Darkness Shining Wild

DARKNESS SHINING WILD

AN ODYSSEY TO THE HEART OF HELL & BEYOND

Meditations on Sanity, Suffering, Spirituality & Liberation

Welcome to the PDF of Darkness Shining Wild!

Included is not only the original text, but also an Afterword covering the time from the

end of the book (1999) to now (late September 2009).

Darkness Shining Wild is an investigation of sanity, suffering, identity, death, and the far

frontiers of spirituality, centered around the story of an extremely harrowing near-

death experience I endured. The ultrahellish journey following that experience provides

a jumping-off point for deep-diving reflections on topics ranging from the anatomy of

dread to the relationship between madness and spirituality.

The odyssey to the heart of hell and beyond that centers Darkness Shining Wild provides

not a consoling cartography of the transpersonal, but rather a reality-unlocking tour of

the everwild Mystery of Being, in which revelation supplants explanation.

Darkness Shining Wild is for everyone who is interested in authentic awakening, and is

especially suited for those who, having left the shores of the status quo, are discovering

that the waters they are crossing have no obligation to remain benign or comfortable.

It may also inspire those who, despite having done considerable psychospiritual work,

nonetheless find themselves stuck or plateau-ing or "sinking" into darkness.

Darkness Shining Wild is dedicated to those whose longing to be truly free is stronger

than their longing to be distracted from their suffering.

It is not a light read. I recommend you proceed at a pace that allows for proper

digestion.

May it serve you well.

robert augustus masters, ph.d.

“An absolutely extraordinary book…

I think you really have offered something to the spiritual literature, an insight into the difficulty of the extraordinary vistas of the path that has never been written before…I absolutely recommend Darkness Shining Wild. It’s a remarkable book long waited for.“

— STEPHEN LEVINE, author of HEALING

INTO LIFE & DEATH

darkness shining wildAn Odyssey to the Heart of Hell & BeyondMeditations on Sanity, Suffering, Spirituality, and Liberation

“Many people who have had breakdowns of psychotic proportions have subsequently undertaken deep spiritual work. We have some powerful first person accounts of people who made this voyage into madness and then returned spiritually awakened. But Dr. Masters is the first I know of to take the plunge with a spiritually attuned consciousness and return to write about it. This is not a romanticisized Dark Night’s Journey…. The story of his odyssey is a naked dance of spirit, with mind in its most wild wandering untamed form.”— DAVID LUKOFF, PH.D., professor of Psychology, Saybrook Graduate School,and co-developer of the DSM-IV category “Religious or Spiritual Problem.”

“A fascinating and illuminating work.”— THOM HARTMANN, author of THE LAST HOURS OF ANCIENT SUNLIGHT

ROBERT AUGUSTUS MASTERS

Tehmenos Press

Meditations on Sanity, Suffering,Spirituality, and Liberation

darkne s ss h i n i n g w i l d

An Odyssey to the Heart of Hell & Beyond

Copyright © 2005, 2009 by Robert Augustus Masters.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be

reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted,

in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,

photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the

written permission of the author.

ISBN: 978-0-9737526-0-2

Designed by Madison Creative Inc.

Printed in the United States

Tehmenos Press

For more information, visitwww.robertmasters.com

First electronic edition, September 26, 2009

contentsPrelude Unraveled by the Minotaur’s Bleeding Howl .......................... 1

of Recognition

Chapter 1 Introduction: Dying into a Deeper Life ................................... 5

Chapter 2 Day One: Into the Stranger-Than-Can-Be-Imagined .......... 13

Chapter 3 Mortality, Identity, Being: An Initial Look .............................. 27

Chapter 4 Days Two to Five: My Locus of Self .................................... 43Splattered Everywhere

Chapter 5 Near-Death Experiences Revisited .......................................... 53

Chapter 6 Navigating in the Dark .............................................................. 65

Chapter 7 Into the Heart of Dread ........................................................... 79

Chapter 8 Gates Dynamited Beyond Repair ............................................ 93

Chapter 9 Avoiding Death is Killing Us .................................................. 107

Chapter 10 Learning to Bear the Unbearable ........................................... 115

Chapter 11 Madness, Creativity, and Being ............................................... 123

Chapter 12 More Meltdown: A Needed Shattering ............................... 135

Chapter 13 Too Real to Have Meaning ..................................................... 149

Chapter 14 Spirituality and Madness .......................................................... 157

Chapter 15 To Transcend Yourself, Be Yourself ...................................... 173

Afterword ..............................................................................................................191

References................................................................................................................203

forthcoming

For DianeMy wife, truest friend, ever-deeper beloved and partner in all things, through whom I am awakened to all that I am.

Just when I thought our bond couldn’t get any deeper, it once again does, emptying me of all that I took myself to be, leaving only this ever-fresh shared familiarity and ever-evolving intimacy, this exquisitely personal mutuality so lovingly rooted in the raw reality of Absolute Mystery.

darkne s ss h i n i n g w i l d

We die, and we do not die.— Shunryu Suzuki

The truly transformative death comes usually unbidden if notunwelcome, of itself, happening to us and in spite of us.

— John Weir Perry

With the arising of overwhelming fearthe mind has no time to be distracted.

— The Tibetan Book of the Dead

A thing is what it is not because of an irreducible essence thatmarks it off from other things but because of the complex and

singular relationships that enable it to emerge with its ownunique character from the matrices of a contingent world.

— Stephen Batchelor

All there is is Is.— Adi Da


~ 1 ~

unraveled bythe minotaur’s bleeding

howl of recognition

PRELUDE

Darkness Shining Wild

~ 2 ~

It’s perhaps midnight.

I am sitting up in bed, as I have for the last sixty consecutive nights, my hearthammering and my mind overrun with accelerating dread. Another night ofhell.

As usual, I am struggling to remain present, struggling not to let the reality ofthe dread engulf me. A dimensionless black pit of primal panic pulls at me,pulls and pulls, eerily sentient and far too close, its jagged electricity wormingthrough me. Variations on a single theme keep campaigning for what remainsof my attention: No more terror. I cannot endure any more.

And yet here it is, apparently immune to meditative practice and catharticdischarge — breath awareness, awareness of body and mind, prayer andpranayama, Vipassana and Dzogchen, bodywork and yoga and running andrelaxation practices, raw emotional release, psychospiritual insight, tears andtears and deeper tears, providing at best a sporadic, extremely fragile relief.Short-lived interruptions of terror.

A deeper imperative than just being aware of whatever constitutes the dreadseems to be addressing — or calling — me. It’s as if the dread is pulling me toitself, sucking me into its dark enormity, its sickeningly bottomless vortex.

Already I am leaving the level, the steady, the familiar, yet somehow keepingsome attention on my breath, my body, my shaking body. I cannot stop thevibrating and jerking. Admitting to myself just how scared I actually am onlyintensifies my terror. I cannot help noticing that the dread seems to possess anintrinsic depth that effortlessly magnetizes my attention.

I am closer than close to the horrifyingly unbearable — hypervividlyexperienced on previous nights — as I “descend,” sometimes step by


~ 3 ~

vertiginous step, sometimes blindly spinning and falling, working very hard tonot give free rein to my wildly panicking mind. A gigantic no-exit madnesssurrounds and threatens to completely fill me. A horizonless insanity.

The movement of my attention is far from straightforward — it is dizzyinglyirregular, complexly angled and involuted, wide then narrow then wide again,as if passing through a maze rather than a chute or corridor. An oscillatingmaze at once claustrophobically contracted and freakily expansive, housing aboomeranging focus. The fear of insanity is overwhelming.

What I am entering is a topography that won’t lodge in memory. All thatconnects me to the world I’ve left is an extremely thin strand of attention, anAriadne’s thread of remembrance. A spectral filament linking me to a glimmerof basic sanity.

A storm-crazed kite gone spelunking am I, tied ever so slightly to a fleetingsemblance of solid ground. Like Theseus descending into the Cretan labyrinth,I too am on my way to face — or to more fully face — what I dread, alreadyfeeling the breath of the Minotaur. But, unlike Theseus, I am not doing sodeliberately, and I am not armed.

The terror intensifies.

I have got to go back — but I cannot. Sometimes I forget the thread, yet Ihave not completely lost it. It is, regardless of its frailty, a lifeline — I mustnot let go of it, but if I hold it too tightly or desperately, it loses its life. Andif I tug on it, as if to secure more of it, I find myself gripping nothing,except the memory of those few times when such a strategy has jerked meback up to the surface, “safe” but still stuck, like dreamers who, reenteringthe so-called waking state, have merely fled their nightmare and its darktreasures.

No heroes here.

My dread is now unmasked terror, staggeringly powerful. Nothing can standin its way. My thread of remembrance? It’s somewhere behind me, its crazilyfraying ghost sinking in warped chasms that elude attention. Insanity.Explanations balloon into sight, then dissolve or mutate into somethingungraspably other.


~ 4 ~

Escape is now terribly attractive, but I’ve no line on which to tug, no cord ofconnection into which to breathe life. There seems to be only thisunperimetered, amorphous monstrosity all around me, ready to swallow andobliterate and possess me. No, not ready — it already has. Within and without.

Intimations of a horror beyond horror invade me from all directions. Thereis a tidal thunder in the distance, a strangely sibilant surf-like roar. It is, I haveto keep reminding myself, the de-familiarized sound of my own breathing.

Reference points eddy and shatter before I can find any anchoring throughthem. I am anchored elsewhere, in what appears to be a no-exit realm. I amvery lost. The life I had before all this started is less than a dream now, itsfleeting shards of memory only reminding me of how very far away I am.My mind rides the slopes of my previous life like an escaped sled with anaccelerating black avalanche a microsecond behind.

Suddenly, without premeditation, I go into the terror, no longer fighting orresisting it, no longer attempting to witness it. The Minotaur’s face is onlyinches away. My mind splinters, unraveled by the Minotaur’s bleeding howlof recognition...

introduction

dying into a deeper lifeCHAPTER ONE


~ 6 ~

It only makes senseWhen we stop trying to make it make senseRest in undressed BeingRemembering to remember thatIt and you have never been apartUntil only What-Really-Matters remainsAlready perfectly dressed for the partToo real to possess meaningAnd the lovers die, die, dieInto a love beyond imaginingCrying out as one: Oh God God O God

Avoiding Death deadens us.

In the resulting numbness — over which may be superimposed plenty offeeling and vitality — we easily become overly invested in whatever mostreassuringly secures us.

But only when we release everything — everything — from the obligation tomake us feel more secure, do we really feel more secure. Through such radicalnon-dependency, we develop a saner relationship with Death (and everythingelse), becoming more intimate both with what dies and with what doesn’tdie.

Keeping Death at a distance distances us from Life.

But we’re never actually far from Death, however much we might assume weare elsewhere. When we say: “I’m dying to see you” or “I’m so happy I coulddie right now,” we’re zeroing in on our deeper sense of Death. Dying are we,all of us, but are we dying — through changes large and small — into Life, or


~ 7 ~

are we just getting deader? How hungry are we to awaken, really awaken,from the entrapping dreams we habitually animate and occupy?

To awaken thus is to die to our illusions. Along the way disillusionment shedsits negative connotations, its potently sobering flowers rising from the debrisof our unraveled dreams. But it’s not necessarily a cut-and-dried course, beingamply supplied with as much peril as promise. At a certain point, for example,we cannot afford to turn away any longer from our fear, pain, or darkness.Traveling to the heartland of these conditions is an adventure that asks muchof us, an odyssey that, among other things, uproots us until we find truerground.

My face is unveiled sky and prehistoric stretchDewbrightened dawn and thunderhead-dappled streamGnarled coastline and screamingly-blossomed stormEver bursting through the roof of what’s unbornGone, gone am IBirthing me am IStruggling deepsea drop am IDreaming of boundless light and fearfully knotted nightWidewinged spacedancer am ISoaring over cobblestone oceans of cloudSeafoam am ILast sigh of a vagabond waveForest am IGreening sunlit shadowsongsAnd this too am IWhere Mystery is the Foundation

Where Love is the WeaveWhere Silence is the Breath

Where there’s so much I’m dying to see

And so much we’re dying to be. Dying to live, to truly live. Dying to be free.Dying into Life, dying into the Undying, dying into the Reality of what weactually are.

To unguardedly face and feel the transience, the inherent insubstantiality, theessential and ultimate Mystery of everything, including the “I” now reading this,undoes the knot and agendas of self, leaving nothing but What-Really-Matters.


~ 8 ~

We may feel very drawn to the promised bliss and peace of being at one withthe Ultimate, but what are the implications of being at one with the Ultimatein all of Its manifestations, including the darkest and ugliest of qualities inourselves and others? What happens when we recognize that our self-containedsomebody-ness, our “I”, is more a mirage, more a contingent arising, than adiscrete entity? What happens when we realize that we’ve been dreaming thatwe aren’t dreaming? With what are we left when we cease superimposingmeaning onto Existence?

These and related questions are intended to be entry points for an inquiryseeking something more relevant than answers, an inquiry that, rooted both inthe personal and the transpersonal, is the essential passion of Darkness ShiningWild, offering not a cartography of the Wild Blue Yonder, but rather aninvitation to a deeper life, a life in which intimacy with everything is cultivated.

Whatever we turn away from, whatever we exclude from our exploration,whatever we deem unworthy of our investigative eye, whatever we refuse tobecome truly intimate with, ultimately only diminishes us. In turning awayfrom our fear — be it everyday worry or transpersonal dread — we are onlyturning away from our own healing and Homecoming. This book explores,among other things, what is perhaps the most difficult condition to fully faceand work with as we awaken — fear.

To study fear in real depth is to study more than fear. For example, the very“I” that is busy being afraid, or that seems to be “behind” fear, has suchimpact on the formation and expression of fear that it cannot be excludedfrom any in-depth look at fear. To truly examine that “I” (or complex of“I’s”) is not just a psychological undertaking, but also a biological and spiritualone, as I’ll later describe.

The relationships between dread, spirituality, and identity are explored throughmuch of Darkness Shining Wild. Dread — how we dread it. How diligentlyand how desperately we apply ourselves to trying to make sure that we and itstay far, far apart. Yet still it persists, insinuating its way into us, undaunted byour psychological and pharmaceutical defenses.

We need to revision dread (and also every other state that we fear or don’tlike), to stop shunning it, so that we might benefit from it. In its capacity tonakedly show us the innate groundlessness of both our world and the veryidentity through which we maintain the illusory security of that world, dread


~ 9 ~

can not only scare us scriptless, but can also catalyze our transition from ego-centered selfhood to soul-centered selfhood and beyond. (By soul, I mean ourpersonal essence, or that depth [or stage] of individuality in which egoity isclearly and functionally peripheral to Being.)

What this requires of us is embodied commitment to the spirit of investigation,asking that we not only look as clearly as possible at whatever arises, but thatwe also look inside our looking.

Finding a fitting language for this is a challenge, rich with difficulties; even themost experientially accurate language cannot help but fall short of its descriptiveintent. Nevertheless, the written word is not necessarily incapable of the requiredarticulation, as quality time spent with sacred literature demonstrates. Somemight argue that the Numinous, the Ultimately Mysterious, the all-pervadingDivine, is beyond words, and they are right, but not completely right. Consider,for example, this statement from Sri Nisargadatta:

Love says: “I am everything.” Wisdom says: “I am nothing.”Between the two my life flows.

As you read it, and read it with more than your intellect, feeling your wayfurther and further into it, are you not, however slightly, reminded of yourfundamental nature? Each time I read it, it feels fresh to me. It empties mymind, fills my heart, refreshes my all. Its beauty strikes Home.

More on language before we get back to the book: Does language have tobecome speechless, obscure, or opaque when confronted with the unyieldinglyparadoxical? Is there a mode of verbal description that is clearly framed andyet simultaneously capable of slipping out of its frames, thereby outdancing,at least to some degree, its lines and contextual constraints and whatever elsemight reduce it to mere information or hold-still facticity?

One such mode is what could be called the holy poetic — not necessarilypoems or verse, but Being-centered articulation, the music of which can lift us,however briefly, out of rationality’s playpens into the unbounded wildernessof Existence, inviting and inspiring us to give birth and sustenance to a languagethat both thinks and sings, both bleeds and soars, both stands apart and cares.

At its best, such language roots the extraordinary and wings the ordinary,making more than sense, bringing the addictive familiarity in which we


~ 10 ~

chronically dwell face to face with its inherent Mystery, until It is more Homethan threat, more foundation than goal. The holy poetic doesn’t so muchexplain as reveal. And how does it do this? By touching both the particularand the Universal with such care, such lucidly intoxicated care, that theirintersection becomes a living — and habitable — reality for us. Hardballmagic this is, viscerally trued.

The holy poetic — the edibly accurate, everwild, epiphanously idiosyncraticsoulsong of significances large and small, weaves itself beyond itself, goingbeneath and beyond its initial range and apparencies, leaving its pages andsupposed author behind, again and again birthing us and a deeper us in itswake, its silences, its openness, its everfresh marriage of limitation andlimitlessness.

All of which is to say that the language in Darkness Shining Wild occasionallytakes on forms that may be far from what would be considered normal. Soyou’ll find in the upcoming pages not one consistent style or approach — theonly consistency I strive for is a consistency of intention and care. The wildand the scholarly, the intuitive and the analytic, the precise and the unkempt,the scientific and the poetic, coexist here, and not always smoothly.

Now, back to the book and its genesis: When I was 22, unhappily immersedin the second year of a doctoral program in biochemistry (my dissertationtask being to isolate and exhaustively study an enzyme found in rabbit hearts,of which I required many hundreds), I had the following dream:

Through a mist I look down and see a small boat bobbing on a glassy sea. I don’t sense mybody; I seem to be a witnessing presence only. In the boat stands a man, apparently unawarethat his boat is slowly sinking, almost brimming with water. He casts his fishing line, andfeels a strong tug. I cry out to him, for I fear that he’s hooked some monstrous creature thatwill surely drag him down, unless he lets go of the line. He does not seem to hear me.

When his boat can hold no more water, he at last releases his line. As it flies from his hands,his boat sinks. He sinks, too, and at that very moment I know that I am he, that he is me.I am drowning, but am not afraid. Without any sense of panic, I gently glide up, upthrough the warm green water. Just before reaching the surface, I stop and exhale fully, theninhale.

With the water rushing into my lungs, I let myself drift down, down, down, my entire beingstreaming with a bliss-saturated joy and ease.


~ 11 ~

That dream-drowning, which catalyzed (literally within a few hours) a majorchange in direction for me — leaving my graduate studies — was the first“dying into life” episode of my adult life. Many would follow. Few were asfluid or easy as the first, but all were of immense — and usually unsuspected —value to me, invariably occurring at times when I was in extreme confusion,pain, or turmoil, times when I was, however unknowingly, ripe for big change.

I neither engineered nor controlled such “dyings.” Nor did I even desirethem, at least at a conscious level — though I did hanker for painless surrogatesof them! — despite the fact that I always emerged from them rejuvenatedand more whole than before, filled with a deeper passion for life. Each “death”was new. Part of my initiation into such radical letting go necessitated a departurefrom conventional familiarity, not as a strategy, but as an act of deep trust.Letting go of security, letting go of knowing, letting go of who I thought Iwas, letting go of the very “I” who was busy letting go. Surrender.

I also sometimes died in dreams, often willingly. During dreams in which Iknew that I was dreaming, I would sometimes let myself die, disintegrate,shatter, dissolve, feeling my sense of identity moving in and out of form,reassembling itself in usually impossible-to-anticipate ways. All I had to dowas relinquish the controls, while maintaining awareness.

My participation in this was not without an increasing pride, though, throughwhich I solidified my identity as a somebody who had really, really beenthrough it all. This somebody apparently disappeared in each “dying,” butactually emerged redressed and strengthened from its brief demise,congratulating itself on its intimacy with the transpersonal.

It was not difficult to use my times of genuine opening and breakthrough asheadline news for my spiritual resumé, as evidence that I indeed was someonespecial. The more transparent that I became to Being, the more denselyguarded — and densely camouflaged — my pride became. By the time I’dreached my early 40s, I assumed that I had endured more than enoughbreakdown and “dying” for my lifetime. Little did I know what my arrogancewas drawing to me.

There was a deeper dying for me, the foreshadowing of which I ignored.The story of that dying is at the heart of this book; though it occurred overten years ago, it is still very much alive in me. I cannot get over it, for I am notapart from it. In the perpetual perishing that it signals, the Real blooms.


~ 12 ~

In such revelation, everything is rendered frontier. In such dying, we are — ifwe but dare to look and dare to move toward our fear — exactly what we areaching to find.

Bathe in this waterfall of unchained pain, bathe in it now, letting the dawning lighttouch it with a purer wonder, letting the furrily mossed cliffsides pulsate inresonance with your suddenly conscious breath, your long-crushed and panic-remembering breath, your close encounters with Death, and bathe also beneaththe falls, far below the cascading white thunder, down where silent riverpoolsglisten with terraced grace and crystalline welcome, for there you will find morethan greenblue embrace and rippling epiphany, more than reflections of formerfaces, more than the stillpoint of joy and grief.

And do you not now, softly stretching now, hear a different kind of thunder, agreenly galloping tapestry of original wonder, lush with gonged throb andprimordial demand? Do you not now sense the unshuttered panorama of eyesbehind your eyes, the overlapping dreams that are much more than dreams, thewildwinged shapeshifters so effortlessly disassembling your mind?

There is an undoing here, a reopening, a lucid vertigo, a macheted clearing, avelvet slide, a stormy desert, a shrieking wasteland, a bloody snowfield, a fallingapart, a skymaking plunge, and there is something else, too, something throbbingbetween the lines and inside the designs, a knowingness that eludes even themost sublime of semantic nets and spiritual mappings...

Permit yourself remembrance, not necessarily of details and history, but of unveiledPresence, of the Obviousness of Being, and of something else, too, somethingthat is not really a something, but rather the very Heart of Mystery, the very Face ofthe Faceless, the ever-paradoxical Truth of you, the Truth that is prior to every youand every view. And the lovers die, die into unimaginable Love, crying out as one:Oh God God O God

day one

into the stranger-than-can-be-imagined

CHAPTER TWO


~ 14 ~

Shortly after 3 pm on February 19th, 1994, in a sun-drenched living roomnot far from San Luis Obispo, California, I smoked about thirty grams of5-methoxy-N, N-dimethyltryptamine (or 5-MeO-DMT) — henceforth called5-MeO — on the enthusiastic recommendation of several members of thepsychospiritually-oriented community that I was leading at the time. Theyassured me that the “trip” would last no more than twenty or thirty minutes,and that I could even do it between counselling sessions. I had taken nopsychoactive substances since the late 1970s — psilocybin, LSD, peyote, nomore than fifteen or so times, all powerfully positive experiences — with theexception in late 1993 of ayahuasca, an Amazonian brew that made LSDseem like a cup of tea.1

The ayahuasca I took — ayahuasca varies according to its preparation — wasvery thick, satiny, and brownish-black, heavily imbued with a pungently sweet,semi-sickening odor. It tasted much like it smelled, but I managed to downtwo hundred milliliters of it. Nothing significant happened for maybe half anhour, then Nancy (my partner at the time), who’d also swallowed a dose ofthe potion, suddenly got very scared, experiencing powerful hallucinations. Iprepared myself to help her, as I had a number of others in my earlier yearsduring psychedelic sessions. Back then, even when I’d been immersed in quitegripping hallucinations, I’d been able to be of assistance to others who weren’tdoing so well.

Before I could do much, however, the ayahuasca kicked in. It was extremelystrong, and getting stronger by the second. I remember saying somethingabout how powerful it was, and then I could be of no help whatsoever toNancy, for I was so overwhelmed that I lost almost all contact with the worldI’d known a minute earlier. As that world and its sustaining views — includingthose rooted in longtime spiritual practices — very quickly became but afleeting speck on the periphery of the impossibly rich revelatory domain intowhich I’d been blasted, I buckled with huge awe and equally huge terror.


~ 15 ~

I thought of leaving the room, but could not move more than a few feet. SoI remained sitting up, quivering with an indescribably strange feeling ofrecognition, periodically fearing that I’d made a fatal mistake in taking theayahuasca. Who I had been before swallowing it was but the flimsiest andmost unreal of memories. Nancy and I seemed to be not observers of —nor even participants in — what has happening. Rather, we were it — and had,it seemed, never really been other than it — the shockingly visceral and nowdevastatingly indisputable realization of which maddened what was left ofmy mind.

My world had not so much been altered as decisively replaced, both externallyand internally. Nancy soon lay with her head flat on the floor, her face to oneside, as if pressed down by an enormous hand. All we could do was ride outthe storm.

For its first third (an eternity of about three hours) my ayahuasca journey wasextremely harrowing, partly because of the considerable strain it placed on mybody — I shook uncontrollably for almost two hours, violently vomiting a numberof times2 — but mainly because of the often terrifying, unspeakably alien yetrivetingly familiar Wonder that was manifesting within and all around me.

The dazzling presence and implications of this Wonder, this reality-unlockingUnspeakableness, and my relationship to it made me reel; I could notconvincingly stand apart from it, not even for a second, and strongly intuitedthat I never really had. When I somehow managed for a moment here andthere to recall my life before ayahuasca, none of it carried any real depth orsignificance. That this didn’t terrify me would terrify me for a moment, thenbend me with animal awe, then pass from consciousness.

What was now my world — and seemingly always had been, while I’d beendreaming that I was elsewhere — pulsed with a power and knowingness thatsurpassed anything I’d ever before experienced. No outside, no inside. Notime. Flames sprouted from the leaftips of my plants with shapely brilliance.The trees outside the sliding glass doors, blazingly vivid and so, so alive, werefused with the sky, as if all drawn with the same vast undulating brush strokes.The objects in the room were no different than the space between them.

There I sat crazily swaying and trembling, transfixed in an imagination-transcending, overwhelmingly sentient Chaos in which everything, including thenonphysical, was inseparable from everything else. The sky, dripping with


~ 16 ~

terrible beauty, poured into my room like a tsunami, my body seemed to beabout to die again and again, my mind frothed insanely, and I felt through allof this an enormous, intensely emotional knowingness, a primordial intimacyand recognition — at once prehuman and transhuman — that shook me likea rag doll in the jaws of a rabid monster.

Looking into Nancy’s eyes was no different than looking into the room orout the windows. It was all, all, the same self-replicating, self-awareUnspeakableness, beyond any conceivable framing. As its perspective andmine merged, I felt as if I’d never really been elsewhere. The Open Secret ofit all only affirmed and deepened its Mystery. I was alternatingly terrified andawestruck. I wanted to escape it all, and I wanted to get down on my kneesbefore it all.

Telling myself that I had indeed taken a drug — which I only could rememberevery ten minutes or so — had about as much effect on me as trying to stopa train by placing a marshmallow in its path. One moment I was convincedI’d gone completely insane and would shortly find myself strapped down inthe local hospital ward, and the next I would gasp wonderstruck at what wasbeing revealed. Finally, the intensity of it all faded a bit, and I was on somewhatfamiliar ground, albeit still highly psychedelic territory, grateful to have survived.The last two thirds of the journey were quite joyful, which perhaps accountsto some degree for what followed.

Not long after my ayahuasca experience was over — and it took days — Iwas ready for more. Sure, I had been very frightened in the earlier stages, butit had turned out very well, hadn’t it? I felt profoundly enriched by the wholeexperience, and wasn’t about to stop. My memories of times in the trip whenmy body became other than human or even mammalian — sometimes to thehorrifying and seemingly very real point where I appeared to have no breathingapparatus, and was therefore about to die — were of little concern to me.Some of this was just hubris, and some of it was something else, somethingthat I would not recognize for a long time.

I knew that N,N-dimethyltryptamine (usually known as DMT) was the mostpotent active ingredient in ayahuasca, and also that it was generallyacknowledged as the most powerful of all hallucinogens.3 But I was moreinterested in its lesser known “cousin” — 5-MeO4 — reputed to be evenstronger than DMT, apparently causing an almost immediate, full separationof consciousness from physical reality, transporting awareness with


~ 17 ~

tremendous speed not only to where hyperbole was impossible, but also intothe very essence of the ayahuascan vastitude.

These, however, were not my reasons for wanting to take it. I simply knew,beyond any doubt, that I had to take it. I did not even bother to weigh thepros and cons of taking such a drug; my lack of concern over the completeloss of waking/bodily consciousness that 5-MeO was supposed to so quicklygenerate did not affect me. I did nothing whatsoever that would prevent mefrom taking it. And so I arranged to do so February 19th, feeling peculiarlyunmoved by my decision.

I ate very lightly that day, and sat in meditation waiting for Marcelo (a memberof the California branch of our community) to bring a dose of 5-MeO tothe seaside house where Nancy and I were staying. It was a hot, brilliantlysunny afternoon. Marcelo arrived, put on “Undercurrents In Dark Water” (aCD from a group called O Yuki Conjugate), and carefully placed some 5-MeO in a glass pipe. I felt relaxed, quite open, and very ready. After I hadplaced the pipestem in my mouth, Marcelo lit the little white pile in the pipebowland asked me to inhale.

My first inhalation, smelling of burnt plastic, almost instantly altered meperceptually — I felt as if I were swimming through solid earth — but didnot, as it was supposed to, render me oblivious to my senses and bodilypresence. So with characteristic chutzpah, I asked for and took a secondinhalation.

What I saw in front of me — the pipebowl, the faces of Marcelo and Nancy,the room, the framed sunlight, everything — immediately shrank into a rapidlycontracting circle, as if it all were being viewed through the quickly closingaperture of a camera.5 In less than ten seconds, I become completely —completely — unconscious of waking/physical reality, finding myself bodilessin a horizonless horror that was madly and monstrously pulsating, moving fartoo fast, in all directions at once.

It resembled my ayahuasca journey at its most titanically wild and insane, spedup and intensified a hundredfold. I knew that I was in very serious trouble; Iwas completely disconnected somatically, unable to locate or feel my body(as in a sleep-dream), unable to locate myself — or anything else — anywhere inparticular. I had no body, not even the slightest semblance of a dream-bodyor mental-body, and I had absolutely no sense of where I was.


~ 18 ~

And what was I now? I was wide awake, but could not leave this domain, asI might leave a dream once I knew it was a dream.

What remained of me was but a ghostly speck of awareness, an entombedlocus of ricocheting attention in a completely unfamiliar locale,6 pervadedwith a sickeningly despairing intuition that the “waking state” me was in gravedanger, perhaps already dead.

If what “I” was immersed in possessed any discernible or translatable form,it was vaguely reptilian, full of scaly-headed waves that were both surface anddepth, both organic and metallic, sliding in and out of form. No limits, noedges, no exit. It was a timeless, boundless Chaos, continuously creating andconsuming itself on every sort of scale with unimaginable power and easeand significance.

As in the earlier stages of my ayahuasca journey, nothing in particular stoodout. Everything was constantly dying and morphing into everything else inendless and impossible-to-anticipate ways, conveying to “me” withoverpowering conviction that this was, and would forever be my — and ourand everything else’s — fate, beyond every possibility of form or individuation.Evolution without end. No exit — nothing existed apart from or outside ofthis. I was in hyperterror, seeing without eyes, hearing without ears, desperatelynot wanting to die — or live — in such a condition.

While this was occurring, my body was, unknown to me, rigidly locked as ifin rigor mortis, purple-faced and unbreathing. As I was told later, Nancy wasscreaming my name in my ears, and Marcelo (who had almost left after I’dfallen back unconscious following my second inhalation, thinking that I wasfine), trained in CPR, was pounding on my chest. Minutes passed before mybody inhaled.

I felt and knew none of this, and heard nothing except the dully roaringsilence of a poisoned edgelessness, faintly punctuated several times by aninhumanly deep, slowed-down voice repeating my full birth name.

Without at all knowing I was doing so, I sat up once, rocking back and forthon my butt, my eyes open but unseeing, then again fell back, not breathing foranother several minutes. Twice in fifteen minutes or so, I almost died, sufferingnot only respiratory failure, but also apparently having seizures (of which Ihad no previous history). Again, I had no awareness of this — all I was


~ 19 ~

conscious of was the madly pulsating, sentient Wonder-Horror that seemedto be the very bedrock and breath of reality, bereft of horizon, including initself every form, every possibility, every alternative to itself.

It was a bit like a lucid dream — a sleep-dream in which one recognizes thatone is dreaming — in that I knew that waking-state reality coexisted with thereality I was in, but with one huge difference: I could, with only minor effort,leave a lucid dream for everyday physical reality, but I could not leave thealien universe into which I had been deposited. Had I — and the question ateinto me with acid ease — ever really been anywhere else? My life as anindividual, and even life on Earth from its very beginnings, seemed but themost fragile of mirages, stretched to nothing in enough places to revealSomething altogether different. I still had no body, no discernible form ofany kind, no rudder, only a feeling both of uncanny calm and sky-fillinghorror.

In the first few hours of my ayahuasca journey, I had repeatedly told myselfto surrender, to not try to control what was happening, but now suchadmonitions or reminders were impossible, for I did not possess the apparatusto convey anything to myself. How could I give myself a message when Icould not locate myself? I could not scream, for there was nothing to manifestmy screaming. I could not leave, for there was nowhere to go.

In the shadowlands of the Unimaginable floated I, bodiless yet pinned. Terrorand Awe locked in boundless embrace.

And then, wondrous then, I became aware of “ordinary” hallucinations,7internally seeing, among other things, a hypervivid baseball game played withoutphysical limits. I was the pitcher, throwing at whatever speed I wished, and Iwas also the batter, hitting with whatever power I wished, watching the ballsoar into endless, ecstatically blue sky. I was in every position, overjoyed withfreedom — I still could not locate myself anywhere in particular, but now Iwas on familiar if still hallucinatory ground.

At last the first sensations of ordinary, physically embodied reality began topenetrate my consciousness. I felt soft, boneless, shy, extremely vulnerable,and, most of all, hugely relieved. As l lay curled up like a newborn in Nancy’slap, I knew that I had been through something remarkably hellish anddangerous, and so felt extremely grateful to be back, to have emerged alivefrom such an ordeal.


~ 20 ~

A few minutes later, I opened my eyes and with childlike innocence lookedup at Nancy and Marcelo, feeling as though I’d been gone for thousands ofyears. Then I spoke, my words straight from my heart, addressed to God: “Ilove You so, so much. I now know why there has to be fear and doubt anddespair, for without them, without passing through them, our love for Youfalls short of what it needs to be.”

And yet not all was well. When Nancy, a short time later, told me what hadhappened to me physically, I was shocked, finding it very difficult to believeher initially. I was quite shaken, but assumed that it would not take long forme to integrate the whole experience. A day or two, I was assured by Marcelo.At the most, two or three days.

However, I was far more shaken than I realized, or wanted to realize. Theassumption of a quick integration mostly stemmed from the very “I” thathad been demolished during my 5-MeO helltrip. That “I,” so easily given thedriver’s seat and my name, was characterized by an inflated sense of its ownstrength and capacity to “play the edge.” Its sense — my sense — of being avery special somebody, a somebody in control (even of my out-of-controlness!), had now been hit with devastatingly disruptive force.

But much, much more than my egoity was in disarray. Everything that I hadassociated with as constituting “me” — including my witnessing andcontemplative capacity — was on very flimsy ground, both appearing andfeeling scarily insubstantial. Nothing whatsoever seemed to have a verifiableexistence — including those teachings that claimed this to be the case —except from the crazily oscillating viewpoint of the me scrambling forpositioning and solidity. Not only did I not feel at home in the world, but Idid not feel at home anywhere.

For twenty-five years, I had practised various forms of meditation, includingthose which had as a central practice the bringing of bare attention8 to whateverwas arising in the moment, including the various habits that took turnsmasquerading (more often than not quite successfully!) as the real me. Regardlessof where that practice took me, I was usually still in control — all I had to dowas shift the focus of my attention, and I’d be “beamed” back to thereassuringly familiar.

Now, however, I was really out of control. Every possible anchoring ofwhich I was aware kept dissolving, and dissolving in full view, leaving me


~ 21 ~

marooned not only in — but seemingly also as — an unbounded, stranger-than-can-be-imagined reality.

Here, awareness and its objects caromed without warning in and out of asickening fusion, unspeakably and alarmingly inseparable, overflowing withreality-unlocking implications for which no translation could suffice.

Contracting uncontrollably was extremely frightening, but so too wasexpanding uncontrollably. I was a spectral leaf in a storm without beginning,already shattered, and yet at the same time, I was that storm, trembling withelectric surges and cosmic winds, my humanness but confetti in a fieryhurricane. My recognition of what was happening didn’t console me in theslightest.

I was terrified to fully admit just how terrified I actually was — I felt asthough I could literally die from the vast, ballooning sense of insanity thatkept pervading me. The only escape seemed to be in distraction, but I wasnot at all capable of “relocating” myself somewhere less troubling — therewas nowhere to go, no harbor of immunity, no truly safe place, no sufficientlydistracting elsewhere. My usual self, consulting its transpersonal dossier, wouldnow and then show up and assert itself for a bit, until what the 5-MeO hadcatalyzed swept in and effortlessly dethroned that self.

It seemed that at any moment I would be swallowed up in irreversible madness.Everything and everyone appeared to be but transparent manifestations ormaskings of the Real, all caught in a neverending web of creation anddestruction. Everything food for something else, forever and ever. Seeing thisonly reinforced my horror.

There were no independent forms, no discrete beings, but only the endlesslycontingent appearances of the Unknowable, but my recognition of this wasfar from joyful or peaceful (as it had formerly been at breakthrough timesduring deep meditative practice). “Form is emptiness, emptiness is form,”proclaimed the Buddha, pointing to the innate inseparability of the manifestand the unmanifest. This, however, was not mere metaphysics to me, noreven a paradox, but a naked obviousness I now could not bear — my wholesystem being in extreme shock — a horror and truth that I felt slammingthrough me, even as I struggled in vain to reenter something more conventional,something less final.


~ 22 ~

But there was no escape for me, no solid door to close and lock. The gateshad been dynamited, seemingly beyond any foreseeable repairing. Myhyperacute, gaping, shock-driven sense of Eternity and the immeasurable,achingly populated sweep of time literally made me shake and buckle. “Notonly our life, but this particular universe is just like one brief instant, even if ithas been in existence for billions of years.”9 An endless procession of universes,and I had the eerie sense of having been there in all of them — not as myconventional self, but as I really was.

That everything appeared to be arising and passing in the same unexplainablemoment — which I had meditatively intuited for years — brought me nocomfort whatsoever, no warm and fuzzy sense of sacred time, no celebratoryfeeling of arrival or oneness, but instead only an ominous, sickeningly brilliant,omnipresent dread.

I somehow managed to keep much of this at bay until bedtime. Havingthose I loved near — familiar faces bright with affection — allowed me topass the evening without outwardly going to pieces. But the dread was loomingclose by, waiting, staring back at me with an unmasked bluish chill in thebathroom mirror, insinuating its way through me, even as I felt my bond withthe others gathered in our living room. How beautiful their shining eyes, howheart-wrenchingly lovely their gestures, their self-presentation, their very being,and also how incredibly fragile — fast wilting cameos lingering in the darklytranspersonal reality now beating my heart. But maybe, just maybe, this wouldmostly pass in a day or two, as the aftermath, biochemical and otherwise, ofmy 5-MeO shock-ride dissipated from my system.

I so badly wanted to be seduced by hope. Just hang in there, I exhortedmyself, for this too will pass. After all, everything passes, doesn’t it? Watch thedoubt that claims otherwise, watch it mutate, watch its contents becomeirrelevant. Everything will be fine in a day or two, I was reassured. But will itreally pass in time? Or will I go mad first, or kill myself ? My doubt —sharpened by unrelenting terror — persisted, like an unwanted dream figurethat won’t go away, even when strangled or cut into pieces. Doubt yourdoubt, I’d taught others, but this doubt — lit with far too much intuition —ate into me with frightening ease.

I spent most of that first post-5-MeO night sitting up in bed (Nancy slept onand off beside me), helplessly absorbed in extremely gripping, three-dimensional replays of the horror I had experienced, now and then trying to


~ 23 ~

comfort myself with the thought that this wouldn’t, couldn’t, last for morethan a few nights. The waves of remembrance did not come gently. I wasthrobbing, shaking, struggling to find some semblance of calm in thepsychospiritual riptides that were tossing me about like a piece of shore-bereft driftwood. A hellride minus an offramp.

Hour after hour I endured, feeling as though I would never return from themadness that was infiltrating me. Finally, just before dawn, I fell asleep andvery soon found myself in a lucid dream.

I had often had such dreams, frequently using them as portals for all kinds ofadventure and experimentation. As such, they were normally quite pleasing tobe in; I would know that the body I “had” in the dream was not my actualphysical body, and so could then freely engage in activities that would meandisaster or even Death in the “waking” state. If I was afraid in a regulardream and then became lucid during it, I could usually face the fear, interactingwith its dream-form until some kind of resolution or integration occurred.

But not now. Yes, I knew I was dreaming, but I could not work with the feartherein. The dream was saturated with an enormous, otherworldly terrorwhich was coupled with savagely hallucinatory disorientation. In the midst ofthis I stood, my dreambody but a ghostly sieve for its surroundings. I knewthat if I left the dream, I would still be in the very same state.

At last, I let myself go fully into the dream, despite my conviction that I verylikely would not return. Now I was completely inside it, utterly lost, immersedin an edgeless domain of look-alike, spike-headed waveforms, each onesentient and subtly scaly, moving protoplasmically in endless procession in alldirections. Just like my 5-MeO setting, but without the speed.

Suddenly, I was overcome by a completely unexpected, rapidly expandingcompassion. All fear vanished. A few moments later, I somehow cut — orintended — a kind of porthole in the bizarre universe that enclosed me, ascleanly round as the shrinking aperture of my consciousness at the onset ofmy 5-MeO journey.

Through this opening the countless alien forms spontaneously came streaming,immediately metamorphosing into flowers, birds, trees, humans: Earthly lifein all its wonder and heartbreaking fecundity. Then the dream faded, and I lay


~ 24 ~

radiantly awake, deeply moved, feeling as though the hardest part was nowover.

It had, however, just begun.

NOTES

1. Ayahuasca — meaning “vine of the soul” — is a hallucinogenic drink long employedin the Amazon basin for both sacred and medicinal purposes. Two species of theforest liana genus Banisteriopsis — especially B. caapi — are mainly used to initiallyprepare ayahuasca. Then plants from other families are added, the most commonlyused being those containing DMT (such as, in my drink, Psychotria viridis). DMT isinactive when taken orally, unless monoamine oxidase (an enzyme that breaksdown DMT) inhibitors are present, and the hallucinogens in Banisteriopsis — harmineand harmaline — are in fact such inhibitors. Ethnobotanist Wade Davis, indescribing this “remarkable example of shamanic alchemy,” asks (1998, p. 166):“How did the Indians learn to identify and combine in such a sophisticated mannerthese morphologically dissimilar plants with such unique and complementarychemical properties?”

Davis’s taking of ayahuasca (in the Northwest Amazon of Colombia) produced,in its initial stages, effects quite similar to my trip in its first few hours: “The skyopened.... Then the terror grew stronger, as did my sense of hopeless fragility.Death hovered all around.... My thoughts themselves turned into visions, not ofthings or places but of an entire dimension that in the moment seemed not onlyreal but absolute. This was the actual world, and what I had known until then wasa crude and opaque facsimile” (pp. 160-161).

A deep-digging, way out-on-the-edge account of tryptamine phenomenologycan be found in True Hallucinations (1994), by Terence McKenna.

For an exploration of the ethnography of ayahuascan shamanism in theAmazon, accompanied by 49 paintings of ayahuasca visions as experienced by aPeruvian shaman, see Luna & Amiringo (1992). The story of Manuel Córdoba-Rios (Lamb, 1990), who was captured by a group of Amahuaca Indians as a youngteen, is also worth reading. Córdoba-Rios was, with great care, taken into the tribeand initiated into the ways of ayahuasca, living with the Indians for seven yearsbefore escaping, eventually becoming a shaman-healer of legendary reputation,using ayahuasca as a diagnostic aid (Lamb, 1985).

Ayahausca has become quite popular. The original recipe has expanded intoayahuasca analogues, in which plants containing DMT and plants containingmonoamine oxidase inhibitors (like harmine and harmaline) are combined tocreate an ayahuasca experience. Hence “pharmahuasca.”


~ 25 ~

2 This “purging” is commonplace during ayahuasca sessions.

3. McKenna, 1992, p. 236. From 1990 to 1995 psychiatrist Rick Strassman conductedresearch in which he injected volunteers with DMT. His account (Strassman, 2001)of what happened in those sessions, along with his speculations about the role ofDMT in human consciousness, is fascinating. Among other things he suggeststhat DMT, which is found not only in various plants, but is also manufactured bythe human brain (probably in the pineal gland), is an integral part of birth andDeath (and near-Death) experiences. He believes that alien abduction experiencesmay be brought on by released DMT. I’ll say more about all of this in laterchapters.

4. 5-MeO is a primary ingredient in the Virola-based snuffs — known as Epená orsemen of the sun— used by certain tribes in the northwestern Amazon and upperOrinoco (Schultes & Hofmann, 1992, pp. 164-171). 5-MeO is also found inremarkably high concentrations in the parotoid glands (on the back of the head) ofBufo alvarius, the Sonoran toad, found in the American southwest and northernMexico. The venom of this toad, when milked and dried, can be smoked, withhallucinogenic results. Smoking toad, despite some sensational media coverage (inwhich it was juxtaposed with toad-licking, a far riskier practice), has nonethelessnot become particularly popular (Davis, 1998, pp. 171-198). More often than not,synthesized 5-MeO is smoked by users. At the extreme, it may even be injectedduring ayahuasca intoxication.

There are reports that 5-MeO is, like DMT, found in human fluids and braintissue. Its synthesis is thought to occur in the pineal gland. Some conjecture (Chia,2004) that greatly increased melatonin levels — as generated by lengthy time (severalweeks or more) in prolonged utter darkness — increases both DMT and 5-MeOproduction by the pineal, so long as monoamine oxidase (an enzyme which breaksdown DMT and 5-MeO) inhibitors are present.

5. For more on this, see U.G. Khrisnamurti, 1984, p. 25.

6. “Attention is just the point of awareness (moving instantaneously from dot todot) in a three-dimensional realm of an infinite number of dots... It is a horror tocontemplate... Wherever you look, everything surrounds that center of looking...Wemust take attention away from its preoccupation with, or bondage to, this infinitemedium of dots and let it fall back into the contemplation of its own Source” (DaFree John, 1983, p. 273)

7. Wade Davis says (1998, p. 189) that “whereas most hallucinogens, including LSD,merely distort reality, however bizarrely, 5-MeO-DMT completely dissolves reality.”


~ 26 ~

8. For a lucid discussion of bare attention, including its parallels with Freud’s “evenlysuspended attention,” see Epstein, 1995, pp. 109-128. See also the writings ofThich Nhat Hanh, Jack Kornfield, Surya Das, and Stephen Levine.

9. Nyoshul Khenpo, 1995, p. 36.

mortality, identity, being:an initial look

CHAPTER THREE


~ 28 ~

The great message of the universe is not that you survive. It is that you areawakened into a process in which nothing ultimately survives....We are alwaysseeking to know in order to protect ourselves. We want to save ourselves andcontinue. And we cannot.— Adi Da

You are asking for truth, but in fact you merely seek comfort, which you want tolast forever.— Sri Nisargadatta

They say that I am dying but I am not going away. Where could I go? I amhere.— Ramana Maharshi, just before his death

DEATH AWARENESS AND IDENTITY

Few topics can arouse as much aversion and delusion as our own death.Modern Western culture’s denial of Death is as blatant as it is firmly entrenched:Corpses are still dressed up as if they are about to go out to dinner or to aparty; appearing youthful is an obsessive, almost unquestioned pursuit; andthe not-so-well-preserved elderly, more often than not, are kept at a “safe”distance or even shunned. The telltale signs of getting old — of beingchronologically disadvantaged — are often greeted with alarm, as if signifyingfailure or perhaps even — in a metaphysical sense — an error in the System.Death reminders are avoided rather than appreciated. But since just abouteverything, when seen clearly, is a Death reminder, the avoidance of whateverreminds us of Death is none other than the avoidance of Life.

I’m not afraid of death. I just don’t want to be there when it happens.— Woody Allen


~ 29 ~

Despite advances in working with dying and despite the abundance of writingon Death and dying that’s emerged since the 1960s, Death generally remainsalmost as much in the closet for us as sex was for the Victorian era. It’s theultimate elephant in the room. We are more likely to celebrate “youthful”achievements by the elderly — like completing a marathon at age 70 — thanmost other achievements that may come with aging, like panoramic equanimity.

Death tends to remain bad news. The media and medical profession makesure of this, so that Death gets to be a tragedy, a misfortune, the supremebummer. Think of the bumper sticker: Life’s a bitch, then you die; and morerecently, its T-shirted sequel: Life is a fish, then you fry. Far from good news,or so it seems. (Imagine the following for a bumper sticker: Life’s a bitch,then you die and have to come back and do it all over again.) The founder ofthe hospice movement in Great Britain termed Death “an outrage.”1

But is it? Is it necessarily a calamity, an enemy, a tragedy? And if so, to whom, towhich of the many “I’s” that together make up our apparent identity? Toaddress these and related questions is to explore not only our fear of Death,but also the nature of Death, to enter into what Martin Buber called “thestarkest of human perspectives, that concerning one’s own death.”2

Such a perspective may be stark, but without it, our lives tend to lose depth,presence, freshness, and authenticity. If this perspective, however, remainsmerely conceptual, it may relieve us of some of our pettiness for a few moments,but it’ll not likely have a particularly profound impact upon our life. To beaware of Death is not synonymous with just thinking about Death.

Bringing awareness — not thought, but awareness — to our mortality has aprofound effect on our sense of identity. It’s a cold-shower awakening, oftenrough and rude, driving our blood to our core.

A note about “sense of identity:” It is not the same as “self-concept” (or thepicture/idea we ordinarily have of ourselves). “Self-concept” refers to howwe tend to think of ourselves, and is therefore, as a belief — or complex ofbeliefs — relatively consistent across time, regardless of its fluctuations in sizeor strength. “Self-concept” is usually considered in terms of weak or strong,high or low, poorer or better — that is, as a something to be primarily viewedquantitatively (the instrumental image here being that of a sliding scale limitedto back-and-forth movement between predefined polarities).


~ 30 ~

By contrast, “sense of identity” is not a thing, nor a belief, and nor is itnecessarily clearly bound, being more a process than an entity. It is our moment-to-moment experience of ourselves as an “I,” ever revealing what is currentlybeing identified with — including, of course, our self-concept.3

We may identify with what dies; we may identify with what doesn’t die; or wemay do neither. Along the way, “I” may undergo many changes, includingdecentralization or even apparent disappearance, dying into a depth of Lifethat imagination cannot touch.

Self-made dreamstuff are weDreaming we aren’t dreamingTaking up space doing our timePassing through Eternity’s GrinderNostalgic for a perfect tomorrowWhen my dreams are emptied of meEverything’s right where it belongsThis odyssey of selfingReturning as alwaysTo what was never leftTravelling high and lowSailing through calm and stormDiscovering where all dreams are born

FEAR, AND A DEEPER FEAR

To journey into, unguardedly feel, and directly relate to our deepest fears requiresthat our usual distancing strategies, cognitive or otherwise, be exposed anddisarmed — assuming that it is timely to do so. These fears can then betouched and known from the inside, and eventually divested of their powerto shrink, misguide, or intimidate us.

Opening to our fear is an act of intimacy, a courageous welcoming of thedisfigured and outcast into the living room of our being. Opening thus is alsoan act of surrender. As such, it is not a dissolution — or collapsing — ofpersonal boundaries, as in submission, but rather an expanding of them.

In submission, we deaden ourselves, sinking into the shallows; in surrender,we enliven ourselves, dying into a deeper Life. In surrender we may lose face,


~ 31 ~

but we do not lose touch. Submission flattens the ego; surrender transcendsit. Submission is passive, but surrender is dynamic.

Surrender is the unarmored heart enlarged through full acceptance of purenecessity. To varying degrees, surrender also carries within itself an observingcapacity which stems not from fabricated awareness, but rather from innateawareness, at once apart from and at one with its apparent objects.

The key to working effectively with fear is to get inside it.

This means, among other things, that we need to have a clear knowledge ofall the ways we’ve learned to get away from fear, so that when one of themshows up, we’re capable of looking at it and saying no thanks. Getting insidefear means getting past its periphery, getting past its defining thoughts, gettingpast its propagandizing sentinels. Entering the dragon’s cave.

What is being mined here is not some fear-obliterating alchemy, but ratherthose raw materials that together contribute to the development of intimacywith fear.

The real challenge is getting close enough to the Minotaur to feel not only itsbreath, its swollen appetite, its violently looming size, but also its ache, itsoriginal need, its cry to be recognized as more than just the dark flowering ofa bad seed. When fear or terror is met with compassion, however fleetingly,we are brought a little closer to the heart of the matter.

But how do we access such compassion? We can begin by learning to becomemore intimate with our smaller, more easily manageable fears. Practicesregarding this — to be given more coverage later — might include: Neitherpulling away from fear nor tightening around it; examining, in attentive detail,the sensations of fear rather than its mental contents; making room for fearto breathe more deeply, as if to expand it; permitting fear’s characteristic energiesto be as they are without, however, identifying with fear’s viewpoint; exposingany strategy to do any or all of the above in order to get rid of fear.

These practices are by no means necessarily easy to do, especially when fear isintense. It can be very tempting — and entirely appropriate at times — in themidst of panic or terror to latch onto whatever delivers or promises a relativelyreassuring sense of security, including entrenchment in lesser, more easilycontrolled fears.


~ 32 ~

These smaller fears, unpleasant as they may be, can provide some degree ofstabilizing through their familiarity of perimeter, feel, and content. Also, theyare not usually very difficult to temporarily escape or sedate — we knowwhat we are afraid of, we are perhaps even oddly comforted by its densefamiliarity, and we know when to throw it a piece of meat, and when not to.We know it well enough to know how to take the edge off it, throughpositive thinking, sexual activity, food, drugs, intense exercise, electronic fixes,and other successfully distracting preoccupations — we know where thecorral is, how high a fence is needed, and the strength of the lock on the gate:“The nothing which is the object of dread,” says Kierkegaard, “becomes, asit were, more and more a something.”4

A something. That is, when our fear has a concrete, everyday thing upon whichto focus or fixate, we’re on miserable yet dependably familiar ground, seeminglyfar from the quicksands of our more primal fears. Thus do we tend toprefer the burdened beasts of depression to the monsters of the deep.

Also, the narrower the focus, as when fear provides the lens, the moresubstantial or dense “I” may seem to become, mechanically projecting itselfinto the future (and therefore into the conviction that there will indeed be atomorrow for it) through its very anxiety, thereby successfully strandingitself from any significant encounter with its own mortality and actualinsubstantiality.

Thus do we tend to cling, however indirectly, to our everyday fear and theapparent security it provides, focusing on what it’s saying rather than on theraw reality of it. In so doing we leave the nature of fear out of our inquiry,settling instead for explanations for why we are afraid.

It’s easy to use our reasoning powers to distance ourselves from our nakedemotion, yet even from the loftiest and most seemingly safe neocortical towerswe’re not out of reach of our core fears. Key among these is our fear ofDeath, however masked it might be by metaphysical lullabies or the pastelvistas of pharmaceutical flatlands.

We may even succeed at making sure that we are always capable of distractionfrom our existential anxiety, perhaps even pretending that it does not exist,but we are then only doing time in a self-conceived maximum security comfort-cell, slowly desiccating in our surrogate chrysalis.


~ 33 ~

Getting sicker with every new cureClearcutting today to secure tomorrowFleeing a grief beyond sorrowAvoiding death by deadening ourselvesNot seeing beneath our herdprintsThe crushed yet leafy reach of another usDivided we stand calling for peaceReducing love to an idealChaining attention to mindchatterPilgrims at the crossroads are weStuck in well-educated knots & fashionable headlocksThe sky opening for us is but the ceilingOf our loftiest thoughtPilgrims at the crossroads are weMissing what is more secure than securityMore moral than moralityMore significant than meaningFear’s the thresholdAnd even the ticket HomeWhen we hold the dragon’s heart

Perhaps almost as inevitable as Death itself is our denial of it, our effort toship its facticity to uninhabited regions of ourselves. We may compulsivelyoccupy ourselves with tomorrow and beyond, perhaps imagining ourselvesin preconceived after-Death realms, still somehow intact and living on andon, consoling ourselves with the notion that Death is just a benign doorway, aportal to blissful domains, spiritual enlightenment, or more lifetimes featuringus. (The intensely positive, uplifting nature of most reported near-Death experiencesmay have contributed to this.)

In its attachment to such a comforting conception of Death, that ubiquitouscase of mistaken identity commonly referred to as ego5 demonstrates itsobsession with survival, as well as its addiction to hope.

Hope is but nostalgia for the future, little more than despair taking a crashcourse in positive thinking. As I will later describe, ceasing to cling to hope(which does not mean falling into the arms of hopelessness or despair) canplay a key role in bringing us into the heart of the present moment, to wherewe have sufficient connection to (and faith in) our core of Being to be able tosanely encounter Death.


~ 34 ~

As our romancing of Later suffers the rude yet deft pricks of awakenedattention, we simply pass from now to now, with an appreciation as simple asit’s sobering.

IS ”I” ANY LESS EPHEMERAL THAN ITS SUSTAINING THOUGHTS?

This existence of ours is as transient as autumn cloudsTo watch the birth and death of beings is like looking at the movements

of a dance.A life time is like a flash of lightning in the sky,Rushing by, like a torrent down a steep mountain.— the Buddha

However obvious impermanence may seem to be, at least intellectually, weusually tend to keep the bare reality of it at a “safe” distance, steadying ourselvesby creating and maintaining reassuring illusions of permanence for ourselves,rarely taking time to investigate the actual nature of the supposed self forwhom all this is being done. Leaves may be falling, grey hairs appearing,friends moving, parents dying, but surely it’s not all changing, is it? It is, evenincluding our assumed identity, that personalized, self-enclosed, often uneasilygoverned coalition of habits that so readily insists on referring to itself as “I.”

The very thoughts that reinforce such a sense of self are (as ten or fifteenminutes of giving our undivided attention to the actual presence and contentof our mental activities will likely show) not being generated by a discretethinker somewhere inside our head, but rather are mostly arising unbidden,far from being under any sort of conscious control. So who — or what — isdoing all this thinking? Not “I.” (The notion of “thoughts without a thinker”is spiritually old-hat, dating back at least to the Buddha, but it also has arisen inpsychoanalytic considerations.6)

Is “I” any less ephemeral than its sustaining thoughts? Is not what “I” — andits multitude of interiorized voices, roles, and perspectives — purports torepresent actually always in flux, regardless of the apparent solidity of its self-presentation? To see our mind’s “I” is not an act of “I,” but rather of awareness.To thus see — or recognize — “I” is to dethrone our conventional subjectivity,perhaps even to recognize the bare “is-ness” that precedes and transcends(and paradoxically is) “I.”


~ 35 ~

Ramana Maharshi states that not only is the mind no more than thoughts,including the “I”-thought, but that “there is no such thing as mind.”7 No suchthing, no self-existing thing-unto-itself. And does anything have a verifiable ortruly independent existence apart from everything else? But before we standtoe-to-toe with the Primordial Is-ness of the Big Picture — which transcendsall framing — we’d do well neither to believe nor disbelieve Ramana’s statement,but rather to check it out in the laboratory of our own experience. Theinherent insubstantiality, inseparability, and contingent nature of all that existsmust be experimentally verified through our own direct experience — this isfirsthand science, the hard-nosed science of spirituality.

The “emptiness”that is found — and that we learn to make room for — isnot a vacuity, an absence, a mere void, but is simply the Matrix and Cradle ofBeing, its translinguistic Truth too essential to have meaning. The Is of is.

Call it Nondual Being, call it the Effulgent Void, call it Spirit, call it the Absolute,call it God, recognizing that It alone is, forever and ever appearing as all, allof this, while simultaneously ever remaining Itself — but I stray too far aheadof my topic, feeling the epiphanous birthstirrings of a poetry that only livesto celebrate the Unspeakable. Such song, however inarticulate or intoxicated,does not make “I” wrong, nor does it seek to obliterate “I” — recognizingthat only spiritually ambitious egoity wants to get rid of ego — but ratherpermits “I” its cloud-dance, developmental dramatics, and evolutionary anticsin the Infinite Playground of Being.

Look for mewhere storms come uncagedLook for mewhere the sea carries shattered skyLook for mewhere cloudsilk weaves through your sighLook, look for mewhere joy and pain disappear into sun and rain,where we can only once again love ourselves sane

To penetratingly study “I” and its anatomical peculiarities, to uncover itsbirthing-place, to feel and intuit our way toward the source of “I,” transportsus into a Life-enhancing appreciation of change and interconnectedness thatrenders Death less alien, less threatening, less other.


~ 36 ~

The degree to which we’re present as Being is the degree to which we don’tfear Death. When there’s awareness of “I,” then who — or what — are we?Furthermore, when awareness becomes aware of itself, what then happensto “I”? When attention no longer goes primarily to objects (whether externalor internal), and therefore is no longer significantly invested in sustaining thedrama of subject and object, is what then still remains in the “position” ofawareness us?

We live in illusion and the appearance of things. There is a Reality. We are thatreality. When we understand this, we will see that we are nothing. And beingnothing, we are everything. That is all.— Kalu Rinpoche

To openly face the transience of everything can be terrifying or maddening, butto avoid doing so is to sentence oneself to a less than full life. Without adeeply felt, ongoing awareness of impermanence, Death tends to remaindistant, mirage-like, of no real concern. Someone famous dies — not passesaway, but dies — and we, with more than a little help from the media, give anabundance of attention to that particular death, all but forgetting that we tooare going to die, and that on the day of the death of that famous someone,over a quarter of a million of us also died.

And tomorrow it could be you or me. This is a possibility to which weusually grant no more attention than a random line in a newspaper. A crucialbut far from popular question in this regard is: How well prepared are wefor our own death? What might we want to complete, to let go of, to moredeeply explore or open to, if we knew we had but a short time to live?8

Recognizing right to our core that Death can happen at any time — anytime — to us deserves a far more prominent seat in our consciousness, ifonly to awaken us more fully to our real condition (“Of all mindfulnessmeditations, that on death is supreme,” said the Buddha9).

To truly prepare for our death is not an exercise in morbidity or despair, butrather a wholehearted entry into a fuller, more awakened and caring life, a lifemade more precious, vivid, and authentic by its ongoing intimacy with Deathand dying. Such preparation is an excuse to at last go more fully into our life,an opportunity to journey into and through the very heart of suffering, untilwe emerge more whole, more alive, more and more intimate both with whatdies and with what does not die.


~ 37 ~

This pain you think of as yoursWells up from something much deeper than yourself,It is Existence, not you, that is suffering,You are a tune it is trying to play on a flawed harp —The pain is protest, is reprimand, almost — is warningThat the instrument will not serve, that withdrawal threatens.Then the tune that is you will cease, the universeBe there, without you. But Existence will go on,And the music it makes in endless others,The music will go on. What then, is lost?Only the self, the loved, the fleeting tune.— John Hall Wheelock

Avoiding Death deadens us. The less intimate with Death we are, the moreshallow, stagnant, and unreal our life tends to be, and the more subservientwe become to the dualistic conventions that separate Life from Death. Theinstability and vagaries of the physical world alone are difficult enough tocope with, we might protest, so why grant attention to Death? Is not Lifealready insecure and challenging enough without the added burden of suchan investigation? The voices of fear.

The inherent insecurity of everyday life, however, ceases being such a problemwhen we bring to it the perspective of our own mortality. The journey intoand through this insecurity leads to communion — and identification — withthe essential core of Life. That is, the insecurity of “I” gets replaced by (orcompassionately enfolded within) the security of Being. Not being this, notbeing that, but simply Be-ing.

This shift to Being asks that we bring a transconceptual (an ungainly yet fittingadjective) perspective to our cognition — after all, how can the rational mindconceive of what subsumes and transcends it, without reducing “that” to justmore intellectual fodder?

Just thinking about a dilemma won’t really resolve it — except perhaps throughdemonstrating the folly of doing so — since thinking in of itself is inherentlydilemmatic (every thought having its counter-thoughts, every argument itscounter-arguments, and so on), unavoidably making only more of what it isattempting to resolve, generating more and more conceptual culs-de-sac foritself, trapping itself in a vortex of hermeneutic circles.


~ 38 ~

Only when we go beyond thought can we truly see and make wise use of it.Beyond thought we find what is already between thoughts, already prior tothoughts, already present during thought. What is it? Don’t know. But it’s there.The more intimate with it that I am, the more deeply I recognize that I don’thave the foggiest idea what it actually is. To name it is not to know what it is.The position of knower sooner or later yields to the position of lover, asexplanation steps aside for revelation. James Hillman talks of “searching fora way to account for the unknown in the still more unknown... Rather thandefine, I would compound, rather than resolve, I would confirm theenigma.”10

And so, in the spirit and open-eyed innocence of “don’t know” mind —which is not an ignorant mind, but rather one that cultivates intimacy with theunfathomable Mystery out of Which it arises — let us now return to the storyof my near-Death experience and its aftermath.


Look for mewhere dewdrops make cathedrals out of grassLook for mewhere light fans through throbbing decayLook for mewhere silent riverpools dissolve your dayLook, look for mewhere joy and pain disappear into sun and rain,where we can only once again love ourselves sane

Look for mewhere dragonlizards await their preyLook for mewhere epic shields are gripped by laureled hand


~ 39 ~

Look for mewhere emerald valleys sway in orgasmic tranceLook, look for mewhere joy and pain disappear into sun and rain,where we can only once again love ourselves sane

Look for mewhere the land is wild with rhythmed WonderLook for mewhere jagged shores moan with white thunderLook for mewhere the sea is ablaze with dawnLook, look for mewhere joy and pain disappear into sun and rain,where we can only once again love ourselves sane

Look for mewhere the elements dance and dieLook for mewhere forehead is an infinity of skyLook for meinside your lookingLook, look for mewhere joy and pain disappear into sun and rain,where we can only once again love ourselves sane

NOTES

1. Ram Dass, 1992. Ram Dass has since the 1970s done much to bring Death out ofthe closet in Western culture. His talks (most of which are available on tape)frequently include considerations of aging, dying, and death, all conveyed in hisuniquely confessional, humorous, and insightful manner. See also his recent book“Still Here: Embracing Aging, Changing, and Dying” (2000).

2. Friedman, 1964, p. 391.

3. I found nothing in psychological research literature concerning the effect thatbringing awareness to one’s own death might have on one’s sense of identity. Thismay have something to do with the lack of attention psychotherapy tends to gives


~ 40 ~

to Death. Obviously, for the dialogue of psychotherapy to include Death, therapistsneed to be receptive to the death concerns, however subtle, of their clients. Mybecoming more focused on the topic of Death has had a very positive impact onthose who work with me, helping them to to more openly and fully share theirthoughts and feelings regarding Death. In so doing, other core issues inevitablyemerge, the most central of which is usually that concerning identity. There isnothing like the openly felt consideration of Death to bring a nearly-immediatedepth and fitting intensity to the question of “Who am I?”

There have been a large number of studies done on death anxiety, which oneresearcher aptly criticizes as being “assembly line studies” (Kastenbaum, 1987).Meat for graduate students’ doctoral appetites. Most of these studies merely correlatedeath anxiety (as “measured” via self-reports with Templar’s Death Anxiety Scale)with various demographic and psychometric variables.

In one of the more intriguing studies, the researcher hypothesized that egodevelopment (as measured by Jane Loevinger’s Sentence Completion Test) wouldcorrelate negatively with death anxiety (again, as quantified through Templar’sscale). Contrary to his hypothesis, he found a positive correlation between egodevelopment and death anxiety, which gives a bit more bite to the old saw thatignorance is bliss— those who “know” less have less to be anxious about, or so itseems. However, this apparently significant finding suffers from at least one majorflaw: Like almost all death anxiety studies, it only measures “conscious” deathanxiety. Unconscious (or repressed) death anxiety must also be taken into account.As Yalom (1980, p. 54) warns, “Very low death anxiety may reflect strong unconsciousdeath anxiety.”

4. Kierkegaard, 1957, p. 55. It’s also important to consider the kind of fear that has asits object the absence of something. At its extreme, such fear may show up whenthe experience of no-self arises. Then, though the fear isn’t experienced as happeningto a separative self, it nonetheless is still happening, as a biochemical reality. Thesustaining thoughts of such transpersonal fear, though they are but thoughts, canbe very seductive, especially when their corresponding sensations are those of full-blown terror or panic (see Segal, 1996). As distressing and disorienting as this canbe, it has the benefit of deromanticizing the passage into no-self — most spiritualliterature tends to overemphasize the bliss of self-transcendence, and to downplayits darker or less “spiritual” dimensions, especially with regard to fear.

5. “Ego” as a concept has negative connotations for many spiritual seekers, for whomit is simply an impediment, an obstacle in need of eradication. On the other hand,many psychologically oriented self-theorists view ego more neutrally, conceptualizingit as a process of knowing, thinking, and adapting (McAdams, 1994, p. 540). Forexample, Jane Loevinger (1969, p. 85) claims that “the striving to master, to integrate,to make sense of experience is not one ego function among many but the essenceof the ego.”


~ 41 ~

As I define it, ego is not actually conscious of itself, regardless of its possibleromanticizing of the idea of transcending itself (such spiritual ambition being butpart of its self-concept). Ego could be said to be a cult of one (or a self-enclosedcoalition of survival-oriented habits that automatically refers to itself as “I”). Thisdoes not mean that it is evil or in need of annihilation, but rather that it’s centeredand unquestioningly governed by its own ideology (Masters, 1990, pp. 10-18).

What is needed is not the elimination, but rather the illumination, of ego. AsEpstein points out (1995, p. 98), what needs to be transcended in spiritual practiceis not the whole ego, but rather its representational component, the essentialgroundlessness or insubstantiality of which simply needs to be recognized, throughthe skillful application of wakeful attention. Perhaps what matters most here isdeveloping the capacity to become aware of what one is currently identifying with(including one’s self-concept) — and this capacity is not a function of ego.

6. Epstein, 1995, p. 41.

7. Godman, 1985, p. 50. “You must look for truth beyond the mind,” Nisargadattasays (1982, p. 365), and (p. 362) “The death of the mind is the birth of wisdom.”Great stuff—and it’s just the tip of the Nisargadattan iceberg—but it’s not all thatuseful until we’ve taken a long deep look at our mind...

We can list its contents—plans, comparisons, daydreams, images, memories,internal conversations, lists, judgments, and so on—but is there more to the mindthan what occupies it? Does the mind differ from its contents, and if so, how?Does the absence of thoughts mean the absence of mind? Thoughts and theprocess of thinking can be observed, but can the mind be observed when it iswithout content, and if so, what then is observed? How does the content-freemind differ from pure space? Or from consciousness?

If you are thinking about these questions, how do your thoughts about themdiffer from the thought or thoughts under examination?

When you are dreaming, how do you experience your mind? The body youhave in your dreams is a dream-body, but is the mind you have in your dreams adream-mind or is it the same as your waking-state mind?

And so on...

8. For a rich and savvy exploration of this, check out Stephen Levine’s A Year To Live:How to Live This Year as if It Were Your Last (1997).

9. Blackman, 1997, p. 21.

10. Hillman, 1975, p. 152.

my locus of selfsplattered everywhere

CHAPTER FOUR

days two to five


~ 44 ~

It’s the morning after.

I drive down to the beach, maybe five minutes from the house, feeling very shaky. The air iscrisp. Sunlight’s spilling all over the hard-rippled sand upon which I am about to run. AsI jog down the hundred or so wooden steps to the beach, I feel disconnected, disembodied,weird. Maybe running will help — it sure has when I’ve been stressed other times. But thisis eerily different. The legs going down the steps might as well be grasshopper limbs or hunksof writhing driftwood, ending in a tangle of color and contour near which the label “runningshoes” flimsily hovers. I’m more scared than I want to admit. Maybe I shouldn’t have comealone.

My body runs, and runs hard, but nothing changes, except that I begin hearing a lot ofnoise in my head. It’s a voice, very different from mine, and talking in high-speed treble,repeating phrases vaguely like “Atta boy!” with a creepy, jab-jabbing singsong intensity. Ican’t shut it off. The sound of the surf doesn’t mute it. Suddenly, I feel hugely disoriented,and know that I cannot continue my run. My legs are electric jelly.

The voice and dread diminish slightly as I drive back to the house, but I have no doubt thatthey’ll have no trouble returning. I feel crazily helpless, my hopes for healing but fast fadingphantoms in the surreal chaos festering within and all around me. I’m not just off balance,but am marooned from anything resembling balance, my every handhold no more than agripping of vacant space.

The next morning, feeling a bit better, a touch more solid, I drive with a friend to the localgym, looking forward to a weight workout. Nautilus equipment, my favorite. I feel good asI move from machine to machine, sensing no dread, not even mild worry — it really seemsas if I’m moving through the aftermath of the 5-MeO. We drive back, I have lunch withNancy, and then go to bed for a nap, really looking forward to sleeping — I have hadhardly any sleep since my near-Death experience. I fall asleep easily, my body sinking withdelicious ease into the mattress.


~ 45 ~

About half an hour later, I am abruptly awakened. My bed is shaking violently. My firstthought is that it must be an earthquake — after all, this is coastal southern California.I sit up and get out of bed. Nothing is shaking — except for me! I am vibrating veryhard, shaking uncontrollably, my whole body jerking around like a frantic marionette.Heart-pounding horror runs rampant through me, my sanity sucked into an acceleratingvortex of sickening despair, my cries having no impact on the jaggedly pulsating chaossurging through me...

The days following my 5-MeO experience were excruciatingly terrifyingfor me, obliterating my hopes for a quick recovery. Again and again, Iwould — usually without any discernible warning — find myself infestedwith intense dread. Sometimes I’d just hold still, trying (with minimalsuccess) to generate the kind of roots that might help me weather themadly-sky’ed, earth-disembowelling storms raging within me. Andsometimes I would uncontrollably shake and vibrate, like a puppet beingviolently jerked in many directions at once, mad with horror, eventuallyscreaming out my shock and pain.

Such unbridled expressions of my terror and helplessness often led to verydeep crying, crying that seemed to go back to my infancy, and perhaps evenmy birth. Afterward, I would feel a melting purity and sweetness of heart, adeep gratitude for simply being alive, as if I had literally been born afresh.Then, a short time later, more terror and madness would suddenly gatecrashmy fledgling sanity, quickly and brutally escalating, infusing me with an extremelyconvincing sense that I was about to enter irreversible madness.

I spent each night at the house of some members of our community, becauseit was more private and soundproof than where I was living. Each night wasmuch the same: I would awaken shortly before midnight after sleeping perhapstwenty or thirty minutes, feeling nightmarishly insane, my heart beating wildlyand my body jerking and twitching. I’d then stumble my way to the livingroom. The amphitheater. Everyone would gather around me, showing afluctuating mix of concern, care, and dismay, as what was possessing mepulled no punches in expressing itself.

This was no therapeutic strategy, no orchestrated catharsis, but rather anunavoidable animation that I — with darkly sobering despair — witnessedmyself participating in, even as densely bizarre dimensions of reality closed inon me, making everyday reality seem like the shallowest of plots. How muchlonger would it be, I wondered, before I was irreversibly lost?


~ 46 ~

Everything was defamiliarized, pervaded by a cold, sickening, yellowish-greylight. The loving, troubled faces all around me were but masks, phantasms,desperate mirages, personalized freezings of time, no more real than me.Space also felt unreal; what was between the objects in the room was just asloaded with uncanniness as the objects themselves. Seeing this brought me nocomfort whatsoever.

I screamed, growled, crawled, writhed, feeling as though I was constructedof electric pulp. As fierce as I was at times, I was also unrelentingly terrified.Even as I let loose, letting the hell within out, I felt chillingly paralyzed. Iwasn’t positioned behind the scenes of “my” mad catharsis, somehow guidingit, but rather was sealed within it, my locus of self splattered everywhere.Only when my core tears finally came — and how I ached for them to comeearlier — did I feel myself returning to some semblance of basic sanity.

Night after night, I barely slept, eventually getting so run down that I couldnot sanely function for very long at all. It seemed increasingly dangerous tojust keep on “expressing it,” regardless of the advice of spiritual emergency“experts.”1 Yet I persisted. The primal fear that kept flooding me could notbe channeled for very long into lesser, more manageable fears. Its arrival wasas abrupt as it was electrifying — in a matter of seconds, my pulse rate wouldjump way up, and my familiarity with the world would very quickly disintegrate.Existence itself — bare and beyond meaning — filled me with apprehensionand horror, and witnessing myself lodged in such a predicament (which seemedinescapable) only intensified my dread.

The gates of self had been dynamited open, blasted beyond any conceivablerepair, leaving “me” ricocheting in madly shapeshifting non-separation fromeverything else, including the primordial Reality of Which everything wasobviously but an expression or shaping. This was a Wonder beyond wonder,but it was mostly only agony for me. Radiantly ineffable, yes, but also horrifying.The Wild Blue Yonder was plainly right here, everywhere and everywhenpresent, but did not feel like Home.

I felt almost incapable of being an “I,” a self that could at best provide “acenter and singleness to the otherwise open-ended and centerless chaos ofexperience and possibilities.”2 Knowing that the undoing or transcendence ofthis self-possessed little center of subjectivity was of immense importance inmany spiritual traditions brought me no solace. The artificial order created byidentifying with the sensation of a discrete, indwelling “I” lay in bloody ruins


~ 47 ~

around me, but so too did the balance formerly generated by abiding inmeditative witnessing. No glamorized freefalls in this abyss.

Nothing held together, including my self-sense, both in personal andtranspersonal contexts. No center. Everything, it seemed, was constellatedaround and emerging from everything else, at once fractured and reborn in awildly evolving, impossibly alive abundance that shredded my mind. In short,nothing I did could withstand the sheer power and size of my terror, so thatI, much of the time, was but confetti in a raging storm, everywhere and yetnowhere in particular.

I mostly felt as if I were on the verge of being totally uprooted, on scalesboth individual and cosmic — everything appeared to be already shattered,and yet was simultaneously resuming shape again and ever again, in theomnipresent embrace of a seamless, infinitely plastic, self-replicatingHorror.

If I indeed was — as I vainly hoped a few short-lived times — in the throesof actual ego-death, I was nonetheless apparently stuck in the passageway (nolonger, so to speak, in an amniotic universe), despite my times of emergence.Proferred notions from well-meaning others — shamanistic crisis, spiritualemergency, or just plain purification — were of no use to me. Conceptualizingdid not, as it often had before, distance me from my feelings, but now onlysuffused them with a shiveringly creepy transpersonal paranoia. Never had Iworked so hard at being present, and never could I remember having beenso scared (I’d had plenty of harrowing nightmares in childhood, but theyusually had not resurfaced during my waking hours). Following are my notesdescribing a typical night from that time, plus the events of the followingmorning:

I’m dreaming that I am asleep in bed, trying to soften the jitteriness in my belly. After awhile, I decide to stop resisting the speedy, bucking sensations that are racing through me.Immediately, everything gets much faster. For a short time, I am able to witness this, andthen I realize that I’ve gone too far — there’s no turning back, no room even to express theenergies that are possessing me. I’m way past the edge.

I cannot scream, cannot cry, cannot move, cannot maintain any body awareness. I amspinning and falling and rising and bouncing at a terrifying speed, not as a body now, butas a very small, shapeless presence, trapped, trapped, trapped! No imagery. Only enormous,mouthless terror. I cannot breathe. I cannot breathe!


~ 48 ~

In the distance, I vaguely sense my physical body — it looks a bit like a vibrating stick-man, rigidly limbed with fibrillating fingers, helplessly splayed-out near the head-end of thebed, as if stapled down.... I awaken from the dream, breathing very fast, shaking withterror.

A little later, I am again dreaming, caught in the same uncontrollable speeding-up, the sameeerie helplessness. I am in a wooden box. A tightly closed, lidless box that is getting smallerand smaller and smaller, accelerating down to an infinitely small size. The fear is finally sointense that it shatters the dream, and I am lying in bed drenched in sweat. I don’t feel verybrave — how much more can I take?

I have a short nap in the morning, awakening elated that I could sleep. Happily, I sit up,then suddenly get scared, incredibly scared —I am shaking uncontrollably, I am hallucinating,and I feel my sanity rapidly vanishing. No! I’m screaming inside, not again, not again!! Itcan’t be happening again! But it is. I’ve got to work with it, even though there’s very little ofme left that has any trust — I’m so, so afraid of dying like this, of being swallowed up inwhat seems to be eternal madness. I hold tightly onto Nancy, sobbing with abandon.

But even deep crying brings no release here — the madness also needs to be given a voice. SoI scream and roar and let the primal dread snake and surge and pour through my body andmind, vibrating wildly, spasming and jolting, until eventually an even deeper crying emergesfrom me.

Afterward, Nancy and I walk to the beach. I am like a newborn. I do not know whatanything is. My programs for getting through my crisis are but the most tenuous of spectersnow. Death is everywhere, and I don’t mind. The ocean is not just water and shatteredsunlight, but Being in the primordial raw, just like the dazzling gulls and sunbathing sealsand passing humans.

No longer do I need Eternity to make sense. I am, however, still on extremely shakyground — into my motiveless opening also stream the shapings and lenses of a horizonlessfear.

Death, it seemed to me, was no escape at all, nor even the entry point intooblivion, but rather was the very process through which the whole cosmicdrama could continue. The unrelenting, unboundaried Wonder and Horrorand Mystery of it all — peering through me at me from all angles — mademe tremble and want to totally disappear. It was so fucking inconceivablyreal, and I (and everything else) seemed so blatantly dreamlike, so conspicuouslyunreal — had I ever really existed? Had anything?


~ 49 ~

And if manifest existence was but the Absolute “making an appearance,”then what exactly was I? I did not dare pursue such questions too closely —and yet I could find no significant distance from them — for I felt incapableof bearing their “answers.” In fact, observing the workings of my mindregarding just about any topic unsettled me, for it all led to the same terrifyinggroundlessness.3 There was no escape, but only degrees of distraction. Forthe first time in my life, I seriously contemplated suicide, even though I intuitedthat it would not bring me the relief I craved.

The transhuman “understanding” insinuating its way through me was pointingto a destiny which “I” did not want, namely that of an eternal arising andvanishing on every scale possible, locked into inescapable — and ultimatelyunexplainable — unity with its animating force.

Whether a lifetime lasted a day or a thousand billion years made no realdifference: For me now, a housefly and a galaxy were both in precisely thesame situation, both existing for less than an instant in the Eyes of Eternity.This was not a thought I had, nor a belief or self-evident abstraction, but agrippingly real, terribly alive knowingness of overwhelming import.

What had seemed real now kept shedding its familiarity — its sense-makingtrappings — with a frequency and intensity that I could not bear. Again andagain, I would “fall” into an annihilating terror, then start shaking so violentlythat I would explosively open, seeing in my shattering everything so, sothrobbingly alive, so heartbreakingly vivid and transparent, at once hyperrealand dream-like. At such times, I saw and felt Death everywhere. My sensethat Death was not “the end” did not at all comfort me, but only filled mewith dread. The notions of eternal recurrence and everlasting Life were nowhell to me, literally making me queasy.

I could not even bear to look at the sky for very long, for it was no longer thesky. Seeing clouds, I did not at all register “clouds” — I had no idea what theywere, but whatever they were effortlessly wrapped itself around my perception-making capacity with deeply penetrating, emotionally electrifying power,stranding my mind in tongueless ravines.

Everything vibrated with a sentient, unspeakable significance, permeated withdarkly oscillating undertones of universal déjà vu. Even space itself was alive,or so it seemed. Life without end, yet saturated moment-to-moment withending after ending after ending — a perpetual perishing providing fodder


~ 50 ~

for metaphysical considerations, but now only rotten floorboards for me.Had I ever really been on anything other than quicksand?

And had I ever really been anything other than this already-shattered, ghostlyenigma? I didn’t feel as though I was coming Home, but rather that I wasawakening to the apparent fact that I was a “prisoner” forever and ever of aboundless, self-replicating, unthinkably sentient Wonder that, making infiniteappearances, was the source, substance, and all of all that existed.

And even if I was that Wonder — the intuition of which I fought as hard asI could — would it not be a hell beyond description to be That without end?One would be free to be anything, but one would realize that behind everyappearance, every role, every manifestation, there was only Oneself. No oneelse. Nothing else. No mirrors, no separation, no alternative worlds, justunfathomable Mystery forever looking at Itself. And so on. This was a Freedomfrom which there was no freedom.

If I had been completely insane, it would probably have been easier, for Iwould have had little or no sense of having a different world in which to be.But I saw what I was doing, saw what I was thinking and feeling, saw what Iwas considering, and I simply could not bear it.

NOTES

1. Like Stan Grof (see Grof & Grof, 1989, 1990). I spoke with Grof by phone on thethird day; his advice then, and a few months later (when things had not improved),was simply to keep going into full-out catharsis, and not to bother taking anymedication. He recommended to Nancy on the second occasion that when I feltreally scared I should lay on my back, with sufficient strength applied on either sideof me — in the form of men — to hold me down, and then allow full catharsis.An arguably useful technique under certain circumstances this was, but far fromappropriate for me, especially given how much heavy catharsis I had already beenthrough.

Unfortunately, the very rigidity that characterizes conventional medical viewsof so-called spiritual emergencies — i.e., that they are nothing more thanpsychological disorders, and so must be treated as such, especially with psychiatricdrugs — also characterized Grof ’s approach, at least with me. Sometimes catharsisis needed, and sometimes something else is called for. And so too with psychiatric


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medication; at times, it may well be what is needed, if only to assist in “putting onthe brakes” for a while. Chapter VI considers all this in more detail.

2. Da Free John, 1983, p. 210.

3. Speaking of the fear that pervaded her for nearly ten years following her abrupt andapparently lasting awakening to no-self, Suzanne Segal (1996, pp. 134-135), declares:“The mind’s contact with the unimaginable, ungraspable, unthinkable vastnesssends it into a frenzy of terror, in which it insists that something must be horriblyawry; otherwise, it argues, the terror would not be present. This is the winter ofemptiness.”

near-death experiencesrevisited

CHAPTER FIVE


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Don’t let these accounts of the near-death experience, which are so inspiring, lullyou into believing that all you have to do in order to dwell in such states of peaceand bliss is to die. It is not, and could not be, that simple.— Sogyal Rinpoche

The Being of Light engulfed me, and as it did I began to experience my whole life,feeling and seeing everything that had happened to me.— Dannion Brinkley, recounting his first near-Death experience

Questioner: Is reincarnation real?Ram Dass: To the extent that you are real, so is reincarnation.

In the last few decades, Death has begun to come out of the closet in theWestern world.1 One of the primary catalysts for this was the pioneeringwork of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross with the terminally ill. Her landmark book,On Death And Dying, published in 1970, brought much-needed attention tothe actual process of dying, restoring some dignity and authenticity to thewhole process, in stark contrast to the professionally hushed euphemisms ofthe funeral industry. Also having a potent impact on Death awareness wasRaymond Moody’s book, Life After Life, published in 1975, which describedastonishing similarities in the near-Death experiences (NDEs) of very differentpeople. Not surprisingly, so-called out-of-the-body experiences (OOBEs),which often form an integral part of NDEs, were also finding an increasinglyinterested audience beyond the marginal occult fascination with so-called astraltravel, especially through the writing and work of Robert Monroe.2

Around the same time, in a study devoted to the actual experience of dying,psychiatrist Russell Noyes concluded that “life and death, rather than beingdichotomous, are inseparably woven.”3 Noyes also later investigated the effectsof having had a close encounter with Death, basing his study on 215 individualswho had had NDEs.4 Twenty-three percent reported a greater appreciation


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of life, and 25 percent reported a deeper awareness of Death, along with anew sense of Death’s closeness. Also, 41 percent claimed that their fear ofDeath was reduced as a result of their NDE. All in all, apparently a positive,life-affirming experience.

The NDE work of Moody, Noyes, and others, helpful as it was in bringingthe topic of Death more into the foreground, had at least one majorshortcoming: The NDE became glamorized. If having — or claiming tohave had — an OOBE was on the curriculum for obtaining a psychicbaccalaureate, having an NDE was one of the surest tickets to a higher degree.“I died and came back” is a tough act to follow, especially given the tendencyof NDE investigation to not sufficiently take into account the egoicappropriation — and resulting distortion — of transpersonal elements ofthe experience (discussed later).

In the late 1970s Kübler-Ross’s approach became more overtly metaphysical,giving the more conservatively inclined an excuse to discredit her work. Irecall attending a five-day residential “Death and Dying” group led by her in1981, at which she not only tirelessly and compassionately facilitated catharticwork (so as to help participants “complete unfinished business”), but alsospoke at length about the “indisputable” reality of OOBEs and the remarkablemetamorphosis afforded by Death. Her central simile was that of beingliberated like a butterfly (leaving its cocoon) at Death, an image immenselyappealing to many, but not so appealing to others. For example, existentialpsychiatrist Irvin Yalom criticized such a notion of Death as being but “denial-based consolation,” saying that it demonstrated self-deception on Kübler-Ross’s part.5

Maybe, but Yalom’s apparently tougher, apparently more existential — ortheoretically more unflinching — position regarding Death may itself constitutea denial of the possible transpersonal or transformational dimensions ofDeath. That the validation of such dimensions eludes current scientificmethodology does not disprove their existence.6 After all, how valid is asearch for validity that is conducted only through the parameters of the rationalmind?

Kübler-Ross’s butterfly simile, which she used extensively to help explain Deathto terminally ill children, originated from the time when as a young womanshe went, shortly after World War II, into the Nazi death camps for children.Scratched into the walls beside the children’s bunks were not only messages to


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parents and loved ones never again to be seen, but also many tracings ofbutterflies. Some, like Yalom, might view this as simply signalling a desire toescape, to somehow “fly away,” but Kübler-Ross eventually interpreted it asan actual intuiting of the nature of Death.

So do we have escape or transcendence here? I’d say both, and perhapssomething else too — radical acceptance. When Death comes to children,they reportedly often display a wisdom far beyond their years, as if theirevolution has been accelerated.7

In my group with Kübler-Ross, I found her convictions about Death andvarious related metaphysical concerns, to be marred by concretized literalism.Most of the group appeared to uncritically absorb all her assertions. Such anunquestioning hearing also seems to be present in many considerations ofNDE phenomena, as though what has been reported must be literally so.Although I am not aligned with those who would explain away NDEs asmere neurological anomalies, I question those claims that glamorize NDEs ,or that present those who have had such experiences as “survivors of Death.”

Survivors? After all, these are not the experiences of those who have died, butof those who have nearly died (varying according to their degree ofapproximation to actual biological death). Tibetan Buddhist master DilgoKhyentse says that the NDE “is a phenomenon that belongs to the naturalbardo of this life,”8 rather than to the actual bardo of Death. (“Bardo” isTibetan for “gap,” being an “interval of suspension”9 or a transitional realityin which the possibility of spiritual awakening is intensified.)

Adi Da further de-glamorizes the NDE, stating that NDE phenomena are“typically valued merely as signs of personal, egoic survival.”10 This might beencapsulated as: “I had a NDE; therefore I am, and will continue to be.”Fine, if “I” is truly transegoic, knowingly inseparable from Being, but not sofine if “I” is just egoity swathed in spirituality’s robes.

Adi Da goes on to say that NDE phenomena are simply “signs that somethingis falling away rather than continuing,” but that when people return to everydayconsciousness, “they concretize the phenomena they encountered, [claiming]that they are now more easeful because they survived death [my italics].”11 Ofcourse, they did not really survive Death, except in the sense that all of us,while alive, are surviving Death.


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Furthermore, is not every experience, however superficial or ordinary, literallya near-Death experience? Can we ever conclusively say — or prove — thatwe are far from Death?

Whether “I” has ordinary or extraordinary experiences, it is still “I”. Howcomforting it can be to conceive of Death as a haven for “I” or as a benigngateway toward a better or more spiritual “I”! The story goes like this: Wedie, and we — if we have behaved properly — get resurrected, deposited, orreborn into a domain clearly preferable to our earthly home. Yet as naive asthis may be, it contains, however distortedly, some sense of the timelesssublimity that we may sometimes intuit in moments of real openness; andthat sublimity, suffused as it often is by a peace that surpasses understanding,sure can feel like Home. Perhaps our major difficulty here is that we want tobe, and remain, in that “place” without doing the preparatory work thatwould enable us to do so.

Also, we’re likely to conceive of such a “place” in a dualistic context — as ifit really is a somewhere for a somebody to go toward — forgetting that it is alreadythe Ground of Nondual Being, to be recognized and embraced not by the“me” of egoity (whatever its spiritual credentials), but rather by the “me” thatis, and fully recognizes itself to be, none other than Nondual Being making anappearance as a somebody.

The “me” of egoity, necessary as it may be for conducting the business ofeveryday life, is inherently fearful, suffering not only from a case of mistakenidentity, but also from existential separation anxiety (“Hell is other people,”said Sartre). In the presence of such fear, it’s quite understandable that wewould seek compensatory comforts, projecting ourselves into the future withenough conviction to create the illusion that we will persist, persist, and persistsome more.

Given that Death spares no one, then Death anxiety ought to be right at theheart of psychopathology. The fact that it apparently isn’t is a testament to ourcapacity for distraction. We need to ask, and ask more than superficially: Howmuch of what we are doing is actually motivated by our fear of Death? Or,from another angle, how much of what we are doing is motivated by oursense of presumed separateness? Lining our prison cell with spiritual books,making it more luxurious, or expanding it may ease us, but doing so does notfree us, and in fact distracts us from recognizing and using the already-open


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cell door, the exit that becomes visible when Freedom becomes moreimportant to us than security.

One of the most common ways to assuage Death anxiety — and the bulk ofsuch anxiety may be unconscious — is to conceive of ourselves as somebodyspecial, which leads to strategies like compulsive heroism, exaggeratedindividualism, let’s-get-ahead aggression, and narcissism. In such practices festermore than a few overblown, dysfunctional cries of “I matter!” (Ironically, wedo matter, every last one of us, but not as agents of self-glorifying egoity andits supporting cast.)

The sense of being somebody special (a legend in our own mind!) helpsimmunize “I” against the bare facticity of its own mortality, here-and-nowinstability, and innate insubstantialness.

Even when “I” dreams of transcending itself — as in those programs thathave (or advertise) as their central agenda the eradication of ego — it is still an“I” who has now achieved the incomparable goal of self-transcendence!“Look, Ma, no ego!” we announce as we unicycle past our rapt inner audience,too proud to notice our pride, forgetting that self-conceit persists well intoadvanced transpersonal stages of development.

In our craving to be somebody special — and don’t forget that we may findour specialness through being “nobody” — we bypass exploration of thatvery craving, committing far more of our passion to fulfilling our dreamsthan to actually awakening from them.

And even when the dream is investigated, studied, analyzed, even integrated,what about the actual dreamer, the dream ego, the conceptual center of thedream? The investigation of that apparent self cannot be conducted by“I,” but rather by that which relates not from “I” but to “I.” Such inquirydoes not make the dreamer any more special than anything else in the dream,and in fact decentralizes and dethrones the dreamer to such an extent that atruer sense of identity than that of dream-state egoity or waking-state egoityemerges.12

Our ultimate identity, which is never other than always already exactly here,awaits our undivided attention. As we decentralize our headquarters, no longerinsisting that Life must revolve around our separative self-sense, we enter thatwhich we never really left but only dreamt we did.


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The Tibetan Book of the Dead, which basically is a series of instructions formaking as liberating as possible use of the after-Death state, does not portraya rosy picture of what allegedly occurs after Death, although it does makeabundantly clear that true liberation (or a full Awakening to our real nature) ispossible at many points during the after-Death state. This, however, is impossibleif we remain self-involved, self-possessed, and self-contracted, committingourselves to acting as if we are a somebody who is busy having experiences.

In our presumed separateness, we may not only seek to fortify our “I”-ness,but may also seek union with what appeals to us. (There is, of course, adifference between seeking union and recognizing it, just as there is a differencebetween recognizing union and being it.)

But what about that which upsets or disgusts or frightens us? How eager arewe to seek union with that? We may extol the virtues of “Oneness,” but justhow inclusive is the circle through which we extend (or purport to extend)ourselves? Consider the following — describing the “wrathful deities”apparently “met” in the after-Death state — from Francesca Fremantle andChögyam Trungpa’s translation of the Tibetan Book of the Dead:13

The fifty-eight blazing, blood-drinking wrathful deities will appear, transformedfrom the previous peaceful deities. But now they are not like they were before; thisis the bardo of the wrathful deities, so one is overpowered by intense fear and itbecomes more difficult to recognize. The mind has no self-control and feels faint anddizzy, but if there is a little recognition liberation is easy, because with the arisingof overwhelming fear the mind has no time to be distracted, and so it concentratesone-pointedly.

But is this really later? Is not Death here, now? So how do we respond to hellishconditions now? How do we react when we find ourselves in a nightmare,face to face with the 3-D, living-color projections of our worst fears? If wetypically retreat or grab for the familiar, is it not likely that we would behavesimilarly in the after-Death state (assuming, of course, that it exists)?

When the “Ground Luminosity” (or natural radiance of primordial Being)of the bardo of dying and Death passes without being recognized by us asbeing none other than our intrinsic nature,14 then there supposedly occurs akind of psychogravitational process (perhaps catalyzed by the very energythat “we” put into maintaining our sense of separateness) that generates color,then various shapings and visions.15 These visions all “ask” to be recognized as


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being just projections of our mind, non-separate from the very consciousnessthat is aware of them.

This is easier said than done, of course (an arguably parallel task being, duringone’s sleep-dreams, to recognize everything therein as a dream, including the roleone plays).

In order to properly perceive such visions, states Trungpa, “The perceiver ofthe visions cannot have fundamental, centralized ego.”16 That is, one cannotbe only operating from an ego-governed position. A radically different“position” is needed —namely, the perspective of Being (which, paradoxically,may be more individuated in its expression than its ego-governed counterpart).

A NDE may open one’s heart and transform one’s life for the better, but itgenerally does not radically decentralize egoity — at least for very long — andmay in fact even strengthen it, in sometimes very subtle ways. The certaintythat Death is not the end may do more to fuel “I’s” craving for immortalitythan to spur an actual exploration of the nature of “I.”

This has been unintentionally supported by the glowingly positive picturesconveyed by the majority of NDE reports. The relative rarity of negativeNDE accounts — usually reported to be less than 10 percent17 — may reflectan actual scarcity of such experiences, but probably has more to do with anaversion to recollecting them, such as is often the case with traumatic events.And negative NDEs may not be all that rare, according to some (like MauriceRawlings, author of To Hell and Back).

Also, it may be that the majority of those having NDEs do not journey far orlong enough “into” their near-Death reality to actually have to encounter thepotentially terrifying visions or implications suggested in sources as diverse asThe Tibetan Book of the Dead and the Bible’s Book of Revelation. That is, theymay have been returned to conventional reality before their honeymoon with“The Light” was over (the Wrathful Deities of Tibetan Buddhism apparentlyare not encountered until about a week after one’s death).

Extraordinary as the experiences of NDEs are, they may be no more than“hallucinated phenomena that arise from the stimulation of the brain duringthe withdrawal of energy and attention from the body.”18 Whether suchphenomena are heavenly or hellish is not as important as the actual lens throughwhich they are viewed — and even created. That is, who, or what, is the experiencer,


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and who, or what, is aware of this supposed experiencer? We’ll revisit these andrelated questions later; for now, let’s close this chapter with a quote fromSogyal Rinpoche:

Wouldn’t it be tragic if this central message of the near-death experience — thatlife is inherently sacred and must be lived with sacred intensity and purpose —was obscured and lost in a facile romanticizing of death?19

NOTES

1. The HBO series “Six Feet Under” is a recent (and superbly presented) example ofthis.

2. Monroe, 1971.

3. Noyes, 1972, p. 183.

4. Noyes, 1980.

5. Yalom, 1980, p. 108.

6. Science need not — and should not — be discarded here. What is needed is ascience conducted through intimacy with what is being studied. Trying to minimizeresearcher bias — as through a removed or sterilized “objectivity” — can itself bejust another sort of bias, often leading to a distance from our subject, a distancethat can easily obscure data obtainable only through intimacy with our subject.

7. Medical psychotherapist and grief expert Ellen Kalm describes (personalcommunication, 1997) a six year-old dying child once saying to her, “Just think ofme as a book on loan from the library — it’s time for me to check back in.” Checkout Melvin Morse’s books on NDEs in children.

8. Sogyal Rinpoche, 1992, p. 332.

9. Fremantle & Trungpa, 1975, p. 21.

10. Da Free John, 1983, p. 49.

11. Ibid., p. 50.


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12. Thomas Hora (cited in Bugental, 1976, p. 303) zeroes in on the consequences ofletting “I” assume the driver’s seat: “The tragic element of the human condition isrooted in that cognitive deficiency which underlies the desire of man to confirm hisself as reality.”

13. Fremantle & Trungpa, pp. 134-135. According to Trungpa, the Wrathful Deitieshave as their main function the cutting of “the continuity of the self-preservationof the ego; that is their wrathful quality” (Fremantle & Trungpa, pp. 66-67). It’simportant to note that such wrath has nothing to do with even the subtlest ego-based ferocity; it is anger completely devoid of hatred. As such, it is a transegoicawakening force, inviting deep transformation. The fear (or shock) it inspires maybe enormous, but such fear (or shock), in its very intensity, may be so immune todistraction that one’s mind is brought into a radically acute single-pointed focus,thereby permitting, at least in potential, a kind of insight and action not otherwisepossible.

14. In speaking of NDEs, Stephen Levine asks (1997, p. 123): “How few returningwere so well prepared, so familiar with their own great nature that they recognizedtheir original face blazing there before them? How few knew to strip naked theclingings to ‘name and form’ and enter directly this unique opportunity?” If we’reused to splitting reality into subject and object, we’re probably not going to abandonsuch a practice during a NDE, and if we do, it’ll likely only be for a very brief time.“Most people,” says Levine (p. 123), “are wholly unprepared for their enormity.”Amen. What lies beyond our honeymoon with “the Light” is not a something,but simply undreaming us, the us that we have always been, inseparable fromwhatever else Being-ness is taking form as, whether heavenly or hellish, sublime orwretched, fading or rising.

15. This is what I’ve observed on the few occasions when I’ve been aware during deep(or non-dreaming) sleep and witnessed the very beginning of dreaming: First, outof nowhere and nothing, there arose color and movement, without any discernibleshape. Then vague forms began appearing, diaphanous and softly swirling, takingon a bit more solidity. When I — in the form of alert, undivided attention —“entered” this nebular fluxing of color and shape-making, it almost immediatelybecame more densely three-dimensional and vividly real in a conventionally sensorymanner, literally taking on substance all around me, including as a dream-bodyclosely resembling my physical body.

16. Fremantle & Trungpa, p. 30.

17. Groth-Marnat & Sumner, 1998, p. 12.


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18. Da Free John, p. 50. It must be noted that Adi Da, like many Eastern spiritualteachers, also views the conventional “waking state” as a hallucination (pp. 255,370). With regard to his assertion that NDE phenomena are generated in the brainthrough the withdrawal of energy and attention from the body, it’s worthconsidering Rick Strassman’s theory that unusually high levels of DMT may bereleased from the pineal gland during a NDE (Strassman, 2001).

19. Sogyal Rinpoche, p. 333.

navigating in the darkCHAPTER SIX


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By the sixth day, I knew that I could not continue. My days had becomeincreasingly occupied by madness and terror, and my nights were unrelentinglyhellish. It couldn’t get worse, I kept thinking. It mustn’t. But it did.

Jackhammer panic, edgeless dread, accelerating helplessness — a sickeninglygripping triumvirate infiltrating and possessing me. I could not live like thismuch longer, and I didn’t want to die like this. Wherever I looked, insanitystared back at me. Yet still, seemingly at the last possible moment, my agonywould again somehow mutate into an enormous, mind-shattering grief, agrief that gradually became suffused with awe and, finally, love.

This was not a love in opposition to dread and insanity, but rather a love thatcould naturally hold and include such “horrors” within itself. This love wasnot the love of personal attraction or desire, even at its noblest, but rather thecore feeling of primordial Being, overflowing with both compassion andopenness, making the innate insubstantiality or “void nature” of objects,perceptions, emotions, and identity nakedly obvious to me.

Nevertheless, all too quickly this very realization would suddenly lose itsmoorings, leaving me sinkingly adrift in a darkly alien, nauseatingly eeriesurrogate of itself. Desperately, I would try to right myself, terrified that Iwould never return to basic sanity. The love and touch of those near mehelped me greatly, aiding me in staying somewhat embodied (everything wassubject to hallucinatory invasion except for my sense of touch). During thescariest times of each night, I would sometimes cling to Nancy like a drowningman to a fragment of a lifeline, more often than not convinced that I wouldnot be able to last another minute.

Such was my life — if you could call dangling over the edge of a precipicewith nothing to hang onto except the rapidly fraying strands of a ghostlyrope a life. I’d struggled thus for five days after my fateful smoke, hoping


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that each breakthrough would be the breakthrough. My bouts of terror weregetting closer and closer together, and I was far from being able to sleep forvery long. For most of the sixth morning, I worked very hard to find somebalance, some semblance of basic sanity, but I only felt a vast quicksand ofterror and madness pulling at me more and more insistently. I was slippingvery fast, knowing that I was definitely in considerable danger.

Late that morning, as I walked in jerky slow-motion through our sun-filledliving room, crying and shaking and severely drained, my body bent into aprayer for help, I realized that I needed medical attention, and needed it verysoon. I didn’t give a damn about sticking with any “alternative” strategy; Isimply could not afford to go any further with what I’d been doing. Nancyagreed.

So shortly thereafter she and I went to the local hospital, with Marcelo driving.It was a short ride, maybe 15 minutes, but it lasted far too long for me. Icurled in on myself in the backseat, frighteningly disoriented, saturated withan intense craving to literally get out of my skin. What was I doing in thismetallic womb, torn from its moorings and hurtling through many-eyedstreets, buildings like monstrous fungi?

All seemed to be no more than interchangeable props in the same cosmicnightmare, all part of the same superplastic, self-replicating Chaos. My screamssquatted in me like congealed dynamite, as I longed — and simultaneouslyrecoiled from my longing — to be out of the car, expelled like some slimyneonatal monster onto bare earth.

As hellishly surreal as the drive to the hospital was, walking into the hospital’semergency room was even worse. Everyone there seemed to be embeddedin — and animated by — an obscenely hallucinogenic, self-consciousprotoplasmic oozefest, the fatly fibrillating pseudopods of which were alreadyinsinuating their way into me.

I made a huge effort, and for a few moments the whole scene took on aslightly more status quo feeling. Humans moved to and fro like cartooninsectoids, busy with this and that, apparently unaware of the bizarre dream-reality in which they were snared. Or so it seemed to me. Puppets in grotesquecardboard dreams they were, dreaming they weren’t dreaming, moved byinvisible strings that twanged violently through me, making me want to retchand scream my guts out.


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Waiting in the emergency room — all I could see was dying flesh goingthrough the motions, with pastel automaticity — was the most difficult sittingof my life, and the most appropriately repressive. I paid extremely closeattention to every breath I took, not straying from even the most minute ofabdominal sensations generated by inhaling and exhaling. I did not dare letmy attention go anywhere else. Still, I could feel what was going on in the restof the emergency room — it was as if I had no skin at all.

At one point, realizing that I was far too close to really going berserk —which would have very likely meant being put under “restraint” and deliveredto the nearest psychiatric ward — I got up and ran outside, with Nancy andMarcelo close behind. The sky was no longer the sky, but still it gave memuch needed space. I briefly paced, weeping and shaking and very scared,then lay down behind some bushes in a field maybe a hundred feet from thehospital, desperately clutching and pressing myself as hard as I could to theearth, crying out my agony and madness. No other contact would do. If Icould have, I would have smeared my whole body with dirt. After a fewminutes, I felt a bit better, and returned to the emergency room, againconcentrating with all of my will on my breathing.

When I at last met the doctor — who knew Marcelo — I felt relieved. Hewas quite sympathetic to my state. I was surprisingly coherent, even calm, asI described what had happened to me, probably because I knew I waswhere I most needed to be. He gave me a thorough checking-over, eventuallyprescribing Ativan — also known as lorazepam — a benzodiazepine likeValium, to ease my shaking and, more importantly, to help me sleep. I’dnever taken a tranquilizer in my life, and had maintained a righteous oppositionto such drugs for a long time, but now I felt no resistance whatsoever totaking Ativan.

However, what had been catalyzed in me from my NDE was not about tobe sedated. I was not, so to speak, going to be let off the hook, the value ofwhich I could not at the time even remotely appreciate. I began by takingAtivan shortly before bedtime, but would awaken horribly panicked withinan hour of falling asleep. So I switched to going to sleep without any Ativan,and then, when I invariably awoke a little later filled with terror, I wouldswallow a milligram of Ativan and sit up for about half an hour in my bed,practising whatever meditative technique felt appropriate, until I could feelthe Ativan taking effect.


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Sometimes during these midnight sittings (with Nancy lying down besideme, usually asleep) there seemed to be only terror and the moment-to-momentawareness of it, without any intrusion or even implication of an “I” oroperative indweller. At such times, it was even possible to respond to theterror as to a badly frightened child, with genuine caring. Sitting thus withdread would often bring me to tears of gratitude. Gratitude for being alive,gratitude for the capacity to thus care.

However, times like these were not particularly frequent. I mostly laboredright at the edge of freaking out, finding just enough inner stability to makegood use of the Ativan’s tranquilizing capacity. I did start getting enoughsleep, but I was deeply troubled by the persistence of my symptoms.

As intimate as I was becoming, at least some of the time, with dread and itscrazily ballooning sideshows, I still feared it greatly. Among other things, Icould not get used to its electrifying arrival.

It appears that we only get used to shock or massive upheaval through somesort of anesthetization, an option I recoiled from, even though I often cravingnumbing. I reduced the amount of Ativan I took, ingesting as little as possible,blinding myself to the fact that in so doing, I was caught up the very samechutzpah and arrogance that I had so recklessly ridden into taking my secondinhalation of 5-MeO. Not that I was particularly brave — I just wanted toget it all over as soon as possible.

About five weeks after I’d started using Ativan, I decided to stop taking it.Cold turkey. I had a heavy cold, and thought my stuffed sinuses and achingbody would provide enough distraction from whatever additional terror myabrupt withdrawal from Ativan might cause.

As part of my healing/weaning strategy, the next day I swallowed, on theadvice of a naturopath, a one-shot dose of homeopathic Stramonium (aspecies of Datura and a powerful hallucinogenic plant1), which was supposedto mimic and uproot my symptoms through a dosage too miniscule to dome any real harm. Such was the theory. But soon I felt even more scared thanusual, full of an ominous jitteriness, flimsily countered by the hope that Imight be in the throes of a healing crisis triggered by the Datura preparation.That night was very long and extremely scary, as were the succeeding Ativan-less nights.


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As hard as this was on me, it was also very hard on Nancy, who now had toendure not only my midnight terror and daytime dread and shakiness, butalso my all-night-long struggles. I was determined to tough it out. My colddulled me a bit, but not nearly enough to make my dread bearable. I barelyslept.

Moving through so much fear was, afterward, occasionally and momentarilyexhilarating, but basically was just very exhausting, at best only a Pyrrhic victory.

Again and again, I’d spontaneously be pulled into darkly primal feelings andstates, particularly those associated with birth (and even prenatal existence),going in so far that I was often terrified that I would never emerge. “Whensomeone is reliving the memory of birth,” says Stan Grof, “he or she oftenconfronts extreme forms of fear of death, loss of control, and insanity.”2

He goes on to explain that the reliving of biological birth is much more thanjust a replay of that event:3

Because the fetus is completely confined during the birth process and has no way ofexpressing the extreme emotions and sensations involved, the memory of the eventremains psychologically undigested and unassimilated. Much of our later self-definition and our attitudes toward the world are heavily contaminated by thisconstant reminder of the vulnerability, inadequacy, and weakness that weexperienced at birth. In a sense, we were born anatomically, but have not caughtup with this fact emotionally.

Consider the following dreams (which took place in mid-March), the secondof which occurred about fifteen minutes after the first:

I am in a room full of an extremely unpleasant light, a nauseating brilliance. I feelcompletely insane. Everything’s going far too fast, spinning wildly.

Same feeling as the previous dream, but I’m in utter darkness, seemingly in a room of somekind. No escape. I’m on a platform, writhing soundlessly at first, then screaming as if witha blanket over my mouth. Then I realize that I’m not alone. There are about 20 others inthe room, apparently in the same situation as me. We’re all flopping around like fish out ofwater. My body seems almost formless, very soft. The horror intensifies. Finally, I noticethat I’m on my back, knees drawn up, still screaming. I awaken, my heart pounding, andthen fall back asleep, going right back into the same dream. I’m on my back, convulsing inextreme terror. Nighttime in a motherless hospital nursery?


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During the birth-pervaded catharses of my Ativan fast (which happenedabout two weeks after the above dreams), I did not just cry and howl like ababy — I was a baby, regardless of the intrusions of my adult mind’s logicaland distant commentary. Over and over, I endured what seemed to be fetalagonies (rooted in an overwhelmingly convincing sense of life-threateningphysiological emergency), straining to breathe, to be de-compressed, movingin and out of blackout, with nothing to rescue me from my agony.

At such times, I could not generate even the most rudimentary gestures ofrepression, except perhaps for the semi-paralysis and nervous enervationthat periodically dulled the intensity of my experience. It’s more accurate tocall this not repression, but a physiological survival reflex that may well havefirst emerged and been implemented during my birth. I later found out thatmy actual birth had been difficult; my mother, young and inexperienced andquite frightened, had been drugged with ether partway through my delivery,and I’d been dragged out with forceps.

There was often an overpowering sensation of annihilation in my “birthing”relivings, not only in my feelings of suffocation, pain, and extreme danger,but also in my sometimes monstrously claustrophobic sensations of no-exit.

It’s about one in the morning, my third or fourth night with no Ativan, and I’m bouncingbetween being very scared and very numb. My attention lacks its usual focus. I awakenNancy and tell her what’s happening, but in a much flatter tone than is usual for me(regardless of my state). Though I’m bothered by how distant I feel from her, I am morenumb than bothered. Everything seems ugly, grey, alien.

After a while, she encourages me to express my fear. My efforts go nowhere — I feelparalyzed, toxically subdued. Dead zone. Then it’s clear : I need to stop numbing myself tomy numbness, and let go more deeply into it. Immediately I start writhing uncontrollably,and in a few seconds am overwhelmed by spasmodic, weighted-down movements. It takes awhile for any sound to emerge — broken, infant-like crying. Lost, so, so lost. My mother’sfear, then ether-induced absence/collapse slamming through my whole body. She is druggedwhile my body, also drugged, is dragged out.

Late the next morning — after somehow leading a therapy group — I go to my room andbreak down, going right into the previous night’s work, but more intensely. I’m way, wayout of control, crying so hard that in a few minutes I start to simultaneously hyperventilateand suffocate. Extreme panic. Screaming follows, then freer crying and breathing and,finally, enormous waves of love.


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There’s more. That night, just before 4am, I awaken feeling engulfed by a thick, almostgelatinous fear. No more, I can’t take any more, but here it is, eating me alive. I get out ofbed feeling very exhausted, then stand up and start shaking. I make myself shake evenharder, but feel no release, just madness and internal chaos. My breathing gets very loudand forceful. In the violent asylum that my mind has become, thoughts of terminal catastropherun rampant.

My head feels like it has a reptilian snout; my body, the form of which seems far fromhuman, is quivering with huge, ominously ayahuascan force. At last “I” get back into bed,eventually saying to myself in a bizarrely unfamiliar voice: “I’ve got you!!” A hair-raisinglaughter then crawls up out of me, followed by a hard crying that has no tears. Finally,deeply exhausted, I fall back asleep.

An hour or so later, I dream that I’m in a lab, a medical room of some kind. I am severelydamaged, insanity running wild within. There is a deep gash down my torso. Crazy laughterand low growls roll out of me. There’s a door at the far end of the room. It’s a long, verynarrow room. The light in the doorway is nauseating to me. Nancy comes in, and I wanther to see my state. So I somehow get off the slab I’ve been lying on, and move toward her,barely able to walk. There are wires and tubes attached to my head, pulling at my scalp. Iput on a pair of huge black headphones. I know that I’m almost dead. Nancy turns intoa two-dimensional effigy of herself, losing almost all color; she’s wearing white, and her headis a white triangle with a few features painted onto it.

I awaken, laying on my belly with my knees tucked under me. My head feels huge, my bodytiny. I’m in the birth canal, but with no feeling. I am drugged. Ten minutes pass and I don’tmove. The feeling of no-feeling pervades me. At last, some writhing, some lateral movementof my hips. My head is too big to move. Now, more movement. A tiny bit of sound. ThenI explode, crying hard. No tears.

Nancy presses on the sides of my skull, then pulls me by the head toward her. Now I’mscreaming; tears come, tears and more tears, welcome tears. I fall back asleep. My finaldream before dawn is of doing a long run on the outer deck of an enormous ferry on someunknown sea; I’ve been running for a long time, and am running naked, feeling deep releasein doing so.

The kind of birth I had was considered normal at the time (1947), and evenfor several decades afterward. Drugs, forceps, supine subservient mother,doctors treating labor like an operation, newborn a rag doll held upsidedown and slapped and measured, then wrapped up in hospital blanketsrather than in motherlove and skin-to-skin contact, with the lights turned on


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too bright and the love too low. Malpractice in the raw. Only in turning awayfrom and devaluing our own softness and vulnerability could we rationalizesuch barbarity and violence toward newborns. Only in being estranged fromour own pain could we tolerate putting newborns in such pain, forgettingthat they (as research shows) feel pain much more than adults do.4

One of the most dramatic offshoots of our culture’s many years of badbirthing practices can be arguably found in the apparently bizarre (and notuncommonly reported) phenomenon of alien (UFO) abduction.5 Typically,those who claim to be abductees describe the following sequence: (a) feelingstrange bodily vibrations or paralysis, as a light of unusual brightness, seeminglyotherworldly and often circularly shaped, approaches, into which one ishelplessly drawn or sucked; (b) finding oneself in an enclosure that appearsto contain technical equipment, surrounded by and at the complete mercy ofaliens — usually humanoid, but also sometimes reptilian or insect-like —who generally relate to one with clinical detachment; and (c) being onsomething like an examining or treatment table, and subjected to variousphysical procedures, especially probings with sophisticated instruments, bythe aliens.

Many take these scenes literally (and others view them as archetypal visionsarising in the collective unconscious, or as rites of passage akin to those thatinitiates in ancient cultures endured6), but to me they strongly suggestsomething much closer to home: a traumatic birth.

Consider the following elements: (a) overly bright light, often somewhatcircular at first (the vaginal “gate”), toward which one is literally pulled ordrawn (not only through the expulsive force of contractions, but perhapsalso through artificial induction or the use of forceps); (b) arrival in an “alien”environment, the delivery room (one’s umbilical link to the earthly — one’smother — having maybe been prematurely severed); (c) being surroundedand stood over by by “non-mother,” emotionally-removed, masked andcapped beings (of whom mostly only the eyes and forehead are seen —hence the myth of prominently-eyed aliens); (d) being treated like a piece ofmeat; and (e) being subjected to very painful or distressingly intrusiveprocedures (poked, stretched, probed, suctioned, circumcised, and so on).

When the biological shock and imprint of a badly handled birth (or traumaof comparable impact from our early years) resurfaces later in life — aswhen we are under extreme stress or are unusually vulnerable — and is not


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recognized as such, we tend to present it to ourselves not just in the contextof its physiological and emotional dimensions, but also through whatever ideationseems to make sense out of it. However bizarre or crazy that ideation may seem,its dramatics — along with our investment in those dramatics — must not beallowed to obscure or supplant its essential themes, if we are to trulyunderstand it.7

And there is more: (a) The reports of many research subjects’ accountsfollowing DMT injection are quite similar to the reports of those claiming tobe alien abductees;8 and (b) endogenous DMT may be released in high levelsduring birth, especially if the mother is unanaesthetized.9 So perhaps whenthe primal feeling-recall of a difficult birth strongly surfaces (without necessarilybeing recognized as such), significant DMT release might occur (possibly inconjunction with substances that deactivate the enzyme systems that ordinarilybreak down DMT), setting in motion the experiencing of nonordinary statesof consciousness, like those characterizing alien abduction reports.

Entrapment is a key theme in both alien abduction and traumatic birth. Wemay have the memory (but not necessarily the recall)10 of being stuck bothbefore birth and after birth. In my case, the prepersonal implications of thefeeling of “no-exit” spoke very loudly of prenatal and perinatal existence, aswell as of infancy; the sounds coming from me were not just like babyhoodcries, but were babyhood cries.

This, however, did not negate or successfully mask the presence of transpersonal“no-exit” elements. I did not feel trapped during these “birthing” times onlyin some shrinkwrapped corner of suffocating compression, but also felttrapped “in” primordial Being itself, as if doomed to exist “there” in — and,worse, even as — an infinite variety of forms, forever and ever. No escape —just endless incarnation hand in transparent hand with the formless,unimaginable enormity of beginningless Is-ness. This was a Freedom fromwhich there was no freedom.

Conventional waking reality had become for me the flimsiest of distractionsfrom this omnipresent, self-perpetuating Wonder/Horror. There was no realgetting away from It, no sufficiently potent distraction from It. These werenot thoughts that arose in me, but sickeningly visceral intuitions that I desperatelysought to sidestep. There was nowhere to go. Every where and every whenwas but an expression, a dizzyingly transparent expression, of It. There was


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no exit from It, for all there was was It and Its infinite appearances, includingwhatever it was that was referring to itself as me.

Devastatingly more relevant than anything in particular this was, far too realto have meaning.

Being fulfillingly occupied by everyday reality just didn’t do it for me anymore,because the game was up, and It held all the cards, as It always had. That sucha perspective had so thoroughly infiltrated and possessed me only reinforcedmy dread. The Dark Side of the Big Picture had my attention by the jugular,reframing reality and my place in it with overwhelming authority.

Thus did I reach my sixth day without Ativan.

Surrounded by the debris of my efforts to heal myself, I had little energy leftto endure my dread. The Datura experiment had failed, my cold was all butgone, I was severely sleep-deprived, and remained still very much in organismicshock. Reality was an infinite, self-fertilizing, endlessly plastic process to me, aboundless Wholeness populated by none other than Itself in countless disguises,each of which was pretending to be other than the Whole, while simultaneouslypretending that it wasn’t pretending. Such realization was not liberation tome, but only hell, a life sentence for which there was no parole.

Late in the evening of the sixth day while sitting in bed, I felt something flowinto the room — an immensely powerful, palpably evil presence, shapelessyet centered by an intake zone that pulled at me with enormous force. Whateverit was, I was in no condition to withstand it, and I knew right to my core thatI must not let it in. Five minutes later, I swallowed an Ativan tablet. Theamorphous presence, indescribably sinister, surrounded me, and I felt myselfbeing suctioned — more compellingly than ever before — into an abyss ofirreversible cosmic madness. A Black Hole of Being. This, however, wassoon countered by the Ativan, for which I was, to put it mildly, very grateful.As much as I wanted not to have to rely on such pharmaceutical help, Ineeded it. I needed to put the brakes on, and I also needed to stop viewingthis as a failure.

Once I’d enough past to have a futureThat was more then than ZenMy history on the make, burying me in its newsThe old repossession blues


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Doing time at Eternity’s thresholdJust another spin of the wheelMy cards before me, one-eyed kings wildEach step the peak, each fall the fuelUntil the same old narcotic dreamweaveCatches me in its thousand-eyed netDown the tubes I once again goImplanted in a speechless helloInto the heart of Now I am thrustGleaming at the tip, sobbing at the ruptureEver-virgin frontiers flowering within and all aroundThere’s no ending this, no mending thisAnd here’s Something upstaging my mindAnd here’s Something no one can findMy dying flesh lit by its bloomsMy every name devoured once againUntil there’s nothing, nothing to reclaimHello to the Stranger at the GateYour face in one hand, mine in the otherErasedReady again

NOTES

1. Datura has had a long history, both in the Old and New World, as a medicine andsacred hallucinogen. It contains the same primary alkaloids as related plants(Belladonna, Henbane, and Mandrake), with scopalamine occurring in the greatestconcentration. Native American tribes in Virginia used a toxic medicine known asWysoccan in certain initiation rites, the active ingredient of which was thought tobe Datura stramonium (Schultes & Hoffman, 1992, p. 111). “Youths were confinedfor long periods, given no other substance but the infusion or decoction [ofWysoccan], and they become stark, staring mad, in which raving condition theywere kept eighteen or twenty days. During this ordeal, they ‘unlive their formerlives’ and begin manhood by losing all memory of ever having been boys” (p.111). Datura is not to be taken lightly; in excessive doses, death or permanentinsanity is a definite possibility.

2. Grof & Grof, 1990, p. 146.


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3. Ibid., p. 149.

4. “Babies undergoing surgery have five times the stress response of adults undergoingsimilar surgery.... The reaction of babies to trauma is often more than they canbear. Part of the response is repressed then held in storage.... This excess is to befound in the reverberating circuits in the brain, where it causes continuing changesin biological functioning” (Janov, 1996, p. 40). The fetus too registers pain, afterthe seventh week. Maternal stress, for example, may have a profound impact onfetal development, perhaps altering neurotransmitter circuitry in irreversible ways.Only after the fifteenth week, when endorphin (endogenous painkillers) tractsbecome operational, are fetuses capable of repression. Prior to that, biochemicaland nerve circuitry set in motion by stressful factors (like maternal fear or drug use)may be “hard-wired” for life, as if they’re genetic predispositions (Janov, pp. 37-39). In short, prenatal and perinatal existence is far from an unfeeling time.

5. e.g., Vallée, 1988; Mack, 1994, 1999. The literal possibility of alien abduction (andrelated themes, like the genesis of alien-human hybrids) probably reached itsbroadest audience through The X-Files television series.

6. Thompson, 1989.

7. Storing pain that cannot be handled at the time is not just something that we do,but is a survival strategy that goes way back. Consider the amoeba. Put it in waterthat’s been polluted with India Ink granules, and it’ll actually absorb the granulesand store them in its vacuoles. Then put it in water that’s clean — that is, a healthyenvironment — and its vacuoles will move to the edge of the cell membrane(much like surfacing trauma in a healthy therapeutic setting) and discharge the inkgranules.

We have a remarkable capacity to isolate and encapsulate trauma (so that therest of our system can adequately function) until we are in a sufficiently safeenvironment. It isn’t so much that the trauma isn’t markedly influential prior tosurfacing as itself, but that its very containment, however neurotically managed,has permitted organismic and personal survival. We may have to “eat” it, we mayhave to swallow it, we may have to act as if it’s not tearing at our insides, but wedon’t have to digest it. Our “vacuoles” are not literal containers — though they mayhave specific bodily locations — but rather the containing dimensions of innerpsychophysiological mechanisms that make possible the repression of pain,especially unbearable pain.

The longer we wait — or have to wait — to open the cell doors of such pain,the more compensatory layers of “gatekeeping” we will likely have to penetrate,including any identification we might have formed with one or more of our survivalstrategies.


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8. Strassman, 2001, pp. 185-219. Many of Strassman’s research subjects reported that,while under the influence of DMT, they had contact with nonhuman and/ornonmaterial beings

9. Ibid., pp. 75-76. This is speculation, since no one has yet searched for DMT innewborn humans. DMT has, however, been found in newborn laboratory animals.

10. Emotional memory and cognitive memory involve different brain systems (LeDoux,1996). The hippocampus, which plays a key role in explicit or cognitive memory,takes a while to come together after birth, which largely explains our inability toremember—at least intellectually — experiences from very early childhood. However,the amygdala, which is centrally implicated in emotional memory (and emotionalarousal), appears to mature before the hippocampus (LeDoux, p. 205), whichmeans that memory (especially emotional memory) can precede recall.

This means that memories of, say, anoxia (or severe oxygen deprivation) duringbirth cannot be remembered just by thinking about them, but may be able to bebrought to consciousness by openly facing and ultimately surrendering (with highlyskilled guidance) to current feelings— like claustrophobia or high anxiety — thatrepresent that experience of anoxia on an emotional-cognitive level rather than ona purely instinctual or visceral level.

Particularly traumatic memories may not be “allowed” to surface in their fullness,being instead symbolically represented to everyday consciousness, as in the formof, for example, paranoia or obsessive thinking. Here, cognition mostly serves tosuppress emotional pain, diluting or avoiding its intensity by “translating” it intosomething more manageable (or apparently more manageable). Not surprisingly,moving from the translation back to the “original” is far more than a merelycognitive exercise.

That so much of what we do — emotionally and otherwise — is automaticallydetermined and processed disturbs our notions of ourselves as being in charge ofour lives. Not only can emotional responses occur without the involvement of thehigher processing systems of the brain, but even such “higher processing systems”may themselves be significantly predetermined by our prevailing — and largelysubmerged — conditioning. That is, unconscious memories may dictate much ofour course.

“Memories,” states neural science authority Joseph LeDoux (1996, p. 252),“can live in the brain [even] when they are not accessible by external stimuli.” Theapparent extinction of particular memories, says LeDoux (p. 250), “involves thecortical control over the amygdala’s output rather than a wiping clean of the amydala’smemory slate.”

into theheart of dread

CHAPTER SEVEN


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At every moment, whatever happens now is for the best. It may appear painfuland ugly, a suffering bitter and meaningless, yet considering the past and the futureit is for the best, as the only way out of a disastrous situation.— Sri Nisargadatta

A great sadhu in India had cancer and wrote me (before he gave his body to anoperation that he knew was to be fatal): “All is right that seems most wrong.”— Sunyata

THE USUAL US IS BUT A THOUGHT AWAY

Whatever its individual and social value may be, ego remains a self-enclosed,self-centered, mechanically governed coalition of survival-oriented habits thatautomatically refers to itself by our name.

Ego is a cult of one.

Identification with ego is the essence of “I”. This means that “I” is not anentity, but a practice, a habit, a doing.

In its ossified, tenaciously reinforced, and innately contracted subjectivity, “I”is not only literally uptight, but also appears to exist over against a universe,inner and outer, of objects (that is, whatever apparently is, or can be classifiedas, “not-I”), including the body in which it seems to be bound.1

Much of “I’s” self-conceptualization and self-presentation is based on itsrelationship to these objects, which in turn is based on the notion that they infact exist apart from “I.” The apparent separation between “I” and its objectsnot only allows “I” to maintain its identity — if only through its sense of the“otherness” of its objects — but also isolates and scares it. “I” may squat


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upon the throne of self, but its rule is shaky at best, with so much that is “not-I” lurking within and without.

When “I’s” headquarters are investigated, it is discovered that “I” has no fixedlocation, no fixed identity, no fingerprints, no more substance than a thought. “I” isthen recognized not as a being, but as an undertaking. A choice.

The more attention that “I” monopolizes, the more real “I” seems to be.2

Bringing awareness to “I” not only exposes its anatomical peculiarities andmultiplicity (each personality being a community of differing voices andperspectives), but also its instability, its flimsiness, its object-dependency, itspretender-to-the-throne ambitions, and its unavoidably contingent nature. Likeeverything else, is it not constructed of other-than-itself elements? Likeeverything else, it cannot exist apart from its constituent elements, whichthemselves, being in exactly the same position, also cannot claim even theslightest degree of truly independent existence.

This is a core realization in many spiritual practices, perhaps most clearlypresented in Buddhist teachings. Nevertheless, when it is first applied — andnot just intellectually! — to our self-sense, level upon level, it can sometimesbe disorienting. My earlier experiences of investigating the nature of “I”,mostly during meditative practices dating back to the early 1970s, were allquite positive, in that they deepened and stabilized me. Paradoxically, recognizingthe “no-self ” nature of self had only made me feel more at home, moreintimate with what seemed to be “my” true identity. But now, I felt far, farfrom being at home; the “empty of inherent selves” universe in which Iseemed to be embedded was the most alien of cradles, rocking in a cosmicnightmare.

The very efforting of “I” to fortify its existence, aside from its ontologicalfunction in the development of our “somebody-ness,” seemed to me to belittle more than a defence against realizing and — especially — feeling theobviousness and inescapability of our true nature. Craving constancy orpermanence — as in “This is who I am” — overly attaches or fastens (hence,fasten-ation) us to whatever most reassuringly provides a sufficiently convincingsense of personal solidity or anchoring.

Through such attachment, security takes on an exaggerated value, so that weget trapped in the very “safety” that we have sought, bought, or installed,


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eluding Death by refusing to really live. As was described earlier, avoidingDeath deadens us. “One need not fear death if one is dead anyway.”3

Making security too important — as when we, both personally and collectively,overbudget for defence — makes us very susceptible to cultism. Cults —rigidly self-contained affiliations that are all but impermeable to outsideinfluence and minimally receptive to inside dissension — are not just thebizarre groupings sensationalized by the media. Marriages may be cults oftwo, political parties cults of many, and so on. Whatever its scale, cultismreflects our need for immunity — or at least a substantial break — from theevershifting nature and uncertainties of Life. To belong to something thatemanates a convincing aura of lasting solidity and certainty is understandablytempting (and may be necessary at certain times, as when our well-beingrequires the protection and insulation made possible by cultism’s encapsulatingcapacity).

But it is not Freedom. Viewing the depths from a consensual bathysphere isnot equivalent to being in the depths. However, egoity (even with all of itspersonalized trappings) is not something to be discarded — regardless ofspiritual ambition’s ego-driven programs advocating ego annihilation — butrather to be illuminated, so that it might serve rather than obstruct or obscureBeing.

When our me-knot gives up the ghostThere’s more room for usRoom that makes all things frontierDon’t give fear your mindDon’t make a goal out of leaving it all behindPass through the looking glass and stopStop worrying about repeating the classThe dream of getting somewhereComes unraveled hereAs we rub the sleep out of our I’sAnd what then is left?What’s been here all along.The briefest of notes are weIn the Song of songsYet also are we its musicThus do we outlive ourselves


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SPIRITUALITY AND FEAR

Leaving the world navigated by “I” — and leaving not as a tourist with areturn ticket and cosmic Mastercard — carries both promise and peril. Thejoy and peace of primordial Being may await us, but so too may a terrorbeyond terror. It not only depends on how prepared we are, but also onhow we arrive “there.”

In my case, biochemical dynamite, accompanied by seizures and near-fatalrespiratory failure, had done the job, getting me “there” with violent efficiency.But having arrived, I was stuck, stalled at the intersection of madness andillumination, my steering wheel disappearing in my hands, my vehicle afirewith wonderstruck dread.

When the night pulled back the bedcoversAnd my breath was not mineAnd I knew, knew the Holy DesignAnd the Dark stormed my room so dreadfully brightAnd my spine was a stem so green and so whiteI did, I did give the night my handAnd let it lead me through a wild of shadowland

In attempting to ensure that we are always capable of distraction from primalfear — including through busying ourselves “fixing” lesser fears — we runthe risk of marooning ourselves not only from every other feeling of a similardepth or intensity, but also from Being. Remaining in the shallows of fearkeeps us in the shallows of joy and love, cordoned off from the deep end.There will be fear until we’re fully Awakened to our real nature, and fear, atleast as a physiological phenomenon, may still even be there, though withoutits usual implications.

As long as we’re preoccupied with being separate, self-contained “I’s,” we’llcontinue to feel threatened by whatever could disrupt, evacuate, or erase ourapparent identity. Even at its noblest, “I” remains fundamentally fearful andfear-driven, plagued by the untraversable gap between it and its idealizationof itself. There is no information that can truly liberate us from fear, “becauseour whole involvement with information and knowledge is secondary tofear itself.”4


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Also, contrary to most models of spiritual development, fear may not decreaseas we “progress” spiritually. Deeper stages of meditative practice, even whenstably established, may in fact be followed by intensely hellish or regressive“descents” that are not mapped into developmental models of spiritualmaturation.

For example, a seasoned Vipassana teacher5 describes how, after years ofhaving deep, sometimes transcendent meditative experiences, she beganexperiencing the apparent opposite, as her positive sense of ceasing to identifywith ego would be followed by a negative disappearing of self, an agonizingsense of overwhelming and inexplicable annihilation. From this “black hole”emerged preverbal memories of heavy trauma and abuse, which necessitatedseveral years of intensive psychotherapeutic work, and a sobering reevaluationof the usefulness and meaning of “ascent” and “descent” metaphors in spiritualcartography.

Dread is not “down there” somewhere, in some archetypal abyss. It is here,less than a thought away, gnawing at our credentials and certainty.

Dread is barely muffled, existential (and sometimes also transpersonal) fear,saturated with a congealed yet still nastily agitating ontological apprehension.It may, vastly diluted, surface as a vague, broad-spectrum kind of worrying,or it may show up unedited, swallowing us whole. In any case, the presenceof dread signifies doom.

In dread, the roots of fear have been glimpsed, but only partially illuminated.The amorphous immensity from which dread seems to emerge is far morethreatening than home-like, and understandably so, given the dualisticperspective through which it generally is perceived. We sense that something“out there” or alien (be it external or internal) is happening to “us,” losingourselves in the dialectic between the two.

But what is wrong with dread? Must we shun, drug, sanitize, and otherwiseavoid it? Must we spurn intimacy with our dread? Must we assign it leperstatus among our clan of emotional states?

The distance between us and our dread is inversely proportional to our depthof compassion — and what is spiritual practice in the crunch, other than theart of keeping our heart open in hell?


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It can be so easy to exploit the attributes of our thinking mind, using itsconsiderable reasoning and contextualizing powers to distance ourselves fromthe very pain or fear that we need to openly feel, embrace, and eventuallyintegrate. It is, of course, very tempting (and not necessarily inappropriate fora time!) to flee dread and its ominous implications, yet in rejecting our dread,we also reject the extraordinarily fertile opportunities it can provide.

DREAD, GRIEF, LOVE, BEING

In its frequent lack of a distinct object, dread is closely akin to ecstasy and thepurest forms of love. These states — dread, ecstasy, love (and grief, too, aswe shall see) — can be viewed as inhabiting different positions along acontinuum of feeling stretching between extreme recoil at one end andseemingly boundless expansion or openness at the other end.

So, we might ask, as an initial orienting question, what happens to “I” here? Isit more intact or tenured at the dread-housing end of our continuum? Logicwould probably say yes — after all, the greater the contractedness, the greaterthe density, and therefore the stronger or more tightly perimetered the sensationof “I” is likely to be. This, however, holds true only up to a certain point,beyond which “I” is severely flattened (as in catatonic states), fractured (as inthe extremes of “going to pieces”), or even obliterated (as in the Vipassanateacher’s “black hole” sense of personal annihilation).

Recognizing and coming to terms with the intrinsic groundlessness (or no-thing-ness) of “I” is not necessarily a benign process.6 Knowledge may beable to distract us from our existential helplessness, but cannot save us fromit. Facts are facts, but they’re not necessarily the Truth.

We cannot truly know ourselves if we insist on dwelling only in the realms ofknowledge, since the Truth of what we fundamentally are transcends allexplanations and descriptions, existing beyond the reach of every strategy tocorral it or reduce it to a reproducible assembly of mere facticity.

Perhaps only in deeply realizing the limitations of knowledge (including theposition of being a “knower”), can we cease making a problem or existentialcrisis out of “not-knowing” — after all, is clinging to the known really themost appropriate response to the Unknowable? — and begin adapting to the


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perspective of nondual awareness. “The true knowledge of the Self,” assertsNisargadatta, “is not a knowledge.”7

About the Nondual: It is not an object. It is not a something. It cannot bethought about, nor even witnessed — it is the source, substance, and reality ofeverything, including witnessing. As such, it cannot be experienced, for who(or what) can truly stand apart from it so as to experience it? It eludes alldescription, including this. The inherent inseparability and “oneness” of allthat exists is not a concept, nor even an experience, but an obviousness beyondunderstanding, ultimately recognized not only to always already exist, but alsoto be none other than the consciousness that “knows” it.8

At the frontier preceding the Nondual, where attention becomes less and lessfocused upon (or absorbed in) objects and more and more focused upon (orsurrendered into) its Source, language is often speechless, leaving only theunspeakable Poetry of Being, the ever-eloquent Silence of Deathless Mystery.Here, says Dzogchen master Nyoshul Khenpo, “there is nothing to lookforward to, and nothing to fall back into.”9

However, as wonderful as this may sound, it may sometimes be, at leastinitially, more of a cosmic Horrorshow to us than a joyous Homecoming.“Returning to the Source” may scare the hell out of us. Something has to.

The final fear — the implications of which are unthinkably vast— involves,says Ken Wilber, “dissolving the boundary between emptiness and form andthus awakening as all Form, endlessly [my italics].”10

Dread may seem to be planted far from a nondual perspective, but it is not.In its miasmically jagged shadowlands, “I” is not only exaggerated — mostlythrough its increased tension and knottedness — but is also infused with asense of unreality (which increases its odds for giving up the ghost).

That is, in its very capacity to reveal to us the innate groundlessness both ofour world and of the identity through which we attempt to maintain theillusory security of that world, dread can not only scare us scriptless, but canalso — if well used — serve our transition from egoically governed selfhoodto Being-centered selfhood.

As such, it is the dragon guarding the fabled treasure, the penumbral beastgodprotecting the sacred threshold, the amorphous yet suffocatingly palpable


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demon we must wrestle (or dance) with until it is no longer an “it,” but onlyreclaimed us.

But, as metaphorically appealing as this might be, who really wants to do it?Who wants a horrorshow that cannot be switched off? Is not the everyday usalready threatened by problems large and small, chronically afraid (if only insome hermetic carrel of concern), addicted to distracting itself as much as itcan from its innate crampedness and fear, doing whatever it can to reel insome security? “We fear what has already irrrevocably happened — separationfrom the greater whole — and yet we also come to fear the loss....of thisprecious individuality.”11

Having lost (or misplaced) our sense of belonging in the larger or ultimatesense, we settle for surrogates of it, the inevitable dissatisfaction of which weall too infrequently use to realign ourselves with the greater whole.

Regardless of its appearances to the contrary, egoity is little more thanpersonified separation trauma, made bearable by its compensatory addictionsand capacity for psychoemotional numbing and dissociation. A cult of one.Monotheism in narcissistic cameo. To move into and through fear can radicallyundermine our assumed identity, but what “I” would ever knowingly choosethis? (It was not “I” who chose to smoke 5-MeO!)

This points to the potentially immense value of unbuffered dread (that is,dread that cannot be controlled or diluted), for in such a condition we arevery likely already far beyond where we would have willingly taken ourselves,already “deposited” in the continuum of feeling that, stretching between terrorand love, leads to — or, more precisely, opens into — Being.

In short, dread is not the enemy; our continued fleeing from it is. And again,this is not to say we should never flee or back off from dread, for we may, infact, actually need to do so for a while, until we are ripe for another encounterof the dreaded kind.

When dread is met with non-aversion and is permitted timely and fittinglyuninhibited expression — emotional and otherwise — in conducive settings,its structuring weakens, so that it begins to be stretched beyond itself, becomingother than dread. Most of the time, this leads to an increasingly heartfelt senseof compassion and connectedness, through which we’re brought into intimatecontact with the collective “us” of humanity and, ultimately, all that is.


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At the time of your death, too, if you think only of Chenrezi [the Buddha ofcompassion in Tibetan Buddhism] you will have nothing to fear from the terrifyingapparitions of the bardo. But if you are overwhelmed by fear, hesitating betweenrunning away or hiding somewhere, you will be in constant anguish all your life,and at death you will be unable to overcome the delusory fears of the bardo.— Dilgo Khyentse

The de-suppression of dread often catalyzes an undamming of grief, of afeeling of loss so immense and deep that it can, eventually, embrace otherlosses — losses that belong to all of us — thereby making deeply significantlinks not only across space, but also through time. Thus do we move fromthe interiorized community of voices that make up “I” to the community atlarge, widening the circle of our reach, our love, our caring.

In such an intensity of grief, however agonizing it might be, there usuallyemerges some sense of a sobering joy, the joy of simply being — not beingthis, not being that, but simply Being. This is not the bliss of immunity-seeking,fear-fueled transcendence, nor that resulting from any other flight from painfulfeeling, but rather is the natural joy of simply existing, equally at home withthe high and the low, unable to be other than compassionate toward all.

Such is the prevailing condition of the heart that, though already broken, isnonetheless sufficiently open to have room for all that we are, however darkor lowly: “In deep disillusionment, the heart’s broken in the same way that astream rushing down through a mountainside forest is broken — it’s stillcohesive spiritually, still unified in essence, its elemental dying only strengtheningand affirming its fundamental aliveness, its rough-and-tumble course onlyfurthering its dynamic yet utterly vulnerable surrender.”12

Where reactive sorrow contracts and isolates us, unimpeded grief expandsand connects us, grounding us in the very openness that realigns us with Being.To avoid dread, to sidestep or tranquilize it, only strands us from the healingfor which we ache. As Stephen Levine says, “It’s the pain that tears open theheart to life.”13 This opening, he continues, allows “life to unfold, not in fear,but in a new kindness, a deeper sense of being that does not pull back fromimpermanence but opens to it as a way of tasting each moment in its preciousessence.”

A new kindness. To touch our dread with kindness — difficult, yes, perhaps“unnatural,” yes, but nevertheless possible, and so, so needed.


~ 89 ~

As long as our desire to continue distracting ourselves from our suffering isstronger, or permitted to be more central, than our longing to be truly free,we will continue to be occupied (or colonized) by both fear and its “remedies”(not the least of which are the spiritually ambitious dreams and immortalityaspirations of “I”).

Grief can be as spacious as it is earthy, existing as a loss-feeling unpolluted bydrama, a deeply personal yet also significantly transcendent sadness pervadedby a more-than-intellectual recognition of the inevitable passing of all thatarises. As such, grief provides not only a bridge between the personal andtranspersonal (with neither having a “higher” status than the other), but alsobetween dread and love.

Every loss must be felt right to the coreor else there’s a greater loss

Sadness must leave its mind to become griefor else it’ll settle for repressive relief

So let the pain sweep through, and the truer acheAnd especially the bare need

the love beyond lovethe pure heartbreak

Martin Heidegger, in speaking of the repression of dread, says that “anexperience of Being as something ‘other’ than everything that ‘is’ comes to usin dread, provided that we do not, from dread of dread, i.e., in sheer timidity,shut our ears to the soundless voice which attunes us to the horror of theabyss.”14

In such “hearing,” our usual sense of familiarity may be all but completelyeviscerated, and our understanding rendered bereft of any even remotelystable frame of reference. I am reminded here of a friend once saying that tobe mindful of the abyss is not to be in the abyss. Our entry therein, if deliberate,is a leap of almost inconceivable faith, a naked plunging into the “dark side”of the Unknowable.

“The clear courage for essential dread,” says Heidegger, “guarantees that mostmysterious of all possibilities: the experience of Being.”15


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When the night pulled back the bedcoversAnd I sat knees-up ashakingSeeking a sign sublimeMy mind looking for the timeMy body athrob with an Eternal rhymeThe windows, the windows did bulge with something unbornSomething I couldn’t nameSomething I could not contain

O When the night pulled back the bedcoversAnd inside and outside were loversAnd exhale was inhaleI did cry out for having so much and for wanting moreAnd for having done all this before

O When the night pulled back the bedcoversAnd my breath was not mineAnd I knew, knew the Holy DesignAnd the Dark stormed my room so strangely brightAnd my spine was a stem so green and so, so whiteI did, I did give the night my handAnd let it lead me through a wild of shadowland

And still I await the great night shining wildThe great night so ripe with childAn undreaming love inviting me to shed my fearInviting me to give the night my handUntil I cannot help but look through the eyesOf every face of every shadowland

O Surrounded by womb was IThe walls all aquiverMy mind no longer looking for the timeMy body athrob with an Eternal rhymeNew growth running wild and velvet through my roomThe windows, the windows a shattering of lightAnd my whole being did shiver and quakeUntil my frame of mind did breakAnd I was in body what I was in spiritThe great night shining wildThe great night forever full of child


~ 91 ~

NOTES

1. When we say or think “I,” where do we sense it in our body? Where does thesensation of “I” primarily register? From where does it seem to arise? I’m nottalking about the sensation of “being-ness” — which we may sense in manydifferent somatic locales (or none at all) — but about the sensation of egoity.Explore the apparent location of “I,” and a crucial, perhaps unnerving discoverywill start to become apparent: “I” does not possess innate existence. And yet hereit is again! The usual us is just a thought away. One moment of nonmindful ornon-attentive attention, and “I” is resurrected, along with the sense of familiaritythat serves as a kind of nutrient dish and hedge for it.

2. For millennia, plenty of spiritual practitioners have recognized (rather than merelybelieved in) the illusory nature of “I” and its gurucentric habits (“I” tends to act asthe guru of what is constellated around it, even to the point of deifying itself).Contemporary psychology, to some degree, also recognizes the illusory — or atleast significantly insubstantial — nature of “I,” although more with regard totheory rather than actual practice. Nevertheless, “I” is not about to be put out ofbusiness. It may even proclaim its non-existence — or, with unintended irony, its“no-body-ness” — donning spiritual garb, calling itself something other than ego,driving its body to meditation classes. “I” loves to dream of being an Awakened“I,” not realizing that it is dreaming that it’s not dreaming — it wants, as StephenLevine somewhere says, to be present at its own funeral. Anything to get awayfrom the reality of the body. The body dies, and “I,” being obsessed with its owncontinuation, is terrified of Death.

3. Yalom, 1980, p. 151.

4. Bubba Free John, 1978, p. 58.

5. McDonald-Smith, 1996, pp. 36-39.

6. This is especially true when one accesses such recognition during sudden or shockingbreaks with conventional reality, as epitomized by so-called spiritual emergencies(Grof & Grof, 1990). Writer Naomi Steinfeld (1986, pp. 22-27) describes an extremelyharrowing and disorienting “alternative” reality she once endured (and which endedwhen she, already terrified, was strapped down in a hospital and injected withThorazine). At one point during her otherworldly crisis, she said, “I knoweverything, everything there is to know, and none of it helps me. I know nothing.”(This, of course, needs to be heard on different levels to be appreciated, for in itintimations of the Nondual, which are unavoidably paradoxical, intermix withseparate-self concerns.) Knowledge is of little use when one’s consensual reality isblown away. See also Suzanne Segal’s “Collision with The Infinite” (1996). One


~ 92 ~

day she says she stepped onto a bus and abruptly found herself with no sense ofself. It was apparently a permanent loss, generating a profoundly disorientingfearfulness that took a long time to work through.

7. Nisargadatta, 1982, p. 143.

8. That is, not only is awareness naturally aware of itself here, but also is not apartfrom whatever may be arising, be such manifestation gross or subtle, ephemeral orlong-lasting. Nothing gets excluded, yet everything is transcended. No dissociationfrom phenomena, no strategic withdrawal from the raw material of life, just animagination-transcending “showing up” as all form, forever and everywhere. Whatperhaps speaks most eloquently and precisely here is silence — not just the absenceof sound, but the primordial chant of Eternity, the presence of which, when feltand unobstructedly “heard,” may catalyze a recognition beyond any translation:

“The true nature of things itself is mahashunyata, the great openness oremptiness, the ultimate relativity free from independent, individual existententities— unborn, undying, immutable, inconceivable, beyond conceptualization.It is the absolute truth. It can never fall apart. It is beyond time and space. It is nota thing, an object of knowledge, an object of the intellect. It is the unfathomableopenness of absolute reality, shining radiantly” (Nyoshul Khenpo, 1995, p. 105).

“The Self is ever-present.... People want to see the Self as something new. Butit is eternal and remains the same all along. It is not light, not darkness. It is onlyas it is. It cannot be defined” (Ramana Maharshi, cited in Godman, 1985, p. 12).

9. Nyoshul Khenpo, 1995, p. 119.

10. Wilber, 1995, p. 625.

11. Epstein, 1995, p. 52.

12. Masters, 1990, p. 395.

13. Levine, 1984, p. 11.

14. Quoted in Friedman, 1964, p. 258.

15. Ibid.

gates dynamitedbeyond repair

CHAPTER EIGHT


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In death only the body dies. Life does not, consciousness does not, reality does not.And the life is never so alive as after death.— Sri Nisargadatta

When death finally comes you will welcome it like an old friend.— Dilgo Khyentse

Seventy-six years, unborn, undying:Clouds break up, moon sails on.— Death poem of Tokken

First of all, a bit about Darkness:

Certainty stumbles down disheveled alleys, clutching at peekaboo walls, andDarkness shows up, effortlessly pouring into every corner and would-be getaway,until anxiety dishes out skewered meaning not only to the front rows, all thewind-up factfeeders and slumberseeders, but also to all of the no-shows who areout redecorating their prisons, installing tastefully recessed shelves for sentencesthat wouldn’t be seen in public with ones like this.

Darkness lifts a veil, an ebonized portcullis densely creaking, and a lush Springflowers forth, budding and blossoming with deliciously pulsing succulence, beltingout a chorus of wantonly ecstatic greens, layer upon swooning layer, everythingmoistly aquiver, upstart growth sweetly curling and nakedly ashiver, moaning sodeep with rippling emerald recess and protrusion, all eloquently asway in themeandering currents of an ancient silken thrill.

A long sigh later, Darkness hoists a second veil, a leering relic of barnacled irony,and sudden fangs swell and gleamingly plunge, plunge sharply into an enormousflabby egg, rottingly speckled and oozing, splitting and splattering open, its thickly


~ 95 ~

bubbling flood of neon-dotted putrescence carrying a half-gutted hermaphrodite,a silver and crimson creature with singalong eyes and terribly familiar cries.

Darkness remains in the shadows until we are no longer blinded by Light.

Darkness simultaneously entombs and enwombs us. It swallows us, densifiesus, contracts and solidifies us, burying us alive, giving us ground to grow upfrom, ground against which to expand and form. Darkness brings us down,down to where down is growth’s key upper. Darkness is universal uterinity,ever pregnant with Being.

Darkness takes shape as a domain at once amorphous and increasinglylabyrinthian, the inhabitants of which — human and otherwise — are onlyrendered threatening or nightmarish by our ongoing refusal to recognize andaccept them as part of us.

Layered over this are our mindmade darknesses, our egoic mazes andconvoluted have-more crazes, prowled by our overfed appetites. Thesepsychostructural traps, these celluloid misrepresentations of Darkness, requirecareful entry, needing more than heroic swordplay or nobility of intention,because their inmates are typically violently opposed to nonresidents (outsidersand insiders), however much they might romanticize breakouts and outlaws.

Darkness tends to be overassociated with Death, Light with Life. The ultimatedouble date. Imagine our Cosmic Foursome — and we know which coupleis in the backseat, making out in the shadows — looking for an auspiciousparking spot at the omnipresent Divine Drive-In, checking out the featureddrama (“God Only Knows”), steaming up the windows with Big Bang flirting,until suddenly the fog clears, the projector blows its circuits, the observerlaughs its infinite heads off, and the accelerator moans with steely accuracy,the parking lot now gone, the highway and everyway that is wildly ribboningoutfront like slaloming mercury now clearly recognized to have been createdby the drive. So much is happening; nothing is happening. Since both are true,what will you do with your view?

See what’s out of sight. Do not belittle the phantoms gathered around you,nor mind their touch running through your hair, nor be put off by their need,for you too are a phantom, a self-conscious clearing in space, a self-centeredfiction making self-serving news out of far too much, surrounding yourselfwith evidence that you do indeed exist.


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Do not seek the homogenization of Light and Darkness. Instead, permitthem interplay and intimacy. Allow yourself to be honed, refined, alerted,remade by their immense attraction for each other. Their loveplay is bothyour heartland and your deathdance. Allow their interaction to unravel andremake you. Know them as the primal threads of all form, as well as theloom of the Beloved. Give Darkness its full due, letting it lead you throughevery face of every shadowland, until it is no longer other.

Bent double amidst Its own inevitable rubble, Darkness lifts yet another veil, and anancient sarcophagus is dragged into the sunlight and ceremoniously unlidded.With extreme yet supremely elegant slowness its lone inhabitant sits up, appearingto some as a successful initiate, to others as a vampire, and to the rest as a dream.There are no veils left. Darkness lies pinned beneath a dogmatic stake of well-meaning daylight, sentenced to life. The witness of this is nailed to a different wall,hung up on its immaculate detachment. But does not something that is not reallya something make unexplainable sense of all this for us, even as we paint ourselfinto corner after corner? The Secret is out, but we are in, constellated around ourinteriorized separateness, peeking through our veils, trying to rehabilitate Darkness,instead of adventuring right to its heart.

Darkness shining wild. Now back to the story:

Through my 5-MeO NDE, I’d been “thrown” into a flaming cauldron ofmaddening heat and equally maddening light. I was in agony and could notimagine enduring it much longer. Whatever faith I had was quickly fading.

For many years I had prided myself on my capacity for “playing the edge”(both externally and internally) and now I was somewhere beyond the edge,peering into bottomless insanity, the ground below me crumbling into nothing.In my arrogance and misguided heroics, I’d habitually conceived of myself asbeing able to face the Real without any buffers, and now, sickeningly ubiquitousnow, I was cowering before it like a trembling animal, far from wanting toface the all-devouring, ever-fluxing, seamless finality of It.

No escape was possible, since there was only It. Only one Sky, one Dance,one Moment, one One. No beings, but only Being. Every exit, every distraction,every consolation, every thought, every object, every incarnation was but ashaping, a play upon, a transparent crystallization or expression of the oneand only One. Now, and forever now. This was not liberation to me, butpure hell.


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Any appearance, any manifestation, was possible. Conceiving of making anappearance as this, that, or the other, indeed as everything — since there clearlywas no time limit — absolutely terrified me. My mind, jammed with darkintimations of Eternity, raced through my body like a barbed-wire lunatic onamphetamines, screaming for release. Death could not end this. In fact, Deathonly kept the whole show going.

The scale of this did not so much dwarf human achievement as dissolve it.

A sentence I’d read long ago (from a Da Free John book whose title eludesme) kept insinuating its way through me, a one-liner that once had interestedme primarily because of its structure, but that now made me reel: “All there isis Is.”

All my notions of purpose, even sacred purpose, kept shredding to nothing,in a kind of cosmic agoraphobia. I was — and I shrank from this with all ofmy will — what I was afraid of, and what I “normally” took myself to bewas but a diaphanous phantom, floating raggedly and quite insignificantlynear the periphery of my attention.

I could not shut off my multisensory feeling-visions of endless recurrence,regardless of how much novelty was factored into it. My death, your death,our death, humankind’s death, planetary death, solar death, death of the wholecosmos, would unfold before me with nauseating intensity, making a mockeryout of human achievement and evolution, and then, worse of all, it — theentire fucking universe — would somehow start up again, then once moreextinguish itself, over and over and over, ad infinitum. No beginning, no end.The entire universe less than a breath in the eternal, self-aware, boundlesscontinuum of Is-ness.

That this transcended imagination did not mean that it could not be intuited;my body shook and pulsed as if in complete cellular accord with suchrealization.1 An infinite, ever-evolving succession of endless forms. I wasn’tonly part of this; I also was it. And, furthermore, when had I not been it? All Icould see was the Real, absolutely out of control, playing peekaboo with Itsperpetually perishing appearances, before which my mind writhed droolingand mute.

Such intimations often made me feel as if I’d been slammed with a wreckingball, my pulverized remains crawling with what seemed to be irreversible


~ 98 ~

madness. A one-way ticket to psychosis. Gates dynamited beyond repair, theedge of my world somewhere back there, out of reach.

But was not all but edgeless Mystery, impregnated with a significance beyondany conceivable meaning, simultaneously devouring and birthing Itself onunimaginable scales, disguised only by our obsessive self-involvement, ourcompulsively ordered fencing of things?

Was not all a centerless, infinite, self-fertilizing, transcendental Wonder beyondwonder, existing as the heartbeat and consciousness and substance and all ofeverything? A horizonless Wilderness of Being animating us and everythingelse? A Wonder beyond any conceivable framing. This is not to say that Iknew what It was; knowing that It, and It alone, was was more than enoughfor me. I saw and felt Death everywhere, but was far more troubled by myinsanity-stained sense of deathlessness.

I remember reading a letter from a troubled community member. It wassimply a letter until I came to the line, “I feel as if I’ve been lost forever.”Although she’d said this in the context of feeling badly about herself, I took itabsolutely literally the very instant I saw it, shifting from relative calm to puredread in a second or two. Lost forever — this appeared to be what was reallyhappening to one and all, at least to what was left of me.

So who — no, what — was in charge? And what if, what if that which wasanimating the whole damned cosmic show was itself irreversibly out ofcontrol? What if the madness that was possessing me was not madness?These and related questions savagely ricocheted in my mind, their implicationsmetastasizing too quickly for any answer to take significant hold. Lost, lost,lost — but exactly what was lost?

At times I felt as if I were simultaneously existing both as an infinitesimalspeck and as the all-pervading presence of unfathomable Is-ness. SometimesI was locatable and sometimes unlocatable — being everywhere meant beingnowhere in particular.

I didn’t feel as though I had achieved anything. I felt stuck, trapped,bound, regardless of my freeway skills; roadkill lay everywhere, guts fryingon the asphalt, bloody eyeballs reining me in. My eyes. Insects splattingagainst my windshield, tiny greenish-yellow Rorschachs, in exactly thesame position as me.


~ 99 ~

Like all that was, I was nothing, and yet I was also everything — this was nota paradox to me, but rather a terrifying knowingness from which I struggledto distance myself. I desperately wanted this to be just a hallucination, a PTSD(post-traumatic stress disorder) hangover, but was it? Any evaluative criteriathat I could construct clearly had no more substance than anything else,including the me that was constructing them.

The nothing that I was was composed of everything —including blackhole hell-realms — and the everything that I was was devoid of anyintrinsic existence, any definitive substantiality, making more than sensebut less than a self.

So what the hell was I doing here? And where exactly was “here”? This blue-green, glistening marble — this achingly beautiful planet — spinning throughblack space, with its ever so fine film of teeming life-forms, a rich butmomentary brilliance, already dying, the Sun’s upcoming supernova but amoment away...

My pulse would all of a sudden jump and buck, my mind would paranoicallyrace and froth, and I, like a fish shuddering its last on some waterless boatdeck,would literally shake before the ungraspable Weirdness and Wonder of it all.Such was my situation for months after my fateful inhalation — but not allthe time.

During terror episodes, I’d sometimes be able to stop making a problem outof the me who was making a problem out of my condition, and would thenoften feel profoundly and simply at home with whatever was happening,experiencing a quality of acceptance that made possible an intimacy with eventhe darkest or most sordid aspects of Life.

Going toward, rather than turning away from, what I “normally” wouldavoid became more of an imperative, as is reflected by the following dream(which occurred about a month after my NDE):

I’m in the throes of 5-MeO hyperterror, in a small, blackish-grey room that is allmirrors from waist height to ceiling. The air is grey, saggy, subtly viscous. A youngboy, perhaps six or seven, is standing in front of me, wraith-like yet still substantial.I am begging him to kill me, to drive a knife through my chest, because I am in suchextreme agony and despair. We circle within the room once, with me on my knees,half-floating.


~ 100 ~

Soon, my pleas sound hollow to me, and I feel some of the strength I had earlier in the dreamwhen, after starting to hyperventilate, I’d forced my dreambody to stop breathing for a whilein order to stabilize my surroundings (I had been aware that I was dreaming at the time).Immediately I find myself outside the room, watching a red-haired young man enduring theeffects of 5-MeO. People are filming him. He runs out of the room, apparently to go to thebathroom, and I fear that he is going to commit suicide there. But he emerges, crying veryhard, obviously deeply disoriented.

Now I’m walking in bright sunshine with Nancy. I feel loose and easy, but soon feel atremendous pull to turn around, and do so — the young man is staring at us, his eyesliterally almost out of his head. I feel such love for him that I turn back and go to him,taking him gently by the shoulders.

Suicide sometimes tempted me — I, knife in hand, considered stabbing myselfin the heart one night — but never was really an option. Taking my own lifewould provide no real relief, it seemed to me, but would only launch myprevailing habits elsewhere (perhaps into another round of incarnation), stillseeded with the very same fear that so seductively and chillingly whispered tome of suicide.

In this there was no significant sense of personal reincarnation, no convincingbelief in a series of lives lived by some self-contained, curriculum-providingentity or soul, but only a hypervivid intuition of the Absolute making countlessappearances, human and otherwise, on every level possible. (Tibetan Buddhistteachers point to something like this when they say that at one time or anotherevery being on Earth has been our parent.)

I remember being stunned when, in Grade Five, I saw written across theclassroom blackboard: Energy cannot be created nor destroyed. Now theblackboard was my sky, already aflame, already gone yet still here, its physicslesson a living reality to me rather than just a concept.

In the dream just described, I was both the sufferer and the witness of thatsuffering. I desperately wanted to be killed — anything to get away from myagony — but only when I stood apart from that tortured me was I able to gotoward him.

Assuming the position of witness can provide considerable detachment frompain. This is generally useful, especially in its allowing a larger, more lucidperspective to emerge, but not so useful when it overseparates or strands us


~ 101 ~

from our pain. Yes, healthy detachment is needed, but so too is a distance-dissolving encounter with the object of our detachment. Separation andconnection — the mutual dance of which generates intimacy.

And we cannot just do this so to earn spiritual merit or points with the Divine.A deeper motivation is needed, wherein we are not looking or bargaining forsome kind of immunity, but rather are looking inside our looking and touchingour pain with compassion, not because it’s the right thing to do, but becauseit’s the only thing to do.

Consider the following dream, which I had about a year and a half after myNDE:

Becoming aware that I’m dreaming, I leap up to fly, but fall back, twice. Then I surrender,inwardly asking to be taken where I most need to go. I’m in the air, a few feet above somepavement. Suddenly I’m pulled backward and downward at a tremendous speed, my bodyalmost totally vanishing during my “flight.” I land in an underground, poorly lit room. Itswalls are all floor-to-ceiling mirrors, all equally sized and all bizarrely distorting myreflection. Though fairly large, the room feels quite compressed. I’m in the middle, afraid butnot panicked.

Slowly, I walk toward one wall, seeing all sorts of mirrored “fragments” of myself. Adarkly eerie, heavy feeling saturates the room. Everything is sickeningly greyish. I gaze intomy reflection’s eyes, seeing less of the hallucinatory than I expected. Then I walk into andthrough the mirror, finding myself in an even more compressive space. It’s extremelyuncomfortable; if I wasn’t still aware that it was a dream, I would surely escape as quicklyas possible.

No exit in sight, though — just claustrophobic greys, amorphous and hideously alive. Ikeep moving, as if through jelly — fatly quivering, ever denser protoplasm — existingboth as a dreambody and a disembodied observer. Finally, I can barely move.

In despair and helplessness, I go down on my knees, crying and wordlessly praying, achingfor release. As the observer, I see my eyes turned up, my hands in prayer position in frontof my chest, my face deathly pale. Surrender. Suddenly, I am vaulted into another world,vaguely sensing that I am in a hospital, watching a group of doctors tend to a covered-uppatient. A series of events transpire [which I cannot recall], ending in joy.

In many lucid dreams, I have moved or have been pulled toward places ofluminosity, often dissolving in their radiance. Sometimes, though, I have gone


~ 102 ~

in the “opposite” direction, going deep into the Earth, into mineral and densedark. In the preceding dream, I’m being pulled below the surface, depositedin much the same environment as in the 5-MeO dream in which I was beggingto be killed.

Let’s permit the image of being in the grey, underground room to unfolditself, to “speak”:

When underground, I don’t appear to myself as I usually am. When I see myselfreflected all around, I don’t appear to be myself.

Wherever I look, I see my reflection, so long as I remain in the center of the room.Though there is a lack of illumination when I am underground looking at myself,there is enough light to see. The ceiling and floor are the same; above and beloware the same underground. I am mirrored from all around when I am below thesurface.

My surface appearance is broken into many components when I am below thesurface. When I remain in the middle, I can see, but am distant from what I see.Wherever I turn, there I am.

When I leave the middle, thereby decentralizing the space, I can more clearly seeparticular reflections. When I no longer occupy the center, I can pass through whatI am looking at. Stepping through one self-image puts me behind them all, andthis happens when I am below the surface, and am willing to “face” myself, howeverunpleasant that might be. When I remain in the center, when I am the center, I amencircled by what I fear.

(Note: I have no explanatory summary for all of the above — its insights areintrinsic to its totality as an image. It speaks not of one meaning for me, but ofmany [from prenatal to transpersonal], each of which could be mined for moresignificance.)

Once “I” am through the mirror, things get worse — but did I not ask to betaken where I most needed to go? Only when I am “decentralized,” down onmy knees, no longer fighting my helplessness, does “release” occur. I haven’tso much given up — submission being but a kind of collapse — as surrendered(surrender being more expansion than collapse), opening to a sacrifice of selfthat is anathema to the usual me.


~ 103 ~

In the sacrifice of that self — which is more of a dethroning than a literalsacrifice or dissolution — Being shines through. And Being — the eternal“Is” of Energy — cannot be created nor destroyed. To live as Being is to liveas the Deathless. Passing through the appearances of “I,” we reappear not asa being, but as Being, which paradoxically may still leave us in what looks verymuch like a separate, discrete existence.

And why not? Does Being feel threatened by any of its appearances and thedramatics of their interactions? Is the sky threatened or diminished in theslightest by its clouds? When a building falls apart, is the space that it occupiedruined? Does the apparent individuation of Being — soul-making in theraw— do anything to Being? Does anything happen to Being when its formschange?

Being simply is. Whatever and whenever the appearance, it’s still just the sameold yet evernew hyperbole-transcending Show. The One showing up as theMany, the Many showing up as the One, while that which refers to itself as uswanders in dreamland hungry for Home.

We may not seem to matter very much in the presence of such unimaginableEnormity and Mystery, yet we — and our intentions and actions — do. Isthere any such thing as a truly insignificant act? To everyday us, there certainlyis, but to Being, there is not. All is sacred. And to say that all is sacred is to saythat all is pervaded by Being, and in fact is Being. How then can we turn awayfrom any of it?

Just as I, in my dream, had to turn back toward the me who was in suicidalagony, we have to, sooner or later, cease turning away from what scares,repulses, or otherwise disturbs us (including our own turning away!). If wedon’t, we are incomplete, partial, fragmented. If we don’t, we are maroonedfrom ourselves, shipwrecked upon our own aversion.

Our work then — and if it was easy, we’d have surely done it long ago — isto make room in our hearts for whatever we have judged as being unworthyof being in our hearts. It’s a true labor of love to stop ostracizing our“negativity,” to stop making a problem out of our anger, hate, jealousy, fear,shame, and whatever else we’d rather stay apart from. As we bring compassionand illumination to such states, they cease being dreaded “its,” and becomeonly more reclaimed us — such is our task, our sacred discipline, the lessonsof which we must learn by heart.


~ 104 ~

The dream’s petals cradle many a viewfinder.

Like evaporating gypsies, like the imagined dead restlessly adrift, like nothing in particular,a few thoughts wander disembodied through old rooms, trying to snare some attention. Thefeeling is that of spectral undersea ruins, wolf-eels necking out of broken hulls like giganticfanged grubs.

But the threat does not run deep. So many rooms, so many dark and winding trails, theliving and the dead so closely intertwined, the whispers of other worlds lost in the static ofour overfed concerns. And again our pain surfaces, like a threatening dream-creature thatwe keep trying to elude or destroy, resurrecting itself even in the most seemingly impenetrableof our psychic citadels.

What we won’t face festers and multiplies within us until it literally takes our place,looking through our eyes and harnessing our energies to its own ends. What we suppresssuppresses us.

Forsake not the lowlands of your days, or else you’ll likely reach the peak half a human orless, crippled by your very ascent. The most depressed of valleys, the vilest of marshes, thedirtiest of gutters, all await and need our conscious attention, our unforced compassion, ourseeding, asking neither to be ostracized nor transcended, nor to necessarily be transformedinto “better” locales, but rather to be simply one more birthing place and burial ground forus, one more crucible for Awakening’s alchemy.

If we condemn or flee anything in ourselves, it will only fester and multiply and eventuallyoccupy every exit, enlarging itself, cancerously or otherwise, so as to seize our attention,encoding its outcast will throughout the apparently healthier regions of ourselves.

No departing from this world is required, no rising above, no turning in. Escape does notwork. Nor does collapse. Freedom is in the outgrowing of the urge to escape. Freedom doesnot mind its chains. Freedom ultimately is about not needing to have a choice. There is noescape from Freedom.

This very world, this dream-theatre of suffering and addiction and distraction, providesthrough its unrelentingly accurate response to our doings an unparalleled opportunity forrecognizing and embodying Being on all levels, until there are no levels, no others, but onlyBeing. Only this.

It is crucial that we not let our embrace of the One separate us from the subterranean,homely, malignant, malodorous petallings of self.


~ 105 ~

They too ache to be known, to be touched, to be deeply encountered, without being made theobjects of some salvation game. Stop making them sit in the backseat, stop pretendingthey’re not your relations, stop treating them like weeds, or else you’ll just keep Humpty-Dumptying yourself all over the place, dragging what’s left of yourself to the nearest bar.

But even in the dispirited downing of one more Soul on the Rocks, the Holy Wakeup Callstill bubbles up, fluidly intact amidst all the frozen fizz and fuss, riding in on the nextconscious breath, reminding us that this too is us.

Into the abyss uncorked at breath’s endis room for all

Starmakers and mud-dwellers alikeAnd out of the blue another breath

arriving all by itselffilling more than lungs

Inhale and exhaleA tide we ride

forgetting we are being breathedAnother breath nowExhale and a truer exhaleSilence just said somethingDon’t lose it in the translationIt’s as simple as your next breathInviting us to bring it all

onto the dancefloor so we might learn our lessons by heartWhile we roam in dreamlandHungry for Home

NOTES

1. Consider the possible evolutionary relationship between human neurochemistryand various psychoactive tryptamines, the best known of which (psilocybin andDMT) bear a remarkable resemblance to the neurotransmitter 5-hydroxy-tryptamine,commonly known as serotonin. Not only does DMT occur naturally in humanbody fluids (Strassman, 1996, 2001), but it is enzymatically recognized at thesynapses in the brain so quickly — literally within seconds of having been smoked—


~ 106 ~

that it is completely deactivated within several minutes (McKenna, 1992, p. 259).DMT researcher and psychiatrist Rick Strassman speculates that the pineal glandmight, under certain unusual conditions (like NDEs), produce enough DMT to“deposit” us in realms ordinarily inaccessible to human consciousness.

Not only does the pineal produces DMT, but it may also produce 5-MeO.Mantak Chia (2004), following Ananda Bosman, speculates that greatly increasedmelatonin levels, as induced through prolonged time in utter darkness, result notonly in increased DMT and 5-MeO production, but also in other substances thatinhibit the very enzymes that normally break down DMT and 5-MeO. Darknessretreats, featuring lengthy immersion in complete darkness, are perhaps best knownin Tibetan Buddhism.

Could lowered serotonin levels be actually reflecting under certain conditions aconversion of serotonin precursors into DMT or DMT-like compounds? Is itpossible that the brain is flooded with such substances right before (or at/after)Death or during NDEs (or during times of severe trauma), blowing open, so tospeak, the gates of perception? It is, of course, also possible at such times thatDMT-deactivating enzyme systems are themselves being deactivated.

The chemistry here hinges on the slightest molecular variations; for example,5-hydroxy-DMT (also known as bufotenine) catalyzed life-threatening circulatorycrises and cyanosis (“plum-colored face”) when injected into unsuspecting (!) patients(Turner & Merlis, 1959, pp. 121-129). This sounds similar to my state immediatelyfollowing my second inhalation of 5-MeO — could my body have been reacting to5-hydroxy-DMT as well (assuming it could be manufactured in my brain), ratherthan just to 5-MeO? There is an enzyme, O-methyl transferase, found in theSonoran toad (Bufo alvarius), that converts bufotenine into 5-MeO (Davis, 1998,pp. 188-189). Perhaps there is an enzyme that catalyzes the reverse reaction. Orperhaps not.

(A final note: Bufotenine, which reportedly has no hallucinogenic properties,and is almost universally acknowledged as a flat-out bummer among drugs, isclassified as an illegal drug, but 5-MeO, probably the most potent hallucinogenknown, is [as of this writing] legal.)

avoiding deathis killing us

CHAPTER NINE


~ 108 ~

Whenever identification with the body exists, a body is always available, whetherthis or any other one, till the body-sense disappears by merging into the source....Buthowever long these bodies may last, they eventually come to an end and yield to theSelf, which alone eternally exists....There is neither real birth, nor real death.— Ramana Maharshi

We do not live. Life lives as us. We do not survive. Life survives us. The individualbody and mind are only temporary expressions and stepped-down modifications orlesser intensities of Life.— Adi Da

Death is perfectly safe....Death, like birth, is not an emergency but an emergence.— Stephen Levine

Like birth, Death is both departure and arrival.

We die as we lived.The chains we adopted remain with us

unless shed while we were aliveAfter Death wandering through

what we’ve made of ourselveswe are but a thought away

from the chance to leave it all behindBut Death is not laterDeath doesn’t happen to LifeBut is the shedding, the release inviting us

into the Heartland of the Supremebeyond every possible dream


~ 109 ~

At the end of exhaling, there usually is a pause, a gap, before inhalation begins.That gap may only last a second, but it is a second that contains Eternity.Death is much like that gap. On the surface, nothing seems to be happening;the breath is gone, the body motionless. But below the surface, there may beplenty happening; dynamic openness, primordial presence, powered by theBreath behind the breath.

The secret of Death is no further away than your next breath. Freefall into thegap between outbreath’s end and inbreath’s very beginning, and you will becradled and filled by boundless space, effortlessly sentient space. Pure openness.The arrival of the inhale may distract you from this openness, but give itsome attention as you observe the beginning, middle, and end of inhalationand exhalation, and you’ll notice that this openness is already always with you.Just like Death. As ordinary and mysterious as our breath.

Possibilities:Death is a built-in breakout carrying reservations for incarnation’s transit lounges,ghostly stopovers haunted by craved possibility — or launching pads into anawakening beyond imagination.

Death is a compulsory loss of face and place, packed with blueprints for anotherround, another resurfacing of the same old bind, yet still just a dream away fromthe Undying.

More possibilities:Death is a mind-blowing tour of what we’ve made of ourselves, followed by rerunsdirected by and starring those habits of ours that possessed us until the body’s end.

Death is a goodbye blooming with epiphanous hellos, but we may be tuned inelsewhere, wrapped up in familiar clothes, busy making binding connections withlesser greetings.

Death is a pregnant pause. It is the bottom line of in-between-ness.

And Death is not really annihilation, but rather just a dissolution of form, seededwith blueprints for further appearances, on every possible scale. Rebirth in darklydramatic drag. Reappearance, not necessarily of us, but of Life-as-form. Inhale.

Death scares the shit out of ego-occupied us. No wonder we dress up corpsesas if they were going to a party; no wonder spiritually ambitious “I” wants to


~ 110 ~

be present at its own funeral; no wonder we go to absurd lengths to keep thealmost-dead alive for as long as possible; no wonder so many of us believe inan afterlife that’s an eternal holiday for “I.” It’s quite understandable, givenhow scared we are of Death. But are we reacting to Death, or just to our ideaof Death?

We tend to keep Death at mind’s length, preferring a vicarious relationship with it,as exemplified by our common fascination with watching dangerous sports andso-called death-defying feats. Being so seemingly close to Death may give us afeeling of being immune to or cheating it. Others succumb to it, but not us — abit of comfort this is, much like sitting by the hearth’s fire while a chill stormhowls outside. But — exhale — the doors will soon swing open, and the nightcome rushing in. We are always close to Death, very, very close.

We hear about near-Death experiences, perhaps marveling at their mysticalelements, forgetting that Life itself is a near-Death experience. Right now.

Still more possibilities:Death is crowded with apparitions as real as you and me, ghosts that refuse to giveup the ghost, phantoms of possibility recruited from our dreams.

Death is an undoing of the mind-latticed personal knot, a brief outshining of ego,an unlacing, an unraveling, a mysterious yet enormously familiar traveling.

Death is the arrow’s release, a solitary flight into welcoming Light, or so we,nostalgic for the future, would like to believe. Death gives all the same opportunity.Death leaves no one out.

Avoiding Death deadens us. Getting intimate with Death enlivens us.

This requires cutting through the mindset that views Life and Death asopposites— which is also the mindset that overseparates experiencer andexperience, observer and observed, inside and outside, good and bad, andso on. Exhale.

Such dense dualism has as its operational center me-centered personal identity,around which orbit seemingly self-existing, discrete objects, things to whichpermanence or constancy may be attributed, but that actually are no more realor any less contingent than the egoity that grants them objective existence.Inhale. When objects — external or internal — appear to be definitively


~ 111 ~

separated from us, we are dreaming. Exhale. But objects do not so convincinglystay “over there” — like objects are supposed to — when we start rubbingthe sleep out of our “I’s”. Inhale with your entire body.

The more attached we are to object-constancy and to the security and kindof reality that it provides, the more fearful we will be of it changing, or,worse, being revealed as less than real. This attachment cannot be avoided —for it’s as natural as it is inevitable — but it loses its grip on us as its objects arerecognized as already being in process, as already being less solid or fixed thanthey appear, as already being not so apart from us, as already dying, seededwith their own end or transmutation. Exhale.

Life beyond the bodyfrees us to embody the Beyond

Life beyond the mindfrees us to know the Unknown

Life beyond Deathfrees us to die into the Undying

Dying to live are weReaching for What we never left

but only dreamt we didThe dream dies

leaving nothing in its wakebut us

Death does not slay us; denying or fearing it does. If we’re so attached to ourlife that Death appears to be a tragedy, a misfortune, a screwup in the System,then we need to bring more light to our attachment, so that its bittersweetnature amplifies, rather than sours, our appreciation of and gratitude for Life,as well as our compassion for all that must die.

About attachment: It doesn’t deserve the bad press it gets from the pulpits ofspiritual correctness. Attachment comes with Life. The point is not to get ridof it or to escape it, but to keep it in healthy perspective. Attachment makespainfully obvious what we need to face and deal with — insecurity, fearfulness,manipulativeness, etcetera — and doesn’t let us off the hook until we truly doso. Exhale. When we are deeply attached, our heart breaks more easily, but ifwe work intelligently with that breaking — which is actually more a rawopenness than an actual shattering — we will find a greater intimacy with Life.And with Death.


~ 112 ~

Without Death, there would be no growth. Yet we tend to fear Death; someeven claim that the fear of Death is innate to us. But which us?

When we are preoccupied (literally so!) with being who we think we are (or whowe think we should be), fear arises, especially the fear of whatever couldthreaten — or, in the case of Death, apparently even erase — that particularidentity. Would we be afraid, or as afraid, of Death if we were to adopt a lessantagonistic, less ego-governed stance toward change, a stance in which wepracticed riding — and being openly present in the midst of — the waves ofchange, instead of barricading and consoling ourselves in sandcastles?

In crashes the surf, effortlessly leveling our monuments, carrying the essenceof its depths in every drop, every surge, every lacy trace of evaporating foam.The broken wave, freed of its perimetering, knows the ocean, and in knowingthe ocean knows that it is the ocean. And we are all coming to shore. Inhale.Thai meditation master Achaan Chaa says that when we understand thatsomething (that is, whatever we take to be real, including our self) is alreadybroken, then every moment with it can be precious. Exhale.

Rainy shore, shimmering sheets of darkly slumping skyLeaning am I into the windchilled thrill of daybreakOcean thunder and a deeper thunder within and all aroundAnd I am ground, ground to sandDrowned, drowned in torrents of broken cloudSpilling shattered against another shoreLetting the storm have my faceLetting the waves take my placeLetting depth unfold amidst stories too real to be toldLetting go every should and every executioner’s hoodAnd now my bodies are no longer just mineThe body unbound, the body bright, the body denseThe dreambody, the dailygrind body, the body doing timeThe body shattered, the body reborn, the body DivineFlesh of mud and starsFlesh of gravity, flesh of ecstasy, flesh of historyBody after body, body within bodyAll speaking their mindThis I walk, letting the day undress meUprooted until I find a truer groundLearning to surrender without collapsing


~ 113 ~

To love without clingingTo be attached without shrinking

To know without thinkingTo break down without falling apart

To be lovers with both the Mortal and the ImmortalTo die into the RealWithout forgetting the Undying OneOr the broken Many

The less intimate with Death (or radical change) we are, the more shallow,stagnant, and unreal our life tends to be, and the more subservient we becometo the very dualism that separates Life from Death. But what actually existsbetween Life and death? Space? Time? No, because Death, in the form ofimpermanence, is always with and within us, from breath to breath, ever now,already eating through whatever veils or gates we may have installed betweenLife and Death.

There is nothing more between Life and Death than the notion that there issomething between them. Exhale.

Life outlives us yet we are LifeDo not simply chew on this as mere metaphorIt is, and it’s also something moreAbout which I’d surely speakIf my words were not already

sea-gossamer dying on the waiting shoreand if I was not already consumed

by What Cannot Be SaidWhile I rock in the cradle

of stories that cannot be told

Gradually, with great respect for our need to go at a pace that allows forsufficient integration, we shift from recognizing the raw Reality of what isto— however briefly or shallowly — actually recognizing ourselves as noneother than That. Preparing for this includes getting intimate with what wemost fear. Inhale. Entering the cave, feeling the breath of the dark. Exhaleright down to our toes.

Sooner or later, we let ourselves be unraveled by the Minotaur’s bleedinghowl of recognition. Its face, however bestial, deformed, or masked, is none


~ 114 ~

other than ours. Inhale, exhale. Its dark dank labyrinth, reeking of corpses, isour birthing canal, the end of which we’re dying to see. The end that is thebeginning.

Here, where the nondual nature of the Real is unmistakably recognized, Deathis not a blackout, nor the Great White Hope, nor a metaphysical fable. Here,Death is neither ascent nor descent, neither beginning nor ending, but rather aMystery-affirming verb effortlessly erasing every metaphor that would try toexplain or contain it, or reduce it to mythological fodder.

Here, the boundless vastitude and eloquent silence of pure awareness becomemore obvious. Things may still be buzzingly abloom, even heavily decibeled,but they’re now playing out their scripts in a more peripheral fashion, nomore disturbing “our” awareness than do clouds disturb the sky. Be still, bequiet: This advice from the greatest of sages (like Ramana Maharshi) is notabout repression or forced quiet, but rather about allowing intrinsic awarenessto become more obvious, more central. Yet even this is not immune to theself-aggrandizing of egoity. We must, at the right time, be willing to let go ofparticular practices; spiritual strategies, however sublime, can only carry us sofar. At some point, we simply have to throw in the towel, not in submissionbut in surrender. Death, and a deeper Death. Dying into the Deathless. Not toscore brownie points with God, but simply because we are sufficiently ripe.

Death and Life together make and consume these lines, together giving shapeand color and seasoning to Being.

All these paper-seeking wordsHanging in space

skewered by gravityPinned down

by what they’re trying to pin downAll these spilling wordsLeapfrogging over each other

in an already-shattered dreamIs it any wonder

the Beloved wears every face?even that of the Lord of Death

Eyes behind our eyesever gazing into the Forever Wild

Homeland of all

learning to bearthe unbearable

CHAPTER TEN


~ 116 ~

Dream (March 14th): I’m with Nancy in a small car at a ferry terminal. For a while,we stand outside in a light drizzle, talking about a wilderness journey I took twenty yearsago. Later on, back in the car, I look at the place that we’re in, and am astonished to see anenormous Buddhist-like building nearby, beautifully carved. Then I notice that all the streetsigns are in Indonesian, and excitedly tell Nancy that we’re in Indonesia. As I continuereading the signs, they all start blurring — and I realize that I am dreaming. But mylucidity brings me no comfort. Nancy starts to fade and waver. I’m in a gigantic, thicklywalled room. I am very scared. Everything speeds up, accelerating with tremendous power,and I am flung as if from a crossbow or cannon against the far wall. I know that becauseit’s a dream, I can pass through the wall, but I am nonetheless in extreme terror, totally outof control, literally ricocheting everywhere.

Dream (March 17th): I’m on my back, convulsing in terror. Someone is sitting on me.I somehow lift him off, and drag him over to where Nancy is sleeping. Flicking on the light,I demand to know what’s going on. They both say they’re trying to help me. Nancy’s faceis completely bloodless. It’s not her. My shock is overwhelming.

For 63 consecutive nights following my NDE, I sat in — and, much lessoften, with — terror and madness. Every damned night. I wondered if I hadindeed done permanent damage to myself. My life had taken a radical turn; itseemed that I was doing little more than trying to survive a hellride with noend in sight, screaming as I went around the corners, hanging onto nothing. Iwas getting increasingly worn down, edging closer and closer to what appearedto be permanent insanity, torturing myself with the question: Was I simplypostponing the inevitable?

Then came the soft, fear-free peace of the 64th night; that afternoon, I hadreceived a three-hour bodywork session that was as meticulously attentive asit was caring. But the very next night, things returned to “normal” — an houror less of sleep, an awakening to intense fear, a disciplined sitting, and moresleep.


~ 117 ~

What I haven’t mentioned is that I — or, more precisely, something resemblingme — resumed work in early March (less than three weeks after my NDE).Since 1978 I had worked as a psychotherapist, integrating counselling skills,bodywork, and various spiritual deepening practices, mostly letting the structureof my individual sessions and groups spontaneously emerge and evolve.Eventually my way of working drew many people to me, including somewho, responding to my invitation to take such work much further, formed atherapeutic, spiritually-oriented community in 1986, which I led.

I continued to work therapeutically, especially with community members, butsoon took on the role of spiritual teacher as well. From 1988 on, with thepublication of my book The Way Of The Lover, people from various places inNorth America, Europe, and Australia wanted to work with me and, moreoften than not, to participate in and even be part of our community (whichfeatured shared living, shared businesses, and an abundance of intensive self-exploration). No longer was our community only in British Columbia; wesoon had branches in England, Australia, and California. My work and influencekept expanding. And so did my insensitivity to what wasn’t working in ourcommunity (which will be discussed in more depth in Chapter 12).

So, despite my condition, I led evening groups and a few weekend workshopsin March and April, offering the kind of work I’d done before, with plentyof raw feeling and deep opening, the dynamics of which were both familiarto me and hallucinogenically unfamiliar. Groupwork had been my forté forthe past 15 or so years, being very natural to me; walking into a group ofstrangers and beginning to work with them, with no prearranged format,had been easy for me, and had been where I was, at least most of the time, atmy best. In some ways, now my work had actually improved; I was softer,more empathetic, more attuned to the deeper fears and needs of groupmembers.

Even so, I was much more fragile than I showed, frequently seeing and feelingmore than I could bear, slipping in and out of the grips of a toxicallydisorienting sense of de-familiarization, barely able to navigate through theboundless Enormity that was, with madly pulsating, ultravivid intensity, literally“making an appearance” as each group member — and as the ghostly enigmaof me. Again and again I would be working with someone in a group sessionand suddenly all that I would see — through unremovable, ever-novel, bizarrelylucid lenses — was a corpse being animated by the very same Current thatwas electrifying me.


~ 118 ~

And yet on I would go, moving intuitively and smoothly through the neededsteps as if in a dream. Those observing me working apparently saw nothingunusual. My therapeutic competence, still intact, seemed utterly alien to me attimes, but more often than not it soothed me. Working as I did provided mewith some sense of anchoring and meaningful connection to who I had been,creating the illusion that I wasn’t really falling apart.

But I wasn’t just falling apart. I was already shattered.

In mid-May, I led a large, week-long residential group in Australia, partiallybecause of financial reasons, but mostly because I thought that I should do it.If I didn’t do it, I’d be letting a lot of people down, or so I thought; mydeeper motive was simply to continue creating connections to who I’d been.The group was called Leela (meaning Divine play), with From Here to a DeeperHere as its subtitle. It sounded good at the time, indicating as it did both thepassionate and spiritual dimensions of my work.

However, the “Divine play” in which I was now immersed had long ceasedto be just a pleasant transpersonal outing. The hand that rocked the cosmiccradle now had claws, mountainous knuckles, and a grip that jaggedly swamthrough my flesh. The “here” in which I was planted made me long for ashallower here.

Nevertheless, I still clung to the hope that doing the group would likely begood for me and all involved. My previous working trips to Australia, I keptreminding myself, had been unusually healing for me — and so, I hoped, thistrip might speed my healing. After the group, Nancy and I would be stayingfor several weeks in a house right on the beach, still doing some session andgroup work, but having plenty of time to simply enjoy our idyllic setting.

I had not taken any Ativan for a month (since mid-April) and was determinedto not return to it. Since I equated not taking it with being well, I persisted,even when I really needed it. On the flight to Australia on May 9th, a non-stop15-hour all-night journey from Los Angeles to Sydney, I had an intense panicattack, immediately following a short nap, before we were even halfway acrossthe Pacific. Everyone was asleep, the cabin dark, the space far too enclosedfor me. Never before had I been afraid during a flight, but now I was reallyterrified, feeling an overwhelming urge to leave the plane, to do whatever Icould to get out. But just as I readied myself to at last take an Ativan tablet, Isuddenly calmed down, and was able to continue my Ativan “fast.”


~ 119 ~

However, I was making too much of a virtue out of not taking any Ativan.In my desperation and hurry to get well, I was driving myself further andfurther into the very hellishness I so dreaded, as well as cutting myself offfrom its benefits and teachings. During the group I was often very troubled,having to break down between many of the group sessions (in the room Ishared with Nancy) in order to be able to sanely function. I once even had toabruptly leave during a lunchtime volleyball game (which I ordinarily lovedplaying) when I was suddenly pervaded — possessed — by a noxiouslycompelling sense of accelerating madness, in which the sky, only momentsago so beautifully blue and clear, itself seemed to be malevolently melting.

Midway through the group I had the following nightmare:

I am standing by the side of an unknown highway, watching cars whizzing by at tremendousspeeds. Abruptly, one stops right beside me. I know that I am supposed to get in. As I doso, I notice that there is no one in the car. I sit in the driver’s seat, and right away the cartakes off, accelerating at an inconceivable speed.

I can control nothing in the car. No brakes, no steering wheel. In utter horror — verysimilar to what I felt when I “awakened” 15 or so seconds after smoking the 5-MeO —I realize I am going far, far too fast for there to be any turning back. The highway is noteven a blur. The scenery is alien, all but shapeless. All familiarity dissolves, along with myremaining sanity. There’s another person in the car now, a woman my age, as surreal as me.In slow motion we turn toward each other, plunging our hands into and through each other’sface and wildly eddying flesh, tearing each other apart with sickeningly terrifying intensity.

I was out of control, even when I was in the driver’s seat. Try as I would, Icould not successfully resurrect my old, super-competent, in-charge self. Thevery pain that underlay — and also played a key role in creating — thatseemingly confident “I” poured forth with raw insistence, in conjunction withthe shock-driven dramatics of the physiological and more transpersonaldimensions of my crisis.

I was disintegrating on many levels at once, feeling torn apart, my locus ofself splattered against shapeshifting walls. In short, I was a mess, maroonedfrom any telling cleanup. I was still in shock (though no one, including doctors,had diagnosed me thus), my nervous system remaining in the electrifying gripof what the 5-MeO had catalyzed in me. A sense of being in extreme dangerstill pervaded me, on every level imaginable. It wasn’t the danger of dying,but the danger of living like this, the torture of undying entrapment on every


~ 120 ~

possible scale — Sisyphian wipeout and resurrection in crazily peakingshockwaves, tranquil seas but the most diaphanous of daydreams.

Equanimity — I had a day of it after the group finished. But the next day Iwas back in hellish chaos, scared to fully acknowledge just how scared I reallywas. The nights were difficult, especially in the predawn hours; I’d hear thesurf outside, feel the lacy tracings of the ocean breeze on my face — which Inormally loved — and be in agony, with seemingly only the slightest of distancebetween me and permanent insanity.

Just before sunrise one morning I heard a voice somewhere above my headsay in a poisonously sweet, crystalline clear tone, “Why don’t you kill yourself?”I had no counterresponse. That’s where I seemed to be headed, even thoughI knew right to my core that suicide wouldn’t solve anything. Nancy left eachmorning to give individual therapy sessions, and I stayed in the house, simplystruggling to cope. I ran, I got massages, I bodysurfed, I cooked and wrotea little, but in it all I mostly felt as though I was just putting in time before Iwent completely mad. Being alone in the kitchen scared me. The kitchen? Ididn’t feel at home anywhere.

Even running along the beach — mile after smooth mile of immaculate sand,semi-jungle on one side, magnificent creamy turquoise surf on the other —was getting more and more scary, its aerobic, naturally tranquilizing benefitsnow outweighed by the fearfulness that was eating its way through me. Finally,after a run with a friend one morning, I fell into what I most feared:

I am in massive shock, pervaded by a thickly writhing feeling of dread. I’ve got to, got towork with it. So I, with Nancy and two friends close by, lie down on a mat, and beginbreathing deeply. They put their hands on me, both to reassure me with caring contact, andto assist me — through bodywork and fitting words — in expressing and passing throughmy terrifying sense of madness.

But I do not, as has always happened before, find myself moving through the madness anddread as I permit open expression of what I’m feeling. Finally I am crying, but my crying,regardless of its depth, only exhausts me. I am out of gas, having drained even the reservetanks. All fight has left me — which has happened many times before —but never can Iremember having felt so bereft of will.

I am stuck, stuck in a doorless insanity, moving like a drugged amphibian in a slurred,hideously fractured terrain. Simultaneously petrified and indifferent, I am amorphously


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disconnected, experiencing space as though it’s a gelatinous mass in which Nancy and myfriends’ concerned, faraway faces are greyly embedded. My speech says nothing. My skin (Iwas later told) is blue.

There seems to be a lack of oxygen, but I cannot make myself breathe with any discernibledepth. I am a salmon dying on a boatdeck, a salamander frying in a desert, an aborted fetusstill somehow alive but left to gasp its last in the cool of a conveniently forgotten hospitalroom. Yet I do not die. I know that what I essentially am will remanifest itself, populating,as ever, the infinite Moebius spread and stretch of “my” cosmic aquarium. So I lie still,pinned by an enormous terror and an equally impactful numbness, seeing the faces of Nancyand my friends fading, fading like an 1890s photograph held underwater.

There was nothing more to do. Time ceased. I was gone.

What was left of perception hovered near the outskirts of an Immensity thatspoke with thunderously eloquent silence, a silence that ate me alive, leavingnothing except my bad habits on the plate. Food for incarnation’s fleshdance.A stillbirth still somehow alive.

There was nothing more to do, except, except... Eventually, I arose withoutintending to do so, getting up on all fours as if lifted by puppet strings, andcrawled — slowly but steadily — to my room, where I grabbed a containerof Ativan. Without any hesitation, I swallowed a tablet. I had had none fornearly five weeks, but I didn’t care now — I needed it. In less than half anhour, I was “back.”

But I was far from through with the whole affair. The shattering shock aroundwhich it was constellated was far from dying down.

Very far.

madness, creativity,and being

CHAPTER ELEVEN


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The attempt to characterize the behavior and expressive activity [art] of theinsane as the meaningless product of neurochemical disturbance is nothing morethan the most recent expression of the terrifyingly intense need felt by somepsychiatrists to put a stop to all “abnormal manifestations.”— John McGregor

Ghosts, demons and other creatures with neither name nor domicile have beenaround me since childhood.— Ingmar Bergman

Great wits are sure to madness near allied;And thin partitions do their bounds divide.— John Dryden

The wellsprings of artistic creativity appear to be fed from many sources,including so-called mental illness. Not surprisingly, creativity, especiallyheightened creativity, therefore is sometimes associated with insanity, since it isinclined to frequent much the same terrain which madness roams, somewherebelow, outside, beyond, or otherwise apart from the comparatively sterileflatlands of status quo reality. The Minotaur is not about to stroll up to thesurface and sit still while we paint or sculpt its likeness; if we truly want tobring it to canvas or poetic life, we’re going to have to descend — and notjust intellectually — to its lair, with no solid guarantee that we will return (or atleast return intact).

In the labyrinths that house madness — but not only madness — dwell morethan a few of the intimations, images, and imperatives that fuel the artist, orthe artistic impulse. It is into this dreamlike, perhaps seemingly chaotic,sometimes terrifying, and often overwhelming locale that the serious artistmust sooner or later descend, not in a tour bus or bathyscaphe, but alone andnaked, open-eyed, significantly unattached to the familiar or known. Some


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artists choose to descend, some have to, and some — like Van Gogh orDostoyevski — are already there.1

And though it all went wrongI’ll stand before the Lord of SongWith nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah— Leonard Cohen

Art — the poetry of creativity, the aesthetic precipitating of intuition —inevitably draws not only from many sources, but also from many selves,even if only one of these does, or is given credit for, the final “translation.”

It is easy to be seduced by contemporary culture’s semi-deification ofautonomy and “I did it my way” individualism, and to forget that not onlyare we all in the same boat, but that we’re all waves of the same shoreless Sea.Life’s art are we, framed by what is beyond all framing. As sages have longtaught, nothing truly exists apart from and independent of everything else,including us.

So should the captain — or artist — be made any more special than thedeckhand or supposedly less creative person? Everyone and everything withwhom, and with which, we are involved is part of the creative process. We’reneeded, yes, but so are they. Is the flower more important than its stem orroots? Can its bloom be truly separated from the sunlight, water, weather,and soil that brought it into being? And can these flower-precursors, thesenon-flower elements of flower-ness, themselves be truly separated from whatbrought them into being? What is being pointed to here is not independence,nor dependence, but rather interdependence on every scale, an interdependencethat’s but the presenting surface of primordial inseparability.

So much for the mythos of the solitary artist — which, not surprisingly, ismost common in cultures that overvalue personal independence. Creativity atessence is inescapably collaborative — as perhaps most obviously exemplifiedby the communally-oriented art of places like Bali — and needs to berecognized as such, both at the level of cultural brainstorming, and in a morepurely or privately personal sense.

In the spirit of such collaboration — which doesn’t necessarily require physicalproximity to “participating” others — individuality does not have to witheror get crowded out, but rather can flower, and flower with idiosyncratic flair


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and beauty and bouquet, since it has sufficient support to breathe and stretchand live without having to try to be or remain “on top.” Independence anddependence can then beneficially coexist, bringing out the best in all involved.

For much of the day I have been feeling off center, oddly fragile. My focus is lesskeen than usual; I’m definitely off balance. And yet as I now begin to write, Iimmediately settle, without trying at all. It seems that the very intention to create—whether with a plan or not — recenters me. Perhaps my off-balanced state givesme an energetic edge, providing both impetus and fuel for creativity. This fuel,once ignited, rearranges me into a conducive environment for what needs to bewritten. A magic of which I never tire.

Not that it always begins like this; often I feel stable and settled well before I sitdown to write. But always there is surplus energy as soon as I start, even if I amexhausted. Diverse and sometimes discordant elements in me find a commonrhythm, a central pulse and purpose in which all can share and be given a voicesimultaneously individual and collective.

So as soon as creativity shifts from intention to actual expression, it seemsthat internal elements — desires, thoughts, feelings, habits that take turnsmasquerading as me — line up. But no, it’s before that, in the very genesis ofintention. At the first whiff of creative possibility, the scattered elementswithin me quickly find a working harmony, like a bunch of previouslyautonomous cells forming a colony — a primordial cooperative capable ofan originality not before possible.

This organic collaboration, a vital community of previously diverse and/ordiscordant elements within, provides much of the juice — and perhaps alsothe animating spark — for creativity. It may even be that the intimacy wecultivate with these elements, and with their interrelationship, largely determinesthe depth and reach of our creativity.

But to whom or to what do we — or can we — give the credit for “our”creativity? So much is involved in the whole process, not just internally, butalso externally. Weather, food, traffic, others’ art, time available, relationshipdynamics — an outer collaboration paralleling the inner.

Others in our life may not seem to be as creative as us, but without them welikely would not create as we do. Their presence, doings, intentions, and qualityof relationship with us affect our creativity. In fact, at times we may simply


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serve as a channel for ideas and artistry that arose more in them than us, butthat they were unable to express. So we express it for them.

And, ultimately, for all of us.

It is easy to overassociate creativity with artists. Our everyday creativity, whichcan manifest in many, many ways—how we do the dishes, arrange our desk,handle a trying conversation, and so on — is not necessarily any less originalor significant than the productions of recognized artists. Just because there isno frame around something does not mean it is not creative.

Still, we can learn much about our own creativity from examining the lives ofthose far more driven to create than us. Modern research, as well as historicalevidence, closely links creativity, especially high creativity, with mental andemotional states that are typically viewed as being far from “normal.”2 Theaberrant condition — bipolar disorders, drug addictions, and so on — ofmany artists and writers appears to be intimately connected with their creativity.3

But what about the rest of us? Are we sentenced to being less creative becausewe’re less prone to extreme mood swings, madness, or drug addiction? No.We might be less creative simply because we’re more cut off from our ownpsychoemotional rawness. We may have overbudgeted for defense againstour own ups and downs.

Nevertheless, the very imbalances and abnormalities we see dramatized inmany artists exist in us also, if only in our dreams, needing not much morethan a timely unchaining, in conjunction with a constructive intent, to spill overinto creativity.

When creativity is at its most potent, we may feel as though we have beentaken over, possessed, literally occupied by the creative process. It is this abilityto be possessed — nondestructively possessed — perhaps in conjunction withsome degree of mood elevation,4 that largely determines our creative reach.

If we are busy being in control, flattening out our highs and lows — or,worse, pathologizing the non-normal — we simply obstruct creativity, byrobbing it of the energy differentials on which it feeds. The very states (orpassions) that have the power to take us over — lust, rage, ecstasy, grief —need to be approached not with leveling agendas, but rather with enoughopenness so that their essential energies might be channeled into creativity.


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The more in contact we are with our depths, the more creative we will tendto be; but much depends on how such contact is made. Some do sodysfunctionally, through self-destructive or pathological freefalls.5 Others doso through a more conscious descent — they are not forced into proximitywith the wonders and horrors of the deep, but instead choose and developintimacy with them. As we cease avoiding our out-of-balance and on-the-edge states, learning to cultivate comfort with our discomfort, we will notonly suffer less, but our creativity will flow more easily.

We don’t access our inner treasures by avoiding the dragon, nor by blindlyleaping into its lair. Some may get too close too soon to the dragon, and socannot properly integrate what surfaces for them as they encounter suchdarkly overwhelming intensity. What works best is developing intimacy with thedragon — gradually and consciously — so that its fire provides not just heat,but also light.

Creativity often begins with being touched by and touching the edges of ourdeep interiority. The resulting energies — in conjunction with a dynamicreceptivity — fuel an expression that’s both original and meaningful.

The ground of creativity is energy not committed to a particular position,energy that is enough on the loose to be available for originality-generatingconversion. The sky of creativity is sentient openness. The richer the energy,the richer the creativity.

Creativity creates the illusion of a self-contained creator, a somebody doingit, but in fact it births and delivers itself, if we will but give our permission. Atessence, creativity bypasses egoity, though egoity may claim credit for creativity’sproducts. In the throes of pure creativity, we primarily exist as an intimatewitnessing of — and space for — what is unfolding. We are then not thecreator, but are simply present for — and also as — the creative process.

Creativity best flourishes when we are out of our own way. We then do notso much make the music, as make room for it, recognizing that creativityultimately is not something we do, but something we are.

I see you’ve gone and changed your name againAnd just when I climbed this whole mountainsideTo wash my eyelids in the rain— Leonard Cohen


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My son Dama, 10 at the time, knew only indirectly of the hellride I wasbuckled into following my 5-MeO NDE. All he apparently knew was that Iwas having a hard time, and that that was because of what I had smoked. Heslept through all of the nights when I was up in terror. Although it seemedthat he had only a superficial or casual sense of my crisis, something changedin him that did indicate a deep knowingness about my struggle — his art.

Up until I took my fateful smoke, his drawings had not been particularlyremarkable, leaning more to unshaded designs than to the depth-suffusedrendition of actual forms. Within a few weeks of my NDE, however, his arttook a radical turn, metamorphosing almost overnight. Bizarre, intenselyenergetic reptilian forms began to dominate his sketchpads — darkly writhing,malevolent-looking, richly shaded things that accurately conveyed to me theactual feeling of what I faced each tortuous night.

Dama was an unusually innocent boy, with seemingly no pull toward themore malignant aspects of things. Nevertheless, his drawings, rapidly churnedout on an almost daily basis, were now overflowing with tangible horror,much of which strongly resonated with what I had experienced while physicallyunconscious and dying — dragon-headed men, repulsively aberrated humans,sky-wide demonic heads, reptilian masses swarming out of galactic birth-clouds, insinuating their way into softer realms. And all drawn with remarkableskill, professionally shaded and precisely lined. No training, no prelude — justfull-blown, startlingly alive artistry, pouring forth seemingly unbidden, pageafter page.

At the same time, Dama’s lucid dreams (dreams in which he knew he wasdreaming) began to feature an apparently alien intelligence, a large-craniumedlizard-headed humanoid with whom he felt a strong, fear-free kinship. Againand again, he would draw this being, and I would watch with fascination,feeling as though my journey through the shadowlands of the prepersonaland the transpersonal was somehow being tracked by Dama’s trans-anthropocentric drawings.

The movement (or magnetizing) of my attention down — and I mean “down”in the sense that the neocortex is “up” — into the phylogenetically older,apparently darker or more primitive territories of my brain (including its“reptilian” zones) had become not only a journey into terror, but sometimesalso a journey through terror, supported to a significant degree both by Dama’sdrawings and his easy, loving presence.


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I was stranded from the familiar, often terrifyingly, and Dama’s art helped menot to return to the familiar, but to make more room for the non-familiar,the alien, the impossible-to-anticipate creations of the chaos within and allaround me. My own creativity was nonexistent during this time, for all myenergies were committed to enduring and working through my “madness”—or so it seemed. Perhaps that very creativity, curled up in a hibernationalextreme, found an articulate outlet through Dama.

In this sense, it was not “his” or “my” creativity, but our creativity. I shouldadd that when I was Dama’s age, I was a talented artist, with a special aptitudefor drawing. The psychic osmosis between us brings to mind those researchfindings indicating that a higher everyday creativity is found in the psychiatricallynormal relatives of those with bipolar mood disorders.6 Not that I was bipolar,but I was definitely not functioning “normally.” I’ve often observed thatwhen one member of a couple is relatively non-expressive of a certain feeling,the other member often ends up expressing this feeling for both parties (thatis, if I won’t get openly angry, my partner may “have to” express both heranger and mine). Could this not also happen with regard to creativity?

At this moment, a chaos of papers surrounds me, on my desk, printer, floor,and elsewhere, many emblazoned with almost indecipherable scribbles. But,but — I know where they all are, and what they each contain, my attentionhovering amidst it all like some mother eagle surveying her egg-laden nest.Both intense focus and deliberate spaciousness coexist here, at once still andoverflowing with new life. As intentionality enters this, conduits spontaneouslyarise, through which order—perhaps a new, more complex ordering—emergesfrom chaos, crystallized through lenses that themselves are constantly beingcreated. The labor may be painful and lengthy, but it’s free of artificial induction,episiotomies, epidurals, anaesthetics, and other “expert” intrusions.

And whose art is it, anyway? Labeling it “mine” is, ultimately, a form of theft,or at least plagiarism.

Quality art does not just celebrate the virtuosity of its creator, but also helpsawaken us to a truer sense of ourselves and the Mystery of Being, to thepoint where there is only Beauty, only shapely Openness. The ecstatic poetryof Rumi is very different than the euphoric efforts of, say, Shelley; the former,rooted as it is in the perspective of Being, directly plugs us into the Sacred,whereas the latter, cemented as it is to a significant degree in egoity, at bestonly alerts us to the Sacred. Art that is not egoically based can either be preegoic


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(as in the art of the insane7 or of a young child) or transegoic (as in the 100,000songs of Milarepa or Rumi’s intoxicated clarity) — but in both cases, it caresnot for fame.

Dama didn’t keep his pictures. As soon as they were done, he’d let them gotheir own way.

It is as if such art, “knowing” that it emerges from all of us — in an unthinkablyvast, unmappable, and organic collaboration — exists as a gift for everyone,owned by none and belonging to all.

NOTES

1. Artists, particularly writers and poets, show a far higher incidence of manic-depressive illness than non-artists. Why? For starters, consider so-called hypomania(meaning mildly manic): Its symptoms include elevated and expansive mood,inflated self-esteem, more energy than usual, decreased need for sleep, hypersexuality,increased productivity, and sharpened and unusually creative thinking. This list,supposedly describing the signs of a disorder, also describes many of the qualitiesthat are most highly valued by (and often characteristic of) modernity’s high-achievers— including me, prior to taking 5-MeO.

Such symptoms — symptoms! — are for most artists (and also for most ofthe rest of us) what steroids are for bodybuilders. The side effects may be quiteunpleasant, but generally are taken as a necessary payment for what is reaped.Paralleling this is a tendency to underdiagnose the manic aspects of manic-depressiveillness (Jamison, 1990, p. 336) — the melancholic side is easily recognized asdepression, but the manic or hypomanic side is often viewed as no more than“normal” functioning or “creative inspiration.”

Hypomanic energy is generally admired in modern culture — nonstop action(which Sogyal Rinpoche [1992, p. 19] calls “active laziness” ) fills business, sociallife, movies. Almost as common a greeting as “How are you?” is “Keeping busy?”In such an atmosphere, productivity is an all but unquestioned virtue. Staying up,keeping up, getting addicted to being up, juiced, buzzed, plugged in, turned on,hyperstimulated — take America completely off coffee for a week, and you’d likelyhave a national crisis! Taking more and more time to save time, we feel squeezed fortime, forgetting that hurrying wastes time, even as we try to find time to offset theresulting erosion of self. Running the red light to make it to meditation class ontime. Or in my case, burning the candle at both ends.

The hyperacusis — the heightening of senses — so commonly present duringmanic (and hypomanic) states is obviously supportive of most creative activity.


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Such states are often epitomized by an obsessive doing, an overdone (and overheated)output, and a chronic (and largely indiscriminate) emptying of one’s reservoirs ofenergy. When there is sufficient depletion, depression may return (or is returnedto), deflating the doer, reducing him or her to a despair that may at times seriouslyflirt with suicide. This is only made worse when depression is rejected, madewrong, or infected with nostalgia for hypomanic well-being.

Yet is not hypomania (like so many strategies to stay “up”) little more than aflight from depression, an obsessive and ultimately desperate absorption in activitythat simply obscures or dilutes the stark presence of depression (and the darkhelplessness implicit in it)? Depression may, in fact, be closer to the truth than itsmanic or hypomanic counterpart; some studies suggest that psychological distortionis more likely to occur in non-depressives than in depressives (McAdams, 1994, p.506). (In severe depression, there is, of course, more than ample distortion.)

Hypomania may seem to be overflowing with feeling, but its intensity andpassion is more that of pleasurable sensation and stimulation than of actualfeeling; its aversion to gravity is too strong for it to possess genuine emotionaldepth. In its own way, hypomania is just as numb as is depression, and far lesshonest.

And, we might ask, is the manic or hypomanic side really that creative? Does itgenerate significant originality, or does it simply provide labor-fuel — emotionaloxytocin — for what has already been birthed within? Perhaps (especially for themanic-depressive artist) depressiveness is the womb, and manic-ness or hypomanic-ness the midwife. Do not seeds grow in the dark?

2. For example, Nancy Andreasen (1987) found that four out of five eminent creativewriters had a major mood disorder. She also found that the psychiatrically normalrelatives of her creative writers showed more creativity than did the relatives of hercontrol subjects. Other research (Richards et al., 1988) also backs this. Why is this?Consider the finding that “thought disorder” — as found in manic andschizophrenic patients — occurs in much the same way in the first-degree relativesof such patients, including relatives who themselves are not clinically ill (Shentonet al., 1989). This way of thinking — supposedly dysfunctional yet arguably richwith creative ferment — can be a symptom of mental illness, and it also can be anoption, a choice exercised for creative purposes. Having access to many conceptualmodes, including the seemingly primitive or divergent or even chaotic, supportsdeeper creativity, so long as we stop equating “abnormal” with “ill.”

3. Consider Ingmar Bergman: His close contact — even intimacy — with his demonsis reflected in many of his films, such as Hour of the Wolf, Cries and Whispers, andFanny and Alexander. His portrayal of dreams is especially striking in this regard. In1949 he, suffering from perhaps too much proximity to his demons, waspsychiatrically hospitalized and placed under heavy sedation. Not surprisingly, thedriving force of his creativity disappeared. Once out of the clinic — three weekslater — he abruptly stopped taking his medication. Without his tranquilizers, his


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anxiety was enormous, his insomnia total. But, eventually, his suppressed ragestrongly surfaced, giving him the power to not be overrun by his demons. Yes,they remained, but so too did his creative genius (Bergman, 1989).

This, however, does not mean that pharmaceutical treatment always willsuppress creativity. Medication that is needed — as when suicide lurks near — may“flatten” us, leaving us marooned from our muse, but it may also in some casesactually increase creative potential (Richards, 1993). If one is at even more of anedge than Bergman was, one would likely do well to at least try medication beforedeciding that it is an obstacle to one’s creativity. Suffering may fuel our creativity,but only up to a certain point.

4. A state of mild mood elevation enhances creativity (Akisal & Akisal, 1988; Jamison,1990), perhaps because even a very slight mood elevation can increase unusualword associations (which increases creativity) and creative problem solving (Isen,1985).

5. When artists not only ride the up-times, but also exploit and artificially extendsuch highs, they are only inviting in serious crashes, like long distance truck driversgobbling amphetamines to keep awake. A famous example is Jack Kerouac, whowrote his novel The Subterraneans in three days in 1958, fueled by benzedrine. AllenGinsberg, longtime friend and compatriot of Kerouac’s, somewhere praised thisprodigious output as “word-sperm.” The first book about the “Beats” (Kerouac,Ginsberg, and friends), authored in 1952 by John Clellon Holmes, was simply andaptly titled Go. But Kerouac, having already zoomed with immensely compellingabandon into the flatlands of Eisenhower suburbia with his classic On The Roadand its manic hero, Dean Moriarty (in real life, Neal Cassady), could not keep up thepace, eventually settling into alcoholism and sodden depressiveness.

Nevertheless, Kerouac’s Whitmanesque deification of hypomanic (for moreon hypomania, see note 1) energy, particularly in the wild-hearted, throbbingly alive(and maddeningly restless) person of Neal Cassady, blew provocatively and almostinnocently through the stifling, buttoned-up complacency of the times, until itwas, some years later, profitably absorbed and appropriated by the surroundingculture, as hypomania went mainstream and technological magic kept accelerating.The thrill of the open road, with Cassady yakking as fast and as intensely as hedrove, had in a few very quick — and hypomanic decades — become an air-conditioned, anesthetized drive toward potential apocalypse. The backgroundblurring whir of all-night tires, the open-windowed poetry sweetly ablaze withbreathless ampersands and lithely arcane juxtapositions, all the muscular racings toand fro — so easy for us to trivialize or judge as we run out of highway, caught upin a monstrous “Go!” that likely would electrify even Cassady (who died in 1968).

6. See note 2.

7. McGregor, 1989.

more meltdown:a needed shattering

CHAPTER TWELVE


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The rest of my time in Australia — a week or so — was far from pleasant. Itook just enough Ativan to cope, as if to contradict the full extent of myhelplessness. The smaller and more infrequent the dosage I took, the lessserious was my condition — such was the equation with which I torturedmyself. But I was getting no better. Almost every activity catalyzed dread inme. The simplest act, like washing a cup or walking into another room, wouldsuddenly be imbued with an extremely creepy strangeness. Worse, my witnessingof this more often than not had an equally freakish quality to it.

On the living room wall was a photo of Leela, my two-year-old daughter. Ithaunted me deeply, both in a fearful and a despairingly poignant way. She wasin California, and I was terrified I’d never get to see her again, because I didn’tknow if I could make the journey back to where she was staying — I couldbarely cross the kitchen without feeling as if I were about to enter irreversibleinsanity. I was very, very fucked-up.

I’d once written that losing balance provided an opportunity to find a deeperbalance, but even the most rudimentary kind of balance eluded me; at anymoment, it seemed that I could be sucked into no-exit madness. That mysteps were mindful did not lessen the hellishness of the terrain, be it coolkitchen tiles or warm seaside sand.

The day of departure arrived sooner than planned; my state was such that weknew we had to get back to California as soon as possible. I was frightenedto get on the flight out of Australia — refusing, of course, to take any Ativanbefore I boarded — and I was even more frightened during our overnightstopover in Tahiti. Picture an elegant, supremely cozy hotel room overlookinga storybook Tahitian bay, luxuriant vanilla and peach blooms everywhere, andsoft, soft air: And there I stand trembling at one end of the room, electrifiedwith terror, letting Nancy know that I’m sure I’m going completely insane.Hell in paradise.


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A few hours later, without any warning, a tsunami of terror roared throughme in the middle of a silky feast of a dinner, while a troupe of aggressivelysmiling, neonesque dancers moved through their nightly repertoire right infront of us — an overcolored, surrealistic soup of shrinkwrapped cultureand amazingly meaty tourists both feeding and inundating my horrified, pseudo-anthropological fascination with the whole indigestible scene. Incentive enoughto ingest another tiny piece of a razor-sectioned tablet of Ativan.

Things were no better in California. I felt a bit more stable, a touch more onhome ground, but I was still very much in shock. I had lost close to twentypounds, much of it muscle, despite working out regularly and eating plentyof high-quality food. Supplements? I had an enormous variety handy, tincturesof skullcap and Jamaican dogwood, capsules of tryptophan and lichen andfreeze-dried colostrum, tablets of Vitamin this and Mineral that, along withpowerhouse herbal elixirs for my nervous and immune systems. I switchedto a totally alkaline diet, testing the pH of my urine several times a day.Dinners became fresh fish plus a huge pile of organic salad greens laced withflax oil and Japanese umeboshi vinegar. But what I most needed to ingestwas Ativan.

To make things worse, I did not feel at home in our house (which had beenbought — ill-advisedly — just after my NDE), despite its beauty and perks.It seemed cold, brittle, even misplaced. Outside it was hot and getting hotter,the air dry and parched. I longed for green, not the imported greenery —shrub implants — that partially disguised the aridity of our location, butnatural green, wild green, the moist emerald lushness of the Pacific Northwest.Wherever I went in the house, I felt out of place, as if I were just doing time,however luxuriously, before everything completely fell apart.

My days were comprised of long, dreamy, overlapping scenes in which I feltalmost constantly shadowed by dread and the presence of Death. Nancyand I were sleeping apart now, so that she could get more sleep; staying withme just about every night since my NDE had seriously exhausted her. Eachnight was an ordeal for me, each day an attempt to recover enough energy toprepare for the following night.

I was a mess, a chronically terrorized mess. Even when having a sauna —saunas being something I had really enjoyed before — I was jittery andscared. Day after day I’d walk (or steer myself) through the house as if half-dreaming — and maybe I was, given how sleep-deprived I was.


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Finally, in early June, exhausted and deeply discouraged by my unrelentingfragility and psychic precariousness — the sudden, treacherous quicksandingof my sanity being as frequent and powerful as it’d been for the previousmonths — I went to a psychiatrist recommended to me by the doctor whohad treated me at the hospital in February. He was far from conventionallyinclined, but did not try to romanticize my condition, as had another psychiatristin late February (an entheogen enthusiast who told me I was simply having a“shamanistic breakthrough”). Now, I was informed, it would be best for meif I took more Ativan, and regularly.

I was in no position to disagree. On the drive to his office, I had for severalsickening stretches of highway seen the houses dotting the bare, tan-dumplinghillsides as living entities, grotesquely quivering and breathing, eating into mewith their many-eyed gaze, emphatically interrupting my sanity.

So I started taking Ativan three times every day. Almost immediately, I wasstabilized. However, in so doing, I became physiologically addicted to Ativan.My once potent sense of independence, already wobbly-kneed, now crumbledcloser to oblivion, aided by the accelerating disintegration of thepsychospiritually-oriented community I had led since 1986.

I had wanted the community — as the potential prototype of a saner, deeper,spiritual yet still practical and passionately embodied way of living — tooutlast me, but now it was clearly starting to come undone, falling apart inparallel with me.1 I had worked very hard to keep it together, not payingenough attention to the fact that it had become overly dependent on me andmy views, and was — for this and other reasons — displaying the verytendencies, cultic and otherwise, that I’d so strongly criticized in other spiritually-based organizations.2

As the community spread worldwide, I became increasingly protective of it,letting what was working obscure or marginalize what was not working.However much it may have been a crucible for a fuller, more authenticselfhood, the community also was often unnecessarily confrontational,impatient, and pressurized (all of which was justified at the time as just beingpart of keeping the ship on course), while remaining quick to congratulateitself for being so unique and wonderful. Just like me.

The only ego left unexplored in the community was mine — probably thebiggest of all. My grandiosity was such that I didn’t see it, even when it was


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staring right at me, as exemplified by the showily inflated self-descriptions Iunquestioningly and shamelessly inserted at the end of the books I wroteduring my community years. In short, I let my unresolved issues — which Iassumed had been worked through to the point where they were no longerissues — pollute what was good and beautiful and sacred in our community.

I had too much power and not enough compassion. Tremendous risks weretaken within the community, but it itself was not risked — it was my baby,and I was damned if I was going to jeopardize it.3 With wide-eyed arrogance,I persisted in viewing the very existence and evolution of the community ascrucial for the type of social and personal support and transformation I wasadvocating, without seriously questioning whether I might not be as on targetas I thought I was.4 I didn’t notice that the very structuring that had initiallyserved the community had become too tight a fit, regardless of its creativity,novelty, or apparent looseness. Seedcases initially protect their seeds, but aftera certain point, if their walls remain intact, they obstruct the seeds’ evolution.5

As much as I had worked to expand the seedcase of the community, Iwasn’t willing to let it shatter (or radically alter). I had no, and made no, roomfor its death. Instead, I took the existence of the community as a holy given,with me as its guardian and resident sage. Also, I was (beginning about a yearprior to my NDE) becoming increasingly restless, vaguely fantasizing aboutdoing something very different with my life. I’d enter and explore thisrestlessness, but only to a certain depth, assuming that it was simply somethingto make the object of awareness, rather than a potential harbinger of neededchange.

I had become isolated, firmly embedded in a position — sitting alone atop agurucentric organization — that I had once vowed to never let myself assume.With a ruthlessly critical eye, I saw and dissected the shadow side of everyteaching approach except mine. I thought I had truly learned from the errorsmade by others who were, or who had once been, in a position similar tomine. I assumed I knew their mistakes well, even intimately, but here I was,right where they had stood, pretending that I was elsewhere. My lack ofcompassion for them, in conjunction with my pride, prevented me fromrecognizing that what I was lambasting them for was sitting right inside me.

Sometimes those who fight authority the most vehemently — like me muchof my life — end up becoming authoritarian themselves, as if to make surethat no one else will ever, ever be in charge of them.


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I did not see that the very depth of psychological and spiritual work beingdone within and through the community, as real and healing as it could be,was only insulating us from the community-at-large surrounding us. We were,to a significant degree, using the very real growth and opening occurringamong us as “evidence” of our specialness. In such a setting, cultism couldonly flourish.

There was too much me in our community, too much focus on the therapeuticand spiritual work I did, too much reliance on my views. For example, in theheat of a community volleyball game, my being pissed off about someone’squality of play was given too much weight and validity, as were my opinionson just about any topic. Sometimes I’d address this, but not to the pointwhere the heat was solidly on me.

Despite our shortcomings — including reconstructing mine as somethingother than shortcomings — we had, at least some of the time, a rare intimacy,one that drew to us many people. However, it was too confined to us. And,worse, it became a community “should” — as when a needed pulling awayfrom others was made wrong — a pressure to always be relational, connected,in touch.

As much as I talked about not turning away from or ostracizing our darkeremotions, I had little tolerance for community members spending muchtime in such states, which only created more fear, especially the fear of being“off ” or “fucked-up” when in my presence. I, the psychospiritual trailblazer,etcetera, etcetera, only came down heavy on people when it was for theirown good — assumptions like this, largely unquestioned, just fed the mythof my supposed impeccability, a myth getting ever riper for terminal exposure.

Not only was there too much agency and too little communion at the “top”of the community (mostly in my person), but it was an agency that —supersaturated with emotionally stirring certainty — tended to engender inothers a very compelling and attractive feeling of connectedness, of belonging,of being reassuringly anchored in an unsettling, painfully fragmented, off-kilter world.6

Most of those in the community spent too much time and energy trying tobe everything for each other; and those outside of our extremely close-knitnetwork usually had “too little in common” with us for anything more thana relatively superficial relationship to develop. The community for the most


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part did not recognize or value the benefits of weak ties. In its emphasis onradical intimacy, it demonstrated often very deep links between its members,but missed out on the value of being part of a loosely knit network.7

The I that’s us and the I that’s you aloneAre stuck in a conflict of interest

warring over what for each seems bestThe I that’s us gets obsessed securing the collective nestThe I that’s you alone gets obsessed with having its own stash

one eye on the mirror and the other on the cashThe I that’s us and the I that’s you aloneBattle in each of us

overbudgeting for defenceForgetting that we’ve got to do itBoth alone and together

no matter what the weather

I had crystallized at a stage with unsound underpinnings, with seriousrepercussions not only for myself and my family, but for many others.Meltdown was inevitable. Ayahuasca had shattered me, but only for a day ortwo. Something more potent was needed, something that would not permitme a quick recovery.

And so I took — and had to take — my second inhalation of 5-MeO. A fewmonths later, community members began forcefully addressing issuesconcerning me and my role in their lives. Wave after wave of anger, hurt, andcriticism came my way, delivered with far more freedom than before myNDE. I was much more receptive to it than I would have been before. Mostof it hurt deeply, and it had to hurt, for I realized — with visceral immediacyand a growing shame — that I had played a major role in causing unnecessaryhurt. This, coupled with the psychospiritual crisis I was enduring in the wakeof my fateful smoke, kept me at a very precarious edge.

I remember reading intensely angry, accusatory letters from some — and ifthey went too far, it had a lot to do with their having gone too far in theopposite direction since joining the community — and breaking down sohard and so crazily that I feared I’d never be able to get up again. I wasn’t justmore receptive to hearing about my shortcomings — I was absorbent to theextreme, once my superficial defences had been parted.


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My sense of proportion was wildly unbalanced, even after I had regainedsome stability from taking Ativan regularly. I received the critiques fromcommunity members, both in person and through letters and calls, not like arational adult, but like a shell-shocked child. Whatever remained of my senseof safety following my NDE — and it was far from substantial — now wasrepeatedly blasted into seeming oblivion. As I would somehow crawl out ofthe bleeding, stunned rubble of myself, glad for a lull in the bombardment,I’d marvel that there was any sanity left at all in me.

And it got worse. Which, paradoxically, made it better in a way that I couldnot fully appreciate until some time later. I began to wean myself fromAtivan, to which I was now addicted. I did so one increment per week,suffering intensely for the first three or four days of my decreased dosage.At the same time, critical summations from community members becamemore frequent. In August, I dissolved the Canadian branch of thecommunity8 — feeling both grief and immense relief at doing so — andcontinued my withdrawal from Ativan. When I was down to a very lowdosage, I went to Spain to lead a large residential group for our Europeancommunity, enduring panic attacks on both the flight there and back. Thegroup went very well (even though I barely slept), but I knew it would be thelast one I would do for a long time.

I was, regardless of my hopes to the contrary, not in a process of building orrebuilding, but of deconstruction. Clearly, I was not going to be able toreassemble even the material form of what I had had (or what my life hadlargely been organized around) prior to my NDE. I had wanted thecommunity to outlive me, not seeing that what I’d built housed its owndestruction.

The criticisms kept coming, but started feeling less and less like blows, andmore like deep-cutting gifts, forcing me to directly face my shame, not justmy shame over my failings in our community, but my longtime shame overfailing at anything. All that I had done to make sure that I wouldn’t have to feelshame had now lost much of its power; I hated my helplessness, but at thesame time appreciated it, for through being in such unavoidably close quarterswith it, I was learning compassion from the ground up, slowly but surely.

Weaning myself from Ativan, which took until early October, vastly increasedmy compassion for those who were or had been addicted to drugs. When I


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was down to my final dosage, a scant one eighth of a milligram per day, myouter world was in ruins, as if no longer needing to be there with any semblanceof solidity now that I, eight months after taking the 5-MeO, was strongenough — but only barely — to begin functioning like a “normal” person.

When I had had no Ativan for a few days, I attended a Vipassana residentialretreat for a week — marking the end of my post-5-MeO gestation —practising sitting and walking mindfully in the midst of my fragility for longperiods, feeling a welcome stability slowly infusing me even as I intuited thatmy falling apart was not over. Immediately after the retreat, Nancy and Iseparated — not because of a loss of closeness or connection, but simplybecause it was, for a number of reasons, the right thing to do. This wasexcruciatingly difficult for me, as I had become extremely attached to (anddependent upon) her during my crisis. No partner, no home, no work — butI was alive. I had survived and was grateful for it. As frightened, disoriented,and fragile as I was, I refused to give up, taking one stumbling (and oftenhumbling) step after another.

So I had to start over again, from the bottom up. My previous life lay behindme, shattered beyond repair, and yet still with me, like a dream that daylightcannot erase. From relative riches to rags, or so it seemed — but it was in therags and discomfort that I grew. No more fine houses for me, no morethickly treed acreage, no more special treatment, no more immunity from theoutside world; I spent a year and a half in a small basement suite, aching formore privacy and space and silence, yet at the same time knowing that Ineeded such a “womb.”

For a long time, getting through each day was sufficient accomplishment. I’dhad plenty of work, deeply nourishing and challenging work, for many years,and now I had none, and would have none until I crawled a little further intodaylight. I felt much like a newborn — simultaneously abandoned and caredfor — but without the fabled blank slate. I was kinder, softer, more vulnerable,and definitely humbled. At the same time, accompanying me into my new lifewere most of my less-than-admirable habits, less prone now to sitting sofirmly and confidently behind the driver’s seat, but still only needing a shot ortwo of unwitting attention to reassert themselves.

However, I no longer cared so much that such habits were still with me. Theymay not have changed — at least in the sense of disappearing — but myrelationship to them had. No longer was I so occupied trying to rehabilitate,


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eviscerate, or get rid of them. There was room for them too “in” Being,along with every “I” attempting to claim the role of self. The more room Imade for them just to be — especially under difficult conditions — the moreroom I had for others just to be, regardless of my reactions to them.

I had far less physical space now — literally living in tight quarters — yetexperienced a fuller kind of inner spaciousness and acceptance than beforemy meltdown. I still was spending plenty of time in hell — being infusedwith dread almost daily for most of 1995 (often suspecting that I had indeeddied right after my fateful smoke, and was now simply dreaming that I wasstill alive) — but was learning, bit by bit, not to flee it; then it was not hell, butsimply my given conditions for spiritual detox.

So, so simple. No leaving the body, no generating of visions, no rising above,no compensatory activity — just sitting in the cave of my labor, neither fightingnor inducing the contractions that inevitably came.

No Oscars for awakening. No applause in spiritual bootcamp.

I was scared, desperate, still badly shaken, but I knew, beyond the protestationsand cries and hallucinogenic certainties of my suffering, that I was in the rightplace, however unfair my placement might appear to me. Dying into a deeperlife. Dying to live. I had known the value of endurance in my passion forhard-paced distance-running; now I knew the value of spiritual endurance.Waiting without waiting. Approaching “I” not with impatience and eliminativeprograms, but with curiosity and caring.

Only “I” wants to get rid of “I.” Being, however, has no such eliminativeurge, already recognizing every “I” as simply a nonbinding expression ofitself. Being no more needs to eradicate “I” than does the sky need to get ridof its clouds.

When we separate Being from its expressions and modifications — therebyriveting our attention to objects, and developing various kinds of object-dependency — we suffer, and further suffer through addicting ourselves towhatever eases our suffering. That is, we lose our inherent peace — the peaceof Being — and further lose ourselves in seeking surrogates of that peace,looking everywhere except inside our looking.

Even so, the realization still arises that Being is not an alternative reality.


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And nor is it something to be attained, but rather is simply and unexplainablyhere, as always, no matter what the weather. To this I bow, and will continue tobow, until there is only bowing, only the alchemy of pure allowing.

Take me to the bottom of your painTake me to the weave of your true nameTake me, take me deep, take me steepLet’s stretch to make the leapLet’s go to where love must also weep

Take me to the bottom of your painTake me to the weave of your true nameTake me, take me over the riseTake me through all your goodbyesLet’s shine through our every disguiseLet’s go to where love has open eyes

Take me to the bottom of your painTake me to the weave of your true nameTake me, take me past your pastTake me, take me to us, take me beyond all the fussLet’s throw away our every alibiLet’s go to where love cannot lie

Take me to the bottom of your painTake me to the weave of your true nameTake me, take me through your hidden doorTake me, take me right to your coreLet’s live where insights lose their mindLet’s go to where love is no longer blind

NOTES

1. When I say that the community was falling apart, I am referring primarily to itsstructure and its modus operandi. Many of those in the community were there notonly because of me and my teachings, but also because of their bonds with eachother. Long after the community had ceased to exist as a communal entity, manyof its former members continued to maintain very close bonds with each other.


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2. In its innovative, dynamic blending of psychotherapy, bodywork, meditativepractices, intensive groupwork, and intimately shared living, the community was aradical setting, its core intention being, as I once put it, “to live a truly human life,a life of full-blooded Awakening.” At its best, it provided an environment of richvitality and investigative opportunity, a setting in which the spiritual andpsychological, the personal and the transpersonal, the individual and the collective,were often deeply and movingly explored and connected. Even so, there wereserious problems (which generally weren’t viewed as problems at the time, at leastby me) with the direction we were taking, stemming from a mixture of the excessiveauthority I increasingly assumed, the overreliance of members on me, and theapplication of my views and methods to just about every situation. A cult in themaking.

3. Ironically, in a 1988 talk about the “birthing a true community,” I had said: “If theleader [of a community] is a true leader, then those around him [or her] willbecome more and more centered in their own being, not so they can stand apartfrom him and govern in their own way, but so that they can cooperate with him tosuch a degree that they can co-evolve with him the necessary forms and processesfor their evolving community — thus can they participate with him, enjoy him, beintimate with him, perhaps even surpass him. The true teacher is willing to sacrificeor radically alter his position right from the beginning, if doing so contributes tothe well-being of the community. His job, in part, is to not allow any sort of culticassociation to form around him — those who insist on being cultically alignedwith him must be weeded out, even if it means the end of the community.”Needless to say, I had a long way to fall.

4. My tendency to put the community ahead of its members, coupled with my lackof awareness that I was doing so, simply kept community members in a confusingand disempowering bind, in which the very setting that they were in often obstructedor undermined what that setting was supposed to catalyze and support. No wonderthe whole thing had to explode.

5. What happens when the shelter that once gave us so much needed support becomestoo tight or poor a fit? Do we then make ourselves wrong, assuming that there’ssomething we are doing that’s generating our restlessness or sense of crampedness,or do we challenge the very structuring and foundational assumptions of such ashelter, no matter how convincingly our protests might be summarized as“resistance” or “our problem” or mere adolescent reactivity?

Even the most supportive of groups or networks can easily become overlyconfining webs, entangling us in their expectations and morality. Organizationstend to propagandize for their own means of ensuring their continuation — andif this is not clearly seen, cultism is all but inevitable.


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By cultism, I mean a tightly bounded self-enclosure that is rigidly overattachedto its core beliefs, and that is no more than minimally receptive to negative orcritical “outside” feedback (feedback from within getting even less of a welcome).Cults are not just the media-hyped enclaves of entranced followers; ego can be seenas a cult of one, most marriage a cult of two, and religion a cult of many.

Cultism overseparates. It is a self-obsessed us, with the rest of existence a ratherdistant them. Whatever caring exists within cultism — and it, however misguided,can be a very deep caring — is eventually impoverished by its isolation from the restof Life. Initially, cults protect what is inside their walls (and here it is useful to putaside the negative connotations one might have regarding cultism), but sooner orlater they become guards rather than guardians.

6. If the alienation, the painful sense of separateness or estrangement that so oftendrives us to seek membership somewhere, is not sufficiently addressed, so that ouryearning for togetherness is not just an escape from our sense of separateness/strandedness, then we’ll remain very susceptible to the pull of various “parental”or “grounding” institutions and movements.

It is so easy to become overly attached to whatever appears to provide for us.However, in becoming part of its “us,” we enter into an allegiance (to it) thatactually reinforces the very separateness that first propelled us toward our particular“support” system.

But what is it that is being supported? Does the hand that feeds us expect usto convert to its faith? Are we more likely to keep getting fed if we do? Is there anulterior motive, and if so, do we see it, or do we even want to see it? Whatever isdoing the giving needs to be illuminated, moment-to-moment.

Nonetheless, how many organizations,including those that are spiritually-based, include — or even want to include — within themselves an uninterfered-withself-investigative branch, one that has unimpeded access to resources outside theorganization (such as persons who might bring to that organization the kind ofcriticism that could necessitate its dismantling or radical reorganization)?

7. Such exclusivity, however lovingly held in place, commonly plagues groups with anoverly strong investment in staying and growing together. Absorption or infiltrationby the community-at-large is usually avoided or resisted by such groups — socialhomogenization being understandably less than popular — but often at the priceof a tenaciously guarded impermeability or “justified” lack of responsiveness to“outsiders” who are clearly not sympathetic to the group’s ways. Thus do cultsarise. I recall being told at a bodywork school in the 1970s — after having completeda long, arduous residential training there, and revisiting the school a few monthslater — that if I didn’t commit to all of the school’s guidelines for life that I was nolonger welcome there. A very short time later, I left.

(As genuine individualism gets swallowed up — or is driven into reactive,soul-barren surrogates of itself — by massive mergers and monolithic centralism


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on the one hand, and narcissistic self-concern and hyperpersonalized egoity on theother hand, an “us” emerges that is spineless, flat, weakly colored, Esperanto’edinto submission. The caring of this “us” is neurotically impersonal, bureaucratized,burdened with politically correct compassion [“we deeply regret any civiliancasualties”] — and yet without it and the contrast it so unwittingly provides, welikely would not be so compellingly driven toward a more genuine caring.)

8. The community had begun in Vancouver. Leadership in our American, European,and Australian branches generally came from certain members of the Vancouvercommunity, who’d regularly travel to the other communities to lead groups, giveindividual sessions, and “prepare the way” for my working with their members.Also, those wanting to get a sense of what the community was all about typicallybegan by visiting — and often staying for a while in — the households of ourVancouver branch. When it was dissolved, it was inevitable that the other brancheswould soon follow.

too real to have meaningCHAPTER THIRTEEN


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A significant life does not have to find meaning because significance is given directlywith reality.— James Hillman

The unknown is the home of the real. To live in the known is bondage, to live inthe unknown is liberation.— Nisargadatta

Just when I found the meaning of life, they changed it.— George Carlin

Looking for meaning following my post-5-MeO experience did nothing morethan provide slippery, speedily-shattering steppingstones across the imaginarydivides of a dimensionless abyss — spectral suspension bridges appearingand disappearing, blinking in and out of being, linking nowhere with nowhere.Mindprints dissolving in space, leaving not even the echo of a trace.

Only for the briefest, most scantily draped of moments was I able to findany comfort in the explanatory dimensions of consciousness. My attempts tofind or extract or assign meaning, whether mundane or metaphysical, at bestonly padded the cell for a bit.

At the extreme edge of meaning frothed my mind, playing paranoia-wiggedpeekaboo with the Context of context, zipping every which way withspermatozoan frenzy in the surreal vistas of gutted cyberspace.

And my attention? It toured my mind and the dying jelly of my body like arunaway camera, leaving me ominously freakish postcards, from which Iderived not meaning, but only further confirmation of my metastasizingmadness.


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To assume that anything possessed — or could claim — intrinsic meaning wasabsurd to me. Meaning appeared to be just a security-driven superimpositionon Being, a consensual mind-game designed to distract us — and protectour separative self-sense — from that which had spawned us and paradoxicallyalso was, as always, literally making an appearance as us.

So is Life meaningless? Coiled deep within-and-beyond the question is the“answer,” existing not as a yes or no, but rather in the transverbal illuminationof what is fundamentally motivating the question. Identifying who — or,more to the point, what — is formulating it is far, far more important thanjust attempting to reply to its content. Whatever is generating the questionneeds to be fully exposed and acknowledged, not just intellectually, but withour entirety. Then, and only then, can the actual relevancy of the question beviewed in its nakedness, so that it might spark a truly fitting response.

That is, when the question becomes primal inquiry, its investigation leads beyondthe cognitive associations of the conventional mind into firsthand participationin deeper dimensions of Being. Something more real than answers — orwhat we “normally” think of as answers — is sought, intuited, taken in.

Life makes sense only when we stop trying to make it make sense.

Put another way, when we cease plastering meaning onto Life — therebygiving Life more breathing room, more space to be — then Life’s naturalsignificance begins revealing itself to us.

The entire issue of meaning and meaninglessness, if explored with sufficientdepth, provides an opportunity to become more aware not only of thefunctioning of our mind, but also of our attachment to knowledge and itsvarious framings. Stephen Levine speaks of how “no ‘meaning’ can hold itall....There is an odd way the mind, particularly when threatened, attemptsto find ‘meaning’ in life, to make some intellectual bargain with theunknown.”1

To talk of meaninglessness likely conjures up modern existential philosophy,as perhaps most famously conveyed through the novels of Camus and Sartre.For Roquentin, the protagonist in Sartre’s 1938 novel Nausea, not only is“existence everywhere, infinitely, in excess, forever and everywhere,” but it isalso repugnant, a “universal burgeoning” of things that have no reason to be,no great purpose or meaning.2 (It’s worth noting that in Nausea, Sartre may


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have incorporated and been “inspired” by a frighteningly bad mescaline triphe endured in 1935.3)

However, I could not settle here for very long, making existential real estateout of meaninglessness. When my mind was quiet and my heart open, thevery same de-familiarized scenario — of horizonless, nameless, naked,ultravivid manifestation — could be before me in all its profuse enormity,and I would have room for it all to be just as it was. It still did not have anymeaning for me, but now I did not mind. Its bare existence and seemingparadoxicalness— a neverending perishing that was never other than EternalBeing — drew me to it, beyond the reach of my mind, until my relationshipwith it became, at least to some degree, identification with it.

That is, my witnessing capacity would still be present, but not distinctly separatefrom what it was viewing — at least until thoughts like “Isn’t this incredible?”or “How can I make this last?” would intrude and be allowed to recruitenough attention to convincingly recreate the sensation of an “I” apart fromthe whole situation.

The usual “I” is but a thought away.

So easy it is to shift from Be-ing to me-ing.

Life has no inherent meaning, both including and transcending whatever seeksto explain, conceptualize, frame, or contain it.

Meaning provides a sensation of security, a psychosemantic hedge against theWild Mystery of Being, a comfortingly shared or personalized flag to holdup and wave in the midst of Infinity, a neatly-bricked bastion of explanatoryfacticity (and corresponding values) in which to hole up when emissaries ofprimordial Being — like Death — come knocking.

As necessary as meaning is at times — as when it provides needed bridgesover stormy or confusing waters — it is fundamentally just a mental strategy.It may take us to the very edge of the personal, but to proceed further, wemust cease hanging onto it.

And we must also cease hanging onto meaninglessness. Where meaning seducesus with hope — nostalgia for the future — meaninglessness seduces us with


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despair — angst for the future. Beyond (and yet also simultaneously prior to)both hope and despair is the Now in which we are always already Home.

The fact that there is nothing but a spiritual world deprives us of hope and givesus certainty.— Franz Kafka

In what concerns divine things, belief is not appropriate. Only certainty will do.Anything less than certainty is unworthy of God.— Simone Weil

Meaninglessness is a grave problem to most, a burdened sea with no habitablecoast, the suffocating yet reassuringly familiar shadow of a brooding existentialghost. Meaninglessness — which is not equivalent to purposelessness — is theglum and sometimes intellectually smug companion and angst-crownedlegitimizer of despair, elevating to pseudo-priesthood those who claim to beable to restore meaningfulness.

Nevertheless, the issue of meaning and meaninglessness isn’t really that muchof a core concern, being peripheral to the issue of purpose, particularly in thecontext of our destiny. Purpose as such involves the uncovering and fittingembodiment of a kind of psychospiritual blueprint, simultaneously simpleand complex, already written yet invitingly blank, rich with improvisationalpossibility. Purposefulness may seem to semantically overlap with meaning-fulness, but it is much, much more than a cognitive construction. Purpose isfar more organismic than meaning, rooted not just in mind, but in body, emotion,psyche, and spirit.

In such totality, there’s a felt sense of significance. Significance transcends meaning.Meaning is rooted in dualistic apperceiving, but significance, in the crunch, isnot nearly so dualistically rooted or framed or limited, signalling the felt impactof direct contact with What-Really-Matters.

We look for meaning, but we live significance. Meaning is in the mind, butsignificance is beyond the mind. As Nisargadatta says, “Knowledge by themind is not true knowledge.”4

And is there really any such thing as an insignificant act?


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Slowly you standYour eyes widening pools of dawnYour look an answer with no questionArms swimming up through a starry seaIntimate with both your uncertainty and your reachYour spine flirting with an unseen windYour head a sudden flowering atop an underwater stemNow the usual you makes its return

overattracting you to the familiarAnd once again limitation is reduced to a problemAnd once again you forget you’ve forgottenAnd once again you remember, rearise, reenter

no longer shopping inside your skullno longer making real estate out of meaning

Your limbs tracing lines that need no explanationYour smile deeper than the dreaded abyssAnd we’re together in our alonenessOur infinity of appearancesExplaining nothing and revealing everything

NOTES

1. Levine, 1984, p. 30.

2. Quoted in Riedlinger, 1993, p. 36. During his mescaline experience, Sartre suffereddelusions of such compelling intensity that he feared he was losing his mind. Formonths afterward, he endured flashbacks in which he imagined he was beingchased by gigantic lobsters — perhaps representing the surfacing of some longrepressed prepersonal issues. Who knows what form long-ago indignities andtraumas will assume when they seize center stage? We may, for example, begin withacute biological panic — a physiological response — during a difficult birth, whichthen, under sufficiently stressful conditions, may manifest as anxiety — an emotionalresponse — during childhood, and then, in adulthood, when similar stress arises,our original stress-response during our birth may manifest not just as anxiety, butalso as paranoia or obsessive-compulsive thinking — both of which are but theoriginating fear-imprint going to mind. Perhaps if Sartre had traced his lobsters


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back, not just in time, but also from cortical to subcortical awareness, he may haverecognized the originating gestalt of his mescaline-inspired fear (which Riedlingerclaims involved Sartre’s actual birth).

3. Ibid., pp. 34-37.

4. Nisargadatta, 1992, p. 457.

spirituality and madnessCHAPTER FOURTEEN


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This is satori: to go into madness and yet not be mad.— Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh

Madness, provided it comes as the gift of heaven, is the channel by which we receivethe greatest blessings.... According to the evidence provided by our ancestors, madnessis a nobler thing than sober sense.— Plato

Studies of rapid culture change show that the visionary experiences of prophetsfrequently contain images of the world disintegrating and being reabsorbed intochaos, which then allows a regeneration to occur.... Our fearsome “disorder ” ismerely nature’s way of dismantling what was inadequate in the past, and in sodoing allowing a new start. We would do well to let nature and the psyche do theirwork in their own tumultuous way.— John Perry

To explore the relationship between spirituality and madness may appear atfirst to be simply a matter of comparing and contrasting those experiencesthat supposedly characterize each, with the ones lining up on the side ofspirituality being “healthier” than those assembled behind the banner ofmadness. However, such a division is not particularly useful, since, as isbecoming increasingly well-known, spiritual experiences can sometimes beterrifying and deluding, and psychotic experiences sometimes blissful andrevelatory.

The experiences — not perspectives, but experiences — associated with eachdo not just overlap phenomenologically, but appear to be almost freelyinterchangeable on a continuum of nonconventional experiential possibilities.Assigning to spirituality the “nicer” or more socially acceptable experiencesnot only reduces spirituality to a particular set of experiences, but also greatly


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increases the odds of getting mired in spiritually correctness, which itself is akind of madness, regardless of how well dressed, cleancut, or deodorized itmight be. (Consider, for example, the spiritual constipation that arises whenwe, as serious meditators, think we’re sitting with our anger — our intentionsupposedly being to calm and transform it — when in fact we are actuallyonly sitting on it.)

I’ve got a couple of definitions of spirituality. First, the semi-scholarly one:Spirituality is immersion, however shallow, in teachings, intentions, and practices(which may be far from formal) adopted in order to establish or reestablishsome degree of alignment with what is taken to be “sacred” or “ultimate.”As such, spirituality may or may not be part of a particular religion; even anatheist can have a spiritual life.

Another, related definition: Spirituality is the cultivation of intimacy with What-Really-Matters. Among other things, this means developing intimacy witheverything. No more turning away.

Spirituality eventually is but sacred detox.

Spirituality is Be-ing in the awakened raw. Spirituality aligns us with Thatwith Which we are already and forever inseparable. That is, spiritualityHomes us.

Reality-unlocking breakthroughs — which are the crown jewels of spiritualexperience — do not cut through the Mystery of the Real, but rather onlyaffirm and deepen It.

Revelation, infused with a Wonder beyond wonder, outshines all explanation.

And once again we reach the extreme edge of inquiry, the far frontier ofquestioning, and discover that Silence is the answer. A Silence without end,eloquent beyond all possible description.

Lone eagle floating so high across milky lapis sky, drifting like an escaped dream,riding a wave of everlasting morning.

In the sunburnt mahogany of its wingspan throbs a silence that dissolves the mind,a silence that answers all questions, a silence into which we die so that we mighttruly live.


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Spirituality opens us until we are openness itself. That opening, however, isnot necessarily easy, for it asks everything of us. It is thus wise to not burdenspirituality with the obligation to make us feel better.

Now the sky bled jagged and bulging black, streaked with ghostly wingprints, thenbegan swelling and thunderously ripping, finally expelling an even denser sky,leaden and fumarolic, spread-eagled with escaped lungs and scaly wingflappersand desiccated visions. He, however, only kept up his pace, he of a thousand aliases,his every step tingling with tightly condensed attention and leggy warmth. He hadcome too far to even consider turning back.

The vermilion butte squatting upon the horizon must surely house the cave hesought — had he not already seen its broken back, its shadowed rise, its bruised pitof promise and peril, in his dreams? Alone he walked, with both certainty andstubborn resolve, shielding himself from the venomous rain.

This quivering life, this shivering birth, ever delivering death and new breath, feastingupon itself, undressing every ambition and intention, making time out of everyslumbering rhyme, walked him toward the foretold entrance. The cave was rumoredto have a ceiling of cerulean slate inlaid with creamy quartz. But was it really a cave,a subterranean chamber for the escapee or the brave, a stony womb, a weatherprooftomb, a rough crucible for initiatory possibility?

Did it not, with alpine whisper and lowland mudmoans, hint ever so slightly of afloor of sunburnt marble, moccasined earth, planked strategy, carpeted smoke,unscratchable polyplastic? Did it not offer a starless sky, a muffler of excessivereach, all adrip with spider-wrapped stalactites? Did it not present a crude shelvingand curving of cool walls, inviting his leaning and dreaming? More to the point, wasit actually empty, or did it contain the fabled adversary he’d been born to face?

From atop the butte burst forth a war whoop, a battle scream, brilliantly aflame,trailing snowy gold tresses, bloody laurel wreaths, and tomorrow’s corpses.Radioactive winged lizards with humanoid craniums fluttered behind his forehead,pressing out the place between and just above his eyebrows, dryly screeching andscratching, digging with featherless blue abandon. It didn’t matter to him whetheror not he was dreaming this or imagining it from the vantage point of another time.Now, nothing could be denied its reality.

Something far more real than verisimilitude was calling him. Spheroidal discs ofincandescent brevity sliced open the madly pulsating, terribly alive sky, making


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way for a thickening stampede of not-yet-personalized fleshiness. Scalps,cheekbones, styrofoam organs, legless lusts, bronzed hype, sexy mannequins, dyingbabies, holy smiles, all descended in front of him, repeatedly appearing in oscillating,overlapping frames, capturing then eluding his attention. Self-authenticatingtranshuman chaos.

Even the sacred stillpoint was now but circumference to him. Suddenly the buttemelted into a billowing upheaval of lava, shockingly red and sensual, its moltenfingers slowdancing, welcoming him closer.

His gloried shield was now less than gossamer, a mere shadow of a veil webbinghis skull and torso. There was no cave here, but only this boundless chaos, birthingan infinity of him’s and not-him’s with wild precision. This neverending extinction,this staggeringly prolific machinery of endless possibility, shone with — and wasnever apart from — What gave it Life. This was not his to know, but his to be. ItsMystery was his to embrace, his to breathe, his to love and be.

And still the sky bled, dripping with dawn, as he emptied his mind in a circle ofblinking stone. Nothing had happened and everything had happened. The onlyway to communicate this was through a poetics that, making more than sense,used him to write, rewrite, and outwrite itself, until there was nothing left of himexcept what could never be lost.

In spirituality, there is — sooner or later — room for all that we are, includingthose phenomena commonly classified as psychotic or aberrant. As such,spirituality is not an attainment of any particular “I,” but rather is a transcendingof every “I” or would-be self, a liberating of attention from the hire of thatego-governed coalition (or mob) of habits that so insistently refers to itself asus. (Attention thus not only becomes more conscious, but also is not socommitted to fixating on apparent objects, having at least some of its focusturned toward the source of attention — thus activating the nondual sense ofawareness being aware of itself.)

However, spirituality is not about premature (or ambition-driven) ego-transcendence, and nor does it necessarily require disengagement from everydayconcerns, including those that are unabashedly ego-centered. In spirituality’sall-pervading crucible are we all, learning — slowly perhaps, but surely — towelcome its preparatory fires, which both burn through and illuminate theclaiming-to-be-us pretensions of “I,” emptying us of our case of mistakenidentity. A radical roast.


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Spirituality is not an escape from Life’s difficulties, but rather a deliberate,open-eyed entry into and through them, a journey in which every spurned ordreaded “it” eventually becomes reclaimed us, reclaimed Life, reclaimed God.When at once deeply embodied and sky-like, spirituality can simultaneouslyground and render transparent all the dimensions of experience, ever revealing,however partially, the identity of the supposed experiencer. Exposure beyondour wildest dreams.

This brings us to the notion of soul. By soul, I mean one’s personal essence, orthat depth of individuality in which egoity is clearly and functionally peripheralto Being. So soul is simply the presence of individuated Being, a presencewhich manifests as the personalizing of the “spiritual line” of development (orthat line indicating one’s current sense of What-Really-Matters).

The soul is the perceiver and revealer of truth.— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Soul is commonly thought of as being within us (like a jinni in a bottle), butwe — as we commonly conceive of ourselves — are within soul. Its profoundinteriority does not condense it, but rather expands the sphere of its reach.

Soul is the last frontier of individuality. Soul recognizes and is intimate withwhat lies beyond it, yet also remains intimate with the personal.

Soul is the face, human and otherwise, of spirituality.

Myth the body, sky the mind, undying the loveCradled in neverborn MysteryWrapped up in speechless historyInto this room come weThrough the lovers’ dying cries, through endless goodbyes,Through lagoons of spurting night, through recycled frightResting in the blazing black of an unforgetting eyeMaking more than sense and less than a selfSeeded so dark and so light

Myth the body, sky the mind, undying the loveSoul dating a deeper rhymeThis room outgrowing its every design


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And how the passages pulse and gleamwith the long-awaited rendezvous

Seethrough shadows dying for a lookOur need to know moaning blue and goneLove feasts on us with us

until we can no longer stand apartfrom the Open Secret of our shared heart

Madness is also a journey into what underlies consensus reality, but it lacks, atleast most of the time, the reassuringly concrete centralization of conventionalegoity, and is also largely bereft — or has too slippery a grasp — of thestabilizing, self-transcending overview of spirituality.

The authors of Synopsis of Psychiatry define psychosis as meaning “grosslyimpaired in reality testing.”1 But which reality? Can sanity and insanity bedistinguished, and if so, how? And by whom? It is far from a given that thosewith supposed expertise in making such a distinction can actually do so.2

Those possessed by madness have left the consensual trance of their culture(which may itself be collectively psychotic), but have only replaced it withanother, largely compensatory trance that is populated by unconventional orbizarre — yet nonetheless often still historically coherent — representationsof the culture or environment left behind.

As illogical as it may seem to be, madness has its own logic, its own internalconsistency, which usually can be teased out into coherency if we will butleave rationality’s playpens for a larger arena, under the skies of which intuition,bare awareness, and transrational logic dance sweet and deep.

In madness, the labyrinth has been entered and travelled, but without Ariadne’sthread — attention wanders, dazed and mostly unconscious (and often quitedisembodied), through hallucinatory culs-de-sac, moving in and out of variousidentities and roles, buffeted by waves of emotion.

Yet is this not, to varying degrees, what is actually going on within almost allof us, much of the time?

If we were to observe all of our thoughts and fantasies and intentions forhalf an hour or so — a far from easy task — just how much coherence and


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sanity would we find? How much automaticity would we notice? Howfrequently would certain thoughts be enlarged, complicated, argued with,reconstructed, or believed? How often would we act as if a particular rolewas actually us? And what might we discover in-between our more familiaror everyday thoughts?

The truly bizarre, just like the usual us, is but a thought away.

Our own madness is even closer.

When a person goes mad, a profound transposition of his position in relation toall domains of being occurs. His center of experience moves from ego to Self.Mundane time becomes merely anecdotal, only the eternal matters. The madmanis, however, confused. He muddles ego with Self, inner with outer,natural andsupernatural....Nevertheless, he often can be to us, even through his profoundwretchedness and disintegration, the hierophant of the sacred.— R. D. Laing

Perhaps, if we can but listen, and listen with more than just our mind andeveryday ear, we might meet our crazed shadowselves at least halfway, reachingfor them not with straitjackets and psychiatric frames, but with a spirit ofgenuine caring, interest, and discerning intelligence.

A certain tendency to insanity has always attended the opening of the religioussense in men, as if “blasted with excess of light.”— Ralph Waldo Emerson

In the very disintegration of madness, the going-to-pieces fracturing anddelusion and disorientation — which I am not at all romanticizing — theremay be unsuspected treasure. Through the rubble and cracks can comeintimations of the truly sacred, signals that cut or shine through the deadeningsecurity to which so many of us cling.

In the sense that madness simply externalizes and dramatizes — howeverbizarrely — what we, the supposedly normal, are tending to internalize andsuppress, it provides an excellent mirror for us.

Nevertheless, madness in contemporary society generally remains in the categoryof a culturally dysfunctional survival strategy (or outright throwing in of the


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towel) that features enough nonconsensual experiences and behavior toapparently warrant some degree of medical intervention.

Madness could be said to be adaptation to failed adaptation. As such, it is asolution — aborted yet still alive — to a problem that has been forgotten,denied, or illegibly rewritten.

And, we might ask, for how many of us has most or much of our adult lifebeen a “solution” to unresolved, misrepresented, or “forgotten” events fromlong ago? Madness is but an exaggeration, however distorted or toxicallyredirected, of our everyday intentions and behavior. Where we act, oftenpretending that we aren’t pretending, psychotics tend to overact. In a scenefrom the film King Of Hearts, a member of the local mental asylum watching“sane” soldiers slaughtering each other turns to another “crazy” and declares,“I think they’re overacting.”

Let no one suppose that we meet ‘true’ madness any more than we are truly sane.The madness we encounter in ‘patients’ is a gross travesty, a mockery, a grotesquecaricature of what the natural healing of that estranged integration we call sanitymight be.— R. D. Laing

Is it not madness to be trashing our environment and dehumanizing eachother? Is it not madness to be compulsively wasting time using time-savingdevices, while acting as if we have no other choice? Is it not madness to keepindulging the case of mistaken identity from which almost all of us aresuffering? Is teaching cannibals culinary etiquette an act of sanity? Who iscrazier, the respectable businessman obsessed with leveraging human capital,or the naked avadhut (wandering sage) sitting atop a dung pile in an Indianvillage?

To the point: Madness is socially unacceptable deviance, generally epitomizedby “delusional” activity. Madness is a departure or escape from conventional,ego-corraled reality, with return tickets all-too-easily shredded to confetti inshapeshifting skies, awareness splintering into many attentional factions.

The mad person may identify with what arises — as in claiming to literally besomeone else — whereas a person immersed in the natural awareness ofspirituality may notice the intention to thus identify, but does not concretize itnor get lost in it (at least to any significant extent).


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As was described earlier, spiritual openness may allow or even invite psychoticor nonordinary phenomena to surface; if this gets out of control, as in whatis termed a “spiritual emergency” (or in spirit-possession situations, asepitomized by Haitian and Balinese cathartic trances), it is not necessarily aproblem, but may actually be an entirely fitting process. (The more disruptive,disturbing, or painful difficulties associated with spiritual opening are oftenmisconstrued as psychological disorders.)

Being out of control may be needed at a certain point, to break down unseenor unacknowledged repressive or dysfunctional structures that are not aboutto surface otherwise. Being out of control may propel one into the obviouslyspiritual, and also may shatter the subtle ossification that can occur whenspirituality gets too “spiritual” for its own good.

The flutecall trembled in the heat, skinnily skiing across the dunes. An albinocamel, astonishingly graceful in its ungainly gallop, sped across the road a stone’sthrow ahead, bringing an admiring grunt from the driver of the minibus, an oldnomad with eyes as blazingly blue as Band-I-Amir on a cloudless Decembermorning, and cheekbones as starkly sculpted as the bare mountains hulking toeither side.

With silent good humor he passed an enormous, aromatically smoldering chillumto the dust-covered youths grinning in the backseats. Their faces, unlike his, wereunlined, and their eyes spoke more of years of comfort against hardship than ofconfrontation with real difficulty. Their backpacks, bound tightly atop the roof, werelittle more, he thought, than the suitcases of pampered non-conformists.

True, they appeared untested, but at least they weren’t tourists, that greedilydestructive breed that paraded before the greatest of sights, like Bamiyan’s twinBuddhas, with all the lucidity of drugged camels. Very few tourists had ever comethis way. The flutecall grew more strident, its notes straining upward in mid-flight,its echoes laced with ankle-bells and lapis lazuli skies, its outstretched, subtlyricocheting melody demanding more than a casual ear.

Naturally, the young Westerners behind him didn’t hear it; they were too busyswaying and giggling under the entrancing influence of the hashish, their faceswildly crisscrossed by stupefying grins and boyish stares. He smiled, thinking of theletters they’d never write, the already-romanticized recountings bouncing aboutbetween their ears. Would not his own son spit upon these spoiled children? Onlyfourteen, he’d been a riflebearer for over two years, patrolling some of the mostdangerous places west of the Khyber Pass.


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The driver coughed, then spat dramatically out his window, knowing the minibuswould soon, very soon, be emptied of its freshfaced contents — the euphoric triobehind him would probably shit their pants when they encountered their fate, asif to empty themselves of their terror.

Suddenly the flute stopped. A knife was under his chin, grazing his throat. A voice,crackling with barely understandable Afghani, ordered him not to stop for the twomen on horseback who had just come into view up ahead. The demand came fromone of the youths, his face now shockingly wrinkled and craggy, his parched skinreddish-brown, a dirty skyblue turban tightly wrapped around his swaying head, hisknife-hand steady as a rock.

The van sped past the horsemen, who immediately charged after it, shooting outits rear tires. Now there would be a meeting. Hashish smoke filled the vehicle, increamy correspondence with the dust boiling up outside, all athunder withhorsehooves and metallic curses.

The driver lost his mind and found a clarity of recognition deeper than he’d everknown, marvelling at the pinpoint yet spacious choreography of the unfoldingencounter. The fact that the three sitting behind him were no longer even remotelyhuman-looking didn’t bother him, but actually flooded him with relief. Whateverthey were, they were his, as were the two bloody specters hovering outside, nothis in the sense of the merely personal, but his in the sense of an inner crossroadfor which he had long yearned. Now explanations shrivelled into nothing, as didthe minibus.

Again the albino camel passed in front of him, trotting now, almost floating, itsgreat turquoise eyes reminding him to closely, very closely, observe the five whonow coalesced before him, leaving him but a momentarily frozen note in theflutecalling, his fluidity of Being now primary, his shapings of self now secondary,his direction more him than his, his history but unalloyed Mystery, his heartbeatcelebrating both desert and oasis, his chestful of goodbyes and hellos now butsacred music.

A moment had exploded into all moments, unveiling the Story that could never betold. This was not the end, nor the beginning, but only the Ever Real making anappearance as him, an appearance that suddenly was utterly transparent, giving upthe ghost. Here, he was not he, and yet never so fully himself.

As much experiential overlap as there is between spirituality and madness,there is nonetheless ample contrast between them. Spirituality is present with—


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or consciously relates to rather than from — whatever is arising; on the otherhand, madness usually lacks such clarity, tending to operate in a more reactivemanner. Madness redecorates, relocates, or reframes the prison, whereasspirituality reveals and desolidifies the prison until its doors are recognized tobe already open. Madness may free us from certain demands and restrictions,or may even free us to see with a relatively liberating perspective, but spiritualityis freedom.

Spirituality’s morality not only is intrinsically compassionate, but is Being-centered; madness’s usual morality is but a surrogate, however weird or ornatelystructured, of conventional morality, whether me-centered or we-centered.

Madness is an escape from consensus reality, a negation of it and its statusquo hallucinations, and as such is often characterized by isolation, avoidanceof relationship, and cultish propensities. On the other hand, spirituality neitherflees nor rejects consensus reality, but instead infiltrates and illuminates it, untilit is recognized to be but one more expression of Being.

In madness, intimacy generally is avoided, mixed up with fusion, or limited toa select few. In spirituality, intimacy with everything is cultivated.

Madness is the soul unchained, yet still marooned; spirituality is the soulunchained, yet anchored to its Source. Madness sees the abyss and falls in;spirituality sees the abyss and swallows it. Madness is an outcast change ofstage; spirituality upstages every would-be us.

Madness is a solution that often camouflages the problem; spirituality is asolution that nonproblematically turns the problem into an opportunity. Wheremadness is busy being a nonconventional somebody or something, spiritualityis not busy being anything in particular.

Nevertheless, the strange forays, sense-bending logic, dramatizations, andspelunking misadventures of madness are not necessarily without value.Sometimes they may simply call for pharmaceutical rescue missions orbehavioral braking, and sometimes they may, through the very crackings theyengender, let sufficient light into the containers of self to awaken us to adepth or dimension of reality that we haven’t yet touched or sighted.

In many cultures, madness has been viewed as a potential harbinger of spiritualdevelopment and giftedness. Psychotic crises, for example, may foreshadow


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the emergence of a genuine shaman or perhaps a so-called “Crazy Wise”spiritual teacher like Adi Da (who is perhaps better known by one of hisearlier names, Da Free John).

In his 1992 autobiography, Adi Da describes several incidents of (eventually)spiritually illuminating madness, including his final ingestion of a hallucinogen(mescaline), which he says was the most terrifying experience of his life.During it, he was overwhelmed by violent fear and confusion, not onlysuffering repeated blackout-inducing seizures, but also an inescapable senseof “passing utterly into madness.” For several hours afterward (he’d had totake tranquilizers) he had no memory and no sense of familiarity with anything,perceiving everything “as an original, blissful, infinite void.”3

It is an understatement to say that hallucinogenic intoxication is a potentiallyvery perilous undertaking, even for the “prepared.” Nevertheless, the journey,for some, may have to be taken.

We so very easily cling to knowledge, as if having it will somehow save us,forgetting that knowledge is not equivalent to wisdom. Knowledge, whateverits metaphysical credentials, does not necessarily make us conscious. Facts arefacts, but they are not necessarily the Truth.

Sometimes madness may be the only way to access what underlies andtranscends knowledge, but it may be a journey that demands so much that itbecomes a trip with no return; hence the need for savvy guides andnavigational tools, not the least of which is a compassion-centered reframingof the very notion of “madness” (this being especially well known by thosewho have been in the labyrinths of insanity and have emerged not with theMinotaur’s head but with its maker’s).

You want me to stopSpeaking in riddlesBut the final detoxIs to be totally at homeWith paradox

Within each of us are many madnesses, many pockets of seedling psychosis,the energies and messages of which need to breathe more freely. Theirviewpoint needs not to be adopted, but to be given more than a merely


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rational ear, so that we might, from toe to crown, be confronted afresh withthe imagination-transcending reality of our actual existence.

In leaving the madness that would suppress or ostracize our madness, weready the vessel for Awakening’s alchemy. In entering our own madness withopen eyes and psychonavigational savvy, we discover a deeper sanity. Comein — is not the door already slightly ajar?

Only if we venture repeatedly through zones of annihilation can our contact withDivine Being, which is beyond annihilation, become firm and stable.— Karlfried Von Durkheim

When what is happeningIs not what is happeningAnd the ground is nothingBut quicksand and bananapeelThere comes a crack in the daylightJust big enough to squeeze throughBut only if you take nothing with youSolo travel it may seemBut that’s just in dreams

NOTES

1. Kaplan, Sadock, & Grebb, 1994, p. 325. When the culturally sanctioned experts onsanity do not themselves demonstrate much sanity (see Note 2 on the next page)when it comes to detecting sanity, what are we to do? Well, first of all, it’s alreadystarting to be done:

Rationality (including dissociative or disembodied rationality) may still reignsupreme in psychiatric diagnosis, but nonrational or rationality-transcending modesof knowing — like intuition or contemplative awareness — are starting to be givenrespect in a few psychiatric circles. For example, psychiatrist and longtime intuitiveJudith Orloff now teaches psychiatrists and psychiatric residents how to use theirintuition in making diagnoses (Orloff, 2000). Psychiatry, though still tending to beneurotically suspicious of holistic or “alternative” approaches to well-being, doesshow signs of beginning to recognize that wisdom and knowledge are not necessarilysynonymous (see Grosso, 1999).

Also, the anti-spiritual bias of psychiatry — a hangover from both an overdoseof scientific materialism and Freud’s dour dismissal of mystical experience — is


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becoming less ossified. The inclusion of a new diagnostic category (Lukoff, Lu, &Turner, 1992) — “Spiritual or Religious Problem” — in psychiatry’s diagnosticbible, the DSM-IV, is highly significant; it is no small feat to make such a crack inthe ultra-conservative armor of mainstream psychiatry.

The public view of what constitutes sanity has become broader and morekindly inclined in the last decade or so. There’s a growing appreciation of thepositive elements in mental disorders, as exemplified by the presence of various”spiritual emergency” centers and helplines (though these are not usually staffed bypsychiatrists). Those “normally” considered to be far from conventionally sane —like mediums for the dead — are now regularly appearing on shows like Larry KingLive, their message transmitted nationwide. Mysticism — with which so-calledmental illness is often suffused — is no longer an esoteric curiosity, a sideshow onthe fringe of the human psyche, but is starting to go mainstream (e.g., CarolineMyss on PBS), bringing about, among other things, an increasingly deep reevaluationof what it means to be sane.

Sanity and rationality are not synonymous. Insanity and nonrationality are notsynonymous. Mainstream psychiatry arguably suffers from “Pervasive LabelingDisorder” — recovery from which “rarely occurs once the person’s annual incomeexceeds six figures” (Levy, 1992, pp. 121-125) — and also from “HyperrationalDissociative Disorder,” the recommended medication for which is a synergistic,freshly brewed blend of contemplative and compassion-enhancing practices, takendaily.

Daily medicine for us all.It is insanity not to recognize and live according to the realization that what we

do to another we also do to ourselves. To wholeheartedly recognize the inseparabilityand shared contingency of all that was, is, and will be, is not some arcane act, butrather the very foundation of a sane life. Basic sanity is rooted in the ongoingcommitment both to awaken and to care, under all conditions. In such a milieu,healing is inevitable, bringing together the best of both conventional and alternativepractices. Diagnosis with dignity.

When the “gnosis” — the knowledge-transcending knowingness that is innateto us all — is put back in diagnosis, then the dichotomy of doctor and patientgracefully yields to the natural intimacy of two unique manifestations of the sameLife interacting in a way that benefits both.

2. Can sanity and insanity be distinguished, and if so, how? And by whom? Canthose with supposed expertise in making such a distinction actually do so? If sanepeople (defined for the purposes of this discussion as those who don’t have thesymptoms of serious psychiatric disorders) were to fake mental illness so as to beadmitted to mental hospitals, would their sanity be detected at some point duringtheir stay? If it indeed was, this would surely count as evidence that sanity andinsanity can be distinguished by those who are in the business of being able torecognize the difference.


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Such an experiment took place in the United States (Rosenhan, 1975). Sanevolunteers —referred to from now on as pseudopatients — claimed to be hearingvoices so as to gain admission to various psychiatric hospitals, and then, onceadmitted, dropped all pretense, except for the use of pseudonyms and, in the caseof those who were mental health professionals, the claim to be in a professionother than their own. In short, they consistently behaved as they normally would,but were never recognized as being sane by the staff, being stuck with the label theyhad been given upon admission — schizophrenic. Upon discharge, each wascategorized with a diagnosis of “schizophrenia in remission.”

Interestingly, many patients in these hospitals detected the sanity of thepseudopatients, presumably because they, unlike the staff, actually paid genuineattention to them.

A psychiatrist may show that a patient is out of contact with him or her, anduse that fact as part of the given diagnosis, but when a psychiatrist is out of contactwith a patient, the patient is usually still seen as the only one with a problem. Thebehavior of the staff with the pseudopatients says it all: They consistently displayeddepersonalization, affective blunting, social withdrawal, delusional tendencies, andnear-obsessive isolationism. Given this, could not they be given close to the samelabel that they gave the pseudopatients?

If I treat my patients as though they do not exist, what right do I have to claimthat I am sane?

In defence of the staff in the above study, it must be noted that, in many cases,the insane normally have times of apparent sanity; that is, observing some sanityor times of sanity does not automatically mean that sanity has been reestablished.However, if obvious mental health is consistently observed over a sufficient periodof time, then is it not insane to continue claiming that mental illness is the case?Whatever the pseudopatients did tended to be viewed in the context of theiralleged condition. With chilling regularity, their symptoms were taken out ofcontext — even their psychosocial history (however normal) was explained in termsof their psychiatric diagnosis.

Would the staff have shown less aversion to the pseudopatients if they hadnot been viewed as being schizophrenic? Probably.

3. Da Avabhasa, 1992, pp. 109-112.

to transcend yourself,be yourself

CHAPTER FIFTEEN


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It’s late December, 1995, 22 months after my NDE, and just over 3 months into a Ph.D.program in Psychology (which I completed in early 1999). My ground is still shaky butgetting firmer.

I’m running through the rain, along the local seawall. Soft, soft waves. Though it’s only 4pm, it’s already dark. My attention wanders for a while through a crowd of jostlingthoughts, as my body weaves through shadowy, umbrella-topped figures having an “evening”walk. I let this be for a few minutes, enjoying the feeling of aliveness slowly surging throughmy flu-ridden body. My awareness of actually running is minimal.

Gradually, as I become more attentive to the actual process of thinking and rethinking,physical sensations claim a little more of my attention. The details of movement, thenuances of texture and pressure, softness and hardness, expansion and contraction, fluidlycombine with a kind of composite sensation, namely that of everything working together sothat running can occur. My attention now and then settles on intentionality — the intentionto lift my leg, to lean forward a touch more, to slow down, to speed up, to rock forward onmy foot, to leap over a puddle, to duck under a sudden umbrella.

The sky is blackish-silver, plump and sagging, as if impaled upon the hazy treetops andhighrises. I gaze at the sky, the sea, the darkly glistening ribbon of path ahead of me, thenbecome aware not just of what is being seen, but also of the process of seeing — not fully,not even steadily, but enough so that perception itself becomes an object of awareness.

In this, seeing, hearing, feeling, and sensing become even sharper. Now there’s a spontaneousshift from what could be called the first stage of conscious attention — a deliberate focusingon the details of our immediate experience — to what could be termed the second stage ofconscious attention — attention that’s given to the totality of our presence. While there’sstill some focus on detail, it is functionally peripheral to the focus given to presence.

Now all there is is running and awareness of running. Pure movement, nothing holdingstill. But does it ever? Does anything every really hold still? My attention is magnetized to


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these questions — and the second stage of conscious attention is no more. Yet, seeminglyinstantaneously, it returns. Or did it actually never leave? Was it just that my focus waselsewhere (or elsewhen)? I love the rain blowing in my face. Washing away the questions.

I’m so hot now that the damp chill and general sogginess are a pleasure. As my attentionshifts from cognition to sensation, I get more and more inside my running. And in that“within-ness,” as my attention shifts from sensation to perception, I’m both in my runningand “all around” it, as if cupping this running body in the palm of a vast, ineffable caring.

There is pain now, as I leave the seawall and labor uphill, my legs heavily afire, sweatrinsing out my eyes. Ambition wrestles with care, and I slow down, grateful to be able torun at all. At last, I finish my run, squatting in drenched silence, stretching my Achillestendons, feeling a deep tenderness for my weak spots.

When lost in thought, I had no body.

When attention was brought to thought, I had a body.

When attention was brought to sensation, I went from having a body to being in a body.

When attention was brought to perception, I went from being in a body to being present asa body.

When attention was brought to my overall presence, my innate wholeness of being, I wentfrom being present as a body to simply being, neither separate from nor identified with mybody.

Our body, be it our physical body or our dream body, is but the medium forbeing in and maintaining relationship with our environment. Embodiment isrelationship.

The body is neither self (childhood), nor object to exploit (adolescence), norego-container (adulthood), nor burden (late adulthood), nor soul-container(metaphysics), but is simply Consciousness “making an appearance.”

What we essentially are is appearing not in, but as a body.

So many bodies are simultaneously here for each one of us, every one ofthem a wondrous coalescing of Being — the body dense, the body unbound,the body bright, the dream-body, the everyday body, the body suddenly see-


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through, the body shattered, the body Divine, the body of no beginning, theembodiment of every possibility, leaving imagination in the dust.

Flesh of mud and stars, flesh of gravity, flesh of ecstasy, flesh of history,body after body, body within body, all speaking not only their own mindbut — if we but hear with more than our ears — also Truth’s tongue, allarising as both cloud and endless sky, all dying to live.

As we shift from having a body to being a body to simply Being, we findourselves not just coming Home, but already sitting at the hearth.

Homebodies.

In embodying, consciously and responsibly embodying, all that we are, webecome increasingly intimate with all that is, including our resistance to suchradical intimacy. We may apparently still be a somebody, but we’re now, to amore than significant degree, no longer in our own way.

Our body is then no longer ours, but Being’s — we’ve just rented the facilitiesfor a needed sojourn, so we could get some things straight.

And even if we keep having to renew the lease, we know we’re in the rightplace. If our Earth-life is a classroom — and don’t assume this is just ametaphor — then we, all of us, have lessons to learn. No grades given, noOscars for waking up. We simply repeat our lessons until we have learnedthem by heart.

It stopped mattering to me how many times I’d have to renew the lease. Mycurrent circumstances, however unappealing, provided, as always, the neededraw materials for my evolution. Not only was the teacher everywhere, sowas the classroom. I had lost so, so much, yet I felt more whole than everbefore in my life.

I often felt terribly cramped in the one-bedroom basement suite in whichDama and I lived until mid-1996 — low ceilings, low light, noisinessstomping overhead — but until I consistently felt gratitude for it and thegrowth it made possible for me, I had to stay there. It was both tomband womb for me. When I finally left it, I was sufficiently energized tomake the leap of faith needed for my next move, to a small house in atown an hour south.


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I had no work, was doing a full-time doctoral program, was very involvedwith taking care of my kids, and could not afford to rent a house — yetwithin a month of moving, I had enough people coming to me for work toprovide the income I needed. My client list quickly grew. The demands on mewere great, more often than not exhausting me. At the same time, my faith inLife grew stronger. I was healing, quietly and steadily. When I felt bad,overwhelmed by this or that, it usually didn’t take long for me to rememberthat I had almost died, and was fortunate to still be alive.

Death cut through all the bullshit. The more aware that I was of Death, themore aware I was of Life. And the more aware I was of Life, the moreaware I was of the Deathless. As my sense of identity expanded from theself-obsessed dramatics of “me” to the self-sharing camaraderie of “we” tothe self-transcending presence of Being, I found myself, more than ever before,touching and being touched by Openness in the raw, in the midst of whateverwas happening. The inseparability and contingent nature of all things nowgladdened rather than maddened me, awakening in me a participatorygratitude.

Death gives all the same opportunity. Death leaves no one out.

Letting Death have a prominent place in our awareness practices — whichmay be far from formal — brings us into more intimate contact with What-Really-Matters, equipped with nothing but a lifeline to our Heartland.

In horror of death, I took to the mountains —Again and again I meditated on the uncertainty of the hour of death,Capturing the fortress of the deathless unending nature of mind.Now all fear of death is over and done.— Milarepa

In modern culture, Death is generally viewed as separation. But is it? Does ittruly create separation? Or is such separation already there? Death does not cutus off from Life; we do.

I’m learning to wear my solitudeIt’s not a bad fitA bit tight around the chestBut I like its touchThe more I hold it


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The more it holds meI bob between buoysOut on postcard seasBalancing atop the wavesWatching the shoreAll the bathers flowing to and froColors spilling and shapingA sudden love for allTurns me to seaThen to shoreA deeper solitude this isConnecting all the dots

By continuing to identify with our egoity and its shrinkwrapped individuality,we withdraw from — and cannot help but exploit — our surroundings,acting as if we are indeed a discrete entity, a bonafide indweller, a solid ortenured self over against the rest of Existence. As was described in earlierchapters, the very practice of thus identifying — which is the essence of “I”or conventional somebody-ness — generates an apparent territory (both outerand inner) inhabited by all that is “not-I,” which seems to be not just “overthere,” but definitely “over there,” definitely apart from us.

“I” is chronically disturbed or threatened by much of what appears to beother than it, creating dependency-relationships with whatever lessens the threat,including the promises of spiritual practice. (To offset such dependency, wemay cultivate an exaggerated independence, which only compounds ourdifficulty.) Hence, not only is “I” an addict, but also is addicted to beingaddicted.

Yet this “I,” this ubiquitous headquarters of delusion, this knot of subjectivity,this self-conscious sleight of mind that seems to center our experience, is, likeeverything else, only arising in — and as — Being, needing not annihilationnor spiritual surgery, but only awakened attention and compassion. After all,our sense of alienating separateness is — just like “I” — not something withwhich we are saddled, but rather something that we are doing. Now.

To not be identified with our egoity is not about existing in some impersonalstate bereft of idiosyncrasy and individuality, but rather is about being presentboth as our unique somebody-ness and as self-transcending Being. Even atthe same time. The point is not to negate or minimize our selfhood — which


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is less a noun than a verb (selfing) — but to permit it such rich transparencyrelative to our fundamental nature that it cannot help but colorfully and fittinglyrepresent us, however superficially.

However, when we let “I” do the driving, we usually end up wandering likehungry ghosts through the I-gotta-be-me malls of distorted or overfed desire,shopping until we’re broke, sated, or diverted elsewhere. Even so, it’s crucialto not prematurely cease such wanderings. It is so easy — as when we are in thespineless throes of spiritual correctness — to make an ideal out of being“good” or “spiritual” and a villain or scapegoat out of our darker impulses.

To transcend yourself, be yourself.

Divine forget-me-nots halo my scarsDissolving amnesia’s infectious anaesthesiaAncient seas seize my sailsWaves aglitter with shattered dawnMy craft ablaze but not goneRiding, riding the high and the lowJoining what’s above with what’s belowWithout homogenizing the showWhen the boat went under

did you sink?When truth came

did you crucify it in a field of facts?When you condemned the executioner

did you see in your hands the bloody axe?I am an exileBanished by no oneMy freedom is in my chains

revealing with just enough lightthe steps I must take

until my heart does completely breakDivine forget-me-nots halo my scarsTomorrow’s children color my dreamsA rain of dying petalsLining the crooked way home

Higher self and lower self, good self and bad self — such formulations arelittle more than status games, hierarchical tyrannies from which stem “moral”


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excuses for often inhuman practices. The “Higher” gets overly focussed onascent (if only to the high-rises of neocortical abstraction), associating itselfwith haloes, crown chakras, unconditional love, samadhi states, ecstasy,dirtlessness, transpersonal experiences, and whatever else seems to demonstratespiritual attainment, while the “lower” gets saddled with the body (a merecontainer or vessel for the “Higher,” of course!), disease, lust, anger, greed,fear, shame, Death, and — perhaps worst of all — the Pollyannaish slummingand “help” of the “Higher.” It’s just the same old spiritual bypass, headed bythe same old egoity masquerading as Soul or Atman or Higher Self, inevitablyseducing almost all of us at some point — and how could it not?

Seeking some sort of parental comfort or a sense of immunity when face-to-face with rock-bottom, existential insecurity is very understandable. Wemay find and cling to what Ernest Becker (author of The Denial of Death)called a “metaphysic of hope.”1 Hope can keep us “safely” distanced fromthe raw Is-ness and in-your-face impermanence of Life, by “futurizing” us,projecting us — or at least our minds — into consoling possibility.

As such, hope is little more than a security-driven romancing of Later and,perhaps less obviously, a rejection of dread and despair, a flight from thevery darkness that may well be harboring the seeds of the transformation forwhich we ache. Hope is pothead optimism, stoned on possibility. Even nondualtraditions are often plagued with hope, if only in the form of unacknowledgedand unworked-with transference issues (the Master being the transferencefigure).2

But to be without hope doesn’t necessarily mean to be stuck in despair orhopelessness. The end of hope is the beginning of faith. Where hope seekssecurity, faith accepts insecurity. Hope invests in possibility; faith invests intrust. Hope dreams; faith awakens. Hope seduces; faith loves. Hope is littlemore than despair taking a crash course in positive thinking; faith, however,does not try to convert despair, choosing instead to go to the very heart ofdespair, touching it with a deeply sobering kindness.

Where hope flees pain, faith seeks intimacy with it. Hope seeks God; faithassumes God. Hope is nostalgia for the future; faith is transcendence of thefuture. Hope is concerned with becoming, faith with Being. Faith is radicaltrust in Being, radical intimacy with Life. Faith uses difficulties to ripen anddeepen itself.


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In facing Death and the ineffable, immeasurable immensity of Existence, theheroic individual — epitomizing the best of the existential “I” — has to,according to Becker, “shrink from being fully alive.”3 But even at its noblest,“I” cannot help but do so, for it is inherently ingrown, cramped, myopic,estranged from its surroundings.

Whether “I” settles into a too-solid, Newtonian domain of things (commonlyknown as the “real world”), or camps in the hinterlands of existentialabstraction, or pursues mystical flight into the subtle or formless dimensionsof Life, it is still seeking immunity, not only from the intimidating vastitude,uncertainty, and all-pervading contingency of bare Existence, but also fromthe very pain of assuming and maintaining the role of a separate self.

Furthermore, is not “I” — regardless of its obsession with confirming itsexistence — also chronically on the outlook for a break from itself, an immersionin something less tightly perimetered? Such a break may, for example, beprovided by intoxication, orgasm, or by dissolution in some sort of groupactivity, all of which basically override or dissolve “I’s” boundaries.

By contrast, participating in Awakening’s alchemy illuminates rather thancollapses “I’s” boundaries, rendering them transparent to Being. (This doesnot mean the end of individuality, but rather only a sacralizing of it. Individualitythen is not only obviously infused with and informed by Being, but alsoincludes a strength that’s unthreatened by dependency.)

Sounds good, doesn’t it? But how readily do we enter into such a process?And what determines how deeply and authentically we go into it? Certainly,the intensity of our suffering plays a major role here, but so too does theintensity and sincerity of our desire to be free. Not free from, not free to, notfree for, but simply free.

When our desire to continue distracting ourselves from our suffering becomesweaker (or is permitted to be less central) than our desire to be truly free, weare magnetically drawn to Awakening’s alchemy, letting the fires of its crucibleprovide us with both heat and light.

Freedom to do what one likes is really bondage, while being free to do what onemust, what is right, is real freedom.— Nisargadatta


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In reading Stephen Levine’s Meetings At The Edge, which is mostly about hiswork and dialogues with the terminally ill, I was deeply moved by how thosein excruciating pain and existential agony often worked (and surrendered)their way into a deep healing, not a healing that necessarily kept them alive orcured their illness, but a healing that went right to their core. When they wereno longer entrapped in the role of being a somebody who was dying, thenthey were, at least some of the time, able to rest in Being, even in the midst ofenormous suffering. They were not just dying, but were dying into Life. Inthe innate openness of Being, there was, eventually, room for even the worstpain. Theirs was the art of learning to bearing the unbearable with in-the-bodycourage, going right to and through the heart of suffering.

Breaking through to a more essential sense of Life through a close encounterwith Death does not, however, always have to be catalyzed by suffering, as isillustrated by John Wren-Lewis’s account of his having nearly died from beingpoisoned.4 His NDE lacked the features commonly associated with NDEs,being not so much an altered state of consciousness for “I” as it was a radicaldissolution of “I.” Rather than having an experience of undifferentiated Being,he was it, claiming that his identity with “it” — which he at one point calls an“eternity of shining dark”5 — has remained.

“Returning” to ordinary physical existence has apparently not troubled him(as it has some who have felt regret at having to come back to earthly existence),for to Wren-Lewis’s “new” consciousness, physical existence is as much Godas anything else. He says such consciousness is not actually extraordinary, butrather is simply our normal state (echoing the sentiments of most spiritualmasters). From the perspective of such “normalcy,” suffering still exists, butis not experienced as suffering, whatever its degree of pain. Says Wren-Lewis,“All I know is that the overwhelming feeling-tone of this new consciousness....isimmense gratitude for the privilege of being part of it all.”

Such grace it is, this capacity to be grateful. Gratitude reinforces and fuels ourfaith, plugging us into a self-sense with too much heart to stay apart fromWhat-Really-Matters.

Gratitude opens doors we didn’t know existed. It is the essence, the heartblood,of real prayer.

Gratitude — especially gratitude stepped into when we are feeling far fromgrateful — is one of the most advanced forms of spiritual practice.6


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We should be grateful to have a limited body... like mine, like yours. If you hada limitless life, it would be a real problem for you.— Suzuki Roshi, as he lay dying of cancer

Is not Life a near-Death experience? Even at this very moment? Perhaps thedistance between Life and Death is none other than the degree to which weflee our pain, our dread, our darkness.

In grief, this distance is taken to heart, and in love, it dissolves.

In dread, our separateness is starkly exposed, its scaffolding stripped bare,leaving us half-paralyzed with fear, both numb and hypersensitized, teeteringat the far frontier of sanity, recognizing the delusional underpinnings of theDeath-denying culture that is all around us, yet not seeing — at least withinreach — any truly viable alternative other than to simply endure.

If we, however, don’t recoil, but allow our dread to mutate into grief —perhaps by unchaining its terror, or by letting our (and also others’) sufferinginto our heart — then our separateness becomes more porous, flimsier, lessand less convincing, eventually existing as a non-alienating play of differences.In our rawness of heart, we both cradle and are cradled by our commonhumanity, facing the Real not with suspicion or fear, but with humility andgratitude and love.

My blood is cutting riversThrough what I thought I knewCarrying no survivors

except for YouThose who see YouSee what is out of sightThis everwild Wonder beyond wonderThat nothing in particular

can replaceSince It wears every face

In real love there is ample room for our dread and grief. The power of suchlove, as I recognized at least some of the time during my post-NDE hellride,was greater than that of my terror or feelings of insanity. As Nisargadatta sobeautifully puts it, “The mind creates the abyss, the heart crosses it.”7


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I don’t see how we can get out of it because we are hallucinating the abyss, but theleap of faith is that that abyss is perfect freedom — that it doesn’t lead to self-annihilation or destruction, but the exact opposite.— R. D. Laing

When asked if Death was real or an illusion, a Tibetan Buddhist teacherreplied, “Death is a real illusion.”8

Such statements — radical poetics, bananapeeling the mind — only makesense when we stop trying to make them make sense; they are not intendedfor the rational mind, but for a more primal locus of knowing.

It is so easy to cling to our presumed identity and its viewpoint, shieldingourselves — and diverting our attention — from our actual situation. And itis just as easy to defend against what appears to be the end (“Rage, rage againstthe dying of the light/Do not go gentle into that good night,” famously recommendedDylan Thomas). Death, however, is not the problem. Openly encounteringDeath and our fear of it can be an occasion for growth, for extending ourselvesinto a deeper unknown.

What serves “death” can also serve depth — and thereby serve life — likePersephone accepting pomegranate wine from the Lord of Death and beingimpregnated with the ecstatic principle of life....What is truly toxic is not thatwhich makes one intimate with death, but rather that which numbs one from avital connection with life and death.— Michael Ortiz Hill

When death finally comes you will welcome it like an old friend, being aware ofhow dreamlike and impermanent the whole phenomenal world really is.— Dilgo Khyentse

Only in dying, Life. We are, all of us, dying to be Free. The dream shatters, asit must, leaving nothing in its wake except us.

Again I break, my need dissolving my prideAgain I spill, my hurt streaming, streaming wideAgain I die, letting all the goodbyes tear open my skyAgain I whisper and again I roarSwimming through, through the dreamy door


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And again I join what’s above with what’s belowAnd again I recognize What’s behind the show

Again I slip, one hand on the candy, the other on a whipAgain I rise, filled with blazing night and newborn criesAgain I pump up my will, gunning for the Holy ThrillAgain I awaken, looking through the veilsNo longer, no longer seeking something else to wearAnd again I join what’s above with what’s belowAnd again I recognize What’s appearing as the show

Again I bulge, feeling murder snaking down my armsAgain I pray, my dungeon walls swallowing my breathAgain I die, releasing all that I took to be mineAgain I howl, prowling through forests of palm and pineOne hand on a spear, the other crucifying my fearAnd again I join what’s above with what’s belowAnd again I recognize What’s behind the show

Again I gaze from one eye, my broken body aglowAgain I drop my sword, watching my blood cut rivers in the snowAgain I beat a sweating drum, urging you to leave your mindAgain I disappear without leaving anything behindNo longer, no longer wandering lost in dreaming landsAnd again I join what’s above with what’s belowAnd again I recognize What’s appearing as the show

Again I smile, unmoving in the black chamber of psychic trialAgain I dance in the fire, entombed by mountainous desireAgain I remember, uncovering my original woundsAgain I rebuild the temple, rising from my ruinsAgain I break and again I taste the final goodbyeAnd again I fall and forget the Sacred CallAnd again I remember and again I include it allAnd again here we are, already freeNot to have, but to be, to form and unformTo be lovers with both the calm and the stormAnd again I join what’s above with what’s belowAnd again I recognize What’s behind the showThe only show we’ll ever know


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There was a quality of love, I realized more and more deeply, that couldsubsume dread, but only if dread was permitted to nakedly show and expressitself. This is, of course, a very large “if,” before which it’s very tempting toretreat — which I did many times — as is so aptly put by W. H. Auden: “Wewould rather die in our dread than climb the cross of the moment, and letour illusions die.”9

But is not dread itself a gift, however ominously or darkly circumstanced?Does not its skillful unwrapping expose — with compelling clarity — thecase of mistaken identity centering our alienation? And what more potentcatalyst for dread is there than the openly felt presence of Death?

Love says: “I am everything.” Wisdom says: “I am nothing.”Between the two my life flows.— Nisargadatta

And Being says: “I am.”

We are more than we can imagine.

This very moment, as I write and as you read, is already dying, its fading skystreaked by the paradox-stained debris of exploded rationality. Even so, whatconstituted it is essentially still here, its elemental forces taking shape anew, allof it moving yet going nowhere.

When we realize that Death is ever now, and that what happens after Death ishappening now, then what is not frontier? What-Really-Matters is not elsewhereor elsewhen, regardless of how camouflaged or marginalized it may be byour knowledge.



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It only makes senseWhen we stop trying to make it make senseRest in undressed BeingRemembering to remember thatIt and you have never been apartUntil only What-Really-Matters remainsAlready perfectly dressed for the partToo real to make the newsAnd the lovers die, die, dieInto a love beyond imaginingCrying out as one: Oh God God O God

As we die into Life, becoming increasingly intimate both with what dies andwith what doesn’t die, we begin to befriend our pain, not letting it mutateinto suffering, while simultaneously inviting it onto the dancefloor, letting itfurther awaken and deepen our capacity for compassion and love. Thenconscious alignment with — and conscious opening to — Being becomesmore and more of a necessity, a sacred responsibility, a labor of love, asacrificial practice that leaves us with nothing except what truly matters. Kabirnails it down: “What you call ‘salvation’ belongs to the time before death. Ifyou don’t break your ropes while you are alive, do you think ghosts will doit after?”10

It is crucial not to let our embrace of our fundamental Oneness separate usfrom our differences.

By the same fire, serene, impersonal, perfect, which burns until it shall dissolve allthings into the waves and surges of an ocean of light, we see and know each other,and what spirit each is of.— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Now, as my words grow weary of their sense-making and begin leapfroggingover each other with accelerating abandon, leaving little more than instantlyvanishing tracks, an enormous avalanche of silence suddenly approaches. Thereis not much else to say.

In spills the silence, too eloquent for translation. Am I aware of it, or is itaware of me? Both. Awareness aware of itself. Full-blooded awaring. Thetiniest of the tiny vaster than we can imagine. Silence says it all. And so toodoes everything else.


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To transcend yourself, be yourself.

We are Light and we are Darkness, and we are the flesh, be it of mud orstars, torn between the two, yet already the One, inseparable from thebroken Many.

Forever now.

May we be Awakened by all things.

Christmas, 2004

NOTES

1. Becker, 1973, p. 275.

2 . Becker, among others, bites into this so hard that he misses not only the flavor butalso the riches of such traditions, dismissing them with facile ease. “Guru yoga”(or surrender — at best, deep, open-eyed, responsible surrender — to a spiritualmaster) is anathema to most Western sensibilities. Such seemingly slavishdependence cannot help but be somewhat repugnant to cultures that glorify oroveremphasize independence. Nonetheless, the perils of guru yoga are considerable,not the least of which is the refusal to acknowledge the reality of such perils.Probably the most blatant peril is cultism. It is easy to see the overly enamoreddevotees of a guru as members of a cult (which they may well be), but not so easyto see the exaggerated individuality that pervades Western culture as a culticphenomenon — ego is, among other things, a cult of one.

It’s not a great leap from the rugged “individualism” of America (which isusually not much more than deified adolescence, disconnected its shadow) to theheroic individual suggested by Becker; the latter’s aim is, of course, nobler, deeper,far less narcissistic, than the former’s, but both are still rooted in unquestionedsomebody-ness, taken-for-granted separateness.

“The most that any one of us can seem to do,” writes Becker in the finalsentence of The Denial of Death, “is to fashion something — an object orourselves— and drop it into the confusion, make an offering of it, so to speak, tothe life force” (p. 285). If this is truly “the most that any one of us can seem to do,”then we are in a shitload of trouble.


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Real freedom lies not so much in the absence of limits as in nonproblematicallyrelating to them. Such freedom minds not its chains, any more than the sky mindsits clouds and weather. Becker’s heroic individual is too busy making a problemout of Existence to be capable of the kind of acceptance that is at the heart of truefreedom. Such “heroism” maintains — and even legitimizes — itself by choosingto view Existence as a dilemma wherein we are “doomed,” acting as if any otherview is mere escapism or fantasy. But who is braver, the one who is positionedbehind the claim that “life itself is the insurmountable problem” (Becker, p. 270),or the one who actually explores the uncharted depths of which “I” is but anephemeral wave? To view Life as only an existential dilemma keeps us stuck at thelevel where it is a dilemma.

What Becker’s heroic individual (and Kierkegaard’s “knight of faith”) bothtremble at the edge of is not just Death, but self-transcendence, the radical releaseof (or full disidentification with) “I.” “I” is in agony because “I” insists on theimpossible: to be Enlightened and yet still be “I.” If “I’s” efforts to transcenditself could be seen as a cartoon, the caption for it might be: Enlightenmentguaranteed, or your ego back. In its reaching for a conceptual Oneness, “I” is onlyavoiding its own suffering, its “spiritual” efforting and metaphysical pretensionsmaking a fitting target for a keen eye like Becker’s.

3 . Becker, p. 66.

4 . Wren-Lewis, 1988. Wren-Lewis’s poisoning occurred in 1983. Two years later hiswife, dream expert Ann Faraday, apparently woke up one morning with her self-sense gone (also see Segal, 1996), leaving her in much the same condition as Wren-Lewis. No NDE preceded this, no triggering event, no sequence of requisite steps.Their spiritual awakenings did not appear to be the result of having reached aparticular stage of spirituality (as put forward in various stage models of spiritualevolution), and so seemingly call into question the whole notion of spiritualprogress — i.e., that there are developmental stages for spirituality (not states, butstages) — that have to be reached before Enlightenment (or full awakening) canoccur. There may be positive correlations between various doings andEnlightenment, but this does not necessarily mean there is a causal link betweensuch doings and the big E. Spiritual “growth” may be more ego-dream (or afantasy of “progress”) than actuality. Nevertheless, there is something to be saidfor preparatory work, a turning of psychoemotional soil; both Wren-Lewis andFaraday had done considerable self-exploration prior to their awakenings. Ripenessdoes matter. And ripeness is the result of many factors.

5. Ibid., p. 115.

6 . The Third Point of Tibetan Buddhism’s “Seven Points of Mind Training”(formulated by Atisha) includes the slogan: Be grateful to everyone. (For more on


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this, check out Chödrön (1997].) This is not a concept to believe in, nor an excusefor idiot compassion, but an invitation to go deeper. The practice of gratitude asksthat we simultaneously open heart and mind, expanding both our caring and ourinsight, so that we see — not just feel but also see — with our heart. A similarpractice is “Love your enemies,” which may be the most practical (and marginalized)of all of the teachings of Jesus. Rooted as it is in our capacity to forgive, it cutsthrough the “I” versus “you,” or the “us” versus “them” mentality that so easilyinfects and twists us. Loving — not necessarily liking, but loving — our enemies isbut radical sanity, for in loving them, in authentically praying for their freedomfrom suffering, we are not only ceasing to dehumanize them, but are also aligningourselves with their healing, which can only benefit them and us.

7 . Nisargadatta, 1982, p. 8. The best of nondual teachings do not explain the Real,but rather reveal It, often in language that is inescapably paradoxical (at least to ourminds!). Where the mystic, seeking refuge in Being, is busy separating from theconventional and ordinary, the sage of the Nondual, being already Home, hasroom for it all and literally has nothing from which to separate.

8 . Levine, 1984, p. xiv.

9. Quoted in Patterson, 1992, p. 318.

10. Bly, 1977, p. 24.

bound togetheryet free

AFTERWORD — SEPTEMBER 2009


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A number of you — having read Darkness Shining Wild (DSW) — have expressed curiosity about what has happened for/to me since my DSW experience. What follows is a response to your curiosity, detailing some of the more significant territories — both outer and inner — that I’ve since then navigated, between 1999 (which is where the book ends) and now.

My DSW time was, to put it mildly, one hell of a ride, during which I often could do little more than just scream (soundlessly and otherwise) as I went around the corners and down the tubes, simultaneously freefalling and insanely ricocheting, gripped by something far beyond even an extreme AFOG (the post-2000 acronym for Another Fucking Opportunity for Growth). I’d gone over the edge of the edge, and knew it, and also knew that the only alternative was to let go of having to have an alternative; I wasn’t just there for a tour of hell, but to know it from the way-in-deep inside, no matter how much it terrified me, as its darkest manifestations played peekaboo with my shredded sanity. As the book makes clear, I simply had to do my time there, no matter how long it took.

And my post-DSW time? An equally rich and revelatory ride, with just enough hell to keep things interesting. As you can probably already tell, I don’t categorically condemn hell. In fact, I recommend getting intimate with it, whatever form it may take.

And why? For starters, its very presence, particularly in its inherent painfulness and contractedness, can be a fantastic albeit rude awakener, a relentlessly fierce


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instructor in spiritual bootcamp. Learning to keep our heart open in hellish conditions is one hell of a tough practice, but an essential one, if we are to truly evolve.

Keeping our heart thus open — including to our close-heartedness! — turns our pain into a crucible of awakening, thereby deepening our intimacy with all that is, bringing us closer not only to the fire’s heat, but also to its light. Thus does hell serve psychospiritual evolution’s alchemy.

I look back at what I have written in DSW, and know that I could improve it; in fact, I could probably Whitmanesquely rewrite it for the rest of my life. But I won’t. It has a life of its own, a life that I respect enough to leave alone. The wordsmith in me would love to rework much of DSW, but he knows that he doesn’t have my permission.

So this afterword is fresh, but everything that precedes it is the original text, settling into a natural aging process, fermenting here and there, gathering more than bouquet, honoring the time of its arising. All I can do is let it breathe. I feel great compassion for the man who wrote it, and for the man who suffered it, and for the man/boy whose actions set it all in motion.

In early 1999 I completed my Ph.D. in Psychology, having jumped through enough academic hoops and negotiated enough footnoted roundabouts for a lifetime. The proposal — just the proposal! — for my dissertation was over 120 pages long, requiring three in-house professors and an outside reader for its approval. And so on. I had quite happily learned to be a student again (welcoming the humbling that that entailed), and had learned to write academically, reining in my wilder prose with enough citations and references

— as well as a modest dose of academic modesty — to make my scholarly side proud. I even won a prize for the best essay of the year in the Journal of Transpersonal Psychology. But such writing simply didn’t sufficiently resonate with me, so I soon returned to a much more vital, poetic, and original way of writing, without regressing, however, to the way in which I had written previous to my DSW experience.

And my work evolved in parallel with my writing. For three and a half years I had worked on my doctorate, while also working full-time as a psychotherapist and spending as much time as possible with my children. This was, most of the time, very consuming and often exhausting, but I was grateful to be alive, grateful to be able to start my life up again, grateful to have enough work to


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support myself and my children. My life was very simple, almost monastic, and I was generally fine with this.

During my pre-DSW years, I had worked primarily as a group leader in psychotherapeutic and spiritual contexts. During my Ph.D. studies, I had been working almost solely as a psychotherapist doing individual rather than group work, deepening not only my skills, but also my compassion and patience, working with every sort of client. Still, I missed doing groupwork, which had always felt, along with my writing, like my vocation.

By 2000 I was doing groupwork again, loving the flow, openness, creativity, and deeply healing breakthroughs that happened over and over again, no matter which group it was. I felt different, very different, than the me who had led groups six years earlier. I felt clearer, sharper, more sensitive and intuitive, and, most of all, more compassionate. Each group was both a sanctuary for healing, a safe place to let go of playing it safe, and also a crucible for transformation, and I felt deeply fulfilled being part of this.

I was still leading, but no longer felt so special in my leadership; I was, in a sense, the captain, but knew right to my core that I and the deckhand were both part of the same unfolding, both essential to the process, both in the same boat, here so very briefly. And I no longer had any desire to lead a community, no matter how small, as I had in my pre-DSW years; what had originally driven me to form and lead community — to construct a topquality surrogate of the family I’d never had — was now sufficiently healed and integrated to no longer be thus acted out. I could now admit that the community I had led was a cult, plain and simple, with me as its iconoclastic guru (deluded enough to have made a virtue out of my multiple-partnering/polyamory); and my desire to shield myself from the fact that I’d hurt many people in the process was weakening. The humanity I had bypassed in myself was the humanity I was now learning to embody.

With the advent of my groupwork, my life was expanding, stretching out past the cocooning of my post-DSW healing. I had relished my anonymity since my DSW time, feeling myself quietly evolving through a kind of psychosocial hibernation, focused only on my work, writing, and my children; I’d had only one post-DSW relationship, which had lasted six months, and had not pursued any beyond that. Intimate relationship was not a priority for me; my hands were already full, to the point where I could not imagine adding a full-on relationship to my life, regardless of my occasional longing for it.


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Along the way I somehow managed to write a draft of what would later be Darkness Shining Wild, and sent it to a few well-known people, half-curious as to how they might respond to it. I felt quite uncertain about putting it out there, especially given its detailed chronicling of my entry into territories that many might label psychotic or at least seriously delusional. And then Stephen Levine (an author best known for his groundbreaking work with the dying), whom I greatly respected, called me to say that he thought it was an absolutely extraordinary book, long awaited for. My response was not so much one of feeling flattered, as of realizing right to my core that I simply had to put the book out, regardless of how it might be received. It was about me, yes, but it was also about much more than me.

My life kept expanding. I had left my cave, not to resurrect my old life and self, but instead to express my new life and self in more public ways. I did more groups, wrote more new material, and kept expanding my clientele. I started a new relationship that lasted three and half years, during which I practiced being present and open no matter what was occurring, even though I intuited that the relationship could only go so far. And I began teaching: instead of only working as a group leader and psychotherapist, I began offering a one-year training program in which I taught my intuitively integral way of working, honoring my desire to pass on what I knew.

In the Fall of 2004 my new relationship at last wound down to a natural end, my first training program came to a very satisfying close, and I felt cleansed, open, ready. More and more work was coming my way, and not just locally. Darkness Shining Wild had been published, following Divine Dynamite, a collection of my essays. My writing was attracting interest and new clients from faraway places. I felt content, excited, happily consumed by my work and writing and new connections. I was going full-steam, greenlighted in many directions, traveling now to different cities in Canada and the United States to lead groups. Nothing was missing — or so it seemed. My openness was exposing me to something I intuited, but could not bring into very clear focus, and that was intimate relationship.

Then I met Diane.

A radical shift was underway, and I initially only glimpsed its presenting surface, having no interest in seducing myself with any hope. March 30th, 2005, I received an email from a woman in southern California who said she’d come across my poetry while checking out my website, and would very much like


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to set one of my poems — Sacred Hymn — to music. Her name was Diane Bardwell.

So I emailed her back, saying that I would like to talk to her about it. Late the next night we spoke on the phone about the poem, about her musical sense of it — she was a longtime professional singer and songwriter — and about many other things. There was no strain, no sizing each other up, no romantic stuff, no clear indication of anything other than a very easy connection.

Over the next few weeks we talked every second night, and the ease continued, along with great depth and friendliness. There was nothing suggestive of getting into relational intimacy, but something definitely was afoot, something that held us so naturally in its embrace that we didn’t have to talk about it, knowing that we were both feeling it, resting in it, allowing it to take its course.

Finally, after three weeks of such conversation, I booked a flight to meet Diane. When we first saw each other in the Los Angeles airport, there were no explosions, no great sparks, no soulmate swooning. And we were fine with that; our liking of each other was very evident, and our sense of deep friendship unwavering. That night was the last night we slept apart.

The following evening, after seeing her sing Sacred Hymn at a full-moon gathering of sixty or seventy people, many of whom were clearly very deeply moved by the song and Diane’s heartfelt, soaringly alive rendition of it, we found ourselves in very deep conversation. All the veils were dropping.

Now we recognized each other, without any explanation needed and without any drama. When we hugged at the end of the evening, we simply could not let go of each other; Diane later said that it was as if she had the found the other half of her hug. Love at first touch. Right away our physical contact felt remarkably comfortable, alive, and familiar. Now it felt completely unnatural to be apart.

We have been together ever since, though we had to travel back and forth between Los Angeles and Vancouver for close to a year before we could live together.


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Diane’s presence in my life had, and continues to have, a very deep impact on me, catalyzing a shift in me toward more softness, more enheartedness, more care, and not just in my personal life — such qualities also pervaded my work. Many of my clients commented on how much softer and more open and happy I seemed since I’d met Diane; they had very much valued my work before I was with Diane, but now valued it more.

Diane began assisting me in my groupwork, bringing to it a lovely and loving presence, not saying much but nonetheless contributing to the work being done. At the end of each group, she would sing for one and all, which everyone greatly enjoyed. But eventually she began taking a more active role, until she was doing much more than just assisting me. I still did the majority of the psychotherapy and bodywork, but she was right with me, helping to guide the work, bringing to what needed to be done a deeply compassionate, strongly grounded presence and intuitive clarity that was very healing for group participants. Like me, Diane works not from behind a preset methodology, instead letting structure naturally emerge in accord with the needs and energies of those with whom she is working. We now work together in all our sessions, workshops, and trainings.

When we are working together, we not only bring our individual abilities to the work that needs to be done, but also our relationship. There is no effort in this, for it’s simply a matter of us being with each other in the presence of others — we are not holding ourselves apart as an example of the far reaches of relational intimacy, but rather remain simply present in deeply connected mutuality and love for whatever work is needed. There is no retiring from


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this; as long as we can function, I’m sure we’ll be doing such work — however much it evolves — with others.

About two years ago Diane set eight of my poems to music, which meant in part that I had to rework them so that they became more lyrics than poetry. Each one was a labor of love, a co-creation, a joy to see come so alive. At last we received the funding to put all of this into a CD, and she took our songs into a recording studio — right down our street, only a mile away! — and with a serendipitously-found bunch of topnotch musicians from all over, began recording the songs, with me sitting facing her as she sang them. The end result was O Breathe Us Deep.

We were married April 2nd, 2006. I read Diane poems that I’d written to her, including one which she had never seen, and she sang to me, including a song to me that I had never heard. My DSW and pre-DSW times seemed far away, but we both knew that what I had been through then had, in diverse ways, prepared me to be with her. When we would sometimes get into wishing that we had met earlier, it didn’t go very deep or last very long, for we both recognized that we weren’t really ready to meet until we actually did — there were things that we both had to do and complete first. Our uncommon bond demanded this.

From out of our ever-deepening intimacy and with Diane’s help (we discussed in great detail every aspect of the book, often in the wee hours of the morning) I wrote Transformation Through Intimacy: The Journey Toward Mature Monogamy,


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including in it everything that I knew about intimate relationship, instructed not only through my relationship with Diane and my 30 years of working as a psychotherapist, but also by all my relational failings and detours with previous partners.

Through my relationship with Diane, I was, and am, deepened and awakened in every area of my life, knowing that intimacy — intimacy with Diane, intimacy with all that I am, intimacy with all that is — is my practice-path.

The more I love her, the more intimate I am both with what dies and with what does not die. Our mutual awareness of our mortality only deepens and furthers us. Are we attached to each other? Hugely! How could it be otherwise? There’s no escape for us in the transpersonal or absolute impersonal, no pull to any sort of spiritual bypassing. We’d rather feel our life in the raw, fully participating in it, gazing with compassion and humor at — and through — its inevitable dramatics, letting ourselves continue to die into a deeper Life, thereby living as fully as possible.

Immature monogamy entraps; mature monogamy liberates. This I know right to my core.

Dying into a deeper Life...

Then came the news that I had prostate cancer.

It was late October 2008. A week earlier I had had a prostate biopsy, a unpleasant procedure that left me urinating blood for four days and reeling from antibiotics. Now I had evidence of cancer running wild in my prostate, with my urologist making a case for surgically removing it. No. And radiation didn’t appeal to me anymore than having my prostate cut out. Very soon Diane and I knew that we’d be going all-natural in treating it, and now, nine months later, I’m sitting writing this in Ashland, Oregon, very used to the regimen of supplements and superfoods I began taking last November. (And how interesting it is that the help I needed in dealing with my cancer was literally right across the street in Ashland, where we’d been coming since the early summer to work. And what remarkable help it has been, combining great herbal and nutritional savvy with the latest medical research — integrative oncology at its very best.)

All my blood tests indicate a diminishing of my cancer. My healing (which is still underway) has been brought about not by some magic bullet — and


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many were presented to me since I first shared my diagnosis! — but by a deep systemic balancing and strengthening, in conjunction with spiritual deepening work and a letting go of the much of the driveness that had characterized me since my teens.

My weight is down, my fitness up, my spirits high, as Diane and I are brought by my cancer into an even sharper awareness of our mortality and the great gift of our relationship. I am three and a half years older than her, and given the twin facts that men tend to die younger than women in our culture and that having cancer could cut my life short, we are both sitting with and settling into the sobering reality that I could die well before her. Considering this both pains and opens us, deepening our love, our full-spectrum mutuality, our intimacy with all that we are.

And central to this is a consistently deeper vulnerability for me, a fuller capacity to empathize, to really feel into, feel with, feel for, with little or no buffering. I look back at my life with much less need to divert myself from my less-than-flattering times, and see all my sloppy behavior, especially in the community I led, and let whatever remorse arises run through me, not at all condoning what I did, while at the same time holding the me of those times with compassion. As the community leader, I was prone to righteous rages in which I shamed and scared and hurt others; I can now say that I was abusive at that time, however much that term makes me cringe. I had way too much control, except over myself. In letting myself unguardedly see and feel this, I am carried back through all my history, back to when I was a boy with an abusive father, and then fastforwarding into my teen years, when I vowed I’d never ever be like my father, and then into my adult years, in which I gradually morphed into a spiritualized version of my father — until 5-Methoxy DMT crossed my path.

The presence of my cancer instructs me, making clear what needs to change in my life. I am listening, very closely. And slowing down, stepping back from the usual intensity that has pervaded much of my days. I know that if I don’t, there is no dietary regime, no arsenal of herbal magic, no therapeutic or spiritual breakthrough, that will stop my cancer.

Cancer is, among other things, a red light. If we don’t stop and really pay attention to it, it will either stay put, blocking our life-flow, or it will spread wide, encoding its outcast will through more and more of our body. So we’re wise to heed its messages as soon as possible, and to take fitting action, whatever that may be for us. For me, this means getting as healthy as I can, physically, emotionally, mentally, spiritually — and maintaining that for the rest of my life.


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No hope, no nostalgia for the future, but rather ever-deepening faith, lining up everything that I am on the side of healing — not necessarily curing, but healing, healing of body, mind, feeling, spirit, healing into authentic wholeness, regardless of illness, old age, road blocks, falls, shocks, bad news.

Honoring our unitive nature while simultaneously honoring the imperatives and evolutionary shifts of individuated life is perhaps the key challenge of living a fully human life.

How we differ from each other (and from earlier versions of ourselves) is just as interesting to me as our oneness. Oneness is a given; the rest is not. Evolution — the fact that we develop — ensures that this is so.

Through my ever-deepening intimacy with Diane, I find myself equally appreciating the personal, interpersonal, and transpersonal. And the shadow of my cancer, however subtle, keeps me from straying very far from this.

And so my DSW time has brought me here, here where I am so grateful to be, no matter what happens. No longer do I turn away for very long from my dragons, even when they shake the hell out of me, for I now can see through their eyes and recognize and honor their purpose...


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May this book continue to serve as a navigational aid for those who find themselves, intentionally or not, at sanity’s edge or in psychospiritual crisis, caught somewhere down in the Dark Night of the Soul, or otherwise challengingly disengaged from the trances of everyday consensus reality.

May this book continue to be a helpful guide for psychospiritual explorers intrepid and otherwise, a travelogue that helps carry the reader into and through the darkest fear to the brightest, most powerful love, bit by bit illuminating and reframing spirituality’s abyss, reminding us right to our marrow that every treasure, including the most profound of awakenings, has — and needs — its dragons.

We cannot fully face God if we cannot face the darkest manifestations of God. This is far from an easy undertaking, but take it we must if we are to awaken fully to who and what we are. Seeds grow in the dark. So do we.

September 22, 2009Ashland, Oregon

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My passion is to fuel, illuminate, and support the living of a deeper life for all,a life of integrity, love, and full-blooded awakening. Providing environments(both inner and outer) in which deep healing and transformation can takeplace is my vocation and privilege.

As I ripen into my early 60s, seeing more of what is out of sight, I am findingfreedom more through intimacy — intimacy with all that is — than throughtranscendence. There is deep joy for me in passing on what I have learned,most recently through my apprenticeship programs and my newsletter.

Since the late 1970s I’ve worked as a psychotherapist (I have a Ph.D. in Psy-chology), group leader, and teacher of spiritual deepening practices, crea-tively integrating the physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual in my practice.Evolving in fitting parallel with this has been my writing. I’ve authored ninebooks, and have another close to publication. My essays have appeared inmagazines ranging from Magical Blend to the Journal of Transpersonal Psychology,as well as in several anthologies. My poetry runs rampant through all mywriting, keeping my prose on its toes.

P.S. If you’d like to regularly receive current material from me on the artof living a deeper life, I invite you to subscribe to my free newsletter (TheCrucible of Awakening). Visit www.RobertMasters.com to subscribe.

~ ABOUT THE AUTHOR ~

DIVINEDYNAMITE(Revised Edition) Forty-nine essays that explore and illuminate the promises, perils, and terrain of the awakening process, providing stepping stones and navigational savvy for the inevitably slippery slopes of personal, transper-sonal, and interpersonal evolution.

“Divine Dynamite is just what it says it is — a sacred explosion! Masters transforms the spiritual landscape with the mind-bending freshness of his prose. With the dexterity of the true master, he shatters complacency and razes the familiar with startling beauty. This book embodies the constantly novel surprise that is the heart of true realization.”

— JENNY WADE, PH.D., author of TRANSCENDENT SEX

“Don’t expect linearity or logic from Divine Dynamite; take satisfaction in being provoked and having your ordinary understanding of reality stretched and transformed..... A splendid book!”

— STANLEY KRIPPNER, PH.D., co-author of THE MYTHIC PATH

“This is such a powerful book! Written on the fire that melds the single heart into the underlying alchemical explosion that rises through the spine of those surrendered into the great unknowing, the original fire from which we were forged. Well done!”

— STEPHEN LEVINE, author of HEALING INTO LIFE & DEATH and A YEAR TO LIVE

The Anatomy &Evolution of AngerFrom Reactive Rage to Wrathful Compassion: Understanding and Working With Anger

The fiery intensity at the heart of anger asks not for smothering, spiritual rehabilitation, nor mere discharge, but rather for a mindful embrace that does not necessarily require any dilution of passion, any lowering of the heat, nor any muting of the essential voice in the flames.

“Brilliant, original, well-crafted and most helpful to us who work with real patients in the trenches...the scholarship is comprehensive and sound...exceptionally competently written.”— JOHN E. NELSON, M.D., author of HEALING THE SPLIT: INTEGRATING SPIRITINTO OUR UNDERSTANDING OF THE MENTALLY ILL

“I don’t know of anyone who has investigated the theme of anger as deeply, in so many ways, as Robert has. He brings wonderfully together deep groundedness in psychospiritual work with anger with a firm background in a great variety of scholarly material on anger — from psychology, psychotherapy, physiology, linguistics, the history of religions, and gender studies. He has a keen sense of the most important questions to ask and his writing is lucid and poetic, integrative and passionate. This is a rare study that I hope has considerable impact on a culture that is often very confused about anger.”— DONALD ROTHBERG, PH.D., co-editor of KEN WILBUR IN DIALOGUE and author

of THE ENGAGED SPIRITUAL LIFE

“...an exceedingly interesting and insightful meditation on the confusing question of where anger comes from and what can be done with it, not only in clinical but also spiritual practice.”— STEPHEN DIAMOND, PH.D., author of ANGER, MADNESS, AND THE DAIMONIC: THE PSYCHOLOGICAL GENESIS OF VIOLENCE, EVIL, AND CREATIVITY

Deeply effective comprehensiveguidance for those who (1) want more loving, passionate and lib-erating intimate relationships, and (2) are ready to work through whatever is in the way.

The journey toward mature monogamy is not necessarily easy, for it asks — and has to ask — much of us. Nevertheless, it is an immensely rewarding passage, bringing us into deepening intimacy with all that we are, awakening and transforming us until we are capable of being in a truly fulfilling relationship.

Immature monogamy entraps; mature monogamy liberates.

Freedom through intimacy.

“For anyone who wants to more deeply understand the seeming mystery of relationship — and transform their partnership to a sublime union of souls.” — BARRY VISSELL, MD, and JOYCE VISSELL, RN, MS, authors of THE SHARED HEART, THE HEART’S WISDOM and MEANT TO BE

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