EXTRACT | 'Bamboozled' by Melinda Ferguson: Repairing the hole in her soul — a spiritual awakening

ABOUT THE BOOK

After a near-fatal car accident, Melinda Ferguson finds herself shattered by post-traumatic stress disorder. The meds she's prescribed at the “Nervous Breakdown Clinic” don't work. After reading that her hero Bill W, father of the AA 12-step programme used psychedelics to heal, she decides to embark on a similar journey to address her extreme anxiety. Despite being terrified that she may relapse, what unfolds is a life-changing spiritual adventure assisted by psilocybin, commonly known as magic mushrooms. Over the next five years, layers of self-destructive behaviour unravel. Deep wounds from two decades earlier, when she was a hopeless heroin and crack addict, begin to heal.

Then the world is hit by a global pandemic. To escape the dystopian madness, Ferguson finds her dream house, nestled in the remote Matroosberg mountains. But just as she feels safe, a week before it's registered, a beautiful woman is murdered two doors away.

What sometimes looks like heaven can transform into hell in an instant. Now she's forced to ask herself: what is freedom, truth and joy?

Underpinned by a deep quest to travel through the ordinary doors of perception, Bamboozled is a deep exploration of self, set in an age of fear and false prophets. Written in Ferguson's no-holds-barred signature style, her new memoir is about looking for patterns and finding answers in a world that's crumbling. It's also about loosening the grip of money and finding magic. Then she rescues a dog, which ends up rescuing her.

EXTRACT

WAITING FOR THE DOORS TO OPEN

The room is inky black. Only candlelit shadows dance on the walls. Thirty people lie alongside each other like overgrown babies on mattresses spread out across the floor. The March evening is still warm, no need for blankets yet. My head aches against my memory-foam cushion. Only my heartbeat seems to thunder through the silence. I’ve just swallowed a cup of warm tea containing honey and 5 grams of cubensis. The mushroom mixture tastes weirdly loamy, almost musty. It’s neither inviting nor unpleasant, although the dregs at the bottom of the cup take some effort to swallow.

Why am I doing this?

Lying here, waiting for the psilocybin mushrooms to kick in, I’m not really sure of anything. What I can’t deny is that something’s been missing in my apparently “inspirational” life.

Despite having religiously attended so many 12-Step meetings — hundreds and hundreds over 16 years — there’s still a hole in my soul. Some might refer to the dull ache as a lack of “spiritual meaning”. I am not a religious person, although over the years I’ve convinced myself I believe in a higher power. Kind of. Some people call it “God”. But I find it hard to bring myself to name mine using those three letters: G.O.D. I think that’s mainly to do with the fact that, in my opinion, so many people on the planet who chant the word “God” are fuckwits.

Like many others who had come before, and those who would surely come after me, I struggled with that “God versus ego” concept throughout my recovery. Somewhere along the line I gave up on seeking “God” outside of myself and settled on the idea that “God” was within, a force that lived inside me likesome magic genie.

As my life improved, I came to the convenient conclusion that “God” was in fact me. The notion suited me perfectly. It nourished my ego and completely validated my need to practise self-will. It was much easier to trust myself, flaws and all, than hand my life and free will to some unknown power greater than myself, a power that was vague and non-relatable. A power with which I simply could not connect.

But the problem with believing that “God” is you, is that the ego thrives on that notion. At some point, I came to the sad conclusion that, no matter how hard I tried to work on myself, how many meetings I attended, how many shrink sessions I booked, how many crystals I rubbed or how many empowering self-help books I read, something unnamable was still missing.

Deep down inside, I didn’t feel “godly” or spiritually connected.

I often felt alone, disconnected and anxious. I hardly ever acknowledged this — my inner panic, my secret awkwardness, my faithlessness — to the outside world; I covered my dis-ease well with outward layers of brash confidence and an extroverted persona.

After the Ferrari accident in 2013, which I write about in my book Crashed, I developed extreme PTSD that forced me to check myself into a mental-health clinic for three weeks and walk out with a bag of psychotropic meds I was told I would need to take for the rest of my life to address my “Bipolar2” diagnosis. By the time I met Soul-Mat in late 2014, I was desperate to chuck out the pills that had begun to insidiously alter my energy levels and dull my old zest for life. Being a maverick psychiatrist, Soul-Mat soon helped me to taper off and become “meds free”. By the time I find myself on the mattress in Monica’s Healing House, I am off the pills but the PTSD from the car crash is still alive and kicking.

*

Before that evening in Somerset West, I armed myself with knowledge. I read studies on psilocybin and watched a string of documentaries. There was an overriding opinion, especially when it came to addiction, anxiety and depression, that this strange psilocybin substance had the power to work miracles.

But what had probably finally tipped my decision to go on my first Soma journey was stumbling across an article about the father of all 12-Step programmes, Bill W, aka Bill Wilson.

He started AA with another alcoholic known as “Dr Bob” back in 1935, and the duo soon grew into a fellowship of thousands who all suffered from the same disease: alcoholism.

In 1939, Bill W penned The Big Book, which subsequently became “the Bible” of the AA programme. Today there are millions of AA members worldwide, with more than 200,000 groups across the globe.

I knew all that historical stuff about Bill and the 12 Steps — after all, I was one of the programme’s most faithful “unanonymous” converts, but what I had only recently discovered, almost as part of some synchronised script, was that Bill W had, over time, also become a vocal proponent of psychedelics.

Always controversial and curious to explore a spiritual path, legend has it that in the 1950s, he hooked up with Aldous Huxley, American psychologist Betty Eisner and consciousness guru Gerald Heard to take part in medically supervised psychedelic experiments using LSD to achieve altered states.

Bill’s world was rocked after he imbibed the psychedelic, and experienced “a profound spiritual reawakening”. Having endured a lifetime struggle with his ego, just as I had, he believed that LSD eliminated the restrictive stubbornness of the self and enabled a mystical connection to the cosmos and God.

When he tried to explain to other recovering alcoholics how spiritual enlightenment might be assisted by the controlled use of psychedelics, he chose his words carefully: “It is a generally acknowledged fact in spiritual development that ego reduction makes the influx of God’s grace possible. If, therefore, under LSD we can have a temporary reduction, so that we can better see what we are and where we are going — well, that might be of some help. The goal might become clearer. So I consider LSD to be of some value to some people, and practically no damage to anyone.”

As I read his statement, I noticed how carefully he’d worded his observations.

In the weeks before my Soma journey, I found myself reading his words over and over again. Just as it had for Bill W, the term “God” that flowed freely at NA and AA meetings and was a fundamental element of all 12-Step literature, had been a barrier to me from the start.

In fact, the constant referral to “God” or “higher power” on the night I stumbled into my first NA meeting back in July 1999, cracked to my eyeballs, had sent me screaming out of the room — a vampire blinded by the light. I couldn’t stomach all the religious referrals: “We made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.” Or: “I came to believe in a higher power that could restore me to sanity.”

Who were these people? What was this cult that chanted the word “God” and a serenity prayer at the close of every meeting?

The very notion catapulted me right back into my negative experiences of religion — the forced Methodist Sunday-school classes from the age of two; the mournful organ pipes that cast shadows over my Sundays; me stealing coins from the collection plate when no was looking; the heated arguments with my mother as I entered my teen years over my refusal to complete my Methodist confirmation classes at the age of 16.

Turning my back on God and everything associated with religion became my way of asserting my independence. I did not want to have anything to do with those hypocritical Christians who put on their Sunday best once a week, and beat their wives and children on other days. By the time I dragged my drug-ravaged soul into my first NA meeting, like Nietzsche, God was dead to me. At my first meeting, I vaguely recall someone saying that “if the word of 'God' chases you out of the rooms, the drugs will chase you back”. 

Before the session was over, I had hurtled out, back to the comfortable numbness of my heroin and crack lovers, back to the freezing streets of the Hillbrow ghetto. Back then, the word “God” had enough negative association to ricochet me straight into my Lalaland of high denial. And even when I did eventually crawl back into and NA meeting a few months later, to embark on my journey into recovery, I continued to wrestle with that three-letter word for the next 16 years. 

But now, stumbling across the literature tracking Bill's spiritual struggle gave me a deep sense of comfort, knowing that the same battle I had fought for most of my life, my disdain for organised religion and my abhorrence of puritanical “God squadders”, was what Bill had experienced too. Despite my fears about what people would say or think of me, I was moved by his willingness to seek an alternative solution, to experiment with psychedelics. 

It placated me somewhat to read in my research that, after his first LSD journey, Bill W claimed to feel “absolutely no guilt

In 1957, soon after his first “trip”, he wrote a letter to Gerald Heard saying: “I am certain that the LSD experiment has helped me very much. I find myself with a heightened colour perception and appreciation of beauty, almost destroyed by my years of (alcohol-induced) depressions.”

In fact, so inspired was Bill W by his psychedelic experience that he chose to share those details with the AA fellowship to suggest that others who struggled with the concept of a higher power might also benefit from regular use of LSD under structured and medically controlled guidance. He strongly believed that using psychedelics could help “melt the icy intellectual mountain in whose shadows they lived and shivered”.

But, of course, most traditionally Christian people in AA back in 1950s America could not get their heads around their “leader” using psychedelics. Some were highly alarmed; others horrified. The AA gossip machine, a sad but real element of the fellowship back then — just as it is today — spewed vitriol against Bill W. This clearly hurt him deeply. 

From the very start, Bill had enjoyed huge popularity among the AA fellowship, where he attained an almost cult-like messiah status. At large gatherings, followers would stand in line to touch his sleeve, try to grab a word of hope or advice from their “leader”, despite the AA doctrines clearly stating that no one person was ever to control the organisation. However, along with friends and admirers came enemies who now leapt at the opportunity to bring Bill down, accusing him of betrayal, morally debased principles and power-mongering. 

The conservative forces in AA, which as an organisation had by this stage grown hugely in numbers, went batshit, recoiling in horror from the idea of Bill W advocating the use of any mind-altering substances. 

And so, lying in the room in the little house tucked away in a panhandle in Somerset West, almost 40 years after Bill passed on, waiting for my own doors of perception to be unlatched, I fail to calm my racing heart. As I close my eyes and try to keep them shut, I think of the man who changed the lives of millions of addicts. If he could walk through the invisible doors, seeking spiritual meaning, surely it was okay for little old me to try to open mine? 

“Please help me, Father Bill,” I pray.

Extract provided by Melinda Ferguson Books, an imprint of NB Publishers