When I first encountered the swirling and chaotic psilocybin-fueled visuals and thoughts of my awakening, I tried to reorient myself by holding specific questions and concepts in my mind. (I should mention, for those unfamiliar with ‘tripping’ on mushrooms, that psilocybin doesn’t remove the ability to think about or be aware of what you’re doing.) One of the images I repeatedly visualized was of the duality of ‘the light’ and ‘the dark’, in all its manifestations; good and evil, right and wrong, love and fear. I would hold this image in my mind and wonder, ‘Why is there both light and dark? Must there always be both? What is the purpose of the dark?‘ I was under the influence of a pretty heavy post-election malaise and was hoping these questions would prompt the mushrooms to deliver some insight about a future that felt heavy with bad news.
Each time I held these ‘light/dark’ thoughts in my mind, into my mind’s eye (I had my eyes closed) would come an image like the one above – light ‘bleeding’ into dark. Only the picture was always moving, as if the light had an energy that was searching, reaching into the dark. When later sketching the image into my journal, I was reminded of similar images from high school biology films that showed, in real time, white blood cells moving through the body’s tissues, constantly reaching out, probing, touching, exploring, looking; I was riveted by the images (I’m still sure those films weighed heavily in my decision to study microbiology in college).
Now, you’ll notice that nowhere in this image, animated or not, are there actual answers to any of the actual questions I was focusing on during the trip. It was more like … specific question, non-specific image … different specific question, same non-specific image. At one point I even got a bit frustrated at just seeing the same image over and over without gaining any understanding (or so I thought) and very purposefully thought, ‘Fine! I was done asking that question anyway!’ And yet, even after experiencing all the incredible visions and perceptions that followed, this light/dark image remained vivid in my mind and was one of the first things I wrote down afterwards, largely just to get it out of my head. And over the following months, a passing comment by some teacher or other would briefly bring the image to mind but the memory never brought insight – until now.
One of the mental exercises that faces the newly awakened consciousness is how to think about the body. It’s the form your awareness inhabits so there’s no real getting around it. And yet the awakening makes clear that you are most definitely NOT your body, which leads to countless hours wondering, ‘So what is it, this body? What’s its purpose? Is it a distraction? Is it a help?’ These questions demanded attention from my newly stretched awareness, while another part of my mind pushed to return to business as usual – feed the body, rest the body, exercise the body – or risk feeling even further out of whack. So I continued tending to my body but in the days immediately following the awakening, it felt strange to be tending to a form that clearly wasn’t ‘me’ and the feeling didn’t fully subside until almost a week later (cannabis helps with this, btw).
The teachings and experiences I encountered in the months that followed helped me gradually come to understand the role of the body. First, there was the insight I wrote about in Experiencing ‘The Now’; the body is for communication. It is meant to communicate with true self through the perceptions we experience – intuition, creativity, love – and it is meant to communicate to others through the things we do with our bodies – talk, dance, create, hurt, heal, etc. But while this insight – which felt more like a memory – provided a purpose for the body, it didn’t reveal much about why exploring consciousness brings up such intense emotions in the body, like overwhelming fear or deep sadness. What’s the body trying to communicate in these situations? (“Turn back and never come this way again” is the answer the egoic self usually offers.)
Additional insights about the role of the body came from several teachers who helped me identify and navigate energies stored in the body, an example of which I shared in this post. From these teachings I’ve learned that our physical form, being made of a kind of energy, can also store energy patterns. Some of the patterns we store are easy to recognize – a feeling of happiness when hearing a certain song or an emotional pain when remembering a deep loss. Others patterns, harder to recognize, are created when we encounter an emotional energy we can’t fully experience in the moment, like intense pain or trauma. The mind protects itself by deflecting the energy and storing it in the body. … For later … Lucky you.
From this perspective, it’s easy to understand how a person can end up carrying around a lot of painful unexamined energy in the body, especially if raised in a culture that values controlling emotions over exploring them. Later, when we come to the time(s) in our life when we want to clear out these stored energies, we end up flailing through what feels like lots of emotional muck. And not just our own muck; many of us also encounter large energies related to ‘inherited trauma’ (a concept used to explain how trauma moves through generations and results in the much higher likelihood that a child will grow up an alcoholic if raised by an alcoholic parent, for example).
So, to summarize – an awakening delivers opportunities to work through your own trauma and, AND! any inherited trauma that has been stored as energy in the body! Doesn’t that sound great!?
In case this is sounding a bit bleak, let me assure your skeptical self that the initial experience prompting all this introspection will deliver more than enough motivation for slogging through all this turmoil. Which is not just my observation, by the way; I recently listened to this video in which Rupert Spira acknowledges to an audience member that the wonderous experience of our initial awakening is what provides the momentum we need to push through the challenges that follow. He says ‘it was included in the fine print’. I’m doubtful.
These two insights on the role of the body – that it is for communication and is made of an energy that can store patterns – went a long way towards helping me re-orient myself to this physical form my awareness inhabits. But it was this recent video that connected these new ideas to the light/dark image from my awakening. In his presentation at the SAND 2017 conference (looks like it was nice and warm in Italy!), independent scientist Dr. Chris Fields introduces a startling concept; all human bodies are continuations of the same original cell! As I rolled this incredible concept around in my head, the image from my awakening snapped into my mind and it was clear; the light moving into and exploring the darkness was the image of this one continuous cell expanding into the vast unknown darkness that is life’s next moment of possibility. Human life on the planet is a single cell whose membrane takes on the shape of many forms as it reaches out to explore the next moment … and the next … and the next. We are the expanding membrane, you and I and everyone. We are the edge of life that takes in energy as it grows and learns and changes and evolves. And when I asked Source consciousness, ‘What is the purpose of the dark?’, I was shown its purpose; it is the space into which life is unfolding. It is an emptiness that holds all possibility. It is a field of probability that can become anything.
(SAND video info) “Our bodies, like our minds, appear to us to be separate individuals, distinct from the bodies of other people. From an evolutionary perspective, however, this is not true. Considering our bodies from the perspective of deep evolutionary time, it is clear that they are not distinct from, but are rather continuous with, the bodies of other people and indeed of all other organisms. Our cell membranes and the cytoplasm they enclose are continuous with the membranes and cytoplasm of the very first cells. We and all of the organisms we see around us are appendages, organs, and sensory surfaces of a single, planetary-scale, almost 4 billion year-old organism that is exploring and altering the physical environment of Earth. What we call “evolution” is the developmental process of this organism from one to trillions of cells. We have only the most minimal understanding of this developmental process. However, rethinking our bodies from this deep-time perspective is perhaps useful for rethinking our minds and self-identities.”
