Extract from In Search of the Ultimate High by Nicholas Saunders, Anja Saunders, Michelle Pauli. Published by Random House. Copyright Anja Saunders 2000. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced without prior permission of the copyrightholder.
"All understanding begins with not accepting the world
as it appears"
Alan C Kay
So far we have been looking at people who use psychoactive substances within an existing framework. The framework can vary. It might be a church setting, like the Santo Daime, or a belief system like Buddhism. It can draw upon a tradition like Shamanism or at least provide an accepted structure like an entheogenic workshop. The framework is there to support a spiritual experience. Some people would argue that it is dangerous to take psychoactives without such a framework, or might doubt the validity of a spiritual experience without the spiritual setting.
It is clear from our research that these experiences do occur with psychoactive use at home, in a familiar setting, alone or with good friends. A survey aimed at "people who have had a spiritual experience induced by a drug" was placed on two Internet sites. We wanted to know what people, who did not belong to a specific religion, defined as spiritual; which substances facilitated a spiritual experience; and in what circumstances the psychoactive was taken. We were also interested in what the experiences meant to our respondents afterwards and to what extent their lives have been changed. The survey was not intended to be methodologically rigorous but rather to be a device for research, to allow people to share their experiences, including the personal accounts in this chapter.
The survey included such questions as:
"Spiritual" can mean a variety of things. What do you mean?
Which drugs have enabled you to have a spiritual experience?
In what situations have you had a spiritual experience while using a drug?
Do you feel that such experiences have been harmful or valuable to you and in what way?
Have such experiences made you want to explore spirituality in other ways and, if so, in what ways?
Examples of how people answered the first question are given in the first chapter "Drugs and Spirituality?". Here the focus is on the nature of the experience itself, and the value or harm of such an experience. The circumstances of each case vary. For instance, some people use psychoactives with the express purpose of accessing the divine, whereas others have such an experience out of the blue. The substances used are also diverse: respondents were not restricted in the type or number of drugs they could mention and some people listed as many as seven different psychoactives. The five drugs mentioned most often were: LSD, ecstasy, cannabis, psilocybin mushrooms and DMT.
However, amongst all the diversity it is possible to see common threads and elements in what makes up a drug-induced spiritual experience.
An overwhelmingly positive reaction to spiritual experiences on psychoactives came across strongly in our survey. Many people were unequivocal in their appreciation of the value of their experiences: "they allow me to realise just how grand and wonderful life is" and "they have brought me to peace with things". These positive feelings can be grouped into four categories: unity and sense of place, feelings of overwhelming love, increased openness, and a changed view of death.
Unity and Place
The most common theme running through the accounts of spiritual experience was of how feelings of transcendence of time and place produced an incredible sense of connectedness and oneness with all creation. This is demonstrated in the following account of a particularly epic experience of this kind:
"Always on the lookout for new and effective ways to access God consciousness, I was looking forward to trying Ibogaine. As we assembled, we discussed the preparation. We had all fasted for two days and spent the day before quietly reading, meditating and doing yoga to ensure the best possible experience. We disconnected the phone and put up a sign: "Meditation in progress". We each took a quantity of ibogaine hydrochloride - a chalky white powder with bitter, earthy taste.
We waited one, two, three hours and nothing happened. I had no desire to move. I was in a humming electric cocoon that gave me little funny-bone shocks if I touched it. I was in the middle, centred between euphoria and depression. I felt balanced. My eyes focused in a different way, clear but taking everything in and then the room started to spin. The whirling increased and I felt like I was in the center of a pinwheel. Faster and faster it spun and then I was rising like a projection through the roof, great chunks of wall and brick peeling back and falling away in slow motion. I shot up into the stars, a pair of disembodied eyes wandering, searching. I was an essence, a solo awareness flying though the universe, exploring, seeking.
I continued on through the galaxies until I arrived above a whirling vortex that was coalescing into a solar system. I watched a planet form and came closer to observe. I skimmed the planet, seeing and being everything I came across. As I watched I saw life appear. I observed spots of green forming along the seashores. The oceans seemed to be teeming with life and then the first buglike creatures started to crawl out on land. Slowly it dawned on me I was watching the history of the planet earth! Manlike creatures appeared, civilizations bloomed, I witnessed slaughter and mayham. I was there, in it, feeling both the doer and the done to. For what seemed an interminably long time civilizations rose and fell in interfolding waves of creation, only to fall in smoking ruins followed by ages of darkness. As I lived through this flux and change, there arose in me an awareness of the noble and brave potential of humanity and its duty as the intelligent species to protect the life forms of the planet. I was experiencing a feeling of sacred unity with all life. I felt how all life was precious, interconnecting and supportive of all other life. I dedicated my spirit not to destroy any part of this puzzle of divine mystery that is the milk of creation. Throughout was this balance and acknowledgement of the intertwining of opposites, the negative and positive, the base and the noble. This feeling went through me as a dual aspect of one energy, total, deep and sweeping me away on this immense journey of life's history. It was like falling in love, so entrancing was this vision. Hours had gone by.
What I learned from this trip is that there is a new paradigm arising
for man. Transcending mind he finds spirit and soul."
Nick, aged 40, from Canada (this account written in San Francisco county
jail)
With the loss of ego and sense of self that comes with a powerful experience, the feeling of being part of something much bigger can involve an awareness of fluidity that is often described in terms of 'energy'.
"Soon after taking the 2-CB I closed my eyes and began to see some of the most beautiful patterns morph into living organism. I felt a rush of energy that went from my torso to my lower extremities and out of my body all together. I felt unusually dichotomous - a part of everything and at the same time detached from everybody else. Besides all the physiological effects I was experiencing, my mind was on overdrive.
I began thinking about energy and how it can transform and carry on. I began to think of myself as energy and that when I die I too will transform and continue existing. This wasn't reincarnation but rather a transfer of sort where my energy will continue on some physical level even if I'm not alive. I found great comfort in this thought and all of the sudden death did not worry me anymore. I was living for a change!
I was on my back near a lake looking up at the sky. I felt a part of everything and it seemed that I could sense energy all around me. Trees, flowers, grass, the water - they all seem to have an entity of their own. I kept thinking about a supreme being and the entire hierarchical nature of it all. All of a sudden I became filled with a sense of peace and had a realisation: God/dess is merely an energy that people can be a part of and become in tune with without the traditional "I'm not worthy" worship mentality.
I think entheogens have already shown me the path and it is now up to
me to follow it."
A Hispanic American man, aged 23, working as a social studies teacher
An increased sense of place in the world, a sense of belonging, was a positive feeling emphasised by many who had experienced an underlying oneness with the universe during a trip.
"The first time I took LSD I did so with the intention of broadening my mind and having a new experience. The trip started out as fun: my friend Mandy and I watched The Wizard of Oz on video and thought it was sheer magic as we went into and flew over the rainbow. Then I had a sense of what I can only describe as timelessness; it was as though time as I knew it no longer existed and as this happened I felt that I became something else - my whole identity as a human being in a physical body on an everyday plane of existence began to evaporate, as though I had become energy or my consciousness had left my body. The room was flooded with bright white light and a feeling of serenity came over me, as though who "I" was didn't matter anymore.
Then I was filled with a sense of joy and amazement as I experienced cosmic consciousness: a sense of all things in the universe being interconnected. Everything felt so right, so perfect as I realised that the planet was alive and time and distance were irrelevant. I understood that no matter where we travel to on the earth, we are already spiritually connected to the entire universe - but our lives and society are constructed so that our attention is taken away from this feeling of belonging.
I was finally enlightened to the fact that although we spend our lives
trying to achieve something - wealth, happiness, or to get somewhere, it
is the journey itself that is important; in other words, life itself is
the ultimate "trip"."
Julie, aged 33, from England
The feelings of unity with the universe which some people experienced as a result of entheogens appeared to remain after the experience and to provide a sense of balance and perspective:
"I can put myself in a frame. I feel now that I am part of the One. I gained some stability from my experience which serves as a base upon which my entire life can be built up. It led me out of chaos. It gave me faith" (experience on LSD).
In one case a wider feeling of belonging led to better relationships on a smaller scale too:
"I have a much stronger idea of what it means to be human and where
I 'fit' into the grand scheme of things. As a result of my entheogenic experiences,
I have gradually moved from an atheistic perspective, feeling lost, being
prone to frequent depressive episodes and suicidal tendencies, feeling disconnected
from the society, community and friends, to being a generally peaceful and
optimistic person with a strong religious and spiritual bent, taking an
active role in the unfolding of my life, and feeling connected to friends
and community"
(experiences on LSD and DXM).
The sense of unity can also occur on an individual rather than universal level:
"The best that I ever felt on ecstasy was something that was not quite happiness nor euphoria, but rather a profound and perfect sense of unity of mind, body, spirit and soul; and I understood in an instant exactly what happiness and being happy involved; and at the same time I was overwhelmed by a hope that I would someday get there. I realised that I was looking for something that few people understand or achieve; something that I understand but haven't achieved and cannot articulate. I am searching for a state of being in which mind, body, spirit and soul are fundamentally indivisible yet each feeds the understanding of the other - a feeling that all the words in the world can only understate. That night I almost found it. Someday I think I might."
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