The Thing That Would Make Everything Okay Forever –  A review.

I believe our culture is saying goodbye to the spiritual darkness left behind by the enlightenment and actively working to reignite the religious flame that once lit its way. However, while the postmodern turn of the modernist knob reopened the spiritual door it did so with many of its materialist sensibilities still intact. It resurrected the traditional religious pursuit of bells and smells but also offered a less arduous chemical alternative.

Ashley Lande, author of the outstanding book, The Thing That Would Make Everything Okay Forever: Transcendence, Psychedelics, and Jesus Christ, helps us understand this cultural progression by giving us a first-hand account of her remarkable journey from atheism, through psychedelics and alternative spiritualities, finally arriving at her forever home in Christianity. She is a marvelous storyteller writing like a hippy version of David Bentley Hart masterfully drawing from her eclectic word palette to paint beautiful world murals that compel the reader to linger over every brush stroke. She beautifully sets the stage for the reader, but rather than just seating them in an auditorium, she makes them feel like cast members in the room where it happened.

As a young woman Ashley was drawn to the works of the New Atheists, perhaps more for their snarky rebellion than the actual intellectual content of their arguments. She was particularly drawn to the literary and rhetorical chops of the late Christopher Hitchens whose book, God is Not Great, bludgeoned religion with an air of sophistication that left one with the impression he was the smartest person in the room.

“Hitch’s wit was deadly, his vocabulary was vast, his insults finely pointed. But something was … absent. A light, a flicker of understanding, a vein of life, pulsing and real. There was no mystery. There was sharp intellect, trenchant wit, prolific rhetoric.”

While the New Atheism initially inspired her nihilistic bravado it was soon cut down to size by her spiritual brokenness. Her life had become a series of meaningless jobs punctuated by partying to anesthetize the pain of its purposelessness. She found she could no longer fuel her seditious sensibilities because the atheist tank was empty and her life was running on fumes.

“But it lacked something vital. I didn’t know what it was, exactly, but suddenly I felt its absence sorely. The lacking thing was, well, everything.”

As the title of her book suggests, she wasn’t content haphazardly adding things to her life to make it more palatable but desired “The Thing That Would Make Everything Okay Forever.” She wanted to be fully alive but realized that her mad skills as a mixologist, blending drugs and alcohol together into exotic cocktails, left her neither shaken nor stirred until she was introduced to psychedelics…and then her whole world convulsed.

Ironically, she went from criticizing believers as religious addicts strung out on the opiate of the masses to becoming her own new age spiritual zealot eagerly gobbling up psychedelic sacraments. She did retain some of her materialist bona fides by making her spirituality a chemical pursuit but quickly lost all credibility when LSD became her messiah. A messiah who was always promising but never delivering, dangling god in front of her like a carrot on a stick. And while her tummy growled for spiritual food, her medicinal messiah never allowed her to get close enough to taste and see if He was good.

“It was like a carrot on a stick, but every time you thought you’d arrived you were told you needed to get over your attachment to a carrot dangling on a stick, and you needed to get over getting over. Your inability to get over it all, to truly detach and relinquish all your ego trips, was preventing you from reaching the carrot on the stick.”

She found that psychedelics rather than satisfy her spiritual hunger gave her a bad case of the metaphysical munchies because, as it turns out, once you blow your mind you need a metanarrative to put it back together again.

“I felt demolished, washed out completely, a bewildered alien, liberated but also bereft. My house was cleared, clean, swept. But who would dwell there now? Was anyone home? Who was I? What was I? And what had I done to myself? It felt as fearfully irrevocable and tenuous as it was exhilarating and illicit.”

Ashley realized that psychedelics didn’t just offer a weekend in the Hamptons but stamped her passport into a universe so strange that she needed a mystical map to navigate the spiritual topography and shamanic linguists to teach her the language. Sadly, the traditionally religious, who were taught as children to “Just say no!” left the metaphysical mapping to a group of psychonauts suffering from altitude sickness. Priests and pastors had neglected their theological duty to chart a more orthodox spiritual course for the chemical seeking and left the mapping to New Age Johnny-come-lately’s instead of calling upon the cartographic skills of the Ancient of Days.

“The Knowledge of the Thing That Would Make Everything Okay Forever was vouchsafed only to those willing to plunge into the esoteric realms of cosmic spelunking, those psychonauts willing to wager everything—including their very sanity—on the promise of wisdom.”

The spirituality offered by these gurus of psychedelia was a syncretic blend of orthodox and alternative spiritualities teaching that we are all one, the universe is the “All,” and the world would be one big group hug if we seriously pursued pharmacological and meditative “ego death” Ashley enthusiastically embraced these precepts until her drug-delusion was subjected to some timely reality testing.

One of the promises of psychedelic spirituality is that if everyone embraced these medicinal and spiritual practices then we would all get along and the world would be a better place. Ashley hoped this was true but discovered, much to her dismay, that ego death made her more egotistical, and being one with the universe made her feel like she stood out from all the rest.

“Despite the glaringly apparent reality—in myself and others—that psychedelics didn’t magically transform a person into a perfect bastion of Zen and peace and love, I still staked my life on the idea, perhaps only at this point for the sake of elitism…According to Ram Dass, Timothy Leary, and Alan Watts, the acid had dissolved my ego time and time again, yet I could not see that it had also engendered a kind of spiritual megalomania:”

Perhaps, one of the most jarring challenges to Ashley’s psychedelic spirituality occurred when the young daughter of one of her friends died from Leukemia. Her friend was a Christian who often served as a folksy foil to her new age mysticism, but with this tragedy everything changed, and she had to put down her sword and allow herself to be pierced by her friend’s grief. Ashley, who was unexpectedly pregnant at the time, was forced to see how her selfish concerns over an inconvenient pregnancy paled in comparison to the loss of a child so selflessly loved.

“My childhood friend’s toddler died while I was pregnant… Just a couple of weeks earlier I’d sobbed over my positive pregnancy test. I was with child when I didn’t want to be, and my pure-hearted friend had a child robbed from her.

Ashley’s New Age spiritualism had no way to adequately explain or deal with the loss of a child.

“What good was ultimate oneness, ego death, this being subsumed into the sum of all things when the sum of all things was a place where toddlers died terrible deaths?”

Commenting on this incident in her article, “Acidhead: God Took Me Higher,” Ashley wrote, “My belief system didn’t have a category for dead toddlers.” 

While her “belief system didn’t have a category for dead toddlers,” she also found, after the birth of her first child, that it didn’t have a category for a live one either. Seeing her child as just one more generic ingredient tossed into a cosmic “All” blender was far too bitter a cup to drink.

“Suddenly I was overcome with grief, a bittersweet flood of longing and sadness and unbearable tenderness all woven together. He would die, one day, this precious child, and nothing would be left of him or me or our love. We would be absorbed into the insatiable All…This was supposed to make me … happy? Joyful? Peaceful? It didn’t. It jolted me with panic and infused me with deep discontent. What had seemed a reasonable set of beliefs before, contiguous with my psychedelic experiences, now, in the face of my precious and irreplaceable toddler, seemed totally untenable and even further—dare I say it, I who had supposedly seen beyond or at least aspired to see beyond polarities—evil?”

Ashley’s New Age canon described god not as a person but as a presence, force, or energy, but deep down she knew that spirituality without relationship was a lonely place and so she attempted to anthropomorphize the “All” and declare LSD to be her friend but found that no matter how hard she tried she couldn’t make the universe care about her or her child, and that her acid bestie was actually a frenemy.

“Ultimately, God or the Universe’s qualities mirrored those of acid: fickle, unreliable, callous and cruel, magnanimous and beneficent. You never knew what you were going to get. Sometimes she brought a party, other times a fresh trauma whose terror I couldn’t have conjured even in my most shattering nightmares.”

She realized she needed a Person to “make everything okay forever.”

“I wasn’t looking for a person, was I? I’d found LSD, my god, my messiah. But still, Someone haunted me, someone just beyond the veil, Someone I couldn’t reach, no matter how many times I launched myself into space, no matter how many times I worked my lungs like bellows to summon the Kundalini serpent up my spine. Someone was out there. Maybe even Someone who could Make Everything Okay Forever.”

She related one particularly memorable psychedelic trip where she caught glimpses of God whisking around corners and frantically tried to catch up with Him believing that if she could just touch the hem of His robe she might be healed. Sadly, however, her passionate pursuit went unrequited, and she found herself brokenhearted because she had just been ghosted by the “All.”

“I kept seeing his robes, just whisking around the corner ahead of me in an ethereal gauzy train of white, bleeding with prismatic tracers… I was on the trail, on the hunt. Yet a sadness struck at my heart as God kept eluding me, kept rounding the corner just ahead of me… I paced, and I paced. I was on the trail, on the hunt. Yet a sadness struck at my heart as God kept eluding me, kept rounding the corner just ahead of me. He was just here, I said to Steven, in my maniacal fervor. I know it. But the gulf between him and me seemed to yawn larger and larger.”

Christianity was always lurking in the background of Ashley’s life, but she kept it a safe distance. Jesus, however, didn’t give up on her and would occasionally peek His head inside her psychedelic fog to see how she was doing, but she would push Him away like a creepy peeping Tom until they finally locked eyes.

“I was sitting on our front porch one afternoon, probably on a microdose of LSD, when I heard it, the voice of God, subtle and gentle in volume and affect—arriving not audibly but cloaked as a product of my own mind, though I know no such thought would ever have occurred by my own power. The message was clarion: It’s time to say goodbye to LSD. It’s time. I began to weep immediately, touched by its tenderness but also rattled by its authority and wisdom, a wisdom that clearly came from outside myself.”

She realized that there was no escaping a God who was willing to put boots on the ground and so instead of kicking against the goads she ran into His arms.

“God become flesh and bones. It was unfathomable, and maybe even unconscionable—it narrowed God to a terrifyingly specific point. And with terrible specificity came accountability, came inescapability, came a piercing intimacy. You can easily turn away from a vague diffuse energy. You can only turn your face away with great dread, in fearsome flight, from a man who claimed to be God hanging tortured on a cross.”

Ashley has written a wonderful book that not only tells a fascinating story but also helps us understand the lay of the spiritual wasteland that has sadly become home to many of our young people. Her journey reminds us that we are not alone, we all have spiritual cravings that cannot be diminished by an atheist hunger strike or fed by reaching into the psychedelic monstrance for the mushroom and the acid, but can only be satisfied by the true food and true drink of the Body and Blood of our Lord Jesus Christ. I highly recommend Ashley’s book and because she writes so beautifully it is only fair that I give her the last word.

“I was no longer the young woman with saucers for pupils, in her hubris glutting herself on fractals in the air, cloistering herself in a secret world of spinning diamonds that once appeared a shrine but quickly became a prison. By some mysterious legerdemain of the Holy Spirit, I was a new creation. My life was hid with Christ in God. I belonged to Someone, and that Someone was the author of life”