Sivan 5786: ~80 doses
What happens when we are flung into the infinite without our conscious choosing? When it arrives without an invitation? The Talmud teaches that when the Israelites heard the first words at Sinai, their souls left their bodies, that the encounter was simply more than a human being could hold. Rabbi Hayley Goldstein did not choose her encounter with the infinite. She reached for what was labeled Echinacea and was flung, at approximately eighty doses of LSD, further from ordinary reality than most people will ever travel. We share her story of an emergency psychedelic trauma for psychedelic education and harm reduction purposes, but more deeply, Rabbi Hayley captures the ineffable intensity of her experience of ratzo v’shov, going out and coming back, with tremendous beauty, grace, and integrity. This is a holy text, just in time for Shavuot.
With warm blessings for receiving Torah exactly the way we need it.
Z
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~80 doses
Rabbi Hayley Goldstein
I wasn’t into space as a kid, which is funny because every one of my teachers from roughly second grade on told my parents that I spent the majority of my time there. And, now being a rabbi, you could say I have spent a notable amount of time in the ethereal realms, but still–I never took a particular interest in space.
But something about Artemis II really grabbed my insides. Four humble and honest astronauts went the furthest from earth that any human being has ever gone—or at least that’s what they think. They don’t know that I was catapulted to space against my will.
There’s no funny or even interesting way to say it. Standing in the kitchen of a relative’s home sniffling with a cold and soon to be en route to the airport back to New York, I rummaged through her fridge and took two full tablespoons of what was labeled as Echinacea.
It was ~80-100 recreational doses of lysergic acid diethylamide. AKA LSD.
Let me first field some common questions: 80-100 doses is enough to satiate an entire village. Yes, I knew this family member was into these things. Yes, in retrospect I should have questioned all of the substances in their home, even the ones labeled as herbs for the common cold. Yes, this family member felt horribly guilty, recognized the irresponsibility, and immediately found a safer home for the substance. No, I had never done psychedelics before.
No less than ten minutes later, not knowing what I had ingested, and never having ingested anything like it before, I started to hear it. The distinct sound of the fabric of reality tearing from me (for what felt like) forever. My vision turned to strobe lights, I was leaving. Over the next twelve hours, I would go through many different worlds, most of them godless and void of meaning, sterile and chemical. Time collapsed completely, all that existed was eternity.
I threw up. A lot. I said to my girlfriend, “I so got this.” I went into a child’s pose. I asked her to tell me she was proud of me, that I was doing a good job, that she loves me. And again: that she was proud of me, that I was doing a good job, and she loves me. And again. And again. After 30 minutes of that, we went to the hospital. I threw up in the car. I asked for my cat, Freddy. She said he was on his way (he wasn’t). The nurse asked me where I was. I said New York (oops). Nurse got scared. Nurse asked how many people were in the room. I guessed 6…? There were 4. Oops. “Ancestors,” I said. There must be at least a couple ancestors hanging around, guys, give me a break. I do not think this was comforting to the nurse.
She asked for my social security number, and I recited it impeccably.
I was surrounded by nurses with eyes all over their faces. I told the doctor that he was absolutely too gorgeous for me to talk to him in this state, I would need a less gorgeous doctor, please. I got a CT scan–lots of beep-boops and the sound of people gently saying, “And….this, and like that.” Later, more lucid because of Ativan, my girlfriend asked me if I took my Echinacea that day. “Yes,” I said, “but not mine.” The pieces came together–only six hours after the fact. I could feel the mix of fear and relief in the room. I talked about sex with my girlfriend being “transcendental.”
When we walked out of the hospital, I dove into the first grass I could find, desperate to connect to the Earth. I rolled down to the ground to lay in a big, open field. It was a 3 foot patch of grass in the parking lot. We were asked by security to leave.
On the drive home, I saw a Holocaust memorial statue crawling with people trying to get to the top, falling off, crawling up again. I looked at my hand and it was pulsating with every color of light, my girlfriend’s hand was earthen, like a golem. I tried to text my friend but the letters were dripping off the screen. Out of guilt, this family member had a masseuse come to the apartment and give me a massage. It felt like someone tugging at a skin covered sack that was not mine. I took a bath but the tiles were dripping off the walls. I told my friend David on the phone that LSD was “not for me.” When I tried to sleep, sparks of rainbow stars and hearts flooded my vision like a Lisa Frank folder.
The next morning, before heading back to New York, I stood at the ocean and felt like the strongest person alive. I had always carried a deep and ancestral fear of losing my mind, of being taken away, of losing my grip with reality. As I stood at the water, I realized that I was further from the edge than I thought. My mind was intact, I made it through the depths of hell, through realms that human beings are not designed to experience.
The existential terror that creeped up a few days later and followed for months was all consuming, and threatened to erase my newfound strength. An ever loudening and expanding “WHY?” screamed into a vast cave that both reflected back at me and threatened to swallow me up. If that sounds dramatic, just trust me. I was an alien in my own body. My home felt haunted.
My friend Ben said on the phone that I sounded like a “shaking leaf in the wind,” exactly how I felt. In fact, my relationship with wind is still tenuous. I don’t trust it. My journey was so full of wind whipping every which way, wind threatening to take me away forever. At one point during The Incident, my girlfriend was made out of pastel colored sand–sand which blew away in the wind.
I tried so many things to feel better. Some actually helped and some just gave me something to do while I waited for the tsunami of insomnia, panic and racing thoughts to pass. Klonopin. Ativan. Song. Dance. Somatic therapy. Acupuncture. Yoga. Ayurveda. Chinese herbs. Western herbs. No herbs. Exercising. Not exercising. Baths. So many baths. Prayer. A “grounding mat” on my bed that purported to emit negative ions, like the earth. “Grounding shoes.”
Sound healing was really amazing, until my girlfriend took me to a sound healer who made wind sounds over us with his mouth. I got up and left. No wind, thank you!
My Spotify wrapped that year was full of calming binaural sounds interspersed with chants in the vein of, “you’re going to make it,” “this will pass.”
During this wildly windy time, I was still working at my synagogue. Sleep deprived and shaky, I showed up the best I could for Shabbat services, for Bar and Bat Mitzvah students, for my young adults. I did funerals and shivas, conversions and even a wedding while on a deficit of three or four nights of sleep. My boss asked me to take a break, but I had a sense (maybe a fear) that this work and my connections to others were tethering me in some way, that without it I would drift off into space alone.
I did finally find the medicine. The best medicine for this vast existential terror—the terror that made me question everything I saw, thought, felt; the terror that would sound like ridiculous Dr. Seuss book premises in my head: “WHY DO WE HAVE EYES? WHY DO CATS EXIST? WHY WORDS? WHY TIME?”—turned out to be awe.
Rebbe Nachman teaches that “when a person cannot find peace in their bones,” it is through awe that they can merit the experience of embodied peace again. Like terror, awe is a cry into the cavernous void, a similar cry of “why?” that instead fills the cave with light, with wonder and acceptance and celebration. The “why” of awe does not beg for an answer, in fact the question is perfectly enough. It’s a why of appreciation, a why of expansiveness. When I did eventually take a break, wandering through Guatemala a few months after the incident, I latched onto every beautiful color, shape, plant, person–tethering me back home. Like a passionflower’s tendrils, each moment of awe twirled me around just a little bit more–grabbing onto the world and myself again.
In my own time, I was able to claim this harrowing and unwanted experience as an initiatory one. Something I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy, but also something that my soul was ready for, even as my body would never have been ready.
I am still integrating the lessons from this time, but some that I can name: that I am not in charge, that awe and praise are medicine, that everything is temporary, that support is abundant. One lesson that I pray I imprint on my bones on behalf of all the Jewish women in my lineage who have worried about their sanity: that I am much further from the edge than I thought, that my tether to this world is strong and deep. I pray this echoes backward and forward through the generations for all of them to hear.
Watching the astronauts in Artemis II grabbed me. Four humble and awestruck human beings who—unlike me—consciously chose to be flung that far away, and in their far away-ness felt closer to all humanity. They saw around the entirety of the moon, described it with such poetic and beautiful detail, and expressed their deep and resonant existential awe.
Watching them begin to descend back to earth was particularly relatable. I assume–unlike me–they were sans Ativan. Besides that, it was very similar.
One of the astronauts said that being that far away made her realize that “we choose earth, and we choose each other.” I had never longed for the earth more. Watching them get closer and closer to the earth’s atmosphere, I wondered if they felt the same longing to be tethered again. As a therapist during this time told me, “the gravitational pull we feel towards the earth tells us that we’re home.” As I watched them splash down into the water, I wondered if they too were so grateful to be home.
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Rabbi Hayley Goldstein received her smicha from the Rabbinical School of Hebrew College in Newton, MA. She currently serves as the Associate Rabbi at Park Slope Jewish Center in Brooklyn, NY. She’s written a variety of ritual guides and offers private spiritual counseling, all can be found at rabbihayleygoldstein.com.
Thumbnail image by Evan M. Cohen.
