“After what seemed like an eternity but was probably only minutes, you start to reassemble and come back into your body. I had the thought, ‘There are children to raise. And there is an infinite amount of time to be dead.’”
I asked her the question that gnawed at me whenever someone recounted such a mystical experience: “How can you be sure this was a genuine spiritual event and not just a drug experience?”
“It’s an irrelevant question,” she replied coolly. “This was something being revealed to me.”
There it was: the noetic sense William James had described as a mark of the mystical experience. I envied Olivia’s certainty. Which I suppose is the reason I decided I would smoke the toad.
* * *
• • •
THE NIGHT BEFORE my date with Rocío was, predictably, sleepless. Yes, I’d come through these first two trips intact, grateful, even, for having gone on them, and had come away with the idea I was stronger, physically and mentally, than I had previously thought. But now all the old fears rushed back, assailing me through the long fitful night. Everest! Could my heart take the intensity of those first harrowing moments of ascent? What were the chances I’d go mad? Slim, perhaps, but surely not zero. So was this an absolutely insane thing to do? On the plus side, I figured, whatever happened, it would all be over in half an hour. On the negative side, everything might be over in half an hour.
As the sun came up, I decided I would decide when I got there. Rocío, whom I’d made aware of my trepidations, had offered to let me watch her work with someone else before it was my turn. This proved reassuring, as she knew it would. The guy before me, a supremely low-affect college student who had done the toad once before, took a puff from Rocío’s pipe, lay back on a mattress, and embarked on what appeared to be a placid thirty-minute nap, during which he exhibited no signs of distress, let alone existential terror. After it was over, he seemed perfectly fine. A great deal had gone on in his mind, he indicated, but from the looks of it, his body had scarcely been perturbed. Okay then. Death or madness seemed much less likely. I could do this.
After positioning me on the mattress just so, Rocío had me sit up while she loaded a premeasured capsule of the crystals into a glass vial that she then screwed onto the barrel of the pipe. She asked me to give thanks to the toad and think about my intention. (Something fairly generic about learning whatever the toad had to teach me.) Rocío lit a butane flame underneath the vial and instructed me to draw on the pipe in short sips of air as the white smoke swirled and then filled the glass. “Then one big final draw that I want you to hold as long as you can.”
I have no memory of ever having exhaled, or of being lowered onto the mattress and covered with a blanket. All at once I felt a tremendous rush of energy fill my head accompanied by a punishing roar. I managed, barely, to squeeze out the words I had prepared, “trust” and “surrender.” These words became my mantra, but they seemed utterly pathetic, wishful scraps of paper in the face of this category 5 mental storm. Terror seized me—and then, like one of those flimsy wooden houses erected on Bikini Atoll to be blown up in the nuclear tests, “I” was no more, blasted to a confetti cloud by an explosive force I could no longer locate in my head, because it had exploded that too, expanding to become all that there was. Whatever this was, it was not a hallucination. A hallucination implies a reality and a point of reference and an entity to have it. None of those things remained.
Unfortunately, the terror didn’t disappear with the extinction of my “I.” Whatever allowed me to register this experience, the post-egoic awareness I’d first experienced on mushrooms, was now consumed in the flames of terror too. In fact every touchstone that tells us “I exist” was annihilated, and yet I remained conscious. “Is this what death feels like? Could this be it?” That was the thought, though there was no longer a thinker to have it.
Here words fail. In truth, there were no flames, no blast, no thermonuclear storm; I’m grasping at metaphor in the hope of forming some stable and shareable concept of what was unfolding in my mind. In the event, there was no coherent thought, just pure and terrible sensation. Only afterward did I wonder if this was what the mystics call the mysterium tremendum—the blinding unendurable mystery (whether of God or some other Ultimate or Absolute) before which humans tremble in awe. Huxley described it as the fear “of being overwhelmed, of disintegrating under a pressure of reality greater than a mind, accustomed to living most of the time in a cosy world of symbols, could possibly bear.”
Oh, to be back in the cozy world of symbols!
After the fact I kept returning to one of two metaphors, and while they inevitably deform the experience,* as any words or metaphors or symbols must, they at least allow me to grasp hold of a shadow of it and, perhaps, share it. The first is the image of being on the outside of a rocket after launch. I’m holding on with both hands, legs clenched around it, while the rapidly mounting g-forces clutch at my flesh, pulling my face down into a taut grimace, as the great cylinder rises through successive layers of clouds, exponentially gaining speed and altitude, the fuselage shuddering on the brink of self-destruction as it strains to break free from Earth’s grip, while the friction it generates as it crashes through the thinning air issues in a deafening roar.
It was a little like that.
The other metaphor was the big bang, but the big bang run in reverse, from our familiar world all the way back to a point before there was anything, no time or space or matter, only the pure unbounded energy that was all there was then, before an imperfection, a ripple in its waveform, caused the universe of energy to fall into time, space, and matter. Rushing backward through fourteen billion years, I watched the dimensions of reality collapse one by one until there was nothing left, not even being. Only the all-consuming roar.
It was just horrible.
And then suddenly the devolution of everything into the nothingness of pure force reverses course. One by one, the elements of our universe begin to reconstitute themselves: the dimensions of time and space returned first, blessing my still-scattered confetti brain with the cozy coordinates of place; this is somewhere! And then I slipped back into my familiar “I” like an old pair of slippers and soon after felt something I recognized as my body begin to reassemble. The film of reality was now running in reverse, as if all the leaves that the thermonuclear blast had blown off the great tree of being and scattered to the four winds were suddenly to find their way back, fly up into the welcoming limbs of reality, and reattach. The order of things was being restored, me notably included. I was alive!
The descent and reentry into familiar reality was swifter than I expected. Having undergone the shuddering agony of launch, I had expected to be deposited, weightless, into orbit—my installation in the firmament as a blissed-out star! Alas. Like those first Mercury astronauts, my flight remained suborbital, describing an arc that only kissed the serenity of infinite space before falling back down to Earth.
And yet as I felt myself reconstitute as a self and then a body, something for which I now sought confirmation by running my hands along my legs and squirming beneath the blanket, I felt ecstatic—as happy as I can remember ever feeling. But this ecstasy was not sui generis, not exactly. It was more like the equal and opposite reaction to the terror I had just endured, less of a divine gift than the surge of pleasure that comes from the cessation of unendurable pain. But a sense of relief so vast and deep as to be cosmic.
With the rediscovery of my body, I felt an inexplicable urge to lift my knees, and as soon as I raised them, I felt something squeeze out from between my legs, but easily and without struggle or pain. It was a boy: the infant me. That seemed exactly right: having died, I was now being reborn. Yet as soon as I looked closely at this new being, it morphed smoothly into Isaac, my son. And I thought, how fortunate—how astounding!—for a father to experience the perfect physical intimacy that heretofore only mothers have ever had with their babies
. Whatever space had ever intervened between my son and me now closed, and I could feel the warm tears sliding down my cheeks.
Next came an overwhelming wave of gratitude. For what? For once again existing, yes, for the existence of Isaac and Judith too, but also for something even more fundamental: I felt for the first time gratitude for the very fact of being, that there is anything whatsoever. Rather than being necessarily the case, this now seemed quite the miracle, and something I resolved never again to take for granted. Everybody gives thanks for “being alive,” but who stops to offer thanks for the bare-bones gerund that comes before “alive”? I had just come from a place where being was no more and now vowed never to forget what a gift (and mystery) it is, that there is something rather than nothing.
I had entered a familiar and more congenial mental space, one in which I was still tripping but could put together thoughts and direct them here or there. (I make no claims as to their quality.) Before I drew the smoke into my lungs, Rocío had asked me, as she asks everyone who meets the toad, to search the experience for a “peace offering”—some idea or resolution I could bring back and put to good use in my life. Mine, I decided, had to do with this question of being and what I took to be its opposite term, “doing.” I meditated on this duality, which came to seem momentous, and concluded that I was too much occupied with the latter term in my life and not enough with the former.
True, one had to favor doing in order to get anything done, but wasn’t there also a great virtue and psychic benefit in simply being? In contemplation rather than action? I decided I needed to practice being with stillness, being with other people as I find them (imperfect), and being with my own unimproved self. To savor whatever is at this very moment, without trying to change it or even describe it. (Huxley struggled with the same aspiration during his mescaline journey: “If one always saw like this, one would never want to do anything else.”) Even now, borne along on this pleasant contemplative stream, I had to resist the urge to drag myself onto shore and tell Rocío about my big breakthrough. No! I had to remind myself: just be with it.
Judith and I had had a fight the previous night that, I realized, turned on this distinction, and on my impatience with being. She was complaining about something she doesn’t like about her life, and rather than simply commiserate, being with her and her dilemma, I immediately went to the checklist of practical things she might do to fix it. But this was not at all what she wanted or needed, and she got angry. Now I could see with perfect clarity why my attempt to be helpful had been so hurtful.
So that was my peace offering: to be more and do less. But as soon as I put it that way, I realized there was a problem—a big problem, in fact. For wasn’t the very act of resolving to favor being a form of doing? A betrayal of the whole idea? A true connoisseur of being would never dream of making resolutions! I had tied myself up in a philosophical knot, constructed a paradox or koan I was clearly not smart enough or sufficiently enlightened to untangle. And so what had begun as one of the most shattering experiences of my life ended half an hour later with a wan smile.
* * *
• • •
EVEN NOW, many months later, I still don’t know exactly what to make of this last trip. Its violent narrative arc—that awful climax followed so swiftly by such a sweet denouement—upended the form of a story or journey. It lacked the beginning, middle, and end that all my previous trips had had and that we rely on to make sense of experience. That and its mind-bending velocity made it difficult to extract much information or knowledge from the journey, except for the (classic) psychedelic platitude about the importance of being. (A few days after my encounter with the toad, I happened on an old e-mail from James Fadiman that ended, uncannily, with these words, which you should picture arranged on the screen like a poem: “I hope whatever you’re doing, / you’re stopping now and then / and / not doing it at all.”)
The integration had been cursory, leaving me to puzzle out the toad’s teachings, such as they were, on my own. Had I had any sort of a spiritual or mystical experience? Or was what took place in my mind merely the epiphenomenon of these strange molecules? (Or was it both?) Olivia’s words echoed: “It’s an irrelevant question. This was something being revealed to me.” What, if anything, had been revealed to me?
Not sure exactly where to begin, I realized it might be useful to measure my experiences against those of the volunteers in the Hopkins and NYU studies. I decided to fill out one of the Mystical Experience Questionnaires (MEQs)* that the scientists had their subjects complete, hoping to learn if mine qualified.
The MEQ asked me to rank a list of thirty mental phenomena—thoughts, images, and sensations that psychologists and philosophers regard as typical of a mystical experience. (The questionnaire draws on the work of William James, W. T. Stace, and Walter Pahnke.) “Looking back on the entirety of your session, please rate the degree to which at any time . . . you experienced the following phenomena” using a six-point scale. (From zero, for “none at all,” to five, for extreme: “more than any other time in my life.”)
Some items were easy to rate: “Loss of your usual sense of time.” Check; five. “Experience of amazement.” Uh-huh. Another five. “Sense that the experience cannot be described adequately in words.” Yup. Five again. “Gain of insightful knowledge experienced at an intuitive level.” Hmmm. I guess the platitude about being would qualify. Maybe a three? But I was unsure what to do with this one: “Feeling that you experienced eternity or infinity.” The language implies something more positive than what I felt when time vanished and terror took hold; NA, I decided. The “experience of the fusion of your personal self into a larger whole” also seemed like an overly nice way to put the sensation of becoming one with a nuclear blast. It seemed less fusion than fission, but okay. I gave it a four.
And what to do with this one? “Certainty of encounter with ultimate reality (in the sense of being able to ‘know’ and ‘see’ what is really real at some point in your experience).” I might have emerged from the experience with certain convictions (the one about being and doing, say), but these hardly seemed like encounters with “ultimate reality,” whatever that is. Similarly, a few other items made me want to throw up my hands: “Feeling that you experienced something profoundly sacred and holy” (No) or “Experience of the insight ‘all is One’” (Yes, but not in a good way; in the midst of that all-consuming mind storm, there was nothing I missed more than differentiation and multiplicity). Struggling to assign ratings to a handful of such items, I felt the survey pulling me in the direction of a conclusion that was not at all consistent with what I felt.
But when I tallied my score, I was surprised: I had scored a sixty-one, one point over the threshold for a “complete” mystical experience. I had squeaked through. So that was a mystical experience? It didn’t feel at all like what I expected a mystical experience to be. I concluded that the MEQ was a poor net for capturing my encounter with the toad. The result was psychological bycatch, I decided, and should probably be tossed out.
Yet I wonder if my dissatisfaction with the survey had something to do with the intrinsic nature—the sheer intensity and bizarre shape—of the toad experience, for which it wasn’t designed, after all. Because when I used the same survey to evaluate my psilocybin journey, the fit seemed much better and rating the phenomena much easier. Reflecting just on the cello interlude, for example, I could easily confirm the “fusion of [my] personal self into a larger whole,” as well as the “feeling that [I] experienced something profoundly sacred and holy” and “of being at a spiritual height” and even the “experience of unity with ultimate reality.” Yes, yes, yes, and yes—provided, that is, my endorsement of those loaded adjectives doesn’t imply any belief in a supernatural reality.
My psilocybin journey with Mary yielded a sixty-six on the Mystical Experience Questionnaire. For some reason, I felt stupidly proud of my score. (There I was again, doing being.) It had been my object
ive to have such an experience, and at least according to the scientists a mystical experience I had had. Yet it had brought me no closer to a belief in God or in a cosmic form of consciousness or in anything magical at all—all of which I might have been, unreasonably, expecting (hoping?) it might do.
Still, there was no question that something novel and profound had happened to me—something I am prepared to call spiritual, though only with an asterisk. I guess I’ve always assumed that spirituality implied a belief or faith I’ve never shared and from which it supposedly flows. But now I wondered, is this always or necessarily the case?
Only in the wake of my journeys have I been able to unravel the paradox that had so perplexed me when I interviewed Dinah Bazer, a NYU cancer patient who began and ended her psilocybin experience an avowed atheist. During the climax of a journey that extinguished her fear of death, Bazer described “being bathed in God’s love,” and yet she emerged with her atheism intact. How could someone hold those two warring ideas in the same brain? I think I get it now. Not only was the flood of love she experienced ineffably powerful, but it was unattributable to any individual or worldly cause, and so was purely gratuitous—a form of grace. So how to convey the magnitude of such a gift? “God” might be the only word in the language big enough.
Part of the problem I was having evaluating my own experience had to do with another big and loaded word—“mystical”—implying as it does an experience beyond the reach of ordinary comprehension or science. It reeks of the supernatural. Yet I think it would be wrong to discard the mystical, if only because so much work has been done by so many great minds—over literally thousands of years—to find the words for this extraordinary human experience and make sense of it. When we read the testimony of these minds, we find a striking commonality in their descriptions, even if we civilians can’t quite understand what in the world (or out of it) they’re talking about.