Dead Set on Living

by Chris Grosso

  “All problems are immediately fixed through the Divine, or whatever you want to call it, including addiction, including fear of death, including fear of anything. How are you going to be afraid anymore? There are so many ways that the light can come shining into the darkness that you’ve created around yourself. One of them is psychedelics. It’s just one. And it’s not the only one. And it’s certainly not something that you should make an altar for. Make an altar for the subsequent feeling of bliss that comes when you recognize that all the horror that you thought life was composed of was a shadow—the subsequent bliss that comes from the relief of realizing that you’re taken care of.

  “Let’s imagine you were in love with the most incredible person you ever met and you got lost in a forest, and you’d been lost in the forest for years and you assumed that this person had forgotten about you and that if you ever found your way out, you’d never be able to find that person again. But somehow you find a letter from that person and realize, ‘Oh my god, they still love me. Oh my god! There’s still hope.’ That’s what happens. You get these little rays of hope that shine in during your catastrophe, and it doesn’t mean the problem is solved; it means ‘Don’t worry, I’m still here. You’re doing fine. I still love you.’ That’s enough, man. That’s enough to get you through about anything.”

  The things Duncan said struck a chord with me. I appreciated how freely he spoke about the Divine and awakening experiences. This was a pleasant rarity for me, because I do a lot of work with younger people in various settings and often find there is a very skeptical attitude not just toward the idea of God but toward spirituality in general. I can appreciate that. It’s healthy to question what we’ve been taught and to look beneath the surface of things. That was instilled in me when I first started listening to punk rock and hardcore music at the age of thirteen, so I do understand where many of the younger people are coming from. But it often seems like the idea of God or spirituality has been written off in many cases before giving it a chance in the first place. What did Duncan have say to the cynics?

  “I would say, ‘Here’s your predicament: You are, as far as you can tell, the only being experiencing a subjective state of consciousness.’ You cannot prove that I am experiencing self-awareness. I could easily be some component in a dream you’re having. What that means is that if you are using data from someone else’s experiment to validate your idea that there is nothing else outside of this universe, or that there is no God, or that there is no transcendent truth or anything like that, then you’re making a horrible mistake. If you were a true scientist, then you’d need to do the experiment yourself. Gather the data. Be smart about it. What’s your hypothesis? Maybe it’s ‘There is no God.’ That’s a very difficult hypothesis to prove or disprove, and countless people have embarrassed themselves in either direction.

  “Let’s start with something like ‘Does prayer work?’ That’s a simple experiment to run. You can run it yourself and you can create the experiment for yourself. Here’s what’s crazy about it: Since you’re a beacon of consciousness that is being held (or not held) in a very temporary flask called your human body, maybe it’s a product of the machinations of some zillion different electrochemical energies blasting through your brain. You are the only one who can do any kind of experiment on this stuff. That means you do the experiment. So start praying. Come up with a system. Maybe don’t pray for a week and write down your experience every day of not praying for a week, and then start praying after that and see what happens. Is there any change at all? Does anything shift? Does it shift toward the positive or the negative? If it shifted toward the positive, then ask yourself why. Or was it a placebo effect? Okay, then great. You’ve discovered a placebo effect that starts transforming you. I guess the long and short of it is, do the experiment yourself.

  “There’s a wonderful quote often attributed to occultist and author Aleister Crowley: ‘We place no reliance on virgin or pigeon: our method is science; our aim is religion.’ This means that we don’t care about the fucking symbols. A lot of atheists and skeptics get completely caught up in these primitive and archaic symbols that people manufactured a long time ago to try to point in the direction of the transcendent. Of course! If you get caught up in the symbols, then you’re going to be one of the annoying people who say things like ‘You’re talking about zombie Jesus.’ Really? To me, that’s funny, because these very same people are not so vitriolic in dismissing Zeus. They’re not going around with the other symbols of mythology and angrily shaking their fists at them. I guess they could say that there are not a lot of people who say that Zeus is the only way to wisdom, but what ends up happening is you wage a war of symbols. You’re arguing over whether the symbol is valid or not, but Crowley is inviting us to rise above the war of symbols and begin to look where these symbols are pointing. Are they pointing to something real? Is that thing they’re pointing to inside us or outside of us? Does it matter? Does it matter? If it’s inside of us, if it’s an embedded thing deep inside of our consciousness, some epigenetic memory encoded inside of our neurology that we can connect to in order to achieve transcendent or bliss states, fine, you’re still achieving bliss states. Is it something outside of you? Even better, because now you’ve opened a faucet in your house that you thought didn’t work, and it’s going to start pouring out God stuff into your life.

  “If the experiment has positive results, you’ve transformed your life for the better. And if the results are negative, then you’ve done your due diligence and now you can live in a world of skepticism, and that’s fine, too. But the thing is, do you think that most of the world’s population is fucking up in this way? Do you think it’s all some shared delusion? Shared delusion is great, by the way. It’s fun. That’s the other thing about it. Why’s everybody so against it?

  “Let’s imagine that this is a shared fantasy allowing people to experience bliss. There’s an evolutionary advantage to transcendent states of consciousness if they allow you to have more energy, more focus, more charisma, more creative output. When that happens, there’s a real evolutionary advantage to this, even if it’s a complete fantasy. If you have groups of people experiencing heightened states of consciousness, the ability to connect with other people more, the ability to empathize with other people more, then I would imagine they are going to be more successful than groups of people who have, for whatever reason, disconnected from a potential power source.

  “Just do the experiment, and if it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work. Don’t get caught up in the symbols because a lot of people are sitting around signs that say BEACH—TEN MILES AWAY and lighting candles in front of the signs instead of going to the beach, you know?”

  PRACTICE

  Pee, Brush Your Teeth, and Laugh

  As Duncan exemplified, one of the most important attitudes we can cultivate on our spiritual path is the ability to laugh and not take this life thing so seriously all the time. There’s a very cool book called The Dude and the Zen Master, written by Roshi Bernie Glassman and the dude himself, Jeff Bridges. In it, Roshi Bernie offers a simple practice to help us do this.

  Bernie wrote:

  Wake up in the morning, go to the bathroom, pee, brush your teeth, look in the mirror, and laugh at yourself. Do it every morning to start off the day, as a practice.8

  Yes, that’s it. It’s simple. Why just do it in the morning? If you want to have some real fun, why not laugh at yourself in the bathroom at work—especially if there’s another coworker in there with you. Waiting to pick your kids up from school? Why not take those few extra minutes to sit in your car and laugh at yourself in the rearview mirror, especially if it’s a busy parking lot!

  All kidding aside, I’ve worked with this practice for a couple of years now—not daily, but off and on—and it’s simple and fun and it does the trick. I mean, you’re laughing.

  I once co-facilitated a Taste of Holistic Healing workshop with my friend Laura Le, who teaches laughter yoga. In all honesty, I
’d gone out of my way to avoid her classes, not because I don’t like Laura—I think she’s great—but the shy part of me just didn’t want to laugh in a room full of other people (except in a very dark movie theater at a Seth Rogen movie—although even then I’d probably still go midday, weeks after it’s come out, to avoid being in a crowded room with strangers). Laura began the yoga exercise by asking us all to start laughing. It was awkward for a couple of seconds, but in no time, all two dozen of us were sincerely laughing—at ourselves, at one another, at the sheer weirdness of the whole thing, but it was real belly laughter. Once we were finished, I felt much better.

  So, my friends, take some time to laugh whenever you’re able. It can be Roshi Bernie’s practice, or laughter yoga (you can find instructions on YouTube), or watching It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, or listening to Duncan Trussell’s Family Hour podcast (see what I did right there?), or anything that puts a smile on your face and in your heart.

  14

  THOSE DARK, HORRIBLE FUCKING PLACES

  CONVERSATION WITH DAMIEN ECHOLS

  In the mid-nineties, I became enthralled by the media frenzy around what came to be known as the West Memphis Three—teenagers arrested, tried, and convicted for the murders of three boys in Arkansas. One of the defendants was Damien Echols, a brainy, sarcastic, metal-loving misfit who reminded me of myself. HBO aired three Paradise Lost documentaries over the years, which helped raise doubts about the guilt of the West Memphis Three. In August 2011, after eighteen years on death row—the last ten of which were spent in solitary confinement—Damien was released from prison due to inconclusive evidence. The real killer remains at large. Damien wrote about enduring the nightmare of his incarceration in his book Life After Death, which had a huge impact on me; it inspired me to find the wherewithal to carry on during my own times of crisis.

  Damien practices and teaches Magick, a process of initiation designed to awaken people to higher states of consciousness so that they can manifest the lives they desire. I was beyond curious about how he used these practices to sustain himself for nearly twenty years in prison and how others could apply Magick to their lives and situations of relapse or habitual behavior that hurt themselves or others.

  To start, I wanted to know more about what Magick was, as I suspected there were all sorts of misperceptions. Damien dove right in. “When I say Magick, I spell it with a k at the end, and that’s to differentiate it from sleight of hand—pulling rabbits out of hats and sawing people in half. Magick with a k is like an amalgamation of Gnostic Christianity, esoteric Judaism, a lot of ancient Chinese circulation practices like Taoism, and things of that nature. It’s not the free-floating, flaky, let’s-all-hold-hands-and-be-friends thing that you see in many Wiccan communities right now, but it’s also not the dark, evil thing some Christians portray it as.”

  Damien’s interest and commitment to the practice of Magick led him to create an art collective called Magick Revolution, which grew out of an art collective he called The Hand that Damien and his friends David Stoupakis and Menton J. Matthews III (Menton3) formed. The Hand represented our hands as the tools we use to shape the world. “It’s what we use to form our reality. It’s what we use to manifest whatever it is we want to see around us. We thought there was a lot of symbolism and strength behind that image.” As Damien, David, and Menton3 were working on art, they discovered they wanted to do more, to start a social awareness movement, which is how Magick Revolution originated. “In Western society, we have preconceived ideas and notions of what Magick is based on—things like cheesy horror movies and stuff we had shoved down our throats in the Bible Belt growing up. These are not the reality of Magick at all. Magick is a beautiful, deep spiritual tradition, as deep as anything you’d find in the East, but it’s been neglected and demonized in Western culture. We want to tell people what Magick is, what Magick is not, and, especially for me, share some of the techniques and the practices that helped me survive almost nineteen years on death row without losing my mind. I figured if Magick helped me in there, then it would be beneficial to people out here.”

  While speaking with Damien, I remembered the many times I had felt locked in a prison of my own making, trapped in the cycle of addiction. In no way am I equating my addiction and Damien’s prison experience, but he helped me realize that one need not be behind bars to feel imprisoned. I remember countless times when I’d be looking at a line of coke (or Ritalin) on a table or holding a fifth of vodka in my hand and sobbing because I didn’t want to snort the powder or drink the poison, but couldn’t not—I was that stuck. It wasn’t a matter of being weak-willed or morally deficient. I was just caught the fuck out, and it was terrible. Like Damien, I would find a way to work more skillfully with the difficult times (at least for the most part).

  The tradition that drew Damien to Magick and is the root of his teaching is called the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. I did a little research and learned that it was a collective of occultists in the late 1800s. Poet William Butler Yeats was a member, as was the notorious Aleister Crowley. Pamela Colman Smith, who was an artist who did the paintings that are the basis for what we now think of as Tarot cards, was also a member. As I continued delving deeper into the Order, I came across a fascinating article in Lapham’s Quarterly that discussed Yeats’s involvement and experience, and the impact that Magick had in his life. Here’s an excerpt:

  Yeats wrote frankly about his vocation as a magician in several memoirs and in A Vision, a dense astrological treatise he labored over for twenty years. A Protestant Irishman in Victorian Britain, Yeats as a young man was pulled in conflicting directions, but the occult always trumped worldly concerns, because it was so deeply connected with his poetic craft. In 1892, when the Irish patriot John O’Leary admonished the twenty-seven-year-old poet for his devotion to magic at the expense of the Cause, Yeats answered:

  "Now as to magic. It is surely absurd to hold me ‘weak’ or otherwise because I choose to persist in a study which I decided deliberately four or five years ago to make, next to my poetry, the most important pursuit of my life. . . . If I had not made magic my constant study I could not have written a single word of my Blake book [ The Works of William Blake, with Edwin Ellis, 1893], nor would The Countess Kathleen [stage play, 1892] have ever come to exist. The mystical life is the center of all that I do and all that I think and all that I write.”1

  I’m no Yeats, but I’ve also received my share of shit for my interest in and practice of things spiritual, sometimes even from people in the “spiritual” community for not looking or acting the part. So I appreciated his response to O’Leary’s accusations.

  The Golden Dawn led Damien directly to modern-day Tarot practices. “It’s an incredibly rich and deep spiritual tradition that has always been (and I mean always—ever since I was a child) the most important thing in my life. Everything else was secondary to the practice of Magick, the study of Magick. Everything else in this world to me is like icing on the cake. I guess some people would say that’s a little zealous, but that’s what happens when you make progress in your spiritual practice—you turn inward and truly get zealous about it.”

  I could identify. Meditation has taught me to turn inward during the difficult times in my life—not always, as exemplified by the relapses I’ve experienced, but much more frequently than before. It’s also helped me pull myself out of relapses much sooner than in the past. Loving-kindness meditation has allowed me to cultivate sincere love for myself: the kind of love that doesn’t want to go back down the road of full-blown addiction; the kind of love that, even when a marriage is ending and nothing makes sense, helps me to know I deserve better than looking to the bottom of a bottle for answers and relief.

  The only time we’re making any true progress is when we’re going inside and doing the kind of work that’s not easy or comfortable. Tibetan Buddhist teacher Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche wrote an incredible book titled Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism. It’s been an important source f
or me, especially in the early stages of my spiritual exploration, and helped me get serious about what the fuck I was doing. There are so many traps we can fall into on the path. The glaringly obvious ones are things like trying to sound spiritual in the way we talk or starting to dress to “look spiritual.” We learn the mantras and buy the malas—basically, we get the gear—but that’s what our focus is on, the external. The clothes and accessories are fine, but when they’re what we focus on instead of our practice and the inner transformational work—well, that’s spiritual materialism.

  Damien agreed. “It’s discipline. A lot of people want to do the novelty part of spiritual practice. They want to do the fun parts. They want to wear robes and have the beads and go to the concerts and things like that, but there is a tremendous amount of real discipline required. To spend hours a day truly practicing, not just to say ‘I’m a Buddhist’ or ‘I’m a magician’ but to become a Buddha, to become the Magick itself, requires more self-discipline than most people are willing to put into those things.”

  That’s why I keep reiterating that practices like meditation and mantra don’t consist solely of love and light and rainbows. I thought I was going to sit down on a meditation cushion and my life was going to miraculously become awesome, that everything was going to be great and peaceful. That’s not the case at all. A spiritual practice can reveal so much darkness. You need to be ready for it.

  Damien, better than many people, realizes that no growth comes without struggle, without strife, without pain. “That’s why they call it growing pains, not growing pleasure. When you’re facing things in this world, that’s what forces you to step outside your comfort zone. It’s the confrontation and the battle. We tend to think of spirituality as entirely and absolutely about peace and peacefulness, but it’s a battle. It’s not an external fight or going to war to force your beliefs on other people. It’s about going to battle with the things that you don’t want to look at in yourself, the things you don’t want to face about yourself—shining the light into those dark, horrible fucking places and wrestling with whatever it is you find there.”