Revisiting Spirituality
Today I wanted to revisit a post I “published” over three years ago to a few friends. The line between personal versus public writing has gotten thinner as I’ve gotten older. Maybe as a function of growing up, I’ve realized that privacy was mainly an effect of a lack of confidence. One catalyst of this trend is the slow death of my personal journal and a movement into Substack. Without shame I can post it all on the internet to the broader market with a minuscule change of developing a following. Privacy in public is given to me by the fact that most people don’t care enough to read more than 300 characters at a time.
The reason why I’m revisiting this post is that I’m currently reading two books. One is called Mere Christianity and another called Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion. Both books are obviously on the opposite ends of the spectrum, but there exists some consistency in how they logically argue for different causes. Reading them simultaneously, I realized I find a longing to go back to a time when I wrote this last post.
In this journal post - I talk a lot about peaking as a 24 year old, and now looking back on it, what I really peaked on (local maxima) was pushing the boundaries on what I wanted to understand about myself. Nowadays I’ve been under more focus, where my time is spent on work, reading, traveling, and close relationships, and at the time I was instead single, working high paying job with no end or real responsibilities, and very much in doubt of what was coming next.
But even without all that free time to self-explore, I do see a draw in devoting a certain piece of my identity in revisiting the concepts of spirituality. Much of this sense of identity and self-exploration died down after I landed a new job and started dating my girlfriend. In my own self-narrative, it fit perfectly because I had “came of age”, and it fit nicely into the ending of the first half of my twenties.
I look back to this time with fondness. A few months after I wrote this post I took two tabs of acid in a hotel room in Bali, and those realizations also created new feelings of greatness. And since then, I’ve made it a point to sit down and plan these events in the future every so often. Whatever one’s own motivations, it’s always nice to take a step back from the day to day and think about the “bigger picture” whatever that might be. My own motivations for understanding spirituality is still in formation stages. And I see it growing, mainly because life is actually quite long.
After all, it’s only been three years and I’m already “looking back” (lol). Please enjoy this piece!
May 8th, 2018 - Spirituality and Drugs
I hiked to the top of Mt. Davidson, sweat dripping down my shirt and the summer wind whipping in my face. I yelled as loud as I could when I arrived to the unknown and desolate highest peak in San Francisco. Maybe I was copying a movie trope, a scene where I imagined a camera behind me, horizontally panning slow enough to exhibit the themes of existentialism and lonesomeness while the breathtaking fog hid the city skyline from me.
“We’re peaking”, my friend said last week in New York. She’s right. My friends and I are 24 years old. I never thought about age until I started writing, tracking the years through a journal at home and sometimes writing letters to my future self. Reading back on those letters, it’s clear I thought I would be more of a grown up by now.
I have to describe a stunning experience I had at Coachella. At one point during the comedown of my acid trip on the second day, I took a joint from a friend and smoked it at the Louis the Child concert set. Within what I believe was five minutes, the combination of acid and marijuana turned my perceptions into overdrive.
My dancing went into autopilot as my senses dissociated from my body. My thoughts shifted to the perspective of how perplexed aliens would be examining myself dancing with ten thousand strangers in a stadium of flashing lights. And then suddenly, my mind fully detached from my body and all I could concentrate on was the strange polygon above Louis the Child’s podium that symbolized their logo.
And it was me.
For however long I could push out my anxiety, I felt an inner peace that I’d never known, experienced, or can otherwise duplicate since then. A resolute mindfulness in where I could only evoke the feeling of being one with the concert, lights, and people. A sense of utter prosperity within my surroundings, I became a fusion of experiences and everything around me with no sense of attachment to any physical form.
But without concentration, I would skitter back into a schizophrenic anxiety based lucid dream within myself, hearing everyone around whispering things about me, and eventually losing my friends in the crowd after the show. Thankfully after thirty minutes of wandering around like an old person on dementia, I was saved by friends in similar drug induced states.
I left day two of Coachella fully believing in something. Nothing omnipresent, nothing physically describable, just one hundred percent spiritual.
Last Christmas I called up a friend after reading an article about Ayahuasca. He was part of a mass layoff from the company that I also started at when I first moved to San Francisco. A Stanford graduate and product manager, he could have easily gotten another job but decided it was time for him to travel to South America to become a volunteer ayahuasca shaman in a spiritual retreat in the jungles of Ecuador. Classic silicon valley tech worker, always pivoting.
“Game of Thrones, Lord of the Rings, these amazing cool fantasies that I used to read about and dream of are now places that I’m living in.”
He spoke with long, grandiose, and poetic pauses as he described his life for the past two years since we said our goodbyes in Dolores Park a few years ago. His travels weren’t like the typical millennial, filled with Instagram photos of food and Snapchat filtered views of city-scapes.
Rather when he first described his ayahuasca experience, he used the phrase that it was “the closest that I had ever felt with God”. And at the time, sitting in the grass of Dolores park, I generalized that he was Muslim, and experienced Allah chilling in the jungle in front of him after ingesting ayahuasca. But rather he clarified he was strictly Atheist during the call and the god he experienced wasn’t the exact deity of Christianity or Islam.
Instead the god he experienced was not an image of a human being, but an ephemeral soul of Mother Nature. He experienced a feeling of undeniable insignificance with something tremendously larger than life woven into the environment and air around him. He told his story of the past two years with earnest and I listened with incredible amazement at his level of self-transformation. After volunteering for what was supposed to be three, then four, and then finally six months in Ecuador, he went back to India to just travel day by day and spend time with family. No longer bound by the desires of incremental career rewards and materialistic success, he didn’t disparage his old life of capitalism and libertarianism in Silicon Valley, but instead felt optimistic unknowing with his current path traveling through India planning trips maybe one or two days in advance.
Ayahuasca is described by wikipedia as a brew used as traditional spiritual medicine in ceremonies among the Indigenous peoples of the Amazon basin. Infused with DMT from a vine and MAOI from a shrub, it causes you to initially vomit within thirty minutes to an hour, and then cause hallucinations afterwards for six more hours. Unlike LSD where you see things move that already exist in your environment from your eyes playing tricks on you, ayahuasca seems to cause new images that never existed to present themselves in front of you, along with multi-dimensional thoughts that can never be properly explained.
“It’s a scary thing man, when you sit there and face your inner demons in front of you for a couple of hours.”
And so that night in Coachella, as I drifted off to sleep, I wondered if the spirituality I experienced was of any comparison. I wondered if the people I heard whispering about me were my demons, a concoction of my own self-consciousness and anxiety that I couldn’t even comprehend in my conscious state. And if that’s true, does that mean the solution to my own intermittent lack of satisfaction and direction in life was as easy as looking internally? I felt like a prerequisite to giving myself meaning meant I couldn’t focus on outside influence. And I always thought my privilege of not having to worry about basic life necessities was the cause of my existential thoughts. But maybe there’s another state for those who are mindful enough where they feel with so much conviction on the state of the universe that the daily workings of life and happiness just happen.
I haven’t planned my own ayahuasca retreat trip. I figure I can take acid, smoke some weed again, and sit down in my room and meditate before buying a plane ticket to Ecuador to try to discover that experience again, or something entirely new.
But in terms of feeling alive and absolution within myself, I realize I encounter it everyday. My head and eyes brushing against the pillow, my consciousness fighting off the subconscious, and then the bright rays of sunlight that shimmer through the curtains that wake me up.
The morning reminds me I am alive. And to that, I am sincere in my appreciation.