I went to the Source of Cosmic One-ness and all I got was this cracked-open heart
Toad 1, on Friday afternoon: I went in with a growing urgency of perhaps wanting to just get it over with, because I was starting to really get worried about my body after not really eating most of the day — fasting is a headache trigger for sure. Feeling nervous — not anxious, precisely, but definitely a healthy fear. I don’t recall basically anything from my first experience with Toad, except dropping in and that feeling of expansiveness, but there’s always the scaries I get with big medicine: is it going to be too big, too beautiful?
Mostly what I wanted was to remember it; my first experience with Toad back in May hadn’t been a bad experience, per se, but I had been disappointed to have no recollection, and the weekend itself had cost me quite a bit (not financially so much as I’d spent quite a lot of it reckoning with physical pain).
I had watched S___ go earlier in the day and it was wonderful to watch — intense, beautiful, and she popped up laughing and sparkling, bemused at how obvious it all was, after all. “Well,” she said, once she had re-located her body in space-time, “that’s it, then!” And then, delighted by the simplicity of the message, she collapsed into what I would have to call “giggles of cosmic glee.” I was pretty sure I wouldn’t probably sparkle like that, but it was pretty reassuring. At the other end of the spectrum I was witnessing N working through a lot of real deep terror — terror of letting go, mostly — from her earlier experiences with Toad plus other things she’d been dealing with. I wasn’t feeling that, exactly. But still. It’s scary! I went in and tried to be present — didn’t want to lock myself out — but not overthink.
So that afternoon I was intimidated perhaps but excited, ready to be present for the experience. I stood on the mat, I said the prayer. Looked at L and felt a deep trust. Did the breaths. Inhaled. Dropped in. And remembered*:
Dissolving. Dissolving into patterns. Fractals. So big. Boundless. Layers of fractals dissolving into layers of fractals dissolving into fractals. If the “I” of I was online, it would have wanted there to be edges, but because the “I” wasn’t online, there was permission to have awareness of the infinite.
Above is the closest image I could find to the kind of visuals I was getting, but mine were in rainbow static color, and didn’t come to a center point like that; it was just endlessly repeating, and also just kept dissolving into more layers beyond layers. And also I wasn’t seeing the patterns, I was the patterns.
And this felt sense of the wheeling of the cosmos, and the knowing of the mechanics of the structure of It All. Wheels within wheels, angels in the architecture spinning into infinity.
And sound of breath, puffs of breath out towards me, a sort of breathy sing-song “tchoooo tchoooo tchoooo” spinning around me in stereo — and what it meant was “yes, that’s it, let go more, now more, now more.” A celestial lullaby, the susurration of the spheres. And beyond that a hum, like a cosmic tuning fork — all of this not out in space, but what’s behind and around and underneath.
No decisions and no choice and no I; completely taken, dissolved, undone. And all of it, throughout, felt absolutely familiar — as if it wasn’t a revelation at all but a return.
And then I was coming back to myself and knowing I had a body and there was a room and a world. Hearing voices, whispering, friends. And my head hurt, and my body was still my body, and there was grief there. And I recalled a conversation with C from earlier, and resolved to try and stay and do some more work, here, in this body. To try and understand what the work with this body was and to stay and do it. I lay there and felt that grief for a few moments.
Also it’s all so cosmically ridiculous and I felt the euphoria of that, too.
Felt energy through my hands, rubbed my face, said at a certain point said brightly to the room “ok, I’m back!” (because I was!) and they laughed. Lay for a few moments more trying to grab the tail end of the tail end of the impressions of it so I wouldn’t forget.
I’m sure I have forgotten some of what I remembered in that moment, and I’m sure even in that moment there was so much I didn’t bring back with me.
Part of what I did wake up with, though, was a sort of a grief of feeling like I hadn’t had any major insight, really. Because I supposed I thought there was set to be a revelation of some sort, and there wasn’t — it felt somehow utterly familiar. Not that it was routine, certainly, but somehow at my core I don’t think I learned anything that I didn’t already know. I believe I had experienced the infinite — to the extent this human brain can comprehend it and come back to report on that experience — but I don’t any more believe that it revealed a fundamental underlying truth about the love and unity of the cosmic one-ness than anything else I had heretofore experienced. It was a powerful drug, that had done a powerful thing to my system, and given me a powerful spiritual experience. Did I know anything I didn’t know before about reality? Was there a different, real knowing in me? I just don’t know if I came back with that. It seemed like that was the promise of the experience — not that anyone in particular had promised me anything, but the expectation writ-large of the big-medicine experience, the gift I take it that most people in general receive is this sort of thing — and that left me with a sense of the experience as a whole being just a little disappointing. Massive, overwhelming, colossal, beautiful and also colored with the faintest edge of sorrow.
I was asked, when somewhat shamefully relating this sense of disappointment (I mean, seriously: how ungrateful, to have gazed upon the face of infinity and be left wanting), to reflect on what I would have wanted to feel; what would I have experienced that would have felt like it fulfilled the promise. What am I yearning for that I did not, have not yet received? I think that’s a longer answer and some writing for another day, but the short answer for here would be be something like: Certainty. Clarity. The behind-the-curtain Truth I have been looking for, the bedrock I have been digging for my whole life. (And “what would it mean to have it” I know is the next question, but we’re also going to save that for another day’s work.)
The next day:
Toad #2 for the week was supposed to be a “meditation dose.” Ten of us who had been meditating together all week (plus including L and Dr. J) were going to be in the studio and meditate together, like we had been, but experiment with a the smaller dose of Toad. Most everyone in the room had already been through Toad experience — either that weekend or previously. Everyone was going to be dosed at almost the same time — they had to go around in a circle so it wasn’t exactly simultaneously but it was nearly so.
I was seated in about the middle of the circle, and as L got to me I started to get scared — like really scared: heart pounding, knees weak, palms sweaty, vomit on my sweater already, the whole bit. Lucky there wasn’t a ton of time to work up a full panic but I was close. I did my thing to calm myself down as much as I could but I could feel myself spiking. Dr J had told us that at this dose we wouldn’t be going over the edge, we’d still be present, and I had over the last couple of days wanted to experiment with smaller doses and wanting to explore the space more while conscious and a little more in control, so this was something I had been looking forward to. But suddenly I was downright terrified. It was just so fucking big.
As L lit the pipe and gave me the instructions, I could have pulled back, not done it all. But as the moment approached, I didn’t flinch— I went as big as I could…inhaled it all, held it in, held it in, held it. And on the exhale as it all fell away the whole world exploded into a thousand shards of reality and I — we, all of us we, because it was being in the room with everyone that did it, I know — shattered, too.*
I heard it, the shattering — I had just enough of a hold on consciousness to register the sound, the strangeness of the sound of the impossibly-loud crackling, shattering, shredding, electricity-arcing, metal-shrieking, bone-popping of space-time collapsing in on itself as we shimmered and writhed in ecstasy. Everyone sighed out and sighed out and out and out and out. We held and were held and beheld the pure shimmering alpha and omega and I had it there, for a few moments, we broke through to the other side of it, consumed in the fire of our collective immolation into to the absolute and total unbearable exquisite agony of the pure existential All.
Ok. Ok ok ok. I remember thinking, just the barest edge that was left of me clinging to myself thinking, during it, ok. Ok ok ok I accept, I will, I accept ok, I get it, whatever there is to get, I get it.
What that is, what that means, I didn’t wholly know then and I certainly don’t fully know now, but I will try.
I was able to move, finally — frankly surprised to find myself still seated upright — and flopped myself onto my back on the floor. As I glitched back in and out back into myself, I became aware of A still upright and still beside me, weeping softly in bliss. C prone in shavassana, overcome, crying. T bonelessly rolling on the mat in the center of the room, somehow having teleported there from her spot several feet away. N on her back, wrapped in a blanket, releasing through gentle sobs. Still snagging in and out of conscious self for a few minutes, we sort of goggled at each other over the improbability of what had just happened. The FUCK!? Laughing, as the fucking idiot dogs scampered around like we hadn’t all just been fully-ass raptured and returned.
I slowly drifted into my body, lying spread-eagle on my back, my heart entirely cracked open. My chest hurt, from being a conduit for all that ecstasy. I thought I had been convulsing, thought I had maybe cracked a molar (not convinced I haven’t, still). My whole body hurt, not in a bad way, just achey from the whole whatever the fuck that just was. I felt incredibly tender towards the world, but especially the people who had just been there for that, we had all been through an incredible fucking thing together, had certainly all experienced something together — if not quite exactly the same thing, probably — we had all definitely done something. We all just lolled around for a while coming back into ourselves, crying and smiling and incredulous and euphoric, Dr J in the corner not a little big smug, a combination “I told you so” and “welcome, I’m so happy you guys are here” look on his face.
And still. What am I left with now?
People come back from these trips cured of addiction, suicidality, depression, etc. I appreciate those stories and I’m glad for those people, genuinely I’m so relieved there exist ways to break through for people beyond hope or redemption. But I also don’t know if those narratives are super helpful for me. I worry that my native skepticism and nihilism run so deep that even after all of this — even after literally getting as close as one can get in this waking life to touching the Source — I still don’t have access to a certain kind of knowing, faith, certainty, clarity, bedrock…whatever the thing is people apparently have that makes them believe in a presence or cosmic unity that I don’t seem to be able to know. (And yes, what would it mean for me to have that? I don’t know, but people who do sure seem to like it!)
I’ve spent now the last several nights not getting enough sleep; I keep getting reactivations, half-asleep and dropping in and out of dissolving into the cosmos and back. It’s ok; I don’t want to forget. But also it actually gets a little scary towards the early hours, worried I won’t be able to sleep enough ever again because I’ll never be wholly back from that trip space. Even though I know that’s not true, tell myself that’s not true and I will of course settle back down, in the wee hours it starts to go a little wobbly. As soon as it started to get light two nights ago I got up and walked down to the arroyo, put my feet on some rocks. Which is what my body was telling me I needed — rocks, ground, soil — and that felt good. But it’s also not easy; also being back in my body is of course still a challenge. I still don’t know why my body is hard. Why I still feel woozy. Why I’ve had headaches both of the last two nights (though they have passed pretty quickly, remarkably). I still don’t know what is the work I still have to do here.
And so I don’t know what it all means. Of course I don’t need to know right now, but damn. Definitely something happened, and I will stay here and keep doing the work in this body in this life and keep experiencing joy and connecting with people and trying to figure it out and keep being open to more and more and more. Ok. Ok ok ok. Ok, I accept.
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