This

  From that point onward, something deep and fundamental had changed in the way I experienced the world. Rather than only seeing through the ego, as though I was separate from all of that out there, the sense of “I” melted into the All.

  To be clear, it is not that any experience of ego disappeared entirely. Without some physical and even emotional sense of where one’s skin ends and the outer world begins, it becomes impossible to function in the world (as I experienced after my “mega-float”). But my ego was taken off the throne of the universe. It was almost like the camera of my observer zoomed out far enough to reveal that there were cameras shooting a scene. I always felt like I had been directly viewing the world. Now I saw firsthand that there was always a mechanism involved in the viewing, and that realization changed my life.17 The effects of the psilocybin wore off, but I couldn’t unsee what I had seen. From then on, I could no longer believe or feel that my experience of the world was objective or disconnected from anything else. Sure, I still had questions about God, about reality, but I could now see that all of those questions were mechanisms of the ego. Those were questions stemming from some pattern in my brain that wanted to make sure my mom still loved me and my dad was proud of me. It was just my mammal brain wanting to ensure a good place in the social pack so that it could be assured of its own safety and ability to procreate. It was all just stories.

  What I saw and couldn’t unsee was that here and now, in THIS, I am always totally free. In THIS, I am unafraid, unshackled, and grounded in the All in which I am. This freedom doesn’t mean that I experience nothing but happiness or excitement all of the time. I still experience pain, sadness, anger, and the full gamut of human emotions that make this life so fascinating and full, but I am no longer imprisoned by these feelings. I experience them like breath. There is THIS inhale. THIS exhale. I don’t cling to the in-breath when it is time for the out-breath. Nor do I cling to the memory of yesterday’s breath or worry about the certainty of tomorrow’s. In the same way, there is THIS sadness. THIS joy. THIS bliss. THIS aggravation. It comes. It goes. I experience it as fully as my mind is capable of experiencing it in that moment, but the experience does not get stuck under my fingernails like it used to. I used to cling to my life, to my stories, to offense, and worry and doubt. Now I see how that sort of attachment to desire only results in suffering, so I have no more desire to cling to these feelings than to hold an angry wasp in my hand. Better to just let it pass. When I do not cling, but simply remain in and as THIS very moment, I am free. And if you have “ears to hear,” so are you.

  This freedom is not just an idea or way of seeing, nor is it a way of disassociating with reality. Rather it is an ever-deepening embodiment of letting go into the fullness of I am. It is the letting go of who we think we are and simply being fully present and open in our bodies’ experience of right here and right now. As natural as this freedom may be, most of us do not feel free. This is because life has evolved in such a way that the experience of feeling separate is necessary for survival. After all, if I felt no physical separation from that tiger who wants to eat me, why would I run? If I didn’t feel that my life and the lives of those I love were more important to tend to than any other pattern of energy in the universe, why would I choose to feed my child as opposed to that flock of birds who are probably hungry as well? Some sort of intrinsic feeling of distinction from our environment and each other is essential for both our survival and our thriving. But unity is not the same as uniformity.

  Assuming “sameness” can be very destructive, especially in contexts that involve oppression or injustice. For instance, our so-called “color-blind” justice system in America assumes a level playing field for all people and therefore ignores the racial bias inherent in every level and arena of the entire system, from police to juries to judges to court clerks to law schools. The result of this is an institutional racism that makes a black man six times more likely to go to jail than a white man charged with the same crime. When black people are convicted, they’re sentenced to approximately 20 percent longer prison terms and are 38 percent more likely to be sentenced to death than white people are for the same crime. And that’s just the justice system. Our entire world is full of injustice for people of color, women, LGBTQIA+, the elderly and handicapped, people with differing abilities, mental illnesses, body shapes, and on and on it goes. To assume that we are all the same can erase very real and important distinctions that are not only matters of fairness, kindness, and community but sometimes even of life and death.

  There is no unity or “oneness” without difference. The vast differences within the universe all work together like the different systems, organs, and tissues of a single body. And if we lose track of either the differences or the underlying unity that allows those differences to exist, we lose our way. One needn’t shove pizza up one’s anus simply because it is part of the same digestive tract as one's mouth.

  Consider the following scenario: Imagine, if you will, that I invite you to come over to my home for a private concert. When you arrive, I tell you that I would like to play for you a selected portion of a beautiful piece of music that has changed my life. You happily agree. I sit down at the piano, crack my knuckles, place my hands on the keys and take a deep breath. I close my eyes. I play a single note. Middle C.

  It rings out, filling the room with its sonorously lonely presence. I take my hand off the piano. I stand and bow.

  You look confused but choose to smile politely. Noting your lack of enthusiasm, I’m confused as well.

  “Well, what do you think?” I ask, expectantly.

  “Well. That was nice, but is that all of it?”

  “No. The full piece of music is a Bach sonata, but like I said, this was just a selected portion. The note C does occur many times in the piece.”

  This is how so many of us interact with the world around us—as though the universe really is a set of separate things and events that could all exist on their own—like individual notes in a piece of music or a wave captured into a jar. We think that our politics could exist without their politics. We think that our in-group could be happy without their out-group even though our sense of us is defined entirely by not being them. Music is not merely the sum of its individual notes but the experience of all of those notes relating to each other within rhythm, timbre, and silence. In the same way, ultimate reality is not merely the sum of a bunch of separate things and events. Reality is also the fundamental unity and relationship within all of the differences that allow us to have particular experiences within that Oneness.

  Oneness and difference go together like light and dark, space and matter, up and down. In the same way that everything you’ve ever seen or heard from a computer has been made entirely of 1s and 0s, everything you see in the universe is composed of the peaks and troughs of vibrations—off/on, life/death, back/front, self/other, yin/yang.

  This universe is an interconnected infinity of unified differences. And just like our alien friend Marge from earlier in the book, what we see and experience within that infinity depends on how and from where we look at it. Whether the period at the end of the sentence is seen as a banal dot on a page or the expressed fullness of an infinite and liberated THIS is simply a matter of perspective. Whether we experience reality as a disjointed, chaotic mess of suffering or a seamless, glorious symphony of unified differences depends entirely on what sorts of stories we are telling.

  Story is what turns One into two, unity into difference. Story looks at an ocean and draws a line around part of its movement and says, “Let there be wave!”

  Story is a prism through which a single beam of uniform sunlight becomes a rainbow of different colors. It can transform an amorphous ball of Play-Doh into a house, or a world, or a thousand tiny Buddhas.

  Story is everything, and everything is story.

  Stories are the way of drawing imaginary lines across an otherwise seamless and, as my favorite philosopher Alan Watts used to say, “wiggly” reality—
the only way that we can exist as a someone with a question to be asked or answered. But when these stories are believed, we often mistake the model of reality in our heads for the thing itself. Because when you get down all the way to the source or essence of reality before One is made two, there really isn’t anything that can be said that is fundamentally “true” or “real.” Down there at the foundations of the world, there is only THIS—ineffable, unquantifiable, unthinkable isness that is beyond language, concept, or story. This reality is not “physical” or “spiritual” or both or neither. It is not “God” or “Creation” or both or neither. It is not “Form” or “Void” or both or neither. Perhaps the most we can meaningfully say about THIS is neti, neti. (Not this, not that.)

  All language, all religion, all concept or understanding of that ultimate reality is an idol18 at best. As soon as you can think of it, it is not IT.

  “The Tao that can be told is not the eternal true Tao.” This is the first line in the Tao Te Ching, which is, ironically, a book that tells us about the Tao! This is the perfect way to begin the Tao Te Ching though because the power of all of the wisdom, truth, and beauty within its pages would be degraded if the reader were to take the words too seriously and think that the Tao was something that could be adequately thought of or written about in a book.

  Our stories and language will always be based on a fundamental illusion that one thing could ever really be separate from another. It is out of this illusion that ideas like ego, free will, and good and evil are born. It is out of this illusion that we get religion and philosophy and science and all the rest of it. Having these sorts of stories in play is absolutely necessary to human life and flourishing. We can’t entirely escape or avoid all stories, because like we have seen, we are made of stories and there would be no possible perspective from which to experience anything without them. But if we want to be free, we must let go of our attachment to these stories. Here, in this free and loving awareness, there is nowhere to go but back to our original Face. There is nobody to try to be other than the manifested All. There is nothing else to cling to, nowhere else to be, nobody else to impress. Just THIS.

  WALKING MY DOG IN THE RAIN

  A Parable (Part 3)

  I woke up last night to the sound of thunder. I quickly threw on a robe and ran outside with my dog to get a good look at things so that I wouldn’t have to walk him in the rain. It was raining really hard. The streets outside my apartment were flooding, and then I saw something absolutely shocking. I saw a woman . . . walking her dog in the rain.

  I’m not even kidding. It was the strangest thing I ever saw. It was the middle of the night. Nobody was around but her and her goldendoodle. They were just walking, right there in the middle of an intense rainstorm, like it was no big deal. In fact, both she and her dog seemed perfectly happy. They splashed through the puddles on the sidewalk without a care in the world. She never fell to her knees, weeping. She never yelled at the dog for how smelly he most likely was. From the looks of things, she didn’t even seem to care that it was raining. I was shocked. I was offended. And then two ideas occurred to me.

  First, I realized that walking one’s dog in the rain is not the end of the world. I mean, as surprising as that may sound, I saw with my own eyes how okay this woman was with her choices, and it made me feel that maybe I’d gotten a little too serious about my dog-walking choices. Maybe walking your dog in the rain is a perfectly acceptable thing to do if you want to do it. I’m not sure why I ever cared so much. Who really cares if someone walks his dog in the rain?! If that’s what one wants to do, I think one should be free to do it! In fact, now that I think of it, it doesn’t really matter in the long run if you and your dog smell like wet dog for a little while. You’ll dry. If your clothes get wet, they’ll dry. If they get ruined, you can always get new ones. I guess it took a long time for me to realize this, but I’m really glad that I finally did.

  This first realization was obviously a big moment for me, but not nearly as earth-shattering as the realization that followed. The second thing I realized in seeing that woman with her dog in the rain was that I don’t even have a fucking dog.

  Letting Go of Yourself

  Who, beloved, do you think you are? That question is the root of the Problem underlying all the problems.

  Under all of the:

  I’m not lovable enough

  I’m not good enough

  I don’t know enough

  . . . there is the idea that you are a small and separate somebody who is supposed to look, feel, think, and behave in a certain way. But I have good news for you, friend—you, the real You, is already fully realized, completely perfect.

  But . . . (your ego argues)

  I’m an addict.

  Or

  I’m a pervert.

  Or

  I’m such an angry person.

  Or

  I’m such a fearful person.

  You are no such thing. You are the All expressed in story that includes experiences of anger and fear and the rest of it. But you are not those things. Nor are you a person who needs to try to not be those things. That idealized version of yourself in your head that you “should” be living up to is a mirage. It is an illusion. It’s a phantom given to you by your society in order to identify, understand, and control you. That ideal version of you in your mind that you’re always striving to be—you know, the one whose body fat percentage is “perfect,” or who nobody ever speaks poorly of, or who doesn’t fly off the handle when her mother-in-law makes that facial expression, or who is prettier, smarter, and harder-working, or who has no interest in walking his dog in the rain—that person is an illusion. Like my friend Hillary McBride once said, “You’ve never seen your own face. You’ve only seen the face your world has reflected back at you.” This face that you think you are supposed to look like is not your true face. It never will be. And it doesn’t need to be. This phantom you that the world has painted in your mind is an illusion. It is a maze of expectations and assumptions with no exit. It’s a piano concerto written with notes that aren’t even on the piano. It’s futility. It’s suffering.

  This isn’t to say that a person cannot grow or change—experiencing less extreme anger or not harming themselves or others by living according to the stories of their addictions. On the contrary, people are change. What are human beings, after all, but an ever-moving and shifting pattern of energy? But the idea that by sheer effort and willpower, one can transcend the Problem of one’s ego and become a “better person” is simply an exercise in futility. A knife cannot sharpen itself. You cannot be anyone other than who you are in this very moment, and you don’t need to be. In this very moment, there is nothing that is missing. Nothing that is lacking. Nothing that is imperfect or ugly. It is only when we leave THIS perfection for the illusion of those other stories, where we are incomplete somebodies who need that to complete or fulfill us, that our experience goes off the rails into creating suffering for ourselves and others.

  I think most of us focus so hard on changing rather than simply and mindfully being. If you desire to be a more loving person, for instance, you won’t do yourself any favors by getting caught up in the story of you not being a loving person. What often happens when we cling to our aversions of THIS (“I wish I were more loving”) is that our clinging becomes a fixation, which becomes the self-reinforcing loop that strengthens the undesirable behavior that we are trying to escape in the first place. Like St. Paul wrote in the Epistle to the Romans, “For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing.”

  The first step in AA’s 12-step program is honesty—admitting powerlessness in the face of addiction. Why do they do this? Because they recognize that the idea of that all-sufficient ego that can just theoretically summon up the willpower to say no to another drink is an illusion and that putting one’s hope in that illusion actually only gives the Problem that much more power.

  This clinging to futility, t
hese loops of unsolvable stories, are the stuff egos are made of. The ego is that sense that I am a separate somebody from everything and everyone else. It is that wound at the center of our being that feels fundamentally not-okay. It is the clinging to desire that creates the wheel of desire upon desire upon desire, that endless cycle of futility that creates so much suffering in the world. The ego is not a thing. It is a function of the mind that is often experienced as a constriction of muscles, a feeling in a human body when story conflicts with story.

  I am no more an ego that exists apart from the rest of the universe than I am a floating pair of flexed butt cheeks that have somehow been metaphysically disconnected from the rest of reality. The ego is how my brain overcompensates for the wounds that I have been dealt.