What happened in Peru? (part 11)

Previously: How Six Flags and Disney on Ice can totally scar a kid for life.

Hi, there. I’m going to tell you some things that I don’t normally say outright. If you’ve come this far in this story then I think I can assume you’re willing to at least grant that the things I say are true for ME, if nothing else.

So, I’ve been going to a Buddhist temple on Sundays. Well, okay, not as frequently as I used to, with all the crap that’s come down the pike in the past year or so. But for a while I was going pretty regularly (and would like to get back to it). The temple I go to is the Drepung Loseling monastery. It’s the American seat for the Dalai Lama. Actual classes in the Tibetan faith and the serious pursuit of their particular brand of meditation cost money, money I don’t have right now, but on Sundays they offer free services, where they lead a beginner’s meditation. Basically, the geshe talks for about 20 minutes on a particular topic and then leads the shamatha meditation practice for about 20 minutes. I am at a very basic level of meditation, it’s not something I do very well at all, but I like it most of the time. I don’t do it on my own, not yet anyway, though my practice space downstairs is a really nice place for it and I intend to try. I have trouble sitting (at the temple they have some spaces for sitting, and then folding chairs in rows behind that), it makes my back hurt and my legs go to sleep, and my always-racing brain is distracted enough without also fighting that.

I started going there for two reasons, apart from the general idea that it would be a good place to try and keep exploring what I’m trying to learn and discover about myself. Firstly, the fact that so many of the things that I saw in Peru were so heavily influenced by Tibetan-style buddhism, with a healthy amount of Hindu thrown in. I didn’t know it was Tibetan-style at the time… I recognized the Hindu-style stuff, but there were other things, though similar in style, that I didn’t recognize. Sarah was actually the one who was able to pinpoint what I was describing.

The other reason I started going was that I had what I can only describe as a religious experience. And I say that as someone who, before Peru, had never had any kind of experience like that, of any kind. I was not very spiritual at all, because it required faith and faith is something I’ve never had in really much of anything. So, when I talk about Peru, and when I say later I had a second religious experience (as I certainly consider Peru to be one as well), you’ll know where it comes from.

We bought a book a few years ago, before ever going to Peru or considering it, called Goddesses of the Celestial Gallery. It’s one of those picture books they used to always have on clearance at Borders. It’s huge, like, two and a half feet tall, full of Tibetan art. Sarah bought it because she liked the art, nothing more. So I was sitting in my chair one afternoon, months after Peru, and I decided to look at it. I never had before. I sat there, flipping the pages (it really is a beautiful book), and I just… even more than Peru I don’t really know how to explain it. It was like what I imagine serious Christians must feel when they look at Christian art. I entered the paintings. Not just one but a few of them. I was staring at them and it was as if they began to move, ever so slightly, but more to the point I could feel them. Which doesn’t express what I’m trying to express. I connected to them. I felt like I had been in those places before. Seen them first hand. And I could feel the air of the place. I entered them.

I’m not really close to where I was going. And I could sit here for another hour trying to explain it. I had a religious experience. Does it mean that I think, therefore, that Tibetan Buddhism is the true way to go? No. But that’s why I decided to go there and learn about it.

(I had an experience, too, during one of the meditation practices, that was a little different. It was about a month or so into going, and at the end of the practice the geshe who was leading it sang a short chant, and I experienced the same sensation of moving through rooms – or again, rooms moving through me – that I had on ayahuasca. Not the rooms themselves, but the sensation of moving. I’d had it one other time, the first time I saw that video that I included a while ago. I don’t consider either of those as religious experiences, oddly, they just felt like I reconnected to a bit of the experience that I’d originally had. But it was a really good feeling, and made me feel like I was exploring what I was supposed to be exploring by going there.)

Look, I’m just going to jump ahead and hope there’s enough context above for it to make some kind of sense. Because this is where I say the thing that I think makes me sound kind of crazy. I learned a lot of things after Peru, about me and about life, I think. They feel true and they play a big role in how I’m trying to live now, and in staying relatively happy these days (and not artificially happy). But mostly it’s about what happened to me in Peru that second night. That’s what it all boils down to for me. Philip K Dick had what he considered to be a religious experience in the seventies. I’m not going to get into it now because it would take some describing, but the experience lingered for him and became part of a larger exploration for him. And when he talked about it afterwards, he would describe that first experience and the ones that followed as literal events. He would describe them and say, I believe this happened, what I experienced was real, it exists. I know that what I’m describing is also a perfect description of a schizophrenic break. And it may very well have BEEN a schizophrenic break. I don’t know. But I choose to believe it was real, because everything it’s led me to since has been nothing but positive.

That’s what happened to me. I know there are probably plenty of explanations for that second night. I’ve thought of them myself. How the brain can manufacture these things, how it could all be a constructed metaphor for myself, a representation of my own mind. Or hell, maybe I had a break, too, who knows? And I entertain all of those thoughts and suggestions, and even grant that they are all entirely probable. But I believe in the experience. Not metaphorically. I believe it happened. I believe that I was in those rooms, that I was operated on by whatever they were, that a consciousness so far above me that I can’t even conceive of whether it was separate from the other beings that were operating on me or not communicated with me as best it could, and told me that everything is love. I know that I am probably full of shit and that I am probably choosing a fantasy over the obvious reality of the situation and at the same time I know it isn’t bullshit, it was all real and I have total faith in it, even though I can barely understand the scope of it.

It was reality. It wasn’t a drug trip. It happened to me.

That’s what I haven’t really told people, up until now.

Next: We may be heading for some kind of resolution, here. Please stow your tray tables.