07/27/2022
A handful of spiritual traditions offer a question as an answer to the search for awakening, “who am I?” This line of inquiry is meant to take us directly to the heart of the issue of being vs. Non-being (death) and to the point at which the whole human drama begins to unfold.
Some of us seem to be called to a spiritual search while some of us don’t.
For me, the yearning to understand has always been there. I deep part of me yearned to understand and know people around me, but, in a more pressing way, the yearning to understand myself became very strong when I started experiencing suffering in early adulthood (in the form of feeling isolated, not having confidence, and struggling to have a voice).
My search for understanding, and for relief from suffering has taken me along a path of learning to mature emotionally (taking responsibility for my perceptions, my emotions, and my actions), but also inward, to deeper layers of seeing what we are as humans. My mentors along the way helped me to see where and how I was suffering, where I had possibility for growth. They also helped point me in the direction of awakening; awakening from falsehood, from distorted perception, from believing unhelpful thinking, and toward essence, fundamental being, and awareness itself beyond all conditioning.
Who needs religion or spiritual teachings when we have direct experience? Direct experience of non-separation, of wholeness, and connectedness, is possible. In many cases, religion and spiritual teachings only muddy the water, so to speak. Though, for many people, religion is their vehicle for awakening and that’s okay, too.
For me, the vehicle for my awakening has been suffering…but also☝️near death experiences and altered state experiences, of which psychedelics have played an important part 🍄
Psilocybin in particular, I believe, expedited some of my initial awakening experiences in my early twenties. Cannabis also played a part in a pivotal awakening moment the night before I left for Thailand with some friends at age 21.
Vippassana meditation practice further deepened the awakening and helped me know myself as a clear and bright awareness.
In 2005, I was robbed at the coffe shop I worked at. They attacked me from behind. I didn’t see them, I just heard the shuffling of their footsteps. They’d hit me over the head with the butt of a knife and I fell to the floor. In that moment I had a flash of awareness, an image of a knife 🔪 in my mind. When I felt the urge to get up and fight another flash came and it was an image of me being stabbed in the gut. I didn't get up to fight. When the police came to investigate the scene where they’d attacked me they found a knife near the safe l, like the one I’d seen in my head.
A near death experience in Bolivia 🇧🇴 in 2006, where I was taken in an ‘express kidnapping’ outside of La Paz, was another pivotal happening that brought me face-to-face with my mortality…but also, it invited me into surrender in the face of death. After having a brief life review, and praying to god, I accepted my death in those moments, while being driven off in the dark into the Bolivian countryside. I didn’t know if I would survive, but there was peace in accepting my death, there was peace in surrender 💗
The years I worked with my mentors, Gary Tzu, Marcia Rich, and Giselle Rhyon-Berry, I had many altered state experiences which lead me to the shamanic path and training to use altered states consciously through traditional shamanic practices.
Most recently, I had a ketamine journey, in which I was transported inter-dimensionally and was communing with the creative forces of the universe(s). My individual consciousness dissolved, I died, and became the essence of the universe(s). As this essence, I began spewing out pure creative energy that was made up of elements unknown to us..and the insight came that we are this essence, all of us. And that beyond death, there is no death…it’s just on to the next thing 💁♂️😂 but that doesn’t diminish what we are, now. What we are, and what we do, now, is the same creation that I experienced as the essence of the universe…it just appears differently. The analogy of each of us being a wave in the same vast ocean 🌊fits, but we are much more dynamic (internally) than a wave rising, cresting, and waning. We have this capacity for awakening and for navigating our internal worlds. And we must create, we must bring forth that which is within us. Each of our individual expressions is an important part of the whole, an invaluable part of the symphony 🎻🌀
