My Secret Life of Psychedelic Mysticism. Part I.
A Seven-year Journey through the Infinite Dark, in Search of the Eternal Light
This post is about the meticulous and dedicated practice of psychedelic ceremony and mystical inquiry that I have been earnestly engaged in as the cornerstone of life for the past seven years. It entails how I came to that calling, some of the experiences and insights I have the enormous privilege to call my own and some context of the wider project of my life which this has been an essential part of. In addition, I provide something of an outline of my process and my journey as well as the troubling and profound implications that my discoveries have for our species, and our precarious moment in history.
psyche: “mind” or “animating human spirit”
delic: “ to reveal”
Psychedelics, applied in a mature and sacred context, with informed caution and respect, hold the potential for profound healing and evolution of consciousness, yet demand mature use, informed guidance and stringent protocols to mitigate their risks and ensure alignment with holistic well-being.
We all have a Calling. We are either living it, or we are deaf to it.
What follows here is only the very green beginnings of my mystical journey, before I came to climb the mountain, before I came to wander the desert…
PART I. CALLING
“As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.” Carl G. Jung
Every single one of us has a calling. The great mistake of life philosophies and spiritual doctrine is implying that we should all share the same one.
What you are called to, however it is that you might reach for fulfilment and peace in this life and the horizon you feel beckoned towards in pursuit of that, is in essence, your calling. That means simply that the sincere sense of meaning we can attach to and derive from our careers, our art, being parents, or equally some form of spiritual pursuit, all live under the umbrella term ‘calling’, and then sometimes all of those together.
So often, the first telegram of that calling is delivered by the messenger of calamity. Given how far our society has meandered from what wholesome and integrated could look like, and how poorly we are ever prepared by our lives, to step up to what our callings demand of us, it is no wonder then, that our first calling is always around healing. It is equally unsurprising then how much of that healing, by definition, feels like dissolution and unravelling, given that our identities are defined by our reputations, our beliefs, our job titles, our social status and the kind of morality and life philosophy we are taught to wear on our sleeves, instead of our actual truth.
Our starting point on these healing journeys always begins in the emergency lane we call inauthenticity. No single child in this world arrives, perfectly initiated into the truth of themself. We are all moulded by the agreements we are co-opted into, simply by the facts of our biography. The family we are born into, the era, the prevailing culture and societal norms we arrive in the middle of, are things we do not choose. This means the language we speak, and the religious and political ideas that shape our psychologies and our senses of virtue and shame, are things that are impressed on us before we have the sense or ability to choose otherwise. The genetics we carry, the family wounds and aspirations and the ancestral trauma we live, also live through us. From the minute we are born, and then far into careers, marriages, mortgages and parenthood, everything about how we ought to feel, what we ought to feel proud or ashamed about, is something we are told to believe by someone else.
I was no different.
I am 49 today, and what I am able to recognise now as calling, seven years ago, was a confounding jumble of contradictory aims and intentions, which I was unable to reconcile, or fully understand about myself. The result manifested as guilt, shame, depression, frustration and aggression. Most of us do not engineer our lives consciously. Our lives sort of just happen to us while we scramble to survive financially and psychologically, stepping into the boots of roles that always feel too restrictive in one sense and far too big for us in another.
After years of running my own therapy and counselling practice, I have since come to a sobering revelation of what a midlife crisis is. It is nothing more than the biological clock of a human being, waking up at a certain age and realising that the shape of the life they have unconsciously arranged for themselves has no room for deep fulfilment and no visible pathways to scratching that itch, and always completely lacking the language to articulate that feeling.
At age 42, overweight, unfit, unhappily married, out of my depths as a father, deeply unfulfilled in my career, undiagnosed neurodivergence, undiagnosed PTSD and zero awareness of generational trauma, shadow or inner child psychology, I was, to say the very least, not living my calling. I did not have any sense of what that might actually mean. I just knew I was unhappy, and I lacked the language to explain myself to myself, much less anyone else. I cannot say for sure what drove me towards plant medicine and later psychedelics as a pathway, except that in hindsight, I understand that I could not have covered the enormous amount of ground that I have, in any other way.
This is not meant to be a blanket advocacy for psychedelics as a panacea—it most certainly isn’t—only, that when your deepest sense of calling is defined by the attainment of a profound level of self-knowledge, finding and following that path by conventional means is nothing short of impossible.
START IN THE HEART
My first experience was with MDMA1, which while not a psychedelic, nevertheless had the effect of the echo that starts the avalanche, or the pebble dropped into a pond that ripples out and touches everything. I was fortunate and wise enough to choose my surroundings, my company and the music. It wasn’t what I have come to understand as a ceremonial framing, but it was warm and insulated from the harsh reality of my life. The key takeaway from that experience was the notion of seeing something that once seen cannot be unseen. I experienced a vastly altered state of consciousness and being, typified by a profound sense of love and goodwill towards anything and everything that I thought about or reflected on. Suddenly, the animus I had towards anyone who had wounded me psychologically in my life was dissolved and I could tap into vast stores of generosity and compassion which felt so much more sane and wonderful than the ambient vigilance and mistrust I understood that I was feeling all of the time. Only when the cricket suddenly stops chirruping do you realise they were making a noise all along. Only when my acute depression and frustration ebbed away did I realise what the natural state of my being was: Love.
When in that state, gratitude, generosity, goodwill and compassion are the most natural responses to all conflicts in your world. Coming down out of that state is challenging for the neurobiology as well as the psyche. For a start whatever precursor chemicals are in your body to be metabolised over weeks to produce your mood-regulating neurotransmitters are used up in one night. It is like going into chronic debt for the holiday of a lifetime—the memories of the holiday and the uplifting feels you enjoyed quickly become a fading, even taunting memory when you are stuck scraping pennies together and unable to pay your bills.
I was fortunate enough to intuit right there and then, that this was not a solution for me. I had been carefully instructed regarding the relationship between MDMA and serotonin. My intuition served me well because some years later I came to appreciate the relationship between serotonin and depression.
Nevertheless, that initial experience was not just consciousness-expanding, but my sense of self vastly expanded. Suddenly, what I thought of as my whole self, was just the troubled corridor to a boundless mansion of rooms and halls, with many levels, and a wild uncultivated garden that stretched on, beyond imagination.
THE VINE
My first encounter with Ayahuasca2 came within a year of that first consciousness-expanding experience. Everyone who follows that call is invited to follow a strict diet, partly to avoid a digestive reaction with the medicine, and partly I came to understand later, that consecration is an essential part of any sacrament. Our bodies are our first temple, and we live in a state of desecration. We eat food that is not nourishment or medicine, we drink alcohol, our air is polluted with smog, our spaces with noise and our darkness with artificial light. I did not appreciate the full implications then, but I did have—as we all innately seem to carry in our bodies—a sense of the sacred built-in, and the mere effort of preparation itself, regardless of the semantics and regimen you follow, does something to focus the psyche and the nervous system.
I had to travel, back to my country of birth as it happens, travel for hours by car, across desolate countryside, with the ridge mountains, transparent and blue on the horizon, seen and then not seen, behind the endless fields of shorn stalks of a late harvest. The last leg of our journey via a small tin boat, ferrying us upriver to the place we would undertake our inner journeys.
Ayahuasca as a soul-healing medicine has been in the Western zeitgeist for several decades and now has become something of a fad. I had chosen this path out of a kind of desperation, as many people do, hoping as we do, in the power of a panacea—a medicine that will cure all our ills. I had no idea what to expect and no inkling of what I would yet experience, nor the life-changing cascade of events that would be triggered like tectonic dominoes.
I did not have what is considered a typical experience. It bears mentioning that I have never acquired a reputation for fanciful embellishments or tall stories.
The strongest recollection of those back-to-back evenings is three highlights from the second night. Up until then I had been somewhat underwhelmed, and the dazzling light show and mind-bending soul-healing experience I had hoped for simply hadn’t come. I remember during the sharing circle on the first morning after the first night, being a little more than crestfallen. Other people were sharing fantastical stories of their experience, and I had merely felt nauseated, and slightly inebriated by the psychoactive.
The first ‘highlight’ was of hearing a voice speak to me in the room, directly and clearly, that no one else heard. For reference, we were lain no more than a couple of feet apart and aside from some singing and humming and gentle hide drums, your neighbour’s voices could be easily heard in the small ceremony space.
The words puzzled me greatly, shamed me even at first, and did not reveal their meaning to me until many months later. But I remember the moment with clarity, both because it was such a surprising occurrence, and the words themselves jarred me. I excused myself and immediately wrote them down and they have remained emblazoned in my mind ever since. When I discovered at last their meaning, which was beyond profound, they emblazoned themselves also onto my heart:
“First the Child must learn True Gratitude. Then the father must learn the playfulness of a child. Finally the grandfather may learn to forget all. And not a single one of these words is wasted.”
The second ‘highlight’ was the key pivotal experience of the whole journey and a key pivotal moment in my life. I have had much more profoundly transcendental experiences since then, none of which would have been possible without that one determinative sequence of events.
Ayahuasca ceremonies take place over an entire evening, and late into the night. Each sacrament has somewhere between a one and two-hour sin curve of come up, peak experience and come down. Depending on who is administering the medicine, participants can be invited to take another drink to deepen the experience or repeat the sin curve. Having become concerned that I was going to have wasted weeks of preparation and that I might have to walk away from this opportunity empty-handed, I was perhaps in a different mindset than the other people in the room. This was a new experience, they all had their troubles in life, but none of them seemed to be carrying the same intensity of necessity. To add to that, when they were offered a smoke of the plant, something guaranteed to turn the sin curve into a steep parabola, I declined.
My reasons were not trivial. I had never smoked in my life, anything. My mother had smoked during her pregnancy with me, as a consequence my twin brother was stillborn and I had suffered from related health complications my whole life. The consequence of the evening is that I fell out of step with the group. While they were taking the wild rollercoaster of smoked DMT, I took another drink and was offered the dregs of the shaman’s bottle. While everyone else was coming down, and gathering together outside to begin their sharing, I was huddled over a bucket in the middle of the temple space, with the shaman working the rattles and the drums like a fiend over my head. He had clearly sensed I had come to an impasse of great distress and he hummed and played the rhythms that carried me in, and eventually through my ordeal.
My whole world, my entire life, my whole broken childhood, my troubled marriage, my self-loathing and deep anguish were reduced to one incredibly tight knot. As soon as I realised the shaman was not going to let up, I let go. I was confronted with the false intellectual bravado that I had used as a mask and as armour my whole life, and with the crushing weight of sorrow for the way the child in me had been harmed and neglected. I did not want to look away any more, and I did not want to get up off that floor until something had broken. The tempo and intensity of the chants and percussion matched the intensity of my inner struggle. The feeling was something like all the tension you have ever held against everything and everyone, even against the inner contradiction that makes us human was sitting behind a dam wall, all that held it at bay, was my own shame and my fear of vulnerability. In that titanic struggle, the minutes felt like hours. The music carried me through. The weight of my anguish I understood, was not something I could bear for the rest of my life, and the purging came.
The concentrated enzymes and alkaloids of the medicine are harsh on the stomach which is why a strict diet is advocated, and also why the experience is always associated with nausea, typically oral purging and occasionally, diarrhoea. —One of several reasons why Ayahuasca is not a ‘party drug’.
I roared my anguish into that bucket. It was as if a parasitic leech that had anchored itself to the root of my soul was being wrested from the lowest bilge of my guts. My body found muscle control I did not know existed and I cleared out everything in me. I noticed myself pushing from behind, willing the parasite of ego to be evicted with extreme prejudice. One of the few times I had a psychedelic-induced hallucination, I saw what looked like some kind of crustacean or insectoid with black eyes, a desperate chittering maw and spiked scrabbling limbs groping desperately for purchase on the side of the bucket as if it were being drawn down a drain. This was the image my subconscious had conjured out of the archetypal source code of my psychological operating system.
I knew instantly in that moment, what the nature of ego is. It is weakness, desperation, and pure terror of being caught in the light. I also knew intuitively, that no amount of desperate heaving and purging was going to get the last traces of that parasite out of me. “I know what you are now,” I said aloud.
“I know you’re hiding, and I know what you look like now. I know you thought you were helping, but I don’t need that kind of help anymore. I am coming for you, and I am never going to stop.”
The third ‘highlight’ was when I cleaned myself up, and still out of sync with the rest of the group I snuck off to get my earphones. We were a small intimate group so I was satisfied that I wasn’t breaking any sacred protocols. I put on Dordoka by Iñigo Ugarteburu. A lot happened in those 5 or so minutes.
The Artist is a genius and there is a shape to that song that magically served my purposes. I had a waking vision of myself as a powerful magician waking up to his own raw elemental inheritance.
I began to do something I had not done in years. I closed my eyes and I simply danced. I moved in a way that was perfect, but unrehearsed, a powerful personal Mythos playing out through me. In that dance, I was walking through a temple to my own spiritual inheritance. Eventually, I came to a narrow corridor, with close walls lined with deeply carved wooden pillars, and barring the door was a lumbering beast, on hind legs, something like a bear, but more primal and nameless. It had its head lowered, it swayed vaguely to the music, every step I took forward, it took forward. Every show of conviction I showed in moving towards the door was mirrored exactly in the growing threat. There was no way through. I sensed my time was running out, the song would end and I did not want the window of opportunity to close with me still at the wrong side of the door. For long moments this confounding circumstance played out, and my sense of urgency mounting. Eventually, a knowing arrived in me. In time to the music, I turned sideways. The lumbering beast mirrored my stance. I then danced my way, two steps forward, one step back, inching my way towards the door. I knew I was going to make it when I stood face to face with the creature, and I understood that it could rip my throat out, but also in a strange way, it was my own primal nature. When we crossed in the corridor, I turned my back to face the door. I could sense it doing the same. The music reached a crescendo, it went silent. I acknowledged the symbolic meaning of the entire sequence, and I crossed the threshold.
I had got what I came for. My entire life was about to unravel, and my mystical journey had only just begun.
PART II to follow…
Note on Drugs, Terminology and Classification
“The Limits of my language define the limits of my world.” Ludwig Wittgenstein
To be clear, putting psychedelics, MDMA and Cannabis in the same category, legally, medically, or ethically, as heroin, cocaine or methamphetamines is like evaluating television and film and putting the movie Titanic on the same footing as The Bachelor. Arguably, they could be described by several areas of commonality and overlap, namely love, relationships, emotionally charged moments, villains and editing used to create dramatic tension. The truth is that one was widely touted as one of the best pieces of cinema of the twenty-first century, with a memorable score, and a visual feast of such sweeping scale that it earned critical acclaim and eleven Academy awards. The other is formulaic garbage, a particularly tasteless example of an already tasteless genre, appealing to people of no discernment and no real understanding of connection.
There are several ways of categorising drugs. The one way is based partially on the physiological effect: Stimulants, Inhalants, Cannabinoids, Depressants, Opioids, Steroids, Hallucinogens and Prescription drugs. That can be wildly misleading since inhalants can be stimulants and prescription drugs can be opioids, depressants, or stimulants etc. It is all a bit sloppy and misleading, safely tucking prescription drugs away despite overlapping with almost all of the other aforementioned categories.
Another way is by the classification of pharmacological compounds, another is by legality, and scheduled control. For the record, the reasons for control and legality are not always puritanical. The efficacy of substances we regulate uses for in medical science is based on two things, pharmacology and dose. A substance that is a life-saving medicine at one dose can be injurious or even lethal at another.
When we consider what falls on the side of public and cultural acceptance, our classification is based only in a very minor way on the clinical profile of pharmacological risk, and more on sentiment due to ignorance, propaganda or cultural bias. In terms of what we allow and what we scandalise or legalise has nothing to do with how safe or addictive something is, but rather with how ignorant we are of that, how it is controlled, sold and marketed to us and the cultural stigma we inherit unwittingly from our culture.
Humans have this habit of applying otherwise arbitrary convenient categories to things, which misapply unspoken labels of what is to be condoned or even cherished and safely considered ethically sound and what is not. We attribute taboo or permissibility on an arbitrary basis that aligns with the equivalence of cultural superstition rather than any real fact about the world.
We attribute taboo or permissibility on an arbitrary basis that aligns with the equivalence of cultural superstition rather than any real fact about the world.
A drug is any chemical, medicine or other substance that has a physiological effect when ingested or otherwise introduced into the body. Sugar, coffee, nicotine and alcohol are drugs.
We happily venerate coffee, our dependency and addiction to which is the subject of endearing tropes that find their way into pop culture and corporate marketing, with absolutely zero movement on the hypersensitive needle of the public-concern meter. Similarly, we have been feeding sugar to children for decades, which is no longer doubted by serious doctors or nutritionists as contributing to high blood pressure, inflammation, weight gain, diabetes, and fatty liver disease. We have a similar self-permissive stance towards sugar with endearing labels like ‘sweet-tooth’.
Nicotine in the form of cigarettes, may have moved from the pedestal of chic and attractive to the wider Overton window of cultural acceptance and now to the outer fringes of cultural unattractiveness, but is still widely acceptable. Nicotine still retains a narrowing verge of credibility through fine cigars and now the scourge of vaping. In terms of what we allow culturally, in the Western world at least, it is on the way out, associated increasingly with low socio-economic class, but nevertheless still holding on. We have lobbyists to thank for that.
Uniquely, alcohol is literally and outright a toxin. Industrially and practically, we use it to kill cells such as the microorganisms we refer to as germs, but it works just as well on any tissue cells in the human body. Even though alcohol is highly diffusible through cell membranes and metabolised by most tissue, giving it an almost unmatched capability to do harm to the human physiognomy, we brand it, sell it and use it to self-medicate. We even use it to mark notable and respectable social engagements. In the same community that would get someone shamed, laid off from work, or potentially incarcerated for the consumption and abuse of one kind of drug, would attract a shared empathy and solidarity for the overuse of alcohol. Not only would excessive use, loss of function and out-of-character anti-social behaviour not be judged terribly harshly, but it would instead be the grounds for endearing anecdotes about how much one consumed and the level to which someone was psychoactively affected.
The top 10 most dangerous drugs in the world, that is which cause death through addiction and damage to health and relationship over time or overdose in a single use include in order of fatalities the following: Nicotine, Alcohol, Fentanyl, Heroin, Cocaine, Methadone, Oxycodone, Morphine, Methamphetamines and Xanax. Two of those are not even regarded as drugs and several others are quite legal.
The cultural way in which we regard pharmaceutical drugs is another quagmire of cognitive bias and selective morality.
The Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein reminds us "The limit of my language become the limits of my world."
Better Understanding requires better language. ‘Drugs’ is an impoverished word, ambiguous and deceptive in meaning, providing no luggage allowance for context and a complete lack of the courtesy of critical thinking when it comes to the application of our moral concern and openness. The misapplication of all that ignorance, selective evaluation and moral distaste is not aimed only at the substance or the habit, but more disquietingly, the person using it.
Note on Addiction, Reliance, Dependence and Abuse
It is not the behaviour or the substance, it is the relationship with these that defines the line between self-care and self-harm.
Any habit or behavior, lacking in consideration of its consequences and without an express willingness to moderate use for sincere alignment with self-care, is inherently negative.
Addiction is any condition characterized by a compulsive engagement with an activity or use of a thing, despite knowing the negative consequences.
Reliance is the use of something for support or aid that enhances function or makes a task easier, without implying full incapacity without it.
Dependence is a state in which the absence of something results in a significant impairment of normal functioning.
Abuse is engagement with something in a manner that exceeds intended or healthy use, often leading to harm or dysfunction. Addiction does not always imply abuse, it can simply imply dependence. Abuse does not always imply addiction, someone may abuse alcohol or prescription medication without being addicted to it.
Misuse is the incorrect, inappropriate, or unintended use of any tool, technology, practice, or behaviour that deviates from its intended use, often leading to harm, inefficiency, or dysfunction, without necessarily leading to dependence or a pattern of repetitive use. You can be responsible for the misuse of something without abusing it and without being addicted to it.
You can be addicted to something you are reliant on. Addiction is less about the substance than it is about the relationship to the experience, what is being avoided by its use and what other relationships are being harmed in that.
You can be reliant on a handrail and still be able to climb steep stairs without one, just with more effort and more difficulty.
You can be dependent on something that you abuse.
An injured person can be reliant or even dependent on crutches, at a certain stage of recovery and then actually jeopardise their own recovery if they do not wean themselves from that dependence.
Note on Safety, Legality and Advocacy
The same scalpel that can save a life, can take one. It isn’t the blade, it is the care and consideration with which it is wielded.
Psychedelics, applied in a mature and sacred context, with informed caution and respect, hold the potential for profound healing and evolution of consciousness, yet demand mature use, informed guidance and stringent protocols to mitigate their risks and ensure alignment with holistic well-being.
This post is not to be considered as a form of advocacy of psychedelics, which remain uncontrolled and illegal in many parts of the world. Psychedelics and various other holotropic modalities can affect the psychology and without proper testing, dosage, guidance and supervision can be detrimental to mental health. Black market sale is by definition unregulated and the substances can be cut with harmful toxins that can be lethal or cause significant and lasting harm.
It is well known that there are life-saving heart medications responsible for saving the lives of millions of people worldwide, which are nevertheless life-threateningly dangerous for a small portion of human beings with certain genetic conditions. In the same way, psychedelics, despite their many positive potential outcomes, have a profound effect on the psychology and for people of a certain neurochemical and/or psychological disposition, the use of psychedelics can be detrimental.
The mental health crisis is already vastly eclipsing the Western world’s social welfare and social healthcare capacity and psychedelics hold enormous promise in this space. Responsible use and a mature respectful approach to use and discussion is absolutely essential because anything less stands to jeopardise the painstaking positive work that is being done and the enormous potential this has to positively impact mental health and the betterment of well people. Any psychedelic use outside a mature and well-informed healing or ceremonial context is strongly advised against and does nothing more than detract from the positive potential and both court and amplify the potential of risk and detrimental outcomes.
The psychoactive substance MDMA or 3,4-Methylenedioxymethamphetamine is a synthetic drug known primarily for its use in enhancing sensory perceptions and energy levels, commonly associated with club and dance environments, and is also being researched for potential therapeutic benefits in treating PTSD and other conditions.
The psychoactive ingredient in Ayahuasca is Dimethyltryptamine (DMT), a powerful psychedelic compound naturally occurring in many plants (and some animals), known for inducing intense and profound psychedelic experiences, especially in traditional ceremonial contexts.