My friends in LA have strip mall psychics and green juice cleanses. My friends in New York have ketamine nasal sprays and love triangles. In Northern California, we have guides who give us ego-dissolving doses of psychedelics. I first heard a detailed account of this phenomenon from my friend Lana, 32, who took a large dose of MDMA under the supervision of a guide this past July. For some reason, I imagined her walking down the streets of Oakland, avoiding traffic and talking to a stranger on speakerphone, radiantly emitting tears. Lana said the journey was metaphysical—the most movement she did was walk across a field to look at a tree. The guide stayed beside her until the comedown ended, listening with calm benevolence as she cycled through her most bitter childhood memories. She saw her mother go into labor in an airplane bathroom stall, the tiles on the floor covered in blood. She saw the dunes in the desert her ancestors were banished from. “You said the experience would be sweet,” Lana said angrily, “but this isn’t sweet.” The guide encouraged her to interface with the images instead of resisting their darkness. Afterward, Lana texted to say the trip was “life-changing, world-changing. For the first time, I feel like I can get better.”

Another friend, Mariah, 28, went on her first guided journey in the summer of 2023 after exhausting various pharmaceutical drugs, therapists, and ketamine-assisted treatments. Since age 16 she has experienced symptoms of mild to catatonic depression, oscillating between “irrational hopelessness, a strong sense of self-hatred, and a desire for annihilation.” Mariah’s journey took place in a converted garage in North Berkeley with several mattresses on the floor. “It had a lava lamp vibe,” she said. Mariah ate a plate of dried psilocybin and spent the next few hours curled in a fetal position, hallucinating her birth and death as tiny slivers in a greater planetary consciousness. Each time she opened her eyes, she saw her guide meditating or quietly journaling in the corner, but otherwise giving her space. Her guide’s presence was assuring rather than disconcerting: Mariah said she felt safe knowing she was with someone who had witnessed hundreds of others in a cute distress and assured them this was normal, encouraging them to cede control to the experience. At the height of her trip, Mariah suddenly opened her eyes and expressed how grateful she was that she never acted on her suicidal ideations. “It doesn’t mean I never experience sadness now,” she said. “But I no longer experience the same caliber of sadness.”

Mariah was introduced to her guide through our mutual friend Wesley, 35, a creative writing instructor living in Oakland. Wesley was diagnosed with depression when he was a teenager. “It was part of my identity,” he said, a condition that had been with him for so many years it became impossible to imagine himself without it. Mental health professionals had convinced him there was no cure—he could develop tools and strategies to manage it, but the depression itself would stay with him for the rest of his life. In the spring of 2019, at age 30, Wesley went on the first of several journeys. He used a metaphor of language acquisition to describe the transformation: during the session, he was suddenly fluent in what it would mean to live differently. He experienced a glimpse of a new way of living that disappeared as soon as the trip was over, and he understood his life’s work was to make this glimpse into a totality. Wesley could see his masculinity with an aerial view, how his desire for control had eclipsed his ability to see reality for what it truly is, a truth so beautiful and simple it had eluded him. Wesley asked the guide to hold his hand as he “died” over and over, his old self molting.

It is difficult to estimate how many psychedelic guides are currently working in the Bay Area, though 100 or so showed up to an informal gathering in San Jose organized by the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) in 2010. Since the decriminalization of psilocybin in Oakland in 2019 and the possibility of California legalizing psychedelic therapy in the coming years, I can only speculate their numbers have grown. Many guides have day jobs in medical- or spirituality-adjacent fields: therapists, psychiatrists, yoga instructors, religious clergy, astrologers, and energy healers. They work with a pool of knowledge that has been transmitted over generations, a series of rituals and protocols that divert focus away from the drugs themselves and towards a trifecta of trust between the drug, user, and guide. Still, “working in the underground” is illegal and could lead to the loss of their professional licenses, a risk I couldn’t imagine someone taking unless they believed in the dizzying power of these drugs to accelerate through years of practice in a single afternoon.

Many guides working underground were introduced to the art by Stanislav Grof, the Czech psychiatrist who has guided thousands of LSD-assisted psychotherapy sessions throughout his lifetime; it is rumored that he once dosed revolutionaries who were involved in the 1968 Prague Spring protests. In 1973, Grof became a scholar-in-residence at the Esalen Institute, a holistic wellness retreat center on the shadowy cliffs of Big Sur. Esalen’s mythos sprawls too widely to be described by a single line, but, among other things, in the ’60s it served as a center for “drug-induced mysticism,” and was frequented by some in glittery circles including Abraham Maslow, Timothy Leary, Jack Kerouac, Ken Kesey, Terence McKenna, and Albert Hoffmann. It first became popular during the 1967 Summer of Love, when 30,000 young people migrated to San Francisco to participate in a countercultural movement that espoused communal living, back-to-the-land agricultural practices, an end to the Vietnam War, and acid parties. These first-wave psychonauts had delusions of grandeur about the power of hallucinogens to influence American politics. Al Hubbard, who traveled with a leather satchel of pharmaceutical-grade LSD, said that if he could trip the top executives at the Fortune 500 companies then humanity’s future would be changed.

In the decades following Nixon’s classification of hallucinogens as Schedule 1 Drugs in 1970, the Esalen Institute held a series of conferences to strategize the long-term revival of research into their medicinal uses. The Pacific Symposium on Psychedelic Research in 1994 brought together several key figures who had been prominent leaders of the “second wave” of psychedelic resurgence. “After the ’60s erupted and boiled over, this drunken mysticism broke out,” Michael Murphy, the co-founder of Esalen said. “Tim Leary was saying take LSD every Sunday. The government clamped down, and the psychedelic adventure came to an end.” This statement seems to ascribe the chaos of the ’60s to a few acid heads who ruined it for everyone. They used it as an insurgent tool to hypnotize the masses toward political ends, inducing moral panic and requiring state containment. To attempt to attain legalization, the second wave had to divorce these psychoactive substances from their legacy as countercultural substances—we promise to play nice this time, they say. James Fadiman, a longtime lecturer at Esalen and “father of microdosing,” has said that “psychedelics don’t have an ideology any more than ice cream has an ideology. People like ice cream and people don’t like ice cream, but nobody makes a political statement about it.”

If psychedelics were to earn FDA approval, these scientists thought, they needed to reinscribe these drugs as effective management tools for personal well-being and mental fitness. Even in the ’60s, Esalen hosted corporate training programs aimed at both executives and middle-management workers. Psychologist Will Schutz supervised their psychedelic journeys while Alan Watts introduced them to various “Zen techniques” and Eastern philosophies. While this may feel like a sharp divergence from the anti-capitalist hippies the institute is known for, it is not incompatible with its founding mission. Esalen was the geographical center of the Human Potential Movement, the belief that every individual has an infinitude of untapped abilities that can be accessed through cognitive training and mindfulness practice. After the wave of tech layoffs in 2018, Esalen held a series of retreats aimed at fired tech workers in states of spiritual malaise, with sessions on “mindful emailing” and “consciousness-hacking.” When I visited the institute this summer, the cafeteria transformed into a temporary WeWork station between mealtimes, resounding with the silence of men microdosing to look at their computers.

I was one of few visitors who had not paid between $900 for a sleeping bag space to $7,000 for a private house. I had signed up for a three-hour kitchen shift in exchange for free meals and access to the natural mineral springs for one afternoon in July. Before I sliced two boxes of white onions, a chef placed a wet paper towel on the corner of my cutting board to soak up the onion moisture before it could reach my eyes. “I learned this trick from TikTok,” he said. I did not shed a single tear. My friends have often described kitchen work as grueling, cocaine-fueled, and cutthroat, but the kitchen at Esalen felt sincerely like a space of play and experimentation. The cooks laughed and chatted with each other, leisurely eating while prepping organic summer vegetables grown on the farm. Today, the institute has an anti-drug policy and advertises itself as a place where psychedelic experiences are integrated, not administered. I had imagined interacting with staff members of varying degrees of high, but the portals of openness I felt from each person did not seem like the result of substances.

“This emotional resonance accumulates in the land—the land is reciprocally charged with every presence that has been charged by it.”

During my own lunch hour, I sat at a picnic table with a yoga instructor who had been living on the property for three years. She said that people become particularly porous as soon as they enter Esalen, willing to reveal their innermost desires to complete strangers. “It’s free-range therapy,” she joked. This emotional resonance accumulates in the land—the land is reciprocally charged with every presence that has been charged by it. Later, I learned that the institute is built over the ancestral lands of the Esselen people, the Indigenous tribe who inhabited the Santa Lucia Mountains for over 6,000 years. Those with terminal illnesses were taken to the mineral springs for end-of-life rituals that facilitated their transit from this life to the next. I learned that the pool of knowledge that psychedelic guides draw from is indebted to the generations of Oaxacan shamans who have conducted psilocybin ceremonies for centuries. The mushroom is not perceived as a psychoactive drug but instead as its own spiritual entity we engage in a reciprocal relationship with. This animistic worldview makes space for both the possible therapeutic effects of a journey and the sublime obscurity one might encounter during such an exchange.

Virtually every dimension of my life has been touched by Silicon Valley techno-capitalism and its desire to optimize human productivity. When I saw Esalen’s parking lot filled with Teslas among the ancient redwoods on Highway One, their ichthyses glinting with “Science” instead of “Jesus,” I didn’t blink twice. Still, I believe there is something in tripping that can’t be captured by the empirical gaze, a quality that resists becoming interpolated in the matrix of self-improvement. In 2006, Esalen lecturer Roland Griffiths published a landmark pharmacology paper titled “Psilocybin Can Occasion Mystical-Type Experiences Having Substantial and Sustained Personal Meaning and Spiritual Significance,” the first rigorously-designed, double-blind, placebo-controlled study of psychedelics since the War on Drugs was declared. Participants were asked to complete a questionnaire that evaluated the psilocybin’s effects, with a numerical ranking system which evaluated feelings of a transcendent or oceanic boundlessness, intuitions of an ultimate reality, awe of the sacred, sensations of internal and external unity, and a deeply-felt positive mood. The phrase “mystical-type” suggests that these experiences can be typified with clinical soundness, and that these altered states can be recorded and taxonomized for the sake of healing.

There are times when my life in California feels like a simulation of someone living in California. I want to give into the allure of microdoses and macrobiotics, to believe that the atomizing structural conditions I feel under capitalism can be overcome through transformations directed at my body. I want the “mystical-type” experience to show me that collective unity is achievable through regular exercise and shifts in my mindset. I know what is much more difficult is the concerted political action needed to materialize such an imaginary. I wish I could say that there is something inherently anti-capitalist about psychedelic experiences—while tripping, I often find myself cycling through thought loops over single-use plastics, meat farms, oil spills, etc.—but this would be too hopeful. They are only mirrors of what is already there. Conversely, to attribute the political activity of the ’60s to a drug would be to diminish the revolutionary dreams that spread organically across the globe, dreams I feel recommitted toward crystallizing every time I trip.

I have never been on a guided journey before, but I have felt existentially altered by my acid experiences. Every year, on my birthday, I take a quarter tab and go on a multi-hour walk through San Francisco. Some of my trips have been disturbing while others have been euphoric, but they always seem to bring me to the same conclusion: everything is real except money (money is artifice), I should call my mom more often, I should tell my friends I love them more often, the world is beautiful and unknowable, it’s so weird I will die someday and even weirder that I lived. I see myself on a grid of everyone who has ever existed and ever will exist, and I think of the chance and indeterminacy that led to my creation. The chain of causality feels so unlikely it becomes surreal. I don’t think I have experienced ego dissolution, but I think often of my impermanence on earth, that every day I am endowed with consciousness is a coincidence. It feels deceptively simple, but the significance is profound. I exit my ennui and see myself as a force interconnected with other forces unseen, that my sadness is sourced from my will to individuate myself from these forces. It’s almost as if I can see every living thing’s auratic glow. The last time I was in Big Sur, my friend and I took mescaline and drove down Highway One, past the Esalen Institute, until we hit the road closure from the mudslide. I saw a snow-white stallion standing alone in the fog. When I got out of the car and reached my hand out, the horse walked toward me, likely thinking I had a carrot. I opened my palm to show the horse I had nothing, and the horse squinted and walked away. If someone asked me to qualify this image, I wouldn’t know what to say, only that it was surreal and inexplicable, unlike anything else.