EVERYTHING
IS
EVERYTHING
but, you know this
I. It is a terrifying experience to have your consciousness transformed
From: “The Power of Myth” by Joseph Campbell
CAMPBELL: […] The old-time religion belongs to another age, another people, another set of human values, another universe. By going back you throw yourself out of sync with history. Our kids lose their faith in religions that were taught to them, and they go inside.
MOYERS: Often with the help of a drug.
CAMPBELL: Yes. The mechanically induced mystical experience is what you have there. I have attended a number of psychological conferences dealing with this whole problem of the difference between the mystical experience and the psychological crack-up. The difference is that the one who cracks up is drowning in the water in which the mystic swims. You have to be prepared for this experience.
MOYERS: You talk about this peyote culture emerging and becoming dominant among Indians as a consequence of the loss of the buffalo and their earlier way of life.
CAMPBELL: […] Recently anthropologists studied a group of Indians in northwestern Mexico who live within a few miles of a major area for the natural growth of peyote. Peyote is their animal—that is to say, they associate it with the deer. And they have very special missions to go collect peyote and bring it back.
[…]Then they come to the threshold of the adventure. There are special shrines that represent stages of mental transformation on the way. And then comes the great business of collecting the peyote. The peyote is killed as though it were a deer. They sneak up on it, shoot a little arrow at it, and the perform the ritual of collecting the peyote.
The whole things is a complete duplication of the kind of experience that is associated with the inward journey, when you leave the outer world and come into the realm of spiritual beings. They identify each little stages as a spiritual transformation. They are in a sacred place all the way.
MOYERS: Why do they make such an intricate process out of it?
CAMPBELL: Well, it has to do with the peyote being not simply a biological, mechanical, chemical effect but one of spiritual transformation. If you undergo a spiritual transformation and have not had preparation for it, you do not know how to evaluate what has happened to you, and you get the terrible experience of a bad trip, as they used to call it with LSD. If you know where you are going, you won’t have a bad trip.
MOYERS: So this is why it is a psychological crisis if you are drowning in the water where—
CAMPBELL: —where you ought to be able to swim, but you weren’t prepared. That is true of the spiritual life, anyhow. It is a terrifying experience to have your consciousness transformed.
2. Everything is Everything
“Everything is everything,” was the first conscious thought I had when I drank ayahuasca some time ago. (Peyote is often called “grandpa,” ayahuasca is grandma.) When the words, everything is everything, first floated into my brain, I was suddenly made aware that despite the sensation of dreaming, I was actually wide awake.
“Everything is everything” sounds a bit worthless, like saying “It is what it is,” and maybe my “epiphany” was the intense nature of the hallucinogen and nothing else. But in the moment, I understood that all things are incredibly complex in a next-level-for-me way that is impossible to express beyond insisting upon it.
Simple ideas deepen when your brain’s neurons fire under the influence of mind-altering substances. Like the fabric of a dream, certain scenarios come prepackaged with rules that are simply understood by the dreamer, even if they don’t make logical sense or seem to have any rational genesis when relayed. Like this dream I had about me and my friend: We were playing volleyball with a drill bit of all things, and we knew that if we let it touch the ground that we would unleash hell on earth. I don’t know why we had to play with something as likely for us to drop as a drill bit and I’m not sure why hell on earth was in our hands. But those were the rules and I knew them the moment I became aware of the image of us playing with the drill bit.
Likewise, during my aya ceremony, I knew that I needed to cycle through certain scenarios, pushing the visions a step farther each time they recurred, and then, when the music started to climax, I was supposed to sit up and puke while saying goodbye. I don’t know why these were the rules, they just were. Nobody laid them out for me, but it was glaringly obvious that I had this particular mission.
I can still conjure up a warm feeling I had at the ceremony that I knew was the collective love of everyone I’ve loved, and I can feel the experience of my realizations, though I have not yet found language for them. I can call upon the dangerous and new sensations I had when I neared my limits. I can even recall what it was to see the past, present and future all at once, even though I’m not sure that’s what I experienced. I suppose I don’t have to make sense of it for anyone (god, but I want to!), because it makes perfect sense to me.
When my eyes were closed, I had visions of the desert, snakes, hiking trails, and a multicolored man sitting cross-legged opposite me. I later learned my “visions” were commonplace images that occur for many, many people. How can so many people see the same thing? Do we all have a neuron for snakes that aya fires?
When my eyes were open, everything was everything. I could see geometric lines of energy (again, a very normal thing to see) that connected everyone and everything in my immediate surroundings. I understood that what I could see was only a very small part of everything. The common belief that we are only small specks in the universe was made concrete in my aya state. I could see how that worked and how I could bring that level of consciousness to everything I did moving forward.
I was certain that everyone near me was pulling for me, that it was in their best interest to pull for me, specifically, and that everyone’s experience was about me. The music was there to make me purge, specifically — how could it not be, the way it punctuated my every thought, my every feeling, my every physical sensation. It had to be constructed with only me in mind the way it was helping me cycle through the many phases of letting go and of saying goodbye that compelled me ever forward. The man purging next to me was purging for me, teaching me, as much as he was purging for himself, as much as my inability to purge was his inability, as much as him teaching me must have been his learning, too.
Everyone in that room felt that way, I imagine — connected and separate. I was having an entirely individual experience and a shared experience at the same time. The lines I saw, the many layers of my vision might be why so many people talk about other dimensions when they talk about ayahuasca.
Bringing this consciousness to my life has complicated it in a way that has been rewarding. It makes it a huge challenge for me to simplify anything. The vast nature of a singular entity overwhelms me. And yet, despite all the learning and feeling and vibing, I still feel compelled to write nonfiction. You might think this thought is disparate from what I was just talking about, but it’s not.
III. Full Circle
I’ve been reading Joseph Campbell lately, “The Power of Myth,” because Pete Holmes talks about so often on his podcast. It’s incredible. I highly recommend it. It came in handy when I was recently consoling a friend on devastating loss, it was a book I used to mend a bridge with someone who I miss so much, I connected with Voldemort over it — a miracle unto itself, it contextualized my aya experience in a quite literal way, and it directly comments on my medium: creative nonfiction.
Professor Blastoff interviewed Pete Holmes about God, and though Pete didn’t hammer in his Campbell obsession too much, he did bring up myth a lot. Then, on You Made it Weird, Pete interviewed David Vanderveen and Larry Charles and more mythology came up with both. In fact, Larry Charles told Pete that he might like Joseph Campbell, which was funny considering Pete’s nonstop Campbell talk, while Vanderveen is some breed of alt Christian who doesn’t get freaked out by equating Christianity and mysticism. I’ve been inundated with this particular conversation.
In addition to all of this, a friend of mine was doing a fellowship in New Zealand. One of his blogs encouraged me to send him a selection from “The Power of Myth.” I typed it out for him, but for you, I found a handy PDF (starting on page 112 of the PDF linked above). You can read it all there, but the below chunk, taken a touch out of context, is what got my wheels turning.
Now, one of the main problems of mythology is reconciling the mind to this brutal precondition of all life, which lives by the killing and eating of lives. You don’t kid yourself by eating only vegetables, either, for they, too, are alive. So the essence of life is this eating of life itself! Life lives on lives, and the reconciliation of the human mind and sensibilities to that fundamental fact is one of the functions of some of those very brutal rites in which the ritual consists chiefly of killing — in imitation, as it were, of that first, primordial crime, out of which arose this temporal world, in which we all participate. The reconciliation of mind to the conditions of life is fundamental to all creation stories. They’re very like each other in this respect.
Everything is everything that came before it.
Bike Boy gave me “The Yage Letters” by Burroughs and Ginsberg (yage = aya). I am only getting started, but I will say, I’m glad I didn’t have to go through what Burroughs did to have an aya journey. Bike Boy has no yage experience, but I’m a magnet for the subject. What resonates most about him, for me, is where we intersect.
One morning Bike Boy insisted I listen to a country singer he’s recently become obsessed with. He gave me his phone to watch a video as he made me insta-coffee (Bike Boy loves all things blue collar, even though I’m not sure that’s his destiny…) and eggs. He lives in Swanzia and makes moonshine that we drank the night before while lightly spraying with a hose the junkyard dogs that live next store to him and never stop barking. Anyway, I was listening to Sturgill Simpson sing “Turtles All the Way Down,” trying hard to engage even though I’m not a huge country-music fan. The melody was lulling and his voice was pleasing, and so I allowed myself to drift with it, though I wasn’t absorbing much. Then old Sturgill said this: “There’s a gateway in our mind that leads somewhere out there beyond this plane, where reptile aliens made of light cut you open and pull out all your pain. Tell me how you make illegal something that we all make in our brain. Some say you might go crazy, but then again, it might make you go sane.” Check him out here: http://youtu.be/LWx6csgGkg4. I’m pretty sure he is talking about DMT, right? That’s the thing we all make in our brains.
As if this isn’t enough connecting, Marc Maron interviewed Dr. Drew Pinsky and they lingered on the current public-health crisis (the subject of my book), while also talking about how drug addiction creates the mythology that, carnally, we are searching for because our society no longer offers us mythology that makes sense. I mean, you’re really gonna have to read Campbell to fully engage with me on this one. But, in a nutshell, Campbell argues that while religion (including mythology) did not keep up with societal evolution, it is what kept society up—it provides a guide we sorely need. It’s just, the old stories don’t satisfy people the way they did even twenty-five years ago. And I’ll tell you what, my old stories and narratives don’t satisfy me any more either.
Let’s make new myths, let’s make new myths (sung to “Pets” by Porno for Pyros…).
NEW-TO-ME THIS WEEK
I add new-to-me podcasts in my podcast guide, too
Love + Radio — I don’t really get into the stylized podcasts… There were some great stories and the production value was high, but I wish they would go for something that doesn’t try so hard.
New Yorker Fiction—What’s not to love? It was just the first time I listened. Basically, famous authors read other famous authors and discuss their thoughts. It’s great.
Sex Nerd Sandra—Sandra talks with people about sex. I understand that people need a schtick. I need one, you need one, we all need one. But sometimes a schtick becomes too entrenched into the identity of the host and they become all schtick. That seems to be the case here. I’m still listening. I would love to find another sexy podcast that’s maybe not as intense as Savage Love and maybe Sandra is the one.
The Daily Show Podcast w/o Jon Stewart—It’s a bunch of hilarious passionate people who write and report for The Daily Show. They have giant egos. I enjoy it when they’re being earnest and honest (brutally so sometimes). When they are doing bits, I lose interest.
THIS WEEK’S BEST-ISODES
- God with Pete Holmes — Professor Blastoff
- 138 O-U-I-J-A—99% Invisible: Anybody who gets scared from ouija boards should have a listen to this. It not only includes the design (as 99% Invisible is about), but also about how your subconscious influences the board.
- The Opposite of the Prosecution—Serial: Ugh, this week’s episode turned everything for me. It’s the first time I wanted to google the facts of the case and what has happened since the show’s producer started reporting. It is just so good, I can hardly take the waiting.
- Dr. Drew Pinsky—WTF
NOTES
{If you see an episode you listened to, too, stick me with a note about your thoughts, yo. Podcasts appear in alphabetical order by podcast name.}
99% Invisible — 138 O-U-I-J-A
→I’ve always felt that people get too creeped out by graveyards, ghosts, and mediums. They think the supernatural is for sure present and only there to cause harm. When I was a little girl, my mother saw no problem with my playing with ouija board (we all pronounce it ouiji board, but this episode’s guests makes sure to pound in that “a”). My mom got a lot of flack for letting a little girl play with the devil like that. “Talking boards,” what the ouija is commonly referred to, where super taboo. This episode makes people who believe in the metaphysical powers of the ouija seem pedestrian. What’s really at work gives me the creeps way more so than the perceived presence of a ghost could.
Death, Sex, & Money—Cult Comedy Heroes Have Bills to Pay, Too & Ellen Burstyn’s Lessons on Survival
→I love Chris Gehard’s voice. It’s in the same family as Steve’s voice from Sex in the City. I love his voice, too. They have the cadence and bass of a man, but the timbre of a child. If I was going to fall in love with an operating system, like the movie Her, I would choose this voice.
→Ellen Burstyn’s magic.
Fresh Air—Taylor Swift & Funny, Dirty, Sad: The ‘Holy Trinity’ for ‘Transparent’
→I don’t like Taylor Swift’s music or relate to her lyrics. I do think she’s a bad ass young lady, though, and I found this review to be extremely well done.
→I really want to watch Transparent (it annoys me though, because, Cris Beam’s book, Transparent, is not what this is based on—and I it makes me think about the name of my future book and how annoyed I would be if something similar happened to my book title—how silly and simultaneously self-aggrandizing, huh?).
Love + Radio—Ghost Stories (Rebroadcast)
New Yorker Fiction—Tobias Wolff reads Denis Johnson
→Bike Boy (see the image of the bicycle from this blog) told me to listen to this one. It’s Denis Johnson’s “Emergency,” which is a fucking mind trip. I can’t talk about it in a more fruitful way than Toby Wolff can, so I encourage you to just have a listen.
→Tobias Wolff’s interest in this piece somehow deepened my understand of Wolff’s “Bullet to the Brain,” a must-read for those of you who haven’t.
→I started listening to George Saunders reading Grace Paley…Swoon.
Professor Blastoff —God with Pete Holmes
→Pete Holmes did not understand the format for Professor Blastoff. He is the only guest I’ve ever heard have such a hard time keeping his mouth shut during the intro and he completely blows the lid off the way they do breaks.
→I enjoy seeing Pete on the other side of the interview, and his uber-Christian roots really came forward in a completely understandable way. He says he likes the Christ story. I like the universe story.
Serial —Episode 6: The Case Against Adnan Syed & Episode 7: The Opposite of the Prosecution
→Episode 6 left me feeling like maybe Serial would turn out to be the worst, but Episode 7 was major. LISTEN EVERYONE!
Sex Nerd Sandra—Death with Caitlin Doughty & Poly Nitty Gritty with Eve Ricket and Franklin Veaux
The Daily Show Podcast w/o Jon Stewart—Episode 6: Live in Austin, TX
The Dinner Party—Episode 276 (Jason Schwartzman, Weezer, Barbara Kruger & Etiquette with Tenacious D), Episode 275 (Joel Edgerton, Justin Simien, and Banks), The After-Dinner Party, & Episode 274 (Jenny Slate, John Waters, and First Aid Kit)
→Why is Jason Schwarzman a dream come true?
The Moth—Radio Hour: Live in Iowa City
This American Life — The Secret Recordings of Carmen Segarra
You Made It Weird with Pete Holmes —David Vanderveen & Larry Charles
Who Charted —Matt Jones & Two Charted 141
WTF with Marc Maron — Dr. Drew Pinsky
→Another confirmation that we are attracted to what was broken in us because of our parents and that we can a) choose to intellectualize that pain and pick more wisely or b) hope we find someone who satisfies that desire but who is not dangerous. I’ve obviously been going for the latter, historically, but Bike Boy isn’t dangerous, and neither was the Photographer, and I was truly attracted to them both.
→Further confirmation that people do not understand the nature of addiction. The episode renewed my emotional urgency about my book proposal.
