I am honestly not sure where it began, but that is the same with most people I suspect. Since an early age I have asked myself, Who am I?, and have never been satisfied with the answer. The drive to explore that question has lead me through many different paths and practices. Study, listening, meditation, physical disciplines. Each has added tools to throw at the question, Who am I? No tool was ever sufficient, but the promise of the great teachers and the ancient teachings was always there, There is an answer.
As I moved about from one tool to the next my desperation grew. Finally I came to the modern bastardization of the Shamanic paths – Drugs. Part of the reason I turned to them was fun. Part was escapism. (That was admittedly a big motivation.) But, part was an honest yearning for an answer. The form this path took for me was mostly LSD. A lot of LSD.
Along the way I had some great fun, some bad times, and some flirting with full blown addiction. And, of course, there were moments of completely “Getting it!” But, those moments were fleeting, and once looked back upon with a sober mind, lacking. As my desperation pushed me forward I tried more an more. A typical trip for me was 7-10 hits, with the occasional re-hit somewhere along the way. I tried to be respectful of the power of the substance and honor the traditions which have used hallucinogenics through the ages, but I was a blind person without guidance and my high ideals often degenerated into escapism and fun. Still, there was chord in the back of the whole thing that somehow held it together.
Finally I got what I was looking for. Sort of. It started with a fairly straightforward excursion, 13 hits this time. The day started normally enough for such things but there was more excitement in an undefinable way. When the group I was with finally found a spot to sit an enjoy ourselves things began to unravel. At first I lamented that the love of my life was not with me to share in the experience. I missed her terribly and began to cry. It was a long, cleansing, cathartic cry and it was good. As the crying subsided my mind began to wrestle with… just about everything. I remember a process of looking back along the evolutionary chain to the start of it all. It seemed to make sense to me that I would have to crawl back along that path, the whole way, to make some sense of it and get free of it. So, as this seemed a reasonable thing to do, I began. As my mind moved I saw how life occurs in resting waves to the individual mind, but all of those undulations occur against the backdrop of reality as a whole. From within each point the waves seem to be all there is, from without they can be seen a all contained within the “bigger picture.” This rippling took me too a lot of contemplation about the concept of reincarnation, not just in the sense of multiple lives but also in the sense of reinventing ourselves from moment to moment. I saw that the people in my life had been with me for so very long, and through so many “lives” that the enormity of it stunned me.
From the idea of reincarnation within the context of waves against the backdrop of reality I perceived that the great teachers really never came up with anything new. They just “held the line” of the truth. They were all fierce and steadfast warriors in the battle against forgetfulness holding up the gem of realization and saying, “See? It’s still here.”
As my mind raced with the idea of just being an individual perception-point against the backdrop of reality I saw how I habitually cut off fields of experience that were inconvenient or difficult to face. I bellowed a vow to, “take all of it!” I promised to let more in, to take in more of experience, all of experience, and to offer that back to the backdrop of reality. It seemed to me that the ultimate service we could make to that reality was to give freely back to it what my individual awareness brought to me.
As I made that vow the world shattered. My surroundings dropped away and I found myself “standing” in a field of horizonless white without edge, ceiling or bottom. In every direction I looked there was only white. I could see my hands, and looked down at my body, but other than that there was nothing, bright ever-shining nothing. After a measureless time I drew my legs up crossed under me and slowly my body faded into the white as well. A span of ages passed as the white faded to a glowing black. Then, in front of me there appeared a stoke of lightening that danced silently in my vision. There seemed to be no top and no bottom to it. As it crackled silently one side cast of a red sheen, the other blue and within it something began to form. Something that seemed to look back at me from across the void of impossible distance but near enough to touch.
Then, suddenly, there was just nothing. No seeing, feeling, hearing. Nothing. I was gone as well. My sense of time ended there, but later the feeling was that I had passed a lifetime there.
And, just as suddenly I was back, face down on the cold grass. The day had passed into night, and one of the friends I was with was sitting next to me smiling. It took a while for my personality to rebuild itself, but I managed to walk along with him back to his house.
When I look back at this experience it is possible to dismiss it all as just a very vivid hallucination, but some part of me denies that it is that simple. I made a couple of half-hearted attempts to duplicate the experience with more bouts of drug use, but they did not even come close and it all began to feel very cheap. It has been a few years since I have taken any LSD, and most of the experiences I have had are simply memories like parties gone to, but that one time burns like looking at the Sun in my mind’s eye.
I continued my inquiry into, Who am I? Along the way I have had moments of clarity, but nothing ever came close to that day.
Until recently. I am very pleased to report that, that place is accessible (after a fashion) through the gateway of deep asking of the question, Who am I? I began a daily meditation practice a couple of weeks ago after being struck by reading The Power of Now
At the end of the day the question, Who am I?, cannot be answered. Or, rather, the mind cannot answer it. When we really face that truth the mind can be stunned into silence, or gently moved aside, or finally be allowed to relax, and then the answer shines through.
So, what does all that mean? Nothing much, only this – Freedom from wondering about what is real is as close as this present moment, and the dropping of the quest to find out what it is.
I have considered myself to be an introspective person for most of my life, and a “seeker” for some years now. It’s an interesting way to live. Some of the best seeds along the way are the ones that make me bust a gut laughing. One of those gut busters is when you hear the same exact message YET AGAIN! Each teacher may have a subtly, or profoundly different way of pitching the teaching, but they all get to the same point. Sometimes that trip may be circuitous, but it is always there. Along the way they almost inevitably touch on one point -
