The View From Halfway Up the Mountain

A little while ago now, I had a mystical experience. I 'saw' God.

Before I get going, I want to say this: yes, the experience happened on a psychedelic drug. No, I don't really care if that means it wasn't 'real'. I'm not interested in the ontology of the experience, whether it was real or not. I don't know if it was real. Hell, I don't know if the love I feel towards my girlfriend is 'real', but to my mind it's pretty damned useful to talk about it as if it does. It explains things for which I could not otherwise account, so even if it isn't real, I'd go on pretending that it was. That's just the product of chemicals in the brain too, anyway.

So even if you don't think my experience is real, pretend with me for a second.

For me, the more important question is whether it was useful. Just like what I, at least, think is love, the important thing isn't whether it's real, but whether it's useful.

I can say that it meant a hell of a lot to me. I felt an infinite ocean of light and bliss; it seemed like several mysteries of the universe were revealed; it removed a bit of the fear of death so that when I experienced a life-threatening situation a little while later, the memory of the unitive experience was able to calm me down out of hysterics. I feel like I can really understand when people talk about their unitive experiences, about God or the Tao or whatever; it makes sense, because I think I've had an experience of the non-duality they're talking about. I feel like the experience has carried me further in my spiritual journey.

Lately, though, I've been questioning that outlook. It's not just that, after the experience, my spiritual life became a disaster. It did. I began to take drugs more compulsively, looking to recapture the experience. I kind of re-captured it when I did so. The bliss was nowhere near as intense, and the unitive insight definitely wasn't as clear, but the basic themes were the same: we are all One, that One is God, there is meaning and purpose behind life etc, etc. In fact, I became bored with drugs as a result of the fact that I was never really able to repeat the experience. Didn't stop taking them, for quite a while, but definitely got bored with the repetition.

More insidious and dangerous, though, was the pride with which I began to bloat. The experience gave me some insights, sure, but I took those insights to be the end-all and be-all of the spiritual path. I started to think I had the answers – all of them – so that when other people around me raised legitimate spiritual questions, I figured that I already had them answered.

(I just realized I'm saying all this in the past tense, but that's not accurate – I still do most, if not all, of these things)

I also started to think that the insights I had entitled me to something. For example, a few months after having the experience, I was lucky enough to meet the Dalai Lama. Before meeting him, I had visions in my head of him seeing me, of the two of us exchanging laughing, knowing glances, of sharing some sort of 'special connection' with the man. Didn't happen. I spent all of two seconds shaking hands the (I swear) 4'8” fella before I was shunted off with a red cord and he moved down the line of Westerners. Some of the folks around me said that they saw this incredible aura around the guy, that they felt something huge and powerful move through them when he touched them, and I wondered what was wrong with me, why I felt nothing, why I got left out.

So I decided that the folks around me were spiritual bobble-heads who saw auras around anybody. They didn't really understand.

Time passed, and the situation didn't get any better, really. I went to a college that sees regular visits from all sorts of spiritual gurus, masters, lamas, rimpoches, yogis, what-not, and I worked as a sound engineer for these people, running their events from 'back-stage'. Some part of me, I bet, was thinking that they would notice me, and although I have no memory of it I'm sure that I had fantasies of being trotted out by them as their successor, their equal, in terms of my spiritual development.

That experience wasn't all bad, really, because I did notice something about all the gurus, which was the fact that most of them were really pretty simple, ordinary, down-to-earth people. The only noticeable difference between them and 'normal' people was that they seemed more relaxed, like they were enjoying life a bit more than average. They seemed a little happier. But that was about it. Some of them were even a little neurotic, a little bit crazy, a little bit un-guru-like. One – I'll refrain from naming names unless you ask me personally – made a pretty wild demand on me and was unhappy when I wasn't able to fulfill it, which seemed kinda mean-spirited.

I noticed the gurus' followers more so. They seemed patently crazy. They were more likely to make wild demands, and would throw temper-tantrums when I either couldn't or wouldn't fulfill them (I'm not about to allow fire in my space, especially when I have only two staff for 500 people in a 350-capacity building). I remember – distinctly – not wanting to be like those nut-jobs. I felt more in common with the gurus than I did with their disciples. By far.

Of course, I chalked that up to my mystical experience, my magic jewel that changed everything.

As time passed, I began a slow descent spiritually, socially, emotionally, morally. More and more – and more and more and more – I began to see myself as separate from, and better than, the people around me. As I did, I also felt increasingly lonely, because of course I had no equals. I got bored more easily, much more easily, because of course I already knew everything that was important to know in the first place. I got more and more frustrated with other people, especially when they wouldn't pay attention to my (entirely reasonable and perfectly sensible) advice. Didn't they understand how right I was? If only these people would do what I told them to do, everything would be fine!

Whatever joy, delight, wonder and compassion I had within began to flicker out. I started to go to bed at night with an unstated prayer that I wouldn't wake up, and a curse when I did. I snapped at people, I flew into uncontrolled and unprovoked rages and would come out of them wondering what the hell had just happened, only to bury the entire thing in a cloud of denial and misunderstanding.

All of this ended eventually. My life fell apart completely, and when one final piece gave way it was like the veil had been lifted and I saw what an absolute mess everything was, how horrendously I had destroyed my own life and, to some degree or another, bits and pieces of the lives of those around me.

I've been rebuilding, on a firmer foundation, ever since.

Well, I don't like the re-building metaphor; it's more like I'm squatting where there used to be some money-pit mansion I tried to build myself that collapsed, and instead now I'm sort of stewarding the land, letting whatever nature was there before reclaim it and helping it along by picking up the detritus of what's left and disposing of it properly. I'm trying to leave a smaller footprint now.

One of the pieces of that old life that I've left is the mystical experience. I've been loathe to pull it up because it meant so much to me, and it reminds me of God, the God that has made this entire new life possible. But I'm beginning to think it's time to uproot that experience once and for all.

The reason I value that experience – really the reason why – is that it felt good. I dare anyone to have the same feeling of infinite bliss that I did and not value it immensely, not think and try with all their might to recreate it, not to think “This is it! This is how I want – no, should – feel all the time.” But just because something feels good doesn't make it meaningful and valuable. Crack cocaine, heroin: by all accounts they feel really damned good, but that doesn't mean they are positive, beneficial experiences, it doesn't mean that we should feel that way all the time (or even any of the time). Trying to recreate the experience of crack cocaine or heroin, also, is seriously detrimental one's wellbeing, as well as the wellbeing of those around us, so why should a mystical experience be any different? Just because it is mystical? Just because in that moment we feel closer to God than we might at some other moment?

More-over, I've since found that some of my more valuable life experiences to be ones of pain. One of the things I lost in my downward spiral was a woman that I loved, truly and deeply loved. Losing that love – undoubtedly one of, if not the most, painful experiences I've had – has been vastly more useful because it broke me out of the spiral and started me on a newer, slower ascent. Not being able to rebuild my life afterwards has been horribly painful, but has forced me to relate to living differently, to value different things. I try to concentrate on process now, instead of results: live well, rather than have [possess] a good life.

I don't mean to imply, and hope you don't take me to mean, that pain is good. It isn't. I've had people tell me this, and all I can think in response is “... then you haven't really hurt before, have you?” I know why people say these things: they're scared of hurt, they want it to have some inherent meaning behind it because they can't stand the absurdity of suffering so they need to give it some sort of 'positive' spin. Believe me, I've done it myself, and still do it, though I'm trying my damnedest to outgrow the habit. I'm just saying that, looking back, I've gotten a lot more out of my painful experiences than I have out of the blissful ones.

Moreover, the mystical experience has created spiritual pride in me, which horrible: from what I understand, spiritual pride is one of the more difficult things of which to rid oneself. Like I mentioned, because of this mystical experience I've thought I was on par with a lot of spiritual masters. I've thought that I deserved other people listening to what I have to say on spiritual matters. I've thought I'm better than other people. Since my life is such a mess, though, and since I still lie and still cheat people of things I don't need but which they do, amongst many manifold other sins, I'm obviously no great master.

But then, neither are the masters. I'm inclined to trust my experience of them, the fact that they seemed so normal and average and not-at-all special. I'm especially inclined to trust one of the experiences where I felt that one of them was rude to me. I don't buy that 'gurus' are on some plane above us, necessarily more in tune with God or whatever. I don't believe for a second that they have gotten rid of their egos; at best, I think they've learned to live with their egos. I think they still make plenty of mistakes and do plenty of things wrongly; but maybe they've gotten past some of the grosser errors, maybe they're a little more familiar with their sinful natures, maybe they've even befriended some of their demons. Maybe, like Ram Dass said, they've become 'connoisseurs of [their] neuroses'.

So why follow them? Well, I dunno about you, but I'm no connoisseur of my neuroses. Yeah, I've gotten to know some of them pretty well, and I've learned to laugh at my own depravity a bit more and therefore take more compassion on this delicate little sinner I am, but I certainly wouldn't pretend to be familiar with my grosser defects of character, or – dare I say it – love them in spite of the pain they cause. I'm deathly afraid of my anger, my pride hurts my self-esteem, and I still bang on the prison-bars of neurotic fear, whining about when I'm going to be free even when the door is wide open. So I've still got something to learn from my elders.

What eats me up most about my spiritual pride, though, is that it has cut me off and still cuts me off from other people. My girlfriend, for instance: she's not a believer. Or maybe she is; I can't tell. The entire enterprise, I know, turns her off a lot of the time. My gut instinct with such people is to write them off as 'just not getting it', but I love her and that means I'm stuck with her. Which is a good thing, because she calls me on the bullshit I don't catch, which is to say, all of it. I'm sure she's fuming about something I've said here already, in fact.

Anyway, my spiritual pride definitely cuts me off from her now and then. I'll talk to her like one of the guys I teach, and she'll have to remind me that I'm not a teacher to her (and neither should I be acting like one to my guys). Or, more simply, she thinks that I feel better than her for having the spiritual life that I do, which my gut instinct is to deny but is probably true, and never fails to send me searching for ways that I'm acting out of pride on this level. I figure a really real spiritual person isn't likely to cause that sort of reaction in another. I could be entirely wrong, but I don't doubt I have at least some spiritual pride going on in me, and it can't hurt to hunt around for that to work with it.

The last thing I want is to be cut off from people – a real life, a good life, spiritual or not, should be one of real, deep and loving relationships with others, I would hope. If I'm setting myself apart from a whole lot of other people because I've had some experience that I think sets me apart from them, what's the point in that? It's lonely at the top, being all alone, being 'God'. You have no equals, no one with whom to share yourself.

Looking back, all in all, the experience hasn't been nearly as valuable as I want to believe it has been. So... time to hopefully finally let the damned thing go. I mean, I now want to let it go on some conscious level; whether other parts of my brain are going to let that happen, though, that's another story. I'm pretty sure that's why I was crying in Meeting on Sunday – I knew this moment was coming.

And of course, I'm doing all this because part of me thinks that doing is will earn me some 'spiritual maturity', which sounds rather nice and good to have. Really, I'm just trading one misconception about spirituality for another.

Which shows you just how little I really understand anything.