I took a little time off because everything I started to write felt forced and unimportant. Then at some point, I began writing what I think will be the follow-up to my Overcoming Cult Trauma with Psychedelics story from three years ago.
I still get a lot of people who message me regarding that story. It feels a bit like my magnum opus, and yet, when I reread it I am irritated by how much I’m leaving out.
In general, the simplest story always seems like the best one.
Nothing ever worked for me until ayahuasca. Now I feel better. The end.
But that wasn’t the end. At all. And maybe for some people, the full story will be a better one. I don’t know yet. I mostly feel like the only responsible thing is to put all the information on the table. Even the stuff that might be difficult to understand or comprehend.
I’m working through the specifics of what I want to say still, but the crux of it is that psychedelic plant medicine is a bit like opening a door to another world. Except once you open that door, it’s not something you can just simply close. Whatever ends up coming through that door may not be what you expect or even what you think you want for yourself. I do think that what comes through is always ultimately beneficial, but that doesn’t mean it will be easy by any means.
After my initial brain rewiring, I kept going back for ceremonies pretty regularly because each time it felt like I was finally getting the answers to everything I’d ever wanted to know. For a while, this all seemed like something very manageable and positive for me, and then at some point, it turned a corner. It went from showing me the information that was necessary for me to go about living my life to what felt like massive downloads of information in which every detail about reality, consciousness, and the universe was included.
In short, I felt like I had gone mad with the knowledge of the universe.
Not mad enough to start talking to myself in public or to go missing in the wilderness, but mad enough that interacting with people who had not also experienced some degree of “the other side” felt incredibly difficult. Sometimes I couldn’t do anything other than just lay in silence because my brain felt too heavy for any more stimulation.
It felt like the equivalent of someone trying to put a wildly advanced operating system into one of those old Macintosh computers that you could only type into and that couldn’t access the internet. I didn’t even have the capacity to understand or the language to express all that was happening within my consciousness.
It took fifty times more effort just to communicate full sentences with a normal person because my brain was now sifting through 3 billion newly uploaded files just to find the same old words. I also struggled with momentary bouts of what felt like vertigo (but upon reflection was not actually that). About 2-3 times a day it felt like I was free falling and I wasn’t sure which way the ground was. This went on for at least six months and included many other bizarre experiences.
It’d be easy to speculate that everything I experienced was a classic case of psychedelics scrambling my brain, nothing more and nothing less. But I knew then and am even more certain now that there was an intelligent force behind what was taking place in my consciousness. In no world could I ever consider it a pointless bout of insanity that served no purpose. I can see now that there was an intelligence and precision to every single thing that played out, even when it felt like chaos.
Now, on the six-year anniversary of where it all began, I feel like I’ve fully integrated all of the information enough to talk about it. I don’t know that it’ll resonate with as many people, but it still seems worth talking about.
In the same way that I wrote that initial article for a younger version of myself who I think would’ve benefited from hearing that it’s completely possible to live a life free of crippling depression and suicidal ideation, I think this next article is for the six-year-ago version of me that wondered what was happening and whether I’d ever come back down to earth again. It turns out I did. Sort of. As much as one can after going mad from all the knowledge of the universe.
The part of me that cares about accurately documenting what happened for posterity and the part that cringes at the idea of sharing the extra crazy parts are currently engaged in a standoff, so TBD on that. Thanks for reading.