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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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
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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
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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.