Dawning

My history with both entheogenic experiences and non-dualism originates in a mystical vision. It happened in a clawfoot bathtub in a neo-Victorian house in Pittsburgh sometime around 1975. I was about nine years old.

One of my favorite bath time rituals involved submerging myself underwater completely until just my nose protruded above the surface. I would enjoy the transformation of sounds and feelings as long as I could, and then allow the water to slowly drain.

Resting in this womb of water was my entrance into another world wherein some senses were suppressed, and others augmented. My hearing seemed to extend far beyond the bounds of the bathroom. I could hear the muffled tones of voices, footfalls, my mother unloading dishes in the pantry, rain on the roof and the intimate details of life throughout the house, unavailable through my normal senses, now telegraphed through beams and bones into my secret sanctuary. As well, my attention was captivated by each breath, heartbeat and unidentifiable creak and gurgle of my own organic, living form. These meditative moments awakened my sense of enchantment every time.

Even as I eagerly anticipated the sensations and sounds of the shedding cloak of ebbing water, I typically waited to pull the drain tab for as long as I could bear the ever-growing chill of the water around me, reluctant to withdraw again to the default world.

But this time, as I stretched my foot out to flip the drain valve, I happened to catch sight of my toe emerging at the end of the tub. At that moment I was suddenly possessed with an incongruous sensation of disconnect. There was my toe… way down there, floating free. I could move it, see it move, feel it move, and knew that this object, seemingly free floating far away in space was actually me.  But also it was simultaneously separate and clearly not me. In that instant of cognitive discord, I realized that nothing I was seeing or feeling was actually me. And yet somehow all of it was me.

What happened next is difficult to describe with words. In his famous book “Flatland”, author Edwin Abbot Abbot describes the adventures of a two-dimensional square-shaped character. “Square” visits other realms such as one-dimensional “Pointland” and three-dimensional “Spaceland”. Their attempts to convey the experience of a third dimension to their peers back in Flatland fail. They have no meaningful reference that would enable them to understand concepts like “up”. This story provides a close approximation of my difficulty trying to describe the intense disintegration and blossoming that happened next.

In a way, it was like I was turned inside out. My usual sense of “I” or “me” disappeared altogether. What was present in the space formerly occupied by my awareness of self was… much bigger. This bigger awareness seemed to be everywhere and in every time all at once. Or at perhaps just many places and many times. My memory is unclear.

The blossoming of this”bigger self” was like a sudden awareness of the entire timeline of my life, and of every point of my body stretching out along that timeline backwards and forwards like a recurring wave or ripple. As awareness of this vast experience of being arose, it was accompanied by something like thought/feeling resonating like a great bell tolling the sound, “I AM”. And as it rang, my default sense of “me” re-emerged, subsuming or sublimating the presence of “bigger self”.

As “normal” awareness re-asserted itself I became utterly present, focused, and keenly aware of the totality of this moment. My body, the water, the bath, the house around me, the ivy on the wall outside the window gently fluttering in the summer breeze, the noises of my family moving about in distant rooms, the sound and feeling of my heartbeat and breath, all filled my awareness with utter clarity, and overwhelmed my senses and my mind with the primacy of *now*, *here*, *this* moment, *this* life.

The experience seemed like a compression of vast, all-encompassing awareness into a hyper-aware concentration of awareness into *this* moment. I felt suffused with a feeling of awe, wonder and profound joy at the realization, “I am ALIVE”. And being alive in this body felt like I had just won the lottery. I could hardly believe how fortunate I was to be present and embodied in that moment. I felt as if “I” had been waiting for this moment for a very long time. But also like this had happened many, many times before, and was nonetheless the most important event ever.

As waves of joy and peace moved through me, my awareness “shimmered” back and forth through “big awareness” and “normal awareness”. This felt like aftershocks from an earthquake, or harmonics resonating from the first strike of a bell. These diminished in both intensity and duration through each successive crest and trough of the passing waves.

The whole experience probably lasted only a minute or two. But the state of lambent joy it left behind continued through bedtime and persisted, gradually diminishing over the ensuing days. I knew that this experience was extraordinary and special. And yet I didn’t share it with anyone at the time. I had no words to explain or describe what had happened. In fact, it was not until recently that I’ve finally tried to put words to this experience. Nevertheless, since that first encounter I’ve looked for opportunities to recover that sense of transcendent awareness and joy.

Of necessity, words objectify experience. To describe something is to attribute to it the qualities of a separate object. There was nothing objective about “my” experience of “bigger self”. How can one describe a thing that is not a thing without making it into a thing? Even to call it an experience is to establish a boundary or frame that is inaccurate.

In what I am trying to describe, time as an experience of sequential moments no longer existed. Rather, time was more like a dimension of space, though calling it that is also insufficient. Within the context of “bigger awareness” all sense of space and separateness was meaningless. Whatever it is that I could call “me” was, at least intermittently, not present. One might reasonably ask how it is that “me” was not present, and yet somehow I can report the experience. I have no way to resolve this paradox. Thus, any words I use must act as pointers towards an experience that is entirely beyond description.

I think if there had been someone else present in the room watching and interviewing me or monitoring my thoughts as “bigger awareness” arose and subsumed, they would have witnessed something like a quantum state change. In one moment there was me without the knowledge or experience of “bigger awareness”. In the next moment there was me with that knowledge and experience. And yet, in the zero time and zero space that the change took place, an entire storyline of experience bloomed in my awareness that I can, post facto, recall and attempt to describe.

My memory of this experience shimmers in the background of my being, not so much steering my life as informing it, subtly, from the back row of the audience of awareness that views the contents of my experience. Since that time, I haven’t been able to quite fully believe in the reality presented by my senses. I have a persistent sense that the universe is up to something behind the scenes. I was also left with a strong conviction that everyone, everything and everywhere is God – that there is nothing that isn’t God. 

For all of my life since that moment, I’ve sought a religion, philosophy or framework that accurately reflects this knowledge, without a lot of dogmatic or religious baggage.  Failing to find one, I began to try and describe a view of the universe that made sense to me. I described the universe and everything in it as a vast ocean of being, and each of us as atoms of water or waves of compressed water moving through the ocean, which itself was really God. But I lacked the language to resolve the inherent paradoxes of this view. I eventually came to believe that each conscious individual was a limited expression of God looking at itself. “We are the universe getting to know itself.”  

It wasn’t until 2022 when, at 56 years old, that I stumbled upon the recordings of Alan Watts faithfully preserved by his son Mark. Here, Finally, was an expression of reality that matched my own. I began devouring his podcasts at every opportunity. Soon I had some words to put on the framework of this new understanding: Vedanta, Advita, and Non-dualism.

A Google search for these terms led me pretty much straight to Rupert Spira. Soon afterwards, I found Amoda Maa, David McDonald, Terrence Stephens and many others. More recently, I’ve begun reaching out via venues like this blog. I feel incredibly fortunate to finally be finding language to express these views. Likewise, I’m grateful for a nascent, growing community of people who share them.

And I’ve begun writing a book. Did you know that coffee is the world’s most popular psychoactive drug? Did you also know that human’s use of coffee has had a profound impact on our social and technological development? “The Tears of Waaqa: How Coffee Saves The World. Again.” traces our coffee habit back to its profoundly mystical roots in Southwest Ethiopia and reveals an alchemical message encrypted deep within. Given that we will lose over half of the cultivatable land for growing cafea arabica by 2050, time is running out for us to unlock this message. Once we do, our morning brew, and indeed our relationship to our true selves may be forever transformed.