* * *
• • •
ACTUALLY, this understanding arrived a little later, during the last part of my psilocybin trip, when the journey took a darker turn. After spending an unknown number of hours in computer world—for time was completely lost on me—I registered the desire to check back in on reality, and to pee again. Same deal: Mary guided me to the bathroom by the elbow, geriatrically, and left me there to produce another spectacular crop of diamonds. But this time I dared to look in the mirror. What looked back at me was a human skull, but for the thinnest, palest layer of skin stretched over it, tight as a drum. The bathroom was decorated in a Mexican folk art theme, and the head/skull immediately put me in mind of the Day of the Dead. With its deep sockets and lightning bolt of vein zigzagging down its temple on one side, I recognized this ashen head/skull as my own but at the same time as my dead grandfather’s.
This was surprising, if only because Bob, my father’s father, is not someone with whom I ever felt much in common. In fact I loved him for all the ways he seemed unlike me—or anyone else I knew. Bob was a preternaturally sunny and seemingly uncomplicated man incapable of thinking ill of anyone or seeing evil in the world. (His wife, Harriet, amply compensated for his generosity of spirit.) Bob had a long career as a liquor salesman, making the weekly rounds of the nightclubs in Times Square for a company that everyone but he knew was owned by the mob. Upon reaching the age I am now, he retired to become a painter of lovely naive landscapes and abstractions in spectacular colors; I’d brought one of them with me to Mary’s room, along with a watercolor of Judith’s. Bob was a genuinely happy, angst-free man who lived to be ninety-six, his paintings becoming ever more colorful, abstract, and free toward the end.
To see him so vividly in my reflection was chilling. A few years before, visiting Bob in the nursing home in the Colorado desert where he would soon die, I’d watched what had been a fit and vigorous man (it had been his habit to stand on his head every day well into his eighties) contract into a parenthesis of skin and bones marooned in a tiny bed. The esophageal muscles required to swallow had given out, and he was tethered to a feeding tube. By then, his situation was pitiful in so many respects, but for some reason I fixed on the fact that never again would a taste of food ever cross his lips.
I splashed cold water on our joint face and made my unsteady way back to Mary.
Risking another glance at her, this time I was rewarded by the sight of a ravishing young woman, blond once again but now in the full radiance of youth. Mary was so beautiful I had to look away.
She gave me another small mushroom—gram number four—and a piece of chocolate. Before I put on my eyeshade, I attempted to conduct the rotating mask test a second time . . . and it was a complete bust, neither confirming nor disproving the hypothesis. As the mask began to rotate, gradually bringing its back side into view, the whole thing dissolved into a gray jelly that slid down the screen of my laptop before I could determine whether the melting mask I was watching was convex or concave. So much for conducting psychological experiments while tripping.
I put on my eyeshades and sank back down into what now became a cracked and parched desert landscape dense with artifacts and images of death. Bleached skulls and bones and the faces of the familiar dead passed before me, aunts and uncles and grandparents, friends and teachers and my father-in-law—with a voice telling me I had failed to properly mourn all of them. It was true. I had never really reckoned the death of anyone in my life; something had always gotten in the way. I could do it here and now and did.
I looked hard at each of their faces, one after another, with a pity that seemed bottomless but with no fear whatsoever. Except once, when I came to my aunt Ruthellen and watched, horrified, as her face slowly transformed into Judith’s. Ruthellen and Judith were both artists, and both had been diagnosed with breast cancer around the same time. The cancer had killed Ruthellen and spared Judith. So what was Judith doing down here among the unmourned dead? Had I been defending myself against that possibility all this time? Heart wide open, defenses melting, the tears began to flow.
* * *
• • •
I’VE LEFT OUT one important part of my journey to the underworld: the soundtrack. Before going back under for this last passage, I had asked Mary to please stop playing spa music and put on something classical. We settled on the second of Bach’s unaccompanied cello suites, performed by Yo-Yo Ma. The suite in D minor is a spare and mournful piece that I’d heard many times before, often at funerals, but until this moment I had never truly listened to it.
Though “listen” doesn’t begin to describe what transpired between me and the vibrations of air set in motion by the four strings of that cello. Never before has a piece of music pierced me as deeply as this one did now. Though even to call it “music” is to diminish what now began to flow, which was nothing less than the stream of human consciousness, something in which one might glean the very meaning of life and, if you could bear it, read life’s last chapter. (A question formed: Why don’t we play music like this at births as well as funerals? And the answer came immediately: there is too much life-already-lived in this piece, and poignancy for the passing of time that no birth, no beginning, could possibly withstand it.)
Four hours and four grams of magic mushroom into the journey, this is where I lost whatever ability I still had to distinguish subject from object, tell apart what remained of me and what was Bach’s music. Instead of Emerson’s transparent eyeball, egoless and one with all it beheld, I became a transparent ear, indistinguishable from the stream of sound that flooded my consciousness until there was nothing else in it, not even a dry tiny corner in which to plant an I and observe. Opened to the music, I became first the strings, could feel on my skin the exquisite friction of the horsehair rubbing over me, and then the breeze of sound flowing past as it crossed the lips of the instrument and went out to meet the world, beginning its lonely transit of the universe. Then I passed down into the resonant black well of space inside the cello, the vibrating envelope of air formed by the curves of its spruce roof and maple walls. The instrument’s wooden interior formed a mouth capable of unparalleled eloquence—indeed, of articulating everything a human could conceive. But the cello’s interior also formed a room to write in and a skull in which to think and I was now it, with no remainder.
So I became the cello and mourned with it for the twenty or so minutes it took for that piece to, well, change everything. Or so it seemed; now, its vibrations subsiding, I’m less certain. But for the duration of those exquisite moments, Bach’s cello suite had had the unmistakable effect of reconciling me to death—to the deaths of the people now present to me, Bob’s and Ruthellen’s and Roy’s, Judith’s father’s, and so many others, but also to the deaths to come and to my own, no longer so far off. Losing myself in this music was a kind of practice for that—for losing myself, period. Having let go of the rope of self and slipped into the warm waters of this worldly beauty—Bach’s sublime music, I mean, and Yo-Yo Ma’s bow caressing those four strings suspended over that envelope of air—I felt as though I’d passed beyond the reach of suffering and regret.
* * *
• • •
THAT WAS MY PSILOCYBIN JOURNEY, as faithfully as I can recount it. As I read those words now, doubt returns in full force: “Fool, you were on drugs!” And it’s true: you can put the experience in that handy box and throw it away, never to dwell on it again. No doubt this has been the fate of countless psychedelic journeys that their travelers didn’t quite know what to do with, or failed to make sense of. Yet though it is true that a chemical launched me on this journey, it is also true that everything I experienced I experienced: these are events that took place in my mind, psychological facts that were neither weightless nor evanescent. Unlike most dreams, the traces these experiences inscribed remain indelible and accessible.
The day after my journey I was glad for the opportunity to return to
Mary’s room for a couple of hours of “integration.” I hoped to make sense of what happened by telling the story of my trip and hearing her thoughts about it. What you’ve just read is the result, and the beneficiary, of that work, for immediately after the journey I was much more confused by it than I am now. What now reads like a reasonably coherent narrative highlighting certain themes began as a jumble of disjointed images and shards of sense. To put words to an experience that was in fact ineffable at the time, and then to shape them into sentences and then a story, is inevitably to do it a kind of violence. But the alternative is, literally, unthinkable.
Mary had taken apart the altar, but we sat in the same chairs, facing each other across a small table. Twenty-four hours later, what had I learned? That I had had no reason to be afraid: no sleeping monsters had awakened in my unconscious and turned on me. This was a deep fear that went back several decades, to a terrifying moment in a hotel room in Seattle when, alone and having smoked too much cannabis, I had had to marshal every last ounce of will to keep myself from doing something deeply crazy and irrevocable. But here in this room I had let down my guard completely, and nothing terrible had happened. The serpent of madness that I worried might be waiting had not surfaced or pulled me under. Did this mean it didn’t exist, that I was psychologically sturdier than I believed? Maybe that’s what the episode with Bob was all about: maybe I was more like him than I knew, and not nearly as deep or complicated as I liked to think. (Can a recognition of one’s shallowness qualify as a profound insight?) Mary wasn’t so sure: “You bring a different self to the journey every time.” The demons might rouse themselves the next time.
That I could survive the dissolution of my ego without struggle or turning into a puddle was something to be grateful for, but even better was the discovery that there might be another vantage—one less neurotic and more generous—from which to take in reality. “That alone seems worth the price of admission,” Mary offered, and I had to agree. Yet, twenty-four hours later, my old ego was back in uniform and on patrol, so what long-term good was that beguiling glimpse of a loftier perspective? Mary suggested that having had a taste of a different, less defended way to be, I might learn, through practice, to relax the ego’s trigger-happy command of my reactions to people and events. “Now you have had an experience of another way to react—or not react. That can be cultivated.” Meditation, she suggested, was one way to do that.
It is, I think, precisely this perspective that had allowed so many of the volunteers I interviewed to overcome their fears and anxieties, and in the case of the smokers, their addictions. Temporarily freed from the tyranny of the ego, with its maddeningly reflexive reactions and its pinched conception of one’s self-interest, we get to experience an extreme version of Keats’s “negative capability”—the ability to exist amid doubts and mysteries without reflexively reaching for certainty. To cultivate this mode of consciousness, with its exceptional degree of selflessness (literally!), requires us to transcend our subjectivity or—it comes to the same thing—widen its circle so far that it takes in, besides ourselves, other people and, beyond that, all of nature. Now I understood how a psychedelic could help us to make precisely that move, from the first-person singular to the plural and beyond. Under its influence, a sense of our interconnectedness—that platitude—is felt, becomes flesh. Though this perspective is not something a chemical can sustain for more than a few hours, those hours can give us an opportunity to see how it might go. And perhaps to practice being there.
I left Mary’s loft in high spirits, but also with the feeling I was holding on to something precious by the thinnest, most tenuous of threads. It seemed doubtful I could maintain my grip on this outlook for the rest of the day, much less the rest of my life, but it also seemed worth trying.
Trip Three: 5-MeO-DMT (or, The Toad)
Yes, “the toad,” or to be more precise, the smoked venom of the Sonoran Desert toad (Incilius alvarius), also called the Colorado River toad, which contains a molecule called 5-MeO-DMT that is one of the most potent and fast-acting psychotropic drugs there is. No, I had never heard of it either. It is so obscure, in fact, that the federal government did not list 5-MeO-DMT as a controlled substance until 2011.
The opportunity to smoke the toad popped up suddenly, giving me very little time to decide if doing so was crazy or not. I got a call from one of my sources, a woman who was training to become a certified psychedelic guide, inviting me to meet her friend Rocío, a thirty-five-year-old Mexican therapist whom she described as “probably the world’s leading expert on the toad.” (Though how intense, really, could the competition for that title be?) Rocío is from the state of Sonora, in northern Mexico, where she collects the toads and milks their venom; she administers the medicine to people both in Mexico, where its legal status is gray, and in the United States, where it isn’t. (It doesn’t appear to be on the official radar, however.)
Rocío worked in a clinic in Mexico that treated drug addicts with a combination of iboga, a psychedelic plant from Africa, and 5-MeO-DMT—apparently with striking rates of success. In recent years, she’s become the Johnny Appleseed of toad, traveling all over North America with her capsules of crystallized venom and her vaporizer. As my circle of psychonauts expanded, most anyone I met who’d had an encounter with the toad had been introduced to it by Rocío.
The first time I met Rocío, at a small dinner organized by our mutual friend, she told me about the toad and what I might expect from it. Rocío was petite, pretty, and fashionably dressed, her shoulder-length black hair cut to frame her face with bangs. She has an easy smile that brings out a dimple on one cheek. Not at all what I expected, Rocío looked less the part of a shaman or curandera than that of an urban professional.
After going to college and working for a few years in the United States, five years ago Rocío found herself back at home in Mexico living with her parents and without direction. Online, she found a manual about the toad, which she learned was native to the local desert. (Its habitat extends the length of the Sonoran Desert north into Arizona.) Nine months of the year, the toad lives underground, protected from the desert sun and heat, but when the winter rains come, it emerges at night from its burrow for a brief orgy of eating and copulation. Following the instructions spelled out in the manual, Rocío strapped on a headlamp and went hunting for toads.
“They’re not very hard to catch,” she told me. “They freeze in the beam of light so you can just grab them.” The toads, which are warty, sand colored, and roughly the size of a man’s hand, have a large gland on each side of their necks, and smaller ones on their legs. “You gently squeeze the gland while holding a mirror in front of it to catch the spray.” The toad is apparently none the worse for being milked. Overnight, the venom dries on the glass, turning into flaky crystals the color of brown sugar.
In its natural state, the venom is toxic—a defense chemical sprayed by the toad when it feels threatened. But when the crystals are volatilized, the toxins are destroyed, leaving behind the 5-MeO-DMT. Rocío vaporizes the crystals in a glass pipe while the recipient inhales; before you’ve had a chance to exhale, you are gone. “The toad comes on quickly, and at first it can be unbelievably intense.” I noticed that Rocío personified the toad and seldom called the medicine by its molecular name. “Some people remain perfectly still. Other people scream and flail, especially when the toad brings out traumas, which it can do. A few people will vomit. And then after twenty or thirty minutes, the toad is all done and it leaves.”
My first instinct when facing such a decision is to read as much about it as I can, and later that night Rocío e-mailed me a few articles. But the pickings were slim. Unlike most other psychedelics, which by now have been extensively studied by scientists and, in many cases, in use for hundreds if not thousands of years, the toad has been known to Western science only since 1992. That’s when Andrew Weil and Wade Davis published a paper called “Identity of a New World Psychoactive Toad.�
� They had been inspired to look for such a fantastical creature by the images of frogs in Mayan art. But the only psychoactive toad they could find lives far to the north of Mayan civilization. It’s possible that these toads became an item of trade, but as yet there is no proof that the practice of smoking toad venom has any antiquity whatsoever. However, 5-MeO-DMT also occurs in a handful of South American plants, and there are several Amazonian tribes who pound these plants into a snuff for use in shamanic rituals. Among some of these tribes, these snuffs are known as the “semen of the sun.”
I couldn’t find much in the way of solid medical information about potential side effects or dangerous drug interactions; little research has been done. What I did find were plenty of trip reports online, and many of these were terrifying. I also learned there was someone in town, a friend of a friend I had met a few times at dinner parties, who had tried 5-MeO-DMT—not the toad but a synthetic version of the active ingredient. I took her out to lunch to see what I could learn.
“This is the Everest of psychedelics,” she began, portentously, putting a steadying hand on my forearm. Olivia is in her early fifties, a management consultant with a couple of kids; I had vaguely known she was into Eastern religion but had no idea she was a psychonaut, too.
“You need to be prepared.” Over grilled cheeses, she described a harrowing onset. “I was shot out into an infinite realm of pure being. There were no figures in this world, no entities of any kind, just pure being. And it was huge; I didn’t know what infinity was before this. But it was a two-dimensional realm, not three, and after the rush of liftoff, I found myself installed in this infinite space as a star. I remember thinking, if this is death, I’m fine with it. It was . . . bliss. I had the feeling—no, the knowledge—that every single thing there is is made of love.
How to Change Your Mind Page 27
