Becoming a Psychedelic Human

Kathleen Harrison reflects on her journey of initiation

Kathleen Harrison is an oceanic presence whose inquiry into the hidden realms of ethnobotanical and psychedelic wisdom was achieved through quiet, reverent, and diligent effort during the height of the international war on drugs. Her fieldwork began in the 1970s, forming relationships with traditional medicine communities in Mesoamerica, the Amazon Basin, and the Pacific Islands. In 1985, she co-founded Botanical Dimensions, an organization dedicated to ethnobotanical research, conservation, and plant-person education with reciprocity built in as a core practice.

This summer, Kat is returning to the Alembic with two vital day-long workshops: Discernment, Boundaries & Protection: Perceptual Practice for Staying Whole and Myth and Practice on the Serpentine Road. In this issue of TRANSMUTATIONS, we go back to her February appearance at The Chalice and listen in as she reveals some of her initiation experiences and the challenging knowledge she earned.

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Art copyright 2024 by Kathleen Harrison, used with permission

I recently got in touch with a great sadness that condensed out of the disappointment that I felt following the great wave of hope and possibility which had seemed apparent in the beginning of the psychedelic era. The goal, then, was to lift the collective global consciousness. There was the sense that we have the potential to really be innovative and use our minds, but to also actually use our hearts to live in a world where love and mutual respect and equity are as important as all the very, very clever things we are able to do. But that dream of our human potential as an aware species on a planet of aware species was not open for very long. The dream closed. We’ve been riding on the good vibe that dwells in the memory of it, in some ways, in a kind of media residue, but it’s not that same vision.

I remember recognizing that there’s a darkness in people and in the world, in culture, that I somehow was not surprised at. It was heartbreaking, but recognizing the darkness is part of the initiation. It points out that a beautiful vision takes a lot of work and dedication by many, many people, and maybe even by many species, to make an aura of life be more vibrant. 

So that became part of my work. I saw this: Whatever you do, whatever field you choose, whichever degree you get, if you open a restaurant and feed people, or go work in Africa, or whatever you choose to do, that there is this work. It’s not only to ease the suffering or to help awaken or educate fellow human beings, but it's to weave the world together again, because it frays very readily. It’s always fraying. There are a million, million ways to be one who mends and one who weaves.

I knew that part of my work was to keep trying to see through different eyes. To keep seeking glimpses of another way of seeing the world and therefore another way of being in the world, because that's what I could bring to the mending. If I couldn't conceive of it, I couldn't help make it happen. So, the way to conceive of it seemed to be to go deeper.

I suspected what LSD could do before I took it. The first time I asked to take it was the Summer of Love. My boyfriend at the time was a cool guy, but he said “Oh, I don't know if you're ready for a real LSD trip. I’ll set it up, I'll get it. I'll give you the right dose and I'll sit in the next room.” It was such a tiny dose that I sat on the floor for six hours and stared at the chair legs. I was taking philosophy classes. “I can stare at chair legs for six hours and think of a bunch of cool things. I can do that. But I don't think this is what LSD is.” I think he meant well.

The next time was with my dear friend Nina. We went traveling for a year and then came back and took the complete “blow the whole universe apart, it will take years to put it back together” LSD trip that I have always referred to as my “Great Gnostic Undoing.” That is where everything lost meaning. After that I stopped talking. I dropped out of school. I felt, I just have to think about everything now. I mean, I can't assume anything is real at all. Who decided what's real? I was reading Borges, that seemed to be the best thing. I remember, it was about two or three months later that I often stopped to watch the sunset. But I could completely take that sunset down to be absolutely meaningless and nothing. Yet I realized, I have to start somewhere because life's going to be really hard if I don't believe in anything. So, okay, I'll make a deal. I'm going to take on only one thing at a time and do this very, very slowly. Today I’ll believe in the sunset as real. That dog is not real.

So, it meant an alienation from the world. You don't get over that. Had I been not so grounded in nature and in myself, or had I been wounded in some ways that I wasn't, I think it would have just undone me and I wouldn’t have been functional. Instead, I learned to use that initiation as a part of the lens through which I see the world. I really, really appreciate that experience. 

Art copyright 2024 by Kathleen Harrison, used with permission

The full-on initiation, in the traditional sense, is dismemberment. That's the ultimate one. Can you be completely dismembered and live through it? And who are you when you come back? Because you're not the same person. I feel very fortunate that I got dismembered and came out this way.

When I was 24 or 25 I went through another wave of “what's it all about?” By that time my illusions about collective, glorious wisdom were pretty well knocked down. But I was still looking for my way of working in the world. I decided I would go south, on my own, overland from California to Colombia. I hitchhiked a lot in those days. I had an angel. 

I first set up camp on a beach on the west coast of Mexico, reading tarot cards, tripping, and getting to know the families that lived in palapas in the woods there, or who tended the coconut grove. Six weeks into that life, everything I had got stolen. All my money and my passport and my earrings, which I had a great attachment to. They were my tiny amulets. I thought: Oh, okay. So, all my plans just changed. This was the more fatalistic period of my life. I was in the phase where signs from the universe were loud. So, I thought: Oh, that means I'm not supposed to go to Colombia. I should just stay in Mexico, until whatever.

Now, I have no identity. Nobody knows where I am. I just have to find my food and my lodging wherever I go because I have no money. So, I did that for six months in Mexico, and that was really the scrappiest period of my life. I mean, I took the most risks. I got really sick, I got stung by a deadly scorpion, I got injured. All kinds of things happened, you know, that were on the hard side. 

But I had a pocket full of LSD, I really love the ocean, and I knew how to cook. I got to know native families on the coast and American surfers who were looking for the ultimate spot that was way off the road. Which meant I got to immerse myself in some of the most beautiful, remote places on the planet. Then I crisscrossed Mexico and camped in the ruins at Palenque, and did all those things one could do in the early seventies. In that period I looked into poverty. I hung out with native and mestizo people who had nothing, who had lost babies, or had a sick baby. We bonded over suffering, basically as different people who were marginal in that time. I was exploring some very margin of being me and surviving. Would I even survive? That phase of my life was really a gift.

Part of what I learned to do in traveling was to not go where the hippies were. Of course, I knew about the whole Huautla mushroom scene, the whole hippie invasion was happening then, but without ever going there I knew that was a bad idea. I didn't want anything to do with it. As wonderful as some of the travelers were themselves, and as cool as their scenes may have seemed to them, I just tried to skirt those parts. I knew where they were, of course. I used the resources if they were needed. But then I’d basically go off on my own. I didn't go meet Mazatec people until twenty years later. And then I developed really deep relationships, which I have returned to over and over. Because the depth of learning the wisdom of people depends on actually, really getting to know them. You don't read it in a book, or get it from a film, or a week on a tripping retreat. 

I think the most surprising thing to me is that psychedelics didn't change the kind of deep character of human beings, at least in American white culture. Things like sexism and racism and gender roles, all of that kind of stuff. It was amazing to me, as I came to see by participating in it myself, that so many of us women were passive. It was very early in the feminist movement; we were very young and we were busy trying to blow our minds every day. But we were passive, relative to the men who were trying to blow their own minds every day. The men who tripped as much or more than anybody else held on to their power, they held on to their social structures, their gender relationships, and they made sure that it came out to their benefit. 

It was so hard to go deep enough in these experiences to really bust ourselves on our own internal structures that were holding us back. All of us, myself included. I had a motto for a while: “I’m going to bust myself every day.” I'm going to figure out some way, every day, that I remain okay with some assumption that I should really not be okay with. Maybe they are little tiny adjustments, if you're examining your mindset every day, but they add up.

Art copyright 2024 by Kathleen Harrison, used with permission

One of the principles of being a human, definitely being a psychedelic human, is discernment. That is the skill that I feel a person, and a culture, needs to develop, to be able to be more animistic, to be able to be more psychedelic in a positive way. You can't function solely on what arises. All that “the universe made this happen” kind of thing. You have to learn to recognize what intuition is, and simultaneously you must cultivate discernment. Being able to recognize something for what it truly is keeps you from falling off the edge, or from tolerating a creepy stranger whom you better get away from, or from caressing poison oak.

What's beautiful about intuition is that we can't really define it. You just have to completely get out of the way and allow for it to happen, and it may or may not. You can't want it, you can't make it happen, and you can't rush to grab it either. You witness. You witness what arises in you. 

It has a lot to do with meditation. You have to be really, really still and give it time. It's not going to come in words, necessarily. Sometimes it is a very clear phrase, but sometimes it's almost like: I feel aware of someone else's awareness. 

Intuition is a place where you make yourself very permeable, so you have to have discernment. That ability to say: I have cultivated the capacity to know what is authentic for me, what is okay for me. Where my boundaries are. I'm not blocking everything off. I'm letting some things through. Some things are treasures and I will examine them and learn more about them. Some are edgy. That’s where you put up that silk shield that is stronger than steel. 

Transmutations is a biweekly publication from the Berkeley Alembic, a post-denominational spiritual center that offers classes, workshops, retreats, and warm cups of tea.

If you enjoyed this post, we think you’ll like these upcoming events:

Tram Day: A Celebration with The Chalice & The Women's Visionary Council

June 12, 7 PM: Celebrate a new psychedelic holiday honoring Susi Ramstein, Albert Hofmann’s lab assistant, who was the first psychedelic guide and the first woman to take LSD. Join us to celebrate this pioneer, with a talk by Susanne Seiler, an imaginary tram ride, and a deep dive into the untold history of LSD.

Seth Lorinczi's “Death Trip: A Post-Holocaust Psychedelic Memoir”

June 5, 7 PM: Death Trip takes readers from the ayahuasca basements of the psychedelic underground to the darkest days of World War II. Author Seth Lorinczi will read excerpts from the book, unraveling the tale of how the quest for answers took him halfway around the world to track down his family’s restless ghosts.

Deconstructing Yourself with Michael Taft

Thursdays, 6:30 PM: A weekly drop-in guided meditation (approximately one hour) plus Q & A with Berkeley Alembic founding teacher Michael Taft. We extend beyond any particular religion or technique in order to welcome any and all who are interested.