Far Out,
Man

The trust fall is a perilous gambit. What if you lack the strength to catch yourself? You won’t know until you’re already falling. That you might slip through your own outstretched arms, splash into the murky non-self that surrounds the tiny islet of being—this is supposedly part of the fun. As Jia Tolentino argues in her New Yorker essay about God, drugs, and DJ Screw, self-annihilation is a central aspiration of the ecstatic experience, whether religious or chemical. This waning of the first-person singular Simone Weil called “decreation.” (The term you’ll find in psychedelic literature, ego death, leaves a metallic taste in my mouth.) Tolentino quotes Weil: “Perfect joy excludes even the very feeling of joy, for in the soul filled by the object no corner is left for saying 'I.'”

H proved a talented amateur mycologist. We spread ourselves across the back lawn of the rental, putting on and taking off layers, rolling lopsided cigarettes, periodically captivated by bugs, birdsong, and foliage: a tall tree with red leaves seethed and trembled, smudging its color on our eyes. T was beautiful in the light; she explained science, brains, and bark. H was game and puckish, eager to delight. The clothes he wore perfectly matched the two-toned paint on the house, burnt-orange and blue. He wouldn’t tell us whether he’d done it on purpose.

I was queasy and quiet. (A few lines from a Migos verse drifting through my head: “I don't know how you feel can you tell me / I won't know how you feel till you tell me.”) In addition to nausea, psilocybin can induce synesthesia, a sensory cross-wiring. You slip into an involuntary metaphoric fugue: shapes have tastes, images vibrate to the sound of music, inanimate objects acquire personalities, emotional valence. The sour grumble in my gut leaked between my senses, infusing everything with sickliness and menace. I wasn’t great company.

But my nausea faded with the daylight, and by dusk, I’d begun to experience something else entirely: a complete, if largely harmonious, divorce from reality. Gregory of Nyssa, a fourth–century bishop, was the first Christian theologian to theorize God as an infinite being. To come to know the divine is thus an eternal, asymptotic process, all the more satisfying for being inexhaustible. Children who are told about heaven often wonder: won’t we get bored of eternal life? Gregory’s answer is no, because there is always more to know of God, more folds and textures of divine goodness to unfurl. We spend eternity in a state of perpetual becoming, from glory to glory.

I am a non-believing Jew, more or less a materialist. None of this was on my mind. But it describes what I felt. That if we would merely submit to desire, a desire irreducibly linked with a will to know, we’d reach rapturous heights of ever-evolving ecstasy.

You’ll not be surprised to hear that my effort to convey this feeling to H and T was not only bewildering but disturbing. Bliss, for the unblissful, is indistinguishable from madness. And I had not yet read Gregory of Nyssa—not that blabbering about a fourth-century mystic would’ve helped my case. As T told me later, with generous irony and genuine concern, I said some things that “could not be unsaid.” I definitely proposed that we three have sex, go swimming in a freezing pool, and break the furniture with our hands. H kept me from acting on numerous dangerous or impossible impulses; I was apparently suggestible, just not rational.

When I returned to myself, I felt cold and harmed. I had been proximate to a state of being without limit. Thrust back into my brittle body, its tight corners and confines, I wondered, would I ever get used to this? How had I?

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Reagan said, “There’s nothing grown–up or sophisticated about taking an LSD trip.” He was right. Sophistication beads on the surface of the psychedelic experience like water on Teflon. Childish wonder and naivete are its substrates. Some neuroscientists hypothesize that the dormant neural pathways activated during a psychedelic trip are constantly firing in infancy. For many, that’s part of the appeal.

In moments of cynicism, renewing a sense of awe may seem like a panacea. But in our era of boardroom ayahuasca retreats, privately insured mindfulness, and micro-dosing software engineers, wide-eyed wonder isn’t exactly in short supply. The California Ideology—that Silicon Valley mélange of techno-utopianism, new age mysticism, and hippie anarchism—is triumphant. Steve Jobs claimed LSD helped him envision the Apple computer. Bill Gates said he used it too, in his “errant youth.”

You can’t blame the drugs for this, I suppose, any more you can blame them for the Grateful Dead. Maybe it was inevitable that the principles of the counterculture to survive the American century—self-expression, hedonistic excess, hazy humanitarianism—would be most compatible with surveillance capitalism. At the very least, if tripping has become a fashionable signifier for the richest men on earth, it must be possible to feel both one with the universe and at its center.

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Julian is dancing with his entire body. Nina is purring, Baby, you understand me now, if sometimes you see that I’m mad. The strings swell, and Julian swells, lets his pelvis slide into the beat. With a soft snap, the snares come in; they’re attached to his hips. I’ve seen him dance like this before, when he’s happy or drunk or the song is just right, a woozy little twist. It’s subtle and campy. Goofily lascivious. Only now does it strike me as beautiful. A man in clumsy control of his body, his skinny limbs bent over the bass notes, taking their shape.

We’re smiling at each other now, big wide-open grins, because we know what’s coming next. Nina bellows over the background singers, all defiance and pique, drums catching the rhythm of each word: But I’m just a soul whose intentions are good—and Jules, arms above his head, twisting his torso in time, lets them fall—Oh Lord, please don’t let me be misunderstood.

“It’s the perfect song,” I say, tears in my eyes. Julian says. “Yesssss.”

This is the other sort of trip. Not remote revery, which distances you from “I” and “them,” but the opposite: an intersubjective mesh. In simple terms, my friend and I are vibing, hard. Julian is a poet and a Marxist. I like to wind him up and set him loose. (I’d prompted him, earlier, to explain the Lacanian Real. “The Real is a piece of chewing gum on the heel,” he said, “a psychic remainder of the pre-symbolic, where excess and lack coincide.” When I told him I didn’t get it, he said, “exactly.”) Our wobbly dialogue flits among these themes, enacting and delineating them both. Communication, we decide, is shaded by the looming presence of its failure. Without fear of misinterpretation, there is no joy in being understood.

It’s the second half of the chorus that breaks us open, when Nina’s voice loses its nerve, gets small. She trails off as if the person she was talking to has left, and now she’s talking to herself. Please, please, she sings, don’t let me be misunderstood.

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Is it the content of revelation that thrills, or its radiant delivery? I’m not sure. In Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), William James identifies two essential features of the “mystical experience”: The first is ineffability: “no adequate report of its contents can be given in words.” ("It resists articulation absolutely," Julian said of The Real.) The second is a noetic quality: mystical reveries seem to be “states of knowledge… insights into depths of truth unplumbed by the discursive intellect.” James, a pragmatist, insisted these experiences were true to the extent they were useful to the believer.

For me, a heathen, the noetic quality was least durable. James writes that revelations derived from a mystical state “carry with them a curious sense of authority” thereafter. Realities have been disclosed, not deduced. They retain their status as revealed truth. But that wasn’t true for me. I can recall the enveloping love I briefly felt; I can even countenance the sense of merging with a disembodied absolute. But none of it carries the same rapture. “The words… have a kind of indecency and must necessarily ring false, seem like twaddle,” Aldous Huxley wrote to a friend, having described a mescaline trip in similar terms. “But the fact remains.”

This, I find, is one of the central conundrums of the psychedelic experience: the blandest of insights arrive packaged in an emotional container of shattering novelty. (If you’ve ever written something down in a moment of drug-addled revery, then found it later—some banality scrawled, maniacally, on a pizza box in Sharpie—you’ll appreciate the bathos I’m referring to.) As the journalist Michael Pollan quips in his 2018 book How to Change Your Mind, “The mystical journey seems to offer a graduate education in the obvious.”

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In Vermont, H puts a blanket over me. There’s an emptied-out space inside me that’s filling up with inarticulate shame. To have let myself go, so completely, to have lost myself, so far gone; it feels like a betrayal, of me and them. I feel finite, as if for the first time. How do we live in these tiny measures of time, these tiny bodies, these tiny lives?

The walls teem with intricate fractal geometry. The word for the human impulse to perceive patterns and meaning where there is none—animals in clouds, faces in inkblots and knotty pine—is pareidolia. (Wherever I look, I see triangles: Me and H and T. The Imaginary, the Symbolic, the Real. The Father, the Son, the Ghost. Takeoff, Offset, Quavo.) In the 90s, an ethnobotanist named Terence McKenna theorized that consuming psilocybin was the “evolutionary catalyst” that enabled our genetic ancestors to make the cognitive leap into language. Think of it: two stoned apes, locked inside their own minds, gripped by the same sensory fugue that manifested my nausea in sights, sounds, and color, suddenly able to attach pattern and pathos to the noises the other is making with his mouth. A sound you can see. A thing you can say. A thought you can hear. Would encountering God be any more miraculous than encountering, for the first time, the interiority of the other? I doubt it. The divine is ineffable, but legibility is divine.

My psychedelic experiences are divided between reverence for the infinite and ineffable and gratitude for the finite and spoken. Even now, as I recede into the edges of my body, cast out of monistic immanence into a world of mediated symbols and measured time, another desire blooms. I cherish being here, being known and cared for. (I don't know how you feel can you tell me?) Oneness with everything risks utter isolation. Dialogue risks failure. (Don’t let me be misunderstood.) To know God, to unfurl His boundless love, is eternal; to be known, a fleeting thrill. But look closely: they are almost touching. The traversable distance between them—between the immeasurable and the measure, the ineffable and the uttered—that is music. Better than pleasure, that is where beauty lives.

Sam Adler-Bell is a freelance writer in Brooklyn. He co-hosts the Dissent magazine podcast, “Know Your Enemy.”