Driving down I-5S late in the evening from San Diego to Tijuana is in itself an experience. The small red, blue, and yellow paper flags hanging outside every house flutter in the wind as I drive down the now empty interstate.
It’s the fourth of July weekend and coming back from Melbourne, I have taken a very uncharacteristic detour before heading back north to Boston.
Adriana’s call the other night sets things in motion.
“Karen had mentioned that you are genuinely interested in a spiritual experience and I am free this weekend if you would like to stop over”.
As my circle of psychonauts from Toronto to Melbourne has expanded, I have learned that pretty much anyone who I had met who’d had an encounter with the toad had been introduced to it by Adriana. The first time I met Adriana was when our common friend had organized a small dinner for a group of friends outside Melbourne.
She was petite and fashionably dressed. Her shoulder-length black hair frames her face and makes her look slightly more diminutive than she is. She looked less of a shaman and more like a working professional.
The night before my meeting with Adriana is, predictably, sleepless.
I am still vexing if I want to try this. I have a basic disgust towards anything even slightly addictive or sensory stimulation that makes me lose control of my senses, which is why I never consume more than one small peg of alcohol in any setting.
I fear as I certainly have for decades — What if having gone through it, I would never be the same again? Was this an absolutely insane thing to do? On the plus side, I figure, whatever happened, it would all be over in half an hour. On the other side, everything might be over in half an hour.
As I toss and turn that night in a small motel on the outskirts of Tijuana, away from the usual touristy destinations, I have this completely random thought -
‘There are children to raise. And there is a long amount of time to be dead.’
As the sun comes up, I decide I would make my decision when I got there. Adriana, whom I’d made aware of my trepidations, has offered to let me watch her work with someone else before it was my turn. This proves reassuring, as she knows it would.
The guy before me, a supremely low-affect college student who had done the toad once before, takes a puff from Adriana’s pipe, lay back on a mattress, and embarked on what appeared to be a placid thirty-minute nap, during which he exhibited no signs of distress, let alone existential terror. After it was over, he seemed perfectly fine.
I guess this is it then. Death or madness seemed much less likely. I could do this.
After positioning me on the mattress just so, Adriana has me sit up while she loads a premeasured capsule of the crystals into a glass vial that she then screws onto the barrel of the pipe. She asks me to give thanks to the toad and think about good intentions.
She then lights a blue flame underneath the small hookah and instructs me to draw on the pipe in short sips of air as the white smoke swirled and then filled the glass.
“Then one big final draw that I want you to hold on to it as long as you can.”
These are the last words I remember..
I have no memory of ever having exhaled, or of being lowered onto the mattress and covered with a blanket.
All at once, I feel a tremendous rush of energy fill my head accompanied by a punishing roar. I manage, barely, to squeeze out the words I had prepared, “Accept” and “Surrender.” These words became my salvation, but they seem utterly pathetic, wishful scraps of paper in the face of this category 5 mental storms.
Terror seizes me — and then, like one of those flimsy wooden houses erected on Bikini Atoll to be blown up in the nuclear tests, the “I” is no more, blasted to a confetti cloud by an explosive force I could no longer locate in my head because it has exploded that too, expanding to become all that there was — a single point of infinity.
Whatever this is, it is not a hallucination. A hallucination implies a reality and a point of reference and an entity to have it. None of those things remain.
Unfortunately, the terror didn’t disappear with the extinction of my “I.” Whatever allowed me to register this experience, the post-ego awareness I’d first experienced is now consumed in the flames of terror too.
In fact, every touchstone that tells me “I exist” is annihilated, and yet I remained conscious.
“Is this what death feels like? Could this be it?” There is this thought, although there is no longer a thinker perceiving it.
Words are just words, complete failures in describing the truth of the experience. In reality, there are no flames, no blast, no thermonuclear storm; I’m grasping at synonyms and metaphors in the hope of forming some kind of articulate and shareable concept of what was unfolding in my mind.
At that moment, there is no coherent thought, just a pure and terrifying sensation. Only afterward do I wonder if this was what the mystics call the ultimate force — the blinding unendurable mystery before which we humans tremble in awe, that some call — God.
Again, after the fact, I kept returning to a single metaphor. It is at best insipid, but perhaps the only ones that allow me to share this experience, to communicate it for my own record. This is the only one that sticks with me and manages to describe in some semblance what the true journey felt like -
It is the image 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 flesh, pulling my face down into a taut grimace, as the great cylinder rises through successive layers of clouds, exponentially gaining speed and altitude, the fuselage shuddering on the brink of self-destruction as it strains to break free from Earth’s grip, while the friction it generates as it crashes through the thinning air issues in a deafening roar.
It is a little like that. Just completely shattering.
And then as suddenly the dissolution of everything into the nothingness has happened, it reverses course.
One by one, the elements of our universe begin to reconstitute themselves: the dimensions of time and space returned first, blessing my still-scattered brain with the cozy coordinates of place; this is somewhere!
And then I slipped back into my familiar “I” like an old pair of slippers and soon after feel something I recognize as my body begins to reassemble. The movie of reality now runs in reverse, as if all the leaves that the thermonuclear blast had blown off the great tree of being and scattered to the four winds were suddenly to find their way back, fly up into the welcoming limbs of reality, and reattach.
The order of things is being restored, “me” notably included.
I still exist!
The descent into familiar reality is swifter than I expect. Almost disappointing.
The ecstasy — is more like the equal and opposite reaction to the terror I had just endured, less of a divine gift than the surge of pleasure that comes from the cessation of unendurable pain. But a sense of relief so vast and deep as to be cosmic.
With the rediscovery of my body, I feel an inexplicable urge to lift my arms. Next comes an overwhelming wave of gratitude. For what? For once again existing. Rather than being necessarily the case that I exist as I do naturally, this now seemed quite the miracle, and something I resolve never again to take for granted.
Suddenly for me, there seemed to be a great virtue in simply being. In contemplation rather than action. To savor whatever is at this very moment, without trying to change it or even describe it. If one always saw like this, one would never want to do anything else.
Even now, many months later, I still don’t know exactly what to make of that voyage I took down south. Its violent narrative arc — that awful climax followed so swiftly by such a sweet aftertaste.
It lacked the coherent beginning, middle, and end that we rely on to make sense of experience. Its mind-bending velocity made it difficult to extract much information or knowledge from the journey
A few days after my encounter with the toad when I am safely transplanted back home in Boston, I accidentally stumble on an old email from Adrianna that ends, uncannily, with this prose:
I hope whatever you’re doing,
you’re stopping now and then
and…
not doing it at all.
I take a moment to savor those words which previously would have meant absolutely nothing to me at all, now suddenly making complete sense in a new light.
My integration to the experience had been cursory, leaving me to puzzle out the toad’s teachings, such as they were, on my own.
Was it a sort of a spiritual or mystical experience? Or was what took place in my mind merely the reaction of these strange chemicals or was it both?
To be honest, I simply did not know.
Karen’s words from our first meeting 35,000 miles above sea level echoed somewhere in the back of my head at that very moment:
“It’s an irrelevant question. This was something being revealed to me.”, she had said.
