Darkness Shining Wild
~ 136 ~
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.
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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.
Darkness Shining Wild
~ 138 ~
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
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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.
Darkness Shining Wild
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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
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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.
Darkness Shining Wild
~ 142 ~
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
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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,
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,