LSD and the Breaking of the Mind
Part one
The black microdots were kicking in hard. We had done acid many times before but this was something else altogether. A threshold had been breached. Normal reality was disintegrating and the concept of ‘me’ as a separate form of consciousness was rapidly disappearing. In short, I was absolutely wasted.
Let me set the scene. The year was 1996 and I was eighteen. A group of friends and I had gone down to the North Devon coast for a weekend of camping. This was obviously the perfect time for an LSD trip, so after nipping off to the local traveller site out on the moor and scoring a couple of high grade microdots, we were ready for a night of hilarity and psychedelic frivolity. However it didn’t quite turn out that way.
Don’t get me wrong, there was indeed much hilarity, in fact the laughter was bordering on the insane. But the trip didn’t stop there. On and on it went. Up and up, higher and higher. Our minds were no longer separate entities, entwined as they were, speech was no longer needed or indeed possible. The boundaries of normal consciousness were swept away as the thing that I thought of as my mind, dissolved into a world of boundless possibilities and paradoxical thought. Around and around the thoughts came and went, always leading back to the same sentence. A sentence that was so all encompassing that it was impossible to articulate. A thought so fleeting and elusive that as soon as I had thought it, I couldn’t remember what it was. Eventually after a Herculean effort and endless grasping, I determinedly managed to bring that one sentence back out of that trip with me….
’I knew everything apart from what was in my own mind.’
And herein lay the problem. The ultimate of all the thought cul-de-sacs and spiralling paradoxes that I had experienced. My consciousness had expanded to such a point that I literally knew everything. However as I was no longer in my ‘own’ mind I couldn’t recall any of it. There was no mind to store or even fathom such information. There was no ‘me’ to witness it. I literally knew nothing.
Everything and nothing. Everything from nothing. The original Big Bang. The original Yin and Yang. Positive and negative. Vibration and the creation of matter… Yet beyond it all, there was a glimpse, just a tiny glimpse of something else. Something beyond the opposites, beyond the polarities. A sense of Oneness. A Oneness that pervades the entire Universe, dividing into itself so that the three-dimensional world can come in to being. A cheeky, sneaky peek at what I subsequently learned that the ancient Chinese called the Tao.
Little did I know it then but this was my first foray of a lifelong journey into the world of Chinese medicine.
Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I’ll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase ‘each other’
doesn’t make any sense.
Rumi