This is an account of my second psilocybin session in the "Spiritual Practices" study. It was written the evening after the session, which was August 29, 2012.
The first part of the experience
seems nearly impossible to write about. It is very hard to remember, it sort of
defied words, and the person who is sitting here typing this was barely there.
I think the first thing I
experienced was brightly colored, lighted, moving geometric shapes. I remember
that this was like what I saw in my first session, but this time they
seemed brighter or more visceral.
The way it looked seemed at once very ancient, like Sanskrit writing come to
life, and something new that young kids might understand but that would be
beyond a middle aged woman to “get.” I also described it as Sanskrit meets
computer circuitry, but all lit up and vibrant with moving colors. It also
seemed linked to the music in some way. I remember feeling surprised that
European classical music would “look” like this.
I had the sense of my normal self
completely, or almost completely, dissolving. I didn’t feel particularly
anxious about this. The string of words that I had identified with in my last
session slowed to a very erratic drip. When I sort of asked myself to think of
it, I could barely remember my name, that I worked as a lawyer, and I could remember
the names of a few people in my life but they didn’t seem to mean much.
I remember being aware that I was
really just this point of consciousness watching this five‐dimensional
pyrotechnic show that the drug or my mind or the universe or whatever was
putting on. I felt grateful that I got to experience this.
I remember laughing, but I can’t
explain why. I was vaguely aware of being in the room, but it seemed very far
away. I was vaguely aware of my body, but it seemed oddly flat and like it was
floating in space.
I remember thinking something like
“aha, now I get it” or “oh” or even that “this” was what meditation was trying
to get at, but at this point I can’t remember or explain what “this” was, other
than just that sense of being consciousness not attached to any particular
identity.
It seemed like this went on a long
time, or that there wasn’t any time. It was peaceful and I felt accepting of
and grateful for this experience, I was even happy in a sense, but it seemed a
very impersonal and abstract experience, as if the ultimate reality, either of
the universe or just my brain, was brightly colored mathematics.
Actually, as I write this I realize I’ve had the sense before of music being
both very mysterious and impossible to really understand, and also of music
being like animated math, and that is what this experience was like.
I was aware that this was going to
end, and I sort of didn’t want it to. Then I gradually re‐formed
into my recognizable self, and as I did I felt really sad and disappointed by
how impersonal and emotionally cold the earlier part of the experience was.
I had wanted an experience of
universal love—and instead I found universal animated mathematics. And somehow
this all snowballed into a despairing sense that there was no love for me in
the universe, that God doesn’t love me, that I am not loved or am not
loveable, and/or that I was/am “autistic” in some sense, incapable of tuning
into love, but
instead that I am just tuned to
something that might be profound but is not warm or comforting.
And I just lay there for a long
time feeling sad and alienated. Crying but at the same time feeling
disconnected from my emotions. Mary said some soothing things to me, but I had
the sense of them being the things she had been trained to say, that they really
had nothing to do with what I was experienced. I felt that Rosemary and I
had maybe rubbed each other the wrong way sometimes in some subtle way, that I
knew she didn’t really like me, that she and Mary were both doing a fine job of
doing their job, but that’s all they were doing. I remember Mary saying
there was love there for me if I would let myself feel it, but I had no idea
how to do that.
And this just seemed to go on
forever, with me at first waiting for the experience to change and for God to
pop out and say Surprise! I love you after all!, then just waiting for the
happy music to come on so I could get up and put myself together and face this
cold reality that I had discovered.
I remember Mary asking me if any
people had come to my in my experience, and there hadn’t been, which just
intensified the experience of alienation.
Toward the end I thought about the
ex‐boyfriend
I always refer to as “The Reptile.” I had the sense that we were both the same,
that what was inside us was mathematics, that were both emotionally alienated.
I sort of knew that, as much as it might seem like a cliché, that this feeling
of not being loved by the universe was because of not feeling loved as a child,
and I knew that that was true of him to, and I felt a glimmer of compassion and
forgiveness for him. I was aware, too, that it was Yom Kippur. Both the Reptile
and my current troublesome sort‐of boyfriend are Jewish. I was aware of doing a sort of
reverse atonement for or to the Reptile.
I got up and I talked about all
this with Mary and Rosemary; somehow we got into talking about my scary,
troubled, possibly violent grievant who believes I was anointed by God to
avenge him. Somewhere in there I had the insight that the love in the world, if
I want it to be there, comes from me putting it there, which is about dealing
with others, even the crazy and difficult ones, in a compassionate and present
way. It’s not the emotion, it’s the intention.
At some point Mary showed me the
picture of me and my sister as children with my Dad. I know she wanted me to
see it because it showed that my father loved me. It was interesting that when
I looked at it, it looked to me like my dad was wearing a yarmulke. We
aren’t Jewish. We talked about in being Yom Kippur and what atonement meant,
from various perspectives.
The sense that the love comes from
my intentions was reinforced with interactions with Barbara, who came to pick
me up at the end of the session. Before this we hadn’t really been close, even
though we like each other, she was someone I had my guard up with maybe even
more than usual.
In the car, I described my
experience to her a little bit. She said she hadn’t really ever done any drugs,
but she had gone to a sweat lodge and had an experience of dissolving and then
re‐forming.
She felt this was a spiritual experience. She said this had happened on
the same day as her daughter had her first communion, and that part of her
experience was the understanding that her experience and her daughters’
experiences were the same, of the unity or essential sameness of spiritual or
sacramental experience.
Then she started talking about the
problems she is having with her husband. She doesn’t feel that they are
really married—they are not really partners in life, he keeps himself and his
finances separate from hers, they don’t have any shared plans for the future,
he goes on trips with his buddies but they don’t go places together, he treats
her as if she is just the most mature and reasonable of the children.
I was able to really listen to her
compassionately and express that to her. I was also aware that there was a
lesson in this for me—that a man can marry you and make an outward commitment
to you, and can still have all the same commitment and intimacy issues and hold
himself apart from you. That her experience with her husband is something
like mine with John.
At some point she said something
about how great I am and how great my life is, with my weird meditation and
psilocybin studies and the rowing and my interesting work, and I thought and
said that I usually walk around feeling sad and dissatisfied with the state of
my love life, but I could see that in a way the problems with love and
connection and commitment were the same no matter the outward relationship status,
and that actually my life is pretty great.
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