SELF-KNOWLEDGE, UNDERSTANDING ONESELF
This forms a big chunk of psychedelic experiences.
More than often, during a journey the journeyer has the impression to be in the presence of a Being whose knowledge and understanding about him/her surpasses by far his/her own self knowledge and self-understanding. The journeyer can experience a more intimate dialogue with this Being than he/she fathomed possible. This mysterious immaterial Being gives answers to old and recent questions about one’s reactions, motives, drives, it reveals hidden causes for various events, it can present in a blink of an eye a complete life review, and much more. Who or what this Being is, is a mystery, as everything else related to these substances. It may be called one’s soul, Higher Self, the Inner Wisdom, the Unconscious, a.s.o.
It can also lead fatally astray, though. The examples below are positive, but there are also examples of journeyers who got lost, deluded, dissociated, more alienated from themselves than they already were.
1) SELF-KNOWLEDGE, UNDERSTANDING ONESELF
- Laure, 34, wanted to go on a psychedelic journey because quite suddenly she developed panic attacks which not only incapacitated her but also baffled her. They baffled her because on the contrary, she had all reasons to feel happy. She had discovered that she is pregnant. Her husband showered her with attention and presents. At her work, a company for locum medical specialists, she had been promoted to be senior recruitment consultant. Why panic attacks?!
The psychedelic journey with Ayahuasca uncovered her pattern of avoiding any unpleasant or challenging feelings, especially her lack of self confidence, and a massive suppressed anger. The thought which came up was: “I can’t” – she can’t be a good mother, and she can’t be responsible for a team of five co-workers.
The root cause? Her mother was a beautiful and witty woman, whom Laure admired greatly, but who rejected Laure and treated her as her slave, not as her child. The one psychedelic experience was the equivalent of months of psychotherapy, but most of the inner work to recover from the abuse and neglect in her childhood had still to be done.
2. Jan, 18, was torn between the demand of his father “to start to take life seriously” and enrol in college, and leaving the parental house and the Netherlands in order to travel for indefinite time around the world. Jan embarked on a psychedelic journey with Psilocybine. I expected him to tell me that he chose, of course, to go to college. Yet, what the experience with Psilocybine revealed to him, was his outstanding talent for music, and his deep need to be free from the control of his father. He was encouraged not “to take life seriously” but to take himself seriously. For a number of sessions we focused on his need to express himself through music. He also needed to prepare himself for the talk with his father. The day when Jan came to my office together with his father, Robert, a successful, self-assured ENT surgeon, was so far the most important day in Jan’s life. He succeeded to convince his father to trust him, and allow him to follow his own path.
SELF-KNOWLEDGE, ENCOUNTER WITH WHITE SHADOW 1. Zeynep, 34, with a history of rape as a teenager and again as a young woman, two unrelated but very nasty experiences which eroded even more her self confidence, already not optimal due to a chronically depressed mother, a father always away for work, a brother with Down syndrome, and she being of Turkish descendant living in Netherlands.
The whole psychedelic experience consisted of being remembered situations in her past which she barely registered as significant, for her they were natural. But all of them pointed to a soft loving heart and a sharp intellectual discernment. She remembered, or was reminded, of the night she did not leave the hospital, she was a obstetrician and gynaecologist, and sat at the bed of a woman, recovering from a heavy delivery in which she had lost her baby; she remembered, or was reminded, of situations which she assessed with great perspicacity; her perseverance to continue studying medicine driven by a genuine passion to know, to help and to heal; how she toppled at school without any further support from home, relying on her own intellect; her courage when a nasty fight broke out between the bully of the class and a shy boy, to protect the boy; what a beautiful mother she is, in spite of not having had a good role model; and more. Each and every memory was accompanied by feelings of love, appreciation, a deeper understanding of their significance. She experienced an affirmation of how she had conducted until then her life. The notion associated with it was: “correctness.” This “correctness” was of extreme significance, it carried an extraordinary weight. It meant that she was aligned with fundamental laws of the universe. From these disregarded and long forgotten mundane situations she was projected into an experience of her place in the grand scheme of creation. She experienced in herself and in the universe the same source of illumination, warmth, nourishment, order and intelligence from where her actions had sprouted.
In the ensuing psychotherapeutic sessions she savoured again and again this experience. Her progress in letting go of the grief and sadness of her youth, of the terror related to the violence she went through, was steadfast and abiding.
SELF-KNOWLEDGE, ENCOUNTER WITH DARK SHADOW
- Kees, 65, also a medical specialist, recently retired. He felt a bit lost, a bit aimless since his retirement, and came to see me advised by friends. Talking to him I could not find any indication for psychotherapy, he had no psychological complaints and life seemed to have still a lot to offer to him. He was a widower, had a young companion, and invigorating hobbies, like sailing in the summer and skiing in the winter. So I told him that life will show him what he has to do more, and we said good bye.
Half a year later he called for a new appointment, because this time he was in real trouble. He had participated at an entheogenic ceremony, with the intention to find out how to benefit more of his retirement.
What happened was this: he went back to the time he was a student in Amsterdam. He grew up in a small provincial town, and the transition to a metropolis was for him not easy. He was extremely lucky with his landlady. She was a motherly figure, who listened to him, shared with him her food, from time to time tidied his room, gave him good advices, and even pardoned him a couple of times for not paying the rent. In short, created for him a second home. It was due to her care that he succeeded to stay on course through all the influences, challenges and temptations of the big city and the demanding study. The last months of his study he was really broken, due to lightheaded spending. The landlady was very understanding, and told him to pay later. After finishing his study, he accepted a work offer in a hospital in another part of Netherlands. He promised to give her back the money he owed her, and to come anyway to visit her, and to look as best as he could after her, as meanwhile she had developed some health problems. Well, he never ever contacted her again.
This was his psychedelic experience, to be reminded of this episode. He felt terribly guilty, had no idea what to do with this feelings, and asked me for help. I did my best to support him in his grief and remorse. In the next weeks, more material surfaced, without a psychedelic, without hypnotic trance work, just spontaneously. He broke the heart of his girlfriend who loved him dearly, because he wanted to “experiment” with more women. Another woman got pregnant, he left her to her own devices and never asked what happened to her or the possible child. As this revelations were pouring out of him, he became increasingly depressed. He suspected that his present girlfriend is with him for his money and sent her her way. He was weight down by remorse, could not enjoy anything any more, was ruminating, had difficulties to sleep and lost his appetite. But the worse had still to come. He remembered the animal experiments he had done when he was working on his PhD. He felt that all the dead animals were now surrounding him, day and night. Without any reproach, without communicating anything to him, just being there, around him. He considered suicide. This is when I had to hospitalise him. After he was discharged from the hospital he still stayed enrolled in a day care program. Then we lost contact.
All this happened after one session with Ayahuasca. His intention was to find out how to benefit more of his retirement. Be careful what you ask.
2) LOVE is a recurrent theme in psychedelic journeys. Either as a universal force, or as a transcendental bond, or as a personal bond or as an entanglement, as an unconditional relationship, a.s.o.
1. LOVE Positive: Willem, 35, computer engineer, since many years depressed, came to me for help. We mapped his biographical data, found enough reasons for his chronic low mood, and started in the following sessions to work through the pain.
Two-three months later, by serendipity, he heard about an entheogenic ceremony, and decided to participate. He had an experience of immense unconditional love for himself and for the whole of creation, something he never imagined as possible.
Our next appointment was three weeks later due summer holidays. Meanwhile the intensity of the psychedelic experience had faded to the background, although his mood was throughout much improved. He felt more warmth and zest. With my guidance he entered a hypnotic trance in which he re-lived to a high degree the unconditional love from weeks before. We anchored this feeling and the perceptions associated with it in his body-mind system with physical cues – how to relax, slow smooth breathing, attention to sounds and visuals without naming them, and paying more attention to feelings instead of thoughts. As homework he had to do all these things, to keep a diary, a.s.o. He did this for a couple of weeks, and felt stronger, more aligned with himself. We saw each other every other week. Once, leaving my office, a sparrow landed in front of him, looked up at him, and chirped. The bird was chirping with all its strength, without holding anything back, its love for life. The sparrows love for life entered him and flooded him. From then on the last remnants of depression left him. It was a surprise for him that he could feel in this way, he did not know this existed. In his perception, the entheogen opened this awareness.
2. LOVE Negative: Andre. I had to attend a wedding in another city in Netherlands. The marrying couple arranged for a friend of theirs to pick me up, as I had no car at that time. When he arrived, we recognised each other from an examination the previous year for the extension of his driving license. He had been an alcoholic, had stopped drinking for ten years, his driving licence was expiring and could be renewed only after a psychiatric evaluation. During the ride he opened up and told me more about his life. He was estranged from his two adult sons, his only brother had emigrated to Greece, and he did not have many friends. He worked as a manager at a manufacturing factory for electrical devices. Much too often he felt squeezed between the workers and the upper management. But what he found at that time the most difficult was this: he had participated at an entheogenic ceremony where he experienced an immense unconditional love for the whole of creation. Nay, he experienced that the whole creation is nothing but love. He could not rhyme the experience either with his everyday life, or with world events, present and past. After the experience he felt a glow which slowly dissipated, leaving him rather disconnected, alienated from the world. He hoped that the wedding will cheer him up. I advised him to have a couple of sessions to integrate the experience, and told him that he is welcome to do it with me. He had already my mobile number, I hoped he will call, which he did not do. About one year lated I heard by chance from our common friends that he had a severe relapse in drinking alcohol.
3) MYTHOLOGY
Myths are blueprints of human existence. They carry information about destiny, the structure of creation, basic patterns, archetypal characters and events, and how they are interrelated in mysterious ways. They are an inexhaustible reservoir of wisdom accumulated by many generations of humans.
They have many layers and meanings, contain parables, analogies, metaphors, and historical annotations.
We grow up with the myths of our culture and refer often to them to point to or to emphasise or to summarise a certain situation, like opening a Pandora box or fulfilling a Herculean task in our Western world.
1. MYTHOLOGY Arnold This example concerns a friend, Arnold, we met by chance at a concert, and with whom we went afterwards for a glass of wine and a chat.
I knew that he participated regularly at entheogenic ceremonies, so I asked him if he had an interesting experience he would like to share. Arnold immediately said “yes” and told out us that in the last ceremony he had been catapulted nowhere else than in the Trojan war. He was a soldier of Troy. He had the impression that the city had been under siege already for a long time, and he felt very tired. He was walking through the city late at night. He sensed inside the walls power struggles, and outside the walls the enemy besieging relentlessly, not willing to give up. In his wandering he passed an altar and he knew that the Gods sitting high up were also mingling heavily in the war. He was alone, and ominous feelings of Troy’s impending destruction became stronger and stronger. We were listening intensely when Arnold’s eyes suddenly widened, his face turned pale, and he stopped in mid sentence. “Damn it, damn it!” he yelled. Then and there it dawned on him that the war for Troy had much overlap with the constellation at his work. The company were he worked was embroiled in a struggle on life and death with another company, actually, was under siege to be taken over. I cannot give more details. It resembled a modern copy of the Troyan siege, the heroes, the savagery and cruelty, the intervening Gods, a luring price, and a prescient group of experts warning in wane for treachery all included. He was now sure that his company will loose, and that he will have to find another employer, as he was not willing to work for the rival company.
3. MYTHOLOGY: Elvira
Elvira was with me in therapy because of too much accumulated pain in her life. A major contributor to it was her daughter, now in her late thirties. For almost 20 years this daughter was an alcoholic. With nineteen she had met an older man, with whom she got terribly infatuated and whom she refused to give up in spite of pleas and threats from her mother, who saw in him a danger for her daughter. The man had great charisma, was intelligent, well read, academically successful, but also arrogant, self centred, demanding, and cold. He was a moderate drinker. Her daughter drank with him, but she slipped into alcoholism, which gave him even more power over her.
Our talks were merely focused on other difficult events in my client’s life, the mother-daughter relationship did not come yet to the forefront.
One day my client, the mother of the alcoholic daughter, arrived for the session calm, smiling, content. What happened? She had participated at an entheogen ceremony in which she experienced her daughter and their relationship in a new way. She did not have all the words to describe it, but the gist of it was this: she saw herself as Demeter, and her daughter as Persephone who had been abducted by Hades and taken to the Underworld.
The effect was a complete acceptance of her daughter’s predicament, and a letting go of her wish to “open her daughter’s eyes” to the malevolence of her partner, and to stop drinking. Her daughter, the man, she herself became very big, heroes in a drama of cosmic proportions, each one playing in it his and her role. She accepted her daughter’s predicament as destiny. She got a sense of the power of destiny. This brought acceptance. A huge burden had lifted.
In the following sessions we worked to retain the experience. It was for my client deeply transformative, as it made her accept more painful things she went through in her life.
Not surprisingly, her daughter called her and they had for the first time after many years a good, harmonious contact. They started to see each other more often, which brought them both happiness.
4) Metaphysical Experiences
Metaphysical experiences are the ones which take us far beyond our usual self. These are experiences which sweep us high on the transcendental dimension of our being, to which we usually do not have access. They bring about a feeling of sacredness.
They are religious in the original, true meaning of the word: re-ligare, to re-connect.
To re-connect what to what?
Our default mind to that which transcends it, to that which is beyond what our mind can conceive, fantasise, and express.
Our mind is re-connected to what has been called the mysterium tremendum et fascinans. The mystery which makes you tremble and at the same time fascinates you. Another name for it is: the Numinous. Another way to put it is: to the attributes of absolute consciousness and infinite energy. Another term could be: the Divine. Briefly, your consciousness is lifted to unfathomable limitlessness.
This happens with a quantitative and qualitative shift in your energy.
Add to this a content with universal meaning, not as intellectual knowledge but as experience. This is when you are re-connected with the sacred, the Numinous. It is the experience of the sacred in its full splendour and power. William Shakespeare commented: ”Under it my genius is rebuked.” Mystics say about it: “I become a drop in an ocean.”
So what exactly can you experience?
You may experience awe and wonder by perceiving in a new way mundane, ordinary phenomena. In the example below the metaphysical experience had as starting point the contemplation of the tiny forget-me-not. You may as well experience infinity, immortality, love as cosmic power, oneness with all creation.
- Metaphysical Experience
The experience starts sweet and charming with the image of a flower, a tiny forget-me-not.
Just imagine: you feel the delicate petals, the hue which matches the colour of the sky. You take in the leaves and follow the stalk disappearing into the earth.
Your attention is drawn back to the tiny delicate leaves.
Just imagine: you enter a leaf. The interior of the leaf expands, becomes huge, surrounds you from all sides. You find yourself inside a very complex structure, like a futuristic plant, with many layers looking like floors, many forms and patterns. This structure is alive, and throbs with activity. You become aware of an extraordinary intelligence which permeates the structure, each and every of its elements and their activities. It is a huge, complex and very much alive factory, with hundreds of simultaneous processes going on, literally engaging millions of components working in harmony, with uttermost precision and elegance. You become ecstatic by the beauty of this all. You know without explanation, that you are in the place where all food needed to maintain life on planet Earth is produced. You feel overwhelmed with a gratitude and awe which surpass words. You know that this living structure is in direct contact with the very centre of the sun, extracting from it the energy it needs to provide this food, without which life on Earth would cease to exist. You are in touch with the essence of what life is, for which there are no words. You feel that you partake in a huge mystery. You tremble in bliss, gratitude and awe. The next day you may read about the process of photosynthesis, and it has a completely different flavour, implication, meaning than if you have read it before this experience.
The great poet Rabindranath Tagore expressed it in this way: (Gitanjali 69)
“The same stream of life that runs through my veins night and day runs through the universe and dances rhythmically.
It is the same life that shoots in joy through the dust of the earth in numberless blades of grass, and breaks into tempestuous waves of leaves and flowers.
It is the same life that is rocked in the ocean, cradle of birth and of death, in ebb and in flow. The life of ages dances in my blood.”
The experience may have taken you other roads as well. There are always bifurcations, instead of inside a leaf and the photosynthesis process, the journey may take you to the nuclear reactions in the centre of the sun itself, the source of the energy the plants absorb and transform.
Disclaimer: I do not administer any psychedelic substances in my practice.
