༺ Thesium ༻

Where did those spiritul explorations go next?

Right, well, there was a lot of transcendental meditation, punk rock, drugs and booze. I wanted to be Jimi Hendrix and Ram Dass at the same time. I was pretty excited about the science I was learning too. I had come to think of all the spiritual type stuff as ’the Good’ and the scientific approach as ’the True’. The split in the family about religion was also a split in myself you see. Around that time I read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. It blew my mind that there might be a potential resolution to this split. I must’ve read it five or six times.

I’d started an ‘O Level’ as they were then called, a course at college, Biology. The first lesson was brilliant and chimed in with what I was reading. The teacher asked us what was the difference between a sparrow that had just died and one that was still alive. He said that any way you could think of to measure it, temperature, chemistry and so on, you wouldn’t find a difference, it’s just that what was ‘alive’ was something that couldn’t be measured. I thought ‘woa’ you know? A real mystery. What was it? Life still retained this essential, mystical quality despite all the science.

The teacher also told us that the word ‘Biology’ meant the ‘study of life’. This was the same investigation as the spiritual side, or so I thought, but coming at it from a Truth perspective rather than all the faith based stuff. Anyway, about the third or fourth lesson the teacher asked me to help with an upcoming dissection. There was this big glass case full of locusts under bright lights. It was back in this special lab room off from the classroom. I don’t remember clearly what I was helping with, maybe I fed them for a few days or something, but when the lesson came, he had killed them all and we were supposed to dissect them.

The sense of grief I had about these creatures was really intense. The sense of outrage that we just killed them all to chop them up seemed like such an outrageously disrespectful thing to do. A crime is what I felt it was. My respect for the teacher and for the science vanished. I thought that this was very similar to the christian split between words and actions, you know? Like, here we are studying life but we have no regard whatsoever for the preciousness of that life. Here we are saying ‘blessed be the meek’ while terrorising these little kids. It made me so mad. Anyway, I quit the Biology class on the spot and never went back. I voted with my feet. I didn’t want to ‘study life’ if it meant trashing it in the process. It wasn’t the right attitude. It might be ‘True’ but it definitely wasn’t ‘Good’.

Right around that time there was a festival at Stonehenge. We didn’t live that far away and so a bunch of us miscreants hitchhiked over there with our camping gear. I was very weedy and skinny and very, very pale-skinned at the time. Still am. I didn’t have any cool clothes so I felt really out of my depth and self-conscious. Someone was selling this acid called ‘Dancing Shiva’. We bought these tabs and they had a tiny little Shiva printed on them. For me, after reading all this Hindu stuff and Be Here Now by Ram Dass and all the beat poets and everything, I was ready to give it a go. I remember taking the blotter as a kind of eucharist like at church. I thought to myself, well, I kind of made an inward vow, something like ‘Please accept me on the path as a spiritual seeker for real’, something like that.

After a few hours it started coming on really, really strong and I felt like everyone was looking at me and that I was the single most ugly creature ever. The paranoia and self-consciousness was inescapable and really hellish. I locked myself inside a car and tried to hide. As I watched the people milling about, punks and hippies and Hell’s Angels and weirdos of every kind, I had a shock. There was this gorgeous hippy girl in all her summer clothes, so cool and sexy and everything, all this hair and jewellery and dynamite figure, but what I noticed was that as she was walking along talking to this guy, she had her arm all tense. It was shocking to realise that the tenseness in her arm was a sign of anxiety just like mine. It was the SAME ANXIETY. Well, that was how it felt at the time. The realisation that it wasn’t just me was devastating.

As I watched some more I could suddenly see this anxiety everywhere, it was like everyone had it in some form or other. I got out of the car and started wandering around seeing how there was fear in everyone. The personal sense of ‘poor me’ turned into ‘poor us’ you know? Like, it was impossible not to feel a huge compassion for these frightened people trying to have a good time. We were all in the same boat as it were. Along with this expansion in my view came the realisation that people were really wrapped up in their own dramas, just like I had been until this expansion. It was like I was invisible to them. They weren’t all looking at me at all, they were concerned with themselves. It was really very poignant and I felt a tremendous love for them.

After what felt like many hours of drifting around the festival with this great sense of universal love and sadness at the pain of it, I started to become aware that because each moment was flitting by and everything was dissolving from one moment to the next, there was no possibility that you could keep anything. All things were just an assembly of components which were themselves continuously changing processes, all swirling and forming and dissolving. The idea that there was any possibility of finding any kind of safety in it was very funny. All the anxieties about what things were or weren’t, all the fiddling with definitions and philosophies, all that vanished into this vortex of swirling nothing. There was no centre to anything at all. No essences or souls or definitions. Nothing, just the flowing of the experience itself and it was continuously being born and continuously dying with absolutely every micro-second.

Looking back now I would frame it as an experience of universal compassion and emptiness. The reason I bring it up is that it was a direct experience of what was undeniable Truth but at the same time it was also deeply Good. The concern for the pain of beings, me being one of course, in the face of there being nothing to hang on to, amidst the deluge of ever-changing experiencing, well, it felt like I’d found the secret of the universe. This was what I’d been looking for. Something both Good and True that could heal the split between the scientific frame and the religious one. I wanted it to heal myself and my family and the whole world. It felt that way until it wore off, of course.

A few days after and I was struggling to remember what had happened. No one seemed interested in the slightest and I couldn’t convey it either. I think I’ve been looking for a way to get it over and make it be something that helps ever since. Much later on I came upon a Tibetan Buddhist practice that makes a very beautiful frame that I could use to explain this experience to myself. It’s the Chenrezig Sadhana and is all about the Bodhisattva, the ‘Wisdom Being’. It’s a practice that we can use to foster and cultivate this perspective.