After The Glow Starts to Go

In this week’s disintegration group we had a conversation about the magic glow that can come after we take the medicine, and for days or weeks fill us with a marvelous hope and a new sense of self.  And then it fades. This fading is especially poignant and painful because the new me felt so wonderful and so right. What, if anything, can we do about it?

 The first thing I notice about the conversation we had on Tuesday was how much all of us took it as a purely personal problem. On reflection, I think it is part personal and part social. If I am singing in a choir where everyone is off tune and is out of time, it’s incredibly hard for one singer to carry on through the cacophony. Or even worse, if everyone else is singing a different song. When we are at work, on the train, in the check-out line, and all the faces and voices around us are tense, tight, competitive, defensive – well let’s at least say not very radiant – it makes it immensely harder to stay on song. And it’s not like you and I are the first ones to have to put up with this, William Blake was moaning about the exact same thing back in 1794:

 I wander every chartered street

Near where the chartered Thames doth flow

And mark in every face I meet

Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

 In every cry of every man

In every infant’s cry of fear,

In every voice, in every ban

The mind-forged manacles I hear.

 In that sense the weight of history is against us, but I’m also remembering Terence McKenna’s idea of the transcendental object at the end of time, which says we are not just blindly blundering through history, but that beauty has already been reached and hovers there at the end of time, drawing us towards it like a great attractor. For me, the idea of this giant lovely magnet makes things feel less vulnerable and accidental. With psychedelics, when we are lucky, we can have a taste of that beauty and bathe in its glory, a lost birthright and a golden emancipation that some future version of “we” will eventually re/capture. You and I are just tentative steps along the way. 

 This reminds us that though the loss of the glow is painful, the transcendent object has not gone away, my sight of it has. Everything still holds in place, and the transcendent object is still tugging away at humanity, which means me too. In a way we should not be surprised that we return to a low vibration baseline, because as someone said in group, “that’s where I live.” The momentum of a lifetime of bad mental habit and self-limiting beliefs draws me back to my day-to-day worried and tense self, and the rest of the choir – the culture round us – doesn’t do much to help.

 So we can start to put this re-loss of Eden into the context of some kind of longer game. I thought I had a foothold in paradise, in fact I just had afternoon tea there. How then, do we change “where I live,” to somewhere a bit greener? As far as I can see there are two ways of going about that. The first is with the psychedelic or some other powerful experience, where our mental habits and old beliefs, briefly at least, get blown away by an immensely powerful force; and the second is in regular consciousness, where a practice like therapy, meditation and so forth can slowly alter my self-limiting beliefs and habits over time. One experience is explosive, the other is an erosion, and the question we are asking here is how may the explosive experience infiltrate normal life?

 I think it can be done if we bring the contents of the trip (if we were lucky enough to have that kind of trip) to bear on the contents of our everyday brain. We can deliberately recall the sense memory of the moments, the gestures, the actions, the images and breakthroughs that happened during the experience, and consciously call them to mind. Let’s say there was a sound that I made during ceremony that meant something or did something then, I can vocalize that sound again after it’s all over and feel it reverberating through my body. Or maybe it was a gesture I can repeat, an image I can recall, a body sensation to feel into, the way I was breathing, or the whole narrative of the trip. We restore that state of mind by, to whatever degree we can, re-enacting part of it.

 By juxtaposing these startling new impressions against my business-as-usual self, it may help in the dissolution, the disintegration, of the old stuff. As well as the psychedelic being an actual chemical inside my body, the memory of the experience can work like a chemical too, seeping into the systems and assumptions that seems so substantial but are really an accretion of defensiveness over essential me. This imaginary chemical needs to be maintained at a certain level of heat, of conscious attention, to stay viable, and if I don’t bring my mind to it the chemical will becomes inert and its disintegrating potential lost. I can make a practice out of revivifying what went on in ceremony. This may not recapture the high I was on after the high, but it can bring more to bear on the process of becoming the spontaneous, exuberant, less stressed, more kind person that I want to be.

 At a very deep level – where else would it be – we make a daily, hourly choice to retain our messed-up patterns of thought, expectation and belief. The psychedelic experience can reach down to that level and help us fundamentally alter our thinking, but when change happens it’s usually a sample of the change we want, or a template for change, not the whole thing. If as a man I find it hard to cry, I must remember that a thousand generations of men before me have been not crying. The post psychedelic work of re-membering myself means I reach into my own depths with as much of regular me as I can muster and see where I may sit beside my old habits and expose them to the new information from my brush with the divine. If I became a tree or if I bathed in sublime light, that’s not a thing in the past, it is living somewhere inside me, and I may be able to bring the heat of that memory to bear on the old structures that once upon a time were of value to me, or maybe to a forebear. The glue that fastens structures which have waltzed down through the generations can begin to soften and move towards melting point. We who have been traveling so long deserve this much.