Some Thoughts on LSD

Experience

I’ve talked about my LSD experiences so many times to so many different people that it’s become really routine for me - a few phrases (‘changed my life,’ ‘blew my mind open,’ ‘knocked out my anxiety’) that have become a short hand for everything else and that are usually met with an approving, understanding nod by the person I’m talking to, who, typically, has gone through their own LSD journey. “The thing about it is that it’s very difficult to remember how you felt before you did it,” said my interlocutor to me recently at the end of one such conversation. 

But I disagreed. I can remember very vividly how I thought and felt before I did LSD - and how much I changed after. I was 28, so relatively late to this. I was very intellectual, very focused on my discipline, and had a great deal of anxiety connected to expectations and status. And the LSD basically obliterated that anxiety. The trip itself was exactly as wonderful as everybody always describes their trips - there was the sense of the world being very vivid, colors, sounds, everything enhanced; the sense of discovering whole worlds inside my mind (if, in my ‘healthy neurotic’ state I might have three thoughts at once, on LSD I seemed to have about eleven thoughts at the same time); the sense of the world, my immediate surroundings, revealing itself to me as a Paradise that could be explored infinitely; the sense of truly appreciating objects around me, of being able to understand what people ‘less in their head’ than I was could appreciate in their material surroundings; the sense of interpersonal relations being the deepest truth and having their own reality - so that any relationship that I’d had with my fellow trippers prior to the trip became magnified and the acid revealed the essence of the relationship. But the greatest gift of it was the sense of having to answer to no one, of being completely intact in myself, of having a right to existence without any regard to status or expectations. 

I had been truly terrified before taking the LSD, had never had any psychedelics, really worried that it would change my cognition, that I’d turn into, who knows, a hippie or a lotus-eater. And none of the things that I was terrified of occurred at all. I never really lost control; never felt that I was in danger. I didn’t have flashbacks, didn’t become addicted to LSD (that’s almost impossible - it really is non-addictive and non-habit-forming), didn’t have bad trips - although I was present for the bad trips of other people and found that the trippers got through them without difficulty if they treated them as useful psychological experiences as opposed to being something wrong with the LSD. My cognition wasn’t affected; I had my old brain, hadn’t lost memory, had the same cortical capacity although with a greater degree of openness and acceptance. 

But it would be really wrong to say that I was the same person after my LSD trips - and, in a sense, they were as personality transforming as any anti-drug zealot would claim them to be. I spent the year after my LSD trips writing a novel about….my LSD trips. I found myself to be much less willing to accept compromises in my life, to be dissuaded from whatever I felt to be true to my path - when I reached a real crisis at work, in a high-status job but finding myself basically abused by my higher-up, it was sort of the spirit of the LSD that convinced me that I had to quit, high-status job or not, and regardless of my employment prospects. 

Maybe even more than any behavioral change, the LSD made me a person of faith. It was completely obvious from the trips that there was just a tremendous amount that I didn’t know about reality and about my own mind - my mind was just capable of a great deal more, of holding more thoughts at once, of seeing things in a very different way, than it had ever revealed itself to me in any other circumstance before. The LSD seemed to be possible to talk about in ‘scientific terms,’ as a chemical compound - although it was inevitable, after an LSD trip, to switch one’s philosophy from empirical materialism to something closer to idealism, the sense that the world shifts dramatically depending on how it is apprehended by mind - but, once I found my way to plant medicines, I was in a completely different epistemic realm. There was the undeniable sense of being exposed to plant intelligence, of the plants themselves working with my psyche, showing me whatever it was that I needed to know about myself. And the trippiest thing of all was when I would be completely ‘sober’ and serendipitous chains of events would occur - ‘chance encounters,’ bizarre ‘coincidences’ - that were very clearly outside the realm of probability. 

Like the LSD itself, it’s not at all clear if that faith has actually benefitted me. There have been episodes of really bitter disillusionment; the faith has made it harder in some sense to make critical decisions - it’s like I have all my usual mechanistic processes and then I also have to triangulate any decision I make against my new metrics of faith and fate. But at the same time it’s obvious that there’s no going back. The LSD, and the plant medicines and encounters that followed it, made it obvious that the world was bigger than my ‘rational,’ ‘analytic’ mind could possibly have imagined and that, at the same time, the world seemed to correspond, incredibly enough, to a gorgeous and intricate design - and that the only proper response to it was what I had experienced on my first trip, a boundless gratitude, a sense of acceptance and belonging. It’s been unnerving to realize that there’s no return to the old baseline; at the same time my life is incomparably richer as a result.