Old Scars:

How Psychedelics Reveal Who We Are

Psilocybin is a naturally occurring psychedelic prodrug compound produced by more than 200 species of fungi. As a prodrug, psilocybin is quickly converted by the body to psilocin, which has mind-altering effects similar, in some aspects, to those of LSD, mescaline, and DMT. In general, the effects include euphoria, visual and mental hallucinations, changes in perception, a distorted sense of time, and perceived spiritual experiences. It can also include possible adverse reactions such as nausea and panic attacks.

When I puked on the first night, I felt happiness for the first time in weeks. Inside my quiet, stuffy Air B&B, soft violins played from my phone. I had just got done giggling, bellowing, singing, and, indeed, vomiting was last on my agenda.

After the bile hit, I aimed for the toilet, focusing on how my body felt the whole time. I went for a towel to wipe my face but couldn’t get a firm grip on it because it dissolved once I touched it.

Once I finished suffering, I laughed and smiled. Then, I realized something, something I had been trying to articulate for years. Contentment flooded my being, and I leisurely made my way back to my bed to rest.

Imagery found on prehistoric murals and rock paintings of modern-day Spain and Algeria suggests that human usage of psilocybin mushrooms predates recorded history. In Mesoamerica, the mushrooms had long been consumed in spiritual and divinatory ceremonies before Spanish chroniclers first documented their use in the sixteenth century. In 1959, the Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann isolated the active principle psilocybin from the mushroom Psilocybe mexicana. Hofmann’s employer Sandoz marketed and sold pure psilocybin to physicians and clinicians worldwide for use in psychedelic psychotherapy.

For two nights, I stayed in Mt.Shasta alone, ingesting an eighth Psilocybin, or “magical mushroom,” each day.

Psilocybin caught my attention for a specific reason: I wanted to illuminate the true nature of existence. Psychedelics like psilocybin cut the fat of our bullshit, ramming us into a force higher than ourselves, and — for a while, at least — the perception of disconnection dissolves.

As a practicing Buddhist, I’ve long understood persuasive arguments that there is no “fixed individual,” no sage behind our ideas, nor a participant behind our feats. Instead, there is only consciousness and direct action; anything more results from the mind projecting into yesterday or tomorrow.

But this is a brutal truth to embrace in daily life. Because you are conscious, it’s easy to believe that a fence exists between your mind and the world because it means something to be you. If you’re encountering a difficulty, then there must be a “you” doing the encountering.

However, the “you” in this circumstance is only a concept; it’s in your mind, not out there in the cosmos. Before psilocybin, I knew this as an intellectual proposition but not as an actuality. Even as an avid meditator, there were limits to how deep this understanding went.

The current generation seeks out psychedelics to aid in psychological healing, personal growth, or growing mindfulness. There are numerous ways to reach the truth of existence. I view it as a hill, with meditators and religious attitudes ascending different sides. Psychedelics donate a bypass, allowing a flash of this higher truth without years of rigorous and disciplined training.

That bypass is what I was after, and I’ll never take that route again. I drove to Mount Shasta, hoping to blast my limited understanding. And I was not prepared for what happened. Psilocybin altered my life, evaporating the wall between myself, history, and the world, gawking toward what I can simply define as the universe’s most open speculum.

It was impossible to look away, seeing everything I needed to see whether or not I was ready.

Psilocybin untangles the narrative thread of your life, reattaching it painfully to every arc in human history. The gap between whom you think you are and who you actually are.

In my case, the gap was expanded by untrammeled pro-black ideology, the need to be loved, and the endeavor of examining its cause and limits for the first time was beautifully unbearable.

Once I took psilocybin, I felt like a scapegoat, crucified for reasons I didn’t know prior. I, and many like me, are alone. Embraced by each other, insulated by passion into a single self. Yet, every human being is doomed to suffer in silence or find a way to enjoy being alone. Thoughts, perceptions, shrewdness, and desires are born in solitude, except through archetypes and, at second hand, unutterable.

We can share information about our pain, but never the pain itself. Every human group is a product of scars, a society of island experiences from tribe to country.

The intensity and duration of the effects of psilocybin are variable, depending on species or cultivar of mushrooms, dosage, individual physiology, and set and setting, as was shown in experiments led by Timothy Leary at Harvard University in the early 1960s. Once ingested, psilocybin is rapidly metabolized to psilocin, which then acts on serotonin receptors in the brain. The mind-altering effects of psilocybin typically last from two to six hours, although to individuals under the influence of psilocybin, the effects may seem to last much longer, since the drug can distort the perception of time. Psilocybin has a low toxicity and a low harm potential.

Most experiences are similar enough to permit inferential understanding or even mutual understanding. Thus, remembering our losses and humiliations, we can soothe others through twin incidents, putting us in each other’s positions.

But in some instances, communication between experiences is nonexistent. The mind is its own place, and places inhabited by the Einsteins, Hitlers, and Kanye Wests appears different from the places where everyday men and women exist, that it is little or no common ground or memory to serve as a basis for understanding or fellow feeling aside from time and conversation itself.

We speak to each other but fail to communicate the things and events to which symbols refer and belong to mutually exclusive realms of experience.

To view ourselves as others see us is a gift. Hardly less important is the capacity to see others as they see themselves. People want to feel seen. But what if those others belong to a different species and inhabit a radically alien universe? For example, how can we get the sane to know what it’s like to be crazy? Or, short of being born again as a visionary, medium, or musical genius, how can we ever visit the worlds that were home to Blake, Swedenborg, Johann Sebastian Bach?

Even with my theoretical understanding, I cannot know what it feels like to be Muhammad Ali or Tupac.

When I first took psilocybin, I expected to sit there with my eyes close, seeing the mechanical dwarves who construct reality, God whispering to me the meaning of life instead of the dramas that unfolded within my mind, the habits of my perspective, the flaws in my personality, discipline, and philosophy.

On the first night, I ate the first eighth of mushrooms at five o clock. I played John William’s original Star Wars score. I stared at a lit candle’s flame. It contained three wicks, the outside of the candle patterned with yellow daisies, every piece of the flower designed a different hue alteration. It was an ugly candle, but the flames looked like they could breathe.

I continued to stare at the flame, and in the artificial light of the Air B&B, it was clearer to detect how alive something without breath could be, a repeated flow from beauty to more beauty, from depth to more depth. Then, with John Williams’s iconic score playing in the background, my thoughts spooling into an eternal thread, I cried. For the first time in years, I cried.

After ingesting psilocybin, a wide range of subjective effects may be experienced: feelings of disorientation, lethargy, giddiness, euphoria, joy, and depression. In one study, 31% of volunteers given a high dose reported feelings of significant fear and 17% experienced transient paranoia. In studies at Johns Hopkins among those given a moderate dose (but still enough to “give a high probability of a profound and beneficial experience”), negative experiences were rare, whereas 1/3 of those given the high dose experienced anxiety or paranoia. Low doses can induce hallucinatory effects. Closed-eye hallucinations may occur, where the affected individual sees multicolored geometric shapes and vivid imaginative sequences.

They were happy tears. Within my soul, I finally understood the perspective of the Buddha on a fundamental level. He stated that the things that make us human are inherently unstable. The beauty of life is that the corporeal material that makes up our bodies is subject to change and decay. Our thoughts, feelings, memories…They will fade away, too.

And if that wasn’t enough. The things of this world do not persist either, constantly arising and falling like great kingdoms of yore, impermanence blowing away Rome and Ancient Egypt like sandcastles. So, given this undisputed fact of reality, why are we troubled by life and afraid of death?

The simple answer is that, from the innermost cores of our being, the powerful longing for happiness attaches itself to our wounds and scars. This remarkable truth about us has no natural or evolutionary explanation.

A billionaire named Christian Angermayer is a part of a movement of elites pushing for aging to be classified as an illness. If they accomplish this, then it would be easier to do clinical trials on anti-aging medicines. He argues that death isn’t “natural,” it’s systems failing in our bodies. So, for him, instead of embracing the inevitability of death and decay, we can use science to treat both like diseases to be healed.

A 2011 prospective study by Roland R. Griffiths and colleagues suggests that a single high dosage of psilocybin can cause long-term changes in the personality of its users. About half of the study participants — described as healthy, “spiritually active”, and many possessing postgraduate degrees — showed an increase in the personality dimension of openness (assessed using the Revised NEO Personality Inventory), and this positive effect was apparent more than a year after the psilocybin session. According to the study authors, the finding is significant because “no study has prospectively demonstrated personality change in healthy adults after an experimentally manipulated discrete event.”

O n the second day in Mt.Shasta, I went horseback riding in the morning. Later that night, I started my psilocybin trip with a question in mind: Where is God?

The question suggested that God is somewhere, lost and waiting for us to find Him, Her, or They. And as we enter culture, we lose the compass, the predetermined path, which could give meaning to the world. We need something to give sense to the size and scope of the world instead of external standards.

These ideas aren’t new, but they thump me over the head constantly, calling my attention to them. So, consequently, I decided to center on the location of God.

It was 7:30 pm. I was terrified. Did I really want to find God? I kept wondering because I was moderately sure I wouldn’t like the discovery — almost no one does, it appears. Cultures have waged war over this misunderstanding.

I closed all the windows. I lay on the bed, feeling safe. This was my second time doing psilocybin, so I wasn’t as afraid as the first night. I take out the mushrooms from my bag, pour them into my hands, silently reflecting on my intention for the night, and then I eat.

The mushrooms were nastier this time. It tasted like dirt and leaves, so I washed it down with water. I sat up, leaning against the wall. The mushrooms take at least 10 minutes to work their way through my body. So I sit quietly for 25, maybe thirty, and then I lie down on my mattress and wait for God.

About 30 more minutes pass, and I start to sense something unusual. While staring up at the ceiling, I can see colors, configurations, and shifting shadows. I’m afraid that something is about to happen, like God would rip open the roof and stare down at me. So I walk over to the window and open it, gazing at the stars.

The stars start to spin clockwise. Then a little quicker. Then, for reasons that escape me, I start squinting at the moon.

On the moon, I see designs. A flicker, showing glimpses of my life as though the moon was a cinema screen. In this projection weren’t my happy moments, but every lie, pretense, missed opportunity to be kind, every fraudulent act and fawning indication, every miserable attempt to be worshipped in a particular light.

I need a closer look, like a child scooting up to the television. I see myself as a kid groveling for attention from my father. I see my 8-year-old self throwing a tantrum because I couldn’t beat my brother in Super Smash Brothers. I see myself, in my early 20s, building my personality based on what I assumed would touch other people. Ahead it went — one minor act after another, building up a structure of personhood.

The film burns on into my university years and my idea of masculinity, with my self-awareness swelling. I see myself not looking into my girlfriend’s eyes because I don’t care about how she feels about my ideas. I see myself pretending to be zen only to hide my anger and the anger creating a shadow that lived in my subconscious. And each time, the reason for pretending was the same: There was no God in me.

But, as many people have experienced and as most of the great religions have insisted should be the case, we can and ought to open ourselves up and become what we have been seeking from the beginning. We are little pieces of God, more widely divine than we initially believe we are. We should realize our cosmic consciousness, the existence of what those in the East call the Atman-Brahman.

The end of life in most great religions is the realization that the mundane manifests the divine in its totality. It’s hard to articulate in words; however, it is one of the facts of experience for many people, or for all of us, it should be a fact that we are all born knowing.

The occurrence made me conscious of how often we all seek outside what is within. We worship ourselves, or if we think we are benevolent, we honor the exalted projection of ourselves, hoping to find solace in deeds and accomplishments. Most relationships are either transactional or performative, but the most important relationship is the one we have with ourselves. That relationship with ourselves gives fruit to whatever relationship we’re seeking with both the divine and mundane. If we look hard enough, we see our reflections everywhere.

All performances kill any chance for a genuine connection with God.

The film ends, and I’m tired. I needed to feel meager and attached before I could understand the senselessness of the individual. To feel those fleeting flashes of eternal connectedness, I had to go straight through my shame and regret. Afterward, I drifted into the most peaceful sleep I’ve ever had.

Psilocybin is known to strongly influence the subjective experience of the passage of time. Users often feel as if time is slowed down, resulting in the perception that “minutes appear to be hours” or “time is standing still”. Studies have demonstrated that psilocybin significantly impairs subjects’ ability to gauge time intervals longer than 2.5 seconds, impairs their ability to synchronize to inter-beat intervals longer than 2 seconds, and reduces their preferred tapping rate.These results are consistent with the drug’s role in affecting prefrontal cortex activity, and the role that the prefrontal cortex is known to play in time perception. However, the neurochemical basis of psilocybin’s effects on the perception of time are not known with certainty.

O n the last day, before I checked out of the Air B&B, I put on shorts and jogging shoes and ran down the dirt road for a lap around Mt.Shasta. I huffed and puffed my way up a bend as a Mercedes Benz pulled up next to me. At the wheel of the car was the host of the Air B&B.

The only other time I saw her was on the website when I booked. She had full eyes, an aura of kindness. A boy, perhaps ten years old, was alongside her, who had her curly hair and the same wide-set green eyes. Her son, she said, introducing us. She said she was happy to have finally met me, and I said likewise. I thanked her for opening up her beautiful space to me. Then, still catching my breath, I stood and watched as her car climbed gradually up the hill, disappearing around a curve.