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 neardeath 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.

“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

robert augustus masters,

ph.d.

darkness shining wild An Odyssey to the Heart of Hell & Beyond Meditations 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

darknes s shining wild

An Odyssey to the Heart of Hell & Beyond

Meditations on Sanity, Suffering, Spirituality, and Liberation

ROBERT AUGUSTUS MASTERS Tehmenos Press

Tehmenos Press For more information, visit www.robertmasters.com

First electronic edition, September 26, 2009

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

contents Prelude

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 .................................... 43 Splattered 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

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For Diane My 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.

darknes s shining wild

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

The truly transformative death comes usually unbidden if not unwelcome, of itself, happening to us and in spite of us. — John Weir Perry

With the arising of overwhelming fear the 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 that marks it off from other things but because of the complex and singular relationships that enable it to emerge with its own unique character from the matrices of a contingent world. — Stephen Batchelor

All there is is Is. — Adi Da

ROBERT AUGUSTUS MASTERS

PRELUDE

unraveled by the minotaur’s bleeding howl of recognition

~ 1 ~

Darkness Shining Wild

It’s perhaps midnight. I am sitting up in bed, as I have for the last sixty consecutive nights, my heart hammering and my mind overrun with accelerating dread. Another night of hell. As usual, I am struggling to remain present, struggling not to let the reality of the 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 worming through me. Variations on a single theme keep campaigning for what remains of my attention: No more terror. I cannot endure any more. And yet here it is, apparently immune to meditative practice and cathartic discharge — breath awareness, awareness of body and mind, prayer and pranayama, Vipassana and Dzogchen, bodywork and yoga and running and relaxation practices, raw emotional release, psychospiritual insight, tears and tears 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 dread seems to be addressing — or calling — me. It’s as if the dread is pulling me to itself, sucking me into its dark enormity, its sickeningly bottomless vortex. Already I am leaving the level, the steady, the familiar, yet somehow keeping some attention on my breath, my body, my shaking body. I cannot stop the vibrating and jerking. Admitting to myself just how scared I actually am only intensifies my terror. I cannot help noticing that the dread seems to possess an intrinsic depth that effortlessly magnetizes my attention. I am closer than close to the horrifyingly unbearable — hypervividly experienced on previous nights — as I “descend,” sometimes step by

~ 2 ~


vertiginous step, sometimes blindly spinning and falling, working very hard to not give free rein to my wildly panicking mind. A gigantic no-exit madness surrounds and threatens to completely fill me. A horizonless insanity. The movement of my attention is far from straightforward — it is dizzyingly irregular, complexly angled and involuted, wide then narrow then wide again, as if passing through a maze rather than a chute or corridor. An oscillating maze at once claustrophobically contracted and freakily expansive, housing a boomeranging focus. The fear of insanity is overwhelming. What I am entering is a topography that won’t lodge in memory. All that connects me to the world I’ve left is an extremely thin strand of attention, an Ariadne’s thread of remembrance. A spectral filament linking me to a glimmer of basic sanity. A storm-crazed kite gone spelunking am I, tied ever so slightly to a fleeting semblance 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, already feeling the breath of the Minotaur. But, unlike Theseus, I am not doing so deliberately, and I am not armed. The terror intensifies. I have got to go back — but I cannot. Sometimes I forget the thread, yet I have not completely lost it. It is, regardless of its frailty, a lifeline — I must not let go of it, but if I hold it too tightly or desperately, it loses its life. And if 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 me back up to the surface, “safe” but still stuck, like dreamers who, reentering the so-called waking state, have merely fled their nightmare and its dark treasures. No heroes here. My dread is now unmasked terror, staggeringly powerful. Nothing can stand in its way. My thread of remembrance? It’s somewhere behind me, its crazily fraying ghost sinking in warped chasms that elude attention. Insanity. Explanations balloon into sight, then dissolve or mutate into something ungraspably other.

~ 3 ~

Darkness Shining Wild Escape is now terribly attractive, but I’ve no line on which to tug, no cord of connection into which to breathe life. There seems to be only this unperimetered, amorphous monstrosity all around me, ready to swallow and obliterate and possess me. No, not ready — it already has. Within and without. Intimations of a horror beyond horror invade me from all directions. There is a tidal thunder in the distance, a strangely sibilant surf-like roar. It is, I have to keep reminding myself, the de-familiarized sound of my own breathing. Reference points eddy and shatter before I can find any anchoring through them. I am anchored elsewhere, in what appears to be a no-exit realm. I am very lost. The life I had before all this started is less than a dream now, its fleeting 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 an accelerating black avalanche a microsecond behind. Suddenly, without premeditation, I go into the terror, no longer fighting or resisting it, no longer attempting to witness it. The Minotaur’s face is only inches away. My mind splinters, unraveled by the Minotaur’s bleeding howl of recognition...

~ 4 ~

CHAPTER ONE

introduction

dying into a deeper life


It only makes sense When we stop trying to make it make sense Rest in undressed Being Remembering to remember that It and you have never been apart Until only What-Really-Matters remains Already perfectly dressed for the part Too real to possess meaning And the lovers die, die, die Into a love beyond imagining Crying out as one: Oh God God O God

Avoiding Death deadens us. In the resulting numbness — over which may be superimposed plenty of feeling and vitality — we easily become overly invested in whatever most reassuringly secures us. But only when we release everything — everything — from the obligation to make us feel more secure, do we really feel more secure. Through such radical non-dependency, we develop a saner relationship with Death (and everything else), becoming more intimate both with what dies and with what doesn’t die. Keeping Death at a distance distances us from Life. But we’re never actually far from Death, however much we might assume we are elsewhere. When we say: “I’m dying to see you” or “I’m so happy I could die 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

~ 6 ~


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 sheds its negative connotations, its potently sobering flowers rising from the debris of our unraveled dreams. But it’s not necessarily a cut-and-dried course, being amply 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 much of us, an odyssey that, among other things, uproots us until we find truer ground. My face is unveiled sky and prehistoric stretch Dewbrightened dawn and thunderhead-dappled stream Gnarled coastline and screamingly-blossomed storm Ever bursting through the roof of what’s unborn Gone, gone am I Birthing me am I Struggling deepsea drop am I Dreaming of boundless light and fearfully knotted night Widewinged spacedancer am I Soaring over cobblestone oceans of cloud Seafoam am I Last sigh of a vagabond wave Forest am I Greening sunlit shadowsongs And this too am I Where Mystery is the Foundation Where Love is the Weave Where 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 we actually are. To unguardedly face and feel the transience, the inherent insubstantiality, the essential and ultimate Mystery of everything, including the “I” now reading this, undoes the knot and agendas of self, leaving nothing but What-Really-Matters.

~ 7 ~

Darkness Shining Wild We may feel very drawn to the promised bliss and peace of being at one with the Ultimate, but what are the implications of being at one with the Ultimate in all of Its manifestations, including the darkest and ugliest of qualities in ourselves and others? What happens when we recognize that our self-contained somebody-ness, our “I”, is more a mirage, more a contingent arising, than a discrete entity? What happens when we realize that we’ve been dreaming that we aren’t dreaming? With what are we left when we cease superimposing meaning onto Existence? These and related questions are intended to be entry points for an inquiry seeking something more relevant than answers, an inquiry that, rooted both in the personal and the transpersonal, is the essential passion of Darkness Shining Wild, offering not a cartography of the Wild Blue Yonder, but rather an invitation 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 to become truly intimate with, ultimately only diminishes us. In turning away from our fear — be it everyday worry or transpersonal dread — we are only turning away from our own healing and Homecoming. This book explores, among other things, what is perhaps the most difficult condition to fully face and 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 such impact on the formation and expression of fear that it cannot be excluded from 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 spiritual one, as I’ll later describe. The relationships between dread, spirituality, and identity are explored through much of Darkness Shining Wild. Dread — how we dread it. How diligently and how desperately we apply ourselves to trying to make sure that we and it stay far, far apart. Yet still it persists, insinuating its way into us, undaunted by our psychological and pharmaceutical defenses. We need to revision dread (and also every other state that we fear or don’t like), to stop shunning it, so that we might benefit from it. In its capacity to nakedly show us the innate groundlessness of both our world and the very identity through which we maintain the illusory security of that world, dread

~ 8 ~


can not only scare us scriptless, but can also catalyze our transition from egocentered selfhood to soul-centered selfhood and beyond. (By soul, I mean our personal essence, or that depth [or stage] of individuality in which egoity is clearly 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 that we also look inside our looking. Finding a fitting language for this is a challenge, rich with difficulties; even the most experientially accurate language cannot help but fall short of its descriptive intent. Nevertheless, the written word is not necessarily incapable of the required articulation, as quality time spent with sacred literature demonstrates. Some might argue that the Numinous, the Ultimately Mysterious, the all-pervading Divine, 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 way further and further into it, are you not, however slightly, reminded of your fundamental nature? Each time I read it, it feels fresh to me. It empties my mind, fills my heart, refreshes my all. Its beauty strikes Home. More on language before we get back to the book: Does language have to become speechless, obscure, or opaque when confronted with the unyieldingly paradoxical? Is there a mode of verbal description that is clearly framed and yet simultaneously capable of slipping out of its frames, thereby outdancing, at least to some degree, its lines and contextual constraints and whatever else might reduce it to mere information or hold-still facticity? One such mode is what could be called the holy poetic — not necessarily poems or verse, but Being-centered articulation, the music of which can lift us, however briefly, out of rationality’s playpens into the unbounded wilderness of Existence, inviting and inspiring us to give birth and sustenance to a language that 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

~ 9 ~

Darkness Shining Wild chronically dwell face to face with its inherent Mystery, until It is more Home than threat, more foundation than goal. The holy poetic doesn’t so much explain as reveal. And how does it do this? By touching both the particular and the Universal with such care, such lucidly intoxicated care, that their intersection becomes a living — and habitable — reality for us. Hardball magic this is, viscerally trued. The holy poetic — the edibly accurate, everwild, epiphanously idiosyncratic soulsong of significances large and small, weaves itself beyond itself, going beneath and beyond its initial range and apparencies, leaving its pages and supposed author behind, again and again birthing us and a deeper us in its wake, its silences, its openness, its everfresh marriage of limitation and limitlessness. All of which is to say that the language in Darkness Shining Wild occasionally takes on forms that may be far from what would be considered normal. So you’ll find in the upcoming pages not one consistent style or approach — the only consistency I strive for is a consistency of intention and care. The wild and 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 immersed in the second year of a doctoral program in biochemistry (my dissertation task 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 my body; I seem to be a witnessing presence only. In the boat stands a man, apparently unaware that his boat is slowly sinking, almost brimming with water. He casts his fishing line, and feels a strong tug. I cry out to him, for I fear that he’s hooked some monstrous creature that will 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, up through the warm green water. Just before reaching the surface, I stop and exhale fully, then inhale. With the water rushing into my lungs, I let myself drift down, down, down, my entire being streaming with a bliss-saturated joy and ease.

~ 10 ~


That dream-drowning, which catalyzed (literally within a few hours) a major change in direction for me — leaving my graduate studies — was the first “dying into life” episode of my adult life. Many would follow. Few were as fluid 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 desire them, at least at a conscious level — though I did hanker for painless surrogates of them! — despite the fact that I always emerged from them rejuvenated and 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 departure from 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 I was, letting go of the very “I” who was busy letting go. Surrender. I also sometimes died in dreams, often willingly. During dreams in which I knew 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 do was relinquish the controls, while maintaining awareness. My participation in this was not without an increasing pride, though, through which I solidified my identity as a somebody who had really, really been through it all. This somebody apparently disappeared in each “dying,” but actually 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 as headline news for my spiritual resumé, as evidence that I indeed was someone special. The more transparent that I became to Being, the more densely guarded — and densely camouflaged — my pride became. By the time I’d reached my early 40s, I assumed that I had endured more than enough breakdown and “dying” for my lifetime. Little did I know what my arrogance was 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 over ten years ago, it is still very much alive in me. I cannot get over it, for I am not apart from it. In the perpetual perishing that it signals, the Real blooms.

~ 11 ~

Darkness Shining Wild In such revelation, everything is rendered frontier. In such dying, we are — if we but dare to look and dare to move toward our fear — exactly what we are aching to find. Bathe in this waterfall of unchained pain, bathe in it now, letting the dawning light touch it with a purer wonder, letting the furrily mossed cliffsides pulsate in resonance with your suddenly conscious breath, your long-crushed and panicremembering breath, your close encounters with Death, and bathe also beneath the falls, far below the cascading white thunder, down where silent riverpools glisten with terraced grace and crystalline welcome, for there you will find more than greenblue embrace and rippling epiphany, more than reflections of former faces, more than the stillpoint of joy and grief. And do you not now, softly stretching now, hear a different kind of thunder, a greenly galloping tapestry of original wonder, lush with gonged throb and primordial demand? Do you not now sense the unshuttered panorama of eyes behind your eyes, the overlapping dreams that are much more than dreams, the wildwinged shapeshifters so effortlessly disassembling your mind? There is an undoing here, a reopening, a lucid vertigo, a macheted clearing, a velvet slide, a stormy desert, a shrieking wasteland, a bloody snowfield, a falling apart, a skymaking plunge, and there is something else, too, something throbbing between the lines and inside the designs, a knowingness that eludes even the most sublime of semantic nets and spiritual mappings... Permit yourself remembrance, not necessarily of details and history, but of unveiled Presence, of the Obviousness of Being, and of something else, too, something that is not really a something, but rather the very Heart of Mystery, the very Face of the Faceless, the ever-paradoxical Truth of you, the Truth that is prior to every you and every view. And the lovers die, die into unimaginable Love, crying out as one: Oh God God O God

~ 12 ~

CHAPTER TWO day one

into the stranger-thancan-be-imagined


Shortly after 3 pm on February 19th, 1994, in a sun-drenched living room not far from San Luis Obispo, California, I smoked about thirty grams of 5-methoxy-N, N-dimethyltryptamine (or 5-MeO-DMT) — henceforth called 5-MeO — on the enthusiastic recommendation of several members of the psychospiritually-oriented community that I was leading at the time. They assured 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 no psychoactive substances since the late 1970s — psilocybin, LSD, peyote, no more than fifteen or so times, all powerfully positive experiences — with the exception in late 1993 of ayahuasca, an Amazonian brew that made LSD seem like a cup of tea.1 The ayahuasca I took — ayahuasca varies according to its preparation — was very thick, satiny, and brownish-black, heavily imbued with a pungently sweet, semi-sickening odor. It tasted much like it smelled, but I managed to down two hundred milliliters of it. Nothing significant happened for maybe half an hour, then Nancy (my partner at the time), who’d also swallowed a dose of the potion, suddenly got very scared, experiencing powerful hallucinations. I prepared myself to help her, as I had a number of others in my earlier years during psychedelic sessions. Back then, even when I’d been immersed in quite gripping hallucinations, I’d been able to be of assistance to others who weren’t doing so well. Before I could do much, however, the ayahuasca kicked in. It was extremely strong, and getting stronger by the second. I remember saying something about how powerful it was, and then I could be of no help whatsoever to Nancy, for I was so overwhelmed that I lost almost all contact with the world I’d known a minute earlier. As that world and its sustaining views — including those rooted in longtime spiritual practices — very quickly became but a fleeting speck on the periphery of the impossibly rich revelatory domain into which I’d been blasted, I buckled with huge awe and equally huge terror.

~ 14 ~


I thought of leaving the room, but could not move more than a few feet. So I remained sitting up, quivering with an indescribably strange feeling of recognition, periodically fearing that I’d made a fatal mistake in taking the ayahuasca. Who I had been before swallowing it was but the flimsiest and most 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 now devastatingly indisputable realization of which maddened what was left of my mind. My world had not so much been altered as decisively replaced, both externally and internally. Nancy soon lay with her head flat on the floor, her face to one side, as if pressed down by an enormous hand. All we could do was ride out the storm. For its first third (an eternity of about three hours) my ayahuasca journey was extremely harrowing, partly because of the considerable strain it placed on my body — I shook uncontrollably for almost two hours, violently vomiting a number of times2 — but mainly because of the often terrifying, unspeakably alien yet rivetingly familiar Wonder that was manifesting within and all around me. The dazzling presence and implications of this Wonder, this reality-unlocking Unspeakableness, and my relationship to it made me reel; I could not convincingly stand apart from it, not even for a second, and strongly intuited that I never really had. When I somehow managed for a moment here and there to recall my life before ayahuasca, none of it carried any real depth or significance. That this didn’t terrify me would terrify me for a moment, then bend me with animal awe, then pass from consciousness. What was now my world — and seemingly always had been, while I’d been dreaming that I was elsewhere — pulsed with a power and knowingness that surpassed anything I’d ever before experienced. No outside, no inside. No time. Flames sprouted from the leaftips of my plants with shapely brilliance. The trees outside the sliding glass doors, blazingly vivid and so, so alive, were fused 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 imaginationtranscending, overwhelmingly sentient Chaos in which everything, including the nonphysical, was inseparable from everything else. The sky, dripping with

~ 15 ~

Darkness Shining Wild terrible beauty, poured into my room like a tsunami, my body seemed to be about to die again and again, my mind frothed insanely, and I felt through all of this an enormous, intensely emotional knowingness, a primordial intimacy and recognition — at once prehuman and transhuman — that shook me like a rag doll in the jaws of a rabid monster. Looking into Nancy’s eyes was no different than looking into the room or out the windows. It was all, all, the same self-replicating, self-aware Unspeakableness, beyond any conceivable framing. As its perspective and mine merged, I felt as if I’d never really been elsewhere. The Open Secret of it all only affirmed and deepened its Mystery. I was alternatingly terrified and awestruck. I wanted to escape it all, and I wanted to get down on my knees before it all. Telling myself that I had indeed taken a drug — which I only could remember every ten minutes or so — had about as much effect on me as trying to stop a train by placing a marshmallow in its path. One moment I was convinced I’d gone completely insane and would shortly find myself strapped down in the local hospital ward, and the next I would gasp wonderstruck at what was being revealed. Finally, the intensity of it all faded a bit, and I was on somewhat familiar ground, albeit still highly psychedelic territory, grateful to have survived. The last two thirds of the journey were quite joyful, which perhaps accounts to some degree for what followed. Not long after my ayahuasca experience was over — and it took days — I was ready for more. Sure, I had been very frightened in the earlier stages, but it had turned out very well, hadn’t it? I felt profoundly enriched by the whole experience, and wasn’t about to stop. My memories of times in the trip when my body became other than human or even mammalian — sometimes to the horrifying and seemingly very real point where I appeared to have no breathing apparatus, 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, something that I would not recognize for a long time. I knew that N,N-dimethyltryptamine (usually known as DMT) was the most potent active ingredient in ayahuasca, and also that it was generally acknowledged as the most powerful of all hallucinogens.3 But I was more interested in its lesser known “cousin” — 5-MeO4 — reputed to be even stronger than DMT, apparently causing an almost immediate, full separation of consciousness from physical reality, transporting awareness with

~ 16 ~


tremendous speed not only to where hyperbole was impossible, but also into the 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 the pros and cons of taking such a drug; my lack of concern over the complete loss of waking/bodily consciousness that 5-MeO was supposed to so quickly generate did not affect me. I did nothing whatsoever that would prevent me from taking it. And so I arranged to do so February 19th, feeling peculiarly unmoved by my decision. I ate very lightly that day, and sat in meditation waiting for Marcelo (a member of the California branch of our community) to bring a dose of 5-MeO to the seaside house where Nancy and I were staying. It was a hot, brilliantly sunny afternoon. Marcelo arrived, put on “Undercurrents In Dark Water” (a CD from a group called O Yuki Conjugate), and carefully placed some 5MeO in a glass pipe. I felt relaxed, quite open, and very ready. After I had placed the pipestem in my mouth, Marcelo lit the little white pile in the pipebowl and asked me to inhale. My first inhalation, smelling of burnt plastic, almost instantly altered me perceptually — I felt as if I were swimming through solid earth — but did not, as it was supposed to, render me oblivious to my senses and bodily presence. So with characteristic chutzpah, I asked for and took a second inhalation. 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 rapidly contracting circle, as if it all were being viewed through the quickly closing aperture of a camera.5 In less than ten seconds, I become completely — completely — unconscious of waking/physical reality, finding myself bodiless in a horizonless horror that was madly and monstrously pulsating, moving far too fast, in all directions at once. It resembled my ayahuasca journey at its most titanically wild and insane, sped up and intensified a hundredfold. I knew that I was in very serious trouble; I was completely disconnected somatically, unable to locate or feel my body (as in a sleep-dream), unable to locate myself — or anything else — anywhere in particular. I had no body, not even the slightest semblance of a dream-body or mental-body, and I had absolutely no sense of where I was.

~ 17 ~

Darkness Shining Wild And what was I now? I was wide awake, but could not leave this domain, as I might leave a dream once I knew it was a dream. What remained of me was but a ghostly speck of awareness, an entombed locus of ricocheting attention in a completely unfamiliar locale,6 pervaded with a sickeningly despairing intuition that the “waking state” me was in grave danger, 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 and depth, both organic and metallic, sliding in and out of form. No limits, no edges, no exit. It was a timeless, boundless Chaos, continuously creating and consuming itself on every sort of scale with unimaginable power and ease and significance. As in the earlier stages of my ayahuasca journey, nothing in particular stood out. Everything was constantly dying and morphing into everything else in endless and impossible-to-anticipate ways, conveying to “me” with overpowering conviction that this was, and would forever be my — and our and everything else’s — fate, beyond every possibility of form or individuation. Evolution without end. No exit — nothing existed apart from or outside of this. I was in hyperterror, seeing without eyes, hearing without ears, desperately not wanting to die — or live — in such a condition. While this was occurring, my body was, unknown to me, rigidly locked as if in rigor mortis, purple-faced and unbreathing. As I was told later, Nancy was screaming my name in my ears, and Marcelo (who had almost left after I’d fallen back unconscious following my second inhalation, thinking that I was fine), trained in CPR, was pounding on my chest. Minutes passed before my body inhaled. I felt and knew none of this, and heard nothing except the dully roaring silence of a poisoned edgelessness, faintly punctuated several times by an inhumanly deep, slowed-down voice repeating my full birth name. Without at all knowing I was doing so, I sat up once, rocking back and forth on my butt, my eyes open but unseeing, then again fell back, not breathing for another several minutes. Twice in fifteen minutes or so, I almost died, suffering not only respiratory failure, but also apparently having seizures (of which I had no previous history). Again, I had no awareness of this — all I was

~ 18 ~


conscious of was the madly pulsating, sentient Wonder-Horror that seemed to be the very bedrock and breath of reality, bereft of horizon, including in itself every form, every possibility, every alternative to itself. It was a bit like a lucid dream — a sleep-dream in which one recognizes that one is dreaming — in that I knew that waking-state reality coexisted with the reality 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 the alien universe into which I had been deposited. Had I — and the question ate into me with acid ease — ever really been anywhere else? My life as an individual, and even life on Earth from its very beginnings, seemed but the most fragile of mirages, stretched to nothing in enough places to reveal Something altogether different. I still had no body, no discernible form of any kind, no rudder, only a feeling both of uncanny calm and sky-filling horror. In the first few hours of my ayahuasca journey, I had repeatedly told myself to surrender, to not try to control what was happening, but now such admonitions or reminders were impossible, for I did not possess the apparatus to convey anything to myself. How could I give myself a message when I could not locate myself? I could not scream, for there was nothing to manifest my screaming. I could not leave, for there was nowhere to go. In the shadowlands of the Unimaginable floated I, bodiless yet pinned. Terror and Awe locked in boundless embrace. And then, wondrous then, I became aware of “ordinary” hallucinations,7 internally seeing, among other things, a hypervivid baseball game played without physical limits. I was the pitcher, throwing at whatever speed I wished, and I was also the batter, hitting with whatever power I wished, watching the ball soar into endless, ecstatically blue sky. I was in every position, overjoyed with freedom — I still could not locate myself anywhere in particular, but now I was on familiar if still hallucinatory ground. At last the first sensations of ordinary, physically embodied reality began to penetrate 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’s lap, I knew that I had been through something remarkably hellish and dangerous, and so felt extremely grateful to be back, to have emerged alive from such an ordeal.

~ 19 ~

Darkness Shining Wild A few minutes later, I opened my eyes and with childlike innocence looked up at Nancy and Marcelo, feeling as though I’d been gone for thousands of years. Then I spoke, my words straight from my heart, addressed to God: “I love You so, so much. I now know why there has to be fear and doubt and despair, for without them, without passing through them, our love for You falls short of what it needs to be.” And yet not all was well. When Nancy, a short time later, told me what had happened to me physically, I was shocked, finding it very difficult to believe her initially. I was quite shaken, but assumed that it would not take long for me 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. The assumption of a quick integration mostly stemmed from the very “I” that had been demolished during my 5-MeO helltrip. That “I,” so easily given the driver’s seat and my name, was characterized by an inflated sense of its own strength and capacity to “play the edge.” Its sense — my sense — of being a very special somebody, a somebody in control (even of my out-ofcontrolness!), had now been hit with devastatingly disruptive force. But much, much more than my egoity was in disarray. Everything that I had associated with as constituting “me” — including my witnessing and contemplative capacity — was on very flimsy ground, both appearing and feeling scarily insubstantial. Nothing whatsoever seemed to have a verifiable existence — including those teachings that claimed this to be the case — except from the crazily oscillating viewpoint of the me scrambling for positioning and solidity. Not only did I not feel at home in the world, but I did not feel at home anywhere. For twenty-five years, I had practised various forms of meditation, including those which had as a central practice the bringing of bare attention8 to whatever was arising in the moment, including the various habits that took turns masquerading (more often than not quite successfully!) as the real me. Regardless of where that practice took me, I was usually still in control — all I had to do was shift the focus of my attention, and I’d be “beamed” back to the reassuringly familiar. Now, however, I was really out of control. Every possible anchoring of which I was aware kept dissolving, and dissolving in full view, leaving me

~ 20 ~


marooned not only in — but seemingly also as — an unbounded, strangerthan-can-be-imagined reality. Here, awareness and its objects caromed without warning in and out of a sickening fusion, unspeakably and alarmingly inseparable, overflowing with reality-unlocking implications for which no translation could suffice. Contracting uncontrollably was extremely frightening, but so too was expanding uncontrollably. I was a spectral leaf in a storm without beginning, already shattered, and yet at the same time, I was that storm, trembling with electric surges and cosmic winds, my humanness but confetti in a fiery hurricane. My recognition of what was happening didn’t console me in the slightest. I was terrified to fully admit just how terrified I actually was — I felt as though I could literally die from the vast, ballooning sense of insanity that kept pervading me. The only escape seemed to be in distraction, but I was not at all capable of “relocating” myself somewhere less troubling — there was nowhere to go, no harbor of immunity, no truly safe place, no sufficiently distracting elsewhere. My usual self, consulting its transpersonal dossier, would now and then show up and assert itself for a bit, until what the 5-MeO had catalyzed 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 or maskings of the Real, all caught in a neverending web of creation and destruction. Everything food for something else, forever and ever. Seeing this only reinforced my horror. There were no independent forms, no discrete beings, but only the endlessly contingent appearances of the Unknowable, but my recognition of this was far from joyful or peaceful (as it had formerly been at breakthrough times during deep meditative practice). “Form is emptiness, emptiness is form,” proclaimed the Buddha, pointing to the innate inseparability of the manifest and the unmanifest. This, however, was not mere metaphysics to me, nor even a paradox, but a naked obviousness I now could not bear — my whole system being in extreme shock — a horror and truth that I felt slamming through me, even as I struggled in vain to reenter something more conventional, something less final.

~ 21 ~

Darkness Shining Wild But there was no escape for me, no solid door to close and lock. The gates had been dynamited, seemingly beyond any foreseeable repairing. My hyperacute, gaping, shock-driven sense of Eternity and the immeasurable, achingly populated sweep of time literally made me shake and buckle. “Not only our life, but this particular universe is just like one brief instant, even if it has 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 my conventional self, but as I really was. That everything appeared to be arising and passing in the same unexplainable moment — which I had meditatively intuited for years — brought me no comfort whatsoever, no warm and fuzzy sense of sacred time, no celebratory feeling 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. Having those I loved near — familiar faces bright with affection — allowed me to pass the evening without outwardly going to pieces. But the dread was looming close by, waiting, staring back at me with an unmasked bluish chill in the bathroom mirror, insinuating its way through me, even as I felt my bond with the others gathered in our living room. How beautiful their shining eyes, how heart-wrenchingly lovely their gestures, their self-presentation, their very being, and also how incredibly fragile — fast wilting cameos lingering in the darkly transpersonal reality now beating my heart. But maybe, just maybe, this would mostly pass in a day or two, as the aftermath, biochemical and otherwise, of my 5-MeO shock-ride dissipated from my system. I so badly wanted to be seduced by hope. Just hang in there, I exhorted myself, for this too will pass. After all, everything passes, doesn’t it? Watch the doubt that claims otherwise, watch it mutate, watch its contents become irrelevant. Everything will be fine in a day or two, I was reassured. But will it really pass in time? Or will I go mad first, or kill myself ? My doubt — sharpened by unrelenting terror — persisted, like an unwanted dream figure that won’t go away, even when strangled or cut into pieces. Doubt your doubt, 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 on and off beside me), helplessly absorbed in extremely gripping, threedimensional replays of the horror I had experienced, now and then trying to

~ 22 ~


comfort myself with the thought that this wouldn’t, couldn’t, last for more than a few nights. The waves of remembrance did not come gently. I was throbbing, shaking, struggling to find some semblance of calm in the psychospiritual riptides that were tossing me about like a piece of shorebereft driftwood. A hellride minus an offramp. Hour after hour I endured, feeling as though I would never return from the madness that was infiltrating me. Finally, just before dawn, I fell asleep and very soon found myself in a lucid dream. I had often had such dreams, frequently using them as portals for all kinds of adventure and experimentation. As such, they were normally quite pleasing to be in; I would know that the body I “had” in the dream was not my actual physical body, and so could then freely engage in activities that would mean disaster or even Death in the “waking” state. If I was afraid in a regular dream and then became lucid during it, I could usually face the fear, interacting with 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 fear therein. The dream was saturated with an enormous, otherworldly terror which was coupled with savagely hallucinatory disorientation. In the midst of this I stood, my dreambody but a ghostly sieve for its surroundings. I knew that 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 very likely would not return. Now I was completely inside it, utterly lost, immersed in an edgeless domain of look-alike, spike-headed waveforms, each one sentient and subtly scaly, moving protoplasmically in endless procession in all directions. Just like my 5-MeO setting, but without the speed. Suddenly, I was overcome by a completely unexpected, rapidly expanding compassion. All fear vanished. A few moments later, I somehow cut — or intended — a kind of porthole in the bizarre universe that enclosed me, as cleanly round as the shrinking aperture of my consciousness at the onset of my 5-MeO journey. Through this opening the countless alien forms spontaneously came streaming, immediately metamorphosing into flowers, birds, trees, humans: Earthly life in all its wonder and heartbreaking fecundity. Then the dream faded, and I lay

~ 23 ~

Darkness Shining Wild radiantly awake, deeply moved, feeling as though the hardest part was now over. It had, however, just begun.

NOTES 1. Ayahuasca — meaning “vine of the soul” — is a hallucinogenic drink long employed in the Amazon basin for both sacred and medicinal purposes. Two species of the forest liana genus Banisteriopsis — especially B. caapi — are mainly used to initially prepare ayahuasca. Then plants from other families are added, the most commonly used being those containing DMT (such as, in my drink, Psychotria viridis). DMT is inactive when taken orally, unless monoamine oxidase (an enzyme that breaks down DMT) inhibitors are present, and the hallucinogens in Banisteriopsis — harmine and harmaline — are in fact such inhibitors. Ethnobotanist Wade Davis, in describing this “remarkable example of shamanic alchemy,” asks (1998, p. 166): “How did the Indians learn to identify and combine in such a sophisticated manner these morphologically dissimilar plants with such unique and complementary chemical 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 sky opened.... Then the terror grew stronger, as did my sense of hopeless fragility. Death hovered all around.... My thoughts themselves turned into visions, not of things or places but of an entire dimension that in the moment seemed not only real but absolute. This was the actual world, and what I had known until then was a crude and opaque facsimile” (pp. 160-161). A deep-digging, way out-on-the-edge account of tryptamine phenomenology can be found in True Hallucinations (1994), by Terence McKenna. For an exploration of the ethnography of ayahuascan shamanism in the Amazon, accompanied by 49 paintings of ayahuasca visions as experienced by a Peruvian shaman, see Luna & Amiringo (1992). The story of Manuel CórdobaRios (Lamb, 1990), who was captured by a group of Amahuaca Indians as a young teen, is also worth reading. Córdoba-Rios was, with great care, taken into the tribe and initiated into the ways of ayahuasca, living with the Indians for seven years before 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 into ayahuasca analogues, in which plants containing DMT and plants containing monoamine oxidase inhibitors (like harmine and harmaline) are combined to create an ayahuasca experience. Hence “pharmahuasca.”

~ 24 ~


2

This “purging” is commonplace during ayahuasca sessions.

3. McKenna, 1992, p. 236. From 1990 to 1995 psychiatrist Rick Strassman conducted research in which he injected volunteers with DMT. His account (Strassman, 2001) of what happened in those sessions, along with his speculations about the role of DMT in human consciousness, is fascinating. Among other things he suggests that DMT, which is found not only in various plants, but is also manufactured by the human brain (probably in the pineal gland), is an integral part of birth and Death (and near-Death) experiences. He believes that alien abduction experiences may be brought on by released DMT. I’ll say more about all of this in later chapters. 4. 5-MeO is a primary ingredient in the Virola-based snuffs — known as Epená or semen of the sun— used by certain tribes in the northwestern Amazon and upper Orinoco (Schultes & Hofmann, 1992, pp. 164-171). 5-MeO is also found in remarkably high concentrations in the parotoid glands (on the back of the head) of Bufo alvarius, the Sonoran toad, found in the American southwest and northern Mexico. The venom of this toad, when milked and dried, can be smoked, with hallucinogenic results. Smoking toad, despite some sensational media coverage (in which it was juxtaposed with toad-licking, a far riskier practice), has nonetheless not 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 injected during ayahuasca intoxication. There are reports that 5-MeO is, like DMT, found in human fluids and brain tissue. Its synthesis is thought to occur in the pineal gland. Some conjecture (Chia, 2004) that greatly increased melatonin levels — as generated by lengthy time (several weeks or more) in prolonged utter darkness — increases both DMT and 5-MeO production by the pineal, so long as monoamine oxidase (an enzyme which breaks down 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 to dot) in a three-dimensional realm of an infinite number of dots... It is a horror to contemplate... Wherever you look, everything surrounds that center of looking...We must take attention away from its preoccupation with, or bondage to, this infinite medium of dots and let it fall back into the contemplation of its own Source” (Da Free 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.”

~ 25 ~

Darkness Shining Wild 8. For a lucid discussion of bare attention, including its parallels with Freud’s “evenly suspended attention,” see Epstein, 1995, pp. 109-128. See also the writings of Thich Nhat Hanh, Jack Kornfield, Surya Das, and Stephen Levine. 9. Nyoshul Khenpo, 1995, p. 36.

~ 26 ~

CHAPTER THREE

mortality, identity, being: an initial look


The great message of the universe is not that you survive. It is that you are awakened into a process in which nothing ultimately survives....We are always seeking to know in order to protect ourselves. We want to save ourselves and continue. And we cannot. — Adi Da You are asking for truth, but in fact you merely seek comfort, which you want to last forever. — Sri Nisargadatta They say that I am dying but I am not going away. Where could I go? I am here. — 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 a party; appearing youthful is an obsessive, almost unquestioned pursuit; and the 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 being chronologically disadvantaged — are often greeted with alarm, as if signifying failure or perhaps even — in a metaphysical sense — an error in the System. Death reminders are avoided rather than appreciated. But since just about everything, when seen clearly, is a Death reminder, the avoidance of whatever reminds 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

~ 28 ~


Despite advances in working with dying and despite the abundance of writing on Death and dying that’s emerged since the 1960s, Death generally remains almost as much in the closet for us as sex was for the Victorian era. It’s the ultimate elephant in the room. We are more likely to celebrate “youthful” achievements by the elderly — like completing a marathon at age 70 — than most other achievements that may come with aging, like panoramic equanimity. Death tends to remain bad news. The media and medical profession make sure of this, so that Death gets to be a tragedy, a misfortune, the supreme bummer. Think of the bumper sticker: Life’s a bitch, then you die; and more recently, 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 of the 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, to which of the many “I’s” that together make up our apparent identity? To address 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 “the starkest 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, remains merely 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 be aware of Death is not synonymous with just thinking about Death. Bringing awareness — not thought, but awareness — to our mortality has a profound effect on our sense of identity. It’s a cold-shower awakening, often rough and rude, driving our blood to our core. A note about “sense of identity:” It is not the same as “self-concept” (or the picture/idea we ordinarily have of ourselves). “Self-concept” refers to how we tend to think of ourselves, and is therefore, as a belief — or complex of beliefs — relatively consistent across time, regardless of its fluctuations in size or 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 viewed quantitatively (the instrumental image here being that of a sliding scale limited to back-and-forth movement between predefined polarities).

~ 29 ~

Darkness Shining Wild By contrast, “sense of identity” is not a thing, nor a belief, and nor is it necessarily clearly bound, being more a process than an entity. It is our momentto-moment experience of ourselves as an “I,” ever revealing what is currently being identified with — including, of course, our self-concept.3 We may identify with what dies; we may identify with what doesn’t die; or we may do neither. Along the way, “I” may undergo many changes, including decentralization or even apparent disappearance, dying into a depth of Life that imagination cannot touch. Self-made dreamstuff are we Dreaming we aren’t dreaming Taking up space doing our time Passing through Eternity’s Grinder Nostalgic for a perfect tomorrow When my dreams are emptied of me Everything’s right where it belongs This odyssey of selfing Returning as always To what was never left Travelling high and low Sailing through calm and storm Discovering where all dreams are born

FEAR, AND A DEEPER FEAR To journey into, unguardedly feel, and directly relate to our deepest fears requires that our usual distancing strategies, cognitive or otherwise, be exposed and disarmed — assuming that it is timely to do so. These fears can then be touched and known from the inside, and eventually divested of their power to shrink, misguide, or intimidate us. Opening to our fear is an act of intimacy, a courageous welcoming of the disfigured and outcast into the living room of our being. Opening thus is also an act of surrender. As such, it is not a dissolution — or collapsing — of personal 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,

~ 30 ~


but we do not lose touch. Submission flattens the ego; surrender transcends it. Submission is passive, but surrender is dynamic. Surrender is the unarmored heart enlarged through full acceptance of pure necessity. To varying degrees, surrender also carries within itself an observing capacity which stems not from fabricated awareness, but rather from innate awareness, 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 of all the ways we’ve learned to get away from fear, so that when one of them shows up, we’re capable of looking at it and saying no thanks. Getting inside fear means getting past its periphery, getting past its defining thoughts, getting past its propagandizing sentinels. Entering the dragon’s cave. What is being mined here is not some fear-obliterating alchemy, but rather those raw materials that together contribute to the development of intimacy with fear. The real challenge is getting close enough to the Minotaur to feel not only its breath, its swollen appetite, its violently looming size, but also its ache, its original need, its cry to be recognized as more than just the dark flowering of a 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 become more intimate with our smaller, more easily manageable fears. Practices regarding this — to be given more coverage later — might include: Neither pulling away from fear nor tightening around it; examining, in attentive detail, the sensations of fear rather than its mental contents; making room for fear to breathe more deeply, as if to expand it; permitting fear’s characteristic energies to be as they are without, however, identifying with fear’s viewpoint; exposing any 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 is intense. It can be very tempting — and entirely appropriate at times — in the midst of panic or terror to latch onto whatever delivers or promises a relatively reassuring sense of security, including entrenchment in lesser, more easily controlled fears.

~ 31 ~

Darkness Shining Wild These smaller fears, unpleasant as they may be, can provide some degree of stabilizing through their familiarity of perimeter, feel, and content. Also, they are not usually very difficult to temporarily escape or sedate — we know what we are afraid of, we are perhaps even oddly comforted by its dense familiarity, 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, through positive thinking, sexual activity, food, drugs, intense exercise, electronic fixes, and other successfully distracting preoccupations — we know where the corral 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, as it were, more and more a something.”4 A something. That is, when our fear has a concrete, everyday thing upon which to focus or fixate, we’re on miserable yet dependably familiar ground, seemingly far from the quicksands of our more primal fears. Thus do we tend to prefer the burdened beasts of depression to the monsters of the deep. Also, the narrower the focus, as when fear provides the lens, the more substantial or dense “I” may seem to become, mechanically projecting itself into the future (and therefore into the conviction that there will indeed be a tomorrow for it) through its very anxiety, thereby successfully stranding itself from any significant encounter with its own mortality and actual insubstantiality. Thus do we tend to cling, however indirectly, to our everyday fear and the apparent security it provides, focusing on what it’s saying rather than on the raw 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 naked emotion, yet even from the loftiest and most seemingly safe neocortical towers we’re not out of reach of our core fears. Key among these is our fear of Death, however masked it might be by metaphysical lullabies or the pastel vistas of pharmaceutical flatlands. We may even succeed at making sure that we are always capable of distraction from our existential anxiety, perhaps even pretending that it does not exist, but we are then only doing time in a self-conceived maximum security comfortcell, slowly desiccating in our surrogate chrysalis.

~ 32 ~


Getting sicker with every new cure Clearcutting today to secure tomorrow Fleeing a grief beyond sorrow Avoiding death by deadening ourselves Not seeing beneath our herdprints The crushed yet leafy reach of another us Divided we stand calling for peace Reducing love to an ideal Chaining attention to mindchatter Pilgrims at the crossroads are we Stuck in well-educated knots & fashionable headlocks The sky opening for us is but the ceiling Of our loftiest thought Pilgrims at the crossroads are we Missing what is more secure than security More moral than morality More significant than meaning Fear’s the threshold And even the ticket Home When we hold the dragon’s heart

Perhaps almost as inevitable as Death itself is our denial of it, our effort to ship its facticity to uninhabited regions of ourselves. We may compulsively occupy ourselves with tomorrow and beyond, perhaps imagining ourselves in preconceived after-Death realms, still somehow intact and living on and on, consoling ourselves with the notion that Death is just a benign doorway, a portal to blissful domains, spiritual enlightenment, or more lifetimes featuring us. (The intensely positive, uplifting nature of most reported near-Death experiences may have contributed to this.) In its attachment to such a comforting conception of Death, that ubiquitous case of mistaken identity commonly referred to as ego5 demonstrates its obsession with survival, as well as its addiction to hope. Hope is but nostalgia for the future, little more than despair taking a crash course 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) can play a key role in bringing us into the heart of the present moment, to where we have sufficient connection to (and faith in) our core of Being to be able to sanely encounter Death.

~ 33 ~

Darkness Shining Wild As our romancing of Later suffers the rude yet deft pricks of awakened attention, we simply pass from now to now, with an appreciation as simple as it’s sobering.

IS ”I” ANY LESS EPHEMERAL THAN ITS SUSTAINING THOUGHTS? This existence of ours is as transient as autumn clouds To 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, we usually tend to keep the bare reality of it at a “safe” distance, steadying ourselves by creating and maintaining reassuring illusions of permanence for ourselves, rarely taking time to investigate the actual nature of the supposed self for whom 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, even including our assumed identity, that personalized, self-enclosed, often uneasily governed 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 fifteen minutes of giving our undivided attention to the actual presence and content of our mental activities will likely show) not being generated by a discrete thinker somewhere inside our head, but rather are mostly arising unbidden, far from being under any sort of conscious control. So who — or what — is doing 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 in psychoanalytic considerations.6) Is “I” any less ephemeral than its sustaining thoughts? Is not what “I” — and its multitude of interiorized voices, roles, and perspectives — purports to represent actually always in flux, regardless of the apparent solidity of its selfpresentation? 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.”

~ 34 ~


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 such thing, no self-existing thing-unto-itself. And does anything have a verifiable or truly independent existence apart from everything else? But before we stand toe-to-toe with the Primordial Is-ness of the Big Picture — which transcends all 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. The inherent insubstantiality, inseparability, and contingent nature of all that exists must be experimentally verified through our own direct experience — this is firsthand science, the hard-nosed science of spirituality. The “emptiness”that is found — and that we learn to make room for — is not a vacuity, an absence, a mere void, but is simply the Matrix and Cradle of Being, 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, all of this, while simultaneously ever remaining Itself — but I stray too far ahead of my topic, feeling the epiphanous birthstirrings of a poetry that only lives to celebrate the Unspeakable. Such song, however inarticulate or intoxicated, does not make “I” wrong, nor does it seek to obliterate “I” — recognizing that only spiritually ambitious egoity wants to get rid of ego — but rather permits “I” its cloud-dance, developmental dramatics, and evolutionary antics in the Infinite Playground of Being. Look for me where storms come uncaged Look for me where the sea carries shattered sky Look for me where cloudsilk weaves through your sigh Look, look for me where 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 its birthing-place, to feel and intuit our way toward the source of “I,” transports us into a Life-enhancing appreciation of change and interconnectedness that renders Death less alien, less threatening, less other.

~ 35 ~

Darkness Shining Wild The degree to which we’re present as Being is the degree to which we don’t fear Death. When there’s awareness of “I,” then who — or what — are we? Furthermore, when awareness becomes aware of itself, what then happens to “I”? When attention no longer goes primarily to objects (whether external or internal), and therefore is no longer significantly invested in sustaining the drama of subject and object, is what then still remains in the “position” of awareness us? We live in illusion and the appearance of things. There is a Reality. We are that reality. When we understand this, we will see that we are nothing. And being nothing, we are everything. That is all. — Kalu Rinpoche To openly face the transience of everything can be terrifying or maddening, but to avoid doing so is to sentence oneself to a less than full life. Without a deeply felt, ongoing awareness of impermanence, Death tends to remain distant, mirage-like, of no real concern. Someone famous dies — not passes away, but dies — and we, with more than a little help from the media, give an abundance of attention to that particular death, all but forgetting that we too are 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 we usually grant no more attention than a random line in a newspaper. A crucial but far from popular question in this regard is: How well prepared are we for our own death? What might we want to complete, to let go of, to more deeply 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 — any time — to us deserves a far more prominent seat in our consciousness, if only to awaken us more fully to our real condition (“Of all mindfulness meditations, that on death is supreme,” said the Buddha9). To truly prepare for our death is not an exercise in morbidity or despair, but rather a wholehearted entry into a fuller, more awakened and caring life, a life made more precious, vivid, and authentic by its ongoing intimacy with Death and 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, until we emerge more whole, more alive, more and more intimate both with what dies and with what does not die.

~ 36 ~


This pain you think of as yours Wells 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 warning That the instrument will not serve, that withdrawal threatens. Then the tune that is you will cease, the universe Be 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 more shallow, stagnant, and unreal our life tends to be, and the more subservient we become to the dualistic conventions that separate Life from Death. The instability and vagaries of the physical world alone are difficult enough to cope with, we might protest, so why grant attention to Death? Is not Life already insecure and challenging enough without the added burden of such an investigation? The voices of fear. The inherent insecurity of everyday life, however, ceases being such a problem when we bring to it the perspective of our own mortality. The journey into and through this insecurity leads to communion — and identification — with the essential core of Life. That is, the insecurity of “I” gets replaced by (or compassionately enfolded within) the security of Being. Not being this, not being that, but simply Be-ing. This shift to Being asks that we bring a transconceptual (an ungainly yet fitting adjective) perspective to our cognition — after all, how can the rational mind conceive of what subsumes and transcends it, without reducing “that” to just more intellectual fodder? Just thinking about a dilemma won’t really resolve it — except perhaps through demonstrating the folly of doing so — since thinking in of itself is inherently dilemmatic (every thought having its counter-thoughts, every argument its counter-arguments, and so on), unavoidably making only more of what it is attempting to resolve, generating more and more conceptual culs-de-sac for itself, trapping itself in a vortex of hermeneutic circles.

~ 37 ~

Darkness Shining Wild 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 to thoughts, 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’t have 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, as explanation steps aside for revelation. James Hillman talks of “searching for a way to account for the unknown in the still more unknown... Rather than define, I would compound, rather than resolve, I would confirm the enigma.”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 the unfathomable Mystery out of Which it arises — let us now return to the story of my near-Death experience and its aftermath. Look for me where storms come uncaged Look for me where the sea carries shattered sky Look for me where cloudsilk weaves through your sigh Look, look for me where joy and pain disappear into sun and rain, where we can only once again love ourselves sane Look for me where dewdrops make cathedrals out of grass Look for me where light fans through throbbing decay Look for me where silent riverpools dissolve your day Look, look for me where joy and pain disappear into sun and rain, where we can only once again love ourselves sane Look for me where dragonlizards await their prey Look for me where epic shields are gripped by laureled hand

~ 38 ~


Look for me where emerald valleys sway in orgasmic trance Look, look for me where joy and pain disappear into sun and rain, where we can only once again love ourselves sane Look for me where the land is wild with rhythmed Wonder Look for me where jagged shores moan with white thunder Look for me where the sea is ablaze with dawn Look, look for me where joy and pain disappear into sun and rain, where we can only once again love ourselves sane Look for me where the elements dance and die Look for me where forehead is an infinity of sky Look for me inside your looking Look, look for me where 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 of the closet in Western culture. His talks (most of which are available on tape) frequently include considerations of aging, dying, and death, all conveyed in his uniquely 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 that bringing awareness to one’s own death might have on one’s sense of identity. This may have something to do with the lack of attention psychotherapy tends to gives

~ 39 ~

Darkness Shining Wild to Death. Obviously, for the dialogue of psychotherapy to include Death, therapists need to be receptive to the death concerns, however subtle, of their clients. My becoming more focused on the topic of Death has had a very positive impact on those who work with me, helping them to to more openly and fully share their thoughts and feelings regarding Death. In so doing, other core issues inevitably emerge, the most central of which is usually that concerning identity. There is nothing like the openly felt consideration of Death to bring a nearly-immediate depth and fitting intensity to the question of “Who am I?” There have been a large number of studies done on death anxiety, which one researcher aptly criticizes as being “assembly line studies” (Kastenbaum, 1987). Meat for graduate students’ doctoral appetites. Most of these studies merely correlate death 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 ego development (as measured by Jane Loevinger’s Sentence Completion Test) would correlate negatively with death anxiety (again, as quantified through Templar’s scale). Contrary to his hypothesis, he found a positive correlation between ego development and death anxiety, which gives a bit more bite to the old saw that ignorance is bliss— those who “know” less have less to be anxious about, or so it seems. However, this apparently significant finding suffers from at least one major flaw: Like almost all death anxiety studies, it only measures “conscious” death anxiety. Unconscious (or repressed) death anxiety must also be taken into account. As Yalom (1980, p. 54) warns, “Very low death anxiety may reflect strong unconscious death anxiety.” 4. Kierkegaard, 1957, p. 55. It’s also important to consider the kind of fear that has as its object the absence of something. At its extreme, such fear may show up when the experience of no-self arises. Then, though the fear isn’t experienced as happening to a separative self, it nonetheless is still happening, as a biochemical reality. The sustaining thoughts of such transpersonal fear, though they are but thoughts, can be very seductive, especially when their corresponding sensations are those of fullblown terror or panic (see Segal, 1996). As distressing and disorienting as this can be, it has the benefit of deromanticizing the passage into no-self — most spiritual literature tends to overemphasize the bliss of self-transcendence, and to downplay its darker or less “spiritual” dimensions, especially with regard to fear. 5. “Ego” as a concept has negative connotations for many spiritual seekers, for whom it is simply an impediment, an obstacle in need of eradication. On the other hand, many psychologically oriented self-theorists view ego more neutrally, conceptualizing it as a process of knowing, thinking, and adapting (McAdams, 1994, p. 540). For example, 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 essence of the ego.”

~ 40 ~


As I define it, ego is not actually conscious of itself, regardless of its possible romanticizing of the idea of transcending itself (such spiritual ambition being but part of its self-concept). Ego could be said to be a cult of one (or a self-enclosed coalition of survival-oriented habits that automatically refers to itself as “I”). This does not mean that it is evil or in need of annihilation, but rather that it’s centered and unquestioningly governed by its own ideology (Masters, 1990, pp. 10-18). What is needed is not the elimination, but rather the illumination, of ego. As Epstein points out (1995, p. 98), what needs to be transcended in spiritual practice is not the whole ego, but rather its representational component, the essential groundlessness or insubstantiality of which simply needs to be recognized, through the skillful application of wakeful attention. Perhaps what matters most here is developing 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,” Nisargadatta says (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 that useful 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 mind than 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 the process of thinking can be observed, but can the mind be observed when it is without content, and if so, what then is observed? How does the content-free mind differ from pure space? Or from consciousness? If you are thinking about these questions, how do your thoughts about them differ from the thought or thoughts under examination? When you are dreaming, how do you experience your mind? The body you have in your dreams is a dream-body, but is the mind you have in your dreams a dream-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.

~ 41 ~

CHAPTER FOUR

days two to five

my locus of self splattered everywhere


It’s the morning after. I drive down to the beach, maybe five minutes from the house, feeling very shaky. The air is crisp. Sunlight’s spilling all over the hard-rippled sand upon which I am about to run. As I 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 this is eerily different. The legs going down the steps might as well be grasshopper limbs or hunks of writhing driftwood, ending in a tangle of color and contour near which the label “running shoes” flimsily hovers. I’m more scared than I want to admit. Maybe I shouldn’t have come alone. My body runs, and runs hard, but nothing changes, except that I begin hearing a lot of noise 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. I can’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 that they’ll have no trouble returning. I feel crazily helpless, my hopes for healing but fast fading phantoms 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 a gripping of vacant space. The next morning, feeling a bit better, a touch more solid, I drive with a friend to the local gym, looking forward to a weight workout. Nautilus equipment, my favorite. I feel good as I move from machine to machine, sensing no dread, not even mild worry — it really seems as if I’m moving through the aftermath of the 5-MeO. We drive back, I have lunch with Nancy, and then go to bed for a nap, really looking forward to sleeping — I have had hardly any sleep since my near-Death experience. I fall asleep easily, my body sinking with delicious ease into the mattress.

~ 44 ~


About half an hour later, I am abruptly awakened. My bed is shaking violently. My first thought 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 very hard, shaking uncontrollably, my whole body jerking around like a frantic marionette. Heart-pounding horror runs rampant through me, my sanity sucked into an accelerating vortex of sickening despair, my cries having no impact on the jaggedly pulsating chaos surging through me... The days following my 5-MeO experience were excruciatingly terrifying for me, obliterating my hopes for a quick recovery. Again and again, I would — usually without any discernible warning — find myself infested with intense dread. Sometimes I’d just hold still, trying (with minimal success) to generate the kind of roots that might help me weather the madly-sky’ed, earth-disembowelling storms raging within me. And sometimes I would uncontrollably shake and vibrate, like a puppet being violently jerked in many directions at once, mad with horror, eventually screaming out my shock and pain. Such unbridled expressions of my terror and helplessness often led to very deep crying, crying that seemed to go back to my infancy, and perhaps even my birth. Afterward, I would feel a melting purity and sweetness of heart, a deep gratitude for simply being alive, as if I had literally been born afresh. Then, a short time later, more terror and madness would suddenly gatecrash my fledgling sanity, quickly and brutally escalating, infusing me with an extremely convincing sense that I was about to enter irreversible madness. I spent each night at the house of some members of our community, because it was more private and soundproof than where I was living. Each night was much the same: I would awaken shortly before midnight after sleeping perhaps twenty or thirty minutes, feeling nightmarishly insane, my heart beating wildly and my body jerking and twitching. I’d then stumble my way to the living room. The amphitheater. Everyone would gather around me, showing a fluctuating mix of concern, care, and dismay, as what was possessing me pulled no punches in expressing itself. This was no therapeutic strategy, no orchestrated catharsis, but rather an unavoidable animation that I — with darkly sobering despair — witnessed myself participating in, even as densely bizarre dimensions of reality closed in on me, making everyday reality seem like the shallowest of plots. How much longer would it be, I wondered, before I was irreversibly lost?

~ 45 ~

Darkness Shining Wild Everything was defamiliarized, pervaded by a cold, sickening, yellowish-grey light. 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 as loaded with uncanniness as the objects themselves. Seeing this brought me no comfort whatsoever. I screamed, growled, crawled, writhed, feeling as though I was constructed of 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. I wasn’t positioned behind the scenes of “my” mad catharsis, somehow guiding it, 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 come earlier — did I feel myself returning to some semblance of basic sanity. Night after night, I barely slept, eventually getting so run down that I could not sanely function for very long at all. It seemed increasingly dangerous to just keep on “expressing it,” regardless of the advice of spiritual emergency “experts.”1 Yet I persisted. The primal fear that kept flooding me could not be channeled for very long into lesser, more manageable fears. Its arrival was as abrupt as it was electrifying — in a matter of seconds, my pulse rate would jump way up, and my familiarity with the world would very quickly disintegrate. Existence itself — bare and beyond meaning — filled me with apprehension and horror, and witnessing myself lodged in such a predicament (which seemed inescapable) only intensified my dread. The gates of self had been dynamited open, blasted beyond any conceivable repair, leaving “me” ricocheting in madly shapeshifting non-separation from everything else, including the primordial Reality of Which everything was obviously 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 everywhen present, but did not feel like Home. I felt almost incapable of being an “I,” a self that could at best provide “a center and singleness to the otherwise open-ended and centerless chaos of experience and possibilities.”2 Knowing that the undoing or transcendence of this self-possessed little center of subjectivity was of immense importance in many spiritual traditions brought me no solace. The artificial order created by identifying with the sensation of a discrete, indwelling “I” lay in bloody ruins

~ 46 ~


around me, but so too did the balance formerly generated by abiding in meditative witnessing. No glamorized freefalls in this abyss. Nothing held together, including my self-sense, both in personal and transpersonal contexts. No center. Everything, it seemed, was constellated around and emerging from everything else, at once fractured and reborn in a wildly evolving, impossibly alive abundance that shredded my mind. In short, nothing I did could withstand the sheer power and size of my terror, so that I, much of the time, was but confetti in a raging storm, everywhere and yet nowhere in particular. I mostly felt as if I were on the verge of being totally uprooted, on scales both individual and cosmic — everything appeared to be already shattered, and yet was simultaneously resuming shape again and ever again, in the omnipresent embrace of a seamless, infinitely plastic, self-replicating Horror. If I indeed was — as I vainly hoped a few short-lived times — in the throes of actual ego-death, I was nonetheless apparently stuck in the passageway (no longer, so to speak, in an amniotic universe), despite my times of emergence. Proferred notions from well-meaning others — shamanistic crisis, spiritual emergency, or just plain purification — were of no use to me. Conceptualizing did not, as it often had before, distance me from my feelings, but now only suffused them with a shiveringly creepy transpersonal paranoia. Never had I worked so hard at being present, and never could I remember having been so scared (I’d had plenty of harrowing nightmares in childhood, but they usually had not resurfaced during my waking hours). Following are my notes describing a typical night from that time, plus the events of the following morning: I’m dreaming that I am asleep in bed, trying to soften the jitteriness in my belly. After a while, 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, and then I realize that I’ve gone too far — there’s no turning back, no room even to express the energies that are possessing me. I’m way past the edge. I cannot scream, cannot cry, cannot move, cannot maintain any body awareness. I am spinning and falling and rising and bouncing at a terrifying speed, not as a body now, but as a very small, shapeless presence, trapped, trapped, trapped! No imagery. Only enormous, mouthless terror. I cannot breathe. I cannot breathe!

~ 47 ~

Darkness Shining Wild In the distance, I vaguely sense my physical body — it looks a bit like a vibrating stickman, rigidly limbed with fibrillating fingers, helplessly splayed-out near the head-end of the bed, as if stapled down.... I awaken from the dream, breathing very fast, shaking with terror. A little later, I am again dreaming, caught in the same uncontrollable speeding-up, the same eerie helplessness. I am in a wooden box. A tightly closed, lidless box that is getting smaller and smaller and smaller, accelerating down to an infinitely small size. The fear is finally so intense that it shatters the dream, and I am lying in bed drenched in sweat. I don’t feel very brave — 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!! It can’t be happening again! But it is. I’ve got to work with it, even though there’s very little of me left that has any trust — I’m so, so afraid of dying like this, of being swallowed up in what 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. So I scream and roar and let the primal dread snake and surge and pour through my body and mind, vibrating wildly, spasming and jolting, until eventually an even deeper crying emerges from me. Afterward, Nancy and I walk to the beach. I am like a newborn. I do not know what anything is. My programs for getting through my crisis are but the most tenuous of specters now. Death is everywhere, and I don’t mind. The ocean is not just water and shattered sunlight, but Being in the primordial raw, just like the dazzling gulls and sunbathing seals and passing humans. No longer do I need Eternity to make sense. I am, however, still on extremely shaky ground — into my motiveless opening also stream the shapings and lenses of a horizonless fear. Death, it seemed to me, was no escape at all, nor even the entry point into oblivion, but rather was the very process through which the whole cosmic drama could continue. The unrelenting, unboundaried Wonder and Horror and Mystery of it all — peering through me at me from all angles — made me tremble and want to totally disappear. It was so fucking inconceivably real, and I (and everything else) seemed so blatantly dreamlike, so conspicuously unreal — had I ever really existed? Had anything?

~ 48 ~


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 incapable of bearing their “answers.” In fact, observing the workings of my mind regarding just about any topic unsettled me, for it all led to the same terrifying groundlessness.3 There was no escape, but only degrees of distraction. For the first time in my life, I seriously contemplated suicide, even though I intuited that it would not bring me the relief I craved. The transhuman “understanding” insinuating its way through me was pointing to a destiny which “I” did not want, namely that of an eternal arising and vanishing on every scale possible, locked into inescapable — and ultimately unexplainable — unity with its animating force. Whether a lifetime lasted a day or a thousand billion years made no real difference: For me now, a housefly and a galaxy were both in precisely the same 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 a grippingly real, terribly alive knowingness of overwhelming import. What had seemed real now kept shedding its familiarity — its sense-making trappings — with a frequency and intensity that I could not bear. Again and again, I would “fall” into an annihilating terror, then start shaking so violently that I would explosively open, seeing in my shattering everything so, so throbbingly alive, so heartbreakingly vivid and transparent, at once hyperreal and dream-like. At such times, I saw and felt Death everywhere. My sense that Death was not “the end” did not at all comfort me, but only filled me with dread. The notions of eternal recurrence and everlasting Life were now hell to me, literally making me queasy. I could not even bear to look at the sky for very long, for it was no longer the sky. Seeing clouds, I did not at all register “clouds” — I had no idea what they were, but whatever they were effortlessly wrapped itself around my perceptionmaking capacity with deeply penetrating, emotionally electrifying power, stranding my mind in tongueless ravines. Everything vibrated with a sentient, unspeakable significance, permeated with darkly oscillating undertones of universal déjà vu. Even space itself was alive, or so it seemed. Life without end, yet saturated moment-to-moment with ending after ending after ending — a perpetual perishing providing fodder

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Darkness Shining Wild 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, ghostly enigma? I didn’t feel as though I was coming Home, but rather that I was awakening to the apparent fact that I was a “prisoner” forever and ever of a boundless, self-replicating, unthinkably sentient Wonder that, making infinite appearances, 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 as I 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 every appearance, every role, every manifestation, there was only Oneself. No one else. Nothing else. No mirrors, no separation, no alternative worlds, just unfathomable Mystery forever looking at Itself. And so on. This was a Freedom from which there was no freedom. If I had been completely insane, it would probably have been easier, for I would 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 I was 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 the third 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 any medication. He recommended to Nancy on the second occasion that when I felt really scared I should lay on my back, with sufficient strength applied on either side of 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 from appropriate for me, especially given how much heavy catharsis I had already been through. Unfortunately, the very rigidity that characterizes conventional medical views of so-called spiritual emergencies — i.e., that they are nothing more than psychological disorders, and so must be treated as such, especially with psychiatric drugs — also characterized Grof ’s approach, at least with me. Sometimes catharsis is 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 on the 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 and apparently lasting awakening to no-self, Suzanne Segal (1996, pp. 134-135), declares: “The mind’s contact with the unimaginable, ungraspable, unthinkable vastness sends it into a frenzy of terror, in which it insists that something must be horribly awry; otherwise, it argues, the terror would not be present. This is the winter of emptiness.”

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CHAPTER FIVE

near-death experiences revisited


Don’t let these accounts of the near-death experience, which are so inspiring, lull you into believing that all you have to do in order to dwell in such states of peace and 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 the Western world.1 One of the primary catalysts for this was the pioneering work of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross with the terminally ill. Her landmark book, On Death And Dying, published in 1970, brought much-needed attention to the actual process of dying, restoring some dignity and authenticity to the whole process, in stark contrast to the professionally hushed euphemisms of the funeral industry. Also having a potent impact on Death awareness was Raymond Moody’s book, Life After Life, published in 1975, which described astonishing similarities in the near-Death experiences (NDEs) of very different people. Not surprisingly, so-called out-of-the-body experiences (OOBEs), which often form an integral part of NDEs, were also finding an increasingly interested audience beyond the marginal occult fascination with so-called astral travel, 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 being dichotomous, are inseparably woven.”3 Noyes also later investigated the effects of having had a close encounter with Death, basing his study on 215 individuals who 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 a new sense of Death’s closeness. Also, 41 percent claimed that their fear of Death 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 bringing the topic of Death more into the foreground, had at least one major shortcoming: The NDE became glamorized. If having — or claiming to have had — an OOBE was on the curriculum for obtaining a psychic baccalaureate, 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 tendency of NDE investigation to not sufficiently take into account the egoic appropriation — and resulting distortion — of transpersonal elements of the 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. I recall attending a five-day residential “Death and Dying” group led by her in 1981, at which she not only tirelessly and compassionately facilitated cathartic work (so as to help participants “complete unfinished business”), but also spoke at length about the “indisputable” reality of OOBEs and the remarkable metamorphosis afforded by Death. Her central simile was that of being liberated like a butterfly (leaving its cocoon) at Death, an image immensely appealing to many, but not so appealing to others. For example, existential psychiatrist Irvin Yalom criticized such a notion of Death as being but “denialbased consolation,” saying that it demonstrated self-deception on KüblerRoss’s part.5 Maybe, but Yalom’s apparently tougher, apparently more existential — or theoretically more unflinching — position regarding Death may itself constitute a denial of the possible transpersonal or transformational dimensions of Death. That the validation of such dimensions eludes current scientific methodology does not disprove their existence.6 After all, how valid is a search for validity that is conducted only through the parameters of the rational mind? Kübler-Ross’s butterfly simile, which she used extensively to help explain Death to terminally ill children, originated from the time when as a young woman she 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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Darkness Shining Wild parents and loved ones never again to be seen, but also many tracings of butterflies. Some, like Yalom, might view this as simply signalling a desire to escape, to somehow “fly away,” but Kübler-Ross eventually interpreted it as an actual intuiting of the nature of Death. So do we have escape or transcendence here? I’d say both, and perhaps something else too — radical acceptance. When Death comes to children, they reportedly often display a wisdom far beyond their years, as if their evolution has been accelerated.7 In my group with Kübler-Ross, I found her convictions about Death and various related metaphysical concerns, to be marred by concretized literalism. Most of the group appeared to uncritically absorb all her assertions. Such an unquestioning hearing also seems to be present in many considerations of NDE phenomena, as though what has been reported must be literally so. Although I am not aligned with those who would explain away NDEs as mere 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, but of those who have nearly died (varying according to their degree of approximation to actual biological death). Tibetan Buddhist master Dilgo Khyentse says that the NDE “is a phenomenon that belongs to the natural bardo of this life,”8 rather than to the actual bardo of Death. (“Bardo” is Tibetan for “gap,” being an “interval of suspension”9 or a transitional reality in 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 be encapsulated 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 so fine if “I” is just egoity swathed in spirituality’s robes. Adi Da goes on to say that NDE phenomena are simply “signs that something is falling away rather than continuing,” but that when people return to everyday consciousness, “they concretize the phenomena they encountered, [claiming] that they are now more easeful because they survived death [my italics].”11 Of course, 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, literally a near-Death experience? Can we ever conclusively say — or prove — that we are far from Death? Whether “I” has ordinary or extraordinary experiences, it is still “I”. How comforting it can be to conceive of Death as a haven for “I” or as a benign gateway toward a better or more spiritual “I”! The story goes like this: We die, and we — if we have behaved properly — get resurrected, deposited, or reborn into a domain clearly preferable to our earthly home. Yet as naive as this may be, it contains, however distortedly, some sense of the timeless sublimity that we may sometimes intuit in moments of real openness; and that 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 to be, and remain, in that “place” without doing the preparatory work that would enable us to do so. Also, we’re likely to conceive of such a “place” in a dualistic context — as if it really is a somewhere for a somebody to go toward — forgetting that it is already the Ground of Nondual Being, to be recognized and embraced not by the “me” of egoity (whatever its spiritual credentials), but rather by the “me” that is, and fully recognizes itself to be, none other than Nondual Being making an appearance as a somebody. The “me” of egoity, necessary as it may be for conducting the business of everyday life, is inherently fearful, suffering not only from a case of mistaken identity, but also from existential separation anxiety (“Hell is other people,” said Sartre). In the presence of such fear, it’s quite understandable that we would seek compensatory comforts, projecting ourselves into the future with enough conviction to create the illusion that we will persist, persist, and persist some more. Given that Death spares no one, then Death anxiety ought to be right at the heart of psychopathology. The fact that it apparently isn’t is a testament to our capacity for distraction. We need to ask, and ask more than superficially: How much 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 our sense of presumed separateness? Lining our prison cell with spiritual books, making it more luxurious, or expanding it may ease us, but doing so does not free us, and in fact distracts us from recognizing and using the already-open

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Darkness Shining Wild cell door, the exit that becomes visible when Freedom becomes more important to us than security. One of the most common ways to assuage Death anxiety — and the bulk of such anxiety may be unconscious — is to conceive of ourselves as somebody special, which leads to strategies like compulsive heroism, exaggerated individualism, let’s-get-ahead aggression, and narcissism. In such practices fester more than a few overblown, dysfunctional cries of “I matter!” (Ironically, we do matter, every last one of us, but not as agents of self-glorifying egoity and its supporting cast.) The sense of being somebody special (a legend in our own mind!) helps immunize “I” against the bare facticity of its own mortality, here-and-now instability, and innate insubstantialness. Even when “I” dreams of transcending itself — as in those programs that have (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 into advanced transpersonal stages of development. In our craving to be somebody special — and don’t forget that we may find our specialness through being “nobody” — we bypass exploration of that very craving, committing far more of our passion to fulfilling our dreams than 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 the dream? The investigation of that apparent self cannot be conducted by “I,” but rather by that which relates not from “I” but to “I.” Such inquiry does 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 a truer sense of identity than that of dream-state egoity or waking-state egoity emerges.12 Our ultimate identity, which is never other than always already exactly here, awaits our undivided attention. As we decentralize our headquarters, no longer insisting that Life must revolve around our separative self-sense, we enter that which 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 for making as liberating as possible use of the after-Death state, does not portray a rosy picture of what allegedly occurs after Death, although it does make abundantly clear that true liberation (or a full Awakening to our real nature) is possible at many points during the after-Death state. This, however, is impossible if we remain self-involved, self-possessed, and self-contracted, committing ourselves 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, a difference between seeking union and recognizing it, just as there is a difference between recognizing union and being it.) But what about that which upsets or disgusts or frightens us? How eager are we to seek union with that? We may extol the virtues of “Oneness,” but just how 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 and Chögyam Trungpa’s translation of the Tibetan Book of the Dead:13 The fifty-eight blazing, blood-drinking wrathful deities will appear, transformed from the previous peaceful deities. But now they are not like they were before; this is the bardo of the wrathful deities, so one is overpowered by intense fear and it becomes more difficult to recognize. The mind has no self-control and feels faint and dizzy, but if there is a little recognition liberation is easy, because with the arising of overwhelming fear the mind has no time to be distracted, and so it concentrates one-pointedly. But is this really later? Is not Death here, now? So how do we respond to hellish conditions 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 we typically retreat or grab for the familiar, is it not likely that we would behave similarly 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 as being none other than our intrinsic nature,14 then there supposedly occurs a kind of psychogravitational process (perhaps catalyzed by the very energy that “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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Darkness Shining Wild being just projections of our mind, non-separate from the very consciousness that is aware of them. This is easier said than done, of course (an arguably parallel task being, during one’s sleep-dreams, to recognize everything therein as a dream, including the role one plays). In order to properly perceive such visions, states Trungpa, “The perceiver of the visions cannot have fundamental, centralized ego.”16 That is, one cannot be 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 it generally does not radically decentralize egoity — at least for very long — and may in fact even strengthen it, in sometimes very subtle ways. The certainty that Death is not the end may do more to fuel “I’s” craving for immortality than to spur an actual exploration of the nature of “I.” This has been unintentionally supported by the glowingly positive pictures conveyed by the majority of NDE reports. The relative rarity of negative NDE accounts — usually reported to be less than 10 percent17 — may reflect an actual scarcity of such experiences, but probably has more to do with an aversion 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 Maurice Rawlings, author of To Hell and Back). Also, it may be that the majority of those having NDEs do not journey far or long enough “into” their near-Death reality to actually have to encounter the potentially terrifying visions or implications suggested in sources as diverse as The Tibetan Book of the Dead and the Bible’s Book of Revelation. That is, they may have been returned to conventional reality before their honeymoon with “The Light” was over (the Wrathful Deities of Tibetan Buddhism apparently are 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 during the withdrawal of energy and attention from the body.”18 Whether such phenomena are heavenly or hellish is not as important as the actual lens through which 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 and related questions later; for now, let’s close this chapter with a quote from Sogyal Rinpoche: Wouldn’t it be tragic if this central message of the near-death experience — that life 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 of this. 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 a science conducted through intimacy with what is being studied. Trying to minimize researcher bias — as through a removed or sterilized “objectivity” — can itself be just another sort of bias, often leading to a distance from our subject, a distance that can easily obscure data obtainable only through intimacy with our subject. 7. Medical psychotherapist and grief expert Ellen Kalm describes (personal communication, 1997) a six year-old dying child once saying to her, “Just think of me as a book on loan from the library — it’s time for me to check back in.” Check out 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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Darkness Shining Wild 12. Thomas Hora (cited in Bugental, 1976, p. 303) zeroes in on the consequences of letting “I” assume the driver’s seat: “The tragic element of the human condition is rooted in that cognitive deficiency which underlies the desire of man to confirm his self as reality.” 13. Fremantle & Trungpa, pp. 134-135. According to Trungpa, the Wrathful Deities have as their main function the cutting of “the continuity of the self-preservation of the ego; that is their wrathful quality” (Fremantle & Trungpa, pp. 66-67). It’s important to note that such wrath has nothing to do with even the subtlest egobased ferocity; it is anger completely devoid of hatred. As such, it is a transegoic awakening force, inviting deep transformation. The fear (or shock) it inspires may be enormous, but such fear (or shock), in its very intensity, may be so immune to distraction 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 otherwise possible. 14. In speaking of NDEs, Stephen Levine asks (1997, p. 123): “How few returning were so well prepared, so familiar with their own great nature that they recognized their original face blazing there before them? How few knew to strip naked the clingings to ‘name and form’ and enter directly this unique opportunity?” If we’re used to splitting reality into subject and object, we’re probably not going to abandon such 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 from whatever else Being-ness is taking form as, whether heavenly or hellish, sublime or wretched, 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, out of nowhere and nothing, there arose color and movement, without any discernible shape. Then vague forms began appearing, diaphanous and softly swirling, taking on a bit more solidity. When I — in the form of alert, undivided attention — “entered” this nebular fluxing of color and shape-making, it almost immediately became more densely three-dimensional and vividly real in a conventionally sensory manner, literally taking on substance all around me, including as a dream-body closely 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 spiritual teachers, also views the conventional “waking state” as a hallucination (pp. 255, 370). With regard to his assertion that NDE phenomena are generated in the brain through the withdrawal of energy and attention from the body, it’s worth considering Rick Strassman’s theory that unusually high levels of DMT may be released from the pineal gland during a NDE (Strassman, 2001). 19. Sogyal Rinpoche, p. 333.

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CHAPTER SIX

navigating in the dark


By the sixth day, I knew that I could not continue. My days had become increasingly occupied by madness and terror, and my nights were unrelentingly hellish. It couldn’t get worse, I kept thinking. It mustn’t. But it did. Jackhammer panic, edgeless dread, accelerating helplessness — a sickeningly gripping triumvirate infiltrating and possessing me. I could not live like this much longer, and I didn’t want to die like this. Wherever I looked, insanity stared back at me. Yet still, seemingly at the last possible moment, my agony would again somehow mutate into an enormous, mind-shattering grief, a grief that gradually became suffused with awe and, finally, love. This was not a love in opposition to dread and insanity, but rather a love that could naturally hold and include such “horrors” within itself. This love was not the love of personal attraction or desire, even at its noblest, but rather the core feeling of primordial Being, overflowing with both compassion and openness, 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 its moorings, leaving me sinkingly adrift in a darkly alien, nauseatingly eerie surrogate of itself. Desperately, I would try to right myself, terrified that I would never return to basic sanity. The love and touch of those near me helped me greatly, aiding me in staying somewhat embodied (everything was subject to hallucinatory invasion except for my sense of touch). During the scariest times of each night, I would sometimes cling to Nancy like a drowning man to a fragment of a lifeline, more often than not convinced that I would not be able to last another minute. Such was my life — if you could call dangling over the edge of a precipice with nothing to hang onto except the rapidly fraying strands of a ghostly rope 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 were getting closer and closer together, and I was far from being able to sleep for very long. For most of the sixth morning, I worked very hard to find some balance, some semblance of basic sanity, but I only felt a vast quicksand of terror and madness pulling at me more and more insistently. I was slipping very fast, knowing that I was definitely in considerable danger. Late that morning, as I walked in jerky slow-motion through our sun-filled living room, crying and shaking and severely drained, my body bent into a prayer for help, I realized that I needed medical attention, and needed it very soon. I didn’t give a damn about sticking with any “alternative” strategy; I simply could not afford to go any further with what I’d been doing. Nancy agreed. 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. I curled in on myself in the backseat, frighteningly disoriented, saturated with an intense craving to literally get out of my skin. What was I doing in this metallic womb, torn from its moorings and hurtling through many-eyed streets, buildings like monstrous fungi? All seemed to be no more than interchangeable props in the same cosmic nightmare, all part of the same superplastic, self-replicating Chaos. My screams squatted in me like congealed dynamite, as I longed — and simultaneously recoiled from my longing — to be out of the car, expelled like some slimy neonatal monster onto bare earth. As hellishly surreal as the drive to the hospital was, walking into the hospital’s emergency room was even worse. Everyone there seemed to be embedded in — and animated by — an obscenely hallucinogenic, self-conscious protoplasmic oozefest, the fatly fibrillating pseudopods of which were already insinuating their way into me. I made a huge effort, and for a few moments the whole scene took on a slightly more status quo feeling. Humans moved to and fro like cartoon insectoids, busy with this and that, apparently unaware of the bizarre dreamreality in which they were snared. Or so it seemed to me. Puppets in grotesque cardboard dreams they were, dreaming they weren’t dreaming, moved by invisible strings that twanged violently through me, making me want to retch and scream my guts out.

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Darkness Shining Wild Waiting in the emergency room — all I could see was dying flesh going through the motions, with pastel automaticity — was the most difficult sitting of my life, and the most appropriately repressive. I paid extremely close attention to every breath I took, not straying from even the most minute of abdominal sensations generated by inhaling and exhaling. I did not dare let my attention go anywhere else. Still, I could feel what was going on in the rest of 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 delivered to the nearest psychiatric ward — I got up and ran outside, with Nancy and Marcelo close behind. The sky was no longer the sky, but still it gave me much 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 the hospital, desperately clutching and pressing myself as hard as I could to the earth, crying out my agony and madness. No other contact would do. If I could have, I would have smeared my whole body with dirt. After a few minutes, I felt a bit better, and returned to the emergency room, again concentrating with all of my will on my breathing. When I at last met the doctor — who knew Marcelo — I felt relieved. He was quite sympathetic to my state. I was surprisingly coherent, even calm, as I described what had happened to me, probably because I knew I was where I most needed to be. He gave me a thorough checking-over, eventually prescribing Ativan — also known as lorazepam — a benzodiazepine like Valium, to ease my shaking and, more importantly, to help me sleep. I’d never taken a tranquilizer in my life, and had maintained a righteous opposition to such drugs for a long time, but now I felt no resistance whatsoever to taking Ativan. However, what had been catalyzed in me from my NDE was not about to be sedated. I was not, so to speak, going to be let off the hook, the value of which I could not at the time even remotely appreciate. I began by taking Ativan shortly before bedtime, but would awaken horribly panicked within an 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 would swallow a milligram of Ativan and sit up for about half an hour in my bed, practising whatever meditative technique felt appropriate, until I could feel the Ativan taking effect.

~ 68 ~


Sometimes during these midnight sittings (with Nancy lying down beside me, usually asleep) there seemed to be only terror and the moment-to-moment awareness of it, without any intrusion or even implication of an “I” or operative indweller. At such times, it was even possible to respond to the terror as to a badly frightened child, with genuine caring. Sitting thus with dread 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 labored right at the edge of freaking out, finding just enough inner stability to make good use of the Ativan’s tranquilizing capacity. I did start getting enough sleep, 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 its crazily ballooning sideshows, I still feared it greatly. Among other things, I could not get used to its electrifying arrival. It appears that we only get used to shock or massive upheaval through some sort of anesthetization, an option I recoiled from, even though I often craving numbing. 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 same chutzpah and arrogance that I had so recklessly ridden into taking my second inhalation of 5-MeO. Not that I was particularly brave — I just wanted to get 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 aching body would provide enough distraction from whatever additional terror my abrupt withdrawal from Ativan might cause. As part of my healing/weaning strategy, the next day I swallowed, on the advice of a naturopath, a one-shot dose of homeopathic Stramonium (a species of Datura and a powerful hallucinogenic plant1), which was supposed to mimic and uproot my symptoms through a dosage too miniscule to do me any real harm. Such was the theory. But soon I felt even more scared than usual, full of an ominous jitteriness, flimsily countered by the hope that I might 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 Ativanless nights.

~ 69 ~

Darkness Shining Wild As hard as this was on me, it was also very hard on Nancy, who now had to endure not only my midnight terror and daytime dread and shakiness, but also my all-night-long struggles. I was determined to tough it out. My cold dulled me a bit, but not nearly enough to make my dread bearable. I barely slept. Moving through so much fear was, afterward, occasionally and momentarily exhilarating, but basically was just very exhausting, at best only a Pyrrhic victory. Again and again, I’d spontaneously be pulled into darkly primal feelings and states, particularly those associated with birth (and even prenatal existence), going in so far that I was often terrified that I would never emerge. “When someone is reliving the memory of birth,” says Stan Grof, “he or she often confronts 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 than just a replay of that event:3 Because the fetus is completely confined during the birth process and has no way of expressing the extreme emotions and sensations involved, the memory of the event remains psychologically undigested and unassimilated. Much of our later selfdefinition and our attitudes toward the world are heavily contaminated by this constant reminder of the vulnerability, inadequacy, and weakness that we experienced at birth. In a sense, we were born anatomically, but have not caught up with this fact emotionally. Consider the following dreams (which took place in mid-March), the second of which occurred about fifteen minutes after the first: I am in a room full of an extremely unpleasant light, a nauseating brilliance. I feel completely 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 some kind. No escape. I’m on a platform, writhing soundlessly at first, then screaming as if with a blanket over my mouth. Then I realize that I’m not alone. There are about 20 others in the room, apparently in the same situation as me. We’re all flopping around like fish out of water. My body seems almost formless, very soft. The horror intensifies. Finally, I notice that I’m on my back, knees drawn up, still screaming. I awaken, my heart pounding, and then fall back asleep, going right back into the same dream. I’m on my back, convulsing in extreme terror. Nighttime in a motherless hospital nursery?

~ 70 ~


During the birth-pervaded catharses of my Ativan fast (which happened about two weeks after the above dreams), I did not just cry and howl like a baby — I was a baby, regardless of the intrusions of my adult mind’s logical and distant commentary. Over and over, I endured what seemed to be fetal agonies (rooted in an overwhelmingly convincing sense of life-threatening physiological emergency), straining to breathe, to be de-compressed, moving in and out of blackout, with nothing to rescue me from my agony. At such times, I could not generate even the most rudimentary gestures of repression, except perhaps for the semi-paralysis and nervous enervation that periodically dulled the intensity of my experience. It’s more accurate to call this not repression, but a physiological survival reflex that may well have first emerged and been implemented during my birth. I later found out that my actual birth had been difficult; my mother, young and inexperienced and quite 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 bouncing between being very scared and very numb. My attention lacks its usual focus. I awaken Nancy 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 more numb than bothered. Everything seems ugly, grey, alien. After a while, she encourages me to express my fear. My efforts go nowhere — I feel paralyzed, toxically subdued. Dead zone. Then it’s clear: I need to stop numbing myself to my 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 a while for any sound to emerge — broken, infant-like crying. Lost, so, so lost. My mother’s fear, then ether-induced absence/collapse slamming through my whole body. She is drugged while my body, also drugged, is dragged out. Late the next morning — after somehow leading a therapy group — I go to my room and break down, going right into the previous night’s work, but more intensely. I’m way, way out of control, crying so hard that in a few minutes I start to simultaneously hyperventilate and suffocate. Extreme panic. Screaming follows, then freer crying and breathing and, finally, enormous waves of love.

~ 71 ~

Darkness Shining Wild There’s more. That night, just before 4am, I awaken feeling engulfed by a thick, almost gelatinous fear. No more, I can’t take any more, but here it is, eating me alive. I get out of bed feeling very exhausted, then stand up and start shaking. I make myself shake even harder, but feel no release, just madness and internal chaos. My breathing gets very loud and forceful. In the violent asylum that my mind has become, thoughts of terminal catastrophe run rampant. My head feels like it has a reptilian snout; my body, the form of which seems far from human, 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-raising laughter 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 severely damaged, insanity running wild within. There is a deep gash down my torso. Crazy laughter and low growls roll out of me. There’s a door at the far end of the room. It’s a long, very narrow room. The light in the doorway is nauseating to me. Nancy comes in, and I want her 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. I put on a pair of huge black headphones. I know that I’m almost dead. Nancy turns into a two-dimensional effigy of herself, losing almost all color; she’s wearing white, and her head is 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 body tiny. I’m in the birth canal, but with no feeling. I am drugged. Ten minutes pass and I don’t move. The feeling of no-feeling pervades me. At last, some writhing, some lateral movement of my hips. My head is too big to move. Now, more movement. A tiny bit of sound. Then I explode, crying hard. No tears. Nancy presses on the sides of my skull, then pulls me by the head toward her. Now I’m screaming; tears come, tears and more tears, welcome tears. I fall back asleep. My final dream before dawn is of doing a long run on the outer deck of an enormous ferry on some unknown sea; I’ve been running for a long time, and am running naked, feeling deep release in doing so. The kind of birth I had was considered normal at the time (1947), and even for several decades afterward. Drugs, forceps, supine subservient mother, doctors treating labor like an operation, newborn a rag doll held upside down and slapped and measured, then wrapped up in hospital blankets rather than in motherlove and skin-to-skin contact, with the lights turned on

~ 72 ~


too bright and the love too low. Malpractice in the raw. Only in turning away from and devaluing our own softness and vulnerability could we rationalize such barbarity and violence toward newborns. Only in being estranged from our own pain could we tolerate putting newborns in such pain, forgetting that 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 bad birthing practices can be arguably found in the apparently bizarre (and not uncommonly reported) phenomenon of alien (UFO) abduction.5 Typically, those who claim to be abductees describe the following sequence: (a) feeling strange bodily vibrations or paralysis, as a light of unusual brightness, seemingly otherworldly and often circularly shaped, approaches, into which one is helplessly drawn or sucked; (b) finding oneself in an enclosure that appears to contain technical equipment, surrounded by and at the complete mercy of aliens — usually humanoid, but also sometimes reptilian or insect-like — who generally relate to one with clinical detachment; and (c) being on something like an examining or treatment table, and subjected to various physical procedures, especially probings with sophisticated instruments, by the aliens. Many take these scenes literally (and others view them as archetypal visions arising in the collective unconscious, or as rites of passage akin to those that initiates in ancient cultures endured6), but to me they strongly suggest something much closer to home: a traumatic birth. Consider the following elements: (a) overly bright light, often somewhat circular at first (the vaginal “gate”), toward which one is literally pulled or drawn (not only through the expulsive force of contractions, but perhaps also 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’s mother — having maybe been prematurely severed); (c) being surrounded and stood over by by “non-mother,” emotionally-removed, masked and capped beings (of whom mostly only the eyes and forehead are seen — hence the myth of prominently-eyed aliens); (d) being treated like a piece of meat; and (e) being subjected to very painful or distressingly intrusive procedures (poked, stretched, probed, suctioned, circumcised, and so on). When the biological shock and imprint of a badly handled birth (or trauma of comparable impact from our early years) resurfaces later in life — as when we are under extreme stress or are unusually vulnerable — and is not

~ 73 ~

Darkness Shining Wild recognized as such, we tend to present it to ourselves not just in the context of its physiological and emotional dimensions, but also through whatever ideation seems 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 be allowed to obscure or supplant its essential themes, if we are to truly understand it.7 And there is more: (a) The reports of many research subjects’ accounts following DMT injection are quite similar to the reports of those claiming to be alien abductees;8 and (b) endogenous DMT may be released in high levels during birth, especially if the mother is unanaesthetized.9 So perhaps when the primal feeling-recall of a difficult birth strongly surfaces (without necessarily being recognized as such), significant DMT release might occur (possibly in conjunction with substances that deactivate the enzyme systems that ordinarily break down DMT), setting in motion the experiencing of nonordinary states of consciousness, like those characterizing alien abduction reports. Entrapment is a key theme in both alien abduction and traumatic birth. We may have the memory (but not necessarily the recall)10 of being stuck both before birth and after birth. In my case, the prepersonal implications of the feeling of “no-exit” spoke very loudly of prenatal and perinatal existence, as well as of infancy; the sounds coming from me were not just like babyhood cries, 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 only in some shrinkwrapped corner of suffocating compression, but also felt trapped “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 from which there was no freedom. Conventional waking reality had become for me the flimsiest of distractions from this omnipresent, self-perpetuating Wonder/Horror. There was no real getting away from It, no sufficiently potent distraction from It. These were not thoughts that arose in me, but sickeningly visceral intuitions that I desperately sought to sidestep. There was nowhere to go. Every where and every when was but an expression, a dizzyingly transparent expression, of It. There was

~ 74 ~


no exit from It, for all there was was It and Its infinite appearances, including whatever it was that was referring to itself as me. Devastatingly more relevant than anything in particular this was, far too real to 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 such a perspective had so thoroughly infiltrated and possessed me only reinforced my 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 left to endure my dread. The Datura experiment had failed, my cold was all but gone, I was severely sleep-deprived, and remained still very much in organismic shock. Reality was an infinite, self-fertilizing, endlessly plastic process to me, a boundless Wholeness populated by none other than Itself in countless disguises, each of which was pretending to be other than the Whole, while simultaneously pretending that it wasn’t pretending. Such realization was not liberation to me, 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 flow into the room — an immensely powerful, palpably evil presence, shapeless yet centered by an intake zone that pulled at me with enormous force. Whatever it was, I was in no condition to withstand it, and I knew right to my core that I must not let it in. Five minutes later, I swallowed an Ativan tablet. The amorphous presence, indescribably sinister, surrounded me, and I felt myself being suctioned — more compellingly than ever before — into an abyss of irreversible cosmic madness. A Black Hole of Being. This, however, was soon 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, I needed it. I needed to put the brakes on, and I also needed to stop viewing this as a failure. Once I’d enough past to have a future That was more then than Zen My history on the make, burying me in its news The old repossession blues

~ 75 ~

Darkness Shining Wild Doing time at Eternity’s threshold Just another spin of the wheel My cards before me, one-eyed kings wild Each step the peak, each fall the fuel Until the same old narcotic dreamweave Catches me in its thousand-eyed net Down the tubes I once again go Implanted in a speechless hello Into the heart of Now I am thrust Gleaming at the tip, sobbing at the rupture Ever-virgin frontiers flowering within and all around There’s no ending this, no mending this And here’s Something upstaging my mind And here’s Something no one can find My dying flesh lit by its blooms My every name devoured once again Until there’s nothing, nothing to reclaim Hello to the Stranger at the Gate Your face in one hand, mine in the other Erased Ready again

NOTES 1. Datura has had a long history, both in the Old and New World, as a medicine and sacred hallucinogen. It contains the same primary alkaloids as related plants (Belladonna, Henbane, and Mandrake), with scopalamine occurring in the greatest concentration. Native American tribes in Virginia used a toxic medicine known as Wysoccan in certain initiation rites, the active ingredient of which was thought to be Datura stramonium (Schultes & Hoffman, 1992, p. 111). “Youths were confined for long periods, given no other substance but the infusion or decoction [of Wysoccan], and they become stark, staring mad, in which raving condition they were kept eighteen or twenty days. During this ordeal, they ‘unlive their former lives’ 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 permanent insanity is a definite possibility. 2. Grof & Grof, 1990, p. 146.

~ 76 ~


3. Ibid., p. 149. 4. “Babies undergoing surgery have five times the stress response of adults undergoing similar surgery.... The reaction of babies to trauma is often more than they can bear. Part of the response is repressed then held in storage.... This excess is to be found in the reverberating circuits in the brain, where it causes continuing changes in biological functioning” (Janov, 1996, p. 40). The fetus too registers pain, after the seventh week. Maternal stress, for example, may have a profound impact on fetal development, perhaps altering neurotransmitter circuitry in irreversible ways. Only after the fifteenth week, when endorphin (endogenous painkillers) tracts become operational, are fetuses capable of repression. Prior to that, biochemical and 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. 3739). 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 (and related themes, like the genesis of alien-human hybrids) probably reached its broadest 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 water that’s been polluted with India Ink granules, and it’ll actually absorb the granules and store them in its vacuoles. Then put it in water that’s clean — that is, a healthy environment — and its vacuoles will move to the edge of the cell membrane (much like surfacing trauma in a healthy therapeutic setting) and discharge the ink granules. We have a remarkable capacity to isolate and encapsulate trauma (so that the rest of our system can adequately function) until we are in a sufficiently safe environment. It isn’t so much that the trauma isn’t markedly influential prior to surfacing as itself, but that its very containment, however neurotically managed, has permitted organismic and personal survival. We may have to “eat” it, we may have to swallow it, we may have to act as if it’s not tearing at our insides, but we don’t have to digest it. Our “vacuoles” are not literal containers — though they may have specific bodily locations — but rather the containing dimensions of inner psychophysiological 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 survival strategies.

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Darkness Shining Wild 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/or nonmaterial beings 9. Ibid., pp. 75-76. This is speculation, since no one has yet searched for DMT in newborn 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 to remember—at least intellectually — experiences from very early childhood. However, the amygdala, which is centrally implicated in emotional memory (and emotional arousal), appears to mature before the hippocampus (LeDoux, p. 205), which means that memory (especially emotional memory) can precede recall. This means that memories of, say, anoxia (or severe oxygen deprivation) during birth cannot be remembered just by thinking about them, but may be able to be brought to consciousness by openly facing and ultimately surrendering (with highly skilled guidance) to current feelings— like claustrophobia or high anxiety — that represent that experience of anoxia on an emotional-cognitive level rather than on a 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 form of, for example, paranoia or obsessive thinking. Here, cognition mostly serves to suppress emotional pain, diluting or avoiding its intensity by “translating” it into something more manageable (or apparently more manageable). Not surprisingly, moving from the translation back to the “original” is far more than a merely cognitive exercise. That so much of what we do — emotionally and otherwise — is automatically determined and processed disturbs our notions of ourselves as being in charge of our lives. Not only can emotional responses occur without the involvement of the higher processing systems of the brain, but even such “higher processing systems” may themselves be significantly predetermined by our prevailing — and largely submerged — conditioning. That is, unconscious memories may dictate much of our 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.” The apparent extinction of particular memories, says LeDoux (p. 250), “involves the cortical control over the amygdala’s output rather than a wiping clean of the amydala’s memory slate.”

~ 78 ~

CHAPTER SEVEN

into the heart of dread


At every moment, whatever happens now is for the best. It may appear painful and ugly, a suffering bitter and meaningless, yet considering the past and the future it 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 an operation 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 that automatically 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 an entity, 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 classified as, “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 its relationship to these objects, which in turn is based on the notion that they in fact exist apart from “I.” The apparent separation between “I” and its objects not 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

~ 80 ~


upon the throne of self, but its rule is shaky at best, with so much that is “notI” lurking within and without. When “I’s” headquarters are investigated, it is discovered that “I” has no fixed location, no fixed identity, no fingerprints, no more substance than a thought. “I” is then 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 and multiplicity (each personality being a community of differing voices and perspectives), but also its instability, its flimsiness, its object-dependency, its pretender-to-the-throne ambitions, and its unavoidably contingent nature. Like everything else, is it not constructed of other-than-itself elements? Like everything else, it cannot exist apart from its constituent elements, which themselves, being in exactly the same position, also cannot claim even the slightest degree of truly independent existence. This is a core realization in many spiritual practices, perhaps most clearly presented in Buddhist teachings. Nevertheless, when it is first applied — and not just intellectually! — to our self-sense, level upon level, it can sometimes be disorienting. My earlier experiences of investigating the nature of “I”, mostly during meditative practices dating back to the early 1970s, were all quite positive, in that they deepened and stabilized me. Paradoxically, recognizing the “no-self ” nature of self had only made me feel more at home, more intimate with what seemed to be “my” true identity. But now, I felt far, far from being at home; the “empty of inherent selves” universe in which I seemed to be embedded was the most alien of cradles, rocking in a cosmic nightmare. The very efforting of “I” to fortify its existence, aside from its ontological function in the development of our “somebody-ness,” seemed to me to be little more than a defence against realizing and — especially — feeling the obviousness and inescapability of our true nature. Craving constancy or permanence — as in “This is who I am” — overly attaches or fastens (hence, fasten-ation) us to whatever most reassuringly provides a sufficiently convincing sense of personal solidity or anchoring. Through such attachment, security takes on an exaggerated value, so that we get trapped in the very “safety” that we have sought, bought, or installed,

~ 81 ~

Darkness Shining Wild eluding Death by refusing to really live. As was described earlier, avoiding Death 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 outside influence and minimally receptive to inside dissension — are not just the bizarre groupings sensationalized by the media. Marriages may be cults of two, political parties cults of many, and so on. Whatever its scale, cultism reflects our need for immunity — or at least a substantial break — from the evershifting nature and uncertainties of Life. To belong to something that emanates a convincing aura of lasting solidity and certainty is understandably tempting (and may be necessary at certain times, as when our well-being requires the protection and insulation made possible by cultism’s encapsulating capacity). But it is not Freedom. Viewing the depths from a consensual bathysphere is not equivalent to being in the depths. However, egoity (even with all of its personalized trappings) is not something to be discarded — regardless of spiritual ambition’s ego-driven programs advocating ego annihilation — but rather to be illuminated, so that it might serve rather than obstruct or obscure Being. When our me-knot gives up the ghost There’s more room for us Room that makes all things frontier Don’t give fear your mind Don’t make a goal out of leaving it all behind Pass through the looking glass and stop Stop worrying about repeating the class The dream of getting somewhere Comes unraveled here As we rub the sleep out of our I’s And what then is left? What’s been here all along. The briefest of notes are we In the Song of songs Yet also are we its music Thus do we outlive ourselves

~ 82 ~


SPIRITUALITY AND FEAR Leaving the world navigated by “I” — and leaving not as a tourist with a return ticket and cosmic Mastercard — carries both promise and peril. The joy and peace of primordial Being may await us, but so too may a terror beyond terror. It not only depends on how prepared we are, but also on how we arrive “there.” In my case, biochemical dynamite, accompanied by seizures and near-fatal respiratory failure, had done the job, getting me “there” with violent efficiency. But having arrived, I was stuck, stalled at the intersection of madness and illumination, my steering wheel disappearing in my hands, my vehicle afire with wonderstruck dread. When the night pulled back the bedcovers And my breath was not mine And I knew, knew the Holy Design And the Dark stormed my room so dreadfully bright And my spine was a stem so green and so white I did, I did give the night my hand And let it lead me through a wild of shadowland

In attempting to ensure that we are always capable of distraction from primal fear — including through busying ourselves “fixing” lesser fears — we run the risk of marooning ourselves not only from every other feeling of a similar depth or intensity, but also from Being. Remaining in the shallows of fear keeps 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, at least as a physiological phenomenon, may still even be there, though without its usual implications. As long as we’re preoccupied with being separate, self-contained “I’s,” we’ll continue to feel threatened by whatever could disrupt, evacuate, or erase our apparent identity. Even at its noblest, “I” remains fundamentally fearful and fear-driven, plagued by the untraversable gap between it and its idealization of itself. There is no information that can truly liberate us from fear, “because our whole involvement with information and knowledge is secondary to fear itself.”4

~ 83 ~

Darkness Shining Wild Also, contrary to most models of spiritual development, fear may not decrease as we “progress” spiritually. Deeper stages of meditative practice, even when stably established, may in fact be followed by intensely hellish or regressive “descents” that are not mapped into developmental models of spiritual maturation. For example, a seasoned Vipassana teacher5 describes how, after years of having deep, sometimes transcendent meditative experiences, she began experiencing the apparent opposite, as her positive sense of ceasing to identify with ego would be followed by a negative disappearing of self, an agonizing sense of overwhelming and inexplicable annihilation. From this “black hole” emerged preverbal memories of heavy trauma and abuse, which necessitated several years of intensive psychotherapeutic work, and a sobering reevaluation of the usefulness and meaning of “ascent” and “descent” metaphors in spiritual cartography. 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 presence of 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 more threatening than home-like, and understandably so, given the dualistic perspective through which it generally is perceived. We sense that something “out there” or alien (be it external or internal) is happening to “us,” losing ourselves in the dialectic between the two. But what is wrong with dread? Must we shun, drug, sanitize, and otherwise avoid it? Must we spurn intimacy with our dread? Must we assign it leper status among our clan of emotional states? The distance between us and our dread is inversely proportional to our depth of compassion — and what is spiritual practice in the crunch, other than the art of keeping our heart open in hell?

~ 84 ~


It can be so easy to exploit the attributes of our thinking mind, using its considerable reasoning and contextualizing powers to distance ourselves from the very pain or fear that we need to openly feel, embrace, and eventually integrate. It is, of course, very tempting (and not necessarily inappropriate for a 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 the purest forms of love. These states — dread, ecstasy, love (and grief, too, as we shall see) — can be viewed as inhabiting different positions along a continuum of feeling stretching between extreme recoil at one end and seemingly boundless expansion or openness at the other end. So, we might ask, as an initial orienting question, what happens to “I” here? Is it more intact or tenured at the dread-housing end of our continuum? Logic would probably say yes — after all, the greater the contractedness, the greater the density, and therefore the stronger or more tightly perimetered the sensation of “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 in the extremes of “going to pieces”), or even obliterated (as in the Vipassana teacher’s “black hole” sense of personal annihilation). Recognizing and coming to terms with the intrinsic groundlessness (or nothing-ness) of “I” is not necessarily a benign process.6 Knowledge may be able to distract us from our existential helplessness, but cannot save us from it. Facts are facts, but they’re not necessarily the Truth. We cannot truly know ourselves if we insist on dwelling only in the realms of knowledge, since the Truth of what we fundamentally are transcends all explanations and descriptions, existing beyond the reach of every strategy to corral it or reduce it to a reproducible assembly of mere facticity. Perhaps only in deeply realizing the limitations of knowledge (including the position of being a “knower”), can we cease making a problem or existential crisis out of “not-knowing” — after all, is clinging to the known really the most appropriate response to the Unknowable? — and begin adapting to the

~ 85 ~

Darkness Shining Wild perspective of nondual awareness. “The true knowledge of the Self,” asserts Nisargadatta, “is not a knowledge.”7 About the Nondual: It is not an object. It is not a something. It cannot be thought about, nor even witnessed — it is the source, substance, and reality of everything, 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 all description, including this. The inherent inseparability and “oneness” of all that exists is not a concept, nor even an experience, but an obviousness beyond understanding, ultimately recognized not only to always already exist, but also to be none other than the consciousness that “knows” it.8 At the frontier preceding the Nondual, where attention becomes less and less focused upon (or absorbed in) objects and more and more focused upon (or surrendered into) its Source, language is often speechless, leaving only the unspeakable Poetry of Being, the ever-eloquent Silence of Deathless Mystery. Here, says Dzogchen master Nyoshul Khenpo, “there is nothing to look forward to, and nothing to fall back into.”9 However, as wonderful as this may sound, it may sometimes be, at least initially, 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 and thus 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 — mostly through its increased tension and knottedness — but is also infused with a sense 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 of our world and of the identity through which we attempt to maintain the illusory security of that world, dread can not only scare us scriptless, but can also — if well used — serve our transition from egoically governed selfhood to Being-centered selfhood. As such, it is the dragon guarding the fabled treasure, the penumbral beastgod protecting the sacred threshold, the amorphous yet suffocatingly palpable

~ 86 ~


demon we must wrestle (or dance) with until it is no longer an “it,” but only reclaimed 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 us already threatened by problems large and small, chronically afraid (if only in some hermetic carrel of concern), addicted to distracting itself as much as it can from its innate crampedness and fear, doing whatever it can to reel in some security? “We fear what has already irrrevocably happened — separation from the greater whole — and yet we also come to fear the loss....of this precious individuality.”11 Having lost (or misplaced) our sense of belonging in the larger or ultimate sense, we settle for surrogates of it, the inevitable dissatisfaction of which we all too infrequently use to realign ourselves with the greater whole. Regardless of its appearances to the contrary, egoity is little more than personified separation trauma, made bearable by its compensatory addictions and capacity for psychoemotional numbing and dissociation. A cult of one. Monotheism in narcissistic cameo. To move into and through fear can radically undermine our assumed identity, but what “I” would ever knowingly choose this? (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 are very likely already far beyond where we would have willingly taken ourselves, already “deposited” in the continuum of feeling that, stretching between terror and 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, in fact, actually need to do so for a while, until we are ripe for another encounter of the dreaded kind. When dread is met with non-aversion and is permitted timely and fittingly uninhibited expression — emotional and otherwise — in conducive settings, its structuring weakens, so that it begins to be stretched beyond itself, becoming other than dread. Most of the time, this leads to an increasingly heartfelt sense of compassion and connectedness, through which we’re brought into intimate contact with the collective “us” of humanity and, ultimately, all that is.

~ 87 ~

Darkness Shining Wild At the time of your death, too, if you think only of Chenrezi [the Buddha of compassion in Tibetan Buddhism] you will have nothing to fear from the terrifying apparitions of the bardo. But if you are overwhelmed by fear, hesitating between running 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 a feeling of loss so immense and deep that it can, eventually, embrace other losses — losses that belong to all of us — thereby making deeply significant links not only across space, but also through time. Thus do we move from the interiorized community of voices that make up “I” to the community at large, widening the circle of our reach, our love, our caring. In such an intensity of grief, however agonizing it might be, there usually emerges some sense of a sobering joy, the joy of simply being — not being this, 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 painful feeling, but rather is the natural joy of simply existing, equally at home with the high and the low, unable to be other than compassionate toward all. Such is the prevailing condition of the heart that, though already broken, is nonetheless sufficiently open to have room for all that we are, however dark or lowly: “In deep disillusionment, the heart’s broken in the same way that a stream rushing down through a mountainside forest is broken — it’s still cohesive spiritually, still unified in essence, its elemental dying only strengthening and affirming its fundamental aliveness, its rough-and-tumble course only furthering its dynamic yet utterly vulnerable surrender.”12 Where reactive sorrow contracts and isolates us, unimpeded grief expands and 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 healing for which we ache. As Stephen Levine says, “It’s the pain that tears open the heart 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 from impermanence but opens to it as a way of tasting each moment in its precious essence.” A new kindness. To touch our dread with kindness — difficult, yes, perhaps “unnatural,” yes, but nevertheless possible, and so, so needed.

~ 88 ~


As long as our desire to continue distracting ourselves from our suffering is stronger, 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 immortality aspirations of “I”). Grief can be as spacious as it is earthy, existing as a loss-feeling unpolluted by drama, a deeply personal yet also significantly transcendent sadness pervaded by a more-than-intellectual recognition of the inevitable passing of all that arises. As such, grief provides not only a bridge between the personal and transpersonal (with neither having a “higher” status than the other), but also between dread and love. Every loss must be felt right to the core or else there’s a greater loss Sadness must leave its mind to become grief or else it’ll settle for repressive relief So let the pain sweep through, and the truer ache And especially the bare need the love beyond love the pure heartbreak

Martin Heidegger, in speaking of the repression of dread, says that “an experience of Being as something ‘other’ than everything that ‘is’ comes to us in 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 the abyss.”14 In such “hearing,” our usual sense of familiarity may be all but completely eviscerated, and our understanding rendered bereft of any even remotely stable frame of reference. I am reminded here of a friend once saying that to be 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 most mysterious of all possibilities: the experience of Being.”15

~ 89 ~

Darkness Shining Wild When the night pulled back the bedcovers And I sat knees-up ashaking Seeking a sign sublime My mind looking for the time My body athrob with an Eternal rhyme The windows, the windows did bulge with something unborn Something I couldn’t name Something I could not contain O When the night pulled back the bedcovers And inside and outside were lovers And exhale was inhale I did cry out for having so much and for wanting more And for having done all this before O When the night pulled back the bedcovers And my breath was not mine And I knew, knew the Holy Design And the Dark stormed my room so strangely bright And my spine was a stem so green and so, so white I did, I did give the night my hand And let it lead me through a wild of shadowland And still I await the great night shining wild The great night so ripe with child An undreaming love inviting me to shed my fear Inviting me to give the night my hand Until I cannot help but look through the eyes Of every face of every shadowland O Surrounded by womb was I The walls all aquiver My mind no longer looking for the time My body athrob with an Eternal rhyme New growth running wild and velvet through my room The windows, the windows a shattering of light And my whole being did shiver and quake Until my frame of mind did break And I was in body what I was in spirit The great night shining wild The great night forever full of child

~ 90 ~


NOTES 1. When we say or think “I,” where do we sense it in our body? Where does the sensation of “I” primarily register? From where does it seem to arise? I’m not talking about the sensation of “being-ness” — which we may sense in many different somatic locales (or none at all) — but about the sensation of egoity. Explore the apparent location of “I,” and a crucial, perhaps unnerving discovery will start to become apparent: “I” does not possess innate existence. And yet here it is again! The usual us is just a thought away. One moment of nonmindful or non-attentive attention, and “I” is resurrected, along with the sense of familiarity that serves as a kind of nutrient dish and hedge for it. 2. For millennia, plenty of spiritual practitioners have recognized (rather than merely believed in) the illusory nature of “I” and its gurucentric habits (“I” tends to act as the guru of what is constellated around it, even to the point of deifying itself). Contemporary psychology, to some degree, also recognizes the illusory — or at least significantly insubstantial — nature of “I,” although more with regard to theory rather than actual practice. Nevertheless, “I” is not about to be put out of business. 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 Stephen Levine somewhere says, to be present at its own funeral. Anything to get away from the reality of the body. The body dies, and “I,” being obsessed with its own continuation, 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 shocking breaks with conventional reality, as epitomized by so-called spiritual emergencies (Grof & Grof, 1990). Writer Naomi Steinfeld (1986, pp. 22-27) describes an extremely harrowing and disorienting “alternative” reality she once endured (and which ended when she, already terrified, was strapped down in a hospital and injected with Thorazine). At one point during her otherworldly crisis, she said, “I know everything, 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 it intimations of the Nondual, which are unavoidably paradoxical, intermix with separate-self concerns.) Knowledge is of little use when one’s consensual reality is blown away. See also Suzanne Segal’s “Collision with The Infinite” (1996). One

~ 91 ~

Darkness Shining Wild day she says she stepped onto a bus and abruptly found herself with no sense of self. It was apparently a permanent loss, generating a profoundly disorienting fearfulness 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 apart from whatever may be arising, be such manifestation gross or subtle, ephemeral or long-lasting. Nothing gets excluded, yet everything is transcended. No dissociation from phenomena, no strategic withdrawal from the raw material of life, just an imagination-transcending “showing up” as all form, forever and everywhere. What perhaps speaks most eloquently and precisely here is silence — not just the absence of sound, but the primordial chant of Eternity, the presence of which, when felt and unobstructedly “heard,” may catalyze a recognition beyond any translation: “The true nature of things itself is mahashunyata, the great openness or emptiness, the ultimate relativity free from independent, individual existent entities— unborn, undying, immutable, inconceivable, beyond conceptualization. It is the absolute truth. It can never fall apart. It is beyond time and space. It is not a thing, an object of knowledge, an object of the intellect. It is the unfathomable openness of absolute reality, shining radiantly” (Nyoshul Khenpo, 1995, p. 105). “The Self is ever-present.... People want to see the Self as something new. But it is eternal and remains the same all along. It is not light, not darkness. It is only as 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.

~ 92 ~

CHAPTER EIGHT

gates dynamited beyond repair


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, and Darkness shows up, effortlessly pouring into every corner and would-be getaway, until anxiety dishes out skewered meaning not only to the front rows, all the wind-up factfeeders and slumberseeders, but also to all of the no-shows who are out redecorating their prisons, installing tastefully recessed shelves for sentences that wouldn’t be seen in public with ones like this. Darkness lifts a veil, an ebonized portcullis densely creaking, and a lush Spring flowers forth, budding and blossoming with deliciously pulsing succulence, belting out a chorus of wantonly ecstatic greens, layer upon swooning layer, everything moistly aquiver, upstart growth sweetly curling and nakedly ashiver, moaning so deep with rippling emerald recess and protrusion, all eloquently asway in the meandering 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 enormous flabby egg, rottingly speckled and oozing, splitting and splattering open, its thickly

~ 94 ~


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, densifies us, contracts and solidifies us, burying us alive, giving us ground to grow up from, 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 increasingly labyrinthian, the inhabitants of which — human and otherwise — are only rendered threatening or nightmarish by our ongoing refusal to recognize and accept them as part of us. Layered over this are our mindmade darknesses, our egoic mazes and convoluted have-more crazes, prowled by our overfed appetites. These psychostructural traps, these celluloid misrepresentations of Darkness, require careful entry, needing more than heroic swordplay or nobility of intention, because their inmates are typically violently opposed to nonresidents (outsiders and insiders), however much they might romanticize breakouts and outlaws. Darkness tends to be overassociated with Death, Light with Life. The ultimate double date. Imagine our Cosmic Foursome — and we know which couple is in the backseat, making out in the shadows — looking for an auspicious parking spot at the omnipresent Divine Drive-In, checking out the featured drama (“God Only Knows”), steaming up the windows with Big Bang flirting, until suddenly the fog clears, the projector blows its circuits, the observer laughs its infinite heads off, and the accelerator moans with steely accuracy, the parking lot now gone, the highway and everyway that is wildly ribboning outfront like slaloming mercury now clearly recognized to have been created by 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-centered fiction making self-serving news out of far too much, surrounding yourself with evidence that you do indeed exist.

~ 95 ~

Darkness Shining Wild Do not seek the homogenization of Light and Darkness. Instead, permit them interplay and intimacy. Allow yourself to be honed, refined, alerted, remade by their immense attraction for each other. Their loveplay is both your heartland and your deathdance. Allow their interaction to unravel and remake you. Know them as the primal threads of all form, as well as the loom of the Beloved. Give Darkness its full due, letting it lead you through every face of every shadowland, until it is no longer other. Bent double amidst Its own inevitable rubble, Darkness lifts yet another veil, and an ancient sarcophagus is dragged into the sunlight and ceremoniously unlidded. With extreme yet supremely elegant slowness its lone inhabitant sits up, appearing to 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 wellmeaning 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 really a something make unexplainable sense of all this for us, even as we paint ourself into corner after corner? The Secret is out, but we are in, constellated around our interiorized 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 of maddening heat and equally maddening light. I was in agony and could not imagine 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 as being able to face the Real without any buffers, and now, sickeningly ubiquitous now, I was cowering before it like a trembling animal, far from wanting to face 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 a shaping, a play upon, a transparent crystallization or expression of the one and only One. Now, and forever now. This was not liberation to me, but pure hell.

~ 96 ~


Any appearance, any manifestation, was possible. Conceiving of making an appearance as this, that, or the other, indeed as everything — since there clearly was no time limit — absolutely terrified me. My mind, jammed with dark intimations of Eternity, raced through my body like a barbed-wire lunatic on amphetamines, screaming for release. Death could not end this. In fact, Death only 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 eludes me) kept insinuating its way through me, a one-liner that once had interested me primarily because of its structure, but that now made me reel: “All there is is 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 of my will — what I was afraid of, and what I “normally” took myself to be was but a diaphanous phantom, floating raggedly and quite insignificantly near 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 whole cosmos, would unfold before me with nauseating intensity, making a mockery out of human achievement and evolution, and then, worse of all, it — the entire fucking universe — would somehow start up again, then once more extinguish itself, over and over and over, ad infinitum. No beginning, no end. The entire universe less than a breath in the eternal, self-aware, boundless continuum 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 such realization.1 An infinite, ever-evolving succession of endless forms. I wasn’t only part of this; I also was it. And, furthermore, when had I not been it? All I could see was the Real, absolutely out of control, playing peekaboo with Its perpetually perishing appearances, before which my mind writhed drooling and mute. Such intimations often made me feel as if I’d been slammed with a wrecking ball, my pulverized remains crawling with what seemed to be irreversible

~ 97 ~

Darkness Shining Wild madness. A one-way ticket to psychosis. Gates dynamited beyond repair, the edge of my world somewhere back there, out of reach. But was not all but edgeless Mystery, impregnated with a significance beyond any conceivable meaning, simultaneously devouring and birthing Itself on unimaginable scales, disguised only by our obsessive self-involvement, our compulsively ordered fencing of things? Was not all a centerless, infinite, self-fertilizing, transcendental Wonder beyond wonder, existing as the heartbeat and consciousness and substance and all of everything? A horizonless Wilderness of Being animating us and everything else? A Wonder beyond any conceivable framing. This is not to say that I knew what It was; knowing that It, and It alone, was was more than enough for me. I saw and felt Death everywhere, but was far more troubled by my insanity-stained sense of deathlessness. I remember reading a letter from a troubled community member. It was simply 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 it absolutely literally the very instant I saw it, shifting from relative calm to pure dread in a second or two. Lost forever — this appeared to be what was really happening 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 was animating the whole damned cosmic show was itself irreversibly out of control? What if the madness that was possessing me was not madness? These and related questions savagely ricocheted in my mind, their implications metastasizing 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 infinitesimal speck and as the all-pervading presence of unfathomable Is-ness. Sometimes I was locatable and sometimes unlocatable — being everywhere meant being nowhere 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 frying on the asphalt, bloody eyeballs reining me in. My eyes. Insects splatting against my windshield, tiny greenish-yellow Rorschachs, in exactly the same position as me.

~ 98 ~


Like all that was, I was nothing, and yet I was also everything — this was not a paradox to me, but rather a terrifying knowingness from which I struggled to distance myself. I desperately wanted this to be just a hallucination, a PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) hangover, but was it? Any evaluative criteria that 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 black hole hell-realms — and the everything that I was was devoid of any intrinsic existence, any definitive substantiality, making more than sense but less than a self. So what the hell was I doing here? And where exactly was “here”? This bluegreen, glistening marble — this achingly beautiful planet — spinning through black space, with its ever so fine film of teeming life-forms, a rich but momentary brilliance, already dying, the Sun’s upcoming supernova but a moment away... My pulse would all of a sudden jump and buck, my mind would paranoically race 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 all the time. During terror episodes, I’d sometimes be able to stop making a problem out of the me who was making a problem out of my condition, and would then often feel profoundly and simply at home with whatever was happening, experiencing a quality of acceptance that made possible an intimacy with even the darkest or most sordid aspects of Life. Going toward, rather than turning away from, what I “normally” would avoid 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 all mirrors from waist height to ceiling. The air is grey, saggy, subtly viscous. A young boy, 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 such extreme agony and despair. We circle within the room once, with me on my knees, half-floating.

~ 99 ~

Darkness Shining Wild Soon, my pleas sound hollow to me, and I feel some of the strength I had earlier in the dream when, after starting to hyperventilate, I’d forced my dreambody to stop breathing for a while in 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 the effects of 5-MeO. People are filming him. He runs out of the room, apparently to go to the bathroom, and I fear that he is going to commit suicide there. But he emerges, crying very hard, obviously deeply disoriented. Now I’m walking in bright sunshine with Nancy. I feel loose and easy, but soon feel a tremendous pull to turn around, and do so — the young man is staring at us, his eyes literally 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 myself in the heart one night — but never was really an option. Taking my own life would provide no real relief, it seemed to me, but would only launch my prevailing habits elsewhere (perhaps into another round of incarnation), still seeded with the very same fear that so seductively and chillingly whispered to me of suicide. In this there was no significant sense of personal reincarnation, no convincing belief in a series of lives lived by some self-contained, curriculum-providing entity or soul, but only a hypervivid intuition of the Absolute making countless appearances, human and otherwise, on every level possible. (Tibetan Buddhist teachers point to something like this when they say that at one time or another every being on Earth has been our parent.) I remember being stunned when, in Grade Five, I saw written across the classroom blackboard: Energy cannot be created nor destroyed. Now the blackboard was my sky, already aflame, already gone yet still here, its physics lesson a living reality to me rather than just a concept. In the dream just described, I was both the sufferer and the witness of that suffering. I desperately wanted to be killed — anything to get away from my agony — but only when I stood apart from that tortured me was I able to go toward him. Assuming the position of witness can provide considerable detachment from pain. This is generally useful, especially in its allowing a larger, more lucid perspective to emerge, but not so useful when it overseparates or strands us

~ 100 ~


from our pain. Yes, healthy detachment is needed, but so too is a distancedissolving encounter with the object of our detachment. Separation and connection — 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 for some kind of immunity, but rather are looking inside our looking and touching our pain with compassion, not because it’s the right thing to do, but because it’s the only thing to do. Consider the following dream, which I had about a year and a half after my NDE: 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 some pavement. Suddenly I’m pulled backward and downward at a tremendous speed, my body almost totally vanishing during my “flight.” I land in an underground, poorly lit room. Its walls are all floor-to-ceiling mirrors, all equally sized and all bizarrely distorting my reflection. Though fairly large, the room feels quite compressed. I’m in the middle, afraid but not panicked. Slowly, I walk toward one wall, seeing all sorts of mirrored “fragments” of myself. A darkly eerie, heavy feeling saturates the room. Everything is sickeningly greyish. I gaze into my reflection’s eyes, seeing less of the hallucinatory than I expected. Then I walk into and through the mirror, finding myself in an even more compressive space. It’s extremely uncomfortable; if I wasn’t still aware that it was a dream, I would surely escape as quickly as possible. No exit in sight, though — just claustrophobic greys, amorphous and hideously alive. I keep moving, as if through jelly — fatly quivering, ever denser protoplasm — existing both 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, aching for release. As the observer, I see my eyes turned up, my hands in prayer position in front of 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-up patient. 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 of luminosity, often dissolving in their radiance. Sometimes, though, I have gone

~ 101 ~

Darkness Shining Wild in the “opposite” direction, going deep into the Earth, into mineral and dense dark. In the preceding dream, I’m being pulled below the surface, deposited in much the same environment as in the 5-MeO dream in which I was begging to be killed. Let’s permit the image of being in the grey, underground room to unfold itself, to “speak”: When underground, I don’t appear to myself as I usually am. When I see myself reflected 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 below are the same underground. I am mirrored from all around when I am below the surface. My surface appearance is broken into many components when I am below the surface. 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 see particular reflections.When I no longer occupy the center, I can pass through what I am looking at. Stepping through one self-image puts me behind them all, and this happens when I am below the surface, and am willing to “face”myself, however unpleasant that might be. When I remain in the center, when I am the center, I am encircled by what I fear. (Note: I have no explanatory summary for all of the above — its insights are intrinsic to its totality as an image. It speaks not of one meaning for me, but of many [from prenatal to transpersonal], each of which could be mined for more significance.) Once “I” am through the mirror, things get worse — but did I not ask to be taken where I most needed to go? Only when I am “decentralized,” down on my knees, no longer fighting my helplessness, does “release” occur. I haven’t so much given up — submission being but a kind of collapse — as surrendered (surrender being more expansion than collapse), opening to a sacrifice of self that is anathema to the usual me.

~ 102 ~


In the sacrifice of that self — which is more of a dethroning than a literal sacrifice or dissolution — Being shines through. And Being — the eternal “Is” of Energy — cannot be created nor destroyed. To live as Being is to live as the Deathless. Passing through the appearances of “I,” we reappear not as a being, but as Being, which paradoxically may still leave us in what looks very much like a separate, discrete existence. And why not? Does Being feel threatened by any of its appearances and the dramatics of their interactions? Is the sky threatened or diminished in the slightest by its clouds? When a building falls apart, is the space that it occupied ruined? Does the apparent individuation of Being — soul-making in the raw — do anything to Being? Does anything happen to Being when its forms change? Being simply is. Whatever and whenever the appearance, it’s still just the same old yet evernew hyperbole-transcending Show. The One showing up as the Many, the Many showing up as the One, while that which refers to itself as us wanders in dreamland hungry for Home. We may not seem to matter very much in the presence of such unimaginable Enormity and Mystery, yet we — and our intentions and actions — do. Is there any such thing as a truly insignificant act? To everyday us, there certainly is, but to Being, there is not. All is sacred. And to say that all is sacred is to say that all is pervaded by Being, and in fact is Being. How then can we turn away from any of it? Just as I, in my dream, had to turn back toward the me who was in suicidal agony, we have to, sooner or later, cease turning away from what scares, repulses, or otherwise disturbs us (including our own turning away!). If we don’t, we are incomplete, partial, fragmented. If we don’t, we are marooned from ourselves, shipwrecked upon our own aversion. Our work then — and if it was easy, we’d have surely done it long ago — is to make room in our hearts for whatever we have judged as being unworthy of 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 compassion and illumination to such states, they cease being dreaded “its,” and become only more reclaimed us — such is our task, our sacred discipline, the lessons of which we must learn by heart.

~ 103 ~

Darkness Shining Wild 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. The feeling is that of spectral undersea ruins, wolf-eels necking out of broken hulls like gigantic fanged grubs. But the threat does not run deep. So many rooms, so many dark and winding trails, the living and the dead so closely intertwined, the whispers of other worlds lost in the static of our overfed concerns. And again our pain surfaces, like a threatening dream-creature that we keep trying to elude or destroy, resurrecting itself even in the most seemingly impenetrable of 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 suppress suppresses us. Forsake not the lowlands of your days, or else you’ll likely reach the peak half a human or less, crippled by your very ascent. The most depressed of valleys, the vilest of marshes, the dirtiest of gutters, all await and need our conscious attention, our unforced compassion, our seeding, asking neither to be ostracized nor transcended, nor to necessarily be transformed into “better” locales, but rather to be simply one more birthing place and burial ground for us, one more crucible for Awakening’s alchemy. If we condemn or flee anything in ourselves, it will only fester and multiply and eventually occupy 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 not work. Nor does collapse. Freedom is in the outgrowing of the urge to escape. Freedom does not mind its chains. Freedom ultimately is about not needing to have a choice. There is no escape from Freedom. This very world, this dream-theatre of suffering and addiction and distraction, provides through its unrelentingly accurate response to our doings an unparalleled opportunity for recognizing and embodying Being on all levels, until there are no levels, no others, but only Being. 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.

~ 104 ~


They too ache to be known, to be touched, to be deeply encountered, without being made the objects of some salvation game. Stop making them sit in the backseat, stop pretending they’re not your relations, stop treating them like weeds, or else you’ll just keep HumptyDumptying 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 Call still bubbles up, fluidly intact amidst all the frozen fizz and fuss, riding in on the next conscious breath, reminding us that this too is us. Into the abyss uncorked at breath’s end is room for all Starmakers and mud-dwellers alike And out of the blue another breath arriving all by itself filling more than lungs Inhale and exhale A tide we ride forgetting we are being breathed Another breath now Exhale and a truer exhale Silence just said something Don’t lose it in the translation It’s as simple as your next breath Inviting us to bring it all onto the dancefloor so we might learn our lessons by heart While we roam in dreamland Hungry for Home

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

~ 105 ~

Darkness Shining Wild that it is completely deactivated within several minutes (McKenna, 1992, p. 259). DMT researcher and psychiatrist Rick Strassman speculates that the pineal gland might, 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 increased melatonin levels, as induced through prolonged time in utter darkness, result not only in increased DMT and 5-MeO production, but also in other substances that inhibit the very enzymes that normally break down DMT and 5-MeO. Darkness retreats, featuring lengthy immersion in complete darkness, are perhaps best known in Tibetan Buddhism. Could lowered serotonin levels be actually reflecting under certain conditions a conversion of serotonin precursors into DMT or DMT-like compounds? Is it possible 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 to speak, the gates of perception? It is, of course, also possible at such times that DMT-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 circulatory crises and cyanosis (“plum-colored face”) when injected into unsuspecting (!) patients (Turner & Merlis, 1959, pp. 121-129). This sounds similar to my state immediately following my second inhalation of 5-MeO — could my body have been reacting to 5-hydroxy-DMT as well (assuming it could be manufactured in my brain), rather than just to 5-MeO? There is an enzyme, O-methyl transferase, found in the Sonoran toad (Bufo alvarius), that converts bufotenine into 5-MeO (Davis, 1998, pp. 188-189). Perhaps there is an enzyme that catalyzes the reverse reaction. Or perhaps not. (A final note: Bufotenine, which reportedly has no hallucinogenic properties, and is almost universally acknowledged as a flat-out bummer among drugs, is classified as an illegal drug, but 5-MeO, probably the most potent hallucinogen known, is [as of this writing] legal.)

~ 106 ~

CHAPTER NINE

avoiding death is killing us


Whenever identification with the body exists, a body is always available, whether this or any other one, till the body-sense disappears by merging into the source....But however long these bodies may last, they eventually come to an end and yield to the Self, 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 individual body and mind are only temporary expressions and stepped-down modifications or lesser 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 alive After Death wandering through what we’ve made of ourselves we are but a thought away from the chance to leave it all behind But Death is not later Death doesn’t happen to Life But is the shedding, the release inviting us into the Heartland of the Supreme beyond every possible dream

~ 108 ~


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 be plenty happening; dynamic openness, primordial presence, powered by the Breath behind the breath. The secret of Death is no further away than your next breath. Freefall into the gap between outbreath’s end and inbreath’s very beginning, and you will be cradled and filled by boundless space, effortlessly sentient space. Pure openness. The arrival of the inhale may distract you from this openness, but give it some attention as you observe the beginning, middle, and end of inhalation and 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 an awakening beyond imagination. Death is a compulsory loss of face and place, packed with blueprints for another round, another resurfacing of the same old bind, yet still just a dream away from the Undying. More possibilities: Death is a mind-blowing tour of what we’ve made of ourselves, followed by reruns directed 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 in elsewhere, wrapped up in familiar clothes, busy making binding connections with lesser 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, seeded with blueprints for further appearances, on every possible scale. Rebirth in darkly dramatic 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 corpses as if they were going to a party; no wonder spiritually ambitious “I” wants to ~ 109 ~

Darkness Shining Wild be present at its own funeral; no wonder we go to absurd lengths to keep the almost-dead alive for as long as possible; no wonder so many of us believe in an afterlife that’s an eternal holiday for “I.” It’s quite understandable, given how scared we are of Death. But are we reacting to Death, or just to our idea of 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 and so-called death-defying feats. Being so seemingly close to Death may give us a feeling of being immune to or cheating it. Others succumb to it, but not us — a bit of comfort this is, much like sitting by the hearth’s fire while a chill storm howls outside. But — exhale — the doors will soon swing open, and the night come rushing in. We are always close to Death, very, very close. We hear about near-Death experiences, perhaps marveling at their mystical elements, 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 give up 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 as opposites— which is also the mindset that overseparates experiencer and experience, observer and observed, inside and outside, good and bad, and so on. Exhale. Such dense dualism has as its operational center me-centered personal identity, around which orbit seemingly self-existing, discrete objects, things to which permanence or constancy may be attributed, but that actually are no more real or any less contingent than the egoity that grants them objective existence. Inhale. When objects — external or internal — appear to be definitively ~ 110 ~


separated from us, we are dreaming. Exhale. But objects do not so convincingly stay “over there” — like objects are supposed to — when we start rubbing the sleep out of our “I’s”. Inhale with your entire body. The more attached we are to object-constancy and to the security and kind of 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 are recognized as already being in process, as already being less solid or fixed than they appear, as already being not so apart from us, as already dying, seeded with their own end or transmutation. Exhale. Life beyond the body frees us to embody the Beyond Life beyond the mind frees us to know the Unknown Life beyond Death frees us to die into the Undying Dying to live are we Reaching for What we never left but only dreamt we did The dream dies leaving nothing in its wake but us

Death does not slay us; denying or fearing it does. If we’re so attached to our life 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 bittersweet nature 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 of spiritual correctness. Attachment comes with Life. The point is not to get rid of it or to escape it, but to keep it in healthy perspective. Attachment makes painfully obvious what we need to face and deal with — insecurity, fearfulness, manipulativeness, etcetera — and doesn’t let us off the hook until we truly do so. Exhale. When we are deeply attached, our heart breaks more easily, but if we work intelligently with that breaking — which is actually more a raw openness than an actual shattering — we will find a greater intimacy with Life. And with Death.

~ 111 ~

Darkness Shining Wild Without Death, there would be no growth. Yet we tend to fear Death; some even 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 who we think we should be), fear arises, especially the fear of whatever could threaten — or, in the case of Death, apparently even erase — that particular identity. Would we be afraid, or as afraid, of Death if we were to adopt a less antagonistic, less ego-governed stance toward change, a stance in which we practiced riding — and being openly present in the midst of — the waves of change, instead of barricading and consoling ourselves in sandcastles? In crashes the surf, effortlessly leveling our monuments, carrying the essence of 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 knowing the 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 that something (that is, whatever we take to be real, including our self) is already broken, then every moment with it can be precious. Exhale. Rainy shore, shimmering sheets of darkly slumping sky Leaning am I into the windchilled thrill of daybreak Ocean thunder and a deeper thunder within and all around And I am ground, ground to sand Drowned, drowned in torrents of broken cloud Spilling shattered against another shore Letting the storm have my face Letting the waves take my place Letting depth unfold amidst stories too real to be told Letting go every should and every executioner’s hood And now my bodies are no longer just mine The body unbound, the body bright, the body dense The dreambody, the dailygrind body, the body doing time The body shattered, the body reborn, the body Divine Flesh of mud and stars Flesh of gravity, flesh of ecstasy, flesh of history Body after body, body within body All speaking their mind This I walk, letting the day undress me Uprooted until I find a truer ground Learning to surrender without collapsing

~ 112 ~


To love without clinging To be attached without shrinking To know without thinking To break down without falling apart To be lovers with both the Mortal and the Immortal To die into the Real Without forgetting the Undying One Or 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 become to the very dualism that separates Life from Death. But what actually exists between Life and death? Space? Time? No, because Death, in the form of impermanence, is always with and within us, from breath to breath, ever now, already eating through whatever veils or gates we may have installed between Life and Death. There is nothing more between Life and Death than the notion that there is something between them. Exhale. Life outlives us yet we are Life Do not simply chew on this as mere metaphor It is, and it’s also something more About which I’d surely speak If my words were not already sea-gossamer dying on the waiting shore and if I was not already consumed by What Cannot Be Said While 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 for sufficient integration, we shift from recognizing the raw Reality of what is to— however briefly or shallowly — actually recognizing ourselves as none other than That. Preparing for this includes getting intimate with what we most fear. Inhale. Entering the cave, feeling the breath of the dark. Exhale right down to our toes. Sooner or later, we let ourselves be unraveled by the Minotaur’s bleeding howl of recognition. Its face, however bestial, deformed, or masked, is none

~ 113 ~

Darkness Shining Wild other than ours. Inhale, exhale. Its dark dank labyrinth, reeking of corpses, is our birthing canal, the end of which we’re dying to see. The end that is the beginning. Here, where the nondual nature of the Real is unmistakably recognized, Death is 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 a Mystery-affirming verb effortlessly erasing every metaphor that would try to explain or contain it, or reduce it to mythological fodder. Here, the boundless vastitude and eloquent silence of pure awareness become more obvious. Things may still be buzzingly abloom, even heavily decibeled, but they’re now playing out their scripts in a more peripheral fashion, no more disturbing “our” awareness than do clouds disturb the sky. Be still, be quiet: This advice from the greatest of sages (like Ramana Maharshi) is not about repression or forced quiet, but rather about allowing intrinsic awareness to become more obvious, more central. Yet even this is not immune to the self-aggrandizing of egoity. We must, at the right time, be willing to let go of particular practices; spiritual strategies, however sublime, can only carry us so far. At some point, we simply have to throw in the towel, not in submission but in surrender. Death, and a deeper Death. Dying into the Deathless. Not to score brownie points with God, but simply because we are sufficiently ripe. Death and Life together make and consume these lines, together giving shape and color and seasoning to Being. All these paper-seeking words Hanging in space skewered by gravity Pinned down by what they’re trying to pin down All these spilling words Leapfrogging over each other in an already-shattered dream Is it any wonder the Beloved wears every face? even that of the Lord of Death Eyes behind our eyes ever gazing into the Forever Wild Homeland of all

~ 114 ~

CHAPTER TEN

learning to bear the unbearable


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 years ago. Later on, back in the car, I look at the place that we’re in, and am astonished to see an enormous Buddhist-like building nearby, beautifully carved. Then I notice that all the street signs are in Indonesian, and excitedly tell Nancy that we’re in Indonesia. As I continue reading the signs, they all start blurring — and I realize that I am dreaming. But my lucidity brings me no comfort. Nancy starts to fade and waver. I’m in a gigantic, thickly walled 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 because it’s a dream, I can pass through the wall, but I am nonetheless in extreme terror, totally out of 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 face is completely bloodless. It’s not her. My shock is overwhelming. For 63 consecutive nights following my NDE, I sat in — and, much less often, with — terror and madness. Every damned night. I wondered if I had indeed done permanent damage to myself. My life had taken a radical turn; it seemed that I was doing little more than trying to survive a hellride with no end in sight, screaming as I went around the corners, hanging onto nothing. I was getting increasingly worn down, edging closer and closer to what appeared to be permanent insanity, torturing myself with the question: Was I simply postponing the inevitable? Then came the soft, fear-free peace of the 64th night; that afternoon, I had received a three-hour bodywork session that was as meticulously attentive as it was caring. But the very next night, things returned to “normal” — an hour or less of sleep, an awakening to intense fear, a disciplined sitting, and more sleep.

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What I haven’t mentioned is that I — or, more precisely, something resembling me — 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 structure of my individual sessions and groups spontaneously emerge and evolve. Eventually my way of working drew many people to me, including some who, responding to my invitation to take such work much further, formed a therapeutic, spiritually-oriented community in 1986, which I led. I continued to work therapeutically, especially with community members, but soon took on the role of spiritual teacher as well. From 1988 on, with the publication of my book The Way Of The Lover, people from various places in North America, Europe, and Australia wanted to work with me and, more often than not, to participate in and even be part of our community (which featured shared living, shared businesses, and an abundance of intensive selfexploration). No longer was our community only in British Columbia; we soon had branches in England, Australia, and California. My work and influence kept expanding. And so did my insensitivity to what wasn’t working in our community (which will be discussed in more depth in Chapter 12). So, despite my condition, I led evening groups and a few weekend workshops in March and April, offering the kind of work I’d done before, with plenty of raw feeling and deep opening, the dynamics of which were both familiar to me and hallucinogenically unfamiliar. Groupwork had been my forté for the past 15 or so years, being very natural to me; walking into a group of strangers 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, at my best. In some ways, now my work had actually improved; I was softer, more empathetic, more attuned to the deeper fears and needs of group members. Even so, I was much more fragile than I showed, frequently seeing and feeling more than I could bear, slipping in and out of the grips of a toxically disorienting sense of de-familiarization, barely able to navigate through the boundless Enormity that was, with madly pulsating, ultravivid intensity, literally “making an appearance” as each group member — and as the ghostly enigma of me. Again and again I would be working with someone in a group session and suddenly all that I would see — through unremovable, ever-novel, bizarrely lucid lenses — was a corpse being animated by the very same Current that was electrifying me.

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Darkness Shining Wild And yet on I would go, moving intuitively and smoothly through the needed steps as if in a dream. Those observing me working apparently saw nothing unusual. My therapeutic competence, still intact, seemed utterly alien to me at times, but more often than not it soothed me. Working as I did provided me with 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, partially because 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; my deeper 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 Deeper Here as its subtitle. It sounded good at the time, indicating as it did both the passionate and spiritual dimensions of my work. However, the “Divine play” in which I was now immersed had long ceased to be just a pleasant transpersonal outing. The hand that rocked the cosmic cradle now had claws, mountainous knuckles, and a grip that jaggedly swam through my flesh. The “here” in which I was planted made me long for a shallower here. Nevertheless, I still clung to the hope that doing the group would likely be good for me and all involved. My previous working trips to Australia, I kept reminding myself, had been unusually healing for me — and so, I hoped, this trip might speed my healing. After the group, Nancy and I would be staying for several weeks in a house right on the beach, still doing some session and group 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 determined to 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-stop 15-hour all-night journey from Los Angeles to Sydney, I had an intense panic attack, immediately following a short nap, before we were even halfway across the Pacific. Everyone was asleep, the cabin dark, the space far too enclosed for me. Never before had I been afraid during a flight, but now I was really terrified, feeling an overwhelming urge to leave the plane, to do whatever I could to get out. But just as I readied myself to at last take an Ativan tablet, I suddenly calmed down, and was able to continue my Ativan “fast.”

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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 and further into the very hellishness I so dreaded, as well as cutting myself off from 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 I shared with Nancy) in order to be able to sanely function. I once even had to abruptly leave during a lunchtime volleyball game (which I ordinarily loved playing) when I was suddenly pervaded — possessed — by a noxiously compelling sense of accelerating madness, in which the sky, only moments ago 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 tremendous speeds. Abruptly, one stops right beside me. I know that I am supposed to get in. As I do so, I notice that there is no one in the car. I sit in the driver’s seat, and right away the car takes off, accelerating at an inconceivable speed. I can control nothing in the car. No brakes, no steering wheel. In utter horror — very similar 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 not even a blur. The scenery is alien, all but shapeless. All familiarity dissolves, along with my remaining 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’s face 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, I could not successfully resurrect my old, super-competent, in-charge self. The very pain that underlay — and also played a key role in creating — that seemingly confident “I” poured forth with raw insistence, in conjunction with the shock-driven dramatics of the physiological and more transpersonal dimensions of my crisis. I was disintegrating on many levels at once, feeling torn apart, my locus of self splattered against shapeshifting walls. In short, I was a mess, marooned from any telling cleanup. I was still in shock (though no one, including doctors, had diagnosed me thus), my nervous system remaining in the electrifying grip of what the 5-MeO had catalyzed in me. A sense of being in extreme danger still 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

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Darkness Shining Wild possible scale — Sisyphian wipeout and resurrection in crazily peaking shockwaves, tranquil seas but the most diaphanous of daydreams. Equanimity — I had a day of it after the group finished. But the next day I was back in hellish chaos, scared to fully acknowledge just how scared I really was. The nights were difficult, especially in the predawn hours; I’d hear the surf outside, feel the lacy tracings of the ocean breeze on my face — which I normally loved — and be in agony, with seemingly only the slightest of distance between me and permanent insanity. Just before sunrise one morning I heard a voice somewhere above my head say 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 though I knew right to my core that suicide wouldn’t solve anything. Nancy left each morning to give individual therapy sessions, and I stayed in the house, simply struggling to cope. I ran, I got massages, I bodysurfed, I cooked and wrote a little, but in it all I mostly felt as though I was just putting in time before I went completely mad. Being alone in the kitchen scared me. The kitchen? I didn’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 benefits now 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 to work with it. So I, with Nancy and two friends close by, lie down on a mat, and begin breathing deeply. They put their hands on me, both to reassure me with caring contact, and to assist me — through bodywork and fitting words — in expressing and passing through my terrifying sense of madness. But I do not, as has always happened before, find myself moving through the madness and dread 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 reserve tanks. All fight has left me — which has happened many times before —but never can I remember 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 my friends’ concerned, faraway faces are greyly embedded. My speech says nothing. My skin (I was later told) is blue. There seems to be a lack of oxygen, but I cannot make myself breathe with any discernible depth. I am a salmon dying on a boatdeck, a salamander frying in a desert, an aborted fetus still somehow alive but left to gasp its last in the cool of a conveniently forgotten hospital room. 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 Nancy and 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 that spoke with thunderously eloquent silence, a silence that ate me alive, leaving nothing 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 without intending to do so, getting up on all fours as if lifted by puppet strings, and crawled — slowly but steadily — to my room, where I grabbed a container of Ativan. Without any hesitation, I swallowed a tablet. I had had none for nearly five weeks, but I didn’t care now — I needed it. In less than half an hour, I was “back.” But I was far from through with the whole affair. The shattering shock around which it was constellated was far from dying down. Very far.

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CHAPTER ELEVEN

madness, creativity, and being


The attempt to characterize the behavior and expressive activity [art] of the insane as the meaningless product of neurochemical disturbance is nothing more than the most recent expression of the terrifyingly intense need felt by some psychiatrists to put a stop to all “abnormal manifestations.” — John McGregor Ghosts, demons and other creatures with neither name nor domicile have been around 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, especially heightened creativity, therefore is sometimes associated with insanity, since it is inclined to frequent much the same terrain which madness roams, somewhere below, outside, beyond, or otherwise apart from the comparatively sterile flatlands of status quo reality. The Minotaur is not about to stroll up to the surface and sit still while we paint or sculpt its likeness; if we truly want to bring it to canvas or poetic life, we’re going to have to descend — and not just intellectually — to its lair, with no solid guarantee that we will return (or at least return intact). In the labyrinths that house madness — but not only madness — dwell more than a few of the intimations, images, and imperatives that fuel the artist, or the artistic impulse. It is into this dreamlike, perhaps seemingly chaotic, sometimes terrifying, and often overwhelming locale that the serious artist must sooner or later descend, not in a tour bus or bathyscaphe, but alone and naked, 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 or Dostoyevski — are already there.1 And though it all went wrong I’ll stand before the Lord of Song With 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 of autonomy and “I did it my way” individualism, and to forget that not only are 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 long taught, nothing truly exists apart from and independent of everything else, including us. So should the captain — or artist — be made any more special than the deckhand or supposedly less creative person? Everyone and everything with whom, and with which, we are involved is part of the creative process. We’re needed, yes, but so are they. Is the flower more important than its stem or roots? Can its bloom be truly separated from the sunlight, water, weather, and soil that brought it into being? And can these flower-precursors, these non-flower elements of flower-ness, themselves be truly separated from what brought them into being? What is being pointed to here is not independence, nor dependence, but rather interdependence on every scale, an interdependence that’s but the presenting surface of primordial inseparability. So much for the mythos of the solitary artist — which, not surprisingly, is most common in cultures that overvalue personal independence. Creativity at essence is inescapably collaborative — as perhaps most obviously exemplified by the communally-oriented art of places like Bali — and needs to be recognized as such, both at the level of cultural brainstorming, and in a more purely or privately personal sense. In the spirit of such collaboration — which doesn’t necessarily require physical proximity to “participating” others — individuality does not have to wither or get crowded out, but rather can flower, and flower with idiosyncratic flair

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Darkness Shining Wild and beauty and bouquet, since it has sufficient support to breathe and stretch and live without having to try to be or remain “on top.” Independence and dependence 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 less keen than usual; I’m definitely off balance. And yet as I now begin to write, I immediately 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 gives me an energetic edge, providing both impetus and fuel for creativity. This fuel, once ignited, rearranges me into a conducive environment for what needs to be written. A magic of which I never tire. Not that it always begins like this; often I feel stable and settled well before I sit down to write. But always there is surplus energy as soon as I start, even if I am exhausted. Diverse and sometimes discordant elements in me find a common rhythm, a central pulse and purpose in which all can share and be given a voice simultaneously individual and collective.

So as soon as creativity shifts from intention to actual expression, it seems that internal elements — desires, thoughts, feelings, habits that take turns masquerading as me — line up. But no, it’s before that, in the very genesis of intention. At the first whiff of creative possibility, the scattered elements within me quickly find a working harmony, like a bunch of previously autonomous cells forming a colony — a primordial cooperative capable of an originality not before possible. This organic collaboration, a vital community of previously diverse and/or discordant elements within, provides much of the juice — and perhaps also the animating spark — for creativity. It may even be that the intimacy we cultivate with these elements, and with their interrelationship, largely determines the 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, but also externally. Weather, food, traffic, others’ art, time available, relationship dynamics — an outer collaboration paralleling the inner. Others in our life may not seem to be as creative as us, but without them we likely would not create as we do. Their presence, doings, intentions, and quality of 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, but that 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, which can 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 original or significant than the productions of recognized artists. Just because there is no frame around something does not mean it is not creative. Still, we can learn much about our own creativity from examining the lives of those far more driven to create than us. Modern research, as well as historical evidence, closely links creativity, especially high creativity, with mental and emotional states that are typically viewed as being far from “normal.”2 The aberrant condition — bipolar disorders, drug addictions, and so on — of many 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 because we’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 own psychoemotional rawness. We may have overbudgeted for defense against our own ups and downs. Nevertheless, the very imbalances and abnormalities we see dramatized in many artists exist in us also, if only in our dreams, needing not much more than a timely unchaining, in conjunction with a constructive intent, to spill over into creativity. When creativity is at its most potent, we may feel as though we have been taken over, possessed, literally occupied by the creative process. It is this ability to be possessed — nondestructively possessed — perhaps in conjunction with some 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, by robbing it of the energy differentials on which it feeds. The very states (or passions) that have the power to take us over — lust, rage, ecstasy, grief — need to be approached not with leveling agendas, but rather with enough openness so that their essential energies might be channeled into creativity.

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Darkness Shining Wild The more in contact we are with our depths, the more creative we will tend to be; but much depends on how such contact is made. Some do so dysfunctionally, through self-destructive or pathological freefalls.5 Others do so through a more conscious descent — they are not forced into proximity with the wonders and horrors of the deep, but instead choose and develop intimacy with them. As we cease avoiding our out-of-balance and on-theedge states, learning to cultivate comfort with our discomfort, we will not only suffer less, but our creativity will flow more easily. We don’t access our inner treasures by avoiding the dragon, nor by blindly leaping into its lair. Some may get too close too soon to the dragon, and so cannot properly integrate what surfaces for them as they encounter such darkly overwhelming intensity. What works best is developing intimacy with the dragon — 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 our deep interiority. The resulting energies — in conjunction with a dynamic receptivity — 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-generating conversion. 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 doing it, but in fact it births and delivers itself, if we will but give our permission. At essence, creativity bypasses egoity, though egoity may claim credit for creativity’s products. In the throes of pure creativity, we primarily exist as an intimate witnessing of — and space for — what is unfolding. We are then not the creator, 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 not so much make the music, as make room for it, recognizing that creativity ultimately is not something we do, but something we are. I see you’ve gone and changed your name again And just when I climbed this whole mountainside To 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 was buckled into following my 5-MeO NDE. All he apparently knew was that I was having a hard time, and that that was because of what I had smoked. He slept through all of the nights when I was up in terror. Although it seemed that he had only a superficial or casual sense of my crisis, something changed in him that did indicate a deep knowingness about my struggle — his art. Up until I took my fateful smoke, his drawings had not been particularly remarkable, leaning more to unshaded designs than to the depth-suffused rendition of actual forms. Within a few weeks of my NDE, however, his art took a radical turn, metamorphosing almost overnight. Bizarre, intensely energetic reptilian forms began to dominate his sketchpads — darkly writhing, malevolent-looking, richly shaded things that accurately conveyed to me the actual feeling of what I faced each tortuous night. Dama was an unusually innocent boy, with seemingly no pull toward the more malignant aspects of things. Nevertheless, his drawings, rapidly churned out on an almost daily basis, were now overflowing with tangible horror, much of which strongly resonated with what I had experienced while physically unconscious and dying — dragon-headed men, repulsively aberrated humans, sky-wide demonic heads, reptilian masses swarming out of galactic birthclouds, insinuating their way into softer realms. And all drawn with remarkable skill, professionally shaded and precisely lined. No training, no prelude — just full-blown, startlingly alive artistry, pouring forth seemingly unbidden, page after page. At the same time, Dama’s lucid dreams (dreams in which he knew he was dreaming) began to feature an apparently alien intelligence, a large-craniumed lizard-headed humanoid with whom he felt a strong, fear-free kinship. Again and again, he would draw this being, and I would watch with fascination, feeling as though my journey through the shadowlands of the prepersonal and the transpersonal was somehow being tracked by Dama’s transanthropocentric 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 sometimes also a journey through terror, supported to a significant degree both by Dama’s drawings and his easy, loving presence.

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Darkness Shining Wild I was stranded from the familiar, often terrifyingly, and Dama’s art helped me not 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 all around me. My own creativity was nonexistent during this time, for all my energies were committed to enduring and working through my “madness”— or so it seemed. Perhaps that very creativity, curled up in a hibernational extreme, found an articulate outlet through Dama. In this sense, it was not “his” or “my” creativity, but our creativity. I should add that when I was Dama’s age, I was a talented artist, with a special aptitude for drawing. The psychic osmosis between us brings to mind those research findings indicating that a higher everyday creativity is found in the psychiatrically normal relatives of those with bipolar mood disorders.6 Not that I was bipolar, but I was definitely not functioning “normally.” I’ve often observed that when 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 (that is, if I won’t get openly angry, my partner may “have to” express both her anger 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 attention hovering amidst it all like some mother eagle surveying her egg-laden nest. Both intense focus and deliberate spaciousness coexist here, at once still and overflowing with new life. As intentionality enters this, conduits spontaneously arise, through which order—perhaps a new, more complex ordering—emerges from chaos, crystallized through lenses that themselves are constantly being created. 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 helps awaken us to a truer sense of ourselves and the Mystery of Being, to the point where there is only Beauty, only shapely Openness. The ecstatic poetry of 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 best only 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 100,000 songs of Milarepa or Rumi’s intoxicated clarity) — but in both cases, it cares not for fame. Dama didn’t keep his pictures. As soon as they were done, he’d let them go their own way. It is as if such art, “knowing” that it emerges from all of us — in an unthinkably vast, 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 manicdepressive 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 qualities that are most highly valued by (and often characteristic of) modernity’s highachievers— including me, prior to taking 5-MeO. Such symptoms — symptoms! — are for most artists (and also for most of the rest of us) what steroids are for bodybuilders. The side effects may be quite unpleasant, but generally are taken as a necessary payment for what is reaped. Paralleling this is a tendency to underdiagnose the manic aspects of manic-depressive illness (Jamison, 1990, p. 336) — the melancholic side is easily recognized as depression, 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, social life, 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 likely have a national crisis! Taking more and more time to save time, we feel squeezed for time, forgetting that hurrying wastes time, even as we try to find time to offset the resulting erosion of self. Running the red light to make it to meditation class on time. Or in my case, burning the candle at both ends. The hyperacusis — the heightening of senses — so commonly present during manic (and hypomanic) states is obviously supportive of most creative activity.

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Darkness Shining Wild 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 of energy. When there is sufficient depletion, depression may return (or is returned to), deflating the doer, reducing him or her to a despair that may at times seriously flirt with suicide. This is only made worse when depression is rejected, made wrong, or infected with nostalgia for hypomanic well-being. Yet is not hypomania (like so many strategies to stay “up”) little more than a flight from depression, an obsessive and ultimately desperate absorption in activity that simply obscures or dilutes the stark presence of depression (and the dark helplessness implicit in it)? Depression may, in fact, be closer to the truth than its manic or hypomanic counterpart; some studies suggest that psychological distortion is 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 and passion is more that of pleasurable sensation and stimulation than of actual feeling; its aversion to gravity is too strong for it to possess genuine emotional depth. In its own way, hypomania is just as numb as is depression, and far less honest. And, we might ask, is the manic or hypomanic side really that creative? Does it generate significant originality, or does it simply provide labor-fuel — emotional oxytocin — for what has already been birthed within? Perhaps (especially for the manic-depressive artist) depressiveness is the womb, and manic-ness or hypomanicness the midwife. Do not seeds grow in the dark? 2. For example, Nancy Andreasen (1987) found that four out of five eminent creative writers had a major mood disorder. She also found that the psychiatrically normal relatives of her creative writers showed more creativity than did the relatives of her control subjects. Other research (Richards et al., 1988) also backs this. Why is this? Consider the finding that “thought disorder” — as found in manic and schizophrenic patients — occurs in much the same way in the first-degree relatives of such patients, including relatives who themselves are not clinically ill (Shenton et al., 1989). This way of thinking — supposedly dysfunctional yet arguably rich with creative ferment — can be a symptom of mental illness, and it also can be an option, a choice exercised for creative purposes. Having access to many conceptual modes, including the seemingly primitive or divergent or even chaotic, supports deeper creativity, so long as we stop equating “abnormal” with “ill.” 3. Consider Ingmar Bergman: His close contact — even intimacy — with his demons is reflected in many of his films, such as Hour of the Wolf, Cries and Whispers, and Fanny and Alexander. His portrayal of dreams is especially striking in this regard. In 1949 he, suffering from perhaps too much proximity to his demons, was psychiatrically hospitalized and placed under heavy sedation. Not surprisingly, the driving force of his creativity disappeared. Once out of the clinic — three weeks later — he abruptly stopped taking his medication. Without his tranquilizers, his

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anxiety was enormous, his insomnia total. But, eventually, his suppressed rage strongly 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 will suppress 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 cases actually increase creative potential (Richards, 1993). If one is at even more of an edge than Bergman was, one would likely do well to at least try medication before deciding 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 unusual word associations (which increases creativity) and creative problem solving (Isen, 1985). 5. When artists not only ride the up-times, but also exploit and artificially extend such highs, they are only inviting in serious crashes, like long distance truck drivers gobbling amphetamines to keep awake. A famous example is Jack Kerouac, who wrote his novel The Subterraneans in three days in 1958, fueled by benzedrine. Allen Ginsberg, longtime friend and compatriot of Kerouac’s, somewhere praised this prodigious output as “word-sperm.” The first book about the “Beats” (Kerouac, Ginsberg, and friends), authored in 1952 by John Clellon Holmes, was simply and aptly titled Go. But Kerouac, having already zoomed with immensely compelling abandon into the flatlands of Eisenhower suburbia with his classic On The Road and its manic hero, Dean Moriarty (in real life, Neal Cassady), could not keep up the pace, eventually settling into alcoholism and sodden depressiveness. Nevertheless, Kerouac’s Whitmanesque deification of hypomanic (for more on hypomania, see note 1) energy, particularly in the wild-hearted, throbbingly alive (and maddeningly restless) person of Neal Cassady, blew provocatively and almost innocently through the stifling, buttoned-up complacency of the times, until it was, some years later, profitably absorbed and appropriated by the surrounding culture, as hypomania went mainstream and technological magic kept accelerating. The thrill of the open road, with Cassady yakking as fast and as intensely as he drove, had in a few very quick — and hypomanic decades — become an airconditioned, anesthetized drive toward potential apocalypse. The background blurring whir of all-night tires, the open-windowed poetry sweetly ablaze with breathless ampersands and lithely arcane juxtapositions, all the muscular racings to and fro — so easy for us to trivialize or judge as we run out of highway, caught up in a monstrous “Go!” that likely would electrify even Cassady (who died in 1968). 6. See note 2. 7. McGregor, 1989.

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CHAPTER TWELVE

more meltdown: a needed shattering


The rest of my time in Australia — a week or so — was far from pleasant. I took just enough Ativan to cope, as if to contradict the full extent of my helplessness. The smaller and more infrequent the dosage I took, the less serious was my condition — such was the equation with which I tortured myself. But I was getting no better. Almost every activity catalyzed dread in me. The simplest act, like washing a cup or walking into another room, would suddenly be imbued with an extremely creepy strangeness. Worse, my witnessing of 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. It haunted me deeply, both in a fearful and a despairingly poignant way. She was in California, and I was terrified I’d never get to see her again, because I didn’t know if I could make the journey back to where she was staying — I could barely cross the kitchen without feeling as if I were about to enter irreversible insanity. I was very, very fucked-up. I’d once written that losing balance provided an opportunity to find a deeper balance, but even the most rudimentary kind of balance eluded me; at any moment, it seemed that I could be sucked into no-exit madness. That my steps were mindful did not lessen the hellishness of the terrain, be it cool kitchen tiles or warm seaside sand. The day of departure arrived sooner than planned; my state was such that we knew we had to get back to California as soon as possible. I was frightened to get on the flight out of Australia — refusing, of course, to take any Ativan before I boarded — and I was even more frightened during our overnight stopover in Tahiti. Picture an elegant, supremely cozy hotel room overlooking a storybook Tahitian bay, luxuriant vanilla and peach blooms everywhere, and soft, soft air: And there I stand trembling at one end of the room, electrified with 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 through me in the middle of a silky feast of a dinner, while a troupe of aggressively smiling, neonesque dancers moved through their nightly repertoire right in front of us — an overcolored, surrealistic soup of shrinkwrapped culture and amazingly meaty tourists both feeding and inundating my horrified, pseudoanthropological fascination with the whole indigestible scene. Incentive enough to 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 on home ground, but I was still very much in shock. I had lost close to twenty pounds, much of it muscle, despite working out regularly and eating plenty of high-quality food. Supplements? I had an enormous variety handy, tinctures of skullcap and Jamaican dogwood, capsules of tryptophan and lichen and freeze-dried colostrum, tablets of Vitamin this and Mineral that, along with powerhouse herbal elixirs for my nervous and immune systems. I switched to 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 with flax oil and Japanese umeboshi vinegar. But what I most needed to ingest was Ativan. To make things worse, I did not feel at home in our house (which had been bought — 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, but natural 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 felt almost constantly shadowed by dread and the presence of Death. Nancy and I were sleeping apart now, so that she could get more sleep; staying with me just about every night since my NDE had seriously exhausted her. Each night was an ordeal for me, each day an attempt to recover enough energy to prepare 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 and scared. Day after day I’d walk (or steer myself) through the house as if halfdreaming — and maybe I was, given how sleep-deprived I was.

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Darkness Shining Wild Finally, in early June, exhausted and deeply discouraged by my unrelenting fragility and psychic precariousness — the sudden, treacherous quicksanding of my sanity being as frequent and powerful as it’d been for the previous months — I went to a psychiatrist recommended to me by the doctor who had treated me at the hospital in February. He was far from conventionally inclined, but did not try to romanticize my condition, as had another psychiatrist in late February (an entheogen enthusiast who told me I was simply having a “shamanistic breakthrough”). Now, I was informed, it would be best for me if I took more Ativan, and regularly. I was in no position to disagree. On the drive to his office, I had for several sickening stretches of highway seen the houses dotting the bare, tan-dumpling hillsides as living entities, grotesquely quivering and breathing, eating into me with their many-eyed gaze, emphatically interrupting my sanity. So I started taking Ativan three times every day. Almost immediately, I was stabilized. However, in so doing, I became physiologically addicted to Ativan. My once potent sense of independence, already wobbly-kneed, now crumbled closer to oblivion, aided by the accelerating disintegration of the psychospiritually-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 — to outlast me, but now it was clearly starting to come undone, falling apart in parallel with me.1 I had worked very hard to keep it together, not paying enough attention to the fact that it had become overly dependent on me and my views, and was — for this and other reasons — displaying the very tendencies, cultic and otherwise, that I’d so strongly criticized in other spirituallybased 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 authentic selfhood, the community also was often unnecessarily confrontational, impatient, and pressurized (all of which was justified at the time as just being part of keeping the ship on course), while remaining quick to congratulate itself for being so unique and wonderful. Just like me. The only ego left unexplored in the community was mine — probably the biggest 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 I unquestioningly and shamelessly inserted at the end of the books I wrote during my community years. In short, I let my unresolved issues — which I assumed had been worked through to the point where they were no longer issues — pollute what was good and beautiful and sacred in our community. I had too much power and not enough compassion. Tremendous risks were taken 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 as crucial for the type of social and personal support and transformation I was advocating, without seriously questioning whether I might not be as on target as I thought I was.4 I didn’t notice that the very structuring that had initially served the community had become too tight a fit, regardless of its creativity, novelty, or apparent looseness. Seedcases initially protect their seeds, but after a 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, I wasn’t willing to let it shatter (or radically alter). I had no, and made no, room for 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 year prior to my NDE) becoming increasingly restless, vaguely fantasizing about doing something very different with my life. I’d enter and explore this restlessness, but only to a certain depth, assuming that it was simply something to make the object of awareness, rather than a potential harbinger of needed change. I had become isolated, firmly embedded in a position — sitting alone atop a gurucentric organization — that I had once vowed to never let myself assume. With a ruthlessly critical eye, I saw and dissected the shadow side of every teaching approach except mine. I thought I had truly learned from the errors made by others who were, or who had once been, in a position similar to mine. 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 of compassion for them, in conjunction with my pride, prevented me from recognizing that what I was lambasting them for was sitting right inside me. Sometimes those who fight authority the most vehemently — like me much of my life — end up becoming authoritarian themselves, as if to make sure that no one else will ever, ever be in charge of them.

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Darkness Shining Wild I did not see that the very depth of psychological and spiritual work being done 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 occurring among us as “evidence” of our specialness. In such a setting, cultism could only flourish. There was too much me in our community, too much focus on the therapeutic and spiritual work I did, too much reliance on my views. For example, in the heat of a community volleyball game, my being pissed off about someone’s quality of play was given too much weight and validity, as were my opinions on just about any topic. Sometimes I’d address this, but not to the point where the heat was solidly on me. Despite our shortcomings — including reconstructing mine as something other 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 away from 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 darker emotions, I had little tolerance for community members spending much time 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 their own good — assumptions like this, largely unquestioned, just fed the myth of 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 in others a very compelling and attractive feeling of connectedness, of belonging, of being reassuringly anchored in an unsettling, painfully fragmented, offkilter world.6 Most of those in the community spent too much time and energy trying to be everything for each other; and those outside of our extremely close-knit network usually had “too little in common” with us for anything more than a 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 on radical 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 alone Are stuck in a conflict of interest warring over what for each seems best The I that’s us gets obsessed securing the collective nest The I that’s you alone gets obsessed with having its own stash one eye on the mirror and the other on the cash The I that’s us and the I that’s you alone Battle in each of us overbudgeting for defence Forgetting that we’ve got to do it Both alone and together no matter what the weather

I had crystallized at a stage with unsound underpinnings, with serious repercussions not only for myself and my family, but for many others. Meltdown was inevitable. Ayahuasca had shattered me, but only for a day or two. Something more potent was needed, something that would not permit me a quick recovery. And so I took — and had to take — my second inhalation of 5-MeO. A few months later, community members began forcefully addressing issues concerning me and my role in their lives. Wave after wave of anger, hurt, and criticism came my way, delivered with far more freedom than before my NDE. I was much more receptive to it than I would have been before. Most of it hurt deeply, and it had to hurt, for I realized — with visceral immediacy and a growing shame — that I had played a major role in causing unnecessary hurt. This, coupled with the psychospiritual crisis I was enduring in the wake of my fateful smoke, kept me at a very precarious edge. I remember reading intensely angry, accusatory letters from some — and if they went too far, it had a lot to do with their having gone too far in the opposite direction since joining the community — and breaking down so hard and so crazily that I feared I’d never be able to get up again. I wasn’t just more receptive to hearing about my shortcomings — I was absorbent to the extreme, once my superficial defences had been parted.

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Darkness Shining Wild My sense of proportion was wildly unbalanced, even after I had regained some stability from taking Ativan regularly. I received the critiques from community members, both in person and through letters and calls, not like a rational adult, but like a shell-shocked child. Whatever remained of my sense of safety following my NDE — and it was far from substantial — now was repeatedly blasted into seeming oblivion. As I would somehow crawl out of the 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 could not fully appreciate until some time later. I began to wean myself from Ativan, 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 became more frequent. In August, I dissolved the Canadian branch of the community8 — feeling both grief and immense relief at doing so — and continued my withdrawal from Ativan. When I was down to a very low dosage, I went to Spain to lead a large residential group for our European community, enduring panic attacks on both the flight there and back. The group went very well (even though I barely slept), but I knew it would be the last one I would do for a long time. I was, regardless of my hopes to the contrary, not in a process of building or rebuilding, but of deconstruction. Clearly, I was not going to be able to reassemble even the material form of what I had had (or what my life had largely been organized around) prior to my NDE. I had wanted the community to outlive me, not seeing that what I’d built housed its own destruction. The criticisms kept coming, but started feeling less and less like blows, and more like deep-cutting gifts, forcing me to directly face my shame, not just my shame over my failings in our community, but my longtime shame over failing at anything. All that I had done to make sure that I wouldn’t have to feel shame had now lost much of its power; I hated my helplessness, but at the same time appreciated it, for through being in such unavoidably close quarters with it, I was learning compassion from the ground up, slowly but surely. Weaning myself from Ativan, which took until early October, vastly increased my 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, my outer world was in ruins, as if no longer needing to be there with any semblance of solidity now that I, eight months after taking the 5-MeO, was strong enough — but only barely — to begin functioning like a “normal” person. When I had had no Ativan for a few days, I attended a Vipassana residential retreat for a week — marking the end of my post-5-MeO gestation — practising sitting and walking mindfully in the midst of my fragility for long periods, feeling a welcome stability slowly infusing me even as I intuited that my falling apart was not over. Immediately after the retreat, Nancy and I separated — not because of a loss of closeness or connection, but simply because it was, for a number of reasons, the right thing to do. This was excruciatingly difficult for me, as I had become extremely attached to (and dependent upon) her during my crisis. No partner, no home, no work — but I 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 often humbling) step after another. So I had to start over again, from the bottom up. My previous life lay behind me, shattered beyond repair, and yet still with me, like a dream that daylight cannot erase. From relative riches to rags, or so it seemed — but it was in the rags and discomfort that I grew. No more fine houses for me, no more thickly treed acreage, no more special treatment, no more immunity from the outside world; I spent a year and a half in a small basement suite, aching for more privacy and space and silence, yet at the same time knowing that I needed such a “womb.” For a long time, getting through each day was sufficient accomplishment. I’d had 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 into daylight. I felt much like a newborn — simultaneously abandoned and cared for — but without the fabled blank slate. I was kinder, softer, more vulnerable, and definitely humbled. At the same time, accompanying me into my new life were most of my less-than-admirable habits, less prone now to sitting so firmly and confidently behind the driver’s seat, but still only needing a shot or two of unwitting attention to reassert themselves. However, I no longer cared so much that such habits were still with me. They may not have changed — at least in the sense of disappearing — but my relationship to them had. No longer was I so occupied trying to rehabilitate,

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Darkness Shining Wild 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 I made for them just to be — especially under difficult conditions — the more room 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 — yet experienced a fuller kind of inner spaciousness and acceptance than before my meltdown. I still was spending plenty of time in hell — being infused with dread almost daily for most of 1995 (often suspecting that I had indeed died right after my fateful smoke, and was now simply dreaming that I was still alive) — but was learning, bit by bit, not to flee it; then it was not hell, but simply 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 fighting nor 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 protestations and cries and hallucinogenic certainties of my suffering, that I was in the right place, however unfair my placement might appear to me. Dying into a deeper life. Dying to live. I had known the value of endurance in my passion for hard-paced distance-running; now I knew the value of spiritual endurance. Waiting without waiting. Approaching “I” not with impatience and eliminative programs, but with curiosity and caring. Only “I” wants to get rid of “I.” Being, however, has no such eliminative urge, already recognizing every “I” as simply a nonbinding expression of itself. Being no more needs to eradicate “I” than does the sky need to get rid of its clouds. When we separate Being from its expressions and modifications — thereby riveting our attention to objects, and developing various kinds of objectdependency — we suffer, and further suffer through addicting ourselves to whatever eases our suffering. That is, we lose our inherent peace — the peace of 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 unexplainably here, as always, no matter what the weather. To this I bow, and will continue to bow, until there is only bowing, only the alchemy of pure allowing. Take me to the bottom of your pain Take me to the weave of your true name Take me, take me deep, take me steep Let’s stretch to make the leap Let’s go to where love must also weep Take me to the bottom of your pain Take me to the weave of your true name Take me, take me over the rise Take me through all your goodbyes Let’s shine through our every disguise Let’s go to where love has open eyes Take me to the bottom of your pain Take me to the weave of your true name Take me, take me past your past Take me, take me to us, take me beyond all the fuss Let’s throw away our every alibi Let’s go to where love cannot lie Take me to the bottom of your pain Take me to the weave of your true name Take me, take me through your hidden door Take me, take me right to your core Let’s live where insights lose their mind Let’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 its structure and its modus operandi. Many of those in the community were there not only because of me and my teachings, but also because of their bonds with each other. Long after the community had ceased to exist as a communal entity, many of its former members continued to maintain very close bonds with each other.

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Darkness Shining Wild 2. In its innovative, dynamic blending of psychotherapy, bodywork, meditative practices, intensive groupwork, and intimately shared living, the community was a radical 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 rich vitality and investigative opportunity, a setting in which the spiritual and psychological, the personal and the transpersonal, the individual and the collective, were often deeply and movingly explored and connected. Even so, there were serious problems (which generally weren’t viewed as problems at the time, at least by me) with the direction we were taking, stemming from a mixture of the excessive authority I increasingly assumed, the overreliance of members on me, and the application of my views and methods to just about every situation. A cult in the making. 3. Ironically, in a 1988 talk about the “birthing a true community,” I had said: “If the leader [of a community] is a true leader, then those around him [or her] will become more and more centered in their own being, not so they can stand apart from him and govern in their own way, but so that they can cooperate with him to such a degree that they can co-evolve with him the necessary forms and processes for their evolving community — thus can they participate with him, enjoy him, be intimate with him, perhaps even surpass him. The true teacher is willing to sacrifice or radically alter his position right from the beginning, if doing so contributes to the well-being of the community. His job, in part, is to not allow any sort of cultic association to form around him — those who insist on being cultically aligned with 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 lack of awareness that I was doing so, simply kept community members in a confusing and disempowering bind, in which the very setting that they were in often obstructed or undermined what that setting was supposed to catalyze and support. No wonder the whole thing had to explode. 5. What happens when the shelter that once gave us so much needed support becomes too tight or poor a fit? Do we then make ourselves wrong, assuming that there’s something we are doing that’s generating our restlessness or sense of crampedness, or do we challenge the very structuring and foundational assumptions of such a shelter, 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 overly confining webs, entangling us in their expectations and morality. Organizations tend to propagandize for their own means of ensuring their continuation — and if 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 overattached to its core beliefs, and that is no more than minimally receptive to negative or critical “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 seen as 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 rather distant them. Whatever caring exists within cultism — and it, however misguided, can be a very deep caring — is eventually impoverished by its isolation from the rest of Life. Initially, cults protect what is inside their walls (and here it is useful to put aside the negative connotations one might have regarding cultism), but sooner or later they become guards rather than guardians. 6. If the alienation, the painful sense of separateness or estrangement that so often drives us to seek membership somewhere, is not sufficiently addressed, so that our yearning 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) that actually 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 us to convert to its faith? Are we more likely to keep getting fed if we do? Is there an ulterior motive, and if so, do we see it, or do we even want to see it? Whatever is doing the giving needs to be illuminated, moment-to-moment. Nonetheless, how many organizations,including those that are spirituallybased, include — or even want to include — within themselves an uninterfered-with self-investigative branch, one that has unimpeded access to resources outside the organization (such as persons who might bring to that organization the kind of criticism that could necessitate its dismantling or radical reorganization)? 7. Such exclusivity, however lovingly held in place, commonly plagues groups with an overly strong investment in staying and growing together. Absorption or infiltration by the community-at-large is usually avoided or resisted by such groups — social homogenization being understandably less than popular — but often at the price of a tenaciously guarded impermeability or “justified” lack of responsiveness to “outsiders” who are clearly not sympathetic to the group’s ways. Thus do cults arise. I recall being told at a bodywork school in the 1970s — after having completed a long, arduous residential training there, and revisiting the school a few months later — that if I didn’t commit to all of the school’s guidelines for life that I was no longer 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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Darkness Shining Wild on the one hand, and narcissistic self-concern and hyperpersonalized egoity on the other hand, an “us” emerges that is spineless, flat, weakly colored, Esperanto’ed into submission. The caring of this “us” is neurotically impersonal, bureaucratized, burdened with politically correct compassion [“we deeply regret any civilian casualties”] — and yet without it and the contrast it so unwittingly provides, we likely 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 Vancouver community, who’d regularly travel to the other communities to lead groups, give individual 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 typically began by visiting — and often staying for a while in — the households of our Vancouver branch. When it was dissolved, it was inevitable that the other branches would soon follow.

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CHAPTER THIRTEEN

too real to have meaning


A significant life does not have to find meaning because significance is given directly with reality. — James Hillman The unknown is the home of the real. To live in the known is bondage, to live in the 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 more than provide slippery, speedily-shattering steppingstones across the imaginary divides of a dimensionless abyss — spectral suspension bridges appearing and 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 find any comfort in the explanatory dimensions of consciousness. My attempts to find or extract or assign meaning, whether mundane or metaphysical, at best only padded the cell for a bit. At the extreme edge of meaning frothed my mind, playing paranoia-wigged peekaboo with the Context of context, zipping every which way with spermatozoan frenzy in the surreal vistas of gutted cyberspace. And my attention? It toured my mind and the dying jelly of my body like a runaway camera, leaving me ominously freakish postcards, from which I derived not meaning, but only further confirmation of my metastasizing madness.

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To assume that anything possessed — or could claim — intrinsic meaning was absurd to me. Meaning appeared to be just a security-driven superimposition on Being, a consensual mind-game designed to distract us — and protect our separative self-sense — from that which had spawned us and paradoxically also 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 illumination of what is fundamentally motivating the question. Identifying who — or, more to the point, what — is formulating it is far, far more important than just attempting to reply to its content. Whatever is generating the question needs to be fully exposed and acknowledged, not just intellectually, but with our entirety. Then, and only then, can the actual relevancy of the question be viewed in its nakedness, so that it might spark a truly fitting response. That is, when the question becomes primal inquiry, its investigation leads beyond the cognitive associations of the conventional mind into firsthand participation in deeper dimensions of Being. Something more real than answers — or what 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 — thereby giving Life more breathing room, more space to be — then Life’s natural significance begins revealing itself to us. The entire issue of meaning and meaninglessness, if explored with sufficient depth, provides an opportunity to become more aware not only of the functioning of our mind, but also of our attachment to knowledge and its various framings. Stephen Levine speaks of how “no ‘meaning’ can hold it all....There is an odd way the mind, particularly when threatened, attempts to find ‘meaning’ in life, to make some intellectual bargain with the unknown.”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 is also 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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Darkness Shining Wild have incorporated and been “inspired” by a frighteningly bad mescaline trip he endured in 1935.3) However, I could not settle here for very long, making existential real estate out of meaninglessness. When my mind was quiet and my heart open, the very 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 any meaning for me, but now I did not mind. Its bare existence and seeming paradoxicalness— a neverending perishing that was never other than Eternal Being — drew me to it, beyond the reach of my mind, until my relationship with it became, at least to some degree, identification with it. That is, my witnessing capacity would still be present, but not distinctly separate from 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 recruit enough attention to convincingly recreate the sensation of an “I” apart from the 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 seeks to explain, conceptualize, frame, or contain it. Meaning provides a sensation of security, a psychosemantic hedge against the Wild Mystery of Being, a comfortingly shared or personalized flag to hold up and wave in the midst of Infinity, a neatly-bricked bastion of explanatory facticity (and corresponding values) in which to hole up when emissaries of primordial Being — like Death — come knocking. As necessary as meaning is at times — as when it provides needed bridges over 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, we must cease hanging onto it. And we must also cease hanging onto meaninglessness. Where meaning seduces us 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 gives us 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 habitable coast, the suffocating yet reassuringly familiar shadow of a brooding existential ghost. Meaninglessness — which is not equivalent to purposelessness — is the glum and sometimes intellectually smug companion and angst-crowned legitimizer of despair, elevating to pseudo-priesthood those who claim to be able to restore meaningfulness. Nevertheless, the issue of meaning and meaninglessness isn’t really that much of a core concern, being peripheral to the issue of purpose, particularly in the context of our destiny. Purpose as such involves the uncovering and fitting embodiment of a kind of psychospiritual blueprint, simultaneously simple and complex, already written yet invitingly blank, rich with improvisational possibility. Purposefulness may seem to semantically overlap with meaningfulness, but it is much, much more than a cognitive construction. Purpose is far 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, is not nearly so dualistically rooted or framed or limited, signalling the felt impact of direct contact with What-Really-Matters. We look for meaning, but we live significance. Meaning is in the mind, but significance is beyond the mind. As Nisargadatta says, “Knowledge by the mind is not true knowledge.”4 And is there really any such thing as an insignificant act?

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Darkness Shining Wild Slowly you stand Your eyes widening pools of dawn Your look an answer with no question Arms swimming up through a starry sea Intimate with both your uncertainty and your reach Your spine flirting with an unseen wind Your head a sudden flowering atop an underwater stem Now the usual you makes its return overattracting you to the familiar And once again limitation is reduced to a problem And once again you forget you’ve forgotten And once again you remember, rearise, reenter no longer shopping inside your skull no longer making real estate out of meaning Your limbs tracing lines that need no explanation Your smile deeper than the dreaded abyss And we’re together in our aloneness Our infinity of appearances Explaining nothing and revealing everything

NOTES 1. Levine, 1984, p. 30. 2. Quoted in Riedlinger, 1993, p. 36. During his mescaline experience, Sartre suffered delusions of such compelling intensity that he feared he was losing his mind. For months afterward, he endured flashbacks in which he imagined he was being chased by gigantic lobsters — perhaps representing the surfacing of some long repressed prepersonal issues. Who knows what form long-ago indignities and traumas will assume when they seize center stage? We may, for example, begin with acute biological panic — a physiological response — during a difficult birth, which then, under sufficiently stressful conditions, may manifest as anxiety — an emotional response — during childhood, and then, in adulthood, when similar stress arises, our original stress-response during our birth may manifest not just as anxiety, but also as paranoia or obsessive-compulsive thinking — both of which are but the originating 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 have recognized the originating gestalt of his mescaline-inspired fear (which Riedlinger claims involved Sartre’s actual birth). 3. Ibid., pp. 34-37. 4. Nisargadatta, 1992, p. 457.

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CHAPTER FOURTEEN

spirituality and madness


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 receive the greatest blessings.... According to the evidence provided by our ancestors, madness is a nobler thing than sober sense. — Plato Studies of rapid culture change show that the visionary experiences of prophets frequently contain images of the world disintegrating and being reabsorbed into chaos, which then allows a regeneration to occur.... Our fearsome “disorder ” is merely nature’s way of dismantling what was inadequate in the past, and in so doing allowing a new start. We would do well to let nature and the psyche do their work in their own tumultuous way. — John Perry To explore the relationship between spirituality and madness may appear at first to be simply a matter of comparing and contrasting those experiences that supposedly characterize each, with the ones lining up on the side of spirituality being “healthier” than those assembled behind the banner of madness. However, such a division is not particularly useful, since, as is becoming increasingly well-known, spiritual experiences can sometimes be terrifying and deluding, and psychotic experiences sometimes blissful and revelatory. The experiences — not perspectives, but experiences — associated with each do not just overlap phenomenologically, but appear to be almost freely interchangeable on a continuum of nonconventional experiential possibilities. Assigning to spirituality the “nicer” or more socially acceptable experiences not 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 a kind of madness, regardless of how well dressed, cleancut, or deodorized it might be. (Consider, for example, the spiritual constipation that arises when we, as serious meditators, think we’re sitting with our anger — our intention supposedly being to calm and transform it — when in fact we are actually only 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 reestablish some 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 an atheist can have a spiritual life. Another, related definition: Spirituality is the cultivation of intimacy with WhatReally-Matters. Among other things, this means developing intimacy with everything. No more turning away. Spirituality eventually is but sacred detox. Spirituality is Be-ing in the awakened raw. Spirituality aligns us with That with Which we are already and forever inseparable. That is, spirituality Homes us. Reality-unlocking breakthroughs — which are the crown jewels of spiritual experience — do not cut through the Mystery of the Real, but rather only affirm 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 of questioning, 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 might truly live.

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Darkness Shining Wild Spirituality opens us until we are openness itself. That opening, however, is not necessarily easy, for it asks everything of us. It is thus wise to not burden spirituality with the obligation to make us feel better. Now the sky bled jagged and bulging black, streaked with ghostly wingprints, then began swelling and thunderously ripping, finally expelling an even denser sky, leaden and fumarolic, spread-eagled with escaped lungs and scaly wingflappers and 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 had come too far to even consider turning back. The vermilion butte squatting upon the horizon must surely house the cave he sought — had he not already seen its broken back, its shadowed rise, its bruised pit of promise and peril, in his dreams? Alone he walked, with both certainty and stubborn resolve, shielding himself from the venomous rain. This quivering life, this shivering birth, ever delivering death and new breath, feasting upon itself, undressing every ambition and intention, making time out of every slumbering rhyme, walked him toward the foretold entrance.The cave was rumored to 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 weatherproof tomb, a rough crucible for initiatory possibility? Did it not, with alpine whisper and lowland mudmoans, hint ever so slightly of a floor of sunburnt marble, moccasined earth, planked strategy, carpeted smoke, unscratchable polyplastic? Did it not offer a starless sky, a muffler of excessive reach, all adrip with spider-wrapped stalactites? Did it not present a crude shelving and curving of cool walls, inviting his leaning and dreaming? More to the point, was it 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 and scratching, digging with featherless blue abandon. It didn’t matter to him whether or 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 of incandescent 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, dying babies, holy smiles, all descended in front of him, repeatedly appearing in oscillating, overlapping frames, capturing then eluding his attention. Self-authenticating transhuman chaos. Even the sacred stillpoint was now but circumference to him. Suddenly the butte melted into a billowing upheaval of lava, shockingly red and sensual, its molten fingers slowdancing, welcoming him closer. His gloried shield was now less than gossamer, a mere shadow of a veil webbing his skull and torso. There was no cave here, but only this boundless chaos, birthing an infinity of him’s and not-him’s with wild precision. This neverending extinction, this staggeringly prolific machinery of endless possibility, shone with — and was never apart from — What gave it Life. This was not his to know, but his to be. Its Mystery 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 of blinking stone. Nothing had happened and everything had happened. The only way 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 him except what could never be lost.

In spirituality, there is — sooner or later — room for all that we are, including those phenomena commonly classified as psychotic or aberrant. As such, spirituality is not an attainment of any particular “I,” but rather is a transcending of every “I” or would-be self, a liberating of attention from the hire of that ego-governed coalition (or mob) of habits that so insistently refers to itself as us. (Attention thus not only becomes more conscious, but also is not so committed to fixating on apparent objects, having at least some of its focus turned toward the source of attention — thus activating the nondual sense of awareness being aware of itself.) However, spirituality is not about premature (or ambition-driven) egotranscendence, and nor does it necessarily require disengagement from everyday concerns, including those that are unabashedly ego-centered. In spirituality’s all-pervading crucible are we all, learning — slowly perhaps, but surely — to welcome its preparatory fires, which both burn through and illuminate the claiming-to-be-us pretensions of “I,” emptying us of our case of mistaken identity. A radical roast.

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Darkness Shining Wild 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 or dreaded “it” eventually becomes reclaimed us, reclaimed Life, reclaimed God. When at once deeply embodied and sky-like, spirituality can simultaneously ground and render transparent all the dimensions of experience, ever revealing, however partially, the identity of the supposed experiencer. Exposure beyond our wildest dreams. This brings us to the notion of soul. By soul, I mean one’s personal essence, or that depth of individuality in which egoity is clearly and functionally peripheral to Being. So soul is simply the presence of individuated Being, a presence which manifests as the personalizing of the “spiritual line” of development (or that 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), but we — as we commonly conceive of ourselves — are within soul. Its profound interiority does not condense it, but rather expands the sphere of its reach. Soul is the last frontier of individuality. Soul recognizes and is intimate with what 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 love Cradled in neverborn Mystery Wrapped up in speechless history Into this room come we Through the lovers’ dying cries, through endless goodbyes, Through lagoons of spurting night, through recycled fright Resting in the blazing black of an unforgetting eye Making more than sense and less than a self Seeded so dark and so light Myth the body, sky the mind, undying the love Soul dating a deeper rhyme This room outgrowing its every design

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And how the passages pulse and gleam with the long-awaited rendezvous Seethrough shadows dying for a look Our need to know moaning blue and gone Love feasts on us with us until we can no longer stand apart from the Open Secret of our shared heart

Madness is also a journey into what underlies consensus reality, but it lacks, at least most of the time, the reassuringly concrete centralization of conventional egoity, and is also largely bereft — or has too slippery a grasp — of the stabilizing, self-transcending overview of spirituality. The authors of Synopsis of Psychiatry define psychosis as meaning “grossly impaired in reality testing.”1 But which reality? Can sanity and insanity be distinguished, and if so, how? And by whom? It is far from a given that those with 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 with another, largely compensatory trance that is populated by unconventional or bizarre — yet nonetheless often still historically coherent — representations of the culture or environment left behind. As illogical as it may seem to be, madness has its own logic, its own internal consistency, which usually can be teased out into coherency if we will but leave 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’s thread — attention wanders, dazed and mostly unconscious (and often quite disembodied), through hallucinatory culs-de-sac, moving in and out of various identities and roles, buffeted by waves of emotion. Yet is this not, to varying degrees, what is actually going on within almost all of us, much of the time? If we were to observe all of our thoughts and fantasies and intentions for half an hour or so — a far from easy task — just how much coherence and

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Darkness Shining Wild sanity would we find? How much automaticity would we notice? How frequently would certain thoughts be enlarged, complicated, argued with, reconstructed, or believed? How often would we act as if a particular role was actually us? And what might we discover in-between our more familiar or 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 to all domains of being occurs. His center of experience moves from ego to Self. Mundane time becomes merely anecdotal, only the eternal matters. The madman is, however, confused. He muddles ego with Self, inner with outer,natural and supernatural....Nevertheless, he often can be to us, even through his profound wretchedness and disintegration, the hierophant of the sacred. — R. D. Laing Perhaps, if we can but listen, and listen with more than just our mind and everyday ear, we might meet our crazed shadowselves at least halfway, reaching for them not with straitjackets and psychiatric frames, but with a spirit of genuine caring, interest, and discerning intelligence. A certain tendency to insanity has always attended the opening of the religious sense in men, as if “blasted with excess of light.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson In the very disintegration of madness, the going-to-pieces fracturing and delusion and disorientation — which I am not at all romanticizing — there may be unsuspected treasure. Through the rubble and cracks can come intimations of the truly sacred, signals that cut or shine through the deadening security to which so many of us cling. In the sense that madness simply externalizes and dramatizes — however bizarrely — what we, the supposedly normal, are tending to internalize and suppress, it provides an excellent mirror for us. Nevertheless, madness in contemporary society generally remains in the category of a culturally dysfunctional survival strategy (or outright throwing in of the

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towel) that features enough nonconsensual experiences and behavior to apparently warrant some degree of medical intervention. Madness could be said to be adaptation to failed adaptation. As such, it is a solution — 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 life been a “solution” to unresolved, misrepresented, or “forgotten” events from long ago? Madness is but an exaggeration, however distorted or toxically redirected, of our everyday intentions and behavior. Where we act, often pretending that we aren’t pretending, psychotics tend to overact. In a scene from 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 grotesque caricature of what the natural healing of that estranged integration we call sanity might be. — R. D. Laing Is it not madness to be trashing our environment and dehumanizing each other? Is it not madness to be compulsively wasting time using time-saving devices, while acting as if we have no other choice? Is it not madness to keep indulging the case of mistaken identity from which almost all of us are suffering? Is teaching cannibals culinary etiquette an act of sanity? Who is crazier, the respectable businessman obsessed with leveraging human capital, or the naked avadhut (wandering sage) sitting atop a dung pile in an Indian village? To the point: Madness is socially unacceptable deviance, generally epitomized by “delusional” activity. Madness is a departure or escape from conventional, ego-corraled reality, with return tickets all-too-easily shredded to confetti in shapeshifting skies, awareness splintering into many attentional factions. The mad person may identify with what arises — as in claiming to literally be someone else — whereas a person immersed in the natural awareness of spirituality may notice the intention to thus identify, but does not concretize it nor get lost in it (at least to any significant extent).

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Darkness Shining Wild As was described earlier, spiritual openness may allow or even invite psychotic or nonordinary phenomena to surface; if this gets out of control, as in what is termed a “spiritual emergency” (or in spirit-possession situations, as epitomized by Haitian and Balinese cathartic trances), it is not necessarily a problem, but may actually be an entirely fitting process. (The more disruptive, disturbing, or painful difficulties associated with spiritual opening are often misconstrued as psychological disorders.) Being out of control may be needed at a certain point, to break down unseen or unacknowledged repressive or dysfunctional structures that are not about to surface otherwise. Being out of control may propel one into the obviously spiritual, and also may shatter the subtle ossification that can occur when spirituality gets too “spiritual” for its own good. The flutecall trembled in the heat, skinnily skiing across the dunes. An albino camel, astonishingly graceful in its ungainly gallop, sped across the road a stone’s throw ahead, bringing an admiring grunt from the driver of the minibus, an old nomad with eyes as blazingly blue as Band-I-Amir on a cloudless December morning, and cheekbones as starkly sculpted as the bare mountains hulking to either side. With silent good humor he passed an enormous, aromatically smoldering chillum to the dust-covered youths grinning in the backseats. Their faces, unlike his, were unlined, and their eyes spoke more of years of comfort against hardship than of confrontation with real difficulty.Their backpacks, bound tightly atop the roof, were little more, he thought, than the suitcases of pampered non-conformists. True, they appeared untested, but at least they weren’t tourists, that greedily destructive breed that paraded before the greatest of sights, like Bamiyan’s twin Buddhas, with all the lucidity of drugged camels. Very few tourists had ever come this 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, subtly ricocheting melody demanding more than a casual ear. Naturally, the young Westerners behind him didn’t hear it; they were too busy swaying and giggling under the entrancing influence of the hashish, their faces wildly crisscrossed by stupefying grins and boyish stares. He smiled, thinking of the letters they’d never write, the already-romanticized recountings bouncing about between their ears. Would not his own son spit upon these spoiled children? Only fourteen, he’d been a riflebearer for over two years, patrolling some of the most dangerous places west of the Khyber Pass.

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The driver coughed, then spat dramatically out his window, knowing the minibus would soon, very soon, be emptied of its freshfaced contents — the euphoric trio behind him would probably shit their pants when they encountered their fate, as if 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 two men on horseback who had just come into view up ahead.The demand came from one of the youths, his face now shockingly wrinkled and craggy, his parched skin reddish-brown, a dirty skyblue turban tightly wrapped around his swaying head, his knife-hand steady as a rock. The van sped past the horsemen, who immediately charged after it, shooting out its rear tires. Now there would be a meeting. Hashish smoke filled the vehicle, in creamy correspondence with the dust boiling up outside, all athunder with horsehooves and metallic curses. The driver lost his mind and found a clarity of recognition deeper than he’d ever known, marvelling at the pinpoint yet spacious choreography of the unfolding encounter.The fact that the three sitting behind him were no longer even remotely human-looking didn’t bother him, but actually flooded him with relief. Whatever they were, they were his, as were the two bloody specters hovering outside, not his in the sense of the merely personal, but his in the sense of an inner crossroad for which he had long yearned. Now explanations shrivelled into nothing, as did the minibus. Again the albino camel passed in front of him, trotting now, almost floating, its great turquoise eyes reminding him to closely, very closely, observe the five who now coalesced before him, leaving him but a momentarily frozen note in the flutecalling, his fluidity of Being now primary, his shapings of self now secondary, his direction more him than his, his history but unalloyed Mystery, his heartbeat celebrating both desert and oasis, his chestful of goodbyes and hellos now but sacred music. A moment had exploded into all moments, unveiling the Story that could never be told. This was not the end, nor the beginning, but only the Ever Real making an appearance as him, an appearance that suddenly was utterly transparent, giving up the 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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Darkness Shining Wild or consciously relates to rather than from — whatever is arising; on the other hand, madness usually lacks such clarity, tending to operate in a more reactive manner. Madness redecorates, relocates, or reframes the prison, whereas spirituality reveals and desolidifies the prison until its doors are recognized to be already open. Madness may free us from certain demands and restrictions, or may even free us to see with a relatively liberating perspective, but spirituality is freedom. Spirituality’s morality not only is intrinsically compassionate, but is Beingcentered; madness’s usual morality is but a surrogate, however weird or ornately structured, of conventional morality, whether me-centered or we-centered. Madness is an escape from consensus reality, a negation of it and its status quo hallucinations, and as such is often characterized by isolation, avoidance of relationship, and cultish propensities. On the other hand, spirituality neither flees nor rejects consensus reality, but instead infiltrates and illuminates it, until it is recognized to be but one more expression of Being. In madness, intimacy generally is avoided, mixed up with fusion, or limited to a select few. In spirituality, intimacy with everything is cultivated. Madness is the soul unchained, yet still marooned; spirituality is the soul unchained, yet anchored to its Source. Madness sees the abyss and falls in; spirituality sees the abyss and swallows it. Madness is an outcast change of stage; spirituality upstages every would-be us. Madness is a solution that often camouflages the problem; spirituality is a solution that nonproblematically turns the problem into an opportunity. Where madness is busy being a nonconventional somebody or something, spirituality is not busy being anything in particular. Nevertheless, the strange forays, sense-bending logic, dramatizations, and spelunking misadventures of madness are not necessarily without value. Sometimes they may simply call for pharmaceutical rescue missions or behavioral braking, and sometimes they may, through the very crackings they engender, let sufficient light into the containers of self to awaken us to a depth or dimension of reality that we haven’t yet touched or sighted. In many cultures, madness has been viewed as a potential harbinger of spiritual development 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 his earlier 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 only suffering repeated blackout-inducing seizures, but also an inescapable sense of “passing utterly into madness.” For several hours afterward (he’d had to take 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 potentially very 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, whatever its metaphysical credentials, does not necessarily make us conscious. Facts are facts, but they are not necessarily the Truth. Sometimes madness may be the only way to access what underlies and transcends knowledge, but it may be a journey that demands so much that it becomes a trip with no return; hence the need for savvy guides and navigational tools, not the least of which is a compassion-centered reframing of the very notion of “madness” (this being especially well known by those who have been in the labyrinths of insanity and have emerged not with the Minotaur’s head but with its maker’s). You want me to stop Speaking in riddles But the final detox Is to be totally at home With paradox

Within each of us are many madnesses, many pockets of seedling psychosis, the energies and messages of which need to breathe more freely. Their viewpoint needs not to be adopted, but to be given more than a merely

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Darkness Shining Wild rational ear, so that we might, from toe to crown, be confronted afresh with the imagination-transcending reality of our actual existence. In leaving the madness that would suppress or ostracize our madness, we ready the vessel for Awakening’s alchemy. In entering our own madness with open eyes and psychonavigational savvy, we discover a deeper sanity. Come in — is not the door already slightly ajar? Only if we venture repeatedly through zones of annihilation can our contact with Divine Being, which is beyond annihilation, become firm and stable. — Karlfried Von Durkheim When what is happening Is not what is happening And the ground is nothing But quicksand and bananapeel There comes a crack in the daylight Just big enough to squeeze through But only if you take nothing with you Solo travel it may seem But that’s just in dreams

NOTES 1. Kaplan, Sadock, & Grebb, 1994, p. 325. When the culturally sanctioned experts on sanity 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 already starting to be done: Rationality (including dissociative or disembodied rationality) may still reign supreme in psychiatric diagnosis, but nonrational or rationality-transcending modes of knowing — like intuition or contemplative awareness — are starting to be given respect in a few psychiatric circles. For example, psychiatrist and longtime intuitive Judith Orloff now teaches psychiatrists and psychiatric residents how to use their intuition in making diagnoses (Orloff, 2000). Psychiatry, though still tending to be neurotically suspicious of holistic or “alternative” approaches to well-being, does show signs of beginning to recognize that wisdom and knowledge are not necessarily synonymous (see Grosso, 1999). Also, the anti-spiritual bias of psychiatry — a hangover from both an overdose of 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 diagnostic bible, the DSM-IV, is highly significant; it is no small feat to make such a crack in the ultra-conservative armor of mainstream psychiatry. The public view of what constitutes sanity has become broader and more kindly inclined in the last decade or so. There’s a growing appreciation of the positive elements in mental disorders, as exemplified by the presence of various ”spiritual emergency” centers and helplines (though these are not usually staffed by psychiatrists). Those “normally” considered to be far from conventionally sane — like mediums for the dead — are now regularly appearing on shows like Larry King Live, their message transmitted nationwide. Mysticism — with which so-called mental illness is often suffused — is no longer an esoteric curiosity, a sideshow on the fringe of the human psyche, but is starting to go mainstream (e.g., Caroline Myss on PBS), bringing about, among other things, an increasingly deep reevaluation of what it means to be sane. Sanity and rationality are not synonymous. Insanity and nonrationality are not synonymous. Mainstream psychiatry arguably suffers from “Pervasive Labeling Disorder” — recovery from which “rarely occurs once the person’s annual income exceeds six figures” (Levy, 1992, pp. 121-125) — and also from “Hyperrational Dissociative Disorder,” the recommended medication for which is a synergistic, freshly brewed blend of contemplative and compassion-enhancing practices, taken daily. 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 inseparability and shared contingency of all that was, is, and will be, is not some arcane act, but rather the very foundation of a sane life. Basic sanity is rooted in the ongoing commitment both to awaken and to care, under all conditions. In such a milieu, healing is inevitable, bringing together the best of both conventional and alternative practices. Diagnosis with dignity. When the “gnosis” — the knowledge-transcending knowingness that is innate to us all — is put back in diagnosis, then the dichotomy of doctor and patient gracefully yields to the natural intimacy of two unique manifestations of the same Life interacting in a way that benefits both. 2. Can sanity and insanity be distinguished, and if so, how? And by whom? Can those with supposed expertise in making such a distinction actually do so? If sane people (defined for the purposes of this discussion as those who don’t have the symptoms of serious psychiatric disorders) were to fake mental illness so as to be admitted to mental hospitals, would their sanity be detected at some point during their stay? If it indeed was, this would surely count as evidence that sanity and insanity can be distinguished by those who are in the business of being able to recognize the difference.

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Darkness Shining Wild Such an experiment took place in the United States (Rosenhan, 1975). Sane volunteers —referred to from now on as pseudopatients — claimed to be hearing voices so as to gain admission to various psychiatric hospitals, and then, once admitted, dropped all pretense, except for the use of pseudonyms and, in the case of those who were mental health professionals, the claim to be in a profession other 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 they had been given upon admission — schizophrenic. Upon discharge, each was categorized with a diagnosis of “schizophrenia in remission.” Interestingly, many patients in these hospitals detected the sanity of the pseudopatients, presumably because they, unlike the staff, actually paid genuine attention to them. A psychiatrist may show that a patient is out of contact with him or her, and use that fact as part of the given diagnosis, but when a psychiatrist is out of contact with a patient, the patient is usually still seen as the only one with a problem. The behavior of the staff with the pseudopatients says it all: They consistently displayed depersonalization, affective blunting, social withdrawal, delusional tendencies, and near-obsessive isolationism. Given this, could not they be given close to the same label that they gave the pseudopatients? If I treat my patients as though they do not exist, what right do I have to claim that 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 sanity or times of sanity does not automatically mean that sanity has been reestablished. However, if obvious mental health is consistently observed over a sufficient period of 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 their alleged condition. With chilling regularity, their symptoms were taken out of context — even their psychosocial history (however normal) was explained in terms of their psychiatric diagnosis. Would the staff have shown less aversion to the pseudopatients if they had not been viewed as being schizophrenic? Probably. 3. Da Avabhasa, 1992, pp. 109-112.

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CHAPTER FIFTEEN

to transcend yourself, be yourself


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 but getting firmer. I’m running through the rain, along the local seawall. Soft, soft waves. Though it’s only 4 pm, it’s already dark. My attention wanders for a while through a crowd of jostling thoughts, 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 through my 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, the nuances of texture and pressure, softness and hardness, expansion and contraction, fluidly combine with a kind of composite sensation, namely that of everything working together so that running can occur. My attention now and then settles on intentionality — the intention to lift my leg, to lean forward a touch more, to slow down, to speed up, to rock forward on my 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 and highrises. I gaze at the sky, the sea, the darkly glistening ribbon of path ahead of me, then become 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 spontaneous shift from what could be called the first stage of conscious attention — a deliberate focusing on the details of our immediate experience — to what could be termed the second stage of conscious attention — attention that’s given to the totality of our presence. While there’s still 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 holding still. 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, seemingly instantaneously, it returns. Or did it actually never leave? Was it just that my focus was elsewhere (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 attention shifts 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 running and “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, sweat rinsing out my eyes. Ambition wrestles with care, and I slow down, grateful to be able to run at all. At last, I finish my run, squatting in drenched silence, stretching my Achilles tendons, 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 as a body. When attention was brought to my overall presence, my innate wholeness of being, I went from being present as a body to simply being, neither separate from nor identified with my body. Our body, be it our physical body or our dream body, is but the medium for being in and maintaining relationship with our environment. Embodiment is relationship. The body is neither self (childhood), nor object to exploit (adolescence), nor ego-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 of them 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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Darkness Shining Wild through, the body shattered, the body Divine, the body of no beginning, the embodiment 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 mind but — if we but hear with more than our ears — also Truth’s tongue, all arising 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 find ourselves not just coming Home, but already sitting at the hearth. Homebodies. In embodying, consciously and responsibly embodying, all that we are, we become increasingly intimate with all that is, including our resistance to such radical intimacy. We may apparently still be a somebody, but we’re now, to a more than significant degree, no longer in our own way. Our body is then no longer ours, but Being’s — we’ve just rented the facilities for 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 right place. If our Earth-life is a classroom — and don’t assume this is just a metaphor — then we, all of us, have lessons to learn. No grades given, no Oscars for waking up. We simply repeat our lessons until we have learned them by heart. It stopped mattering to me how many times I’d have to renew the lease. My current circumstances, however unappealing, provided, as always, the needed raw materials for my evolution. Not only was the teacher everywhere, so was the classroom. I had lost so, so much, yet I felt more whole than ever before in my life. I often felt terribly cramped in the one-bedroom basement suite in which Dama and I lived until mid-1996 — low ceilings, low light, noisiness stomping overhead — but until I consistently felt gratitude for it and the growth it made possible for me, I had to stay there. It was both tomb and womb for me. When I finally left it, I was sufficiently energized to make the leap of faith needed for my next move, to a small house in a town an hour south.

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I had no work, was doing a full-time doctoral program, was very involved with taking care of my kids, and could not afford to rent a house — yet within a month of moving, I had enough people coming to me for work to provide the income I needed. My client list quickly grew. The demands on me were great, more often than not exhausting me. At the same time, my faith in Life 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 remember that 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, the more aware I was of Life. And the more aware I was of Life, the more aware I was of the Deathless. As my sense of identity expanded from the self-obsessed dramatics of “me” to the self-sharing camaraderie of “we” to the 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 whatever was happening. The inseparability and contingent nature of all things now gladdened rather than maddened me, awakening in me a participatory gratitude. Death gives all the same opportunity. Death leaves no one out. Letting Death have a prominent place in our awareness practices — which may be far from formal — brings us into more intimate contact with WhatReally-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 it truly create separation? Or is such separation already there? Death does not cut us off from Life; we do. I’m learning to wear my solitude It’s not a bad fit A bit tight around the chest But I like its touch The more I hold it

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Darkness Shining Wild The more it holds me I bob between buoys Out on postcard seas Balancing atop the waves Watching the shore All the bathers flowing to and fro Colors spilling and shaping A sudden love for all Turns me to sea Then to shore A deeper solitude this is Connecting 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 or tenured self over against the rest of Existence. As was described in earlier chapters, the very practice of thus identifying — which is the essence of “I” or conventional somebody-ness — generates an apparent territory (both outer and inner) inhabited by all that is “not-I,” which seems to be not just “over there,” but definitely “over there,” definitely apart from us. “I” is chronically disturbed or threatened by much of what appears to be other than it, creating dependency-relationships with whatever lessens the threat, including the promises of spiritual practice. (To offset such dependency, we may cultivate an exaggerated independence, which only compounds our difficulty.) Hence, not only is “I” an addict, but also is addicted to being addicted. 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, like everything else, only arising in — and as — Being, needing not annihilation nor spiritual surgery, but only awakened attention and compassion. After all, our sense of alienating separateness is — just like “I” — not something with which we are saddled, but rather something that we are doing. Now. To not be identified with our egoity is not about existing in some impersonal state bereft of idiosyncrasy and individuality, but rather is about being present both as our unique somebody-ness and as self-transcending Being. Even at the 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 transparency relative to our fundamental nature that it cannot help but colorfully and fittingly represent us, however superficially. However, when we let “I” do the driving, we usually end up wandering like hungry 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 crucial to not prematurely cease such wanderings. It is so easy — as when we are in the spineless 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 scars Dissolving amnesia’s infectious anaesthesia Ancient seas seize my sails Waves aglitter with shattered dawn My craft ablaze but not gone Riding, riding the high and the low Joining what’s above with what’s below Without homogenizing the show When 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 exile Banished by no one My freedom is in my chains revealing with just enough light the steps I must take until my heart does completely break Divine forget-me-nots halo my scars Tomorrow’s children color my dreams A rain of dying petals Lining the crooked way home

Higher self and lower self, good self and bad self — such formulations are little more than status games, hierarchical tyrannies from which stem “moral”

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Darkness Shining Wild excuses for often inhuman practices. The “Higher” gets overly focussed on ascent (if only to the high-rises of neocortical abstraction), associating itself with haloes, crown chakras, unconditional love, samadhi states, ecstasy, dirtlessness, transpersonal experiences, and whatever else seems to demonstrate spiritual attainment, while the “lower” gets saddled with the body (a mere container or vessel for the “Higher,” of course!), disease, lust, anger, greed, fear, shame, Death, and — perhaps worst of all — the Pollyannaish slumming and “help” of the “Higher.” It’s just the same old spiritual bypass, headed by the same old egoity masquerading as Soul or Atman or Higher Self, inevitably seducing almost all of us at some point — and how could it not? Seeking some sort of parental comfort or a sense of immunity when faceto-face with rock-bottom, existential insecurity is very understandable. We may 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 from the 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 the very darkness that may well be harboring the seeds of the transformation for which we ache. Hope is pothead optimism, stoned on possibility. Even nondual traditions are often plagued with hope, if only in the form of unacknowledged and unworked-with transference issues (the Master being the transference figure).2 But to be without hope doesn’t necessarily mean to be stuck in despair or hopelessness. The end of hope is the beginning of faith. Where hope seeks security, faith accepts insecurity. Hope invests in possibility; faith invests in trust. Hope dreams; faith awakens. Hope seduces; faith loves. Hope is little more 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 of despair, touching it with a deeply sobering kindness. Where hope flees pain, faith seeks intimacy with it. Hope seeks God; faith assumes God. Hope is nostalgia for the future; faith is transcendence of the future. Hope is concerned with becoming, faith with Being. Faith is radical trust in Being, radical intimacy with Life. Faith uses difficulties to ripen and deepen itself.

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In facing Death and the ineffable, immeasurable immensity of Existence, the heroic 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 (commonly known as the “real world”), or camps in the hinterlands of existential abstraction, or pursues mystical flight into the subtle or formless dimensions of Life, it is still seeking immunity, not only from the intimidating vastitude, uncertainty, and all-pervading contingency of bare Existence, but also from the very pain of assuming and maintaining the role of a separate self. Furthermore, is not “I” — regardless of its obsession with confirming its existence — also chronically on the outlook for a break from itself, an immersion in something less tightly perimetered? Such a break may, for example, be provided by intoxication, orgasm, or by dissolution in some sort of group activity, all of which basically override or dissolve “I’s” boundaries. By contrast, participating in Awakening’s alchemy illuminates rather than collapses “I’s” boundaries, rendering them transparent to Being. (This does not mean the end of individuality, but rather only a sacralizing of it. Individuality then is not only obviously infused with and informed by Being, but also includes 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 the intensity and sincerity of our desire to be free. Not free from, not free to, not free for, but simply free. When our desire to continue distracting ourselves from our suffering becomes weaker (or is permitted to be less central) than our desire to be truly free, we are magnetically drawn to Awakening’s alchemy, letting the fires of its crucible provide us with both heat and light. Freedom to do what one likes is really bondage, while being free to do what one must, what is right, is real freedom. — Nisargadatta

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Darkness Shining Wild In reading Stephen Levine’s Meetings At The Edge, which is mostly about his work and dialogues with the terminally ill, I was deeply moved by how those in excruciating pain and existential agony often worked (and surrendered) their way into a deep healing, not a healing that necessarily kept them alive or cured their illness, but a healing that went right to their core. When they were no longer entrapped in the role of being a somebody who was dying, then they were, at least some of the time, able to rest in Being, even in the midst of enormous suffering. They were not just dying, but were dying into Life. In the innate openness of Being, there was, eventually, room for even the worst pain. Theirs was the art of learning to bearing the unbearable with in-the-body courage, going right to and through the heart of suffering. Breaking through to a more essential sense of Life through a close encounter with Death does not, however, always have to be catalyzed by suffering, as is illustrated by John Wren-Lewis’s account of his having nearly died from being poisoned.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 radical dissolution 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 God as anything else. He says such consciousness is not actually extraordinary, but rather is simply our normal state (echoing the sentiments of most spiritual masters). From the perspective of such “normalcy,” suffering still exists, but is 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....is immense gratitude for the privilege of being part of it all.” Such grace it is, this capacity to be grateful. Gratitude reinforces and fuels our faith, plugging us into a self-sense with too much heart to stay apart from What-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 from grateful — 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 had a 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 the distance between Life and Death is none other than the degree to which we flee 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, teetering at the far frontier of sanity, recognizing the delusional underpinnings of the Death-denying culture that is all around us, yet not seeing — at least within reach — 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’) suffering into our heart — then our separateness becomes more porous, flimsier, less and less convincing, eventually existing as a non-alienating play of differences. In our rawness of heart, we both cradle and are cradled by our common humanity, facing the Real not with suspicion or fear, but with humility and gratitude and love. My blood is cutting rivers Through what I thought I knew Carrying no survivors except for You Those who see You See what is out of sight This everwild Wonder beyond wonder That nothing in particular can replace Since It wears every face

In real love there is ample room for our dread and grief. The power of such love, 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 so beautifully puts it, “The mind creates the abyss, the heart crosses it.”7

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Darkness Shining Wild I don’t see how we can get out of it because we are hallucinating the abyss, but the leap of faith is that that abyss is perfect freedom — that it doesn’t lead to selfannihilation or destruction, but the exact opposite. — R. D. Laing When asked if Death was real or an illusion, a Tibetan Buddhist teacher replied, “Death is a real illusion.”8 Such statements — radical poetics, bananapeeling the mind — only make sense when we stop trying to make them make sense; they are not intended for the rational mind, but for a more primal locus of knowing. It is so easy to cling to our presumed identity and its viewpoint, shielding ourselves — and diverting our attention — from our actual situation. And it is just as easy to defend against what appears to be the end (“Rage, rage against the dying of the light/Do not go gentle into that good night,” famously recommended Dylan Thomas). Death, however, is not the problem. Openly encountering Death and our fear of it can be an occasion for growth, for extending ourselves into a deeper unknown. What serves “death” can also serve depth — and thereby serve life — like Persephone accepting pomegranate wine from the Lord of Death and being impregnated with the ecstatic principle of life....What is truly toxic is not that which makes one intimate with death, but rather that which numbs one from a vital connection with life and death. — Michael Ortiz Hill When death finally comes you will welcome it like an old friend, being aware of how 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, as it must, leaving nothing in its wake except us. Again I break, my need dissolving my pride Again I spill, my hurt streaming, streaming wide Again I die, letting all the goodbyes tear open my sky Again I whisper and again I roar Swimming through, through the dreamy door

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And again I join what’s above with what’s below And again I recognize What’s behind the show Again I slip, one hand on the candy, the other on a whip Again I rise, filled with blazing night and newborn cries Again I pump up my will, gunning for the Holy Thrill Again I awaken, looking through the veils No longer, no longer seeking something else to wear And again I join what’s above with what’s below And again I recognize What’s appearing as the show Again I bulge, feeling murder snaking down my arms Again I pray, my dungeon walls swallowing my breath Again I die, releasing all that I took to be mine Again I howl, prowling through forests of palm and pine One hand on a spear, the other crucifying my fear And again I join what’s above with what’s below And again I recognize What’s behind the show Again I gaze from one eye, my broken body aglow Again I drop my sword, watching my blood cut rivers in the snow Again I beat a sweating drum, urging you to leave your mind Again I disappear without leaving anything behind No longer, no longer wandering lost in dreaming lands And again I join what’s above with what’s below And again I recognize What’s appearing as the show Again I smile, unmoving in the black chamber of psychic trial Again I dance in the fire, entombed by mountainous desire Again I remember, uncovering my original wounds Again I rebuild the temple, rising from my ruins Again I break and again I taste the final goodbye And again I fall and forget the Sacred Call And again I remember and again I include it all And again here we are, already free Not to have, but to be, to form and unform To be lovers with both the calm and the storm And again I join what’s above with what’s below And again I recognize What’s behind the show The only show we’ll ever know

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Darkness Shining Wild There was a quality of love, I realized more and more deeply, that could subsume dread, but only if dread was permitted to nakedly show and express itself. This is, of course, a very large “if,” before which it’s very tempting to retreat — which I did many times — as is so aptly put by W. H. Auden: “We would rather die in our dread than climb the cross of the moment, and let our illusions die.”9 But is not dread itself a gift, however ominously or darkly circumstanced? Does not its skillful unwrapping expose — with compelling clarity — the case of mistaken identity centering our alienation? And what more potent catalyst 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 sky streaked by the paradox-stained debris of exploded rationality. Even so, what constituted it is essentially still here, its elemental forces taking shape anew, all of it moving yet going nowhere. When we realize that Death is ever now, and that what happens after Death is happening now, then what is not frontier? What-Really-Matters is not elsewhere or elsewhen, regardless of how camouflaged or marginalized it may be by our knowledge. Look for me where storms come uncaged Look for me where the sea carries shattered sky Look for me where cloudsilk weaves through your sigh Look, look for me where joy and pain disappear into sun and rain, where we can only once again love ourselves sane

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It only makes sense When we stop trying to make it make sense Rest in undressed Being Remembering to remember that It and you have never been apart Until only What-Really-Matters remains Already perfectly dressed for the part Too real to make the news And the lovers die, die, die Into a love beyond imagining Crying out as one: Oh God God O God

As we die into Life, becoming increasingly intimate both with what dies and with what doesn’t die, we begin to befriend our pain, not letting it mutate into suffering, while simultaneously inviting it onto the dancefloor, letting it further awaken and deepen our capacity for compassion and love. Then conscious alignment with — and conscious opening to — Being becomes more and more of a necessity, a sacred responsibility, a labor of love, a sacrificial practice that leaves us with nothing except what truly matters. Kabir nails it down: “What you call ‘salvation’ belongs to the time before death. If you don’t break your ropes while you are alive, do you think ghosts will do it after?”10 It is crucial not to let our embrace of our fundamental Oneness separate us from our differences. By the same fire, serene, impersonal, perfect, which burns until it shall dissolve all things 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 leapfrogging over each other with accelerating abandon, leaving little more than instantly vanishing tracks, an enormous avalanche of silence suddenly approaches. There is not much else to say. In spills the silence, too eloquent for translation. Am I aware of it, or is it aware of me? Both. Awareness aware of itself. Full-blooded awaring. The tiniest of the tiny vaster than we can imagine. Silence says it all. And so too does everything else.

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Darkness Shining Wild To transcend yourself, be yourself. We are Light and we are Darkness, and we are the flesh, be it of mud or stars, torn between the two, yet already the One, inseparable from the broken 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 but also the riches of such traditions, dismissing them with facile ease. “Guru yoga” (or surrender — at best, deep, open-eyed, responsible surrender — to a spiritual master) is anathema to most Western sensibilities. Such seemingly slavish dependence cannot help but be somewhat repugnant to cultures that glorify or overemphasize 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 enamored devotees of a guru as members of a cult (which they may well be), but not so easy to see the exaggerated individuality that pervades Western culture as a cultic phenomenon — ego is, among other things, a cult of one. It’s not a great leap from the rugged “individualism” of America (which is usually not much more than deified adolescence, disconnected its shadow) to the heroic 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 unquestioned somebody-ness, taken-for-granted separateness. “The most that any one of us can seem to do,” writes Becker in the final sentence of The Denial of Death, “is to fashion something — an object or ourselves— and drop it into the confusion, make an offering of it, so to speak, to the 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 nonproblematically relating to them. Such freedom minds not its chains, any more than the sky minds its clouds and weather. Becker’s heroic individual is too busy making a problem out of Existence to be capable of the kind of acceptance that is at the heart of true freedom. Such “heroism” maintains — and even legitimizes — itself by choosing to view Existence as a dilemma wherein we are “doomed,” acting as if any other view is mere escapism or fantasy. But who is braver, the one who is positioned behind 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 an ephemeral wave? To view Life as only an existential dilemma keeps us stuck at the level where it is a dilemma. What Becker’s heroic individual (and Kierkegaard’s “knight of faith”) both tremble at the edge of is not just Death, but self-transcendence, the radical release of (or full disidentification with) “I.” “I” is in agony because “I” insists on the impossible: to be Enlightened and yet still be “I.” If “I’s” efforts to transcend itself could be seen as a cartoon, the caption for it might be: Enlightenment guaranteed, or your ego back. In its reaching for a conceptual Oneness, “I” is only avoiding its own suffering, its “spiritual” efforting and metaphysical pretensions making 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 his wife, dream expert Ann Faraday, apparently woke up one morning with her selfsense gone (also see Segal, 1996), leaving her in much the same condition as WrenLewis. 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 a particular stage of spirituality (as put forward in various stage models of spiritual evolution), and so seemingly call into question the whole notion of spiritual progress — i.e., that there are developmental stages for spirituality (not states, but stages) — that have to be reached before Enlightenment (or full awakening) can occur. There may be positive correlations between various doings and Enlightenment, but this does not necessarily mean there is a causal link between such doings and the big E. Spiritual “growth” may be more ego-dream (or a fantasy of “progress”) than actuality. Nevertheless, there is something to be said for preparatory work, a turning of psychoemotional soil; both Wren-Lewis and Faraday had done considerable self-exploration prior to their awakenings. Ripeness does 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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Darkness Shining Wild this, check out Chödrön (1997].) This is not a concept to believe in, nor an excuse for idiot compassion, but an invitation to go deeper. The practice of gratitude asks that we simultaneously open heart and mind, expanding both our caring and our insight, so that we see — not just feel but also see — with our heart. A similar practice 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 cuts through the “I” versus “you,” or the “us” versus “them” mentality that so easily infects and twists us. Loving — not necessarily liking, but loving — our enemies is but radical sanity, for in loving them, in authentically praying for their freedom from suffering, we are not only ceasing to dehumanize them, but are also aligning ourselves 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 our minds!). Where the mystic, seeking refuge in Being, is busy separating from the conventional and ordinary, the sage of the Nondual, being already Home, has room 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.

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AFTERWORD — SEPTEMBER 2009

bound together yet free


-YBODYSSPUNFROMGRAVITYANDBOUNDLESSLIGHT $REAMINGOFGYPSYJOYSANDKNOTTEDNIGHT .OTHINGSMOVINGYETEVERYTHINGSINMOTION /NLYBROKENWAVESWILLEVERKNOWTHEOCEAN

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 ~ 192 ~


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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Darkness Shining Wild 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 oneyear 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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Darkness Shining Wild 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. )THEHUSBANDOFYOURHEART 9OUTHEWIFEOFMINE ,ONGHAVEWEBEENAPART

~ 196 ~


.OWBEGINSOURTIME "OUNDTOGETHERYETFREE 4WINmAMESOFINTIMACY

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. "ELOVED TAKEMYHAND ,ETSTRAVELTHROUGHEVERYLAND 5NTILSEPARATIONCANNOTKEEPUSAPART !NDWEAREWHATBEATSOURHEART 7HATTHENSHALL)CALLYOU )KNOWYOURTRUENAME "UTFORITTHERESNOWORD /NLYTHISNAKEDKNOWING 4HATSPEAKSANDSINGSOFYOU 4HROUGHALLWEAREANDALLWEDO

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 ~ 197 ~

Darkness Shining Wild 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. )AWAKENENTWINEDWITHYOU 9OURALLANDMINESUCHAlNElT &REEDAREWETHROUGHANDTHROUGH +NOWINGWEVECOMETOOFARTOQUIT )NTHETIMEBEYONDTIMEYOUCOMETOME 2EMINDINGMEOFOURLONGSHAREDGROUND !NDSO)POURINTOOUREVERFRESHFAMILIARITY /URLOVEUNBOUNDINSIDEANDALLAROUND

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. -YSOLOTRAVELSAREDONE /URSHAREDHEARTMYSUN !SWETOGETHERDIE )NTOTHEUNDYING/NE 7ITHOUTFORGETTING 4HEBROKENMANY

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, ~ 198 ~


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 ~ 199 ~

Darkness Shining Wild 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. ~ 200 ~


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. ,OOKFORME WHERETHElRSTOFUSSEARCHEDTHESKY ,OOKFORME WHERETHELASTOFUSISSAYINGGOODBYE ,OOKFORME WHEREYOUREBROKENENOUGHTOBEWHOLE ,OOKFORME WHERELOVESTHEGROUNDANDNOTTHEGOAL ,OOK LOOKFORME WHEREJOYANDPAINDISAPPEARINTOSUNANDRAIN

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... /3URROUNDEDBYlERYWOMBWAS) 4HEDOORSGONE THEWALLSCRAZILYAQUIVER -YMINDNOLONGERLOOKINGFORTHETIME -YBODYBLAZINGWITHETERNALRHYME .EWGROWTHRUNNINGWILDTHROUGHMYROOM 4HEWINDOWS THEWINDOWSASHATTERINGOFLIGHT !NDMYWHOLEBEINGDIDSHIVERANDQUAKE 5NTILMYFRAMEOFMINDDIDBREAK ~ 201 ~

Darkness Shining Wild !ND)WASINBODYWHAT)WASINSPIRIT 4HEGREATNIGHTSHININGWILD &OREVERFULLOFCHILD

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, 2009 Ashland, Oregon

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references

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~ ABOUT THE AUTHOR ~ 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 take place is my vocation and privilege. As I ripen into my early 60s, seeing more of what is out of sight, I am finding freedom more through intimacy — intimacy with all that is — than through transcendence. 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 Psychology), group leader, and teacher of spiritual deepening practices, creatively integrating the physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual in my practice. Evolving in fitting parallel with this has been my writing. I’ve authored nine books, and have another close to publication. My essays have appeared in magazines ranging from Magical Blend to the Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, as well as in several anthologies. My poetry runs rampant through all my writing, keeping my prose on its toes.

P.S. If you’d like to regularly receive current material from me on the art of living a deeper life, I invite you to subscribe to my free newsletter (The Crucible of Awakening). Visit www.RobertMasters.com to subscribe.

DIVINE DYNAMITE (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, transpersonal, 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 Anger From 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 SPIRIT INTO 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

Transformation through

Intimacy The Journey Toward

Mature Monogamy Deeply effective comprehensive guidance for those who (1) want more loving, passionate and liberating 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

Darkness Shining Wild

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