How to Change Your Mind

As the sun came up, I decided I would decide when I got there. Rocío,
whom I’d made aware of my trepidations, had offered to let me watch her
work with someone else before it was my turn. This proved reassuring, as
she knew it would. The guy before me, a supremely low-affect college
student who had done the toad once before, took a puff from Rocío’s pipe,
lay back on a mattress, and embarked on what appeared to be a placid
thirty-minute nap, during which he exhibited no signs of distress, let
alone existential terror. After it was over, he seemed perfectly fine. A
great deal had gone on in his mind, he indicated, but from the looks of it,
his body had scarcely been perturbed. Okay then. Death or madness
seemed much less likely. I could do this.
After positioning me on the mattress just so, Rocío had me sit up while
she loaded a premeasured capsule of the crystals into a glass vial that she
then screwed onto the barrel of the pipe. She asked me to give thanks to
the toad and think about my intention. (Something fairly generic about
learning whatever the toad had to teach me.) Rocío lit a butane flame
underneath the vial and instructed me to draw on the pipe in short sips of
air as the white smoke swirled and then filled the glass. “Then one big
final draw that I want you to hold as long as you can.”
I have no memory of ever having exhaled, or of being lowered onto the
mattress and covered with a blanket. All at once I felt a tremendous rush
of energy fill my head accompanied by a punishing roar. I managed,
barely, to squeeze out the words I had prepared, “trust” and “surrender.”
These words became my mantra, but they seemed utterly pathetic,
wishful scraps of paper in the face of this category 5 mental storm. Terror
seized me—and then, like one of those flimsy wooden houses erected on
Bikini Atoll to be blown up in the nuclear tests, “I” was no more, blasted
to a confetti cloud by an explosive force I could no longer locate in my
head, because it had exploded that too, expanding to become all that
there was. Whatever this was, it was not a hallucination. A hallucination
implies a reality and a point of reference and an entity to have it. None of
those things remained.
Unfortunately, the terror didn’t disappear with the extinction of my
“I.” Whatever allowed me to register this experience, the post-egoic
awareness I’d first experienced on mushrooms, was now consumed in the
flames of terror too. In fact every touchstone that tells us “I exist” was
annihilated, and yet I remained conscious. “Is this what death feels like?