The Sonoran Desert Toad

HOME

Bufo alvarius

The Psychedelic Experience as a Spiritual Encounter
By Ethan
Director of The Fane of the Psilocybe Mushroom
B.C. Canada

What you are encountering in your high dose experiences with the sacrament is the central challenge and mystery of the psychedelic religious experience. The classic death-rebirth experience, the great transformation, the mystical experience. The sacramental means is not easier than traditional methods of meditation and prayer, just faster and more dynamic, demanding greater dedication and courage or at least as much as more traditional means.

When you ingest religious doses you are inviting one of the greatest mysteries of life to take place in the temple of yourself; union with the essential nature of the universe necessarily entails a renunciation of individualized being, which is a kind of death, but it is not a physiological death, it is a metaphorical and a psychological death, for which you must be prepared to make a kind of spiritual sacrifice of your known self in the interests of that greater life that will reveal.

There are many things that could be said about this, but as a companion on the way let me assure you that your body will take care of itself and is even renewed in many ways by the process. I shall also admit that no one knows the whole story behind the infinite circumstances of this mystery, which of course is one of its awesome charms.

Nevertheless, from a study of the mystical traditions at the core of the world's religions and literatures we can derive useful attitudes of approach that can almost entirely reduce the sources of fear and confusion and open the way to the maximum illumination in the psychedelic practice. By reflecting upon our own experience, we can confirm the validity of these observations and through trial and error, develop our own style of receptivity and communion.

Upon ingestion of the sacrament, as Huxley has written, "all our actions must be devoted to making ourselves passive in relation to the activity and the being of divine reality". You have invited the great transformation to jettison consciousness into an expansion of limitless potentiality. As the peak approaches and all the elements of blooming awareness gather towards the breakthrough of light, consciousness manifests beyond previous limitations of conception, fixed notions of reality and self-identifications; not previously informed of the propensity of the psychedelic experience to induce the sacred death-rebirth experience at the central heart of mystical practice, like an emerging butterfly taking it into its head to resist the natural course of the potentiality, you get the beauty of your bejewelled wings tangled up in the chrysalis of your former self which gives rise to the confused and darker visionary elements, which are the elements of divine grace colored with your fears and resistances. With ecstatic consciousness at full throttle, jamming against the tension of your hanging on, the conflict between potentiality and resistance goes into a kind of feedback loop of harrowing experience. If you can remember at any point to "relax and go with the flow" the complexion of the experience will immediately lighten and evolve thereafter into states of insight and joyful release.

The key here is relaxation. Even without the agency of the sacrament, a completely relaxed condition of consciousness will give rise to an expansion of consciousness. This is what meditation and breathing exercises are all about; approaching that delicate state of passive receptivity that empties the mental contents so that awareness may shine clear; relax the body and the mind relaxes, relax the mind and the body relaxes. Perfect relaxation is perfect liberation; simple words through which the universe blows. "Fear not!" is an exclamation that a gesture of the Buddha's hand expresses. Fill your heart with loving observation, your mind with an all-embracing openness and when the time comes, seek again the kingdom within. Surrender to the wisdom of the sacramental process with a bright hope and a simple humble faith, for the process itself has its own divine logic and wisdom which is simultaneously native to your own being. This is the grand adventure of awareness, a delicate alchemy of listening. Imagine yourself a transparency open to all things; suspend judgements, likes and dislikes, welcome every manifestation that arises, fear not, it is all a revelation of mind; trust yourself, trust life, trust the gift of the sacrament, trust the unfoldment, and the treasure beyond measure will return. We who seek audience with the marvelous must practice the humility of a Ghandi. Be humbler than the sands of the Ganges. Like them, embrace everything; they are not repelled in disgust by the droppings of the camels wandering the shores, nor delighted to receive a jewel encrusted tiara that is lost by a bathing princess. The sands do not impose their will but blow with the seasons, bake in the sun and run with the rains. Impose no assumptions, reduce yourself to innocence.

"Now if the mind is attentive and does not move away from suffering at all, then you will see that out of total attention comes not only energy, which means passion, but also that suffering comes to an end. In the same way, all images can end instantly when there is no preference for any image. This is very important. When you have no preference, you have no prejudice. Then you are attentive, then you can look. In that observation is not only the understanding of the building of images but also the ending of all images." Krishnamurti.

Everywhere in the religious and meditative literature one discovers similar clues. In the Varieties of Religious Experience by William James, he writes, 

"There is a state of mind known to religious men but to no others in which the will to assert ourselves and hold our own has been displaced by a willingness to close our mouths and be as nothing in the floods and waterspouts of God. In this state of mind, what we most dreaded has become the habitation of our safety, and the hour of our moral death has turned into our spiritual birthday. The time for tension in our soul is over and that of happy relaxation, of calm, deep breathing, of an eternal present with no discordant future to be anxious about, has arrived."

Or from the Zen master Shunryu Suzuki, "Good and bad is not the point. Whether or not you make yourself peaceful is the point, and whether or not you persist to do so."

Or from the commentary in "The Secret Golden Flower": Out of what I thought to be evil much good has come to me. By keeping quite repressing nothing, remaining attentive, and by accepting, taking things as they are and not as I wanted them to be, by doing all this, unusual knowledge has come to me such as I could never have imagined before. I always thought that when we accepted things, they overpowered us in some way or other. This turns out not to be true at all, and it is only by accepting them that one can assume an attitude of freedom towards them. So now I intend to play the game of life, being receptive to whatever comes to me, good and bad, also accepting my own nature with its positive and negative sides. Thus everything becomes more alive to me. What a fool I was! How I tried to force everything to go according to the way I thought it ought to go!

#####

(Earlier Draft)

What you are encountering in your experiences with the sacrament is one of the central mysteries of the psychedelic experience, the classic death-rebirth experience. In Ancient Greece this was vouchsafed to individuals perhaps once or twice in a man's life. It is the Grand Adventure of the mind; it is not a physical death, but a process of grace every bit as incredible as life and death itself. It takes a special kind of preparation and courage, or chance trust and luck, but if you relax at that point of highest tension the death is transcended and the door into that peace that passeth understanding is gone through. You will notice that at the higher dose range you made the transition, and entered the Way. When you take the sacrament at religious doses, be prepared to co-operate with the transformations; by ingesting you are inviting the greatest mystery to carry you through an unfoldment of the potentiality of the universe and awareness not two.

As consciousness by grace of the sacrament is jettisoned, launched into its limitless potentiality of experience, it moves beyond the ordinary limitations of biology and cultural conditioning. A death necessarily does occur, it is merely a death of previous conceptions and perspectives of reality. But rest assured that it is not of a physical nature; your body will take care of itself; the death is metaphorical and psychological, and if you don't know that, one is inclined to interpret the process as actually dying. (Incidentally this mystical practice frees one of perhaps 80 to 90% of the fear of death.) Not to worry. Its happened to us all to some degree. Not previously informed of this potential , the sensible Joe will hang on for dear life and miss the trip.
Sometimes a change in lighting, bodily position, breathing exercises, mental gymnastics of letting go, certain delightful varieties of music can be of assistance. Pick up a copy of Jane English's translation of the Tao Te Ching and absorb your self in it before your next trip.