I took notes the first time I tried LSD and the two most important things I took away from it were that I could send the same love I always send away from myself towards myself and that “this is how Buddha and Christ must have felt all the time”. I continued experimenting with psychedelics with only the occasional life-changing realization (such as the extent of how much we distract ourselves from death) and little to no context about the experience otherwise. Enter The Midnight Gospel (A Netflix series).  Duncan’s show started to help me put my experiences into perspective and I decided to really ham it up and take ~950ug before watching the last episode. In that episode, Duncan has an absolutely heartbreaking conversation with his mother that was recorded about 3 weeks before she left her body, before leaving the main character in an ambiguous death-like situation where he ends up meeting Ram Dass. Upon seeing Ram Dass on what I would call an ultra-heroic dose of LSD, I experienced a moment of unconditional love that made me question my worldview (specifically the possibility that death is really the end) and essentially oriented me towards this practice of unconditional love as a means of attaining life after death. Didn’t read Be Here Now until a few weeks later and now I’m hooked. I listen to his lectures every day and have been making my way through the rest of his bibliography (with other holy books interspersed as follows my natural interest).

I don’t really get the opportunity to tell this story very often due to how prominent psychedelics are in it, but I do feel like it represents a very important moment in my life.

Drew Vaughn

October, 2020

Posted to the Teachings of Ram Dass Facebook group. Used with permission