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The Mushroom Chronicles: Plant and Man, The Final Alliance
Introduction
First of all I have to admit that I am every bit the man with a narrow beam flashlight banging around in a very large and pitch black room. I have seen some pretty strange things within this narrow flashlight beam but have no idea where the wall switch for the lights is located in this room. What I hope is that my unorthodox experience in dealing with my mental illness is universally relevant. I not only read about indigenous peoples shamanic uses of mind altering natural substances for the purposes of healing, I obtained these substances; in the most significant instance grew them, and then systematically used them to free myself of the debilitating psychotropic medications which were both harming causing physical harm and obliterating my personality. I used drugs to free my mind of drugs. I use the term “drugs” here for clarity but one of the things I discovered is that we lump many natural, unrefined substances into this drug category, which do not belong there any more than do dried Thyme or Basil. By this I mean that Tylenol is a drug; methamphetamine is a drug; cocaine is a drug; but I do not consider psilocybin mushrooms to be a drug. What I found is that these mushrooms are “plant teachers” and they do not simply allow us to access unconscious material but possess a unique and profound intelligence and interact with us as one sentient being interacts with another. This is meant simply to be an account of my own personal experiences with the mushrooms and how they not only healed me of this psychological disease but transformed me at the deepest emotional and spiritual levels.
I think that it is our greatest hubris that seduces us into believing that we can create chemicals which have not been vetted by millions of years of evolutionary interaction and then introduce them into our own complex biology and the vastly more complex biological systems of the planet and then delude ourselves into thinking that such ignorance will ultimately do good. Here I am referring to more than simply the psychotropic drugs we put into our precious brains and nervous systems but all the man made substances that we dump into our environment with such drunken abandon.
My experience involved a process that took nine months to succeed, coincidentally the length of human gestation? I did this from our small home in the suburbs of a major American city while working at an office in multimillion dollar corporation. I did this mostly via the internet using my visa card. Much to my own surprise my experience with these substances went far beyond my original intentions of healing a nearly thirty year long depression – diagnosed bi-polar II - to revealing my own soul and blessing me with purpose, direction, meaning and most of all a deep and abiding love - as well as burdening me with what I consider to be a dire warning about the future of our biosphere. This warning sat in my belly like a poison for months but now I believe that all I can do is go ahead with telling my story keeping it honest and centered upon my own feelings and experiences. This warning aspect which came later in my experiences was extremely difficult to deal with for a time, perhaps like knowing that your loved one is going to die but not knowing how; or, more significantly, not knowing how to prevent their death. I think about it every day but I do not feel as though it is tearing me apart any more. I will return to this as it was without question the most bizarre aspect of what turned out to be a far, far stranger experience than I ever dreamed possible.
I think that where this all begins for me was three o’clock in the morning sitting in the office of a sleazy motel at the age of nineteen with the short barrel of a .38 caliber revolver in my mouth. I can taste the metal flavor even now, a little like the taste of blood. I worked this lonely all night shift so that I could write. The audit took me only two or three hours and then I wrote the rest of the night in the welcome solitude. This was circa 1978 so I used a manual typewriter. The clicking of the typewriter and the slight hum of the neon lights outside the office seemed like a beautiful symphony to me: the sound of purpose. On the night that I had this gun in my mouth I had determined after two months of “writers block” that I would never write again. (Perhaps you are nineteen or you remember being nineteen: how unbearably long two months is!) That two months of sitting in the same place through the dark hours of morning without the reassuring clicking of my typewriter but only with the maddening hum of the neon lights and a blank sheet of white paper had become the worst kind of cliché: hell on earth. I had been writing fiction by means of what I can only call automatic writing such that when I sat before a blank piece of paper I generally had only the vaguest notion of what I was going to write. Once I started the characters literally took on a life of their own complete with relationships and story lines, saying and interacting in manners unimaginable to me. During this period, I read everything Hemingway ever wrote. I recall him commenting that when he wrote he discovered that he knew things that he never knew he knew. Now Hemingway was an awfully practical fellow for a romantic. So I didn’t think of my automatic writing as being particularly unusual, only a manner of knowing things I never knew I knew. My first love had always been reading and I guess my writing was like reading since as it appeared before me it was almost like reading someone else’s fiction. Characters came to life right before my eyes and literally told their own stories. I had come to believe that if I could not write then I did not want to live. What other reason for living was there?
In retrospect, even though I could not pull the trigger, I died that night and I stayed dead for twenty eight years until the morning of 02/25/07 when the mushrooms resuscitated me in their own, special way. To a significant degree, I knew all along that I was dead inside. As the years, even decades passed, this awareness grew inside like a tumor. I really do not write this to be in any way melodramatic. There is such a state as Living Death and I am certain that I am not the only person to whom this is familiar. Many people familiar with this state go on to kill themselves. Many do not kill themselves but only destroy themselves, perhaps taking their loved ones with them. Years of psychotherapy pursued which provided me with profound insight into my childhood and my own psychology; and, I hope, a much deeper empathy for others psychologies, but ultimately no life. It was to this state of living death that “the mushrooms” addressed themselves most significantly during my breakthrough experience. They informed me that they eat dead things and could be of no help to me if I were not alive. Somehow these psilocybin mushrooms broke through to me in that crucial way beyond intellectual understanding; in that internalized, gestalt of realization that seems to precedent dramatic human spiritual transformation. A more colloquial way of putting it is that they busted my head so wide open that the light of the cosmos poured right in, amen!
I feel it necessary to be clear here that I was not engaged in the kind of get high, giggle-giggle adolescent nonsense in which many of us have indulged – not that there is anything wrong with that, for the most part. Engaging in that type of behavior is probably a natural part of our human psychology; throwing a human being in jail for it is the unnatural part. I approached all the substances that I dealt with in the most reverent manner I could muster, dead as I was. I knew that I was no shaman but that I was using shamanic methods. I had made up my mind early on that there would be no feathers or chanting or dancing – again, not that there is anything wrong with that. I just could not see myself chanting and dancing and my feelings here are definitely not something I would defend in any way. I think that I would have been better off with the full regalia of ceremony as would our modern society in general. My instinct was that I would not benefit by doing something that made me feel uncomfortable and I think that for me this was a good instinct. The mushrooms seem to be able to work their magic even without the traditional forms of interaction. I would have dearly loved to have had the option of attending a mushroom ceremony instead of having to approach this in total isolation as a criminal act which had to be carefully hidden away from my fellow humans.
I took a stab at school, psychology of course, but failed and went on to work a truly dead end job in a business for which I did not have even a mustard seed of passion. The relationship I developed with my work over twenty years became very negative. I constantly experienced my work as microcosm of our society at large – that is, a frustratingly stupid environment that systematically stultified my humanity. Certainly I am not alone in this feeling. Later in my twenties, I tried various antidepressants. My decade’s long commitment to psycho-pharmaceuticals that followed happened to corresponded to the rise of our Prozac Nation. Really, here were the core years of a human life and what did they matter to me since I was dead? I have some regret about what a waste those twenty eight years were but I recognize now that I could not have arrived at this present moment by any other route: so be it. Here is one of the gifts the mushrooms bestowed, acceptance. After trying for decades to address this depression with both extensive psychotherapy and medication, I gave up and lapsed into what I can only describe as a fatal ennui which lasted for many years. I say fatal because I have no doubt that I would have died from it at my hand eventually. Finally, at the age of forty five, after having given up on being alive, I went to see a psychologist at my wife’s urging – actually, after years of my wife’s urging. Perhaps one of the newer antidepressants would help, I reasoned. It had been a while since I had tried. When the psychologist I saw asked me if I had any thoughts of suicide I simply told her the truth. She simply went ballistic. Apparently I had the most elaborate suicide fantasy that she had ever heard. It had become so much a part of me that I did not even think of it as being odd any longer.
Her alarm somehow hit me just right. I guess it appealed to that little part of me that wouldn’t let me pull the trigger all those years. By this time I had determined that I was one significant life problem away from suicide – loss of job, loss of marriage, significant health crisis. She convinced me, partly through my witness of the sincerity of her alarm, that induction, diagnosis and the ensuing medications could actually help me and this is why I committed myself that day, something I still find amazing. As I said, by this time my psychological “tumor” of impending doom had grown to frightening proportions. Every New Years I write a “state of union” haiku that I feel either sums up the past year or looks forward to the coming year, and that particular haiku was:
The breath of doom
Soft as intuition
Stirs the hairs on my neck
Until that moment I in no way believed that I would ever commit myself. I still can’t believe it. As I said before, it was the only way that I could get to this place now. That having been said, the ensuing commitment in a mental institute was a dismal, humiliating experience. (This stands in stark contrast to the healing experience of the psilocybin mushrooms which was the exact opposite: loving beyond articulation, uplifting, beautiful, empowering) This psychologist was on the phone instantly to my wife and then immediately to an in house treatment facility where I was to find myself standing somewhat in a state of shock only a few hours later. Before going in I had run by our house and picked up a few essentials that for me always included books. One of the books I took in with me happened to be the book, The Cosmic Serpent by Jeremy Narby, which led after an eighteen month gestation to this quixotic notion of saving myself with shamanic hallucinogens. It is a short book and I read all of during my three days commitment and it made a hell of an impression on me. Of the thousands of books that I have read in my life this is without a doubt the most significant book that I have ever read. It definitely made me began to wonder if these “primitive, superstitious shaman” were not on to something. At that time I had no idea how much of an impact that it would ultimately have upon my life.
After induction when I met with my assigned psychiatrist he asked me what I thought my diagnosis was and I said Bipolar II without hesitation. I had banged around in the DSM a few years earlier and Bipolar II fit my psychological symptoms exactly. The doctor then turned the notebook that he had on his lap around so I could see it and written there was his diagnosis from my extensive induction paper work: bipolar II. He was impressed with my self awareness and when after a long talk I pointed out how little my perception had helped me over the years, he assured me that the meds would help. I had a “chemical imbalance” that the meds would correct. I took my meds compliantly and for a while they seemed to help: the desired emotional leveling of my personality was achieved. At one point I found myself humming “everything is beautiful in its own way”. You would just have to know me to appreciate how wrong that is. My newly drugged self was probably more palatable to society and those around me including my wife but it quickly became clear to me that this artificial, drug induced state was not sustainable. Numerous and debilitating side of effects of these drugs presented themselves including memory loss, an increasingly distressing and severe tardive-dyskinesia; and the fact that I was becoming an emotional zombie. My ongoing psychiatrist dutifully prescribed me different medications to try and mitigate these symptoms but our fifteen minute sessions focused solely on the medications and their direct symptoms and he had little to say regarding my concern over the loss of my personality. Some of the feelings that these medications induced were almost unbearable. The merry-go-round of medication literally left my head spinning at times and each seemed to be worst than the last.
It became obvious to me during this period also that there is an aspect of mind control in our new reliance on these psycho-pharmaceuticals. I will touch on this in the book but again this aspect has been addressed by others more capable than I and would take me far away from a focus on my own feelings and experiences. But this aspect is simply too insidious to side step entirely. I have always felt that Brave New World was an amazing act of prescience by Huxley – and that was long before reading Doors of Perception. My experience with these medications was certainly that they were better at making me a complacent consumer than they were at relieving my emotional distress. My concern is for the future. We will inevitably improve upon these medications reducing their most obvious side effects. My concern is that these medications will still possess their zombie effect and there is no doubt in my mind that this has Brave New Worldish connotations. We as a species are constantly choosing which “drugs” to employ and there is what appears to me to be a consistent pattern of choosing substances that promote and protect “the status quo”. While I am certain that we are in no danger of losing our humanity to a plant, I am almost equally certain that we will loose our humanity to a man made synthetic substance, or more realistically a complex of man made synthetic substances. When I read Brave New World some thirty years ago and Soma gave me the creeps. It is one thing to have your humanity beaten out of you by the butt of a rifle but it is another to have it seduced out from under your own nose so that you do not even know what you have lost. This I see already happening. I have often thought that if there were soldiers in the street like in good, old fashioned fascism a la Orwell’s 1984, we would be a lot better off – then we would all understand what was happening to us at least.
I had told my new psychologist about my wife’s .357 magnum pistol sitting in the nightstand next to our bed and its central role in my elaborate suicide fantasy but in the ensuing alarm I never got to tell her how reassuring that pistol was: if it ever got too bad to bare, I could end it if I wanted to! No doubt, this sentiment would have been no reassurance to her at all. I never went near the gun, never even looked at it, but just knowing it was there was my “one-day-at-a-time” way of coping, sick as that may be. A year after this commitment when I entered what turned out to be a nine month period of obtaining, growing and consuming, various entheogens, the gun served a similar purpose as I told myself that if I were caught, I would blow my head off rather than go to prison. If I may, I would request that you overlook the sickness of this position and imagine the depth of desperation that it reflects. I am not nor have I ever been any kind of criminal and at a very deep level prison is more frightening to me than anything, even death itself. By this time I felt that I really had my back against the wall and I was completely aware of the possible legal implications of what I was doing – even though I find these legal consequences to be a real sickness in our society. The thought of making a plant that grows naturally out of the ground illegal; of taking away a human beings freedom for consuming such an innocent plant, is repulsive to me. But then again, we evidently have decided as a society that it is perfectly okay to patent a human gene, so our sickness seems to know no bounds. By this time it had been over a year since my voluntary commitment and even though I followed the doctor’s advice to the letter and took my meds with the regularity of a machine, the tumor was still inside me in a state of uneasy stasis. I felt death breathing on the back of my neck and this breath seemed to compete with my fear of the legal consequences of my actions. I was not particularly afraid of death and did not in any way dwell upon death. What I realized is that it was not death at all that I was afraid of , it was life – life terrified me. It had been terrifying me for my entire adult life.
I recall taking this loaded pistol out of the nightstand eighteen months after my voluntary commitment for suicidal ideations on the evening of 02/25/07, after my breakthrough experience that morning with the mushrooms and looking at it, turning the pistol slowly around in my hands. I had never had any interest in guns except for suicide and I wondered at how it had lost all its meaning to me now. For so long it had been this hard, steel, brutal anchor by which my precarious psychology was moored against a frightening and tempestuous sea. It was as if by transforming myself I had transformed the stainless steel .357 magnum. In fact, it was exactly like that. By transforming myself I had transformed everything. Everything was completely different now. I would never be able to kill myself. Now that I had awoken from my twenty eight years of death, suicidal ideations were as vanquished as were my life long abandonment issues. Before eating those mushrooms earlier that day, I had been an atheist and now God was more real than the heft of this gun. I put it back and closed the drawer: wow, that is heavy, I thought.
Heavy as it was, it was only an inkling of just how much my life was changed.
On 02/25/07 – a date I recall the way perhaps an alcoholic recalls their date of sobriety - only three hours after ingesting 5 grams of psilocybin which I grew myself, I stared out our living room window at snow accumulating on the ancient azaleas and vowed to exhaust every resource that I could muster to pursue what I believed to be “the tiger”. I had The Tiger by the tail and I wasn’t about to let go. The soulless materialist existence that I had lived sat on the floor next to me like the old crumpled, outgrown skin of a snake. I felt as if I were glistening and new. I looked back on my years of living death coldly, rationally, without regret or remorse but fully understanding the nature of the waste that it represented. What more could I possibly waste than my own life? Yes it is the sins of omission not the sins of commission that get you. I had the tiger by the tail and I wasn’t going to let go, not ever. What exactly is the Tiger? Well, I can’t say exactly but I know that everything – literally everything – is a distraction and that this tiger is The Reality beyond language – the reality of God beyond our concept of God; what in Zen they call Satori. I did not find a Christian God or any God that I had ever read about but something real and tangible and I wasn’t about to let go. At one point within the psilocybin experience, I had punched my hand and arm through the veil that seemed to separate what I can only call our “conscious reality” (call it “language reality”) from a greater surrounding reality. This was a very visceral experience. So much of this is so impossible for language. It is as if what we perceive as “everything” is really the inside of a vast, opaque ball and beyond the inside of the ball is an even vaster reality. When I managed to punch my arm through it was as if I were crawling along the inner surface of our confining conscious reality. As I crawled along, I continuously slammed my forehead against the inner surface in an attempt to physically punch through to the other side. Occasionally, I would punch it with my fist. Dammit, there must be a way through! Finally, I punched my right arm through up to the shoulder but could go no farther and it was then that I grasped the tiger’s tail. Got ya! The tail was something real to me, something tangible. Once I had this tail, I knew I was onto something real. Now if I was insane, than I was an insane man with the tiger’s very tail clutched tightly in his fist. One of the few things that I have ever in my life allowed myself to feel pride in, is that I did not let go of that tigers tail, and in holding on it has thrashed me around in what has turned out to be the wildest ride of my life.
I told my wife that afternoon that I intended to quit my job and reduce my cost to the absolute minimum and use every resource that I had, including my 401k monies, to pursue the truth of this reality – to pursue this tiger which I had by the tail. All conventionality snapped and I stood so far out of the box that I could not even see the box. Our marriage had been a difficult one to say the least. I told her that I was not going to negotiate and that I would agree to any arrangement she wanted. I did not for a second believe that she would go along with this … insanity. Because I was not insane but quite lucid, I understood perfectly well how insane I must have sounded. I saw clearly the strange, dark path that lay stretched out before me and I knew that I would take this path now for better or worse. I had no idea where this path would lead but it was down this path that the tiger was pulling me. O the pull of the tiger is very strong. I think I can say that I have never been so surprised in my life as when she agreed to go along with what I was certain that she would perceive – wouldn’t anyone? - as my psilocybin mushroom inspired madness. I guess this is really what you call love. Even though it had been merely four hours since ingesting 5 grams of mushrooms, I had the lucidity to understand just how preposterous was my position. I have to say what I have heard so many other people say about various unusual experiences: I wouldn’t believe it if it hadn’t happened to me!
Within less than three months I had quit my job and we had closed on our house, literally weeks before the housing market collapsed – like stepping away from a crumbling cliff at the last possible second. Coincidentally, my wife suffered that rare (1%) a complication from a simple surgery that turned out to be completely debilitating. It is seven months later now and she is still in no physical shape to work. She was kept alive by an IV stint in her arm providing liquid nutrition and hydration for three solid months and danced on the lip of death. The fact is that as is the case with so many Americans, we were in no shape financially to absorb what would have turned out to be the total loss of her income. After about a month she was fired from her professional position as an ophthalmic technician, having only a couple weeks of sick leave. She went from being a very high functioning woman to being virtually helpless. Since we had no idea at the time how serious her condition was, and believed each day that she was merely one day, or one week away from turning the corner, we would have no doubt hung in there and eventually found ourselves with maxed out credit cards, delinquent mortgage payments, ending without a doubt in bankruptcy. If I had not had my mushroom experience, this situation with my wife would have been exactly the straw that would have broken the camels back, I am sure. I was the only caretaker who she had and it pains me beyond words to admit it, but if the mushrooms had not released me from the state of living death that I had languished in for over two decades, her sickness and the ensuing financial ruin that we narrowly dodged, would no doubt have lead to my own suicide. Suicide may be the very definition of selfishness. My sense here of dodging the bullet at many levels was very strong but I have no reason to believe this anything other than a coincidence.
The three months from 02/25/07 until we closed on our house was a very busy time and very stressful time. I knew that I had to write about my experience but was concerned about the legal ramifications. I conceived of a fictional vehicle that I believed would protect me and still allow me to convey my experience. In my early years before the above mentioned writer’s block, I had only been interested in fiction and I knew that if I lived a million years, I would never remotely conceive of writing any nonfiction, so this came quite naturally to me once the mushrooms had restored my ability to write.
During this time also I was writing a lot of material that I considered being “from the mushrooms”. One thing that is already apparent I am sure, is that I do not believe that the psilocybin mushroom simply allowed access to previously unrealized – subconscious – aspects of my own mind, but that they convey information inherent to themselves. I am not exactly sure of how this can be so, but for such enquiry is life lived. My suspicion is that psilocybin enhances our nervous system in such a manner as to allow us to communicate with an otherwise unrealized Plant consciousness. On the other hand, they may simply possess an innate intelligence of their own; or more likely some combination. About one month after my breakthrough experience, during which time I consumed no mushrooms, I engaged in an extended inner, collaborative dialogue with the mushrooms . I felt a need to tell the mushrooms story mostly out of sense of both love and gratitude. This inner dialogue is hard to describe but was not the same as “the voice” which came afterwards and which I will describe in a moment. What this involved was really just a form of automatic writing during which I felt as though the information was coming not from my subconscious but somehow from the mushrooms. Only in retrospect did I come to understand that a relationship was evolving between the mushrooms and myself. I will explore that much further in the book.
During this period, I was “asked” by the mushrooms not to write my experience as a disguised fiction but as a factual memoir and I readily agreed, grasping immediately how this was necessary at many levels. I have no illusions about the possibility of substances like marijuana or psilocybin being legalized. I understand now how frightening these substances are to the status quo of our society. I am very pessimistic about the future and there are far more serious issues than psilocybin mushrooms. Right now our country is in the midst of an illegal war. Our constitution and our very democracy is threatened in a way that in my opinion has not existed since the rise of Hitler and second world war – only now the threat is not from the outside, but the inside. How much more insidious is this? Who would not rather fight an interloper than a cancer? That having been said, I have determined that I must personally turn away from this political reality. For now I feel it best for myself anyway to work on a personal, spiritual level. Really, I see little hope for our nation, our world or our species and this itself puts me in a very odd position. At the same time that I see something very positive in the form of a growing “Archaic Revolution”, as well as unprecedented personal hope, I see my society literally crumbling around me. One thing that drew me to Shamanism is the way that they do not shy away from the dark side of life. I have never had patience for Pollyanna’s and I still do not proscribe to what I consider a bunch of new age nonsense. The success of our human culture has taken us from launching a stick across the African savannah to launching a space probe beyond our galaxy. Our human culture has also brought us to the brink of total destruction. I just do not think that placing crystals strategically around the planet will save us magically. To me Karma is when you do not brush your teeth and eventually they rot in your mouth – and we have not been brushing our teeth.
After a period of about two months period post 02/25/07, during which I still had consumed mushrooms only once, I began to really hear voices. I did not hear them in the form of an auditory hallucination that is exactly as if someone were actually speaking out loud. I heard the voices in the form of alien thoughts in my head. It really is hard to explain. I have given it some thought especially since I will have to write about it in some detail eventually, but suffice it to say that there was not doubt at the time that thoughts were my own and which were not. The first time I noticed it, I was stunned: this cannot possibly be happening. When this started happening, I was under a great deal of pressure. It was just after my wife had to be admitted for a life threatening infection in the picline that provided nourishment through a vein in her arm. This line was slide up to within inches of her heart such that an infection, we had been told, could be deadly. In addition to this, I had already quit my job and we were about to close on our house, manifesting in reality what had been conceived under the influence of psilocybin mushrooms. On the one hand, because we had no income with which to pay a mortgage, getting out from under our ponderous mortgage was a very good thing, indeed. On the other hand, we were about to be homeless with my wife now deathly ill. Because I was not insane, I realized all too well the precarious nature of our position in the world, feeling no manic sense of invulnerability. My bold plan had not take into account a wife on the verge of death, suffering from we really knew not what with no end in sight.
I could not have anticipated my wife’s illness and it complicated things greatly. It was really dawning on me that I could not put the genie back in the bottle. I couldn’t help but think of the scene in the Matrix where Morpheus says to Neo, “if you take the Blue Pill, there is no going back.” Well, I had taken the Blue Pill. I felt very bad for my wife. I had signed on for this, Jana’ had not. I did not feel guilt because I had done what I had to do – as I have said, our suburban house and even my job would not have helped in this case but only have dug us deeper into a hole. At the time, we still had hope for a medical “cure” and we had plenty of money and now freedom to go wherever we felt necessary for medical intervention. I did feel tremendous stress. Perhaps many can understand how it is easier sometimes to undergo something yourself than to watch it happen to a loved one. If nothing else, you don’t have to think about it so much. I believe that this stress precipitated “the voice” phenomenon and have since gathered some understanding of what this voice may have been all about. But at the time it was far weirder to me than it must sound to you – it was actually happening to me.
The first two weeks after this “new” voice phenomenon started were the hardest by the end of which I felt as if I were really going insane. The voices were no doubt the voice of the mushrooms and there was nothing disintegrative about this voice, nothing negative – it wise and loving just like the mushrooms. Still, having to attend to my own thoughts and the thoughts of an alien other is more than a little stressful. At about the two week point I began to integrate the voice into my life and my impending sense of insanity abated. I could not for the life of me understand how it was happening, but I began to accept this voice in my head and to understand that it was helping me, not hurting me. Just after this I came across a book by Daniel B. Smith titled, “Muses, Madmen and Prophets,” which offered much solace. I saw him on a talk show pushing his book and I definitely perked up an ear, given my situation. When I first read this in Borders, I read around looking for anything in the book which could shed light on my own recent experience with these voices. I would read something and think: this is not what is happening to me, these people are clearly insane! Still, when I left the book store, I held it the way someone adrift in the ocean might hold onto a life preserver. After a more careful reading, I found that there were others who heard voices and that they were not all insane, contrary to the opinion of modern psychiatry. People apparently either integrated their voices into their lives or they really did go insane. Mushrooms were never mentioned but there were numerous parallels to my own experience – not the least of which was the fact that psychiatrist presented with the slightest whiff of voices in a patient immediately pumped them full schizophrenic medications. In many cases the voices caused no problems to the individuals affected but the schizophrenic medications they were given most certainly did. There was clearly a spiritual aspect to many of these voice hearers’ experiences but this also was completely ignored. Those who integrated the voices went on to function perfectly well, often finding the voices helpful. I realized that after two weeks, I had already begun integrating them and that what I was doing was a normal process for someone who hears voices. This was most reassuring to me because at the time I did not know if these voices in my head would ever go away.
Sometimes the alien thoughts would respond to my own, almost conversationally. The voice was always very succinct and I had the sense that the mushrooms had a really hard time generating language. Often they would offer a very succinct few words and the rest of what they meant I would have to extrapolate. An example is once when I sort of had my head in my hands and was thinking wearily, “what will I do about Jana’, the doctors are useless”. The voice came back and said: “a Navy Seal will heal her”. One thing that I had noticed is that the voices were literal, never metaphorical. They meant what they said and said what they meant. I also took them very seriously. If they said a Navy Seal would heal her, then I had no question in my mind that a Navy Seal would heal her. By this time I was really concerned that she was going to die. I couldn’t imagine HOW a Navy Seal would save her but I had complete faith that what they said was literally true. Then it came into my mind that this Navy Seal would be a man who practices hypnosis and that he would be able to heal her through hypnotherapy – hard to put into words, but I knew that is what the mushrooms meant. We had determined that her problem has something to do with the severing of the vagus nerve and what was killing her was simply an inability to keep down water or food without throwing it up. In a way her problem was terribly simple. The idea that hypnosis could help in this situation was not quite as far fetched as it sounds since there was at least possibly in all of this a psychosomatic element. I reasoned that unlike her surgery that had caused all of this, hypnosis could certainly not hurt. I actually spent a lot of time on the phone trying to track down a Navy Seal or – I thought – most likely an ex Navy Seal who was a practicing Hypnotherapist. I could not, of course, tell anyone why my wife had to have a Hypnotherapist who happened to also be a Navy Seal. I got no where with that and even tried to enlist my wife’s help – she is a Navy veteran. I still believe that a Navy Seal could have healed her and I believe it simply because the mushrooms said it was so. She had been throwing up almost constantly, unable to eat or even to drink the slightest sip of water. Throwing up constantly for months on end is literally torturous. It was tormenting just to watch. She never told me, but she was considering suicide after two months of this torture with no end in sight as none of her doctors could say exactly why she was throwing up or when or even if it would ever stop. Jana’ basically would have nothing to do with my search for a Navy Seal hypnotist. I found this very frustrating since I knew in my heart that the mushrooms had given us the key to helping her and I felt that since she was a Navy veteran, she might be able to find this Seal while I could not.

This voice phenomenon lasted for a period of about one month. On each of the last three days I had a very powerful experience. Each of these experiences were the most powerful of any of my experiences with this voice and each was uniquely accompanied by strong bodily sensation of energy which I can only describe as an electric energy even though the sensation was not at all like that of being shocked. These three experiences were the only times that I felt this energy. I just cannot think of any other word to describe the bodily sensation involved. I had never felt anything like this before and on each of the three days the sensation was similar but not at all identical. The first experience was on father’s day and is by far the most difficult experience to write about. The second was the day after father’s day and this was the warning about our biosphere. The third was the following day and was when this voices left, actually “saying” goodbye. This was 6/17, 6/18/ 6/19/2007.
Father’s Day: I do not have any children. I write this because I have made what I consider to be a sacred commitment to write with the utmost veracity about every aspect of my experience with the mushrooms no matter how outrageous or even unflattering it may be. This I very much do not want to write. Sometime in the afternoon while alone in the kitchen of a suite we were renting next to the hospital where my wife was being treated for her picline infection, I thought rather idly, “at least I don’t have any kids to worry about”. I very much was worrying about my wife and I guess that is why this thought came to me. It was just an idle thought, something that I would not even normally notice and I am sure that a similar thought must have popped into my head on previous Father’s Days. What follows is a good example also of how … moralistic the mushrooms could be. At this time, I did not fully understand the relationship that was evolving between us. The mushrooms had moved far beyond bipolar disorders to addressing my being as a spiritual whole. I have said how loving they were but their love was not always fluffy and cuddly. They often applied what in Zen is called “grandmotherly kindness”, what we may call “tough love” but they also did it without negativity or blame but with a really healing kind of purity. It is in this way, in addition to their deep and abiding love, that they helped me so much. It was not unusual for them to respond to a thought I might have, although this is not how they always expressed themselves. As soon as I thought: “at least I don’t have any kids to worry about”, they responded in their typically succinct manner, again without blame or reproach but just simply and flatly stating: “you have a dead baby girl, Dakota” and this simple statement opened what is unquestionably the most painful emotional floodgate ever released in my life. Years earlier I had impregnated a woman and after much emotional angst she had miscarried a girl who she named Dakota. I had made up my mind to marry her and raise this child, but only reluctantly. I in no way wanted to marry her or have a child with her but after a very bad childhood myself, I had long ago sworn that I would never, ever abandon my child. I told myself that I would simply make it work and that our child would have a mother and a father, period. I had made the commitment to my potential child not this woman, however. When she miscarried I dropped her like a hot potato. It is fair to say that I almost literally ran away – a dark experience in my life for which I still feel only shame and regret. Over the years, I had very much put this behind me. The slightest thought of it brought only the deepest shame. I cannot imagine that my feelings about it were much different from a soldier who discovers that he is a coward. When the voice in my head said: you have a dead baby girl, Dakota – it was really almost more than I could stand. This was my first experience with this energy and it seemed to be burning me alive. The pain I felt was more than my callused disregard for this woman and this child, it was all the selfishness of my entire existence and I sobbed harder than I had ever felt possible while the pain seemed to consume me like a fire. I recall screaming out loud, “I can’t stand this, dear God, I can’t stand this”. I found myself suddenly on the floor. I was on my knees and without thought, like a man on fire, I began to hammer my closed fists into the kitchen floor, crying and screaming like a madman. I found myself begging, “take this earth, please I can’t stand this, take this,” and I still have no idea what possessed me to say that or to get on my knees. The voice, barely “audible” in my thoughts through the screaming madness of my pain said, “open your hands, put your forehead on the ground”. Without thinking about it, already on my knees, I placed my sobbing head forehead against the floor and without a second of self consciousness, began to slam instead of my closed fist my open palms onto the floor, screaming, “take this earth, please take this pain,” and after an indeterminate amount of time, I felt what I can only describe as a bolt of energy – this same energy which seemed to be all the pain burning me from the inside out – discharge from my forehead into the kitchen floor. This brought my head abruptly up as if someone had touched it with a tazer. I can’t say that my pain went totally away but it was reduced by ninety percent or so, or to what I would just say was bearable levels. I felt exhausted and confused, sobbing still only less violently. I sat on the floor for a long time slumped against the kitchen counters. I felt numb and afraid. It was as if someone had leaped out of no where and shocked me with an almost deadly jolt of electricity and I literally feared that at any moment a second jolt could come – I think for a long while I was simply too afraid to move. This definitely qualified as the worst father’s day ever.
The next day I was sitting at the hotel writing. I was just about to get in the shower and go over to the hospital to see my wife. Out of no where, I felt a slight tingling in feet. Again, what I can only describe as an electric energy seemed to be coming up from the floor. The voice in my head then did something that it only did this once, it shouted. Imagine a voice in your head, and then imagine that voice shouting. It was so bizarre that I can think of no other way to describe it. It shouted WARNING, WARNING over and over, like a boat horn as simultaneously this energy rose up into my legs. I couldn’t help for a second but to think of the robot from Space Family Robinson. This all took seconds but I have the pad which was sitting next to my laptop where I wrote, warning, warning, and then began to write the message that the voice delivered and on the pad there is this writing trailing off into a long scrawl where I began to loose consciousness. The energy coming up from the floor did not hurt but rose up my legs as if fear itself were rising up my legs. Imagine a cobra crawling up your pants leg, maybe – that kind of fear. As this energy rose into my torso, the screaming alarm, WARNING, WARNING ceased and the voice said “normally” in what was by far the longest and most complex sentence that it ever uttered in my head,
“If you connect the mind of man to the mind of a machine before connecting the mind of man to the mind of plant, the biosphere is doomed.”
Even as this long message from the voice played inside my head, the energy wave coming up from the floor reached the level of my chest. I was certain that I was having a heart attack as I slid off of the chair crumpling onto to the floor in a heap. My thought was at once that I am dying and also that no one will hear this message. I did not understand what this message meant, but it clearly meant a lot to the voice. On father’s day the energy had gone from myself down into the earth and on this next day the energy had come up from the earth into myself. I have a pretty good idea what the message means. Unfortunately, for this message to do any good it would have to be delivered to those who are working on a cybernetic computer to human “connection”. My guess is that no scientist who could be of any help would give any of this the slightest consideration: a conundrum. The mushrooms were always literal and I know that by machine they meant computer. This actually answered a lot a questions for me. We humans are on the threshold of creating a new consciousness and this new consciousness will change everything, just as our human consciousness has obviously changed everything, only not necessarily for the better – this much I understood. What exactly the Plant Mind is and how exactly it will save our biosphere is still a bit of mystery. Much of what happened to me is a mystery but for me that doesn’t make it any less meaningful.
Here is what I believe that the Plant Mind was saying with this warning. Our biggest problem as a species is that our intelligence – our technology/culture – has far exceeded our wisdom. My guess is that anyone who has bothered to read this far would not argue such a statement in it’s broadest terms. The key here for me is that in all my experiences with this mushroom voice phenomenon, it had always been literal not metaphorical or allegorical. I noted this aspect immediately because it is only natural to express mystical experience metaphorically and allegorically and this literalness stood out. I pondered this a lot. My guess is that the mushrooms may not be capable of such use of our language. They definitely seemed to have a difficult time with language and think in maybe an odd or almost ironic way, their lack of human language facility led to them “speaking” only in this literal manner. This is all very different from the well known ability of low dose mushrooms to greatly enhance “our own” language facility. What they are saying is that we are about to enhance our human consciousness through a computer interface. What I am talking about here is more than a simple silicon implant to enhance mathematical ability or the kind of mind body enhancements already in the news whereby say a paraplegic can move a mouse with their mind – as amazing as all this is. What I see is an intelligent machine that has its own consciousness. Problem is that we will have made this machine still in a state lacking real wisdom and this interface will create a new consciousness and this new consciousness will be, according to this voice message, what precedents the ultimate destruction not only of our ourselves but of all DNA life from the depths of the earth to the heights of the atmosphere. This is what the Giaian Consciousness/Plant Consciousness is alarmed about. So basically what the voice is saying is that when – or before – such an interface is made, we need to be tripping balls. A few weeks before this happened I had been resting my head in my hands and again thinking rather idly, “man what is this shit all about”, still grappling with what was happening to me. Just then the voice chimed in: “I am a New Creature. I am here to save the biosphere”. I assume the above message to be from this self proclaimed New Creature and no I do not consider this New Creature to be any part of myself at any level, unconscious or otherwise. For months the mushrooms had addressed themselves only to me personally, my own personal emotional and spiritual issues. This New Creature, this “warming” was different – this was not about my personal issues, period.
Because I am not a megalomaniac or suffering in some state of semi-permanent mania, I wondered often during these months, “why me?”. The only answer I can come up with is twofold. One, some weeks before this New Creature announced itself, and before the warning, I had reached a level in my symbiosis with the mushrooms and the mushroom voice where I had promised them my allegiance. My trust evolved to the point where I felt that this was necessary. It was a matter of gratitude, purely and simply. It is exactly as if someone had saved your life and you might think sincerely, if only to yourself, “I would give my life for that man/woman, I owe them that much, my gratitude is that great”. I do not regret it for a second but I do believe that this commitment to them a very deep level led some weeks later to the New Creature and the warning. Two, the Plant Mind/Giaian Mind, by reaching out to someone like myself, is demonstrating just how desperate She is.
The next and third day the voice left, saying goodbye in their way. My wife was home from the hospital and because she could not stand the smell of food, I was driving to a nearby Indian restaurant when this happened. They said: “you are done” and I felt immediately the most incredible feeling of warmth and love flush my whole body and I knew that they were saying goodbye. I looked down at the digital clock on the dash and it read 6:12. The energy this time was exactly like a body encompassing hug and it just enveloped me and this time it was not frightening at all. Father’s day had been horrific but I think healing. The day before with the warning had really been without question the only experience that I had with the mushrooms from 02/25/07 until 06/26/07, almost four months, which I could describe as negative. This is why it shook me up so badly. This is a most esoteric and most personal science, but I try to make sense of the mushrooms and I do not think that it was a coincidence that this message came the day before “they left”. At this point, I really was not sure if these voices would ever leave my head. As I looked at the dash, I was not 100 percent certain that they had really left, but 99 percent so. As I ate my Indian food I “listened” more carefully than ever. Exactly ½ of me was glad that they were gone and exactly ½ was sad that they were gone. By the time I went to sleep that night I was as certain as I could be that the voice phenomenon was over – but at the time how could I know if it would come back? It is now seven months and they have not returned.
It is not my intention to “prove” anything. The warning not withstanding, for one thing at the deepest level I do not feel that there is anything to prove. I believe that the destructiveness of our amazing human society is a tangible reality and that it has amassed more than enough power and momentum to destroy our civilization. I wish I could believe that the movement of crystals to particular points on the planet, or the prayers of the meditating millions, or anything could have an effect but I just do not see that. If aliens came from outer space with unimagined terra-forming technology … well, that is a hellava thread to hold onto. I now often see the world as if I am in some memory reality and it is already gone, people walking around, the sky overhead, the sound of children playing. When I first discussed this with my wife she said, “like Linda Hamilton in The Terminator when she’s looking at the playground”. Yes, exactly like that – eerily, horribly, hopelessly just like that. I do not feel any fear of death. Yet another gift the mushrooms imparted was relieving any fear of death. That is not to say that if some thug puts a gun to my head that I may not piss my pants. My existential fear of death is just gone. I guess that is from being shown how little of what “I” am is in this body which dies. But sometimes when a child looks into my eyes, their innocent, sparkling eyes so full of life and so full of … the future, I have to look away the feeling is almost unbearable. How much I wish that I am wrong about this and basically I try not to think about it. In the ending of one of my favorite movies, Blade Runner, Deckard reassures Rachael, the android, when she realizes that her “lifetime” is limited and that she literally doesn’t know how long she has to live by saying, “none of us know how long we have ” and the point is that this simply makes life more precious, not less. Who knows, maybe somehow we will figure out a way to save the fifty percent of species on the planet that now appear to be already doomed. Maybe the New Creature is out there now saving us all, saving our biosphere.
Here in this introduction I am taking some license in making judgments about such issues as drug laws and the use of psycho-pharmaceuticals, not to mention taking passing swipes at religion and politics – just could not help it. Such things fall firmly into the purview of my direct experiences and so I feel no need to apologize. What I am finding is that when I “believe” anything I have simply allowed myself to falter into perhaps the most seductive and spiritually deadly traps of language – of consciousness. My belief is how my ego limits me. I have always suspected that Zen Buddhist philosophy comes closest of all the religions to what our actual spiritual reality is and the mushrooms seem like a Zen Master who can attach to your nervous system and enlighten us from the inside out. I began to think that Shamanism offered an equally realistic understanding of our reality and this is what really inspired my to use some Shamanistic techniques to attempt to heal myself since they seemed more accessible than ten years of intensive Zen practice. I find now that it best to believe as little as is necessary to function in this physical reality. In practice I fail constantly, my ego all to anxious to assert its seemingly endless array of belief, but it is for such worthy effort do I have life. The hallucinogens ability to quiet the ego is a great help here. I have been finding that when I am not in that mode of asserting my beliefs, my ego judgments, I am actually receiving more from life and that I am therefore much happier. I guess I am saying in a way that it is better to receive than to give. My wonder and respect for those truly enlightened souls is much greater now: so that’s why they spend ten years in almost constant prayer and meditation with nothing but the clothes on their backs eating only enough rice to stay alive!
In The Mushroom Chronicles I intend to focus more on my experiences and feelings than on my opinions. It has just been my experience that these psilocybin mushrooms convey information (information actually is a hollow shell of what they convey, they convey life itself, love, God) that is so far beyond my own personal realm, that it could not possibly come from any part of me, conscious or subconscious. My guess at this point is that they convey a collective conscious of what I call the Plant Mind. The experience is so alien that I cannot imagine it coming from even a Jungian collective human unconscious. But this is just a guess. The closest human conception that I can find is the Giaian Hypothesis that appears to be exactly the reality that I have experienced myself.
An important point is that when I originally went into all of this it was “simply” to heal myself psychologically of my depression. At the beginning I did not make the connection with my adolescent onset of writers block. Deep down I have spent my entire life searching for God but finding God was not a conscious intention when I began researching the shamanic use of hallucinogens – I’m embarrassed to say that while I thought I was taking indigenous people very serious in having faith that they were in touch with something real, I still did not take their word at face value. Jeremy Narby in The Cosmic Serpent really brings this home – the practicing Shaman are not speaking metaphorically, they are speaking literally. Entheogen – plant substance that invokes God in man. It is typical of our western, science oriented culture to reduce our deepest spiritual yearnings into many different instances of psychological disease and then to treat them individually with many different psycho-pharmaceuticals. The last thing our western mind would conceive of is an innate spiritual yearning being a natural and necessary component of our consciousness. I do not mean to say that all anti-depressants are evil or even unnecessary. Our biology and most certainly our brain is as a complex biological system subject to all manner organic problems, otherwise after these four billion years of evolution we would all be perfect. Certainly we should attempt to fix what we can. I should mention that in such instances as true schizophrenia or Bipolar I – classic Manic Depression, our modern medicines are life saving. My own diagnosis of bipolar II is so different from full blow bipolar disease that I think it would be best if they had different designations. In fact, each time I take mushrooms I suffer for about a week with real mania that involves virtually no sleep and really takes an horrendous toll on me physically and mentally. This period after the active dose is a rough ride, far more so than any actual “hallucinatory” experience when under the influence. It is because of this that I can recognize so clearly what is mania in my own behavior or feelings. This is to say that two types of people who should not consume such substances as psilocybin are those diagnosed with schizophrenia or bipolar I.
But our western, linear thinking blinds us to entire spectrums of reality. This can be as simple as a psychiatrist not even considering a patients life circumstances as even possibly contributing to depression. Here is as good an example as I have ever seen of Maslow’s theory that if the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like it can be solved with a nail. The problem as I see it is that this idea that so many millions of us are born with “chemical imbalances” and I have come to detest that phrase. No doubt some of us are born so but not in the numbers in which these antidepressants are prescribed. This is what the mushrooms have shown me in my own life and I believe that my experience is not isolated. It is not that hard to whittle out. If one has a fulfilling career – say one is doing what one feels born to do – and one also has fulfilling and meaningful relationships, and then one find themselves depressed, well more than likely there is your chemical imbalance. But if one has a meaningless job that is only hated, has surrounded themselves with shallow and unfulfilling relationships – or some cases virtually no relationships at all – then if they have a so called chemical imbalance, it is obvious to me that they were not born with this imbalance. It is to this latter group that my own experience directly applies. The latter group I suspect is very rare. I am inclined now the view of depression of being exactly analogist to physical pain. The pain tells the brain to favor that broken arm because it needs to heal. Depression is telling the brain that something is broken emotionally. I guess that I see this “chemical imbalance” bullshit as serving more the purpose of commoditizing medicine. If you have this chemical imbalance then you need to buy the drugs for the rest of your life. What is really going on here is just another sad aspect of a society that is hopelessly lost in materialism.
Without question there is a far more insidious issue in all of this. In America here especially our reality has become so Orwellian that you could take whole pages out of 1984 and read them and I would defy you to distinguish this literature almost literally from current events. It would not surprise me at this point if my elected leaders just did away with the names of countries and starting using colors. Instead of feeding me this ludicrous crap about how I am suppose to be afraid of Iran now, why not just say: “this month the Blue State is our enemy. Ramp up production or the Blue State will kill us all. Be afraid, be very afraid.” At this most insidious level, our Soma like antidepressants come along as the perfect adjunct to this Orwellian reality and by the millions we all instead of understanding that we are depressed not because of chemical imbalances but because of profound human imbalances, eat our meds and stare vacantly at out televisions numbly unaware of how vacuous and meaningless our materialist, consumer driven lives have actually become.
This is very, very different from someone who has say lost a loved one of many years and truly suffers depression that could be mediated by these substances for a given period of time. I should not even have to say this but somehow I know that I do.
The mushrooms did not fall into this reductionism. Far from it, they gathered me up in a totality that I did not even know existed within myself. They addressed every level of my being as one. They healed me from the inside out. They showed me my soul. They gave me God. They gave me meaning, direction and purpose. They proclaimed to me inside my own head that “love is the only power you possess” with such stunning power that I think of this every day – and I cannot help but feel that thinking of this beautiful, transformative phrase, “love is the only power you possess” is not far more powerful than any of the pills in our pharmacopeias.