Teatime

In case you haven’t noticed, we’re making some headway.

I’m not talking about the recent slew of largely positive articles about psychoactives in the press or the controlled human studies that have finally been given the go-ahead by the Powers that Be.

I’m talking about the way that psychedelic consciousness has permeated and informed popular culture.

Now I know that this is not exactly a recent development. I myself was raised on a cartoon about a swarm of little blue elves that live inside of what appear to be giant Amanita muscaria mushrooms. I’m just pointing out that it seems to be coming on a little bit stronger in recent years.

I’m a nanny for very young children, which is rather like being a professional tripsitter most of the time. The pre-school set is given to rapidly fluctuating emotional states. Commonplace objects can provide them with hours of amusement. They live in the eternal Now. And they positively adore the Teletubbies. In case you’ve been busy being a grown-up for a while, the popular television show features brightly colored and oddly elf-like tykes who live in an organiform spaceship and have TV monitors in their bellies. They seem to be trying to communicate something about the nature of language. I might be too old to understand exactly what these little mediamorphic ambassadors from the land of eternal sunshine are trying to get across, but whatever it is it’s coming in loud and clear to the carpet cruising contingent in millions of otherwise straight-laced households every day, for the simple reason that that it affords Mommy the only twenty minutes of peace and quiet that she is likely to enjoy before bedtime.

Fundamentalist parents were aghast at the wild success of Harry Potter and company, decrying the pervasive occult themes and the notion that strange potions can work wonders. They were so focused on the hocus pocus that they missed the real magic, I’m afraid, but their kids soaked it up like blotter and are largely the better for it.

Video games have been chock-full of psychedelic imagery since Mario powered up on his first pixelated mushroom. Today some games look and feel like a full blown ayahuasca trip, complete with animal spirit allies, terrible gateway guardians and bejeweled palaces packed with unexpected treasure.

TV shows all seem to have their psychedelic episodes, whether it’s as literal as Homer Simpson getting puddled on Guatemalan Insanity Peppers or as subtle as Buffy the Vampire Slayer wondering if her whole life has been a hallucination brought on by a schizophrenic break.

Hollywood is on the bus as well. I can think of ten movies off of the top of my head that just had to have been conceived under the influence of something illegal. I bet you can, too. Go to your local video store and look around. The new releases section is jam-packed with bizarre time loops, nested realities, psychic powers, alien encounters, existential uncertainty, eschatological scenarios and messianic inflation. Heck, they pretty much have to make trippy movies at this point, or their costly special effects programs will go to waste.

Then of course there is the Internet—the most boundary-dissolving force on the planet, smearing the wonder and the weirdness around at a totally unprecedented rate.

Now you can look at this situation in two ways. On the one hand, the media is trying to co-opt the psychedelic experience to sell tickets, toys and advertising minutes. Big whoop, right? But on the other hand, the trippers and visionaries are successfully embedding their memes in packages that get opened by a wide variety of people, and that is a much more interesting phenomenon in every respect.

The Matrix is probably the most successful example of this, and it’s certainly one of the most overt. Take the red pill, kids, and find out how deep the rabbit hole really goes. It’s not cool because the psychedelic experience is directly referenced or glorified, it’s cool because it gets the point across. Millions of people walked out of the movie theater after seeing The Matrix and cast a suspicious eye on what we are pleased to call reality for the first time in their lives. Even if it was just for a moment, that was a victory.

Because that’s what we’re supposed to be doing, isn’t it? We who have nominated ourselves as our community’s designated shamans and explorers have a tradition to uphold, if not a sacred duty to perform. The Hero’s journey is not complete until he or she brings the goods back to the tribe for the benefit of all. Our job is to take the experience home with us and pump it back out into the community in the form of art or the commitment to catalyze change. Otherwise it’s just psychic masturbation. Nothing wrong with that, of course, everybody does it; but imagine how much more legitimate and justified you could feel about your practice if you were using it to liberate your fellow man as well as to amuse yourself!

It’s never been more important. We’re making some headway, yes, but things are speeding up and most people aren’t going to be as ready as we are when the world starts getting strange fast. When the future comes to test us, it’s not just going to test the shamans. Our species’ survival may well depend upon the sophistication of the population at large, and the number and type of concepts that it can handle without seizing up and shutting down. It’s up to us to stretch that limit. The tribe needs a guiding vision. It needs a million guiding visions. It needs to be warned and enlightened and shocked and inspired, as quickly and efficiently as is humanly possible. It’s a moral imperative. So go earn your next trip by sharing what you learned from the last one. If you can’t write a brilliant screenplay at least write up an experience report. Write a game or a song or a subversive children’s book. Write a program. Paint a picture. Put up a video. Organize large-scale performance art. Share your vision. Slip it in however you can. Remember, we take drugs so the straights don’t have to.

I’m not suggesting anything in particular about the personal habits of the creators of the specific entertainments that I mentioned, by the way. The Teletubbies sure are some trippy shit, though. I mean, whoa.

I worked at a big concert venue for a couple of years in the early ’90s, way back when I was first coming on to my vocation as a tripsitter. I was a Peachy Puff, which means I wore a tiny spangled outfit and carried a heavy box around my neck, slinging melted two- dollar candy bars by day and light-up toys at night.

I was a veritable tripper magnet. Just by virtue of glowing in the dark I became a beacon for the easily amused, and for the lost.

“Hi!” the addled apparition before me would begin, perhaps in greeting, or possibly in an awkward attempt to communicate his current state of being. “My name is Jimmy. I’m sixteen and I just took a few tabs of acid a little while ago and now things are starting to get a bit strange around the edges. Can I just stand by you for a little while?”

Sure you can, Jimmy. Sure you can.

Most nights I ended up with a little flock of lost lambs following me around. The other girls all seemed to regard them as a nuisance. I had only recently discovered the awesome and unpredictable power of psychedelics in my own life, so, for me, taking care of them was a sacred mercy mission.

Of course there were thousands of trippers at shows like the Grateful Dead (this was still in the Jerry days), but in any other concert crowd of 20,000 there were also always a few. Punk shows, country music festivals, rap, and even Christian rock concerts all seemed to inspire their share of intrepid souls; and the Teafaerie was always there to walk them to the bathroom, help them find their people, and listen to whatever they needed to say.

I started peachy-puffing around 1993, and while the internet was up and running then, it was not yet on the radar of the likes of me; as far as I knew, nobody had ever done any serious psychedelic research on a massive scale. I eventually printed up little questionnaires and started giving out lightsticks or candy to anyone willing and able to answer a few deceptively simple questions. I also took to carrying a micro-recorder around to collect live testimony.

I asked people what substances they were on and what sorts of effects they were experiencing. Regular Erowid readers will not be astonished by my discoveries. At the time, though, I thought I was breaking new ground. I was blown away by the results of my informal surveys. I started keeping tallies and drawing up little charts. The variation was striking, and, as far as I was concerned, the similarities were even more so.

About thirty percent of respondents said that they had, at some point, experienced something that met their personal definition of telepathy. Interesting. Seventy-five percent had experienced moderate to intense time dilation. Cool. Three different people reported being blown back to the beginning of time, traversing all of human history, and then passing through the present moment into a bright but indescribable event in the near future, barely missing some sort of target and getting blown back to the beginning of time again in faster and faster cycles until they whited out. Wow! The first time I heard this story it went down as an anomaly, the second time elevated it to the status of mystery, and the third one shocked me to the core.

I became obsessed with trying to figure out answers. I served as Ground Control for anybody who would let me. I attended conferences. I put on raves, I went on Phish tour, and I started going to Burning Man. I talked to hundreds upon hundreds of psychonauts; current, former, and habitual.

The responses I routinely got to one question in particular haunt me, confuse me, intrigue, amaze, and terrify me more than any other.

That question is WHY? Why did you do it, Jimmy? Why did you choose to embark upon a risky and potentially life-transforming journey at Lollapalooza? Almost invariably, the answer was, “I don’t know”.

And they really didn’t know. Ingesting psychedelics in a crowded public place is dodgy at best. Taking a handful of mystery drugs procured from some shady-looking character in the parking lot is downright stupid. I suspect the revered elders of the old guard would mostly be shocked and dismayed by my temporary charges’ choices of venue, and appalled by the apparent nonchalance with which such a profound endeavor often seemed to be undertaken. I was appalled too, at times, but also intrigued. I felt like I was discovering and documenting a whole new species of human being, one to whom such extreme forays were commonplace, easily entered into, and just as easily forgotten.

By doing my amateur research at concerts, raves, and festivals, I’ve had an opportunity to study the habits of a unique and fascinating demographic, one which I cannot entirely deny being a part of, though I like to fancy myself more thoughtful and sophisticated than the mean. We are largely young, hip, fairly well-off and well-educated, and willing to go to extraordinary lengths to be Truly Amused. Born when the Sixties were already history, we came of age in an environment that was largely manifested by the psychedelic vision in one sense or another. We’ve been soaking in its imagery since we were born. The current youth culture takes digital telepathy entirely for granted and gets impatient when it takes all of fifteen seconds to literally pluck any bit of information in the world out of thin air. We’ve been trained by consumer culture to seek maximum overload.

We want it brief, bright, interactive, hyperconnected and coming at us at a million miles per hour. Ecological collapse is practically a foregone conclusion, and if we manage to dodge that bullet, novel doomsday scenarios are waiting in the wings. We have always assumed that the Eschaton would come within our lifetimes in one form or another, and yet we carry on watching cartoons and playing video games. We’re like stunned bunnies frozen by the dazzling light of the onrushing singularity. We have 50,000 songs in our pockets and can’t think of anything we want to listen to. It should come as no surprise that some of us are willing to die for fun from time to time, so long as we stand a decent chance of living to tell about it. The thing that is urgently manifesting itself on this planet burns brightly in our hearts. It’s calling us, shaping us, training us, and goading us to push the envelope. The future, if any, is going to be much more intense than an acid trip and however clumsily we go about it, I do truly believe that we’re preparing ourselves to meet it head on.

Almost every night for two springs and summers, I watched thousands of young people pour into that amphitheater in their mommies’ SUVs, looking for an authentic experience. And once in a while a few of them found, for a change, more than they bargained for. So be it. You buy the ticket and you take the ride. I’m lucky to have had the chance to help a few fellow travelers make their way through the night. In the process, I’ve been blessed with the opportunity to learn a great deal about the actions of these puzzling and impressive substances that humans have discovered or created, and the light they may shed upon who we are and where we’re going.

This was a couple of years before Erowid first appeared, and nowhere near as awesome, but I like to think that I was driven by something like the same spirit that moved its founders, Earth and Fire, to start providing data online. Direct experience may be the only true knowing, but in order to establish any kind of consensus we are obliged to ask, report, analyze, and speculate. It took me about five years to give up on my naive fantasy of finding all the answers and settle into the serious business of trying to figure out what the questions are. The project continues apace.

Hi! I’m the Teafærie. Greetings from the Center of the Universe!

Teafærie is a title, not a name. It’s like Doctor or Professor. It denotes the office of the girl who serves tea at Teatime, in a traveling pirate teahouse of no minor psychedelic repute that is widely referred to as the Center of the Universe by patrons and crew alike. Named for the famous perpetual tea party in Alice in Wonderland, the Teahouse is always open and noisy even when everything else at any given festival is closed down. Naturally, it ends up being the place where trippers congregate in the wee hours, swapping stories, making music, and babbling about the beautiful absurdity of it all. I started serving tea there when I was really just a kid - rather like some people serve God or serve their country. (It all boils down to tea.) It was at Teatime that I discovered and developed my talent as a tripsitter, a vocation that I have been actively practicing in an astonishing array of contexts for almost fifteen years.

In the course of my work I’ve given a great deal of thought to what sort of ceremony, if any, is appropriate to incorporate with the use of psychoactive substances in our modern context. Many of us fancy ourselves, however naively, more savvy and sophisticated than our indigenous cousins, and in general the community that I work and play with tends to eschew theatrical rituals. In truth, I suspect that the so-called primitive practitioners who employ those types of technologies are no less pragmatic than we, making a big show and laying it on with a trowel when necessary to catalyze group consciousness, but generally setting aside the costume jewelry amongst themselves in favor of simple solidarity in the face of the mysterious unknown. Through my own experimentation, I’ve found that nothing can really prepare me much better than feeling at home and maintaining a slightly ironic sense of humor.

On the other hand, there’s something that feels just a bit cocky—if not perilously blasé—about going at it willy-nilly, sans even an acknowledgment of the depth and intensity of the undertaking.

So to kick off my new column on Erowid I’ll share a little something that I sometimes like to say before things get rolling. Borrow, add, adjust, enjoy!

A toast (throws toast) originally composed in March of Aught Seven, for my frequent co-pilot, second, and most excellent good friend Seuss Dean upon the occasion of a 5-MeO-DMT experience on the island of Koh Chang, Thailand:

To those who have gone before!
To the explorers of the last Great Sea; true heroes all, sink or swim.
To the self-elect: shamans, adventurers, visionaries, and madmen alike.
To the courageous and to the curious.
To the persecuted and to the lost.
To all of the exiles who have dared to climb the garden wall.
To the holy fools, the seekers, the ambassadors, and the pioneers.
To those who have had the temerity to storm Heaven and Hell,
and who have returned with the Secret Fire to light our way.
To those who can never remember, and to those who can never forget.
To all of the intrepid and extraordinary spirits who have played at the edge,
We, who prepare to confront the Mystery, salute you.