Without warning the headphones go silent, replaced by a profound, absolute stillness. It is otherworldly. But then, all of this is and has been for hours now.

Just as abruptly comes a brilliant white light that fills everything. There is nothing but light and, as with the stillness, it is complete. Nothing exists beyond this light.

Together, the stillness, the light hint at an incomprehensibly vast intelligence.

“At high doses, psilocybin occasions mystical-type experiences that are phenomenologically indistinguishable from classical mystical experiences described across cultures and ages.” – Johns Hopkins Researchers

I am hours into a heroic dose of psilocybin that is whipsawing me between bouts of terror and bliss, anxiety and astonishment. It is the most terrifying / meaningful thing I’ve ever done, and I have the disconcerting feeling I’m never going to ‘make it back’ to the old ways of being.

Taking the Heroic Journey

Made famous by the late ethnobotanist Terrence McKenna, the consumption of five grams of dehydrated Psilocybe cubensis mushrooms is considered heroic because of its reputation as an ego killer, albeit of the temporary kind. As McKenna put it: “Five dried grams will flatten the most resistant ego.”

A day earlier I’d asked my wife to ‘sit with me’ while I took the entheogenic plunge. For more than a year I’d been feeling increasingly flat, despondent, dead inside even as old anxieties and fears started to resurface. I felt the desperate need for a reboot and had found ample evidence suggesting psilocybin might do the trick deliver.

“Several of our patients described feeling ‘reset’ after the treatment … one said he felt like his brain had been ‘defragged’ like a computer hard drive, and another said he felt ‘rebooted.” – Robin Carhart-Harris, Imperial College London

After some initial trepidation my wife agreed and the following day we took up temporary residence at the home of a friend who was traveling for the weekend. After consuming the five grams (not easy), I slipped on a sleep mask and some noise-canceling headphones, then lay back on a sofa to listen to the start of a 7-hour playlist specifically designed for such occasions by Johns Hopkins researchers.

It’s been said, in both spiritual and metaphysical circles, that when asked psilocybin and God, respectively, give you what you need, not necessarily what you want. Your job, after the fact, is to decipher, with the help of your sitter, the intent and meaning of that offering.

While I won’t get into all the details of my journey, I’ll speak to the three stages that stood out most:

1. 1. Beware of the Doug
   2. God’s Perfect Plan
   3. Perfect Brilliant Stillness

Beware of the Doug

We tend to think of ‘ego’ and its engorged cousin, narcissism, in solely inflationary terms – as in thinking too highly of oneself. But as I’ve come to learn, an exaggerated preoccupation with oneself can just as easily skew toward the negative pole.

I share my name with a man who, in the words of his own father, was mistakenly glorified as a child. As a result, that man grew into the first kind of narcissist. His endless abuse of yours truly – Doug Jr. – produced an equally self-obsessed adult, this one hellbent on protecting itself from a hostile, uncaring world.

“Childhood adversity literally gets under the skin, changing the brain’s architecture and how the body functions for life.” – Nadine Burke Harris

While I can’t speak to what may have resulted if my father had taken a heroic dose, I can attest that for me there were intermittent bouts of anxiety, fear and, at the start, absolute terror. Suffice it to say, having a heavily fortified ego ripped from its moorings can be excruciating.

Unlike, say, a military veteran who experiences an acute trauma during his / her service, the malignant effects of chronic trauma are literally stitched into the child’s very makeup. Trauma becomes as much a trait as hair color or height. The ego, then, becomes a security blanket, ironically enough, the only one the child feels it can trust.

“It was pure terror. As though every fear I had ever suppressed arrived at once, demanding to be faced.” – Psilocybin Study Participant

In his book, The Body Keeps the Score, Bessel van der Kolk notes that chronic childhood suffering “lingers in the tissues, shaping how we survive rather than how we live.”

This might help explain why, as the mushrooms first started to distort my sense of self, my initial reaction was full-blown panic. I’d spent my life building and constantly reinforcing castle-thick walls and here I’d gone and willingly consumed a Trojan Horse-style agent hellbent on tearing it all down from the inside out.

“The terror was so total I could not remember what safety felt like.” – Psilocybin Study Participant

At some point, however, it became clear that I was in it for the duration. And more important, if the mushrooms were to help, I needed to give them room to do so. Nearly 20 years earlier that same fear had diluted the value of my ayahuasca ceremonies in the Amazon. I was determined not to let that happen again.

God’s Perfect Plan

As anyone with a panic disorder well knows, one cannot talk or think oneself out of fear. But it doesn’t stop us from trying. So as I lay there and the psilocybin’s effects intensified, I began a kind of mantra: “Please let it be love and God.” My wife’s notes suggest I whispered these words dozens of times.

Why those words? Because I’ve always felt that all of my fears, when bundled up, stem from the idea there is no God, no purpose, no hope. Or, worse, that my suffering – all suffering – is the work of a malevolent force. It’s worth noting that Joel Goldsmith and other perennial way teachers have suggested the same thing: human fear is born of the idea we truly are separate and alone in a hostile existence.

“Fear cannot be overcome by affirmations or denials. Fear disappears only when God is realized as the only Presence and the only Power.” – Joel Goldsmith.

At some point subtly, imperceptibly, the fear began to dissipate. In its place came a growing sense that everything – me, life, existence itself – is perfect. With that knowledge came a corresponding sense of love, joy, bliss.

Even with the mask and headphones on, I could ‘see’ how everything – even suffering – made perfect sense. There were no mistakes, there could never be a mistake, all of it was perfect harmony.

The best way I can describe it was as if ‘revelations’ of truth kept unfolding within my own consciousness. As if Truth with a capital ‘T’ is only possible from within.

As the bliss intensified, I repeatedly asked me wife, “Should I take off my mask?” Her answer, each time, “It’s up to you.” I was asking because the last vestiges of my ego warned that my joy was unfounded – that my wife would turn out to be a twisted demon, the room the inner workings of hell itself.

“Everything is just as it should be, in the cosmic sense.” – Psilocybin Study Participant

After what seemed like an eternity and feeling as if I was going to burst from the excitement, I sat up and tore away the mask and headphones. What I saw: a room exactly the way it was supposed to be, my wife very much my wife. No hallucinations, no distortions, none of the synesthesia one usually experiences with psychedelics.

Yet it was all sublimely, incredibly beautiful. And best of all, when I looked into my wife’s eyes I saw God smiling back at me. “You knew!” I shouted, happily, joyfully. “You always knew!”

What I meant was that my wife knew, yes, but so did my son, my daughter, my friends, everyone knew / knows. We’ve always known how perfect it is, because we and God are interchangeable. It’s just that, as Rumi would put it, we’ve stepped away while God stayed put.

“There was this sense that everything — every moment, every thought — was part of some divine game. I kept thinking: This is Lila. The dance, the play, the cosmic humor of taking myself so seriously.” – First-Person Report

I knew, in those moments and beyond a shadow of a doubt, that God was smiling out at me through the eyes of my wife. God’s joy matched my own as I gleefully saw more and more of this undeniably beautiful existence. And there was wisdom in those eyes and an infinite patience, smiling, waiting until the next big reveal, God as a parent watching its child open gifts on Christmas morning.

“Oh my God!” I’d say at one point, and then a short while later, “It’s unbelievable.” My wife even wept, explaining later that I was like a child again, overwhelmed with joy and happiness.

The simple truth here is that there are simply no words – these experiences are precisely why a word like ineffable’ had to be invented.

“High-dose psychedelics have the capacity to dissolve the boundaries of the ego and open individuals to dimensions of existence for which our language has no words.” – Stanislav Grof

I also should point out how playful it felt, like a great divine dance or comedy (Lila) revealing itself in a kind of hide-and-seek game. At one point I turned to my wife/God and laughed: “You’ve been playing with me the whole time. It’s all such an incredible game!”

It became obvious that all of these so-called human characters, are all part of a fantastic, inconceivably interconnected game; that existence is nothing more than God enjoying being God through these infinite expressions, ‘Doug’ being just one of them.

“There was a presence – ancient, laughing softly – as if amused by the whole drama of life. Not mocking, but affectionate. I thought: the universe is a divine comedian.” – First-Person Report

Perfect Brilliant Stillness

At some point I settled back onto the couch and slid on the mask and headphones. While this next part felt like it could have been days or weeks or years, my wife’s notes show it was only minutes in duration.

First, the headphones abruptly went quiet, replaced by the most profound silence. At the same time a brilliant light filled everything. Fear returned. I called out to my wife. She responded with a gentle squeeze of my hand. Immediately the music returned and out went the light.

“Silence is the language of God, all else is poor translation.” – Rumi

But whatever ‘it’ was proved surprisingly insistent. Again and again the music would stop, the light would return. And again and again came the fear, my voice, the reassuring squeeze, rinse and repeat.

At some point, however, I opted to let go, to see where that stillness-silence-light would take me. Ineffable is indeed the best way to describe it. The stillness is beyond stillness, the silence beyond silence, the light fills everything so that there is no room for anything else.

Hours later I’d be reminded of the title of David Carse’s book on his spiritual awakening, Perfect Brilliant Stillness. He nailed it. It was indeed perfect brilliant stillness.

“At high doses, psilocybin occasions mystical-type experiences that are phenomenologically indistinguishable from classical mystical experiences described across cultures and ages.” – Johns Hopkins Researchers

What was screamingly obvious to me was that this light, this stillness, this profound silence is One and the same thing. And it is living, intelligent, and one can spend an eternity there because the one experiencing it is itself the perfect brilliant stillness. Ego dissolution, completed.

Later that evening, when my wife asked me what I’d felt during this stretch, I could only shake my head and answer: “That’s the thing, I couldn’t feel anything because there was no ‘me’ there to experience anything. It was just experience itself, no subject or object.”

Again, ineffable, no words. In a dualistic world where each of us is accustomed to acting as a subject in a universe of objects, the idea of both being eliminated is impossible to conceive or describe.

Re-Integration

There was more to the experience, but this piece is already long enough. I started this noting that psilocybin is said to give us what we need, not what want. So what did I take from it?

First, that my so-called ego is even stronger than I’d previously imagined. It will not go easy into that dark night.

Second, that there is indeed something profound taking place in the background. Is it God? Sure, why not, that’s as good a word as any.

I sensed I only got a taste of the love and beauty and perfection of it. I have read, in accounts of both the mystics and those who have undergone a near-death experience, that at some point our limited central nervous systems feels as if it will disintegrate into flames, that there literally can be too much bliss or joy. I didn’t get there, but I definitely got the sense it was possible.

Today, more than a month after the experience, I’m finally able to semi-describe that day. Anxiety and bouts of fear still plague me, reminding me that these experiences are just that, experiences, and that true healing or peace require something more organic or native to ‘my self.’

Having spoken to more than a few who have undergone similar experiences (as part of healing retreats), I can attest that they, too, continued to struggle after the fact.

It doesn’t mean some haven’t enjoyed great benefits from the process. But, at least to me, it suggests that the ‘peace that surpasses’ understanding isn’t going to be found in the ancient wisdom of an entheogen.

I got my hard reboot. Not sure where I go from here.