The following is
Essay #8, Better Dying Through Chemistry, of Dr. Ring's new book,
Waiting to Die: A Near-Death Researcher's
(Mostly Humorous) Reflections on His Own
Endgame.
"A high dose
psychedelic experience is death practice."
-- Katherine
McLean, psychedelic therapist |
Lately, I've
been reading a new book by the celebrated
food guru,
Michael Pollan, the author of
The
Omnivore's Dilemma and other well known
books about food and the food industry. But
his new book isn't about food. It's all
about psychedelic drugs, and its subtitle
tells you exactly what Pollan is on to in
this surprising turn in his professional
career:
How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics
Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying,
Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence.
Wow, about the only thing he left out is the
proverbial kitchen sink.
Well, did you
know that there is such a thing as a "new
science of psychedelics?" Indeed there is,
and if you haven't noticed, it's actually
been going on for the last two decades. And
these days it's legit, too, with research
programs being carried out by distinguished
scholars and academics at some of the
leading universities in the U.S. as well as
in Europe. Pollan's bestselling book,
entitled
How to Change Your Mind, is an
excellent journalistic account of all this
work and what we can all learn from it,
regardless of whether we have used
psychedelics or not.
For me
personally, however, it is also a
remembrance of trips past because
psychedelics were once a pivotal part of my
life, and before picking up Pollan's book I
was already personally familiar with many of
the figures who played an important part in
this movement in the days before its recent
and surprising re-emergence as an exciting
and thriving area of research into the
mysteries of consciousness. Yes, Virginia,
I, too, had my adventures as a psychonaut
back in the day, and this book revived many
of those memories...
In these essays,
I usually try to stay pretty much in the
present tense, and before concluding it I
will return there, but to set the stage for
what I really want to end up discussing --
which is our end -- I hope you will indulge
me for a few moments so that I can describe
my own improbable and unplanned entry into a
world I had no clue even existed. What I am
about to relate was, in fact, the most
important thing that ever happened to me,
and after it my life was never the same.
In March of
1971, when my then wife and I went off to
the Berkshires to celebrate our anniversary,
I happened to pick up a book that she was
then reading --
Carlos Castañeda's first
book,
The Teachings of Don Juan. It looked
intriguing and after she had finished it, I
read it.
I was then a
typical Jewish professor -- wedded to
rational thought, committed to science and
atheistic in my worldview. I had no interest
in religion and very little knowledge of
mysticism. But I was open to new
experiences, and what had particularly
excited me about Casteñeda's book was his
discussion of what he called "seeing the
crack between the worlds," which he had
apparently effected through the use of
mescaline.
At the time, I
had never considered using psychedelic drugs
and my only familiarity with anything close
was having smoked marijuana a few times. But
since I had never been a smoker, even that
was difficult for me, and my experiences
with it, though of the usual kind, did not
have any particular impact on my life.
Nevertheless,
since there was a long-haired hippie-ish
colleague in my department at the time who I
knew was familiar with psychedelics, I
approached him to tell him about my interest
to take mescaline and why. This fellow was
one of those half-crazy/half genius types
that most of my colleagues had no use for
but whose brilliance and charisma were
enough of a compensation to keep him on the
faculty. In any case, he had read
Castañeda's book and knew what I was after.
I came to the
point. Could he provide me with some
mescaline? He could.
By then it was
early May. The semester was just about over.
He told me not to read anything further on
the subject and just come to his apartment
on the following Saturday.
That day turned
out to be a rare beautiful sun-splashed day
with everything beginning to bloom. My
colleague lived at the edge of a forest. He
suggested that I take the mescaline in his
apartment, wait just a bit and listen to
music and then go outside into the nearby
woods.
And then he gave
me two purple pills to ingest.
I did not know
my colleague well, and as I was soon to find
out, he was not only impish, but embodied
the
trickster archetype. While he gave me to
believe I was taking mescaline, he had
actually given me 300 micrograms of
LSD, a
very high dose.
I will not bore
you with an account of the next twelve
hours. Suffice it to say that all the
pillars of my previous ontological
categories soon began to crumble into dust.
At the time and afterward I realized that
this was the most important and most
transformative experience of my life -- and
nearly fifty years later, I still feel the
same way. I had the undeniable feeling that
I was seeing the world as it really was with
pristine eyes for the first time. And once I
did, I could never return to the person I
had been for he, too, had been obliterated.
The one portion
of the experience I will allude to here --
because it eventually led me to the study of
near-death experiences -- took place when I
was sitting on a log near a stream in the
woods. I don't know how long I was there,
but at some point for a moment outside of
time I -- except there was no "I" any
longer-- experienced an inrushing of the
most intense and overwhelming rapturous LOVE
and knew instantly that this was the real
world, that the universe, if I can put this
way, was stitched in the fabric of this
love, and that I was home. However, again I
have to repeat: There was only this energy
of love and "I" was an indissoluble part of
it, not separate from it.
In fact, I was
soon to learn that this experience of
"non-duality" in which one becomes aware of
the primacy of love is fairly common in
psychedelic journeys, and Pollan himself had
a similar experience the first time he took
LSD and comments, as all psychedelic
voyagers will attest, at the paucity and
seeming banality of using everyday words to
describe the ineffable:
Platitudes that
wouldn't seem out of place on a Hallmark
card glow with the force of revealed truth.
Love is
everything.
Okay, but what
else did you learn?
No -- you must
not have heard me; it's everything. |
Pollan also
mentions that
Aldous Huxley had the same
insight the first time he was given LSD:
What came
through... was the realization... of Love as
the primary and fundamental cosmic fact...
The words, of course, have a kind of
indecency and must necessarily ring false,
seem like twaddle. But the fact remains. |
And again, in
interviewing another psychedelic sojourner,
who will allude to where we are going with
this, Pollan hears her say: I remember
thinking, if this is death, I'm fine with
it. It was... bliss. I had the feeling, no,
the knowledge -- that every single thing
there is is made of love.
This indeed is
the exact same revelation that comes to
people who have actually experienced the
first stages of physical death when they
undergo an NDE. Let the following example,
which I draw from my book,
Lessons from the
Light, stand for the many accounts of NDEs I
have heard over my more than thirty years
researching such experiences. This woman was
writing of her encounter with a being of
light:
"... the light
told me that everything was Love, and I mean
everything... I vividly recall the part
where the light did what felt like switch on
a current of pure, undiluted, concentrated
unconditional LOVE. This love I experienced
in the light was so powerful it can't be
compared to earthly love... It's like
knowing that the very best love you feel on
earth is diluted to about one part per
million of the real thing." |
Which brings up
a question: If psychedelics can afford
direct knowledge of the primacy of love in
such an overwhelming way, and if near-death
experiencers encounter the same truth when
they come close to death, then might it be
possible to use psychedelics with terminally
ill people to afford them a preview of what
they may actually encounter when they die?
He who dies
before he dies
Does not die
when he dies.
-- Angelus
Siliseus (1624-1677) |
Ketamine is a
dissociative anesthetic, which when used at
sub-anesthetic levels induces a very
distinctive but powerful alteration in
consciousness that some people feel mimics
the experience of death. In 1984, I was
asked by a psychedelic therapist whether I
would be willing to participate in a study
she was carrying out with an oncologist to
determine whether ketamine did induce
something like an NDE. (Presumably, I was
being tapped for this study because I was an
"expert" in such matters -- despite never
having had an NDE myself.) The idea was that
since NDEs almost always cause a loss of the
fear of death, ketamine might serve a
similar purpose for those facing imminent
death, such as terminally ill cancer
patients.
I eventually did
accept the offer and wound up taking it a
number of times. I have written about my
ketamine experiences elsewhere (those
interested will find my account in a book
called
The Ketamine Papers, edited by
Phil
Wolfson and
Glenn Hartelius), and although I
personally did not find that they resembled
very closely NDEs, others have reported
striking similarities. And, indeed, since my
own adventures with ketamine, there have
been some very promising preliminary case
studies reported in which ketamine has
significantly
reduced fear of death in
cancer patients.
Furthermore,
beginning in 1965 and continuing into the
next decade, the psychiatrist and leading
psychedelic therapist,
Stanislav Grof, and
his colleagues at Spring Grove Hospital in
Baltimore, using LSD with terminally ill
patients reported the same thing and many
other benefits as wall in a significant
number of cases.
Finally, Michael
Pollan brings us up to date in his book with
the latest studies of this kind using
psilocybin. Preliminary but very impressive
studies have been conducted at both NYU and
Johns Hopkins, and once again, 80% of
terminally ill cancer patients:
"...showed
clinically significant reductions in
standard measures of anxiety and depression,
an effect that endured for at least six
months after their psilocybin session."
|
Moreover, the patients with the best
outcomes were precisely those who themselves
had had the most complete mystical
experiences, presumably akin to an NDE.
These findings
astounded even the researchers carrying out
these studies. One of then confessed:
"I
thought the first ten or twenty people were
plants -- that they must be faking it. They
were saying things like ‘I understand love
is the most powerful force on the planet'...
People who had been palpably scared of death
-- they lost their fear. The fact that a
drug given once could have such an effect
for so long is an unprecedented finding. We
have never seen anything like that in the
psychiatric field."
|
But lest this
essay become too academic, let me simply
quote a couple of brief excerpts from these
patients. First, from a man named Patrick
who had these insights during his psilocybin
session:
"From here on, love was the only
consideration... It was and is the only
purpose. Love seemed to emanate from a
single point of light... I could feel my
physical body trying to vibrate in unity
with the cosmos." Aloud he said, "Never had
an orgasm of the soul before." And then
later, "It was right there in front of me...
love... the only thing that mattered."
|
Next, from
Dinah, who described herself to Pollan as a
"solid atheist". Nevertheless, Pollan
relates that in her psilocybin-induced
epiphany, she experienced feelings of
"overwhelming love," and later said that she
felt herself "bathed in God's love." When
Pollan pointed out that using such a phrase
would seem to be in contradiction to her
professed atheism, she retorted, "What other
way is there to express it?"
So from all
this, we have learned that psychedelics can
be very effective for the terminally ill in
helping them overcome the fear of death and
their depression about dying, thus enabling
them to die with greater serenity and peace
of mind. But what about a more radical
possibility?
How about
administering LSD, at the very point of
death, so that one goes out riding high on
the wave of a psychedelically-induced
ecstasy?
Actually, it's
been done, and no less by than Aldous Huxley
himself whose second wife, Laura,
administered LSD to him on his deathbed
while urging him to "go toward the light."
She has said that he died with "a very
beautiful expression on his face." (By an
odd stroke of fate, he was having his
drug-aided death experience that same day,
November 22, 1963, that John Kennedy was
assassinated.)
Which as
promised brings us back, at last, to the
present moment that finds me still waiting
for death and thinking again about
psychedelics. I'm wondering whether I should
follow Huxley and die with the aid of
psychedelic agent when my time comes. If it
comes.
Check with me
later.
Or just read my
obit.
Kenneth Ring's New Book:
Waiting to Die:
A Near-Death Researcher's (Mostly Humorous)
Reflections on His Own Endgame
|