What happened? How’d I get here?
Four Years
In 2019 the floodgates opened — to regular Cannabis use, psilocybin-containing Mushrooms, my first experience with Ayahuasca and even a little adderall, which I took for five days or so during the last finals of my academic career (and while writing my thesis).
In 2020 I got high approximately 365 days (weed, mostly). In 2021 moving to Ecuador broke up the patterns, but I still managed to smoke plenty, and to add Tobacco into the combustible mix. For at least half of 2022 I struggled with addiction to Tobacco and Cannabis, finding sporadic reprieves from both as I’d quit to go the jungle. During these reprieves, I drank Ayahuasca thirty-five times throughout the year, and I imbibed dozens of other plant medicines among the jungle’s natural pharmacopeia.
This year, I drank Ayahuasca once. And now, I may never drink Ayahuasca again (again).
The last time I considered never drinking Ayahuasca again, she came to me in a dream saying she had a message for me. Then, I had a dream warning me about the dark energies and spiritual dangers in Ayahuasca circles. Then I tripled my lifetime Aya intake anyway. No regrets.
Thanks to Ayahuasca, I steered clear of neurosis overflow, saw through the lies of the Covid era, reconnected with who I actually am and why I came to Earth, moved to Ecuador, stayed in Ecuador and discovered a vision for the future here.
Ayahuasca and her homies (Tobacco, Cannabis and all the other plants) mothered me, broke my delusions, held my hand and escorted me from one chapter of my life to another. The chapter in which I now find myself resembles the prior chapter approximately 0% — all-new characters, all-new places and an entirely new way of life. No wonder I needed a team of plant teachers (and Osteopathy, Orofacial Myofunctional Therapy, therapy therapy, Mushrooms) to cope. I needed all this external aid to make sense of a story — my story — and in rendering that batshit crazy tale sensible, I walked the “Downward Path.”
Before that, most intensively from 2016 - 2019, my focus was instead on reaching higher states of consciousness, on my own power, through meditation — cultivating awareness in myself with which to transcend the story of the self. I was walking the “Upward Path.”
Four years up, four years down. I’ll say more about what I mean by “upward” and “downward,” but first I’ll explain the few months that marked the turning point between these paths.
Three Months
Two weeks into the eighty-four day silent vipassanā retreat I completed at the Insight Meditation Society (“IMS”), I knelt praying on my knees and elbows in my bed. I’d just broken down during one of the fifteen-minute teacher meetings (the only chance to speak) that occurred every other day, saying through tears and desolation, “this isn’t working.” Much like during my one-month retreat at Panditarama Lumbini, after two weeks of relentless vipassanā, I was failing to get enlightened. Now I had the freedom to cry about it (At Panditarama, I overheard a guy getting kicked out of the center because he admitted to the nun that he’d been crying), but was I any better off? Whether practicing in a hypermasculine monastic setting or in the hyperfeminine U.S. Buddhism culture, I wasn’t finding the fruit I kept expecting from sitting still and feeling my breath all day. Expecting fruit wasn’t very yogi-like of me, but hey, I was only human.
Being human was something I very much needed to learn (or remember) how to do, but I was getting burnt out on meditation as my teacher. Having discovered the profundity of plants and mycelium, I started wondering if perhaps these non-human teachers were what I needed — if perhaps vipassanā was just an old and clunky technology, whereas external substances were the cutting edge. A year after IMS, I’d chase that cutting edge to the Amazon, and discover just how cutting (of my house-of-cards psyche) it could be. A few years after IMS, I’d break up with my shaman, muster up all my physical strength (feeling so weak that standing felt laborious) and walk out of the jungle, perhaps for the last time. This was one week ago.
In just a few months after IMS, though, the sequence of events that would turn my path upside-down unfolded:
I left the way-too-long meditation retreat in early December 2019, and at the end of that December, my dad passed away. After grieving with the help of Cannabis (and doing all the real-world shit one must do when a parent dies) in January, I went to Guatemala in February and drank Ayahuasca. That’s where I had what is still probably my most powerful experience on the medicine (of death and rebirth, which I already talked about in The Heterarchy), and that’s when I started viewing medicine with reverence. Then, in March I moved across the country with my girlfriend. We arrived in California one week before the sky started falling (Covid).
Suddenly, I was living in a world changing faster than ever, and I was out of my depth in determining how to live in and navigate it. Humbled out of narcissistically conceiving of myself as anything close to enlightened, I turned to the plant queendom for answers. The universe had called my bluff, revealing a twenty-seven year old’s 2-7 off-suit, and I didn’t know where I was going.
Down internet rabbit holes while numbing pain with Cannabis, it turned out. And then to Ecuador as my relationship fell apart. With the mind that had failed to attain enlightenment, I was going nowhere except down. And as it turned out, down was exactly where I needed to go.
Two Paths
In my view (which entails thoughts I heard from other people, or adapted from the thoughts of other people), there are two distinct paths for spiritual growth:
The Upward Path:
Gaining insight within one’s own self
Transcending the human structure to ultimately see the self as nothing
Loving the present moment
The Downward Path:
Gaining insight from things (projections) external to the self
Embodying the human structure to see the self within stories, within this relative world
Loving the infinite creation of reality
Examples of the upward path are meditating, praying, practicing yoga or sitting on a park bench for two years like Eckhart Tolle. Examples of the downward path are relationships, working on a worldly life purpose, creating art or working with plant medicines.
The writing may get worse from this point forward, because I'm high now. I guess I’ll say I’m keeping this post in-theme.
If I hadn’t walked up first, these past four years of the downward path would have made me lose my mind completely. If I hadn’t walked down, I would have remained in the clouds and delusional about myself, cut off from my body.
I didn’t walk the upward path to a grand realization of no self, and I didn’t walk the downward path to fully meet True Self, but I found some of both — nothing and everything — in each.
Where do I walk now?
To Do or To Learn
WITH A LITTLE more deliberation in the choice of their pursuits, all men would perhaps become essentially students and observers, for certainly their nature and destiny are interesting to all alike. In accumulating property for ourselves or our posterity, in founding a family or a state, or acquiring fame even, we are mortal; but in dealing with truth we are immortal, and need fear no change nor accident. The oldest Egyptian or Hindoo philosopher raised a corner of the veil from the statue of the divinity; and still the trembling robe remains raised, and I gaze upon as fresh a glory as he did, since it was I in him that was then so bold, and it is he in me that now reviews the vision. No dust has settled on that robe; no time has elapsed since that divinity was revealed. That time which we really improve, or which is improvable, is neither past, present, nor future. — Henry David Thoreau, Walden
I first read this in Walden during a daily 1-2 hour hike I’d take at IMS in 2019. There was an unoccupied shed far out on one of the trails through the beautiful New England fall forest, and that shed had a collection of ‘spiritual-y’ books (e.g. Siddhartha), as well as journals, old furniture and God-knows-how-old liquor. I stopped by on my ass’s daily vacation from the meditation cushion, and would do things like peruse through Walden. The views and books of this shed passed the time when I could neither count one more in-breath nor sip one more chamomile tea, being as writing wasn’t an option on the retreat.
The quote above made me feel pretty validated in deciding to abandon all relationships and “work” for three months and chase naive dharma dreams. Leave it to a guy who ignored the world and lived alone by a lake for two years to make you feel not-too-anti-social. Yet, while I agree with some of Thoreau’s ideas (“in dealing with truth we are immortal”), I have to say that I am here to be more than just a student and observer. Thoreau refers to multiple self-interested pursuits as being “mortal,” and I suppose so are pursuits aimed beyond our personal posterity.
Yet, in this world crying for so much help, can a human heart really be here to simply watch it all go by? My heart, at least, has more to engage with in this relative, relational human experience than truth and truth alone. Maybe in 2019 I would have said that everything is perfect as it is, but I would have said that from my mind. Now I feel everything — the energy of spaces, of cultures, of people — as it is in my body. My body, our bodies and the earth’s body have a lot to heal. I’m as big a fan of pursuing the truth for its own sake as you’ll probably find, but even I have to recognize that there is more. I’m not going to sit by a pond or on a park bench while kids starve and societies collapse. I’m not going to run off as a wannabe monk while there are words here to be written.
I don’t know what I’ll do about everything in the world, but I have some ideas, and I have an ability to write. So, I start there. I’m here to write and to create in general, and even if it means a marginal reduction in how much of the time I’m “awake,” I’ll do it so that I have a reason (other than drugs) to wake up in “real life,” in saṃsāra. This world of form isn’t absolutely true, but it’s part of me, and I’ll write to be part of it.
Between these two paths — upward and downward — any given individual finds just one path. It could be flagellating the inner child into silence as one meditates twenty hours per day, or it could be reveling in trauma and using medicines every weekend. It could be a healthy path up or a healthy path down. Your path could be breathing, meditating, walking, fighting, overdosing, playing jazz in your elephant socks while vaping, watching the movie The Secret fifteen times over a weekend, whatever it is you want to do. I can’t tell you yours any better than Ayahuasca can tell me mine. Whatever paths we walk, they’re ours.
Write you soon. Happy walking
Before finishing (at the examples given of upward/downward paths): it is the age-old balance of Being-doing. Both exist while we are present in these avatars, this mortal coil. To be succinct, Being is the answer to all, the one priority: I AM. And I am all I must ever be.
Doing urges arise (which can be either pressured, rushed, given too much outward attention; or can be healthy, joyful, real, guided) and they arise purely from this space.
I was lost in doing recently (here in US) until I remembered to cultivate the discipline of practicing Being (aware -- it doesnt "click in", it is just the connection to the feeling within as who I am, not the chatty mind attempting to be.) This is the only focus.
It answered all the dizzy confusion, helplessness, and questions of doing I had when focused just on doing (serving the mind-made little me; not the peace within). It is the way. There are two ways, but this is the only real way. Simply, it is not what you do, it is HOW you do what you do. Always.
Because you are not at stake. There are no musts. What you love is a given mystery to honor.
Being. Then the doing of our apparent, outer world. Instead of with lost self-servitude and sabotage, it will be inner, which reflects outer, Love.
Blessed Be.
This is really interesting.