“Deep in the human unconscious is a pervasive need for a logical universe that makes sense. But the real universe is always one step beyond logic.” ~Frank Herbert, Dune
I was born January 13, 1984 in Los Angeles, California. At the age of four, my family moved to Tucson, Arizona, where I would spend the next twenty years before leaving to the Bay Area for graduate school. My parents were both immigrants—my mother from Mexico and my father from Iran. My childhood was painful. I felt alienated at school. By high school I was clinically depressed and suicidal. Though I chose to go to church as a child, I was an atheist by the time I became a teen. Existence seemed bleak. A month after graduating high school someone I had just met that day gave me a handful of mushrooms while I was on my way to see my favorite band, Tool, play for the first time. Little did I know it was going to be one of the most significant days of my life.
Once Tool hit the stage, the mushroom’s effects began. My experience of time dissolved. There was only this present moment. My consciousness rushed toward a threshold that I perceived to be death. The movie The Matrix came to mind. I felt like the character, Neo, about to be unplugged from the Matrix. And like his first time being unplugged, I did not know what was on the other side. For fifteen minutes I held back from crossing this line and then, out of curiosity, I relaxed and let my being move forward. What occurred was an explosion in my consciousness to a degree I had never experienced. I could feel every cell of my being orgasmically rejoice in love and celebration. I felt eternal—that my consciousness existed before the Big Bang and will exist after death. There was a familiarity to this feeling, as if I had known it all along. Then a voice—strong and not my own—arose in my consciousness to say “Jahan.” I asked if this was real. The voice replied, “Yes.” Every wall I had built in my heart collapsed. I broke into a gushing river of tears for the next 90 minutes.
“Ride the spiral of our divinity and still be a human.” ~Tool
“So crucify the ego, before it’s far too late.
To leave behind this place so negative and blind and cynical.
And you will come to find that we are all one mind.
Capable of all that’s imagined and all conceivable.” ~Tool
I knew this was the voice of God—a recognition of something I thought was impossible. The experience continued telepathically. I realized that, beneath my awareness, this being was always seeing through my eyes and hearing through my ears. It had been doing so my entire life. It was also simultaneously doing this within everyone else. It registered every experience in the cosmos. I witnessed each instant of my life flash by, frame by frame, all leading to this one moment. I grasped that all the pain I experienced was necessary and precisely choreographed by a divine intelligence to bring me to this breakthrough so that I could dissolve into this union. At this level of relationship with God, I felt I knew everything, including the location of every atom in the universe. I was one with the larger mind, and yet still wholly an individual self. I felt the greatest contentment I had ever known. The being asked “What do you want?”. Even though I did not need anything in this state of wholeness, I thought I should apply some effort to at least ask one question and harvest a nugget of golden wisdom.
For nine months before this moment I had spent six hours walking each day contemplating the nature of our existence and looking for a purpose to my life. Almost everything else seemed meaningless. I deeply yearned to understand how and why we existed. At this moment during the mushroom journey I asked God, “What are we?”—we referring to us as human beings. The response came from this encompassing being in the form of visions. These visions were accompanied with an immediate understanding of what they meant. I saw light arise from the ground and fill everybody in the arena. I understood that we are love and light and that those qualities are one and the same. Light was wholly intelligent.
“Change is coming.
Now is my time.
Listen to my muscle memory.
Contemplate what i have been clinging to.” ~Tool
I was then taken through our solar system and realized that “outer space” was the same space right in front of me here on Earth. Just as our bodies that evolved on Earth need vessels to go out in outer space, light needs the vessels of our physical bodies, these “space-time” ships, to explore our spatial and temporal dimensions. When these “bio-vessels” die, we simply move into another. Eternal life of an individual soul, wholly connected through a central uniting being, without the possibility of death, is bliss.
I grasped that our identities are the creation of our imagination. This world was in fact Heaven. This realization had profound implications for me. Up to this point, I had thought of existence as a miserable hell. In this moment the contradiction of believing I had been in Hell when I was actually in Heaven brought up anger and the feeling of having been lied to my whole life. I understood that others in my life were sending me the wrong message (ultimately that life is hell) and in this moment I understood that they did not have awareness of what I was now being shown. We were already in God’s palace and the only thing that stops us from living this way is the shortcomings of our collective awareness. It seemed that there would come a time in our future where all humans realize this and we will treat the planet and each other as if we are in Heaven.
Lessons were given on how to live life. The most important was that this being coming from the stance of absolute unity told me that the most important values in life are love and learning. These are the guiding values that are most important in all existence. Love is by far the most important; miles behind is learning. Everything else, and this cannot be overstated, was so far behind these values that they seemed almost empty. Love is the most intelligent force in the cosmos. It is always pointing in the right direction. Learning helps us adapt, evolve, and move further in that direction. Both of these, ultimately, move toward unity. I was told that if a person orients their life with these two values, they would never have to worry about holding the complexity of everything else. Seeing through the lens of these two values allows one to recognize what is important in each instant.
“Pneuma.
Reach out beyond.
Wake up remember.
We are born of one breathe, one word.
We are all one spark, eyes full of wonder.” ~Tool
When the experience ended I went to the highest seat in the arena to look over the entire Tucson Convention Center. I knew this was the moment that my life had changed and I felt privileged to have the awareness to take that in. I contemplated that experience almost daily for the next seven years. Two decades later I am still integrating what occurred and still find myself in awe. I saw how drastically and quickly life can be transformed with psychedelics. That moment awakened a passion for learning that become my greatest source of fuel for the next fifteen years of academia. A month later I started college as a neuroscience major with the hope of understanding the link between matter and mind in an effort to create a scientific understanding of consciousness. Privately, I hoped to pursue research on psychedelics, though not much was happening in the field at this time because research on psychedelics was largely restricted. A couple semesters later I came across a passionate physics professor with a similar hunger for knowledge and switched my major to physics. I believed it would give me a fundamental understanding of the universe. I majored in physics and mathematics for the next three years. A psilocybin journey three years into my major told me to leave physics and focus more directly on mysticism. This brought up tremendous fear since the path of studying physics seemed to hold more social and financial security. At the same time, my intuition said to trust the experience. Studying philosophy and psychology were the closest things to understanding mystical experiences in the undergraduate context, so I switched my major to philosophy in order to better understand consciousness. I graduated with a major in philosophy and minors in psychology, physics, and mathematics.
A few months after graduating, I enrolled in John F. Kennedy University to work on my master’s degree in Consciousness and Transformation and used all the math I had learned to support myself as a math tutor. During this time, I was introduced to psychotherapy and have been studying it since. In tandem I joined Diamond Heart, a school focused on integrating Eastern philosophy with Western psychology, for four years. After my master’s, I started work on my doctorate in Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness at the California Institute of Integral Studies. While working on my dissertation, I went into three more multi-year trainings. It was during a psychedelic experience that I was advised to undertake each training. I underwent a training within a Mazatec Mushroom tradition as well as in Hakomi, a two-year mindfulness-based somatic-psychotherapy comprehensive training. For two years I assisted the Psychedelic-Assisted Psychotherapy Certificate Training at the California Institute of Integral Studies. During this time I started facilitating legal psilocybin mushroom ceremonies in Jamaica as part of the Atman Retreat team. In 2020 I became a mentor at the School of Consciousness Medicine that trains guides. Each day I am filled with gratitude for the psilocybin mushroom experience that first transformed my life. I can see how everything since has been a ripple from that psychedelic experience. It has been my greatest resource during dark moments and it has allowed me to deeply embrace all the light that followed.
Similar experiences to my own have occurred in the lives of many others. In almost two decades of researching the transformation, development, and evolution of consciousness, I know of no more powerful means of transforming consciousness than those that use the assistance of psychedelics. This is not to say that psychedelics are substitutes for psychotherapy, meditation, or working within a community. In fact, I believe all these practices can be synergistic and that psychedelics deeply enhance these practices. Psychedelics can lead to deeply painful and frightful experiences. The help of a therapist or guide, the awareness cultivated in meditation, and friends and family are all useful sources of support. I hope that those who want these experiences find the resources they need. Movements toward decriminalization and legalization are currently underway. Several retreat centers exist and many more are already in the planning stage. I hope the following work supports the bringing of psychedelics out of the shadows and into the light, so that they can be seen as wholesome, healing, and perhaps humanity’s greatest untapped resource.
