Unraveling Consciousness

It was dark and cold as I pulled the blanket high up over my head. I closed my eyes. A translucent, veiny sac in my mind's eye breathed as my body breathed, moved as my body moved. My body became a body, no defining characteristics, no personality, no attachment or need other than to breathe. The self detached, a solid orb circling a sac as it drew in oxygen. Something else noticed the self and how it built walls, how it denied itself love and reached into the void for abstract answers.

I was two hours into my slow but steady mushroom trip—the first one I had ever taken—before I took the leap from nibbling to committing. I had openly mused to company about whether I should take the rest of what I had. Nobody wanted to be responsible for telling the newbie to go for it. So I did, kind of sneakily, and right after I announced while giggling, "I'm a goblin" and admitted to my shenanigans.

I did it because I felt I had support, both real and spiritual. I was in a safe place. I trusted my environment and people. And most of all, I trusted myself. I only didn't know what myself meant.

It was 2009 on a chilly night in a haunted house that I happened to live in. I had just picked up my first books on druidry, paganism, and Wicca not long before and I wanted to have some kind of experience. I wanted to defy the laws of consciousness and astrally project myself somewhere and somehow. I laid down on my bed, breathed deep, and felt a part of myself lift out of the bed and soar. I eventually arrived to a beautiful place that my mind's eye can no longer remember to see a woman whom I can no longer identify. I remember her embrace. I remember feeling safe, warm, and like I had done something important.

That began more than a decade of what I now understand to be spiritual or soul journeying. I have flipped through more modes of understanding and belief systems than I care to admit. I have only recently reached a point in my life where I've accepted that my rational side, the deeply skeptical part of me that judges wishful thinking and the pop religion that most people adhere to, has too much power over my own experiences.

A while after I ingested the rest of my relatively small amount of mushrooms, I started to notice little things in my environment. At one point I grabbed the cup of water I'd set on the tile floor beside me to take a drink. When the cup scraped against the floor, I was enraptured. The sensation went through me and it felt as if I were the cup. I said, "The floor is in me." And then I laughed and said, "That doesn't make any fucking sense."

In 2007 an acquaintance of mine committed suicide. It was a devastating loss, particularly because I was close to one of his closest friends. That was the first funeral I went to for someone around my age. It was a beautiful and bright spring day and, as the graveside service went on, a bird started singing in one of the trees. I remember feeling so angry at that bird and how it pierced through the solemnity and suffering. I had no answer for the weight of the dissonance I felt. Nor did I have the right questions to ask.

I felt that same helplessness in 2014 when my Nana died after navigating the horrors of an aggressive form of lung cancer. By this time, I had already started trying on countless belief systems. I had done witchcraft, had visions, dreams, and experiences that led me to believe that finality is an illusion. I embraced the impermanence of life and cleaved it to the impermanence of the shifting seasons. But I had not before seen what I saw that February night.

After getting the call and having only just seen my Nana with her unconscious, labored breathing earlier that day, I arrived at her house to try to give company and comfort. I walked into her room where she lay on the bed. It was not her that greeted me, but the rawness of death, a rawness that gave me nightmares and hallucinations more than once in the following months. It is an image I at first struggled to forget but now thank for its brutal honesty.

At her funeral, I remember drowning out the words of the pastor to contemplate how my belief system at the time stood up. It did not. The Wiccan cycle of life, death, and rebirth was no comfort in my grief. It was simply a joke, a cliche we tell ourselves to avoid digging deeper. When our family did our final pass by the casket, my mother grieved as we once did before society told us that expressing grief is weak. I was left with only questions that would take a long time to explore.

I went to lie down shortly after the mushrooms brought the floor into me. I was not afraid, not in the least, and even over the next couple of hours as I had shifting states of consciousness, even as I experienced tactile hallucinations of someone touching my legs, even when I stared in the mirror and witnessed my unbecoming and becoming and collapse into different forms and people I had never seen, I was unafraid.

I brushed the surface of ego death that night and cried tears of catharsis. I realized the person I told myself I was in fact was not a person at all, but a construct. An image that does not even reflect anything but portrays what I will into being. Consciously or not, this self takes memories it chooses to emphasize and forgets others. It creates narrative arcs, reinforces them, and aside from a very few key ties that bind us all to each other, it was hardly anything remarkable at all.

This self I built had called itself I but did not know me. This self did and said things that made it relatable to other selves, which are also just as constructed as my self. It undertook tasks and paid bills and did work that, at various times through its life, it did not truly connect to but did so because it was trained to do so.

When we accept that self is an illusion and that there is some deeper essence to who and what we are, integration becomes possible. The self no longer is in control, that deeper something that defines our essence begins to run through its checklist. Similar to what happens when we encounter the death of a loved one, all the little particles of life start running through what I like to think of as our own little cosmic Plinko board. Usually on this board we stop for a while and get focused on things that don't really matter. Someone dying or facing death tends to reverse that and the chips just start cascading. What really matters? What can I jettison to get after those things and people that matter? Who am I?

I was sitting on the floor of my living room in August 2018 with a few candles going at the bottom of the fireplace. I had brought out some things that represented what I valued most. I pulled a blanket over my head and began an underworld journey that, in hindsight, was ill-advised and needed a lot more preparation and guidance. I gave up several things important to me, not to lose them necessarily (though that was always a risk) but to have them transformed. I existed in limbo for about two weeks before making a ritualistic ascent.

My life changed dramatically in the following months. I left my job I hated. I left my partner who had become more like a roommate with commitment issues and friendships saw themselves out the door in conjunction with that. Throughout each of these processes and later events that added weight to my journey, I realize I thought I had far more control than I really did. I was in denial. And I think part of the reason why I write today is because I decided I would never be in denial again. I would face the truths that appear before me.

My mom's cancer diagnosis has been the first real test of that determination. The lingering uncertainty, the concern for the future, rehashing the past. There is this residual instinct to grasp for an answer, knowability, understanding.

Have you ever reached an answer that didn't leave you with more questions? Better questions, perhaps, but questions nonetheless? This is who we are. We ask questions. Sometimes we repress those questions, we bury them in a dissertation or study or a verse from our favorite written religious tradition. We accept the infinite possibility as being beyond and the final answer is often God, science, the laws of physics, the way it is.

I have no real answers but I've realized answers are rarely what we truly seek.

What if instead we respected that answers are much like material things, and that collecting them no more leads to happiness than buying a bunch of books we will never read or the latest video games that leave us disappointed? How many times have scientists, theologians, philosophers, and anyone else arrived at a conclusion and said, "You know what? I'm fine with this. This is all I need to know." It happens, of course, there are people who cling to their answers with memorized lists of retorts, anger, and narratives of exclusion. But this is not who we are, it is what we become.

Questions beget answers beget questions. Integrating our essence with our selves should look a lot like asking questions to not find an answer but to distill which questions really matter and build upon those. It defines who we are to such an extent that I found myself realizing that integrating the internal I with the external self must be one of our purposes in life. Perhaps integrating the internal I with the external self into one cohesive force is each of our directions, whether we are conscious of it or not.

It demands a lot intellectually and spiritually. If we have this direction, consciously or not, it speaks to something deeper. It speaks to every path of life and death, a literal command line in our cosmic code that makes it impossible to not have lived our purpose. Is this what fate means? How could a finger of God not go where God has intended it? How could we be broken if we are but a subcellular function of that finger? If we consider that we are all a temporary projection of the Universe engulfing its will into itself, where must we be going except where we must?

We swim and dive and soar in our little pond in the vastest of vastness, circling around in the beauty of the faintest and tiniest microcosm of everything everywhere all at once. We make consequential choices freely and find ourselves stuck in patterns against our will. We are so impactful and so inconsequential that this tension fills us with its own purpose that feeds directly into and from some cosmic universal principle, simultaneously.

Is there a beginning and end? There is nothing and everything. There is only paradox and uniformity. Are there final answers? Every answer begets a new field of questions which begets a new field of questions and so on and on until collapse begets birth. Endless. Serene. Furious. Chaotic. Singular. Perfect. Nonextant.

What fields of questions will you grow? Are you right now lost in your cosmic Plinko board or soaring through it, full of life and freedom? What lies at the bottom once the chips fall? So many delicious questions.

When I woke up the morning after my trip, I had no idea how to process it. I still don't think I've fully done so but I at least have a new set of questions to ask, questions that have made life simpler and happier even in the midst of difficulty.

I have been training for over a decade to reach these kinds of questions. There is a lot to be said about protecting your core, not cheapening your experiences by forcing them through the filter of language and others' perceptions. If I cheapen anything, I take solace in knowing what I know, having wondered at what I've wondered. I hope we can all say the same in the moments when life becomes so overpowering that you take its deepest gulps.