And then there’s the amazing case of Mark Matzeldelaflor.
Mark was a Navy Seal. In case you’re not familiar with that, the Seals and the Green Berets are the ultimate warriors. Incredible athletes, highly disciplined and impeccably trained, they are considered the finest combat soldiers in the world.
Mark was also a professional sniper in the Seals. His job was to kill other human beings by shooting them with high powered rifles, as rapidly and effectively as possible, and he was very good at it.
After serving two tours in Iraq, he left the military and returned to the West Coast, where he became an emotional and spiritual shipwreck. He drifted from one meaningless job to another, drank too much, suffered from horrible PTSD and sank into depression and suicidal ideation.
Then one day a buddy of his said, “Hey, man, why don’t you take some Magic Mushrooms with me”. And it all went away. All of the trauma, all of the depression, the alcoholism, the PTSD – it vanished from his heart and brain like . . . well . . . magic.
Mark immediately started trying to use his new world view to help other veterans and started an organization called Guardian Grange. The idea is to use the discipline and talents that they’ve acquired in the military but channel that into helping to save the earth. And their first project is . . . a refuge for monarch butterflies.
Now, I’ve written quite a bit here about toxic male role models and I find this story so amazing from that perspective. When we think of the classic toxic male, we tend to envision a guy who’s taken a few too many steroids, muscular, swaggering, fairly devoid of emotions, unable to admit any vulnerabilities, and a bully.
That kind of a guy becomes a sort of a silly cartoon when you put him up against the reality of a Navy Seal. These are men who can run or swim for hours with no rest, survive in a jungle or desert with no food, and kill with no mercy or compunction.
So how does someone who is literally a stone cold killer suddenly become a Butterfly Warrior? It’s fascinating to think about, isn’t it?
The normal cultural model for male/female behavior is based on hormones. To put it in a nutshell, men are chock full of testosterone and that makes us aggressive, dominant, and violent. Women are flooded with estrogen, and that makes them passive, nurturing, and weak. That model was given a huge boost by Sigmund Freud, a man who wanted to fuck his own mother and thought the clitoris was utterly unimportant in female sexuality.
Despite it’s rather shaky logic and dubious proponents, that remains the model that most people operate out of: we’re simply predetermined products of our hormones. But what if we’re not?
Scientists are just now beginning to really dig into what psilocybin does to the human brain. They know, for instance, that it has some sort of a strong interaction with serotonin and pleasure receptors, meaning that it makes us happier. They know that it vastly increases the connectivity between different parts of the brain, so that parts of our brain that don’t usually, “talk to each other,” are suddenly communicating. They know that it suppresses activity in other parts of the brain, such as the portion that maintains our sense of self and ego.
Still, there’s much more that we DON’T know about how Magic Mushrooms affect our brains than what we DO know. Somehow it erases depression, anxiety, PTSD, and suicidal ideation. And – I suspect – it may also erase toxic male role modeling.
My symbol for the Male Archetype in our culture is The Emperor. He’s strong, he’s heavily armored, he’s living in a barren environment, and he’s very much alone. He rules, but he’s paid a heavy price for his crown. He is, above all else, disconnected.
One of the best descriptions I’ve read of what psilocybin does to the human brain is that it’s just like a snow globe. It picks up our brains, gives them a good shake, and a lot of our normal neural pathways are disrupted and fly off in totally new directions. If you’re more into mechanistic models, it seems to instantly rewire our brain patterns.
Dig what Mark said in that interview: “I just reconnected to nature and my past, where I was like a kid in the woods.” That description is what we hear from many other people who have taken psilocybin: an instant sense of reconnection with the earth and with meaning.
Now, there’s no suggestion that psilocybin caused a huge drop in Mark’s testosterone levels or that he suddenly became a eunuch and that’s what took away his aggression or his toxic male role modeling. He simply instantly learned how to be a male in an entirely different way than what WE ARE TAUGHT that it means to be a male.
All of this is strongly indicative that, “manhood,” is much more in our heads than it is in our testicles. Toxic masculinity may very well consist of a series of enculturated neural pathways that are so deeply burned into our brain tissue that they’re nearly impossible to overcome. Unless someone picks up that snow globe and gives it a good shake.
We can’t expect that taking psilocybin will turn our culture around anytime soon. For one thing, we’re taught from the cradle that some form or another of toxic masculinity is good, that this is the way that a real man behaves. For another, there’s no money to be made by the pharma industries where psilocybin in concerned. It’s out there and it’s relatively cheap, so why manufacture it?
Still, it’s a start. If a man who was the most efficient killing machine the military can manufacture can suddenly turn into a warrior for butterflies that’s . . . a miracle.
There’s hope.
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