My psychiatrist looks straight at me. His body completely still, his eyes piercing with total concentration. I précis the last hour, “So, basically, I’ve given up drinking and taken up mushrooms and DMT…” And his answer?… “Great!”… Seriously. Hand on heart. I shit you not. He closes his notebook, wrapping up the session and repeats, “Great.”… If ever I needed validation, that was the moment. I could have kissed him.

I float out to his reception desk and am less bothered by his astronomical fees than usual. I wave a plastic card over a plastic box to make a plastic sound. I ponder whether that “friendly” beep has been acoustically engineered to hide the laugh of bankers. But I shrug it off. Sometimes you get fleeced. Sometimes it’s worth it.

I didn’t get the chance for him to expand on why he thought psychedelics were better for me than alcohol. But do I need to? Who am I kidding? How many trippers do you meet in A&E on a Saturday night, nursing their smashed up heads or broken arms? Zero. Zip. Nadda.

Booze was just the best thing we could come up with at the time. Liquid bread. Goes well with a fag. Something to throw in the air when England score a goal… The thing is that the world isn’t that simple anymore. The world has changed, and our needs have changed with it. And it’s not going back because reversing isn’t an option offered by its gear box. It can only travel in one direction. 

Evolution is a journey towards complexity. It is inexorable. Relentless. It started with simple cell division and it ends with?… Well, I guess that’s the million dollar question… Telepathy? Teleporting? Inter-dimensional travel? Perhaps we become the gods. Wherever we’re going, whether you lubricate the wheels with psychedelics or not, it will undoubtedly blow our minds.

Often when I dose on psilocybin, I think of a coral reef in The Red Sea called Ras Mohammed. The metaphor is as simple as it is beautiful. A giant figure of Mohammed is standing with his feet planted on the Earth’s core, and the top of his head (specifically his scalp or “Ras”, the most spiritual part of the brain according to Islamic scriptures, being “closest to God”) is a huge coral reef, bursting with life and exploding with colour. 

But you don’t need to have scuba-dived off the Sinai Peninsula and witnessed the intricacy and symbiosis of a coral reef to bathe in the beauty of natural psychedelia. You can experience the same complexity and harmony by walking through the stunning woods and countryside that surround our city. You only need to open your eyes a little wider and study a leaf whose veins divide and divide again until you enter the mesh of its photosynthesising cells. Follow the light that refracts through a droplet of dew on a bed of moss; marvel at its suspension in space and time by the perfection of surface tension; allow your mind to bend with its lens. Enable your senses to reach into the roots of a vine winding round its host with will and intent, and grasp its strength, yoke its power. 

What I’m trying to say is that, if you dive into the detail and increase your true connection with nature, you will find your nirvana. In a world where our food is sterilised in cylinders of tin, wrapped in plastic or presented in polystyrene, (none of which exist in the natural world), we are often barred from quenching our thirst for spiritual grounding. Earthing is not a paradox, it is a human requirement. Whether you believe in the ionic exchange between your body and the Earth’s magnetism, whether you consciously bridge that gap with psychedelics or you’ve developed your own method, modern society’s hellbent determination to contain us with concrete, cover us with plastic and encase us with metal, leads to a schism with the natural environment and that … makes … you … sad… Why? Well, this is the hilarious secret. Hilarious, because it’s so obvious: You Are Nature. 

Nature is not something separate to you. You are not simply the Observer. Nature is not something you only watch on TV. Yes, it is out there, sure, but it is also within. It is You. It is Me. It exists in each and every exchange of our breath. In our beauty. In our faults and mistakes. In our skills and talents. In our empathy. In our senses, our thoughts, our beliefs and our emotions. In our smiles. In our tears. Even in our dreams… If you can’t see that, at our finest, we are the coral reef, then maybe it’s time to take off your mask. 

With love. 

Ray, Brighton, 2024

Editor’s note: The Whistler does not condone Ray’s opinions. We chose to publish this as we know there are many microdosers in the city. But remember, what works for Ray may not work for anyone else.