This is my autobiographical chapter in which I primarily focus on my learning and healing experiences with the life-enhancing substances and their contexts. Excerpts after the additions.
Additions
The summer of 2024: Miller’s Girl
This is the title of a movie that stirred me up, and reminded me of one of my basic premises. In the story, a married middle-aged male English literature Professor Miller, is pursued by a talented, beautiful student Cairo. She is quite the character. I’m not going into the details other than that Miller is very attracted to her and conflicted for obvious reasons.
I found myself somewhat uncomfortably stirred by the idea of being sexually pursued by a beautiful young woman. That feeling wouldn’t be particularly novel. What made it interesting is the realization that while that’s true, I feel no sexual desire with any young woman, no matter how conventionally attractive. This is not out of some moral code or socially frowned upon behavior, but rather because I know I would be disappointed.
With experience and wisdom, I’ve found, as discussed throughout the book, that mature seniors have sensitivities unavailable to the young. It’s not that the sex wouldn’t feel good; it’s that it could never feel great, and that’s what I’m used to at this stage of life.
The analogy that comes to mind is that of a virtuoso musician having to play a poor-quality instrument that they couldn’t make truly sing with the exquisite beauty they could create on a finer instrument. There is nothing against young women other than they’ve yet to develop the sensitivity and skill they may have with age and experience. I have joked that who wants to eat a green peach no matter how lovely? I want a sweet, fully ripe, juicy one.
The other side of the equation would be an attractive young woman wanting to have sex with me at this point in my life. It isn’t that I might remind her of her father but rather it would be her grandfather, which somehow doesn’t sound that sexy!
The Early Years 1968–70
In the summer of 1968, between my junior and senior years in college, I started smoking cannabis. Two weeks later, I took my first acid trip. It was interesting but not revelatory. I remember thinking, ‘I don’t think this is doing anything’, and then I looked at the wood paneling in my room, and it was three-dimensional with swirling veins of lighter wood in the darker. That was novel.
I tripped some more, and it got a lot more interesting. I was tripping along on LSD one night when I was shown who I really was in my personal life. I was shown that I was in denial about my alcohol abuse. I saw my immaturity in romantic relationships. I saw my ego using my philosophy training and high SAT scores to think I was more intelligent than others. To say I was stunned is an understatement. Until then, I thought other people had issues, but I was fine. Really seeing myself was a very uncomfortable experience, yet I knew it was necessary. I had no idea what I could change, but I knew something had to. This was the beginning of my more conscious life.
Entering my senior year, given my new hippie worldview, I was skeptical regarding the purpose of my education. I semi-consciously adopted Tim Leary’s Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out philosophy. I had planned on attending an Ivy League law school, but that had lost its appeal, so I dropped out. As many of my brethren did, I started dealing pot and LSD for my income. It was fun, relatively lucrative, and felt like a good karma gig. We were turning on the world, helping others wake up to this new view of the world and what a more enlightened life could be like. And yes, looking back at it now, the naivete is obvious.
I realized that some ideas I got while tripping weren’t… uhh… very good ideas. Once on acid, I thought about how natural and right it would be to get up and run naked into the street, demonstrating my freedom. And then, even better, find a policeman and hug him. Fortunately, it was the middle of the night, and I couldn’t get up and do anything anyway.
Through 1968–70, my friends and I usually tripped, mostly on LSD, twice a week or so. I probably tripped over 200 times in those couple of years, often on strong and a few times on truly heroic doses. I didn’t keep count. This behavior was the norm among my peers. I had many notable experiences.
Early on, I took some LSD and went to a Chambers Brothers concert. I was tripping heavily in front of a giant speaker rack. I was still very awkward and shy. My hair barely covered my ears, and my first pair of bell bottoms were too short. I couldn’t then and still haven’t figured out how to be cool. Oh well. Anyway, I was being hammered by the beat — and I couldn’t let go and give my body and spirit over to the throbbing music. I stood there vibrating in place and watched a blond, long-haired hippie dude next to me dance ecstatically, the lights bouncing off his long hair and flying arms. I so yearned to have that freedom.
Another time, I had a ‘when not to trip learning experience’. I attended a Led Zeppelin concert in Hollywood, Florida. I took a hit of strong LSD and didn’t get off. That was strange, as I knew it was good acid. The whole concert scene was disconcerting. People up front were dancing, and some people behind them were throwing things at them, yelling for them to sit down. Afterward, I meandered around the venue for a while and didn’t find the people very healthy or attractive-looking. I finally went out to the parking lot and got into my car. Before I started it, I really — I mean really — began to get off on the acid. Driving home down I-95 through Miami was like looking out from inside an old glass Coca-Cola bottle. I made it back to my mother’s apartment in Coconut Grove, where I’d been crashing. I’ve often wondered if there is a category of guardian angels assigned to protect stoned-out hippies. I got the lesson that my psyche did not want to open up in a bad vibe scene like that — a lesson I haven’t forgotten.
Jumping past many interesting journey stories to the end of the chapter
It is often pointed out that spiritual experiences rarely, if ever, can be stabilized by psychedelic use alone. The following is a description of a series of focused healing journeys using MDMA with a psychedelic, usually 2C-B. I was at a point in my life where I felt compelled to do everything I could to heal my deepest old traumas. They worked! The results of these journeys are permanent
The First One
I went into it with the general intention/request to learn what I could to be a better, healthier, kinder, and wiser person. I don’t remember the dose or even what psychedelic I took. It was probably 150–175 mg MDMA, and 3–4 g of dried psilocybin mushrooms. I don’t remember specifically what I learned on this one, but I do remember that it came in a cascade. I remember holding a legal pad on a clipboard next to me and scribbling on it, recording my vast personal, global-and-beyond psychological and spiritual insights. It went on for page after page. OMG — What a Wonder!
Later, eons later, I found it lying next to me in the dark. I put it aside for the next day. Want to guess? I’m sure many of you can. I picked it up, and the first page had several brief, legible partial sentences of sweeping, clunky, semi-printed letters. All of which made sense. The next page had smaller-lettered, longer lines in which every few choppy squiggles could be identified as words. Then… uhh… pages 3 through 15 were just wavy lines widely dispersed across the pages, completely unrecognizable as anything relating to any written language. Oh well, the loss of such brilliance! Maybe if I had used a voice recorder, although given my state of mind, it might not have been recognizable as language either.
The Second One
My intention with this one was to confront my psychic legacy from my father. He wasn’t a good father. He was a classic high-dark triad like Trump. He was narcissistic, Machiavellian, and psychopathic. He thought he was the greatest and he should have whatever he wanted. He enjoyed manipulating and cheating people. He justified cheating because it taught them a lesson. And he had no empathy for others.
He was born in Germany in 1914 and grew up in chaos and poverty. His father wanted him to be a farmer, but he had no interest in that. He wanted to get rich. He came to the US in 1935 under a temporary emigration visa. He received an induction notice from the German army and decided to stay here—an easy decision. Unlike Trump, he became wealthy through hard work and business savvy.
My mother was the first of his six wives and the only one who was an American. My parents divorced shortly after the death of their first child, my older sister Marilyn when I was two years old. From age 7 to 17, I spent summers with him. At age 17, we argued, and he disowned me. Years later, I looked him up and visited him a few times. He was quick to let me know that I wasn’t going to get any of his money. He didn’t have a funeral when he died because no one would come. There’s a lesson in that.
That I was young when they divorced surely saved me from much more dysfunction. Still, the negative influences on infants and toddlers in their preverbal stages are some of the most difficult traumas to reach and heal. For this journey, I took double doses of MDMA (250 mg) and 2C-B (40 mg). It must have seemed like a good idea at the time.
For one glorious period, I felt myself co-creating the universe, nanosecond by nanosecond, out of unbelievably brilliant, beautiful silver diamond-like light. I had never known such beauty. At another part of the journey, I went way out into… into what I don’t know… some far far distant realm of consciousness where I encountered the two strangest beings I’ve ever experienced. There is no way I could describe them. They didn’t like me poking into their space and forcefully let me know. They told me that everything I think about the nature of reality — the universe, multiverses, God, consciousness — was ignorant, childish nonsense. I did everything I could to go back somehow, to go away — anything to get away from their malignancy.
Then, after some interminable time, it got worse, much worse. I remember spending what seemed like an eternity stuck in a dark, morbid world. How to describe it? Imagine a world of one dark room made of old, damp, moldy cardboard, a world so controlled that I would have to ask permission from some unseen authority to even notice someone else, if there was anyone else, much less contact them. Utterly alone and impotent, and in that state, I knew for sure that this was it forever. This was it for eternity — my private hell.
This was the most awful experience I’ve ever had. Nothing else has come close. I think it came from the anguish of feeling that my father had never seen me as a human being. I came back out of it with such relief, only to slide back into it again. NOOOO! Eventually, I came down. So very, very grateful to be free of such horror.
There is debate in the psychedelic community as to whether there is any such thing as a ‘bad’ trip. We know that there can be excruciating trips, as one may confront the emotional pain of childhood or other trauma. Sam Harris and Francoise Bourzat had this conversation on one of his podcasts. She held the position that there are no really bad trips. Sam, from his personal experience, held that some trips are so fragmenting and dissociating that there is nothing good or useful in them. I agree. Nonetheless, I knew I had to continue my healing quest; perhaps the most difficult was yet to come.
The Third One
‘I killed my sister, and if they ever find out, they’ll kill me’ is the story assumed in my 18-month-old psyche. I felt, or thought, or whatever it is that happens in a toddler’s perception and preverbal cognition, that I was responsible for my sister’s death. One factor was that my parents were indirectly responsible. My mother didn’t want to have a child with my father, which is not surprising with what I know about him. It was the 1940s, and the option she chose to try to abort the fetus was swallowing some toxic brew. It didn’t terminate the pregnancy, but it did damage the baby. From the moment she saw her daughter, it was clear that the child had been seriously damaged. I’ve seen pictures of her as a toddler. She had a bulbous forehead, pinched-in eyes, and sausage-like limbs. My mother lived with that guilt. My mother was an alcoholic, which didn’t help.
I understand that at 18 months, a toddler has a sense of omnipotence, creating everything around them: a storm, a barking dog, screaming parents. I’ve been told that an infant is also psychically part of its mother’s energy field until around the same age. I assume I felt my mother’s guilt as my own. My sister Mary was 3 years old at this time. One night, she was screaming and screaming, and my father picked her up and shook her. She went into a coma and died the next day from a brain tumor or shaken baby syndrome. There’s no way to know now, which wouldn’t have mattered to my toddler self. My parents divorced soon after that.
I can’t imagine what an awful atmosphere that was for me. I grew up very shy and did everything possible to avoid bringing attention to myself. In elementary school, I couldn’t raise my hand to ask to go to the bathroom and peed in my pants a couple of times. Even in college, while that wasn’t a problem, I could barely think or talk in an oral exam, even tho I was an honors student. Even tho I drank a lot of alcohol and didn’t work hard, I could maintain my magna cum laude GPA.
I didn’t become aware of all this until decades later. My mother became a chronic alcoholic after her third marriage ended in the late 1960s. She would drink until she passed out, wake up, and do it again. She sobered up once a week to go grocery shopping. The liquor store delivered. I was still living a few hours away in the home where my wife and I had lived with our daughters until her death six months earlier. Periodically, I would visit my mother and some of my old friends. On one of those visits, I told her about some minor thing I had done with my girls that I felt bad about. In her inebriated, slurred speech, she said, “You don’t know the meaning of guilt,” and told me the story of my sister’s brief life. Growing up, I had never heard anything about my sister from my mother. My father mentioned a couple of times that his beautiful little girl had died.
I was ready to do whatever it took to go into the pain of this. I took a normal dose of MDMA and a psychedelic. As I went deeper and deeper into myself, I kept getting distracted and would think, ‘No, I’m going there no matter what.’ I kept pushing and pushing deeper into my past. No matter what, I wouldn’t stop until I got to the root of the pain. Then, much to my surprise, the same wise, beautiful presence that came to me the day after my wife’s death was in me again. He said, ‘You don’t have to go there. That’s not in you anymore.’ In my very altered state, I sobbed and simultaneously rushed with joy; I felt great relief in a depth that has had no equal in my life.
I also noticed a couple of things. One is that while in his previous appearance, he introduced himself as Jesus, on this occasion, he was simply the Christ. I realized that the last time, it was vital that he identified himself as Jesus because at the cemetery when I talked about his coming to me if I had said that the Living Christ came to me, that wouldn’t have worked for my fundamentalist in-laws. It’s worth considering that I was in the deepest, most profound grief I’ve ever felt on both occasions. I wonder if, as that great consciousness scans the planet, the level of suffering is the signal that called Him. Who knows?
The Fourth One
After that trip, I felt complete with the goals I had given myself, and then I realized something odd. In thinking about the factors that influenced my life, I hadn’t considered my mother, my primary parent. To overlook this seemed suspicious. Was there something I was avoiding? She died in 1977, six months after my wife, at age 53, from chronic alcohol abuse. I took this journey into my past using a moderate combo dose. It was an easy trip. I saw how some of her early family and cultural conditioning had imprinted on me. I didn’t find anything kinky, and I thanked her for that. She had dedicated most of her life to caring for me and helping me get started in adulthood.
2018 Home at Last
Two months after my 10-year relationship ended, I finally met the great love of my life: The fourth and final one! Right? This time, I’m confident that it’s for so long as we both shall live. This one is the crowning glory of all that I had strived for in a relationship. Early in writing this book, I told her a story from Peter Coyote’s second autobiography. After a long, extraordinarily fascinating life from archetypal hippie to movie star, he met the final love of his life. In closing that story, he says she is the most private person he’s ever met and won’t say anything more. My partner liked that and requested I do the same.
I can say that on the first night we met, I asked her if she wanted to see if we could live the rest of our lives together. She smiled. And so it is. I read this poem to her. Of all of the poetry I’ve written, this one has had the most lingering presence, the embodiment of deep yearning, now finally realized.
Home At Last
For all the whiles that love has seen
none like this moment has ever been
As fullness builds a surging swell
upon the heart’s true beam
I am carried, duty-bound
to seek the fairest shore
But ohh, how far the voyage
what enticements passed
to find my spirit conjoined
finally, a home at last
The Spring 2023 Journey
Having successfully voyaged and healed on the four focused journeys and found my life’s great love, I felt complete. I thought I had healed my major traumas. But something wasn’t quite right. As the next few years passed, I sometimes found that when my partner held me in a physically and emotionally intimate way I had never been held, something deep came up and out of me. In especially intimate loving moments, I sometimes found myself hyperventilating, quivering, and moaning from an ancient, anguished place.
We realized this was coming from my earliest trauma. It was something I hadn’t thought about, although I probably should have, so I couldn’t even begin to integrate it. I had been a six-week–early, 4 lb 4 oz preemie. I spent the first two weeks of my life in an incubator. This was in 1947, when they didn’t know how important it was for preemies like me to be held. They have since learned, and preemies are often toted around in snug carriers to feel and hear an adult body’s movement, breath, and heartbeat.
Even tho the life issues I had focused on had been processed, I still vaguely sensed a deep stressor, an old pervasive ontological fear, a wrongness in my very beingness in this world. This was probably the result of my earliest life experience. I wanted to see if this psychic wound could be healed. Could I become free of this omnipresent emotional miasma? I decided to take another focused, hopefully, healing journey, letting come what may.
No one can predict what will happen on a particular journey, although there are obvious guidelines about dosage set and setting. I was prepared to relive the full intensity of my infant self’s hopeless, seemingly endless despair and loneliness. I sensed how grievous such an experience could be, and I didn’t assume anything about how it would go. I set my intentions and took a moderate 150-mg dose of MDMA and a solid 25-mg dose of 2C-B. I was essentially alone, although my lover was nearby if I needed to call for help.
I had a very easy, yet profound, healing journey. I was told by some mysterious inner voice that I didn’t have to feel that suffering. I was told that what I had to do to heal was to see and feel how the repercussions of that early trauma were affecting my life now and let them go. There followed a series of insights that did just that. I learned how and why I unconsciously never felt safe, how and why I judged myself and others, and so much more. Imagine a stream of nuanced understandings of these kinds of issues in which the very sight of them dissolves them like a beam of laser light sweeping through cobwebs, turning them into vapor, and gone. Gone forever.
The primary insight, the huge healing rush, was, as silly as it may sound, I AM NOT A BAD PERSON. NOTHING I DO IS BAD BECAUSE I AM NOT A BAD PERSON. PERHAPS STUPID OR EVEN ACCIDENTALLY HARMFUL, BUT NOT ANYTHING THAT WOULD MAKE ME A BAD PERSON. I silently, exuberantly, tearfully shouted this over and over again. A deep, pervasive unconscious drag on my very being let go. Assuming ordinary common sense, I now feel I can be myself without fear or self-censorship. Such freedom. Such joy. Such a simple, obvious truth about my Self. This sense of essential well-being has continued. Of course, various daily scenarios can still be challenging, yet this ground of non-threatening beingness remains present. Amen
PS As you’ll read, I wasn’t quite as finished with this as I thought.
Note: These are the last words, the last story, added to this book before it is going to be formatted and printed. This feels good. It feels right.
The Spring of 2024 Journey
Recently, I was surprised by an event that sent me into another bout of deep suffering, grief, and a sense of existential wrongness. Unlike the others of these I’ve had, there was a deep, brief, underlying flash of lightning-like anger. There was no context in this, just the raw feelings. Trying to get to the end, or as close to the end as I can, of my emotional healing process, I took another solid journey combining MDMA and 2C-B. I went in with: ‘Dear Lord, please help me understand and heal whatever I can to become a better person and servant of the Great Work. Amen.’
OMG — I had no idea what I was getting into. I couldn’t have. It came on fast. I started feeling it after 15 minutes. That was the first hint. This trip had two major themes. The first was the challenge of looking unflinchingly into my deepest wounding. The second related one was my relationship with Universal Consciousness.
Feeling the Guilt
Reflecting on the first part, I found I need an analogy to prepare readers to have a better sense of it: Imagine if you had, say, a boil on your arm, and you not just needed to but knew you had to squeeze all of the nasty putrid pus out of it. Imagine that you squeezed it, painfully squeezed it, and some of the gross material came out, and as it came out, it simply disappeared. Still, there was more. You squeezed it even harder, and it was more painful, and more crud came out. You were committed to getting it all out; you had to get it all out.
There was no longer any choice, and you squeezed it even harder, really hard, excruciatingly painfully hard, and you knew you were getting closer to having it all gone. So, with even more determination to get it all, you strained with all your might. You pushed into the pain again, and yet there was still more of the disgusting, noxious pus.
Then, with an overwhelming sense of urgency, because you didn’t know if you had any more left in you to give, you somehow pulled some deep, mysterious power up out of the core of your very being and pushed and pushed, getting closer to the end. Now, you were consumed by doubt that there was no end to this, that you would fail. You were scared because, in this movie, it was life or death: a glorious life or a horrible, unending death.
In this most profound state of existential fear, you found some deep, deep reserve and found the energy to make an even more intense effort, experiencing even more pain than you ever could have remotely imagined. Nothing in the entirety of your life to this moment life had ever come close to preparing you for this.
Finally, like a wounded animal about to be killed and consumed, you were giving up, resigning yourself to an inevitable descent into eternal damnation. Then, from only God knows where, came a surge of power, a torrent of incandescent diamond light – and you burst free, free of that awful legacy. The lifelong soul malady was exhumed, every lingering shred ripped from its hidden lair, finally and forever gone.
Now, change the boil to my psyche and the pus to my guilt, and rather than trying to squeeze something out, I was pushing my awareness deeper and deeper down and in, becoming more and more conscious of the guilt. The deeper I went in and felt the malevolent awfulness, the worse it got. Then, in a miracle of transubstantiationalist magic, as I exposed it to my awareness, the guilt kept disappearing until, after, timeless anguish was completely gone. Oh my God, what a relief. What an incredible blessing that after almost a lifetime of not just holding this guilt but having it control part of me from this immeasurable depth, I was free of it.
Foolish as all of this was from a rational viewpoint, my infantile concept of the totality of the Universe was only a vague Other. I felt with absolute certainty that my badness was responsible for all the badness in the Other. All of it! I felt with absolute certainty that if I could only have been ‘good,’ the Other, the entire Universe, would be good. I felt as my very identity that I was guilty of the darkest, most unforgivable sin. I felt nothing else could be as bad as what I had done at any time or place in all of eternity. This wretched wrongness in my soul was what I was struggling to remove from the core of my being, and I did. Amen.
Then Beauty Came
As this drama ended, a beautiful gift opened in my mind. I was simultaneously hearing a beautiful, pure, bell-like tone and seeing a kind of static etheric flame with an oval base rising to an impossibly thin, extended point. I fell into appreciating them each in their own manner. The more I did, the more beautiful they each became, and the more their beauty consumed me. Then, faster and faster, they became more and more awesomely beautiful. Full of grace, I rose in an increasing ecstasy with this asymptotic ascending beauty until I could stand it no more, and something popped. I don’t know where I went next.
The Ultimate Act of Trust
A few hours or eons later, they can be the same, I faced another challenge. Now free of that existential guilt, I was called to something else. I was shown that I had a simple choice. I could either trust totally in the benevolence and wisdom of the Mind of God, the infinite and eternal Consciousness from which, and in which, everything exists. There could be no exception to this. I’ve seen enough to have no trouble believing this in theory. I got that long ago on heroic acid trips.
The challenge now was to believe this in my very being, to know that this, whatever it is, is ultimately the manifestation of Goodness with the certainty that no matter how awful some things are or how many things, from my limited perspective, look ugly, seem wrong, and all the rest, are even so, part of the Perfect Plan, the inexorable creation of ever greater Beauty, Goodness and Truth. I was shown that if I couldn’t come to know this in my core, to trust in this, I’d be left with nowhere to ever settle in true peace. I was shown that without this existential trust, nothing is fully trustable, and how terribly sad that is.
Redemption
This redemptive act, this working out the polarity of these two processes, the expiating the darkness and the opening to love, was and is a truly blessed gift. It required not only my history of commitment and effort but also the presence of these life-enhancing substances, without which it could not have happened. This is not simply my opinion. If you had been there, you’d know this to be true. Modern neuroscience and clinical experience back this up. This is testable.
Later
A couple of weeks have now passed. I’m different; I’m unsure if it is obvious to others yet. I have a new lightness of being. I’m smiling and settling easier with my lover, so what was already sweet and lovely is now even more so. I was more chatty in a regular monthly group gathering, although given my Aspie social reticence, perhaps that was an aberration. We’ll see. Anyway, that’s not something I wish for. Long drives, plane flights, and work projects seem to pass more quickly. There’s less of an undercurrent of wishing they were already over. I feel physically lighter and more buoyant. I feel a more permeable softness at the interface between my internal and external realms. Lovemaking has a bit more light sweetness, opening to more passion. Peaceful, quiet, and intimate periods seem more languid. Maybe they are.
One fascinating thing is that this new sense has not been habituated. There’s no sensory-specific satiety. Unlike most state changes, it appears that I may not be losing the rush. Am I really off the hedonic treadmill that flattens experience? This would be a statistical anomaly. That would be amazing. Gotta love that!
The End of the Story for Now
I hope these stories encourage others who have a strong desire for deeper healing to pursue their goal with more confidence that such healing, given the appropriate conditions, is truly possible.