The Anatomy of Journey
Page 28
We are blazing through one hairpin turn after another, burning through the switchbacks, the wind screaming through hair and limbs and bandanas, and everything around us disappears in a blur, except the blue, blue sky. The blueness is disturbed by bright, white, sun-lit clouds, hanging on to see if something new happens. Here and there the blue is also disturbed by the dark shapes of mocking birds as they swoop past us, flying from valley to mountain and switchback to switchback, not needing to heed to a road like we must. With envy, I stare at the sky.
What is it in the sky that makes us think of the infinite; of ways to immerse our deepest selves with that infinite? What is it in the sky that pulls at the strings of that deep something inside us, and asks us to somehow, somehow leave behind our finite physicality and dissolve completely in the mystery? What makes us yearn to somehow merge with it? Why does humanity seek, generation after generation, oneness? Oneness with what? What is out there that we seek so willfully within ourselves? What is it that the sky is hiding that we think we see when we're not watching but only sensing?
Questions, questions.
Descending from the heights of Magnetic hill, I see a storm crackling faraway in the evening sky, enveloping distant grey-blue mountains. It is against the Sun, so it’s still bright here as we descend, but the storm is throwing a veil of shadow quickly across the eastern sky. I see the lightning and wait for the thunder. I wait and wait and my wait stretches into thought, and it becomes difficult to agree with the fact that in some time and space that my senses don't yet understand, the thunder and lightning happened at the same instant. How is it that one event can cause such fractured reactions in our senses? We see before we hear. Shouldn’t this give us a hint of the fragility of our senses, of their susceptibility to the tricks of nature? Shouldn't this tell us something about the way nature works - that somehow all natural beings - things that are alive in all the senses of the word - communicate with each other, recognize each other and acknowledge each other using just one sense - presence? That in the mere whisper of clouds touching clouds the twins thunder and lightning are born but we are informed almost casually, as if in afterthought; and beams of light from the Sun hit the Earth and turn heat into moisture into water into grey, pregnant clouds? Shouldn't this tell us something about nature's sensory network, how much more complex and simpler it is than that of man's? Shouldn't it tell us, that while our senses look at nature's elements and divide them for understanding, nature seems capable of understanding the elements in their evanescence? Most importantly, shouldn't it tell us how flimsy the mirage of reality is that is being built around our ears, second by second, by our weak senses?
The human sensory system amazes me, both in its strengths and in its weaknesses. Perhaps this is why I delve sometimes into the world of psychedelics – to explore the limits of my senses and to play with them. What amazes me, and what I often think about, is that human beings have been using psychedelics and hallucinogens since the beginning of civilization, although it is only natural, but no less extraordinary, that we’ve been having psychedelic experiences for such a long time – civilizations were born in the nurturing heart of nature where most natural psychedelic substances were and are found. We have been eager to modify and alter our senses using any method available to us, long enough to allow us to see through the gaps in nature. If our senses allow us to describe the world, then stretching our senses allow us a different description of the same world; and all descriptions are necessary in order to come to a greater understanding.
Modern humans have the advantage of historic and anecdotal knowledge to better understand the altered condition of the mind during a psychedelic experience. Even then, we don’t quite understand them completely. But imagine, and this is what amazes me, the reaction of the first human being who happened to drink the potent tea made from the roots of Ayahuasca, or chewed on a Peyote cactus or a Psilocybin mushroom. He would have had no one to guide him through the strange and mind-bending visualizations and emotions, the effect of time slowing down, the out of body experience. His primitive mind must have grappled to make sense of such a trance and may even have come up with the first theories of how another world exists just beyond the one we see - a strange world, a spirit world, a world hard to define physically, as floating, as untethered and as ethereal as the mind, because this world is an aspect of the mind. He must have gone to sleep dumbstruck, this brother ten thousand years separated, and right at the edge of the last moment of his experience, he may have felt that he had peeled back a layer of an unknown world and, for the briefest of seconds, stared at the face of something incomprehensible. It is then easy to imagine how he may have come up with the first imaginations of god, His first definition and first identity – primitive, fearsome, awe-inspiring.
But do not misunderstand me. I am not trying to imply that the idea or concept of god is a byproduct of a psychedelic experience, but only trying to suggest that these natural chemicals may have been a medium for us to silence the chatter of the mind long enough to hear the softly tinkling anklets of god for the first time, to keep open the eye of mind long enough to discern a pattern among the chaos of jungle-living, to cleanse for a minute second our doors of perception to witness the unification of the un-ending diversity of life. We must have, for the first time, felt the soft touch of a great and mystic energy, bubbling and flowing in everyone and everything.
We have to start by agreeing with ourselves that we have another sense we do not openly acknowledge. There is something within us that is able to see the immaterial, the non-physical and the invisible. And this sense drives our thoughts and cravings of the eternal. What logic within us drives this? What dreams? Is it something in our religion? Or is it something in our spirit? What is the seat of this sense? How did humanity acquire it, learn to use it, learn to hone it? Is religion the seat of this sense? Is this where it was born? It cannot be - not everyone has religion; not everyone subscribes to a written faith. Then we must find something that is common in all, because this sense and its symptoms are common in all. Some don't accept it; some avoid the truth of it by not heeding its call. But everyone is drawn to the sky within as they are to the sky outside, at least once in their lifetime. What then is common to all?
The spirit, or the soul - the one thing that all humanity shares equally. And we are yet to find physical evidence of it. We have seven billion witnesses but no evidence - another proof that the universe enjoys dealing in paradoxes and ironies. We have no evidence of the infinite, or of its sensing soul. There is only the feeling, and the fear, of their existence.
It seems to me that it was somehow easier for us to believe in these things before, that humanity had a certain innocence that could believe in the magic of the soul. In the last century, we lost that innocence. Civilizations met each other and did not know how to greet each other. The world became a smaller place and foots were crushed. The last hundred years were humanity's teenage years, the years of rebellion and discovery. Everybody grew up. Life on earth slowly entered the more stable twenties. We are a more careful people now. We are more tolerant. We respect other cultures and other faiths. We respect rights. We seem to have swallowed the pain of two world wars and the thousand, thousand battles, and we seem to have gained some sense of letting go. We have gained a certain kind of kindness. If some good were to come out of the deaths of sixty million people, then it must be this - that humanity is easier with kindness. We are more inclined to give it away. So now there is a freedom in the air that allows us to study the infinite. And this time the freedom is global. It is no longer for the East to be mysterious and the West to be capricious. Worlds are mingling. And when worlds mingle, new brave ideas are born. Something good will come of this. Perhaps we will regain the innocence that believes.
When alone with these thoughts on a silent beach, with the entire panorama of night sky watching you watch it, you can’t help but wonder - if the soul does exist, what is it made of? The ocean replies that perhaps the soul is nothing but an emerg
ent quality of the interaction of neurons firing in the brain - an epiphenomenon; that the soul is removed when the mind is removed, that the soul dies when the brain dies; that the soul is a delicate perfume, formed in the careful mix of identity, emotions, experiences, perspective, knowledge and wisdom; that the soul is the rainbow that is formed when the light of this world hits the prism of the mind.
And the velvet blanket of night replies that perhaps the soul is made of the same thing the sky is made of, the stars are made of - hence the endless attraction, hence the mysterious magnetism. The soul seeks to return to where it was born. It seeks completion, perfection, saturation. It seeks dissolution in a universe of division. That's why we bond. That's why we have families and friends, groups and teams, villages and cities, civilizations and cultures. We must mingle because we must somehow remain in touch with another soul, for every soul is a constant reminder of home, of sky. Here humanity is torn: between an earth-bound body and a flightless soul. That's why we share lives and share stories. That's why we kiss, that's why we make love - to be inside another person, inside enough for one soul to touch another; to find one moment of contact, one moment of flight and weightlessness in the tornado-chaos of absolute gravity. When you kiss a person, you seek the soul of that person. No longer is your body under the commands of your heart and mind. No, that kiss was sought by your soul yearning for the reassuring touch of another. It is no longer something physical – it’s just two souls seeking communion.
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This Way of Life
The typical human life seems to be quite unplanned, undirected, unlived and unsavored. Only those who consciously think about the adventure of living as a matter of making choices among options, which they have found for themselves, ever establish real self-control and live their lives fully.
Karl Albrecht