The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born

By Nicholas Powers, Ph.D.

What if psychedelic therapy were available to social workers? I imagine clients who stand at the doors of a treatment center nervously holding the TRIP pamphlet. The case manager takes their hand and says it is going to be okay. They guide the client to a low-lit room with ocean sounds. Fidgety, one woman, thin and scarred, sits on a warm mat. She talks about binge drinking and fistfighting her boyfriend. The more the story unspools, the further back in time it goes until she talks with her father, who left the family.

The social worker gives her psilocybin. The client wears an eye mask and from her unconscious rises sharp grief. Behind closed eyes, a dim patch of color moves toward her and takes the shape of her father. He seems to walk on bioluminescent water, every footfall stirring glowing trails. The closer he gets, years peel off his face. He becomes a teen, a child, then a baby. She cradles him. A mirror faces her. In it she sees that her reflection is her grandfather. The old man had been jailed and never saw his son, her father, the baby in her arms. He never saw her either. The reflections fall on each other like dominoes on a table. Pushed by the pain of abandonment.

The psilocybin wears off. The client tears off the eye mask and sees the long, winding path that trauma takes in her family’s life. She palms her chest and feels her heart kick and says over and over, “I understand.” Imagine her leaving the treatment center and joining the MTA workers, cops, sanitation crews, paramedics, and firefighters. Client after client opens the center doors and stops to look in wonder at their hands. They study fingers and wrists and palms in wonder. They touch their faces, then each other’s faces as if they were beautiful sculptures
by Rodin.

The growing throng studies their arms and faces. They gather in the street, on stoops and intersections. They hold each other like reunited lovers. They have returned to their bodies. Euphoria gives way to sadness. Why were they separated from themselves for so long? Who dulled them to the painful beauty all around them? The air—my god—was it always electric? Was breathing always filled with so much flavor?

Gathering in parks, feeling grass tickle fingertips, workers rejoice in the world. Every touch feels like a miracle. Songs burst from mouths like roses. No one knows who began it but pressing palms with another person becomes a greeting. A new image rises from the warm, tactile communion. The Body, they keep talking about the Body as what everyone has in common and is older than ideology or theology. Across the city, Collective Transference charges the air like static before a storm. Hair rises on the back of people’s necks. Whole groups take LSD and press palms. They stare at and touch their limbs as if they were just born.

While I was walking down Lexington Avenue, the LSD made it easy to see what the future can be. Each wave of psychedelic therapy must smash an invisible wall separating the deserving from the undeserving. Of course, workers deserve it. We owe them our world. So do the sick. They did not cause their illness. What about ex-felons? 

What of the chronic poor? Do they deserve a second chance?

Imagine an ex-felon going to a freshly painted treatment center with a crumpled TRIP pamphlet in his back pocket. His brother, who drives a bus for the city, told him psychedelic therapy worked and he should sign up. It comes with time off parole, less check-ins. He is like fuck it, why not. He saunters into the treatment center, slaps the pamphlet on the desk, boom-shouts he is here for the Hippie shit. The staff look at each other, smile, and usher him to his therapist. The doctor is a salt-and-pepper-haired Black man with bright red glasses and a boxer’s broken nose. He sizes up the client and asks him to walk and talk.

The two men joke about jail; they had both done time. They shake heads at the transition to civilian life. Finally the therapist asks if he saw his son. The man snaps no. They meet over weeks, undressing old wounds, and the therapist even has the client sit on different chairs and talk from the perspective of his father, his son, his baby mama, and finally himself as a child. After two months, the therapist takes him to a candlelit room and the client lies on a thick mat, swallows the LSD, and holds a photo of himself kissing his newborn son, nine years ago. The LSD strips husk from mind. The tough-guy act and loudness slide off. The more he looks at the photo, the more it moves like film. In it, his face changes into his son’s face. The newborn’s face changes into his middle-aged face. They have reversed roles, and his son now cradles his father, says the same thing he said nine years ago in the hospital, “I waited for you my whole life.”

The LSD ebbs like low tide. The ex-felon presses the photo to his chest, snot bubbles from his nose while apologizing. Days later, he goes to the basketball court where his son plays and waits. His palms are sweaty. He knows the kid will diss him. They had not seen each other in years. He is a failure. What child will want him? The boy dribbles with his friends, sees his father, and turns absentmindedly to a teammate, spins back, and yells. He runs and his father catches him. They fall to the ground and weep and sway back and forth.

Imagine him walking out of the housing projects, holding his son’s hand and joining the massive march of MTA and sanitation workers, cops and firefighters, social workers and their clients, paramedics and their patients. Hundreds of thousands fill the avenue like a river. Heads rise and fall like waves. Voices swell and sizzle like seafoam. A vision glows in their faces as if the sun shines on every one of them.

At each housing project the march passes, men and women pour from the buildings. 

They shake the streets. The Section 8 houses are brightened by art. Murals make walls into utopian visions. Graffiti artists paint snapped slave chains that morph into a DNA double-helix that becomes ladders climbed by children into a clean futuristic New York. Flowers are painted on trash cans. Poetry is written in multicolored chalk on the sidewalk. In playgrounds, activists announce the new Exodus. Standing on top of the jungle gym, they shout through a megaphone that “trauma cuts us from our bodies, our history and city.” They raised the volume: “The Black Freedom Struggle has always been returning to our truth.” Holding the Bible and the Circle Seven Koran and the real Koran, they dramatically throw them into the trash. “We do not need lies. No more gods. No more masters. Our bodies are the holy text. Our bodies are the promised land.”

Imagine in the most blood-soaked neighborhoods psychedelic strike teams of violence interrupters take rival gangs to the African Burial Ground. They sit them face-to-face, give them MDMA. Therapists ask them to tell their enemies about the person they killed. Who were they? Why did you love them? Why do you miss them? Stories rebound through the night. Stripped raw by the MDMA, they realize the man they killed was just like them. “I’m sorry,” one says, then another. “I’m sorry.” They wipe tears with gang bandannas. They look at the monument, sigh, and feel the ancestors buried inside them. They reach for each other, and say, “Never again. By any means necessary.” A joyous New York rises from the dead husk of the old New York.

Hundreds of thousands flood the streets. In their eyes is a burning question: How did we get so low? How did we get used to our own depravity? Why did everyone forget we are human? Why did we? In a seesaw effect, crime plummets to near zero as protests erupt. Vowing not to go back, mi gente stage die-ins at banks, occupy city hall; crowds block traffic and chant. They demand better housing, better schools, and jobs.

The mayor orders the police to crack down. Only a third show up in riot gear. The rest are too moved by the beauty to crush it. Many have seen the healing up close and cannot kill it. A threadbare line of cops stands in the avenue like a cheap necklace. They try to stop the river of New Yorkers. Face-to-face with colleagues they have known their whole lives. Hands tremble on batons. Friends in sanitation or doctors or social workers gently push aside the riot shields. They fall on the ground like large fingernail clippings.

The governor on TV calls for law and order. The TRIP program is canceled, but it is too late. Activists organize a Psychedelic Underground Railroad where secret meetings take place in safe spaces to continue radical therapy. New language grows from the navel like an umbilical cord to instinctual truths. Abandoned offices are repurposed for LSD consciousness raising. Odd combos show up, a middle-aged doorman, a subway driver, a sex worker, and migrants. They lie on mats, and on psychedelics, dig through a kaleidoscope unconscious. Afterward, they sit up and see the strangers they came in with are now bathed in a new light. Each pair of eyes, a mirror to their own depths. They share different languages, how their lives were pulped in the gears of modern life. Wealth wrung from them to create power for the powerful.

I am so lost in imagining psychedelic New York that I do not realize how far I walked. I am across the street from Madison Square Garden. It is lit up and buzzed with people going in for an event. Standing out- side a deli, nurses on lunch gossip and smoke cigarettes. A Chinese man fixes the mannequin in a store window. Whoever I see is split in two, the flesh-and-blood person, yes, but also, as if peeling off plastic wrapping, who they could be shimmers in the air. In this dreamed-up city, the lines of people that pour into the stadium carry Fat Joe for Mayor signs. Speakers boom the speech he gives inside. I hear his nasal Bronx voice yelling in rap cadence that it is time for workers to go “all the way up.” Thunderous foot stomping and yelling and roars make the sidewalk vibrate.

Why did I think this movement could be different? Why does a worker-led Psychedelic Revolution succeed where the ’68 generation failed? The secret is it does not need a Moral Shock to get us “woke.” When done right. When done with the proper Set, Setting, and Container, the masses taste Heaven. The people experience the transcendent interconnectedness with each other and themselves and their bodies. With that euphoria at hand, the joy and love for another world fuel the movement.

The Psychedelic Renaissance becomes the Psychedelic Revolution when it serves the multiracial working class. It really is that simple. When workers win, everyone wins. I turn the corner with a tornado of butterflies in my head. Down the avenue is the Freedom Tower. I put in earbuds and play Roberta Flack’s “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” and people-watch. The New York I conjured on my LSD trip seems loony. Most would say it does not exist, but I saw it. I lived it. After 9/11, we searched photos of the dead with candles and held hands at bars. We listened to each other’s loss. I lived with it in quarantine when Covid put the city into a forced coma and we wore masks to save lives. I marched with it during Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter. Every day when buildings caught fire or we got sick or kids shot kids, I saw our best—civil servants risking their lives for strangers even when it was hopeless. Even when it cost their own lives. We live in two New Yorks. One rough and greedy. One luminous with love and courage. You have to live here a while to see both cities wrapped inside each other. When a crisis hits, the people’s soul burns the thin screen that separates them. Sometimes we look away. We have been warned for decades not to stare at bright lights. Think of Times Square. You get blinded. You get hustled. Yet our love for each other rises like towers of light. If we saw without blinking. If we touched it. We would know how powerful and handsome we are. We could change ourselves. We could change the world.

The party rages. Outside the Freedom Tower it is like the scene from The Wiz. Dancers leap and twist. Police cars blare deep house music. Buses rock as passengers sway side to side. Passersby toss beers to them. A huge bonfire paints the skyscrapers red and gold. Thousands encircle it, drumming, and chanting. Climbing on top of a turned-over jeep, I can see the streets filled with jumping, thrashing, raucous New York.