This

  My dad and I hadn’t had a great relationship at the time of Lucette’s birth. I had told him about my letting go of belief, and as a pastor and deeply Christian man, that understandably upset him. The philosophical elephant in the room had sometimes made it difficult to try to talk about “normal” things. Neither he nor I are prone to loquacious small talk. But when Lucie was born, we found a common ground on which to meet. My daughter. His granddaughter. She needed a family’s love and support, and we were both willing to put aside our differences for the task. He was there in the hospital with us. He cried with us. He told us how much this baby girl would be loved. And how I loved him. And in my time as a dad, I’ve begun to understand my own father more and have been able to see how much he always loved me. Even after his worst mistakes and deepest shame, he always came back for us.

  Today, that chunky four-year-old with the crooked pinkies is one of my favorite human beings on earth, and that’s not only because she’s my daughter. Lu’s favorite song is “Happy Birthday.” She loves it. She sings it all day, often even in the morning as she is waking up with her low, groggy, sleep voice: “. . . appy Birday to Looolooo . . . appy birday to you . . .” I think she likes the song so much not because of its compositional structure or lyrical depth but because she associates it with parties. Lu loves to party. Come to our living room, turn off all of the lights except for the dance light that was our family’s best purchase decision of all time, crank up the right music, and look around for the shirtless, twerking toddler holding a sandwich in one hand and a packet of apple sauce (pronounced “saw” in Lu language) in the other—that’ll be Lu, a human being more full of life, love, passion, and presence than almost anyone I know. Her life is not a burden for anyone. It’s a gift.

  Today, I can see how closed-hearted, ignorant, and even bigoted I was when Lulu was born. It wasn’t that I hated or pitied people with Down syndrome (DS) or anything; I just didn’t know anybody who had it. I only knew what our culture had told me about DS. I only knew what I experienced from society—the look on the nurse’s face, the absence of people with DS in our media, the quickly shrinking DS population due to the extremely high abortion rates. In our society, this baby girl’s life was seen as “less than.” It was assumed to be nothing but a miserable life of suffering. Nothing could be further from the truth. Sure, there are hard days and complications. She is human after all. But our society teaches us a weird myth about how life is supposed to look. The top of the societal ladder is straight, white, male, cisgender, and able-bodied. Baby girl with Down syndrome? Sorry, that’s way down the ladder. And though I never would have thought that I bought into those sorts of societal lies, my emotional roller coaster in the hospital had proved otherwise.

  The stories we tell are the reality we experience, and from my limited frame of reference steeped in all of the myths of twenty-first-century American life, I could only see a condition that threatened my personal pursuit of happiness. My experience of the world was limited to the small, destructive stories from which I was viewing Lucette (and everything and everyone else). In these flawed stories, I could only see failed expectations and changes in hoped-for circumstances. It didn’t take long though until she helped me to see the light. And that’s what we ended up naming her—Lucette—it means “light.”

  Karma

  The high peaks of freedom that I experienced in the wake of letting go in Assisi, the spa, and the hospital were all eventually followed by valleys of suffering in one way or another. In Assisi, my mystical high wore off eventually, and even though I still had the souvenirs of my experience in the form of language, metaphor, and memory, I had once again gotten lost in the weeds of belief. In the spa, I experienced tremendous and lasting freedom from shame and the need to comprehend the incomprehensible, but, as you might expect, my social web and sense of tribal belonging completely fell to pieces, leaving a giant existential hole in my sense of self. I found out firsthand that being an atheist really is not the best career move for a Christian musician. Our career went into the toilet. We went into debt. We lost our management. We had money stolen from us. People said untrue and hurtful things about us. We had a good friend die. All of this was happening just as Lucie was born.

  Lucie, who not only needed all of the attention and money that any newborn needs but also heart surgeries and extensive therapy. How could we travel? Traveling was how we made a living. We were terrified. And we felt more alone than ever because this was all happening simultaneously with a bunch of church drama where one of my closest friends, whom I had hired to help pastor the church we had started, tried to kick us out of our own church. So we didn’t really have our church family to walk alongside us through any of the pain we were experiencing. We felt alone and depressed. We tried to escape the drama of Denver by leaving for Los Angeles, but the house buyer backed out on the day of closing, and we ended up having to move in with my parents in Oklahoma.

  We just couldn’t get a breath. Life had devolved into pure chaos. I lost some of the most important relationships in my life. I felt betrayed. Gigs kept canceling. Lisa and I were fighting a lot. We had this new baby girl with special needs who we didn’t know how we would be able to raise, and our sweet little Amelie was getting far too little of our attention in all of the mess.

  As I look back at that period of time now, I can’t help but laugh and shake my head. It was insane. It hurt like hell, but somehow, we made it through. What I can see now is that all of that suffering was simply the river (karma16) doing what she does: washing away that which I thought would be my salvation. Washing away all of the that while at the same time offering the ever-present and infinite THIS.

  The thing about suffering is that at a certain point, it takes the ability to cling to desire right out of you. At a certain point, you lose the storyline. Perspective gets jumbled so that up is no longer up, down is no longer down, and all that’s left is THIS moment.

  Here’s what that looked like for me:

  I would feel completely overwhelmed and depressed and had no desire to get out of bed. But then Amelie would wake up and tell me she was hungry, and I had to look at THIS, my daughter needing food, or that, my own narratives about what my life was supposed to look like. And I’d just have to get out of bed and pour the goddamn Cheerios.

  It looked like me feeling sad a lot. I would weep out of fear and shame and pity for myself. And then eventually the tears would stop flowing. And I would take a shower and watch a movie. Not because I acquired the wisdom of always being present in the here and now, but simply because the that had run its course, and there was nothing else to do.

  What it looked like was that I was mad a lot. I would pound my steering wheel with my fist and say the worst things I could think of at the top of my lungs. And then the light would turn green, and I’d keep driving.

  This is life. It does what it does. It turns here and bends there. It drops you off a cliff and into a thorny bush, and then it offers you a rose. What happened for me to make it through that time was that life simply went on and so much of the that which held me hostage simply withered up and died of old age or maybe starvation. All things die at some point. I would be stressed out about the that of how far behind Lucie was in her crawling or fine motor skills or any of the other line items on the therapist’s scorecard, but then it would be time to rock her to sleep and I would sing lullabies to her, and she would coo and gurgle while my crooked pinky finger curled up around hers, and that story would fall away into the staggering glory of THIS moment. Here, in THIS, all the tests and rankings in the world that told me what my baby girl was supposed to be didn’t matter in the slightest.

  Then another career door would slam shut in our face, and I would feel impotent as a provider for my family. Then I’d sit in the corner and play my guitar as I watched my three girls playing and dancing together. I’d watch Amelie’s blue eyes beam as she twirled around her little sister, who despite not being able to crawl, could headbang like a rock star in
the ’90s. I’d marvel at Lisa’s innocent, childlike ability to play and laugh with the girls despite all of the pain I knew she was experiencing. As I watched them, I would realize just a little more how beautiful life is regardless of how many chromosomes, positive magazine articles, or well-paying gigs it has.

  What happened to get us through the hardest time of our lives is the river simply continued to flow. I’d feel despondent. I’d read a chapter in a book by Karen Armstrong and realize that some people don’t have a firm idea of who or what God may be, but they still have a meaningful spiritual practice in their life. I’d be angry at American Christianity and write a snarky song. Then I would meditate a little, and let that anger go, allowing my heart to open to the God I didn’t really believe or not believe in. And I’d get depressed again, but then have to let go to get out of bed again. And again. And again. The river did what she does. Life moved on.

  The river would offer a conversation with a friend. A transcendent sushi dinner. Another meditation retreat. Another career disappointment. A new friend. A failed idea. A podcast. I’d discover an audiobook by a guy named Ram Dass and watch how the ideas within it resonated with my own experience.

  Step by step. Moment by moment. A slow and steady surrender. Attachment by attachment, constriction by constriction, myth by myth—slowly, but surely, one breath at a time, She continued to flow, to cleanse, to ravish, to heal. It felt as though She was teaching me how to loosen my grip, over and over again. It felt as though She was allowing me to become more and more free—free of who I thought I was supposed to be, free of the life I thought I was supposed to have. This river is ruthless in her grace. No shortcuts, it flows as it will. There’s nothing you or I can do about it. Fight it to the degree that you want to suffer. After that, there is always surrender.

  Shaman (2016)

  I met my first shaman at a progressive Christian festival. He spoke to the winds and the trees and did everything I hoped a shaman would do. I participated in a ceremony with him that involved hand drums and chanting and all sorts of aesthetics that I would have considered dangerously demonic when I was younger. We ended the ceremony by silently listening for the great Spirit to whisper a word to us. If and when we heard it, we were to come up and write whatever the word was on a stone of our choosing with a black Sharpie. The black Sharpie didn’t seem all that shaman-like, but I rolled with it anyway. I had lived in Los Angeles for a couple years at that point, and was getting more comfortable with woo—the native religion of LA. But also, I had felt something shifting inside of me again through the last several months and was in a very open place spiritually. I had been listening to a lot of Ram Dass and Alan Watts. I was meditating a lot. I was deeply interested in mysticism again, and having a lot of spiritual experiences that were a bit reminiscent of how things were in the afterglow of my mystical experiences in Assisi. But this time, there was something a bit different about all of it. My thirty-five-year-old ego was a bit quieter than my thirty-year-old one had been. I had been through a lot the last few years, and my hands were getting used to not always clenching my stories so tightly. I had recently told Lisa that it felt like something significant was about to happen in my spiritual journey. I didn’t know what exactly, but I could feel the seas beginning to part.

  I sat in the shaman’s ceremony, closing my eyes, listening for any word that the “Spirit” might whisper (even if the Spirit was nothing but my own unconscious mind). Sure enough, the word flow began to repeat in my mind over and over. I tried for a moment to dismiss it, thinking that I must have just thought of it on my own. But it kept repeating. So I figured I’d go with that one. I walked to the table, picked out the rock that grabbed my attention, and wrote the word flow across it with the shaman’s black Sharpie.

  To be honest, it was a bit underwhelming. I simply went on with my day. Then, that night after we played, I was invited to go to a house where the shaman would be, and apparently, he had grown some very special fungi that he might be willing to use for another spiritual ceremony. Now this was interesting!

  I had never taken mushrooms or any other illegal substance before. (Not counting Colorado gummies, because, well, it was Colorado.) I had always been suspicious of people’s “spiritual experiences” while on some sort of substance. It just seemed to me that such an experience could not be trusted. But in all of my Ram Dass studies, I had learned a great deal about psilocybin (the active psychological ingredient in “magic” mushrooms) and had become very curious about it. The reports had shown no harm whatsoever to the brain (except in fringe cases involving schizophrenia or other mental illnesses), unlike what I had been raised to believe in the “say no to drugs” era. In fact, the few studies that were out there reported overwhelmingly positive responses for most people exposed to mushrooms, including increased happiness, creativity, and feelings of love and connection and a decrease in negative feelings like depression or anxiety for time periods up to fourteen months for a single dose. Also, I had learned enough about the brain from my friend Science Mike by that point to know that everything that we experience in “sobriety” is really a hallucination that our brain is creating for itself anyway. No human experience should be trusted to the point of infallibility. So I said yes.

  We pulled up to the house, and my heart was racing. Was I actually going to do this? Was this stupid? Would I get arrested? I was nervous, but there was something under all of that, something that knew that this was about to happen and that it was going to be okay. Once inside, the shaman explained to the few of us there that if we wanted to do this, it was to be engaged as a spiritual sacrament. This was not a party. It was a ceremony. These plants were not drugs. They were teachers. In hearing how serious this was going to be, some of the people in the room opted out, deciding that it wasn’t right for them at that moment. Others of us stayed, heeding the call. The shaman asked us to set an intention. I knew mine immediately.

  At the spa, I had decided to not believe in God, but by my own definition, God was not a something to believe in or not believe in. Choosing to not believe was, in a weird way, a method of believing my own definition of God. I had already known that God was to be experienced, not believed in, but still I had tried to believe in him. In the past several months, I had begun to experience “God” in a deeper way again, but I still needed the quotation marks. My go-to fundamental myth about reality was still essentially postmodern, scientific materialism with an openness that I might be wrong. That night, I wanted to know—do I need quotation marks around God? Is there anything out there beyond what the senses can perceive or the scientists can theorize? Is it silly to call “God” a “Thou” rather than simply an “it” (the universe)? I wanted a direct experience of God in some way. A voice. An image. A realization. I didn’t care. I just wanted to be free forever of any remaining shadow of needing to figure out what I meant by “God.”

  We spoke our intentions to the shaman, and then he administered the sacraments. They tasted earthy. My heart began to race. I sat down in my normal meditation pose—legs crossed, index finger against my thumb, paying attention to my breath. The shaman told me that I looked like I was trying to do something. “Maybe try just lying down.” He smiled. I lay down, hoping to see the face of God. Instead, I became the gaze of God looking back at my Self.

  The next five or six hours is difficult to translate into words, but it was as if I had been wandering through a forest my whole life, looking at the trees all around me, trying to figure out where I was exactly—what kind of forest was this? How big was it? Who planted it? But as I lay down and melted into the cosmos, it was as though the camera suddenly zoomed back, allowing me to see that I, the true I, was not someone wandering around the forest—I was the forest itself. I was no longer a someone in the river, choosing to flow with the current or not, I was the flow of the river herself. Later that morning, while walking around in contemplation of the experience I had with the shaman, I put my hand in my pocket and felt the Sharpie-marked stone I had com
pletely forgotten about. In that moment, I saw so clearly how it all went together. Everything in my experience to this point and every experience I would ever have in the future went hand-in-hand with THIS moment. Before I knew what flow meant, before I had fully melted into the empty awareness of its ever-present ubiquity, it had been whispered into my soul from the great Spirit, my very Self. I pulled the stone out of my pocket, looked at the word, and wept at the beauty of it All.

  And finally, we can now come back to the period at the end of the sentence, and why the realization of the nondual, interconnectedness of All is tied to our freedom.

  One Becomes Two

  Sub Ek (All Is One)—Neem Karoli Baba

  It’s all one. This is something that mystics, sages, yogis, and psychedelic users have been saying for millennia. It’s one of those phrases that probably doesn’t mean much until you’ve really experienced it for yourself, and then it means everything. You know, like, “Someday, you’re not going to care so much about cooties” or “Parenting is difficult.” The nondual unity of everything and everyone is an idea that you might see expressed in fortune cookies, on the walls of yoga studios, or in the pages of cheesy, new-age, self-help books, and so it can be easy to dismiss it as sentimental woo, or to find it interesting but impractical, like the knowledge that there are approximately two trillion galaxies in the visible universe. It may be true and even impressive, but still, what are we going to do about these gas prices?

  In my journey, “It’s all one” evolved from being a meaningless statement to a heretical idea to a fascinating possibility to an inspiring truth to a life-changing reality to simply THIS. In the months leading up to the shaman’s ceremonies, I had felt my heart softening to a place I hadn’t ever experienced before. I had studied a lot of Buddhism, Hinduism, and Taoism, and the ideas resonated so deeply with me. I wrote songs about all being One. I thought back to Assisi and remembered how God (ultimate reality), was not experienced somewhere else. He/She/It was closer than my own breath. For twenty years, I had been asking the big questions about the world “out there.” What was all of this? Was God real? Was there any meaning to life? But until I laid back on that shaman’s floor, I had never fully turned that deconstruction laser beam on itself. I had never fully questioned the questioner. I had never fully let go of the person who thought he needed to let go. I had always looked through the eyes of ego, looking for something real “out there” in the world. But this experience placed me, the observer, in a different enough frame of reference that it made me realize for the first time in an experiential way how fundamentally my experience is connected to my perspective. There was no real, separate me to be a prisoner, other than the stories in my head.