The Acid Diaries (Christopher Gray) / quote 55 of 125
Resistance on psychedelics
More generally, what I’d suggest was involved was . . . resistance. Resistance is an analytic concept you don’t hear much about in relation to psychedelic drugs, as though they were so potent that blocking them was out of the question. Such hasn’t been my experience. My first dose of mescaline I managed to stop dead in its tracks, and I wonder whether a lot of recreational acid trips don’t owe their remarkable shallowness to the same subconscious fear of losing control. So what was I resisting? Something personal? Some long-buried trauma? That could be the case, since later I was to unearth a massive physical and emotional wound in early childhood . . . but somehow I don’t think that was what it was. Rather, looking back on it today, I’d suspect there is a qualitative break involved in leaving the aesthetic and psychodynamic realms behind and beginning to penetrate the deeper, transpersonal levels of mind. Perhaps we weren’t meant to do any such thing. Perhaps there’s a Promethean, heaven-storming quality to acid that arouses deep-seated, almost biological levels of resistance. Perhaps all the fear we have been denying suddenly explodes in our faces. I just don’t know. All I can say for sure is that serial tripping may well run into phenomena that will not make sense unless you factor in resistance. Failing to do so—which was what happened to me—led me to try to abandon the whole project.