I was recently asked to describe my "exact moment of realisation".
N: "What happens at the exact moment of seeing? I can't really answer this, because there is no rule here. Whatever happens, happens. For some it might be cataclysmic, and for others a non-event. Looking too deeply into another experience can potentially further taint your own. All I can talk about is my experience of it, which I am happy to do, as long as you can treat it as just another interesting, inconsequential story as I do."
M: "Do it, make a long rant filled with epicness! Hah.
No, seriously I´d love that. Starting from the moment before
realization, following with a-ha moment and then even enlightenment is
let go off and that traceless enlightenment continues forever. Okay, I
borrowed that last part from Dogen, but that´s how I see it: the
moment of realization is also let go off, mere flow of phenomena is
what stays and rolls on as it has always been going, by itself without
an agent."
So despite my initial misgivings, this response reassured me that the telling of my tale could potentially be used for good instead of evil... haha... but mostly just be a fun story to share. So, here goes.
I grew up in a pretty alternative community with very open-minded parents, which I feel very grateful for. I've always been exposed to a largely diverse and colourful array of people and ideas. Meditation, Zen, and the idea of waking up really started to kindle my interest in my early twenties, although I still didn't really know all too much about these things. I think around this particular time, I'd just finished reading Aldous Huxley, Lin Yutang, and most importantly this amazing book by Alan Watts (The Book On The Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are - if you haven't read it, you must!!), and I decided to take some mushrooms with an old friend of mine. I was quite thin at the time, more so than my friend, and I think I had a serving that was way too much for my body weight. Basically, I overdosed. Big time. (Now, I can probably spend pages describing this night but I'll try to keep it relatively short. It's mostly a lot of mystical-type nonsense... so please stay with me... and probably the only relevant thing is that it was my first satori, or insight of no-self. But you still might find it interesting!)
I thought I was dying. I thought I had died. I didn't want to freak anyone out too much (especially myself!) so I went into the kitchen by myself and sort of curled up into a foetal position on the floor in the corner. The trip just kept getting more and more intense and showed no signs of slowing down, it was more than I seemed able to handle! The visual hallucinations grew more and more intense until I became blind, nothing but bright white light. The state of my mind intensified higher and higher to a point that was unbearable, I thought I had lost my mind and was never going to return. The buildup was so great I thought I was going to explode. All I could do at that point was surrender to whatever was happening and let go of the fear. It seemed I had died, exploded, and come back over the other side, like the peak of a mountain, and suddenly I knew everything was going to be okay. I opened my eyes and my little dog was sitting in front of me, looking up at me with great big wet tears running down her face! She and I had a solid psychic connection for the rest of the night. We could speak telepathically. I walked outside to where my friend and my boyfriend-at-the-time were, and they stared at me wide-eyed with mouths agape.
They told me I was in a sphere of glowing golden energy (I know, a lot of this sounds like hippy crap, right? And I'm a pretty discerning person with healthy amounts of skepticism, but all I can do is give my honest account of this experience!). I knew I was in this sphere, I could see it and feel it blasting out from me in all directions like a fireman's hose! But I was amazed that they could see it too. My then-boyfriend hadn't even eaten any mushrooms, he walked into my sphere but couldn't stay there very long as it was making him trip out way too hard. It was the contact high of his life! Shit, I'd never even heard of contact highs before that night, I had to assure him several times that I had not put any mushrooms in his dinner! Anything or anyone that came within my sphere was affected. My dog would come and sit in my sphere, she loved it, was soaking it up. We could all actually see the energy blasting through her long fur and rippling it as if it were the wind.
My friend came and sat next to me with her camera to try and take some photos of us together. I tried to compose myself and smile for the camera and it seemed like the most surreal, bizarre thing in the world, I just couldn't do it. Fake smiles, fake poses, a fake moment for the camera to make a more permanent facsimile of. I started laughing. I couldn't stop laughing. The flash went off in my face a couple times, the camera became this living creature, it was like a menacing demon with a large blinking eye stealing fake moments... my laughter became hysterical. Literally. I was laughing hysterically and couldn't stop, it was a truly horrible sensation!
A little later, I was playing with ink and water on paper. The three of us were mesmerized. If I wet some good paper, and ran a generous amount of black ink over it with an eyedropper, the most amazing thing happened. The image continued to grow and thrive and metamorphosize until it gradually died away, each picture was like plucking a moment - a real moment - like a thread in the tapestry of life, the complete cycle from birth to death, every microsecond so exquisite and perfect and beautiful, with the end picture/result unable to retain any of it, not a trace of it recordable. It lived in the moment, it was the moment. It was truly moving, we were captivated. We were creating these fragile fleeing lives out of nothing. Time and space became one... there was no being in the moment, we were the moment. Everything was. There was no separation. My first real understanding of non-duality, and I had never even heard the word. Another thing I noticed looking at my friends, was that I couldn't determine where they stopped and the rest of the universe began. I tried to trace them with my finger, but I didn't know if I was tracing their outline or the inline of the universe. Sound strange? Yeah, it even sounds a little strange to me now, heh! I myself had melted away to just a tube, a tube loosely attached to some kind of dimensionless floating mind. I was physically sensationally unaware and unattached to my body. It was there but it didn't seem to be me or mine in any way, it was like a hologram.
All of my little "props", all the things we use to hold ourselves up, keep ourselves in check, or simply make us able to operate in a polite and civilised manner, socially, had gone. All the strings holding up my puppet, snipped. All the energy and thought that went into the continuous projection of my self, suddenly taken away from me, whipped out from beneath me, as it were. Not just this, not just my strings or props, but my entire self image, gone. Not just the one I projected, everything I thought I was, my entire ego, ripped mercilessly away from me and held up in front of my eyes, shown to me for what it truly was. An illusion, a delusion, a farce. A lie. I looked in the mirror and didn't know who or what I was looking at. I thought it should have been horrifying, and in a way it was, but in a good way. It was truly incredible, very sobering and IMMENSELY humbling. Permanently perspective-altering to say the least. And as I said before, I wasn't prepared at all as I knew very little indeed about all this stuff at the time! I guess, looking back, it was probably a good thing I had no idea what was going on... haha!
Whew! Anyway, this was my first kensho or satori or whatever. My first taste of no-self and it had left me primed, ripped wide open, and ravenous for more. Perhaps what Jed McKenna might call my First Step.
I spent the next few years mostly reading and meditating. I'm a bookaholic too, always reading. My house is a library! I collected a lot of wrong ideas and a lot of right ideas. Each book always containing both. Zen seemed to make the most sense to me, seemed to have the best pointers, and even appeared at times to be more about human psychology than religion. Although it could still potentially be confusing and distorted as hell. I found this author called Robert Anton Wilson, have you heard of him? He's written lots of great stuff, including this book called Quantum Psychology, which gives a great brief rundown of the lineage of western philosophy, in a very tongue-in-cheek manner. All his writing is very tongue-in-cheek actually, which is probably why he appeals to me so much, I think it's really important not to take your self or anything too seriously. A sense of humour is vital.
Anyway, he wrote these amazing books called The Illuminatus! Trilogy. Quite possibly the best thing I have ever read. And it's fiction. I can't even begin to describe how it changed my modes of thinking. He invented this whole pseudo-religion, which actually became a religion, called Discordianism, which to me is like Zen pointing and laughing at itself.
About two years ago I went to Japan and there I went to a temple to meditate and dialogue with a Zen monk and with other Zen students. I was also getting into Vipassana around this time and spent a brief time at a Vipassana monastery near where I live here in Australia, with an 'awakened master' and group of fellow students. It seemed quite severe and disciplined though, extended periods of no talking and fasting, and walking around really slowly a lot in walking meditation. I became discouraged because it kept coming up again and again that I would need to have the focus and concentration to meditate for hours every day, for years, before I could ever get anywhere. And I did not believe I had the discipline. Enlightenment was looking further and further out of reach. I watched a good friend of mine become consumed by the endeavour. His determination was enthralling, but became disheartening as I saw the hell he was putting himself through, while enlightenment always seemed so far out of his reach. Enlightenment became something I was entire unworthy of.
Jed McKenna was definitely a catalyst. I had already read the first book a couple years ago, then earlier this year I read the second one. I had been living more or less as a hermit up on a mountain in the rainforest (where I still live) for a few years, over time my capacities to interact with other people had become diminished, as I retreated more and more inside my own head, analysing, observing. I'd always been a very social and outgoing person before, but now my inward obsession and over-self awareness had created a large amount of anxiety. I had all but forgotten how to act socially with others.
An old friend of mine could see that I needed some escape and asked me to come and stay with him on the Gold Coast for a week. The Gold Coast is a city, by the way. So I packed a bag and went, still reading Jed's second book, which seemed to be doing some serious damage coupled with my current state of mind. I was actually freaking out, I felt manic, crazy. I had started to burn. My friends on the GC threw a party and I went along, had a few drinks, probably more than I should have in order to cope with the social situation, grease the wheels so to speak. All of a sudden I was sitting there, talking to some other people, watching the effort they were putting into maintaining their self-projections. And having been up in the mountains for so long I had forgotten how image-conscious people are, it was all too surreal. There was no authenticity. I could see how manipulated they were, how manipulated I was myself, only the difference now was I was painfully aware of it and I couldn't understand how everyone else wasn't. The whole bizarre scene turned into a bunch of marionettes sans puppet masters, and I just couldn't do it, I was unable to jiggle my marionette in accordance with the other marionettes.
I felt sick. I ran out into the garden and sat there under the full moon, rambling to myself. I had lost the plot. I thought I had gone insane, and that they would lock me up in a mental hospital. My friend, the one who had asked me to come, came outside and sat with me. Luckily he had some idea of what I was going through, and could understand, even if not fully relate. He managed to talk me down off my ledge and eventually, back inside. I was so thankful he was there, the way he handled my whole mini-psychosis that week was amazing. He said later he felt honoured to be witness to such an event.
I had slipped out from the party fairly discreetly so luckily no-one was too weirded out by me when I returned. Then the strangest thing happened, this English guy who I had only just met, came up to me and pointed and said, "Dark night of the soul." I was amazed. Then we talked about it for a while, he said he admired that I had the courage to do something like this, he knew a lot about it but never met anyone who was actually doing it. I wondered how anyone who knew so much about this stuff could have a choice. He said he was too scared of losing the life he had, he wanted a wife and kids and all that and thought he would have to give everything up. I myself had wondered and worried about this stuff too (thanks Jed, you asshole) although deep down I didn't think it could be true, literally. Either way, I had crossed the point of no return, whatever had to happen, so be it. It wasn't a choice for me, it was do or die, no turning back. I was desperate and determined.
After that night I'm pretty sure I had broken something in my brain. My consciousness was completely different, it's hard to explain but it was like it was busted wide open, really switched on for the first time, and in full speed, non-stop. As soon as I got home I started Spiritual Autolysis. Almost every waking moment was spent in front of my computer typing. And when I wasn't at my computer my brain was still going non-stop, trying to figure out this existence thing, being completely overwhelmed at thoughts about itself and reality, trying to figure this shit out. It was in autopilot. When I went to sleep there was no distinction between asleep and awake, the line was blurred. It was incredible. My subconsciousness was completely lucid and as driven as my consciousness, constantly sorting shit out, still doing mental autolysis, throwing bits of my self into the fire. The backdrop, my dreams, were filled with barren, scorched, post-apocalyptic landscapes. When I woke up I could remember every moment, it was as if I'd never even slept, and I was back on the computer typing. Then I stopped typing, I realised I didn't need to anymore, my brain was constantly, automatically doing it all the time.
I climbed to the top of a huge waterfall out here in the rainforest, and peered over the edge. I had an irresistible urge to jump. Not because I wanted to die, there was no me left to care about anyway, there was just this massive urge to experience the exhilaration of jumping, the sensation of really living and then really dying in all it's splendour, in one magnificent swoop. The urge got so strong it scared me a little, and I had to force myself to step right away from the edge, and go.
This all went on, the strange manic head space and the autolysis, for about two months. I had also discovered the Ruthless Truth Arena and was reading pages and pages and pages of direct pointing and guided no-self realisations, I was hooked. I sent an email asking for posting rights. Before I knew it was in a 'duel'. And what preceded was what I deemed 'interactive autolysis', which for me was tying up loose ends and clearing up some remaining confusion and debris. My dueling partner, a young American guy, was amazing. I couldn't have asked for someone better suited for what I needed at that point (we're still friends now in fact and still write to each other). Ah, Serendipity. Then, it was done. Belief in self, dead. It's hard to pinpoint and describe the exact moment, because for me the moment stretched out over two months. The moment happened, or started, at the party (perhaps even before), and the reconciliation happened with RT. However, when that last shred fell away, once again there was a new perspective, looking out fresh eyes. There was a huge sense of relief. Confusion and doubt had melted away, there was a contented confidence. Also a lot of amusement at the simplicity of it all, and the complication, difficulty, agony, and craziness that had necessarily led up to it. What a ride! It still took a few weeks to gain proper equilibrium after that. And although I am no longer seeking, I don't believe there can ever be such a thing as DONE done. Done only happens when you're dead, that's the beauty of it all. The ride continues...
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