A New Context for Existence

The sun was an hour away from slipping below the horizon when the mushrooms started to take hold. It hit Mike first and was expressed in a contagious, creeping grin that spread across his face as he bobbed in the waves of the biblical Sea of Galilee. The religious significance of this body of water wasn’t lost on us. Mike and I were raised ultra-Orthodox Jewish and studied the Torah almost exclusively until we reached adulthood. For me, psychedelics played a significant role in the process of letting go of God. The discovery of plants that made me feel holier than a lifetime of ascetic practices was a revelation that I still haven’t quite gotten over.

“I’m starting to feel it,” said Mike, his grin somewhat receding as the beginnings of nausea often experienced on the come-up began. A minute later I felt the wave of nausea too. “Let’s get the hell out of the water,” we said excitedly, rushing up the shore to our isolated campsite. I trusted my feet to find a path atop the rocks. These rocks dominated the shoreline leading up to where we had set up our tent, somewhere in the wilderness of northern Israel. I have always preferred to trip in nature, with one trusted friend, access to a body of water, and a setting sun. We sat on the rocks by our tent and let the mushrooms work their way through us. Later, we decided the best term for what we were experiencing then was a sort of “nausea of the soul” — a price to pay for rocketing into an entirely different mode of consciousness. It’s always worth it. In its own brutal way, especially when coupled with meditative training, it can be very fulfilling, healing, and even cathartic, akin to the way a rough massage is followed by an elating absence of pain. At the very least, any doubts as to the potency of the medicine were completely gone. Mike lifted his head with a pronounced effort and met my eyes. His pupils were already dilated, and he grinned through obvious discomfort, his eyes showing surprise at how powerful the fungi were. “This is already the strongest trip I have ever been on,” he said in a low and certain voice. I laughed a “shroomy” laugh: easy, powerful, felt in every muscle of the body. “What did I tell you?”

Mike felt he had taken enough psychedelics to know what they were about, but his set and setting had been radically different than this one. He had taken a lot of acid, mostly at nature festivals (a combination he would introduce me to later), which has its own unique flavor reminiscent of archaic peoples and their practices of dancing to and making syncopated beats for shamanic rituals and journeys. But after many raves, Mike had moved on to meditation as his way of, in his own words, “improving my subjective experience.” I too had been moved deeply by my meditative practices, but over the first year of our friendship, we argued passionately about the place of psychedelics in consciousness expansion, healing from trauma, and generally living our new, free, godless lives the best way we could. “Just try one fungus with me, Mike,” I kept saying. “Eat mushrooms with me one time before you say you’ve got the entire psychedelic message, and are ready to hang up the phone.”

And so we did. Now, sitting on the beach with our souls locked in what felt like some kind of hippie astronaut training device, our minds spinning and our stomachs turning, it felt like we may have bitten off more than our minds could chew. I vomited, or rather, I purged; more than just my breakfast was jettisoned out of my body. It felt like I was excreting the pain of the last few years in a stream of projectile emotions. Losing God, fighting and a temporary split with my family, my first sexual relationship and heartbreak, the stress of my first job, my existential angst, everything was finally moving and flowing. I could see Mike’s head between his knees in my peripheral vision as I wiped the corners of my mouth. When I turned to face him, my vision moved behind him, to the grasses and trees in the background. They were decidedly more saturated and brighter than I normally perceived them, but what was truly astonishing to me was that every branch and blade of grass in my field of vision had sprouted its own face. It was all the same face, a face I had never seen before, with a beard and a psychedelic grin. In unison, they rotated slowly clockwise in such a convincing way that I felt an urge to rotate my own head to match their pace. I know it may seem hard to believe, but that was one of the least fascinating visuals of the trip. It wasn’t disturbing, or even absurd, I thought. I knew another person might see it that way, maybe even get scared, but I knew I had the choice to accept it, and that if I did, my evening would be a lot more enjoyable. An enhanced appreciation and affection for the absurd has become one of the greatest gifts psychedelics have given me. After a bit of that, an idea sprouted in my mind.

I tried to force some words out to Mike.

“Watch me,” I said.

“What?”

“Watch me while I go inside!” I insisted.

“What?”

“I’m going to close my eyes, I’m scared, I think we should watch each other go inward.”

“Uh…

“….OK.”

I saw him close his eyes as I closed mine, but it didn’t matter. What was going on behind my eyelids was the most ineffable, powerful, mind-blowing thing I had ever experienced. I simply don’t have the vocabulary to do it justice. I don’t think anyone does. All I can say is what it wasn’t. It wasn’t finite, or previously experienced, or repeatable. I understood now what the FMRIs I had seen of people’s brains after they were injected with psilocybin were showing: many more connections in the brain, with previously unconnected sections connected for the first time. That was the only way I could possibly be experiencing this chaotic explosion of qualia. It felt like it went on forever, but when I opened my eyes and asked Mike how long it had been, he insisted it had been less than 30 seconds. I was astonished. I knew then that the mind goes far, far deeper than I had previously imagined, that what I knew about the world and my function in it was laughably inadequate, and that I wanted to learn more.

Communication had already broken down, but by now it was almost entirely gone. Still, I had real confidence in both the efficacy of the medicine and the equanimity of my friend. Mike was now on his back, positioned between our tent and some trees, making sounds I can only describe as a combination of bemused laughter and deep, sorrowful sobbing. At the time, though, this didn’t seem at all like a contradiction to me; it was indeed funny how much one could cry in this state of mind. My friend Mike is one of my favorite people, but emotional vulnerability was at that point mostly off the table for him. An ex-Special Ops, pessimistic intellectual, he wasn’t the first guy I went to for big mushy hugs or emotional intimacy. It was novel and liberating to be in the presence of such intense processing. And it was beautiful, too. I enjoyed the sounds of previously unresolved emotions released into the atmosphere, a celebration of the complete dissolution of boundaries and inhibitions.

The setting sun was doing overwhelmingly wonderful things to the sea and the sky, and it became obvious the time had come to return to the water. I checked in with Mike, who gave me a thumbs up from his prone position between sobs and giggles. I headed down to the shore, barefoot, skipping from rock to rock without moving my head from the sun, which was pulsing with combinations of epic colors and sensations of wonder. I picked up the largest, most beautiful moss-covered rock I could find, about the size of a basketball, and carried it with me into the sea. I sat down, cross-legged, with the water up to my solar plexus, and placed the rock in my lap so I could watch the sunset without being carried away by the tide.

A quote from Sam Harris about trees is the best thing I can say about what it felt like to stare at that scene with a brain full of psilocybin: “It is one thing to be awestruck by the sight of a giant redwood and to be amazed at the details of its history and underlying biology. It is quite another to spend an apparent eternity in egoless communion with it.” That evening, I entered into communion with the sun that was more spiritually, existentially satisfying than any religious ceremony I had been a part of in my efforts to become a rabbi.

Tears of awe rolled down my cheeks. I was continually astonished by the continued intensity of ecstatic wonder I was experiencing, by its consistency and reliability. Surely, I thought, this can’t last any longer. I would wait for it to fade but it would only increase, and long after my jaw had dropped and my tear ducts had emptied I was still sitting there, half-submerged, as waves of water and awe moved into and through me. I remember feeling so completely at peace, so fully satisfied with the moment and with life itself, that I truly did not care if the sea took me then and there. Take me now, sure! — I have lived so fully in this moment, I am satisfied. Sitting there, watching the sunset, the thought of lapsing back into nothingness was not disturbing at all. For the first time since I had lost my faith in the afterlife, death was not a looming dreadful end, but a natural and consoling conclusion.

This was during one of the challenging, difficult periods in my life. My existential crisis had cost me more than just mental health: it cost me my relationships with my family and with most of my friends. I was in a foreign country, going through my first breakup, and struggling to keep up with the demands of my first real job. I was anxious and exhausted and really doubting my ability to survive those circumstances. And then I found myself in a body of bliss and seawater, staring at a sun I’d seen a thousand times but seeing it for the first time, and my ability to be discouraged was rapidly deteriorating. I stared until it disappeared, beneath the waves, and then stood up in the water. Suddenly I was treated to a new sort of hallucination, superimposed over the stunning scenery of the Sea of Galilee. As my mind moved away from the awe and wonder toward the city in the distance behind me, a series of pipes appeared in the air that moved and squirmed and grew. They seemed connected to, representative of, the experience of thinking the way I had been taught to think, the symbols and concepts handed to me by my predecessors in the human experience. I watched in fascination as they started to fade. As they did, I felt my mind relinquish its fearful vise grip on those concepts; they faded with it, until they were gone. I stared at the space where they used to be and heard myself saying:

“Oh —

“Ohhhh —

“OHHHH!!!!”

I was like that for a while, how long I can’t say, just oh-ing away, astonished by how familiar yet novel this realization was: the inherent emptiness of the mental construct I had of the world. The oh’s turned to laughter, which lasted for a while, and then turned to shivers as cool night air settled in over the isolated beach we had made camp in. It didn't bother me, though; the reality of felt, direct experience, even of discomfort, had improved in a way I couldn't articulate at the moment, but knew was powerful. Still, vague concerns of hypothermia began to creep into my mind, and I looked for the first time behind me toward the land, then headed toward Mike and the tent.

When I arrived back at the campsite, Mike was still on the ground. This did not surprise me. What did was his reaction to noticing me. In one motion, he sprang up from the ground and wrapped me in one of the most genuine, warm, and eager hugs I have ever received. When we pulled away, he looked me directly in the eye and said, “Thank you. Thank you. I really needed that.”

We sat down over a meal of fire-roasted canned tuna and hummus, excited to use our freshly returned capacity to vocalize our thoughts in language. Mike told me that he felt like he had just “received open-heart surgery, sans anesthesia, but in the best way.” It remains one of the best nights of my life, among several other life-changing, transformative, and healing psychedelic trips I have had the privilege of experiencing.

Before psychedelics, I struggled with anxiety and depression that effectively crippled me. Anxious looping thoughts, hair pulling, and destructive rumination were the norm. Three years have passed since my first trip, and depression is no longer the monster it once was. My experience of anxiety has been significantly mitigated, but more importantly, my outlook on life, on my experience of consciousness itself, has so radically shifted that the challenges of life and the stress that come with it are experienced in a context that makes them far less intimidating. My broken world, my broken heart, and my broken mind were reorganized and reassembled by nights like that one, on the Sea of Galilee, with a setting sun and a dear friend.

When I lost God, I lost my context for existence. When I ate mushrooms, that broken context was finally replaced with reality.

I will never be the same.