After Psychedelics

What is to be done with a broken open mind?

Sitting across from William Leonard Pickard¹ at a fluorescent lit coffee shop in Northwest Portland, trying to contain my impish wonder as I listen to him recount in hushed, steady tones the various techniques he refined in order to endure two decades of brutal incarceration–this was both the first and the last time I heard anyone in the psychedelic space invoke the notion of natural mind.

“The only drug that matters,” Leonard intoned, “the greatest trip of all…”

This extolling of natural mind’s many virtues was a follow-up to a breathtakingly vivid account of Leonard’s accidental acid overdose–a decanter of achingly pure liquid LSD shattering overhead, some 800,000+ hits crossing through every membrane, illuminating mind beyond mind’s brightest possible illumination. Perhaps the largest single dose of LSD ever taken by a human, though Leonard’s zen humility would never permit him to boast as such.

“In the end,” said Leonard, “there was no effect.”

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It felt (and still feels) wrong to assume that my experience of natural mind is anywhere close to that of an acid luminary-turned ordained Zen monk who spent the last 20 years of his life in and out of solitary confinement. My experience of riding a bicycle, e.g., is nothing like that of Lance Armstrong.

Still, I was intrigued by the basic premise, and deeply shaken by its implications, that mind alone, unadulterated and left to its own devices, could produce the most profound states of ecstasy, tranquility, and abjection. It struck me–a bright-eyed, outspoken, opportunistic proponent of psychedelic drugs eager to make a name for myself in the burgeoning field–as hopelessly abstract, borderline blasphemous.

Or–more scandalous still–that mind might not even be the proper vehicle for such transcendence; that what we’re all seeking might exist on a plane way outside of mind, completely independent of mind…unthinkable.

I’d spent the prior year dedicated to the study of extreme states of mind and the drugs that induce them, with a strong preference for the obscure and the intense. What had I been given, what had I left behind?

I had beheld glimmering jewels of pure information. I had seen myself as a child through the eyes of the Goddess, and I had spent countless sacred hours tending to my unaddressed wounds accordingly. I had chipped away at stubborn ego structures as a sculptor might attack a lump of alabaster–forcefully, yet with exquisite care and something like tenderness. I had witnessed infinities within infinities within the eyes of my beloved, sacred mirrors reflecting my own divine nature back to me in an infinitely recursive loop that eventually collapses and gives way to a place of no I, no beloved, just Love as pure and foundational as carbon is to organic life.

And I had spiralled. I had tunneled, heart in throat, blood red concentric circles flashing frantically behind my eyelids, downward into total abjection, a place devoid of feeling, a place that can only be called Hell. I had witnessed my ancestors being whipped and corralled like livestock as the word ‘TORTURE’ boomed omnisciently around me. I’d gone full Sarah Palmer on my face in a desperate attempt to destroy the last vestiges of inauthenticity, artifice, ego. I had ripped away the very ground that my unconscious worked so hard to establish and maintain, destroyed my hard-earned foundations and violated all sense of stability in vain attempts to make contact with the Beyond.

I thought all this seeking would save me.

I didn’t realize I was already home.

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Catching my breath as I sat and listened to Leonard weave tapestries with his words, I was still under the impression that psychedelics were it, the technology par excellence for exploring mind’s inner landscapes. It was 2021 and I was growing disillusioned with…everything, really. Veils were lifting and illusions shattering in 1080p before our eyes. America was reeling, I was reeling, all of my friends were cancelling plans and overdosing on fentanyl. The psychiatric industry and the culture at large seemed to be engaged in a lock-step conspiracy to dull everyone into the most banal, infantilized versions of themselves, compelling us to enjoy every step of our undoing, always just one Netflix mini-series away from finally accepting the slow foreclosure of the future.

It was a perfect time to dig deep, and psychedelics erupted onto the scene with characteristic intensity, whipping myself and countless other inveterate seekers up into a near-religious frenzy over their potential as change-makers, mind-shifters, soul-healers. Psychedelics were it because they had to be, there was simply nothing else. They felt shiny and they gave me hope, and there was still that patina of vanguard sexiness surrounding them, a vestige of the 60’s and the golden age of the American counterculture.

It all feels like a distant memory now.

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As is to be expected of a cultural movement that has been forced–by draconian laws, by bad science, by fraudulence and corruption and so many fractured minds–into a state of prolonged adolescence, American psychedelia is plagued by both staggering arrogance and withering insecurity. Many of the most vocal proponents of these drugs are themselves in a process of psychic unraveling, a factor which lends itself to a tremendous amount of vicious infighting and ego-driven blowouts among those who are alleged to have killed their egos. These inner schisms ran alongside and in many ways precipitated the FDA’s devastating decision to shoot down MDMA-assisted therapy earlier this year.

One of the funniest outsider critiques of neo-psychedelia

It’s a messy scene full of messy people, and who can blame us? We’re reckoning with the legacy of prohibition and banging our heads against so much misinformation and red tape, all while doing battle with 6D Mesoamerican demons in our free time. As is so often the case, though, prohibition is to blame for much of the madness.

One of the downstream effects of prohibition is a deep insecurity among those who have seen through the propaganda and discovered for themselves that some drugs—most drugs—are good, actually. Once the veil on the drug war has been lifted and you’ve seen the lies for what they are, it’s impossible to un-see just how ruthlessly we’ve been deceived, just how much unnecessary blood has been spilled, families ripped apart, bodies and souls left to rot in cages over lies.

The impulse, quite justifiable, is to overcorrect in the opposite direction, to frame the drugs and the users thereof as not only safe, but perfectly innocent, a panacea in fact. As a matter of fact, they’re not even drugs anymore, they’re medicines². We saw this with cannabis, as millions of Slightly Stoopid enthusiasts bravely emerged from the closet not as stoners but as helpless victims of sudden onset glaucoma who deserved—nay, needed—to smoke dabs from morning til’ evening because ganja is medicine, man.

So much of the clumsiness surrounding the integration of psychedelics into the American machine seems to fall back on this simple fact:

We don’t understand mind. We haven’t sat long enough with the difficult questions of who and what we are to justify introducing these powerful, ancient technologies into our systems. This is not a call for moderation, and certainly not an effort to halt any progress that would counteract the obscene violence of prohibition. This is, simply, a cry for deeper contemplation of the ground in which we’re planting these seeds.

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There’s a feeling of betrayal in the air, a sense that we have been betrayed by the institutions that were supposed to offer us meaning. Many of us have been irreparably hurt by the very people, practices, and drugs that were supposed to offer us healing. What’s worse, we have been complicit in our own betrayal, all-too eagerly seeking diagnoses, comfortable paradigms, simple solutions to the slippery questions of what we are and why we suffer. We try to smooth out our edges and those of others, slouching toward the same dull plastic smooth space that characterizes the flat digital landscape of the machine.

In the absence of core values and authentic ecstatic transcendence, American culture offers us one way and one way only out of suffering: sedation. A life well lived is a painless, picket fenced-in life, a life devoid of suffering and intrusions. Anything or anyone that compromises this delicate equilibrium is a threat to your existence and should be eliminated. And so we fall back on morally dubious notions like consent and transparency, contractual agreements to not offend or invade one another’s delicate spheres of subjectivity. And we suffer unimaginably, from abstract horrors of Lovecraftian magnitude: autism, ADHD, compulsive self-harm; chronic inflammation and its very many discontents.

Psychedelics remain at the top of the list of most likely allies in the human race’s fight for salvation, and I have repeatedly made very public appearances advocating for their use. And yet, of the countless people who have come to me over the years seeking relief and insight through psychedelics, I’ve wanted to say the following to many: haven’t you had enough of your mind?

Earth and soil, animal joy and animal grief, skin touching skin–all of these things are not mind. Your body is crying out for you to notice it and tend to it like the living thing that it is. The world, the real world (also a living thing) on which you’ve turned your back in favor of an algorithmically-mediated technocratic fantasy realm, in service of Netflix and Doordash and endless endless porn, the world is crying out similarly: notice me, please, it cries. I’m still here.

And so it is: go ahead. Blow mind all the way open, use mind to fix mind, to rescue mind from its own clutches. See mind through to the other side of mind. Obliterate mind and soothe mind and scramble mind and detach mind from body. I can’t help but see these all as essentially fruitless endeavors if they always, inevitably deliver mind right back to itself, right back to mind, in all of its mundane glory.

One of the sweetest messages I’ve gotten from psychedelics has been: put us down. We’re through with you, for now. Much like when a partner realizes before you do that the relationship has run its course, and subtly, gently encourages you to see yourself out—there’s an almost diplomatic courtesy to it. It’s as if they (both of them—the loving partner, and the psychedelic) know that too direct a dumping would be jarring, traumatic, and so they leave you to ponder for a while until you arrive at the conclusion that it’s time to split, thinking all the while that you’ve reached that place on your own.

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It always feels cheap and disingenuous (and a bit creepy) when psychedelic advocates (read: zealots; evangelists, etc.) evoke notions of “revolution” as they preach about what psychedelics can do for people and for the culture at large. It’s a similar sort of cheapness I feel when I hear techno-optimists rambling on about the latest developments in blockchain.

Listening to late-stage Leary, obsessed as he was with cybernetics, ESP, high-tech solutions to everyday miseries, one gets a taste of both. Had he lived to see the 21st century in all its hellish glory, what would he make of all that this mind-blowing epic tech has delivered us? Would he bet it all on Dogecoin, Oura rings fitted snugly on each finger, obliterating his ego with MindBloom lozenges and VR porn? Would he go straight, denounce freakdom, chant MAGA? Would he still be preaching the revolutionary potential of dropping out seeing as there isn’t really anything left to drop out of, or in to?

It’s getting late, the world is burning, and I don’t want to write about psychedelics any more.

I don’t want to write about revolution.

And I don't want to hear about either, really.

I want to know: what comes after? After the fireworks and the fractals, after mind and culture have both been blown apart and stitched back together, what do we do with this perfect world we’ve been tasked with saving?

One of the many lessons of the psychedelic encounter seems to be a deepening of our appreciation of the wild organic mystery that is human incarnation. At their best, they offer us an alternative to the centuries-old violent project of foreclosing the human subject. They remind us that our suffering, our innate queerness, is a gift, not an aberration; that, despite what mainstream psychiatry would have you believe, we are not hopeless, broken machines aching to be fixed and returned to a state of humming equilibrium.

There is suffering, imbalance, chaos everywhere, everywhere—this is the essence of Buddhism’s first noble truth. The work lies in the question of how to stay with the mystery, how to stare at the chaos and to let it stare back at you, how to be not afraid.

A monk asked Ma-tsu, “Why do you teach, ‘Mind is Buddha’?”

Ma-tsu said, “To stop a baby from crying.”

The monk said, “When the crying has stopped, what then?”

Ma-tsu said, “Then I teach, ‘Not mind, not Buddha.’”

The monk said, “How about someone who isn’t attached to either?”

Ma-tsu said, “I would tell him, ‘Not beings.’”

The monk said, “And what if you met a man unattached to all things: what would you tell him?”

Ma-tsu said, “Nothing. I would just let him experience the great Tao.”

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Pickard and I spoke in person only once. Ariana Grande’s voice hung like a stale odor in the air between us, and I did the thing, this one and only time I did the unthinkable thing where I accosted the poor pimply adolescent working the late shift at Peet’s and asked him if he could please, please turn this dreadful music down, I’m trying to hear my friend speak, and he is very soft spoken because, well, he’s 78, and you see, he spent the last 20 years in maximum security prison, in and out of solitary confinement, and he is as close as anyone on this timeline will most likely get to being authentically enlightened, and do you have any idea who is in this Peet’s right now, and you have the nerve to interfere with this dross, this drivel, this slop, you madman?

As we prepared to part ways and head off into the mist-drenched November evening, Leonard offered me one last shimmering insight. I wanted to know where he thought I should direct my energies, what I should do with this insatiable hunger that burned in me for some sort of real, thoroughgoing truth.

Softly, gracefully, he said:

“The truth waits for eyes unclouded by longing.”

1. William Leonard Pickard is a Harvard-educated drug policy expert, an ordained Zen monk, and was the first person to seriously warn American authorities of the impending wave of novel synthetic opioids like fentanyl. He’s also the greatest, most prolific LSD chemist in American history, producing up to 80% of the world’s acid supply over the course of 20 very productive years. He was sentenced to two consecutive life sentences for conspiracy to manufacture, dispense, and distribute LSD following the largest acid bust in history, but to everyone’s delight (especially his own) was let out on compassionate release during the height of COVID in late 2020 after serving two decades of his sentence. His story is fascinating and I encourage anyone reading this to do some supplementary reading on him. I count my and Leonard’s friendship among the great honors of my life.

2. If you feel you’ve cracked the code and figured out the essential difference between a drug, a medicine, and a poison—after accounting for dose/setting, cultural context, and personal biases—I’m sorry, you haven’t. Three different (heavily loaded) words for the same thing. I’ve wasted so much oxygen belaboring the absurdity of trying to distinguish between these terms. It’s a semantic debate that goes, inevitably, nowhere.