Part IV - The Aftermath

Blog 12-8-24 Journey Aftermath

0:00

After “Tripping” 50-60 times while I spent last August in the hospital, and making my best attempt to put the wordless into words, I’ve come to this point of trying to share my take-aways, lessons, insights or…….delusions from my experience. 

First a disclaimer.  Writing about, finding words for, searching for meaning and for context, grossly reduces (almost profanely) the actual experience.  How to describe, without criminally diminishing it, the birth or death of a loved one?  A Hawaiian sunrise, a glorious rainbow.  A Bruce Springsteen concert, your favorite movie, a fast-moving thunderstorm across the Nebraska plain.  “One picture is worth a thousand words,” speaks to the relative power of words, those that are to follow here, included.  

I realize that the (unique to me) view I have of myself and the world I live in impoverishes me, to the point that I can no longer ‘see’ this place I spent so much time in and with last August.  Everything I saw, I am convinced, is still there.  The same as the beaches of Normandy and the city lights of Berlin are still there, though I am not.  Paradoxically, when I close my eyes, I can see them once again.    

My August hospital experience and the images I witnessed was as if I was looking at the elements of the universe through an electron microscope.  Each time I go back to that time and place as I am doing now, writing this, or each time I tell the story to some poor soul who asks a simple question about how I am, and I lay the saga out there, it seems less strange, and more real, especially in terms of the lessons learned.       

So, here goes.  As I awoke at the end of the very last ‘visit,’ an awareness, as clear and bright as the mid-day sky here in Colorado (six days out of seven) flooded over me.  “THE ANSWER!!!!!”

“The complete and utter essence of the Universe is nothing more or less than Compassion, Joy, Belonging, Peace, Purity, and Love.”  That’s it.  That’s the answer to everything.  What didn’t happen, was the answer “…..and here is what you are to do with this gift of knowing.”  Dang.  “What in the world am I supposed to do with THAT?”       

If you look at earth from the moon, or a hurricane from 100 miles up, all that is visible is an amazingly beautiful scene.  That represents the view of the universe to which I was exposed.  Wonder, awe, completeness, perfection, beauty…….  

A profound immutable sense of belonging and well-being washed over me as those words rolled through my head.  What roared into my consciousness, on the heels of that magical “It’s all about Joy and Peace….” Moment (and in a strange way, more powerful than those messages) was a confrontive, challenging energy.  Where in this perfect picture of beauty, awe,  harmony and wonder, do the other parts of what it means to be human reside?   

What about sickness, disability, death, violence, racism, murder, school children being shot, car accidents, cut-throat competition, exploitation of man and earth, starvation, environmental war, selfishness, torture, hunger, judgment, punishment, manipulation, victimizing, etc.?  Where does all that stuff fit into the “beautiful” picture that I had been a witness to for over four weeks?

Unless I could find some way to put them into the picture-perfect universe that I had experienced, I would be just tripping like any other Psychedelic’er.  No more transformative  than watching a Sci-Fi flick.  Like the Avatar movie. Like the radio broadcast of War of the World. A beautiful, entertaining experience to be sure, a wonderful way to pass the time, but not real, and not all that helpful.  A waste of time.       

I was really bothered by that dissonance.  The stark comparison between what I had seen and what I experience as existing in life.  It was a true existential crisis moment that continued for the next few weeks.  One morning an answer suddenly appeared.    

My ‘tripping’ experiences had always been wordless, noiseless scenes.  Unbelievably colorful, stunning scenes.  Always in slow motion.  Never still. Constantly fading in and out.  Slowly swirling, spinning.  Appearing, disappearing.  Moving, shifting, merging, emerging, dissolving, colors displaced, replaced.  Melding, mixing, covered over, exposed. Each transition slowly revealing the next unbelievably beautiful scene.

If you want to have a little bit of the sense of what I saw, close your eyes, and gently press your fingertips against them for a minute.  I’m told that the Apple Pro Virtual Reality Googles allows one to experience something similar.  I am told that for some, hallucinogens do something similar, though please do not take this suggestion as an endorsement to use that tool.  I have serious reservations about anyone doing so. 

The answer?  The not so beautiful, peaceful elements of the Cosmos?   That space and place where one atom nudges another out of the way.  At the edges where blue meets green, yellow merges into red.  The darkness is found at the edges of the transitions, the changing places.    

When that thought came to me, I knew I had found it.  The implications of that were and remain almost overwhelming.  What in the world might it mean if what I experience as pain and darkness is nothing more or less than how I witness or judge change at its transition point?

Perhaps the dark and painful part of human experience is caused by my failure to recognize, see or accept the transitions of my human experience, resisting the momentum of the cosmic energy.  This awareness seemed and as time goes on seems more and more right.  I have only a vague idea of what to do with all this, but there is something about this concept that seems right, whatever the word ‘right’ means.  That was the most profound awareness that came from my experience.

Here are the other nine lessons.    

1. I am a part of, not apart from the universe, and so are you.  I saw us both.

2. What’s “out there” is exactly what is inside of me.  I could not, not, be a part of it all if wanted to, nor can you.    

3. There is singularity and connection; no division, any more than heat can be separated from a flame, wetness from water.  There is a constant flow of energy, changing, beginning, middles, and endings, everything and everyone fitting together perfectly.  

4. We, you, and I, add essential energy to the cosmos, as well as consume it. 

5. Consciousness is matter (I have no idea what I mean by that).

6. Every one of us is a piece to the puzzle of what the cosmos is, and we (every one of us) is  unique and essential, necessary to complete the puzzle.  Because we lack access to the ‘big picture,” (though we might get glimpses from time to time) we don’t know for sure how or where we fit in, we, each one of us, are alchemists.  Our role being to connect elements of the Cosmos that otherwise, without our presence, will never be connected.  The cool part is that we can’t know whether we have already done that, are doing that now, or will somewhere down the line. 

7. I am, as well as you are not limited to our bodies. 

8. My guide (and yours) has always existed, and looking back now, I can recognize those moments when he has said “Do this,” “Don’t do that,” Or “Go ahead and try it.”  Sometimes I listened, other times I didn’t.  

9. I have had many moments in my life when an insight or a “knowing would occur”.  At the time, I couldn’t have told you where it came from.  Now I can. 

What does all this mean?  The experience was too vast to be reduced to any “idea.”  Any thought or conclusion is far too small.  I have no credible evidence of any meaning.  I just have a sense that something happened to my soul.  I have no idea if I touched, witnessed, or experienced the divine.  Whether I did or not, really doesn’t matter.  That’s too small a question.

History is full of human beings who have had similar experiences.  Some have been able to write about them, or paint them, or sculpt them.  I’m guessing many others haven’t. Perhaps they shouldn’t.  Perhaps I shouldn’t be trying to.     

Some that I have shared with believe that what I experienced was nothing more than a drug induced series of hallucinations.  Who knows?  They seem certain and I am left to wonder why they might need that assurance.

So, I am not all that unique and I am really glad I got a peek, though I would not recommend the technique.    

Some have asked me what, if any, difference I’m noticing in myself.  It is subtle but I notice that I have gradually shifted a bit in terms of how I  see, hear, and experience things.  Non-human as well as human.  What I am aware of is that I am able to see a bit more beyond the external and see it/they as a part of that space I visited.  I walk around with a bit more grace and compassion, and less reactivity and judgment of what I am experiencing.  Reduced to one sentence it would be, “I now more easily see through what I used to perceive as a wall.” 

I’m better able to glimpse in others (and myself) that divinity I experienced that the universe is.  I feel pleasantly challenged to see what I saw then and now.  Here.  From the inside out.  Without external, artificial guidance. 

It is as if my guide, like ET, is simply pointing his finger and saying, “Look.”  “Home.”    

I wrote a poem wrapping up the entire experience. 

Through the Wall

I sat in the echo of fifty trips,

the whispers of swirling tides,

a microscope view of a snowflake dissolving,

its edges fading into the vastness of everything.

Words fall short, like a child’s attempt

to sketch the ocean with a broken crayon.

How do you describe the universe singing

without flattening the sound into silence?

The world once seemed finite,

boxed, labeled, defined—

but now, I see it breathing.

Each scene shifting, blending, dissolving.

The snowflake’s edge wasn’t lost,

it simply became.

I found myself standing at the crossroads of opposites:

joy and despair, beauty and violence.

The hurricane and the stillness within its eye.

Where do the shadows fit in a painting of light?

Perhaps they were never separate,

never outside the frame.

The essence of all things is motion,

ceaseless transformation,

a dance of connection,

where the pain is the friction of change,

and the beauty lies in surrendering

to what is becoming.

I glimpsed the bones of the universe—

Compassion, Joy, Belonging,

Peace, Purity, Love.

Each word a wave, crashing through me,

leaving me drenched with a profound knowing:

There is no outside.

You are here,

I am here,

not apart but within,

woven into the same fabric

that spins stars and whispers to roots.

I learned this:

The puzzle pieces we are

don’t know the full picture,

yet we fit perfectly,

necessary and complete.

The sickness, the violence, the hunger—

they are not mistakes.

They are the cracks

through which the light reshapes itself,

the movement in the still image,

the alchemy of existence folding into itself.

I was told once,

“This is hallucination.”

Perhaps it is.

Perhaps all vision is,

whether born of mushrooms,

or dreams, or the quiet moments

when grief breaks us open.

But when I close my eyes,

I see beyond the walls of this world—

not escaping, but arriving,

and with each arrival,

the veil grows thinner.

To reduce it would be to betray it.

To write it would be to lose it.

But still, I speak,

because perhaps in these words,

fractured though they are,

you might see through your own walls,

and catch the glow of what is waiting.