Panpsychedelia: It's all in your head!

Journey to Wholeness Part II

“Space was still there; but it had lost its predominance. The mind was primarily concerned... with being and meaning... [within] a perpetual present made up of one continually changing apocalypse.” ~ * ~ Alan Watts on Mescaline

My Wayward Youth

I attended high school at the tail end of “the sixties” (generally regarded as 1965-1974) in that part of the Chicagoland area where the mean streets of Harlem and Cicero give way to unlit, winding roads, hills and forest preserves. We were ideally situated to venture into the city in the evenings for all kinds of nefarious activities, rock concerts, secret raves, and other kinds of frenetic hysteria, then retreat into secluded wooded areas in the wee hours, where we’d ‘come down’ around campfires, sipping Old Milwaukees and spinning mad tales for each other.

The forest preserves were largely vacant and unused, except by us. The only reason we discovered them was that Jimmy C and Bobby M got kicked out of their homes once they started using H and ripping off their Ps. They pitched Army surplus tents in the woods to serve as makeshift homes. We’d skip school, go visit them, start playing Allman Brothers 8-tracks on our car stereos and throwing the frisbee around. We realized pretty quickly how free and easy we were out there, without much fear of being busted. It was sweet! Breezy memories from those carefree days.

Of course, it wasn’t too long at all before our idea caught on, the preserves filled up with perpendicularly parked cars lining each side, and motorcycle gangs started visiting from the city. The police then saw that we were fish in a barrel! They’d block the exits, take off their badges, and attack us with rubber bullets and boogie sticks, often stealing our drugs in the confusion. L.A. and Chicago cops are the worst.

Such were the sixties. Free love came at a steep cost.

I didn’t get high until I was 15. In my school of 2500 kids, the choice was to either be a nerd, a jock, or a freak. I actually thought I’d go out for the football team as a tight end, but couldn’t believe what assholes they were. So, as my hair was already pretty long, I became a freak instead. Before long, I was introduced to psychedelics by a flamboyant upper classman named Adam. We ran into one another in the boys room one morning, both of us quite late, and he placed a hit of blue moon mescaline on the aluminum shelf over the sink. “Let me know what you think,” he said with a crazed look in his eye as he wheeled out into the hallway.

For somewhat mysterious reasons, Adam and his best bud Mike, who was Cool Hand Luke to Adam’s Breaking Bad, brought me into their little circle. School bored the shit out of us, and we found our release in navigating the dangers of dealing drugs from the inner city’s mafioso and street gangs to our peers on the outskirts of the city. Adam had a hot Mustang and all the inner city contacts from having grown up in an area of the city controlled by the “Saints,” as well as being a world-class, charismatic BS artist.

We literally bought drugs from guys in pin-striped suits with diamond pinky rings named Sal, Vinny and Guido. Mike had that steely, quiet air of someone you never wanted to cross. And I had a talent for strategically thinking things through, along with a reputation for always keeping it together and looking inscrutable no matter how many drugs I’d take. And believe me, I tested the limits. Karen Quinlan had nothing on me.

For the next two years, we three amigos always had an endless spigot of money, drugs, and sense pleasures. We attended concerts nearly every weekend, especially at our favorite venue, the Aragon Ballroom, which would line up four bands at a time and even had a bar on the side of the stage. It was a pretty heady time for me. The best part was that we always managed to outsmart the police and narcs, though our dealers were not so lucky. To this day, I maintain that the street education I received during those wild hazy days prepared me better than anything for a career in law.

Our favorite drugs in “why do you think they call it” high school were downers - especially Tuinals (Christmas trees), Seconals (Reds) and Nembutals (Yellow jackets), all of which have since been mostly discontinued. Downers slowed the world down, induced a euphoric, dream-like state, and were reputedly more addictive than heroin - though you couldn’t prove that by us.

We also favored Turkish (opiated) hash and, yes, LSD.

During those years (1972-74), LSD was still pure and plentiful (thank you CIA!). The pure came to us in the form of windowpanes, so-called because the liquid was pressed between two square-millimeter sheets of hard gelatin that could be cut 4 ways. We rarely bothered cutting ours, however, as we paid less than a dollar a pane, and like all kids of that age, we felt indestructible even when racing through the city with a full head of acid. Adam was hell on wheels. Never cracked up.

Male no mistake, though - windowpanes were pretty heavy. An 8-hour ride never to be taken lightly. I honestly don’t know how we got away with it all - like someone was watching over us or something.

For lighter fare, a carnival ride versus the alien spaceship ride windowpanes took you on, we had purple microdots, orange sunshine, and the aforementioned blue moon mescalin. Those were fun, but the world didn’t melt away on you.

I can remember one time on windowpane sitting at a kitchen table somewhere deep in the city, positioned in front of an air conditioner blowing at my back, when everything suddenly vanished into a fluidic, cool ocean of darkness. As so often was the case on LSD, it felt like I’d just switched universes. I couldn’t let on what had just happened, nor could I make out the distant voices. Somehow, I willed my body up and navigated my way down a hall to what felt like the bathroom - always my go-to strategy when feeling chemically overwhelmed - and waited patiently to re-emerge into the light universe. Nothing to freak out over, as long as I could still hear my heart beating and feel the blood coursing through my veins. Maybe I was a bat!

The downers were always a welcome way to soften the descent from good acid, which could otherwise be rather harsh, and broaden the cosmic mind states one entered after several hours of exhilarated joyriding. In a way, that was my favorite part of various altered states we induced in our minds, and the seeds of my future spiritual growth as well.

I’d usually be back in my basement bedroom by that point, with ‘black lights’ on and the 3D posters they animated, and it felt like I could see the whole universe all at once while lying back and staring up towards the white foam ceiling hovering over my head, listening to spacey late night music on WXRT radio, or just the music of the spheres whirring around endlessly in my head.

I remember the awe and wonder I’d feel towards the effects such a small amount of some mysterious chemical substance could have on my mind. With something like downers, you could comprehend the mechanism for depressing your central nervous system. But LSD? It was more like being transported through different versions of the multiverse, one throbbing dimension at a time.

Where did these strange new worlds come from? Where did they go to after the effects wore off? Surely, their origin could not be found in the innocuous substance itself. How could one explain this phenomenon in worldly terms?

One couldn’t. Not at 16, anyway.

And that, I guess, is why these experiences opened so many of us children of the sixties up to a more spiritual life. Because what became clear to us was that there were all these strange, new worlds enfolded in our consciousness. Myriad realms of alien life were accessible to us, if we just had the right keys to unlock those “doors of perception,” as Alduous Huxley had called them.

And the worlds you could visit in your expanded mind were so much more interesting and vital, really, than the mundane world our parents had struggled to provide for us - at least, since they stopped reading us fairy tales.

These fairy tales were real! We could inhabit them.

Ah, there’s the rub - these fantastical realms seemed more real and convincing than reality itself. They put us in touch with something that the more conventional world could not, even in books. Something eternal, not ephemeral. Something meaningful, not vacuous.

I was once told this story by a dharma friend who’d ordained. He was asked by his lama one night if he’d had any experiences with LSD. When he rather sheepishly answered in the affirmative, because you cannot lie to your lama, he was taken aback by the response: “Good... good - so much easier to teach emptiness to Western students who’ve done LSD.”

Precisely so. We were, rather naively, touching ultimate reality, even if just in passing fancies. That cannot help but create a spiritual hunger inside - you don’t just “grow out” of such experiences. They have a formative effect on your psyche, stretching it in new directions and shapes that become part of your storehouse of experiences. It’s really hard to become close-minded and small after you’ve had your mind opened up into the multiverse!

Or in terms of modern physics, once you perceive the world as waves of energy, beautiful and self-absorbing, then even after it collapses back into the appearance of matter, you know in your heart that the world is really a vibratory realm of tremendous potential, and that it only collapses in response to the mundane expectations of the observer. What we call “flashbacks” are merely momentary lapses where your mind remembers that it had once seen “reality in a flower, and eternity in an hour,” as Blake said.

“Panpsyche” means the psyche of everything. It dwarfs the self. To become panpsychic is to become one with the cosmos. But what does THAT mean, really? That is the koan that is guiding this journey to wholeness. The answer lies ahead of us.

I’ll prove it to you. Really, there’s a method underlying all this resurrected madness.

The End of the Blue Bus Road - and a New Beginning

For the purposes of establishing my credibility as your panpsychic guide, I would estimate that I took somewhere between 300-500 trips between my sophomore year of high school and my sophomore year of college. In fact, I can remember a period during the Watergate Hearings of 1973, which hearings seemed to have a tranquilizing effect on the dominant culture, when we would take Orange Sunshine in the morning at school, drop windowpanes as soon as we could get away from school, take downers much later to get at least a couple hours of sleep - and then wake up and do it all over again the next day! This literally went on for weeks on end.

We were indefatigable mind warriors in those days! I’m sure this jag started with someone asking “what would life be like if we lived it like this every single day?” After a while, it was like we were living in an insane asylum, where we were the sane ones! The kabuki theatre of the Watergate hearings only added to that effect, as it seemed omnipresent on every tv we came within earshot of. The Rumpelstiltskin Senator from the South, Sam Irvin, would not stop gnawing on that pencil eraser!

Who WERE these gray-suited beings? Then we’d go to the mall and get into fits of laughter that were so hard, tears and snot flowing, that it would hurt our mouths. But everything there, including the shoppers, just seemed so preposterous to us! This was the way people lived their lives? REALLY??

I had my first really unpleasant, borderline psychotic experience with LSD in the college dorms one night in 1976, having taken only a small, quarter dose of something at a beer pyramid party.

It wasn’t the acid. It was the fact that my father was dying of brain cancer 360 miles away, and my mom needed me. I was in the wrong place. After an interminably long night of dealing with a mind that was like a short-wave radio on which I just couldn’t tune in a station, all screeching white noise and scary theremin whining, thoroughly drained by the sheer terror that the signal may never return to my brain, I finally regained my senses. I knew instantly, without the need for words in my still scrambled, emotional psyche, what I needed to do. I walked to the train station and caught the Amtrak for Chicago. I dropped out of school, and forswore hallucinogens altogether.

The long, strange trip had reached its conclusion. Or so I assumed at the time.

My father’s passing turned me, almost overnight, from the most decadent, irresponsible, and really quite reckless youth you’d ever want to come across, to a serious young man determined to take sole responsibility for finding his way in the world. There is one thing about this transition that will become relevant when we get to the death part of this journey next week. I never grieved my father’s death. I turned my talent for being too cool for school into an ability to be a total rock for my mom.

Zombie like, I took the graveyard shift at a local gas station. I rarely visited my father, who was in a nursing home by this point. I’d just wait for mom to return, and let her collapse in my arms, containing her shattering grief. She was my only focus.

Years later, that repressed grief would rise up and devour me.

Back in college, after dad passed, I quit engineering. It occurred to me, at low ebb, that I’d only thought of becoming an engineer to please him. While completing the science and math part of it, I went on to get a degree in communications. Still not ready for the real world, I ended up going to law school by default. I figured it would at least allow me to live wherever I chose.

After graduating, I moved out West, drawn by the grandeur of the Rocky Mountains, and after a stint in labor law, became a successful environmental lawyer. More importantly, I stumbled upon meditation along the way, while utilizing breath control exercises I’d discovered in a book from the Rosicrucian Society called “Wisdom of the Mystic Masters” (1968) by Joseph Weed.

You see, after my dad passed, I started taking women seriously for the first time in my life. I fell in love my first day back at school, and before long moved in with my college sweetheart, sexy Sadie. I also began experiencing debilitating bouts of anxiety around that time. Eventually, it ruined our relationship.

The next summer, while thumbing out West, I came across Weed’s classic from the sixties. Rosicrucians taught that by practicing deep, slow breathing, and pushing all the air out every 7th cycle, holding it for a count of 7, you could release anxiety. I was desperate, and it worked so long as I practiced at least 3-4 times a week. I could feel my mind deeply relax in a step-wise manner over a 20-minute session, usually at sunset, timed to the side of Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk album that ended with “Sarah,” and after the 3rd or 4th such step, after the music would stop, I’d find myself in the most pleasant, floating state.

That’s where my meditation practice began.

After several years of this disciplined practice of self-regulation, which allowed me to cope with law school and start a career in a place where I knew nobody, I remembered one evening that the mystic masters also taught that you could reverse this process if you wanted to reach heightened states of consciousness. That worked, too.

Oh my goodness, it worked!

It was not long at all that I was experiencing nondual/nonself states, and visiting blissful realms of mind that were reminiscent of my earlier experiences of LSD w/barbiturates - only I had my hand on the throttle this time around. I could ease into and out of these alternate states at will. It’s much like Huxley found with mescalin:

“Each one of us is potentially Mind at Large. But... [t]o make biological survival possible, Mind at Large has to be funnelled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system.”

That’s what I mean by the throttle. It seems like, once your ‘reducing valve’ has been opened and closed a number of times, that with concentrated effort you find the controls, and are able to open it up at will. Next, I found that nature acted like spiritual steroids for these meditative experiences, likely due to the preponderance of negative ions that fuel the Rocky Mountain High John Denver sang about. It’s science, actually, though science still can’t explain why free electrons elevate our mood. So it’s nature, actually. And really, these states were even more profound than anything I’d ever experienced with drugs.

A whole new world opened up for me at that time in my life. Meditation became my gravamen around which everything else revolved. Because those elevated nondual states, coming out of which I’d literally have to reorient myself to my physical body, seemed to contain the answers to all my questions directly, without any conceptual effort. Gnosis. Metanoia. That world felt so much more meaningful than the one where I was a successful environmental attorney. I began plotting my escape from the world of corporate success, squirreling away my resources in order to buy my freedom from suits, ties, and clocks.

My journey to wholeness had begun.

It wasn’t until after I took a year off at 33 to backpack around the world, and on my return to live out of a van in nature, that I renewed my acquaintance with LSD-25. But that, it turns out, has more to do with death than it does with drugs. So we’ll leave it there till next time.

Takeaway

I want to leave you with this to ponder: I know hallucinogens. Hallucinogens and I were good friends. And thus I can assure you now, before going on to my experiences with death and the God molecule: 5-MeO-DMT is of a whole different order of being than hallucinogens. It is in a class by itself, though it may be related somewhat to Ayahuasca and Yage. But this much is crystal celar to me: 5-MeO-DMT and LSD are not related at all in that way.

That seems to be the first assumption people, including myself, who have experience with hallucinogens jump to when hearing for the first time about the God molecule. And it’s understandable. But even if they’ve experienced ayahuasca, peyote, or psilocybin, these these are still false equivalences.

There is no real referent in hallucinogenic substances for what I experienced on 5-MeO-DMT. It is truly something quite different from all that, and in a most remarkable way. It’s why I’m compelled to write about it now, more than 5 years later (seems like a lifetime). And I hope you can acknowledge now that, with the sole proviso that I’ve not experienced Ayahuasca, I’m more than qualified to make that comparison!

So next, we’ll get to the death and dying part. It’s equally important as the hallucinogenic part, as people who’ve experienced it often compare the God molecule to a Near Death Experience. I think that, too, is understandable, but still misses the boat by a wide margin. And in the next Dharma Beat, we’ll get into that.

And then we’ll be good and ready to complete this epic journey to the center of the unknowable universe!