Book Review:
The Thing That Would Make Everything Okay Forever: Transcendence, Psychedelics, and Jesus Christ
by Ashley Lande

I just finished reading “The Thing That Would Make Everything Okay Forever: Transcendence, Psychedelics, and Jesus Christ” by the Christian artist Ashley Lande. Lande’s book recently won awards from The Gospel Coalition and Christianity Today, so I decided to take a look. Lande’s book is a memoir of drug abuse and New Age seeking from her adolescent years until her conversion to Christianity, and she seeks to use her story as a means to condemn psychedelics and Eastern religions while pointing her readers towards Evangelical Christianity. I do not think she accomplishes this goal. By failing to provide a consistent portrayal of herself, other religions, and psychedelics, Lande instead inadvertently only demonstrates the danger of polysubstance drug misuse and spiritual abuse.

 

The book itself was well-written: both compelling and entertaining. To quickly summarize Lande’s story, she was first introduced to mushrooms during her senior year of college. She went on to obsessively use psychedelics like mescaline, LSD, and mushrooms many times, a pattern that paralleled a cycle of self-destruction. She came to believe psychedelics put her in contact with God or “the Universe,” and she pursued more knowledge through New Age communities. One of these communities, a birth preparation space, spiritually and physically abused her. Eventually, this mistreatment and the weight of her lifestyle became too great. After multiple beautifully described breakdowns, Lande converted to Christianity, and she rejected her former life completely, flushing her drugs and trashing Eastern religious iconography.

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It became apparent to me that there is an essential contradiction in Lande’s story. She wants to portray herself as a former member of the “LSD cult,” someone who understood psychedelic doctrine, cared about “The Rules” of psychedelic subculture, and was obsessed with crafting a trip’s set and setting. She cites frequently from 20th century psychedelic influencers like Timothy Leary, Stanislav Grof, Ram Dass, and Alan Watts. Through this portrayal, Lande sets herself up as an authority to justify why she can unilaterally condemn psychedelics.

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Yet contrary to this portrayal, Lande’s pre-conversion life demonstrated gobsmacking irresponsibility and dismissal of standard harm reduction practices within psychedelia. Her story is filled with polysubstance abuse, driving while under the influence, taking massive doses of drugs, and tripping alone with strangers. Never once does she mention testing drugs for purity, nor if she measured doses, nor how she knew what substances she’s buying. Without testing, the “LSD” she bought on numerous occasions could have been NBOMe or DOx class drugs, associated with bad trips and even death.

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Lande’s list of drugs she misused is particularly extensive. During the same period that she used psychedelics, she also misused marijuana, amphetamines, opioid pills, psychiatric medication, and alcohol. Marijuana and and alcohol were misused at the same time as psychedelic trips, which were sometimes more often than once a week. Of course, polysubstance abuse greatly increases the likelihood of difficult or bad trips, and although psychedelic use is not associated with a greater risk of psychosis, using other substances alongside psychedelics is correlated with increased psychosis risk

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During Lande’s foray into psychedelics, she blew through standard wisdom in psychedelic subculture. When she encountered Alan Watts’ encouragement to “hang up the phone” and stop using psychedelics, Lande claims she was incredulous. Willfully ignoring Watts’ wisdom about ending her psychedelic use, Lande made the conscious decision to continue polysubstance drug abuse. Even after being diagnosed as bipolar, a diagnosis properly demonstrated by her many stories of manic behavior, she continued to abuse drugs. This is also frowned upon in the psychedelic community. 

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These repeated poor decisions create an unevenness to her story. Lande cannot simultaneously claim to be a former psychedelia acolyte who practiced “The Rules” and a self-described former addict who irresponsibly dismissed psychedelia’s most basic wisdom altogether. Were she self-aware of this contradiction, this could have been an excellent opportunity to teach the reader about the importance of harm reduction, but the negative experiences are largely blamed on LSD without consideration for how changes in behavior or cessation of polysubstance drug abuse can improve psychedelic experiences and reduce harm.

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This is not the only fundamental disjointment of self in Lande’s memoir, nor her only failure to address the real risks. She resolutely seeks to blame the New Age and psychedelics for her traumatic experiences without taking responsibility for how her actions greatly increased the likelihood of negative outcomes.

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Another kind of disjointment is how Lande incongruently depicts psychedelics themselves. She depicts LSD in particular as an “abuser” that “enslaved” her. Psychedelics “made” her believe falsehoods. Mushrooms, as she claims towards the end of the book, are “poison, deceitful little henchmen.” She even claims that Satan or a demon was in her bedroom as a result of psychedelic use, though this seems to have been a sleep paralysis hallucination from my perspective.

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Despite this first claim, Lande’s own descriptions of psychedelics force the careful reader to beg for nuance. Mirroring recent studies, Lande says that a psychedelic trip caused her to stop smoking. She also believes that God spoke to her on multiple trips. On a microdose of LSD, she claims God told her “it’s time to say goodbye to LSD.” In another, God told her “you don’t have to do this to yourself.” In yet another trip, this time in a church, she began to realize Christianity could provide her a “cleansing.” Of her final psychedelic trip, Lande says “with lightning clarity I suddenly knew the name of what I longed for: I longed for God.” How is it that psychedelics are toxic, poisonous, abusive, enslaving, and deceptive, yet they are essential means through which God speaks to her in this story four separate times?

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No doubt, Lande would respond that God can use evil for good, and this may be true. But these exceptions complicate the image of psychedelics that she wants to portray. On the one hand, she wants the reader to reject what psychonauts believe because of trips. On the other hand, she wants the reader to make exceptions to accept what she believed, in part, because of psychedelic trips. Sometimes, psychedelics can offer truth… but only her truth. Lande wants us to be incredulous toward Alan Watts, even when his wisdom to "hang up the phone" mirrors what she claims was a revelation from God. She wants the reader to think Watts was just listening to his own mind, but her identical revelation came from God himself.

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There is one shocking element of this book that caught me off guard. Lande is spiritually groomed for sexual abuse by a self-proclaimed psychedelic “guide,” but she downplays this ethical violation. Jasper, Lande’s dealer, acted as a spiritual authority against her wishes while she was on her first LSD trip. The morning after the trip, Jasper made advances toward her. Later, he refused to give her more LSD unless she accepted him as her teacher. According to him, they were “bonded in the spiritual realm.”

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All of this is textbook spiritual grooming, which is often obfuscated in Christian and New Age circles. It often goes unrecognized by those who suffer it. Under no circumstances should anyone positioning themselves as a spiritual or religious teacher pursue a romantic relationship with someone positioned as their student. This is especially the case when drugs are involved and used to manipulate. I audibly gasped when Lande dismissed this disturbing episode by saying she rolled her eyes at Jasper’s misconduct, calling him a “lonely stoner.” I can only hope Lande was the last woman Jasper tried to manipulate using drugs.

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To be clear, I have no ill will towards Lande. It is quite evident that she went through horrible trauma and victimization, including medical and spiritual abuse. My intention here is not to pick at her story, claim that she is lying, or call her character into question. I am glad she has found her “Thing That Would Make Everything Okay Forever” in the love of Christ, and I hope she is forever healthy and happy with her family. If her book were a plain memoir, meant to only tell her story for encouragement, I would not have written this review.

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However, her book is not a plain memoir. It has a theological agenda. Lande uses her story as an ethos to lend credibility to theological claims that disparage other religions and psychedelics as demonic. This is a common motif in Evangelical Christian literature. Autobiographies of shocking conversions are standard fare for culture warriors to justify moral panic. During the Satanic Panic, stories from Mike Warnke and Michelle Smith were published in fraudulent best-selling books. These books retold their tales of underground Satanic cults allegedly sacrificing thousands of babies a year. The so-called “ex-gay” conversion therapy movement built itself up through testimonies of allegedly cured homosexuals. Of course, many of these “ex-gays” like former Exodus International president Alan Chambers eventually denounced conversion therapy as harmful.

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Lande’s story follows this same pattern. It is not enough for her to reject the Buddha or Ganesha. She declares them to be demons. It is not enough for her to admit that she gravely abused psychedelics, resulting in horrible consequences. She declares all psychedelics to be demonic enslavers. Her story is the source of power by which she can make these sweeping claims, separating people into categories of “soiled” nonbelievers bound for hell and “pure” Christians chosen by God, to use her colorful terminology.

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Through her story, Lande makes claims on my own life. I deeply disagree with many of her assessments. I use psychedelics, and I am a Christian minister. If psychedelics are demonic, then I am at best deceived and at worst a demonic deceiver myself. I believe that other religions can be paths to Christ, whose death and resurrection made possible the only path to God through himself. Again, in Lande’s paradigm, I am deceived at best and deceiver at worst. Listening to her life story requires me to reckon with the claims she makes over my life and my story.

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Lande’s story must be the means by which she lays claim on my life, in part, because she does not have a proper grasp of other religions. She continually mischaracterizes world religions through a converted New Age-to-Evangelical lens. To Lande, Buddhism’s central call to nonattachment is “inhumanity,” “callousness,” and “the death of the soul.” She claims Buddhist doctrine is that we must “withdraw” into “complacency” in the face of suffering. She uses this rhetoric to justify later throwing Buddhist iconography in the garbage. This an unfair and disrespectful view of Buddhism, which Lande may never have encountered outside of New Age circles.

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Buddhism does not advocate for callous complacency when facing suffering, also called duhkha. It advocates active compassion, known as karuna. Karuna is the way by which one can face and engage with duhkha, living in a suffering world while not being overwhelmed by it. It’s also worth noting that drug use violates the Fifth Precept in the Eightfold Path of Buddhism. While some New Age practitioners may try to combine the two, psychedelics or marijuana have no part in orthodox Buddhism. This is a fact that Lande fails to name, either because she does not know or because it does not support her agenda to condemn world religions as “oppressive” demonic paths.

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Our stories have power. Everyone has the right to tell and understand their own story, but when anyone uses their story to make authoritative theological claims, we must be skeptical. When we look closely, Lande’s depiction of psychedelics, other religions, and herself is unstable. It changes as needed to push a theological agenda through storytelling, and it mischaracterizes ways of life foreign to her primarily conservative Christian audience. Worse still, her story fails to recognize real dangers in psychedelic subculture like grooming or irresponsible substance use. Again, I wish Lande only the best for her future, but this evangelistic retelling of her past does more harm than good.