Darkness Shining Wild
~ 14 ~
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.
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~ 15 ~
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
Darkness Shining Wild
~ 16 ~
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
ROBERT AUGUSTUS MASTERS
~ 17 ~
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.
Darkness Shining Wild
~ 18 ~
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
ROBERT AUGUSTUS MASTERS
~ 19 ~
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.
Darkness Shining Wild
~ 20 ~
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
ROBERT AUGUSTUS MASTERS
~ 21 ~
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,
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,