And this realization scared me. Like I am losing my mind. Like this is another psychotic break. And I suppose I could look at it that way. Or I could look upon this as an invitation to something else. As if I really have a choice.
I don't really remember what the red pill and the blue pill meant in the Matrix, which also had something to do with dreams and reality, but I do remember the alleged first level of the plant medicine experience. It simply shows you what your life is. This is what I asked of it when I started the journey. I wanted to look into that peripheral vision that is always with me and see what was always making me a little unsettled, a little not at home with what is going on around me. But of course, who am I kidding? I may have started off with that intention, but as soon as I had even an inkling of what was in my peripheral vision, I avoided it, tensed against it, and ran from it. Just like I have always done. No big surprise there.
And to be honest with you, I'm not entirely sure what is in my peripheral vision that I am running from. Of course, when a lawyer starts a sentence with "to be honest with you," your best course may be to run for the hills because what follows and the truth may be two very separate things. But all joking aside, let me take a swing at it. I think what is the biggest confusion I have in my life is how to react to the fear that I will sink into some dark abyss that I will never get out of unless I resist or do something now. Like I must start swimming now or I will drown. Like I'm being sucked down into a downward spiral of depression and craziness and fear I can never get out of unless I start thinking positive thoughts now. That I am about to lose my mind, and I must find somebody anybody to talk to because if I keep listening to myself and my own mind I will go crazy. This doesn't happen all the time, thank God. But this is exactly what I was doing during my forth night of plant medicine at Rhythmia: I was running either from some sort of mind state which I equated as an unending death or a pack of men with dubious intentions if I did not resist. And its not like these practices of resistance haven't worked to some degree for me over the years in a variety of situations. For example, the same impetus got me out of my apartment on a Friday night in a strange city when I didn't know anyone. But I know half the people now in this stinking town and I still am unsettled. And this feeling seems a different animal that what I have felt before and strikes an entirely different if not discordant chord.
Over the years the universe has been giving me all sorts of messages probably starting from my early days of zen that struggling against this fear may not be the best therapeutic approach to it. Now almost almost every book I read and every podcast I listen to has the same message: Acceptance is the path to liberation. Ok, I get it. I mean sure, if there were really jungle tigers running after me, fighting or running from them might be the best option. But there are no physical tigers here. And maybe, just maybe, little by little, I am settling into the fear. Just a bit. But make no mistake, the training wheels are still very much attached to my bicycle and I'm still afraid of wrecking it. So when you call up that shrink in Beverly Hills, and ask about me, you know the one, Dr. Everything be alright, instead of asking him how much of your time is left, she might tell you that I have unilaterally decided that I'm not going to let the elevator bring me down, bruce.
But wait, there is more, the after-world. You can always see the sun, day or night. And in the after-world, I have had two people recently tell me that crows are their spirit animals or "familiars." They are both drummers--go figure. I'm not sure whether this is a good omen or a bad omen for them. Maybe I'm getting a crow confused with a raven, which has more nefarious connotations. In any event, I think I told them both that I don't have a familiar, but I wanted one. But the more I think about it, I am wrong. There is a story about me running in the background. A small little snarly animal perched on my shoulder. And its not something I necessarily want. Probably most people have a similar story going on to some degree. It is the story of what D.W. Winnicott's called the "false self." The false self is created when the authentic self of a child goes into hiding for whatever reason during some portion of the child's development. The false self grows up prematurely and becomes a rigid adaptive self, complying with outer requirements as best it can, all the while protecting the authentic self from something. What I'm getting at with this psychobabble is that I feel my gnawing feeling of being disconnected from reality, or lack of grounding in relationships is related to growing tension between my authentic self and this false self. I have an intuition that my current life is an illusion because in some sense it might be as it is transformed by the false self. And unlike my friends who have some sort of spirit animal or guardian angel, I feel more and more that I have nothing to fall back on without effort on my part. That is the unsettling feeling.
They preach this kind of stuff almost every day at Rhythmia. The whole purpose of plant medicine is for the false inauthentic self to be reunited with authentic self. And I suppose that's why I want to go back there, to take another run at it. That's what I do. I keep trying. But as trying may be another form of resisting, may I be more nuanced. May I see what I am doing, and when that uncomfortable feeling occurs again, when that little snarly animal on my shoulder infects me with the venom that I feel I must get rid of, may I remember not to try or resist, but let it run its course. After all, the venom is not really death, but a more authentic self trying to break though in the only way it can.
But in the meantime, there are new adventures awaiting me, even though they are not of my choosing. The winds of fate have blown my ship away from its port that I seem to have gone in an out of for the past seven years. There is an entire sea open to me now. There is a reason behind this. Maybe someday it will all be in more focus.
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