My first experience with shamanic healing was through my spiritual enabler/therapist, L. A trim, raven-haired, woman with an aquiline nose, she had studied and practiced under the supervision of several founders of the psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy movement based in San Francisco. I was referred to L through an acquaintance that had met her through their own journey in spiritual healing. Although the introduction seemed quite accidental at the time, my life had recently entered a transitive period brought on by my wife’s midlife crisis and ongoing dissatisfaction with her life. L and I had first talked several times before in her home, situated semi-isolated in the quiet orchards of a small farming community. We had previously discussed my life – how it was that I found myself in the position of scapegoat for someone else’s misery, what I felt was missing from my life at this later stage, and what I wanted to change. She said the work that I must do will lead the way and if I surrender to the medicine I would get what I need.
While I felt that I could trust her, I was still rather nervous about what might (or might not) happen. I had only limited experience with the psychedelics – a few light mushroom trips in Alaska and Amsterdam that were never a part of an inward journey, as the therapy demands. As I lay down on a soft mattress with light Japanese flute music playing in the background, I felt a dizzy tingling feeling of warmth come over my head after several minutes. Next, a perception that the ground underneath me might somehow slip away led to a brief moment of anxiousness that was immediately perceptible to L, as she sat sentinel next to me. “Just let go” she said. And I did.
For the next three-four hours I took what can only be described as a journey back in time, back to the garden of my youth on Long Island. There I sat in the bright sunshine of a summer morning that seemed every bit as vivid and real as a moment in waking life, if not more so. Oddly, I felt a bit child-like, like an earlier version of myself, although older and more experienced as I am today. I sat in the lush green grass and examined flowers of every kind that I had long-forgotten – roses zinnias, marigolds, azaleas and more – all in bloom and each with their rush of brilliant color and own sweet scent. All the bushes, rocks and trees remained as they had been long ago, as if time had stood still, and I felt the warmth of the sun and gazed upwards at the azure-blue sky. I thought no thoughts, lived no worries, and forgot my usual dulled adult existence with its oft heavy burden of duties, responsibilities, and travails. I felt at great peace for the first time in many years and was so joyful that I could reach this place, where time had not moved. “You needed a vacation from your life – it’s what your soul desired”, she told me afterwards. And in that brief, yet amazing trip back to my childhood garden, I felt joy, tranquility, and self-love. I didn’t know it then, but this vacation from myself, from my narrative, marked my first steps to ascend the ladder of consciousness – to know who and what I really am.
Hours after this profound experience, I pondered greatly how a structurally simple molecule, could deliver such an intense experience of augmented consciousness. How could a chemical stimulate my mind to recreate (or at least perceive) what was long lost according to sequential time? Nay, rather than a re-creation it felt like I experienced a timeless state more real, more lucid, than how I usually experience the world. How does that come about? Either my unconscious is a masterful artist of realism (i.e. imaginative idealism) beyond compare or that the experience of time is but an illusion of our waking minds. I have no answers to persuade, only to say that the mind clearly creates the experience and the objects of experience through its perception of what is. The question of how is what is perceived when it comes from the interior of the mind and not via the usual external sensory perceptions of the body, which leads to our more shared or consensual view of what is. This knowledge is essential for our understanding the nature of the inner experience, whether it be purely imaginative or somehow tapped into, like hacking another dimension or accessing a simulation.
That we all perceive virtually the same experience in our waking state is the likely consequence of our shared biology (and neurodevelopment) and conditioning. This is top-down perception. Yet, it was the awareness that stands behind the thinking mind (and its activity) that allowed me to feel far more alive in my journey than I do in everyday life. It was as if I had transcended from a very dull sense of awareness to full throttle bottom-up thinking and perception, as typically felt in a lucid dream state. In fact, the two – psychedelic-augmented reality and lucid dreaming – are comparable in their intensity. So what is reality, anyway? Is it just the outer journey that we all can agree on? What about the inner journey?
This brings me to reminding myself that I’m alive, as if that were a given. While self-awareness is characteristic of a sentient being, the act of living – life itself – is a miracle so profound that it defies all understanding – both regarding its origin, as well as its purpose. It’s rather humbling to think that billions of years of cosmic and then biological evolution have led up to this very moment when I live and breathe, and write these very words. We can draw a direct line of events all the way back to the first cells, the first planets, and the first stars – a lineage map back to the origin of the cosmos itself. And yet, does time really exist beyond the thinking mind necessary to perceive it? Would this universe exist without a thinking mind to perceive, nay create, it? This brings us to Schrödinger and his cat – is it either alive or dead, but only when there’s an observer, otherwise it’s both. The outcome is created by the observation. Is there a universe without a mind to perceive it? To create it?
Here’s another way of looking at how the mind creates – when I sleep, I dream of other people, places, and events. Yet, where is time, where is space in the dreaming mind? The answer is simple, the perception of time and space are created by the mind. They are, in fact, illusions of the mind – although they have great influence and power over us. Time and space rule our waking lives, day in – day out. Yet it is only the stupor of our conditioned minds that gives time and space the strength to rule. Time – what time? Tolle would say that there is only now, the endless eternal now…