Category Archives: Psychedelic Musings

The Daimon. A Greek word, meaning spirit. An aspect of the Psyche that functions independently of the ego. In those who have experienced neglect(and that is mostly everybody, even if their neglect was a lack of empathy for their depths) it is the protector. Everyone has one. It’s been there their whole life. It was there in moments when nobody looked after a vulnerable child. Even if there were adults around, even if the parents were good and present. There were still moments of isolation and vulnerability, when a small child had no protectors. Maybe it was late at night in your room alone. Perhaps it was during a frightening dream. Maybe it was during an event that was too big to metabolize emotionally. But whenever this happened, if you are grown and whole, it was there, looking after you, when nobody mortal was.

The Daimon isn’t all negative. In fact, it also leads us to our fate. It knows of our gifts, our talents, our contribution that we have to(or have yet to) make to humanity as a whole. It whispered to us as children. It informed our interests, our predilections, our gifts and our aspirations. It has been with us, from the beginning of our life, and it will be with us till the end. It whispers to us in moments of intuition, insight and important decision making. It’s presence is felt in sychronicities. It is both with us in the temporal world, and outside of time and space. It lets us know how it views us, and what it wants for and from us.

In my work with people, I know nothing predicts success better than my capacity to partner with their Daimon. If I can’t partner with it, no good can come from our relationship. If I don’t respect its authority and express my empathy for its lifelong regard for my client, it will not allow the person I am working with to expose their depths. In the past, when those depths were threatened, it was the Daimon who comforted the person I find myself working with all these years later. If the Daimon doesn’t feel as though I am going to respect its’ authority in the depths of my client it will alarm the client that I am not to be trusted, and the depth we are working at will feel threatening and foreboding. But if the Daimon feels I have partnered and respected its authority, it will chaperone our descent.

Part of my job in working with people is listening to the Daimon as it tries to communicate with me. It communicates with me in its preferences, its concerns, and its guiding suggestions. From the moment someone makes contact with me for work, I am listening for the whisper of the Daimon. It’s a bit like fishing. But once the Daimon responds to my interest, or my empathy, it becomes a presence in the relationship. Like a third party, it remains present in my relationship with clients, and in the work I do with them. We become a triad, and the Daimon will chaperone us to remarkable depths. For those who have worked successfully with me in the past, now you know what a big ingredient of our success has been. For those who wish to work with me in the future, I look forward to becoming acquainted with your Daimon, and partnering with it for your benefit.

May 28, 2019

I received two undergraduate degrees from Syracuse University, One was in Religious Studies and the other was in Anthropology. I studied with brilliant and challenging professors. I did well, and I enjoyed college so much, that right after graduation, I immediately enrolled in graduate school. I couldn’t learn fast enough. The years of my advanced education were the most stimulating and exciting of my life. I studied with world renown religious scholars, and world famous anthropologists. In graduate school, I was educated by visionary psychologists, psychiatrists, and therapists. I asked thousands of questions, read hundreds of books, spent months in classrooms, and then spent two and a half years training to become a therapist while seeing clients. This challenging experience showed me how to separate the false from the real.

At Syracuse I studied with David Miller, a world famous Neo- Jungian thinker. He was James Hlllman’s(the last person to head the Jung Institute in Zurich while Jung was alive) best friend and had been very close with Joseph Campbell. Though, he admired Campbell, he knew him as a person who was a man of his time and because of that he “never discussed women or politics with him”. Another amazing character I met there was a Professor named Ageahananda Bharati. He was an Anthropologist and a Religious Scholar. He had been born to Austrian Aristocracy, was drafted into Hitler’s army, and when he was sent to India, deserted and became a wandering sunnyasin monk who walked across India twice, barefoot. By the time I met Bharati, he was in his late seventies. He had been the head of the American Anthropological Association, and had once been the head of the Eastern Studies Program at the University of Washington. He had to leave that position because he had been giving undergraduate coeds LSD and instructing them in Tantric Sex. A colorful lapse in judgement, for sure.

I took every class I could with Professor Bharati. He was brilliant, contentious, funny and sometimes rude. Kids would come to class with dreadlocks and he would tell them what a dumb religion rastafarianism was, and that Haille Selassie was a terrible man(It’s true) with no cultural sensitivity at all. I once took two of his classes simultaneously, and once after taking the midterms in both of his classes, he demanded that Robert Mitchell stand up. Frightened, I did. “Are you Robert Mitchell?”, he asked. I nodded affirmative. “You received A’s on the midterms in both of my classes, are you stalking me?” “No,” I said. “Nobody gets A’s in two of my classes simultaneously!” He roared. I sat back down glad that I was not in trouble.

One day, while he was talking about the Indigenous people of the American Southwest, and Northern Mexico, I made the near intellectually fatal mistake of asking him a question about the Yaqui Indians. The word Yaqui snapped him to attention. He pointed at me, accusingly, and shrieked, “You read that liar Castaneda, don’t you?” “I slid down in my seat. “Uh yeah.” I replied meekly. “The Yaquis don’t even use Peyote in their culture,” he stated contemptuously. He then rattled off ten things about Carlos Casteneda’s books that were easily proven to be false, and spoke of the anthology he had edited called, “Tracking Castaneda,” which on one hand was about how fictitious Castaneda’s books were, and on the other, how gullible and indiscriminate the minds were that consumed them by the millions.

He told a story about seeing an album in a record store called “Aloha Amigo,” and how stupid this statement was, and then compared them to Castaneda’s books. He showed how Castaneda’s books were a hodgepodge of psychedelia, caucasian people’s fantasies about indigenous religion, Guirdjieffs’s thinking, Tibetan Buddhism, and any other New Age influence you could fit in. He was on the one hand territorial, because Castaneda had presented himself as a fellow anthropologist. But on another, he was a truth teller intent on deconstructing his fictions. More than anything he wanted people to understand just how desperate for, and bereft of mysticism western culture was, whether they were aware of it or not. He felt Castaneda exploited this desire, and then lied about it.

Today these same dynamics are in play in the modern psychedelic world. People declare themselves “Shamans”, or “Shaman’s apprentices”. Both of these things mean the same thing. “I like working with psychedelics, but I have no education.” Many of these people found themselves around people using psychedelics at festivals and found it made them feel powerful and useful to interact with people in these states. In the Bufo Community, it has recently been revealed that its’ two most well known practitioners have been doing terrible things to people under the guise of healing. (Deaths have even been reported. ) In both cases they made themselves a big part of the experience which is what happens when a practitioner wraps their unconscious narcissistic wounds around the role of “Shaman” or “Medicine Man” or “Medicine Woman.” In both cases the providers made the experience more about them, than the inherent healing capacity in the psyche of the people they administered the “medicine” (medicine is for children by the way).

On my first day of graduate school, in my first class on counseling, I sat in that class, so full of myself. I had just graduated “Cum Laude” from Syracuse as a member of “Theta Chi Beta,” The National Religious Studies Honor Society. The keynote speaker at my induction ceremony was Robert Thurman. I was going to be the smartest therapist since Jung. Only the first thing I learned was it doesn’t matter how smart, or how insightful you were, if you didn’t have empathy. If someone sat down and said, “Sorry I’m late, there was terrible traffic,” the best reply was “So, the traffic made it hard to get here.” “Yeah,” an excited client would say, “And I was fighting with my girlfriend and left late. “So You were fighting with your girlfriend, and the traffic was bad, it sure hasn’t been a great afternoon. “ And bam! We were on our way. I didn’t need to be Carl Jung, I just needed to demonstrate that I was listening, and had empathy for my client, and their unconscious would notice I was listening and take me down the rabbit hole to their furthest depths. On that day, the woman I sat with doing exercises was a housewife from Los Altos whose kids had grown and moved out, so she now wanted to be a therapist. I seethed thinking about how intellectually demanding my college experience had been, and now here I was doing exercises with an empty nester. It turned out that with her empathy and her kindness, she was probably the best therapist in my entire class!

Now I am in a world of “Psychedelic Integration” where people who have online degrees talk about “Plant Medicine” because it is a trendy way of talking about psychedelics. When I first studied Psychedelics in the early 1990s, there was no such thing. There had already been nearly fifty years of scientific study of psychedelics and they didn’t have to be renamed to make them seem cooler, more current or exotic. Psychedelics was a big top that contained naturally occurring psychedelics as well as those that were created by chemists. They didn’t need to be romanticized or mythologized. They were powerful, they were effective, and they were life changing.

The same weaknesses in our culture that a generation before gave rise to “A Yaqui Way of Knowledge”, are giving life to “Plant Medicines,” “Shamans” and “Psychedelic Integration”. People who didn’t feel the call the to help others before Psychedelics gave them an angle to get into healing professions, or felt the need to educate themselves about how the Psyche works, suddenly feel called to offer people “Plant Medicines” and call themselves “Shamans”. People head down to the Amazon or gather in living rooms taking part in Ayahuasca ceremonies that are a recent invention, designed to get as many people paying for a ceremony at once, maximizing, the currency intake for the provider. In most of these circles, it’s impossible for the administers to properly care for people, or to actually know what is going on with them. There are exceptions, but just as with Modern Doctors, most of the healing arts are done one on one, even if that’s not the most financially efficient way to do it. Imagine going to a hospital and having one or two doctors on call and twenty people in a triage room, all traumatized at the same time. That is the modern Ayahuasca experience.

Still others bombard people with multiple chemicals simultaneously. Psilocybin, MDMA, 5 MEO DMT in the same afternoon and charge desperate suffering people through the nose to have their brains chemically assaulted under the guise of “healing.” Each of these compounds on their own, are very potent and have been shown to create great changes in one’s consciousness. Anybody’s need to combine these substances, shows a lack of dexterity with any of them. It’s a consumer fantasy that “more is more”. The real skill is to use as little of singular materials as possible, and facilitate an experience that is more about how if given an opportunity to access the deeper realms of consciousness, the ego will right itself in its’ orientation from the lesser to the greater. From uninformed anxiety and depression to informed peace and inspiration.

This essay reminds me of a scene from one of my favorite movies, “The Outlaw Josey Wales.” The Hero, Josey Wales, in possession of a folky common sense, is crossing a river with a young compatriot who has has been shot in battle. The boy is clearly suffering and a snake oil salesman notices, and approaches them, uninvited with a bottle of his magic tonic. He holds it out and tells Josey , “Your young friend could use some help, this is it, one dollar a bottle, it works wonders on wounds.” “I bet it works wonders on just about anything,” Josey Wales replies. “It can do most anything,” the snake oil salesman states enthusiastically. . Josey Wales then spits tobacco juice onto his lapel, and asks, “How’s it with stains?”

OLD WINE

    This past week an old friend of mine died. His name was Michael Harner. Michael was an anthropologist who in 1973 published a book called “Hallucinogens and Shamanism.” It was the first time Shamanism and Psychedelics had been chronicled. He followed this with a book called the “The Way of the Shaman,” which enormously influenced western culture’s understanding of this hidden art. In his book Michael recalled his time in the Amazon in the 1950’s with the Jivaro tribe, and his experiences drinking Ayahuasca. My friendship with Michael did not originate in the interests that I fantasized we shared, or that he taught at the graduate school I attended, but rather grew out of my willingness to put aside a New York Times for him everyday at the bookstore where I worked.

    The explosion of Ayahuasca use in our culture can be directly attributed to Michael’s work. By the time I knew Michael it had been thirty years since his adventures in the Amazon and he appeared to be past his interest in Ayahuasca. He had created the Foundation for Shamanic Studies and was more interested in reconnecting indigenous cultures with their ecstatic roots from which modern civilization had separated them.  He thought of himself partly as the Archaeologist he had dreamed about being as a child. His preferred induction tool into the Shamanic experience was drumming, not Ayahuasca.

    Michael’s use of the word shamanism to describe the work of the healers in the Amazon was an interesting choice. The word Shaman has its’ origins in a Siberian dialect, and was first used by Mircea Eliade in, “Shamanism: Archaic Forms of Ecstasy” in the 1940’s. But the word is from a language that originates eight thousand miles from the Amazon.  Before I met Michael I had met another brilliant Anthropologist named Agheahanda Bharati who had once been the head of the American Anthropological Association. He was a stickler for not mixing cultural aphorisms, because doing so lost the meaning of what they represented. He once told a story of how he was in a record store and saw an album called “Aloha Amigo”, and thought that title portented the end of western civilization. He turned out to be wrong, but his point was valid. How we describe our experiences is important. What Michael encountered in the Amazon wasn’t shamanism, but it was the closest word he could use to describe what he experienced. Nowadays Chelsea Handler and Lindsay Lohan discuss their “Shamans” as though they are doctors, dentists, lawyers, or skin care experts. If you know the right people, you can probably get a “Shaman” to come to your house.

        I regularly receive email updates from groups leading Ayahuasca Ceremonies in places as diverse as London, Ibiza, Goa, Santa Barbara, Paris and locally in Los Angeles. Ceremonial leaders everywhere are singing Icaros (songs sung by Amazonian Healers usually in Spanish) and playing native Amazonian Instruments to facilitate psychedelic journeys. The fetishizing and appropriation of Amazonian Culture is in some ways absurd, and here’s why: The psychoactive alkaloid in Ayahuasca is DMT, and it is molecularly identical to psilocin.  Psilocin is what psilocybin, the active ingredient in “Magic Mushrooms” (a fungus that grows on every continent but Antartica) gets metabolized into before it passes the blood brain barrier. The only difference between the two psychedelic molecules is that psilocin has an extra hydroxene leg on it’s structure that allows it to be orally active. Simply stated, Psilocybin is orally active DMT. DMT gets metabolized by the digestive process before it passes through the blood brain barrier, and requires a second agent, an MAOI inhibitor that keeps it from being metabolized. The Banisteeropsis Caapi, the famous “Vine of Souls” isn’t even the plant that contains DMT. It’s very dramatic looking, but the plant that contains DMT, Psychotria Viridis, looks like a million other plants. The Ayahuasca brew is the result of a mixture of two plants, but it’s psychedelic catalyst is identical to the chemical that is in magic mushrooms.

    A worldwide industry has risen up to monetize the interest in Ayahuasca. People put on Ayahuasca ceremonies in homes throughout the world. Every year more people travel to the Amazon to take part in ceremonies in retreat centers that are being built by the same people that invested in Yoga Studios in the 1990’s. People spend  thousands of dollars to travel and take part in dramatic reenactments of Indigenous Amazonian rituals. Ageahanda Bharati once told me that, “When a Japanese villager walks into a Shinto Temple, they have a totally different experience than a westerner who enters one does.” Flying to the Amazon does not provide an indigenous experience of an Ayahuasca Ceremony, any more than attending a Shinto ceremony in Japan would. The sights, sounds, and emotional experience is completely different for the non indigenous.  Even “La Purga” the expected mystical vomiting that expels unprocessed emotions is caused by the high acid content of the brew. Some people’s stomach’s can handle it, some cannot. Those who can’t handle the high acid content get the “La Purga” out of both ends, just like the online tourist guides promise.

     The efficacy of the psychedelic experience is a separate matter altogether. During the past few years there have been numerous reports on the positive effects of Ayahuasca in both the Amazon and in the United States. People have self reported its benefits. But the scientific evaluation of it is somewhat unreliable because of the folk medicine manner in which it is administered. Studies in Brazil have shown that when Ayahuasca is given to prison inmates, their recividism rates are greatly reduced. This mirrors studies done in the United States in the early 1960’s with psilocybin. In the last few years, psilocybin has been studied for its’ effectiveness with a variety of ailments.   At John Hopkins University and NYU, psilocybin has been shown to have efficacy in smoking cessation, moving people out of treatment resistant depression, anxiety, and end of life despair in cancer patients . Psilocybin works as a psychological, existential, and spiritual aide.  It’s been shown to switch up the way the brain processes information. Most surprisingly by quieting the brain activity so that different regions which which have been camoflaged from one another by habitual modes of thinking discover they can communicate with unfamiliar neuro-neighbors.  Once the brain discovers new paths of communication, it lays down tracks by creating new brain cells built toward the direction of new experience.

    The efficacy of psilocybin is now scientific fact. Yet pharmacological companies are in no rush to legalize psilocybin as a medicine. Its potential as a profitable product is minimal. Psilocybin isn’t patentable because it occurs naturally in over 130 kinds of mushrooms. It also only has to be utilized one to two times in therapeutic dosages to catalyze changes in psychological and neurological functioning that last for months. Pharmacological companies are invested in compounds that require daily, long term usage, at great cost, that often turn out to be minimally effective.

     It turns out the Ayahuasca entrepreneurs have similar motivation to marijuana entrepreneurs and pharmacalogical companies. People spend thousands of dollars to go to the Amazon and take part in dramatic re-enactments of Ayahuasca ceremonies, and the DMT in the brew does work.  A new experience is provided for the brain that changes neurological and psychological functioning. But the truth is, the experience that can be had in an Amazonian Jungle at night listening to Icaros and native instruments, thousands of miles from home, is available to a person using psilocybin on their couch in Santa Monica, wearing eyeshades and listening to music that they find inspiring and moving.  It’s not as exotic, or as exciting as adventure travel, but once you close your eyes the experience is the same. These roads are well traveled, and they lead  someplace miraculous. They’ve been traveled by uncountable numbers of people, all over the world. The experience of consciousness transformation doesn’t need to be made more exciting than it actually is, and it doesn’t require novelty.  Metanoia is the most novel experience available to any human being, and it’s a democracy.

IN THE LIGHT

MAY 1, 2018

     “Everybody needs the light.” – Led Zeppelin

    A couple of weekends ago, I had one of the most remarkable experiences of my lifetime.  Perhaps the most remarkable. It was a subjective experience, however it was shared with four other people. All others present had their own version of the experience, reported it similarly, and shared its’ aftermath. I will try to communicate to the reader what I experienced as well as I am able.

    In other essays, I have alluded to psychedelic experiences.  I have a long and positive history with psychedelics, that goes back over thirty years.  The first time I used Psilocybin(the chemical that makes mushrooms magic) I became aware of parts of myself that had no origins in my historical biography.   Part of my consciousness of which I had previously been unfamiliar,  had no connection with my family, my history, my culture or the self narratives I had used to define my experience in every moment I could recall.  Like a dream(of which I have recorded thousands) the experience washed over me in a sensation that I could only describe as profoundly healing.

     In the past three decades since that experience I have used Psychedelics in stops and starts.  I’d say probably twenty five times between the ages of eighteen and twenty six.  Then roughly five times or so, between the ages of twenty six and forty six, and perhaps that many in the years since.  My experience has been overwhelmingly positive and expansive. I have utilized Psilocybin mostly, on rare occasions LSD(two or three times) Mescaline occasionally(once or twice) and DMT, which is found in Ayahuasca five times, and MDMA twice.  I have written previously about Ayahuasca and Mushrooms providing identical experiences from identical molecular structures and will not reference that here.  LSD felt synthetic compared to Psilocybin and bit more unpredictable.  To me it was a synthesized version of a plant entheogen that democratized psychedelics and brought them to places in the world where plant entheogens were not locally available.  However, I had always thought if the plants were available, better to just use them.  MDMA was heart opening, but made me feel worse the next day than anything I had ever done in my life.  Mescaline I have encountered a couple of times in cactus form,  and found it  quite pleasant and mellow. Funnily enough, these cactus are in almost every neighborhood in Los Angeles.  All the Psychedelics I have used had virtually no post use physical impact, and to be honest, usually I felt phenomenal in the days afterwards.

     This past weekend I had the opportunity to experience 5 MEO DMT.  This has been described to me by people that know as “The Crown Jewel of Psychedelics.” It is also known as “The God Molecule.” In Nature it occurs in the venom of the Bufo Alvarius Toad, which appears in the rainy season in the American Southwest and Central Mexico.  It has also been synthesized by chemists.  It is ignited with a flame then inhaled as smoke.  I had done a couple of years research on this particular agent as I am actually pretty meticulous about what I take into my body.  I also have a healthy respect for the fragility of the psyche and did not want to do myself any damage.   Though it may seem from my disclosures that I am pretty adventurous, I have, I promise you been very careful with these substances.  I have always kept my dosages fairly conservative and always been very careful about the setting I used psychedelics in(though I had been dragged toa few Grateful Dead shows) as well as the people who were present when I used them.  I have rarely used them recreationally, and I don’t use other intoxicants.  I have probably smoked marijuana ten times in my life and haven’t been intoxicated by alcohol since I was a teenager.  Psychedelics however, have been a path of development for me, for most of my adulthood.

    I have had several noteworthy experiences using psychedelics and very few negative ones.  Quite a few experiences have verged on the mystical, and I have always found upward stratas of consciousness to experience and incorporate that were separate from my everyday egoic state.  What was most interesting to me about Psychedelics was that the insights or experiences of a broadened consciousness that I had while using them, had utility in the times afterwards.

    To be honest though, I was sort of a middling psychedelic user.  I didn’t really do too many “heroic” doses out of fear of damaging my Psyche. I once was given 5 doses of LSD surreptitiously by a malevolent associate,  and found the experience upsetting to the point of considering having a friend to take me to the hospital in search of Thorazine. The only way I could describe the experience subjectively was that it was like having physical reality broken up into its’ sub-atomic origins, with no hope of it ever coming back together in its usual ways.  I talked myself through it, and ended up fine, but it left me wary, and unwilling to turn myself over to Psychedelics in that uncontrolled manner again.  In recent years, I have attended Ayahuasca ceremonies where I passed on the opportunity to “top off” my experience to take it to a higher level.  I found these experiences challenging enough, and always found myself holding myself right on the edge of the the psychological, emotional, and yes I’ll say it, spiritual chaos that these experiences offered. Instead, I peered over into an unknown abyss and said, “No thanks, this is far enough for me.”  These experiences left me feeling disappointed with my untrusting spirit, and maybe even my lack of courage.  So, while they were useful, and broadening, they were not as transforming as I would have liked them to be.

     The limits on my Psychedelic experience were self created.  There was an experience that I was not willing to engage.  The experience of releasing control.  It often felt like I was standing in an open doorway of a skydiving plane, but not being willing to relinquish my hold on the frame and let myself fall.  I was strong enough to hold myself in the whipping winds, interested enough to stick my head outside the plane to feel the wind rushing by, more adventurous than those who sat on the floor or who wouldn’t even fly in such a plane,  but envious of those who had the courage to fling themselves into the open sky with the faith that they would return safely to earth.

    A couple of months ago, I met someone who was talking about their 5 MEO experiences like teenagers who had actually had sex talked about it with those of us who were still virgins.  As I had felt as a teenager, I felt suspicious of this man’s enthusiasm.  He literally had no reservations about people using this substance, and referred to “full releases,” and “godgasms”.  It sounded intriguing and I discussed it with him further.  I gathered my courage and composed a group composed of experienced friends who took their development seriously.  I spoke with our enthusiastic leader about my reservations, and about my historical fear of letting go.  He assured that in this instance that wouldn’t be a problem, because it wouldn’t be an option.  This made me feel worried.

     In the week before the sit, I felt anxious.  I imagined reasons to cancel it, and stacked events before and after it to make it less and less likely.  Two nights before it was scheduled, I had the following dream.  “I was in a room with two women.  They had a pipe filled with smoke that they offered to me.  I inhaled the smoke and at the moment I did, the whole scene began to recede away from me very rapidly.  It was like a 1970’s television that was turned off where the whole picture collapsed to a colored pinhole at the center of a black screen, until it was gone. ”  In the dream when this began, I felt a acute panic, which very quickly gave way to feelings of bliss as I recalled this void catacombs that I now found myself preceded and followed all my lifetimes, and was connected to all of them as an entranceway and exit.  The dream made me feel remarkably hopeful and I released all thoughts of canceling the sit.

   On the day of the sit, the momentum brought me to the front door of the building where the sit was to occur.  The other sitters whom I had recruited were there and the facilitator arrived.  There was no turning back.  Our leader discussed  some yogic philosophy, read a couple of inspiring passages from the Upanishads and gave us a few breathing exercises to prepare us for the experience.  Our bravest member went first and had what appeared to be very dynamic experience.   From his inhalation to the end of his experience, it was about twenty minutes.  Of the four of us who sat, his experience seemed the most complicated, and it did nothing to decrease my anxiety, and probably increased it.  The second sitter, was a good friend of mine, and a very strong and inspired yogi and healer.  When he inhaled, he went straight into super blissful state, and stayed there the whole time.  His experience seemed inspired, and made me want to go next.  But I had another friend who wanted to swim in the yogis wake and he hopped in.  He also had a great experience and when he was done said, “I don’t want to say too much about it, but I’m excited for Robert to go there.”  So there I was.  Everyone had gone and was looking at me, and I had no reason not to go, so I entered the center of the room.

    The facilitator asked me some questions about my previous experiences and dropped what looked like a few grains of sand into the pipe.  I was seconds away from liftoff and all my reservations were gone.  He flicked the lighter and the material in the transformed into smoke and began to circle the pipe, and I began to inhale.  I kept inhaling until all the smoke was gone.  It wasn’t harsh, or acrid, it was warm and comforting and smelled like corn tortillas.  I lay back and held the smoke a good long while.  Then I exhaled. I lay back and the room disappeared and my consciousness was pushed right into all the boundary lands that I had refused to enter in all my previous experiences.  Then, they flew past me, at the speed of light.  In the first 3 seconds I went further and faster beyond the previous self imposed limitations of my experience than I had gone in all my previous experiences combined.  There was nothing I could do to resist or control the experience it simply was happening. Fear was not an option.  There was only the unassailable flight into the unknown.

     It is difficult to describe the indescribable, so I will not bore the reader with anything but a brief synopsis.  Colors, and sensations of unimaginable movement streaked past me at indescribable speeds.  My whole being  felt like the Starship Enterprise looked after Captain Kirk asked Scotty for Warp Speed.   Colors were bending as they were being stretched by the speed I was moving.  Gradually colors were being funneled into the center of my experience while the outsides began to lose their integrity.   I felt as though I was the edges of my consciousness were going to break apart while the center moved into a tighter whirl.  I was being released from a notion of “I” and simply becoming the tightening and accelerating center.

      Then it happened, the center reached such velocity that the only color it would contain was white.  A bright white light that appeared a bolt of lightning as it appeared from the inside was coursing through me at unimaginable speeds with unimaginable force.  This felt like the true center of all existence.  Beyond galaxies and the known physical universe, this was the energetic center from which all existence, physical and non physical, sprang.  I wanted to slurp it up.  I wanted to get as much of this experience inside of my body to recalibrate my cellular experience, but also to free me from all conceptual limitations.  The only thing that seemed necessary was to bring this brilliant stream through my consciousness as clearly and and voluminously as I was able. I spread out my arms and legs as broadly as I could. I relaxed my physical core  The light had a tonal quality and I wanted it to reverberate throughout my physical body.  I began to tone it as closely as my inner ear would allow me to.  It was a high pitched, metallic sound.  When I made the sound, I could feel areas in my body that were tight from conventional thinking open in response to the sound.  In my heart I knew that making these noises were a translation of the experience.  As I continued to move through the experience, the speed changed and so did my tones, but I stayed committed to articulating the sounds of the experience.  It was completely exhilarating .  The sounds like the white light had a metallic tone to them.  The louder I got, the more they affected my body, which no longer felt like my body, but an energetic experience.

     So, without sounding too nutty, I’m going to write a few words about the white light. It wasn’t physical, it existed outside of physical reality in a quantum, non local location.  It instantly relativized all physical life.  My life itself seemed like an experience conditioned by my biological nervous system.  All memories, concepts, and histories were shown to be something assembled by my nervous system and my brain.  Perhaps it was predestined and shaped by some non physical force, perhaps it was shaped by the intelligence that I experienced in the white light, but it was relativized.  It was a hypnotic state that was not relevant in the experience of the light.  I was instantly made aware that there was an experience of existence outside physical life.  It wasn’t conceptual, it was the actual experience.  All answers about an existence after physical life were provided.  It was not an etheric version of physical life with other disembodied persons, nor was it a void ending.  There was only union with the light.  All struggles in this life were a measure of the distance between oneself and the light, and all struggles at the end of life were resultant of not willing to let go of the conditioning of one’s nervous system and brain, and reenter the light.  It was simple.  There was nothing to fear. There had never been anything to fear.

“One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.”
―Carl Gustav Jung

In my work, I often encounter suffering in my clients, whether they be men or women. It always catches me by surprise, because it is unusual for people to be able to articulate accurately what their suffering is like. People can describe their histories, their traumas, and their difficulties, however suffering in each person occurs as uniquely as an orgasm does. You can never anticipate how someone’s suffering is going to appear until it flows through them in its purest expression.

People work with me for a variety of reasons. Most are seeking some kind of an expansive experience of themselves beyond their ego, which is constructed of their history, biography and reaction to pain and pleasure. Nobody comes to me in search of suffering. Yet, it always appears, and is in my opinion, even more profound than the experience of transcendence, which also regularly visits my work. Over time my understanding of the work I do has changed. Transcendence has always interested me, but the further I go in my life and in my work, the more I believe that the willingness to endure one’s suffering is the staircase that leads to transcendence. That is not what I believed when I began this work, but now I am now sure of it.

In my own experience, suffering has been a great teacher. When i was sixteen, my father died of cancer. He was the person that I had been closest to growing up, and his death was an unimaginably cruel irony. This experience changed my life in its’ entirety. I was no longer a carefree child. Death was suddenly a real presence. Seven years later I found myself in an analyst’s office because being in analysis was required for my graduate school counseling internship where I was seeing psychotherapy clients for the first time. My self narrative for my being in therapy was that it was required for my training. The reality turned out to be something else entirely. Through the skills of my analyst, it quickly evolved into profound grief work. Grief that I had carried since my father’s death poured out of me for an entire year. I would go to therapy, sob, and then ride the BART back to San Francisco, still crying. I would go home, make dinner while still crying, then go to sleep. Analysis or no Analysis, I cried everyday for a year, and accepted this new reality as one that may always exist. Then, one day, it just stopped. The pressure I had been under was gone. The well of tears was empty. I am quite sure that this experience saved my life.

Perhaps my own suffering was how I was being prepared for this work. But still it was not my primary focus. I am a big believer in the power of awe and joy. These two missing emotions in our culture is the vacuum from where suffering takes hold. Awe and Joy are birthrights. They should be available to everyone. But they are not often provided by experience, environment or upbringing. There is a paucity of awe and joy in our experience and our instinct for these experiences is frustrated. We have a natural instinct to experience awe and joy, and in not being provided an environment to experience these states, we are denied our most profound capacities.

This is not an intellectual, verbal or conceptual experience. It is a re-experiencing of the denial of the divine and the suffering that results from this frustrated instinct. This frustration results from the limitations of understanding of the people we grew up around. Often our family, friends, and stewards, had themselves been compromised in their capacity to express joy and awe. People being unkind, or abusive, or neglectful, or just not being able to empathize with who we are, is usually the result of their own misunderstanding resulting from their own suffering. Usually this experience exists outside their conscious mind.

When suffering comes, it is an awesome experience. The air in the room changes. It is like a long absent spirit has entered. Sometimes it begins with a trickle, sometimes the floodgates open all at once. Once the walls of the ego lower, the experience that lies beyond them floods awareness quickly, defenses collapse, a flood of emotion, memories, sensations and frustrations rush into consciousness. Often these emotions, sensations and memories have been hidden from awareness for decades, or perhaps an entire lifetime. But when these feelings come, they run through the body and consciousness with the only resistance being the tolerance capacity of the individual. Crying, sobbing, and wailing are all commonplace, and always welcome. They all are the death throes of the holding of a lifetime’s burden.
However suffering comes, it is always a relief. People ask, “Am I doing this right?” “Is this OK?” “Is something wrong?” “Will this end?” The answer is always the same, “No, nothing is wrong, this is fine, this is alright. This is good.” Usually after realizing that they are doing nothing wrong, a catharsis occurs. Relief follows, then awe and joy. Suffering is the pathway to awe and joy. Once it is done, laughter often follows. It sounds counterintuitive, but it is predictable. Suffering is the gateway to the transcendent. It is the artifact of where we have last known it, and where our circumstances caused us to lose touch with it. Like a trail of crumbs left in the forest, it shows us our where we have deviated from our transcendent origins and become distracted from that primary reality. It’s not to be avoided, it’s to be embraced. It will never let you down.