Author: Paul

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.

Previously: I made a stupid choice.

One of the requirements at Blue Morpho was that you took part in the first ceremony, and you could opt to not take any more of the drug beyond that. But they preferred that you still participate in the ceremonies. They said that aya stays in your system for days, and that, for some people, it can still affect you in a ceremony even if you haven’t taken a dose. That wasn’t true for me. I lay there on the mat for the whole ceremony, in my head, and it was horrible.

Once, when I was maybe six or seven, I was at Six Flags and I rode the Spindle Top. Basically it was a round room that spun really fast, everyone stood against the wall and the floor would lower out from under you and everyone would stay fixed against the wall from the force of the spinning. Which was like magic to a six year old. So I rode it. The room spun, the floor lowered… and I went down with the floor.

It was like that. I kept waiting for the mareación to sweep me up, I listened to Don Alberto’s icaros and hoped and hoped and nothing happened. My brain churned it over and over; my depression, what I’d felt the night before and that day, and how it was all gone now, lost. The depression won and everything was hopeless. It was a pit, as dark as any I’d been in. And while sometimes I wonder if I DID have an experience that night, and it was just a bad one, the truth is there were no hallucinations. It was just me, in that room, on the floor, crying, because I could hear everyone around me, swept up in the moment, and I was just on a mat in the dark.

And ceremonies last about three hours or so.

Because it was the final night, it ended with a process where the shaman comes to each participant and performs an icaro specifically for them. The aya “opens” a person up to the world, totally exposed, so once the ceremonies are complete these songs are meant to sort of stitch a person back together. So they can go back to the real world and function. Based on where I was laying, Hamilton was who came over to me. He asked me how I was doing and I told him I wasn’t doing well, that’d I’d made a huge mistake in not taking aya that night. He said something to the effect that it didn’t matter now, there was no point in focusing on that decision, it was past me now. I mean, it made sense, but it was not at all what I needed to hear. He performed a brief icaro over me and moved on. I felt so despondent. I didn’t trust him any more, and I sat and wished that Don Alberto had come over instead.

Another story of my childhood: when I was about five years old, I think, I was taken to see “Disney on Ice” at the Omni. At one point during the show, an usher came over to me and asked me if I wanted to be part of the show. I was an incredibly shy kid, but even so I said yes, and so I followed her down the steps to the side of the rink. We stood there, waiting for whatever it was I was going to be part of, and I was so nervous and uncomfortable. Finally, I timidly asked if I could go sit back down until they were ready for me, and she said yes. I walked back up the stairs and sat back down. When the next section of the show started, clowns came out onto the ice pushing giant brooms, and each one had a lucky kid riding on top of the broom head.

Just like when I was five, I’d said “no” to something, out of fear, out of nervousness, out of uncertainty, and I’d missed the ride again.

Next: What little framework this story had completely breaks down.

Previously: I expressed the ineffable nature of God and the universe. Except not really that at all.

To think that I was frustrated that it took me three months to get to the end of the second day… yeesh. Hi there! It’s been two and a half years since we were all here! I’m sitting here trying to remember what in the hell I was referring to at the end of the last post. I don’t think I mention a high school book report or Philip K Dick within this post, though I’m sure I will get to them soon. Anyway, let’s see how this goes…

We had learned something important before that second ceremony, which was that once the ceremony itself was over it was best to stand up and start interacting and moving around. It helped to bring the mareación to a close. So as the lights were relit we both stood with the others. It didn’t end the sensation of being drugged or nauseous, but it helped to make me feel more connected to reality once the songs were over. Around us were people doing yoga stretches and chatting about their experiences. I stood and talked a little but mostly listened. Eventually, we left to head back to our beds.

Outside it was still night, but the sky… good god, the sky. We were in the middle of a spiral arm of the Milky Way. I mean, you could SEE it. Just once in your life I highly recommend going somewhere in the middle of absolute nowhere, while on some kind of drug that makes you incredibly light sensitive, and seeing the sky at night. We stood and felt small but holy.

The next day was probably one of the best days I’ve ever had in my life. I just felt alive. And so very good. At breakfast Malcolm walked around and checked in with people to see if they had any questions or concerns. Honestly, I felt so good that I had a creeping doubt lingering in my head: was I doing this wrong? I had expected to bring my own self-persecution into the experience, I had heard so much from the others about “work” and “dealing with dark stuff” and so far it had just felt… effortless. All I’d felt was love. Malcolm reassured me… there is no wrong way. The medicine shows you what it shows you.

After breakfast we went to the lake, where I hadn’t wanted to get in the day before. I jumped in, without a thought about it. It was fed by some sort of underground thing, I forget now, but so you’d pass through weird temperature differences in the water, freezing cold and then suddenly some warm, perfect temperature spot. The sky was a perfect blue, with huge white clouds, and it was reflecting off the water and I just stared at it. In the water the world was all sepia-toned, it reminded me of the photos from this set of encyclopedias we had as kids. I thought about suicide and depression, and I felt saved. I felt saved. I thought about other people who hadn’t been. Bill Hicks, a comedian I love, and who was a huge fan of psychedelics, and who died of cancer, likely caused by the abuse he’d subjected his body to in the years prior. David Foster Wallace, a writer I’d only recently discovered, who had suffered from severe depression and had become meds resistant like me. He’d discovered it by going off his meds at some point, then trying to go back on them, and they no longer worked. He struggled with it for years, and in the end he killed himself. And I thought, I wish they’d found this place. I really did feel saved.

After the swim I went and spent some time in the ceremony hut. There were hammocks in there for the daytime, and I sat in one and listened to my iPod. It was the first time I’d played anything since we got there and the first music I’d listened to in a long time just for the sake of listening to music. I listened to an old Peter Gabriel-era Genesis record called Selling England by the Pound and slowly swayed in the hammock.

It’s funny, I was in the middle of the fucking Amazon, and it was as humid as it normally is here in the summer, but after the first ceremony I don’t have any memory of ever noticing the heat. There was a really great breeze occasionally blowing through the screens. The music was the best thing I had ever heard (and I’d heard it a million times before, you understand). It was all perfect. When I was at the lake beforehand I remember saying to Sarah, “This place gives you exactly what you need, when you need it.” The first time that had occurred to me had been during the ceremony… I would try to steer things, I’d see a color I really loved, or I’d want to get back to the “waiting room,” but I would never get them when I thought about how I wanted them. But as soon as I’d get distracted and think of something else, they’d appear. It was like being constantly reminded, you can have it all, but only when you need it. And YOU aren’t the judge of when you need it. That entire day was a whole day of here is what you need. Simple, nothing at all, really, and perfect. I don’t think I have ever been happier than I was during that day.

But that was also when I learned that the night before hadn’t been such a great experience for others. As I was laying in the hammock, Friendly Guy (let’s just call him that) came in with Malcolm. And they sat and talked about the night before. I clearly had headphones on, I guess, and had my eyes closed for the most part, so I guess they weren’t concerned about me listening. And I didn’t, until the album ended. The conversation was about how out of control the whole night had seemed to the guy, and how he didn’t want to participate in the next one, or be in the room. I knew about the girl who was laying behind me, who’d gone through such hell. And I knew that the noises coming from the bathroom had seemed kind of over the top at times. But it’s also difficult because, obviously, when you’re deep into the experience your senses are really not reliable in so many ways. I knew these things but had also been separate from them. Friendly Guy didn’t feel like Hamilton was a very good shaman, he felt he wasn’t treating the thing with the proper respect, and that was contributing to how bad the night had gotten for some. I don’t really want to get into the whole thing, because it would take explaining minutiae and it isn’t really relevant. It matters because it planted the doubt.

Just like the night before, I wasn’t sure that I was going to do it again. Even at its most fucking magical (and that second night WAS), it was still unbelievably draining. And I felt empty, and tired, and I was fasting for the most part… the same as the day before. But now, someone had just inadvertently planted doubt, and that is probably why, just before the ceremony, I decided I was done. I had experienced so much, and I was tired, so I made my decision as we were waiting to drink, just like I had the second night. Except this time, I opted not to join in.

Next: The story of a sad little boy too shy to be in the world.