The Acid Diaries (Christopher Gray) / quote 54 of 125
Ego death and the risk of psychosis
The next morning I still felt dislocated and physically in shock. What had happened? I’d had experiences of overload before, brief episodes from trips I couldn’t recollect . . . but never total blackout for hours on end. Were the official warnings I dismissed with such indifference all too accurate, and LSD could well trigger psychotic breaks? For the first time in my tripping career I started to get really scared. Then I remembered that Grof had listed blackouts in the passage from LSD Psychotherapy I quoted a couple of chapters back. I reread that section, “Critical Situations in LSD Sessions,” more closely and found another paragraph that was equally chilling. Ego death involves an experience of the destruction of everything that the subject is, possesses, or is attached to. Its essential characteristics are a sense of total annihilation on all imaginable levels, loss of all systems of relation and reference, and destruction of the objective world. As it is approached in different directions and on different levels, the process requires more and more psychological sacrifice. In the final stages, subjects have to face and confront experiences, situations, and circumstances that are unacceptable or even unimaginable to them. Even after I had calmed down a bit (and, truth to tell, furtively combed the local paper for corpses on the Heath), something had snapped inside me. What the fuck do you think you are doing? I thought. You are risking psychosis, without even so much as a sitter. True, you started off with some very positive experiences. Acid dissolved a state of chronic depression, and those trips about childhood and adolescence changed the way you saw your whole life—but these recent escapades are totally out of order. All that lunacy about Christianity. You are doing exactly what everyone else did with acid in the ’60s—and that’s take far too much. Don’t be a fool. What’s happening now is a clear message to stop.