Darkness Shining Wild
~ 44 ~ 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.
ROBERT AUGUSTUS MASTERS
~ 45 ~
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?
Darkness Shining Wild
~ 46 ~
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
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~ 47 ~
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!
Darkness Shining Wild
~ 48 ~
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?
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~ 49 ~
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
Darkness Shining Wild
~ 50 ~
for metaphysical considerations, but now only rotten floorboards for me.
Had I ever really been on anything other than quicksand?
And had I ever really been anything other than this already-shattered, ghostly enigma? I didn’t feel as though I was coming Home, but rather that I was awakening to the apparent fact that I was a “prisoner” forever and ever of a boundless, self-replicating, unthinkably sentient Wonder that, making infinite appearances, was the source, substance, and all of all that existed.
And even if I was that Wonder — the intuition of which I fought as hard as I could — would it not be a hell beyond description to be That without end?
One would be free to be anything, but one would realize that behind every appearance, every role, every manifestation, there was only Oneself. No one else. Nothing else. No mirrors, no separation, no alternative worlds, just unfathomable Mystery forever looking at Itself. And so on. This was a Freedom from which there was no freedom.
If I had been completely insane, it would probably have been easier, for I would have had little or no sense of having a different world in which to be.
But I saw what I was doing, saw what I was thinking and feeling, saw what I was considering, and I simply could not bear it.
NOTES
1. Like Stan Grof (see Grof & Grof, 1989, 1990). I spoke with Grof by phone on the third day; his advice then, and a few months later (when things had not improved), was simply to keep going into full-out catharsis, and not to bother taking any medication. He recommended to Nancy on the second occasion that when I felt really scared I should lay on my back, with sufficient strength applied on either side of me — in the form of men — to hold me down, and then allow full catharsis.
An arguably useful technique under certain circumstances this was, but far from appropriate for me, especially given how much heavy catharsis I had already been through.
Unfortunately, the very rigidity that characterizes conventional medical views of so-called spiritual emergencies — i.e., that they are nothing more than psychological disorders, and so must be treated as such, especially with psychiatric drugs — also characterized Grof ’s approach, at least with me. Sometimes catharsis is needed, and sometimes something else is called for. And so too with psychiatric
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~ 51 ~
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.”