"You get the trip you need, not the trip you want." Oh really, how do you know that?

It’s a common response these days to people who have had a bad trip – “You Get the Trip You Need, Not the Trip You Want.” But how do we know this? Getting the trip you “need” suggests there is some kind of agency inside you, or outside you, that is evaluating what that need is, and making some smart, if rather hard-nosed, decisions about what will suit you best. But who, or what, is this agency? My soul, a celestial being, the inner reaches of my brain, the intelligence of the plant, the “universe”? Whoever it is, what is the process of their information gathering, and how do we know that their judgement calls are so accurate? What about the people who go into a mental health crisis during their trip and never emerge: did the trip-making deity just have a bad day with them?

 Even though people might not be so blithely reassuring about other traumas, like difficult childhoods or bad marriages, “You get the trip you need, not the trip you want” has a tough love, warmly parental feel to it when applied to the disembodied, bizarre and terrifying experiences of a bad trip. With the belief that it was actually engineered for your benefit after all, you might be able to take up Robert Browning’s declaration that:

The lark ’s on the wing;
The snail ’s on the thorn;
God ’s in His heaven—
All ’s right with the world!

Unless of course you still feel like crap, because then, piled on to your regular post-trip woes, you now have the added shame and humiliation of having been too small-minded, too blind, too weak or too unspiritual to appreciate the benefits of this trip you apparently needed but still don’t want. How much cachet does that get you in the psychedelic community?

 The fact is, you have just taken a drug that has catapulted you into spaces that are very unfamiliar to the modern Western mind. Yes indeed, quite often a bad trip is a useful experience and sometimes it does teach us valuable wisdom that could never have been taught any other way; sometimes despite the terror, it was worth it simply to have been unequivocally located in spiritual spaces while in the flesh, in this lifetime. And then sometimes, being in that space is just traumatic and it would have been so much better if it had never happened.

 For a movement that still needs to sell psychedelics to a somewhat skeptical public, (Schedule A and all that) this trauma business is a very inconvenient truth that needs to go on the backburner, because what it means is that there are always going to be some wild cards in the psychedelic pack. For all our controlling for set, setting, sitter, and the client’s psychology, rather like Frodo venturing out from The Shire into the Wide World, you never quite know what is going to happen, for good or for bad. Maybe that’s even the point.

  Psychedelics are an entry way into a realm that our culture long ago stepped away from, as we grew out of magic and mystery and into scientific materialism. And, as I sit here under an electric light, bashing away at my laptop computer, on the third floor of a building that is heated in the winter and cooled in the summer, having just eaten a meal of my choice, cooked on the gas stove, let me say how glad I am that we had a scientific revolution. If you disagree, you can always email me from any corner of the world. It’s no exaggeration to say that we gave up a lot of darkness and useless superstition, and we should be glad for that. But as we re-enter the world of spirit, of the unconscious, whatever name you want to put on it, we are a little like Hansel and Gretel, entering the deep, dark forest, hoping that our breadcrumb trail will lead us back to the world we know. Sometimes though, it lets us down.  

 C.G. Jung addressed this renewed encounter between ourselves and the eerie world of the inner unknown in The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious:

 Since the stars have fallen from heaven and our highest symbols have paled, a secret life holds sway over the unconscious. That is why we have a psychology today and why we speak of an unconscious. All this would be quite superfluous in an age or culture that possessed symbols…Our unconscious hides living water, spirit that has become nature, and that is why it is disturbed. Heaven has become for us the cosmic space of the physicists, and the divine empyrean a fair memory of things that once were. But “the heart glows,” and a secret unrest gnaws at the root of our being.

 Not just the psychonauts and the freaks, but the collective “we” is gearing up to develop new symbols in our renewed encounter with the ineffable, and we are in the cultural moment of bracing ourselves for disturbing those living waters. There will be casualties as we re-enter the unconscious with our conscious minds – just as there will be casualties if we don’t. I believe the psychedelic casualties are primarily people who have spiritual sensitivities that they are probably quite unaware of, and when they enter that spirit world unequipped and unprepared, then the trouble can begin. Our culture has no college courses on the summoning and subduing of spirits or on the practical applications of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, so tripping can be like entering a boxing ring without even knowing what the gloves are for. There’s a decent chance you will get beaten up, perhaps quite badly; sometimes the beat-down will lead to good things in the end, and sometimes all you will get is lasting wounds and “this lousy tee shirt.”   

 If we go in there en masse, pursuing what we like to call “improved mental health outcomes,” some of us will get damaged, and there is no way around it. Gradually, the culture may develop ways to negotiate with the world of darkness, demons, birds made of gold, and lost fiery gems, so that we can have, if not greater safety, greater meaning-making and hence greater enrichment and recovery after our experiences. In the meantime: if you hastily go for a heroic dose, just remember that the whole point about heroes is that some of them never make it back. Instead of aspiring to be the Clint Eastwood of your spiritual universe, try on a judicious dose, which might in fact give you the best learning. You may not get the trip your dreams of glory wanted, but it could be the trip your commonsense needs.