I want to explore the question of why we suffer, but first, I need to tell you about the moment when I could say that my life changed.
Four grams is far too much a for a beginner. In my defense, I didn’t know that. Nor did I know that what I had on hand was a particularly potent strain named after male genitals. I’d soon come to realize that, first, eaten raw, they taste terrible, and second, the power of these things is nothing to take lightly. The only thing I started off knowing for certain was that I was in a state of immense suffering, and it had gotten to a point where I needed to take drastic, direct action. Daily mood swings, hair-trigger panic attacks, flashbacks, and lashing out had made my life unbearable. Things had gotten dark, and were threatening to get even darker.
Whatever compelled me to down those dried, shriveled little things with a glass of orange juice, what I experienced was something I never could have prepared for.
This is where things get weird, and not even for the kind of reasons that writing about psychedelics gets weird. Yes, there were visuals; yes, there was ego death; yes, time itself did weird, ineffable things; yes, there were encounters with archetypal entities—all of this, I knew to expect. By this time in life I was a heavy daily pot user and had gone through a handful of inadvertent “weed trips.” I’d even taken a tab with a friend sometime back. If these were the reference points for setting expectations, they were extremely inadequate.
Because what I experienced was a complete and total submersion into the very mechanics of my own mind. As the effects of the mushrooms took full effect, I had descended into the kaleidoscopic shapes and colors that were pretty standard. Gradually, things got more intense. The visuals got increasingly disorganized. My system felt over-throttled, my senses so jacked up they became a single cloud of pure experience with no differentiation between inputs. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t think, remember anything at all, feel any kind of identifiable emotion, or even so much as interpret. My visual field simply showed me these random colors and movements as my mental faculties were suspended in real time. In that state, something of a half-thought got smuggled in: This is deep inside my own trauma.
I was caught in the very fault line that trauma opens in awareness itself. If you’ve ever felt an electrical jolt of shock or terror seize your body—imagine freezing it, and then descending so far into it that you watch it unravel at the molecular level. That’s where I was.
I didn’t remember any of this a few hours later when I came back to lucid experience. It took more than a year—alongside intensive meditation and psychedelic integration—before the memory even surfaced, let alone before I could begin to make sense of it.
It wasn’t about the visuals. It was about the state itself. And that’s where things get interesting.
In time I would turn to Buddhist teaching, and it shed a lot of light on this experience. Consciousness isn’t a unified thing. It’s contingent. It arises from a host of things that clump together to produce a magic trick, or mirage. An analogy: in the desert, heat causes rising air, which causes changes in air density, which bends light, which causes a shimmering effect, which we perceive as a “mirage.” In the mind, when we make contact with matter, it produces sensory sensations, which cause perceptions, which construct patterns of experience, which gives rise to consciousness itself. Consciousness depends on each of these arising in a tightly-orchestrated way so that one cannot see the seams in this chain. For everything to appear solid and continuous, the mind has to cover its own tracks.
My mind couldn’t do that anymore. This process got stuck—specifically in the gap between sensation and perception. The result was a systemic “freakout,” not necessarily a traumatic freeze response, but that which makes that freeze response at all possible. I didn’t experience this as unpleasant or terrifying because I was frozen in the chain of the mental process before I could even interpret it as unpleasant or terrifying.
If I had to point to any single moment in which I can say, “this is where my life changed,” that’s it. A lot happened in the trip after this, but this was the first moment my mind saw through itself and into its own nature. That’s what meditation is all about. It’s what so many people spend years, even decades, coming to realize. The challenge with psychedelics isn’t reaching that point. It’s recognizing it, and staying with it. On shrooms one is never going to have that “Bodhi Tree” moment, like the Buddha’s full awakening. But one can be shown the blueprint in intimate detail. One simply has to know what they’re looking at.
What I had seen, I’d come to understand much later, was my mind laid bare. Not just its workings, but the exact mechanics of where suffering arises.
Where all suffering arises.
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