The Psychedelic ChristianBorn Again on LSD: Part 4
Many people prefer to have a blindfold over their eyes when they have a psychedelic experience. Truly, it can have a wonderfully magical effect, highlighting visual hallucinations.
Given a high enough dose, many similarly report seeing a chrysanthemum-type shape appear and continuously unfold, or perhaps even a veil being opened which they pass through. In Food of the Gods, Terence McKenna recounts how, during his travels in South and Mesoamerica, he observed that many of the rituals surrounding traditional entheogen use are undertaken in the dark, at night, and speculates that perhaps the presence of darkness lends itself to a more powerful psychedelic gestalt, so to speak; that the two belong together on account of the undistracted focus that night-time can bring. Also, in the writings of Gordon Wasson, and Albert Hofmann they recount a taboo on ingesting these mushrooms at any other time of day. To underscore this, we read also in F.J. Carod-Artal’s helpful article in Neurologia entitled ‘Hallucinogenic drugs in pre-Columbian Mesoamerican cultures’ how
‘Today, Mazatec rituals associated with hallucinogenic mushroom use have been blended syncretically with various Catholic rites. Mushrooms are harvested at dawn and during the new moon, after which worshipers recite Christian prayers and bless the mushrooms in church. The consumption ritual during which Psilocybe specimens are ingested a pair at a time must comply with a series of precepts, including fasting and abstinence from sex and alcohol. The ritual takes one night to perform and mushrooms must be placed on an altar to be purified with tobacco and incense.’
And so we see that even in branches of Christianity which have embraced the usefulness of ingesting psilocybe mushrooms for spiritual purposes, the importance of consuming them at night seems to be important; even on par with prayer/blessing, as well as fasting.
I realize that I am jumping paddocks by equating LSD and psilocybin. Nevertheless, I think it is safe to say that taking psychedelics at night seems to be a thing. And, it seems reasonable to think that this may (at least partly) be because the dark helps us to concentrate on our inner state with less distraction, and also allows visual hallucinations to come to full effect.
Now, in the story that I’m veering from so often, you’ll recall that night had indeed fallen, but at this particular point in our story, I am far from being in an ideal state of mind. I had just confessed to my tea-totaling parents that I was on LSD and I’m beginning to feel pretty nervous.
Perhaps I should go into a little more detail: Truth be told, I was starting to get pretty paranoid and to indulge in delusions. I began suspecting people — suspecting my parents and even my brother of being in cahoots with each other. It seemed that they were able to communicate with one another on a level that I just wasn’t able to enter into. That through cunningly executed hand gestures, subtle allusions, and coded doublespeak they were conversing around me, and about me, and at times even to me in ways I just wasn’t shrewd enough or witty enough to join. As you can imagine, this engendered a terribly lonely and defeated feeling in me. I felt like an outsider; like a lesser being.
It is thought that when a dog has been raised by humans, it can sometimes identify as a human. It can sure seem that way to some of their owners. Imagine then, what it would do if the scales dropped from the dog’s eyes and she finally knew what you know about her? Imagine, for example, if your family dog was all-of-a-sudden able to understand the complexity and subtlety of the English language. Not only would a whole new world of meaning open up to her, but she would at the same time realize at what a bestial level she had been operating on for her whole life. Any genuine love and affection you may have had for her would, at that moment, become eclipsed by the realization that all her life she had been viewed and treated as a mere beast. She had never truly been considered a peer — she eats from a bowl on the floor and licks her butt. She poops outside in front of others without shame. She is not allowed on the couch. It is perhaps akin to what Adam and Eve would have felt, understanding themselves to be ‘naked’ — a totally new concept to them, but one that now held a weight of shame.
This is how I felt.
What was more, my paranoia grew beyond my home and into the world around me. It wasn’t just my family who was talking/living in this elevated level, it was the whole world. It was as if, they all had been engaged in a higher, more enlightened state of being this whole time; communicating on a plane that I had been completely oblivious to my whole life, to which I was finally waking up. I sensed a level of excitement in them that I was perhaps beginning to understand them at long-last; that I was finally graduating from a lower state, to a more transcendent one. It was as if being able to understand and convey one’s self on this higher level acted as a shibboleth, weeding out the worthy from the unworthy. On a scale reminiscent of Peter Weir’s The Truman Show, my eyes were opening to a great conspiracy of tolerance, and everyone was in on it. I use the word tolerance with purpose because that is how it felt. It felt as if for my whole life, my lower-realm ways of simpleton living were absolutely devoid of pith and meaning and had been merely tolerated in the hopes that one day I would ‘wake up’ and ‘get it’.
With this growing dread at my predicament came a crushing sense of the need for eternal vigilance. If I let my guard down, if I missed a cue, or veiled remark I was just the same old let-down. And of course, there were no cues, no veiled remarks to understand or miss, and so any attempt made on my part undoubtedly landed on deaf ears. But to me, I was just sinning — perpetually missing the mark.
Now, you may recall my upbringing in the conservative Christian church, and how one main point that particularly stood out to me was the idea that God was merely cusping on tolerance; that God’s foremost emotion towards me was disappointment at best. While God’s love for the world was seen in the coming of the God-Man Jesus, this love was fragile and the dam of God’s wrath was precarious.
So, it’s not a big jump from a burgeoning realization of disappointing the community around you to a realization of disappointing God. After all, the ‘new awareness’ I was gaining regarding the people closest to me was profound to say the least. It took on cosmic, even divine proportions. Even the juxtaposed roles that my parents and brother had through the years as authority figures and co-conspirator, respectively speaking, was nothing more than a finely orchestrated ruse within which the deeper conspiracy abode. It was all just a facade that I had been foolish enough to live within in dopey ignorance. They abode in a higher state, a divine state, and one in which a dark and secretive mindfulness of hidden communication was absolutely necessary, and I wasn’t up to it. I failed at every turn. But, a path opened up to me.
It was while I was sitting on the couch in our living room with my mother that I thought I understood. She asked if I wanted to go to the hospital.
Poor thing. What a bad idea. But, what can you expect from her? She just didn’t know any better. And, neither did I. In my delusion, I understood her suggestion to mean an invitation to heaven. It feels pretty silly to write, even now, 30 years later, but in my mind, when my mother asked if I thought I should go to the hospital, I was convinced that it was a divinely cryptic coquetry to die. This was not a light decision — the decision to die — and it was only after mustering my courage that I was able to say ‘yes’, after which my attitude shifted.
Once I committed, a giddy excitement took me. I was beginning to engage on their level. I had understood the invitation and acted upon it. It was tremendous and new, and it was transcendent. So, my mother made the call, and an ambulance departed the back dock of the emergency room to come fetch me like some sweet chariot, swinging low.
The cops came first. I remember that they left their roof lights on while in our suburban driveway, no-doubt harrowing the neighborhood out of their beds. They came in our home with their hands on their hips, dispassionate eyes, belying nothing, assessing everything. I remember also hugging one of them as a comrade in the whole wacky escapade. What he thought about that, who knows?
An interesting thing about LSD, and all psychedelics as far as I know, is that you can remember everything perfectly well afterwards. It differs in this way from other drugs and intoxicants (though I do not like to use these words as descriptors of psychedelics). In fact, it is unfortunate that they are grouped with substances such as alcohol, marijuana, heroin, and the like at all. The experiences are worlds apart. There is no ‘blacking out’ or lapse in memory; at least not for me, nor for most scientific literature. Indeed, some psychedelics — DMT comes to mind — don’t seem to shift one’s presence of mind at all. During my brief and few experiences with DMT, which I underwent to quit smoking several years ago, I found that I was every bit my normal self. My ability to think and rationalize did not appear to be compromised at all. Rather, it was the world around me that had changed.
Obviously, not all psychedelics affect the mind like this. In the above story, my ability to make sense of the world was obviously compromised. Nevertheless, I was able to recall everything perfectly, just as if I had not taken the substance at all. And so, I remember sitting on the couch with my mother, talking and waiting. I remember when the police came. And, I remember that I let my pants hang a bit too low. And I remember how, when the ambulance came and opened its back doors it seemed almost as if I was looking into a Dante-esque beatific vision; a Doré inspired cloud-tunnel to paradise; a long hallway culminating in a waiting gurney.
And I got in.