Disintegration and reintegration
First trip report
Almost 20 years late, but it feels like this both happened just yesterday, but also in some other world, with some other person (because, of course, I was a different person, and the world was a different world).
Setting: It’s 2007. I’m 30 years old, but I’ve only just begun to discover the life of the world, and the life of the mind. I’ve smoked a lot of pot in the past six years, trying to make up for my sober (but totally dissociated) adolescence. I’m in love. Erin just moved in. She’s a psychologist. I know nothing of psychology, but I did just read my first self-help book (Feel The Fear And Do It Anyway), and I am suddenly interested. I know nothing of meditation. Kegan Stage 3. I know only what pop consciousness has suggested to me about psychedelic drugs. I’m prepared to be transformed from my repressed self into a full-on tree-hugging hippie. Erin has agreed to be my trip-sitter.
Set: Of course there was plenty of anxiety already going into it: People with family histories of bipolar disorder or schizophrenia should steer clear. We know that, yes, for some predisposed people, psychedelic drugs can trigger and unleash latent psychosis. No family history, so I guess I’ll be safe? And then there’s the anxiety of anticipating experiencing something totally new and unpredictable that one can’t prepare for. Not to mention the anxiety over getting the dose right (which is prone to error, since psilocybin mushroom potency can vary drastically naturally, even from one part of the mushroom to another). And then you actually have to eat the things. I mean, I thought I liked mushrooms but, fuck me, that was a nasty and unpleasant way to start something that I thought was supposed to be fun.
The next thing that I remember is feeling like I had poisoned myself. Nauseous, on the sofa, awkwardly shifting this way and that, trying to find a way to be comfortable, when discomfort was clearly the central message being emitted from the core of my being – seemingly from the fabric of the universe itself. I clearly remember thinking, “why? why would I do this to myself? what the actual fuck was I thinking?” And then I remember when, still horribly uncomfortable, I started to notice how beautiful everything looked. The fibers of the fabric on the sofa. The wood grain on the floor. The textures. The light. The colors! Everything was sensuous and beautiful. Everything was new.
Erin must have put on Rufus Wainwright. I remember writhing around in blissful ecstasy, in a state of awe. Go or Go Ahead was playing on the hi-fi. The “do-do-do do-do-do-do” vocalizations were synesthetized with the sparkles of light all around the room, like twinkling stars in the morning sky. The bookshelves in the room started breathing: rows of books were like opening and closing accordions in rhyme to the music. The whole room was breathing. And I felt like I was breathing for the first time. There was such an abundance of fresh air. I wanted to cry of overwhelming relief. I remember looking at my hands and being hit by the dawn of new consciousness. “Holy shit, I’m an actual human animal.”
In the years that followed, I chased after that experience. Of course I was only interested in the positive feelings and far less into the discomfort. Much of my efforts went into attempting to find ways in which to maximize the former and eliminate the latter, mostly with predictably frustrating results. The same played out in the relationship with Erin, where I insisted only on connection and I threw tantrum after tantrum over our regular disconnects. It took a bunch of years to admit that that particular chase was a dead end, and a bunch more just to begin to understand why.
The bliss and the ecstasy are not separate from the reintegration into the world of form and relationship, and reintegration is not separate from, and can only ever follow disintegration. In fact, though there is no way to contrive reintegration, for it is uncontrivable, we can cultivate the soil by accepting the disintegration, just as it comes; we can even will it; we can even see the pregnant beauty and perfection that is embedded in its nature. It is, in any case, the one thing that we can truly count on readily having access to in our daily lives, and we can either choose to resist it, or we can choose to embrace it: in our selves, in our relationships, and in all of our moment-to-moment encounters that make up our conscious experiencing. We can stand corrected. We can take what the world is giving us, and we can give some back too. And then when it comes, we can also accept the momentary grace and splendour of the inevitable reintegration and reunification with our fellow human animals.
