When I was 24 years old, I moved to Austin Texas.
Spurred by a passion for the arts, and desirous of letting my self-perceived liberal flag fly, I took a job at a startup. Though the startup's mission could not be pinned down, their industry was hazy and the CEO was eccentric (to put it lightly), there was one thing that really excited me about it: Their focus on self improvement.
The CEO imagined himself to be the next Tony Robbins. He called himself a "coach to billionaires," a "meditation expert," a "master marketing strategist" an "entrepreneurial guru" and much more. At this age, I was aware that charlatans existed, and I'd watched enough cult documentaries to be wary of creatures like him, but I was also open-minded enough to give him a chance. More importantly, I had recently come upon a new obsession that was quickly taking over my life. That obsession was Self-Help.
At some point in the years between graduation and the workforce, I'd noticed something: I was both terrified and overwhelmingly saddened by the realities of adult life. The first job I'd had, that at first seemed so cool, turned out to be surprisingly dull and empty. Getting let go from that boring job (3 months after starting it) was even more disconcerting.
There seemed to be no structure to this new life I found myself in. There was no rubric, no grading system, only chaos. I didn't know what I was supposed to do. Furthermore, no one else I asked seemed to have any clue either. Advice seemed to come in two forms: "Don't do what I did" and "you must do what I did."
Something changed, however, when I discovered a new trend that was on a vicious rise: Podcasts. Listening to Joe Rogan opened my ears and mind to an entirely new world of self optimization. Psychologists, athletes and nutritionists each speaking their own gospels. I devoured this content like a starving animal because it seemed to be the only thing that provided me some comfort.
And I was beginning to get the feeling that there was some hidden, underlying framework behind the strategies that all these experts espoused. It seemed that if I could just apply each of their teachings to my life, I could solve this constant existential aching that was eating up my soul. I thought that perhaps it worked like a math equation: The more bio-hacking, pscyhology and exercise information I could absorb = the better my life would be.
And so, I became something of a self-help scholar. I watched every YouTube video, listened to every podcast and read every book I could get my hands on. And it felt good. Really good. In fact, I actually started to change. In the span of a couple years, I went from chubby to lean. I ate better, I exercised like a madman and began a meditation practice.
Immersed in this new world of entrepreneurs, tech and health, I got better at speaking the language of these people. I became something of an entrepreneur myself, getting work as a freelance marketer/writer. Eventually, I landed what was at that time my dream job. After years of work, it seemed that I was really starting to get the self-help engine up and running in my life. I was employing a lot of the techniques and in some respects it was working.
There was only one problem: The bottomless emptiness of my existence lingered. That feeling of lostness and chaos that had set me on this path was still there, raising its grotesque hand in the in-between moments of my days. A persistent wanting.
Self-help had "fixed" many of the surface-level shortcomings in my life. I now had enough money to not be freaked out all the time, I'd become more aesthetically pleasing to look at. I gained a smug pride in the fact that my career was "cool" compared to some of the more soul devouring forms of income earning in which my friends were engaged.
But nevertheless, I was consumed with angst. I'd traded out my old anxieties for new ones. And the sadness I found now was deeper because I had everything that was supposed to alleviate it. These things were not enough.
Had I not taken the self help far enough? Perhaps I needed to create my own business based solely around my passions. I needed to go from fit to shredded. I needed to drive a Lexus. I needed to have a hotter girlfriend. I needed cooler friends. I needed better instagram content. I needed to be funnier in social circles. I needed to be more at ease and present. I needed more freedom from work. I needed meaning.
I was not alone in feeling this way. In my new job, I'd made two close friends who were grappling with the same concerns. We were all at this incredibly "chill" company with the freedom and funds to support whatever pursuits we wanted. But what the hell were we supposed to pursue? We started scheduling meetings together to solve this problem. We did lifestyle design exercises, we made lists, we wrote, we had phone calls, we shared ideas. It was amazing. Our mutual search for meaning felt euphoric for a while. It was so nice to share these concerns with one another. It felt so right to create goals, to look toward the endpoints or destinations of our life paths.
I think we all felt that if we could just create clearer goals and more discipline, we could achieve what we were searching for. But those aha moments never came — for any of us. Moments of clarity and excitement quickly faded back into the drab day-to-day living of life. We lost interest in the projects we started and found new ones that would fade again.
What is wrong with me? I thought. Nothing sticks. Nothing becomes anything.
I couldn't seem to follow through on things. And the things I did follow through on always lost their luster. It seemed to me that I was plagued with an eternal discontent. I just had this itch that could never be fully scratched.
It was at this point that I essentially gave up. I was tired of my brain. I felt exhausted by all the strategizing, talking, planning, goal-setting, writing. I felt like I was "over" everything. The more I read self-help, the more I was sickened by it. It was like I'd gotten to the bottom of these methods and found that there was nothing holding them up. I resigned myself to a lack of effort with it all. I was done.
Strangely enough, it was this resignation that initiated a sequence of perspective-altering events in my life.
These events instilled something within me that, up to now, has stuck. Something that I am following through on. This something is a thing that words cannot give justice to. I can describe it but I cannot give it to anyone else. And I am not this thing's keeper, It keeps me. I cannot activate it, only be activated by it. It bestows itself to me only upon its choosing and my willingness to be chosen by it.
The process of this "finding" has been happening since I was born and it is still very much happening. But I'll condense the process into the context of recent experiences that instilled in me a heightened awareness of its existence.
The Path to Nowhere
As I said, my two friends and I were fed up. We were self-helping ourselves to death, spiraling in un-ending talks of what we needed to do to satiate our starving souls. It was time to try something new as a group. On a whim, we found an Air Bnb and booked it. Our plan was simple: We were going to turn off our phones, go to a cabin in the woods, and drop some acid.
With eager feet, we leapt into my friend's Chevy Cruze and embarked upon a two-hour journey to Normangee Texas. None of us were aware of the existence of this nearly non-existent Texas town before our journey. But the pictures online made it clear that it was comfortably nestled in the middle of nowhere, and nowhere was exactly where we wanted to go.
The car ride was filled with laughs. Conversation oscillated between penis jokes and metaphysics and we were all just thrilled to be doing something different. A few turns off the highway and we were making our way through sunlit woods and rolling fields. The lines of disparate countryside mailboxes were soon lined with Trump 2020 flags, and we knew that we were getting close.
I absentmindedly wondered what our hosts would think of our city-folk hipster/athleisure attire, particularly the ornate, poofy Indian-style yoga pants and thonged leather sandals one friend had donned for the journey. We rendezvoused with the cowboy boot-wearing hosts in their pickup truck at the front gate, and the poor Cruze began a slow, slamming trek over washed out dirt trails and forsaken fields until we were finally at our home for the weekend.
The cabin was small, old and quaintly decorated. It had an elevated porch with swings and rocking chairs from which we could stare down into the thick bramble. It backed to a massive field, at the back of which was a pond with a couple sturdy wooden recliners. The air there was different. So quiet, that it hummed with the sounds of skittering creatures and screaming insects. It was perfect.
We ate and went to bed early, giving our minds adequate rest for the majesties or horrors we were bound to encounter the following day. I'd done a fair amount of psychedelics before this adventure but I'd never done them as intentionally as my poof-panted friend. At his bidding, the three of us engaged in rituals of breath work, meditation and a walk to get our minds right. We then wrote out our own private intentions for the trip in little notebooks we'd brought. Each of us wanted something a little different, but all of us were looking for truth.
I won't try to detail the psychedelic experience itself. There truly is nothing like it. It is a mystical mode of being that laughs at the idea of verbal or written description. All I can say is that we were launched into a different plane of human experience. The cabin, woods and water were still there. But they were disassociated from all common conceptions. Each of us were all still ourselves, but it was like I was seeing my friends for the first time.
The characteristics of their faces more clearly communicated who they were in their deepest hearts. Their facial gymnastics were a tapestry of miraculous emotion. And our souls and bodies were freed from any restraint of expression. We laughed, cried and were terrified with reckless abandon.
False Identities
A few parts of the experience stand out with clarity. The first came when we started to talk about the company at which we were all employed. It was something we talked about often. But now, when we tried to discuss anything serious about it at all, it was as if were breaching the most hilarious joke ever conceived by mankind. Each of us were in total disbelief at the concept of what business was. There was nothing tangible or real or important about it, and yet everyone seemed to treat it with the utmost gravity. They even adopted it as a part of their identity!
We sat there repeating the name of our company over and over, weeping with laughter at the contrast of its cheerful branding and the fact that we were all its willing prisoners. We cackled maniacally at the ideas of "office politics" and "company culture." There was nothing cruel in our exclamations. It was all just so ludicrous. How could anyone, ever, consider this type of a work a calling? How could a life be based around something whose only use was to generate money? We rolled around on the porch, abs cramping from hilarity in the sunlight.
After that giggle-fest was complete, my memory has a bit of a hazy gap in it. I remember puffy-pants-friend aggressively bounding barefoot down a hill filled with sticker burrs which I then had to carry him back up due to how pierced his feet were. After that, we tried to listen to some music but it sounded too much like the moaning of demons to not be completely horrifying, so we quickly gave up on it.
The Ludicrousness of Logic
One of the most important moments of the trip came when we began a conversation about meaning. As always happened when the three of us got together, we raised once again the question of what we were supposed to do with our lives. What was the point of it all? We had thought that perhaps the LSD could give us a new perspective on this topic, that it would provide the answer. But instead, it was as if the very idea of asking that question was deflated of all significance. It felt like the chemical was rebuking us for asking such a childish question.
The more we tried to "go deep," the more we felt as if we were being stupid or searching for something that wasn't there. We kept losing our trains of thought, and then wondering what we were so confused about in the first place. Was the question of purpose really that complicated? The answers seemed to be spinning all around us in this vortex of existence. The beauty of the trees, the breath in our bodies, the overpowering love in our hearts that we had for one another. The preciousness of every living thing, captured by our senses in this fleeting moment, only to be followed by a new moment and then another and another.
I had this blunt realization that every time I stepped out of this experience and into my own head — to grapple with my man-made concerns — I was pulling myself away from life itself. Perhaps this revelation (that questioning my purpose through a lens of rationalism was ultimately foolhardy) was the answer I'd been looking for. I wondered if this psychedelic epiphany would carry the same weight in my sober life.
Drinking from the Empathy Firehose
As our inhibitions lowered, we began to speak our minds freely. At one point, one friend said to me, "You really are handsome!" "You're a beautiful man." We all laughed. I told him that I thought he was too. And then I turned to Puff Pants. I looked at him, and as I looked, I saw Him. The experience confounds explanation, but it was as if I was looking at him from all the angles I'd never noticed before. It was like who He was could no longer be hidden from me. The face became more than exterior features, it seemed to express his goodness and his love. I was transfixed. I said, "You're really .... I dunno .... you're pretty!" "You're so, so pretty." and I meant it.
Again, it's hard to explain what happened after this. It was a metaphysical connection so forceful, I was genuinely frightened by it. It was like my words created some sort of bridge between our two spirits. My friend's face became mystically placid as he absorbed what I said. He sat with it for a while, thinking deeply. Then he started to tell me, with intimate quietness, how his whole life, concerns with his appearance had plagued him. How he struggled not to see himself as ugly.
As he said this, I felt my heart break. For a moment, I experienced the years of pain he was describing, tied up in him, a personal war. It became mine and I was revolted by the lie of it. How could such fundamental falseness creep its way into my friend's life? How could he not see how unique, precious and beautiful he was? It was so wrong I felt angered by it, deeply hurt. We stood there in silence, eyes locked, and something moved between us that I've never felt before.
We were silent. But this moving was so real that my other friend who was watching us audibly said "woah." I broke away from this presence out of some sort of fear of its otherworldliness. "What was ...." I trailed off trying to understand what had happened. All I could do was wipe my eyes and shake my head in wonder. My friend was just smiling peacefully.
Fear in Physical Form
But, just as it is with life itself, all meaningful journeys must contain a trial. That trial came for me toward the tail-end of the chemical's "peaking" experience. The three of us were sitting contemplatively on the porch, each of us navigating our own inner journeys. I was smiling to myself, thinking about how beautiful the trip had been so far, when I looked to my right and noticed that the woods were on fire.
My first reaction to this was thinking that the chemical was having a new sort of effect on me that I hadn't encountered before. I had heard that vivid hallucinations were possible and had touched the fringe of those hallucinations on mushrooms before. But this trip was different. I knew that my perceptions had been altered for the last few hours, but I hadn't even come close to seeing something that wasn't there. It just wasn't that kind of experience. I gazed dumbly at the fire trying to understand what I was seeing. I mean it when I say that the silence of those flames was the most unnerving thing I have ever beheld in my lifetime. And right as I acknowledged the fact that I was afraid, a wave of immeasurable physical terror rose up and fully overwhelmed my senses.
My brain jumped into hyper-speed as it tried to comprehend what was happening. I gasped and stood to my feet. Could this have been caused by nature? Had someone lit the woods on fire to frame us? Had someone been walking down here and lighting things on fire without us noticing? Had the three of us broken our brains and simply forgotten that we had done this? What was our responsibility? Should we put it out? Was this actually a normal occurrence and I was just losing my mind? The whole world took on a dark heaviness then. I was thrown into a state in which I could not distinguish reality from fantasy. I could not even trust my own senses. It sounds ridiculous, but this experience was the purest form of terror I've ever encountered. I was absolutely consumed by it, frozen.
The smoke was rising above the trees and I realized that people would probably come and check it out if it got any thicker. People! I couldn't handle speaking to people. They'd know I was in another dimension. The thought of encountering another person was as scary as death. Shakily I stood up from my rocking chair. "Guys. Something's on fire." Hearing the words come out of my mouth somehow managed to increase the fear. Now it was real and my friends could see it too.
Strangely, their reaction was devoid of intensity. They seemed to merely be curious and decided to go down there and check it out. Their lack of concern only heightened my terror. The fact that they didn't understand the gravity of it made me trust them less. I decided to stay on the porch, tightly gripping my rocking chair as I tried to stave off a nervous breakdown.
Soon, my friends would discover that what was burning was not "the woods" but a burn pile we hadn't noticed before. The gusting wind had kicked up some embers that sparked a new flame. But even after they dumped some water on it, I could not immediately return to ease. My conception of reality had been shaken and I still didn't know who or what to trust.
I felt ashamed of the way I was behaving. I wanted to face this challenge with bravery and boldness. I wanted to go toward the things that frighten me. But this was different. For whatever reason, I could not shake this fear. It was a fear that had no rationality or logic to it, only raw unmitigated experience — animalistic. Eventually, I got past the incident and was able to enjoy the rest of the time. But the whole thing stuck with me in a profound way. I can still recall the feeling clearly.
Magic Beyond Language
The final part of the LSD experience that remains with me was after the chemical's effects had mostly worn off. Things didn't look different anymore. My mind was back within my control. But my essence or inner self — I would say — felt more raw, like my soul was more exposed to the elements.
Me and my friend were lying on twin beds in the upstairs attic, marveling at the silence and the lingering awe of what we'd just gone through. Dusty light broke through the window onto the faded 70's-blue carpet. He said, "I need you to hear this song," and I said "ok."
The song was by Max Richter. It was a recomposition of The Four Seasons by Vivaldi. My ego now tells me it's cheap or dramatic to say that it was the most beautiful thing I've ever heard. And I'm sure most would pass off the song's effect on me as a lingering high. But, who cares? It was. And still as I think about it, it seems that I was able to fully absorb the mysterious significance of music in a way that I can only now get glimpses of.
It was like I was peeking behind the vail of music's mysterious nature. In it, I felt the purest expression of existence. As if I was being transported into the glowing fire of Vivaldi's entire emotional life. A life that ended hundreds of years ago, still burning hot as ever in the present moment. A wordless song that told the story of human experience. Birth, passion, strife, longing, death and love. All of it was in there and my heart didn't shy away from drowning in it. I asked myself for the millionth time, "What is music?" How was it able to communicate more poignantly than any word or act ever could? I couldn't help but feel it all and weep. My other friend did the same.
We left the next day with with a mutual sense of inner quiet. We each knew that something profound had happened. But we weren't sure exactly what. "Sometimes the meanings of these experiences reveal themselves later," one of us said. And that sounded right to me.
God?
I looked in my little notebook at the missions I'd written out before my trip: "Grow closer to my friends." "Meet God, lol."
In the throes of the experience itself, the missions we'd written seemed comical. Who could ever tie up something as big and insane as an LSD trip into a human narrative? But now, looking back and examining our time together, I wonder if the missions were actually accomplished. Because, as I try to make sense of that experience, the only idea that gives it any meaning or context whatsoever is God.
Oof, "God."
It is a word that, for years, I've swept under the rug. It has too much baggage attached, too many preconceived notions from others. The word means so many different things to people: A bearded man in the sky, a fairy tale, dogma, lies, extremism, rules, moral superiority, etc. But this word is all we have. Our problems with it are our own.
As I live more life, I've begun to see things differently. I no longer think humanity "invented" God to give us hope. I think God is the name we gave to the one presence that is hope. We didn't construct the idea of God because we needed love. We experienced love and knew that it was nothing we could ever truly understand, much less create. It was from another place, or from no place — beyond our labels of cells and hormones and dopamine. Otherworldly.
It is a presence that surpasses our understanding. A force that defies description, or label, or any other thing mankind has ever conceived. And because God defies our understanding, we have replaced God with things we do understand.
We've replaced a knowledge and seeking of God with the knowledge and seeking of our own egos. We refer to these egos as the "self." But this is only the "self" of society. It is a self created by the human brain, formed out of name, ethnicity, gender, birthplace and job title. In the face of true chaos and lostness, we cling to this "self" to no avail. It falls like water through our hands, a laughable empty identity.
Our dependence on logic fails us. Our "self-help" gives us no answers. We cannot bio-hack our way out of existential despair. We cannot find peace through productivity and our paychecks cannot purchase meaning.
I don't believe that LSD is the answer to enlightenment. It is only occasionally a door to that which we are all seeking. It is not the destination. I'm not sure the destination is a place we are ever meant to reach. But, I know now the importance of seeking it anyway — with an empty openness and unflagging ferocity.
When it came to my beliefs, I used to say, "I'm in the progress of working it out." But recently, I've given up on working anything out. And that's because I don't think there is anything for me to work out. There is only me being worked out. In terms of who or what is doing the working: Call it "love" or "hope" or "power" or "the universe" or whatever. My word for it is God.
Maybe it was never our human purpose to question the meaning of life after all. Maybe life is the thing that questions us, and it is how we individually respond to that question that counts most.