Acid Ecstasy

Before his ascension, the next messiah sat on a mesa with a bottle of water. All around him were other campers in similar states of sobriety. All smiling, young, potent thinkers from dedicated festival regulars to exhausted coders. All of them were there for something; funding, basebuilding, employing, advertising, whatever they convinced themselves they needed all served a greater purpose.

They were seeking something both insubstantial and totally genuine, an honest authenticity that no school or seminar could teach. Hundreds of people had applied to speak at the tech convention and dozens were accepted. Speakers flew in from around the world, imperfectly convinced that they were in possession of that fabled alchemical property, the Rockstar Quality. Not just charisma, creativity, ambition, or luck, but the kernel at the core of the venn diagram that represented all four elements at once.

The catalyzing agent that jumpstarted the next messiah was a bona-fide spiritual teacher, a genuine Maya of Peruvian nationality, an accredited Doctor of Theology. He’d been on archeological digs and spirit visions, lectured in universities and dirt floor churches with equal gravity. He’d built his church on an explicit support of the modern, welcoming new ideas as evidence that God was still speaking to humans. It was the spiritual teacher who wrote the prescription for acid and ecstasy waiting to be unleashed through the next messiah’s bloodstream.

“No Ayahuasca?” the next messiah joked when the sacrament arrived, and the man laughed. The next messiah didn’t know it, but ayahuasca had been officially restricted from the festival after some bright young things chased visions of Steve Jobs off the edge of a cliff. As much as the doctor would have loved to provide Ayahuasca, he walked a narrow tightrope over the pit of discovery. His speeches and seminars were still being circulated online, but now they were used to help identify sexual predators. If anyone googled his name, the accusations would have filled the screen, but those seminars weren’t translated into English, and no one on the organizing board spoke any other language. All the better for the spiritual teacher. He rebranded himself and wrote a brand new script to explain how ecstasy and acid were God’s real sacrament.

“Do you know why the Catholics drink wine?” he asked. In Peru he wore t-shirts and suits, but in America he wore traditional clothing. His cocky smile stayed the same. “Dionysus. Before the Greeks learned how to write, they learned fermented grapes would release their inhibitions. They thought they were taken ahold of by gods. They saw themselves in thrall to their deities.”

“Are you saying wine doesn’t do that?” one of the students shouted, and everyone laughed.

“There is more than one key to your mind,” the old man explained. “The reason you need a teacher is to direct you down your path. Otherwise, you flounder on the shores of your unconscious. Wine has been a sacrament for millennia before Christianity, but how many of you have felt connected to the divine while drunk?”

There was a general murmur of agreement. Someone in the back raised his voice with an uncertain lilt, suggesting nights that might have brought him to Heaven. The audience, and the doctor, laughed. With that one gesture he won the messiah’s whole heart; he hadn’t felt this wide eyed and excited since he was a child. He entered the auditorium unsure the doctor could deliver. The convention was just a sample platter full of tastes to entice new clients, and he’d mostly come for the free acid.

The next messiah’s father had been raised by the hippie generation. He knew hopeful social consciousness wouldn’t save anyone, threw himself at earlier philosophies hoping to grab hold of something concrete. His father dropped acid, listened to the Beatles and waited trembling for his third eye to open. He emerged from his journeys whole, with cautionary tales to pass down about burnout and permanent acid trips. His father was sure he’d encountered some universal truth, and yet it hadn’t changed him much. He didn’t even switch his college major. All acid seemed to do was foment a loving curiosity in safe psychedelic travels to his young son. The next messiah took acid and ecstasy all throughout high school, and never saw anything he didn’t expect.

“The door to heaven is sealed until the moment of our deaths,” the mystic said. “No path on Earth will take you around it. You won’t see the face of God in this lifetime. Remove that possibility from your mind, that won’t happen. Our purpose is to prove you are interwoven in the fabric of this plane of existence, no better or worse than any other aspect. I see some of you nodding. You all know, intellectually, that this is true, but you don’t fully understand it. When astronauts go to space, they experience a shift in their understanding that is called the Overview Effect, where they understand, for the first time, that we are a part of this world, not separate. Again, you all know this, but you haven’t experienced the Overview Effect. The medicine I’ve given you is designed to create a euphoric separation from your rational, balanced minds, and allow you to swim in the sea of subconscious while still awake. Combined, these two prescriptions upset your sense of balance and order, which will force you to re-evaluate your place, and force a state of religious ecstasy.”

The next messiah was beginning to feel the early effects of the drugs in his system, the giddy butterflies building up in his stomach. Or maybe it was just nerves.

“Chemically induced religious fervor was first described as an entheogen in the sixties, after it was synthesized and tested. It was first developed to be a truth serum.”

Long pause, a bubble of laughter. The messiah’s senses were separating like oil in water, and he realized with a jolt that Oh fuck, that wasn’t cheap, watery acid. His eyes weren’t connected to his ears, his skin buzzed with electricity. The auditorium seemed to break in clumps and smear across his vision. He was losing his balance. He grit his teeth, straightened his back, and stared at the stage where he knew the doctor was talking, but he couldn’t focus on the words. He heard the history of LSD, muted, but he already knew that story. He could practically say it with him.

He was slipping. He knew this was supposed to be trip setting, but something jarred him. He wasn’t with the auditorium, he was apart from it, like a loose nail on a piece of furniture. A bead of sweat fell off his nose and hit the back of his hand. It was a sign. The acid was activating. He had to leave. He stood and worked his way through the row of chairs, to the aisle, to freedom. His feet tangled with others, people grew restless.

“Water,” he croaked, scrambling over the knees of other attendees. “I need water.”

It was a lie and the truth, he needed water because he’d taken a juicy tab of ecstasy, but because he was on ecstasy, he didn’t need anything. The people in his row pushed him into the aisle, where he landed face-first on the ground. He kicked his feet under him and was moving before he’d stood, scrambling on his hands to the door. Once outside he ran to the nearest food vendor and grabbed a bottle of water. All his convention purchases were automatically deducted from his account, but in that moment, the relief of convenience warred with his vestigial, nascent fear of surveillance.

He was confused by his hesitance. Surveillance was endemic, fears of a panopticon were for another generation, and the next messiah’s goal was to take full advantage of every opportunity science could offer him. Anyone who would refuse automatic toilet paper refills and quick, easy impulse buys was being irrational and performative. He thought he understood, but in that moment he froze while unscrewing the bottle, overwhelmed by a sense of being pinned and insectile, more like a stock character in a cautionary children’s movie than a pioneer. He scrambled for balance and remembered that he was, ultimately, fine. He had water, his wallet, and his cellphone. If he was too fucked up to find his hotel room, he could beg a security guard to take pity on him. Undignified but safe, and in the morning when he woke up in his bathtub or amongst the ruins of his curtains, he could feel a wave of shame before ordering room service.

Warmth flooded his chest as his brain alchemetized. His eyes were like crystals with a perfect lattice structure. When filled with sun, the light separated in a spectrum of colors. His vision was rimmed in blues, greens and reds as he looked out onto the tech convention and saw it the way he looked at fairs when he was little, full of huge machines that offered exciting adventures. The crowd was like a stream trickling through dirt, and he followed it the way a child would, amused and curious.

A sober mind was too blunt to identify the subtle flow of kinetic energy through the chaotic, swirling pattern of tech con pedestrians, but the messiah wasn’t hampered by sobriety. He followed it out of the convention, into the desert, and arrived at the mesa. All around him were other people who could see the same freedom and peace from the cliff, as the late afternoon blew cool gusts of air through the hot pillars of the sun. The desert was stretched out before them under the blue dome of the sky, and the wind in his hair was like a soft hand brushing off the last of the discomfort from the auditorium hall. He tried to remember the doctor’s name, but he couldn’t remember human details about him. He remembered the man had salt and pepper hair, a white shirt and pants, but the memory was morphing as he tried to focus on it. As he stared over the cliff, and wavy textures invaded his field of vision like worms, he remembered the phrase Overview Effect.

The waves grew thick and fibrous, took root and sprouted. He had never seen a peyote plant before, and he didn't know the chemical structure of ecstasy. Instead grapes, bitter or sweet, filled his thoughts. The vines crisscrossed the landscape of his mind as Dionysus Christ climbed out of the grave of the collective unconscious. Joseph Campbell grabbed him by the neck, stuck a knife in his stomach and unseamed him like a duffle bag to reveal a tiny Luke Skywalker, a Goku, Superman, Batman, heroes spilling out like a slot machine. The warm, moving guts flopped out of the cavity and tore, freeing thousands of smaller, boring heroes from films the next messiah hadn’t seen. It was like watching a spiders’ egg sac breach.

Hairs rose from the back of his neck. He shut his eyes and shook his head, trying to clear the vision from his mind, but the more he resisted the more it clung to his consciousness. Fighting it was useless. Instead he stretched flat on his back on the mesa and let the waves submerge him.

The wind washed hot air over his body as he lay back. In his mind, millions of tiny heroes wriggled and fought like grubs, but every moment the vision overtook him was followed by a gust of wind. He thought to himself, this was what the doctor meant. Bad acid trips come from the detritus of a cluttered mind, buried under free association. The best results come from a clear mind, unconcerned with outcomes or solutions.

He felt the epiphany before he understood it. It was like a stone falling into the pit of his stomach as he scrambled to unravel it. He envisioned himself catching it, holding it, then folding up and digging into it like a worm in an apple. Inside was a forest of DNA-like ladders, burdened with information.

Solutions were the problem, he realized. Outcomes, productivity, goals, all artificial. He was experiencing the same self-awareness he had during a brief period of unemployment after college, when he realized that life was meaningless. There was nowhere to go, no one to see and no distractions to keep him from the knowledge that his birth was an accident. He was experiencing that awakening again, but he was entering it from a different perspective; he had places to go and people to see, but he couldn’t keep that knowledge in his head. Holding on to them made the monomyth split into further microfractures and splinter deeper into his conscious mind.

The waves of sunlight were growing cooler as the sun set. The sky was like a watercolor painting, the sun a shiny coin. Outside the over-excited neurons of his burning brain was reality, where the monomyth couldn’t follow. He was safe with all the world.

Epiphany was washing over him like the wind. Was there an epiphany before this one? There must have been, if there was a word for it, but this was bigger than himself. He marvelled at it. He’d never had anything of such sheer magnitude. As soon as he thought it he felt a flash of fear. Did he deserve it? Was it really his? How could he own something like this? The fear started to morph into pride… how indeed could a man own something like this… what did it mean to hold intellectual property on this scale… If he was capable of holding thoughts that large inside his own skull then he was chosen to have them. God was his seed investor, his angel funder. He could see the great desk under God’s shaggy white beard. He could feel the giddiness that came from a successful pitch. He’d nailed it. He was the one with the Rockstar Quality.

He was ascended.