I Ate Magic Mushrooms and Found a Small Child Who Had All the Answers

It took me two years to write this. I'm still not sure I'm ready.

There's a version of this story where I don't tell you any of this. Where I keep it locked away in a couple of PDF files on my hard drive, safely categorized under "Things Tobe Will Never Talk About in Public." That version is easier. Cleaner. Less likely to result in those close to me questioning my sanity.

But I've spent too much of my life performing a version of myself that looked good on paper and crumbled under any real pressure. So here we go.

In the summer and fall of 2024, I took psychedelic mushrooms - aka magic mushrooms - on two separate occasions, in controlled, intentional settings. What happened during those experiences fundamentally rewired the way I see myself, the people I love, and whatever the hell this thing called life actually is.

I need you to understand something before we go any further: I am not a drug guy. I grew up Mormon in Bossier City, Louisiana. I served a two-year mission in Mexico. I didn't drink alcohol until I was in my forties (except for a brief, wild stint in my teens). The idea of me sitting cross-legged somewhere having a "spiritual experience" on mushrooms would have been absolutely laughable to anyone who knew me even five years ago.

But five years ago, I was also a different person in a very different place.

The Backstory You Need

I'll keep this brief because this isn't really a story about business failure - it's about what happens after.

By the summer of 2019, I had been an entrepreneur for my entire adult life. I'd built a marketing company business that was doing around $10 million a year in revenue, left that, started a digital advertising agency, and then watched it all collapse under the weight of my own overhead, lost clients, and - frankly - my own ineptitude.

I missed a payroll. Then another. My employees turned on me (as they should have). I shut it all down. Etc.

That same year, my wife and I were in the middle of a devastating faith crisis after 40+ years in the Mormon church. My father - a meth addict who had already caused two decades of trauma in our family - was arrested and convicted on child pornography charges. My marriage was hanging by a thread. I was severely overweight, deeply depressed, and closer to a nervous breakdown than I've ever admitted publicly.

My entire identity up to that point in my life had been "entrepreneur." And I had just proven, at least to myself, that I wasn't very good at being the thing I'd spent my whole life calling myself. Imagine that for a second. You describe yourself as something for twenty years and then the universe rips the mask off and says, "Nah."

My wife went back to work. She saved us from bankruptcy. From absolute financial ruin. The hole I dug for us was so deep I had to look up to look down.

(I want to pause in the story here to give her some long overdue, public credit. She didn’t just save “us.” She saved my sorry ass. While I was wallowing away like a little bitch she picked up her end of the couch and mine and kept our household going. She did what a lot of women - and men - couldn’t do and built a thriving 6-figure business all by herself. She is one of the most amazing human beings I have ever met. And incredibly, through it all, she never - SHE NEVER - gave up on me.)

Anyway, I started freelancing and slowly, painfully, began rebuilding by hiring Filipino virtual assistants to help me deliver work I could no longer do alone. That desperation eventually became Katuva, my VA staffing company, and an entirely new chapter of my life.

But the internal damage? That doesn't just heal because your revenue stabilizes.

The First Trip: "You Fucking Civilian"

June 2024. 3.5 grams of Albino Penis Envy (yes, that's really what they're called - I don't name these things).

I went in with one question: How do I love myself?

What I got back was not the gentle, affirming answer I was hoping for. It was more like the universe grabbed me by the collar, shook me, and said, "You're asking the wrong question, and you don't even know it."

What I experienced over the next several hours is genuinely impossible to put into words - and I say that as someone who who used to make his living with words. The best I can do is tell you what I wrote down during the experience, raw and unfiltered. From my handwritten notes:

Asking "how can I love myself" is like asking "how do you love the ocean?" or “how do you love a sunset?” The question is absurd. You just do. Get over yourself. There is no SELF you fucking civilian.

That's what hit me. There is no self. Not in the way I'd been thinking about it. I'd spent years trying to fix Tobe, improve Tobe, heal Tobe - operating from the assumption that there was this distinct, separate entity called "me" that needed to be loved and repaired. What I experienced that day shattered that assumption completely.

I'm part of everything. Everything is part of me. The separation I'd been feeling - from my wife, from my purpose, from whatever you want to call God - wasn't real. It was a story I'd been telling myself, and I'd gotten very, very good at telling it. This is what many have described as an “ego death.” You experience a complete dissolution of Self. It can be very jarring and destabilizing in the moment, but it soon dissipates as you realize that it really isn’t as important as you have come to believe.

We are taught (particularly in Western society) that the Self is almighty. That we are special and unique. In my former religion, that we are children of God even. (What could be more special than that?) In that moment in time, during that mushroom experience, that struck me as so trite, so incredibly arrogant. It actually saddened me that we could be so self-centered and selfish. I understand that I will ruffle some feathers with that statement and that’s ok, I’m just the messenger here.

I wrote in my notes afterward that I wanted to tell all of humanity, "I'm sorry. I didn't know. I just didn't fucking know." What didn’t I know? That it was me and I was it. That we are everything and everything is us. I know I am coming across as a babbling idiot, but in the moment it was all so perfectly clear to me how connected we all are to each other and to everything around us. And if we just knew that maybe we’d be a little gentler, a little kinder to one another and to the world.

As I started to come out of the trip I had two big thoughts: First, it was such an intense experience that I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy, but also that every human being on the planet should experience it at least once. And secondly, I wrote down that every psychiatrist should be required to take a trip dose of psilocybin before treating patients. Otherwise, it's like letting people build bridges who have only ever played with Lincoln Logs. I stand by that.

When I came fully out of it, I found myself kneeling at my wife's side of the bed sobbing uncontrollably. I don't remember how I got there. Was this symbolic? Was I drawn to her in that moment as a way of paying my respect to her for how she had saved me from myself? You can draw your own conclusions. I don’t think it was a coincidence.

The Second Trip: The Small Boy With All the Answers

October 2024. 3.6 grams.

Even though I swore I would never put myself through that again I found myself wanting to explore more of the depths of what the mushroom could show me. This time I went in with bigger ambitions. I wanted to "expand my reality." I wanted to break free of self-imposed constraints. I wanted to experience "deeper dimensions of time and space."

Reading that back now makes me laugh and shake my head at my naïveté. I walked in there like some wannabe philosopher with a checklist, and the mushrooms essentially looked at my agenda, set it on fire, and said, "Sit down son. We're going to talk about something else entirely."

What came through - and "came through" is the only way I can describe it - was a message about the Ego. Not the pop-psychology version of ego where it's this villain you need to destroy. Something much more nuanced and, honestly, much more tender.

The ego, as I experienced it, is like a small child. A little boy who's been with you your whole life, who carries every answer you've ever searched for, and who just wants to be understood. He's not your enemy. He's not something to kill off or dominate or suppress. He's the most intimate part of who you are.

And what have most of us been doing with him? Trying to beat him into submission. Trying to silence him. Trying to transcend him like he's some obstacle on our spiritual journey.

I realized I'd been doing that my entire life - to myself, to the scared parts of me, to the parts that failed, to the parts that didn't measure up. I'd been treating the most vulnerable piece of who I am like a problem to solve instead of a child to love.

The message was clear. Again from my notes: Stop trying to control him. Cooperate with him. He will hold you back or set you free, and the choice is entirely about how you treat him.

I'm not going to pretend I didn't cry. I sobbed like a man who'd just realized he'd been at war with himself for 47 years and didn't have to be. I saw my ego in that moment as a small child who just wants me to be happy. That doesn’t mean he always wants what’s best for me. He’s impetuous and impatient. He can be cranky and short-sighted. But he just wants me to be happy.

Often-times I have to tell him no. I have to negotiate with him. And sometimes I have to plead with him. But kill him? My ego is not my enemy. He is part of me and it is my responsibility to love him and care for him.

Right at the end of that experience, my actual son Beau called me with exciting business news. I don't think that was a coincidence. I don't think much of anything is anymore.

What I Actually Believe Now

I need to be careful here because I'm not trying to start a religion or sell you a life coaching program. I'm just a guy living life in Idaho who ate some mushrooms and had his worldview completely rearranged. Take what's useful and leave the rest.

We don't really know anything (and that’s ok). And I mean that with zero exaggeration. We are just playing at humanity. We walk around with such certainty about how the world works, how relationships work, how life works, how God works - and we really have no idea. The answer to nearly everything is to slow down and hold our convictions a little more loosely. Most everyone would be much better off to add the phrase “I don’t know” to their lexicon a little more often.

There is no "out there." I went looking for answers in the cosmos, in expanded consciousness, in some other dimension - and every single time, the answer was the same: it pointed to my heart and said it's in here. It's been in here the whole time. Whatever you're searching for externally has been sitting inside you, patiently waiting for you to stop running long enough to notice.

We are connected in ways that defy comprehension. The separation we feel between ourselves and others, between ourselves and the universe - it's not real. It's useful as a human-created construct for navigating daily life, sure. But it's not the deeper truth. The deeper truth is that we are specks in an infinite ocean, and the ocean is conscious, and we are the ocean.

Death is not what we think it is. I'm not going to pretend I have a clean theology here or if this belief is true in any way, shape, or form. It’s just what I saw. But I walked away from these experiences with a visceral sense that what we call death is more like a transition than an ending. A changing of form. An infinite number of transformations across dimensions of time and space that our current minds can barely conceive. Death doesn’t exist (at least not how we conceive of it.) It’s not an ending. It’s a never-ending process/transformation.

The purpose of life is to experience it. Fully. Completely. Not to accumulate, not to achieve, not to prove anything to anyone. Just to experience this particular slice of time and space to the absolute fullest extent possible. And then - and this is the part that wrecked me - your job is simply to arrange the molecules of your life in a way that maximizes that experience. Health. Wealth. Relationships. All of it. Not for their own sake, but because they are the vehicles through which you fully experience being alive. They are simply means to an end that actually never ends because there are an infinite number of time and space continuums to experience and enjoy. So put that in your pipe and smoke it.

Why I'm Telling You This

I'm not telling you to go do mushrooms. I'm not qualified to give that advice, and frankly, these experiences were among the most intense and gut-wrenching of my life. This is not recreational. This is not a party trick. This was the most sacred, humbling experience of my entire life. It is not something to be taken lightly.

I'm telling you this because I spent 40+ years walking around thinking I had a reasonable handle on how reality worked, and I was wrong. Spectacularly wrong. And I think a lot of people reading this are in a similar place - maybe coming off their own version of 2019, their own crisis of identity, their own dark night of the soul.

If that's you, here's what I'd say: the answers you're looking for are not in the next business, the next relationship, the next achievement, or the next self-help book. They're in the small, scared, brilliant child inside you who's been trying to get your attention for as long as you've been alive.

Be kind to him. He knows the way.

I found myself kneeling at my wife's side of the bed at the end of the first trip and cooperating with a small boy at the end of the second. I went searching for the vast, infinite mysteries of the universe and instead found the most intimate, tender truths about who I already was.

I went looking for answers "out there." There is no "out there." There is only "in here."

And it's been here the whole time.