NEVER GIVE UP –
April 2026 – I’d been taken in by all the public talk of mushrooms and their “sacred” and “transcendental” use; of their remedial power, which seemed to arouse an idiosyncratic “mystical consciousness” in the suffering and addicted. There were the familiar tales of sin and redemption, of shipwrecked lives made brand spanking new, of Beckettian agonists discovering bliss in life’s end zone.
Still, I’d come reluctantly, with a trailing sense of dread, having flown in the night before — from Boston, where I lived with my wife and children — at the urging of Mary, who’d agreed to psilocybin therapy as a last-ditch attempt to help my father on the condition that I appear in a supporting role.
No matter how badly I wished him well, the minute I arrived, I wanted to leave. In the spirit of McKenna, who claimed that psilocybin was a source of human salvation, I held fast, resigned to doing something, even if that something might have all the effect of Pentecostal faith healing, knowing that doing nothing, as we’d done all along, would get us nowhere. “What erodes hope is inertia and the momentum of negative psychological activity,” McKenna wrote in The Archaic Revival. “And by simply changing your mind, you just step aside and the momentum sweeps past you and you are transformed.”
