Darkness Shining Wild PDF

DARKNESS SHINING WILD
AN ODYSSEY TO THE HEART OF HELL & BEYOND

Meditations on Sanity, Suffering, Spirituality & Liberation
Welcome to the PDF of Darkness Shining Wild!
Included is not only the original text, but also an Afterword covering the time from the
end of the book (1999) to now (late September 2009).
Darkness Shining Wild is an investigation of sanity, suffering, identity, death, and the far
frontiers of spirituality, centered around the story of an extremely harrowing near-
death experience I endured. The ultrahellish journey following that experience provides
a jumping-off point for deep-diving reflections on topics ranging from the anatomy of
dread to the relationship between madness and spirituality.
The odyssey to the heart of hell and beyond that centers Darkness Shining Wild provides
not a consoling cartography of the transpersonal, but rather a reality-unlocking tour of
the everwild Mystery of Being, in which revelation supplants explanation.
Darkness Shining Wild is for everyone who is interested in authentic awakening, and is
especially suited for those who, having left the shores of the status quo, are discovering
that the waters they are crossing have no obligation to remain benign or comfortable.
It may also inspire those who, despite having done considerable psychospiritual work,
nonetheless find themselves stuck or plateau-ing or "sinking" into darkness.
Darkness Shining Wild is dedicated to those whose longing to be truly free is stronger
than their longing to be distracted from their suffering.
It is not a light read. I recommend you proceed at a pace that allows for proper
digestion.
May it serve you well.

“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
robert augustus masters, ph.d.
INTO LIFE & DEATH
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

!,3/"92/"%24!5'53453-!34%23
&REEDOM$OESNT-IND)TS#HAINS
2EVISIONING3EX"ODY%MOTION3PIRITUALITY
4HE!NATOMY%VOLUTIONOF!NGER
!N)NTEGRAL%XPLORATION
$IVINE$YNAMITEREVISEDEDITION
%NTERING!WAKENINGS(EARTLAND
4RANSFORMATION4HROUGH)NTIMACY
4HE*OURNEY4OWARD-ATURE-ONOGAMY
-EETING4HE$RAGON
%NDING/UR3UFFERING"Y%NTERING/UR0AIN
^forthcoming^
3PIRITUAL"YPASSING
7HEN3PIRTUALLITY$ISCONNECTS5S&ROM7HAT2EALLY-ATTERS
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
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 ~
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 ~
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 ego-
centered 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 ~
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 ~
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 panic-
remembering 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-than-

can-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 imagination-

transcending, overwhelmingly sentient Chaos in which everything, including the
nonphysical, was inseparable from everything else. The sky, dripping with
~ 15 ~
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 5-
MeO 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 ~
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 ~
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-of-
controlness!), 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, stranger-

than-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 ~
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, three-
dimensional 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 shore-
bereft 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 ~
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 Córdoba-
Rios (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 ~
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 ~
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 moment-
to-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 ~
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 comfort-
cell, 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 ~
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 self-
presentation? To see our mind’s “I” is not an act of “I,” but rather of awareness.
To thus see — or recognize — “I” is to dethrone our conventional subjectivity,
perhaps even to recognize the bare “is-ness” that precedes and transcends
(and paradoxically is) “I.”
~ 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 ~
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 ~
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
Look for me
Look for me
Look, look for me
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
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
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
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
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 ~
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 full-
blown 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 ~
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 ~
In the distance, I vaguely sense my physical body — it looks a bit like a vibrating stick-
man, rigidly limbed with fibrillating fingers, helplessly splayed-out near the head-end of 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 perception-
making 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
~ 49 ~
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
~ 50 ~
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.”
~ 51 ~
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
~ 54 ~
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 “denial-
based consolation,” saying that it demonstrated self-deception on Kübler-
Ross’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
~ 55 ~
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.
~ 56 ~
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
~ 57 ~
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.
~ 58 ~
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
~ 59 ~
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,
~ 60 ~
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.
~ 61 ~
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 ego-
based 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.
~ 62 ~
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.
~ 63 ~
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
~ 66 ~
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 dream-
reality 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.
~ 67 ~
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 Ativan-
less nights.
~ 69 ~
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 self-
definition 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 ~
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 ~
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 ~
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. 37-
39). In short, prenatal and perinatal existence is far from an unfeeling time.
5. e.g., Vallée, 1988; Mack, 1994, 1999. The literal possibility of alien abduction (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.
~ 77 ~
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.
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 “not-
I” 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 ~
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 ~
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 no-
thing-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 ~
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 ~
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 ~
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 ~
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.
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 ~
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 well-
meaning daylight, sentenced to life.The witness of this is nailed to a different wall,
hung up on its immaculate detachment. But does not something that is not 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 ~
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 blue-
green, 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 ~
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 distance-
dissolving 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 ~
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 ~
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 Humpty-
Dumptying yourself all over the place, dragging what’s left of yourself to the nearest bar.
But even in the dispirited downing of one more Soul on the Rocks, the Holy Wakeup 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 ~
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 ~
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 ~
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 ~
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.
~ 116 ~
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 self-
exploration). 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.
~ 117 ~
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.”
~ 118 ~
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
~ 119 ~
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
~ 120 ~
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.
~ 121 ~
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
~ 124 ~
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
~ 125 ~
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
~ 126 ~
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.
~ 127 ~
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-the-
edge 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
~ 128 ~
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 birth-
clouds, 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 trans-
anthropocentric drawings.
The movement (or magnetizing) of my attention down — and I mean “down”

in the sense that the neocortex is “up” — into the phylogenetically older,
apparently darker or more primitive territories of my brain (including its
“reptilian” zones) had become not only a journey into terror, but sometimes
also a journey through terror, supported to a significant degree both by Dama’s
drawings and his easy, loving presence.
~ 129 ~
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
~ 130 ~
(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 manic-
depressive illness than non-artists. Why? For starters, consider so-called hypomania
(meaning mildly manic): Its symptoms include elevated and expansive mood,
inflated self-esteem, more energy than usual, decreased need for sleep, hypersexuality,
increased productivity, and sharpened and unusually creative thinking. This list,
supposedly describing the signs of a disorder, also describes many of the qualities
that are most highly valued by (and often characteristic of) modernity’s high-
achievers— including me, prior to taking 5-MeO.
Such symptoms — symptoms! — are for most artists (and also for most 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.
~ 131 ~
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 hypomanic-
ness 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
~ 132 ~
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 air-
conditioned, 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.
~ 133 ~
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.
~ 136 ~
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, pseudo-
anthropological 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 half-
dreaming — and maybe I was, given how sleep-deprived I was.
~ 137 ~
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 spiritually-
based organizations.2
As the community spread worldwide, I became increasingly protective of it,

letting what was working obscure or marginalize what was not working.
However much it may have been a crucible for a fuller, more 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
~ 138 ~
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.
~ 139 ~
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, off-
kilter 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
~ 140 ~
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.
~ 141 ~
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
~ 142 ~
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,
~ 143 ~
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 object-
dependency — 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.
~ 144 ~
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, 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, 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, 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.
~ 145 ~
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.
~ 146 ~
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 spiritually-
based, 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
~ 147 ~
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.
~ 148 ~
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.
~ 150 ~
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
~ 151 ~
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
~ 152 ~
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 meaning-
fulness, 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?
~ 153 ~
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
~ 154 ~
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.
~ 155 ~
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
~ 158 ~
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 What-

Really-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.
~ 159 ~
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
~ 160 ~
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) ego-

transcendence, 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.
~ 161 ~
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
~ 162 ~
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
~ 163 ~
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.”
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
~ 164 ~
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).
~ 165 ~
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.
~ 166 ~
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—
~ 167 ~
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 Being-

centered; 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
~ 168 ~
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
~ 169 ~
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
~ 170 ~
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.
~ 171 ~
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.
~ 172 ~
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
~ 174 ~
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-
~ 175 ~
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.
~ 176 ~
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 What-
Really-Matters, equipped with nothing but a lifeline to our Heartland.
In horror of death, I took to the mountains —

Again and again I meditated on the uncertainty of the hour of death,
Capturing the fortress of the deathless unending nature of mind.
Now all fear of death is over and done.
— Milarepa
In modern culture, Death is generally viewed as separation. But is it? Does 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
~ 177 ~
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
~ 178 ~
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”
~ 179 ~
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 face-

to-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.
~ 180 ~
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
~ 181 ~
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
~ 182 ~
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
~ 183 ~
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 self-
annihilation 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
~ 184 ~
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 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
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 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
The only show we’ll ever know
~ 185 ~
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
Look for me
Look for me
Look, look for me
~ 186 ~
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.
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.
~ 187 ~
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.
~ 188 ~
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 self-
sense gone (also see Segal, 1996), leaving her in much the same condition as Wren-
Lewis. No NDE preceded this, no triggering event, no sequence of requisite steps.
Their spiritual awakenings did not appear to be the result of having reached 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
~ 189 ~
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.
~ 190 ~
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
~ 193 ~
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.
~ 194 ~
Along the way I somehow managed to write a draft of what would later be
Darkness Shining Wild, and sent it to a few well-known people, half-curious
as to how they might respond to it. I felt quite uncertain about putting it out
there, especially given its detailed chronicling of my entry into territories that
many might label psychotic or at least seriously delusional. And then Stephen
Levine (an author best known for his groundbreaking work with the dying),
whom I greatly respected, called me to say that he thought it was an absolutely
extraordinary book, long awaited for. My response was not so much one of
feeling flattered, as of realizing right to my core that I simply had to put the
book out, regardless of how it might be received. It was about me, yes, but it
was also about much more than me.
My life kept expanding. I had left my cave, not to resurrect my old life and self,
but instead to express my new life and self in more public ways. I did more
groups, wrote more new material, and kept expanding my clientele. I started
a new relationship that lasted three and half years, during which I practiced
being present and open no matter what was occurring, even though I intuited
that the relationship could only go so far. And I began teaching: instead of
only working as a group leader and psychotherapist, I began offering a one-
year training program in which I taught my intuitively integral way of working,
honoring my desire to pass on what I knew.
In the Fall of 2004 my new relationship at last wound down to a natural end,
my first training program came to a very satisfying close, and I felt cleansed,
open, ready. More and more work was coming my way, and not just locally.
Darkness Shining Wild had been published, following Divine Dynamite, a collection
of my essays. My writing was attracting interest and new clients from faraway
places. I felt content, excited, happily consumed by my work and writing and
new connections. I was going full-steam, greenlighted in many directions,
traveling now to different cities in Canada and the United States to lead groups.
Nothing was missing — or so it seemed. My openness was exposing me to
something I intuited, but could not bring into very clear focus, and that was
intimate relationship.
Then I met Diane.
A radical shift was underway, and I initially only glimpsed its presenting surface,
having no interest in seducing myself with any hope. March 30th, 2005, I
received an email from a woman in southern California who said she’d come
across my poetry while checking out my website, and would very much like
~ 195 ~
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.
"ELOVEDTAKEMYHAND
,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 ~
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 ~
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
,OOKLOOKFORME
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)
4HEDOORSGONETHEWALLSCRAZILYAQUIVER
-YMINDNOLONGERLOOKINGFORTHETIME
-YBODYBLAZINGWITHETERNALRHYME
.EWGROWTHRUNNINGWILDTHROUGHMYROOM
4HEWINDOWSTHEWINDOWSASHATTERINGOFLIGHT
!NDMYWHOLEBEINGDIDSHIVERANDQUAKE
5NTILMYFRAMEOFMINDDIDBREAK
~ 201 ~
!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
~ 202 ~
references
Akisal, H. & Akisal, K. (1988) Reassessing the prevalence of bipolar

disorders: Clinical significance and artistic creativity. Psychiatry and
Psychobiology, 3, 29-36.
Andreasen, N. (1987). Creativity and mental illness: Prevalence rates in
writers and their first-degree relatives. American Journal of Psychiatry,
144, 1288-1292.
Batchelor, S. (2004). Living with the Devil: A meditation on good and evil.
New York: Riverhead.
Becker, E. (1973). The denial of death. New York: The Free Press.
Bergman, I. (1989). The magic lantern: An autobiography. New York: Penguin.
Blackman, S. (Comp. & Ed.). (1997). Graceful exits: How great beings die. New
York: Weatherhill.
Bly, R. (1977). The Kabir book: Versions by Robert Bly. Boston: Beacon.
Borglum, D. (1997). The long shadow of good intentions. Tricycle,
7(1), 66-69.
Brinkley, D. (1994). Saved by the light (with Paul Perry). New York: Harper.
Bubba Free John. (1978). The way that I teach. Middletown, CA: Dawn
Horse.
Bugental, J. (1976). The search for existential identity. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Chia, M. (2004). Darkness Technology. Chiang Mai, Thailand: Universal Tao
Publications.
Chödrön, P. (1997). Awakening compassion [cassette recording]. Boulder, CO:
Sounds True.
Chopra, D. (2000). How to know God. New York: Harmony Books.
Da Avabhasa. (1992). The knee of listening. Clearlake, CA: Dawn Horse.
Da Free John. (1983). Easy death. Clearlake, CA: Dawn Horse.
Davis, W. (1998). The clouded leopard: Travels to landscapes of spirit and desire.
Vancouver, BC: Douglas & McIntyre.
Dilgo Khyentse. (1992). The heart treasure of the Enlightened ones. Boston:
Shambhala.
~ 204 ~
Emerson, R. W. (no date). Essays. New York: Hurst and Company.

Engler, J. (1986). Therapeutic aims in psychotherapy and meditation. In
K. Wilber, J. Engler, & D. Brown (Eds.), Transformations of consciousness
(pp. 17-52). Boston: Shambhala.
Epstein, M. (1995). Thoughts without a thinker. New York: Basic Books.
Evans-Wentz, W. (Trans.). (1960). The Tibetan book of the dead. New York:
Oxford University Press.
Fremantle, F., & Trungpa, C. (Trans.). (1992). The Tibetan book of the dead.
Boston: Shambhala.
Friedman, M. (Ed.). (1964). The worlds of existentialism. New York:
Random.
Godman, D. (Ed.). (1985). Be as you are: The teachings of Ramana Maharshi.
London: Arkana.
Grey, M. (1985). Return from death: An exploration of the near-death experience.
London: Arkana.
Grof, C., & Grof, S. (1990). The stormy search for the self. Los Angeles:
Tarcher.
Grof, S., & Grof, C. (Eds.). (1989). Spiritual emergency. Los Angeles:
Tarcher.
Grosso, R. (1999). Saints and madmen. New York: Henry Holt.
Groth-Marnat, G., & Sumner, R. (1998). Altered beliefs, attitudes, and
behaviors following near-death experiences. Journal of Humanistic
Psychology, 38 (3), 10-18.
Gutierrez, C. (1993). Existential theory and ego development. Unpublished
doctoral dissertation, Michigan State University.
Heidegger, M. (1962). Being and time. New York: Harper & Row.
Hill, M. (1994). Dreaming the end of the world: Apocalypse as a rite of passage.
Dallas, TX: Spring.
Hillman, J. (1975). Re-visioning psychology. New York: Harper & Row.
Hillman, J. (1979). Image-sense. Spring, 1979, 130-143.
~ 205 ~
Isen, A., Johnson, J. , Mertz, E., & Robinson, G. (1985). The influence of
positive affect on the unusualness of word associations. Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology, 48, 1413-1426.
Jamison, K. (1990). Manic-depressive illness, creativity, and leadership. In F.
Goodwin & K. Jamison (Eds.), Manic-depressive illness (pp. 332-367).
New York: Oxford Univ. Press.
Jamison, K. (1995). An unquiet mind. New York: Random.
Janov, A. (1991). The new primal scream. Wilmington, DE: Enterprise.
Janov, A. (1996). Why you get sick and how you get well. West Hollywood, CA:
Dove.
Kalweit, H. (1989). When insanity is a blessing: The message of shamanism.
In S. Grof & C. Grof (Eds.), Spiritual emergency. Los Angeles: Tarcher.
Kaplan, H., Sadock, B., & Grebb, J. (Eds.). (1994). Synopsis of psychiatry.
Baltimore, MD: Williams & Wilkins.
Kastenbaum, R. (1987). Some critical issues for thanatology. Omega, 18,
397-410.
Krishnamurti, U. G. (1984). The mystique of Enlightenment. Fort Lauderdale,
FL: Mind and Miracles.
Kierkegaard, S. (1957). Concept of dread. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press.
Kornfield, J. (1989). Obstacles and vicissitudes in spiritual practice. In S.
Grof & C. Grof (Eds.), Spiritual emergency. Los Angeles: Tarcher.
Kornfield, J. (1993). A path with heart. New York: Bantam.
Kornfield, J. (2000). After the ecstasy, the laundry. New York: Bantam.
Kübler-Ross, E. (1970). On death and dying. New York: Collier.
Laing, R. D. (1967). The politics of experience. New York: Penguin.
Laing, R. D. (1987). Hatred of health. Journal of Contemplative
Psychotherapy, 4, 77-86.
Laing, R. D. (1989). Transcendental experience in relation to religion and
psychosis. In S. Grof & C. Grof (Eds.), Spiritual emergency. Los
Angeles: Tarcher.
~ 206 ~
Laing, R. D. (1990). Eros, love & lies [Videocassette]. New York: Mystic Fire.
Lamb, B. (1985). Rio Tigre and beyond: The Amazon jungle medicine of Manuel
Córdoba-Rios. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic.
Lamb, B. (1990). Wizard of the upper Amazon: The story of Manuel Córdoba-
Rios. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic.
LeDoux, J. (1996). The emotional brain. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Levine, P. (1997). Waking the tiger: Healing trauma. Berkeley, CA: North
Atlantic Books.
Levine, S. (1984). Meetings at the edge. New York: Anchor.
Levine, S. (1987). Healing into life and death. New York: Anchor.
Levine, S. (1997). A year to live. New York: Bell Tower.
Levine, S., & Levine, O. (1995). Embracing the Beloved. New York: Anchor.
Levy, D. (1992). A proposed category for the Diagnostic and Statistical
Manual of mental disorders: Pervasive Labeling Disorder. Journal of
Humanistic Psychology, 32(1), 121-125.
Lukoff, D., & Everest, H. (1985). The myths in mental illness. Journal of
Transpersonal Psychology, 17, 123-153.
Lukoff, D., Lu, F., & Turner, R. (1992). Toward a more culturally sensitive
DSM-IV. Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, 180 (11), 673-682.
Luna, L., & Amaringo, P. (1991). Ayahuasca visions: The religious iconography of a
Peruvian shaman. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic.
Mack, J. (1994). Abduction. New York: Ballantine.
Mack, J. (1999). Passport to the cosmos. New York: Crown.
Macnaughton, I. (Ed.). (1997). Embodying the mind and minding the body.
Vancouver, BC: Integral Press.
Masters, R. (1989). The way of the lover. W. Vancouver, BC: Xanthryos.
Masters, R. (1990). Truth cannot be rehearsed. W. Vancouver, BC: Xanthryos.
Masters, R. (2004). Divine Dynamite: Entering Awakening’s Heartland. Surrey,
BC: Tehmenos.
~ 207 ~
May, R. (1969). Love and will. New York: W. W. Norton.

McAdams, D. (1994). The person. Orlando, FL: Harcourt Brace &
Company.
McDonald-Smith, M. (1996). Bringing awareness back home: Toward an
integrative spirituality (a conversation with Donald Rothberg).
ReVision,19 (1), 36-39.
McGregor, J. (1989). The discovery of the art of the insane. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press.
McKenna, T. (1992). Food of the gods. New York: Bantam.
McKenna, T. (1994). True hallucinations. San Francisco: Harper.
Mitchell, S. (Ed.). (1991). The enlightened mind. New York: HarperCollins.
Monroe, R. (1971). Journeys out of the body. New York: Doubleday.
Moody, R. (1975). Life after life. Atlanta: Mockingbird.
Myss, C. (1997). Spiritual madness: The necessity of meeting God in darkness
[cassette recording]. Boulder, CO: Sounds True.
Nisargadatta, S. (1982). I am That: Talks with Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
(M. Frydman, Trans.). Durham, NC: Acorn.
Noyes, R. (1972). The experience of dying. Psychiatry, 35, 174-183.
Noyes, R. (1980). Attitude change following near-death experiences.
Psychiatry, 43, 234-242.
Nyoshul Khenpo. (1995). Natural great perfection (Surya Das, Trans.). Ithaca,
NY: Snow Lion.
Orloff, J. (2000). Intuitive healing. New York: Times Books.
Osborne, A. (1970). Ramana Maharshi and the path of self-knowledge. London:
Century Hutchison.
Patterson, W. (1992). Eating the “I”. San Anselmo, CA: Arete.
Perry, J. (1999). Trials of the visionary mind. Albany, NY: SUNY.
Plato. (1973). Phaedrus and letters VII and VIII (W. Hamilton, Trans.).
London: Penguin.
~ 208 ~
Poonja, H. W. L. (1992). Wake up and roar. Kula, HW: Pacific Center.

Rajneesh, Bhagwan Sri. (1980). The sound of running water. Poona, India:
Rajneesh Foundation.
Ram Dass. (1992). Death is not an outrage [cassette recording]. Boulder, CO:
Sounds True.
Ram Dass. (2000). Still here: Embracing aging, changing, and dying. New York:
Riverhead.
Richards, R. (1993). Seeing beyond: Issues of creative awareness and social
responsibility. Creativity Research Journal, 3, 300-326.
Richards, R. (1996). Does the lone genius ride again?: Creativity, chaos, and
community. Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 36 (2), 44-60.
Richards, R., Kinney, D., Daniels, H., & Linkins, K. (1992). Creativity in
manic-depressives, cyclothymes, their normal relatives, and control
subjects. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 97, 281-288. .
Riedlinger, T. (1993). Two classic trips. Gnosis, 26, 34-41.
Rosenhan, D. (1975). On being sane in insane places. In T. Scheff (Ed.),
Labeling madness (pp. 54-75). New York: Prentice-Hall.
Schultes, R., & Hofmann, A. (1992). Plants of the gods. Rochester, VT:
Healing Arts.
Segal, S. (1996). Collision with the Infinite. San Diego, CA: Blue Dove Press.
Sharp, J. (1996). Living our dying: A way to the Sacred in everyday life. New York:
Hyperion.
Shenton, M., Solovay, R., Holzman, P., Coleman, M., & Gale, H. (1989).
Thought disorder in the relatives of psychotic patients. Archives of
General Psychiatry, 46, 897-901.
Sogyal Rinpoche. (1992). The Tibetan book of living and dying. San Francisco:
HarperCollins.
Steinfeld, N. (1986). Surviving the chaos of something extraordinary.
Shaman’s Drum, 4 (Spring), 22-27.
Strassman, R. (1996). Sitting for sessions: Dharma and DMT research.
Tricycle, 21, 81-88.
~ 209 ~
Strassman, R. (2001). DMT: The spirit molecule. Rochester, VT: Park Street
Press.
Thompson, K. (1989) The UFO experience as a crisis of transformation.
In S. Grof & C. Grof (Eds.), Spiritual emergency. Los Angeles: Tarcher.
Trungpa, C. (1976). The myth of freedom. Boston: Shambhala.
Turner, W., & Merlis, S. (1959). Effect of some indolealkylamines on man.
Archives of Neurology & Psychiatry, 81, 121-129.
Vallée, J. (1988). Dimensions: A casebook of alien contact. New York:
Contemporary Books.
Wilber, K. (1995). Sex, ecology, spirituality. Boston: Shambhala.
Wolf, F. (1996). The dreaming universe. New York: Touchstone.
Yalom, I. (1980). Existential psychotherapy. New York: Basic Books.
~ 210 ~
~ 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 Psy-
chology), group leader, and teacher of spiritual deepening practices, crea-
tively integrating the physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual in my practice.
Evolving in fitting parallel with this has been my writing. I’ve authored 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, transper-
sonal, and interpersonal evolution.
“Divine Dynamite is just what it says it is — a sacred explosion! Masters

transforms the spiritual landscape with the mind-bending freshness of his
prose. With the dexterity of the true master, he shatters complacency and
razes the familiar with startling beauty. This book embodies the constantly
novel surprise that is the heart of true realization.”
— JENNY WADE, PH.D., author of TRANSCENDENT SEX
“Don’t expect linearity or logic from Divine Dynamite; take satisfaction in being
provoked and having your ordinary understanding of reality stretched and
transformed..... A splendid book!”
— STANLEY KRIPPNER, PH.D., co-author of THE MYTHIC PATH
“This is such a powerful book! Written on the fire that melds the single heart
into the underlying alchemical explosion that rises through the spine of those
surrendered into the great unknowing, the original fire from which we were
forged. Well done!”
— STEPHEN LEVINE, author of HEALING INTO LIFE & DEATH and A YEAR TO LIVE
The Anatomy &
Evolution of 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 lib-
erating intimate relationships,
and (2) are ready to work through
whatever is in the way.
The journey toward mature monogamy is not necessarily easy, for it

asks — and has to ask — much of us. Nevertheless, it is an immensely
rewarding passage, bringing us into deepening intimacy with all that
we are, awakening and transforming us until we are capable of being in
a truly fulfilling relationship.
Immature monogamy entraps; mature monogamy liberates.
Freedom through intimacy.
“For anyone who wants to more deeply understand the seeming

mystery of relationship — and transform their partnership to a
sublime union of souls.”
— BARRY VISSELL, MD, and JOYCE VISSELL, RN, MS, authors of THE SHARED
HEART, THE HEART’S WISDOM and MEANT TO BE

Darkness Shining Wild PDF

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Darkness Shining Wild PDF

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

DARKNESS SHINING WILD

AN ODYSSEY TO THE HEART OF HELL & BEYOND

Welcome to the PDF of Darkness Shining Wild!

May it serve you well.

darkness shining wild

“A fascinating and illuminating work.”

An Odyssey to the Heart of Hell & Beyond

Meditations on Sanity, Suffering,

ROBERT AUGUSTUS MASTERS

For more information, visit

First electronic edition, September 26, 2009

Copyright © 2005, 2009 by Robert Augustus Masters.

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

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

My wife, truest friend, ever-deeper beloved and partner in all things,

The truly transformative death comes usually unbidden if not

With the arising of overwhelming fear

A thing is what it is not because of an irreducible essence that

All there is is Is.

It’s perhaps midnight.

As usual, I am struggling to remain present, struggling not to let the reality of

I am closer than close to the horrifyingly unbearable — hypervividly

The movement of my attention is far from straightforward — it is dizzyingly

What I am entering is a topography that won’t lodge in memory. All that

A storm-crazed kite gone spelunking am I, tied ever so slightly to a fleeting

The terror intensifies.

My dread is now unmasked terror, staggeringly powerful. Nothing can stand

Intimations of a horror beyond horror invade me from all directions. There

Suddenly, without premeditation, I go into the terror, no longer fighting or

dying into a deeper life

It only makes sense

Avoiding Death deadens us.

In the resulting numbness — over which may be superimposed plenty of

But only when we release everything — everything — from the obligation to

Keeping Death at a distance distances us from Life.

My face is unveiled sky and prehistoric stretch

Whatever we turn away from, whatever we exclude from our exploration,

What this requires of us is embodied commitment to the spirit of investigation,

Love says: “I am everything.” Wisdom says: “I am nothing.”

The holy poetic — the edibly accurate, everwild, epiphanously idiosyncratic

That dream-drowning, which catalyzed (literally within a few hours) a major

I also sometimes died in dreams, often willingly. During dreams in which I

My participation in this was not without an increasing pride, though, through

It was not difficult to use my times of genuine opening and breakthrough as

In such revelation, everything is rendered frontier. In such dying, we are — if

There is an undoing here, a reopening, a lucid vertigo, a macheted clearing, a

into the stranger-than-

Shortly after 3 pm on February 19th, 1994, in a sun-drenched living room

The ayahuasca I took — ayahuasca varies according to its preparation — was

The dazzling presence and implications of this Wonder, this reality-unlocking