The Spiritual Emergency

In the recent documentary, “Music for Mushrooms”, DJ East Forest explores the healing effects of music in the entheogenic space. His music is expansive with beautiful riffs and quiet samples of streams, wind and chirping birds. Pilgrims and clients sit against the walls and bathe in the sound bath. Slowly, inevitably, they start to cry. Participants later describe accessing deep wells of grief, some they did not realize they carried. Others describe finding closure with loved ones long dead. In interviews their eyes sparkle with catharsis and joy. In the documentary “Fantastic Fungi”, Paul Stametes describes taking a massive dose of mushrooms, climbing up into a tree during a thunderstorm, and subsequently curing himself of his stutter. Other journeyers describe transcendent vistas of God and eternity. They describe their trip as the most spiritual experience of their life. In research papers, mushrooms are lauded for their ability to cure PTSD and depression. Research surveys list transcendence as the most common descriptor. Mushrooms can be beautiful, but they are also immensely difficult. Over the past year, all of my high dose mushroom trips have been deeply confronting. Most recently they sent me into a full panic attack. The critic in my mind questions, especially after the last session, why do I continue?

Valid.

To understand this, I would reexamine the last trip.

On a quiet Saturday a few weeks ago I took 4.2 grams of mushrooms. This trip, again, would be difficult. My shoulders were tense. For weeks I had grappled with a simmering depression rooted in the winter darkness, but also heavy shifts in my family dynamics. I debated whether to hold off on the trip, but my gut pushed me forward. I had grappled with tensions in past trips and emerged feeling clean and bright. I expected this to be the same.

I carefully designed my setting. I cleaned the room and swept the floors. I changed the sheets. I lit a candle. My soundtrack was chosen to be neutral, supportive and uplifting.

I lay down and covered my eyes. My music began with 45 minutes of shamanic drums to shepherd me past the veil of consciousness. The drum beats rose up massive in my mind. I began to feel a strong current and began to relax into it, but my mind twitched and I resisted. I could feel my body tense as I pushed against the flow. My hands began to shake. I drifted uneasily then and time bled away. Handpan and shamanic chants guided me forward, but my mind bucked like an animal in a cage. The shamanic chants became increasingly driving and a deep sense of unease flooded in. I felt like the intonations were turning up some nasty darkness in my gut. A vision emerged and once again, my father filled my mind's eye. I saw myself as worthless in his eyes and unable to take care of myself. I yearned for some kind of path or direction, any shred of guidance, but met only disapproving silence. 

When I was 19 years old I had a crisis of faith, failed out of my christian college and moved home. I remember playing video games in my basement until my father woke up for work at 5 am. I remember hearing his footsteps stop at the top of the stairs, silently acknowledging his fuck-up son, before walking out for work. I learned then to shut up, get my worthless self to work and hold whatever job would have me. The vision expanded out and I stood before my sick father years later. I watched his strong and vital body shrink to bone. I heard his voice slur. I saw myself in his eyes and I saw my own vitality bleed away as well. A small part of me believed I would also die of ALS and as the vision drew me into that darkness, I saw that belief stark and real against my chest. The sliver of my conscious mind knew what I was being shown was truth and it was splitting my head open.

Four hours later I sat on the toilet shaking uncontrollably. Something foul and diseased sat in my large intestine. Colors swam in the shadowed bathroom. “I’m not OK” I breathed, “I’m going to be OK”. I was with my father again. I was in his shadow and he was a misted mountain- a far-off titan walking in the clouds. I was alone. I felt his disease in me. Every muscle ache, every tired morning, every lost memory is a sign of ALS. I felt myself molded in his image with all his fear and sadness and malady. I was poor and worthless. I was fated to die early. The reflection of myself fused with my own. I had no way to contextualize it, no story to lessen it, no identity to combat it. I was absolutely defenseless. This other truth pressed down and merged into me. My stomach twisted and I tried to breathe. I breathed.

For weeks now I have been emotionally raw. Recently I came across a video of the Mamuna tribe of South Papua traveling through the jungle with children on their shoulders. As they walk, they sing:

Day by day we walk on,

Our feet pressing

The same earth

Our fathers and our fathers'

fathers

Walked day by day,

While they walked on.

Day by day we walk on,

Hush, little ones,

Don't tell the earth 

We love her yet.

We will sleep in her soon

enough,

But for now we walk on.

I feel like I walk with these men in the forest, pressing my feet into the soil. I feel the earth-memory in my feet. I feel my own death at my hip. I feel my own exhaustion. “Not yet,” I whisper. “We’ll all sleep there someday, but not yet.” I feel the process of my mind: broken and quiet and vibrant.

The vision I saw was horrible and vicious and traumatic, but it was me. I saw an emotional aspect of myself that I had carefully squirreled away. Even as I hyperventilated on the toilet, I saw the volcanic truth of it. As this discordant part of myself merged with my ego, I shook. I am still shaking. Finally though, I can cry.

The great Gabor Mate discusses how trauma and unresolved grief creates ego-protected shells of ourselves, shielded away from overwhelming emotions. This dissociation from ourselves locks us away from our own emotional core. We become a husk of ourselves. I have seen this first-hand. I have experienced it first-hand. Much of my self work over the years has been reconnecting with myself that I lost. When the ego smashes into parts of ourself that we have hidden, it can feel like a break from reality. Jules Evans, author of Breaking Open: Finding a Way through Spiritual Emergency, offers how there is no clean line between psychosis and spiritual emergency. Both contest our fundamental perceptions of self. Both threaten to collapse our ego. The difference is perception of the event: understanding that even at the limits of our psyches, we are simply ourselves. As we expand out the bounds of our conscious perimeter, we integrate the larger scope of our soul. 

That brutal phantom behind the locked doors in my mind is just me.

To heal is to embrace this.

I acknowledge this is a hard sell for a mushroom trip. Honestly this is a hard sell for myself as a practitioner. After I had this mushroom trip, I considered dropping this whole endeavor.

Ultimately I arrive here: I don’t have answers, but I believe this work is absolutely vital. I walk forward. I offer to anyone who resonates-- I will walk with them when they venture there as well.