Teatime

When I’m on psychedelic drugs, I’m much worse at most of the things that I try to do. I’m worse at tying my shoes, for instance, and I’m worse at keeping track of time. I suck at operating electronics when I’m stoned, and at finding large objects in small pockets. I’m bad at remembering what I was just thinking or saying, I can scarcely read printed text, and making sense of subway maps is entirely out of the question. The dire warnings about the operation of heavy machinery are well founded, as are the tough laws against attempting to drive a car.

On the other hand, there are a few things that I’m better at when I’m high. Such, in any event, is my consistent perception. Importantly, sober observers tend to agree with me, and video records made at various altitudes confirm my suspicions.

I’m active in the fire spinning and flow arts community, which means that I like to set things on fire and swing them around. Sometimes the thing is a hula hoop or a big staff, other times it’s something more like a baton or a small ball on the end of a chain. I mostly don’t practice with real fire, of course (for which sobriety is emphatically recommended), but I practice quite a bit. I do it every day. I know what I can do and I know what’s just barely out of my reach, and I can state with complete confidence that I’m noticeably more awesome at twirling things around on, say, a touch of acid than I am when I’m stone cold sober.

This is assuming that all conditions are nominal and I can rally my focus to give it a good go and what have you; but the effect is fairly consistent, tested over maybe 100 experiences in a wide variety of sets and settings. It doesn’t require a whole lot of drugs. There’s a point of diminishing returns, obviously. Sometimes I just like to take a little bit. A good +1 on ye olde Shulgin Scale is enough to give me an appreciable edge. I think it has something to do with time dilation, though I don’t think that this is a complete explanation. I do occasionally get this sort of Bullet Time effect where I seem to be watching my tool swing around in slow motion, and I have plenty of time to pluck a falling object out of the air without quite having to rush.

I had this practice for a long while and spinning became a real trip anchor for me, and eventually also something like a sail. Accordingly, I started hanging out with more spinners and attending related events, which is kind of how I met my best friend Seuss, with whom I spent a few months at a skill toys retreat in Thailand and co-founded a flow arts school in LA. As a result of all this our house has become something of a crash landing pad for itinerant flowbos on the international fire-spinning circuit, so I get a chance to talk in depth with quite an impressive cross-section of the subculture’s superstars. In the beginning, I was surprised by the percentage of top-tier performers who would cop to having made enormous breakthroughs in their arts on psychedelics. Now I kind of tend to assume it, unless I’m told otherwise. It’s by no means the rule, so please don’t think I’m suggesting that all or even most flow arts practitioners use drugs. I know plenty of straight or straightish spinners who are truly amazing, though many of them are way into yoga or some other integrated physio-energetic practice in addition to spinning.

The ecstatic dance community reports similar phenomena. Almost everybody has a story about the time they finally clicked into the trance, and nine times out of ten the experience involved some kind of psychedelic or empathogen. What they tend to say about it always sounds vaguely Eastern to me, with people talking about Chi and feeling “in tune” or “in harmony” with their tool, or even with the Universe itself. Some of them speak of a mysterious energy field that seems to both control their actions and obey their commands. Is this perception just a hangover from our Star Wars–soaked youth, or is there something to it? For sure a sense of unity with all things is an almost hackneyed psychedelic cliché, as is the impression that one is suddenly possessed of extraordinary skill, knowledge, or good fortune.

Another well-worn trope of the psychedelic experience is the perception that events seem to mysteriously constellate themselves around the vagaries of whim or will, or in accordance with some underlying congruity between the individual and her environment. Carl Jung called this phenomenon “synchronicity”, and he thought it to be objectively true, whatever that means. He found that it often occurred when a patient was unusually inflated, or at a particularly critical phase of therapy.

My personal experience with synchronicity, manifestation and repetition of pattern as related to psychedelics is far too bizarre to elucidate in this forum. I’d lose whatever shred of credibility I might hope to cling to if I told you half of the less impressive stories in my exceedingly outré collection. I’m not just talking about opening up to the right pages in books and little parlor tricks of that nature, either. The repetition thing is particularly interesting to me. For instance, I happened to eat apricots and almonds at the peak of my very first candyflip, and I’ve been “randomly” offered both foods together on no less than ten subsequent occasions, all while under the influence of the same combination of chemicals. The stranger holding the bag of trail mix always looks at me kinda funny when I suddenly burst out laughing and can’t seem to stop. I’ve given up trying to explain it to them. But I always accept the munchies. It’s sort of a tradition.

Yeah yeah, I know. We’re pattern-recognizing machines. That’s what we do. I was one of those kids who read Illuminatus in high school and I thought the number 23 was following me around for a while, right up until I decided to make myself obsessed with a different random number on purpose. Lo and behold, the new number starting appearing everywhere in my life. Just like any number would if you happened to be especially programmed to notice it. One of the things that drugs do is goose the button that says “This Is Important! This Means Something!” even when the situation is totally trivial. For sure this is part of what’s going on here. Tough to pick it all apart, though.

I think enhanced pattern recognition is a big piece of the puzzle, actually. According to several friends (ahem) high up in the field, a lot of computer programmers do their best work with just a little bit of an edge on, too. I once had a friend who got his PhD in mathematics. In order to do this you have to *discover something new in math*. I can still remember him sitting on the floor of the rec. room on half a hit of acid, shuffling and
reshuffling pages of numbers, trying to pick the whole pattern up in his head and turn it sideways so he could see it from a different angle. This might also explain why some musicians find that psychoactives enhance their art. And indeed I hesitate to speculate about who would be left holding their statuettes if they started stripping folks of their Grammys and whatnot on the grounds that some of the past winners made use of performance-enhancing substances. That being said, in my experience many tripping musicians are rather like drunk musicians: overweening, underprepared, and incompetent. Except when they aren’t.

On June 12, 1970, Pittsburgh Pirates pitcher Dock Ellis pitched a rare no-hitter against the Padres in the opening game of a double header in San Diego. He claims to have been under the influence of LSD when it happened, although he did not reveal that part of the story until many years after the fact. He had forgotten that it was a game day until after he’d already dosed. Apparently he was in the groove and success was inevitable, even though by all accounts he pitched a pretty wild game, walking several batters, dodging imaginary line drives, and almost hitting a couple of guys.

Psychedelics have been associated with the stimulation of the linguistic function in more than one context. I myself have had mixed luck attempting to amuse the muses in this manner. Writing is definitely a flow thing for me, though, and while it’s sadly true that most of my high-flung output is pure crap, what I still think of as the best thing I’ve ever written was produced on several grams of P. cubensis, straight upstream of consciousness, all-in-one-go, with almost no cross-outs or editing. (You can find it at mammafesta.tumblr.com and judge for yourself.) At other times, I couldn’t complete a sentence on an eighth of mushrooms if my life depended upon it. It’s not all that reliable, but when it works it works.

It goes without saying that plenty of users never experience anything remotely like this at all. I just find it interesting that so many of the people whom I bring it up to seem to know what I’m talking about. I’ve heard some fascinating stories. Certainly the commonality of these themes is well borne out in the literature.

Then of course there’s anti-flow, which is when everything goes haywire and you can’t do a damn thing right. Yes, it does happen. Let’s not even talk about it, though.

So what’s going on here? Is it a Chi thing, like a surge in The Force that I grew up wanting to believe in? Or is it something more akin to having a faster processor speed and a better connection? Is it the result of some kind of perceptual shift, like time dilation, increased visual acuity, or super-sensitized kinesthetic awareness? Is it a concentration thing? Is it just the placebo effect? Is it immersion in the Tao or some more Jungian organizing principle? Is it magic? Is it an illusion? Is there a difference? The debate flows on.

It really is a thing though. If you’ve never had it happen to you, try dancing more.

I can see excellent reasons for allowing drug experiences to unfold as ephemera.  I get it.  I really do.  But when it comes down to it we need more data, damn it, and I feel like I have a duty to the community to gather as much information as I possibly can.  Or maybe that’s just how I justify my practice.  In any event it’s hilarious to listen to myself trying to read Finnegans Wake when the words keep rearranging themselves on the page, and this one guy’s crazy breakthrough experience is hands-down the most moving monologue I’ve ever heard in my life.

I’m particularly interested in primary records, by which I mean records that are made during the experience itself.  Hunter S. Thompson strapped a big clunky ’70s tape player to his belly when he wandered into the neon night in search of the American Dream. Both the raw tapes themselves and the gonzo articles that proceeded from them are records of his misadventures, but the tapes are primary and the finished pieces are secondary.  Your notebook doodles, EKG readouts, tapes of your drum jams, and the poems written in mustard on your walls are primary. Finished trip reports, recipes, and the musical comedy inspired by your experience are secondary.  Neither is inherently more valuable than the other, but primary records are hard to come by and rarely discussed.

It’s good to keep in mind the possible legal and social issues raised by evidence of crimes having been committed.  The ways in which your past can come back to bite you in the ass are not always predictable. Consider the case of the Canadian psychologist Andrew Feldmar.  In 2007, when attempting to enter the United States, a border guard Googled his name and discovered an article he had written wherein he admitted to having taken LSD twice in 1967.  Andy’s scofflaw admission resulted in him being barred from entering the country.  And that was over a mere secondary record with no hard evidence to back it up. Imagine how bong-toting Olympian Michael Phelps must feel about primary records these days!  Remember, almost every cell phone is a camera now, and they’re all plugged in to the shared data field.  Your friends might not intend to sell you out (at the moment) but stuff gets away from people.  It gets lost, or stolen, or accidentally left on abandoned hardware, or posted somewhere “safe” that isn’t.  I always joke that if I ever run for office I’m running on the Party Platform anyway, but in deadly earnest I may one day want to emigrate or get a job or something and it could really suck if some of my favorite records slipped out of my control.  And information is very slippery stuff.

Video records are especially problematic.  I’m personally ravenous for firsthand testimony.  I think I’ve actually read every experience report in the Vaults on the dozen or so substances that are of particular interest to me, and I often think how cool it would be if there were a large repository of video reports out there as well.  We could all benefit from seeing what various states look and sound like, and good demonstrations of cultivation, extraction, preparation and administration techniques would be an invaluable resource.  Unfortunately, in these benighted times, the risks involved with video can far outweigh the potential benefits.  People get locked up for life over this stuff.  It’s nuts.

Even if the enterprises that you choose to engage in are not, strictly speaking, illegal, videotaping them can have unwanted ramifications. This is a delicate moment in history.  Studies are quietly getting approved and showing good results, and so far the popular media is approaching the topic  of psychoactives with a refreshingly open mind. People relate to video much differently than they relate to text, and the intense nature of some of these experiences can easily frighten the untrained eye. And let’s face it, some people are jackasses. The folks putting their salvia vids up on YouTube, for instance, don’t seem to have given much thought to what sort of impression their activities might reasonably be expected to make on concerned parents, law enforcement agencies and members of the press. Also, remember that the vast majority of primary records are painfully boring, even to the participants, and most of the rest of them are bound to make you look like a moron.  What’s left over when you edit out the inane, the banal, the gobsmackingly pathetic, the utterly ridiculous, and the extremely personal? What would your family think?  Or your employer?

Another problem that comes up I think of as the Uncertainty Principle, though my abuse of the term probably makes Werner Heisenberg spin with unknowable momentum in his grave.  What I mean by it is the notion that the act of observing a thing changes it. It changes it in principle, and it changes it in practice if it distracts the voyager.  Extracting yourself to jot down notes or to change audio cassette tapes can become a disruptive chore whilst communing with the ineffable.  As a rule of thumb I’d say that the trip is always more important than the record, and if record-making is detracting from the experience then it’s not worth doing and it should be suspended immediately.

In general, though, I’ve become something of a booster for giving it a try, particularly with audio recordings. Keep in mind not to mention any specifics regarding illegal actions or substances and you should be pretty safe.  Most people forget about the tape recorder after a few minutes if it’s unobtrusive enough, and some people actually use it to good effect as a focus or an anchor.  Having observed hundreds of experiments, I can say with complete confidence that more people end up wishing that they had recorded more of their trip than the reverse.  You can always erase the damn thing.  You can’t choose to go back and record the experience after the fact.

One reason for capturing your trips by making audio recordings is that it gives you an opportunity to finally solve some of those eternal riddles: How many times has this happened?  Did I say that out loud?  Is our conversation really so incredibly deep and clever as it seems? What do we sound like when we’re high, anyway?  (On the other hand, perhaps there are some things that we’re better off not knowing…)
A record can be a window into lost time.  Some deep trance material apparently never makes it into long term memory.  Either memory isn’t set up to encode it, or it’s repressed, or it’s state dependent, or something else.  People frequently forget whole sections of a trip right after they take place, and later go back and find out to their utter amazement that they were like speaking in tongues for 15 minutes or something and they never would have known it if they didn’t have the recording.

Once when I took ayahuasca in the Amazon I found myself spontaneously singing a beautiful melody that was previously unknown to me.  It was haunting and timeless, rising and falling in subtle and intricate patterns; a delicately recursive and ever-mutating statement about mind and world, jungle, space, intelligence, the body, art, time and death. I sang my way out of a very dark place indeed and then held the flame aloft, warming everyone in the nighttime maloka with the golden sunlight of an honest-to-gosh icaro.  Everybody agreed that it had happened, but after it was over nobody could remember a note of it.  Nothing.  I tried and tried.  I had a sense of the feeling, more or less, but the fragments of the tune itself that I thought I could recall were deeply suspect.  Entropy!

The next day I blew off part of an awesome conference to travel by third world bus into Iquitos, where I spent my very last nuevos soles on a micro-cassette recorder.  There was another ceremony the following evening, and at one point I walked out into the jungle by myself and essentially made it happen again, but this time I caught the genie in the bottle!  It wasn’t the same one, but it was a real one and I got it - and now any time I want to I can sing it again, by heart.  It’s my favorite lullaby.  Also, by a particularly uncanny twist of fate, I managed to find out what it is. Or what it might be, anyway.  The first time I ever downloaded any icaros off of the net I pulled down some random 40 minute compilation and opened it up in iTunes somewhere in the middle of the track.  Guess what?  You got it.  I was all alone in the house when the voice of a little old jungle shaman inside of my computer speakers started singing the self-same song that had poured through me in the bejeweled night forest lo those many months before. I did all the classic tests too see if I was dreaming, to be sure.  Then I totally flipped out.  Eventually I managed to track down the person who had done the recordings and it turned out that this song was somehow considered to be intrinsic to the very area where my trip had taken place. Nobody would ever believe this story in a million years if it were not for the recorded evidence.  Even I wouldn’t believe it, and that’s the truth.

When taking drugs that affect short term memory, a micro-recorder with a play back feature can function as a buffer.  You know that game where you’re constantly sure you were just now saying something absolutely brilliant, but you keep on not quite being able to remember what we were just talking about? (If you love a train of thought let it go—if it comes back to you, it’s yours.  If it doesn’t, it never was…)  Well with the handy-dandy recording device, all you have to do is back it up for a few seconds and press play. You can probably even do it on your cool phone.  Just remember to hit record again when you’re done listening.  It’s tricky.  You have to develop a mnemonic for it. Seuss and I always say, “Are we recording?  Hit record.” and then actually check to make sure that we’ve hit the record button. Without our little rituals we’d be lost.

And hey—this could be the time that you finally get some really big insight, and you don’t want to forget what it was!  I’m afraid that most of my own revelations from on high have later proved to be subject to rather broad interpretation.  I once awoke in the morning after a multi-molecule bender to find that I had apparently managed to get the goods down once and for all.  I had circled and underlined something in my notebook dozens of times, then decorated the page with arrows and stars so I would be sure to take special note of the nearly illegible scrawl when I returned to my normal upright position.  And what was the message that I had so valiantly succeeded in preserving for suffering mankind?  ”It’s all one thing and it doesn’t exist”.  Riiiight.  I have notebooks full of such pithy proclamations and impenetrable koans.  I find that taking them down is quite satisfying to me at the time of their generation, and they provide me with no end of amusement after the fact, both cosmic and comic.

Sometimes the records are just awesome for their sentimental value; pix from trips that changed my whole life are like graduation photos or wedding portraits.  Just remember to keep the bong out of the shot.

Research can no longer be effectively suppressed.  When the formal institutions that we deputize to figure stuff out are unable to get the job done because of the limitations of circumstance and their own complex agendas, it falls to the proscribed field’s practitioners to gather and share information.  In the Middle Ages doctors had to rob graves or visit battlefields to study human anatomy, but by golly they did what had to be done.  There’s a long and glorious tradition of standing up in defiance of the idea that ignorance can be legislated, letting go of professional rivalries (which matter less when nobody can get paid anyway) and working together to figure out what the bleep is going on.  They can’t stop us.  We can’t stop ourselves.  Technologies of connectivity have made it possible for millions of private practitioners to pool their data and work together towards establishing some consensus.

Erowid is leading the charge of collecting and publishing various types of data, with a focus on secondary records, for obvious reasons. At this time it may be best to consider primary records to be personal records—records of a sort that you mostly keep to yourself or share with trusted loved ones.  However, primary records can be a big help when creating secondary records.  They can assist you in writing experience reports, for example.  More and more people every day are participating in the effort, mindfully recording the relevant times and dosages, sets and settings, and any other factors they deem to be of possible interest to fellow explorers, as well as noting their impressions of the experience itself.  Go team!  Thank you for playing!  Everyone who has the discipline to put in the extra effort rocks the Casbah.

And who knows?  We may yet live into a day when the primary records you are gathering now can be freely shared without fear. So consider holding on to the real gems; squirreling them away in safe little hiding places until the tide has good and truly turned.  Every bit of data brings us closer to understanding the Big Picture, and everyone has an opportunity to make a significant contribution to the evolving conversation. Also you’re so damn cute when you think you’re omnipotent.

My maternal grandmother passed away last year on September 11, a day when many of us might have been moved to reflect upon our mortality and some of its intriguing but ultimately unknowable implications.

I mean — here we are, right? We’ve been born, and we can extrapolate with reasonable certitude that if nothing changes drastically we’re going to die sometime fairly soon. Fascinating predicament, really. We’re sliding downhill at an ever-increasing speed toward a singularity that cannot be adequately anticipated. For the Muggles, this is pretty much a universally terrifying prospect. For psychedelic heads it may sound like an exciting Saturday night, but there are still a few issues to resolve.

When my other grandmother left the party, I was in high school and I had no experience with psychedelic drugs whatsoever. Everyone was very keen to assure me that Nana was in a better place, which wasn’t much of a stretch since she’d been completely paralyzed by a stroke since my childhood and our occasional visits to Shady Acres creeped me out more than somewhat. I had my doubts, though, which I politely kept to myself. More likely, I thought, we’re just figments of our own imaginations and death is the end and that’s all she wrote. This time, as I listened to the country preacher rhapsodize soothingly about the big ranch house in the sky, I had a somewhat more surreal perspective.

Death comes up around psychedelics from a number of different angles, so I’ve had a chance to think about it and talk about it more than most healthy young hipsters tend to care to.

For one thing: use carries risks. Overdose hazards aside, Thanatos is present in potentia whenever one gives up rational control of one’s actions, which can happen during high-dose psychedelic sessions. I’ve had a couple of youthful close calls in the behavioral toxicity arena, one of which involved an emergency room visit while I was high on way too much acid. Let’s just call it a less than ideal setting, and leave it at that. Not good. But it beats dying. Probably.

Then there is the much discussed Ego Death, which is usually a good thing if you’re not trying to fight it, and its numerous near relatives that probably have Sanskrit names I can’t pronounce. How relevant is all this to the actual experience of bodily death, though? A lot of the reports do sound suspiciously similar to near-death experiences recorded regularly by people around the world: tunneling, a white light, the presence of loved ones, life review, transcendence, and all the hokey trappings that go with the package. For all we know though, these effects could be features of the rebooting program that tell us little or nothing about what consciousness might be like without a brain to run it on. After all, we mostly get there by perturbing the brain. It’s a brain thing. Dead guys don’t have brains. Dead guys eat brains. No wait, that’s the undead. Sorry.

A lot of folks are attracted to the Tibetan Book of the Dead model that was at one time promoted by Timothy Leary. According to the theory, the state of one’s mind at the moment of death is critical, and drugs give us a sneak preview and a chance to practice keeping our shit together. There is a short but crucial window of opportunity; it is of the highest possible importance that we make the most of it. I’ve kind of always wanted to stir up a Psychonauts Against Nukes movement along these lines, the premise being that anything that vaporizes people instantly is unacceptable on the grounds that it would deny its victims the opportunity to run the upload sequence. Hopefully this is hogwash, but you never know.

I do know that it’s important to me personally to live so that if and when my life flashes before my eyes I’m generally aesthetically satisfied and I don’t feel the need to fight the flow on the grounds of missions left undone or words unspoken. It’s important to me to die at peace, though I’m not sure exactly why.

The anecdotal reports that I’ve heard coming out of the government-approved end-of-life anxiety studies with psychedelics certainly seem promising. I’d personally be somewhat hesitant to recommend psilocybin or LSD to a virgin with a set that involves mortal terror, though. The potential to win big is certainly out there, but on the other hand it would be a real bummer to have a bummer, if you know what I mean. Most sober people can’t imagine a hell anywhere near as intense as the sort of thing that a bad trip can bring up. I guess I’d want to first format the subject with a lot of MDMA, say, but official experimental protocols have to be tight. Considering the harsh prohibitionist restrictions on psychedelics, we should count ourselves lucky that we get to research the matter at all. I’m very glad that there are some excellent sitters involved with the projects.

While the approved end-of-life studies with psychedelics do not involve administering psychedelics to people who are actually on their death beds, I’ve heard a lot of people speculate about what drugs, if any, they would take if they knew that they were dying right away. It’s one of those perennial conversations that some enthusiasts come back to again and again. Would you Huxley-out with LSD, overdose on heroin, or something else entirely? I guess I go back and forth on it. It would depend on if I could control the exact moment somehow or if there was a real potential that I would come down and spend my last hours all cracked out and uncomfortable. I do know that it’s a decision that cannot be made ethically for others. When they told me when my grandma had less than six hours to live, the thought crossed my mind for a brief instant, but I do believe that dosing people without their explicit consent is an ultimate no-no.
Ancestor magic is very big in indigenous shamanism. Lots of modern folks also claim to interact with the dead or to travel to their realms, though it goes without saying that these experiences are subject to the voyager’s personal interpretations and prejudices. I’m no more qualified to dismiss these claims than I am to stamp them as true and valid evidence of the persistence of consciousness. The disembodied entity thing is weird. And scary. And awesome. And suspect.

So in the end, what are we left with? Has my experience on the frontier made me more sanguine about death and dying? Did I feel better when I held my grandmothers ashes in September than I felt when Nana was buried and my teenage universe was a
far simpler place? Have psychedelics blessed me with greater clarity or have they muddied the question and deepened my doubt? Am I more peaceful about my inevitable discorporation, or am I afraid in new ways of the bizarre dimensions that may lie ahead?

The answer is yes in all directions. Psychedelics certainly have not given me anything to hold on to, but that’s not what they’re for. What they’ve taught me is how to let go. They’ve shown me that the universe is cooler than I can suppose, and that’s a weird kind of faith all its own.

Rest in peace, Grandma. I hope you’re enjoying the ride.

When I found out that my husband was going to be away at an overnight bachelor party I was thrilled to pieces. I’d finally have the house to myself for long enough to get some serious tripping done.

A thorough examination of my lunch box revealed that I had a bag of mushrooms and a capsule of MDMA left over from Burning Man, a tab of acid of indeterminate providence, Salvia divinorum, DMT and 5-MeO-DMT, pot, and a few assorted research chemicals that I was largely unfamiliar with. I selected the E and the fungus, figuring I’d stick to basics. I also prepared a bit of the cannabis, but the herb is such a staple in my household that I almost didn’t count it as a drug.

The only dilemma was that I didn’t really have any way to weigh the mushies. I eyeballed the bag and estimated it to be about four grams, give or take. Maybe more give than take. I’m a tiny little thing and I knew that whatever it was, it was more than enough. Mentally, I shrugged. The ecstasy would buoy my set, I reasoned. I’d be fine. I filed a flight plan with a friend like a good girl and set about my business, excited about the upcoming adventure.

All was as it should be in hyperspace for what seemed like quite a long time. The Universe was doing what it does and the Faerie was surfing it handily, lucidly hallucinating (say that ten times fast) and inventing some awesome new yoga moves. All was as it should be, that is, until I decided to turn some music on.

I selected the Re-Evolution track by Terence McKenna and The Shamen, set it to play, and turned my attention back to the Vortex. Presently, however, I started to notice something rather odd: the same series of events repeating themselves over and over again. I was so far gone that it took me a few iterations, if it was a few iterations, to catch on to this phenomenon; but once I realized that this was happening it became the focus of my awareness.

The sequence went something like this: Terence McKenna’s inimitable voice is heard saying “and not a moment too soon!” I suddenly become aware of myself and take stock of the situation. Didn’t I already hear that line? I remember thinking this before, and notice that I’m breathing in the same pattern as I did the last time. Oh shit, I’m caught in a time loop! (thought that before, too!) How many times has this happened? Is it really happening over and over, or is it just a glitch in the Matrix? (think of something new, dammit!) Terence says something about “…the End of the World…” Uh oh, now I remember. Here it comes again! Then the whole thing repeats: Terence’s voice is heard saying “…and not a moment too soon!” I suddenly become aware of myself and take stock of the situation…

Wash, rinse, repeat. I truly have no idea how many times I cycled through. Then, in a new twist on the game, the scenario started to play itself out in different parts of the room! Terence McKenna’s voice is heard saying “and not a moment too soon!” I suddenly become aware of myself and take stock of the situation. Didn’t I already hear that line? I remember thinking this before, and notice that I’m breathing in the same pattern as I did the last time. Oh shit, I’m caught in a time loop! (thought that before, too!) How many times has this happened? Oh wait! I was on the sofa before, and now I’m under the table! Is it really happening over and over, or is it just a glitch in the Matrix, or am I getting bleed-through from nearby alternate dimensions? Yes! It must be multiple variations of the same moment! I have to figure out which one of them really “happened” in my home dimension so I can get off at the right stop. Terence says something about “…the End of the World…” Uh oh, now I remember. Here it comes again!

To my eternal credit (or perhaps to Dr. Shulgin’s credit) I managed to maintain a sense of humor about the whole thing. Yep, there I was all alone in the house, once again a perfect poster child for the campaign to promote the use of the digital scale. Typical. Hilarious, really. If only my friends could see me now…

Finally, be it luck or skill or fate, my native intelligence rearing its foggy little head, or an act of mercy by whatever powers that may be, I stumbled upon the answer to the riddle:

I had accidentally put the track on repeat.

That explains everything, I’ve accidentally put the track on repeat! (I’ve thought this before) I’ve been falling into a reverie whenever I hear the End of the World line, and coming back into what passes for normal consciousness at the very end of the track, just before the voice says “and not a moment too soon!” All I have to do is… Uh oh, now I remember. Here it comes again!

Over and over, I figured it out. Each time, I lurched a few more precious feet in the rough direction of the computer that was masterminding my insanity. Eventually, heroically, I managed to pull the plug out of the wall. I’d passed the test. Time obligingly resumed its normal flow, and after a brief but passionate victory celebration, so did the Teafaerie. And not a moment too soon!

I’ve since acquired an accurate scale; you should, too! And learn to laugh in the face of the impossible. When the head and the heart are both working in your favor, there isn’t much reason to fear.

———————

And Not a Moment Too Soon appears in the newest issue of Erowid Center’s member newsletter, Erowid Extracts.

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.