Golden State Warriors coach Steve Kerr speaks at a news conference before the team’s NBA basketball game against the San Antonio Spurs in San Francisco, Friday, Nov. 1, 2019. (AP Photo/Jeff Chiu)Photo: Jeff Chiu / Associated Press
These are confusing times.
We’re plunging into the heart of the NFL playoffs, with all kinds of great matchups and compelling stories. Meanwhile, the threat of war looms.
What should we do? Should we wallow in football and ignore the real world? Or put aside the fun and games as long as our globe is as unstable as a lopsided basketball?
Steve Kerr has offered a suggestion. Since the Warriors’ head coach continues to guide his team, we can assume he still sees a value in sports. But Kerr also urges sports fans to not lock out the real world. There is room for both.
Before a game last week, Kerr was asked why he has been so busy tweeting about political matters.
“I’m worried we’re going to end up in another war,” Kerr explained. “I try to use my Twitter platform to remind people to do their homework before we all blindly wave the flag and get ourselves into another mess like we did in Iraq.”
Remember Iraq? The Gulf War? The U.S. and allies began bombing Iraq on Jan. 16, 1991. The Super Bowl was 11 days later in Tampa.
I was there. Fear was in the air. Security was super tight. Military helicopters hovered over the stadium. The halftime show, featuring New Kids on the Block, was not televised by ABC. Instead the network aired a war update with Peter Jennings.
I camped out in the media tent in front of the TVs, one eye on the game and one eye on the war. TV gave us live feeds from Saudi Arabia of American troops watching the Super Bowl. We watched them watching us.
On the grass, Scott Norwood missed a kick, the Giants won. On the sand, the bombing continued, nobody won.
Three decades later, here we are again, heading to Florida for another Super Bowl while heading to the desert for another possible conflict.
Enjoy the games, but consider taking Kerr’s suggestion. No matter which way you lean politically, pay attention, do your homework, be informed, think, listen, express your opinion, vote. American stuff. Go, team.Scott Ostler is a San Francisco Chronicle columnist. Email: sostler@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @scottostler
Scott Ostler has been a sports columnist at the San Francisco Chronicle since 1991. He has covered five Olympics for The Chronicle, as well as one soccer World Cup and numerous World Series, Super Bowls and NBA Finals.
Though he started in sports and is there now, Scott took a couple of side trips into the real world for The Chronicle. For three years he wrote a daily around-town column, and for one year, while still in sports, he wrote a weekly humorous commentary column.
He has authored several books and written for many national publications. Scott has been voted California Sportswriter of the Year 13 times, including six times while at The Chronicle. He moved to the Bay Area from Southern California, where he worked for the Los Angeles Times, the National Sports Daily and the Long Beach Press-Telegram.
“Now with respect to analysis, with the Freudian personal unconscious analysis you try to search back to find what the crisis was, what the historical or biographical moment was, and then come to know it and get released from it.
“That’s not the Jungian way at all. What the Jungian tries to find out is what are the energies that have not been allowed to play. Evoke them. You are a flower that is only half opened. Drop a little water on the unopened petals. Let them come. And so it’s a pitch forward instead of backward. Instead of hunting back, back, back, back to disengage back there and then come forward, you just flood forward and this other thing will get washed out.
“And that’s the way myth works. Myth is opening to you the total humanity of yourself and it evokes energies and brings them into play. Some of those energies have been repressed and are consequently frightening for you.”
–from Joseph Campbell: Mythos III
More wisdom from Campbell:
“Imperfection is life.” –Joseph Campbell
“No one has ever performed a good deed.” –Wolfram von Eschenbach in Parzival
“All deeds have good and evil results, motives and everything else.” –Joseph Campbell
“I’m not a very good American because I like to form my own opinions,” said the famous standup comic in 1992 following the first Gulf War. “I don’t just roll over when I’m told to. Sad to say, most Americans just roll over on command—not me.”
Comedian George Carlin performing at the Paramount Theater in New York City on April 24th, 1992 during his eighth recorded special for HBO. (Photo: via Scrapsfromtheleft.com)
Amid growing concern that President Donald Trump will further escalate tensions with Iran and start a new war in the Middle East, Rep. Ilhan Omar—an outspoken anti-war Democrat in the U.S. House—shared a historic clip of comedian George Carlin Monday morning that bemoaned the pattern of American militarism in which the United States—often with the help of a conspiring media and pliant public—start or jump into a major war with another country just about every twenty years.
“We like war because we’re good at it! You know why we’re good at it? Cause we get a lot of practice. This country’s only 200 years old and already, we’ve had 10 major wars.” —George Carlin in 1992Carlin recorded the routine—entitled “Rockets and Penises in the Persian Gulf“—as part of an HBO special in 1992 on the heels of the first Gulf War launched by President George H.W. Bush.
Sharing the clip on Twitter, Omar—who on Sunday announced a War Powers Resolution she plans to introduce with Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) to block Trump from additional attacks on Iran—suggested the topic of Carlin’s routine was once again relevant, but said it remains “no laughing matter.”
“You know my favourite part of that war?” Carlins asks in the routine. “It’s the first war we ever had that was on every channel plus cable… and the war got good ratings too, didn’t it? Got good ratings! Well, we like war! We like war! We’re a war-like people! We like war because we’re good at it! You know why we’re good at it? Cause we get a lot of practice. This country’s only 200 years old and already, we’ve had 10 major wars. We average a major war every 20 years in this country so we’re good at it!”
He goes on to describe that the U.S. government is especially fond of waging war against countries populated by brown people. He explains that bombing people is a good thing to be good at if you don’t have any other national talents.
“Can’t build a decent car, can’t make a TV set or a VCR worth a fuck, got no steel industry left, can’t educate our young people, can’t get health care to our old people, but we can bomb the shit out of your country all right! Huh? Especially if your country is full of brown people—oh we like that don’t we? That’s our hobby! That’s our new job in the world: bombing brown people. Iraq, Panama, Grenada, Libya, you got some brown people in your country, tell them to watch the fuck out or we’ll goddamn bomb them!”
Carlin, who died in 2008 at the age of 71, is widely heralded as one of the great standup comedians of all-time and was known for his sophisticated social critiques which included irreverent attacks on conventional thinking and cultural norms.
“That’s our hobby! That’s our new job in the world: bombing brown people. Iraq, Panama, Grenada, Libya, you got some brown people in your country, tell them to watch the fuck out or we’ll goddamn bomb them!”
“Now you probably noticed I don’t feel about that war the way we were told we were supposed to feel about that war, the way we were ordered and instructed by the United States government to feel about that war. You see, I tell ya, my mind doesn’t work that way,” Carlin says in the Gulf War routine.
“I got this real moron thing I do; it’s called ‘thinking,'” he continues. “And I’m not a very good American because I like to form my own opinions. I don’t just roll over when I’m told to. Sad to say, most Americans just roll over on command—not me.”
In order to maintain this position, Carlin explains that he has certain rules that he lives by. “My first rule,” he says, “I don’t believe anything the government tells me… nothing, zero, no.”
That is where the clip that Omar shared online ends, but in the full performance, Carlin goes on to say that he has other rules when it comes to U.S. war-making.
“I don’t take very seriously, the media or the press in this country, who in the case of the Persian Gulf war were nothing more than unpaid employees of the Department of Defense,” he continued, “and who most of the time, most of the time functioned as kind of an unofficial public relations agency for the United States government. So I don’t listen to them, I don’t really believe in my country and I gotta tell you folks, I don’t get all choked up about yellow ribbons and American flags. I consider them to be symbols and I leave symbols to the symbol-minded.”
Watch the complete portion of the routine:
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One of Albert Einstein’s great legacies is his Gedanken experiments (or thought experiments). He was a competent mathematician, of course, but more than that, his strength was in his ability to ask interesting and novel questions and then use his imagination to crystallize how different components relating to those questions could come together.
In physics, numbers and formulas provide the fixed nails on which theories hang as they find their final form. For Einstein, one of his breakthrough theories came from the realization that the speed of light must always be constant — that it’s the one thing that isn’t relative to anything else. Imagining a railway carriage moving at a particular speed, and contrasting that with the speed of a beam of light, he realized that he couldn’t make the thought experiment work unless the speed of the beam were constant relative to both the railway carriage and the railway station from where the carriage left.
E=mc2. That’s what the thought experiment yielded — the idea that energy and mass are interchangeable. The spacetime that makes up our entire conception of the Universe is composed of both matter and energy, yes, but they are tangled with one another, interconnected to a point where anything with a mass, anything that moves or vibrates, can be broken down to energy. In this sense, the Universe is a thermodynamic system, where everything possesses energy capable of doing work. This simple idea is what makes the laws of thermodynamics fundamental to our understanding of reality.
The first law of thermodynamics states that energy can neither be created nor destroyed; it can only be transformed from one form to another. The second law of thermodynamics states that, as energy is transformed from one state to another, more and more of it is wasted — meaning that as time goes on, we get more and more entropy, or disorder, in the Universe, until at some point in the far future the Universe will destroy itself because it has reached maximum entropy in what is referred to as the heat death of the Universe.
If this is where the story ended, nobody will blame a person for slowly decaying into a state of depression. Except, something strange started to happen some 4 billion years ago. On a tiny speck of dust, in a relatively tiny galaxy, in a tiny, tiny part of the Universe, a process called abiogenesis occurred for the very first time. This tiny speck of dust is the floating rock we call Earth, and this process is otherwise known as the origin of life.
We don’t know how life came to be, we don’t know why it came to be, but we know that out of non-living matter living entities eventually arose and began the evolutionary process of increasing their complexity relative to their environmental habitats. As the evolutionary tree grew out with time, so did the variety in species. This went on for billions and billions of years until some two hundred thousand years ago when a great ape by the name of Homo Sapiens — or, modern humans — began to roam the planet.
This brings us to a very crucial point. With the arrival of humans, the Universe suddenly became self-aware in a way that it hadn’t previously been before. Not only that, but this self-awareness also pointed us in a singular direction that continues to be the driving force of both culture and civilization: The collective generation of order in the fight against entropy.
Biological organisms are strange because they generally maintain their internal states and their external form, in a kind of homeostasis, in the face of a constantly changing environment. They fight entropy by virtue of existing, by virtue of how efficiently they use their energy. As a human being, you don’t break down with every change that happens around you — either you know how to manage it through prior experience or you simply adapt, and you do this very efficiently. In the words of neuroscientist Karl Friston: “Biological systems somehow manage to violate the fluctuation theorem, which generalizes the second law of thermodynamics.” In other words, our very existence is a fight against the heat death of the Universe.
This knowledge, of course, does nothing to account for the fact that as individual beings we are likely to die even far before this heat death has anything to say about it. And that is true. Using the first law of thermodynamics (the idea that energy cannot be created nor destroyed, only transformed into something else), we might bring ourselves some solace in knowing that we are a part of the Universe and that our energy turns into something else, just like it was something before we were human, but it doesn’t actually stop our physical body from withering away. But that’s a limited way to understand the power of our collective efforts.
Not only are biological organisms great at creating order with their bodies, but humans, in particular, have learned to harness energy outside of their bodies to create order in the external world. First, we discovered fire, which likely gave us our big brains. Then we built simple tools that allowed us to domesticate animals and plants. Then we settled down in agricultural communities. With time, we developed meaningful technologies that gave us the leverage to use energy in such a way as to run a collective civilization where we have things like corporations and art and the rules of morality. The world of abundance we know today is the resulting phenomenon.
We are a species dominant due to our ability to cooperate flexibly in exceptionally large groups, and this cooperation has allowed us to create the knowledge to understand how the Universe works. We think. Our self-awareness allows us to understand our surroundings, and that understanding allows us to create culture, along with civilization. And while our individual bodies may wither away and die long before the heat death of the Universe, as long as we continue to have culture and civilization, our contributions, whether they be through raising decent children or inspiring innovations, will live on, in big ways and in small ways.
In nature, we have consumer species and producer species. Producer species are plants and bacteria that convert the energy of the sun. Consumer species are organisms that eat to fuel their bodies. In this sense, all large animals, including humans, are consumers. In the ecological food chain, we take more value than we add, whereas producers add more value than they consume. Except, abstracted away, humans produce value in a different way, a lasting kind of value when we build civilization.
Each individual person is a bundle of energy. This bundle of energy consumes not just food, but also information and knowledge from the existing cultural thought soup. Our mental models, our education, our values — all of these things we consume from our surroundings. But when we use this complex mixture of consumption to produce, we add something back to the environment. The act of creativity, which is what humans innately do best, is the act of producing more than the sum of our consumption with the energy contained within the human body.
When someone takes action to raise awareness in our fight against climate change, or better yet, builds a technology that helps us take it on, they are producing something that creates more value than the sources of their consumption. When someone creates a work of art that changes our cultural perception for the better, or when a sage or a saint guides our moral compass in a more meaningful direction, they are producing something that creates more value than the sources of their consumption.
Even the simple act of working on yourself, your character, your inner world, ordering it so that it sets a better example for people on the outside produces more value than your sources of consumption. It’s an action with indirect consequences. Little things add up to big things, and big things eventually break down barriers that were previously considered unbreakable.
We don’t know where we came from. We don’t know where the collective culture and civilization are going. We don’t even know that they can overcome this fight against entropy. As it currently stands, according to the current laws, it doesn’t look like it. But we also don’t know for sure that they can’t. We don’t know what kind of discoveries lie ahead. What we do know is that, collectively, as a species, we are moving forward. We are adding more order to the world, and that order is largely good, no matter what metric we use to define it. In 10,000 years of civilization, we’ve come far. There’s no telling how far we could go if we widen our horizons to another 10,000 years. Even if we deny the value of the moral arc of civilization, the creativity, the interestingness, that it has enabled in our quest for self-awareness means something even if only because of things like hope and curiosity.
We are all tied in this interconnected web of actions and meanings that create ripples as a whole that could reach all kinds of corners of the Universe. We have bodies of mass that move and vibrate to give us energy. From a first principle view, the purpose of life is to use that energy to produce more than you consume, to act creatively in the world, to add order to culture and civilization in the grand fight against entropy, on whatever scale you are capable of doing so at. We might win, we might lose, we might perish, but the attempt itself is what helps us transcend our temporary condition.
Humans aren’t perfect. We are beautifully flawed in various complex ways. But one thing that differentiates us from any other organism that we know of is our potential. We are the Universe observing itself to make sense of itself. And the knowledge we create in that quest, the outcomes we produce, have the possibility to take us to places we have yet to even imagine.Personal Growth
Playing at the intersection of science, art, and philosophy. Trying to be less wrong. I share my more intimate thoughts at www.designluck.com/community.
“The truth is, we know so little about life, we don’t really know what the good news is and what the bad news is,” Kurt Vonnegut observed in discussing Hamlet during his influential lecture on the shapes of stories. “The whole process of nature is an integrated process of immense complexity, and it’s really impossible to tell whether anything that happens in it is good or bad,” Alan Watts wrote a generation earlier in his sobering case for learning not to think in terms of gain or loss. And yet most of us spend swaths of our days worrying about the prospect of events we judge to be negative, potential losses driven by what we perceive to be “bad news.” In the 1930s, one pastor itemized anxiety into five categories of worries, four of which imaginary and the fifth, “worries that have a real foundation,” occupying “possibly 8% of the total.”
A twenty-four-hour news cycle that preys on this human propensity has undeniably aggravated the problem and swelled the 8% to appear as 98%, but at the heart of this warping of reality is an ancient tendency of mind so hard-wired into our psyche that it exists independently of external events. The great first-century Roman philosopher Seneca examined it, and its only real antidote, with uncommon insight in his correspondence with his friend Lucilius Junior, later published as Letters from a Stoic (public library) — the timeless trove of wisdom that gave us Seneca on true and false friendship and the mental discipline of overcoming fear.
In his thirteenth letter, titled “On groundless fears,” Seneca writes:
There are more things … likely to frighten us than there are to crush us; we suffer more often in imagination than in reality.
With an eye to the self-defeating and wearying human habit of bracing ourselves for imaginary disaster, Seneca counsels his young friend:
What I advise you to do is, not to be unhappy before the crisis comes; since it may be that the dangers before which you paled as if they were threatening you, will never come upon you; they certainly have not yet come.
Accordingly, some things torment us more than they ought; some torment us before they ought; and some torment us when they ought not to torment us at all. We are in the habit of exaggerating, or imagining, or anticipating, sorrow.
Illustration by María Sanoja from ‘100 Days of Overthinking’.
Seneca then offers a critical assessment of reasonable and unreasonable worries, using elegant rhetoric to illuminate the foolishness of squandering our mental and emotional energies on the latter class, which comprises the vast majority of our anxieties:
It is likely that some troubles will befall us; but it is not a present fact. How often has the unexpected happened! How often has the expected never come to pass! And even though it is ordained to be, what does it avail to run out to meet your suffering? You will suffer soon enough, when it arrives; so look forward meanwhile to better things. What shall you gain by doing this? Time. There will be many happenings meanwhile which will serve to postpone, or end, or pass on to another person, the trials which are near or even in your very presence. A fire has opened the way to flight. Men have been let down softly by a catastrophe. Sometimes the sword has been checked even at the victim’s throat. Men have survived their own executioners. Even bad fortune is fickle. Perhaps it will come, perhaps not; in the meantime it is not. So look forward to better things.
Art by Catherine Lepange from ‘Thin Slices of Anxiety: Observations and Advice to Ease a Worried Mind.’
The mind at times fashions for itself false shapes of evil when there are no signs that point to any evil; it twists into the worst construction some word of doubtful meaning; or it fancies some personal grudge to be more serious than it really is, considering not how angry the enemy is, but to what lengths he may go if he is angry. But life is not worth living, and there is no limit to our sorrows, if we indulge our fears to the greatest possible extent; in this matter, let prudence help you, and contemn with a resolute spirit even when it is in plain sight. If you cannot do this, counter one weakness with another, and temper your fear with hope. There is nothing so certain among these objects of fear that it is not more certain still that things we dread sink into nothing and that things we hope for mock us. Accordingly, weigh carefully your hopes as well as your fears, and whenever all the elements are in doubt, decide in your own favour; believe what you prefer. And if fear wins a majority of the votes, incline in the other direction anyhow, and cease to harass your soul, reflecting continually that most mortals, even when no troubles are actually at hand or are certainly to be expected in the future, become excited and disquieted.
But the greatest peril of misplaced worry, Seneca cautions, is that in keeping us constantly tensed against an imagined catastrophe, it prevents us from fully living. He ends the letter with a quote from Epicurus illustrating this sobering point:
The fool, with all his other faults, has this also, he is always getting ready to live.
After watching how my family treated my lesbian mom, I assumed it would all repeat when I came out. But as my grandma’s memory faded, her disapproval of gay people vanished too.
I sat on the shag carpeting in my grandma’s basement near her vintage Pac-Man arcade game, watching my cousins whip the joystick around, trying to beat the record so they could leave the initials A-S-S on the system’s high-score board. When a ghost caught up with Pac-Man, my cousins screamed, but I was more invested in the yelling echoing from the floor above us. I quietly crept over to the basement staircase, trying my best to hear what was happening in the kitchen. My mom was up there with Uncle Jay and Grandma, and they didn’t sound happy.
“I didn’t raise you to be this way,” I heard Grandma say. “What are you going to tell your kids?”
“My kids love me,” my mom said, her voice strained like it used to get when she fought with my dad.
“Listen, Denise,” Uncle Jay said, ruffling through some papers. “Take a look at these. It’s a conference that many women who think they’re lesbians have attended. It’s helped them change their lifestyle, and it’s here in Michigan.”
When my mom started crying, I found myself wondering why I always found myself watching relationships crumble from the vantage point of a staircase. At 5 years old, I had sat at the top of the stairs, watching my parents devise their divorce in a language I couldn’t understand yet. At 8 years old, I had watched through the bars of the upstairs railing as my mom begged her partner, Janet, not to break up with her; until then, I’d thought they were just best friends. And now at 12, I sat at the top of another staircase, listening to my grandma estranging her only daughter.
My mom says that the first time she realized she was gay was in high school when she developed a crush on a girl who later ended up being one of her bridesmaids when she married my dad. She thinks her dad and brothers knew way before she did. Her brothers nagged and teased her, calling her butch and a lesbian, and while her mother ignored all of it, her dad tried to overcompensate by giving her extra attention.
In 2001, right before my parents divorced, my grandpa suffered a heart attack and died. I was only 5, so I don’t remember him much, but I wish I did. Before he passed away, he was alone with my mother in his hospital room and said to her, “You need to do what you need to do to be happy, and don’t let anyone hold you back from doing that.” He told her that he knew she was unhappy in her marriage, and he wanted her to follow her gut.
Because I was only 6 when they split up, the memories I have of my parents together are mostly sensory. The sight of their headlights when they pulled into the driveway at the end of their weekly bowling night. The scent of cigarettes and beer on their smooth, leather jackets when I hugged them both before they could even set down their bags, and how they never reprimanded me for being awake even though the babysitter had told me to go to bed hours earlier. The warm comfort of crawling into their bed after a nightmare I’d pretended to have just so that I could spend more time with them.
I’ve immortalized these stories and memories of them together and happy in my mind because rewinding and replaying them like a VHS tape was my way of coping as I watched them drift apart. As my mom’s new partner, Janet, came around more and more, my mom and dad transitioned from amicable co-parents to archnemeses who used their kids as pawns in the chess match that is raising children post-divorce. When my brother, my sister and I got old enough to understand my mom’s relationship, my dad would openly condemn it. In 2008, he even banned Katy Perry’s “I Kissed a Girl” from being played in his household.
A car ride with Dad was like Sunday mass. Whether the drive was five or 45 minutes, a homily from Dad was inevitable. The second he reached to turn down the Christian rock station, I knew it was coming.
The first time we were alone in the car after my mom came out, I sat in the passenger seat of his moss-green minivan, and we had only just left our subdivision when he said, “So, how do you feel about gay people?”
“I don’t know,” I answered. “I like Mom and Janet being together.”
“You know that’s not right, right?” he said.
“Why not?”
“Because in the Bible, God says boys are supposed to be with girls, and girls are supposed to be with boys,” he said. “I’m not saying your mom is a bad person. I love your mom. I married her. I’m just saying that you can’t get sucked into the idea that it’s OK, and you can’t encourage it. Don’t you want your mom to be in Heaven with you?”
I did want my mom to be in Heaven with me. I wanted it desperately. Conversations like that sprouted incessant nightmares in which I would die and float up to Heaven and God would tell me that Mom was in Hell for being gay, and I’d never get to see her again.
“But they seem happy together, Dad,” I said.
“Life isn’t always about being happy.”
I wanted to disagree with everything he was saying. I wanted to tell him he was mean, and that he was an idiot. I wanted to tell him, and Grandma, and everyone else, to stop talking about my mom that way. I wanted to get out of the car. There was a powerful force inside me that knew she was an amazing person no matter who she loved. I wish I could’ve told him that, but looking back, I realize I couldn’t have defended her because I was nervous he might have become suspicious about me.
As I got older, the conversations about my mom felt more and more like they were also about me. I was aware of my attraction to men, which began with Zac Efron in the High School Musical movies and was confirmed when I simultaneously discovered gay porn and how to delete my browsing history. I still believed I would end up with a woman because I was no good at interacting with other boys, and the girls I surrounded myself with were intelligent, captivating, and superior to any man I’d ever met. I didn’t realize then that I was attempting to pull off what my mom had tried — and failed at — with my dad.
By the time high school began, I had dropped out of all of the sports my dad had signed me up for all my life, the majority of my friends were girls, and I’d even begun experimenting with concealer on the acne that had sometimes driven me to tears. I was severely lacking in the traditional masculinity department, and when my dad spoke of “the gay lifestyle” I could feel his eyes boring into me, and I felt like an addict realizing he’s at his own intervention.
One night during my junior year, I found myself alone at the dinner table with my dad, and he brought up my mom’s “lifestyle” again for what felt like the millionth time. With newfound confidence that came with knowing I’d be free from his lectures in less than two years when I graduated high school, I told him I was done discussing my mother. In that moment, I could imagine us estranged, exactly like my mom and her mother, and that seemed better than this Hell. I was overloaded with AP classes, maintaining a 4.0 GPA, and on track to becoming valedictorian. I didn’t have time for his religion anymore.
“Why do you think you know if Mom will go to Heaven or not? Why do you think you know everything?” I yelled, louder than I’d meant to. I took the napkin from my lap and tossed it onto the full plate of food. “I hate to leave you alone at the dinner table, but you’ve got God, right? You two can talk all about your stupid Bible all you want!”
My dad looked like he’d just seen a ghost, and he yelled my name as my body carried me out the front door.
I stomped through our neighborhood. My head was pounding with rage and shame, and as I passed each perfect home and its pristine green lawn, I felt like I was slowly being suffocated by a performance I’d never auditioned for.
***
About a year later, I got a scholarship to a summer acting program in New York City. It was a summer full of firsts: My first time living on my own, my first time smoking a cigarette, my first time sneaking into a bar, and most importantly, my first time falling in love with another boy. This sun-kissed boy from L.A. helped me toss the closeted and curated version of myself into a New York City dumpster — and yanked out the free spirit that was hiding underneath.
When he first grabbed my hand in public, I flinched, but when I gave into love, it was mesmerizing. Hand in hand, we walked through crowds of people of all races, ages and occupations, and I realized that no one gave a shit, so I decided I didn’t either. I came out to everyone except my dad before that summer ended. If I had to go back to Michigan, I was taking my newfound freedom with me.
My dad and I never talked about it directly, but I knew he had heard through the grapevine that he’d lost another loved one to Satan. He ignored it for as long as he could. He knew that I was dating, but he never asked about it. He stopped asking about everything. The conversations about my mom finally ceased too, along with the Sunday morning texts asking if I was coming to church.
My dad was stuck in his ways, but as I got older my mom’s brothers came around. After the day that my uncle and grandma had presented my mom with conversion therapy papers, my mom didn’t hear from Grandma for months, and their relationship was nearly nonexistent for years afterward. My mom says that her brother John would call Grandma and tell her, “You’re gonna lose your daughter, Ma. You need to accept who she is.” I wondered if my grandma and dad didn’t care about losing us because the Catholic Church had convinced them that they already had.
Not long after I came out, Grandma’s body began turning against her. Her doctor discovered a tumor in her brain, and after it was successfully removed, she dealt with minor memory loss and stints of narcolepsy. After falling asleep at the wheel of a golf cart and running over Aunt Paula’s leg, they took away her driver’s license. The doctors gave her a walker that she refused to use, which resulted in many falls and phone calls from the floor of her kitchen. She convinced herself that she was strong and agile, until her kids had to hire her home assistance for a while — and for the last two years, she’s been in a hospice home, battling dementia.
Despite their history, my mom became my grandma’s most frequent visitor. When someone is dying, we tend to forget their wrongdoings and focus on the good. By the time my grandma had begun her stay in her new home, my mom had finally found “the one.” She’d fallen in love with a woman named Erika, and when I saw my mom smile at her, it was like seeing her smile for the first time — and somehow, after all those years, my grandma could see it too.
My grandma had lost a lot of her memory, and she’d apparently forgotten her disapproval of same-sex relationships too. She loved Erika from the day they met. If Erika was at work and my mom showed up without her, Grandma would ask about where she was. Once she even said to my mom, “You better not have messed things up with her!”
While Grandma’s brain let go of many of her memories, her heart held on to some of the dearest ones. She could recite all 20 of her grandchildren’s birthdays, she could tell you about every date she’d gone on with my grandpa before he became her husband, and during one of my mom’s solo visits, Grandma even seemed to remember what she’d done to my mother.
“I never would’ve expected you to be here like this,” she said to my mom, who sat in a chair next to her bed after tucking her in.
“Why?” my mom asked.
“Because I never treated you the right way. I never accepted you for who you are.”
Mom laid her head on her mother’s chest and cried like a baby until Grandma fell asleep.
As I grew up, I watched her grow up too. She started her life over, and I watched the world turn their fear and hatred into obstacles and place them in my mom’s path—but I also watched her overcome them all. All she ever wanted was to be accepted and loved, and she finally got it.
My dad has since grown at a glacial pace. It could be better, but it could be worse. He calls once in a while to talk about trivial things, but he never asks about my love life, and he never reads my writing. I constantly think about demanding more from him, and I often draft letters that end up sounding like contracts, stating my terms if he wants to continue our pseudo-relationship, but I never finish them.
In this political climate, it sometimes feels like arguments and debates and outcries and protests are changing nothing, but watching my mom and grandma has reminded me of another important element of change, and that is time. Time may be a limited resource, but hope isn’t, and I have that now. Hope starts small like a seed we plant in our hearts, and it’s watered with each moment of progress. Moments like holding hands with a boy for the first time, coming out, making my mother proud, and watching her finally get the love she deserves. I believe my dad and I will find our way to the same kind of reconciliation, and now I have proof that it’s possible. The hope I have has blossomed, and its roots are deep.
Brandon Sargent is a nonbinary writer living in New York City. He’s a graduate of Marymount Manhattan College, and his work has appeared in The Marymount Manhattan Review and The Odyssey. His most recent project was a queer-based web series, Hard Feelings Web Series, which he wrote, directed, and starred in, and he is currently working on a memoir about queer identity and family.
This article was originally published on April 1, 2019, by Narratively, and is republished here with permission.
Philip Pullman’s work preempted the cutting-edge ideas of panpsychism, writes Philip Goff.
20th December 2019 (iai.tv)
Philip Goff
| Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Durham University. Author of Galileo’s Error: Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness and Consciousness and Fundamental Reality1,122 words
The BBC/HBO dramatization of Philip Pullman’s magnum opus His Dark Materials has been one of the televisual highlights of the year, if not the decade. The alternative reality of Lyra Belacqua’s Oxford, with its airships and daemons and gateways to other worlds, is so strange and yet somehow so familiar. The violent dogmatism of the Magisterium mirrors the rising tide of nationalism; the Gyptian children severed from their daemons might serve as a metaphor for the scars of a decade of austerity.
What is perhaps most captivating is how Pullman draws on cutting-edge developments in science to tell his story. At the centre of the His Dark Materials trilogy is the mysterious substance known as ‘Dust’. In developing his theory of Dust – he likes to talk of it as a process of discovery rather than creation – Pullman drew inspiration from dark matter, the equally mysterious substance that is predicted by our best scientific theories but which we have thus far not been able to observe directly. Another source of inspiration was the Higgs Boson – also known as the ‘the God particle’ – the fundamental particle discovered in the Large Hadron Collider in 2012. The Higgs Boson is in fact an excitation, an all-pervasive field known as the Higgs field. And the Higgs field plays a very special role in physics; it gives mass to the particles that make us up. Without the Higgs field, electrons and quarks would be weightless and travel at the speed of light. It is the interaction of these particles with the Higgs field that slows them down and gives them weight.
Pullman draws inspiration from cutting-edge developments in science; in this case, he may have foreshadowed one.
What has this got to do with Dust? As the story develops, we discover that Dust is in fact a kind of fundamental particle: the ‘Rusakov particle’. And, like the Higgs boson, this particle is an excitation in an all-pervasive field: the Rusakov field. Whilst the function of the Higgs field is to give mass to particles, the function of the Rusakov field is to give consciousness to humans. It was when, 30,000 years ago, human beings began to interact with the Rusakov field that the lights of self-awareness switched on and we began to reflect on our own existence.
I’m a huge fan of Pullman’s work, but it was only recently that I discovered connections to my own work on the science of consciousness. Sir Philip and I hooked up on twitter, when he interjected into a philosophical discussion I was having on the nature of consciousness. We subsequently emailed, he read and kindly endorsed my book Galileo’s Error: Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness, and we ended up having a public discussion in Oxford on the philosophy of consciousness (which you can view here or read the transcript here). In preparation for this discussion, I looked back at the His Dark Materials trilogy, and was blown away to discover a line from The Subtle Knife (the middle volume) that perfectly captures a view that has recently been causing waves in consciousness research: panpsychism. We have been discussing how Pullman draws inspiration from cutting-edge developments in science; in this case, he may have foreshadowed one.
Panpsychists are trying to address one of the deepest challenges in contemporary science: the problem of consciousness. Despite great progress in our scientific understanding of the brain, we still don’t have even the beginnings of an explanation of how complex, electro-chemical signaling is somehow able to give rise to the inner subjective world of colours, sounds, smells and tastes that each of us knows in our own case. There is a deep mystery in understanding how what we know about ourselves from the inside fits together with what science tells us about matter from the outside.
So it turns out that there is a huge hole in our scientific story. The proposal of the panpsychist is to put consciousness in that hole.
How does the panpsychist solve this problem? Their starting point is that physical science doesn’t actually tell us what matter is. That sounds like a bizarre claim at first; when you read a physics textbook, you seem to learn all kinds of incredible things about the nature of space, time and matter. But what philosophers of science have realized is that physical science, for all its richness, is confined to telling us about the behavior of matter: what it does. Physics tells us, for example, that matter has mass and charge. These properties are completely defined in terms of behavior, things like attraction, repulsion, resistance to acceleration. Physics tells us absolutely nothing about what philosophers like to call the intrinsic nature of matter: what matter is in and of itself.
So it turns out that there is a huge hole in our scientific story. The proposal of the panpsychist is to put consciousness in that hole. Consciousness, for the panpsychist, is the intrinsic nature of matter. There’s just matter, on this view, nothing supernatural or spiritual. But matter can be described from two perspectives. Physical science describes matter “from the outside,” in terms of its behavior, but matter “from the inside,” i.e. in terms of its intrinsic nature, is constituted of forms of consciousness. Panpsychism offers a wonderfully simple, elegant way of integrating consciousness into our scientific story, a way of bringing together the inner reality of consciousness with the external description of physics.
I said earlier that this panpsychist view is foreshadowed in the middle volume of His Dark Materials. The scene in question is one in which the scientist Mary is talking to Dust particles, or “shadows” as she calls them. I won’t go into the strange method they’re using to communicate – you’ll have to read the book – but Mary asks the Dust particles:
“Are you what we would call ‘spirit’?”
…to which the particles reply:
“From what we are, spirit. From what we do, matter. Matter and spirit are one.”
If we replace ‘spirit’ with ‘consciousness’, this is pretty much the panpsychist position outlined above.
Pullman has gone on to describe panpsychism as a ‘new Copernican revolution’:
“This idea has the glorious simplicity of our first realisation that the earth goes around the sun, and not vice versa. Suddenly the universe appears in a new and much more revealing perspective.”
He’s clearly enthusiastic about the idea. But does he actually believe it might true? I put this to him in our discussion. He answered:
“Yeah. But I should add that I’m prepared to believe anything that will help me tell a story.”
Scientists, philosophers and novelists all have their story to tell. Sometimes those stories connect together and enrich each other. Long may it continue!
Dear love, what thing of all the things that be Is ever worth one thought from you or me, Save only Love, Save only Love? The days so short, the nights so quick to flee, The world so wide, so deep and dark the sea, So dark the sea; So far the suns and every listless star, Beyond their light—Ah! dear, who knows how far, Who knows how far? One thing of all dim things I know is true, The heart within me knows, and tells it you, And tells it you. So blind is life, so long at last is sleep, And none but Love to bid us laugh or weep, And none but Love, And none but Love.
This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on January 5, 2020, by the Academy of American Poets. About this Poem “Evening Song” was originally published in April Twilights (The Gorham Press, 1903).
Willa Cather was born in Virginia on December 7, 1873. She is the author of several books of prose and poetry including April Twilights, and Other Poems (Alfred A. Knopf, 1923). She died in New York City on April 24, 1947.
In October of 1883, a paper in the nation’s capital reported under the heading “Current Gossip” that “an Iowa woman has spent seven years embroidering the solar system on a quilt” — a news item originally printed in Iowa and syndicated widely in newspapers across the country that autumn and winter. The New York Times reprinted the report as it appeared in the Iowa paper, dismissively qualifying it as a “somewhat comical statement.”
Ellen Harding Baker’s Solar System quilt, completed in 1876 (Smithsonian)
The woman in question, Ellen Harding Baker (June 8, 1847–March 30, 1886), was not a person to be dismissed with a patronizing chuckle. Baker taught science in rural Iowa, in an era when most institutions of higher education were still closed to women, all the whilst raising her five surviving children. She used her Solar System quilt to illustrate her astronomy lectures. To ensure the accuracy of her embroidered depiction, Baker traveled to the Chicago Observatory to view sunspots and a comet — most likely the Great Comet of 1882, which had become a national attraction — through the professional telescope there.
Ellen Harding Baker (Smithsonian)
Baker was born in the year Maria Mitchell — the figure who sparked the initial inspiration for my book Figuring — made the landmark comet discovery that earned her worldwide acclaim and established her as America’s first professional female astronomer. When Baker began working on her Solar System quilt, she was the same age Mitchell was when she discovered her comet — twenty-nine.
Quilt detail
The quilt, crafted long before we knew the universe contained galaxies other than our own, depicts an enormous radiant sun orbited by the planets known prior to Pluto’s discovery in 1930, as a comet — one of those mysterious and enchanting celestial bodies, extolled in poems and foreboded in Medieval paintings — blazes in one corner. The quilt is made of wool, lined with a cotton-and-wool fabric, and embroidered in silk and wool.
Quilt detail
The convergence of the threaded arts and astronomy was not entirely uncommon in Baker’s day. Mitchell herself, while condemning the needle as “the chain of woman” and resenting the tyranny of “stitch, stitch, stitch” as society’s means of keeping women confined to the domestic sphere, believed that the needle could be reclaimed as an instrument of the mind. “The eye that directs a needle in the delicate meshes of embroidery will equally well bisect a star with the spider web of the micrometer,” she wrote in her diary.
Quilt detail
Nearly a century after Baker made her quilt, the pioneering astronomer Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin — who revolutionized our understanding of the universe by discovering its chemical composition and became the first woman to chair a Harvard department, having ended up at the esteemed university thanks to a fellowship established there by the Maria Mitchell Association — would pick up where Baker left off, crafting a stunning yarn-on-canvas needlepoint depiction of the supernova remnant Cassiopeia A. In the year of Payne’s death, the artist Judy Chicago would also bring needlepoint and astronomy together in her iconic project The Dinner Party, which features a hand-embroidered runner celebrating Caroline Herschel — the world’s first woman astronomer and the subject of Adrienne Rich’s stunning tribute.
Baker’s quilt is available as an art print, with proceeds benefiting the endeavor to build New York City’s first-ever public observatory at Pioneer Works — a dome of possibility for future Ellens.
A century later, Albert Einstein recounted his takeaway from the childhood epiphany that made him want to be a scientist: “Something deeply hidden had to be behind things.” Virginia Woolf, in her account of the epiphany in which she understood she was an artist — one of the most beautiful and penetrating passages in all of literature — articulated a kindred sentiment: “Behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern… the whole world is a work of art… there is no Shakespeare… no Beethoven… no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself.”
This interleaved thing-itselfness of existence, hidden in plain sight, is what two-time U.S. Poet Laureate Howard Nemerov (February 29, 1920–July 5, 1991) takes up, two centuries after William Blake saw the universe in a grain of sand, in a spare masterpiece of image and insight, found in his altogether wondrous Collected Poems (public library), winner of both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.
Howard Nemerov
On Being creator and Becoming Wise author Krista Tippett brought the poem to life at the third annual Universe in Verse, with a lovely prefatory meditation on the role of poetry — ancient, somehow forgotten in our culture, newly rediscovered — as sustenance and salve for the tenderest, truest, most vital parts of our being.
FIGURES OF THOUGHT by Howard Nemerov
To lay the logarithmic spiral on Sea-shell and leaf alike, and see it fit, To watch the same idea work itself out In the fighter pilot’s steepening, tightening turn Onto his target, setting up the kill, And in the flight of certain wall-eyed bugs Who cannot see to fly straight into death But have to cast their sidelong glance at it And come but cranking to the candle’s flame —
How secret that is, and how privileged One feels to find the same necessity Ciphered in forms diverse and otherwise Without kinship — that is the beautiful In Nature as in art, not obvious, Not inaccessible, but just between.
It may diminish some our dry delight To wonder if everything we are and do Lies subject to some little law like that; Hidden in nature, but not deeply so.
Dr. X is a dad. Appropriately – boringly – at 4:37 p.m. on a national holiday, he is lighting a charcoal grill, about to grab a pair of tongs with one hand and a beer with the other. His kids are running around their suburban patio, which could be anywhere; Dr. X, though impressively educated now, grew up poor in a town that is basically nowhere. Like most Americans, he is a Christian. Like a lot of health-conscious men, he fights dad bod by working out once or twice a week, before going into his medical practice.
Somewhat less conventionally, two hours ago, he was escorting a woman around his yard, helping her walk off a large dose of MDMA. He’s the one who’d given it to her, earlier in the morning, drugging her out of her mind.
This would be psychedelic-assisted therapy, the not-new but increasingly popular practice of administering psychotropic substances to treat a wide range of physical, psychological and psycho-spiritual concerns. “Some people stagger out” of the room in Dr. X’s home that he uses for these “journeys,” as sessions are called in the semiofficial parlance. Some have to stay for hours and hours beyond the standard five or so, crying or waiting to emotionally rebalance, lying on a mattress, probing the secrets, trauma, belief or grief buried in their subconscious. Dr. X recalls a patient who was considering a round-the-clock Klonopin prescription for anxiety; she reluctantly decided to try a journey instead. On the “medicine,” she spent seven hours unraveling ballistically, picturing herself dumping sadness out of her chest into a jade box that she put a golden heart-shaped lock on and tossed into the sea. She’d been skeptical going in, but after it was over, Dr. X says, “She was so angry that it was illegal.”
Because Dr. X’s hallmark treatment – an MDMA session or two, then further journeys with psilocybin mushrooms if called for – is, absolutely, illegal. MDMA is a Schedule I controlled substance. Psilocybin is as well. Exposure could get his medical license suspended, if not revoked, along with his parental rights, or freedom. “This should be a part of health care, and is a true part of health care,” he says in his defense. The oversimplified concept behind MDMA therapy, which causes intense neurotransmitter activity including the release of adrenaline and serotonin (believed to produce positive mood), is that it tamps down fear, allowing people to interact with – and deal with – parts of their psyche they otherwise can’t. Psychedelics in general are thought to bring an observational part of the ego online to allow a new perspective on one’s self and one’s memories, potentially leading to deep understanding and healing.
As an internal-medicine specialist, Dr. X doesn’t have any patients who come to him seeking psychotherapy. But the longer he does the work, the more “I’m seeing that consciousness correlates to disease,” he says. “Every disease.” Narcolepsy. Cataplexy. Crohn’s. Diabetes – one patient’s psychedelic therapy preceded a 30 percent reduction in fasting blood-sugar levels. Sufferers of food allergies discover in their journeys that they’ve been internally attacking themselves. “Consciousness is so vastly undervalued,” Dr. X says. “We use it in every other facet in our life and esteem the intellectual part of it, but deny the emotional or intuitive part of it.” Psychedelic therapy “reinvigorated my passion and belief in healing. I think it’s the best tool to achieving well-being, so I feel morally and ethically compelled to open up that space.”
Currently – legally – we’re in the midst of a psychedelic renaissance. As of March 2017, New York University, the University of New Mexico, the University of Zurich, Johns Hopkins University, the University of Alabama and the University of California-Los Angeles have all partnered with the psilocybin-focused Heffter Research Institute, studying the compound for smoking cessation, alcoholism, terminal-cancer anxiety and cocaine dependence; the biotech-CEO-founded Usona Institute funds research of “consciousness-expanding medicines” for depression and anxiety at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Since 2000, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), a nonprofit based in Santa Cruz, California, has been funding clinical trials of MDMA for subjects with PTSD, mostly veterans, but also police, firefighters and civilians. In November 2016, the FDA approved large-scale Phase III clinical trials – the last phase before potential medicalization – of MDMA for PTSD treatment. MAPS, which has committed $25 million to achieving that medicalization by 2021, also supports or runs research with ayahuasca (a concoction of Amazonian plants), LSD, medical marijuana and ibogaine, the pharmaceutical extract of the psychoactive African shrub iboga. The organization is additionally funding a study of MDMA for treating social anxiety in autistic adults, currently underway at UCLA Medical Center. Another study, using MDMA to treat anxiety in patients with life-threatening illnesses, has concluded.
“If we didn’t have some idea about the potential importance of these medicines, we wouldn’t be researching them,” says Dr. Jeffrey Guss, psychiatry professor at NYU Medical Center and co-investigator of the NYU Psilocybin Cancer Project. “Their value has been written about and is well known from thousands of years of recorded history, from their being used in religious and healing settings. Their potential and their being worthy of exploration and study speaks for itself.”
Optimistic insiders think that if all continues to go well, within 10 to 15 years some psychedelics could be legally administrable to the public, not just for specific conditions but even for personal growth. In the meantime, says Rick Doblin, MAPS’ executive director, “there are hundreds of therapists willing to work with illegal Schedule I psychedelics” underground, like Dr. X. They’re in Florida, Minnesota, New York, California, Colorado, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, New England, Lexington, Kentucky. “Hundreds in America,” he says, though they’re “spread out all over the world.”
As within any field, underground practitioners vary in quality, expertise and method. Some are M.D.s, like Dr. X, or therapists, and some are less conventionally trained. They don’t all use the same substances, and don’t necessarily use just one. Some work with MDMA or psilocybin or ayahuasca, which has become trendy to drink in self-exploration ceremonies all over the country; others administer 5-MeO-DMT, extracted from a toad in the Sonoran Desert, or iboga or ibogaine, which, according to the scant research that exists, may be one of the most effective cures for opiate addiction on the planet – but may also cause fatal heart complications.
“Psychedelic therapy reinvigorated my belief in healing,” says one physician.
Underground psychedelic therapists are biased toward their preferred medicines, and those they think work best for particular indications. But they are united by true belief. “People that are involved are risking their careers, their freedom, in order to help others achieve a certain emotional freedom, and they disagree with prohibition,” says Doblin. “The fact that people are willing to do these therapies at great personal risk says something about what they think the potential of these drugs actually is to enhance psychotherapy.”
There are limitations. Psychedelics aren’t for everyone. Or at all foolproof. Nary a researcher or provider, under- or aboveground, fails to point out that some pre-existing conditions make them inappropriate for use, and that though the dangers don’t rise nearly to the level of drug-war -mythology (iboga/ibogaine is the major exception), adverse outcomes do happen. The toxicity of -ayahuasca is on par with codeine – though codeine causes many thousands more deaths per year. Psilocybin’s is even less. Some studies have found brain damage in chronic Ecstasy users, but in 2010, researchers at Harvard Medical School studied a large sample of Mormons who used Ecstasy – which the LDS Church was late to ban – but no other drugs or alcohol, and failed to find cognitive consequences; safety studies of the dosages used in MDMA therapy have found no evidence of neurotoxicity or permanent changes in serotonin transporters. LSD does not stay in your body forever (its half-life is a matter of hours). But behaviorally, people on Ecstasy have died from heatstroke, or drinking too much or not enough water at raves; there have been assaults and even a murder at ayahuasca ceremonies for foreigners in Peru, which has seen a massive tourism boom around the substance’s popularity. Probably the most common concern, the specter of “freaking out” during or long after a bad trip, has yet to happen in any of the clinical trials – though it’s not unusual for subjects to have tough experiences in their journeys. Dr. Charles Grob, a professor of psychiatry and biobehavioral science at UCLA, who has conducted studies with MDMA, ayahuasca and psilocybin, says that’s a function of screening, preparation and expert support. “This is serious medicine with a capital M,” he says, “and if you don’t watch yourself and you don’t pay attention to the essential basics, you could be in for a very difficult time.”
Even under the best of circumstances, the process catalyzed by psychedelic therapy is often far from painless. “It’s definitely not that people just get blissed out and it gets better,” says Dr. Michael Mithoefer, the lead clinician on the MDMA trials in Charleston, South Carolina (others are ongoing in Boulder, Colorado; Canada; and Israel). “It makes the healing process possible, not easy.” When you take 125 milligrams of pure MDMA, enough to nearly immobilize you, and someone invites you to take a look at your deepest self, “it is a destabilizing agent,” Dr. X cautions. But it’s purposefully so. “It opens us,” he says. “Sometimes the medicine can stabilize someone in a difficult situation. Sometimes it stirs up madness, so they can process that. Some people feel rejuvenated and ready to go back into their lives, but other people feel frazzled, spent, fragmented. I’ve had a few people say, ‘That shattered who I thought I was.’ ”
Limitations and challenges aside, the evidence so far still makes researchers cautiously optimistic that psychedelics hold potential for great healing and change. If they’re right, medicalization could address the deficits in treatment options for afflictions – trauma, depression, anxiety, addiction – that collectively impact millions of Americans, and ultimately shape our world. “If we move forward and understand that these substances should only be used under optimal conditions,” says Grob, “it will have a positive impact on an individual, family, collective and societal level.” In aboveground clinical trials like his, subjects routinely report that psychedelic therapy is among the top five most important experiences of their lives, akin to the birth of a child.
We’ve been here before: From the 1950s to the early Seventies, more than 40,000 cases of psychedelic treatment were studied in 1,000 different papers in the medical literature, covering everything from addiction to PTSD to OCD to antisocial disorders and autism. Despite encouraging results, says Grob, the “wild, uninhibited enthusiasm of the Sixties” contributed to some bad recreational outcomes that gave legislators ammunition to ban psychedelics from research for decades. But as the above-ground movement has again been picking up steam, so is the underground. More positive studies get published; more patients and doctors read them; more underground success stories spread through word of mouth. “The secret is out,” says Grob, and, perhaps combined with depression and opiate overdoses at all-time highs, skyrocketing civilian and veteran suicide rates, and trends toward personal optimization and wellness, demand is increasing. Researchers at NYU, UCLA and Johns Hopkins all stressed that they cannot and do not ever work with people in the underground, but some of them admired the willingness of certain health care professionals to act, however illegally, on their belief that sometimes healing can’t wait and that psychedelics are imperative to it. “I respect that in them,” NYU’s Guss says. “I really do. I’ve become a member of the most established establishment. And so in a way, we’re isolated from all the wisdom and knowledge in the underground community.” That vast, uncollected experience contains details about the medicines’ potential and pitfalls, challenges and inconsistencies – the variety of ways psychedelics might wholly, drastically change a life. “I’m very interested to learn,” Guss says, “what underground psychedelic psychotherapists have to teach us.”
***
My first introduction to underground psychedelic therapy was when, years ago, a doctor told me my vagina was depressed. I’d gone in for a pelvic exam because something felt wrong; at the follow-up appointment, when my test results were all negative and my answers to her hundred questions about the post-traumatic stress disorder I was in treatment for were all related to sexual threats and reporting on sexual violence, she said my genitals were just fucking bummed out.
This was San Francisco, and I did a lot of yoga; but even I rolled my eyes at the idea that my privates had an emotional disorder. I was very intrigued, however, when the doctor said she knew a therapist who could heal years of trauma in one five-hour swoop, so long as I had the secret password. The doctor gave me the number for that therapist – who worked with MDMA.
I never called. I moved across the country. Years later, I was on vacation on the coast when my husband went out for a run, and I stayed behind and may or may not have contemplated suicide.
OK. I did. In the car, on the road, running an errand, I thought about driving off the edge of a cliff into the brilliant, crashing Pacific.
“We can direct our own intellectual evolution by using psychedelics as self-hacking tools,” says a Silicon Valley magnate.
Yes, I had a history: the PTSD, with concomitant major depressive disorder, suicidal thoughts. On my official paperwork, I was technically permanently disabled, but I had been doing much better – working, going to karaoke, having a life. I had backslides and big episodes, but if my “issues” were not exactly handled, they were at least on a general upswing thanks to years of constant treatment. But then, the night before my drive, I had started yelling in a restaurant, feeling that I was spiraling out of control but unable to stop myself from making a scene. Now, having coaxed my car away from the cliff edge and back to the hotel, I lay facedown and screamed into the pillows. I called a local therapist and begged for an emergency appointment. As I lay there in her office, in the fetal position, I wondered aloud if I should try MDMA therapy.
Weirdly (or magically, as would later be obvious), she happened to have the number of another therapist who worked with it.
The therapist who gave me the second referral said she had a client with whom she’d been working for years who had done a journey. The difference in that patient’s suffering, she said, was like night and day. When I called the number, the woman who answered said we needed to meet in person, and when we did, she mentioned that my struggle was why the wait for MDMA to become widely available was untenable. She said, in a stunning lack of expectation management, that she could help me massively – more, in a few sessions, than all my years and dollars of hard therapeutic work had combined.
So after one more conversation, I showed up nervous, but excited, but desperate on a Monday morning (as scheduled) with an empty stomach (as directed) to a charming room with a couch at one end and a bed at the other. After we did something like a prayer, I took the see-through capsule of white powder and retired to the bed with the journal I was encouraged to bring while the therapist went out on the deck to give me space. I’d been told that the journey with psychedelics truly starts beforehand, the moment you decide to do it, and I had indeed been struggling extra since then. Waiting for the medicine to come on was no exception.
The Journey. 9:35 a.m.
I’m full of grief, and gratitude, and terror. I’ve been extra wound up and tight, extra untouchable, since we put this on the calendar. My body must be gripping and tensing in preparation to let go. . . .
9:55 is when the doubt sets in. About the pointlessness, the uselessness, the futility of this endeavor. A moment ago, I was envisioning lots of purple tears. I’m like, let’s just go read a newspaper and drink some tea somewhere.
This is when the therapist, who had come back inside, told me I was higher than I realized, and to lie down and let it ride.
I hadn’t anticipated tripping, or time-travel. But there were movies of my life, and visits with loved ones. The therapist had turned on jangly guitar music, which struck me as lame at first, but soon became the most beautiful, dynamic composition I’d ever heard because: Ecstasy. I breathed deep with my eyes closed and a hand on my chest. I cried, often, as I rewitnessed my life. My therapist said very little. She had said before that our collective job was to trust my intuition. I went back to the scenes where my PTSD started. In one of them, I revisited a remote, bleak room where a stranger cornered me. I watched the scenario – which, in reality, I had escaped physically unscathed – play out with an alternate ending. But I didn’t get overpowered and raped, which is what I’d always assumed was so scary about it. Instead, the stranger stepped forward and, in one swift move, landed his hands in a death grip around my throat.
Several times, the scene replayed. Repeatedly, I watched myself get strangled.
Ohhhhhhhhhhh, I could see, suddenly. This isn’t just a rape issue, as I’d been working through it in therapy for years. This is also a murder issue.
For weeks after the journey, every man I walked past triggered an automatic but definitive – and elated! – voice inside me that said: That guy’s not gonna kill you! Down the sidewalk in a city, that guy’s not gonna kill you, and that guy’s not gonna kill you. If I had realized at the conscious level that I thought they would, I would have stopped leaving the house. No wonder I was always exhausted. After the journey, I stepped down the street with wild new energy. Seeing, finally, the ultimate fear of that moment, my feared choking death, was sort of terrible, I guess, but not really, it wasn’t, because: Ecstasy. And as soon as I acknowledged it and saw it through, the moment lost its quiet, powerful rule over my system.
For some people, an MDMA journey ends after a few hours. They sit up and start talking. They drink the water and eat the snack given to them, and talk for a bit as the medicine wears off. And then they leave.
I had to be pulled out of mine. Whether because I have a genetic variation that makes people more sensitive to MDMA or because I am “a very intense person,” around 2 p.m. the therapist had to shake me; it was time to get ready to go – my husband was scheduled to pick me up, and the therapist had another appointment coming. She had me sit up and eat and drink and try to rejoin the present. When I left some half an hour later, I was cheerful and articulate, but still tripping. My husband, in utter bewilderment over how to handle me, took me to a nearby hotel, as planned. Later, we tried to go eat in a restaurant. I babbled, pleasantly at first, but then, about eight hours after my journey began, everything turned twitchy and dark. I called the therapist frantically and asked her if most people, post-journey, felt like every single thing in their entire lives needed to be burned down immediately, and she said no, not really, but that my job in any case was to “do nothing, very slowly.”
In the clinical trials of MDMA for PTSD, the protocol is to keep patients overnight. The sessions – typically there are three, spaced a month apart – last at least eight hours, because that’s sometimes when the heaviest processing will only begin to kick in, particularly for patients who have a history of dissociation, or severe detachment from reality – which I do. My MDMA therapist, who had been doing journeys for a long time, had never happened to see a person quite like me, but for people like me, researchers say, it’s not unheard of for the journey to get ugly at around the time I was in the middle of a dinner date.
But I didn’t happen to know any of that.
That night, I ran, fleeing from the hotel into the rural darkness, alone. I had total conviction that every facet of my existence was a mistake. I was engulfed in panic. I had no idea what to do with myself, except for one specific thing, as the clear message of it kept ringing over and over in my head, and that message was: GET. DIVORCED.
***
It’s harder to integrate if you have a life: a company, a house, a wife,” Dr. Y explains to a patient during a phone session one day. Dr. Y, who looks younger than his middle age, paces and stretches while he talks to the man, many states away, who recently started therapy after he lost his relationship, lost his job and moved – three of the top five stressful life events, psychologists say. Dr. Y is a psychiatrist, which means he has the ability to prescribe medications, but in this session, this patient’s third, he instead asks whether the patient is feeling open to taking ayahuasca after having read all the literature Dr. Y assigned last time. He wants to be sure the man is fully aware of the “integration” process, which could be less charitably called “picking up the pieces of inner-personal land mines,” that may follow. Half of Dr. Y’s patients enact a major life change after ayahuasca. “Probably a quarter,” he says, strongly consider a breakup or divorce.
Dr. Y considers about 90 percent of his patients to be fit for ayahuasca. The one out of 10 he believes it isn’t right for could include people with a history of psychosis, mania or personality disorders, but more often it is those who don’t have the support necessary for integration, or aren’t ready to be led through symptom management while they’re weaned off antidepressants. That’s required by most knowledgeable practitioners: Like MDMA and psilocybin, ayahuasca increases serotonin in the body, and there’s a risk of serotonin poisoning if it’s taken with certain medications. Dr. Y’s patient today doesn’t have any of these contraindications. And Dr. Y believes the patient is strong enough to sort through his psychological contents as long as the patient also thinks he’s ready, which he says he is after airing some hesitations (“You know,” he says, “once you pull back a layer, there’s no going back, and you can’t unsee or unfeel what you saw”). Dr. Y will send him referrals to vetted, reputable providers in his preferred city. “Three nights [in a row] is better than two, and two is definitely better than one,” he tells him. First night, drink ayahuasca, open up; next night, dive deeper in. Layers of self-discovery. The soul as a somewhat coy onion. Sometimes, the peeling of it with ayahuasca involves experiencing your own death. Dr. Y gives the patient instructions for the month leading up to his journey: no other drugs, no alcohol, no sex. No reading news, no violent TV; reduce stress, meditate, find quiet. And, in the final week, no meat, no spice, no fermented foods. “The cleaner you go in,” Dr. Y, who himself has experienced hundreds of ceremonies, tells the man, “the more impactful the ceremony.” Whatever happens, during or after, Dr. Y will be available.
There are downsides to doing things underground. In addition to the obvious threat of arrest, more risks are created at every step of the psychedelic-therapy process by illegality, providers say. There can be difficulty with something as basic as finding and ensuring clean compounds: MAPS helped run an MDMA testing program, and half of the pills sent in didn’t contain any MDMA at all; there have been reports of some shamans spiking ayahuasca with a more toxic hallucinogenic plant to intensify the trip. The best-cared-for patient is still disadvantaged by the general lack of cultural wisdom and support around the treatment. Even good providers aren’t as knowledgeable as they could be. Once a year, there is a secret conference that brings together 50 to 100 underground practitioners at a revolving location. “Information gets shared, and people learn new things,” says one regular attendee. Another participant recalls lectures on practicalities like the best and most therapeutic doses, how to screen for patients with borderline personality – whom many believe are not compatible with psychedelics – and how different music and sounds impact sessions. But not nearly all the world’s practitioners are there. And none of the minutes or findings can be published.
“It’s really our best shot at solving the veteran suicide crisis,” says one marine who underwent MDMA therapy.
Plus, not every underground patient gets care as elaborate or expert as Dr. Y’s. Some don’t receive the preparation or follow-up they may need, because they can’t afford it, or because in an underground, patients don’t have the luxury to be picky about their providers; they may have to take anyone whose number they can manage to get their hands on, and it can be hard for laypeople to adequately vet providers anyway. An M.D. who used to administer psychedelics (he prefers not to say which) for depression and anxiety (and who, when I tell him he’ll have a secret identity – like Batman – asks if he can be Dr. Batman) doesn’t provide underground psychedelic treatment anymore because it started to feel too threatening to his legitimate practice, but in extreme cases he still refers opiate addicts to underground providers who work with ibogaine. “I know quite a few people who do that,” he says. “But I only trust two of them. Out of about 10. These are nurses, or respiratory therapists – people that know how to resolve an emergency.” Outside of that, there’s “a whole subculture” of more amateur iboga and ibogaine therapists, Dr. Batman says. “It’s a movement that’s driven by addicts helping other addicts. I don’t think that’s good, per se.”
It would be best, in Dr. Batman’s opinion, for people to get iboga-based addiction treatment in a reputable clinic outside the country. According to one such center in Mexico, one in 10 patients needs some medical care, one in 100 needs serious medical intervention, and, even in the hospital-like setting, people do occasionally die. But not everyone has the money to travel to the best treatment. “It’s very difficult for me to make that referral” to the underground for such a risky compound, Dr. Batman says. But sometimes his concern that someone will join the nearly 100 Americans who die of opioid overdose every day overrides his hesitation.
Even for comparatively safer MDMA and psilocybin, says Dr. X, “the fact that we have to do this and hide and send people back to their lives, versus doing it at an inpatient facility,” where patients could stay for more integration, is less than ideal.
But all these are risks that people who feel they need psychedelic therapy are willing to take. Nigel McCourry, a 35-year-old Iraq War veteran who participated in a MAPS MDMA study, was so transformed by the PTSD treatment that he was determined to get it for one of his fellow Marines. “This is my Marine battle buddy,” he says. “He needed help.” It took a lot of searching and ultimately traveling to another state to find an underground therapist, whom neither Marine knew, and McCourry was acutely aware of how difficult the process could be: For up to a year after his own treatment began, he says, “It was really wild. I had all of these emotions coming up out of nowhere. I would cry at random times. I had to give myself so much space to be able to let that out. I would be crying and I had no idea what I was crying about. It was just really intense.”
As a subject in the clinical trial, McCourry underwent three 90-minute preparatory sessions prior to dosing, another long integration session the morning after, a phone call every day for a week, and additional 90-minute sessions every week between the three journeys. His friend didn’t have the money or opportunity for nearly that kind of support. But he took the journey anyway. In their infantry unit, 2/2 Warlords, “guys are consistently committing suicide,” McCourry says. “I think [MDMA therapy] is really our best shot at solving the veteran suicide crisis.”
Elizabeth Bast, a 41-year-old artist and mother, also felt like she was out of options when she and her husband, Joaquin Lamar Hailey (better known as street artist Chor Boogie), flew to Costa Rica to get iboga therapy at a healing center after Hailey relapsed into an old heroin addiction that both of them felt was going to kill him. When he felt he needed a booster dose six months later, they turned to an underground provider closer by, in the States. Iboga “was crucial,” Bast says. “It saved his life.” The couple have started organizing and facilitating treatment trips for addicts to other countries (the drug is illegal in less than a dozen). But there are a lot of others they can’t help. Since Bast wrote a book about their experience, “I get inquiries every day: ‘My brother’s dying, and I can’t get out of the country.’ We would love to support that. But it’s too risky.”
Psychedelic medicalization isn’t without its own potential problems. There is squabbling in the underground community about whether it would provoke too much regulation over who can administer medicines, and who can take them and how; or whether it would lead to corporatization, or a boom in licensed but low-quality providers of substances that are so intense. Even now, in the aboveground in other countries, “There are places where it’s done that are very unprofessional,” says Ben De Loenen, executive director of the International Center for Ethnobotanical Education Research and Service (ICEERS), which provides resources for users and potential users of ayahuasca and iboga. UCLA’s Grob has been called by patients who’ve suffered severe, persistent anxiety for months after a psychedelic-therapy experience, which he says tends to be the result of bad preparedness, ethics, or practices of providers. There are also questions about sustainability. As both deforestation of the Amazon and popularity of ayahuasca increase, shamans have had to trek deeper into the jungle to find the plants that compose it. The increasing popularity of 5-MeO-DMT, called “the Toad” for its origins in the venom sacs of an amphibian – which are milked, the liquid then dried and basically free-based (smoking it is necessary; swallowing it can be fatal) – has led to incidences of people stealing onto Native American reservations to find the frog, leaving empty beer bottles and trash in their wake. If the broader culture ever accepted the species as the path to healing or enlightenment, one can surmise how long it might survive.
Guss, the NYU researcher, sees a future where psychedelic therapy is the specialty of highly and appropriately trained professionals and a robust field of scientific inquiry. For now, there’s the underground, some developing countries and the Internet. ICEERS offers tips for vetting practitioners, as well as free therapeutic support to people in crisis during or after ceremonies. MAPS has published a manual for how to do MDMA-assisted psychotherapy on its website, downloadable by anyone.
“Putting out info about how we do the therapy is more likely to contribute to safety than anything else,” says Doblin. On the dark Web, sellers of iboga and ibogaine thrive. There were a thousand people on the wait list for MAPS’ most recently completed MDMA trial. “People are desperate,” Doblin says. “People are doing this.”
***
Personally, my integration after MDMA was brutal. Though I eventually returned to my hotel room that first night, my state didn’t improve. I didn’t sleep, lying next to my husband, garnering every ounce of willpower to keep from saying that I was leaving, immediately and forever; my husband didn’t sleep either, blanketed in my agitation. For weeks, we found ourselves on the floor, or in bed, one or both of us crying as he asked if I still wanted to be married and I didn’t know; and I didn’t know, for that matter, what my personality was (callous? Funny? Was I funny? If so, was I really, or just performing?) or whether I was bisexual like I always thought or strictly gay. My moods swung from extreme openness and optimism to utter despair and stunned confusion. One day, I spent hours indulging a rich and specific fantasy about filling a bathtub with hot water, downing the years-old bottle of Ativan from when I was first diagnosed, and slitting my forearms from wrist to elbow. Later, in an entirely different temperament, I saw the plan in my Journey Journal and recognized it as active suicidal ideation; if someone had taken the notebook to the police, they could have legally committed me to an institution against my will.
From the beginning, my MDMA therapist had recommended more than one journey. Next time, she said in one of our multiple follow-up integration sessions, I’d stay all night. I agreed that another journey was in order, but I happened to talk to someone who mentioned an underground therapist with a different practice and whom I got a good feeling from when we talked, and so, three months after the first journey, in a dark and silent room with three other people after nightfall, concerns about my family history of schizophrenia thoroughly discussed and considered, I drank ayahuasca.
On the first night of the two-night ceremony, sitting on the “nests” we each built with yoga mats and sleeping bags on the floor, I was nervous again. But less than last time. After drinking about an ounce of the thick sludge, I lay down. There were the initial sparkles and shooting stars behind my eyes, and after a while, as the facilitators started singing – ancient songs they say come from the plant and help it work – a vision of myself as a five-year-old appeared. There was a suggestion at a history, something bad that happened that I didn’t remember; I did not like the direction it was going in; I also thought it was bullshit. The visions stopped. Instead, an abject, suffocating rage came over me, and I lay there in it for five hours thinking about getting in my car and driving away and wishing everyone else in the room would fucking die.
The next night, after a long, raw and still-irate day in the house, the first vision that showed up was five-year-old me again – pissed. She wouldn’t talk to me, however much I tried to coax her. I knew I had to get her to engage, which over the course of seven hours involved recognizing that I hated myself, that my self-hatred was my best and most reliable friend, and that my self-hatred would never die until I appreciated how it had protected me; when I did, and it did, I gave it a Viking funeral in the vision and in reality cried harder than I ever had in my life. Then I just had to reckon with shame. I sensed the five-year-old had brought it, actually, not me, but no matter, I assured her: I was the goddamn adult here, and I was going to take care of it. There was suffering and writhing and grief and nausea. I threw up, twice, prodigious quantities of black liquid, once so hard into a bucket that it splashed up all over the bottom half of my face.
A few inches away from me, a woman, who’d recently been in a car accident that put her in the hospital and in a wheelchair for a time, lay perfectly still and silent; a few inches from her, a man gnashed his teeth at visions of his abusive parent. At the other end of the room, another participant relived the night of his father’s suicide. In the vision, as in real life, he was unable to stop him from slipping out into the garage to do it. But this time, when the man discovered his father’s body and cut him down from the rope, he didn’t falter under the weight and drop him, as he did when he was a teenager. This time, he had the strength of his adult self, and when he caught him, he held him. Suspending his own sense of horror and failure, and the calling of the police, and the screams of his mother, he got to hold him for a very long time.
***
In November 2016, the results of two large studies showed that the majority of cancer patients who received one dose of psilocybin experienced lasting recovery from depression and anxiety. In February of 2017, a paper in the Journal of Psychopharmacology found that “experience with psychedelic drugs is associated with decreased risk of opioid abuse and dependence.” Medical-journal papers about ayahuasca suggest it can treat addiction, anxiety and depression, and change brain structure and personality. So far in the MDMA PTSD trials, zero participants haven’t improved at all, and more than 80 percent have recovered to an extent that they don’t qualify as having PTSD anymore. Estimates for the effectiveness of other PTSD treatments range as high as 70 percent but as low as 50 percent. The number is somewhat contentious, but even “if you think it’s only 25 percent” for whom conventional treatments don’t work, says Mithoefer, the lead clinician on the trials in Charleston, “that’s still millions of people a year in the United States alone.” All the participants in the trials had previously tried medication or therapy, usually both; as a cohort, they’d had PTSD for an average of 19 years.
But “ultimately, the decision to reschedule [psychedelics from Schedule I substances] is not a scientific one,” points out NYU’s Guss. “It’s a governmental one. We may be able to prove safety and efficacy. But there still may be governmental legislative reasons that rescheduling doesn’t move forward.”
Psychedelic use has been opposed and persecuted by authorities for centuries, both in Europe and in the New World. Among those reasons, believers believe, is the fear that widespread smart psychedelic use could foment societal upheaval. That’s not unlike the belief in the Sixties – but we know more now about what psychedelics do and how to optimize them. “We didn’t have as much data then as we do now,” says Dr. Dan Engle, a board-certified psychiatrist who consults with plant-medicine healing centers worldwide. “And we didn’t have as many of the safeguards as we have now.” He envisions “the psychedelic renaissance as a cornerstone in the redemption of modern psychiatric care.” Now, thanks to brain imaging, researchers can see that far greater “brain-network connections light up on psilocybin compared to the normal brain. More cross-regional firing. That’s what the brain actually looks like on the ‘drugs’ that we’ve been using for hundreds if not thousands of years.”
This has helped make psychedelics particularly popular in Silicon Valley, where a drive toward self-actualization meets the luxury of having the resources to pursue it. California, where Berkeley-born chemist Alexander “Sasha” Shulgin synthesized and distributed MDMA to therapists for decades before it was prohibited, has long been at the front of the movement; today, Doblin estimates, the state doesn’t have quite the majority, but probably 40 percent of underground psychedelic therapists in the nation. In 2016, California Sunday Magazine reporter Chris Colin profiled Entrepreneurs Awakening (EA), a company that arranges Peruvian ayahuasca sojourns primarily for tech and startup CEOs. The customers, says owner Michael Costuros, are “supersuccessful type-A people who use it to be better at what they do.”
“These things are so powerful,” says Eric Weinstein, managing director at Thiel Capital, Peter Thiel’s investment firm in San Francisco, “that they can get into layers of patterned behavior to show folks things that they could change and could do differently. And the brain has probably been playing with these ideas in the subconscious. This entire family of agents is extraordinary, as they appear to be very profound, unexpectedly constructive and surprisingly safe. Most people who take these agents seem to discover cognitive modes that they never knew even existed.” Weinstein has been considering trying to put together a series of opposite-land “This Is Your Brain on Drugs” public-service commercials, in which other Silicon Valley luminaries and scientists like himself – a Ph.D. mathematician and physicist – out themselves as having “directed their own intellectual evolution with the use of psychedelics as self-hacking tools.”
But even for the super-high-functioning, psychedelic use isn’t just about optimizing. It also, Costuros says, makes them better people: “What I’ve seen consistently happen is CEOs become a people-centric, people-focused person.” After well-administered and integrated psychedelics, “we’re not gonna see the kind of Donald Trump entrepreneurs that are only about extracting value.” After an ayahuasca journey with EA, an arms magnate left his multimillion- dollar company to build an art and music residency program. Chris Hunter, the 38-year-old inventor of caffeinated malt-liquor beverage Four Loko, went into his trip with EA’s Costuros as a regular former Ohio State University fraternity brother from Youngstown and came out a new man. “Why are you such a dick?” he says he asked himself on ayahuasca. “What if you approached masculinity in a different way – instead of being dominant and overseeing the women in your life, you came from the other side, underneath, fully supporting and lifting women up?” Ayahuasca users whom UCLA’s Grob has researched in other countries “have become better partners to their spouses, better parents to their children, better children to their parents, better employees, better employers, just more responsible overall, bringing a higher level of ethical integrity to everything they do,” he says.
It’s possible that psychedelics could transform a wide array of people. Clinical trials have included subjects across demographic categories, including soldiers and conservatives and the elderly and people who’ve never taken drugs at all before. Some of Dr. X’s patients most definitely do not vote Democrat. But the people who have access to psychedelic treatment underground (or overseas) do tend to have something in common: They are usually well-off. “If I could do it legally, I would not turn away anyone for treatment, if I could be aboveground and I could get them to supportive services [afterward],” Dr. X says. Because of the necessary secrecy and lack of outside support now, he considers it irresponsible to provide journeys to anyone without the time and resources to also pay for integration sessions. (McCourry had to pay for the first journey of his Marine friend, who didn’t have any money; they had to find a wealthy benefactor to cover the next two.) Clients are also mostly white – as are providers. “Sentencing for middle-class white people is a hell of a lot friendlier than for minorities and poor people,” Dr. X says. “It’s a tragedy that people with the most vulnerability, who need it most, we can’t do it with them.”
Doblin, for his part, speculates that the DEA hasn’t cracked down on underground psychedelic therapists because they have more pressing priorities than those trying to heal a select few of the rich, the traumatized and the addicted. It’s also one thing for psychedelics to be popular with millionaires – and some Nobel laureates and business celebrities you’d never believe, Costuros maintains – and the hip participants of the estimated 120 ayahuasca ceremonies that take place in New York City and the Bay Area every weekend. But who knows what might unfold if psychedelic therapy were available to people for whom the status quo doesn’t work so well?
It’s unclear if the current presidential administration, which includes some extremely drug-unfriendly members, will alter or slow the course of possible medicalization. For the time being, the researchers soldier on, and the underground grows. In 2017, K., a therapist with a traditional practice in an Appalachian state, administered her first MDMA journey with a client (with two additional medical professionals on hand for safety); the client, who’d still needed occasional suicide watch stemming from symptoms of complex PTSD despite 16 years of therapy, had brought her the MAPS manual, downloaded off the Internet. “I’m trained to provide the best care to my clients in a way that’s ethical,” K. says, “so if research is backing up that things that are now illegal are really helpful with little to no side effects, especially compared with psychiatric medications, which have a ton of side effects, then it’s something I’m open to.” When dosed, K.’s client, S., talked through a childhood of severe abuse and torture – “but none of it was terrifying,” S. says. “I talked in detail about a lot of horrific shit that happened. Then I said: The thing is, all those things are over, and I know they’re over, and my body knows that everything is going to be OK.”
For Silicon Valley’s Weinstein, the success stories show the importance of advocating for broader access. “If we don’t legalize, study and utilize these plants and other medicines, people who could be saved will die,” he says. “Families will break apart. Parents will continue to bury depressed children who might have been saved by these miraculous agents. Can we bring ourselves to ask if a single professionally administered flood dose of legalized ibogaine could have saved Prince from opioid addiction? Some of these agents are anti-drug drugs . . . and we are still against them. I definitely would like to attack the idea that any of this makes any sense.”
***
So I’d done an underground MDMA session, and a weekend of illegal ayahuasca ceremonies.
The integration, as the months went on, seemed to go a bit smoother.
After ayahuasca, I still had good and bad days. The process was still intense but less earthshaking, either because I’d done the first big, tough layer of processing post-MDMA, or because the journey was different, or I was getting used to being unsettled, or all of the above. Or maybe the smoother time was a little reprieve, since something more shattering was about to happen.
After all the months, all the pieces that had been stirred up were not quite connected. I felt I needed one more sitting with the therapist and the psychedelic that at that point felt right. So I settled into a nest on a little patch of floor, again, in the same house as last time, but in a large, high-ceilinged living room full of moonlight coming in through the windows, and I whispered into a cup of ayahuasca a plea for wholeness, and drank it.
The vision is about me, as a five-year-old. Again.
Psychedelics, they say, will not give you what you want. But they will give you what you need.
I’m shocked to encounter the child again, but ready to see what she shows me this time. The child remembers; I remember, though the realization is slow, and the acceptance is slower.
When I thought I cried the hardest in my life the last time I drank ayahuasca, I was wrong.
I cannot (and would not) begin to encompass, in a brief space, what happens in the next long hours, and the next day, and the next night. The second night, the facilitators have to end the ceremony without me. They bless and blow smoke and perfume on the others because after so many hours, they’re done, but I’m still deep in it. They take turns staying with me and singing. It goes on for so long, with so much shaking and sickness, that to be kind to my nervous system, my facilitator, who in her day job cares for homeless children, puts me in a bathtub of hot water.
I hyperventilate, for a long time, until I don’t. I remember the bathtub-suicide fantasy. The facilitator is sitting next to me, on the floor, putting a soaked hot washcloth against my face, my neck, on my head. I tell her about the fantasy, and that I have come to know, in this bathtub, that I am not going to kill myself.
For a second she thinks I mean I won’t kill myself in her bathtub, rather than in general. Then when she gets it, the two of us laugh about what a drag that would be for her, if I killed myself here, on drugs in her house, both of us joking about it: me, naked, her, trying to help me save my life.
We’re laughing, but this moment is a big deal, and we know it. I am not healed. But I am whole. I can go ahead and get divorced if that turns out to be the right thing, but not because I was violated too many times to bear intimacy. There will be many more spectacularly challenging, professionally supported months of working through the terror and pain imprinted on my body when it was tiny, powerless under adult darkness and weight, but one of the end results has already arrived. The too-many years of my life where I sometimes actively, and maybe always a little bit passively, thought about killing myself are over.
But what has changed, people keep asking me, since the journeys. In my life, what difference did it make?
Every single thing is different, I tell them. Because I was splintered before, but now: I’m here.
This article was originally published on March 9, 2017, by Rolling Stone, and is republished here with permission.
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