beings are afraid of: death, other people, and their own minds. Put me
down as two for three. But there are moments when curiosity gets the
better of fear. I guess for me such a moment had arrived.
• • •
BY “PSYCHEDELIC UNDERGROUND,” I don’t mean the shadowy world of people
making, selling, and using psychedelic drugs illegally. I have in mind a
specific subset of that world, populated by perhaps a couple hundred
“guides,” or therapists, working with a variety of psychedelic substances
in a carefully prescribed manner, with the intention of healing the ill or
bettering the well by helping them fulfill their spiritual, creative, or
emotional potential. Many of these guides are credentialed therapists, so
by doing this work they are risking not only their freedom but also their
professional licenses. I met one who was a physician and heard about
another. Some are religious professionals—rabbis and ministers of
various denominations; a few call themselves shamans; one described
himself as a druid. The rest are therapists trained in dizzying
combinations of alternative schools: I met Jungians and Reichians,
Gestalt therapists and “transpersonal” psychologists; energy healers;
practitioners of aura work, breathwork, and bodywork; EST, past-life,
and family constellation therapists, vision questers, astrologers, and
meditation teachers of every stripe—a shaggy reunion of that whole 1970s
class of alternative “modalities” that usually get lumped together under
the rubric of the “human potential movement” and that has as its world
headquarters Esalen. The New Age terminology can be a little off-putting;
there were times when I felt I was listening to people whose language and
vocabulary had stopped evolving sometime in the early 1970s, at the very
moment when psychedelic therapy was forced underground, freezing a
subculture in time.
I tracked down several of these people in the Bay Area, which probably
has the largest concentration of underground guides in the country,
without much difficulty. Asking around, I soon discovered that a friend
had a friend who worked with a guide down in Santa Cruz, doing an
annual psilocybin journey on the occasion of his birthday. I also soon
discovered that the membrane between the aboveground and the