On Drugs

It wasn’t only Mahadevi’s binding spell that put a stop to my consciously initiated OBE’s. I’ve seen those who interpret an OBE as a spiritual experience say often that they enjoy the knowledge that they’re “more than [a] body.” Well, due to stresses mostly unrelated to my psychic development, I became more concerned with being (or not being, that’s the question) at the exclusion of my body.

So... that’s how I wound up in an office with a psychotherapist once a fortnight and in another office with a psychiatrist once a month, with a diagnosis of depression. I won’t preach about how things are so much better now that I’d had help, and how they always get better for people who hang on (as far as I’m concerned, if anyone out there feels half as badly as I did, it’s just wrong to stop them.) Instead, I’ll once again turn to the “more than my body” idea.

Even modern, supposedly materialistic people I know, express aversion to taking a “happy pill.” They would recognize the benefits of a healthy diet, take an antipyruvic so they’re not confined to bed from fever for too long, or an aspirin so their throbbing headache doesn’t influence them to shout in anger at their children to keep the noise down. Compounds that directly influence the brain, however —— the brain, no less of an organ than any other organ —— and it appears to threaten free will, a decidedly unmaterialistic concept.

While it's terrible that there are people out there who were pushed into a drug regiment as a quick fix, perhaps so others can save themselves the embarrassment of accountability or the inconvenience of improving their outlook and behaviour, I can only speak for what I’ve personally suffered: a resistance to treatment that would have saved me several months of heartburn so intense that I'd be afraid to swallow food, headaches that no painkiller could dull, and most of all the greatly reduced efficiency of my attention and memory.

The advice from the spiritualists I knew was to meditate more, to reduce stress, to sharpen the mind... and that advice, I felt, was given with a rather presumptuous disregard for the fact that I had meditated for at least an hour almost every day since I was 14. I could silence my discursive thoughts in under half a minute, focus myself to autoscopy in at least twenty—— I would consider myself having had a quite disciplined mind. Yet this fog that seemed to envelope me, or more like filaments of mold felt like they were growing on the inside of my skull and blurring the outlines of my thoughts, would not be cleared by meditation.

I finally started taking antidepressants on the 21st of April, and, after a few days of subtle uncontrollable shivers as a side effect, the fog began to clear. My mundane, sensory perception began to sharpen back to normal. Perhaps that was just a little bit of a placebo, since it takes at least a month to heal damaged brain cells.*

By the 19th of May that same year, I began experiencing what my psychiatrist hadn't told me was a side effect: my taste buds seemed to be behaving strangely. I no longer tasted the lovely saltiness in salami, but just the slime. Just a crumb of beefburger had me running to the kitchen sink to wash my mouth out. While a snack of steamed chicken cut into cubes tasted too mild to be disgusting, my stomach just felt queasy afterwards.

By late June, I began to care about my garden again. When Sibling told me that she'd read something about polar bears drowning from not being able to find sturdy enough ice floes, I felt a pang—— not the distant, how to say... "emotional incomprehension"... that I didn't know I'd also been suffering from. After that, I began to feel an expansion in an area about two inches above the base of my sternum and below my collarbone, like a steady billowing of a breeze. I believe this was my heart chakra, which I hadn't even bothered to develop during meditations, and by now I had stopped meditations entirely. This sensation was completely spontaneous. I hadn't understood why, until then, the attempts I'd seen to meld Eastern and Western mysticism attributed the quality of "air" to this center of power. Now I even give it a little more credence than I used to.

Perhaps materialists would say that this proves psychism and spiritualism are purely an illusion created by a tampering of brain chemicals, and I'd expect spiritualists to re-assert that I should have been more proactive—— ridden my own psycho-spiritual journey into that state of caring, and from there released myself from depression, instead of depending on physical treatments. I'd just wonder why there should be such a resistance to the harmony of both.


Recommended Links
Erowid Ethnobotany Vault: Spiritual Use, Journal Article #3

Bruce Parry, host of the BBC documentary series Tribe, being initiated through iboga root.
From the BBC site's profile page on the Babongo tribe: "As well as influencing religious belief across Gabon, Iboga is also of increasing interest to Western medicine. One of its active ingredients, ibogain, has been used to treat heroin addicts, alcoholics and people who have been traumatised in childhood. Advocates say its particular powerful effects allow those who take it to move on from their previous lives and habits."

National Geographic's Taboo, episode 14 (Part 1)
National Geographic's Taboo, episode 14 (Part 2)
National Geographic's Taboo, episode 14 (Part 3)
National Geographic's Taboo, episode 14 (Part 4)
National Geographic's Taboo, episode 14 (Part 5)


* Ackerman, Diane. An Alchemy of Mind. New York: Scribner, 2005.