I always thought of myself as a fan of altered states, but even as a lifelong drinker and early adopter of just about everything I could get my hands on, I noticed long ago that if the conversation turns to getting high, I lose interest after about twelve seconds. I think now that this is one of the first ways that my intuition tried to speak up about my own addictive and maladaptive habits—I liked drinking and doing drugs, but I didn’t like talking about drinking and doing drugs. Eventually, I found my way to changing and healing my relationship with alcohol, one of the main reasons being that I was so terminally bored with its effects. In fact, I’d say that now I find most mind-altering substances to be pretty boring too. Overall, I’m much more interested in my own—and your—real life experiences.
Especially with interest in the psychedelic experience higher than ever, and because it’s come to mind several times lately for me, I feel that it could be timely to share some of my own history, and a bit of a counterpoint to the flood of emergent—and mostly quite justified—enthusiasm about the mind-expanding possibilities of psychedelia. Everyone’s spiritual prescription is different, and although they were part of my path over the years, there’s no single answer for anyone.
At this point it’s inescapably clear that psychedelics can offer the potential to access states of consciousness that few of us have the opportunity to experience in any other way, and that these experiences can be legitimately mind expanding and even, for some, deeply healing. All sorts of psychedelics are beginning to be used in therapeutic settings, reviving efforts that began decades ago to bring these plants and compounds into the formulary of modern wellness and medicine.
It’s worth noting at this point that the word “psychedelic” is getting a bit worn. All of what tends to get lumped together under that umbrella encompasses a very wide range of substances, effects and experiences, ranging from generally very pleasant and just-more-then-slightly-trippy love drugs to “heroic” doses of very powerfully mind-altering hallucinogens—and many things in between and otherwise. Also, while the word “psychedelic” is still most often associated with certain substances that can often have unusual perceptual and visual effects, it is more properly understood in line with the meaning of the original coinage—something like ’mind expanding’—and not necessarily hallucinatory per se. Overall, it’s definitely time to move past the emphasis on the drugs and shift our focus to the experiences. Because of these past associations, the alternative term “entheogen” is now becoming used more often, in part because it includes reference to the intention of a spiritual purpose. To sum that up, a more up-to-date understanding of the ’psychedelic experience’ would be much less about the technicolor enhancement of the Lazerium production of Dark Side of the Moon that I experienced so many times as a young person and much more about opening a channel to the subconscious that might otherwise be totally unavailable—and doing so with great care.
All of that said, I think it’s fantastic that psychedelics—or entheogens—are gradually being decriminalized, legalized and normalized. I think it’s amazing that we now have access to ketamine therapy for depression, that you can do MDMA with your therapist to process trauma, and that we can buy chocolates infused with perfectly-measured dosages of psilocybe cubensis by mail. I love that my Venice barbershop guy wants to turn me on to 5-MeO-DMT so that I can experience death without actually dying, even though, I have to say, even just getting a haircut on Lincoln Avenue there on the west side of LA will pretty much turn you on to what it feels like to die, whether or not you choose to do the toad work while you’re in the neighborhood.
I’m a supporter. I really am. I think we should all be glad that psychedelics are coming out of the closet. There are a lot of folks out there who would gain a lot from a properly designed and well-intentioned psychedelic experience of one sort or another. And yet… I’m here to suggest that you might not want to join the rush to try to expand your mind in this particular way. Not that you shouldn’t consider it—just that, if you’re considering doing something, that it makes sense to also fully consider the possibility of not opening this channel, and that there are other modes of growth and self-expansion that can yield similarly dramatic results.
My own experience with psychedelics began—as with my experience with alcohol—at the age of ten or eleven. Too early. Way too damn early—in both cases—but it does mean that I have a long history to draw upon. As did most of my peers of that era, I did magic mushrooms and LSD many times in my teenage years, and then far less often once I was out of high school. I always had a great time on mushrooms, but LSD was definitely more of a mixed bag, and frankly, it was often just too strong. Too strong of a dose, too strong of a drug—I don’t know, but man, really, my experience was that acid is strong stuff, no way around it. I had a small number of pleasant recreational experiences with MDMA over the intervening years, one serious LSD trip in my thirties, and then, much more recently, one positive and yet only very moderately enlightening ayahuasca ceremony, and a few west-coast journey-parties with the old ’hippie flip’ double of Ecstacy and psilocybin, which were all good, really, aside from the last, which I describe in more detail below. Clearly, there are lots of people with lots more experience than I have, and I’m not claiming any sort of hugely deep expertise here, but I have been down for a more than few dives in the Yellow Submarine.
What’s prompted me to write about this now have been my most recent experiences, which I suppose you could say have been particularly enlightening—just perhaps not in the way that you would expect.
The first of these was an evening where I joined a group for the aforementioned heart & soul combo, usually a fairly reliable recipe for an enjoyable and perhaps somehow enlightening evening journey. This last time though, what I got was mostly a headache. It wasn’t the fault of the gear—it was me. I didn’t exactly have a bad time, and…nothing dramatic, but the fact is that I just didn’t really have much of any particular time aside from feeling sort of trippy for several hours, and all the while my body was telling me clearly enough that perhaps I’d had enough, at least right then and there.
The second instance that comes to mind was a New Years Day not long ago. I was out at one of those incredible beaches here on the northern California coast where the view stretches north and south for miles along deserted sand to windswept bluffs and sparkling cerulean sea. As I reached the end of the three-mile walk to the point with my loving partner of the time, I remembered that I’d tucked a little bit of mushroom-enhanced chocolate away in my backpack, and the high school kid in me kicked in, big time. I had the drugs! Drugs are cool, girls like cool, drugs make you cool—and I have the drugs, so, let’s do the drugs! I’m 52 and part of me still wants to be the cool kid with the drugs, y’know, and that same kid also has a very strong impulse to do the drugs. Smoke ‘em if you got ‘em, right?
We sat there in the dunes, basking in the pristine sunshine of a bluebird day at Drakes Bay, watching the outgoing tide form swirls and whirlpools in the current and the seabirds wheel and caw, and we sliced off and ate just the tiniest little piece of that special chocolate. Really, all we did was a microdose—and I mean really, a very micro dose, just a sliver, like around a fifth of a gram, maybe less, and pretty much right away, it was kinda weird.
I just felt off. I felt anxious and uncomfortable. My outer jaw muscles were tighter than normal. I felt a little furry around the eyes. The sky seemed too bright, a knot began to form in my stomach, and I felt a faint but persistent headache. Some people do experience some nausea with some psychedelic substances, but I never had before. In fact, I’d always enjoyed the taste of psilocybin mushrooms and how they felt in my stomach—and yet there I was at the beach on a dose that was so tiny as to be barely perceptible…aside from the quite noticeably unpleasant physical sensations. I couldn’t wait for it to be over—and thankfully, because we had eaten so very little, in about 45 minutes the headache and feeling of sickness had subsided. We got back in the car, went to buy some oysters, and carried on with the first day of the year.
I’m no newbie to all of this, and I had used that same particular formulation several times in the past, both at higher doses and in micro- and what I call ’museum’ doses, all with predictable and positive effects. Of course, there are other variables that come into play—it might have had something to do with something I’d eaten earlier, or—more likely—the turmoil that was lurking beneath the surface of the relationship that I was in at the time. Either way, I couldn’t ignore what was a very clear message from my body. It wasn’t nearly as bad as what resulted from that plastic bag of fried rice I’d bought on a slow night train going north from Yangon, the whole thing rocking, rocking, rocking as the cars lurched their way towards Mandalay until I finally got sick enough to puke up my dinner—but still, definitely a gut feeling.
The last of these experiences was just recently. I was at a weekend workshop up in Montana (you heard it here first, Whitefish is the new Ojai)—a gathering where we’d all come to learn more about, you know, creative writing, human sexuality, and Brazilian jiujitsu—and, no surprise, when Saturday night rolled around, several little tins and bits of gold-foil-wrapped special chocolate appeared. There, with the offer on the table, I asked myself whether I needed or wanted to run this particular experiment on myself once again—and once again, my body provided the answer. Without any further thought, I found myself back outside by the fire, where I sat and watched a fat September full moon rise glacial through the trees until an eighty-car Burlington Northern Santa Fe freight rolled through, and sent me happy, to my rack.
These three experiences have made it pretty obvious to me that while I’ve had a number of very positive psychedelic experiences in the past, the reality is that in the present I don’t feel compelled to seek out more. In all three cases, my body spoke up clearly, both in terms of the literal sensations inside my body—known as interoception—and also in terms of how I felt to move away from the psychedelic experience—a clear expression of intuition manifesting as physical action.
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Previously Published on substack
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