Psilocybin

Well. I certainly didn’t expect this physical exhaustion, this hangover, from psilocybin. I have been through the ringer. A mild headache; neck and shoulders all bunched up.

It was valuable. It was very much not what I expected, which is good, but it was very difficult in some ways.

One of the participants was having an intense and intermittently difficult experience, and was vocalizing a fair amount. Early on I started practicing tonglen (“taking and sending”) and I basically spent four hours doing really intense tonglen, mostly with her but with the other participant and the facilitator, too. It’s different when the taking and sending feels so palpable and literal. 

I wasn’t really tripping, in the sense of seeing pretty colors or apparitions of entities – I could see how one could go that way, I could have kept on my eye mask and turned inwards, but I felt called pretty urgently to attend to the others. So it was all about care-taking, for me. Often I felt, when “sending,” that there was something, or many somethings, behind me. Large and luminous persons. The light I was sending wasn’t emanating from me, it was coming through me. At one point I had the thought – it seemed profound at the time but now it seems faintly ridiculous – “well of course you can’t see God. You’d have to be facing the wrong way to do that.”

It was exhausting to refrain from touching people. Touch is my first language, the only real-time one I have ever been fluent in. But I supposedly didn’t know these people. So I sat in one place. Occasionally I felt an enormous constriction settling into me, and I had to breath deeply, find my hara, stay there a bit, let the thing lift. That too felt like a person, or persons: not necessarily malevolent, not necessarily intent on me at all. But I was surrounded by powers and intentions that I could just not quite hear or make intelligible. I found myself cocking my head, often, listening as hard as I could.

I am suspicious of conceptual take-aways from such experiences: they’re the probably the least useful way of responding. But one forms them no matter what, so here they are:

1. There’s a lot more going on than what I ordinarily let myself perceive. There are a lot of persons, a lot of intentions. In my ordinary state of mind I’m filtering out most of them. They are neither entirely inside me nor entirely outside me. (Are they real? I dunno. Am I? Are you?)

2. I am a caretaker, that’s “what I’m for.” 

3. But I don’t have to do all of it, or most of it. There are a lot of caretakers out there. The whole thing is just a lot more complicated than I have ever let myself imagine.

The connection with people was intense and lovely, but I was staggered by the responsibility it entailed. I don’t think I’d ever seen that so clearly before. 

I’m deeply grateful for the Buddhist practices I’ve learned: returning to the breath, letting conceptions go, inviting pain and confusion in instead of trying to fence it out. Nothing fancy. Bread and butter practice. But it was very helpful.

The Special of the Day

Baker Roshi says that the greatest obstacle to enlightenment is the desire for enlightenment. The Zen fondness of paradox approaches, maybe, a vice. But you can see what he means. Once you get firmly in your head a notion of what enlightenment is going to be like, what chance would actual enlightenment have of finding a clear space to unfold itself?

But we’re being too crude and peremptory here. I do sit down to meditate in hopes of a “special experience,” and really I don’t think I would sit at all if I didn’t have that hope. It’s all very well to knock away the crutches of a novice in a monastery who has lots of other things (rules, master, companions, a daily rice bowl) to hold him up. Kicking away the crutches of a homeless man is quite another thing.

I do want the experience again: the sunrise through the dripping twigs, each random twig picked out by the sunlight to form a perfect circle of radiance. That tree glittering in the wind, in Olympia, fifty years ago, all the leaves shivering. Of course I do. That and more. I’m a wanty little creature, and life rolls very rapidly to its drop-off.

Seriously, I don’t think I can afford to dismiss the desire for special experience. And I don’t think I have to: I think I just need to hold it lightly. I do wonder if psilocybin might give me an experience to steer by. A jolt, a reminder. Of course, you can’t order a psychedelic experience like you order your breakfast at Tom’s. You get the special of the day, Honey, and you sit there and eat it, whether you like it or not.

Nor Elephant Nor Cat

Indra’s elephant, pure white,
Has three heads, six tusks,
Except some say ten tusks,
One for each direction
(Eight, you know, plus Up and Down)
But I think it more suitable to give him
Two tusks per head, plus
A unicorn on his middle head
Threatening to split heaven, giving us
The pleasing number of seven
Cornamenta. Then picture
Indra’s famous net, flung
And settling over all that
Beautiful and deadly ivory,
Carelessly yet just so, shrugged
Back like the shawl
Of a model on the catwalk.
Elephants are not cats, except
Some say that they are: it’s just
The speed at which you perceive them
That varies, and which end
You start from. (Don’t try this at home.)
Each jewel would burn our flesh, we
Being neither elephant nor cat,
Altogether unhorned, and
Of minimal dignity; still we are
Invited to this party, slower than the cat,
Faster than the elephant, and subject
To sunburn and ulcer as we are;
Our job apparently to sing, or maybe
To clown: the instructions
Are unclear.

Three Things

1. Replacing mindless scrolling with reading. I think this has been… about halfway successful. I have to remember how little reading I was doing before the current push. I was reading, say, two pages of “hard” stuff, maybe five pages of Spanish; I think I’ve doubled that, and added in much “middle” reading, things such as Atkinson’s history, Jules Evan’s ecstatic experience book, Marshall Sahlins’ swan song. I am reading much more, and it is very rich and fertile reading. Really I think the main thing that remains to be done is not so much to increase the hard reading or the middle reading, but to swap out the scrolling (YouTube and Facebook “shorts” are particularly noxious) for music. The solutions to the other discontents, perplexities, and problems are not to be found in reading more intensely, or reading more widely. You’re doing that. It’s not going to give you people to pray with or sing with, and it’s not going to expose you to ecstatic experience. It’s just not. That’s not something it can do.

2. So there, you’ve just delineated it. You want people to sing with, people to pray with, people to dance with, and

3. You want to be inviting ecstatic experience in a responsible way (but not in a guarded way: the distinction is crucial. You can’t invite the Goddess only if she promises not to make anyone uncomfortable. I mean, you can; you do: but wondering why she doesn’t come, under those conditions, is idiotic.You know why she’s not coming. Get real.)

 

Affliction

With Christmas, as with so many afflictions, I have taken it too seriously and not seriously enough. Too seriously: it is not a grave injury that is done me by a brutal world. Not seriously enough: my distress is a thing I have to thoroughly understand and intelligently address.

Yes, yes, it is distressing in that it’s a last gasp of a dying Christianity that doesn’t understand itself. It’s being celebrated by people who don’t believe in it for reasons they themselves do not understand and do not process properly. Yada yada yada miserable people trying to fill a spiritual hole with mountains of crappy stuff yada yada they won’t even sing a damn Christmas carol together yada yada yeah all that. Take it as read.

But my distress has much more to do with an autistic person’s distress at interrupted routines, and in particular what feels like an intentional subversion of everything I try to build in the course of the year, every bulwark against anxiety and overeating systematically stripped away. Like the damned time-change twice a year: everything I work so hard to create is violently jolted. And the timing of the winter assault, with Thanksgiving leaving just time to semi-recover, and then Christmas (with New Year’s for a coup de grace!) wrecking everything again. It is as demoralizing as it could well be: it’s as if designed to ruin me.

It is not designed to ruin me. It is people clinging desperately to one of the last scraps of sacred time left to them. Mauled as they are by modernity, shell-shocked and stupefied by diabolically clever marketers, they’re still trying to salvage something. Wish them God speed. But I still have my own problem. I lose myself, I lose my nest, I lose all my supports, I’m naked in the wind.
First of all: remember: no one gives a fuck. No one is paying attention. You do this season however makes sense to you. They are actually looking after each other, in their fashion. You just figure out your own stance, and your own ritual. So you don’t have your breakfast cafe for two days! What that means is that you can do extended sits, both mornings. Like maybe two thirty minute and one twenty minute sit, with your little walking meditations in between. Then make your breakfast and have your coffee and face the day. Whatever else happens then, you will have done something that will feel like it’s of value, and like it’s not participating in ruination. And say a prayer, while you’re at it, for the exiled Christ-child. This can’t be fun for him either.

Fetch

30 mins sit, brief walking meditation, then 20 more mins sitting. Felt like it had some traction. I drove to Tom’s at sunrise by way of 82nd Ave: the sky was all orange fire, huge and stippled like textured plaster, and when I turned west on Division street I swear to God there was a faint rainbow in front of me. I don’t know what more of a sign I could ask for, unless I’m holding out for angels with blazing swords and loquatious shrubbery. I’m really not at all sure what the enterprise of meditation is, for a lapsed Buddhist and not-really-Christian and pilferer of hozho; but it appears to be the correct one.

Not that I imagine the show was put on for my benefit. I don’t require a monogrammed universe. I think a lot these days about how to save the enchantment while rejecting the falsehood. Maybe it is to be done by methodically inverting the Aristotelian hierarchy, and making things subordinate to -- less real than -- actions and relationships. The sunrise was not an object created by God for my edification: that's an absurdly grandiose idea. The sunrise was a movement in which She and I participated; and the sunrise as object -- as a thing that could have been photographed by third party --  is simply an artifact, a by-product of the multitude of relationships in motion between the person of the Sun and various persons here on earth. Who are ourselves by-products of multitudes of interactions among and within themselves. It becomes ponderous and absurd to try to make my language reflect that sense of what is most real, for any amount of time, but it's quite easy to see it that way. I see it that way all the time, and always have. The wind of the world blows through me, and every bit of me shimmers like leaves in the sunlight. That's not some advanced meditative state: it's the state of my ordinary daily walk under the sky. It is often breathtakingly beautiful, it's true, but it's also normal, ordinary, regular. I don't have to fetch it from far away. I just have to step out of my door, and it fetches me.

It Makes A Neater Job

Instead of sitting 50 minutes this morning, I prepped a 30 minute and a 15 minute timer on my phone. When the thirty-minute bell came I kicked off the 15 minute timer, lay back over my cushion to stretch my spine and legs a little, stood up and walked, very slowly, attending to the sensations of the floor under my feet, and dangled briefly from my chin-up bar, then walked slowly back to the cushion and resumed the sit, till the second bell. It is challenging to keep any kind of meditative attention while moving, but no more challenging than constantly bringing my awareness back from the fact that my knee hurts and my shin is going numb. I think this is how I’m going to do my longer sits from now on. There’s a not-very-clever machismo involved in white-knuckling through some kinds of physical discomfort, marching under the banner of a mind-body dualism that is no more convincing in eastern metaphysics than it is in western. Being still for a long time is obviously necessary for training the attention, but sitting so long that I can’t easily stand up afterward doesn’t demonstrate my superior spiritual craftsmanship so much as it demonstrates abusing my spiritual tools. At the end of the second sit I could stand up like a hale human being. With variations of these breaks for my legs I could do a whole morning sit, or possibly even a day-long sit: whereas sitting down again soon after a straight fifty minute sit is clearly not going to happen.