What to make of a challenging psychedelic experience?
by Alejandro Tuama
This article by English and Psychology teacher Alejandro Tuama first appeared in the Psychedelic Press journal, issue XXXIX (summer, 2023). Tuama is also the author of A Glimpse of Eternity (2022).
Psychedelic drugs have played an important role in my life. For one, they’ve helped me access aspects of my emotional self that were previously obscured. This includes opening myself up to fear, sadness and anger, but it also means greatly expanding my capacity to feel joy and love.
As well as my emotions, psychedelic drugs helped to unlock my capacity to experience what many call the ‘spiritual’ aspects of existence. Since I was a youngster, I’ve been intrigued with the prospect of a realm outside of the material, and I’ve been interested in the wide variety of religious and spiritual experiences available to people. But it was not until I found Ayahuasca that I actually felt what a spiritual experience is. The dissolution of my ego, the dissolution of my sense of self; and the subsequent unity with the whole, with God, with the universe. That kind of thing…
Some of my psychedelic experiences have heralded beautiful, clear visions—of myself, of the world, of what I could become.
Some of my psychedelic experiences have shown me clear images of my past—acts over which I felt shame or guilt, or where I was hurt or wounded.
I’ve had many trips that were fuzzy, physically uncomfortable, or heavily purgative. I’ve had experiences where I’ve felt socially awkward, sometimes painfully awkward, and alone. I’ve endured experiences that were brutally upsetting. I’ve sat through ceremonies that I’d hoped would herald a visionary experience that brought nothing but boredom, doubt, and disappointment.
But there is another class of psychedelic experience that I am concerned with in this essay: the baffling, the terrible, and the utterly bizarre; those experiences that seem to defy explanation, or at least are most difficult to frame.
In this essay I will discuss four experiences. These occurred across my ten years of psychedelic use, each with a different medicine, and in a different context. Of each experience, I present my recollection of the trip, the context in which I took the substance, and my interpretation, or at least, my attempt at an interpretation.
Salvia divinorum, and becoming the armpit of my apartment building
I’m in my apartment in Melbourne. It’s the early afternoon. I’ve got the day off and my girlfriend is at work. The year is 2012. At this stage in my life, I’ve drunk Ayahuasca twice (both times in Peru, in 2011). The first was a very mild visionary experience, but with a heavy purge. The second was a breakthrough psychedelic experience that set me on the psychedelic path.
But regarding Salvia divinorum, I am curious and shockingly naïve.
The night before, I’d been over at my mate’s place. We’d asked another mate of ours from Perth to send over some DMT. What we got was this bag of green stuff that looked like tea leaves. We both took a bit of it that night. I hit it first and was trying to tell my mate not to smoke too much but all I could do was open my eyes really wide and make this weird humming sound. I remember the feeling like I was about to be sucked down into the floor. It wore off pretty quickly.
It’s the next day and I’m sitting on the floor in my bedroom, and I’ve loaded up my bong with crushed Salvia leaves. I hold the flame of my jet lighter over the cone piece and suck in the smoke deeply. Immediately I feel a hit to my body and my arms feel weak and dizzy. I focus and finish off the rest of the Salvia. I have just enough time to place the bong down and lie back before I am blasted out into the void and am completely torn apart.
First there’s a black void for God knows how long and then I regain some kind of awareness, but I have absolutely no sense of my body, or even my Self. This is total disassociation. There is no me. No I.
I’d never felt anything like it. It was utterly terrifying.
And then ‘I’ start the process of rebuilding my sense of Self.
I feel like a moving piece of machinery, like clockwork or some kind of cog. With each turn of the cog, I regain a slight sense of self. There seems to be this plodding, clockwork process that I’m a part of — I’m a small, insignificant fragment of a greater thing that is moving through mechanical phases, grinding towards… something?
I must emphasize that at this stage I still have no sense of who I am, what I am, or even when I am…
But then in a turn for the stranger, after a monumental turning of the mechanical cog, I become my true self. Only, my true self happens to be the apartment building. Well, not just the apartment building. I fully, and completely identify my sense of self with the armpit of the apartment building.
The apartment building is one giant organism, and I, am the armpit.
I don’t remember the transition from that state of the trip to the next, but eventually, I regain some sense of my original human form—thank goodness—albeit disconnected from my physical body and floating through Fitzroy. In time I reach the front door of my apartment building, and float through like a ghost. I float up the stairs, float to my front door, and float through that as well, and it’s now that I’m confronted with an intense feeling of dread. It’s like I’ve stumbled into a crime scene. Actually, I’ve stumbled into my crime scene.
You see, I’d totally forgotten that I’d smoked Salvia. I’d only just pieced it together that I wasn’t actually a part of the apartment building but a human being.
So, I’m floating through my living room with this feeling that I’d done something terrible. I come to my bedroom door and just as I enter the room and look upon the place where I was sitting with the bong, Boom! I return to my body, open my eyes and come back to the reality of the room, thinking, holy fuck! What the hell just happened!
Interpretation:
1. It’s all in my head
There exists, within my mind, many models that make up my map of the world. In my mind is a model of myself. Also in my mind, is a model of the apartment building. During the Salvia trip, my mind (or at least, some part of it), identifies with, confuses, or integrates the part of my mind that contains the model of my apartment block. Somehow, in my befuddled mental models, I end up aligning the position of my particular apartment with the ‘armpit’ of the building.
2. Animism extends to apartment buildings
Everything in the world has a spirit. This includes not only crows and trees and squirrels, but also fridges, armpits, and apartment buildings. Separate to me and my mind is the spirit of the apartment building. During the Salvia trip, my separate and unique mind was somehow able to travel into an astral realm inhabited by—among whatever else—the spirit of the apartment building. My separate mind fuses and connects with the spirit of the apartment building for as long as the Salvia lasts in my bloodstream.
If nothing else, the main take home message from this utterly bizarre psychedelic experience is that consensus reality balances on a knife’s edge.
Ayahuasca, and all the pain and suffering of the world
The year is 2016. I’ve spent around a month at an Ayahuasca Healing Centre in the Amazon jungle outside Iquitos, Peru. By now, I’ve drunk the medicine maybe fifteen, maybe eighteen times. I have dieted twice with tobacco, and have just come out of a five day dieta with Chiric Sanango.
Chiric was taken in the same way as tobacco—isolated, in my little wooden cabin. Seven times over five days, the senior facilitator delivered this medicine. He would smile and shake the bottle of jungle brew in his hand and then take a seat in front of me on the floor, and pour the brew into a small bowl. He would speak a set of prayers and incantations, and waft tobacco smoke around himself and over the freshly poured bowl of Chiric. Then he would look to me and nod, and I would take down the muddy green liquid—tasting bitter and spicy— in one gulp. We would talk briefly, as waves of nausea passed over me, and then he would leave, and I would be alone with my thoughts.
During the five days of the dieta, I would have vegetable juice for breakfast and lunch, and a small bowl of porridge for dinner. Each day I experienced the sensation of pins and needles all over my skin, periods of shaking, and strong vibrations running up and down my body. Most days I felt weak, lightheaded and woozy, always with the feeling that I might purge. And I did purge, each day. The nights were thick with vivid dreams, which left me tired and dazed in the mornings.
The medicine built up in my body over the days and by the end of the dieta I was tossing and turning in my bed with electric, vibrating skin. Too weak to get up, vibrations too strong to rest. The tingling sensation on my skin had become overwhelming. It was like having acupuncture all over my body, all the time. I remember the relief at the final purge. Gushing tobacco-bile and burning acidic mandarin and then relief.
On the night of the ayahuasca ceremony I drink two strong cups, but as the ceremony draws to a close, I’m still not feeling the medicine. A sense of contentedness and warmth washes over me. It seems this is to be a placid reintroduction to the medicine after the dieta. The Chiric seems to have done its job. I’m comfortable in my body. There’s no cramping in my stomach. For possibly for the first time in my life, I feel a deep sense of satisfaction with my body, inside and out. I’ve been happy with the way I looked before but this is different. I feel clean. I feel cleansed. I feel… healthy.
I remain on my mat while others around me mingle and chat. It’s not long before most begin to filter away out of the maloka, and back to their rooms.
A storm hits. Not a figurative storm, a literal storm.
There’s only a few of us left in the maloka now. The bloke lying next to me was heaving into the bucket all night, but finally he’s sleeping. Rain flits through the fly wire windows. The cool water is refreshing on my bare chest. I lie silent on my mat. Thunder rolls in and I close my eyes.
Brilliant visions!
Spiralling neon coral organisms, dazzling in form and colour, morph via kaleidoscopic means into unfolding pyramids of light. Folding, twirling seaweed structures. Expanding and contracting analogue shapes!
I am the captain of a ship, navigating through shocking psychedelic waves, but soon the medicine becomes too intense, and I lose my sense of control, and I tumble helplessly through realms of space and time and it’s all I can do to hold on…
In time, the waves die down and I return to the room and my mat, and I open my eyes.
Christ almighty! That was a ‘breakthrough’ DMT experience, no doubt about it.
Instead of going back to baseline, though, I’m still buzzing and trembling.
The thunder rolls in and I steady myself as my ship sails atop a great black ocean. Dark creatures creep and crawl and scratch and claw. On my ship I gently float into dark clouds with a world of nightmares swirling below me. I pierce through the fog and on the other side am I overwhelmed by the raw power of the Universe and my ship is shattered to pieces. Nothing in my life could have prepared me for this. There is no joy nor fear nor pain here in the darkness of the Universe, just intense power.
My consciousness breaks out of the ocean of darkness and blasts back into the room to join my hyperventilating body. I breathe for my life. I breathe for something to hold on to.
Oh God. This is so intense!
I turn to my side and laugh. Waves of joy. Waves of euphoria rushing up and down my body. Laughing. Breathing it in, laughing it out.
This is so fucking intense!
But then comes agony.
The agony glues my eyes shut. I’m lying on my back, but the agony pulls me over, and I curl into myself. My vision is red and black. All is red, and all is black. Deep bleeding red. Twisting shadow black. Knives cut and impale. Claws tear away at my flesh. I feel all the pain and trauma of the people in ceremony. It’s flooding into me and I’m taking it all on. A great ocean of blood envelopes me. I fall onto my back and clutch my legs up into my chest. The red is everywhere. I am choking. There is no air in this world. I’ve lost myself to panic. I can’t breathe. I’m stuck. The red is everywhere.
My eyes open.
I can breathe.
A bizarre sense of joy! It’s a joy at being shown this pain and being allowed to experience it, and understanding what it means to feel, to really feel. This is incredible! But the joy soon vanishes, and I am with the pain again. This time it’s more intense. This time it’s more than the pain of the maloka, it’s the pain of the world, flooding into me. I’m an open vessel, and I’m taking in all of it.
All the disease and famine and war and rape and trauma and abuse and suffering. It’s all draining into me. The pain becomes unbearable. Tears silently slide down my cheeks. I am too shocked to cry. My stomach contracts with the pain. I have nowhere to go, nowhere else to be, but with the pain. My skin crawls with the pain. It tears my body apart. My mouth hangs open. The pain is incomprehensible. There is no face, no name, just pain. It’s too much. I spend an eternity with the pain.
In time, the waves settle, and amongst the wreckage of my ship, I wash up to shore. Utterly broken. I softly weep into my pillow.
Interpretation:
1. This is empathy
In my thirty years of existence on this planet I’ve encountered tremendous suffering (witnessing firsthand, reading in books, learning in school, watching on television).
In order to carry on existing I have to repress most of this suffering or else I’ll end up spending most of my time on the floor crying.
Now in the trip, I must face (all, or at least, some of) this repressed pain, trauma, suffering I have encountered in my life.
Or, related to this explanation. Rather than connecting with repressed experiences of other people’s suffering that I have encountered over the years, perhaps the ayahuasca has helped me to tap into some kind of collective unconsciousness or memory of suffering. And so, as a result of this access, I’m able to witness a portion of my species’ suffering that otherwise I might not be able to see.
2. This is my shit
In my thirty years of existence on this planet I’ve encountered great personal suffering. In comparison to the suffering experienced by the world this personal suffering seems utterly trivial, but as I’m experiencing it first-hand, it’s all the more traumatic.
As in my first interpretation, in order to carry on existing I have to repress most of this personal suffering or else I’ll end up spending most of my time on the floor crying. Now in the trip, I must face (all, or at least, some of) this repressed pain, trauma, suffering from my life…
As a side note on this particular ayahuasca trip. The following day, a trusted friend from the healing centre spent hours consoling me, until she eventually encouraged me to sit in ceremony again that night. After much deliberation and reflection and building of courage, I did. And it was the best night of my life. (But that’s another story…)
Home grown mushrooms, and getting stuck in ‘The Trap’
The mushrooms begin to slowly kick in, and this is our cue to nestle into our respective nooks. Myself, my friend, and his brother are in my bedroom, all of us lying on the carpet. We’ve each taken five grams of psilocybin mushrooms, and spoken our intentions. There is space enough for the three of us to spread out on the floor. I lay down on my back, as the sun dips below the horizon, and I close my eyes.