On Free Will & Responsibility
The important thing is this: to be ready at any moment to sacrifice what you are for what you could become.
― Charles Dickens
I’ve always been a meditator.
Meditation was the first thing I turned to when anything challenging came up in my personal life. After a series of traumatic events, I built the habit of sitting down and facing these difficulties head on instead of finding ways to avoid the pain I was feeling inside. After many years of keeping up this practice, I developed an ability to observe many of my problems for what they truly were. Whenever I was frustrated at work, I could meditate on the root cause of my frustration and begin dissolving the problem - little by little. You feel you aren’t being appreciated enough, my heart would tell me. After I identified the root cause of my inner turmoil and acknowledged it, I could begin directing my attention to either remediating the problem, or focus on letting go of the situation if it was beyond my control. It was a beautiful practice, and I remain forever changed by it.
I have something to confess however. In the past 4 months, I have not meditated at all. Not even a brief moment to stop and assess. Nothing. While this may sound normal to the layperson, this is a tremendous shift for me. I was always a meditator, was always supposed to be a meditator, and here I am - not being a meditator (I can hear a monk chuckling somewhere). Sadhguru once said that meditation is the symptom of a higher aim. Had I lost my cause?
Prior to four months ago, I was living by myself and for myself. Life wasn’t difficult, and I had plenty of time and energy to direct towards this higher aim. And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free. This was my motto, and I did everything I could to live by it. As latest events would have it however, I have been given a responsibility. A responsibility many men assume when they wed and have children of their own. I have a small family to provide and care for, and a family to support should anything go wrong. Although this responsibility of mine has given me tremendous meaning and made me a better person, a deep yearning for my meditation practice quietly lingers in the background. An un-communicated spiritual intuition sits at the edge at the edge of my awareness, watching calmly in the background, hanging on every such interaction and whispering to me in one way or another, Wake up…
For the first time in my life, I am going to admit something that old Marcelo could never possibly agree with, and it is something simple.
Meditation is not always the answer.
I am just as flabbergasted as you, my dear reader, to hear such words come out of my mouth (or writing). But I stand by it. Sometimes, life presents you with situations that are so heavy, difficult, and pressing, that there is no solution but to carry the weight of the world on your shoulders and move forward. Despite how difficult and isolating this may seem, there lies something intrinsically fulfilling behind such a responsibility. It has given me a level of confidence and clarity in life that I would not have had otherwise. I have none other than Jordan Peterson to thank for such an insight.
As such, meditation no longer helps. The reason for my meditating was the pursuit of this higher aim — the pursuit of truth, awareness, and a fundamental expansion of my consciousness. I’ve had meditative experiences where I could feel my aura flowing from out of my body. I’ve had visions of the fundamental absence of self, represented as a tremendous black hole within. I have felt Gods love. This was all made possible by the art of deep introspection, and systematic releasing of anything that gets in the way of you, the real you, which hides skillfully behind the ego. As of late however, I have found no other truth for me to face. No amount of meditation will reframe your responsibilities as a man into something as light as a feather. The truth of this situation is to carry the weight of the world on your shoulders and press forward. In this regard I have found nothing else to look for.
Last weekend I was offered an escape from my duties as man of the house, and was invited to up north in Collingwood to visit a newly built pre-construction property. Excited by the prospect, I accepted. After a two hours drive north, I was presented with a beautiful property, complete with a pool table, TVs, a lounging area and everything I could ever ask for of a man cave. Little did I know that in this house would be the first time I take psilocybin, a psychedelic compound that is produced by more than 200 known species of fungi. Psilocybin is currently being investigated for its potential therapeutic applications in treating conditions like addiction, depression, and end-of-life anxiety, and has shown a recent surge of popularity with (illegal?) mushroom stores opening all around Canada. As a result, one of the people we came with had a case jam-packed with every psilocybin permutation you could think of, from chocolate to gummies, to the real mushrooms and everything in between.
I have been interested in mushrooms for many years, and have repeatedly denied the opportunity to do them due to the fears of a bad trip. I have a good university friend whom after one bad trip remain changed forever, and not in a way that he would have preferred. The main conclusion he drew from his experience was that your brain is a fragile organ, and should be treated as such. This story along with my own fears was enough to dissuade me from most drugs, despite living in Berlin, known to be one of the recreational drug capitals of the world.
And thus, presented with the opportunity to do mushrooms in a controlled setting with people I trusted, I accepted. I began with a 300mg dose, and slowly worked my way up to about 2 grams by the end of the night. As my high progressed gradually, I began to progress into deeper and deeper phases of the psychedelic experience.
It was beautiful.
Psilocybin has a way of fundamentally altering your reality without actually affecting your mental alertness. At the peak of my high I felt that I could have sat down and written code, discussed philosophy, or done a workout (which we did). As it begins to alter reality in this way, it pulls you into the present moment and forces you to let go of everything that sucks you out of the present in day to day life. Those with severe issues and traumas will experience resistance at this stage, as they are forced to confront the very things that hold them back from what they already contain within them — connection and joy.
What gets in the way of our intrinsic connectedness to life are the stories we tell ourselves. Although these stories can be positive or negative, but they are just that — stories. I am this way because of that person. I’m too tired to go to the gym. I’m not the kind of person that reads. Etcetera. Unfortunately for us, these stories constrain us and limit our potential from what we could be.
As Dr. Gabor Mate elaborates in his book, The Myth of Normal:
If we’re constrained by anything, maybe it’s [our] very open-endedness; strange as it may sound, our miraculous talent for adaptation could also be a liability. Because our nature is so influenceable, different conditions evoke different versions of us, from benign to disastrous. When we reify—set in stone, mentally speaking— the particular way human behaviour shows up in a certain place and time, we commit the fallacy of conflating how we’re being with who we are.
As psilocybin begins to alter your perceptions and bring you into the present, you begin a healthy process of reframing reality. You’ll experience sensations you’ve never felt before. You’ll experience highs and lows that are completely new to you. You’ll understand things about yourself that you didn’t consciously understand before, as you begin piecing together the narrative arc of your entire life. At higher doses, something different begins to happen: the narrative structures we have constructed around our lives starts to break down, we begin the process of rebirthing, seeing the world anew for the first time in many years — for some of us, decades. If we are lucky, we can catch a glimpse of what lies beyond the other side of the veil.
I experienced a tremendous moment of change during this trip. At one point during our walk, we lied down in the middle of the forest, covered in ice and snow, and gazed upwards at the trees, stars, and the universe beyond. This is it. This is what you have been looking for. Looking at the stars with close friends, smiles plastered on our faces, I felt deeply connected to myself and every aspect of the world around me. At this stage I began to feel a deep connection with my inner child.
After a while we got up and began making our way back home. Suddenly, I felt something shift, deep in the core of my being. It was like a vertical line, radiating and opening up from my heart centre. Not only was this a feeling of love and connection, but a fundamental experiencing of my free will. In that moment, I could do anything I wanted. I could think about things freely, I could jump, walk backwards, or look up at the stars. In that moment, I could feel the infinite number of possibilities that are available to us in the present moment. And instead of feeling fear, all I felt was gratitude. Gratitude to have this level of agency. Gratitude because I was. In this moment of presence and agency, I felt a tremendous sense of responsibility to be to be kind and loving to my fellow human.
It is precisely because we have this level of free will that we must strive to be kind to others and make this world a better place.
It was a life changing moment. Suddenly everything in my life was up to me. The burden I had been carrying had become an opportunity to share my gift with others. Knowing there would be no escape, I was free to face my struggles head on, knowing all had all the agency I needed to make my life better.
After my trip, I have noticed small but noticeable improvement in my quality of life. I am more present and calm with those around me. My relationship with my girlfriend has deepened. I have more love and compassion for those around me, whether in passing, at work, or with close friends and family. Psilocybin changed my life that day, and I am all the better for it.
My theory for the effectiveness of psychedelics in improving substance abuse, depression, anxiety, and other common illnesses can be attributed to these factors:
A releasing of the past, and being brought into the present moment
A fundamental experience of your free will, and the agency that comes with it
Experiencing your fundamental connectedness to everything around you
Experiencing the deepest parts of your subconscious
Although I am not advocating that you wake up tomorrow and go buy some psychedelics from your local mushroom store, I do believe that psilocybin may provide the path to making the world a better place, one mushroom at a time.
“Psychedelics are illegal not because a loving government is concerned that you may jump out of a third story window. Psychedelics are illegal because they dissolve opinion structures and culturally laid down models of behaviour and information processing. They open you up to the possibility that everything you know is wrong.”
― Terence McKenna