Darkness Shining Wild
~ 66 ~
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
ROBERT AUGUSTUS MASTERS
~ 67 ~
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.
Darkness Shining Wild
~ 68 ~
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.
ROBERT AUGUSTUS MASTERS
~ 69 ~
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.
Darkness Shining Wild
~ 70 ~
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?
ROBERT AUGUSTUS MASTERS
~ 71 ~
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.
Darkness Shining Wild
~ 72 ~
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
ROBERT AUGUSTUS MASTERS
~ 73 ~
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
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