Psychedelic Lessons and the Grieving Process

I lost my dog to age and illness recently and I am rather devastated by that. I have, however, been reminded, by the incident, of some of the psychedelic lessons that I have been taught over the years. The process of coming to terms with grief has some interesting parallels with certain aspects of the psychedelic experience. Both force one to come to terms with his or her helplessness, both require that one face his or her difficult emotions, and both lead to new discoveries about the self and what it values. There are important distinctions between the grieving process and the psychedelic experience but I believe that psychedelic lessons can function to help a person to prepare for the inevitable loss of a loved one.

There is a sense of helplessness that can define both a psychedelic experience and the grieving process. I had a dream last night in which my lost dog still lived and a man was coming to do him harm. When the confrontation came, I drew a pistol (or manifested one out of nothing), took aim, and attempted to fire. It failed to function and I was left powerless to against the threat to a member of my family. I do not recall anything else about the dream and I typically don't attach much significance to dreams in the first place but this one seemed too similar to reality to ignore. Age and illness come for us all and there is nothing that we can do to prevent that. Cancer does not respond to threats. You can't shoot time. Death is immortal. Despite the level of power that we may possess, we are utterly helpless when we are faced with those things. There is an impulse to fight and to despair when that reality makes itself known to us but psychedelics can help us understand how to come to peaceful terms with it. A trip is also something that we are powerless to control. If a user attempts to fight the experience, the trip will be bad. It will slap the user down and he or she will become desperate. The user may try to continue his or her resistance but with every attempt, the weight of the trip becomes more crushing. The only way out of this cycle of futility lies on a path of acceptance and understanding. A psychedelic experience behaves like a force of nature and one cannot stand against those sorts of things. He or she must accept them as they are and make peace with them or he or she risks harming the self in a pointless struggle. With psychedelics, this truth comes more gently than it does with things like age and death and that softer touch, I believe, helps to prepare us for what we will all face one day.

Grief and sadness are what one might call negative emotions ( I don't consider any emotional state to be inherently "negative" but I use the term because there really isn't a better one) and psychedelics have a way of teaching a person how to confront those sorts feelings. Like the difficult emotions that a psychonaut will eventually face on his or her journeys through the underworld of his or her mind, grief, sadness, and loss are "adversaries" that we will all meet at some point or another in our lives. These sorts of emotions, whether they are pulled out of the darkened depths of our minds by a drug or if they are born into existence by some unfortunate event, appear as though they are our enemies. We would like to slay them like the hideous hydra but they are not monsters and we are not Hercules. They are part of us. Fighting against them only means doing battle with the self and that leads to greater harm. Grief is the dark manifestation of love and killing it would require the death of that love. I miss my dog and that is painful but forcing that pain out of my life would require that I leave my love for him behind and that would be an act of selfish betrayal, in my mind. Psychedelics and the similar struggle that they may bring, force a person to face these sorts of emotions and to make piece with them because the trip cannot flow freely if a feeling weighs heavily on the mind of a user. The user, who has submitted to the power of the trip, knows that he or she cannot fight the emotions and that the only remaining option is to accept them as a part of the self. Through the use of these substances, one learns to take the grief by its rough hand and to embrace it because tripping requires this sort of self-diplomacy in many contexts. We are our emotions and if we cannot live with them, we will always be in conflict with ourselves. In that sense, one can see psychedelic substances as having the potential to help an individual to "train" for the unavoidable appearance of "monstrous emotions" in our real lives.

Both grief and the psychedelic experience can uncover hidden knowledge about the self and what it values which can be a painful process. Again, psychedelics are far more gentle in the way that they usher in this self-discovery. Coming to understand who we are and what we value can be difficult and it may only truly happen when we lose something. With psychedelics, the "ego" is stripped away and the user feels as though everything is "lost." However, this change is only temporary and when the psychonaut returns to reality, he or she regains everything with a new understanding of its value. This effect of a psychedelic experience, I think, functions well as a "dry run" for the same lesson that will be taught to us when we lose someone who we care about. Psychedelic drugs and the loss of the "ego" do not reduce our real world grief but I believe that they provide us with a solid frame of reference for what we feel by understanding value through loss and that can serve as a "rock" to cling to during the "storm" of sadness.

Perhaps, I am just telling myself these things because they make me feel better about a bad situation. There are as many differences between a trip and the process of grieving as there are similarities. Trips do, after all, end. Psychedelics alter one's perception of reality but grief and the event that causes it actually alter reality. However, I can't help but to find some strength in my psychedelic states of mind and the knowledge that they are responsible for. There is an intensity of emotion (it could be joy, fear, or any other feeling) and focus that manifest during a trip and they are only matched by the most intense and highly focused emotions that we are capable of feeling in real life (like grief). These substances teach us how to deal with that intensity in a controlled and lower stakes environment. They provide us with perspective when we are faced with our intense emotional states. Finally, they allow us to develop strategies for coping with our intense emotions in as healthy of a way as is possible. This is not a "magic bullet," of course. I am still deeply saddened by my loss and no amount of trippy "training" or psychedelic "wisdom" will change that but I am thankful for what I have experienced in that strange realm and I feel as though it has been instrumental in keeping me relatively stable during this difficult period in my life.

Peace.

All the images in this post are sourced from the free image website, unsplash.com.