Dead Set on Living

by Chris Grosso

  That reminded me of something Krishna Das (the kirtan artist) once told me during a conversation. I had asked him why, in his opinion, people turned to drugs. Why are we willing to compromise our best selves for a few moments (or hours) of relief when we know the potential consequences? He responded: “Well, on one hand, who the fuck are we? Where the fuck are we? What the fuck are we doing? How did we get here? We’ve been shot out of a cannon and we’re hurtling through space and we’re trying to get comfortable. It’s almost impossible. We’re trying to find a place to land. I think people are just so lost and so clueless and so hurt that they need to numb themselves. They need to anesthetize themselves and self-medicate, because how do you fucking deal with this? What is this? Even people who don’t consciously ask that question are constantly running around trying to get money, trying to get jobs, trying to get pussy, trying to get cars, trying to get all kinds of stuff. They’re compulsively doing all this shit, completely not present, and there’s a part of you that just has to stop. But they have no tools for that. Their parents didn’t know about that [various spiritual teachings and techniques]. The people they grew up with didn’t know about that. Nobody in their life knows about that, so the only thing they know is chemicals. Sleeping pills, alcohol, drugs, dangerous sports—anything that pulls us out of our mind and out of our suffering, no matter how temporarily, is what we’re going to go for. And the problem is that none of that stuff really works, except temporarily. Maharajji said, ‘Go ahead into a room and smoke hash; the only problem is, it doesn’t work. If it worked, I’d get a whole bunch of hash, we’d all go into a room, and we’d smoke together. But it doesn’t work.’ The problem is that people don’t see it doesn’t work because they don’t understand that something else might be possible. That’s the real killer—that most people will never have that conscious glimmer of real hope, or a real understanding that there’s another way to be in the world. They won’t even get a chance to ask the question. They will just tumble and roll until they hit the wall and die. When you really see this, this is how you develop compassion, because you see the state of things. You see how lucky you are that you know something even exists, to the tiny little infinitesimal percentage that you’re able to know something. Still, it’s enough to change the way we live and go through the day.”3

  As my conversation with Duncan continued, he mirrored Krishna Das’s words, saying, “Why wouldn’t we be completely perplexed if we were an eternal being—to some, a nonbeing, which is basically the same thing—that got stuck in the flytrap of time? You’re going to freak out, and then you fall back into the nothingness. What happens is that people like Ram Dass and other great teachers have apparently been doing this loop for a while, and when they come out, they say, ‘Hold on, hold on, you can do tricks. You don’t have to be screaming out here.’ That calms us down and lets us play around during our very brief period here. When someone exits the airport waiting room ahead of time, it’s a sad moment. When friends come to stay with me and then they leave, I’m sad. It sucks. Of course I’ll be able to call them, whereas I can’t call somebody who’s annihilated, but I can still feel the loss. When someone leaves this dimension, it’s sad, but it’s also the most natural thing, and every single one of us is marching in that direction. It’s going to happen to every single one of us—the catastrophists seem to have forgotten that single element of reality, and because of that, any time the truth comes flashing into their lives in the form of a person dying, they freak out. It’s an unnecessary freak-out. You don’t have to freak out when someone goes away or when you start to go away. You can use it as an opportunity to do more tricks.”

  This made me think of something Eckhart Tolle said about the secret of life, when he wrote, “The secret of life is to die before you die and find that there is no death.”4 He means to die to the egoic nature, so we can see through the illusion of an individual, separate self. You then truly see that Atman or soul is Brahman or the ultimate reality in a direct and undeniable way. Herein lies a key to eliminating suffering. Rather than analyzing the contents of thoughts and feelings, or trying to control, change, or eliminate them, we see through the belief in a separate self who believes he is having the experience in the first place. That said, there is still suffering in life, there is still the experience of anxiety, sadness, and depression before one truly sees through this illusion.

  Duncan reminded me that death is not solely corporeal. “Sometimes a relationship dies. You know how some people have brain death but are kept alive for a long time and the body is there, and they look like the person but aren’t the person? That’s what happens with relationships sometimes. The connection may be dead and nothing can bring it back, but we’re keeping it around out of nostalgia. That happened to me with a person I’m now very close friends with. We’d been together for quite a while, and we weren’t meant to be a couple. We were living in separate rooms in a house, and I was on an air mattress in the basement and depressed and scared and freaked out because a big shift was about to happen in my life. I was doing all the things that are surefire recipes for depression: pretending I was a victim, imagining that the universe was an unkind place. Everything became a noxious blur of heaviness and numbness. I was down in the basement sleeping on an air mattress, dead broke, spending hours a day playing this highly addictive video game called StarCraft II, and a real pathetic mess. Not taking showers enough. Wasting away. Somewhere in there I remembered something I’d heard somewhere about how if you give service, you do service, your life gets better.” That’s when Duncan started helping Raghu Markus, the executive director of Ram Dass’s Love Serve Remember Foundation, create its podcast network (which, shameless plug, I’m honored to host the Indie Spiritualist show on). “It was the only thing I could think of to offer. And then my romantic relationship ended. I found a sublet.” But things got worse before they got better. “I got cancer and then my mom died and tragedy kept happening, but it wasn’t tragedy. On paper, it’s tragedy, but this is where you realize the beautiful timing of things, because it was as if the Love Serve Remember people came into my life exactly when I needed it.”

  I wanted to return to the talk of depression, because I know for many people, psychedelics—something Duncan isn’t the least bit shy about discussing—have been instrumental in healing their depression and other afflictions, including addiction. I’d talked about ayahuasca with Gabor Maté, but Duncan had been up-front about his use of psychedelics like psilocybin and LSD, so I was interested in his experiences with them. Did he ever use them in an intentional way to work through depression?

  It turns out Duncan has been taking psychedelics for most of his life, so he had a lot to say. “In the old days of taking psychedelics, I was less—I don’t want to use the word ‘responsible,’ but I would take a psychedelic for fun. I’ve struggled with depression throughout my life. I first experienced it while I was in college. I can remember eating mushrooms while depressed and going on a hike with some friends, and the psilocybin was kicking in but the depression was there—it was a mixture of these two things. The depression was saying what depression always says, which is, ‘You’re fucked. Everything is fucked. You’re an awful person. You’re a bad person on a bad planet in a terrible universe.’ I walked out into a field, and there were flowers everywhere. It was beautiful. And the mushrooms were almost responding to this, in the most beautiful way. Suddenly raining down out of the sky and out of the earth and flowers was this: ‘I love you. I love you. You are fine. You’re carrying this through the world. You’re carrying this heavy weight of self-judgment and guilt and all the shadows of the world. You’re holding on to this.’

  “The idea you get from mushrooms, on a nice day, is that you’re the one piece of the universe that isn’t loving you. Out of the entire universe—the cosmos, everything from beginning to end, or non-beginning to non-end—you’re one little pixel surrounded by love, and the final step in this process of the universe becoming heaven is for you to surrender
to the love. That’s a mind-blowing thing to experience on mushrooms, or even not on mushrooms. I remember feeling much better after that trip, though. Psychedelics have successfully pushed me out of a depression, or they’ve at least given a little bubble of air amid depression to remember that the universe is a very loving place, which, when you’re depressed, your experience is generally the opposite of that.

  “Researchers are confirming that psilocybin does appear to have some antidepressant qualities. When I was younger, I was against taking prescription medications, but now I feel that anything you can use as a bit of wood to put under your tires when you’re stuck in the mud of depression, use it. In my experience, I can’t think of many things that are more horrible than depression. Psychedelics have helped. What psychedelics do, if taken in the right way or with the right intention in the right situation, is remind you that this is an incredibly beautiful universe, and I think the reminder comes in the form of how they bring you into the present moment. If you can come into the present moment, then the universe becomes the most excruciatingly wonderful place. If you’re out of the present moment, everything sucks. When you come into the present moment, no matter what’s going on, no matter what’s waiting around the corner the next hour, the next day, the next year, no matter what’s happened, it’s the most amazingly beautiful place. It transcends all economic systems, it transcends all social constructs, it transcends all names given to geography—there’s no more America, there’s no more Los Angeles, there are no more names. There’s a beautiful exhalation of matter into time, of which we get to be a part, and it is exquisite. That’s been my experience with the present moment.”

  There’s another side of it, though. “When you pop out of the present moment, that’s where things suck. People have invested a lot of money into figuring out ways to get you out of the present moment by injecting states of need into you. Huge corporations pay billions of dollars every year to try to figure out how to trick people into thinking that there’s something better than the present moment. And there are also shitty people in your life: bad bosses, bad relationships, bad friends. All of them will try to remind you of what you did some time ago, or inform you of some horror awaiting you in the future. There are many people who make a habit, whether intentionally or not, of doing this. Psychedelics can be a wonderful way to bring you back to that incredible point in time, or non-point in time is a better way to put it. That’s where they get useful. How many bad trips happen because you’ve gone out of the present moment? How many bad trips are because you’re sitting there thinking about what you should do next week, or something that happened to you in the past? That’s where things get fucked-up fast. You start thinking about your death. You start thinking about your parent’s death. You start thinking about whatever it may be. The answer in these situations is to surrender. Just let go, and everything will be beautiful again. The good news—because psychedelics do cost money—is that you don’t need the psychedelics to get into that present moment. You don’t need anything. The present moment is the great disrupter of all economic systems.”

  I found this fascinating. And it jibed with what I’d been researching. As Ram Dass has mentioned in many of his talks and books, his teacher, Neem Karoli Baba, maintains that psychedelics gained popularity in the 1960s because in Western culture many people needed a substance to glimpse these radical states, to taste God directly. As Ram Dass has also noted, Maharajji went on to say that while psychedelics can certainly bring you into the room where you can see the face of Christ, since you’re on a substance, you’ll always have to eventually leave. What’s important is to learn to walk into a room from which you don’t have to leave.

  Duncan gave this an interesting spin. “I think about that stuff in terms of nipples, like a single nipple. Another verse in the Bhagavad Gita reads: ‘He who gets attached to the flowery words of the scriptures is like a person who drinks water from a well when it flows everywhere.’ In the same light, something we do probably instinctively is that when we identify a source of water, food, or happiness, we can get very protective of it and start worshipping it and pretending that it’s the only nipple, when there are nipples everywhere.

  “That’s what can happen with psychedelics. We accidentally take up a form of pharmacological idolatry where we start worshipping the chemical structure that brought us into the holy of holies, and we forget about the actual holy of holies. It’s like somebody walking you into the sanctum of some eternal temple, and instead of recognizing that the glorious joy to be found there is what’s important, you find it almost unbearable to deal with the reality that you’re in heaven. Imagine if Picasso, in a nonsarcastic way, said, ‘Will you help me paint this picture?’ and you replied, ‘Fuck that! You’re Picasso. Look at me. I’m this fucking guy who can barely draw a straight line.’ And that’s what the universe seems to be inviting everyone to do. Paint this picture with me. Let’s paint this universe together, but that’s so unbearable that we like to create the illusory idea that this state of consciousness or this experience can be accessed only via gateways that have to be unlocked using whatever our key happens to be—the right number of mantras, the right amount of psilocybin, whatever it may be—because there’s something terrifyingly exhilarating about this state of wisdom that is available in every single moment.”

  That’s so important. At some point, we need to lay aside all the drugs, books, teachings, mantras, or psychedelics; put all of it away and see that what’s right here in this moment is perfect. There’s no way of getting around it. It’s all that’s here—that is, until our thoughts arise and begin creating stories, and then it turns into a whole fucking mess.

  When it comes to psychedelics, I have encountered considerable pushback from people in the recovery community because I have no qualms saying that those of us who struggle with anxiety, depression, smoking cessation, or addiction can sometimes reap benefits from using psychedelics in the proper context. There have been plenty of studies done that support this. For example, a 2015 CBS News article titled “Psychedelic Drugs as Treatment for Anxiety, Addiction,” reported:

  In a carefully controlled setting, psychedelic drugs such as LSD or “magic mushrooms” may benefit patients with hard-to-treat anxiety, addiction or post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), new research suggests.

  The finding comes from a review of small-scale and preliminary studies conducted recently in the United States, Canada and Europe, all of which await follow-up.

  These preliminary results show that “in the right context, these drugs can help people a lot, especially people who have disorders that we generally treat poorly, such as end-of-life distress, PTSD, and addiction issues involving tobacco or alcohol,” said study co-author Matthew Johnson. Johnson is an associate professor in the department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore.5

  And from a Johns Hopkins study:

  The Johns Hopkins group reported that psilocybin decreased clinician- and patient-rated depressed mood, anxiety, and death anxiety and increased quality of life, life meaning, and optimism. Six months after the final session of treatment, about 80 percent of participants continued to show clinically significant decreases in depressed mood and anxiety, with about 60 percent showing symptom remission into the normal range. Eighty-three percent reported increases in well-being or life satisfaction. Some 67 percent of participants reported the experience as one of the top five meaningful experiences in their lives, and about 70 percent reported the experience as one of their top five spiritually significant lifetime events.6

  Fuck reports—I’ve seen it with my own eyes. Ayahuasca completely turned around the life of a friend of mine who struggled with depression and drugs. However, I’m also not saying go drop acid or take a bunch of mushrooms just for the sake of doing it, either. It’s all about context and purpose, and is absolutely a case-by-case scenario, where probably more of the time than not, it isn’t a good idea. What wor
ks for one person may not for another, and vice versa.

  Duncan heard where I was coming from. “There is a lot of superstition out there, and many people in twelve-step programs have been within inches of death. They’ve been resuscitated in emergency rooms, so from their subjective perspective, they know that because of the way they’re wired, if they take the wrong chemical even accidentally, they’re fucked. That’s the reality of their situation. Those people are trying to keep themselves alive, so to roll the dice on some substance that isn’t inside of their bodies already is Russian roulette. So I get it. I get the dogma. I do understand why they’re like that. Ultimately we should direct our own states of ecstasy, and if we have identified any kind of exogenous chemical that enters our body and creates any kind of change in our states of experience that can lead to some cascade ending with us covered in trucker semen under a bridge with heroin needles hanging out of our arm, then clearly don’t do it.

  “However, we do have to give some credence to science, and we do have to give some credence to even what Bill Wilson, the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous,7 discovered through LSD. He recognized that addiction is an incurable problem where the only hope is the transcendent entering our lives. It’s such a hopeless predicament to get stuck in that, to put it in non–politically correct words, the only thing that can save your ass is God. He recognized that psychedelics are a quick way to experience the Divine. What’s interesting about this is that some of the studies done using psilocybin to treat addiction found that if during the prescribed course of the psilocybin you have a mystical experience—and they’ve charted what makes up a mystical experience—then your odds of quitting smoking—because that’s a lot of what they’ve been using psilocybin for, smoking cessation—dramatically increase. It’s fascinating because it’s not the psilocybin that’s treating the addiction, it’s the mystical experience that’s treating the addiction.