The night sky makes a good metaphor for what we call “reality.” It’s a sign of our times that inside the city, you can hardly see the stars any more, but if you go to the country, the vision of the universe is still magnificent, millions of stars and galaxies dancing against a velvet backdrop.
But what are we seeing, exactly when we look up at the stars? Not an array of light that exists in anything like the present. What we are seeing is the coincidental arrival upon earth and our retinas light from all different times of the distant past, mostly millions of years old. How those stars are actually configured now in relation to each other, we don’t have a clue. No matter if we use an optical telescope or the most advanced radio telescope on Hubble, we are viewing ancient phenomena, each event coming from widely different time periods. Half those stars could have collided in some kind of cosmic catastrophe millions of year ago, and we wouldn’t know it for another period of millions of years, which is to say never.
The relationship to what we are seeing in the sky has no relationship whatsoever to what is happening with those objects of our vision in the present.
I wonder how this metaphor translates to our lives on the ground. What comes to mind is our relationships to each other. I look into your eyes: how far away are you? What epoch of the past are you living in? How many light years are there between us? This is a lonely thought. I sometimes feel: “I’m on my own here.”
In a sense, the opposite is true. In the relationships between us as human beings, there is no separation. We are born with a physical, real time connection to our mothers, through the umbilical cord. And though the cord is cut soon after, we remain skin to skin close to our mothers for a long time.
When my son Slater was born, his mother needed to sleep, so the wise nurse gave him to me and had him sleep skin to skin against my chest for the first six hours of his life on earth. When he became a toddler, he would repeat this post birth scenario every morning. I would be working at my computer when he awoke, and he would crawl onto my lap and sleep or cuddle there for a solid half hour. He kept it up for a good 4 or 5 years. He’s 12 now, and light years have come between us, but we still have that primal connection.
Looking at the stars, we can trace their light back in time to 13.7 billion years ago (whatever that means) to before the alleged big bang, when our universe was infinitesimally small and composed of just one clump of whatever, infinitely connected.
Maybe death is like a reverse big bang for us, where we get to feel connected with each other again. Where ever it is we go, it seems obvious to me that we go to the same place, even if that place is nowhere. How much consciousness we get to bring with us is another question: we just don’t know. But it’s comforting to think that no matter how disconnected we get with each other during our life times, we will all connect again in the end.
Saturday, September 29, 2007
Wednesday, September 26, 2007
THIRTEEN: The Death of Capitalism
My sincere apologies to my readers: I have taken the steps necessary to earn money by having ads (“relevant” ads – I can’t wait to see what kind of ads Google thinks are relevant) on my blog site. Why? Frankly, I want to get paid for my writing. I work hard at it and deserve to be paid for my work. As the five novels languishing in my drawer attest, this getting paid business is easier said than done, and I have the feeling that the ads will earn me about two dollars a month. However, the more you, my readers, click on the ads, the more money I make. So, click away, readers, click away.
So, unrepentant communist that I am, I make another compromise with the blood-sucking capitalist system. Yes, I still refer to myself with the “c” word, despite the horrors of Stalin and the collapse of the USSR, “proving” that communism doesn’t “work.”
Of course, the collapse of the Soviet Union proved no such thing. Communism is alive in Cuba, and alive and well in Venezuela. Remember the transition from feudalism to capitalism took 500 years, with all kinds of setbacks and reversals.
Arguably, capitalism collapsed in 1929, and the only thing keeping it going since then is war – the kind of military socialism that has us constantly at war.
To give capitalism its due, the system has engendered enormous technological progress and reduced the general level of human suffering significantly for as much as half the world’s population. The other half remains impoverished, just as they were under previous systems of feudalism, or master-slave systems (Egypt, Rome, Greece).
But when a system believes it has to be at constant war with the still impoverished half of the world, it’s time to retire that system.
Clearly one failure of the Soviet system was its failure to win the hearts and minds of the people. Capitalism is a system based on addiction – its initial development depended on that nifty triangle of slaves-sugar-rum. Now consumerism itself is the addictive engine that keeps the system going.
According to co-counseling, addiction is a distress pattern based on an undischarged early hurt. In other words, addictive behavior is something we engage in order to keep from feeling our feelings. Chemicals – cocaine, heroine, alcohol, caffeine, nicotine, and Prozac – are a big part of the addiction picture, but so are shopping, pornography, and accumulating money.
The way to overcome addictions in co-counseling is to exchange counseling time with a partner, taking turns intently listening to each other for a couple hours a week. This relationship that develops between co-counselors is not just immensely healing, finally giving us the slack we need to feel our feelings, but it provides a model of the close egalitarianism that we want not just in all our own relationships, but that we want in everyone’s relationships.
Thus, in my view (and this is NOT official co-counseling policy) co-counseling, also called Re-evaluation Counseling (www.rc.org), is an effective way of building socialism, one person at a time.
So, unrepentant communist that I am, I make another compromise with the blood-sucking capitalist system. Yes, I still refer to myself with the “c” word, despite the horrors of Stalin and the collapse of the USSR, “proving” that communism doesn’t “work.”
Of course, the collapse of the Soviet Union proved no such thing. Communism is alive in Cuba, and alive and well in Venezuela. Remember the transition from feudalism to capitalism took 500 years, with all kinds of setbacks and reversals.
Arguably, capitalism collapsed in 1929, and the only thing keeping it going since then is war – the kind of military socialism that has us constantly at war.
To give capitalism its due, the system has engendered enormous technological progress and reduced the general level of human suffering significantly for as much as half the world’s population. The other half remains impoverished, just as they were under previous systems of feudalism, or master-slave systems (Egypt, Rome, Greece).
But when a system believes it has to be at constant war with the still impoverished half of the world, it’s time to retire that system.
Clearly one failure of the Soviet system was its failure to win the hearts and minds of the people. Capitalism is a system based on addiction – its initial development depended on that nifty triangle of slaves-sugar-rum. Now consumerism itself is the addictive engine that keeps the system going.
According to co-counseling, addiction is a distress pattern based on an undischarged early hurt. In other words, addictive behavior is something we engage in order to keep from feeling our feelings. Chemicals – cocaine, heroine, alcohol, caffeine, nicotine, and Prozac – are a big part of the addiction picture, but so are shopping, pornography, and accumulating money.
The way to overcome addictions in co-counseling is to exchange counseling time with a partner, taking turns intently listening to each other for a couple hours a week. This relationship that develops between co-counselors is not just immensely healing, finally giving us the slack we need to feel our feelings, but it provides a model of the close egalitarianism that we want not just in all our own relationships, but that we want in everyone’s relationships.
Thus, in my view (and this is NOT official co-counseling policy) co-counseling, also called Re-evaluation Counseling (www.rc.org), is an effective way of building socialism, one person at a time.
Sunday, September 16, 2007
TWELVE: Channeling Jack
I am writing this installment on the plane back to Oakland from San Miguel de Allende, a beautiful colonial town in the mountains north of Mexico City. My wife Gloria and I met there in 1991 when we were both on a one year sabbatical. At the end of that year, we got married, exactly 15 years ago today.
On my first day in San Miguel, a few days before I met Gloria, I met Jack Slater, a tall, black, gay writer who ran the literary readings. We quickly became the best of friends – a year later he was my best man at my wedding. I had heard from a mutual friend before I met Jack that he was HIV+, a far more serious condition then than it is now.
Jack was a delightful character with kind words for everyone, voluble, charismatic. He would ride in the rear of San Miguel’s rickety busses, towering above everyone, shouting hearty greetings to all of the people he knew, which were legion, gringo and Mexican.
Jack was writing a novel about the homeless in Los Angeles and asked me to collaborate with him. Though we never talked about it, I knew he felt he needed a co-writer because he wasn’t sure he would survive long enough to finish it himself.
We spent a week on LA’s skid row sleeping in the missions and fleabag hotels and interviewing dozens of homeless men and women.
In late 1994, he succumbed to the very Mexican bug, cryptospiridium, which might cause some diarrhea in a healthy person, but was fatal in people with compromised immune systems. He returned to Los Angeles, where he spent his final days in a squalid nursing home on public assistance, losing his mind along with control of his bowels.
One day, Gloria and I were lying in bed in the early morning when a small voodoo doll we kept as a folk art knick-knack, startled us by jumping off the shelf at the head of our bed, seemingly on its own. Gloria and I looked at each other. We both knew. “Jack,” we said.
Within a half hour, the phone rang. We also knew. It was one of Jack’s friends telling us he had died.
We flew to LA to help with the arrangements and then to San Miguel to execute his estate, such as it was, mostly books and papers, a few paintings. We organized a memorial service.
The night before the service, I smoked some dope to help write my eulogy. I had a weird feeling.
“Jack?” I wrote on my computer.
“Yes, Henry,” he dictated back to my fingers. And so it began, a collaboration beyond the grave.
Together, we were able to finish the novel, Show Me the Way to Go Home. Our mutual friend Clifford Irving called it “gritty real, almost too real.” In subsequent drafts, Jack emerged as a character in the narrative.
Did it really happen? Did our communication really cross the boundary between life and death? It was clear to me that I was doing what people called “channeling.”
Yet when I tested the circuit, tried to get out of him some unique piece of information that only he could know, he failed the test. I couldn’t prove this experience was real.
I concluded that, yes, my imagination played a major role in this conjuring, but that the imagination itself has tentacles that penetrate the spirit world. The imagination is also the vehicle that creates our sense of reality. There is no clear boundary between reality and imagination, just as there is no clear boundary between life and death. Take a plant seed, for example. Is it alive? If not, how could it create a living tree just by dropping to the ground?
It may be that if you believe in something strongly enough, if you can muster sufficient faith, you can make true what you want to be true.
I still have shrine to Jack in my study, complete with the little voodoo doll. Once the book was finished, we stopped talking to each other.
Gloria was pregnant with our son when Jack died. So we named him Slater. Jack lives on in other ways, in memory, which also has no clear boundary with imagination.
On my first day in San Miguel, a few days before I met Gloria, I met Jack Slater, a tall, black, gay writer who ran the literary readings. We quickly became the best of friends – a year later he was my best man at my wedding. I had heard from a mutual friend before I met Jack that he was HIV+, a far more serious condition then than it is now.
Jack was a delightful character with kind words for everyone, voluble, charismatic. He would ride in the rear of San Miguel’s rickety busses, towering above everyone, shouting hearty greetings to all of the people he knew, which were legion, gringo and Mexican.
Jack was writing a novel about the homeless in Los Angeles and asked me to collaborate with him. Though we never talked about it, I knew he felt he needed a co-writer because he wasn’t sure he would survive long enough to finish it himself.
We spent a week on LA’s skid row sleeping in the missions and fleabag hotels and interviewing dozens of homeless men and women.
In late 1994, he succumbed to the very Mexican bug, cryptospiridium, which might cause some diarrhea in a healthy person, but was fatal in people with compromised immune systems. He returned to Los Angeles, where he spent his final days in a squalid nursing home on public assistance, losing his mind along with control of his bowels.
One day, Gloria and I were lying in bed in the early morning when a small voodoo doll we kept as a folk art knick-knack, startled us by jumping off the shelf at the head of our bed, seemingly on its own. Gloria and I looked at each other. We both knew. “Jack,” we said.
Within a half hour, the phone rang. We also knew. It was one of Jack’s friends telling us he had died.
We flew to LA to help with the arrangements and then to San Miguel to execute his estate, such as it was, mostly books and papers, a few paintings. We organized a memorial service.
The night before the service, I smoked some dope to help write my eulogy. I had a weird feeling.
“Jack?” I wrote on my computer.
“Yes, Henry,” he dictated back to my fingers. And so it began, a collaboration beyond the grave.
Together, we were able to finish the novel, Show Me the Way to Go Home. Our mutual friend Clifford Irving called it “gritty real, almost too real.” In subsequent drafts, Jack emerged as a character in the narrative.
Did it really happen? Did our communication really cross the boundary between life and death? It was clear to me that I was doing what people called “channeling.”
Yet when I tested the circuit, tried to get out of him some unique piece of information that only he could know, he failed the test. I couldn’t prove this experience was real.
I concluded that, yes, my imagination played a major role in this conjuring, but that the imagination itself has tentacles that penetrate the spirit world. The imagination is also the vehicle that creates our sense of reality. There is no clear boundary between reality and imagination, just as there is no clear boundary between life and death. Take a plant seed, for example. Is it alive? If not, how could it create a living tree just by dropping to the ground?
It may be that if you believe in something strongly enough, if you can muster sufficient faith, you can make true what you want to be true.
I still have shrine to Jack in my study, complete with the little voodoo doll. Once the book was finished, we stopped talking to each other.
Gloria was pregnant with our son when Jack died. So we named him Slater. Jack lives on in other ways, in memory, which also has no clear boundary with imagination.
Monday, September 10, 2007
ELEVEN: Life is Death's Dream
The trouble with the memories of past lives that many rely on to convince themselves of their immortality is that they have only a single witness. If what we call “reality” is based on consensus, experiences that we have on our own with no other witnesses could be completely valid – or figments of our powerful imaginations. There is simply no way of knowing.
But let’s not minimize the role of the imagination. The imagination is that part of the mind that associates images, and it plays a part in just about every aspect of our thought process. I imagine the imagination – if one can do that – as a pool of raw consciousness, like this waterhole of magical paint that contains all colors and can take any form with just the slightest nudge of an idea. It is out of the stuff of imagination that we create the universe.
Another thought I have had on the relationship between life and death is this: Life is Death’s dream. I don’t remember when I first had the thought, and I’m not at all sure what it means, but it feels like one of the more profound thoughts I have ever had. Life stands in the same relationship to nonliving matter as a dream relates to one’s wakeful experience. Note that dreaming connotes aspiring, and that root “spir-“ refers to breathing as in respiration and spirit, as in, well, spirit. I have a sense that eons ago in the primordial soup, the right combinations of molecules came together and in some kind of rudimentary act of will, chose life. I sense the willfulness underlying all of evolution as well, though I can’t prove it. I have a sense that whales and other sea mammals, for instance, as adaptations of land species, “chose” to return to the sea. And I sense some reflection of the aspiration toward life in my own life: I have a lot of choices and within them, I generally choose those that enhance my life rather than those that might lead toward death. I have sometimes interpreted this sense as meaning essentially that the universe created itself, that we create ourselves, but there is this underlying willfulness that qualifies as spiritual, that one could characterize as the will of God.
I have a hard time with the idea of past lives, though God know I am trying to be open minded. Again, whatever past life experiences people report are individual experiences without other witnesses. There’s this guy Newton, a hypnotherapist who wrote a book called Journey of Souls. He claims to take people hypnotically not only into their past lives but also into their past deaths, and into the spirit time between their lives. It is an impressive collection of case studies, with all kinds of intriguing similarities of the experiences that people report, but it also seems so likely that these peoples’ stories are telling the hypnotist what he wants to hear. After all, a primary characteristic of the hypnotic state is suggestibility.
Also the entire concept of past lives seems dependent on the concept of history and therefore on the development of complex language and writing. Could “past lives” have existed in prehistorical times? It would seem that the lives of prehistoric humans, and for that matter, other species of animals, wouldn’t be sufficiently distinguished to be recognizable as past lives, unless these lives included taking on the identity of different species, as the Buddhists believe. And then you have to reconcile the existence of some kind of spiritual hierarchy, a hierarchy of beings that gives humans, surprise, surprise, the position at the zenith. This doesn’t jibe with my sense that any creative impulse in the universe would be fundamentally egalitarian, valuing no species or being over any other.
I suppose there could be a spiritual hierarchy based on the notion that “ontology recapitulates phylogeny” – the idea that development of the human embryo passes through phases that resemble more “primitive” species, a human embryo’s temporary development of gills, for example, phases that mirror evolutionary development. It would make sense that the creative impulse such as it is would apply the principles of evolution to souls, just as it does to bodies. And there is a hierarchy implied by the theory of evolution, the sense that over time, organisms become increasingly complex – a hierarchy which once again puts humans in the cat-bird seat, but why not since it is humans articulating the theory.
A premise I developed in writing Tales of Monkeyman was that rather than taking the “scientific” approach of assuming that humans are fundamentally different from other species in all ways where they are not demonstrably similar and turning it on its head: let’s assume that other species of animals are exactly like us except in ways where they are demonstrably different. This approach is scorned as “anthropomorphism” by most of the scientific community, but it seems to me to be an equally valid premise.
So I don’t cotton to systems of thought which emphasize human exceptionalism. Humans are no better nor worse than any other species, just as no individual humans are, in the grand scheme of things, “better” or “worse” than any other. Which brings up Hitler again, and his historical cohort of genocidal maniacs.
In the useful set of metaphors I adhere to called co-counseling, all humans are born completely good, and their essential humanity remains completely good throughout their lives. But what happens is that humans get hurt, sometimes over and over, and as they try to get some emotional release from their hurts, they sometimes hurt others – sometimes pretty badly, to put it mildly. Theoretically, their goodness remains intact, but the set of patterns that develops from their hurts, from their disconnection to others creates a false, or limited reality that gloms onto them like some kind of primordial parasite and forces them to do horrific things. Such patterns justify the most drastic of interventions, surely, like a bullet to the head in the case of the Hitlers of the world, perhaps with a small apology, “I’m sorry, I know you didn’t mean it.” BLAM!
But let’s not minimize the role of the imagination. The imagination is that part of the mind that associates images, and it plays a part in just about every aspect of our thought process. I imagine the imagination – if one can do that – as a pool of raw consciousness, like this waterhole of magical paint that contains all colors and can take any form with just the slightest nudge of an idea. It is out of the stuff of imagination that we create the universe.
Another thought I have had on the relationship between life and death is this: Life is Death’s dream. I don’t remember when I first had the thought, and I’m not at all sure what it means, but it feels like one of the more profound thoughts I have ever had. Life stands in the same relationship to nonliving matter as a dream relates to one’s wakeful experience. Note that dreaming connotes aspiring, and that root “spir-“ refers to breathing as in respiration and spirit, as in, well, spirit. I have a sense that eons ago in the primordial soup, the right combinations of molecules came together and in some kind of rudimentary act of will, chose life. I sense the willfulness underlying all of evolution as well, though I can’t prove it. I have a sense that whales and other sea mammals, for instance, as adaptations of land species, “chose” to return to the sea. And I sense some reflection of the aspiration toward life in my own life: I have a lot of choices and within them, I generally choose those that enhance my life rather than those that might lead toward death. I have sometimes interpreted this sense as meaning essentially that the universe created itself, that we create ourselves, but there is this underlying willfulness that qualifies as spiritual, that one could characterize as the will of God.
I have a hard time with the idea of past lives, though God know I am trying to be open minded. Again, whatever past life experiences people report are individual experiences without other witnesses. There’s this guy Newton, a hypnotherapist who wrote a book called Journey of Souls. He claims to take people hypnotically not only into their past lives but also into their past deaths, and into the spirit time between their lives. It is an impressive collection of case studies, with all kinds of intriguing similarities of the experiences that people report, but it also seems so likely that these peoples’ stories are telling the hypnotist what he wants to hear. After all, a primary characteristic of the hypnotic state is suggestibility.
Also the entire concept of past lives seems dependent on the concept of history and therefore on the development of complex language and writing. Could “past lives” have existed in prehistorical times? It would seem that the lives of prehistoric humans, and for that matter, other species of animals, wouldn’t be sufficiently distinguished to be recognizable as past lives, unless these lives included taking on the identity of different species, as the Buddhists believe. And then you have to reconcile the existence of some kind of spiritual hierarchy, a hierarchy of beings that gives humans, surprise, surprise, the position at the zenith. This doesn’t jibe with my sense that any creative impulse in the universe would be fundamentally egalitarian, valuing no species or being over any other.
I suppose there could be a spiritual hierarchy based on the notion that “ontology recapitulates phylogeny” – the idea that development of the human embryo passes through phases that resemble more “primitive” species, a human embryo’s temporary development of gills, for example, phases that mirror evolutionary development. It would make sense that the creative impulse such as it is would apply the principles of evolution to souls, just as it does to bodies. And there is a hierarchy implied by the theory of evolution, the sense that over time, organisms become increasingly complex – a hierarchy which once again puts humans in the cat-bird seat, but why not since it is humans articulating the theory.
A premise I developed in writing Tales of Monkeyman was that rather than taking the “scientific” approach of assuming that humans are fundamentally different from other species in all ways where they are not demonstrably similar and turning it on its head: let’s assume that other species of animals are exactly like us except in ways where they are demonstrably different. This approach is scorned as “anthropomorphism” by most of the scientific community, but it seems to me to be an equally valid premise.
So I don’t cotton to systems of thought which emphasize human exceptionalism. Humans are no better nor worse than any other species, just as no individual humans are, in the grand scheme of things, “better” or “worse” than any other. Which brings up Hitler again, and his historical cohort of genocidal maniacs.
In the useful set of metaphors I adhere to called co-counseling, all humans are born completely good, and their essential humanity remains completely good throughout their lives. But what happens is that humans get hurt, sometimes over and over, and as they try to get some emotional release from their hurts, they sometimes hurt others – sometimes pretty badly, to put it mildly. Theoretically, their goodness remains intact, but the set of patterns that develops from their hurts, from their disconnection to others creates a false, or limited reality that gloms onto them like some kind of primordial parasite and forces them to do horrific things. Such patterns justify the most drastic of interventions, surely, like a bullet to the head in the case of the Hitlers of the world, perhaps with a small apology, “I’m sorry, I know you didn’t mean it.” BLAM!
Saturday, September 1, 2007
TEN: Consciousness
In a “good” psychedelic experience, or after more years of meditation than I’ve been able to sit still for (yet), one experiences the death of some aspect of one’s self. Let’s put it this way: it feels like you are dying, or how you imagine what death would feel like. Once you let go, you realize that it, the ego, or whatever you want to call it, is not the true self. It is more like the self that has been conditioned in each of us by focusing on how different we are from each other, how we are better, how we are worse.
In co-counseling, another frame of reference I’ll talk more about later, we refer to it, to this false self, as a set of distress patterns that we developed as young people when we were hurt and unable to release (“discharge”) the emotions engendered by these hurts (by crying, laughing, shaking, raging, tantruming, etc.).
This false self seems to be that self which arises out of our sense of dis-connection with others. This false self is based not in the present, but in the past. It exists as a challenge for our true self to overcome. Presumably it has the same evolutionary advantage – which we no longer need – as the fight or flight instincts that kept us alive in the wild. For example, the hurt of hearing about the family friend who drowned skindiving haunted me sufficiently to make me afraid of swimming. Despite having grown up on a lake where in the summer we went swimming every day, I never became a good swimmer. Our lives are replete with such examples of generalizing from a single incident and thereby creating a false self living in a false reality. False isn’t quite right either, given that everything has a shred of truth in it. Limited. A narrow view of self or of reality.
In the sixties we used to talk about “expanding our consciousness,” and that became the excuse for imbibing a lot of substances, which seemed to give us the experience of our consciousness expanding. While I would no longer advocate imbibing the substances, expanding our consciousness still seems like a worthy idea, a good description of the “Path” that I would like to be on, perhaps even a moral compass of sorts: those things which expand our consciousness are good, those things which narrow it (denial, self-absorption, alcohol, repetitive behavior, pettiness, caving into fear – we each have our own list), not good.
Then the question becomes, can some kind of consciousness survive the death of the body? The psychedelic experience implies that the universe itself is conscious, that consciousness is an attribute of all matter and energy, that there is a universal consciousness that is so powerful one is tempted to call it Divine. In this metaphor, our miniscule consciousness as human beings will merge into the universal consciousness as we die. This makes some sense. Our own human consciousness spends a lot of time drawing distinctions between things, between “me” and “not me,” between living and not living, between energy and matter. The universe, by definition, recognizes no such distinctions. There’s no “universe” and “not universe.” The universe is one thing: everything. Can one thing be conscious of itself?
This view favors the final moment of ecstasy metaphor, as one’s individual consciousness merges with the universal consciousness. It doesn’t seem to support the notion of past lives, or of individual consciousness somehow surviving, being reincarnated, or whatever.
One possibility takes into account the fluid nature of time. Another common LSD insight is about how extremely relative our concept of time is. “Trips” lasting for hours seem to last at least weeks if not longer. Suppose as one approaches death asymptotically (the way a mathematical curve on a graph approaches a line without ever reaching it), time slows down. Suppose we experience the last few nanoseconds of life as every bit as long as the rest of our life, or longer. If this were the case, one could even see how some sense of “heaven” and “hell” might apply. If you acted really badly – Hitler, say – those last few nanoseconds could be pretty horrific. But if you did your best to be kind to animals and all that, those last few nanoseconds reviewing your life could be, well, heavenly. And there could be many purgatorial scenarios in between where you might have to go back and clean some things up, apologize to some people, at least in your mind’s eye.
In co-counseling, another frame of reference I’ll talk more about later, we refer to it, to this false self, as a set of distress patterns that we developed as young people when we were hurt and unable to release (“discharge”) the emotions engendered by these hurts (by crying, laughing, shaking, raging, tantruming, etc.).
This false self seems to be that self which arises out of our sense of dis-connection with others. This false self is based not in the present, but in the past. It exists as a challenge for our true self to overcome. Presumably it has the same evolutionary advantage – which we no longer need – as the fight or flight instincts that kept us alive in the wild. For example, the hurt of hearing about the family friend who drowned skindiving haunted me sufficiently to make me afraid of swimming. Despite having grown up on a lake where in the summer we went swimming every day, I never became a good swimmer. Our lives are replete with such examples of generalizing from a single incident and thereby creating a false self living in a false reality. False isn’t quite right either, given that everything has a shred of truth in it. Limited. A narrow view of self or of reality.
In the sixties we used to talk about “expanding our consciousness,” and that became the excuse for imbibing a lot of substances, which seemed to give us the experience of our consciousness expanding. While I would no longer advocate imbibing the substances, expanding our consciousness still seems like a worthy idea, a good description of the “Path” that I would like to be on, perhaps even a moral compass of sorts: those things which expand our consciousness are good, those things which narrow it (denial, self-absorption, alcohol, repetitive behavior, pettiness, caving into fear – we each have our own list), not good.
Then the question becomes, can some kind of consciousness survive the death of the body? The psychedelic experience implies that the universe itself is conscious, that consciousness is an attribute of all matter and energy, that there is a universal consciousness that is so powerful one is tempted to call it Divine. In this metaphor, our miniscule consciousness as human beings will merge into the universal consciousness as we die. This makes some sense. Our own human consciousness spends a lot of time drawing distinctions between things, between “me” and “not me,” between living and not living, between energy and matter. The universe, by definition, recognizes no such distinctions. There’s no “universe” and “not universe.” The universe is one thing: everything. Can one thing be conscious of itself?
This view favors the final moment of ecstasy metaphor, as one’s individual consciousness merges with the universal consciousness. It doesn’t seem to support the notion of past lives, or of individual consciousness somehow surviving, being reincarnated, or whatever.
One possibility takes into account the fluid nature of time. Another common LSD insight is about how extremely relative our concept of time is. “Trips” lasting for hours seem to last at least weeks if not longer. Suppose as one approaches death asymptotically (the way a mathematical curve on a graph approaches a line without ever reaching it), time slows down. Suppose we experience the last few nanoseconds of life as every bit as long as the rest of our life, or longer. If this were the case, one could even see how some sense of “heaven” and “hell” might apply. If you acted really badly – Hitler, say – those last few nanoseconds could be pretty horrific. But if you did your best to be kind to animals and all that, those last few nanoseconds reviewing your life could be, well, heavenly. And there could be many purgatorial scenarios in between where you might have to go back and clean some things up, apologize to some people, at least in your mind’s eye.
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