I just finished reading ‘The Thing That Would Make Everything OK Forever’ by Ashley Lande, published by Lexham Press in 2024. It’s an autobiographical journey through Ashley’s psychedelic search for transcendence.
The author takes you through a labyrinthian maze of her magic mushroom memories. The book consists of a prologue and 11 chapters, weighing in at 273 pages (including the end-notes). The prologue begins: “The last time I ever tripped, I ate mushrooms I’d grown myself.”
She describes stumbling down the rabbit hole of psychedelic drugs as a teenager, looking at the “glittering doorway of decadent effulgence… I was a feckless moth, drawn toward the flame of anything even remotely countercultural.” (p.15) “I was in that sweet spot, poised on that glimmering threshold where the Turkish Delights proffered by the White Witch still tasted good. Rumors of darkness from beyond — bad trips, psychosis — glanced off me.” (p.29)
Although it’s her first book, her obvious love of art, music, and literature reveal a mature vocabulary. She had me looking up a few words in the dictionary, like someone studying the menu at a nice restaurant — to savor the flavors.
Atheism, Buddhism, Hinduism and Other Delusions
This author was a contributor to another volume published in 2023, “Coming to Faith Through Dawkins: 12 Essays on the Pathway from New Atheism to Christianity“
In this memoir, she interacts with a variety of authors, like atheists Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens (God is Not Great). Along the journey she mentions William J. Craddock (Be Not Content); R. A. Lafferty, Ram Dass, and Alan Watts (On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are).
I particularly enjoyed her subtle slam of Hitchens (p. 36,37) by way of analogy — she recalls writing a story for the local newspaper about a teenage dance pageant — likening the whole affair to a drag show. “My conscience stirred for the first time in a while, and I realized that mocking an innocent dance pageant was about as much an act of valiant countercultural rebellion as kicking a puppy.” Hitchen’s “vocabulary was vast, and his insults finely pointed.” However, his “wit had morphed into nastiness… it just all seemed so empty, a blind effluvium of barely bridled rage and sniffy superiority.”
“I shut God Is Not Great halfway through and stared at the yellow cover, now garish and embarrassing in its boldness. I was – what was I? Disappointed. Bereft. Disgusted, even. I slid the book underneath my bed, where I wouldn’t have to look at it and thus further consider my confusion. For perhaps the first time since I’d so confidently declared myself an atheist to my shocked parents, the hard dome of my determined irreligiosity suffered a fissure — minute, barely perceptible, but relentlessly niggling, like the pea beneath a tottering stack of mattresses.” (p.42)
Searching For The Thing That Would Make Everything Ok Forever
“But beneath it all loitered that gnawing doubt that Hitchens had inadvertently sewn within me: that tenacious desire for something beyond materialism, a desire that was sometimes nothing more than a whisper and sometimes a gripping, consuming yen that had eclipsed all else and compelled one to seek all manner of earthly pleasures in futilely trying to satiate it. Could this be the last thing, The Thing That Would Make Everything Okay Forever, as I’d later write?” (p. 52)
Spoiler Alert: This Story Has A Happy Ending
After a while ride, the final chapter takes us in for a soft landing:
Psychedelics, at best, could never do more than airlift me to the tenuous and swaying peak of the tower of Babel, an unsound piecemeal stack of children’s blocks, of man’s spurious attempts to reach heaven. Jesus and Jesus alone can lead us into the true kingdom, the one that never perishes, the one that satisfies and gives us more than we could have ever asked or imagined, the one where our tearful, anxious questions, like mine on that final mushroom trip –“Does anything mean anything at all?” — are answered conclusively, and abundantly, and in greater affirmative measure than we could have ever hoped. (p. 261)
Here’s a link to the book on GoodReads.