by Pete Holmes
I was there to be a guest on his podcast, The Duncan Trussell Family Hour, and even though we had met only a few times before, Duncan hugged me enthusiastically, the bounty of dogs still figure-eighting between my legs. His bungalow was the usual comedian bachelor pad: a large TV and a comfy, lived-in couch, but what stood out were the stacks of books arranged like columns and makeshift end tables—numerous Stephen Kings, the Bhagavad Gita, and a collection of graphic novels that looked like they probably had nudity in them. Incense was burning next to a few brass statues of what I thought were Hindu gods—I recognize Ganesh only from The Simpsons—and on top of his bookshelf was a large framed photo of a bald Indian man who sort of looked like Sean Connery, reclining, smiling, and wrapped in a plaid blanket. In front of the photo were a bunch of browning bananas that I guess Duncan had left as an offering for the man that were as of yet uneaten.
Before we started recording, Duncan stepped into his kitchen and dabbed three drops of liquid THC onto the back of his hand the way a mother tests the temperature of the milk in her baby’s bottle, and then licked it off. “I used to do this straight into my mouth,” he said, offering me the bottle the way another person might offer a guest lemonade, “but this stuff is strong.” Duncan’s eyes lit up madly and he laughed, not unmanically. I politely declined.
For all my wild adventures, Duncan, by comparison, makes me feel very square. I suddenly feel a bit dumb for wearing a navy polo and khakis, like I was flyering for a Republican senator in front of a Jo-Ann fabrics, but he was so bubbly and warm I wasn’t the least bit uncomfortable. There’s a charge to being around Duncan, like one of those light bulbs you touch in the science museum that make your hair stand up, and we hadn’t stopped talking—urgently—since I arrived. We bounced from topic to topic, frantically, like fast friends excited to find someone else who also wanted to talk about religion, mysticism, sex, ghosts, and drugs.
We sat down next to the incense like two kids in a dorm room trying to mask illegal aromas, and Duncan hit Record. I told him I wasn’t used to things getting so deep and so interesting so quickly. “That’s what happens when you’re with cool people,” Duncan said. “You end up getting in great conversations.” I wondered in this moment if Duncan knew how unique he was. I wondered if he knew how bored and dismissive people can be when you try to talk about dreams, or out-of-body experiences, or the afterlife, or if you suggest that the physical world is only just a small piece of what’s really going on here.
“The plague of the world is that so many people allow themselves to be surrounded by vampires,” Duncan said, using the classiest monster as a word to describe all the what-you-see-is-what-you-get people, the ones who are busy cockblocking the curious weirdos from tripping out on their basic wonder. “Their whole life is one shit conversation to the next to the next to the next until they’re on their deathbed, and that’s the one real conversation they have. They finally say, ‘I love you so much!’ And then they die.”
This is Duncan, the opposite of a vampire. He doesn’t drain life from people, he infuses them, resuscitating their awe and bringing color back to their cheeks. The vampires, he warned, “will keep you stuck in the harbor of sorrows. They’ll try to keep your fucking anchor down.” I cackled with laughter.
Duncan is one of those rare people who remind you that we’re all here, stuck in our human bodies, confused and curious since we all emerged from the interdimensional space portal commonly known as a vagina. He wants to get into it; he wants to touch, taste, scream, laugh, and sing his way toward enlightenment, and as I sat with him that day, he made me think he just might bring me along with him.
Duncan Trussell is also one of the least afraid and least embarrassed people I’ve ever met, and at that point in my life, I desperately needed him as a role model. I was still overly polite, turning my car radio down when I paid a toll so as to not disturb anyone, or changing my shirt three times before a casual lunch with friends. Never mind admitting to people that I was spiritually curious or had a nagging feeling that God was still worth thinking about; I was still the sort of person who would ask what everyone else thought of a movie before offering my opinion so I could avoid upsetting anyone by admitting that I didn’t like Baby Driver.
But Duncan gives zero fucks—he doesn’t care if people think he is weird for being a mystic. He loves Buddha, Krishna, Allah, rabbis, Sufis, and monks and seemed to think it was weird that other people didn’t. Talking to him, I realized he was deep into his own exploration of the big what-is-this? and anything that brought him the juice—whatever faith, whatever tradition, drug, dance, or ceremony—was coming with him. His strategy, it seemed, was if you’re invited to seven parties, go to all of them. Each religion was like another tile he could add to his own personal mosaic of belief, which hopefully, when he zoomed out, would give him a little glimpse at real truth. To him, there may be many wells, but we’re all after the same water.
When we talked about mushrooms, to my delight, I learned that Duncan saw psychedelics as a tool, not just a party drug, and he told me that most if not all religions have ties leading back to hallucinogenic plants. While some people might be spending their weekends drinking beer and going to escape rooms, Duncan was using mushrooms or LSD to break out of the escape room you and I call reality. He was regularly flying his kite into a black hole, yanking it back, and collecting what had stuck to it, using his podcast to share what he learned.
“I was raised Christian,” I told him sheepishly, certain that even to someone as open and eager as he is, Jesus would still be considered lame. I told him that I was worried that he might see the church as a means to keep me away from the visceral, exciting, psychedelic mysticism he seemed to be enjoying so much.
“It depends on your branch of Christianity,” Duncan said. Then he unloaded on me his ongoing passion for Christ. He told me about how he sometimes went to a Gnostic church, a branch of Christianity he said is devoted to making direct contact with the truth, like a mushroom trip but sober. I giggled at the possibility.
“I’m thirty-two,” I said. “How have I never heard of Gnostic Christianity?”
“In a lot of different forms of Christianity, it’s not the invitation to connect with real truth,” Duncan explained, “it’s the invitation to connect with a symbol system. It’s like the difference between going swimming and reading about going swimming.”
I nodded, comparing in my mind a typical Sunday in my church with my experience of deep cosmic unity while on psilocybin.
“Basically, their idea is that this entire world is a veil resting over the Christ energy,” Duncan continued. “The world is concealing us at this very moment from the Son of God, which represents the manifestation of consciousness into the infinite from the big bang, which we’re all a part of.”
Again, I laughed, equal parts shock and excitement. I’d never heard anybody talk about Christ that way, let alone admit that he went to church without some sort of qualifying statement like “I’m from Kansas” or “I converted for my wife.”
But Duncan saw Jesus differently than I had growing up. Jesus wasn’t a heavenly alien just visiting earth, amused by and outside our predicament, like someone playing a video game with cheat codes. To Duncan, Jesus was a human, born confused and limited just like us, who self-realized and connected and merged with infinite Truth so deeply that He became it. “Christ” wasn’t His last name. “Christ” was another word for the immeasurably dense dollop of potential that exploded into everything and anything that would ever exist, and Jesus, through quieting his mind and slipping into his heart, remembered his true Self and become one with it.
“It’s kind of like you suddenly realize this life where you’re a comedian was a dream,” Duncan said. “You’re in the middle of a dream right now, you’re truly dreaming, and you begin to realize that you’re dreaming and you actually wake up for a second. Some people, that happens to them in life when they’re alive. They wake up to their true identity, which is a mani
festation of the Super Intelligence of the Universe.”
I felt like I was on a roller coaster—in just a few minutes, Duncan had shifted my understanding of the whole game. It isn’t about heaven or hell later—it’s about methods to achieve union and connection now.
My mind flashed to another billboard, this time one near a church in my neighborhood that said over a graphic of a failing heart monitor, “When you die, you will meet God.” This was meant as a threat, obviously—par for the course in my tradition—but Duncan’s response to it would be, “Why wait?” The hero’s journey was about going on an adventure to find a diamond only to realize it had been sewn into the lining of your coat the entire time. We were all beggars sitting on a box, not realizing the box we never bothered to open was filled with gold. We were already one with everything, already holy, already complete—we had just forgotten.
Enlightenment had never really made sense to me before. I always just thought it was a good, warm feeling, like a secret inner orgasm you could enjoy cross-legged under a tree in an orange robe. But when Duncan tied it to something I had experienced, I knew suddenly what it might feel like. I’m not enlightened, obviously, but my experiences with lucid dreaming had given me a taste.
I remembered the countless times I had had the dream where I was back in high school, and final exams were that day, and I was not ready. Shit. In my version of this dream, it’s math class. Of course. And I’ve been skipping all year, so my only hope is to scramble and ask everyone I know if I can borrow their notes and their books so I can cram and maybe, just maybe, pass the test, graduate, and not have to go to summer school. It’s the worst. Just pure panic, fear, and dread. Lost in the drama of what I think is my life.
But then, something clues me in—a giant set of hands, Stevie Wonder inexplicably walking by, or a clock that reads 17:91 c.m.—and suddenly it dawns on me: Wait a minute . . . I’m not in high school anymore! I’m thirty-nine years old. This is a dream. I don’t need this book. There is no test. And suddenly I’m free. It’s the best feeling in the world. In fact, it’s worth having the bad dream just for how good it feels to realize this. It’s joy. Everything in the dream becomes fascinating, everyone is beautiful. I laugh, because I get the joke. Look at everyone, still scurrying about, as if any of this is real. And then I fly to Milan and play tennis with ’80s Andre Agassi and win.
Duncan was suggesting that maybe this was what Christ felt like all the time. Can you imagine? He was awake. He realized He wasn’t in high school anymore, then He went around proclaiming, “Hey! Relax. You don’t need this book. There is no test.” You know. The Good News.
This completely shifted my view of ethics and moral behavior. This whole time, I had thought of sin as a demerit, something bad you did that upset God, like when your upstairs neighbor gets angry when you play your stereo too loud. But our conversation gave shape to something I had always felt but never had the right words for: God is Love, and Perfect, and He made me and knew me, and yet somehow my behavior was upsetting Him? In that moment, the model shifted. There’s nothing I can do to bring me closer to or farther from the infinite love of God, I thought. There are only things I can do that can increase or decrease my awareness of that love. “Sin” wasn’t the “bad thing,” it was unconsciousness.*
Just like that, my most frequent prayer—Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner—took on a whole new meaning. It was no longer “have mercy” as in “please don’t send me to hell,” it became a request for grace to clean up my connection, like pulling up the reeds murking up my lake or moving the rocks impeding my river and flow, clean and easy.
I realized I had had little tastes of enlightenment in my waking life, too, even if that’s not the word I would’ve used. Not just on mushrooms, I had experienced those brief moments when I stepped outside time and, usually, laughed. Those moments when you go from grumpy on an airplane to in awe of a pinch of dust hovering in a sunbeam, tearing up because it looks so much like us, our vulnerable little planet, floating among the stars. Those moments when you go from hating the guy behind you in line for standing just a little too close to your heels with his pretentious hipster two-simultaneous-haircuts—and you surrender. Something inside you says yes to the line, says yes to the hipster, says yes and yes to both coexisting haircuts. And in that moment, you are back in the place where you want to be, the light place, the easy place, the place where everything seems so vitally precious and at the same time so wonderfully empty. The place where everything is funny. Where you’re in on the secret joke. Where you can’t help but smile at the woman who drops a bottle cap and instead of throwing it in the garbage kicks it five or six times until she finally abandons it somewhere near the garbage. You’re not pinched. Or upset. You’re amused and free. You can feel that all of this—a coffee cup, a dog, the air—is all made of the same stuff. Like we’re all under the same mold. You and everyone around you, even bottle cap lady.
There is no test.
I wondered why I had never heard this before. How had my religion turned into something nice people did to help them be nice all the time? How did niceness become the point?
“Well, that’s the problem,” Duncan said. “A group of people have this very potent, powerful thing, and they’re all pretending that it’s turned on when it’s just blank. The moment you plug into this fucking thing, however you do it—you can plug into this as an atheist, you can plug into this as an agnostic, you can plug into it as whatever—the moment you get a taste of it you can’t fake it.”
Duncan was addressing a question I had had my entire life in the church: Why, if we really believed the things we were singing, were we so bored? How was it that we could hear about a Divine Love and a God calling us to participate in the Mystery and be so preoccupied with leaving in time to get a decent table at lunch or not missing the big game?
Duncan, on the other hand, was extremely excited about it.
“It’s the most beautiful religion ever, the symbols are so beautiful and perfect, it’s wonderful! It’s radical, it’s incredible. I mean, that’s why I get so infuriated with people because they’re shitting on it for everyone else. Because then you get all these people that the moment you even bring up the idea of Jesus they just shut down.”
Duncan didn’t think Jesus was the only one who woke up. This is pure blasphemy in my circle, but in the moment, I was loving it.
Which brought us to the man with the bananas.
Duncan pointed behind him. “That picture I have up there is of Neem Karoli Baba, which they call Maharaj-ji, which is this super-advanced being who lived in the middle of the Himalayas.”
I looked up, half believing that maybe some of the bananas would be gone.
“Unconditional love was coming out of this guy like a tsunami, and once you got around it there was nothing you could do, you just melted.” Duncan called this man his guru—not just a teacher showing the way, but the embodiment of the way itself. His guru was a supernatural presence that he felt, viscerally, in his life every day. Duncan told me that Neem Karoli Baba had managed to stay in the place I had only visited on psychedelics.
“Are we to believe that his normal state was in that place?” I asked.
Duncan exclaimed, “His normal state was a million times greater than that state!” Taking drugs, it turns out, gives us only a glimpse of where it is possible to go.
“In the Western world we came up with a pharmacological solution to something that they came up with in India a long time ago, which is this cracking open the ego and obtaining your true identity and merging with the whole. But since it’s a chemical solution, it doesn’t last! Over there, some people have done it permanently. They woke up from the fucking dream permanently. And apparently, this man had woken up, according to everyone who had ever come in contact with him.”
One of the people who came in contact with him was a teacher who would go on to transform millions of lives, mine included, only I didn’t know it yet. It seem
ed like just another moment, but an hour into our conversation, this shouting, passionate, stoned comedian-philosopher asked me a question that I had no idea would shift the entire trajectory of my spiritual life.
“Do you know who Ram Dass is?” he said.
I quickly replied, “No.”
sweet lady val
AS MY SPIRITUAL LIFE WAS SLOWLY BEING RESUSCITATED—and my talk show, now titled The Pete Holmes Show, got up and running—my personal life was experiencing a rebirth of its own. I was trying desperately to break my cycle of codependence—my habit of sleeping in the spoon position and pledging my undying love to every woman I ever kissed. I’d vowed to remain single for at least a year.
This might be an exciting proposition for some guys, but to me it was frightening. I had always been a relationship guy. I didn’t know who I was if I didn’t have a girlfriend. But with the help of my therapist, Dr. Gary Penn, whose book is available now, and with some friends cheering me on, I began to do something I never thought I’d do: be a single guy looking for babes.
It took a lot of convincing. One night at dinner with Kumail and Emily they assured me, over and over, that I had put women on an unfair pedestal and that girls, just like boys, were sometimes just looking for a good time. Emily told me that my desire to snuggle with women after one date was fucked up and inappropriate, an idea that made so little sense I just took her word for it and continued to secretly think she was wrong. They said it was my time to go out and explore, jokingly calling it the beginning of my time on Whore Island, stressing that the “whore” was going to be me.
I had my doubts, but I thought I’d give it a try.
I knew if I was going to be one of those strange guys I saw out there, bumming cigarettes and asking women if he could buy them a drink, I was going to have to continue to deprogram myself, just as I had when I was trying to lose my second virginity. I had had sex with three people at this point, but each of them had been serious, long-term, committed partners. If I was even going to attempt having sex with someone I didn’t know everything about and had no intention of marrying, I was going to have to dig deep into my subconscious and do a little rearranging.
