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psychedelicadventures.com
George My
entheogenic agenda
Before describing my experiences, however, I'd like to say that I am
somewhat reluctant to do so. I once asked a peyote shaman to talk about his
visions and he declined, saying. “It would be like you talking about making
love with your beloved. Visions are private.” The word mystery,
like the word mystic, has the Greek
root mystes, which means “to shut
one’s senses” or “to be silent about.” In a conversation I had with
world religion expert Huston Smith, he offered the metaphor of a ball floating
in water as instructive of the eternal veil of mystery over entheogenic
consciousness. Half of the ball is always submerged in water, no matter what
side is up. Perhaps we should just accept that entheogens, to be effective, must
remain underground, or kept "secret" to protect their sanctity. Initiations, early breakthroughs
I did not get experientially involved in psychedelics until I was
twenty-three, in my third year of college, at Columbia University in New York.
In the fall of 1978 I took a course in the history of Indian Buddhism, which
touched upon the role of the divine plant/god Soma as the inspiration for the
Hindu religion. When it came time to write the take‑home final, I had
writer's block and decided that this would be a propitious time to have my first
psychedelic mushroom experience. If religion can begin with such inspiration, I
thought, I might better understand if I ingested myself. The experience,
however, was uneventful.
My first real breakthrough occurred on my third trip, when I dropped acid
with my girlfriend Kathyrn, who abstained. We went to the beach in Santa Cruz.
Although I hadn't gotten off yet, it was really extraordinary playing around in
tide pools with sea anemones, observing the way they'd flow with the water
moving around them. When Kathryn had to go to class, I returned home with her,
still feeling no real alteration of consciousness. She kept checking with me.
"Did anything happen yet?" I said, "No, I don’t notice
anything." I lay down on the couch, where I could hear the water running as
she showered.
Prompted by this aquatic audio cue, I remembered the water on the beach,
and the next thing I knew ‑‑ and it happened so quickly I didn't
immediately register the change ‑‑ I had a total identification with
a sea anemone. I essentially turned into one. The walls of the apartment swished
and swayed like the seaweed we'd seen in the tide pools, and everything was
flowing like the ocean water there, to the sound of the shower and the music on
the stereo. I was completely caught up in the flow of life that was, just a
moment before, a concrete physicality.
Kathryn stuck her head out of the shower. "How ya doing?
Anything happened yet?"
"No, not yet."
"What are you experiencing right now?"
"Well, I'm just a sea anemone in this tide pool, and everything is
moving around like water." Suddenly I realized what was happening, and it
blew me away. I’ll never forget the laughter that roiled out of me.
That evening I had one of the most beautiful experiences in my life. I
was sitting on the couch and noticed a field of energy with darting splinters of
multicolored light around a houseplant. Then, while looking at a candle flame,
tiny fragments of light began to sputter off the top like a fountain of
fireworks, filling the room with sparkles of resplendent light. It was the first
time on psychedelics that I cried for joy. Beholding such beauty, I felt I was
being welcomed to an ineffable mystery, as though I'd finally come into contact
with a spiritual dimension that gave hope to humanity. I'd been a disciplined
student of yoga and meditation for two or three years, yet this was my first
real gnosis of mystic reality. The plant's energy field was also around me, a
tangible bioelectrical force that seemed to be the very energy of life itself.
Was this eros, orgone, or what is called in Asian philosophies, Chi,
Shakti, or Kundalini?
When Kathryn came back from class, she sat next to me, I held her hand
and looked into her face. A parade of visages flowed out, the faces of women
from all times, young, old, beautiful, hideous. It's a hallucinatory phenomenon
that I've experienced several times since. There are meditation techniques for
staring into the face of a partner to trigger this effect, where the face goes
through a series of fleeting masks, some recognizable, some imponderably complex
in the geometry of intertwining inner cubes and outer space.
I felt a whole new dimension of love and compassion, a bioelectrical
energy surrounding me, which was intensified by my interaction with Kathryn and
the thought of people I loved. I felt blessed and exalted, both ecstatic and enstatic.
Ecstasy connotes a separation of the
soul from the body, while enstasy is
an intense concentration in the present moment. Zen practice fosters a kind of
enstatic liberation in which you drop all your illusions and petty desires and
just be here now, whereas certain shamanic and yogic practices pursue an out of
stasis, cosmic-travel sort of mysticism. I felt I was alternately undergoing
both states. This was a real dawning for me. I was twenty‑five.
In June 1981 I finally grokked the mystery of the Grateful Dead, when the
Jerry Garcia Band came to Santa Cruz. Prior to that I just didn’t “get”
what the fuss and cult following was all about. My friend and I took Om Tabs,
little yellow barrels of LSD, which we ingested by crushing them up and snorting
them so we'd come on very quickly. We came on as the band was playing "Dear
Prudence," which was so stirring, I thought that in five hundred years, it
would be known as one of the mantras of our time. Garcia seemed to be watching
himself play, as though he were channeling the music from another source. I saw
a light coming in through the top of his head and going out through his fingers
and through the emanations of his guitar, which created rainbow‑colored
vibrations that filled the auditorium in the same way my vision of the roman
candle had filled the room with splinters of light. I was transfixed.
A few months later I met a fellow in Brooklyn who had an old stash of
acid made by Nick Sand, the Owsley protégé, whom Canadian officials alleged
was making LSD “106 percent pure” prior to his arrest up there a few years
ago. On September 18, 1981, I decided to pass up the Simon and Garfunkel concert
in Central Park to drive up to Vermont and take some of this ultra‑clean
acid. I went for a walk in the forest. After a short time, I looked up at a
stand of white birch trees and they'd become animated by tree spirits. I don’t
know what else to call them. Instantly I could see the validity of shamanic
ontology – the belief in the existence of spirits -- but my first reaction was
fear. They looked like those big stones on Easter Island, oblong,
anthropomorphic beings with long eyes and long faces, morphing in and out of the
trees. I've seen similar images in the Cycladic idols of ancient Crete. The
beings seemed to be comprised of the trees' ethereal bodies.
I turned away, embarrassed and frightened. I felt like I was intruding.
Then I looked at them again and the trees began to assume a menacing posture.
They were horrifying. I looked away again, even more alarmed. I said to myself,
"Stay calm." Why would these tree spirits be trying to scare me? I
wondered. I approached this mystery with a sincere heart. I
know that I've wandered into their dimension uninvited, but I mean no harm, and
whatever I learn from this adventure, I will use for the benefit of all.
I looked back at them and they looked back at me. They looked puzzled
too, as though scratching their chins, pondering some peculiar enigma. I turned
away again and thought, "This is really strange. First they're trying to
terrorize me and now they look as confounded as I am. This is a riot." I
looked up at the trees again and at that moment they started doing a goofy
little dance, rocking back and forth and laughing, "Ho, ho, ho!" In
that moment I got what I was supposed to get from this encounter: The world
responds according to how you approach it. The mind and the world are one. This
truth, difficult to discern in this gross dimension of reality, is easy to grok
in the pure psychic space I was in. As soon as I comprehended this, I looked at
them again and they'd disappeared.
In 1982 I entered the Divinity School at the University of Chicago,
equipped with a good quantity of the then‑legal and relatively unknown
MDMA, which we called Adam. The purity of my supply had been established by a
nuclear magnetic resonance. I'd hoped to continue in the vein of Walter Pahnke's
studies at Harvard: to scientifically demonstrate the religious value of
psychedelic experiences. I naively thought that the Divinity School, with its
purported interest in the nature of religion and in revitalizing the sacred,
would be the right setting to explore these mystical states in a safe and
controlled setting ‑‑ and with a legal drug. But they're not interested in mystical experience at
divinity schools. They're interested only in words and in history. If someone
had a mystical vision a safe two thousand years ago and left some record of it,
that might interest them. But mystical experience,
the raw and vital force that gives rise to a religion, is too much for them to
cram into their linguistic, pseudo‑scientific endeavor to understand God.
I lost patience with the bureaucratic obstacles and decided to conduct
the investigations on my own, without university auspices. I started doing
quasi-formal (some more quasi than formal) naturalistic observational research,
using MDMA and other entheogens. Using my apartment and the basement of the
Episcopal House, my associates and I conducted several psychedelic trips for
Divinity School students and other grad students and faculty, who thought they'd
gone back in time to the experimental Los Angeles of the Fifties. I asked the
experients to write a report, and many breakthrough experiences were recorded.
The university campus is surrounded on three sides by fierce ghettos.
Hyde Park is one of the most racially tense places I've ever lived. My colleague
and girlfriend was a striking blond from California. Whenever we ventured
outside the borders of the university, to a place called the Point, which juts
out into Lake Michigan, she'd have to endure catcalls from the homeboys. It was
usually a drag. But one time we walked out there with MDMA in our bloodstreams,
and on this day, instead of the jeers our presence usually provoked, we
attracted sincere, authentic communication. I'll never forget this afternoon,
sitting on a stone wall by the lake. We engaged in more genuine, honest,
profound, and meaningful conversations about the soul and the nature of God and
joy and suffering, than I had in any of my classes. We talked honestly about our
own experiences, sharing a three‑hour oasis of sanity with
African‑Americans who at first appeared dangerous, as though they might be
Blackstone Rangers or members of another inner‑city gang. They'd come over
to hassle us, but then sensed our openness and sincerity and instead opened up
themselves and had intimate exchanges with us. It was amazing! I believe their
reaction was triggered by the fact that we were radiating love, peace and
acceptance ‑‑ instead of fear, anger, and worry.
The encounter at the Point planted the idea that MDMA could help to
improve race relations. With that potential use in mind, we handed it out to
some people and went to the blues bars on the South Side, two in particular,
Teresa's and the Checkerboard Lounge, where the crime rate is so high, you have
to be escorted in and out by a bouncer who carries a gun on his hip. You might
be the only white person in there, and a lot of fear is generated until the
music gets going, which tends to melt it down.
These clubs were our laboratories. We’d go there with people who'd
ordinarily be afraid to go to that part of town. There was one fellow from
Georgia, Luke, who struggled with the racial fear and animosity he’d inherited
from his father, an unabashed bigot. Luke was terrified of going to the blues
bars for fear of the locals. I pursuaded him to come one night and he had a
breakthrough experience on MDMA. By the end of the night, Luke, myself, and our
newfound black friends – all experimental subjects, high as kites -- were
wading knee-deep in Lake Michigan with our arms around each other, watching the
sun rise, telling stories of what we’d learned and what we wished to forget. What happened to MDMA is a real pity. Large illicit labs had sprung up seeking to capitalize on its not yet illegal status. It became widely known as the "love drug," which it is, but as greed and misinformation grew, this extremely valuable substance was lost to scientific or legal religious uses. Finally it was outlawed and its subtle profundity became obscured by hysteria on both sides. The Drug War really began to rage then, in the mid Eighties. It was time for all of us who'd tasted such sacraments to lay low or be imprisoned.
Saved by the belle
One evening in February 1983, I felt a strong urge to take LSD, even
though I had an exam and a paper due. My girlfriend Lynn tried to dissuade me,
but I insisted, "I really need to do this tonight"
and took about four hundred micrograms. I followed a method for internalizing
the effects I’d learned from the work of Stan Grof. The technique is to wear
eyeshades and headphones for the duration and to not interact with the outside
world. Stan used a sequence of varying types of music, which would begin
melodically, rise up to a crescendo with a cacophonous peak, and then gently
ease off. These suites of edited sound went on for several hours to facilitate
the dissolution of the ego and then a period of reintegration. The role of the
sitter is to very gently keep the psychonaut focused on the internal process,
which s often very difficult, because of natural resistance.
I came on surprisingly fast. My body began vibrating with an intense
energy. I felt a sense of complete oneness with the entire planet, as though I'd
experienced everything that ever happened all in one instant. There was an
initial flash of unity, which then peeled off into a trip through the collective
unconscious. I received images from ancient Egypt, China, and India, then
fast‑forwarded to modern life and memories of my own history, including a
bizarre sequence in which I felt I was reliving my conception. At one point,
when Lynn, wasn't looking, I managed to get the eyeshades off. I looked around
and the whole apartment was a sea of green electromagnetic energy. The rug
swelled up like a rough sea and at the end of each wave was a serpent looking
back at me. I watched this for a while and then had the keenest feeling of being
out of my body, floating in field of energy. It was incredibly exhilarating.
Then Lynn came back in and coaxed me back into staying with the eyeshades
and the music, which returned me into my body. After several hours, I felt oddly
clear‑headed and took off the eyeshades and headphones, noticing that it
was almost four in the morning, nine hours after I’d dropped. Lynn was sound
asleep on the bed. It was extraordinarily quiet. I felt perfectly clear.
"That was some trip," I said to myself, figuring
I'd come down. There was an uncanny stillness and purity of presence in the
moment. I lit a candle and sat down on the floor to meditate. After a few
moments I felt a tingling at the base of my spine, and in the next moment, my
whole body was pulsing with new energy. I relaxed into this orgasmic vitality.
I rose to my feet, my body being moved by the energy into a sort of
Indian temple dance similar to Tai Chi movements. Then my hands came up into a
hatha prayer position, palm to palm in front of my heart. At that instant,
the energy became very intense and all of a sudden the candle flame became the
same size as me. There before me blazed the purest brightest white light
composed of the same energy that was guiding my posture. I cried at the beauty
of this vision. I felt so blessed to have seen what I felt was the energy of
creation at its purest and highest vibration. This did not seem to be a
hallucination, but a vision, a darshan,
a glimpse of another plane.
As I relaxed and surrendered further, it became more intense and the
light grew larger and closer to me. As it was about to engulf me entirely, I
paused, thinking if it did, "I" would be gone. For now I felt it was
enough just to see and know this light. At that moment, I vowed that my life's
work would be to reveal this light to others. This was the
light. Let there be light. At the moment I declined to be dissolved in it,
it shrunk back, yellowing at the edges. Then it went down to about two feet
high. I sat down for a few minutes of solemn and joyous meditation.
After a half-hour I got up and sat in front of a floor‑length
mirror and looked at myself. My reflection flashed through a procession of
changes I'd only seen happen in the faces of others. This was the first time I'd
done it with my own mug. I saw the whole evolutionary history of humanity
unfolding. Some images were bizarre, imponderable countenances. All the while my
eyes remained constant, looking back at myself peacefully through the succession
of faces, until the image in the mirror became a goat. A snout began to form.
Horns came out of the head. The eyes yellowed.
There was a pause, as though this was the point of this part of the
vision. I looked at the eyes and they were not mine anymore! I'd lost my
observational capacity. I was utterly panic-stricken. I thought I'd lost my
mind, that I'd gone completely, unexplorably insane forever. I was so terrified,
I couldn't breathe. My terror released a torrent of harsh, swirling energy into
the room. The nature of this dark force was like the cataclysm unleashed from
the Ark of the Covenant in the movie Raiders
of the Lost Ark at the moment Indiana Jones yells to his companion,
"Don't look at it!" in order to keep them anchored to Earth and
preserved from being ripped into oblivion. (The word panic
originally connoted fears attributed to the mischief of the pagan god Pan. As my
consciousness was overwhelmed by a kind of primordial power, I'd resonated with
the archetype of Pan.)
I thought of screaming for help from my sleeping friend, but I could not
muster the language and did not want to freeze the moment and get really
caught in it. So, remembering the
advice of my teachers, I tried to bring my mind to rest on a familiar,
comforting image, a small statute of Buddha, which to me symbolized centered
mindfulness. I prayed with more conviction than I knew I had to whatever was out
there, "Please don't let me go crazy. I'll only be a burden on my family
and friends. I'm here to help.
Please don't let me go crazy."
At that moment, there appeared before me a beautiful celestial being,
hovering five feet off the floor. It looked like green Tara,
a goddess of mercy and compassion comprised of green energy; or Kwan Yin, the
Chinese Buddhist incarnation of the Hindu goddess of compassion. Natural sized
and sitting in a lotus position, she looked me right in the eye, smiled the most
beatific smile and made a sweeping gesture with her left hand in a mudra,
index finger and thumb touching lightly. All my fear passed with this blessing,
and the terrible energy subsided. Then she made a gesture of acknowledgment for
this moment. I returned to a state of
crystal lucidity and peace in her presence, with the moonlight, the Buddha, and
my sleeping companion enhancing the restfulness in the room. Then she turned her
head a little and I saw an infinite row of faces trailing behind it. In a few
seconds she was gone. I sobbed tears of joy.
I continue to savor the presence of such an angelic being, which often
prompts me to ponder its ontological provenance. Feeling I'd reached a crest in
my entheogenic vision quest, I did not take so high a dose of LSD for many years
afterwards. Tryptamine ventures
I turned my attention to botanical entheogens and began an exploration of
psilocybin mushrooms and Amazonian ayahuasca. I'd hear mythical beings on
mushrooms, voices inside my head. I'd ask them who they were and they'd answer
back teasingly, "We are who you came to see."
"Then show yourselves. I want to see you," I demanded.
"We're not going to show ourselves to you. We want you to remain a
human being for a little while longer."
I took DMT a number of times. Once I attended a session for about ten
people in Big Sur. When it was my turn, I took the pipe but balked at taking a
full hit, and passed out, perhaps too afraid. I came to, and the leader was
still there, standing over me. "No, you really need to take a hit," he
said. So I did and fell back. My tongue curled up and pushed against the top of
my mouth. Many Pranayama yoga breathing exercises are done with the tongue in this
position. Then my mouth filled with the most exquisite tasting fluid, a sweet
ambrosial nectar. The closest thing I've tasted in this reality is royal jelly,
a special elixir made by bees to feed the queen bee, which is a real delicacy,
very potent in amino and pantothenic acids, and a very expensive little drink. I
drank it in, sucking it out of the top of my mouth. I told the leader about it,
and he smiled and said, "Amrita,” which means in Sanskrit
“non-death,” referring to a nectar of immortality derived from the
secretions of inner essences in occult yogic practice. (I’m not saying that
this was amrita or that I am immortal; I’m merely reporting that a most
delectable fluid filled my mouth. I tasted this ambrosia one other time, during
a Tantric practice on LSD.)
During one DMT trip, I had a vision of the state of planetary affairs.
According to the cosmology of this revelation, more and more people were
becoming aware of the dire state of things, and many would soon wake up to the
essential divinity of the human being, but it might be too late. Humanity would
wake up at the moment it would become extinct! Those souls who'd attained a
certain level of integrity, enlightenment and right conduct, the ones who lived
their lives with respect for the whole of life and not just for their own petty
parochial interests, would be transported to a dimension ahead, while the
selfish, ignorant, greedy, exclusively materialistic, violent, less evolved ones
would become like fodder or compost for a new generation of consciousness.
Of all the entheogens, ayahuasca has been the most somatic for me. You
drink this stuff and it winds its way down into your gut like a lazy serpent,
churns it all up and spews out the garbage. The native people who use it call it
"la purga." Purge it does. This sacrament won't become popular in
dance clubs unless they make vomiting trendy. Often the purge comes out both
ends. The puking and shitting will control recreational use better than the DEA
ever could. The visions are also part of the purge. You give something up and
get a vision in return.
The first time I took it was relatively uneventful except for the
wonderfully deep vomiting and subsequent flashes of blue light in my forehead.
The first few times, I took it in a circle with about twelve other intrepid
explorers. The next day, I returned home and, though I was a novice, defeated an
expert dart player two out of three times with
my eyes closed. Shortly after that, I won a local golf championship, defeating a
guy who'd won the previous eight years in a row.
On one occasion, I gathered with some friends in a circle in a high
meadow overlooking the Pacific Ocean and took pharmahuasca:
pharmaceutical harmine, harmaline, and DMT. This was a delicate first
experiment, because you have to get the ratio correct. Too much harmine and
harmaline and the nausea can be too intense; not enough and you fail to
potentiate the DMT, which isn't active unless the harmaline blocks the MAO.
Well, I did get it right and proceeded to lay on my back late at night, gazing
at the stars. The entire sky became an enormous black panther, the stars points
of light that shimmered like glistening black fur. I broke into a full joyous
laughter at the mystery and the beauty of it all.
How little we know about the soul’s journey. We are so smug in our
Western science, while the mystery is perhaps more actively pursued out on
mountaintops or in forests by people beating drums and dancing around a fire.
Perhaps the most explicit trip I've had occurred when I smoked some DMT
and felt like a rubber band pulled back as far as it could go. Just as it was
about to snap, the tension in my head was so strong I thought it was going to
explode. But then the rubber band was released and I was fired out of my body
through a spinning tunnel. The interior walls were emblazoned with Aztec
figures, chattering very fast, and I was rocketing out through them. Then I
entered into a vast blackness where I saw many symbols of the world’s
religions. A telepathic voice informed me there was an immortal component of the human being. It explained that the deathless soul was continually reborn in many different times and places and in many different bodies on a variety of planets over the course of a vast intergalactic adventure. Earth was, apparently, just one stopover in space, and a lifetime here was just an instant in the limitless span of time over the course of the immense enterprise of the soul's journey. I was quite impressed, and took a moment of reflection. I thought, "Okay, what's the point of all this? What does the soul's journey mean? Why do we keep getting reborn?" So I posed the question, "What’s the point of all this?" and got this wonderful answer. Chiding me in a punitive but jocular tone, the voice said, "You idiot. Here I've just shown you that your soul is immortal, that you don't have to worry about dying, that the adventure is immense, and you still want to know what it means? It doesn't work like that. There is no meaning that you can put into words. The only thing that means anything is what's happening right now. Stop looking for ultimate meaning. Fix your attention on the present moment." That was it. I thought it was beautiful, perhaps the key I’d been looking for in my many years of experiments. This trip was a reconciliation of two metaphysical poles. I'd just had an expansive vision of the continuous rebirth of planets and souls in a very big universe, and was then brought back full‑circle to the Now, which is all there ever really is.
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