Exploring the depths of one’s own mind can be a beautiful and dynamic journey. It can often be hilarious. And sometimes dangerous.
Shane Mauss is no stranger to the power of psychedelic compounds and their potential to impact how we perceive the realms within and without ourselves. For years, the comedian and podcast host has engaged in spiritual spelunking, crafting a career and a following by delivering a potent blend of humor, education and first-person experience earned from delving into the corners of his own mind.
His resulting body of work illuminates, educates and entertains. Here is a man who has consumed the majority of psychedelic substances known to humanity lived to tell the tale.
He has released a documentary, “Psychonautics: A Comic’s Exploration of Psychedelics,” recorded a decade’s worth of shows for his podcast, “Here We Are,” and riffed on tripping in comedy specials and various late-night talk show appearances.
One could say that Mauss pushed the boundaries so we don’t have to. And he’s definitely found his limits.
The Power
There was a time when Mauss didn’t hesitate to eat mushrooms and didn’t fear the power of psychedelics. Then, a few years ago, a heavier-than-intended Ayahuasca journey unearthed the comic’s latent, undiagnosed bipolar disorder.
“I thought that psychedelics were just always amazing,” Mauss said. “Even when they were a little difficult, that was just part of it. Then I lost my mind. I’ve been much more skittish ever since.”
As a psychonaut who built his career and public persona around psyche-spelunking, it’s been a difficult journey to balance his diagnosis with his exploration of the mind. It adds a complicated layer to the onion.
“I have two things that I hate now,” he said, “one of which is that mushrooms are my favorite psychedelic, and I’m now more scared of them than I’ve ever been. I have rules about when I do them. And two, when things feel really good in my life now, because I’ve had some severe manic episodes, I can’t just appreciate feeling good anymore. I am on alert a little bit. I definitely don’t do psychedelics if things are going really well, for fear that it’ll lead to a manic episode.”
That doesn’t mean he doesn’t trip. But he’s careful and intentional with his choices.
“I go on streaks,” he said. “I got very into ketamine for a while because that never made me feel unsafe in terms of having a manic episode … DMT is something that I’m kind of looking to get back into. I’ve had so many DMT experiences, and just oddly enough, it just only gets weirder and weirder and weirder. I definitely hit a wall with DMT where things were just getting so insane and weird and confusing that I needed a little break for a while.”
The Progress
Just like with anything, a psychonaut’s relationship with psychedelics evolves over time. In Mauss’ case, that evolution experienced an acceleration event with his diagnosis. Now, he’s more interested in the growth potential that swells immediately after a trip than he is in the trip itself.
“When I was young, it was to see a cool visual or to be in this altered state and just to feel different,” Mauss said. “That’s what I was after. With enough experience, all of the visuals and those sorts of things kind of got old and didn’t really do as much for me. [Now] it seems to be that the trip is just a thing that I get through so I can have the integration afterward, which is what I seem to enjoy the most. It’s funny: because I’m on a psychedelic tour, I’m doing the least amount of psychedelics in my life because the tour is so busy that I almost never have two or three days to set aside to integrate an experience. I don’t like doing a psychedelic experience if I don’t have at least a full day free afterwards.”
The evolution of his relationship to psychedelics seems to be happening in tandem with a sea change in the public perception and use of entheogenic, mind-altering medicines. Mauss points out that the original archetypical American psychedelic explorer of the free love generation saw the experience through an idealistic, kaleidoscopic lens. Not only has the popularization and mainstream implementation of these powerful substances changed how they’re used and why, but it’s also changed the profile of people who use them.
“The idea that everyone would do acid and turn to universal love and peace was probably a little naive, but I think that I would have believed that more [during the Woodstock era],” Mauss said. “I had a fairly closed-minded-ish upbringing and had my own biases and prejudice and everything else that as a kid I bought into, so psychedelics were very opening and mind-expanding in that way for me. That was always my assumption too, that it would make people more empathetic and sympathetic and mindful and caring. But people didn’t microdose before either, so people were having experiential changes. Now people are doing these optimizing doses, so it’s in this supplement grift kind of category of optimizers. I think if you would go back to Woodstock and go like, ’Hey, in the future, people are going to do small amounts of LSD to get better at punching people in the head for sport in gladiator arenas.’ I think that would’ve surprised people.”
The Presence
Mauss is currently in the middle of a marathon tour that kicked off at Area 15, the Las Vegas home of Meow Wolf’s amazing psychedelic tourism attraction Omega Mart. The shows are a vibrant blend of storytelling set against a visual backdrop from his collaborator Michael Strauss, a VJ who creates digital eye candy-scapes to complement the material.
“I try to combine my experiences with ideas that I have about perception,” he said, “to get at why a human brain would be having this experience at all, so that it’s less about me and more about a universal experience.”
He’s found that the acceptance of psychedelics into the mainstream brings a wider array of people to his shows.
“Being 44, I went through the D.A.R.E. program and all of that stuff as a kid. I mean, I never thought in my wildest dreams that psychedelics would be as normalized as they are,” Mauss said. “A decent percentage of my audience on this tour hasn’t done psychedelics. And that’s pretty unusual. Usually, if that happened in the past for a psychedelic tour, it was because someone who was really into psychedelics and a huge fan, or whatever, would drag one of their friends that they’d been trying to tell about psychedelics and get them to come and listen to what I say in the show.”
Mauss sees it as his mission to make sure that while his bits are funny and entertaining, they are informative and, above all, that they’re accurate depictions of the psychedelic experience.
“That’s probably the number one compliment that I get after a show: the accuracy,”
Mauss said. “People are laughing or learning a thing or two here and there. They’re always impressed by the accuracy, which is a hard thing to pull off.”
Mauss is recording his next special on October 20 at Meow Wolf in Denver. Find his tour dates and more at shanemauss.com. He also has his own brand of Amanita Muscaria and Blue Lotus gummies inspired by his DMT experiences, called My Purple Lady. Learn more at mypurplelady.com.
Words of Wisdom from Mauss
The Leaf asked Shane Mauss for advice on what budding psychonauts should avoid in their early experiences. Here’s what he had to say:
“I think the mirror is not for first-timers. I think you should have your sea legs a little bit because there are certain things that can really add to a psychedelic experience but can also be much harder to navigate. I would never be like, ‘Hey, you know what? You should do psychedelics and get in a hot tub.’ That’s about my favorite thing in the world, but I also know the right time. It’s after I’ve peaked and I’m coming down. There’s something about it that can bring on another wave for me, and I feel comfortable. Psychedelics can already be an overwhelming experience, so anything that can make it more overwhelming is something you want to have more experience with before you try.”
“I think bathrooms generally are easy to get yourself lost in. There’s just too much stuff going on with bathrooms: germs, nudity, hygiene, tiles. It’s weird, especially if you’re in public and there’s just too much going on. I would always recommend a first-timer just have a plan: get in and out as soon as you can. It’s not some hard-and-fast rule or anything, but it is like a quick, dirty heuristic, more than some dogmatic rule that’s going to be the right thing for everyone. But I find that there are things like seeing yourself as others see you [by looking in the mirror on psychedelics], I think is something that most people will benefit from even early on, even if that’s a little harder.”
“But then there’s things like looking deep into your dilated pupils and looking into the infinite space of your pupils … that’s almost concerning the first time that it happens to you. But I do all sorts of stuff. I mean, I’ve driven while tripping. I do all sorts of things that I don’t ever recommend to people. My best LSD experience of my life was when I accidentally did a bunch LSD, and then I had to drive for 12 hours. It was one of the greatest days of my life. I’m not recommending that to anyone, clearly. I’m not recommending it to myself. I’m not going to replicate the experience. But it was amazing. It would be dishonest of me to say that it wasn’t one of the single greatest days of my entire life. It was beautiful.”
“TV is another one. I would generally stay away from it. It is funny because I think early on you’d hear people be like, ’Oh, what we should do is eat mushrooms and watch a trippy movie.’ I think that if you have animal documentaries on mute with just regular music playing in the background, that’s a nice atmosphere — something that’s just ambient that you don’t have to be watching, but you can also get sucked into if you want to. But it also leaves a lot to the imagination and interpretation and everything of the experience. Often, whatever random song happens to be playing will influence your perception of how these animals are behaving. Jimmy Buffett’s on, and you’re like, ’Wouldn’t it be great to be an animal like that?’ And then Pink Floyd starts in on the dark stuff, and you’re like, ’Oh my God, I hope they make it!’ I once watched ’Requiem for a Dream’ on mushrooms. I’d heard it was a trippy movie.” (Spoiler: It was a horrible experience.)
“I actually have a pinned post on my Instagram trying to dissuade people from coming to my show while tripping, because I don’t think you need to do trippy things while tripping necessarily. But, I mean, if you’re into tripping a lot, that’s a different thing. What I would hate is for people to come to my show and be like, ’I’ve never tripped before. What more apt time than now to do my first-ever experience than to eat some mushrooms and go and listen to this guy talk about psychedelics?’ Not realizing that a psychedelic state is best when you can go off on your own in your own world for two and a half hours because that’s what you happen to be feeling in the moment. And then you can get back into whatever social conversation when your capacity and attention span are there. But standup comedy requires so much attention, and there’s just a lot going on, and there’s information, and people do it all the time. And I’m like, ’Cool. Hope you had fun.’ And it seems like they do.”
