How to Choose Your Own Life
What psychedelics and mortal fear have taught me about choice
When I was 23, I had never taken psychedelics. I had sustained a head injury on my left temple from a bike accident, however, and spent a few months a little dumber than I had ever been. This was a period of lots of silence and contemplation. It was also a period of losing my job as a waitress thanks to slow reaction time.
I can’t say I was any more depressed at the time than usual, especially because I think you have to be at least somewhat sober to identify yourself as truly depressed, and I was rarely sober.
It was the holiday season, and one night I went out to a party in my neighborhood. There was a guy there, and — long story short — I took a trip the next morning to the pharmacy for the morning after pill. This isn’t my regular choice of birth control, but my memory of the night before wasn’t great and I wasn’t taking any chances.
I took the pill, and throughout the day I sat in my apartment. I wasn’t drinking or doing any other drugs, but as the hours went by I started to feel like I was getting absolutely wasted.
I don’t know the science behind the combination of head injuries, hangovers, and the morning-after pill, but by that evening I was having what I could only currently identify as a psychedelic experience. I have since taken various entheogens for therapeutic purposes in both controlled and uncontrolled environments, and the experience I had that night was the equivalent of getting dosed without knowing it and freaking out. I was having hallucinations, my mental imagery was out of control, and it felt like the fabric of reality was unraveling. In short, I was tripping.
I felt at one point as though I might have an actual stroke and die, and that’s when my consciousness quieted down enough for me to hear a voice. It seemed as though my higher self was talking to my 23-year-old Earthly self, negotiating.
“You can leave now, if that’s what you really want,” she was saying. “But have you finished what you came here to do?”
Before I could ask her exactly what it was that I had come to do, I saw my whole life in the manner one hears about from people who have had brushes with death. In my case it wasn’t like a movie, it was like looking at a lake and each droplet was a facet of my life — the failures, the triumphs, the loves, the fears, the family, the friends, the boring moments, the exhilaration — and as I looked these over, it occurred to me that I had chosen every drop of it.
I couldn’t think of a single thing that I would really change. It all felt so me. From the perspective of my higher self, even my greatest humiliations were precious and absolutely vital to creating the matrix of my life here in this go-around.
Perhaps I was never really in danger of dying that night, but to me it felt as though I was choosing not to die. It wasn’t until I tried psychedelics a little later in my life that I realized how similar the experiences were.
Humans have a long and complicated history with psychedelics, and I think it makes sense that they are making a comeback in our current state of societal uncertainty.
Used as a tool for therapeutic research throughout the 50s and 60s, psychedelics were finally outlawed in the US in 1968. I think their outlaw status was the result of several factors — for one, the substance couldn’t be weaponized as the government had hoped. Second, it seemed to have a consciousness-expanding component that seeded potentially subversive attitudes in a time when patriotism reigned supreme. Third, it was the perfect scapegoat when the CIA ruined several lives in their experiments with the substance during Project MK-Ultra.
This operation reads like science fiction, and if it wasn’t so sad it would be highly entertaining to learn about. Unfortunately, this government attempt at mind-control resulted not only in the destruction of several lives but the reversal of any and all breakthroughs in the field of psychology that were being made with these substances at the time.
Things are changing now, though, as mental health issues like depression and anxiety have reached epidemic proportions worldwide with nearly 800,000 people per year committing suicide. Just recently, Oakland became the second city in the US to decriminalize the use and possession of magic mushrooms. Micro-dosing all kinds of psychedelics is becoming more widely accepted as a safer form of self-medication than anti-depressants. While the cultural stigma and paranoia around these substances still clings, there seems to be a definitive movement toward acceptance.
What I have learned is that you don’t have to take these drugs to have an expansion of consciousness. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend hitting your head then getting drunk and taking the morning-after pill either, but I have had many experiences since then that aren’t drug-induced that I would put on par with the use of psychedelics.
A short list would be: regular meditation, sensory deprivation chambers, extended periods of focus on artistic projects, and long periods of silence. What all of these actions have had in common for me was the fact that I entered into these experiences feeling as though something was wrong and had to be fixed.
The benefit of expanding consciousness, though, is that once you get to the higher perspective of your life, you realize that nothing is broken. There’s nothing to fix. This is your energy matrix, your life, your reality, and if you truly wanted something to be different, it would be — but then you wouldn’t have the benefit of experiencing the variety of life that you were born to experience.
It’s this sort of paradox that can make you laugh-cry when you’re high, and seem impossibly simplistic when you’re on the front lines of your life’s daily struggles.
I think it’s ultimately positive that we are beginning to embrace psychedelics again, but what’s even more important to me is that we start learning how to dismantle these experiences for their components and learn to apply their lessons without taking any substances or facing our own mortality.
So next time you find yourself drowning in feelings of inadequacy, anger, or frustration, see if you can take a look at yourself from a higher perspective. If you weren’t experiencing this, what would you prefer? Do you really think you’d be happier if you were more successful, richer, more loved, skinnier, bigger-breasted, stronger, more popular? Or can you find some satisfaction in exactly what you are now?
Sometimes we can’t find that satisfaction. Sometimes we truly feel desperately broken, and we should be grateful that our home planet has provided substances to help us see from a higher perspective and be reminded of our inherent choice to become who we are now.
