THE RED PILL
An Essay on Psychedelics and Reality

     Morpheus: The Matrix is everywhere. It's all around us, here even in this room. You can see it out your window, or on your television. You feel it when you go to work, or go to church, or pay your taxes. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.
     Neo: What truth?
     Morpheus: That you are a slave, Neo. That you, like everyone else, was born into bondage ... kept inside a prison that you cannot smell, taste, or touch. A prison for your mind.... Unfortunately, no one can be told what the Matrix is. You have to see it for yourself.
     Neo: How?
     Morpheus: Hold out your hand.

     In the sixties and early seventies of the last century, many of us held out our hands. Many of us took the Red Pill and saw beyond the media induced reality that we had been fed since our births. Many of us became free and creative life artists.
     Taking the Red Pill enabled many of us to see the beauty and simplicity of true and natural reality. It allowed us to see how the world really worked - in spite of those in 'power' with their self-serving attempts to convince us that making unnecessary things and then talking ourselves into buying them, spiced perhaps with plenty of TV and enough money for beer, was all there was to reality.
     We saw that when we took the Red Pill, we could hear Spirit speaking to us - and what we heard Spirit say was that it was time for a new collective adventure for human beings. It was time for a new, more centered and whole consciousness and for a new and much more compassionate way of life.
     Taking the Red Pill also let us see past the artificial limits that this false reality had imposed upon our powers. We found that each of us was much more than our socially accepted Matrix identity. We found that each of us was actually a powerful being - a compassionate, heroic, wise, and magical being.
     We also found that we didn't need government or religion. We found ourselves to be naturally good folks. We saw that no one needed to be told what to do - certainly no one wanted to be. Left to themselves, people know how to take care of themselves and each other - check out any Rainbow gathering of the past twenty-seven or so years.
     Out of all this, we came to see that we didn't need to tell anyone else what to do. How could we? We weren't them. We didn't know what they needed to do. We saw the other side of it too - that no one needed to tell us what to do either. We embraced partnership. We embraced consensus. We realized that everyone was family.

     Stanislav Grof, in his enlightening book, LSD Psychotherapy, describes how almost all of us can become whole, realized beings through the proper therapeutic use of LSD. He describes what is likely to occur in a series of healing sessions:
     In the beginning, as we examine our lives for the first time from this higher perspective, we're likely to see that they have been largely inauthentic and that we have been unconscious for much of our existence. We begin to become more real.
     Later, as we continue our series of LSD journeys into self, we see that our entire existence has been overshadowed by a terrible although unconscious fear of death. However, once we have accepted this fear and have moved on through it, once we have undergone the necessary death and rebirth experience, we will have come to see that it is more important to be an integral part of life than to pursue any particular goal. We will have also learned that selfishness and competitiveness are just unconscious responses to fear. By accepting our deaths and, at the same time, siding with life, we will have come to see that material possessions can never give us real happiness or help us to be any less fearful. Only a sense of being at one with all life can give us this.
     Later in the LSD sessions, we will come finally to a borderland, beyond which the organized religions have not wished us to go. Magic occurs here - all sorts of synchronicities and telepathic encounters and more. Intrigued, we become interested in consciousness itself, in our deeper selves, and begin to seek out Spirit and our place in the larger reality. (LSD Psychotherapy, p. 229-30.)

     As I began my own use of LSD, I definitely found my life to be inauthentic and unconscious. I had created and identified with what Ronald Laing called a "false self." Seeing this, I began working on my head to see who I really was. I soon realized that an early experience that happened when I was a young boy had warped my very nature.
     I had been brought to the hospital with a high fever. I was dying. I had pneumonia in both lungs. I had polio. I had meningitis. I had an infected mastoid bone that was killing me. They hurriedly performed two successive operations to remove the infected bone. I died on the operating table. Although no one knew it, I was still conscious. But, until they managed to resurrect me, I was out of my body - first looking down at my body on the operating table and then floating out to a beckoning white light and a feeling of bliss.
     This experience of dying frightened me out of my body, especially after I had returned to consciousness and the pain that my body had become. I spent the next thirty or so years as a gifted intellectual - but that was not my true nature. It wasn't until I began using LSD that I was able to work through my old fears and return to my body.
     Later, after earning my Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology, I left society and its materialistic ways. I gave up trying to be successful and decided to live in the flow of life, in the Tao. I have lived simply ever since, needing little, asking little of others, and content to go my quiet, peaceful way. It helps to know that I am a part of the great web of life.
     I found too that magic was alive. I began to notice it all about me. I would pick up my phone and dial my tripping friend. He would have just done the same, and it wouldn't even have had time to ring. In 1974, while driving east, I met the same two medicine brothers in every city I passed through, beginning with Boulder, Colorado. I would have just driven up and parked the van and they would walk by, or they would be staying where I had just been invited to stay - that sort of chance encounter.
     More importantly, an inner voice began to tell me where I had lost things. I became a finder. It has proved to be a useful talent. Also, during an LSD healing ceremony in Southern New Mexico, I learned to relate to wind and thunder, and ever since then if I am centered and rain is needed, I can call it down.

     Today, I take LSD to explore my new fatherhood, working always to extend the boundaries of my compassion, my patience, and my understanding. I also take it these days to help keep myself alive and healthy for Aspen and these two wonderful boys that she and I are raising together. Aspen will certainly need my help raising them, and the boys will definitely need me to stay around until they are men themselves.
     I have always taken LSD to explore the powerful and mysterious interaction of consciousness and reality. As the I Ching says, speaking of those like myself who wish to understand this interaction: "It enables them to apprehend the mysterious and divine laws of life, and by means of profoundest inner concentration they give expression to these laws in their own persons. Thus a hidden spiritual power emanates from them, influencing and dominating others without their being aware of how it happens." (Hexagram 20, Contemplation.)
     I definitely wish to influence this world that I'm going to pass on to my children. I have always left my campsite better than I found it, and I don't intend to change this habit now. If I can do this best by expressing the Tao through my own person, so be it.

Now, I did take the Red Pill, but I am certainly not Neo, certainly not the One. God knows, we've had enough of that. This was the ego trap that Tim Leary fell into - thinking he was the One. Anyone who has taken the Red Pill enough and has seen through the false Matrix reality knows that there isn't any one person or group that can free the rest of us. Anyone who has taken LSD and delved deeply enough knows that each of us has to free him or herself.
It made for a good movie though.

Eugene Marks