Let It Happen

Most people have a record like this. The one that was playing the year everything fell apart, and somehow held you up. The album you put on after a funeral, or a breakup, or a birth, not because it said anything about what was happening but because it made a room you could stand to be in. You may never have thought about why it worked. It just did.

For my wife, Sarah, and me, that record is Currents, by Tame Impala, and the something it has held us through is a long practice with psilocybin mushrooms: journeys we’ve taken together, at home, in the dark, with that album playing. I’ll say plainly what that is, because the rest of this depends on it. You don’t need to have ever taken anything to follow what comes next. Nothing here recommends that anyone does. This is about what the music taught us, and the teaching isn’t really about mushrooms.

Here it is, as simply as I can put it. You can’t force transformation. You can’t think your way into being a different person, or argue yourself out of grief, or will yourself whole. What you can do is build a room where change can happen, and then get out of its way.

The Taoists of ancient China had a name for that second part: wu wei, usually translated as “non-action” or “effortless action.” It doesn’t mean doing nothing. It means not forcing. The Tao Te Ching, in James Legge’s 1891 translation, says it in a single line that sounds like a riddle until you’ve lived it: “The Tao in its regular course does nothing (for the sake of doing it), and so there is nothing which it does not do.”

The first song on Currents is called “Let It Happen.” It’s the best two-word translation of wu wei I know.

I.A song about change you can’t control

Tame Impala is one man, Kevin Parker. He writes, plays, records, produces and mixes the records himself, mostly alone, at his home studio in Fremantle on the coast of Western Australia. He released Currents in 2015, and he was clear about what it was. “It’s about this deep feeling of transition in your psyche,” he told SPIN, “the roller coaster of emotions that go with realizing that you’re changing as a person.” Years later he put it more simply: “I’m really singing about breaking up with myself and another part of myself.”

An album about change, then. And not change you choose. Of “Let It Happen,” he said: “It’s about chaos, the whirlwinds of life that have always seemed too intense for you.” And then the line that is the whole of this piece in a sentence: at some point, “it takes more energy to block it out than allow it to wash through you.” Another time he said it was “about allowing what is overtaking you to take control.”

Allow it to wash through you. That’s water, the image the old Taoist books return to more than any other: the softest thing there is, which goes where it’s let and in time wears away the stone. Parker, who lives by the ocean, made a record that tells you to stop holding the door shut.

Even the way he talks about making it sounds Taoist. Of “Yes I’m Changing,” the song at the centre of the album, he said: “It was like it was someone else made the song. I had no memory of imagining it.” He has said that what he’s after above all is evocation: “I’ll do anything for evocation. Anything. I’ll forsake everything else to just do something that transports me.” He doesn’t describe building a song so much as getting out of its way.

The album closes with a song called “New Person, Same Old Mistakes,” which is about as honest a description of real change as I’ve heard: you do become someone new, and you bring yourself along.

II.The room

I first heard Tame Impala in 2015, in Peru. I was travelling abroad on my own for the first time, in Cusco and then Machu Picchu, and two Australians I met at the hostel each handed me something I’ve kept. One did peyote with me. The other introduced me to Tame Impala.

For the five years after that, Sarah and I had a practice. We kept it private, we kept it at home, and we kept it serious. We called it the Nest. We’d bring a pile of blankets into the bed and build something soft enough to disappear into. Neither of us likes to move much during a journey. Your body gets heavy. You want to melt into what’s around you, to merge with everything else there is, and after a while even holding yourself together feels like too much work. So you stop.

And Currents played.

There’s a chapter of the Tao Te Ching about rooms, and it’s the one I’d hang over the Nest if I could. “The door and windows are cut out (from the walls) to form an apartment; but it is on the empty space (within), that its use depends.” A room isn’t its walls. It’s the space they hold open. That’s what we were making: not an experience, but a space where one could happen.

Here is what happens in that space, as best I can tell it.

The beginning is always a little uncomfortable. I’ve come to think that makes sense: it’s a crossing, a transition between states. You don’t cross a threshold without feeling the step. Once you’re over, there’s comfort, and then a different kind of knowing. For me, every time, it is simply obvious that everything is one. It isn’t a conclusion. Nothing argues me into it. It’s just known, and lived in, the way you know you’re warm.

I don’t feel intoxicated. My mind feels normal; my reasoning is intact. It’s perception that changes. It’s like standing between two distinctly different worlds.

Under the mushrooms, my senses cross, and it happens most with sound. The music moves the emotions, but not in the normal way, the way beautiful music moves you on an ordinary day. It’s the whole range of feeling, all of it, and the depth of it can be amazing. Parker builds his sound in layers that blur into one another, so that on Currents the songs don’t sound like instruments in a room. They sound like the room.

There’s also something in the Nest that I’ve never known how to say to people who haven’t been there, so I’ll just say it. The plant responds. Sometimes in words, sometimes not. Sometimes in ways I can’t explain. But it always feels like an answer. It can guide you if you let it, and break you apart if you fight it. That’s wu wei again, from the inside: the same experience goes one way if you surrender to it and another way if you grip.

The harder journeys did the real work. Afterward there’s what I’ve always called a download, and it takes days to unpack. Slowly, things shift: you face what you’d been avoiding and find you can carry on without the weight of it; a habit that needed breaking gets exposed, and suddenly you have the will to break it. You don’t come back entirely the same person who went in.

None of this is only my impression. Researchers running psilocybin trials have found the music matters enormously. In one study of patients with depression, how they experienced the music predicted how much better they felt a week later, and how strong the drug felt didn’t. The researchers called the music “the hidden therapist.” The man who designed the playlist for the Johns Hopkins trials called his “a nonverbal support system, sort of like the net for a trapeze artist.” A net is a kind of room. It’s what lets you let go.

III.The wrong room, and no room

If the room matters that much, the wrong room should matter too. We found out.

In September, after six years away, we came back to this in the strangest place possible: a sold-out arena. Tame Impala played Ball Arena in Denver on Friday 11 September. We didn’t want to take anything into the venue, so we took a small dose in the parking lot. We timed it wrong. It came on hard, and we peaked during the opening act, a band our kids know and we didn’t, in a big, loud crowd that got a little messy at times. The wait for Tame Impala ran past forty minutes. My ears had been ringing since the opener, and the ringing turned into a droning echo that kept building and building. Sarah, who is more anxious than I am, was having a harder time. She said the lighting made everything look like a circus. I told her to watch the people around us. They were a trip all by themselves.

It was the wrong room. Terence McKenna, the writer whose words gave this site its name, had warned about exactly this. In a 1994 lecture he said “you would be nuts to take a major psychedelic” at a club or a rock concert. He was right.

And yet. By the time Kevin Parker walked out, we were coming down, and what we saw was probably exactly what was there: a synchronized symphony of lasers, moving and morphing screens, light and atmosphere, the visuals dancing with the rhythm and mood of the music. I’ve been to a lot of concerts. I’ve never seen production like it. The setlist did something I only understood afterward. The first half was mostly the new album, Deadbeat, which we barely knew; the second half was all the older songs, the ones that live in the Nest. Unfamiliar music while we were still unsettled, then the songs I know by heart as we came home. The wrong room, and still the music found a way to hold us.

There’s a worse case than the wrong room, which is no room at all. Tool, another band this site has written about, has a song called “Rosetta Stoned” about a man who is handed an overwhelming vision and has nowhere to put it. He comes back with something nobody around him can see, and it breaks him. The danger in these experiences isn’t only the experience. It’s coming back alone, carrying something you can’t hand to anyone.

McKenna’s own prescription was solitude: a large dose, alone, “in silent darkness.” I’ve never done that. I’ll admit I’ve been intrigued by it. But I’ve come to think what saved us over the years is the opposite. In the Nest, someone else has been there. Sarah and I make these journeys side by side, and over the years we’ve found our experiences are remarkably similar. When we come back, there’s someone there who already knows where we’ve been.

IV.When life takes the room away

The last time, before the pause, was in 2020. Sarah believes it may have been the night our youngest daughter was conceived.

That same year, Tame Impala released The Slow Rush, an album about time. Parker described life as a piece of string with a start and an end, and said “we never really know where we are on that piece of string.” The album opens with a song called “One More Year” and closes with one called “One More Hour.”

Then we stopped. For six years.

I want to be plain about those years, because the teaching means nothing if I’m not. They were a crucible, and it burned hot. We had a baby, and two older daughters coming of age while we poured ourselves into the youngest. Sarah became the caretaker for her parents not long after our daughter was born. I took a new job when our daughter was ten months old. It was relentless, I moved up fast, and it only began to balance out this year. Somewhere in there I developed an addiction to kratom.

None of that is unusual. That’s the point. It’s what a life does when it’s full: it fills every space, including the space where the practice used to be. The Nest got folded up and put away with everything else we didn’t have time for. A room isn’t its walls, the old book says. It’s the empty space. And for six years, we didn’t have any.

In the days after the arena, the clearest thing I knew was that we had healing to do. I said it in the only words I had: I’m ready to be purged. I didn’t get that word from anywhere. It’s how I’ve always thought about these journeys: they clear you out of all the baggage you’ve been carrying.

V.Letting it happen

We went back properly in October.

We put on Currents. When it ended we put on Deadbeat, and when that ended we put on The Slow Rush. Three albums, start to finish, the whole night held by one man’s sound. Kevin guided us through another magical experience. That’s how it felt, and I don’t have a better way to say it. It was 17 October, a year to the day after Deadbeat came out.

Deadbeat surprised me. I’ve listened to it properly since, in that state and out of it, and the word I keep landing on is human. It’s strikingly human, and I think that’s its beauty. When it finished that night, Sarah said it wasn’t her favourite of his. I said no, but I’d really enjoyed it: it’s very human. And she said, “He must have gone through something.”

That’s the feeling of the whole record to me. You can hear it in the song titles alone: “My Old Ways,” “Loser,” “Oblivion,” “Obsolete.” The one that sold it for me was “Afterthought.” There’s no way of knowing what a man goes through from his records, and Parker hasn’t told us. He has said that to him the title means “the feeling of being disconnected from the world … feeling like you’re not built to keep up with the world around you.” And he said this time he set out to free himself from perfection. “I’ve always been sort of annoyingly meticulous with my music, where things have to be perfect,” he said. The man whose mixing of Currents once drove him “insane” opened Deadbeat on “this janky phone recording of me playing piano.” Ten years after the record that taught us to let it happen, here was one where he seemed to have let something happen to himself. I agree with Sarah. I think he went through something.

Partway through the night, something happened in my body that happens to me often in that state. Strange physical sensations. Zaps in my head. Strong forces moving in my chest. I took it as the mushrooms working on me, doing the healing I’d come for, and I did the only thing I know how to do with it. I surrendered. I said, inside: I’m open. Heal me.

It’s the instruction on the first song we’d played. Let it happen. Halfway through that song, the music catches on itself and repeats, a single fragment looping over and over, as if the record has stuck. Parker said he just “put it on a loop to see what sounds cool.” It’s hard for me not to hear the threshold in it, the moment where everything catches, before the song opens out again and keeps going for minutes more. The Tao Te Ching asks: “Who can (make) the muddy water (clear)? Let it be still, and it will gradually become clear.”

And then, this time, something didn’t happen. Usually I go deep, and I come back with insights, and the download takes days to unpack. This time I didn’t. I’m not counting that as a loss. It was simply good to get out of my ordinary way of being and reconnect. The journey gives you what you need rather than what you came for, and I’d come for a purge and got a homecoming. Researchers have found something like this too: for some people what helps is insight, and for others it’s mostly a deep sense of connection, and the two are partly separate roads.

Zhuangzi has a line about the mind of a person who has learned to let things happen. “When the perfect man employs his mind, it is a mirror. It conducts nothing and anticipates nothing; it responds to (what is before it), but does not retain it.” That was the night. Nothing to bring back. Just something met, and let go.

VI.The teaching

So here is what I think this music has been teaching us, stated for someone who will never take anything at all.

Wu wei isn’t passivity. In the Zhuangzi there’s a cook so skilled that his knife stays sharp for nineteen years, because he never forces it; he finds where the ox already wants to come apart and lets the blade follow. Water isn’t weak; it carves canyons. What the Taoists saw is that most of the important changes in a life can’t be forced, and that forcing them is usually what stops them. You can’t make yourself grieve faster, or love someone back into who they were, or become a new person by deciding to. What you can do is build the room. Make the space, protect it, put the right music in it, bring the right person, and then stop holding the door shut.

For us, the room has been a pile of blankets, a decade of Tame Impala, and each other. For you it might be a walk you take every morning, or a friend who’ll sit with you without fixing anything, or one record you put on when it all gets to be too much. The teaching is the same. The space is what does the work.

I keep thinking about the crowd that night. I’d expected people closer to my age. Instead the arena was full of people who would have been children when Currents came out, and that’s to their credit. I didn’t get the sense that the people around us were on anything. But they knew the songs. What had they found in them? I won’t guess. But I’d bet it’s their own version of what we found: a record that made a room for whatever they were carrying, at an age when there’s plenty to carry. Our five-year-old already loves “Dracula.” The room keeps getting built, for people we’ll never meet.

And sometimes, when the work is done, what’s left is laughter.

When we had properly started coming down that October night, we put on Marc Rebillet. If you don’t know him: he’s an improviser who builds songs out of nothing, live, on the spot, looping his own voice and a keyboard into something that is half music and half joke and entirely committed to being both. We watched the video he made with Erykah Badu, and then we just kept going, one live show after another. I can’t remember the last time we laughed that hard. He’s a master of working in the absurd, and at some point I turned to Sarah and told her that people like Marc restore my faith in humanity.

My mom asked me recently where the hope is, if we can see the pattern of what’s wrong with the world and still fail to learn from it. I didn’t have a good answer for her then. I had a better one at the end of that night. It looks like a man alone in a room, making something out of nothing for no reason but the joy of it, while strangers laugh along. Ram Dass called it the cosmic giggle. Alan Watts said that “the meaning and purpose of dancing is the dance.”

So that’s the reading. Not of an album’s words, but of what a sound has held for us across ten years: a crossing in Peru, five years in the Nest, a wrong night in an arena, six years with no room at all, and a right night in October. A man in Fremantle, alone in his studio, tuning a record until it nearly broke him, so that two people he’ll never meet could lie in the dark in Colorado and feel held.

Let it happen. Then laugh on the way down.

This reading is the contemplative end of three pieces on the same territory: an Inquiry on The Edge, More Real Than Real, takes up what the clinical research shows and doesn’t, and a new thread in The Mycelium, The Sacred Mushroom, follows the sacred mushroom through history. A Collection draws the lines between them. The Taoist teachings it stands on are on the Map: Wu Wei — Effortless Action, Highest Good Like Water, Water and Stone, Subtracting Daily, The Living Are Soft, and The Fish Trap. The site’s name comes from The Antibody. The earlier reading of Rosetta Stoned is Not Like You; the laughter has its own dispatch, The Cosmic Giggle. Nothing here recommends that anyone take anything. It describes what happened to us.

Is there a record, a film, a book or a game that has carried something like this for you? Tell The Signal.

Read alongside: The Backstop.