trip 
by tao line


Tao Lin
TRIP
Tao Lin is the author of the novels Taipei and Richard Yates and Eeeee Eee
Eeee, the novella Shoplifting from American Apparel, the story collection Bed,
and the poetry collections cognitive-behavioral therapy and you are a little bit
happier than i am. He was born in Virginia, has taught in Sarah Lawrence
College’s MFA program, and is the founder of Muumuu House.
ALSO BY TAO LIN
Selected Tweets
Taipei
Richard Yates
Shoplifting from American Apparel
cognitive-behavioral therapy
Eeeee Eee Eeee
Bed
you are a little bit happier than i am

A VINTAGE ORIGINAL, MAY 2018
Copyright © 2018 by Tao Lin
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Penguin
Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a
division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.
Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
A portion of this work first appeared as “Beyond ‘Existentialism’ ” on Vice (www.vice.com)
on July 8, 2014.
This page constitutes an extension of the copyright page.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Lin, Tao, 1983– author.
Title: Trip : psychedelics, alienation, and change / Tao Lin.
Description: New York : Vintage Books, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and
index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2017041009 (print) | LCCN 2017043462 (ebook)
Subjects: | MESH: McKenna, Terence K., 1946–2000. | Lin, Tao, 1983– | Psychotropic
Drugs—therapeutic use | Plant Extracts—therapeutic use | N,N-Dimethyltryptamine—
therapeutic use | Psilocybin—therapeutic use | Salvia | Cannabis | United States | Personal
Narratives
Classification: LCC RM315 (ebook) | LCC RM315 (print) | NLM QV 77.2 | DDC 615.7/88—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017041009
Vintage Books Trade Paperback ISBN: 9781101974513
Ebook ISBN 9781101974506
Cover design by Joan Wong
Cover image © Tao Lin
www.vintagebooks.com
v5.2
a
CONTENTS
Cover
About the Author
Also by Tao Lin
Title Page
Copyright
Introduction
Why Am I Interested in Him?
Terence McKenna’s Life
My Drug History
Psilocybin
DMT
Salvia
Why Are Psychedelics Illegal?
Cannabis
Epilogue
Appendix
Acknowledgments
Bibliography
INTRODUCTION
I learned of Terence McKenna (1946–2000) on September 14, 2012, the day
after completing the main final draft of Taipei, my seventh book, third novel,
and first book to include psychedelics. I was in my room, zombielike and
depressed after embodying a “whatever it takes” attitude regarding
amphetamines and other drugs and completing my novel. I had clicked a
YouTube video in which Joe Rogan, whom I was vaguely aware of as the host
of Fear Factor, was aggressively, excitedly talking about DMT, an illegal
compound made by many species of plants and animals, including humans.
At one point Rogan began referencing someone in an “if you think I
sound crazy, listen to this other guy” manner. He referred to Terence
McKenna, a person who would smoke DMT and, within a minute, every
time, find himself in an “unanticipated dimension” infested with “selftransforming machine elves” that spoke English and a kind of “visible
language” while jumping in and out of his body, “running around chirping
and singing.” McKenna described these things, which he also called “fractal
elves” and “jeweled self-dribbling basketballs,” in a word as “zany.” He
speculated they were dead people in an “ecology of souls,” humans from the
future, or entities in a parallel world with their own hopes and problems.
The next week or so, alone in my room, which received no direct sunlight,
I listened to McKenna make “small mouth noises,” as he called human
speech, on YouTube for probably thirty-plus hours—including in a ten-hourand-twenty-three-minute, three-day workshop—with sustained, intrigued
interest. I estimate this was twenty-five to twenty-seven more hours than I’d
ever spent listening to an individual talk on YouTube. My unprecedented
level of interest surprised me. McKenna seemed excited and delighted by
topics I’d just finished expressing in my novel as sources of bleakness and
despair and confusion—technology, drugs, human existence, the future.
He spoke on a myriad of what seemed gradually less like disparate
interests than one purposed, interconnected, developing “web” of topics. He
discussed consciousness, language, literature, art, memory, time, religion,
dreams, octopi, math, aliens, biology, botany, shamanism, schizophrenia,
psychotherapy, alienation, culture, sex, light, death, DNA, the I Ching, the
internet, virtual reality, nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, family,
fractals, feelings, science fiction, self-empowerment, and, at the center of it
all, the impetus and sustaining force for the web’s construction and
elaboration, “the psychedelic experience,” specifically the effects of psilocybin
and DMT on humans.
His model of the universe had a singularity at the end—a mysterious
attractor, pulling us to it—instead of at the beginning, as with the Big Bang, a
theory he called “the limit test for credulity” because it asked one to accept
the unlikeliest scenario possible, that everything appeared instantly from
nothing for no reason. “If you can believe that, you can believe anything,”
said McKenna, taking something I’d encountered hundreds of times—and
had always felt “nothing” toward—and successfully representing it to me,
with the energizing suddenness of an epiphany, as a comical, egregious,
eerie absurdity.
At a weekend workshop in December 1994, McKenna recalled some
questions he’d had in 1961 as a fourteen-year-old: “What are we? Where did
we come from? And where are we going?” His response—a reasonable one,
he felt—was to check the cultural database. “Surely there are answers to
these questions,” he thought. He found that
our best efforts are nothing more than half-completed stories told
around the campfire. We don’t actually know what our predicament is.
We are up against a phenomenon which we can barely bring into focus
in our cognitive sphere, and it’s the phenomenon of our own existence.
What does it mean? What does it mean, first of all, to be a biological
creature—to be, as an animal—what is that?
And then what was that, embedded then in a culture with languages and
aesthetic canons and cosmic theories? McKenna was unsatisfied with the
conventional answers. But, beginning with The Doors of Perception (1954) by
Aldous Huxley (1894–1963), he’d also been introduced, also at age fourteen,
to “the whole array of consciousness-altering substances”—cannabis, LSD,
DMT, psilocybin, mescaline—that in the past hundred years had “come into
the toolbox of thinking Westerners.” These substances, called psychedelics,
put one in the metaphysical unknown by dissolving ideological, personal,
and other boundaries. McKenna explained:
All these things you might cling to—Catholicism, democratic ideals,
Hasidism, Marxism, Freudianism—all of these things are exposed as
simply quaint cultural artifacts, painted masks and rattles assembled
by people of good intent but clearly not great grasp of the situation.
Well, I thought that that process of deconstruction of cultural reality
would end in a kind of liberation of cynicism, where you become sort
of really street smart, you know—nobody can put anything over on you,
you’ve been there, you’ve done that. It turns out that that existential
phase, which I reached at about age eighteen, is itself simply a place,
along the way.
I think I reached that place when I was twenty or twenty-one, but in a
vague, already-alienated way—I’d written an essay on existentialism when I
was eighteen that concluded that people disagreed on what it was; I felt I
didn’t understand the Sartre I’d read; and I was unmoved by The Stranger,
which I found melodramatic and unrelatable, though I also often found
myself melodramatic and unrelatable—and I began to view it as “simply a
place” maybe a year or two later. It was a place that didn’t stimulate or
comfort me anymore, but I remained there, even after, at twenty-seven, I had
my first psychedelic experiences via psilocybin and LSD. I was still there after
contemplating and describing those experiences for two years and feeling
“done” with them, on some level, upon completing Taipei, which ended with
a scene in which a character on psilocybin thinks he’s dead.
Life still seemed bleak to me, as it had in evolving ways since I was
thirteen or fourteen. I was chronically not fascinated by existence, which,
though often amusing and poignant, did not feel wonderful or profound but
tedious and uncomfortable and troubling. Life did seem mysterious, but
increasingly only in a blunt, cheap, slightly deadpan, somehow unintriguing
manner. As I aged, I seemed to become less curious why I was here, where I
came from, and what would happen when I died. Psychedelics alone had not
been enough to significantly affect my worldview. I required both
psychedelics and McKenna—among other things, which I share in this book
—to persuade and lure and charm and provoke me to depart the familiar and
dead-end-like land of existentialism in an organized, sustained manner.
Before encountering McKenna, I’d felt only alienated, mostly, by the
admittedly little I’d read, seen, and heard about psychedelics. People seemed
to me superstitious, irrational, hyperbolic, dishonest, and/or incurious when
discussing them, even and sometimes especially if they were advocating
them. Not unexpectedly, people seemed satisfied to express and embody the
same stereotypes—and embodying stereotypes is something I do too, an
example being my “whatever it takes” mind-set—about psychedelics that had
kept me away from them most of my life. Alienated from what others
thought about them—and feeling like I’d confirmed to myself by writing
Taipei that I had not been significantly affected by them—my interest in
psychedelics dwindled and I became nearly as uninterested in them as I’d
become uninterested in “the existential place.”
After listening to McKenna talk for more than thirty hours, during which
he spoke around as many words as are in a seven-hundred-page book, I
became interested in psychedelics again and in new ways. I began to view
them—and everything, including myself—within a context spanning from
the unknown origins of the universe to when the sun formed in the Milky
Way galaxy, through the emergence of biology and its development over
three to four billion years on Earth from microorganisms to fish to
amphibians to reptiles to mammals to primates to humans to Homo sapiens,
around 300,000 years ago, until, finally, 15,000 to 25,000 years ago, the
beginning of a brief transformation called history, which McKenna compared
to the gestation period in the metamorphosis of a caterpillar to a butterfly,
except instead of gaining wings as a specimen, we will be “turning ourselves
inside out” as a species.
In June 2013, nine months after I encountered McKenna, Taipei was
published. During my book tour I felt most engaged when people asked
about psychedelics or McKenna, topics I’d mentioned in tweets. I told people
I’d become more interested in psychedelic drugs than the drugs I’d focused
on most in Taipei and other art—drawings, essays, movies—I’d released in
the past three years. I was glad to distance myself from amphetamines,
benzodiazepines, opiates, and MDMA because I felt they would, for me, lead
to scarily more depression and anxiety. By explaining that my interests had
changed, more people in the future would talk to me, I knew, about
cannabis, psilocybin, LSD, DMT, salvia, and other psychedelics.
At Skylight Books in Los Angeles, I discussed McKenna’s idea that “our
map of the world is so wrong that where we have centered physics, we should
actually place literature as the central metaphor that we want to work out
from,” as he explained in “Shamanology” (1984) in a quote I later taped to my
wall and memorized and which continued: “Because I think literature
occupies the same relationship to life that life occupies to death….In the
sense that a book is life with one dimension pulled out of it and life is
something which lacks a dimension which death will give it. I imagine death
to be a kind of release into the imagination in the sense that, for characters in
a book, what we experience is an unimaginable dimension of freedom.”
At Brazos Bookstore in Houston, a person asked during the Q&A after my
reading if I’d smoked DMT. She was seated in the front row with a laser-like,
unanxious gaze and looked like she was probably in high school. I said yes,
but not enough else to cause anything except buzzing noises. She said she’d
recently smoked DMT and asked if I’d read The Cosmic Serpent (1998). I said
I’d just started it, actually, and asked how she’d found the somewhat obscureseeming book, in which French anthropologist Jeremy Narby wrote about
drinking ayahuasca with an Asháninca shaman while doing fieldwork in
Peru for a doctoral degree. She said she’d found it randomly in a used
bookstore. I was surprised she’d experimented with DMT and was talking to
me about it in a bookstore in the presence of fifteen to twenty other people,
including three of her friends—who seemed “dragged along,” to some
degree—and what seemed to be her mom.
In August, at a London bookstore and a Melbourne writers festival, I
explained to audiences who’d ostensibly come to hear me discuss Taipei how,
earlier in the month, I’d eaten psilocybin mushrooms, believed I was an alien
occupying Tao Lin, sobbed for around an hour sitting on my bed, deleted
parts of my internet presence, and thrown away my MacBook.
In September, back in my room, I considered how, in the year since
discovering him, my interest in McKenna’s ideas had not abated or
weakened but invigoratingly endured and stabilized and expanded and
deepened. This surprised me because part of me had expected to lose interest
within weeks or months and revert, like many times before, somewhat
sheepishly, to my vaguely existential worldview—in which I continually, if
often halfheartedly, tried and failed to create and sustain my own meaning in
life.
I was surprised again, another year later, in September 2014, when, after
five months researching and writing a twelve-week, weekly column for Vice
called Tao Of Terence—a goal of which, I stated in week 1, was to “spread
Terence McKenna’s memes”—I realized I was still interested in him and his
ideas. On some level, I had still suspected I’d become disillusioned,
irrationally antagonistic, jaded, or indifferent—at least temporarily, for
months or years—and as a side effect revert to feeling, again, “done” with
psychedelics, but this hadn’t happened.
A year and a half later, in February 2016, it still hasn’t. It’s been three and
a half years since I discovered McKenna, and I’m ready to explain what I’ve
learned and how I’ve changed. Besides to externalize, organize, contemplate,
personalize, and share what has interested me most since completing Taipei,
I have at least four other reasons for writing this book. The first two:
• To me, the world remains a terrible place, worthy of all the negative
attributes I’ve called it in the past. But I’m now gratefully convinced it’s
also awe-inspiring and excitingly bizarre and complicatedly magical, a
place of easily accessible wonder and pervasive, explorable, feelable
mystery. I want to explain why.
• For reasons examined throughout this book, I’ve gradually realized that
sustained, conscious effort is required—or at least strongly self-suggested
—for me to not drift toward meaninglessness, depression, disempowering
forms of resignation, and bleak ideologies like existentialism. This book is
part of my effort.
Trip is in eight chapters, with a long epilogue. In the first and second
chapters, I examine McKenna’s ideas and life. In the third chapter, I share
my history with drugs, introduce my “recovery” and recovery, graph my drug
history, and analyze my shift from pharmaceutical to psychedelic drugs.
In the fourth and fifth chapters, I examine my first three years and
McKenna’s three decades of experiences with psilocybin and DMT. I share
accounts of my hedonistic, “alien sex,” “leave society,” exploratory, and
paranoid psychedelic experiences. In the sixth chapter, I discuss Salvia
divinorum, a plant introduced to modern people by the Mazatec of Central
Mexico.
In the seventh chapter, I explore why psychedelics are illegal by
investigating TV, magazine, newspaper, book, and government media; my
experience serving on a “special narcotics” grand jury; McKenna’s theory that
they’re illegal because they’re “catalysts of intellectual dissent”; and our
Goddess-worshipping, partnership past. In the eighth chapter, I fractally
examine cannabis.
In the epilogue, I write about flying to California to meet Kathleen
Harrison—whom McKenna married in 1976 and created children and a
nonprofit organization with in 1978, 1980, and 1985—and be a student in her
plant-drawing class.
WHY AM I INTERESTED IN HIM?
The first thing I noticed about him was his strange voice, which I felt
aversion toward because my default state in 2012 while sober was an easily
annoyed grumpiness. His nasally, slightly craggy, often high-pitched,
sometimes low-pitched, slowish voice sounded surprisingly similar to the
voice used by characters in The Simpsons who were “nerds”—low-charisma,
socially clumsy, unathletic humans with thick glasses who spent most of
their time with books and/or computers. I hadn’t seen The Simpsons, which
began seven years after McKenna started speaking publicly in recorded talks
in 1982, in years and couldn’t recall anyone else’s voice reminding me of its
“nerd voice.” As I associated McKenna’s unrushed cadence with his poignant
ideas and reservedly cheerful, calmly skeptical, playfully self-aware,
contemplative personality, my aversion dissipated and was quickly forgotten.
Now I liked his style of talking for its distinctly non-commercial, I felt,
oddness, its thorough enunciation and sometimes singsongy lilt. Now it
seemed funny and auspicious to me that a person with this voice existed and
was using it to share his extreme-seeming worldview to audiences of
delighted, laughing, giggling people. I enjoyed McKenna’s triangulating
deviations into stand-up comedy and, as I experienced it, “fiction”—
sentences I’d feel similarly stimulated and moved by if I read them in a short
story or novel, like when he said, in a 1998 talk:
The toughest thing to figure out is relationships. It is the yoga of the
West. But it’s harder than yoga. I’m fifty-two, merely—and I don’t feel
greatly wiser in this area than I felt at twenty-four. And, you know, I’ve
had a marriage, I’ve had a divorce, I’ve been single, I’ve had long-term
relationships, short-term relationships, on and on and on.
He seemed always partially talking to himself but was also teacher-like,
often unpromptedly defining and verbally footnoting terms, names, and
historical events. “I represent to myself—and I hope to convince you of this
—radical ideas, innovative ideas, even peculiar ideas, but not loose or
preposterous ideas,” he said in one talk. His language was a mix of idiomatic,
literary, poetic, popular, obscure, crass, ventriloquial, scientific, and
academic. “Notice that I use big words,” he said when asked in 1992 why, as
an assiduous, long-term promoter of illegal drugs, he wasn’t in jail. “I don’t
try to boil it down to a shoutable slogan, like ‘Turn on, tune in, drop out’?
Uh-uh, that—then they come, they come. So that’s one possibility—that,
simply, if you are defined in their eyes as an intellectual, then they
automatically put you in the harmless category and send resources
elsewhere.” Except for a title and sometimes a list of topics, his talks, which
were forty to ninety minutes and usually ended with thirty to sixty minutes of
Q&A, and workshops (connected talks over multiple days) were improvised.
They employed a wandering, exploratory form, like the tunnel an ant might
create by entering a cube of sand at one point and exiting at another, with the
cube representing McKenna’s knowledge on a chosen subject and the tunnel,
exiting in a manner seeming inevitably abrupt, being the content of the talk.
McKenna’s disembodied voice creakily emanated from the 1980s and 1990s,
through the internet, into my room—which often felt cave-like in late 2012—
and I learned scattered details about his life and ideas:
• He insisted the world was made of language. Not the thoughts of God,
quarks, electromagnetic wave packets, planets, or stars but language. He
called this “the primary fact that has been overlooked.”
• He’d been attracted, since he was a small child, to the weird, which led
him to psychedelics—the ultimate, he felt, in weird. “Weird is the
compass heading,” he said.
• He called himself “a hardheaded rationalist” and seemed more earnest
and sophisticated and undeluded than anyone I’d absorbed this much
information from on nonmaterial topics like consciousness and
imagination. He had arrived at his conclusions—that there was
“confounding, paranormal material” in the psychedelic experience, that
humans were near the end of time—through skepticism and disbelief.
• He distinguished himself from the New Age, which he called “a flight
from the psychedelic experience,” and various other contemporary groups
attracted to occult and mystical topics. “I say this as a reasonable person,”
he said in 1992. “I want to keep stressing that. I won’t sit at the same table
as the channelers, and the people who have good news about Atlantis, and
all of this stuff.”
• Despite being extra-rational, he was also optimistic. This surprised me
because I associated rational thinking with pessimism, or at least a wan,
slightly feigned sort of optimism. McKenna was energetically optimistic.
He called himself “a resolute optimist of a complicated sort.” In one talk,
he asked if there was “any reason why people of analytical intelligence,
who are connected up to the facts of the matter about the state of the
world, should hope.” He observed that the conventional wisdom was
“basically no,” then explained why, in his view, “yes.”
• He went to the gym as “psychedelic training”—to improve his ability to
explore the unknown and bring back useful information.
• He’d “scoured India and other places” and been underwhelmed in terms
of spiritual teachers—no one had shown him anything close to what
psychedelics delivered reliably—and he was “not willing to climb aboard
the Buddhist ethic because Buddhism says suffering is inevitable,” which
was “not a psychedelic point of view.” Religions that had “made
meditation the centerpiece of their ontology,” like Mahayana Buddhism,
were, he felt, nihilistic. This surprised me, because, at first mindlessly
associating McKenna with the term “hippie,” I had expected him to
automatically regard Eastern philosophies—in a manner belying, I had
always vaguely felt, some amount of mindlessness—as wise and
praiseworthy.
• He argued, in a manner I found compelling and revelatory, that nature
was not, as Sartre said, “mute,” but that, obviously, it was people who
were deaf. “The myth of our society is the existential myth that we are cast
into matter, that we are lost in a universe that has no meaning for us, that
we must make our meaning,” he said in a 1998 workshop on alchemy.
“This is what Sartre, Kierkegaard, all those people are saying, that we
must make our meaning. It reaches its most absurd expression in Sartre’s
statement that nature is mute.”
• He seemed to exclude nothing from his model building—the early
internet and prehistoric shamanism, quantum physics and romantic love,
Saharan rock art and the Hubble Space Telescope, Taoism and Riane
Eisler.
As I solitarily and passively and sometimes distractedly—and also
sometimes, at this point, a little skeptically but decreasingly so as I gradually
realized the depth and carefulness of his words—assimilated all this and
other atypical information from McKenna, I became, in the weeks and
months after discovering him, especially interested in his ideas on ideas.
HE DIDN’T BELIEVE ANYTHING
McKenna stressed he deliberately didn’t believe anything—even his own
theories. “My technique, which I recommend to you, is don’t believe
anything,” he said. “If you believe in something, you are automatically
precluded from believing its opposite.” Belief was a “self-limiting function,” a
“stultifying force.” McKenna’s disbelief was not due to apathy, cynicism, or
stubbornness but determination, as he explained in “Gathering Momentum
for a Leap” (1994):
I have been vehemently accused by people who didn’t understand me
of not believing in anything. I don’t believe in anything. This is not a
statement of existential hopelessness for which you should light a
candle for me at night. It’s a strategy for not getting bogged down in
some weird trip. After all, what is the basis for believing anything? I
mean, you have to understand: You’re a monkey. In some kind of a
biological situation where everything has been evolved to serve the
economy of survival—this is not a philosophy course. So belief is a
curious reaction to the present at hand. It isn’t to be believed; it’s to be
dealt with—experienced and modeled.
He was clear and persistent on this—“I would entertain any idea, but
believe in nothing”; “I don’t believe in belief”; “My anti-ideological stance
makes it very important to believe nothing,” he said in 1989, 1994, and 1996
—and to me it was a central, vital, exciting aspect of his thinking, but many
people, I found, seemed to ignore, overlook, or, for whatever reason, choose
not to engage with or acknowledge it. “He believed wholeheartedly in the
stories he told,” wrote Andy Letcher egregiously in Shroom (2007) near the
end of an error-ridden, partially dismissive chapter on McKenna, two pages
after I wrote “this guy doesn’t get McKenna” in the margins, for example.
HE WAS AGAINST GURUS
McKenna traveled the planet telling groups of people his ideas, including on
what to ingest and how to save the world—an arguably guru-like activity—
but, in most other ways, he was distinctly and severely not like a guru. “Avoid
gurus, follow plants,” he advised. “I think: no method, no guru, no teacher.
Nobody has a handle on this; nobody understands. All these esoteric schools
are the dealings of beady-eyed priests.” He was “against any group who keeps
secrets.” He called secret-keeping “a bad habit” and “a way of controlling
people.” He promoted guru-defeating, self-empowering ideas that the
mushroom told him, like: “For one human being to seek enlightenment
from another is like a grain of sand on the beach seeking enlightenment
from another.”
Another way he was unguru-like can be found in a forty-minute fivesecond video on YouTube titled “A Conversation with Terence McKenna and
Ram Dass (1992)” in which Dass, seated at a table with McKenna, said, “My
mantra is the Gandhi line ‘My life is my message.’ ” After nine seconds,
during which they self-consciously, I felt, busied their mouths (McKenna
with fork, Dass with cup), McKenna said:
I think I’m at a lower level. Because I’m very aware that, um—I have to
struggle to say “My life is my message.” I would almost rather say “My
message is my message. Please don’t look at my life because I’m a
fallible human being and I’m constantly fucking up.”
“But, you see how that weakens your message?” said Dass.
McKenna answered with an anecdote: He once told Leo Zeff, the
psychologist who pioneered the use of LSD and MDMA in psychotherapy,
that Zeff was finished, was “baked.” McKenna, however, was not; he was
“half-baked,” he told Dass, then laughed mildly. “And I hope that the rest of
my life will finish the baking process,” he said, turning to his food.
For me, this strengthened his message, gave his ideas an evolving,
collaborative, discussable quality.
HE POINTED ME BACK TO MYSELF
McKenna promoted one thing arguably more than psychedelics: the felt
presence of immediate experience. “No one knows how it is that I can
command my hand to make a fist and that it will do that,” he said in “Eros
and the Eschaton” (1994). “I mean, that’s mind over matter. That’s the
violation of every scientific principle in the books. And yet it is the most
trivial experience any of us have; we expect to command our body.” He called
the body “the nexus of the mystery of life.” While explaining his worldview,
he sometimes paused to recommend that I focus on my own experiences,
that I empower myself by creating culture based on my highs and plans and
fears, my friends and body and history.
He was adamant and funny on this. Despite earning his income by
sharing and explaining his ideas, he stressed that people should not listen to
him. In one talk, he said “the mystery” was “best served by silence and
contemplation”; then, changing tone, he said, “The problem is, you know, it’s
just hell on your bank account if you’re a professional lecturer. So we drop
down a level, to raving and ranting.” Changing tone again, he elaborated in
earnest: “But all of these things are provisional and literalistic. Nowhere is it
writ large that the minds of higher primates are going to hold a simulacrum
of reality.”
In “Appreciating Imagination” (1994), responding to an audience member
whose question was inaudible in the recording I heard, McKenna said, “Well,
I hate to tell you this, but I would NEVER do what you are doing.” This was
the only instance in his verbal oeuvre where I felt the need to both italicize
and use all-capital letters, and I felt it confidently, though it was not spoken
loudly. This followed:
MCKENNA: This may be the ultimate teaching.
AUDIENCE: [laughter]
MCKENNA: Do not ever again spend money to see me. [In a slightly asided
voice, laughing a little] Uh, my god, how much income is going down
the drain as the ultimate oral empowerment is given?
AUDIENCE MEMBER: This is entertainment!
MCKENNA: [loud laughter] Well, okay, as long as you take it as
entertainment, that’s fine.
I took his talks as nourishment that was synergistically entertaining, that
made me mentally and physically smirk, smile, grin, snicker, chuckle,
chortle, and laugh while informing me in a non-boring, challenging manner
on seemingly everything. Like a friendly, quick-witted, college-less metaprofessor, he took the most interesting pieces, the glinting memes, from
each subject—geology, physics, molecular biology, harmony and
counterpoint—and shared them with me in a concise and original manner.
HE VIEWED IDEAS AS MEMES
McKenna defined a meme as “the smallest unit of an idea that still has
coherency” and said he was very conscious of creating and spreading them
during his talks. Madonna, socialism, yellow sweaters, rainbow-colored
dreadlocks, DMT elves, and “the felt presence of immediate experience” were
all memes, which were to ideology as genes were to biology. McKenna
compared the ideological environment to a rain forest. “Launch your meme
boldly and see if it will replicate—just like genes replicate, and infect, and
move into the organism of society,” he said in “Shamanism, Alchemy, and
the 20th Century” (1996). “And, believing as I do that society operates on a
kind of biological economy, then I believe these memes are the key to
societal evolution.”
Previously, in the cultures and subcultures I was part of or aware of
existing around me—on the internet, in the media, and in the literary world
—the word “meme” seemed to refer almost exclusively to photos and GIFs,
sometimes with a small amount of overlaid text, that circulated online for the
purpose of humor. I gladly supplemented that definition of “meme” with
McKenna’s broader, older usage of the word, which biologist Richard
Dawkins invented in the 1970s.
As I continued listening to McKenna—who in one talk called himself “a
meme replicator”—with varying amounts of attention, I noticed he had
different definitions than most people for other words also. These words
seemed mostly to be common abstractions that I’d always suspected people
to be using with unexamined or deliberate vagueness, for rhetorical and
commercial purposes. For some of these words, I felt I was finally
encountering meanings I could understand and add to my mental dictionary.
TRUTH
Before McKenna, “truth” was a word I avoided earnestly using and tended to
distrust and gloss over when others used it. Like the word “real,” which
McKenna also helped me to finally confidently define—“ ‘Real’ is a
distinction of a naïve mind, I think; we’re getting beyond that,” he said in
“Techno-Pagans at the End of History” (1998)—people seemed to use the
word “true” to externalize their mental hierarchies in which certain feelings,
preferences, behaviors, beliefs, and lifestyles were ranked above others. Now
truth seemed obviously to be a provisional, relative concern. Something
could be “true enough.” McKenna explained: “I’m sure some of you have
heard me recall the situation where Wittgenstein was raving about
something and one of his students said, ‘But is it the truth?’ And he said,
‘Well, it’s true enough.’ ”
HISTORY
Besides redefining the word “history” for me, McKenna also successfully
interested me in learning about human history. Instead of a subject in school
involving wars and treaties and generals, or the study of the past of any topic,
history was now also a birth-like, 15,000-year transformation occurring late in
biology on certain planets to certain species—a “nearly instantaneous
transition” beginning with “animals kept in balance by natural selection” and
ending with “the transcendental object at the end of time.” History, in
McKenna’s view, was not “a trendlessly fluctuating process,” nor a phase, to
be continued for millions of years, but a phase shift, of which humans were
only decades or centuries from the end—a possibility I’d never suspected and
from which I now derived awe, mental stimulation, and meaning.
IMAGINATION
No longer a vaguely childish-seeming, fantasy-related abstraction that I
associated mostly with poets and Disney, imagination became the
imagination—a dimension outside time that was “accessible only to the
degree that one can decondition oneself from the history-bound cognitive
systems that have carried one to this point,” explained McKenna. Realer and
larger than the universe, the imagination was where bone flutes, ivory
figurines, novels, sonatas, airports, dance moves, nuclear weapons, and
computer games—captured by human consciousness and downloaded into
matter—came from and where we, as individuals and a species, were going.
ALIENATION
I used to associate alienation mostly with sadness and meekness. I viewed it
as a personal issue I could possibly overcome with regular exercise and more
social contact. I’d encountered its political meaning in middle school through
“punk music,” as I examine in the third chapter, but in college it became
more of a melancholic thing. After McKenna, my alienation regained the
earlier meaning, became shared and justified. Instead of a glum,
demoralizing, indirectly satisfying sensation, alienation now seemed once
again action-oriented and hope-filled and analysis-demanding. It indicated
something about my relationship with society. In “The World and Its
Double” (1993), when his children were fifteen and twelve, McKenna said:
The reason we feel alienated is because the society is infantile, trivial,
and stupid. So the cost of sanity in this society is a certain level of
alienation. I grapple with this because I’m a parent. And I think
anybody who has children, you come to this realization, you know—
what’ll it be? Alienated, cynical intellectual? Or slack-jawed, half-wit
consumer of the horseshit being handed down from on high? There is
not much choice in there, you see. And we all want our children to be
well-adjusted; unfortunately, there’s nothing to be well-adjusted to.
COMPLEXITY
“Complexity” used to be a somewhat mundane word, an antonym for
simplicity. I was perpetually unsure if I wanted more or less in my life.
Sometimes I admired and strove for complexity, but, on average, and
increasingly, I seemed to prefer simplicity, maybe because it felt less
stressful and crazed. Now complexity, which McKenna also called novelty,
was the featured element of two crucial-seeming laws of nature that I’d never
consciously acknowledged or heard of before. The first was “so obvious” it
had “never been embraced as a general and dependable principle,” said
McKenna in 1994: As the universe ages, it complexifies. The second was that
this process, in which previously achieved complexity is used to create more
complexity, accelerates.
PSYCHEDELIC
Before McKenna, I associated the word “psychedelic” (which I didn’t know
meant “mind-manifesting”) with a kind of vaguely hedonistic mindlessness.
I more than half-believed the stereotypes I’d absorbed throughout my life
about psychedelic drugs—that they caused insanity and out-of-control
behavior and were hazardous and uninteresting. People on psychedelics,
when not going insane, seemed to laze or frolic or dance in fields and not
worry or think about anything but only (somewhat pointlessly, I’d always felt)
look at things, which they usually described as geometric. Now I associated
psychedelics with language, time, emotion, change, mystery, sanity, nature,
compassion, learning, awe, problem-solving, the unconscious, and the
unknown. “Living psychedelically is trying to live in an atmosphere of
continuous unfolding of understanding,” said McKenna in “Psychedelic
Society” (1984). “So that every day you know more, and see into things with
greater depth, than you did before.”
In this chapter I’ve described McKenna’s voice, shared what I learned early
on about him, considered his meta-ideas, and examined his unusual
definitions for six words. One reason I chose this mediumly discursive
approach—to answering why I’m interested in McKenna—is to simulate my
encounter with him in the last four months of 2012. Another reason is
because it has increasingly been my view of his oeuvre that “no part is first
and no part last,” “every part supports the whole just as much as it is
supported by the whole,” and “even the smallest part cannot be fully
understood until the whole has been first understood,” as Arthur
Schopenhauer (1788–1860), who, like McKenna, stressed experience via the
body as the sole source of knowledge, wrote in 1818 in the preface to his main
work. With this in mind, a sampler-like, many-parted, meme-studded
method of teaching McKenna’s worldview seemed most desirable.
But now I want to provide an opposite, balancing experience with a
chronological narrative of McKenna’s life, which is another reason why,
besides his ideas, I’m interested in him.
TERENCE MCKENNA’S LIFE
The public story of Terence McKenna’s life—as told in thousands of
sentences and anecdotes from his talks and interviews, his essays “I
Understand Philip K. Dick” (1991) and “Among Ayahuasqueros” (1992), his
memoir True Hallucinations (1993), scattered mentions of him by his
children and Kathleen Harrison, tens of newspaper and magazine articles on
him, and around 20 percent of his brother Dennis’s memoir The Brotherhood
of the Screaming Abyss: My Life with Terence McKenna (2012)—would be, if
collected into one place, around a five-hundred-page book, which, if it
existed, could be titled One Version of Terence McKenna’s Life. The following is
my sixteen-page, ten-part biography of McKenna. It begins with an epigraph.
The world which we perceive is a tiny fraction of the world which we
can perceive, which is a tiny fraction of the perceivable world.
—TERENCE MCKENNA, 1987, Los Angeles
1. PAONIA
Terence Kemp McKenna was born on November 16, 1946, in a one-hotel
town in Colorado named Paonia. “They wanted to name it Peony but didn’t
know how to spell it,” he said in an interview with Omni magazine in 1993.
“In your last year of high school, you got your girlfriend pregnant, married
her, and went to work in the coal mines. An intellectual was someone who
read TIME.”
It’s unknown if Terence read Time, but he did, at least once, read Life. The
May 13, 1957, issue included a first-person narrative, “Seeking the Magic
Mushroom,” in which R. Gordon Wasson (1898–1986) wrote about
becoming, with photographer Allan Richardson, in a ceremony in Oaxaca
with María Sabina (1894–1985), a Mazatec curandera, “the first white men in
recorded history to eat the divine mushrooms.” They “saw visions” and
“emerged from the experience awestruck.” The article included watercolor
paintings of the seven known types of psilocybin-containing mushroom; the
last painting, of five palely golden mushrooms, had this caption: “First
discovered in Cuba in June 1904, Stropharia cubensis Earle grows on cow
dung in pastures.”
In this way, appearing bluntly in a mainstream magazine via the clear,
lyrical, restrained prose of a New York banker, the mushroom introduced
itself with characteristic charm and brashness to the McKenna brothers. In
his 2012 memoir, Dennis, who was six, remembered Terence, who was ten,
waving the magazine at their mom, following her as she did housework,
demanding to know more. “But of course she had nothing to add,” wrote
Dennis.
Growing up, Terence wore thick bifocal glasses. He subscribed to the
Village Voice and Evergreen Review—a literary magazine that published
Kerouac, Burroughs, and others from 1957 to 1973—and collected fossils.
“We would find dinosaur bones and two-hundred-million-year-old clam
shells and stuff,” he said in a talk in Manhattan in 1998. “And when I finally
figured out that a million years is a thousand years a thousand times, it was like
an epiphany.” At age eleven or twelve, he began collecting insects and
building model rockets, an interest his dad, who owned a plane and enjoyed
flying, encouraged. He ordered butterflies and beetles from listings in the
back of Science News. On weekends, his dad helped him build and launch
solid-fuel rockets.
Over time, his weirder interests—drugs, magic, “the more obscure
backwaters of natural history and theology”—came to dominate his attention.
“There’s something going on here for sure,” he said to himself after reading
The Doors of Perception, Aldous Huxley’s seventy-one page account of his first
mescaline trip. To the despair of their parents, Dennis shared Terence’s
interests, which, beginning in the early 1960s, because their dad sometimes
brought home “sci-fi pulp mags,” also included science fiction—most
influentially Star Maker (1937) by Olaf Stapledon and Childhood’s End (1953)
and The City and the Stars (1956) by Arthur C. Clarke—which Terence later
called his “entry drug.” They wanted “answers to the ultimate questions,”
wrote Dennis in The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss, and were dissatisfied
by the “shallow answers” provided by their Catholic faith.
To their parents, their most troubling interest was psychedelic drugs. Their
mom, who’d introduced Terence to Huxley with The Art of Seeing (1942), was
more receptive than their dad, with whom it was impossible to rationally
discuss “drugs.” A World War II veteran, he viewed alcohol as benign but felt
cannabis, LSD, and heroin were all “intrinsically bad,” wrote Dennis, who
observed that their dad, with whom Terence had “ongoing contentious
conversations” and “screaming matches” about drugs and other topics,
“made the mistake of seeing evil as a moral quality imbued in the
substances, not a product of how they were used.”
2. CALIFORNIA
In 1963, when he was sixteen and the population of Paonia, at around 1,100,
was near its lowest since the 1930s, Terence convinced his parents to let him
move to California. He lived with an uncle and aunt in Los Altos, then a
family friend in Lancaster, where he finished high school.
In 1965, he was admitted to UC Berkeley’s Tussman Experimental College,
a new program—replacing the first two years of curriculum for 150 of
Berkeley’s entering undergraduates—in which students created their own
reading lists and weren’t graded. He studied ecology, resource conservation,
and shamanism, which was, he said in 1994, “about the felt presence of
immediate experience in the absence of theory.” Near the end of 1966, his
mom and Dennis visited him, and he convinced his mom to smoke hash.
She felt “so wracked with guilt, and so afraid of how furious Dad would be if
he ever found out she’d actually gotten stoned with her sons, she couldn’t
really let herself go and enjoy the experience,” wrote Dennis.
In early 1967, Terence smoked DMT. Compared to cannabis and LSD,
both of which he’d encountered in 1965 and had been powerful in
transforming his personality, DMT was of a different order of experience,
raising questions that he felt science and philosophy needed to examine. By
the end of his second year of college, his library had more than a thousand
books. He lived in a three-story communal building on Telegraph Avenue in
a room that became “a sort of informal salon where people would show up to
get loaded and stay to hear him rant,” wrote Dennis, who visited him in July
of that year. “He often had a receptive audience of very stoned listeners
hardly able to speak or move while he regaled them.”
Terence worked that summer, the Summer of Love, mounting butterflies
at the California Academy of Sciences. That fall, he paused his studies to
travel with a girlfriend to India, Nepal, and elsewhere. His relationship ended
during the trip and then, in Jerusalem, he met Kathleen Harrison, who was
born on Catalina Island off the coast of Los Angeles and was also traveling
and had smoked DMT even earlier than Terence—in 1966 as a freshman at
UC Santa Cruz, when a friend offered her a DMT-laced joint, which they
shared before entering a harpsichord concert. In 2013, Harrison described
this brief encounter: “I wrote my mom a postcard from Jerusalem in 1967
that said ‘I just met the weirdest person I’ve ever met, but I suspect he’s
going to have some kind of influence on my life.’ ”
Continuing his travels, Terence went south to Mombasa and rode a
freighter to the Seychelles, an archipelago nine hundred miles from the east
coast of Africa, to focus on writing. He planted cannabis seeds when he
arrived, telling himself he would smoke the grown plants when he finished
writing his book. “According to a story Terence would later tell, when that
day came he got totally baked and realized what he’d written was terrible,”
wrote Dennis. Staying on Silhouette Island an extra month, smoking
cannabis daily, he rewrote the book.
3. NEW YORK CITY
Months later, in fall 1968, Terence was in New York City failing to interest
publishers in his book, which he would describe twenty-five years later as “a
rambling, sophomoric, McLuhanesque diatribe that was to die a bornin’,
fortunately” and was titled Crypto-Rap: Meta-Electrical Speculations on Culture.
Seated, as he described in a scene in True Hallucinations, at an outdoor
restaurant in Central Park with his friend Vanessa, whom he’d met in
Berkeley, Terence discussed a startling idea his brother—“some sort of
genius”—had that “some hallucinogens work by fitting into the DNA.”
Vanessa, the only person he knew in the city, was from the Upper East
Side. Terence said the political revolution had become “too murky a thing to
put one’s hope in.” He called DMT “the most interesting unlikelihood” in
their lives and wondered if they should “stop fucking around and go off and
grapple with the DMT mystery.” Which meant going to the Amazon. But
Vanessa already had plans in Australia. “And I am committed to this hash
thing in Asia in a few months,” said Terence, “for who knows how long?”
4. ASIA
Terence lived in Nepal, smuggling hashish and, because of his interest in
Tibet’s indigenous, pre-Buddhist, shamanistic religion, studying the Tibetan
language until late August 1969, when U.S. Customs intercepted one of his
Bombay-to-Aspen shipments. Traveling under “the dramatic assumption,” he
wrote in True Hallucinations, that “international police agencies” were
looking for him, he wandered through Southeast Asia viewing ruins and
eastwardly crossed the Indonesian archipelago collecting butterflies.
In early 1970, he returned to city life, living in Hong Kong, Taipei, and
Tokyo, where he taught English. In the Berkeley hills, meanwhile, that
summer, wildfires destroyed his friend’s house that was storing his library
and art collection. Terence obtained a false Australian passport and flew to
Vancouver, Canada, where he lived for three months, during which (1) he and
Dennis and two friends planned a trip to La Chorrera, a town in Colombia, in
search of oo-koo-hé—a DMT-containing plant preparation they’d learned of
from the June 25, 1969, issue of Botanical Museum Leaflets—and (2) his
mom, who’d survived breast cancer five years earlier, died at age fifty-seven
of bone cancer.
5. LA CHORRERA
In southern Colombia in early February 1971, Terence, Dennis, and now
three friends (Vanessa, Ev, and Dave) encountered a large specimen of
Stropharia cubensis sprouting from old cow manure in a meadow. At the
suggestion of his companions, Terence ate the mushroom. “The eerie sense
that some other dimension or scale of being had intersected with the bright
tropical day lasted only a few minutes,” he wrote in True Hallucinations. It
was “unlike any feeling” he could recall. On February 21, after living with a
Witoto tribe for almost a week, during which they hired two boys to help
them carry their things, including a kilo of unexpectedly gained cannabis and
a fiberglass butterfly net, then walking through the jungle for four days, they
arrived at La Chorrera, where they found Stropharia cubensis growing on a
large pasture where white cattle grazed.
On the night of March 4, two weeks later, deviating from the plan to spend
three months “slowly getting to know the botanical and social environment
of the Witoto” in service of finding oo-koo-hé, which seemed heavily taboo,
the McKenna brothers performed “the experiment at La Chorrera.” Using
harmine from Banisteriopsis caapi, psilocybin from Stropharia cubensis, the
body, a kind of singing, and the principles of superconductivity and
harmonic resonance, they tried to intercalate psychoactive compounds into
the rungs of neural DNA in order to create the philosopher’s stone, or, as
Terence in True Hallucinations quoted Dennis’s journal entry from that day,
“four dimensions captured and delineated in three.”
The experiment was successful and not. It did not create a
hyperdimensional object—the soul was not concretized—but it did, over
weeks, seem to cause these unusual phenomena: sibling telepathy, cognitive
hallucination, a teaching voice in the brothers’ heads, mental phone calls
decades through time, a UFO sighting containing its own debunking.
Terence didn’t sleep for nine days, during which he watched over Dennis,
who “alternated between calmness and long harangues on a supra-cosmic
scale,” claiming he’d been smeared across the universe and was
incrementally returning—condensing to the galaxy, the solar system, Earth,
his extended family, and his sibling dyad before realizing he was Dennis. Ev,
Terence’s girlfriend, remained sympathetic, but the brothers’ other friends
did not. “Everyone thought that everyone else was crazy,” wrote Terence in
True Hallucinations.
On March 21, in his first journal entry in weeks, Terence wrote that the
past few weeks had been “seemingly made of so many times, places, and
minds” that “a rational chronicle” had been “impossible.” Dennis flew home
to Colorado on March 29, and on April 13, Terence returned to Berkeley. In
July, he and Ev returned to La Chorrera, where the mushroom was less
abundant than in February. They gathered spore prints and brought them to
the States.
6. MUSHROOMS AND MARRIAGE
Five years later, in January 1976, Psilocybin: Magic Mushroom Grower’s Guide
by O. T. Oss and O. N. Oeric with drawings by Kat was published by And/Or
Press. The sixty-four-page book began with a Wasson quote on finally
knowing “what the ineffable is” and “what ecstasy means.” Written by the
McKenna brothers under pen names, it told how to grow and preserve
Stropharia cubensis—“the starborn magic mushroom”—and featured eleven
drawings of the mushroom in different contexts, including a life-cycle
diagram, glass-jarred, and cosmic.
It was the brothers’ second co-written book. The first, The Invisible
Landscape: Mind, Hallucinogens, and the I Ching, had been published the
previous year; in 229 pages, including an appendix of mathematical
equations, it had examined what happened at La Chorrera within a shamanic
framework, introduced a holographic theory of mind, and presented
Timewave Zero, a model of history viewing time as a fractal phenomenon
with an end. The Invisible Landscape had quickly gone out of print.
Psilocybin went through printings quickly. In the preface to its expanded
1986 edition, Terence wrote that more than a hundred thousand copies had
been sold and that probably more people were “involved in a religious quest
using psilocybin than ever before in history.” A year before the guide was
first published, in spring 1975, after he and Ev had separated, Terence and
Kathleen Harrison met again. Eight years had passed since their Jerusalem
meeting.
They became lovers that summer, moved to Hawaii that fall, and the next
spring, in 1976, three months after the guide was published, traveled to Peru,
where, over seven weeks, they experienced five days of cramped boat travel;
equipped themselves against insects in Iquitos; found eighty-eight-year-old
Manuel Córdova-Rios (the subject of the 1971 book Wizard of the Upper
Amazon), who recommended Juana Gonzales Orbi; flew 334 miles to
Pucallpa; failed to locate Orbi; met Don Fidel Mosombite; and, in the last
three weeks, drank ayahuasca five times. They brought two kilograms of
concentrated ayahuasca, which took three days to make, back to the suburban
community in Berkeley where they now lived. Seven months later, on
November 22, 1976, six days after Terence turned thirty and when Kathleen
was twenty-eight, they married.
7. CONSULTING
In the early 1980s, living in Occidental, California, a town in Sonoma County
as small as Paonia, with Kathleen and their children, Finn and Klea, born in
April 1978 and December 1980, Terence began giving talks at Esalen
Institute and elsewhere. “Usually the shaman is an intellectual and is
alienated from society,” he said at the Lilly/Goswami Conference on
Consciousness and Quantum Physics in 1982. “You have to take seriously
the notion that understanding the universe is your responsibility, because the
only understanding of the universe that will be useful to you is your own
understanding,” he said at Shared Visions in Berkeley in 1983. He appeared
repeatedly on a late-night Los Angeles radio show called “Something’s
Happening” to discuss psychedelics. How did this start? A 1993 interview
with tripzine offered one answer:
INTERVIEWER: So you lived on the royalties of the Magic Mushroom
Grower’s Guide alone?
TERENCE: And something which we should probably describe as
“consulting.”
INTERVIEWER: I see. [laughs]
TERENCE: [laughs loudly]
INTERVIEWER: [regaining composure] Well, I guess that’s what I was
shooting for with that question.
TERENCE: Yes, there was a lot of “consulting” in the ’70s. [laughs]
INTERVIEWER: How did your success with the Magic Mushroom Grower’s
Guide steamroll into a career?
TERENCE: As the new age got going, say ’80, ’81, ’82, I just found it
incredibly irritating, and I was busy consulting and staying home and
I also had small children, but I just thought it was such a bunch of
crap.
INTERVIEWER: Talking about crystals and such?
TERENCE: Yeah, the crystal, aura, past life, channeling business, and I
said, you know, why don’t these people check out drugs? What’s the
matter with them, my god? And finally someone persuaded me to say
that in a public situation, and it’s been constant ever since.
Terence had farmed mushrooms until 1986, when he quit after an LSDsynthesizing friend was caught. “They fucked him so terrifyingly that I saw I
couldn’t do this anymore,” he told Wired in 1999. After that, his main source
of income became talks and tapes of talks. In 1984, Sound Photosynthesis
had released a nine-hour, fourteen-minute “talking book” in which he
examined the experiment at La Chorrera, and in 1985, he and Kathleen had
founded Botanical Dimensions, an ethnobotany-dedicated nonprofit
organization that included a garden on the Big Island of Hawaii. After he
stopped farming mushrooms, he and his family moved to Hawaii and lived
there in 1986 and some of 1987 before returning to California. By the late
1980s, Terence was speaking to audiences of sometimes around two
thousand people. Publishers became “suddenly interested” in his work, he
wrote in the preface to True Hallucinations.
8. BOOKS AND DIVORCE
In Food of the Gods (1992), his first non-co-written book—and first from a
large publisher—Terence argued, via his Stoned Ape theory, that psilocybincontaining mushrooms caused the human brain-size to triple. He wanted to
title the book—in which he recast Eve, portrayed in the Adam and Eve myth
as easily tricked and deserving punishment, as brave, wise, and inspirational
—Why Eve Was Right: Plant, Drugs, and History, but his publisher said no.
“You learn your place in the hierarchy of being when you work with Bantam
Books,” he said on February 7, 1992, ten days before the book was published,
and the audience laughed. “But, seriously, this is my best shot at making a
rational argument—heh, sort of—based on archaeology, history, and so forth
for the importance of psychedelics.”
In the 313-page book, his longest, Terence also, in a part titled “Hell,” told
the histories of sugar, coffee, tea, chocolate, opium, tobacco, heroin, cocaine,
and TV, showing bleak connections between sugar (“the world’s least
discussed and most widespread addiction”) and slavery, the CIA and heroin,
and the CIA and cocaine. The book’s other three parts—“Paradise,”
“Paradise Lost,” “Paradise Regained”—focused on “hallucinogens,” as he
called psychedelics in this book, whose last chapter included eight pages on
DMT and a ten-item list—“A Modest Proposal”—that suggested cannabis be
legalized and, with alcohol and tobacco, taxed 200 percent. “Since I feel
pretty much among friends and fringies here, it doesn’t trouble me to
confess that my book Food of the Gods I really conceived of as a kind of
intellectual Trojan horse,” he said in a talk soon after it was published.
Containing a bibliography, footnotes, and “citations of impossible-to-find
books,” the book seemed to be—and was—a scientific study. Another
function, though, of this presentation was to “calm academic
anthropologists” who out of the “staid, rational discourse” would find “selftransforming elves from hyperspace with their own agenda.”
Terence’s second book, published three months later, was less Trojan
horse–like. Its characteristically long subtitle (“Speculations on Psychedelic
Mushrooms, the Amazon, Virtual Reality, UFOs, Evolution, Shamanism, the
Rebirth of the Goddess, and the End of History”) accurately stated its
contents. Its title—The Archaic Revival—referred to his idea that we should
look back in time for help and solutions like the medieval world did in the
Renaissance when they revived Greek and Roman ideas, except since our
problem was worse, we should look back further, to before agriculture and
civilization. The book collected six interviews, four transcribed talks, and
seven essays, including “Among Ayahuasqueros,” a “reflective diary” of
Terence’s trip with Kathleen, whom he described in Food of the Gods as “the
best possible companion, colleague, and muse,” to Peru in spring 1976,
seven months before their marriage.
Sixteen years after that trip, in 1992, the year Terence published four books
—the two mentioned, the limited-edition Synesthesia, and a collection of
trialogues—they divorced.
9. TRUE HALLUCINATIONS
With his third non-co-written book—a poignant, sometimes zany, scenebased memoir—Terence, at age forty-six, in 1993, externalized the version of
the story of his life that most people now know. True Hallucinations was an
updated, print version of the talking book released in 1984 that had the same
title. Changes included sentence-level edits, the excision of two UFO-focused
chapters, and the addition of an epilogue, in which he shared that his
marriage to Kathleen, despite their children and “efforts to be decent people,”
seemed to be ending—that the presence of the Logos, the teaching voice of
the mushroom, had “done nothing to mitigate or ward off the ordinary
vicissitudes of life.”
Terence called True Hallucinations “the easy-to-read narrative anecdotal
version” of The Invisible Landscape. The twenty-chapter, lightly footnoted book
was centered around what happened at La Chorrera but also examined
temporal mirages, Witoto history, avoiding “non-freaks,” replacing “the
ordinary anticipation of the future” with a Zen-like appreciation of the overall
pattern, understanding sand dunes as lower-dimensional templates of wind,
chronons, DNA, extraterrestrial life, his childhood, his career, and his family.
Terence wrote cinematically and in a more exuberant, uninhibited prose than
in his other, less personal books. He quoted his and Dennis’s journals from
when they were twenty-four and twenty. He wrote of “the every-colored
stars,” of “imagining what one can imagine.”
He described what he felt as a twenty-four-year-old in 1971 smoking a joint
on the Putumayo River—“on the edge of war-bloated, mad America,” away
from his mom’s death months earlier and the loss of all his books and art a
year earlier—on his way to La Chorrera with his brother and friends to find
an obscure psychedelic drug: “The flow of smoke, the flow of water, and of
time. ‘All flows,’ said a beloved Greek. Heraclitus was called the crying
philosopher, as if he spoke in desperation. But, why crying? I love what he
says—it does not make me cry. Rather than interpret pante rhea as ‘nothing
lasts,’ I had always considered it a Western expression of the idea of Tao. And
here we were, going with the Putumayo’s flow.”
10. FIRE AND CANCER
The year True Hallucinations was published, a year after his divorce, Terence
began building his own house in Kona, Hawaii. “The first stop on the
psychedelic trip is the library,” he said in 1994 in Sherman, New York. In
1995, he created his website. “I spent all summer learning modeling and
three-dimensional animation programs from my son because I want to
animate,” he said in Chicago in 1997. His talks evolved in the mid-to-late
1990s, including more on the internet, AI, nanotechnology, and computers
while continuing to ponder old themes. “In the course of taking psychedelics
and looking at my life and other people’s lives and narrative, I think that the
secret of—I don’t want to say anything as pretentious as transcendence or
enlightenment—but the secret of taking hold of one’s destiny is to
understand that one is a character,” he said in San Francisco in December
1998. Psychedelics, he said in the same talk, spread alienation: “But what
they alienate us from is preposterous, Earth-murdering, sexist, consumerist,
shallow, trivial, inane, insane, and dangerous.” In a two-titled talk
—“Psychedelics in the Age of Intelligent Machines” and “Shamans Among
the Machines”—in Seattle in April 1999, he discussed the “drug-like nature
of the future,” how drugs and computers are both “function-specific
arrangements of matter,” and the possibility of redeeming “the horror of
history” by externalizing the soul into a “galaxy-roving vehicle.”
At home three and a half weeks later, on May 22, 1999, he had a brain
seizure and collapsed. A CAT scan showed a tumor in his right frontal cortex.
He had glioblastoma multiforme, a rare form of brain cancer. From June 6,
1999, to April 3, 2000, ten updates were posted on his condition—written by
himself; his brother; his editor on two of his books; and his girlfriend, whom
he’d met a year earlier—on his website. “Generally my spirits are high and
my life is certainly very interesting and more emotionally rich than before,”
he wrote on June 25, three weeks after undergoing Gamma Knife surgery.
He was mostly in Honolulu for treatments, but his goal was to return every
two weekends or so to his “secret rebel base on the Big Island”—the house
he’d finally, a year earlier, completed.
Described as “a modernist origami structure topped with a massive
antenna dish and a small astronomy dome” in a profile of Terence published
in Wired three weeks after he died, the house was irrigated with rainwater
collected on a hill, powered by solar panels and a gas generator, and had
Ethernet connections “everywhere, even out on the deck” but no phone lines.
The dome was for a telescope Terence couldn’t afford. In the study, fourteen
bookcases held his second library, which included rare first editions of
alchemical texts and which, in 2007, while being stored by Esalen Institute,
which planned to make it available to the public, would also, like his first,
destruct in flames, this time not from wildfires but a fire beginning in a
Quiznos. Around the house grew patches of white-and-purple-flowered
Salvia divinorum and thick hanging vines of Banisteriopsis caapi with its pairs
of opposing leaves.
“I’ll try to be around and about,” said Terence at a conference on the
influence of psychedelics on artists held in Kona in part due to his failing
health, seven months before he died. “But if I’m not, then you know that I’m
behind your eyelids, and I’ll meet you there.”
EPILOGUE
When Terence died on April 3, 2000, at age fifty-three, his belongings
included art, books, and an insect collection. In 2008, a year after his books
were destroyed, his daughter, Klea, creatively preserved his insect collection
in The Butterfly Hunter—a large, hardcover, olive-green book featuring
photographs of 122 insects collected by Terence between 1969 and 1972. The
butterflies, moths, and beetles were photographed with the magazine ads,
newspaper articles, and typewritten manuscript pages in which Terence had
wrapped them. Each photo was an arrangement, and each page was a part of
a narrative. “The years of 1969 to 1972 were deeply formative for him; he had
left home and childhood behind, but did not yet have a family or a public
persona,” wrote Klea in the book’s introduction. “He was deciding who he
would be.”
I’ve told you about McKenna’s worldview and life. Now I’ll focus on
psychedelics, which McKenna advocated for shamanic exploration, “personal
growth work,” and as “a force that forces us to grow up and clean up.” To do
this, I will first share my history with drugs. Before I was interested in
psychedelics, I was interested in drugs.
MY DRUG HISTORY
My parents were born in Taiwan. They married on April 28, 1976, when my
dad was twenty-eight and my mom was twenty-three, before coming to the
United States that year (Dad) and the next (Mom), the only ones from their
families of nine siblings combined to leave the island country. My dad
borrowed money from my mom’s dad for his plane ticket. In upstate New
York, my mom waitressed and my dad earned a master’s degree and
doctorate in physics from the University of Rochester. My dad was thirty-five,
my mom thirty, and my brother six when I was born on July 2, 1983, in
Alexandria, Virginia. Two and a half years later, we moved to Florida, where
we lived in three houses of increasing size in suburbs near Orlando called
Apopka, Winter Springs, and Oviedo. My dad taught physics at the
University of Central Florida and founded four medical laser companies
while my mom raised my brother and me and helped my dad with his
businesses—doing almost full-time work, including all the paperwork—and
maintained our finances and household, which included Binky and Tabby,
our toy poodles. My brother left for college in Philadelphia when I was
eleven, and when I was eighteen, in 2001, I went to New York City, where I
attended New York University, majoring in “undecided.” I encountered no
drugs in my first twenty-five years, except:
• Antibiotics for a fever when I was two or three and later for ear infections.
• Tylenol Cold, Tylenol Flu, Advil, and other store-bought drugs.
• Ten to fifteen vaccine shots containing glyphosate and other pesticides,
thimerosal and other preservatives, and aluminum and other adjuvants.
• Thirty-plus injected, rubbed, and oral doses of benzodiazepines, opiates,
and antibiotics from dentists and orthodontists.
• Nicotine, β-carbolines, pesticides, and additives from a cigarette in middle
school.
• Cannabis once in high school.
• Morphine and other opiates fifteen to twenty-five times in hospitals in
high school, when my right lung spontaneously collapsed three times.
• Ten or so Percocet (left over from twelfth-grade lung surgery) in college.
• Alcohol with little or no enjoyment twenty to thirty times.
• St. John’s Wort, 5-HTP, and other legal mood-enhancers, which I dabbled
in hopefully six to ten times, with disappointing results.
• Thousands of types of pesticides, antibiotics, hormones, chlorides and
fluorides, artificial flavors and colors, and stray pharmaceuticals in food,
water, lotions, soaps, shampoos, conditioners, and swimming pools.
• Caffeine from soda, coffee, and tea most days since middle school.
Except after caffeine, when for up to two hours, one to three times a day,
I’d feel motivated and energized and happier, my experience of the world
through my body—my felt presence of immediate experience—from 1983 to
2009 was, for reasons examined throughout this book, mostly one of
frustratingly vague nausea, amoeboid posture, itchy skin, stuffed-up sinuses,
multi-cold-sored lips and gums and throat, pain-threatening eyeball
discomfort, debilitating headaches and stomachaches, worryingly long
nosebleeds, uneasy eye movements, dysphoria, dyspnea, insomnia,
bloatedness, and sluggishness.
Still, as a small child, I was very energetic. My mom called me hyperactive.
I climbed things, ran around, felt excited. I easily smiled and laughed,
sometimes for no reason. But in middle school most of that went away as I
began to feel more often sickly, anxious, tired, awkward, self-conscious, and
uncomfortable.
D.A.R.E.
At Red Bug Elementary School, 1989 to 1994, ages six to ten, my dominant
source of information regarding “drugs” was probably the Drug Abuse
Resistance Education program. D.A.R.E., which manifested in school with
police officers coming in to talk to us and on TV, billboards, and cars as
commercials, advertisements, and stickers, “dared” children “to resist drugs
and violence.” My main memory of D.A.R.E. is of not understanding why
resisting drugs was daring. The natural state of many of my classmates
seemed to be low-level, casual violence—in the form of randomly punching
and elbowing, or “bowing,” as it was called, one another—so I understood
how violence, which I disliked, partly because I was small and frail, was
something some children would need to resist. But it seemed obviously
riskier and braver—more daring—to try, instead of, like seemingly everyone,
resist, drugs. The word “resist” in combination with the government’s War
on Drugs’s motto “Just Say No” confused me because these messages
seemed to assume I would occasionally, or at least once, be aggressively
offered free drugs, a scenario I felt didn’t make sense and would probably
never happen.
D.A.R.E.’s psychology also confused me in terms of its logo, which was the
acronym seemingly spray-painted—in a slanted, all-capital, bloodred graffito
—against a solid black or white background. The design conveyed menace
and anarchy, things that obviously, it seemed to me, encouraged drug use,
violence, and other illegal behavior. My elementary-school mind, beginning
in its unsuspecting way, in the long psychedelic trip of childhood, to discern
deception in the world, sensed it was somehow unsound for D.A.R.E. to try
to offer us what it thought we would, later in our lives, want from drugs—
rebellion, disorder, chaos—as part of its strategy to keep us away from drugs.
But I didn’t think about it much. In elementary school I didn’t encounter
“drugs.” The word remained undifferentiated, referring to a single, bad
substance I’d never seen.
GEMSTONE III
In middle school, 1994 to 1997, ages eleven, twelve, and thirteen, I continued
encountering no drugs. In the minutes between classes, we played quick
games of Magic: The Gathering, except my best friend at the time, Ryan, who
wasn’t allowed to have Magic cards because his Christian mom felt they were
“evil.” In fall 1995, some of us began playing a multiplayer text-based online
role-playing game that had become available on AOL. Four or five classmates
had already been playing it heavily for weeks, it seemed, when I learned
about GemStone III, which, because it involved fantasy figures like orcs and
sorcerers, Ryan also wasn’t allowed to play.
Soon, I was playing GemStone III—a game in which I could type “east” to
move my character, a dark elf wizard I’d named Esperath Wraithling, to a
new location, which I “saw” by reading sentences describing his new
surroundings—around six hours on school days and more on weekends.
Normally, I didn’t feel awake until third or fourth period; now I was waking
early to play an unbeatable game set on a two-mooned planet called Elanthia
for an hour or more, lucid and focused, before school. My friends and I
began calling one another “addicts” derogatorily and defensively and
understandingly. It became shameful to play too much, to spend so many
hours engaged in a graphics-less, nonphysical activity. Anyone could type
“find [name of character]” to learn if whomever was in the game—which cost
something like $20 a month—so, except by creating a new character, it was
impossible to hide how much we played. Most of us never saw one another
on Elanthia; we did things alone or interacted with others—mostly adults, it
seemed—across America who’d begun playing as early as 1990. When we
met at Red Bug Lake Park to play basketball, we ended up betting GemStone
III possessions on games of H-O-R-S-E or single, half-court shots before
returning excitedly, after hours of abstinence, to our computers to be in a
language-world that, at its peak, occupied around 2,500 humans
simultaneously. We derived enjoyment and satisfaction through social
interaction (like in an advanced chat room), by exploring Elanthia (like in a
fractionally higher-dimensional novel), by amassing belongings (amulets,
weapons), and by discerning numbers increase in a recorded, public manner.
At the peak, around ten children at Tuskawilla Middle School, that I was
aware of, were “addicted,” as we continued to call one another accusingly and
sympathetically, with varying amounts of amused humor, which remained
possible because there were so many of us, giving the reality of Elanthia
some legitimacy. I was surprised to see some of us succumb this hard to a
game of spells and kobolds and empaths—a friend who usually focused
busily on extracurricular activities that colleges liked to see on application
forms, at least two football players. Our time-consuming, antisocial behavior
troubled some of our parents, but not others’, and the children of the latter
seemed to become the most obsessed. One classmate, named Brad, playing
probably nine or ten hours a school day, rapidly advanced to level 80-
something, becoming one of the most powerful characters in the history of
the game, and ended up marrying someone in real life that he met on
Elanthia.
I think my main character (I also had a halfling wizard and other
characters) was level 28 when, after two years, around the beginning of high
school, I stopped playing GemStone III.
PUNK MUSIC
In high school, 1997 to 2001, when I was fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, and
seventeen, my interests included playing piano, playing drums at home and
in Lake Howell High School’s concert and marching bands, playing
computer games with graphics, and listening to punk music. I encountered
no drugs in the first three activities. The fourth, which I enjoyed almost
exclusively alone, sometimes mentioned drugs and is also worth examining
due to its influence on my worldview. I learned of punk music in middle
school when (1) someone in GemStone III said I should listen to Operation
Ivy and (2) in a record store I recognized the Descendents from one of my
brother’s T-shirts and bought their 1991 compilation album Somery. In high
school, I often listened to punk music as my only activity (before and after
school, between classes through earphones, in my car, in bed before sleep),
focusing on the lyrics, vocals, guitars, bass, or drums. Using Napster, which
was active from June 1999 to July 2001, I downloaded thousands of songs.
Punk music primed me for Terence McKenna’s ideas, many of which I
first encountered in lyrics and liner notes in simpler, angrier, catchier, more
emotional, less contextualized form. The bands I listened to rarely sang about
paranormal, extradimensional, or mystical topics; didn’t seem obsessed with
psychedelics; and sparingly referenced deep time, but punk music and
McKenna overlapped in many other ways. Both disapproved of materialism
and consumerism and organized religion, advocated liberal and humanist
and DIY ideas, viewed knowledge as power and trusted books, and distrusted
and criticized the media, governments, corporations, textbooks, TV, and
mainstream culture. They comfortably occupied antiestablishmentarianist,
esoteric but not unpopular, deliberately independent positions in music and
philosophy, with McKenna remaining outside academia and punk bands
releasing albums through labels, like Asian Man Records and No Idea
Records, started and owned by friends.
Before “punk music,” a broad term I’ll stop using now to focus on specific
bands, I didn’t consider why every morning at school I put my right hand on
my chest and slowly recited allegiance to the United States flag in unison
with my classmates. Now one of my favorite bands, the Broadways, had a
song that began “Do you remember the first thing you had to memorize? /
Was it the Pledge of Allegiance? / A five-year-old stands for a flag / that killed
off all the real Americans.”
I’d previously never encountered sentences like these, which I began
absorbing daily from sung and screamed lyrics by almost all males in their
twenties. The Broadways, who seemed to be four undergraduate students in
Chicago, taught me, in their albums Broken Star (1998) and Broken Van
(2000), to seek wisdom and sanity from nature, to question “progress” and
technology, and to pay attention—not to celebrities and advertisements but to
the poor and homeless and indigenous and underprivileged. They suggested
that working 9 to 5, then watching TV from 6 to 10, wasn’t good. My favorite
song by them began “All down the streets the signs read / cheaper and better
technology / this capitalist vision is my nightmare / put up a sign in my face
/ what the fuck happened to this place? / I think we made a wrong turn /
look at the ugly concrete” and ended “And I wonder if this crazy world /
thinks I’m the one who’s crazy / What if I’m the one who’s crazy? (×4) / I’m
not crazy just frustrated.”
Another band that consistently and provocatively moved me was Choking
Victim, whose songs excerpted talks by the political scientist Michael Parenti.
“Born to die and you get / to sit and watch your TV set / believe the lies
before your eyes, credit cards and apple pies / Fifty stars to blind your eyes,
thirteen stripes to hypnotize / free thought is gone / you’ll never see you’re
just a pawn,” began their three-minute, twenty-seven-second song “Born to
Die,” which used the same chord progression as “Wild Thing” and was from
their Squatta’s Paradise EP, which was released in 1996, the same year as
Adderall. In “Fuck America,” from their 1999 album No Gods/No Managers,
Stza, the New York City band’s vocalist and guitarist, sang, “McDonald’s will
bloom as the major competition / Between Jesus and the devil for this
country’s religion.”
Atom and His Package—one person with a drum machine—had an
upbeat, catchy, gleeful song praising Rob Halford, the singer of Judas Priest,
a heavy metal band, for coming out as gay. In the song’s chorus, Adam
Goren sang that he wanted to be a homosexual. Since elementary school,
probably 70 to 90 percent of my classmates and maybe a third to half my
teachers had blithely used the concept of homosexuality in a derogatory
manner, calling people or things “gay” as a synonym for “bad.” I had done
this also but then had felt self-conscious and stopped, somehow realizing it
didn’t make sense and was hurtful and mindless. I’d felt alone in my change.
Hearing “Hats Off to Halford,” a song my peers would call “gay” and be
unable to enjoy, I was touched and startled, feeling more and less alone—
more because I had no one to share the song with, less because the song
indicated people existed who felt similarly as me.
The message from these bands regarding “drugs” varied, but all seemed to
view them differently than on TV and at school. Propagandhi, whose albums
included spoken word by Noam Chomsky, had members who outspokenly
used no drugs. NOFX’s song “Drugs Are Good” observed that when you use
drugs people think you’re cool. Jeff Ott, singer of Fifteen, was born in 1970 to
a drug-addicted teenager as the result of a gang rape and used drugs
intravenously from when he was fifteen to around twenty-four. In “War on
Drugs,” a song on Fifteen’s 1999 album Lucky, Ott sang that the war’s
enemies were young black men, Mexicans, poor whites, and homeless
people. He sang that his enemies were not heroin junkies, speed freaks, or
skid row alcoholics and that his enemy did not sleep on the street. In “My
Congressman,” he shared how to clean a syringe with bleach and argued
against politicians who said legalizing clean-needle exchanges would be
“sending the wrong message” by pointing out that the message of
magazines, TV, billboards, and stores was to buy cigarettes and alcohol.
These bands deromanticized and, more than other sources I’d
encountered, differentiated “drugs” for me. They connected drugs to the
CIA, Hollywood, racism, despair, mindlessness, being a victim of a larger
system, and other topics that made drugs seem more complicated than
before. Unlike MTV, most movies, programs like D.A.R.E., and authority
figures like the president, these bands, which largely constituted my
“friends” in high school, did not make drugs seem especially mysterious,
interestingly taboo, extreme, dangerous, desirable, or transgressive.
LITERATURE
In college, from 2001 to 2005, I continued listening to the bands I did in
high school but began preferring lyrics about feeling bad socially,
romantically, and especially for “no concrete reason,” as I liked to think of it.
I sought and collected and prized lyrics that directly expressed or examined
social anxiety, low self-esteem, depression, loneliness, disappointment,
disillusionment, and resignation in a personal, non-sociological, apolitical
manner. Some bands from high school had formed new bands that lyrically
mirrored my preference change—Propagandhi’s bassist had formed the
Weakerthans, whose lyrics poetically explored meek desperation and
controlled longing; members of the Broadways were now in the Lawrence
Arms, and they still sang about homeless people but added more on
unrequited feelings and having low motivation in life. “Sixty watts, brighter
than my future; an empty forty, fuller than my life,” sang Jim Marburger in
“Less Than Nothing,” a song by a band called I Hate Myself.
I wanted elaboration—paragraphs, scenes, stories, characters, worlds—and
I found it in literature, which I had begun reading in high school after
watching Fight Club and, identifying with its characters’ alienation and
unhappiness, going to Chuck Palahniuk’s website and finding, from his
recommendations, Kurt Vonnegut, Don DeLillo, and Amy Hempel. I bought
Hempel’s out-of-print collections Reasons to Live (1985) and At the Gates of the
Animal Kingdom (1990) off eBay and, in my first year of college, read her
stories repeatedly, as if they were songs. From Hempel, I found Raymond
Carver, Mary Robison, Frederick Barthelme, and others. I became especially
interested in short stories—the gamely, brazenly purified novels of them,
their almost memorizable arcs and complex epiphanies and valuable
rereadability, with many stories, like those by Lorrie Moore and Lydia Davis
and Joy Williams, startling and moving and transporting me as much on the
first reading as the third. I read and reread The Book of Disquiet, a book of
fragments by Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935), published in Portuguese in 1982
and English in 1991. “Tedium is not the disease of being bored because
there’s nothing to do, but the more serious disease of feeling that there’s
nothing worth doing,” wrote Pessoa. In a self-profile published in The
Stranger in 2010, I described myself during this time, in college, as “lonely
and friendless but mutedly excited about autobiographical narratives
featuring characters with low serotonin.”
Those—and other—writers affected and delighted me with their intimate,
detached, amusing, wry, melancholic, quietly desperate, non-melodramatic,
calming, loneliness-reducing portrayals of mundane, realistic worlds, often
from outsider perspectives. “I would never be part of anything,” wrote Jean
Rhys (1890–1979), who I discovered by Googling variations of “depressing
lonely novel” at night in New York University’s library, in her unfinished,
posthumous autobiography. “I would never really belong anywhere, and I
knew it, and all my life would be the same, trying to belong, and failing.
Always something would go wrong. I am a stranger and I always will be, and
after all I didn’t really care.”
Drugs, in the form of alcohol, featured in many of my favorite novels, like
Chilly Scenes of Winter by Ann Beattie and The Easter Parade by Richard Yates,
both from 1976, but never became the main theme. In Rhys’s Good Morning,
Midnight (1939), Sasha Jensen, an Englishwoman living alone in Paris in
1937, drank heavily and used Luminal, a product created by Bayer in 1912 that
contained phenobarbital, seemingly nightly—“I am not sad as I go upstairs,
not sad, not happy, not regretful, not thinking of anything much. Except that
I see very clearly in my head the tube of luminal and the bottle of whisky.” In
Anagrams (1986) by Lorrie Moore, a character told the reader that sedatives
helped one “adjust to death better.” Psychedelics never featured and were
rarely mentioned in my favorite books. The term “drugs” often wasn’t
differentiated, like in “Willing,” Moore’s 1990 story about an actress living in
a hotel room that was “L-shaped, like a life veering off suddenly to become
something else” in Chicago:
She would try then not to think too strenuously about her whole life.
She would try to live life one day at a time, like an alcoholic—drink,
don’t drink, drink. Perhaps she should take drugs.
This partially joke-like view of “drugs,” as a symbol for giving up on or
starting a new kind of life, was the one I embodied most during college,
when I was alone most of the time, reading and writing. I graduated in 2005
with a degree in journalism and minors in creative writing and psychology.
In 2006, 2007, and 2008, I published four books and rarely thought about
drugs—except caffeine, which I strategically used every day and thought
about, on some level, constantly.
ADDERALL AND METHADONE
In 2009, when I was twenty-six, after reading about it for months online,
including in an essay in the fall 2008 issue of n+1 magazine called “Kickstart
My Heart,” I began wanting Adderall, a drug made by Shire Pharmaceuticals
that contained amphetamine, colloidal silicon dioxide, compressible sugar,
cornstarch, magnesium stearate, microcrystalline cellulose, saccharin
sodium, and FD&C Blue #1, an 87-atom compound, or FD&C Yellow #6, a
39-atom compound. In March, a friend in Seattle mailed me three Adderall.
The effects surprised me, seeming much more powerful than I’d anticipated.
Using only 5 or 10 milligrams at a time, it made me feel like a hard-working,
fast-moving, social, contented robot. It provided mental acuity, motivation,
and improved mood for hours in which I existed as another person who was
less grumpy and immobile and inhibited.
In April, I bought something like sixty 20-milligram Adderall from my
then girlfriend Sarah’s friend. In July, a different friend of Sarah’s injured
herself and received methadone, which she gave to Sarah, and which Sarah
and I enjoyed around once a week, walking around SoHo and the Lower East
Side in twilight, eating in restaurants, seeing movies, sleeping. It lasted
much longer than Adderall, sometimes into the next afternoon, providing
pleasurable calmness and a subtle, ancient-seeming, fuzzy sensation of not
being worried about anything. A search of “methadone” in my Gmail shows
that Sarah and I were excited that summer about opiates and other drugs,
that we discussed how to get more drugs, but our relationship ended in
November.
Compared to Adderall and methadone, caffeine—which had previously
impressed me often—seemed weak and unsatisfying, its effects so
comparatively brief that it now usually just caused me to feel distractingly
and discouragingly aware that, within minutes, I’d feel zombielike and
unenthused again. After Adderall and methadone, drugs that gifted me levels
of energy and collectedness I’d never felt before, I realized I’d
underestimated the strength and usefulness of drugs, partly because I’d
suspected people of faking how powerful they were and partly because of all
the inaccurate drug information I’d absorbed since grade school.
“RECOVERY”
In spring 2010, I began using “drugs” in a staggered but increasingly regular
manner; the word differentiated to tens of words, each indicating a drug or
category of drug that I wanted to try. I excitedly viewed drugs as tools I could
use to significantly change my underlying experience of life—how I felt while
I wrote, talked to people, went to parties, watched movies, read books,
exercised, typed emails, browsed websites, gave readings. Aware that millions
of children and adults used Adderall, methadone, and other, presumably aspowerful drugs daily for years and even decades, I felt encouraged to
incorporate more drugs into my life. Aware that most people ate terrible food
that damaged their bodies more, I estimated, than drugs would damage mine
—and that, unfortunately, food provided only seconds of an elusive,
emotionless pleasure, not minutes to hours of productivity and emotional
euphoria and intimacy with one’s peers—I was encouraged to use more
drugs and also to eat healthier food, choices that I felt benefited both myself
and others. People interacting with a drugged, nourished me encountered a
pleasanter, less dismaying, often more attentive person. I was grateful and
often giddy for drugs. Used consciously in a relevant, real-life game,
amphetamines and benzodiazepines and opiates and MDMA—and other,
stranger drugs, like LSD and psilocybin, which I began trying that summer—
made my life more vivid, poignant, peopled, exciting, and interconnected.
But drugs also made my life bleaker, emptier, scarier, and more troubling.
Always aware of the reality of tolerance—that I needed to use more each time
to achieve the same effect and so was still, with drugs, required to endure
uncomfortable and interminable hours and days—I was always, on some
level, worried about my situation. I entered more social situations and
communicated more fulfillingly with drugs than without, but I also spent
more consecutive hours alone in my room wishing a “sleep machine” existed
that I could use, by pushing a button, to instantly fall asleep. I became
accustomed to not being in a social situation unless also on a drug. Soon, I
didn’t want to do anything, even solitary activities, unless I was on at least
one drug or, increasingly, two. It had once been a funny joke to want to be on
both Adderall and Xanax—an upper and a downer—but now it became
mundane and humorlessly “not a good sign.” Sometimes, I wanted to refrain
for a day or two or three—which I did gradually less—so the drugs would
work better when I restarted, but I would easily convince myself why I
should, in this particular instance, not refrain, citing any reason or
combination of reasons from “it will benefit me as an artist” to “I could die at
any moment” to “I should be extra-impulsive sometimes to jostle and
challenge my underprovoked brain and for variety.” I would sometimes not
think anything, but just take more, aware I was mindlessly giving in to what
most of me wanted. Then I would feel both troubled and dimly amused to
have, again, either rationalized myself into or just, after initial indecision,
observed myself using more drugs.
Despite viewing myself as in a committed, long-term process to use less
drugs, I found myself using gradually more in an increasingly habitual,
uncontrolled manner—a paradox I’ve conceptualized in this book as my
“recovery.” I began to “recover” from drugs in fall 2010. Some of the time,
usually while on drugs, I became convinced and even told people that I was
actually becoming happier as I used more drugs—that somehow the
chemicals were doing something beneficial to my brain, maybe causing cells
to grow that, unlike the old ones, knew how to be happy—but most of the
time I knew my behavior was definitely and disturbingly leading to more
anxiety and depression. My “recovery” continued through 2011 and 2012,
when sometimes I felt that maybe I would die soon, or eventually, from
drugs, low self-esteem, self-caused lovelessness, unstructured days and
nights, unexamined expectations I’d absorbed from various sources in
culture, a complicatedly uncomfortable experience of my body, not belonging
to any group except myself, living alone, an at least somewhat romanticized
perspective on all these things that would kill me, and a bleak worldview.
Many people had died from combinations of those things, and now I would.
It made sense and seemed normal. “There’s a horribly frightening little
passage in Jung somewhere, where he says, ‘The unconscious has a
thousand ways to terminate a life that has become meaningless,’ ” said
McKenna, who I encountered in the depths of my “recovery,” in a talk in
1994. “Meaning you’ll step in front of a streetcar, or something.” I imagine
that’s how I could have died—in a manner seeming, even to myself, with my
level of consciousness being, most of the time, lower than ever, accidental.
In January 2013, I went to live with my parents (who’d moved back to
Taiwan in 2006 after thirty years in “beautiful country,” as the United States
is called in Mandarin) for around a month, during which, viewing myself (in
a disempowering manner that was paradoxically helpful) as physically unable
to obtain drugs—because my Mandarin was bad, I feared social interaction
as much as not having drugs, I had no friends in Taiwan, and I wasn’t close
to my relatives—my recovery began.
RECOVERY
In my parents’ fifth-floor apartment in Taipei, I felt deep underground.
Sometimes I felt, even more unexpectedly, “beneath” the substrate of
concrete reality in some kind of dimensionally recessed state. At night, in
bed, in my room that was comfortingly lit by lunar and municipal light
through large windows, I felt scared. In the day, I tasted metal in my mouth.
By my request, I received Xanax in the mail from a friend, but only once;
otherwise I used only caffeine.
I returned to New York in February 2013 and restarted Adderall, Xanax,
and other drugs in somewhat considerable amounts, including thirty-six- to
forty-eight-hour, room-based, stimulant-centered binges, but much less than
in 2012 and 2011. As my drug use decreased, my knowledge and use of
psychedelics increased. In Taiwan, I’d read True Hallucinations and The
Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss, and now I ordered Terence and Dennis’s
earlier books and other books from psychedelia. With help from cannabis,
psilocybin, the McKenna brothers, myself, my parents, and my history,
including the inspiration and reasons to live I’d absorbed from punk music
and literature, my “recovery” ended at the end of August—a month when I
had a seminal psilocybin trip (examined in the next chapter) and, on a
weeklong book tour in the UK with a fellow drug-enjoying friend, my last
drug binge, as I considered it at the time but later recast, within an overall
plan of decreasing usage, as one of my last binges.
The first eight months of 2013, I was both “recovering” and recovering. In
September, my recovery finally continued alone, without its bleak
counterpart. I continued decreasing my use of amphetamines, benzos, and
opiates (I’d stopped MDMA months earlier with ease because I’d felt
aversion toward it since using it to discomforting excess in late 2010 and
early 2011) and started smoking cannabis daily. I began to “regain control of
my brain,” as I thought of it and sometimes told people. After two or three
months, with a kind of surprise that was itself surprising, I felt able to
realistically envision a future that didn’t just get worse, or stay the same, but
would actually—almost mechanically—get better, or at least feel better, over
weeks and months, as I recovered from years of dependences on various
drugs. I comprehended how, just by abstaining from damaging behaviors I’d
habitualized, life would gradually feel different—which would affect my
thoughts and worldview—and the idea seemed pleasing and surreal.
On January 10, 2014, after using only cannabis for around a week,
abstaining even from caffeine, I felt unexpectedly content and peaceful. I’d
known I would feel better over time, but I was still, in my room that
afternoon, surprised it was happening, that I had the power and opportunity
to give myself a gradual, barely noticeable, never-ending psychedelic
experience, without a peak or denouement, arcing across years instead of
hours, going somewhere without coming back. My life, I sensed with some
clarity, could slowly become vastly different. I wanted to remind my future
self about this feeling, so I typed a paragraph, wrote it on paper, and taped
the paper to my wall, then screenshotted the paragraph, emailed it to myself,
and made it my phone’s background. I didn’t want to forget:
I was beginning to change—happier, more interested in things—this
afternoon, I could feel. It’s incremental change in one direction every
day, because I’m recovering from 10–20 years caffeine, 4–7 years other
drugs, etc.
* So it will lead me somewhere new and unfamiliar. This is
how I can get out of my life. This is how life can be exciting and
interesting again. This is how my life, after 30 years, can slowly
adventure into the unknown, instead of stalling here.
BRIEF ANALYSIS OF MY DRUG HISTORY
I began late, not starting non-caffeine drugs until twenty-six and psychedelics
until twenty-seven. As a writer interested in describing my experience of the
world through varied states of consciousness, my late start seems
advantageous. I like to imagine that, instead of immediately using it
habitually once I learned to enjoy it, I deliberately and wisely, with
impressively delayed gratification, abstained (mostly) from cannabis until I
was thirty, so that its effects, against the backdrop of three decades of nonstoned consciousness, would be more distinctive and powerful and so that,
by then, I’d have a decade of practice in languaging experience. My drug
history is also notable, besides my late start, for shifting almost completely
from drugs to psychedelics—taking thirty-two years to attain a satisfyingly
balanced, I feel, looking at my graph, arrangement.
* I overestimated with “4–7”—I’d been using drugs in considerable amounts for
around three-and-a-half years. With “etc.” I referred to the culture I’d consumed,
my thoughts and goals, and my malnourished, toxified, dysbiotic, inactive,
understimulated body.
DIFFERENCES BETWEEN PSYCHEDELICS AND DRUGS
The word “drugs” referred to one thing for most of my life, then to uppers
and downers, then to stimulants and MDMA and benzodiazepines and
opiates, and so on, but now I found it most useful, personally and in terms of
this book, to differentiate the word to two main categories—drugs and
psychedelics, which could specify to tryptamines (psilocybin, DMT, LSD),
phenethylamines (mescaline, 2C-B), and others (THC, salvinorin A). One
similarity between psychedelics and drugs is that we are always experiencing
both, are always on fluctuating amounts of serotonin, DMT, GABA,
adenosine, oxytocin, dopamine, opioids, cannabinoids, and hundreds of
other compounds for which we’ve evolved receptors. The amounts we are on,
and their ratios, determine, or at least strongly influence, our realities. “Life
itself is a drug experience,” said Dennis McKenna, who earned a PhD in
botanical science in 1984 and has published around forty papers on
psychedelics, in an interview in 1994. Seven differences:
1. Drugs are, on average, more habit-forming than psychedelics, which can
also, like almost anything, be habit-forming, but, unlike drugs, can also
dissolve habits.
2. Drugs don’t cause mystical experiences at safe doses; psychedelics do, as
was shown in 1962 in the Good Friday Experiment in which graduate
divinity students ingested psilocybin or a placebo. Eight of ten on
psilocybin had mystical experiences, and in a study twenty-four years later
on seven of the eight, all seven viewed their experience as “one of the high
points of their spiritual life.”
3. For me, drugs stopped feeling amazing after the first few times—and
never felt profound—but psychedelics consistently feel both amazing and
profound. The word “profound” had little meaning for me before
psychedelics—before, among their other effects, I experienced reality so
differently that, from the rare far vantage, I discerned the utter weirdness
of normal existence.
4. Drugs don’t seem to guarantee relief from boredom. Psychedelics I would
immediately rate 10 on a 1–10 scale for boredom relief, even for the easily
bored, because they seem to catalyze the imagination through stimulation,
like some drugs, but also at least two other ways, bringing in emotion and
the unconscious.
5. In fall 2014, while doing interviews for the German edition of Taipei—
which I wrote during a period of increasing drug use, from early 2010 to
late 2012, about a previous, overlapping period of increasing drug use,
from November 2009 to August 28, 2011—I was asked, after directing
conversation there myself, about the difference between psychedelics and
drugs. I said one difference was that drugs affected my energy levels,
mood, focus, and other attributes—calmness, patience—that I
experienced noticeable fluctuations in while sober, for example depending
on how much I’d slept. Psychedelics seemed to affect aspects of
consciousness that normally changed only slightly, if at all.
6. Another difference seemed to be that drugs increased my current levels by
taking from the future. When the future arrived, I felt the lack of what I’d
already used. Psychedelics, I told one or two journalists, didn’t seem to
take from the future. Months later, then, I noticed that if I smoked
cannabis all day—and all day felt partly in a dream—then at night I didn’t
dream, and that when I abstained I dreamed vividly. I realized
psychedelics, or at least cannabis, did seem to take from the future.
Cannabis seemed to take something that was felt during sleep.
7. In early 2016, on Vimeo, I watched a 2015 talk by Kathleen Harrison in
which she said psychedelics awakened compassion in her. I realized they
did in me also, and that drugs did not. On Xanax around my parents, I’ve
never felt almost overwhelmingly endeared by their behavior and
perceived them as children, as I have on cannabis and LSD. Peaking on
large doses of Adderall alone in my room, I’ve never sobbed while
thinking fondly and lovingly about my parents, as I have on cannabis and
psilocybin.
“I am not an advocate of drugs; I am an advocate of psychedelics,” said
Terence McKenna, who felt it was “too early for a science” regarding the
psychedelic experience. “What we need now are the diaries of explorers,” he
said in an interview in 1989. “We need many diaries of many explorers so we
can begin to get a feel for the territory.” In the next two chapters, I examine
my and his experiences with the two compounds he promoted most—
psilocybin and DMT.
PSILOCYBIN
On August 5, 2013, at around 12:50 A.M., in my fourth-floor apartment on
29th Street in Manhattan, I ate 2.5 grams of an unknown species of dried,
psilocybin-containing mushroom. I ate over forty to fifty minutes, motivated
partially out of boredom, nibbling absentmindedly while feeling, as I did
those days, in 2013, less doomed than one or two years earlier, but only a little
and not consistently. Sometimes I still felt “non-humorously fucked,” as I
thought with varying amounts of humor; this was my eighth and final month
both “recovering” and recovering. I had no plans that night, except to
eventually sleep.
Seated at my desk, part of me felt like the mushrooms wouldn’t do
anything. I hadn’t had psilocybin in around two months, so had forgotten the
strangeness and potency of its effects and reverted somewhat to my view of
psychedelics prior to eating mushrooms three years earlier—that they
probably weren’t as intense as people claimed. People seemed to use the
same words to describe food and naps and images and normal reality—
amazing, profound, mind-blowing, unbelievable—as psychedelic experiences
not, I’d realized over time, because they were lying, and not necessarily
because they were being characteristically hyperbolic, but because the
phenomenology of psychedelics was difficult “to English,” as McKenna said
in “In the Valley of Novelty” (1998), observing that psilocybin and DMT
seemed to particularly affect “the language-forming portions of the brain,”
which resulted in “bizarre states of mind” because it was these portions that
explained what was happening.
Psilocybin’s initial, rumblingly stimulating effects prodded me from my
near-catatonic state, gazing at things with slow eye movements and no
distinct thoughts, a common status for me in 2013, into a healthier mode of
detail-oriented, collegial behavior: I began packing my other 2.5 grams of
mushrooms to mail to a friend, who was at Yaddo, to nurture her interest in
psychedelics. My calm productivity continued as I emailed her a photo of the
package and a block of phone-typed text, recommending she eat the
mushrooms alone at night with no obligations the next day (which was my
situation) and sharing a little about my mushroom experiences:
• I’d eaten mushrooms ten to fifteen times in the past three years.
• I’d rarely eaten them alone. I’d eaten them before a reading, before going
to the American Museum of Natural History, before seeing movies in
theaters, at social gatherings, and with friends in the city and elsewhere.
• Around five times I’d concluded, for minutes, that I’d died.
• The most I’d eaten at once was probably 3 or 4 grams. That night was the
first time I’d weighed a dose.
• Whenever I ate more than maybe around 1.5 grams, the intensity and
alienness of the effects re-amazed me, causing me to think, “How could I
have forgotten this?”
After sending my email at 1:44 A.M., my room began to feel spaceship-like.
In my liver, 36-atom molecules of psilocybin were breaking down into 31-
atom molecules of psilocin, which were entering my brain, where they were
interacting with serotonin and other receptors. I felt myself leaving Earth in
an intimidatingly disquieting manner, like I was on a vessel I hadn’t
suspected to exist, departing a place I’d assumed was the only place.
FLOOR
Feeling exposed and distractedly physical on my chair, I moved to the floor,
sitting cross-legged with palm-up hands on the sides of my knees to relax and
center myself. I lowered my eyelids, ending visual input of the locked,
artificially lit concrete box of my room, which was permeated by microwaves
from my phone, computer, router, and other apartments. Instead of the
usual placeless darkness, I was calmly surprised to gradually—over around
twenty seconds, with a certain mental effort—find myself in an unfamiliar,
off-sunny, un-gaudily shimmering expanse.
Focusing various distances and directions into my eyelids, I looked at this
place. Its golden, slightly visceral appearance modulated subtly and rapidly.
Sometimes I didn’t seem to be in an alien sky, but an incomprehensibly
advanced structure with busily morphing tiles on every surface.
Wanting to explore, I tried to hover directionally as a cursor-like
perspective, but I couldn’t seem to move. I realized I was still required to
think while disembodied. Somewhat troublingly, I couldn’t just exist and
feel. I was like a baby here, unable to do anything. I acknowledged I might
explore this place—the imagination—better with more psilocybin and a
healthier mind and body.
I became aware of a dull attention from a presence in the distance and
instinctively wanted to raise my eyelids—to regain the privacy I normally
enjoyed in my room—but didn’t, partly because it wouldn’t make sense; I’d
be acting like Tabby, my family’s charmingly awkward toy poodle who would
hide her head and seem to believe we couldn’t see her because she couldn’t
see us. I defaulted to a waiting-based stasis, and we settled into what felt
vaguely like a pre-social situation.
Except in ways that I quickly discerned were just me paranoidally
imagining things, I had never encountered a seemingly independent
abstraction like this. Part of me rationalized it as an electromagnetic burst
elsewhere in the building—a giant TV turning on in a room on another floor,
forty feet away, maybe—that I was abnormally detecting, due to reconfigured
senses on psilocybin, and had partially interpreted as an entity in the
imagination.
In Heaven and Hell (1956), published when he was sixty-one, Aldous
Huxley wrote about how “the aid of a chemical—either mescaline or lysergic
acid”—brought one to the “antipodes” of the mind, which like Earth in the
mid-nineteenth century still had its “unmapped Borneos and Amazonian
basins.” Earth’s antipodes had duck-billed platypi and marsupials. “And if
you go to the antipodes of the self-conscious mind, you will encounter all
sorts of creatures at least as odd as kangaroos,” wrote Huxley. People, in his
view, could not control these oddities; we could only visit “the mental
equivalent of Australia” and “look around.”
Before anything happened, the thing—already somewhat in the distance—
drifted dirigibly away, seeming incurious in me in a way that made it seem
realer. Its casual indifference gave its world a mundane, universe-like quality.
BED
I climbed on my bed and lay supine. As I pulled my childhood blanket over
me with slow-moving, funny-feeling hands, it seemed disturbingly different
than ever before. It felt frighteningly complicated, comprised of startlingly
minuscule Lego blocks, which increasingly also formed the air and my bed
and, in a slowly engulfing way, my body. I felt precariously maintained as a
conscious being by the liquidly recombining, intershuffling, everywhere
blocks. This briefly felt fun in an obscure, risky, claustrophobic, darkly zany
way. Then I felt I was “sinking” in a way that seemed hazardous.
Soon I became convinced that something I didn’t comprehend had
malfunctioned—which made sense because things broke all the time—and
that now I was stuck and unlocatable. I seemed secluded inside a mountain
on a lifeless planet. Not in a mountain cave, or the solid mountain itself, but
an X-Y-Z-T coordinate (with T being time) in the finished object of the
universe that marked the inside of a mountain somewhere. To find me,
others would need to “dig” from a higher dimension—something, I sensed,
that wasn’t done. I was “encased” where none would look. This was my life
now. I was fucked.
After realizing all this began when I lay on my bed and stopped moving, I
felt glad and relieved. I stood and shakily walked three steps to my sofa,
where I sat.
SOFA
Holding a ringed binder of watercolor paper and a red crayon, ready to write
or draw something, I sensed the pointlessness of recording information
outside oneself, something I’d also sensed four days earlier after smoking a
non-threshold dose of DMT. “Crayons,” I wrote in words covering almost
half the paper, surprising myself a little. The word seemed written to occupy
an unsuspecting majority of me so that a smaller part of me could analyze
the concept of note-taking in private.
Note-taking seemed misguided and neurotic. Experience was the only
usable information—takable from existence in the universe—and it was
recorded automatically. My life was notes, etched into the four-dimensional
object of the universe. Or was that just my behavior? My thoughts and
feelings left no trace here; they went into books and then other minds.
I became distractedly hyper-focused on the screen-like nature of my vision.
My face was so near the screen of my life that it was all I could see. This was
normal, I reminded myself. I saw my crayon-grasping hand and other, lowerresolution things, like my wooden floor.
“Watching this,” I wrote below “Crayons” in smaller letters.
I began to feel like I was an alien experiencing the life of a human named
Tao Lin. I seemed to have my own life elsewhere but was currently “reading”
the higher-dimensional book of Tao Lin. Once he died, I would return to my
real life. I could sense my family—a partner and two children, it seemed—
desiring my return in a moderate, healthy, appreciated manner. “I’ll be there
soon, I just have to do this thing,” I thought without dread or despair,
referring to Tao Lin’s life, which I sensed I was living, was enduring and
enjoying, for financial reasons. Pleased that life apparently involved much
more than I previously thought, I felt eager yet patient to return to my world.
All I knew now was Tao Lin, but soon I would complete my job and, with the
satisfaction of a long-term task accomplished, return to my life wiser and
more financially secure. I sensed maybe I was here not for money but to
gather information. To collect data on humans. I reviewed my notes, to
which I’d at some point added a third line:
Crayons
Watching this
i’ll be there soon
Taking notes seemed pointless. I knew I’d already realized this. I felt calm
and restless. I’d learned my alien heritage, ascertained and affirmed my
situation as an extraterrestrial being, and communicated warmly with my
real family. I was ready to move on to other topics.
BED AGAIN
I returned to my bed, where instead of lying supine, which could invoke Lego
ontology, I sat cross-legged and forgot I was an alien. I thought about my life
and sobbed, realizing I was finally going to end years of decreasingly
enjoyable drug use. I’d “realized” this before but never this confidently, this
lucidly. It felt actualized already. I cried thinking about how I was going to
distance myself from the writing world and Twitter and Facebook and all
culture except books and maybe movies and live alone in a rural area and
publish a book about it or never publish another book but just disappear and
maybe much later emerge messianically with a book or just never reemerge.
I felt surprisingly able to decide what to do in terms of years and decades
instead of hours and days, as if the decisions were literary.
I cried at what was happening.
My plan changed sometimes. I felt I would contentedly settle into a longterm relationship—countering my history of relationships lasting around a
year each—and use my free time to leisurely research and carefully explore
the mystery. I was, uncharacteristically, convinced, for minutes, that I would
have children.
At 3:08 A.M., physically uncomfortable and becoming seemingly
depressed, unsure if the effects were still intensifying and not wanting to be
in a tensely unhappy mood, I used half a Xanax bar, which contained
alprazolam, cellulose, cornstarch, docusate sodium, lactose, magnesium
stearate, silicon dioxide, and sodium benzoate.
From 3:37 A.M. to 3:43 A.M., sitting on my bed sobbing, I tweeted “337,”
“339,” “340,” “Resting,” “Resting on 340,” “Then 341,” “I’m crying,” and
“343” from my iPhone. I felt sometimes outside time, like time was a planet
whose waves I floated on in a boat, beneath the stars of other worlds. Time
was keeping me here, conscious.
At 3:46 A.M., I tweeted “I’m leaving behind all this lit game shit. I’m
laughing. I dunno what I’m leaving behind in specific terms but I’m cutting
it all off bye” from my MacBook. Taipei had been published two months
earlier. On drugs at the release party, seated, I’d signed books seemingly the
entire time for a line of people who kept coming, including ones who gifted
me half-filled bottles of drugs that I accepted with private chagrin.
I noticed through bleary eyes, with some confusion, that the boxes on the
screen didn’t conceal their contents. Words and sentences were inside boxes,
but I could see and change them, looking down into the lower dimension of
the screen. This cross-dimensional access felt poignant and revelatory. I
suddenly felt it didn’t matter how I released information—emails, texts,
tweets, even thoughts. My thoughts seemed public and findable in a higher
dimension whose existence made life as relatively insignificant as the
contents of a book. My tears felt dense and complex as blood. I encouraged
my crying, sometimes viewing it as an uncommon, beneficial exercise. The
next hour and a half included these atypical behaviors:
• With my hands covering my face, I forgot I could move my hands off my
face, then moved them off my face and wondered why they weren’t
attached to my face.
• I texted and/or called four friends. Usually, I did not call anyone and
rarely initiated texting, especially at around 5:00 A.M. “Listen: an alien was
in me,” I texted Gian, the only friend to respond until hours later. “It was
using my body to figure out this terrain!” An alien, I said, was using me to
“scope out this place,” to learn about “this thing we’ve got set up: family.”
Gian, who I knew used psilocybin to treat his cluster headaches,
responded, “You don’t think they have families?” I answered, “I’m
laughing / No they do / Of course they do / I respect that,” called him, and
we talked for around twenty minutes. I felt he was “controlling” me
because his voice seemed to emanate from inside my head. He assured
me he wasn’t.
• Sitting on my bed, I looked across my room and felt on the verge of
materializing my ex-girlfriend Gwen by imagining her. I saw a nebulalike, person-size, glitchy distortion in the air and felt startled and looked
away from where she would’ve appeared.
AFTER THE TRIP
Around 5:40 A.M., almost five hours after eating mushrooms—feeling back
and alert and a little frenetic because I wanted to hurry while I still felt
motivated and exhilarated to “leave society,” as I’d begun to think was the
main message of my trip—I deleted my Tumblr, my publishing company
Muumuu House’s Tumblr, and Muumuu House’s Facebook. I considered
tweeting my Gmail password, then tweeted my Facebook password, then
deleted my Twitter and Facebook, feeling both surprised and not. I’d often
“wanted” to but had never actually deleted my accounts on those websites
before.
At 6:01 A.M., my room was lit by doubly indirect sunlight from that day’s
5:58 A.M. sunrise. I deleted my blog and main website, taolin.info, which I’d
posted on almost exclusively in lowercase letters since 2005, when the URL
was reader-of-depressing-books.blogspot.com, and replaced it with four
paragraphs in capital letters saying I was canceling my UK/Australian
obligations and looked forward to being with my family and a few friends.
My message implied I wouldn’t be communicating with anyone else
anymore. In paragraph two, I said I was confused, yawning, and periodically
laughing. In paragraph four, I reiterated I was confused and deemed my note
“OFFICIAL.” The first paragraph was the longest:
I DELETED THE ‘FRONT PAGE’ OF MY GMAIL ACCOUNT…ALL THE
EMAILS. I OFFICIALLY HAVE NO MEMORY. DON’T THINK I HAVE
ONE OF OYU. I’M SORRY!! LOL. I LOVE MY FAMILY, WILL BE
LOOKING FWD TO SPENDING TIME WITH THEM. AND A FEW
FRIENDS. EVERYONE ELSE: LOL JESUS GOOD BYE…NOT IN A BAD
WAY…OKAY. JESUS…
I considered deleting my Gmail account. Increasingly, I felt I needed to
rush to fulfill my plan or else it wouldn’t happen; as my determination and
vision left, I’d probably simultaneously rationalize, I knew, that it was better
not to do this; so, using large scissors, I cut the cords connecting the internet
to my modem, the modem to my router, my computer to its charger, and
other things to other things, feeling only a little self-conscious. I put the cut
cords, modem, router, and computer into a black garbage bag, which I put
into a public, bus-length garbage container on the street by a construction
site two blocks away.
REST OF THE DAY
I slept for around three hours, then walked thirty blocks south to the Apple
Store in SoHo to buy another computer. My brother, months earlier, had
said he would buy me one for my birthday. I had turned thirty on July 2, one
month and three days earlier. After selling me a MacBook Air, an Apple
employee said he’d email me the receipt.
Outside, I considered email. Nearly all my communication—with family,
friends, acquaintances, media, career-related entities, readers, and
combinations of those—occurred by email. When I’d desired deleting my
Gmail, I hadn’t hurried enough, and the feeling had left. I wanted to want to
leave society as much as before; instead, I seemed almost totally pulled back
in already. I had bought a computer in a process that began more than a
month earlier. I had, from my phone, emailed my editor and agent
apologizing—somewhat needlessly, as both had read my all-caps message
and emailed their support—and saying I was okay and not canceling my
UK/Australian obligations. In the UK, in three days, I would promote and
discuss Taipei; journalists would talk to me about drugs and young people. I
would be deep in society for at least another month, during which I’d
become very far from the feeling.
Walking to New York University’s library—Bobst Library—to use their
computers, I continued thinking about my expending momentum, which
had felt unstoppable around twelve hours earlier. Now it seemed so
inconvenient to delete my email account that it felt flatly, obviously
impossible. Soon, within hours or days, I would forget how it had felt to
excitedly believe I’d be living alone in a rural area within weeks or months.
I felt dramatic in a way that itself felt dramatic and false. Why did I feel
vaguely ashamed and melodramatic for actualizing change? For trying to
leave a life I increasingly disliked, dreaded, and hated? Disposing of my
computer—even if on some level I’d known I would get another—and
deleting parts of my internet presence were precious, rare behaviors that I
didn’t want to diminish, belittle, or ignore. I wanted to remember them and
how I felt to do them. It was twilight and cloudless—I was in a quiet part of
the city, south of the library—and I wanted to stop moving, to kneel and
weep, but I kept walking.
NEXT FEW DAYS
As my urge to immediately leave society dissipated, I doubted the wisdom of
my plan. It seemed wiser—more effective and earnest and considerate, less
frantic and belligerent and crazed—to leave slowly, patiently, and carefully. I
began to view my desire not as weakening but transforming—from an
isolated outburst to a nuanced, lifelong theme. I didn’t want to leave the
interconnecting technology of the internet anymore, just parts of it. I
regained my Twitter and Facebook accounts, which were impossible, I
learned, to delete without thirty days’ notice—or, in other words, took thirty
days to delete—and reinstated taolin.info in minimal form, without the
stream-of-consciousness, retirement note–like message.
I would leave society—its drugs and language and ideas and habits and
opinions and websites—incrementally, as a gradual and evolving process. I
would use psychedelics, books, my history, my mind, and my body to
continue learning and to fill my unconscious with more of my experiences
and the mystery and less of culture and its hierarchies, so that I wouldn’t
sink, like in quicksand but without a directionalized struggle, back into the
life I’d once wanted—and had felt, surprisingly and gratefully, empowered—
to leave.
I don’t view my experience as a “bad trip,” as I imagine some may think. I
view it as my favorite trip that I’ve had on psilocybin—the one I’ve given the
most attention in my mind and now in print. For me, a bad trip would be one
where I hurt myself or others, was imprisoned, or, say, watched TV and ate
candy for three hours. I view the trips I share in this book as lessons that
were discomforting, portentous, frighteningly intense, and safe. Psychedelic
experiences uniquely combine safety and intensity, I’ve noticed. Other
extreme activities—wingsuiting, mixed martial arts—don’t seem as low-risk,
accessible, feasible, or transcendent.
Without psilocybin, I don’t see the imagination brightly with details while
awake. I don’t realize I’m alien-occupying Tao Lin, sob profusely, delete my
websites, feel outside time, announce life changes in typo-dominated blocks
of text at 6:01 A.M. or any other time, or discard my computer. Psilocybin
removed me from the creodes of my habits and provoked me into long-term
change. I’m grateful for all these effects, which aren’t all its effects.
McKenna said all psychedelics were similar at low and moderate doses,
causing boundary dissolution, increased access to unconscious thoughts and
behaviors, compromised ability to repress and ignore memories and
problems, and faster and broader and less linear cognition. The effects
became idiosyncratic only at high doses. Beyond my experience of 2.5 dried
grams is a weirder, less biographical experience, which McKenna said
occurred reliably, for a 160-pound person, on 5 dried grams of Stropharia
cubensis, which was reclassified in 1951 as Psilocybe cubensis, or other amounts
of other psilocybin-containing species, experienced alone in silence and
darkness, or, in the headline form McKenna often said, “5 dried grams in
silent darkness.”
McKenna stressed that people who hadn’t done this, which he called a
heroic dose, hadn’t experienced psilocybin’s full spectrum of effects. I’m
unsure if I’ve eaten a heroic dose, which for me at 125 pounds would be 3.9
dried grams, but I know I haven’t in silent darkness (in 2011, 2012, and some
of 2013, I often feared being alone in dark places, making it uneasy for me to
spend even five minutes in darkness) and that I haven’t, except maybe in
inchoate ways, experienced the two effects McKenna said occurred on heroic
doses.
VISIBLE LANGUAGE
McKenna said heroic doses could impart the ability to produce language into
a shared space where it was viewable in 360 degrees by others on psilocybin
or DMT. “The thought that is heard becomes more and more intense until,
finally, its intensity is such that, with no transition, one is now beholding it
in three-dimensional, visual space,” he said in “New Maps of Hyperspace”
(1984). “One commands it. This is very typical of psilocybin.”
He theorized humans could evolve this arguably telepathic behavior;
telepathy, in his view, wasn’t hearing what others think but seeing what
others mean. A species gaining a vaguely magical skill like this seems
unlikely and science-fiction-like, which, as I increasingly expect the
unexpected, makes it seem like a reasonable prediction. The strange
possibility of it reminds me of the J. B. S. Haldane sentence from Possible
Worlds and Other Papers (1927) that McKenna often paraphrased: “Now, my
own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but
queerer than we can suppose.” In “The World Could Be Anything” (1990),
McKenna theorized humans were a one- or two-gene mutation away from
being able, through endogenous DMT, to speak visually. He found an
approximate precedent of visible language in nature in octopi, who folded
their soft, chromatophored, texture-changing bodies into selective
concealment, employing “blushes, dots, stripes, traveling fields” in their
“dance of light.” McKenna compared human speech—in which one made
noises to another, who checked their private dictionary for the meaning of
those noises, then made noises back—with octopi communication, in which
there is no dictionary:
Both parties are seeing the same thing because my body is my
meaning. I become my meaning. And you behold the meaning I have
become. I am like a naked thought. Not even a naked nervous system.
More naked than that. I am like a naked thought, in aqueous space,
unfolding in time. I maintain this is why octopi eject clouds of ink; it’s
so they can have private thoughts.
The other effect of high-dose psilocybin McKenna described also involved
language but was unrelated to visible language. It was the invocation,
allowing, or triggering of “a voice in the head,” which McKenna called the
teaching voice, the Logos, and, most often, “the mushroom.” McKenna didn’t
necessarily believe what the mushroom told him; rather, they dialogued.
THE MUSHROOM
From 1971 until he died, McKenna industriously promoted human resymbiosis with the mushroom. He ingested it at a range of doses, learned
and taught others how to grow it, connected it to human evolution, and
mythologized it, outlining and sharing a billion years of its possible history to
“the human beings,” as he said the mushroom called us. In possibly gracious
return, the mushroom shared aphorisms and one-liners and ideas—most
notably the theory that all times are harmonic-resonantly related because a
fractal wave conditions events on all levels, from milliseconds to centuries—
with McKenna, who downloaded selections of these into the public domain
as print and spoken-word memes. “Nature loves courage,” he quoted the
mushroom. “If you don’t have a plan, you become part of someone else’s
plan,” he quoted. “Within the mushroom trance, I was informed that once a
culture has complete understanding of its genetic information, it reengineers
itself for survival,” he said in 1982.
Much of what the mushroom told McKenna was answers to his questions.
When McKenna asked what it was doing on Earth, it said, “Listen, if you’re a
mushroom, you live cheap; besides, I’m telling you, this was a very nice
neighborhood until the monkeys got out of control.” Asked about “the social
chaos at the end of history,” the mushroom said, “No worry, bro. This is what
it’s like when a species departs for hyperspace.” Asked how to save the world,
the mushroom said, “Each person should parent only once.” McKenna called
this “an astonishing idea.” He elaborated in “In the Valley of Novelty”:
This is not zero population growth, this is population falling by 50
percent every twenty years from here on out. If people in the high-tech,
industrial democracies would limit themselves to one child, almost
immediately the destruction of the Earth’s ecosystems and resources
would halt. We preach population control in the third world, but the
statistics show that to a woman in the first world who has a child, that
child will consume between eight hundred and a thousand times more
resources in the course of its lifetime than a child born in Bangladesh.
But the mushroom—who was sometimes like Dorothy of Oz, sometimes
like a pawnbroker—did not answer all of McKenna’s questions. McKenna’s
approach to it, he said in “New Maps of Hyperspace,” was Hasidic. “I rave at
it; it raves at me. We argue about what it is going to cough up and what it
isn’t.” In “In the Valley of Novelty,” McKenna said the mushroom composed
its message “out of bits and pieces of what you already possess” and so “the
more you put into your head, the more far-out your trips can be.” In “The
Psychedelic Option” (1990), he said that, once, during a tumultuous time in
his life, he ate mushrooms to try to resolve his personal difficulties. Before
the trip, he prepared a question—“Am I doing the right thing?”—and during
the trip he asked it. “What kind of a chickenshit question is that?” answered
the mushroom. “To ask an extraterrestrial entelechy?” Other things the
mushroom would not tell included what happened to human consciousness
after death and, as McKenna discussed in a talk in Maui in 1994, what it was
for itself:
The scariest thing to say to it is “Show me what you really are for
yourself.” At that point, it just begins to come apart, and you can’t
stand it. After forty seconds of that, you say, “I’m sorry I even asked.”
You know, reassure me, because you have a sense, my god, this thing
is what it seems to be. It’s a galactic intelligence. It’s a billion years old.
It’s touched ten million worlds. It knows the history of 150,000
civilizations.
EXTRATERRESTRIAL
The idea that Stropharia cubensis—and the other two-hundred-plus known
species of psilocybin-containing mushrooms—did not originate on Earth was
proposed early in McKenna’s career, in 1976, and he continued to suggest
and promote it throughout his life. The idea came from the mushroom itself,
according to McKenna, who quoted it verbatim—“straight transcription,” he
said in 1983—in the foreword to Psilocybin:
I am old, older than thought in your species, which is itself fifty times
older than your history. Though I have been on earth for ages I am
from the stars. My home is no one planet, for many worlds scattered
through the shining disc of the galaxy have conditions which allow my
spores an opportunity for life.
In the two-page quote, the mushroom explained that its nearly immortal
body (“only the sudden toxification of a planet or the explosion of its parent
star can wipe me out”) was a network in the soil with potentially more
connections than in a human brain and that it sought symbiosis—a relation
of mutual dependence and benefits—with humankind. In its memory was
“the knowledge of hyperlight drive ships and how to build them.” It would
trade this knowledge for a ticket—via humans—to worlds around stars
younger and more stable than the sun.
McKenna said one reason he liked to “make this argument about the
mushroom and the extraterrestrial” was to show people “how one can see
things differently.” In the mushroom-focused, penultimate chapter of True
Hallucinations, he wrote that species with star-travel would “look as they
wished to look” and that the mushroom, living on dead organic matter,
seemed “designed with Buddhist values of noninterference and low
environmental impact in mind.”
Other evidence, besides the mushroom’s own claims, supporting the
extraterrestrial-mushroom theory can be found, in McKenna’s view, by
examining the psilocybin compound. McKenna stressed psilocybin’s status
as the only known 4-phosphorylated indole in nature. This was unusual, he
said in his tripzine interview, because “the way biology works is if you have a
molecule useful in a biological system, then in other biological systems you
will get the same molecule or tiny variants.” He called psilocybin “as artificial
as a Coke bottle.”
McKenna often pointed out that psilocin and DMT are closely related to
serotonin, the 25-atom compound that mediates tens of functions in animals.
When I contemplate how these three similar compounds, all made from
tryptophan, cause three drastically different experiences, I sense this
indicates something about how little of the world a human can detect.
On Earth, serotonin was probably first synthesized three to four billion
years ago by cyanobacteria and later by multicellular plants and fungi before
by animals, in which, after neurons evolved around 600 million years ago, it
functioned as a neurotransmitter. It’s unknown how old psilocin and its
“storage form” psilocybin are, but they’ve been found only in fungi, a
Kingdom of life that evolved probably at least 2.4 billion years ago. DMT,
which is psilocin minus an oxygen atom, probably existed more than three
billion years ago in small amounts and then in large amounts around 700
million years ago, when land plants evolved. Today, DMT is widespread in
plants and animals. In humans, it has been shown or theorized to mediate
attention, orgasm, inflammation, tissue regeneration, immune regulation of
carcinogenesis, neuroprotection in times of low oxygen, spontaneous
psychedelic states, the perception of dark matter or parallel dimensions,
dreams, sleep, childbirth, and death. McKenna was most interested in the
experience of smoked DMT, about which, in 1994, he said, “I’m here to tell
you that it is real—there is a doorway into another dimension.”
“Magic” is a seventh word that McKenna and psychedelics helped me
define. Before, I associated “magic” with its fantastical meaning of a skill
used to harm and heal, its figurative meaning in which auspicious,
uncommon events were called magical, and its literal meaning as a synonym
for impossible. I avoided using the word because it referred to something I
couldn’t remember ever experiencing or detecting, though I suspect I did
once, as a baby or toddler, before I knew the word, view the world as
figuratively and literally magical. Now I associated the word excitedly,
earnestly, and specifically with psychedelics—cannabis, which made normal
experience magical; psilocybin, which caused behaviors and feelings that
seemed previously, personally impossible; and especially DMT, which
produced experiences seeming both impossible and unimaginable.
DMT
On October 3, 2015, a Saturday, my internet friend Tracy emailed me in the
afternoon saying she’d completed her third extraction of DMT—from
chacruna leaves purchased in an herbal market in Iquitos—and would be in
New York City from Tuesday to Sunday for the ninth annual Horizons:
Perspectives on Psychedelics conference. Would I like to try some of her
DMT?
By then I’d smoked DMT three times. The first time was in December
2012, three months after learning of Terence McKenna. A chemistry student
(and fan of my writing) had mailed me five self-synthesized doses for $25 in
mid-October, and the waxy, orange substance had remained unused in my
drawer with my drug stash. I’d avoided it due to feeling that, at this time in
my life, while failing more than ever to wean myself off drugs and at times
borderline suicidal, my DMT experience would likely be horrifying.
The day the DMT arrived, I’d written “i have dmt on me but want to wait
until i feel better via tapering off xanax before using it” in an email to Gwen,
my then girlfriend. Ten days later, on October 29, 2012, Hurricane Sandy
caused multiday electrical blackouts in areas of the bottom third of
Manhattan, including my apartment building, where Gwen and I and some
friends, aware the world was supposed to end soon, had gathered. The
coming apocalypse—predicted, it seemed, by the Mayan calendar and, in a
way I was only vaguely aware of then, McKenna—plus the hurricane
encouraged us to indulge in a nearly weeklong drug binge. (Later, I learned
that McKenna argued that humans were, at most, centuries from the end of
time but stressed it was not possible to know the end date. He chose a date—
December 21, 2012—only so he and others could graph and better
contemplate his Timewave theory, it seemed to me. But various people and
media had irresistibly latched on to the date, sensationally promoting it as
when McKenna believed the world would end.) On November 18, still alive
after the eschatologically, meteorologically backed binge, Gwen and I
returned, in emails, to the topic of DMT. We wanted to try it but, like the
previous month except more, didn’t think our timing was wise. I wanted first
to “recover more,” I said in an email. We decided, as our activity for the
night, for one of us to snort heroin and the other to ingest Suboxone—a
decision based on what drugs we had—and draw or do something else
productive, and so my “recovery” continued. By late December I was
“recovering” more than ever.
But I felt bored and uncomfortable one night and was alone and wanted to
alter my sensation of existence and had no other drugs. Being inexperienced
with smoking (I’d smoked around twenty times ever), I suspected I wouldn’t
inhale enough DMT to leave the world, and I didn’t. Sitting on my bed, I felt
disconnected, unpredictably spaced, buzzing sensations that seemed both
physiological and psychological. I wasn’t sure if the effect was all due to the
DMT or also because, in a vigilant state of motionless self-awareness, I was
detecting or exacerbating a preexisting condition—some form of
amphetamine-related brain damage, internal micro-twitching, or tinnitus-like
inner-ear problem. I felt electrified around eight times, at first dreading it,
then somewhat desiring it because it obviated, if crudely, my mundane
despair and seemed to hint at more of itself. I left my bed once or twice to
put more DMT in my glass pipe, which Gwen and I had used three months
earlier to smoke a vial of crack that a friend had mailed me. I continued to
ineptly and, fearing the full experience, probably self-sabotagingly, with my
bad smoking skills, smoke little amounts of DMT, squandering two or three
doses.
Seven months later, in July 2013, I tried DMT again. I was less hopeless
and using considerably fewer drugs than in December, but still years or
many months, I felt, from a mental and physical state recommendable—by
myself and, I imagined, most people—for smoking DMT. Seated on my bed
with legs dangling off, I kind of impulsively smoked one dose of DMT
(“~105mg,” according to the chemistry student), inhaling more than in
December because, due to increasing cannabis usage, I’d gotten better at
smoking. I included a non-psychoactive, half-dried herb with the DMT and I
think I inhaled more than once. I tried to remember how much time was
supposed to pass—how many seconds or, an especially aloof part of me
thought, minutes—until the effects began. I felt I knew this information.
Distractedly, I considered how my half-conscious approach to DMT might be
accidentally wise or even ideal, since I felt relatively calm. “It goes to my
blood, which goes to my brain, so shouldn’t it have worked already?” I
thought. “Or at least by now?” I wondered what I should be thinking about.
Then something happened that scrambled time and erased my memory,
interrupting my continuous experience, since birth, of life, even though I
remained conscious. I was suddenly so distant from my prior situation inside
a body that I could only sense my life—and the world it was embedded in—
as a vague myth, shockingly. The blipped passage of my life—a dot of thirty
years in a landscape of billions—seemed like a microscopic span of capillary
inside the furred ear of an animal on a planet I was rocketing away from in a
vessel that had entered a wormhole and departed the universe.
I arrived, with amazement, in a silvery-gray, bulgingly dimensional,
complicatedly pulsating, profoundly unfamiliar-feeling, nonphysical place
that seemed ancient, public, and, because I couldn’t change perspective,
strangely screen-like. It seemed like a dungeon room from The Legend of
Zelda (1986) experienced from inside the game; things seemed able to enter
from left or right, but nothing did. I felt 50,000 years away from where I was
before—not in the past or future but in one of the other directions away from
the planet of time. At one point I realized with panic that I needed to
experience 50,000 years to return to my prior existence, which I couldn’t
remember; I don’t remember how that resolved. Then I was in a sky-like
whiteness, densely and glaringly bright. There was something there, and as I
tried to comprehend it, it flew away. To chase it, I applied mental pressure
behind my eyes. I was trying to use language on it, which I sensed would kill
it, which I felt wouldn’t happen because of how swift and elusive it seemed
in its own environment, outside language.
Parachuting, then, through the night sky of the one planet, out of trillions,
that I’d left and forgotten—falling slowly through blank space—around six
minutes after smoking, my trip now ending, I sensed I could currently do,
and so feel, anything imaginable, as in a lucid dream, which I’d never
experienced. I wondered how to take advantage of this opportunity. I didn’t
want to merely feel “good,” didn’t want to indulge in sensations from the
familiar spectrums of physical pleasure, abstract euphoria, or mindless,
pointless joy. What satisfied me unconflictedly? I couldn’t think of anything.
I didn’t want to imagine myself in any situations. I tried to communicate
telepathically with a friend, and it seemed to almost work. Finally, as if giving
up due to time constraints, I considered sex—deriving sexual pleasure by
fantasizing about a situation with an imaginary woman or focusing
imagelessly on the sensation of orgasm. I was next aware of myself with my
pants half off. I went to my computer and began typing.
A flock of things I’d told myself to remember flew mutely out of view in
the sky outside the stuffy cabin of my mind as I focused on one aspect of the
experience, trying to type coherently about it:
i should have expected this unexpectedness but by its quality it’s
definitively not able to be expected
the experience of dmt is unexpected…but it’s not that…it eludes even
that definition because naming it would give one the illusion of it having
a connection to the word, which would mean allowing oneself to expect
it
it’s outside language, except by being outside language it can’t be
described, or to describe it would be to kill it
it’s an entity that resists description in language
meaning it’s an entity that is the opposite of the bias created by
language
it’s anti-language
I typed some lines trying to express the inadequacy of what I’d typed—the
six lines here that seemed frustratingly and faintly comically irrelevant to
what I sensed I most wanted, but still hadn’t begun, to remember. Urgently
thinking I shouldn’t dwell on one topic—especially one in which, having
begun analyzing my note-taking, I was already twice removed from the
experience—I tried to desultorily address an array of what I was continuously
forgetting, like a dream but quicker, dreams being memorable in part
because they have familiar things and people. I typed “am i actually the
question that someone else is asking to someone else?” in reference to
sensing, at one point, that my life was an interrogative communication going
from source to recipient. I typed that on DMT it felt possible to leave Earth
irreversibly—something I’d told myself was crucial to remember. I typed that
maybe I was spreading DNA dimensionally. I couldn’t, at my motivation and
energy levels, which were low, remember anything else. Over days, I
remembered more, but my new memories seemed like language and
imagery thrown back at my original memories of the language-proof, higherdimensional object of what had happened, further obscuring and distorting
it.
If death by comet was unexpected, and departing Earth nonphysically like I
did on psilocybin was, after decades in the same metaphysical place, beyond
unexpected, my experience of smoked DMT was beyond beyond unexpected.
It was around two ontological corners. It was closing closed eyes twice, or
waking, incredibly, thrice. It was a mental sneeze that kept intensifying,
ludicrously, instead of ending in a second. These are ideas I can contemplate
to slightly remember how it felt. DMT became extra frightening and notable
to me after this trip. It seemed possible I did experience 50,000 years, hour
by hour, before returning with amnesia of my exile, to my life in the
universe, where only five minutes had elapsed.
The next day I uncharacteristically and half-consciously walked forty to
fifty blocks without a destination, framing where I lived in two rectangles,
and for three or four more days I remained more active, less neurotic, and
saner, I felt, than normal. I abstained from pills with unusual ease, spent less
time mindlessly refreshing websites, and dwelled less on irrationally
conceived problems. I theorized this was because I was deficient in DMT.
Three years later, I would find support for this theory while researching
glyphosate—Earth’s most used pesticide—which made plants, fungi, and
microorganisms unable to make three amino acids, including tryptophan,
which plants and animals used to make DMT and other compounds.
Eight days after the second time, I smoked DMT a third time. Alone in my
room, using the rest of my orange DMT, I smoked less, it seemed, than on
July 24, when I had my “50,000 years” experience. Early in the trip, I became
distracted by my eyes. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to open or close them; trying
both, I couldn’t discern a difference. After realizing I was wasting time on
the visual aspect of my experience, I rushed to focus elsewhere and then at
some point experienced “alien sex,” as I later, back in the universe, termed it.
On my computer, I typed “all non-experience activity seems pointless,
seems worthless, like typing, like recording any info outside oneself” and
four more lines before fully realizing I was, again, failing in my note-taking. I
refocused and began typing about sex—a topic I’d stressed to myself to
remember. I’d sensed the presence of a faceless, bodiless, genderless
abstraction, and the experience had felt intensely sexual. This time I did not,
like the previous time, feel duly disappointed in myself for thinking about sex
while in the imagination; the interaction this time did not seem pleasurebased. I was only terming it “sex” because it had been as intense and
relational as sex. Like how I hadn’t died during my psilocybin trips when I’ve
felt dead, this wasn’t sex. I didn’t know what else to type. I’d forgotten most
of the trip. I typed that I wanted to smoke more DMT—“as much as it takes,
to be in the space it puts me into to completely go there”—but I had none left
and didn’t try to get more.
Unable, after four or five days, to recall what it felt like, I rarely thought
about DMT. I increasingly associated it with my “50,000 years” sensation,
which made it seem scary and risky. What if I smoked it and had to wait
50,000 years again to return to my life? Hadn’t I warned myself that I could
go elsewhere permanently? I wanted to recover more before trying DMT
again. It was August 2013, the month of my psilocybin trip in the previous
chapter.
Twenty-six months later, when Tracy emailed me, I was assuredly
recovering from drugs. In the past year, I’d used benzos only around ten
times and hadn’t used any amphetamines or opiates. Eating healthier,
sleeping better, and exercising more, I was less depressed and anxious and
more stable and in control of my thoughts and behavior than maybe ever
before. I had no excuses not to smoke DMT. I thanked Tracy and said yes to
her DMT, which I’d learned a lot about since last smoking it.
N,N-dimethyltryptamine, the simplest psychedelic and commonest in nature,
a 30-atom compound made by marine animals, amphibians, reptiles,
mammals, and plants, was synthesized in 1931 and found to be psychoactive
in 1956 when Stephen Szára injected himself with it in his lab in Budapest,
Hungary. In South America, aboriginals have used it for millennia,
insufflating it in snuff preparations and drinking it in ayahuasca, a drink
made by boiling or soaking the woody vines of Banisteriopsis caapi—or other
species from the Banisteriopsis genus—with zero or more DMT-containing,
or other, plants. Compounds in Banisteriopsis caapi inhibit the enzyme that
breaks down DMT in the gut before it can reach the brain. “How, one
wonders,” wrote ethnobotanist Richard Evans Schultes (1915–2001) in 1988,
“did these Indians find from the 80,000 species around them these two
additives with such extraordinary effects?”
In 1963, City Lights published The Yage Letters, a sixty-eight-page
“epistolary novel” in the form of twelve letters from William Burroughs
(1914–1997) to Allen Ginsberg (1926–1997), a reply, a reply to the reply, and
an epilogue. Burroughs, in his letters, described going alone to the Amazon
to find yagé—another name for ayahuasca, which is used by people across
hundreds of languages—in a 1953 journey that “prefigured,” wrote Dennis
McKenna in 2012, the McKenna brothers’ in 1971. “South America does not
force people to be deviants,” wrote Burroughs, observing that one could be
“queer or a drug addict and still maintain position” and that in the States “all
intellectuals are deviants.” He described two yagé experiences in detail—one
seeming painful and unencouraging, one entrancingly hyperdimensional. In
the first, Burroughs vomited repeatedly, convulsed with nausea on all fours,
twitched uncontrollably, swallowed five Nembutal, had “a chill like malaria,”
and slept. In the other, which was added to the book in its second edition in
1975, he visited Composite City, a place of “addicts of drugs not yet
synthesized” and “blind paranoid chess players,” where boys sat in trees
“languidly masturbating” and “the unknown past and the emergent future”
met in a “vibrating soundless hum.” In the morning, still high, this occurred
to him: “Yage is space time travel.”
DMT became illegal in late 1966, and Terence McKenna first smoked it in
early 1967 as an undergraduate at Berkeley. Compared to LSD, it was “so
much more alien, raising all kinds of issues about what is reality, what is
language, what is the self, what is three-dimensional space and time,” he said
in an interview in 1988. In “Rap Dancing into the Third Millennium” (1994),
he wondered why DMT wasn’t “four-inch headlines on every newspaper,”
why theology hadn’t enshrined it as “its central exhibit for the presence of the
other in the human world.” DMT was physically harmless—its brevity meant
the body, which made and used it, knew what to do with it—but still
dangerous, McKenna stressed, due to the possibility of “death by
astonishment.”
COMPOSITE OF COMPOSITES
From 1967 to 1994, McKenna smoked DMT around forty times. In “A
Weekend with Terence McKenna,” a 1992 workshop, he said when he first
did DMT, he “couldn’t bring anything out of it,” but he went back and kept
“working at it.” In “Time and Mind” (1990), “The Search of the Original Tree
of Knowledge” (1992), “Rap Dancing into the Third Millennium,” and the
aforementioned workshop, he described composites of his trips. From his
four spoken composites, I’ve made a print composite.
0:00. First toke. Colors brighten, edges sharpen, distant things gain
clarity—“there is a sense as though all the air in the room has been
sucked out.”
0:10. Second toke. You close your eyes and “colors begin racing
together” to form a mandalic, slowly rotating, usually yellow-orange
thing—“the chrysanthemum,” which you break through or, using your
glass pipe, require another toke.
0:20. Third toke. The chrysanthemum parts. There’s the sound of “a
plastic bread wrapper” and a feeling of transition, then “it’s as though
there were a series of tunnels or chambers that you are tumbling
down.”
0:40. You burst into “this place.” In one composite, McKenna said,
“And language cannot describe it—accurately. Therefore I will
inaccurately describe it. The rest is now lies.” His engagement with
this aspect of DMT—that the experience can’t be downloaded into as
low-dimensional a language as English and so one has to create a story,
a series of words conveying as much about the teller as the experience,
to talk about it—increased my interest in his DMT accounts. The place
is indirectly lit and seems underground—“everything is machine-like
and polished and throbbing with energy”—and as you enter there’s “a
cheer” and then you’re “swarmed by squeaking, self-transforming elfmachines” who say “Hooray! Welcome!” And, in McKenna’s case,
“You send so many and you come so rarely!”
0:50. You’re thinking, “Jesus H. Fucking Christ, what is this?” DMT
doesn’t affect “the part that you call you.” You’re like before, but the
world has been replaced. You’re saying, “Jesus, a minute ago I was in a
room with some people, and they were pushing some weird drug on
me, and, and now, what’s happened? Is this the drug? Did we do it?”
1:00. The ball-like elves, made of language, run forward. “These things
do not require belief to sustain their existence—you may doubt, you
may deny, yet there they are.” Each elf elbows others aside. “Look at
this, take this, choose me,” they say. “And then—and you have to
understand they don’t have arms, so we’re kind of downloading this
into a lower dimension to even describe it, but—what they do is they
offer things to you.” This continues for around three minutes, during
which the elves, speaking an advanced form of visible language,
encourage you not to stagnate in astonishment but to pay attention, to
do what they’re doing.
4:10. Then—“only 5 percent report this”—“everything stops and they
wait, and you feel like a torch, a spark, lit in your belly, that begins to
move up your esophagus.” Your mouth opens and “language-like stuff
comes out.” The elves “go mad with joy.”
4:40. “The whole thing begins to collapse in on itself.” The beings
move away, and “usually their final shot is they actually wave goodbye.”
There’s “a ripple” and you realize “two continua are being pulled
apart.” McKenna said, “And often it’s very erotic, although I’m not
sure if that’s the word. But it’s almost like sex is the surface of which
this is the volume.”
5:00. “You’re raving about it.”
7:00. “You can’t remember it.”
McKenna theorized DMT mediated “the spiral descent into dream”
because, among other reasons, when people smoked it, their closed eyes
darted as if “shoved into deep dreaming.” McKenna had dreams in which he
was handed a pipe of DMT, smoked it, and it worked, implying that one
could, at least while asleep, convince oneself to make it. He said everyone’s
DMT experience would differ, except for how dramatic it would be; once, he
introduced a Tibetan lama—“a name that you would recognize, although not
one of the top five, but a more wizened, older, stranger character”—to DMT
and the lama said it was “the lesser lights,” that one couldn’t go further
without “breaking the thread of return.” McKenna concluded:
This has to be taken seriously. In other words, the “it’s only a
hallucination” thing—that horseshit is just passé. I mean, reality is
only a hallucination, for crying out loud, haven’t you heard? So that
takes care of that—it’s only a hallucination. What we’ve got here, folks,
is an intelligent entelechy of some sort that is frantic to communicate
with human beings for some reason.
WHO ARE THEY?
McKenna called them tykes, fairies, self-articulating sentences,
translinguistic elves, friendly fractal entities, elf legions of hyperspace, meme
traders, art collectors, and syntactical homunculi. From my three trips, I’d
only gotten as detailed as “faceless, bodiless, genderless abstraction” in
describing any entities I’d encountered. From his tens of trips, McKenna
formed four theories on who they were, which he presented “without
judgment” because he was “not sure.”
1. Aliens. McKenna said he could imagine aliens that wanted to interact with
humans but had ethics preventing them from landing on Earth, thinking,
“Let’s analyze these people. Okay—they’re kind of hardheaded
rationalists, except they have this phenomenon called ‘getting loaded,’ and
when they get loaded, they accept whatever happens to them, so let’s hide
inside the load and we’ll talk to them from there, and they’ll never realize
that we’re of a different status than pink elephants.”
2. Entities in a parallel continuum. “Call it fairyland, call it the Western
Realm, whatever you like, but you don’t go there in starships.” McKenna
called this possibility “friendlier to Pagan notions” and observed that
“human folklore in all times and places except Western Europe for the last
three hundred years has insisted that these parallel domains of
intelligence and organization exist.”
3. Dead people. McKenna reached this theory “reluctantly”; due in part to
spending his adolescence and early adulthood “getting free from
Catholicism and its assumptions,” he found it “hair-raising.” His evidence
for it included that the entities seemed to love us, care for us, and be more
aware of us than we of them.
4. Fractal shards of himself, in that if one breaks a mirror, each piece reflects
an entire, tiny you. This theory was supported by how McKenna-like the
entities were—in their zaniness, contagious glee, and obsession with
visual language—but was not supported in other ways, like those
examined next.
RICK STRASSMAN
Rick Strassman (b. 1952) studied DMT in an arguably opposite way from
McKenna. In 1990, Strassman began the first new, government-funded
research in the United States in more than twenty years on the effects of
psychedelics on humans. From 1990 to 1995, he administered around four
hundred intravenous doses of DMT to sixty volunteers with extensive
experience with psychedelics. The results, which he shared and analyzed in
DMT: The Spirit Molecule, included an unexpectedly high number of
encounters with “seemingly autonomous nonmaterial entities” in
“freestanding, independent levels of existence.” The entities were called
Jokers, clowns, “the entities or whatever they are,” cartoonlike people, aliens,
guides, helpers, reptiles, mantises, bees, spiders, cacti, stick figures, and, by
at least one person, elves. When people opened their eyes, the hospital room
overlapped with the DMT reality.
In DMT, which was published in December 2000, eight months after
McKenna died, Strassman wrote that, due to Burroughs’s frightening
accounts of its effects, the compound had remained “relatively obscure” until
the mid-1980s, when McKenna began “praising it publicly and lavishly.”
Strassman was familiar with McKenna—in a footnote he said he’d visited
Terence in Hawaii and that Terence had estimated 5 percent of people he’d
given DMT showed “nearly no effect,” a number matching Strassman’s study
in which three of the sixty volunteers were unaffected—but most of the
volunteers, who had little contact with one another, were not. Strassman
often asked volunteers if they were familiar with “popular accounts of DMT-
mediated encounters with elves or insectoid aliens”; few, “if any,” were;
therefore, he argued, the entities did not seem to be “a type of mass hysteria
or a self-fulfilling prophecy.”
In a 2013 essay titled “DMT Research from 1956 to the Edge of Time,”
Andrew Gallimore and David Luke wrote that around half in Strassman’s
study had reported “travelling to normally invisible worlds and meeting an
array of peculiar beings.” The essay argued that this might not be “a later
counter-cultural affectation” but “a core feature” of the phenomenology of
DMT because it had also featured in the first DMT tests on humans, in 1958
and 1959, before cultural input on DMT existed. In 1958, in Budapest,
Stephen Szára injected thirty volunteers, mostly doctors from the National
Institute for Mental and Nervous Diseases, where he worked, with 0.7
mg/kg, or around 50 milligrams, of DMT. Of the surviving accounts, one
person said the room became “full of spirits,” one saw “two quiet, sunlit
Gods,” and one encountered “strange creatures, dwarfs or something.” In a
study done a year later, a “33-year old psychotic” given 50 milligrams of DMT
intramuscularly met “horrible” “orange people” who were “not human.”
One of the more shocking experiences in Strassman’s study was by a
volunteer named Ken. It isn’t a representative experience, but I share it here
as counterpoint—equally appalling but tonally opposite—to McKenna’s
experiences.
[Ken] settled down at about the 5-minute point, but grimaced and
shook his head. Within a couple more minutes he took off his
eyeshades and stared straight ahead. His pupils remained large, so
Laura and I sat quietly, waiting for him to come down further. At 14
minutes, looking shaken but keeping some composure, he started
[talking],
There were two crocodiles. On my chest. Crushing me, raping me anally.
I didn’t know if I would survive. At first I thought I was dreaming, having a
nightmare. Then I realized it was really happening.
I was glad he didn’t have the rectal probe
*1
in place, this being a
screening day.
Tears formed in his eyes, but stayed there.
“It sounds awful.”
It was awful. It’s the most scared I’ve ever been in my life. I wanted to ask
to hold your hands, but I was pinned so firmly I couldn’t move, and I
couldn’t speak. Jesus!
In DMT, Strassman also described his two-year, remarkably persistencerequiring (“I called every day for the next ten days, asking for the fax.”),
Kafkaesque (“The DEA would approve neither Dave’s request to make DMT
nor my Schedule I permit to possess it until the FDA approved the protocol.
The FDA couldn’t give me permission until I possessed the drug and tested
it for safety.”) process, involving syncopated interactions with an ethics
committee, a scientific advisory board, the FDA, the DEA, and others, of
getting approval to do the studies. Strassman shared this narrative to show it
was possible.
His research, which eventually included psilocybin, ended in 1995 after,
among other difficulties, his ex-wife was diagnosed with cancer, his Buddhist
monastic community began criticizing his research and “withdrawing their
personal support,” and he was denied permission to relocate the research
setting to somewhere less egregious than a loud hospital, which in an
interview he called “the most distasteful, in some ways, possible place for
people to have huge trips.”
Near the end of his book, Strassman, a medical doctor, wrote that he “had
little interest in or knowledge about alien encounters” before the DMT study
and that, after, he felt required to include “contact” as a phenomenon
mediated by “high levels of brain DMT.”
At around 7:00 P.M. on October 10, 2015, one week after emailing me her
DMT offer, Tracy arrived at my apartment after spending her day at the
psychedelics conference in a church by Washington Square Park. We’d met
online in 2007 through our blogs and since then had communicated tens of
times, including in 2009, when a website asked me for recommendations
and I chose, with four other things, Tracy’s Microsoft Paint blog, calling it
“my favorite collection of one-panel ‘comics’ online or in print,” but we’d
never met in person. I’d learned of Tracy’s interest in psychedelics the
previous year, when she noticed my Vice column and emailed to say she was
“quite possibly the biggest Terence McKenna fan in the world” (which she
qualified with “but probably not? idk”) and that McKenna was why she was
studying altered states of consciousness in college. After graduating, she’d
traveled and studied in Peru for three months, returned to the States with
dried leaves of chacruna, or Psychotria viridis, and done an “acid-base
extraction” on them—a method involving lye, naphtha, coffee filters,
ammonia, a freezer, and distilled water—to isolate their DMT in a crystal
form.
Tracy said I should smell the white DMT, which was in a contact lens case.
I said I wanted to focus first on not sneezing. She showed me two tabs of
LSD in the case’s other side and said she didn’t like LSD. She held the case
toward me and I accidentally exhaled, causing a little DMT to go in the air. It
smelled like mothballs, which I hadn’t smelled since childhood, making the
scent distinctive and familiar. To smoke it, I’d made a plastic-aluminum
device—a two-liter bottle with the bottom replaced with foil—into which
vaporized DMT could be stored until I unscrewed the cap and inhaled it all at
once.
*2
I’d learned how to make this by searching “how to best smoke DMT”
on YouTube and clicking the second result—“How I’ve Smoked (DMT)
Dimethyltryptamine”—which had more than 450,000 views.
We discussed Tracy’s new job, writing for a local newspaper, then planned
what to do after my trip. I said I wanted to drink iced coffee and type about
my experience; in my email response seven days earlier, the previous
Saturday, I’d mentioned wanting to “focus on typing about the experience for
like hours” right after my trip. Tracy said that, in return for the DMT, she
would at least like for me to briefly tell her what happened before she left. I
agreed to this plan, which seemed more than fair.
Tracy used my wood-handled pocketknife, which I’d used, mostly to cut
food, almost daily for around two years, to transfer DMT to a crater of foil. As
we taped the foil to the bottle, part of me somewhat automatically, as a
person who routinely considered each situation’s worst possibilities, felt
paranoid that Tracy was there to poison me. It seemed unwise and
unnecessary to not share this intuition, which I felt could lighten the mood.
From what I could discern of her sense of humor based on our online
interactions and her Microsoft Paint art—one drawing was of an olive-eyed
face with the caption “i have olive eyes im scared”; another was a girl with
two cats, ice cream, and other things stacked on her head, her arms around a
cat and a monkey, and the caption “i have it all”—I felt Tracy might enjoy my
revelation.
Seeming maybe a little taken aback but not unnerved, Tracy said she
wasn’t going to kill me. This was really DMT. I said I believed her fully,
which I did. I said I wanted to go for a walk first. We decided to smoke
cannabis before going outside.
—
We walked east three blocks, turned 180 degrees, and walked back toward my
apartment. We discussed Holotropic breathing, Kundalini yoga, and Weston
A. Price (1870–1948), a Canadian dentist who visited fourteen non-modern
societies in the 1930s, photographing teeth and studying diets. Price
published his findings—that aboriginals prized foods that modern people
shunned, like animal organs and animal fats, and that modern food resulted
in cumulative degeneration—in Nutrition and Physical Degeneration (1939),
which included more than 150 photos of Native Americans, aboriginal
Australians, Eskimos, and other dietarily non-modern people, like the
isolated Swiss of the Lötschental Valley. Physical degeneration was bodywide, but Price focused on facial degeneration. Modern people can’t fit all
thirty-two teeth in their mouths in a neat, aligned manner not, I learned, due
to breeding between races—as some, Price observed, had theorized—but
multigenerational malnutrition. Aboriginals, to name one difference, began
feeding women nutrient-dense food—egg yolks, liver, seafood—for up to six
months before marriage, then during and after pregnancy.
The more time and physical scale, from galaxies to microbes to molecules,
I included in my model of the world—and the more I absorbed the work of
Price, McKenna, Harrison, and others who viewed deep time and aboriginals
and nature with curiosity and enthusiasm, as obvious sources of knowledge
—the more complex and, surprisingly, less confusing the world became. In
the past, it had seemed impossible to learn accurate information about health
and diet; now it increasingly seemed wise to trust aboriginal diets, which had
developed and optimized over tens of thousands of generations outside the
influence of publicly owned companies, which seemed to be the main
influence on what twenty-first-century modern people ate and viewed as
healthy. Aboriginal ways with food—the calm result of millions of years of
nature-embedded evolution—had not been warped by a century and trillions
of dollars’ worth of advertising, marketing, branding, and packaging from
thousands of corporations.
The effects of society-wide degeneration included pain, confusion, dark
humor, and, it seemed to me, a kind of restlessness. The more suffering that
was built into the human body, the deeper human consciousness—
squirming and uncomfortable inside malformed bodies—burrowed into the
imagination, reaching stranger places and downloading subtler and more
complex and grotesque and startling ideas and behaviors and art and lives
into the universe. Physical degeneration, which in its current thread began
with agriculture at least 12,000 years ago and worsened significantly in the
twentieth century with non-organic farming, factory farms, processed food,
thousands of synthetic compounds, and depleted soil—the terrestrial source
of nutrition—seemed to be one factor that encouraged individuals, through
discomfort and dissatisfaction, to invent things, start companies, write
novels, cause wars, explore unknowns, theorize transcosmically.
—
In college, I’d been surprised to read a line of backstory in Lorrie Moore’s
fractal novel Anagrams, which was made of four stories that were ideally, said
Moore in an interview in 2001, “thought of as little satellites orbiting” the
short novel ending the book, revealing that a character had, as a child,
“nightly pressed her front teeth hard against the heel of her hand, to push
them back: orthodontia for the poor and trailered.” I didn’t grow up in a
trailer and had gotten braces like most of my peers, but I also, like Moore’s
character, had pushed my teeth—and other parts of my skull—with the heels
of my hands at night in bed. After recognizing the behavior in Moore’s
fiction, I realized many children probably felt intuitively compelled to push
their teeth into their mouths, to try to change their skull shape, not just me.
After reading Nutrition and Physical Degeneration in November 2014, I finally
realized why.
My teeth and tongue had always felt too big—especially before having
eight teeth pulled so the remaining twenty-four could non-snaggledly fit—for
my mouth, which felt small behind lips that seemed often almost numb with
oversizeness. I’d assumed my face felt bad because I wasn’t as healthy as
other children, or that this was just how life felt—mocking, cramped,
obnoxious, achingly awkward. I’d assumed it was normal for most people to
have buckteeth, crooked bites, crowded mouths, and other facial problems.
Now I was glad and empowered to learn it wasn’t normal. It was because our
upper and lower jaws, among other body parts, were thwarted expressions of
human DNA—were degenerate—and had been, in this diet-induced way that
could be reversed in future generations, for only, depending on the person, 1
to, at most, around 480 generations, “only” because the human species was
at least 11,200 generations old.
—
Back in my room post-walk, I said I was going to type about how I felt, as per
my DMT checklist, which I’d created the day before, stipulating that, before
smoking DMT, I would (1) type about how I feel, (2) meditate, (3) breathe.
“Typing how I feel now,” I typed on my MacBook Air, which I’d purchased
twenty-six months earlier. The past week, I’d sometimes anticipated my
upcoming DMT trip causing me to do what would seem, from my current
perspective, deeply inconvenient—isolating myself in some permanent way,
deleting my email and other accounts, disposing of my computer, phone,
keys, and/or cards—but which, post-DMT, would seem irresistible. “I feel
kind of disoriented and blank,” I typed in notes.rtf, a file I’d typed in 97 to 99
percent of days since October 28, 2013. “Earlier I thought it would be funny
and interesting if I felt blank during this and maybe that is making me feel a
little blank.”
I told Tracy I was going to sit and breathe. I entered my DMT tunnel,
which I’d also created the day before. In the afternoon, using my blacksheeted mattress as a movable wall, I’d created a DMT corner, which, at
night, I’d tightened and decreased into a tunnel, where I’d slept on my yoga
mat with my childhood blanket; supine in darkness, around midnight I’d
considered how I’d had a hedonistic trip (on DMT), an alien-sex trip (on
DMT), and a “leave society” trip that was briefly messianic (on psilocybin).
These seemed to be possibilities I’d gotten through. Now I would try to have
an exploratory, information-gathering trip.
After breathing cross-legged, I stood and breathed with swinging arms to
further oxygenate and calm myself. I smoked another hit of cannabis, which
hadn’t been part of the plan. Despite this transgression, I felt in a good,
somewhat playful, childlike, non-despairing, mostly unworried, ready mood.
I reviewed my post-DMT plan:
1. Tell Tracy what I saw
2. Type account
3. Drink caffeine while typing if desired
4. Try going into third-person if desired
Tracy brought the plastic bottle into the DMT tunnel, and I felt not ready
anymore. I felt a little like hiding and being alone and quitting, though I was
smiling and vaguely giddy. Remembering that some volunteers in
Strassman’s study had floundered and spasmed, I wondered aloud how to
position my body. Tracy suggested sitting with legs stretched ahead. I
decided on cross-legged. I said I wanted to verbally rehearse what was about
to happen—I would heat the foil, the DMT would vaporize, I’d inhale air,
exhale air, unscrew cap, inhale DMT, give Tracy the bottle, close eyes—but
Tracy said no, I shouldn’t overthink it. In my indecision, I felt grateful for the
confidently stated instruction, but I wanted to talk more to expend restless
energy that was becoming anxiety, so I kept talking and we seemed to argue a
little on if a step-by-step run-through was desirable or not. Purposefully
stalling, I said things to sustain a mirthful and humorous rapport, within
which I would gradually feel calmer. Tracy was sometimes laughing, which
calmed me. I felt moderately stoned and was also sometimes laughing.
As I self-consciously heated the foil, I felt unsure what to say or think. We
were suddenly quiet. I was about to ask if the flame should touch the foil
when Tracy said not to touch the flame to the foil. I realized I could be mute
—Tracy would talk and I could zone out socially. The disquietingly serious
scent of DMT, startlingly and humblingly mnemonic of other worlds, cast
doubt on normal reality—a room in a city in human culture on a planet in
space and time.
Unscrewing the cap, I distractedly occupied my mind and supported my
behavior with historical precedent indicating a thread of character by
remembering times I’d unhesitatingly behaved courageously. In grade school
when I spit on a minivan on a dare and was sent to the principal’s office.
When I was ten or eleven and jumped off a roof and didn’t get hurt.
0:00. I inhaled the cloud of DMT with a full, satiating breath in four
seconds, then screwed the cap back on. It was around 8:05 P.M. “Now
hold it in as long as you can,” said Tracy, taking the bottle. Wincing a
little from the intensity of my upper-body situation, I nodded mutely
with shoulders abnormally high, above extra-filled lungs.
0:08. Closing my eyes, I unconsciously turned five to ten degrees
toward my computer, which for the past eight minutes twenty-three
seconds had been recording a video, which Tracy and I had agreed was
a good idea. Sensing the need to immediately concentrate because
many complex things were beginning to happen, I quickly brought my
hands up into prayer position, the sides of my index fingers touching
my lips, and remained motionless like this—straight-backed, hands
clasped. With two exceptions, which I remembered later in the night, I
have no memory of the next four minutes fifty-two seconds.
0:17. My motionlessness ended with my head tilting slightly back,
away from my hands, which remained in a self-canceling position,
lessening my sensation of my body. I looked like I was on a magic
carpet flying ahead.
0:22. I exhaled audibly through my nose. My eyes trembled wildly,
exhibiting rapid-eye movements behind closed, scrunched lids. My
expression was earnest, engaged, brow-furrowed, challenged.
0:34. My hands disengaged prayer position and somewhat distractedly
rested palms-down on the yoga mat. I leaned forward, as if landing or
arriving somewhere. Tracy left the DMT tunnel.
0:41. I laughed a little. I fully covered my face with both hands, then
laughed quietly, almost mischievously, through my hands. After five
seconds I removed my hands, revealing a grinning face with open,
alert eyes. My hands returned to prayer position and bowed forward
and back in front of my amused face as if busily, enjoyably praying.
0:56. “Interesting,” I said in response to returning to an intenser,
tinier-detailed version of a DMT place I’d visited before and had mostly
forgotten until then—a place with squiggly, bulging, self-spiraling,
involuting, organismic shapes that I experienced visually, auditorily,
and ontologically. I was one of them, it seemed, while here—an
internally bending, screw-like, purply gray entity, whorling into and
out of myself. I heard strange, bouncy, rubbery noises that felt
somehow sexual. My first time here, I’d lingered maybe half a minute.
Now I was zooming through in seconds. Worlds blurred past. My left
eyebrow—which I later learned I normally don’t move without also
moving my right eyebrow—briefly went, by itself, higher on my
forehead than I’ve ever seen it.
1:00. “It’s more interesting than…I anticipated,” I said while
experiencing the unengageable blur in a visceral, severely
preoccupying way. I began deep breathing—something I’d been doing
more the past year—and slowly moving my upper body forward and
back. Calmly swaying in an unconsciously rhythmic, uninhibited
manner with wide-open, receptive, alert eyes, I looked like I was seated
in active, satisfying contemplation of fun and poignant topics.
1:29. “The question is do I want to keep breathing—” I said
conversationally, sounding like I was talking to myself.
“Yes,” said Tracy in a robotic voice.
“—or not,” I said, finishing my thought, showing no reaction to
Tracy’s voice.
“Yes,” repeated Tracy.
I suddenly stopped swaying. My demeanor changed from calm to
stricken and suspicious. My eyeballs turned toward Tracy’s voice on
the other side of the mattress. Seeming to forget the voice—and
become reengaged with something outside the universe—I began
swaying again, a little less uninhibitedly than before.
1:52. “This is something that is…interacting,” I said slowly. My hands
were relaxed in front of me in the air—the left holding the right like a
dog’s mouth holding a rubber toy—moving up and down as if
steadying myself while deep in thought.
“I’m in…ter,” I said very slowly, squinting one eye in acute
contemplation.
“Yes, just go with it,” said Tracy.
“…act,” I said, and rested my left hand on a gray-socked foot. My
right hand, alone in the air, moved rhythmically up and down, as if
conducting my concentration. “Go with it,” I said in a tone of
agreement and approval. I nodded affirmatively. My eyes glanced
Tracyward, and I put my hands together in prayer, then rested them
palms-down on the yoga mat. I hung my head down, seeming
overwhelmed. “Tracy,” I said, and looked suspiciously in her direction.
“Tracy,” I said in a voice like I thought I might be alone.
“Uh-huh?”
“Where are you?”
“I’m here.”
I looked extremely perplexed for three seconds. “I forgot about you,”
I said, waving my right arm in her direction while slightly
hunchbacked. “Where are you? Where are you?”
“I’m here,” said Tracy.
I leaned my upper body toward her. “Can you come here?”
“Mhm,” said Tracy, and entered the DMT tunnel.
“Should I touch you?” I mumbled with a bewildered, confused
expression while perceiving Tracy with difficulty and awe as a slightly
reptilian, huge-eyed entity, radiating spiky light, like an animated,
Kirlian photograph. She held my right hand with her left hand.
3:14. I stared in concentration at our hands. In overwhelmed
confusion, I briefly closed both eyes, then opened my left then right
eye and glared suspiciously up at Tracy, who was kneeling, sitting on
her feet. I was still cross-legged. I appeared to be concentrating as
much as possible in response to being confronted with an intensely
novel somethingness that continually remained astonishing and
incomprehensible.
“This feels weird,” I said, moving our hands up and down a little,
then suddenly took my hand away and stopped looking at Tracy. My
eyes became round and calm and I swayed backward, as if dodging
something while flying. I briefly stared at my hand in extreme,
shocked confusion.
“Close your eyes, close your eyes,” said Tracy. “Breathe. Keep your
eyes closed.” After a delay, I sat straight, closed my eyes, and breathed,
as if hypnotized. My upper body swayed forward and back. I opened
my eyes, looking baffled. “Do I want to close my eyes?” I said in a
conversational tone, as if normally talking to Tracy.
“Yes. Close your eyes.”
“Why?”
“You’ll see,” said Tracy.
My eyes remained open, though I hadn’t seen or been aware of my
room since three seconds after inhaling. My behavior in concrete
reality seemed on autopilot, like it was a small part of me
unconsciously speaking while most of me was elsewhere. I don’t
remember where.
“I’m going to test it,” I said in reference to [unknown], scratching
my chin quickly with my left hand and pointing left at seemingly
nothing with my right forefinger. My face, almost smiling, looked
suddenly unconfused. I touched my right cheek with my right hand.
Both my hands were touching my face.
I stared at Tracy’s face, which was out of view in the video.
“Wait, why do you want me to close my eyes?” I said in an almost
playful manner, as if I was being tricked in a harmless, gamelike way.
4:24. I looked directly, it seemed, into my computer’s camera. “This
feels so weird,” I said, scooting toward Tracy a little while seeming
unaware of her presence anymore. I looked complicatedly but
undespairingly confused in three or four successive facial expressions.
I unfolded my legs in front of me, bent at the knees. Stretching my
arms leisurely in front of me, my right hand grazed Tracy’s knee as she
stood and, saying, “Yeah, just close your eyes,” left the tunnel. My eyes
were widely open. I looked content, spirited, and extra alert. “Breathe,”
I said confidently to myself, inhaling and exhaling deeply and
peacefully.
4:49. “So this is gonna be,” I said with an excited expression, swaying
forward and back with conscious, thinking, relaxed eyes, then made a
small laughing noise. “This…should be…this experience should
be…dif erent,” I said, and suddenly looked bored. “Than my normal,” I
said, looking engaged and stimulated again.
5:00. I folded my legs in and, using my right hand to gesture while
talking, put my left hand on the yoga mat for support and kneeled,
saying, “Experience,” then stood. “Of day-to-day life…drawing,” I said
while vaguely recognizing an amorphous, context-less thing as my
drawing table, where I drew standing because I had hip and back pain
that I suspected was due at least partly to sitting too much. “My daily
life,” I said, looking at the table, which seemed to float blurrily in
empty space.
“Do you still feel it? Are you still there?”
“Am I…still…under…the…effects…of…it?”
“Uh-huh,” said Tracy.
“Yeah. Yeah. ’Cause this normally…this isn’t what I experience. I
don’t think this is what I normally…I experience each…day. ’Cause
each day,” I said, and laughed a little. “Twenty-four hours in a day,
right?”
“Mhm,” said Tracy.
“There’s twenty-four…hours in a day. And there’s 360 degrees,” I
said, then walked out of the DMT tunnel and saw smoking
paraphernalia on the floor.
6:18. “Yeah, so I smoked a drug!” I said in an excited, relatively loud
voice, realizing there was an explanation for whatever had happened—
which I couldn’t remember—and was still happening.
“Are you…back? Are you back?”
“Obviously…not…yet,” I said, enunciating words as if speaking them
for the first time. “I’m not back yet…”
“But kind of?”
“…’cause I smoked a drug and, yeah, the effects are wearing
off…’cause I’m remembering…,” I said to myself, unsure exactly who
Tracy was and why she was there, on the sofa. From a formless
somethingness, plus time divisions and a spatial aspect, and now this,
I began foggily remembering life. I was in a dense city…
“You’re starting to feel normal again?”
“More normal,” I said distractedly while sensing my situation—
amid miles of buildings—as intriguingly science fictional. At first,
aware only of a blobbily pixelated, strangely patchwork, detaillessly
shifting image, I’d thought I was insane, that, shockingly and
appallingly, I’d somehow gone insane, but now I was realizing that I
was going to be able to sufficiently perceive or re-create reality to not be
insane.
Tracy laughed.
“Yeah, ’cause I used to stand here and draw. I used to stand there
and draw,” I said, then noticed the computer filming.
7:05. “Why is…what’s this?” I said with audible, almost quivering fear.
“Recording?” I said in a scared, confused, ambivalently curious voice.
Tracy laughed loudly. “You don’t remember that you recorded it?”
I stared helplessly at the computer.
“Sit down, and chill out,” said Tracy.
NEXT THREE MINUTES
“No, I don’t remember this part,” I said in a shaky voice, pointing at the
computer. I was standing, so my head was out of view on the screen.
“Okay,” said Tracy in a tone indicating it was fine—not something to panic
about—to not remember.
“I don’t remember that,” I said firmly, then laughed a little. I barely
remembered my own life. “I just felt paranoid,” I said, and made a
frightened, surprised, laugh-like noise.
“When? There?”
“Yeah,” I said, less as an answer than to stall so I could think.
“When we were doing the tape?”
“Yeah,” I said distractedly. “Earlier did I feel paranoid of you?”
“To me, you mean? Did you seem paranoid to me?”
“No,” I said, confused. “I suspect—sus-suspected you of doing something
to me…earlier.”
“Oh, you weren’t joking? I thought you were kidding. You said, ‘Are you
going to kill me?’ and I said no. I thought you were joking.” Tracy laughed a
little.
“I…was…joking,” I said in a serious voice.
“Okay,” said Tracy lightly. “I know.”
She coughed. “Sit down,” she said.
“I was joking,” I repeated, unsure what this meant.
“Yeah, I know,” said Tracy.
“So you didn’t kill me,” I said with a strange emphasis on “kill,” making it
sound difficult to pronounce.
“No,” confirmed Tracy. “Is that what you wanted?” she said in a voice that
sounded, in my DMT-stoned state, which felt as if I’d woken from a long nap
into a moderate LSD trip, like I’d unwisely desired something and gotten it.
“I didn’t want you to kill me,” I said in a quiet voice, half to myself, still
somewhat assuming, due to a lack of other possibilities, that I was dead.
“What did you see?” said Tracy. “Did you see something?”
“I’m back now?” I said in a confused voice. “I’m not back yet.”
“Okay,” said Tracy.
“Well…I’m thinking, like, Jesus, that was…weird,” I said quietly.
Tracy laughed.
“Where’s my…I need to type it,” I said, indicating I wanted to type notes.
Had I had some sex-like experience in another dimension with an entity who
was now on my sofa?
“Want me to help you?”
“Help me type it,” I said, looking for my computer.
“No, like—” said Tracy.
“Write it,” I said, looking around for writing materials.
“No, just chill out for like two minutes.”
I kneeled then sat on the floor.
“Yeah, sit,” said Tracy.
We were out of view in the video.
“You didn’t kill me,” I said in a voice like I was reconfirming something I
was glad seemed true, then laughed a little, sounding less scared for the first
time since noticing the computer recording.
“No, you’re alive,” said Tracy.
“Okay,” I said.
“You should yell ‘I am alive!’ ”
“What?” I said absently. “How many minutes…since I smoked?”
“I don’t know,” said Tracy, and appeared in the video facing the computer.
“Let’s see if…” she said, looking at the screen.
My left eye and half my forehead entered the video and I said, “Seventeen
minutes?!” in an incredulous voice as Tracy said the same thing calmly. “But
I don’t know when you turned it on exactly,” she said, then estimated,
accurately, that I’d smoked around ten minutes earlier.
I turned my computer toward me and started typing. My face looked calm
and energetic. Tracy, behind me, bent at her waist, spied on what I was
typing. “Sorry,” she said after around six seconds, then laughed a little at
herself, stopped looking at the screen, and, adding, “I’m so nosy,” moved
away, onto the sofa.
I turned my head distractedly and briefly toward her, unaware of her
spying or what she’d just said. “Ten minutes? Has it really been…ten
minutes?” I said with a manic, distracted expression, turning back to the
screen, where in notes.rtf I was typing about time—how whatever happened,
which I still couldn’t remember, hadn’t felt at all like ten minutes.
“Wait, were you just watching this?” I said suspiciously, finally processing
what she’d said.
“No, I can’t see,” she said innocently.
I carried my computer into the DMT tunnel.
“Well, you’re going to make it public anyway,” she said in a playful,
singsongy voice. Then she laughed in a manner sounding malicious and
threatening. Within seconds, I reinterpreted her tone as openly and
confidently antagonistic and sarcastic, which made me feel very paranoid. My
face in the video seemed distressed and worried.
NEXT TEN MINUTES
In the DMT tunnel, I tried to type about my experience but mostly just stared
at the screen. Tingly sensations across my torso made me sometimes think
I’d been stabbed, was bleeding. Sometimes I closed my eyes and tried to
remember, or somehow figure out, what happened. Had something been so
embarrassing or unseemly or offensive or horrific that I immediately
repressed the entire experience? Sometimes I crawled or walked out of the
tunnel to briefly, indirectly query Tracy, returning each time to the computer
with more, new paranoia-fueling words to mentally replay and use in my
distraught model building.
My mind collaged theories desperately and I strongly invested my belief in
each and not all were nightmarish. Some were excitingly auspicious and,
especially between theories saying I was going to jail for decades, powerfully
and humblingly relieving. My internal state went from terror to elation. With
each oblique exchange of language, my models of what had happened and
was happening changed significantly. Tracy’s intonation ranged widely—
from mildly inflected to suddenly detached and monotone to entrancingly,
theatrically, inventively expressive. In my confused state, her nuanced voice
was dense with unspoken meaning and secondary, connotative features,
most of which I interpreted self-defeatingly. Unaware I normally wore
glasses, I didn’t attribute the frustratingly painting-like, splotchy appearance
of things to my defective vision; I projected all my suspicions onto Tracy’s
low-resolution form without knowing I was taking something blurry and
imagining the details inaccurately, in overly pessimistic (mostly) or
optimistic (sometimes) ways.
I felt I needed to elicit information from Tracy—that could help me
remember what happened—without revealing I remembered nothing and
was at times petrified with fear. At first, I was able to control my face to make
it look relatively stoic and inscrutable, but then I began to feel overheated and
tense and self-conscious. I realized my face had begun to look accurately
terrified and defeated and vulnerable, that I was flustered and blushing.
Sometimes, doubting my innocence, I thought that maybe Tracy hadn’t
planned this but that I’d unexpectedly done something—while blacked out,
maybe—deserving her coldness and disdain, that she was telling the truth
and was even being generous by not, for example, calling the police or
leaving, but staying to talk. Two or three times, she asked if I was ready to
share anything, if there was anything at all I could say, and I responded I was
still thinking. “So,” I said after around five minutes. “How long after I
smoked it did you…”
“What?” said Tracy.
“…try to talk to me?”
“I didn’t try to talk to you,” she answered after a pause. “You talked to me,”
she said in a voice that sounded subtly and very accusatory, increasing my
paranoia. She seemed to be assuredly manipulating the story to her
advantage, to frame me. She said I talked to her “during,” which confused
and troubled me.
“But I was over here,” I said, beginning to reveal and promote my side of
the story, aware the video was recording all the audio in the room, to
complicate Tracy’s story that she was trying, I felt, to make the official one.
“Yeah, well, you called me over,” she said. “You called me over,” she
repeated, as if cementing this improvised reality. She said I’d been speaking
very slowly, that I’d said, “This is interesting…something is…I am interacting
with something,” which didn’t seem incriminating but, in my paranoid state,
instead of mollifying my fear, added a dauntingly unsettling, horror-movielike eeriness.
My sensation of victimization, of being targeted and masterfully defeated,
already higher than probably ever before in my life, increased considerably at
one point when Tracy, with what sounded like gleeful delight, said, “You’re
going to see in the video exactly what happened. It’s going to be so funny to
watch.”
In the last three minutes of this ten-minute period, I walked to the
refrigerator to get my bottle of iced coffee, which contained 270 milligrams
of caffeine. In my fluctuating paranoia, like a pendulum, I felt temporarily
okay. Then I noticed Tracy handwriting notes—seeming like a veteran,
diligent journalist, seated with straight posture on my sofa—and part of me
assumed she was producing incriminating information to use against me.
Her notes would be viewed as factual evidence in court and by editors of
magazines—something that had always seemed dubious to me, since
obviously a journalist would also concoct notes if they were going to lie in
print, but I understood this was how things worked, that Tracy’s notes could
be as damning as video footage, so I felt extra self-conscious of my words. “It
just feels like I’m leaving, I’m going from a place of nothing to this,” I said,
feeling like I was focusing on this aspect of the experience, which I knew I’d
already discussed, primarily to suppress or distract from a terrible memory,
and that Tracy was scrutinizing me for inconsistencies. Almost trembling in
fear, I sensed I was more annoying and repulsive to Tracy than she was
showing—that she was professionally restraining her real emotions. “Now
it’s beginning to feel normal, like everything’s normal,” I said, standing by
my refrigerator, aware I was at least partially lying. I asked Tracy when I’d
called her over and she said, “I think after like five minutes.”
For some reason this made me feel less paranoid. Then she said, “Actually,
I’m trying to write down what I saw, ’cause it was very interesting and
unexpected.” I heard the last four words as “very interesting from my
perspective” and felt dread, curiosity, and, mostly, terror. I returned with
coffee to the DMT tunnel and stopped the video at twenty-nine minutes
twenty-seven seconds, scared of what it had recorded. I could delete it, I
knew. In Photobooth, you pushed Delete to delete forever, it seemed. If the
video was incriminating, and I deleted it to save myself, that seemed
immoral. But deleting ambiguous information that was going to be distorted
into damning evidence seemed like self-defense. During thoughtlessseeming seconds, I deleted the video.
NEXT SEVEN HOURS
After deleting the video at around 8:28 P.M., my paranoia increased further.
More than once during the next eighty minutes, which were not recorded, I
became aware of my legs trembling from, it seemed, fear and other
psychological reasons. To a third person, Tracy and I would have appeared to
be having a slow, surreal, sometimes psychotherapeutic, sometimes tense
conversation. I was in the tunnel, I think, for most of this unrecorded period,
struggling to determine who she was and what had happened. At around
9:48 P.M., I secretly began recording a second video. “What other drugs did
you make me smoke?” I asked Tracy, almost directly accusing her of
poisoning me. She said it was pure DMT, nothing mixed. We continued
talking, and I continued, as I had in various forms since noticing my
computer recording the first video, suspecting her of being, among other
possibilities:
• A CIA agent. In the past five years, I’d discussed illegal drugs—on social
media and panel discussions, at bookstores and colleges, in interviews—
arguably more than any writer of literary fiction my age. In 2011, I
cofounded MDMAfilms; in 2012, Vice published my column Drug-Related
Photoshop Art; in 2013, Rolling Stone profiled me—“A New Kind of
Linsanity”—focusing on my drug use, and the New York Times published
reviews of Taipei titled “The Agony of Ecstasy” and “A Literary Mind,
Under the Spell of Drugs and a MacBook”; and in 2014, Vice published
my McKenna column, the DMT post of which, in May 2016, was the
second Google result for DMT. So if the CIA, which had more than twenty
thousand employees in 2015, were to track one person in the literary
world, it conceivably could be me, I had sometimes, mostly with
amusement, imagined. They’d infiltrated a mushroom-seeking trip to
Mexico in the 1950s and dosed people with LSD in the 1960s, I knew, and
I knew I knew little about the CIA.
Tracy’s internet presence, which seemed too original and project-like to
be real, as if it were the enjoyably crafted work of a polymathic CIA agent,
supported this theory, which had an auspicious inflection. The concrete
nightmare of it sometimes resolved, briefly and surprisingly, into a
bizarre reality of being with Tracy forever in a performance-art-like
existence, forcing me to creatively use all of myself: I believed, for maybe a
total of around a minute, that my goal now was to charm and endear
Tracy into increasing amounts of interest in my activities, so that, instead
of incriminating me, she would let me live my life in my room and just
continue to observe me from a distance—that she was faking an interest
in psychedelics, but my life would now busily and meaningfully, as my
only hope to remain free, consist of persuading her to really be interested.
I imagined her becoming an intimate, internalized friend who I’d
communicate with only indirectly, through the medium of her CIA job.
• A person who hated me. Someone who independently wanted me to go to
jail and who, in order to successfully infiltrate my life—to make it into my
room and poison, frame, and/or kill me—had gone as far as faking an
interest in Terence McKenna and attending an out-of-state psychedelics
conference three years in a row. In the past two years, since my computerdisposing trip in August 2013, it had been difficult to enter my life.
Focusing on my recovery, I’d indulged the hermit parts of me and stayed
alone most of the time, making no effort to be social and negative effort in
meeting anyone new or in person. But Tracy had done it, had gotten as far
as helping me tape together the device I’d used to smoke what I’d believed
was DMT.
Of the four or five theories that I believed for varying amounts of time,
this one demoralized and frustrated me most—that a stranger had tracked
me online for almost a decade, pounced on my McKenna interest, emailed
me to reveal an interest in psychedelics, offered me plant-extracted DMT
that she knew I wouldn’t refuse, and then, while busy with her own life,
framed me for crimes in my own room. Unlike the CIA theory, this one
didn’t bend into desirability but remained terrible and stinging.
Nine minutes into the second video, the weighty, wood-handled knife was
on the floor between Tracy (on the sofa) and me (on the floor around five feet
away). In a tone meant to vaguely criticize her apparent massive amount of
free time allowing her, as a person who hated me, to track me for years, I’d
accusatorily asked her how she made money. Terrified she was going to grab
the knife and stab me, I frantically and abruptly, without looking at my hands
but continuing to hold eye contact with a blurry Tracy, who was answering
my question, snatched and threw the knife to my left, across the room.
“What are you doing?” said Tracy, taken aback.
“Getting rid of that,” I mumbled.
“Why? What are you doing? Don’t throw things.”
“I’m just…I’m not throwing it, I’m just moving it over there,” I said very
quietly.
“You won’t throw my stuff, right?”
I was silent, terrified.
“Right?” repeated Tracy.
“No,” I said, laughing nervously.
“Okay,” said Tracy. “Good.”
“That was—yeah, that was my,” I said in a moderate whisper. “Pipe,” I said
in a louder whisper, not wanting Tracy to think I’d thrown a knife, at the
same time, however, that she said, “You can throw your stuff—just don’t
throw my stuff.”
“I won’t throw your stuff,” I said.
“I won’t steal your pen,” said Tracy. “I just sew, I just do it, I make stuff,”
she said, continuing to answer my question about her financial situation.
“And then people give me money for it, which is cool.”
After five seconds of silence, I said, “I’m still trying to understand,” in a
dejected, tired, resigned voice. I was trying to understand how I’d been so
thoroughly deceived.
“I know,” said Tracy in an understanding voice I half-heard as patronizing
and sadistic. She looked distractedly in her bag.
“What are you looking at?” I said in a quietly panicked voice, believing she
was getting a weapon or signaling the police, FBI, or CIA to break down my
door.
“I don’t know, I thought that was mine,” she said, indicating the side of
the room I’d blindly thrown the knife—in a sideways manner ending
possibly with some sliding—and briefly showing me her pipe, a ceramic
piece she’d shown me earlier.
“How do…you…feel?” I said meekly.
“How do I feel? Fine.”
“It seems like you’re trying…”
“What?” said Tracy. “Don’t be so suspicious.” Minutes later, she said she
was going to leave and asked if I was going to be okay. In an email three days
later, she would say, “I didn’t understand that you really wanted me to stay
until you explicitly said ‘I need you to stay, I’m having a bad trip.’ I thought
you wanted me to leave, because you were so suspicious of me, and I
couldn’t compare your ‘normal’ self to your DMT self to know what was
happening, because I don’t know you well.”
“No, I’m not going to be okay,” I said in a feeble voice.
Tracy said she was going to take one more hit of my cannabis. Around ten
minutes later, she was ready to leave again. Her boyfriend, whom I had
suspected existed but hadn’t known for sure until then, was outside walking
around waiting for her. They were staying in Brooklyn while here for the fiveday psychedelics conference, and it was getting late. “Any last words?” she
said, which made me feel condemned. “I’m sorry I can’t hang out for longer.
But I also feel like maybe you want to be alone.”
I asked why.
After some thought, Tracy said because I was quiet, like I was thinking a
lot.
“But that doesn’t mean…I want to be…alone,” I said in a nearly inaudible
monotone.
“That’s true,” said Tracy, and began telling me what had happened, that I’d
vaporized DMT into a plastic bottle. I listened, enrapt, and sometimes asked
questions. We digressed a few times. I told Tracy I thought she’d killed me.
She said she hadn’t. I said I’d suspected her of poisoning me. She laughed.
“Okay,” she said at around 10:24 P.M. “I’m going to go.”
I was silent.
“Do you feel better now?”
“I feel like we haven’t talked…we’re still talking…I feel like…” I said.
“Do you want to keep talking? But earlier you said that you just wanted to
write.”
“I just wanted to…write,” I whispered. “When earlier?”
“Before you smoked it,” said Tracy.
“Yeah, I did say that, but now something’s different,” I said cautiously.
She called her boyfriend, and then we continued talking. Finally, at around
10:49 P.M., after she’d finished telling me all she remembered—and after
we’d tried to discuss what I remembered of the five minutes after smoking,
which at that point, besides that I “interacted” with an “alien,” was nothing—
I began to fully realize the extent of my paranoia. I began to confidently
realize, with immense relief and a quiet, humbling joy, that Tracy was not a
CIA or FBI agent, undercover officer, journalist, or vigilante and that nothing
terrible or even embarrassing or awkward had happened. Tracy was a friend
who had brought me DMT and helped me smoke it and—despite my
distrustful, mumbly attitude and seemingly antisocial inability to share
anything about my experience—stayed, through my time of paranoid despair,
to talk until I finally felt better!
“Thanks for staying,” I said, feeling deeply grateful.
“You’re welcome. So, you took mushrooms and had a bad time?”
“Not a bad time,” I said about my psilocybin trip from two and a sixth
years ago, which we’d discussed a little before I smoked DMT. “I just…cut a
lot of my cords and threw away my computer.”
Tracy laughed and asked if I’d been upset afterward.
I shook my head no. “I felt really happy.”
At 11:15 P.M., after making sure everything made sense to me, Tracy was
ready to leave again. I told her I’d been “really paranoid” before and
apologized. She laughed and it sounded friendly and comforting. My voice
wasn’t quiet anymore. I sounded outgoing. She asked if she could fill her
bottle with tap water and I offered mineral water and she accepted and said
she needed only a little, enough for an hour. I encouraged her to take as
much as she wanted. She laughed and thanked me and we walked to my
door. “Bye, thank you,” I said.
“Bye, Tao. Have a good night.”
“Thank you, you too.”
My door closed. A minute later, after doing things out of view—which
sounded like moving things around—I appeared in the video smiling happily
with an alert, focused demeanor. I typed that Tracy had left and that it was
11:18 P.M., then stopped the video at ninety minutes twenty-nine seconds. I
closed my eyes and thought about what to type. “Feel like I was mobbed by
alien sex, then I forgot it all,” I typed. “Now suddenly I remember having sex
with an alien and feeling overwhelmed by it. Maybe aliens love sex with me.”
I was aware of the inadequacy and redundancy of this; I’d already typed about
alien sex, I knew, and wasn’t adding anything new. I struggled to remember
anything worth noting. “When Tracy was texting, I thought police or CIA
were going to break into my room,” I typed after a while. I was glad to have
remembered this; it reminded me how terrified I’d been. I began watching
the ninety-minute video. At 11:31 P.M., Tracy texted “Hows it going?” I
responded:
Good, thanks. I’ve been trying/failing to get the video back. I recorded
video of us talking after because I was paranoid and thought you were
trying to get me to admit I’d done something horrible when I was
blacked out, I was interpreting everything you were saying in terms of
this for a long time. Thanks for talking to me until I was okay again.
At 12:20 A.M., Tracy texted “Did that go horribly wrong?”
I responded:
No. I like how it went. I was so scared and paranoid but then it turned
out I was wrong which I feel good about. I interacted with something
tremendous seeming but remember nothing, then got paranoid due to
not being mentally in control enough I think is what happened. Thank
you for the experience, definitely glad it happened.
Tracy asked if I’d recovered the first video. I said I was trying. She said she
still couldn’t believe I deleted it. We discussed if I’d smoked too much. In
DMT, Strassman wrote that he asked Stephen Szára if, in the 1950s, he ever
gave his volunteers too much DMT. “Yes,” said Szára. “They could not
remember anything. They could not bring back memories of the experience.
The only thing that remained with them was the feeling that something
frightening had happened.”
At around 12:50 A.M., I finished watching the second video, and at 1:30
A.M., I texted Tracy that I’d recovered the first video. I uploaded it to Vimeo,
emailed her the link and password, and began watching it. The timesensitive, language-resistant, universe-transcending experience of smoked
DMT seemed suited to me as a research subject. It used all of me, was the
opposite of boring, could be done alone, and involved writing both
autobiographically and about unmapped, unacknowledged worlds. Despite
the compatibility, my DMT (and psilocybin) trips had remained mostly
terrestrial and biography-muddled. After my hedonistic, alien-sex, and “leave
society” trips, I’d now had an exploratory trip with a paranoid afterexperience that made me forget what I’d explored. All I remembered was (1)
the place of self-twirling entities and (2) when Tracy looked like a reptilian,
higher-dimensional being.
My experiences had shown I wasn’t ready to explore the unknown.
Metaphysical exploration seemed like something one could do for a lifetime,
passing on knowledge over generations, which was what aboriginals had
done. Modern people, like me, in the global culture, seemed handicapped at
it, which therefore made it challenging. The activity asked me to be healthier
and more patient and self-aware, to have better memory and language skills,
to learn, feel, notice, and understand more.
At 3:30 A.M., summarizing my last two hours, I typed “Recovered the
video! By deleting a photo, then going to Edit then Undo Delete twice. Then
watched it, then returned to beginning and summarized first 19:32 of video,
working hard.” I was asleep an hour later. “Can close my eyes and enjoyably
deeply imagine and hear Chopin sonatas” was the last note I typed, at 4:11
A.M., very stoned, having enjoyed cannabis throughout the late night.
*1The temperature-measuring probe, which only one person refused, was around oneeighth of an inch in diameter and, made of rubber-coated wire, “quite flexible.”
Strassman wrote that it “went in about four to six inches and rarely caused any
discomfort, except in those with hemorrhoids.”
*2
I don’t recommend plastic or aluminum to smoke anything because, I later learned, both
will vaporize to some degree. I recommend glass.
SALVIA
“A new psychedelic has been discovered that is active in the microgram
range, exactly as LSD is, but it’s not related to LSD at all, nor is it related to
any other known psychoactive substance,” said McKenna in “The New
Psychedelics” (1995) in Amsterdam about salvinorin A. It was news he also
shared in other talks that, and the previous, year. “DMT test-pilots come back
white-knuckled and ashen from these places,” he said about where the 59-
atom compound, a dose of which, at 300 micrograms, was the size of a small
grain of salt, transported people. Salvinorin A interacted only with κ-opioid
and D2
receptors—unlike psilocin and DMT, which interacted with at least
seventeen receptors, or LSD, which interacted with at least twenty-one—and
was made by Salvia divinorum, a species of sage introduced to modern people
in 1961 by the Mazatec, who’d also, in 1938, introduced us to psilocybin
mushrooms.
My first time smoking salvia, at night in the Standard Hotel in October
2012 during my “recovery,” the only effect I noticed was that my voice
seemed to become squeakily high-pitched, but when I asked if I sounded
different, my friends seemed to ignore me. Seconds later, Gian smoked
salvia and stood and ran out of the room into the hallway because, he
explained after returning, he’d felt inside a snake whose scales dropped away
behind him as he ran. The second time was sixteen days later, in my room
with Gwen and a third person we’d never met—a filmmaker paying us $40
to record us smoking salvia. After smoking, I went to light the pipe for Gwen
and, realizing I was trying to do something I’d be hilariously, it seemed,
unable to within deciseconds, burst out laughing before going unconscious.
The third time, I felt mild, vague effects.
The fourth time was a month after that, in February 2014. Sitting on my
bed, I smoked a hit of dried salvia leaf that I’d ordered online, choosing 5×
potency from a selection reaching 60×. I lay on my back and noticed that part
of the ceiling was extremely distorted, like in a Dalí painting. I calmly
thought, “Melting,” and “Weird, that’s a stereotypical psychedelic thing I’ve
never experienced and didn’t think really happened,” and “That’s not weird
then; it just actually happens, interesting.” I sat, exhaled, smoked hit 2, lay
supine, and closed my eyes.
After a few seconds, I blacked out fully and I think briefly. I was next
aware of having convinced myself, while unconscious, to go to the beach. In
my thirteen years in New York, I’d never been to the beach. I felt amazed I
was going. “Beach,” I said in a strange and tinny voice. “I’m going to the
beach,” I said to somehow, by saying and hearing this, confirm if I was or
not. It seemed my body was momentarily going to go all the way to the beach
—to Coney Island, I sensed, more than an hour away—and that I wasn’t in
control. I didn’t want to go, but my mind seemed to have been jarred
backward one or two seconds, or somehow laterally, moving it beyond where
it could control my body. When I saw Being John Malkovich (1999) in college,
I enjoyed its deadpan tone and absurd world, in which a portal existed in a
building in Manhattan that led to the inside perspective of John Malkovich.
Now I felt inside myself in a Being John Malkovich manner, disconnected and
trapped. My only role now seemed to be to observe. Passively observing my
life had seemed attractive to me in the past—I’d described it in fiction as a
pleasant-seeming state—but I hadn’t taken into account that, as I realized
then with dread and panic, I wouldn’t only observe but would also feel
whatever happened. I sensed my body would behave “out of character” at the
beach and, on other days, elsewhere and that I would feel anxiety, tedium,
shame, and discomfort. I sat, stood, and—around half a minute, I estimate,
after hit 2—walked two or three steps toward my front door before I was able
to stop myself from going. Relieved, I lay on my bed, closed my eyes, and
immediately forgot about the beach.
To my surprise, my entire weight felt precariously supported on a fence
exactly aligned with my spine. This entranced me for minutes. Then I felt
like I was being vaguely scooped by a bulldozer in a reddish, dusty, skyless,
barren landscape. Sometimes I was a scooper, dragging harshly against
concrete. My expectation that this feel painful and abrasive inflected some
original sensation into what I felt: physically awkward in a complicatedly
pleasing, unfamiliarly texture-related, fascinating manner. At one point my
tongue felt like a building-size slab of concrete, powerfully scraping an
unseen surface far below. At another point I was the slab, being invisibly
dragged at an angle like a falling domino with other massive slabs. My
motion seemed extradimensionally controlled, which made me feel like I was
inside a computer game. I sensed roughness and danger, the possibility of
things being crushed, but the situation felt productive and somewhat
peaceful, like a construction site. At times, I felt less like a consciousness in
this world than the world itself, focused on a specific scene in the universe of
me. I sensed how on a larger dose I could completely enter this world.
Near the end of the trip and lingeringly afterward, supine on my bed, I felt
that entities as different to me as I am to a cloud or lake could and were, in
their way that I couldn’t comprehend so wasn’t bothered by, observing me.
The building I was in—densely packed with six floors of walls—seemed
somewhat comically to not conceal anything. I felt more in the sky, outer
space, and hyperspace than in a building. At 3:49 P.M., thirty-two minutes
after hit 1, I began typing the first draft of this account of my fourth time
smoking salvia. It was February 25, 2014, seventeen months after I
encountered McKenna, and I hadn’t encountered the information in the rest
of this chapter.
KATHLEEN HARRISON
In “Indigenous Plant Wisdom” (2001), a talk in Palenque, Mexico, Kathleen
LaPriel Harrison shared something she did a month prior, in December
2000, at a salvia conference in Oregon. After declining on joining, she’d
agreed to watch over seven people as they ate salvia leaves in an octagonal
room late at night. Thirteen had shown—“and that was okay,” said Harrison,
who in 2013 would estimate that 60 percent of her experiences with
“different medicines” had been solitary and comment “that’s the kind of
‘investigator’ I am.” She used the opportunity to try an idea she got from the
Mazatec—that everyone pray together in soft voices. The group created a
“tapestry of sound, rolling” then ate the leaves. “And then one person had
that occasional experience, that thing that you hear of with usually the
stronger salvinorin kind of doses, of suddenly wanting to bolt!” For forty
minutes, quietly because everyone had agreed on silence, Harrison prevented
the “very strong little dude” from going outside where there was snow. She
learned a lot—about containing energy, cajoling, whispering—that night, she
said in her Palenque talk, which included slides.
One slide showed the male and female flowers of corn. “I just wanted to be
sure that we understand that sacred plants bridge many categories,” said
Harrison. She explained that she taught part-time at a university and also
talked to the herbal community, including to native plant societies, and that
the way she discussed psychoactive plants “in the so-called ‘straight world’ ”
was by embedding them within the entire spectrum of plants used by
humans. “And there is a way that we can infiltrate, lovingly and effectively,”
she said, and laughed. “And I don’t mean infiltrate—you know, kind of
joking, but—I just think that we overcategorize, so I try to embed it. So,
therefore, corn is a sacred plant, there you go,” she said, and showed the next
slide.
In her Palenque talk, in January 2001 at the Entheobotany Conference,
Harrison also shared her history with the Mazatec. Around seven years
earlier, she decided to go to them. She’d grown up in the 1950s on the
Californian Channel Islands—where her naturalist dad taught her to pay
attention to nature—and had visited Mexico when she was six, spending
months in a small village, and then throughout her life, including a sixmonth trip in 1973 and 1974, but she’d never visited the Mazatec. She talked
to her friend Bret Blosser—who’d chewed thirteen pairs of salvia leaves in a
Mazatec ceremony in the mid-1980s and found himself “out of the three
dimensions and linear time”—and he introduced her to a shamanic Mazatec
family.
Harrison had visited the Mazatec three times and was going again after the
conference. Staying five or six weeks per trip, she immersed herself in their
worldview by helping them harvest crops, clean beans, and watch
grandchildren; by listening to conversations, collecting plants, playing with
children, and taking photographs; and by sleeping on their floors and also in
a rented place of her own, where she could write.
THE MAZATEC
In 2016, there were 7,080 million modern people in 196 countries and, the
UN estimated, 370 million aboriginal people in 5,000 groups, at least 62 of
which lived in Mexico, including 16 in Oaxaca, one of which, inhabiting the
Sierra Mazateca since an unknown period of time before the Spanish arrived
in the sixteenth century, was the Mazatec. In “Roads Where There Have
Long Been Trails” (1998), an essay about her time with the Mazatec,
Harrison quoted a Zapotec man from another part of Oaxaca: “My people
know many herbs; so do the Mixtec and the Mixe. But the Mazatecs know
magic. They know how the plants talk.”
In “Spirit in Nature: Psychedelic Plants and Mushrooms Through Native
Eyes” (2008), Harrison described the Mazatec as “kind of self-isolating,”
keeping to themselves not only from other linguistic groups but also from
one another. When she began her fieldwork with the Mazatec in 1994,
around 40 percent of them spoke only their own language, which had many
dialects, even after five hundred years of colonization, which meant, observed
Harrison, that “an equivalent amount of their knowledge, their lore, their
stories, their songs, and probably their information about the natural world”
was intact. Among the psychoactive plants and fungi used by the Mazatec
were two species of morning glory (also used in childbirth), many species of
psilocybin mushrooms (called “the little ones that spring forth,” “the little
holy children,” “the landslide,” and other folk names), and Salvia divinorum,
which once grew only where they lived.
Harrison said many people had “just plain weird” and some had “bad”
experiences with the plant and that she felt this was due to how it was used,
then shared what she’d learned from the Mazatec, the only known people
with a tradition of using it.
• The plant grew in filtered light “in little glades in the woods” and liked to
be moist and cool. “They always refer to it as her, and I try to do that too,”
said Harrison. “She’s very shy. She’s very powerful, but she’s very shy.”
The Mazatec grew her off the trail to keep her clean. They compared her
to the deer, which are startled away by noise or quick movements.
• Harrison waited years before telling them salvia had gotten out and people
were smoking the dried leaves. They were appalled by the drying, doubly
appalled by the smoking. “That won’t work—that will just really offend
her,” Harrison said they said. “She won’t show up. Whatever you’re
getting it’s not her.”
• The Mazatec ate salvia in pitch dark—rolled-up wilted leaves “like a large
salad rolled into a cigar.” Before the experience, they stated their
intentions, which they returned to throughout in “a kind of murmuring
prayer.” They did not do it to “see what will happen.” They did it asking
for help, a gift, or a favor.
• They said not to do it alone. Sitting close, they guarded the person doing it
because of “the bolt factor”—that around 10 percent get up and start
moving and later don’t remember what they did.
• They said not to laugh because laughter scares away the spirit of the plant.
“People have experienced salvia as being something that gives them the
uncontrollable giggles,” said Harrison, and shared an example: She knew
a Buddhist who fell “passionately in love” with a toaster after smoking
salvia. “And that so amused him that he found himself rolling on the
ground laughing. And when he came out of it he was just like, ‘I’ve been a
Buddhist monk for decades—what happened to me?’ ”
Which reminded me of the fifth—and most recent—time I smoked
salvia. On my sofa in my room, in July 2014, I became aware of myself
talking to my bong. When I realized I was earnestly asking my bong for
advice on what to do about feeling lonely, I said, “The bong can’t tell you,”
aloud in a playfully scolding tone, then laughed hysterically for a while.
Harrison called the toaster experience “amusing” and “even interesting”
but said it wasn’t what she was after, personally. She desired a relationship
with the species’s spirit. She was “fascinated by their worldviews,” but
fascination wasn’t the main reason she directed her attention to the Mazatec
and other aboriginals. It was because she felt that, after doing it for so long,
they’d figured out the spiritual and behavioral technology of relating to Salvia
divinorum and other species in order to get “the best result,” which she
defined as “the most rebalancing of oneself” so that one could “do work in
the world that is balancing also.”
THE EDGE OF THE GARDEN
Sisters of the Extreme: Women Writing on the Drug Experience, the retitled,
expanded second edition of Shaman Woman, Mainline Lady (1982), was
published in 2000 by Park Street Press. The anthology had eighty-seven
contributors, including George Sand on opium, Anaïs Nin and Julie Doucet
on LSD, Alice B. Toklas and Maya Angelou on cannabis, Valentina Wasson
on psilocybin, Ann Shulgin on MDMA, and—one of the additions—Kathleen
Harrison on salvia.
In “The Leaves of the Shepherdess,” Harrison wrote about her heart,
which had always murmured but began beating irregularly in a more
disturbing manner after her divorce and the death of her dad. Harrison saw a
doctor, then decided to travel to Mexico to ask a Mazatec healer to do a
ceremony for her with the Leaves of the Shepherdess. “The curandero
unrolled banana-leaf bundles of hand-sized Salvia divinorum leaves, slightly
wilted, and sorted them into pairs,” wrote Harrison, who received forty pairs,
representing feminine and masculine, rolled into “a long wad.” She was told
not to hesitate at their bitterness, stop until she’d eaten them all, or laugh.
“Suddenly there was a shimmering, the curandero blew the candles out for
total darkness, and within seconds I was completely in another realm,
astonished. Some part of me ate the final bite and I relaxed into another
place: I was in the presence of a great female being, a woman, twenty feet
high and semitransparent.”
In a talk in 2010, Harrison said the Mazatec had been engaged for
probably millennia in “profound psychedelic investigations” in order to cure,
to invoke and exchange with “forces and deities,” and to ask the questions
“What is it all about, really?” and “What is real?”
Harrison realized she couldn’t move her feet. She felt the curandero, his
wife, his son, and “the little granddaughter” giving the spirit their full
attention. They were plants at the edge of the spirit’s garden. The spirit’s
hand passed through Harrison’s chest twice and “a pocket of hurt blew
away.” Returning to the present, Harrison heard “Show them the edge of the
garden” repeatedly in Spanish and English. “That is my work,” ended her
essay.
FROM THE GODDESS
The age of the Mazatec–salvia relationship is unknown. If salvia and
pipiltzintzintli—a plant used by the Aztecs, who also used psilocybin
mushrooms, peyote, and daturas and who gave the Mazatec their name,
which means “the deer people”—are the same, as R. Gordon Wasson
theorized, the relationship could be at least seven hundred years old. If salvia
is pipiltzintzintli, it probably once grew over a much larger area than its
“current, extremely limited distribution,” said a 2010 paper that identified
Salvia venulosa—a species that did not make salvinorin A and was known
from only three locations in the Colombian Andes—as Salvia divinorum’s
closest relative. If salvia is not pipiltzintzintli, maybe the relationship is
somehow only one hundred to four hundred years old; that the Mazatec
name for the plant, Shka Maria Pastora, has two Spanish words serves as
evidence for this mysterious possibility, about which McKenna, in one talk,
theorizing on the “puzzlement,” said, “I think it is sent from the Goddess at
this time.”
Whatever its age and origins, Salvia divinorum was once, for at least
centuries, before a specimen was brought to UCLA’s Botanical Garden in
1962, limited to the cloud forests of the Sierra Mazateca, but now, through
cloning (growing cuttings into single-parent plants), lived in homes and
gardens worldwide. “It is speculated that the species diminished its ability to
set seed through centuries of human tending,” wrote Harrison in 2000.
“And perhaps this highly sensitive species—growing in light-speckled
seclusion in such a small region of the world—would have long ago
disappeared, had it not been for its lovely medicina and gift to human
consciousness.”
In May 2016, a PhD thesis by Ivan Casselman at Southern Cross Plant
Science revealed that Salvia divinorum makes rosmarinic acid, a 42-atom
compound with antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, anti-depression, antibacterial, and anti-viral properties that treated herpes simplex, had potential
in treating Alzheimer’s, and was common in the Lamiaceae, or mint, family.
Casselman cited eight studies from 2000 to 2011 that found salvia and/or
salvinorin A had low toxicity. He suggested the plant be “recognized as a
threatened species” due to low genetic variation and population, and
observed that the Mazatec, of which around three hundred thousand existed,
also used the plant to treat diarrhea, headaches, rheumatism, and a Mazatec
illness called “swollen belly” that was caused by being cursed.
THE SALVIA VIDEOS
Starting in 2002 with Australia and 2005 with Missouri, countries and states
began to criminalize Salvia divinorum. The species and its unique compound
joined psilocybin, DMT, LSD, and other psychedelics as illegal for use in
scientific research, self-help, art, psychotherapy, solving problems, disrupting
addictions, catalyzing change, and other practices and activities. On
November 27, 2006, when salvia was regulated in five states, KSL-TV in Salt
Lake City aired an “Eyewitness Investigation” titled “Dangerous Herb Is
Legal in Utah” that showed a young man named Jim laughing and saying, “I
feel like the octopus ride” after smoking salvia. Reporter Debbie Dujanovic
brought videos of people smoking salvia to a high school football game on a
DVD, showed parents, and had this conversation:
DUJANOVIC: The herb is called salvia. Have you heard of it?
DAD: No, never heard of that.
DUJANOVIC: Detectives we’ve talked to say it gives kids the same high as
LSD.
MOM: Really. I’ve never even heard of it.
DUJANOVIC: What do you think?
MOM: And children here are using this? That can’t be right for it to be
legal.
DAD: That should be illegal.
The next night on KSL-TV, in “Lawmaker Responds to Investigative Report
on Dangerous Herb,” Dujanovic reported on the previous night’s
investigation. “Moments after our story ended, Utah Representative Paul Ray
began writing a bill to ban salvia,” she said, commending the lawmaker’s
frantic haste. A local police department, she added, was “also reacting,” had
decided to “educate officers about the herb.” Ray himself said three
sentences in the brief segment: “It was upsetting to see we have a drug of
that strength that’s legal. We’re basically going to make it illegal to possess or
sell. Period.”
On June 10, 2008, “Writing a Letter to Congress on Salvia” was uploaded
to YouTube. In the video, Erik Hoffstad smoked salvia on a sofa and tried to
write a letter to Paul Ray, who after a year and a half had failed to regulate the
plant. Hoffstad laughed intensely and deeply and satisfyingly, it seemed to
me, for 55 of the video’s 180 seconds, making me smile and grin and also
laugh. In another video, uploaded sixteen days earlier, he’d tried to garden on
salvia. The two videos, among the most-watched salvia videos on YouTube—
a website that started in April 2005—with 1.8 and 2.2 million views after
eight years, showed him unable to do the physical tasks in a manner
indicating he’d left concrete reality; they, and other salvia videos in which
stationary people have facial expressions conveying they’re conscious
elsewhere, experiencing awe, reminded me that, using only plants and fungi
that have evolved over millions of years and been selected and used by
humans over millennia, I can safely travel to the furthest places humans have
gone and stay there 5 or 30 or 120 minutes, during which I can experientially
research consciousness, death, time, existence, magic, ecstasy, and the
mystery within a tradition older than agriculture.
Three months after Hoffstad’s videos, when salvia was regulated in
thirteen states, including Florida, where possession was punishable by five
years in prison, the New York Times published a front-page article that began
“With a friend videotaping, 27-year-old Christopher Lenzini of Dallas took a
hit of Salvia divinorum, regarded as the world’s most potent hallucinogenic
herb, and soon began to imagine, he said, that he was in a boat with little
green men.” The article reported that the “rare claims of salvia-related
deaths” (two suicides blamed on salvia) had been “speculative”; that “salvia-
related emergency room admissions” were “virtually nonexistent” even
though 1.8 million people, according to the government, had tried it; that in
many states “the YouTube videos” had become “Exhibit A in legislative
efforts to regulate salvia”; and that pharmacologists who felt salvia could treat
addiction, depression, and pain feared its criminalization would make it hard
to do tests on humans.
Six years later, in 2014, the Associated Press published an article about
Paul Ray, who’d continued failing to ban Salvia divinorum and seemed to
have stopped trying, titled “Utah Lawmaker Proposes Bringing Back Firing
Squads for Executions.” The next year, Utah became one of the two states
where execution—a punishment illegal in around 60 percent of countries—
by firing squad was legal, reversing its 2004 banning of the method. A year
later, in 2016, salvia remained legal in Utah but was illegal to some degree in
around 14 percent of countries and at least 62 percent of states. In twenty-one
states it was a Schedule I drug.
WHY ARE PSYCHEDELICS ILLEGAL?
On March 1, 2016, in the morning, I rode an elevator to the eleventh floor of a
building in Chinatown and sat in a surprisingly high-ceilinged—for being so
far up in the sky—courtroom with sixty to eighty people. Two grand juries,
we learned, would be selected that day. Those not chosen could go home; the
rest would begin their service. The 60 to 70 percent of us, it seemed by a
show of hands, who’d deferred thrice could not, it was explained, get out of
jury duty again; if our name was called, we had to say “serve” and go sit with
the other chosen ones. Using a hand-operated, lottery-seeming, plastic ball
filled with folded paper, a man called out forty-six names in an impressively
subtle, game-show-like voice that amused me and others in, I felt, a calming
manner. With twenty-two other people who lived in Manhattan, I was
selected for a “special narcotics” grand jury, which meant we’d hear mostly
only drug cases.
I’d deferred three times in two years and now—thirteen days after I began
writing this book—had been selected to serve on a rare, drug-focused grand
jury. I viewed this coincidence as a gift for my drug-focused book to absorb.
We rode the elevator down, crossed the street into another building, rode
an elevator up, entered a small courtroom, and sat where we’d sit the rest of
the day and for nine more days. I was stoned, not abnormally, on baked
cannabis. We received the 2015 edition of Grand Juror’s Handbook, which said
only 29,000, or around 5 percent, of the 574,000 jurors in New York in 2005
were grand jurors; the rest were trial jurors. We watched videos that seemed,
to me, surreal and sometimes surprisingly funny. I began, after around an
hour, falling asleep. Others seemed to also struggle, in the large, soft seats, to
stay awake. After a lunch break, we watched more videos. Four times during
this second session of videos, I laughed uncontrollably for seconds while no
one else was laughing but seemingly without attracting attention—probably
because my laughter was quiet and involved little to no movement. After the
videos, there was time to hear a case.
We learned from two officers that they’d bought drugs from someone—
the accused person—while undercover, working on a team that did this
regularly. Then it was time to vote.
For each charge, we’d vote to indict or dismiss. According to our
handbooks, people couldn’t be brought to trial for a felony unless they’d been
“indicted by a grand jury.” We voted to indict weapon and cocaine charges
but not a charge for marijuana. Then we voted on if we wanted to deliberate.
More than eleven raised their hands, so the deliberation began.
Someone in back asked why we dismissed marijuana but indicted “a dinky
pocketknife.” He spoke in a manner that seemed designed to influence
jurors to also dismiss the weapon charge but which, I felt, could be
interpreted to mean he felt we should not have dismissed the marijuana
charge.
The juror to my left, either having the latter interpretation or just taking
the opportunity to defend marijuana, said because marijuana—the court’s
name for cannabis—had never killed anyone. One or two others spoke—we
acknowledged that, obviously, we should have deliberated before voting—and
then the deliberation, and day 1, ended.
—
The words “marihuana” and “marijuana” became popular in the 1930s, when
newspapers published headlines like, in 1933, “Murder Weed Found Up and
Down Coast—Deadly Marihuana Dope Plant Ready for Harvest That Means
Enslavement of California Children,” and when Henry Anslinger, the first
commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, which was founded in
1930 when cannabis was banned in twenty-four states, “depicted marijuana
as a sinister substance that made Mexican and African American men lust
after white women,” wrote Martin A. Lee in Smoke Signals (2012). Anslinger
avoided the word “cannabis” because few people “knew that marijuana, the
weed that some blacks and Chicanos were smoking, was merely a weaker
version of the concentrated cannabis medicines that everyone had been
taking since childhood,” wrote Lee. In 1937, when cannabis, which comes
from the Greek kánnabis, a word at least 2,500 years old, was banned in
thirty-five states, the Marihuana Tax Act was passed, making possession
illegal federally. At the congressional hearing for the act, which he co-drafted,
Anslinger said these sentences:
• This drug is as old as civilization itself.
• We seem to have adopted the Mexican terminology, and we call it
marihuana, which means good feeling.
• In India it is sold over the counter to the addicts, direct, and there it is
known as “bhang” and “ganja.”
• It is impossible to say what the effect will be on any individual.
• It is dangerous to the mind and body, and particularly dangerous to the
criminal type, because it releases all of the inhibitions.
• Not long ago we found a fifteen-year-old boy going insane because, the
doctor told the enforcement officers, he thought the boy was smoking
marihuana cigarettes.
• Last year the state of Pennsylvania destroyed two hundred thousand
pounds.
• We have always pointed the finger of scorn at China, and now marihuana
is being smuggled out to China, by sailors.
• It makes very fine cordage, and this legislation exempts the mature stalk
when it is grown for hemp purposes.
Anslinger—who was head of the FBN until retiring in 1962, six years
before the FBN merged with the BDAC to form the BNDD, which in 1973
merged with the ODALE to become the DEA—continued being both
informative and inaccurate in material submitted for the public record of the
hearing, writing, among other sentences:
• The plant was known by the Greeks as “nepenthe” and was lauded in the
immortal Odyssey of Homer.
• In the argot of the underworld it has colloquial, colorful names such as
“reefer,” “muggles,” “Indian hay,” “hot hay,” and “weed.”
• Its use frequently leads to insanity.
The term “420” originated “among California teenagers in the 1970s,”
wrote Chris Duvall in Cannabis (2015), which was published in the UK.
Duvall described the “internationally important” code word as “the number
‘420’—pronounced ‘four-twenty’, and including the time ‘4:20’ and the
American-style date ‘4/20’.” He wrote: “Even the authorities take notice: on
20 April 2006, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration reiterated its view
that drug Cannabis is medically useless.”
—
On day 2, we heard six or seven cases. Each case began with the judge and
his assistant leaving the room; a stenographer entering and sitting at a
typewriter with large, rubber buttons; and a prosecutor entering and saying
the name of the accused person, the charges, the witnesses, and if we’d see
any evidence, like photos and/or videos, then leaving and returning with the
first witness. In one of the cases we heard that morning—which I share as a
representative case—the prosecutor left and returned with a police officer,
who seemed to be in his late twenties. Juror 2, our “foreperson,” asked if the
officer swore to tell the truth, “so help you God.” He did. He sat in the booth.
The prosecutor asked him questions and we learned that he’d bought three
“twists” of crack from the accused person, who we knew only by name. The
prosecutor’s job was to mediate our interactions with the witnesses, who, it
seemed, could only respond to questions. The prosecutor asked if we had
further questions. We didn’t.
The second witness—the first’s commanding officer—was called. We
learned from him that the first witness had brought him drugs, which he’d
confirmed via field test was crack cocaine, which he’d vouchered, after which
he’d filled out a form, which we saw projected on a screen. The prosecutor
asked the officer to explain how the test worked and he did.
The prosecutor asked if we had questions. At least two jurors, including
me, raised their hands. The prosecutor walked to Juror 12, who asked the
prosecutor—in, as we’d been instructed, a quiet voice—to ask the officer if
he’d tested all three twists. The prosecutor returned to the podium, asked the
question. The officer said he’d tested only one. The prosecutor looked at
Juror 12, who raised his hand. The prosecutor walked to him, conferred
quietly, returned to the podium, asked why. The officer said there was no
reason why—they just did it that way. I laughed a little.
The prosecutor walked to me, Juror 5.
“How did he learn of the defendant?” I said quietly.
The prosecutor seemed confused.
“How did he learn of the defendant?”
After a second, the prosecutor said, “Right,” returned to the podium, and
asked the officer how he learned of the accused person. When the accused
person was brought to him by the first witness in handcuffs, answered the
officer. The prosecutor looked at me, walked to me, leaned toward me. I
asked how the first officer, who bought the drugs, learned of the accused
person. I was curious. Poor minorities seemed more likely to be targeted
than, say, college students living in dorms.
In “Legalize It All,” a “report” in the April 2016 issue of Harper’s, Dan
Baum shared something the assistant to the president for Domestic Affairs
under Richard Nixon told him in 1994: “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and
the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and
black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it
illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to
associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then
criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities.”
“He isn’t going to be able to tell you that,” said the prosecutor.
I laughed in an unself-conscious, jolly-sounding manner. “Oh, right,” I
said smiling. People continued to seem unbothered by my laughter. What to
me was increased laughter just brought me up, I felt, to the level of a
normally—or somewhat above-averagely—good-humored, not-grim person.
Cannabis did this to me, for which I was grateful.
Two more jurors asked questions, then the witness, prosecutor, and
stenographer left and we voted on if we wanted to deliberate. Fewer than
twelve did, so we moved on to the crack-selling charge. Fifteen voted to
indict. Due to the seating arrangement, all twenty-two other jurors could see
my vote, but I could see only six other votes—unless I turned around, which
I didn’t except once or twice slightly, allowing me to see eight or nine votes—
and all were to indict. Fifteen exceeded eleven, so the person who’d allegedly
sold crack and was currently in a cell, where he could be held for forty-five
days, would now go on trial to learn his punishment.
—
The Controlled Substances Act of 1970 differentiated “drugs, substances, or
chemicals”—or “drugs”—into five schedules. Drugs with psychedelic—or, in
the government’s preferred terminology, “hallucinogenic”—effects were
Schedule I, which meant they had “no currently accepted medical use and a
high potential for abuse.” The Drug Enforcement Administration formed in
1973, under Nixon, to enforce the act. Of the six examples of Schedule I drugs
on the DEA’s website in 2017—
heroin, lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), marijuana (cannabis), 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine (ecstasy), methaqualone, and peyote
—three were psychedelic (LSD, cannabis, peyote), two were plants (cannabis,
peyote), at least four and arguably all had medical use, and only one
(methaqualone) was made by corporations but not since 1985 due to
hundreds of deaths. By listing three psychedelics and avoiding more than
one representative from any other class of drug, the DEA seemed to strongly
convey that psychedelics were the most useless and destructive class of
drugs, which has been the opposite of my experience. None of the DEA’s
examples of Schedule IV drugs (“low potential for abuse and low risk of
dependence”) was psychedelic, growable, or natural; all were sold by
corporations—
Xanax, Soma, Darvon, Darvocet, Valium, Ativan, Talwin, Ambien, Tramadol
—and the DEA refrained from including any chemical names, sharing only
the selling-and-advertising-optimized, capitalized brand names. The DEA
listed nine examples, as if to squeeze in more for promotional purposes.
Seven were opioids or benzodiazepines—two of the three classes of drugs
with, I feel based on experience, the most potential for self-destruction and
highest risk of dependence (the third being amphetamines, which are
Schedule II), an opinion supported by statistics: In 2016, the New York Times
reported there were 43,982 drug overdose deaths in 2013—none from
psilocybin, DMT, salvia, LSD, or cannabis—including 22,767 from
prescription drugs, with 16,235 and 6,973 involving opioids and
benzodiazepines.
—
“I don’t live there, no,” I emailed my mom at 6:04 A.M. on day 3, which was
March 3. I’d been waking early to work on this book’s first three chapters. “I
just go to a courtroom on the 6th floor each day from 10 A.M. to around 4:20
P.M. We have a 1-hour lunch break and 3–4 other breaks.” I told my mom I
was “voting ‘no’ for every case” because I felt it was “a waste of time and
money to pursue these drug cases” and that, whenever the drug was
marijuana, a “slight majority” of jurors voted no.
At around 11:00 A.M. that day, we heard our only non-drug case, which had
our only non-officer witness—a low-level employee of a college. We learned a
student had paid off his student loans in three transfers over two or three
months totaling around $140,000 from the college itself back to the loan
company, five years earlier. The witness didn’t know exactly how this was
achieved but assured us the flaw in the system allowing the felony had been
fixed.
We seemed bolder with this case than the drug cases because, I think, for
most jurors it probably seemed offensive, unseemly, or incomprehensible—
or like it might appear so to others—to question officers when it was officers
against drug dealers. We asked six or seven questions, which wasn’t enough
to learn where the accused person was currently. In custody? Enjoying life
with a college degree thinking he’d gotten away with it? Thirteen jurors voted
to indict.
—
A major reason psychedelics are illegal seems to be because of the increasing
influence, in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, of corporations, which
are existentially required to increase both revenue and profits in a reliable,
competitive, continual manner because their sole function is to grow in value
so that their stockholders will own more valuable stock.
Corporations have existed for only around 450 years or 0.16 percent of the
time since Homo sapiens evolved. I learned about them as a child because the
first two medical laser companies my dad founded went public, or became
corporations, when I was in elementary and high school, in 1991 and 1999,
and because my parents became obsessed with the stock market when I was
a child and for years I’d been interested also, reading penny stock message
boards and investing my parents’ money. Publicly owned companies—the
term I prefer because it puts the blame more accurately on everyone—either
grow or quickly shrink and vanish. They don’t grow to a certain size and
begin diverting profits to workers and carefully ensuring they aren’t harming
the planet, their customers, and future and unsuspecting life-forms—not
because they’re evil, or because they don’t want to, but because this option
isn’t available to them as it is for privately owned companies. Publicly owned
companies can survive only by constantly growing and so their only choice is
to automatically and mindlessly—through the decisions of boards of people
representing the stockholders, or investors, who decentrally own the
company—slough off CEOs, CFOs, and other employees who aren’t helping
the stock price significantly increase, meaning that opposing employees of
corporations, or supporting one corporation over another, has no effect on
the metaphysical entity called “corporations.”
The pharmaceutical drug industry—whose ten largest companies, all
publicly owned, earned around $440 billion in revenue in 2014, when global
revenue of legal drugs exceeded $1 trillion for the first time—would lose
probably tens to, eventually, hundreds of billions of dollars annually if
psychedelics became legal, because hundreds of millions of people could
then cheaply and effectively and sustainably, instead of expensively,
ineffectively, toxically, and fatally, relieve and/or treat depression, anxiety,
addiction, pain, inflammation, insomnia, nausea, thanatophobia, epilepsy,
cancer, asthma, dementia, arthritis, fibromyalgia, cluster headaches, PTSD,
OCD, ADHD, Tourette, and other problems with cannabis, psilocybin, DMT,
salvia, LSD, mescaline, and ibogaine, as users of psychedelics have known or
suspected for millennia, aboriginals have known for tens to hundreds of
millennia, and science has begun to confirm since the fifties in two main
waves of research, the second beginning in 2006 at Johns Hopkins and New
York University.
—
By day 4, we were, on many charges, not getting enough votes to either indict
or dismiss. Fewer of us were raising our hands to indict cannabis, weapons
(mostly knives), paraphernalia (scales, plastic baggies), and possession
charges. Since most cases also involved cocaine, crack, and/or heroin—
which we seemed to view as obviously unforgivable—our dismissals were
relatively insubstantial, punishment-wise. Selling—or having and intending
to sell—up to 28 grams of “a mixture containing crack” was punishable, for
example, by up to twenty years in jail and $1 million, I learned online. In the
courtroom, we weren’t told punishments because that was for the trial jury to
decide. Our job was to indict or dismiss. With each charge, we first voted to
indict; if fewer than twelve raised their hands, we voted to dismiss. If fewer
than twelve raised their hands, the charge remained undefined and the
prosecutor could ask us to vote again later or bring the case to another grand
jury.
—
Another reason psychedelics have been globally illegal for almost five
decades is, I feel, because most people, not surprisingly, believe they are, in
addition to pointless and frivolous, very dangerous. McKenna stressed the
remarkably benign nature of the substances he promoted—sometimes by
comparison to alcohol, cigarettes, sugar, cocaine, caffeine, and even MDMA
and ketamine, which he observed hadn’t been user-tested for millennia. He
specifically advocated natural substances—psilocybin, DMT, salvia, cannabis,
ayahuasca—he’d determined to be safe in the short- and long-term. In
“Psychedelics Before and After History” (1987), he shared “three tests to
apply to a compound that you’re thinking of ingesting.”
• Does it come from a plant or fungus? (“Plants are also biological systems
like us, they cannot produce truly alien compounds.”)
• Does it have a history of shamanic usage? (“If a compound is toxic,
triggers psychosis, is mutagenic, or induces tumors, it will have been
dropped long ago by human groups who experiment with these things.”)
• Does it have an affinity to brain chemistry? (“If you take a drug and the
next day you feel lousy, and the next day you sort of feel okay, that’s not a
very good drug; that’s an insult to the physical brain.”)
He said it was “probably okay to go ahead” if a drug passed at least two
tests. “This is a task of a lifetime, so you want compounds which are
extremely effective in delivering the noetic experience, the plunge into the
tremendum, but you also want to be able to race again another day,” he said.
Yet his New York Times obituary, published in 2000, was able to say he
advocated “substances that many experts consider highly dangerous.” Three
paragraphs later, after quoting a fragment of praise from Jerry Garcia, calling
McKenna “the only person who has made a serious effort to objectify the
psychedelic experience,” the obituary referenced experts again—“But experts
on drug treatment attacked Mr. McKenna for popularizing dangerous
substances”—and quoted a letter by Judy Corman, vice president of a drug
treatment center:
Surely the fact that Terence McKenna says that the psilocybin
mushroom “is the megaphone used by an alien, intergalactic Other to
communicate with mankind” is enough for us to wonder if taking LSD
has done something to his mental faculties.
Corman’s letter, which the New York Times had published on May 9, 1993,
misleadingly quoted not McKenna himself but, I learned, a May 2, 1993, New
York Times profile of McKenna that said, “One thing he argues is that the
psilocybin mushroom, Stropharia cubensis, is no ordinary life form, no lowly
fungus, but in fact the megaphone used by an alien, intergalactic Other to
communicate with mankind.” Corman’s letter cited multiple deaths of
athletes from cocaine and argued, “Whether it’s LSD, marijuana, cocaine or
heroin, the message from The Times should clearly be that drug abuse is
dangerous.”
—
On day 5, when we heard no cases, a juror asked me if I was the writer Tao
Lin. As part of me considered if there was a way I could say no, I said yes.
She, a woman in her thirties, Juror 11, said her sister was a fan of my writing.
She asked if I was going to write about my jury experience. I said I wrote, in
some way, in notes or books, about almost everything I did, so probably yes. I
said I felt the student who paid off his student loans with his college’s money
shouldn’t have been punished, and she laughed. I felt comfortable saying
this because I’d noticed that she and Juror 12 were the two most questionasking jurors—the two most involved and unautomatic in their judgments
and who most wanted, it seemed, to deliberate.
That night, in my room, to amuse myself, I imagined Juror 11 was a CIA
agent. I also spent minutes thinking about my “CIA novel,” a novel about an
autobiographical writer who suspects various people of working for the CIA,
which I enjoyed fantasizing about writing. At this point, on March 7, 2016, I
was aware the CIA had a history of using undercover agents. I’d read
MKUltra’s Wikipedia page and parts of other writing on it, but not entire
books or government documents. Months later, when, over eight months, I
researched MKUltra for this book, I discovered a CIA–LSD–suicide–
homicide thread that supported McKenna’s argument that psychedelics are
illegal not because the government wants to protect us from us but because
they catalyze intellectual dissent.
—
On December 22, 1974, the New York Times reported that the CIA had
conducted “a massive, illegal domestic intelligence operation during the
Nixon Administration against the antiwar movement and other dissent
groups.” The government created two committees and a commission to
investigate. And so, in the summer of 1975, people learned of Project
MKUltra, which had existed under various names from 1950 to 1972,
involved more than thirty institutions, and included tests in which, to
research “behavior modification,” LSD and other drugs were used on
unwitting non-volunteers in a manner targeting “all social levels, high and
low, native Americans and foreign”—or, by design, everyone—with no
medical screening, follow-up, or even record-keeping. In spring 1977, more
information became public, revealing that actually at least eighty institutions,
including forty-four universities and twelve hospitals/clinics, had been
involved. In Subproject 3, one of 149 subprojects, the CIA paid George H.
White, who worked for the Anslinger-headed FBN, $40,000 a year to test
LSD on random civilians. White set up “safe houses,” as the CIA called them,
in Greenwich Village, where he secretly dosed people with LSD, and in San
Francisco, where he paid prostitutes to secretly dose customers with LSD
while he watched via two-way mirror.
“Other experiments were equally offensive,” said Senator Edward M.
Kennedy in his opening remarks to the Senate hearing on MKUltra on
August 3, 1977. “For example, heroin addicts were enticed into participating
in LSD experiments in order to get a reward—heroin.” Kennedy said,
however, that “perhaps most disturbing of all was the fact that the extent of
experimentation on human subjects was unknown. The records of all these
activities were destroyed in January 1973, at the instruction of then CIA
director Richard Helms.” Kennedy, admirably, if futilely, stressed that, still:
“The best safeguard against abuses in the future is a complete public account
of the abuses of the past.”
LSD testing on unwitting non-volunteers had not, I learned, been limited
to the CIA. Appendix A of the public transcript of the three-hour five-minute
hearing, at which only men spoke, was a novella-length report by the Senate
Select Committee on Intelligence Activities titled “Testing and Use of
Chemical and Biological Agents by the Intelligence Community.” The report
described eight classified projects, including two by the Army. In Project
Derby Hat, the Army interrogated seven people in the Far East on LSD,
including, in 1962, a “suspected Asian espionage agent” who received 6
micrograms per kilogram (or, if he weighed 140 pounds, around 2.5 tabs) of
LSD one morning at 10:35 A.M., was “assisted to the interrogation table,”
according to the Army’s “trip report”—a term used four times in the report,
the first time in quotation marks—at 12:20 P.M., and interrogated until 3:30
A.M.
Like the hearing itself—in which seven current and former CIA employees
were questioned, including Stansfield Turner, who said, “Let me emphasize
that the MKULTRA events are twelve to twenty-five years in the past,” and
had been head of the CIA for only five months and was separated from
Richard Helms by three heads—I found the Senate report darkly comical.
The two sentences in the report that eventually most attracted my attention
were from a quote of a “lengthy staff study” published by the Army in 1959.
The study analyzed data from LSD tests on more than a thousand Army
soldiers since 1955 and concluded, quoted the Senate report:
There has not been a single case of residual ill effect. Study of the
prolific scientific literature on LSD-25 and personal communication
between US Army Chemical Corps personnel and other researchers in
this field have failed to disclose an authenticated instance of
irreversible change being produced in normal humans by the drug.
This impressive finding on the safety of LSD, expressed in an internal
Army text, has been supported by my personal experience as an emotionally
unstable person with various mental problems who has enjoyed LSD at least
eighty times since 2010 at measured doses of 20, 25, 37.5, 40, 50, 70, 87.5,
100, and 150 micrograms—and some higher, unmeasured doses—with only,
I feel, positive, sanity-promoting effects. But in 1977, LSD had been a
Schedule I drug for seven years. The Senate report commented on this
disagreement between the Army and the government by arguing that the
Army’s conclusion had been based on incomplete data, because in 1959
they’d been unaware of “the circumstances surrounding Dr. Olson’s
death”—that Army scientist Frank Olson’s 1953 death had been caused “at
least in part,” said the report, by LSD.
—
On day 6, we again heard no cases. In the waiting room, we napped and did
things on our phones and computers, which we were encouraged to bring.
We learned the other jury selected on day 1 was in a courtroom one room
from our waiting room, which they sometimes entered to use our
microwave. We theorized prosecutors had determined that, with our
decreased indictment rate, it had become smarter—if the goal was to
efficiently elicit indictments—to try the other jury first.
—
In a section titled “The Death of Dr. Frank Olson,” the Senate report then
examined what it called “the most tragic result of the testing of LSD by the
CIA.” On November 19, 1953, at a cabin in rural Maryland for a semi-annual
“review and analysis conference,” Frank Olson unwittingly ingested 70
micrograms of LSD, which CIA employee Robert Lashbrook had put into a
bottle of liquor. Of the ten people there—seven Army, three CIA—all but
two, from the Army, were dosed. Around twenty minutes later, Sidney
Gottlieb, head of MKUltra, informed the group they’d ingested LSD. The
report quoted Gottlieb saying they became “boisterous and laughing” and
“could not continue the meeting or engage in sensible conversation.” The
report said, “Shortly after this experiment, Olson exhibited symptoms of
paranoia and schizophrenia.” After multiple meetings with a doctor in New
York City with LSD experience and CIA clearance, “it was agreed that Olson
should be placed under regular psychiatric care at an institution closer to his
home” in Maryland. The next night, eight days after being dosed, Olson was
in a tenth-floor room in Hotel Statler, across the street from Penn Station,
with Lashbrook; at around 2:30 A.M., he “crashed through the closed window
blind and the closed window,” according to Lashbrook, who told police he
didn’t know why Olson committed suicide.
In the 1950s and 1960s, the CIA explained that Olson, who specialized in
the use of microorganisms in biological warfare, had killed himself for
unknown reasons. After the world learned, briefly in 1975 via the Rockefeller
Commission and in more depth in the 1977 hearing and its appended report,
that LSD had been involved, Olson’s case was frequently, through the 1980s
and 1990s, cited as an instance in which LSD led to psychosis and suicide,
even in books reporting on the hellish details of MKUltra that the
commission and hearing didn’t mention—like In the Sleep Room: The Story of
the CIA Brainwashing Experiments in Canada (1988), which described people
being put into “chemical sleep” for weeks, hearing the same statements up to
five hundred thousand times from football helmets or speakered pillows in
what was called “automated psychotherapy,” receiving unwitting injections of
LSD, and undergoing amnesia-causing, electroshock-based “depatterning.”
In the Sleep Room referred to Frank Olson twice, saying on page 29 that he’d
“been slipped a dose of LSD” and “had freaked out and jumped from the
tenth-floor window of a New York hotel several days later” and on page 214
calling him “the army scientist who died of a fall from a hotel window shortly
after being dosed with LSD.”
As the world, for decades, associated LSD with insanity-caused suicide via
the Frank Olson case, the 1977 Senate report’s quote of the 1959 Army study
deeming LSD safe remained obscure, unpublicized, and seemingly almost
totally forgotten. A Google search, on March 21, 2017, of “There has not been
a single case of residual ill effect” returned forty results, and all were
reproductions of the entire MKUltra hearing itself except for a paper
—“Cluster Headache, Dreaming & Neurogenesis”—self-published in 2006
by Peter May, meaning the quote has been reproduced by a Googlable source
of newspaper, magazine, journal, book, blog, or other media only one time in
forty years. May’s paper, which argued for the use of psilocybin and other
psychedelics to treat cluster headaches, included the Army quote with
summaries of other studies that had found psychedelics to be relatively safe.
Researching Peter May, I found an article published by Nature Medicine in
2006 that quoted him saying cluster headaches felt “like someone is trying
to pull your eye out.” The article called them “suicide headaches” and said
many sufferers had found “illegal drugs are their only choice,” like May and,
I knew, my friend Gian, who has ordered 5-MeO-DALT—a 42-atom
compound created by Alexander Shulgin in 2004 that, being an analog of a
Schedule I or II drug, can itself, under the Federal Analogue Act of 1986, be
illegal—from the Czech Republic since 2015 to treat his cluster headaches.
Unlike Gian, Peter May had no experience with psychedelics when, in 2002,
after six months of research, he tried them for his cluster headaches—which
he’d had since 1999—and experienced immediate success, reported the
Nature Medicine article, which said the condition affected around one in one
thousand people, making it, based on the Army study, more common than
LSD causing “residual ill effect” when used wittingly.
Researching Frank Olson, I learned that, in 1994, evidence began to
emerge that he didn’t kill himself, though LSD may still have led to his death
by inspiring him to speak out against an atrocity. That year, Eric Olson, who
was nine when his dad died, had Frank Olson’s body exhumed and a second
autopsy ordered. James Starrs, who led the autopsy, concluded the body was
“rankly and starkly suggestive of homicide,” a finding absolving LSD from
the death and so refuting the Senate report’s only argument for why the
Army study had been wrong. In 2001, then, the New York Times Magazine
published an article reporting that Frank Olson’s wife, Alice, remembered
him, in the days after being dosed, being “in the grip of an ethical dilemma”
and “withdrawn but not remotely psychotic” and that months earlier Olson
may have confided to a psychiatrist that he’d witnessed something terrible,
possibly a terminal experiment. I learned from the article that in 1997 the
CIA “inadvertently declassified” an assassin’s manual from the 1950s and
that, from it, Eric Olson learned what the CIA seemed to have done to his
dad—“dropped” him.
—
On day 7, we again heard no cases. During a long lunch break, I talked to
Juror 12 on a bench outside Columbus Park. We recognized each other as he
approached and he, a man in his sixties, sat. He was a playwright and had
voted to dismiss around half the charges. I told him I was glad I hadn’t
entered the courtroom ahead of everyone and sat in one of the three elevated
seats that faced the other twenty jurors and unwittingly become a secretary,
foreperson, or assistant foreperson. We discussed Juror 8—who always voted
to indict and never to deliberate and who seemed impatient when jurors
asked questions—then he had a phone call from his daughter, who was
meeting him nearby. After he left, I watched a squirrel unbury, unshell, and
eat a peanut. That night, I noted that I was enjoying “suspecting both jurors
who have talked to me to be working undercover for the CIA.”
—
“Psychedelics are illegal not because a loving government is concerned that
you may jump out of a third-story window,” said McKenna in “Nature Is the
Center of the Mandala” (1987). “Psychedelics are illegal because they dissolve
opinion structures and culturally laid down models of behavior and
information processing. They open you up to the possibility that everything
you know is wrong.” This was the reason he stressed most—and which can
be viewed as underlying the other reasons discussed in this chapter—for why
psychedelics are illegal. Because they’re “catalysts of intellectual dissent.”
They make people question their behavior, other people’s behaviors, and why
things are how they are, and they do this while putting one in a state of mind
open to change, novelty, and historical revisionism. This makes it difficult,
observed McKenna, for societies—even democratic and especially dominator
ones—to accept them, much less praise them, and we happen to live in a
global dominator society.
McKenna got the terms “partnership” and “dominator” from Riane Eisler,
who in The Chalice and the Blade (1987) proposed that beneath the “surface
diversity of human culture” are two models of society—not
communist/capitalist, matriarchal/patriarchal, religious/secular, or
aboriginal/modern, but partnership/dominator. In the dominator model, one
gender is ranked over the other in a bias that influences all relationships
because it involves “the most fundamental difference in our species.” In the
partnership model, diversity, beginning with gender, isn’t equated with
inferiority or superiority; instead of ranking, there’s “linking.” Eisler’s terms
were deliberately gender-holistic—all humans can, and do, embody
dominator values. The problem, she felt, was “not men as a sex” but the
dominator model, in which “the Blade is idealized.” In The Chalice and the
Blade, which she observed was unlike most studies of society because it
considered all of human history, Eisler argued that the dominator model
began only around 7,000 years ago.
—
On day 8, we heard one case and saw, in an undercover video, our first
accused person—a black man selling cocaine to an undercover Hispanic
officer in a Dunkin’ Donuts. I recorded most of this case as a Voice Memo.
“So, if we’re ready to vote on the one charge, please raise your hand; okay,
that’s everyone,” said our foreperson. The simplicity of our cases—officers
buying or finding drugs—was not conducive to deliberation; in the fifteen to
twenty cases we heard, we deliberated three or four times, briefly, with two to
five people speaking, then stopped getting enough votes to deliberate. “So
then on the charge of the criminal sale of a substance in the third degree, if
you want to vote to indict, please raise your hand.” With twenty jurors
looking at her, she counted the votes. “Okay, that’s fifteen.” Juror 1, our
secretary, wrote the voting result on paper, then left to tell the judge we’d
finished voting. The judge entered and said, “All right, folks, we’re going to
break for lunch until two thirty.”
—
At least 35,000 years ago, humans in Eurasia began to carve female figurines
from bone, stone, and ivory. The oldest known example, the Venus of Hohle
Fels, was found in Germany in 2009. Instead of a head, the fig-size, 35,000-
to 40,000-year-old mammoth-tusk sculpture had a polished ring, probably
indicating it had been suspended as a pendant. Archaeologist Marija
Gimbutas (1921–1994) estimated in her posthumous book The Living
Goddesses (1999) that around three thousand female and genderlessly
zoomorphic figurines had been found in the Upper Paleolithic, from 40,000
to 12,000 years ago, a period with no male figurines. Popular culture and
most books and textbooks explain that they’re either, Eisler wrote, “an
ancient analogue for today’s Playboy magazine” or “expressions of a primitive
fertility cult.”
An example of the sex object interpretation is in “She’s Still a Pin-up after
35,000 Years,” an article on NBCNews.com that quoted archaeologist Paul
Mellars, whose commentary on the sculpture was published in the issue of
Nature announcing the discovery: “Paleolithic Playboy? We just don’t know
how it was used at this point, but the object’s size meant it fit well in
someone’s hand.” The pornography interpretation also occurs in Cave of
Forgotten Dreams (2010) by Werner Herzog, who brought 3-D cameras into
Chauvet Cave in France to film 30,000- to 32,000-year-old art. For insight
into the cave’s only human representation—a bison-zoomorphized drawing
of thighs and vulva—the documentary cut to the director of the cave’s
research project, who showed a copy of a 27,000- to 30,000-year-old
limestone figurine (with a characteristic hexagram of bulges around a
pregnant belly) and said its bottom half resembled the drawing. Then his
voice was muted and Herzog voice-over narrated, “There seems to have
existed a visual convention extending all the way beyond Baywatch.” In 2010,
I had not consciously heard of or suspected the existence of an ancient
religion with a female God, so, though Herzog’s interpretation seemed
unconvincing, I lacked a better explanation. I remember telling myself
maybe the figurines really were sex objects.
Four years later, when I researched this topic for Tao Of Terence—for a
post in which I encouraged people to “get stoned and read The Chalice and
the Blade”—I began to realize that people with busy, public, meaningful lives
(embedded with families and tribes in densely symbiotic ecosystems, tending
and harvesting and hunting and preparing food, monitoring the stars and
seasons and other life-forms) probably wouldn’t spend hours carving a tiny
pendant to help them masturbate. Gimbutas, who wrote four books on the
Goddess, observed that due to “modern cultural programming,” people
associated “nakedness” with “sexual enticement” but that the female body
symbolized many other functions, including “the procreative, nurturing, and
life enhancing.”
As I read books by Eisler, Gimbutas, and others, I became convinced, as
those authors argued, that the figurines symbolized the universe’s life-giving
force by emphasizing the female body’s unique parts and abilities—and that,
with other evidence, they suggested the existence of a widespread, crosscultural, female-deitied religion that began in the Upper Paleolithic or earlier.
One reason humans worshipped a female deity was probably, I learned,
because only women give birth. Prehistoric humans, noticing that life
emerged only from women—who alone nursed that life—naturally
developed a worldview featuring this fact. In When God Was a Woman (1976),
sculptress Merlin Stone (1931–2011) shared another reason why people, for
tens of thousands of years, seemed to have worshipped female deities; citing
studies of aboriginals by James Frazer, Jacquetta Hawkes, and others, Stone
wrote that “as the earliest concepts of religion developed, they probably took
the form of ancestor worship,” which meant mother worship because people
had not connected sex and babies so did not know they had fathers.
After agriculture developed from 12,000 to 10,000 years ago in the Fertile
Crescent, people there and beyond, from England to Pakistan, continued for
at least three millennia, I learned, to create female figurines, though they
now lived not nomadically but, as at Jericho, in stone-foundationed, mudbrick houses with thousands of others. It was during this Neolithic period,
when gender equality was “the general norm,” wrote Eisler, that most of the
technologies of civilization—farming, stockbreeding, pottery, ceramics,
megalithic architecture, metallurgy, wheeled vehicles, textiles, writing—
developed. Eisler, who was born in 1937 in Austria and fled the Nazi takeover
of her country when she was a child, going to Cuba then the States, called
this “one of the best kept historical secrets”—that advancement doesn’t
require war.
In Earliest Civilizations of the Near East (1965), James Mellaart (1925–2012)
identified Çatalhöyük, where people lived from 9,400 to 7,500 years ago, as
the most advanced culture and largest settlement, with up to eight thousand
residents, of this period. From 1961 to 1963, Mellaart excavated an acre of the
33.5-acre main mound of the double mound of Çatalhöyük. He found
matrilineal and matrilocal organization—the woman’s platform for sitting,
working, and sleeping was always on the east side of the house, whereas the
man’s shifted and was smaller—and that, based on stone-and-clay figurines,
wall paintings, and other art, the city’s “principal deity” was “a goddess who
is shown in her three aspects, as a young woman, a mother giving birth or as
an old woman.” People probably had gained the concept of father—a stone
plaque showed a couple embracing on the left and a child-holding woman on
the right—and now also made male figurines (Mellaart found thirty-three
female, eight male), but Goddess worship seemed to remain the most
important practice. At least 40 of 139 buildings excavated were, in Mellaart’s
view, shrines, including one with wall drawings of women birthing, which
Gimbutas called “probably one of the most sacrosanct events in Neolithic
religion,” and the rest were homes. Shrines, homes, and middens formed
one accreting, doorless, streetless, leaderless, egalitarian city enterable only
by ladder from each building’s different-elevationed roof.
The commonest motif in Çatalhöyükian art was the male cow, or bull,
which Mellaart interpreted in 1967 to represent “male power.” Gimbutas
stressed throughout her work that, in the pre-dominator cultures of Anatolia
and Europe, the bull was a Goddess symbol, conveying becoming and
regeneration, because of the resemblance of its head-and-horns, or
bucranium, to the uterus and fallopian tubes. McKenna in Food of the Gods
argued the cow and bull symbolized both the Goddess and the mushroom
because Çatalhöyükians recognized the mushroom as “the physical
connection” to the Goddess and, since it sprouted from cow dung, viewed it,
like milk, as a product of cattle. Abandoned around 7,500 years ago for
unknown reasons, with people possibly relocating to the island of Crete,
maybe because they sensed the violence to come on the mainland,
Çatalhöyük was the last civilization, theorized McKenna, that was
continuously informed by “the gnosis of the boundary-dissolving plant
hallucinogens.”
—
On day 9, a Friday, Juror 11 said bye to me because, she said, she wouldn’t be
there Monday, the last day. This made sense, I felt, if she worked for the CIA;
her expensive time was subject to reprioritization. Maybe she or her boss had
determined I was closed off to a certain degree in terms of talkativeness—as I
was during this time, being focused on my book—making me not a good
investment in befriending, and then it took three days of paperwork to move
her off the project. We heard no cases that day.
—
The dominator model, which previously existed in balanced and controlled
form, emerged in a sustained, whole-society, assailing manner around 7,000
years ago, argued Eisler and Gimbutas and others. At this time, various
groups of dominator-style people from the north, including the Kurgans in
Europe, Luwians in Anatolia, and Hittites in the Fertile Crescent—called, as
a group, Indo-Europeans—began to invade the Goddess-worshipping
civilizations in the south, first in the Near East, then in Anatolia, and,
spreading west over millennia, throughout Europe. They worshipped male
deities, rode horses and war chariots, were hierarchic, patrilineal, patrilocal,
and pastoral, and had lighter skin and were bigger than those in the south.
They associated black with death, unlike the preexisting people in Europe
and Anatolia—Old Europeans—who viewed black, wrote Gimbutas in The
Language of the Goddess (1989), as “the color of fertility, the color of damp
caves and rich soil, of the womb of the Goddess where life begins.”
In the Sumerian and Egyptian civilizations, which began 6,000 to 5,000
years ago and, wrote Eisler, “are celebrated in our high school and college
textbooks as marking the beginnings of Western civilization,” people still
worshipped female deities, but male deities began to dominate. Around the
Eighteenth Dynasty, 3,570 years ago, when Egyptian women were no longer
part of the religious clergy, some people in the Near East—where a supreme
deity, known by many names, had already, for millennia, been “revered as
Goddess—much as people think of God,” wrote Stone—began to worship a
male deity named Yahweh, who, according to the Bible, told his laws to
Moses, who wrote them down and gave them to the Levites, a Hebrew tribe.
“Perhaps the most shocking laws of all were those that declared that a
woman was to be stoned or burned to death for losing her virginity before
marriage, a factor never mentioned in other law codes of the Near East,”
wrote Stone, who observed that the Bible “purposely glossed over” the
Goddess’s gender, calling her Elohim—“in the masculine gender, to be
translated as god”—but that the Koran, the bible of Islam, did not: “Allah will
not tolerate idolatry…the pagans pray to females.”
The Levites, tyrannically leading the other eleven Hebrew tribes, invaded
Canaan—an area around the size and mirror-reversed shape of California—
and instated their laws over the survivors of their rampage. “So Joshua
massacred the population of the whole region—the hill country, the Negeb,
the Shepelah, the watersheds,” according to the Bible. The laws targeted
Goddess worship because in Goddess-worshipping societies, daughters
inherited name, title, and property—and because, even though the concept of
father had been known for millennia, women called qadishtu—“holy
women”—continued to birth fatherless babies by living in temple-complexes
where, coming and going as they desired, they had sex with various men.
This was “probably the underlying reason for the resentment of the worship
of the Goddess,” wrote Stone, who stressed that the sexism of the laws was
political, not religious, having nothing to do with the mystery of life.
After the initial invasions from 7,000 to 4,800 years ago, the Goddess
religion survived, in places, as the popular religion for millennia; it was not
until the Levites and then the rise of Christianity that it was, in the first
century, “finally suppressed and nearly forgotten.” For the next two
millennia, Yahweh-based, anti-partnership ideas continued to spread in the
form of the Crusades, the Inquisition, witch hunts, all-male clergies, and,
among other memes, the Adam and Eve myth—in which Yahweh absurdly
punished women with pain in childbirth and to be ruled by men. Around 350
years ago, the United States was founded “under God” and around 100 years
ago, American women gained the right to vote. On November 8, 2016, at 7:30
P.M., the New York Times estimated Hillary Clinton had a more than 80
percent chance of becoming the president. By midnight, it was under 5
percent. The next morning, Donald Trump, embodying the dominator model
arguably more than any previous candidate, was, in the lowest voter turnout
since 1996, elected the forty-fifth consecutive male president of the United
States, which, out of 196 countries and 5,000 aboriginal groups, had by far
the largest military budget—triple the second-place country, China, which
had four times the population.
Knowing this narrative, the past 4,800 years can be viewed as an
inconsistent, unpredictable, many-threaded, unguaranteed but achievable
recovery—instead of a hopeless continuation of a seemingly always cruel and
violent human history, like I mostly suspected before learning all this—from
the overexpression of the dominator model, which for 7,000 years has been
erasing evidence and memory, across civilizations and continents, of the
Goddess religion and its partnership way of life.
—
We also heard no cases on day 10, when I brought my computer for the first
time. The other days, I’d hand-edited pages of this book and read others’
books. On days 3 and 4, I’d read LSD: My Problem Child (1980) by Albert
Hofmann, who was born in 1906, created LSD from a compound (lysergic
acid) made by ergot (fungi from the genus Claviceps) in 1938, answered
“What general medical uses might LSD be marketed for in the future?” with
“Very small doses, perhaps 25 micrograms, could be useful as a euphoriant
or antidepressant” in 1976, and died in 2008. I’d used 0.3 grams of baked
cannabis every day except day 8, when I used half an old, degraded tab of
LSD—maybe around 40 micrograms—and day 10, when, on my way to
Chinatown, at 9:53 A.M., I used the other half. On this dose, I felt more
outgoing and curious, and less inflamed, than normal. Walking around on
my lunch break, I enjoyed “remarkable mobility,” I typed in notes.rtf at 2:08
P.M., in my hips and legs. “Still feel lucid,” I typed at 4:56 P.M. in my room,
where I worked on this book’s psilocybin chapter, researched inflammation,
and, at 10:32 P.M., slept.
Besides cannabis, we’d heard only two cases with psychedelics—psilocybin
and LSD. Both cases also involved heroin and/or cocaine and,
unsurprisingly, we indicted all four drugs without deliberation. Cannabis,
which can be almost as powerful as psilocybin and LSD when eaten, had
been involved in almost every case. I was reminded of this prevalence when I
read “Legalize It All,” which was published a month after jury duty; the
report, subtitled “How to Win the War on Drugs,” quoted the director of the
ACLU from 1978 to 2001 as saying that “the drug war couldn’t be sustained”
if cannabis was legal because the “vanishingly small” use of other drugs
couldn’t justify police and prison spending. Researching prison, I learned
two countries had more than a million prisoners in 2015, the United States
with 2.15 million and China with 1.65 million.
—
It’s unknown how the dominator model became so out-of-control. Maybe the
human species is so precariously balanced that a combination of seemingly
small factors, like horse domestication, invoking military advantage and the
desire to ride and be nomadic, tipped entire societies into dominator mode.
And as societies abandoned the cross-gender reverence of women to worship
the larger-so-better-at-war gender, things deteriorated further and the
partnership model was forgotten. In Food of the Gods, McKenna argued that
the equilibrium was maintained by psychedelics and their connection to “the
archetype of the Goddess and hence to the partnership style.”
One of the last places in Western society where psychedelics were
regularly, if seldomly, used was Eleusis, where the most famous Mystery was
practiced. In the Greco-Roman world, a Mystery was a religion in which “the
individual was afforded an experience of personal communion with deity,”
wrote Carl Ruck in Sacred Mushrooms of the Goddess (2006). The Eleusinian
Mystery is theorized to have been practiced openly for millennia on Crete by
the Minoans, a partnership civilization, or gylany, which may have been
seeded from Çatalhöyük, before it began to be practiced semi-secretly on the
mainland around 3,500 years ago—fifty years after Abraham, six hundred
miles away, began promoting Yahweh, according to an estimate from When
God Was a Woman. For 1,900 years, people in Athens who spoke Greek and
had not killed anyone outside of war had the option to experience the
Eleusinian Mysteries, whose Goddesses were Demeter and Persephone.
Completing the Lesser Mystery in February allowed one to be an initiate,
nineteen months later, in the Greater Mystery, which occurred over nine
days in September, including a day walking fourteen miles from Athens to
Eleusis and a night stoned on a drink called kykeon in a building called the
telestêrion that, after multiple reconstructions, held thousands and which
contained a small chamber that one initiate entered at a time.
Alaric the Visigoth destroyed the telestêrion in 396 AD, four years after a
Christian Roman emperor deemed Christianity the official religion and
closed the Eleusinian Mystery. Before the experience became illegal,
Pythagoras, Sophocles, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, and others went, drank
kykeon, and published positive, awed thoughts on their trips. In The Road to
Eleusis (1978), Wasson, Hofmann, and Ruck theorized kykeon contained an
LSD-like compound made by ergot, which grows on rye, barley, and other
grasses. Wasson quoted Aristides the Rhetor, calling the experience “new,
astonishing, inaccessible to rational cognition.”
—
In May, when I was working on this book’s DMT chapter, I encountered a
juror who I’d also seen in public in March, the night after jury duty ended,
when, walking in opposite directions, we’d waved. He was the juror who, on
day 1, asked why we were indicting a dinky knife. This time we stopped to
talk.
He said he forgot to tell me something last time. We’d been the only two,
he said, who voted to dismiss on every charge. As prologue, it seemed, to
explaining why he’d voted to dismiss all, he said he’d “studied law and
philosophy” and trailed off, looking at me. He asked how I felt about the
experience. I said good, productive. As officers learned juries were
dismissing cannabis felonies, they would become reluctant to try to
prosecute them—to make the arrest, do the paperwork, go to Chinatown, sit
on a witness stand—and as people in the cannabis trade learned juries
weren’t indicting cannabis felonies, they’d become bolder in their
investments and marketing, and eventually cannabis, barring being targeted
by a billion- or trillion-dollar industry or organization, could become legal
again; with cannabis, the entry psychedelic, legal, the others could follow. My
votes supported this trend, so I felt productive.
We were in Washington Square Park. We discussed how, in the back row,
he’d seen every vote. He said most jurors had seemed to try to vote with the
majority and that gradually more had voted to dismiss cannabis charges. He
was the only juror I’d encountered since jury duty ended; he seemed to want
to talk a little more but didn’t, and we said bye.
CANNABIS
1
On February 14, 2016, I learned from Tracy that Botanical Dimensions, the
nonprofit founded in 1985 by Kathleen Harrison and Terence McKenna to
“collect, protect, propagate and understand plants of ethno-medical
significance,” had opened a library in Northern California. Four months and
four days had passed since I smoked Tracy’s DMT, and in three days I would
begin writing this book. Investigating Botanical Dimensions’s website, I
noticed the organization’s curvy logo—made of eight pairs of curly parts
connected by a squarish ring into an asymmetrical, wreathlike design, like a
vine-inflected yin-yang—and that Harrison was co-teaching a plant-drawing
class at the library on July 2, my thirty-third birthday.
2
In “Who Is Cannabis?” (2015), Kathleen Harrison observed that humans are
skilled at consciously and unconsciously noticing qualities about other
humans and suggested we use our “groking” abilities on other species too,
instead of thinking, “Oh, more green stuff that’s really hard to tell apart from
all the other green stuff.” From her twenty-five-minute talk, I learned:
• Harrison, who was sixty-seven, had “never left her love of cannabis.”
When she wanted to “climb onto her magic carpet” and go above the
situation to reflect on and write about it, she smoked cannabis.
• It surprised her how many people she met who said cannabis made them
paranoid. “I think it’s become a meme, you know—‘It makes me
paranoid.’ ”
• In terms of staying well in a “seemingly crazy modern world,” she most
appreciated cannabis for the “comfort” and “solace” it provided.
• She was not social with cannabis; for her, it was “a meditative herb.”
• She always greeted cannabis as her “big sister.” Her impulse was to rest
against cannabis’s shoulder and say, “Ah, thank you, you’re here too, that
reminds me that the world is not on my shoulders, it’s on our shoulders,
there are bigger entities than me trying to do the little part to save it every
day.”
• People she’d spent time with in Latin America appealed daily, she’d
noticed, in prayers and songs, to Santa María, a deity viewed by some
practitioners of the ayahuasca-based religion Santo Daime as accessible
through cannabis: “To be soothed, because life is hard. To remember the
beauty so they can do the next hard thing.”
• In Harrison’s view, cannabis’s millennia-long relationship with humans
showed it wanted to be with us. Cannabis had offered herself as fiber,
food, medicine, and “medicine for the spirit,” helping us “balance out all
the alienation and mechanization and institutional-enforced suffering.”
3
Terence McKenna encountered cannabis in 1965, when he was eighteen.
He’d inherited “the programming” from his “middle-class straight parents”
that “the road to hell was paved” with it, but he’d also read Burroughs,
Ginsberg, and others with different opinions. As an adolescent, he’d been
“what they call ‘a nervous child’ ”; now he realized that smoking “a small
amount of vegetable material” could make him “a reasonably functioning
member of the community.” Within months, cannabis became “the central
practice” of his life. “And it has remained so up until just two or three
months ago when, under the pressure of my apparently dissolving marriage,
I stopped smoking in order to see, really, what sort of effect it would have,”
he said in “Cannabis Trialogue” (1991). He explained that he and Kathleen
had been in couples therapy with someone “who seemed to be a very skilled
psychotherapist” but had “no sophistication whatsoever about cannabis.”
This conversation would happen:
PSYCHOTHERAPIST: Well, now, how many times a day do you do this?
MCKENNA: Eh, ten to fourteen.
PSYCHOTHERAPIST: And how many years have you been doing this?
MCKENNA: Well, twenty-five, twenty-six, twenty-seven?
Cannabis was impeding the therapeutic process due to its effects on his
therapist’s attitude toward him, so he stopped smoking it. “And I’m happy to
report that, though I was at that time the heaviest and most continuous
cannabis user that I have ever known or ever heard of, it was no big deal. I
simply stopped smoking it, and took up reading in the evenings, and it
seemed to have no impact on my psychological organization at all except that,
I must say, my dream life became considerably more interesting.”
4
In his book’s preface, Chris Duvall said he wrote Cannabis to try to
understand how cannabis “gained its cosmopolitan status,” growing on “all
inhabited landmasses to about 60 degrees latitude, a distribution broader
than any other crop.” In “Ancient Cannabis,” his book’s second chapter, he
observed that cannabis evolved tens of millions of years before humans.
5
On March 1, sixteen days after learning of Botanical Dimensions’s library and
the plant-drawing class, I began serving ten days of jury duty, which I
examined in the previous chapter. I was surprised so many jurors voted to
dismiss cannabis felonies, but also unsurprised, because I knew humans had
enjoyed cannabis for millennia and that, in the United States, after almost a
century of criminalization, it was quickly becoming relegalized, with
Washington and Colorado unbanning it in 2012, Alaska and Oregon and
Washington, D.C., in 2014, and other states expected to follow.
6
Around 50 million years ago, when our ancestors resembled long-limbed
squirrels, India began colliding into south-central Asia, where proto-cannabis
lived, creating the Himalayas over tens of millions of years, during which,
elsewhere on the planet, monkeys and then apes evolved. The impact moved
some proto-cannabis populations closer, through changes in elevation and
latitude, to the sun. These populations evolved more THC, a 53-atom
compound acting in part as “sunscreen,” wrote Duvall, against ultraviolet-B
radiation. India finished colliding into Asia around eleven million years ago.
By six million years ago, when proto-humans had begun walking upright but
still lived in trees, cannabis had evolved into a genus of two species, indica
and sativa, producing versatile fiber, nutritious seeds, and resin, flowers,
leaves, stems, and roots with at least 554 different compounds, of which 113
were cannabinoids, including, most abundantly, psychoactive THC and antiinflammatory CBD.
7
In 2015, a paper in Emotion observed that clinical depression and anxiety are
“associated with higher levels of proinflammatory cytokines.” The paper
shared the results of a study at Berkeley in which 105 undergraduates
answered questionnaires online and later had their IL-6 (a pro-inflammatory
cytokine) levels measured. One questionnaire measured “positive emotions
in their daily lives.” Of those measured—amusement, awe, compassion,
contentment, joy, love, pride—awe, surprisingly, had “the strongest
relationship” with IL-6 levels, followed, not closely, by joy, pride, and
contentment. The paper said there was probably a “bidirectional relationship
between positive affect and cytokine production,” or, in other words, probably
(1) decreasing inflammation via diet and environment and exercise increases
one’s capacity to feel awe and other positive emotions and (2) positive
emotions, especially awe, decrease inflammation. Awe, I learned after some
research, was measured by numerical ratings of these sentences:
I often feel awe.
I see beauty all around me.
I feel wonder almost every day.
I often look for patterns in the objects around me.
I have many opportunities to see the beauty of nature.
I seek out experiences that challenge my understanding of the world.
Reading those sentences, I thought of how I never felt awe, and almost
never felt wonder, before incorporating psychedelics and McKenna’s ideas
into my life. I thought of how I saw beauty all around me but mostly only in
advertisements—a kind of “beauty” determined by corporations that made
me feel exploited, exploitative, inadequate, and alienated. I thought of how I
did not especially seek experiences to challenge my worldview, rarely went to
see the beauty of nature, and left New York City only for book-related events
or to visit my parents in Taipei, another dense metropolis.
8
On April 22, a month and eight days after my jury duty ended, I bought a
ticket for the plant-drawing class—“Botanical Illustration: Learning to Really
See Plants & Draw Them”—and on May 2, embedded in notes.rtf, I started a
plant-drawing diary. Eight days later, I began drafting this chapter, on
cannabis. Unsure what form to use, but knowing I wanted a change from the
previous chapters, I contemplated and waited and experimented, organizing
and disassembling and recombining information. Over thirteen months and
four drafts, adapting to feedback from my editor, a thirty-three-part fractal
structure formed with ten of the parts—1, 5, 8, 15, 18, 21, 23, 26, 32, 33—
telling a story set from February, when I began writing this book, to July,
when I flew to California to visit Kathleen Harrison.
9
From six to three million years ago, our ancestors began to spend less time in
trees and evolved into the Homo, or human, genus. From three million to
around 300,000 years ago, the human brain-size tripled; in Food of the Gods,
McKenna quoted biologists Charles Lumsden and Edward Wilson, calling
this “perhaps the fastest advance recorded for any complex organ in the
whole history of life” and theorized psilocybin catalyzed the evolution. To the
millions of humans who lived during these 27,000 centuries, when
knowledge on how to live in optimized symbiosis with thousands of lifeforms was passed down over more than 110,000 generations in an unbroken,
unconscious process, like in salamanders, vultures, and other animals, the
rapid change was probably impossible to notice.
10
In its “General Discussion” section, the Emotion paper said it contributed to
“a growing body of work” showing that positive emotions “not only feel good,
they are good for the body” and that awe was associated with “curiosity and a
desire to explore.” The 2015 paper referenced a 2006 paper in The Journal of
Positive Psychology that said people “experience awe when confronted with a
novel, highly complex stimulus that current knowledge structures cannot
fully assimilate.” The 2006 paper referenced a 2003 paper in Cognition and
Emotion that said awe hadn’t “been shown to have a distinctive facial
expression” and that psychology “has had surprisingly little to say about
awe.” The psychedelic literature has had much to say, I’ve noticed, on awe.
“Awe leads to humility,” wrote Kathleen Harrison in a 2009 essay. “It gets
you outside yourself, and puts your story in appropriate perspective as an
instant in a very long saga, the one we’re all in together. That we humans,
and human cultures, are embedded in natural cycles becomes obvious. The
question—and psychedelics certainly raise more questions than they answer
—is how do we best ‘wear’ and ‘articulate’ that fact of being creatures with
unusual agency in nature’s timeless epic.”
11
Homo sapiens, or anatomically modern humans, evolved at least 280,000
years ago in Africa. Multiple times in our first 206,000 years, groups of us
left Africa in various directions, surviving for varying amounts of time and
sometimes reproducing with other species in the Homo genus, like
Neanderthals and Denisovans.
Around 74,000 years ago, Mount Toba in Sundaland—a landmass that
existed where the Indonesian islands are now—ejected 670 cubic miles of
material over nine to fourteen days in the largest explosive eruption in at
least nineteen million years. Six years of “volcanic winter” that “could have
decimated most modern human populations,” wrote Stanley Ambrose in a
1998 paper in Journal of Human Evolution, was followed by a millennium of
“the coldest, driest climate” of the past 500,000 to a million years. The
human population fell from around one hundred thousand to probably
between two and eight thousand. The traumatized survivors, who “would
have found refuge in isolated tropical pockets, mainly in Equatorial Africa,”
wrote Ambrose, were our ancestors.
Around 72,000 years ago, estimated a 2016 paper in Nature, a group of us,
again, left Africa, entering Eurasia. At some point—30,000 years ago,
estimated Duvall—we encountered cannabis in the Himalayas. The next
20,000 years, as we drew on cave walls and sculpted female figurines and
began living in permanent settlements, cannabis went where we went.
Without planes or websites, cannabis took longer than Salvia divinorum,
which also once existed in montane isolation, to become our international
symbiont—millennia instead of years, reaching the Black Sea by 16,000
years ago; Yangmingshan, the mountains north of Taipei where pottery
fragments have been found with “the imprint of a cord-like material thought
to be of hemp,” wrote Leslie Iversen in The Science of Marijuana (2008), by
12,000 years ago; Italy and Japan by 10,000 years ago.
12
Cannabinoids are compounds that interact with cannabinoid receptors, of
which at least two types exist—CB1 mediates psychoactivity and CB2
mediates immune-system functions, like inflammation. Despite evolving
long before cannabis—as early as 600 million years ago in sea squirts—
these receptors are named after cannabis because compounds that interact
with them were discovered in cannabis before, in 1992 with the discovery of
the 62-atom compound anandamide, in animals.
In 2010, a paper in the British Journal of Pharmacology asked if other plants
besides cannabis made phytocannabinoids. It answered yes—βcaryophyllene, a 39-atom compound, was in cannabis and many other plants
and had “strong anti-inflammatory and analgesic effects in wild-type mice
but not in CB2 receptor knockout mice”—but not THC. “The question
remains as to why Cannabis sativa L. appears to be the only plant that
produces a metabolite (Δ9-THC acid) that readily leads to its decarboxylation
product Δ9-THC, which is the most potent phytocannabinoid activator of the
CB1 receptor,” concluded the paper.
One answer could be that other plants with THC remain undiscovered;
around two thousand plant species are discovered annually, according to a
2016 paper in Phytotaxa that estimated around 374,000 plant species are
known. Another answer could be that there are so many possible compounds
that, even with so many species, some can still be expected to have unique
compounds; or, in other words, that cannabis is a special plant and so, as we
attracted it—because it thrives, wrote Duvall, “in recently disturbed, fertile
soil”—it attracted us and when we found it we prized and grew it.
13
Between 12,000 and 10,000 years ago, some humans began farming and
raising animals in an area between Europe, Asia, and Africa around the size
of three Californias in “a pluralistic process with initial domestication of
various crops and livestock occurring, sometimes multiple times in the same
species, across the entire region,” according to a 2011 paper on the origins of
agriculture. Their descendants multiplied and spread and became “modern
people” who comprise our global culture. Other humans continued living
like they had for seemingly ever—in a timeless trance, outside history, like
snails and leopards and other animals, hunting and foraging and gathering
and doing limited, if any, farming. These people, without changing, became,
in terms of this book, “aboriginal people.” Aboriginals lacked the hierarchyand-material-obsessed, nature-ignoring knowledge generated by millennia of
dominator-style civilizations—a knowledge ranging from egregiously wrong
to complicatedly confusing to stimulating and useful, like knowing down to
atoms how life builds itself—and modern people increasingly lacked the
knowledge gained from living in nature for millions of years, but many of
them, like Kathleen Harrison, were learning and teaching it.
14
In late 2014, I learned from Weston A. Price, a modern person from Canada,
that aboriginals who lived like their ancestors, outside agriculture and
civilization, were, without toothbrushes or dentists, nearly free of tooth decay
—a major problem for modern people—and that in aboriginals “practically
all teeth form and erupt normally, including the third molars.” I learned
aboriginal children born to parents who’d switched to a modern diet suffered
lowered fertility and mentation, deformed feet, and other types of cumulative
degeneration, like underdeveloped bottom halves of heads, causing the long,
thin faces and crowded mouths that, already, in the 1930s, characterized
modern people. Like seemingly everyone, I’d accepted the absurd-seeming
reality that humans have evolved through natural selection to grow
debilitatingly impacted wisdom and other teeth requiring surgical removal.
Now the absurdity resolved to instructive, extrapolatable clarity as I learned
this was degenerative.
Since sedentizing into increasingly grain-based, pesticide-using, factoryfarming, automobile-infested, plant-deprived, plasticized, sterilized, sunlightless, virtual-reality-like civilizations, we have also, besides degenerating
physically, become gradually more dysbiotic, diseased, malnourished, and
inflamed. A 2007 paper in Clinical & Experimental Immunology called
inflammation “part of the nonspecific immune response that occurs in
reaction to any type of bodily injury.” Inflamed, our bodies distract our
minds with pain and discomfort instead of feeling like easily controllable,
lightweight tools that we can put down when we want to explore the
metaphysical part of existence. Inflammation encourages the development of
bleak worldviews by sucking attention toward matter, making us feel less
dimensional, like we are only our bodies and not our minds. As degeneration
and inflammation worsened by the millennium, century, and decade, in
increasingly steep curves, cannabis became more useful, helpful, powerful,
and magical-seeming.
In “Art, Drugs & Consciousness” (2012), a discussion in Brooklyn,
Hamilton Morris said he once tried a drug, invented for dieting purposes,
that blocked his cannabinoid receptors. “You become miserable,” he said.
The drug, a 51-atom compound called rimonabant, worked for weight loss but
failed overall because people became “suicidally depressed,” among other
problems. “You don’t think you’re high all the time,” said Morris, “but in
some sense you are.” I imagine that, as twenty-first century, chronically
inflamed degenerates, we are at least a little less high, on average, than
90,000, 15,000, 5,000, or 500 years ago—that we each have the opportunity
to become gradually more stoned just by weaning ourselves off civilization,
natureward.
15
On May 21, walking from Bobst Library to my apartment, I collected fourteen
leaves. “I started drawing the most circular leaf, and it seemed more complex
than I had unconsciously assumed,” I typed in my plant-drawing diary that
night. After looking at it for minutes, the leaf began to seem like a vaguely
pulsing organism instead of a motionless shape. The next night, I learned
the leaf had twenty-two and nineteen points on each side, with the
bottommost point being both twenty-third and twentieth, and that eight and
seven veins went left and right from its midrib. I was surprised by the
complexity—that 22/19, 23/20, and 8/7 were irreducible and that each point
protruded from a protrusion, like beaks from birds’ heads, instead of just
sticking out from the leaf like I’d obliviously assumed. I was surprised I
could count, between the smallest veins, each tiny green shape that seemed
two-dimensional and roundedly geometric, fitting amid one another like
weathered blocks. I could keep looking, I knew, into the leaf, like in those
YouTube videos that zoom into fractals for hours. Staring, with a microscope,
at the same place, I’d keep discovering new details.
16
In The Fractal Geometry of Nature (1982), Benoit Mandelbrot (1924–2010)
wrote that nature’s patterns are “so irregular and fragmented” that,
compared to standard geometry, the natural world was “an altogether
different level of complexity”—referring to how stars and galaxies are not
evenly distributed, hearts not spheres, mountains not cones, bark not
smooth. “The nature of fractals is meant to be gradually discovered by the
reader, not revealed in a flash by the author,” wrote Mandelbrot, who
invented the word “fractal” from a Latin adjective—fractus—whose
corresponding verb—frangere—meant “to create irregular fragments.”
Nature builds with fractal shapes and processes, which graph in jagged
patterns that seem random but are to some degree predictable. Fractals are
common in nature but, because humans have downloaded many non-fractal
forms from the imagination into the universe, uncommon in culture. Things
humans do not consciously influence remain fractal—weather, Brownian
motion, spider webs, the wending paths of birds. The roughness of sidewalks
at micrometer levels, where humans haven’t smoothed the concrete, is
fractal, but sidewalks are not. On Earth, only with humans have strangely
non-fractal objects appeared—doors, cubicles, streets, straight-line-flying
drones. But humans, being natural, are also fractal and so enjoy behaving
and creating fractally. Bobst Library looks like a simple cube from far away,
but up close one can see that it’s vertically fissured like a tree trunk, though,
with exact spacing and right angles, less fractal than a tree.
Fractal can be a point of view. Most things can be viewed as fractal. In
terms of being self-similar at different scales—a characteristic of fractals—a
refrigerator is fractal in that, as a plastic, hollow container, it contains objects
similar to itself, like how an animal (organs in skin) contains cells (organelles
in membranes). Zooming in more, though, into one of its containers, one
encounters things that suddenly aren’t refrigerator-like—sauerkraut, miso—
and now the refrigerator seems more obviously unnatural. Fractal, in this
way, can be a subjective word. I sometimes use it as a synonym for “naturalseeming” when considering behaviors, systems, visual art, writing, and
music. Chopin’s music is rhythmically more fractal to me than what I’ve
heard of Bach’s, for example, because it often uses polyrhythms—sustained
passages of four notes against three and three against two, instances of 7/6,
14/3, 22/12, and other oddities—while Bach’s is often reducible to 2/1, an
unnaturally simple temporal relationship between sounds.
Fractals are explorable. In a fractal object—a galaxy, a leaf—one can travel
through scale in either direction, discovering new properties and patterns
and life-forms. Zooming into a dot in the sky, one could discover a
supercluster. Zooming into a dot in the supercluster, one would discover a
galaxy. Zooming into one of the galaxy’s billions of dots, one would be a little
surprised to find not another enormous selection of dots but an intensely
glowing sphere—or two or more in binary and multiple systems—orbited by
a small number of tiny, dim spheres. Zooming into a sphere, one would be
surprised to find not more dots or spheres following the laws of physics but,
seemingly hidden there, in the meter scale of size, complicatedly shaped
objects traveling in desultory, anti-gravitational ways. Zooming into an
animal, one would find, at the micrometer level, more unpredictably moving,
irregular shapes. In this way, planets, animals, and microorganisms are
hidden far inside the fractal of the universe.
“Time is a fractal, or has a fractal structure,” wrote McKenna in a 1991
essay. “All times, moments, months and millennia, have a pattern; the same
pattern. This pattern is the structure within which, upon which, events
‘undergo the formality of actually occurring,’ as Whitehead used to say. The
pattern recurs on every level. A love affair, the fall of an empire, the death
agony of a protozoan, all occur within the context of this always the same but
ever different pattern. All events are resonances of other events, in other
parts of time, and at other scales of time.”
If time is a fractal, the human genus is hidden inside ten million years,
Homo sapiens inside a million years, individual humans inside millennia and
centuries, thoughts inside seconds and minutes, and feelings, both briefer
and longer lasting than thoughts, inside deciseconds, seconds, minutes,
hours, days, weeks, months, seasons, years, and decades.
17
In China, a millennium before Jesus, a group of people went as deep into
their study of time, McKenna argued in talks and books, as scientists today
have gone into their study of matter and energy. These people—Taoist sages
—meditated and felt time and determined it was describable not with ten or
two hundred, or thirty or one hundred, but sixty-four parts, each with six
subparts definable as yin or yang. With this knowledge, they created the I
Ching, a 384-part system of time and accompanying text.
Three millennia later, at La Chorrera in 1971, when the mushroom was
downloading a fractal model of time into McKenna’s mind, McKenna asked
why him. “You are the first person who has ever walked through this pasture
who had these sixty-four hexagrams in your head,” said the mushroom, a
collagist. McKenna returned to the States and modeled the fractal wave in his
Timewave theory on the oldest surviving yin-yang configuration—the King
Wen sequence—for all 384 parts of the I Ching, whose structural
correspondence with DNA he would call “staggering” in an interview in
1998, observing that all the processes in DNA, which expresses sixty-four
codons, could be “easily modeled with the six line hexagrams.”
While investigating the I Ching, which he called “the world’s oldest book,”
McKenna also discovered it works—and was probably used in Neolithic
China—as a lunar calendar. In The Invisible Landscape, he and his brother
showed that an I Ching calendar, with thirteen lunations of 29.53 days
totaling 383.89 days, resonated with sunspot cycles, zodiacal ages, and
equinoctial precession and was more than twice as accurate as the solar,
Gregorian calendar. In a lunar calendar, seasons slowly shift over years in a
systematic sampling of possible variety. If winter began in December as a
child, it would begin in August as a young adult; later in life, winter would
again begin in December. Instead of stability and permanence, as with a
solar calendar, the message of a moon-based calendar is gradual, constant,
unceasing change.
18
On May 31, I emailed Kathleen Harrison—whose email address I’d gotten
from her daughter, Klea, who I’d interviewed for Tao Of Terence—
introducing myself and my book. “In the book’s epilogue, I hope to write
about you, Botanical Dimensions, the Ethnobotany Library which I’m eager
to experience, and/or the drawing class I am excited to be taking from you
and Paetra Tauchert on July 2,” I said. I asked if we could talk for around an
hour outside of the class. “If you’d rather not talk in this capacity, that is
totally fine, and you don’t need to provide a reason, I’ll be able to write about
the class and the library,” I added.
19
In the fractal model of recovery that I began developing for personal use in
2013 and continue to ponder and use on myself, change becomes a kind of
practice. A graph of fractal recovery from drugs and other problems is
somewhat unpredictable in the short-term but stable and directional in the
long-term. In fractal recovery, change happens to some degree in waves.
Failure is expected and can be viewed partly as resonances of past failures, as
unavoidable and useful and even enjoyable. Other strengths of the fractal
model of behavior modification include that it has no rules so is optimized
for creative involvement, that its main inspiration is nature (the longest
surviving known system), and that it allows one to avoid ideology (rules
coming from other humans) and so retain individuality even while making
an earnest attempt at recovery. In my personalized model of fractal recovery,
I’ve used these techniques:
• Note-taking. I’ve recorded, in notes.rtf, each time I’ve used a substance
and the amount used. I’ve regularly studied my notes to learn and remind
myself how much—and how—I’ve changed. By documenting life daily
and scaling back to months and years to examine the past, I’ve generated
momentum and confidence while increasing self-awareness and
countering the distorting effects of memory.
• Busy isolation. Hiding in my room, I’ve refrained from entering situations
that might cause anxiety, despair, and tedium that I’d want to ameliorate
with the drugs I want to stop using. In my room, I’ve stayed productive
and challenged by reading, writing, exercising, experimenting with
psychedelics, and drawing extremely detailed mandalas.
• New worldview. I’ve immersed myself in a worldview almost the opposite
of the bleak one I had before. I’ve done this by writing a column on
McKenna—who I encountered in 2012 during the most problematic
months of my “recovery”—and his ideas in 2014, and then in 2016 a book
on my still-increasing interest in psychedelics and nature.
• New drugs. Instead of quitting all drugs—which still fascinated and
excited me with their ability to selectively alter consciousness—I changed
drugs. Encouraged by McKenna, who observed that drugs can be allies
and that aboriginals have always used a variety of plant-based drugs, I
shifted my drug interest from synthetic to natural, new to ancient.
20
Cannabis, the plant I’ve had the closest relationship with so far in my life,
has been the main ally in my recovery. Early in our relationship, in August
2013, when I was in Australia for two book festivals, three weeks after
throwing away my computer, I tweeted that I was seeking cannabis. A
doctoral student named Oscar, who was studying if computers could write
poetry, emailed me, met me in person, and gifted me cannabis that had been
grown, he said, by the author of a book titled Jesus Weed. Oscar said cannabis
made him both more judgmental and sensitive and I realized it did for me
too.
I began smoking it daily the next month, in September, when my
“recovery” ended. By then, I’d learned that my previous knowledge, absorbed
from mainstream culture, on both drugs and psychedelics, had been wrong.
And so instead of believing what seemingly everyone, even many who
promoted it, said about cannabis—that it made one lazy, careless, paranoid,
forgetful, and unproductive—I listened to Terence McKenna, Kathleen
Harrison, and my own experiences and experiments with the plant and
began to associate it with meticulousness, social interaction, physical activity,
calmness, learning, empathy, wonder, creativity, and productivity.
In January 2014, I began to also eat cannabis, baked with coconut oil at 250
degrees in my oven for thirty minutes, once or twice a day. For months, then
years, I occupied a new mental location where I accumulated feelings, ideas,
habits, and memories. Stoned, I forgot what it felt like to be on Adderall or
Xanax and so stopped being lured to them by my distorted memory of their
effects. Instead of being only interminable, dreadful, and boring, my
recovery, due largely to cannabis, which I looked forward to daily, was
routinely exciting, educational, moving, and awe-instilling.
Stoned on ingested cannabis, I’ve felt back inside a dream I once had. Not
like I was remembering it, but in it again, in its world, while also still in
concrete reality, drawing a mandala. Stoned in bed, I’ve learned with
amusement that an effect of a catalyzed imagination can be self-control; with
my cannabinoided brain, automatically having more thoughts than normal, I
once convinced myself to sleep by thinking of reasons why it was then the
most desirable activity. I was surprised, as it happened, that it seemed to be
working—I was pleasurably reasoning myself asleep.
21
On June 3, Kathleen responded she was “willing and interested to meet
separately” from the class for a conversation. “I appreciate your tone, and I
find the working title amusing,” she said about my book, whose tone I’d
called “positive and exploratory.” After thinking it hundreds of times, I’d
forgotten Beyond Existentialism, my book’s then title, which twelve months
later would become Trip, a suggestion by my publisher that attracted me for
its dense minimalism, once seemed amusing to me too—in its “moving
along now/then” indication of something being obviously past existentialism,
which, in its assumption that the universe was indifferent and meaningless,
seemed authoritatively like an end, not a phase. Kathleen mentioned I was
probably referring by “beyond existentialism” to both the animist and the
cosmic. In the animist worldview, every species was in conversation and
humans were “just one of the beings,” she’d said in her talk on cannabis.
“We are a talking being,” she’d observed with a smile. “And we really like to
talk and we really like the illusion that we are the only ones talking.”
22
On cannabis, alone in my room, thinking about family and friends and
myself, remembering repressed and obscure and difficult and shameful
moments, feeling compassion and self-pity and loneliness and joy and
gratitude, I’ve sobbed and wept and profusely cried for, I estimate, ten to
fifteen hours in 2013, 2014, and 2015. I’ve fallen down laughing for seemingly
no reason, laughing uncontrollably on my hands and knees. I’ve often
laughed for little, ridiculous, absurd, and unconscious reasons, reminding
me I did this as a small child.
On cannabis I’ve spontaneously danced. I’ve intuited dance, something I
normally never did or thought about, as a uniquely holistic activity, a
behavior in which one tried, in a constantly evolving process, to relent to
what each of the body’s parts wanted—what amount and quality and
configuration of contraction and relaxation, in what rhythm, at what speed,
in which direction, would benefit it most and so feel most gratifying. I’ve felt
dance as a behavior wanting to be done unconsciously. I’ve felt it as a yogalike activity, dancing slowly while seated.
Cannabis has made exercise and stretching reliably engrossing,
pleasurable, mentally stimulating, meditative, and a source of knowledge.
Doing yoga on baked cannabis, I don’t feel like I’m inside my body straining
to push it into new positions, but, often, like I’m two large hands outside of
myself, satisfyingly pulling my body into various shapes. Stretching stoned,
I’ve realized that flexibility is like strength; in both, you increased the size of
a muscle. In flexibility, a muscle became longer; in strength, thicker.
Cannabis transports me outside my sphere of worry—the dreary,
unpleasant place where some to most of me normally exists and where, in
my tetchiest moments, I feel unable to stop lingering on things I’ve already
told myself to stop worrying about. Ingested carefully, before meaningful
activities, cannabis can relocate all of me outside the sphere for more than
three hours—often so far away I forget it exists. Smoked with strategic
control of amount, timing, and purpose, cannabis transports me multiple
times a day. Outside, I change my thoughts with surprising ease; instead of
being distracted by my own worried face and recursive internal monologue, I
see the world with unself-conscious, appreciative eyes.
23
On June 5, I responded that I was (referring to the animist and cosmic), that
in my book I quoted McKenna on how nature wasn’t mute but people deaf
and that I planned to examine science fiction. I said I’d noticed that
existentialism seemed to ignore “deep time”—that life had billions of years of
history from which meaning and knowledge could be extracted, understood,
and used. Something else I’d noticed about existentialism was that, for me, it
had been partly a reaction to Christianity—the model of reality most people
in Florida had used—which said to find meaning in the Bible. Existentialism,
which said to make my own meaning, seemed more reasonable than
Christianity. Similarly, the worldview McKenna had introduced to me (which
sought meaning not from one book, oneself, or others but many books and
people plus oneself, nature, and the unknown) seemed more reasonable—
more curious and exploratory, including a larger context and so ignoring less
information—than existentialism.
24
Cannabis has assuaged and underscored my degeneration. When moderately
stoned, sometimes my teeth and gums ache in waves ranging from not
unpleasant to mildly distracting and I can feel how my face is apparently
always somewhat tensed and squished. When not stoned, parts of my face
probably still feel vaguely numb, but over decades I’ve habituated, like others
who’ve undergone years of torturous orthodontics to make their mouths
presentable despite facial degeneration, to the sensation, absorbing it
unknowingly into my personality and worldview.
By both soothing and sometimes gently alerting me to the existence of
these and other pains, cannabis reminds me of a recommendation made by
Arthur Schopenhauer in the nineteenth century, before degeneration
worsened significantly in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, that we
greet one another not with “ma’am” or “sir” but, for accuracy and to remind
us of “tolerance, patience, forbearance, and love of one’s neighbor,” “my
fellow sufferer.”
25
After two months in 1991 without cannabis, McKenna resumed smoking
daily except while traveling and after his brain cancer diagnosis in May 1999.
“At first I cut back on cannabis, because it seemed to trigger the seizures,” he
said in an interview in September 1999. “But then I easily got that corrected.
Now I’m smoking as much dope as I ever did.” In “Cannabis Trialogue,” he
wondered why he smoked so much. He answered because after writing for
three hours and feeling depleted, he could smoke for “a second wind and a
third wind to go forward with creative activity”; because it also revitalized him
with physical work like stacking wood; because if he refrained, he worried
about his “immediate short-term career goals,” but if he smoked, he roved a
world made of every book, person, and place he’d ever read, known, and
been; and because if he refrained, his creativity was “a kind of brick-by-brick,
linear extrapolation,” but if he smoked, he could be surprised by “unexpected
ideas.”
26
On June 16, Kathleen responded to my June 5 email, offering dates for our
conversation, including July 1, a Friday, and July 5, a Tuesday. I read her
email at night in Bobst Library, then crossed the street into Washington
Square Park, where, as I walked through, multiple people tried to sell me
cannabis. Since arriving in New York in 2001, cannabis dealers in the park,
concentrated usually in the northwest plaza, with more appearing at night,
had unsuccessfully solicited my business probably more than two hundred
times.
On June 18, walking to the library, I heard someone behind me on the
sidewalk say, uncertainly, “No, I think whales know about humans.” In the
library, I thought about July 1 and July 5. I wasn’t sure which to choose. I
reread Kathleen’s email and noticed she offered Friday first and that she’d
mentioned a farmers market on Friday. I emailed her saying Friday would be
good. She responded seventy-two minutes later, at 4:05 P.M., saying, “How
about meeting me at the BD Library at 1pm,” and that her son, Finn, who I’d
also interviewed for Tao Of Terence, looked forward to meeting me.
The next day I noticed a ginkgo tree in Washington Square Park for the
first time. My first time recognizing a ginkgo tree anywhere, by its unusual
leaves, which I’d seen online, had been only two or three months earlier, by
Gramercy Park; since then, I’d learned Ginkgo biloba was the only extant
species in the Ginkgophyta division, which differentiated into class, order,
and family Ginkgopsida, Ginkgoales, and Ginkgoaceae, and that the genus
was at least two hundred million years old—around seven times older than
cannabis and seventy times older than humans.
Now I was surprised to learn it lightly dominated the park—small ones
like sleep-matted, jutting hair; large ones full and rising and Afro-like.
Including one on the perimetering sidewalk, there were twenty ginkgo trees,
concentrated in the southeast corner, across the street from Bobst Library,
where I’d been 4,000 to 4,500 of the past 5,400 days. A tall, pagoda-shaped
ginkgo shared the corner with the library and Goddard Hall, where I lived
when I arrived in New York in fall 2001, when I took my first creative writing
class and wrote poems about feeling sad, doomed, lonely, and meaningless.
27
I used to think there weren’t that many species of life. There were the ones I
saw on TV and in picture books—thousands, maybe. At some point I learned
there were millions, which seemed like so many that hundreds or thousands
going extinct seemed not disastrous. Now I felt there were barely any species,
that each species was millions of years in a certain evolutionary direction,
was like an explorer that had traveled through time in an unmapped
direction and survived the dangerous journey to reach a place where it was
alone and far away from everyone else, so that we had species like cannabis
and salvia with their own unique compounds.
28
“We are a body of knowledge,” said Kathleen in a talk given in 2010 in San
Jose. “We are furthering it all the time through our brave and sometimes
foolhardy investigations. And, so, what makes it research, then, is if we
actually—individually—come out of each one of these investigations, these
experiences, having learned something. Actually noting ‘What did I learn?’
and then doing your best to remember that—we know that that could be a
challenge sometimes, but—adding that, then, to your body of knowledge.
And part of the research, the value of it, then, is exchanging what you’ve
learned with other people. So that’s the ‘telling the stories’ part, you know.
Telling the stories and the insights, ’cause the insights build on each other
and they will continue to—they have over the years.”
29
Kathleen’s talks were created in front of their audiences, like in a meta,
linguistic sport utilizing one’s entire knowledge. This dynamic, practice-like
method, which Terence also used but which otherwise seems somewhat rare,
increased the complexity and relistenability of their talks while minimizing,
for speaker and audience, redundancy and boredom. “I have not made a
slideshow, I barely have any notes and I may not look at them, and I’m doing
something that I seem to get more and more comfortable with as I age,
which is I’m ‘winging it,’ ” said Kathleen near the beginning of a talk on
December 13, 2013, in San Francisco, eliciting laughter. “I…speak
extemporaneously,” she began a talk on a Sunday in summer 2015 in a sunny
room at the University of Greenwich. “I gather my notes from my heart and
my mind and the crowd and the event that I’m at. I challenge myself to do
that.”
30
In a profile of McKenna published in 1992 in Esquire, Mark Jacobson wrote,
“Immediately upon leaving Esalen, he drove like a maniac to a gas station
where he bought three Hershey bars and a bag of Doritos.” In the Q&A of
“Plants, Consciousness, and Transformation” (1995), McKenna said he’d
been vegetarian “for long periods” before. “Now I sort of follow the hippie
philosophy that your body knows what it wants, even if it’s a Snicker,” he
said, referring to Snickers bars, whose ingredients included partially
hydrogenated soybean oil, and laughed. On June 25, 1999, in a message to
his mailing list nine months and nine days before he died, McKenna
discussed his cancer. He’d undergone Gamma Knife surgery and was
“having focused radiation treatments five days a week.” He’d refused
chemotherapy, which he felt “may have to be tried if things get worse.” He
wrote:
But my intuition is that the people who survive unusually long times
are those who follow the surgery and radiation with extreme attention
to cleaning up their diets and then supplement their diet very wisely. It
is a wake up call to be very attentive to what goes into my body. You
would think that an old psychonaut would have learned that long ago
but what can I say? In other words attention to the details of food and
nutrition will significantly prolong my life. How long? Who can say?
31
On the topic of worry, McKenna often referenced Wei Boyang, a secondcentury Taoist. When asked what he’d learned after a lifetime studying the I
Ching, which viewed time as a finite number of irreducible elements like how
the chemical elements composed matter, Boyang answered, “Worry is
preposterous; we don’t know enough to worry.”
32
On June 20, in Bobst Library, I bought a round-trip ticket leaving for San
Francisco on June 29, a Wednesday. I would arrive at night, travel to
Occidental the next day, meet Kathleen on Friday, and be a student in her
plant-drawing class on Saturday, I thought to myself. I would write about my
experience. It would be the epilogue of my first nonfiction book.
33
In July, after returning from California and drafting the epilogue in firstperson and changing it to third-person—to, among other reasons, explore
what McKenna called “the main thing to understand,” that we’re
“imprisoned in some kind of work of art”—I noticed someone in my
peripheral vision moving toward me in small, robotic, slightly dance-like
increments.
“Weed. Weed. Weed. Weed. Marijuana. Weed. Weed, weed, weed, weed,”
he said in a surprisingly loud, fast monotone, like a single-message Morse
code. It was Sunday and I was walking through Washington Square Park,
which was bustling—70 to 90 percent of seats occupied, people of all ages
standing in sunlight—on my way to the library.
I briefly saw the man’s hand, which displayed a plastic baggie of cannabis,
underhand and proffering. This was the most conspicuously someone in the
park had ever tried to sell me cannabis. But the offer didn’t feel belligerent,
being nonrhetorical and easily ignored, coming in a crowd in the form of a
musical communication. I walked away smiling.
EPILOGUE
In Taoism, rest is a mere preparation for activity,
and death is but one stage in the transformation of Life.
—ELLEN MARIE CHEN
1. OCCIDENTAL
Twisting and pressing it with both hands in San Remo Hotel, Tao broke his
computer’s screen. He felt surprised and a little confused. It was June 29,
2016. He’d owned the computer since August 5, 2013, when he disposed of
his previous one the morning after a solitary, post-midnight psilocybin trip.
In the past year, he’d fixed its screen hundreds of times with his hands.
Sometimes tens of slightly torqued squeezes, over minutes, were required to
unfreeze the screen, yet he’d never felt at risk of breaking it, and now he’d
cracked it on the second or third squeeze, easily and absently and distinctly
as a knuckle. He suspected his unconscious—not unreasonably, he felt with
interest and approval—for contributing to the “accident.”
The broken screen looked like a painting of a segment of two-dimensional
mountain, rising to the right at a 15-degree angle with 0- to 20-degree
subangles, detailed with tiny trees and shrubs and grasses. A second slope,
deliberate and lightly stylized as Chinese calligraphy, hovered above the left,
lower side, so that the painting resembled a fractally embellished, runelike
symbol of Kathleen Harrison’s house, which also sloped acutely left, ended
unexpectedly with two slopes, and was partially plant-covered.
Tao hadn’t seen the house yet, so he didn’t think of it as he posted a photo
of the broken screen on Instagram. He’d handwrite this week, then, he
thought—in the notebook he somewhat impulsively bought seven hours
earlier by the Civic Center BART station, where many homeless people had
milled. Tao had been in San Francisco in 2007, 2009, 2010, and 2013 to
promote his poems, short stories, novella, and novels. Now he was there on
his way to Occidental to meet Kathleen and be in her plant-drawing class,
experiences he planned to model in his book’s epilogue.
—
At 10:08 P.M., around fifteen minutes after cracking the screen, Tao emailed
his mom from his iPhone asking about her mouth-doctor appointment,
which he knew was the next day, because in May he’d noted it in notes.rtf—a
file he’d typed 307,088 words in since October 28, 2013, when he created it to
track his drug use, diet, sleep, exercise, and other behaviors against his
mood. Sometimes he worried that his mom’s jaw pain, which had begun in
October 2015, might be advanced-stage cancer.
Sometimes he stopped himself from worrying, focusing instead on
learning and on becoming a more encouraging and discerning and stable
person—someone more able to help and console people, including himself,
regardless of the situation. Tao didn’t want to worry. He’d rather embody an
always-evolving, performance-like behavior that was informed—not stifled or
paralyzed—by his mental world.
But he’d already worried so much in his life. Worry comprised a major
part of the finished object of himself—the five-or-more-dimensional object
that, from somewhere outside time, was shareable and discussable and
examinable as the text of a book was in time—and therefore he was
susceptible, he felt, to worrying unconsciously. For the rest of his life, he
could expect to sometimes become aware of himself worrying; these times,
he would have the opportunity to stop.
—
In a FedEx Office the next morning, Tao printed a file of Kathleen-related
information he’d collected, including excerpts of her talks, interviews, and
essays. He rode BART to the airport. He lay supine on concrete in sunlight
outside International Departures. He was there to ride the Airport Express
bus to Santa Rosa. On his phone, he looked at photos from two months
before he was born that had been recently posted online. “One of the few
major psychedelics conferences during the dark age of the ‘Just Say No’
Reagan regime was the Psychedelics and Spirituality Conference (aka
Psychedelic Conference II), held on the campus of UC–Santa Barbara on
May 13–14, 1983,” said text introducing the photos. Tao counted thirteen
people in a photo in which Kathleen, seated in a chair, and Terence, below
her on the floor, were looking at an old man who was bald. “We were the
young ones in awe of the elders in 1983,” said Kathleen’s tweet linking the
photos, taken when she was thirty-four and Terence was thirty-seven, via
@BotanDim, whose profile said:
#Ethnobotany, plants, fungi, culture, food, native knowledge, healing,
shamanism. Non-profit org, founded 1985 by Kathleen Harrison.
Library, Classes & Festival
The traffic-prolonged three-hour bus ride to Santa Rosa passed quickly. In
the front passenger-side seat, Tao enjoyed an aerial-seeming view of the road
and bright scenery. He listened to a 1959 recording of Ann Schein playing a
selection of Chopin études. He listened to a May 14, 2015, interview with
Kathleen on a podcast called Expanding Mind in which she observed we all
have indigenous ancestors, that for most of human history, immersed in
nature, our worldview has been animist. “Basically right now I think we treat
technology as the most animate engagement that we have with the world,”
she said. “If I may generalize about Western civilization,” she added.
Passing Petaluma, Tao remembered his reading at a bookstore there in
2009, before his “recovery,” “recovery”/recovery, recovery, and current
mode, which was a kind of never-ending, practice-like recovery from most
aspects of life as he’d experienced it so far—before all that. Two men had
attended, one who resembled Salman Rushdie and didn’t say anything, and a
high school teacher interested in obscure punk/ska music. The latter, after
the reading, drove Tao back to San Francisco, where they ate at a taco place.
“We each have an observer,” said Kathleen on Expanding Mind. “We can use
that observer. We can engage that observer and carry her or him with each of
us as we go.” Near the end of the podcast, she said:
I sometimes have to remind myself—I wobble in my balance, you
know, with these elements—that there’s a motivating spirit that’s
running through everything, and it takes many, many forms, endless
forms and endless manifestations, whether it’s life-forms or even ideaforms, thought-forms, and in some sense that’s spirit. And it doesn’t
mean it’s all good. That phrase, actually, sets me off. It’s not “all good.”
Nothing is all good. But it’s complex and beautiful and always
changing, even with the suffering in it.
In Santa Rosa, Tao walked toward Whole Foods to eat and get a taxi to
Occidental. He saw signs promoting Bernie Sanders for president. He
imagined creating and carefully assimilating multiple “observers” into his
unconscious, where they’d help him consider and maneuver his life. He
thought about Santa Rosa’s population of 174,170. Occidental’s population,
according to Wikipedia, was only 1,115 in 2010—around half to an eighth the
number of Toba survivors, knew Tao, who in two weeks would read a book
titled Supervolcano that argued the cataclysm traumatized the human species
on a cellular level. On the bus his eyes had become watery from complex
emotions five times. Now he felt focused and relaxed. Due to what he’d
learned in the past two years about DNA and proteins and amino acids—
information he’d eventually decide to include in his book as an appendix—he
also felt enormous, bizarre, and that life pervaded the universe. It was late
afternoon. Santa Rosa seemed quiet.
—
The idea to visit Kathleen first occurred to Tao sometime in fall 2014 when
he wanted to convert his summer 2014 column, Tao Of Terence, into a small
book by expanding it 20 to 30 percent and adding two chapters—“Life and
Literature,” on how life was like a higher-dimensional form of languagebased art, and a chapter on Harrison, whom he’d regretted not devoting a
post to in the column. He was glad that plan—which now seemed meager
and strangely reluctant, as if he wanted to spend only a little more time,
instead of the rest of his life, thinking about psychedelics and nature and the
Mystery—hadn’t happened.
Early in February 2016, after discussion with his editor, Tim, a McKenna
fan since reading Food of the Gods as a teenager in the 1990s, Tao became
excited about writing an all-new book, which would include only some of the
column. He created an outline of the book that included an epilogue in
which maybe he’d visit Kathleen in California. Tim approved of the outline
and seemed especially interested in the epilogue, which Tao was further
encouraged to actuate when he learned Kathleen was teaching a plantdrawing class on July 2, his birthday.
Days later, in mid-February, he began writing Beyond Existentialism, as his
book was called then, based on a schedule that he and Tim both openly
viewed as existing solely to help, not rush, him. In March, April, and May, he
completed drafts of his book’s introduction and first five chapters. He mostly
successfully refrained from excessively worrying or fantasizing about the
epilogue (how to collect material for it, what tone and form to use, if he
should meet Kathleen or take the class but remain at a distance) and was
able, he noticed with approval, to proceed with it gradually—buying the class
ticket on April 22, emailing Kathleen on May 31, buying the plane ticket on
June 20.
In June, while working on his book’s cannabis chapter, Tao became a bit
tired of Terence—in, he felt, an expected and healthy way, after four months
immersed in his ideas. He’d had enough of Terence for now. He decided not
to feature Terence’s ideas in the chapter. As he experimented with structure,
his notes on Kathleen’s talk “Who Is Cannabis?” entered, roamed around,
and eventually settled near the chapter’s beginning. He welcomed Kathleen
and her talk’s subthemes—animism, cannabis as soothing ally, the histories
of species, interspecies relationships—into the chapter, from where they
would resonate, he knew, into the rest of the book, and on June 29, 2016,
with around half his book written, he flew to San Francisco.
—
After checking into Occidental Hotel, Tao explored the small town, where his
phone had no service, in late twilight. Occidental existed around a 0.6-mile
stretch of a two-lane street called Bohemian Highway and had spacious
sidewalks, a food store called Bohemian Market, a smaller food store, a
restaurant called Hazel, an Italian restaurant called Negri’s, Union Hotel,
Sonoma Fine Wine, a café, a tavern, a bakery and juice bar, a volunteer fire
department, a post office, a YMCA, and around ten other establishments.
Houses were scattered throughout and on the overlooking, forested
mountainsides.
Tao entered Harmony Village, which included apartments, a place for
acupuncture and Chinese medicine, Occidental Center for the Arts, Botanical
Dimensions’s library, and an art gallery. Through a window briefly, Tao
noticed more than ten, it seemed, elderly people drawing a naked woman.
He slowly crossed the parking lot, toward houses with gardens, and
incorrectly theorized Kathleen lived in one of them. The non-electronic,
honkless, sirenless, vast-seeming peacefulness of his surroundings made
him aware of himself, as a person, in the world.
His eyes suddenly teared up again, surprising him. He usually didn’t cry
this often. But his emotion was appropriate, he knew. He was doing
something that, four years earlier, in 2012, he might’ve estimated a 1 to 3
percent chance of himself doing. Something rare was happening. He was
here! The narrative of his life had led him to here—a place where he felt
encouraged and surprised and moved by the story he was slowly
experiencing. He walked a little more on Bohemian Highway to what seemed
like the end of the town, then returned to the hotel on the other end, which
was the south end.
—
In the hotel room, he emailed his friend Tracy saying he was meeting
Kathleen the next day and felt “a little nervous.” The email’s subject was
“Kathleen.” He and Tracy had expressed admiration and interest in Kathleen
and her work multiple times to each other. He emailed his mom, reread his
Kathleen notes, and went outside to look at the stars, which he never saw in
the city. He craned his head back and held it there in a strained
motionlessness that was similar, he realized when it felt comically awkward,
to how, since 2009 or 2010, he’d daily looked down to stare at phones. He
couldn’t specifically remember the last time he saw this many stars. The
previous time, he’d also felt surprised, he vaguely recalled, by how small they
made the universe seem. Now the stars also made the universe seem densely
interconnected. Tao felt like he was looking at the stable, zone-like, pulsing
insides of a thing.
In the past 10 percent or so of his life, he’d been contemplating and
studying the possibility that the imagination, containing at least every
imaginable universe, was infinitely larger than the universe, that dying
released one into the imagination, and that the imagination was also where
life itself, tunneling through matter on the surface of planets, was going—
that a day, starting with morning and ending in dreams, was like a life, which
was like life itself.
—
In the morning, Tao walked to a picnic bench and lay on it in warm sunlight.
He felt sad and kind of doomed. Since February, he’d used 270 milligrams of
caffeine within an hour, most days, of waking, and that day so far he’d used
only around 20 milligrams, so his mood wasn’t abnormal, but it felt
abnormal and even troubling. He knew it was unreasonable and gullible to
expect to always feel the same, but when he felt chemically depressed like
this, the feeling sometimes too often tricked him into believing it was
permanent. He remembered a recommendation by Kathleen on Expanding
Mind, to “spend two minutes looking at a single leaf” when one felt “selfobsession of some sort.” He lifted his body, removed a leaf from a tree, and
returned to a supine position. The fractal leaf, backlit by sunlight, reminded
him of the fractal nature of recovery—that he’d feel better in the long-term
but not always in the short-term.
—
Back in the hotel room, Tao read an email from his mom, who’d gone to the
mouth doctor that morning. The doctor had prescribed a “mouth guard” after
diagnosing her with protruding bones on both sides of her mouth. “So
nothing serious, don’t worry,” said Tao’s mom in summary and conclusion.
Historically above-average worriers, Tao and his mom often told and
reminded—and sometimes requested and, saying “please,” even pleaded
with and beseeched—each other and themselves not to worry. Tao didn’t
dwell on his gladness that it wasn’t cancer; he’d automatically feel the effect
of the news, he knew, over hours and days and weeks, like a complex timerelease pill. He was glad the doctor hadn’t tried to prescribe a drug.
2. KATHLEEN HARRISON
Tao photographed the note, dated 12:54 P.M., on the library door from
Kathleen saying she’d be back in ten minutes, then walked around talking to
himself—a complex, multipurpose tool he’d avoided at times in the past in
part, he suspected, due to society’s dim view of it, associating it with
complete insanity or a kind of neurotic mindlessness. The behavior seemed
especially stimulating and valuable and sanity-helping for Tao, who often
spent his time in mute aloneness. He wondered aloud what to do about
recording. He’d recently become conflicted about whether to record part, all,
or none of his formal and/or informal interactions with Kathleen. As he
talked to himself, Tao realized with some surprise—which made him aware
part of him had been pessimistically anticipating he’d realize nothing useful
—what he’d say.
He practiced saying it and it made sense and he felt capable. Sometimes
his intuitions while stoned seemed powerful and lucid at first but upon
examination became dull and strangely vague, but not, it seemed, this time;
as he became more familiar with this state of consciousness, his discernment
within it increased. He was caffeinated and cannabinoided to feel at his most
social and curious and lively and charming, his least troubling and joyless. In
the past, this required not-small amounts of benzodiazepine, amphetamine,
and caffeine; afterward, he’d feel terrible, suicidal. Now it could be achieved
on low to moderate amounts of caffeine, smoked cannabis, and ingested
cannabis; afterward, he often felt pleasantly tired and existentially
reinvigorated.
Kathleen had parked in the distance and, obscured by cars, was
approaching. Tao began recording a Voice Memo, which he’d stop and delete
if they, in a few minutes, decided against recording, as per his just-conceived
plan. He thanked Kathleen for meeting him and for her note and its
specificity. He said his mom was also specific to the minute in handwritten
notes.
They entered the library, a rectangular room around the size of Tao’s
apartment, and discussed Huichol art on a wall. The peyote-using Huichols
had lived in the mountains of central Mexico for at least 15,000 years,
according to carbon dating of ashes in their fireplaces, and now lived in
western Mexico. Kathleen offered Tao a pair of plant parts to smell. His
hands trembled like faceless animals as he held the plants, which smelled
like sage. He said his parents’ toy poodle enjoyed rolling around in sage,
meaning, though, he’d realize months later, rosemary.
Kathleen asked where they lived.
Tao said Taipei. He said since they were going to move around—and not
just sit, like he imagined Kathleen might’ve imagined when he asked, in his
May 31 email, if they could talk for an hour—he wanted to ask again how she
felt about being recorded. Kathleen said she felt fine.
Tao said he’d rather not record if it would make anyone self-conscious.
Kathleen asked if it would make Tao self-conscious.
“No,” said Tao, feeling a little self-conscious.
Kathleen said it wouldn’t make her self-conscious, either.
Tao said good and disengaged the “try to remember” and note-taking parts
of himself. He chose a yerba maté from the library’s large selection of teas—
gifts from “tea people”—and said he didn’t talk much and encouraged
Kathleen to talk about anything for as long as she wanted.
Kathleen said two conferences had invited her to give talks on, specifically,
tobacco. Tao said he’d noticed and liked Kathleen’s fondness for tobacco. She
asked why. Thinking of how most people associated tobacco with
corporations, lies, cigarettes, and cancer instead of the genus of plant, which
aboriginals had chewed, smoked, insuffulated, used as an ingredient in
ayahuasca, and drunk as a cold-water infusion for millennia in its naturally
pesticide-and-additive-free form, Tao said because it was different and
unexpected. He said he was currently writing his book’s chapter on cannabis
and that it included notes on Kathleen’s talk “Who Is Cannabis?,” which he’d
listened to around five times. Kathleen asked if Tao was a “cannabis person”
and realized she already knew he was, from Twitter. Tao praised Kathleen’s
writing, citing her precise, concise prose and interestingly varied sentence
structures. She thanked him for the feedback and said the latter wasn’t
conscious. He learned she’d published an essay on “tripping in nature” in a
Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies newsletter.
Kathleen brought the teas to the table, which was between tall bookshelves.
Tao momentarily believed the notepad and pen on the table were for him,
then admired Kathleen’s preparedness, then identified a framed piece on a
wall as by Klea McKenna. It was from Rainstorms & Rain Studies, 2013–2016,
her “ongoing series of unique gelatin silver photograms of rain made
outdoors at night,” according to her website, which showed twenty-three
from the series. In the first, rain droplets containing their own shadows
resembled elongated, blurrily falling birdcages. The fourth seemed to Tao
like an aerial, computer-enhanced view of the different-size forms of life in a
randomly selected rectangle of nature; it was all dots, from tiny and blobby to
even tinier and pixel-like; as little as the blobs were, the pixels seemed
hundreds to thousands of times littler.
They sat facing each other. Tao had at other times considered that maybe
the questions he’d prepared would be background information—that, finally,
he wouldn’t use them—and now he felt sure of this. He wouldn’t try to ask
his questions. He would try to inconspicuously and somewhat slyly
encourage Kathleen to talk about whatever she wanted to talk about that day.
—
Kathleen Harrison was born on August 12, 1948, on Catalina Island, around
twenty-two miles off the coast of Los Angeles. She was the eldest of three
siblings, with two younger brothers. Her parents divorced when she was
fifteen. When she was sixteen, her dad said, “I think you might be a
‘bohemian.’ Do you know what a bohemian is?” She said she did. She said
she too thought she might be one.
She learned of psychedelics from her mom, who took LSD with a Maori
woman who lived with their family when Kathleen was a teenager. Her mom
didn’t tell her about LSD. Rather, one day Kathleen found a piece of paper
with handwriting by her mom that began legibly and ended in scribbles.
At the University of California, Santa Cruz, she studied art and
phenomenology. She was open to trying almost anything. She called herself
an “experience junkie.”
In Jerusalem in 1967, her best friend, Nina, introduced her to Terence.
Kathleen recognized him from a dream the previous night. She’d been
walking along a cliffside. Terence had approached and they’d passed each
other, edging by, and then Kathleen saw an island in the distance and
wondered why it was in silhouette. Terence, in concrete reality, said he was
on his way to the Seychelles to live on Silhouette Island. “You’re a good
dreamer,” he told Kathleen. They met again one spring eight years later,
moved to Hawaii that fall, and married the following fall.
Kathleen said Terence wanted marriage but she didn’t, and Tao asked why.
“I think he thought,” said Kathleen, then explained that maybe Terence—
who otherwise avoided many modern institutions, for example not keeping
his money in banks—had thought marriage would tame him, keep him
focused. Kathleen said she felt marriage could actually do the opposite. She
said maybe Terence wanted to exhibit some normality to his family. She
added with a smile that she enjoyed “a good ironic reversal.”
They moved to Freestone—a town by and even smaller than Occidental—
where they knew no other people. They created a mail-order company called
Lux Natura in 1977 to sell Psilocybe cubensis spore prints. Finn was born in
1978, Klea in 1980, both at home. Kathleen’s “experience junkie” lifestyle
ended; she focused on nursing her children for six years, during which she
refrained from tripping—imperfectly, she qualified with a smile, which Tao
reciprocated widely. Every day, Terence woke at 6:00 A.M., swept the floor,
made a pot of coffee, began smoking hash—the same every day.
Tao asked if Kathleen was like that.
“Me?” she said. “No. I like variety.”
She called Terence a narcissist, then a few sentences later connected him
with a history of “brilliant narcissists.” She observed this didn’t make him a
good husband or father. She said he used to smoke cannabis heavily—when
it was illegal even medically—in the house’s central location, where their
children sometimes played with friends. This stopped when they built a loft
for smoking in at the top of the house. Every night, Kathleen and Terence
met there and talked.
After it became illegal to sell Psilocybe cubensis spore prints, Lux Natura
began selling psychedelics-related art and essays and also audiotapes and
transcripts of Terence’s talks, which for years he’d practiced exclusively on
Kathleen, who helped him develop and hone the style of lecturing he later
used for almost two decades to share ideas with people. The “someone”
referenced by Terence in his 1993 tripzine interview who persuaded him to
speak publicly about psychedelics was Kathleen.
Discussing Terence’s work, Kathleen said The Invisible Landscape was
unreadable. She reiterated the book was unreadable and Tao grinned and the
grin became a large smile. She said there was a time when Terence said
things like “If people can’t understand what I’m saying, they don’t deserve to
know my ideas” and that she’d convinced him otherwise. Which led to True
Hallucinations, which had originally been titled Down to Earth. Kathleen had
suggested True Hallucinations. Tao said he much preferred True
Hallucinations because Down to Earth reminded him of the idiomatic
expression meaning practical, ordinary, and wholesome.
He asked Kathleen about her writing. What did people want to read by
her? She said people had expressed interest in reading her account of her and
Terence’s 1976 trip to the Amazon. Tao asked how she felt about “Among
Ayahuasqueros,” Terence’s account. Kathleen said she’d been Terence’s editor
through the 1980s, and the essay, first published in 1989 in the anthology
Gateway to Inner Space, “got through”: she’d approved of it, but that, still, it
was only his side of the story.
She said people had also wanted to read her account of an episode at the
end of True Hallucinations in which, on psilocybin in Hawaii with Terence,
she encountered a vehicle with entities in it that began to beam her up—
UFO-style—but weren’t successful. Tao said he vaguely remembered that
scene. Kathleen said she hadn’t read any of Terence’s books since their
breakup twenty-five years earlier. She shared her account of the trip, which
she’d written in a journal; she’d felt like the entities wanted her because
she’d learned something she wasn’t supposed to know.
As Kathleen discussed UFOs, explaining they were viewed differently in
the 1970s and 1980s than now, there was a cough that seemed twenty to
thirty feet away. Kathleen said it was an accountant on the other side of the
wall and wondered if he could hear her and Tao talking about UFOs and
LSD. She warned Tao there was also a dog, which might bark, and later it did
—once, at a moderate volume, like in a roll call of attendance.
Tao learned Kathleen smoked cannabis around four nights a week and
that, in addition to her cannabis-inspired journal, which filled twenty
notebooks and was handwritten at night, she kept a journal on her computer
that was typed in daytime on coffee. Tao said he’d heard Terence, in a
trialogue on cannabis, say that when he abstained from cannabis for two
months, he read more and his dream-life became more interesting but he
was otherwise unaffected. Kathleen said he’d been miserable and
overbearing, with seemingly no sense of humor, those months—a nightmare
to be around, for her and their children—and Tao smiled, amused.
At one point, Kathleen said she’d always just gotten by, financially, and
Tao remembered his own career—$500 to $1,500 advances on his first six
books, working in a restaurant, selling shoplifted batteries on eBay. He
mentioned Nutrition and Physical Degeneration at one point, and Kathleen
wrote the title on her notepad. He asked if her children had braces. She said
no but maybe should have—Finn had a crooked bite. Tao expressed his
opinion that it was good they hadn’t. He mentioned his tongue being too big
for his mouth, his eight pulled teeth.
Two other dialogues occurred while in the library. Klea called and talked to
her mom for a few minutes, then Finn texted and Kathleen said he was at the
house and would like to meet Tao. As a joke, Tao said he thought Kathleen
was going to say that Finn had texted to say he was coming now to bring Tao
some cannabis.
Kathleen said that could be arranged. Tao thanked her and then talked
about something else. Seated in the quiet room, he felt maybe both a little
overcaffeinated and a little overcannabinoided. Sometimes, during their
conversation, he’d partially to fully lost track of what was being discussed,
but this seemed okay since his phone was recording.
Kathleen was surprised it was already 3:00 P.M. She’d said she was free
until 4:00 P.M., Tao knew, and they hadn’t walked and talked yet. She’d said,
in an email, that she “loved walking-talking in nature.” They decided to visit
her garden, which surrounded her house.
After they stood, Tao said he did better when not sitting and staring at the
other person, then realized he’d said something probably better suited—
more comprehensible and relevant—for his internal monologue.
Photographing a bookshelf, he unwittingly stopped the Voice Memo. He
photographed more bookshelves, thinking he’d read the titles from the
photos later.
—
Kathleen’s car’s dashboard, lightly strewn with dried plant matter, reminded
Tao of his low table where he’d been working significantly more with plants
in the past half year—maintaining two or more syncopated fermentations,
routinely buying new plant parts from the farmers market in Union Square
to taste, eat, smoke, smell, burn, chew, dry, photograph, collect, and draw.
Kathleen parked in her driveway by peach trees. She opened the passenger
door, which didn’t open from inside, then rapidly felt around fifteen peaches
until finding one suitably ripe for Tao, who idly felt four or five that all
seemed similarly ripe. One thing he’d forgotten to praise about Kathleen’s
writing was the range and amount and density of information, emotion, and
life it conveyed. Her essay in Sisters of the Extreme began with this sevensentence paragraph:
I had grown the plant—Salvia divinorum—for twenty years, and I knew
the scant botanical and anthropological literature on this rare, sacred
plant, but I’d never successfully had a visionary experience from
ingesting the leaves. Once I’d tried putting thirty leaves in a blender
with water and drinking the green slurry, but other than a headache
and distinct empathy with a trapped butterfly, not much had
happened. In the summer of 1995 I was ready for another in my series
of solo ethnobotanical fieldwork adventures, and so I headed off for a
month in the mountains of northern Oaxaca, Mexico. My son and
daughter were staying with family, and I had work to do: not only
investigating the folk uses and beliefs regarding healing plants, but
also a health challenge of my own. For a couple of years following the
dissolution of my marriage and the sad, slow death of my father, my
heart had not been beating regularly. I’d always had a heart murmur
and the strain of recurrent anemia, but this was more disturbing,
grabbing my breath away. After one episode with a doctor, I decided I
wanted to ask a Mazatec healer to do a ceremony for me with the
Leaves of the Shepherdess.
Peach in hand, walking downslope on her driveway, Tao asked Kathleen
what the doctor in her essay had told her. To take medication that would be
for the rest of her life, she answered.
Tao said he’d been trying to keep his parents away from non-holistic
doctors—a group that had historically prescribed them symptom-treating,
cause-ignoring, destructive drugs—and teach them to focus on diet, which
doctors learned little about in school. According to a paper published in the
American Journal of Clinical Nutrition in 2006, medical school students in the
United States in 2004 received, on average, only 23.9 hours of nutrition
instruction—which the paper called “inadequate,” Tao knew. Kathleen added
“exercise” and Tao said “diet and exercise,” agreeing. He’d forgotten exercise.
Doctors did encourage exercise.
“Wow,” said Tao when he saw Kathleen’s house, a wooden triangle
surrounded by a diverse variety of plants, including tall trees.
—
They entered Kathleen’s somewhat L-shaped garden, toward an end with a
cottage. Tao said he was seeing plants he hadn’t seen before and Kathleen
encouraged him to take photos, film movies. She gave him a tour of the
narrow cottage, where Klea and her husband and their daughter were staying
currently. Tao said it was a little bigger than his room in New York. He exited
the cottage, saw Finn, and said, “I’m Tao.”
On the phone with Klea in the library, Kathleen had pronounced his name
Dao; now in the garden he explained to her and Finn that he pronounced it
Tao and that in Florida, where he grew up, most people, unfamiliar with the
philosophy, had called him Tay-O; some had called him Towel.
In Mandarin, each syllable could be said in four tones, each with at least
one symbol and meaning— (mā), (má), (mǎ), and (mà) meant
“mom,” “numb” or “cannabis,” “horse,” and “scold,” for example. Tao’s
name, /Tāo, was unrelated to the Tao or Dao, /Dào, of Taoism. Despite
asking his mom every few years, Tao had never been able to confidently
remember what his name meant. It had something to do with hiding and
jade, about hiding then appearing and succeeding, or something.
There’d been a time when, for reasons he’d forgotten, Tao believed his
name did refer to Taoism. During that time, for months or years, he’d
avoided Taoism despite feeling attracted to its ideas because he didn’t want to
be interested in something that was his name, which he didn’t choose. He
was glad his name meant something else—“Your Tao ( ) is usually in a
phrase called (hiding and cultivating the jade like shining good in
order to shine someday),” said his mom in one email as her entire
explanation. That his name didn’t refer to Taoism increased Tao’s interest in
Taoism. “While the Greeks worshipped strength and beauty of form, Taoism
considers the grotesque and deformed and weak somehow to belong more to
the process of change, thus they are closer to the Mother,” wrote Ellen Marie
Chen in a 1974 essay that began with an observation Tao hadn’t heard before:
“One important aspect of thought in the Tao Te Ching, the significance of
which has so far been neglected, is its emphasis on the feminine.”
Tao had learned of Chen from Merlin Stone, whom he’d encountered
through the Goddess religion, which he’d learned about from Riane Eisler,
whom he’d heard of from Terence McKenna, who’d also introduced him to
Kathleen Harrison.
Kathleen showed Tao a plant whose leaves had looked completely insecteaten from a distance. The plant wasn’t goldenseal but contained the 43-atom
compound berberine like goldenseal.
Finn introduced two Panamanian tobacco plants. Tao touched a large, soft,
lime-green trichomed leaf. He held another leaf to it and they cohered as if
tinily Velcroed. “I’ve never seen cannabis,” he said as a partial non sequitur.
Kathleen said it was tobacco they were gathered around.
Tao said he had not seen cannabis or tobacco in person.
Kathleen said Finn was a bit obsessed with gardening and Finn said it
wasn’t a bad thing to be obsessed with and Tao thought of a character in a
novel he’d read in April who’d collected “petascale volumes” of pornography.
In his research, Tao had sometimes encountered the question of how
Amazonian aboriginals found two plants out of tens of thousands to combine
to achieve orally active DMT. People seemed somewhat baffled by this, but
Tao felt it made sense. How, after all, had Japanese players of Super Mario
Bros. learned to access 256 secret levels by removing the cartridge without
turning off the system, inserting the unrelated game Tennis, playing it a
little, and reinserting Mario? By being obsessed, curious, and exploratory.
Living outside history for at least 265,000 years, aboriginals had been more
interested and involved in plants, Tao estimated, than twentieth-century
people in Nintendo.
Kathleen indicated an area where Finn used to play as a child.
Tao misidentified red chard as beet, then identified lacinato kale—in the
distance, dark green. Kathleen referenced its blueness, which Tao then
noticed. He looked at a sloped, pathless area dominated by feverfew, a kneehigh, white-flowered plant that grew throughout the garden in a pleasingly
random-seeming manner. He photographed and touched cannabis, which
seemed a more conspicuous green than the other plants, almost neon.
—
The fractal garden and triangle house thrived, Tao felt, on the craggy, almost
mountainously sloped, modest-to-small property. Due to the many curvy
paths Kathleen had allowed to naturally develop, the garden seemed large
and immersive and explorable—a place with many of its own special places.
Tao consciously, subconsciously, and unconsciously imagined the garden in
the form, among others, of a text-based computer game, a 16-bit role-playing
game, a nonlinearly fragmentary essay, and a nonfiction book. He began
talking, at some point, about turmeric. He said he’d recently—six months
earlier—learned he had ankylosing spondylitis, an autoimmune disease
causing inflammatory pain in his hips and back that turmeric relieved.
Kathleen asked how much turmeric he ate.
Tao didn’t know what to say.
Kathleen said she was curious because she also ate turmeric.
Sensing, somewhat uncertainly, that she was talking about turmeric in its
powdered form, Tao felt self-conscious. He didn’t want to seem “more hardcore,” some part of him thought, than Kathleen by revealing how much
whole, raw, powdered, boiled, and fermented turmeric he ate; he also didn’t
want to, because it seemed ridiculous to lie about this. Vaguely, without eye
contact, he said something like “I just eat a piece sometimes” and felt rude
and closed off. He looked away and felt disappointed in himself and
confused—he wouldn’t formulate a theory on why he’d suddenly lied until
examining this situation later in prose—but then recovered almost instantly
from the convoluted faux pas that now seemed okay and at least partially
amusing. He reminded himself he lived in relative hermitude and that his
brain and mind were broken in thousands to millions of ways, that his
temporary malfunction wasn’t unexpected. It was expected and so could be
meta-experienced and, in various ways, enjoyed.
Tao said turmeric, which contained anti-inflammatory curcuminoids, had
helped him a lot. He felt less pain and suppler since he began eating it daily
in January. For the first 95 percent of his life, chronically inflamed and
swollen, he’d never been able, for example, to crack his knuckles—it had
seemed strangely impossible. He’d felt confused by his peers who casually
and seemingly enjoyably—were they just stronger and/or braver and/or
more pain-tolerant?—squeezed their fingers to produce unexpectedly loud,
satisfying-sounding noises. Now he cracked his knuckles and other joints
often, with physical and intellectual pleasure, as a technique to further
differentiate his body and to test what its thousands of parts felt like—and
could do—at different times on different days on different drugs and foods.
Pushing, pulling, arranging, and stretching it into positions new to him but
not his species, Tao regularly heard and felt his body emit pleasing and
informative sounds.
Kathleen used the word “hospitality,” which made Tao anticipate beverages
or snacks, then asked if he’d like some cannabis.
—
—
Facing the garden and the grapevine-covered back of the house, they sat by a
shed and smoked cannabis—except Kathleen, who refrained. Tao looked at
tens of species—in pots on the railing and hanging from the ceiling—on a
second-floor covered balcony. Finn offered him a hash-and-tobacco joint.
After smoking one hit, Tao felt very different. It seemed the opposite of bleak
to him that people had the opportunity in life to significantly modulate their
cannabinoid systems for the first time—and that one could refrain for hours,
days, or years and do it again, the effect recharged by time. He looked at tiny
green grapes. He looked at Oriental poppy pods resembling intricate models
of massive, fantastical structures. Like feverfew, various species of poppy
grew throughout the garden. They’d stood at some point—and Kathleen had
gone inside—and now they sat again on the edge of the garden.
Tao expressed interest in living in the cottage on the other side of the
garden. Finn smiled and seemed to like this idea. He said if Tao wanted a
place to “hermit out,” there would be good. In the past few months, Tao had
sometimes considered just moving to Occidental—“just” because he knew he
wanted to move to California but wasn’t sure where exactly—but the
possibility of living in Kathleen’s garden hadn’t occurred to him. Finn said
he’d tell his mom he approved of Tao potentially renting the cottage when/if
it became available.
After Kathleen returned with cups of mildly sweet, effervescent drinks, Tao
told her and Finn about his book. The first chapter was on encountering
Terence in 2012, the second was a biography of Terence, the third was on
Tao’s drug history, fourth on psilocybin, fifth on DMT, sixth on cannabis
(which would later become eighth), seventh on salvia, and eighth on why
psychedelics were illegal. Tao described three more chapters—which he
would write in the next six months to complete a first draft of the book and
then, after receiving Tim’s purifying edits, absorb into the second and third
drafts as fragments, sentences, and passages—and said the book’s epilogue
would be about meeting Kathleen, and Finn, and the drawing class the next
day.
Finn, smiling in a way that calmed and pleased Tao, said he looked
forward to reading the book. He said he was amused their “little plantdrawing class” might be “a snippet” in a book that would be read by
intellectuals and literary people in New York—“the literati.” Tao was amused
and stimulated by Finn’s amusement. He wasn’t sure what Finn’s
conception of that group of people was, but he guessed something like
severely disconnected from nature, atheist, cynical, pessimistic, and
depressed. Without thinking of anyone, Tao said he wanted to convert “those
people,” his readers, worldview-wise, with his book. Then he said he was just
living his life, taking a plant-drawing class, that actually the book was
secondary.
Kathleen asked how he became interested in writing.
Tao talked about shyness.
Kathleen asked his age.
Tao said thirty-two, and then they discussed Botanical Dimensions, which
had been created when Tao was one or two. Kathleen asked if Tao knew BD’s
origin story. Tao said he’d heard it in one of her talks but would like to hear it
again; compared to her prose, which seemed chiseled and somewhat
geometric, Kathleen’s spoken language, in her talks, was curving and jutting
and gently flailing and organistic and unpredictable, often producing
unusual, unlikely-to-be-written sentences. Tao had heard the story in the
Q&A of her December 13, 2013, talk, in which she shared how, one night long
ago, seated in a circle during an ayahuasca ceremony with “a couple of
beloved troopers,” she’d gotten up, gone outside, sat, and looked at the stars.
And I saw this human heart—not a classic heart but a human heart—
way, way, way out there in space, with ribbons blowing in the breeze
off of it, and I was just like, “Really, the human heart way out in space;
now that is really interesting.” So I was at a moment in my life where,
because my kids were just old enough that I thought now I could just
really seize what my work is in the world—and I haven’t said it yet, but
that’s always been much of my question: “What is my work? What is
my work for the next stretch of the path? I don’t need to know the
whole picture all the way for the rest of my life. I’d just like to see to
the place that the path turns again, please.” And, so, I asked that
question and the answer was, from ayahuasca and the spirit, I felt: “Put
the plants front and center.” And I had just seen this huge human
heart and I was, you know, on ayahuasca, and I was struck by the
power and the beauty of that for a moment, and then I said: “You’re a
plant; of course you’re going to tell me to put the plants front and
center! I have two small children. I have to put them front and center.”
And it was like, “Well, okay, behind the children—no more
negotiating.”
Botanical Dimensions was founded in 1985. Kathleen and Terence bought
land in Hawaii and Terence raised money through his name and people all
over the world mailed them plants and not all survived but some did and
these were planted in the Ethnobotanical Forest-Garden, BD’s eight-acre
botanical repository. Kathleen had planted twigs that were now big trees. She
said that when Terence left BD, after their divorce in 1992, he “basically took
‘the talking part’ with him” and that she kind of regretted spending so much
time helping him with his talks instead of working on her own projects,
which included teaching since 1991, almost-annual fieldwork with the
Mazatec since 1994, writing a collection of essays since 2007, the
Amazonian Digital Herbarium Project since 2010, BD’s internet presence
since 2013, and now BD-sponsored classes, workshops, and events—
including the first Ethnobotany Festival & Symposium in eleven weeks—and
the new library, which opened on November 14, 2015.
Tao said but now it was bringing people like him to her.
Kathleen smiled and said people had so far been willing to come to
Occidental for classes and events. Tao said she deserved it after all her work.
He asked what had been in the room before the Ethnobotany Library.
Kathleen said the room had been too big for anyone to want to rent and now
half was the library, containing her and donated books, and half was the
accountant and his dog. “This is how it should be,” she said about her garden
having many species together.
“This is how I would want my garden to be if I had one,” said or thought
Tao, becoming increasingly stoned. He remembered a moment in Kathleen’s
writing, which he began praising again. He’d felt surprised and moved by
Kathleen’s description of metaphysical transportation, finding herself “in
another realm, astonished” while chewing salvia leaves. Tao said he’d only
smoked salvia as dried leaves with extract added.
Kathleen said if he moved to California he could try the fresh leaves. Tao
thanked her and said he’d like that. She reconfirmed with Finn to supply him
with cannabis for later. Tao said he’d brought some dry cannabis and also
capsules of baked cannabis. Kathleen said she’d made olive oil tinctures in
the past for travel, then went in her house. She had first smoked DMT in
pure form, Tao knew, in 1975—an experience she described in 2010 as filled
with “more information in a shorter time that was retrievable than I have
ever experienced before or since.”
Tao told Finn that, in New York, he hung out with a person only once a
week, or less, and Finn said something like “I prefer to live in the woods
myself.” Tao said this was the only time he’d left New York to do something
that wasn’t a book tour or parent visit or family vacation, but something he’d
conceived and planned himself. He said he usually stayed home. He’d
imagined Kathleen and/or Finn imagining him writing one of those
nonfiction books in which the author visits someone new in every chapter,
asking them questions they’ve already answered in their work. Tao tried to
abstain from those questions because they usually led, for him at least, to
redundant answers that were less clear and accurate than he’d already
meticulously expressed in context in print; it felt a little petulant to ask people
to repeat themselves in different words just for his book.
For his book, Tao was only visiting Kathleen. His book would trend toward
the feminine, he’d begun to think. In conveying evolution over years of a life,
it would itself evolve a little, from yang to yin, dead to alive, Terence to
Kathleen.
—
Tao and Finn discussed the plant-drawing class, which Finn was attending as
a student. Tao had posted two pieces of Finn’s art with his interview with
Finn for Tao Of Terence and both had shown teeth. They’d also included a
face with a smaller face on its forehead, a cartoon figure half the size of the
face, two two-headed entities (one with a nongeometric body sprouting
geometric mazes), and an area of straight-angled lines morphing
dimensionally into beings of various ontological status. Finn explained that
his visual art wasn’t plant-focused, but that the next day’s class still interested
him, though his art wasn’t averse, either, to plants.
“You’re not changing your direction,” said Tao in summary.
Finn laughed in a way that made Tao want to make him laugh more.
“I’m not changing my direction,” he confirmed.
Kathleen came outside, ready to drive to the library.
Walking to her car, they discussed a benefit event thirteen days earlier—
for Botanical Dimensions and the Green Earth Foundation—featuring
Kathleen and Ralph Metzner in “a conversation between two old friends.” In
an email the day after the event, Kathleen had mentioned it’d gone “very
well,” though Metzner had been “rather ponderous in mood and content.”
Finn said Metzner had railed against the idea of the double-blind study, then
said something that Tao uncertainly interpreted as meaning Metzner had
bristled in some way when Kathleen, during the conversation, spoke of
myths as metaphors. Ahead of Tao and Finn, Kathleen said, “I think I said
science was a metaphor,” which Tao quickly emailed himself to contemplate
later; his phone had no internet connection in the garden but the email
would go through later, he knew.
By then, he’d stopped recording audio. While talking to Finn around an
hour earlier, he’d noticed his phone had stopped recording—around when,
he calculated, he and Kathleen left the library. He’d been excited to be
recording their informal interactions (in the car, on the driveway, in the
cottage and garden) but apparently he hadn’t been, he realized with
disappointment, then started a second Voice Memo, then minutes later
noticed he’d, again, unintentionally stopped recording—by photographing,
he finally realized. He then recorded a third, brief Voice Memo—to sample
Finn’s peculiar, difficult-to-remember language—after which, around a half
hour earlier, he committed to stop recording for the day.
Opening her car door, Kathleen said Metzner might’ve been suffering that
night from age-related pain, which made him depressed. She said she could
relate.
“I can relate to that also,” said Tao over the car. “I feel depression…often.”
“You and I have felt physical pain,” said Kathleen in the car, looking at Tao
in the passenger seat. She said it could be hard. Combined, Finn, who was in
the back seat, and Tao were seventy years old, two years more than Kathleen.
Looking ahead through the windshield, Tao said that, after suspecting for
around a decade that his hip-and-back pain was due to a macrophysical
problem, like a herniated disc or pectus excavatum—a degenerative
deformity he had that affected ten to eighty in one thousand people, making
their chests sunken in front—he’d learned in January that it was probably
mostly microphysical, involving compounds and microorganisms. Now that
he knew, he could help himself with diet. Kathleen asked how. Giving the
simplest formulation, Tao said by avoiding starches. “By eating more like our
aboriginal ancestors,” he later realized he could’ve said.
—
During the drive to Harmony Village, where Kathleen would meet Paetra to
prepare for the following day’s class and Finn and Tao would walk to the
farmers market, Tao asked Kathleen how the Mazatec found Salvia divinorum
and she said she didn’t know that story. The Mazatec always told her, even
when she asked more than once, that they’d known whichever plant forever
—even coffee, which they began growing around 1850, and tobacco, which
was introduced to them one to five thousand years ago.
Outside the library, Tao met Paetra, who had a calmly alert demeanor that
encouraged him to skip small talk. “I heard you’ve never taught before,” he
said, feeling encouraging and interested, then realized he’d exceeded
something maybe, then realized it was okay when Paetra said, in amicably
gameful response, “I heard you’re thinking of moving to Northern
California.”
Tao was peripherally aware of the route’s idiosyncratic form—the result,
he imagined, of thousands of cross-town walks—as he and Finn walked to
the farmers market. His caffeine (iced coffee before and yerba maté in the
library) and nicotine (from Finn’s joint) had worn off. The cannabis capsule
he swallowed two hours before meeting Kathleen had worn off. But the hash
and cannabis he smoked in the garden were still helping him and so he felt
in a good mood, laughing and speaking often.
But then at some point he began to suspect his laughter might be
disconcerting, inappropriate, offensive, or disturbing. He realized he’d
laughed—maybe loudly, as if at an unexpectedly funny joke—after Finn said
his “thirty-five-year-old friend” who’d recently undergone hip surgery would
be in the class the next day. But it hadn’t been a joke. Finn had been directly
answering a question about who else would be in the following day’s class.
Tao wasn’t sure—and, in the confusion, didn’t ask—why Finn, who seemed
to ignore his laughter, had focused specifically on his friend’s age, saying
“thirty-five-year-old” before anything else. Finn was thirty-eight. How was
thirty-five significant? Had he misheard something?
After that, Tao became quiet and humorless, losing his sense of tone and
long-term purpose. His voice now sounded lifeless and agitatedly monotone
to himself, as if he wanted to be alone. The walk began to seem flickeringly,
harshly, unsteadily surreal. Tao focused on asking questions. He learned
Finn and Paetra had been in a relationship for four years, that she was the
“most wholesome” woman he’d dated, that he’d dated intravenous heroin
users, and that Kathleen had fallen through a second-floor stairwell in
Mexico in 2008 and been badly injured. Finn, who lived in Santa Rosa with a
roommate, prefaced the last with something like “I don’t know if she told you
or not but” and Tao said she hadn’t. Finn said he’d lived in the house for one
and a half years after the accident, taking care of his mom, the house, and the
garden.
Tao had anticipated it since June 16, when Kathleen said, “Occidental hosts
a charming and lively farmers market each Friday, 4pm to dark, which is
kind of a street party with music and beautiful vegetables” in an email, and
now the market’s peacefully bustling ambience and varied offerings
dissolved the walk’s relatively foreboding mood. It was on a fragment of
street beginning and ending in Occidental and had at least twenty-eight
stands, including ones selling fermented beverages and vegetables, nonfactory-farmed meat, organic gluten-free spring rolls, made-to-order
smoothies, baskets of greens, tiny plums, and face painting. Relative to the
size of Occidental, the market was around equivalent to, Tao later estimated
using Google Earth, Manhattan hosting a market filling Central Park.
—
That night, Tao went outside twice to walk, jog, and breathe. He felt better
after each brief trip—calmer, stabler, less neurotic, less gloomy. In five
months, in December, the Journal of Neuroscience would publish a paper on
how people recognized fearful faces faster and had better short-term memory
when inhaling than exhaling, but only when inhaling through the nose.
“When you breathe in, we discovered you are stimulating neurons in the
olfactory cortex, amygdala and hippocampus,” said Christina Zelano, the lead
author of the paper, which would remind Tao of the hours and days in his
childhood and as an adult when his nose, due to various twentieth-century
reasons, had been completely obstructed with mucous and/or sometimes
dried blood; reading the paper, he’d consider how contemporary children,
being more toxified and degenerate and immobile and inflamed than he’d
been in the 1980s and 1990s, must be mouthbreathing even more than he
had as a child. He was probably stronger now than he’d ever been, which he
suspected contributed to his breaking his computer. Parts of him probably
hadn’t realized his body moved less weakly and tentatively now.
Two nights earlier—before returning to San Remo Hotel and cracking his
computer’s screen—he’d also enjoyed moving around outside. He’d walked,
sat, lay, jogged, ran, stretched, and breathed in Fort Mason Park for around
two hours, the Golden Gate Bridge small and fog-framed in the distance. On
the low-lit, hilly sidewalks of North Beach, he’d skipped in three rhythms,
skipping more than he had since some forgotten day in childhood. Society
associated skipping with children and viewed it, a fractal form of walking,
jogging, and running, as feminine. Tao wanted to do it more. His shoes had
3-millimeter soles. In the past, he’d worn shoes that separated him from the
ground by 25.4 to 63.5 mm or 1 to 2.5 inches. Like most people, he’d turned
his feet into densely mitted, awkwardly club-like things, treating them as if
they were severely injured and required thick casts. Tao had learned this
“cast” metaphor from Move Your DNA (2014) by Katy Bowman, who also
applied it to vision, observing that rooms were like casts on the muscles in
our eyes that changed the shape of our lens so we could focus different
distances.
Tao could move only four of his ten toes. Staring at five toes, he was
unable to mentally focus in a manner causing the middle three to
individually move, but, partly because sometimes one or two would twiddle a
little, he sensed the skill existed. He’d never noticed this inability until
recently, and it had seemed strange and interesting. For the first time, he’d
sensed a physical inability as a kind of deadness. Six of his toes seemed
numb and uncontrollable from disuse. He imagined that parts of the
deforested, razed, replaced wilderness of his mind—filled with tens of
thousands of hours of TV, video and computer games, public education,
pornography, mass media, movies, literary fiction, nightmares, and dreams
—must also be partially to fully nonfunctioning, that probably there were
mental abilities he’d forgotten or never learned, ones he could discover,
revive, nourish, and use.
As Tao’s interest in nature, psychedelics, the possibility that life ended
with a release into a higher-dimensional place called the imagination, and his
mind increased, so did his interest in microbes, his body, nutrition, and
other physical topics. By self-consciously, note-takingly exercising and
stretching in a variety of physical and mental states in the past three years,
including in Taipei doing yoga in a class alternating days of baked cannabis
and 50 to 100 micrograms of LSD, he’d learned that he often unconsciously
held some of his muscles, especially in his neck and jaws and shoulders and
back, in sustained tension and that, in this way, his unconscious seemed to
have a kind of control over his body. He’d theorized that he was unable, as a
twenty-first-century degenerate, to generate enough consciousness to be
aware of his entire body and surroundings and mind at one time; therefore
he sometimes seemed to become aware of his muscles having been
“unconsciously tensed” for unknown amounts of time.
After his two brief walks/jogs, Tao emailed his mom saying he was happy
her mouth pain was “not something serious.” He told her about the market
and said people in Occidental seemed healthy, that he “ate many organic
blueberries and bought organic fermented cabbage and a fermented turmeric
drink,” and that the plant-drawing class was the next day from 10:00 A.M. to
4:00 P.M. Tao had learned the term “organic,” which in Taiwan was
(yǒujī), in college, maybe in 2003, while researching how to feel less
depressed, tired, and anxious. Once, in San Francisco in 2010, on book tour,
he’d overheard a new friend criticizing “organic” as a marketing scam; he’d
told the friend that organically certified food was grown without synthetic
pesticides, among other restrictions. “Oh, then that means something, then,”
the friend had said earnestly, having believed, probably due to being naturally
suspicious of adjectives applied to products, the term was a meaningless
abstraction like “best” or “high-quality.”
Before sleep, Tao thought about how that day he’d maybe embodied the
role of a normal person too much and too often. In the garden, he’d said his
book was secondary, that he was just a normal person taking a drawing class,
doing what he wanted to do in life. In the moment, he’d overstated his
position, he now felt, and then had begun to act that way. To idly sit there,
patiently enjoying the situation—as if for some reason pretending he wasn’t
going to write about any of this—instead of remaining inquisitive, extra-alert,
and time-sensitively exploratory.
The next day, Tao told himself, he would be more journalistic. He liked
being journalistic—focusing on others with heightened attention, noticing
details and behaviors, asking series of questions. He’d called his book
secondary, but sometimes he preferred viewing his life as secondary and his
books and other writing—the selective downloads of his life—as primary.
Since college, when he began creating linguistic, sharable, fractal
microcosms of his life in the form of short stories and poems, experience
and literature had become increasingly symbiotic for him—a trend that made
him curious about the future.
3. THE PLANT-DRAWING CLASS
Kathleen introduced herself, the class, and her former student Paetra, who
said a little about herself, and then the students began to introduce
themselves. After a few introductions, Tao remembered his plan to be more
journalistic—toward others but also toward the higher-dimensional character
of himself, who seemed to become more controllable the more he recovered
—and began recording a Voice Memo with his phone on his chair by his
thighs. Holding up his arm and turning it self-consciously in various
directions, feeling a little nervous, Tao said he lived in New York City and
used to draw simple things, like the red hamster tattoo on his hand, but was
now drawing more complex things and had recently noticed nature made
complex things, which made this class perfect for him. A woman in her
fifties said she’d been zooming into plants and drawing them at up to 600×
magnification. Finn, seated in back, said he found his mom’s classes
“fascinating, psychologically.” He alluded to “long psychoanalytical sessions”
that happened afterward with his mom and maybe others. Tao imagined
them analyzing human behavior and felt interested. A bearded man in his
twenties with glasses had traveled there from Oregon. A man named Daniel
had sold Tao plums the day before at the farmers market. Around half the
students in the filled, fifteen-student class cited Kathleen and her work as a
reason they were there, and around half had attended a previous BD event.
Tao sat opposite Corinne, adjacent Frances, and diagonal Emelia. Corinne
was in her sixties and wryly and endearingly self-critical. Frances was shy and
taciturn and smiley and had a nose ring and was dressed like a punk. Emelia,
the youngest student, was in high school; her presence gave the room, day,
and class a slightly futuristic quality. Tao felt excited for her and imagined
others also vicariously feeling what she felt, or what they imagined she felt,
as a teenager in a non-school-related, somewhat obscure plant-drawing class
on a Saturday morning in July 2016. Tao was amused to hear Emelia, at one
point, meekly say, “Hm?” to Corinne, who responded, “Oh, nothing, I was
just talking to myself.”
As Kathleen demonstrated tools while speaking on and around the topic of
botanical illustration in a range of tones, regularly eliciting laughter, her
fingers sometimes shimmered or blurred or vibrated in non-physical ways, it
seemed to Tao, who was the kind of stoned where concrete reality felt slightly
ajar and light from elsewhere seemed almost able to get through, making
things seem realer and more captivating from obscurely increased
dimensionality. Kathleen reminded the students to breathe and Tao realized
he’d been breathing shallowly—as he had most of his life—and began taking
deep, long breaths, looking around a little. He’d read an email that morning
from his mom that said, “Another 2.5 hours, 5:02 is the time you were born
33 years ago. Here I wish you the best, healthiest and happiest birthday ever.”
As students moved in and out of the library—deciding what to draw,
gathering tools—Tao located Finn and began praising his family’s garden.
He said he regretted not exploring and photographing and tasting it more the
day before. Finn said he was welcome to visit again. Tao said he was leaving
that night, though. “And so a second garden visit remained uncertain,” he
thought while returning to his seat to focus on drawing the ginkgo leaf he’d
picked that morning by Bohemian Highway, at the entrance to Harmony
Village. He’d been surprised to see the lone, flame-shaped ginkgo tree there.
—
Later, around ten minutes after stopping the Voice Memo, Tao began
recording a second Voice Memo, found a semi-busy-seeming Finn, and
asked him how many species of plants were in his family’s garden. Finn said
he didn’t know. Hadn’t counted. He was gathering drawing tools and
seemed a bit distracted. Tao asked if he could estimate at all. To his
amusement and approval, Finn then seemed to move away, back toward his
seat, in a manner one might depart someone asking annoying questions. Tao
imagined Finn being quietly brusque with him from then on—as people
should be with overbearing journalists, he thought while grinning to himself.
A little later, Tao found himself outside with Finn by the table of plant
parts to potentially draw. He felt stoned and caffeinated to a degree that he
felt friendly and playful with almost everyone. Suddenly and with awkward
language, he asked Finn how many greens the garden had that could be
eaten in a salad.
“You’re really into this quantitative thing, aren’t you?”
Tao laughed. His best question as a journalist, the first he’d asked that day,
had been how many species were in the garden. Now his second question
was also focused on how many of something existed. Tao considered
explicating a little (he wanted to use numbers to gain a more accurate sense
of the relative diversity and size and scale of things) or defending himself
(the question was deliberately awkward and objective so his subject could feel
comfortable and helpful at the beginning of an interaction, which might lead
elsewhere) but then focused, instead, on Finn, who was naming species from
the Brassicaceae family, of which the garden had many, including kale,
mustard, and arugula.
After that, Tao felt he’d behaved journalistically enough for the day and
stopped recording. He’d created five Voice Memos, which seemed like
enough. If he visited the garden again, he would be journalistic there—in an
unforced and limited way, photographing and listening and noting—but
otherwise he’d try to be his normal, nonbelligerent self. He’d gone too far,
maybe, after the affirmation the night before, in the journalistic direction; or
maybe, he suggested to himself, he’d gone just far enough, creating an
overall, commensal balance, reporting-wise, between the temporal dyad of
the day before and that day.
—
During the lunch break, students and teachers sat in sunlight in the middle
of Harmony Village. It took the sun 226 million years to orbit the black hole
at the center of their galaxy, whose diameter was 0.15 million light-years.
Light from their galaxy took 2.54 million years to reach Andromeda, the
nearest non-satellite galaxy. In four to five billion years, the two galaxies,
which together had at least 1.1 trillion stars and were each orbited by tens of
satellite galaxies, would collide, becoming one. Tao felt friendly and even
garrulous, peaking on a capsule of coconut oil, turmeric powder, black
pepper, and 0.3 grams of cannabis—a plant he was still learning how to use
after three years of constant, varied alliance. He met Klea and her daughter,
Fiona, who seemed uncannily discerning, like she was 102, not almost 2.
Feeling slightly surreal as he behaved with uncharacteristic charisma, Tao
found himself “openly hinting,” he felt, that he’d like to see the garden again.
Kathleen said he could visit the garden after class since he’d already been
there once and had come all the way from New York. Tao realized some
students—three or four within earshot—might be wondering why he was
allowed to see Kathleen’s garden after class. He hadn’t told anyone he was a
writer.
“Do you think you want to have children?” he asked Finn.
Finn repeated Tao’s question, then they and others laughed.
Finn said he would. He would like to have children.
A student named Chris said California’s Central Valley was full of
pesticides, attracting Tao’s attention. Pesticides, Tao knew, had been
invented during World War II for use in chemical warfare and to kill insects,
then corporations had sold them to people and governments for use in
killing rodents, birds, insects, plants, fungi, microorganisms, and other lifeforms. As modern people spread pesticides across the planet in the 1950s and
1960s, aboriginals had spread psychedelics (psilocybin, salvia, ayahuasca) to
modern people, and then both pesticides and psychedelics had spread, from
the 1960s to the 2010s, into bodies and cities, fields and brains, food
products and drug stashes. Chris and Tao discussed smog. Tao had read a
Swedish paper recently that linked mental illness in children with air
pollution. Eating avocado and fermented cabbage, Tao said he wanted to
move to Santa Cruz.
Another student, named Ellie, also had a glass jar of fermented vegetables,
he’d noticed. Every aboriginal and “traditional”—a differentiation on the
aboriginal-modern spectrum—society that Weston A. Price visited in the
1930s preserved and nutritionally enriched their food via fermentation, which
transformed food into stable homes for beneficial microbes, Tao knew from
Wild Fermentation (2003) and other books. Tens of trillions of bacteria, fungi,
archaea, and protists, representing probably one to five hundred species,
lived in his eyes, mouth, esophagus, stomach, intestines, genitals, skin, and
lungs. Each microbe was a cell made of up to tens of millions of giant
molecules called proteins. Each microbe affected Tao’s consciousness at all
times by, among other means, creating neurotransmitters and other
compounds for him to absorb, including ones he needed but couldn’t make,
like vitamins C, K2, B1, B2, B5, B6, B7, B9, and B12.
Pesticides—different types of which killed different microbes—were one
reason why the three to four generations of people born since World War II
had significantly less diverse, helpful, and stable microbiotas than their
thousands of generations of ancestors. In Silent Spring, marine biologist
Rachel Carson (1907–1964) wrote that pesticides, which she viewed as a
major threat to human existence, had been underestimated as a problem
because, among other reasons, they caused damage that was “almost
impossible to trace to its origins.” Carson had breast cancer when Silent
Spring was published in September 1962—after being serialized that
summer in the New Yorker—and died nineteen months later of a heart attack.
Due in part to her book, her fourth after three on the sea, the Environmental
Protection Agency was created in 1970 and some pesticides were eventually
banned—DDT in 1972, aldrin in 1974, heptachlor in 1978—but these and
other compounds, plus their metabolites, like DDD and DDE, were still, in
2015, detectable in food due to their “persistence in the environment,”
according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s annual Pesticide Data
Program report.
Banning those and other pesticides meant relatively little, Tao had learned,
because hundreds of others, in the meantime, since the 1970s, had been
invented, marketed, sold, and heavily used. In its 2015 PDP report, the USDA
explained it had tested 10,187 samples of food (360 certified organic) for 465
pesticides, metabolites, degradates, and isomers and that, after washing and
blending the samples, 14 types of pesticides had been found in lettuce, 16 in
apples and peaches, 20 in cherries and pears, 23 in spinach, 27 in tomatoes,
and 38 in strawberries, to name some common foods, even though they
didn’t test for all pesticides.
One pesticide not tested for was glyphosate, which Monsanto began selling
in 1974 in its product Roundup for killing plants. Seven hundred tons of
glyphosate were used globally that year, 73,941 tons in 1995, and 910,292
tons in 2014, when the United States, with 4.5 percent of the planet’s
population, used 15 percent of the glyphosate, which killed by, among many
other ways, disabling an enzyme used by plants, fungi, and microbes to
create the aromatic amino acids, including two that animals required but did
not make—phenylalanine (used by turmeric to make curcuminoids, plants to
make vitamin E, and animals to make opioids and dopamine) and
tryptophan, which some fungi used to make psilocybin and animals used to
make serotonin and DMT and other compounds.
Meaning that because of the one pesticide glyphosate, which was in air,
soil, rain, surface and ground water, tap water, non-organic cotton and
tobacco and food, and vaccines in amounts confirmed or suspected, due to
increasing usage, to be rising over time, most or potentially all twenty-firstcentury humans were deficient, to some degree, in at least three amino acids,
nine vitamins, twenty opioids including six endorphins, dopamine,
adrenaline (made from dopamine), serotonin, melatonin (made from
serotonin), and DMT.
—
During Tao’s childhood in Florida, in the 1980s and 1990s, seemingly every
family had used an array of synthetic poisons in and on their homes,
vehicles, lawns, and pets—“bug sprays” and “weed killers” and cockroach
traps and flea collars and other essential-seeming products that civilized,
sedentary people had existed without for more than ten thousand years.
Parks, businesses, schools, and houses had been fumigated regularly. The
familiar, woozy, deadly scent had seemed unharmful and even vaguely
comforting. When, at age eighteen, Tao left for New York City, the city of
him probably contained parts per million or billion of glyphosate—which
had been in vaccines since probably the late seventies because vaccines
contained soy, sucrose, and various proteins from non-organic sources and
because some viruses, like measles, shingles, and flu, were grown on gelatin
derived from pigs and cows fed genetically modified food containing up to
400 parts per million of the 18-atom compound, which Tao would eventually
think of as “the bleakest drug”—plus hundreds to thousands of other
synthetic compounds, making him malfunction socially, physically,
cognitively, psychologically, and emotionally in obvious, subtle,
subconscious, layered, and unpredictable ways.
Tao used to think of his body as a small, swamp-like thing, where anything
could be tossed without concern because it’d disappear into the overall stew
of him. Encouraged by corporations and governmental organizations and
media that parroted those sources, which said there were “safe” levels of
compounds that had been introduced decades earlier to biological systems
that had evolved without them for billions of years, he felt he could throw
things into the pile of his body and they would dissolve, or something. Now
he viewed his body as an enormous city in which each molecule of BPA,
PVC, PCB, and CFC, of ethylmercury and phthalate and polyethylene and
anti-depressant, flame retardant and surfactant and artificial sweetener,
neonicotinoid and organophosphate, was a nonfunctioning, havoc-causing
member of society—that would not be absorbed into the murky bog of him
and be forgotten but would have a concrete effect on the molecular city of
him during its life-span as itself and multiple metabolites. There was no
“safe” level, it now seemed to Tao; the effects began, on him and his microbe
symbionts, at one molecule and increased from there and also varied by
person.
Silent Spring, which Tao read in February, a week and a half before starting
his book, memorably contributed to his reconceptualization. In one passage,
Carson wrote that scientists had found the food of Eskimos to be DDT-free
except for two migratory owls, but that some Eskimos themselves, in 1961,
contained up to 1.9 ppm of DDT, which Monsanto and other corporations
began selling in 1944, because they’d undergone surgery in a hospital in
Anchorage. “For their brief stay in civilization the Eskimos were rewarded
with a taint of poison,” wrote Carson, who observed that, because DDT was
stored in fat, an intake of 0.1 ppm could be magnified in storage to 10 to 15
ppm, which the body would experience when it used its fat reserves, at which
point the effects would most likely be obliviously misattributed. “One part in
a million sounds like a very small amount—and so it is,” wrote Carson about
the 28-atom, colorless, tasteless compound. “But such substances are so
potent that a minute quantity can bring about vast changes in the body.” In
animal experiments, 5 ppm of DDT and 2.5 ppm of the also-common
pesticides dieldrin and chlordane, banned in 1974 and 1988, killed liver cells.
Those findings—and other evidence that twenty-first-century humans
were deeply unoptimized—meant to Tao that there was a lot of potential for
life to feel less arduous and nauseating, more satisfying and enchanting,
than it had so far. Due to malnutrition, pesticides, the overuse of synthetic
antibiotics (a twentieth-century invention that, like pesticides, harmed in
difficult-to-trace ways, like by altering the human microbiome over
generations cumulatively), and other problems, like air pollution and plastic
contamination and hundreds of nuclear power plants continually producing
radioactive waste, humans in 2016 did not feel like humans 100,000, 10,000,
100, or even 10 years ago. Because diet, environment, and microbiota are the
main factors determining the ingredients of the drug cocktail of the drug trip
of life, humans felt different than ever before.
When Tao encountered Terence in 2012, he’d initially been most intrigued
and excited by his theory that humans were near the chaotic end of a
dimension-rending transformation called history—and that the task, then,
was to remain calm and do something to facilitate the birth-like, unnaturalseeming, difficult, delicate, failable process. Humans couldn’t return to
grassland nomadism or even the nineteenth century, but if we survived long
enough we might leave Earth behind, like a placenta, in a “forward escape”
into the imagination. The theory had seemed startling and convincing—
systems in the universe did seem to naturally complexify at an accelerating
rate, from cells to animals to Çatalhöyük to New York City to the internet—
and, with its attached suggestion of helping instead of panicking or freezing
in worry and anxiety, it continued to influence Tao and to attract his
investigative attention.
The end of history, he was now gradually learning, was feelable. It felt like
being unwittingly poisoned, like something was pervasively wrong. The
younger one was, the more one felt it, but it was a feeling everyone alive, near
the end of time, closely shared, apparently. Tao was glad to be continuing to
learn and increasingly understand all this. That he’d felt bad as a child and
adult not for “no concrete reason” but for reasons so tiny they were nearly
invisible. And now also for invisible—electromagnetic—reasons, which he’d
learned about from An Electronic Silent Spring (2014), which described the
carcinogenic and other effects of radiation from wireless technology,
computers, smart meters, microwave ovens, and smartphones.
—
Back in class, Tao checked on Finn, who was drawing a poppy pod, then sat
and focused on his ginkgo leaf. Kathleen had said if students showed detail
in selected areas, the viewer would fill in the rest. Tao was attracted to this
selection-based technique, but his leaf seemed so small and simple—most
students had chosen multi-parted subjects—that it seemed joke-like to only
detail some of it. After hearing Corinne talk to herself about wanting to
abandon her drawing—which seemed, to her, bad—Tao said he also wanted
to start over and then was surprised when Corinne strongly encouraged him
to keep going. Minutes later, he quietly started over on the back of his paper.
Corinne had been bluffing about wanting to start over, he thought with a
mental grin.
Kathleen sometimes inflected the class with a relationship metaphor,
pointing out the at-some-point-necessary decision to “commit” to one’s
drawing, referencing the choice of whether one wanted to sleep with one’s
drawing. Tao heard her tell a student that fractals were hard to draw and
remembered he’d recently written “Fractals are difficult to draw” in his book.
He was struggling, he felt, with his ginkgo leaf. Kathleen photographed it
with her phone and minutes later returned with a zoomed-in, X-ray-looking
image of the leaf with every part, it seemed, visible.
After redrawing it and feeling unsatisfied like before, Tao began to feel the
stimulating and jostling effects of a cannabis capsule he used after lunch (his
second capsule of the day) and privately acknowledged he was trying to draw
something related to his book—two weeks earlier, he’d noticed Ginkgo biloba
in Washington Square Park for the first time and since then had been
surprised to find the plant, which he’d written into his book’s chapter on
cannabis, wherever in Manhattan he went—and was forcing it and it wasn’t
working. Finally letting his plans evolve, he began drawing a pin oak leaf
he’d also picked that morning.
Near the end of class, Tao said his computer was broken and asked
Kathleen if she had a charger for his phone. Kathleen asked if his computer
broke while “here.” Thinking of California, Tao answered, somewhat
vaguely, “yes.” Speaking partially then to around four people, Tao said he’d
broken his computer by accident while trying to fix it, then thanked Kathleen
and returned to his seat. Kathleen had taught the class how to further
dimensionalize drawings by indicating a light source, and now Tao applied
the technique to his twenty-nine-tip pin oak leaf, which he’d quickly sketched
down, in one area, to the smallest visible shapes outlined by the reticulating
subveins, impressing himself.
At the end of class, teachers temporarily framed and showed each drawing
and said descriptive, analytical, encouraging comments. Students also
commented. Sometimes there were discussions, digressions, and subdiscussions, including one on the possible synergistic effects of opium poppy
and carrot greens, which Chris had drawn as a pair. Paetra, discussing three
or four pieces, pointed out plants’ whimsical and comical aspects. Kathleen
directed attention toward plants’ aesthetics. She indicated the specific leaf in
a black-and-white drawing that to her conveyed the plant was silvery. “It
reminds me of Botanical Dimensions’s logo,” said Tao at the end of the
discussion on Corinne’s drawing, which students and teachers felt exuded an
offbeat, restrained humor while also seeming somewhat wild and even
bursting.
—
Immediately after class, Tao walked quickly to Union Hotel—because he
wanted to stay another night and Occidental Hotel had no vacancies—and
learned it wasn’t a hotel. It was an Italian restaurant (Occidental had two), a
general store, a bar, and, it seemed, one or two other establishments. Tao felt
like he was on a cruise ship. He found his way outside and walked for around
a minute in pleasurably warm sunlight to Inn at Occidental, which he
learned was expensive—for marriages and honeymoons, it seemed. He
wouldn’t stay another night, then.
Part of what he was experiencing, as an animal, was his feelings, a large
part of which came from the ever-changing statuses, quantity, distribution,
and level of functioning of his neurotransmitter receptors, of which he had at
least 141 types, including nineteen purinergic, fourteen serotonergic, eleven
adrenergic, nine opioid, five dopaminergic, and probably three cannabinoid.
His feelings existed with what his other receptors, like ones for vision and
olfaction and other senses, detected. As an anatomically modern human, he
also had language, with which he continually influenced his feelings from a
metaphysical direction. He had the opportunity to experience emotions at
this gradation of subtlety and level of control and awareness—a gift of
complexity that could be overwhelming to almost unbearable, sometimes
making him cry from appreciation and incredulity and confusion—because
billions of his ancestors’ siblings had died young, leaving more resources for
the survivors: his ancestors.
Each of Tao’s billions of ancestors, going back to shrews and fish and
earlier, had been strong and motivated enough to survive and reproduce—
consecutively, over billions of years, through five mass extinctions and
thousands of global cataclysms, in an incredible living streak, never starving
or being eaten or succumbing to shyness or accident or religion, or some
other temperament or circumstance or interest, before reproducing. Tao’s
parents had survived and passed on their DNA, and so had their parents, and
so on. Billions of moms and dads had survived. Tao felt especially impressed
by this reality—the improbability of which he’d only recently begun to realize
—because he felt he could have easily died already and because he felt he
could easily live the rest of his life without reproducing, thus casually ending
the streak.
Walking back to the library, at the T-shaped intersection with the ginkgo
tree, Tao saw Klea and Fiona across the street. He and Klea waved and then
there was a moderately loud rumbling in the near distance. Facing the noise
with her upper body, as if on guard, Fiona cowered cutely in a different
direction toward her mom. “Oh, that’s just a motorcycle,” said Klea.
—
Outside the library, Finn told Tao they thought he’d left. And that he’d left
his phone. Tao said he hadn’t left, that he was excited to be in the garden
again. Corinne and Chris and other students were helping move things and
tidy the library—of their own volition, Tao knew, as Kathleen had explicitly
said not to worry about it. Students seemed reluctant to leave. Tao smiled
and waved bye to a smiling, leaving Frances—who’d drawn the most
impressive, people had seemed to agree, piece—and entered the library.
“What’s your birthday?” said Paetra to him suddenly. Taken aback, in part
because he’d decided with satisfaction to just not mention his birthday, Tao
asked why. Paetra said she did astrology. Tao said his birthday was that day.
Paetra observed, then Tao confirmed, that he was taking a plant-drawing
class on his birthday. Paetra then Kathleen hugged him.
“You’re thirty-three?” said Finn, and Tao, feeling amused (slightly now and
more later in contemplation) that Finn, who’d also homed in on age when
introducing his thirty-five-year-old friend, focused on the topic’s main
quantitative aspect, said he was.
Outside, on the sidewalk, minutes later, Tao heard Paetra and Finn talking
about Finn’s headache, which he’d had for hours and for which he’d used an
Advil. Tao sympathetically discussed headaches with Finn while moving
things to his car.
By the car, Finn and Tao assessed the class. It had gone well. Finn said
people had sometimes come to Terence’s talks on drugs—someone would
begin dancing, someone on mushrooms. He said Kathleen hadn’t attracted
anyone like that.
“Someone get this boy a birthday cake!” shouted Paetra as she drove away.
Kathleen told Chris, who’d driven from Berkeley and had attended other
BD events, they were going to her garden and that he was welcome to join.
Getting into Kathleen’s car, Tao thought he’d lost his phone then found it
after seconds. “It was in my pocket,” he said to Kathleen. “I found it,” he said
across the parking lot to Finn, who was riding with Chris. “It was in my
pocket.”
—
Driving to her house, Kathleen said she felt really good after planning,
creating, promoting, preparing, and teaching the class. She seemed
energized and ready to teach another class. In the passenger seat, Tao briefly
felt he should be interviewing her like a TV reporter might with an athlete
who’d just won something. He said it was good to bring like-minded people
together.
Kathleen said Paetra, who’d been her student at the California School of
Herbal Studies, once was going to marry a South American man. Kathleen
was going to officiate the wedding. But then the wedding had been canceled.
Then Kathleen had thought, “Finn would like Paetra,” and now, after a fouryear relationship that ended six years earlier, the two were best friends.
Kathleen said she’d been set to officiate nonoccurring weddings twice in her
life.
Tao said he’d noticed Finn and Paetra had a playful, witty rapport that
seemed fun and intimate. Tao himself had been married since 2010, when
he was twenty-seven. He and his wife, Megan, had separated in 2011, but
they’d procrastinated since then on getting a divorce, which would cost
hundreds of dollars and require many forms and a number of notary public,
court, and post office visits. Like Finn and Paetra, they’d remained friends,
though they lived in different states and communicated intermittently.
—
At Kathleen’s house, Tao opened his door through his open window, eliciting
congratulations on learning. Exiting the car, he heard Kathleen tell Klea, who
was standing in the driveway, he’d gotten too stoned the day before and had
forgotten to take pictures and videos and explore the garden, so was back to
do those things now. He asked Finn how he’d describe the house’s shape.
“Wedge-shaped. Terence used to call it ‘the wedge at the edge.’ ”
Tao asked if he could photograph it and Finn said yes.
Walking toward it after photographing it, Tao noticed the house, which
he’d two-dimensionally thought of as a “triangle” because he’d first seen the
polyhedron triangle-side-on and because he didn’t know the name “right
triangular prism” or think of the word “wedge,” had a second, baby wedge,
connected at its top to the main wedge’s bottom. The others sat by the shed
and Tao explored the garden alone, touching and smelling and eating new
and familiar plants. In a week, back in the city, where the trees grew away
from the buildings for sunlight and probably other reasons, he would read
Kathleen’s essay on tripping in nature, “Treat Her Right: Lessons from a
Medicine Walk” (2009), which began “To begin with, I’ll go out on a limb:
Nature loves it when we take psychedelics and wander around, appreciating
her, in a state of respectful awe and gratitude.” In the five-part essay, which
included a first-person-plural nature walk and a part on the use of
psychedelics by activists, artists, and scientists, he would read: “I think one of
the coolest causes is bringing very urban kids to the country, the forest, or
the shore, the kind of places they’ve never seen.” He would read:
Be careful, I must warn you, watch your step! The plants and fungi
have been known to hijack humans! Many of us! Of course, those of us
who’ve been hijacked seem to be pretty darn happy about it, so there’s
that. But so many people have turned toward plants, toward growing
things, from what they thought was their career, it’s laughable.
Tao sat and smoked cannabis with Kathleen, Finn, and Chris. He
wandered back into the garden once or twice to breathe and eat more plants.
He ate a seven-leaflet cannabis leaf, finding it surprisingly nutty. When Finn
handed him the pipe a second or third time, he acknowledged and felt
excited at the possibility—low, he felt, but not zero—that Finn had for some
reason spiked it with something. Kathleen, who’d abstained the day before,
smoked that day. Cannabis was probably significantly stronger for her, Tao
considered with vicarious excitement, than for him, who since February had
begun smoking within an hour of waking most days and continued into the
night, though not uncontrollably but around 0.6 g per day. Besides “sober,”
life for Kathleen had at least two other distinct, historied, familiar settings
(caffeine, which interacted with her adenosine and glycine and other
receptors, and cannabis), usefully triangulating her daily experience and,
among other effects, stabilizing her, Tao imagined.
In four months, in November, Nevada, Massachusetts, Maine, and
California would relegalize cannabis, and six months after that, Tao would
develop a Kathleen-inspired method of not smoking until five hours after
waking. Two months after that, in July 2017, while finishing the fifth and
final draft of his book, Tao would learn that twenty-first-century humans
were even less stoned and more inflamed than he’d so far realized; that
month, a paper would announce the discovery that mammals convert DHEA
and EPEA—endocannabinoids created from DHA and EPA, which are found
mostly in animal fats—into more potent, previously unknown
endocannabinoids that interacted with both CB1 and CB2 receptors and had
“enhanced anti-inflammatory properties.” The conversion was made by CYP
enzymes, which, Tao would know from a 2013 paper by Anthony Samsel and
Stephanie Seneff, were suppressed by glyphosate.
—
Kathleen led Tao and Chris, who was six-five or six-six and affably bearish, on
a smell and taste tour of her garden. Tao made a six-second video of a species
of Digitales that was taller than him. Its flowers looked like painted models of
tunnels with little entities rushing out or being suctioned in—only on the
bottom, making the colored dots seem affected by gravity.
“Do you have a—garden at all?” said Kathleen in the video.
“Not so much,” said Chris. “I have a couple of houseplants.”
Tao said his room had no direct sunlight or plants. For around 10,700
generations, from 280,000 to 12,000 years ago, the diets of his ancestors had
probably averaged much more than a hundred plant species, each with its
own distinct configuration of common, uncommon, rare, and unique
compounds. The Sierra Miwok, for example, who once lived in central
California, used around 160 species for food and 110 for medicine, suffusing
themselves in minerals, amino acids, phytoncides, antioxidants, antiinflammatants, neurotransmitters, polyphenols, terpenes, anthocyanins,
carotenoids, chlorophylls, vitamins, peptides, enzymes, and other
phytocompounds. Humans began eating fewer plant species when they
condensed into permanent settlements—at Çatalhöyük, 8,000 years or 320
generations ago, fourteen food species were grown and others were foraged
—but still more, and more nourishingly, than in the twentieth and twentyfirst centuries, when most people, genetically starved for nutrition from
microbes, fungi, insects, animals, and plants, were suffused in compounds
that had been invented less than five generations ago and were sold not with
hundreds of others in the nutritious matrix of a leaf, seed, root, rhizome,
bulb, or fruit but with ten or so other toxic ingredients in the surreally crude
dead zones of pills, tablets, creams, pastes, sunscreens, and processed foods.
They looked at a three-dimensional spider web that seemed absurdly and
extravagantly complex—a mansion with thousands of rooms, each a different
size, fitting in every direction. There was something comical about the level
of complexity, but instead of laughing, Tao felt himself become more
attentive.
Eyes closed, he chewed what he thought was lemon balm, which Finn,
from a distance, had recommended they taste. Kathleen asked what he saw
and Tao said the star from Super Mario Bros. He explained that, in the video
game, one jumped on things to kill them but with the star you could run
through them.
He learned he’d chewed catnip, not lemon balm, then said that “lemon
balm” had maybe influenced what he saw because “lemon” had made him
think yellow—the color of the star item.
Finn joined the tour and Tao looked at a hazelnut wrapped in an octopuscostume-like covering that was a lighter green than the kelpy, rippling leaves
it seemed to float among.
After smelling a species with three colors of flower, each with a different
scent, they approached what Tao thought of as Raspberry Fortress, which
seemed like a magically blown-up, living, plant version of the spider’s webcomplex.
Tao showed Finn a tiny raspberry and said it was cute and Finn grinned
and agreed. Tao pulled a raspberry and it slid off, revealing a white,
stalagmite-ish cone. He recorded his left hand removing a raspberry and
thought, “Decapping the stalagmite.”
Kathleen brought him a peppery orange flower, which he ate.
Finn encouraged Chris and Tao to eat a tomato leaf and they did.
Kathleen went inside to get travel information for Tao. She returned and
told Chris the plan: Drive Tao to Cotati. As Tao and Chris left the garden,
Finn jogged to them, offering blueberries from his palm. Tao overheard that
Klea was going to cook dinner for Fiona, Finn, and her mom. On the
driveway, he noticed a front-yard area that was steeply sloped and bonsai-like,
covered with a rococo verdure of plants. He began to think of the property as
a garden containing a house, cottage, shed, and driveway.
By Chris’s car, Finn felt peaches—less rapidly than his mom but with a
similarly “peacefully frenzied,” Tao felt, way of maneuvering the branches—
while talking and chose three or four and gave Tao one, which Tao ate, then
another, which Tao put in his bag. Tao confirmed he had enough cannabis
for later, then said bye to Kathleen and her children, thanking them.
Four weeks later, he would decide what to mail them as a thank-you gift
—Nourishing Traditions (1995), a 688-page cookbook based on the findings of
Weston A. Price that began with an essay with 188 scientific references
supporting the wisdom of aboriginals on food and health. “Technology can
be a kind father but only in partnership with his mothering, feminine
partner—the nourishing traditions of our ancestors,” wrote Sally Fallon in
the preface to her cookbook, which Tao would mail with a typed letter that
began “I’ve been writing with pleasure about my trip.”
On the 8:15 P.M. bus from Cotati to San Francisco, Tao handwrote
memories of the unrecorded parts of his day in the notebook he’d bought
hours before breaking his computer, then on yelp.com found a hotel with an
average rating of four stars, shared bathrooms, and, according to one review,
“EXTREMELY thin” walls. It was called Union Hotel, like the non-hotel
establishment in Occidental. Tao called and reserved a room, then emailed
his mom, saying he was on a bus, and in the email attached a photo of the
wedge-shaped house.
4. SAN FRANCISCO
After disembarking at 5th Street, Tao walked south on Mission Street,
smoking cannabis from a glass one-hitter he’d bought around there three
days earlier, in transit from SFO to San Remo Hotel. He noticed the taco
place he ate at with the ska/punk man after his reading in Petaluma seven
years earlier. He ordered takeout of half a roasted chicken from a
bar/restaurant on Valencia, then walked south to 21st Street, remembering
times he’d been here and sometimes, while feeling lucid and alert, calmly
forgetting where he was—in which city and when, as whom.
In Union Hotel, on Mission and 16th, around 11:15 P.M., Tao texted a photo
of his gray-blue bed to his mom, calling it cozy and cute. The hotel, which
seemed to be operated by three generations of an Indian family living behind
the main counter, smelled strongly of cumin, clove, paprika, dill, cinnamon,
nutmeg, fennel, chili pepper, star anise, and other Indian-food spices, to
Tao’s approval and delighted satisfaction. His aversion to artificial scents had
increased significantly in the past few years. He ate chicken and turmeric
sauerkraut and drank mineral water. Writing memories in his notebook, he
felt densely, pleasurably stoned.
That night, he woke to sex from two heterosexual couples—first one, later
another—that seemed loud enough for everyone on the floor, maybe in the
hotel, to hear. Tao hadn’t had sex, or even kissed anyone, in almost three
years, which didn’t feel especially aberrant to him—even though since 2002
he’d been in five relationships each lasting around a year—because he’d had
other periods in his life, like ages one to nineteen and when he was twentyone and twenty-two, among other ages, when, with varying amounts of
loneliness, he’d refrained, by choice and/or not, from romantic and sexual
relationships, focusing instead, in ways that sometimes encouragingly
reminded him of being a child happily playing alone, on other things.
Like with DMT in 2012, 2013, and 2014, Tao felt he should “recover more”
before trying relationships beyond friendship. Having hermit-like
tendencies, a job and main interest in life that was solitary, and generally
liking being alone, celibacy hadn’t been difficult for him. Someday, he’d try
romantic and sexual relationships again, or maybe he wouldn’t. He could
just focus on all these other things now. The more he learned, the more
alienated he felt from others and the harder it became to find people with
similar perspectives. Which was another reason for his book. So people could
know what he knew. So he wouldn’t feel alone in knowing.
Another reason—the fifth—for his book was that he wanted to learn the
ideas, stories, discoveries, reconceptualizations, statistics, and other
information that he’d put in it. Without the book, he wouldn’t have learned
its content as fast or maybe ever. He wouldn’t have sought, read, reread,
created, contemplated, and experimented with phrases, sentences,
paragraphs, parts, and chapters about the topics in it six to thirteen hours a
day, around 97 percent of days, for seventeen months. His book was an effect
of teaching himself its content. After it was published, he would occasionally
reread it to refresh its ideas. Its existence in the world, as something he’d
discuss and reference, would catalyze changes in his life.
—
In the morning, Tao bought another night at Union Hotel. He walked
leisurely in sunlight smoking cannabis, eventually arriving at Valencia Whole
Foods, a food store unrelated to Whole Foods, on Valencia and 21st, more
stoned at around an hour after waking than he’d been in weeks or months.
He crossed the street, sat on a raised area on the sidewalk, drank six eggs and
a glass-bottled kombucha, researched directions to a public library, and
returned his nearly depleted phone to Airplane Mode.
Walking north on Valencia, he began to fantasize about writing his book’s
epilogue. Kathleen had said many things he’d never heard before. He wanted
to quote her at length. He was excited to selectively document spoken
language, to share unusual fragments of dialogue, trialogue, syntax, and
word choice by Kathleen, Finn, Klea, Paetra, Corinne, Chris, and others from
the garden, in cars, on sidewalks, and in class. Because he’d unwittingly
stopped the first two recordings, an unconscious selection of the possible
material had already been made. This seemed auspicious. Tao had less audio
than if he’d recorded straight through the first day, but, due to restarting
twice, more Voice Memos, more variety.
Approaching 18th Street, he realized he couldn’t find his phone. He
checked his pockets unsystematically, feeling sometimes a little amused—
checking some of his five pockets three or four times, it seemed—then
checked each pocket in turn, finding no phone. The day before he’d lost his
phone in his pocket, he knew.
He walked back to where he’d sat to drink eggs. The phone wasn’t there.
He sat where he’d sat and felt pleased by the warm sunlight, as he had before
losing his phone. He walked where he’d walked, looking at the sidewalk for
his phone. He entered three businesses, asked if anyone had turned in a
phone, and they said no.
—
In Dolores Park, Tao lay on a slope of grass and felt, overall, glad his phone
was gone. He looked forward to his phoneless day. In his notebook, he began
writing the pros and cons of losing his phone and realized he’d lost all his
photos and videos. With a pang of disappointment that made his heart beat
faster—and with surprise he’d ignored or overlooked this until now—he
realized he’d also lost all the Voice Memos:
• 1 hour 49 minutes with Kathleen in the library
• 6 minutes with Kathleen and Finn in the garden
• 2 minutes of Finn talking in the garden
• 40-something minutes of student introductions in the library
• 40-something minutes that included asking Finn two quantitative
questions
He listed losing the photos, videos, and Voice Memos as the only cons. He
felt worried. He reminded himself he’d posted two videos on Instagram and
sent photos to his mom (he’d collect those later), then wrote these pros:
• Less mindless, repetitive, distracting, despair-causing, frustrating behavior
• Calmer thinking patterns/style
• Less things to focus on
• More focus on book
• Healthier for eyes
• Healthier for body
• Past abstinence has proven to have desirable effect on my life
• Closer to nature including more in-person interaction
• Different than before, a change, opportunity for evolution/variety
He added, obligatorily but, he felt, still helpfully, “Learning experience”—
that he would, or could, learn from what had happened. He began wondering
if he’d unconsciously gotten rid of his phone. After drinking eggs and
kombucha, he’d carried their containers across the street with his right hand
and put them in a metal trash can. Had his phone been in the same hand?
Once, a year or two earlier, he’d tossed his phone into a makeshift trash bag
in his room and retrieved it minutes later, surprised.
With excitement at a possible resolution—of having the Voice Memos
again!—and a conflicted feeling of relinquishing the pros he’d collected into
a substantial-seeming list, he returned to where he might have discarded his
phone and saw the metal trash can had a comically thick, armor-like casing
around it that was locked. He tried to search it, sticking his hand in a little,
but the structure seemed designed to thwart him and he stopped.
—
Walking to the main branch of the public library, Tao noticed a row of
camping tents—on the sidewalk across the street—in which people lived,
apparently. Each tent on the wide-sidewalked block was paired with a tree,
but not every tree had a tent. At an intersection, a man asked Tao for money
and received. He thanked Tao and said someone had come out of a bar
across the street and started “shit-talking” him for no reason. Stoned in
public, Tao interacted with more people, often unconsciously reciprocating
the calming, he felt, eye contact of panhandlers and homeless people.
Walking, he considered the cons of losing the Voice Memos. One con was
that he’d inconvenienced Kathleen. Objective audio of what she’d said no
longer existed. Tao wasn’t sure what to do. Ask questions by email? Phone?
Skype? Return to Occidental? He thought of when Kathleen noticed it was
3:00 P.M. and said time had gone fast—and that she had, at least twice, asked
Tao if he was getting all the information he needed—and told himself she
probably hadn’t been too inconvenienced, but that, still, this was clumsy of
him, to lose the precious Voice Memos—fatally clumsy, as a journalist and
person. Journalists had done this to him before and then had repeated the
same questions, which he didn’t enjoy because, among other reasons, it
underscored the situation’s artificiality.
Arguing again against despair, Tao reminded himself he was very
interested in Kathleen’s thoughts, feelings, experiences, and knowledge and
was writing about her, her family, and Botanical Dimensions in a book
contracted to be published by Vintage, an imprint of Penguin Random
House. Asking her to talk to him again about the same things in an interview
format didn’t seem too bad. This wasn’t a newspaper or magazine
assignment in which she’d be mechanically and disrespectfully reduced to an
embarrassing and inaccurate headline, linking her non sequiturly to some
absurd trend and then further labeling and categorizing her in promotional
tweets and other language on various websites that future media, researching
her, would repeat in slight variations indefinitely. This wasn’t something Tao
was belligerently and selfishly doing for a personal blog with a tiny
readership in a misguided, “seize the day”–related disregard for Kathleen’s
time. It was for a book whose “positive and exploratory” tone Kathleen had
said she appreciated, Tao reminded himself.
He considered the pros of losing the Voice Memos. Besides being a good
learning experience, another pro was that this was an opportunity for his
book to evolve. Another pro was that now he had an unusual and challenging
task that interested and excited him and would require all his attention. His
task was to remember the hundreds of minutes in Occidental when he
believed his phone was recording—when, instead of trying to memorize
everything, he’d tried to “be here now,” as Kathleen quoted Ram Dass in her
talks. He’d deliberately refrained from recalling those experiences—for, by
now, one day and two nights—so they remained uniquely, he felt,
undisturbed. Now he would go model them in prose.
—
In the library, using one of the two “express internet” computers, Tao went to
iCloud.com/find and put his phone on Lost Mode, which, from what he
could discern, wouldn’t help since his phone had been on Airplane Mode.
He reserved a seated computer to use from 3:00 P.M. to 4:00 P.M. He crossed
the street and lay in sunny Civic Center Park, which was sparsely in use,
mostly by alert, mobile, bored-seeming homeless people. From Tao’s
hundreds of book-related visits to cities across Earth since 2006, San
Francisco at this time seemed to have the most homeless people.
Back in the library, seated with homeless people at one of the reservable
computers with internet, Tao rapidly typed and edited and organized words
and sentences about his time in Occidental. After his allotted hour, he went
outside, smoked, stretched, and exercised, swinging his arms forward and
back while walking. In his room and elsewhere, the past few years, he’d
invented many exercises, naming and typing a little on each in notes.rtf.
When he invented exercises, or personalized other aspects of life, he felt like
an exclusive, non-recruiting cult.
Back in the library again, he sat in a chair in line for one of the
unreservable “express internet” computers. He was second and last in line,
then first and only. Then a man dressed like and as tall—at least six-five—
and almost as muscular as an NBA basketball player sat by him and began
talking to an imaginary person with whom, it seemed, he was in controlled,
moderate, resolvable conflict. He had a lisp and smelled sour, like one of
Tao’s fermentations. Instead of sitting in one of the other three or four
chairs, the man, who didn’t seem to be waiting for a computer but just
resting, had sat by Tao, but he seemed unaware of Tao—until after around
five minutes, when he asked Tao to move his paper bag that was on the floor
because it was “taking up too much space” and Tao moved it to his other
side.
The man’s complex natural sour smell helped Tao, who felt he’d benefit if
he rubbed himself against or even licked the man’s microbe-infested skin,
which probably was relatively free of synthetic chemicals. In the past, Tao
avoided sourness except in Sour Patch Kids, sweet and sour sauce, plastic
packets of relish, and other substances he now viewed as toxic. Now he did
not move to avoid natural sourness but enjoyed it physically and mentally.
Compounds and microbes traveled invisibly from the lactic-acid fermenting
man to Tao—who, as a twenty-first-century, computer-reliant human, was
starved for plant, fungal, microbial, animal, and human contact—and then
the library began closing and Tao and other people went outside.
The rest of the day and night, he walked through the city writing memories
in his notebook while sometimes somewhat discreetly smoking cannabis,
whose effects seemed as impressive and complicatedly magical as ever. He
considered the possibility he was smoking cannabis that, for the first time in
months, was not pesticide-ridden, as he suspected/assumed his illegal
cannabis in New York was—cannabis he got by texting a number he’d
forgotten how he’d gotten but seemed to have been using for years, then
waiting one to eight hours until someone he only sometimes recognized
arrived with cannabis. He downloaded recent memories into series of words,
scrawling at one point that he felt “exquisitely, happily, discerningly stoned.”
—
The next day was July 4. The library was closed. In a FedEx Office, at 35 cents
per minute, Tao transferred notes from his notebook through his mind,
where fragments became sentences, to the Google Drive document for his
book’s epilogue. Outside, he peed illegally behind a giant trash bin, then
smoked cannabis, hurried inside, and continued working for around a half
hour.
He walked to the harbor market and contemplated moderate exploration.
He wanted to be moderately exploratory with, among other things, DMT.
Applying patient, controlled, long-term effort in the DMT domain, he’d
smoke it seven to fifteen more times in his life, and his accounts would
appear in various forms in his oeuvre and the thirteen or however many
DMT trips of Tao Lin would be known and, he fantasized, could be analyzed
and discussed like Chopin’s twenty-one nocturnes or Lorrie Moore’s thirtyeight short stories. His DMT trips, novels, short stories, and other sequences
—in which each new entry was informed by a slightly larger history—would
stabilize and complexify his life, leading him places he’d otherwise never go,
he thought to himself while walking through the market.
Back in FedEx, he worked for another hour, finishing at 5:35 P.M. with
5,892 words. He printed the file, stapled the paper, and felt productive. He’d
enjoyed it so much the previous night that he did it again: wandered the
mostly unfamiliar city while becoming increasingly stoned, intermittently
writing memories and ideas in his notebook. Walking circuitously to briefly
explore, he encountered Rainbow Grocery, which he recognized from 2007,
2009, or 2010, he wasn’t sure. He entered, browsed, bought nuts and seeds.
He’d forgotten this place.
—
In Union Hotel, on the way to his room, Tao saw it was 8:07 P.M. on the
digital clock behind the counter where the Indian family lived. Phoneless, he
had a different relationship with time—which seemed good because he
desired increased and varied familiarity with nanoseconds, microseconds,
milliseconds, centiseconds, deciseconds, seconds, minutes, hours, days,
weeks, months, years, decades, centuries, millennia, and other periods of
time, like lunations, seasons, a million years, and a billion years.
In his room, he wrote about his day—that he’d transcribed his notes to a
file and organized it into parts he could “enter and explore.” He wrote that he
was “smoking a small hit & going to sleep without alarm.” Kneeling at the
window, he blew cannabis smoke up and out and saw part of the twilightblue sky.
He turned off the light and got into bed. There were fewer fireworks than
he expected for the night of Independence Day. Manhattan was denser, he
reminded himself, than San Francisco. He was in a large city, but he felt like
he was in a suburban home, hearing sporadic fireworks elsewhere in the
neighborhood. He focused on what he felt, and the feeling seemed
surprisingly subtle. “I’m happier than I’ve ever been,” he thought calmly.
“Happier and healthier.”
A few seconds later, he realized both how he would write his book’s
epilogue and how it would end, simultaneously and with clarity. He’d write
it, he realized, as a short story—like the ones that had moved and consoled
and inspired him in and after college—ending with him in bed thinking he
was happier and healthier than he’d ever been! He’d quote his internal
monologue, braiding life and literature for a long moment, a small
paragraph.
He got out of bed, turned on the light, wrote a note to himself to write the
epilogue as a short story ending with him thinking “happier and healthier,”
and returned to bed. Weeks later, working on the story, which had become
novella-length, he’d notice that his sleepily stoned internal monologue had
murmured language he’d in part absorbed, it seemed, from his mom, who in
her email three days earlier had wished him “the best, healthiest and
happiest birthday ever.”
He fantasized about the myriad-seeming pros of this epilogue form—its
holding capacity for a range of information, the option of third-person
perspective, that he could insert ideas that didn’t fit elsewhere, and the
opportunity to end in a narrative, nonrhetorical, emotional moment—then
stopped and focused on rest.
APPENDIX
1. There are ninety to one hundred natural types of atoms on Earth—
hydrogen, helium, etc.
2. Most atoms aren’t small, conceptually.
3. Oxygen is made of eight electrons, eight protons, eight neutrons.
4. Atoms automatically, in time, join to form molecules.
5. Hydrogen and oxygen form water, a 3-atom molecule.
6. Amino acids are a type of small molecule.
7. Amino acids are made by adding a “side chain” to a specific 9-atom
molecule.
8. Glycine, a 10-atom amino acid, has a hydrogen atom as its side chain.
9. Tryptophan, a 27-atom amino acid, has an ethylene and an indole
molecule.
10. Estimates of how many types of amino acids occur in biological systems
range from hundreds to thousands, according to a 2013 paper in Journal
of Chemical Information and Modeling.
11. But life uses only twenty different amino acids, made from ten to
twenty-seven atoms, to build proteins. Francis Crick, co-discoverer of
the structure of DNA, wrote in Life Itself (1981) that it was surprising
only twenty were used and that it was the same twenty, made of only
hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and sulfur, for all life on Earth.
12. Life uses twenty-two amino acids, it has since been discovered, to build
proteins, but the twenty-first and twenty-second—selenium-containing
selenocysteine, used by animals but not fungi or land plants, and
pyrrolysine, used by some bacteria—are inserted into proteins
differently than the others.
13. Life is made of billions of types of proteins.
14. Life builds proteins by connecting tens to tens of thousands of amino
acids in one-dimensional sequences that automatically fold, in
microseconds, into three-dimensional objects that function by their
unique shape. Before this was discovered in the twentieth century, no
one seemed to have predicted it.
15. The dimensional inflation seems like the most surprising aspect of the
process.
16. The others—atoms forming amino acids, forming proteins, forming
cells—seem more predictable.
17. Proteins can’t be made with atoms, only amino acids.
18. Titin, the largest known protein and third most abundant protein in
adult human muscles, is made from 34,350 amino acids.
19. The smallest known foldable protein is the semi-synthetic, Gila
monster saliva–derived Trp-Cage, which is twenty amino acids—
NLYIQWLKDGGPSSGRPPPS—and looks like this when unfolded and
folds in four microseconds:
20. Hemoglobin, a protein that moves oxygen to tissues and carbon dioxide
to lungs, is 574 amino acids.
21. Receptors are proteins. CB1 is 472 amino acids in humans. CB2 is 347,
360, and 361 amino acids in mice, humans, and rats.
22. CB1 and CB2 are two types of serpentine receptors, of which more than
a thousand types exist in mammals and which cross the cell membrane
seven times and are also called G-protein-coupled receptors.
23. Enzymes are proteins that accelerate chemical reactions. INMT is a
263–amino acid enzyme that can N-methylate tryptamine, which is
decarboxylated tryptophan, twice to create N,N-dimethyltryptamine.
24. EPSPs is a 427–amino acid enzyme used by life in the seven-step
shikimate pathway to create, among other compounds, phenylalaline,
tyrosine, and tryptophan.
25. In March 2016, in their fifth paper on glyphosate, Samsel and Seneff
theorized that life mistakenly inserts glyphosate instead of glycine into
hundreds to thousands of proteins that depend on glycine to function,
including EPSPs, the CYP enzymes, collagen, and various receptors,
contributing to or causing autism, cancer, infertility, birth defects,
diabetes, obesity, asthma, Alzheimer’s, Crohn’s, Parkinson’s, and many
other modern problems.
26. Collagen, which is 20 to 25 percent glycine, comprises a fourth of the
proteins in humans.
27. There are “proteins whose job it is to unwind the double helix,” wrote
Crick.
28. A list of every known protein would begin with ones containing
hundreds of atoms and end millions of entries later with titin, which
contains more than 400,000 atoms.
29. On a different planet, the periodic table of elements would be the same,
showing ninety-plus types of atoms, but a table of the planets’ proteins
would be much different.
30. This is because, I learned from Crick, on a different planet, life may
have chosen a different set of twenty amino acids to use to build itself.
Life that uses only sixteen amino acids probably exists on many of the
hundreds of billions of planets in the Milky Way—and maybe these
forms of life, lacking the complexity of twenty, never evolve past
unicellular existence.
31. If we encountered a planet of life-forms made from twenty-eight amino
acids, maybe they would seem, in a strange way, all the same—looking
and acting in a certain 28–amino acid way. We would become selfconscious and realize that, despite our variety, from chlorella to flying
fish to Barack Obama, we are almost all built from the same set of
amino acids. Crick stressed that this was how terrestrial life was,
beneath appearances, unified.
32. The knowledge of how to build proteins is stored in DNA. Human DNA
codes for around twenty thousand proteins, each of which, postassembly, can be modified up to a hundred ways.
33. Species know how to create unique sets of proteins, which partially
determine their form.
34. DNA is made by connecting two small molecules, which are always the
same, with a third, which can be adenine (fifteen atoms), guanine
(sixteen atoms), thymine (fifteen atoms), or cytosine (thirteen atoms);
each triplet is called a nucleotide.
35. DNA is read in three-nucleotide groups called codons. There are sixtyfour codons because 4 × 4 × 4 = 64.
36. Sixty-one codons refer to twenty amino acids; the other three mean
“end chain” and can also refer to the twenty-first and twenty-second
amino acids. Tryptophan is the only amino acid of the main twenty with
only one codon; the other nineteen have two to six codons.
37. Life reads a codon that says “adenine (A), adenine (A), guanine (G)” and
knows to insert a lysine amino acid next, knowing as a planet knows
how to orbit its star, by being its unique shape and following natural
laws.
38. If I had a box of amino acid models and a model of twenty codons of
DNA coding for Trp-Cage and I wanted to teach a child to build TrpCage, I would give the child a chart showing the twenty-two
proteinogenic amino acids and “the genetic code.”
39. The genetic code says what the codons mean—that GGA is glycine,
UAA “end chain,” etc.
40. Life does what the child would do—reads a codon, consults the code,
inserts an amino acid, reads the next codon, etc.—automatically, using
proteins and natural laws. It learned how over an unknown amount of
time.
41. The automatic process involves transcription, translation, RNA, and
ribosomes. “Because it is so complicated the reader should not attempt
to struggle with all the details,” wrote Crick.
42. The “important thing to realize,” he felt, was that the genetic code
“must have evolved from something much simpler.”
43. Life built cells from proteins, animals from cells.
44. Life automatically, in time, created humans.
45. Crick pointed out that enough time—9.3 billion years—had already
passed for life to have gone from “soup to man” twice by the time Earth
formed. This made him theorize life began extraterrestrially and, over
billions of years, spread to other stars and probably galaxies. Which
made him theorize life on Earth was seeded from elsewhere, maybe as
bacteria, which over three to four billion years became humans.
46. Humans created language.
47. English uses twenty-six letters, -,—, ;, :, ?, !, ., and other symbols, like ~,
+, =, and ,.
48. Connecting words in a one-dimensional manner, with punctuation,
humans created sentences. Instead of always folding the same way, like
proteins, sentences dimensionally inflate in unique ways depending on
the mind and time.
49. As life tunneled efflorescently through the universe into the
imagination, complexity increased in a level-jumping, nonlinear
manner.
50. Atoms, amino acids, proteins, cells, humans. Strokes, letters, words,
sentences, books.
51. In 1937, Olaf Stapledon published Star Maker, a novel made of
hundreds of thousands of symbols arranged one-dimensionally into
thousands of sentences.
52. In Star Maker, a character in London goes outside one night feeling
discouraged and bleak, suddenly zooms away from Earth as a
disembodied consciousness, and participates in the entire future history
of the universe. At the end of the novel, the character, now comprised of
every galaxy—around half—that had “awakened” sufficiently to form a
mind, meets its creator.
53. The universe-character learns it’s arguably Star Maker’s first mature
work. Requiring half a trillion years to sustain an incipient, cosmic
mind for fifteen billion years, the universe was much more complex
than Star Maker’s earlier creations. Star Maker placed the halfconscious universe alongside its other art and, after contemplation,
continued creating.
54. In April 1939, five months before the start of World War II, Jean Rhys
published Good Morning, Midnight, a novel about a woman in her
forties living in hotels in Paris in October 1937. It intimately conveyed
the strange experience of being a lonely, afraid, alienated, modern,
ideology-less human interacting with others in an unsatisfying manner.
55. It was in four parts, often used the ellipsis symbol, and included this
sentence: “All that is left in the world is an enormous machine, made of
white steel.” And these: “I have another drink. Damned voice in my
head, I’ll stop you talking…”
56. In an interview with the Paris Review in 1979, Rhys said, “All of writing
is a huge lake.” She called herself one of the “mere trickles” and said,
“All that matters is feeding the lake. I don’t matter. The lake matters.
You must keep feeding the lake.”
57. Stapledon (1886–1950) and Rhys (1890–1979) are two of the 108 billion
humans, according to the Population Reference Bureau, who’ve lived
since 50,000 BC.
58. The effect of 108 billion humans metabolized on Earth over 52,000
years is agriculture, solitary confinement, skyscrapers, science fiction,
postmodern novels, two world wars, factory farms, smoked DMT,
ubiquitous glyphosate, computers, and the internet.
59. 108 billion molecules of LSD, the most potent psychedelic, metabolized
in a human isn’t noticeable.
60. 108 billion molecules of LSD weighs less than .0001 micrograms.
61. 150 micrograms of LSD are in an average, contemporary tab of LSD.
62. More than 225 million billion molecules are in 150 micrograms of LSD.
63. 225 million billion molecules of LSD metabolized in a human over
hours is startlingly, scarily, and safely intense.
64. 225 million billion humans metabolized in a universe: ?
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thank you to my family and friends; to Kathleen Harrison, Finn McKenna,
and Klea McKenna; to Tim O’Connell, Bill Clegg, and Angie Venezia; and to
my publisher, Vintage.
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APPENDIX
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THANK YOU FOR PERMISSION TO REPRINT THE FOLLOWING:
Interview of Terence McKenna from tripzine.com © 1993. Reprinted by
permission from James Kent.
Lyrics from “Police Song” and “15 Minutes” by The Broadways © 1998.
Reprinted by permission from Dan Hanaway.
Lyrics from “Born to Die” and “Fuck America” by Choking Victim © 1996,
1999. Reprinted by permission from Scott Sturgeon.
Lyrics from “Less Than Nothing” by I Hate Myself © 1997. Reprinted by
permission from Jim Marburger.
Text from DMT: The Spirit Molecule by Rick Strassman © 2000. Reprinted
by permission of Inner Traditions International and Bear & Company.
www.innertraditions.com.
The words of Terence McKenna. Printed by permission from Finn and Klea
McKenna.
The words of Kathleen Harrison. Printed by permission from Kathleen
Harrison.
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