For 500 years, humans have harnessed the psychoactive potential of caffeine to power the engines of creativity, society, art, science, industry, commerce, and politics, bringing about revolutionary progress in nearly every field of human endeavor. But in our outward-facing quest for fulfillment we have overlooked the source of true and long lasting joy, and our achievements, while laudable, have left many with a sense of lack, and a haunting conviction that something fundamental is missing or perhaps lost.
In the preceding pages, I’ve pointed out some of the most conspicuous costs of this disconnect: environmental devastation, loss of meaning and purpose, social separation and spiritual depredation. And like many before me, I’ve also attempted to re-direct our attention back towards the true source of our fulfillment. What perhaps makes my case novel is my assertion that our journey home might be expedited by the same fuel that helped get us here.
As I write this, humanity appears to be perched on something of a precipice, and many express a feeling of impending, possibly dramatic, possibly cataclysmic change. I count myself among them. My time spent in the loving embrace of my allies has left me with some impressions of this time and of these changes that I feel compelled to share.
I am smitten with being. I am in Love with being an apparently localized finite awareness embodied in a limited physical form that experiences time, death, beauty, love, despair, hate, pain, joy, touch, breath, music, desolation, loneliness, connection and so much more. It is my considered opinion that being alive as a human being is the best game ever invented.
Of course, I also suffer. I want to talk about suffering for a moment. I believe suffering is distinct from pain. In my view, pain is inevitable, suffering is optional. Suffering is a story I tell myself about the world, and that story is pernicious, self-replicating and sticky, like a tar-baby. My story of suffering is an indicator of the difference between how the universe actually is, and how I think it ought to be. As long as I am stuck in a story that things should be different than they are, I am suffering. Said another way, suffering is like the opposite of acceptance.
A lot of what I’ve learned about spirituality and enlightenment appears to point to an end of or transcendence of suffering as its primary function or goal. The general idea is that via mediation, focused awareness, yoga or similar practice, one becomes aware of one’s true nature and the nature of the universe, and in so doing, the function or need for suffering diminishes and eventually disappears altogether.
I first became “aware” in that bathtub when I was 9 years old, and continued to return to that awareness through many of the experiences I reported above. But despite having embarked on adventures of awareness, I don’t experience myself as being anything like “enlightened”. Awake? Perhaps. Aware? Maybe. But despite knowing at my core that my true fundamental, indivisible self is synonymous with the self of the entire universe and everything and every living being within it, despite experiencing in my body that there is no difference between me and everything around me, and all of it is one and the same, despite having experienced egoless freedom and the knowledge that ego itself is an illusion, I don’t believe that knowing or experiencing these things makes me particularly special or extraordinary. Quite the contrary, experiencing myself as timeless and infinite Awareness, indistinguishable from the unified wholeness of everything seems like the most fundamental, simple and obvious thing possible to know.
Knowing these things and fostering that awareness has not made me a better person. I have not become any more or less compassionate, reverent, or peaceful. I haven’t become a monk, bodhisattva or guru. And I haven’t stopped suffering. What I have done is fall in love with it. I mean all of it. In my view, love, suffering, joy, pain, connection, loss, and all of the drama and pathos of living is, as I say, the very best game ever invented. But more than that, I have come to believe that all of that activity is actually the very point of existence. The adventures of illusory differentiated and limited awareness and all the drama those adventures convey is the fundamental function of the universe, and the reason for anything to exist at all.
When I contemplate the apparent history of the universe, I see that billions of years of iterative creation have produced ever finer and more complex expressions of possibility. From my view, the action of the universe appears to be to explore every possible avenue of creation with intense focus towards the realization of conscious awareness. The purpose of creation appears to be to become aware of itself as the universe, as fast as possible. If I were to anthropomorphize that activity, I might say that the universe appears to be fundamentally curious about itself.
The most highly developed expression of that curiosity that I am aware of is human beings. Our awareness, our lives, are the activity of the universe becoming aware of itself. This may seem like an overly grandiose statement or hubris, but you can easily prove it to yourself in the space of a few seconds by answering the following questions: Are you a part of the universe? Are you aware of yourself? Are you aware of the universe around you? QED. To paraphrase Alan Watts, we are each of us portals through which the universe looks into itself. And to quote Rupert Spira, “Awareness is that within which everything occurs, through which everything is known, and from which everything is made.”
Given that the universe has gone to all this trouble to create the possibility for limited localized consciousness, it seems to me that the highest expression of life is to experience it as thoroughly and completely as I am able… and give that experience to the universe, willingly and without reservation. Said another way, I believe that the function of the spiritual path, the activity of enlightenment is not to end suffering nor even to transcend it, but rather to embrace it and fall madly in love.
That is not to say that we stop feeling pain nor even that we stop feeling miserable and sorry for ourselves sometimes, but rather that we allow ourselves to experience those feelings completely and wholly, while deep down inside knowing that we are going through all of this drama as part of the game of the universe, that we are playing out our role in service to the fundamental curiosity of creation. From this perspective our suffering is a prayer as sacred as our joy and as valuable as our bliss.
Which brings me back to the precipice upon which we find ourselves, and the entheogenic experience of caffeine that might help us find our way home. Humans are, as far as I know, the only species on Earth that can choose to evolve consciously. Standing here, possibly on the brink of self-inflicted extinction, we can consciously exercise our power to evolve. We can choose to foster awareness of our true selves, and entheogens can, when used with intention, assist us in our journey towards self-knowing.
My personal caffeine-fueled adventure down the non-dual, “direct path” of self-knowledge is an ongoing work in progress, and I don’t expect it will be to everyone’s liking. The direct path offers me the clearest, simplest expression of essential truth I’ve ever found, and my ability to see that path clearly appears to be facilitated by my particular chemical sensitivities, as well as by my apparent predisposition for profound experiences of beauty, truth and love, particularly while under the influence of caffeine. Yet even though this exploration has been uniquely my own, I strongly suspect I am not unique in any of these regards, and that others following different paths may also find caffeine to be a surprisingly potent ally on their inward journey, if only they take the time to shift their relationship to the ally, and change the way they use the tool.
Do we need caffeine, or for that matter any drug, to help us out of the constellation of messes into which we’ve gotten ourselves? Of course not. But arguably we didn’t need them to get us here in the first place, either. It’s just as likely that even without the profound influence coffe has had on the trajectory of our development, our innate curiosity and creativity would have inevitably brought us to the brink of our own destruction anyway, though perhaps at much reduced speed that may have allowed us more time to consider the consequences of our actions. Regardless, here we are, running headlong into disaster, assisted by our chemical crutches, who will just as dispassionately assist us into either oblivion or enlightenment, as we choose. I advocate for consciousness.
And if we do choose to foster a deep relationship with the joy that is the essence of our being, why not seek the assistance of the allies with whom we’ve already partnered so successfully on our outward journey? That the outward journey has been fraught with unintended consequences and peril should not be considered the fault of our allies, but ought more accurately be traced to our own unconscious relationship to them, the remedy of which will be addressed by the very inward journey I and many others advise us to undertake. And just as with our voyage of discovery in the external world, while we don’t need entheogens to realize our dreams, we can nonetheless partner with them as powerful aids to speed the journey.
Given the state of things, it seems we have little time to waste.