There is no getting around the role of luck here. If you are lucky, and you take the right drug, you will know what it is to be enlightened (or to be close enough to persuade you that enlightenment is possible). If you are unlucky, you will know what it is to be clinically insane. While I do not recommend the latter experience, it does increase one’s respect for the tenuous condition of sanity, as well as one’s compassion for people who suffer from mental illness.
However, it cannot be denied that psychedelics are a uniquely potent means of altering consciousness. Teach a person to meditate, pray, chant, or do yoga, and there is no guarantee that anything will happen. Depending upon his aptitude or interest, the only reward for his efforts may be boredom and a sore back. If, however, a person ingest 100 micrograms of LSD, what happens next will depend on a variety of factors, but there is no question that something will happen. And boredom is simply not in the cards. Within the hour, the significance of his existence will bear down upon him like an avalanche. This guarantee of profound effect, for better or worse, is what separates psychedelics from every other method of spiritual inquiry.
Meditation can open the mind to a similar range of conscious states, but far less haphazardly. If LSD is like being strapped to a rocket, learning to meditate is like gently raising a sail. Yes, it is possible, even with guidance, to wind up someplace terrifying, and some people probably shouldn’t spend long periods in intensive practice. But the general effect of meditation training is of settling ever more fully into one’s own skin and suffering less there.
The fact that both the Mayans and the Aztecs used psychedelics, while being enthusiastic practitioners of human sacrifice, makes any idealistic connection between plant-based shamanism and an enlightened society seem terribly naive.
With my first (good) acid trip, I was blown away by beauty and purpose, and saw how much of a participant I was in my experience. Colors were brighter. The atoms of the world became sacred art. The seal had been broken — where before I had been a scientist puzzling things on paper, now I was part of the puzzle, and it was glorious.
I became an evangelist, feeding irresponsibly high doses to newcomers and feeling confused when they didn’t all have the same reaction I did. I wanted other individuals to feel like they were part of a collective consciousness too, ironically feeling somewhat uncollective with the individuals who didn’t grok the psychedelic realm, man.
With each successive acid trip, I felt profound insights emerging at subconscious levels, though they remained as just faint impressions to my sober self. This is why I kept going back — I was learning, something really important, and it was changing me. I really did feel better — I was at greater ease with myself and my life, I felt intense love for everyone around me, and I was hemorrhaging art onto every blank page in sight. I accidentally did therapy on myself, permanently healing trauma around my abusive father. This stuff was healing me, and so the nonverbalness of my insights didn’t bother me, really.
The acid pried my eyes open, and it was overwhelming and brutally exhausting. I was an infant, formless and unknowing. I was pure love, born to be sacrificed for mankind.
I entered profound silence, both internal and external, even when not tripping. I lost the urge to evangelize, my inner monologue left me, and my mind was quiet and slow-moving, like still water. I inhabited weird states; sometimes I would experience a rapid vibration between the state of “total lost of agency” and “total agency over all things.” Sometimes I experienced pain as pleasure, and pleasure as pain, like a new singular sensation for which there were no words at all. Sometimes time came to me viscerally, like an object in front or me I could nearly see except it was in my body, rolling in this fast AND-THIS-AND-THIS motion, and I would be destroyed and created by it, like my being was stretched on either side and brought into existence by the flipping in between. I cried often.
I enjoyed causing pain to myself, and with this I discovered evil. I found within me every murderer, torturer, destroyer, and I was shameless.
I lost many core concepts besides love, like “death” and “self” and “other”. Somewhere in all this I lost the belief that I was enlightened — I realized that to think I was enlightened, I must also be holding onto a belief about what enlightenment is made out of, and to have a concept about enlightenment, I must also have a concept about what is not, and about who has it and doesn’t, and how this was functioning as a division in concept between myself and other, and was incompatible with the experience of self as the divine. When I realized this, the belief faded, and some deep part of me melted away. The world “enlightenment” became a joke, one that applied and did not apply to me and others equally.
With this journey to annihilation came loss of function; for example I had lost many of my beliefs about my experience of time, and so my experience of time changed drastically; I constantly found myself in moments of infinity, like time had slowed down in between my thoughts, and I completely lost my ability to hold plans for the future.
This state — and all the weird states I described above — maintained itself in between doses, when I wasn’t tripping, as well as for nearly a year after I quit.
My goal was to keep looking, because I wanted to see everything. I strove to observe every part of my experience in the finest detail, and in this process I began to disappear. At some point I realized if I continued down this path I would die — both philosophically and physically because the
TRUTH IS NULL. THE UNDERSTANDING OF THE TRUTH IS NOT-SELF. TO KNOW IS TO DIE.
I began to see others who I’d once long ago seen as unenlightened, as now much more advanced than me — as symbols of successful forgetting. I wanted to cling! I was an idiot child, surrounded by adults, who were wise in the ways of the world. They were successfully immersed in their roles. I was impressed.
Once this whole thing became A Story, it started getting even weirder. I wrote about it on reddit and got a huge amount of attention. People started referring to me as the Acid Queen. Opinions were divided — some looked to me with awe and asked for advice, while still others explained how I was infantile or unbalanced, and that you can’t get very far with LSD, that only meditation would get me to the real stuff.
People tried to match the things I described to various traditions or stages, but these discussions felt like play. Why describe the unnameable?
The “talking about it” was weird. The place I had been was always this presence behind me, like this slow ancient god had thrust its hand into the world and I was a character painted on the tip of its thumb. And to talk about it was to give it form, to say what it was and was not. How was I supposed to talk about it at all? It felt dishonest, or silly — and yet talking about it was hard to avoid.
The Void was still within me, but it started to fade from an intense, ever-present vibration just behind my consciousness, into a warm memory fitting occasionally at my edges. I knew it was leaving, but I was even more confused — isn’t losing the Void exactly what I was aiming for? How much Void should I lose? How close should I be?
I saw a vision of myself climbing behind a lectern in front of a wide audience, who gazed at me as a guru with a Mystic Spiritual Journey Backstory — an image which had appealed to me greatly. But then I cleared my throat, turned to the blackboard and in a bright rainbow brush, painted the words I DON’T KNOW. “Do you understand?” I asked them all in between giggles. “I have nothing to teach you. I am an idiot. I am unenlightened. I am a child. I am the one who has come here to learn.”