In August 1974, a few weeks before starting a new job at the University of Washington, I went by myself to Maui for three weeks. Upon arrival, I bought my first pair of Birkenstock sandals and, for a cost of $3.33, a copy of “Be Here Now” by Ram Dass. By the way, this was during a time in my life when the number “3” was showing up repeatedly, everywhere, usually in multiples.
The friends I hooked up with suggested I might want to try the “magic mushrooms” which I had read about in that book. So we journeyed to Hana, found the grassy mound upon which sits “Fagan’s Cross,” hopped over a fence, and made our way up the hill. It was a grazing area, and the mushrooms grew happily in the cow patties.
I’m sure the dose was way too high (I certainly got way too high). I remember, as the drug kicked in, nervously asking in my mind “Am I going to die?” and hearing a voice (it was my own voice) saying gently, “yes, but not today.” It wasn’t an entirely blissful trip, but it was definitely life-changing.
The net effect on me was to initiate a major psychological reset. I lost a lot of my critical self-doubt and floated through the next several months with a contented grin on my face, loving everyone and everything. I wondered if I was experiencing what it felt like to be Jesus. I also recall that if something tickled my funny bone, I could easily begin laughing nearly uncontrollably. About that time, Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon, and that seemed perfectly fine to me. I was all into forgiveness and light. That lasted for two or three months, fading slowly in intensity.
Ayahuasca Trips
Subsequent to the mushroom trip of 1974, I did not venture into the world of psychedelics until much later, although before married life I did enjoy occasional altered states of consciousness listening on headphones to my favorite LPs on the turntable. After a couple of tokes of cannabis I could really immerse myself into the musical experience.
More recently, in January, 2018 on the recommendation of a spiritual comedian we liked, Kyle Cease, we traveled to Guanacaste, Costa Rica, to “Rythmia Life Advancement Center” on a get-away vacation. Kyle would be there and we thought it would be fun to spend some time with him in a group. The yoga, metaphysics classes, hydro-colonic cleanses, volcanic mud baths, dead sea cleanses, breathwork, massages, and farm-to-table organic food were definitely calling us as well. We didn’t realize at the time that Rythmia is known for being one of the few places in the world that is legally authorized to offer plant medicine (ayahuasca) ceremonies. We decided to go for it.
A visit to Rythmia typically involves arrival on a Saturday, and staying through until the following weekend. We met Gerry Powell, the center’s founder, and very much enjoyed the “orientation” talk he gave on Monday morning. In many ways it was like a hilarious comedy stand-up routine, as he described in a self-deprecating way his personal history as a very successful but rather unscrupulous entrepreneur who had been addicted to sex, alcohol, and other substances. Even though he had sold his cosmetic surgery company for $94 million, had 5 houses, 20+ cars, and 2 planes, he was never satisfied with anything in his abundant life. As he has admitted, “I became a world class asshole, one of the biggest walking pricks on Earth. And not only was I an asshole, I was unhappy.” Suicidal, in fact.
When he hit bottom, he realized something had to be done and he allowed himself to be hauled in to a rehabilitation center in Los Angeles. After many months, rehab wasn’t working. A friend said, “I’ve found something that might work for you, but I don’t think you’re strong enough to do it.” The challenge was to visit a shaman in Costa Rica for a plant medicine ceremony, and it was one that Gerry accepted. His experience with the shaman, who expertly guided him on the journey, is documented in Gerry’s book Shit the Moon Said: A Story of Sex, Drugs, and Ayahuasca.
Gerry says “It was during my eighth or ninth plant medicine journey that I was finally getting a real sense of freedom.” He says:
I got to see how the universe really works and I understood for the first time what love was and I understood why I was the way that I was, why I was that way with women, why I was a drunk, why I was a sex addict, why I couldn’t connect with people, why I had attachment disorder, why I was a nut. I understood why and next morning, I was a different human. And this is all from one night. I was a different man in one night.
Here’s a photo of us with Gerry at Rythmia.
The plant medicine experience at Rythmia starts on Tuesday and involves four ceremonies beginning in the evening and lasting till about midnight each night, except for the Thursday night marathon event does not end until daylight Friday morning.
I didn’t experience anything really life-changing during these ceremonies, though I had a clear sense that I was purging unwanted or obsolete energy patterns in my mind and body as I threw up in the bucket each person had handy next to their mat. Purging is not at all unexpected and can be beneficial. It also explains why no one considers ayahuasca use to be in any way habit-forming! The first time vomiting was quite intense, as I unsuccessfully tried to hold in whatever was trying to be expelled. After that, I got much better at letting go, so that was good.
Actually, the most intensely engaging part of that experience for me was the music. Rythmia employs actual practicing shamans, who not only administer the brew, but also chant or play instruments during the ceremony. They also had a recorded playlist of evocative music, the “icaros” traditionally used by shamans in healing ceremonies. Here’s an example:
Just listening to this again brings me back to that place and time.
One artist we discovered at Rythmia that we have followed ever since is Nahko Bear (Medicine for the People). Here’s a sample of a tune that was played:
Both the visuals and the lyrics are beautiful:
Lend your ears, lend your hands
Lend your movement, anything you can
Come to teach, come to be taught
Come in the likeness in the image of God
‘Cause you can be like that
With all that humbleness, and all that respect
All of the power invested in me
Be it hard to love my enemies
All of the black bags over the heads of the dead and dying
The more I understand about the human race
The less I comprehend about our purpose and place
And maybe if there was a clearer line
The curiosity would satisfy
Time-based prophecies that kept me from living
In the moment I am struggling
To trust the divinity of all the gods
And what the hell they have planned for us
I cry for the creatures who get left behind
But everything will change in a blink of an eye
And if you wish to survive
You will find the guide inside
I go back and forth every single day
The clarity it comes to me in the choppy waves
As the feelings and the places
And the seasons change
The galaxies remain
Energy fields pullin’ up out of this space
The angels that are composting the spiritual waste
The hate that gets me displaced from my spiritual place
Ten fold the manna when the planets are in place, in polar alignment
We’re on assignment
Bodies on consignment
Return them to the circus
And what is the purpose?
What is the purpose and would you believe it?
Would you believe itIf you knew what you were for
And how you became so informed?
Bodies of info performing such miracles
I am a miracle made up of particles
And in this existence
I’ll stay persistent
And I’ll make a difference
And I will have lived it
At the end of each plant medicine ceremony at Rythmia, I was able to crawl over to my sweetheart’s mat to rejoin with her. Sweet gratitude for her love and companionship, intensified 100-fold!
Leo Cordero (left) is one of the shamans we met at Rythmia. One of the female ceremonial leaders we met told us at lunch that she had personally experienced over 1200 ayahuasca experiences and had felt she had completed her life’s journey along that path. She was recruited and agreed to help at Rythmia. She exuded so much peace and love that being in her presence felt other-worldly.
Vancouver Island
One winter we visited Vancouver Island in British Columbia, Canada, for a two-night plant medicine ceremony. This time I had a couple of very vivid and intense experiences. The ceremonies were held in a yurt on sacred native Indian land. The yurt was decorated with flowers, skins, sacred relics, beautiful art and dream-catchers.
After the medicine had kicked in the first night, I began to sob, deeply. Part of me was observing this grief and asking “what is it about?” The answer I got was that I was tuning in to the sadness and despair of a native American woman trying to defend her land and her rights to her reservation’s water, according to Treaty, against a faceless corporate bureaucracy and their bulldozers and water cannons. First it was just hopelessness, but that morphed into a feeling of resolve: that no matter what injustice or physical harm she might encounter, her conviction to the truth could never be shaken. Almost a feeling of triumph in the face of defeat.
Another, experience I had (in addition to the psychedelic fractals of moving colors and color-shifting rotating gears) was to observe the world from the point of view of a high-flying bird. I was that bird, looking down at the trees from a high vantage point. But instead of being awed by the exhilaration of flight and the grandeur of the scenery, the thought was, “of course; as a bird this is just the way it is every day, nothing special here.”
The Promise of Psychedelics
I Know that psychedelics can be of great benefit when used respectfully. As Timothy Leary said of one of his trips, “I learned more in six of seven hours of this experience than I had learned in all my years as a psychologist.” The director of the premier alcohol addiction center Gerry Powell attended in Los Angeles, Dr. Jeff McNairy, said to Gerry after his return from Costa Rica, that Gerry had made more progress in a weekend than he was able to offer, with all his training, over the past many years.
It is sad that our government has stifled the study and responsible use of mind-altering drugs like LSD, ayahuasca, DMT, and psilocybin. I highly recommend Michael Pollan’s excellent book How to Change Your Mind, which documents the author’s personal experiences with these substances and highlights their many profound therapeutic applications and benefits. Check out as well the Netflix documentary series based on this book.
If you’re interested in discovering more in this area, here are a couple more avenues to explore. Check out mycologist and author Paul Stamets, founder of Fungi Perfecti and a leading expert on mushrooms including the psychedelic variety. Some links:
- TED Talk: Six Ways Mushrooms Can Save The World
- Interview #1: Joe Rogan Experience #1035 – in which Stamets describes his first magic mushroom trip, climbing (high) up a tall tree and somehow surviving a severe thunder and lightning storm. Just wow.
- Interview #2: Joe Rogan Experience #1385
- Check out the movie “Fantastic Fungi” (currently available on Netflix)—highly recommended.
Also, I recently read the book LSD and the Mind of the Universe: Diamonds from Heaven, by professor of religious studies Christopher M. Bache, PhD. The author documents a total of seventy-three high-dose LSD trips he embarked on during a twenty-year period. Wouldn’t you like to know what might happen if you were to repeatedly take such seriously mind-bending trips into your own consciousness? Professor Bache documented each trip as a true scientific explorer would do. It’s hard to explain what he discovered, other than the fact that the “work” took him well beyond healing the personal psychic wounds (e.g. from birth, childhood, adolescence, etc.) to the ongoing society- and species-wide journey of evolving consciousness, ultimately reaching an experience of the unified field of consciousness that underlies all physical existence. A truly remarkable human achievement, in my view.
Another recommended book is DMT: the Spirit Molecule by Rick Strassman, M.D., who recounts his experience beginning in 1990 conducting the first human research with psychedelic substances since they were banned in the ‘70’s. It’s a highly-readable story about his research with 60 volunteers and the over 400 doses of intravenous DMT that he administered to them, blending science with spirituality and exploring fundamental questions such as “what is reality?” Joe Rogan has interviewed Dr. Strassman as well. It’s worth looking up.
Author and ethnobotanist Terrence McKenna is an academic and well-known explorer in the psychedelic realms. In his groundbreaking book Food of the Gods: The Search For the Original Tree of Knowledge, McKenna posits that magic mushrooms may be the original “tree of knowledge” and that the lack of psychedelic exploration is leading our Western society toward the precipice of collapse.
Dr. Larry Dorsey said of the book, “An eloquent proposal for recovering something vital—a sense of the sacred, the transcendent, the Absolute—before it’s too late.”
I loved how McKenna rails against the Establishment, who he says (and I agree) moved in the 1960’s to criminalize the psychedelic experience in order to maintain control over the population, and suppress the critical thinking that might arise in an awakened populace. One way a government corrupted by corporate interests can maintain power over its citizens is to create and sustain divisions among groups, and simultaneously instill fear and uncertainty. If enough people rise up, for example, and say “no more tax dollars for foreign wars,” things can change. But all those people who would agree with that have been split into factions that continue to war against each other, be it racially, politically, by sexual orientation, by choice of how to educate our children, by allegiance or not to governmental edicts.
This quote says it all. Dylan gets it too.
Here’s a quote I like:
“When we meet somebody whose separate tunnel-reality is obviously far different from ours, we are a bit frightened and always disoriented. We tend to think they are mad, or that they are crooks trying to con us in some way, or that they are hoaxers playing a joke. Yet it is neurologically obvious that no two brains have the same genetically-programmed hard wiring, the same imprints, the same conditioning, the same learning experiences. We are all living in separate realities. That is why communication fails so often, and misunderstandings and resentments are so common. I say ‘meow’ and you say ‘Bow-wow,’ and each of us is convinced the other is a bit dumb.”
Robert Anton Wilson, Prometheus Rising