Ben “Doc” Askins, author of The Anti-Hero’s Journey, has a background that’s as eclectic as you can get: He has degrees in outdoor education, intercultural studies, physician assistant studies, and divinity. While in the military, he taught wilderness, tactical, and expeditionary medicine. He works as a psychiatric physician’s assistant with a practice that focuses on integrative mental health, including ketamine-assisted therapy, and has a Multidisciplinary Association of Psychedelic Studies certification for MDMA-assisted therapy. He is also a member of the Wilderness Medical Society and has done postgraduate studies in neuropsychiatry and genomics.

The last thing you’d imagine from someone with a CV like Askins’ is a boring book. In the opening pages, he describes The Anti-Hero’s Journey thusly:

Everything you are about to read is true or points to something that is true. [...] This isn’t an autobiography; it’s a naughtobiography.

The title of this book is a riff on the late Joseph Campbell’s classic work The Hero With a Thousand Faces, also known as the Monomyth or the Hero’s Journey. As an American scholar of literature and comparative mythology, Campbell wrote the most brilliant, thorough, and comprehensive descriptions of the utterly insane view that reality is, in fact, reality. Hero suggests that in the greatest myths and religions, and even in our own lives, there is a discernible heroic narrative arc, such that anyone can become the hero of their own story by getting in sync with the pattern. [...] The Hero has a thousand faces and at least one of them is yours.

Alternatively, in this book I suggest that the Monomythical Hero’s Journey of The Hero With a Thousand Faces is a detailed topographical map of the pure illusion where so many of us have gotten lost, having taken for granted that reality is real. Campbell gives an extensive analysis of the dream state for sleepers. I am suggesting that you wake the fuck up by offering you the Zeromyth, Anti-Hero’s Journey: The Zero With a Thousand Faces.

Kirkus Reviews says The Anti-Hero’s Journey is a “slim volume of musings—part memoir, part work of philosophy—[that] dismantles the idea of the ‘self’ even as it encourages readers to live more fully and fearlessly,” and remarks that it is “a lot to think about in a small, sometimes unnerving package. Readers who enjoy thought exercises and existentialist philosophy will likely find much to ponder here.”

Askins, who lives in Louisville, Kentucky, says “it had always been on my list to write down my story at some point,” he says. “I’m a voracious reader. I have a Master of Divinity degree, which involves a lot of very deep reading and writing. But if I’m being completely honest, I’m a military veteran, and I have my own struggles and demons from those experiences. I got involved in psychedelic-assisted therapy, and I was doing a lot of integration work around a psychedelic journey that I’d had. I had a good two-week period where I simply couldn’t sleep until I sorted all these thoughts and memories and experiences [out and put them] down on paper. So at that point, it felt like I had to pull the trigger and write a book. Depending on your perspective, it took me both 42 years and just two weeks to write that first draft.”

Askins describes The Anti-Hero’s Journey as a book that isn’t about a psychedelic trip, but is, in itself, a psychedelic experience. His intention is for his writing to open the reader’s mind, making them question the nature of reality. At a brief 150 pages, The Anti-Hero’s Journey can be completed in one sitting; however, however, Askins jokes that the length also works well because readers might want to read it twice to really wrap their minds around it.

But it isn’t meant to be the kind of book that meanders. Instead, Askins pulls in his experience as both a patient and a practitioner of psychedelic-assisted therapy, urging his readers to widen their perspective and get a better view of themselves and their experiences.

“The idea that I present early on is that everybody needs to un-tell their untrue stories in order to be fully themselves,” he says. “And then I just do that myself, with my own story in the book. So it’s heavily autobiographical as an example of how other people could do that work for themselves.” Askins owns a ketamine-assisted therapy practice in Louisville, and he says that he sometimes shares the book with clients at his practice. “It helps them understand the point of the therapy,” he says. “They can create their own story, their own way, and live out whatever is on the other side of the un-true stories that everyone else in your life may have told about you.”

The Anti-Hero’s Journey is partially Askins’ take on Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces, particularly the beginning. So fans of Campbell will find a lot to think about here, especially as Askins criticizes some of Campbell’s ideas about the famous “hero’s journey.” “The Bible was also really influential, oddly enough,” says Askins. He goes on to cite philosophers like Graham Priest and the school of deconstructionism as other ways of thinking and writing that influenced him.

Readers do not, however, need to have a background in the kind of intensive reading that one does in graduate school, or any experience with psychedelics, before they pick up The Anti-Hero’s Journey. Kirkus says that the book is “both amusing and thought provoking,” and comments that “the author’s actual journey toward ‘zero’ is told with plenty of sarcasm and self-deprecating wit.”

Askins has more to offer readers who enjoyed The Anti-Hero’s Journey and wants to crack their minds open a little more. He recently published The Hero’s Journey for Anti-Heroes, which he describes as “a different approach entirely from Anti-Hero’s Journey. It’s not autobiographical, and it’s not quite as gonzo-style and frenetic.” Instead, in this new book, Askins goes back to Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces and takes it apart chapter by chapter, breaking it down for his clients at his therapy practice. It’s a tool to use alongside the therapy Askins administers in his clinic over a six-week period and for readers who would like a less dense and technical way to understand what Joseph Campbell was writing about.

Overall, Askins is passionate about taking heady concepts like philosophy—and the reality-bending experiences that come from using psychedelics—and making them accessible to the average person who hasn’t had the wider life experience and education that he’s had. “I’m really drawn to research and academics,” says Askins. “But I’m a blue-collar guy at heart. The people I’ve talked to in my life, whether in the military or in my practice, are regular people. I’ve had so many great conversations with smart people by starting with making these academic ideas accessible to everyone. And it helps me figure out what I’m trying to communicate with my writing.”

Askins hopes that regular person—that average reader—reads The Anti-Hero’s Journey and maybe learns how to take things a little less seriously. “I don’t take my own story very seriously,” he says. “If we can expand our minds a bit to see the big picture of the universe, it can help people understand their traumas and experiences as important and central to their own lives, but it lightens things enough that they can approach their lives with more of a sense of humor.”

Chelsea Ennen is a writer living in Brooklyn.