Fate summoned me to the deepest core of true America, alligators, shotguns, and all (citation refused). Through the power of friendship and acute financial freedom, I’ve been gifted with the opportunity to meet my beloved researcher friends in the heart of ALaBaMa (depiction of a Southern accent for those of you who can’t hear the text). During this literal trip, we found ourselves also figuratively tripping into the magical warm fuzzies of a psilocybin-facilitated bonding session. Peculiar observations smacked my face with encrypted epiphanies and I began to decipher the coded message sent to “me” by my own shroomed out brain.
The session initiated with the usual tensing of muscles and emotions. Like a strong cup of coffee except far beyond the realm of jitter and into jaw clenching thrill. I held my place at the edge of the hotel bed, refraining from screaming out in exhiliration while watching my amazing and sober friend (disregarding the obvious contact high that flustered her brain) explain the excitement of knitting. Another non-sober friend was ahead of me after impulsively eating the delicious mushy chocolate. Soon, all three of us danced from topic to topic, from trauma to theories of society and human nature, spiraling down a euphoric social rabbit hole with laughter, occassionally at the cusp of tears.
Of course, these were partially the mere effects of socializing. Such social occurrences are rare due to the brick wall of fears guarding our fragile hearts. The “contact high” my sober friend experienced emerged from reciprocating the intoxicated us and our emotional vulnerability. It’s a hell of a lot safer to expose your heart when you see others letting their guards down. And clearly it’s euphoric.
This party continued for maybe an hour, when I realized I couldn’t procrastinate a visit to the restroom any longer. This ain’t ketamine and we don’t need no bladder damage when unnecessary! As I left our homely feedback loop of love and connection, the new cold-tiled space I entered gave off a bitter taste. The droning loops of euphoria dissapated. The mirror showed me the pours of my skin, ugliness, and clarity. The muffled sound of my friends laughing and chatting grew sad and distant. The restroom really isn’t a fun place (usually). Hints of fear cropped up, but not enough to petrify or worry me too much. Fascination took front and center. Realizations appeared before me and I dissected whether it would be selfish or unethical to share such epiphanies. “Don’t worry, the fears were absurd”, says my suspiciously sober mind as it prepares to confess to a virtual audience.
After leaving that cold dead space, I rejoined the glowing atmosphere created by our friendship circle. But this is where the story stops. The truth has already been revealed.
Yes.
The intense shift of mood that occurred when moving from the party of 3 to the soulless tile chamber says it all. Most users of psychedelics have probably experienced this and know exactly what this is like. But why isn’t ordinary experience like that? When we leave the party, our brain usually loops and persists in its intoxicated heightened mood through the power of imagination. We addictively obsess and cling to the past created by our minds. But under psychedelics, the immediate effects of stimuli die out when they leave our sights and so we become fragile to the flows of the “real” world as percieved through our pathetic eyes. See! We can avoid that enlightenment bullshit!
Such persistance of the past is life. Ordinary experience is comprised of the world in our memory. In the same way that psychedelics help reduce addictions (a clinging and obsession of past experiences) and trauma (fear of a future that repeats past experiences), they also help reduce the anchor to ordinary life, allowing us to see life in a very non-ordinary way. Our view of the world is guided by an accumulation of the past and the present, but the present exists as only a fraction of that accumulated data. So little that we often dismiss it. For those with trauma or addictions, their data is tainted and hijacking the present. Hijacking life. Creating the future. And psychedelics disrupt that endless feedback loop of the past, present, and future much like they disrupted the cozy friendship loop as I tripped to the restroom. The stability of our mind is due to an unresponsiveness to the present reality and reliance on the past.
One of my favorite hypotheses is that high doses of psychedelics mimic the state that infants are in. A world before the past existed. The eternal present and the cosmic horror of an impending mysterious future. In our desperation to resolve that horror, we seek meaning and prophecy. We develop a system of future sights created from the remnants of past moments. For screaming babies, no such library of knowledge exists yet and as such, no cozy religious prophecy about the nature of life and the future can protect them. In their state, the future is so utterly open to interpretation and uncontrained by data. There’s little information about whether to expect a nightmare world or the most immense pleasure. We could take a bad trip to hell or chase our curiosity to the fractal meadows of heaven.
Regardless of all that, always remember that the future is unknowable. It’s scary, exciting, or better yet, truly unjudgable. Those with depression, PTSD, addiction, and other mental situations often rely on a library of experiences and feedback loops of the past with the present. This library is often dubbed “environmental factors”. Perhaps we can call them wounds. Present factors may be out of our control, but often we forfeit control by assuming prophecies of doom due to our damaged hearts.
I know it hurts, but you need to fight.
I hope this was useful so that I can convince myself that life has more meaning.
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