Talking to God on Psychedelics (Part Two)

The pineal gland, spiritual encounters, and the worst trip I ever had

Another long essay, with a personal story I’ve been reluctant to share. This is an abridged version, with many parts omitted for brevity — and because some things are best saved for a paywall or between the covers of a book.

I would appreciate it if those who choose to start reading it stay with me until the end. Because this is a long story, I’ve decided to split it into three parts.

Part one, which tells the back story of how magic mushrooms healed me and my husband and helped us fall in love, is here.

This is part two.

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“In her waters, deep and true / Lie the answers and a path for you / Dive down deep into her sound / But not too far or you’ll be drowned”

— Robert Lopez & Kristin J. Anderson, “All is Found”, Frozen 2

I cannot prove this, but I am convinced that magic mushrooms got me pregnant.

Prior to my daughter’s conception, I frequently saw in my fractals — close-eyed psychedelics visuals — the image of a Sphinx-like lion. I sensed the lion wanted me to get pregnant. Later, I found out lions are associated with Ishtar, a Mesopotamian goddess of fertility, love, political power, and war (etc).

Some Christians and Jews may know Ishtar as Astarte and believe she is a demon. Ishtar is certainly a complicated goddess — among other things, she is the protector of prostitutes and promiscuous women, the guardian of alehouses / drunks, and many of her ancient temples were possibly run by gender-bending priestesses.¹

I realize some might interpret these visions as evidence of demonic possession. However, pre-mushrooms, I was a hard-drinking woke-addled feminist slut and after mushrooms I was a barefoot-in-kitchen alcohol-abstaining STAH mother and housewife to a Jew who sings and plays Hebrew prayers on his guitar. And so, I would argue that the mushrooms, if anything, were an exorcism.

Of course, skeptics would argue that Zach and I simply did an excessive amount of psychedelics on New Year’s Eve 2020 (objectively true), and were irresponsible birth control-wise (also true). But I suppose I just think it is a much funnier story to believe that the mushroom spirits and an ancient fertility goddess conspired to bring our confident, clever, sweet-natured, and beautiful daughter into the world.

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Our daughter was born in early fall 2021 after a pregnancy riddled with minor complications — fatigue, brain fog, morning sickness, chronic yeast infections, bacterial vaginosis and two UTIs (and three rounds of antibiotics), bad morning breath, heartburn, restless legs syndrome, and an iron deficiency. At her twenty-week ultrasound, she was also classified as “high risk” due to a missing artery in her umbilical cord.

Against my better instincts, I was pressured into getting an mRNA vaccine in my second trimester, and fell into a depression shortly afterward — the various pregnancy complications followed. My midwives started talking to me about SSRIs. I told my midwives I wouldn’t take them and asked what they thought about me doing a small dose of mushrooms instead. They were opposed to this.

I moped around for a couple of months until a day at the beach in early July. I mentioned that I wished I could do a small mushroom trip to alleviate my depression, and one of Zach’s friends said he was in the band for an underground plant medicine ceremony, and there were members of that community who had taken the medicine while pregnant and breastfeeding, and had healthy children. He gave us the number of the woman who ran the ceremony.

We set up a call. She turned out to be a gentile who had studied for two decades under a rabbi, and incorporated Jewish mysticism into her work. We took this as a good sign. Zach and I were well-versed in the pharmacology of both psilocybin and SSRIs, and logically, it made no sense that taking an SSRI daily was somehow safer during pregnancy than taking a small dose of psilocybin once. We decided to attend an upcoming ceremony.

In a beautiful room in an ordinary-looking suburban house surrounded by two dozen friendly, healthy-looking men and women dressed mostly in loose-fitting light-coloured clothing, I drank 2.5 grams of magic mushrooms and meditated. I confronted my fears of motherhood. I had the sense the mRNA vaccine had poisoned me, but that the mushrooms would help heal the damage. In the second half of the trip, my daughter began moving, as though she were joyously dancing to the band’s spiritual hymns. After that, my depression lifted.

The birth was a mess; I’d intended to go natural, but when I failed to fully dilate, the doctor who had been called in to assist my midwife insisted I get an epidural, which over-froze me to my neck and put my daughter’s heart into distress. Minutes after we’d signed the consent forms for an emergency c-section, my cervix dilated, and I was able to push her out — with the assistance of the vacuum — in about 45 minutes. She came out blue, and was whisked off the NICU. Panicked, I screamed at my husband to follow her — “I don’t want her to be alone!” It was about half a day before I could convince the nurses to take me to her, as they felt — and I disagreed — that I needed to be able to feel my legs again before I could stand and walk and be with my daughter.

Once I was in the NICU, I finally held my helpless daughter, who they were monitoring for signs of brain damage. On her second day in the NICU, she defiantly ripped out her feeding tube. She was discharged two days later and has been a thriving, healthy, almost surreally-alert, and clever child ever since.

The diagnosis came back a few weeks after we were discharged; “unexplained placental inflammation.” Years later, while listening to a podcast discussion between

Meghan Murphy

and

Dr Naomi Wolf

, I learned that inflamed placentas had been unusually common among mothers who received mRNA vaccines during pregnancy — leaving me with a sense of gratitude to the mushrooms and Elohim for the good health of my daughter.

In 2022, part two of our psychedelics journey began.

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It’s come to my attention that some people are worried I am “addicted” to psilocybin, and so I’m going to pause the story for a second to clarify a few things for those who are unfamiliar with psychedelics.

1. Psilocybin is not addictive. Tolerance builds up so quickly, you actually cannot take it more than 2-3 times per week and feel any effect, and no more than two days in a row. Psilocybin has been shown through numerous clinical studies and case reports to actually treat drug, alcohol, and food addictions. You can, however, take it too frequently. From my experience, you’ll know when you’re doing this because the mushrooms themselves let you know and they will tell you stop.

2. You cannot overdose on psilocybin. It is probably the safest “drug” out there (drug is in quotes because I tend to think of it as a plant medicine, not a drug).

3. A psilocybin trip lasts about 4-6 hours (in my case, closer to four). There is usually no hangover (some people may get a mild headache). If anything, you usually feel better in the days that follow. (That is, unless you have a “bad trip”, in which case they can worsen mental health without proper support).

4. At low doses, psilocybin basically just makes me happy, more attuned to my environment, boosts my energy a little, and increases my desire to do things like clean my home, water the plants, dance to music, do yoga, and/or go for a walk in the woods. They also make me averse to screens and therefore far less likely to use my phone or computer, and far more likely to play with, dance with, and stare lovingly into my children’s faces.

For more on the safe use of psilocybin and research about its medicinal benefits for both mental and physical health, please see this article. To learn more about psychedelics in general, I recommend checking out

Andrew M. Weisse

’s Substack.

The only other mind-altering substances I have used with any regularity from 2022 onward are marijuana and ketamine. I assume most readers are familiar with marijuana.

Ketamine is a synthetic dissociative anesthetic used in hospitals, including in infants and children. It is also been studied for its potential benefits in treating depression and chronic pain. In low doses it sort-of mimics the effects of alcohol (except with some crazy close-eyed fractal visuals), without a hangover. Effects last about 45 minutes. Recreational users typically take far smaller doses than those used in clinical settings. If you do happen to take too much and go into a “k-hole”, unlike overdoing it on alcohol where you are out for the night, you are basically fine after an hour.

While there is a low risk of physical dependence, it is very possible — even likely — to become psychologically addicted to ketamine, and long-term, heavy use can cause serious damage to the bladder.

I personally think ketamine — which is effective as an antidepressant for up to two weeks after a single dose — is a safer option than other pharmaceutical antidepressants and anti-anxiety medications, but I do not think it can treat the underlying issues or relieve depression long-term in the same way psilocybin can.

However, ketamine is incredible for chronic pain, and this is what I primarily use it for. I’ve found that combining a low dose of ketamine with a low dose of either marijuana (think one hit off a joint) or psilocybin (0.5-1 grams) and doing some yoga has worked wonders for my chronic shoulder and neck pain. It’s difficult to describe, but I enter a meditative state where my body essentially does the yoga for me, moving through the stretches I need to loosen up, while my mind works through various problems and emotional releases.

The other good use I’ve found for ketamine is to intensify a psilocybin trip for an hour; under the tranquilizing effects of ketamine, my overactive left hemisphere shuts up, and the mushroom spirit(s) take over — allowing for greater psychological healing under a much lower dose than would otherwise be required. With ketamine, 1-2 grams of mushrooms can feel closer to a hero-dose (5+ grams) for that hour before the k wears off.

The issue with psychedelics, however, is that they are unpredictable — especially when the spirit world gets involved. As I would soon learn.

With that out of the way, it’s time to return to the story.

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Financial help from my parents allowed me to realize my desire to stay at home with my daughter. I wasn’t eligible for maternity leave because I was “self-employed” (in quotes because my freelance work for festivals mostly vanished with the lockdowns), and so my husband took the opportunity to take a break from his emotionally-taxing job as a mental health worker at a health authority and joined me at home for eight months of parental leave.

Our daughter was a clingy baby, but otherwise very happy and healthy. She quickly became a good sleeper, and in early 2022, Zach and I started experimenting with psilocybin (and ketamine, on rarer occasions marijuana) again.

My husband would brew the psilocybin tea while I breastfed our daughter to sleep for the night in the middle of our king-sized bed. We played music quietly and drank our tea in the bedroom, and stayed up late talking. On the rare occasions when our daughter woke up, we either swept her into our arms and danced, or strapped her in a wrap to one of our chests and went out for a late-night walk on Vancouver’s seawall. She loved those nights.

We often talked about God and religion/spirituality. We watched a lot of movie adaptations of Torah stories; Zach is half-Jewish through his father, but his family is not particularly religious — and so, although he was far more familiar with the Torah than I was, we were still learning together. We also watched a lot of musicals — I was convinced good music was the purest expression of human genius, and that musical theatre in particular was a fractal art form that potentially contained many truths of the human condition; rhymes were revealing. During the day, we both read and listened to a lot of books. Our love for each other deepened in a psychedelic glow.

Starting around the spring of 2022, I began to occasionally take small amounts of mushrooms during the day. I would wander around our condo under the heightened sensitivity of mushrooms and try to pay attention to what revulsed me. I purged the synthetic clothing from our wardrobes. I stopped using tampons and switched to cotton period panties. A cheap multivitamin was thrown into the trash. I researched nutrition and medicinal plants, and started roaming around the rabbit hole of Big Pharma and Big Food skepticism. I believe the greatest health benefits of psilocybin come from the behavioural changes after a trip — from identifying factors in your life that are harming your health, and removing them.

Then, in late May, after a dose of mushroom tea prompted me to vomit, I noticed how grossed out I was by our fluoride toothpaste. I went to our local health food store the next day to buy a non-fluoride option. On a whim, I picked one made with neem, a medicinal tree native to India. My husband thought this toothpaste was disgusting and was skeptical about quitting fluoride, so he continued using our old toothpaste.

A month later, we were at my family cabin for the long weekend with my father (my parents are divorced), brother, and a handful of relatives and family friends. My family members drink a lot on vacation and at parties, but my husband and I were still avoiding alcohol. We brought some psilocybin and ketamine along as alternatives.

One afternoon, I brewed some tea and my husband and I each had a small dose and took a small amount of ketamine. We then took our daughter for a short walk to a small moss-covered meadow surrounded by trees and other plant life.

My husband took smaller doses than me. He played with my daughter, while I lay down and closed my eyes.

Suddenly, the usual fractal patterns were disrupted, and glowing sprite-like orangish spirits descended upon me from the sky.

I’d never seen anything like this before— and in 2020 I’d taken as much as three times as much psilocybin and twice as much ketamine in one go.

The spirits were playful. They teased me, wordlessly — communicating in feelings and images. What was I doing there in their realm? They poked at me, and my body started tingling. They told me my father was a good steward of the forest, and that I should be kinder to him and appreciate him more. They also told me to pass along the message that my family was not to cut down any more trees.

The experience lasted about 15 minutes. I opened my eyes and sat up and started babbling to Zach about what I’d just seen. He looked at me like I was crazy and accused me of accidentally overdosing myself, which I denied.

We returned to the cabin, and I told my family what had happened. They were skeptical, but more or less just seemed happy the spirits told me to be nicer to my dad. Years earlier, he had built a deck and pathway from the cabin to the water, constructing it around the trees to avoid cutting any down. He was shaving the sides of the wooden deck around each tree carefully, and told me it was to make room for them to grow. I told him the forest spirits were grateful. He gave me a weird look, but said thank you.

My brother told me that my parents had been arguing about whether or not to cut down more trees. My mom wanted to, to improve the view. My dad and brother were against it.

“Oh,” I said. “Well, the forest spirits are on Team No-More-Cutting-Down-Trees.”

“Well, I mean, they would be, Meghan.”

I asked him if he believed me, and he summarized the family position on the incident. “I believe that’s what you believe happened.”

---

Much later, Zach would speculate that I’d seen chikones, or spirits which, according to Mazatec mythology, act as guardians of natural places, and communicate with humans with the aid of psilocybin.

But why did I see them and he didn’t? It made little sense to me that I could so dramatically screw up my own dosing, and not his, and, in any case, I wasn’t overly high before or after the encounter with the spirits. (I was, however, after the encounter, both in shock and still buzzing — like my cells were vibrating — from the experience).

The answer, I suspected, lay in my toothpaste.

While fluoride’s adverse effects have been frequently dismissed as a conspiracy theory, there is evidence it can contribute to the calcification of the pineal gland (and, as the New York Times recently admitted, lower IQ — score another point for the crunchy conspiracy nuts).

Calcification of the pineal gland can result in disrupted melatonin production, sleep difficulties, and headaches. In various mystical traditions, the pineal gland is our “third eye”, the connection between us and the spirit world.

Pineal gland abnormalities and calcification have been linked to autism, and, as I noted in a previous essay, to precocious puberty. People high in autistic traits are more likely to be atheists.

Fluoride was first added to tap water in 1945, and today over 70% of the US population and around 40% of the Canadian population has tap water with added fluoride (fluoride drops are sometimes recommended for young children who do not drink fluoridated water). The first fluoride toothpaste appeared in 1956, and today a majority of people in the West brush their teeth with fluoride. The “New Atheist” movement appeared about fifty years later.

No, I am not claiming fluoride is the cause of autism, or atheism, or even pineal gland calcifications — all are multifactorial. I’m merely suggesting it may be one of many contributing factors.

Other factors which may result in poor pineal gland functioning and calcification include: lack of sunlight, chronic stress, a diet high in processed foods and refined sugars, and heavy metal accumulation. I was eating healthy, spending plenty of the time in the sun, and relatively un-stressed in 2022. Alcohol also negatively affects the pineal gland, and I’d all but completely stopped drinking.

I was also doing a lot of yoga and drinking turmeric in chamomile tea nightly, both of which may help decalcify the pineal gland. And, finally, the neem extract in my new toothpaste may have also contributed.

And so, if one assumes the chikones are real, and not a figment of my psychedelics-addled imagination, then, it seemed, I had inadvertently opened up my third eye to the spirit world.

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Zach returned to work, and so our psychedelics adventures became less frequent.

In his absence, the weight of motherhood began to hit me and my mental health took a dive. Still, I was determined to be a “good enough” mother.

By the end of July, however, I began to feel haunted.

Literally.

The first time I saw the dark spirit, my daughter had just woken up from her nap. I had taken a small dose of mushrooms, and was just coming down when she woke up.

The room went cold and I saw a dark haze, open-eyed. When I looked around the room, the haze didn’t move with my eyes — it stayed in the same place, hovering at the corner of the bed, near the WiFi router. This was confusing; any open-eyed visual distortions from psychedelics should move with your eyes. But the rest of the room looked normal.

My daughter, sitting on my lap, followed my gaze, and began swiping her hands angrily in the direction of the haze.

Frightened, I grabbed the stick of palo santo we kept on a nearby shelf, lit it, and waved the smoke in the direction of the haze. It immediately disappeared, and my daughter calmed down.

Shortly thereafter, Zach and I took mushrooms together on a weekend night after our daughter had gone to bed. He took a higher dose, and reported feeling like a dark spirit was whispering to him, telling him bad things about me and our marriage. He assured me this wasn’t coming from him, but he felt a sort of demonic possession that he was trying to fight.

Then, around mid-August, I took a small dose of mushrooms again at the start of my daughter’s nap. I was stretching on the bed to a quiet live stream of meditation music on YouTube, when the room went cold again. The dark haze appeared in the same spot, near the WiFi router, and, at the same time, the music stopped streaming and the room went still and silent.

I stared at it for about three or four minutes, trying to make it out. Finally, I reached for the palo santo and a lighter. I lit the palo santo and waved the smoke at the haze. It instantly disappeared, and, at the same moment, the music resumed streaming.

Fully freaked out, I messaged Zach at work to tell him what had happened. I also told his mother — a former hippie, she’s very into this sort of thing, and usually supplies some sort of astrological explanation as to why the spirit world seems to be unusually active whenever I have an “experience.”

That night, Zach and his mom banished the dark spirit. Candles were lit, palo santo was burned, and Zach improvised a banishment song in Spanish. They walked through the house, waving palo santo in every corner, as Zach played his guitar and sang. I trailed behind them, carrying our daughter.

Vayase espíritu (Go away, spirit)
Vayase a la luz (Go to the light)

The last room we went into was the living room. Zach asked me if the spirit was gone. The mushrooms had worn off hours earlier, and I said I wasn’t sure.

Then our daughter began to kick and fuss and pointed to a corner of the living room that Zach and his mom had forgotten to palo santo.

Zach walked to the corner and sung while his mom waved the palo santo.

Our daughter calmed down. Zach asked her if the spirit was gone, and she smiled.

---

I proposed there were three possible explanations as to why the dark haze disappeared and the music stream resumed at the same time when I burned the palo santo.

1. It was a coincidence.

2. Palo santo fixes WiFi issues and the dark haze was just a weird hallucination that had nothing to do with what happened.

3. South American Indigenous peoples who claim burning palo santo protects against and wards off dark spirits are correct. Also spirits have some sort of ability to interfere with WiFi.

Number 2 is obviously stupid.

Number 1 is possible, but mathematically improbable due to the timing.

Which leaves Number 3. I have a lot of respect for Indigenous wisdom, so this is the explanation I lean towards. Maybe the palo santo worked because, as various Indigenous groups claim … it works.²

“Palo santo” means “holy wood” in English, and is the name of a tree native to South America. It is from the same plant family as frankincense and myrrh, trees native to India, Africa, and the Arabian peninsula. Readers might recognize frankincense and myrrh as being two of the gifts to baby Jesus from the wise men.

Palo santo. Source: Herbs America.

Studies indicate palo santo is effective for repelling mosquitos, reducing inflammation, pain, and stress, and has antibacterial properties that clean the air when it is burned. Apparently, it also wards of dark spirits (and “dark energy”).

So, assuming the dark spirit was real, how did it come to haunt me and my husband?

We have two working theories:

1. The dark spirit was a manifestation of / summoned by my own depression, anxiety, and “dark energy”. I was in a dark place, and because I forgot to burn palo santo before taking mushrooms (like you’re supposed to), the dark spirit came to haunt me as a manifestation of my own psyche. This is the explanation my husband and the woman who runs the plant medicine ceremonies (who we consulted after the incident) both lean towards.

2. The dark spirit was a remnant of my ex-boyfriend’s “energy” that was lingering in our apartment (see Part One of this essay), in the house plants he’d left behind and via a spiritual emergence from the skin cells and microbiota he would have shedded while he lived there. I would come to take “cleanliness is next to Godliness” quite literally through my mushroom use, and now suspect dark spirits emerge from “microbiomes” that form when a house is not well-cleaned. (This is why carpets are demonic). Palo santo and other plant medicines that clean the air when burned banish “dark spirits” partially by killing the bad bacteria of these spirit-infested microbiomes. This is the explanation I lean towards, as it explains why the spirit seemed to be obsessed with me and was trying to mess with my husband’s head about our relationship. A jealous spirit and an off-shoot of my ex’s toxicity and reluctance to let go.

In any case, the dark spirit never bothered us again. We also got rid of one of my ex’s houseplants which had taken on a rather sinister vibe, and I became a little more diligent about cleaning the bedroom.

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This brings me to the scene I opened Part One of this essay with.

A couple of weeks later, I was out for my morning walk with my daughter, when I noticed she seemed more tired than usual. I cut the walk short and brought her home and lay down with her, and she almost immediately fell into a deep sleep for an unusually early nap.

And then I felt called to take mushrooms. I hadn’t been planning on taking any that day, but suddenly I felt an intense pull to go to the kitchen and brew myself a tea.

This wasn’t like an addiction craving — I’ve experienced those too. This was different, and in my experience unique to mushrooms. I’ve never felt “called” to take ketamine or smoke weed.

This was the first time I felt “called.” It would happen again, on random unexpected occasions. And every time I complied, the reason would reveal itself.

So I went upstairs and made some tea. Following my gut, I brewed a stronger tea than I would usually take when alone with my daughter (2.5 grams). I drank it, and went back down to the bedroom, turned on some meditation music, and began stretching on the bed while my daughter slept soundly. When the mushrooms started kicking in about half an hour later, they “told” me to enhance the trip by smoking some weed and taking a small dose of ketamine. And so I did.

Half an hour later, I was high, but not particularly so. When I closed my eyes, vivid fractals whirled around. But I was preparing to do some yoga so I kept them open and the room looked normal, other than colours being slightly intensified and my vision slightly blurred.

And that’s when the orange-blue light emerged from my ceiling.

Like the dark spirit, this wasn’t an ordinary psychedelic hallucination. The light remained in the same place when I moved my eyes, and the rest of the room still looked normal.

We had our silent conversation. The light speaking to me wordlessly, and my left hemisphere translating it into language and responding.

The light dipped down and I reached my hand up to touch it.

The warm electric feeling buzzed through my body. The light disappeared and the room returned to normal, and I collapsed onto the bed.

I was still conscious. But completely exhausted. My cells were vibrating. I could barely move. My daughter had a bizarrely long nap — well over her usual 3-4 hours, closer to five. I lay on the bed until she woke up.

She looked at me confused. Normally, when I took mushrooms during her nap, I had more energy and was more playful when she woke up. Collapsed-on-the-bed-useless-Mom was new for her.

I mustered every bit of strength I had to help her off the bed. We lived in a townhouse back then. I struggled to stand, and so tried to make a game out of crawling up the stairs to the kitchen and living room with her. I used the last of my energy to put together an easy lunch, put on Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, and collapsed onto the couch with her to watch it.

Fortunately, she was in an incredibly good mood. I told her Mommy had been zapped by God and that I was really, really tired. She ate her snack and watched her movie and didn’t seem to care.

When Zach got home from work, I tried to explain what had happened. He told me to take a break from mushrooms.

I went to bed early. When I woke up the next morning, I felt deliriously wonderful, joyful, touched by God. Energetic. The next couple of weeks were filled with synchronicities. I felt like I was guided by the Great Spirit. We went back to the cabin with my family for the September long weekend, and I’d feel a pull to go to a specific room or area, and something “important” would happen. Something I “needed” to see, a conversation I “needed” to have. At one point I fell a pull to go to the small cabin, adjacent the main one, where my husband, daughter, and I were sleeping. My husband said I was being ridiculous. I tried to insist, and then our daughter pooped, making it necessary for us to go there to change her. I told him God had made our daughter poop.

Outside the cabins, my father and brother were on the roof of the shed, repairing it. This felt enormously significant to me; how hard they worked, the fact that, despite my father’s wealth, he built and repaired almost everything himself (with the help of various family members). My brother’s dedication to our screwed-up family. Their stewardship of the forest and the spirits it was home to.

Shortly after the long weekend, I went for a long-overdue trip to the dentist and made the mistake of not refusing the fluoride treatment.

I immediately crashed back into depression. The connection to the Spirit had been severed. The glorious heavenly euphoria was gone.

---

My depression lasted through the fall. I was shaken by the spiritual encounters, and by the command to start writing again — about the controversial subjects I’d been obsessively researching for years — by the being I’d taken to be the Great Spirit, or God. I lacked any faith in myself, and, as it was pointed out to me, therefore lacked faith in the Spirit who had touched my hand. I stopped taking magic mushrooms, but I continued to use ketamine.

Without the spiritual connection and anti-addiction effects of the mushrooms, my ketamine use spiralled. I was no longer using it to do yoga or deepen the healing power of the mushrooms during meditations. I was using it to dissociate. I had a sense I was unravelling — that the ketamine unspooled secrets embedded in my DNA and mitochondria, but I was taking it too far, getting lost in the past. I also stopped brushing my teeth with the neem toothpaste, and started using fluoride again, like a middle finger to the spirit world that had helped me so much, cutting off the connection after it finally called in the favour and asked me to use my divinely-restored health to do something productive.

My daughter was going through that stage nearly all little girls do nowadays — she was obsessed with the Frozen franchise.

In Frozen II, Elsa hears a voice calling her. She follows it to an enchanted forest, and then to a “river of memory”, a frozen river of ice which holds “all the secrets of the past.” But Elsa goes too far, and is “drowned” and freezes into an ice statue.

I decided at some point that the river of memory, “Ahtohallan”, worked rather well as a metaphor for ketamine. Trips can help you unravel your own past (and ancestral memories) and sort through traumas. But if you do it too much, if you go too far, you become frozen, paralyzed, drowned in dissociation. Unlike plant medicines, a synthetic drug like ketamine will not tell you to stop taking it and move on with your life. You can get lost in the river of memory.

By December, both Zach and I were tired of my BS — as was his mother, who had moved in with us in September after being renovicted from her basement suite — and we decided it was time for me to attend another one of the underground ceremonies.

I took ayahuasca instead of mushrooms. In a basement of a suburban home surrounded by the beautiful, kind people in light-coloured clothing who attended these ceremonies, I swallowed the thick, black liquid and lay down to listen to the music.

I was able to keep the medicine down long enough to have a short trip and work through various anxieties that were keeping me from writing. I felt a serpent slither through my body, as if it were looking for damaged cells to repair. I cried a couple of times, then vomited up the black liquid and the trip was over.

The next day, I felt far better, even though I hadn’t been able to go particularly deep due to the early vomiting. I stopped brushing my teeth with fluoride (but found a better-tasting option than neem) and started to organize my books and notes and prepare to write.

We flew to Mexico for vacation a few weeks later. On the plane ride, we were seated next to a guy in a mask who seemed very sick. Our family had managed to avoid Covid for nearly three years — and I’d been very healthy since May 2020 when I first did mushrooms. Soon Zach and our daughter had Covid symptoms.

I ran around the small Mexican town, trying to find various teas, foods, and herbal remedies that would help them. Zach eventually sent me to the pharmacy to buy some Ivermectin. Hours after his first dose, his sense of taste and smell returned. Our skepticism about Big Pharma and the mainstream media deepened.

I got sick a few days later, after my daughter vomited on me three times and I spent a sleepless night caring for her. I woke up with body aches and fatigue, but no other symptoms. They lasted a day, and then I was okay.

I blamed myself for getting sick. The mushrooms had given me clear instructions on how to stay healthy, which included regularly taking mushrooms, and I’d stopped in September after the incident at the dentist. To make matters worse, I’d had a moderate amount of alcohol and sugar at holiday parties. Zach said I was being irrational, but I was convinced — especially when, shortly after we got home, we discovered we both had symptoms of a parasite infection.

After a week of gastrointestinal distress, Zach and I decided to hero-dose mushrooms again. We put our daughter down for her nap on a Saturday afternoon, and asked his mother to watch her when she woke up. We drank a large dose of mushroom tea, and lay down on yoga mats in the living room.

We had an intense trip. The mushrooms seemed to be trying to communicate with me about the origins of life on Earth (basically fractal visuals of the “giant impact hypothesis”), and then they got a bit silly, teasing me they’d get me pregnant again. I replied that Zach and I had ways to foil their plans.

I’d like to apologize in advance to Christians for what happened next.

The mushrooms told me it was possible to get pregnant from oral sex. I said that was nonsense, and they laughed at me and told me to Google it.

So I sat up, opened my eyes, and grabbed my phone to look it up.

This story popped up:

You should probably go click the link and check out the story yourself. But the short version is, yes, at least one girl (she was fifteen) has gotten pregnant from sperm swallowed after giving a blow job. She was stabbed in the stomach shortly afterward and the sperm travelled from her stomach to her fallopian tubes.

I nudged Zach out of his meditation and shared this story with him.

“Do you think it’s possible Jesus was a blow job baby?” I asked.

“There’s nothing in the Bible about the Virgin Mary getting stabbed in the stomach.”

“Maybe she had a leaky gut.”

Now, I’m not saying that’s what happened (although, unlike the regular kind, mouth virginity is impossible to check for). But it’s pretty funny to think about. Either way, Jesus’s conception was a miracle — whether the Biblical story is true or this version, where he was an exceptional sperm who survived the perilous journey from Mary’s stomach to become a baby in her womb.

Later, Zach and I were talking about the nature of God when the mushrooms sent him a revelation.

“God’s power is fractal to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and the Observer Effect.”

Zach described God as “the eternal observer.” God’s power over human events primarily comes from our awareness that we were being observed.

I also suggested God had some influence over the weather and some sort of ability to influence electromagnetic fields. God was not all-powerful, we decided, and one of the limits was whether or not people believed there was a God observing them. This seemed to resolve many of the common criticisms against God and believers.

Oh, and after a trip to the bathroom and a good night’s sleep, both of our parasite symptoms were completely gone.

---

I started drinking low doses of mushroom tea again a couple times per week, then, when my daughter stopped napping, I switched from tea to homemade mushroom chocolates (0.25-0.4 grams per chocolate). I became more intentional — using mushrooms to prevent illness when my husband or daughter brought something home, to do yoga when I had child-free time, or to answer the “call” when it came.

The Great Spirit infrequently appeared to me, open-eyed, an orange-blue cloud of mesh-like electric light descending into whatever room I happened to be in to have a conversation. Other times when I responded to “calls”, an “important” insight would pop into my head, usually when I combined ketamine, mushrooms, and yoga. There were no more “dark spirits”, but I’d learned to burn palo santo and sage before the mushrooms kicked in.

Bizarre synchronicities continued to occur.

I also returned to the ceremony to do ayahuasca a couple more times. The first time, I threw up before anything could really happen. The third time, one of the guys in the band told me to hold the ayahuasca brew in my mouth after each sip and think, I accept you. This worked. The Mother Ayahuasca serpent appeared to me, her silver skin shimmering with all the colours of the rainbow. And then I got brutally sick, purging out damage I didn’t even know I had, purging out bad bacteria, what lingered of my unhealthy microbiome, and purging out my psychological addiction to ketamine.

I felt wonderful afterward, but it took some time to process.

By the fall of 2023, I quit using ketamine. I also more or less stopped smoking marijuana. I only took very small doses of mushrooms, barely enough to feel a psychedelic effect. I launched this Substack in December — due to the spiritual guidance, it feels wrong for me to take full credit for the ideas in many of the essays.

By the end of January 2024, I was pregnant with our second daughter. And so, I paused all psychedelics use again, and focussed on writing.

---

As I’d learned a lot about health from the mushrooms and various books and online influencers between my pregnancies, I had a complication-free second pregnancy — no morning sickness and barely any fatigue, no restless legs, no heartburn, etc.

Everything was going fine until shortly before my due date, when our daughter brought home RSV from preschool. Zach soon got sick, as did his mother. I held out for a bit, but soon I had a stuffed up nose and a bad cough as well — after all, I couldn’t (or at least was unwilling to) use my usual illness-preventing protocol of magic mushroom tea and various herbal remedies like oil of oregano.

My midwife — a wonderful Metis woman in her forties — and I had planned for me to have a home birth. A week after my due date, I went into labour. My mother-in-law and daughter went to my mother’s house. After hours of labour, my water still hadn’t broken and I began to freak out. My midwife tried to calm me down, and told us I could still give birth without my water breaking — and that my daughter might be born with the amniotic sac still on her, a “caul”, which happens in about 1/80,000 births and is seen in many traditional cultures as a sign of good luck.

I insisted on going to the hospital. We went via ambulance, where I gave birth, naturally and without interventions, to a healthy baby girl with the amniotic sac over her head. It was removed, and three hours later we were back home. Apparently I still carried some trauma from my first daughter’s birth, and perhaps a bit of lack of faith.

---

We kept getting sick. We’d start to recover, then one of us would get sick again and soon we all were. Stuffed-up noses, nasal drips, sinus infections, bad coughs, sore throats, GI issues, headaches, fatigue, and even earaches. The baby got sick from us, and spent her first few months on Earth with a nasty cough. My immune system overloaded and I developed postpartum hives. I spent those months experimenting with various herbal and alternative remedies (e.g. roasted onions over the ears for earaches — that one worked), making chicken soup and various non-psychedelic teas for my family, and cleaning the house, burning sage, and doing laundry to banish germs / dark spirits. I was sleep-deprived and exhausted.

In December, I started making magic mushroom chocolates again. I took one or two a couple of times per week just before my daughter left for preschool. I’d put the baby down for a nap in the bedroom, then take an extremely small dose of ketamine (my tolerance was low and I was far more cautious about it at this point) and do some yoga, hoping it would help boost my immune system.

The first time I did this, the Spirit dropped down into the living room to remind me that my previous encounters were real — I’d begun to doubt again — and to get back to writing. The entire room was filled with orange-blue mesh-like clouds for about ten minutes, and my cells felt like they were vibrating for hours afterward.

For the next few weeks, every time I combined mushrooms, ketamine, and yoga, I got a download. Once again, I was being asked to do something I was scared to do — to write about my psychedelic experiences with the spirit world, to argue for the existence of the Great Spirit, and to encourage people to decalcify their pineal glands so Elohim could influence them again.

I had zero faith in my ability to pull this off and worried all my Substack subscribers would think I was insane (the name of my Substack is a nod to my insecurity about both being believed and others thinking I am crazy). Quite a lot of people think that if you believe in God and spirits it means you are some sort of “anti-science” idiot with a two-digit IQ, or you’ve developed schizophrenia. This is especially true if you admit this spiritual awakening occurred after you took massive amounts of what most people think of as an illegal and dangerous “drug”. This is extra-especially true if you claim, as I have, that God occasionally pops into your living room or bedroom to give you a pep talk.

The Spirit started sending me messages of urgency — the time is now. I made excuses. They were weak. It’s the holidays and I’m busy! I’m too sick to write. I had plenty of time to write, and even at its worst, my cold was relatively mild; I was letting my anxieties and lack of faith get in the way.

---

The worst trip I ever had happened on Sunday, January 19, 2025 — as many subscribers to this Substack bore witness to.

Zach had gone out of town for the weekend to attend a psilocybin retreat about an hour from our house with a bunch of healthcare workers in order to finish up a certificate for his work as a clinical counsellor.

With both kids sick, I got very little sleep over the weekend. My MIL had taken my older daughter to my mom’s for a few hours on Saturday, and my brother, who was also visiting, offered to come over Sunday night and make dinner. She accepted. By the next morning, my mom and step-father were also coming over for dinner.

I went along with it, but I was tired and my cough had gotten worse and my face was chapped from blowing my nose and the last thing I wanted to do was host a dinner party. I took three mushroom chocolates (1.2 grams) around noon, and put the baby down for a nap. On a whim, I decided to take a small dose of ketamine as well and lie down with the baby for a small trip to calm down (my older daughter was with my MIL) — I also hoped the larger dose of mushrooms might help me fight off the cold. I thought about some ideas for upcoming essays, felt a bit more rested, and when my brother arrived and the baby woke up, we got up and came into the kitchen and everything was fine. My mom and step-dad showed up about an hour later.

I wasn’t particularly hungry and my brother had made a heavy meal. He offered me a hit off his weed pen, and I accepted. It hit me much harder than I expected.

My kids were playing with their grandparents so I went into the bedroom to lie down and close my eyes.

That’s when things began to get weird.

The typical fractal patterns parted, and I saw a being of light. It was humanoid, but featureless, and seemed to me to be distinctly masculine. A second figure of light appeared, a feminine one, which I took to be me.

The feminine light (me) ran toward the masculine one, and we met in the middle, separated by a thin wall of light.

Who are you? I asked.

The light answered with a wordless feeling of love.

I decided this meant the masculine light was my husband, Zach. I knew he was also taking mushrooms that day as part of his retreat, and convinced myself the mushrooms had somehow connected us telepathically through our right hemispheres. We could send feelings and images via our right hemispheres, which would then be sent to our left hemispheres for translation.

We “talked” for a while. He told me many of the Covid conspiracies were true, and that more pandemics were coming — or were already here — and they would be far worse than Covid-19. But this time there would be an under-reaction — a lack of media coverage etc — and far more people were going to die.

My family wasn’t the only one who had a rough fall of back-to-back illnesses. I’d heard countless examples from friends and family, and the hippie who ran our local health food store had told Zach that the recent weird viruses going around were man-made. I’d been wandering around depopulation-conspiracy-theory Substack for a while now, and my skepticism about these theories vanished.

According to the health food store hippie, our family only had a very mild version of these illnesses. This seemed true — one of our friends had her eardrum burst thanks to the earache one — especially as I’d seen basically no media coverage of the recent bouts of illnesses, which seemed at least as bad as Covid if not worse.

In my vision, I collapsed in grief and fear.

The light being warned me people’s vices would make them more vulnerable to illness and death. He told me to cease all my unhealthy behaviours — no more smoking, no cheating on the avoiding-alcohol-and-sugar thing. Don’t overdo it on ketamine. Etc.

I was terrified. Would we never recover? The being of light told me not to worry, we just had to stick it out for another week until our yearly vacation to Mexico, and once we were there and could soak up all that healing sunlight, we’d be fine.

I had no sense of time. Because I thought more time had passed than actually had, I was filled with gratitude that my family had decided to let me skip dinner so I could get some rest. I have a hang-up about not being taken care of much as a kid when I was sick, and one of the reasons I fell in love with Zach was that he nursed me back to health in those early days of our relationship. And now he was here, psychically, to take care of me again when I needed him.

I was mentally thanking my family when my mother-in-law burst into the bedroom to tell me to get my butt out of bed and join everyone for dinner.

I told her I wasn’t feeling well and wanted to skip dinner and rest.

She told me I was being a lousy host.

My eyes were still closed. In my vision, the light that was me started to fall away from the masculine light I thought was Zach, into a dark hole. I reached my arm up toward him, and he told me to focus on the vision and not to let myself get distracted. But I fell. And as I fell, a glowing light overtook my vision, which I felt was God.

Shaken and heartbroken, I opened my eyes and staggered out of bed to the dining room.

At the table, I thought about how much my brother drank. Overwhelmed by fear for him, I began to babble about what I’d just seen.

My mother and mother-in-law started yelling at me to be quiet, telling me I was scaring the kids (they seemed more scared by the shouting than my babbling, but whatever), that Covid killed lots of people so nothing worse could be coming (?), I was being weird and to start acting normal.

The stress and exhaustion and marijuana high hit a tipping point, and I became paranoid. If telepathy is possible, there’s no way Zach and I were the first to figure this out. If there was some big global conspiracy to cull the population, the powers-that-be must be greater than I’d realized. The tech companies had to be in on it.

In a state of panic, I started to freak out that our cell phones were secretly recording everything we said. I doubted we were being actively monitored — we’re too boring — but I thought maybe there was technology that flagged “trigger” words and phrases and it was only a matter of time before the Big Evil realized I was on to them and sent someone to kill my whole family.

It gets blurry for me after that. I just remember fear. And grabbing my computer and opening Substack because I thought if I shared what I’d found out to the greatest number of people possible, my family would be safe. I sent out seven short posts, terrified as if a sniper were waiting outside to pull the trigger.

An example of one of the Substack posts I published during this psychosis.

At some point, my mother-in-law called my husband and he asked to speak to me. He talked me down, and told me that he’d taken mushrooms in the morning and they’d worn off hours ago (if I’d been thinking clearly, I would have realized that I also would have come down from both the mushrooms and ketamine by this point, and my high was entirely from the weed pen). He told me we never spoke telepathically.

The next day, I sent out a quick apology email to my remaining subscribers (only about 10% un-subscribed, which isn’t too bad — thank you again to those who stayed). I hadn’t processed the event, and was badly shaken and scared.

I’ve had lots of time to think about it now, and to talk to Zach about it.

So what happened? What does it all mean?

Where do I go from here?

I’ll discuss this — and much more — in part three.

1. Ishtar also, supposedly, has the ability “to turn a man into a woman and a woman into a man.” Ishtar herself was also androgynous, and both male and female.

2. Apparently, I am not the only person who has experienced dark spirits interfering with the WiFi. I was chatting with

David Swindle 🟦

(a gentile who writes an interesting Substack about “psychedelic Zionism”, and he said something similar has happened to him.