Darkness Shining Wild

(1)

DARKNESS SHINING WILD

AN ODYSSEY TO THE HEART OF HELL & BEYOND

Meditations on Sanity, Suffering, Spirituality & Liberation

Welcome to the PDF of Darkness Shining Wild!

Included is not only the original text, but also an Afterword covering the time from the

end of the book (1999) to now (late September 2009).

Darkness Shining Wild is an investigation of sanity, suffering, identity, death, and the far

frontiers of spirituality, centered around the story of an extremely harrowing

near-death experience I endured. The ultrahellish journey following that experience provides

a jumping-off point for deep-diving reflections on topics ranging from the anatomy of

dread to the relationship between madness and spirituality.

The odyssey to the heart of hell and beyond that centers Darkness Shining Wild provides

not a consoling cartography of the transpersonal, but rather a reality-unlocking tour of

the everwild Mystery of Being, in which revelation supplants explanation.

Darkness Shining Wild is for everyone who is interested in authentic awakening, and is

especially suited for those who, having left the shores of the status quo, are discovering

that the waters they are crossing have no obligation to remain benign or comfortable.

It may also inspire those who, despite having done considerable psychospiritual work,

nonetheless find themselves stuck or plateau-ing or "sinking" into darkness.

Darkness Shining Wild is dedicated to those whose longing to be truly free is stronger

than their longing to be distracted from their suffering.

It is not a light read. I recommend you proceed at a pace that allows for proper

digestion.

(2)

(3)

robert augustus masters, ph.d.

“An absolutely

extraordinary book…

I think you really have offered something to the spiritual literature, an insight into the difficulty of the extraordinary vistas of the path that has never been written before…I absolutely recommend Darkness Shining Wild. It’s a remarkable book long waited for.“

— STEPHEN LEVINE, author of HEALING

INTO LIFE & DEATH

darkness shining wild

An Odyssey to the Heart of Hell & Beyond

Meditations on Sanity, Suffering, Spirituality, and Liberation

“Many people who have had breakdowns of psychotic proportions have subsequently undertaken deep spiritual work. We have some powerful first person accounts of people who made this voyage into madness and then returned spiritually awakened. But Dr. Masters is the first I know of to take the plunge with a spiritually attuned consciousness and return to write about it. This is not a romanticisized Dark Night’s Journey…. The story of his odyssey is a naked dance of spirit, with mind in its most wild wandering untamed form.”

— DAVID LUKOFF, PH.D., professor of Psychology, Saybrook Graduate School, and co-developer of the DSM-IV category “Religious or Spiritual Problem.”

“A fascinating and illuminating work.”

(4)

ROBERT AUGUSTUS MASTERS

Tehmenos Press

Meditations on Sanity, Suffering,

Spirituality, and Liberation

darkness

_{s h i n i n g w i l d}

(5)

Copyright © 2005, 2009 by Robert Augustus Masters. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of the author.

ISBN: 978-0-9737526-0-2

Designed by Madison Creative Inc. Printed in the United States

Tehmenos Press

For more information, visit www.robertmasters.com

(6)

!,3/

&REEDOM 2EVISIONING 4HE !N $IVINE %NTERING 4RANSFORMATION 4HE -EETING %NDING ^forthcoming 3PIRITUAL 7HEN

(8)

For Diane

My wife, truest friend, ever-deeper beloved and partner in all things,

through whom I am awakened to all that I am.

Just when I thought our bond couldn’t get any deeper, it once again does,

emptying me of all that I took myself to be, leaving only this ever-fresh

shared familiarity and ever-evolving intimacy, this exquisitely personal

mutuality so lovingly rooted in the raw reality of Absolute Mystery.

(9)

(10)

We die, and we do not die.

— Shunryu Suzuki

The truly transformative death comes usually unbidden if not

unwelcome, of itself, happening to us and in spite of us.

— John Weir Perry

With the arising of overwhelming fear

the mind has no time to be distracted.

— The Tibetan Book of the Dead

A thing is what it is not because of an irreducible essence that

marks it off from other things but because of the complex and

singular relationships that enable it to emerge with its own

unique character from the matrices of a contingent world.

— Stephen Batchelor

All there is is Is.

(11)

ROBERT AUGUSTUS MASTERS

~ 1 ~

unraveled by

the minotaur’s bleeding

howl of recognition

(12)

Darkness Shining Wild

~ 2 ~ It’s perhaps midnight.

I am sitting up in bed, as I have for the last sixty consecutive nights, my heart hammering and my mind overrun with accelerating dread. Another night of hell.

As usual, I am struggling to remain present, struggling not to let the reality of the dread engulf me. A dimensionless black pit of primal panic pulls at me, pulls and pulls, eerily sentient and far too close, its jagged electricity worming through me. Variations on a single theme keep campaigning for what remains of my attention: No more terror. I cannot endure any more.

And yet here it is, apparently immune to meditative practice and cathartic discharge — breath awareness, awareness of body and mind, prayer and pranayama, Vipassana and Dzogchen, bodywork and yoga and running and relaxation practices, raw emotional release, psychospiritual insight, tears and tears and deeper tears, providing at best a sporadic, extremely fragile relief. Short-lived interruptions of terror.

A deeper imperative than just being aware of whatever constitutes the dread seems to be addressing — or calling — me. It’s as if the dread is pulling me to itself, sucking me into its dark enormity, its sickeningly bottomless vortex. Already I am leaving the level, the steady, the familiar, yet somehow keeping some attention on my breath, my body, my shaking body. I cannot stop the vibrating and jerking. Admitting to myself just how scared I actually am only intensifies my terror. I cannot help noticing that the dread seems to possess an intrinsic depth that effortlessly magnetizes my attention.

I am closer than close to the horrifyingly unbearable — hypervividly experienced on previous nights — as I “descend,” sometimes step by

(13)

~ 3 ~

vertiginous step, sometimes blindly spinning and falling, working very hard to not give free rein to my wildly panicking mind. A gigantic no-exit madness surrounds and threatens to completely fill me. A horizonless insanity. The movement of my attention is far from straightforward — it is dizzyingly irregular, complexly angled and involuted, wide then narrow then wide again, as if passing through a maze rather than a chute or corridor. An oscillating maze at once claustrophobically contracted and freakily expansive, housing a boomeranging focus. The fear of insanity is overwhelming.

What I am entering is a topography that won’t lodge in memory. All that connects me to the world I’ve left is an extremely thin strand of attention, an Ariadne’s thread of remembrance. A spectral filament linking me to a glimmer of basic sanity.

A storm-crazed kite gone spelunking am I, tied ever so slightly to a fleeting semblance of solid ground. Like Theseus descending into the Cretan labyrinth, I too am on my way to face — or to more fully face — what I dread, already feeling the breath of the Minotaur. But, unlike Theseus, I am not doing so deliberately, and I am not armed.

The terror intensifies.

I have got to go back — but I cannot. Sometimes I forget the thread, yet I have not completely lost it. It is, regardless of its frailty, a lifeline — I must not let go of it, but if I hold it too tightly or desperately, it loses its life. And if I tug on it, as if to secure more of it, I find myself gripping nothing, except the memory of those few times when such a strategy has jerked me back up to the surface, “safe” but still stuck, like dreamers who, reentering the so-called waking state, have merely fled their nightmare and its dark treasures.

No heroes here.

My dread is now unmasked terror, staggeringly powerful. Nothing can stand in its way. My thread of remembrance? It’s somewhere behind me, its crazily fraying ghost sinking in warped chasms that elude attention. Insanity. Explanations balloon into sight, then dissolve or mutate into something ungraspably other.

(14)

Darkness Shining Wild

~ 4 ~

Escape is now terribly attractive, but I’ve no line on which to tug, no cord of connection into which to breathe life. There seems to be only this unperimetered, amorphous monstrosity all around me, ready to swallow and obliterate and possess me. No, not ready — it already has. Within and without. Intimations of a horror beyond horror invade me from all directions. There is a tidal thunder in the distance, a strangely sibilant surf-like roar. It is, I have to keep reminding myself, the de-familiarized sound of my own breathing. Reference points eddy and shatter before I can find any anchoring through them. I am anchored elsewhere, in what appears to be a no-exit realm. I am very lost. The life I had before all this started is less than a dream now, its fleeting shards of memory only reminding me of how very far away I am. My mind rides the slopes of my previous life like an escaped sled with an accelerating black avalanche a microsecond behind.

Suddenly, without premeditation, I go into the terror, no longer fighting or resisting it, no longer attempting to witness it. The Minotaur’s face is only inches away. My mind splinters, unraveled by the Minotaur’s bleeding howl of recognition...

(15)

introduction

dying into a deeper life

CHAPTER ONE

(16)

Darkness Shining Wild

~ 6 ~

It only makes sense

When we stop trying to make it make sense Rest in undressed Being

Remembering to remember that It and you have never been apart Until only What-Really-Matters remains Already perfectly dressed for the part Too real to possess meaning

And the lovers die, die, die Into a love beyond imagining

Crying out as one: Oh God God O God

Avoiding Death deadens us.

In the resulting numbness — over which may be superimposed plenty of feeling and vitality — we easily become overly invested in whatever most reassuringly secures us.

But only when we release everything — everything — from the obligation to make us feel more secure, do we really feel more secure. Through such radical non-dependency, we develop a saner relationship with Death (and everything else), becoming more intimate both with what dies and with what doesn’t die.

Keeping Death at a distance distances us from Life.

But we’re never actually far from Death, however much we might assume we are elsewhere. When we say: “I’m dying to see you” or “I’m so happy I could die right now,” we’re zeroing in on our deeper sense of Death. Dying are we, all of us, but are we dying — through changes large and small — into Life, or

(17)

~ 7 ~

are we just getting deader? How hungry are we to awaken, really awaken, from the entrapping dreams we habitually animate and occupy?

To awaken thus is to die to our illusions. Along the way disillusionment sheds its negative connotations, its potently sobering flowers rising from the debris of our unraveled dreams. But it’s not necessarily a cut-and-dried course, being amply supplied with as much peril as promise. At a certain point, for example, we cannot afford to turn away any longer from our fear, pain, or darkness. Traveling to the heartland of these conditions is an adventure that asks much of us, an odyssey that, among other things, uproots us until we find truer ground.

My face is unveiled sky and prehistoric stretch

Dewbrightened dawn and thunderhead-dappled stream Gnarled coastline and screamingly-blossomed storm Ever bursting through the roof of what’s unborn Gone, gone am I

Birthing me am I

Struggling deepsea drop am I

Dreaming of boundless light and fearfully knotted night Widewinged spacedancer am I

Soaring over cobblestone oceans of cloud Seafoam am I

Last sigh of a vagabond wave Forest am I

Greening sunlit shadowsongs And this too am I

Where Mystery is the Foundation Where Love is the Weave

Where Silence is the Breath

Where there’s so much I’m dying to see

And so much we’re dying to be. Dying to live, to truly live. Dying to be free. Dying into Life, dying into the Undying, dying into the Reality of what we actually are.

To unguardedly face and feel the transience, the inherent insubstantiality, the essential and ultimate Mystery of everything, including the “I” now reading this, undoes the knot and agendas of self, leaving nothing but What-Really-Matters.

(18)

Darkness Shining Wild

~ 8 ~

We may feel very drawn to the promised bliss and peace of being at one with the Ultimate, but what are the implications of being at one with the Ultimate in all of Its manifestations, including the darkest and ugliest of qualities in ourselves and others? What happens when we recognize that our self-contained somebody-ness, our “I”, is more a mirage, more a contingent arising, than a discrete entity? What happens when we realize that we’ve been dreaming that we aren’t dreaming? With what are we left when we cease superimposing meaning onto Existence?

These and related questions are intended to be entry points for an inquiry seeking something more relevant than answers, an inquiry that, rooted both in the personal and the transpersonal, is the essential passion of Darkness Shining Wild, offering not a cartography of the Wild Blue Yonder, but rather an invitation to a deeper life, a life in which intimacy with everything is cultivated. Whatever we turn away from, whatever we exclude from our exploration, whatever we deem unworthy of our investigative eye, whatever we refuse to become truly intimate with, ultimately only diminishes us. In turning away from our fear — be it everyday worry or transpersonal dread — we are only turning away from our own healing and Homecoming. This book explores, among other things, what is perhaps the most difficult condition to fully face and work with as we awaken — fear.

To study fear in real depth is to study more than fear. For example, the very “I” that is busy being afraid, or that seems to be “behind” fear, has such impact on the formation and expression of fear that it cannot be excluded from any in-depth look at fear. To truly examine that “I” (or complex of “I’s”) is not just a psychological undertaking, but also a biological and spiritual one, as I’ll later describe.

The relationships between dread, spirituality, and identity are explored through much of Darkness Shining Wild. Dread — how we dread it. How diligently and how desperately we apply ourselves to trying to make sure that we and it stay far, far apart. Yet still it persists, insinuating its way into us, undaunted by our psychological and pharmaceutical defenses.

We need to revision dread (and also every other state that we fear or don’t like), to stop shunning it, so that we might benefit from it. In its capacity to nakedly show us the innate groundlessness of both our world and the very identity through which we maintain the illusory security of that world, dread

(19)

~ 9 ~

can not only scare us scriptless, but can also catalyze our transition from ego-centered selfhood to soul-ego-centered selfhood and beyond. (By soul, I mean our personal essence, or that depth [or stage] of individuality in which egoity is clearly and functionally peripheral to Being.)

What this requires of us is embodied commitment to the spirit of investigation, asking that we not only look as clearly as possible at whatever arises, but that we also look inside our looking.

Finding a fitting language for this is a challenge, rich with difficulties; even the most experientially accurate language cannot help but fall short of its descriptive intent. Nevertheless, the written word is not necessarily incapable of the required articulation, as quality time spent with sacred literature demonstrates. Some might argue that the Numinous, the Ultimately Mysterious, the all-pervading Divine, is beyond words, and they are right, but not completely right. Consider, for example, this statement from Sri Nisargadatta:

Love says: “I am everything.” Wisdom says: “I am nothing.” Between the two my life flows.

As you read it, and read it with more than your intellect, feeling your way further and further into it, are you not, however slightly, reminded of your fundamental nature? Each time I read it, it feels fresh to me. It empties my mind, fills my heart, refreshes my all. Its beauty strikes Home.

More on language before we get back to the book: Does language have to become speechless, obscure, or opaque when confronted with the unyieldingly paradoxical? Is there a mode of verbal description that is clearly framed and yet simultaneously capable of slipping out of its frames, thereby outdancing, at least to some degree, its lines and contextual constraints and whatever else might reduce it to mere information or hold-still facticity?

One such mode is what could be called the holy poetic — not necessarily poems or verse, but Being-centered articulation, the music of which can lift us, however briefly, out of rationality’s playpens into the unbounded wilderness of Existence, inviting and inspiring us to give birth and sustenance to a language that both thinks and sings, both bleeds and soars, both stands apart and cares. At its best, such language roots the extraordinary and wings the ordinary, making more than sense, bringing the addictive familiarity in which we

(20)

Darkness Shining Wild

~ 10 ~

chronically dwell face to face with its inherent Mystery, until It is more Home than threat, more foundation than goal. The holy poetic doesn’t so much explain as reveal. And how does it do this? By touching both the particular and the Universal with such care, such lucidly intoxicated care, that their intersection becomes a living — and habitable — reality for us. Hardball magic this is, viscerally trued.

The holy poetic — the edibly accurate, everwild, epiphanously idiosyncratic soulsong of significances large and small, weaves itself beyond itself, going beneath and beyond its initial range and apparencies, leaving its pages and supposed author behind, again and again birthing us and a deeper us in its wake, its silences, its openness, its everfresh marriage of limitation and limitlessness.

All of which is to say that the language in Darkness Shining Wild occasionally takes on forms that may be far from what would be considered normal. So you’ll find in the upcoming pages not one consistent style or approach — the only consistency I strive for is a consistency of intention and care. The wild and the scholarly, the intuitive and the analytic, the precise and the unkempt, the scientific and the poetic, coexist here, and not always smoothly.

Now, back to the book and its genesis: When I was 22, unhappily immersed in the second year of a doctoral program in biochemistry (my dissertation task being to isolate and exhaustively study an enzyme found in rabbit hearts, of which I required many hundreds), I had the following dream:

Through a mist I look down and see a small boat bobbing on a glassy sea. I don’t sense my body; I seem to be a witnessing presence only. In the boat stands a man, apparently unaware that his boat is slowly sinking, almost brimming with water. He casts his fishing line, and feels a strong tug. I cry out to him, for I fear that he’s hooked some monstrous creature that will surely drag him down, unless he lets go of the line. He does not seem to hear me. When his boat can hold no more water, he at last releases his line. As it flies from his hands, his boat sinks. He sinks, too, and at that very moment I know that I am he, that he is me. I am drowning, but am not afraid. Without any sense of panic, I gently glide up, up through the warm green water. Just before reaching the surface, I stop and exhale fully, then inhale.

With the water rushing into my lungs, I let myself drift down, down, down, my entire being streaming with a bliss-saturated joy and ease.

(21)

~ 11 ~

That dream-drowning, which catalyzed (literally within a few hours) a major change in direction for me — leaving my graduate studies — was the first “dying into life” episode of my adult life. Many would follow. Few were as fluid or easy as the first, but all were of immense — and usually unsuspected — value to me, invariably occurring at times when I was in extreme confusion, pain, or turmoil, times when I was, however unknowingly, ripe for big change. I neither engineered nor controlled such “dyings.” Nor did I even desire them, at least at a conscious level — though I did hanker for painless surrogates of them! — despite the fact that I always emerged from them rejuvenated and more whole than before, filled with a deeper passion for life. Each “death” was new. Part of my initiation into such radical letting go necessitated a departure from conventional familiarity, not as a strategy, but as an act of deep trust. Letting go of security, letting go of knowing, letting go of who I thought I was, letting go of the very “I” who was busy letting go. Surrender.

I also sometimes died in dreams, often willingly. During dreams in which I knew that I was dreaming, I would sometimes let myself die, disintegrate, shatter, dissolve, feeling my sense of identity moving in and out of form, reassembling itself in usually impossible-to-anticipate ways. All I had to do was relinquish the controls, while maintaining awareness.

My participation in this was not without an increasing pride, though, through which I solidified my identity as a somebody who had really, really been through it all. This somebody apparently disappeared in each “dying,” but actually emerged redressed and strengthened from its brief demise, congratulating itself on its intimacy with the transpersonal.

It was not difficult to use my times of genuine opening and breakthrough as headline news for my spiritual resumé, as evidence that I indeed was someone special. The more transparent that I became to Being, the more densely guarded — and densely camouflaged — my pride became. By the time I’d reached my early 40s, I assumed that I had endured more than enough breakdown and “dying” for my lifetime. Little did I know what my arrogance was drawing to me.

There was a deeper dying for me, the foreshadowing of which I ignored. The story of that dying is at the heart of this book; though it occurred over ten years ago, it is still very much alive in me. I cannot get over it, for I am not apart from it. In the perpetual perishing that it signals, the Real blooms.

(22)

Darkness Shining Wild

~ 12 ~

In such revelation, everything is rendered frontier. In such dying, we are — if we but dare to look and dare to move toward our fear — exactly what we are aching to find.

Bathe in this waterfall of unchained pain, bathe in it now, letting the dawning light touch it with a purer wonder, letting the furrily mossed cliffsides pulsate in resonance with your suddenly conscious breath, your long-crushed and panic-remembering breath, your close encounters with Death, and bathe also beneath the falls, far below the cascading white thunder, down where silent riverpools glisten with terraced grace and crystalline welcome, for there you will find more than greenblue embrace and rippling epiphany, more than reflections of former faces, more than the stillpoint of joy and grief.

And do you not now, softly stretching now, hear a different kind of thunder, a greenly galloping tapestry of original wonder, lush with gonged throb and primordial demand? Do you not now sense the unshuttered panorama of eyes behind your eyes, the overlapping dreams that are much more than dreams, the wildwinged shapeshifters so effortlessly disassembling your mind?

There is an undoing here, a reopening, a lucid vertigo, a macheted clearing, a velvet slide, a stormy desert, a shrieking wasteland, a bloody snowfield, a falling apart, a skymaking plunge, and there is something else, too, something throbbing between the lines and inside the designs, a knowingness that eludes even the most sublime of semantic nets and spiritual mappings...

Permit yourself remembrance, not necessarily of details and history, but of unveiled Presence, of the Obviousness of Being, and of something else, too, something that is not really a something, but rather the very Heart of Mystery, the very Face of the Faceless, the ever-paradoxical Truth of you, the Truth that is prior to every you and every view. And the lovers die, die into unimaginable Love, crying out as one: Oh God God O God

(23)

day one

into the

stranger-than-can-be-imagined

(24)

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.

(25)

~ 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

(26)

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

(27)

~ 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.

(28)

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

(29)

~ 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.

(30)

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

(31)

~ 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, something less final.

(32)

Darkness Shining Wild

~ 22 ~

But there was no escape for me, no solid door to close and lock. The gates had been dynamited, seemingly beyond any foreseeable repairing. My hyperacute, gaping, shock-driven sense of Eternity and the immeasurable, achingly populated sweep of time literally made me shake and buckle. “Not only our life, but this particular universe is just like one brief instant, even if it has been in existence for billions of years.”9_{An endless procession of universes,}

and I had the eerie sense of having been there in all of them — not as my conventional self, but as I really was.

That everything appeared to be arising and passing in the same unexplainable moment — which I had meditatively intuited for years — brought me no comfort whatsoever, no warm and fuzzy sense of sacred time, no celebratory feeling of arrival or oneness, but instead only an ominous, sickeningly brilliant, omnipresent dread.

I somehow managed to keep much of this at bay until bedtime. Having those I loved near — familiar faces bright with affection — allowed me to pass the evening without outwardly going to pieces. But the dread was looming close by, waiting, staring back at me with an unmasked bluish chill in the bathroom mirror, insinuating its way through me, even as I felt my bond with the others gathered in our living room. How beautiful their shining eyes, how heart-wrenchingly lovely their gestures, their self-presentation, their very being, and also how incredibly fragile — fast wilting cameos lingering in the darkly transpersonal reality now beating my heart. But maybe, just maybe, this would mostly pass in a day or two, as the aftermath, biochemical and otherwise, of my 5-MeO shock-ride dissipated from my system.

I so badly wanted to be seduced by hope. Just hang in there, I exhorted myself, for this too will pass. After all, everything passes, doesn’t it? Watch the doubt that claims otherwise, watch it mutate, watch its contents become irrelevant. Everything will be fine in a day or two, I was reassured. But will it really pass in time? Or will I go mad first, or kill myself ? My doubt — sharpened by unrelenting terror — persisted, like an unwanted dream figure that won’t go away, even when strangled or cut into pieces. Doubt your doubt, I’d taught others, but this doubt — lit with far too much intuition — ate into me with frightening ease.

I spent most of that first post-5-MeO night sitting up in bed (Nancy slept on and off beside me), helplessly absorbed in extremely gripping, three-dimensional replays of the horror I had experienced, now and then trying to

(33)

~ 23 ~

comfort myself with the thought that this wouldn’t, couldn’t, last for more than a few nights. The waves of remembrance did not come gently. I was throbbing, shaking, struggling to find some semblance of calm in the psychospiritual riptides that were tossing me about like a piece of shore-bereft driftwood. A hellride minus an offramp.

Hour after hour I endured, feeling as though I would never return from the madness that was infiltrating me. Finally, just before dawn, I fell asleep and very soon found myself in a lucid dream.

I had often had such dreams, frequently using them as portals for all kinds of adventure and experimentation. As such, they were normally quite pleasing to be in; I would know that the body I “had” in the dream was not my actual physical body, and so could then freely engage in activities that would mean disaster or even Death in the “waking” state. If I was afraid in a regular dream and then became lucid during it, I could usually face the fear, interacting with its dream-form until some kind of resolution or integration occurred. But not now. Yes, I knew I was dreaming, but I could not work with the fear therein. The dream was saturated with an enormous, otherworldly terror which was coupled with savagely hallucinatory disorientation. In the midst of this I stood, my dreambody but a ghostly sieve for its surroundings. I knew that if I left the dream, I would still be in the very same state.

At last, I let myself go fully into the dream, despite my conviction that I very likely would not return. Now I was completely inside it, utterly lost, immersed in an edgeless domain of look-alike, spike-headed waveforms, each one sentient and subtly scaly, moving protoplasmically in endless procession in all directions. Just like my 5-MeO setting, but without the speed.

Suddenly, I was overcome by a completely unexpected, rapidly expanding compassion. All fear vanished. A few moments later, I somehow cut — or intended — a kind of porthole in the bizarre universe that enclosed me, as cleanly round as the shrinking aperture of my consciousness at the onset of my 5-MeO journey.

Through this opening the countless alien forms spontaneously came streaming, immediately metamorphosing into flowers, birds, trees, humans: Earthly life in all its wonder and heartbreaking fecundity. Then the dream faded, and I lay

(34)

Darkness Shining Wild

~ 24 ~

radiantly awake, deeply moved, feeling as though the hardest part was now over.

It had, however, just begun.

NOTES

1. Ayahuasca — meaning “vine of the soul” — is a hallucinogenic drink long employed in the Amazon basin for both sacred and medicinal purposes. Two species of the forest liana genus Banisteriopsis — especially B. caapi — are mainly used to initially prepare ayahuasca. Then plants from other families are added, the most commonly used being those containing DMT (such as, in my drink, Psychotria viridis). DMT is inactive when taken orally, unless monoamine oxidase (an enzyme that breaks down DMT) inhibitors are present, and the hallucinogens in Banisteriopsis — harmine and harmaline — are in fact such inhibitors. Ethnobotanist Wade Davis, in describing this “remarkable example of shamanic alchemy,” asks (1998, p. 166): “How did the Indians learn to identify and combine in such a sophisticated manner these morphologically dissimilar plants with such unique and complementary chemical properties?”

Davis’s taking of ayahuasca (in the Northwest Amazon of Colombia) produced, in its initial stages, effects quite similar to my trip in its first few hours: “The sky opened.... Then the terror grew stronger, as did my sense of hopeless fragility. Death hovered all around.... My thoughts themselves turned into visions, not of things or places but of an entire dimension that in the moment seemed not only real but absolute. This was the actual world, and what I had known until then was a crude and opaque facsimile” (pp. 160-161).

A deep-digging, way out-on-the-edge account of tryptamine phenomenology can be found in True Hallucinations (1994), by Terence McKenna.

For an exploration of the ethnography of ayahuascan shamanism in the Amazon, accompanied by 49 paintings of ayahuasca visions as experienced by a Peruvian shaman, see Luna & Amiringo (1992). The story of Manuel Córdoba-Rios (Lamb, 1990), who was captured by a group of Amahuaca Indians as a young teen, is also worth reading. Córdoba-Rios was, with great care, taken into the tribe and initiated into the ways of ayahuasca, living with the Indians for seven years before escaping, eventually becoming a shaman-healer of legendary reputation, using ayahuasca as a diagnostic aid (Lamb, 1985).

Ayahausca has become quite popular. The original recipe has expanded into ayahuasca analogues, in which plants containing DMT and plants containing monoamine oxidase inhibitors (like harmine and harmaline) are combined to create an ayahuasca experience. Hence “pharmahuasca.”

(35)

~ 25 ~

2 This “purging” is commonplace during ayahuasca sessions.

3. McKenna, 1992, p. 236. From 1990 to 1995 psychiatrist Rick Strassman conducted research in which he injected volunteers with DMT. His account (Strassman, 2001) of what happened in those sessions, along with his speculations about the role of DMT in human consciousness, is fascinating. Among other things he suggests that DMT, which is found not only in various plants, but is also manufactured by the human brain (probably in the pineal gland), is an integral part of birth and Death (and near-Death) experiences. He believes that alien abduction experiences may be brought on by released DMT. I’ll say more about all of this in later chapters.

4. 5-MeO is a primary ingredient in the Virola-based snuffs — known as Epená or semen of the sun— used by certain tribes in the northwestern Amazon and upper Orinoco (Schultes & Hofmann, 1992, pp. 164-171). 5-MeO is also found in remarkably high concentrations in the parotoid glands (on the back of the head) of

Bufo alvarius, the Sonoran toad, found in the American southwest and northern

Mexico. The venom of this toad, when milked and dried, can be smoked, with hallucinogenic results. Smoking toad, despite some sensational media coverage (in which it was juxtaposed with toad-licking, a far riskier practice), has nonetheless not become particularly popular (Davis, 1998, pp. 171-198). More often than not, synthesized 5-MeO is smoked by users. At the extreme, it may even be injected during ayahuasca intoxication.

There are reports that 5-MeO is, like DMT, found in human fluids and brain tissue. Its synthesis is thought to occur in the pineal gland. Some conjecture (Chia, 2004) that greatly increased melatonin levels — as generated by lengthy time (several weeks or more) in prolonged utter darkness — increases both DMT and 5-MeO production by the pineal, so long as monoamine oxidase (an enzyme which breaks down DMT and 5-MeO) inhibitors are present.

5. For more on this, see U.G. Khrisnamurti, 1984, p. 25.

6. “Attention is just the point of awareness (moving instantaneously from dot to dot) in a three-dimensional realm of an infinite number of dots... It is a horror to contemplate... Wherever you look, everything surrounds that center of looking...We must take attention away from its preoccupation with, or bondage to, this infinite medium of dots and let it fall back into the contemplation of its own Source” (Da Free John, 1983, p. 273)

7. Wade Davis says (1998, p. 189) that “whereas most hallucinogens, including LSD, merely distort reality, however bizarrely, 5-MeO-DMT completely dissolves reality.”

(36)

Darkness Shining Wild

~ 26 ~

8. For a lucid discussion of bare attention, including its parallels with Freud’s “evenly suspended attention,” see Epstein, 1995, pp. 109-128. See also the writings of Thich Nhat Hanh, Jack Kornfield, Surya Das, and Stephen Levine.

(37)

mortality, identity, being:

an initial look

(38)

Darkness Shining Wild

~ 28 ~

The great message of the universe is not that you survive. It is that you are awakened into a process in which nothing ultimately survives....We are always seeking to know in order to protect ourselves. We want to save ourselves and continue. And we cannot.

— Adi Da

You are asking for truth, but in fact you merely seek comfort, which you want to last forever.

— Sri Nisargadatta

They say that I am dying but I am not going away. Where could I go? I am here.

— Ramana Maharshi, just before his death

DEATH AWARENESS AND IDENTITY

Few topics can arouse as much aversion and delusion as our own death. Modern Western culture’s denial of Death is as blatant as it is firmly entrenched: Corpses are still dressed up as if they are about to go out to dinner or to a party; appearing youthful is an obsessive, almost unquestioned pursuit; and the not-so-well-preserved elderly, more often than not, are kept at a “safe” distance or even shunned. The telltale signs of getting old — of being chronologically disadvantaged — are often greeted with alarm, as if signifying failure or perhaps even — in a metaphysical sense — an error in the System. Death reminders are avoided rather than appreciated. But since just about everything, when seen clearly, is a Death reminder, the avoidance of whatever reminds us of Death is none other than the avoidance of Life.

I’m not afraid of death. I just don’t want to be there when it happens. — Woody Allen

(39)

~ 29 ~

Despite advances in working with dying and despite the abundance of writing on Death and dying that’s emerged since the 1960s, Death generally remains almost as much in the closet for us as sex was for the Victorian era. It’s the ultimate elephant in the room. We are more likely to celebrate “youthful” achievements by the elderly — like completing a marathon at age 70 — than most other achievements that may come with aging, like panoramic equanimity. Death tends to remain bad news. The media and medical profession make sure of this, so that Death gets to be a tragedy, a misfortune, the supreme bummer. Think of the bumper sticker: Life’s a bitch, then you die; and more recently, its T-shirted sequel: Life is a fish, then you fry. Far from good news, or so it seems. (Imagine the following for a bumper sticker: Life’s a bitch, then you die and have to come back and do it all over again.) The founder of the hospice movement in Great Britain termed Death “an outrage.”1

But is it? Is it necessarily a calamity, an enemy, a tragedy? And if so, to whom, to which of the many “I’s” that together make up our apparent identity? To address these and related questions is to explore not only our fear of Death, but also the nature of Death, to enter into what Martin Buber called “the starkest of human perspectives, that concerning one’s own death.”2

Such a perspective may be stark, but without it, our lives tend to lose depth, presence, freshness, and authenticity. If this perspective, however, remains merely conceptual, it may relieve us of some of our pettiness for a few moments, but it’ll not likely have a particularly profound impact upon our life. To be aware of Death is not synonymous with just thinking about Death.

Bringing awareness — not thought, but awareness — to our mortality has a profound effect on our sense of identity. It’s a cold-shower awakening, often rough and rude, driving our blood to our core.

A note about “sense of identity:” It is not the same as “self-concept” (or the picture/idea we ordinarily have of ourselves). “Self-concept” refers to how we tend to think of ourselves, and is therefore, as a belief — or complex of beliefs — relatively consistent across time, regardless of its fluctuations in size or strength. “Self-concept” is usually considered in terms of weak or strong, high or low, poorer or better — that is, as a something to be primarily viewed quantitatively (the instrumental image here being that of a sliding scale limited to back-and-forth movement between predefined polarities).

(40)

Darkness Shining Wild

~ 30 ~

By contrast, “sense of identity” is not a thing, nor a belief, and nor is it necessarily clearly bound, being more a process than an entity. It is our moment-to-moment experience of ourselves as an “I,” ever revealing what is currently being identified with — including, of course, our self-concept.3

We may identify with what dies; we may identify with what doesn’t die; or we may do neither. Along the way, “I” may undergo many changes, including decentralization or even apparent disappearance, dying into a depth of Life that imagination cannot touch.

Self-made dreamstuff are we Dreaming we aren’t dreaming Taking up space doing our time Passing through Eternity’s Grinder Nostalgic for a perfect tomorrow When my dreams are emptied of me Everything’s right where it belongs This odyssey of selfing

Returning as always To what was never left Travelling high and low Sailing through calm and storm Discovering where all dreams are born

FEAR, AND A DEEPER FEAR

To journey into, unguardedly feel, and directly relate to our deepest fears requires that our usual distancing strategies, cognitive or otherwise, be exposed and disarmed — assuming that it is timely to do so. These fears can then be touched and known from the inside, and eventually divested of their power to shrink, misguide, or intimidate us.

Opening to our fear is an act of intimacy, a courageous welcoming of the disfigured and outcast into the living room of our being. Opening thus is also an act of surrender. As such, it is not a dissolution — or collapsing — of personal boundaries, as in submission, but rather an expanding of them. In submission, we deaden ourselves, sinking into the shallows; in surrender, we enliven ourselves, dying into a deeper Life. In surrender we may lose face,

(41)

~ 31 ~

but we do not lose touch. Submission flattens the ego; surrender transcends it. Submission is passive, but surrender is dynamic.

Surrender is the unarmored heart enlarged through full acceptance of pure necessity. To varying degrees, surrender also carries within itself an observing capacity which stems not from fabricated awareness, but rather from innate awareness, at once apart from and at one with its apparent objects.

The key to working effectively with fear is to get inside it.

This means, among other things, that we need to have a clear knowledge of all the ways we’ve learned to get away from fear, so that when one of them shows up, we’re capable of looking at it and saying no thanks. Getting inside fear means getting past its periphery, getting past its defining thoughts, getting past its propagandizing sentinels. Entering the dragon’s cave.

What is being mined here is not some fear-obliterating alchemy, but rather those raw materials that together contribute to the development of intimacy with fear.

The real challenge is getting close enough to the Minotaur to feel not only its breath, its swollen appetite, its violently looming size, but also its ache, its original need, its cry to be recognized as more than just the dark flowering of a bad seed. When fear or terror is met with compassion, however fleetingly, we are brought a little closer to the heart of the matter.

But how do we access such compassion? We can begin by learning to become more intimate with our smaller, more easily manageable fears. Practices regarding this — to be given more coverage later — might include: Neither pulling away from fear nor tightening around it; examining, in attentive detail, the sensations of fear rather than its mental contents; making room for fear to breathe more deeply, as if to expand it; permitting fear’s characteristic energies to be as they are without, however, identifying with fear’s viewpoint; exposing any strategy to do any or all of the above in order to get rid of fear. These practices are by no means necessarily easy to do, especially when fear is intense. It can be very tempting — and entirely appropriate at times — in the midst of panic or terror to latch onto whatever delivers or promises a relatively reassuring sense of security, including entrenchment in lesser, more easily controlled fears.

(42)

Darkness Shining Wild

~ 32 ~

These smaller fears, unpleasant as they may be, can provide some degree of stabilizing through their familiarity of perimeter, feel, and content. Also, they are not usually very difficult to temporarily escape or sedate — we know what we are afraid of, we are perhaps even oddly comforted by its dense familiarity, and we know when to throw it a piece of meat, and when not to. We know it well enough to know how to take the edge off it, through positive thinking, sexual activity, food, drugs, intense exercise, electronic fixes, and other successfully distracting preoccupations — we know where the corral is, how high a fence is needed, and the strength of the lock on the gate: “The nothing which is the object of dread,” says Kierkegaard, “becomes, as it were, more and more a something.”4

A something. That is, when our fear has a concrete, everyday thing upon which to focus or fixate, we’re on miserable yet dependably familiar ground, seemingly far from the quicksands of our more primal fears. Thus do we tend to prefer the burdened beasts of depression to the monsters of the deep. Also, the narrower the focus, as when fear provides the lens, the more substantial or dense “I” may seem to become, mechanically projecting itself into the future (and therefore into the conviction that there will indeed be a tomorrow for it) through its very anxiety, thereby successfully stranding itself from any significant encounter with its own mortality and actual insubstantiality.

Thus do we tend to cling, however indirectly, to our everyday fear and the apparent security it provides, focusing on what it’s saying rather than on the raw reality of it. In so doing we leave the nature of fear out of our inquiry, settling instead for explanations for why we are afraid.

It’s easy to use our reasoning powers to distance ourselves from our naked emotion, yet even from the loftiest and most seemingly safe neocortical towers we’re not out of reach of our core fears. Key among these is our fear of Death, however masked it might be by metaphysical lullabies or the pastel vistas of pharmaceutical flatlands.

We may even succeed at making sure that we are always capable of distraction from our existential anxiety, perhaps even pretending that it does not exist, but we are then only doing time in a self-conceived maximum security comfort-cell, slowly desiccating in our surrogate chrysalis.

(43)

~ 33 ~

Getting sicker with every new cure Clearcutting today to secure tomorrow Fleeing a grief beyond sorrow

Avoiding death by deadening ourselves Not seeing beneath our herdprints The crushed yet leafy reach of another us Divided we stand calling for peace Reducing love to an ideal

Chaining attention to mindchatter Pilgrims at the crossroads are we

Stuck in well-educated knots & fashionable headlocks The sky opening for us is but the ceiling

Of our loftiest thought

Pilgrims at the crossroads are we

Missing what is more secure than security More moral than morality

More significant than meaning Fear’s the threshold

And even the ticket Home When we hold the dragon’s heart

Perhaps almost as inevitable as Death itself is our denial of it, our effort to ship its facticity to uninhabited regions of ourselves. We may compulsively occupy ourselves with tomorrow and beyond, perhaps imagining ourselves in preconceived after-Death realms, still somehow intact and living on and on, consoling ourselves with the notion that Death is just a benign doorway, a portal to blissful domains, spiritual enlightenment, or more lifetimes featuring us. (The intensely positive, uplifting nature of most reported near-Death experiences may have contributed to this.)

In its attachment to such a comforting conception of Death, that ubiquitous case of mistaken identity commonly referred to as ego5_{demonstrates its}

obsession with survival, as well as its addiction to hope.

Hope is but nostalgia for the future, little more than despair taking a crash course in positive thinking. As I will later describe, ceasing to cling to hope (which does not mean falling into the arms of hopelessness or despair) can play a key role in bringing us into the heart of the present moment, to where we have sufficient connection to (and faith in) our core of Being to be able to sanely encounter Death.