wasn’t the very act of resolving to favor being a form of doing? A betrayal
of the whole idea? A true connoisseur of being would never dream of
making resolutions! I had tied myself up in a philosophical knot,
constructed a paradox or koan I was clearly not smart enough or
sufficiently enlightened to untangle. And so what had begun as one of the
most shattering experiences of my life ended half an hour later with a
wan smile.
• • •
EVEN NOW, many months later, I still don’t know exactly what to make of
this last trip. Its violent narrative arc—that awful climax followed so
swiftly by such a sweet denouement—upended the form of a story or
journey. It lacked the beginning, middle, and end that all my previous
trips had had and that we rely on to make sense of experience. That and
its mind-bending velocity made it difficult to extract much information or
knowledge from the journey, except for the (classic) psychedelic platitude
about the importance of being. (A few days after my encounter with the
toad, I happened on an old e-mail from James Fadiman that ended,
uncannily, with these words, which you should picture arranged on the
screen like a poem: “I hope whatever you’re doing, / you’re stopping now
and then / and / not doing it at all.”)
The integration had been cursory, leaving me to puzzle out the toad’s
teachings, such as they were, on my own. Had I had any sort of a spiritual
or mystical experience? Or was what took place in my mind merely the
epiphenomenon of these strange molecules? (Or was it both?) Olivia’s
words echoed: “It’s an irrelevant question. This was something being
revealed to me.” What, if anything, had been revealed to me?
Not sure exactly where to begin, I realized it might be useful to
measure my experiences against those of the volunteers in the Hopkins
and NYU studies. I decided to fill out one of the Mystical Experience
Questionnaires (MEQs)* that the scientists had their subjects complete,
hoping to learn if mine qualified.
The MEQ asked me to rank a list of thirty mental phenomena—
thoughts, images, and sensations that psychologists and philosophers
regard as typical of a mystical experience. (The questionnaire draws on