Good Friday, 1962. Twenty divinity students strolled into Marsh Chapel for services, escorted by scientists. Howard Thurman, then pastor and once mentor of a young Martin Luther King Jr., bellowed into a mystical journey on the meaning of death.
His sermon was laced with poetry and accented with sweet and sorrowful hymns from the choir. The spring air floated inside and swirled around the parishioners. The legendary preacher was just hitting his stride when 10 of the students had started tripping on drugs.
The students were involved in a now famous double-blind study directed by Timothy Leary to discover if psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms, can have a defining effect on a person’s character. Ten of the students had taken a placebo, the other 10 received the drug.
Mike Young was a first-year divinity student who received the hallucinogen. In an interview with The St. Petersburg Times in 1994, he outlined the height of his religious experience.
Colorful visual patterns appeared before him like a spider web, each strand a different color. He began to follow them, like navigating a maze. But there was a problem – Young was stuck in the middle of the web.
“I could see that each color band was a different life experience. A different path to take. I could choose any path I wanted. It was incredible freedom. . .but I had to choose one. To stay in the center was to die. I just. . .couldn’t. . .pick one. And then I died.”
He wasn’t dead from the drug; Young had suffered an ego loss. He felt the importance of the self fade into the vastness of the world.
“I was talking about having to make this choice of what to be…I had to die in order to become who I could be,” he said. Young is now a pastor in Florida.
Now what does this experiment have to do with college students? Well, every college student faces the problem that Young faced almost 50 years ago tripping in Marsh Chapel. We have the incredible freedom to choose a major and then a career. We’re stuck in the center of a colorful web of possibilities struggling to find our path.
This struggle can build stress in a person’s life. I once watched my friend leave a Red Sox game in the eighth inning when Jon Lester was pitching a no-hitter. He had just graduated, he didn’t have a job, he was out of money and he had no idea what he was going to do. He couldn’t just sit there and relax, the stress was eating him up. He wanted a clear path in front of him that he was comfortable with, but he didn’t know how to find it.
More recently a team of researchers at Johns Hopkins have been using psychedelics to test its effects on treating depression in cancer patients, obsessive-compulsive disorder, end-of-life anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder and addiction to drugs or alcohol. Patients that have undergone the tests have reported in interviews that they felt part of some transcendental or larger state of consciousness. They felt personal insecurities vanish and reviewed old relationships with new sympathy, according to a story in The New York Times.
Now while I don’t believe too many students at Boston University are suffering from PTSD or end-of-life anxiety, we are suffering from beginning-of-new-life anxiety.
If life is three phases &-&- education, career and retirement&-then we’re already one-third done. I want my final two-thirds to be rewarding to me. That’s why I’ve thrown this hallucinogenic drug example out there to think about. I’m not saying go out and drop acid and you’ll realize what you want to do for the rest of your life. But what I am saying and what I do believe is that it takes soul searching to figure out what you really want to do.
The other day I was at a baseball memorabilia auction. In the back was an older man and woman who sold old cards with pictures of old celebrities. I told them I went to BU and wanted to be a journalist. The woman said her daughter had graduated from BU. She was an art history major and made good money when she first left school. I asked her what she’s doing now. She went to cosmetology school to be a hairdresser; she asked herself what she really wanted to do and did it.
I thought at the time how much money she wasted to figure out she wanted to be a hairdresser. But, really, who cares. If that’s what she wants to do, more power to her.
Finding the right career is not easy, but figuring it out requires a loss of ego. Don’t worry about what your parents want you to do, whether your friend is going to make more money than you, whether you’re going to succeed or fail or any of that crap. Because honestly, you never know. And life’s too short to stress and regret.
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