wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede,
and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life.” He goes
on:
An individual human existence should be like a river: small at
first, narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing
passionately past rocks and over waterfalls. Gradually, the
river grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more
quietly, and in the end, without any visible break, they
become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their
individual being.• • •
PATRICK METTES lived seventeen months after his psilocybin session, and
according to Lisa those months were filled with a great many unexpected
satisfactions, alongside Patrick’s dawning acceptance that he was going to
die.
Lisa had initially been wary of the NYU trial, interpreting Patrick’s
desire to participate as a sign he’d given up the fight. In the event, he
came away convinced he still had much to do in this life—much love to
give and receive—and wasn’t yet ready to leave it and, especially, his wife.
Patrick’s psychedelic journey had shifted his perspective, from a narrow
lens trained on the prospect of dying to a renewed focus on how best to
live the time left to him. “He had a new resolve. That there was a point to
his life, that he got it, and was moving with it.
“We still had our arguments,” Lisa recalled, “and we had a very trying
summer” as they endured a calamitous apartment renovation in
Brooklyn. “That was hell on earth,” Lisa recalled, but Patrick “had
changed. He had a sense of patience he had never had before, and with
me he had real joy about things. It was as if he had been relieved of the
duty of caring about the details of life, and he could let all that go. Now it
was about being with people, enjoying his sandwich and the walk on the
promenade. It was as if we lived a lifetime in a year.”