The Long Shadow Hoaxer Carlos Castaneda Cast on Psychedelics and New Age Spirituality

By: Natalie Storey

A new biography of Carlos Castaneda chronicles how the hoaxer invented the idea of shamanism for a white American audience and then capitalized on its popularity to create a suicide cult. The stereotypes Castaneda generated are still pervasive in American society, especially in the psychedelic renaissance. But—as biographer Ru Marshall points out—it was all based on a lie. Don Juan, the Yaqui elder Castaneda quoted in his books, never existed and his “knowledge” was cobbled together from European sources.

“(H)e was a particularly American trickster—a trickster of the Americas. A simulacrum, a trickster for a consumer society,” Marshall writes. “For trickster stories serve a social and ritual function. They’re employed in healing rituals. However much they disrupt society, they have a role in it. And, when the tricking is done, the charming perp disappears.”

At its core Marshall’s biography is an exhaustive accounting of how the guru created his hoax, and then how forcefully American culture lapped it up. Castaneda’s books have been translated into 17 languages, sold at least 10 million copies, and continue to sell thousands every year. When the University of California Press published a deluxe fortieth anniversary edition of The Teachings it categorized the book as Religion/Native American Studies/Mysticism even though various scholars and friends of Castaneda have decried the accounts as fake. The books inspired a laundry list of famous artists, including George Lucas (don Juan was perhaps the inspiration for Obi-Wan Kenobi), Joni Mitchell, John Lennon, Bob Dylan, Federico Fellini, Octavio Paz, even the philosopher Gilles Deleuze.

“In his books, it seemed to his readers that Indigenous knowledge was being shown to be superior to ‘Western knowledge,’” Marshall writes. “But then, the shell trick: Indigenous knowledge turned out to be largely based on European philosophy.”

American Trickster opens with an eerie scene in 2003 when two hikers find the body of Nury Alexander—one of five women who disappeared after Castaneda’s death—in the PanamintDunes in Death Valley, CA. Nury was the adopted daughter and sometimes lover of Castaneda who had built her life around sharing his teachings. Castaneda’s cult fell apart in the late 90s after his death at home from liver cancer and the disappearance of the women, who he had dubbed witches. Five of his closet female companions disappeared shortly after their guru’s death, apparently committing suicide to join their leader, which members of Castaneda’s cult called “making the leap.” The bodies of the other four women have never been found.

American Trickster’s first section delves into Castaneda’s childhood in Peru. Although Castaneda often claimed he was from Brazil and younger than his age, he was born in Cajamarca, a remote city in the northern Andes, in 1925. Marshall tracked down characters from Castaneda’s early life who remembered him as a gregarious liar and a fabulous storyteller. Castaneda came from one of the village’s leading merchant and silversmith families, but his branch was the “poor relations,” according to Marshall.“When he was a boy, all of (Castaneda’s) friends called him by his nickname, Fashturo. Fashturo was the town drunk, famous for his jokes and colorful lies.” As a young boy, Castaneda talked of going to America. When he arrived in San Francisco by boat in 1951, he left a wife and child behind in Peru, whose existence he would lie about for the rest of his life.

Marshall makes a convincing case that the author’s family was involved in the brutality of mining in South America, possibly even owning slaves and participating in a massacre of indigenous people. “Did the grandfather of Mr. World-Famous Author own a mine, or a share in a mine? Family members in Cajamarca told me he did. Some said silver, some said gold.” Given that the family belonged to the non-Indigenous aristocratic class, Marshall argues that it’s unlikely Castaneda would have picked up knowledge of indigenous healing or psychedelic practices from his childhood in Peru except as a distant observer.

Friends and associates never saw Castaneda use psychedelics and some of the information about indigenous psychedelic use in his books is inaccurate. Gordon Wasson, who created a bank of stereotypes of his own when he convinced Maria Sabina to give him mushrooms in the 1950s, was the first to log suspicions about the psychedelic use chronicled in The Teachings. Wasson knew a thing or two about psychedelic mushrooms, such as the fact that they aren’t smoked by any tribe as Castaneda recorded. Marshall argues this was probably an error by Castaneda, who was naïve about psychedelics. According to Marshall, the obvious conclusion was: “The drug culture’s new hero had never tried shrooms.” Castaneda’s only documented contact with Yaqui people appears to have been on trips to Mexico when he bought masks from merchants, Marshall writes. Over the years, Yaqui elders have attempted to distance themselves from Castaneda’s books and the ideas within.

Marshall shows how Castaneda tricked multiple prominent UCLA professors during the 1960s in part because “the knowledge” in his books was branded as indigenous. Requesting funding to do a research trip in Mexico, Castaneda’s professors touted the fact that he spoke “several South American languages fluently and can pass as Mexican and/or indigenous,”Marshall writes. In fact, The Teachings likely began as an assignment in the archaeologist Clement Meighan’s “Methods of Field Archaeology” class in the spring of 1960. Meighan promised any student who could find and interview a real “Indian” an automatic A, which Castaneda received. Meighan then helped Castaneda launch his career.

The last third of American Trickster chronicles Castaneda’s descent into debauchery and increasing manipulation of his followers as he created a New Age cult in Pasadena. Marshall shows how the author’s lifestyle program called Tensegrity devolved into a recruitment tool for his ever-expanding harem. Castaneda kept a rotating roster of female followers who changed their names at his insistence, cut ties to their families and friends and waited for their chances to sleep with “The Nagual,” whose semen they believed had magical powers. Marshall relies on the testimony of writer Amy Wallace, one of Castaneda’s long-term sexual partners, to illustrate the salacious dynamics of the cult. According to Wallace, the women believed: “You needed the Nagual’s sperm to become a magical being. It was like drinking a magic elixir.” Castaneda demanded that members of his inner circle give up their personal histories and attachments, including giving away pets, and he instructed them to lie about the existence of his cult and harem. Castaneda claimed celibacy yet continued to sleep with his female followers. He banned his women from going to hairdressers and insisted on giving them the cult’s signature boyish bowl cuts himself. Sexuality and jealously “permeated the interactions within the group” despite Castaneda’s claims of celibacy, Marshall writes. “Carlos, almost until the very end, was still carefully choreographing sexual interactions among the inner circle.”

American Trickster reveals the colossal ramifications of the cultural paradigm Carlos Castaneda created, which is still alive and well in American culture today, especially in the psychedelic underground, where people continue to pass out The Teachings as a paragon example of indigenous spiritual practices involving psychedelics. The psychedelic renaissance remains preoccupied with the lineages of its teachings, facilitators and substances in ways that mimic The Teachings. But, of course, as Marshall’s new biography tries to assert yet again: don Juan wasn’t real, and the “knowledge” in Castaneda’s books was largely plagiarized from European philosophy and previously published anthropological studies. In the end, Marshall reminds us: “We believe stories that fit narratives to which we already subscribe.” And Carlos Castaneda was an expert at manipulating his readers with these narratives.

“The truth was indeed much stranger: a mestizo author, who insisted on identifying himself as ‘European,’ who’d created an ‘Indian’ character who turns the world of the ‘Western’ character ‘Carlos’ inside out, revealing a supposedly indigenous way of knowledge that was in fact based on German philosophy.”

By stacking I mean: the practice of using many different psychoactive substances together to enhance effects.

By spinning people up I mean: Facilitators intentionally sending people deeper into their amplifications, inflations and visions as an alleged part of a client’s purging process.

Stacking

Facilitators in the shaman’s network used various substances at timed intervals during one-night journeys to enhance the effects.

(Before I describe different common variations I witnessed or took myself, I want to note that no one is sure exactly what was in the shaman’s pills. Two unconfirmed tests of pills from the network suggest a range of synthetics. is collecting samples for testing.)

The first night I journeyed, the facilitator allegedly gave me theobromine and kanna. A half hour after we took the first round of kanna, some women at the journey had an additional pill. I think that I did, but I can’t recall for sure. Someone at the journey had a reaction and had not disclosed taking diet pills, which the facilitator said interacted with the kanna.

As I continued to journey in the network I experienced more combinations:

Theobromine - kanna - white lily

Theobromine - kanna - sassafras & kanna

Theobromine - kanna - mushroom chocolate

Theobromine - white lily - mushroom chocolate

Theobromine - white lily - voacanga & dendrobium

Theobrmine - voacanga - white lily

As I mentioned in a previous post on the shamans’ drugs, journeys had a rhythm. About a half an hour after the first round of sacraments, the facilitator offered clients a bump up. A second bump was often given to select people who sought it out, a half hour or an hour after the first bump. The shaman always left at about midnight.

By the way, people have been asking how could you be duped by someone like the shaman, and that’s in part what this blog is for: To show how and why. The network had extensive intake questionnaires and an interview to gain access to journeys. The intake process was comparable to hiring a therapist and lends the group legitimacy. The intake forms ask about medical history and medications, but when I started journeying it eventually became clear that facilitators didn’t know all that much about what they were giving people or the potential interactions.

Spinning Em Up

The shaman often talked about “sending an organism into chaos” to learn what it is made of. I never heard him tell someone their delusions were false. Like he did with me, I heard him tell others to explore their so-called delusions and their fears. There was a belief in letting people go through their shit, in “holding space” so they could breakdown or go into chaos.

And while I agree that the perspective of Western man/whiteness has cut people off from a richer sensorial experience of the world and convinced them to prefer order over chaos…

And while I agree that, in an archetypal sense, creation comes from chaos and insanely creative phases can come after chaos…

Some of the chaos I witnessed around the shaman was far from productive or creative. Actually, people’s lives had been ruined, literally and figuratively. People had lost touch with reality.

Some people had developed highly addictive behavior related to the groups, the pills and the shaman. People followed him around the country. I knew people who journeyed every weekend. I knew lots of people who bragged about how long or how much they journeyed.

It makes me uncomfortable to think about the extent to which the groups ushered people toward breakdowns.

Not to worry, he said, because as a literature teacher my brain was primed for navigating psychedelic trips. He said literature had given my brain roadmaps, essentially training it on many of the situations, entities and thought patterns a person might experience during a psychedelic trip.

And, after all, stories are the most effective translators of information about the human psyche. They teach us everything we can’t learn from science and psychedelic integration handbooks.

And the Odyssey, which I have taught a dozen times, is perhaps the longest, strangest trip in literature. The experience of reading it aloud with high school freshmen (repeatedly) most certainly altered my brain chemistry.

The Lotus Eaters

When discussing psychedelics in the Odyssey, most people will point you to Book 9 in which Odysseus tells the story of landing on the Lotus Eaters’ island. Three of Odysseus’ men consume a lotus concoction brewed by the islanders and then want to stay there forever.

“(T)hose who ate this honeyed plant, the Lotos,

never cared to report nor to return:

they longed to stay forever, browsing on

that native bloom, forgetful of their homeland,” reads the Fitzgerald translation.

The New York Times recently came out with a story suggesting we still don’t know what the lotus eaters were actually consuming, but to me it’s obvious: They were literally consuming lotus flowers just like the text says, distilled in alcohol and honey like the Egyptians did. Perhaps we can’t be sure which species of lotus, but there’s beaucoup evidence for the ceremonial use of lotus across the ancient world.

Although Blue Lotus has recently become popular in the psychedelic renaissance—billed as psychoactive, calming and a plant favored by Cleopatra—the flowers you can buy on Amazon are likely not the same ones ancient Egyptians used. One of my favorite works of psychedelic art, the Turin erotic papyrus, features Blue Lotus above people’s heads:

Whenever I return to Odysseus’ description of his men’s trip on the Lotus Eaters’ island, I think they sound like opiate addicts. I imagine they were doing what’s depicted in the Turin papyrus.

(Maybe today the Lotus Eaters would be hooked up to a ketamine drip and calling it medicine?)

Epic literature is an altered state

But the Odyssey’s treatment of altered states doesn’t end with Book 9 and the Lotus Eaters. The Homeric epics are also systems of human consciousness that allow us a window into what it might be like to live in an expanded state. They give us a window adjacent to the window psychedelics can give us.

If you really want to understand dominant culture’s depictions of the psychedelic experience, I think you have to deal with the Greeks. Reading the Greeks is humbling—they can help you realize that your trips aren’t actually that BIG or unique or new, at least not when compared to Odysseus’ trip, and also that maybe one uninitiated white man’s ideas about tripping shouldn’t immediately be classified as literature. But I digress.

In The Spell of the Sensuous, David Abram argues the Homeric epics represent an expanded human consciousness that was closer to nature. His enumeration of qualities he believes this past consciousness embodied according to the Iliad and the Odyssey so closely resembles the psychedelic experience that they bear summarizing here:

• Deities or entities speak directly through the environment

• Deities or gods are not indistinct from nature

• Human events and emotions are not separate from the environment

• The environment is sentient

• The environment instructs humans

  

I don’t say much when the psychedelic dweebs start pontificating about DMT entities and then pen their memoirs about meeting these entities, but inside I’m screaming: Bro have you even read the Odyssey?

Homer—whoever they were—had wayyyy better entities than today’s psychedelic writers.

Dude talk to me when you’ve met Proteus.

What the dweebs are actually talking about is the fact that psychedelics helped them (briefly) slip into a ecological state of consciousness that they, like most of dominant society, have lost touch with—it’s not a new discovery, trust me, merely new to them because they don’t read literature or tend a garden—a consciousness that is akin to what the Iliad and the Odyssey depict. A consciousness embedded in and dependent on nature.

Which, of course, we are. We just lie to ourselves about it.

To me, the Iliad and the Odyssey are maps of Western man’s psyche. They are archetypal meaning-making structures that transmit information from the collective unconscious. It’s a crime we don’t teach them in high school any more.

More thoughts on navigating psychedelic trips and basketball here: The Field is the World.

Many advocates have access or they are affluent enough to buy it. Too many of them either don’t care or don’t understand how regular people access psychedelics for mental health treatment. For most of us the choices are limited: dubious Ketamine IV clinics that aren’t cheap, spurious shamans in the underground (also not cheap) or your neighborhood drug dealer.

Americans are losing access to health care, and even in places where you can be prescribed psychedelic treatment, it remains prohibitively expensive. This is crazy to me because many psychedelic elders gave away LSD or mushrooms for free. Access was central to their ethos, not an afterthought.

An old man told me that profiting from sacred medicines creates the worst possible karma. He said he could never profit from peyote because it would undermine his ceremonies. He said he would never do such a thing because he would never saddle his grandchildren with such a curse.

When I started dabbling in psychedelics eight years ago, access was much more limited than it is now. State by state legalization efforts were still building momentum and people were afraid of losing jobs and relationships if others found out they used psychedelics. When I joined the shaman’s groups, I made a vow that I understood a key protocol: You were allowed to share only your experience and not the experiences of others, unless they explicitly granted permission.

This is one of the many reasons why I see the shaman’s network as a product of draconian drug laws.

The illegality of psychedelics directly influences the price inflation, the lack of access, and the secrecy in the psychedelic underground. It convinces profit-hungry grifters and creeps to join the field. It explains why facilitators say what’s in their pills is proprietary information and clients in their groups might accept this explanation as plausible.

It all comes down to access and money. Money and access.

What follows is a dump of everything I can remember or wrote down in my notebooks about the shaman’s sources of income:

When I started journeying with the the shaman, facilitators charged $400 a night. Often the host who owned the journey house charged an extra land fee. Former facilitators tell me they were pressured to charge $450 a person per night so as not to undercut others in the network.

The shaman developed multiple income streams from his MLM-style network of companies. Whenever he had a falling out with an ex, he gave her a supplement company, took a percentage of the profits and sold the pills through his network.

This arrangement kept former girlfriends dependent on him. It also facilitated a continual rebrand of his pills and other products. When I was around from 2016-2021, he had two supplement companies and was developing a third with an ex-girlfriend. She now sells “kanna” spray for anxiety.

The shaman’s income streams included:

• Percentage from one-night journeys

• Percentage from week-long “intensives”

• Facilitator training course fees

• Sacrament access/subscription fees

• Online lecture series subscription fees

• One-on-one Zoom calls with clients

• Supplements sold online

• Donations for a psychedelic church

This information comes from interviews and text messages with the shaman when he was courting me to be his ghost writer. I attended a company meeting at his home in Pasadena in 2020. The situation was so dysfunctional and strange that I elected to move to Rocky Boy’s Reservation to teach English in 2020 instead of moving to LA to work for the shaman.

Former facilitators in the network provided additional information that corroborated my observations about how the shaman’s network functioned.

The shaman’s facilitator training program lasted two years and required facilitators to attend several “intensives” a year. The facilitators at the top of the MLM ran the intensives, typically at super fancy houses in locations like Hawaii, Carmel or St. Thomas, or trips to Peru. I recently received an email for a 7-day intensive in Hawaii that cost $3,700.

To enter the network, a new facilitator had to sign an NDA and give 20 percent of journey proceeds back to the shaman. Another 10 percent went to the mentor, or the facilitator who was higher up in the MLM and initiated the new person into the network. Top earners gave $1,200 or 40 percent back to the organization monthly. This percentage was on top of facilitator training fees and the subscription fees to access the sacraments.

Former facilitators say the monthly subscription fee to access the sacraments was $450. Estimates put the shaman’s total in-network facilitator count at 600 to 1,500. Ostensibly, he could have been making $8 million a year alone on sacrament subscription fees.

Not every facilitator paid this fee because some who had been guiding in the shaman’s network before Dawn helped monetize the facilitator training pathway were grandfathered in. In trainings, new facilitators at the bottom of the pyramid complained they could barely get by because of the various fees they paid to the shaman’s organization.

The shaman didn’t own property in his name—he rented his house in Pasadena—but he had a company that was applying for patents when I was around. I didn’t like his house because the backyard was cement with a pool and it was too sad for me to live without a garden. Journeys were held at the homes of longtime clients or facilitators. Some of the shaman’s facilitators at the top of the pyramid traveled around like he did. One recently built a retreat center in California. In general, the network had few non-liquid assets and lots of cash flow. Facilitators could easily collect $10k a night.

If you know something else put it in the comments!

I’ve seen two versions of results from drug testing allegedly done on the little pills from the shaman’s network. These results identify amphetamines, MDMA analogs, valium and synthetic opiates in some of the capsules, while finding other substances unidentifiable. These tests are unconfirmed and lack the full array of what was available in the network. Additionally, one set of testing results forwarded to me contained so many misconceptions that I doubted the results completely, which is why I am not posting them here. It’s been five years since I left the groups and I still don’t know what was in the capsules I took during journeys. What seems clear to me is that the drugs the shaman uses are synthetics branded as indigenous plant medicine.

In fact, the very first question I asked the shaman the first time I met him was about “the plants,” which was what I had been coached to call them. In the groups, it was taboo to call the little white pills drugs. The little capsules were always undergoing rebranding and people were always getting judged for using the wrong language to describe them. People called the drugs “sacraments,” “sacred indigenous plant medicine,” “medicine” and “plants.”

When I asked the shaman about the plants the first time I met him he said, “You and I will have to discuss this later.” Then he instructed everyone to avoid getting fixated on the plants because such a way of thinking could lead to unmet expectations and a bad trip. At first, this seemed true in practice, especially after the night I watched him talk down a woman who had come to the group to have a vision of her recently dead grandmother. It was rather amusing, actually, listening to him explain that it was rude to call in shades and, anyway, no one can script a psychedelic journey that way. But later, I began to see how “don’t get fixated on the plants” became a way to obfuscate what was actually in the little white pills.

The shaman once told me he could make any plant psychedelic. He was a radical experimenter and combiner and he used his facilitators and long-time clients as guinea pigs. He was inspired by Chinese medicine and his acupuncturist. There was a pick-me culture around who got which sacraments, and if the shaman offered one of his special new pills for you to try, it was a vote of confidence in your journeying ability. A badge of honor that shouldn’t have been.

It never sat right with me that I didn’t know what was in the little white pills even though everyone around me was saying things like, “trust the process,” “surrender,” “trust the medicine to give you what you need,” “trust the shaman.” The shaman’s sacraments were safe, people said, certainly safer than street drugs, they claimed.

When the shaman asked me to become his ghost writer, I started researching the sacraments the group used because I believed better descriptions of them were needed. Back then, I was naive enough to believe the shaman wanted come into integrity. Maybe there was a time when he wanted to change—maybe he meant it when he promised me gardens—but of course it’s cheaper and easier to make millions from synthetics made in a lab.

What follows is a dump of everything I know about the little white pills from the shaman’s groups (2016-2020):

Journeys had a rhythm, starting at sundown, and beginning with a lecture by the shaman and the first round of sacraments, allegedly kanna. After that, some people were given a bump up of kanna or sometimes another sacrament. After that, there was sometimes a third round for select people. There was tons of combining and stacking, determined by individual facilitators or clients.

Although it was frowned upon to become fixated on the plants, people in the groups constantly discussed which sacraments they used and compared experiences and reactions.

Some facilitators denied clients—especially new clients—the choice or knowledge of which sacrament they received. Once, at a group in San Francisco, I was encouraged to blindly pick a pill from a facilitator’s fanny pack.

Share

Here’s a list of everything I can remember people saying they had in the shaman’s groups (2016-2020):

- Kanna (described as a heart-opener, sent through the mail during & after COVID. He has many derivative products such as sprays available for order online. Kanna was normally handed out as the first round of sacraments in journeys, often with theobromine or shortly afterward.)

- Theobromine (described as an enhancer. Was given as the first round of sacraments or before the first round of kanna.)

- White Lily. (The shaman once told me this one tested too much like an opiate and couldn’t be sent in the mail.)

- S & K (allegedly a mix of sassafras and kanna. This one was hard on my body from the beginning & I only took it once because of it.)

- D (dendrobium allegedly)

- V (voacanga. I took V alone one time & it was highly dissociative. The shaman said he told me not to take it alone.)

- V + D (voacanga & dendrobium)

- Liquid psilocybin. (Only saw it served once. They were kinda stingy about their shroom stuff.)

- Chocolate (mushroom chocolate. Usually not given until the second or third round if at all.)

- Snakeroot. (He said it was from India & was testing it.)

- Ketamine cough drops. (Heard they have it now. I make fun of it in my novel.)

- Ayahuasca. (The real tea. I drank it in Feb. of 2020 with him in LA. He said it was flown in from Hawaii. Some people say he has Ayahuasca pills, which I had never heard. The tea I drank in 2020 was real.)

Please add any others that I might not remember or never knew about in the comments.

Leave a comment

The group was constantly changing the names of its drugs and cagey about what was actually in the baggies the facilitators carried around. Like I said, calling the pills drugs was taboo. You could call them sacraments or plants or plant medicine or medicine and later, on Zoom, Dawn tried to make everyone call the pills music but people forgot. Everyone assumed we were using indigenous plant medicine. No one ever talked about synthetics.

The sacraments were almost all pills and the bags of them were labeled only with abbreviations like S & K. When they traveled, the shaman said the pills were wellness supplements. The shaman traveled with a black backpack of sacraments for 40 years across the country and around the world. He stopped traveling in 2020 due to the pandemic. Many people who have journeyed in his network since 2020 have never met him in person. Before the pandemic, he visited his facilitators around the country and sold them sacraments from his backpack. After the pandemic, the network switched to mail-order kanna. You could order enough for a journey for about $40. It came certified mail with no labeling. You also had to pay the Zoom journey fee, which I believe was still $400 a night.

I never liked the sacrament they called kanna and suspected it was merely a synthetic MDMA analog because kanna’s range in the wild is extremely limited—it’s found only in two places in South Africa—and I could find only one company cultivating the plant for commercial use back in 2018. The shaman had no gardens or green houses. When I was around, he had a lab in Queens. It seemed cost prohibitive and logistically impossible that he could be importing as much kanna extract as he would have needed to supply his operation. At journeys, it was handed out like candy, as though it was harmless. Real kanna extract is extremely bitter, smelly and brown. The pills contained pure white powder. Some women in the groups seemed to be using the shaman’s kanna daily like a diet pill because it suppresses the appetite. One of his ex-girlfriends now sells a spray that’s meant to be used daily and billed as a microdose for anxiety. Behind the scenes, facilitators were complaining about the consistency of the kanna pills—some batches were rough on people’s bodies, I once heard a woman complain in a facilitator training session. I noted the comment because I had stopped using the kanna because of the effects it had on my body. I’d have a horrible headache and zits the next day. The shaman told me to drink magnesium powder dissolved in water and take tryptophan. He said to rest more. The women around me said I didn’t feel good because I was having a contraction—the natural come down after an expansion in journeywork. It was all part of the process, they said, not just an MDMA hangover.

By the way, the lack of gardens was a major sticking point between me and the shaman. When he first brought up the idea that I should move LA to live with him, I thought it was ridiculous and told him I didn’t want to live there, especially if I had to travel all the time with him and couldn’t have a garden. In my younger years I traveled across the world—I was in the Peace Corps in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan and later a Fulbright scholar in Casabalanca, Morocco. I went to Syria before the civil war and waded in the Jordan River during Israel’s 2009 bombing of Gaza. When I started using psychedelics in 2016, I became very interested in dirt and my backyard garden. The shaman’s travel schedule back then was punishing. I thought traveling was killing him and I wanted to have my feet firmly planted on the earth.

He told me once that I reminded him of his mother because she had a garden in their backyard. He said she would pick plants from it daily for teas and salad, which is what I do, because it’s what my mother did. As I write this, I’m sitting outside in my sad yard munching on arugula from my tough little garden. The more drugs I have done, the more depressed I have gotten about cement and urban noise and data centers. I didn’t think I could survive in LA, and I didn’t want to try. I didn’t want to appear in front of his groups at his side like his past girlfriends and wives and facilitators had done. I didn’t want to sleep in his bed. I just wanted to journey with him.

Once when I asked him directly about the obfuscation surrounding his novel psychedelic pills, he said he was trying to remove pressure from plants like peyote. He said he wanted to remove the romanticization of plants that white people inevitably act on when they start learning about psychedelics. He said his pills were safer for older, affluent white people and easier on their bodies than the real substances like Ayahuasca, which he said can be highly variable. He thought there would be a market for psychedelics in the United States no matter what—legalization or not—and he bet that it would be huge before most. Anyone who reads literature or trips knows the outcomes are rarely what you intended or expected. Actually, outcomes are usually flavored with a heavy dose of irony no one can avoid, not even a writer, it turns out. American society has, at this point, made hypocrites of us all. The shaman is just the paragon example in psychedelics.

But he isn’t alone in his hypocrisy.

If you’d like to support my work you can become a paid subscriber or Venmo me here.

Here’s a link to some research on kanna I did in 2019.

• Confirmable information—dates, places, names and victims who will go on record to tell their stories.

It’s been strange to receive sympathy in the DMs because it has become abundantly clear to me that many people have been harmed by this network much worse than me. Troublingly, the harm that people are reporting has been worse than I imagined. I want to acknowledge the gossip that circulates within the shaman’s network, while also trying to help this information in the world. This network needs to be investigated and I hope more people will step forward. What follows are the most troubling unconfirmed allegations reported to me and several journalists who are working on this story:

• Additional deaths. My tally of suspected deaths is now four at journeys and one suicide among the inner circle.

• 18 reported sexual assaults by one male facilitator in the network.

  Thanks for reading Maenad Diary! This post is public so feel free to share it.

  Share

These claims need further investigation and the people who are doing the investigating need more information, especially dates, places and names. Ironically, when I gave my novel Dharma Sluts a suspenseful plot, I felt guilty about suggesting people died in the psychedelic underground. Learning more information about the shaman’s network has been unsettling. I am pressing forward because I believe information I learned while I was trying to be his ghost writer can help others piece together their experiences.

As I said before, not only is the shaman’s network full of gossip—as tends to happen when no one knows the truth—but the network is also full of conspiracy theories and—let’s be honest—people who think they’re lizard people or aliens because of past life regressions. Journalists have been unable to verify the most serious accusations because the many tips they’ve received tend to lack verifiable information like names, dates, places and victims who are willing to come forward.

When I was writing my novel, I deliberately made the shaman into a character and named him Don Mateo to spoof Carlos Castaneda. Once I make someone into a character—once I fictionalize them—I have always believed they become more of my creation. You could call my characters my projections. I intentionally created Don Mateo to be an “every shaman” type of character so that he could embody many fantasies of whiteness, white American new age spirituality and the psychedelic renaissance. I didn’t want him to be dismissed as an outlier or singled out as one bad actor because I wanted the psychedelic field to finally cope with its hypocrisies connected to whiteness. Fat chance, you might say.

I was altered during most of the brief in-person time I spent around the shaman. Not to mention, the kind of stuff that happened around him was unbelievable, such as the woman who was parked outside his house in Pasadena glassing us when I arrived in February of 2020. He said she was a former client who had a psychotic break in a journey and was living in her car outside his house to protect him from evil energy. Seriously. When I was writing my novel, before I knew about the deaths, I believed the truest parts of it were the psychedelic vision scenes. Now it seems more of my fiction is coming true.

Cassandra, the journalist in my novel who is investigating Don Mateo, asks him to define shamanism. “It’s a figment of the white imagination,” he responds. Although the real shaman deleted our old text messages last week, in my novel Don Mateo tells the journalist, “Make me whatever you need me to be.” So I did. I wanted to make art as in fiction as in real literature from my experience. I didn’t want to write a half-baked psychedelic memoir about my proximity to him. I am making these posts now to help others piece together their experiences with this network. There are other people working in psychedelics who should be—and should have been—calling out this person and this network for a long time. This experience has profoundly soured me on the psychedelic movement as a whole. Alleged mental health professionals working in psychedelics are hopping on here and popping off about how I should be naming him and assuming all the risk when they should be looking in the mirror. I’m writing these posts because people working in psychedelics have lacked the courage to speak out against these practices and end them.

The people who talk about knowing of this network for a long time make me the sickest. If you knew why were you silent? If you knew, why didn’t you try to stop it?

(Btw someone reported to me that the name the shaman uses isn’t even his real name. Go figure.)

I knew a white chick writing about a corrupt Peruvian shaman would be a hard sell, but I believe I write about whiteness more than I write about him. His network is equally an amplification of himself and American culture. His groups’ practices of secrecy and NDAs are adaptations to U.S. drug laws. His network’s success, up until now, is also a product of current drug regulations. Things have to change in the psychedelic movement as a whole to make sure this doesn’t happen again.

I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m tired of having this story on my conscience. Like many of the people in my DMs, I want it to be revealed so that everyone can move on.

Provide confirmable information!

Here’s some previous work that discuss shamanism in the United States and whiteness:

• White Shaman & Other Unfortunate Ideas

• Manifest Destiny & the Psychedelic Renaissance

• The English Teacher & The Shaman

And here’s The Story of White Water: A White Guy With a Sweat Lodge published in Hobart Pulp last year.

It’s been five years since I left the psychedelic underground groups run by a famous LA-based Peruvian guide, and although I’ve tried to put that era of my life behind me, it keeps resurfacing. In the past weeks, I’ve learned of two recent deaths connected to my former teacher. A stroke at a journey in Colorado took the life of a 55-year-old man earlier this month. Facilitators believe the man had high blood pressure and shouldn’t have used the group’s “sacraments,” but, as I’ve written on this blog before, my former teacher was never honest about what was in his pills. This was one of the major ethical violations that caused me to quit the psychedelic underground.

The other death was one of the women closest to the shaman, Dawn Revett. Dawn built the group’s website, created the shaman’s online lecture series, and his facilitator training program. She helped him make millions and lived with him during the pandemic, essentially acting as his servant. Other former members reported to me that she had recently moved out of his house and left the group. My former teacher’s AI message about her death suggested she died from suicide because she “carried an immense darkness.” I am sure she did because the darkness she carried was, in part, him. Because he offloaded the consequences of his ethical violations onto the cadre of beautiful white women around him. He wanted me to be one of them, but I didn’t bite. Before Dawn moved in with him, he asked me to live with him, but I declined. Lately, I’ve been feeling like she took my place and left me here to speak a story no one in psychedelics wants to hear.

Editors and journalists in the psychedelic media ecosystem have received tips about the groups I was a part of for years. Even now that there have been three deaths connected to my former teacher, journalists are afraid of getting sued. Former members are shamed into silence. Many observers don’t realize how vast the shaman’s network is: He has as many as 1,500 facilitators worldwide and one of the biggest underground psychedelic networks in the United States. He’s been leading journeys for more than 40 years. Many of the people trying to quietly distance themselves from him have journeyed in his groups or are currently working alongside someone who was trained by him. As far as the intellectual lineage of the psychedelic renaissance goes, he’s all over it. You might have never heard of him, and you might not know who I’m talking about, but if you work in psychedelics, you are using language and ideas that came from his groups. There is no one working in psychedelics today who has turned on as many people as him. In his groups, I journeyed with prominent psychedelic researchers, psychiatrists and psychologists trained at places like Harvard and Stanford, university professors, Hollywood people, and heiresses from some of the wealthiest families in the United States. I am not talking about a fringe group. I’m talking about someone who has unfortunately set many of the standards in the field.

I recently had an unfortunate interaction with an alleged psychedelic writer who dismissed the survivors of my former teacher’s groups by saying, “Well, then, don’t join a cult!” while at the same time—I kid you not—unknowingly using language I had once heard coming from Dawn’s mouth. Such are the ironies and hypocrisies of working in psychedelics today. The field is full of love and light wankers who will turn around and tell you that you can’t expect psychedelics to be safe. But what you can expect—what you should expect—is the type of informed consent that comes from knowing what you’re putting in your body.

I once took a walk with Dawn and the shaman in Pasadena. She introduced me to the trees along their route that she considered her friends, including her favorite tree, which was a tall oak. Later, she sent me a tiny vial in the mail with bark from the tree. The shaman didn’t pay the people around him a salary—they were all contracted employees who were expected to develop income streams by using proximity to him and their positions at the top of his pyramid scheme. Dawn built much of the architecture to collect money from facilitators in the network, and she wrote the entire facilitator training curriculum. But she had her own creative ideas. She once told me about a board game she wanted to create that she called “Shaman’s Chess.” “What if we all created with chess, instead of being created by it?” she wrote in a pitch deck for the game she sent me in 2019.

Reading Dawn’s old emails is sickening now. The shaman hasn’t left his house much since the pandemic because of his health problems, I’ve heard. Dawn was holed up with him for a long time. Here’s something she wrote in December of 2021: “I am so grateful for all of the growth and creation that has been possible for me during these many months in quarantine, and I am also looking very forward to the changes coming in 2022 as we finally see the arrival of the Novavax vaccine in the U.S., which will allow (the shaman’s) and my return to the huggable world with you all.” Novavax came and went, but the shaman didn’t start traveling again. Dawn described part of her role as “home care” for him. The friends that helped her leave the group said she was suffering from the ways the shaman asked people around him to compromise their integrity.

The shaman turned on more people than anyone, but the closer you got to him the more you were asked to compromise your integrity. The more you got burned. Dawn wasn’t the first woman close to him to become suicidal. It happened to the shaman’s girlfriend at the time when I met him, and it happened to me too. I remember how alone I felt when I first quit his groups. Not only was it traumatic to lose the support system within journeywork—a woman I loved like a mother got me into it and introduced me to the shaman—but the gaslighting around the shaman confused me for a long time and nearly convinced me my version of events wasn’t true. I now hear the same gaslighting strategies and phrases coming from the mouths of people working in psychedelics and people who claim to be psychedelic journalists and writers. They act like what they’re doing is somehow above or different from the shaman while unknowingly using language his groups introduced to the field. No one wants this kind of corruption to be the truth in psychedelics. Trust me, I don’t. Like Dawn, I once harbored delusions of working in this field. Like Dawn, I once thought I’d spend the rest of my life helping people turn on with psychedelics. No one wants this to be truth. It just is. The facts are people are dying.

If you are a current or former facilitator or participant who wants to be connected to the network of defectors, please reach out. If you want to make a financial contribution to my work you can do so here or by subscribing to this Substack.

Share

Literature and tripping are related because they both provide maps of the human psyche. Reading literature rewires your brain in similar ways as psychedelics. When I say literature, I’m talking primarily about fiction. I don’t consider much of the derivative nonfiction being written in the psychedelics field today to be in the same class as writers like Kimberly King Parsons or Louise Erdrich, discussed below. The experience of reading KKP or Erdrich is to me much more like the psychedelic experience than any Leary or Michael Pollan book ever will be because of the depth, complexity of tone and ambiguity that only fiction can capture. Depth, complexity of tone and ambiguity are also hallmarks of the psychedelic experience to me, and key parts of psychedelic consciousness.

So here are four novels by women that I think come closest to representing psychedelic consciousness (even if without drugs) and contain extended altered states of consciousness:

1. Four Souls, Louise Erdrich

   

   Erdrich captures the ambivalence, horror and terror of altered states of consciousness—characteristics of the psychedelic experience people don’t seem to be talking about much these days in the rush to legalize and regulate. A woman buries herself underground and breathes through a straw for several days in this novel, which is insanely trippy without drugs.

   “You heal by taking on the pain of others, by going down to argue with death itself, by swallowing the sharp bone and vomiting the sickness out in your own blood.”

2. Wildseed, Octavia Butler

   

   Butler’s books make a case for psychosis as power and depict how generational trauma from slavery manifests. Butler’s books are allegories for what happens to people with extra-sensory abilities in western society.

   “Eventually they would learn to be civilized and to understand as the whites understood that the hearing of voices, the seeing of visions, the moving of inanimate objects when no hand touched them, all the strange feelings, sensitivities, and abilities were evil or dangerous, or at the very least, imaginary.”

3. Power, Linda Hogan

   

   A coming-of-age novel about a young woman who learns about power from her grandmother. The heroine survives a hurricane in her deceased grandmother’s shack in the everglades in Florida, sharing a visceral connection with nature that is depicted as both terrifying and erotic just like the psychedelic experience is (at least for me).

   “We are surrounded by matter, but time disappears from us. Or maybe, as Ama says, there are other worlds beside us all the time and every now and then we cross over and enter one, and every so often, too, one passes over and enters ours.”

4. We Were the Universe, Kimberly King Parsons

   

   No one captures the irreverence and whimsy sensuality of tripping better than KKP. In addition to positing the idea that LSD prepares women for childbirth, this novel makes a convincing case that psychedelic consciousness is pansexual and queer.

   “Love is found in the difficult places—the bramble, the brush. Love is in the fuckup.”

Leaving My Father’s House: A Journey to Conscious Femininity by Marion Woodman

This book chronicles the attempts of three women to break the hold of patriarchy in their lives through psychoanalysis and dreamwork. Woodman co-wrote the book with her clients and each speaks to her own experience. The fairy tale Allerleirauh frames Woodman’s analysis, which is broken into three sections: The Golden Dress, The Silver Dress and The Dress of Stars. Woodman argues that conscious femininity is bringing the wisdom of nature to consciousness.

“The eternal feminine is thrusting her way into contemporary consciousness,” Woodman writes. “Knowing her has nothing to do with blindly stumbling toward a fate we think we cannot avoid. It has everything to do with developing consciousness until it is strong enough to hold tension as a creative energy.”

Descent to the Goddess: A Way of Initiation for Women by Sylvia Brinton Perera

Brinton Perera uses the Sumerian myth of Inanna-Ishtar and Ereshkigal to chronicle the stages of initiation a woman might go through on a trip to the underworld (or a psychedelic trip). “I have found that by relating to this very early material—from an age when the Great Goddess was still vital—I have been able to reclaim some of my own relation to the archetypal feminine instinct and spirit patters,” she writes.

“The problem is that we who are badly wounded in our relation to the feminine usually have a fairly successful persona, a good public image. We have grown up as docile, often intellectual, daughters of the patriarchy.”

Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype, Clarrisa Pinkola Estes

This book blends psychoanalysis with archetypal stories from across the world that have particular meaning for women such as Bluebeard, La Llorona and The Handless Maiden. Pinkola Estes is gifted at literary analysis and storytelling.

“Underneath it all is the same hunger for numinous experience that humans have had since the beginning of time. But sometimes this hunger is exacerbated, for many people have lost their ancestors. They often do not know the names of those beyond their grandparents. They have lost, in particular, the family stories. Spiritually, this situation causes sorrow…and hunger.”

I’ve read this book at least a dozen times and still find it intensely ameliorating.

Reach out if you need help. Any of us could find ourselves in a dark tunnel we didn’t expect.

Share

Of Cortes’ trip, Alvaro Enrigue writes, “Then he got up from the ground and looked down on himself dreaming. He scratched his head. He was dreaming that he was dreaming. Mentally he saw himself dreaming that he was dreaming, and he could also see himself dreaming and also watch himself dreaming. And he saw himself remembering himself dreaming. I’m still drunk, he thought, I’d better go. And he said goodnight to Moctezuma and thanked him.”

Would that Enrigue’s version of history were true. The characters’ use of psychedelics—Moctezuma is a big fan of mushrooms—gives the novel a slippery sense of time and undermines dominant history and consensus reality. When Moctezuma, on mushrooms, goes to visit a temple priest, they inexplicably hear T. Rex’s “Monolith.” “The priest was also up to his ears in whatever he had taken to carry out his temple duties, so he bent his magic powers of hearing to the music and caught the sexy crooning of Marc Bolan. He smiled. That’s good stuff, he said. Moctezuma swung his hips to the beat. It’s nothing I’ve ever heard before, he replied, but I like it.”

Subscribe now

Enrigue loves to break the fourth wall, reminding the reader of the novelist’s vision and the beautiful absurdity of human existence. This authorial trick mimics the psychedelic experience better than any psychedelic nonfiction I’ve read: “(The Priest) carefully lifted the clay basin in which the blood of doves sacrificed that afternoon had yet to coagulate—their decapitated bodies sensually dancing to ‘Monolith,’ all around the priest and emperor—and showed him the image forming in it. It took Moctezuma a while to bring it into focus because it came from very far away. When it was finally sharp and clear, it made no sense to him: It was me writing this novel in a yard on Shelter Island. Uh, he said, strange, and he was seized by laughter.”

The novel culminates in a truly epic psychedelic vision scene, one of the funniest I’ve read in literature. Moctezuma offers Cortes a slice of “cactus-of-tongues” glazed in honey so they can speak Greek together and won’t need translators to talk about Jesus. Moctezuma turns into an eagle, terrifying Cortes. “Then the emperor, who was beginning to glow; the emperor, whose arm moved in stutter-stop; the emperor, whose nose was sometimes a nose and sometimes the beak of a magnificent eagle…”

Anyway, I highly recommend this riot of a novel especially if you work in psychedelics and need to get over yourself.

Share Maenad Diary

A lawsuit alleges Amy Griffin and her ghost writer lifted the story of sexual assault in the book from a high school classmate of Griffin, even going so far as to interview the plaintiff about her experiences under the ruse that the story would be adapted into a film. Tellingly—ahem—the lawsuit also alleges the memoir is merely a disguised form of advocacy and an advertisement for MDMA therapy, the legalization of which Griffin and her husband, who is a rich psychedelics investor, hope to profit from. The title The Tell now seems uncanny given that the memoir has hugely told on its author, her ghost writer and the psychedelics industry. When are people going to realize these blockbuster psychedelic memoirs aren’t real? Amy Griffin is merely the paragon example.

The thing is: The psychedelic experience cannot be rendered in nonfiction. To attempt to reduce it to a form that explains it betrays the uncanny qualities of the experience. The very idea that a person could write a true story about their psychedelic experiences seems naïve, foolish and arrogant to me. Not only that, but many so-called psychedelic journalists and memoirists are merely advocates in disguise profiting from their roles as mouthpieces.

Subscribe now

The thing is: The most difficult experiences in our lives often leave us bereft of expression. We have no way to process our most difficult experiences unless we put them into a story—we need an architecture of meaning to bring us along to understanding and acceptance. But to me this architecture in nonfiction is too limited for altered states of consciousness and, in fact, does harm when it’s situated in the trauma-signaling-to-memoir-to-advocate pipeline. Such writers claim to cut through ambiguity like the psychedelic science crowd, but I don’t think you can do that. Ambiguity is fundamental to the psychedelic experience. You will never integrate it all; and you will never be able to explain everything you experience on drugs. Psychedelics made me a fiction writer because I realized I didn’t want to explain anymore. Instead, I wanted to preserve the ambiguity of the experience because that was where the uncanniness and wonder came from, and the humor and the irreverence too. It baffles me how people who love psychedelics keep writing boring nonfiction books about them. It makes me scream, “But did you even trip bro?!” at the ceiling. It makes me think they’ve never gotten to see aliens or talk to plant spirits or see jaguars.

The psychedelic experience doesn’t fit the form of memoir or the Michael Pollan memoir/science journalism blend because these forms reject ambiguity and instead love things like the voice of authority and social media followers. Oftentimes after the fact we find out these authors were not actually the best advocates for psychedelics. I see The Tell as karmically and hilariously ironic in that a rich white woman attempted to use her money, power and influence to advocate for psychedelics so she and her husband could make even more money, but her public performance of borrowed trauma instead validated and provided evidence for the risks and side effects of psychedelic therapy, and the corruption in the psychedelics industry. The Tell controversy also shows how much of the traditional media is totally accepting of this corruption in psychedelics and unwilling to critically question the motives and tactics of such advocates. No matter: the karma is already coming back to bite people on this one.

Once an old man told me one of the worst sins is lying about visions. Many OGs won’t talk much about their psychedelic visions because they’re afraid of misrepresenting them. In literature, the punishment for lying about visions or attempting to ignore them is usually dire—for Oedipus, for example, the consequences are arguably worse than death; for a character in Fools Crow, one of my favorite novels for understanding altered states of consciousness, lying about visions leads to death.

Amy Griffin might not even know that the other woman’s trauma didn’t happen to her because of some effects of MDMA therapy that advocates often leave out. Psychedelics can lead people to become more convinced of their delusions. Because of the elasticity of the brain during and after psychedelic therapy, you can easily pick up an idea and become convinced of its truth. I mean really convinced of something you would have previously considered insane.

But that doesn’t excuse the bad actors here. Amy Griffin and her ghost writer must have forgotten the power of stories. Over time, I’ve come to realize that stories are responsibilities, especially trip stories. In truth, stories don’t belong to one individual ego. They are part of a web, and they have a life and an integrity of their own. A storyteller must always get permission, even when she is telling her own story, and once the permission is granted she inherits the burden of expressing the story in all of its uncanny beauty. I don’t think any psychedelic memoir can do that.

Share

It’s funny the details these men leave out.

In contrast, the version of the uses of the plant given by Sir Hans Sloane, a leading botanist at the time, was tepid. Schiebinger explains, “Sloane placed his discussion of the abortive qualities in the context not of the colonial sufferings but of the growing conflict between doctors and women seeking assistance in abortion. In this instance, Sloane carried fully-formed notions concerning abortion with him to Jamaica; his attitudes toward abortion mirrored those of the majority of his male medical colleagues in Europe.”

While Plants and Empire functions as a plant biography, it’s also a history of the exclusion and suppression of women’s plant knowledge from science and medicine in service of the empire. In my view, the psychedelic renaissance continues to re-inscribe these exclusions to the determent of all non-male, non-white psychedelics users.

Here’s Schiebinger writing about the 18th century: “The colonial enterprise was, as we have seen, largely male—most planters and slaves were men, as were colonial administrators, naturalists, and colonial physicians. The voyages of scientific discovery, as part of the colonial enterprise, showed little interest in the female side of life.” Instead, scientists were interested in plants that could supply the empire with cures or food and make them rich. The same thing is happening in psychedelics today.

Subscribe now

The research in psychedelics remains focused on mental health and trauma, in part by design of MAPS—once a nonprofit research association but now a for-profit pharmaceutical company called Lykos—because these applications were seen as the most profitable. Just like in the 18th century, women’s health care applications have been almost completely left out or forgotten in psychedelic studies. But the applications of psychedelics for women’s health care are many, as I and other female guides know to be true in our bodies.

In the dozens of courses on psychedelics I’ve taken, I only heard about the benefits for women’s reproductive health once from a female researcher studying indigenous female healers in Mexico. Perhaps people have kept this knowledge secret from the psychedelic renaissance and Michael Pollan, or the psychedelic renaissance has been too blind to look, or psychedelic research is funded by straight-up quacks who don’t believe in vaccines and want all women back in the home. Anything that touches life or death white people have systematically banned from medicine and our medical and plant research at least since the 1700s. The fact that Project 2025 proposes a ban on fertility treatments shows how these biases are alive and well.

If you dance with psychedelic substances, then you understand and respect their connection to death, earth, menstrual blood, everything fecund. This is why I say don’t listen to old white men about psychedelics. In my experience, they are the least likely to have confronted death in their lifetimes. Some of these elites are so insulated from the discomfort of normal life that they experience few of death’s lessons until they’re on their literal death beds ala Ivan Ilych (or maybe you’ve never read any Tolstoy). These type of people don’t make good psychedelic guides; in fact it has been my experience that these types are more willing to use psychedelics for manipulation. If someone is trying too hard to avoid actual death or ego death, they won’t make a good psychedelic guide no matter how many trainings they complete. The people who have gone to the darkest places and returned from the underworld are the true guides. The elements of this type of wisdom that come from lived experience cannot be learned in any psychedelic sitter training.

Your tolerance for discomfort—physical and psychic—is strongly related to what plants teach you. If you’ve hardly experienced discomfort in your life and you don’t read books, then you’re more likely to lack the imagination to see your way through rough or big trips.

As soon as you start talking about something’s use value, you take away its integrity, at least in your own mind, and you unconsciously close channels through which it might have spoken to you if you weren’t so greedy.

Here are some conclusions Schiebinger reaches after a breath-taking breadth and depth of research:

1. Botany was big business for European empires. Plant knowledge was crucial for the success of colonialism—for example in curing tropical disease like malaria and for feeding slaves. Plant knowledge formed the basis of all colonial economies.

2. Plant science was exploitive from the beginning, with early bioprospectors, doctors and naturalists funded by and deeply tied to European empires. Many of these men owned slaves and considered indigenous women and plants as available for the taking. Botanists, doctors, and bioprospectors acted as agents of empire.

3. Plant knowledge was used to resist empire, especially women’s knowledge related to fertility. Non-transfer of knowledge or refusing to give plant information to white Europeans acted as another form of resistance. Schiebinger also shows how knowledge of abortive plants helped slave women who refused to bare the children of their masters.

4. Plants have always been involved in high-stakes politics, as when the Nazis tried to secure the stores and supply chains of the anti-malaria quinine, and throughout history they’ve been tied to heroic masculinity to code white male scientific explorers as heroes.

5. White men have systematically excluded perspectives of women, non-white and non-binary people from the record on plant medicine both for profit and to control women’s fertility, which was and remains a major goal of empire.

   

Today psychedelic science seems to be attempting to divorce itself from plants, with most trials using synthetics, and many alleged scientists trying to hedge their forms of plant colonialism by placing their work under the heading of “science,” just as they did in the 18th century. As psychedelic therapy gets increasingly medicalized, it’s losing the safeguards that real plants enforce when we have to deal with them directly.

Troublingly, I’ve also heard 18th century narratives recirculating re psychedelics in the form of people saying, “No one owns nature” or “these resources were put on earth for us all.” The European bioprospectors of the 18th century emphasized the benefits of their research for all mankind in a similar way to deliberately obscure the fact that they oftentimes profited from plants and knowledge they took from others, and then used in ways the people they took them from advised against.

Subscribe now

Share

This gets to the heart of the fundamental ethical issue I had with my psychedelics mentor. For me it was about the plants, and for him it wasn’t. It upset me that the people in his groups were gaining almost no plant knowledge—in fact I frequently heard facilitators tell clients not to focus on the plants because it could lead to an underwhelming or traumatic trip. My teacher also once explained that he formulated his sacraments the way he did so that even older white women could take them and avoid puking all night or having other adverse reactions. The self-knowledge that these people gained from my teacher’s little white pills often seemed shallow, fake and disconnected from most people’s realities.

For me, from the first moment I ingested a psychedelic substance, plants began to talk to me. When I first met my teacher, I was trying to figure out if I was crazy. I was trying to figure out if what the plants were saying was true.

In the end, though, I had to turn back to plants because people proved too unreliable.

Plants talk in feelings if you didn’t know.

And all plant knowledge is resistance.

“The new context made it harder for Rosemary to ignore the ‘banality’ of her husband’s mind,” Cahalan writes of how inflated Leary became after his escape from prison. “LSD was always the solution to the world’s ills. Racial conflict? Free TV and LSD. Overpopulation? Tantra and LSD. Women’s liberation? More LSD.”

So much of The Acid Queen felt familiar and eerie in a heartbreaking way. The person who introduced me to psychedelic group therapy had similar issues with inflations and psychedelics, and my teacher’s groups were rife with claims similar to the ones Leary was making in the 60s. If only we had listened to Rosemary Leary instead of her husband.

Many other parts of this biography hit close to home and enraged me, such as Rosemary’s habit of giving away her ideas to men around her who continually exploited her, betrayed her and denied her contributions to their work. I, too, am guilty of such behavior. Just ask my fly fishing guide ex who is currently getting rich off of a business idea I gave him and then made happen or my former psychedelics teacher who based his lectures on my ideas and experiences for more than a year after I left his groups.

Cahalan’s descriptions of the early connection between Rosemary and Timothy Leary as telepathic—especially while on acid—triggered now-sickening memories of parts of my psychedelic journey that I wish could have remained true and untainted. Sickening because I remember still the feeling of merging with someone else while on psychedelics, and then the come down of that person’s betrayal. I remember still the euphoria of feeling someone else had touched my mind, and then how awful it felt to have that connection ripped away. While the connection is live, you feel indestructible and it imbues you with insane hopes. Once you have woven your psychic threads with someone like that it’s very painful to unweave them. I personally experienced the pain as a psychic amputation, as though I had cut off parts of myself, especially the ones my teacher saw and helped me name.

Subscribe now

Or take this personally enraging and terrifying detail Cahalan reminds readers of throughout the The Acid Queen: How long and hard Rosemary Leary tried to get her writing published to no avail. No one wanted to publish her, but anything her husband said was printed immediately even though she was the one scripting him. Cahalan even includes a moment in The Acid Queen when Rosemary realizes Timothy plagiarized her unpublished memoir in one of his books. Maybe what you liked about Timothy Leary were her words all along. Did you ever think of that? Of course, it’s the same in psychedelics today as it was in the 1960s—it’s one field where white dweebs’ opinions still reign supreme.

Share

Or perhaps the most validating and troubling part of The Acid Queen: the fact that through her many years of drug use and her proximity to a psychedelic guru, Rosemary came to the same conclusions as I eventually did about psychedelics. “I’m more inclined to pay attention to beauty had I not done these things,” she said near the end of her life. “I believe in everything, and at the same time almost nothing, but it leaves me in a very comfortable place.”

• Ambiguity regarding substances

• Secrecy and gaslighting, especially around the leader and his behavior

• Lots of money flying around, but wealth isn’t evenly distributed

• People in power who are high all the time

• Victims who are tossed aside, silenced and disappeared

I want to address ambiguity regarding substances at length here because I view it as the biggest red flag when it comes to drugs. Never sit with a facilitator who isn’t upfront and honest about what they’re serving you. This might seem basic, but thousands of people are still using my former teacher’s little white pills without knowing exactly what they are or where they came from. This is, in fact, part of the business plan.

Subscribe now

The Reckoning describes an atmosphere around Diddy in which many different exotic compounds were readily available all the time. According to the doc, Diddy’s favorite substances to use for manipulation were ketamine and ecstasy. Some victims report he laced baby oil with the date rape drug so it could be absorbed through the skin. In the documentary artists say that they don’t know how much they were drugged or what happened to them while they were in altered states. Aubrey O’Day and Lil Rod are still not sure if they were raped. P. Diddy may be an extreme example, but the same kind of profiteering and egoism that he embodies is alive and well in the psychedelic ecosystem too.

There was intense weirdness and secrecy around my psychedelic teacher’s so-called sacraments. What people called the drugs in his groups went through near-constant rebranding and facilitators woke-checked clients who used the wrong words. It was not cool in those groups to call psychedelics drugs. Some psychedelics advocates get upset when I use the word drugs but I continue to use it because I’m unwilling to use the others—medicine in particular makes me cringe. I see the word medicine when it’s applied to psychedelics as a branding strategy white people use to make their practices seem indigenous-adjacent and somehow exceptional. My teacher was Peruvian, but he knew how to sell his drugs to rich white people.

Also, don’t be that white person who says Aho to me unless you want to be mocked. (To clarify: I am 100 percent white and Montana-made, and I can’t go for that Aho crap.)

While I was actively journeying we called the little white pills medicine and then sacraments and then music for Zoom and then back to supplements for website sales. This was always something that never sat right with me. From the very first night I met him, I asked my teacher about “the plants” and he threw me a line about not getting fixated on them. Eventually I realized there were no plants at all. His ethical process for sourcing compounds was to use synthetics made in a lab but brand them as sacred indigenous plant medicine. I’ve said before I have no problem with synthetics and I think they can be more environmentally friendly, but I do have big problems with facilitators who aren’t open about what they are actually serving people and where it came from.

Subscribe now

When I first asked my teacher about his “medicine” he advised me and the rest of the group that getting too hung up on or starry-eyed about the plants could hamper our personal development work. While I agree with his statement on the surface, this kind of trip advice becomes gaslighting if you also aren’t telling people what you’re giving them. My teacher said not to get hung up on the plants, but he also bragged about the range of compounds he had and said he could make any plant psychedelic.

Some time ago I told one of my psychedelic mothers that I was writing a book about my experiences and asked her how she justifies continuing to use our teacher’s suspicious sacraments. She said it was true she couldn’t say for sure what was in his pills, but she felt they worked and that it was still safer than giving people street drugs.

She didn’t know that behind the scenes the shaman was complaining about his lab, worried about the lease on the property in New York where his pills were actually made, worried that some of his sacraments could be sniffed out in the mail or during travel because they tested too much like MDMA or synthetic opioids, and critical of his lab technician because of inconsistencies. At the same time, he rolled out subscription-only access to his sacraments that ran several hundred dollars a month, exclusive to facilitators in his network. To even get a subscription to his drugs you first had to pay thousands of dollars to the organization for facilitator training and you had to commit to doing a certain amount of personal work, which meant paying the organization for psychedelic journeys or retreats. Turns out Diddy had a similar exploitive financial relationship with his artists.

As a potential girlfriend who wasn’t sure if I wanted to facilitate, I was exempt from the pay-to-play structure. For a while it appeared he wanted me to be both a live-in girlfriend and a personal assistant without pay as he had tried to cast his previous girlfriends and wives. The payment was supposed to be him changing our lives. His inner circle was made up of independent contractors who had an incentive to profit from proximity to him because they were not paid as regular employees and sometimes not paid regularly. The sacrament subscription and facilitator training was the scheme of someone who was trying to find a way to get paid for her work.

While I was in a facilitator training group on Zoom, another facilitator in my teacher’s organization complained about the consistency of the sacraments, saying the kanna, which was the group’s starter drug, was so rough and harsh she had stopped giving it to her clients. Clients had complained, she said, and at least one had an adverse reaction. Meanwhile, this facilitator was still paying hundreds of dollars a month to the organization to access the sacraments and not even making enough money facilitating journeys to cover the cost of the subscription and the annual retreats that were required, she said.

My teacher used money to silence critics and people from his inner circle who had become disgruntled, including giving his exes spin-off supplement companies in arrangements that keeps these women, who he found in his groups, dependent on him. One time when I journeyed with his lawyer, the lawyer said: My advice to you is to stay independent of him.

I did and here I am.

In love with Curtis Jackson.

Certain ways people manipulate others might be clearer to you if you’ve ever had to survive in a snake den. The more snake dens you’ve been in, the easier it becomes to spot the patterns. If you can spot the patterns, then you can avoid them, and maybe make it out. Spotting the patterns doesn’t make you morally superior—it means you were in the mud with the snakes. But if you made it out and you can see the patterns, I think you have to be speaking right now. This is why it didn’t surprise me that the Diddy doc came out now, at the cultural moment when even the most insulated rich white people are starting to realize we’ve been getting dragged through the mud. The Diddy doc shows how deeply our exploitive politics mirror the music industry. Why would people expect the psychedelics industry—where just as much money and power is at play—to be any different?

I didn’t think I’d feel this way about 50 Cent, but I respect all artists who are trying to express patterns they know to be true in their hearts. I wasn’t a victim of my teacher in the same ways some of the other women in his inner circle were, I wasn’t even around him very much or for long, but I saw the patterns (ironically with the help of psychedelics) and so now expressing them is a duty I carry, part of my psychedelic inheritance.

My advice to you is to stay independent.

50 Cent Top 10

Psymposia summarizes Doblin’s beliefs and motivations this way: “Doblin viewed the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) approval of MDMA-assisted therapy as a necessary step in his plan to avert global catastrophe by ushering in a new epoch of human enlightenment. As Doblin commented at a 2018 MAPS board meeting, ‘We have said that MDMA-assisted psychotherapy will be a gift to the world from the psychedelic community.’”

When I started using psychedelics in groups with women in 2016, I had never heard of Rick Doblin or MAPS, but the ideas that psychedelics would usher in a period of enlightenment and stop climate change and global war quickly trickled down to me anyway. It’s fair to say such inflations are rife within the psychedelic underground, spread by many facilitators and advocates. But such a perspective puts too much pressure on mind-altering substances to save us without holding humans accountable. It continues to project the role of savior onto someone or something else instead of taking action in the present to stop the harmful behaviors.

Subscribe now

Doblin also famously claimed mass psychedelic use would lead to net zero trauma. This idea creeps me out because it’s so similar to what Huxley warned about. The world state’s cure for trauma is explained this way in the first chapter of Brave New World: “‘And that,’ put in the Director sententiously, ‘that is the secret of happiness and virtue—liking what you’ve got to do. All conditioning aims at that: making people like their unescapable social destiny.” Translate this idea into current psychedelic speak and you get: the secret of happiness and virtue is using psychedelics to help you endure your unescapable social destiny. The elites who now control the psychedelic industry aren’t interested expanding the ranks of the one percent. In fact, all indications are that they want to use psychedelics like they use social media: to brainwash the public.

To put it another way: Doblin and his friends are creating a capitalistic autocratic wet dream juiced by psychedelics. We cannot stop causing harm, they cajole, but we can make people more comfortable with it. In Brave New World soma is used to make people more comfortable so they don’t exercise critical thinking and continue to consume. Underneath the veneer, the idea of net zero trauma hides the exploitive methods needed to achieve such a delusion. Net zero trauma is the ultimate spiritual bypassing, an idea accessible to only a few at the expense of many.

But the most Brave New World part of Psymposia’s report is near the end when the authors discuss psychedelic billionaire Steve Jurveston’s plans to use psychedelic therapy and AI together for social engineering. Here are a few quotes from the report:

• “It’s clear that Jurvetson identified psychedelics as an infectious “countermeasure” to reprogram the religious impulse in Silicon Valley’s favor.”

• “In effect, PSFC was engaging in cultural engineering using Silicon Valley’s playbook for mass influence: shaping markets by shaping minds.”

• “In 2017, Jurvetson argued that ‘mimetic countermeasures’ are necessary to combat ‘infectious bad ideas,’ which he identified as ‘the biggest barrier to democratizing the future.’”

Imagine how profitable it would be if they could achieve their goal of supplanting the religious impulse with branded pharmaceutical psychedelics. As Huxley writes of soma in Brave New World: “All the advantages of Christianity and alcohol; none of their defects.” Jurveston and Doblin are essentially making the same pitch.

People should read more books fr.

The authors raise many key issues, including: how powerful actors in Silicon Valley are transforming the psychedelic renaissance into a vehicle for profit and social engineering, how they want to integrate AI with psychedelic therapy and supplant religion in American society, and how these people have led targeted campaigns against whistleblowers and critics. The report should be essential reading for anyone working in psychedelics and I want to thank Psymposia for publishing it despite threats made against the authors. In this post, I want to focus on the extent to which their report shows that “patterns of abuse are systemic to communities of practice” in the psychedelics scene.

The report details many reported sexual abuses and assaults in psychedelic therapy, including during clinical trials and by alleged luminaries in the field:

• Reports that Aharon Grossbard, the co-founder of the Center for Consciousness Medicine, sexually abused male patients. Grossbard is believed to be the creepy underground guide Michael Pollan calls “Andrei” in How to Change Your Mind. There are also allegations against Grossbard’s wife, Francoise Bourzat, an important consultant who helped design the MDMA trials. Former patients have reported a decades-long practice of sexual contact with clients.

• The story of Meaghan Buisson, a survivor of complex PTSD who sought relief in the MAPS MDMA trials only to be abused by her therapists. This one was videotaped, but I never want to watch it again.

• Parties at billionaire psychedelics funder Steve Jurveston’s California estate where a woman reported a venture capitalist tried to ambush her by giving her MDMA and then trying to get freaky. These are the kind of parties you have to sign NDAs to get into.

• Dr. Richard Ingrasci who told a psychedelic therapy patient having sex with him was necessary to cure her cancer. Some women believed variations of this about my teacher too—just being with him was supposed to heal you.

• Francesco DiLeo, a psychedelic therapist, who justified sexual contact with a patient by saying it was “partial fulfillment of her oedipal desires”. The woman was awarded $500,000 in a civil lawsuit.

  Subscribe now

I was not sexually assaulted during my time in psychedelic group therapy, but I fully believe the stories of those who were. The authors of the report are right: Systemic issues within the psychedelic renaissance and with psychedelics themselves facilitate sexual abuse. In the psychedelic therapy groups I was a part of, it was widely known—and excused—that my teacher found his girlfriends among his clients. In fact, when he took an interest in me during a drug trip, a couple women who I thought of as my psychedelic mothers encouraged me to pursue the relationship as though him choosing me was a badge of honor. In the groups, I met a Harvard-trained psychoanalyst who was attempting to copy my teacher by finding his girlfriends through psychedelic therapy. When facilitators told him to stop or he would be banned from the groups, he remarked that the shaman did it so why couldn’t he.

MDMA stands out to me as a substance that can facilitate sexual assault when it’s in the wrong hands. It blurs your boundaries, it can cause disassociation at high doses—it feels as though you are merely observing what’s happening to your body from above—and it can expand your sensory experience, leading to a desire to touch and be touched. In journeywork some of the facilitators derisively called the cuddlers the “Puppy Pile.” Needless to say, I wasn’t at all surprised when P. Diddy’s victims reported he drugged them with MDMA and ketamine. There are lots of substitutes for MDMA that can produce similar effects: kanna, molly, ecstasy, MDA, MDEA, MBDB, etc. etc. Many MDMA pills are spliced with ketamine or fentanyl these days, which can enhance the effects and immobilize patients. Essentially, MDMA is a very effective date rape drug.

Psychedelics changed my life—I never would have become a fiction writer or quit my teaching job without them—and despite my experiences I remain supportive of legalization. What I don’t support is the corporatization of psychedelics by Silicon Valley bros. When these people are in charge it leads to all sorts of other abuses, including sexual abuse.

I just wanna know: Why are we letting dweebs dictate the future of drugs? Dweebs are dumb and arrogant, which leads to lame trips.

Here’s some advice about psychedelics I wish someone would have given me:

• Pick female or LGBTQ+ facilitators. If the power dynamic feels off, don’t journey with that facilitator.

• Don’t journey alone with someone who is sober. I know this is the way many people experience psychedelics today in clinical settings, but it creeps me out because it seems to be the situation in which sexual assaults most easily and frequently occur.

• Pick groups with diversity. If there are no women or gay people, it’s an indicator the group isn’t safe.

Stay safe out there.

When I first started psychedelic journeywork in 2016, I would have answered these questions easily with a resounding yes! of course there is a psychedelic consciousness that is inherently de-colonized with positive implications for the world. While I still believe in psychedelic consciousness, I don’t believe it’s inherently de-colonized or that it will necessarily make the world a better place.

A facilitator once described the shift in perception that can occur after psychedelic trips as “inside-outside consciousness,” or the ability after psychedelic trips to intensely experience your internal world of sensations and responses while remaining attuned to the world around you. She said people could end up at different ratios, like 80 percent taken by their internal experience, 20 by external experience, and that it was best to fall somewhere in the middle. Psychedelics, supposedly, helped you develop this inside-outside perspective so your perception could become more balanced.

Personally I would define psychedelic consciousness as being attuned to multiple layers of reality at once. My teacher said that while some people only experience this type of consciousness in psychedelic trips, others can bring layered ways of seeing and experiencing the world back into their daily reality. While the sort of consciousness that comes from altered states didn’t necessarily com from psychedelics, you could develop it during Journeywork by learning to navigate your psychedelic experiences.

Yet people were inevitably and easily excluded as navigating crazy trips (and being able to describe it) was seen as a mark of higher consciousnesses. (Additionally, my teacher’s groups cost $400, making that pathway to psychedelic consciousness inaccessible to many.) There was a slippage between psychedelic consciousness and the belief in a hierarchy of consciousness. So the idea of psychedelic consciousness in my teacher’s groups easily became an elitist, ego-supporting one. The same thing happens in Brave New World via soma, a substance nearly everyone in the World State takes daily. “(Soma) proclaimed the possibility of loveliness,” Huxley writes, “the possibility of transforming even the nightmare into something fine and noble.” Yes, getting high is noble, pro-social and patriotic in The World State in A Brave New World. I love getting high and wish it was noble, but I hate how psychedelics advocates have carved out spaces by differentiating themselves from other drug users as if psychedelics were noble but opiates are not.

Here’s some parts of psychedelic consciousness I still believe in:

• synesthesia

• loss of sense of time

• wonder

• enhanced sensorial experience

A devastating part of Brave New World is how Huxley shows the citizens of the World State experiencing psychedelic consciousness through soma and feely theaters with pornographic films, but the aspects of psychedelic consciousness that the characters access also allows the World State to manipulate them. The World State uses the openness of brains on soma to do intense psychological conditioning. This is why I see Brave New World as a psychedelic consciousness horror story.

People can use an enhanced sensorial experience of the world to manipulate or exploit others; some people manipulate others by merely mimicking or simulating an enhanced sensorial experience of the world.

I’ve been doing research for a new novel set in a far-right absurdist dystopia. My mind is warped, and I’m very afraid for the U.S.A.

Recently, I’ve been reading about the Return to the Land community, a group of white supremacists in Arkansas who don’t believe living in a whites-only community is morally wrong. The group’s president, Eric Orwoll, says they believe white Western culture is under threat of extinction via mass immigration. He says he wanted to create “an environment where my kids can celebrate their identity.”

In a recent Wired story about how he became an extremist Orwoll says, “In my early twenties I did plenty of things that I am now totally against.” (Orwoll was once in pornos, apparently.) “I considered myself a nihilist, did psychedelics, and didn’t respect traditional sexual morality. The lack of guidance I had and the way it threw off my early adult life informed the importance I later placed on traditional values.”

Holy.

I’ve run across enough examples and correspondences between white nationalism and the psychedelic renaissance that I’m starting to wonder if psychedelics or the psychedelic bro ecosystem played a role in the transition of any of these men into white nationalist extremism.

Researchers are already studying these correspondences. My internet friend Nese Devenot is an author of this 2021 paper published in Frontiers of Psychology called “Right-Wing Psychedelia: Case Studies in Cultural Plasticity and Political Pluripotency.” The authors argue that psychedelic use can lead to a spectrum of political beliefs, including authoritarianism.

According to the abstract: “We propose that the common anecdotal accounts of psychedelics precipitating radical shifts in political or religious beliefs result from the contextual factors of set and setting, and have no particular directional basis on the axes of conservatism-liberalism or authoritarianism-egalitarianism. Instead, we argue that any experience which challenges a person's fundamental worldview—including a psychedelic experience—can precipitate shifts in any direction of political belief. We suggest that the historical record supports the concept of psychedelics as “politically pluripotent,” non-specific amplifiers of the political set and setting. Contrary to recent assertions, we show that conservative, hierarchy-based ideologies are able to assimilate psychedelic experiences of interconnection, as expressed by thought leaders like Jordan Peterson, corporadelic actors, and members of several neo-Nazi organizations.”

It’s troubling to come across so many examples of the coziness between psychedelics and alt-right views. Not to mention Elon’s Nazi salute, not to mention Joe Rogan’s propensity to invite far right and/or white nationalist guests onto his show, including Gavin McInness, founder of the Proud Boys, and Peter Boghossian, the father of demonizing critical race theory, among others. There is a large ecosystem of psychedelic bros on Substack and Instagram who espouse variants of white nationalist beliefs maybe because they never did the assigned reading or have never heard of Frantz Fanon. I wrote about some of that in a previous post here.

Subscribe now

Lately, I’ve been interested in the thought patterns that brought us here, the ones embedded in so-called psychedelic culture that have facilitated the slippage from altered states of consciousness to white supremacy.

Many psychedelic renaissance figures such as Rick Doblin and my former teacher claim that psychedelic use will lead to a better society. The thinking goes that we are all but travelers on the journey of cultural awakening. But the dark side of this perspective is that it allows people to see Donald Trump or white nationalist accelerationists as agents of chaos who are almost blameless because they are bringing about society’s great awakening. In this way of thinking, their role is to usher in the events that we all must suffer through to ascend to a higher consciousness, something like the arguments of the Enlightenment that supported colonization, sort of like the narrative of progress that has so obviously failed western society but still many people especially in psychedelics cling to it, sort of like a dictum I imagine Joe Rogan agreeing with: no pain no gain. These ways of thinking easily lead to slippages such as: the horrible things happening around us are steps on a path to enlightenment, inevitable trials of the journey to higher consciousness, and sacrifices that must be made for the greater good. What they don’t say, what they encourage us to look away from, is the fact that these sacrifices aren’t just something like eating less meat. They are unimaginable human suffering.

And as I said in a previous post: I do not consent to any of the sacrifices currently being made in America or overseas, especially in Gaza and the Ukraine.

But this is exactly what many white nationalist accelerationists predict will happen and in fact want to happen. They believe they are better equipped to survive the violence than the rest of us simply because they support its use in certain contexts and they are prepared to exclude or kill others to assure their own survival. I have now lived in Montana for most of my adult life—including four years on the Hi-Line near the Canadian border in the deeply red rural place where my mother’s family homesteaded—and letmetellyou many of these people have absolutely no shame about their beliefs. These are people who dove into the rabbit hole. I don’t see very many of them coming back, especially since they are increasingly living in communities segregated by race and/or political viewpoint. Orwoll, the Back to the Land guy, has merely made official what some communities have already being doing via social media: recruiting other likeminded white Republicans to join them.

If I ever got on Joe Rogan’s podcast I would want to ask him about the connection between white nationalism and psychedelics. I’d like to hear him address the issue directly.

I came back, though, and I remained suspicious of my psychedelic experiences until they began entering my real life. And that made me freak out. I thought the world of dreams and drug visions existed separately from my daily life and that I would always be able to keep them apart, but over time I lost that ability. Or, rather, psychedelics took it away from me. It’s challenging to describe how terrifying and isolating this was. Sometimes in groups, people became jealous of how easily (they believed) I entered visionary states. Once a woman tried to stop my experience; other times people tried to touch me, hoping I would infect them. People didn’t see how much energy it took to open myself up to visions and then sustain them. For days afterward, I would be exhausted and tender, requiring a great deal of time alone to recover.

I came to see the visions as a burden. I didn’t know how to understand what I saw or how to communicate it. Whenever something I’d seen in a drug vision showed up in daily life, I flipped. I thought I had gone insane. I wondered what my friends and family would think if I told them my drug visions were real. And, in fact, admitting my drug use and my belief in the reality of visionary states led to a great shedding in my life. Many former friends and family members wrote me off as unhinged and illogical.

I only came to believe in and trust my visionary world—the same one I use to write fiction—because the shaman assured me that I could. He said my visions were real and valid and that they had wisdom in them. I clung to his explanation when others told me I was crazy. But validation is only needed by those who believe that some things are real and other things aren’t. Once I truly ditched the idea that dreams and drug visions are separate from waking reality—an understanding I came to feel while living on a Native American reservation in Northern Montana—I found I didn’t need the shaman’s validation any more.

It wasn’t in a ceremony that this step of integration occurred. Rather, it began to happen while I was watching basketball. I write more about that experience here: The Psychedelic English Teacher and the Rez Baller. It wasn’t easy to give up the conceptual split between the real and the not-real, a cognitive dissonance required by modernity because it enables exploitation and alienation. I don’t think it’s easy for anyone to accept information coming from the unconscious. Apart from making you a strange outcast, the information is often terrifying for me, especially when it relates to climate change or the time I spent living in the Middle East, or, when I lived in Havre, a psychopathic neighbor who was somehow gay, frequently on meth and aggressively flying Trump flags in his yard. He wasn’t a threat to me because he had looked up to my wild mother in high school, but that guy surely knows where a few bodies are buried.

Since I was young, I’ve known there was something cognitively unusual about me and many of the women in my family. If we went the traditional mental health route, I’m sure we could be diagnosed with several different personality disorders. Throughout my life people have tried to diagnose me with many. I’m suspicious that there may have been a history of paranoid schizophrenia on my mother’s side. In addition to my mother’s challenges with mental health and alcoholism, I believe one of my grandmother’s sisters might have been sent away to an institution during a time in the United States when people diagnosed with mental health disorders faced brutal treatments and were often never spoken of again. My mother once told me about this disappeared auntie, but she was drunk at the time and later denied telling me the story or that the woman even existed.

It’s standard advice in psychedelics that people with a history of mental illness, especially schizophrenia, should not use mind-altering substances or exercise extreme caution. But I believe some of the characteristics of schizophrenia that I have, along with being a prolific reader, gave me greater access to visionary states. Paradoxically, although some advocates say people like me shouldn’t use psychedelics, many people in the groups were trying to be like me. They wanted to see crazy shit and they thought they weren’t doing it right or didn’t have enough drugs if they didn’t see aliens or hear a plant spirit talking to them. Everyone wanted to have a transformative experience—that’s what they expected from the media coverage of psychedelics and the way influencers talk—but truly truly truly I wish people knew that once you open that door, you can’t shut it.

When I first met the shaman, he exclaimed that he loved how my brain worked. No one had ever said such a thing to me before and I got the feeling, whether it was because I was on drugs or not, that he really meant it. We were talking about Russian literature at the time. I had never thought to appreciate how my brain worked. Normally, my mind seemed like a crutch.

So when he said he loved the way it worked, I took him at face value and I tried to understand and appreciate my brain, to see it the way he saw it. The images from our first conversations are still with me, and I’ve often wanted to go back there and just talk to him, tell him how I see it now, how I think it all works, and receive the blessing of his agreement.

This is the saddest and hardest part for me: To have believed I found a true friend to my mind and then to have that taken away. I know that he would say he tried his best to be a friend to my mind. And there are some ways in which he was, I suppose, and still is, although I haven’t spoken to him in several years.

Believing you have a great connection with a brilliant mentor and then watching it spiral into a toxic stew of manipulative delusions is quite a trip. But when I look around, I see tons of people who are on the same sort of ride. We seem to be going through the same thing culturally, which is another reason I’m not surprised that MAGA and the psychedelic scene are getting so cozy. When delusions collapse you don’t suddenly recognize the truth. In my case, I quit my teaching job and spent two years researching what had happened to my mind. Then I wrote a novel. I never came to the sort of satisfying conclusions I think most people mean when they talk about healing or integration. Instead, I came to the troublesome conclusion that everything is real, even our delusions. Even when we see through our delusions, they still exist in the world in some form, they still have a beingness. An old man from the rez told me once that the human mind is the most powerful and dangerous technology on earth. I believe him.

When you start to see through your delusions, you don’t at first realize how painful it will be, how much shame you’ll feel, how many bridges you will torch. You don’t at first realize that delusions are a cluster of rope or maybe a ball of snakes—the are wrapped around each other, intertwined, related. The speed at which they are unraveling today is terrifying.

I thought that if it happened to me that I learned I was an entirely different person from using psychedelics—that if my life fell apart or I had to radically change it— the shaman would be there for me. He promised he would talk me through it, and even better, he said I could go through my transition with him, that I could live with him and travel with him.

His promises dissolved, however, when his ex-girlfriend attempted suicide. And then my belief in him dissolved too. If he wasn’t real, then did that mean I wasn’t either? If he was a fraudster, then what did that say about my visions? I started to wonder what he planted and what was true.

But the Big T truth for me is that it hardly matters. For better or for worse, this is my brain now. The thing about psychedelics is you can’t stuff the rabbit back in the hat. You have to move forward with the information you are given.

Share Maenad Diary