Several cancer patients described edging up to the precipice of death
and looking over to the other side before drawing back. Tammy Burgess,
diagnosed with ovarian cancer at fifty-five, found herself peering across
“the great plane of consciousness. It was very serene and beautiful. I felt
alone, but I could reach out and touch anyone I’d ever known.
“When my time came, that’s where my life would go once it left me,
and that was okay.”
The uncanny authority of the psychedelic experience might help
explain why so many cancer patients in the trials reported that their fear
of death had lifted or at least abated: they had stared directly at death and
come to know something about it, in a kind of dress rehearsal. “A high-
dose psychedelic experience is death practice,” says Katherine MacLean,
the former Hopkins psychologist. “You’re losing everything you know to
be real, letting go of your ego and your body, and that process can feel
like dying.” And yet the experience brings the comforting news that there
is something on the other side of that death—whether it is the “great
plane of consciousness” or one’s ashes underground being taken up by
the roots of trees—and some abiding, disembodied intelligence to
somehow know it. “Now I am aware that there is a whole other ‘reality,’”
one NYU volunteer told a researcher a few months after her journey.
“Compared to other people, it is like I know another language.”
At a follow-up session with Tony Bossis a few weeks after his journey,
Patrick Mettes—whom his wife, Lisa, describes as “an earthy, connected
person, a doer”—discussed the idea of an afterlife. Bossis’s notes indicate
that Patrick interpreted his journey as “pretty clearly a window . . . [on] a
kind of afterlife, something beyond this physical body.” He spoke of “the
plane of existence of love” as “infinite.” In subsequent sessions, Patrick
talked about his body and cancer “as [a] type of illusion.” It also became
clear that, psychologically at least, Patrick was doing remarkably well in
the aftermath of his session. He was meditating regularly, felt he had
become better able to live in the present, and “described loving [his] wife
even more.” In a session in March, two months out from his journey,
Bossis noted that Patrick, though slowly dying of cancer, “feels the
happiest in his life.”
“I am the luckiest man on earth.”
frankie
(Frankie)
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