SPEAKER_01 0:00

SPEAKER_00 1:02

The first time I took LSD before the trip started going bad, I said, like, how does anyone ever have a bad trip? Like I don't even understand that. It's kind of like falling off a horse, too. Like, once you understand just how bad a bad trip can get, it's very scary. I feel like a bad trip on psychedelics is something that the human psyche is not designed to bear. I felt so damaged by my years of LSD use that I'm amazed to see how much God has healed me psychologically now. God can restore you beyond what you can even imagine.

SPEAKER_01 1:34

Hi, I'm Glenn from Speak Life. We like to see all things through the lens of Jesus. I'm thrilled today to be able to talk to Ashley Landy, the author of the book, The Thing That Would Make Everything Okay Forever, Transcendence, Psychedelics, and Jesus Christ. You are described on the cover of your book as an artist and an author. So, Ashley, um, after some origin stories from you to begin with, I want to figure out when you first learned that you were an artist and when you first learned that you were an author.

SPEAKER_00 2:03

Okay, sure. So my father was a commercial interior designer. He had a his own commercial interior design firm in Kansas City where I grew up, on the Missouri side, actually. And so um he was always very particular. He designed our entire house. He was very particular about how things were arranged and always wanted things to look um very beautiful, and um he just had a particular geometric way of arranging things. We always had lots of beautiful art hanging in our house and unusual contemporary furniture and light fixtures. So I grew up in that environment, and and like I said, my dad was an artist as well. He enjoyed drawing um in addition to what he did for his profession. So it I feel like it's uh just kind of in my blood to be an artist, and um I'm just really grateful to have grown up in that environment and was such an artistic father. So I always enjoyed drawing. I'd say when it really took off for me was maybe in high school, and um then when I became a young adult, I kind of picked it back up again, and it's just always been something that I enjoy doing. And as far as writing, I also always enjoyed writing, but I remember when I was in elementary school, I was always writing just these stories that were tried to write fiction and these stories that were just kind of ripoffs of um like the equestrian, you know, girlhood stories that I like to read. And it wasn't until I got into high school that I remember um maybe my junior year in high school, I wrote something, an essay for my English class that was about my sister, who um she has passed away seven years ago, but she um just had a lot of difficulties when we were growing up. And so anyway, I wrote this essay that was that was kind of memoiristic, I guess. And I remember my English teacher who I'd had as a teacher before and she'd never really paid attention to me, she took me out of class and pulled me aside, and she she said very emphatically to me, you have to be a writer, you have to be a writer. And I felt like I had kind of tapped, like I said, when I tried to write fiction, I just wasn't particularly imaginative. I was just kind of ripping off whatever I read. But then when I wrote about my own experiences and my own life, I feel like I tapped into um I don't know, like what I what I was meant to do. And I kind of discovered, also through that teacher, discovered the genre of memoir. She had us read Angela's Ashes, and I just felt something move in me, like, oh, this is the kind of writing that that I'm meant to do.

SPEAKER_01 4:38

Is that because you're quite an internal person? Like you have a very vivid internal world, it seems to me, and and and reading your book, you very much get the sense of, oh, okay, I'm I'm on the inside of how Ashley is seeing this world, and it is an intense place to be. Is it an intense place to be inside the mind of Ashley Landry?

SPEAKER_00 4:59

I, you know, um, I guess it is. My mom is fond of saying, telling me, like, it's hard being you, isn't it? But but I also like the thing I love about a good memoir is that you can read about someone's experience that, you know, their actual life experiences might be completely foreign to yours, but there's something common in the experiences and the way that they convey them and the emotions they experience. So that's what I really love about memoir. And that's what I hope that I've done in my memoir. Even someone who's never taken psychedelics in their life, doesn't know anything about them, could still find something, you know, common, something to relate to, something to identify with, something that would um move them or or touch them or reach them. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 5:43

I think that's exactly what you achieved, um, because yeah, I've never been tempted to to take psychedelics in that way. I think I'm just too s I'm just too cowardly that I I'd have a bad trip. And so I and so very, very happy for for others to have gone on that trip. And and you kind of nevertheless made me see, oh, I see what people see in this. And in in a sense, the inevitability of, you know, if I'm you, then this is this is everything. And and I kind of jump in with both feet with you. So you definitely achieved that thing of helping people to see with your own eyes, um, with that that fierce kind of intense internality um that that you have. And and I I wonder whether that same thing was what was attracting you to psychedelics in the first place.

SPEAKER_00 6:30

Oh, for sure. Yeah, for sure. I, you know, I guess I was always attracted to extremes when I was I was raised um, I would say nominally Christian. I think my parents did did the best they could with what they were working with from their childhoods, and they became much stronger in their faith as they got older. But when I was growing up, it was um not a huge part of our lives. Like I didn't really we went to church on Sundays, most Sundays, but I didn't necessarily know what was in the Bible. Like I didn't I remember uh becoming a Christian as an adult. I was like, who's Paul? Like I know he's in there, but I don't really know who he is or what he did, you know. Um, and so and I just you know, when I became a Christian as an adult, like I literally had never read the Bible, and I just dismissed it out of hand, assumed I knew what was in it, based on my childhood experiences in church. But and then when I so then I was um I have 14, 15, it was really easy for me to just rebelliously declare that I was an atheist. I didn't even necessarily think that deeply about it, but I think I was always looking for a depth of feeling or a depth of experience, and I had already decided, like I said, offhandedly that I wasn't gonna find it in Christianity. And so then when I discovered what I thought was it in psychedelics, it felt revelatory. Like I became evangelistic about psychedelics. I just thought, you know, if everyone could just take psychedelics, you know, kind of the classic hippie, hippie thing, like in the 60s, people would say, Oh, if we could just, you know, get the president to take psychedelics, if we could just get all the pr uh politicians to take psychedelics. And so it would really burst my bubble, you know, when somebody would say to me, like, but like millions of people took psychedelics in the 60s and nothing really changed, I'd be like, Oh, well, you know, that was your yeah, true psychedelics have never been never been tried.

SPEAKER_01 8:25

Yeah, right. Like communism. Right, right.

SPEAKER_00 8:27

Exactly, exactly. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 8:29

So tell me about your first trip.

SPEAKER_00 8:31

Um, so my first trip was at the end of college. I had gotten a lot into drinking culture, and of course that was very destructive in a lot of ways, and you know, really not the transcendence that I was seeking, or the, you know, the depth of it. It was just so destructive in so many ways. And so I had kind of, I guess, moderated myself on that, so I thought. And toward the end of college, one of my good friends said that he had some psilocybin mushrooms, and so I had absolutely no inhibitions about it. I said, sure, why not? Let's do it. Um, I had I also had no expectations. Um, I didn't really know anything about bad trips. I didn't um I just didn't know anything at all. Yet I was completely open to it. And that that first time was um, yeah, it was, it seemed very transcendent. It seemed very fun and different and exotic and new and thrilling. It was there was really nothing spiritual about it. It was just, it was just fun. It was just fun. The sensory distortions and perceptions, you know, the visual distortions, the auditory distortions of listening to music and having it cut in and out and swell and crescendo and decrescendo. Like I just thought it was um really fascinating. But like I said, at that point there wasn't really anything spiritual about it, but it felt so new and so like I said, so exotic and so different from anything I'd ever experienced that I wanted, I wanted more of it.

SPEAKER_01 10:06

Yeah. So was it a kind of a a slow kind of incremental uh descent into trips that that got worse? Or did did you have a kind of a honeymoon period on them?

SPEAKER_00 10:17

Uh yes and no. So I tried psilocybin mushrooms, I think, a couple more times after that, and it was just the same thing, just fun. Didn't have a bad trip. Also, wasn't really a spiritual dimension to it that I perceived yet. And then I think um there came a point, maybe six months to a year later, that I was looking for um psilocybin mushrooms, and all I could find was LSD. I met someone who had LSD, and I said, Oh, sure, why not? Yeah, same thing, right? You know, and um that first time on LSD was shattering, I would call it. It was shattering. It was um I don't know if I could I remember saying afterward, like, that's either the best thing that's ever happened to me or the worst thing that's ever happened to me. Like I could not decide if it was a good thing or not. Like I said, it was very shattering. I felt like afterwards I didn't know who I was, I had no identity anymore. I um which was scary and exhilarating at the same time. So I guess I experienced what um people in the psychedelic world, I think, I'm not sure if Timothy Leary coined this term or he got it from like the Egyptian Book of the Dead or the Tibetan Book of the Dead, but um ego death. Like I experienced the quote unquote classic ego death on psychedelics, and it was um really, really destabilizing, really destabilizing. And I remember saying to you after that first trip, I don't know if I would ever do that again. And two weeks later I was doing it again. So um that's another thing. People love to say that psychedelics aren't addictive, and I don't think they are addictive in the in the sense of like you're not just dumping dopamine into your brain, like with cocaine or something like that. But I think they are they are addictive in a different sense that's that's really seductive. You get addicted to that spiritual experience, and even even when the spiritual experience is bad, um, like I would have said, I had this abstract concept of God that was kind of a synthesis of, I don't know, different concepts from Hinduism. Of course, Hinduism is polytheistic, but and Buddhism and just new age philosophy, and I would have said that I felt like I was encountering God through psychedelics, but slowly it morphed into like I am I'm worshiping LSC, like LSC was my god. Like that was how I experienced a different, a different um state of mind, you know, even if it was an extremely unpleasant state of mind. And I guess, sorry, to go back to the original question, I guess there was there was something of a honeymoon period, even after that initial really um shattering trip, there was something of a honeymoon period where I just felt like I was speeding towards some kind of enlightenment. Like there was some there was some answer to the essential question of life that I was going to reach, that was within my reach. You know, if I could just do one more trip, if I could just if I could just, you know, turn that corner, like I would, I would re- I would find the thing that would make everything okay forever. So there was there was that honeymoon period of of feeling like I was really making some kind of spiritual progress with psychedelics. Like things were happening, you know, like I was I was almost I almost had the key to everything. Um and it was a really I I just yeah um I I wrote about this in the book. I got to a really I started taking LSC by myself frequently and sometimes I would take it with other people, but even when I would take it with other people, I kind of crafted this whole like theology and religion around my LSD use and around things I'd experienced and and incorporated that into my artwork, and it got to a really scary point psychologically where I felt like the outside world was incomprehensible to me, and I'm sure I was incomprehensible to people that I would talk to about my my different theories and philosophies. Um and I actually, gosh, probably I'm trying to remember six months to a year after that initial LSD trip, I ended up checking into a mental hospital because I was just so uh I had just gotten so out of it. But of course, then at that point I still didn't want to tell anyone like LSC is what basically brought me to this place because I didn't want my LSD taken away, you know. I had it in my freezer in my apartment.

SPEAKER_01 14:54

Um yeah, it was I mean I just you you described so evocatively in the book, um, the with vividness what the internal world is like. And um you're you're able to make it seem seductive. Ego death. Ego death doesn't sound attractive. This shattering experience doesn't sound attractive, but you're also able to um talk about the the the transcendence and the and the feeling and the yearning that you're reaching towards the answer to everything. So this is going on on the inside of you. On the outside of you, um surely life is falling apart. Who who is on the outside of Ashley at this point looking in and what are they seeing?

SPEAKER_00 15:35

Oh yeah. I was I mean, um I worked at that point I worked temp jobs, and um, so I had no real stable income. I spent most of my days with my I had this little terrier mix, Gene Hackman, and I I had kind of like anthropomorphized him, you know, like he was my companion on all my trips.

SPEAKER_01 15:57

You named your dog Gene Hackman.

SPEAKER_00 16:00

Yes, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, I did. And um, and yeah, I I didn't have many friends at that point. I had one friend who lived up the block from me who uh supplied me, started supplying me with amphetamine pills, and so I would take those, like the day after I had a trip, I would take a speed pill and I would just draw for hours. And like I said, I thought, and that's another really corrosive thing about I'm sure anyone who's been addicted to methamphetamine or amphetamine, like you feel like you are a genius, like you are just a blazing genius, you're creating a masterpiece that to rival like the Sistine Chapel. I mean, it's just insane, and so I think that the extremely destabilizing effect of the LSD and then combined, I wouldn't take them at the same time, but like I said, I was taking it all, you know, like I would take LSD the night before, and then the day after I would take speed, and so it was yeah, my life was absolutely falling apart. I was losing my mind. I was losing my mind, I was really going crazy.

SPEAKER_01 17:05

Right. This this might take the story on too far in the timeline, but tell tell me how did you meet your your husband and and and how how did that and drugs work together?

SPEAKER_00 17:19

Yeah, so I met my husband at our acid dealer's house, which is a fun story to tell to our church friends. Um, you know, it's kind of like a little embarrassing, but I'm like, well, we're not gonna we're gonna be honest about it, what God has delivered us from. And um, yeah, so I met him there, and we started dating a few months after we initially met, and we got engaged like three weeks after, and of course we were taking LSD together this whole time. We got engaged um like three weeks after we started dating, and then we got married a month and a half after that. So it was very much, you know, we got married in a fever, like, and um, but we just celebrated 16 years of marriage, and um something else has changed since we spoke last. I'm 11 weeks pregnant with our fourth child, so yeah. Yeah, it's very exciting. So um, yeah, God has definitely restored and preserved our marriage, and I'm I'm so thankful for that. But yeah, that's how we met. He was just as into LSD as I was, and so it felt like a match made in heaven. And at that point, I was um I was still taking LSC, I had gotten out of the mental hospital, um, I had a job, you know, I was a little more stable, like I had kind of figured out how I thought, you know, I had gotten in control of the drug. Like I could still take it, but I wasn't as um frantic about creating this world as I had been before, and I was kind of staying a little more in touch with the real world. Like I said, I had a job. Um and um yeah, so we we got married really quickly and just fell in love on LSD, basically. Wow. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 19:02

Wow. And we will think about how that and then children coming along um, you know, it started to change some of your outlooks on things. But let's just um press pause on the timeline and let's go up to 30,000 feet and ask about the spiritual side of psychedelics and Timothy Leary, you've already mentioned. Um tell us um something about well, first of all, we'll think about how um how psychedelics and spirituality are often taught. Um and also what what is the sort of the spiritual reality as as you experienced it yourself? But but what what is what is the sort of the spiritual teachings that that often surround psychedelics?

SPEAKER_00 19:44

Yeah. So I feel like the beliefs that kind of organically tend to come out of psychedelic experiences very much uh revolve around pantheism. Um lots of new age spirituality, which new age spirituality is just kind of a grab bag of like whatever you want, you know. There's a lot of like Buddhism life, there's some Hinduism, there's um, yeah, there's a lot of like law of attraction type of stuff. Um just yeah, a lot of things like that. And so I feel like it's it's really fascinating to me. And I was reading um a few years ago, I was reading Miracles by C. S. Lewis, and he was talking about how pantheism is kind of the original, it's it's what human beings default to without any revelation. And I thought that was just really fascinating, and it got me thinking about kind of the obliterative nature of psychedelics, and as far as like they just the the ego death, you know, kind of erasing everything you've known, erasing and like you feel like you're at ground zero again. And so I just thought that was interesting to make that connection with what C.S. Lewis was arguing about pantheism and how that tends to be organically what comes out of psychedelic experiences because you feel like you feel like you're a part of everything and everything's a part of you. You feel like a lot of people come out thinking like they are God, like um the God delusions are a really common thing. I mean, Charlie Manson, Mel Lyman from the 60s, and I've read stories, contemporary lots of contemporary stories about ayahuasca shamans having you know messiah complexes, basically, which is really scary. But um, yeah, that's a common thing to be like, and I remember thinking along those lines, I remember around the time where I feel like God was really shaking things up for me and working on me, I remember thinking, like, you know, if we are God, like we collectively are God, and that's it. I just remember thinking, like, we're we're alone in the unit, like, it's just us. That and that thought really terrified me. Like when I really started breaking down, I think that was after I had we had our first child, like when I really started, which changed a lot for me. When I really started breaking down these concepts. And thinking about them. You know, there are people like there's another philosopher that my husband and I were both really into, named Alan Watts, who was big in the 60s. And he was very, you know, highly intelligent, could talk so in such a sophisticated way and like dress up these concepts to make them sound like so highfalutin, so sophisticated, that was very attractive to me. It sounded very intellectual. But then once you kind of like bring these concepts down to earth and break them down, then you're left with you know conclusions like that. Like, and I just realized like I don't I don't want to be God. I like it's just so apparent to me that I'm not God, you know. And and furthermore, I don't I don't want to be, it was terrifying. So um yeah, I'm sorry, I feel like I lost the thread of the original question.

SPEAKER_01 22:48

No, just pressing into the yeah, that that whole spiritual side of things and what tends to be taught and the beliefs that tend to surround um. Okay, yes, yeah. Um and so, yeah, a lot of pantheism. Um so in interestingly, you know, pantheism you might think of as a very pre-modern thing, and C.S. Lewis might, you know, talk in exactly these terms, is there's this sort of pre-modern thing. Um you also had a little bit of dabbling with sort of new atheism and Christopher Hitchens and and and that kind of stuff um as a as a quite sort of post-modern thing. Um tell tell me about that that kind of uh interaction.

SPEAKER_00 23:25

Yeah, so that was before um I think before I tried psychedelics, that was actually part of my I had gotten I I loved Christopher Hitchens. He was my favorite out of the New Atheist. And I wasn't as into Dawkins and Sam Harris, but I just Christopher Hitchens really click with me. I think because he was very intellectual and he could sound very clever and very smart, and I was really attracted to that. And he was welcome.

SPEAKER_02 23:52

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 23:53

Yes, yeah, yeah. And he he was a gifted writer, and he was, although when I went back um a couple years ago and started reading some of his writing, it just seemed it didn't seem nearly as clever to me, I'll put it that way. It seemed very shallow and and it made me sad. But at the time, I was very I was very attracted to that. And um, I remember his book, God is not great, how religion spoils everything or religion poisons everything was coming out. Yeah, was coming out, and and I just I was attracted to that, you know, it was such a bold title, such a bold declaration. And I remember um and this was at so this was after I had already tried mushrooms, but like I said, the mushroom experience didn't have a spiritual dimension to me, but this was before the LSC. And I remember getting that book, and I was so excited to read it, and I I also felt like I was starting to feel this urgency about um, you know, my dad would argue with me about atheism, and I felt like I could never really um I don't know, back up what I was saying in a way that was that certainly not in a way that was satisfying to him, but also in a way that was not satisfying to me. And so I just felt this urgency to um be able to more effectively argue for atheism, I guess. And so I I was so excited to read this book, and I remember I got maybe halfway through it, and I just felt so depressed. I just felt, I felt like if this is what's true, you know, and he he talks about how um we we experience transcendence through like literature, through art, through, through these wonderful cultural things. And now I look back on that, like he talks about like Dostoevsky and you know, people who were conveying very Christian ideas, and I think that's interesting, but but I just remember thinking like it just doesn't it doesn't feel like enough. It does it just does not feel like enough. And so I just found that was just a really disillusioning experience. I just found his argument so inadequate all of a sudden, and I just didn't even read the rest of the book. I just found it so depressing. And um, so yeah, that was my experience with Christopher Hitchens.

SPEAKER_01 26:11

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SPEAKER_00 29:01

I mean so yeah, I'd read that Sam Harris had experience with psychedelics, and I thought that was interesting. Um but I I mean I really hesitate to say there are positives because I think I think you're right. I think it it shows that like most people, I don't know if most is accurate, but a lot of people um don't come out of the psychedelic experience still being atheists. Some of them do though, some of them do. And um like I remember from one of the Johns Hopkins studies about um that was like giving terminal cancer patients psilocybin. I remember reading that one of the studies that was published, and one of the women said, I, you know, that she did remain an atheist, and she came out of it with the conclusion that when she died her body would return to the earth and go down and nourish the roots. And I just remember thinking like I don't find that comforting in any measure whatsoever, but I I guess it worked for her, maybe. But it's that's not a million miles, is it?

SPEAKER_01 30:07

From the pantheist idea. Which is interesting, isn't it? Like like if if we are God, then like in in what sense is that different from we become fertilizer? You know? Like it's it's it's interesting how the sort of the pre-modern, the postmodern, the pre-Christian, the post-Christian thing kind of come together at that point.

SPEAKER_00 30:25

Yeah, yeah, for sure. I mean that definitely would be like a pant, like I I become a part of everything. I go back to nourish, you know, the soil, to nourish the roots, like to fortify the soil. Like, yeah, that would absolutely be. And I I wrote about in the book, this is kind of a different thread, but um one of our friends gave us a children's book that like broke, like I said, it took these Alan Watts sophisticated sounding concepts and broke them down to, and there was this child, the narrator of the book, was like, uh like I am my puppy, I am my feet, like or uh like I am my I am the tree, I am my feet, I am the puppy across the street. And it's like wow, when you put it that way, it just sounds absolutely stupid and absurd and like not comforting whatsoever. And I just remember thinking, like, looking at my toddler son, like I don't want him to be incorporated into the all when he, you know, inevitably does pass away.

SPEAKER_01 31:17

Like it's monism, isn't it? Like both both yeah, both the both the pre-modern and the postmodern thing are monism. We're all the same thing. Um and therefore, yeah, that that kind of arose all that sense of a personal transcendence. Yeah, there might be you could call every everything transcendent, but if everything is transcendent, then so is the compost, and that's what you become. Um what we really want is the other to be personal and for us not to have an ego death, but for us to remain persons in communion with that person. And that's precisely what both the pre-Christian and the and the anti-Christian thing doesn't get. But yeah, sorry.

SPEAKER_00 31:54

Yeah, yeah, no, that's really good. That's really good. Yeah, so I I don't find yeah, the the pantheism comforting in any measure. So, like you said, there is that reality though that it does um tend to um like super hardline atheists who have a psychedelic. I don't know about Sam Harris, I haven't read like how his philosophy has changed. I think he's still an atheist, right? Like he's kind of a Buddhist, maybe.

unknown 32:19

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 32:19

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 32:20

But um it it it opens it does open you up to the fact that there is a spiritual dimension and that is real, but then it takes you in a completely wrong direction, you know.

SPEAKER_01 32:32

Let's talk about that. Let's talk about the the the negative side of um of this descent in some ways. Um and there there is a kind of a priestly caste sometimes that sort of develops around the psychedelic community and people who want to take you on these journeys. Um so tell us tell us about that and some some of the the sinister side.

SPEAKER_00 32:56

Yeah, for sure. So um, like we know from the Bible, there are absolutely powers and principalities, like there are demons at work in the world, you know, there are spirits at work in the world all the time. And so I remember there was a point at which I um I like the only time in my life that I've seen a visual manifestation of a spirit was when I was heavily into using psychedelics. I was not on drugs at the time, but it I remember it was one evening I lived alone in an apartment in Kansas City, and we um woke up in the middle of the night. Like I said, I wasn't I hadn't taken psychedelics in a few days. I woke up in the middle of the night, and my dog, I remember I saw in the corner of my room there was like this dark column of smoke, and um that really freaked me out. I could tell like it wasn't a an actual human being, but I knew it was something, and so I told myself, that's not real, you know, like this isn't happening, I'm just imagining this. And then my dog, Jean, stood up and started bristling and barking very intently at the corner, and I lived on the second floor of an apartment and it was in the middle of the night, there weren't any noises, like it was obvious he was very focused on that, and that that really freaked me out. And at that point I had no like biblical framework to understand spiritual warfare, and so there was almost like this, even though it freaked me out, there was almost like this um enchanting um aspect of it. Like I felt like I was in this cosmic war between good and evil, but because I didn't have any kind of biblical framework for what was actually good, um the lines became really blurred of like what was actually good, what was actually evil. Um and so that that was really scary. And I think just from a lot of the stories I've heard, like I said, about these ayahuasca shamans and um becoming like having Messiah complexes and and saying that they are God, and some of them will say like that they are Jesus Christ. And um it just like things get so muddled. Like I said, there's no there's just there's no framework, there's no absolute truth. It's just wherever the psychedelics lead you, and whatever spirits are working behind the psychedelics, wherever they want to lead you, you become very malleable, very impressionable. Because the the psychedelic experience, like it can seem very, very real. Like I think that was one of the things, like, along with the transcendence, like it felt like this very real thing that I hadn't experienced. And I suspect that's um, well, I suspect that's statement at work, but but I talked to um there's a man named Jim Wilder who calls himself a neuro-theologian, which I think is a really fascinating term, and I talked to him about it a few years ago, and he said he suspects it's also connected to, of course, there's you know a spiritual reality, but there's also a material reality, but it's connected to the way that um psychedelics flood your brain with serotonin, that everything it makes everything seem related, like everything seems deeply meaningful, even if it's not. And I remember that really gave me a lot of insight looking back, you know. I remember there are times my husband and I would be walking, we'd be high in LC, we'd be walking in outside at night, and there'd be like one sock in the middle of the road, and it was like, whoa, like that sock is like gravid with meaning, you know. I don't know what meaning we would have assigned to it, but it seems like these things, and then it seems like also the thoughts you have are really profound and really meaningful, and um, and then kind of the next day you think over things and it's like, huh, I don't, you know, but at the time it can make everything seem really meaningful. So if someone has or is you know um prompted by a spirit to have a revelation that they are Jesus Christ, like that can feel very it can feel very real, and that's scary, because a lot of people have a lot of revelations in psychedelics. I mean, uh earlier I mentioned Charlie Charlie Manson, he's probably the most famous example, um, but there are plenty of lesser figures like him who just never ended ended up doing anything quite as heinous as he prompted other people to do, I guess. But um yeah, it's it's scary. It can get really, really, really dark. And that's something that I didn't really appreciate when I I first had you know, first tried those mushrooms and and it was this very shallow party experience, and I was kind of like, oh, like why do we people even I don't even know. And I remember saying that the first time I took LSD before the trip started going bad. I said, like, how does anyone ever have a bad trip? Like, I don't even understand that. And then once you once you under it's kind of like falling off a horse, too. Like, once you understand just how bad a bad trip can get, it's it's very scary. I feel like a bad trip on psychedelics is something that the human psyche is not designed to bear. It's just not. And so I I'm very thankful and grateful that I feel like God has healed me so much from that because I definitely had some um t tell us about that.

SPEAKER_01 38:14

We'll we'll we'll we'll pull out of the abyss and you can start talking about yeah, how having your first child started waking you up to things and and how God was waking you up to things. Um, but yeah, let's let's just what what is a bad trip like?

SPEAKER_00 38:29

Um it's just a terrifying state. It's like a state of absolute terror and disintegration. It feels like um I think about um the Dementors in Harry Potter, like it felt like all the happiness and goodness had gone out of the world and it would never come back again. Like that's that's what it feels like. It's and it feels like it's interminable, it feels like it's gonna go on forever. Um it's yeah, it's a very scary experience. It's something that I would never wish on anyone, and something that I wish I had never experienced, but like I said, I feel like God has been so faithful to heal me from a lot of that. It it felt like in a lot of ways there was a a real like uh sorrowful loss of innocence that went along with it. That was um that was really scary. And if you look at, if you kind of look at like the cultural arc of psychedelics in the 60s, and I think it's probably happening again, and that's why I'm sad, but I'm also hopeful that there are going to be a lot of psychedelic refugees that the church needs to be ready to receive. But like you can see that kind of arc of like idealism, utopianism, almost like oh, psychedelics are gonna save the world. Like, I still see people saying that on Twitter, and also, you know, uh that psychedelics are gonna save the world, they're gonna transform people, and then there's like that disillusionment and that coming down. Um, and it's interesting, like I I experienced that in my own life, and you can kind of see it like writ large in culture too.

SPEAKER_01 40:00

Well, Sam Harris's podcast is called Waking Up. Um, how did Ashley Landy uh begin to wake up from some of this? You you just alluded to your first child. Um what did what did pregnancy do to you? What did having a child do to you?

SPEAKER_00 40:15

Yeah, um gosh. Uh so I think there was something, there's another um interesting story, and I wrote about this in the book. In the new age world, um among women, like natural birth is like um this rite of passage that um that people will say, like, oh, it can be a lot of the birth books I was reading, you know, in my my first pregnancy was about how birth can be this blissful experience, like it doesn't really have to be painful at all. It can just be you can just float on a Zen cloud, you know, it's all about it's all in your mind, like it's all about controlling things. And so I think like encountering real suffering in childbirth um was was an interesting experience for me. And at the time I that's another thing about the new age ideology, like I didn't have I didn't have a a framework for real suffering, my own or or others. You know, there was no framework for it, there was certainly no redemptive framework for it. And so that was that was a I'd say like a somewhat disillusioned experience, but then just being overwhelmed with love for this baby, and um I it just breaks you wide open. I just can't describe it like the tenderness that you feel, and just the yeah, I you feel like you've never really known love before, you know, and just the wonder that you feel looking at your baby, it's that was really profound. And I think when that collided with my worldview, like I was talking about earlier, this thinking about oh, my baby's just, you know, uh Alan Watts always had this kind of cringy, gross phrase called, like, I think he said like skin bags, like we're just all walking around in our skin bags, which is so growth tonning. Yeah, and like that we're oh, we just have this illusion of separateness, but we're not actually separate, you know, we're like monism, like you said, we're just all part of the one, we're all part of the all, and and part of enlightenment is breaking through that illusion and fully realizing that we're part of the all. But then when I I would look at my baby, like I said, and he was as he was growing into a toddler, and I'm like, I don't want him to be part of the all. Like, I don't want his in individual identity to just be disintegrated upon death, and he just gets reabsorbed into this all, and it's like he never even existed. Like that that was just heartbreaking to me. So I think, like I said, when the my love for my child collided with these views, it just things just weren't adding up. And there was also there were several things that God was doing at the same time. My husband had he was kind of in the same place as me. He was just burnt out on psychedelics, he felt like he wasn't finding the truth that he thought he was going to find, and so he actually started getting interested in Christianity. And at first I said, No way, you know, I am not interested in Christianity, been there, done that, so I thought. And um he finally got to a point where he said, I feel led to see if this is true. He wasn't convinced yet, but he said he just felt led to see if it was true, and he was going to do it whether I was coming or not. And that made me upset, and I I there was part of me that I I wanted to be able to say yes, I'll try it too, but I there was just such still such resistance in me. But I did, I think when I was like eight months pregnant with our daughter, I ended up going to church with him, and I remember just sitting. I wanted to sit in the back, I don't want to talk to people, you know, I don't really want to be here. Um and but I just remember. Sobbing during the the worship at the beginning of the service. And it was but it was yeah, afterward it was easy to be like, oh well, I'm pregnant, you know, that's just all that is. And but um there was something in me that like I was so tired of basically trying to save myself, which was basically, you know, what I had been doing for years, and it wasn't working, I knew it wasn't working. And then around the same time as well, like earlier in my pregnancy, and um after I had our son, our first child, I had reconnected with a friend that I knew from childhood, and she had been raised Christian, and then she had um really become devoted to her faith when she was in college. And I remember at the time she sent um an email out to my friends and I, you know, the group of us that were friends in childhood, and I just thought it was so hokey. And she was talking about how like God had set her on fire and what God was doing in her life, and I just remember thinking, like, oh my gosh, are you serious? And um she met her husband, and and anyway, so I after we both had children, somehow, I can't even remember how, we reconnected, and I started we started meeting up for play dates just every few months, and I would talk to her a little bit about spiritual things, and I would just kind of go off on whatever tangent I was on about I don't even remember, you know, whatever theory I had, and and she's she's a very gentle, humble person, and she would just respond to me with scripture. She would just say, Well, you should kind of pause for a while after I said something, and she'd say, like, well, um, the Bible says, and then she would just recite a Bible verse, and I was kind of impressed. I was like, wow, she knows the Bible verses by memory, that's cool. But but I was, you know, it didn't at the beginning, at first anyway, it didn't really have an effect on me, because I just thought, oh, you know, whatever. Even though, like I said, I was so arrogant because I didn't really even know what was in the Bible. I had never actually read it. But I just looking back, that was so um I hate to use the word effective, that sounds kind of sterile, but but the way that she ministered to me, like she really did just she didn't get worked up if I said something stupid, which I'm sure I said plenty of very stupid, heretical things, but she didn't get all worked up. She would just say, like, well, you know, the Bible says this. And then um in the midst of that, her she had two children already, and her younger child, her daughter, who was two at the time, started getting sick, and they didn't know what was going on. It was like two weeks she was running a fever, she had some bleeding in her gums, and and finally they got a diagnosis of leukemia, and um, like it was like three weeks later she died, and so just hor horribly tragic, so so sad. Um, and I just think that really shook me up. Like, on one hand, there I kind of had this anger, like, even though I I thought that she was misled, you know, in her Christianity, like I thought, I thought it was kind of silly. I also felt like, but she's a good person. Like, she's a good person, she lived right, she didn't have sex before marriage, she has done everything right, like she is she is a good person. Why would this happen to her? This isn't fair, and I am very much not a good person, and my son is still alive, and um, so that kind of shook me up, and also, like I was talking about earlier, like my worldview, which was just like I said, just kind of this mishmash of a bunch of different things, but I there was no framework for suffering, like I there was no redemptive framework for suffering. Like, okay, what what happens after a toddler dies, you know, a a very sad, tragic, presumably painful, distressing, you know, death. Like, I just had no framework for that. And I think there was also something very, very powerful in seeing how she and her husband um suffered well and suffered with hope. Um, you know, like like Paul says, like, we do not grieve as those without hope. Like, we have hope. And and I I didn't have that hope. So it was really intriguing and and attractive, even, even in the sadness of it all, I just kept thinking, like, I could not survive this if this happened to my child. Like, I I could not survive this. Um, because I just didn't have any, like I said, I didn't have any framework for for hope in the face of something that profoundly tragic. And so that that had a huge effect on me, a huge effect on me. Her the way that she ministered to me and the way that she and her husband suffered with hope, and they were broken down but not destroyed, you know, like Paul says this, and that that yeah, that had a really powerful effect. So, like I said, I feel like God was doing several things at the same time working on me, but those were the those were the big things.

SPEAKER_01 49:03

Wow. And and so did it come to a head in a kind of a come to Jesus moment, like if if the film of Ashley Landy's life was being shut, where where where is the cameras being set up? What's what's the what's this scene?

SPEAKER_00 49:15

Yeah, if there was one moment I could point to, and I wrote about this in the book, it would be um maybe gosh, maybe six months to a year after Joella, the little girl, passed away, and after I'd had my daughter, and Carrie and I had stayed in touch, and she had um that was another thing too, that like I felt like, you know, at her at Joella's funeral, and then afterward, I almost felt like Carrie, um, her mother was like the one who was ministering to me, who was encouraging me. And I'm like, you're the one who's who lost their daughter, you know. So and but she um so we kind of stayed in touch, just sporadically with would email and and um she mentioned once that um the hymn, It Is Well With My Soul, was really powerful for her and a husband in their in their grieving, and she shared with me the story behind that hymn, and which is one of very profound loss. And I remember she said I should try listening to it, and I said, Okay. And I put it on a playlist and I kind of forgot about it, and then I I put that playlist on one day in the spring, and my children we were sitting on the front porch, my children were playing, I had the window open, so I could hear the music through the and I wasn't even paying attention to what was the music that was playing. And then all of a sudden that hymn came on, and I just felt like it the Holy Spirit just snapped my attention to it, and I I've heard the lyrics. Right.

SPEAKER_01 50:42

And um written by Horatio Spafford, who just lost his was it his it's certainly his children, was it his wife as well? I think his wife was the one who survived, and his children died, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 50:53

Yes, and I think it was like four daughters at sea. Yeah, it was just just crazy. And um and just so listening to those lyrics and it just had this profound effect, and I remember like the idea, like my sin is nailed to the cross and I bear it no more. I felt like I I was trying so hard to like understand the whole Jesus thing, and like, you know, I I can and coming from New Age ideology where there is no sin, like sin is just um I remember my yoga teacher said something about like we're all born perfect crystals and we're just then we get dirt on us from being handled, and that's the if there is any concept of sin, that's all it is, and we just need to, you know, clean ourselves off through meditation and yoga and you know become enlightened. And even that though I remember like once I started thinking about it, I was like, but where does the dirt come from? Like the dirt that got on us has to come from somewhere. Um, and and so I I had been trying to like intellectually get at like I don't understand this whole thing of Jesus dying for me and Jesus becoming sin and Jesus bearing my sin and dying, like I just don't get that. And um and it was really frustrating because I I was feeling so attracted on one hand and at a point of spiritual desperation, but I just wasn't getting it. And there was something about that day and hearing those lyrics that just pushed me over the edge. Like I felt like I I understood, not even in a way that I could necessarily verbally articulate at the time, or but I just I just understood. And um, and of course I was weeping, you know, and my husband came home from work that night, and I remember telling him, um, we still had some little like I had an icon of the Hindu goddess Kali, which was really scary looking, and now I feel bad that my kids saw that, and a little like Buddha statuette, a little Ganesh, just these little, you know, religious trinkets from Hinduism and Buddhism. And when he came home that night, I said, we need to get rid of all this stuff. And my I had some astrology books and things like that, and um, so we just kind of did a purge and he he agreed wholeheartedly and we got rid of all that. So if if I had to point to to one moment, like a conversion moment, I think that would probably that would probably be it.

SPEAKER_01 53:09

How long ago was that?

SPEAKER_00 53:10

Yeah. That was let's see, my son is about to turn 15. That was thir 13 years ago, maybe? Okay. All right.

SPEAKER_01 53:21

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 53:23

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 53:23

So after 13 years, you're still Ashley the author and the artist and the um the profoundly internal woman who feels things and you know, you want everything to be made okay forever. You're still you're still seeking transcendence and and all that kind of stuff. Um how does Jesus relate to that Ashley, who has always gone after that sense of transcendence, and and for for many years sought it in in drugs and in trips. Um I'm brought to what I'm thinking about is um in Ephesians 5, Paul um says uh do not get drunk on wine, but be filled by the Holy Spirit. And it's a fascinating verse because it it says that kind of drunkenness um and the Holy Spirit are both similar and dissimilar to one another. Um they're similar in that he's he's he doesn't just say quit it with the alcohol. Um he says quit it with the alcohol, have the you know, be filled with the Holy Spirit. So there's there's something that is similar about the Holy Spirit to um the effects of a drug. But there's also something very different because he doesn't say don't get drunk on wine, get drunk on the Holy Spirit. There's something different. So as you think about what you have found in Jesus, how is he both similar to the trips and and how is he different?

SPEAKER_00 54:54

Yeah. Um, you know, I feel like it's it's all the difference in the universe to know that there is a there is a person at the center of the universe. There is like he is the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. Like he is he's a person. And before, when I like I said, I had this vague conception of God when I was into psychedelics, but it wasn't personal. It wasn't, and it was also I didn't know if that God was good or not. Like, you know, sometimes I'd have a good trip, sometimes I'd have a bad trip. Like I didn't trust that God, because there was no there was no human element to that God, there was no personal element to that God. It was this impersonal thing out there, you know, if it was that at all, or it was like we're all kind of one and we're all collectively part of it, and like the collective makes the whole. And I feel like it's just all the difference in the world because Jesus is is good. God is good, and I can trust him fully. And he has has the reins at the center of the universe. Like that was the thing. I never knew who was in control before. I never knew, and there was also um, especially once I had had a bad trip, there was always a kind of um perilousness, I guess, to the highs on psychedelics. It just always felt like you never knew if you were gonna stay on the mountain. You never knew if you were going to, and so it's it's so I think I've said before, like my spiritual experiences of the presence of Jesus, and I have been blessed with like very strong um experiences of the presence of Jesus very, very immediate with me. There's a um clean, clean quality, there's a cleanness to it that there never was in psychedelics, and that's the only word that I can think of. That's like the word that always comes to mind. Maybe holiness would be a better word, um, like a purity, a a realness to it that was not present with psychedelics. And so I like I said, I just feel like it's it was all the difference in the world to me to realize, and also there was a really profound moment too, like if I had to point to a secondary moment in the movie of my life and my conversion, realizing that Jesus and and the Holy Spirit and God, they weren't the Trinity was not just a thing that I was gonna stuff into my other little pantheon of gods. Like the Trinity is the is the ground of the universe. Like Jesus, the everything was made through him, apart from him, nothing has been made that has been nothing was made that has been made. Like he's the Alpha and the Omega, he is the Word. Just realizing that, and that like I'm I'm not like He makes a claim on me. I don't I don't make a claim on him, you know. Like I don't I it was it's so profound. And like I said, the that Jesus was fully human and fully God. Now like I said, it took so long when I was on the outside of it for me to really understand, and even then I think I feel like God's constantly refreshing us through his word and the Holy Spirit with like new vistas of understanding, you know, or just reminding us. But it was just so profound, and now I just realized like, oh, there could never be any other any other thing that would make everything okay forever, you know, like Jesus isn't a thing, but but um yeah, like there could be no other story big enough to account for everything, like it it just makes it yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 58:38

Yeah. He's unimprovable. Yeah, you've met the ultimate, yeah. Right. You've found you have found the one. Yes, and he has a he has a name. His name is Jesus. Um you've been so generous with your time, Ashley. Let me just ask one more question. Um give some encouragement to those who are considering whether um whether they can get off drugs or get off whatever it is that's addicting them and find wholeness. Um and and give some hope to those who are loving such people. Um for those who are stuck and and hope for for those who are helping.

SPEAKER_00 59:24

Yeah, absolutely. And I I mean, absolutely, like God can restore anyone from any addiction. Like, I felt like I felt so damaged by my years of LSD use that I I'm amazed to see how much God has healed me psychologically now. Um and there have been times since I've done, you know, started doing podcasts here and there. I I got contacted by a young man who said that he um he hadn't taken psychedelics for a year, but he had had a really bad trip and felt profoundly damaged by them. And it it gave him hope to just see that I was really I appeared to be psychologically intact after having, you know, having had so many drugs, so I just tried to encourage him, like, yes, like it's gonna be okay, like God can restore you. Absolutely, God can restore, um God can restore you beyond what you can even imagine, beyond what you can even imagine. And I think to those, um, and I've heard from a lot of parents too, whose children are adult children are dabbling in psychedelics. I I really think I look back at, I mean, obviously praying for them, which I'm sure, you know, they're already doing if they're Christians and their adult children are dabbling in psychedelics, but I look back at the way that my friend Carrie ministered to me, and I just think that was that was so effective. She wasn't reactionary, you know, she wasn't offended, um, but she spoke truth at the same time. She didn't just let me go by and say what I was gonna say and not respond to it, but she almost always used scripture, and I just think that was that was so effective. And I and like I said, also just praying. Like I know my parents were praying for me. I don't think they knew the extent, I know they didn't know the extent of my drug use at the time. Um, but I know that they were praying for me, so I know that there were people praying for me all along. And um, yeah, I just want to say absolutely, absolutely, there's hope. There is hope. Like, I I have found so much hope in Christ. It's yeah. I don't even know. I don't even know how to put it.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:33

You do know how to put it because you've written a wonderful book uh all about it, Ashley, and I I really do hope that people check it out. It's called The Thing That Would Make Everything Okay Forever, Transcendence, Psychedelics, and Jesus Christ. Uh and you go deep into um the trips that you've had, but you kind of raise us up and and show us Jesus in a really compelling way as well. And I think I think that will get um get people thinking it'll give people hope uh who feel like they're stuck, and it will uh give people encouragement who are trying to help uh those who are stuck as well. So I I do uh highly recommend the book. Uh Ashley, are there other ways that people can keep up with you online?

SPEAKER_00 1:02:14

Um I have a very neglected website. That's just AshleyLandy.com, um, and also a very neglected Facebook page. But I am I am on Twitter um and I am on Instagram, um, such as it is. Like I said, I have a toddler and I'm pregnant, but I'm I'm trying to keep up with things better. But I do have a newsletter too on my website, so I'm I'm out there in the digital world, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:36

Fantastic, fantastic. We'll put links uh for that in the show notes. But uh Ashley Landy, thank you so much for spending time with us.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:43

Thank you so much.