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Jerzy
Kosinski,5
in an interview, said that for him there was only
one game in town: "How close can I get to another
person, without anybody getting hurt?" Not a bad
formulation of the goal of
psychotherapy.6
As early as 1965, R. D. Laing7
wrote, "Psychotherapy must remain an obstinate
attempt of two people to arrive at a re-covery of
the wholeness of being human through the
relationship between them." The patient is a
person-to-be-accepted, and not an
object-to-be-changed. As a therapist, my
main task is to attend, to pay attention, to signal
that I am harm-less, and to provide a safe
container for the patient. If all goes well, a
play-space opens up between the patient and me, and
in it we can each practise being
nobody-but-oneself. The introduction of
entheogens into this play-space enhances the
possibility of authentic meeting beyond the
interference generated by egoic forces. Did He not
say, "For where two or three meet in my name, I
shall be there with them?" (Matthew
18:20).8
What does "in my name" mean? "I am the Way, the
Truth and the Life" (John 14:6 ). At best,
the sacred space of therapy allows love and
compassion to manifest, so that communion or
co-presence can occur. Suddenly there is the
experience of an "us right now," that you and I are
parts of, without either of us having to be altered
to suit the other’s book. Laing called this
the healing factor.
I
have been interested in psychedelics since
1967, when I left mathematics, physics, chemistry
and computers and began working on my MA in
psychology. My supervisor, Zenon Pylyshyn, was from
Saskatchewan and had participated, along with Abram
Hoffer and Duncan Blewett, in the first experiments
with LSD-25. Zenon told me he had had enough
strange experiences, that he had gone about as far
with LSD as he wished to go. He still had what was
once legal: Sandoz-manufactured LSD. I thought he
wanted to pass it to me, for me to run with it,
like they do with the baton in relay races. He
offered to sit with me and said that the trip would
take eight to ten hours. Looking back 33 years, I
don’t quite recall why I decided to
accept his tentative offer. I was 27 years old,
thought of myself as a rational scientist, and had
no experience with delirium, hallucination, or
altered mind states. I was curious. Very curious. I
thought that, like Faust, I might make a pact with
the devil in return for esoteric knowledge.
The
first time is unlike any other time.
Zenon9
gave me 900 micrograms and the surprise of my life.
He made himself comfortable, read a book,
occasionally glanced at me, but otherwise he left
me to my own devices and no words were exchanged.
At one point he gave me a single stem of hyacinth
to hold in my hands. I felt he had entrusted me
with a fragile treasure, and I wasn’t sure I
could do well by it. The strangest experience that
day was what I would now call
mind-interlock: although Zenon had taken no
mind-altering drug, I read his mind, I
became he, I knew everything he knew. I knew
how he felt about his wife, I knew how he held his
penis when he stood at a urinal, I knew what he
thought about what he was reading. I experienced
intense and embarrassing intimacy. Zenon seemed
unaware that I was tapping into his soul. After
some days, during which my embarrassment persisted,
I asked Zenon about some of my more innocuous
insights. He confirmed them all to be true, and
felt short-changed because he had made no inroads
into my mind. He had become transparent while I had
remained opaque. I felt shy and uncomfortable to be
so entwined with my thesis supervisor: I was
loving him through knowing him. I had no
critical thoughts, and felt deeper and deeper
levels of acceptance. Many years later R. D. Laing
told me you can only love that which you know and
you can only know that which you love.
Zenon
didn’t want to influence my expectations by
saying very much, so the set and
setting10
for my first trip were deliberately left vague and
open. The intensity and novelty of my experiences
were all the more surprising. I entered a bizarre,
yet meaningful and encouraging, world of phenomena.
I experienced myself to be a magical, complex,
mythical creature. The experience was spiritual
because I realized I was a part of something
greater than what I could imagine. I was intrigued:
I had experienced something, but I did not know
what my experience meant. Had I gained insight into
the universe, or just into what a mind, poisoned by
LSD, might secrete: dreams, visions,
hallucinations?
Following
this initiation, I traveled to many regions many
times with the help of many different substances. I
took peyote, psilocybin mushrooms, cannabis, MDMA,
DMT, ketamine, nitrous oxide, 5-MeO-DMT, but I kept
coming back to LSD. Acid seemed my most spacious,
most helpful ally. While on it, I explored my past,
regressed to the womb, to my
conception.11
I remembered, grieved and mourned many painful
events. I saw how my parents would have liked to
love me, and how they didn’t because they
didn’t know how. I learned, on acid, to endure
troubling and frightening states of mind. This
enabled me, as meditation has done, to identify
with being the witness of the workings of my mind,
observing whatever was going on, while knowing that
I was simply captivated by the forms produced by my
own psyche.
On
one trip I was trapped in an isolated, encapsulated
state of mind, and I struggled to make contact with
the world. I couldn’t hear, see, touch, smell
or taste, but I thought and felt. I felt caged in
an autistic mind. It occurred to me that many years
might have passed since I was last in contact with
reality. I might have walked in front of a car, got
hit, and the shattered glass of the windshield
could have blinded me. Were I to regain my sanity,
I might wake up in the back ward of a mental
hospital. There might have been news reports about
a psychologist who lost his mind as a result of
ingesting LSD. Then I got the idea that a fire was
starting near me and unless I could put it out, I
would die in the ensuing conflagration. I tried to
annul all traces of fire from my consciousness,
thinking and hoping my mental maneuver could be
guided, by unknown pathways, into the real world,
and thereby save me from immolation. I found out
later that my wife had lit a candle and I had, to
her surprise, repeatedly blown it out with such
fury that, after a few attempts, she gave up trying
to re-light it.
During
my apprenticeship with R. D. Laing in 1974 - 75, he
trained me in his approach to LSD-therapy. In
contrast to Stan Grof’s method of directing
attention in (by suggesting that the patient
stay in a sleeping bag with eyes blindfolded,
earphones on, and as little interpersonal contact
as possible), Ronnie12
liked, in his LSD sessions, to explore the
between by participating in the
session. Laing’s only direction was that I
fast for three days before the trip. He arrived to
our London apartment by taxi an hour after I took
the clear, colorless liquid contents of three
ampules of Sandoz LSD-25, each marked 100
micrograms. He sat down on the floor near me,
informed me that he had also taken some LSD to keep
me company, and for the next four hours he
attended to me.
Ronnie
looked beautiful. He was wearing cool, velvet
textures. His head conjured up images of Socrates.
The light from the window felt soft and gentle, it
was an early summer afternoon in London. When I
mentioned the lighting, Laing nodded and said, "Let
us be grateful for it!" I can still hear his Scots
accent. I played a raga by Ravi Shankar (Ahir
Lalit: for the morning hours, creating a mood
of pathos, languor and pining), and engaged Ronnie
in a dance of sorts. Our right hands locked, then
our thumbs pirouetted, then our fingers danced; we
locked both hands, in parallel, then crossed
formation, we rolled about, disengaged, continued .
. .
I
looked into Ronnie’s eyes and saw myself
reflected there. I felt unworthy and flooded with
shame; then I felt accepted. I asked, "Why would I
want to hurt you?" I had thought up to then that
violence was ubiquitous and I could not take love,
caring and gentleness for granted. "DO you
want to hurt me?" Laing asked. "If you do, I can
think of one reason why you might: REVENGE
!" I remembered my mother, who, in 1943, had been
taken to Auschwitz. Ronnie said, "The forces of
evil are infinite." His thighs trembled.
I
heard myself ask: "Is there a way?" A long silence
followed. His forehead contracted into wrinkles, he
bent his head down. I had a clear vision of two
opposing forces battling, creating a storm in
Laing’s body and in his whole being. A force
of light and clarity was streaming into his head
from above. Another force, dark, foul and murky,
was entering him from below. At last, he said, "I
believe there is. We are doing it right now.
It’s unfolding through us."
An
hour that seemed an infinity passed, and I asked,
"Are you kind?" "Yes," he replied, "at times I am
kind, and I suppose, at times, I am cruel." "I am
afraid that I am not really kind," I said. Ronnie
spoke softly, "You have a very nice set-up here:
two children, a woman who is an artist, your living
arrangement. You must have let some kindness
go around to get it all together . . . You have
more perhaps than you allow yourself to
think".
Still
quizzical, I asked, "Do you trust me?" Without
hesitation he responded, "I trust you to cut the
rope, and bet I’d come out better than if I
had to cut it. I trust you as far as I’d trust
myself – that much or that little." (Here,
Laing was referring to mountain climbing etiquette,
according to which the lead climber, when his life
is in jeopardy, must cut the rope that holds the
second climber: there is no sense in both climbers
plummeting to their deaths.)
I:
"Why don’t I try to pluck your eyes out?
Why don’t I kill you or me?"
Ronnie:
"I trust you more than I trust those to whom no
such ideas have ever occurred."
The
window was open and rainy, moist, cool air streamed
in. Birds sang. I sipped tea from a tea-bowl that
my wife had made. I noticed my reflection on the
surface of the steaming tea. I was frightened by
the images that shimmered through the steam: they
seemed to forebode tragedy, pain, agony. The cup
became the huge mouth of hell’s dragon. I
fought this image. Ronnie tuned into my dark
predicament and picked up a drum and accompanied my
battle with salvos of rhythms. I found my own drum
and we conversed and played together. My wife, who
at the time was in another room, told me later she
thought that only one person was drumming.
Can
a man who has looked into his own soul respect
himself? Can he respect weakness, triviality, shame
and fear? I was reworking my relationship with
myself and felt somehow fertilized by the
whole trip. A lasting calm enveloped me. A few days
later, during our next therapy session, Laing
observed that as we had talked, during the trip,
about trust, hurt and kindness, he had seen a storm
pass through my face. Once that was over, he said,
he detected an ease and flow in my movements. He
said also that he had noticed that during our LSD
session my wife had not been as much at ease as the
children, and we talked about how a family is like
a mobile. If I change, he said, a change is
imminent for my wife and children as well. Even if
I were moving closer to her, she still has to
adjust, and change implies anxiety. Change, a foray
into the unknown, arouses the fear of life.
Since
that trip with Laing, I have had many such
significant, transformative experiences using
entheogens, both as the one who takes the journey
and as the one who attends, accompanies others. You
may be asking: Why do it? What’s to be
gained?
I
would like you to imagine walking up to the altar
in a Catholic church and taking into your mouth the
communion wafer. Imagine you are
experiencing what this common ritual refers
to. To know yourself to be a living cell in the
body of Christ means to experience yourself as a
tiny part of something much more, much greater than
yourself. If a cell in my body, like Theudas,
"boasting himself to be somebody" (Acts
5:36), suffered from an ego-mania, then it
might separate away from the organizing principle
of my being. We call such self-willed cells
cancerous. If too many of my cells rebelled in this
Satanic way, I would die.
The
spiritual use of psychedelics is always in search
of self-naughting13
and self-sacrifice. By the self here, I mean
ego or soul or psyche. Since
language, thought, the ability to speak are powers
of the soul, at the moment of the soul’s
annihilation nobody remains to experience and
nothing can be said about it. Leading up to this
meltdown feels like dying, reconstituting oneself
from nothing feels like rebirth. But the crucial
point remains ineffable: it’s blinding light,
everything; it’s total darkness, nothing; "the
soul, in hot pursuit of God, becomes absorbed in
Him... just as the sun will swallow up and put out
the dawn" (Meister Eckhart). It’s
terrifying; it’s bliss...
Leading
up to this indescribable moment, one meets oneself,
with all one’s doubts, pretensions, heroics,
defenses, habits, hopes and paranoias. Entheogens,
carefully used, in the right setting, in the right
frame of mind, allow your heart to fill with
compassion. Towards yourself, as well as others.
One learns to become more and more feminine,
receptive, relaxed and balanced. It is most
difficult to learn that there is nothing to be
afraid of. Not even fear needs to be feared or
avoided. One becomes no longer the victim, but the
spectator of one’s own fate. One realizes that
the only proper function of the will is not to
will. The task is to turn the will back upon
itself, like the Ouroboros, the snake who
eats its own tail, making room for surrender.
"Nothing burns in hell but self-will. Therefore it
is said, ‘Put off thine own will, and there
will be no hell’" (Theologia Germanica
). If a trip goes bad, this is where it
happens: willing anything other than what is
happening precipitates one in hell. An experienced
guide or sitter who is unafraid, because (s)he is
familiar with the territory and has gained the
trust of the one who struggles, can midwife one
into surrender.
After
the unspeakable, a warm surprise awaits one. Just
as one can never get used to dying, the process of
rebirth or reconstituting oneself is always an
unexpected blessing. Regaining awareness of self
and environment, I felt loved and whole and welcome
in the world. After all, I could have been killed,
and I wasn’t, but I didn’t survive by my
own clever efforts. I experience mercy and
humility. Whatever guilt or shame made me
hide before is burnt away: I have been forgiven.
Love and Death are one person. I feel frail,
tender, but safe: "The eternal God14
is thy refuge, and underneath are the everlasting
arms" (Deuteronomy 33:27).
This
sequence of dying=death (or nothingness) =rebirth
is a universal pattern called initiation.
The secret of initiation remains inviolable by its
very nature; it cannot be betrayed because it
cannot be expressed.
The
worst trauma is betrayal. I have been betrayed and
I have betrayed. Each time it happens, we contract,
tense up and defend ourselves from further
let-downs. And we begin to die of our
defenses.
The
use of entheogens in the safe container of
psychotherapy can heal this wound, both in the
patient and in the therapist. In each other’s
company we can find the Way "from privation to
plenty, darkness to light, and death to
immortality" (Coomaraswamy).
Entheogens,
of course, are not the only way. There are many
other pathways of engaging in the exploration of
the same territory. In my practice I never suggest
the possibility that therapy could encompass the
use of entheogens. Similarly, I also abstain from
suggesting going on, or coming off psychiatric
medications. These decisions are all in the domain
of my patients.
To
illustrate the importance of relationship in
doing entheogen-assisted psychotherapy, I will
report a dream. Linda15
was 23 years old when she called me to ask if I
would do LSD-therapy with her. I agreed to see her
for an exploratory session, but I told her that
normally I only do LSD-therapy within the context
of ongoing psychotherapy. She impressed me as a
strong-willed, impatient woman who wasn’t
afraid of anything. I ventured to say that perhaps
she was rushing things. She agreed but justified
her hurry by letting me know that she would be
leaving for Europe shortly. Then she recounted a
dream she had remembered from during the night
preceding her appointment with me. She said, "I am
meeting a therapist for the first time. We meet
outdoors but I want more privacy, so we go to my
place. We make love, but neither of us can orgasm.
We remark on how unusual that is. We are constantly
being interrupted by my family and others. There
are four doors to my room, two of which I could
lock, but the other two I had no keys for." I told
her that I interpreted her dream as a warning from
her unconscious: "Be careful, Linda, you don’t
know Andrew; the LSD experience may fizzle without
peaking. You can’t keep out your past, your
world, and there won’t be enough time to deal
with it all. There will be too many distractions."
Three days later she telephoned me to say that she
had decided to try LSD alone, by herself. I
wondered out loud, whether this was a decision to
further devalue relationship. I asked her to
contemplate the differences between "making love"
(doing an LSD session within the context of
on-going therapy), "a quick fuck" (doing LSD
with a stranger), and "masturbation" (doing
LSD alone). She never contacted me
again.
Earlier,
I referred to the notion that seeking esoteric
knowledge through the use of psychedelics might be
a pact with the devil. Satan, or Lucifer, is an
egomaniac, concerned with his own power, the power
to defy, to control and to predict. The knowledge
or certainty or light that Luci-fer
brings is loveless. Satan delights in dogma
and he is called the tempter because he
distracts us with cleverness away from The
Kingdom of Heaven that was promised to be
within us. The desire to seek within is more
and more lacking in our current world, and it
isn’t difficult to be led astray by false
direction.
What
to deplore and what to cherish? Are they
necessarily incompatible? It seems to me that
psychiatry with its pharmacological armamentarium
is in much greater danger of selling its soul than
entheogen-assisted psychotherapy. The two
enterprises attract very different kinds of
practitioners and patients. Our society of sex,
capitalism and antidepressants is terrified of the
dark. Laing named this fear of our own and other
people’s souls psychophobia.
Psychiatry, aiming at control and prediction, is
one response. Entheogen-assisted therapy, aiming at
being with what is, in an open-hearted way, is
another. Caveat emptor...
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