Wisdom
The following is a five-minute story I performed at the Moth on the topic of Wisdom. I decided to talk about my use of psychedelics.
I’ve been breaking a federal law on a regular basis for almost two years now. Shh. Don’t tell anyone, okay? Because I’m not hurting anybody. The law was implemented by Nixon. The guy second only to you-know-who in bad, nasty presidents, and it made psychedelics a Schedule 1 drug. The claim was that they’re addictive. Well, if you can get addicted to becoming a better person, then I’m guilty as charged.
But I’m not here to talk about laws or creepy presidents. In fact, I’m kind of viewing my five minutes as a Public Service Announcement. Have you noticed all the stories in the media touting the benefits of psychedelics? Has it you want to try them?
There’s pretty much a rule that you should never try to convince someone to do psychedelics. No, you come of your own volition. You’re called to them. And this is very true. So, I’m just going to tell you how the criminal me became a wiser version of myself by using these illegal substances and let you decide if I should be imprisoned.
So, after being called, I had to figure out how to get access. It was pretty easy because — surprise — a lot of people are really suffering from depression, addiction, trauma, free-floating fear, PTSD…The list is endless. The good news is that the list is even longer for the benefits you can get from these medicines — because they ARE medicines.
My crime spree started when I micro dosed magic mushrooms to help me get off anti-depressants. I’m not recommending this for anyone else, but in just four months, I was off them completely without a single side effect. None. As a reference, the recommended tapering time for the drug I was on is about 1–11/2 years. Maybe I just got lucky.
I needed to get off anti-depressants if I wanted to do Ayahuasca. You may have heard of it? It’s a plant from the Amazon that’s brewed and drunk in a ceremonial setting. In fact, all these medicines are given in a manner that respects the indigenous peoples that have been consuming them for thousands of years — before we became, you know, “civilized.”
I’ll never forget my first ceremony. I felt like I entered a shamanic time machine. There I was on the floor surrounded by 10–15 other strangers in a dark room, with weird music playing, and I start getting these visions all of my negative patterns — where they come from, why I do them. By the next morning I’d gained more wisdom about myself than all the years of talk therapy failed to show me. I now understand how to stop the cycle. And I happily work on it every day.
Another trip zoomed out on this theme. In this one, I entered the matrix of my ancestral lineage. I could see all the pain that was passed down to me. That knowledge helped me relate differently to my family and made me understand that I am not the things my ancestors did, and neither are they. I used to dread Christmas. Now I love being around my family. And because I’m not an asshole anymore, they like me a heck of a lot more, too.
In my most epic ceremony so far, I was shown exactly why women continue to get raped and brutalized. I saw in great detail how men are given permission to treat women this way because these messages are embedded in our patriarchal religious rituals. That one was crazy because I was allowed an eagle-eyed view into what we need to change collectively.
I remember lying there thinking, oh, my god I’m going to write a book about this…only to do some googling afterwards and discover that scholarly works exist on the topic. But that’s the thing: It’s not something my conscious mind knew. Where did this wisdom come from?
Modern science knows that psychedelics can create new neural pathways, but it doesn’t know how or why. I keep thinking, why don’t these scientists just use psychedelics to figure it out?? This is not as crazy as it sounds. Did you know that the guy who won the Nobel Prize for identifying the double helix structure of DNA credits an acid trip?
And while you’re probably familiar the Pythagorean theorem, did you know the ancient inventor Pythagoras hung out with religious mystics who used psychedelics all the time to get closer to god? It’s true! Read “The Immortality Key.”
I’m not in their league, of course. But psychedelics have made me a wiser person, so I’m going to keep breaking the law. So, Fuck Nixon. Support decriminalization! Support legalization in therapeutic and ceremonial settings!
Thank you.
