In the following two posts, I will attempt to relate my first experience of complete ego dissolution, or “ego death” during a trauma therapy session, occasioned by a high dose of psychedelics. I say “attempt” because psychedelic experiences — as Michael Pollan noted in his bestseller How to Change Your Mind — “are notoriously hard to render in words; to try is necessarily to do violence to what has been seen and felt.” They are, by their very nature, ineffable, transcending our capacity for linguistics. Still, it was illuminating to put this down on paper, and will serve as important context as I begin writing about my experiences with ayahuasca here in Peru. 

In Part II of this post, I will share the conclusion of my journey, insights from my integration of it, and the lasting effects.

[Disclaimer: Psychedelic experiences, especially in a closed-eye context, are singular to the individual experiencing them. My recounting here should not be used as a guide for attempting this therapy. Nor should it be construed as my advocacy for, or promotion of, psychedelic drug use. Psychedelic inward journeying of this nature has the potential to be destabilizing to one’s psychological state and should only be done with the guidance of an experienced professional. MAPS.org and the Johns Hopkins Center for Psychedelic & Consciousness Research are trusted resources for further information on this type of trauma therapy.]

A sunny spring day in Colorado, May of 2019

My “inner journey” was scheduled for noon. That morning I awoke and went to an early yoga class, came home and had a single egg for breakfast. It is typically advisable to fast before taking psychedelics, but in this case I knew my brain would be working hard, and I wanted to ensure it had protein and choline available as fuel. 

After my breakfast, I meditated, and then gathered my belongings — the essentials I would need for this journey into my psyche:

• A set of high quality, over-the-ear headphones

• My memory foam “blackout” sleep mask, to use as a blindfold

• Three perforated “tabs” of paper, each containing one standard dose or “hit” of lysergic acid diethylamide, LSD

Hold up — a high dose of LSD while blindfolded?

Psychedelics are known to cause heightened states of sensation, allowing individuals under their influence to see, hear, taste, smell, and feel the outside world in a new way. But when you are deprived of one or more of these sensory inputs, the distractions provided by these sensations go away, and the “trip” turns into a journey — a journey inward, into the subconscious.

“Inner journeying” with high doses of LSD is a therapeutic modality established in the 1950s as a method for treating alcoholism. Research into other applications for this mode of psychedelic-assisted therapy, including mushrooms, soon began at Johns Hopkins and other institutes. Despite promising results, LSD and psilocybin were banned in the U.S. in the late 1960s, and all research ceased. A recent revival in interest in these substances has cleared the way for clinical trials to resume, with the FDA granting “breakthrough” status to MDMA in 2017 for the treatment of PTSD in war veterans, and Johns Hopkins opening a new $17 million facility dedicated to psychedelic research, with an emphasis on treating depression and end-of-life anxiety in terminally-ill patients just last year. [1]

Paving the way for these advances, was a peer-reviewed scientific paper published in the journal Psychopharmacology entitled “Psilocybin Can Occasion Mystical-Type Experiences Having Substantial and Sustained Personal Meaning and Spiritual Significance.” It was this study that inspired Michael Pollan to explore the topic, and also describes the methodology I employed in my journey with LSD:

“Thirty volunteers... lay down on a couch wearing eyeshades and listening to music through headphones, attended the whole time by two therapists.” The results were stunning: two-thirds of the participants rated the session among the top five “most spiritually significant experiences” of their lives; one-third ranked it as the most significant such experience in their lives, comparable to the “birth of a first child or death of a parent” [2, 3]

This knowledge, and my own struggles with depression, is what led me to seek out this novel treatment with an experienced trauma healer.

At 11:45 a.m.

I arrived at the location of my session. The room had already been prepared for me — a comfortable reclining chair, pillows, blankets, and soft lighting courtesy of a salt lamp. 

My facilitator “Elizabeth” was there too, awaiting my arrival. We sat cross-legged on the floor facing each other, and she set the context, affirming my intention and method, and “the container” — the boundaries for the time and space in which I would be under the influence of this powerful psychedelic. 

The strip of paper I brought was presented back to me in a ceremonial bowl. I gazed upon it for a moment, took a deep breath, and then gently placed the medicine under my tongue. Elizabeth and I chatted quietly while we waited for my “alert” — the moment I noticed the LSD’s effects starting, in this case, after about 35 minutes. 

I sat down in the chair and reclined it to a horizontal position. Elizabeth handed me the headphones, and plugged them into a laptop, from which she would play a predetermined playlist of soothing, acoustic music.

She reassured me she would be in the room with me throughout my journey (an estimated 8 hours).

I slipped on my eyeshade

and was instantly immersed in a world of breathtaking spiraling geometries, closed-eye visual hallucinations familiar to me from past LSD experiences. Next, Elizabeth assisted me in sliding the headphones over my ears, and started the music. The swirling visuals morphed and synced to the acoustic notes flowing into my ears. Elizabeth and I communicated a few times to adjust the volume — just low enough as to be able to hear her if she needed to communicate to me, but high enough as to drown out any potential distractions from the outside world. Once set, I began to drift away from the physical reality we experience in daily waking consciousness. 

I began floating through a dreamlike world of 3-D fractaled shapes and patterns — a blissful state, a merging of visual beauty and auditory symphony, and all the while feeling waves of physical euphoria wash over my entire body. 

As the medicine came on stronger, and the songs changed, the beautiful patterns faded away. I entered an immersive phantasmagoria of nature scenes — the topography was mountainous and rugged, similar to Colorado, but more lush, verdant, bursting with life. I saw sweeping jungles, and then an azure oceanscape and rocky coastline, and images of weathered driftwood, beautiful stones, and well-worn leather. The word “Peru” arose in my consciousness, and then manifested in my field of vision, like the 3-D graphic rendering of a movie title, with each letter being created by an amalgam of these natural elements. “Peru, Peru, Peru,” as if a voice was softly whispering into the depths of my psyche, but there was no audible sound, only the deeply felt allure of this foreign land. 

Peru faded away, and now I found myself being carried into a dark void, like flying through outer space.

Approaching in the distance, a star.

But as I drew closer I realized it wasn’t a star at all, but a glittering, amorphous mass of energy. I got closer and closer, until this brilliant white light was the only thing in my field of vision. I was suspended there in space, basking in its warmth — but it felt more like bathing, the light washing through every cell in my body, every iota of my spirit, with it’s wholesome benevolence. It was a feeling of pure, consummate bliss.

In this moment, fully immersed in its presence, I wanted nothing. For the first time in my life, I felt completely accepted for who I was. In every ounce of my being, right down to the level of my DNA, I felt loved, held, nurtured, cared for, and connected to all things in the universe. All of my worries, anxieties, ambitions, needs simply melted away, as I became one with the light. 

But soon I felt myself being gently carried away from it. I was suddenly flying backwards, the way I came, but a beautiful tendril of this lightforce followed closely behind me. This vine of cosmic energy spiraled with organic geometries reminiscent of a pinecone, perpetually blossoming anew. I realized in this moment that the light was pure love, and it was me. It was me, and yet, it was also everything in the natural world. In this moment I was filled with the knowledge that I was witnessing what we know as the Big Bang — the genesis of everything in the universe.

As I continued traveling further with this light-love energy vine, it was getting smaller and thinner, because there were blockages in the light as it got farther away from Source. There was a felt sense that these dark matter blockages were traumas in my ancestral lineage. And I now knew where this vine was taking me: to my own trauma.

With a final, brilliant flash of light 

I emerged from the void to my destination: a thick, dense expanse of forested swamp. There were cicadas buzzing loudly here, and before me was a bog. A stench was in the air, and I soon saw where it was coming from — a half-submerged, decaying carcass in the murky water. I could make out the grotesque, necrotic flesh covering the remains of a rib cage. The cicadas got louder, deafening almost, as if to taunt me. 

My intuition was telling me to go towards this horrific scene, and that my job now, was to examine this rotting carcass, to study it, and to lift it out of the water and on to dry land.

I didn't even want to look at this morbid, ghastly thing, much less grab hold of it and drag it out of a rancid cesspool. I stalled there, reflecting on my journey to “the light” — how could I go from that experience, being in the presence of such magnificent beauty, to the hellish task of dragging a rotting cadaver from a swamp?

My pulse quickened and breathing grew heavy. I began to inch closer to the festering trauma in my psyche. 

[Please read 07: The First Time My Ego Dissolved, or, When I Heard my Calling to Peru, Part II for the conclusion of this journey, and takeaways from my synthesis and integration of it.]

References:

1. The New York Times: “Johns Hopkins Opens New Center for Psychedelic Research.” https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/04/science/psychedelic-drugs-hopkins-depression.html

2. Griffiths RR, et al. “Psilocybin can occasion mystical-type experiences having substantial and sustained personal meaning and spiritual significance.” Psychopharmacology. Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16826400

3. Pollan, Michael. How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence. New York: Penguin Press, 2018.

Resources for journeying deeper on this topic:

• Grof, Stanislav. “Lessons from 4,500 LSD Sessions and Beyond.” Interview by Tim Ferriss, 20 Nov 2018.

• Doblin, Rick. Evolving Earth Podcast. “E8 – Rick Doblin on The Frontiers of Culture and The Future Of The Psychedelic Renaissance.” Interview by Will Sacks.

• Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies. https://maps.org/

• The Nowak Society. https://www.thenowaksociety.org/

Photo credits:

1. Brinton Duncan, photographer.

2. Wikimedia Commons.