Well many people ask me about the virtues
of psychedelics because I’ve written about
this on my blog and in my book Waking Up.
And they were at a point early in my inquiry
they were indispensable and this is an experience
that’s shared by many Westerners.
It’s hard to really recommend psychedelics
without serious caveats because some of them
I think are probably neurotoxic.
Some are really well tolerated but still you
can have very scary destabilizing experiences
on them.
So you just can’t without a caveat recommend
that people drop acid or take MDMA.
So it’s – everything I say on the subject
should be understood in that context.
But for some people taking a drug is the only
way they’re going to notice that it’s
possible to have a very different experience
of the world.
They’re sufficiently lumpen and uninquisitive
about the nature of their own minds that if
you tell them to meditate, if you teach them
mindfulness, if you tell them how to follow
their breath they will look inside for 30
seconds or 30 minutes and see nothing of interest
and walk away feeling that there’s no there
there.
Either it doesn’t work for them or that
everyone else must be just faking it or there’s
– it requires a certain talent and a certain
degree of luck, therefore, to have enough
concentration to connect with any “spiritual
practice” the first time or even the tenth
time or even after a year of attempting it
because it’s just – these practices are
difficult and the conditioning of our minds
to just ceaselessly talk is deep.
So, as Terence McKenna once said, “Psychedelics
are the only method that truly guarantee an
effect.”
And this effect can be, again, very painful.
You’re not necessarily going to have a good
experience but there’s no question that
if someone gives you 100 micrograms of acid
something is going to happen.
Two hours later the significance of your existence
will have just been borne down on you like
an avalanche.
And again this can be terrifying or it can
be absolutely sublime depending on various
causes and conditions.
But the one thing it cannot be is boring.
And that is you can’t say that about yoga
or meditation or just going into solitude
or anything else that – any other, you know,
non-pharmacological means of inquiry.
So, where drugs have been indispensable for
many people is in advertising the possibility
of a change in consciousness.
And so I don’t think they’re durable methods
for people that – I don’t think you need
or should just keep taking drugs month after
month, year after year, as a mode of spiritual
inquiry.
But there’s certainly a period in many people’s
lives at the beginning where you wouldn’t
even see a glimmer of reason to suspect that
a radical change in the nature of your experience
would be possible.
My first experience with psychedelics that
was important, that actually shifted my view
of human possibility was with MDMA which I
took before it became a club drug.
I think this was in 1987 I took it.
And no one I knew, no one of my generation
had taken it.
And although the drug obviously goes back
many decades before that.
And it had not been adopted by popular culture
as a party drug.
So this was coming pretty much coming out
of the therapeutic community.
People were doing in a closeted way psychotherapy
with it.
And I took it as a means of discovering something
about the nature of my mind.
It was not a social situation.
I was just – a friend and I were alone and
we took it together and just had a conversation
on this drug.
And what was revelatory about it was that
it was an experience of absolute sobriety.
It was not – there was no druggy component
to it.
We just became clearer and clearer and clearer
in our thinking and feeling.
And the crucial component of this was a loss
of any feeling of self-concern.
I was no longer looking at myself through
my friend’s eyes.
I was no longer worried about what he was
thinking about me.
I was no longer subtly correcting course based
on changes I saw in how he was perceiving
what I was saying.
It was a whole veneer of fear frankly that
I didn’t know was there that got stripped
away.
And there was just kind of naked awareness
of the present moment and what came into that
void was a very clear understanding that I
loved him, that I – here I was, you know,
18 or 19 and I was not in the habit of, you
know, thinking about how much I loved the
men in my life.
And here’s one of my best friends and I
just realized with a, you know, it sounds
absolutely pedestrian to say it but I realized
that I wanted him to be happy in a way that
was just – it was like, you know, a lightning
bolt.
And the – what was truly revolutionary about
this insight was that the feeling that came
crashing down to that point was just, you
know, boundless love for one of my best friends
and absolutely no egoic self-concern, no possibility
for feeling envy, for feeling any kind of
petty emotion that separated myself from him.
But then I realized in the next moment that
I would feel this way for anyone who walked
through the door.
There was nothing contingent on our relationship
about this feeling.
It was not a – it was not justified by my
friendship with him.
This was the way I felt for every other conscious
being.
So this is the way I would feel for the postman
if he walked through the door.
And that suddenly opened my mind to the possibility
of being like Jesus, whoever he was, you know.
That these icons of traditional religion were
not all epileptics and schizophrenics and
frauds.
These were people who – and again we can
be skeptical about any specific individual,
you know, some of them could have been schizophrenic.
Some of them could have had temporal lobe
epilepsy but some people historically – and
even in the present have borne witness to
this experience where you can just quite literally
lose yourself concern in a way that makes
you love people unconditionally.
And so, you know, that was the experience
I had on MDMA.
It, you know, frankly blew my mind and it
took me years for me to integrate this understanding
of this possibility into my intellectual life.
And it prompted me to seek to have this experience
in other ways, you know, for many, many years.
I spent years studying meditation in various
contexts, mostly in India, Nepal.
And, you know, I can say you can have this
experience without MDMA.
It’s not, MDMA isn’t the only way to have
it.
And the truth is virtually any experience
you can have with psychedelics you can have
without psychedelics because all psychedelics
do is modulate the existing neurochemistry
of the brain.
They’re not doing something that the brain
can’t do on its own.
You’re just playing with neurotransmitters
or mimicking neurotransmitters.
I have had the same experience to more or
less a similar degree just through meditation.
But it’s clear to me that I would never
have suspected that such an experience was
possible but for my experimenting with MDMA
in the beginning.
So I have to just acknowledge that.
Again, issuing the caveat that this drug could
well be bad for you.
There’s some evidence of its neurotoxicity.
And there’s also a lot of evidence that
that research has been heavily politicized
so you have to be cautious on both sides.
But, I can’t advocate that we drop MDMA
in the water supply and cure us of our egocentricity.
There’s reasons to be circumspect there.
