WHY I LICKED THE TOAD

5-MeO-DMT and the Dark Night Of The Soul

I’m going to try and describe a state of being for which the English language has no word. I know. “No words” is the standard dodge offered by psychonauts and weekend mystics for supposedly indescribable experiences, but I call myself a writer, so I have to try, if only to better come to terms with what happened to me when, on a February afternoon in Portugal, enwombed in a yurt buffeted and pounded by Atlantic wind and rain, cradled by two gentle women and one gentle man, I willfully drew the volatilized vapor from crystallized 5-MeO-DMT into my lungs. Surely there’s a metaphor or analogy that will nail it. But I need to be careful, because just a few hours ago, visualizing the descriptors I might use in writing this piece, I felt myself being pulled back into that vortex of not-being-ness, and I wasn’t ready to go there again just yet. Maybe one day, but not yet.

Yes, there is a toad involved (“Cherchez le crapaud”), but no, I didn’t really lick it. That’s an expression, based on a legend about people hunting down and bagging the primary animal source for 5-MeO, the Colorado River Toad, Incilius Alvarius, milking its venom and licking it like a toxic dreamsicle. No toads were injured or traumatized in the making of my movie. I took my medicine from a pipe and it was of the synthetic variety, but exactly the same molecule. There is no “coming on” with this drug. You take two deep breaths, a big pull on the pipe, and then you’re there. Where? The Buddhist bardo? The Sufi fana? The Kabbalistic en sof? Let me not cheat and rely on words belonging to another culture, another mindset, other scriptures. Let me try to do this in my native language, that of a reasonably well-read and well-traveled but far from erudite Baby Boomer who has always enjoyed having his mind blown but also feared losing it. It is a no-place, a place where even awareness is extinguished, and yet the word I heard whispered to me after my curandera, an extraordinary woman named Natasja, said, “Breathe into it,” and I rocketed back into inner space with a single kaleidoscopic burst accompanied by sound that for all the world sounded like the very first sound—a kind of reverse Big Bang—was “yes.” And then I was alone. Certainly more alone than I have ever been in my life, because basically, there was not just only me, but no me. I was gone, baby, gone. Writing in How To Change Your Mind, the best account of coming as a virgin (at 60) to what are now, in the psychonautic culture, called entheogens, Michael Pollan describes his first 5MeO experience this way:

“Unfortunately, the terror didn’t disappear with the extinction of my ‘I.’ …every touchstone that tells us ‘I exist’ was annihilated, and yet I remained conscious. Is this what death feels like? That was the thought, though there was no longer a thinker to have it.”

I knew that terror. My “handlers” tell me that not only did I sweat out a good percentage of my body’s fluid content, but the three of them had to join forces to keep my jaw from locking up. These physical side orders are, I think, mostly a consequence of the extraordinary sense of acceleration (in my case backwards) that Pollan also describes well: “The first image is of being on the outside of a rocket after launch. I’m holding on with both hands, legs clenched around it, while the rapidly mounting g-forces clutch at my face, pulling it into a taught grimace.”  That grimace. I wore it, too, and in the rear-view mirror, it does look like fear, and fear isn’t pleasant unless it’s induced by a well-made horror film, or perhaps, a roller coaster, if you like that sort of thing. But I have to remind myself that along with those g-forces, I was also experiencing some things that knocked at the door of the sublime. As Rudolf Otto wrote in his 1917 classic The Idea Of The Holy, the sacred is a mysterium tremendum et fascinans—at once fascinating and terrifying. There was, at least initially, a voice, coming from some Vedic time tunnel, singing a kind of ghazal. And there was, fairly quickly, a sense of separation of body and whatever part of me was being transported into that void. My body was in the yurt, sweating, clamping down, being toweled off by my helpers, but I had no doubt that another aspect of me was traveling great distances without benefit of a passport and without an identity, and certainly without any sort of spirit guide. There were no DMT “entities,” singing elves or talking locusts. It’s dark out there, and that darkness, experienced for the first time, holds very little comfort. But of course, once you’re out there, the only way to come back before the experience has run its course is to lose your mind—to “freak put”—at least for long enough for someone to get you to the hospital and onto a thorazine IV. No. I had to hold on, and I suppose that’s what all the sweating and clenching was about. In Baptism of Solitude, Paul Bowles’ shiver-inducing account of a first encounter with the Saharan night, he says, “…you have the choice of fighting against it, and insisting on remaining the person you have always been, or letting it take its course.” Against my impulse, but according to my will, I held on and rode it out. So, if I were in your place, reading, I would ask, “Why did you do this crazy thing in the first place?”

5-MeO-DMT is known, to a small group of psychedelic pilgrims, as “the God molecule.” James Oroc, an apostle of extreme sports and just as extreme entheogenic experience, who died a little over three years ago in a paragliding accident, writes in Tryptamine Palace that the Toad provides more or less direct access to what he calls G_d, and—less religious but equally confounding—to the vacuum quantum field and zero point energy (I do hope he got to both places, if they are, in fact, different places). He also calls 5-MeO the world’s most powerful psychedelic. I’ve been reading accounts of and having secondhand encounters with mystical experience for more than forty years. I read The Dark Night Of The Soul and The Cloud Of Unknowing when I was still a young man, then moved on to Pseudo-Dionysius, the Celtic saints, the Desert Fathers, Meister Eckhart, William James, the Hesychasts, Gershom Scholem and Kabbalah, Tantra, Vedanta, ibn Arabi and Sufism, Jung and alchemy…basically, the canon of mysticism. I’ve gone to Glastonbury and Glendalough, Mt. Shasta and Sedona and Area 51, Fez, Marrakesh, and recently, Montségur, as a pilgrim and a willing abductee. But I have never broken through the veil, maybe because I’ve never been able to let go of the world’s apron strings. So, in a nutshell—that’s “Why” I enlisted. I’ve always wanted to see God, and I’d kind of like to get a peek at the quantum vacuum, as well. But there was another reason, possibly a prerequisite.

Ego-death is what they call it. Transcendence of the illusion of self in fifteen minutes, if you believe the trip journals. Instant sunyata. That’s what’s written on the message boards where people post about their 5-MeO experiences. And that, I suppose, is what really got me. That, and a great desire not to be afraid of death any longer, which it seems to me ought to be a kind of a by-product of ego death. I think the latter may have been why, for 2500 years, Greek and later Roman poets, philosophers, leaders, as well ordinary citizens, trudged off to the Temple at Eleusis to drink the hallucinogenic kykeon and leave their apprehension of mortality behind. I can’t say if ego-death is what I experienced, because I still don’t really know what that is. But during the time I was “under,” something died, and something was reborn, because I emerged fifteen minutes later soaked from head to toe in what felt like amniotic fluid, and when I could speak (after asking tremulously, “Am I okay?”) I asked my coach if she’d ever been a midwife. “Only this way, “ was her answer. “Is there something you need to say,” she asked. “A sound you need to make?” And then, I began to sob, first gently, then violently, then moaning from the belly of the cosmos. I’m not sure that even as an infant, I had cried like that. These were a man’s tears. A man who has lived and knows what grief living can bring, and a man who knows that the love he has given has not always been equal to the love he has taken. “Where the fuck does all this sorrow come from?” I asked her, finally lying back and resting my wet head in her skirts. “Maybe it’s not even yours,” she answered, and I think those were possibly the sweetest words I had ever heard. After a minute, she asked, “What do you know now?” What I said, without hesitation, was, “I think I know I have a soul.”

Being an analytical and self-questioning type, I immediately wondered if I had given a prescribed answer. Told her what she wanted to hear: that I had gotten my money’s worth. I now don’t think so. I think I answered that way because I had felt the violent tearing away of something from my material, world-centered, ego-weighted corpus, and that was the something that went to the dark no-place of terror and made the journey back. That was what I was calling a soul. What better word for it really? It wasn’t mind because it couldn’t think. It could only experience. And I now think that it wasn’t my soul that was experiencing terror. It was the part of me that was left behind in the yurt and feared I might not get it back. Out there in the void, my shaman soul was never in danger, though it was certainly being given the ride of its life. I wish I could remember. I wish I could be where it was again. What was probably in some danger was the mind that was struggling to reconcile all this with the reality it knew, and possibly also my heart, which is why my curandera wouldn’t let me take the medicine a second time with the rest of our cohort. It was for the best. “You had the 5-MeO experience. Big time,” she told me. “But we do have to be aware of your body. Your age.” Damn my age. But it’s probably true that this stuff could kill you.

Biochemically speaking, the 5-methoxy-N,N-dimethyltryptamine molecule is binding to 5-HT1A and 50-HT2A serotonin receptors. In terms of toxicology, what’s being ingested is what the poor Colorado River Toad secretes when in a state of abject terror, and it is potent enough to kill a full-grown dog in its raw, unvolatilized form. So yes, in a very real sense, I had agreed to be poisoned. But you don’t want to know about the chemistry. You want to know if it was worth it. The answer is not one-dimensional. I had a rough re-integration. For three weeks, I was unsteady, weak, often morose. I told my beloved curandera that I thought I—the I that sat in the yurt, sweating and trembling and clenching—had suffered some kind of trauma. I met online with a U.K.-based shrink she had recommended and told her that I was afraid I might not be able to put myself back together. But there it was, you see. Evidence of the shamanic ordeal. Being torn apart, and now my task of reassembling the pieces, though hopefully not in quite the same order. And I am still doing that. Had I seen God? If so, only in the sense of the via negativa, the “apophatic” theology of what God is not. I didn’t see James Oroc’s white light, and I wasn’t taken aloft by angelic beings. As for the quantum vacuum, that paradoxical place where emptiness is full, maybe.

In the immediate aftermath of the trip, after I had finished sobbing out what felt like a lifetime of anguish, shame, regret, and compassion, I lay across their laps and said, weirdly, that I had never before felt comfort in this way. Not from my mother, not from my lovers or wives. There had always been distance—cold spots in the air between us, as if they had felt me unworthy of comforting, or more likely, that I had felt myself unworthy of accepting what they were willing to give. But now, in the yurt, the rain beating time on its skin, the wind lifting its moorings, the candle flickering and the cup against my lips, I accepted the comfort.

Perhaps the logical question to ask at this point is: Why go? The answer is that when a man has been there and undergone the baptism of solitude he can't help himself. Once he has been under the spell of the vast luminous, silent country, no other place is quite strong enough for him, no other surroundings can provide the supremely satisfying sensation of existing in the midst of something that is absolute. He will go back, whatever the cost in time or money, for the absolute has no price.” - Paul Bowles, The Baptism of Solitude.