experience of another way to react—or not react. That can be cultivated.”
Meditation, she suggested, was one way to do that.
It is, I think, precisely this perspective that had allowed so many of the
volunteers I interviewed to overcome their fears and anxieties, and in the
case of the smokers, their addictions. Temporarily freed from the tyranny
of the ego, with its maddeningly reflexive reactions and its pinched
conception of one’s self-interest, we get to experience an extreme version
of Keats’s “negative capability”—the ability to exist amid doubts and
mysteries without reflexively reaching for certainty. To cultivate this
mode of consciousness, with its exceptional degree of selflessness
(literally!), requires us to transcend our subjectivity or—it comes to the
same thing—widen its circle so far that it takes in, besides ourselves,
other people and, beyond that, all of nature. Now I understood how a
psychedelic could help us to make precisely that move, from the first-
person singular to the plural and beyond. Under its influence, a sense of
our interconnectedness—that platitude—is felt, becomes flesh. Though
this perspective is not something a chemical can sustain for more than a
few hours, those hours can give us an opportunity to see how it might go.
And perhaps to practice being there.
I left Mary’s loft in high spirits, but also with the feeling I was holding
on to something precious by the thinnest, most tenuous of threads. It
seemed doubtful I could maintain my grip on this outlook for the rest of
the day, much less the rest of my life, but it also seemed worth trying.
Trip Three: 5-MeO-DMT (or, The Toad)
Yes, “the toad,” or to be more precise, the smoked venom of the Sonoran
Desert toad (Incilius alvarius), also called the Colorado River toad, which
contains a molecule called 5-MeO-DMT that is one of the most potent
and fast-acting psychotropic drugs there is. No, I had never heard of it
either. It is so obscure, in fact, that the federal government did not list 5-
MeO-DMT as a controlled substance until 2011.
The opportunity to smoke the toad popped up suddenly, giving me
very little time to decide if doing so was crazy or not. I got a call from one
of my sources, a woman who was training to become a certified