About a year ago I wrote an article called “Your Mileage May Vary”, in which I recounted the story of a good friend of mine who took something that was represented to her as “ecstasy” and then ended up suffering an apparent stroke during the resulting experience. At the time that the original version of this article was written, my friend was still in the hospital with unknown prospects, and I was sort of anguishing over having personally recommended MDMA for her consideration.

I knew that my friend was a big girl, fully capable of doing her own research and coming to her own decisions. I still felt like complete shit, though. I couldn’t remember exactly what I’d said to her about it, but I was statistically certain that I had made it sound too good to be true–waxing eloquent about the wonders of transcendent self-discovery and emotional bonding in pill form, without ever really going into too much detail about the possible perils and pitfalls. I particularly regretted (and still regret) that I didn’t bother to mention that many pills sold as ecstasy these days are dubious at best, and that only some of them turn out be pure MDMA.

I felt so bad, in fact, that for a while I honestly thought that I was going to quit writing about drugs forever. And I did end up taking more than a year off. Maybe you noticed. I’m coming back, though, because after a whole lot of soul-searching I’ve decided that it really is critically important to keep raising awareness about the awesome power and potential of psychedelic medicines.

Whenever we discover something truly amazing, we naturally want to tell others about it. It’s probably part of the software suite associated with pack survival. We gain social capital when we introduce people to things that later become important to them. Also, your whole team (I think of the entire human race as my team) gains some advantage whenever any of its members take on an adaptive behavior. Maybe that’s part of why I’ve always loved introducing people to certain psychedelics. There’s sort of a rush associated with being the one who gets to provide somebody with something that they’ve been trying to manifest for a long time, and it’s an honor and a privilege to witness other people’s most profound and intimate experiences. I used to be really into it, actually. Way back when I was a homeless neo-hippie festival-hopping street kid, I totally went around with various rockets in my pockets. I ended up having a rather curious series of psychospiritual one-night stands in which I’d meet a single-serving friend on the trail somewhere and take him back to his tent for a little ten-minute freefall down the rabbit hole. Just whiz blur, thank you, sir! — and off again into the night to look for other minds to blow (she says glibly, and then reconsiders that phrase with a shudder). At the time of these events I was absolutely convinced that this practice was not only entirely ethical but something along the lines of a sacred duty that I had been especially selected and trained to perform. I had every confidence in the world that I was doing a very good deed by opening these people up to a larger truth that they had an inalienable right to know about; I figured that however they chose to react to that knowledge was up to them and essentially none of my business. Fortunately the Force was with me, and my little ministry was almost uncannily blessed with unanimously triumphant outcomes. It nevertheless feels wildly irresponsible to me in retrospect. What seemed like the true courage of the mystic libertine fifteen years ago now reads in my memory rather more like recklessness, and my “selfless service” stands revealed in the cold clear light of hindsight as having been more than a little bit motivated by ego.

Yet I really am super glad that somebody had the courage to introduce me to my favorite substances. And I’m grateful that I had more than just Nancy Reagan’s opinion on the matter to consider when it came time to make those big decisions. Indeed, psychedelic evangelism has played an important part in the history of consciousness exploration, and I daresay in the history of the world at large. I’ve always resonated with the Prankster ethos, and I count Timothy Leary amongst my many personal heroes. Faced with the burden of arcane knowledge and the glimmer of evolutionary opportunity, I can see why folks who happen to be in the know would want to spread the good news far and wide. But the “dose ‘em all and let God sort ‘em out” approach is doubly irresponsible at this point in the game, because it endangers both the individuals involved and the tenuous and grudging respect that the psychedelic movement at large has painstakingly managed to achieve through careful hard work and dogged persistence.

So where does that leave people like me? My enthusiasm for the topic is obvious and contagious. Is it more wrong to write about the wonders of psychedelics than it is to proselytize about how fun it is to go snowboarding? How would you feel if your words inspired somebody out there to take up, say, mountain climbing and that person later fell off of a cliff and broke her leg? If that’s different, then why is it different? This is the question that has haunted me all year long. Is there such a thing as responsible advocacy, or even merely the responsible dissemination of positive information where drugs are concerned? And if so, what does it look like?

For one thing, we have to remember to be upfront about the dangers of experimentation. Taking drugs always involves some risk. Period. It might seem like this goes without saying, but I think that it’s important to keep on saying it all the same. Given a substance of known quality and a positive set and setting, I think a healthy volunteer is about as safe taking a mild amount of a psychedelic drug as he would be if he attempted (with some training) to ride a motorcycle stone-cold sober. On the other hand, most of my friends who ride motorcycles have been in at least one accident. I don’t think this means that motorcycles ought to be prohibited. I don’t think it should be illegal to sell motorcycles. And I don’t think it’s particularly irresponsible to talk about how much fun they can be to ride. Lots of wonderful stuff is a little bit risky. It pays to educate yourself about the specific hazards inherent to whatever it is that you’re into, though, so that you can make informed choices and take the necessary precautions. Like wearing a helmet, for instance. Or having a sitter. We have to tell the whole truth. We have to present a balanced picture. Even tested, approved, and properly prescribed pharmaceuticals can be potentially lethal in a small percentage of patients, and the manufacturers have to list the known side effects on the packaging even if they’re vanishingly unlikely to happen to any one particular person. The law requires such labeling for a good reason. It’s important to remind consumers that everybody is different in order to prepare them for unexpected outcomes, in case they turn out to be the rare exception.

When you recommend a drug to someone, you’re taking on some serious karma. It might not happen on their maiden voyage, but there is always a small chance that a person who becomes interested in certain drugs will eventually end up getting hurt, or addicted, or they’ll try to buy something from a cop, or they’ll trigger a latent psychological issue that they’ve been suppressing, or they’ll start believing that they’re the reincarnation of an Egyptian deity, or they’ll fail a piss test and get fired from their job. Or something even worse could happen. I’m not saying that any of those things would be the fault of the person who started the ball rolling, but it’s worth thinking about them before you start rhapsodizing about bliss and enlightenment.

Those who actually supply drugs to others take on an even heavier burden. I feel that suppliers should be obliged to find out whatever they can, and to pass on whatever they learn. Where did a substance come from? How strong is it? How certain is the identity? Is it habituating? Did the supplier try it personally, and if so what was the experience like? Suppliers need to make clear what they DON’T know, too, and point folks to information resources so that they can do their own research. Anyone who says some crappy back-alley ecstasy is pure MDMA (in order to look good or to close a sale) totally sucks, and they deserve what they’re going to get someday. Believe it.

You may think that you’re the Trickster’s darling, but the tides of fortune can turn real fast, believe you me. Shit happens. I’ve been attacked by a trip buddy. I’ve gotten horribly sick. I’ve been busted. I’ve ended up in the hospital. And I’ve felt like I was being torn apart in all nine levels of Hell simultaneously for a billion years compressed into every second of what we’re pleased to call “real time”. I’ve had trips so bad that I can’t even think about them properly, much less write about them. Some of the most intense memories seem to be repressed now, or were always somewhat inaccessible, and I sometimes wonder exactly how terrific for me that is. I’ve had software updates installed that I could not possibly have consented to before I knew what it was going to be like to think differently. (Fortunately for me, I feel like I would have chosen most of the ways that I’ve been changed, but that’s entirely beside the point.)

I’ve been changed quite a bit, actually. I think about a lot of weird stuff that I didn’t use to think about. Some of it is very interesting. Some of it is challenging in the extreme. I don’t think that my short-term memory is as good as it used to be, though that might just be me getting older. I have a couple of friends with mild Hallucinogen Persistent Perceptual Disorder. I have friends who were more comfortable with their spiritual viewpoints back before they had what they themselves would consider to be full-blown spiritual experiences. I’ve lost hundreds of hours worth of productivity because I smoked way too much pot. And who knows what all the new and newish psychedelics will end up doing to their users in the long run? Same goes for pharms, of course. (And Twinkies!) It’s a calculated risk, just like everything else. It adds up, though, and you increase your odds of an unwanted outcome if you take more drugs, or if you take drugs for a longer period of time, or if you mix things. Sometimes people die just because they get a little bit sloppy and forget to follow the basic ground rules. Sometimes people do everything exactly right and they still die anyway. It happens on the freeway all the time. We still drive. But we fasten our seat belts, or we ought to.

I’m not laying out all this scary stuff to try to convince anyone not to take drugs. Heck, the fact that I’m still interested in devoting a lot of my attention to psychedelics in light of everything that I’ve been through is a more impressive testament in their favor than anything I might be able to offer up if I had only experienced their more pleasant and salubrious effects. I mean, I must be getting something pretty fantastic out of my practice for it to be worth all of that risk and hassle to me, right? It’s not that I want to scare people. Fear is the mind-killer, and all that. Once you’ve committed to taking a drug, you can’t afford to sit around thinking about all the things that could go wrong. You have to put all that out of your head and relax. Blind or exaggerated fear is actually part of the problem, because it keeps us from thinking about these things in a clear and practical way. I think scare campaigns about drugs are sort of like abstinence-only sex education crusades; if kids feel bad about even researching the matter, they tend to make poorly informed choices about the proscribed activity when they eventually do yield to their natural curiosity.

I teach people to dance with fire and I recommend it to almost everyone I meet. It’s a great meditation and self-transformation practice, as well as being a fun and sexy performance art. It’s also kind of dangerous. It’s probably less dangerous than SCUBA diving, though, and my first fire class is all about how to avoid getting burned and how to put yourself out if you do happen to catch on fire. So far none of my students have had anything really bad happen (knock on my wooden head). I do know there is always a chance that something could go wrong for one of them some day, either through their own error or because of tool failure, but it doesn’t exactly keep me up nights. Maybe it’s because I spend so much time going over the potential risks and mitigating them by installing a working understanding of best practices. A fire dancer must carefully cultivate a healthy respect for fire. Not fear, exactly, but a keen awareness that focuses the mind and makes the dance more graceful. Occasionally, people do get burned. Sometimes it’s because they were careless. Sometimes it just seems like their number came up. It’s the same with surfing, or skateboarding, or driving a car. Life is dangerous. It’s going to kill us all eventually, in fact. It’s up to each of us to decide which experiences are worth the risks that they carry, both for ourselves and for our loved ones.

As of this writing, my friend who had a stroke last year is doing much better. She walks and talks and drives and hangs out with her friends and all that. She’s developing a novel hula-hoop based therapy that may someday help other people with bilateral coordination problems. For the most part, she seems pretty happy. I can tell that she’s not the same, though. I just called her up and asked her how she feels about me writing for Erowid again, and she was unexpectedly supportive. She said that I should be proud of who I am and what I do, and she thinks that I should continue the good work in spite of everything. But she also sees it as a chance to become a more powerful advocate for keeping one’s eyes open, and I find that I really resonate with that these days.

That’s one of the reasons Erowid exists. I happen to know about a few times that they’ve delayed posting experience reports for a new substance because they had nothing but positive descriptions of the effects, and they wanted to wait until they had the corresponding cautionary tales that they suspected would eventually come in. There is an honorable way to spread the good word, and that way is to provide people with high quality data and resources so that they can sort it out for themselves and make informed decisions. So please take the time to do your homework, and always tell the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth (at least as far as you’re able to discern it). Don’t curb your enthusiasm, but do remember to temper it with a healthy dose of respect, especially when you’re talking with those who are just starting to get excited about exploring. I do think, in the end, that most people would benefit from having at least one psychedelic experience to broaden their perspective. But the person standing in front of you is never “most people”. She’s an individual with her own chemistry and her own set and her own unique opportunity; and she needs to be told that her mileage may vary.

Predictably enough, this leads to people asking me to define Chapel Perilous for them. I’ve been trying to define it for myself, or rather to figure out what it means, for most of the five years that I’ve been working on the book. It’s a hard thing to put one’s finger on. In fact, that’s part of the point.

The history of the term is interesting. Traditionally, the Chapel Perilous or Grail Castle has been the ultimate destination for knights questing after the Holy Grail. For most people of my generation, this brings up an image out of Monty Python, as well it should. The story has been around for a long time, though. The mystical experiences within this chapel are the climax of many an Arthurian adventure story. Those who entered were typically subjected to a rigorous battery of challenges, some of which seem to be training exercises of sorts, while others are ultimate tests of purity, conviction, and understanding. Dangerous traps are to be found there, often tailored to force a confrontation with an individual knight’s personal weaknesses. Those who failed would not be allowed to access the Grail and might even be killed or driven mad in the attempt. On the other hand, a candidate who proved worthy might hope to be granted great power and priceless treasures.

The idea of Chapel Perilous as it is commonly used in psychedelic parlance comes from Robert Anton Wilson’s countercultural classic The Cosmic Trigger. Bob defines Chapel Perilous as: “A stage in the magickal quest in which your maps turned out to be totally inadequate for the territory and you’re completely lost.” He has quite a lot more to say on the topic, having spent a good deal of time there himself:

“Chapel Perilous, like the mysterious entity called ‘I,’ cannot be located in the space-time continuum; it is weightless, odorless, tasteless and undetectable by ordinary instruments. Indeed, like the Ego, it is even possible to deny that it is there. And yet, even more like the Ego, once you are inside it, there doesn’t seem to be any way to ever get out again, until you suddenly discover that it has been brought into existence by thought and does not exist outside thought. Everything you fear is waiting with slavering jaws in Chapel Perilous, but if you are armed with the wand of intuition, the cup of sympathy, the sword of reason and the pentacle of valor, you will find there (the legends say) the Medicine of Metals, the Elixir of Life, the Philosopher’s Stone, True Wisdom and Perfect Happiness.”

I myself tend to think of Chapel Perilous as the place where you find yourself when the sheer absurdity of it all can no longer be ignored. When it all starts to add up and multiply while remaining somehow stubbornly indivisible. When synchronicity spirals out of control and you finally discover that you really are, in fact, the center and purpose of the universe after all. Either that or you’re stone-cold crazy. Or maybe it’s both. It’s the dark night of the soul, and it’s generally understood to be some kind of a trap. But it’s also a doorway, if one has the courage, strength, intelligence, and luck to pass through it.

Not everybody visits the Chapel, of course. Even heavy psychedelic users often seem to navigate around it, or perhaps they slip through it quickly and easily, passing its tests and collecting its treasures without ever quite realizing that they’ve done so. Sometimes I envy those people; either so pure of heart that the door stands wide open for them or so solidly constructed that their ontologies don’t support that kind of nonsense in the first place. Thousands of frequent fliers do end up doing some hard time there at some point in their careers, though, as anybody who reads a lot of trip reports can attest.

I think it goes harder on people whose operating systems are susceptible to metaphysical speculation, for reasons that ought to be obvious enough. If you really know what you believe going in, it’s pretty hard for psychedelics (or anything else) to jerk you around. If someone has a strong clear spiritual faith, they tend to interpret whatever they find in terms of their pre-existing models. Conversely if a person is a dyed-in-the-wool rational atheist or a logical empiricist, they’re probably not going to come back from a big trip raving about contact with multi-dimensional entities or wormholes in the fabric of space-time. My friend Reilly is like that. He’s a professional scientist, and his hard-boiled positivism is utterly unassailable. He also happens to love DMT. I think maybe it’s easier and more fun for him than it is for me or any of my other friends, because although he experiences a wide spectrum of the classic effects, he’s pretty much immune to the pitfalls associated with taking any of it too seriously.

On the other hand, sometimes people get a big surprise that they were not at all expecting. I’ve seen folks who would surely have described themselves as ontologically secure and totally invulnerable to transcendental malarkey lose their proverbial shit in the wake of an unanticipated revelation brought on by their use of psychedelic drugs. And I’m not talking about brain damage cases here, unless your definition of damage extends to encompass unwanted software updates.

Spiritual experiences or their counterfeit counterparts (which may also be considered spiritual insofar as they have a direct bearing on the subject’s evolving spirituality) are so common amongst psychedelic aficionados that there is a large movement to rebrand certain substances as “entheogens”, which is Greek for something like “god-generating” or “divine within”. Psychonauts worldwide often report deeply spiritual, religious, or philosophically transformative trips. So much so that it’s kind of a psychedelic cliche. In fact, many users tend to look down their noses at anyone who takes drugs for reasons that are not overtly spiritual. So I think we can at least acknowledge the prevalence of the meme, whatever our personal opinions on the matter may be. It’s easy to imagine how an abrupt spiritual revelation, especially one that an individual is not culturally prepared to accept, can lead to the kind of cognitive dissonance that’s typically associated with the Chapel Perilous phenomenon.

Of course, some people who hold vigil in the Chapel don’t think about it like that. Many of the congregants there don’t consider themselves to be spiritual types at all. They simply think of themselves as rational atheists who just so happen to have been contacted by extraterrestrials. Or maybe they think they’re becoming a little bit telepathic around the edges, or precognitive, or they just keep seeing that same damn number everywhere they go. I’ve talked before about how synchronicity can pile up in the wake of a crisis or breakthrough, be it psychedelically inspired or otherwise. Synchronicity is like a rainbow in that it only exists relative to the viewpoint of a character who happens to be in the right position to manifest its effects. For sure our brains are pattern recognizing machines, and at least part of the explanation lies in our own shifting fields of focus and perception. Carl Jung, who coined the term, thought that in some cases it really did represent a statistical disruption of probability, though. And whatever you might think about the reflexive relationship between mind and matter, the subjective experience of a reality storm can be more than a little bit unsettling. When the fabric of the real seems to be unraveling, it’s easy to get paranoid or fixated, or to fly off into bouts of wild speculation. We can all think of a few fine minds who got way into psychedelics and then started raving about all kinds of whack-ass-sounding shit. Straight people often see this as a sign of brain-burn, but I tend to think of it as a stage in the Quest. Chapel Perilous can be a wilderness of mirrors in which fragments of our own souls are reflected back to us at odd angles, sometimes amplified and distorted beyond recognition.

The idea that the universe exists, at least in part, to somehow train us or test us, goes way back and runs real deep. I know lots of people who don’t consider themselves to be particularly religious or spiritually inclined who nevertheless seem to have a vague but pervasive sense of karmic propriety. If a person does something bad, they feel that their sins will surely come home to roost in one way or another. Perhaps this is just a superstitious method of dealing with hard feelings about an unfair world or wishful thinking on the part of long suffering do-gooders who want to imagine that they and others like them will one day be paid out for all their temporally unappreciated efforts. Likewise lots of people feel that they are being tested when trials arise in their lives, or that the universe is trying to teach them something. Mostly it’s pretty harmless. Amplified by psychedelics, though, this kind of thinking can turn your life into a cosmic comic book. The Faerie was raised on fantasy novels and Kung Fu flicks, so maybe I’m particularly susceptible to that sort of thing. But I’m not the only one who has wrestled with it. It’s fairly common to hear at least the plant psychedelics referred to as “teachers”. For me they were the Jedi masters that I’d been waiting for all my life. Unsurprisingly, a good deal of my training took place in Chapel Perilous. I had a kind of tenuous and ambiguous relationship with consensus reality there for a while. This was almost ten years ago now, but the memories of my confusion, conviction, and vulnerability still haunt me. I think that I might have lost the thread if hadn’t found a strong and sympathetic community to keep me anchored. I really, really, really, really do.

Any relationship that you can’t talk openly about strikes me as suspect. Yeah, yeah, the law and all that. Don’t risk your teaching position or your job as a cop. But if you can’t talk honestly about what’s going on with you to a friend or a counselor, or even to a stranger on the Internet for dog’s sake, you might be susceptible to unchecked squirrely notions. If you’re afraid that you’ll be judged as insane, or even if you’re afraid that you might pop your own bubble and lose faith in your own revelations and experiences, then it’s probably time to take a good hard look at your practice. In shamanic traditions, or even in non-psychedelic energetic practices like Kundalini Yoga, it is considered essential to train with somebody who knows what’s up. Otherwise a new student runs the whole gamut of risks associated with plugging themselves into voltage that they’re simply not rated for yet. Intuition is awesome. Intuition is great.  Maybe, in the end, intuition and experience are indeed the best teachers. But there is a lot to be said for actual teachers. People have been at this for thousands upon thousands of years, and you don’t have to make stupid beginner’s mistakes or get caught in well-known perceptual traps if you’re willing to seek out and incorporate the wisdom of your elders. You don’t have to re-invent the wheel. There are wise people in the world who have been there and back again. Oh, you don’t know any of them? Go find one. Can’t find one? Read a book. Which book? Read reviews. Ask people. Ask people online. Read a bunch of different books and see what resonates. A book can’t give you much feedback, though. Find someone you can talk to. Sometimes just listening to yourself talk is all that it takes to see whatever you’ve got going on from a new perspective. Some of this stuff that gets buried in the human psyche tends to decompose in the presence of air and sunlight once you get it out in the open. Pay a homeless person $20 to listen to your story if you have to. If you really can’t find a listener, write up a trip report or a retrospective and read it out loud to yourself. Then send it to Erowid, so that others people can benefit from what you’ve learned (or at least see that they’re not alone).

The Zen master Shunryu Suzuki said that a premature enlightenment experience is not necessarily a good thing. I don’t know from enlightenment, but I know that at times, under the right circumstances, some of this stuff can rock people’s inner worlds. Psychedelics are deconditioning agents. Which is great. Culture is full of bullshit that we need to be deconditioned from. But revelation without integration can make you wish you’d taken the blue pill. Robert Anton Wilson said that people come out of Chapel Perilous either paranoid or agnostic, and there’s not really a third choice. I don’t believe that, though. I think it’s possible to recondition yourself to a broader and more ambiguous worldview, pass the tests, gain the powers, and carry the treasures back to renew your homeland. Of course, I wouldn’t know. I haven’t exactly made it out yet, myself. Maybe that’s why I can’t seem to finish my book.

Perhaps one day I will find the Holy Grail. Until then I plan to make myself
at home in Chapel Perilous. I like it here. It’s nice. I’ve written on the walls and rearranged the furniture. I’ve festooned the mirrored labyrinth with Silly String and marked the moving tiles with lipstick. I don’t expect the map to match the territory anymore. I’ve given up the need for closure. I can deal with a little bit of peril. I haven’t stopped playing with fire, but after having been burned a few times I’ve learned how to flow with it. I’ve got the wand of intuition, the cup of sympathy, the sword of reason, and the pentacle of valor. (Now if I could only remember where I put them.) And also, perhaps most importantly, I have the rubber chicken of humor. I’ve learned how to be crazy without going totally insane. I’ve learned how to lighten up. Erleichda! It’s a game, not a test or a trap. The Chapel is the Trickster’s temple, and the laws of storybook logic apply. Monty Python is probably as good a source for Grail mythos as Malory, though, from a practical standpoint. Don’t try to reason with silly people. Know when to run away. Watch out for the giant bunnies, and don’t take anything too seriously.