Psychedelic Wisdom
For several years now I’ve considered myself a serious spiritual seeker. I have read, meditated, experimented, and attacked my sense of identity from a thousand angles. My main questions: what is Truth? is there Truth?
In my searches I’ve discovered that all spiritual seeking seems to converge at some point towards a group of general principles. In fact, the main variance I see in the teachings of mystics worldwide is that these principles are so ineffable and difficult to describe that the metaphors used by the mystics to point to these Truths (are they really Truths? hmm) are culturally and linguistically bound. You can see clues of these truths in the major religions, buried under the misinformation and misinterpretations the heirophants use as vectors of control. Jesus says to give tomorrow to God. The Buddha says tomorrow does not exist. The intention is the same: be present. Be now.
Through my searches I came across the notion of psychedelic shamanism more than once but I didn’t investigate that deeply. I was focused on meditation and active contemplation as avenues of truth, and occasionally I made progress. However, my strongest spiritual experiences had always involved drugs. Large doses of THC or fourth-plateau robo-trips. Over the last year and a half I began experimenting seriously with ritual use of DXM, the active ingredient in Robitussin, and made several interesting discoveries. Foremost, I found that DXM allowed me to think about time in new ways. It was from DXM meditations that I came to understand time as a sort of hyper-dimensional liquid substrate. Not something that flows in a single direction, but more of an ocean of events and meaning, of information. I believe that the future influences the past as much if not more than the past influences the future, and I have developed an intuitive sense of this influence.
Synchronicity, I think, can be explained as the “ripples” through time of influence from an event, both from the future and laterally in the present. Events cause “splashes” of meaning and correspondence which are experienced most strongly by those in narrative proximity to the event — those most connected and identified with the event and its causes.
When I realized the potential of DXM, though, I went in far too deep. My flirtation ended a year ago, after a month-long binge led to … something I still can’t really describe, except that I went too far, I pushed against the veil until it ripped in two and exposed the underlying machinery of this grand interactive theater we call reality. I took a very long break after that, and only sparingly use DXM now. I think it has taught me all it can for now.
However, my enthusiasm for drug-based shamanism was not dampened at all, and after a few months of casual research I stumbled across LSA, lysergic acid amide also known as ergine, which is present in certain legal and easily-obtainable plant materials. Could it be true? Yes, as it happens. The downside to LSA is its side effects: nausea, cramping, flushing. If LSA was a legitimate, potent, legal psychedelic, though, I considered some bodily discomfort worth the price of admittance.
After some searching, I managed to find enough for a solid trip, and I went home to ingest it. I will never forget coming up that first time. I, of course, knew of psychedelics’ reputation for opening the mind. I listened to the Beatles. But this did not prepare me to be instantly transported into what I clearly recognized as a higher spiritual state of being. I felt as though I had finally been let in to an inside joke the universe had been laughing about since it was conceived.
The LSA cut right through the societal expectations I had internalized and identified with and gave me, essentially, space in which I could just be me, be more myself than I had been since I was five years old and hadn’t yet been fully indoctrinated into the self-shaming, rationalizing, ultra-dissonant set of schizophrenic beliefs that are the cultural norm in the western world.
I came down, of course, and the dominant narrative crept back in … but it was weakened. I knew now, from firsthand experience, that there is another way.
Those seeds were, well, the seeds of my next awakening. I began a routine of taking LSA ritually every couple weeks to a month, weathering its heavy body-load as a cost of doing business. I learned quite a bit about the art of Just Being, which seems to be LSA’s principle lesson for me.
Mushrooms are on an entirely different level. Mushrooms are insistent. In one trip the mushroom taught me that property is a conceit with no basis in reality. It taught me that all the tanks and guns and jails in the world do not give a leader authority, because no man or woman has authority over another and all the power of the governors is nothing more than the consent of the governed. The mushroom showed me that all the empires on our planet are held together with string and tacky glue and an egalitarian society of consent rather than coercion is a heartbeat away at all times, that all the machinations of the police state, the mass media, and the surveillance systems in place are there out of fear. The tiny minority of the human race that has power is terrified, because they are outnumbered, and their sins are piled high into the heavens. All it would take is another psychedelic spiritual revolution for the will of the masses to wash our capitol buildings clean and start anew from positions of equality.
And they know it.
No wonder these substances are illegal! I firmly believe that psychedelics are our birthright, that they are Gaia’s way of letting us transcend our monkey bodies and touch the divine directly. Christianity preaches that God is in heaven. No. God is right here with us. God is in the tryptamine and phenethylamine psychedelics, in LSD and LSA, and you can experience God right now, in this life. Psychedelics are the dissolution of false power structures and illusory boundaries. Psychedelics are the gateway to new understanding. And all you need, to paraphrase McKenna, is the right plant and a healthy dose of courage.
The principles and breakthroughs that meditation and prayer can reveal in the span of decades can be revealed in hours, given the proper mindset, setting, and dose. The very same ones. If meditation is a trickle of divine knowledge, psychedelics are like putting your mouth on a firehose.
I don’t think many people outside of the scene understand what psychedelics are really about, which is tragic. McKenna was absolutely right in saying that a lifetime without ever trying psychedelics is like a lifetime without ever having sex. But it seems that the propaganda about taking acid and thinking you can fly, or tripping and never coming down, or all of that nonsense, has deterred most people from exploring it themselves … granted, psychedelics can be very scary and dangerous when used irresponsibly. It requires some thought and preparation, some research. Psychedelics require respect, and I don’t see them as recreational substances, as you might classify cannabis or alcohol. I see them as somewhat unpredictable doors to the divine. To be honest, while I support everyone’s rights to do as they please with their bodies, I do get a little sad when I talk to trippers who use these drugs as thrills and fireworks shows, in much the same way I would be saddened to see someone making paper airplanes out of rennaissance paintings.
I hope someday to see psychedelics take on mainstream, legal use as a ritual tool. My vision would be something like a mainstream religion where biweekly meetings were used to discuss spiritual concepts and the psychedelic experience, and once or twice a month there were group and individual psychedelic ceremonies where you take the psychedelic of your choice under the guidance of a shaman. The ayahuasca religions and the Native American Church already have their own variation of this and I think it’s a winning concept. Psychedelics in the proper set and setting are the best method we have of contacting our divine natures and seeing beyond the veil, and we should all have the opportunity to do it safely and responsibly.
