The myth of normal, p.44
The Myth of Normal, page 44
What I can articulate is what I saw at the very end. On a sky-screen of deep blue, outlined in giant cloudlike wisps of letters, was spelled B O L D O G: the Hungarian word for “happy.” The vision and the inner peace evoked with it came from beyond thought—even, I’d venture, beyond my subconscious mind.[*] It was both beyond me and deeply a part of me, connecting whatever I’d previously thought of as “I” to something mysterious, transcendent, awesome. That same state—spacious and aware, unfragmented, free from self-concern—infuses my awareness now as I revisit the experience and ponder its lessons (which I will return to in the next chapter).
The reader might wonder what happened with the health professionals who had traveled so far to engage in the plant work under my guidance. I’m pleased to report that most of them did famously well. My co-leader acquitted himself admirably. And for all their understandable disappointment, and contrary to my fears of a mutiny, people appreciated that I was modeling for them a willingness to care for myself. This may have been the teaching these overworked, compassion-fatigued, wounded healers most needed; certainly the shamans thought so. The temple had hosted many Europeans and North Americans, but never a group of medical workers, and the Shipibo healers reported afterward that, to their own surprise, they had never worked with such a “heavy bunch.” “As healers ourselves,” they said, “we must face all the pains and traumas people bring to us, but we take care of ourselves: we regularly clear those energies out of our bodies and souls, so they do not accumulate and burden us. We expected you médicos to have done the same for yourselves. But no, we found, you came here weighed down by the griefs and heavy energies you have all been absorbing for years and years.”
I spoke recently with a physician who was at the retreat, a specialist in his late fifties who holds a high medical position in the Canadian Armed Forces. Often his patients suffer from a combination of physical injuries and PTSD. “I’m finding so much joy in my work now,” he told me. “I had been tired, cynical. After thirty-two years I couldn’t wait to retire. Now I look forward to connecting with people at a real level, rather than in a shallow, artificial medical way.” I have heard similar reports from many of the others of how much they had gained from the shamans giving “Dr. Gabor” the pink slip.
The morning after I read the Hungarian word for “happy” in the azure sky, Publio asked the shaman how he saw my journey. The maestro smiled. “Oh,” he said, “Dr. Gabor was communing with God.”
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Sometime after the 2009 publication of my book on addiction, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, I began to receive inquiries about what I knew regarding the therapeutic use of ayahuasca. At the time, the answer was “Nothing,” just as I knew nothing about the potential of psychedelics in general to promote well-being. Though I’d always been keen to investigate ways of healing outside the Western medical model, I initially found these inquiries bothersome. I didn’t want to learn about anything so strange and new, so “out there.” Nor could I imagine how a psychedelic substance could help anyone overcome addiction, or help heal PTSD, or decondition the ingrained patterns of self-suppression that so often contribute to illness.
Since then I have developed deep respect for the synergistic power of psychedelics allied with the insights and practice of modern psychology. “Respect” may be too mild a word—“reverence” hits closer to the mark. Over the years I have worked with people struggling with drug use and sex addiction, people facing cancer, degenerative neurological illness, depression, PTSD, anxiety, and chronic fatigue, as well as those seeking wholeness, meaning, and an experience of their true selves. In all cases, people have sought liberation from ingrained, habitual, constrictive patterns. I have witnessed people looking for their vulnerable and fully alive child selves, for their parents, for love, for God, for truth, for community, for Nature. I can’t say that everyone found everything they were seeking. What I can say is that most people took major steps forward on their way to authenticity and found significant liberation from their limiting or even deadening mind patterns and behaviors.
One man in his thirties, a first responder in British Columbia, wrote to me, “Since my first ayahuasca experience several months ago, I have been experiencing that shift in my consciousness daily. My presence within myself and with others, including animals, is different. I see everything I’ve done from a completely new perspective and live it. I am able to see the difference I make to ease pain in others, and to help them see themselves in a different light.” A real estate broker from New York who attended one of our retreats struck a similar chord: “In my day-to-day capitalistic pursuits, I often meditate now on ways that I might help other people in a deeper way.” And a woman whose life had been blighted by chronic pain and addiction, the template for which had been a history of childhood sexual abuse, wrote, “Today I stand in awe of life’s blessings and the sacred and precious nature of life. I never understood it until now.”
To be sure, before spiritual transcendence, the psychedelic experience may first penetrate to the most hidden recesses of torment in the psyche. “Tonight I experienced my fetal pain, and then I gave it up to the heavens,” a young man reported after a plant ceremony. “I had been asking the medicine to take me there, to my deepest, most fundamental suffering, but it hadn’t. All of a sudden tonight I was there, feeling myself in the womb, and feeling the harshest pain I think I’ve ever felt. It was awful. It consumed me fully. I stayed with it for as long as I could because I knew this is what I needed to experience. Then I came out of it, and without hesitation, I released that pain to the heavens. From the worst feeling I can recall, I was now experiencing one of the most joyful.”
Michael Pollan’s book How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence has opened many eyes to the healing possibilities of psychedelics. “People are hungry for something,” the bestselling author told me. “It’s very hard to say what it is, but people are certainly looking for a spiritual dimension to their lives, it seems to me. Also, we have very high levels of mental illness: people are suffering in all sorts of ways, and the mental health treatments available are completely inadequate, not up to the job.”
Pollan acknowledged that he had been startled by the reception that greeted his book—named as one of the ten best of the year by the New York Times—from within the medical world. “I thought there would be a lot of resistance from psychiatry, from people who work in mental health care,” he said. “But they know how empty the cupboard is, how empty the medicine cabinet is, of effective drugs, effective healing modalities. This renaissance of psychedelic medicine is coming along at a time when it’s much more urgently needed than I ever imagined when I wrote the book.” His survey covered traditional ceremonial plants such as ayahuasca, peyote, tobacco, and mushrooms; it also included modern human-made substances such as the psychedelic LSD (or acid) and MDMA (the psychoactive drug popularly known as ecstasy, E, or Molly), both of which are increasingly studied in therapeutic settings, with encouraging results.
We often equate the word “psychedelic” with terms like “mind-altering,” but a glance at its etymology gets us closer to the mark. The British psychiatrist Humphry Osmond, who coined the word from the Greek words psyche, for “soul,” and deloun, “to reveal, to make visible,” meant it to indicate “mind-manifesting.” In other words, not altering or even “expanding” the mind, but revealing consciousness to itself.[*] The therapeutic use of psychedelics requires the proper setting and the right intention and guidance. This is absolutely crucial: absent these conditions, the use of psychedelics can too often lead to a Sorcerer’s Apprentice nightmare scenario. Conversely, in adeptly led sessions and in safe circumstances, psychedelics can uncover and bring acceptance to pain and sorrows people have tried desperately to escape all their lives and, too, reveal the peace, joy, and love at the core of being alive, qualities often buried under the edifice of the conditioned personality.
Readers interested in the research and science behind the resurgence of psychedelic therapies in our time can consult Pollan’s comprehensive volume or the many scientific studies continually being published internationally.[1] I’ll say here only that after over a decade of experience as participant, physician, and healer, I have been more than impressed with the possibilities, which are rooted in the mind-body unity we have explored. I have seen people recover from addictions of all kinds, including pornography, cigarettes, alcohol, and drugs; from mental health challenges such as depression and anxiety; and from physical conditions such as multiple sclerosis and rheumatic diseases.
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Recall Mee Ok, from chapter 5—the traumatized, sexually abused Korean adoptee in Boston with the diagnosis of advanced scleroderma, unable without assistance to move her painfully “mummified” body, as she called it. Moribund, beyond the help of Western medicine, she at one point longed for death as the only conceivable release from suffering. One evening, on her own, Mee Ok took some ayahuasca she had somehow obtained. That night, for the first time in months, she was able to rise from her bed, stand, and walk on her own. The experience was transformative. “Instead of seeing myself as Mandy[*] and as identifying with my physical body,” she told me, “meaning my demographics, my race, my gender, and all of that, the plant helped me to see a deeper core to myself that would still be there after you stripped away all of those elements.”[*]
Mee Ok has since attended one of my retreats and has received other forms of therapy and physical treatment. As I mentioned in chapter 5, she is now independently mobile, physically active, and currently writing her autobiography. “Before, when I was very sick,” she recalled, “I saw everything, as all of life just having happened to me. ‘This is my fate; I’m going to die. I have no voice in this.’ And I’ve never had a voice . . . When I saw that there was a reason behind all of that, then I could search for meaning. That was a big conceptual shift for me. I realized that all of those traumas I’ve experienced in my life could be meaningful and that I could choose the life I am meant to live. And so these traumas were also manageable, whereas before, I couldn’t even access them. I couldn’t remember a lot of my childhood. The ayahuasca did slowly open up a lot of those memories and all those things I had forgotten about: who I was as a child, and who I really am.”
I spoke with Mee Ok’s Boston family doctor, who confirmed the medical history and the recovery, which she herself, the physician, was at a loss to explain. Yet from the perspective of bodymind science, there is nothing miraculous or even perplexing about it. Once Mee Ok reconnected with her authentic self—in her case with the aid of a plant, but the principle generalizes—she was able to divest from the trauma-confined personality. She began to free herself from the conditioned set of beliefs, behaviors, and emotions, and hence from the physiological responses these dictated. Her body—nervous system, immune system, and tissues—followed her lead, along pathways we have described.
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Beyond the realm of healing, many have found psychedelics to be transformational teachers. Certainly, in their original contexts, plant medicines were and are consulted for far more than cures and pain relief: shamans consulted the spirits of these plants for community guidance, for divination of hunting and weather patterns, to commune with ancestors and help make peace between warring factions, and, most elementally, simply to know and learn their ways. Each plant—including many flowers, bushes, and trees that wouldn’t be considered psychedelic by our standards—is thought to have its own wisdoms to impart, with its own curriculum that can take years of dedicated practice to absorb. The anthropologist Wade Davis is fulsome in his appreciation. “I always tell young people that our parents were so frightened of these substances, you know, that they’d scream at us, ‘Don’t take this. You’ll never come back the same!’ But that was the whole blessed point. In that sense, I am very open about how catalytic these substances have been in my life and how valuable they are. One thing I know is that these medicines allowed me to understand our connection to the natural world in a way that never in a million years could have happened just by reading books.”
How can psychedelics exert such potent transformative effects? Through the mind-body unity we have been exploring and through their power to access the unconscious, where, hidden from awareness, many of the emotions and motivations driving our lives reside. Sigmund Freud once said that dreams are the royal road to the unconscious. Psychedelics may be said to be an even more direct route. Dr. Rick Doblin, founder and executive director of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, has spearheaded the drive for the investigation of psychedelic treatment modalities. “There is a membrane between conscious mind and unconscious mind,” Doblin told me when we spoke recently, “between what we are paying attention to and what we are thinking and feeling on deeper levels. Psychedelics open up that membrane so that more emerges. Each substance does it in a different way. It both connects you to parts of yourself that have been suppressed or ignored, but also you can see the wider world beyond yourself, beyond your ego self.” He drew an analogy to the Copernican revolution of the 1600s. “We tend to believe with our ego that we are the center of the universe,” he explained. “Psychedelics displace that and we see that we are part of something enormously bigger than any individual and that this unity goes back in time and forward in time. They can take us out of our habitual patterns. When you are no longer looking at things from the perspective of the ‘I,’ you feel a newly released potential and sense of connection.”
Plant substances and synthetic psychedelics are not “drugs” in the medical sense of the word. A pill like the antidepressant Prozac, or the easily accessible aspirin or codeine, is meant to change your biological state—your physiology—so long as you are taking it. Depending on circumstances, that may or may not be a good thing, but such pharmaceutical treatments are not designed to get at root causes and unconscious dynamics. Psychedelic medicines are not intended to be taken daily to keep you in a state of altered physiology. Ideally, they can help facilitate your entry into a renewed relationship with yourself and the world, long after you have ingested them, whether in ceremony, as with ayahuasca, or in a therapeutic session, as with MDMA. In a real way, these experiences retune the brain’s emotional apparatus. I was not surprised, for example, by a recent study showing that psychedelic use reduced the odds of men perpetrating intimate-partner violence.[2]
All that said, I am no psychedelic evangelist. Contrary to the fond imaginings of some enthusiasts, neither plant-based nor manufactured psychedelic medicines will, on their own, transform health care or human consciousness at large. That will have to await vast-scale social change, not least the broadening of the mainstream medical ideology. For all they can offer, at present psychedelic treatments are esoteric, expensive, and time-intensive. They are bound to remain beyond most people’s reach for both practical and cultural reasons. But we would be negligent to exclude them, to ignore their healing potential for many endemic conditions in the face of which Western medicine finds itself largely helpless.[*]
Wondrous as their effects can be, for our purposes plant medicines and other mind-manifesting substances are not only interesting in themselves but also powerful ambassadors for the bodymind principles that modern science is only now catching up to. The lessons they transmit testify to the indomitability of the human spirit and the possibility of unlocking its potency, with or without substances and no matter what life has thrown at us. We now know that on every continent, seemingly in every recorded era, people have availed themselves of the apothecary called Earth to promote healing, wisdom, and spiritual realization, and indeed to transmit culture down through the generations.
Psychedelic medicine came to exert a major influence in the life of one of the last great Native American warrior leaders to challenge the relentless, genocidal expansion of settler colonialism in the American Southwest. After his inevitable defeat and his people’s humiliating confinement to ever-shrinking reservations, the brilliant Comanche chief Quanah Parker turned to spiritual pathways for solace. He worked with the desert cactus peyote, as a forerunner of what later became the Native American Church. Typical of Indigenous practices, he wasn’t interested in religion but in spirituality. “The white man goes into his church and talks about Jesus,” he once said, “but the Indian goes into his tipi and talks to Jesus.”[3]
After my “communion with God” in the Peruvian jungle, I had a felt sense of what Quanah Parker had meant.
Chapter 32
My Life as a Genuine Thing: Touching Spirit
Ultimately your greatest gift to the world is being who you are—both your gift and your fulfillment.
—A. H. Almaas, Being and the Meaning of Life
Until my clear-blue-sky moment in the Peruvian jungle in 2019, spirituality had existed for me mostly as rumor, theory, or concept—or as a vague longing, both wistful and wishful. Though I had consumed shelves of books, and could even speak articulately on the subject, I had never myself been subject to a direct encounter with such storied states as wonder, mystery, or “the peace that passeth all understanding.” My faith in humanity’s potential for genuine, revelatory transformation, while sincere, had come to me largely secondhand; I could not trace this faith to any experience of my own. It certainly didn’t derive from any deistic belief or devotional practices of the organized religious kind. That said, what I learned in Peru gave experiential substance to these inklings of possibility. It went beyond belief and spoke to the essence of healing.
