A Trip to the Edge

From Psychedelic Wanderlust to Obedience to Christ

Like many in Gen X, I grew up with divorced parents, a dysfunctional family, and the fracturing of community life as our individualist, techno-industrial culture turned digital. Many of us in the “Grunge Era” coped with our pain, isolation, and disillusionment by cynically disengaging and turning to self-reliance.

A Lone Brain on a Stick

As someone with an intellectual bent, I sought to secure personal stability through academic achievement and to escape the emotional volatility of my social world by spending hours alone in nature. My mind and I alone would build a nice, peaceful world for ourselves far away from narcissistic Boomers and the greedy excesses of the consumerist machine.

I tried my best to live as a purely thinking, contemplative creature—someone who didn’t have emotional or relational needs. It didn’t matter if I ate lunch alone; I should be reading for class anyway. It didn’t matter if no one invited me to the weekend party; I’d rather be riding my horse or walking beneath the canopy of nighttime stars.

I grew up in a nominally Christian home, and my devout grandma made sure I knew Scripture well. I genuinely enjoyed attending the Anglican church where I was baptized, but I never knew how to emotionally integrate the faith into my relational life. What did Jesus have to do with my detachment issues and fear of female friendships? I had no idea.

Just before high school graduation, I met Mark. He was dynamic and fun, full of enthusiasm and gifted in friendship—everything I was not, and we spent the summer exploring the Pacific Northwest. I had never had so much fun. Still, I planned to make my way in the world as an independent academic, so I left for Wheaton College and resumed living as a brain on a stick.

Predictably, once I was away from the familiarity of home, the lie soon broke; I was desperately lonely and sad, a huge tangle of confusion and despair that could no longer go untended.

Meanwhile, Mark delved into the Oregon drug scene. I spent hours on the phone hearing about his amazing trips, all the spiritual truth he was discovering, and all the euphoria he felt communing with transcendent being. Meanwhile, I ate, slept, and worked all day every day to achieve a 4.0 in my double major of philosophy and literature while pretending not to need friends. At some point I realized, I cannot do this anymore. I need to feel alive again.

The World Unmade

Over Christmas break, I let Mark convince me to try shrooms. He seemed alive and joyful; I was dying and miserable. What if these drugs aren’t really so evil as the bureaucratic, imperial stiffs and self-righteous, misogynistic hypocrites make them out to be? God has given us bread to satisfy our physical hunger; why couldn’t he have given us psychedelics to satisfy our spiritual longings as well?

My first trip completely unmade my world. It was like someone had ripped bandages off my eyes and I saw reality for the first time, or like I was a deaf infant who finally heard his mother’s voice. All the protective walls I had carefully built around my heart were torn wide open and reality poured in.

Everything seemed wondrously alive, the whole world radiant with life, stretched tall with joy, pulsating with wonder. As Ashley Lande describes in her book The Thing That Would Make Everything Okay Forever: Transcendence, Psychedelics, and Jesus Christ, “It was transcendence. Unfathomable heights. The sun itself.” Like her, I too was “forever changed in a searing flash of white-hot atomic cataclysm, lobotomized by the searing revelation of the enormity of everything, sent scuttling backward on hands and feet as matter consumed and rebirthed itself in terrifying perpetuity.”

I spent the next year living a double life: my dutiful, ambitious self plowed through academic work during the semester, and my secret, mystical self tripped through fairyland with Mark whenever I could. I traversed galaxies with Radiohead on their OK Computer tour, wandered through the Redwoods wearing elfin robes and talking to the Ents, and backpacked across Mt. Rainier weeping at the alpine meadows as my heart nearly exploded from the drug-induced climb.

Each good trip seemed to bring euphoric epiphanies—except I could never really remember what they were in the sober daylight. Apart from a potent experience of spiritual reality that confirmed to me its undeniable existence, I never learned any genuine insights into that spiritual reality.

The Illusion of Meaning

Drug-induced states give one the sensation of meaning and profundity without the reality. Any rock or tree can seem like the very heart of being and the embodiment of divine mystery, yet hierarchy and differentiation are actually essential for genuine meaning. If everything is equally significant, then nothing is really significant. The world is indeed filled with the glory and presence of God, but not in equal measure. In truth, the sacredness of all things varies by degree, and genuine experiences of profundity emerge from that realization of hierarchical relevance.

There is a reason psychedelic culture is always connected to pantheistic mysticism, relativism, and dogma-free spirituality. The chemicals blow open your neurology and obliterate the psychological boundaries between the self and the world around you. It is a simulation of pantheistic oneness with all things. Yet the reality that the drugs portray is amorphous and fluid; in the psychedelic world there are no stable truths or reliable boundaries that can ground identities.

Trippers are like the man who told C. S. Lewis, “I know there’s a God. I’ve felt Him: out alone in the desert at night: the tremendous mystery.” Psychedelics were for me both an awakening and a marooning. The drugs forced me to feel again; but mere chemical stimulation cannot show you what it is you are seeing and feeling. A flood of serotonin alone cannot offer you any wisdom, improve your discipline, or give you genuine virtue. Simply knowing that a spiritual world exists does not offer much help in knowing how to build a life there. As usual, Lewis describes it best:

What happened to that man in the desert may have been real, and was certainly exciting, but nothing comes of it. It leads nowhere. There is nothing to do about it. In fact, that is just why a vague religion—all about feeling God in nature, and so on—is so attractive. It is all thrills and no work: like watching the waves from the beach. But you will not get to Newfoundland by studying the Atlantic that way, and you will not get eternal life by simply feeling the presence of God in flowers or music.

Those years I lived in the psychedelic subculture did nothing to make me a better person. I had traded depression for neurosis. I no longer slogged through the bog of drudgery; I ran down the streets like loose electricity. In fact, I dropped out of college and spent a semester working at Olive Garden until I finally pulled myself together enough to transfer to the Honors College at University of Oregon, where I could better integrate my double life of academic ambition and psychedelic ecstasy.

Darkness Calling

But now that we lived in the same town, I broke up with Mark because we fought all the time. His life was going nowhere and my terror of poverty prevented me from fully embracing the slacker lifestyle. I intended to graduate and go somewhere. I’d figure out where later.

Unfortunately, it was only after I gave up my academic opportunities at Wheaton that things turned dark, and the Pied Piper came to collect his due.

During that time in Eugene my psychedelic visions began to turn dark. At first, I simply felt the presence of shadows on the edge of my consciousness. Then one night my roommates brought over a new guy to trip with us. I can’t remember if we were doing shrooms or LSD that night, but I do remember that the world took on a kind of cavernous darkness where the only glittering radiance I saw was the thin, cold shimmering of the stars stretched high above and far out of reach.

The horror of the moment so cauterized my memory that I am left only with the searing imprint of a single image. I think we were standing outside on the front porch, and this man, this traveling trickster, whoever he was, changed his face into the horned image of a devil. I tried to shake my head and clear my vision. He laughed. I remember trying to say something but feeling only that this devil played with me like a toy, like Voltaire sparring with some mid-wit librarian.

I went inside and told my friend he had to drive me to Mark’s house—now. That one-mile drive took at least eight hours. I pressed my foot down on the floorboard thinking I could make the crawling car move faster, but the more I willed for us to be there, the slower we seemed to move, the more the sludge of the world seemed to thicken and resist our progress.

I barged into Mark’s room, woke him up, and insisted he keep me company until I could wash the devil from my mind. I stared at his clock, which read 4:05 for at least another 10 hours, willing the trip to end with as much futility as I had willed the car to move.

The following spring, I was wandering around Eugene’s famous Oregon County Fair high on shrooms when I heard the World Soul demand I give him everything—that I finally release my ego completely. I was Brahman and Brahman was me. It was time to let go of illusion, let all the boundaries fall, and release my mind to it once and for all.

The droning didgeridoos pulled at my mind like so many liquid hands; I panicked and ran to the bus line, clutching at my own face to make sure it was still there. I repeated “I am not Brahman” like a lunatic all the way home and somehow ended up back in my room where I spent hours, days, years rocking back and forth in my bed until at last the drugs released their grip and let me be.

My mind!? Not my mind. That was the part of me I depended on and identified with; my ability to think, to see, to know was all I had. I was done with these demons for good. I would not trade sanity for the elusive hope of pseudo-bliss.

True Wonder

I needed out. To clear my head. To find some kind of starting point from which I could rebuild my sanity, some light on the horizon by which to orient my life on these endless seas of shifting thought and gnawing desire. I was a chaos, and before I ran out of scholarship money, I needed to figure out a principle of order and a destination for which I could aim.

I decided to go to the one place I knew I could find something genuinely, wholesomely good: the mountains. I borrowed my friend’s German shepherd as company and security, hopped in my car, and drove straight to Denali, Alaska. I made the 2,620-mile trip alone in four days, sleeping in my car as needed and smoking cigarettes to keep myself awake as I alternately played Tom Petty and Sarah McLachlan down the gravel highways of northern British Columbia and the lonely Yukon.

I parked my car inside Denali State Park, grabbed the dog, and started walking. I didn’t know where I was really going or how far I was going to go. I just needed to bore myself as deeply into the peace of the wild things as I could.

While traversing a scree slope, I slipped and nearly tumbled over an edge that would’ve taken me at least 1000 feet down hard, shifting rock. Frightened, I sat down and cried. I couldn’t do this anymore, this breathing in and out, this attempt to keep going somewhere despite the deadness and fear that ruled my heart. I was a little surprised that I didn’t just black out and somehow disappear right then and there. I so sincerely felt that I was the one in control of my life, it seemed that if I were to give up control, my life would simply cease to be.

Instead I heard the quiet breathing of Dakota as he patiently waited for me and licked his paw. I heard a voice say, “I am the one who sustains you. You have tried independence. Come and try obedience.”

I knew who was talking to me. I knew his name. Often the words from the Anglican liturgy of my childhood had come to mind during those years.

I believe in one God,
the Father almighty,
maker of heaven and earth,
of all things visible and invisible.

I believe in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Only Begotten Son of God, born of the Father before all ages.
God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made ...

They echoed through my imagination like a song from beyond the walls of the world. The transcendence I had experienced through psychedelics animated and electrified my perception of this world, but ironically, the drugs moved me further away from the glimpses I could see of another world.

I got back in my car, drove home, and tried obedience. I started reading my Bible, I stopped dating someone just because he would give me attention, and I stopped doing drugs. I took a break from University of Oregon and spent a year at Ecola Bible College learning to integrate my faith into my emotional and relational life through the fellowship and care of God’s good people he had gathered there.

And I never looked back.

The past 25 years have brought epiphanies and adventures trod on the heights of meaning. My world has been crammed with a wonder free from the shadows of compromise and the predation of demons, for “In him there is no darkness at all” (1 John 1:5).

Everything truly good and beautiful and profound that I’ve gathered from this world has come not from the shifting sands of stimulated perception, but from Scripture, liturgy, Plato, Homer, Dante, C. S. Lewis, Wordsworth, my husband, my children, the trees, the mountains, the ocean, even the roses in my garden. By the grace of God, these real things have provided me with the genuine, durable insights out of which I have built a life on the solid rock of the Logos.

The key to meaning and happiness is obedience, not pharmakeia and not technique. We do not storm the heights of heaven to bring down the secrets of life. Christ offers them freely to us in bread and wine, if only we will obey him and submit to the patterns and structures of life that he has woven into the fabric of his world.

I was looking for the new drug or trick that would give me happiness without submission, for ways to conform reality to my will rather than conforming my will to reality. But I discovered that true joy comes from being integrated into the Divine Love that moves the spheres, for “In him was life, and that life was the light of men” (John 1:4).