“Oh, yeah,” I said. “Esalen.”
Esalen Institute, a “holistic learning and retreat center” in Big Sur, is a place where you can go on a “modern day vision quest,” take a class in the “Energetics of Consciousness,” or study the “Alchemy of Love and Aliveness.” It is an overtly spiritual place, where meditation and yoga first gained a foothold in the West. It’s also where many of the early researchers into the therapeutic uses of LSD and other psychedelics gathered to exchange information and insight. So what was I, the condescending rationalist, doing at Esalen? I could spin some yarn about how Big Sur, on the Central Coast of California, where the Santa Lucia Mountains drop abruptly into the Pacific, is one of the most beautiful places on earth. I could blame it on how much I love a good massage (Esalen hosts one of the best massage schools in the world). I could describe the stunningly beautiful hot baths, cantilevered out over the crashing surf below. I could complain about how hard it is to find a reasonably priced place to hole up and write, especially one that feeds you three delicious, wholesome meals a day made from food plucked from the garden. All that is true, but it’s not the whole truth.
The truth is that part of me has for a long time been in a tentative rebellion against my parents’ credo.
About a dozen years ago, when I went to Esalen, I told myself that I was depressed and stressed out, and needed time to be alone and to work. But the truth is, I was looking for something more. I spent my first two days as I would have expected to: working, eating, soaking in the hot tubs, taking ecstatic-dance (silly but fun) and yoga classes. On the third day, I woke up, danced myself into a sweat, had some breakfast, and then wandered out to the meditation yurt. I settled myself on a pillow in front of a window. Outside the window was a little canyon leading to the sea, its banks blanketed by orange flowers. I looked out at the view for a while, marveling at how pretty it was, the contrast between the flowers and the green grass, the deep-blue sky and the gray surf.
Then I closed my eyes. For about fifteen of the next twenty minutes, I alternated between cataloguing my anxieties and haranguing myself for my inability to clear my mind. Finally, exhausted by self-reproach, I just kind of zoned out. When the alarm buzzed, I opened my eyes and looked out into the canyon. The orange flowers glowed; their petals shimmered in the sunshine. And then, with a trembling rush, they took flight.
They weren’t flowers but monarch butterflies, thousands upon thousands of them. They had rested still for the entire twenty minutes of my meditation, and then they rewarded me with a swirl of sudden, unexpected beauty. It felt as if someone or something had decided to show me that the world is filled with grace, and that I need only open my eyes to see it. It felt, though it pains me to say it, like a gift from the divine.
I wish I could say that I was so inspired by that experience that from that moment on I meditated every day. My depression lifted a little, but it didn’t fly away. For a while, I could raise my spirits just by closing my eyes and thinking about the butterflies. But soon enough I stopped thinking of the experience as a divine gift, and instead dismissed it as a delightful coincidence. The monarchs, migrating from the Rockies to their winter home in Mexico, just happened to stop for a rest in that little hollow between the hills, and I just happened to open my eyes as they, rejuvenated, took wing. Just as it is hard for me to believe that my husband is not making a terrible mistake by loving me, it is hard for me to believe that some larger force in the universe wrangled that butterfly show just for me.
But I have always sworn that the thing I believe in more than anything else is my own fallibility. If I’m not to be a hypocrite, then I think I must at least explore the possibility that it is I who am blind, not the psychedelic researchers. Surely, it’s possible that Aldous Huxley’s Doors of Perception might open to admit a spiritual experience even to the likes of me? If the author of Brave New World believed in the “Dharma-Body of the Buddha,” who is the author of Death Gets a Timeout to sneer?
There are so many things I believe in that are ephemeral, and I don’t mean atoms and quarks. The most profoundly important thing in my life cannot be quantified or photographed. It lacks all substance, yet I not only believe in it but govern my life by it. The love I feel for my husband and my children is entirely intangible but absolutely “real.” If I can love so deeply and so specifically—this man, not any other—if I can believe that this love is as real as the hands that type on this keyboard, if I can wrap my mind around love, why do I have such a hard time wrapping my mind around the concept of a greater spiritual meaning to life beyond our corporeal existences?
Is my mind opening? Is the microdose responsible? Or is it merely a result of being exposed to the writing and research of so many philosophers and scientists, to being immersed in this psychedelic world? I don’t know the answer. All I know is that something feels like it’s shifting in me. Who knows? I may end up publishing these notes scribbled in blue crayon on recycled grocery bags, replete with illustrations of mandalas and all-caps exhortations to create the CALM CENTER and BE HERE NOW.
* * *
*1 ?Charles S. Grob et al., “Pilot Study of Psilocybin Treatment for Anxiety in Patients with Advanced-Stage Cancer.”
*2 ?David Jay Brown and Louise Reitman, “Psilocybin Studies and the Religious Experience: An Interview with Roland Griffiths, Ph.D.”
*3 ?Perhaps if the board had been more open-minded AA might have provided a more effective treatment. Critics of AA estimate its actual success rate at somewhere between 5 and 8 percent. See, e.g., Lance M. Dodes and Zachary Dodes, The Sober Truth.
Day 19
Microdose Day
Physical Sensations: Nauseated and flushed. Diarrhea.
Mood: Activated. Maybe even a little agitated.
Conflict: Feeling a bit irritable but managed to tamp it down.
Sleep: Restless. Woke early but eventually fell back asleep.
Work: A solid day’s work.
Pain: None.
Microdose Day is fun and productive, but sometimes it has an edge. Senses are ever so slightly heightened, which can be pleasurable, but does incline me to a version of my infamous irritability, albeit a mellower one. My husband and I have a test we do to evaluate how irritable I am. I sit in the living room, he stands two rooms away in the kitchen, and he chomps on some almonds. I have a severe nut-noise allergy. If the sound of his chewing makes me feel like running into the kitchen to throttle him, then we know I’m a bit more activated than I should be. Today I did not run, nor did I throttle; I just stayed where I was, making a Darth Vader throttling gesture with my hands.