Psilocybin

Well. I certainly didn’t expect this physical exhaustion, this hangover, from psilocybin. I have been through the ringer. A mild headache; neck and shoulders all bunched up.

It was valuable. It was very much not what I expected, which is good, but it was very difficult in some ways.

One of the participants was having an intense and intermittently difficult experience, and was vocalizing a fair amount. Early on I started practicing tonglen (“taking and sending”) and I basically spent four hours doing really intense tonglen, mostly with her but with the other participant and the facilitator, too. It’s different when the taking and sending feels so palpable and literal. 

I wasn’t really tripping, in the sense of seeing pretty colors or apparitions of entities – I could see how one could go that way, I could have kept on my eye mask and turned inwards, but I felt called pretty urgently to attend to the others. So it was all about care-taking, for me. Often I felt, when “sending,” that there was something, or many somethings, behind me. Large and luminous persons. The light I was sending wasn’t emanating from me, it was coming through me. At one point I had the thought – it seemed profound at the time but now it seems faintly ridiculous – “well of course you can’t see God. You’d have to be facing the wrong way to do that.”

It was exhausting to refrain from touching people. Touch is my first language, the only real-time one I have ever been fluent in. But I supposedly didn’t know these people. So I sat in one place. Occasionally I felt an enormous constriction settling into me, and I had to breath deeply, find my hara, stay there a bit, let the thing lift. That too felt like a person, or persons: not necessarily malevolent, not necessarily intent on me at all. But I was surrounded by powers and intentions that I could just not quite hear or make intelligible. I found myself cocking my head, often, listening as hard as I could.

I am suspicious of conceptual take-aways from such experiences: they’re the probably the least useful way of responding. But one forms them no matter what, so here they are:

1. There’s a lot more going on than what I ordinarily let myself perceive. There are a lot of persons, a lot of intentions. In my ordinary state of mind I’m filtering out most of them. They are neither entirely inside me nor entirely outside me. (Are they real? I dunno. Am I? Are you?)

2. I am a caretaker, that’s “what I’m for.” 

3. But I don’t have to do all of it, or most of it. There are a lot of caretakers out there. The whole thing is just a lot more complicated than I have ever let myself imagine.

The connection with people was intense and lovely, but I was staggered by the responsibility it entailed. I don’t think I’d ever seen that so clearly before. 

I’m deeply grateful for the Buddhist practices I’ve learned: returning to the breath, letting conceptions go, inviting pain and confusion in instead of trying to fence it out. Nothing fancy. Bread and butter practice. But it was very helpful.