“Happiness consists in realizing it is all a great strange dream”
-Jack Kerouac
My history with entheogenic experiences originates in a bathtub sometime around 1975. I was about nine years old, and engaged in one of my favorite bath time rituals, submerging myself completely until just my nose pierced the surface, and then allowing the water to slowly drain. I was fascinated by the sensations and sounds of emergence that the ebbing water produced. 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 and was suddenly possessed with an incongruous sensation of disconnect. There was my toe… way down there, floating free… and yet I could move it, see it move, feel it move, and knew that this object seemingly free floating in space way over there was actually me and yet 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 somehow me. I became aware of the entire timeline of my life, and my body stretching out along that timeline backwards and forwards through time like a recurring wave or ripple, but at the same time I also became utterly present within 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 filling my awareness and overwhelming my senses and my mind with the primacy of *now*, *here*, *this* moment, *this* life. I felt suffused with a feeling of awe, wonder and profound joy at the realization that I am alive, and being alive felt like I had just won the lottery. I could hardly believe how fortunate I was to be present in that moment. In retrospect, it felt to me very much like one of the “cracks in time” we explored in the previous chapter.
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, as I had no words to explain or describe what had happened. In fact, it was not until recently as I’ve been writing this essay that I’ve finally tried to put words to this experience. Nevertheless, throughout the years since that first encounter, I’ve looked for opportunities to recover that sense of transcendent awareness and joy.
To the best of my knowledge, this earliest experience had nothing to do with caffeine, though as I mentioned earlier, we drank a lot of iced tea in my childhood, so I can’t completely discount this possibility. Regardless, this initial encounter had a profound effect on my sense of reality and my sense of self that has continued to affect my thinking and actions ever since. Perhaps it predisposed me to seek transcendent or “non-dual” experiences, and made me just a bit more likely to find them.
A year or two later, I sat alone, gazing up at the intricately carved wooden beams and stonework of St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church, illuminated by shimmering stained glass-tinted light, as I gratefully sipped the mug of powerfully sweetened, triple-bagged Lipton tea that was a favorite post-service treat from my childhood. In what I would years later recognize as a caffeine-induced trance, my eye followed the tracery of light and shadow through deeply etched stone and wood, and I felt the power of their art resonate in my bones as if they were carved by the hand of God Himself, who in turn was reaching His hand through them and into me, pulling me up into His creation, wondering at the beauty of man reflecting His divine grace in works of such devotion. I truly felt like this must be the most special place on Earth, and that I must be experiencing the presence of God in His house suffusing and possessing me. Although I repeated this visitation many Sunday afternoons thereafter, It would be decades before I made the connection between the experience and the beverage.
Throughout my teens and into my twenties, these experiences became ever more fleeting and infrequent. In my search for what now appeared to be a lost sense of enchantment, I traveled many roads. I spent many late-night hours at the piano, another gift of a childhood spent in a home that fostered artistic expression, engaged in meditative exploration of the chiaroscuro of tone, harmony, rhythm and discord that every once in a while provided a dim echo of the divine experience. I devoured authors like Richard Bach, Robert Persig and Benjamin Hoff, and later new physics writers like Deepak Chopra and Fritjof Capra, hoping to find deeper meaning by peeling back the layers of physical and mental reality. I put on my headphones and meditated to Yes, Vangelis, Rush and Led Zeppelin. I also began to explore the effects of alcohol and marijuana, and for a while became something of a devotee of Mr. Jack Daniels. I found solace in the earthy groundedness of paganism, and became a practicing Wiccan.
In my early twenties the woman I would soon marry introduced me to the teachings of Prem Rawat, a.k.a. Maharaji, and his simple message – “that which you are looking for is within you”. The more I listened to Maharaji speak, the more I wanted to tear away the illusions of my attachments and stories about myself to discover what was at my core, my “true self”. Right about this same time, I also became deeply inspired by the revolutionary call to freedom I found in the Beat writings of Jack Kerouac, Allan Ginsberg and William Burroughs. When my young and passionate marriage came to a dramatic end, I renounced the trappings of my life, sold or trashed nearly everything I owned, put the rest in a backpack, and hit the road.
In July,1995, the road hit back. While attending the Willie Clancy music festival in Miltown Malbay on the west coast of Ireland, I was walking alone on a dark road headed back to my campsite on Spanish Point when I had a brief, though poignant encounter with a fast moving vehicle. The experience left my body shattered. I spent six weeks in the hospital (thank you, socialized Irish medicine!), and it took me a year to teach myself how to walk properly again. But something else happened in those hours following the accident that would once again inform my quest for transcendence and healing long after my physical wounds had healed.
During the three days following the accident, my awareness shimmered between my ordinary waking state and an awareness of a state of being that, for lack of any better description I’ll call “elsewhere”. In the space of elsewhere I experienced being alive and present very much as I do in my ordinary waking state, that is to say I had a physical body and interacted with other people and places in ways that are familiar. However, my experience of time was highly compressed, and the experiences of many years passed in the space of a few moments of “ordinary” time. The experience was more real than dreaming, but lacked the experience of “dreaming awake” I associate with lucid dreams.
During my time in elsewhere, I lived three successive lifetimes, each separated by an interlude at the scene of the accident. In the first lifetime, the accident proved fatal, and I died on the road within a few minutes after the impact. In the second lifetime, the accident resulted in only minor injuries. I spent a night in the hospital, was released the next day and went on to meet up in Galway with a friend I’d been traveling with. We followed the rough plan we’d previously worked out together to find work at the Edinburgh Theatre Festival, then went on to Morocco. There we quickly found ourselves on the wrong end of a scam that involved framing us for a drug deal, and ended up first in Moroccan prison, and then on the streets attempting to work off our end of the “deal” through a life spent in an ever descending spiral of hair-raising adventures and petty crime, wherein I eventually died of a heroin overdose in prison a few years later. In the third lifetime, my injuries were life threatening, but not fatal, and required a long, slow and intensely painful recovery over several years. During that time, I returned to Seattle, met up with a group of friends I’d left behind, and together started an artists’ cooperative that produced films, books and plays. There were other experiences in this life, but during my time elsewhere, I never saw the end of it.
Pain was the first thing I remember noticing when I woke. Lying with my eyes closed, my head throbbing powerfully and incessantly from somewhere that seemed deep within and in several places around the front, back and sides, I mentally scanned my body, and could find no part of myself that didn’t hurt. Opening my eyes slowly against what felt like piercing light, one of the first things I saw beside my bed was the flute I’d carried with me nearly everywhere and played for years, now lying in shattered splinters. I turned my head to look down at my body and found it in a similar state, swaddled in blankets and bloody bandages, an IV hanging from an insertion in my left arm. Any further movement was out of the question.
I inhaled, slowly, as deeply as I could, and gave thanks. An echo or ghost of that sense of gratitude has stuck with me ever since.
After I returned to the States, I indeed helped to found and work with the artist’s collective from my vision. While traveling, I had learned the techniques of meditation taught by Maharaji known as “Self Knowledge” (or simply “Knowledge” as it was called then), and continued to practice, albeit inconsistently. I felt something in Maharaji’s words and teachings pointing me towards the inner home I was seeking, and yet it still felt out of reach. I attended many community video events to hear Maharaji speak (there was no YouTube yet), and often left them feeling lighter, inspired by Prem Rawat’s words, and occasionally would feel something of an echo of the lightness of being I remembered from childhood, but never in my meditations was I able to find a lasting sense of peace, of “home”.
Right around this time, a friend introduced me to the work of Landmark Worldwide – or Landmark Education as it was known then. Like many, I was quite hesitant to jump into the work of personal transformation taught at Landmark, as my first exposures to the company and their coursework left me with something like a “cultish” vibe, and I was suspicious that something nefarious or exploitative was happening that I couldn’t quite put my finger on. Yet one of the promises of the work was to restore the power of my childhood mind to create and recreate my life spontaneously. This gave me hope that I might somehow find my way back to nine-year-old me’s experience of presence and joy that I longed for. This was enough to get me to at least temporarily suspend my misgivings, and I enrolled in their premier course, known as The Landmark Forum.
Over the next three years, I went on to complete several other courses at Landmark, and even went to work for the company for a brief time. During my time at Landmark, my inner work of uncovering and discovering the self became entwined with the coursework I helped to support, and that of the other people, both staff and students, with whom I shared a common cause to create and live a life transformed by the new possibilities for humanity envisioned by our work together. It was tremendously inspiring and deeply valuable work that informs nearly every aspect of my life to this day. However, as I became more deeply involved in the work as a staff member, I realized that, as valuable as this work was to me, my longing for joy and search for an experience of transcendence seemed at least as far away as it ever had been, perhaps even farther. I knew that continuing as a staff member would mean giving over most of my life energy to the work of transformation as conceived by Landmark, and I saw that this was no longer an appropriate avenue for me. So, I left.
Meanwhile, throughout all this time and all my travels, I maintained my daily caffeine ritual. Usually this was in the form of coffee or tea, though often enough I found my drug of choice via one of the major cola brands. I will admit that for a brief period during my early 20s, a frequent breakfast consisted of a can of Pepsi and a Snickers bar. I don’t recall any of these experiences as being anything quite like what I’d call “entheogenic”. Sure, the combined caffeine, dopamine and sugar rush were a reliable source of temporary pleasure and, as Pollan calls it, “baseline maintenance,” but my relationship to this feeling was that it was just what I needed to “jump start” my morning (or afternoon, or evening, or nighttime revel) and get me in the right frame of mind to submit myself to whatever form of labor I had chosen to subject myself to for the day.
This all changed shortly after I arrived at Breitenbush Hot Springs. I landed at Breitenbush in 2004, fresh out of Landmark. In fact, I left my job at the Houston Landmark Center, sold everything I owned that wouldn’t fit in my car (thank you again, Kerouac), and drove pretty much straight to Breitenbush, where a working interview was set to begin the day after I arrived. I longed to see the stars at night, to breathe clean air, and move a bit more slowly, with more time to spend hiking, being with friends, or just doing nothing at all. Breitenbush provided an antithesis to the power-driven, sun baked, concrete and asphalt experience that dominated most of my time in Houston. It was to be my ideal retreat, at least for a while.
Within my first year of living at Breitenbush, several things happened concurrently. First, I lost 50Lbs. My past year behind a desk at Landmark and a diet of mostly fast food (including, still the occasional soda and snickers) had taken its toll. Now that my commute consisted of a ¼ mile hike through the woods, my meals shifted to an all-vegetarian organic diet, and my workday was interspersed with trips to the sauna, my body shifted quickly.
Another profound shift was that time changed. My days at Landmark were rigorously managed around producing extraordinary results, and given my propensity for distraction, my manager at one point had me report my progress to her every 15 minutes to ensure that I was doing what I said I would do. Conversely, at Breitenbush I worked largely independently, set my own hours, and was mostly free to work as I wished as long as I completed what needed to be done. I doubt this lack of structure would be ideal for everyone, but for me it was heavenly. I ended up moving far more easily and gracefully through my days, while managing to get far more done, and with more free time to do as I pleased.
The third shift is more difficult to quantify. To put it simply, I felt safe – possibly for the first time since I was a child. I lived in community housing, and thus paid no rent or mortgage. Food was freely available, as leftovers from the meals we made for our guests were typically plentiful, and beyond that we maintained a company store stocked with organic ingredients purchased in bulk and at a substantial discount leveraged by the volume discounts enjoyed by the cooperative. Thus, I felt largely free from the subtle tyranny of capitalism and its mandate to constantly produce, constantly earn the right to simply stay in one place.
Most of the community housing had no locks on the doors, and we didn’t need them. Theft within the community, while not entirely unknown, was exceedingly rare. We worked together, cooked together, partied together and soaked naked together in a small village where we relied on each other for all of the essential services needed to sustain life. We generated our own electricity, heat and drinking water, paid the bills, took care of our own septic system, maintained the roads, shoveled snow, cooked food, birthed babies, cared for our sick, in some cases through death, held each other through sadness and celebrated each other’s joys, all of us (or at least most of us) unified by the purpose of service enshrined in our Credo, “to provide a sacred healing retreat and conference center that promotes holistic health, spiritual growth, and brings people together in celebration of the experience of life”.
In this space of solace, safety and sacred service, I soon noticed a gradual shift in my daily caffeine ritual. For one thing, I no longer needed a “welcome lift” to motivate me for my day, and I rarely had to rush to work, so I was also able to take my time and simply enjoy coffee for what it was, decoupled from any imposed need for energy, endurance, increased cognition or social stimulation. In the cozy space of the community kitchen, I slowed down, rested, and discovered, perhaps for the first time since childhood, a space where I felt safe to simply… be.
It was from within this set and setting that experiences like the sunlit dance of the leaf began to emerge. And as they became more frequent, I began to notice that throughout my day, hours after the initial effects of the caffeine “buzz” had worn off, I would catch momentary “echoes” of the joy and bliss I felt during my morning coffee. Sometimes these spontaneous feelings would be startling or powerful enough that I would stop, close my eyes and breathe into the feeling of warmth and joy that rose up and coursed through my body.
It was during such moments that I began to sense something else that is again difficult to describe, but it was like a “presence” within my being. I could say that I “felt it in my heart”, though that is not entirely accurate. Closer would be to say that it came through my breath as if my breath were a vehicle, and sort of centered in my chest, but suffusing my being – not necessarily my “body” per say, but my “being” – my awareness of being alive, being conscious, felt magnified, simultaneously more tangible and yet lighter, freer, and was accompanied by a sense of peacefulness and fulfillment. I became convinced that this was the identical feeling I had been looking for through meditation, but which now came spontaneously and without preamble or conscious effort on my part.
I began to look for these moments and cultivate my awareness of them, taking time to breathe into, recognize, acknowledge and give thanks for the experience whenever it happened. Eventually these fleeting “interstitial” experiences seemed to leave a permanent impression. At any given moment I could turn my awareness within -towards my experience of being, or rather, towards the place from which my experience of being appears to me to emanate, and feel a deep sense of presence, or “here-ness” that remained constant, despite any other thoughts, feelings or sensations I experienced. That feeling remains with me to this day, and is an ongoing source of comfort, peace, solace and happiness.
These moments of presence, awareness, beauty, truth, Love, acceptance, and “here-ness” feel to me like direct descendents of the visitation of “here-ness” I first experienced in the bath back in 1975. I am also absolutely certain that my awareness of these perceptions has been augmented, amplified and attuned by the chemical and energetic interactions of caffeine in my body.
In other words, as the Oromo, Sufis, Swedenborg and perhaps many others have experienced, my single shot of espresso in the morning, lovingly and meticulously crafted, and the deep amber black tea I drink nearly every afternoon have come to provide me with an experience of union or unity (some might use the word atonement) with the divine and with the world. They have become the sacrament in my personal celebration of Communion.