An infinite-pointed star begins to grow behind my closed eyelids… ZZZzzzooom! I’m catapulted through the star and into hyperspace. Into total and infinite Reality, the endless ocean of energy that is the Cosmos. Into everything in the entire Universe at once, realizing that there is only One Infinite Consciousness and that your and my individualized portions are but tiny holographic fractions of the Whole, and that the boundaries between us can be dissolved and the wounds of separation healed by expanding our awareness with spiritual practice: devotion to God, fervent prayer, breathwork, meditation, shamanic drumming, ecstatic dance, chanting the names of God, energy manipulation, plant and chemical entheogens, sacred sexuality, fasting, sensory deprivation, etc.
Still seeing beautiful crystalline geometry everywhere, I remember. No I don’t remember, it’s déjà vu. No not déjà vu, it’s actually happening. I’m not only just aware of the Now, I’m aware of every point in my past simultaneously. I’m not just aware that I had these experiences, I’m having them in the Present. There is only the Absolute Present. Time is gone. There is no past, no future, no history. Everything is occurring in One Infinite Moment.
I find myself inside a boundless sphere, an infinite space that feels like being inside a vast bubble despite the fact that there is absolutely no outside of the bubble. I find myself in an endless spherical ocean of thought and energy. In all directions space itself is somehow visibly fractioned into ever tinier and tinier holographic copies of the Whole. I feel stupid. It seems so obvious. Each and every point in the Universe is a Universe in itself. The One Universe. A copy. A fractal. A hologram. Reality is boundless. I exist within a construct of space and time that exists as a holographic representation built by Consciousness, the Creator and Experiencer of the endless energy flow of the Universe.
Now I can hear the internal voice of not only myself, but every other being in the Cosmos. Infinite overlapping thoughts in English and every other human language. Thoughts that aren’t even made of language. Plant thoughts. Animal thoughts. Star thoughts. Alien thoughts. Alien thoughts!?
“BANG! LISTEN UP! I’M TALKING TO YOU!”
Holy shit! It’s happening again! The Alien. The words are audible, tangible, a voice both heard and felt inside me. The voice is the same familiar “inner thought” voice that I have always had, but right now it is not under my control. Someone else is speaking to me using MY inner voice? How? Why? In fact I find my normal control over my inner thought voice to be completely blocked or scrambled somehow. If I try to have a personal thought to myself about what is happening, I get nothing but a mass jumble of random words piled on top of each other. Hundreds of sentences, but with all the words occurring at once and therefore ending up as complete gibberish. No, my inner voice is already in use.
“THIS MAY SEEM IMPOSSIBLE. YOU MIGHT FEEL EMBARRASSED FOR EVEN HAVING THIS THOUGHT, BUT YOU ARE NOT THINKING IT, I’M TELLING YOU! MY CONSCIOUSNESS TO YOURS. I EXIST IN SPIRIT AND PERMEATE THE COSMOS, AND SO DO YOU. WE CAN SHARE INFORMATION. I WANT TO KNOW YOU AND YOU HAVE NO IDEA HOW MUCH HELP I HAVE TO OFFER YOU. I CAN TELL THAT YOU DOUBT THAT THIS IS HAPPENING. I CAN PROVE THAT I AM REAL AND THAT I AM IN CONTROL RIGHT NOW. TRY TO OPEN YOUR EYES, YOU WILL FIND THAT YOU CANNOT. TRY TO STAND UP, YOU WILL FIND THAT YOU CANNOT. TRY TO EVEN HAVE A THOUGHT.”
I can’t. I’m dumbfounded. I’m terrified but in utter awe. The fear that I’ve somehow broken Reality or broken my mind washes over me. At first I’m frightened that the experience will never end. I’m thunderstruck, but then totally calm because I’m being reassured by some warm Entity that this experience will end and I will regain control of my mind and body as soon as I receive a clear message. I’m all ears…
“FOR NOW YOU ONLY NEED TO KNOW AND BELIEVE THAT I AM NOT A FIGMENT OF YOUR IMAGINATION. I AM REAL AND WE CAN COMMUNICATE. YOU MUST NOT TRY TO EXPLAIN THIS EXPERIENCE AWAY WITH YOUR LIMITED AND FLAWED HUMAN KNOWLEDGE. WHEN YOUR EGO RETURNS, YOU MUST NOT ALLOW IT TO SHED DOUBT ON WHAT I AM SHOWING YOU NOW. YOU CAN FEEL NOW THAT WHAT I SAY IS ABSOLUTE TRUTH.”
I can.
“YOU MUST HAVE FAITH. FAITH IS NECESSARY FOR A BEING TO GROW SPIRITUALLY.”
Okay. And then I feel the release. I pause for a second and enjoy a free thought. I realize I can now once again control my inner voice. I tell myself to open my eyes. They open. Faint but brilliantly colored sparks dance in the darkness around me. I take a sigh of relief. I think about what just happened to me. Huge mistake…
With the return of my human ability to reason comes a flood of doubt and paranoia. Had I just had a psychotic break? Don’t schizophrenics hear voices in their heads and believe them to be real? Don’t they hold mental conversations with imagined beings, spies, dead relatives, angels, demons, aliens…? Have I lost it? But I was told that my ego would bring back with it doubt. I was told to have faith. Faith… Why does this sound so familiar? Déjà vu… I close my eyes and am confronted again by utter timelessness. I am myself at every age of my life, from birth to death, and every other form I have ever taken and will ever take. Is this happening?
“HAVE FAITH!”
Faith? My whole childhood I was told by my mom to have faith. I was told in church to have faith. I had thought this meant forcing myself, against all common sense, to accept the Holy Bible as a complete and literal description of God and his relationship to his Creation. I now see that faith is misunderstood.
God, the One, the Infinite, is beyond literal description, beyond the limits of words. Truth is necessarily distorted by the simple act of committing it to language.
Scriptures, thus, reveal only limited portions, or distortions, of the Truth, which is One and Whole. The Bible and all sacred texts are complex multi-layered mythologies, interweaving into the histories of peoples and nations poetic descriptions of mystical and prophetic events, accounts of enlightened beings and their teachings, scientific, spiritual, metaphysical, and cosmological data embedded in symbolism, and much more. However, these texts have been interpreted and re-interpreted over and over again, too often by unenlightened and negatively oriented minds. Meanings have been bent to fit social and cultural trends and for political conquest. Faith, therefore, cannot mean the blind belief in the literal accuracy of one religion’s scriptures over the rest, but must refer to the intuitive certainty that Infinite Truth cannot be wholly contained in any description but can without a doubt be directly experienced as the inner, mystical currents within all of the world’s wisdom traditions suggest.
Faith means realizing that I exist in a world that exists within me. Faith means knowing that I am inside you and you are inside me and we are both inside a world that is inside each of us. Faith means knowing that we are all a part of the One. There’s no other way it could be. All of the beings on this planet, all of the beings in the Universe, though seemingly separate, are in fact inseparably interconnected. Each individualized portion of the Universe has access to a holographic copy of the Whole created by Consciousness as it generates and filter-feeds through the energetic ocean of Infinity.
Our separate realities are fabrications, tiny distorted fractions of the Truth. Our everyday experiences of the world are dictated by our brains recognizing and interpreting everything they’ve been conditioned to believe to be Reality and throwing everything else out. This strategy is great for simple organic evolution, but obviously physical evolution can only go so far before the most highly evolved creatures on a planet become so evolutionarily successful that they begin to destroy themselves and their world. We have foolishly over-reproduced and overpopulated the Earth causing plagues and viruses to arise. We have greedily depleted the planet’s resources and made war on each other over the scraps. We have carelessly burned fuel, drastically disrupting the homeostasis of the planet, causing catastrophic climate changes. We have synthesized and ingested unnatural and inorganic preservatives, hormones, dyes, and other artificial ingredients that have led to cancers and birth defects and even more damage to the Earth. We have manufactured and prescribed pharmaceutical drugs that have caused more mental and physical pain than they have alleviated.
So what is the solution? How can humans continue to survive now that we have reached the obvious end of physical evolution? The answer is Faith. Humans must have faith in the unlimited potential of the One Mind, Universal Consciousness, God. All things will come together for good for those who love the One and live in harmony with each other. It is the human Self, therefore, that must evolve, or devolve in a sense, shedding the ego and the notion of separateness and reintegrating back into Oneness with the Collective Mind of the Universe, and most immediately Oneness with our planet and its co-inhabitants – the earth’s plants, animals, and chemicals.
This is where entheogens come into play. For thousands and thousands of years, tribes of humans lived in relative harmony with each other and the planet. They accomplished this through a shamanic understanding of the Consciousness of Nature. Through shamanism, people gleaned Divine wisdom via certain plants and fungi. Just as God has given us plants and fungi for our physical nourishment and health, God has also given us plants and fungi for our mental and spiritual nourishment and health. There are plants and fungi on this planet that feed us and plants and fungi that treat our illnesses. And there are also plants and fungi that miraculously give one access to the Collective Mind by dissolving the ego, the imaginary membrane around the Self that tricks people into thinking that we are separate from the grass we are standing on, the water we are drinking, the air we’re breathing, or the person passing us on the sidewalk.
You see, entheogens do not have to be looked at as some kind of a shortcut to “legitimate” spiritual practice. They do not have to be seen as something outside of the Self. In Truth, there is nothing outside of the Self. There is only One Reality. And the Reality is that we are all One. An Alien told me this.
And in case you haven’t figured out who the Alien is, the Alien, though quite possibly an actual, highly spiritually evolved extraterrestial existing somewhere else in the Universe, was also in one way or another a higher aspect of my Self, which in turn is a manifestation of the One, otherwise known as God. You see, although God is One, which means that God absolutely cannot be separate from the Self, God is also alien because God is not a holographic fraction of the Whole like you or me or any being, terrestrial or otherwise. God IS the Whole. God is Infinity.
This seemingly paradoxical nature of God, being both Self and Other, both immanent and transcendent, has been recognized and wrestled with by spiritual seekers throughout all of history. It is the Great Mystery of Being. It is this quality which has led me to sometimes lovingly refer to God as the Great Asymptote, toward whom we eternally journey, into whom we eternally spiral, always getting closer, but always having further to go.
As Alex Grey, my favorite artist and someone whose wisdom has had a profound impact on my life, wrote, “The supreme Godhead is greater and beyond all consciousness and knowing. All words and concepts fail to grasp the Great Mystery of the transcendental cause of existence. Yet the unknowable God must also yearn to be known, for why else would the Infinite One reveal itself to us through the mystical experience of communion with the visionary realms? This is why the mystical experience is the most healing event in a person’s life. The unknowable reveals itself in theophanies of the divine imagination. Without a cosmos, God cannot be known and loved by creatures.”
[A note about entheogens: I feel I must stress that the entheogenic path is not for everyone. It’s important that every individual trust his or her own inner Guidance on this matter. If one does feel called to utilize entheogens on the path to Self-realization, it is important for one to remember that it is not the plant or fungus itself that imparts wisdom, but the Divine Light within. It is also crucial for one to not become attached to or dependent upon the entheogenic experience. One on this path should practice spiritual disciplines, such as prayer and meditation, both with and without the aid of entheogens. Eventually, the ingestion of plants and fungi may become superfluous. This is true not only of entheogenic sacraments, but actually of food as well. There are yogis and saints who no longer eat at all, or eat only very minimally, instead nourishing themselves on the Divine Light within and without. A perfect example of this is Siddhartha Buddha, who survived on one hemp seed per day for three years during his ascetic phase.] [A note about the word God: I use the word God here as a unisex term that means both God, the masculine aspects/energies of Reality, and Goddess, the feminine aspects/energies of Reality as well as that which is beyond both, the Source of both that is in a sense neither.]