like the ego it supplanted. Yet this by itself strikes me as a remarkable
gift: that we can let go of so much—the desires, fears, and defenses of a
lifetime!—without suffering complete annihilation. This might not come
as a surprise to Buddhists, transcendentalists, or experienced meditators,
but it was sure news to me, who has never felt anything but identical to
my ego. Could it be there is another ground on which to plant our feet?
For the first time since embarking on this project, I began to understand
what the volunteers in the cancer-anxiety trials had been trying to tell
me: how it was that a psychedelic journey had granted them a perspective
from which the very worst life can throw at us, up to and including death,
could be regarded objectively and accepted with equanimity.
• • •
ACTUALLY, this understanding arrived a little later, during the last part of
my psilocybin trip, when the journey took a darker turn. After spending
an unknown number of hours in computer world—for time was
completely lost on me—I registered the desire to check back in on reality,
and to pee again. Same deal: Mary guided me to the bathroom by the
elbow, geriatrically, and left me there to produce another spectacular
crop of diamonds. But this time I dared to look in the mirror. What
looked back at me was a human skull, but for the thinnest, palest layer of
skin stretched over it, tight as a drum. The bathroom was decorated in a
Mexican folk art theme, and the head/skull immediately put me in mind
of the Day of the Dead. With its deep sockets and lightning bolt of vein
zigzagging down its temple on one side, I recognized this ashen
head/skull as my own but at the same time as my dead grandfather’s.
This was surprising, if only because Bob, my father’s father, is not
someone with whom I ever felt much in common. In fact I loved him for
all the ways he seemed unlike me—or anyone else I knew. Bob was a
preternaturally sunny and seemingly uncomplicated man incapable of
thinking ill of anyone or seeing evil in the world. (His wife, Harriet, amply
compensated for his generosity of spirit.) Bob had a long career as a
liquor salesman, making the weekly rounds of the nightclubs in Times
Square for a company that everyone but he knew was owned by the mob.
Upon reaching the age I am now, he retired to become a painter of lovely