The Field is the World

Psychedelics, schizophrenia, altered states & basketball

When I first started journeying in 2016, I didn’t see what I was doing as “using drugs” or a “drug trip.” Such phrases were forbidden, woke-shamed, canceled in the shaman’s groups. Instead, I saw journeying as a miracle, a cure, a way of understanding human consciousness.

In the beginning, I never wanted to stop journeying. I wanted to feel that way the rest of my life.

The shaman was teaching about the field back then. I experienced his concept in a drug vision as the web of connection in the universe. At the same time, I understood the field as my high school English classroom, which was merely a smaller replica of the web of connection. When the shaman encouraged these associations, I began to more fully understand the connections between the elements in my classroom and what I was trying to teach. Much more of the sensory information from the world had been let into my consciousness, and this phenomenon persisted even when I wasn’t using psychedelics. Suddenly everything became important—the furniture, the mix of personalities in the room, the lights. Especially the lights. The florescent ones in my classroom gave me a headache when I tried to read or write under them, and I began to wonder why in the world most schools use such harsh lighting. I began to find the classroom environment intolerable. I don’t understand why we send children to these places to learn and expect it to go well.

But the place where the shaman’s concept of the field manifested the most clearly for me was, of course, in the gym, watching my students play basketball. Every connection mattered in basketball and there were moments when they were made profoundly visible. One bum call from a referee, one steal, one three-pointer could change the trajectory of the game and even an entire season.

 High school basketball fascinated me because the players were still learning to maneuver within the field. To me, they were doing much the same thing as the shaman was teaching me to do in journeys. He called it navigating.

 When it came to basketball, one of my greatest joys was watching a Rocky Boy student I loved develop a killer no-look pass. Now that he plays college ball, he’s become a wizard of this move, arguably the hardest in basketball. I’ve even seen him successfully land a no-look bounce pass. I think his mastery of this move is a beautiful expression of his ability to navigate the field. To throw a no-look pass, a player has to let in a great deal of the right sensory information while ignoring the background noise. The player has to be completely aware of their own body, as well as the bodies of every other player on the floor and all those bodies’ trajectories. Tell me that isn’t wizard-level shit.

To this day, I believe the shaman could do the same thing in psychedelic ceremonies, at least when he wasn’t talking on his cell phone or trying to find his next girlfriend in a group. I watched him spend journeys throwing no-look passes, essentially tricking people into understanding themselves, dropping knowledge right at their fingertips so all they had to do was go with the flow to catch the ball. I believe the type of awareness I’m talking about can’t be taught, but it can be awakened and the skills for working with it can be transferred. Essentially, I believe you have to play with another wizard to absorb and refine the awareness. You learn from the more experienced player what to focus on and what to ignore. That’s how the no-look pass wizard taught his little brother to throw them too.

In basketball, I could see the field flagellated some of the players who were at the mercy of its elements. Once I started watching Rez ball, I watched the crowd get to lots of kids. Other players practiced enough that they programmed the moves into their bodies and were able to ignore some of the more basic elements like the crowd, but they were still at the mercy of others like the referees, the defense of the opposing team, whether they were left-handed or right. Some very good players could neutralize many of the elements. I think of someone I taught who played for Park High School who had practiced so diligently for so many years that he consistently made All State.

But there was another kind of player, I realized, when I got to the Rez: These were the sharks, the wizards, the fly boys.

This kind of player could merge with the field and then direct its elements. I had the great privilege of watching some of these players realize, accept and then take command of their skills. Some people, like the shaman, could do this in psychedelic trips too, I realized from watching basketball. It’s what people mean when they say “the right touch.” It’s not manipulation or trying too hard—it’s acting within your character toward an experience, a feeling, something shared…

            a perfect swish.

In its most beautiful manifestations, it’s not even about winning. It’s an expression of love. It’s art.

That is truly the mindset one needs for psychedelic journeying:  It’s not actually about manipulating others or always having good trips or healing your childhood trauma or seeing visions. It’s way simpler than the psychobabble.

It’s just about playing with love.