Blog

A Student of Psychedelics

A university student asked if I would answer some questions about Acid Test for a paper he was writing. Below are the questions and my responses:

Q: How would you describe to someone who has never done psychedelics, why they should?

A:I would never tell someone they SHOULD do psychedelics. These are powerful drugs with not always predictable effects, and with widely varying impact from time to time and person to person. What I would say is that the psychedelic experience CAN be extremely enlightening and helpful by allowing a more profound experience of reality. In a safe environment, with a properly respectful mindset, psychedelics allow you to step out of the iron grip of your own ego — the rote, oversimplified categorizations that you use to deal with an overwhelming universe by keeping yourself at safe remove — and to for once see the world, and yourself, as they really are.

Q: What are misconceptions about these drugs that could change people’s opinions?

A: Considering their spectacular effects, psychedelics are remarkably safe in a physiological sense. They are non-addictive and serious adverse physical side effects are very rare. The psychological dangers of taking them — which can be substantial — can be minimized by taking them in a safe and comfortable environment with someone who has a reassuring, positive attitude and ample psychedelic experience.

Q: Why did you feel the need to begin taking these psychedelics?

A: I never felt a “need” to take them. I wanted to try psychedelics because accounts I read of the psychedelic experience persuaded me that it might be a valuable tool for learning about myself and the world.

Q: What is your most intriguing finding throughout your research about psychedelics?

A: I think I would say it is that the fact that the remarkable power of psychedelics to heal people who suffer from addiction, depression, PTSD, anxiety and other serious mental disorders seems not to be so much about what the drug does on a synaptic level in the brain (as is the case with most psychiatric drugs), but rather it is a direct consequence of the experience the drug facilitates. People are being healed not through chemical interactions, but rather through genuine insights that come from seeing the world in a different, more profound way than “normal” consciousness generally permits. Albert Hofmann,  who discovered LSD, said something really deep on this subject: “LSD wanted to tell me something. It gave me an inner joy, an open mindedness, a gratefulness, open eyes and an internal sensitivity for the miracles of creation.”

Q: Why do you believe the government lied about psychedelics, particularly LSD?

A: This is a complicated and interesting question. Ultimately, I think that there is a significant part of Western culture that is overinvested in a simplistic and materialistic view of the world. Anything that challenges that severely limited worldview is seen as a threat, and the powerful sense of spiritual connectedness fostered by the psychedelic experience definitely challenges that worldview.

Q: Would you let your children do psychedelics?

A: I believe physical and mental maturity are prerequisites for the safe and beneficial use of psychedelics.

Q: At what age did you first do psychedelics?

A: I think I was 19.

Q: Has the stigma increased or decreased around these drugs?

A: I think the stigma is rapidly diminishing as the facts and reality of the beneficial uses of psychedelic drugs become clear in the many carefully controlled medical studies and clinical trials now underway.

Q: Do you believe that spiritual drug experiences will ever have a place in modern medicine?

A: Absolutely, and in just a few years. The use of MDMA for treating PTSD is already in the third and final phase of clinical trials and should be an available prescription therapy within five years. The use of psilocybin and LSD for conditions like smoking cessation and the treatment of depression, among other things, is not far behind in my estimation. As I mentioned, the healing these drugs provide is because of the spiritual experience they provide, not the direct chemical effects. As these drugs become available to psychiatrists, they will inevitably be used not just for life-threatening mental illness, but as well for people who are “normal” mentally but want to explore spiritually and improve their own healthy mental functioning.

Q: What is the craziest story you have about tripping?

A: I actually wrote an article about that. You can find it here: https://reset.me/…/tried-psychedelic-mushrooms-35-years-sa…/

Deja Vu

This essay on how we would take better care of the world if we all knew we might be reincarnated is a nice thought, but I feel I have to add something Ian Stevenson — the most serious investigator of reincarnation claims — told me when I was researching Old Souls twenty years ago:

““In general, I tend not to claim too much for the spiritual benefits of proving reincarnation,” he said. “When I first went to India, I met with a swami there, a member of a monastic order. I told him about my work and how I thought it would be quite important if reincarnation could be proven, because it may help people to lead more moral lives if they knew they would come back after death. There was a long silence, a terrible silence, and finally he said, ‘Well, that’s very good, but here, reincarnation is a fact, and we have just as many scoundrels and thieves as you do in the West.’ I’m afraid that rather deflated my missionary zeal.””

 

 

Where Harry Potter Was Born

My Washington Post travel story on Edinburgh.

Some more photos.

 

 

Thoughts on Making “The List”

The Operator will debut at number three on the New York Times bestseller list (combined hardcover and ebook nonfiction; it’s no. 4 on the hardcover list) of May 14. Having a book I wrote, but have no cover credit for, make such an impressive showing obviously produces mixed feelings. Mostly I’m thrilled for the success — I’ve always wanted to write a bestseller — but there is a tinge of, not regret, but wistfulness I guess … If only.
But here’s the reality: It’s Robert O‘Neill’s remarkable life, and his impressions of that life, that made this a book that everyone would notice, and want to read. I was paid a fair sum to do the writing, and Rob couldn’t have been a better subject. I didn’t know this when I signed on, but he was smart, funny as hell, honest and unafraid to put himself out there. He also has an incredible memory. Not only that: he’d taken detailed notes on what he’d gone through, beginning with his mind-blowing stint at BUD/S, the infamous SEAL tryouts.
It was nonstop fascinating to work on this book, and really absorbing to try to inhabit Rob’s world and write in his voice.
The four-month Orwellian ordeal of getting the book vetted by the Department of Defense was no picnic, but other than that, the project was a joy for me, and I only continually gained respect for all involved, primarily Rob, his (and my) agent Howard Yoon of RossYoon agency, and Scribners editor Rick Horgan, who is something of a genius in his own right.
Finally, I’m just thrilled that so many people are, and will be reading it.

 

The Operator is now in operation!

My recent ghostwriting project, The Operator: Firing the Shots That Killed bin Laden and My Years As a SEAL Team Warrior, published today, April 25, and as of noon it was #4 on Amazon bestsellers list. Robert O’Neill is a smart, articulate guy with a one-of-a-kind story to tell. You can read the first chapter here, just click on “Look Inside”.  Check it out.

 

WRITING FAQ

question-markI activated my Goodreads author account and the Goodreads bot sent me some questions to answer. Hey I put in the time, so I might as well post them here:

Q: HOW DO YOU DEAL WITH WRITER’S BLOCK?
A: In my first newspaper job, the news editor had a slogan printed in huge WWIII headline type and taped it above his desk. It was exactly three words long, and it has stayed in my mind ever since as the single best antidote to writer’s block. It said: “DON’T WRITE, TYPE.”
So whenever I get stuck, I remind myself that nothing matters but putting words on the screen, one followed by another. You can always come back to improve it — that’s the fun part — but you need SOMETHING to work on. And sometimes you surprise yourself, and just by typing, you come up with something unexpectedly worthwhile.
Q: WHAT’S THE BEST THING ABOUT BEING A WRITER?
A: It’s not the writing, that’s for sure. To borrow a phrase, it’s the “having written.” There is nothing to match the feeling of accomplishment you get when you manage to express an idea or a feeling or tell a story in a way that matches the inexpressible internal sensation you were trying to express to begin with.
Q: WHAT’S YOUR ADVICE TO ASPIRING WRITERS?
Never think that writing well is about the words and sentences. It’s about the ideas, information, sensations and insights behind the words.  You can have brilliant ideas and screw it up by failing to find the words to express them, but you can always keep working on it until the words get out of your way and the ideas come through. But if you don’t have anything interesting or important to say in the first place, no amount of beautiful words or clever turns of phrase will ever make what you write worth reading.
QUESTION: HOW DO YOU GET INSPIRED TO WRITE?
I clean out the closet. Not always literally. But to get ready to accomplish the almost impossibly hard work of writing, I start out accomplishing the much smaller, easier tasks of every day life — whether balancing the checkbook, answering emails or organizing my desk. Once I get that done, I’m feeling ready for the tough stuff. If I have something written already, I go through from the top, revising, adding, deleting, and by the time I get to the end of that, I’m warmed up and ready to push forward into the jungle.
QUESTION: WHERE DID YOU GET THE IDEA FOR THE MOST FAMOUS WRITER WHO EVER LIVED?
 
For so many people, maybe even most—and it’s certainly true of me and my siblings—even extreme dramas in family history beyond one generation removed become a kind of white noise, tuned out until it’s too late. I can’t remember the exact moment it occurred to me, but at some point a question popped into my head about my grandfather and I realized nobody alive could answer it.

Even as the details of my grandfather’s life evaporated from the reservoir of human memory, my questions about him grew more numerous and insistent. I couldn’t explain why it had never occurred to me that my desire to become a writer, or the fact that I had, to some extent, succeeded in that rather ludicrous ambition, might have something to do with my heritage, and specifically my grandfather. If anyone ever asked me why I wanted to write, I remembered a moment in an eighth-grade English class poetry section when the teacher chose my poem to read, and my chattering, snoozing classmates actually sat up at their desks, stopped talking, and listened. But suddenly, a half century tardy, I remembered that, around the time I was learning to read, I would corral a tiny portable typewriter—a functional toy (and who gave their five-year-olds typewriters as toys?)—roll in a sheet of crisp white paper, and attempt, letter by letter, to copy the text from The Cat in the Hat, mesmerized by the idea that by assembling words together, one typed letter at a time, one could actually create that magical thing called a book.

When I did the math in my head, I realized that this unusual childhood literary fetish would have coincided perfectly with the moment of my grandfather’s maximum fame. Could I really believe it was unrelated? Had I been predisposed by nurture or nature, or simply by imitation, to tie my identity to the written word? Could so complex a skill as writing possibly be passed down in Grandpa’s DNA? Could it be mere coincidence that my most fervent dreams of accomplishment were precisely those things my grandfather in fact accomplished?

I had only too late considered the possibility that I might have been formed or even influenced by the abilities, proclivities, or eccentricities of my near and distant forbears after the firsthand sources of knowledge about them had forever vanished.

Who arrives at maturity without experiencing that regret? Why, I wondered, do most of us have these dual and conflicting tendencies, resisting our genealogical past as if it were an existential threat, yet ultimately pining to connect with it, even as it vanishes before our eyes?

Suddenly, questions about the past, your past, and your family’s past begin to flood in, questions that could have been so easily, or at least profitably, answered during the lifetimes of your parents or their parents, but have become literally unanswerable, lost forever behind the impenetrable veil of death.

Tracing one’s lineage, a persistent psychological impulse through the ages, has also become a cultural mainstay. A 2013 Time magazine story called genealogy the second most popular American hobby after gardening, and the second most visited category of websites after pornography. Popular reality TV shows are filled with genealogical sleuths digging through crumbling registers and handwritten census documents. The portraits they manage to draw with great effort, even when they make lucky finds, are mere outlines providing in the end little more than ancestral stick figures.

I realized I had an advantage, a big advantage—if not unique, at least exceedingly rare: in the Library of Congress of the United States, which happened to stand less than twenty-five miles from my home, was a room stacked with 158 boxes filled with 50,000 items; countless pages of indexed correspondence, contracts, manuscripts, photographs, journals, tax returns, paraphernalia, and even an unpublished autobiographical novel—all of it by or about my grandfather. This vast cache—collected because a committee at the Library in the 1950s determined that my grandfather represented a “typical American writer”—was supplemented by the forty-some books that he had published, including at least two autobiographies, as well as a memoir about him written by my uncle—almost none of which I had ever read.

What secrets, what forgotten calamities and unremembered triumphs, what surprising revelations and shocking truths could be pried from those cardboard file folders, all that slowly disintegrating cellulose and black ribbon ink? Was it possible, forty years after his death, that I could get to know my grandfather, not as a teenager might remember a sometimes garrulous old man, but as a contemporary could come to know a living, breathing intimate? More than an intimate—someone whose blood ran in mine, whose most primal makeup mixed in quarters to make me who I am. In learning about my grandfather’s life, what would I come to discover of my own? What would I gain from studying the minute realities of the history of a man from a now distant era to whose life and mine bore such obvious parallels? What could I learn about writing from my grandfather’s mastery of words, his huge success, and his ultimate failure?

And what would that tell me about why any of us care about our ancestors? Are we blank sheets of paper, waiting to write our own stories? Or are we merely appendixes to lives already lived and largely forgotten?

Ghosts of August

Gene Weingarten was rooting around in the past and came up with a 400-word essay I wrote for Tropic Magazine in the “Calendar Issue” that ran the last Sunday of the year in 1986. This was a gimmick issue, where we had full page calendars accompanied by a piece of art and a short essay relating to each month. My month was August. It’s very interesting to read something you wrote that you have no (or almost no) memory of having written. That sense of not knowing what the next sentence, the next word, is going to be is essential to the reading experience — and impossible for the author to duplicate — EXCEPT if it’s something he wrote 30 years earlier and hasn’t thought of since. As in this case.
Gene’s verdict was that it was 8% overwritten, and I can accept that. But as I read it, as if it were the first time I was ever seeing this particular grouping of words, I thought, “not bad.”

AUGUST IN MIAMI
1986

By August, the heat is like an injury you keep reinjuring. You begin to worry that all that pain has got to add up to something bad. It bakes your paint job and cracks your vinyl dash. It melts the asphalt and lingers spitefully at night. Your sheets are damp.

Each day is the same, and the ocean is flat, windless, heavy — molten lead. ‘ It rains, but the rain brings no relief, and mold grows in your closets and you think it’s growing between your toes and on your teeth. Flossing doesn’t help either, and you begin to feel that whatever is growing isn’t mold but malignancy.

And then you understand a hurricane, you understand the angry force that spawns it. The sun cauterizes the ocean, a hot poker on an open wound. Power hemorrhages from the sky day upon day. The threat is born, and the threat is fed.

It is a threat you have to wake up with in the morning and sleep with at night, like the missiles in the submarines swimming up the Gulf Stream, or the words “I want a divorce” in a bad marriage. And like all threats you live with, you forget about it until the sun pounds it into your brain again, or if your head is deep in the sand, it takes the man on the 11 o’clock news.

Will you pull down the storm shutters that have been rusted in place for a decade? Will you pack your bags and roll up the carpets and leave for who knows where at 3 in the morning? Because if you believe what August has been trying to tell you, you shouldn’t have built or bought a house here in the first place. And will your insurance cover the loss or even begin to? Will the causeways be clogged? Or just washed out to sea?

The heat of August threatens to go on in unchanging monotony to the end of time. Until it starts to push the sea over the sea wall and threatens to change everything instead. Change beyond recognition or redemption. For the only point of the month is the Storm, or the threat of the Storm and to walk through the heat is nothing against walking with that dark threat on your back: a disaster with no one to blame, the kind of random, unpredictable horror we hope to eliminate with our vaccines and C-sections, V-E Day and the Neighborhood Crime Watch.

Back to Newsbreak: The watch has become a warning. It takes 12 hours to get out, and the storm is, or may be, only nine hours away. Since it is the middle of the night, you go to sleep with the radio on and wake up to blue skies and wind and another threat that was just a bad dream.

And now you’ve got a whole season, two seasons, of cool, but not too cool, breezes — six months to pretend that nothing is out there, nothing threatens. Six months to forget.

A Big Ol’ Slushball

A writer named David Cameron did something very clever: He copied a short story published in the New Yorker and sent it out, as a submission with a false name, to assorted and sundry literary journals. They all rejected it. Form letters. Then he submitted it to the New Yorker, which rejected the story they had previously published. Just to be sure, he did it again with another New Yorker story. Same results.

So what do aspiring writers conclude from this little experiment in masochism?

That pursuing publication is a hopeless, thankless, random enterprise in which merit counts for next to nothing?

Gee, now that I say that out loud, it sounds a little too defeatist. Don’t let the bastards get you down. YOUR story will be blessed. It will be so good, that even a system stacked against you will buckle and crumble when exposed to its brilliance.

So Carry On!

But don’t get your hopes up.

 

So You Don’t Think You Need Copy Editors?

Trips

It’s been months since my last post, mostly because I’m working on another book, this one about the ever fascinating topic of psychedelic drugs. And speaking of unforgettable trips, a travel piece I wrote a year ago about spending Christmas in Spain just ran in the Post travel section. Since it had a seasonal theme, they had to hold it for 11 months. That set up an interesting scenario. When I read it online today, enough time had passed so I barely remembered writing it, which allowed me to read it as a reader, rather than an author. As I read, I wasn’t sure what was going to come next. I was capable of being surprised by a turn of phrase, to get an overall sense of personality that was myself, but not quite myself — like looking at an old photo in which your hairstyle was slightly different, your features just discernibly younger and the shirt you’re wearing is not one you ever remember having.

It’s the second travel piece I’ve written for the Post. The first — actually the second, but it ran first — was on a kayak trip to the Everglades. Both of them were a pleasure to work on, which is a rare thing for me to say about any piece of writing. I think it is because trips are always natural narratives with two destinations — one the literal, the other psychological. As you work out the writing, you discover the hidden meaning of the voyage, and the sometimes surprising psychic path you traveled to arrive there.