When I got sick earlier this year- or diagnosed with cancer and then getting sick after surgery- I fell into a state of despair that I am only now beginning to process 8 months later. During my time in a respite facility, with huge quantities of pus pouring from holes in my chest, more ill than I had ever been and knowing that the small bit of stability I had worked for was going away, I could not see what possible lesson or reason behind all this could be. I consider myself a rational and non-superstitious person, but my life experience has been such that I do believe that all things occur for a reason. I know this reality is far stranger than I can fathom and I am not a materialist. That said, what foundational spirituality I have was utterly challenged through this. The only meaning I could see what that I exist to suffer.
That foundational spirituality- for lack of a better term- is an experiential awareness that I am something simultaneously intrinsic and insignificant to something outside of and far greater than myself. That I exist as a human with awareness of consciousness at the gate between the material and the eternal. This is born directly out of the singular psychedelic experience that brought me to this community. And it was and is one of the most important experiences of my life and has shaped the person I am today. And now it seemed like utter bullshit, that there is no meaning to any of this, that all of my experience is just going to vanish to leave no trace or mark upon time or space. I came from nothing and will return to it, but while I am I am here to do something but that was not going to happen. It was a dark place.
Somehow- well, I know how, I'll get to it- I healed. Coming out of the respite and trying to get back on track, reengaging with some mental health resources, I felt completely disconnected from who I am. I kept telling people that I do not know who I am now. I have a different body, and something in my mind is a different shape too. I couldn't explain it any other way. I didn't know who I was. During the afore-mentioned journey, there was a part were I (hallucinated) regurgitating a giant black snake. Fearing this would somehow wreak havoc in the world ( I know, I was high, OK?) I clamped my jaws down on it and felt it slink back into my body. It was my darkness, my evil, and I wasn't ready to let go of it.
The subsequent years saw me finally seeing and trying to find my own path of recovery- from drug addiction and PTSD mostly- and it has been a long twisting road, as it is for most who engage in recovery of some kind. Lots of failures, but lots of successes too. But the entire time, I couldn't let go of a persona that I had developed "out there" to stay safe, to feel protected, even if it was utter bulls#!t. Kind of a fake badass, someone you just didn't want to f##k with, someone unpredictable maybe. But it was someone completely in opposition to my values and to the person I was deep inside. No amount of psychedelics could remove it, no therapy, because I still needed it. The cancer and the infection tore it all away somehow, and emerging as the person that I really am, the authentic me, was unrecognizable.
I know that now, and that is the gift of all this. That is the lesson the universe sought to teach me. I am motivated by service, and the pain and suffering that the most vulnerable and marginalized people in my community needlessly go through is unbearable for me to watch and I want to do something about it. To help some actual individuals and eventually policy change and program direction. Shit sucks and nobody needs to go thru half the shit I have. I am really lucky to be as high-functioning as I am, and I don't know how someone with more challenges than I have navigates these systems that are supposedly there to help, from addiction services to housing to crisis intervention....ugh, no tangents. But until and unless I myself broke through the barrier that holds back my authentic self- my self actualized being or whatever- I will remain impoverished and unable to help anyone. And I don't mean broke or poor, I will always be those things probably, but impovershed in the heart and soul.
Anyway, that is the journey to here now, thank you to all who have helped, and thanks Trav for that thing over there. I won't mess it up.
Sine experientia nihil sufficienter sciri potest -Roger Bacon
*γνῶθι σεαυτόν*