Book Review – The Thing that Would Make Everything Okay Forever

Ashley Lande, The Thing that Would Make Everything Okay Forever: Transcendence, Psychedelics, & Jesus Christ, (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2024), 264pp.

Psilocybin (magic mushrooms) and MDMA (ecstasy) are in Phase III clinical trials with the FDA for the treatment of depression and PTSD, respectively. LSD (acid) and DMT (ayahuasca) are also in the pipeline as potential psychotropics to alleviate mental suffering. This is a strange development for baby boomers who remember the Summer of Love (1967), Haight Ashbury, and regarding the use of hallucinogens have either been there and done that or never went there and would never do that.

Ashley Lande’s book, The Thing that Would Make Everything Okay Forever: Transcendence, Psychedelics, & Jesus Christ should be a part of this discussion. However, for those who have tripped and fallen down the psychedelic rabbit hole, as I did so many years ago, I offer a “trigger warning.” Lande’s writing is evocative and vivid. She’s a good writer, but a better artist; she paints with words that are as kaleidoscopic as the hallucinogens that captured and nearly wrecked her life. If you don’t need the trigger warning and would like to dip your toes into the psychedelic waters without diving in headfirst, read this book.

The first nine chapters of this eleven-chapter book is an eloquent and visceral narrative describing Ms. Lande’s descent from nominal Christianity into Hitchens style atheism, and then a ten-year pagan quest for transcendence in which mushrooms and LSD were the sacraments. Although Lande took the road less traveled, she was motivated, as all of us are, by intrinsic desire for sensual pleasure for the body, enlightenment for the mind, and transcendence for the soul. She gets what she wants, kind of, but only at first. What begins as a light-hearted, wide-eyed roller coaster ride descends so severely that she required psychiatric hospitalization. And that’s not to mention a harrowing encounter with the devil.

Lande summarizes the moral to her hallucinogenic story with this line, “I didn’t know that some things destroy you and some things make you live and the things that make you live in the beginning are usually the ones that destroy you.” She recalls James Bell, “Psychedelics take us somewhere we’re not intended to go.” Or as my mother told me in my roller coaster days, “Sam, you’ll never, ever get enough of what you don’t really need.”

Post Tenebras Lux

Lande finally finds what she is looking for in the last two chapters when she realizes that for all her desires for enlightenment and happiness Jesus is the The Thing That Would Make Everything Okay Forever. Both on the way there and after conversion, Lande’s transparency about her not-so-pretty moral and mental battles were exemplary, realistic, and eventually hopeful. “My heart – and the demons that warred within me – refused to cede the territory…But he was naked on the cross, and that was the point at which I couldn’t look away, couldn’t relativize him and consign him to the pantheon of great teachers or enlightened beings. He was something and Someone else entirely…. It’s a mystery that cannot, thank God, be parceled into squares of blotter paper (the typical medium for LSD), not absorbed through shriveled mushrooms, not smoked through marbled glass… The divine that I was looking for in psychedelics is mediated through Christ alone.”

On Medication

Do we really need anything other than Jesus to flourish spiritually or as a potential remedy for mental problems? How should Christians who believe that sin is our biggest problem and that Jesus is the ultimate solution respond to this flashback of fascination with psychedelics?

Those are fair questions that have some reasonable although not unanimous answers, if analyzed and responded to by means of a perspective that persons are by God’s design both spiritual and physical beings, always (except in the intermediate state) body and soul simultaneously.

Will psychedelics be the new Prozac? Perhaps for some but not for all. If these substances are approved, and they may be someday – the FDA has given them the status of “breakthrough therapies” to accelerate the approval process – I suspect that there would be some sort of “black-box warning,” as is the case with many antidepressants.

With hallucinogens, the risk is real – we didn’t call them “bad trips” for nothing. Ms. Lande has commented in interviews that she was traumatized by some of her psychedelic experiences. Proponents assert that hallucinogens can be safe if proper attention is paid to “set” and “setting”. What this means is that candidates are prepped and coached so that their mindset is optimized, e.g., they develop a reasonable therapeutic goal for their “treatment” and educated about common experiences so they know what is coming. In addition, care is taken so that the external setting is safe and pleasant, that they are not alone but are accompanied by an experienced coach, often an old hippy that is still mostly sane. Of course, any history of psychosis contraindicates therapeutic treatment with hallucinogens.

Critique

Other than the trigger warning recommendation (no, I’m not kidding), I have one small and one more significant critical comment. Small one – There are times when Lande binges on words; her writing can be a bit overwhelming because it is so profuse and visceral. Even so, reading her book will expand both your sensorium and your vocabulary. Moderate one – I was so glad to get to the last two chapters of the book after the progressive darkening of the first nine. The Gospel is foreshadowed here and there in the first 9 chapters, but not much. I will wrap up this review with Ashley Lande’s last line that brims with hope, “And in him there is light, and there is no darkness at all.”