconds amplified into a state analogous in its intensity to, yet distinct from, pain.

I closed my eyes. Waves of tessellating shapes came at me. Behind each wave I sensed an infinity of others, a lapping shoreline of endless geometrical variation that appeared on a dimensional plane not in the physical room, not behind my eyelids, and not in my mind.

I tried to relax. Everything was okay.

This was safe.

It was completely safe, while alone and unsupervised, to swiftly and violently increase the amount of a trace endogenous neurotransmitter in the brain.

I raised the vape and took a third hit.

*

Before me were two clowns, composed of illuminated squiggly lines against a dark backdrop. They peered over me as though at a baby in a crib. Their lips were downturned. I sensed ill-intention.

You guys are scary! I blurted.

My spontaneous, unverbalized thought went directly from me to them. The clowns were delighted. Yeah! they said. We like being scary! But we can be happy, too.

Happy? I said. Can you please be happy?

Okay. We’ll be happy for you.

The clowns reversed their expressions into fantastic grins. It altered the entire texture of existence. Everything was okay! They bounced up and down. Pure elation!

I felt a pressure drop, as though we were in a punctured balloon. The DMT was wearing off.

Hey! I said. I came here for a guide. Will you help me?

Are you sure you want our help?

Yes! I said. Help me!

They were losing power, like something unplugged. They smiled. In a kind of “Here, take this!” gesture, they reached out and rammed something into my chest.

*

In those first moments of return, I didn’t know if I was okay. After twenty-five years on this earth, I’d thought I’d more or less sized things up. What was this? It felt like an unfathomable violation. Whatever hyperspace realm had just slurped me up and spat me back out, it was utterly significant, even world-changing, and yet at the same time had nothing to do with anything. It occupied an orthogonal relationship to the entirety of my life and possibly to the whole history of human culture and thought.

When I opened my eyes, the brightness stung. A shiver broke free from my bones and I pulled the blanket over my chest. I waited. It seemed possible that something might still happen.

Clowns? I thought.     

Clowns?

And burst into laughter.

*

A few nights later I met some other MFAers in Prospect Park. The group had been gathering since classes had moved to Zoom, but I didn’t attend often. Spending time with my peers tended to put me in a high-school-level funk of self-alienation. I brooded, conscious of an essential difference between us that seemed to account for, and supersede, the way that they, being writers who’d likewise made a decision not to pursue normal-person things, must also have felt conscious of an essential difference.

“Richie! What are you doing this Friday?” April, a loud Texan with perfect teeth and bitter eyes, co-edited the MFA lit mag. She was always on the prowl for slush pile readers.

“Nope,” I said, grabbing a beer.

“If—”

“Nopety nope nope.”

I sat back on my elbows. I didn’t want to talk. I just felt like listening to other conversations.

Around people for the first time since the DMT, I noticed that I occupied a newfound distance from the world which my usual social reticence couldn’t account for. At the same time, that distance felt only one-way, an imaginary thing. I observed my friends smoking cigarettes and scrolling on phones and doing other peopley things. Just a few days ago I’d been outside all this, in a place that none of them knew of or even suspected.

“You’re quiet.”

Yusef, the group empath, sat down beside me. His agent had just sold his story collection, Humans Being Weird with Each Other, and it had given him a surplus of goodwill. I hadn’t congratulated him in person yet. I did so now.

“Thanks,” he said. We clinked beer bottles and took deep swigs. “When are you headed back to Canada?”

“End of next month.”

“What’s the plan?”

I shrugged. “I might take my old position at a homeless shelter. Lots of pressing buzzers, watching security cameras.”

“And time to write.” He nodded. I gave a reply-nod, but he detected something and leaned in gently. “Still lying fallow?”

Yusef and I had been in three workshops together over the last two years. He knew I hadn’t turned in half the required submissions last semester, and that I’d given up on the novel I’d spent most of the program writing.

But I wasn’t about to get into it. Among writers, struggling to write is acceptable, even met with positive reinforcement. But for the love of God, never admit that you’re giving up entirely.

“What’s the blockage, you think?” he said.

“If I knew, would I be blocked?”

He waited for more.

“Before I started the program, I had all these ideas. I wanted to write something completely different. Something no one had seen before.” I gave a self-deprecating grin. He nodded, like this was obvious, we all wanted that.

“No, I mean really different.” I hesitated, remembering who I was talking to. “I have this impression that the books getting published, the stuff out there, you know, it isn’t enough. This isn’t it.” I polished off the rest of my beer, to hide my embarrassment.

“Give it time.” Yusef nodded in sympathy. “Sometimes it’s the drive itself that gets in the way.”

The warm night air felt like thin soup. Behind us, the traffic on Ocean Ave roared and roared without ever taking a breath. I looked at Yusef. His eyes seemed to embody a kind of certainty I knew I’d never achieve.

“Right,” I said. “Yeah.”

When he stood to fetch another round of beer, I cast my gaze around the circle. All these laughing faces. It seemed remarkable to me that I’d spent two years together. Remarkable that we’d stuck it out when the virus hit, this little group of comrades, all of us just trying to make it with our art. This would probably be the last time I’d see them.

Was I already getting nostalgic?

I looked up at the dim, featureless sky. The vastness of its indifference felt capable of meeting the vastness of my yearning, and swallowing it without a thought. 

*

I used Archer’s God telescope a few more times that week. From the beginning, of course, I’d held my hope lightly that some random superpotent psychoactive alkaloid would bring me back in touch with my lost motivation. But it fascinated me nonetheless. My experiences imparted a savage bewilderment that felt capable of sustained and possibly infinite inquiry. Where was it that I went? That DMT place, was it in my head or out there? Where those clowns in that place right now, waiting for my return?

Ridiculous.

Ridiculous!

But neither could I reduce it all to some obscure neurological kablooey.

I met a bizarre pantheon of beings in these sessions: sentient cubes, dancing question marks that extended out from my own face, and, in an outer dimension of fluid, fruity colors, a horde of ecstatic and vaguely cybernetic gnomes. Though I’d never seen them before, they said they’d missed me dearly.

But I never met Archer’s Guide.

Then one day, I scared the shit out of myself. Right away I sensed an uncertain edge to the trip, as though something was at stake. I traversed an immense four-dimensional tesseract palace that felt far older than the physical universe but which, at the same time, seemed somehow identified with my mind. I blew through door after door, deeper and deeper into this ancient architecture. At last, a wide room opened before me. A hole yawned at the center of the floor, and strange shapes emerged from the hole. Some expanded, taking on baffling complexity; some seemed to hit a kind of limit and fade away.

These shapes, I understood, were my thoughts. I’d arrived at the place my thoughts came from, the exact point where my unconscious threw them up into the light.

Fear hit me, then. It was as though I’d reached a forbidden extremity: this was as far as the mind could go without triggering a world-collapsing paradox.

What would happen if I looked into that hole?

*

For an hour I paced the apartment in a low-level panic. I was convinced that I’d seen too much, and that now the baseline quality of my subjectivity had shifted irrevocably. I knew I ought to get outside, go to the park, clear my head. But the physical world seemed somehow inaccessible, even sinister. I sprawled on the linoleum and just stared up at the kitchen light.

I told myself to relax.

I was me.

Me.

But what was “me”? “Me” was just a slim illuminated zone of awareness surrounded by a vast and fecund Dark. Sensations, thoughts, impressions—they wandered in and then back out, their visits brief and perhaps not even their main purpose. Where were they going? Why? I couldn’t know. I could only know what was in my mind.

I made a bowl of oatmeal and sat on the couch. I checked my email, considered calling my parents, and instead started to swipe on my dating app. The repetition soothed me at first. Then it nauseated. A face appeared, I swiped it away and immediately another popped up, each different than the last, each representing a new person with a wholly unique history and personality, but not really, really they were interchangeable, swipe swipe swipe, see? An infinite supply.

I closed the app. The presence of panic remained, waiting on the sidelines.

What if it never left? What if this was the way things were, now? What if every time I thought it was over, the fear pounced again?           

Oh, you think you’re done with me?

Ha!

I ran the shower. In the cool water I let my body reclaim center stage.

Flesh. I was flesh.

*

Archer had told me about a group he belonged to, the Psychonaut Sangha, which met every month. It turned out they held meetings ten minutes from the apartment, and their next gathering was that weekend.

I kept my expectations low. I’d encountered neohippies and psychedelic evangelists at festivals, and I found them cheesy and overblown if basically harmless. What bothered me was their tendency to assume that drugs gave them some sort of epistemological privilege, that all their divine, transcendent experiences exempted them from thinking. As if a molecule could open some secret back door out of the whole human dilemma! It was just dumb.

…Wasn’t it?

When I arrived, a man stood at the mic describing a recent acid trip. He’d been gazing at a pencil on his desk when suddenly, with absolute certainty, he knew that he could move it with his mind.

“But I knew that if I actually did, there’d be no going back. I’d have exposed the fact that we were all really living in the matrix. It would have ruined my life. You know? So I left the pencil on the desk.”

Thin clapping. Another man removed his mask and took the mic.

The stories were somehow both over-the-top and banal. All the same, it warmed my heart to hear people talk so openly about ingesting illegal substances. After overhearing someone order kratom, which wasn’t on the menu, and looking around to see half the attendees sipping the muddy brew, I ordered some myself and settled in.

Half an hour later, I got what I came for.

His name was Krista. He launched into a rapid spiel about various legally-sourceable psychoactive plants. Datura grew on street corners in Brooklyn. Betel nuts were sold at local markets in Queens. Morning glory was ubiquitous and only needed to be soaked in water to release the LSA alkaloid—he held up a plastic bottle filled with a witchy-looking murk. And, surprisingly, rhododendrons had buds containing the inebriating grayanotoxin.

Lastly, he explained how from Mimosa hostilis bark, commercially available as a dye, you could extract DMT.

DMT!

My dude.

Afterwards, I found Krista outside on the curb, packing a pipe. The light from the streetlamp glinted metallically on the pulled skin of his forehead. I could see a deep purple above the houses, some mouth somewhere swallowing the daylight.

“So you smoke DMT a lot?” I said.

Krista narrowed his eyes as he inhaled. “When I’m peaking on acid. Then ketamine for the come down.”

Jesus.

“Is it, ah, possible to smoke too much?” I said.

He considered that, as though I’d just presented him with an interesting koan. “How many milligrams you doing?”

“I don’t know. I’m using a vape pen.”

“In that case you’re probably not even breaking through.” He looked at me as though sizing me up. Then he offered me the pipe. I accepted.

“A friend of mine is hosting a Circle next weekend. It’s just a few of us. We’ll do a reading, then pass the pipe.”

“Oh?” I didn’t know what to say. Was he inviting me? To smoke DMT with a group of strangers? I’d come here to ask about this panic in my bones, not to get sucked further into the weirdness.

I took another hit and returned the pipe.

“Cool,” I said.

He nodded. “Fast three hours in advance. And bring thirty bucks for the energy exchange. I’ll send you the details.”

He took my number and hit the pipe again.

*

The heat-wave hit that week. I began to wake at night with impressions of an abysm nearing, stealing cat-like to the foot of my bed. Sometimes it felt like I’d woken before anything could happen; other times that, in fact, it was already too late, and although I seemed to be inside my bedroom, watching passing cars pull boards of light across my walls, my bed sheets sticky and everything as tactile as could be, I was no longer really here.   

I had nine days left before my flight back to Canada. Soon the indignity of these left-over weeks would end. I would return to my old home, and my old job, and it would be just as though I’d never left, the front and back end of my time in NYC closing in on each other like dark water over a dropped jewel.

Was the whole situation so unsalvageable? In the beginning, I’d thought that I could at the very least write about my DMT experiment. Some kind of autofiction maybe; everyone gobbled that up. But it was clear that, no, the neurological kablooey merely translated into another kind of kablooey, a literary kablooey, without any purpose or thematic thrust. Was the problem mine or the drug’s? I couldn’t tell. The experience itself, always so novel and significance-fueled, had begun to seem like a false promise—giving my thoughts, indeed my whole inner life, an explosive, vibratory power that kited me up through the ether and beyond the dazzling rim of heaven only to dump me back on my own ass.

This was how it had always been. Every since I was a kid I’d nursed this longing, nursed it so furiously that it hurt, and then treasured that hurt as a promise. And this was all it did to me, all it ever did.

*

The night before Krista’s Circle, I lay in bed watching TikTok clips about the big bang and entropy. It was the only thing I felt even vaguely mattered: those big inevitable cosmic gears. I waited to get tired enough to fall asleep, and at the end of each video I checked my tiredness. Was it time?

Not yet.

Not yet.

A text from Archer occluded my screen: call me

I’d texted him a few days earlier, about Krista. I hadn’t expected a reply. I’d figured he was out-maneuvering satellite signals in the high Himalayas, or had disconnected his service entirely. A developing Buddha, releasing one more attachment.

“Listen, Rich.” The signal was poor, as though Archer was shouting through a wind-tunnel. “If Krista invited you to a Circle, you gotta go.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah. Look, I don’t know how in hell I’m getting cell service here, but let’s pretend it’s a sign. I want to read you something I underlined last night.”

“Where are you?”

“It’s from Carl Jung’s Red Book,” he went on, not hearing me. “Check it. We also live in our dreams, we do not live only by day. Sometimes we accomplish our greatest deeds in dreams.”

A pause.

“Archer?” I said.

The call had dropped.

Archer delighted in synchronicities, so much so that I felt sometimes he helped them into existence. I wouldn’t have doubted that he’d dropped the call for dramatic effect.

Sometimes we accomplish our greatest deeds in dreams. It sounded like the ultimate stoner’s mantra.

Still, it had a neat ring to it. I turned it over in my head.

Well?

No, I was done with DMT.

I was done with it!

But I could feel a decision taking shape, and as I fought against it the decision only grew more precise, a hard ball with an impenetrable center. I imagined holding it in my hand, feeling the solid mass.

My decision.

One last time, then. Maybe this was how I’d finally overcome my… what? What block exactly was I trying to overcome?

*

The Circle took place at an apartment in Williamsburg. A large woman with heavy eye-shadow and a huge ceremonial pendant resting on her cleavage greeted me at the door. Her name was Yael. She smiled warmly and guided me into the living room, where several others had already gathered, including Krista.

I nodded. He nodded back.

“We were just pulling cards,” Yael said. “Please, find a cushion.”

I sat and examined the room surreptitiously. The air was a sweet haze of Palo Santo smoke. White crystal bowls lined the east wall. A coffee table, covered with a patterned cloth, displayed knick-knacks: an ornate wood pipe, rose quartz stones dressed in beads, one carved onyx figure…

I couldn’t believe my own boldness in showing up. Was I actually about to smoke DMT with this group of strangers? Was this really a thing people did?

One by one the members of the circle pulled a card from what Yael called the Oracle deck. Each card had an image coupled with a word: Acceptance, Grief, Power, and so on. She asked each time, “Does that resonate?” It never didn’t. Everyone met their card with a mixture of mild awe and unsurprised confidence, as though this was exactly right.

When my turn came, I pulled an image of a waning moon.

Allow, it said.

Yael tilted her head. “Does that resonate?”

I shrugged.

“Are you currently reaching the end of something in your life? A big change?”

“I suppose.”

“And you’re experiencing some tension, some resistance, inside yourself?”

“Maybe.”

Oh boy.

Still, I couldn’t help but be a little impressed.

When it came time to share our intentions, everyone had their answer ready. A man with a Looney Tunes grin was trying to break a bad habit. A twitchy hedge-witch type wanted an “energetic reconstitution.” Krista intended to simply open himself up to universal love. This wasn’t their first rodeo.

Yael recorded their answers in a spiral notebook, then turned to me.

When I’d started all this, I hadn’t had an explicit intention. I’d simply decided to hurtle myself off a psychospiritual cliff, perhaps in the hopes that some kind of guardian angel, possibly a literal one, would swoop in and rescue me.

Well, I was off the cliff. I was in freefall.

What now?

After a moment of silence, Yael placed her hands patiently on her lap. “With this Medicine, it is best to establish an intention. Otherwise you’ll have nothing to condense the experience around, and it will dissipate.”

I looked at her, surprised. That made sense.

“I guess I’m at a dead end,” I said. “I can’t see the way forward.”

“This chapter in your life, this dead end. Perhaps your card is making a suggestion?” Her eyes flicked down at it.

Allow.

“Right,” I said.

“Can you see yourself forming an intention around that?”

I wondered, as I sat there, if maybe I really could just give in to the whole thing. After all, they’d invited me, they’d welcomed me in, and here I was. Did I really want to just sit here sneering?

But how?

How did you just change your whole insides in a flash?

I thought of those clowns from my first DMT voyage, the way everything had just flipped on a dime. We can also be happy.

How inhuman.

How human.

Yael scribbled something in her notebook. Then she closed the cover and readjusted her posture, dropping her shoulders back and opening her chest. Everyone else followed suit: it was time. Something in me contracted.

Yael asked us to close our eyes and led the circle in a kind of syncretic prayer. She paused after each line so that we could repeat it back. I peeked once: everyone wore such serious expressions that I felt guilty for peeking and closed my eyes again.

We surrender to the Medicine’s flow of love

And we ask for its help to transcend our identities

Our bodies and our minds

Our pasts and our imagined futures

So that we may be aligned with the Source of love

And express its power, inspiration, and healing

For the good of this world

And all sentient beings upon it.

We sat in silence, taking long breaths. When Yael invited us to open our eyes, the wood pipe from the coffee table now rested between her knees.

Krista went first. Yael didn’t need to give him instructions. He had expert technique: he took three huge breaths before each hit from the pipe, to flood himself with oxygen, and held each lungful of DMT for a good thirty seconds. After the third hit, he lay back and immediately started to groan. His face spasmed. There was something lizard-like about the movement; his lips kept twitching in a way that suggested an entity taking over from within.

Was that how it looked from the outside?

He was out for a good five minutes. Strangely, that empty time did not bore me: the silence seemed to expand and fill with a breathy, anticipatory charge. When Krista opened his eyes, Yael put a hand on his shoulder.

He beamed.

Hedge Witch went next. After her it would be Looney Tunes. Then me.

I’m ready, I said to myself, trying to get pumped up.

I’m ready for this.

Holy fuck, I’m ready.

Yeah.

But I knew I wasn’t. I was only psyching up that part of myself which I could control, that part of me which kept me in a perpetual mode of ironic detachment. Way down inside there was another part, the part that mattered. And it did not consent. The whole game I’d been playing, from the very first moment I’d picked up Archer’s vape pen to this one now—it knew it was a sham.

Here was Yael with the pipe.

“Ready?”

I flicked my gaze around at the placid faces. What would they think if I chickened out now? But there was no judgment there, only this infuriating patience. It seemed like they were ready to wait minutes, hours, as long as it took. My heart made wild demonstrations of protest in my chest.

Why was this happening now? Why, when I had done this so many times before?

“Three deep breaths,” she said.

I took them. One, two, three. Then I leaned forward, and Yael lit the pipe.

As I inhaled, the room went very still. I could feel a certain obscure busyness within my body, as though all activity had shifted inward, like sand in an hourglass trading sides.

Another set of deep breathes, another hit. Then a third.

And it came on.

Quicker than any time before, an entire world of sui generis geometry blossomed before my eyes. Within seconds I was lost. I don’t remember lying back on the mat. I don’t remember exhaling. I simply jumped reality-tracks into an unboundaried realm of photons which seemed to engorge themselves on my attention. Scaffolds of light folded and arched from them. The only stable point of reference was a tiny black dot at the center of it all, so small I almost thought I was imagining it, and yet I knew I wasn’t: it drew my attention sharply to itself, and then at once began to move. It darted through the unstable terrain, moving so steadily and with such a sure trajectory that it reminded me of a spaceship. But the dot itself was empty, a fragment of darkness. Moving at remarkable speed, it reached a hypertrophying bloom of fractal geometry and cut through it like soap bubbles. I understood that this dot was headed somewhere, and that if I wasn’t careful I would lose it. It was like holding on to the One Important Thing. I concentrated, and fueled by my concentration, the dot sped up. It cut through golden lattices and crystal palaces. Soon an immense hyperspatial wall emerged in the far distance, the impenetrable membrane that held all material things. The dot soared toward it.

No. Would it?

It did. With a high zipping sound the dot broke a hole in the hyperdimensional fabric, simple as that, and I dove after it. FWUUUM. For a split second I saw something like white light. It was a substance that I sensed must have preceded the universe not by eons but by factors of a kind of duration incomprehensible to the mind. I swam in it. Then came a powerful contraction, and superheated chaotic particles exploded out in all directions. This was the beginning of time. This was the birth of everything from the great womb of Before. Stars formed, space itself expanded. Galaxies tore outward, millions of galaxies like sand hurtled handful after handful into the void, each grain a billion stars, so many it felt like some kind of joke. And the dot moved through it, dark on dark. Where was it going? I watched it slice across the solar system, where Earth had just formed. Life was piecing itself together in the volcanic soup down on its surface, multiplying into incomprehensible directions, it was a precious and utterly singular thing, and now the dot was no longer racing through space, it was racing through time. Species split off from species. Bizarre adaptations, endless creativity—and beauty, ever more refined and minute. Delicate green stems pushed their heads up through rich soil. Strange holofoil shrimp clung to rock beds in the azure seas. Trees that ate clouds and sunlight, fearsome dinosaurs, whales like blimps. Then humanity. Civilizations. Wars erupted, forests died, oceans turned to acid. An empty wind howled in petrified treetops, sunset clouds captured a theatre of pink light, and then that too came to an end. The earth ate itself, and the dot moved on. It charged through incomprehensible eons, the entire future of the cosmos. That dot—what was it? It took me out to the furthest reaches of time, where the last old stars were collapsing and black holes speckled the heavens, suckling at the fabric of space like fat worms. Then even these began to evaporate. Over trillions of years they vanished one by one, until only the largest was left: a supermassive, uber-dark entity, the last bulk that would ever exist. And then it detonated. Light, one last time, and a faint ringing sound, like the note of a bell dying in cold winter air, dispersed across the universe. Fading, fading. Then silence. The heat-death and the final plateau of all motion. No more change. Time itself had died. This was the end, the true finale of the whole fantastic story, and I understood that this was how it really would happen, and that this was what would be left: luke-warm nothingness. It would sit there, on and on, forever, without the remotest possibility of anything ever happening again. Everything had been used up. I began to weep. It was as though my very being had become a profound, a vast, a god-sized melancholy. So this was what waited on the other side of the whole cosmic drama? This was where the dot had been headed? Of course, I thought. Ah, ah. Of course. How else could it be? Every single thing that could have lived had been given the chance. Everything had been allowed to feel the surge of life and desire in the bones, to chase dreams, to fail and to succeed, to feel every last thing it was possible to feel. Now the grand game was done. The finality of it stretched as wide and long and deep as the universe itself had stretched. No: bigger. Oh! It hurt like an acid on the skin, only everywhere, within and without. This was how the end ended. This infinite devouring sadness would just smolder on and on and never go out.

Then I looked, and I saw it.

There!

The little dot—still going, breaking past even the sadness now, charging beyond it all.

“Introduce yourself,” S told me while I still cupped the powder. “State your full name, who you are the son of, and your intention.”

I did so. Then I spoke the final phrase, the one she’d told me to repeat just before ingestion.

“Iboga,” I said, “please be kind to me.”

Over the next forty-eight hours, I experienced an adverse physical reaction to the alkaloids, resulting in one of the darkest psychedelic experiences of my life. Iboga was not kind.

*

The date was April, 2022. I had spent months vetting practitioners, and then, choosing S, vetting the source of her Iboga to confirm it was not poached. I had prepared intentions and life-review questions. I had paid $1500. Finally, I had taken a four-day weekend in the middle of a busy season at work to fly south—not to visit Disneyland, not to swim at the beach, but to lie on a mat in a darkened room for days on end.

Why?

How to put this. Sometimes I’m seized by an impulse to run lunatic over the cliff edge of my own comfort zone.

Also, I wanted to see if Iboga might improve my physical health.

Since seventeen years old, I’ve suffered from a steadily worsening gastrointestinal ailment. It involves, but is not limited to, bloating, gas, diarrhea, and stabbing abdominal pain that interrupts my sleep. I can’t digest many foods—so many that, when friends or colleagues go out to dinner, I have often simply chosen to stay behind. Every year it seems I must eliminate a new category: now peanuts, now onions, now cashews. By the time I’m fifty, what will be left? Rice and oats? I’ve seen gastroenterologists, integrative health specialists, environmental medicine doctors. I’ve had colonoscopies, food sensitivity tests, blood and tissue panels, gut microbiome tests. I’ve tried parasite cleanses, heavy metal detoxes, coffee enemies, fecal transplants, kambo, leech therapy, all manner of supplements and probiotics and digestive enzymes…

Anything. I will try anything. So why not superpotent psychoactive alkaloids extracted from a sacred plant in Gabon?

The chances were slim. The evidence was only anecdotal. But only the insufferably healthy, with their privileged, never-sick bodies, can afford the detachment of skepticism.

*

As we waited for the plant to make its presence known in me, S gave a “fire talk” in the light of a flickering paraffin candle. The Bwiti tradition is entirely oral, she explained. They don’t have spiritual texts, they don’t write spiritual texts. They trace their origin back to a woman who, a long time ago, ate a porcupine and saw incredible visions. Afterwards, she learned that the porcupine had been eating Iboga root. She returned to the village and shared the rootbark with the tribe, and in their visions Iboga introduced itself to the Bwiti and told them how to use its power.

“For the Bwiti,” S said, “the meaning of life is to enjoy your time here. It is to be happy. And each person must trust themselves, because no one else will ever know how to take care of you the way you do.”

Soon I was feeling heavy. S eyed me seriously. “You better lay down now, or soon you won’t be able to.”

With that, the Iboga began to kick in. On the matt, my eyes closed, I saw my older brother’s face. He seemed sad. He was staring at his feet, a great heaviness weighing on him. It felt like I was perceiving something deep, deep in his soul. I saw another image: I was touching the base of his spine with my finger. It felt as though, if I could touch him there, I could take away his despair.

I burst into tears.

The sobbing ended quickly, and I was back in the visions. I saw my paternal grandfather as a young man, and he shook my hand. It felt good to be respected this way, man to man. After this, I didn’t see any more people, only strange objects. I hoped that the visual space would resolve into some kind of screen, like the life-review Iboga Search Engine I’d heard about, but no such luck.

Out of nowhere, I began to think about the origin of evil through the lens of geometry.

First, I had a vision of the universe repairing a hole in its own fabric, represented as a puncture on a vast concave membrane. It could heal itself because every part of existence has the whole reflected within it: if there is a defect, the adjacent parts simply show the defective part how to be. But if there was a defective part, how did it get that way? How did anything ever go awry? Now the metaphysical inquiry began. I thought of Lucretius’ answer: the swerve. According to that ancient Roman thinker, at the level of particles, everything is deterministic—except for a random, unpredictable swerving action that happens now and then. This swerve accounts for all free will in the universe, and, accordingly, the presence of evil. It may start out small, the smallest possible deviation, but over time it amplifies into a perceptible wrongness.

A dialogued ping-ponged in my head.

Question: “What caused the original swerve?”

Answer: “The swerve was so small, so infinitesimally small that it was hardly a deviation. That’s how it could happen.”

Question: “Even so, wherefore that infinitesimally small deviation?”

Obviously, this could go on ad infinitum. My reasoning mind craved a cause, and the response was, essentially, to minimize that craving. You want the cause? Well, it’s barely measurable, barely a cause. On and on it went, until somehow my line of inquiry shifted into dualism: Why is it that so many cosmologies posit two powers, a Good and a Bad, locked in a struggle with one another?

Why not three powers?

Why not eight? Why not thousands?

The answer, which I tried to write down because it felt significant, was a kind of geometrical proof.

Imagine a scenario in which there aren’t two but three primary forces: a good, an evil, and a third thing. What would happen? If you mapped them out as three points of an equilateral triangle, with all three pushing away from each other, you have a perfect equilibrium. The triangle will be maintained so long as the angles and the forces are consistent. However, if just one of these points shifted ever so slightly—if there as an infinitesimal swerve—the situation would immediately change: instead of three points struggling against each other, now you have one point against two. You have in effect reduced three into two directions. This is why a Three Forces model (Good, Evil, Third Thing) wouldn’t work; it’s unstable. If it had ever been the case in the deep past, it isn’t any longer.

The last thing I was able to write for the rest of the weekend, before the nausea and the vomit took control:

All it takes is a swerve…

*

Let me back up and explain something that happened the day before, while waiting for my flight to Orlando.

S had asked me to fast. But due to a shitshow with the airline (first the pilot hadn’t shown up and we had to deplane, then we had to wait for someone in first-class get back to their seat, resulting in a three and a half hour delay) I’d decided to have a little snack. After all, I was about to stay up all night and into the next day; I wanted to make sure I had the steam. I went over to the one food spot in the whole janky terminal and got myself some grapefruit juice.

Little confession: I didn’t pay for the juice. I didn’t set out to steal it, but the line wasn’t moving, no one was paying attention to me, and after considering whether the food service workers owned the place and if by stealing I’d be personally ripping them off (not likely), I fell away from the line.

I must say, I enjoyed the hell out of that grapefruit juice. But it’s bad karma, stealing before an Iboga ceremony.

Grapefruit, it turns out, is the one fruit you can’t mix with Iboga. It delays the liver’s ability to process Iboga’s alkaloids. When S, on the drive to her place from the airport, found out I’d had grapefruit juice, she vetoed the original plan. To allow it time to pass through my body, we delayed the ceremony until the next day.

As it turns out, even a full twelve hours may not have been enough.

*

The nausea began. I couldn’t move an eyelash without the whole world dipping and bucking like an anguished bull—and still it increased, a nausea on an order of magnitude outside my previous categories. Later in the night, in fact, it reached what felt like an impossible somatic peak: though I lay flat and motionless, I could actually feel my body sway rhythmically, like someone rocking me from head to toe—a clear and physical sensation.

When I managed to tell S about the nausea, she nodded and said something that changed the entire texture of the journey from this point forward.

“Now do you see why I don’t tell people what Iboga is like? Who would choose this?”

At the time, S couldn’t have known that I was having an abnormal reaction. If she had, I’m certain she would not have said this. All the same, she did. And everything turned on a dime.

S had tricked me.

My thoughts cascaded into paranoid fantasies. It wasn’t just S. It was everyone. All the trip reports I’d read online, all the people I had talked to about their own Iboga experience: none of them had mentioned nausea like this. Not one. It was worldwide conspiracy! Everyone who’d tried Iboga was keeping mum! What a pure fool I’d been. I’d thought this was going to be another psychedelic experience—much longer and maybe more serious, but a psychedelic experience nonetheless. Now, thanks to a global deception, I’d remain paralyzed on this matt for the next thirty hours.

I know, I know. The drama! But at the time, the thought was real and literally too much to bear. S was right: I would never have willingly chosen this. Even a person like me would have had to be suckered into it.

But… was that ethical?

I respected S. Our conversations in preparation for this weekend had always been grounded and focused. I felt safe with her. I wouldn’t have agreed to this otherwise.

Still.

Surely it couldn’t be ethical?

When I got out of this, I swore, I’d tell people. I wouldn’t participate in this dark initiation. Fuck that.

Through all this, I was becoming aware of a certain demented power exerting itself on my mental imagery. Violence fell upon anything that appeared in my mind’s eye. In one scene I saw a pudgy middle-aged man in a locker room held down, screaming, while two people cut off his penis. They plugged the wound and tied him up, laughing and mocking him. Then they took a hot dog, limp and uncooked, and inserted it into the wound. They mocked him for his hot dog penis. They had just begun to pretend-masturbate the hot dog when I ended the cascade by sheer force of will and hot rage. But the real horror was that worse things, even, had been around the corner. They would have kept happening, this twisted force could have carried on its perversions infinitely, it loved nothing more than to dismantle everything in the most humiliating and painful way.

I called it “the demon.” In time, I grew acquainted with the demon’s particular character. I learned to watch out for it, and to truncate its demented cascades earlier and earlier in the process.

But there were a dozen other enemies.

Another I called “the algorithm.” It would take any image—a flower, a shoe—and make a copy. Then it would stack these two images together into a unified image, then make a copy of that, and so on, repeating the process across an infinitely expanding two-dimensional plane. It was like that silly nightmare scenario where the AI turns the universe into paperclips. The algorithm was doing this to everything that existed, making the whole complex of organic life horribly simple. It was the ugly triumph of the reductionists and the positivists, so much more awful than they could possibly know.

I had asked Iboga to be kind to me.

Nope.

*

Now began the guided portion of the journey, the part I’d most anticipated. S crouched down beside me, holding a list of twelve questions I had given her in advance. The questions included:

What are the sources of my digestion problem and how can I take care of myself?

How should I meet artistic rejection?

What’s stopping me from pursuing a new relationship?

What is the source of that malaise I feel some afternoons?

What’s the most valuable thing I can offer others?

What aspects of my shadow do I need to see?

I had difficult recalling the answers even the next day. What I do recall is the sense that I was “forcing” something during this guided portion of the journey. I hadn’t known, before it began, what to expect from this part, and when S knelt down beside me and began to move rapidly through the questions, pausing to let me respond verbally to each one, I realized that this was it. All the answers were going to come from me. I was crushed. I had wanted Iboga to show me things. I wanted someone else to do it for me.

The answer I recall most distinctly was my response to the question, What is blocking me as a writer?

“Nothing.”

That was all I said. As an aspiring fiction writer, I have had trouble actually getting my butt in a seat to do the work (familiar, anyone?). Over time, I had developed a notion that I was “blocked.” But this was in my head. I could sit down and write whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted. My perfectionism and despair were soap bubbles I could simply cut through.

If I chose to, I could.

*

After the guided journey, which also involved giving my younger self a special message (don’t ask, I forget what I said), S returned to her chair while I remained on the matt. I still could barely move a finger, and now that I was on my own again, I had nothing to do but stew in my own congealing negativity. My thoughts, already dark, went darker. They touched the most obscene solipsism and despair. I felt something surfacing, a terrible thing…

And just like that, a memory, an indisputable knowingness, burst through from deep, deep, deep in my history: I was the one irredeemable thing in the universe.

The thought was fully formed on arrival. Before everything, before I had become Patrick, I was the everlasting enemy of the Light. I had been there at the beginning with God, possibly even before God, and had reincarnated over innumerable eons, over and over and over again, each time drifting further away from the divine love. There was no hope for me. I was, at bottom, incompatible with the whole beautiful project of the cosmos, and nothing that love and goodness could ever do for all eternity would bring me back to the fold.

And I was the only thing that was this way. The only thing.

Could it really be?

Oh, horror.

The realization felt irrefutable. It came with the distinct impression that it and all the other negative thoughts I was experiencing were not just random fears but intimately mine, ideas I had indulged in as a kid, lonely nightmares I had fed to my soul.

*

At last, three or four hours in, the vomiting began. (Oh yes. There’s more. You want to skip the suffering but you can’t, you came here to suffer it with me, didn’t you know?)

As I’d been coming up, S had guided me through a visualization exercise wherein Iboga cleaned out my bowels, scrubbing me spick and span. I’d taken this exercise seriously. I wasn’t here to mess around.

Now, with encouragement from S, I experienced the vomiting as a cleanse. I let myself feel all the toxic garbage down inside, and I willed it out of me. My retching took on an urgency I’ve never experienced before, not even when as a teenager I ended up in the emergency room with food poisoning. My gagging had sublevels; I’d retch, and my retch would be interrupted midway by a deeper and more violent retch, a fractal vomiting. I was reaching way way down into the final nooks of my bowls for the source of the problem. Soon a rhythm developed. I’d purge, then roll back onto my matt where the gag would, over the course of ten to fifteen minutes, wind its way up again from my bowels into the top of my throat so that it could start all over again, with even more violence. There was nothing more to expunge, I had nothing left in me, and on it went. The intensity of the vomiting seemed to prove the strength of my gut’s corruption.

S, during all this, played traditional Bwiti initiation music from Gabon on her laptop. Normally, she would have had a higher quality Bluetooth speaker, but a friend was borrowing it. The music itself was bare-bones: percussion, m’congo harp, and occasional voices. The rhythms had subtlety, and you could discern a great deal of mastery and freedom in the beats. But in the end they were repetitive. And at around this point in the night, hearing a familiar song, I realized that she had only about eight or nine tracks.

The knowledge seemed to hurdle me into the center of the nausea’s downward spiral.

She had them on repeat.

*

At last it was time to get onto the bed, where I would spend the rest of the day and all Saturday night. I had drunk nothing since taking the Iboga, and I didn’t feel thirsty. Anyway, there was no chance of keeping water down.

This was the night’s longest phase.

I lay there, and I lay there. I couldn’t believe what was happening to me. If I’m honest, part of me was fascinated with my own pain: here I was, just stuck in myself, paralyzed, with nothing to do or contemplate but the horrors of the night, nothing to listen to or occupy my mind with other than the tinny rain sounds on S’s laptop. The more intense visions were gone by this point; they had really only lasted for that first hour or two on the mat.

It was just me.

Here’s another moment to get through.

And another.

And…

Later, after many hours of suffering through this blankess, this horrible boredom, I simply broke down and cried.

“I feel so alone,” I said.

I told S about all my negative thoughts, and she described these as a purge. Some people have “grey days” afterwards, she said; I was just going through mine a little earlier than most.

“It doesn’t feel like a purge,” I said. Still, the interpretation comforted me. 

When S went out to buy ice for me to suck on, I learned that it was Sunday morning. This shocked me. Only twenty-some hours had passed? It felt like much longer. This extreme time-dilation might be attributable to the suffering, to the Iboga, or to the fact that we kept the place dark and void of time-keeping devices. So, I calculated to myself, that means I’ve got another ten hours to go.

Dear God. How could so much time exist to be lived through?

I recall consoling myself with the thought that whatever happens on any future psychedelic journeys, it couldn’t be worse than this. I’d done it; I’d touched a kind of bottom. Surely this would buy me comfort later.

On and on it went. On and on. I asked S if she’d seen anyone else stay in it as long as me.

No, she said.

This was the longest she’d seen?

Yes.

I felt a tinge of pride at that. And this from someone who had served Iboga to the president of Gabon’s wife! She’d seen it all.

“I had some crazy ideas, back there,” I told her. Now that I understood my experience might be an outlier, I felt comfortable describing my paranoia: how I’d thought she’d tricked me into doing Iboga by concealing how agonizing it was. “It was a fully fleshed-out conspiratorial fantasy,” I confessed.

We laughed about it. At the same time, I wanted her to pick up that I was also displeased. After all, she had induced the whole nightmarish delusion with those ill-chosen words. Hadn’t she?

Suddenly I was in doubt. Was it possible I had misunderstood her tone?

Throughout the night and the following day, S had been attentive and solicitous. She stayed awake at my side all thirty-plus hours. She called me her “baby bird” as she fed ice cubes into my mouth, making tender fun of my condition and giving me comic relief. S cared for me.

I didn’t know what to think. Between the zone of my experience and hers (how could she have known how bad it was for me?), wasn’t there enough of a gap, enough of a darkness, a freedom, for something bad to happen? For a misinterpretation to arise?

For a… swerve?

*

In time, S started to gently challenge me with tasks. She made me sip coconut juice. She brought blue berries to snack on. And she encouraged me to sit up now and then, to get my blood flowing and work the nausea out of my system. Just sitting the edge of the bed proved a feat. I could manage it for only half a minute or so until I became overwhelmed and lay back down.

Next, she drew a bath with Epsom salts and essential oils. I soaked a long while, then managed to rinse off in the shower, a shaky-legged newborn fawn. I felt like a sponge cake that had been suspended in water for three years: touch it and it dissipates like a cloud of smoke.

My gut, however, felt purged. I directed loving attention to it. I called it my New Gut. “I love you,” I said to it.

I really wanted this to work.

At around two or three in the afternoon, I managed to get downstairs and onto the grass in the backyard. It took at least ten minutes: I suffered dizzy spells at every step. On the lawn, I kept my eyes shut again the sharp sunlight and the huge blue sky and ate a few bites of mushy banana. Next, S tried to get me to swallow a spoonful of a puce-colored oil that smelled like plastic and looked like a congealed wad of snot; it was supposed to cancel the nausea.

“It’s one ordeal after another,” I thought. I braved it. And vomited it up on the grass immediately, along with the banana.

In the evening, S ordered sushi. I managed to nibble a few edamame beans and some rice, and she put the sushi away for later. At this point I still didn’t know if I’d make my flight on Monday morning. She would only let me go if I slept, and I didn’t know if I’d be able to.

But we tried it: I took 5mg of melatonin, some Ashwaganda and GABA, and she turned the temperature way down. I settled in. S had told me that as soon as people slept, their brain reset and all the negativity left. I hoped to god that wasn’t a false promise.

*

When I woke, the darkness in my head was gone.

Could it be?

Could it really be?

I checked the time: 1:00 am, Monday night. I’d gone to bed at 7:15 pm. That meant I’d had a good five hours. I could have laughed aloud. When I stood to use the bathroom, I found I could walk. I still felt wobbly, but the weight was off me. I hadn’t dreamt at all, the sleep was a complete blank. I’d been reset.

Reset!

At 2:00 am, I went down to the fridge and, giddy as a prankish schoolboy, gobbled up the sushi and seaweed salad.

Cozy in the blankets again, sated with food, the whirl of vague Iboga after-images resolved into the image of a dog. It was lying on its side, and someone, its owner presumably, was reaching out to pet behind its ear. The dog pulled its head back and looked askance at the hand. Then it stretched out a little, sighed, and went back to sleep.

That little sighing stretch—ah! It seemed to contain the whole ache and pleasure of being a body.

At 5:00 am, S woke me and we headed to the airport.

*

In my journal entry a day later, I wrote:

Looking back on the weekend, I feel like I punctured a hole in my life. Existence opened up onto a vast blackness, then closed again. While I was in it, the experience was everything. It just went on and on, never any closer to ending. Once, I confessed my fear to S that I wouldn’t ever get back to baseline, that I’d live the rest of my life on sunken ground. How, I wondered, would I look to my friend M, another psychonaut, when I saw him next? Like some madman, surely, with the addled gaze of those hapless Lovecraftian heroes who have witnessed cosmic terror or infinite loneliness.

But then I slept, and when I woke it was all gone, everything wiped clean.

How can that be?

Where is the hole?

*

It has been a year since the above events, and we are now near the end of this article. So here comes the uplifting part, right?

Reading this over, most of which was lifted from my journal entries in the week following the journey, I feel its darkness anew—and along with it, a pressure to arrive at a resolution, some black pearl of a lesson. People want that; I want that. It’s a natural and sacred impulse to make meaning. What psychonaut hasn’t at least tried to have faith in that platitude, “The medicines don’t give you the trip you want but the trip you need”?

But what if meaninglessness is just... meaningless?

And what if the “work,” as they say, is, despite everything, to honor it for what it is?

*

Once, as a social work student, I attended a workshop on dying and bereavement. The instructor stood at the front of the class with a jar filled to the brim with rocks. “This jar,” she said, “represents a woman who has just lost her partner. These rocks are her grief. You see how the rocks fill every inch of her, all the way to the lid?”

She poured the rocks into a bigger jar. There was room, now, between the rocks and the lid.

“This is two months out from the tragedy.”

She kept this up, moving through time: now six months, now a year, now three years. Each time the same amount of rocks, and each time a bigger jar. Finally, she took out a massive carboy. In that tank, the rocks became mere pebbles.

“Ten years,” she said.

This image has stuck with me. We want our grief to diminish. We want our suffering to go away. Instead, we get bigger. If we are not denying the reality of the pain, we expand around it.

Isn’t that remarkable? Something in us is always trying to get bigger than the “bad thing.”

This, I think, is one of the most satisfactory models I’ve encountered for what’s really going on in long-term, intentional use of psychedelics: the creation of a more “capacious” self. Compounds like ibogaine, psilocybin, DMT, LSD—they can open the visionary gates, they can throw you into the seas of non-duality, induce mystical ecstasies, untouchable peace, unfathomable bliss. They can also bring you to the negative limits. But wherever they take you, each time, you’re given new coordinates for your map of reality.

And let’s face it. On that map exists a Shadowland of seemingly unmetabolizable suffering. It’s there. So the question is: how do we create space in ourselves for it? How do we become a consciousness in which it can all exist?

The trap of “experience acquisition” is real (as if you could really “collect” experience). Still, I am convinced that seeking states of being that touch all extremes of the soul, joy and hurt, sorrow and peace, can, when we achieve equilibrium again, have the effect of bringing us into greater alignment with the complexity of reality itself.

The writer and psychotherapist James Hillman observes something interesting in regards to dreams. You miss the point, he says, if you’re looking for hidden messages to decipher for therapeutic insight. Instead, he suggests the experience of the dream is itself the therapy. We can collapse the reflective gap between a dream and its meaning (the so-called lesson) and still benefit.

In this paradigm, it’s not about symbols that act dialogically upon our ego. It’s about the experience itself.

In the same way, by sharing our psychedelic experiences, we often create a large reflective gap between the experience and its meaning. We build our psychedelic stories—quite naturally—towards moments of transformation and insight. But in my Iboga session, this reflective gap reduced to a vanishing point. I cannot utter a lesson.

And yet, please believe me—

I do not regret it at all.

*

To be sure, my stomach issues were not magically resolved. I haven’t been healed. In all honesty, things were a little worse than usual, gastrointestinally, the following week. All the same, something did shift in my attitude. I continued to talk to my stomach, to send it love, and it didn’t even feel that silly.

My New Gut.

And S, once I had made clear how hard it had been for me, devoted herself to my integration. We talked multiple times the next two weeks. This, folks, is why you want a loving guide. Not to protect you during the experience—how could anyone protect you from your own mind?—but to be there when you return. A guide offers a way to ground yourself back into what really supports us and, paradoxically, establishes us in our own strength and autonomy: relationships.

Anyway, that’s the truth I bank on. I had asked to see my shadow and I did. Oh, I did. Savage violence; absolute self-loathing; profoundest confusion. But even measured against that immense darkness, against visions of sadism and despair, against even that inconsolable confusion seething at the foundation of our minds, a strong human connection can be realer still.

Already within ten days of the session I was writing journal entries like the following—which, for lack of any true conclusion, will have to do.

*

April 23, 2022. This morning I woke with an impression of durability, of energy, of courage, of trust in myself, of faith in my ongoing growth. What is this feeling? Where does it come from? While lying in bed, still in that swirling hypnagogia, I dug my way imaginatively towards the explanation until it clarified into a kind of dream-image.

Since Iboga, but not necessarily just because of Iboga, something like a switch—a light-switch buried way down in the folds of my psyche—has been flipped.

Once it was set to “Indifferent.”

Now it is set to “Yes”.

It seems I’ve been trying for a long time to reach this switch. But it is way, way down there for a purpose; you’re not supposed to be able to just toggle with it. You could just as easily flip it to “No.”

But it’s flipped. And now, going forward, things will be different. The momentum has gathered.

Yes.

This is the story of my first seven experiences with psilocybin mushrooms and what happened when, during a group trip, a friend of mine nearly died.

One

The first time I took mushrooms was the summer after my freshman year of university. I was eighteen, and riding a high. I’d lucked out with a well-paying government job in my hometown, and Descartes’ Meditations, assigned reading for the Modern Philosophy class I’d enrolled in that first semester, had awakened in me an irrevocable passion for metaphysics.

As a birthday present to myself, I booked a sky-diving appointment outside of town for early August. Only afterwards did a few of my high school friends inform me that they were planning a little “pharmaceutical adventure” that same weekend.

When the flight company called to rebook, I couldn’t have been gladder.

This was far more exciting.

*

It was a mild and cloudless day on the Canadian prairies, with none of the heavy languor of high summer. We met at T’s place around noon—his parents were out of town and we had the house to ourselves.

There were five of us. I remember distinctly, as though it were the iconic opening scene of some film, how we sat around a table in the sunlit dining room, a plate of dried mushrooms at the table’s center—aware, all of us, that we lingered on a kind of immaterial threshold. After dividing the mushrooms into equal portions, we sat and chewed. At last, a pair of stipes remained on the plate.

I ate them.

My guess is that the extra two stipes made my dose around four or five grams.

I was there for epiphanies and adventures.

*

We washed down the fungi’s gamey pap with grapefruit juice, which was supposed to help with the digestion, then descended to the basement to play videogames. It was a giggly and anticipatory atmosphere. I kept checking in on myself to see if anything was different. “You’ll know,” one my friends said. “You’ll know when it happens.”

I’m sure I did. But now, thirteen years later, I can’t recall the exact moment it hit.

What I recall is a sense, pervading that dim basement like a substance, of a sudden and powerful awe. 

*

Aldous Huxley made Henri Bergon’s idea of the brain as a “reducing valve” famous when he published The Doors of Perception. This idea has become so foundational to my own interpretation of what went on in this maiden voyage into the Psilocybe that I cannot honestly say if I read Huxley’s book before or after the trip.

The concept involves a simple paradigm shift. Instead of the brain giving rise to consciousness, Huxley views the brain as that which restricts “Mind at Large” into an animal-sized container. We are aware, in other words, only of what services our biological and social thriving. But this awareness represents but “a measly trickle” compared to everything actually going on in the universe.

The psilocin molecule, according to this metaphor, prises open that valve, that Door of Perception—and lets in a torrent of existence.

*

In short, a lot went on.

We listened to “The End” by the Doors, a chilling, uncertain song that brought us to outermost solitude. The stucco ceiling became a heap of shifting lizard tails. T went into the shower and started yelling. My friends pooled money and ordered pizza (evidence that I was much higher than they were; I could never have figured out how to do that). But chief in my memory was the discovery of the apple tree in the backyard.

The tree stood at the back of a lengthy lawn. That the apples were ripe made me laugh with astonishment.

I must have been “peaking”—a word I learned much later. Walking to the tree became an epic journey. One specific apple caught my attention, and I plucked it, drew back to the sundeck, and lay on the reclining beach chair. When I closed my eyes and the deep orange sunshine oozed over my lids, I understood I was in the Garden of Eden, on the first day of creation. We had made it back. Maybe we had never left.

Here is where it becomes important to know whether I read The Doors or Perception before or after the trip. At the time, it seemed to me that the apple tree itself suggested Eden—not suggested, but was. Yet there is another famous image from Huxley’s book: looking at a flower arrangement, he writes, “I was seeing what Adam had seen on the morning of his creation—the miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence.”

Was this episode primed by Huxley?

In How to Change Your Mind, Michael Pollan suggests that the entirety of psychedelic experience since the ’60s is primed by language cribbed from religious traditions. Of Albert Hofmann’s famous first bioassay of LSD, he writes: “Because Hofmann’s experiences with LSD are the only ones we have that are uncontaminated by previous accounts, it’s interesting to note they exhibit neither the Eastern nor the Christian flavorings that would soon become conventions of the genre.”

What Pollan doesn’t address is why that connection—between psychedelic experience and the language of mysticism—is made in the first place, and why it is such an intuitive one.

In any case, I had entered ecstasy, and now I had to (had to!) leave the house and get out into the world. My friends were back in the basement, listening to a playlist. What were they doing in the dark on a sunny August day? I urged them to walk the neighbourhood with me, but there was little interest, and at last I became impatient. Not irritated—irritation wasn’t possible. I only felt we were missing out on something huge and amazing.

So I left.

I was gone for what felt like the briefest time, because out the front door was something so astonishing that I ran back to the house, trembling, bent on convincing my friends once more. But inside, they were in a state of panic. Where were you? You can’t just leave like that! Their worry astonished me. I knew it was real, but at the same time it didn’t seem right to dignify it.

This was my first lesson in the tripper’s truism: you know only your trip.

It’s a hard lesson. How could it be that others aren’t jiving, aren’t wrapped up in this same euphoria? It is difficult to wrap your mind around the fact, cosmically strange, that others aren’t feeling what you feel. They aren’t seeing what you see. They don’t wonder what you wonder, or attend to what you attend to. As kids we are reprimanded for such lack of empathy; for what it’s worth, though, I believe the incongruity between subjectivities really is astonishing. Only, it has become one of those marvelous enigmas, like the sheer isness of things, that, rubbed down by habit, have lost their glint.

*

There’s one final image from this first trip, strange and useless, which I have nonetheless carried with me all these years.

Early on, while we were still in the basement, I was playing around with the remote control of T’s massive flat screen TV. I stuck my thumb beneath the clamp on the back. As it bit down, I felt as though it were now in control of my thumb and, by means of my thumb, my entire body.

This tiny remote, I understood, also controlled the TV. So: it was an object that manipulated entities larger than itself. I thought about this, and about all the other technological objects of control—cell phones, car keys, remote detonators—all of which possessed unprecedented influence over things physically greater than themselves. Suddenly I felt cold dread.

Everything was getting smaller, yet controlling more.

One day there would be only one object, occupying a single point in space, commanding absolute power over everything in the universe.

Terrified, I called it “the Point.”

*

In the end, as we were coming down, I got my walk with my friends. The neighbourhood was uttermost suburbia: clean sidewalks and picket fences, homes with high gables and wide porches supported by white columns. Yet everything had a sharpness of color and detail that made me giddy. The leaves on a strip of boxwood hedge seemed like forms newly sculpted from a holy substance capable of holding more detail than the matter we knew.

But, like cooling magma, it would soon settle down, become blunted: become the boxwood hedge we knew in our daily lives.

Exhausted, I longed for that.

But the greater longing, I think, was never to be exhausted.

Two

The second time I took mushrooms was at a Flaming Lips concert. This was just after the band had released their bizarre, paranoiac, acid-rock album Embryonic. I was in third year university, in Edmonton, which was on their tour circuit, so I said to those same high school friends of mine that, if they drove down for the concert, they could crash in my dorm.

At the entrance to the stadium, we encountered a problem. Security guards were patting people down. How did we get the drugs inside?

The solution should have been obvious: eat the mushrooms in the parking lot. But we were nervous idiots, and besides, we wanted to time things right. We made ourselves PB&J sandwiches and put the dried mushrooms in these. Then we put the sandwiches in plastic bags and shoved them in our crotches.

It could have gone south; we got lucky.

I remember little of the concert, only vague impressions of loud, static-soaked alien soundscapes, and one astonishing moment when a huge ball of light descended from the top of the stadium and seemed to break a dozen laws of physics. What I remember, instead, is our long walk back to the dorm. We’d driven to the stadium, but when we were let out none of us was near sober enough to drive. My friends talked among themselves while I walked several paces ahead.

I’d been reading Wittgenstein for one of my courses, and my mind was on language. It seemed to me that language was a Möbius strip that, as you followed its contour, now faced you outward, then faced you inward again. The inside and the outside were one, but in a dynamic way. What we say is what we mean; and yet there are concealed dimensions to what we say, even from ourselves; and yet we ought not to despair of language on account of what it buries, but rejoice on account of what was revealed; and yet we should never forget how much—so much!—is buried. I couldn’t stop spinning thoughts, and that too became part of the vortex of realizations: the way that language naturally hypertrophied, and how that hypertrophy could be valued or distained depending on your existential position.

Language is an open field!

It is a cage.

Becomes a field again.

A cage.

*

First there is the conviction that nothing will ever be the same again. Then you come down from the high.

Maybe you have more compassion in the days that follow; maybe your anxiety has lessened; maybe you even make some kind of life decision. But sooner or later you return to work or school, things organize again into something very much like the everyday. And the question becomes: does this Return mean that your conviction was a delusion?

The following semester I tried to explain the experience of psychedelics to my girlfriend, S, who had never used them, and in particular this sense of cosmic significance. I hadn’t talked about these things with anyone, not knowing how, nor having much inclination to. But she was curious, and the best listener I knew: so we walked along the North Saskatchewan River and over the course of two hours I tried to describe what made the phenomenon qualitatively unique.

It felt good to communicate my excitement. But it also confirmed for me the linguistic intractability of psychedelic experience.

There was no way around it. You had to take mushrooms to really know.

These days, there’s much talk among researchers and activists about psychedelics as therapeutic tools. Some even argue for the positive gains of “horror tripping”—intentionally inducing a bad trip. But perhaps one of the great unstated things about psychedelic experience is that it acclimatizes you to solitude. This solitude is semantic. It is due, I think, not to the meaningless or deluded nature of these experiences, but to their over-abundance of meaning.

Behind all my musings on language during that long walk back to the dorms was the consciousness that, if called on, I would be unable to explain these thoughts to my friends. Indeed, when I sobered up, I might not be able to communicate them to myself.

I would wake, but it would be a downward waking, into something less than the dream.

Three

In 2014, two years after graduation, I was working for an environmental activist organization on Vancouver Island. A co-worker said he’d acquired a species of psychoactive mushroom that originated in the Amazon. Since my second trip, I hadn’t actively considered using them again. Had the time come?

Typical of a positive psychedelic experience is a strong desire to share it with loved ones. While high, I’ve found myself thinking, If only so and so could experience this! At the time, my older brother, N, and a close friend from university, K, both lived in Victoria. Neither had done psychedelics before.

Did they want to try?

*

We took the mushrooms in a spacious and light-filled apartment sometime in the spring. After a huge surge of kinetic energy which had me doing indoor cartwheels, I began to feel queasy. N vomited pretty much as soon as the high kicked in, and K, after initial enthusiasm, did too. Afterwards, he called his girlfriend in mortal panic:

Do I need to go to the hospital?

Am I dying?

Am I going to die?

“The Great Liberation by Hearing” in the Tibetan Book of the Dead is concerned with helping the dying into a better postmortem outcome. It contains the instructions:

O, Child of Buddha Nature, however terrifying the appearances of the intermediate state of reality might be, do not forget the following words:

...

Renouncing the merest thought of awe, terror or fear,

I will recognise all that arises to be awareness, manifesting naturally of itself.

Granted, K wasn’t actually going through the post-mortem intermediate state of reality. But there’s a lesson here, I think, for users of psychedelics. Facing down terrors, you don’t necessarily need to think “this is not real,” but rather, “this is not something to fear.” If you spend your energies resisting what is happening, either through fear or through continuous inner debate about what is “real” and what is “just the drug,” you will end up missing what “the drug” can offer.

            K and his girlfriend talked for over fifteen minutes. Meanwhile, my brother and I listened at the sidelines. We weren’t worried that K was dying; we knew you can’t really overdose on mushrooms. Still, the conversation was harrowing. At the time, I even recorded myself reacting to this episode, and so I can give, verbatim, an example of the sorts of things that were going through my head.

I was fixated on K getting off the phone.

Every moment has a little decision at the very center of it. You have to pull through it. You have to pull through the infinity of little decisions, downwards, downwards, downwards—then you flip up. It’s like Dante in hell: you go down to the center and you find at the very center that what you thought was down is now going up. And—woo!—reality is a sphere.

I wish I could give K that image.

It is strange to transcribe the full-body excitement I was experiencing into plain words-on-a-page. I continue in this vein:

It’s K alone—he has to understand it himself, we can’t tell him that. Oh man, I sympathize with the angels in heaven. They’re all looking down and they want to tell us things. But no, we’re alone, and we have to follow it ourselves. God planted it there, but in our structure of being. He—wow—he is incredible.

[Long awe-filled pause]

He actually designed something that allowed it to choose itself. He designed that! From the outside!

At this point, K left the bathroom. “I’m pulling out of it,” he said. “C [K’s girlfriend] says I’m totally good. Everything is good. I don’t need to get a doctor.”

N and I were relieved. He and K lay down in a sunbeam by the window and I brought them food—oranges, bread—which they did not eat.

When I begin to talk again into the recorder, my voice has changed. It’s no longer ecstatic.

Oh. I’m facing it myself now.

It’s like everyone has been ushered into heaven and now, now I can step through.

I have to choose to go through it. Fuck. I existed and I was unaware I had to make this choice and now I have to make the choice and, fuck, it’s hard. Okay, I’m going through it. Do I induce it? Am I inducing it right now? Do I just let it happen?

Listening to the recording, you can tell something has changed: I’ve gone to a darker place, things are getting sombre. I remember this moment well. It was the moment I realized that my active interpretation of the experience was creating the experience. The idea that each of us had to “pass through it” (i.e. the dark part of the trip in which both N and K vomited, but I did not) seemed like a fact of reality. You had to go through something difficult and come out the other side. That’s what this trip was about.

But I wasn’t coming out the other side.

Ho. This is joyous and disappointing to have a clear image of reality. Huh. I would have thought there is more mystery. Hmm. Okay. Okay okay.

Oh fuck, why do I have to...

It continues on like this for some time. I can’t seem to stop talking, and then I talk about how I can’t stop talking. Yet there was a deep conviction that I was working something out, and that the angels were rooting for me.

But what were they rooting for?

What was going on?

*

Years later, it is painful and somewhat deflating to listen to this recording for the first time. I had long thought of this trip with N and K as the one in which I intuited the existence of angels. And I did. The impression I had then—hordes of sympathetic beings of light just outside perception, leaning in at the edges of existence to root for struggling humanity—remains strong. But the idea of “priming” returns to me here. Listening to the recording, I am inclined to think of my love of Rilke’s poetry and the Wim Wenders film Der Himmel über Berlin. The film is, after all, about angels whose witness to the tormented inner lives of various characters around Berlin lifts up and sanctifies those lives—without their knowing it.

The notion of priming reaches its limits, however, in the next question: why this image, this metaphor, and not some other? Why angels? Who chose this?

Not I.

Not the psilocin.

The rest of the trip consisted of laying in sunbeams and joking around on the carpeted floor. When the sun went behind a cloud, the mood darkened. When the sun returned, everything was made well. “I was not expecting this!” K kept saying. We ate the oranges, or at least parts of them—when we sobered up, we found orange peels in just about every inch of the apartment.

On our walk through the neighbourhood afterwards, K said, “I’m not sure what that was. I’m not sure I’d do that again.”

A week later, he said, “That was amazing.”

Four

There were a few pellets of dried mushrooms left over from the experience. I stuck them in the freezer. One day that August, bored and wanting an adventure, I took them.

The nausea came again, worse this time. Perhaps it was the strain of mushroom, or perhaps they were too old. I felt heavy, and slippery with perspiration. I lay on the couch and hoped that the housemate that my partner, S, and I were living with did not return from work. I closed my eyes.

Before me was a tennis match. It was like I had turned on a TV; I could observe every detail. The tennis ball went back and forth, back and forth.

“Watch.”

It was not a voice that said this, not quite. But something, something that wasn’t me, had spoken.

I watched. The game was repetitive, and the volley never ended. When my attention drifted, it said, “Watch.” When my attention did not drift, it said, “Watch.” Nothing in particular happened.

Yet, to be told to watch—it gave something, a significance, to my gaze.  

*

After a while, I was able to get up from the couch and sit at the table, where I had my notebook. I wrote quickly and in fragments. Meanwhile, the nausea came in waves. Suffering through it felt involved, as though it required use of my own willpower to pass through time.

Getting high on shrooms alone is not fun. Who to talk to? All things are said as a question, and with questions, there’s always supposed to be someone on the other end.

Everything is textured by the effort. Strive and...Flop. Too much weight inside. Micro-like.

I will just have to accept that my body is different. Not weaker or more prone. Different. Their bodies are made for this world. Mine: not. Mine: for another place. Who knows what place. Not the task to reconstruct it. The task is to live here.

Breath.

I am writing, above, about more than nausea. I have a gastrointestinal condition which is like, but much more than, IBS, and which occasionally gives me bloating, abdominal pain, and puts me into depression, to say nothing of the ongoing social isolation of having severe dietary restrictions.

Fresh figs sat in a bowl on the table. I had picked them the day before, from a tree in the park down the street. I took a small bite. Before I had finished chewing, I went back to my notebook:

If getting high brings me closer to things, then nausea is close close close to things—as close as joy and the rest of it! The fig gets forgotten in my mouth.

I want to talk to K, S, whoever, but they’d be like the fig.

I must bring the music with me to the washroom. I must bring it companion with me everywhere.

It is the trip.

In the bathroom, I almost did a million things but come back out here

Eventually our housemate did come home. I hid in the bedroom while she busied about in the kitchen. I called my brother, who was tree-planting, and we talked for a while. Then I made a break for it: dashing past my sober housemate without saying hello—as though, by avoiding a greeting, I could disguise the fact that I was on mushrooms, but in fact only weirding her out—I raced down the stairs and out of the apartment.

What followed was a long, anxious trip. I paced around in a nearby park, listening to Arcade Fire, enduring ups and downs. One moment I was eating figs from a tree and giggling to myself, the next I was sick with obscure and irresolvable self-loathing.

As I came down, my partner S met me in the park. We sat in a private corner, amid clumps of tall switchgrass, and although I’d been waiting impatiently for her, I wished she hadn’t come. She was there, but her spirit dwelt across an ocean. The feeling was akin to postcoital tristesse, that melancholic lull you sometimes get after sex.

I was back in the world.

Five

I tripped for the fifth time on mushrooms in early December, 2018. After a conversation about psychedelics with my friend, E, he said he wanted to try them.

Remembering the last time, I did what I could to circumvent nausea. We made tea, cutting the mushrooms finely and steeping the crumbles three times, because I had heard that cooking the chitin (the cell walls of fungi) made it more stomachable. Then I added ginger and Clavohuasca, an antinauseant.

It was an overcast day in Vancouver, and we were in E’s poorly lit basement suite. No matter: we had a sound system. We played the album A Deeper Understanding, by The War on Drugs, and E was in tears by the end of the track, “Pain.” He cried: Oh the earth! What are we doing to the earth! And: My parents! I love them so much. I closed my eyes and moved to the music, paying no attention to the lyrics.

At one point I stood and, my eyes still closed, felt the wall. It existed in a field of blackness, of abstract space, and as my hands moved along its surface to connect with the ceiling, it seemed to me strange that, existing as I was in black, bare space, these walls nonetheless existed. What should have stretched on infinitely just—didn’t. What was a wall? What sort of force could do that?

“Don’t!”

I opened my eyes. E was pointing at where I had been pounding on the ceiling. “There are people living up there!”

He meant the family with a baby on the floor above. It dawned on me: what I had thought was my own isolated action—a few experimental slaps on the surface of this thing, the ceiling—was in fact communication.

Epiphany: everything was communication! Everything, no matter what you did!

*

Once, I was asked by a psychedelically naïve friend, “What is it like to be on mushrooms?” The best answer I could give was: “No matter what happens, on mushrooms, it means something.”

To the inexperienced, this might sound as though the drug is “simulating” meaning. But even if that’s the case, so what? What could it mean to hallucinate not just visually but with our organ of meaning?

I had a dream, several years ago, that I had a ten-year-old daughter. I loved her with a fierce, protective love. Then I woke. Was that love not real just because I dreamed it? I felt it, and I remember feeling it. That love is mine.

This is the reason, I think, those who have had psychedelic visions rarely dismiss it as “just a drug trip.” Meaning is meaning, no matter where it comes from or the kind of consciousness in which it occurs.

*

While E listened to the music, I began to write haiku-like poems in my notebook, each occupying its own page. I would sit and think a moment between pages; then, once I began to write, I didn’t stop until the poem was done. This took only seconds. I felt utterly fluent.

a ways away

     a baby cries

                     once

there are people

*

leave yourself

     a moon shines

on the city meadow

*

there is a deepness

     a tree in the woods

     stands there with

     the trees

Six

In mid-March, 2019, three friends—T, R, and Z—and I rented a cabin on one of the gulf islands off the coast of Vancouver, BC. On our second day, T took five grams of Psilocybe Cubensis, aka Golden Teachers, a gentle strain, while the rest of us split fourteen grams of a strain about which we knew nothing, save that the friend who’d given them to me had cautioned: “I know everyone says this, but be careful with these.”

I concluded later that what we took was likely Psilocybe azurescens, a strain local to the Pacific Northwest which even renowned mycologist Paul Stamets finds “almost too strong.” If this was the case, then our dose, measured as Psilocybe cubensis, was around eight to ten grams per person. 

*

So much happened on this trip that I need to break it down into three phases here.

Phase one: joy. We sat on the lawn at the back of the cabin. The sun was out and the sky so shockingly blue that T, giggling up at a gap between the evergreen branches, cried out, “The sky can’t do that! No way!” R was curating the music and every song she played was powerful and always just right, as though she knew in advance what I wanted to hear. I rolled and flipped around in something analogous to dancing. At one point T noticed a strange object in the yard and, reaching toward it but not getting up, said, “What is that?” “I’ll be your arm!” I cried, and ran over and brought it back to him. It was a decorative ceramic bowl.

But instead of peaking when we should have, we kept getting higher.

I mark the beginning of phase two with the appearance of the dark elves. At first, a hush fell upon the world. Everything—the high sycamores, the distant ocean, the uncut grass of the wide lawn—was filled with whispers, like language without the backbone of consonants. Then I looked towards the cabin.

There they were: mischievous faces with a distinct elfish quality. They seemed to grow up out of an unfamiliar dimensional plane and superimpose themselves upon the sunlit afternoon. It was the first open-eye, non-geometrical visual hallucination I’ve ever had. But I was slightly dissociated: I only faintly understood them as hallucinations. I knew intuitively that if I kept looking, things could get scary. I looked away.

But I was curious. I performed an experiment: I closed my eyes and turned my head to where they were, by the cabin. Strangely, I found that even then, with my eyes shut, I saw them. Their faces pulsed in the blackness. I knew it was risky to keep looking, so I turned away.

Then something really frightening happened.

R and T were inside. To my right, Z was repeating fragments of song lyrics, and asking questions aloud: “What is reality?” “Lift me up!” “Where are we?” I was enjoying the sunlight, writing things in my notebook. The things I wrote, however, were sloppier and more discombobulated than usual when I was high. This is one of the few fragments I can make out:

time is trying to give it to us as nonsense

Suddenly, I was interrupted by a choking sound. Z was laying on her back and her mouth was filled with vomit.

I was paralyzed. I had never been so high in my life, and I was only just realizing it. My body felt heavy, a thing made of liquid metal.

Somehow I got up. I stumbled over to her. I remember looking for red—for blood—and feeling relief when I saw none. I sat her up and did a few J-thrusts. As her airway cleared, vomit spilled down her front.

I ran into the cabin and got T and R. Together we lugged Z out of the sun and into the tiled floor of the dining room.

We were unsure if she was dying. She vomited and coughed and babbled. One minute I’d think, we’re in the clear, she’s breathing, this will be okay. Then suddenly she’d break out in these terrible choking murmurs—“Please, please, please!”—and again I’d descend into terror. I made it my one task, as she thrashed about, to keep her head from knocking against the counter. Her eyes rolled back and her tongue flicked in and out. Her smile was awry. I had the sense of something demonic: I didn’t see my friend Z in those eyes, I did not see a person.

To be clear: Z really had been choking on her own vomit, and if no one had intervened she really could have died. I was tripping, but I knew this. As for the reason she blacked out, that is still unclear. She is a small person, and her body was dealing with a mild cold at the time; the dosage might have been too much. It was almost too much for me. I was far higher than I had ever been.

While I held her, I exchanged worried glances with T, who hovered over us, providing warmth and support. We wanted to give her some water, but she was in no state to drink. We vacillated endlessly. At this point I was finally peaking, and the time dilation was extreme: every second was a long narrow tunnel. I kept thinking, “This is still happening. How much time must we still get through?” Then I would be distracted, and the thought would reset: “Oh shit, I’m still here.”

In the worst moments, when I was sure Z was dying, I was compelled to reinterpret the world.

This is as clear I can put it. We know that the difference between life and death is vast. Like the line between land and sea, there is an absolute divide: on the one side trees grow and people build houses, and on the other side there is nothing. But in those moments holding Z, that difference was stripped of all value. I regarded the duality as a god might: here I was on the one side intuiting the other, and I understood, deeply, that it was an arbitrary divide. We live here and not there, and the only reason we did not voluntarily cross over was just that we were used to this side. Oh my God, I kept thinking. Oh my God, it doesn’t matter if I die.

I knew what I’d realized was true, and that it made all fear of death irrelevant. But it felt wrong, it felt ugly. It was meaningless. Life, death, they were incommensurate yet together, a part of this same great holy ungraspable ongoing Thing that didn’t matter.

I felt the scaffolding of my life collapse. The habits and desires that kept me going drifted apart like space junk. I was, at that time, working on a novel in my spare hours; now I could not imagine returning to it. I had planned a trip to Haida Gwaii with my Mom later that month; I could not imagine going anymore. My projects seemed pointless, having nothing to do with anything. People in my life came to mind, and they were placeholders of themselves; their personhood was missing.

I considered killing myself. Since it did not matter if I died, it did not matter if I lived: either way I was obliterated. Even now I was gone, yet somehow still around to see it. There were knives in the kitchen, a few arm spans away. My eyes kept seeking them out. I could do it. I could.

But I didn’t.

There was a line between life and death that, once crossed, could not be uncrossed. I knew this and clutched this knowledge fiercely. From the outside it could not have looked like anything—I was just sitting there, holding Z—but I was fighting for my life.

*

What brought me back?

At last, I became certain that Z was not going to die. She’d been breathing evenly for some time and I felt a strength in her body. She is going to live, I thought. I seized that certainty and did not let it go. I had to use a kind of inner muscle for this—I had to flex my will. It was a little like holding focus on one of those Magic Eye pictures, which involve the minute coordination of the pupil and its ciliary muscles. If I let go of that control, I knew, the terror would be back. Time passed and it became easier, until at last little effort was involved and I allowed myself to feel relief.

That I could feel relief was utterly surprising to me. Before, a positive outcome had been impossible to conceive.

This was the beginning of phase three. Z was still not herself, and I continued to hold her head and keep her in a position to vomit when she needed. But I knew she was getting better. She had started smiling. I’d never seen anyone beam that way; enhanced by the psilocin, her eyes were astonishing. The joy I felt in her being alive was absolute. T put on classical music. Then he and R helped Z upstairs into bed, where she eventually came back to reality with no memory of what had happened.

*

What had happened?

It turned out that T, who had been on the Golden Teachers, not on the unknown strain the rest of us had taken, hadn’t lived the same nightmare. (You know only your trip.) Because he hadn’t seen Z choking on her vomit, he’d simply worried about her hydration, and about protecting her head.

I found this out when, that evening, the two of us made a fire behind the cabin. I was thankful for the difference between us: if his bliss had been punctured, he would not have been such a grounding presence throughout the terror.

That terror, however, still made me weak to think about.

It was not, I tried to explain, “fear.” It was doom. Fear is when we face an unknown outcome; doom is when we become aware that we are already defeated. In that long nightmare in the dining room of the cabin, holding a friend I thought was dying, I knew that my very selfhood was part of this terrible storm. I was not ontologically separate, with some destiny outside the universe; I was a brief gust in a hurricane of being that was this universe. This is different from the idea of facing your own personal death. I saw that, merely by taking part in this universe, this happening which included death, all of us were already dead. There is no option of victory, no successful spiritual quest, and there never had been. Before our first baby steps we have all already collapsed.

*

Sitting fireside as the night sky ripened into dark, trying to explain this view of things, I realized that I had nothing to disprove it.

Nothing other than the mere fact that the sense of doom was gone, and that I did not feel dead.

Seven

If the reader wonders how, after trip six, I was stupid enough for trip seven only a few weeks later, I don’t blame them. But, long before all this, I had promised my younger brother, T, that I would introduce him to the five-gram heroic dose. So in late June, that’s what we did.

T had a great time. For a while he lay on his back staring at the ceiling in awe, looking up at something he called “the Mother.” I lay down beside him. He explained that the ceiling was pulsing with life, it had become a great intelligent protrusion into our world, patterned and complex; it stretched and kaleidoscoped, interested in us. For a moment I saw it. But I had given myself a lesser dose of three grams, and the vision faded.

Just before this, however, something happened that triggered a negative thought spiral which lasted the entire duration of the trip.

I had been moving around to the music—we were playing Four Tet’s album, New Energy—when T, lying on the floor, groaned. My nervous system shifted gears faster than I could think; I was once again looking up to see my friend Z lying on her back, choking. I thought, Oh shit, it’s happening again. T is having a bad trip, he wants out and he can’t get out. And behind that, quieter: I did this, it was me.

“T!”

He looked up, grinning.

It was too late for my body to recover. The bad feeling, the doom, possessed me. It was as though the world had flipped over and I was clawing at the underside. Why did I do this again? I thought. What did I think was going to happen? I had hoped, by having a good time with my younger brother, I might recover for myself what wonder and joy I had found in psilocybin mushrooms. I had thought the darkness, if I encountered any darkness, would be something else. Now came the sinking realization: Nope. It’s this again. This.

I wrote things in my notebook to comfort myself, and to try to understand what was happening, but my words always felt like distractions, a cover up to what was unbearable. What I really wanted was for the trip to end.

*

Somewhere along the line I had picked up the idea that the only “key” to psychedelic experience, if there is any key at all, is surrender. If you feel fear, fall into the fear in order to come out the other end. If you think you are dying, even, there’s no need to flinch away: you are, at least, physically safe. “Whatever terrifying experiences may arise,” go the ritual words of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, “they are natural manifestations of actual reality.”

But this anxiety was different.

What disturbs me most in life is not the possibility of fundamental meaninglessness. It’s the possibility that the discovery of meaning can occur at the same time as the discovery that the self, your self, is inadequate to that meaning. It’s the existence of a spiritual imperative to ascend, combined with the certainty of failure. As I spiraled, I lived this fear. I tried to “surrender” to it, but what was supposed to happen did not happen: the anxiety did not become something else. It increased. All soothing things, music and good company, could only be sorry salves. Ugly and small, I didn’t want to be human anymore.

To say “it was just a bad trip” is reductive. If there is to be any point at all in describing psychedelic experience, it must find its own semantic integrity. I don’t believe this was some encounter with the Jungian “Shadow.” I don’t believe this was Death, or Suffering. It was something else, something worse. Doom.

And then, like every trip, it was over.

Epilogue

Don Juan Matus, the Toltec shaman from Carlos Castaneda’s books, observes that psychoactive plants (what he calls “allies”) can “make you see and understand things about which no human being could possibly enlighten you.” This shouldn’t surprise veteran psychonauts, nor even those without direct experience of these substances. We live in a world that constantly exceeds our language, and each one of us has lived through things we can explain to no one.

I can’t conclude, however, that these experiences have any more claim to truth than others.

Here is what I think. Inconceivably, Ultimate Reality, though unified, is multiple. It is final void and it is Light beyond light. There are those who have dark visions—Thomas Ligotti, Emil Cioran, or the Terrance McKenna of his last mushroom trip (“a lack of all meaning, a lack of all meaning!”). And there are, more numerously, the religious mystics—Jakob Böhme, Ibn ‘Arabî, Julian of Norwich. Those who insist on one version of ultimate reality, then, may misunderstand the nature of mystical and psychedelic experience. If there are both mystics of horror and mystics of love, it is the result of difference—perhaps at the level of the self, of character and of deepest desire.

As I mull over these journeys into the Psilocybe, I take a kind of comfort in this. I am not obliged to accept my experience of Doom on its own terms.

Recently, I was pleased to see that Erik Davis, in his well-reasoned and entertaining book, High Weirdness, argues something similar. He calls his position weird naturalism. Instead of thinking about visionary or psychedelic experience as pointing to a “beyond,” he locates that “beyond” within the world. What psychedelics do, he argues, is “not transcend so much as loop together culture and consciousness, sacred and profane, romance and realism, gnosis and nature.”

For a time, I simply could not imagine enduring again what I endured in those last two trips. In the weeks that followed trip seven, I lost all self-esteem and basic trust in the world. I gave the realm of the Psilocybe a wide berth. I even thought that I’d never enter it again.

But I have.

On many occasions.

And, as is typical of the Psilocybe, each of those deserves their own log.