The Wild Kindness: A Psilocybin Odyssey, by Bett Williams

This is perhaps the most personal of all the books I’ve read about psychedelics in the last fifty years. And it’s almost certainly the most extreme. 

These qualities are not unrelated - Williams is coming from a heart deeply broken by the horrors of history, a feeling that will be all too familiar to most of us:

‘The wounds of history, of genocide, colonization, ecological devastation, and violence don’t heal on their own. Actions and intentions are needed to make that happen. … I ask for help.’

- and, similarly familiar, a terrible disappointment with the defeat of progressive forces in society: 

‘Occupy was a brief moment in time when we could collectively set aside what divided us in favour of a utopian spirit that permeated our spaces. Then Occupy was defeated. The new reality was impossible student loans; call-out culture; Abilify and Adderall; trigger warnings; PTSD; GoFundMes; safe spaces; paying rent in San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York; Tinder; and MFA or Die. It was years past the time when we found each other on personal blogs. Now anything we wrote on the Internet just fed the monster that was Google and we couldn’t pretend otherwise. We said we would quit Facebook but none of us ever did.’ 

The present world feels broken, but we can go beyond that brokenness:

‘Our moment is defined by a collective state of consciousness so infused with cognitive dissonance and surreality that it can only be called psychedelic, and not in a good way.’ 

‘... Psychedelics allow us to glimpse the incomprehensible.’ 

The author advocates a very strong medicine: extremely high doses of psilocybin mushrooms. The normal sense of self must be dissolved:

‘Psychedelics had brought me to a place of heightened awareness of the tyranny of my own mind. My need to frantically recognize patterns and make meaning out of everything was strangling the life force out of reality itself. I was uncovering the toxic egotism at the core of my perception, rooted in my desire to be a good person.’ 

The author leads us into a world of profound disorientation, something like Rimbaud’s ‘dérèglement systématique’. The trip reports read like being on the edge of terrifying states of incoherence; in one such case, she is talking with one of her dogs, who has overdosed on chocolate because she is confessing to being a CIA agent. This is Franz Kafka on mushroom megadoses, seeking a kind of ’grace’. Yes, the quest is sometimes framed in religious language:

‘“I am not ok” is a perfect prayer. Feel how grace rains upon us when we say it…’- although the author does not impose such a frame on all her experiences:

‘I approach the voice of the mushrooms not as absolute truth but as a linguistic result of a collaboration between my psyche and the fungal entity. Hold on loosely, child, loosely.’

Rather, this work is done with conscious magic, with the honouring of various deities and spirits building sophisticated psychedelic rituals. 

Williams is part of a community of explorers who take extremely high doses. She tells us that unless you take a high enough dose that you can't help but be led by the ’shrooms, you're pretty much just messing about. Microdosing is of course nonsense. So it’s no surprise that she meets an African American community leader called Kai Wingo, who sounds a lot like the late, great psychedelic community leader Kilindi Iyi. This is not the sort of work you can do entirely alone; surely community is essential, at the very least for regular sanity checks, when you are dissolving your selfhood so deeply.

There is so much more in this book - a chapter about what's worth reading, a chapter about her 5 dogs, recipes for herbal drinks and suffumigations, and great one liners such as: 'Connan Mockasin is a living mascot for the stereotype of a psychedelic life - a human being entirely assembled from drugs...' 

This is a unique and courageous book, vulnerable, highly-focused and totally mad. If you love psychedelics and / or love reading about other explorers and their exploits, it’s essential reading.